Acronis True Image Home 11.0.8101
September 13, 2008
Chris Wiles, vnunet.com, Saturday 13 September 2008 at 00:00:00
Get 80% off retail price and get Disk Director 10 for free!
This is the software publisher’s description. You’ve accumulated a lifetime of work, important memories and key data on your home PC in addition to important personal documents, such as your…
 |
 |
Attention span
August 15, 2008
By Marc Settle
Reporter, BBC iPM
As the age at which children start to get familiar with computers and the net gets ever lower, questions are starting to be asked about what that exposure is doing to our children’s brains and their ability to concentrate.
These questions are ones which eminent neuroscientist Baroness Greenfield says needs to be confronted. The director of the Royal Institution says the “sensory-laden environment” of computers could result in people “staying in the world of the small child”.
Professor Greenfield has spent a lifetime researching the physiology of the brain, and now thinks that there could be a link between the attention span of children and the growing use of computers.
In an interview for Radio 4’s iPM she said: “The last 10 years have seen a three-fold increase in the prescription of the drug Ritalin, a drug used for Attention Deficit Disorder. One asks why
“Why suddenly is there greater demand for a drug for attentional problems” she asked. “This might, and I stress might, be something to do with the increased exposure of young children to unsupervised and lengthy hours in front of a screen.”
"The technology is creating an environment that is answer rich, but we’re question poor"Susan Greenfield
iPM: Listen to the interview with Baroness Greenfield
Baroness Greenfield wondered if the cause was growing computer use.
“Could it be, and this is just a suggestion which I think we should look into, could it be if a small child is sitting in front of a screen pressing buttons and getting reactions quickly for many hours, they get used to and their brains get used to rapid responses” she said.
If children do not have stories read to them and have little practice of concentrating for long periods this could effect how they handle the sedate pace of school life, said Baroness Greenfield.
She asked: “Could it be that they then have to sit still for half an hour and of course they’re not used to that because they’re used to the rapid interaction with the screen, and could it - again a question - be that they are fidgety and hyperactive and then diagnosed as having a disorder”
The brain, says the distinguished neuroscientist, changes all the time - but it is very sensitive to the environment its in, and so it might be affected by the continual use of computers.
“What we need to question is this: are we putting people into the optimum environment How can we create an environment which will pre-dispose the brain to react in ways we consider ideal” she said.
“The technology is creating an environment that is answer rich, but we’re question poor.”
She contrasts the life of modern-day children with the generation which grew up without computers, who had to work to find answers by going to a library to look things up.
Baroness Greenfield also claims that the distinction has been lost between information and knowledge - with the facts provided by easy-accessed information losing the context necessary for knowledge.
Her views are echoed by the writer Nicholas Carr in his recent essay “Is Google making us stupid” that was published in Atlantic Monthly. In the article Mr Carr claims that his mind is changing as a result of greater computer use. “Deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle,” he said.
But a contrasting view comes from the philosopher Julian Baggini, who has written that the fear of change and of children becoming “degenerate aliens” is as old as parenthood, an “age-old anxiety” which he accused Baroness Greenfield of dignifying.
In response, the professor told iPM that she would rather not be complacent and “end up with a world that we don’t want”.
Baroness Greenfield can be heard on BBC Radio 4 at 17.30 on Friday 15 August 2008.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
Finally, Mega Man ‘E’ Energy Tanks are real
August 15, 2008
Man, I don’t know how many times I’ve been at some industry event for this fine Web site this year, feeling drained and tired after not sleeping and drinking working too much. I’m always in need of a pick-me-up, but most places give you crap like old cookies or the rancid 5-hour Energy Drink. Or a Beefsteak tomato salad. Seriously? Beefsteak tomatoes?
What I’d really like is to just happen upon Mega Man’s "E" tanks during my work days. Just walk over one and you’re good! Amazingly, E tanks are real now, thanks to the marketing muscle at Capcom Japan, according to Siliconera. For just 137 yen (.25) you can get your own Rockman E-Tank Sports Drink at your local Japanese konbini. You can thank Mega Man 9 for this. I bet it tastes like sh*t, but if it gets me through another "level," I’ll take it. Besides, Mega Man would never pass on one, right?
Maybe they will make one that enable me to shoot a ring of leaves at people. That would be really useful.
I’ll do my best to have someone send this over and tell you what it tastes like later.
Smartphone memory boost from new Samsung software
August 15, 2008
Samsung has announced they are to roll out software that has been designed to improve embedded flash memory within their range of smartphones.
Samsung has said this new software will optimise data transactions within its memory chips while interacting with a Windows Mobile, Linux, Symbian, or real-time OS. Samsung states this will bring about speedier booting, searches, and downloads which will greatly increase power performance.
Samsung’s new software file systems include PocketFS, RFS, and UniFS, these execute file operations such as creating, reading, writing, and deleting files.
Samsung says: these flash drivers can also prolong the mobile phones lifetime, and is achieved by converting “file system requests into low-level flash operations and by wear-levelling and bad-block replacing.”
VP of Samsung’s memory division, Young Joon Choi, said: “The new software, which upgrades performance of our embedded memory solutions, is expected to make OneNAND and other high-performance, high-density memory solutions such as the 16-GB movieNAND desirable for advanced handsets.”
Source – informationweek
Mars robots begin test campaign
August 15, 2008
By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News
Engineers have unveiled the latest prototypes for a European rover that is due to land on Mars in 2015.
BBC News has had exclusive access to the test vehicles which are being put through their paces by space company UK Astrium at its HQ in Stevenage.
The British team on this European Space Agency (Esa) project has nicknamed the prototypes Bruno and Bradley.
The six-wheeled robots are claimed to be the most robust and manoeuvrable planetary rovers to be built.
According to Chris Draper, Astrium’s ExoMars rover vehicle industrial manager, they can go literally where no rover has gone before.
“Obviously, the American MER rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) that were put up by Nasa enjoyed an extreme amount of success. They were able to travel large distances, well beyond their planned lifetimes. But we’re hoping that with our baby, we’ll be able to go places that are actually much further.”
EXOMARS MISSION CONCEPT- Set to leave Earth in 2013; primary aim is to search for life
- Will launch on a heavy-lift rocket, such as the Ariane 5
- Vented landing bags allow for a larger payload
- Rover will carry a 16.5kg ‘Pasteur’ instrument suite
- 30kg geophysics/environment static station also possible
- This would study the weather and listen for ‘Marsquakes’
- Concept to cost Esa states more than first estimates
Each prototype has six-wheel steering, which means that they can turn all six wheels and crab sideways.
They also have what engineers describe as “wheel walking capability”. This means that when the vehicles come across a particularly steep or slippery slope, they can anchor themselves with five of the wheels and inch each wheel forward one at a time, to crawl over an obstacle.
The prototypes have a unique intelligent navigation system which enables them to plot their own course.
Such is the distance between the planets, it can take 20 minutes for an instruction sent from Earth to arrive at Mars. The delay means instant commands to change direction are not possible and so a rover must have autonomy to make decision if, for example, it is approaching a dangerous precipice.
And because the rover will make its own decisions, it can also cover more ground.
ExoMars’ primary mission is to search for signs of past or present life.
To do that, it will make its way to locations thought most likely to support life and drill up to two metres into the ground. Sub-surface soil samples will be analysed by an onboard laboratory.
The rover will have the largest array of scientific instruments to be taken to Mars. So if it gets strong indications that organisms might be present, it will be able to subject samples to a wide range of tests to confirm initial readings.
But the executives at Astrium are concerned that after having done the groundwork in developing the vehicle systems (the chassis, locomotion and navigation systems), the company might actually lose the opportunity to build the final flight vehicle.
"It’s quite a tense period for us in Astrium and for the other companies involved in building ExoMars"Dr Ralph Cordey, UK Astrium
The concern stems from the recent funding difficulties faced by the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC), the agency which supports astronomy and space science in the UK.
The company won its role on the mission as leader of vehicle development partly because of the funding the STFC put through Esa. But Astrium’s science business development manager, Dr Ralph Cordey, said that given the recent squeeze on British astronomy and space resources, he was now unsure if that same level of funding would continue.
“It’s quite a tense period for us in Astrium and for the other companies involved in building ExoMars; and for all the many, many scientists who will depend on this mission,” he told BBC News.
“On the one hand, we are moving ahead with a great momentum, as you’ve seen. This is not a paper project - there is real engineering going on and we are on the verge of building the real hardware that will go on to the planet Mars. 
“But on the other hand, we do have a real problem. In order to complete the project, further funding needs to be made available and it won’t be until November that we are sure that that is in place.”
The cost of ExoMars has risen dramatically since European space ministers first approved the venture in 2005. Revised estimates to be agreed next month with industrial partners mean the price for ExoMars will nearly double from its original 650m-euro price tag.
If the UK wants to maintain its position on mission, it will have to boost its financial commitment to ExoMars or come to some other compensatory arrangement with Esa.
If the UK plays the wrong hand at the next space ministers’ meeting in November, UK Astrium warns, the contract to build the flight vehicle could go to a space company sited in another Esa member state.
The STFC said: “The UK will be working with its international partners to try to bring about a mission that has high impact and is affordable, in a process of negotiation that will culminate in decisions at the ministerial in November 2008.
“Meanwhile, it remains a high strategic priority for the UK as emphasised previously.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
Register your interest in the Blackberry Bold at Carphone Warehouse
August 15, 2008
Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Bold smartphone, a mobile phone that embodies an elegant design yet doesn’t sacrifice functionality or features, is coming to the Carphone Warehouse.
With the BlackBerry Bold there are no compromised with email, internet, IM and phone. With the aid of the BlackBerry Bold’s integrated organizer it can help you remain on top of your working day.
With the BlackBerry Bold’s 2 megapixel camera and video recording, life’s precious moments can be captures with a few simple clicks. The BlackBerry Bold incorporates WiFi, GPS, and satellite navigation, and this is only the beginning.
Sometime this month Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Bold is expected to become available throughout the United Kingdom via The Carphone Warehouse, and you can now register your interest in the RIM BlackBerry Bold smartphone, and you will receive an exclusive offer on the BlackBerry Bold as soon as it becomes available.
Source – Carphone Warehouse
Game store
August 15, 2008
Next time you cut down a monster in an online game or punch a supervillain into the next county remember that your actions are helping to write the history of a new world.
To ensure that the big and small events in these fledgling worlds are not forgotten, erased or overlooked, the University of Texas, Austin has kicked off a project to study the best way to preserve their history.
“It’s a huge challenge for archivists to deal with digital information,” said project co-ordinator Professor Megan Winget from the School of Information at the university.
Prof Winget’s interest in preserving massively multi-player games grew from her involvement in digital artworks that do not hang on a wall but invite interaction, and change as a result.
“One of the most interesting problems for digital preservation is interactivity and how difficult that is to preserve,” she said.
“Video games offer all of the same problems as digital art,” she said. “They are interactive, very complex and a lot of people get involved in making them happen.”
Oral history
The game preservation project aims to interview game makers to tease out the process of creating a game and the materials, such as sketches, doodles and early code, involved in bringing one to life. The experiences of people who play the beta, or trial, versions would be useful as their feedback often shapes the final game.
The insights from the interviews will help the project define how to go about preserving such malleable media, said ProfWinget.
"“You cannot just throw everything into a box and put it in the attic so in 50 years your kids can look at it"Prof Megan Winget
“When you are trying to preserve anything you are trying to preserve the most important things about that artefact,” she said. “With video games we do not yet know what is important.”
The project will establish a repository that, Prof Winget hopes, game makers will come to use as an archive for games.
She also hopes that the project gets game makers thinking about the steps they need to take during game creation to preserve materials.
“We want to raise the consciousness in the industry about how important these records are,” said Prof Winget. “I do not think they save anything or it’s saved in such a way that they would not be able to recognise the significance of what they are holding.”
As well as talking to game makers the project will conduct interviews with players who took part in or witnessed the significant world events seen in some online games.
Examples of this, said Prof Winget, were the assassination of Lord British in Ultima Online, the death of Morpheus in The Matrix Online and the “Corrupted Blood” plague that killed hundreds of characters in some parts of World of Warcraft.
Prof Winget wants to get hold of oral histories of these events plus any media that people collected while they were unfolding.
During preliminary work many people mentioned the importance of the murder of Lord British - actually the avatar of Richard Garriott, co-creator of Ultima Online.
“A lot of people have mentioned that to me as a pivotal moment in their lives,” she said. “I would like to talk to people who experienced that, saw it happen or where they were when they heard about it.”
“Maybe we can talk to the people who did it and whether they knew Lord British was Richard Garriott,” she said.
Future proof
But, said Prof Winget, it was not just game makers and games that faced a problem when it came to preserving important documents, images or videos memories held on a computer.
“You cannot just throw everything into a box and put it in the attic so in 50 years your kids can look at it,” she said. “That’s not going to happen, because digital media degrades so fast.”
Rory McLeod, digital preservation manager at the British Library, said some webmail providers were starting to put archiving and backup systems in place to help people preserve records. However, other technologies were proving more troublesome.
“Old digital cameras do pose a problem,” he said. “The RAW formats that cameras capture images in are proprietary in nature so this raises issues around accessibility if the information about that RAW format is lost.
More broadly, he said, librarians and archivists often bumped up against copyright and legal deposit legislation.
“Those are two areas that we need to address to do our jobs successfully not just for today but for the next generation,” said Mr McLeod.
“As more and more information is published in e-only formats, the legislation must keep pace so that we as digital librarians can keep this information safe without the threat of legal issues hanging over us,” he said.
“We are far from drowning in digital data as our skills have come a long way,” he added. “It’s more a case of not drowning but waving.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation
Sections
- Camcorder
- Cell Phone
- Computers
- Digital Camera
- Games
- GPS
- Laptops
- Mp3 Player
- News
- Robots
- Software
- Technology
Link
Tag Cloud
