Heads Up! Are You Running These Apps?: Two lawsuits target Apple, app makers over privacy concerns - CNN.com

Two separate class-action lawsuits filed last week in federal court allege that Apple and as many as eight makers of popular applications for the iPhone facilitated the sharing of private information about their customers to advertisers.

Though a recent news report claimed that many apps are sharing this personal data, the lawsuits together target just eight: Dictionary.com, the Weather Channel, internet radio service Pandora, the messaging app textPlus 4, as well as the makers of entertainment or game apps Talking Tom Cat, Paper Toss, Pumpkin Maker and Pimple Popper Lite.

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http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/12/28/apple.app.lawsuits/index.html#

Watch Out Little Ones! Nintendo's 3DS Warning: Children, Avert Thine Eyes. TechNewsWorld

Nintendo has issued a warning for parents of children under age 6: If you're planning on giving the kid a Nintendo 3DS when the device is released early next year, keep it in 2D mode.

The 3DS is a portable video game system capable of displaying 3D games without the use of special glasses. However, the warning (originally posted on Nintendo's Japanese site and translated to English here) urges parents to use the 2D feature of the device instead if their kids are less than six years old.

Nintendo isn't the first company to issue a health warning about 3D-related technologies. For example, Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Samsung issued similar warnings related to their own products earlier this year.

All three indicate certain symptoms -- including convulsions, altered visions, eye or muscle twitches, involuntary movements, loss of awareness and disorientation -- might manifest among some users.

Sore Thumbs, Tired Eyes

For some time, Nintendo has maintained a warning page on its website directed at parents. It focuses on several potential product dangers, from battery leakage to repetitive motion injuries.

The page, which is in English, warns that about one in 4,000 people may suffer seizures or blackouts, and it suggests parents monitor their kids when the latter are playing video games.

Anyone who suffers from convulsions, disorientation or other symptoms should stop playing video games and seek medical attention, Nintendo says.

The maker also recommends that video game players reduce the likelihood of a seizure by staying as far from the screen as possible when playing, using the smallest available TV screen for their games, playing in a well-lit room, taking a break hourly, and not playing if they are tired or short on sleep.

Multidimensional Grief

In warning its users about potential dangers inherent in viewing 3D content, Nintendo joins other companies that have issued similar warnings.

In July, Sony updated the PlayStation's terms and conditions of use with warnings about potential risks. In April, Samsung issued its own warning on 3D TV viewing.

Both of them issued warnings that are fairly similar to that from Nintendo.

Why People Get Affected

Apparently, a significant percentage of people can't properly see 3D images rendered on a TV or movie screen, and that can lead to headaches and other problems, according to the American Optometric Association.

Such people have vision misalignments or don't have equal vision in both eyes. There are anywhere from 1 million to 9 million such people in the United States, the Association claims.

Symptoms experienced by those unable to comfortably see 3D images vary from person to person. A survey by the Association showed 13 percent of those who can't see 3D images suffer from headaches, 12 percent from blurred vision, and 11 percent from dizziness.

Here's why 3D images cause headaches and other problems in people with vision flaws: Humans have binocular vision, in which we see things from a slightly different perspective with each eye. The resulting images are correlated in the brain to create one view. It helps us to calculate distance, among other things.

This mechanism is thrown askew when we view 3D images rendered on a screen. There are two basic methods of creating 3D images: with glasses and without glasses. In either case, each eye gets fed a different image. That throws off our depth perception, fooling the brain, as it were, into believing what we see is right in front of us.

The eyes of people who have problems with 3D can't cope with or correlate these separate images properly, which leads to their suffering various problems when viewing 3D content.

"Whether with or without glasses, the technology provides separate images to both eyes, and some people aren't wired for this, so they get sick or suffer seizures," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld.

Still, 3D images aren't wholly a curse -- they can help unmask vision problems such as lazy eye, convergence insufficiency and poor focusing skills, the AOA said.

The American Optometric Association did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Calls to Nintendo USA weren't answered, as the company's offices are closed for the holidays.

Saw It Coming

Perhaps Nintendo acted after getting user complaints, Laura DiDio, principal at ITIC, speculated.

"3D hasn't been around long enough for us to really assess its impact, so people are just beginning to find out the problems it might cause," DiDio told TechNewsWorld.

Nintendo unveiled the 3DS at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles this past June. It's set to go on sale in early 2011.

However, consumers are also responsible for the health problems they experience, DiDio suggested.

"You get kids playing games for hours without interruption," DiDio said. "That's a scary thing."

Awful? Awesome? Star Trek!: Cornell Lab develops 3D Food Printing

Project Members: Jeffrey Lipton

Past Members: Evan Malone. Dan Periard, Dan Cohen, Meredith Cutler, Deborah Coulter

Cornell CookieCooling Cookie

FCI image   Printing Celery and Turkey Printed raw turkey cube with celery inner cube

Chocolate printedprinted frostingprinted cheese

 

Bellow is an edited excerpt from “Hydrocolloid Printing: A Novel Platform for Customized Food Production

More examples and Materials can be found on the Fab@Home Website

Impact of Food SFF

Few things are as natively intertwined with humanity as food, which is essential to biological and social life. Not only does food support life and underpin social relations, but it also accounts for a substantial part of our economy. As of 2008, Americans spent $1.02 trillion annually on food, i.e., 9.6% of the nation’s combined disposable personal incomes. Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) has the potential to leverage its core strengths (e.g., geometric complexity, automated fabrication) and make its mark on the culinary realm by transforming the way we produce and experience food.  Technological innovations are necessary, however, before these visions can be realized. In addition to lowering barriers to SFF, such as cost of the machine, materials must be developed to feasibly enable a wide range of foods to be produced on SFF platforms.


Impact on Culinary Professionals: Overview  

Food-SFF would benefit the professional culinary domain primarily in two respects: by lending new artistic capabilities to the fine dining domain, and also by extending mass-customization capabilities to the industrial culinary sector.

 

Impact on Culinary Professionals: Fine Dining  

Fine dining chefs are continually developing new, innovative techniques and seeking the enabling technologies that will help them push the boundaries of culinary art. They innovate by harnessing non-traditional ingredients, such as hydrocolloids, and by employing new tools pulled straight from the scientific community; the result is “culinary magic” including flavored gelatin spheres with liquid centers, sauce foams, hot liquid deserts with flash frozen shells, syringe-extrudable meats, and much more. SFF promises to be the next important enabling technology in the fine dining realm. SFF delivers new possibilities by lending this faction of culinary artists one of SFF’s core capabilities: fabrication of multi-material objects with high geometric complexity. As the barriers fall (e.g., SFF machine prices have reduced nearly an order of magnitude in the last decade) and non-traditional ingredients gain credibility in the fine dining world (e.g., hydrocolloids), the question is not whether SFF will play an important role in the future of food, but rather, in what ways will it do so. Examples of potential future applications include cakes with complex, embedded 3D letters, such that upon slicing the cake, a message is revealed. Or, even a prime rib with a hidden message. Perhaps an on-demand, customizable menu in which the dish is prepared in any 3D shape that the diner desires: the diner can co-create with the culinary artist in real-time.

 

Impact on Culinary Professionals: Industrial Production  

The second way in which SFF could benefit the professional culinary community is by enabling mass-customization in the industrial culinary sector. Today, industrial food producers rely heavily on high-throughput processes such as molding, extrusion and die-cutting. These processes, however, are not amenable to mass-customization (i.e., the use of flexible manufacturing techniques to produce custom output in a low-unit-cost fashion). Molding, extrusion and die-cutting each require substantial custom-tooling, and consequently, producing custom output for low-quantity runs is simply unfeasible. This is precisely where SFF’s inherent strengths can be leveraged: producing food with custom, complex geometries while maintaining cost-effectiveness. The cost-effectiveness is enabled by the fact that SFF does not require custom-tooling or extensive manual labor. One potential future application is custom production of edible giveaways, for example, as marketing collateral for small corporate events. Currently, the cost of custom tooling prohibits low-quantity custom production runs, but with a flexible culinary production platform like SFF, such production runs would be feasible.

 

Impact in the Home: Overview  

Culinary professionals are more primed to adopt SFF than are homeowners, however, the implications for laypeople are even more profound. The effect on laypeople is essentially twofold: increasing productivity and injecting knowledge.


Impact in the Home: Productivity  

Currently, the average American spends more than 30 minutes per day preparing food, according to USDA economists. If food-SFF were brought to the “set-and-forget” state, requiring minimal human labor, the average person could possibly realize time savings of 150+ hours per year (3.8 workweeks per year).

 

Impact in the Home: Injecting Knowledge  

The second way that food-SFF could impact laypeople is by abstracting culinary knowledge and injecting it directly into the home. The idea of abstracting knowledge is nothing new. When chefs create new dishes and then write recipes, they are effectively abstracting their knowledge and distilling it into a prescription for others to reproduce their work. Nevertheless, just like the skills a musician needs to effectively play a song from sheet music, a recipe follower still needs non-trivial skills to execute a recipe. It is not only in the abstraction of knowledge, but also in the execution of the prescription that SFF could have tremendous impact. Just as MIDI software can offload musical skill by taking in digital sheet music and directly creating sound, the SFF system could directly inject the skills necessary to follow a recipe end-to-end. Laypeople don’t have to know the first thing about musical notation, valve/key/fret fingering, or tonal theory to be able to utilize a stereo system to deliver a distilled version of a live musical performance directly into their home. Likewise, a layperson would not necessarily need to possess even basic culinary skills to employ an SFF system to create geometrically complex, multi-material food items. Culinary knowledge and artistic skill of world renowned chefs can be abstracted to a 3D fabrication file and then used by laypeople to reproduce famous chefs’ work in the home. Also, expert knowledge of the world’s leading nutritionists can be abstracted and encoded in 3D fabrication files to help laypeople eat more healthily, without necessarily having to learn healthy cooking techniques or even understand nutritional principles such as caloric intake and protein balance. SFF systems could even go one step further, and deliver customized solutions (SFF’s core strength) to each user that incorporate the individualized nature of nutritional needs. For example, a layperson may soon be able to upload a report of their daily activity from a pedometer and digital food log, and the SFF system could use expert knowledge to print them a meal that fulfills their particular nutritional needs for the day. While experts can currently offer advice on how to balance a nutritional program, their influence falls short of delivering the end-to-end solution that only SFF system can provide: from personalized design through fabrication.

 

Conference Proceedings

 Lipton, J.I., Arnold, D., Nigl, F., Lopez, N., Cohen, D.L., Noren, Nils., Lipson,H., (2010) "Multi-Material Food Printing with Complex Internal Structure Suitable for Conventional Post-Processing", 21st Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium (SFF'10), Austin Tx, USA. 

 Cohen D.L., Lipton, J., Cutler, M., Coulter, D., Vesco, A., Lipson, H. (2009) “Hydrocolloid Printing: A Novel Platform for Customized Food Production” Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium (SFF’09), Aug 3-5 2009, Austin, TX, USA. 

 Periard D.,  Schaal N.,  Schaal M., Malone E., Lipson H., (2007) “Printing Food”, Proceedings of the 18th Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, Austin TX, Aug 2007, pp.564-574. 

Indie Film needs $ for Sundance! Pariah the Movie by Dee Rees — Kickstarter

About this project

HELP US PREMIERE PARIAH AT THE 2011 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL!

Dear Friends, Family, and Fans,

I know you have busy lives and tons of things to do especially with the holidays coming up and we want to thank you SO much for taking the time to watch our kickstarter video. We sincerely believe that PARIAH is a film that will touch audiences and open minds in a meaningful way, and we hope you’ll be a part of helping us bring it to the big screen!

Making this film over the past five and half years has been a labor of love and a true testament to independent spirit and it’s only fitting that we finish the film in the same fashion. We’re standing on a lot of shoulders and couldn’t have made it this far without an amazing team of artists, filmmakers, and fans surrounding us and holding us up. We’re almost there and just need to pay for our music clearances, sound mix, and help bring some of our fabulous cast out to the festival to help in the effort to bring the film to a theater near you. You’ve help us make it this far, please help us go a bit further and make our dreams come true.

I know it sounds corny, but the power really is in your hands, and you can make a huge difference in the life and success of this film no matter what your contribution level. Your voice counts and your support of this film matters. Thank you for supporting Pariah and thank you for being a part of bringing this story to life.

Kind Regards,
Dee

Lovely: Playing with the sky by Valeria Prieto | LivingDesign

Media_httpwwwlivingde_aacdl

Artist's comment:

"Those images were shot with Sony Cyber Shot TX5, and then I selected some vintage images/elements to add more life into them. Sometimes I use a peephole and a crystal with cuts to get various background effects and I like to merge several photos into one.

I have loved photography since childhood. One of the best things I’ve seen in the city where I live (city of Juárez, Chihuahua, MX) are the sunsets, so I love to take pictures of them because every day it is different, especially in winter the sunsets are so colorful that I don’t need to apply color correction. I like to play with the shots by adding items such as musical notes and birds on electric wires, buildings or images that may become part of those great sceneries."

WOW!!! Kinect Hacked to Play World of Warcraft: Welcome to the Future of Gaming | Fast Company

Excerpt:

"Kinect hacks are coming thick and fast, but here is one that will set millions of PC gamers' hearts a-flutter: A hack that lets you gesture control a game of World of Warcraft.

The tech is coming from the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, where a team has built a toolkit, dubbed the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit, which lets them quickly harness Kinect's various image processing and motion-sensing powers to whatever bits of code they desire. This middleware, with some tweaks, lets FAAST quickly facilitate "integration of full-body control with games and VR applications," via a clever processing server that streams the user's skeleton pattern, including body position and gestures which can be mapped onto keyboard controls.

The code is free for non-commercial use, because the Institute has big plans for it--including simple, medically inspired games for rehabilitation of motor-skills after a stroke, and even for reducing childhood obesity through "healthy gaming" (though, given the wild flailing Kinect-playing requires, the health of coffee tables and trinkets around the world might be in danger)..."