Multi-Touch Systems

Have a look of “Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved” by Bill Buxton.

Pay special attention to the section/appendix “An Incomplete Roughly Annotated Chronology of Multi-Touch and Related Work”. Fun and insightful stuff.

Death of an Energy Efficient Spiral Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb

This Energy Efficient Spiral Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb started to flicker and I thought it was going to die pretty soon. So I took my camera out and decided to shoot a video of its death.

What I didn’t expect was the chemical burning smell that came afterwards. I am glad there wasn’t any fire but the chemical smell was strong enough that I opened the window for half an hour.

I hope better and more affordable LED light will come to the market soon.

Stealth Canadian Skiers (Will GPS help us “Own the Podium”?)

From the University of Calgary press release,

“STEALTH [Sensor for the Training of Elite Athletes] is a partnership between the Schulich School of Engineering, Alpine Canada Alpin and Own the Podium, a winter sport technical program designed to help Canada win the most medals at the 2010 Winter Olympics. STEALTH has been in the works for years and the men’s Canadian Alpine Ski Team has been training with it since 2007.

“STEALTH performs with accuracy of five centimetres and up to a timing accuracy of .1 millisecond. We’re the first in the world to do this with such a high level of accuracy and with a unit that weighs less than 300 grams,” says Gérard Lachapelle, Canada Research Chair/iCORE Chair in Wireless Location.”

Here is a more technical article in the GPS World, and articles from Canadian Press and Calgary Sun.

Ted Hoff, co-inventor of the Microprocessor, @ UCBerkeley

Ted Hoff, Inventor of the Microprocessor, @ UCBerkeley

“Ted Hoff took the inner circuitry of a computer and shrank it down onto a single chip of silicon: the microprocessor, a computer-on-a-chip. He realized that the memory, the calculating, and the processing functions of a computer could all be contained in a single circuit if only the architecture could be built simply enough. He designed that architecture and so invented the first microprocessor, the chip that is essentially the “brains” in all of today’s computers.”

Innovating Search – Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products and User Experience, Google

Fascinating and insightful talk “Innovating Search” by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products and User Experience, Google. Here is the talk info,

Lecturer for A. Richard Newton Distinguished Innovator Lecture Series. Marissa Mayer leads the company’s product management efforts on search products web search, images, news, books, products, maps, Google Earth, Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Health, Google Labs and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer and led the user interface and web server teams at that time. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages, defining Google News, Gmail, and Orkut, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. In her spare time, Marissa also organizes Google Movies outings a few times a year to see the latest blockbusters for 6,000+ people (employees plus family and friends).

The Impact of Smart Grid

From the US Department of Energy,

May be later: Google Wave changes news

Interesting read and some examples of “How Google Wave is Changing the News“. Very neat early day experiments.

At the moment, the early adopters of Google Wave are trying things out and playing with it. And this group is likely biased towards the tech savvy ones and spread around the world (thus not necessary local in your city nor even care about things happening in your country). I think it will be dangerous to draw much conclusions from people participating in Wave conversations and then concluding their views as representative of your town/city/society as a whole.

Surveying people “randomly” over the the phone in the early early days of telephone will bound to produce biased result with people who are “rich” enough and “savvy” enough to want a phone in their home. It is probably not fair to survey people on their satellite phones (or Google Wave) to get their views on Oprah ending her show in 2011 and then try to draw some general conclusion. :)

P.S. I think Google Wave has the potential to be a powerful tool, but we need to see how the experiments pans out first and also what we learn from these experiments. For example, a Wave that collects factual eye witness accounts of a notable event (a fire, a concert, an accident, etc) may be a neat way to use Wave.

Now I want to see some Canadian news media doing some Waving! How about CBC News, as the leader in many things internet, you want to give it a try?

What is Google Wave?

Some people may not know what is Google Wave. Here are a few videos that will give you some ideas what is Wave.

A nicely done explanation

Google Wave: 15 features. Pretty clean and concise instructions on how to use some features.

OK, this one is the infamous 80 minutes long original launch video. Watch at your own risk! :)

Dejero Labs – Powering Live Webcast of Olympic Torch Relay

From CTV, “Groundbreaking technology powers Olympic Torch Cam“. Plus this video via @CTVOtorch, “Video from Canada AM : Alon Marcovici describes cutting edge technology for the live cam following the torch. http://bit.ly/4CzmwE“

Based on what I understand at the moment, I think the smart people at Dejero Labs in Waterloo, Canada are doing some groundbreaking stuff. Take a look of these cool features.

I am trying to get more information from the Dejero Labs team and will add more neat info to this entry if I have things to add.

P.S. I’ve been attending the Banff World TV Festival (for broadcaster and producers) and NextMEDIA conferences since 2006. And I have always been on the lookout for cool technologies. Dejero Labs is really cool in my eyes.

P.P.S. For my blog entry about the Torch relay itself, see “Live Webcam @ Vancouver 2010 Olympic Torch Relay“.

The Eyeborg

From TIME magazine’s 50 Best inventions in 2009,

Rob Spence, a 37-year-old Canadian filmmaker, sustained permanent damage to his right eye when he was 9. Fast-forward to 2009, when Rob’s quest to regain vision in his right eye takes an unusual spin. With the help of Kosta Grammatis, John Polanski, Martin Ling, Phil Bowen and camera provider OmniVision, he is attempting to replace his prosthetic eye with a battery-powered, wireless video camera, thereby making himself into an “Eyeborg,” with the power to record exactly what he’s looking at as digital video.

[via Alan Sawyer]

A Historical Perspective on Semiconductors and Moore’s Law

Intel’s former CEO and Chair Craig Barrett has given an interesting podcast, “A Historical Perspective on Semiconductors and Moore’s Law“. Enjoy.

Description
Intel Corporation legend, former CEO, and Chairman of the Board Craig Barrett discusses his personal career path from a Stanford Associate Professor, to Silicon Valley consultant, to a 35-year career inside one of the globe’s most prominent players in technology. His talk concentrates on Moore’s Law and the myriad factors in place to ensure its continued progeny.

Snow Leopard Chinese Input System Demo – (using the lyrics of a song by Sandy Lam)

In the following YouTube video, I used the lyrics in Sandy Lam’s (林憶蓮) song “願” to demonstrate Apple Snow Leopard’s Chinese input system. I hope you and other Snow Leopard users will enjoy it.

林憶蓮 – 願(電影”晚9朝5″主題曲) 作曲：許願/黃偉年,

填詞：林夕, 編曲：符元偉

P.S. It should be noted that the word “隨” took me a long time to write without success in the above demo. Since it would be rather boring for you and me to see me write the word “隨” for much of the demo, I eventually gave up after trying for about 38 seconds. As for the rather simple word “生”, I got stuck again. It proves that sometimes simple words also tricks me.

I think sometimes it was my pen stroke and other problems that lead to the system missing the words.

P.P.S. For the record, in this demo, I used Snow Leopard 10.6.1. This video is shown in real time, only two edits were made for the words “隨” and “生” to make it fit into the YouTube 10 minute per video limitation.

P.P.P.S. By the way, here are the words I typed in the demo.

最美一幕 還未閉幕
最闊的路在塵世遠方
最好知己永在身旁
聽我講 我從不說謊

我想相聚 誰便再聚
我想歡樂便?(隨)意去追
我想相信我做得對
想到人極疲累

* 我自信有日如願
縱使天高地厚 仍被我逆轉
假使一?(生)會沒了沒完
總有日會如願 *
REPEAT *

當結局未揭穿

Re-invent the syringe (Reuse of syringes kills 1.3m each year)

(TED Video) Reuse of syringes, all too common in under-funded clinics, kills 1.3 million each year. Marc Koska clues us in to this devastating global problem with facts, photos and hidden-camera footage. He shares his solution: a low-cost syringe that can’t be used twice.

Digital Emily explained at TED

Paul Debevec talks about animating Digital Emily, a photo-real digital face at TED.

‘Amateur’ IBM brings down Air New Zealand

• Air New Zealand boss criticises IBM over outage
• ‘Amateur’ IBM brings down Air New Zealand
• Air New Zealand boss lands hard on IBM
• The cloud: no place for amateurs

The boss of Air New Zealand has given us a convenient term for companies that can’t get to grips with the realities of delivering computing as a service: “Amateurs”. His reported comments were addressed to IBM, which failed to restore operations at a mainframe data center in a responsive enough fashion after a major outage on Sunday:

“In my 30-year working career,” he reportedly emailed the hapless vendor, “I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client’s customers.”

Using Wi-fi to “See” Through Walls

Impressive research.

By the way, I’ve blogged about other technologies that can see through walls as well. Time Domain’s Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology has been available to law enforcement and authorized agencies for a few years now.

[via Bruce & Wired]

Note: Because of the training needed (?), deployment of this Wi-fi technology in unknown/non-trained locations will be unlikely.

Canadian researchers show how a breast tumor evolves

• B.C. research alters view of breast tumours (CBC News)
• Genetic `typos’ open new doors in breast cancer research (Canada.com)
• Canadian researchers show how a breast tumor evolves (LA Times)
• A cancer evolves: heterogeneity and mutational evolution in a breast tumour (source Nature magazine article)

Making Canada Proud – Nobel physicist Willard S. Boyle

Canadian scientist Willard S. Boyle shares Nobel physics prize (CBC News report with interview video).

Here is a good interview of Boyle at science.ca.

More info on the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Google News & Thoora

I have been using Google News as my news reader for a while and quite happy with it. For some fun and because I am curious, I am taking a look of Thoora (in beta).

Google News

Google News is a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each reader’s personalized interests. [...]

Our articles are selected and ranked by computers that evaluate, among other things, how often and on what sites a story appears online. We also rank based on certain characteristics of news content such as freshness, location, relevance and diversity. As a result, stories are sorted without regard to political viewpoint or ideology and you can choose from a wide variety of perspectives on any given story. We’ll continue to improve Google News by adding sources, fine-tuning our technology and providing Google News to readers in even more regions.

Thoora,

We start by using our proprietary algorithm, clustering and ranking technology to identify what’s attracting the most buzz by indexing the entire blogosphere – putting the spotlight on new voices that often don’t get the attention they deserve by taking into account the originality, quality, and relevance of blog posts. We also explore what’s happening on Twitter, which provides more “signals” about what people are talking about.

We then identify the mainstream news stories that attracted the most interest within the blogosphere. Finally, our technology blends the two sources to provide a take on “the news” that’s more unique and relevant than anything other place on the Web.

Twisted Architecture

I love architecture so I quite enjoy this blog entry “Twisted Architecture” even I don’t understand much of it. If and when I have to dig deeper, I will know where to look.