Submission + - Light barrier repels mosquitoes (forbes.com)
kodiaktau writes: Dr. Szabolcs Marka has received one of five $1M grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to continue his experiments with using light beams to create mosquito barriers. This is the second grant he has received from the foundation and proves to be a deviation from the previous and more dangerous use of lasers to control mosquitoes. A video can be seen here
Submission + - Australian Govt to streamline anti-piracy process (delimiter.com.au)
daria42 writes: Remember how the mass piracy lawsuits common in the US are now coming to Australia? Of course you do. Well, now Australia's Government has come out backing the legal process which makes them possible — and is even promising to streamline it. Anti-piracy organisations will be jumping for joy — but I'm not sure how popular the move will be with the rest of the population.
Submission + - What To Do With Old Webcams
An anonymous reader writes: I work as an IT Admin at a school. We have just upgraded our entire webcam inventory (about 45 webcams, model Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX) and have all the old ones sitting around. I would like to know what a neat project would be with so many old ones. I was figuring that there would be an open project somewhere that involved mass amounts of webcams.
Submission + - Scientists Build Wireless Bicycle Brakes (itworld.com)
itwbennett writes: "Computer scientists at a German university have built a set of brakes controlled using a small motor for a braking mechanism and wireless signaling device to tell it when to brake and how hard. 'Making a popular set of bike brakes wasn't really the point of the project,' says blogger Kevin Fogarty. 'The project was to find out how to make the wireless connections between two components of a system that has to operate in real time – with milliseconds of difference between success and failure – more reliable than systems normally are that are connected by a wire.'"
Submission + - Australian Malls to track shoopers by their phones (news.com.au) 2
Fluffeh writes: "Australian shopping centres will monitor customers' mobile phones to track how often they visit, which stores they like and how long they stay. One unnamed Queensland shopping centre is next month due to become the first in the nation to fit receivers that detect unique mobile phone radio frequency codes to pinpoint location within two metres."
Submission + - Accent Monitoring: Innovation or Rights Violation?
theodp writes: After almost a decade of sending monitors to classrooms across the state to check on teachers' articulation, the NY Times' Marc Lacey reports that a federal investigation of possible civil rights violations has prompted Arizona to call off its accent police. The teachers who were found to have strong accents were not fired, but their school districts were required to work with them to improve their speech. Interestingly, one person's civil rights violation is another's 'wonderful little phenomenon', which is how PBS described the accent neutralization classes attended by Bangalore call center workers who toiled for the likes of IBM and Microsoft. A 2004 NY Times Op Ed also celebrated the practice. And on its website, IBM Daksh notes that 'To make sure that customers all over the world can understand the way our people speak, every new hire is trained in what we call voice and accent neutralization.'. So, is accent monitoring and neutralization a civil right violation, as the U.S. Depts. of Justice and Education suggest, or is it an 'innovation', as IBM argues?
Submission + - Purdue Students Give NASA Lander Boost (engadget.com)
tekgoblin writes: "This one strikes right at home:
We just learned of NASA's end-of-decade plans to rocket astronauts into deep space for exploratory missions to Mars and beyond. Now, we're getting a peek at the Purdue University-designed lander tech that'll plant our space fleet's feet firmly on terra incognita. What originally started as a senior research project for grad students Thomas Feldman and Andrew Rettenmaier, has now blossomed into a joint research endeavor for the federal space agency's Project Morpheus — a think tank for trips to heretofore unexplored celestial bodies. The in-development propulsion tech, now undergoing testing at the university's Maurice J. Zucrow Laboratories, is required to "meet stringent design and performance" standards, but most importantly, needs to lift the fuel-depleted lander post-descent. You'd think scientific work of this magnitude would come with a hefty paycheck, but the student team behind it all's just doing it for the hands-on knowledge. Sure beats your summer internship at that magazine, huh?"
We just learned of NASA's end-of-decade plans to rocket astronauts into deep space for exploratory missions to Mars and beyond. Now, we're getting a peek at the Purdue University-designed lander tech that'll plant our space fleet's feet firmly on terra incognita. What originally started as a senior research project for grad students Thomas Feldman and Andrew Rettenmaier, has now blossomed into a joint research endeavor for the federal space agency's Project Morpheus — a think tank for trips to heretofore unexplored celestial bodies. The in-development propulsion tech, now undergoing testing at the university's Maurice J. Zucrow Laboratories, is required to "meet stringent design and performance" standards, but most importantly, needs to lift the fuel-depleted lander post-descent. You'd think scientific work of this magnitude would come with a hefty paycheck, but the student team behind it all's just doing it for the hands-on knowledge. Sure beats your summer internship at that magazine, huh?"
Submission + - Intel experimental processor runs on solar power (hothardware.com)
An anonymous reader writes: With all the talk about being green and energy efficient, I always thought the sun's power was wasted since very few humans will try to harvest them, and in small quantities may not be very usable. For the IDF keynote, Intel showed an experimental processor, running Windows (either XP or 2000, not sure) that is powered by solar power (incandescent light shining on solar panel). The whole computer itself still runs on regular power, only the processor itself is solar powered — where it operates near the voltage threshold for transistor switching. More pics on engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/13/intel-demos-haswell-enabled-solar-powered-computing-at-idf-2011/
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