Wireless Monitors? [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters] Viewsonic link

wsonic.com/products/airpanel100.htm">here. It's not so much a monitor as a wireless tablet PC running WIN CE/.NET [Per the specs]. One of my current fields of inquiry is into decent family oriented PIM/CMS software. Being able to sync everyone's schedule, the recording of their favorite shows, when they'll be where and their contact numbers where they are is important for a family, and moreso for a business. This all ties into my Higgins idea as well, of having MajorDomo that runs off your home server in the background, and takes care of day to day contact management etc for you. So how does this tie into a "wireless monitor"? I can see these on nightstands around the country, slowly brightening to act as a combination light/noise alarm, and since it's ties into your PIM/CMS system, it makes it super easy to answer the phone, change your alarm settings, etc. I know a lot of this tech exists in a variety of ways now, but there is a long row to hoe before we get to the point that ubiquity will bring down the prices to where everyone can afford it. 11:12:05 PM     comments

(testing ignore) Hello World How have you been? Life treating you good? How are the kids? Glad to hear it! Catch you later! Dave, this is FANTASTIC!

4:47:59 PM     comments

Mortimer Adler.

"You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think." [Motivational Quotes of the Day] Thomas H. Huxley. "Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." 11:00:34 AM     comments

Chemical block boosts nerve re-growth.

The treatment stimulates the regeneration of damaged rat neurons and might help repair spinal cord injury [New Scientist] Great news! Any step forward in this is good to hear. 10:59:17 AM     comments

Thinking out loud about terrorism and air travel

ID Cards for `Trusted Travelers' Run Into Some Thorny Questions. The idea seemed simple: figure out who the good guys are, give them easy-to-recognize and hard-to-counterfeit ID cards and let them breeze past airport security. It wasn't. By Matthew L. Wald. [New York Times: Technology] Any system can be broken, any security can be bypassed. The problem is we lack good metrics that we can use to ID/profile terrorists. I still think that terrorists used the Daffy Duck method of attacking, in that "It's a neat trick, but you can only do it once." So how do we establish who the likely terrorists are on the plane? Some of them had flight training in the past few years, but that alone is hardly a qualifier. Multiple people at the same address? Ditto. But their drivers licences were faked. Should the airports have the same books that nightclubs have that show what valid licences look like? That would only slow air travel. While some states have adopted "smart" licences, not all have and there is a blacklash against the idea of such databases already. No easy solution here. 10:49:05 AM     comments     Google It!

Killer news courtesy of the Shifted Librarian: IBM Wants You to Talk to Your Devices "Dubbed th

e "Super Human Speech Recognition Initiative," IBM's push aims to create new technology that supports what IBM Voice Systems Director Nigel Beck calls "conversational computing." The Super Human Speech Recognition Initiative's ultimate goal is to create technology that performs better than humans for any transcription task, without the need for customization. It seeks accurate transcription of everything from voice mail to meetings and customer service calls -- with full audio (and possibly) video searching capabilities. Along the way, the company plans a number of milestones that it expects will have wide-ranging applications in everything from data mining in call centers to interpersonal communication to biometrics.... 'The state of the speech world is roughly where the state of the Web world was six years ago,' Beck said.... To that end, working with partners Motorola and Opera, IBM has submitted a specification for Multimodal Access to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The specification, XHTML+VoiceXML, would allow users to access data on devices through multiple modes of interaction. 'Multimodal is the mixing of voice and data," Beck said. "People operate in multiple modes at once....' The company has also put together a number of prototypes to display its ideas. One, Meeting Miner, is an agent used during meetings to passively capture and analyze meeting discussion. It also has the capability of becoming an active participant in the meeting when it finds information it determines to be pertinent to the discussion. Meeting Miner uses the audio streams from one or more microphones to capture the speech during the meeting and converts it to a text transcript." [allNetDevices Wireless News] [The Shifted Librarian] 10:23:29 AM     comments

quondam: Dictionary.com Word of the Day.

quondam [Dictionary.com Word of the Day] 10:21:54 AM     comments

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