Another World Is Here

Another World Is Here "The new Southern Caifornian NRDC headquarters building may be the greenest in the country. No one quite knows, but it's clearly a sign of what's possible. http://www.gristmagazine.com/powers/powers112503.asp"

Dog cart

New Scientist "Orgasmatron"

Orgasmatron: "Women who cannot have orgasms can now have a device implanted in their spines that will trigger the sensation for them. Clinical trials of the 'orgasmatron' have begun in the US, with the approval of the Food and Drug Administration. The device was the focus of massive media attention two years ago, after New Scientist broke the news of its existence and used the term orgasmatron to describe it."

RFID Journal - California Holds New RFID Hearing

RFID Journal - California Holds New RFID Hearing: "...addressing Berkeley library's pending decision on whether to replace manual checkout systems with self-serve RFID-enabled stations in order to reduce the burden on its staff, many of whom are hampered by repetitive-stress injuries from checking books in and out. These injuries were responsible for approximately $200,000 in direct and $200,000 in indirect costs to the library through workers' compensation each year for the past five years. "As a library, we function on the basis of individual privacy and freedom," she said. "We take questions [about privacy] very seriously." In order to avoid infringing upon the privacy of its patrons, the library would use a closed system, that is, one in which the tag would not be linked to a book's identifying International Standard Book Number (ISBN). Six digits in the EPC tag's 10-digit system would be used to identify the book; the other four digits would be unused. The patrons' name, address and other identifying information would be kept separate from records detailing which books they checked out, except when the library is required to provide such records under subpoena or by the Patriot Act. "

RFID Journal - IP Forms RFID Alliance

RFID Journal - Paper RFID Alliance: "International Paper's Smart Packaging Group, offers a suite of RFID-enabled supply chain solutions that includes smart packaging, warehousing and transportation tracking. Since joining the Auto-ID Center in 1999 and kick-starting its RFID business, IP says it has had 350 meetings with customers of its industrial packaging materials who are interested in the potential for RFID in their own operations. It has also overseen eight pilots for customers that manufacture consumer goods, cosmetics and food and beverages.

RFID Journal - Smart Labels for Higher Education

RFID Journal - Smart Labels for Higher Education: "Inside Contactless has delivered a total of 10 million of Inside's PicoTag smart labels and microchips to China's Ministry of Education. 'This project makes us the number one supplier of RFID labels in China. Made of paper and polyethylene terephthalate (PETE) plastic and backed with a pressure-sensitive adhesive, PicoTag smart labels measure 70mm by 40mm. Chinese universities and colleges across a number of provinces have applied the smart labels to their students' ID cards. "

Well. More low power networking

Home Phoneline Networking: "The Home Phoneline Networking Alliance (HomePNA) is an international community of companies working together to develop and motivate adoption of specifications that allow people to use existing telephone lines as a home-networking infrastructure. "

OK. More low power...

HomePlug: "The HomePlug Powerline Alliance is an international community of companies working together to develop and motivate adoption of specifications that allow people to use existing power lines as a home-networking infrastructure. Members of this community span the broadband networking, telecommunications, hardware, software, service provider and consumer electronics industries. HomePlug's focus is to ensure mass deployment of consumer-friendly, low-cost, high-speed, no new wires solutions for in-home, powerline-based networking. "

More low power networks

Global Inventures Online: "The ZigBee Alliance is an association of companies working together to create a very low-cost, very low power consumption, two-way, wireless communications standard. This wireless communications solution will be embedded in consumer electronics, home and building automation, industrial controls, PC peripherals, medical sensor applications, toys and games. The ZigBee Alliance was established as a non-profit organization in 2002. The ZigBee technology is a low data rate, low power consumption, low cost, wireless networking protocol targeted towards automation and remote control applications. The ZigBee Alliance was created to address a market need for an industry standard to support these applications, as opposed to proprietary solutions. Philips, Honeywell and Invensys joined forces to draft a Market Requirements Definition for ZigBee. The IEEE 802.15.4 committee started working on a low data rate standard a short while later. The ZigBee Alliance and the IEEE decided to join forces and ZigBee became the commercial name for this technology. There are presently more than 35 companies, including major semiconductor manufacturers, IP providers and OEMs active in the ZigBee Alliance and helping to define this standard."

World Development Report 2004

World Development Report 2004: "Making Services Work For Poor People"

"Broad improvements in human welfare will not occur unless poor people receive wider access to affordable, better quality services in health, education, water, sanitation, and electricity. Without such improvements in services, freedom from illness and freedom from illiteracy - two of the most important ways poor people can escape poverty - will remain elusive to many.

The World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People says that too often, key services fail poor people - in access, in quantity, in quality. This imperils a set of development targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which call for a halving of the global incidence of poverty, and broad improvements in human development by 2015. The report provides powerful examples of where services do work, showing how governments and citizens can do better. "

VeriChip Forearm Registry

In your Forearm? VeriChip Registry: "VeriChip is a miniaturized, implantable radio frequency identification device (RFID) that has the potential to be used in a variety of personal identification, security, financial, and potential healthcare applications. About the size of a grain of rice, each VeriChip product contains a unique verification number and will be available in several formats. The verification number is captured by briefly passing a proprietary scanner over the VeriChip. A small amount of radio frequency energy passes from the scanner energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal transmitting the verification number.

Once implanted just under the skin, via a quick, simple and painless outpatient procedure (much like getting a shot), the VeriChip can be scanned when necessary with a proprietary VeriChip scanner. A small amount of radio frequency energy passes from the scanner energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal transmitting the individual’s unique personal verification (VeriChip ID) number. The VeriChip Subscriber Number then provides instant access to the Global VeriChip Subscriber (GVS) Registry – through secure, password-protected web access to subscriber-supplied information. "

Beyond the box

Beyond the box at ebuild.com

The structural insulated panels industry says the latest panels are energy efficient, easy to assemble, and strong.

But can they produce stylish architecture?


The Insulspan SIP walls and roof of this Michigan custom home handle the complex roofline and the 25-foot great room ceiling.

Despite the large window openings, the natural gas cost per year is about $500 (2003) for heating, hot water, and appliances.

Sick Home Syndrome

HOW HUMIDEX WORKS: "If your home has musty, stale odors you may have a condition known as Sick Home Syndrome. This occurs in homes with inadequate ventilation and excess humidity. In other words, your home is not breathing properly - as the EPA says it should for a healthy environment. Not enough air and too much moisture can make anything and anyone sick - including you and your family. Sick Home Syndrome usually leads to mold growth, as well as an accumulation of toxins, pollutants and gases. In addition, dangerous and costly structural damage may take place.

Humidex is a mechanical ventilation unit engineered to exhaust the moist, musty and contaminated air that becomes trapped in the house due to the poor circulation of indoor air. Excess humidity can be removed by heating it, by condensing it, or by ventilating it. Heating and/or condensing excess humidity is expensive and seasonal at best. Ventilating excess humidity with Humidex technology is the inexpensive and most efficient year round solution. High relative humid air, Molds, Musty Odors and Gases are expelled to the outside via the Humidex unit, and replaced with Fresh Air."

The Denpo Door Holder

The Denpo Door Holder: "Introducing a new and innovative tool that will enable the user to secure a door while preparing it for installation. Simply place the door between the two 'L' members and the weight of the door automatically clamps it securely into place. The door holder will accommodate doors of varying thickness, from 1'1/8 to 2'1/4. The wheeled model allows a heavy door to be transported from one location to another with ease. Sheet goods such as drywall or plywood can be moved by simply placing the material in the holder as you would a door. This door holder is a quality product. Its paint is a tough powder coat finish that can stand up to the heaviest of shop activity. Made of heavy gauge steel, this holder can hold up to 300 Lbs. and will provide many years of heavy duty use."

Door Boring

Door Boring Installation Kit: "Boring Jig Kit complete with basic fixture for Standard 2-3/8' and 2-3/4' backset positioning, 1' spade boring bit, 2-1/8' spur bit, 1-1/2' spur bit, 3/8' quick release adapter, 1-1/2' reducer ring, 1' x 2-1/4' latch mortiser,2-1/4' strike mortiser with full lip, steel strike marker, and heavy duty molded carrying case. $250.00"

Research in the Interest of Society

CITRIS & TinyOS: "In the midst of this energy crisis, how do you know if you're wasting power? Try asking your house. That's the idea behind the smart energy technology in development at UC Berkeley's Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITIRS). Instrumenting buildings with a network of tiny and inexpensive electronic sensors could save the state as much as $7 to $8 billion a year in energy costs while keeping consumers' utility bills in check, estimate UC Berkeley engineers, energy and environmental experts. Outfitted with wireless radio transceivers and their own "TinyOS" operating system written by computer science professor Dave E. Culler and his students, the Motes cost $100 each but could easily be produced for less than $1 in the near future. Hidden in office corners, conference rooms, and along hallways and running on batteries or solar power, they keep a constant vigil on light and temperature conditions. Similar devices coupled to electrical circuits in breaker boxes monitor power consumption. The readings hop from one Mote to another, ultimately landing at a central Web site for storage and data mining.

"The SensorWeb will provide huge reams of data about what's actually happening at any moment..."

TinyOS

TinyOS: "The networked sensor regime is an exciting new design space that is emerging as a result of innovations in RF Communication technology and MEMS technology. TinyOS explores the software support that is required in that design space. TinyOS is a component-based runtime environment designed to provide support for deeply embedded systems which require concurrency intensive operations while constrained by minimal hardware resources. Check out a fraction of the hundreds of TinyOS projects including the PicoRadio -- a meso-scale low cost (< 50 cents) transceiver for ubiquitous wireless data acquisition that minimizes power/energy dissipation. "

Intel's Tiny Hope for the Future

wired.com: "The microprocessor giant is thinking even smaller: tiny sensor chips that network with each other - inside everything on earth. As a department head at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's R&D arm, David Tennenhouse spent the late 1990s approving or denying funding for hundreds of far-out military programs. One proposal he reviewed, from a research team at UC Berkeley, outlined a concept called smart dust - fleck-sized wireless sensors intelligent enough to organize themselves into autonomous networks. Dropped from a passing helicopter, the sensors could spy on enemy movements or detect a hidden stash of mustard gas. Tennenhouse was intrigued enough to authorize several hundred thousand dollars in funding. Then he moved on to the next bizarre proposal. Tennenhouse left Darpa in 1999 to found Intel Research, the semiconductor giant's stab at offbeat R&D. Charged with finding up-and-coming growth technologies, he gave little thought to smart dust. A neat plaything for the Pentagon folks maybe, 'but not all that relevant to my new role at Intel,' he recalls thinking. A network of minuscule sensors, each containing only a few dollars' worth of circuitry, just didn't seem like a moneymaker. That is, until August 2000, when Tennenhouse was invited to Berkeley to check out a student-designed mote - the housing that contains a sensor assembly and a radio antenna to allow it to communicate with other motes. While examining the circuit board, something clicked. If motes could get significantly smaller - say, small enough to fit inside pill-bottle caps - they'd be unobtrusive enough to go anywhere. And that, Tennenhouse thought, would mean a windfall to the company providing the processors."

Wired 11.09: The New Diamond Age

Wired 11.09: The New Diamond Age: "Armed with inexpensive, mass-produced gems, two startups are launching an assault on the De Beers cartel."

Wired 11.12: View

A Municipal Information Utility: "Burlington, Vermont, is building a network. Like many municipalities across North America, it has decided to construct an advanced fiber network on its own. The AFN is being deployed first to support city services. Then, as part of the four-phase project, this municipality of just 40,000 will extend blazingly fast Internet service to businesses and residences. To many, this just looks like more socialism from Vermont. Why should government be in the business of providing high-speed networks? Isn't that what free markets are for? Haven't we all learned that the market is more efficient at supplying goods and services? Do we really need to rediscover the failings of Karl Marx at 100 megabits per second? The answer, as Cornell economist Alan McAdams argues, has nothing to do with Karl Marx and everything to do with basic economics. AFNs are natural monopolies. That doesn't mean that there can be only one, but rather that if there is one, then it is far cheaper to simply add customers to the one than to build another. The electricity grid in a local neighborhood is a good example of a natural monopoly. Sure, we could run four wires to every home, but do we really need four electricity companies serving every home? "

Digging for Googleholes

Digging for Googleholes - Google may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent.: "The arrival of Google five years ago served as a kind of upgrade for the entire Web. Searching for information went from a sluggish, unreliable process to something you could do with genuine confidence. If it was online somewhere, Google and its ingenious PageRank system would find what you were looking for and more often than not, the information would arrive in Google's top 10 results. But the oracle recently described as 'a little bit like God' in the New York Times is not perfect. Certain types of requests foil the Google search system or produce results that frustrate more than satisfy. These are systemic problems, not isolated ones; you can reproduce them again and again. The algorithms that Google's search engine relies on have been brilliantly optimized for most types of information requests, but sometimes that optimization backfires. That's when you find yourself in a Googlehole."

U.S. Conference of Mayors: Metro Economies Report (June, 2003)

U.S. Conference of Mayors: Metro Economies Report (June, 2003): "The U.S. Conference of Mayors Metro Economies Report June, 2003 The Role of Metro Areas in the U.S. Economy -- 84% of the economic activity and climbing?? "

IDEAS

IDEAS: "... the largest bibliographic database dedicated to Economics and available on the Internet. Over 200'000 items of research can be browsed or searched, and over 110'000 can be downloaded in full text! This site is part of a large volunteer effort to enhance the free dissemination of research in Economics"

Favorite Poem Project: The Poems

Favorite Poem Project: The Poems: "...a small sampling of some of the poems chosen by volunteers for the Favorite Poem Project. Take a look at the poems, perhaps say them aloud, and read or listen to some of what the Americans who love the poems have to say about them. "

[AHRI] - Aware Home Research Initiative

Aware Home Research Initiative: "Is it possible to create a home environment that is aware of its occupants whereabouts and activities? If we build such a home, how can it provide services to its residents that enhance their quality of life or help them to maintain independence as they age? The Aware Home Research Initiative (AHRI) is an interdisciplinary research endeavor at Georgia Tech aimed at addressing the fundamental technical, design, and social challenges presented by such questions. "