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Self service kiosks aren’t a new idea. We see them everyday at places like airports and banks, but a Microsoft Research project hopes to improve interactive systems.

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Building a better kiosk

NASA’s satellite fails, NTT trials an electronic loyalty card phone application, Microsoft Research demos prototype technology, Gmail goes down, Kindle 2 begins shipping, and Samsung’s new phone shoots HD video.

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Week in Review – 2/27

AMD demonstrated its first working models of Istanbul chips, the company’s upcoming line of server processors with six cores.

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AMD demos 6-core Istanbul chips

At TechFest 2009 Microsoft Research is showing off many projects in development. One of them is an in-car infotainment technology called Commute UX.

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Microsoft TechFest: Commute UX keeps your eyes on the road

It was supposed to be a mission that helped scientists working on the problem of global warming but in the end it produced more junk.

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NASA OCO satellite fails

NTT Communications in Japan has begun trials of a system that promises to combine up to 100 loyalty cards in a single cell phone application.

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Organizing retail loyalty cards on cell phones

Augmented reality technology mixes the real world and the virtual world. At TechFest 2009, Microsoft Research demoed its augmented reality tools.

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Microsoft TechFest: Real and virtual worlds collide

Microsoft Research hopes to make data centers more efficient. They are testing a prototype data center that runs off of low-power processors.

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Microsoft TechFest: The low power data center

Beauty Affects Men’s and Women’s Brains Differently | Wired Science from Wired.com

Beauty is famously in the eye of the beholder; but it’s also in the beholder’s brain, and may work differently in the brains of men and women.

In men, images they consider to be beautiful appear to activate brain regions responsible for locating objects in absolute terms — x- and y-coordinates on a grid. Images considered beautiful by women do the same, but they also activate regions associated with relative location: above and behind, over and under. The difference could be the result of evolutionary pressures on our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

The findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are preliminary and based on a small number of people, but intriguing nonetheless.

“This the first study about neural activation in aesthetic tasks to include sex as a variable,” said study co-author Camilo Cela-Conde, an evolutionary anthropologist at Spain’s Universitat de les Illes Balears.

Earlier studies on sex-based cognitive differences have found that men seem to have a heightened sense of absolute location. Women, by contrast, are quicker to process relative values.

How these brain systems became tied to the perception of beauty, widely considered a defining human trait, is an evolutionary mystery. According to Cela-Conde, aesthetics may simply be a byproduct of other cognitive tasks.

Differences in cognitive tasks, however, may be less mysterious: For much of human history, men and women had different jobs. Their brains may thus have developed in subtly different ways.

“In current hunter-gatherer groups, men are in charge of hunting; meanwhile women collect,” said Cela-Conde. “If this is a scheme that can be extended to ancestors’ behavior, then we can think about a selective pressure to increase the capacity of spatial orientation in men, and the capacity to identify edible plants and tubers in women.”

Beautybrains In the study, 10 men and 10 women looked at images of modern and classic paintings, as well as photographs of landscapes, artifacts and urban scenes. The researchers recorded their reactions with a magnetoencephalograph, which monitors real-time neural activity by measuring magnetic fields generated by electrical currents in the brain.

(To avoid confounding by romantic regions of the brain, close-up images of people were not included.)

The subjects varied as to what they considered beautiful, but brain patterns were consistent: coordinate-processing activation in both men and women, and category-processing in only women.

These differences do not seem to translate into differences in the actual experience of beauty. In earlier research, said Cela-Conde, both men and women describe beauty as being “original, interesting and pleasant.”

However, as the differences were expressed only in response to images the subjects found to be beautiful, they do not seem to reflect a general sex-based difference in perception.

As the brain regions involved are far more developed in humans than chimpanzees — our closest living relative — Cela-Conde’s team suspects that the differences are rooted in early hominid divisions between men and women.

Another possible explanation is language-based: Coordinate-reading brain systems are less activated by linguistic communication than categorical systems.

The differences observed in the study would then originate in another sex-based difference, albeit an arguable one: Women are especially talkative.

Citation: “Sex-related similarities and differences in the neural correlates of beauty.” Camilo J. Cela-Conde, Francisco J. Ayala, Enric Munar, Fernando Maestu, Marcos Nadal, Miguel A. Capo, David del Río, Juan J. Lopez-Ibor, Tomas Ortiz, Claudio Mirasso, and Gisele Marty. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106, No.8, Feb. 23, 2009.

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Beauty Affects Men?s and Women?s Brains Differently

It can send e-mails, play video, access the Web and snap pictures, but control a car? Swiss automobile design house Rinspeed will unveil a concept electric car controlled by an iPhone at next week’s Geneva Motor Show.

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iPhone controls concept car

25 Innovative Ways Companies are Using Twitter (That You May NOT Have Heard of Yet)

A lot of people have been talking about Twitter lately, the social media site that brings users the conversation of right now. We’re even doing a free webinar on Twitter next week. If you’ve spent any time

Why the gOS Could Now Hurt Microsoft – The Chart – IT Channel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness

Good OS, the Taipei, Taiwan-based company that launched in 2007, could turn out to be bad news for Microsoft.

The makers of the gOS, Linux-based desktop operating system may now find themselves at the right place at the right time. With a market that is anxiously sizing up the netbook platform – - driven in large part by Intel’s low-cost Atom processors – - the gOS offers a simple proposition: A simple-to-install, free operating system integrated with Mozilla and Google technology for fun and productivity.

It’s slick.

The CRN Test Center has taken a look at the gOS 3 Gadgets and compared it to other operating systems on a simulated netbook test bed. (You can take a look at the Test Center’s netbook benchmarking results, comparing gOS to Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Ubuntu, right here.)

gOS was competitive on performance. But its clean, Mac-like task bar at the bottom of the user interface, its combination of both OpenOffice.org applications and Google apps, and its friendly, gadget-based look and feel seem almost tailor-made for small, often keyboard- and memory-challenged netbooks.

Good OS describes its operating system as “a full desktop operating system perfect for desktops and notebooks.” That may be a stretch for all desktops and notebooks, but for the netbook platform it’s hard to argue.

gOS launched first on the obscure Everex gPC – - shortly before a wave of Tier 1 manufacturers came to market with their own netbooks running mostly Windows XP or Ubuntu. But if the market is opening up, as it appears it may be, gOS may have the opening it needs to get another look.

In looking at gOS, you also get a good look at Mozilla’s Prism software and Google’s productivity applications, including Google Docs and Gmail. And you begin to see how possible it is to build a nice, productive interface without ever-expanding hardware requirements or licensing concerns. At a time when some in the market are more aggressively considering doing more with less compute power, and less cost, those are all technologies that could fit the bill.

For now, Windows XP remains the most popular operating system for business PCs and netbooks. But the world isn’t standing still and Good OS and other vendors are in a better position than ever to get a good look.

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Why the gOS Could Now Hurt Microsoft

Personal computing is currently in a state of transition. While traditionally users have interacted mostly with desktop applications, more and more of them are using web applications. But the latter often fit awkwardly into the document-centric interface of web browsers. And they are surrounded with controls–like back and forward buttons and a location bar–that have nothing to do with interacting with the application itself.

Mozilla Labs is launching a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur.

Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web. We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.

The first of these experiments is based on Webrunner, which we’ve moved into the Mozilla Labs code repository and renamed to Prism.

Prism

Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.

Prism lets users add their favorite web apps to their desktop environment:

When invoked, these applications run in their own window:

They are accessible with Control-Tab, Command-Tab, and Exposé, just like desktop apps. And users can still access these same applications from any web browser when they are away from their own computers.

The Best of Both Worlds

Prism isn’t a new platform, it’s simply the web platform integrated into the desktop experience. Web developers don’t have to target it separately, because any application that can run in a modern standards-compliant web browser can run in Prism. Prism is built on Firefox, so it supports rich internet technologies like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and <canvas> and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

And while Prism focuses on how web apps can integrate into the desktop experience, we’re also working to increase the capabilities of those apps by adding functionality to the Web itself, such as providing support for offline data storage and access to 3D graphics hardware.

The User Experience

We’re also thinking about how to better integrate Prism with Firefox, enabling one-click “make this a desktop app” functionality that preserves a user’s preferences, saved passwords, cookies, add-ons, and customizations. Ideally you shouldn’t even have to download Prism, it should just be built into your browser.

We’re working on an extension for Firefox that provides some of this functionality. For more information about the user experience we hope to achieve in Prism, see Alex Faaborg’s blog post. For some of the technical details and new features found in Prism, see Mark Finkle’s blog post.

Getting Started with Prism

We have an early prototype for this working today on Windows, with work continuing on Mac and Linux (for which we should have builds available soon).

To try out the prototype, download and install it: Download Prism for Windows.

Then start Prism. It will display an Install Web Application dialog.

Enter the URL of the application you want to use in Prism (e.g. mail.google.com), a name for the application (e.g. Gmail), and pick where you’d like to create shortcuts to the application.

Then press the OK button. Prism will create shortcuts to the application in the locations you specified and then start the application.

How to Get Involved

Prism is just the first of many experiments we hope to conduct around improving the usability of web applications. It’s open source, like everything we do, and we’re interested in hearing from and working with anyone interested in further developing this concept.

• Discuss, debate and add to the design in the forum. Report bugs in Bugzilla.
• Get the source code, extend it, fix bugs and/or submit patches.

  The project lead for Prism is Mark Finkle and contributors include Cesar Oliveira, Wladimir Palant, Sylvain Pasche, Alex Faaborg, and Myk Melez.
  
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Introducing Prism

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Inside the meltdown

Samsung aims for touchscreen phone market with updated Tocco | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Samsung is making a play for the title of mass-market touchscreen handset of 2009 with the launch of an updated version of its popular Tocco device. The Tocco Ultra Edition, available in the UK from next month, has a larger and much brighter touchscreen than its predecessor and the camera has been upgraded from 5 megapixels to 8.
Samsung Tocco Ultra

Samsung has also added a slide-out numberpad while making the whole phone slimmer than the old Tocco, which despite the hype surrounding the iPhone was the most popular handset among British customers signing up for a contract in the latter half of 2008, a fact that helped the Korean company leapfrog Nokia to become the UK market leader.

Part of the previous phone’s attraction was the price, with the phone available free on contracts pitched at around £25 a month – a full £20 a month less than Apple’s device.

But the new phone may find it harder to make such an impression as it is likely to be pitched at up to £35 in a part of the market which has become saturated in recent months. Nokia’s 5800, HTC’s G1 (also known as the “Google Phone” as it runs the search engine’s Android operating system) and the BlackBerry Storm have all brought top of the range specifications into the £30 to £35 a month contract range.

The £40 a month asked by Vodafone for the Sony Ericsson Experia X1 looks a little steep and is likely to come down later in the year, while the critically acclaimed Palm Pre is scheduled for release in the UK in the second half of the year, which will further shake up the market. However no pricing has been given for the Pre.

Meanwhile the HTC Touch Diamond, HTC Touch HD and LG Renoir are already very attractive in the £25 to £30 a month bracket. There is also, of course, the 8 megapixel Samsung Pixon, currently available free on a £24.46 a month contract with Orange.

The Tocco Ultra Edition (which will be called the Ultra Touch everywhere else in the world) has the same left-hand scrolling toolbar as the original phone, giving users the ability to customise their home screen by dragging icons across and dropping them. Widgets can now be downloaded to the phone “over the air” with Samsung widely tipped to announce it is opening an application store to compete with the likes of Apple’s iPhone App Store at next week’s Mobile World Congress event.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the phone is its scratch-resistant screen. It is an Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode screen, which essentially means incredibly vivid colours and sharp resolution without a massive drain on the battery. Samsung has also added touch feedback, so that when you click on an icon you get little “shiver” to confirm you’ve done it.

But the stunning screen is wasted when it comes to accessing the internet. The browser is a disappointment as it renders web pages as single images instead of displaying the internet as a full screen.

The operating system also seems to let the phone down. In the brief time I had to experiment with it last week, the phone, which is based on Samsung’s proprietary SHP operating system, was slow to complete tasks, leaving me pawing away at the screen unsure if it was carrying out the requested function or not.

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Samsung aims for touchscreen phone market with updated Tocco