jawfish

Wireless Recharging
john posted in repost, technologies on February 1st, 2012

Wireless power could revolutionize highway transportation, researchers say from physorg.

This the resonant frequency magnetic field technique. This article quotes a researcher that it is 97% efficient. Personally I am dubious, but I have no first-hand experience with it. The idea of making recharging roads is just plain silly, because we can’t afford to fix our bridges and pavement, let alone add billions in new infrastructure. I suppose one could argue that charging for the service could repay the bonds…

 

 

A Stanford University research team has designed a high-efficiency charging system that uses magnetic fields to wirelessly transmit large electric currents between metal coils placed several feet apart. The long-term goal of the research is to develop an all-electric highway that wirelessly charges cars and trucks as they cruise down the road.

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The new technology has the potential to dramatically increase the driving range of electric vehicles and eventually transform highway travel, according to the researchers. Their results are published in the journal Applied Physics Letters (APL).

“Our vision is that you’ll be able to drive onto any highway and charge your car,” said Shanhui Fan, an associate professor of electrical engineering. “Large-scale deployment would involve revamping the entire highway system and could even have applications beyond transportation.”

Driving range

A wireless charging system would address a major drawback of plug-in electric cars – their limited driving range. The all-electric Nissan Leaf, for example, gets less than 100 miles on a single charge, and the battery takes several hours to fully recharge.

A charge-as-you-drive system would overcome these limitations. “What makes this concept exciting is that you could potentially drive for an unlimited amount of time without having to recharge,” said APL study co-author Richard Sassoon, the managing director of the Stanford Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP), which funded the research. “You could actually have more energy stored in your battery at the end of your trip than you started with.”

read entire article

History of Outcry Against SOPA/PIPA
john posted in Pitchforks and Torches, repost, technologies on January 25th, 2012

A history of how the opposition to SOPA/PIPA developed.

from:

Public Outcry Over Antipiracy Bills Began as Grass-Roots Grumbling – NYTimes.com.

 

When Wikipedia went dark and Google blacked out its logo on Wednesday, millions of people could not help but notice. For most, it was the first time that they had heard about two antipiracy bills. One puzzled Twitter user wrote: “Isn’t a SOPA some kind of food?”

But that protest grew out of a much wider grass-roots movement — a collective flexing of Internet muscle that started in some of the less mainstream parts of the Web, like the social news site Reddit and the blogging service Tumblr, and in e-mail chains and countless message boards.

It is no coincidence that these social sites were among those that, according to critics of the legislation in question, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Protect Intellectual Property Act had the most to lose if it passed. And by design they were able to take the message about the threat and make it go viral.

In the resulting groundswell, lawmaker after lawmaker renounced support for the legislation. Fight for the Future, a nonprofit organization that helped organize the protests, said more than 115,000 Web sites participated, and three million people e-mailed Congress to voice their opposition to the bills. “The tech community is using its own technology to rally around the issue,” said Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley patriarch who has invested in hundreds of start-ups, and runs SV Angel, an investment fund. “We probably wouldn’t prevail here if we weren’t eating our own dog food.”

Supporters of the bills, which include major media and entertainment companies, say their only intention is to go after foreign Web sites that distribute unauthorized copies of software, videos and music. But the tech industry maintains that the language in the bills is too broad, and that they could pose a threat to free speech and stifle innovation. Among other things, they say, the bills could make sites responsible for all content or links posted by their users, a weighty burden for social sites.

Read the whole article at Public Outcry Over Antipiracy Bills Began as Grass-Roots Grumbling – NYTimes.com.

 

Obstacles Facing US Wind Energy
john posted in memes, repost, technologies, Whole Earth Database on January 25th, 2012

from:

The Oil Drum | Obstacles Facing US Wind Energy.

In the United States, we have been working on scaling up wind energy but not getting very far. In 2010, wind energy supplied only 2.3% of electricity purchased.

Such slow progress seems strange for a product that seems to have such great promise. It can reduce CO2 emissions. It doesn’t require fuel. It is at least partly US made. It seems to have promise for protecting against rising fossil fuel prices……

 

One of the big issues with wind is that hopes have been raised for its widespread use, without really working through feasibility issues. If we are already having trouble with the electrical grid not being able to accept more wind energy in popular wind-generating areas when wind energy constitutes only 2.3% of total electricity supply, then wind energy is going to be difficult to scale up quickly. The issues I point out in this article suggest that the cost problem is still large, and the fixes needed to add long-distance transmission are likely to make the cost problem even worse.

 

read the whole article and check the comments, which are often quite good at The Oil Drum.

Digital Textbooks by Apple: Through the Looking Glass
john posted in home-grown, memes, repost, technologies on January 22nd, 2012

Edit 2/1/2012:
from ZDnet Ed Bott

Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement

I read EULAs so you don’t have to. I’ve spent years reading end user license agreements, EULAs, looking for little gotchas or just trying to figure out what the agreement allows and doesn’t allow.

I have never seen a EULA as mind-bogglingly greedy and evil as Apple’s EULA for its new ebook authoring program.

… Imagine if Microsoft said you had to pay them 30% of your speaking fees if you used a PowerPoint deck in a speech.

I’ve downloaded the software and had a chance to skim the EULA. Much of it is boilerplate, but I’ve read and re-read Section 2B, and it does indeed go far beyond any license agreement I’ve ever seen….

read entire article
from Ars Technica:

Apple announces iBooks 2, iBooks Author to “reinvent textbooks”.

(edited) lots more from Tidbits:
Examining iBooks Author from the Publisher Perspective

previously from Tidbits:
Apple Goes Back to School with iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U

Immediately this strikes me as both potentially wonderful, and potentially Stalinist in the way that only Apple can be.

‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’  from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Could be wonderful:

The textbook system in K-12 and college is just plain awful. Other than the content, there is nothing right about it. School districts and students pay far too much, can’t get partial sections of giant books, can’t exercise Fair Use as intended, and are stuck with heavy, frequently out-of-date, and fragile paper. Authors have to indenture to a very small number of publishers, and don’t make enough money. Good graphics and audio and linking and full-text search are impossible. Textbooks stink.

Apple is famously good at designing creative apps, and I guess most think they’ll do a good job here with authoring applications. So all the problems with textbooks may well be solved here by Apple. A future where textbooks are cheap, colorful, noisy, linked, up-to-date, and light looks very good. But that leads to what makes me think this is a dangerous situation.

 

Could be awful:

Publishers, who currently own the content, are notoriously clueless about the digital world. They, like the movie types who pushed SOPA, are infamously attached to a monopoly/closed market business model. Schools are notoriously clueless about the digital world and strongly tend to one-size-fits-all canned solutions. And which digital company is also attached to a closed market model? Apple of course. Apple who only allows access to its music store through Apple applications that don’t run on Linux. Apple who requires developers pay them for the right to sell software for Apple hardware, and decides whether they are allowed into the store. Apple who turns your iPhones into a brick if you load somebody else’s software onto it. Apple who refuses to allow Flash on its mobile platforms (arguable pros and cons technically, but they do it for anti-competitive reasons).

Will Apple software only make textbook applications that  run on iPads? If so all students in the new system will have to buy one brand of hardware, Apple. And Apple will sell an extra gazillion iPads. Hooray for Apple shareholders, they’ve found a market thats not saturated, and they intend to colonize it. But public schools would never require all students to be driven to school in one make of car, or wear one make of sneaker or backpack, so why would they ever require students to use one brand of tablet? I fear they are clueless enough to rush heedlessly into a monopoly situation without consideration.

What do the experts say on format?

Tidbits editor Adam Engst:

iBooks Author can export three types of files: text, PDF, and iBooks. The text export is likely only for extracting text from an existing file, the PDF export appears to be useful only for a certain level of proofing, and the iBooks format is apparently EPUB, with a slightly different MIME type (drop one on BBEdit if you want to look inside). You can export directly to a connected iPad for testing, which is far easier than the normal convoluted process for syncing ebooks to the iPad.

However, don’t get your hopes up for being able to use iBooks Author for EPUB in general — the license agreement states that files created with iBooks Author must either be made available for free or sold only through the iBookstore, and they will likely display only in iBooks on the iPad without some hacking. In short, if TidBITS wanted to create an enhanced Take Control ebook using iBooks Author, the only way for readers to purchase it would be through the iBookstore, which makes it much harder for us to communicate with readers and provide outside-the-book features as we do now. It would also make it harder for us to provide a similar ebook in other formats, such as one that can be read directly on the Mac or on the Kindle….

So the authoring software is OK, but not brilliant. Tellingly they haven’t bothered  to put forth a technical excuse for the blocking of other platforms.

What about ownership?

Here’s a report on the seizure of rights by Apple mentioned by Engst at Tidbits (above): publish on iBooks and lose your rights to publish elsewhere.

from  Venomous Porridge   The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

This restriction — that iBooks can be sold only in the iBookstore — isn’t enforced on a technical level. You can save the document, move it to your iPad in any of the usual ways (including just emailing it to yourself), and it happily opens in the iBooks app.

But if you look at the end-user license agreement (EULA) for iBooks Author, accessible via the app’s About box, the following bold note appears at the top:

IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

There’s more at that site.

What about distribution?

again Tidbit’s Adam Engst

…Debates are already raging on Twitter about how iBooks Author doesn’t allow works created with it to be sold anywhere but the iBookstore, and we publisher types are already trying to imagine how we can justify the extra effort and expense of creating enhanced ebooks for a single retail outlet….I’ll give Apple this — they don’t think small. These apps set a new standard for electronic books and online courses, and the apps are all available for free. The problem is that Apple also wants to own the entire pie, and in the process say exactly what is and is not possible.

On thing seems clear, whether Apple gets its monopoly, or a duopoly with Amazon or Google, or a real market with all of the above and Wikipedia, traditional publishers are that much closer to being roadkill. They really aren’t needed in the digital world, once their salespeople and contracts are rendered obsolete by an influx of digital books. For them to partner with any of the big digital players like Apple, is like playing the turkey who helps the farmer design the menu at Thanksgiving.

‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter, ‘You’ve had a pleasant run.! Shall we be trotting home again?’ But answer came there none – And this was scarcely odd, because They’d eaten every one.”

 

My conclusions: greedy power-mad monopoly bearing benefits.

I don’t mind if Apple sells some great software that only runs on Apple computers. They have always done that, and other developers have written great software that runs everywhere including Apple computers. I care that Apple will give away the software through deals with publishers and schools in order to lock everybody, authors and students, into an Apple-only ecology.

I do care that Apple controls the developer’s access to their hardware – that’s anti-competitive. I do care that Apple forces an author to give them exclusive rights – that’s restraint of trade. And I do care if Apple offers a luscious juicy package to the dim and unsuspecting Adams and Eves of the digital textbook garden, only to have those Adams and Eves wake up to discover that Apple controls all the fruit.

The Solution:

It’s simple, schools should specify only that digital books they buy, distribute, or require have versions to run on all the standard hardware/software, Android/Linux, Kindle, iPad, Nook, and whatever Microsoft settles on. In practice that might mean epub or HTML5, but it would probably be a mistake to specify a format because our long experience as users is that formats come and go, and authors should be free to use a better solution.

 

Some more details: Ars says, in part:

 

“iBooks” are no longer old Apple laptops made out of white plastic, nor are they simply e-books to be purchased within Apple’s iBookstore. Apple announced what it’s calling “iBooks 2″ during its media event in New York on Thursday, a textbook software program that allows textbook-makers and instructors to create rich, interactive teaching media for the iPad. As we first reported earlier this week, the announcement is akin to “GarageBand for e-books,” giving authors access to easy-to-use tools on the computer in order to create multimedia content for the iPad.

Books created for iBooks 2 can have all manner of media attached, complete with multitouch capabilities. The company listed numerous ways in which iBooks 2 authors can create engaging content for students, including multiple-choice questions with immediate feedback within the text, the ability to make notes and highlights that can be found in a single location as note cards or sprinkled throughout the text, ways to explore embedded graphics and 3D animations, full-motion movies, and more.

iBooks 2 itself is an app for the iPad, but books for the application can be found within the already existing iBookstore under a new “textbook” category, with free samples available to those who want to try out the books first. Students can use codes to redeem them for books and can re-download them whenever they need to.

But how does one create a textbook for iBooks 2? Apple also announced a Mac application on Thursday called “iBooks Author,” which Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller described as “powerful and feature-rich.” The interface, as demoed to the audience, is similar to Apple’s iWork applications and allows authors to format books through WYSIWYG interaction and format the pages in a variety of ways. (It’s worth noting that news broke on Wednesday that Apple had commandeered its VP of productivity applications Roger Rosne to head up this project.)

In addition to the WYSIWYG interface, authors can further customize their books with HTML5 or JavaScript, and the application provides live previews so that authors can see what the final result will be before publishing. The price of the books is capped at $14.99 or less (the company specifically said “high school” books, so it’s unclear as to whether the cap applies to all books), though instructors can sell individual chapters at what Schiller described as a “very aggressive price.”

 

 

Science needs a universal symbol
john posted in memes, repost, technologies on January 11th, 2012

I thought maybe the Flying Spaghetti Monster was a symbol for supporting Science, but maybe its an anti-symbol symbol.

 

via Science needs a universal symbol – opinion – 06 January 2012 – New Scientist.

SCIENCE is under assault. In the US and throughout the world, rhetoric about evolution, stem cells, global warming and other controversial and cutting-edge technologies often transcends legitimate disagreement to challenge the work of scientists.

Less visible is the community of those who believe deeply in the integrity of the endeavour, who defend the need for rigorous objectivity in politics and education, and who – even if they are sympathetic to religion or religious themselves – believe in the need for clear jurisdictional boundaries between religion, ideology and science.

They are passionate about science and see themselves as sharing a mission to defend the enterprise. Yet they lack a sign of their position, something that could unite their effort – in short, a symbol that stands for science, in much the same way as the Christian fish symbol declares adherence to that faith on car bumpers worldwide.

A single, unified symbol would have many uses. It could be displayed to represent a position: opposition to the politicising of science in government, support for increased research spending, or concern about global warming and species loss. It could be displayed by an astronomer or geologist or sociologist or teacher as a symbol of their allegiance to science. It could be used on car bumpers and web pages, and in public venues.

It should be simple and versatile, instantly recognisable and encompass all of science – a double helix alone, say, won’t do as it does not take in astronomy or particle physics.

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more… Science needs a universal symbol