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September 2008 - Technology Trends

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  • Tree power

    MIT gurus dream up self-sustaining sensor network for preventing forest fires“a self-sustaining sensor network that taps into trees for power in order to continuously monitor forests for threats of fire. Moreover, the concept could be applied in...
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  • Touch-free

    Alps Electric’s “non-contact touchpad” needs no touch“Alps’ prototype (shown without the hand model after the break) breaks linguistic and laptop convention by letting you control your machine with fingers waving about an...
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  • Google satellite tracking

    Russian Town Puts Giant Smiley On Google Maps“Citizens of the Russian town Chelyabinsk calculated when the satellite, QuickBird, which takes images for Google Earth and Google Maps, would cross above their city and used people to make a giant smiley...
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  • Digital measurements

    RulerPhone Lets You Ditch the Ruler For An iPhone“In order to start measuring, you need to place an object about the size of a credit card in the picture you’re about to take in order to derive accurate measurements between the objects in the image...
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  • Remixes

    Radiohead Launches Easier, Less Expensive Remix Contest“The time signature is much simpler than it was with “Nude.” For “Reckoner,” the band is using the much more common, and therefore easier to work with, 4/4 time signature...
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  • High pixel densities

    Casio goes insane with 2-inch, 960 x 540 pixel LCD“Using a proprietary Hyper Amorphous Silicon TFT (HAST) LCD, Casio achieves a 960 x 540 pixel resolution resulting in 546 pixels per inch supporting 16.8 million colors — hoozah! Although not...
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  • Personal airbag

    People’s airbag ‘prevents injury’“The device is strapped around the body and inflates in 0.1 seconds if it detects it is accelerating towards the ground, the manufacturers say. The Tokyo-based company, Prop, says the product is...
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  • Shared photo timelines

    Chronicle Your Life In Photos With LifeSnapz“Collaborative photo albums are nothing new - many popular photo services allow multiple users to upload to the same album. But CEO Brian Hand says that LifeSnapz takes a different approach, by allowing...
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  • Estimating age

    Computers can now guess our age“So is this software successful at guessing our age? “‘Human faces do convey a significant amount of information, however, and provide important visual cues for estimating age,’ Huang said. ‘Facial...
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  • Online marital dispute resolution by crowds

    Enlisting the crowds to resolve marital disputes“Launched earlier this month, Pittsburgh-based SideTaker begins the dispute-resolution process when one member of a couple submits their side of the argument on the site. A link is then e-mailed to...
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  • Searching government video

    Crowd efforts make parliament videos searchable“The website created a timestamping application in June 2008 to match up each clip—recorded from BBC Parliament, the British equivalent of C-SPAN—to the correct transcript. Even though all of the timestamping...
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  • Bringing gaming to your party

    Mobile gaming theatres pop up at birthday parties“Back in January, Texas-based Games2u stepped in to solve this problem with its mobile video game theatres—self-powered, climate controlled trailers that house X-Box 360, Wii and PS3 systems, enabling...
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  • Overhead view

    Volvo testing “birds-eye-view” awareness system for truck drivers“he systemhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System utilizes four fisheye cameras mounted on each side of the vehicle. This electronic eye system “de-warps” and seamlessly combines the images...
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  • Remote intent

    Homeland Security Detects Terrorist Threats by Reading Your Mind“MALINTENT, the brainchild of the cutting-edge Human Factors division in Homeland Security’s directorate for Science and Technology, searches your body for non-verbal cues that...
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  • Many lenses

    Controlling Light With Sound: New Liquid Camera Lens As Simple As Water And Vibration“Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have designed and tested an adaptive liquid lens that captures 250 pictures per second and requires considerably...
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