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Freenigma Adds Privacy To Mail
Today, all your e-mails are stored and sent around the planet in plain text. And today you have no control over what happens to your private or business e-mail conversations and you can't prevent others from reading them. Get your privacy back! Encrypt your private and business e-mails to protect your freedom, privacy and your business secrets. Actually, we support not only Google Mail, but all large webmail services: encrypt your e-mails in Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail and others. Exchange encrypted content with your friends and business partners. One freenigma account can be used for all supported webmail systems!......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source Apple Announces Recall of Batteries
Name of Product: Rechargeable, lithium-ion batteries with cells manufactured by Sony for certain prior iBook G4 and PowerBook G4 notebook computers only. Units: About 1.1 million battery packs (an additional 700,000 battery packs were sold outside the U.S.). Battery Cell Manufacturer: Sony Energy Devices Corp., of Japan. Computer Manufacturer: Apple Computer Inc., of Cupertino, Calif. Hazard: These lithium-ion batteries can overheat, posing a fire hazard to consumers. Incidents/Injuries: Apple has received nine reports of batteries overheating, including two reports of minor burns from handling overheated computers and other reports of minor property damage. No serious injuries were reported. Description: The recalled lithium-ion batteries were used with the following computers: 12-inch iBook G4, 12-inch PowerBook G4 and 15-inch PowerBook G4. Consumers should remove the battery from the computer to view the model and serial numbers labeled on the bottom of the unit......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source What Can You Turn Me Into?
I specialize in vampires, skeletons, demons, and zombies, but I can try to do other types of creatures, as well. Just let me know what you want to become and I'll do my best to bring your spooky fantasy to life (or death!). WILL I LOOK MODERN OR "OLD-FASHIONED"? This is really up to you. I can do it either way. I recently did a full-color photo of a person in modern clothes and it turned out quite well! Of course it helps greatly that the background was creepy looking, so I recommend you pose in front of something that will add atmosphere......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source Tiny Ion Pump To Cool Hot Computer Chips
The device, which uses an electrical charge to create a cooling air jet right at the surface of the chip, could be critical to advancing computer technology because future chips will be smaller, more tightly packed and are likely to run hotter than today's chips. As a result, tomorrow's computers will need cooling systems far more efficient than the fans and heat sinks that are used today. "With this pump, we are able to integrate the entire cooling system right onto a chip," said Alexander Mamishev, associate professor of electrical engineering and principal investigator on the project. "That allows for cooling in applications and spaces where it just wasn't realistic to do before". The micro-pump also represents the first time that anyone has built a working device at this scale that uses this method, Mamishev added. "The idea has been around for several years," he said. "But until now it hasn't been physically demonstrated in terms of a working prototype". Mamishev and doctoral students Nels Jewell-Larsen and Chi-Peng Hsu presented a paper on the device at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics/American Society of Mechanical Engineers Joint Thermophysics and Heat Transfer Conference earlier this summer and are scheduled to give an additional presentation this fall. In addition, the UW scientists and collaborators with Kronos Advanced Technologies and Intel Corp. have been awarded a $100,000 grant from the Seattle-based Washington Technology Center for the second phase of the project......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source Handheld Computers Make Light Work
Under the casually watchful eye of Eric Klopfer, director of the MIT Teacher Education Program, a roomful of students recruited under the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) is writing code for three different handheld (PDA) projects. All of them aim at making science, economics and other "dry" topics vividly interesting, interactive and fun, for students, teachers and citizens at large. "We use cheap hardware with easily downloadable software that pairs with curricula and with related activities," said Klopfer, who is an associate professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. All three projects use commercial, off-the-shelf handhelds, such as the Palm Pilot and Dell Axim, which are easy to use and more affordable for strapped school systems than laptop or desktop computers. Ben Schmeckpeper, a 2005 MIT grad who is now working toward his master's in electrical engineering and computer science, is among the students working on the Augmented Reality project that utilizes GPS (global positioning system) capability. In addition to coding, his summer has included conducting three workshops for teachers -- two in Wisconsin and one at Harvard -- to introduce educators to the games the team has developed. The MIT group, in collaboration with colleagues at Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin, demoed two games, Hip-Hop Tycoon (an economics simulation game) and Sick at South Beach, aimed at seventh- and eighth-grade environmental science students, for a group of about 15 teachers in Milwaukee, which fortuitously is also Schmeckpeper's hometown......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source Chip Bounces Electrons Around Like Billiards
"Everyone has been trying to make better transistors by modifying current designs, but what we really need is the next paradigm," says Quentin Diduck, a graduate student at the University who thought up the radical new design. "We've gone from the relay, to the tube, to semiconductor physics. Now we're taking the next step on the evolutionary track". That next step goes by the imposing name of "Ballistic Deflection Transistor," and it's as far from traditional transistors as tubes. Instead of running electrons through a transistor as if they were a current of water, the ballistic design bounces individual electrons off deflectors as if playing a game of atomic billiards. Though today's transistor design has a number of years of viability left, the amount of heat these transistors generate and the electrical "leaks" in their ultra-thin barriers have already begun to limit their speed. Research groups around the world are investigating strange new designs to generate ways of computing at speeds unthinkable with today's chips. Some of these groups are working on similar single-electron transistors, but these designs still compute by starting and stopping the flow of electrons just like conventional designs. But the Ballistic Deflection Transistor adds a new twist by bouncing the electrons into their chosen trajectories-using inertia to redirect for "free," instead of wrestling the electrons into place with brute energy......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source Web Database For Ionic Liquid Data
There has been an explosion of interest in the last few years (including a near-exponential growth in journal articles) in the synthesis and use of ionic liquids--salts that melt below the boiling point of water. A large part of the interest is due to something ionic liquids don't have: a measurable vapor pressure at room temperature. With typical vapor pressures in the range of 10-10 pascal (10-14 psi), ionic liquids have essentially no vapor emissions and so look like excellent candidates for "green solvents" to replace hazardous, air-polluting organic solvents like acetone and benzene. With dozens of anions and cations to choose from, they can be tailored to specific needs and may be particularly useful as solvents for biocatalysis. One problem has been a lack of organized, reliable data on the basic physical properties of ionic liquids, critical information for designing industrial processes. NIST, in cooperation with the International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), has created ILThermo, the IUPAC Ionic Liquids Database. Launched at the end of July, ILThermo is a free, web-based research tool that allows users worldwide to access an up-to-date data collection of thermodynamic, thermochemical and transport properties of pure ionic liquids as well as binary and ternary mixtures......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source OneWebDay: September 22, 2006
Add the OneWebDay Button to your site and get together with friends in your town to plan an outdoor celebration with an online component that people elsewhere on the Web can appreciate. Put a link on the OneWebDay wiki In New York's Bryant Park, San Francisco's Union Square, in London with the Lord Mayor, near City Hall in Austin, in downtown Chicago, in downtown Portland, Maine, all over Canada, and in Naples (Italy), and Canberra (Australia), OneWebDay will be celebrated for the first time on Sept. 22 - and those are just the celebrations we know about. The goal of OneWebDay is to make the Web, and our individual connection to it, visible - so that we don't take it for granted. We make progress when we make things visible......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source How angry customers get revenge
"The Internet is changing the power of negative word-of-mouth," write James C. Ward and Amy L. Ostrom in the recent issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. "Customers who create these Web sites frame their grievances to the broader public much like civic protesters". Consumers are now creating complaint Web sites that reach out to millions, tell stories of injustice at length, and sometimes attempt to create "communities of discontent" focused on particular companies. When analyzing hundreds of complaint sites focused on personal product or service failures but not political or environmental grievances the researchers found that, like in many other protest movements, consumer protesters often "stereotype those they identify as responsible for an injustice as not just mistaken or wrong, but evil." Companies targeted by the complaint Web sites include American Express, United Airlines, and DaimlerChrysler......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source new mobile robot that balances and moves on ball
Ralph Hollis and Ballbot
Ballbot's creator, Robotics Research Professor Ralph Hollis, says the robot represents a new paradigm in mobile robotics. What began as a concept in his home workshop has been funded for the last two years with grants from the National Science Foundation. Hollis is working to prove that dynamically stable robots like Ballbot can outperform their static counterparts. Traditional, statically stable mobile robots have three or more wheels for support, but their bases are generally too wide to move easily among people and furniture. They can also tip over if they move too fast or operate on a slope. "We wanted to create a robot that can maneuver easily and is tall enough to look you in the eye," Hollis said. "Ballbot is tall and skinny, with a much higher center of gravity than traditional wheeled robots. Because it is omnidirectional, it can move easily in any direction without having to turn first"......... Posted by: Ethan Permalink Source |
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