Inkjet printing didn’t kill the market for crayons, markers, and other “dumb” drawing tools. So why not a not-smart, hand-held version of a 3-D printer? That’s the concept behind 3Doodler, a Kickstarter project launched earlier this week by WobbleWorks, a toy company in Somerville, Mass. WobbleWorks' idea is to use a pen-shaped gizmo and rolls of ABS plastic, a feedstock used in many of today’s 3-D printers, to let people draw 3-D shapes. I’m guessing the process will be somewhat meditative; you’ll have to draw slowly enough to let the plastic cool enough to support your structure; the video on Kickstarter appears to be sped up a bit. So it might not be as easy as it looks, but the minute I saw the “doodled” Eiffel Tower, I wanted to get my hands on this gadget.
Turns out I’m not alone. Earlier this week 3Doodler’s Kickstarter campaign launched with a $30,000 goal; the effort already far surpassed that goal, with more than $1.5 million in funding pledged, and that funding window stays open until March 25. Early backers are promised the gizmo in September or October; later backers have to wait until 2014.
Why does this vision of a dumb, hand-held, 3-D printing-pen so capture the imagination? It has to have helped that 3-D printing seems to have just burst out of the Maker sphere and into the broader public consciousness. Every time I turned on the radio or TV this week I heard someone waxing poetic about 3-D printing or arguing about whether or not it was somehow going to cause widespread unemployment or raise insurmountable copyright issues. So people today, at least in the U.S., have likely heard of 3-D printing, though they probably aren’t quite ready to put down a thousand bucks to bring it into their homes.
Conversations about Bitcoin eventually funnel down into one exasperated question: "But where can I use them if I have them?!" It's a good question. And the most honest answer is, you can buy drugs. Sure you can buy a lot of other things if you look for them, but this is the product that's moving and with Silk Road, it's the most developed market that Bitcoin has right now.
Everyone who wants to see Bitcoin grow into a mainstream currency agrees that legitimate vendors need to jump in. Then, some day, drugs will just be one of Bitcoin's dirty little side shows. You know, like they are for every other currency.
Last week, a couple of legitimate vendors jumped in. Reddit, a news recommending site, and Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom announced that they will begin accepting payment in Bitcoin, resulting in an impressive expansion of Bitcoin's merchant base and the desirability of the currency.
Reddit is the bigger catch in this haul and the biggest gain for Bitcoin since WordPress started dealing in the currency last fall. The user-generated news aggregator and self-proclaimed "front page of the Internet" consistently ranks in the top 150 most trafficked websites worldwide. In the U.S. and Canada, it's even more popular.
On Valentine's Day it announced that it would begin accepting Bitcoin payments for its Gold membership, a feature that enables users to browse without viewing advertising and gives them access to some storage for archiving. Evidently, Reddit was responding to direct requests from its users who were annoyed that their only payment options were Google Checkout and PayPal. The Bitcoin transactions will be facilitated by a relatively new intermediary called Coinbase.
Rothschild took pride, in the interview, in the fact that he's seen few of the films. He says that makes it easier to do. I agree. I saw all 9 Best-Picture nominees and another 4 films that received nominations in the 10 categories below. In total, I saw 51 of the 54 nominations here. (I'm missing two in Cinematography, and Naomi Watts's performance in The Impossible.) That creates a schism between who I think will win based on my intuitions about Academy voters, who I think will win looking at Rothschild's data, and who I want to win.
I also saw a number of other movies worthy of Oscar attention, including Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, The Hunger Games, and The Color Wheel. I'd like to thank the podcast "Filmspotting" for introducing me to those films, along with Footnote, Killer Joe, and Searching for Sugar Man, an amazing film that's nominated for Best Documentary. While I'm giving shout-outs, I've learned a lot about some other movies this year by listening, in podcast form, to two of KCRW's radio shows, "The Treatment" and "The Business."
I saw many of the films in theaters, but quite a few viaNetflix (both disk and Instant), and as iTunes rental. One relatively new development this year is the number of movies that are available for rental, either through iTunes or on-demand cable services, while they're still in theaters. The jury is out on whether that will help or hinter them at the box office.
More and more movies are going straight to rental, as well—and making a profit. It will be interesting to see what happens when an Oscar-worthy film fails to be released in theaters—will Hollywood ignore it? That almost happened with independent filmmaker Ed Burns's The Fitzgerald Family Christmas, a wonderful film that didn't quite go straight to rental (it had a one-week run in Chicago and one performance in New York, which is where I caught it) and wasn't quite of Oscar caliber.
In the end, Rothschild's work is about who will win, so here are my predictions about that, along with some notes about who I would have voted for were I a member of the Academy.
Listeners can go to PredictWise for David Rothschild’s latest predictions. Or grab his Oscars Ballot Predictor and join the predicting fun!
Best Picture—Argo. My own favorite movie of the year, among those nominated, was Amour, with Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Master close behind.
Last week, while reading the latest online comments in the news, blog, and Twitter battle between New York Times reporter John Broder and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, I got a call from my 17-year-old daughter. (Broder, as you know unless you were stuck on a cruise ship in the middle of the Gulf with a dead cell phone, ran out of juice during an official test drive of a Tesla Model S. Musk charged that Broder ran down the battery on purpose in order to generate the photo-op of the Model S on a tow truck.) That evening, my daughter had used my car to pick up her brother from an after-school activity and take him out for frozen yogurt. Just as she had arrived at the school, the low-gas-warning light went on. She was a little freaked out; she didn’t know if she would make it to a gas station. What should she do? Having pushed the “empty” limits on that car a few times, I was able to tell her with confidence not to worry, to go ahead with her driving plans and I’d still have plenty of gas the next day, when an errand would take me past my favorite gas station. Simple wisdom, easily imparted, but it wasn’t something she could have figured out from looking in the car manual, which only said, “This warning light in the fuel gauge signals that the fuel tank will soon be empty. Get fuel as soon as possible.” Not particularly helpful.
So I have a little sympathy for Broder, behind the wheel of a car he’d never before driven, though he was in phone communication with Tesla staffers (like my daughter had been with me). And I also can sympathize with Musk and the Tesla support staff, who, now that they are used to driving electric cars, may have forgotten the anxiety of being in an unfamiliar car.
The Elon Musk/New York Times debate did offer a few lessons about how to drive an electric car to maximize range. (Though, for most of us, if or when we drive electric, we’ll probably have to test the limits for ourselves; haven’t we all pushed the limits on our gas engine cars on occasion?) Here’s my takeaway:
It’s not too early to seriously start thinking about that internship application. Top tech companies are already looking for interns. And, while these highly-coveted intern spots might be hard to get, if you can land a summer job at one of these bigwigs, you’d not only be padding your resume big time, but also your wallet.
Plus, there’s a good chance the internship could lead to a stable full-time job. An internship survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers last year showed that, on average, about 60 percent of companies' interns turn into full-time hires. Employees brought on board in this manner, the survey showed, have a much better chance of keeping their jobs five years later compared with hires with no internship experience.
10. Apple, average monthly intern pay: $4914 (annual: $58,968)
9. Yahoo, average monthly intern pay: $5191 (annual: $62,292)
6. Google, average monthly intern pay: $5678 (annual: $68,136)
3. Microsoft, average monthly intern pay: $5936 (annual: $71,232)
2. Facebook, average monthly intern pay: $6056 (annual: $72,672)
But number one on the list is a company that might come as a bit of a surprise:
1. VMWare, maker of cloud and virtualization software, which pays its interns a monthly average of $6536 (annual: $78,432)
The good news is that many of the companies on the top-paying list are also ranked as some of the best places to work by current and former interns—and they’re hiring, according to another Glassdoor report. The top-20 highest-rated companies that are hiring interns in 2013 include: Google (rating 4.6), QUALCOMM (4.2), Microsoft (4.2), Intel (4.1), Cisco (4.0), IBM (3.9), and Amazon (3.9).
So if these companies aren’t already on your list of places to apply for an internship, they might be worth adding.
Airbus will not include lithium-ion batteries in its A350 airliner as originally planned, the French company said today, in the first industry-wide consequence of the fires that grounded Boeing's 787 Dreamliner in January. Back then we reported that Airbus executives were keeping open the option of reverting to tried-and-true nickel-cadmium batteries. Today they exercised that option.
Airbus stood by the safety of its original choice, a lithium-ion battery from France's Saft, but implied that it was not prepared to wait as the safety investigations of Boeing's batteries slowly wend their way to a final verdict on what caused the fires.
By acting now, Airbus can hope to swap battery types with relative ease, seeing as it still has 18 months to go before its first scheduled deliveries of the A350. For Boeing, however, such a change, in an airliner already in service, would cost much in time and money, as well as embarrassment.
It may seem strange that the two companies chose lithium-ion batteries, which are known to be as temperamental as racehorses, seeing that the savings in weight over the nickel-cadmium alternative barely amounts to that of a single passenger. But weight may not have been the primary consideration; lithium-ion batteries are still getting better, while the older ones are not; they charge faster; and they supposedly require less maintenance. The last claim has been undermined, though, by reports that the Boeing batteries had problems even before the fires in January.
Today's the kind of day when you can see the future. Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first treatment that can restore (limited) eyesight to (some) blind people. Despite the caveats, it's an exciting milestone.
The treatment involves electrodes implanted in the eyes of people whose retinas are damaged. The FDA approved the implants for people with severe cases of retinitis pigmentosa, a relatively small patient population. But the company that makes the implants, Second Sight Medical Products, says they can benefit a much broader group of people with vision problems, including many elderly people who suffer from macular degeneration.
IEEE Spectrum covered the technology in "Birth of the Bionic Eye." Click through to that article for all the technical details of how the retinal implant system works, and what the experience of wearing one was like for one test subject, Barbara Campbell (pictured at right).
That article was part of our "Top Tech 2012" special report based on Second Sight's optimistic predictions that it would win FDA approval for the implants in the year 2012. So the company is a couple of months behind schedule in the United States, but its implants have been on the market in Europe since 2011.
Second Sight isn't the only company working on retinal prostheses. We've also described a competing technology from the German company Retina Implant AG, whose system was undergoing clinical trials last year.
With the flip of a single red switch, the operators of the Large Hadron Collider cleared the last near-light-speed protons from the particle accelerator early this morning. Such "dumps," which divert the LHC's particle beams from their circulating ring and into two 10-ton graphite blocks, are routine. They can occur multiple times a day to protect the collider from beams that become unstable. But today's dump is expected to be the last one for two years, as physicists and engineers work to repair and upgrade the facility, with the aim of nearly doubling its power.
The coming campaign, dubbed "Long Shutdown 1," will span all 27 kilometers of the LHC's accelerator ring. The chief aim will be to fix some 10 170 high-current connections between superconducting magnets. A single faulty connection between two magnets was responsible for the explosion in September 2008 that destroyed part of the accelerator and set the LHC's schedule back more than a year.
In the aftermath of that accident, a careful investigation of the quality of other connections around the accelerator revealed additional faulty connections. Some of the most egregious ones were fixed, but LHC managers couldn't exclude the possibility that there were other large ones lurking in parts of the accelerator that were not warmed up for careful inspection after the accident. These were deemed not a danger, so long as the LHC did not operate at too high of an energy. As a result, the collider has been run at 3.5 TeV per beam (more recently 4 TeV), instead of the 7 TeV it was designed for.
CERN's Lucio Rossi, who headed up the production of the superconducting magnets, explained in a 2010 article from the CERN Courier that the magnet team estimated that 10-15 percent of the joints in the facility will need to be resoldered in order to make the collider safe to run as designed. Technicians will also add on an extra, copper shunt to each of the 10 000-odd interconnections. That will allow an extra pathway for electric current should a superconducting connection suddenly quench, or become normally conducting (this greatly raises the material's electrical resistance and can lead to overheating, which is what happened in 2008).
In addition to new joints, the LHC will also be getting new electronics shielding, new computers, and upgrades to the four large detector experiments stationed around the ring. "It's absolutely not time off," Dave Charlton, deputy spokesperson for the LHC's ATLAS experiment, told Nature.
Physicists will also continue to analyze the data collected over the three years that the LHC was in operation. There's still a lot of work to be done in pinning down the properties of the newly discovered, Higgs-like particle that was announced in July. And when I spoke with Joe Incandela, spokesperson for the CMS experiment, last year, he told me that the CMS team had been stockpiling data in anticipation for the shutdown. They hope to comb through it for evidence of still more new physics.
A lot of planning and testing goes into creating a new web site and we want our readers to be part of it. That’s why we’ve launched the beta version of our new site, which won't be fully completed until May. Keep in mind that it's a true beta version—if you see things that look broken, it's probably because we're still fixing bugs and adding features. If you spot a bug, or have a complaint or feature request, let us know by using the UserVoice widget in the lower left corner. You can also vote on the suggestions of other readers. We'll be using this feedback to help guide our remaining development priorities
On the beta site, one of the first things you’ll notice is that it sizes to fit your screen, whether you’re viewing it on a TV, desktop monitor, laptop or tablet. If you don’t see something that grabs you on the first page of our homepage or topic pages, you can load more stories, as many as you want. We’ve given you various ways to explore our treasure trove of technology news and analysis like a rich navigation menu that lets you explore engineering topics, special reports, multimedia, our award winning magazine and sponsored content including our popular webinars and whitepapers. You’ll notice that our search results page provides better sorting and filtering controls to help you find exactly what you’re looking for the first time around.
Our content pages have been revamped to be easier to read, with bigger, more legible fonts and a wider content well. Our videos and podcasts are presented in a big, bold format and our blogs have been spiffed up with new landing pages and logos. We’ve switched to a new commenting system powered by Disqus that we think is going to facilitate even more lively discussions.
We also have a number of other features in the works. We’re going to let you sort the modules on our homepage by recency and what other readers find most interesting right now. In addition, we’ll be adding some filters to let you drill down to exactly what you want to see on our homepage and topics pages. We’re going to tighten up the header to reveal more content above the fold and we’re going to redo the bottom of our content pages so they are more readable and easier to navigate. The first column to the right of the content well will all be content related to the item you’re reading so a deeper dive is just one click away. We’ll also be adding our entire print magazine archive going back to 2000.
While we still have lots of work to do, we'd like to get your feedback on what we've got so far. So, take the new site for a spin, and let us know what you think. On the lower right corner of every page, you'll also find a toggle that allows you to switch back and forth between the current site and beta version on any page.
The North Korean provenance of yesterday's nuclear explosion leaps out at even the most casual visitor to the Web site of NORSAR, the Norwegian Seismic Array, north of Oslo.
“Look at the three lines showing the test blasts of 2006, 2009 and 2013,” says Steven J. Gibbons, senior research geophysicist at the organization. “The ripples on the seismograms look identical, except for the difference in amplitude. That’s because the seismic waves have travelled through exactly the same rock, the same rock boundaries.”
It's a correlative method, like fingerprinting, but it works only if you have an earlier, positively identified blast from the same site to serve as a template, notes Gibbons, an IEEE member. “People are trying to develop models that might one day be able to detect such an explosion without a prior example, but I personally think that’s a long way off,” he says.
After noting a nuke's characteristic squiggle in a seismic readout, researchers around the world can compare notes to pinpoint the origin. “By measuring miniscule differences in travel times between the different stations, you can say that the test in 2009 was approximately 2 kilometers west of the one in 2006 and that the one today was less than one kilometer away.”
Detector arrays in quiet areas, like the central Sahara or the Australian outback, are particularly useful for separating a nuclear explosion’s fingerprint from background noise coming from road traffic, ocean waves, and numberless movements in the depths of the earth. Once the identification is certain, the amplitude of various data samples over time can help you estimate the size of an explosion.
“If you increase the yield by a factor of 10, you increase the amplitude on the seismograph by a factor of log 10,” Gibbons explains. “We think North Korea’s yields have increased tenfold--from 1 kiloton in 2006 to 5 kilotons in 2009 and to 10, in 2013.”
For all the advantages of a far-flung network of detectors, there is still good reason to get as close to the action as possible. “A seismic wave will decay with distance,” Gibbons explains. “I follow very closely what happens in North Korea, and we process data from Russia’s detector, which is about 350 km from the North Korean border, and from South Korea’s, which is about 250 kilometers from it. We can thus detect mining blasts in North Korea, and I can say, yes, that is what it is, and it came from here or from there.”
IEEE Spectrum’s general technology blog, featuring news, analysis, and opinions about engineering, consumer electronics, and technology and society, from the editorial staff and freelance contributors.
In my 
Last week, while reading the latest online comments in the news, blog, and Twitter battle between 
IEEE Spectrum covered the technology in "
