Home lender lied about loan specifics in addition to calling 5.4 million people on the national DNC registry
From The UberReview: Stair-Rover Allows You to Skate Where No Man Has Skated Before
You know what the problem with your skateboard is? It can’t go down stairs without you having to jump over the entire set. The Stair-Rover is an 8-wheeled longboard that does what was once impossible. It is a fully-functional street skate vessel that actually climbs down stairs without you having to get a running start and try your best to ollie over them (read: risk killing yourself). Check out the video below, and here for the Kickstarter page.
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from The UberReview
From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Satellite Photos Reveal Forced Relocation Of Tibetans
Human Rights Watch/ DigitalGlobe 2013
“The scale and speed at which the Tibetan rural population is being remodeled by mass rehousing and relocation policies are unprecedented in the post-Mao era,” says Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s China director. “Tibetans have no say in the design of policies that are radically altering their way of life, and-in an already highly repressive context-no ways to challenge them.”
According to the 115-page report, Chinese authorities in the Tibet Autonomous Region plan to relocate more than 900,000 people by the end of 2014. The Chinese government denies that it has forcibly evicted residents and claims that the rehousing program respects “the will of the Tibetan farmers and herders.” But the report says that relocated Tibetans struggle with financial difficulties after being forced to move, reduce their herds, or demolish and rebuild their homes.
Human Rights Watch has called for authorities to end the rehousing program and permit an independent evaluation of the policies. Read more about this story, including testimony from Tibetan villagers, over at Human Rights Watch.
Satellite imagery is helping humanitarian groups identify rights abuses around the world. Last week, near-infrared images revealed attacks on villages in Darfur, and in May, satellite photos undermined the Nigerian Army’s claim that it had only destroyed 30 homes, showing instead that 2,300 houses had been burned.
Watch a video about the rehousing program in Tibet, including analysis of the satellite images, below:
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: This Goofy-Looking Helmet Is Made Of Old Newspapers
Tom Gottelier, Bobby Petersen and Ed Thomas
Most safety gear isn’t exactly fashionable, and these helmets are no exception. As a consolation, though, at least you’re saving the environment in addition to your bean: They’re made of recycled newspaper.
The concept for the Paper Pulp Helmet was designed by a group of artists to potentially be a safety side dish to London’s bike share program. It could be sold in vending machines or stores near the docking stations for just £1, the designers say (though the city’s mayor, Boris Johnson, has said in the past that he has no intentions of making helmets available for the program, and that evidence of the “usefulness of cycle helmets is mixed.”)
Creators Tom Gottelier, Bobby Petersen and Ed Thomas, all graduates of the Royal College of Art in London, seem to think more helmets would be plenty useful. To put together the headgear, they made a pulp out of newspapers they gathered in the city’s public transportation network. They mixed in an adhesive, some pigment and organic additive to make the gloop water resistant for up to six hours in the rain, and voila!–molded it into a vaguely fruit-bowl shaped helmet. (Though if you’re biking in the rain for six hours, you’re probably too intense for a newspaper helmet.)
The paper mache head-bowls come in at least two fashionable colors (that correspond to different sizes) and are held in place by a strap that grips the grooves in the structure and snaps in place under your chin. Once they’ve been worn, they can be recycled and made back into pulp for a new helmet.
Cheap, readily available helmets are great if you’re seized with the unexpected urge to grab a Citibike, and presumably any cranium shielding is better than nothing at all. But it’s not entirely clear if this crafty headwear has gone through full safety testing. Creator Bobby Peterson told Metro “We have done some initial drop tests which indicate they are safe,” and the paper writes “the headgear meets stringent European safety standards.” From the pictures, they still look a bit flimsy. Give me a high-impact crash test video and I’ll strap one on happily.
See more of the process in the video below:
Paper Pulp Helmet from Bobby Petersen on Vimeo.
[Dezeen]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
From Gizmodo: Oh Great, Wi-Fi Networks Can Be Used to See Through Walls Now
And here we thought the only privacy risk with having a Wi-Fi network at home was someone figuring out our password. Researchers at MIT felt that a stranger having access to your wireless network wasn’t scary enough, so they developed a way for someone to use Wi-Fi signals as a sort of x-ray vision to track a person’s movements in another room.
Borrowing similar techniques as used with radar and sonar, the Wi-Vi system—as the researchers have called it—sends out a pair of inverse wireless signals as pings. When they hit something stationary, they cancel each other out, but when an object is in motion it creates an offset between the signals that can be processed to determine where and how fast it’s moving.
In its current state it’s far from Superman’s x-ray vision, though. The system isn’t precise enough to determine exactly what someone is doing in another room, but that doesn’t mean its useless. Using a smartphone as the signal source, Wi-Vi could provide a cheap way for rescue workers to search for captives in a building, or even as a way to hunt for survivors trapped under rubble, as long as they’re moving. Or, as a mobile version of Kinect that doesn’t necessarily need to see you to detect your gestures. [MIT via SlashGear]
from Gizmodo
From Engadget RSS Feed: Handibot Smart Tool hits Kickstarter, cuts in 3D with mobile controls (video)
While CNC routers are part-digital by their nature, they haven’t really kept up with the times: they’re often fixed in place and don’t easily adapt to unique tasks. ShopBot Tools hopes to modernize these machines by crowdfunding its Handibot Smart Tool. The device is portable and cuts 3D shapes out of many flat surfaces, but its specialty is the accessible, app-driven control that the fundraising will support. Builders can give the Handibot a wide range of instructions through apps on PCs or (eventually) mobile devices, whether they need a few simple holes or large, ornate patterns. Those pledging support will need to spend at least $1,995 to get a Handibot this September, assuming ShopBot reaches its $125,000 goal; still, it may be worth the cost for any workshop enthusiast who feels limited by existing tools.
Filed under: Household
Source: Kickstarter
from Engadget RSS Feed
From Gizmodo: Whoa, What Makes This Chain of Beads Magically Float?
Here’s a brilliant experiment you can do at home if you’ve got yourself a lengthy chain of metal beads, and a container big enough to hold them. You just take one end of the chain out and drop it so that it drags the rest with it, and almost immediately you’ll see it rise up out of the container like it’s magically defying gravity.
It works even if you don’t have a degree in magic, but how’s that possible? The folks at BBC Earth Productions wanted to find out, so they pointed their high-speed camera at the mesmerizing effect, and got Steve Mould—who posted an earlier video of it occurring—to weigh in on what’s happening.
Once again, physics has a fairly reasonable explanation that debunks the magic theory, but even knowing why it’s happening doesn’t make it any less fascinating to watch. So let’s check out Steve’s original video too:
from Gizmodo