Drink up that beer -- another will soon be whisked to the table thanks to a hi-tech pint glass that tells bar staff when it needs refilling.Developed by a Japanese electronics company, the intelligent glass is fitted with a radio-frequency coil in its base and emits a signal to a receiver set in the table when it's empty, New Scientist magazine reported Thursday.
The iGlassware system works by coating each glass with a clear, conducting material, enabling it to measure exactly how much liquid has been sipped or guzzled.
When empty, the glass sends an electronic cry for more beer from the table to waiters equipped with hand-held computers on frequencies similar to those used by mobile phones.
A team from the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories working in Cambridge, Massachusetts has made the first prototypes, but may find it hard to sell the idea to Britons.
"It sounds like a fun idea, but I don't think it would work in our pubs," said a spokesman for J.D. Wetherspoon, which runs over 500 pubs in Britain.
"The tradition in Britain is to get up and go to the bar for a round of drinks, not to have a waiter bring beers to the table, no matter how quickly," he said
2008年5月18日星期日
New Secret Weapon -- the Indestructible Sandwich
Picnics and packed school lunches may never be the same again, thanks to the latest breakthrough by military science -- the non-soggy sandwich.
Spurred on by rather unappetizing U.S. battlefield food known as Meals Ready to Eat, scientists at the Army Soldier Systems Center in Massachusetts have devised a vacuum-sealed sandwich that stays edible for up to three years.
"The water activity of the different sandwich components needs to complement each other," project officer Michelle Richardson told New Scientist magazine. "If the water activity of the meat is too high you might get soggy bread."
Using an array of chemicals to seal the meat and inhibit bacterial growth, the scientists already have produced pepperoni and barbecue chicken indestructible sandwiches, which have been given a cautious welcome by soldiers who agreed to try them.
Inspired by their apparent breakthrough, the scientists are now experimenting with pizzas, bagels, burritos and even the staple peanut butter sandwich.
Spurred on by rather unappetizing U.S. battlefield food known as Meals Ready to Eat, scientists at the Army Soldier Systems Center in Massachusetts have devised a vacuum-sealed sandwich that stays edible for up to three years.
"The water activity of the different sandwich components needs to complement each other," project officer Michelle Richardson told New Scientist magazine. "If the water activity of the meat is too high you might get soggy bread."
Using an array of chemicals to seal the meat and inhibit bacterial growth, the scientists already have produced pepperoni and barbecue chicken indestructible sandwiches, which have been given a cautious welcome by soldiers who agreed to try them.
Inspired by their apparent breakthrough, the scientists are now experimenting with pizzas, bagels, burritos and even the staple peanut butter sandwich.
Noise From Phone Can Chase Mosquitoes
South Korea's largest mobile phone operator said Thursday that it will offer cell phone users a new noise service that it says will repel mosquitoes.
SK Telecom Co. said subscribers can pay 3,000 won (US.50) to download a sound wave that is inaudible to human ears but annoys mosquitoes within a range of three feet. Customers can then play the sound by hitting a few buttons on their mobile phones.
The company claimed that the service worked during tests.
The service, which begins Monday, has one drawback: it consumes as much battery power as normal cell phone rings.
SK Telecom has 17 million subscribers and controls a little over 50 percent of the domestic market.
SK Telecom Co. said subscribers can pay 3,000 won (US.50) to download a sound wave that is inaudible to human ears but annoys mosquitoes within a range of three feet. Customers can then play the sound by hitting a few buttons on their mobile phones.
The company claimed that the service worked during tests.
The service, which begins Monday, has one drawback: it consumes as much battery power as normal cell phone rings.
SK Telecom has 17 million subscribers and controls a little over 50 percent of the domestic market.
Getting lost in the translation
Relying on online translation tools can be a risky business, especially if you expect too much of it. For the time being, might translation be something best left to the humans?Earlier this month the small German town of Homberg-an-der-Efze, north of Frankfurt, had to pulp an entire print run of its English-language tourism brochure - after officials used an internet translating tool to translate the German text.
According to one report, the brochure was "rendered meaningless" by the online tool.
Martin Wagner, mayor of Homberg-an-der-Efze, admits that the town made a "blunder". As a result of officials trying to save money by getting the Internet to do a translator's job, a total of 7500 brochures had to be binned.
This story highlights some of the pitfalls of translating online. There are many instant translation tools on the web - but they are best used for individual words and short phrases, rather than for brochures, books or anything complex.
For example, one of the joys of the web is that it grants you access to an array of foreign news sources. Yet if you were to use a translation tool to try to make sense of such reports, you could end up with a rather skewed and surreal view of the world.
Why is foreign text "rendered meaningless" when passed through an online translation tool? According to Sabine Reul, who runs a Frankfurt-based translation company, translation tools have limited uses - and problems arise when web users expect too much from them.
"A translation tool works for some things," says Reul. "Say a British company wants to order a box of screws from a German supplier. A sentence like 'We need one box of a certain type of screw' is something that a machine could translate reasonably accurately - though primitively."
Yet when it comes to translating blocks of text - words and sentences that convey thoughts and sentiments - online tools are bound to fail, she adds. "Beyond simple sentences, the online process simply doesn't work because machines don't understand grammar and semantics, never mind idiom and style."
"Language is not a system of signs in the mechanical sense of the word", says Reul. "It is a living medium that is used to convey thought. And that is where machines fail. Human input is indispensable as long as computers cannot think."
Reul and other translators look forward to the day when clever computers might help to ease their workload - but that time has not arrived yet.
"It would be nice if computers could do the job. And certainly the quest for machine translation has prompted a lot of linguistic research that may prove valuable in unforeseen ways. But experience to date confirms that even the most subtle computer program doesn't think - and you need to be able to think in order to translate."
Until the dawn of thinking computers, online translation tools are best reserved for words, basic sentences and useful holiday phrases. For tourism brochures, newspaper reports and the rest, you will have to rely on some old-fashioned "human input".
According to one report, the brochure was "rendered meaningless" by the online tool.
Martin Wagner, mayor of Homberg-an-der-Efze, admits that the town made a "blunder". As a result of officials trying to save money by getting the Internet to do a translator's job, a total of 7500 brochures had to be binned.
This story highlights some of the pitfalls of translating online. There are many instant translation tools on the web - but they are best used for individual words and short phrases, rather than for brochures, books or anything complex.
For example, one of the joys of the web is that it grants you access to an array of foreign news sources. Yet if you were to use a translation tool to try to make sense of such reports, you could end up with a rather skewed and surreal view of the world.
Why is foreign text "rendered meaningless" when passed through an online translation tool? According to Sabine Reul, who runs a Frankfurt-based translation company, translation tools have limited uses - and problems arise when web users expect too much from them.
"A translation tool works for some things," says Reul. "Say a British company wants to order a box of screws from a German supplier. A sentence like 'We need one box of a certain type of screw' is something that a machine could translate reasonably accurately - though primitively."
Yet when it comes to translating blocks of text - words and sentences that convey thoughts and sentiments - online tools are bound to fail, she adds. "Beyond simple sentences, the online process simply doesn't work because machines don't understand grammar and semantics, never mind idiom and style."
"Language is not a system of signs in the mechanical sense of the word", says Reul. "It is a living medium that is used to convey thought. And that is where machines fail. Human input is indispensable as long as computers cannot think."
Reul and other translators look forward to the day when clever computers might help to ease their workload - but that time has not arrived yet.
"It would be nice if computers could do the job. And certainly the quest for machine translation has prompted a lot of linguistic research that may prove valuable in unforeseen ways. But experience to date confirms that even the most subtle computer program doesn't think - and you need to be able to think in order to translate."
Until the dawn of thinking computers, online translation tools are best reserved for words, basic sentences and useful holiday phrases. For tourism brochures, newspaper reports and the rest, you will have to rely on some old-fashioned "human input".
Search for 'human computer'
A Northern Ireland team is leading the search for a thinking computer which can sense a user's mood.
Researchers at Queen's University in Belfast hope to complete the 10m euro project for an emotion-sensitive computer within four years.
The aim is to enable computers to think and behave more like humans.
The European-wide project is being coordinated from the university's School of Psychology and involves 160 researchers from 27 institutions.
The university's researchers developed the proposal and negotiated the contract with the European Commission.
The academics said the work would build upon attempts to create "multi-modal interfaces" which allow machines to sense and respond to the moods of the user.
Programme coordinator Professor Roddy Cowie said while it sounded like science fiction, computers which responded to human emotion would emerge.
"At the moment, our use of computers is limited by the fact that we need a keyboard and a screen to access them," he said.
"It would make an enormous difference if we could interact with them by speaking normally - perhaps through a microphone and a transmitter in a 'Star Trek' badge.
"But emotion is part of normal speech, and experience has shown that most users are deeply uncomfortable with speech interfaces that ignore it - too uncomfortable to use them very much.
"If we can make computers more intuitive and expressive, and also less challenging to use, there is enormous potential to let people make fuller use of information technology."
The emotion-sensitive computer would have its own "personality" and establish a social relationship with the user.
"It's a fair bet that in 30 years' time, emotion-sensitive interfaces will be as much part of life as windows and mouse interfaces are now," said Professor Cowie.
The project team believes such computers would play a major role in teaching and learning
Researchers at Queen's University in Belfast hope to complete the 10m euro project for an emotion-sensitive computer within four years.
The aim is to enable computers to think and behave more like humans.
The European-wide project is being coordinated from the university's School of Psychology and involves 160 researchers from 27 institutions.
The university's researchers developed the proposal and negotiated the contract with the European Commission.
The academics said the work would build upon attempts to create "multi-modal interfaces" which allow machines to sense and respond to the moods of the user.
Programme coordinator Professor Roddy Cowie said while it sounded like science fiction, computers which responded to human emotion would emerge.
"At the moment, our use of computers is limited by the fact that we need a keyboard and a screen to access them," he said.
"It would make an enormous difference if we could interact with them by speaking normally - perhaps through a microphone and a transmitter in a 'Star Trek' badge.
"But emotion is part of normal speech, and experience has shown that most users are deeply uncomfortable with speech interfaces that ignore it - too uncomfortable to use them very much.
"If we can make computers more intuitive and expressive, and also less challenging to use, there is enormous potential to let people make fuller use of information technology."
The emotion-sensitive computer would have its own "personality" and establish a social relationship with the user.
"It's a fair bet that in 30 years' time, emotion-sensitive interfaces will be as much part of life as windows and mouse interfaces are now," said Professor Cowie.
The project team believes such computers would play a major role in teaching and learning
Blog reading explodes in America
Americans are becoming avid blog readers, with 32 million getting hooked in 2004, according to new research.
The survey, conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, showed that blog readership has shot up by 58% in the last year.
Some of this growth is attributable to political blogs written and read during the US presidential campaign.
Despite the explosive growth, more than 60% of online Americans have still never heard of blogs, the survey found.
Blogs, or web logs, are online spaces in which people can publish their thoughts, opinions or spread news events in their own words.
Companies such as Google and Microsoft provide users with the tools to publish their own blogs.
Reading blogs remains far more popular than writing them, the survey found.
Only 7% of the 120 million US adults who use the internet had created a blog or web-based diary.
Getting involved is becoming more popular though, with 12% saying they had posted material or comments on other people's blogs. Just under one in 10 of the US's internet users read political blogs such as the Daily Kos or Instapundit during the US presidential campaign.
Kerry voters were slightly more likely to read them than Bush voters.
Blog creators were likely to be young, well-educated, net-savvy males with good incomes and college educations, the survey found.
This was also true of the average blog reader, although the survey found there was a greater than average growth in blog readership among women and those in minorities.
The survey, conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, showed that blog readership has shot up by 58% in the last year.
Some of this growth is attributable to political blogs written and read during the US presidential campaign.
Despite the explosive growth, more than 60% of online Americans have still never heard of blogs, the survey found.
Blogs, or web logs, are online spaces in which people can publish their thoughts, opinions or spread news events in their own words.
Companies such as Google and Microsoft provide users with the tools to publish their own blogs.
Reading blogs remains far more popular than writing them, the survey found.
Only 7% of the 120 million US adults who use the internet had created a blog or web-based diary.
Getting involved is becoming more popular though, with 12% saying they had posted material or comments on other people's blogs. Just under one in 10 of the US's internet users read political blogs such as the Daily Kos or Instapundit during the US presidential campaign.
Kerry voters were slightly more likely to read them than Bush voters.
Blog creators were likely to be young, well-educated, net-savvy males with good incomes and college educations, the survey found.
This was also true of the average blog reader, although the survey found there was a greater than average growth in blog readership among women and those in minorities.
'Robot soldiers' bound for Iraq
The US military is planning to deploy robots armed with machine-guns to wage war against insurgents in Iraq.
Eighteen of the 1m-high robots, equipped with cameras and operated by remote control, are going to Iraq this spring.
The machine is based on a robot already used by the military to disable bombs.
Officials say the robot warrior is fast, accurate and will track and attack the enemy with relatively little risk to the lives of US soldiers.
Unlike its human counterparts, the armed robot does not require food, clothing, training, motivation or a pension.
When not needed in war, it can be mothballed in a warehouse.
However, the robot will rely on its human operator, remotely studying footage from its cameras, for the order to open fire.
According to Bob Quinn, a manager with Foster-Miller, the US-based company which worked with the military to develop the robot, the only difference for a soldier is that "his weapon is not at his shoulder, it's up to half a mile away".
The robot fighter has been christened Swords, after the acronym for Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems.
It is based on the Talon robot, which is widely used by the military to disarm bombs.
A US officer who helped test the robot said it was a more accurate shot than the average soldier because it is mounted on a stable platform and takes aim electronically.
Eighteen of the 1m-high robots, equipped with cameras and operated by remote control, are going to Iraq this spring.
The machine is based on a robot already used by the military to disable bombs.
Officials say the robot warrior is fast, accurate and will track and attack the enemy with relatively little risk to the lives of US soldiers.
Unlike its human counterparts, the armed robot does not require food, clothing, training, motivation or a pension.
When not needed in war, it can be mothballed in a warehouse.
However, the robot will rely on its human operator, remotely studying footage from its cameras, for the order to open fire.
According to Bob Quinn, a manager with Foster-Miller, the US-based company which worked with the military to develop the robot, the only difference for a soldier is that "his weapon is not at his shoulder, it's up to half a mile away".
The robot fighter has been christened Swords, after the acronym for Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems.
It is based on the Talon robot, which is widely used by the military to disarm bombs.
A US officer who helped test the robot said it was a more accurate shot than the average soldier because it is mounted on a stable platform and takes aim electronically.
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