For everything from family to computers…
The first analysis of team dynamics in a multiplayer first person shooter reveals that friendship is an important factor in success
In many fields of endeavour, the notion of team spirit is an important component of success. The idea is that friendships and understanding between team members will help them perform at a higher level.
Each AudioBulb is essentially just a 10-watt-per-channel mini speaker embedded in a five-watt LED bulb (roughly the equivalent of a 60-watt incandescent). You screw the lightbulb/speaker into your regular lightbulb socket, in a lamp or light fixture or whatever, and it provides light as well as sound. The system includes a docking station/router with an iPhone/iPod dock, as well as a 3.5mm jack (also known as a headphone jack) to accommodate non-Apple music players. You place the docking station somewhere around the room, place your audio player in the docking station, and it beams music to the Audiobulb.
Of course, that hardware isn’t exactly new; anyone who wants to send music wirelessly from an iPod dock to remote speakers already has a host of options available, many with a greater signal range than the Audiobulb system’s 100-foot maximum. And LEDs aren’t exactly hard to come by. The innovation is in elegantly shoehorning two very different things into one form factor that doesn’t require expensive or unusual additional equipment. The Audiobulb, shaped like a miniature version of those hats that British police officers wear, is compatible with any standard light socket. Blimey, that’s clever.
Writers are taught not to use clichés like “easy as screwing in a light bulb,” but there’s really no better way to describe how easy the setup is. Plug in the dock and the bulbs pair automatically. You can also easily create separate zones within a house using the remote, so you can send audio to different rooms.
Assuming your lamp can handle the oversized bulb (more on this below), it’s a convenient and unobtrusive option for a bedside table. You can charge your iPhone and play some music, with hardly any extra room taken.
The brightness of the bulbs can be adjusted to four different levels, regardless of the lamp they’re in. The bulbs function normally when the music is off, and they’re eco-friendly-GiiNii claims that with eight hours of use per day, they’ll last for 10 years.
Cramming a speaker into a light bulb comes at the cost of significant additional weight and size. The adjustable neck on one small lamp I tried was unable to support the bulb’s heft, while the harp on another one could not accommodate its 3.35-inch width. And many lamps require screwing in the bulb so that the speaker faces straight up, hardly the optimal angle for projecting music into a room. The sound is a bit hollow, though not much worse than most speakers in the same size and price range.
Using the device in multiple rooms has a downside as well-if you only have one dock and you want to move to another room, you either have to bring it with you, or choose your music and room brightness in advance. (There’s a little remote control, but it has to be pointing at the dock.) Personally, I don’t always know exactly how brightly I want to light a room until I’m in it, and I want to change the music I’m listening to relatively frequently.
The dock and two bulbs sell together for $300, and additional bulbs (the system can support up to eight) cost $99 apiece. It’s pretty expensive–that’s the same price as a Sonos Play:3, a wireless music system with nicer controls and a more established ecosystem (though of course it does not plug into a lamp).
Some gear succeeds by satisfying a need that the electronic-buying public didn’t know it had. That appears to be what GiiNii is attempting to do. The company wants you to feel like you can’t live without having your music come from the same place as your light-even if it’s something that had never before occurred to you to want.
I’m not sure the Audiobulb achieves that goal. It’s unquestionably a smart idea and a fairly nifty package, but there’s a good reason beyond technological limitations why nothing like it had come to market before. I appreciate the convenience of one-remote music and light setting, but setting the two separately just isn’t that onerous. No matter what kind of lamps and stereo equipment, a couple of clicks and switch flips each time is all it takes to set the mood. Even Wilt Chamberlain would have time for that.
But for the non-audiophile who has a house with multiple rooms or zones (and doesn’t mind leaving the same music and light setting on all the time) the Audiobulb does its job well. It will never be the most necessary piece of equipment you have in your house, but it will almost certainly be among the coolest.
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
The high data loads of the future–and even the present–require that optical communications platforms continue to get faster, leaner, and cheaper. At the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in Los Angeles today, IBM will report on a prototype optical chip it has developed that has hit a significant milestone in optical data transfer: one terabit–that’s one trillion bits–per second.
That’s like downloading 500 HD movies at once, a speed matching the bandwidth consumed by 100,000 users at today’s average high-speed Web rates. It’s important to note that this a parallel optics chip technology, not a long-range fiber optic serial communications technology, so it’s not going to instantaneously boost the speed at which data traverses the oceans. But between computers on a local network (between different servers in a data center, for instance) this technology could provide some pretty searing speeds.
The chip itself gets its name from the fact that there are 48 tiny holes bored through a standard silicon CMOS chip that connects on the back side with 24 receiver and 24 transmitter channels. These channels allow a whole lot of data to move through the chip in both directions simultaneously, allowing for these terabit-per-second transfer speeds.
What’s more, in proper IBM fashion the chip isn’t some kind of behind-the-glass prototype never destined for commercial production. The company claims it achieves these record data speeds with excellent power efficiency–that a 100-watt light bulb could power 20 of the optical modules. They are also constructed from off-the-shelf, commercially available components. But there’s no word yet on when, exactly, this manufacturer-friendly optical device might begin taking advantage of those economies of scale and deliver the next-generation of cloud computing and data center technologies.
[IBM]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
Wow… that’s messed up…
=======================================================
Delegates to the National People’s Congress have turned up carrying Chanel handbags and wearing Pucci suits. Photos of this display of wealth have gone viral, prompting outrage among Chinese. It’s estimated the richest 70 Chinese legislators have more wealth than the entire U.S. Congress.
from Morning Edition
Ewww………… be careful what you buy from now on… “meat” may not be really meat…Â >.<
======================================================
An estimated 70 percent of the ground beef supply contains these lean bits of meat derived from muscle and connective tissue. The industry calls the trimmings Lean Finely Textured Beef.
from Morning Edition
Jiro Ono, 85, owns a small sushi restaurant in a Tokyo subway station. The 10 seats at the sushi bar require reservations months in advance. In the new movie, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, director David Gelb explores the chef’s relationships with his sons and the art of sushi-making. Gelb talks to Renee Montagne about Ono’s story.
from Morning Edition
The sheer number of law enforcement officers makes it hard for big gangs to meet openly in New York City the way they did back in the 1980s, so many gang members who have left state prison have migrated north. Authorities say they brought shootings and stabbings with them.
from Morning Edition