About Robin Edgar

Organisational Structures | Technology and Science | Military, IT and Lifestyle consultancy | Social, Broadcast & Cross Media | Flying aircraft

Celluon evoMouse – laser projected multitouch mousepad

The evoMouse is the evolution of the computer mouse.

With the evoMouse, your finger is your pointer and there is no more pushing around a physical mouse.

The evoMouse works on nearly any flat surface and requires very little space. It tracks effortlessly to your comfortable and natural movements.

With the evoMouse, you can perform common mouse operations using only your fingers. You can control the cursor, click and select, double-click, right-click and drag with basic hand gestures.

The evoMouse also features multi-touch functionality including scroll, rotate, zoom, forward and back. The evoMouse can even be used for handwriting recognition with your finger or a pen.

The evoMouse is easy and convenient to set up and use with almost any desktop or laptop computer. It connects via Bluetooth or a standard USB port.Because it allows natural movements and doesn’t require pushing around a physical object, the evoMouse may help reduce repetitive stress injuries like Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

via ++CELLUON ++.

TSA Airport perv scanners emit 10 times more radiation than initially stated.

The story then says that radiation levels are still ‘safe’. I’d say radiation levels were still ‘safe’ too. As far as I’m concerned we get enough radiation levels from the global background radiation, we really don’t need ANY more radiation from any source at all. Except medical X-Rays – these fall under what I term necessary. Not these stupid scanners that don’t work, don’t deter, cost millions and resequence our DNA.

TSA Admits Bungling of Airport Body-Scanner Radiation Tests | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Social Media Dashboard | Unilyzer

Unilyzer – Social Media Dashboard Share25Social Media ManagementWant to understand the return on your investment ROI from social media? Need to show your clients, investors, or manager results? Now you can with the Unilyzer Social Media Dashboard. Simply add your social accounts and let Unilyzer do the tracking and reporting.

Social Media Metrics Facebook Fan Page Metrics Twitter Metrics LinkedIn Metrics YouTube Metrics Google Analytics MetricsSoftware Features Profession Presentation Charts, Graphics, & Reports Configurable Dashboards Compare Fanpages and Metrics Compare Twitter Accounts and Metrics Email, Print, or Publish Exportable Reports Excel & PDF Effectiveness Scoring

Automatically Retrieves Data

The Unilyzer™ automatically retrieves marketing data and transforms it into the exact information you need. Unify and analyze your data with one tool.

via Social Media Dashboard | Unilyzer | Social Media DashboardUnilyzer – Social Media Dashboard.

PrimaSee – translucent displays

Making its first debut into the retail marketplace, STRATACACHE’s PrimaSee™ is a translucent digital display that showcases high-definition, dynamic video advertisements embedded within a glass panel. These see-through promotional videos correspond with products visible in the backdrop to convey point-of-purchase brand messages. Using an embedded media player, content can easily be updated based on current promotions.

via PrimaSee.

Tiny Spy Planes Mimic Birds, Insects

With a 6.5-inch wing span, the remote-controlled bird weighs less than a AA battery and can fly at speeds of up to 11 mph, propelled only by the flapping of its two wings. A tiny video camera sits in its belly.

The bird can climb and descend vertically, fly sideways, forward and backward. It can rotate clockwise and counterclockwise.

Most of all, it can hover and perch on a window ledge while it gathers intelligence, unbeknownst to the enemy.

“We were almost laughing out of being scared because we had signed up to do this,” said Matt Keennon, senior project engineer of California’s AeroVironment, which built the hummingbird.

via Tiny Spy Planes Mimic Birds, Insects.

Opendedup – SDFS, a file-system that does inline deduplication for free

The main features of SDFS are:

  • Cross Platform Support – Works on Linux or Windows.
  • Reduced Storage Utilization – SDFS Deduplication can reduce storage utilization by up to 90%-95%
  • Scalability – SDFS can dedup a Petabyte or more of data. Over 3TB per gig of memory at 128k chunk size.
  • Speed – SDFS can perform deduplication/redup at line speed 290 MB/S+
  • VMWare support – Work with vms – can dedup at 4k block sized. This is required to dedup Virtual Machines effectively
  • Flexible storage – deduplicated data can be stored locally, on the network across multiple nodes, or in the cloud.
  • Inline and Batch Mode deduplication – The file system can dedup inline or periodically based on needs. This can be changed on the fly
  • File and Folder Snapshot support – Support for file or folder level snapshots.

Opendedup.

Turn your plastic bags into crude oil

A Japanese inventor has found a way to convert plastic grocery bags, bottles and caps into usable petroleum.

Plastic bags are, of course, made from petroleum to begin with, but it is not the same kind of petroleum that is used in fuel. In order to turn home waste into home power the machine heats up the waste plastic and traps the vapors created in a system of pipes and water chambers. Finally, the machine condenses the vapors into crude oil, that can be used for heating on the home level

via New invention can turn your plastic bags into fuel at home.

Why is a lot of science not reproducible – the decline effect

The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved?

via The decline effect and the scientific method : The New Yorker.

A lot of medical science in question

This is the second time scientific results are being questioned on a very deep level in a very short time. It’s a very disturbing trend.

In just the last two months, two pillars of preventive medicine fell. A major study concluded there’s no good evidence that statins drugs like Lipitor and Crestor help people with no history of heart disease. The study, by the Cochrane Collaboration, a global consortium of biomedical experts, was based on an evaluation of 14 individual trials with 34,272 patients. Cost of statins: more than $20 billion per year, of which half may be unnecessary. Pfizer, which makes Lipitor, responds in part that “managing cardiovascular disease risk factors is complicated”. In November a panel of the Institute of Medicine concluded that having a blood test for vitamin D is pointless: almost everyone has enough D for bone health 20 nanograms per milliliter without taking supplements or calcium pills. Cost of vitamin D: $425 million per year.

Ioannidis, 45, didn’t set out to slay medical myths. A child prodigy he was calculating decimals at age 3 and wrote a book of poetry at 8, he graduated first in his class from the University of Athens Medical School, did a residency at Harvard, oversaw AIDS clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health in the mid-1990s, and chaired the department of epidemiology at Greece’s University of Ioannina School of Medicine. But at NIH Ioannidis had an epiphany. “Positive” drug trials, which find that a treatment is effective, and “negative” trials, in which a drug fails, take the same amount of time to conduct. “But negative trials took an extra two to four years to be published,” he noticed. “Negative results sit in a file drawer, or the trial keeps going in hopes the results turn positive.” With billions of dollars on the line, companies are loath to declare a new drug ineffective. As a result of the lag in publishing negative studies, patients receive a treatment that is actually ineffective. That made Ioannidis wonder, how many biomedical studies are wrong?

His answer, in a 2005 paper: “the majority.”

via Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong – Newsweek.