The Pandora of movies. Films by Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation are clips pieced together by a computer algorithm.

Indie movie makers can be a strange bunch, pushing the envelope of their craft and often losing us along the way. In any case, if you’re going to produce something unintelligible anyway, why not let a computer do it? Eve Sussmam and the Rufus Corporation did just that. She and lead actor Jeff Wood traveled to the Kazakhstan border of the Caspian Sea for two years of filming. But instead of a movie with a beginning, middle and end, they shot 3,000 individual and unrelated clips. To the clips they added 80 voice-overs and 150 pieces of music, mixed it all together and put it in a computer. A program on her Mac G5 tower, known at Rufus as the “serendipity machine,” then splices the bits together to create a final product.

As you might imagine, the resultant film doesn’t always make sense. But that’s part of the fun! As the Rufus Corporation writes on their website, “The unexpected juxtapositions create a sense of suspense alluding to a story that the viewer composes.”

It’s a clever experiment even if some viewers end up wanting to gouge their eyes out after a sitting. And there is some method to their madness. The film, titled “whiteonwhite:algorithnoir,” is centered on a geophysicist named Holz (played by Wood) who’s stuck in a gloomy, 1970’s-looking city operated by the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. Distinct scenes such as wire tapped conversations or a job interview for Mr. Holz are (hopefully) woven together by distinct voiceovers and dialogues. When the scenes and audio are entered into the computer they’re tagged with keywords. The program then pieces them together in a way similar to Pandora’s stringing together of like music. If a clip is tagged “white,” the computer will randomly select from tens of other clips also having the “white” tag. The final product is intended to be a kind of “dystopian futuropolis.” What that means, however, changes with each viewing as no two runs are the same.

Watching the following trailer, I actually got a sense…um, I think…of a story.

Rufus Corporation says the movie was “inspired by Suprematist quests for transcendence, pure space and artistic higher ground.” I have no idea what that means but I hope they’ve achieved it. Beautiful things can happen when computers create art. And it’s only a matter of time before people attempt the same sort of thing with novel writing. Just watching the trailer, it’s hard to tell if the movie’s any good or not. I missed the showings at the Sundance Film Festival, but even so, they probably didn’t resemble the trailer anyway. And that’s okay, because that’s the whole point.

[image credits: Rufus Corporation and PRI via YouTube]
[video credit: PRI via YouTube]
image 1: whiteonwhite
image 2: Rufus
video: whiteonwhite

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Witha PogoPlug NAS box, a few antennae, flash memory and some batteries, and you've got a cheap, disposable F-BOMB with which to collect data on adversaries.

Attach a camera to a drone, fly the drone around the back of the house, locate the bad guys. Robotic UAVs are being used for surveillance by everyone from the military to local law enforcement to emergency personnel. But if you think about it, drones are kind of big and really noisy, not the ideal tool for spying on someone. Their data gathering capabilities are limited too and they’re really expensive. What about a computer, small and durable enough for you to toss over a fence or inconspicuously attach to a car? Equipped with Wi-Fi cracking software or GPS, it could infiltrate someone’s computer or track someone’s location without them knowing.

Allow me to drop the F-BOMB. The Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors, that is. Invented by Brandon O’Connor as an alternative to high-tech and costly spy devices, the F-BOMB is made so cheaply with off-the-shelf parts that you’ll feel perfectly okay with losing one or two. Very convenient when it’s sitting in the backyard of a drug lord hideout.

Before building the F-BOMB, O’Connor challenged himself with several constraints. He wanted multiple wireless radios, USB capability for expansion (add GPS for example), battery life that lasted hours to days, a size small enough that it won’t be found by the “bad guys with guns,” as he calls them, and do all this without spending thousands or even hundreds of dollars.

The key addition was the PogoPlug. The PogoPlug is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box, a data storage device through which people can share information over the Internet. It runs on Linux which makes it pretty user-friendly, according to O’Connor. Normally the boxes cost about $150, which would have made the F-BOMB too expensive for O’Connor’s purposes, but the company is having a hard time selling the devices. PogoPlug’s misfortune becomes O’Connor’s advantage as he can now purchase them for just $25 on Amazon.com. And that’s the most expensive bit of hardware. Add the antennae, eight gigabytes worth of flash memory and a plastic casting that’s 3D-printed and you’ve got a little spying computer you can build for under $49. Four D batteries will provide power for 30-plus hours.

Aside from being cheap and reproducible, building a monitoring device with commercial off-the-shelf, or COTS, components from Amazon or craigslist means when the bad guys find it in their backyard they won’t be able to trace it to you. Were the F-BOMB to require any kind of made-to-order, a determined person could find the manufacture, start asking questions.

O’Connor talked about the F-BOMB (“because one time I worked for DARPA and they love terrible acronyms”) at ShmooCon 2012. As you’ll see in the video, he’s nothing if not enthusiastic.

The F-BOMB won an award from DARPA’s Cyber Fast Track program. The title of the project is “Reticle: Leaderless Command and Control,” which kind of makes me wonder what else he’s developing. As Forbes reports, O’Connor was tight-lipped about what DARPA might do with the technology.

But we can venture a few guesses. The platform can be attached to a quadcopter and dropped onto a roof. It can be hidden inside a carbon monoxide casing, or any other imaginative cover container such as a box of stale Triscuits that you’re pretty sure no one’s going to touch. As I mentioned before, Wifi-cracking software will allow you to eavesdrop on a person’s computer, and you can track someone with a GPS module. And if you’re more in the business of science than spying, you can add temperature or humidity sensors to collect data for meteorological research.

O’Connor has a security and software consultancy called Malice Afterthought. He learned about such things teaching at cybersecurity schools for the military as well as working in the security devisions of VeriSign and Sun Microsystems. The website describes him as “dreamer and mad scientist capable of making even the most challenging tasks into reality.” Being that he kind of runs the consultancy himself, he probably wrote the description himself, which is kind of weird. Anyway, he certainly has created a little security monster in the F-BOMB. Effin’ cool.

[image credits: Forbes and Wired]
[video credit: USSJoin via YouTube]
image 1: F-BOMB
image 2: F-BOMB
video: F-BOMB

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The upright, folded hands is a sign of confidence. So is driving a BMW. With ConnectedDrive Connect, BMW owners can do both!

While robotic cars have a ways to go yet before rolling (themselves) out onto showroom floors, BMW is incorporating driver assistance features into its cars that drivers can use – and they can sell – sooner rather than later. Their semi-autonomous driving system, ConnectedDrive Connect, was announced last year. The car maker has finished its closed track test runs and has released a video of the car out on the Autobahn for some good old fashioned hands off driving fun.

ConnectedDrive Connect includes four types of sensors – radar, camera, laser scanners and ultrasound distance sensors – that allow it to track cars in front of it up to a distance of 50 meters. It also detects cars in adjacent lanes. A driving simulator produces driving strategies on the go. For example, the car slows if it’s moving to fast into a turn, and it taps the brakes to maintain control going downhill. Like any cruise control the driver sets the speed and the maintains a safe distance behind a car in front of it. The system can be enabled between speeds of 30 and 180 km/h (81 mph). I’d be a little worried if that truck in the next lane splashes some mud on the car that it doesn’t go pell mell into the car in front of me. The sensors are “largely resistant to dirt build-up” according to BMW, but I’d wipe down regularly just to be safe. BMW owners probably don’t need to be reminded of that anyway.

But it’s really no fun to just simply maintain a safe distance, not with a Beamer. If the car in front of you is going too slow, ConnectedDrive Connect senses your impatience, changes lanes, and leaves the slowpoke in the dust.

To date the BMW 5 Series has logged 5,000 kilometers in “highly-automated” mode on freeways. When can we expect to see BMW drivers begin using both hands to apply their makeup? The company says it’s a few years yet before CDC goes into production. One of the things they’ll have to improve is the GPS tracking. Right now they only take the car out on roads that they’ve mapped to within centimeter accuracy.

It is becoming increasingly likely that your next car will have some kind of driver assistance. Last year carmakers spent over $10 billion in advanced driver assistance systems. By 2016 that number could increase to $130 billion, according to an ABI Research projection. The rapid spread will be due largely to their incorporation into more mainstream cars rather than being an option for luxury cars. As the technology is improved production costs are decreasing, making it increasingly feasible to add driver assistance to less expensive cars. Volkswagon’s Temporary Auto Pilot (TAP) is similar to ConnectDrive Connect in that it maintains a safe distance behind cars and keeps the car from veering out of the lane. And both Volkswagon and BMW get the job done without the ungainly periscope-looking sensor on Google’s Prius.

[image credits: World Car Fans]
[video credits: motorsixty via YouTube]
image: ConnectDrive Connect
video: ConnectDrive Connect

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Dropcam adds HD, infrared and two-way audio to their new Dropcam HD.

The dropcam surveillance camera was already about as user-friendly as could be, now it’s added high-definition video and two-way audio to its arsenal of awesomeness. The previous model, Dropcam Echo rolled out in 2010, was presented as an affordable ($279, $199 direct) home surveillance system. Like the Echo Dropcam’s new camera, Dropcam HD, connects through Wi-Fi and works through Dropcam apps for iPhone and Android so you can stream video to your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android phone, and even a Kindle Fire tablet. The apps are free, but if you want to record the footage Dropcam offers a cloud-based DVR service. The $9.99/month plan allows up to 7 days of continuous recording with time-stamped motion and audio alerts. Because the data is recorded on Dropcam’s servers you don’t have to use valuable hard drive space to store video, which comes in handy given that the new camera has a 720p HD resolution, 16 times the resolution of Dropcam Echo. Storing videos in the cloud also allows users to log into the Dropcam network and review their videos from anywhere. You can keep the footage you want just by specifying date and start time and the length of time you want to save. New video recordings automatically erase old ones from offsite storage so you don’t have to do it manually. Email notifications are sent when the camera detects motion within its field so you don’t have to sift through hours of footage like a convenience store video rewind. And because Dropcam HD is powered by AC, you can potentially record your back patio 24/7.

Another feature added to Dropcam HD are twelve infrared LEDs that give it night vision for full 24-hour surveillance. Speakers have been added to so, together with the camera’s microphone, you can hear what’s going on and talk back. Who needs an iPad2 to Skype from anywhere?

Dropcam has also miniaturized the camera. It’s new circular plastic chassis fits into a wall bracket that gives it more pivot than the Echo had. And the small camera can be removed from the bracket and placed in a concealed location to make sure the babysitter isn’t pocketing the family silver.

In the following video CNET talks with Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy at CES 2012 about Dropcam HD.

Cameras such as dropcam are the perfect hardware to accompany video 2.0. Sites like Hulu and On Demand cable features mean you watch what you want, when you want. And YouTube revolutionized personal video. People can now instantly self-publish and share their videos, opening up an online dialogue in the form of comments, sharing and editing. Gone are the days of static content – Internet videos are works in progress. With its Wi-Fi connectivity and ease of use, Dropcam HD is the perfect “appware” to make creating videos as easy as sharing them.

[image credits: anandtech]
[video credits: CNET channel via YouTube]
images: dropcam hd
video: dropcam hd

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The winds of change continue to blow for this in vogue renewable energy.

When Barack Obama ran for President back in 2008, one of the ‘changes’ that he set forth was a New Energy Plan for America, which included a requirement that by 2012, 10% of US electricity would come from renewable resources. The good news is that goal was met in 2009 and today, nearly 13% of US electrical generation is from renewable sources. The one renewable energy that President Obama targeted as “the future of American energy” was wind power, even before it was dubbed the most promising renewable energy in a study published in Energy and Environmental Science in 2009.

In anticipation of the election cycle now underway, which ultimately will see energy policy kicked around by candidates, what is the state of wind power in the US? The simple answer: wind power is on the rise. For the first nine months of 2011, wind accounted for 1.45% of domestic energy production. That’s 121% higher than for the same period in 2008.

Wind energy is often touted “clean” energy as it doesn’t require fuel or water to operate and doesn’t pollute the air or water. It also doesn’t experience the price fluctuations that fossil fuels do. As more research is pouring into the industry, improvements in turbine technology are reducing costs. Because Americans make the environment a secondary priority when energy costs are high and the economy goes south, wind power offers one of the best and cheapest solutions to the long-term energy production vs. environment protection debate.

At the same time, wind energy has made such great strides because of the government. In fact, the government subsidized wind power to the tune of $5 billion in 2010, and state and local government contributed as well. At the same time, companies are investing in wind power, such as BP and Sempra recently announcing a $1 billion investment in US wind farms. Wind power is also helping to create jobs as foreign companies build turbine manufacturing plants in places desperate for recovery, such as Louisiana. Offshore wind farms are in the planning stages but will likely require years to be in production, and advocates say that offshore wind needs more government help to work, even as millions of dollars are already flowing its way.

But it seems wind power cannot blow its problems away. Wind energy suffers inherently from stable supply, because the intermittent generation from wind within a given day, from one week to the next, and month-to-month with seasonal changes make it difficult to stabilize electricity output. And massive surges to the grid can be just as bad as dead air. Another issue for the US is that the best locations for wind farms are in the middle of the country, as can be seen in a map of the mean annual wind speeds at turbine heights, but the greatest demand for electricity is on the coasts, whose best bet is offshore wind farms in certain locations. Transport of wind-generated electricity to those areas is not currently possible (though research is underway), which basically makes dependence on other energy sources mandatory for those periods when the wind dies down.  Finally, the introduction of wind turbines has received mixed response from the public, with some people (often from the not-in-my-back-yard sector) complaining about the noise, health concerns, property values, and the impact on aesthetics, which have been mostly nixed.

US wind resources maps for both land (top) and offshore (bottom) identify the key areas for wind power.

So, how will wind power do in 2012? It ought to be a huge year. With the expectation that the government’s Production Tax Credit will expire at the end of this year, projects are scrambling to get orders in. The potential for growth is even higher as a new study shows that extension of the tax credit could create 100,000 jobs in the US in the next 4 years. At the same time, if the tax credit expires, it is believed that 37,000 American jobs could be lost and research in wind would drop incredibly. It seems then that all eyes will be on H.R. 3307 for the make-or-break extension of the credit before year’s end, which could very well come down to the wire as it is pushed until after the election in November.

In the long term, the US Energy Information Administration in its Annual Energy Outlook for 2011 projected that non-hydropower-based renewable energy will increase over the next 25 years with wind power doubling its contribution to total renewable energy. Growth in wind power is projected to flatten out if the tax credit is not extended meaning only one third of the growth in wind power seen between 2009 and 2012 is expected from 2012 to 2035.

Around the world, wind power added the most new capacity among renewable energy last year with China leading the world in turbine installations. We’ve recently covered the growth of offshore wind facilities in the EU. However, BP recently stated that while renewable energy in general will grow globally over the next few decades, it’s total contribution will only be around 5% to total energy production, with China and the US being the biggest producers for growth. So, it seems that the recent success of US wind power may very well turn out to be merely a correction to America’s overdependence on oil, rather than the solution to the country’s energy problems as claimed by President Obama and others.

Still, things change. For instance, nuclear power was once “the energy solution.” But last year’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan led to a nuclear disaster and caused nations around the world to curb their plans for nuclear power amid radiation fears. Renewable energy reached an important milestone when domestic production surpassed that of nuclear power and is now producing more than 18% of nuclear power. Odds are that as the brake will be put on nuclear energy, the potential for wind power will look brighter and brighter.

US energy policy is complicated but wind power is increasingly seen as part of the equation, unlike solar energy. The steps that the Obama administration have taken toward making wind power part of America’s energy future have been good, but whether they will be successful depends on too many factors at this point to know for certain.

To get just a brief sense of what is at stake this year, check out this video from the American Wind Energy Association discussing the jobs on the line:

[MEDIA: AWS, sxc, YouTube]

[SOURCES: AWEA, EIA, Renewable Energy World]

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UPDATE: Kickstarter has cancelled funding for eye3 due to delayed deliveries, skepticism that the drone will actually work and suspicion that the eye3 kit is actually pieced together from other kits already sold online. See IEEE Spectrum.

(Thanks to SH readers PatrikD and okiski!)

The eye3 can carry up to 12 pounds of camera equipment for your aerial photography pleasure.

The Holidays may have come and gone, but that’s no reason not to get your hands on the robotic hexacopter eye3. Kickstarter Kellie Sigler and her husband have been working out the kinks (and crashes) for the past two years to optimize the drone for reliable flying so you and I don’t have to. And the best thing is you don’t need a military-sized budget to purchase one.

Targeting cinematographers, journalists, scientists and hobbyists, the eye3 isn’t just a toy but packs enough power to hoist weighty (and expensive) 35mm dSLR cameras or even 16mm motion picture cameras with mounts. It has a durable, high precision carbon and glass fiber frame that weighs just half a kilogram. It uses the popular APM2 open source autopilot platform. Each of the six rotors is powered by a 350-watt motor. The six rotor design is a safety measure: two rotors can fail and the copter will still be brought back safely.

For $999 you get the basic hexacopter kit, which is the minimum you need to fly. You won’t get the autopilot, and you’ll need to provide your own radio controller. For $1,499 the full autopilot is added, and for $2,499 you get the top package that includes the controller and a handy carrying case for the robocopter.

Think about how much fun you’re going to have while watching the eye3 in the video below. For one thing, it definitely scoots faster through the air than Sigler’s calming, tranquil narrative. The accompanying piano is pretty incongruous with the hexacopter action as well. But that’s fine. They build it, we play with it, and next thing you know we’re causing all sorts of mischief.

Ain’t flying robots fun?

[image credits: Kickstarter]
[video credits: Kickstarter]
images: eye3
video: eye3

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The most extreme smartphone users are eating up the network extremely well.

It’s tough being an avid mobile device user these days. First, carriers tempt you with the latest feature-packed devices while promising to satiate your content fix, then they hobble your data plan and shun you for hogging the network. Now a scathing report of a survey conducted by the British mobile consulting company, Arieso, makes you look as bad as a hedge fund manager. Smartphone users who snagged an iPhone 4S since its release in October are accessing two times the data that iPhone 4 users are using and three times the data of iPhone 3G users. The worst offenders, however, are using 3G modems or USB dongles for laptops, consuming over 8 times the data of iPhone 4S users. And if you literally live on your device, you are part of the 1% of extremists consuming 50% of the data on the network. As the survey found that average device demand is increasing by 40% per year, Arieso warns mobile operators that things are only going to get worse in the next year. Yikes.

The survey tracked the data usage of 1.1 million European mobile subscribers in both urban and suburban areas over a 24-hour day. Now, it’s important to realize that this is not a comprehensive study.  Comparing multiple carriers, usage broken down by time or day of the week, and a host of other variables would permit more systematic analysis of the mobile landscape. As it had in a previous 2010 mobile survey, Arieso used data for calls, uplink and downlink volume for the iPhone 3G as its usage benchmark. The report focused on three aspects of mobile use: a usage survey of mostly smartphone and some tablet (iPad and iPad 2) devices, the extreme users, and suggestions to mobile operators about meeting the network strains.

Here are the highlights of the survey:

1. Google’s HTC Nexus One has the most data calls per subscriber (this was true of the 2010 survey too): It had over twice (2.21x) as many data calls as iPhone 3G subscribers. This includes user initiated voice and data calls, as well as the automatic transfers between the device and network for updates and location information. Now, it’s completely speculative as to why Nexus One holds this top spot, but Arieso suggests it may be ease of use, which is debatable as it is a four-step process to make a call on the phone. Or perhaps Nexus One users simply use the device for its original, antiquated role (a phone), regardless of how marginalized that function is nowadays.

2. Uplink data volumes on the newest smartphones are as much as 3.2 times higher: This one isn’t a surprise if you take into account the improved camera quality/functionality of the latest phones. Take a look at the chart and you can see that the guilty culprits are the iPhone 4S, upgrading the iPhone 4′s 5 megapixel camera up to 8 megapixels, and the HTC Desire S, which added a front-facing camera to the HTC Desire for video chats and all those duckface photos filling up Facebook. So what does it mean that these two smartphones, the latest in their respective lines, are using more than three times what iPhone 3G users upload? The trend suggests that the iPhone 5 (and whichever HTC phone can rival it) will only increase user-generated data uploads even more.

This chart shows smartphone usage (as a factor of iPhone 3G usage) based on Arieso data.

3. Downlink data volume is also increasing, as much as 2.8 times higher: Although the survey found that downlink volume is up by 176% in general, the iPhone 4S is the frontrunner with users downloading significantly more than with other phones. Also, Arieso found that users still download more than they upload, 7 times more in fact, which means that smartphones are primarily pull devices and will probably remain so for a long time, especially with the increasing number of apps available for both iOS and Android smartphones.

4. Don’t blame iOS users for traffic: Apple recently released their record-breaking quarterly sales covering the holiday period. Amazingly, 37 million iPhones were sold and the majority were the iPhone 4S. That means more iPhones were sold per day than children born around the world, according to CNET. Furthermore, Apple sold over 15 million iPads and indicated that 85 million people are now using Apple’s iCloud service. It would be very tempting then to analyze the data usage from the charts and conclude that Apple is causing some major problems, but the reality is that the worst data hogs are those using 3G modems. While there aren’t as many of them as those using Apple products, they upload 8.3 times as much and download 8.8 times as much as the average iPhone 4S user. And that trend is likely to continue as the iPad looks much more like an iPhone than a PC, in terms of data volume.

5. Extreme users are becoming even more extreme: The network stats are pretty lopsided, which is going to force mobile companies to corral high-end volume. The top 10% of subscribers are eating up 90% of the downlink volume, while the top 1% consume 50% of it. And if you cut it even thinner, the most voracious 0.1% are responsible for 20% of that volume. Based on previous surveys, Arieso states the trend is increasing, or as their report puts it, “the hungry are getting hungrier.”

Top mobile carriers have been nerfing their plans by eliminating unlimited data over the course of the last two years amid protests from mobile phone users, but the Arieso report reveals why it is necessary. Current networks clearly cannot handle the extreme loads that high-demand smartphone users place on them. In fact, an Ericcson report from last November predicted that mobile data traffic would increase 10 times in the next 5 years. Users who are downloading large amounts of content needed to be leashed in order to ensure network stability for all.

It'll be a long time before tablets become the "problem child" for mobile network usage, even among extreme users.

In the end, we all know mobile is the future, and one might even say we are in the heyday of the smartphone as both the hardware and software is being gobbled up across the world. Mobile companies will have to kick it into a higher gear to meet user demands and remain competitive at the same time. Don’t be surprised if data plans become even more capped, get more tiers and increase their overage penalties.

RIP unlimited data plans.

[Media: Arieso, SXC]

[Sources: Arieso, CNET, Engadget, Ericcson, NY Times, Reuters]

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If you want to see a pretty part of Earth, step outside. If you want to see all the pretty parts of Earth, step into outer space. NASA recently released the first piece of celestial eye candy for the year, and it’s a whopper. Blue Marble 2012 is a gorgeous image of Earth taken from 512 miles above the surface using NASA’s Visible IR Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard the Suomi NPP satellite. The suspended sphere hanging in the night is a call back to the iconic image Blue Marble taken during the Apollo 17 mission to the moon 40 years earlier. Unlike the original, Blue Marble 2012 was created through a composition of multiple images taken during four orbits on the Suomi NPP. Scroll down to see the original 1972 Blue Marble followed by updated incarnations of the planetary portrait all the way to the latest picture just released. The crafted grace of these images is almost as impressive as the successive leaps in technology that enabled their creation.

Blue Marble (1972):

Taken on December 7, 1972 aboard the Apollo 17 during its mission to the moon, this photograph was the first of its kind to successfully capture the southern ice cap. Since NASA first released it, this image has become one of the most iconic, and recognizable pictures of the globe ever taken.

Image Credit: NASA Johnson Space Center

Blue Marble (1997):

25 years after the original Blue Marble, NASA compiled the latest in satellite images to create this anniversary portrait. While the base image was taken on September 9, 1997, vegetation and oceanic coloring was created using data collected throughout the fall of that year. That coloring data was draped over topographical models created by the U.S. Geological Survey. The completed computer file for this portrait was 26 MB, making it one of the largest ever taken by NASA at that time (though that’s only equivalent to less than 10 photos shot with an iPhone 4S). The moon in the image is an artistic conceit, created from a 1994 photo swollen to twice its relative size.

Image Credit: Reto Stockli with the help of Alan Nelson, under the leadership of Fritz Hasler

Blue Marble (2001):


Collected from June to September of 2001, this image integrates various land, ocean, and atmospheric readings almost entirely gathered by MODIS. Photos were taken every eight days to avoid cloud images that may block the sensors. Visuals of city lights were gathered over nine months and superimposed. The entire globe was captured in this model with the true-color represented accurately for every square kilometer of the surface – allowing for both sides of the planet to be shown. At the time of release it was the most high definition, true-color, image of the Earth to date.

Image Credits: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli (land surface, shallow water, clouds). Enhancements by Robert Simmon (ocean color, compositing, 3D globes, animation). Data and technical support: MODIS Land Group; MODIS Science Data Support Team; MODIS Atmosphere Group; MODIS Ocean Group Additional data: USGS EROS Data Center (topography); USGS Terrestrial Remote Sensing Flagstaff Field Center (Antarctica); Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (city lights).

Blue Marble 2012:

The newest Blue Marble was created from images collected by VIIRS during four orbits on the Suomi NPP satellite around January 4th, 2012. The National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project (NPP) was recently renamed for Verner E. Suomi, considered by NASA to be the father of satellite meterology. With that name change comes a focus on improving understanding of Earth’s weather and improving forecasts to never before seen levels of accuracy. In a sun-synchronous orbit, Suomi NPP passes over each portion of the Earth at roughly the same local time, allowing each section photographed to be exposed to approximately the same light level. This latest Blue Marble once again represents the current pinnacle of NASA terrestrial imaging power.

Image Credits: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

The NPP Satellite was just launched in October 2011 and from its position 512 miles above the surface it continually collects images of the Earth in sections about 3 million meters across (~1900 miles). The following image, though not a member of the Blue Marble series, demonstrates how these large wedge photos can be overlain together to form a complete view of the planet. Well, almost complete, for this image the North Pole was not able to be photographed due to a lack of sunlight during the winter season.

Image Credit: NPP Land Product Evaluation and Testing Element

Blue Marble 2012 represents forty years of NASA sharing its celestial view with humanity. From well timed photographs on long-range manned missions, to artistically compiled images, to data driven models, to automated observations gathered by satellites, these portraits give us a unique perspective on Earth. Humanity’s commitment to science and exploration has provided a point of view we could have never achieved otherwise. It may feel like we’re simply stuck on a warm wet rock hurtling through space, but Blue Marble reminds us that we live on a wondrous, beautiful planet.

[image credits: as listed in text]
[source: NASA, Suomi NPP]

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The Kickstarter team has helped $130M go towards 17,000+ projects. Click to see one of the coolest team pictures ever.

Five hundred years ago, most Western artists lived off the charity of wealthy patrons. Today, you are that patron, and with Kickstarter you’ll be funding a lot more than just art. The Manhattan based company, not quite three years old, works as an online network to match worthy projects with crowd-based funding.  On Kickstarter an artist, advocate, or even engineer will post a call for help, often with a video detailing what they want to do and how your money will be used. Almost anything is fair game, from putting on a rock concert to designing a better iPad keyboard. Every visitor to Kickstarter decides on their own which project, if any, they wish to help fund and how much they want to give. Through word of mouth and internet buzz, Kickstarter has  helped 17,000+ projects succeed, raising more than $130 million in pledged support! Almost $100M is from 2011 alone. Kickstarter’s growth is phenomenal, and they are expanding into realms many may have thought beyond the reach of crowd-sourcing. 17 films at the Sundance Film Festival (about 10%) were funded on Kickstarter. Two projects have nearly broken the million dollar barrier. Increasing numbers of projects feature high-tech devices that are more commonly found at startup incubators than community supported websites. Kickstarter is making an impact not only in the lives of artists and patrons, but in the very industries those participants come from. This flourishing network is a prime example of the delightfully disruptive power of crowd-sourcing…and it’s just getting started.

Everyone from the Red Cross to Radiohead has turned to the internet to raise money, but Kickstarter is a little different. They ask as much from their project leaders as they do their donors. Their philosophy of crowd-sourcing seems to have two major tenets: 1) patrons are consumers, and 2) when it comes to funding it’s an all or nothing game. The first part of their philosophy lends itself towards one of the best parts of donating money to Kickstarter – you get something in return.  Every project offers various rewards for those who pledge different amounts of money. For a music show it could be a ticket to the event at $20, or a VIP pass at $100. When the project is aimed at producing a device, the rewards tend to function like pre-sales. Give them $50 now, and they’ll ship you a copy of the gadget once they get produced. In this manner, every pledge is kind of like an exchange. Backers offer money, and project leaders give either a token of appreciation, a valuable asset, or a one-of-a-kind momento depending on the pledge level. Leaders of the project determine the rewards offered, and are encouraged to make them as desirable as possible.

Most projects attract attention through a video that accompanies the project’s home page on the Kickstarter site. In 2011, 80% of projects had one. The following is a montage that celebrates the mixture of vision, charm, and insanity that one finds in Kickstarter fund request videos:

Once the pledges start rolling in, however, a project isn’t done proving itself. That’s when the “all or nothing” aspect of Kickstarter comes into play. Each project has a set amount of time (typically 30-60 days) to raise pledges. If they don’t meet their goal, the project will not be funded, and none of the backers’ credit cards will be charged. In other words, if a project decides they need $50k to put on a concert, they can’t walk away with $35k and do the best they can with the limited funds. It’s all or nothing. Either a project meets its goals (and backers are thus more likely to get their rewards as promised) or the project disappears and patrons can move on to find another (more successful) project to sponsor.

Between tantalizing rewards, and a system that doesn’t broker half-assed attempts, Kickstarter provides a kind of security to its potential patrons. Sure, any project may fail even if it reaches its funding goals, and some tech projects take much longer to enter into full production than expected (I’m still waiting for my video camera spy-glasses) but the Kickstarter system makes it more likely that money given to a project will yield a tangible benefit. Unsurprisingly, this quasi-reliability has attracted a lot of interest and a lot of money.

Justin Kazmark, one of Kickstarter’s 30+ employees and their PR guru, was able to walk through some of the impressive figures the organization has been able to generate. In 2011, $99M was pledged, up from $27M for 2010, bringing the total to around $130M. 27,000 projects were launched in 2011, of which about 11,800 met their goals. That’s up from 11,000 launched and 4000 successful in 2010. The project success rate stayed about the same, however (46% in 2011, 43% in 2010) and the overall number of successful projects has surpassed 17,000. For every dollar a patron pledges to a project that meets or exceeds its goal (and thus gets funded) more than 90 cents will reach the project’s coffers. 5% goes as a fee to Kickstarter and between 3-5% goes to Amazon to process payments. Even with those fees, in overall terms Kickstarter is an efficient service for both patrons and project leaders. Of the $130M+ that’s been pledged, 85% eventually made it into the hands of projects – that’s a fantastic figure considering that about 45% of projects succeed. Because Kickstarter validates the credit cards of patrons as they pledge, the collection rate for successful projects is “close to 100%”. When it comes to getting raw patron interest converted into project finances, 85% is awesome – kudos to Kickstarter.

Of all the stats surrounding Kickstarter, however, perhaps the most impressive is the number of people who participate. There have been more than 1.25 million supporters! 200,000 or so of those have funded multiple projects. A few people go crazy, with the most prolific patron supporting over 700 projects! Even when not garnering pledges, project pages on Kickstarter generate some serious traffic – 30 million people visited Kickstarter in 2011 (up from 8 million in 2010), and media outlets regularly cover Kickstarter projects (Singularity Hub included).

Some projects have attracted so much attention and support that their success seems out of place. Tik Tok is a device that converts an iPod nano into a multitouch wristwatch. In 2010 it raised more than $940,000 from 13,512 backers – most as effective pre-sales for the device at $25 or $50. More recently, the Hidden Radio and Bluetooth Speaker raised almost as much money (~$938k) from just 5358 backers. Again, most patrons were pledging at levels where the reward was an advanced copy of the device. Kazmark says that these high levels of donations spread beyond tech gadgets which offer effective pre-sales. Dozens of art and design projects have surpassed the $100,000 mark. These include films, concerts, and much more. As more and more people learn about Kickstarter, the size of the projects it can handle grows as well, and the potential for multimillion dollar projects is here.

That’s both wonderful and strange as supporting a Kickstarter project is not like entering into an online marketplace. “It’s about getting behind a person not a product,” says Kazmark, “and we have to make people aware of that. We have to educate people. It’s a new experience. I’ve backed my own share of projects…it’s hard not to back some things. I just trust this person and that they’re going to do their best. Sometimes thing don’t go as planned. It’s kind of a cool place in between commerce and patronage. A space where we can test the idea before it happens.” The idea is certainly for there to be a value-exchange. Backers should be receiving valuable rewards for their patronage, and the system seems custom fit to offering pre-sales for gadgets (or tickets to concerts, etc). Yet there’s no receipt of sales, no guarantee. Kickstarter does its best to vet a project, and the project leaders are expected to do their best to fulfill their vision if their fund-raising goal is met. Transparency is encouraged at every step of the process. In the end, however, social pressure and community expectation are the only real safeguards when someone pledges money and expects a reward in return. There’s always a chance you could not get what you thought you were “buying” (did I mention the video glasses I’m still waiting for?).

Yet the money keeps flowing in, and Kickstarter’s influence is continuing to grow. Kazmark mentions that successful projects in games (perhaps especially app-based games), film, and comics may be transforming those industries. Why should a designer, author, or artist go through a major publishing house when they can raise funds on their own through Kickstarter? Most of what those established production companies can provide is seed-money and marketing, and Kickstarter is a way of crowd-sourcing both. With a grass-roots approach, artists can maintain full rights and royalties to their work and hopefully launch themselves into their careers. To Kazmark, this “creative independence” is the whole reason behind their work – “There’s value in the world beyond things that can make money.”

So now there are a growing number of filmmakers, game designers, comic artists and writers, gadget designers, musicians, and other creative types who know that they don’t have to go through normal channels to be successful. The crowd-sourced model is viable, respectable, and gives them a much better deal in many cases. It’s hard to understand where that trend may lead to in the long term, but it seems possible that it will lead to increased creative freedom and money going to individual artists, not producers.

There are other trends to consider as well. Singularity Hub has seen a growing number of tech projects which have raised impressive amounts of money from Kickstarter. Sometimes at very high pledge amounts – 10k or more from a single backer. At that level, one wonders if equity in a company shouldn’t be a reward offered. It is illegal in the US for businesses to crowd-source equity in that way, but a bill currently in Congress may change that (if you don’t mind some political slant, you can learn more here with a nifty video). Until such equity-raising crowd-funding becomes more routine, however, Kickstarter seems unlikely to participate in such exchanges.

Besides which, they have their eye on a different short-term prize. Kickstarter is gung-ho about expanding outside the US. While backers come from all over the world, every project requires a US driver’s license and bank account. That was to be expected at first as many Americans tended to equate online funding of offshore projects with email scams featuring Nigerian princes. Now, however, Kickstarter is ready to go international. Kazmark says the company will work to clear legal and administrative hurdles, reach out to creative types in new markets, and build interest and trust abroad. Within a few years Kickstarter could be crowd-sourcing projects in every corner of the globe. Expect the number of backers and dollars pledged to increase exponentially when they do.

As big as Kickstarter may get, however, it’s always going to come down to the individuals that conceive of and fund-raise for these projects. Every project on the site, whether it fails or raises a million dollars, is someone’s dream. Perhaps that’s a romantic way of looking at it, but the passion and hope is clear in so many of these projects. Perhaps this type of crowd-sourcing is becoming so popular because it sells that dream as well as it offers more tangible rewards. I’ll let you decide. Here are some of the most exciting, heartfelt, and enjoyable videos from 2011, as decided by the Kickstarter staff. I can feel my heart and my wallet opening:

*All 12 of the Kickstarter staff favorites can be found here.

[image and video credits: Kickstarter (various projects)]
[source: Kickstarter, Justin Kazmark]

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When the iPhone 4S arrived last fall, one of the most talked about, and lauded, features was Siri, the virtual assistant. Able to understand real human language, Siri could answer questions, send text messages, update Facebook, and even tell jokes. Yet Siri was exclusive to the iPhone 4S, leaving older iOS and Android users wondering when they could enjoy the benefits of a smart and sassy digital helper. Now those users have a new option: Evi. Developed in the UK by True Knowledge, the Evi app also understands real language, can find answers, and provide some witty repartee. Most importantly, it’s already available for most iPhone and Android platforms. So, is Evi a Siri killer? No, not really. But it is a quality app, and a sign that we’ve finally entered into the age of practical virtual assistants.

Released on January 23rd, Evi is still technically in beta. Most of the important functionality seems in place, however, as seen in the demo below. Users simply open the app, press the microphone icon and start talking. Evi can answer basic factual questions, guide users to relevant websites, call up requested Google maps, or even find recipes :

As is reportedly true for Siri, Evi’s voice recognition is powered by Nuance, and it stands out as one of the best and most reliable features of the beta launch. (That licensing is also why Evi costs $0.99 at the Apple store, but is free on Android Market.) Regular readers may recall that I am often frustrated with voice recognition to the point of wishing violence on electronic devices. Yet Evi has gotten nearly every single one of my words correct. That’s truly remarkable considering the speed at which I speak and the poor quality of my annunciation. Even other Nuance-enabled apps haven’t been this good. In noisy environments Evi occasionally let the pick up run longer than necessary (thinking I was still talking) but once it processed the sound it still gave me the exact sentences I had uttered. The speech to text is just top quality. A virtual assistant needs to be able to take dictation, and Evi passes that test with flying colors.

Unfortunately, it’s not always able to understand what I mean. Both Siri and Evi can handle natural language from speakers. One can simply ask questions as to another human, and either of these digital assistants will figure out the task the needs to be done by analyzing the sentence. However, like Siri, Evi seems to rely on parsing sentences into key words or phrases, and like Siri it sometimes makes errors of association. Use the word “sound” and Evi may call up web results for rock bands even if the question was “what does my voice sound like?”. These mistakes stand out because in general, Evi is eerily good at understanding what is being discussed. “What sound does a cow make?” works just fine. As do “what’s your favorite color?”, “how do I get to a cafe from here?”, and “can a square be a rectangle?”.

It’s important to point out that Siri and Evi, while similar on the surface, have very different code running on the back end. Siri has its own natural language processing originally developed at SRI in Silicon Valley (Apple acquired it a few years back). True Knowledge has their own approach to language, one that powers their online question answering services as well as Evi. As more users take advantage of True Knowledge, the company improves its language skills and (one assumes) Evi will get better as well. True Knowledge also has its own huge database of facts and information, with more than 635 million individual pieces of knowledge that it can use to extrapolate trillions of answers people may ask. Siri, on the other hand, is powered by Wolfram Alpha. At this stage in the game it’s too early to say which system of language and data analysis is more helpful to the average Evi or Siri user.

What is clear, however, is that Siri is just light years ahead in term of practical and successful applications. Siri is embedded into almost every feature on the iPhone 4S, and I don’t know a single user that hasn’t begun to change the very way they approach the phone because of this broad integration. Texting, web searching, alarm setting, reminder emails, dictation…Siri does it all. Evi, on the other hand, seems like it’s in a cage. It can call up web searches, Facebook updates, or maps, but it does this largely inside its own app. That makes Evi feel limited. An add on. Which, honestly, it is. Evi is an app to download, it’s not a fully integrated assistant that seemingly lives in the phone. Siri is. And while that means comparing the two is unfair, users are going to make that comparison, and Siri wins hands down.

Another arena in which Siri wins is speed and reliability, but that may be temporary. Evi is still in beta, and since its launch the True Knowledge servers seem to be down more often than they are up. Even when Evi understands my requests, it has to drop more than half of them because it can’t get the server to send it an answer. Reviews on the Apple store and Android Market are pretty low for Evi, and browsing through the comments makes it fairly clear that intermittent service is the primary culprit. True Knowledge has made fixing these server overloads a priority, so the situation may improve considerably. We shouldn’t be so quick to damn a product for server issues when its still in beta, especially as its early popularity is the cause for its own slow service. Still, those hoping to download Evi today and get started may find themselves severely disappointed.

In the long run, however, Evi’s arrival should be seen as a cause for universal jubilation. Siri is a marvelous product, but it’s one that is severely limited in who can enjoy it. Most people don’t own an iPhone 4S. Hell, most mobile users don’t even own a smart phone. By opening up the Android and greater iOS markets, Evi is greatly expanding the use of virtual assistants, paving the way for them to become a standard feature of mobile devices.

Evi is also providing a desperately needed alternative to Siri. The more competition that Apple has in this space, the faster they will innovate, and the better products each company will develop. While I suspect that in the arena of vetted databases Wolfram Alpha and Siri will come out ahead of True Knowledge and Evi, the competition there is also very important. Having at least two sources for these kinds of facts is an absolute necessity to maintain their intellectual integrity.

In a sense then, Evi doesn’t need to be better than Siri, it just needs to be really good, and it seems to be headed in that direction. The voice recognition is already top notch. Natural language analysis, and use of its proprietary databases is good and probably getting better. All Evi really needs to work on is integration with other apps (Facebook is a good start) and server reliability. Hopefully True Knowledge will fix those issues very soon. If they do, I see no reason why Evi won’t take its rightful place in the pantheon of digital assistants. We’ve already got two options, and there’s room for dozens more.

[image and video credits: True Knowledge]
[source: Evi]

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Udacity gives students videos that they can watch at their own pace and be continually quizzed on.

This past August fellow Singularity Hub writer Aaron Saenz wrote about Udacity, the online university created by Stanford artificial intelligence professor and Google autonomous vehicle leader, Sebastian Thrun. At the time Thrun was gearing up to teach his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course to a class of 200 at Stanford. But why teach 200 when you can teach 1,000…or 160,000? With Udacity, Thrun and fellow AI giant Peter Norvig created an online version of the course, and anyone that wanted to enroll could – for free. The homework assignments and exams would be the same as the ones given to the Stanford students, and they would be graded in the same way so online enrollees could see how they stacked up to some of the brightest students in the world. It was to be a grand experiment in education.

Now, the semester’s over. The exams have been taken, the homework’s been turned in, computers logged off and pencils set down. How’d it all turn out? Thrun spoke recently at the Digital Life Design conference about he and Norvig’s experience. As you’ll see, his students weren’t the only ones with much to learn.

Online, the course went viral. Over 100,000 people enrolled in the initial weeks. By the time the lessons began Thrun and Norvig were instructors for a class size of 160,000. With students all over the world, they enlisted the help of some 2,000 volunteer translators to translate the classes into 44 different languages. Discussion groups were set up on social networks like Facebook so students could help each other, forming what Thrun called an “entire counterculture.”

Thrun also proudly pointed out that he was teaching more students than all the students of Stanford.

The lessons themselves were very simple – at least in method if not in content. Material was explained by Thrun and Norvig as they drew on sheets of paper. Kind of like the overhead projector lessons before the days of Powerpoint, except the online students could interact with the drawings. Rather than simply lecturing to the student and asking them to regurgitate the information on exams, the online format allowed for constant quizzing. Students would be asked a question then answer it by clicking or entering values right on the drawings. They wanted the student to actively think, be constantly challenged and given constant feedback.

The flexibility that this format offers is immediately clear. If the student misses a point or doesn’t quite understand, he or she can rewind, watch it again. Get the quiz wrong, just take it again…and again if you have to.

Until you get it right.

Udacity's artificial intelligence course attracted 160,000 people from all over the world.

When the course began, however, it wasn’t like that. Initially Thrun had structured it as he had structured every other course over the past twenty years of teaching. Give the kids really hard material, then it’s sink or swim. But then he received an email from a parent who called his class a “weeder” class, and told him his daughter was dropping out. It was an epiphany for Thrun, compelling him to make a bold claim: “Grades are the failure of the education system.”

Thrun’s sudden dislike of grades is with its all-or-nothing nature. If we get a “C” on an exam we obviously haven’t mastered the material. Yet even if we get a “C”, the professor moves on to more advanced material anyway that will likely depend on the previous, unmastered material. After the email,
Thrun completely revamped Udacity to break the mold. If a student is having trouble with a problem they continue to work on it until they get it right. To Thrun, that’s still worth an A+. Imagine that, an entire class of students who can test at an A+ level. He sums up the attitude by paraphrasing a point made by Salman Khan, founder of the online Khan Academy: “When you learn to ride a bicycle, and you fail to learn a bicycle, you don’t stop to learn a bicycle, give the person a ‘D’ and move onto unicycle.”

What will education look like in the future? If other educators buy into the Udacity model it would be a sea change in the approach to education. An email Thrun received from a student in Afghanistan shows just how radically it is already changing.

I spent the last few days under incoming mortar and rocket attacks, then dodging checkpoints under questionable legal status to exfiltrate a war zone to a third world air field until things settled down. I had about an hour of fairly solid internet connectivity to be able to get the assignments done, and still managed a respectable score. This is a typical week here for me.

Okay, it’s time to address the note-taking, 800 ton gorilla in the room. Don’t we always hear that the key to a better education is to make classes smaller? How can two people possibly teach a class of 160,000 students? Obviously Thrun and Norvig didn’t grade the homework and exams by hand. What kinds of pioneering AI professors would they be if they didn’t employ their subject matter to correct it? AI programs shouldered the grading, and even handled question submissions. The multitudinous questions submitted by the students are sifted by a program and the most common ones are plucked out to be addressed. Not only does this make effectively answering questions possible, but it will highlight confusion points where the curriculum could be fine-tuned.

Will online education bring about the end of 'class as usual?'

One might logically question the format, wonder if learning by yourself on a laptop turns education into a lonely and impersonal experience. But anyone who’s watched a movie on a long plane ride knows the blissful isolation of plugging in ear phones and watching the latest action/romance/comedy/family movies. If done thoughtfully, educators can take advantage of the intimacy of just you and your laptop and create an amazingly personal learning experience despite being one of 200,000 enrolled. Here, Udacity seems to have succeeded. With its illustrations literally drawn out for the students, the lessons made one student feel that Thrun and Norvig were “personally tutoring” her. Anyone who’s sat in an auditorium, looking over the heads of 200 hundred other students at the far away professor and Powerpoint projections knows that the impersonal feel of an average university classroom has much room for improvement. Incidentally, two weeks after Thrun’s AI class began at Stanford the class attendance had dwindled down from about 200 to about 30. They preferred him online rather than in person.

Udacity is now offering up two new courses, CS 101: Building a Search Engine and CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car. Together with David Evans, a professor at the University of Virginia, Thrun will teach you how to build a search engine in just seven weeks. The Search Engine course doesn’t require any programming experience. The Robotic Car course is more advanced, but don’t be scared off. Thrun says that familiarity with linear algebra and statistics and programming experience is useful, but none of this is required.

If you have 22 minutes to spare, I think you’ll enjoy Thrun’s talk. If you don’t, just go to 15:45 and listen as the moving student testimonials come in from all over the world. They alone should convince you that Udacity is on to something great. It was made clear that Thrun thinks so, when he shocked the audience by announcing that he was leaving his tenured position at Stanford. “I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill,” he told them. “You can take the blue pill and go back to Stanford…but I’ve taken the red pill and I’ve seen Wonderland.”

[image credits: Udacity and Xbxg32000 via WikiCommons]
[video credits: DLDconference via YouTube]
image 1 and 2: Udacity
image 3: lecture hall
video: DLDconference

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SkyLight co-founders Andy Miller and Tess Bakke.

The SkyLight is really a simple device derived to solve a simple problem: how to keep your smartphone still enough to take high quality photos through a microscope. Watching other people holding their cell phones up to their microscopes, SkyLight co-founder, Andy Miller, realized that he wasn’t the only one in search of a low cost and easy way to take pictures of microscope images. I recently had the joy of chatting with Miller and fellow co-founder Tess Bakke about how the SkyLight came to be, and how they think it will impact research, medicine and education.

The SkyLight is essentially an adapter that fixes a smartphone to a microscope. Using the phone’s camera to peer through the eyepiece and snap photos, you get images that are practically indistinguishable from images taken with professional microscopy cameras. The big difference is that conventional microscope cameras can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, while the SkyLight is just $60. Of course, you’ll need a smartphone too, but you probably already have one in your pocket.

The SkyLight adapter consists of a movable platform that the smartphone fits into, and a base that locks onto just about any microscope eyepiece. After connecting the smartphone to the eyepiece, you adjust the platform position to align the camera correctly, and adjust it up and down for focus. Lock it up, and you’re ready to take pictures.

“I was building a microscope in college,” Miller tells me casually, as if microscope-building was as normal as joining the chess club, “and I was trying to attach a telephone to that microscope and I realized, well, it’s fine if I can attach one cell phone to one microscope but it would be pretty feasible to have a universal adapter that would allow me to attach any phone to any microscope.”

Miller likes to build microscopes, but there’s a purpose behind his geeky pursuit. While studying bioengineering and global health at Rice University, he designed and built the Global Focus microscope – a simple, affordable microscope that can be built for areas of the world with limited resources. With off-the-shelf lenses and mirrors, an LED flashlight for a light source, and running off batteries, the microscope could take bright field and fluorescent images and cost only $240 to make. Right now there are 20 prototypes being tested in the US, Central America, and Africa.

Not too shabby: a 10X image of esophageal cells taken by an iPhone 4S.

As the Kickstarter page confesses, “Now he’s bent on making meaningful change through design.” The SkyLight is a simple idea that could have profound results. Connecting a cell phone to a microscope not only saves money, but in a developing country, it makes the difference between quality care or not. Don’t have a pathologist in your rural Kenyan village? No problem. Just send the images to the hospitals in Nairobi. SkyLight can literally bring together innovative solutions such as the Global Focus microscope and the $80 IDEOS Android smartphone, which 350,000 Kenyans had scooped up as of this past summer, to extend the reach of much needed quality healthcare.

The idea for the SkyLight came to Miller while building the cheap microscopes in Africa. The lack of resources available there forced him to create a general design. “How do you make it work with anything you might have?” He made a product that would work with any cell phone. Had he been in the US and had all the resources he needed, Miller expects the adapter he’d have come up with would have been specifically built for an iPhone and only an iPhone, or a specific microscope together with a specific phone. The tightened constraints in Africa forced Miller to make a more general use device, and it’s all the better for it. The SkyLight can work for different phones and different microscope with different kinds of eyepieces. And even though they’re focusing on microscopes at the moment, the team expects that SkyLight will eventually be used to mate smartphones with other types of cameras such as spotting scopes, the telephoto cameras used by birders. Check out their gallery of images here.

Think you could tell the difference between images taken with a phone and conventional camera? While they haven’t rigorously compared the images taken by their smartphone with images taken by conventional microscopy cameras, they’ve already passed the eyeball test. As Miller tells me, the Kickstarter page “received the most attention from…doctors, pathologists who want to do doctor-to-doctor consult.” Some physicians actually contacted the group and asked that they take pictures of samples. They took the pictures with an iPhone 4S with a resolution of 8-megapixels. After posting the pictures on their website they were contacted by multiple pathologists who told them that it’s good enough for them to make diagnoses.

The SkyLight won the Proto Labs Cool Idea! Award in the program’s inaugural year. According to their website, Proto Labs is the “world’s fastest” maker of CNC machined and injection molded parts. Their Cool Idea! Award is aimed at producing high quality prototypes for startup businesses that might not have the resources to follow through on a good idea. In a press release about the award, Proto Labs cited how SkyLight enables researchers, clinicians and educators to communicate in new ways by combining tools already available to them. Winning the award was a key achievement for SkyLight’s mission to make the adapter available to those who need it. The mold that Proto Lab has created lowers production cost and makes it more affordable. The SkyLight was listed on Kickstarter for $60, but Miller and Bakke hope to work with an NGO in the future and offer the adapter for even less.

Bakke emphasized SkyLight’s social enterprise aspect, mentioning their 5 to 1 promise: for every five SkyLights they sell they’re going to donate one to schools or other places like a local health program that could use them.

We shouldn’t forget that the camera in use is still a phone. Miller and Bakke point out that SkyLight could be used live; that is, you could connect a collaborator with a live view through your microscope all the while having a conversation.

“Can you move it a little to the left…great, now zoom in.”

As an easy and inexpensive way to generate and share images, SkyLight is an ideal telemedicine tool. Wanting to explore SkyLight’s potential, the company has sending their prototype to telemedicine researchers to tap their imaginations. At the same time they’re encouraging apps developers to come up with apps to improve image-based smartphone telemedicine and telediagnosis capabilities. Miller mentioned one app that would be universally useful would be an app that pushes images directly to a server, and labels and organizes them. That way people wouldn’t have to email or text themselves every image they want to keep.

Right now the adapter is still in its testing and production phase, but they expect SkyLight to be ready around the first of March. When that happens there will be no shortage of takers. Their first production run will be aimed at filling Kickstarter orders and getting feedback for improvement.

Kickstarter is great for turning great ideas into real tools. SkyLight’s goal was to raise $15,000. They ended up with over $22,000. I have no doubt that these two, enthusiastic young people and the SkyLight will get a lot of attention in the coming months. All they did was find a way to combine technologies that already existed, showing us once again you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to create something useful.

[image credits: SkyLight]
images: SkyLight

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iRobot CEO, Colin Angle, with AVA.

We found this video from CNNMoney, about AVA, iRobot’s latest personal assistance robot. We’ve covered AVA before, how it’s basically an iPad (or notebook) on a pretty sophisticated set of wheels. We don’t learn anything new about the robot, but watching AVA we begin to get a feel for how AVA might work in the home, particularly, as iRobot CEO Colin Angle points out, to assist the elderly. With laser range finders, acoustic sensors, accelerometers, bumpers, and two cameras for 3D vision, iRobot’s built AVA to have the tools to get around the home and be of service.

What service will AVA provide exactly? Mainly telepresence communication between the elderly and healthcare providers. Angle’s main point is that the elderly don’t want to live in assisted living homes, and their relatives don’t want to pay the cost of assisted living homes. By having doctors, nurses, or other health personnel available at the tap of a touchscreen, AVA can mediate exchange of immediate health information between patients and their doctors. AVA would be perfect for the elderly who require minimal care but regular monitoring.

And healthcare aside, AVA’s perfect for curing another major ailment of the elderly: loneliness. With AVA, friends and family members can “drop in” from time to time. Watching the robot scoot around, it’s actually got some personality, the way it’s head swings around and tilts to look at you – even thought it’s head is an iPad. Imagine a grandson’s face rolling into the living room, “Hi grandma!” I think she’ll take that over a telephone call any day.

[image credits: CNNMoney via YouTube]
[video credits: CNNMoney via YouTube]
video: AVA

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The man of the hour. UCLA's Steven Schwartz and his team partially restored vision to two patients by injecting stem cells into their retinas.

Macular degeneration had left Sue Freeman, 78, legally blind. She couldn’t go for a walk by herself, she couldn’t go shopping or even cook by herself. Another woman, age 51, was suffering from Stargardt’s macular dystrophy, which causes the loss of cells located in the pigmented layer of the retina called the retinal pigment epithelium. Also legally blind, she was unable read the large letters on an eye chart used to test people with compromised vision.

In July of 2010 doctors injected retinal cells derived from human embryonic stem cells into one eye of each woman in the hopes that they would regrow the cells needed to see. A couple weeks after surgery Freeman improved her visual acuity score from correctly identifying 21 letters (20/500 vision) to 28 letters (20/320). She could once again pour a glass of water without spilling it, read her own handwriting, and – to the chagrin of her husband – take notice of all the improvements that needed to be done on rental properties that they own.

The other patient, who wishes to remain anonymous, could only detect hand motions prior to surgery. Two weeks following surgery she began counting fingers. She also improved from identifying zero letters on the acuity chart to correctly recognizing five. She woke up one morning and looked at the armoire in her bedroom. “It has a lot of detailed carvings and I thought wow, I was missing those before,” she told CNN.

Both patients continued to show improvement in the treated eye four months after surgery and did not show any adverse side effects. Importantly, the eyes that did not receive stem cells did not show improvement. The patients were also given immunosuppressants to prevent their bodies from rejecting the foreign tissue.

The trial was led by Steven Schwartz, an opthalmologist and chief of the retina division at UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute, and the results were published in The Lancet. Although the results are extremely promising, Dr. Schwartz is quick to temper enthusiasm over the trial. Only two patients were treated, after all. Many more will need to be successfully treated before the procedure can be accepted as a robust option. He justified publishing the study after only two patients given the amount of interest in the field. Qualifying the study further, Dr. Schwartz cautioned that the improvement in eyesight for one of the women could be a placebo effect.

Pigmented epithelial cells were grown from embryonic stem cells prior to injection.

The stem cells were treated before being injected into the patients’ eyes. Researchers at the company that had provided the stem cells, Advanced Cell Technology, had induced the cells to become retinal pigment epithelial cells. The procedure, which included the injection of about 50,000 cells, took half an hour. The team received stem cells from Advanced Cell Technology, which had gotten them from an embryo stored at a fertility clinic. The couple who’d produced the embryo decided not to use it and then donated it to the company. After stem cells were derived from the embryo it was destroyed. The hope is that in the future stem cells will be taken from embryos without the need to destroy them.

The stem cell treatment gives new hope to the blind. Macular degeneration is the leading cause of vision loss among the elderly. When the light-sensitive photoreceptors of the macula degenerate people can no longer bring objects into focus. Stargart’s muscular dystrophy, or Stargart’s disease, is a common cause of vision loss among children and young people. Right now there is no treatment for Stargart’s disease, and while drug injections, laser treatment and diet alteration can slow the progression of age-related macular degeneration, it is also considered incurable.

Others are working towards a stem cell cure for macular degeneration. In 2010 researchers successfully grew a retina in the lab from human embryonic stem cells. It was the first time a 3D tissue was produced from stem cells. Curing macular degeneration is an ideal target for stem cell treatments. The number of cells needed is low compared to, say, regrowing the neurons of a damaged spinal cord. Unlike other cells in the retina, cells of the retinal pigment epithelium don’t need to form synapses to work. Lastly, the retina’s immune environment is more tolerant, thus decreasing the need for immunosuppressants.

Pharmaceutical giant Geron Corporation used to represent one of the best chances for making stem cell treatments a reality. But recently after the company had begun human trials on their promising cell line that allowed paralyzed mice to walk again, they dropped out of the stem cell game altogether. If the UCLA trial results hold, it could entice more companies like Advanced Cell Technology to invest in stem cell research. According to a commentary on the trial, when Geron ended their trial it left ACT and Dr. Schwartz and his colleagues as the sole group treating patients with embryo-derived stem cells. That’s not good enough. Let’s hope the trial not only brings the world into focus for its patients, but also brings the potential of embryo-derived stem cells back into the focus of medicine.

[image credits: UCLA Jules Stein Eye Institute, CNN and The Lancet]
image 1: Schwartz1
image 2: Schwartz2
image 3: stem cells

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The gangly Agile Justin, ready to toss a ball to its robotic twin Rollin' Justin.

Where was Agile Justin last year when we needed him to throw out the first pitch at a Philadelphia Phillies game? The PhillieBot was booed by Phillies fans after bouncing the ball to home plate. It would have been a different story had DLR’s latest robot been there.

Last summer DLR showed us Rollin’ Justin’s amazing ability to catch. Now they’ve created a robot that can toss the ball to Rollin’. Just as Rollin’ Justin was a great test platform for robotics technologies behind high-speed perception, catching strategy, dexterity and body control, Justin’s Agile twin presents DLR programmers with the challenge of effective ball tossing – something that PhillieBot failed miserably at.

As Hizook reports, DLR started with Rolling Justin and added “1.5 faster arms through different gear ratios; completely new wheel electronics and bus architecture, which allows a 500Hz control loop over all four wheels and steering [degrees of freedom] on the mobile platform; 1kHz control loop for the arms, torso and hand [degrees of freedom].”

Watch the ball toss in the video below. Obviously Agile Justin throws like a robot, kind of sidearm/underhand, not much like a major league pitcher. The coordination between arm, torso, and wheels gives new meaning to the term “pitching mechanics.”

[image credits: hizook via YouTube and DLR]
[video credits: hizook via YouTube]
image 1: throw
image 2: Agile Justin
video: Agile Justin

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Just like scanner in "Total Recall," the terahertz scanner can spot metallic weapons through clothing.

The New York Police Department is working with the Department of Defense to develop a scanning device that would allow them to detect concealed firearms on a person 80 feet away. The scanner detects electromagnetic waves with a frequency in the terahertz range. Terahertz waves sit at the higher frequency end of infrared on the electromagnetic spectrum, just before the microwave range. The device works the same way an infrared detector does. Just as our bodies emit infrared radiation, so do they emit terahertz waves. These waves can pass through non-conducting material such as paper or clothing but are blocked by conducting material such as a piece of metal – or a gun. So if a person has a piece of metal under their jacket, such as a gun, the police will see the telltale outline of the weapon. The waves also pass unperturbed through wood and brick so the device can scan through walls.

The NYPD has a prototype that they’re testing at the department’s Rodman’s Neck shooting range in the Bronx. Right now, the prototype only has a range of three to five meters, but they hope to eventually be able to scan for weapons on people up to 25 meters, or 85 feet, away.

Of course, we can’t mention police and scanners and people without mentioning the ACLU. The New York Civil Liberties Union isn’t taking a hardline stance against the frisking from a distance. In a statement, the group acknowledged New York’s problem with gun violence and pointed out that using the scanner could decrease the city’s stop-and-frisk rate by a half-million people annually. They also caution that “the ability to walk down the street free from a virtual police pat-down is a matter of privacy.”

New York state’s handgun licensing regulations are among the strictest in the country. As a result, 90 percent of guns used in New York crimes are illegal and from out-of-state. Currently the method for sniffing out guns tucked into jackets and jeans is to stop the person and frisk them. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, 88 percent of these stop-and-frisks carried out in the city turn up nothing. That’s a lot of inconvenienced, annoyed and embarrassed people. In 2011, however, the NYPD collected over 800 guns – including an AK-47 – through stop-and-frisk. If police were able to park a van on a street corner and scan the people as they walk by – exactly the scenario the NYPD has in mind – the amount of people being screened would obviously increase dramatically. But, as the NYCLU’s point indicates, not everyone’s going to take kindly to being frisked without even knowing it.

No doubt trying to allay these types of concerns, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly said that the police department has been in discussions with their lawyers for the past three years and that they foresee no constitutional issues with the device, reported NBC New York.

Privacy rights aside, they’re going to have other problems if they stop too many people with concealed iPhones and Androids.

[image credits: Law Enforcement Today and Scrape TV]
image 1: Terahertz
image 2: Total Recall

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CES 2012 was a mammoth display of the trend toward smart, connected devices for every form of consumer activity: toys, appliances, entertainment, health, mobility, etc. More than 20,000 new products were launched at this year’s CES and a large portion of them could be considered “smart.”

“Smart” (robotic-like) products profess to add value, assure safety, and provide convenience through connectivity… claims that in many cases are true, particularly with in-car infotainment systems.

3,100 exhibitors, 1.86 million sq ft of exhibition space, 153,000 attendees of which 34,000 were international and only one good food stand (Nathan’s hot dogs – you can’t ruin a Nathan’s hot dog). Massive crowding, slow moving, loud, extravagant and wonderful. Thin TVs – so thin they looked like they couldn’t stand up by themselves without bending – 3D with and without glasses, projectors, smart appliances, and apps for everything from TVs to refrigerators to scales.

Consumer robotics represented a very small part of CES but had the same combination of glitz, glamour, marvelous stuff, misrepresentation, uninspiring products and hidden gems, just like the rest of CES. Robotics Trends hosted a Robotics Tech Zone but the action was well beyond their purview because many of the companies wanted to emphasize their consumer orientation instead of highlighting the robotic.

Romibo

One of the most interesting areas was focused on Digital Health – where one could easily see benefits from sensors and smart apps providing data for the cloud to process and selectively inform doctors or users of the results, and progress over time. The highlight of the area was Life Technologies $150,000 Ion Proton Genetic Sequencer, which, by the end of the year, will be able to sequence an entire human genome for about $1,000 in a few hours. Digital Health was also the only area where research was shown and where the NSF/Carnegie Mellon University Quality of Life Technology booth was located, an area packed with healthcare inventions and eager young inventors. Few fell under the robotics umbrella (most were digital apps and devices) except these three:

1. Romibo, a do-it-yourself robot for therapy, education and play.
2. PerMMA, a personal mobility and manipulation appliance for power wheelchair users.
3. Myomo, rehabilitation robotics and interactive gaming systems for stroke victim rehab.

Certainly the most publicity went to Tosy Robotics, a Vietnamese manufacturer of robotic and high-tech toys, for the launch of  their new mRobo, a transformer-type boom-box entertainment robot with a two-hour meet-and-greet by teen heartthrob Justin Bieber.

Tosy also showed their other robotic toys: DiscoRobo, a dance to the beat with lights toy, and Sket-Robo, a robot that draws.

Cubelets, $160, by Modular Robotics, had a small booth and a big hit for their educational robot construction kit. These magnetic blocks can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. Since each cube has unique functions, you can build robots that drive around on a tabletop and respond to light, sound and temperature.

Parrot, a French manufacturer of hands-free wireless devices for cars and phones, was the hit of CES 2010 with their AR.Drone, a quadcopter with two cameras that is driven from an iPhone or iTouch. This year they upgraded the camera to enable hi-def video, improved their software for still and video capture, and added a range of games and customization accessories… all shown at a huge outdoor booth at CES.

iRobot launched their Roomba, Scooba, Verro and Looj vacuums, floor washers, pool cleaners and gutter cleaning robots at previous CES’s, but at this CES they only had office visits for demos and marketing where they were also showing off their AVA concept robot and promoting their partnership with InTouch Health, a provider of telepresence collaboration for doctors, nurses, paramedics and patients and a place where iRobot’s lower cost AVA robots could be armed with InTouch Health’s hospital experiences and enable the resulting systems to be available to a larger audience.

More than 7 million robot vacuum cleaners have been sold thus far with real competition for iRobot showing up recently with a flurry of similar cleaners – all displayed at CES:

But LG and Samsung entered the arena, and, with their large consumer client base, vast manufacturing and marketing resources, and an array of add-on features, has been selling their vacuums in Asia and Europe; not yet in the US. iRobot should feel their presence very soon.

Another consumer products manufacturer (of home theater systems), South Korean Moneual, also sells a robot vacuum and a more interesting $1,000 home mobile air filter / security device. The mobile air filter is also designed as a safety system for the elderly, it connects with a wrist band that can detect a fall and can call for help if one occurs.

A skinless Pleo showing it's complex innards

Pleo, the baby robotic dinosaur, was represented by both the seller (Innvo Labs) and the manufacturer (Jetta Co. Ltd.) that reincarnated the old bankrupt company, and was showing the new Pleo rb (reborn), with accessories and software enhancements.

Amongst the pseudo robotic products were three which act as a pedestal for the camera and video functions of iPhones and swivel or have wheels or tracks to move as wirelessly directed:

1. Xybotyx, a Colorado start-up, is launching a $111 wheeled platform and app for your iPhone that lets you drive your phone wirelessly.
2. Swivl by Satarii, is a $159 stationary platform for your iPhone camera or video. It swivels to follow you or can be remote controlled.
3. Romo by Romotive, is a $99 tracter-like iPhone holder which can stream video to your PC and also dance to music on your iPhone.

Karotz, by Violet (a subsidiary of Aldebaran, the builder of the Nao robot), announced the launch of their Karotz “intelligent internet companion” into the U.S. market with a $99 special price for the rabbit and 30% off all accessories. Ideal for learning how to develop apps with voice recognition and Internet connectivity, and now with Aldebaran stewardship, this interesting little device may hold a key to the future of human-robot communication.

Other vendors under the robotic umbrella included:

(from left to right): Windoro, Sphero, Ladybug, Mantarobot, Paro, Crawler

• Windoro, from Ilshim Global, a window washing device.
• Sphero, by Orbotix, a robotic ball controlled from your phone.
• Ladybug, by JS-Robotics, a bug-like mobile device with collision avoidance sensors.
• Mantaro telepresence robot, a mobile Skype platform using your own iPhone or iPad.
• Paro, the therapeutic furry seal-like bot for hospitals and eldercare.
• Crawler, by Topy Industries, an experimental tractor-like base for search and rescue.

Not exactly robotic, but for prototyping and DIY’ers, there were three 3D printers of note: Makerbot announced their new $1,750 two-color 3D printer, Essential Dynamics showed their $3,000 Imagine Printer that prints with a whole host of materials, including food, chocolates, silicone, cheese, epoxy, organics, etc., and the Cube from Cubify which offers both a $1,300 3D printer and also a service for those that just want to send their designs in and get back the finished product.

So there you have it — 25+ robot vendors focused on consumer products — less than 1% of CES — and perhaps only one or two to rave about. Maybe next year….

[source: This story originally published by Frank Tobe on Everything-Robotic]

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The Hiriko, designed by MIT Media lab, is part of MIT's plan to develop smart and efficient technology for tomorrow's cities.

You think European cars are small now, wait till the Hiriko takes to the roads in Spain’s northern Basque country. The two-seater is about the size of a SmartCar, but when parked, it can actually fold. After folding the car takes up about a third of a normal parking space. This is the kind of car you need, I suppose, when the city roads have become too crowded for all those space-wasting Mini Coopers. Hence the Hiriko, Basque for “urban car,” folds as the rear of the car slides underneath its chassis. Every square foot counts.

The car is the brain child of MIT Media lab. They’re collaborating with seven firms in Spain’s Basque country part of Hiriko Driving Mobility. Its primary use will be along the line of ZipCars, owned by the city and hired out temporarily. But if you simply want to be the only guy on the block with a folding car, you can buy one for about €12,500.

The Hiriko runs on electricity, of course, since there’s no room for a gas tank. It’s part of MIT’s goal of building a next-generation vehicle. Mechanical control systems that are traditionally found in the steering column, throttle, and brakes are replaced with electrical, drive-by-wire technology. The motor, which is located in the wheels, can drive about 120 kilometers (75 miles) when fully recharged. Although you may want to stop along the way to stretch your legs. You exit the car George Jetson style, by pushing open the glass window and stepping out. And the car’s smart: its top speed is programmed to obey city speed limits.

The Hiriko prototype is being presented to European Union president Jose Manuel Barroso, and another 20 prototypes are to be built and tested this year. Hiriko Driving Mobility is currently approaching other European cities that might want to build a Hiriko for themselves.

CityCar project is part of their Changing Places program that seeks “How new strategies for architectural design, mobility systems, and networked intelligence can make possible dynamic, evolving places that respond to the complexities of life.” The world population just passed 7 billion on its exponential trajectory upward. And half of those people are living in urban centers, a first in world history. As mentioned in the video, MIT thinks city driving can be much improved. Instead of a bulky, inefficient car they opt for a small, efficient, smart car that is shared by city dwellers. After using the car people will just leave it at the destination for someone else to take.

The Next Web shot this video of the Hiriko at Media Evolution’s The Conference. Check it out and let the half-scale Hiriko prototype fold its way to your city-dwelling heart.

[image credits: the next web via YouTube]
[video credit: the next web via YouTube]
video credit: CityCar

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iBooks 2 promises a digital textbook revolution, but it's more mainstream than it appears.

Apple started off 2012 with the $10 billion textbook market in its crosshairs. Last week, the company unveiled iBooks 2, the next iteration of its iBooks software now beefed up for the textbook market, and with it, a Steve Jobs-worthy dose of fanfare for its accompanying authoring software aptly dubbed iBooks Author. While media sources we’re quick to laud the move as Apple “reinventing” the textbook, concerns began to emerge about Apple’s licensing agreement, which restricts commercial ownership to any textbook developed with iBooks Author to Apple products and a requirement that it be sold through iBookstore (it can be given away for free anywhere). Only time will tell if Apple can defend its license to the tech and educational community. However, while many may look at this move as innovative, the truth is it is a huge step backward for the revolution that Apple was leading in education with the rapid adoption of iPads and apps for learning.

The idea behind iBooks 2 and iBooks Author seems timely. A publishing platform that would embed videos and polls right into textbooks allows them to become more interactive, and since anyone can download iBooks Author for free, educators around the world can start creating textbooks immediately and either give them away or sell them, presumably cheaper than their print equivalents. Pilot programs are already showing student math scores are 20% higher using iPads instead of print textbooks, and the word on the street is that 350,000 textbooks for iBooks have been downloaded in the first 3 days.

See, traditional textbooks suffer a few inherent problems. First, they cost a lot to print, especially when they are chock full of glossy, bright images. Second, information changes over time (though not as rapidly as textbook publishers might want you to think). So new textbook editions are released about every three years, even if the book undergoes minimal changes such as new images and a few rewritten sections. This means that the most expensive part of textbook publishing is launching a new title, and it typically takes years for the investment to pay off. Third, it is a highly competitive market with very slim profit margins, which is why publishers make deals with entire school districts and textbooks come bundled with CD-ROMs and online access to resources (they help with the more-bang-for-your-buck selling point).

It makes sense then that Apple would want  to use the iPad to replace textbooks. The company announced that high school texts will sell for about $14.99 compared to the $60 price tag of print books. These digital books can be updated instantly without the high cost of a reprint as well as the hassle of trying to talk everyone into getting the latest edition. And because the books will be sold in iBookstore, it promotes a free market for textbooks rather than dealmaking between publishers and school districts.

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And this is why the EULA is a problem. By binding textbook authors to selling in iBookstore only, it creates a new kind of bureaucracy for textbooks because it forces schools to have iPads to benefit from the innovation. In other words, it’s a way to force iPad sales. When textbooks are written for future iPads that require HD or more memory, schools will have to upgrade. At the rate that iPad innovations are coming, Apple may be creating their own version of the three-year edition cycle. Apple has already sold 40 million iPads for a whopping $25 billion in sales, but the tablet market is becoming increasingly competitive, especially with the latest success, the Amazon Fire. Because revolutions often inspire more revolutions (just look at the history of France) and Google’s Android is spreading like wild fire, perhaps Apple is wisely jumping into textbooks now before Amazon makes another attempt.

Digital textbook projections look very promising in the next few years, and that was before Apple's iBooks 2 announcement. (from SiliconIndia)

Here at Singularity Hub, we’ve monitored and profiled the amazing sales growth of iPads, how they are changing books, and especially how they are increasingly being used in the classroom with great success to usher in digital education. (TechCrunch has recently offered the alternative view that classrooms aren’t quite ready for digital textbooks). In fact, Apple states that over 600 districts are already implementing one-iPad-per-student programs. So the big questions is: Why on Earth would Apple not allow the quantum-leap-like transformation that began with the iPad to take its natural course of conquering education and accelerating the extinction of the textbook format?

It’s almost as if Apple took something from the automobile industry’s playbook: sell hybrid vehicles to the public in the short term to acclimate them toward all-electric cars in the long term. But the issue is that the iPad isn’t experiencing adoption problems. It seems that more and more schools are using iPads for learning and app developers are coming out with more educational apps to suit the demand.

It may be that Apple’s foray into textbooks is simply a way to penetrate further into the educational market, bring old schoolers into the tablet world, and slowly watch textbooks get smaller and smaller until they are app sized and app publishers emerge as the new educational publishers. In other words, make some money, bide some time, and keep everyone addicted to iPads.

Before his death, Steve Jobs had targeted the textbook industry and dubbed the American educational system as “hopelessly antiquated.” Clearly, iBooks 2 and iBooks Author are part of his legacy and only time will tell if these tools can change the role textbooks play in education, either through transforming  them to the digital age or obliterating them with apps. If he were alive today, he might even be able to give us one last “And one more thing…” that would hint at which way he wanted it to go. But sadly, the future that Apple envisioned for schools seems a lot less spectacular and a lot more mainstream than ever.

[Media: Apple, SiliconIndia, YouTube]

[Source: PC Magazine, Washington Post]

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In just a few weeks UK’s Raspberry Pi Foundation will be ready to launch one of the most anticipated products of 2012 – a $35 computer. The Raspberry Pi Model B is a bare-bones circuit board that packs a surprising punch – 700 MHz ARM processor, 256 MB of memory, and HDMI output. Designed as a low cost, easy to explore learning platform to attract a new generation of students to coding, the Linux Box computer is a marvel of efficiency. The first 10,000 Model Bs will be shipping into (and then out of) the UK very soon, so it only makes sense that Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton would take the time to prepare everyone for what to expect. He gives a detailed report on the exciting new device in the video from Slashdot below.

The Raspberry Pi Model B may not look like much, but it’s not supposed to. At $35 each (or just $25 for the yet to be seen, slightly less powerful Model A) the computer is cheap enough that no one should object when a student takes it home, plays around with it, and explores what makes it tick. Yet this computer isn’t made to be disposable, just explorable…and ultimately rewarding in its use. To that end, one of the more exciting capabilities of the Model B will be available through an extension called the Gertboard. The Gertboard allows code on the Raspberry Pi computer to drive motors, actuators, and other physical devices in the real world. What could make programming sexier than being able to effect things around you?

Here’s a quick demo of the Gertboard prototype:

Whether they are attracted to the portability, the power, or the price, people all over the globe have already expressed interest in the Raspberry Pi. As he mentions above, Upton raised thousands just by selling some of the beta boards on eBay. Hopefully students will be as drawn to the possibilities of the cheap and sturdy little computer.

[video credits: Slashdot, dutchnemo (Gert via YouTube)]

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