January 15, 2007, 7:47 PM CT
Is Apple trying to trick iPod users?
Steven Hoskins, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, recently told me the following story and I begged him to write it up for us. Basically, he observed that Apple reversed the colors of standard AV cables so that people who try to hook their iPods up to a TV using a non-Apple cable assume it won't work:
For years I have used a standard AV cable that connects from the mini-AV-out on most digital cameras to composite video and audio RCA jacks on televisions. The jack/plug color coordination is standard: red and white is for stereo audio; yellow is video.
Apples latest iPod can be connected to a television as well, and I immediately uploaded an iPod movie and plugged in my trusty cable, but to no avail. After re-reading the manual, I turned to Apple's website, where I found a wealth of information on Apple's AV Connection Kit for iPod, about $100, which included a cable to connect the iPod to a television. Hmmm. I was fairly miffed my trusty $30 cable could not do the job.
Noted on its website: "Important: You should only use the included cable. Other RCA video cables won't work. Though other cables may look similar, only the Apple iPod AV Cable works with the iPod Headphones and AV port".
Somehow during later experimentation, I accidentally attached the wrong color plugs of my cable to the television RCA jacks -- and it worked! It looks like Apple has merely changed the standard color scheme to make people believe their regular cables are incompatible. Sneaky Apple.........
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January 11, 2007, 8:32 PM CT
W880
The W880 Walkman phone will blend astonishing good looks with all of the music-centred features that fans have come to expect from the Walkman phone family.
The W880 will launch within the first half of 2007 when more details will be provided.........
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January 7, 2007, 9:47 PM CT
Cheaper LEDs from Zinc Oxide
Engineers at UC San Diego have synthesized a long-sought semiconducting material that may pave the way for an inexpensive new kind of light emitting diode (LED) that could compete with today's widely used gallium nitride LEDs, as per a new paper in the journal Nano Letters.
To build an LED, you need both positively and negatively charged semiconducting materials. In an LED, when an electron meets a hole, it falls into a lower energy level and releases energy in the form of a photon of light. The UC San Diego engineers synthesized zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoscale cylinders that transport positive charges. The so-called "p-type ZnO nanowires" are endowed with a supply of positive charge carrying "holes" that, for years, have been the missing ingredients that prevented engineers from building LEDs from ZnO nanowires. In contrast, making "n-type" ZnO nanowires that carrier negative charge (electrons) has not been a problem. The starting materials and manufacturing costs for ZnO LEDs are far less expensive than those for gallium nitride LEDs.
Deli Wang, an electrical and computer engineering professor from UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering, and his colleagues at UCSD and Peking University, report synthesis of high quality p-type zinc oxide nanowires in a paper published online by the journal Nano Letters.........
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December 28, 2006, 9:49 PM CT
Challenges When Hawking Innovations
Hundreds of technology-transfer offices have popped up on campuses over the past 20 years to enable universities to facilitate the commercialization of innovations and discoveries pioneered by their professors. Licensing patents for the inventions is a commercial opportunity for universities, which hope to make money selling the intellectual property and to see faculty research make a tangible impact in the marketplace. While all the inventions might be equally genius, they aren't all equally valuable. The question for technology-transfer offices is: what will sell?.
Daniel Elfenbein, assistant professor of organization and strategy at the Olin School of Business, observed that the ease of selling intellectual property doesn't necessarily depend on whether the innovation has received patent protection.
Elfenbein examined the timing of licensing with respect to whether a patent for the invention had already been applied for or granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a process that typically takes multiple years.
"Getting intellectual property protection does increase the likelihood of finding a buyer - that's true on average," Elfenbein said. "However, if you are an established professor with a great reputation, receiving a patent grant isn't as necessary in order to sell the technology. But professors who are still relatively young, or who haven't attained high status yet, benefit from receiving this intellectual property protection from the patent office."........
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December 26, 2006, 6:31 PM CT
Developing Invisibility
The theorists who first created the mathematics that describe the behavior of the recently announced "invisibility cloak" have revealed a new analysis that may extend the current cloak's powers, enabling it to hide even actively radiating objects like a flashlight or cell phone.
Allan Greenleaf, professor of mathematics at the University of Rochester, working with colleagues around the globe, has announced a mathematical theory that predicts some strange goings on inside the cloak-and that what happens inside is crucial to the cloak's effectiveness.
In October, David R. Smith, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, led a team that used a circular cloaking device to successfully bend microwaves around a copper disk as if the disk were invisible. In 2003, however, Greenleaf and his colleagues had already developed the mathematics of invisibility.
"We were working on improving the mathematics behind tumor detection," says Greenleaf. "In the final section to one paper, we spelled out a worst-case scenario where a tumor could be undetectable. We then wrote a couple of additional articles describing when this could happen. At the time, we didn't think further about it because it seemed extremely unlikely that any tumor would be covered with the necessary material to be hidden that way".........
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December 26, 2006, 6:24 PM CT
Why Video Games Are So Addicting?
Ever wondered why those video games are so addictive? Now researchers have some answers for you.
Kids and adults will stay glued to video games this holiday season because the fun of playing actually is rooted in fulfilling their basic psychological needs.
Psychologists at the University of Rochester, in collaboration with Immersyve, Inc., a virtual environment think tank, asked 1,000 gamers what motivates them to keep playing. The results published in the journal Motivation and Emotion this month suggest that people enjoy video games because they find them intrinsically satisfying.
"We think there's a deeper theory than the fun of playing," says Richard M. Ryan, a motivational psychologist at the University and lead investigator in the four new studies about gaming. Players reported feeling best when the games produced positive experiences and challenges that connected to what they know in the real world.
The research found that games can provide opportunities for achievement, freedom, and even a connection to other players. Those benefits trumped a shallow sense of fun, which doesn't keep players as interested.
"It's our contention that the psychological 'pull' of games is largely due to their capacity to engender feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness," says Ryan. The researchers believe that some video games not only motivate further play but "also can be experienced as enhancing psychological wellness, at least short-term," he says.........
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December 23, 2006, 10:52 AM CT
invisible Electronics
Imagine a car windshield that displays a map to your destination, military goggles with targets and instructions displayed right before a soldier's eyes or a billboard that doubles as a window.
Only in science fiction you say? Northwestern University researchers report that by combining organic and inorganic materials they have produced transparent, high-performance transistors that can be assembled inexpensively on both glass and plastics.
The results of this breakthrough, which brings such futuristic high-quality displays closer to reality, were published in the November 2006 issue of the journal Nature Materials.
Researchers have long worked on developing new types of displays powered by electronics without visible wires. But, until now, no one was able to develop materials for transistors that could be "invisible" while still maintaining a high level of performance.
"Our development provides new strategies for creating transparent electronics," said Tobin J. Marks, the Vladimir N. Ipatieff Research Professor in Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern and professor of materials science and engineering, who led the research. "You can imagine a variety of applications for new electronics that haven't been possible previously -- imagine displays of text or images that would seem to be floating in space".........
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December 20, 2006, 4:51 AM CT
Super Slim Portable DLP Projector From Casio
Offering 2x wide-angle zoom lens to project large-size images in a small space and 2000 ANSI lumens brightness, the hot 32mm-thick slim projector supports WLAN capability, together with USB port that allows making presentation even without the need for a PC or laptop.
The latest projector combine water-cooling with heatpipe technology, owing to Casio's super slim manufacturing technologies, as well as four different patent technologies make this super-slim projector even unique. No words on pricing.
Via
Aving News network........
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December 6, 2006, 8:01 PM CT
Nike Plus iPod Sport Kit
Yoshi Kohno, Carl Hartung and Scott Saponas (l-r) with devices they built to pick up on the Nike+iPod signal.
This holiday season, gift-givers may unwittingly give their favorite athlete a workout accessory that can double as a tracking device. Scientists in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington say there are serious privacy breaches posed by the gadget, which is marketed to runners but may be equally attractive to stalkers and thieves.
"It is easy for someone to use the Nike+iPod as a tracking device," says Scott Saponas, a doctoral student in computer science and lead author of a technical report and video posted online on Nov. 30. "It's an example of how new gadgetry can erode our personal privacy."
The scientists suggest that people who own a Nike+iPod Sport Kit turn it off when they're not exercising so that it stops emitting signals.
Saponas is an avid runner and had originally bought the device to use in his workouts, before he started wondering about potential security risks. Now, he and colleagues have built a range of low-cost devices that use information from his Nike+iPod to monitor his whereabouts. Other scientists on the report are UW graduate students Jonathan Lester and Carl Hartung, and Yoshi Kohno, assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
Since its August release, retailers have sold more than 450,000 Nike+iPod Sport Kits, as per industry publication AppleInsider. The $29 item consists of two parts. One piece is a chip the size of a dinner mint that acts as a pedometer, which runners slip into their shoe. The other piece is a receiver that fits into an iPod Nano and stores information beamed from the person's foot. After their workouts, high-tech runners can upload the data and use a Nike software program to track their distance, speed and calories burned.........
Posted by: Ryan Permalink Source
December 5, 2006, 9:09 PM CT
Why We Buy Bad Gifts For Loved Ones?
This holiday season, another woman who loves the rock band No Doubt will receive a plaid skirt that only the band's singer, Gwen Stefani, could pull off. Another athletic guy will receive an oversize sports jersey even though off the field he prefers Brooks Brothers. Why are we so terrible at predicting the tastes of the ones we love? A new study from the recent issue of the Journal of Consumer Research explains why familiarity with another person actually makes predicting their tastes more difficult.
Past research has argued that lack of diagnostic information causes this sort of misperception, but Davy Lerouge (Tilburg University, the Netherlands) and Luk Warlop (Katholieke University, Belgium) observed that we buy unwanted gifts even when we have plenty of knowledge. In fact, we frequently have the most trouble understanding the tastes of those we know a lot about.
Not only do we feel overconfident that we'll pick something they like, but our tendency to assume that we are extremely similar to the ones we love also motivates us to ignore cues that don't support preconceived notions.
"Our results suggest that familiarity caused [people] to put an overly heavy weight on pre-stored information," write the authors. "The pre-stored information that people possess about their partner is extensive. This elaborate knowledge makes predictors overly confident, such that they do not even attend to product-specific attitude feedback".........
Posted by: Ryan Permalink Source
