Want to record your life?

Originally invented to help jog the memories of people with Alzheimer's disease, it might one day be used by consumers to create "lifelogs" that archive their entire lives.

Worn on a cord around the neck, the camera takes pictures automatically as often as once every 30 seconds. It also uses an accelerometer and light sensors to snap an image when a person enters a new environment, and an infrared sensor to take one when it detects the body heat of a person in front of the wearer. It can fit 30,000 images onto its 1-gigabyte memory.

The ViconRevue was originally developed as the SenseCam by Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, for researchers studying Alzheimer's and other dementias. Studies showed that reviewing the events of the day using SenseCam photos could help some people improve long-term recall

Interested in film?

In the past, movie studios relied heavily on focus groups, audience surveys and reviews by film critics to anticipate how their films would fare at the box office.
But recent months have underscored the influence of online word-of-mouth in a world where a Twitter comment can help break or make a movie.

"The writing is on the wall much quicker than ever before," said Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president of Nielsen Online's digital strategic services, which is one of the largest such services working with studios.
"If you know the dog's not going to hunt, at what point do you start to get more efficient and say, 'OK, we're not going to spend everything, maybe we save the marketing budget for DVD,'" Blackshaw said.

Online buzz drove "Paranormal Activity" to a $7.9 million box office in the U.S. and Canada last weekend, setting a record for a movie playing in less than 200 theaters. The low budget horror flick is now on its way to wider release.
But in July, the raunchy comedy "Bruno" gave a lesson in the perils of another kind of audience horror, as it suffered a sharper-than-usual box office drop after its opening following negative comments by individuals on Web sites like Twitter and Facebook.
But all was not lost. "Bruno," which made a disappointing $60 million at U.S. and Canada box offices, inspired a new service to measure online reaction to movies.

A creation of advertising firm Bradley and Montgomery, the outfit Fizziology puts out a weekly chart showing which movies are getting people talking.
Two days before the Paramount Pictures release "Paranormal Activity" opened in 160 movie theaters, the Fizziology Web chart showed it was generating more online buzz than such highly anticipated films as November's "Twilight" sequel "New Moon," and that people were saying good things.

"What's really cool about this is the fact that we're listening in and we're paying attention, and folks don't even necessarily know," said Ben Carlson, co-creator of Fizziology.
"When someone comes out of 'Paranormal Activity' and says, 'It was so scary I won't sleep again,' that's positive buzz."
Christine Birch, president of marketing at DreamWorks Studios, said marketers are increasingly taking into account what average moviegoers say online.

Rwanda Emerging!

Now that we are in a Globalized age, there are more and more countries trying to speed up to the tech-based society.

We are looking now to Rwanda, which is country located in central-east Africa and it is a third world country, but now it is catching up whith computer and network devices in rural areas where, believe it or not, some of the people did not knew what a computer was.

Korea, and Rwandan government are working together to start this new age in villages. Once a week there is a bus which has 11 laptops and network, for the Rwandans to start their learning whith computers and to make them join the Tech- Society.

The part that they are working in is to make the network, faster and more avilable, because it is not enough.
Also Government is working in giving courses, and 4 year degrees to it's people.

Now Rwanda has got a greater thing to celebrate than it's rise up from the 1990's genocide and "dark age"

As well as network, the Government is working to provide comunication with phones, it is expected comunication to be doubled for next year. We are watching a country in ashes rise up and go further for it's development.

RFID Tags

RFID Tags

RFID Tags stand for Radio Frequency Identification this kind of identification is applied or putted into a product, animal and even humans for its identification and tracking through radio waves.

Some of its uses are access management, tracking of goods, tracking of persons and animals, contactless payment, travel documents, smart dust, location-based services, tracking sports and to verify authenticity.

We have all had relation or used a RFID tag, while using credit cards, buying a car with GPS, etc. some of us have seen on the television sports that require time track on each competitors.

Many musical instruments are stolen every year. For example, a brand or vintage guitar is worth about $50,000 each. “Snagg”, a Californian company specializing in RFID microchips for instruments, has ensambled tiny chips in 30,000 Fender guitars already. The database of RFID chip IDs is made available to law enforcement officials, dealers, repair shops etc. This could be some of the best advantages on RFID devices; actually they are very useful in daily life

On the other hand, there are also concerns about the fact that, even after you leave the store, any RFID devices in the things you buy are still active. This means that a thief could walk past you in the mall and know exactly what you have in your bags, marking you as a potential victim. A thief could even circle your house with an RFID scanner and pull up data on what you have in your house before he robs it.

Military hardware and even clothing have RFID tags to help track each item through the supply chain. Some analysts are concerned that, if there are particular items associated with high-level officers, roadside bombs could be set to go off when triggered by an RFID scan of cars going by.

In some recent report it was revealed about some clandestine tests at a “Wal-Mart” store where RFID tags were putted in packages of lipstick, with scanners hidden on nearby shelves. When a customer picked up a lipstick and put it in the cart, the movement of the tag was registered by the scanners, which activated surveillance cameras. This allowed researchers to watch 750 miles away those consumers as they walked through the store, looking for related items.

In my opinion the disadvantages are heavier than the advantages, because it could be an attempt on human’s security. The clandestine test could have been taken to trial, because the “researchers” were violating this costumer’s privacy.

In addition the most important part of the disadvantages in RFID tags is that if they are putted into a human, for tracking him or her, is just not moral, even if they are conditionally free, there are other punishments or things governments could do instead of tracking a prisoner.

In conclusion there are bigger and important disadvantages in RFID and I think they should be eradicated from the society because of the struggles they might cause.

Sofia Hernandez Ortega

PERSONAL Supercomputer!

SGI has launched the new personal supercomputer which combines power and performance capabilities in a desk type computer with the usability of a workstation.

It is the machine of our dreams, because it measures one by two feet and whisper quiet operations, low maintenance requirements and can stand what a whole company claims for!

The new Octane III works at a speed of 80 high-performance cores and has got nearly 1 TB of memory. It is configurable, and offers a selection of performance, storage, graphics, GP-GPU and a range of networking options.

Octane III is now selling with different configurations such as: ten dual-socket, quad-core Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based nodes; one dual-socket, quad-core Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based workstation with advanced NVIDIA graphics and/or GP-GPU card support; nineteen single-socket, quad-core Intel Xeon processor 3400 series-based nodes; and nineteen single-socket, dual-core Intel Atom processor-based nodes.

The Octane III ships as a pre-integrated platform with HPC application support for out-of-the-box experience and works with Microsoft HPC Server 2008, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems. Linux configurations include SGI ProPack and ISLE cluster management software.

Octane III is available with Intel Xeon processor 5500 series or Intel Atom configurations. Its price starts at $7995.