Saturday, June 23, 2007

Brain/Machine Interfaces Approaching Usefulness

Gary writes with a link to a Wired article about a brain-machine interface that may eventually have practical purposes. Though right now it simply allows a user to move a train on a track by performing math in their head, someday it may result in more serious applications. "Honda, whose interface monitors the brain with an MRI machine like those used in hospitals, is keen to apply the interface to intelligent, next-generation automobiles. The technology could one day replace remote controls and keyboards and perhaps help disabled people operate electric wheelchairs, beds or artificial limbs. Initial uses would be helping people with paralyzing diseases communicate even after they have lost all control of their muscles. Since 2005, Hitachi has sold a device based on optical topography that monitors brain activity in paralyzed patients so they can answer simple questions - for example, by doing mental calculations to indicate 'yes' or thinking of nothing in particular to indicate 'no.'"

Hitachi: Move the Train With Your Brain

By HIROKO TABUCHI
Associated Press Writer

AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi

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HATOYAMA, Japan (AP) -- Forget the clicker: A new technology in Japan could let you control electronic devices without lifting a finger simply by reading brain activity.

The "brain-machine interface" developed by Hitachi Inc. analyzes slight changes in the brain's blood flow and translates brain motion into electric signals.

A cap connects by optical fibers to a mapping device, which links, in turn, to a toy train set via a control computer and motor during one recent demonstration at Hitachi's Advanced Research Laboratory in Hatoyama, just outside Tokyo.

"Take a deep breath and relax," said Kei Utsugi, a researcher, while demonstrating the device on Wednesday.

At his prompting, a reporter did simple calculations in her head, and the train sprang forward - apparently indicating activity in the brain's frontal cortex, which handles problem solving.

Activating that region of the brain - by doing sums or singing a song - is what makes the train run, according to Utsugi. When one stops the calculations, the train stops, too.

Underlying Hitachi's brain-machine interface is a technology called optical topography, which sends a small amount of infrared light through the brain's surface to map out changes in blood flow.

Although brain-machine interface technology has traditionally focused on medical uses, makers like Hitachi and Japanese automaker Honda Motor Co. have been racing to refine the technology for commercial application.

Hitachi's scientists are set to develop a brain TV remote controller letting users turn a TV on and off or switch channels by only thinking.

Honda, whose interface monitors the brain with an MRI machine like those used in hospitals, is keen to apply the interface to intelligent, next-generation automobiles.

The technology could one day replace remote controls and keyboards and perhaps help disabled people operate electric wheelchairs, beds or artificial limbs.

Initial uses would be helping people with paralyzing diseases communicate even after they have lost all control of their muscles.

Since 2005, Hitachi has sold a device based on optical topography that monitors brain activity in paralyzed patients so they can answer simple questions - for example, by doing mental calculations to indicate "yes" or thinking of nothing in particular to indicate "no."

"We are thinking of various kinds of applications," project leader Hideaki Koizumi said. "Locked-in patients can speak to other people by using this kind of brain machine interface."

A key advantage to Hitachi's technology is that sensors don't have to physically enter the brain. Earlier technologies developed by U.S. companies like Neural Signals Inc. required implanting a chip under the skull.

Still, major stumbling blocks remain.

Size is one issue, though Hitachi has developed a prototype compact headband and mapping machine that together weigh only about two pounds.

Another would be to tweak the interface to more accurately pick up on the correct signals while ignoring background brain activity.

Any brain-machine interface device for widespread use would be "a little further down the road," Koizumi said.

He added, however, that the technology is entertaining in itself and could easily be applied to toys.

"It's really fun to move a model train just by thinking," he said.

How to Dominate The Sky in Future Warfare

The Dominator, the future terror of the sky

By: Lucian Dorneanu, Science Editor

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The future of air combat will make the classical dogfight obsolete. The times of air aces like the Red Baron – the most successful fighter pilot of f World War I, credited with 80 confirmed air combat victories – are gone, and the next flying aces will be unmanned drones, hunting and killing ground enemies while being remote controlled from a safe distance, or even capable of taking decisions on their own.

More and more scientists,

militarists, and governments are investing large amounts of resources in an intriguing, futuristic technology: fleets of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The main reason for investing in UAV technology lies in the replacement of the traditional, open battleground with the urban theater of war.

Boeing’s Air Dominator is a 100 lb drone with a 12-foot span which looks like a model aircraft. It will have a special lightweight fuel cell, that could bring its endurance to over 40 hours, and there are plans for a sophisticated new vision system for mid-air refueling to increase endurance even further.

The Dominator drone will carry a payload of three explosive charges, each warhead firing an explosively-formed projectile triggered by a two-color infrared sensor. It won't operate alone, but rather in swarms of tens of drones, along with a few 'gateway' vehicles providing networked communications and refueling.

In the JITSA scheme, Dominators would be packed in pallets of twenty on a C-17 transport plane, with thirty pallets in all – that’s a total of six hundred drones. They will be able to wirelessly communicate with each other, to confirm the destruction of a target, so that ammunition is not wasted two times on the same target.

As a last resort, once the drone had fired all three warheads, it will also be able to make the ultimate sacrifice and plunge kamikaze-style into a target, creating a small blast powerful enough to destroy a terrestrial vehicle.

The manufacturers estimate that any target in the kill zone could be hit within 2-4 minutes maximum. None of those fleeting targets would escape, so this UAV will fully deserve the name of Dominator of tomorrow's sky.

NANO-BIOTECHNOLOGY

New Laser Technique Could Redefine Absolute Zero and the Kelvin

- A new and improved definition of the Kelvin unit of temperature

By: Lucian Dorneanu, Science Editor

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The kelvin (K) is a unit of temperature, one of the seven base units, along with the Celsius and Fahrenheit degrees. Absolute zero on the Kelvin scale is defined as being equivalent to zero kelvin (0 K). The magnitude of the kelvin unit is precisely 1 part in 273.16 parts the difference between absolute zero and the triple point of water.

Now, a group of French physicists were able to perform the first direct measurement of the Boltzmann constant, using a technique

known as laser spectroscopy, whose accuracy could help in creating a new and improved definition of the kelvin unit of temperature.

The Boltzmann constant (k or kB) is the physical constant relating temperature to energy, in fact a bridge between macroscopic and microscopic physics, relating the kinetic energy of an ensemble of microscopic particles, like gas molecules, to its temperature.

Only one technique can, so far, determine the constant to an accuracy of about 2 parts-per-million (ppm), but the new one – currently less accurate, but easily improvable – could surpass the present degree of accuracy.

This promised accuracy is welcomed by the Paris-based International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM), which is planning to redefine the kelvin in 2011 using kB. They want to define the kelvin and other SI units in terms of each other and the fundamental constants; more specifically, they want to define the absolute temperature involving a time unit, the second, which is known to an extremely high degree of accuracy of about one part in 1016.

The new alternative way of measuring kB to ppm accuracy, the laser spectroscopy technique, was developed by Christian Chardonnet and colleagues at Université Paris 13 - Institut Galilée, and is based on the fact that the thermal motion of a molecule – ammonia in Chardonnet’s experiment – smears out peaks in its optical absorption spectrum in a process called thermal broadening.

This phenomenon is determined by kB, but also by the pressure and temperature of the gas and the frequency of the light being absorbed, so one only needs to measure the width of the broadening as a function of pressure at a fixed temperature and frequency, to determine kB to an accuracy of about two parts in ten thousand.

Although not completely reliable yet, the researchers say this applications could be improved to 1 ppm.

Monday, April 30, 2007

Gnome 2.19.1 Released

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On the road to 2.20.0 Gnome has just reached the 2.19.1 release. What does it bring new compared to 2.18? Well, first of all it brings new documentation and translations (maybe just in case the previous were not enough), new features and new bug-fixes. This is a development release though; so many modules still need improvements. The Gnome developers encourage Linux lovers to compile and test this new release and offer some for download and for some compiling tools. For example for compiling Gnome 2.19.1 you can use Garnome, which can be found here and the release should be found here along with the release notes.

The Gnome 2.19.1 developers announced this release as a snapshot of development code that is mainly intended for testing and hacking purposes. The release is though buildable and usable. You can join the Gnome project too. Any Linux fan willing to help with the Gnome development is more than welcomed here. You do not have to be a programmer to join this project, as there are also a lot of things to be improved that do not require programming knowledge.

The Gnome project aims to create an easy-to-use computing platform out of completely free software. The Gnome project gathers a lot of software and it is used in conjunction with an operating system such as Linux or Solaris. It is also part of the GNU operating system, being its official desktop environment.

Gnome was set-up in August 1997 by the GNU project as an alternative to the KDE software desktop environment that relied on the Qt widget toolkit, which did not use a free software license at that time. Gnome was intended to create a new desktop without making use of the Qt libraries. Thus, instead of Qt Gnome uses GTK+ toolkit under the GNU Lesser Public License (LPGL).

Low-Energy LED Lighting for Streets and Buildings

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A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor device that emits incoherent narrow-spectrum light through a form

of electroluminescence. LEDs are small extended sources with extra optics added to the chip, which emit a complex intensity spatial distribution. The color of the emitted light depends on the composition and condition of the semiconducting material used and can be infrared, visible or near-ultraviolet.

The Department of Trade and Industry-led Technology Programme in UK has funded a Â£175,000 ($350,000) grant to researchers at The University of Manchester to develop powerful low-cost LED lighting modules that can be used in buildings and on roads. Dialight Lumidrives - a company founded by a former student - is contributing another Â£175,000 to the scheme.

The main goal is to investigate how tightly packed groups of LEDs can be made to work safely and reliably, and with less energy consumption and lower sosts. LEDs lighting solutions have the potential to reduce energy consumption by between 25 and 50 per cent, depending on the applications.

Illumination applications using LEDs are already being used in advertising panels in the streets and for traffic lights, but their use in street and building lighting has yet to overcome some obstacles.

The technical ones involve thermal and electrical issues at the desired lighting levels (of 12,000 lumens and above, when a typical 60w household light bulb produces about 800 lumens), like the amount of heat generated by LEDs packed closely together.

Since the project aims to develop LED modules to be used outside, environmental factors will also be a concern, such as glare, pollution and even the possibility of a bird nesting over a vital heatsink.

Dr Roger Shuttleworth from the Power Conversion Group at The University of Manchester, said: "LED technology first came to prominence in instrument displays back in the 1970s, but we are increasingly seeing it used in things like traffic signals and car lights. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the old fashioned sodium street lights that made everything look orange were gradually replaced by high-pressure sodium lamps. While these are brighter and more aesthetically pleasing, and can help tackle street crime and anti-social behaviour, they are also less energy efficient. With the environment at the top of the public and political agenda, energy saving has become a very important issue. When you consider how many street lights there are in the UK alone, it's clear there are some big opportunities for energy and cost savings."

The many benefits of LEDs will include cutting energy consumption and overall running costs, reducing light pollution and the glow that radiates from big cities, and their longer lifespan which means they would need to be replaced less often, potentially cutting down on traffic disruption and local council repair bills.

Gold Nanoparticles Used to Detect a Toxic Metal - Mercury

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Throughout history, mercury has widely been used by alchemists that were trying to produce gold. Now, the roles have changed, and gold is what helps scientists find mercury.

In

the litmus test, litmus is a water-soluble mixture of different dyes extracted from certain lichens, especially Roccella tinctoria, often absorbed on to filter paper. The resulting piece of paper or solution with water becomes a pH indicator (one of the oldest), used to test materials for acidity. Blue litmus paper turns red under acidic conditions and red litmus paper turns blue under basic (alkaline) conditions, the color change occurring over the pH range 4.5-8.3 (at 25 degrees Celsius). Neutral litmus paper is purple in color.

Scientists at Northwestern University have recently developed a simple "litmus test" for mercury that could be used for environmental monitoring of bodies of water, such as rivers, streams, lakes and oceans, to evaluate their safety as food and drinking water sources.

The colorimetric screening technology and its success in detecting mercury rely on using gold nanoparticles and DNA.

Produced directly and indirectly as part of several industrial processes such as the manufacture of acetaldehyde, methyl mercury is a neurotoxin that is particularly dangerous to young children and pregnant women and the form of mercury people ingest when they eat contaminated fish and shellfish.

Mercury is released into the air through industrial pollution, falling into bodies of water and polluting the waters in which fish and shellfish live. Bacteria in the aquatic environment then convert water-soluble mercuric ion (Hg2+) into methyl mercury, which accumulates in varying amounts in fish and shellfish.

Chad A. Mirkin, George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Medicine and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, who led the study, said that "It is critical to detect mercury quickly, accurately and at its source. Most existing detection methods require expensive complicated equipment forcing tests to take place in a lab. Our method is simpler, faster and more convenient than conventional methods, and results can be read with the naked eye at the point of use."

Being highly sensitive, they are capable of detecting mercuric ions at the 100 nanomolar level. "To the best of my knowledge, we have set a record for the most sensitive colorimetric sensor," said Mirkin. "A glucose meter, for example, operates at a high micromolar scale, with glucose being 100,000 times more concentrated than the mercury we are detecting."

Future applications using similar principles will include developing a colorimetric screening method for cadmium and lead.

Geographic Records of the Water

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Water is the blood of planet Earth and its circuit maintains it alive.

And this cycle implies rivers, lakes, seas and oceans.

Here are some of their records.

The largest running water

in the world is the Amazon river. Each second, this enormous river disgorges 150,000 cubic meters of water into the Atlantic Ocean (3,120 cubic km annually).

Amazon is also the longest river in the world (4,195 mi or 6,750 km), 50 mi (80 km) longer than the Nile, and it also has the largest river basin in the world: 7,050,000 square km (2/3 of Europe or double of the sum for Mississippi and Nile).

The second river is Congo and the third by debit is Ganges.

The largest river delta in the world is that formed by the Ganges and Brahmaputra (Bangladesh and northeastern India): 7,800,000 hectares.

The longest river estuary is that of Obi (Siberia): 450 mi (720 km).

The largest lake in the world is the Caspian Sea: 424,800 square km and 975 m maximum depth.

The deepest lake in the world is Baikal (Siberia): 1,620 m. It has 23,000 cubic km of water, and harbors 1,200 animal species and 700 plant species.

The largest gulf in the world is the Gulf of Mexico: 615,000 square mi (1.6 million square km).

The shortest known river is D.River, in Oregon, that enters into the Pacific after just 132 m (440 ft).

The highest waterfall in the world is the Angel Falls (Venezuela): 979 m (3,212 ft) tall.

The biggest geyser in the world is “Old Faithful” from Yellowstone National Park (Wyomong, US): its water column is 30-54 m (100-180 ft) tall and erupts from 21 to 65 minutes.

The saltiest ocean is the Atlantic: 3.5 % salts, and amongst the seas, the record is detained by the Red Sea : 4 %.

The warmest seawater is that of the Persian Gulf: 35 degrees C, followed by the Red Sea: 32 degrees C.

The coldest seawater is that of the Ross and Weddell seas (Antarctica).

The strongest marine current is the Gulf Stream: it carries 82 million cubic meters of water per second.

The widest strait is the Yucatan Channel between Yucatan peninsula (Mexico) and Cuba: 220 km (360 mi).

It is also the deepest: 2,000 m (6,660 ft).

The longest strait is the Straits of Malacca, between Sumatra Island and Malacca peninsula: 805 km (500 mi) long.

The narrowest intercontinental strait is Bosporus (between Europe and Asia): 700-750 m wide (0.5 mi) and 80 km (50 mi) long.

The narrowest navigable strait in the world is Khalkis (Aegean Sea), between the Balkan peninsula and Eubea island: 40 m (133 ft).

The largest fjord in the world is Northwestern, located in ...eastern Greenland: 313 km (195 mi) long.

Geographic Records of the Water

Tiny Machines Made of Microbes

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Biomimetics employs organisms as models for building new machines.

But now new machines could be made of organisms. In fact, tiny machines from microorganisms.

The single-celled Spirostomum, a Paramecium-related protozoan, resembling a tiny brown worm, can contract its 0.5 mm-long body to 25% of its length

in a millisecond: this is the fastest known movement in a microorganism.

Many microorganisms are integrated in MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems) technology, the so-called “biotic-MEMS,” developing micron-level machines.

A team of University of Washington has realized a catalogue of the most promising microorganisms (all less than 1 mm long and made of one or few cells) for MEMS systems, and which can boost the conventional MEMS technology. “Tools and concepts have been increasingly borrowed from biology to solve technology problems. Biological concepts such as self-assembly are under serious consideration by technologists now for making highly integrated nano and micro systems”, said co-author Babak Parviz, an electrical engineer.

The microorganisms were assigned into four employment fields: material synthesis, precise structure formation, as functional devices, and integrated into controllable systems. Through biomineralization, a process detected in 700 million years old rocks, microorganisms can produce at least 64 different inorganic materials employed in MEMS technology, like silicon dioxide, biogenic calcite, magnets, gold and silver crystals.

Magnetic bacteria produce magnetosome crystals, crucial for the heading of their water movements.

Unlike industrial MEMS synthesis methods, requiring high temperatures, corrosive gases, vacuums and plasma, microorganisms produce the materials at room temperature, at near-neutral pH, in water solutions.

These structures made by microbes can develop into three dimensions and can be changed with nanoscale or macroscopic (visible scale) precision.

The spicules in the skeleton walls of one deep-sea sponge have excellent fiber-optical properties.

The fields of the chemical and biological sensors (for food and environmental monitoring) could employ microorganisms, as they evolved to detect specific chemicals. “One of the most interesting applications of MOs [microorganisms] in MEMS is to directly use them for detecting chemicals. MOs can be genetically engineered to have various receptors. All the transduction and amplification machinery is already in MOs. I think integration of these MOs into MEMS platforms can generate extremely powerful chemical/biological analysis systems”, said Parviz.

There are microbes that turn chemical energy into electrical energy, like the environmentally-friendly Microbial Fuel Cells for powering robotics and biomedical devices, and for economic hydrogen production, replacing small conventional batteries.

The biggest challenge by now is to integrate these devices into controllable micron-scale systems. “Our ability to manipulate small organisms and produce platforms that can interface with them one cell at a time is brand new. It is yet to be seen how researchers will take advantage of these new capabilities”, Parviz added.

Linux Kernel 2.6.21 Released

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After two and a half months from the last release, Linus Torvalds has just announced today the final and stable release of the Linux kernel, version 2.6.21. The biggest change in 2.6.21 is all the timer changes to support a tickless system:

"If the goal for 2.6.20 was to be a stable release (and it was), the goal for 2.6.21 is to have just survived the big timer-related changes and some of the other surprises (just as an example: we were apparently unlucky enough to hit what looks like a previously unknown hardware errata in one of the ethernet drivers that got updated etc). [...] So the big change during 2.6.21 is all the timer changes to support a tickless system (and even with ticks, more varied time sources). Thanks (when it no longer broke for lots of people ;) go to Thomas Gleixner and Ingo Molnar and a cadre of testers and coders." - says Linus Torvalds.

Highlights of this release include:

• VMI (Virtual Machine Interface)
• KVM updates
• Dynticks and Clockevents
• ALSA System on Chip (ASoC) layer
• Dynamic kernel command-line
• Optional ZONE_DMA
• devres (optional subsystem for drivers)
• GPIO API

Here come the new drivers:

Graphics:

• Add fbdev driver for the old S3 Trio/Virge
• Driver for the Silicon Motion SM501 multifunction device framebuffer subsystem,

Storage devices:

• Add two drivers for the it8213 IDE device, one using the old IDE stack, and other using libata
• Add IDE Driver for Delkin/Lexar/etc.. cardbus CF adapter
• Add IDE driver for Toshiba TC86C001 (old IDE stack)
• Add SCSI driver for SNI RM 53c710
• Add driver for Initio 162x SATA devices

Networking devices

• Add driver for the latest 1G/10G Chelsio adapter, T3,
• Add driver for the Attansic L1 ethernet device
• Add driver for the Gigaset M101 wireless ISDN device
• Add PC300too alternative WAN driver
• Add driver for Silan SC92031 device
• Add driver for the Davicom DM9601 USB 1.1 ethernet device

Various

• Add driver to charge USB blackberry devices
• Add driver for iowarrior USB devices.
• Add support for the GTCO CalComp/InterWrite USB tablet
• New driver for the Analog Devices ADM1029 hardware monitoring driver

For a full change-log with all the new features, drivers and improvements, please visit this website.

The Linux Kernel is the essential part of all Linux Distributions, responsible for resource allocation, low-level hardware interfaces, security, simple communications, and basic file system management.

Linux is a clone of the operating system Unix, initially written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.

You can download the Linux kernel now from Softpedia.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Intel Wi-Fi Travels Over 100 Kilometers

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What is the biggest problem when it comes to Wi-Fi connections? The distance; that's why new standards have been created – to allow for the transmission of information on longer distances, and also a higher data

transfer is made possible. The nag of having to deal with cables is also a big thing you should consider, many people actually choose the wireless solution for this reason alone.

And newer chips cost more, and manufacturing facilities give a lot of new jobs and that's progress, but what if, instead of always taking a piece of hardware apart and call it “obsolete”, why not putting some thought into what can be done with existing hardware, rather than just bringing out new stuff, that doesn't always bring something good.

Take, as an example, the AGP slot and the PCI Express, it was first said that the PCI Express interface was necessary because of the bottlenecking of the data going through the 8GB/s AGP interface. That wasn't 100% true when it was said, but nobody took it upon themselves to actually verify the truth in that affirmation. That other purposes have been found for the interface, or better said, that the change was made using the bandwidth as the cover story. It's hard to give up on something good for that which is just as good, but in order for the people to accept the change, it was presented as a mandatory requirement for the maximum bandwidth to be achieved. The people said “yes”, and then they had the chance of actually putting their ideas into action.

Regarding the Wi-Fi, it's the same thing, but under a different “mask”. Eric Brewer, Director of Intel Research Berkeley, was able to bring a new point of view to an “old” piece of hardware, by using “regular Wi-Fi hardware (...) with modified software”. The goal was to take the normal Wi-Fi transmission, which is sent by an antenna on a 360-degree radius, and focusing the signal into one direction. By using this method, they stated that their system can take regular Wi-Fi signal and transmit it to over 100 kilometers.

The alignment of the antennas so that they would communicate to one another is hard to achieve on a physical level, because any small shift in the position would cause signal loss. The solution was to make an “electrical steering”, instead of normal position shifting, thus eliminating any signal loss in case the antennas move out of alignment.

My Personal Earthquake

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Have you ever wanted to have your own earthquake? I guess not. But I am sure that at least on one occasion you wanted your room either bigger or

to have your sound system's loudspeakers placed somewhere else while still be able to enjoy your favorite music.

Now, as I presume you figured it out, you're not the only ones who have faced the insufficient room problem; other people thought about this as well and the big difference is that they had both the mind and resources to make things different. PSB is their name and they are currently solving your biggest problem: placing the sometimes inconveniently-large subwoofer away from your path and your sight but not away from your hearing range.

PSB's in-wall mountable CWS10 subwoofers promise to have the problems above solved in no time, right from the start. Basically, there were some point to be checked in the development of such gear. First of all, designing a shape for the box, which they did in marvelous style, creating a 4-inch deep bass box so you don't need to ruin the house while installing the speakers.

Secondly, since we're speaking about woofers, there's bass: bass means low frequencies and this requires special speakers with special cones to move a lot of air - they also need special architecture. PSB managed to create an anechoic box for the CWS10 both allowing air to flow as it is supposed to when talk comes to bass.

Two 4 Ohms, 10” woofers with a much lower profile than the regular ones (hence the 4” overall depth) will pump out bass coming from a 50 to 300W amp so they'll literally shake your walls if need be. Neodymium magnets ensure the smooth yet strong and reliable operation at the nominal 89dB SPL.

The CWS10 is mountable on any wall, even from construction stage or after the building has been finished. The in-wall woofer is affixed with an extruded aluminum flange and “dog leg” clamps and its perforated metal grille can be painted to match any interior design.

Finally, the third construction issue was not carried out as brilliantly as the others have been: the price is one dollar short of $2,500 and this makes these woofers a rather expensive alternative to the fuss of having to deal with wires, dusting and/or re-arranging loudspeakers in your living room.

Friday, March 16, 2007

Summer of Code Student Applications Now Open

The accepted Google Summer of Code 2007 mentors list is now complete at the Summer of Code website — 131 projects could use your help. Student applications are open and the end date is March 24. Google has an application guide in the Summer of Code Announce discussion group that provides more information on the application process.

Google Summer of Code™

Google Summer of Code 2007 is on! We are now accepting student applications. We've also published some additional web app documentation for mentors and organization administrators.

All the information for participants in Google Summer of Code 2007, including student abstracts and other information provided by them, is available by visiting the individual mentoring organization pages below.

Mentoring Organizations Participating in Google Summer of Code 2007

AbiSource (ideas)

Adium (ideas)

Aqsis Team (ideas)

Ardour (ideas)

ArgoUML (ideas)

Audacious Media Player (ideas)

Bazaar (ideas)

BBC Research (ideas)

Beagle (ideas)

Blender Foundation (ideas)

Boost C++ (ideas)

BZFlag (ideas)

Casetta (ideas)

Center for the Study of Complex Systems (CSCS), University of Michigan (ideas)

CLAM ( at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra) (ideas)

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (ideas)

Coppermine Photo Gallery (ideas)

coresystems GmbH (ideas)

Creative Commons (ideas)

Crystal Space (ideas)

Debian (ideas)

Detached Solutions (ideas)

Dojo Foundation (ideas)

Drupal (ideas)

DSpace (ideas)

Eclipse (ideas)

Etherboot Project (ideas)

eXist (ideas)

FANN - The Fast Artificial Neural Network Library (ideas)

FFmpeg (ideas)

Fityk (ideas)

FreeBSD (ideas)

Freenet Project Inc (ideas)

Freevo (ideas)

Gaim (ideas)

Gallery (ideas)

GCC (ideas)

Geeklog (ideas)

GenMAPP (ideas)

Gentoo Foundation (ideas)

Git Development Community (ideas)

GNOME (ideas)

GNU Project (ideas)

GnuCash (ideas)

GNUstep (ideas)

Haiku (ideas)

Handhelds.org (ideas)

Haskell.org (ideas)

hugin / panotools (ideas)

IEM - Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, Graz (ideas)

ikiwiki (ideas)

Inkscape (ideas)

Internet2 (ideas)

Jikes RVM (ideas)

Joomla! (ideas)

K-3D (ideas)

KDE (ideas)

Lanka Software Foundation (ideas)

Liblime (ideas)

LispNYC.org (ideas)

LLVM Compiler Infrastructure (ideas)

MacPorts (ideas)

maemo (ideas)

MetaBrainz Foundation (ideas)

Mixxx (ideas)

MoinMoin Wiki Project (ideas)

We are no longer accepting applications from open source organizations.

If you're feeling nostalgic, you can still access the Google Summer of Code 2005 and Google Summer of Code 2006 pages. We've also created a map (requires Google Earth) of all 2006 mentors and student participants for your perusal.

Questions?

Please peruse our FAQ and Terms of Service for more information about the program. If you still have questions, email us for support.

Guide to the Google Summer of Code^TM Web App for Student Applicants

This document is a work-in-progress. Additional information on how to use the application will be added as Google's program administrators receive questions via either our program discussion list or to our support alias.

Using the Web App to Register for GSoC

These are the steps for registering as a student participant for Google Summer of Code:

Start registration by reviewing and accepting our program Terms of Service.

Once you have accepted the Terms of Service, you should automatically be redirected to the student dashboard.

Click on the "My Profile" link in the left hand navigation menu. Please update your personal information.

Notes on the Student Profile Page

Name

Please list your name as you would like it to appear on your program certificate.

Citizenship

We are required to ask for this information. Please see the FAQ entry in student ineligibility for more details.

Shipping Address

Please be very, very careful when filling out this section and provide as much detail as possible. While we're successfully cutting down on the number of problem shipments of t-shirts, etc., we rely on you to provide us with accurate address information. If you have any questions, we suggest you call your local FedEx office and see if they would be able to ship to your address as you have listed it in the web app.

It is very important that you provide a phone number where you can be reached consistenly, as all shipping companies ask for a phone number so they can follow up when there are issues with delivery. If you have a mobile number, please provide it here. It is also very important to include your country code, as a problem with your shipment may occur in a country outside of your own and the shipping company will need the country code information in order to reach you.

School

Please include the full name of your school as it would appear in any official document sent from the administrative staff.

Please include the URL to your school as a whole, not to a particular department.

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Start-Up Fervor Shifts to Energy in Silicon Valley

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Andrew Beebe is the president of Energy Innovations, which makes low-cost solar panels.

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By MATT RICHTEL

Published: March 14, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, March 13 — Silicon Valley’s dot-com era may be giving way to the watt-com era.

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Out of the ashes of the Internet bust, many technology veterans have regrouped and found a new mission in alternative energy: developing wind power, solar panels, ethanol plants and hydrogen-powered cars.

It is no secret that venture capitalists have begun pouring billions into energy-related start-ups with names like SunPower, Nanosolar and Lilliputian Systems.

But that interest is now spilling over to many others in Silicon Valley — lawyers, accountants, recruiters and publicists, all developing energy-oriented practices to cater to the cause.

The best and the brightest from leading business schools are pelting energy start-ups with résumés. And, of course, there are entrepreneurs from all backgrounds — but especially former dot-commers — who express a sense of wonder and purpose at the thought of transforming the $1 trillion domestic energy market while saving the planet.

“It’s like 1996,” said Andrew Beebe, one of the remade Internet entrepreneurs. In the boom, he ran Bigstep.com, which helped small businesses sell online. Today, he is president of Energy Innovations, which makes low-cost solar panels. “The Valley has found a new hot spot.”

Mr. Beebe said the Valley’s potential to generate change was vast. But he cautioned that a frenzy was mounting, the kind that could lead to overinvestment and poorly thought-out plans.

“We’ve started to see some of the bad side of the bubble activity starting to brew,” Mr. Beebe said.

The energy boomlet is part of a broader rebound that is benefiting all kinds of start-ups, including plenty that are focused on the Web. But for many in Silicon Valley, high tech has given way to “clean tech,” the shorthand term for innovations that are energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. Less fashionable is “green,” a word that suggests a greater interest in the environment than in profit.

The similarities to past booms are obvious, but the Valley has always run in cycles. It is a kind of renewable gold rush, a wealth- and technology-creating principle that is always looking for something around which to organize.

In this case, the energy sector is not so distant from other Silicon Valley specialties as it might appear, say those involved in the new wave of start-ups. The same silicon used to make computer chips converts sunlight into electricity on solar panels, while the bioscience used to make new drugs can be employed to develop better ethanol processing.

More broadly, the participants here say their whole approach to building new companies and industries is easily transferable to the energy world. But some wonder whether this is just an echo of the excessive optimism of the Internet boom. And even those most involved in the trend say the size of the market opportunity in energy is matched by immense hurdles.

Starting a clean technology firm is “not like starting an online do-it-yourself legal company,” said Dan Whaley, chief executive of Climos, a San Francisco company that is developing organic processes to remove carbon from the atmosphere. “Scientific credibility is the primary currency that drives the thing I’m working on.”

Just what that thing is, he would not specify. For competitive reasons, Mr. Whaley declined to get into details about his company’s technology. His advisory board includes prominent scientists, among them his mother, Margaret Leinen, the head of geosciences for the National Science Foundation.

In the last Silicon Valley cycle, Mr. Whaley’s help came from his father. In 1994, he did some of the early work from his father’s living room on GetThere.com, a travel site. It went public in 1999 and was bought by Sabre for $750 million in 2000.

This time around, entrepreneurs say they are not expecting such quick returns. In the Internet boom, the mantra was to change the world and get rich quick. This time, given the size and scope of the energy market, the idea is to change the world and get even richer — but somewhat more slowly.

Those drawn to the alternative-energy industry say that they need time to understand the energy technology, and to turn ideas into solid companies. After all, in contrast to the Internet boom, this time the companies will need actual manufactured products and customers.

“There are real business models and real products to be sold — established markets and growing economics,” said George Basile, who has a doctorate in biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley and specializes in energy issues.