The Gravity of Light... Way too cool.. MidNight Picker

GravityLight is a revolutionary new approach to storing energy and creating illumination. It takes only 3 seconds to lift the weight which powers GravityLight, creating 30 minutes of light on its descent. For free.  

Very Very Cool (But they may need to change their product name?)

Following the initial inspiration of using gravity, and years of perspiration, we have refined the design and it is now ready for production. We need your help to fund the tooling, manufacture and distribution of at least 1000 gravity powered lights. We will gift them to villagers in both Africa and India to use regularly. The follow-up research will tell us how well the lights met their needs, and enable us to refine the design for a more efficient MK2 version. Once we have proved the design, we will be looking to link with NGOs and partners to distribute it as widely as possible. When mass produced the target cost for this light is less than $5.
Why GravityLight?

Did you know that there are currently over 1.5 billion people in the World who have no reliable access to mains electricity? These people rely, instead, on biomass fuels (mostly kerosene) for lighting once the sun goes down.


Lift the weight and let gravity do the rest.

The World Bank estimates that, as a result, 780 million women and children inhale smoke which is equivalent to smoking 2 packets of cigarettes every day. 60% of adult, female lung-cancer victims in developing nations are non-smokers. The fumes also cause eye infections and cataracts, but burning kerosene is also more immediately dangerous: 2.5 million people a year, in India alone, suffer severe burns from overturned kerosene lamps. Burning Kerosene also comes with a financial burden: kerosene for lighting ALONE can consume 10 to 20% of a household's income. This burden traps people in a permanent state of subsistence living, buying cupfuls of fuel for their daily needs, as and when they can.

The burning of Kerosene for lighting also produces 244 million tonnes of Carbon Dioxide annually.


Our final prototype with ballast bag and bits.

GravityLight vs Solar powered lighting.

A commonly held view is that solar powered lighting is the answer to these problems in the developing world. However a number of conflicting factors combine to complicate matters. Solar panels produce electricity only when the sun shines, so the energy needs to be stored in a battery to produce the light when it becomes dark. The amount of energy stored is dependant on the size of the panel, the size of the battery, and how much (if any) sun has shone.

However batteries, panels and lights are expensive, and beyond the reach of people with no savings. Solar lighting projects continue to provide lighting for thousands of people in the developing world, but the spread is slow because the cost is too high for individuals, so they need to be bought and installed by communities instead.



LED bulbs do not attract mosquitos like conventional bulbs.

Lower cost self-contained lamps are becoming more widely available, but batteries are the weak link, because they are expensive and deteriorate through use and over time. Very often, when buying a low cost solar lamp with an inbuilt rechargeable battery, a full third of what you're paying for is the battery, and you will need to replace it every few years. Assuming you can get a new battery... The capacity is often reduced to save money which limits the use time, after which there is no light.

With GravityLight, however, it only takes a few seconds to lift the weight, which creates enough energy for half an an hour of light, whenever it is needed. It has no batteries to run out, replace or dispose of. It is completely clean and green.

Because there are no running costs after the initial low cost purchase, it has the potential to lift people out of poverty, allowing them to use the money they have saved to buy more powerful solar lighting systems in the future.

Where will you use yours?



Hang it in the shed or make it into a great porch light, you can clip on a hanging basket or anything weighing about 20lbs.



No batteries to drain or replace.

Credentials

We are Martin Riddiford and Jim Reeves, London based designers who have spent 4 years developing GravityLight as an off-line project. We work for therefore.com, which has over 20 years of experience in designing and developing hand held computing and communication products for a host of pioneers including Psion, Toshiba, NEC, TomTom, Inmarsat, ICO, Sepura, Racal Acoustics, Voller Energy, FreePlay and SolarAid.

We’re using a tried and tested manufacturer who has the right expertise to make GravityLight. We have some links to partner organisations in Africa and need to do the same for India. If you're part of an organisation and would like to get involved then please contact us.

Smartphones Rule - Mary Meeker Speaks...

2012 KPCB Internet Trends Year-End Update from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Mary Meeker

Free Topo Maps - DEMs for Research

NSF Renews Funding for OpenTopography
December 04 2012:

NSF Renews Funding for National OpenTopography ProjectInternet-based High-Resolution Topographic Data Facility Led by SDSC and ASU

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has renewed funding for OpenTopography, an Internet-based project that provides open and free access to high-resolution topographic data collected by technologies such as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging).

OpenTopography is managed by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, and Arizona State University’s (ASU) School of Earth and Space Exploration. The three-year renewal under the National Science Foundation’s Geoinformatics and Earth Sciences: Instrumentation and Facilities (EAR-IF) programfollows an initial three-year award from EAR-IF and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, announced in late 2009.

OpenTopography was initially developed as a proof-of-concept cyberinfrastructure project for the earth sciences as part of the NSF Information and Technology Research (ITR) program-funded Geosciences Network (GEON) project, and continues to emphasize innovative cyberinfrastructure approaches to the online storage, access, and processing of large topographic datasets.

OpenTopography’s primary emphasis has been on earth science-related, high-resolution topography collected with LiDAR technology, providing datasets to a large and varied user community to further research in areas ranging from earthquake geology to ecology and hydrology.  OpenTopography has demonstrated success in efficiently managing, archiving, distributing, and processing terabytes of community geospatial data in a manner that democratizes access for researchers, educators, and commercial sector users.

“OpenTopography began as a project to host EarthScope LiDAR data for the San Andreas fault with the ability to generate custom digital elevation models from the data, and has since grown to host a variety of topographic datasets from a range of sources covering an expanse of more than 85,000 square kilometers,” said Chaitan Baru, an SDSC Distinguished Scientist, SDSC’s Associate Director for Data Initiatives, and principal investigator for the project. “In this next phase, called OpenTopography 2 or OT2, we will continue to accept new datasets as before, to be served to the community at large. In addition, however, OT2 will also develop a pluggable services infrastructure to enable scientsts to contribute state-of-the-art LiDAR processing tools and algorithms operating on OT data, for use by the larger community.”

The growth of OpenTopography has been spurred by the increasing demand for data collected with LiDAR technology.  As one of the most powerful tools available to study the earth’s surface, overlying vegetation and man-made structures, high-resolution LiDAR data sets are regarded as revolutionary for earth science, environmental, and engineering applications, as well as natural hazard studies.

“These data provide an unprecedented fine-scale view of earth surface features such as fault scarps, glacial moraines, lava flows, meteor craters, and numerous surface-sculpting processes,” said Ramon Arrowsmith, co-investigator for the project and an associate geology professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. “In addition, data from the bare earth surface and the vegetative canopy enable valuable earth science and ecological studies in heavily vegetated terrain.”

During the first three years of operations, the OpenTopography user community has grown to several thousand registered and guest users and a catalog of half a trillion LiDAR points.  OpenTopography has also developed successful data hosting relationships with NSF-funded projects such as the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM), as well as other federal, state, and local agencies that are collecting LiDAR data.

“OpenTopography has been very successful during our first round of funding in building strong partnerships and collaborations with groups that want to make these data more easily accessible, but who lack the infrastructure and technology to do so themselves,” said Christopher Crosby, a co-investigator of OpenTopography who also heads the Geodetic Imaging (Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) and Synthetic Aperture Rader (SAR) activities at UNAVCO based in Boulder, Colorado.  “The great power of OpenTopography is that it allows a wide spectrum of users to access the datasets, and thus dramatically increase the impact of those datasets.”

Other SDSC researchers contributing to OpenTopography include Viswanath Nandigam, a project co-investigator who has been the technical lead on the project since its inception; Minh Phan, a software developer/programmer analyst; Emily Kleber, a geospatial data specialist; and Choonhan Youn, a research programmer.

---

Related Links:
San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)
UC San Diego
School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University
OpenTopography Facility
National Science Foundation

Smooth as Glass...

SmartPhone in War or ...?

The Cell Phone in War

The ALANTIC - DEC 4 2012, 4:09 PM ET 

A striking photo highlights a new facet of modern warfare.
These are five government troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo, three of whom, according to Reuters' caption, are recording video with their phones. They are in the town of Sake, near the town of Goma, which rebels captured last month.

I don't know what to say about this photograph aside from suggesting that an enterprising PhD student write a dissertation on "Cell Phones in War." How are fighting, killing, and controlling territory different when you can call your brother after battle, post a photo of your squadron on the march to Facebook, or play Angry Birds between skirmishes?

Philip Bump reminded me of this chilling CJ Chivers post from a few months ago in Syria. A soldier sits with a high-caliber machine gun, one hand on the trigger, the other on his phone. Chivers' description:

Machine gun in right hand. Cell phone in left. On duty on the gun-truck's machine gun, at 80 miles an hour into Aleppo, checking messages along the way. 

Even as the war in Syria rages, large areas of the countryside have cellular phone coverage, and the fighters are constantly checking their phones. When they stop, many of them immediately look for ways to recharge their phone batteries. And, often as they move and enter an area with a strong signal, they commence texting back and forth.

Update: here's one monograph that touches on some of the military strategy concerns of ubiquitous cell usage, "YOUTUBE WAR: FIGHTING IN A WORLD OF CAMERAS IN EVERY CELL PHONE AND PHOTOSHOP ON EVERY COMPUTER."

Smartphone killing SLRs?

The Smart Threat: How mobile phones are forcing camera manufacturers to evolve

Author: Olivier Laurent
30 Nov 2012

Samsung's Galaxy Camera offers 3G, 4G and Wifi connectivity and is powered by the latest version of Android, making it a truly connected camera.

A few years ago, the Nikon and Canon brands used to dominate the charts on Flickr's Camera Finder, which tracks the most-used cameras on the image-sharing website. But since the release of Apple's iPhone, as well as many other smartphones by the likes of HTC and Samsung, camera phones have taken over. Last month, the iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 were ahead of Canon's EOS 5D Mark II and 550D, with compact cameras failing to appear in the top 10 of the most-used cameras on Flickr.

In the UK alone, the number of fixed-lens cameras sold dropped to 4.6 million from June 2011 to May 2012, down from 5.2 million the previous year, according to analyst GfK, with Olympus openly admitting that smartphones were now competing with compact cameras. "Due to the increasing popularity of smartphones equipped with high-spec digital camera functions, more and more products are competing with low-cost compact digital cameras," Olympus spokeswoman Ayako Nagami told Amateur Photographer earlier this year. "This trend, which is not unique to our company, applies throughout the market."

The rising popularity of smartphones is now forcing traditional camera manufacturers to reassess their strategies by offering devices that can, for example, connect to the internet easily. Nikon, for example, released the S800c, a compact camera powered by Google's Android system, which allows users to download applications that can help email and share images on social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Flickr. "There is an expectation to have your computers, tablets and laptop devices all talking together," says Jeremy Gilbert, group marketing manager at Nikon UK. "The future for technology is connectivity - this camera is all about improving connectivity between smart devices, taking quality images and sharing them instantly across devices and social media platforms. The S800c will appeal to people looking to upgrade to a camera from a smartphone and are used to all the mobile capabilities of a smartphone, plus they will be used to using apps."

Of course, when speaking to BJP, both Nikon and Canon denied that their markets are suffering from smartphones' popularity. "Cameras and smartphones have different capabilities and therefore, ultimately, different audiences," says Gilbert. "Cameras are aimed at people who essentially want better-quality images and want to record special moments, whereas smartphones are used to capture day-to-day ‘post-it' images, rather than being relied upon to capture big life events."

For Steve Marshall, a product marketing director at Canon Europe, the issue is not as simplistic as saying the compact camera market is dying. "The fact that consumers are using smartphones to take pictures is really good, because it gets consumers interested in taking photos," he tells BJP. "There's been an explosion in the number of images posted on social networking sites over the past few years. The fact that people like to take and share photos is good for a camera manufacturer because, at some point, people will want more than what a camera phone can offer. It's a good opportunity for us."

These past few years, Canon has been paying particular attention to how people are using images, says Marshall, and "we're making sure our products can be integrated in these activities". The firm's solution has been to add Wifi capabilities to some of its products. The Canon IXUS 510 HS, for example, uses Wifi to connect to an Android or iOS applications that can then be used to transfer images online. "Wifi is the simplest way to get images from a camera to a smartphone and to Facebook or any other social networking site," says Marshall. "We're doing it the way we think is best at the moment. We're seeing very early stages of development in regards to how images are utilised from a phone manufacturer or camera manufacturer's point of view. To be honest, I don't know where this is going to end, but I think cameras have a history of delivering results."

The iPhone's camera isn't perfect, but, for many users, it's good enough to replace their compact cameras.

Samsung is taking a different approach altogether, embracing its expertise both in the camera and phone markets. The result is the Samsung Galaxy Camera, which shares the same 4.8-inch HD Super Clear LCD touchscreen as the Galaxy S III phone's, and features a 21× optical zoom lens, as well as 3G, 4G and Wifi connectivity.

"We all love to take pictures," says Stephen Taylor, vice president of Samsung Brand Europe. "Consumers are looking for high-quality images and the power to share what [they] create seamlessly. We're combining smartphone features you can't find on cameras, with camera features you can't find on smartphones." For Samsung's president of IT and mobile communications, JK Shin, the camera is the result of communication becoming more visual, with more people editing and sharing moments with images - via Instagram, for example, with which Samsung is closely working to create a more integrated version of the photo-sharing application for the Galaxy Camera.

For Samsung, the new hybrid camera - or, as it calls it, the smart camera - isn't just a one-off experiment. According to Samsung's digital imaging sales and marketing vice president, SH Lim, the South Korean company will be monitoring consumer demands closely and could, in future, release new versions of the Galaxy Camera sporting larger sensors. In the meantime, Samsung is busy adding Wifi connectivity to most of its compact and interchangeable lens cameras, with 3G and 4G features added to "premium" models, says Lim. And, he continues, Android could also be added to these cameras, if the demand is there. "Android is the most popular operating system at the moment," he says. "And it would make sense for us to use it in other cameras."

For Canon, however, Android isn't the answer. "We have cameras that work with a really fast operating system that has been developed over so many years," says Richard Trestain, a product specialist team leader in charge of digital compact cameras at Canon Europe. "It allows our cameras to be blistering fast. So, to fill the camera with a complicated alternative system could cause issues, especially when you already have this smartphone in your pocket." And that's at the heart of Canon's solution to compete against smartphones. "I think what's great about our solution is that you already have a smartphone you use and love. You know how to download an app and all we're doing is plugging into that, and the camera continues to focus on the stuff it's good at. As a result, the consumer isn't confused. I think the idea with our solution is that you can say: ‘Don't worry, you're still going to get the same image quality you expect from your camera, but now, that smartphone you had in your pocket, you can utilise it.'"

Nikon is using the Android operating system in its S800c compact camera in a bid to compete against smartphones.

Fujifilm, which did not return BJP's request for a comment, has chosen the same path, earlier this year introducing its Photo Receiver and Camera apps on Android and iOS. The apps can communicate with Fujifilm's Wifi-enabled cameras, such as the FinePix F800EXR, to transfer photos, but also to record the user's current location data by sending the tablet or smartphone's latitude and longitude, and displaying it on the LCD monitor of the camera, according to Fujifilm. "Users can also send that image to their smartphones and tablets to display the location where it was shot on general map applications," it adds. "With a database of approximately one million landmarks worldwide, users can enjoy various functions, such as Landmark Navigator, which acts as a tour guide, displaying the distance from where you are to nearby landmarks (in the direction the camera is facing), and Photo Navigation, which displays the distance from the photographer's present location to the place where a tagged photo was taken."

For Canon, however, new features shouldn't be added just to a smartphone app, with the firm preferring to introduce new features within its operating system. For example, some of its Wifi-enabled cameras offer the option to upload images to Facebook, but, says Trestain, "the image goes through the Canon Image Gateway" before getting to Facebook. "What's good about that," he claims, "is that you can set everything up online in the Canon Image Gateway, so you don't have to mess around with settings on the camera." And that eco-system is set to expand dramatically next year when Canon will officially release a new online environment dubbed Project 1709.

The goal, says Canon, is to allow photographers to store "a lifetime of images" online, which will be accessible from any devices - from computers to smartphones, compact cameras and DSLRs. "Right now, if you decide to store your images in the cloud, who would you trust?" asks Trestain. "There are a lot of cloud storage options, but would you trust your entire image library to these services? People trust Canon. We're not there to mine data. We're here to satisfy photographers' needs."

The service would integrate with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and allow users to store and monitor any comments made on any of their images irrespective from where they are shown. "You can imagine it as the one place where all of your images will reside," he says. And by tightly integrating the online environment with its cameras, as well as allowing users to browse and manage their image libraries from a smartphone or tablet, Canon hopes it will be able to remain relevant in a changing camera landscape.

But with Apple, Samsung and even Nokia adding new features to their smartphones that typically make their way to traditional cameras - such as 40-megapixel sensors, smart-scene selection and panorama options - camera makers will have to remain vigilant to maintain their market shares.

Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/report/2228796/the-smart-threat-how-mobile-phones-are-forcing-camera-manufacturers-to-evolve#ixzz2DvLj6XNS
Subscribe to BJP and save money. Click here to save 29% today.

Palantir - too smart for its own Good?

No Spy Software Scandal Here, Army Claims

• BY NOAH SHACHTMAN
• 11.30.12
• 5:41 PM

• 

Military analysts look at the Distributed Common Ground System – Army, the service’s core intelligence suite. Photo: U.S. Army.

It had all the trappings of a classic Pentagon scandal: an Army report, mysteriously ordered destroyed; billions of dollars’ worth of military gear; fuming Congressmen; maligned generals; screaming headlines. But the Army has just concluded that this whole flap over competing intelligence systems was the result of a bureaucratic screw-up, not malicious wrongdoing.

Yes, that report was strangely squashed, writes Army Lt. Gen. William Grisoli in a review obtained by Danger Room. The move wasn’t “attributable to anyone attempting to improperly advance” his own agenda, Troy says.

So, scandal over? Not quite, says one of the congressmen at the heart of the affair.

The imbroglio centers around a system called Palantir, which teases out connections from giant mounds of data, and visualizes those links in ways that even knuckle-draggers can understand. With its slick interface and its ability to find hidden relationships, Palantir has attracted a cult of fanboys in the military and intelligence communities not unlike the one Apple has amassed in the consumer gadget world.

The problem is the Army already has a $2.3 billion system that does what Palantir is supposed to do — plus several dozen more things, besides. The DCGS-A (“Distributed Common Ground System – Army”) is meant to be the one resource that Army intel analysts can use to find links between events, build dossiers on high-level targets, and plot out patterns in enemy attacks. Accessing 473 data sources for 75 million reports, it’s supposed to be the primary source for mining intelligence and surveillance data on the battlefield — everything from informants’ tips to satellites’ images to militants’ fingerprints.