Month: September 2012

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From Geeks are Sexy Technology News: Apple Supplier Foxconn Hit by Staff Riot

Around 40 people have been injured in riots at one of Apple’s main suppliers. An estimated 1,000 to 2,000 people were involved in a mass brawl at the Foxconn plant in Taiyuan.

The incident began in a dormitory at the factory where staff lived. The company has been at the center of repeated allegations of poor labor standards and living conditions.

Foxconn says the disturbance began around 11pm local time last night. More than 5,000 police officers attended and regained control by9 am today. Production at the factory has been halted for the moment.

A government official has said early police investigations suggest it was sparked by a personal dispute between staff from different regions of China, while Foxconn says the incident wasn’t work-related.

However, unverified reports on social networks have put the blame on security guards violently attacking a worker in an earlier incident, with staff either rioting as a direct response or using the disturbance as an opportunity to seek revenge. Foxconn claims there was no property damage, though independent photos and videos show broken windows and a burned out van.

A spokesman for a Hong Kong group supporting Chinese labor rights suggested worker protests across the country are becoming more common, though only around five percent of such incidents lead to physical damage.

The Taiyuan factory is said to make some iPhone components, though isn’t the main production point for Apple in the country. Staff at the factory held a brief strike in March over pay and working conditions, reportedly because a promised pay increase didn’t materialize.

 

from Geeks are Sexy Technology News

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From Geeks are Sexy Technology News: Patent trolls face public scrutiny


A change to US law means patent and trademark officials must allow the public to report that a patent claim is bogus because the technology is already in use. That’s led to the creation of a dedicated website for making such reports.

The change comes in the America Invents Act, which became law last year. The clause in question took effect from September 16 this year and states that “Any person at any time may cite to the Office in writing prior art consisting of patents or printed publications which that person believes to have a bearing on the patentability of any claim of a particular patent…”

Prior art means the process put forward for patent can be shown to have already been used anywhere in the world. If accepted, prior art will usually kill a patent application.

The legal change is significant because patent examiners have only a limited time (around 20 hours) to review each application, making it difficult if not impossible to look in every place an “invention” might have been used before.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has now asked for the help of Stack Exchange. That’s a company that runs dozens of question and answer sites where users can vote for how useful submitted answers are to give them added prominence: think Yahoo! Answers without the dribbling idiots.

Stack Exchange is working alongside the USPTO and Google Patent Search to produce Ask Patents, a searchable database with tags for keywords, classification and patent number. Once somebody submits an example of prior art, readers can vote on whether they think it is indeed a match. Patent officials can then concentrate on the submissions that appear most credible evidence of prior art.

According to Stack Exchange:

Collectively, we’re building a crowd-sourced worldwide detective agency to track down and obliterate bogus patent applications. Over time, we hope that the Patent Stack Exchange will mitigate the problems caused by rampant patent trolling. It’s not a complete fix, but it’s a good start.

 

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From Ars Technica: Apple apes trademarked Swiss railway clock for iPad’s new Clock app

A comparison of Apple’s iPad clock to the SSB original.

Apple added a Clock app to the iPad in iOS 6, but the company may get into trouble for the visual look of the app’s analog-style clock face. According to Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger, Apple’s designers copied the iconic—and trademarked—look of the Swiss Federal Railway (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, or SBB) clocks used in train stations all over Switzerland. And the SBB wants Apple to pay up.

This isn’t the first time Apple has used an iconic design for an iOS app. The original iOS calculator used a design that paid homage to the classic Braun ET44 calculator. Apple SVP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive is well-known as an unabashed fan of Braun designer Dieter Rams.

However, SBB noted that it has a copyright and trademark on the design of its railway station clocks, which have become an icon of both SBB and Switzerland itself. “We enjoy the fact that the Swiss railway clock is being used by Apple. It once again proves that it’s a real piece of design,” SBB spokesperson Christian Ginsig said. “This act, however, is an unauthorized use [of the clock’s design] by Apple.”

from Ars Technica

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From Ars Technica: Arctic melt bottoms out at new record low

This year’s melt (blue) has ended up well below 2007’s record (green).
NSIDC

Yesterday, the National Snow and Ice Data Center announced that the Arctic melt season was probably over. This year’s melt had already set records back in August, so the only real question was just how low it would go. Assuming there’s not a downward fluctuation during the next couple of weeks, the answer is 3.41 million square kilometers, or about half of the typical low point observed from 1980-2000. That’s about 750,000 square kilometers below the previous low (set in 2007), an area roughly equivalent to that occupied by Texas.

In fact, as the NSIDC notes, every year since 2007 has seen unusually strong summer melts: “The six lowest seasonal minimum ice extents in the satellite record have all occurred in the last six years.” Although weather has undoubtably played a role in making this year’s melt unusually severe, the strong tendency toward record amounts of open water in the Arctic Ocean seems to lend credence to the ideas of Cornell professor Charles H. Greene, who has referred to recent trends as signs that we’ve entered what he called an “Arctic warm period.”

One of the surprising aspects of all of this is that it’s happening much faster than most climate models have predicted. Many of them had been indicating the ice would be relatively stable for most of the current century.

from Ars Technica

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From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: This Escape Pod Could Save Lives In A Tsunami

Safety Capsule Matt Duncan with his four-man Tsunami Survival Pod. Gold Coast Bulletin
Watching footage of the 2011 Japanese tsunami inspired Matt Duncan’s design.Australian business owner Matt Duncan usually builds steel-hulled houseboats, but he was so affected by last year’s devastating tsunami in Japan that he’s turned his focus to seaworthy survival craft. His bright orange Tsunami Survival Pod can accommodate four people for two and a half hours.

Duncan tells the Gold Coast Bulletin that he couldn’t take his eyes off the TV last spring after a tsunami ravaged Japan. “I was home the day the tsunami hit, watching it on television and just thinking, ‘What could I have done to save these people?'” he recalled. He watched hours of footage and observed how different objects responded to the action of the waves and the other debris pulled out to sea.

Within a few days, he’d designed this safety pod, using the spiral-welded steel he uses for his houseboats. It has crumple zones to absorb impacts; racing-style seats and five-point safety harnesses for four passengers; a flashing beacon to alert rescuers; and hooks for helicopters to grab and lift it to safety. It even has one-inch-thick polycarbonate windows so you don’t feel claustrophobic.

He said the pods will retail for $8,500 in Australian dollars, or about $8,872 USD, and they can fit in an average garage. A tsunami usually comes with at least some warning, so someone could conceivably wheel it out and hop in before the water rises. Check out some more images of it here.

[via News.com.au]

from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now

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From Geeks are Sexy Technology News: LIFX: The Light Bulb Reinvented

This is a project that I’m backing right now. A LED light bulb that generates as much light as a traditional 60 Watt incandescent bulb, can be controlled wirelessly, lasts up to 25 years, and consumes less power than a fluocompact bulb (without all the nasty chemical), now how awesome is that? Sure, it’s a little on the expansive side, but have you seen what it can do? Check it out in the video below!

[LIFX: The Light Bulb Reinvented]

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From Geeks are Sexy Technology News: HOLY BAT-BIKE! San Jose State Students Build Omnidirectional Motorcycle

San Jose State University students have built a prototype chassis for an omnidirectional motorcycle — which will eventually allow them to not only move sideways and have the bike balance itself, but do total 360′s while driving!

The students hope to have their prototype complete and fully operational by the end of the year. You can follow their progress and concepts here.

[Via Geekologie]

from Geeks are Sexy Technology News