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The March Of Technology

After the crash of the UFO crash in Roswell, technology exploded from back engineering.

British hacker Gary McKinnon found evidence of this process.
Glad you brought that up - I have heard many times that the laser beam, for instance, was one of the results of the Roswell crash.
 
Glad you brought that up - I have heard many times that the laser beam, for instance, was one of the results of the Roswell crash.
Another view is that the technological revolution of the mid twentieth century onwards was largely driven by the development of quantum theory in the twenties, which in turn grew out of attempts to explain observations inconsistent with classical physics beginning probably around the turn of the century. The laser is a good example of this, having been predicted by quantum theory and having been developed through several different discoveries leading up to the first lasers in I think the sixties. I mean, I can't guarantee that the official accounts are correct, but there never seems to have been a sudden leap of technology without foundational work having been done in previous years as far as I can tell. I don't know whether we have craft from advanced species hidden away somewhere, but I just don't think they've driven our technology.
 
Another view is that the technological revolution of the mid twentieth century onwards was largely driven by the development of quantum theory in the twenties, which in turn grew out of attempts to explain observations inconsistent with classical physics beginning probably around the turn of the century. The laser is a good example of this, having been predicted by quantum theory and having been developed through several different discoveries leading up to the first lasers in I think the sixties. I mean, I can't guarantee that the official accounts are correct, but there never seems to have been a sudden leap of technology without foundational work having been done in previous years as far as I can tell. I don't know whether we have craft from advanced species hidden away somewhere, but I just don't think they've driven our technology.
So you feel it is just coincidence?
I find it very interesting that UFO sightings and alleged interactions (and crashes?) were so plentiful during the 20th century, along with our technology surge.
 
Another view is that the technological revolution of the mid twentieth century onwards was largely driven by the development of quantum theory in the twenties, which in turn grew out of attempts to explain observations inconsistent with classical physics beginning probably around the turn of the century. The laser is a good example of this, having been predicted by quantum theory and having been developed through several different discoveries leading up to the first lasers in I think the sixties. ...

Einstein predicted the stimulated emission phenomenon (that underlies maser / laser tech) circa 1917, based on "old quantum theory" (pre-quantum-mechanics work dating back to the turn of the century). The phenomenon was confirmed in 1928.

Perhaps more importantly ... Were there any UFO reports (as opposed to science fiction stories a la Wells or Gernsback) that claimed any sort or ray or energy beams?
 
Einstein predicted the stimulated emission phenomenon (that underlies maser / laser tech) circa 1917, based on "old quantum theory" (pre-quantum-mechanics work dating back to the turn of the century). The phenomenon was confirmed in 1928.

Perhaps more importantly ... Were there any UFO reports (as opposed to science fiction stories a la Wells or Gernsback) that claimed any sort or ray or energy beams?
Sure, for example the Travis Walton case in Arizona, but of course that was years later in 1975.
But if a 'crashed' UFO had been found at some point, who knows what technology might be inside the craft.
 
So you feel it is just coincidence?
I find it very interesting that UFO sightings and alleged interactions (and crashes?) were so plentiful during the 20th century, along with our technology surge.
It doesn't seem like much of a coincidence to me, just technology progressing as it's always done. Thanks to the scientific method, the processes of any given discoveries and the people and institutions responsible for them are usually well documented. I just don't think there's any room for influence by hidden extraterrestrial technologies. Perhaps it's our use of more advanced technology that has made us more worthy of study by other civilisations.
 
It doesn't seem like much of a coincidence to me, just technology progressing as it's always done. Thanks to the scientific method, the processes of any given discoveries and the people and institutions responsible for them are usually well documented. I just don't think there's any room for influence by hidden extraterrestrial technologies. Perhaps it's our use of more advanced technology that has made us more worthy of study by other civilisations.
And perhaps it's our awareness of other civilizations in our universe that has helped us advance.
 
My husband has a very interesting theory -
When Nikola Tesla died in 1943, the government confiscated all of his paperwork.
Mr. R thinks that Tesla's inventions and theories were used by the government.
He may be right, after all Tesla was one of the major geniuses of that time, and who knows what he was working on?
 

Briefcase-sized desalination device

The briefcase-sized gadget was invented by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) earlier this year.

While most desalination units are large, heavy and expensive, this solution is portable and works at the press of a button.

There are no filters or high-pressure pumps required to treat the water, as it uses a process called Ion Concentration Polarization (ICP) that was conceived almost a decade ago.
Using electrically-charged membranes above and below the water, ICP repels the salt particles as they pass through.

The membranes repel positively or negatively charged particles — including salt molecules, bacteria, and viruses — as they flow past.

The charged particles are funneled into a second stream of water that is eventually discharged.

The process removes both dissolved and suspended solids, allowing clean water to pass through the channel. Since it only requires a low-pressure pump, ICP uses less energy than other techniques.

The researchers found this process on its own couldn’t remove all the salt, so they paired it with a second technique called electrodialysis to catch any remaining salt ions.

To test the device, the MIT researchers said the took it to a beach and, on the first go, it was able to successfully turn seawater into drinking water.

‘It was successful even in its first run, which was quite exciting and surprising,’ said Jongyoon Han, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of biological engineering, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE).

‘But I think the main reason we were successful is the accumulation of all these little advances that we made along the way.’
video at link.
 

Briefcase-sized desalination device

The briefcase-sized gadget was invented by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) earlier this year.

While most desalination units are large, heavy and expensive, this solution is portable and works at the press of a button.

There are no filters or high-pressure pumps required to treat the water, as it uses a process called Ion Concentration Polarization (ICP) that was conceived almost a decade ago.

video at link.
Nice work tbh.
 

Smart glasses allow deaf people to ‘see’ conversations with subtitles

The XRAI Glass uses augmented reality to convert audio into captions that appear in front of the eyes of those who wear the glasses.

The ‘first of its kind’ smart glasses are tethered to a phone and aims to enable the deaf community to engage in everyday conversations.

The glasses have voice recognition that can even identify speech and the company hopes to develop the technology to translate languages. It is planning to reach 70,000 people by the end of 2023.

The company shared a video of a deaf woman trying the glasses for the first time and her delight at seeing the technology in action.
Diana, who uses sign language to communicate, is blown away by the text appearing on the glasses in front of her and says she is ‘honoured’.

‘We are so proud of the ability of this innovative technology to enrich the lives of people who are deaf and have hearing loss, so that they can maximize potential,’ said Dan Scarfe, XRAI Glass’s CEO.

‘Whether that means being able to have a conversation while continuing to make dinner or keeping a conversation going while walking with a friend,’

The British company has partnered with AI company, Nreal, to create consumer-ready AR glasses.

XRAI Glass has launched a public trial period where the company ‘will continuously listen and learn from its users, expanding the AI capabilities and intuitive properties of the software to provide the very best service’.

The XRAI Glass glasses will be available to purchase in the UK via EE for £399.99 or £10 then £35 per month for 11 months.
short video at link.
 
I hope the subtitles they 'see' are better than the ones that appear on the screen. They vary between confusing, hilarious and downright baffling!
If they are auto-generated, they are probably wrong quite often.
 
I hope the subtitles they 'see' are better than the ones that appear on the screen. They vary between confusing, hilarious and downright baffling!
Have you seen a different video? The one in the link doesn’t show any subtitles at all..
 
Have you seen a different video? The one in the link doesn’t show any subtitles at all..
The XRAI Glass uses augmented reality to convert audio into captions that appear in front of the eyes of those who wear the glasses.
So ... the captions aren't subtitles?
Oh, and I refuse to 'read' any article that demands me to drop my adblocker so I can read it. Sorry.
 
I hope the subtitles they 'see' are better than the ones that appear on the screen. They vary between confusing, hilarious and downright baffling!
I wonder what happens if there's a crowd or a group of people together?
 
So ... the captions aren't subtitles?
Oh, and I refuse to 'read' any article that demands me to drop my adblocker so I can read it. Sorry.
No captions are seen in the video. A profoundly deaf woman puts them on & seems happy with what she sees. There is only one slightly less deaf woman talking to her.
I wonder what happens if there's a crowd or a group of people together?
These are for deaf people who would otherwise need to lip-read. In a crowd I think they could be confusing - you wouldn't be able to tell who was talking, but then lip-reading would only work when looking at one person.
 
From 2022 Golden Goose Awards, a prize organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Foldoscope - The rule-breaking paper microscope

More than a decade ago, Stanford University bioengineer Manu Prakash was in the Thai jungle on a field trip for his research into rabies when he had an idea for a cheap, easy-to-use microscope.

Prakash imagined an inexpensive microscope that could be used by anyone anywhere but was powerful enough to see a single bacterium. Along with his colleague Jim Cybulski, Prakash came up with the Foldscope -- a flat-packed microscope made from paper and a single ball lens.

"It took an immense amount of engineering. In that earliest phase, I was sat next to labs with million-dollar microscopes. We wanted to make a microscope at a price point of $1."

People initially thought the idea was a bit silly, Prakash said, and getting funding for the work was a challenge.

Fast-forward to 2022. The Foldscope isn't quite as cheap as a dollar, but at a cost of $1.75 to make, it's a tiny fraction of the price point of most lab equipment. The final magnification of the telescope is about 140x, powerful enough to see a malaria parasite in a cell.

The instruments have been deployed across the world in a dizzying array of applications. Last year in India, the Foldscope was used to identify a new type of cyanobacteria. The microscope has also helped to identify fake drugs, Prakash said.
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"Phone call from the dead" used to be a Fortean topic. Now it's a smartphone feature ... Cell / mobile phone tech is now advanced to the point your phone can call authorities to advise them you've just died in a car crash ...
Phone alerts responders after car hits tree, killing all 6

A passenger’s cellphone automatically alerted responders after a car hit a tree early Sunday in a Nebraska crash that killed all six of its young occupants, authorities said.

Five men in the Honda Accord died at the scene of the crash around 2:15 a.m. in Lincoln, about 3 miles east of the state Capitol, police said. A 24-year-old woman died later at a hospital where she was taken in critical condition.

The five men who died included the 22-year-old driver. The other victims were one 21-year-old, one 23-year-old and two 22-year-olds.

Police said the cause of the crash remains under investigation, and they said the crash was reported by an iPhone that detected the impact and called responders automatically when the phone’s owner didn’t respond.

“This is the worst crash in Lincoln in recent memory,” Lincoln Police Assistant Chief Michon Morrow said. “We’ve been trying to think of another accident this bad and we haven’t come up with anything.” ...

Investigators hadn’t been able to find any witnesses to the crash by Sunday afternoon ...

“The cause of this accident is going to take us some time to pin down,” Morrow said. “We are looking at all possibilities, including alcohol, speed or distracted driving.” ...
FULL STORY: https://apnews.com/article/nebraska-lincoln-91393ae2a062e16516984f121a39f20a
 

Why would you want a vacuum cleaner with a camera?

Pictures of woman on toilet taken by robot vacuum cleaner leaked online

Images of a woman seated on the toilet with her shorts pulled down to her thighs, captured by a robot vacuum cleaner, were shared on private Facebook and Discord groups, as reported by MIT Technology Review.

iRobot, the company that owns the Roomba vacuums that took the images in question, confirmed that gig workers outside the US, shared the intimate photos of unsuspecting users to social media.

The images were shared on social media by gig workers in Venezuela, whose job it is to label audio, photo and video data to train the company’s train artificial intelligence.

Only high-end robots on the market like the Roomba J7 have computer vision and currently cost around £459.

iRobot has since terminated its relationship with the ‘service provider who leaked the images’ and is actively investigating the matter, and ‘taking measures to help prevent a similar leak by any service provider in the future’.
 
Wow! I love the fact that it is scalable, and can be made portable.
I saw a much more primitive version of this at a computer show over 20 years ago, and it was just in 1 colour. This new one is the best I've seen.
The next advance needs to be to get rid of the fan mechanism itself - make it solid state.
 
It's probably holographic if you stand in front or behind it. I don't think you will see much if you stand under or above the fan looking at it.
The simple version of this is the fan which shows text when it rotates.

Here's another 3D hologram tech coming:
 
Google Glass attack: tech giant accused of 'killing' San Francisco
A late night attack on a woman wearing Google Glass tech has become emblematic of anti-technology backlash in Silicon Valley
By Nick Allen, San Francisco
4:04PM GMT 08 Mar 2014

Sarah Slocum loves her Google Glass. She wears the gadget on her face for more than 12 hours a day and enjoys showing others how to use it.
With the wink of an eye she can take a picture, or use her voice to command it to record video. The device is, she says, “the future”.

So it was with some shock that she discovered there are those who disagree. Rather forcibly in fact. On a recent outing to a bar in San Francisco, the 34-year-old technology writer says she was attacked by people who told her “F--- Google!”, accused her of “killing this city” and ripped the hi-tech gear from her head.

The incident has become a touchstone for a wider debate in San Francisco, where a section of the otherwise tolerant, liberal and peace-loving population appears to have had enough of the inexorable march of technology.
Bars and coffee shops have begun putting up signs banning Google Glass devices. Special buses that take employees to work in nearby Silicon Valley have been picketed. Hundreds of demonstrators recently gathered outside Twitter’s headquarters to protest about tax breaks for the company.

And, most of all, there is anger over spiralling rents and evictions as young tech workers colonise previously low-income areas.

Miss Slocum is one of several thousand “explorers” across the world road-testing Google’s latest gadget. As with any late-night bar fracas, there are conflicting accounts of what happened at 1.30am in Molotov’s, a dimly lit, cash only bar.

But she insists she was not recording anyone or invading their privacy, simply demonstrating the device to some interested patrons, when some other customers began rolling their eyes.
She said: “A few minutes later ... they cursed at me. I started feeling threatened. At that point I decided I was going to turn on the camera and start recording this hateful, threatening behaviour.

“Then a guy and a girl charged me. The guy started waving his hands and trying to grab the Glass. I couldn’t believe they were behaving that way. All I could do was say, 'I’m recording you. I’m recording you’. They were calling me the B-word.”

After a hiatus, someone threw a dirty bar rag at her, she said, and a woman came over and said: “You’re killing this city.”
Curses were exchanged and, according to Miss Slocum, a man ripped the device off her face and ran out of the bar with it. She pursued and grabbed him, regaining the Glass after a scuffle.

What was perhaps more telling than the incident itself was the reaction after she detailed her encounter on Facebook and said it constituted a “hate crime”.
There was some of the sympathy one would expect, but many blamed her for having taken a recording device into a bar in the first place.

In the days that followed, a series of bars and coffee shops banned the device. At The Willows, which is popular with young technology types, a sign in the window shows the Glass with a red line though it. “Our patrons have expressed concern with being recorded while enjoying themselves,” it reads. One customer said: “The Google Glass is extreme tech. You don’t know you’re being recorded. People want some privacy.”

The furore follows another divisive controversy in San Francisco, that of its “Google Buses”, which has pitted technology workers against residents of traditionally low-income areas such as the formerly bohemian and artistic Mission district.

Giant, air-conditioned, internet-equipped buses with tinted windows now glide past the thrift stores and second-hand book shops there, taking workers to their jobs 30 miles away at companies such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple and Yahoo.

Watching them go by, long-time residents see a visible reminder of the “one percenters” in their midst as they are forced to rely on a more rickety, century-old public transit system. It has led to protests, bus tyres being slashed and stones hurled. Signs have been taped to the vehicles reading “F--- off Google”.

A recent study found the average passenger on these buses is a 30-year-old man earning more than $100,000. But when The Telegraph visited a pick-up point in the Mission at 7am, the people didn’t look very happy about it.
A line of workers stood against a wall attempting to look inconspicuous, wearing earphones and staring determinedly down at their smartphones in silence.

The question “Excuse me sir, do you work for Google, are you getting on the bus?” elicited the wary response: “Er, I’m very sorry, I don’t feel comfortable talking about it.” Even anonymously? “No.”

One employee eventually broke ranks but still declined to give his name. He said: “This a real problem and there’s a big internal dialogue going on in our companies about what to do, whether to make the buses look different, and also about rent control. The free market people don’t agree with rent control, but someone put a brick through one of the bus windows recently so they’re worried.
“You have all these nerds who grew up feeling fairly victimised and now they are in positions of extreme privilege and wealth. But they’re getting picked on and a lot of them feel like they’re right back at high school again being bullied. People are upset.”

Tony Robles, who runs a Mission housing advocacy group for the elderly and disabled, and who has been involved in peaceful protests against the buses, said: “Do you honestly think I want to get up at 6am and chase a bus? It’s reached boiling point. We’re seeing the rise of the tech-washed digital human.

This insulated world they live in is creating a lot of resentment with long-time residents, the people that contribute culturally to our city.” Mr Robles said the technology workers were “aloof” and like “shadows” but the main problems were caused by “mean-spirited speculators” buying properties and evicting long-term tenants, so that rents can be raised astronomically.

In San Francisco, 23.4 per cent of residents are below the poverty threshold, according to a recent study. In December alone, rents went up by 10.6 per cent. In the Mission, a two-bedroom apartment recently went on the market for $10,000 a month, which probably had the regulars at Molotov’s spluttering into their $2 beers.

Google, whose motto is “Don’t be evil”, knows it has a problem and is determined to make San Francisco love it again. Last week it donated $6.8 million to the city, which will allow underprivileged children to ride public buses free of charge for the next two years.

Miss Slocum believes differences will be resolved. “I’m really excited about the time we’re living in,” she said. “Every day there is some new invention that’s going to dramatically change our lives.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... t-age.html

Google Glass has been officially discontinued and this BBC "Toast" podcast explores in detail the reasons for the product's failure:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m...link_title=Toast_Google_Glass&at_bbc_team=BBC

Towards the end of the podcast though, they do mention that Apple is apparently planning to launch a similar product.
 
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