A Case for Reverse Innovation?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRAL_QRDORQ

Quoting from Technology Review " This year's Tourist Trophy eXtreme Grand Prix" (TTXGP) was billed as the first zero-emissions motorcycle race. The winner would not just be the fastest in the most dangerous race (It was so dangerous that even the Federation Internationale de Motocyclisme decertified the race in 1976) but the front-runner in the greater challenge ahead: creating an electric bike that can compete in the $50 billion world motorcycle market.

The winner was a four man team from Agni Motors in Gujarat India. It was four week's of four men working out a garage in India.

0 Comments | Add a Comment | Permalink

Adding a new wrinkle to the 'droid versus iPhone debate, a project at Keio University in Tokyo have created iPhone software specifically designed to control androids. More specifically, they've created an interface that puts control of a humanoid robot right at your fingertips.
"Walky" takes advantage of an iPhone or iPod's touchscreen to create an intuitive interface that requires virtually no learning. Your fingers simulate the robot's legs: a walking motion using the index and middle fingers makes the robot walk, tapping the screen makes it jump up and down, and a flicking motion with one finger elicits a kicking motion.

The idea is to make the robot's motion as intuitive as possible. Most controller commands, like joysticks, paddles and buttons, don't have any natural relation to each other. That's why you keep getting fragged in Modern Warfare; until you become very familiar with the controls, your knee-jerk reactions aren't necessarily the ones programmed into the game. By making the robot respond to commands that the user already knows, they've created a sort of universal remote that anyone can pick up and start using.
On that note, the team at Keio thinks their software could also be employed in controlling digital characters -- think on-screen avatars in video games -- but for now it's best suited to bipedal robots. While it won't be integrated into gadgets this holiday season, it will debut officially in December at SIGGRAPH Asia in Yokohama.

0 Comments | Add a Comment | Permalink

Combining the output of Dr Steven Thaler , Professor Hod Lipson, Professor Simon Colton, Professor John Koza, and Assistant Professor Kenneth O. Stanley to come up with novel and innovative concepts and paradigms in Automated Invention, computational intelligence etc would be a good idea.
Dr Steven Thaler's work is available at http://www.imagination-engines.com. Professor Hod Lipson's work is outlined at http://www.mae.cornell.edu/Lipson/, Professor Simon Colton's output is available at http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/ Professor
John Koza's work is available at http://www.genetic-programming.org, and Assistant Professor Kenneth O. Stanley discusses his work at http://www.eecs.ucf.edu/~kstanley/.
Dr Steven Thaler has invented the Creativity Machine, which in turn invented the Self Training Artificial Neural Network Object.
Professor Hod Lipson has produced Bio-inspired robotics. Professor
Simon Colton specialises in Computational Creativity, Professor John Koza's work is in genetic programming as human competitive intelligence, Assistant Professor Kenneth O. Stanley works in Evolutionary Complexity.
Use all their outputs in a joint research and study program to synthesize something new, whatever it may be. Study their websites, literature and patents and from it all, generate something novel. You might as well use the artifacts that they invented and created to assist in the process.

0 Comments | Add a Comment | Permalink

Soccer-Ball-Sized Submersible Robots Will Track Ocean Currents and Disasters at Sea



The National Science Foundation has awarded almost $1 million to develop a swarm of underwater robotic explorers.

Hundreds of soccer-ball-sized robot drones could soon ply the friendly waves to help scientists track ocean currents and harmful algae blooms, or even swarm to disaster sites such as oil spills and airplane crashes. That's no mere flight of fancy, now that the National Science Foundation has provided almost $1 million in funding to researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. The underwater swarm would coordinate with larger mothership drones as they move around and gauge the physics of ocean currents. Such information might allow researchers to scout out critical nursery habitats in protected marine areas, and might likewise lead salvage teams to recover the black boxes from airplane crash sites"You put 100 of these AUEs [Autonomous Underwater Explorers] in the ocean and let 'er rip," said Peter Franks, an oceanographer at Scripps. "We'll be able to look at how they spread apart and how they move to get a sense of the physics driving the flow."More data gathered over time could also feed into better ocean models that try to capture the ocean weather and climate.
Scripps researchers first plan to build five or six prototypes the size of soccer balls, along with 20 smaller versions. They would join a growing fleet of underwater robots ranging from U.S. Navy submarine drones to ring-wing robots designed for oil exploration.

0 Comments | Add a Comment | Permalink

Privoxy is an application used for web proxy management. It is generally used with Tor, and is also sometimes used with Squid.

Pros of Privoxy:

Privoxy uses filtering to prevent unwarranted identification on the internet, keeping you protected online by modifying web data to prevent a spy such as a hacker, criminal or stalker, from identifying you online. It can also work if you were banned from a forum, though I do not recommend perpetuating spamming in general, if you use it to go around a forum ban, be careful next time. In general, use this type of software only for real anonymity issues such as not wanting to be identified by a stalker online through IP address and cookies, especially when using with Tor, a relay network based on volunteers donating bandwidth.

Another positive is that it can be used with Tor, a really strong high anonymity network using proprietary Onion Routing technology, which can be pretty useful for high anonymity and protection while you browse the net.

Privoxy allows managing cookies in your browser so that you don't get tracked and identified by cookies online. Very useful.

Privoxy removes banner ads and popups that can also track you. Remember that ads, and also, applications such as Macromedia Flash can reveal your true IP despite filtering. Privoxy provides the maeans to circumvent that and maintain protection.

Privoxy is customizable to be stand alone or to work with user friendly software like Tor. users.

Best of all, Privoxy is free, and so is Tor.

Moreover, it does not use lots of computing resources, it is easy to update the filters, and the log in Privoxy is relatively easy to understand compared with other software like AdMuncher.


Cons of Privoxy

Privoxy uses a lot more RAM than Ad Muncher and other similar software.

Privoxy does a good but not exceptional job compared to software like Ad Muncher, in removing ads. A lot of them are missed and not filtered out. Ad Muncher is better at ad removal, though some source code tweaking could make Privoxy in fact even better than Ad Muncher.

The div container or similar element is left behind, in other words, Privoxy leaves behind white boxes or rectangles in place of the advertisement. With Ad Muncher it is as if the ad wasn't even there. Customization of source code is necessary to eliminate this.

Like all ad filters, Privoxy slows down website load time, problem: slower than Ad Muncher. Customization of source code may be necessary to eliminate this. Also usage of high anonymity or elite anonymity proxies that load pages fast, is of course important in any proxy filtering software. Sometimes the prox itself is the problem.

Privoxy works on browsers (HTTP and SOCKS5 protocol). Configuring it to work otherwise requires advanced programming and customizing open source code, but if this is done it would be undoubtedly better than Ad Muncher's default support for this feature (e.g. filtering in AIM).

Privoxy overall

I would recommend Privoxy, especially if you are good in software development, in which case you can customize it to outweigh some of the negative aspects identified overall. Overall, Privoxy is great free proxy software! More very detailed info on Privoxy as well as guide on how to install and use the software is available at Privoxy Reviews.

0 Comments | Add a Comment | Permalink