We’ve always been interested in the Notion Ink project, which has always striven to be a true alternative to both the iPad and Android masses. Last time, it was through both a Pixel Qi screen and an interesting custom interface, but delays and yield problems more or less buried it and competitors piled up.

The sequel to Notion Ink’s Adam was originally going to have a 10″ screen running at 1920×1200. A post on the company’s development blog has admitted that this is not likely to happen.

What would replace it in the new model isn’t said, though a more common 1280×800 screen or thereabouts would be a likely candidate. They’re common, efficient, and cheap, and the high-resolution panel they were looking at before was none of those.

It says something about the trials of developing hardware as a small company. Someone like Apple has the clout to make the components and materials for something like the new iPad cheap enough to buy in bulk. But if you’re only shipping, say, 10,000 units, the cost per unit starts looking way different.

He notes also that such a high-resolution screen, while it has its benefits, is not really beneficial in the Android ecosystem now. Apple’s high-res screen is being adopted at large by developers (or else), but Android is a more complicated beast and the display engine isn’t locked down quite so tightly.

On that front, Notion Ink’s Shravan says that their next blog post will go over the new Adam’s “Visual Enhancement Engine,” probably a serious makeover of stock Android, and a “Display Power Optimizer,” which is probably what it sounds like. Once they lock down the hardware specs, they have the advantage of knowing what they’re developing for, and final software work can begin.

It may not ever ship as many units as an iPad or Kindle Fire, but the David vs. Goliaths story continues to be worth following.

[via Engadget]

In Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt,” two children play in their “nursery,” a sort of home holodeck where they can conjure up any scene in which to play. Bradbury always had a wonderfully clunky sort of technobabble; in this case, as the father tells the mother, “it’s all dimensional superreactionary, supersensitive color film and mental tape film behind glass screens. It’s all odorophonics and sonics, Lydia. Here’s my handkerchief.”

Naturally, the nursery never shipped. It’s not a real thing, and there’s no mental tape film in 3M’s labs. But Bradbury wasn’t an engineer, and his story isn’t a patent application. It was a work of imagination — yet still guided by a sense of the practical.

Most concept devices, like last week’s eye-mounted display from Google, are works of imagination, and are usually good or bad concepts according to how well they manage the aspect of practicality. Sometimes they’re dead ends, pie in the sky. But often works of imagination are crystallizations of collective fear and desire: manifest destiny, in this case, for an industry.

What was “The Veldt” about? It certainly wasn’t a techno-fantasy about how cool our entertainment devices would be in the future. It was an example of Bradbury’s most common theme, the loss of humanity through, in this case, a surrogate for parenting, as embodied by a sort of mega-TV. In this way, although it has been 60 years since the story was written, and the nursery has yet to appear, it’s still true in the most important way it was meant to be true. The story was a vessel for a feeling that is still relevant.

There’s no reason to suggest that Google’s Project Glass video is any different from the many concept videos we’ve seen in the past. But like Bradbury’s story, the take-away isn’t the piece of technology, but the idea it embodies. People are quick to jump on Google as a company that, for one thing, doesn’t really make hardware, and for another, a company that has killed off half the projects it has started. Real artists ship, they say. But before the artists can do their part, the engineers have to do theirs. And what they create isn’t exactly art.

How often does a product come out that didn’t have some ugly, bulky precursor? Somebody has to make one, after all. Devices don’t spring fully formed from their creators’ foreheads. We quickly forget the failures that preceded the glorious success because they aren’t something we want to think about. But they existed, and they were not without utility. They beat the path that their successors followed, then fell exhausted by the wayside.

A brief tangent, if the reader will permit it. There’s a fallacy often used as an argument against evolution: “what good is half an eye?” That is to say: the complicated structure that is the eye and its supporting wetware doesn’t work if you only have part of it, so why and how would it evolve if it was no good until its final stage? People make that same mistake when looking at a device like this. What good is this video, this concept, if Google isn’t shipping it this year? What both arguments ignore or miss is that, in fact, the transitional forms of both the eye and the breakthrough device are necessary to the final product. They’re points on a path. Before the eye, the eyespot. Before the iPhone, the Palm Pilot.

What Google is doing is positing the iPhone as they build the Palm Pilot. Remember, ten years ago, Apple was no more able to make the iPhone than Palm. Palm decided to make ugly, functional things and Apple deferred, looking ahead. Google is trying to do both. It’s a bit early to be calling the success or failure of what is essentially a fictional device (the real one, though we’ve seen it, has not been truly demonstrated), but it is at least an honest, compelling, and even realistic concept.

Project Glass is a vessel for a vision, so to speak, as “The Veldt” was a vessel for a concern. It’s a vision of the connected internet, mobile and ubiquitous, and totally divorced from the handset-based ecosystem that Apple took by storm and molded to its own advantage.

Google must have looked around at the crowded, tooth-and-nail spaces they’re in right now, and one imagines its lip curling in distaste. They feel they barely managed to ship Android in time. They’re struggling for relevance in social. Browsers, the soldiers that formed their invincible phalanx for a decade, are fundamentally changing. Can you blame them for averting their eyes, and directing them towards the horizon?

It must be refreshing sight. A fantasy, maybe, but everything we have today started as a fantasy. But importantly, it’s not a mirage. Sergey Brin is actually wearing an early version of the things. They’re as ugly as sin and nowhere near the level of functionality shown in the video. Why should it be otherwise? Apple made the Newton. Was it a mistake?

Intel has roadmaps looking forward a decade or more, roadmaps that assume their engineers will accomplish die shrinks and material research and nanolithography methods that aren’t even imaginable today. No one is calling them frauds because they are showing a product they won’t ship for years to come. They’re writing their own story because that’s something they can do. When you are on the forefront of technology, science fiction stops looking like science fiction and it starts looking more like a long-term business plan. Perhaps Google’s plan is overoptimistic. That’s not something you can tell at the outset, however, and it seems cynical to assume so.

The prudent archer, says Machiavelli, aims for the horizon, knowing that the arrow will fall short of his mark — but hopefully on the target. So it is with those futurists who mix their imagination with knowledge. Ray Bradbury’s nursery has yet to appear, but the lesson it teaches is no less real. Google’s Project Glass is about as real as the 6nm transistors planned for production by Intel around 2020. Which is to say, imaginary — until it isn’t.

Late last week, one Justin Watt discovered something suspicious going on with the Wi-Fi at his hotel, the Times Square Marriott. Not content to charge him hundreds for the room and $16.95 for internet access, it appeared that the service provider was using JavaScript injection to serve banner ads on every website guests visited.

The story spread like wildfire for obvious reasons, and at last Marriott has responded, saying the problem has been remedied and won’t happen again.

In an emailed statement, they write:

As soon as we learned of the situation, we launched an investigation into the matter. Preliminary findings revealed that, unbeknownst to the hotel, the Internet service provider (ISP) was utilizing functionality that allowed advertising to be pushed to the end user. The ISP has assured the hotel that this functionality has now been disabled.

While this is a common marketing practice with many Internet service providers, Marriott does not condone this practice. At no time was data security ever at risk.

We will continue to look into this matter and find opportunities to remind our hotels of Marriott’s high-speed Internet policies.

The company that apparently provides the Wi-Fi service, RG Nets Inc., has not made any statement. Their fate as the provider of this Marriott’s (and presumably others’) Wi-Fi is unknown.

Let this be a lesson to us all, though: this kind of behavior should not be tolerated, but it is up to savvy users like Justin not only to notice, but to care and investigate and follow through. Minor but real liberties like this will probably only increase in frequency, so be on the lookout and if you see something suspicious like this, tell an Internet.

Jack Tramiel, one of the PC industry’s major pioneers, has died. He was born in 1928 and, after surviving imprisonment in Auschwitz and another concentration camp during World War II, first established the Commodore name in business in 1953. His most successful endeavor, and one of the most successful in the history of computing, was the legendary Commodore 64, one of the very first computers built, as Tramiel would later put it, “for the masses, not the classes.” He was 83.

The legacy of Commodore lives on to this day, mainly in how this breakthrough device popularized the idea of a home computer. The C64, introduced in 1982, will certainly be remembered fondly by many readers of this website, as well as the Vic-20 and other less iconic devices. After he left Commodore, Tramiel purchased Atari in 1984, though its most influential devices were already behind it. Commodore, too, would go on to smaller successes like the Amiga series.

There will soon surely be more comprehensive and relevant examinations of Tramiel’s life and work, but for now let it suffice that the man was critically important in the history of personal computing, and in a great part shaped its present and future. He is survived by his wife and three sons, and of course the indelible mark he left on the industry.

The Big Apple is looking into upgrading its existing pay phones, and a pilot study is underway that replaces everyone’s favorite anachronism with something a little more 21st-century: giant touchscreens. According the NY Post, the city will unveil 250 revamped phone booths next month that have been revamped with 32-inch touchable displays. These access points would be set up for Skype and other video services, email, wi-fi access, and *11 numbers.

It’s ambitious, and depending on the execution could be a big step forward for public communication points. On the other hand, city dwellers are likely to be skeptical of the devices; smartphone owners will find no use for them, and pay phone users won’t know what to make of them. Are they really going to Skype their dealer?

I kid, but it really is kind of a strange proposition. These enormous screens (32 inches is quite large for a phone booth) will of course make whatever one is doing very public, though they helpfully double as ad screens when not in use. And part of the draw of payphones is the simplicity of their operation. You put in your money, you dial your number, and that’s that. Replacing a system that has the familiarity of decades is no simple task, and this huge screen might be overshooting the mark.

On the other hand, it could also be a great method to provide public wi-fi and information about local businesses — like London’s Smart Bins.” Tourists will almost certainly find them useful. And the smaller 22-inch subway ones will be helpful for navigating the city and announcing trains. But who is the average user of pay phones, and will they find this new system useful? Details are scarce now and only seeing and trying the new booths will tell.

The booths are being installed at no cost to the city, and after the pilot program, 36 percent of ad revenue will be handed over to them. And don’t worry, the screens are waterproof and dustproof, and will be cleaned regularly. No word on whether they’re hack-proof, however, though I can guess.

[image: ishane on Flickr]

Living in Seattle, you tend to find yourself in the company of tech people all the time. With Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, Google, and a dozen other major companies established in the area, it’s never a surprise when you find out the guy next to you at the bar is working on Windows Phone 8 or Half-Life 3. This week, I was lucky enough to get a chance to see what Amazon has cooking for its next generation of e-readers. Their new offices and the mysterious Lab 126 are just down the street, after all, so I’m actually surprised it hasn’t happened before now.

Back in November, I speculated that the new Kindles and Nooks and what have yous might have glowing screens, the likes of which we’ve seen occasionally but were never fully implemented. It turns out Amazon was thinking the same thing, and actually bought a company that was, I am told, the world leader in light-guide technology. They’ve finally gotten it to the point where it’s ready to be released, and a new generation of glowing Kindles will be coming our way sometime this year.

Incidentally, that acquisition doesn’t appear to have ever been reported, so although it happened in late 2010, this is the first anyone has heard of it. The company, Oy Modilis, was founded in 1991 in Helsinki, and has a number of patents relating to this sort of thing. This one, for instance, seems to cover the type of lighting technology used in the new Kindle.

The device I saw was crudely camouflaged in a sort of cardboard enclosure, but the screen was clearly visible. With a tap, a slider popped up on the screen, and as it was dragged to the right, the screen lit up evenly with a rather cool light. In the dark, it was plainly noticeable as a glow, and in uneven light — say, shade or a shuttered room — the slight illumination made the screen much more readable. At full blast it was definitely projecting some light (technically speaking it was reflecting it), but it was still a soft glow and not the harsh flashlight of a backlit LCD.

I commented on the temperature of the light — it was that blue-white glow found in uncorrected white LEDs, not the warm light on off-white that most people associate with books by lamplight. But, of course, the e-ink screen is in fact grey and dark grey, not black on off-white, as paper is, so a cooler light may actually work better. At any rate, they are apparently sensitive to these issues and looking into it. I thought that the text looked better as well, but it’s possible that this was the result of improved font rendering and aliasing reduction, or perhaps something to do with the light. At any rate, it wasn’t any of the crazy new bistable displays we’ve been seeing at trade shows (alas).

As for the shape of the device, it was impossible to tell, wrapped as it was in its little cardboard box. But the size appears the same, and the whole point of purchasing the light-guide company was to get the team and their patents, which essentially laminate the light diffusion layer right onto the screen without adding much in the way of depth or interfering with the touch system. I was told the industrial design isn’t finished yet, but I ruled out things like ruggedness, waterproofing, or a flush-front screen — all things, by the way, I suggested they look into. It shouldn’t be any thicker, though it will have to accommodate the LED circuitry and presumably a larger battery.

The current crop of e-readers is, as I recently lamented, both troublingly homogenous and still not good enough for paper-lovers like myself. The new Kindle doesn’t look like it’s going to address all of my issues with this kind of device, but the improved display will definitely set it apart from its rivals. We’ll know for sure when it comes out later this year.

[note: the top image is a concept image from Flex Lighting, not a real device]

The Google Books project (just today pared down a bit) always impressed me with its sheer scope. Offering modern e-books is all well and good, but that’s more of a business problem. It’s the scanning and free availability of thousands upon thousands of old books that struck me as a worthwhile endeavor.

But publishers and booksellers have been wary of the service, knowing that Google is a fan of free, and their scan-first, ask-permission-later strategy caused some consternation as well. And while access to all that knowledge is appreciated, it is lost on no one that the data is in the hands of a for-profit company.

Enter the Digital Public Library of America, which aims to create a similar catalog of works, but both more comprehensive and unimpeded by commercial motives. It’s been in the works for a while, but it seems it may finally launch as early as a year from now.

The news comes from Robert Darnton, Harvard University librarian and member of the DPLA’s steering committee, who at a recent event made a serious promise that the project would launch in April of 2013.

There’s a lot of work to be done if that’s true: the project aims to unify such disparate sources as the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, various academic collections, and presumably any other collection that would be meaningful to include. And they have yet to even decide such issues as how near to the present their catalog will come. There is an ongoing dispute regarding so-called “orphan works” and other questions of copyright, and the problem is far from trivial.

Darnton suggests a rolling off-limits period, perhaps between five and ten years before the present, from which no books would be added to the collection. But outside that limit (and yearly, as a new publication year is added to the archive), works would be added on an opt-out basis — the same basis that caused so much anger when Google did it, scanning thousands of works whose copyright information they had not ascertained.

In fact, during the Q&A period following Darnton’s talk, the man who led the Authors Guild suit against Google, Nick Taylor, asked whether any authors had been consulted in the planning of this potentially precedent-setting policy. Darnton replied that authors as a “sector” had not been consulted, but that many of the people on the steering committee were authors themselves and sympathized with the needs of that particular set.

We’re still in the early stages of this archival process; even the Internet Archive and Google’s massive book collection are, in some ways, rather crude first steps. The DPLA is ambitious and may face serious obstacles, but it’s to be expected when they’re making it up as they go along.

The American Booksellers Association sent a letter to its members today announcing that Google was putting an end to its reseller program, which allowed independent bookstores to operate an e-book storefront using Google as the wholesaler. The news was confirmed shortly afterwards by a post on the Inside Google Books blog, saying “it’s clear that the reseller program has not met the needs of many readers or booksellers.”

The news will be unwelcome to the bookstores that were relying on Google, but it’s not all gloom and doom. For one thing, the reseller program will continue to operate for about nine months, giving booksellers plenty of time to make the changes necessary. And, as the ABA puts it, in 2010 the program “was the only viable means for us to enter the e-book market, but, like so much else in our industry, things have changed rapidly, and we have options that simply did not exist 18 months ago.”

Like so many other of Google’s well-formed but not particularly popular services, Books is getting the consolidation treatment. They’ll still offer e-books, of course, but their role as a middle man is coming to an end. They prefer to be the alpha and the omega, and will focus on their own storefront, the redesigned all-purpose Play store.

This means an opportunity for another e-book wholesaler to step in and pick up the contracts Google is leaving behind. The independent bookstores don’t want anything to do with B&N or Amazon, but at the moment power is so concentrated in the biggest companies that there isn’t much room in the margins.

PaidContent has a copy of the letter the ABA sent to members. It’s apologetic but quietly critical of Google for what amounts to pulling the rug out from under an industry that was grateful for its support.

Richard Clarke was a major feature in US security for a decade, serving as a member of the National Security Council and special adviser for cybersecurity to President George W. Bush. He has written a column for the New York Times that details just how serious the threat of cyber attacks is for this country, something increasingly evident in light of things like the creaking infrastructure of things like NASA and general cluelessness in legislature.

But Mr Clark gives the world a lesson in cluelessness with the conclusion of his column, where he suggests that the United States should, under provisions made to regulate the movement of goods to and from this country, inspect international internet traffic. The suggestion is, in a word, idiotic.

Believe it or not, the following was written by someone who worked in national security — specializing in cybersecurity, no less — for years and years:

Under Customs authority, the Department of Homeland Security could inspect what enters and exits the United States in cyberspace. Customs already looks online for child pornography crossing our virtual borders. And under the Intelligence Act, the president could issue a finding that would authorize agencies to scan Internet traffic outside the United States and seize sensitive files stolen from within our borders.

Mr Clark, I have to tell you, that is the dumbest goddamn idea I’ve heard in a long time. And I work in a business with one of the highest concentrations of dumb ideas per capita in the world.

The objections to this proposal will come so quickly and so readily to the mind of anyone at all concerned about privacy and legislation, at all versed in internet infrastructure or cybersecurity, or at all familiar with reality, that I don’t think it’s necessary to go through them in detail. By the time most of our readers finished reading that paragraph, they probably had three or four separate objections.

What you suggest is absurd to contemplate, let alone legislate. It would be impossible to pull off technically, legally, diplomatically, and unlikely to be supported in any way by the people of this country, or any free country. It is fear-mongering, monomaniacal, totally unrealistic nonsense.

I just wanted to post this here as yet another example of how the people whose job it is to understand and take action on things like technology, international cybersecurity, and the internet, are completely disconnected from reality. It terrifies me that such a man held such a post for so long, and I tremble to think of the damage he has already wrought.

Moving everyday transactions into the digital realm seems an inevitability, but as yet there have been no breakout successes. Sure, there are fringe efforts like Square (which relies on existing card and bank infrastructure) and Google Wallet (which is a bit early to the NFC party), but there’s nothing that the average consumer would see and think “yes, that is as simple as handing the merchant a five-dollar bill.”

The Royal Canadian Mint is hoping to create such a system: a multi-platform, simple, and secure alternative to cash. Others around the net have likened it to Bitcoin, but that’s really an inapt comparison. MintChip isn’t a virtual currency, it’s a virtual wallet, something which has been tried before. But, naturally enough, they hope to succeed where others have failed. But are they writing a check they can’t cash?

Briefly, it must be explained why MintChip is nothing like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a fundamentally different style of currency: a regulated “resource” that uses a totally different method of exchange than cash. It’s very secure in a way, but the aspects that give it that security also make it foreign to existing and familiar payment methods, and by extention, users. Furthermore, its value fluctuates wildly, making it unsuitable for everyday purchases like coffee and cab fare.

MintChip, named after the Mint, the chip enabling the system, and perhaps inadvertently the ice cream flavor, is just a way of securely exchanging Canadian dollars (or at some point, they would hope, other currencies) by means of trusted hardware and straightforward accounting. The actual chip can be fitted into a number of devices, from micro SD cards to POS systems. MintChip value is transferred onto a chip by a MintChip broker, and can then be transferred independently between chips, online or off.

They claim the system is secure and anonymous, though any system that relies on trusted hardware and intermediaries is vulnerable to spoofing and duplication. And anonymity is not an easy promise either: as long as amounts and transfers are tied to account numbers, and account numbers are tied to identities and cards used to purchase funds, anonymity is far from assured. It’s not clear from the spec when and how long account and transaction information is stored. The litmus test is, realistically speaking, is it anonymous enough that someone could buy drugs with it without thinking twice?

The reliance on trusted, independent hardware seems like the weak link here, and all it will take is a few hackers (on their own or backed by bank and credit interests) to make public a tool that fools either brokers or merchants into thinking a transaction has taken place. Not a trivial task, but far from impossible. This gives the whole system a bad smell for anyone looking to adopt it. Credit card fraud is rampant, admittedly, but that’s more a function of the system’s widespread use and acceptance. MintChip doesn’t have the advantage of being accepted everywhere.

It’s an admirable effort and the Mint should be praised for the project, but this is likely to end up a dead end. But it’s a necessary dead end to explore, and the shortcomings of this system will inform the next version, and so on.

Lastly, since the most exciting part of a story must always come last, the Mint is holding a contest, giving away thousands of dollars in pure gold as prizes. Grand prize, for best overall application, gets one 10-ounce wafer of pure gold, with an enduring value of around $17,000. Judges include representatives from the Mint, Google, eBay, and the CBC. If you’re a developer interested in payments, and you love gold, check it out.

[via Hacker News]

The saga of India’s “$35 tablet” is long and slightly disappointing. While the idea of low-cost, standard hardware to be distributed in needful communities is a great one, the fact is that the device itself is more or less junk. Poorly built, with a small battery, outdated OS, and low-quality touchscreen, the Aakash has not had a good reception among people who care about such things.

But it’s only the beginning of the road for this type of device, and DataWind, the company that made the Aakash, has already announced the follow-up — and now they’re considering expanding the market to the US. A pilot study may be in the works for under-served schools in Philadelphia.

This could be the start of something big, or it could fizzle out. A dozen or so of these per 30-kid class makes for a lot of opportunities, but troubles as well. The hardware is cheap, but probably more useful at large than graphing calculators, which cost twice as much. And as one can’t expect every kid to have their own PC or laptop just yet, something like an Aakash tablet could be a nice compromise.

It can show video, administer quizzes, mirror class resources, and so on. A tool any teacher would love to have… if it isn’t more trouble than it’s worth. And there are many practical considerations. Charging the devices, keeping them clean, secure, and updated, preventing inappropriate usage, creating class-administration software… the list goes on and on. But that is, of course, part of what pilot programs are meant to explore.

Right now, it’s all still in the planning stages; Philadelphia-based Wilco Electronics is hoping to set up a procurement deal for schools there and will be meeting with DataWind and presumably Philadelphia officials over the next month.

Google has rolled out a great number of small changes to the search engine and UI over the last month, and now they have rolled them all into a big blog post for your consecutive enjoyment.

We’ve highlighted a few that seemed more relevant, but there isn’t much here that’s life-changing. All the same, it’s good to stay up on changes like this, just in case you happen to do SEO for a living (scoundrel).

• “+” is now treated as a normal character when that seems to be the intent, along with %, $, \, ., @, and #. Its days as an operator are probably over, though, except when you’re using it in an equation.
• Changing your password now logs you out from all your Google stuff, including Search.
• Better answers and live scores for Tennis, Russian Hockey, and UEFA Champions League games.
• Platform-specific results for app search – so if you search for Angry Birds, you’ll get different results on Android, iOS, and so on. Results are also richer, with stars, download buttons, reviews, etc.
• The “Freshness update” that brought recent and differently-organized results to News searches has been rolled out more generally, apparently as a result of having acquired the “machine resources” to do so.
• Image search has gotten a handful of updates, including relevancy, better ratings for the quality of the source page (fewer trash pages Google-bombing with popular images, presumably), and Safesearch changes.
• The +1 button will show in search results in more countries and domains.

The rest of the list can be found at Google’s Inside Search blog.

[image source]

In some of the old science fiction stories I remember from Weird Tales and Ray Bradbury and the like, robots always figured. But they always came the way you might expect a new dryer or hot water heater to arrive. In a big box, packed in straw or foam, heavy and metal of course as they always were back in the day. But the world of robots is different from the way they imagined it then: the metallic golems of yore have given way to a sort of Cambrian explosion of potential robot types, imitating everything from worm to dog to bird.

A team of researchers hopes to both expand that robodiversity and change the way our future companions are delivered. Funded by the NSF, they’ve begun a 5-year-long project exploring the idea of on-demand robots.

MIT is leading the effort, specifically Professor Daniela Rus from CSAIL. They have researchers from University of Pennsylvania and Harvard on the team, and the object is to “make it possible for the average person to design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours.”

Imagine, just for a domestic example, that you have a crawl space that’s difficult to get into and possibly dangerous. You could hop online or go to your local robot shop and have them create an ambulatory, four-legged robot with a couple pincers in it, so you could easily get any tools or toys that happen to go under there, or check for mice, or inspect wiring and construction for damage.

A standard robot might do, but you might need it bigger or smaller, or with or without a camera, or with a magnet or insecticide dispenser instead of a gripper. Or maybe the robot you need is outdated or expensive, or requires assembly, or must be shipped from Korea. Why should replicating a copy of a product with the end user apply only to media? Have it made right in your neighborhood, ready for pickup in the afternoon after the resin body has solidified and the stock boards have been updated with the latest control firmware.

The project leaders sum up its scope thusly:

The capability to customize cyber-physical systems on-demand would change how we plan for contingencies. Rescuers engaged in humanitarian aid and disaster reliefs in remote locations could minimize their logistic needs on-site. Warehouses of spare and replacement parts that may never be used could be replaced by storing only their designs digitally, not the physical parts themselves.

Fundamental problems in computer science about what is computable by digital machines will change. The problems will be reframed in a larger context as what functional hybrid machines are constructable from cyber-physical primitives.

As for the research itself, it will encompass more or less the entire ecosystem: supportive tools and materials for design and engineering of the “mechanical, electrical, computing, and software aspects of the device,” algorithms for production and assembly, programming and operational environments, and more. A few prototypes show how functional robots can be created from a few parts and an “origami” type structure.

They intend to include K-12 students in the process as well and establish sub-programs at the universities participating in the project. The $10M in NSF funding could end up going rather quickly when all these things are considered.

Needless to say, the potential revolutionizing of product engineering and delivery could have enormous implications down the line, although at the moment it is mostly speculative. Notably, this is fully orientated towards consumer applications, not military, where one might reasonably expect on-demand robotics to be sought after. The results of this program’s research are sure to be interesting and influential, as anything with a pedigree like this with fabrication and decentralized design and engineering as a starting point is certain to bear fruit.

Arizona’s legislature has passed some proposed amendments on Section 13-3916 of the State Statutes. The law has to do with stalking and harassment, and originally defined telephone harassment — generally a one-to-one communication that was deemed threatening or obscene.

The law has been revised with, essentially, a find-and-replace of “telephone” with “electronic or digital device,” without any thought given to how fundamentally different these forms of communication are. If signed by the governor, the revised law would potentially outlaw any speech on the internet determined by the government as being lewd, profane, threatening, or disturbing of the “peace, quiet, or right of privacy of any person.”

In this case, the law does not actually appear to be being twisted by an agenda to encompass certain communications, and appears to be a simple lack of due diligence by a host of ignorant lawmakers. It’s intended to extend existing stalking and harassment definitions to include cyberbullying and the like, which is of course a very reasonable and in fact admirable thing to do.

But with anything related to regulating online communications, old wording and definitions are rarely applicable. Criminalizing legitimate internet-based harassment is a good goal, but laws need to be written from the ground up to account for the very different nature of internet-based speech.

Media Coalition, a first-amendment rights advocacy organization, sums up the shortcoming succinctly in a letter to Arizona’s governor, Jan Brewer:

…This legislation takes a law meant to address irritating phone calls and applies it to communication on web sites, blogs, listserves and other Internet communication. H.B. 2549 is not limited to a one to one conversation between two specific people. The communication does not need to be repetitive or even unwanted. There is no requirement that the recipient or subject of the speech actually feel offended, annoyed or scared. Nor does the legislation make clear that the communication must be intended to offend or annoy the reader, the subject or even any specific person.

Speech protected by the First Amendment is often intended to offend, annoy or scare but could be prosecuted under this law.

It’s only a local provision for now, which may or may not be signed into law, but these things have a way of picking up steam and being replicated elsewhere, and once that happens — flaws like this are made to be exploited. To call it a censorship bill is mistaken; SOPA and PIPA were censorship bills, deliberately written with the end of shutting down problematic sites in mind. This, it appears, is just another example of the ignorance and laxity of our legislative bodies when it comes to the internet.

You can find the full Media Coalition letter and law in PDF form here.

[via Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and InfoWars]

Cult of Mac has a great write-up of an app for iOS called Girls Around Me, which essentially displays the public check-ins and profiles of girls around you. With a little shift in context it could easily be confused for a hot new startup (discoverability meets speed dating!), but no, it really is just a way for guys to creep on nearby girls who have failed to lock down their info.

It’s sad, but maybe something like this is what people need to shock them into understanding just how much information they put online.

The app itself is pretty much straight-up stalker material, but the fact is it uses publicly available information — information that, really, is being deliberately broadcast. There is a larger debate to be had about the nature of privacy and how information like location and profiles should be handled, and many subtle points to be made. But right now it seems that things must be done in broad strokes, and it’s mainly broadly offensive things like this app that will bring attention to the issue.

It’s perfect fodder for evening news debates: “After the break, we talk with our tech experts about a new app that lets you track women in your area without their knowledge.” And that’s a good thing: the more exposure the problem gets, the better. Many of the people being tracked by this app, male and female, haven’t even considered the idea that their movements might be tracked systematically by a stranger.

For example: all these options in Foursquare default to on, which is really fine, since after all the service is about sharing your location. And linking it to your Facebook or Twitter account is a natural step for many. But at the same time it’s easy to fail to understand that one is providing a sort of path that strangers can follow from a face on the street to a name, other photos, current location, and a number of other things.

Girls Around Me is a shortcut for creeps, but it’s not like it had to do anything illegal or complicated to get this information. A handful of public APIs is all it took to put a faces on a map and link them to a trove of personal data.

Apps like this one are distasteful, sure, but they are also important ways to show how exposed many of our friends and peers are. An understanding of social media is not prerequisite to its use, and many are ignorant of the level to which their actions and data are public. With any luck, Girls Around Me and its ilk will convince these people to take their own privacy seriously.

Update: Foursquare has reached out to say that the app was in violation of their API policy, so they’ve revoked access. I feel safer already!

TechCrunch’s Best Buy tag isn’t exactly a heartening place to visit. In the last few months, it “stole Christmas,” been “finished,” and is now “going out of business.” Dire straits indeed for a company that has defied the odds not only against big retail competition but against deadlier online opponents as well for nearly 50 years.

But an announcement today seems to give a little weight to the doom and gloom expected from a tech community that views Best Buy as an anachronism. Best Buy will be closing 50 of its big box stores and laying off some 400 people, mostly on the administrative side. Is it rightsizing or just plain attrition?

CEO Brian Dunn sees it as a necessary measure to reduce costs and make the chain’s retail experience more relevant to the average consumer. “We’re going to have more doors and less square footage,” he said, suggesting that further big box closures may be in the company’s future, but at the same time assuring that said closures were part of an overall strategy.

The sprawling megastores cost far more and see more competition from the likes of Amazon and Newegg, whereas smaller stores with popular items and services save on both space and costs. One has to admit that it makes a certain amount of sense. Best Buy is in the retail business, not the warehousing business, and at any rate they can’t compete in the latter category with online storefronts.

The 400 jobs, which Best Buy said would mostly come from its headquarters, would be enough to raise an eyebrow, but they neglect to estimate the real number of jobs that will be lost as a result of the closures. The employees of the 50 stores could easily amount to a couple thousand with floor staff, management, warehousing, and so on. Needless to say, it’s not a number they care to shout from the rooftops. It would take the wind out the sails just when the new plan needs a boost.

February was a big month for Kickstarter. Not only did they have a number of record-breaking projects, but they were shoved into the mainstream consciousness with a flood of traditional news coverage.

But there was always the question of whether these thousands of pledges would have any lasting effect on the site. Could such a rush of attention actually have negative effects, increasing competition and bringing in more projects than the site’s population of donors can handle?

Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to have been the case. The site’s big month appears to have made a lasting increase in both projects, users, and funding.

There are a ton of details at Kickstarter’s blog post, but the gist is this: the two biggest projects lately, Double Fine Adventure and Order of the Stick, brought in millions of dollars themselves, but have also produced a halo of funding where there was very little before.

In the gaming category, for instance, only one project had reached $100,000 in funding before last month. Since then nine have. And in webcomics, where the Order of the Stick book was categorized, the number of pledges per week, on average, has doubled.

They’re not just staying in the original category, either: 22% of each group of original backers have been busy in other categories, backing nearly 2000 projects with over $1m all told. Many of the backers were on Kickstarter for the first time to back the big projects, and these big names on the marquee ended up working as advertisements for the site itself as well.

It just goes to show that crowd-funding is a space with a ton of room to grow as new models and ideas are found to be applicable. Before last month, many would have thought that raising millions via Kickstarter was a fantasy. But the scale of the site is growing and naysayers are constant casualties. What remains to be seen is how long Kickstarter itself can remain on top. Just as it brought a change to the world of funding and launching products, another could bring yet more changes to the still-nascent field of crowd-funding.

A contest is underway at data-crunching competition site Kaggle that challenges people to create “an automated scoring algorithm for student-written essays.” This is just the latest chapter in a generations-long conflict over the nature of teaching, and to that end it’s also just one of many inevitable steps along the line. Automated grading is already prevalent in simpler tasks like multiple-choice and math testing, but computers have yet to seriously put a dent in the most time-consuming of grading tasks: essays.

Millions of students write dozens of essays every year, and teachers will often take home hundreds to read at a time. In addition to loading the teachers with frequently undocumented work hours, it’s simply difficult to grade consistently and fairly. Are robo-readers the answer? Mark Shermis at the University of Akron thinks it’s at least worth a shot.

The competition is structured as you might expect, and actually is nearing its conclusion. It’s been ongoing for a few months and ends on April 30th. So far there are over 150 entrants and over 1,000 submissions. The contest provides them with a database of essays and their scores to “train” the engines, then tests them, naturally, on a new set of essays without scores. Presumably the engine that produces the most reliably human-like results will take home the first prize: $60,000. Then it’s $30k for second place and $10k for third. The contest is sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

It’s interesting enough as a data-analysis project, but likely also to be a major point of contention over the next decade or so. The increasing systematization of education is something many teachers and parents decry; the emphasis on standardized tests is abhorrent to many, while the human component of essay grading is considered indispensable.

To replace human readers with robots – “It’s horrifying,” says Harvard College Writing Program director Thomas Jehn, speaking to Reuters. “I like to know I’m writing for a real flesh-and-blood reader who is excited by the words on the page. I’m sure children feel the same way.”

Fair enough. But if the results are the same, is there really a conflict? Ideally, these machine readers would produce the same grade, for the same reasons. Is a TA scanning each essay and marking off the salient key words and checking for obvious failures doing a better job? It probably depends on the TA. And the professor or teacher, and the student, the length and topic of the essay, and so on.

There’s a counter-argument, then, that grading essays is, much of the time, a mechanical process that humans have to perform, and which in many cases they can’t perform consistently. Like working at an assembly line — a robot can do it faster and cheaper. This has real benefits, not least of which is freeing the humans to do more human work. TAs could spend more time doing one-on-one tutoring, and teachers could work harder on lesson plans and the actual process of teaching.

The essay-grading portion is only “phase one” of the project’s plan, though. Phase two would focus on shorter answers, and phase three on charts, graphs, representations of math and logic. It’s exciting, but it’s one of those areas of advancement that makes many uncomfortable. It could be said, though, that we feel uncomfortable because it is those very areas that need the most attention.

The Fair Labor Association has concluded its month-long investigation of Chinese manufacturer Foxconn’s factory conditions, and as they indicated early on, they have encountered “significant issues,” though it’s far from the sub-Dickensian hellhole many perhaps expected. They have focused on a few of the most significant problems and made some suggestions as to how to remedy them.

Ultimately these solutions will need to be monitored by Chinese authorities — the same authorities under which the previous, nominally illegal excesses of Foxconn’s were swept under the rug. But with the eye of the world upon them, it may be that even the most lax of regulators will have to make an effort to keep their industry in line with the laws that ostensibly bind them.

The investigators looked into three factories over a month, talking with leadership and surveying 35,500 workers. It’s only a fraction of Foxconn’s dozens of factories and 1.2 million employees, but it was apparently enough to derive some systematic failings. The press release summarizing the FLA’s findings and suggestions is here, but for your convenience they are further summarized in bullet form below.

• All three factories exceeded weekly and monthly overtime limits and used worker-unfriendly overtime calculation. Foxconn agreed to bring working hours down from an average of over 60 hours a week during peak production periods to the legal maximum of 49, including overtime. Unscheduled overtime was calculated in half-hour increments, rounding down, a measurement style which will also change. They will also improve pay so that the reduced hours do not result in financial problems for employees.
• 64 percent of employees said that compensation does not meet their basic needs. The FLA will conduct an assessment of the cost of living in Shenzhen and Chengdu to determine the validity of these claims. Foxconn also agreed to look into low enrollment in social security benefit programs.
• A number of simple safety precautions were not being taken, such as protective equipment, permits, and ensuring a safe exit. Many of these problems were remedied immediately, and the FLA noted that Foxconn had in fact improved “operating procedures, measurement, and documentation” related to the facilities where aluminum dust (which is dangerous and inflammable) must be managed.
• More systematic safety issues were noted, such as high rates of unreported accidents. Foxconn will immediately require accidents to be reported if they result in an injury, rather than if production is stopped, which was the previous criterion.
• Workers were not adequately represented in management. Foxconn agreed to improve the election of worker representatives, as required by local law. Workers will also be consulted more in issues of safety and health.

Curious readers can download the entire report here, including data and methodology.

The investigation has focused on the parts of Foxconn that have served as suppliers to Apple, but it is to be hoped that the changes suggested will be adopted more widely, though it may take time for them to propagate through so large and international an entity.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is in China at the time of this report coming out, which surely is not a coincidence. His televised meetings with higher-ups and tours of Chinese Apple Stores are likely just window-dressing, however, and the meat of his visit will be in private meetings with the leaders of China’s manufacturing industry. The results of these meetings, in which the FLA’s findings will no doubt be discussed, will probably be announced by Apple once its suppliers have had some time to make the changes suggested.

The world of portable, general-purpose computing is moving along two parallel paths. First, and most popularly, you have devices like smartphones, which are focused on user interaction and connectivity, but are smart enough to be the “brain” for any number of more capable devices. Then there are purpose-built devices with one or a few specific functions: a high-precision range finder, or a pollutant detector, or a simple laser level.

But in the middle somewhere, and perhaps a bit into the future, you have a middle way: the tricorder. Some might consider it the best of both worlds; some, the worst. But whether it’s the one or the other, tricorders are getting more real by the day. The Tricorder Project is just one among many, but the idea is sound and hell, the device even works.

There are initiatives to create such devices already; there’s the Tricorder X-Prize, sponsored by Qualcomm, which hopes to create a handheld device capable of “capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases.” And we wrote a while back about a device that can check pulse and temperature from a distance using lasers.

This particular project, though, began by Peter Jansen when he was a PhD candidate at McMasters University, isn’t about health care but rather science. Jansen is passionate about the invisible world of magnetism, radiation, temperature, and other things all around us, and wanted to build a single tool that could measure all of these things — while remaining usable and compact. In other words, the kind of thing you’d want to send down with an away team in Star Trek. Jansen explains:

The idea is really to have something that’s useful both for a young student first being introduced to science, as well as being standard equipment for future planetary explorers. I think the difference here, and how that’s possible, is with an open source design philosophy. By having an open device folks can easily write apps that use and interface to the onboard sensor hardware. For kids, one might load up a software suite based on the OLPC suite and Alan Kay’s squeak e-toys, which is a great tool for teaching computer science concepts to even very young kids in a fun and intuitive way.

The Mark II device has sensors for temperature (atmospheric and spot/IR), magnetism (3-axis magnetometer), distance (ultrasonic), GPS, pressure, color and brightness, and a few other things. it’s easy to think of numerous other measures it could add (non-visible radiation, pH, air and soil quality, auditory measurements) but as it is, it already acts as a powerful extension to our existing senses. It displays the info on two OLED touchscreens and folds up to fit in a pocket. And of course, it runs Linux.

The obvious question many readers will ask is: why not do this on an iPhone? The reasons are both technical and philosophical. I asked Jansen about this.

The main issues with this approach are standards and openness for connecting external devices. It’s challenging to design a device that will connect to some large subset of smartphones, and some manufactures (like Apple) complicate the process with proprietary interfaces.

For kids and science education, which is a large part of the mission of the Tricorder project, I think having an extremely inexpensive standalone device is still a very good way to go. The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) and new Raspberry Pi have shown us that extremely sophisticated devices for learning can be produced inexpensively.

The device at the top of the article is the Mark I; above is the Mark II with its improved casing, and a Mark III that was more modular ended up being scrapped. The Mark IV, Jansen says, has a focus in imaging and visualization — something that’s important for people who may not have an intuitive understanding of numbers and histograms. He hopes to include thermal imaging on it, among other things.

The most important thing, perhaps, is the price. Keeping the cost down is the only way to even create the possibility of widespread use. Jansen hopes to bring the cost of the device down to around $200, and he has tried as much as possible to stay with off-the-shelf sensors and parts to control the cost. And as the software and blueprints are totally open and free, the device can be built by anyone with the resources to do so (which is to say, soldering and board-building skills as well as the money). But ideally, manufacturing would be democratized as well, and allow for home fabrication of the casing and perhaps pre-assembly of the more difficult parts of the device.

Is the tricorder class of device something that we’ll be seeing more of or less of as time goes on? In a way it’s an uncomfortable compromise between the elegance of a single-purpose device and the versatility of a smartphone. But it’s also something different, purpose-built, powerful. The end game seems to favor modularity, but at the same time, there are many people and organizations that would love to have a few of these things lying around. Whatever the future holds for this sort of thing, the Tricorder Project is both admirable and impressive. You can learn more, or check out the specs and build instructions, over at the project’s page.