The future of nuclear power

Posted on by

Nothing like this happened with nuclear power. It was a technology whose development was dictated by a few prominent government and military officials and large organizations and straitjacketed within narrow constraints. Most of the developers of nuclear technologies were staid, elderly bureaucrats rather than young iconoclasts like Frederic de Hoffmann. An early design invented by Admiral Hyman Rickover – suitable for submarines but hardly optimal for efficient land-based power stations – was frozen and applied to hundreds of reactors around the country. Since then there have been only a hundred or so reactor designs and only half a dozen or so prominent ones. Due to a complicated mix of factors including public paranoia, lack of economies of scale, political correctness and misunderstandings about radiation, nuclear technology was never given a chance to be played around with, to be entrusted to youthful entrepreneurs experimenting with ideas, to find its own way through the creative and destructive process of Darwinian evolution to a plateau of technological and economic efficiency. The result was that the field remained both scientifically narrow and expensive. Even today there are only a handful of companies building and operating most of the world’s reactors.

via The future of nuclear power: Let a thousand flowers bloom – Nobel Week Dialogue.

Bullet Time Effect – Frozen Raspberry Pi

Posted on by

I’d been working on a PiFace interface so I could use my Raspberry Pi without a keyboard and monitor. For a bit of fun I wondered if I could turn it into a simple digital camera, that would take a picture when a button was pressed, and to my pleasant surprise, discovered you could. An idea was beginning to form in my head. If I wrote a bit more code, instead of pressing a button to take a picture, I could trigger it remotely over a network. Furthermore, it cost a lot less than any other digital camera. Could the Raspberry Pi really recreate a bullet time style effect?

via Bullet Time Effect – Frozen Raspberry Pi | PiFace.

To everyone’s amazement, including mine, it actually worked! Raspberry Pi had frozen time, recreating a Hollywood effect for a fraction of the cost. You can see the results in the video above http://youtu.be/IqoA4HeBCQ4?t=2m19s

Opus Codec

Posted on by

Opus 1.1 includes:

  • new analysis code and tuning that significantly improves encoding quality, especially for variable-bitrate (VBR),
  • automatic detection of speech or music to decide which encoding mode to use,
  • surround with good quality at 128 kbps for 5.1 and usable down to 48 kbps, and
  • speed improvements on all architectures, especially ARM, where decoding uses around 40% less CPU and encoding uses around 30% less CPU.

These improvements are explained in more details in Monty’s demo (updated from the 1.1 beta demo).

via Opus Codec.

From the Xiph.org developers

Opus is a codec designed for interactive usages, such as VoIP, telepresence, and remote jamming, that require very low latency. In this test Opus is running with 22.5ms of total latency but the codec can go as low as 5ms. Making a codec for low latency requires serious tradeoffs which reduce efficiency, so it might seem a bit strange to test it against a collection of state-of-the-art codecs which are completely unsuitable for these low-latency applications.

Chris Messina Talks About Inventing The Hashtag On Twitter

Posted on by

On Quora, Messina explained why he chose to let the hashtag become a free device anyone can use and not a licensable product that he could have made money from:

  1. claiming a government-granted monopoly on the use of hashtags would have likely inhibited their adoption, which was the antithesis of what I was hoping for, which was broad-based adoption and support — across networks and mediums.
  2. I had no interest in making money (directly) off hashtags. They are born of the Internet, and should be owned by no one. The value and satisfaction I derive from seeing my funny little hack used as widely as it is today is valuable enough for me to be relieved that I had the foresight not to try to lock down this stupidly simple but effective idea.

via Chris Messina Talks About Inventing The Hashtag On Twitter – Business Insider.

Swarm Mobile gets $3.5M to track shoppers in physical stores

Posted on by

The goal is to put physical shops on a similar playing field as e-commerce stores, which already have a wealth of data about customer buying habits. According to the website, Swarm treats smartphones like “offline cookies,” so stores can personalize the experience for new and repeat shoppers. Swarm does this through its cloud-based platform that integrates into a store’s public Wi-Fi network.

via Swarm Mobile gets $3.5M to track shoppers in physical stores | VentureBeat | Mobile | by christinafarr.

Stealth camera takes pictures virtually in the dark

Posted on by

In the team’s setup, low-intensity pulses of visible laser light scan an object of interest. The laser fires a pulse at a given location until a single reflected photon is recorded by a detector; each illuminated location corresponds to a pixel in the final image.

Variations in the time it takes for photons from the laser pulses to be reflected back from the object provides depth information about the body — a standard way of revealing three-dimensional structure. However, the algorithm developed by Kirmani and his colleagues provides that information using one-hundredth the number of photons required by existing light detection and ranging (LIDAR) techniques, which are commonly used in remote mapping or measuring forest biomass, for instance.

via Stealth camera takes pictures virtually in the dark : Nature News & Comment.

Bitcoin Thefts Surge, DDoS Hackers Take Millions

Posted on by

Bitcoin users have echoed that suggestion. “One note of warning: don’t trust any online wallet,” read a comment on a recent Guardian feature. “The two biggest ones have already been robbed. Use your own wallet on your own computer and back it up on a USB stick.”

“Remember, you don’t have to keep your Bitcoins online with someone else: you can store your Bitcoins yourself, encrypted and offline,” said Ducklin at Sophos.

via Bitcoin Thefts Surge, DDoS Hackers Take Millions – InformationWeek.

Magnetic tape to the rescue

Posted on by

Tape will never be the whole answer to storing data, according to Dr Eleftheriou. But it forms a crucial part of a “storage hierarchy”. At the top of this are so-called hot data, those that need to be available for immediate access. These are best held in flash memory. Lukewarm data—those that people need to access frequently, but not instantaneously—are best stored on disks. Cold data, the stuff in long-term storage, can be recorded on tape. This cold store is by far the biggest repository. A report published in 2008 by Andrew Leung of the University of California, Santa Cruz, found that in general, 90% of an organisation’s data becomes cold after a couple of months.

via Monitor: Magnetic tape to the rescue | The Economist.