Imagine a video of 4096 on 3072 pixels. To make you understand, that's the same resolution than 12 screens of 17 inches: three lines of four.
Imagine that to keep this high-quality, this video is not compressed and that you decided to send it on the Internet.
Finally, imagine that you send it… by streaming, i.e. the receiver must read it as soon as it receives it, without interruption.

Knowing the current means, you quickly understood this is not really realizable. Sometimes, you still get troubles with small videos where the fuzzy characters move at the same rhythm than the clip "Around The World" of the Daft Punk.

Yet, researchers of the Purdue University (Indiana, USA) succeeded to send in loop and streaming such a video two minutes long. With possibility to pause, fast back- and forward.

A rate of 7.5 gigabits per second with a peak transfer rate of 8.4 gigabits per second! At this speed, they could have transmitted approximately 12 movie DVDs in the same two minutes!
On the Internet. On the super-fast National Lambda research network, at the SC06 conference in Tampa, Florida. This is maybe not the absolute record of downloading on Internet but Laura Arns, associate director and research scientist at the center, explained that the equipment to realize this can be bought off-the-shelf for less than 100,000 dollars. Which is quite cheap when looking at all possibles applications: industries, medicine, theatres, ...


Source: Perdue University, last week.

Researchers of the University of Tokyo have developed a software which will be able to select results from a Google query and distinguish unique names and identities from the results.

The NewScientistTech gives the example of Michael Jackson: Michael Jackson is, of course, a big expert in beers, but he's also a old american singer in eighties. Those two persons are on the first page of a Google query and this is the problme: which web site talks about who ?

When a user searches for a name on web search engine, the program will look at the first 100 results returned, and examines common words in the search summary to see if the results will relate to different people of the same name. The program will also give users an estimation on how many different identities for the same name have been returned.

The firsts tests reveal that the software is between 70% and 95%. Co-developer of the program, Danushka Bollegala, reckons that the tool will really help webwatchers to refine their searches: "The keywords extracted by the algorithm can be used to suggest better queries to the user".

When writing those lines, Bollegala has not been bought by Google yet...

Source: NewScientistTech, thursday.

MIT researchers have found a (theorical) way to wirelessly charge portable devices.

The main technology is already known as "inductive coupling": the current is passed through wires of the "charger" part of the system, producing a magnetic field that induces a current in the wires of a nearby portable device. This device has to be at maximum 5 meters of the charger.

The idea which seems to be the solution to the problem we first imagine, i.e. the radiation and the energy loss .. the idea, then, is the resonance and the use of low-frequency electromagnetic radiation between 4 MHz and 10 MHz. The receivers are resonating at an identical frequency than the transmitters (chargers) and obstacles should not decrease the efficiency of the transfert. The non-used energy is recovered . By who, that's another story, since the idea is just theorical for the moment. A prototype could appear in one year. Researchers are now thinking about a unique charger in the ceil, that would distribute energy to all devices in the house.

MIT suspects that people will be uneasy at first about having electricity being transmitted through the air but explains that while the electric field could be harmful for humans, the magnetic field would be a lot safer .


Source: Technology Review, tuesday.

For those who do not know:
- Wireless energy transfert already exists in such a manner, in particular with the passive RFID tags and the phone SplashPad of SlashPower.

- A magnetic field is that part of the electromagnetic field that exerts a force on a moving charge. A magnetic field can be caused either by another moving charge (i.e., by an electric current) or by a changing electric field.
- The space surrounding an electric charge has a property called an electric field. This electric field exerts a force on other charged objects. The concept of electric field was introduced by Michael Faraday.
==> (*) Charges do not only produce electric fields. As they move, they generate magnetic fields, and if the magnetic field changes, it generates electric fields.

Dr Cohen and his friends of the Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh (PA) gathered 334 healthy volunteers aged 18 to 54 years. They categorized them in 2 sets : the "positive" on one side (happy, glad, dynamic and sociables) and the "negative" on the other side (dissatisfied, stressed and especially grousers). Then, they gave them nasal drops containing a rhinovirus. During 6 days, researchers collected data on the health of the patients. Objective data like the production of mucus but also of subjective data like the complaints of pains, cough, etc.

Results: The tendency to experience positive emotions was associated with greater resistance to objectively verifiable colds. In other words, the group "positives" fight the virus better than the group "negative". Moreover, but that's more obvious, the "negatives" complained more easily about symptoms than the "positives", at "equal disease".

The researchers show that the joy, not the self-esti or the optimism, can explain these effects. They speak about objective reasons like the fact that the joy boosts the immune system, and subjective reasons like the fact that happy people are less worried about a cough or a noise which falls.

Today, looking at grousers, just think that they maybe won't survive this winter ... and smile :)

Peter Strickx is the CTO of Fedict,
an initiative for the development of e-government in Belgium.

Peter Strickx made me laugh in an interview that he gave to DataNews in November about the Lommel TV project: "It's almost like YouTube, but on your television. The PC is not a good channel for watching videos, and television is not a good channel for surfing. When looking at the success of YouTube on PC, imagine the same on a personal television channel!"

It's insane to be contradicted like this. The PC is not a good channel for watching videos. So what? 31 billion videos viewed in 2006, says the french newspaper Libération. And our friend Peter seems to agree with this when he talks about success. So what ? What is then a good channel?

Anyway, that makes me laugh, Peter seems to belong to these people who are so much convinced of their idea that they can tell such stupid things. And that's perhaps completely creditable. Peter also says things like thus: “We make a point of preserving a leading edge but without bleeding edge”. And thank you well...

British researchers are developing a technology that will allow phone users (with a camera) to take a picture of any map and receive back an interactive version of the same map on their handset.

It's enough to have a city-map provided by the tourism office, or displayed near the metro station, or in the Michelin, or .. ok, got it.

The system Map Snapper returns a map with clickable icons for restaurants, hotels, festivals, sausage-fairs, miss-universe elections, etc. With more photos, informations and a link to the website, eventually.

The phone sends a photo of a portion of the map to a central server that uses the image to generate a unique signature for that area of the map and then searches matches in a database of signatures.

The persons in charge for the project also envisaged to allow users to generate their own content for maps using an online interface, but we still didn't understand this one.
The wire also says that they are conscious that the technology could become obsolete shortly with the emergence of cell phones featuring GPS receivers.
Well done, guys ;)