One of the new SpeedSpike speed cameras which has been installed on the A374 in Cornwall
Speed cameras which communicate with each other by satellite are being secretly tested on British roads.
The hi-tech devices can follow drivers’ progress for miles to calculate whether they have broken speed limits.
Combining number plate recognition technology with global positioning satellites, they can be set up in a network to monitor tens of thousands of cars over huge areas for the smallest breach.
Known as SpeedSpike, the system uses similar methods of recognition as the cameras which enforce the congestion charge in London, and allow two cameras to 'talk' to each other if a vehicle appears to have travelled too far in too short a space of time.
After a covert national trial which has not been publicised until now, just days after a report showed motorists have been fined almost £1billion in speeding tickets under Labour, authorities hope the new cameras will enable them to re-create the system used on motorway contraflows.
The Home Office is currently testing them at two sites - one in Southwark in London and another on the A374 between Antony and Torpoint in Cornwall.
Details of the secret trials emerged in a House of Commons report and immediately attracted criticism.
Conservative MP Geoffrey Cox, whose Devon constituency is close to the Cornish test site, said fundamental questions had to be addressed before such an 'alarming' level of surveillance was extended.
The high-tech devices are an enhanced version of the spy cameras which enforce London's congestion charge
He said: 'You always have to ask if it is really necessary to watch over people, to spy on them and film them.
'We will get to a point where it becomes routine and it should never be a matter of routine that the state spies on its citizens.'
'We will get to a point where it becomes routine and it should never be a matter of routine that the state spies on its citizens'
SpeedSpike uses automatic number plate recognition technology, which in 2008 took photos of 64 million of motorists in Britain - ten times more than the previous year.
The new cameras have been developed by PIPS Technology Ltd, an American-owned business with a base in Hampshire.
In the company's evidence to the House of Commons Transport Committee, it boasted of 'number plate capture in all weather conditions, 24 hours a day' as well as pointing out the system's low cost and ease of installation.
The company believes the cameras can be used for 'main road enforcement for congestion reduction and speed enforcement', can help to 'eliminate rat-runs' and cut speeds outside schools.
It said: 'We have an urban test site at Salter Road in Southwark and are working in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police.
'We also have an inter urban test site located on the A374 from Torpoint to Antony at which we are working with the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary.'
The trial is being carried out in conjunction with the police and the Devon and Cornwall Safety Camera Partnership.
Superintendent Tim Swarbrick, chairman of the partnership and head of roads policing, said it was being tested 'on a live road system to assess how effective and accurate it is'.
He added: 'Average speed recorders have proved to be very successful in roadworks on the major trunk roads. They have reduced injury and deaths and we would like to replicate this positive effect on more rural roads.
'To this end we are assisting the Home Office in piloting a new version of this equipment to gauge both its accuracy and operational effectiveness.
'The equipment is not being used for enforcement purposes, as it is not Home Office approved at this stage.'
The Home Office said it was unable to comment on the trials because of 'commercial confidentiality'.
Last week a report showed that motorists have been hit with speeding tickets worth almost £1billion under Labour.
But receipts have fallen since police were stopped from keeping part of the money raised from speed cameras.
It suggested that the explosion in the number of cameras was used as a 'cash cow' and that forces no longer have an incentive to install them.
Drivers were clobbered with 1.23million tickets in 2008, of which 1.03million were issued by speed cameras, the Home Office report revealed.
The tickets raised more than £73million for the Treasury that year, or £200,000 a day.
In total, 16million tickets have been issued since 1997, raising £913million.
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We've still got a long way to go before human beings can be beamed from one place to another Star Trek-style, but on Friday a team of scientists at the University of Maryland achieved, nonetheless, a milestone in teleportation.
According to LiveScience, the university's Joint Quantum Institute for the first time was able to teleport information between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter--about one step for an adult.
The overview of the experiment's setup.(Credit: LiveScience)
Generally, teleportation works thanks to a remarkable quantum phenomenon called entanglement that only occurs on the atomic and subatomic scale. Once two objects are put in an entangled state, their properties are inextricably entwined. In layman's terms, if they are in entangled mode, what you "see" on one is what you get on the other.
The JQI team set out to entangle the quantum states of two individual ytterbium ions so information embodied in one could be teleported to the other. Each ion was isolated in a separate high-vacuum trap, suspended in an invisible cage of electromagnetic fields and surrounded by metal electrodes.
After that, the experiment worked like this: Single photons from each of two ions in separate traps interacted at a beamsplitter. When both detectors recorded a photon simultaneously, the ions were entangled. At that point, ion A was measured, revealing exactly what operation had to be performed on ion B to teleport ion A's information (see illustration at right).
It's important to note that the achievement is not any form of conventional communication. This is because in teleportation no information pertaining to the original object actually travels to the other. Instead, the information measured from the first object appears on the second object.
The research was supported in part by the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity program under U.S. Army Research Office contract.
It looks like the military's interest in teleportation remains strong. Who knows? This might mean we'll catch Osama bin Laden soon.
There's still a lot of blue sky in Boeing's plans for directed-energy weapons like the Laser Avenger.(Credit: Boeing)
Updated 2:40 p.m. with details on how the laser damaged the UAV and on the Laser Avenger's targeting system.
Boeing is seeing a glimmer of progress in its work toward fielding laser weapons.
The defense industry giant on Monday said tests of its Laser Avenger system in December marked "the first time a combat vehicle has used a laser to shoot down a UAV," or unmanned aerial vehicle. In the testing, the Humvee-mounted Laser Avenger located and tracked three small UAVs in flight over the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and knocked one of the drone aircraft out of the sky.
Boeing didn't go into much detail about the shoot-down. In response to a query by CNET News, it did say this much about the strike by the the kilowatt-class laser: "A hole was burned in a critical flight control element of the UAV, rendering the aircraft unflyable."
While decades of Hollywood imagery may conjure up a vision of a target disintegrating in a sparkle of light, the actual workings of the laser beam are probably more prosaic. For instance, the beam from Boeing's much, much larger Airborne Laser, which is intended to disable long-range missiles in flight, uses heat to create a weak spot on the skin of the missile, causing it to rupture in flight. Boeing hopes to conduct the first aerial shoot-down test with the much-delayed 747-based Airborne Laser later this year.
In tests in 2007, the Laser Avenger "neutralized" improvised explosive devices (IEDs) like those that have been a deadly threat in Iraq, along with other unexploded munitions.
Layoffs and other expense controls show that Google isn't immune to mundane economic realities. But the company's cool factor is still intact, judging by the fact that it signed up former Vice President Al Gore to speak at a Google Earth event next month.
Oceanographer Sylvia Earle will speak at a Google Earth event February 2.(Credit: National Geographic Society)
Gore is set to join Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, at the on February 2 event at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco's newly rebuilt aquarium, planetarium, and natural history museum. But it's another speaker's name that gives the tip-off about what the event might be about.
That person is oceanographer Sylvia Earle, explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society and the founder of the Deep Search Foundation.
Hmm--an aquarium, oceanographer, and a high-profile politician interested in the fate of the Earth. Perhaps this will be the announcement of Google's work to add 3D ocean maps to Google Earth?
An invitation to the event described it only as an announcement of "the next big step in the evolution of Google Earth."
Google Earth and Google Maps already show satellite views of the Earth, and the sights can be inverted to show the heavens through Google Sky.
This image shows the inauguration scene from more than 400 miles in space. You can see the dark clusters of ant-like people gathered around the Capitol and in front of JumboTrons along the National Mall.(Credit: GeoEye Satellite Image)
U.S. President Barack Obama was sworn in on Tuesday in Washington. But the number of people who braved the frigid D.C. weather to watch the historic event could have been anywhere between 800,000 and 3 million, depending on who you talk to.
Researchers have projected widely varying figures for the event's attendance, based on satellites circling above the clouds, aerostat balloons tethered blocks away, television coverage of the crowd, and good old-fashioned mathematics calculations.
Steve Doig, a journalism professor at Arizona State University who specializes in crowd counting, said he is estimating there were 800,000 people in attendance, based on a satellite image taken by GeoEye about 40 minutes before the swearing-in ceremony.
"The space-based image is fascinating because all the low-level shots make you think the crowd is much larger. (In the satellite images), you see the very dense clots of people in front of the JumboTrons, but then the wide open spaces elsewhere," Doig said. "I'd still suspect this crowd was larger than the Lyndon Johnson one, which wasn't estimated with the benefit of an image from this excellent viewpoint."
Estimates have put Johnson's inauguration attendance at 1.2 million, but Doig said he thinks that figure is inflated.
With the images, Doig tries to figure out how many people there might be per square foot and then factors in the surface area.
"It's actually fairly simple math, getting the square footage and dividing that by some number of feet per person," he said. "A scary mosh pit is 2.5 square feet per person. That's about as tight as you can pack people, where they can't move--elevator tight."
If people up and down the Mall were crammed that tight, there could have been 2 million, he said.
GeoEye collected a high-resolution image of Washington, D.C., at 11:19 a.m. EST from 423 miles in space, said Mark Brender, GeoEye vice president of marketing and communications.
"There were high, wispy light clouds, but one could clearly see throngs of people, especially gathered around the large JumboTron televisions spread along the National Mall," he said. "The satellite collects imagery at 41 centimeter ground resolution, so one is able to see an object the size of home plate on a baseball diamond."
Satellites owned by Digital Globe also took shots, from 300 miles up following the polar orbit at a speed of about 17,000 miles per hour, said company spokesman Chuck Herring.
This shot was taken from a satellite 300 miles high.(Credit: Digital Globe)
Others made estimates based on video images.
"I just watched the event in the American embassy in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates!!" Farouk El-Baz, a Boston University professor who is considered the leading authority on providing crowd estimates, wrote in an e-mail. "I do not have the pictures yet, but the video images show nearly 3 million people!"
El-Baz explained how he arrived at his figure this way: The area between the steps of the Capitol Building and the Lincoln Memorial is 2.2 miles. The width of the National Mall is half a mile and there is another one mile along the western greens, he said. "If this area is nearly full it can accommodate at least 3 million people," he said.
"Crowd counting is an art," said Curt Westergard, president of Digital Design and Imaging Service, which took photos of the event with 360-degree spherical panoramic cameras attached to balloons bobbing 500 feet above and a few blocks away from the White House. Fiber-optic cables tethered the balloons to a special launch trailer, which transmitted live shots to CNN.
"We're trying to contribute some of the oblique-angle photos of the scene that might see things under trees that satellite photos might miss (or) people standing in alcoves," he said.
The cameras took the shots between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. EST, when they were forced to shut down due to air space regulations. The balloons, which measure about 12.5 feet in diameter, only rose to 500 feet instead of 800 feet because of issues with President Bush's helicopter, according to Westergard.
Fixed-wing planes and even helicopters usually can be used, but were prohibited from coming near the event for security reasons.
The U.S. National Park Service, threatened with a lawsuit over its crowd estimate for the Million Man March in 1995, stopped doing crowd projections as a matter of policy. But the agency changed its mind for the Obama inauguration, although it won't release a figure until later in the week, according to USA Today.
Imaging technology also was being used to help the U.S. Department of Interior keep track of crowds for security, public safety, and traffic purposes, according to the GIS Cafe Web site. The Interior Department uses a wall-sized display of high-resolution flat-screen, tiled LCD monitors called the "OptIPortal" that displays 35-megapixel aerial imagery, the report said.
An image of the inauguration crowd shot by a camera attached to a balloon 500 feet above the ground.
The new cloak with the bump, left, and the prototype, right.(Credit: Duke University)
That cloaking device we've been dreaming of appears to be one step closer to actual cloakdom, so start pondering the mischievous possibilities.
Scientists from Duke University have improved on their earlier efforts at producing an invisibility cloak, coming up with a new type of device they say is significantly more sophisticated at cloaking an object (and eventually a person?) from visible light.
The device is made from a light-bending composite material that can detour electromagnetic waves around an object and reconnect them on the other side. That creates an effect similar to a distant mirage you'd see hovering above a road on a hot day.
In Duke's latest experiments, a beam of microwaves aimed through the cloaking device at a "bump" on a flat mirror surface bounced off the surface at the same angle, as if the bump wasn't there. Additionally, the device prevented the formation of scattered beams that would normally be expected from such a perturbation. (The team details its findings in far more technical terms than I ever could in the latest issue of Science magazine.)
A CES attendee checks out LG Electronics' 3D LCD TV.(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET News)
Three-dimensional TV is coming to a living room near you. But will the technology spur a consumer spending spree like digital and high-definition TV did before it? Or will 3D end up being the next big flop?
One thing is clear, TV manufacturers need something new to get people buying TVs. Over the last ...
Starting on Thursday, residents of Hawaii will be able to pay a flat fee for a 10-minute online visit with a doctor.(Credit: American Well)
For people in Hawaii, going to see the doctor just got as easy as booting up their PC.
The state is the first to offer online physician visits statewide, under a program that kicks off Thursday. Residents can chat with a doctor over a standard Web browser (IE 7 or Firefox 2) or carry out their visit over the telephone. Those with a Webcam can also use that to share video with the doctor. The service will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week (with a few monthly maintenance outages during low-volume times).
Members of Hawaii's largest insurer, HSMA (which operates the state's Blue Cross and Blue Shield) pay $10 for the 10-minute consultation, while non-members pay $45.
The launch comes as the modernization of health care is taking center stage. A Senate working group is scheduled to hold hearings Thursday on the topic, with Microsoft Vice President Peter Neupert among those offering testimony.
Hawaii passed a law in 2006 that paved the way for Thursday's launch. The legislation led HMSA to look for ways to implement online health care, a search that eventually led the company to Boston-based American Well. The two companies have been working together since last June, along with Microsoft, whose HealthVault system is supported to allow patients to maintain their own health care records.
Proponents of the system caution that while it may help reduce the number of people going to emergency rooms for routine off-hours ailments, it isn't a substitute in true emergencies.
Doctors in the system are told to apply the same standards of care and address only the kinds of things that can be handled over the phone or Web. Doctors are allowed to issue prescriptions for most medications, but in some cases will not be able to offer a definitive diagnosis within the 10-minute visit.
Family practice doctor Michelle Shimizu, who has been among the doctors helping test the system, said she sees opportunities for handling things like glucose monitoring, discussing lab results as well as for unplanned queries.
"That doesn't necessarily need to be done on a face-to-face basis." Shimizu said. At the same time, she doesn't see traditional visits going away.
"I don't think this situation can completely replace one-on-one doctor's visits," she said. "It's an adjunct to that."
She's found another use for the system. Shimizu, who is in the process of moving her practice from Oahu to the Big Island, said the online option will allow some of her current patients to keep seeing her without having to hop on a plane.
In general, doctors receive $25 for each online visit they handle. They can use the Web to schedule unused time as it becomes available. Doctors, like patients, need only a phone or a PC to participate.
"The $25 has been received tremendously," said HMSA marketing Vice President Michael Stollar. "They think the fee is very fair," he said, noting that many offer phone or e-mail follow-up today without getting paid at all.
For now, the company expects doctors to mainly use the service to fill their spare time, though he said that he can imagine a day where a new medical school graduate might choose to set up an online-only practice.
Roy Schoenberg, the CEO of American Well, said that making better use of physicians' downtime fills a critical need. "There are not enough primary care physicians," he said. "It really allows us to capture 'care opportunities' out of the same number of physicians that were out there."
A Sega Toys employee pets the new robot cat "Yume-Neko Venus" in Tokyo Wednesday.(Credit: AFP Photo/Yoshikazu Tsuno)
Some will call it cute, others will surely call it creepy. We'll reserve final judgment until we see how it feels when Sega Toys' new "Yume-Neko Venus," or "Dream Cat Venus," sheds on our couch and rubs up against our leg.
The robo-cat is equipped with touch sensors that let it engage in such real-life feline behavior as purring, moving its legs when you rub its belly, and sleeping a lot. It will not, as far as we know, scratch your face or drag mice in.
The furry faux cat (OK, maybe if you're allergic...) is set to hit the market in July, but we're not yet sure for how much. Hopefully by then we will have finally made uneasy peace with the existence of Lucky the robo-dog.
For a better sense of how Dream Cat Venus operates, watch this video of its predecessor, Dream Cat Smile, in action.
Two British adventurers are about to head off on a 3,600-mile maiden voyage that could well give new life to the phrase "from here to Timbuktu." They'll be traveling alternately by land and sea in what they're calling the "world's first bio-fueled flying car"--the Parajet Skycar, which is essentially a dune buggy with a fan motor and paragliding wing attached.
Pilot Neil Laughton plans to leave from London Wednesday and journey through France, Spain, Morocco, the Western Sahara, Mauritania, and Mali, returning home via Senegal. Joining him for part of the journey will be engineer Gilo Cardozo, who created the two-seat, road-legal vehicle. The Skycar will be accompanied by a team of overland adventurers in all-terrain vehicles carrying fuel and supplies.
Have a look at the gallery below for more details on this crazy car, which has a take-off speed of 60 mph, and in flying mode, supposedly can hit a cruising altitude of 2,000 to 3,000 feet and a maximum altitude of 15,000 feet.
The USB 3.0 cable is substantially thicker than the USB 2.0 cable as it contains six wires rather than two.
Intel demonstrated a working version of USB 3.0 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. Here's why it will make eSATA and FireWire obsolete.
When USB 3.0 is expected to hit the market in early 2010, it will have been 10 years since the now ubiquitous USB 2.0 was introduced (April 2000). The current USB 2.0 specification runs at a theoretical maximum speed of 480Mbps, and can supply power (for those looking for the hard details, you can find the USB 2.0 specification here (zip file).
According to the USB Implementers Forum, there were 2 billion USB 2.0 devices shipped in 2006 (one for every three people in the world), and the install base was 6 billion (almost one for every person in the world). In November 2007, the USB Implementers forum announced the USB 3.0 specifications, and Intel officially demonstrated the technology at CES 2009.
Now, the juice: USB 3.0 promises a theoretical maximum rate of 5Gbps, meaning it's 10 times faster than USB 2.0. USB 3.0 is also full duplex, meaning it can upload and download simultaneously (it's bi-directional); USB 2.0 is only half duplex.
Put side by side with eSATA and FireWire 800, USB 3.0 is far superior. eSATA, an external connection that runs at the same speed as the internal SATA 1.0 bus, has a maximum theoretical of 3Gbps. This makes USB 3.0 faster than eSATA and about six times faster than FireWire 800 (full duplex at 800Mbps).
USB 3.0 also provides another advantage; while eSATA is faster than FireWire 800, unlike FireWire it cannot supply power. USB 3.0 has the advantage of being faster than both, even while supplying power.
Finally, USB 3.0 has improved power management, meaning that devices can move into idle, suspend, and sleep states. This potentially means more battery life out of laptops and other battery-based USB-supporting devices like cameras and mobile phones.
Of course, there are other factors to consider; the FireWire 3200 standard is also in the works and promises to allow 3.2GHz speeds on existing FireWire 800 hardware. USB 2.0 generally doesn't meet its theoretical maximum throughput, due to its dependence on hardware and software configuration, where FireWire gets much closer.
It's hard to say whether USB 3.0's updated architecture will still use more CPU time than FireWire does.
But in the age of powerful hardware (can anyone say "3.2GHz, quad-core CPUs"?), all of this means that FireWire is still not going to match USB 3.0's theoretical maximum of 5Gbps.
The ultimate signal that this war has already been won is Apple's recent decision to ditch FireWire from its consumer line in favor of USB. Previously, Cupertino had been one of FireWire's greatest advocates. And surely the company will be one of the first to adopt USB 3.0.
All in all, we can't wait for motherboard manufacturers like Gigabyte and Asus to start supporting the technology and mainstream PC builders like Dell to start integrating it into their products. Bring on the speed.
While it’s hardly the end of the user-friendly porn delivery system known as the internet, a second profit warning from Intel can hardly be considered good news. In total, the microchip manufacturer are warning that profits from the final quarter of 2008 will be down by 20 per cent, described by the Financial Times as a “rapid and unexpected” decline.
Intel are blaming the losses on “further weakness in end demand and inventory reductions by its customers in the global PC supply chain.” In other words, while businesses are struggling with rising costs and a decrease in sales, they’re making do with older IT infrastructures instead of upgrading.
Meanwhile Dell is cutting 1,900 of the 3,000 jobs at its manufacturing site in Limerick, as part of a $3billion global cost-cutting effort. Again, the company seen global profits slip because consumers are buying fewer computers in the downturn.
Finally, Bitterwallet received an anonymous comment concerning PC World Business:
**** PC WORLD BUSINESS CLOSURES **** PC World Store Managers have been briefed about further redundancies. These include closure of the PC World Business units within stores - even when many of them have just been refurbished in a UK wide multi million pound store transition package.
**** PC WORLD BUSINESS CLOSURES ****
PC World Store Managers have been briefed about further redundancies. These include closure of the PC World Business units within stores - even when many of them have just been refurbished in a UK wide multi million pound store transition package.
We called the PR agency for PC World Business, who denied that any such closures were occurring, or that any store managers had been briefed of any such action.11:28 GMT | Read comments(0)02 OctoberNew Company Logo I have a new company logo, Just putting it up here to see what you all think13:39 GMT | Read comments(0)Credit Crunch? Credit Crunch? This bloody credit crunch has been driven down by the media and news, I am sure that if they started to report that "Things are on the up" and "house prices set to rise" then this credit crunch would be over in a few months.Maybe I am wrong, but that's just my opinion.Bloody Credit Crunch?13:37 GMT | Read comments(0)24 JulyFusion Power?
Fusion power is "within reach", according to atomic scientists in the UK.
The best approach appears to be to confine a superhot gas, called a plasma, in a magnetic field. Some success has been achieved this way using huge experimental fusion reactors.
But now, according to United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) scientists, making smaller versions of the same equipment may be technically easier, cheaper and swifter to develop. The most recent experiments show promise, they claim.
Leaner and swifter
"I believe that if our experiments are successful, and they are promising, we could be designing the forerunner of the first commercial fusion reactor," said UKAEA's Dr Alan Sykes, as he showed BBC News Online around his laboratory at Culham, near Oxford.
It is a leaner version of a prototype fusion reactor that has already solved many technical problems.
"Building Mast is like building a fighter aircraft when you have already built an airliner. It could be faster and more efficient at reaching our goal of significant fusion power," said Dr Rob Akers, of the UKAEA.
Star power
Few would argue that fusion power holds great promise.
It is the energy that allows the Sun to shine. But taming the power that lights up the Universe is not proving easy. For almost 50 years, scientists have been trying to harness star power in the laboratory.
At the heart of our Sun, fusion takes place at a temperature of 15 million degrees and a pressure of 100,000 atmospheres.
Because it is not possible to reproduce these conditions on Earth, terrestrial fusion reactors must operate at lower pressures and higher temperatures - about 100 million degrees.
There is also the major problem of confining the plasma.
'Naughty child'
"A plasma is a form of gas that has a great deal of free energy that is just looking for a way out," explained Dr Akers. "You could say that plasmas are like naughty children."
So far, the most successful magnetic bottle is a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped device invented by the Russians. In a tokamak, two magnetic fields are combined to confine the plasma.
The world's largest tokamak is called Jet, the Joint European Torus. It is also at Culham.
Using the Jet, scientists have heated plasma to 300 million degrees - more than is needed to achieve fusion ignition. But magnetic confinement is easier if the prototype reactor is small.
Smaller is better
"That is where Mast comes in," said UKEA's Dr Chris Warwick. "Mast keeps the plasma in a tighter configuration that is more energy efficient."
"If we follow the Mast idea and not the Jet one, we could imagine a string of medium-scale fusion reactors instead of a few very big ones," said Dr Sykes.
"There are still very many difficulties but perhaps in a few decades we could have commercial fusion reactors in cities providing cheap pollution-free power," he added.