Supermac18 - Target Dance Party

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Foursquare founder: Privacy fears are exaggerated

Dennis Crowley, head of location-based social networking site Foursquare, says the app is no stalkers' paradise

Can you explain Foursquare for non-users?

It's about making cities easier to use. It lets you "check in" to places from your cellphone. You can then share your experiences by leaving tips for your friends. There are also game mechanics. Users are rewarded with badges, and if you check in the most somewhere, you become the "mayor" of that place.

Why would I want to be the "mayor" of my local pub?

I wrote the rules and code that enables people to become mayor of places over a year ago, but I'm still a sucker for it. If someone ousts me, I take personal offence. I want to defend my territory. I don't fully understand the psychology, but there's something primal and territorial about it.

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Innovation: TV networks to become social networks

What will your TV look like in five years' time? The screen in your living room may be about to be transformed by the union of television broadcasting and online social networking.
This week, Google's chief Eric Schmidt announced that in the next month or so Google TV will go live in the US.
Google joins a host of other internet companies that want to transform our viewing habits by integrating TV with interactive web features. So far, all have failed. The trouble is, services like Apple TV and Roku tend to allow us only to stream stuff on-demand from the internet, but without any live TV. Others, such as TiVo and Microsoft, provide live TV, but with only limited access to the web. Google claims it will bring together live TV and unfettered access to the web for the first time.
Yet many researchers and tech analysts say the most profound change to our TV habits will come via technology that allows us to share and socialise via our screens. The winners of the battle for digital domination in our living rooms, they argue, will be those who work out how to draw on the success of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. New Scientist has spoken to some of the activists of this potential social TV revolution to get a glimpse of what will be on the box tomorrow.
Goal!
The premise of social TV is simple: allow people to easily share and discuss the shows they are watching, no matter where they are – be it recommending the next episode of True Blood or participating in a goal celebration.
Some people think of TV viewing as a solitary experience. But, says Marie-José Montpetit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is developing an experimental social TV system called Nextream, ever since the birth of TV we have been talking to each other during broadcasts. And now we're using online social networks in the same way. "The Twitter servers were brought down by the World Cup because people were exchanging views about it," she says.
Social TV could soon usurp TV guides, because the huge number of channels is so overwhelming to navigate, says Greg Goldman of Philo, a social TV application launched in July.
According to a 2008 study by consultancy Parks Associates, based in Dallas, Texas, 20 per cent of people in the US want TV recommendations from friends and to chat with fellow viewers. What's more, a quarter of them are happy to share the stuff they watch.
Rate, recommend, comment
The seeds of this social revolution are already sprouting. The BBC's iPlayer now allows users to rate and recommend programmes through the likes of Facebook. Others like Philo and Tunerfish also use existing networks but are more interactive, by pushing comments to a smartphone app.
Boxee goes a step further by integrating social and video features on the same screen through a computer media player. However, the content is limited to online on-demand sites like Netflix.
Herein lies one of the major hurdles to social TV: the availability of content. Broadcasters are unlikely to hand over their programmes to social TV without getting a sure reward, says Montpetit. However, social TV could make it easier for advertisers to target particular social groups, Goldman points out.
Another big issue is design. User studies have shown that people dislike cluttered comments on their screens, says Montpetit. Nextream's solution is to use a touchscreen smartphone to control the TV, and to read or make comments.
Google has far kept quiet about whether its TV will include social networking, but it has hinted that Jinni.com – a site that creates themed TV channels based on user feedback – will play a role.

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Innovation: The smartphone's shape-shifting future

The smartphone of the future might lose its sleek, solid shell to become a shape-shifter, able to alter its appearance to signal an alert in situations where visual and audible cues won't do.

Shwetak Patel, a computer science and engineering researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues have developed a squeezable cellphone – SqueezeBlock – using tiny motors built into the casing to mimic the behaviour of a spring.

Pressure plates on the device detect how much force is being applied to the casing, while the motors control the amount of resistance exerted in response. Because the resistance can be tweaked, the degree of squishability can be controlled by some aspect of the phone's status to provide some basic feedback without demanding the attention of eyes or ears.

For example, after the battery is fully charged, the phone might feel as taut as a glutton's post-lunch belly, while a gadget running on empty might be as easy to squeeze as a stress ball. Alternatively, the stiffness could convey the number of emails marked as important that have arrived in a user's inbox.

"You can imagine squeezing the phone to give you a little bit of information on its status – ring level, messages – without having to look at it," says Patel.

Squish test

In trials, Patel asked 10 people to test seven different uses of SqueezeBlock. They were able to distinguish up to four levels of squishiness, suggesting it could provide a basic way of checking battery charge, for instance.

The work was presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in New York last week.

Shwetak's team isn't alone in exploring how a handset's physical attributes could communicate something about its state. Back in 2008, Fabian Hemmert, a researcher at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin, Germany, breathed virtual life into a cellphone. His phone "inhales" and "exhales" at a steady rate, which can increase suddenly to indicate an incoming call, or ebb away as the battery dies.

Hemmert is now exploring how tactile feedback could provide further cues. He has devised mechanisms that enable mobile devices to change their shape and even their weight.

This way

His shape-shifting device uses motors to move the handset's panels apart, creating a wedge shape. Feeling that one side of the phone is thicker than then other could alert the user that there is additional content available that the screen is too small to show but which can be found in the thicker direction, says Hemmert. For instance, if a user was scrolling horizontally through a photographic slideshow, the phone's right-hand side would gradually thin and the left-hand side would thicken.

A different handset, meanwhile, houses a weight resting on two perpendicular runners, so that it can be moved in two dimensions. Our hands are remarkably adept at detecting shifts in balance, says Hemmert, so that when used in conjunction with a mapping application, the phone's centre of balance can move in the direction a user should travel to reach a desired destination. This would allow people to navigate a foreign city without having to actually look at the map – helping them take in the sights while avoiding collisions with the locals. Hemmert is presenting the work at the Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 2010 in Reykjavik, Iceland, this week.

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Innovation: Mind-reading headsets will change your brain

Innovation is our new column that highlights the latest emerging technological ideas and where they may lead.
This week, engineer Adam Wilson made global headlines by updating Twitter using his brainwaves. "USING EEG TO SEND TWEET" he explained.
Wilson's achievement was actually pretty trivial. He used a system called BCI2000, found in hundreds of laboratories across the globe, that can do the job of a keyboard for any software program. But it was significant precisely because it was trivial: mind-reading tech is going to have a massive impact this year.
In the coming months, cheap headsets that let you control technology with the electrical signals generated by your firing neurons will go on sale to the general public. Our relationship with technology – and our brains – will never be the same again.
Escaping the lab
Researchers have developed systems that read brainwaves – in the form of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals – in order to help people suffering from disabilities or paralysis control wheelchairs, play games , or type on a computer. Now, two companies are preparing to market similar devices to mainstream consumers.
Australian outfit Emotiv will release a headset whose 16 sensors make it possible to direct 12 different movements in a computer game. Emotiv says the helmet can also detect emotions.
Compatible with any PC running Windows, it will ship later this year for $299 (see image). They have shown off a game where the player moves stones to rebuild Stonehenge using mind power alone (see video).
Californian company NeuroSky has also built a device that can detect emotions: the firm says it can tell whether you are focused, relaxed, afraid or anxious, for example.
Rather than selling it directly to the public, NeuroSky is licensing its set-up to other companies, including Mattel, Nokia and Sega. Mattel, for example, will soon sell a game which involves players levitating a ball using thought alone (see video).
Mind hacks
These devices are remarkably cheap, especially when compared to the price tags on research-grade EEGs, which can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Emotiv's headset will retail for $299, while Mattel's game will cost just $80. At such low prices, these dirt-cheap brain interfaces will likely be popular – and not just with people who want to play with them.
Consider what happened when the most revolutionary interface of recent years appeared – the wireless controller of Nintendo's Wii games console. Legions of hackers started experimenting; and millions of people have now seen how the interface can be repurposed to make an industrial robot play tennis (with video), track a person's head movements and make a normal TV display 3D images (video).
You can expect some similarly mind-blowing hacks to result once Emotiv and NeuroSky release their devices. That'll certainly help make for some compelling viewing on YouTube and accelerate the development of brain controllers.
But the most interesting consequence of the coming flood of brainware isn't technological at all. Parents, and anyone else whose schooldays are fading into memory, will be acutely aware that today's youngsters have a facility with interactive technology that can be acutely disorienting.
There's already speculation about how the internet, gaming and other interactive technology is changing the brains of the next generation – albeit not necessarily well-founded. But for the generation after that, it will be normal to control machines using thought alone. Given the awesome adaptability and plasticity of the human brain, how will our biological hardware and software adapt?

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Robot arm punches human to obey Asimov's rules

ISAAC ASIMOV would probably have been horrified at the experiments under way in a robotics lab in Slovenia. There, a powerful robot has been hitting people over and over again in a bid to induce anything from mild to unbearable pain - in apparent defiance of the late sci-fi sage's famed first law of robotics, which states that "a robot may not injure a human being".

But the robo-battering is all in a good cause, insists Borut Povše, who has ethical approval for the work from the University of Ljubljana, where he conducted the research. He has persuaded six male colleagues to let a powerful industrial robot repeatedly strike them on the arm, to assess human-robot pain thresholds.

It's not because he thinks the first law of robotics is too constraining to be of any practical use, but rather to help future robots adhere to the rule. "Even robots designed to Asimov's laws can collide with people. We are trying to make sure that when they do, the collision is not too powerful," Povše says. "We are taking the first steps to defining the limits of the speed and acceleration of robots, and the ideal size and shape of the tools they use, so they can safely interact with humans."

Povše and his colleagues borrowed a small production-line robot made by Japanese technology firm Epson and normally used for assembling systems such as coffee vending machines. They programmed the robot arm to move towards a point in mid-air already occupied by a volunteer's outstretched forearm, so the robot would push the human out of the way. Each volunteer was struck 18 times at different impact energies, with the robot arm fitted with one of two tools - one blunt and round, and one sharper.

The volunteers were then asked to judge, for each tool type, whether the collision was painless, or engendered mild, moderate, horrible or unbearable pain. Povše, who tried the system before his volunteers, says most judged the pain was in the mild to moderate range.

The team will continue their tests using an artificial human arm to model the physical effects of far more severe collisions. Ultimately, the idea is to cap the speed a robot should move at when it senses a nearby human, to avoid hurting them. Povše presented his work at the IEEE's Systems, Man and Cybernetics conference in Istanbul, Turkey, this week.

"Determining the limits of pain during robot-human impacts this way will allow the design of robot motions that cannot exceed these limits," says Sami Haddadin of DLR, the German Aerospace Centre in Wessling, who also works on human-robot safety. Such work is crucial, he says, if robots are ever to work closely with people. Earlier this year, in a nerve-jangling demonstration, Haddadin put his own arm on the line to show how smart sensors could enable a knife-wielding kitchen robot to stop short of cutting him.

"It makes sense to study this. However, I would question using pain as an outcome measure," says Michael Liebschner, a biomechanics specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. "Pain is very subjective. Nobody cares if you have a stinging pain when a robot hits you - what you want to prevent is injury, because that's when litigation starts."

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selamat datang!

selamat dataaaaaaang semua pengunjung blog!
blog ini terbentuk karena adanya tuntutan nilai dari guru TIK sekolah gue. jadi, selamat menikmati:-)

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