Posts Tagged ‘communications’
Australians Could All Get Free Lifetime Federally Hosted Inboxes, If Government Quits Snail Mail
A spokesman for the federal Opposition (the minority coalition under Australia’s parliamentary system) said the “electronic pigeon hole” would serve as a lifelong mailbox and storage service for communications between each citizen and the government.
Australians would likely get an account name using their names and dates of birth, hosted on the government’s Australia.gov.au domain, according to . Much like online bank statement setups in the U.S., the account would be free to anyone who wanted it, as long as the user agreed to stop receiving paper mail.
The government could save plenty of money by reducing paper, according to Malcolm Turnbull, a spokesman for the federal Opposition coalition. He made the comments as part of a larger discussion about Internet connectivity in the country.
Australia is one of a handful of nations debating major mail changes. In Sweden and Denmark, postage stamps are being replaced by , and in Finland, officials are taking the dramatic step of opening and (for people who opt-in). But these programs don’t address how the bureaucracy would continue to connect with the citizenry in the absence of mail carriers. Australia aims to keep those connections, and eliminate worries about fickle email users who change their addresses, by establishing a national system.
A federally hosted inbox would be problematic for poor populations or people living in rural areas without good , as ComputerWorld points out. But the government could conceivably address that by subsidizing broadband build-out and ensuring physical delivery remains an option for those people.
There are plenty of questions to be answered here, not the least of which is how to maintain privacy when all you'd need is someone's name and date of birth to access his or her mail. It's also based on the assumption that people would actively check their federal inboxes — yet another password to remember — when receiving physical mail is a much more passive activity. But it's an interesting idea, and one potentially worth considering as our own postal service struggles under a massive shortfall — the USPS stands to this year. A few servers and some firewalls would conceivably be a lot less expensive.
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Nanodrug Swarms Use The Human Body’s Biocommunications System to Coordinate Their Attack
Specifically, researchers have developed nanoparticles that can guide each other to a destination, resulting in a much more effective onslaught against a tumor.
Nanoparticles could be a boon for cancer treatment because they can travel through the body unimpeded, delivering drugs directly into tumors and lessening the side effects of chemotherapy. But they quickly disperse when they’re released into the body — even in the best cases, only about 1 percent of them reach their intended target, .
To improve this outcome, researchers from MIT, the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute and the University of California-San Diego designed nanoparticles that can work in teams. One wave of nanoparticles homes in on a tumor, and when they arrive, they can communicate their location to the other nanoparticles still circulating in the body, helping them find the tumor too.
To do this, the nanoparticles take advantage of the body’s blood coagulation process, according to formal MIT doctoral student Geoffrey von Maltzahn, who is the lead author on a paper in Nature Materials describing this new work. At the site of an injury, blood clotting factors and other proteins interact in a chain of steps to form fibrin, which seals the wound and prevents further blood loss, as an MIT news release explains. The proteins not only bind to the area of an injury, but recruit other proteins to the area, von Maltzahn said.
“We’re trying to emulate that on the scale of synthetic particles, such that when one particle gets to the site of disease, it can communicate that event to expedite the subsequent arrival of other synthetic nanoparticles,” he explains in a video posted by MIT’s David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. (Watch it below.)
The researchers used two types of nanoparticles, which could either signal a message or receive it. The signaling particles flow through the bloodstream and arrive at the tumor site, where they trick the body into believing an injury has occurred (either by emitting heat or binding to certain proteins). This stimulates the natural fibrin-building process. Then the receiving nanoparticles, which carry a payload of cancer drugs, are outfitted with proteins that bind to fibrin. The fibrin acts as a homing beacon, helping the nanoparticles travel to the tumor site. They release the drugs once they get there, delivering a targeted blow to the cancer cells.
The researchers studied this method using mice and found that the communicating nanoparticles delivered 40 times more doxorubicin, a common chemotherapeutic, than a system that could not communicate.
MIT researchers are exploring how to test this system with existing clinical studies using nanoparticles.
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Iceland’s Citizens Are Writing Its New Constitution Online
It turns out the Web really is democratic
There is still the small collection of leaders in a room drafting the actual document--25 of them to be exact. But they are reaching out to Iceland’s 320,000 people--one of the world’s more computer-literate populations--through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (but mostly Facebook, let’s be honest).
A thorough review and rewriting of the constitution (which is more or less Denmark’s constitution with a few minor tweaks) has been on the legislative agenda since Iceland gained independence in 1944. The new crowdsourced document could be put before the entire voting population in a referendum before parliament decides on the final draft. We’re not sure why. It seems like parliament should have a pretty good notion of how the public feels about the final draft based on how many “likes” it gets.
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Video: Can We Please Have A PR2 For the PopSci Office? Thanks
Wanted: a robot to bring beer and read the label aloud
One PR2, owned by the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Lab, can pronounce his name — "Graspy" — and can helpfully point out the location of restrooms and professors' offices. Too bad he can't quite pronounce the word "robot."
It sounds more like "ribbit," but hey, he's still learning.
We have already seen PR2 ; now watch the newly literate 'bot make out different fonts, text of various size and even lettering at a distance.
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Divers Attempt to Communicate With Wild Dolphins, Using A Two-Way Translation Device
Helping dolphins talk back
A researcher in Florida aims to meet the mammals in the middle, that both humans and dolphins can understand.
Denise Herzing, founder of the Wild Dolphin Project in Jupiter, Fla., and Thad Starner, an artificial intelligence researcher at Georgia Tech, developed a project called Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT). Researchers will test a prototype device this summer, reports New Scientist.
It involves a small computer encased in a waterproof shell and two hydrophones capable of detecting the full frequency of dolphin sounds, which can be up to 10 times higher than the highest pitch a person can hear. A diver will strap the computer to his or her chest, using a handheld device to select which sound to make in reply.
The diver will wear a mask with LED lights that indicate where the sounds are coming from, so he or she will know which dolphin is talking.
The team hopes to create a new language using a call-and-response method. Divers will play one of eight sounds they’ve already created, which correspond to dolphin desires like “play with seaweed” or “ride the boat’s wake.” Using CHAT software, the diver will determine whether the dolphin repeats the sound. Over time, the system will learn to recognize the dolphins’ accent, as it were, and learn how to decipher natural dolphin sounds.
Ultimately, the goal is to serve as a sort of Rosetta stone for dolphins, deciphering the fundamental units of dolphin language.
Herzing has been trying two-way communication with wild dolphins since 1998, and has successfully taught animals to associate symbols with specific requests, like “play with seaweed.” But the system wasn’t very dolphin-friendly, she tells New Scientist. The CHAT system will ideally play to the strengths of both dolphins and humans, allowing people to make dolphin-like communications that are more appealing to the cetaceans. And then they can tell us what they really think of those aquarium attractions.
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Tech Evangelists To Meet in DC to Figure Out the Future of the Postal Service
And debate whether it even has a future at all
The conference will highlight how social networks and electronic communications continue to reshape the role of mail. Participants include Vint Cerf, Google’s “chief Internet evangelist,” and Jeff Jarvis, a blogger and journalism educator who has asked whether the Postal Service is even necessary anymore. Plenty of postal advocates will also be on hand, including members of a panel who have suggested post offices start selling gift cards and other retail items.
The goal is to discuss how snail mail might be saved, through dramatic structural changes or methods like privatization.
The USPS is on track to lose about $7 billion during the current fiscal year, the . With that hemorrhaging unlikely to stop anytime soon, it’s unlikely any investors would want to buy it.
John Callan, a mailing industry consultant who is organizing the meeting, told the Washington Post that the USPS is already working to address its current problems, but outsiders might have some useful ideas for its long-term future.
The meeting will also review what foreign postal services are doing — like sent via text, and scanning all mail into .
Eventually, postal services may be more useful for a much broader purpose than delivering coupons and J. Crew catalogs. The mail’s unparalleled ability to reach everyone, everywhere could be useful for a host of services — delivering drugs in case of a disease outbreak or bioterrorism, for instance. Or in neighborhoods. Or playing a role in the delivery and maintenance of nationwide broadband services ... the list goes on. For those reasons, at least, it could be well worth saving.
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Record-Breaking New Fiber Optic Cables Transmit 100 Terabits Per Second
That is the equivalent of sending 3 months of HD video in one second
The researchers used two different tricks to up their data rates, one altering the light itself, the other by carving up new channels within the fiber. The first approach, via NEC, notched 101.7 terabits per second over 100 miles using a novel scheme that stuffs pulses from 370 different lasers into the single pulse that reaches the end receiver.
Each laser emitted a slightly different frequency of light in the infrared spectrum, with things like amplitudes and polarities tweaked to make each of them different. So even though all 370 slivers were packed into the same pulse, each could code its own packet of information that could then be unpacked separately at the other end.
The other approach, from a team at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, was even faster. A standard fiber cable contains a single light-guiding core, so the researchers decided--logically enough--that seven cores would work even better. Their seven-cored cable can transmit 109 terabits per second (or 15.6 terabits per second per core), drastically improving capacity.
But don’t expect to see those kinds of speeds hitting your PC any time soon. For one, neither of these technologies is particularly easy to integrate into the current infrastructure, and difficulty notwithstanding there isn’t a real commercial need for these high capacities--they simply far outstrip commercial data demand.
But traffic is growing at a rate of something like 50 percent per year, thanks to TV-on-the-Web offerings like Netflix and Hulu, as well as cute puppy videos and Rebecca Black. One day we’ll need those data rates no doubt. In the meantime, these technologies will likely find work as short haul, high volume connections in places where their capacity can be put to use, such as server farms at Amazon.
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