Here is the Ambien Clock, a little desktop clock that will connect to your Google Calendar account. Your appointements then appear in the corresponding time area and also the background colour changes according to your planning: blue - nothing foreseen, yellow - move your a***, orange - too late.

The clock connects via the Ambient Information Network, a technology developed by the company Ambient which also developed others similar gadgets. And since it works on AAA, this device is really wireless...

... but maybe we would have preferred Wifi. Anyway, it's just a prototype in beta test: you can go to the website and help the engineers to decide the best look.

The system uses a glass surface with a digital camera overhead, and a video display underneath that consists of a projector and a mirror. After placing an object on the table, the user presses a button to have a digital copy of the image to the screen, with the software working in the background to distinguish the image from its surroundings.

IBM has developed a translation system that allows US soldiers to speak directly to Iraqis in their mother tongue !

The system has this lovely name: MASTOR. Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator. Returns.

Concretely, it's a software running on a laptop with two microphones. The user speaks in one microphone, the voice is translated by the algorithm that takes in account the pitch, the dialect, the feeling, ... Then it outputs the translation to the other guy.

MASTOR also creates a "textual account" of conversations. Previous speech-to-speech generation technology required the use of set phrases but MASTOR is able to process any speech and output the real meaning. Theorically. It knows 50,000 english words and 100,000 Iraqi Arabic words. There is also an English-Modern Arabic version and English-Mandarin Chinese. Ah, so, a future conflict under construction ?


"It's not a weapon", has the audacity to say Yuqing Gao, director at IBM Research, "the world has been divided and had so much conflict, and so much of that has been because of language barriers." Yeah.
The system is overall a response to the lack of linguists in the US army.


Source: InternetNews.com, last week.

The Danish companies RambØll and viZoo developed Cheoptics360 XL, an holographic display system visible on 360 degrees.
It's thus a little bit stupid that, on this introduction video, the spectator stands up motionless whereas in theory, he could attend the spectacle from anywhere in the room.

'Cause in this room, you'll find a 4-sides pyramid, 4 video projectors and a system of mirror creating a 3D image in the center. The goal of this display is essentially events, but many of us would like to have that in their living room ... but only if it's possible to see something else than dummy turning objects.

The new book by journalist Timothy Hornyak explains the Japanese fascination with robots and their attitude toward them as personable beings or as family members.

The problem facing Japan right now:
One-third of the population is predicted to be over 60 years old by 2050 and the country has very little immigration.

One of the solutions imagined by Japans: robots !
The government is making a big effort to develop cool and friendly robots to help out with office duties, housework, and taking care of the elderly. The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry has dedicated $17 million to create such intelligent robots! He hopes to see them on the market by 2015.

An attitude that the journalist links to the pacifistic mentality adopted by japan since the atomic bombing.
Anyway, it's totally crazy to compare solutions imagined by Europe or United-States and Japan to the problem of ageing population. It's almost unthinkable that governments elsewhere in the world, had that kind of idea. It seems uncredible, but let's wait and see...

Source: News.com, two weeks ago.

A team of scientists of the University of Copenhagen succeeded teleporting information significantly further than ever before. They were able to teleport light and matter together !

Eugène Polzik, the big chief, the gourou, explains "It's one step further because it involves 2 different objects: one is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium."

What made this exploit possible was the use of quantum entanglement, a way to interlock two particles without physical contact. The method allows teleportation over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement.

All right.
I don't understand everything neither but let's remember that this attempt worked over a distance of 50 centimeter, which is huge compared to previous attempts where the distance was fraction of a millimeter. And according to the researchers, it's just the beginning.
Of course, we talk here about teleportation of quantum information from one site to another, not about teleportation of dogs, flies or Jeff Goldblum, but we go further and further.

According to Polzik, quantum information is different than traditional information in the sense that it cannot be measured. It has much high information capacity and cannot be eavesdropped on. The transmission of quantum information can be made unconditionally secure. In conclusion, it's super safe and super fast.


Source: News.com, ten days ago.

Pour ceux qui ne savent pas:
Définition of wikipedia : Teleportation is the process of moving objects from one place to another more or less instantaneously, without passing through the intervening space.

Here we are! The 100th post on hOwGee. After 6 months! Then we come back on the 10 most visited articles.
Hey, everyone can make his own best-of :)

Number 10 : a wall socket of with USB and a connector for a screen. Great for industry 'cause they do not need a desktop anymore...

Number 9 : an ecologic post on economic decreasing. Infinite economic growth is simply not acceptable by the ecosystem of the Earth, which is limited.

Number 8 : an algorithm which is capable to enhance the appearance of a human face in a photograph within a few minutes.

Number 7 : What looked like Google at the beginning ? in 1998. Screenshots...

Number 6 : A french company works since 2 years on a silicium dragonfly, totally nanomechanics. It's called a nanodrone.

Number 5 : This page lists up the cars whose CO2 emission does not exceed the 120 g/km per kilometer. Some of them can be the subject of a tax cut in Belgium.

Number 4 : A comparison file between Skype, Yahoo Messenger and VoIPbuster. It's less interesting now that VoIP products exists.

Number 3 : two DVD drives in the next Eclipse AVN6600. The main purpose, and every user of embedded navigation system understood it since the title, is to listen music or watch a movie being guided on the road.

Number 2 : A toll-free number is mentioned in the Honda's manual, a service for safety and prevention on the public highway. When calling the number, you speak to Virginia, a sexy voice who invites you, on an old funky beat, to join her tonight.

Number 1 : The big trick is to have a ring tone that you can hear, because you're young but your teacher can't, because he's old.

Thank you very much for visiting hOwGee !

Web designers will be able to convert a sketch into a functional Web page using a new software that is being developed by researchers at the University of Auckland in New-Zealand.

The tool is called InkKit, it works with a tablet computer and uses some sophisticated rules that will allow it to transform code drawn by hand into a real application. InkKit is able to determine whether the input is writing or a drawing, and a tablet's built-in handwriting recognition procedure has been included.

Users would have to follow some basic rules, such as drawing a rectangle with a triangle pointing down at one side to produce a drop-down menu...
Something we already do, mmh?


Source: NewScientistTech, 3 days ago.

A team of researchers from Intel and the University of California announced last week that they have developed a silicon-based chip capable of producing laser beams!

Great, you say. So what, it's StarWars in my PC?
Allez.
By using light instead of wires to send data between chips or to the memory, we solve the principal bottleneck in computers.

Even if it is announced now, there will be no commercial application before 2010. But the door is opened to many things: routers and switchs mega-high-speed, very quick and very cheap processors, ... That would definitively kill the Moore's Law (which is already almost dead).

Lasers already relay heavy volumes of data over long distances, on optic cables. In computer chips, data passes through the wires at great speeds, but slows to a crawl when moving from one chip to another inside a computer.
With laser beams, we speak about unprecedented speeds.


"This is a field that has just begun exploding in the past 18 months," said Eli Yablonovitch, a physicist at the University of California.


Source: The New-York Times, two weeks ago.