Rochester Amerks need to rebound against Toronto (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle)

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Switched On: When the smartphone giveth, Part 2

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

In case you missed it, Part I of this article can be found here

Last week's Switched On discussed the Slacker Portable, Sony eMarker and TrafficGauge, three dedicated devices that didn't make it but saw their functionality ultimately realized via smartphones. But there have been other idea for which the idea ultimately proved popular as smartphone bits rather than separately packaged atoms.

Continue reading Switched On: When the smartphone giveth, Part 2

Switched On: When the smartphone giveth, Part 2 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 Apr 2012 17:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Roboticist: This Is My Job

April 20, 2012 12:00 PM

Matt Bunting Tucson, Ariz. Age: 25 Years on Job: 3

When Matt Bunting was 12, he began building robots?simple rovers driven by remote control. His parents were supportive of his hobby, but one member of the household wasn't so thrilled. "I'd make the rovers chase after my cat," Bunting says. "It would hide, so I had to make a robot to invade its privacy!" His robots became more sophisticated, and when he got to the University of Arizona, he built a hexapod with artificial intelligence. Bunting's professor offered him a job in the Robotics and Neural Systems Lab, where the 25-year-old now creates robots inspired by biology. "I knew that this was what I wanted to do, and now I'm doing it," he says. "It's incredible."

Projects

1. Hexapod

When Bunting built this bot in 2009, it had no programmed knowledge of its own geometry. It used a camera to teach itself how to walk over four days. Now Bunting uses the device for research on machine learning. "I'm exploring behaviors using only the camera?no fancy sensors," he says. In one experiment, Bunting gave the robot a genetic algorithm that mimicked evolution, allowing it to learn how to walk with "this very eerie, natural motion," he says. "And that only took 10 seconds." For another, the hexapod built a 3D map of the surrounding terrain and stepped over obstacles.

2. Cheetah

To construct a robotic cheetah for a DARPA project, Bunting and his colleagues built a pair of pneumatically powered legs with simulated feet and toes. Most robots that run have springs in their feet. But the goal here isn't just speed. "If we wanted to build the fastest land robot, we'd make a wheeled machine," Bunting says. "Our constraint is to learn how biology solved a problem. It's hard to make a fully articulated limb that hits the ground all the time. It wears parts out." In the future, this work will help others make more durable robots and prosthetics.

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GPS: An Effective Location Tracker Device

Traveling to a new location and getting lost while on the highway can be one of the most stressful conditions that individuals encounter and the most typical solution is either to consult a map or to ask for instructions. But what if the map only appears to be a piece of document with multi-colored lines and if the person who is supposed to help is also not familiar with the directions? The top solution to this problem is a location tracker system.

Amongst the several locations trackers these days is the Global Positioning System (GPS). This technology was first introduced for military use but was then launched for open use, although having a partial coverage.

The GPS receiver is the component accountable in receiving the signals being sent by strategically positioned satellites through the air. Once received, the data will be extracted through a decoding procedure and then transmuted showing the desired information including road instructions.

Apart from acquiring instructions, a GPS has also been found as a useful vehicle tracking system that functions mainly in identifying the placement of a stolen or missing car. Considering the aid from real time tracking information vehicle location results in being a breeze to detect.

The GPS, although an advancement in technology, is also affected by certain factors that bring about the existence of certain limitations. An excellent example is the continuous development of towering buildings made from concrete which are found to block signals being sent off by the satellites to the various GPS models.

In addition, there are also other elements that cause erroneous data processing. First relates to the improper installation of either the hardware, software, or both. Another is the inability of the device to fulfill all of the system requirements required by a specific signal sent coming from the satellite.

A GPS Location Tracker

Why A Location Tracker Is Helpful

The Limitations Of A Vehicle Tracking System

The Limitations Of A Location Tracker

Why A Vehicle Tracking System Is Important

What Is A Location Tracker?

What Is A Vehicle Tracking System?

A GPS Vehicle Tracking System

Never Get Lose With A Location Tracker

Never Lose Your Car Again With A Vehicle Tracking System

Categories: Technology, auto and trucks, Communications: GPS

Click for further information on gps vehicle tracking or fleet management.. This article, GPS: An Effective Location Tracker Device is released under a creative commons attribution license.

Tagged as: car tracking, Communication, Fleet Management, gps track, gps tracker, gps tracking, location tracker, vehicle gps tracking, vehicle tracker, Vehicle Tracking, vehicle tracking gps

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Chumby halts hardware sales, long-term support looking mighty unlikely

"The site is closed temporarily." Never a good sign, indeed, and particularly not when it's plastered across Chumby's own webstore. For over two days now, that's the message given to anyone attempting to buy hardware from the company, and it looks as if the Chumby we knew may be counting down its final days. A scrappy upstart attempting to bring its Chumby OS to the masses via injections into larger OEMs, the outfit saw little to no uptake across a wide variety of products; Sony nixed the Dash earlier this year, and Insignia turned its back quite some time ago. To be fair, Chumby had stopped manufacturing its own branded hardware in 2011, with the outfit's Duane Maxwell confirming the outright death of Chumby's store in a forum posting today. According to him, there was "no point in keeping the store around once inventory was exhausted," though hardcore loyalists can still snag a NeTV from adafruit.

Other forum members have noted that all support emails now seem to be headed into the Great Beyond, and while the actual network that Chumby OS relies on remains alive at the moment, there's no guarantee it'll last. Interestingly, at least two individuals instrumental in the building of Chumby are now working at Media Navi -- both Alison Fay and Michael Coleman have moved Chumby-related job listings to "Past" in their LinkedIn profiles. We'll be reporting more as we get it, but in the meanwhile, we'd recommend giving your favorite Chum a warm hug. His / her heart may not be beating for too much longer.

[Thanks, Jonathan]

Chumby halts hardware sales, long-term support looking mighty unlikely originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Apr 2012 20:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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West African grouping calls summit on Mali, Guinea-Bissau

Tensions eased in post-coup Mali on Friday after the release of 22 political prisoners and as the regional grouping ECOWAS announced a summit on the crisis next week.

Leaders of the Economic Community of West African States will meet in Abidjan on Thursday when they will also address the crisis in Guinea-Bissau, whose government was also overthrown in a military coup, the Ivorian presidency of the bloc said Friday.

In Mali, interim prime minister Cheick Modibo Diarra set about forming his interim government after soldiers agreed to cede power to civilians in the Saharan nation.

And in comments on state television he said that while he was ready for talks with the armed groups who have seized control of the country's north, he would not let them hold the country to ransom.

"Yes, we will negotiate because we hate war. We will negotiate because we are not afraid to negotiate," he said.

But not with "a knife to the throat, accepting a fait accompli."

Ousted president Amadou Toumani Toure, who formally resigned after being overthrown by the military on March 22, left the country to seek refuge in Senegal.

It was not immediately known whether Toure, 63, would stay in Senegal indefinitely.

A military source in Bamako had earlier said on condition of anonymity that Toure had departed "with the agreement of Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo," the coup leader, after soldiers posted at the airport earlier refused to let him leave.

The military source said troops had tried to oppose the former president's departure by firing in the air, sparking mass panic.

Toure's departure from Mali and the release of his allies who were rounded up by the junta helped ease tensions in Bamako where some feared that soldiers were loath to give up power as arrests continued despite the commitment to a return to civilian rule.

The wave of detentions took place shortly after Diarra, a former NASA astrophysicist and current head of Microsoft Africa, was appointed. He is expected to announce the makeup of his transition government in the coming days.

Television footage had showed assault rifles and ammunition clips as Colonel Diamou Keita, the head of the gendarmerie, said they had arrested 11 civilians and 11 soldiers.

Also Friday, former colonial power France called on the military to "respect freedoms, especially that of the press, by withdrawing from the radio-television office."

French foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero hailed the release of political prisoners as "good news," adding: "This type of arbitrary arrest, which maintains a climate of pressure, should not be repeated."

Gendarmerie chief Keita said late Thursday that those released could still be recalled by the authorities for questioning. He did not elaborate.

Renegade soldiers said they acted against the government's inability to stop a Tuareg rebellion in the north. Since then however, the Tuaregs and Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamists have conquered the entire northern part of the country.

Amid a barrage of international condemnation, the junta handed power back to civilian authority but the coup leaders have continued to flex their muscles.

ECOWAS has also condemned last week's coup in Guinea-Bissau and the junta's subsequent decision to appoint a failed presidential hopeful to lead a two-year transition to democracy.

Malian deputies appealed Thursday to the armed movements controlling the north of the country to lay down their arms and withdraw immediately from all the occupied zones.

An African rights body warned Thursday that if Mali did not receive assistance to win back its north from Islamists and other rebels, it could become the "Afghanistan of Africa."

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Line In The Sand (talking-points-memo)

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