Jessi Arrington: Wearing nothing new

Jessi talks at TED Active 2011, she is a designer who buys only second-hand close, wears the vivid color, and follows her own meditation. 

Very beautiful dress and very beautiful attitude.

Her blog http://luckysoandso.com is very worth seeing.

Daniel Kraft: Medicine's future? There's an app for that

Daniel Kraft shares about the future of medicine, with the newest, up to date trend. 

1. More resources spent on preventing instead of curing diseases. 

2. More information to make treatment personalized (personal dosage), such as geographic, nutrition, genetics. 

3. Kinect like cheap device will help examine the patient shape. 

IDEA:  Develop Kinect base game/application for physical rehabilitation. 

Prediction: I felt that the future technology will produce more and more data points, which might be possible to be processed on the client site. Medical device will need to be combined with cloud system. 

He also mentioned singularity university, an academy founded by cisco, google... They seems to have interesting video on the website. And cool event, such as "FutureMed 2011", too.


http://singularityu.org/

Paul Romer's radical idea: Charter cities Paul Romer: The world's first charter city?

Paul Romer's radical idea: Charter cities

Paul Romer talks about how to change rules, so to improve living in (developing) countries. He believes that we can build charter cities that runs independently from other country's rule and makes people choose whether to opt-in.  

He uses the example of China-Hong Kong, North-South Korea example to illustrate that different rules make up different living standard. Romer also arguing that different rules can be adopted as different technology. Which is a rather interesting perspective, as the later is usually more of a smaller scale: technology will be introduce if there is sufficient profit area. But rules are a set of things that can not be introduce separately.

The idea of charter city is therefor to launch these set of rules at the smallest possible scale. 

And as the cost of building a city< the value of a city, this is possible. Romer talks about the Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Indeed, many former colonial countries has enjoyed a better infrastructure/advanced rules from its occupiers, such is the case of  Taiwan from the Japanese occupation as well. What if we can replicate this process without coercion.   

Modulize. Also, he mentioned that we should invite academia to solve some of the problem such as how to draft a multi-party charter. 

Paul Romer: The world's first charter city?

In 2011, Romer talks about this subject, this time sharing an on-going project he has been participating. In Honduras they are trying to build the first charter city. He restate the important elements in building a city which are: 

1. Tenants  ( Honduras)
2. Site ( Honduras)
3. Legal system ( Canada)
4. Financing
5.  Manager/Leader 
6. Builder/ Designer ( South Korean and Singapore)

Problem to solve
How to transit the charter city? Will it always run interdependently?
How to split profit among players?

A High-Tech Movie Battle: Which 3-D Glasses Are Best?

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By ERIC A. TAUB

Published: December 27, 2009

While the blue-skinned Na’vi are shooting arrows out of the screen toward the audience in the 3-D movie “Avatar,” another battle is being fought in the theater — over the goofy-looking glasses that moviegoers must wear to see the three-dimensional effects.

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Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Maria Costeira, chief executive of XpanD, brandishing the glasses at a 3-D screening of “Battle for Terra” in Las Vegas.

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XpanD's 3-D glasses are among those competing for dominance.

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J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Other than its standard-issue movie glasses, RealD offers 3-D sunglasses, top, prescription, right, child-size glasses and adult.

Four companies are fighting for bridge of the nose with three different technologies. Each of them is more advanced than the paper glasses worn to view “Bwana Devil,” regarded as the first of the commercial 3-D movies in the 1950s, but all work on the same general principle. Each eye sees a slightly different frame of the movie, but the brain puts them together and perceives depth.
About four million glasses made byRealD, the market leader, were worn during Avatar’s opening weekend in the United States. RealD’s glasses use polarized lenses and cost about 65 cents each. MasterImage 3D, another vendor, uses a similar technology.
Dolby Laboratories, the company behind theater sound systems, makes glasses that filter out different frequencies of red, green and blue. They cost about $28 each. The glasses of the third company, XpanD, use battery-powered LCD shutters that open and shut so each eye sees the appropriate frame of the movie. Those cost as much as $50 each.
Each company claims its glasses and projection-system technology is better. Because glasses using one technology are useless in a theater using a different digital projection system, the companies backing the three technologies are scrambling for the upper hand while the 3-D industry is still in its infancy.
James Cameron, the director of “Avatar,” is more often than not the main marketing tool. He has endorsed RealD, says the company, which has about 5,000 screens using its system. But he, his wife and his production partner were photographed at the premiere in Japan wearing XpanD glasses, which work on 2,000 screens worldwide. Dolby says its glasses work with 2,200 screens, but it has no Cameron connection. The company helpfully points out instead how a malfunction in the RealD system spoiled a press preview of “Avatar.”
The battle over what glasses patrons wear is a big deal because exhibitors are convinced that 3-D, while seeming like a gimmick now, will lure movie lovers away from their crisp high-definition widescreen TVs at home and back to the theater. But Maria Costeira, the chief executive of XpanD, believes the sky’s the limit: “Eventually, we’ll see 3-D movies on airplanes as well.”
The fight over the glasses may well intensify because TV makers are now pushing 3-D TVs for the home as a way to increase their sales of more expensive sets.
Despite the marketing effort, when it comes down to choosing a 3-D system, many exhibitors are making a decision based on one factor: Do they want to be in the cleaning as well as the movie business?
The expensive Dolby and XpanD glasses are going into a dishwasher after each use, not the trash. Both companies recommend that theater owners clean them in an industrial-grade machine. (To prevent pilfering, Dolby and XpanD glasses can also contain built-in antitheft tags that can be activated by exit-door sensors.)
XpanD offers its theater partners disposable wipes that it can distribute to customers along with their tickets to assure them the glasses are germ-free.
RealD, whose cheap throwaway glasses were being perceived as a liability, has addressed concerns of hygiene. Theater owners are now encouraged to ship back the used glasses to the company, which will clean, repair and repackage them for other theaters.
But in all the hubbub about each product’s advantages and which system Mr. Cameron really, truly loves, the most important question remains unanswered: does one system create a better looking 3-D picture than another?
“I don’t think the consumer can tell the difference,” said Joe Miraglia, the director of design, construction, and facilities for ArcLight Cinemas, a chain of luxury theaters based in Hollywood. The movie chain uses each system in one or more of its theaters, and finds the cost of operation to be roughly the same for all.
While Mr. Miraglia uses RealD in several theaters, he chose XpanD’s LCD glasses for the large curved screen in the company’s flagship Cinerama Dome theater on Sunset Boulevard. This is similar to the technology that will be used by Panasonic, Sony and others as they bring 3-D HDTV to market next year. Recently, electronics makers set standards for creating 3-D Blu-ray discs and players.

But in order to make the wearing of 3-D glasses as routine as ordering popcorn, the makers need some help in the design department. Many of the glasses resemble the “fitover,” or wraparound sunglasses favored by senior citizens in the Sun Belt, a look that is not appealing to young moviegoers.
RealD and XpanD hope that 3-D will soon become a fashion statement. In addition to its standard movie glasses, RealD is introducing child-size versions, as well as high-style 3-D specs that people can wear without embarrassment out in the three-dimensional world as sunglasses or prescription lenses.
Ms. Costeira of XpanD thinks personalized designs that can be used with 3-D HDTVs and video games could turn into something big. “Stylish, thin and light, 3-D glasses will become your new iPod,” she said.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth

Blaise Aguera is sharing a technology at Microsoft:

1. Seadragon. It's an initiative to merge all the graphical data together. The performance is not limited by the size of the picture, but from the number of pixel the monitor display.

2. Photosynth, making hiperlink with all the pictures, that can be linked to each other. A algorithm is deciding the relative position of the picture.
http://chinese.engadget.com/2008/08/24/the-microsoft-photosynth-technology/

傳送們2

遊戲小檔案

• 遊戲名稱：傳送門2（Portal 2）
• 開發商：Valve
• 版本：PS3、XBOX360、PC
• 發售日期：2011年4月19日
• 官方網站：http://www.thinkwithportals.com/

IBM and Yale Team-Up To Train Business Students in Analytics

IBM and Yale Team-Up To Train Business Students in Analytics

by Klint Finley

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The Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management is working withIBM on a new course that will provide students with hands-on analytics education. Students will work with real big data sets from companies and learn to use professional analytics tools that are in demand today. IBM Business Analytics posted a YouTube video about the course.

"It's more than statistics," says Sharon Oster, dean of the Yale School of Management. "When you have a plethora of data it means you have to think a little more strategically upfront about what you do with the data."

Sponsor

As we've covered before, business intelligence professionals and data geeks of all types are in high demand. And that demand is only going to grow as enterprises deal with the explosion of social data being delivered by social media analytics services.

Lead image by nasa1fan/MSFC

Disclosure: IBM is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor

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