Free Republic

Peter Hughes of Highway Energy Systems Ltd. is an electrical and mechanical engineer responsible for many sustainable technological innovations. He spent years as an environmental consultant to the United Nations. Hughes developed ways to use solar-powered cooking at night for third world countries, and ways to force water into arid climates. But none of his accomplishments is as impressive as his most recent innovation. The electro-kinetic road ramp, or as he refers to it, his “prized jewel in the crown,” is already making an impact in the UK and will soon be coming to the United States. In development for...

The CrunchPad, a simple touch-screen computer for Web-browsing only, is nearing reality with a company formed to oversee its manufacture. A dream product of TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, the CrunchPad is designed to be "dead-simple," in Arrington's words. With just a half gigabyte of RAM, a 4 GB solid state drive and no physical keyboard, the device isn't capable of much besides running Firefox on Linux. In addition, the CrunchPad will have a single button for powering on and off, and will include headphone jacks, one USB input, low-end speakers, a microphone and a Web cam. The idea is to sell it for...

Researchers made progress enabling a computer to teach itself British Sign Language by analyzing video footage. The scientists from the University of Oxford and University of Leeds first programmed a machine vision algorithm so the computer could identify the shapes of hands in the video. From New Scientist: Once the team were confident the computer could identify different signs in this way, they exposed it to around 10 hours of TV footage that was both signed and subtitled. They tasked the software with learning the signs for a mixture of 210 nouns and adjectives that appeared multiple times during the...

AN ILLUSION device that makes one object look like another could one day be used to camouflage military planes or create "holes" in solid walls. The idea builds on the optical properties of so-called metamaterials, which can bend light in almost any direction. In 2006, researchers used this idea to create an "invisibility cloak" that bent microwaves around a central cavity, like water flowing around a stone. Any object in this cavity is effectively invisible. Now a group of researchers has gone a step further. "Invisibility is just an illusion of free space, of air," says Che Ting Chan, a...

It sounds like something from a science fiction movie: Sensors are surgically inserted in the brain to understand what you're thinking. Machines that can speak, move or process information — based on the fleeting thoughts in a person's imagination. But it's not completely fictional. The technology is out there. A researcher in Wisconsin recently announced the ability to "think" updates onto the Twitter website. Locally, researchers at Washington University have developed even deeper ways of tying humans and computers together. For Eric Leuthardt, 36, a neurologist at Washington University Medical School, it's about taking our relationship with computers to the...

Beating up your friends, family, boss, coworkers, celebrities, etc, etc has never been more fun! FaceFighter is one of those games that seems extremely gimmicky, and turns out to be extremely hilarious and fun. Appy, the guys behind AppyNews, are putting their facial integration technology to good use with this game, which lets you fight against anyone who you can find a picture of (online or elsewhere), or take a picture of with your iPhone camera. I’ll start with the best part of FaceFighter… adding faces! The setup is extremely simple, and the game allows you to either take a...

Washington - The video gave substance to what seemed so far away. We saw the look in her eyes as they went lifeless. We heard the sounds of her friends and family as they begged her to hold on. And she became the personification of the struggle for democracy in a country where voices for freedom are quelled. Her name was Neda Agha-Soltan, and without Twitter we might never have known that she lived in Iran, that she dreamed of a free Iran, and that she died in a divided Iran for her dreams. Neda became the voice of a...

CCTV, RFID tags and GPS-enabled phones are among the technologies that can be used to keep track of your movements. Big Brother is watching you: CCTV cameras have become one of the most contentious pieces of technology in public use The furore around the Chinese government’s Green Dam software has raised the issue of the way modern technology is used to monitor our daily lives. Here, we list seven of the technologies that can be used to keep track of your movements. CCTV Censorship of the web is futile, says Google CEO China accuses Google of spreading ‘vulgar content’ Closed-circuit...

The Force can be with anyone now. Later this summer, anybody anywhere will have the ability to physically move stuff with their minds like characters do in "Star Wars." No joke. A new toy that harnesses the same technology doctors use to monitor brain waves will arrive in stores in August. The toy moves when it senses a change in the user's brain-wave patterns.

Wal-Mart Stores is striding into the market for electronic health records, seeking to bring the technology into the mainstream for physicians in small offices, where most of America’s doctors practice medicine. Wal-Mart’s move comes as the Obama administration is trying to jump-start the adoption of digital medical records with $19 billion of incentives in the economic stimulus package. The company plans to team its Sam’s Club division with Dell for computers and eClinicalWorks, a fast-growing private company, for software. Wal-Mart says its package deal of hardware, software, installation, maintenance and training will make the technology more accessible and affordable, undercutting...

Teenagers, Gratitude, and a Culture of Affluence Holland, MI. Like many readers, or perhaps more accurately, like many readers with children, I read with great interest Mark Mitchell’s piece on “Cultivating Gratitude [1].” As the father of three children I have long made such cultivation a central concern, but must confess only middling success in the endeavor. One of the central difficulties we face as parents is the paucity of tools we bring to the task. One of our main tools is the use of rhetoric, but at a certain point – oh, let’s say the teenage years – parental...

ecurity sites are warning web users to beware fake Twitter invites in their email inboxes. The reports, based on an alert on Wednesday from Symantec, say the emailed invites come with a malicious attachment which, if downloaded, harvests email addresses from your computer and copies itself to removable drives and shared folders. The emails carry the subject line “Your friend invited you to twitter!”, while the sender’s address is spoofed as “invitations@twitter.com”. Unlike a typical Twitter invite, however, the email contains no invitation link: instead it carries the attached file Invitation Card.zip, tempting the receiver to download it. The attachment,...

Six years after he got the idea and bought the streamliner, Jesse James has set the world record for hydrogen-powered speed. Late afternoon on June 16, James flew across the windswept dust of El Mirage dry lake bed in the California desert and tripped the lights at 199.712 mph. That was 14 mph faster than the previous record of 185 mph, set in Germany by BMW in its hydrogen-powered H2H. "This, I honestly believe, is world-changing," James said of the emissions-free race car. "We can't rely on gasoline forever. I'm paying it forward." The whole deal was for the season-ending...

Five days after the transition to all-digital television, WUSA, the area's CBS affiliate (Channel 9), and WJLA, the ABC affiliate (Channel 7), have disappeared from screens around the region. The stations were the only two in the Washington area to move their digital signals from UHF to the VHF frequencies they once used for their analog broadcasts... LaRochelle received the stations perfectly before the digital transition on Friday, when all full-power stations permanently turned off their analog signals. But now, "they don't even register after a rescan," he said, although he is able to receive Baltimore's ABC channel... The sudden...

Tehran's authoritarian leaders clearly were caught off-guard. They had managed to take down the telephone system opposition supporters used for texting but for some reason were slow to eliminate other social media. As open defiance of the election results broke out, citizen journalists used new media to spread the word. And the whole Web was watching.

The long-awaited switch from analog to digital TV took place last Friday, and if you're like most people, you weren't aware of it. But if you are poor and/or stupid, you've probably had a rough weekend. "Nearly 700,000 calls were received by a federal hot line this week from people confused about the nationwide switch from analog to digital TV broadcasts that occurred Friday. About a third of the calls were about federal coupons to pay for digital converter boxes." Does that really say, "federal coupons for digital converter boxes?" "The largest volume of calls came from the Chicago area..."...

What maybe the Second Iranian Revolution illustrates the power of social networking sites like twitter, blogs, youtube and flickr. They have completely superceded the MSM as the best source of information. In fact on twitter, CNN is being excoriated for it lack of coverage - #cnnfail The Iranian government belatedly has realized the power of these sites and attempting to cut the internet, cellphones, and satellite dishes. I'm stunned by the courage of some of these people who are trying to get inform people on what happening in iran. Here's a list of some of what's available out there http://twitter.com/Change_for_Iran...

Claims of bias against women in academic science have been greatly exaggerated. Meanwhile, men are becoming the second sex in American higher education.In 2006 the National Academy of Sciences released Beyond Bias And Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering, which found “pervasive unexamined gender bias” against women in academic science. Donna Shalala, a former Clinton administration cabinet secretary, chaired the committee that wrote the report. When she spoke at a congressional hearing in October 2007, she warned that strong measures would be needed to improve the “hostile climate” women face in university science. This “crisis,”...

The high-tech industry is planning to amplify its opposition to a tax proposal by the White House. On June 5, about a half-dozen tech trade associations discussed strategy for stopping a tax hike on multinational corporations, which would come if the Obama administration succeeds in changing a law that allows companies to defer taxes on overseas revenue of their subsidiaries. ..... That has led to a lobbying blitz out of Silicon Valley. This week, at least three tech trade associations are flying in executives from their member companies for meetings with lawmakers and White House aides. They will lobby against...

The next Silicon Valley? You're kidding, right? Google the phrase, and you'll find an archive of old stories with titles like "India likely to be the next Silicon Valley," "Could the next Silicon Valley be in a developing country?" "Is Vietnam the next Silicon Valley?" Or my favorite: "Could Silicon Valley be the next Detroit?" Long the preeminent high-tech center in North America and the world, Silicon Valley saw unrivaled success that has proved very tough to clone or import. The Valley has done a great job over the years of attracting and retaining global talent and local capital, and...