By John Biggs, TechCrunch – December 10, 2010 at 08:46AM
Katie Goldman is a cute little first grader who lives in Evanston, Illinois. She’s 7 years old and loves Star Wars. For a while she carried her Star Wars water bottle to school and then, one morning, she asked for the pink one instead. She told her mother that some kids at school had bullied her, telling her that Star Wars was for boys. Heartbroken, she resolved to fix the problem by backing down instead of calling them womp rats.
By Brian Barrett, Gizmodo – December 10, 2010 at 08:20AM
The good news is that with this chart of optimal Tic-Tac-Toe moves, you’ll never lose another match. The bad news is that this would’ve made War Games a whole lot less suspenseful. More »
By Robin Wauters, TechCrunch – December 10, 2010 at 06:37AM
Want to check out WikiLeaks on one of its thousands of mirrors hosted around the globe? You might have to click around quite a bit to find one that’s available and fully up-to-date.
Opinion site Antiwar.com has now launched a tool that automagically directs visitors of the site wikileaks.antiwar.com to the best WikiLeaks mirror site in his or her area.
It takes the guesswork out of finding a reliable mirror site when you wish to check out tens of thousands of leaked diplomatic cables but you’re actually in too much of a hurry to spend a couple of seconds clicking about.
Or you can just go to WikiLeaks.ch, I guess.
By Mike Masnick, Techdirt. – December 10, 2010 at 12:44AM
We’ve pointed out how badly many universities have fallen for the myth of magical profits from tech transfer efforts. In the last 30 years or so, there’s been this massive effort for some universities to try to profit off of “commercializing” their research. What they did was set up expensive “tech transfer” offices that were in charge of taking university research, patenting it, and then trying to find buyers. The theory, then, was that the university would make lots of money and companies would get access to all this great university research. The reality is that this hasn’t worked out at all. First of all, that whole theory skipped over the part that prior to locking up all that research, companies already had access to it — and were able to actually make use of it quickly because they didn’t have to go through a crazy and expensive licensing process.
The other problem is that, since these tech transfer offices are focused on making money, and all they have to sell is patents, they started to overvalue the patents themselves, making them prohibitively expensive, which actually decreased the ability to get those ideas out to the commercial sector and to turn that research into big money. And, did we mention how expensive it is to set up and run some of these tech transfer offices? A study from a few years back found that the majority of tech transfer offices lost money, with only a tiny handful (somewhere around a dozen) actually making money.
Oh, and on top of all that, this focus on putting up locks for the sake of charging has actually made basic research much harder as well, since much of it is based on freely sharing ideas — which is made more difficult when you want to hoard the idea in order to get a patent.
At some point, you would think universities would recognize this. They’re losing money, harming their own research and going against their basic principles as institutions for disseminating knowledge. Thankfully, some are finally starting to get the message. James Boyle points us to the news that the University of Glasgow has announced that it will be offering up most of its research under a free license. It is still reserving a few “key” bits of research for fee-based licensing, but it appears the default will now be free, which seems like it should be a good thing in terms of actually commercializing the research out of the university.
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By Sean Michael Ragan, MAKE – December 27, 2009 at 10:00PM
Transparentius, by noted Russian design firm Art Lebedev, consists of a semi-trailer equipped with a projector that displays the view from a forward-looking camera on the back of the trailer. [via Neatorama]
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By (author unknown), Core77 – December 23, 2009 at 09:34AM
Ever been stuck behind a semi on the highway and missed your exit sign? We’re digging Art Lebedev Studio’s Transparentius concept, which mates a simple idea with existing technology in a clever way: Cameras mounted on the front of a semi transmit the image to screens on the back of the truck, rendering a sort of virtual transparency.
By Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo – December 22, 2009 at 07:15AM
Art Lebedev calls this simple invention—a camera that takes images from the front of a truck to show it on screens in the back—Transparentius. I call it geeneeuzz.
I don’t know why this drawing shows a tank at the front of the truck, but I guess that in Russia people drive T-90s like in the US people drive Fords. I wish the technology was so cheap that this could be implemented for real, because I’m sure it would save a lot of lives on the road. [Engadget]
By Vladislav Savov, Engadget RSS Feed – December 22, 2009 at 06:07AM
Kudos where it’s due: not many design houses use tanks in their illustrations of a new road safety concept. Transparentius, as with most good ideas, is remarkably simple — you jack a camera onto the front of a truck, or lorry as they’re known in some places, and then project that image onto the back of your hulking transporter. The effect of this is to render the truck figuratively transparent for the driver behind, who is enriched with a lot more information about what lies on the road ahead. No word on how the rear projection is achieved or how sunlight glare is overcome, but knowing Art Lebedev, you can bet both challenges are solved in the most unaffordable fashion possible. Anyhow, now that you’ve got the idea, we’re throwing this one over to you dear mod-loving friends — can you build this without remortgaging the house?
[Thanks, Dennis]
Art Lebedev’s Transparentius eliminates opacity, improves road safety originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
By Kyle VanHemert, Gizmodo – December 21, 2010 at 11:20AM
Roughly six million cubic feet of water tumble down the Niagara Falls every minute. But for a few months in 1969 the American falls were completely dry, and last year a Connecticut man found never-before-seen photos of the historic occasion. More »
By Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo – December 21, 2010 at 10:40AM
William Castleman made a beautiful time lapse of yesterday’s Winter Solstice lunar eclipse, which was truly spectacular. If you missed it, you are going to love it. And if you watched it live, you are going to love it anyway. More »
