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Issue no. 33, 2003 Published: Sep 12, 2003
EU delays vote on digital copyright plan
EU acts to make internet and mobile phones safer
IBM unveils breakthrough chip technologies
Microsoft to open video standard for review
Computer with 3-D display on sale next month
Scientists develop 'bacterial battery'
Don’t count out the TV tube just yet
Smart software makes sense of rough sketches
Researchers develop silicon retina
Neural net tracks skin colour
Display brighter than film
Palm-tops to beat nicotine craving
'Reflectoporn' is new craze on eBay

EU delays vote on digital copyright plan
A vote on the EU's proposed directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights has been pushed back to November. The proposed directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights, earlier set for a vote in a Thursday plenary session, is now scheduled for discussion on November 4. When the proposal was first introduced in January, it drew a 'dismayed' reaction from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and other copyright holder lobbyists, which called for the measure to be beefed up. Rather than taking on board the strongest antipiracy measures of the member states, the draft legislation aims to represent 'best practice' legislation, according to the EU. Critics say large multinationals would be the biggest beneficiaries of the directive because of its ban on reverse engineering. But the directive could backfire on some of its sponsors, such as Microsoft and eBay, by opening the companies up to more serious legal attacks, according to UK's Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR).
ZDNet UK Sep 11, 2003	back to top

EU acts to make internet and mobile phones safer
The European Commission has published a call for proposals to help make the internet a safer place and mobile phones safer to use. €11.7m of EU funding is made available to promote safer use of the internet and new online technologies including mobile phones. This call will establish a European network of safer internet awareness centres and will continue to support for two more years the existing network of hotlines that allow users to report illegal content. Other areas covered include a study on children's use of new media, quality labels for websites and benchmarking of filtering systems. The EU's Safer Internet programme covers the internet and new online technologies, including mobile and broadband content, online games, peer-to-peer file transfer, and all forms of real-time communications such as chat rooms and instant messages. It is particularly designed to help protect children and young people from being exploited.
Telecom Paper Sep 08, 2003	back to top

IBM unveils breakthrough chip technologies
IBM announced breakthrough chip technologies that could extend Moore's law by more than five years and lead to advanced chips much sooner than expected. This could make possible futuristic applications such as hand-held real-time language translation, or supercomputer performance on a desktop, within the next few years rather than towards the end of the decade under the current rate of technological progress. The latest breakthrough concerns materials such as 'strained silicon' and 'hybrid substrate', which each speed up the movement of electrons while at the same time reducing electric power consumption. For the first time, IBM researchers have managed to combine strained silicon and hybrid substrate with dramatic results. Using both of these materials the performance of chips can be improved by 40 to 60 per cent. The technology will take at least three years to appear in commercial products. IBM will be the first to benefit, using the technologies to boost its chip business, which is currently losing money. It will also collect licensing revenue from other chipmakers.
Financial Times Sep 09, 2003	back to top

Microsoft to open video standard for review
Microsoft said Monday that it would open the specifications for its video compression technology, which would allow other companies to make products based on its technology. Microsoft, which launched its latest video and audio standard Windows Media 9 series in January, said it submitted the standard to the society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) on Monday for review. Acceptance by the international standards body would allow Microsoft's Windows Media 9 to be more easily adopted by other companies because the specifications would be open for all to see. Microsoft competes with RealNetworks and Apple Computer's QuickTime format in the market for video compression and streaming software. With open standards, other software companies could create applications that use Microsoft's video-encoding technology. The SMPTE will consider the standard when it meets next week, kicking off a process that could last six to 12 months.
Reuters Sep 08, 2003	back to top

Computer with 3-D display on sale next month
Notebook computers that show images in 3-D will be put on sale in Japan and the US next month by Sharp, the company announced. The 3-D feature, which does not require special glasses, is a world first, said Sharp, Japan's largest maker of liquid crystal displays (LCD). It said the 3-D feature can be used for video games and such purposes as architectural design, and users can switch to 2-D for normal use such as word processing by just pressing a button. Sharp said it targets developers of 3-D content and other corporate users at the initial stage. But it plans to launch models targeted at general users by the end of the year.
Reuters Sep 11, 2003	back to top

Scientists develop 'bacterial battery'
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst say the electricity that mud-dwelling bacteria could produce from a lump of sugar could power a mobile phone for four days. Fuelled by this unfashionable high-carb diet, the recently identified bacterium, Rhodoferax ferrireducens, releases the energy in sugar molecules by removing electrons. In their natural habitat of Vancouver bay sediment, the bacteria pass on the electrons to iron compounds, but in the lab the bacteria have been persuaded to donate them to an electrode as an electric current. Although the new process is efficient - up to 83 per cent of available electrons can be turned into usable electricity - it is slow and produces a little current over a long period. Early applications may include a charging mechanism to top up more conventional cells, with particular applications in surgical implants running from blood glucose and sensors extracting electricity from sucrose, fructose or other sugars in the immediate environment.
Silicon.com / ZDNet UK Sep 09, 2003	back to top

Don’t count out the TV tube just yet
LG Philips Displays, the world’s largest supplier of television and monitor tubes, said Wednesday it aimed to give standard televisions an extra lease of life with new tubes that are up to 30 per cent thinner. The slim tubes will allow TV makers to produce colour television sets that appear a little deeper than expensive flat TVs and plasma screens that have become all the rage, and only at a fraction of the cost. Flat televisions are three to five times as expensive as normal tube televisions - beyond the reach of many consumers. A 21-inch TV containing a slim tube will be 38 centimetres deep, compared with 51 centimetres for a standard TV. A bigger prototype 32-inch tube will also be 38 centimetres deep, compared with 54 centimetres for its predecessor.
MSNBC / Reuters Sep 10, 2003	back to top

Smart software makes sense of rough sketches
Intelligent software that brings rough sketches to life in a virtual world is promising to revolutionise the way children learn and to help engineers visualise their designs. The software, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, monitors the image as it is being drawn on to a computer screen and allocates probabilities to various interpretations of what it might represent. As the user adds more detail, the software adjusts these weightings. To do this, it uses a technique known as Bayesian analysis, which is normally used to compute the likelihood of specific causes, given certain effects. Once the computer has settled on an interpretation, it applies the laws of physics such as gravity and friction to set the virtual world in motion. Cars roll down hills, pendulums swing, and objects bang into each other.
New Scientist Sep 10, 2003	back to top

Researchers develop silicon retina
The video cameras and image processing software that are used to give machines the ability to see are relatively bulky and expensive. But researchers from the State University of New York at Buffalo and Stanford University have built a silicon retina that uses a timing signal to mimic a form of data compression performed by biological eyes, and transmits high-speed optical rather than electrical output. The silicon retina could be used in robots, smart sensor systems, and remote monitoring cameras, where its ability to sort out important information would allow reduced amounts of data to be analysed, transmitted and stored. Like its biological forerunners, the electronic retina processes the larger amount of data that makes up an image in order to transmit a smaller amount of key information. The silicon retina provides information about the edges of images rather than a whole picture. Edge information is usually sufficient for detecting and tracking objects.
Technology Review / TRN Sep 05, 2003	back to top

Neural net tracks skin colour
Our seemingly easy ability to spot and distinguish one object from another is actually a complicated process that evolved over millions of years. Researchers working to give computers and robots the ability to recognise gestures are up against several challenges. This system must recognise a face or a gesturing hand, and it must be able to continue to distinguish faces and hands as they move around among other objects. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Institute of Modern Optics have come up with a way to use skin colour to detect faces and hands. The researchers' system uses a camera connected to a processor that uses an artificial neural network to detect skin colour, then processes the information further to determine which skin-colour objects should be connected together. The system could be used to enable gaze and gesture control of electronics like appliances and robots. Tests of the system show that it was able to segment gestures with 96.25 per cent accuracy.
Technology Review / TRN Sep 08, 2003	back to top

Display brighter than film
The human eye is capable of seeing the sun's entire range of brightness - nearly seven orders of magnitude, or 10 million to 1. The liquid crystal screens used in laptops, palmtops and cell phones, however, display only a fraction of that range: they average around 300 to 1, and top out at 800 to 1. Researchers from York University in Canada, the University of British Columbia in Canada, and Sunnybrook Technologies, have devised a way to boost the dynamic range of liquid crystal displays to 90,000 to 1. The technology promises to make computer screens look more realistic. Key to the improvement is using hundreds of light-emitting diodes as a backlight rather than a pair of fluorescent tubes. The method should improve architectural rendering, and flight and vehicle simulators. It also promises to prove viewing medical imaging data, which, because of the limitations of today's computer displays, is often broken up into many pictures that show a series of brightness ranges.
Technology Review / TRN Sep 10, 2003	back to top

Palm-tops to beat nicotine craving
Looking at simple flickering images, or conjuring up mental pictures, can help stop cigarette cravings, researchers at the University of Sheffield, UK, have discovered. The team hope the trick could assist people in stopping smoking. If so, they plan to develop a palm-top application for would-be quitters to look at during a craving. The researchers asked a group of 40 smokers to imagine either sounds, or images. Half the subjects smoked before the test, while half abstained. Subjects then had to rate their cravings. For abstainers who pictured visual images, cravings fell away after one minute of imagery, and they ended the test with cravings rated as low as those who had actually had a cigarette. Smoke-free people who thought of sounds had moderate cravings throughout the experiment. The team also found that asking people to look at a screen of flickering black and white squares worked as well as mental imagery. A program to display the flashing pattern on palm-top computers might give people a portable way of using the technique while trying to stop smoking.
New Scientist Sep 11, 2003	back to top

'Reflectoporn' is new craze on eBay
Internet auction site eBay has been hit by a new craze in which sellers appear naked in reflections on goods they're selling. 'Reflectoporn' is said to have started in the US and now British exhibitionists have caught on. Sellers take a photo of the object they are auctioning in the nude - and their naked body is reflected in its polished surface. Naked bodies have been spotted on electric guitars, knives and forks. The craze was spotted by experts at web magazine Internet. An eBay spokesman said users are banned from selling erotica or sexually oriented materials, and are not allowed to depict genitalia. 'If we become aware of any item listed for sale on the site that breaches this policy, it will be removed,' he said.
Ananova / Daily Record Sep 09, 2003	back to top