Hasta La Gadget!

Wearing a pair of glasses might make you look cool from time to time, but it is not fun at all whenever you are involved in a sporting event, as the presence of sweat tends to make your glasses slip. Here we are with researchers at UC Berkeley laying claim to the creation of a vision-correcting matrix for display screens, which could go a long way in helping office drones work longer at their cubicles with less amounts of eye strain.

Glasses-free 3D technologies have certainly developed forward in the past few years, with the Nintendo 3DS being one of the more famous champions of such technology, but those can be painful on some eyes after a few hours of usage. University of California researchers have managed to come up with a prototype device that enables folks who have vision problems to forget about wearing their prescription eyeglasses and contact lenses whenever working on standard 2D computer displays, as the displays are “smart” enough to compensate for the viewer’s visual impairment.

Just how does this vision-correcting matrix work? Currently in a prototype stage, it will be made up of a screen that has been printed with a matrix of pinholes, measuring all of just 75 microns in diameter while being separated by gaps that are 390 microns wide. The printed pinhole screen will be inserted between a couple of layers of clear acrylic, before it is attached to an iPod display. An algorithm will consider a person’s eyeglasses prescription, letting the screen perform the relevant compensation through intensity adjustment as well as direction of the light emitted from individual screen pixels. [Press Release]

Vision-Correcting Display Screens

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel said Thursday it has called up another 16,000 reservists, allowing it to potentially widen its Gaza offensive against the territory’s Hamas rulers in a war that has killed more than 1,300 Palestinians and more than 50 Israelis.

The new call-up follows another day of intensive fighting, in which tank shells struck a U.N. school where Palestinians were sheltering and air strikes tore through a crowded Gaza shopping area. At least 116 Palestinians and three Israeli soldiers were killed Wednesday alone.

The move also coincides with stalled diplomatic efforts to end the war, which has claimed more than 1,360 Palestinian lives — most of them civilians — and reduced entire Gaza neighborhoods to rubble since it began on July 8.

Israeli attacks in the strip continued Thursday, with witnesses saying that munitions struck the Omar Ibn al-Khatab mosque next to a U.N. school in the northern town of Beit Lahiya.

Fifty-six Israeli soldiers and three civilians on the Israeli side have died in the Gaza campaign, as Palestinians have fired hundreds of rockets at Israel — some reaching major cities — and carried out attacks through tunnels beneath the heavily guarded frontier.

Israel has now called up a total of 86,000 reserves during the Gaza conflict, which it launched to try to end the rocket fire from Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza.

An initial aerial campaign was widened into a ground offensive on July 17. Since then the campaign has concentrated on destroying more than 30 cross-border tunnels that militants have constructed to carry out attacks on Israeli territory.

Israel says that most of the 32 tunnels it has uncovered have now been demolished and that getting rid of the remainder will take no more than a few days.

The strike in Beit Lahiya early Thursday damaged water tanks on the roof of a building near the mosque, sending shrapnel flying into the adjacent school compound.”The shrapnel from the strike on the mosque hit people who were in the street and at the entrance of the school,” said Sami Salebi, an area resident.

Gaza health official Ashraf al-Kidra said at least 15 people were wounded, with three of them in critical condition.

Kifah Rafati, 40, was being treated for shrapnel injuries at the nearby Kamal Adwan hospital. She said she and her six children had been sleeping in a classroom facing the mosque when the explosion went off. “There is no safety anywhere,” she said.

On Wednesday Israeli tank shells struck a U.N. school in the Jebaliya refugee camp where some 3,300 Gazans had crammed in to seek refuge from the fighting, killing at least 17 people and drawing sharp condemnation from the United Nations.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the deadly school shelling “outrageous” and “unjustifiable,” and demanded an immediate humanitarian cease-fire.

“Nothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping children,” the U.N. chief said.

Hours later, an Israeli airstrike hit a crowded shopping area in the Shijaiyah district in Gaza City, killing at least 16 people, including local Palestinian photographer Rami Rayan, who was wearing a press vest at the time, and wounding more than 200 people, al-Kidra said.

Thursday marked a third day of particularly heavy Israeli air and artillery attacks, at a time when Egyptian cease-fire efforts appeared to have stalled. Israeli media said late Wednesday that Israel’s Security Cabinet decided to press forward with the operation.

Egyptian officials, meanwhile, met with an Israeli envoy about Israel’s conditions for a cease-fire, including disarming Hamas, according to a high-ranking Egyptian security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to discuss the delicate diplomatic efforts.

Hamas has said it will only halt fire once it receives guarantees that a seven-year-old Gaza border blockade by Israel and Egypt will be lifted.

Israel says it wants to decimate Hamas’ rocket-launching capability, diminish its weapons arsenal and demolish the tunnels. It has launched more than 4,000 strikes against Hamas-linked targets, including rocket launchers and mosques where it says weapons were being stored.

Israeli strikes have also hit dozens of homes. Mahmoud Abu Rahma of the Palestinian human rights group Al Mezan said nearly half of the Palestinians killed so far died in their homes.

Israeli officials have said Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields by firing rockets from crowded neighborhoods. Palestinian militants have fired more than 2,600 rockets at Israel over the past three weeks.

However, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, chief of the U.N. aid agency for Palestinian refugees, said Israel must try harder to ensure that civilians are not hurt, especially in Gaza, where 1.7 million people are squeezed into a small coastal territory. His agency has opened 80 of its schools to more than 200,000 Palestinians fleeing the violence.

“What maybe the world forgets … is that the people of Gaza have nowhere to go,” he said. “So when the fighting starts and they move, it is not as if they can cross a border to somewhere.”

___

Barzak reported from Gaza City, Gaza Strip.

NEW YORK (AP) — Prolific TV producer Robert Halmi, Sr., has died.

Halmi died Wednesday in his New York City home at 90, said spokesman Russ Patrick. The Hungarian-born Halmi found success as a magazine photographer after arriving in America in 1951, shooting pictures for such publications as Life and Sports Illustrated.

But in a mid-career switch in the mid-1960s, he turned to moving pictures. During the next half-century he produced more than 200 programs and miniseries for television.

His specialty was family-friendly entertainment, with TV projects including “The Josephine Baker Story,” the Bette Midler-starring “Gypsy,” ”Merlin,” ”Dinotopia” and “The Lion in Winter” with Glenn Close.

Other projects included TV versions of “The Odyssey,” ”Alice in Wonderland,” ”Gulliver’s Travels,” starring Ted Danson, and “In Cold Blood,” with Anthony Edwards and Eric Roberts.

Teamed with his son, Robert Halmi, Jr., he claimed every project was a passion project, including the 1994 miniseries version of “Scarlett,” Alexandra Ripley’s sequel to “Gone With the Wind,” which he defended as not a rip-off of the world’s most beloved movie, but “an eight-hour study in American history.”

Still active well into the new millennium, he produced the TV miniseries “Neverland” in 2011, and a year later a new version of “Treasure Island,” starring Donald Sutherland and Elijah Wood.

“Today’s producers are just money people who have X number of dollars, and with them they buy people, mostly on the phone,” Halmi told The Associated Press in 1993. “I’m somebody with pretty good taste who goes one step further. With the creative process, everything has to be nurtured. I know on every project, every day, where it stands dollars-and-cents-wise, but I also know did someone have a cold.”

His projects were honored with 136 Emmy Awards. A Peabody Award citation hailed him as “perhaps the last of the great network television impresarios.”

Halmi recently had begun filming “Olympus,” a mythological series for the Syfy channel.

“There are two English words which I never could understand or cope with ever since I came to this country,” he told The AP. “One is ‘security.’ The other is ‘retirement.'”

We all rely on USB to interconnect our digital lives—-but new research reveals that there’s a fundamental security flaw in the very way that the humble Universal Serial Bus functions, and it could be exploited to wreak havoc on any computer.

Read more…

Can robots actually know how feelings are like? I suppose if one could boil down feelings to a series of 1s and 0s, then it would be a phenomenal breakthrough, but until then, abstract ideas such as courage and perseverance would be difficult for a robot to “know”. However, robots can be programmed to have a sense of “perseverance”, which would be to go on until it is not physically possible to do so. Engineers have successfully come up with a robot that will reassess its walking options and continue to the destination despite carrying a broken leg.

This is made possible thanks to an “intelligent trial and error” process, where the half dozen legged robot was able to figure out how it will continue marching on despite having a broken leg, doing so in under 2 minutes, now how about that? This would definitely lead to a generation of more robust, effective, and autonomous robots, which is something the military too, might be interested in.

The whole aim of such research was to have robots mimic the behavior of injured animals, as animals that are injured will still hobble along and not lie on their backs, waiting for death to clam them.

Robot Continues Working Despite Of Broken Leg

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.