Techno-News Blog

by Christopher Mims, Technology Review

Mining, textiles, retail—these are the industries that are most likely to violate worker’s rights, right? Nope— turns out the electronics industry is worse, according to a recent report from Oekom, a sustainable investment research firm. (For more on that report, check out the breakdown of its findings at GreenBiz.) The appearance of monologist / investigative reporter / anti-Apple agitator Mike Daisey on the most recent episode of This American Life is leading to a whole new wave of awareness of a stark fact of electronics manufacturing: There is no “Fair Trade” standard for our electronics, even though industry watchers have been calling for one ever since the well-publicized suicides at FoxConn, China’s largest manufacturer of electronics.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27475/?p1=blogs

by Christopher Mims, Technology Review

You’re not actually running Windows on the iPad, just streaming a continuous video feed of Windows directly to your iPad. So you have to be on a reasonably fast connection (wifi, not 3G) for it to work. Windows and its apps run in “the cloud,” or in this case OnLive’s remote servers. This is an interesting application of a much larger trend: offloading some, or in this case nearly all, of the processing for an application into the cloud. For example, processor-intensive tasks like face recognition are better accomplished by remote servers, and everything from location services like Skyhook to your cell phone’s email client represent a series of trade-offs between server and client side processing. AJAX, Web 2.0, etc. are also part of this trend of re-balancing which parts of the application are best chewed through locally or somewhere else.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27476/?p1=blogs

By Kevin Bullis, Technology Review

As part of our special report on manufacturing, we asked Neri Oxman, a professor at the MIT Media Lab and an internationally recognized artist whose work is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to create a sculpture that would illustrate the future of manufacturing. What she produced, in collaboration with MIT materials science professor Craig Carter, is a powerful demonstration of the possibilities of 3-D printing, using techniques that take advantage of the capabilities of 3-D printers in ways that conventional manufacturing techniques cannot.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39437/?p1=A2

by the BBC

In 2012 expect to hear a lot more about 4G as many big operators begin the process of upgrading their service to us. Forget 3G, 4G is so fast it could make your mobile quicker than your home PC while reaching the parts other networks have left behind. From rural outposts to high-speed cities, Dan Simmons reports on 4G and the promise of super-fast broadband everywhere.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9672822.stm

By Dave Lee, BBC

John Locke was the first self-published author to sell one over a million copies on Amazon – making him a New York Times bestseller. “Company policy, not mine. Were it up to me, we would. The revolution is not yet complete.” A change in policy at the 164-year-old Chicago Tribune is not something to be taken lightly. But when Julia Keller, the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic, calls something a “revolution”, you sense things may be about to change. She’s referring to her newspaper’s policy on reviewing self-published books. It’s a simple one: they don’t. And until recently, it would be unthinkable to even consider over-ruling it as an obvious method of quality control.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16469000

By Chris Vallance, BBC

Can a £15 computer solve the programming gap?

A test version of the Raspberry Pi computer has attracted bids of more than £3,000 in a fund-raising auction on eBay. With the machine about to start its first major production run, could it be the right tool to revitalise computer science in schools? “Consider our gast well and truly flabbered,” blogged Liz Upton of the Raspberry Pi team in response to news that an auction of 10 trial versions of the computers had attracted offers worth thousands of pounds. The highest bid for one of the beta versions is over £3,000, more than a hundred times the planned asking price for the most expensive model of £22.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16424990

By Leo Kelion, BBC

A “smart” internet-connected television that has the ability to have its hardware upgraded every year has been unveiled by Samsung. It has an expansion slot allowing new kit to be added to boost processing performance and introduce new features. The innovation may help reassure shoppers concerned about their screen becoming outdated. The move is aimed at helping the South Korean tech giant retain its lead as the world’s best-selling TV maker. Samsung’s president of consumer electronics, Boo-keun Yoon, unveiled the firm’s flagship LED television at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas noting that his firm currently sells two televisions every second.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16480712

By Clint Boulton, eWeek

MIPS Technologies scored some first-mover points for the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show a month ago when it announced its 7-inch, Ainovo Novo7 Basic tablet, the first slate to run Google’s Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system. ICS, a merging of the Android 2.x smartphone branch and Android 3.x Honeycomb branch for tablets, includes software navigation keys, a holographic user interface and several other UI improvements. The Novo7 tablet is powered by a 1GHz CPU built by MIPS and an application processor from Ingenic Semiconductor. The tablet, which will soon be offered with 8-inch and 9-inch displays, will be available in the United States within several months for only $100.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/CES-Highlight-Ice-Cream-Sandwich-Novo7-Tablet-Costs-100-482480/?kc=rss

By: Clint Boulton, eWeek

Media who proclaimed carriers were keeping a low profile at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas were sorely mistaken. AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint all announced major handsets, most of which are based on Google’s Android operating system. AT&T arguably made the loudest noise, unveiling five handsets and a 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) tablet as part of its 2012 Developer Summit. Perhaps the most high-profile handset was the Samsung Galaxy Note “phablet,” a phone with a 5.3-inch, HD Super AMOLED screen that provides some tablet-type real estate to work with for consumers and business types alike. The handset, which AT&T has not priced but will launch in the coming weeks, boasts the S Pen digital pen input technology and software to let users draw, sketch or just write. Two more Samsung Android handsets are coming from AT&T in the coming months.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/CES-ATT-Verizon-Sprint-Tout-Android-Smartphones-638610/?kc=rss

By Christopher Mims, Technology Review

Microsoft has developed a new kind of Wi-Fi network that performs at its top speed even in the face of interference. It takes advantage of a new Wi-Fi standard that uses more of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also hops between the narrow bands of unused spectrum within television broadcast frequencies.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/39429/?p1=A3

By Duncan Graham-Rowe, Technology Review

Researchers at Samsung have developed a smart phone that can detect people’s emotions. Rather than relying on specialized sensors or cameras, the phone infers a user’s emotional state based on how he’s using the phone. For example, it monitors certain inputs, such as the speed at which a user types, how often the “backspace” or “special symbol” buttons are pressed, and how much the device shakes. These measures let the phone postulate whether the user is happy, sad, surprised, fearful, angry, or disgusted, says Hosub Lee, a researcher with Samsung Electronics and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology’s Intelligence Group, in South Korea. Lee led the work on the new system. He says that such inputs may seem to have little to do with emotions, but there are subtle correlations between these behaviors and one’s mental state, which the software’s machine-learning algorithms can detect with an accuracy of 67.5 percent.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39434/?p1=A2

By Tracy Mitrano, Inside Higher Ed

The new case is an employee contract dispute that includes a difference over who owns a Twitter account. My guess is that there is more than meets the eye. The Twitter account issue may be standing in for other concerns about a soured relationship. But that this case raises the question is not without legal significance. So who does own the Twitter account, the employee or the company?

The answer: Twitter!

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/who-owns-twitter-account

by kfc, Technology Review

Google Earth provides a cornucopia of exotic images of our planet taken from above. For the most part, the focus of attention is on the land and the cities, roads and natural formations that it supports. Today, however, Fabrizio Logiurato at Trento University in Italy says that Google’s images of the oceans are just as fascinating. Logiurato’s interest is in the wave dynamics that the images reveal. To demonstrate this, he has selected a gallery of beautiful images showing phenomena such as diffraction, refraction and interference.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27466/?p1=blogs

by kfc, Technology Review

Sudoku is a number puzzle consisting of a 9 x 9 grid in which some cells contain clues in the form of digits from 1 to 9. The solver’s jobs is to fill in the remaining cells so that each row, column and 3×3 box in the grid contains all nine digits. There’s another unwritten rule: the puzzle must have only one solution. So grids cannot contain just a few starting clues. It’s easy to see why. A grid with 7 clues cannot have a unique answer because the two missing digits can always be interchanged in any solution. A similar argument explains why grids with fewer clues must also have multiple solutions.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27469/?p1=blogs

By: Brian T. Horowitz, Technology Review

Tablets will be a fixture in many doctors’ offices in 2012, research firm NPD Group reports. About 75 percent of small and midsize medical practices plan to buy tablets over the next year, according to a recent survey by the company. The results were part of NPD’s third-quarter “SMB Technology Monitor.” Released Dec. 29, the report found that in small and midsize businesses (less than 1,000 employees), 73 percent planned to buy tablets over the next year, up from 68 percent in NPD’s second-quarter report. Small medical practices tend to buy tablets at a faster pace than larger enterprises, said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Health-Care-IT/Doctors-Offices-to-Emerge-As-Heavy-Tablet-Buyers-in-2012-NPD-Group-168070/?kc=rss

By: Nicholas Kolakowski, eWeek

Microsoft’s Windows 8 will offer a new feature, Storage Spaces, designed to both protect data and organize physical drives for maximum use. In a Jan. 5 posting on the “Building Windows 8” blog, Rajeev Nagar, a group program manager on the Windows Storage and File System team, broke down the two overarching themes behind Storage Spaces: one, the ability to organize multiple physical disks into storage pools, and two, the use of virtual disks (which he refers to as “spaces”).

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Microsofts-Windows-8-Will-Feature-Robust-Storage-Spaces-700432/?kc=rss

By: Chris Preimesberger, eWeek

Storage used to be considered a snoozer of an IT beat. You get data, you store data, and sometimes you back it up. Couldn’t be simpler. Right. Well, the storage beat is a bit more than that. Storage is the home base for all our data, in whatever form. The advancements in various types of media, cloud systems, management software, dataflow accelerators — there is a long list of subsets — make the sector more compelling all the time. Looking back at the recently-passed-into-memory 2011 with a data storage lens, we saw few dull moments at eWEEK. Following are, in somewhat an order of importance, the most impactful storage news stories of 2011.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Why-Storage-Was-a-Newsy-Sector-in-2011-347847/?kc=rss

By: Frank Ohlhorst, eWeek

A recent study of technology job want ads shows a 61 percent increase in demand nationwide for IT professionals with cloud computing experience. The study, which is based on ads posted by about 2,400 businesses, was performed by Wanted Analytics, a firm that provides business intelligence for the talent marketplace. “This growth spurt shows that businesses are truly seeking to invest in cloud technologies” said Raj Mehta, president and CEO of Infosys International, an IT services firm. “It is pretty safe to say that the cloud has gone past the consideration phase and is rapidly becoming an entrenched IT service for most companies,” Mehta added.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Explosive-Job-Growth-seen-for-Cloud-Savvy-IT-Professionals-557061/?kc=rss

by the BBC

US bookseller Barnes & Nobel has said it is considering options for its Nook e-book division. The firm also said its losses for the year would be larger than expected due in part to the cost of investing in new e-readers. The company’s shares fell 23% after the announcement before recovering slightly. Sales of the Nook were up 70% on a year ago in the nine weeks to the end of September, according to the retailer. However it said sales of its new ‘Simple touch’ device were lower than expected.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16435312

by the BBC

Where in the past the consumer’s journey from awareness to conversion – buying something – was a fairly linear process such as watching a TV ad, nowadays it’s much more complicated than that. Understanding those different journeys is the challenge. With the proliferation of personal technologies like mobile devices and indeed websites like Facebook and so on, what we realise is that our consumers are more connected. We have a bunch of connected consumers who expect connected experiences. This requires connected databases – the biggest problem is for us to connect the dots together.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16429321

by the BBC

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has resolved to take an online computer coding course. The mayor is joining more than 180,000 people currently taking part in Code Year, a campaign to encourage more people to program. “My New Year’s resolution is to learn to code with Codeacademy in 2012!” he wrote on Twitter. Participants in the course receive an interactive lesson each week, via email.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16440126