Technology Effect

Toronto:  The flying car is on its way.  An American company Terrafugia Transition, based near Boston, is set to unveil the dual-purpose car-cum-plane vehicle called 'The Flying Car' as early as 2011. The two-seater vehicle can let you fly if you wish to avoid the congested city traffic. If you want to drive on the road, just touch the road. The vehicle will fold up its wings in 30 seconds and transform itself into a car. "The Flying Car" can travel up to 725 kilometres in the air at a speed of more than 115 kilometres per hour. Fuelled by gasoline, it has front wheel drive on the road and a propeller for flight. With its wings folded, it can be parked in your ordinary car garage. Its initial cost is expected to be around $200,000 (nearly Rs.1 crore), says the company which has already orders for 60 vehicles. The CEO of the company told Canadian TV (CTV) network here that they have successfully test-flown "The Flying Car" as many as 28 times. The tes...

This could be the year when we quit dragging ourselves to work and send remote-controlled robot avatars instead Why drag yourself to work through rush-hour traffic when you can stay at home and send a remote-controlled robot instead? Firms in the US and Japan are already selling robot avatars that allow office workers to be in two places at once. So 2011 could be the year when many of us find ourselves sitting across the desk from an electronic colleague. Californian company Willow Garage is developing a so-called telepresence robot called Texai, while Anybots, also in California, recently launched the QB office bot. The QB, which looks like a small Segway vehicle with a robot head on top, can travel at 6 kilometres per hour, using a laser scanner to avoid books and other office clutter. It can be controlled via a web browser from anywhere in the world and has camera eyes to allow you to navigate your robot's surroundings and see who you are talking to. A sm...

A dealer in antique coins gets an offer to buy a beautiful bronze coin. The coin has an emperor's head on one side and the date "544 B.C." stamped on the other. The dealer examines the coin, but instead of buying it, he calls the police. Why? Solving this "insight problem" requires creativity, a skill at which humans excel (the coin is a fake -- "B.C." and Arabic numerals did not exist at the time) and computers do not. Now, a new explanation of how humans solve problems creatively -- including the mathematical formulations for facilitating the incorporation of the theory in artificial intelligence programs -- provides a roadmap to building systems that perform like humans at the task. Ron Sun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor of cognitive science, said the new "Explicit-Implicit Interaction Theory," recently introduced in an article in Psychological Review, could be used for future artificial intelligence. ...

The FBI has joined the hunt for hackers who took down websites like PayPal, after they stopped processing payments to whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, US media reports said Friday. The Smoking Gun website published five pages of an FBI affidavit, detailing an operation that took US federal investigators to Europe, Canada and back to the United States as they hunted down the "Internet activists" who launched attacks "against perceived corporate enemies of WikiLeaks." The attacks earlier this month targeted firms including electronic payments site PayPal, and Visa and Mastercard credit cards, which had suspended or frozen WikiLeaks’s accounts after the whistle-blowing website published thousands of sensitive Department of State cables. In mid-December, the FBI traced Internet protocol addresses for the hackers to Canada and then back to California where a virtual server that was assigned one of the IP addresses used to launch the attacks was hous...

IN 1837 British mathematician Charles Babbage described a mechanical computer that later became known as the Analytical Engine. Calling it a computer is no stretch: the Analytical Engine had a central processing unit and memory and would have been programmed with punched cards. Parts of the Analytical Engine were built in the 1800s and are on display in the Science Museum in London along with a stack of punched cards. But Babbage never completed the project. The computer was an extension of his well-known Difference Engine, which was designed to calculate tables of numbers such as logarithms. While building a prototype of the Difference Engine No 1, Babbage realised that a more general-purpose machine was possible. While the Difference Engine could perform the same set of calculations over and over again, it couldn't examine its own results to change its calculations. A machine that can do that has the power of a modern computer. Even though the Analytical En...

Toronto:The flying car is on its way.  An American company Terrafugia Transition, based near Boston, is set to unveil the dual-purpose car-cum-plane vehicle called 'The Flying Car' as early as 2011. The two-seater vehicle can let you fly if you wish to avoid the congested city traffic. If you want to drive on the road, just touch the road. The vehicle will fold up its wings in 30 seconds and transform itself into a car. "The Flying Car" can travel up to 725 kilometres in the air at a speed of more than 115 kilometres per hour. Fuelled by gasoline, it has front wheel drive on the road and a propeller for flight. With its wings folded, it can be parked in your ordinary car garage. Its initial cost is expected to be around $200,000 (nearly Rs.1 crore), says the company which has already orders for 60 vehicles. The CEO of the company told Canadian TV (CTV) network here that they have successfully test-flown "The Flying Car" as many as 28 times. The tests...

Toshiba on Wednesday launched in Japan what it calls the world's first television that allows viewers to see 3D images without having to wear special glasses, amid intensifying competition in the market. The new model with a liquid crystal display carries a price tag of 119,800 yen (1,400 dollars), which may put off consumers accustomed to falling prices. A 20-inch model will be released on Saturday. While other 3D-capable TVs require glasses that act as filters to separate images to each eye, creating the illusion of depth Toshiba's new screens use processing technology to create depth-filled images. The Regza GL1 Series also allows users to switch between 2D and 3D on normal TV programmes. Kazuhito Gunji, a public relations official at electronics retailer Bic Camera, said the company had received several inquiries from customers on when they can get their hands on the product. Electronics stores are hoping that the release of the latest technology will help offset ...