I know this is out of the ordinary, and non design stuff, but since I’m a fan of Dave Matthews Band, I’m going to announce this, they are coming to town for summer tour, go get your tickets guys.
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Source : dave matthews band concert tickets
Japan is investigating a possible defect in Apple Inc.’s iPod after one of the popular digital music players reportedly shot out sparks while recharging, a government official said Wednesday.
An official at the trade and economy ministry, which oversees product problems, said a defect is suspected in the lithium-ion battery in the iPod Nano, model number MA099J/A. He spoke on customary condition of anonymity, saying he is reiterating a ministry position.
The problem surfaced in January in Kanagawa Prefecture southwest of Tokyo, and Apple reported the problem to the ministry in March. No one was injured, the official said. Other details weren’t available.
Apple Japan did not contest the ministry statement but declined further comment. Nano players are sold all over the world, and it was still unclear where else besides Japan the suspected model was sold, said Masayoshi Suzuki, an Apple spokesman in Tokyo.
The ministry has instructed Apple Japan to find out the cause of what it is categorizing as a fire and report back to the government.
The iPod was assembled in China, but it was unclear who made the lithium-ion battery, the ministry official said.
Lithium-ion batteries have been blamed for a series of blazes in laptops recently that have resulted in massive global recalls.
The ministry said Apple has shipped about 425,000 iPods of the same suspected model were shipped into Japan. It was unknown how many have been sold and how many might still be in stores.
Shipments of the model began in September 2005 and were discontinued after September 2006, the ministry said.
The iPod has been the symbol in recent years of the successful fashionable image of Apple. But its sales momentum may be gradually running out of steam.
Apple sold 22.1 million iPods during the holiday quarter ended Dec. 31, fewer than the 25 million iPods analysts had expected it to sell. That’s raising fears that the company, based in Cupertino, Calif., may suffer as it tries to convince consumers to buy higher-end iPods — a key part of its strategy.
The batteries in Apple products have had some problems in the past, largely about wearing out, not about being prone to fires.
In 2006, Japanese electronics and entertainment maker Sony Corp. apologized for the troubles it had caused consumers through defective lithium-ion batteries that had equipped Sony laptops and products by Dell Inc., Apple, Lenovo and other major manufacturers.
The Tokyo-based company recalled about 10 million batteries following reports of some computers using Sony power packs overheating and bursting into flames.
The lithium-ion battery is considered an overall good technology because of its ability to furnish power in relatively small sizes, although its suspected tendency to catch fire is a major reason Toyota Motor Corp. and other automakers are being cautious about using it in ecological cars.
Toyota’s Prius gas-electric hybrid uses a different kind of battery, and the switch in future green models to the lithium-ion battery will be seen as a considerable breakthrough.
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More : Yahoo
A good contractor is the key to a successful bath renovation. Candice’s crew installed streamlined storage, waterproof lighting and a gorgeous vessel sink in this modern guest bath
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See more : hgtv
It’s hard to find anyplace in Europe today, even here in peaceable Sweden, where people aren’t squabbling over cultural property and the spoils of war. For some time, it turns out, a handful of nationalist Danes have been loudly barking about booty that the Swedes nabbed 350 years ago in a war with Denmark. The cache includes an ornate canopy from Kronborg Castle, of Hamlet lore, and recently people in Skane, a region in the south of Sweden that was ceded by Denmark in 1658 after losing the war, said they wanted the canopy handed over.
In other words, one part of Sweden claimed restitution from, well, the rest of Sweden. An Internet poll by a Swedish newspaper revealed that a majority of residents in the region apparently still harbor dreams of Danish citizenship and resent their calm, polite, democracy-loving Swedish masters. On Valentine’s Day, a Danish newspaper went so far as to run a front-page headline accusing Ikea, the furniture giant founded by a Swede, which Danes have long loved to hate, of “bullying Denmark” by giving comfy sofas and shiny tables Swedish and Norwegian place names while assigning Danish names to doormats and rugs.
“I don’t think this can be a coincidence,” a Danish professor is quoted as saying on The Local, an English-language Swedish Web site (thelocal.se). He called it “cultural imperialism.”
Feeling guilty about my living room carpet, I decided to stop the other day into the Royal Armory here for a show called “War Booty” to see if the Swedes had anything to say for themselves. The exhibition ends up being a refresher course in history for an amnesiac nation that, having not fought a battle since losing Finland to the Russians 200 years ago, clearly prefers to think of itself as the home of Dag Hammarskjold rather than as a bygone empire.
But into the 18th century, as the show recounts, Sweden stocked its libraries and museums and churches with stolen arms, books, altarpieces, textiles and art by painters like Titian and Tintoretto, Dürer and Archimboldo. Much of this loot was pinched from Poland and Lithuania. The show argues that this was the custom of the day and that the best thing now is simply to lay everything on the table for all the world to see. But the clock can’t be turned back.
Not until the Congress of Vienna in 1815 (notice how that date falls after Sweden’s empire collapsed, a happy coincidence, no doubt) did countries in Europe generally agree that taking booty was a war crime. So there’s a cut-off date, a legal line in the sand.
Which won’t placate the Danes, you can bet on that. Under the Communists, Poland and Czechoslovakia also made some noises about getting back what Sweden took. The Swedes volunteered to return a treasured scroll to the Poles as a goodwill gesture.
The Czechs longed for the Silver Bible, produced around 520 in Ravenna, Italy. It had wended its way to a monastery in Essen, Germany, before ending up in the hands of Rudolph II in Prague, from whom Sweden’s Queen Christina grabbed it in 1648. Recently the Swedes have loaned the so-called Devil’s Bible to the Czech Republic, but they aren’t going to fork over either permanently. Former Eastern bloc countries are caught today between pressing to recover works like these Bibles and proving themselves to be agreeable partners in the European Union. It’s a tricky diplomatic problem that 17th-century monarchs like Christina clearly didn’t face.
“Do not forget to procure and send me the library and the rarities there in Prague,” she instructed her troops. “These, as you know, are all I really care about.” Her father, King Gustavus Adolphus, at least had looted in what you might call a more enlightened way, to fill Sweden’s then-backward libraries and churches. She treated war like a shopping spree.
Which raises the question: Does it matter whether booty comes from good wars or bad ones, from evil owners or helpless ones, from public places or obscure corners and rich men’s vaults? In principle, the answer should be, “No, it doesn’t matter.” But Germany in World War II stole art from its victims; the Soviets then looted Germany when their troops overran Berlin. In Germany’s case, it’s considered a war crime. Russians insist their actions were just revenge.
And now the descendants of two great czarist-era Russian collectors are pressing the Russian government to compensate them for what the Soviets took from their families, using the occasion of a show currently at the Royal Academy in London of loans from Russia to press their case. And good luck to them with the current Russian regime.
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Read More : nytimes
For Blu-ray, the format war has turned into one of those epic quests you see in badly dubbed martial arts movies.
Sure, its kung fu was too good for rival HD DVD to overcome. But hold on to those nunchaku — Blu-ray still has to overcome an army’s worth of fierce competition before it can officially crown itself the master of the global homevid village.
And that next battle starts with the entrenched format Blu-ray is trying to usurp, good-old 480p-resolution DVD, which may not be the "it" product it was back in the early days of the Bush administration, but overwhelmingly remains the go-to platform for delivering recorded movies and TV shows into the home.
"You will now see more of a comparison towards standard DVDs and less about the difference between Blu-ray and HD DVD," says Sony Pictures Home Entertainment topper David Bishop, summing up Blu-ray’s next major marketing push.
Buoyed by obvious advantages, including a better, nondegradable picture, menu-driven nonlinear playback, not to mention sheer product-design elegance — and, best of all, unanimous studio adoption from the very start — DVD quickly caught big-box-store fire and was able to usurp the once-very-established VHS format and make gobs of money for almost everyone involved with it.
Now that HD DVD is going away and the DVD biz is undeniably in recession — despite a boffo summer theatrical season, North American homevid sales declined 3.1% in 2007, according to Variety sister publicationVideo Business — the studios would love it if Blu-ray became even half as trendy as DVD was just a few years ago.
And there is at least some wind at their backs on this. For one, the federal government is mandating that all over-the-air TV broadcasts go digital next February. In the practical sense, this won’t actually affect that many people, since so many Americans get their TV through a cable or satellite box that will automatically convert digital TV signals for their old analog cathode ray tube-based sets.
But emotionally, having a stodgy government body like the FCC think they’re technologically uncool might be enough to convince many of the 50 million or so American households without high-definition sets that it’s time to take the bewildering plunge into the digital world this coming fourth quarter.
For Blu-ray, that amounts to go time.
In explaining the rationale behind the decision that ultimately doomed HD DVD — that is, homevid market share leader Warner Bros.’ choice in early January to forge exclusive ties with Blu-ray — Warner officials agreed that the long-awaited mass adoption of a high-definition TV was nearly at hand, and that now would be a good time for the industry to cut out this confusing dual-format stuff.
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Read More : Variety.com
It is called water jewels, very beautiful piece of designs from Vitra, designed by Matteo Thun
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More Pics : Water Jewels Bathroom Collection
Scare stories about mobile phones cooking our brains come and go as regularly as the seasons. Irrational and unexplained results are periodically hailed by the media as the death knell for the mobile industry.
Schools, colleges and universities advise against - or even ban - the use of wi-fi, and services are closed down as a potential health risk.
There are many protest groups actively campaigning against wireless in any form because of some unknown and unquantified potential risk to health. These groups include those preventing base station towers being erected close to their schools or in the middle of their communities.
Unfortunately their lack of understanding actually has an inverse reality impact. If they understood the basic physics involved they would be asking for more towers and not fewer. Living really close to a mobile phone base station tower is the safest place to be.
Here is what is happening. The mobile phone pressed close to your ear adjusts its transmit power according to the distance from the base station.
That means the further from the tower the lower the power received by a mobile and the higher the power transmitted back as a result.
So if you get really close to a base station your mobile sees lots of signal and therefore transmits back a minimal amount in turn. Interesting, isn’t it? That is the inverse perception of the protestors.
The detailed physics is also interesting. Near-field emissions - those that are mainly magnetic field coupling - fall away at a rate of 1/d^6 while the far-field radiation - that is, electro-magnetic waves - die at the slower rate of 1/d^2 where d is the distance from a transmitter.
These inverse distance laws lead to the situation whereby the power entering the human head from a tower is generally less than 1,000 times smaller than that produced by a mobile.
Hence, to reduce the exposure to radiation to a minimum it is always better to be really close to the base station to ensure the mobile is emitting a minimum energy.
And what of wi-fi and WiMax? Various emission limits and active control systems, plus deployment methods generally render these systems less power aggressive than mobile networks. And of course the same inverse distance/power laws apply.
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Read more : silicon.com
The evolution of light and technology has been illuminated by an artist using a simple light bulb and the Australian Synchrotron.
Melbourne-based multimedia artist Chris Henschke has also connected the facility to its outside environment by ensuring it resonates with the sound of a cicada.
Henschke, from RMIT University, says during his time at the Australian Synchrotron he wanted to expand on a desire to show artistically how science has grown.
"I wanted to use the synchrotron to illuminate an old light bulb and look at it as many different ways as I can," he says.
Henschke describes the tungsten filament light bulb as the great-grandfather of the synchrotron.
"Ironically it is about to become obsolete [under government plans to phase out domestic use], but one day the synchrotron will also become obsolete," he says.
"I am trying to put the new technology into its historical and technological context."
Henschke is still working on pieces for exhibit, but has a series of images produced by exposing the light bulb to different sources of light such as the optical, infra-red and protein crystallography beamlines.
Two-way creativity
He says the residency allowed for a two-way creative process.
One work is the product of a scientist’s suggestion that he expose the light bulb to the protein crystallography beamline.
The resulting image Henschke says is symbolic of his work at the synchrotron.
"I’m at this point where I can almost see into this whole other world, but not quite," he says.
In tune with the synchrotron
One of his creations is permanently embedded in the synchrotron.
Henschke says when he discovered the existence of the so-called synchrotron tune he wanted to hear it.
The synchrotron tune is the balance of frequencies around 13 megahertz needed to make the synchrotron beam work.
With the help of Dr Andreas Wilde, at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, in Dresden, Henshcke made the synchrotron tune audible to the human ear.
"I then thought I could put my own tune into their tune," Henschke says.
He initially planned to insert an audio file of all the synchrotron-based scientists shouting the word "synchrotron" and then toyed with the idea of inserting a guitar riff from one of his own songs into the instrument.
Sounds of the cicada
But the night before the experiment was due to happen Henschke heard a cicada in the facility’s car park and knew he had found his sound.
"The cicada’s deafening high-pitched tune was not only geoacoustically appropriate, it also gave me a perfect synaesthetic picture of the energy beam whirling around the synchrotron ring," Henschke says.
After having the tune encoded in Germany he gave it to the accelerator physicists to inject into the machine.
Henschke says the first attempt shut the synchrotron down.
But on the second attempt the sound file was lifted from a base frequency of 5 kilohertz to 1 megahertz to make the "vibration" fast enough to modulate the amplitude of the beam.
"Even though nothing was directly perceivable, just to know that the heart of the huge facility around me was pulsating with the sound of the cicada that lived next to it somehow connected the synchrotron back to the world around it," Henshke says in his blog on the experience.
"The experiment revealed a relationship between sound and light and energy and matter, the cicada singing in the sunlight and the light in the synchrotron singing with the cicada’s tune."
The works were completed as part of a three-month residency sponsored by Arts Victoria and the Australian Network for Art and Technology.
Henshke will outline his experiences at the Adelaide Festival later this week. His work can be viewed at www.topologies.com.au.
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Source : abc.net
Do you think this garden watering system will be available in the future ? This is just a concept, but from the description, I’m pretty sure it will come in handy when available. Cute design like a little insect hanging around in our garden, well … looking forward for it in the future.
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More images : garden watering system - beyflo