Hasta La Gadget!

Ditching school used to be a lot easier. A California based school district wants to stop all hooky playing. Anaheim Union High School District will being giving students who have missed four unexcused days in a school year a GPS tracking device.

The GPS device will be a size of a cellphone and force kids to “check in” a couple of times of a day. That way the school district will know where the students are at any given time. The real kicker here is that both the student and parents have to agree to use the device. No word about what will happen if neither party agrees to use it.

I have heard about these ideas before, but this one is less invasive idea than other proposals. My only issue here is that the kid could leave it at one location, and thus make the device pointless. Either way, the school district could lose on this. What are your thoughts about schools using GPS devices to track students?

Via Hot Hardware

[photo from Flickr user jamescridland]

Solar cells aren’t cheap. The cost of turning the sun’s energy into usable electricity has been one of the main factors in keeping solar energy adoption rates down. However, a new method of producing cells developed by researchers at Stanford could lead to less costly and more efficient green energy production. Cells using quantum dots have been a subject of research for several years due to their potential for providing much more efficiency than traditional cells using materials like silicon. This is because regular cells can only capture a single part of the spectrum dependant on the material they are constructed from, whereas the very small dots on quantum dot cells can be adjusted in size to capture energy at different wavelengths. These types of cells are easier to make too, as the chemical reactions involved in their production are simpler than those used in building existing solar cells. Unfortunately, these solar panels have yet to live up to their high-efficiency promise, and researchers are working on ways to change that.

Stanford chemical engineering professor Stacey Bent, along with a team of researchers, found that, by adding a single layer of organic molecules less than a nanometer thick, the efficiency of these quantum dot cells can be tripled. The type of organic molecule used is not important, which surprised Bent.

“We thought it would be very sensitive to what we put down,” Bent said in this article on PhysOrg.com.

Right now, the team has only been able to achieve about 0.4 percent efficiency, which doesn’t compare favorably with the 31 percent efficiency of traditional cells. The group plans on adjusting elements of the cell to hopefully bring this number up in the future, challenging traditional solar cells with less costly, more efficient alternatives.

[via PhysOrg.com, ACS Nano]

Thus far, Android has been been primarily rolled out on smartphones and tablets. NEC bucked the trend by debuting a netbook in Japan that runs the OS, called LifeTouch Note. While NEC didn’t offer a release date, it announced the price: ¥45,000 ($540 USD).

LifeTouch Note has a keyboard, seven inch touchscreen, 2MP Webcam, Wi-Fi, GPS, SD, SDHC slots, can support up to 8GB memory, Nvidia Tegra 2 GPU, and Android 2.2 (Froyo). Not bad for a netbook, but those specs come at with a premium price tag. 

Via Engadget

If night one was a glimmer of hope in the battle of man against machine, night two can hardly be regarded as anything but a trivia bloodbath. Jeopardy’s top moneymaker, Brad Rutter, managed to tie IBM’s Watson at the end of the first of a three night showcase, both parties ending the evening with $5,000 (with Jeopardy’s top game winner, Ken Jennings, trailing at $2,000).

By the end of last night’s show, which consisted of the Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy portions of the two-parter (tonight’s episode will be a full competition), there was no more room for doubt–computers are better as Jeopardy than us. Way, way better.

Watson walked away (or, more likely, was rolled away) with $35,734. Rutter ended the game with $10,400, and Jennings managed to rack up $4,800 by the end of Final Jeopardy.

The humans actually bested the computer in Final Jeopardy. The answer was “Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle.” The right response was Chicago. But even though Watson incorrectly guessed Toronto, the machine’s bet of $947 wasn’t enough to knock it out of first place.