Technology & AI

Discover, October 25 2010.

Those Street View cameras aren’t just collecting pictures of streets and buildings to make Google Maps better, they’re also scooping up email addresses and passwords, Google admitted Friday. Back in May the company announced that its Street View cars were mistakenly collecting data from unencrypted wireless networks; now they’ve acknowledged that this data included emails, url addresses, and passwords from people who were sending that data over open (non-password protected) networks when a Google car passed by. In making the new announcement, Google declared itself deeply chagrined, and outlined the steps it has taken to improve its privacy policy.

We are mortified by what happened, but confident that these changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users. Read More >

Discover, October 22 2010.

In June, the Guggenheim Museum announced a collaborative video contest with none other than YouTube. Yes, you read that right: YouTube, the video website overrun with videos of cats and each tween’s latest shopping spree. The contest was open to anyone and everyone who has made a video in the last two years.

A total of 23,000 videos were submitted and judged by a panel of artists and curators, and the competition’s 25 winners were announced last night. These 25 videos will be on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York through the weekend, and all the shortlisted videos will stay online indefinitely. Read More >

Discover, October 21 2010.

3D printers are beloved by geeks the world over. Enter the Lego 3D printer: it’s not only MADE of Legos, but it also PRINTS with Legos. With only a few tweaks, this LegoBot could even take over the world print copies of itself, maker Will Gorman told Wired:

“There is a recursiveness to this whole thing,” says Gorman.

“I love the idea of self-assembly and the Star Trek replicator and I love Legos,” he says. “I wanted to bring those two worlds together.” Read More >

Discover, October 21 2010.

A new approach to electrophoresis is giving researchers more control over how they play with small particles.

Electrophoresis is the movement of particles in solution under a current–a phenomenon that can be exploited for use in everything from ePaper to DNA separating gels. Instead of using a normal fluid to conduct current, researchers led by Oleg Lavrentovich tried using liquid crystals as their conductive fluid. Read More >

Discover, October 21 2010.

A small town in Ontario has come down with a bad case of technophobia. The majority (88 percent) of an Ontario school’s parent group (which has 210 members) voted that they want the wireless Internet at their children’s school shut off, the group said in a press release:

“After learning the whole story about how risky WiFi is, parents voted to protect their children’s health and plug the computers back in with hardwires,” said Andrew Couper, a member of the elected School Council…. “This is something every school council across Canada should be questioning.” Read More >

Discover, October 19 2010.

Flexible materials technology may just bring the next wave of trendy to the markets, in the form of glowing tattoos and T- shirts. Or the hot new tech could be used for its intended purpose: monitoring medical conditions.

This flexible light-emitting diode (LED) array uses many already existing materials and techniques to create a nano-sized, flexible patch of light. A team lead by John Rogers developed the array as a medical device; it could be implanted to serve as a readout for monitoring internal body conditions, like blood oxygenation or glucose levels, or it could turn on light-activated drugs. Read More >

Discover, October 18 2010.

The world’s first robot pop star, aka Divabot, made her debut last week at the Digital Contents Expo. Tech News Daily’s take on her:

The warbling robot, with the Star Wars-esque designation HRP-4C, stands at about five feet, two inches (1.58 meters) tall. It has the appearance of a young Japanese girl, although one admittedly wearing a RoboCop suit minus the helmet. Read More >

Discover, October 15 2010.

What would you do with a spare $640,000? John Graham-Cunning would build a steam-powered computer invented in the 1830s. And instead of waiting around for this mysterious spare money to show up, he’s started soliciting donations. The plan: Raise the money by January 2011, build the analytical engine from Charles Babbage’s original design, then donate the machine to a museum. Graham-Cunning knows this idea sounds crazy, but it won’t deter him, as he wrote in an article for the O’Reilly Radar:

It might seem a folly to want to build a gigantic, relatively puny computer at great expense 170 years after its invention. But the message of a completed Analytical Engine is very clear: it’s possible to be 100 years ahead of your own time. Read More >

Discover, October 14 2010.

How much harm would a robot cause, if a robot could cause harm? Ok, admittedly that’s not as good of a tongue twister as the woodchuck chucking wood, but it’s a legitimate question being posed by researchers in Slovenia. In Slovenia, where electronic gadgets smack you. 

Borut Povše at the University of Ljubljana has been testing the punching ability of an industrial-strength robot, inflicting everything from mild to unbearable pain on six of his colleagues and measuring how much they said it hurt. Povše told New Scientist’s Paul Marks that robots need to learn their limits to safely work side by side with humans. Read More >

Discover, October 11 2010.

Google announced this weekend that it has been driving automated cars around California’s roads, and that the vehicles have already logged about 140,000 miles. A fully automated car just finished a big trip–all the way from Google’s campus in Mountain View, California to Hollywood.

Larry and Sergey founded Google because they wanted to help solve really big problems using technology. And one of the big problems we’re working on today is car safety and efficiency. Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use. Read More >