Author: Madhu Reddy

Along with the arrival of touchscreens have come pundits’ predictions that in time the keyboard will go away. In 2015 the keyboard is still a much-desired component, though, pain points and all. Over the years, the headaches continue as users complain: “Why do they call them shortcuts when I have to remember so many of them?”

The Sonder keyboard wants to redefine the keyboard as a tool for possibilities beyond those words, numbers and quotation marks in places you have memorized along with the list you keep when you forget certain shortcuts. Sonder’s keyboard changes its keys to fit the range of a user’s application needs.
Utilizing e-ink technology, all of its letter, number and function keys can change appearance and function, depending on the application being used, said Ben Coxworth in Gizmag.
“With Sonder you can establish game-specific hotkeys, macros and specific in-game commands,” said the company. “Customize each key to have their own individual iconography,” it added, and “create your very own keys to perform whatever command you wish.”
Hills, technology providers, has a Hills Young Australian Design Awards site, which expressed a view of how the Sonder concept could ease the work of designers:
“Sonder’s E-ink keyboard is the inevitable solution to a compelling design sector need. Designers are required to memorize hundreds of application-specific shortcuts, etc. Not only is this inefficient and costly for the sector, it’s frankly frustrating.”
Evan Killham wrote in Cult of Mac that the keyboard “features the 78 keys you’d expect from a standard, keypad-less typer, but the cool part is that about 50 of them include little screens that can show any symbol or icon you want.”
The keys can be changed for different language settings and key layouts—such as from QWERTY to DVORAK, English to Chinese and typing emoticons to text.
Michael Zhang gave some examples in PetaPixel of what work might be like in design mode, using the keyboard. “When you’re using Photoshop, you can have the icon on each key reflect the particular tool or feature that key is used for while editing your photos. Need to switch over and do a little work in Adobe Illustrator? The keyboard will adjust the keys to reflect the new shortcuts you have at your disposal.”
Sonder considered the users who may need to work in the dark; front lighting is provided through “a fiber optic waveguide” for working in the dark, said the company.
The keyboard works with a Mac or PC, tablet or smart phone through Bluetooth. After pairing them, you move your keyboard anywhere within range and go to work. Sonder said the internal battery is charged by plugging in braided fiber cables.
The company founders and directors are Francisco Serra-Martins, CTO, and Felipe Serra-Martins, COO. At what stage of readiness is the keyboard? They are taking pre-orders at $199.
Sonder sent an e-mail to Cult of Mac saying “Given the insane interest to date from some pretty big names in tech, we will be launching an epic Kickstarter campaign later this year, and will be shipping internationally thereafter.” The message also said, “With the assistance of NSW Trade & Investment, we are developing our E-ink keyboard and have already commenced pilot production in Sydney and Shenzhen.”
The message also said where they want to take their concept next. The keyboard, they said, “adapts intuitively to the user to display any application-specific shortcuts, in addition to any language or custom icons. Later, we will launch an online library where users can freely access and share cool new user-generated content.”

References:http://phys.org/

Ello, the ad-free social network which gained prominence last year with an invitation-only launch, announced Thursday it was opening to the public with an application for iPhone users.

The startup got attention with its “anti-Facebook” policy of promising to never use advertising or to sell customer data to third parties.

Last September, a surge in interest made Ello membership a hot ticket, with invitations selling on eBay at prices up to $500.

In announcing the public launch, Ello provided no details on numbers of members but said there were “millions” using the platform.

“The new app is beautiful with dozens of unique features,” said Ello co-founder and chief executive Paul Budnitz.

“With so much positivity on Ello, and with awareness of the negative effects of ads and data collection by other networks coming to the forefront of the news, the timing of our app release couldn’t be better.”

Ello has upgraded the service to include new ways to find friends, full search, real-time alerts, private messaging, private groups and “loves” instead of likes.

It received $5.5 million in funding last year as it changed its charter to back a promise to remain ad-free, becoming a “public benefit corporation.” While the services is free, Its future plans include premium features which would be paid.

Ello was launched by a group of artists and programmers led by Budnitz, whose previous experience includes designing bicycles and toys.

References:http://phys.org/

If you leave your job, chances are your pattern of cellphone use will also change. Without a commute or workspace, it stands to reason, most people will make a higher portion of their calls from home—and they might make fewer calls, too.

Now a study co-authored by MIT researchers shows that mobile phone data can provide rapid insight into employment levels, precisely because people’s communications patterns change when they are not working.
Indeed, using a plant closing in Europe as the basis for their study, the researchers found that in the months following layoffs, the total number of calls made by laid-off individuals dropped by 51 percent compared with working residents, and by 41 percent compared with all phone users. The number of calls made by a newly unemployed worker to someone in the town where they had worked fell by 5 percentage points, and even the number of individual cellphone towers needed to transmit the calls of unemployed workers dropped by around 20 percent.
“Individuals who we believe to have been laid off display fewer phone calls incoming, contact fewer people each month, and the people they are contacting are different,” says Jameson Toole, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division, and a co-author of the new paper. “People’s social behavior diminishes, and that might be one of the ways layoffs have these negative consequences. It hurts the networks that might help people find the next job.”
When the factory closes

The paper, just published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, builds a model of cellphone usage that lets the researchers correlate cellphone usage patterns with aggregate changes in employment. The researchers believe the phone data closely aligns with standard unemployment measures, and may allow analysts to make unemployment projections two to eight weeks faster than those made using traditional methods.
“Using mobile phone data to project economic change would allow almost real-time tracking of the economy, and at very fine spatial granularities … both of which are impossible given current methods of collecting economic statistics,” says David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University and a co-author of the paper.
In addition to Toole and Lazer, the co-authors of the paper are Marta Gonzalez, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT; Yu-Ru Lin of the University of Pittsburgh; Erich Muehlegger of the University of California at Davis; and Daniel Shoag of the Harvard Kennedy School.

References:http://phys.org/

Fog can play a key role in cloaking military invasions and retreats and the actions of intruders. That’s why physical security experts seek to overcome fog, but it’s difficult to field test security cameras, sensors or other equipment in fog that is often either too thick or too ephemeral.
Until now, collecting field test data in foggy environments was time-consuming and costly. “Fog is difficult to work with because it rarely shows up when needed, it never seems to stay around long enough once you’re ready to test and its density can vary during testing,” said Rich Contreras, a systems engineer at Sandia National Laboratories.
That’s why Contreras and others started thinking about developing a controlled-fog environment for sensor testing. The sunny, high desert of New Mexico may seem an unlikely place to make fog, but Sandia has developed a fog chamber—one of the world’s largest—that meets the needs of the military, other government agencies and industry. The chamber is in a tunnel owned by the Air Force Research Laboratory.
“The ultimate goal of this whole endeavor is to defeat fog,” Contreras said. “From physical security and force protection aspects, as scientists and engineers who care about national security, we want to be able to make it so that a security force person at a site has the ability to maintain uninterrupted situational awareness.”
Researchers say the chamber will help develop and validate cameras’ and sensors’ abilities to penetrate fog, knowledge that could lead to improved surveillance at sites. The chamber also could be used to answer fundamental optics questions, which in time could lead to improved security camera lenses and medical imaging equipment, safer aircraft landings and better vision for drivers in fog.
“People need to see through fog,” said optical scientist Gabe Birch. “So much of the U.S. population is on the coastlines in places where fog exists. If you could discover an inexpensive technique to see better through it, there are a lot of people in industry who would be interested in that.”

Cloud microphysics used to characterize fog, prolong testing

This is not your Halloween party fog machine. Sandia’s fog chamber is 180 feet long, 10 feet tall and 11 feet wide. The chamber is enclosed by air curtains and rubber baffles to entrap the fog, approximating real-world conditions. Tunnel walls are painted with a special black paint to reduce reflection and improve data quality, Contreras said

Walk a few steps down the hallway when the chamber’s fog is at full strength and a sense of disorientation washes over an observer as the walls, ceiling and entranceway disappear and people only a few feet away fade first into dark, obscure silhouettes and then become invisible.
Sandia researchers use cloud microphysics to generate fog for video analytics, environmental testing and new sensor development. Currently, the chamber’s fog resembles that found in coastal regions, but output can be customized to produce fog physically similar to that found in any location, said Crystal Glen, an aerosol scientist. Researchers eventually hope to add smoke and dust to the chamber’s repertoire.
In the atmosphere, fog forms from a seed particle, such as pollen or sea salt, surrounded by layers of water. Seed particles differ based on the fog’s location. Sandia currently uses sodium chloride, or sea salt, as its seed particle to mimic the composition and particle size of coastal fog. By consulting journals or traveling to a region, researchers can measure the droplet size distribution and chemical composition of different fogs worldwide and then alter the seed particles to customize the fog.
The longer the fog’s seed particles hold onto the water layer, the longer they are visible for testing. The length of the test depends on the relative humidity in the chamber.
Glen mixes a solution of sodium chloride and water that produces the desired core particle seed diameter. The solution is sprayed into the chamber where the relative humidity is above 95 percent. The initial sprayed droplets are roughly 2.3 times their dry diameter.

The deliquescence point, or the amount of relative humidity required for a particle to take on water, happens at 72 percent relative humidity for coastal fog, primarily composed of sodium chloride. The amount of water clinging to the seed particle grows exponentially from there. This process happens naturally in the atmosphere and leads to fog and cloud formation, Glen said.
To speed up Mother Nature, Glen checks the rate at which a particle will gain or lose water in relation to the chamber’s relative humidity, termed the hysteresis curve for water interactions with sodium chloride. This information allows the team to target a specific relative humidity and obtain a desirable size for the wet particles, so the droplet size distribution is close to what is found in natural fog, she said. While the fog generated in the chamber is not identical to fog formed in nature, it is physically representative and extremely useful for research involving optical transmission and visibility.
Typically, gravity causes the fog to settle before the decrease in relative humidity takes effect. The fog density can remain constant for up to 30 minutes, allowing a test to last 10-20 minutes. Adding a 30-second blast of fog particles can prolong the testing, Glen said, adding that the fog’s density can be controlled by the amount sprayed into the chamber or the particle size.

Optics experts see potential of controlled fog

The layer of water around the fog seed particles either absorbs the photons, the elementary particles and waves that make up light, or causes them to change direction in random ways, so that by the time they reach the cameras being tested, the wavelengths being picked up create a fuzzy image, Birch said.

Optics researchers refer to fog and seeing through bodily tissue in medical imaging as “scattering environments.” Sandia optical engineer David Scrymgeour likens the photons’ movements in these environments to walking through a sunny, full parking lot and seeing glints of light bounce in every direction off windshields.

In fog, it’s the scattering of the photons that causes the car headlights or a pedestrian’s flashlight beam to illuminate an entire scene, making vision even more difficult, Scrymgeour explained.

In physical security, “the cameras are very sensitive to the sizes of fog particles and how the photons scatter. That’s why it’s so important to know the sizes of particles that we have in the environment, which is something that we in the optical field have not really had before,” Birch said. “It enables a lot of very interesting testing because you can finally characterize your system’s performance by knowing the scattering that’s happening in the environment.”

Fog chamber tests could lead to security camera improvements

For the military or any agency seeking to physically secure a site, not knowing the exact ranges that cameras can penetrate fog in a particular environment makes it difficult to choose the correct cameras and sensors and their placements, Contreras said.

Birch explained: “It’s very difficult to quantitatively compare all those modalities together with the same fog and in the same conditions because you go outside and five minutes later it could be very different.”

Once the chamber’s fog density is set, cameras or sensors mounted at one end of the tunnel are monitored to see how well they detect humans or custom targets, Contreras said.

Different types of lighting representing specific sites could be installed in the chamber to see the combined effect of fog and lighting or the desired time of day, he said.

Examples of tests include showing raw data from various cameras, characterizing how different wavelengths and polarization states are influenced by fog, comparing different optical systems in a controlled foggy environment and resolution testing to see how the optical properties and resolution degrade in a variety of foggy environments, Birch said. Polarization states describe the way electromagnetic waves oscillate as they propagate in space.

Fog chamber could provide answers for optics research

The fog chamber also could be used to answer fundamental scientific questions.

“When you look at the huge gap from the visible spectrum all the way up to the far infrared, no one can say we absolutely understand how the polarization states at all these different wavelengths behave as they go through a foggy atmosphere,” Birch said.

Recent research at Sandia has suggested that the polarization of photons could be exploited to see better through fog or other scattering environments, Scrymgeour said.

Researchers have ideas about how to use optics—for example, a filter on a camera lens—to exploit polarization, he added, but they need to be tested in a real-world environment, like the fog chamber.

Such testing could inform not only physical security camera design to better handle fog, but also medical imaging, he said, “The physics in scattering events are the same.”

References:http://phys.org/