Archive for the ‘robots’ Category

DIY : TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit

Planet Earth has entered the age of the Personal Satellite with the introduction of Interorbital’s TubeSat Personal Satellite (PS) Kit. The new IOS TubeSat PS Kit is the low-cost alternative to the CubeSat. It has three-quarters of the mass (0.75-kg or 1.65-lb) and volume of a CubeSat, but still offers plenty of room for most experiments or applications.A And, best of all, the price of the TubeSat kit actually includes the price of a launch into Low-Earth-Orbit on an IOS NEPTUNE 30 launch vehicle. Since the TubeSats are placed into self-decaying orbits 310 kilometers (192 miles) above the Earth’s surface, they do not contribute to the long-term build-up of orbital debris. After operating for a few months (the exact length of time on orbit is dependent on solar activity), they will safely re-enter the atmosphere and burn-up. TubeSats are designed to be orbit-friendly.A Launches are expected to begin in the first quarter of 2011.

.:interorbital.com->

Dave McClure on Tapping into Consumers' 'Reptilian Psyche'

And to make a product really matter, McClure says, entrepreneurs need to "tap into the reptilian psyche" of consumers. Make your serviceaand the visual elements on your website, if it's Web-basedaappeal directly to people's primal need for things like sex, power, money, fight-or-flight response, protecting loved ones, and so forth. Simplify the interface and focus on one or two aspects, making use of people's natural visual affinity for things like faces, buttons, and edges.

.:xconomy.com->

Information Overload

How to deal with information overload? Consume information consciously, practice attention fitness and breathe.

"As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes." - Denis Diderot

.:infovegan.com->

What’s New? : Redesigning the Past

What would you do if you could travel back in time? Assassinate Marilyn Monroe? Go on a date with Hitler? Obviously. But here’s what I’d do after that: grab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70’s, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars.

.:behance.net->

What’s New? : Digital Afterlife?

What's New? covering what's new in tech…… we ask….

There are well defined legal, social, and religious traditions that come into play when our physical lives end that help decide how people remember us, and what happens to our property. Yet we also have digital lives, and their fates are much less understood and controlled. Facebook pages, Google, Twitter - all of these services exist in a legal murky ground after you die as most of these companies maintain rights to any public information you share through their sites. That can prove hectic to loved ones trying to tie up loose ends after someone has passed, but it also highlights a curious condition of the modern age: we may continue to live long after we die thanks to our online records. Are we creating a digital afterlife?

.:singularityhub.com->

Will We Ever Be a Galactic Civilization?

Asked the biggest question that he would like answered, Physicist Michio Kaku answers:AWill we survive long enough as a species to evolve into an advanced "type 1" civilization?

"Choose your president wisely if you want to be around to join Star Fleet."

Japan Plans a Robot Moon Base by 2020

America may have eighty-sixed its moon base ambitions, but the Japanese have no plans to let perfectly good lunar real estate go to waste. An ambitious $2.2 billion project in the works at JAXA, the Japanese space agency, plans to put humanoid robots on the moon by 2015, and now official backing from the Prime Minister’s office says the Japanese could have anAunmanned lunar base up and running by 2020.

Continue reading at popsci.com

The Subversive Vending Machine

Vending machines or automated coin operated commerce have represented a subversive element in our culture since Richard Carlisle first came up with a machine to distribute his criminal writings that "dropped a customer's desired book after money was inserted and a dial positioned to a corresponding number."

There is a machine in Italy that "whips up flour, water, tomato sauce and fresh ingredients to produce a piping-hot-pizza in about three minutes." After the global economic downturn, a machine popped up at Germany's Frankfurt Airport dispensing one-gram wafers of gold. In a drug-prone section of Sydney, Australia, a machine dispenses clean hypodermic needles. At a beverage machine in Tokyo, consumers pay for libations not in money but by watching a 30-second advertisement.

.:reason.com->

Japan May Pick Robots Over Immigrants

Japan, like many countries across the globe, is facing huge challenges in caring for its aging population.

Its hospitals are stretched because there are not enough nurses to cope.

The low birth rate there means foreign workers need to be recruited but there is a widespread opposition to immigration in the country as many Japanese value an ethnically homogenous society.

For some, robots may be preferable to allowing foreigners to work there.

.:japundit.com->