COMPUTECH

iPhone "Patent Wars"

2012-02-16T16:18:00.000-05:00

So-called 'patent wars' are raging between large technology firms like Apple, Motorola Mobility and Samsung, as they vie for market share in the burgeoning smartphone and tablet market.

These battles are being fought in courtrooms by intellectual property (IP) lawyers across the globe, as big firms seek to protect the elements of their product that make them stand out from the crowd.

Geoff McCormick, director of UK design firm The Alloy, which devises technology products, took apart an iPhone to explain the thousands of pieces of intellectual property that are contained in a modern smartphone.

Patent disputes are increasingly defining the way smartphones and tablets develop - both what they do, and how they look - and the issue will loom large at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of February, the industry's annual gathering.

2012-01-24T18:01:00.005-05:00

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Perpetual motion

2012-01-24T17:38:00.007-05:00

October 1920 issue of Popular Science magazine,
on perpetual motion. Although considered impossible
by scientists, perpetual motion continues to capture
the imagination of inventors. The device shown is
a "mass leverage" device, where the spherical weights
on our right have more leverage than those on the left,
supposedly creating a perpetual rotation, but there
are a greater number of weights to our
left, balancing the device.

Perpetual motion describes hypothetical machines that operate or produce useful work indefinitely and, more generally, hypothetical machines that produce more work or energy than they consume, whether they might operate indefinitely or not.

There is undisputed scientific consensus that perpetual motion would violate either the first law of thermodynamics, the second law of thermodynamics, or both. Machines which comply with both laws of thermodynamics but access energy from obscure sources are sometimes referred to as perpetual motion machines, although they do not meet the standard criteria for the name.

Despite the fact that successful perpetual motion devices are physically impossible in terms of our current understanding of the laws of physics, the pursuit of perpetual motion remains popular.

Basic principles

There is an undisputed scientific consensus that perpetual motion violates either the first law of thermodynamics, the second law of thermodynamics, or both. The first law of thermodynamics is essentially a statement of conservation of energy. The second law can be phrased in several different ways, the most intuitive of which is that heat flows spontaneously from hotter to colder places; the most well known statement is that entropy tends to increase, or at the least stay the same; another statement is that no heat engine (an engine which produces work while moving heat between two separate places) can be more efficient than a Carnot heat engine.

Machines which comply with both laws of thermodynamics by accessing energy from unconventional sources are sometimes referred to as perpetual motion machines, although they do not meet the standard criteria for the name. By way of example, clocks and other low-power machines, such as Cox's timepiece, have been designed to run on the differences in barometric pressure or temperature between night and day. These machines have a source of energy, albeit one which is not readily apparent so that they only seem to violate the laws of thermodynamics.

Classification

Robert Fludd's 1618 "water screw" perpetual motion machine
from a 1660 wood engraving. This device is widely credited as
the first recorded attempt to describe such a device in order
to produce useful work, that of driving millstones

One classification of perpetual motion machines refers to the particular law of thermodynamics the machines purport to violate:

A perpetual motion machine of the first kind produces work without the input of energy. It thus violates the first law of thermodynamics: the law of conservation of energy.
A perpetual motion machine of the second kind is a machine which spontaneously converts thermal energy into mechanical work. When the thermal energy is equivalent to the work done, this does not violate the law of conservation of energy. However it does violate the more subtle second law of thermodynamics (see also entropy). The signature of a perpetual motion machine of the second kind is that there is only one heat reservoir involved, which is being spontaneously cooled without involving a transfer of heat to a cooler reservoir. This conversion of heat into useful work, without any side effect, is impossible, according to the second law of thermodynamics.

A more obscure category is a perpetual motion machine of the third kind, usually (but not always) defined as one that completely eliminates friction and other dissipative forces, to maintain motion forever (due to its mass inertia). Third in this case refers solely to the position in the above classification scheme, not the third law of thermodynamics. Although it is impossible to make such a machine, as dissipation can never be 100% eliminated in a mechanical system, it is nevertheless possible to get very close to this ideal. Such a machine would not serve as a source of energy but would have utility as a perpetual energy storage device.

Use of the term "impossible" and perpetual motion

While the laws of physics are incomplete and stating that physical things are absolutely impossible is un-scientific, "impossible" is used in common parlance to describe those things which absolutely cannot occur within the context of our current formulation of physical laws.

The conservation laws are particularly robust from a mathematical perspective. Noether's theorem, which was proven mathematically in 1915, states that any conservation law can be derived from a corresponding continuous symmetry of the action of a physical system. This means that if the laws of physics (not simply the current understanding of them, but the actual laws, which may still be undiscovered) and the various physical constants remain invariant over time — if the laws of the universe are fixed — then the conservation laws must hold. On the other hand, if the conservation laws are invalid, then much of modern physics would be incorrect as well.

Scientific investigations as to whether the laws of physics are invariant over time use telescopes to examine the universe in the distant past to discover, to the limits of our measurements, whether ancient stars were identical to stars today. Combining different measurements such as spectroscopy, direct measurement of the speed of light in the past and similar measurements demonstrates that physics has remained substantially the same, if not identical, for all of observable history spanning billions of years.

The principles of thermodynamics are so well established, both theoretically and experimentally, that proposals for perpetual motion machines are universally met with disbelief on the part of physicists. Any proposed perpetual motion design offers a potentially instructive challenge to physicists: one is almost completely certain that it can't work, so one must explain how it fails to work. The difficulty (and the value) of such an exercise depends on the subtlety of the proposal; the best ones tend to arise from physicists' own thought experiments and often shed light upon certain aspects of physics.

The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. — Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Thought experiments

Serious work in theoretical physics often involves thought experiments that expand our understanding of physical laws. Some thought experiments involve apparent perpetual motion machines, questioning why they either work or do not work in compliance with the laws of physics.

Maxwell's demon: A thought experiment which led to physicists considering the interaction between entropy and information.
Feynman's "Brownian ratchet": A "perpetual motion" machine which extracts work from thermal fluctuations and appears to run forever but really only runs as long as the environment is warmer than the ratchet.

Techniques

Some common ideas recur repeatedly in perpetual motion machine designs. Many ideas that continue to appear today were stated as early as 1670 by John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester and an official of the Royal Society. He outlined three potential sources of power for a perpetual motion machine, "Chymical Extractions", "Magnetical Virtues" and "the Natural Affection of Gravity".

Perpetuum Mobile of Villard de Honnecourt (about 1230).

The seemingly mysterious ability of magnets to influence motion at a distance without any apparent energy source has long appealed to inventors. One of the earliest examples of a system using magnets was proposed by Wilkins and has been widely copied since: it consists of a ramp with a magnet at the top, which pulled a metal ball up the ramp. Near the magnet was a small hole that was supposed to allow the ball to drop under the ramp and return to the bottom, where a flap allowed it to return to the top again. The device simply could not work: any magnet strong enough to pull the ball up the ramp would necessarily be too powerful to allow it to drop through the hole. Faced with this problem, more modern versions typically use a series of ramps and magnets, positioned so the ball is to be handed off from one magnet to another as it moves. The problem remains the same.

Gravity also acts at a distance, without an apparent energy source. But to get energy out of a gravitational field (for instance, by dropping a heavy object, producing kinetic energy as it falls) you have to put energy in (for instance, by lifting the object up), and some energy is always dissipated in the process. A typical application of gravity in a perpetual motion machine is Bhaskara's wheel in the 12th century, whose key idea is itself a recurring theme, often called the overbalanced wheel: Moving weights are attached to a wheel in such a way that they fall to a position further from the wheel's center for one half of the wheel's rotation, and closer to the center for the other half. Since weights further from the center apply a greater torque, the result is (or would be, if such a device worked) that the wheel rotates forever. The moving weights may be hammers on pivoted arms, or rolling balls, or mercury in tubes; the principle is the same.

Yet another theoretical machine involves a frictionless environment for motion. This involves the use of diamagnetic or electromagnet levitation to float an object. This is done in a vacuum to eliminate air friction and friction from an axle. The levitated object is then free to rotate around its center of gravity without interference. However, this machine has no practical purpose because the rotated object cannot do any work as work requires the levitated object to cause motion in other objects, bringing friction into the problem.

To extract work from heat, thus producing a perpetual motion machine of the second kind, the most common approach (dating back at least to Maxwell's demon) is unidirectionality. Only molecules moving fast enough and in the right direction are allowed through the demon's trap door. In a Brownian ratchet, forces tending to turn the ratchet one way are able to do so while forces in the other direction aren't. A diode in a heat bath allows through currents in one direction and not the other. These schemes typically fail in two ways: either maintaining the unidirectionality costs energy (Maxwell's demon needs light to look at all those particles and see what they're doing), or the unidirectionality is an illusion and occasional big violations make up for the frequent small non-violations (the Brownian ratchet will be subject to internal Brownian forces and therefore will sometimes turn the wrong way).

Invention history

The 8th century Bavarian "magic wheel" was a disc mounted on an axle powered by lodestones, claimed to be able to rotate forever.

Orffyreus Wheel. The device was designed by Johann Bessler.

Indian mathematician-astronomer, Bhāskara II, described a wheel, dating to 1150, that would run forever.

Villard de Honnecourt in 1235 described, in a 33 page manuscript, a perpetual motion machine of the first kind. His idea was based on the changing torque of a series of weights attached with hinges to the rim of a wheel. While ascending they would hang close to the wheel and have little torque, but they would topple after reaching the top and drag the wheel down on descent due to their greater torque during the swing. His device spawned a variety of imitators who continued to refine the basic design.

Following the example of Villard, Peter of Maricourt designed a magnetic globe which when mounted without friction parallel to the celestial axis would rotate once a day and serve as an automatic armillary sphere.

In 1607 Cornelius Drebbel in "Wonder-vondt van de eeuwighe bewegingh" dedicated a Perpetuum motion machine to James I of England. It was described by Heinrich Hiesserle von Chodaw in 1621. Also in the 17th century, Robert Boyle's proposed self-flowing flask purports to fill itself through siphon action and Blaise Pascal introduced a primitive form of roulette and the roulette wheel in his search for a perpetual motion machine.

In the 18th century, Johann Bessler (also known as Orffyreus) created a series of claimed perpetual motion machines. In 1775 the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris issued the statement that the Academy "will no longer accept or deal with proposals concerning perpetual motion".

In the 19th century, the invention of perpetual motion machines became an obsession for many scientists. Many machines were designed based on electricity. John Gamgee developed the Zeromotor, a perpetual motion machine of the second kind. Devising these machines is a favourite pastime of many eccentrics, who often devised elaborate machines in the style of Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson. Such designs appeared to work on paper, though various flaws or obfuscated external energy sources are eventually understood to have been incorporated into the machine (unintentionally or intentionally).

Patents

Proposals for such inoperable machines have become so common that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has made an official policy of refusing to grant patents for perpetual motion machines without a working model. The USPTO Manual of Patent Examining Practice states:

With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the Office to demonstrate the operability of a device. If operability of a device is questioned, the applicant must establish it to the satisfaction of the examiner, but he or she may choose his or her own way of so doing.

And, further, that:

A rejection [of a patent application] on the ground of lack of utility includes the more specific grounds of inoperativeness, involving perpetual motion. A rejection under 35 U.S.C. 101 for lack of utility should not be based on grounds that the invention is frivolous, fraudulent or against public policy.

The filing of a patent application is a clerical task, and the USPTO won't refuse filings for perpetual motion machines; the application will be filed and then most probably rejected by the patent examiner, after he has done a formal examination. Even if a patent is granted, it doesn't mean that the invention actually works; it just means that the examiner thinks that it works, or that he couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work.

The USPTO maintains a collection of Perpetual Motion Gimmicks as Digest 9 in Class 74

The USPTO has granted a few patents for motors that are claimed to run without net energy input. Some of these are:

Howard R. Johnson, U.S. Patent 4,151,431

Gallery

This is a gallery of some of the perpetual motion machine plans.

The "Overbalanced Wheel". It was thought that the metal balls on the right side would turn the wheel because of the longer lever arm, but since the left side had more balls than the right side, the torque was balanced and the perpetual movement could not be achieved.

The "Float Belt". The yellow blocks indicate floaters. It was thought that the floaters would rise through the liquid and turn the belt. However pushing the floaters into the water at the bottom would require more energy than the floating could generate.

The "Capillary Bowl". It was thought that the capillary action would keep the water flowing in the tube, but since the cohesion force that draws the liquid up the tube in the first place holds the droplet from releasing into the bowl, the flow is not perpetual.

Apple Lisa

2012-01-19T00:45:00.001-05:00

Apple Lisa, with an Apple ProFile external hard disk sitting atop it.
Note the dual 5.25-inch "Twiggy" floppy drives.

The Apple Lisa was a personal computer designed by Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple, Inc.) during the early 1980s.

The Lisa project was started at Apple in 1978 and evolved into a project to design a powerful personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) that would be targeted toward business customers.

In 1982, Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project, so he joined the Macintosh project instead. The Macintosh is not a direct descendant of Lisa, although there are obvious similarities between the systems and the final revision, the Lisa 2/10, was modified and sold as the Macintosh XL.

The Lisa was a more advanced system than the Macintosh of that time in many respects, such as its inclusion of protected memory, cooperative multitasking, a generally more sophisticated hard disk based operating system, a built-in screensaver, an advanced calculator with a paper tape and RPN, support for up to 2 megabytes (MB) of RAM, expansion slots, a numeric keypad, data corruption protection schemes such as block sparing, non-physical file names (with the ability to have multiple documents with the same name), and a larger higher resolution display. It would be many years before many of those features were implemented on the Macintosh platform. Protected memory, for instance, did not arrive until the Mac OS X operating system was released in 2001. The Macintosh featured a faster 68000 processor (7.89 MHz) and sound. The complexity of the Lisa operating system and its programs taxed the 5 MHz Motorola 68000 microprocessor so that consumers said it felt sluggish, particularly when scrolling in documents.

Etymology

While the documentation shipped with the original Lisa only ever referred to it as The Lisa, officially, Apple stated that the name was an acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture or "LISA". Since Steve Jobs' first daughter (born in 1978) was named Lisa Jobs, it is normally inferred that the name also had a personal association, and perhaps that the acronym was invented later to fit the name. Hertzfeld states that the acronym was reverse engineered from the name "Lisa" in autumn 1982 by the Apple marketing team, after they had hired a marketing consultancy firm to come up with names to replace "Lisa" and "Macintosh" (at the time considered by Rod Holt, V.P. of Engineering to be merely internal project codenames) and then rejected all of the suggestions. Privately, Hertzfeld and the other software developers used "Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym", a recursive backronym, while computer industry pundits coined the term "Let's Invent Some Acronym" to fit the Lisa's name.

Development

The Lisa was a major project at Apple, and with more than 90 people participated on the design, with more on the sales and marketing effort to launch the machine.[4] The project began in 1978 as an effort to create a more modern version of the then-conventional design epitomized by the Apple II. Initial team lead Ken Rothmuller was soon replaced by John Couch, under whose direction the project evolved to the 'windows&mouse-driven' form that was finally released. Trip Hawkins, who was then on the marketing team for the nascent Lisa project, and Jef Raskin contributed to the change in design.

Byte Magazine credited Wayne Rosing with being the most important person on the development of the computer's hardware until the machine went into production, at which point he became technical lead for the entire Lisa project. Bruce Daniels was in charge of applications development, and Larry Tesler was in charge of system software. After a six month period in which the user interface was designed, the hardware, operating system, and applications were all created in parallel.

Hardware

The Lisa was first introduced on January 19, 1983 at a cost of $9,995 US ($21,693.67 in 2009 dollars). It was the first commercially sold personal computer to have a GUI. It used a Motorola 68000 CPU at a 5 MHz clock rate and had 1 MB RAM. Several years prior to this, research had been going on at Xerox PARC to create a new way to organize everything on the screen, today known as the desktop. By late 1979, Steve Jobs successfully negotiated with Xerox for his Lisa team to receive two demonstrations of ongoing research projects at Xerox PARC; when the Apple team saw the demonstration of the Alto computer they were able to see in action the basic elements of what constituted a workable GUI. A great deal of work was put into making the graphical interface into a mainstream commercial product by the Lisa team. Head of the Hardware Development Team for the Lisa was Robert Paratore.

Drives

The original Lisa had two Apple FileWare 5.25-inch double-sided floppy disk drives, more commonly known by Apple's internal code name for the drive; "Twiggy". They have a capacity of approximately 871 KB each, but required special diskettes. The Macintosh, which was originally designed to have a single Twiggy, was revised to use a Sony 400k microfloppy drive in January 1984. An optional external 5 MB or, later, a 10 MB Apple ProFile hard drive (originally designed for the Apple III) was available. With the introduction of the Lisa 2, an optional 10 MB internal proprietary hard disk manufactured by Apple, known as the "Widget" was also offered.

Lisa 2

The first hardware revision, the Lisa 2, released in January 1984 and was priced between $3,495 and $5,495 US. It was much less expensive than the original model and dropped the Twiggy floppy drives in favor of a single 400k Sony microfloppy. It was possible to purchase the Lisa 2 with as little as 512k RAM. An external ProFile and internal Widget drive were available as standard options in different configurations. In 1984, at the same time the Macintosh was officially announced, Apple offered free upgrades to the Lisa 2 to all Lisa 1 owners, by swapping the pair of Twiggy drives for a single 3.5-inch drive, and updating the boot ROM and I/O ROM. In addition, the Lisa 2's new front faceplate was included to accommodate the reconfigured floppy disk drive. With this change, the Lisa 2 had the notable distinction of introducing the new Apple inlaid logo, as well as the first Snow White design language features.

There were relatively few third-party hardware offerings for the Lisa, as compared to the earlier Apple II. AST offered a 1.5 MB memory board, which — when combined with the standard Apple 512 KB memory board — expanded the Lisa to a total of 2 MB of memory, the maximum the MMU could address.

Late in the product life of the Lisa, there were third-party hard disk drives, SCSI controllers, and double-sided 3½ inch floppy-disk upgrades. Unlike the Macintosh, the Lisa features expansion slots. Like the Apple II, it was an 'open system'. The Lisa 2 motherboard had a very basic backplane with virtually no electronic components, but plenty of edge connector sockets/slots. There were two RAM slots, one CPU slot and one I/O slot all in parallel placement to each other. At the other end, there were three 'Lisa' slots, parallel to each other. This flexibility provided the potential for a developer to create a replacement for the CPU 'card' to upgrade the Lisa to run a newer CPU, albeit with potential limitations from other parts of the system.

Macintosh XL

In January 1985, following on the heels of the Macintosh, the Lisa 2/10 (with integrated 10 MB hard drive) was re-branded the Macintosh XL and with new software, positioned as Apple's high-end Macintosh. The price was lowered yet again, to $4000 and sales tripled, but (according to CEO Sculley) Apple would have lost money increasing production to meet the new demand. Apple discontinued the Macintosh XL, leaving an eight-month void in Apple's high-end product line until the Macintosh Plus was introduced in 1986. Apple would not introduce a replacement computer with an internal hard drive or expansion slots until 1987.

Software

A screen shot of the Lisa Office System 3.1

The Lisa operating system featured cooperative (non-preemptive) multitasking and virtual memory, then extremely advanced features for a personal computer. The use of virtual memory coupled with a fairly slow disk system made the system performance seem sluggish at times. Based in part on advanced elements from the failed Apple III SOS operating system released three years earlier, the Lisa also organized its files in hierarchal directories, making the use of large hard drives practical. The Macintosh would eventually adopt this disk organizational design as well for its HFS filing system. Conceptually, the Lisa resembles the Xerox Star in the sense that it was envisioned as an office computing system; consequently, Lisa has two main user modes: the Lisa Office System and the Workshop. The Lisa Office System is the GUI environment for end users. The Workshop was a program development environment, and was almost entirely text-based, though it used a GUI text editor. The Lisa Office System was eventually renamed "7/7", in reference to the seven supplied application programs: LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaProject, LisaList, and LisaTerminal.

Third-party software

A significant impediment to third-party software on the Lisa was the fact that, when first launched, the Lisa Office System could not be used to write programs for itself: a separate development OS was required called Lisa Workshop. During this development process, an engineer ran the two OSes in a dual-boot config, writing and compiling code on one machine and testing it on the other. Later, the same Lisa Workshop was used to develop software for the Macintosh. After a few years, a Macintosh-native development system was developed. For most of its lifetime, the Lisa never went beyond the original seven applications that Apple had deemed enough to "do everything."

MacWorks

In April 1984, following the success of the Macintosh, Apple introduced MacWorks, a software emulation environment which allowed the Lisa to run Macintosh System software and applications. MacWorks helped make the Lisa more attractive to potential customers, but did not enable the Macintosh emulation to access the hard disk until September. In January 1985, re-branded MacWorks XL, it became the primary system application designed to turn the Lisa into the Macintosh XL.

Commercial failure

The Lisa 2 / Macintosh XL

The Apple Lisa was a commercial failure for Apple, the largest since the Apple III disaster of 1980. The intended business customers balked at Lisa's high price and largely opted to run less expensive IBM PCs, which were already beginning to dominate business desktop computing. The largest Lisa customer was NASA, which used LisaProject for project management and was eventually faced with significant problems when the Lisa was discontinued.

The release of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, which was faster and much less expensive, was the most significant factor in the Lisa's demise. Two later Lisa models were released (the Lisa 2 and its Mac ROM-enabled sibling Macintosh XL) before the Lisa line was discontinued in April 1985. In 1986, Apple offered all Lisa/XL owners the opportunity to turn in their computer and US$1,498.00, in return for a Macintosh Plus and Hard Disk 20 (a US$4,098.00 value at the time).

Historical importance

The Apple Lisa was immediately recognized as a significant machine, with Byte for example opining it more important than the IBM PC. Further, though a limited number of Lisas were sold, the Lisa software, in combination with an Apple dot-matrix printer, could produce documents that surpassed other comparably-priced options available at the time. This one compelling usage meant that the Lisa was introduced into a number of larger offices, and due to the price, the number of people who had used a Lisa was much larger than the number of Lisas sold.

An often-overlooked feature the Lisa system used is its early harnessing of document-centric computing instead of application-centric computing. On a Macintosh, Windows, or Linux system, a user typically seeks a program. In the Lisa system, users use stationery to begin using an application. Apple implemented stationery documents on System 7 in 1991 and attempted to further advance this approach on the Mac platform later with OpenDoc; stationery documents are still used as template documents for many applications, but OpenDoc and its complex object embedding had only limited success, and the project was canceled in 1997. Microsoft also later implemented stationery in a limited fashion via the Windows Start menu for Microsoft Office.

International significance

Within a few months of the Lisa's introduction in the US, fully translated versions of the software and documentation were commercially available for British, French, German, Italian, and Spanish markets, followed by several Scandinavian versions shortly thereafter. The user interface for the OS, all seven applications, LisaGuide, and the Lisa diagnostics (in ROM) can be fully translated, without any programming required, using resource files and a translation kit. The keyboard can identify its native language layout, and the entire user experience will be in that language, including any hardware diagnostic messages.

Although several foreign-language keyboard layouts were available, the Dvorak keyboard layout was never ported to the Lisa, though such porting had been available for the Apple III, IIe, and IIc, and later for the Macintosh. Keyboard-mapping on the Lisa was complex and required building a new OS/kernel. All kernels contain images for all layouts, so due to serious memory constraints, keyboard layouts were stored as differences from a set of standard layouts, thus only a few bytes are needed to accommodate most additional layouts. A notable exception is the Dvorak layout that moves just about every key and thus requires hundreds of extra bytes of precious kernel storage regardless of whether it were needed.

Each localized version (built on a globalized core) requires grammatical, linguistic, and cultural adaptations throughout the user interface, including formats for dates, numbers, times, currencies, sorting, even for word and phrase order in alerts and dialog boxes. A kit was provided, and the translation work was done by native-speaking Apple marketing staff in each country. This localization effort resulted in about as many Lisa unit sales outside the US as inside the US over the product's lifespan, while setting new standards for future localized software products, and for global project co-ordination.

The end of the Lisa

In 1987, Sun Remarketing purchased about 5,000 Macintosh XLs and upgraded them. Some leftover Lisa computers and spare parts are still available today.

In 1989, Apple disposed of approximately 2,700 unsold Lisas in a guarded landfill in Logan, Utah, in order to receive a tax write-off on the unsold inventory.

Like other early GUI computers, working Lisas are now fairly valuable collectors items, for which people will pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The original model is the most sought after, although working ProFile and Widget hard disks, which are necessary for running the Lisa OS, are also particularly valued.

Timeline of Lisa models

Aircraft Ejection Seats.

2012-01-13T16:44:00.002-05:00

United States Air Force F-15 Eagle ejection seat test using a mannequin

In aircraft, an ejection seat is a system designed to rescue the pilot or other crew of an aircraft (usually military) in an emergency. In most designs, the seat is propelled out of the aircraft by an explosive charge or rocket motor, carrying the pilot with it.
The concept of an eject-able escape capsule has also been tried. Once clear of the aircraft, the ejection seat deploys a parachute. Ejection seats are common on certain types of military aircraft.

History

A bungee-assisted escape from an aircraft took place in 1910. In 1916 Everard Calthrop, an early inventor of parachutes, patented an ejector seat using compressed air.

The modern layout for an ejection seat was first proposed by Romanian inventor Anastase Dragomir in the late 1920s. The design, featuring a parachuted cell (a dischargeable chair from an aircraft or other vehicle), was successfully tested on August 25, 1929 at the Paris-Orly Airport near Paris and in October 1929 at Băneasa, near Bucharest. Dragomir patented his "catapult-able cockpit" at the French Patent Office (patent no. 678566, of April 2, 1930, Nouveau système de montage des parachutes dans les appareils de locomotion aérienne).

The design was perfected during World War II. Prior to this, the only means of escape from an incapacitated aircraft was to jump clear ("bail-out"), and in many cases this was difficult due to injury, the difficulty of egress from a confined space, g forces, the airflow past the aircraft, and other factors.

Martin-Baker WY6AM ejection seat

The first ejection seats were developed independently during World War II by Heinkel and SAAB. Early models were powered by compressed air and the first aircraft to be fitted with such a system was the Heinkel He 280 prototype jet fighter in 1940. One of the He 280 test pilots, Helmut Schenk, became the first person to escape from a stricken aircraft with an ejection seat on 13 January 1942 after his control surfaces iced up and became inoperable. The fighter, being used in tests of the Argus As 014 impulse jets for Fieseler Fi 103 missile development, had its regular HeS 8A turbojets removed, and was towed aloft from Rechlin, Germany by a pair of Bf 110C tugs in a heavy snow-shower. At 7,875 feet (2,400 m), Schenk found he had no control, jettisoned his towline, and ejected. The He 280, however, never reached production status. Thus, the first operational type to provide ejection seats for the crew was the Heinkel He 219 Uhu night fighter in 1942.

An Aviation Structural Mechanic works on an ejection seat removed from the cockpit
of an EA-6B Prowler aboard USS John C. Stennis.

In Sweden a version using compressed air was tested in 1941. A gunpowder ejection seat was developed by Bofors and tested in 1943 for the Saab 21. The first test in the air was on a Saab 17 on 27 February 1944, and the first real use occurred by Lt. Bengt Johansson (who later changes it to Järkenstedt) on 29 July 1946 after a mid-air collision between a J 21 and a J 22.

In late 1944, the Heinkel He 162 featured a new type of ejection seat, this time fired by an explosive cartridge. In this system the seat rode on wheels set between two pipes running up the back of the cockpit. When lowered into position, caps at the top of the seat fitted over the pipes to close them. Cartridges, basically identical to shotgun shells, were placed in the bottom of the pipes, facing upward. When fired, the gases would fill the pipes, "popping" the caps off the end, and thereby forcing the seat to ride up the pipes on its wheels and out of the aircraft. By the end of the war, the Do-335 Pfeil and a few prototype aircraft were also fitted with ejection seats.

After World War II, the need for such systems became pressing, as aircraft speeds were getting ever higher, and it was not long before the sound barrier was broken. Manual escape at such speeds would be impossible. The United States Army Air Forces experimented with downward-ejecting systems operated by a spring, but it was the work of Sir James Martin and his company Martin-Baker that was to prove crucial.

The first live flight test of the Martin-Baker system took place on 24 July 1946, when Bernard Lynch ejected from a Gloster Meteor Mk III. Shortly afterward, on 17 August 1946, 1st Sgt. Larry Lambert was the first live U.S. ejectee. Martin-Baker ejector seats were fitted to prototype and production aircraft from the late 1940s, and the first emergency use of such a seat occurred in 1949 during testing of the jet powered Armstrong-Whitworth AW.52 experimental flying wing.

Early seats used a solid propellant charge to eject the pilot and seat by igniting the charge inside a telescoping tube attached to the seat. As aircraft speeds increased still further, this method proved inadequate to get the pilot sufficiently clear of the airframe. Increasing the amount of propellant risked damaging the occupant's spine, so experiments with rocket propulsion began. In 1958 the F-102 Delta Dagger was the first aircraft to be fitted with a rocket-propelled seat. Martin-Baker developed a similar design, using multiple rocket units feeding a single nozzle. The greater thrust from this configuration had the advantage of being able to eject the pilot to a safe height even if the aircraft was on or very near the ground.

In the early 1960s, deployment of rocket-powered ejection seats designed for use at supersonic speeds began in such planes as the F-106 Delta Dart. Six pilots have ejected at speeds exceeding 700 knots (1,300 km/h; 810 mph). The highest altitude at which a Martin-Baker seat was deployed was 57,000 ft (from a Canberra bomber in 1958). Following an accident on 30 July 1966 in the attempted launch of a D-21 drone, two Lockheed M-21 crew members ejected at Mach 3.25 at an altitude of 80,000 ft (24,000 m) The pilot was recovered successfully, however the observer drowned after a water landing. Despite these records, most ejections occur at fairly low speeds and altitudes, when the pilot can see that there is no hope of regaining aircraft control before impact with the ground.

Late in the Vietnam War the USAF and US Navy became concerned about its pilots ejecting over hostile territory and those pilots either being captured or killed and the losses in men and aircraft in attempts to rescue them. As a result both services began studies, for what is and will most likely, remain in aviation history the most unusual combat eject seat type ever researched and designed. Both services began a program titled Air Crew Escape/Rescue Capability or Aerial Escape and Rescue Capability (AERCAB) ejection seats (ie both terms have been used by the US military and defence industry), where after the pilot ejected, the ejection seat would fly him to a location far enough away from where he ejected to where he could safely be picked up. A Request for Proposals for concepts for AERCAB ejection seats were issued in the late 1960s. Three companies submitted papers for further development: A Rogallo wing design by Bell Systems; a gyrocopter design by Kaman Corporaton; and a mini-conventional fixed wing aircraft employing a Princeton Wing (ie a wing made of flexible material that rolls out then becomes ridged) by Fairchild Hiller. All three after ejection would be propelled by small turbojet engine developed for target drones. With the exception of the Kaman design, the pilot would still be required to parachute to the ground after reaching a safety-point for rescue. The AERCAB project was terminated in the 1970s with the end of the Vietnam War. The Kaman design was the only one in early 1972 which was to reach the actual hardware stage and come close to being tested with a special landing gear platform attached to the AERCAB ejection seat for a first stage ground take offs and landings with a test pilot.

Pilot safety

The purpose of an ejection seat is pilot survival. The pilot typically experiences an acceleration of about 12–14 g (117–137 m/s²). Western seats usually impose lighter loads on the pilots; 1960s-70s era Soviet technology often goes up to 20–22 g (with SM-1 and KM-1 gunbarrel-type ejection seats). Compression fractures of vertebrae were (and are) a recurrent side effect of ejection, and are often a career-ending (if not fatal) injury for pilots and aviators.

Lt. (j.g.) William Belden ejects from an A-4E Skyhawk on the deck of the USSShangri-La in the
western Pacific circa 29 July 1970. The pilot was recovered by helicopter, unharmed;
the Skyhawk was later recovered from carrier catwalk. (NH-90350)

The U.S. government selected the Martin-Baker seat for the U.S.A.'s new Joint Strike Fighter. The F-22 Raptor uses a variant of the ACES II ejection seat. Both JSF and the Eurofighter Typhoon use the Mk.16A ejection seat.

The capabilities of the Zvezda K-36 were unintentionally demonstrated at the Fairford Air Show on 24 July 1993 when the pilots of two MiG-29 fighters successfully ejected after a mid-air collision.

The minimal ejection altitude for ACES II seat in inverted flight is about 140 feet (43 m) above ground level at 150 KIAS. While the Russian counterpart - K-36DM has the minimal ejection altitude from inverted flight of 660 feet (200 m) AGL. When an aircraft is equipped with the Zvezda K-36DM ejection seat and the pilot is wearing the КО-15 protective gear, he is able to eject at airspeeds from 0 to 1,400 kilometres per hour (870 mph) and altitudes of 0 to 25 kilometres (16 mi). The K-36DM ejection seat features drag chutes and a small shield that rises between the pilots legs to deflect air around the pilot.

As of July 2010, Martin-Baker ejection seats had saved 7325 lives. They give survivors a unique tie and lapel pin. The total figure for all types of ejector seats is unknown, but might be considerably higher.

Egress systems

A warning applied on the cockpit side of all aircraft using an ejection seat system.
Intended especially for the maintenance and emergency crews.

The "standard" ejection system operates in two stages. First, the entire canopy or hatch above the aviator is opened or jettisoned, and the seat and occupant are launched through the opening. In most earlier aircraft this required two separate actions by the aviator, while later egress system designs, such as the Advanced Concept Ejection Seat model 2 (ACES II), perform both functions as a single action.

The ACES II ejection seat is used in most American-built fighters. The A-10 uses connected firing handles that activate both the canopy jettison systems, followed by the seat ejection. The F-15 has the same connected system as the A-10 seat. Both handles accomplish the same task, so pulling either one suffices. The F-16 has only one handle located between the pilot's knees, since the cockpit is too narrow for side-mounted handles.

Non-standard egress systems include Downward Track (used for some crew positions in bomber aircraft, including the B-52 Stratofortress), Canopy Destruct (CD) and Through-Canopy Penetration (TCP), Drag Extraction, Encapsulated Seat, and even Crew Capsule.

Early models of the F-104 Starfighter were equipped with a Downward Track ejection seat due to the hazard of the T-tail. In order to make this work, the pilot was equipped with "spurs" which were attached to cables that would pull the legs inward so the pilot could be ejected. Following this development, a number of other egress systems began using leg retractors as a way to prevent injuries to flailing legs, and to provide a more stable center of gravity. Some models of the F-104 were equipped with upward-ejecting seats.

Capt. Christopher Stricklin ejects from his F-16 aircraft with an
ACES II ejection seat on 14 September 2003; Stricklin was not injured.

Similarly, two of the six ejection seats on the B-52 Stratofortress fire downward, through hatch openings on the bottom of the aircraft; the downward hatches are released from the aircraft by a thruster that unlocks the hatch, while gravity and wind remove the hatch and arm the seat. The four seats on the forward upper deck (two of them, EWO and Gunner, facing the rear of the airplane) fire upwards as usual. Any such downward-firing system is of no use on or near the ground unless the aircraft is upside-down at the time of the ejection.

Aircraft designed for low-level use sometimes have ejection seats which fire through the canopy, as waiting for the canopy to be ejected is too slow. Many aircraft types (e.g., the BAe Hawk and the Harrier line of aircraft) use Canopy Destruct systems, which have an explosive cord (MDC - Miniature Detonation Cord or FLSC - Flexible Linear Shaped Charge) embedded within the acrylic plastic of the canopy. The MDC is initiated when the eject handle is pulled, and shatters the canopy over the seat a few milliseconds before the seat is launched. This system was developed for the Hawker Siddeley Harrier family of VTOL aircraft as ejection may be necessary while the aircraft was in the hover, and jettisoning the canopy might result in the pilot and seat striking it.

Through-Canopy Penetration is similar to Canopy Destruct, but a sharp spike on the top of the seat, known as the "shell tooth," strikes the underside of the canopy and shatters it. The A-10 Thunderbolt II is equipped with canopy breakers on either side of its headrest in the event that the canopy fails to jettison. In ground emergencies, a ground crewman or pilot can use a breaker knife attached to the inside of the canopy to shatter the transparency. The A-6 Intruder and EA-6 Prowler seats are capable of ejecting through the canopy, with canopy jettison a separate option if there is enough time.

CD and TCP systems cannot be used with canopies made of flexible materials, such as the Lexan polycarbonate canopy used on the F-16.

Soviet Yakovlev Yak-38 VTOL naval fighter planes were equipped with automatically activated ejection seats, mandated by the notorious unreliability of their vertical lifting powerplants.

Drag Extraction is the lightest and simplest egress system available, and has been used on many experimental aircraft. Halfway between simply "bailing out" and using explosive-eject systems, Drag Extraction uses the airflow past the aircraft (or spacecraft) to move the aviator out of the cockpit and away from the stricken craft on a guide rail. Some operate like a standard ejector seat, by jettisoning the canopy, then deploying a drag chute into the airflow. That chute pulls the occupant out of the aircraft, either with the seat or following release of the seat straps, who then rides off the end of a rail extending far enough out to help clear the structure. In the case of the Space Shuttle, the astronauts ride a long, curved rail, blown by the wind against their bodies, then deploy their chutes after free-falling to a safe altitude.

Crewmember escape capsule from a B-58 Hustler

Encapsulated Seat egress systems were developed for use in the B-58 Hustler and B-70 Valkyrie supersonic bombers. These seats were enclosed in an air-operated clamshell, which permitted the aircrew to escape at airspeeds high enough to cause bodily harm. These seats were designed to allow the pilot to control the plane even with the clamshell closed, and the capsule would float in case of water landings.

Some aircraft designs, such as the General Dynamics F-111, do not have individual ejection seats, but instead, the entire section of the airframe containing the crew can be ejected as a single capsule. In this system, very powerful rockets are used, and multiple large parachutes are used to bring the capsule down, in a manner very similar to the Launch Escape System of the Apollo spacecraft. On landing, an airbag system is used to cushion the landing, and this also acts as a flotation device if the Crew Capsule lands in water.

Zero-zero ejection seat

A zero-zero ejection seat is designed to safely extract upward and land its occupant from a grounded stationary position (i.e., zero altitude and zero airspeed), specifically from aircraft cockpits. The zero-zero capability was developed to help aircrews escape upward from unrecoverable emergencies during low-altitude and/or low-speed flight, as well as ground mishaps. Before this capability, ejections could only be performed above minimum altitudes and airspeeds.

Zero-zero technology uses small rockets to propel the seat upward to an adequate altitude and a small explosive charge to open the parachute canopy quickly for a successful parachute descent, so that reliance on airspeed and altitude is no longer required for proper deployment of the parachute.

Other aircraft

The Kamov Ka-50, which entered service with Russian forces in 1995, was the first production helicopter to be fitted with an ejection seat. The system is very similar to that of a conventional fixed-wing aircraft; the main rotors are equipped with explosive bolts and are designed to disintegrate moments before the seat rocket is fired. Prototype #9 (s/n 66-8834) of the AH-56 Cheyenne was fitted with downward firing ejection seats in 1970 after a fatal testing accident the previous year.

The Lunar Lander Research Vehicle (LLRV)/Training Vehicle (LLTV) used ejection seats; Neil Armstrong ejected on 6 May 1968; Joe Algranti & Stuart M. Present, later.

Early flights of the NASA's Space Shuttle were with a crew of two, both provided with ejector seats, (STS-1 to STS-4), but the seats were disabled and then removed as the crew size was increased.

The Soviet shuttle "Buran" was planned to be fitted with K-36RB (K-36M-11F35) seats, but it was unmanned on its single flight; the seats were never installed.

The only spacecraft ever flown with installed ejection seats are the Space Shuttle, the Soviet Vostok and American Gemini series. During the Vostok program, all the returning cosmonauts would eject as their capsule descended under parachutes at about 7,000 m (23,000 ft). This fact was kept secret for many years as the FAI rules at the time required that a pilot must land with the spacecraft for the purposes of FAI record books.

The Sukhoi Su-31M is a single-engine aerobatic aircraft factory-equipped with a Zvezda SKS-94 ejection seat.

Some ultralight, single-engine and glider general aviation aircraft such as the Cirrus SR-22 or Schempp-Hirth Discus 2c have been fitted with ballistically deployed parachutes recently. However, these systems cannot be considered "ejection" systems because the entire aircraft with occupants is suspended by the chute.

Fresnel lens

2012-01-01T23:27:00.003-05:00

Lighthouse Fresnel lens, on display at the Musée national de la Marine

A Fresnel lens (pronounced /freɪˈnɛl/ fray-NELL) is a type of lens originally developed by French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel for lighthouses.

The design enables the construction of lenses of large aperture and short focal length without the mass and
volume of material that would be required by a lens of conventional design. Compared to conventional bulky lenses, the Fresnel lens is much thinner, larger, and flatter, and captures more oblique light from a light source, thus allowing lighthouses to be visible over much greater distances.

History

The idea of creating a thinner, lighter lens by making it with separate sections mounted in a frame is often attributed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. The marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) proposed grinding such a lens from a single thin piece of glass. French physicist and engineer Augustin-Jean Fresnel is most often given credit for the development of the multi-part lens for use in lighthouses. According to Smithsonian magazine, the first Fresnel lens was used in 1823 in the Cordouan lighthouse at the mouth of the Gironde estuary; its light could be seen from more than 20 miles (32 km) out. Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster is credited with convincing the United Kingdom to adopt these lenses in their lighthouses.

Description

The Fresnel lens reduces the amount of material required compared to a conventional spherical lens by dividing the lens into a set of concentric annular sections known as "Fresnel zones", which are theoretically limitless.

How a Fresnel lens works

1: Cross section of a Fresnel lens
2: Cross section of a conventional plano-convex lens of equivalent power

In each of these zones, the overall thickness of the lens is decreased, effectively dividing the continuous surface of a standard lens into a set of surfaces of the same curvature, with stepwise discontinuities between them. In fact a Fresnel lens can be regarded as an array of prisms arranged in a circular fashion, with steeper prisms on the edges and a nearly flat convex center.

In the first (and largest) variations of the lens, each zone was actually a separate prism. Though a Fresnel lens might appear like a single piece of glass, closer examination reveals that it is many small pieces. It was not until modern computer-controlled milling equipment (CNC) could turn out large complex pieces that these lenses were manufactured from single pieces of glasss

Fresnel lens design allows a substantial reduction in thickness (and thus mass and volume of material), at the expense of reducing the imaging quality of the lens, which is why precise imaging applications such as photography still use conventional bulky (non-Fresnel) lenses.

Fresnel lenses are usually made of glass or plastic; their size varies from large (old historical lighthouses, meter size) to medium (book-reading aids, OHP viewgraph projectors) to small (TLR/SLR camera screens, micro-optics). In many cases they are very thin and flat, almost flexible, with thicknesses in the 1 to 5 millimeter range.

Examples and uses

Close-up of a
lighthouse lens

Model showing a
plastic Fresnel lens

Cutaway fixed
Fresnel lens

First-order
Fresnel lens

Third-order
Fresnel lens

The use of a Fresnel lens for image projection reduces image quality, so they tend to be used only where quality is not critical or where the bulk of a solid lens would be prohibitive. Cheap Fresnel lenses can be stamped or molded of transparent plastic and are used in overhead projectors, projection televisions, and hand-held sheet magnifying glasses. Fresnel lenses have been used to increase the visual size of CRT displays in pocket televisions, notably the Sinclair TV80. They are also used in traffic lights. Fresnel lenses are also used to correct several visual disorders, including several ocular-motility disorders such as strabismus.

Since plastic Fresnel lenses can be made larger than glass lenses, as well as being much cheaper and lighter, they are used to concentrate sunlight for heating in solar cookers, in solar forges, and in solar collectors used to heat water for domestic use.

Cape Meares Lighthouse (Oregon, USA) first-order Fresnel lens

Perhaps the most widespread use of Fresnel lenses, for a time, was in automobile headlamps, where they allow the roughly parallel beam from the parabolic reflector to be shaped to meet requirements for dipped and main beam patterns, often both in the same headlamp unit (such as the European H4 design). For reasons of cost, weight, and impact resistance, newer cars have dispensed with glass Fresnel lenses, using multifaceted reflectors with plain polycarbonate lenses. However, Fresnel lenses continue to be widely used in automobile tail, marker, and backup lights.

Fresnel lenses are also used in left-hand-drive European lorries entering the UK and Republic of Ireland (and vice versa, right-hand-drive Irish and British trucks entering mainland Europe) to overcome the blind spots caused by the driver operating the lorry while sitting on the "wrong" side of the cab and driving on the "wrong" side of the road. They are applied to the passenger-side window.

High-quality glass Fresnel lenses were used in lighthouses, where they were considered state of the art in the late 19th and through the middle of the 20th centuries; most are now retired from service. Lighthouse Fresnel lens systems typically include extra annular prismatic elements, arrayed in faceted domes above and below the central planar Fresnel, in order to catch all light emitted from the light source. The light path through these elements can include an internal reflection, rather than the simple refraction in the planar Fresnel element. These lenses conferred many practical benefits upon the designers, builders, and users of lighthouses and their illumination. Among other things, smaller lenses could fit into more compact spaces. Greater light transmission over longer distances, and varied patterns, made it possible to triangulate a position.

Glass Fresnel lenses also are used in lighting instruments for theater and motion pictures (see Fresnel lantern); such instruments are often called simply Fresnels. The entire instrument consists of a metal housing, a reflector, a lamp assembly, and a Fresnel lens. Fresnel instruments usually have a convenient way of changing the focal distance between the lamp and the lens. As a result, they are very flexible, and can often produce a beam as narrow as 7° or as wide as 70°. The Fresnel lens produces a very soft-edged beam, so it is often used as a wash light. A holder in front of the lens can hold a colored plastic film (gel) to tint the light or wire screens or frosted plastic to diffuse it. Many Fresnel instruments allow the lamp to be moved relative to the lens' focal point, to increase or decrease the size of the light beam. The Fresnel lens is useful in the making of motion pictures not only because of its ability to focus the beam brighter than a typical lens, but also because the light is a relatively consistent intensity across the entire width of the beam of light.

Aircraft carriers and naval air stations typically use Fresnel lenses in their optical landing systems. The "meatball" light aids the pilot in maintaining proper glide slope for the landing. In the center are amber and red lights composed of Fresnel lenses. Although the lights are always on, the angle of the lens from the pilot's point of view determines the color and position of the visible light. If the lights appear above the green horizontal bar, the pilot is too high. If it is below, the pilot is too low, and if the lights are red, the pilot is very low.

Optical Landing System on US Navy aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower

New applications have appeared in solar energy, where Fresnel lenses are used to concentrate sunlight (with a ratio of almost 500:1) onto solar cells. Thus the active solar cell surface can be reduced to a fraction compared to conventional solar modules. This offers a considerable cost-saving potential by low material consumption, and it is possible to use high-quality and expensive solar cells, which achieve a very high efficiency under concentration due to thermodynamic effects.

Fresnel reflectors are also currently being incorporated into next-generation solar thermal-energy systems. See solar power for more information.

In photography, Canon developed a diffractive optics (DO) version of their EF 70-300mm lens using Fresnel lenses. Also, the Polaroid SX-70 camera used a Fresnel reflector as part of its viewing system.

Multi-focal Fresnel lens are also used as a part of retina identification cameras, where they provide multiple in- and out-of-focus images of a fixation target inside the camera. For virtually all users, at least one of the images will be in focus, thus allowing correct eye alignment.

The Fresnel lens has seen applications for enhancing passenger reading lights on Airbus aircraft: in a dark cabin, the focused beam of light does not dazzle neighboring passengers.

Fresnel lenses have also been used in the field of popular entertainment. The British rock artist Peter Gabriel made use of them in his early solo live performances to magnify the size of his head, in contrast to the rest of his body, for dramatic and comic effect. In the Terry Gilliam film Brazil, plastic Fresnel screens appear ostensibly as magnifiers for the small CRT monitors used throughout the offices of the Ministry of Information. However, they occasionally appear between the actors and the camera, distorting the scale and composition of the scene to humorous effect.

Sizes of lighthouse lenses

Fresnel's lighthouse lenses ordinarily fell into six orders based on their focal length. The order of a Fresnel lens is approximately the dioptre or optical power of the lens. The dioptre (also spelled diopter) is the reciprocal of the focal length of the lens in meters. A Fresnel lens with a focal length of 50 cm or 0.5 m would be classified as a second-order lens.

However, there are a few hyperradiant Fresnel lenses—the largest ever made—'off the chart' of sixth through first order. One such lens was on hand when it was decided to build and outfit the Makapuu Point Light. Rather than order a new lens, the huge optic construction—twelve feet tall and with over a thousand prisms—was used there.

The largest (first-order) lens has a focal length of 920 mm (36 in) and an optical area 2590 mm (8.5 ft) high. The complete assembly is about 3.7 m (12 ft) tall and 1.8 m (6 ft) wide. The smallest (sixth-order) has a focal length of 150 mm (5.9 in) and an optical area 433 mm (17 in) high.

Subsequent development extended this to seventh and eighth orders, an intermediate three-and-one-half order, and two orders even larger than first: mesoradial and hyperradial.

Projection uses

Fresnel lenses of different focal lengths (one collimator, and one collector) are used in commercial and DIY projection. The collimator lens has the lower focal length and is placed closer to the light source, and the collector lens, which focuses the light into the triplet lens, is placed after the projection image (an active matrix LCD panel in LCD projectors). Fresnel lenses are also used as collimators in overhead projectors.

Generating solar power

More recently Fresnel reflectors are used in concentrating solar power (CSP) plants to concentrate solar energy.

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What Is HTML5?

2012-01-01T04:48:00.004-05:00

HTML5: Everyone’s using it, nobody knows what it is. I realize that sounds more like a line out of an existential movie — maybe Waiting for Godot or a screenplay by Sartre — than a statement about HTML5. But it’s really the truth: most of the people using HTML5 are treating it as HTML4+, or
even worse, HTML4 (and some stuff they don’t use). The result? A real delay in the paradigm shift that HTML5 is almost certain to bring. It’s certainly not time to look away, because by the time you look back, you may have missed something really important: a subtle but important transition centered around HTML5. Read source details>>>

Maser

2011-12-17T21:22:00.005-05:00

A hydrogen radio frequency discharge, the first element inside a hydrogen maser

A maser is a device that produces coherent electromagnetic waves through amplification by stimulated emission. Historically, “maser” derives from the original, upper-case acronym MASER stands for "Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation".
The lower-case usage arose from technological development having rendered the original denotation imprecise, because contemporary masers emit EM waves (microwave and radio frequencies) across a broader band of the electromagnetic spectrum; thus, the physicist Charles H. Townes’s suggested usage of “molecular” replacing “microwave”, for contemporary linguistic accuracy. In 1957, when the optical coherent oscillator was first developed, it was denominated optical maser, but usually called laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation), the acronym Gordon Gould established in 1957.

History

Theoretically, the principle of the maser was described by Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov from Lebedev Institute of Physics at an All-Union Conference on Radio-Spectroscopy held by USSR Academy of Sciences in May 1952. They subsequently published their results in October 1954. Independently, Charles H. Townes, J. P. Gordon, and H. J. Zeiger built the first maser at Columbia University in 1953. The device used stimulated emission in a stream of energized ammonia molecules to produce amplification of microwaves at a frequency of 24 gigahertz. Townes later worked with Arthur L. Schawlow to describe the principle of the optical maser, or laser, which Theodore H. Maiman first demonstrated in 1960. For their research in this field Townes, Basov, and Prokhorov were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964.

Technology

The maser is based on the principle of stimulated emission proposed by Albert Einstein in 1917. When atoms have been put into an excited energy state, they can amplify radiation at the proper frequency. By putting such an amplifying medium in a resonant cavity, feedback is created that can produce coherent radiation.

Some common types of masers

1. Atomic beam masers

Ammonia maser
Free Electron Maser
Hydrogen maser

2. Gas masers

Rubidium maser

3. Solid State masers

Ruby maser

The dual noble gas maser is an example of a masing medium which is nonpolar.

Uses

Masers serve as high precision frequency references. These "atomic frequency standards" are one form of atomic clock. They are also used as electronic amplifiers in radio telescopes. Masers are being developed as directed-energy weapons.

Hydrogen maser

Today, the most important type of maser is the hydrogen maser which is currently used as an atomic frequency standard. Together with other types of atomic clocks, they constitute the "Temps Atomique International" or TAI. This is the international time scale, which is coordinated by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, or BIPM.

A hydrogen maser.

It was Norman Ramsey and his colleagues who first realized this device. Today's masers are identical to the original design. The maser oscillation relies on stimulated emission between two hyperfine levels of atomic hydrogen. Here is a brief description of how it works:

First, a beam of atomic hydrogen is produced. This is done by submitting the gas at low pressure to an RF discharge (see the picture on this page).

The next step is "state selection"—in order to get some stimulated emission, it is necessary to create a population inversion of the atoms. This is done in a way that is very similar to the famous Stern-Gerlach experiment. After passing through an aperture and a magnetic field, many of the atoms in the beam are left in the upper energy level of the lasing transition. From this state, the atoms can decay to the lower state and emit some microwave radiation.

A high quality factor microwave cavity confines the microwaves and reinjects them repeatedly into the atom beam. The stimulated emission amplifies the microwaves on each pass through the beam. This combination of amplification and feedback is what defines all oscillators. The resonant frequency of the microwave cavity is exactly tuned to the hyperfine structure of hydrogen: 1420 405 751.768 Hz.

A small fraction of the signal in the microwave cavity is coupled into a coaxial cable and then sent to a coherent receiver.

The microwave signal coming out of the maser is very weak (a few pW). The frequency of the signal is fixed and extremely stable. The coherent receiver is used to amplify the signal and change the frequency. This is done using a series of phase-locked loops and a high performance quartz oscillator.

Astrophysical masers

Maser-like stimulated emission also occurs in nature in interstellar space, and is frequently called superradiant emission to distinguish it from laboratory masers. Such emission is observed from molecules such as water (H2O), hydroxyl radicals (OH), methanol (CH3OH), formaldehyde (CH2O), and silicon monoxide (SiO). Water molecules in star-forming regions can undergo a population inversion and emit radiation at 22 GHz, creating the brightest spectral line in the radio universe. Some water masers also emit radiation from a vibrational mode at 96 GHz.

Extremely powerful masers, associated with active galactic nuclei, are known as megamasers and are up to a million times more powerful than stellar masers.

Terminology

The meaning of the term maser has changed slightly since its introduction. Initially the acronym was universally given as "microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation," which described devices which emitted in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The principle of stimulated emission has since been extended to more devices and frequencies, and so the original acronym is sometimes modified, as suggested by Charles H. Townes, to "molecular amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." Some have asserted that Townes's efforts to extend the acronym in this way were primarily motivated by the desire to increase the importance of his invention, and his reputation in the scientific community.

When the laser was developed, Townes and Schawlow and their colleagues at Bell Labs pushed the use of the term optical maser, but this was largely abandoned in favor of laser, coined by their rival Gordon Gould. In modern usage, devices that emit in the X-ray through infrared portions of the spectrum are typically called lasers, and devices that emit in the microwave region and below are commonly called masers, regardless of whether they emit microwaves or other frequencies.

Gould originally proposed distinct names for devices that emit in each portion of the spectrum, including grasers (gamma ray lasers), xasers (x-ray lasers), uvasers (ultraviolet lasers), lasers (visible lasers), irasers (infrared lasers), masers (microwave masers), and rasers (RF masers). Most of these terms never caught on, however, and all have now become (apart from in science fiction) obsolete except for maser and laser.

Masers in science fiction

Masers often appear as weapons in science fiction movies and novels. Their characteristics often differ from those of real masers, however, and it is doubtful whether a practical maser weapon such as these can actually be made.

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WordPress Introduces Ad Program.

2011-11-29T21:42:00.008-05:00

WordPress has announced a program that aims to offer bloggers an alternative to Google’s AdWords for monetizing their sites.

Called WordAds, the offering makes use of WordPress.com’s partnership with Federated Media. Jon Burke, ads lead for WordPress.com, wrote on the company’s  blog Tuesday that bloggers have been asking WordPress.com for some time to introduce a monetization program, but “we’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad.”

Burke, however, didn’t divulge any details about how WordAds would be different from AdWords. Instead, the post merely directs users to fill out a  form if they’re interested. The page directing users to the form notes that joining WordAds is “100% optional” and that Federated Media sells ads for  BoingBoing  and  Apple Insider

Though the announcement makes it official, it’s not a surprise. In October, WordPress.com told attendees at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco that the company was teaming up with Automattic and Federated to let users place ads on their blogs. As Burke notes, more than 50,000 WordPress-powered blogs (including both WordPress.com and WordPress.org blogs) come online every day.

Burke said users deserved better than Google’s AdSense. Google didn’t break out revenues for AdWords in its most-recent financial filing, but AdSense programs, which include AdWords,  brought in  $2.6 billion — 27% of the company’s total revenues — in Q3.

Scientist rejects "faster than light" particle finding

2011-11-21T23:17:00.021-05:00

The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) tunnel, located at the CERN particle research centre near Geneva,
is seen in this undated handout photograph.

An international team of scientists in Italy studying the same neutrino particles colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light rejected the startling finding this weekend, saying their tests had shown it must be wrong.

The September announcement of the finding, backed up last week after new studies, caused a furor in the scientific world as it seemed to suggest Albert Einstein's ideas on relativity, and much of modern physics, were based on a mistaken premise.

The first team, members of the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome, said they recorded neutrinos beamed to them from the CERN research center in Switzerland as arriving 60 nanoseconds before light would have done.

But ICARUS, another experiment at Gran Sasso -- which is deep under mountains and run by Italy's National Institute of National Physics -- now argues that their measurements of the neutrinos energy on arrival contradict that reading.

In a paper posted Saturday on the same website as the OPERA results, arxiv.org/abs/1110.3763v2, the ICARUS team says their findings "refute a superluminal (faster than light) interpretation of the OPERA result."

They argue, on the basis of recently published studies by two top U.S. physicists, that the neutrinos pumped down from CERN, near Geneva, should have lost most of their energy if they had travelled at even a tiny fraction faster than light.

But in fact, the ICARUS scientists say, the neutrino beam as tested in their equipment registered an energy spectrum fully corresponding with what it should be for particles traveling at the speed of light and no more.

Physicist Tomasso Dorigo, who works at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and the U.S. Fermilab near Chicago, said in a post on the website Scientific Blogging that the ICARUS paper was "very simple and definitive."

It says, he wrote, "that the difference between the speed of neutrinos and the speed of light cannot be as large as that seen by OPERA, and is certainly smaller than that by three orders of magnitude, and compatible with zero."

Under Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. That idea lies at the heart of all current science of the cosmos and of how the vast variety of particles that make it up behave.

There was widespread skepticism when the OPERA findings were first revealed, and even the leaders of the experiment insisted that they were not announcing a discovery but simply recording measurements they had made and carefully checked.

However, last Friday they said a new experiment with shorter neutrino beams from CERN and much larger gaps between them had produced the same result. Independent scientists said however this was not conclusive.

Other experiments are being prepared -- at Fermilab and at the KEK laboratory in Japan -- to try to replicate OPERA's findings. Only confirmation from one of these would open the way for a full scientific discovery to be declared.

Reuters

Neutrinos still faster than light.

2011-11-18T16:01:00.009-05:00

Example of subatomic particle

A new experiment appears to provide further evidence that Einstein may have been wrong when he said nothing could go faster than the speed of light, a theory that underpins modern thinking on how the universe works.

The new evidence, challenging a dogma of science that has held since Albert Einstein laid out his theory of relativity in 1905, appeared to confirm a startling finding that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos could travel fractions of a second faster.

The new experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory, using a neutrino beam from CERN in Switzerland, 720 km (450 miles) away, was held to check findings in September by a team of scientists which were greeted with some skepticism.

Scientists at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) said in a statement on Friday that their new tests aimed to exclude one potential systematic effect that may have affected the original measurement.

"A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication on physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny," said Fernando Ferroni, president of the INFN.

"The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world."

An international team of scientists shocked the scientific world with the original findings in September.

That first finding was recorded when 15,000 neutrino beams were pumped over three years from CERN to Gran Sasso, an underground Italian laboratory near Rome.

Physicists on the experiment, called OPERA after the initials of its formal scientific title, said they had checked and rechecked over many months anything that could have produced a misreading before announcing what they had found.

If confirmed, scientists say the findings may show that Einstein -- seen as the father of modern physics -- was wrong when he set out in his theory of special relativity that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and nothing can go faster.

This would force a major rethink of theories about how the cosmos works and even mean it would be possible, in theory, to send information into the past.

EAT MY SHORTS?

Jim Al-Khalili, a physics professor at Britain's Surrey University whose reaction to the first "faster-than-light" results was that he would eat his shorts if they turned out to be true, said on Friday he remained unconvinced.

"I am not yet ready to get out my knife and fork," he said. "Ideally, the experiment would have to be done somewhere else entirely to try to verify the controversial result that these tiny particles really are going faster than light."

The Italian scientists, whose second set of results were published in online science journal ArXiv at arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897v2,

said one potential source of error in the first results was that the pulses of neutrinos sent by CERN were relatively long at around 10 microseconds each, so measuring their exact arrival time at Gran Sasso could have had relatively large errors.

To account for this, the beams sent by CERN in this latest experiment were around three nanoseconds shorter, with large gaps of 524 nanoseconds between them, meaning the scientists at Gran Sasso would time their arrival more accurately.

"In this way, compared to the previous measurement, the neutrinos bunches are narrower and more spaced from each other," the scientists said. "This permits to make a more accurate measure of their velocity at the price of a much lower beam intensity."

Jacques Martino, director of the French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics, who worked on the second experiment, said while this test was not a full confirmation, it did remove some of the potential errors that may have occurred in the first one. "The search is not over," he said

Christos Touramanis, who heads a neutrino research team at Britain's Liverpool University and is involved in scrutinizing the OPERA result as part of CERN's scientific committee, agreed the new test with short beam bunches had excluded one possible source of systematic errors, but said "a number of other possible effects" still needed to be checked.

"Ultimately, full independent confirmation will be required before accepting this result as accurate," he said in an emailed comment.

Reuters

RELATED ARTICLE:

Einstein's law of physics shattered.

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Tech Tools for Paper-free business.

2011-11-12T00:31:00.003-05:00

The following services, apps and gadgets aim to completely eliminate the need for paper in your business in your everyday life.

1. LifeLock

LifeLock is a service that helps prevent identity theft by automatically removing your name from every mailing list you don’t want to be a part of.

The service renews monthly to ensure you are permanently removed from lists and not placed on new ones. Within three months of signing up for Lifelock, I had reduced my paper mail intake by about 70%.

2. CatalogChoice

CatalogChoice is a non-profit that works with companies to make sure catalogs are sent to people who want them and not to you. This free service lets you search through a huge database and remove your name from any listing.

3. Square Reader

The Square Reader app allows you to accept credit card payments from your iPhone at low rates and with no monthly fees.
Payments are approved instantly and both you and the buyer get copies of the receipt via email.
You also don’t need to carry the physical card reader with you. You can enter the card number manually at a slightly higher percent charge.

4. HelloFax

HelloFax gives you a local fax number that delivers to your email inbox. You can seamlessly fill in forms, sign documents, request signatures from others and fax the documents back. It’s been about three years since I’ve held a faxed piece of paper in my hands.

5. SignNow

With SignNow you can simply forward a document from anywhere, including your iPhone. In a few minutes you’ll receive an email that lets you sign anywhere, fill in fields, and send to someone else for signature.

It’s similar to HelloFax except it’s free, doesn’t have the fax element, and works well on mobile.

6. Doxie

Doxie is a small, efficient scanner that will digitize your documents directly into cloud services like Dropbox and Google Docs. There will soon be a version that doesn’t require a computer, so you can scan anywhere and then sync up when you return.

7. PostalMethods

If you still need to send physical mail, PostalMethods lets you upload a document with its web interface or via email.
The company will print it out, put it in an envelope, stamp and mail it. Never lick a stamp again.

8. Virtual Post Mail

For remaining mail, consider a virtual mailbox. Virtual Post Mail will give you a P.O. box and any received mail displays in an organized web portal. You can then decide if you want to have Virtual Post Mail open and scan the contents, recycle it, or forward it to any address in the world.

You can also automate letters to sort for certain senders. That way you can download and forward images as PDF files, check your mail on the beach in Thailand or let a virtual assistant handle it for you.

Check depositing is great, especially if you manage rental properties, or deal with a lot of checks. Have them sent directly to Virtual Post Mail and for $1 per check, they will be deposited at the bank for you.

9. CardMunch

CardMunch is an app that turns a picture of a business card into a transcribed piece of information sent to your phone. The scanned card is added to the contact in your address book, making it their picture.

The free app is owned by LinkedIn so the person added to your contacts is one click away from a connection request.

10. CamScanner

For bigger documents, CamScanner is an application that lets you use your phone as a scanner. Take a picture of the document, and it finds the edges, adjusts perspective and enhances text and images. Then you have a PDF you can email or upload to one of your cloud services.

11. ScanDigital

ScanDigital is great for those old boxes of photos fading away in your basement. Send all of your old media, photos, VHS tapes, even slides, and it will scan and digitize everything for you.

Now you can really enjoy those photos by carrying them on your mobile device to share with friends and family.

12. shoeboxed

Shoeboxed is great for outsourcing paperwork. The service mainly catalogs receipts, but you can also send any other paper product. It also provides pre-addressed and stamped envelopes. Mobile apps are available to capture receipts and business cards on the go.

All pertinent information is organized, so if you need to do expense reports or taxes, your life will be so much easier. You can also send in reams of paperwork to clear out for a fresh start. Everything is scanned and organized in an online portfolio for you.

13. TaskRabbit

For the odd paper-based tasks that will inevitably happen every once in while, you need to get a person involved. I use TaskRabbit to turn my handwritten notes into something more useful. (These are few and far between, thanks to Evernote, of course.)

Mashable

Prepulse inhibition

2011-10-21T18:04:00.005-04:00

Prepulse inhibition: preceding stimulus attenuates the startle response.

Prepulse Inhibition (PPI) is a neurological phenomenon in which a weaker prestimulus (prepulse) inhibits the reaction of an organism to a subsequent strong startling stimulus (pulse). The stimuli are usually acoustic, but tactile stimuli (e.g. via air puffs onto the skin) and light stimuli are also used.
The reduction of the amplitude of startle reflects the ability of the nervous system to temporarily adapt to a strong sensory stimulus when a preceding weaker signal is given to warn the organism. PPI is detected in numerous species ranging from mice to human. Although the extent of the adaptation affects numerous systems, the most comfortable to measure are the muscular reactions, which are normally diminished as a result of the nervous inhibition.

Deficits of prepulse inhibition manifest in the inability to filter out the unnecessary information; they have been linked to abnormalities of sensorimotor gating. Such deficits are noted in patients suffering from illnesses like schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, and in people under the influence of drugs, surgical manipulations, or mutations. Human studies of PPI have been summarised in reviews by Braff et al. (2001) and Swerdlow et al. (2008).

Procedure

PPI measurment in human.

The main three parts of the procedure are prepulse, startle stimulus, and startle reflex. Different prepulse-to-pulse intervals, or lead intervals, are used: 30, 60, 120, 240 and 480 ms. Lead interval counts from the start of prepulse to the start of the pulse. With the interval exceeding 500 ms, prepulse facilitation - increased response - is most likely to follow. Burst of white noise is usually used as acoustic startle stimulus. Typical durations are 20 ms for prepulse and 40 ms for pulse. Background noise with 65-70 dB is used in human studies, and 30-40 dB in rodent experiments. Prepulse is typically set 3-12 dB louder than background. Startle response is measured in rodents using the so-called automated “startle chambers” or “stabilimeter chambers”, with detectors recording whole-body reaction. In humans, the movements of oculomotor muscles (“eye-blink reflex” or “eye-blink response” assessed using electromyographic recording of orbicularis oculi muscle and by oculography) could be used as a measure. Pulse-alone results are compared to prepulse-plus-pulse, and the percentage of the reduction in the startle reflex represents prepulse inhibition. Possible hearing impairment must be taken into account, as, for example, several strains of mice develop high frequency hearing loss when they mature.

Major features

The magnitude of PPI is often significant, reaching as much as 65% in healthy subjects.
Maximum inhibition is typically observed at 120 ms interval.
Baseline startle response does not affect overall PPI levels – this finding was first discovered in rat studies and later duplicated in the studies of mice.
The opposite reaction, Prepulse Facilitation (PPF), is typically noted when the interval between stimuli lasts longer than 500 ms. PPF is thought to reflect, at least partially, sustained attention.
There is noted sex difference in prepulse inhibition, with men having higher PPI, while women having higher PPF.
Monaural PPI is higher than binaural.
Even the very first prepulse of the test session induces inhibition, which indicates that conditioning and learning are not necessary for this effect to occur. However, the lack of conditionality has been questioned.
It is thought that the short intervals used in PPI task do not give enough time for the activation of a volitional response.
Prepulses could be attended or ignored, and attention affects the outcome. In one study, normal college students were instructed to attend to one of the kind of prepulses, high- or low-pitched, and ignore the other. Attended prepulse caused significantly greater inhibition at the 120 ms interval compared to the ignored one, and significantly greater facilitation at the 2000 ms interval.
Louder background noise increases the amplitude of the startle response.
Increased prepulse duration leads to increase in PPI.
Steady background noise facilitates the startle response, while pulsed background produces inhibition.

Disruption of PPI

Disruptions of PPI are studied in humans and many other species. The most studied are deficits of PPI in schizophrenia, although this disease is not the only one to cause such deficits. They have been noted in panic disorder (Ludewig, et al., 2005), schizotypal personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder(Swerdlow et al., 1993), Huntington's disease, nocturnal enuresis and attention deficit disorder (Ornitz et al. 1992), and Tourette's syndrome (Swerdlow et al. 1994; Castellanos et al. 1996). According to one study, people who have temporal lobe epilepsy with psychosis also show decreases in PPI, unlike those who have TLE without psychosis. Therefore, PPI deficits are not typical to specific disease, but rather tell of disruptions in a specific brain circuit.

PPI deficit in schizophrenia

PPI deficits represent a well-described finding in schizophrenia, with the first report dating back to 1978. The abnormalities are also noted in unaffected relatives of the patients. In one study, patients failed to show increased PPI to attended prepulses. Dopamine, which plays a major role in schizophrenia, had been shown to regulate sensorimotor gating in rodent models. These findings fit to the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia. In theory, PPI disruption in schizophrenia may be related to the processes of sensory flooding and cognitive fragmentation.

Antipsychotic medication have been shown to increase PPI in patients, with atypical antipsychotics having more effect. Patients display the same gender difference in PPI as healthy people: males have higher PPI compared to females. One notable finding is that patients are specifically deficient in PPI with 60 ms prepulse intervals relative to intervals of other lengths; this remains so even under antipsychotic treatment.

The other fact is the influence of cigarette smoking. Non-smoking patients have lower PPI compared to smokers, and heavy smokers have the highest PPI. This finding runs in accord with the high rates of smoking among schizophrenic patients, estimated at 70%, with many patients smoking more than 30 cigarettes a day. Thus, smoking may be a way of self-medication. Some studies show association of schizophrenia with the CHRNA7 and CHRFAM7A genes, which code for alpha7 subunit of nicotinic receptors, but other studies are negative. Contrary to the predictions, nicotine receptor alpha7 subunit knockout mice do not show disruptions in PPI.

Disruption of PPI in rodents

Murine models are widely used to test hypotheses linking genetic components of various diseases with sensorimotor gating. While some of the hypotheses stand to the test, others are not, as some mice models show unchanged or increased PPI contrary to the expectations, as in the tests of COMT-deficient mice.

Certain surgical procedures also disrupt PPI in animals, helping to unravel the underlying circuitry.

Many animal studies of PPI are undertaken in order to understand and model the pathology of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia-like PPI disruption techniques in rodents have been classified in one review into four models:

PPI impairment driven by dopamine-receptor agonists, most validated for antipsychotic studies;
PPI impairment by 5-HT2 receptor agonists;
PPI impairment by NMDAR antagonists;
PPI impairment by developmental intervention (isolation rearing, maternal deprivation).

Diverse chemical compounds are tested on animals with such deficits. Compounds that are able to restore PPI could be further investigated for their potential antipsychotic role.

RIM unveils new OS (BBX)

2011-10-18T15:21:00.003-04:00

BlackBerry BBX Demo with HTML5 - BlackBerry DevCon 2011

Research In Motion (RIM) today unveiled BlackBerry BBX, its next generation mobile platform that takes the best of the BlackBerry(R) platform and the best of the QNX(R) platform to connect people, devices, content and services.

In addition, RIM announced a series of developer tool updates, including WebWorks for BlackBerry smartphones and tablets, the Native SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook and a developer beta of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 with support for running Android applications. RIM also provided direction for developers on how to best develop and monetize their BlackBerry applications for today and for the future.

"With nearly 5 million BlackBerry apps downloaded daily, our customers have made BlackBerry one of the most profitable platforms for developers," said Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO at RIM. "At DevCon today, we're giving developers the tools they need to build richer applications and we're providing direction on how to best develop their smartphone and tablet apps as the BlackBerry and QNX platforms converge into our next generation BBX platform."

BlackBerry BBX

BBX is the next generation platform for BlackBerry smartphones and tablets. It combines the best of BlackBerry and the best of QNX and is designed from the ground up to enable the powerful real-time mobile experiences that distinguish BlackBerry products and services.

The BBX platform will include BBX-OS, and will support BlackBerry cloud services and development environments for both HTML5 and native developers. BBX will also support applications developed using any of the tools available today for the BlackBerry PlayBook - including Native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash and WebWorks/HTML5, as well as the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps - on future BBX-based tablets and smartphones.

BBX will also include the new BlackBerry Cascades UI Framework for advanced graphics (shown for the first time today), and bring "Super App" capabilities to enable many advanced capabilities including deep integration between apps, always-on Push services, the BBM(TM) Social Platform, and much more.

BlackBerry WebWorks

Developers who want to support both existing smartphones (running BlackBerry 6 and BlackBerry 7 OS) and BlackBerry PlayBook tablets can monetize apps on both platforms today with BlackBerry WebWorks, which supports apps built on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. The latest release, BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.2 (supporting both smartphones and tablets), is now available and includes updates for the new PlayBook OS SDK, PlayBook Simulator and more.

The BlackBerry WebWorks APIs are supported by the Ripple Emulator, a standalone, high-fidelity browser-like emulation tool that allows developers to test and debug their applications on multiple platforms and devices without having to compile or launch simulators. Starting today the Ripple Emulator is available in beta and can also be downloaded from RIM's WebWorks Developer site at: http://developer.blackberry.com/html5 .

Native SDK - Content Rich, Fast and Smooth Running Applications

RIM also announced today the immediate availability of the Native SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook (1.0 gold release). The Native SDK allows developers to build high-performance, multi-threaded, native C/C++ applications and enables developers to create advanced 2D and 3D games and other apps with access to OpenGL ES 2.0 and Open AL, as well as device specific APIs. Applications developed with the Native SDK will run today on the BlackBerry PlayBook and will be forwardly compatible on BBX-based tablets and smartphones.

The Native SDK includes support for C/C++ POSIX library and compliance, device events like gesture swipes and touch screen inputs, access to code management systems using industry standard Eclipse CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) and advanced debug and analysis tools. QNX Momentics Tool Suite, an Eclipse-based integrated development environment, is included. It provides memory profiling, application debugging, and memory usage statistics to help developers debug sophisticated programs, including hardware accelerated OpenGL applications.

The Native SDK makes the development and porting of game applications to the BlackBerry PlayBook an extremely attractive proposition for developers. Well known game publishers, developers and major game engine companies have already started to bring their game titles and applications to the platform.

Scoreloop, the largest and fastest growing cross-platform social gaming ecosystem on mobile, is now available in beta for the Native SDK through BlackBerry(R) Beta Zone. The Scoreloop SDK provides everything a developer needs to easily integrate social capabilities into their native PlayBook applications and includes support for Leaderboards, Game Challenges, Awards & Achievements, and Player Profiles. Scoreloop's fully customizable and cross-platform technology empowers developers to add as many or as few features as they want, from a simple leader-board to more extensive player achievements. It makes mobile games more social and profitable.

BlackBerry Cascades - Create Visually Stunning Interfaces

RIM today showcased BlackBerry Cascades, a rich user interface framework coming to a future release of the Native SDK. Cascades unleashes a new breed of design centric mobile applications and provides developers with an exceptional feature set for creating visually stunning interfaces with custom layouts, animations, effects and 3D graphics. These features, combined with a strong set of built-in core user interface components, will make it easy to build beautiful native applications with innovative user interfaces for the current BlackBerry PlayBook and future BBX-based tablets and smartphones. Cascades is scheduled to be made available in beta later this fall.

Adobe AIR 3.0 Support

Adobe Flash enables developers to produce visually stunning, highly functional applications for the BlackBerry PlayBook that can integrate with the underlying OS and will be supported on future BBX-based tablets and smartphones.

The BlackBerry PlayBook now supports the recently announced Adobe AIR 3.0 runtime. Among the supported features are Encrypted Local Store that gives developers the ability to use the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to encrypt and securely store sensitive information on the device, as well as store passwords, keys or credit card information safely within the app; StageText that allows developers to take advantage of native text controls and the native interaction behaviors of those controls; Multitouch and Gestures built into applications to provide great usability; and more.

PlayBook OS 2.0 - Developer Beta

RIM introduced today the Developer Beta version of the BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0. The Developer Beta includes the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps and the BlackBerry Plug-In for Android Development Tools (ADT), allowing developers to quickly and easily bring Android applications to BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.

The BlackBerry Plug-In for ADT (an Eclipse plug-in) extends a developer's existing Eclipse Android development environment to support the PlayBook, and includes the BlackBerry PlayBook Simulator for developers to test and debug their apps before submitting them to BlackBerry App World(TM). Developers can also test and debug their apps on a PlayBook running the BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 - Developer Beta.

Android developers can also repackage Android apps for the BlackBerry PlayBook online by using the BlackBerry Packager for Android Apps. The web tool guides developers through a step-by-step process, allowing them to test their apps for compatibility with the PlayBook, and repackage and sign their apps for submission to BlackBerry App World, all without downloading any tools.

BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps and the associated tools allow Android developers to easily expand their market to include BlackBerry PlayBook users, and hence increase their apps' market potential.

The BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 - Developer Beta also supports Adobe Air 3.0 and Adobe Flash 11, as well as WebGL, a new web technology that brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser without installing additional software. Developers will be able to generate rich, interactive 3D graphics within their BlackBerry WebWorks application.

For more information about the BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 - Developer Beta and BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps and associated tools, visit For more information about the BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 - Developer Beta and BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps and associated tools, visit: https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/android/bpaa/ .

Increased Developer Productivity with Open Source Libraries on the BlackBerry PlayBook OS

RIM also announced the BlackBerry Open Source Initiative to port popular Open Source libraries to the BlackBerry PlayBook platform. Libraries already available include physics engines like Bullet Physics and Box2DX, scripting languages like Lua, multimedia libraries like OpenAL and SDL, gaming frameworks like Cocos2DX and general-purpose libraries like Boost and Qt. Also available under an Open Source license are a range of code samples that developers can use to get started quickly, as well as GamePlay, a new 3D native gaming framework.

RIM will continue to expand its involvement in the Open Source community to help increase developer productivity on the BlackBerry platforms. For more details on RIM's Open Source activities, visit http://blackberry.github.com .

About Research In Motion

Research In Motion (RIM), a global leader in wireless innovation, revolutionized the mobile industry with the introduction of the BlackBerry(R) solution in 1999. Today, BlackBerry products and services are used by millions of customers around the world to stay connected to the people and content that matter most throughout their day. Founded in 1984 and based in Waterloo, Ontario, RIM operates offices in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America. RIM is listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market RIMM +2.23% and the Toronto Stock Exchange CA:RIM +1.83% . For more information, visit www.rim.com or www.blackberry.com .

Forward-looking statements in this news release are made pursuant to the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities laws. When used herein, words such as "expect", "anticipate", "estimate", "may", "will", "should", "intend," "believe", and similar expressions, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on estimates and assumptions made by RIM in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as other factors that RIM believes are appropriate in the circumstances. Many factors could cause RIM's actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including those described in the "Risk Factors" section of RIM's Annual Information Form, which is included in its Annual Report on Form 40-F (copies of which filings may be obtained at www.sedar.com or www.sec.gov ). These factors should be considered carefully, and readers should not place undue reliance on RIM's forward-looking statements. RIM has no intention and undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

The BlackBerry and RIM families of related marks, images and symbols are the exclusive properties and trademarks of Research In Motion Limited. RIM, Research In Motion and BlackBerry are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be pending or registered in other countries. All other brands, product names, company names, trademarks and service marks are the properties of their respective owners. RIM assumes no obligations or liability and makes no representation, warranty, endorsement or guarantee in relation to any aspect of any third party products or services.

The Phonograph cylinder

2011-10-13T14:01:00.005-04:00

Edison Gold Moulded Cylinder made from black wax, ca. 1904. The term 'gold' was
a reference to the metal plated onto the master wax cylinder as the
first part in the process of manufacturing the mould.

Phonograph cylinders were the earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound. Commonly known simply as "records" in their era of greatest popularity (c. 1888–1915), these cylinder shaped objects had an audio recording engraved on the outside surface which could be reproduced when the cylinder was played on a mechanical phonograph.
The competing disc-shaped gramophone record system triumphed in the market place to become the dominant commercial audio medium in the 1910s, and commercial mass production of phonograph cylinders ended in 1929.

Early development

The phonograph was invented by Thomas Edison on 18 July 1877 for recording telephone messages, his first test using tin foil wrapped around a hand-cranked cylinder. Tin foil was not a practical recording medium for everyday use and commercial production. Within a few years Edison licensed wax cylinders invented by Charles Sumner Tainter, Alexander Graham Bell, and Chichester Bell, and licensed by Bell's Volta Laboratory.

Two Edison cylinder records (on either end) and their cardboard storage cartons (center).

By the 1880s wax cylinders were mass marketed. These had sound recordings in the grooves on the outside of hollow cylinders of slightly soft wax. These cylinders could easily be removed and replaced on the mandrel of the machine which played them. Early cylinder records would commonly wear out after they were played a few dozen times. The buyer could then use a mechanism which left their surface shaved smooth so new recordings could be made on them. In 1890 Charles Tainter patented the use of hard carnauba wax as a replacement for the common mixture of paraffin and beeswax used on phonograph cylinders.

Paper slip from 1903 cylinder

Early cylinder machines of the late 1880s and the 1890s were often sold with recording attachments. The ability to record as well as play back sound was an advantage to cylinder phonographs over the competition from cheaper disc record phonographs which began to be mass marketed at the end of the 1890s, as the disc system machines could be used only to play back pre-recorded sound.

In the earliest stages of phonograph manufacturing various competing incompatible types of cylinder recordings were made. A standard system was decided upon by Edison Records, Columbia Phonograph, and other companies in the late 1880s. The standard cylinders were about 4 inches (10 cm) long, 2¼ inches in diameter, and played about two minutes of music or other sound.

Imprint of backside from the 1903 paper slip

Over the years the type of wax used in cylinders was improved and hardened so that cylinders could be played over 100 times. In 1902 Edison Records launched a line of improved hard wax cylinders marketed as "Edison Gold Moulded Records".

Commercial packaging

Cylinders were sold in cardboard tubes, with cardboard lids at each end. These containers helped to protect the recordings. These containers and the shape of the cylinders (together with the "tinny" sound of early records compared to live music) prompted bandleader John Philip Sousa to deride the records as canned music (though that did not stop him recording on cylinders). Record companies usually had a generic printed label on the outside of the cylinder package, with no indication of the identity of the individual recording inside. Early on such information would be written on the labels by hand, one at a time. Slightly later, the record number would be stamped on the top lid, then a bit later the title and artist of the recording would be printed on to labels on the lid. Shortly after the start of the 20th century, an abbreviated version of this information (together with the name of the record company) would be printed or impressed on to one edge of the cylinder itself. Previously, the actual cylinders had no such visual identification (though they would have a spoken announcement of the song or performance title, recording artist, and record company recorded on to the beginning of the recording.)

Portion of the label on the outside of a Columbia Records cylinder package, before 1901.
Note the title of the recording is hand written on the label.

Small paper inserts with the recording information were placed inside the package with the cylinders. At first this was hand written or typed on each slip, but printed versions became more common once cylinders of certain songs were sold in large enough quantities to make this economically practical. Note that in the example in the image below, from Edison Records, 1902, the consumer is invited to cut out the circle with printed information. This paper circle could then be pasted either to the lid of the cylinder container, or (as this example prompts) to a spindle for this cylinder in specially built cabinets for holding cylinder records which were marketed by record companies. Only a minority of cylinder record customers purchased such cabinets, however.

Hard plastic cylinders

In 1906 the Indestructible Record Company began mass marketing cylinder records made of celluloid, an early hard plastic, that would not break if dropped and could be played thousands of times without wearing out. This hard inflexible material could not be shaved and recorded over like wax cylinders, but had the advantage of being a nearly permanent record. (Such "Indestructible" style cylinders are arguably the most durable form of sound recording produced in the entire era of analogue audio before the introduction of digital audio; they can withstand a great number more playbacks before wearing out than such later media as the vinyl record or audio tape.) This superior technology was purchased by the Columbia Phonograph Company. The Edison company then developed their own type of long lasting cylinder, consisting of a type of plastic called Amberol (which was blue in color) around a plaster core;(the plastic was a phenolic resin, similar to the contemporary "Bakelite") these were called Blue Amberol cylinders, the earlier Amberols being made of wax. Around the same time Edison introduced 4 minute cylinders, having twice the playing time of standard cylinders, achieved simply by shrinking the groove size and spacing them twice as close together in the spiral around the cylinder. Amberol cylinders are of the four-minute variety. Edison made several designs of phonographs both with internal and external horns for playing these improved cylinder records. The internal horned models were called Amberolas. Edison also marketed its "Fireside" model phonograph with a gearshift and a reproducer with two styli that allowed it to play both 2 minute and 4 minute cylinders.

Amberol cylinder package lid

Disc records

In the era before World War I, phonograph cylinders and disc records competed with each other for public favor.

Rim of Edison "Blue Amberol" cylinder

The audio fidelity of a sound groove is debatably better if it is engraved on a cylinder, due to much improved linear tracking, and this was not resolved until the advent of RIAA standards in the early 1940s, by which time it was a moot point, as cylinder production stopped with Edison's last efforts in October 1929.

Advantages of cylinders

The cylinder system had certain advantages. As noted, wax cylinders could be used for home recordings, and "indestructible" types could be played over and over many more times than the disc. Cylinders usually rotated twice as fast as contemporary discs, but the linear velocity was comparable to the inner most grooves of the disc. In theory, this would provide generally poorer audio fidelity. Furthermore, since constant angular velocity translates into constant linear velocity (the radius of the helical track is constant), cylinders were also free from inner groove problems suffered by disc recordings. Around 1900, cylinders on average were indeed of notably higher audio quality than contemporary discs, but as disc makers improved their technology by 1910 the fidelity differences between better discs and cylinders became minimal.

Cylinder phonographs generally used a worm gear to move the stylus in synchronization with the grooves of the recording, whereas most disc machines relied on the grooves to pull the stylus along. This resulted in cylinder records played a number of times having less degradation than discs, but this added mechanism made cylinder machines more expensive.

Advantages of discs

Both the disc records and the machines to play them on were cheaper to mass-produce than the products of the cylinder system. Disc records were also easier and cheaper to store in bulk, as they could be stacked, or when in paper sleeves put in rows on shelves like books.

Many cylinder phonographs used a belt to turn the mandrel; slight slippage of this belt could make the mandrel not turn evenly, thus resulting in pitch fluctuations. Disc phonographs using a direct system of gears turned more evenly; the heavy metal turntable of disc machines acted as a flywheel, helping to minimize speed wobble.

In 1908 Columbia Records introduced mass production of disc records with recordings pressed on both sides, which soon became the industry standard. Patrons of disc records could now get two recordings for less than the price of one on cylinder.

In addition, consumers could store discs more easily and densely than they could store collections of cylinders.

The disc companies had superior advertising and promotion, most notably the Victor Talking Machine Company in the United States and the Gramophone Company/HMV in the Commonwealth. Great singers like Enrico Caruso were hired to record exclusively, helping put the idea in the public mind that that company's product was superior. Edison tried to get into the disc market with hill-and-dale discs, Edison Disc Records.

Demise of cylinders

Cylinder recordings continued to compete with the growing disc record market into the 1910s, when discs won the commercial battle. In that decade, Columbia (which had been making both discs and cylinders) switched exclusively to discs, and Edison started marketing their own disc records. However Edison continued to sell new cylinder records to consumers with cylinder phonograph machines through 1929. The latest of the new cylinders were simply dubs of disc records, and as such were of lower fidelity than the disc versions.

Disc records and cylinders

Cylinder records are once again being manufactured but out of modern long lasting materials. The Vulcan Cylinder Record Company of Sheffield, England currently boasts nearly two dozen titles in both 2 and 4 minute sizes, mostly dubs from original material but also some recent acoustic recordings. Also, out of Baldwin, New York, the Wizard record company is making similar cylinders.

Later application of phonograph cylinder technology

Cylinder phonograph technology continued to be used for Dictaphone and Ediphone recordings for office use for decades.

Cylinder on Dictaphone dictation machine. The recording head moved R-L.
The black lines are shiny gapsbetween tracks. Wax cylinders could record
1200-1500 words. They could be reused 100-120 times by putting them
in a machine that erased them by 'shaving' off the surface.

In 1947, Dictaphone replaced wax cylinders with their DictaBelt technology, which cut a mechanical groove into a plastic belt instead of into a wax cylinder. This was later replaced by magnetic tape recording. However, cylinders for older style dictating machines continued to be available for some years, and it was not unusual to encounter cylinder dictating machines into the 1950s.

In the late 20th and early 21st century some new recordings have been made on cylinders for the novelty effect of using obsolete technology. Probably the most famous of these are by They Might Be Giants, who in 1996 recorded "I Can Hear You," performed without electricity, on an 1898 Edison wax recording studio phonograph at the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, New Jersey. This song was released on Factory Showroom in 1996 and re-released on the 2002 compilation Dial-A-Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants. (The band also performed and recorded a song about Edison, a studio recording of which appeared on their 1999 internet-only release Long Tall Weekend and subsequently on their first album aimed towards a younger audience, No!.)

In 2010 the British steampunk band The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing released the track 'Sewer', from their debut album, Now That's What I Call Steampunk! Volume 1 on very limited edition Wax Cylinder, only 40 were made and only 30 were put on sale. The box set came with instructions on how to make your own cylinder player for less than £20. The BBC covered the release on Television on BBC Click, on BBC Online and on Radio 5 Live.

Preservation of cylinder recordings

Because of the nature of the recording medium, playback of many cylinders can cause degradation of the recording. The replay of cylinders diminishes their fidelity and degrades their recorded signals. Additionally, when exposed to humidity, mold can penetrate cylinders’ surface and cause the recordings to have surface noise. Currently, the only professional machine manufactured for the playback of cylinder recordings is the Archéophone player, designed by Henri Chamoux. The Archéophone is presently used by the Edison National Historic Site, Bowling Green State University (Bowling Green, Ohio), The Department of Special Collections, Donald C Davidson Library at The University of California, Santa Barbara, and many other libraries and archives.

Proper way to hold a cylinder record: put fingers on the inside;
do not touch the outer surfacewhich has the recording.

Other modern so-called 'plug-in' mounts, each incorporating the use of a Stanton 500AL MK II magnetic cartridge, have been manufactured from time to time. Information on each may be sighted on the Phonograph Makers Pages link. It is possible to use these on the Edison cylinder players.

Also of interest is the cylinder player built by BBC engineers working in 'Engineering Operations - Radio' in the early 1990s. This was equipped with a linear-tacking arm borrowed from a contemporary turntable, and an Ortofon cartridge. It employed a wide range of analogue EQ filters (since various recording companies used different EQ until standarisation (for discs) arrived in the form of RIAA curves), and was used to transfer archive material to DAT tape.

In an attempt to preserve the historic content of the recordings, cylinders can be read with a confocal microscope and converted to a digital recording format. The resulting sound clip in most cases sounds better than stylus playback from the original cylinder. Having an electronic version of the original recordings enables archivists to open access to the recordings to a wider audience. This technique also has the potential to allow for reconstruction of damaged or broken cylinders. (Fadeyev & Haber, 2003)

Modern reproductions of cylinder and disc recordings usually give the impression that the introduction of discs was a quantum leap in audio fidelity, but this is on modern playback equipment; played on equipment from around 1900, the cylinders do not have noticeably more rumble and poorer bass reproduction than the discs. Another factor is that many cylinders are amateur recordings, while disc recording equipment was simply too expensive for anyone but professional engineers; many extremely poor recordings were made on cylinder, the vast majority of disc recordings were competently recorded.

Also important is the quality of the material: the earliest tinfoil recordings wore out fast. Once the tinfoil was removed from the cylinder it was nearly impossible to re-align in playable condition. None of the earliest tinfoil recordings has been played back since the 19th century. (Hypothetically in the future some sound might be salvaged from few surviving flattened out early tinfoil records.) The earliest soft wax recordings also wore out quite fast, though they have better fidelity than the early rubber discs.

In addition to poor states of preservation, the poor impression modern listeners can get of wax cylinders is from their early date, which can compare unfavorably to recordings made even a dozen years later. Other than a single playable example from 1878 (from an experimental phonograph-clock), the oldest playable preserved cylinders are from the year 1888. These include a severely degraded recording of Johannes Brahms and a short speech by Sir Arthur Sullivan in fairly listenable condition. Somewhat later are the almost unlistenable 1889 amateur recordings of Nina Grieg. The problem with the wax cylinders is that being an organic material (it is not actually wax) readily supports the growth of mildew which penetrates throughout the cylinder and, if serious enough, renders the recording unplayable. The earliest preserved rubber disc recordings are children's records, featuring animal noises and nursery rhymes. This means that the earliest disc recordings most music lovers will hear are shellac discs made after 1900, after more than ten years of development.

Facebook launched iPad app.

2011-10-10T19:44:00.005-04:00

Facebook has finally launched its official iPad app, after months of speculations and leaks.

Facebook for iPad, now available in the iOS App Store (update: it’s still rolling out), looks much like the version that leaked in July. The app is designed primarily as a consumption experience, which is why the app emphasizes photos. Photos take up the entire screen, and users can pinch to zoom in on them. Navigating through a photo album is done simply by swiping left or right.

The Facebook iPad App includes a left-hand navigation bar for accessing the News Feed, photos, messages, Groups and settings. Notifications, chat, status updates, search and Facebook’s other key features made the cut as well.

The app does offer a few new features. Users can play their favorite Facebook games in full-screen mode, thanks to the launch of the Facebook Platform for mobile devices and iOS. Games from EA, Zynga and more will support additional features such as Facebook Credits.

Facebook didn’t forget about video, either — Facebook for iPad supports HD video and Airplay, so users can watch Facebook videos through their Apple TVs or their other Apple devices.

The app is launching with surprisingly little fanfare, given the anticipation of the app’s launch and the multitude of leaks and speculation surrounding it. We reported that Facebook was supposed to launch the app at Apple’s iPhone 4S event.

Facebook News Feed with Sidebar

The sidebar is the main navigation tool of Facebook for iPad.

Facebook News Feed with Sidebar

The sidebar is the main navigation tool of Facebook for iPad.

Facebook Photo Albums

The Facebook iPad App focuses on the consumption experience, specifically photos.

Facebook Photo: Full-Screen

Photos appear in a full-screen format on the iPad app.

Facebook Photo Album Scrolling
Users can swipe left or right to view other photos in an album

Facebook Friends List

This is a simple and visual way to view somebody's friends.

Facebook Places

Facebook Places actually maps out the location of your friends on a Google Map.

Facebook Messages

Facebook has included its popular Messages feature in the app.

Facebook Chat and Notifications

Facebook's iPad app includes chat functionality and notifications, like the desktop version.

Get the App>>>

Amazon Unveils Kindle Fire Tablet.

2011-09-28T17:14:00.005-04:00

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos unveils the Kindle Fire

Amazon has unveiled a colour tablet computer called the Kindle Fire.

The $199 (£130) device will run a modified version of Google's Android operating system.

Until now, the company has limited itself to making black and white e-readers, designed for consuming books and magazines.

As well as targeting Apple's iPad, Amazon is likely to have its sights on rival bookseller US Barnes & Noble, which already has a colour tablet.

The Kindle Fire will enter a hugely competitive market, dominated by Apple's iPad.

Amazon will be hoping to leverage both the strength of the Kindle brand, built up over three generations of its popular e-book reader, and its ability to serve up content such as music and video.

In recent years, the company has begun offering downloadable music for sale, and also has a streaming video-on-demand service in the United States. Those, combined with its mobile application store, give it a more sophisticated content "ecosystem" than most of its rivals.

"It's the price and the backup services that make it really exciting," said Will Findlater, editor of Stuff magazine.

"Content is the big differentiator. It's what every other platform has been lacking, except the iPad."

Amazon's decision to opt for a 7" screen, as opposed to the larger 10" displays favoured by many rival manufacturers was a cause for concern for Ovum analyst Adam Leach.

"This screen size has undoubtedly helped them achieve a lower price point for the device but so far this form factor has not been popular with consumers, we shall see if this is related to other aspects of those devices other than its screen size. "

Digital dividend

Digital content has already proved itself to be a money-spinner for Amazon.

Although the company has never released official sales figures for the Kindle, it did state - in December 2010 - that it was now selling more electronic copies of books than paper copies.

Its US rival, Barnes & Noble, has also enjoyed success with its Nook devices.

In October 2010, the company unveiled the Nook Color, which also runs a version of Android, albeit with lower hardware specs than many fully featured tablets.

While the Nook Color is largely focused on book and magazine reading, some users have managed to unlock its wider functionality and install third-party apps.

The Kindle Fire's $199 (£130) price tag undercuts the Nook Color by $50 (£30) and is significantly cheaper than more powerful tablets from Apple, Samsung, Motorola and others.

It is due to go on sale on 15 November in the US, although global release dates are currently unavailable.

Price cuts

Alongside the Kindle Fire, Amazon also announced a refresh of its Kindle e-readers.

Amazon has droped the keyboard from some of its Kindles in favour of touch

The entry level device has had its keyboard removed and will now sell for $79, down from $99. Amazon UK announced that the new version would retail at £89.

A version with limited touchscreen capability, known as the Kindle Touch, will sell for $99. Only the US pricing has been announced so far.

"These are premium products at non premium prices," said Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos. "We are going to sell millions of these."

Get the copy>>>

Einstein's law of physics shattered.

2011-09-25T16:55:00.020-04:00

Fired neutrino beam 454 miles (730 kilometres) underground from Geneva to Italy.

Physicists on the team that measured particles travelling faster than light said Friday they were as surprised as their skeptics about the results, which appear to violate the laws of nature as we know them.

Hundreds of scientists packed an auditorium at one of the world's foremost laboratories on the Swiss-French border to hear how a subatomic particle, the neutrino, was found to have outrun light and confounded the theories of Albert Einstein.

"To our great surprise we found an anomaly," said Antonio Ereditato, who participated in the experiment and speaks on behalf of the team.

An anomaly is a mild way of putting it.

Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen, according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity. The speed of light - 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometres per second) - has long been considered a cosmic speed limit.

The team - a collaboration between France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research and Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory - fired a neutrino beam 454 miles (730 kilometres) underground from Geneva to Italy.

They found it travelled 60 nanoseconds faster than light. That's sixty billionth of a second, a time no human brain could register.

"You could say it's peanuts, but it's not. It's something that we can measure rather accurately with a small uncertainty," Ereditato told The Associated Press.

If the experiment is independently repeated - most likely by teams in the United States or Japan - then it would require a fundamental rethink of modern physics.

"Everybody knows that the speed limit is c, the speed of light. And if you find some matter particle such as the neutrino going faster than light, this is something which immediately shocks everybody, including us," said Ereditato, a researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Physicists not involved in the experiment have been understandably skeptical.

Alvaro De Rujula, a theoretical physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva from where the neutron beam was fired, said he blamed the readings on a so-far undetected human error.

If not, and it's a big if, the door would be opened to some wild possibilities.

The average person, said De Rujula, "could, in principle, travel to the past and kill their mother before they were born."

But Ereditato and his team are wary of letting such science fiction story lines keep them up at night.

"We will continue our studies and we will wait patiently for the confirmation," he told the AP. "Everybody is free to do what they want: to think, to claim, to dream."

He added: "I'm not going to tell you my dreams."

RELATED ARTICLES:

Scientist rejects "faster than light" particle finding

Neutrinos still faster than light.

Microsoft Presents Windows 8 Developer Preview

2011-09-13T19:30:00.005-04:00

Steven Sinofsky, president of Windows and Windows Live Divisions at Microsoft, talks to thousands of developers about the Windows 8 Developer Preview during the opening BUILD keynote, Sept. 13 in Anaheim, Calif.

LOS ANGELES — Sept. 13, 2011 — Today at its developer-focused BUILD conference, Microsoft Corp. showcased a detailed preview of the next major release of Windows, code-named “Windows 8.” The company also detailed new tools for developers to help write applications for more than 1 billion people around the world who use Windows every day.

“We reimagined Windows,” said Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft, in his keynote address to the thousands of developers in attendance. “From the chipset to the user experience, Windows 8 brings a new range of capabilities without compromise.”

See your apps and content in a glance on the start screen.

The company also highlighted a variety of new features in Windows 8, including the following:

Touch-First User Interface

•Metro style. Windows 8 introduces a new Metro style interface built for touch, which shows information important to you, embodies simplicity and gives you control. The Metro style UI is equally at home with a mouse and keyboard as well.

•Touch-first browsing, not just browsing on a touch device. Providing a fast and fluid touch-browsing experience, Internet Explorer 10 puts sites at the center on new Windows 8 devices.
More Ways to Engage With Powerful, Connected Apps

•Powered by apps. Metro style apps built for Windows 8 are the focal point of your experience, filling your entire screen so there are no distractions.

•Apps can work together. Apps communicate with each other in Windows 8. For example, you can easily select and email photos from different places, such as Facebook, Flickr or on your hard drive.

•Your experience syncs across your devices. Live roams all the content from the cloud services you use most — photos, email, calendar and contacts — keeping them up-to-date on your devices.
With SkyDrive, you can access your files, photos and documents from virtually anywhere with any browser or with Metro style apps in Windows 8.
Enhanced Fundamentals

•The best of Windows 7, only better. Windows 8 is built on the rock-solid foundation of Windows 7, delivering improvements in performance, security, privacy and system reliability. Windows 8 reduces the memory footprint needed — even on the lowest-end hardware — leaving more room for your apps.

•Preserving power-user favorites and making them better. For those who push the limits of their PC, Windows 8 features an enhanced Task Manager and Windows Explorer and new, flexible options for multimonitor setups.

New Developer Opportunities

•Windows Store. The Windows Store will allow developers to sell their apps anywhere Windows is sold worldwide, whether they’re creating new games or familiar productivity tools.

•Build using more languages. Windows 8 lets you leverage your existing skills and code assets to create great experiences using the programming language you prefer.

•Rich hardware integration leads to richer experiences — particularly for games. DirectX 11 gaming power underlies Windows 8, allowing the easy creation of full-screen games with smooth, flicker-free action.
New Generation of Hardware

•One Windows — many shapes and sizes. Support for ARM-based chipsets, x86 (as well as x32 and x64) devices, touch and sensors means Windows 8 works beautifully across a spectrum of devices, from 10-inch tablets and laptops to all-in-ones with 27-inch high-definition screens.

•Always connected. With Windows 8, new ultrathin PCs and tablets turn on instantly, run all day on a single charge and stay connected to the Internet so your PC is ready when you are. Next-generation system on a chip (SoC) support will also enable greatly extended standby and low-power states.

•Tap the full power of your PC. Windows 8 runs on PCs and is compatible with the devices and programs you use today on Windows 7, without compromise, to deliver the performance you expect of a PC.

Beyond seeing highlights of the work done on devices by partners including AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, attendees at BUILD also received a Samsung prototype PC with Windows Developer Preview to aid them in creating and testing apps. Developers will also be able to download the Windows Developer Preview via the new Windows Dev Center later this week. Webcasts of sessions will be posted on the BUILD site as well.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Some information relates to a prerelease product, which may be substantially modified before it’s commercially released. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, with respect to the information provided here.

Facebook changes privacy options

2011-08-23T20:11:00.003-04:00

Facebook users will be asked to approve any postings that they are tagged in

Facebook has announced a major revamp of how users control their privacy on the site.

Among the changes, items posted online will each have their own sharing settings determining who can see them.

It is the latest in a long line of attempts by Facebook to streamline how members manage their personal information.

In the past, the social network has been criticised for seeming to bury privacy settings in obscure menus.

Now when users are tagged in a posting - such as a photograph or video - they will have the option to confirm or remove their identity before it appears on their profile.

Postings will have their own unique privacy setting

It is hoped the safeguard will eliminate the problem of malicious tagging, which is often used by cyberbullies who add other people's names to unpleasant images.

Other changes include:

In line controls - each item on a user's wall has individual privacy options, such as public, friends and custom
Tag takedown - the ability to remove tags of self, ask the person who tagged you to remove it, or block the tagger
Universal tagging - users can tag anyone, not just Facebook friends. Other person can choose not to accept the tagged post on their profile
Location tagging - geographic locations can be added in all versions of Facebook, not just mobile app
Profile view - the option to see how others view your profile is added above the news feed

Facebook's vice president of product, Chris Cox said that the arrival of another privacy refresh didn't necessarily mean the old system was confusing.

"I don't think the old controls were bad. I just think the new ones are much better," he told BBC News.

"The goal is just to make [the settings] more inline and more immediate, just right there in the profile."

Users can ask for tags of them to be removed or have the content deleted completely

Mr Cox also played down suggestions that Facebook might be improving its privacy controls as it prepares to extend access to children under 13 - something its founder Mark Zuckerberg has said he would like to see.

"This change is really just about the people that are on Facebook today and the new users who just joined today and making it easier for them.

"This really is not in any way about the under-13 experience," said Mr Cox.

He promised there would not be any unexpected changes to users' privacy settings during the changeover process.

Existing users will retain their current default sharing settings.

The first time new Facebook members share a piece of content, their default suggestion will be public - which replaces the "everyone" setting. If users select another option, that will become their default in future.

The new privacy options will begin to be rolled out across the site from Thursday 25 August.

Commercial Space Hotel

2011-08-18T14:49:00.002-04:00

The age of space tourism might be closer than you think. In fact, if you have an extra $1 million lying around, five years from now you could be one of the first off-world adventurers to stay for five days in this orbiting hotel built by Russian company Orbital Technologies.

You’ll get there via a Russian Soyuz rocket, taking you about a day to reach the Commercial Space Station 217 miles above the earth. Once you catch up to the orbiting abode, you’ll settle in with your comrades — up to six other space tourists (or researchers) — for an unparalleled adventure, residing in four cabins aboard the space station.

While you’re traveling at 17,500 miles per hour in low earth orbit, you’ll be pampered with all the spacely amenities you can imagine, such as plenty of gourmet foods, a specially designed sealed shower, your choice of a vertical or horizontal bed

Perhaps the best feature of the Commercial Space Station will be its large portholes, which will probably occupy most of your time as you gaze out into the cosmos and down at the earth below.

We’re just wondering if this trip can really be done for $1 million apiece, when Russia and the U.S. agreed in 2009 on a $51 million price for each Soyuz round trip. No matter what, it’s not going to be cheap. We can only hope there will be many private space ventures in operation during the next decade or two (so far, we’ve counted 9 private sector companies ready to take off into space), creating a competitive environment for such spectacular vacations that could bring the price down to mere stratospheric levels.

Interior View

Cutaway View

Interior View

Cutaway View 2

Cutaway View 3

Docking

Single Docking

Docking

World’s fastest plane missing

2011-08-16T20:09:00.004-04:00

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

A hypersonic airplane capable of speeds of 27,000 kilometers per hour and worth $300 million dollars is now missing in action somewhere in the Pacific ocean.

The folks who officially invented the Internet – better known as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) – have officially lost a $300 million dollar plane called the Falcon HTV-2 on August 11th. Clocking in at speeds of 27,000 kilometers per hour, this unmanned aircraft was considered to be the world’s fastest HVC (Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle) only now, it’s believed to be lying somewhere in the Pacific ocean after losing contact some 30 minutes or so into it’s flight.

The idea behind the small launch vehicle was to possibly produce an alternative to intercontinental ballistic missiles and give the U.S. military the ability to strike any target worldwide, within an hour or two, delivering a payload of hypersonic weapons on-board. Built of a special carbon composite body and coupled with sophisticated on-board navigational systems, the Falcon HTV-2 was supposed to provide engineers and military defense officials insights into aerodynamic performance and thermal protection capability. Considering as air travels past the aircraft at speeds of 6.4kms per second, temperatures can reach up to 2000 degrees Celsius around the exterior. This wasn’t the first attempt for the Falcon. In April last year, the original HTV-1 was set off screaming into the edges of space and it too met it’s demise only 9 minutes into flight. The on-board navigation or autopilot, self-terminated due to a technical glitch detected. Avoiding any disasters, it forced itself into a controlled roll and pitchover and dropped directly into the Pacific ocean.

In order to reach the unfathomable hypersonic Mach 6 speed noted, both the HTV 1 and 2 take were an all-in-one aircraft in which it could take off on a runway using a turbine engine and reach an initial airspeed of Mach 3 only to then be further propelled into the sky using ramjet booster rockets, that later disengage once the aircraft reaches the edge of space and then begins its return to earth. While travelling through the atmosphere, teams of engineers were banking on testing various manouvers and gathering critical data to further the program, only now the Falcon Project appears to have been shut down.

Spaceplane travel is nothing new for the U.S. and has been around since the 1957 when the first project called the x-20 Dyna-Soar was pubically acknowledged. Since then, several other projects have come along and it has been noted by one former Director under President Ronald Regan’s Star Wars program, that approximately $4 billion dollars had been spent on spaceplane research and development throughout 1970′s up until the 1990′s and that is not including the Space Shuttle program. All of which he noted, basically provided nothing in return except crashed vehicles and useless aircraft dubbed ‘hangar queens’ which are scrapped test planes stripped of their parts so other planes may fly.

That’s a lot of money spent on something that really isn’t a priority given the current economic situation in the U.S., but if history has a way of repeating itself, I am sure there will be another program in the works. Just wait and see.

A short video below demonstrates the test flight profile.

Can Google+ "undercut" Facebook?

2011-08-07T22:59:00.002-04:00

If it’s not obvious yet, Google+ is going to be able to “undercut” Facebook when it comes to game developers and platform transactions. Instead of taking a 30% cut of all Farmville seeds (or whatever people are buying), Google will be able to take a smaller percentage for themselves.
They may even take nothing. And when it comes to “monetization” on the G+ “website,” Google’s trump card against Facebook is that we may never even see an ad on G+. Google has plenty to gain without ever showing an ad and, put simply, Google doesn’t need the money. Facebook’s got to know this, and it’s got to have them just a little bit concerned.

This week, the WSJ reported that FB is testing out a “real-time” feed (as opposed to Facebook’s current default “Top News” algorithm). Presumably this new feed would become the new norm for users. Though I’d like to think Facebook has been listening to me when I critique their Top News algorithm, what’s really moving Facebook’s hand here (according to the WSJ) are complaints by advertisers and app developers. It seems that the “Top News” stream is killing the virality of advertisers “content” and of apps that are trying to find new users.

If it’s true that FB is considering these changes because of complaining developers and advertisers, that’s a real bad sign for FB. Facebook has made some defensive moves since the launch of G+, which in itself is unusual for them. But this is the first indication they may kowtow to complaining third parties. (Hey, the IPO is coming… competition is heating up, it has to happen, right?) Making decisions informed by the concerns of these third-parties doesn’t automatically spell doom, of course. But Facebook has been so darn good for so long because of their refusal to IPO, their refusal to think about the short term, and their refusal to let one party’s needs overshadow the general health of the service. The tough thing for Facebook is that the larger you get, and the more competing interests you have to consider, the more difficult your choices become.

FB’s trouble may seem like a positive for G+, but it’s not that simple. It’s a virtual certainty that Google will launch a platform (and not just a games platform), but how they do this is critical. We don’t want a repeat of Facebook’s cycle—where FB promised the world to developers, gave them free reign to build the hype, then cut off their marketing channels and destroyed their businesses so G+ needs to carefully balance the needs of developers with the health of the overall community.

From what I can tell, the heads at G+ are aware of the delicate balance that’s needed here. Though they gaffed in the way they carried it out, Google’s decision to block business accounts indicates that Google understands they need a real plan here. Frankly, I’m surprised that no “regular users” have spoken up to say they don’t want brands on G+. Maybe that’s just because 80% of the active users on G+ work in the “Internet industry”, and thus have something to gain by letting “businesses” into the service . Would “regular users” be so happy about this? As Matt Hogan argues, it may not be the best idea to let businesses come in and muck up the place at the very beginning.

That said, what we may be seeing here is a general evolution of brand-user interaction to the point that users trust that it just can “work” (like Twitter, where you can follow brands, but they can’t really bug you).

Because of poor planning on my part, the regular-user / business relationship on MySpace was never quite right. Businesses wanted to be able to go around and add people on MySpace, and it was hard to tell them “no” because of they way MySpace evolved over time. Facebook was smart to make it impossible for “Pages” to add people & comment for the first few years. But they recently reversed that decision. Whether that turns out to be a good thing remains to be seen. (It’s an easier move to make for Facebook now when the “true” user base is already established, and Facebook has years of refining spam prevention algorithms under their belt.)

But whatever the case, both Google and Facebook have some tough decisions ahead of them: how do they balance what’s best for the regular guy (you & me), advertisers (big brands), small local businesses (who can never afford the big spend), platform developers with non-competing services (games & music, which it appears FB won’t get into) and platform developers with potentially competitive services (like business networking and dating, which FB/G+ may want to get into themselves someday).

Over the long haul (5-10 years), the company that makes the right choices in these areas may just end up winning.

Techcrunch

Faster surfing, Upgrade your Web browser

2011-07-25T18:26:00.006-04:00

If there’s one piece of software on your computer that gets run ragged on an everyday basis, it’s your Web browser. With so many great sites on the internet for catching up on news, checking out videos, enjoying a mindless laugh, socializing with friends, or doing just about anything else you can imagine, our browsers have become a huge part what we do on computers.

So what’s changed? A big reason why we’re doing more on the Web is that our browsers have gotten a whole lot better in recent years. Early competition from Firefox, Opera, and Safari pushed Microsoft to deliver Internet Explorer 7 and 8, which were huge improvements over version 6. With the arrival of Chrome, Google challenged everyone to put the pedal to the metal – and it worked. Today’s browsers like IE9, Firefox 5, and Chrome 12 tear through web pages at a blistering pace, offering speed up to three or four times faster than browsers from just two years ago!

Faster, more powerful browsers have led to more complex, more feature-packed websites. It’s to the point now where our web browser is a bit like an operating system running web sites as “programs.” And like your operating system — whether it’s Windows, OS X, or Linux — there are important reasons to keep your browser as up to date as possible other than speeding it up.

It’s also about security. Nearly every major update for the big-name browsers in the past few years has introduced a new security feature. With Internet Explorer 9, for example, there was the new App Rep system that helps block social engineering malware with almost a 100% success rate. That feature also taps into another one that debuted in Internet Explorer 7: URL Reputation, which helps users avoid arriving at a malware-stricken site after clicking through a malicious link.

Google Chrome introduced sandboxing, which isolates web code in a secure “container” so that it can’t easily harm your computer – and later it began securing Adobe Flash content the same way. And just about all major browsers offer built-in protection against phishing attacks like the kind that plague Facebook from time to time. All these security measures have become increasingly important as cybercriminals move away from traditional viruses to smarter, more deceptive, Web-based attacks. Using scare tactics and infecting advertisements on the sites we browse, the bad guys try to push things like fake antivirus and system repair software onto our systems. A shiny, new browser can help protect you against their snares; old browsers probably won’t. In the past two years, these types of attacks have become incredibly common — and they’re costing Canadians money, too.

If you’re using an older browser, you’re simply not enjoying the same level of protection online that you would if you were to update. The more time you spend on the Internet, the more you’re exposing yourself to risks if you use an out-of-date browser, and there’s really no reason to avoid making the switch. Dealing with a look that you don’t like (a common complaint about IE9) is a small price to pay for the increased speed and security you’ll enjoy.

Worried that you might lose your bookmarks, saved passwords, or other browser data if you upgrade? Check out FavBackup, a free utility that will save data from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and even Flock.

Once you’ve done that, go ahead and download a newer, better browser!

Flying Car

2011-07-17T15:19:00.001-04:00

A concept PAV (artist's impression)

Considering the prevailing congestion problems with ground-based transportation and the anticipated growth of traffic in the coming decades, a major challenge is to find solutions that combine the best of ground-based and air-based transportation.
The optimal solution would consist in creating a personal air transport system (PATS) that can overcome the environmental and financial costs associated with all of our current methods of transport.

We propose an integrated approach to enable the first viable PATS based on Personal Aerial Vehicles (PAVs) envisioned for travelling between homes and working places, and for flying at low altitude in urban environments. Such PAVs should be fully or partially autonomous without requiring ground-based air traffic control. Furthermore, they should operate outside controlled airspace while current air traffic remains unchanged, and should later be integrated into the next generation of controlled airspace.

A concept cockpit (artist's impression)

The myCopter project aims to pave the way for PAVs to be used by the general public within the context of such a transport system. The project consortium consists of experts that can make the technology advancements necessary for a viable PATS, and a partner to assess the impact of the envisioned PATS on society (socio-technological evaluation). To this end, test models of handling dynamics for potential PAVs will be designed and implemented on unmanned aerial vehicles, motion simulators, and a manned helicopter. In addition, an investigation into the human capability of flying a PAV will be conducted, resulting in a user-centred design of a suitable human-machine interface (HMI).

Furthermore, the project will introduce new automation technologies for obstacle avoidance, path planning and formation flying, which also have excellent potential for other aerospace applications. This project is a unique integration of technological advancements and social investigations that are necessary to move public transportation into the third dimension.