South Koreans and Counterfeits.

In a recent blog by Michael Arndt from the BusinessWeek Innovation Web Site, he speaks on how South Korea has a problem with fake goods. I find this to be really funny because it is so true! This may seem like a statement that would usually offend a South Korean, but I will have to say that Koreans love to find a bargain. Even though that Louis Vuitton looks more like a IY than a LV, as long as it looks like the real deal, Koreans will buy it. So in order to crack down on the fakes, South Korea has created a new innovative way by creating pretty nifty incentives. If someone reports anyone who is selling fake goods, they will be awarded with money.

"Like
nations elsewhere, South Korea has a problem with fake goods. It's trying an
innovative method to stop counterfeiting…It's enlisting everyday citizens to
tell on people selling knockoffs, and paying bounties for their detective
work. "
—Michael Arndt, NEXT: Innovation Tools & Trends

For More Information: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/next/archives/2008/12/koreas_new_anti.html

-Nina

Is That a Fly or Wait a Camera?

What looks like an insect is actually a camera that is under study to be used in the United States military. The military is hoping that they could develop these cameras to spy on enemies and make attacks. It is used to conduct dangerous missions while saving people's lives. The hopes for this flying robots is to send them out in a swarm so it looks like it is just insects.

For more information: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27845644/

-Nina

Go Green While You Eat.

You may think, gee another post on Going Green?? I am going crazy! No, but this one will be useful, even though it might be something you already know. Going green while you eat, does not necessarily mean eating vegetables and organic food everyday. There are other ways you can care for the environment when you are shopping for groceries. First, make sure that you write EVERYTHING you need from the supermarket. This prevents you from making multiple trips because you forgot something, which ultimately helps you save gas. Also, make sure that you are bringing your reusable shopping bag, so the supermarket can cut back on all of those plastic and paper bags. Only one percent of plastic bags are recycled and surprisingly, only 20 percent of paper bags ever gets recycled. Also, try shopping at your local Farmer's Markets, so you can support local growers and a good way to get some fresh air. Lastly, you can buy recycled cups, paper towels and napkins for your meal.

For more information: http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/green/sns-green-eco-meals,0,6329839.story

-Nina

New Drug Can Help You Sleep Easier.

Wouldn't it be nice if someone created a medication to minimize jet lag and bring sleep back to graveyard shift workers? Everyone needs the right amount of sleep to stay healthy and when someone does not have a steady sleep cycle, it can be unhealthy. About 450 people were conducted in a study by a team from Bringham and Women's Hospital in Boston, to test an experimental drug that can restore normal sleep. The group were subjected to stimulated jet lag in a sleep laboratory and found it to work the first night it was used! There were no aftereffects from the drug, minimal side effects and has no potential for addiction or abuse, unlike other sleeping aid drugs. The people who took it also performed normally the next day. The experimental medication, called tasimelteon, works like melatonin and restores normal sleep patterns.

For more information: http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-sci-sleep2-2008dec02,0,6896293.story

-Nina

Obama and Innovation.

Jeneanne Rae is a columnist for Business Week on the Web. In a recent piece entitled, "What Obama Needs to Know About Innovation," she basically describes what well, what the President-elect Obama needs to know about innovation. It is clear that the future President-elect will need to have a clear understanding of innovation, because we are currently in an age of transition. Transitioning with innovative ideas and products, that he will need to utilize and further advance for our society to advance as well. It is also clear that Americans want and need to change in our society today and for the future. In order for that to be successful, the government needs to make some changes of its own.

What Rae suggests that Obama learns from failure, analyze bureacracy and look globally to learn. There needs to be some improvement in health care, social security, education, aid of rescue and most importantly in our financial system.

For more information: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/nov2008/id20081126_872242.htm

-Nina

Food vs. Fuel: Saltwater Crops May Be Key to Solving Earth's Land Crunch

Saltwater-loving plants could open up half a million square miles of previously unusable territory for energy crops, helping settle the heated food-versus-fuel debate, which nearly derailed biofuel progress last year.

If the world's irrigated acreage by 50 percent, saltwater crops could provide biomass for alt fuel makers. An article in wired.com said Saltwater plants could be put in over a million miles of previously unusable land. This the article said, will “tone down the rhetoric of U.N. officials worried about food prices, one of whom called the conversion of arable land to biofuel crops "a crime against humanity."

NASA scientists have taken new interest in the salt-water crops.

The article said, “that salt-loving crops could be used to produce 1.5 billion barrels of ethanol annually on a swath of new agricultural land almost five times the size of Texas.”
Because of the worlds need to feed 6.7 billion people its hard to find room for biofuels.
So the article said, “social and environmental groups agree that the best location for bioenergy crops would be on currently unusable land. That would ensure that land used to grow food crops in poor countries was not converted to growing energy crops to power cars in developed nations.”

So the one problem is where do you find all this land, solution is overly salty land could be used to grow a special set of salt-tolerant plants — halophytes. The article said, “calculated that this could produce 1.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent per year. That's 35 percent of the United States' liquid fuel needs.”

-Adam

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/saltwatercrops.html

Eye Spy: Filmmaker Plans to Install Camera in His Eye Socket

An article in Wired.com explains that Rob Spence’s hazel-green eyes will have a tiny wireless video camera in it that records your every move.

Rob Spence lost his right eye at 13 while playing with his grandfather's gun on a visit to Ireland. "I wanted to shoot a pile of cowshit," he says. "I wasn't holding the gun properly and it backfired, causing a lot of trauma to the eye."

Therefore, the eye he is considering replacing is not a working one and he has had prosthetic eye for many years.

The article said, “Spence, a 36-year-old Canadian filmmaker, is not content with having one blind eye.” He wants a wireless video camera inside his prosthetic; this will give him the ability to make movies wherever he is, all the time, just by looking around.
"If you lose your eye and have a hole in your head, then why not stick a camera in there?" he asks.

Spence, who calls himself the "eyeborg guy," will not be restoring his vision the article said. “The camera won't connect to his brain.” It is like having someone else with you recording and watching your every move.

"The eyes are like no other part of the body," says Spence. "It's what you look into when you fall in love with somebody and [influences] whether you trust someone or not. Now with a video camera in there, it will change how people see and perceive me."
The article said a wireless video camera into a prosthetic eye isn't easy. “The shape of the prosthetic is the biggest limitation: In Spence's case, it's 9-mm thick, 30-mm long and 28-mm high.”

Spence will be the first of his kind having a camera physically put in his body. The article said, “Getting a completely self-contained camera module to fit into the tiny hollow of a prosthetic eye is a significant engineering challenge.”

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/eye-spy-filmmak.html

-Adam

Mars Mission Delayed Until 2011

NASA announced that it's over-budget Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover will be delayed by two years, to 2011, adding another $400 million to the cost of the mission and could delay other missions.  Technical problems are to blame for the delay.

According to newscientist.com, the nuclear-powered rover, which aims to test whether the planet is or once was capable of supporting life, was originally set to launch in October 2009.  Rushing to fix the problems would put the entire mission at risk, said NASA administrator Mike Griffin.  

The mission is already $300 million over its proposed budget of $1.6 million, established in 2006.  This delay could bring the cost of the mission near $2.2 billion.  Money to fund this may have to come from other Mars missions, this delaying or canceling their progress.

-Michael Strachan

Twitter turns down Facebook

Social network, Facebook offered competitor, Twitter, $500 million dollars in stocks Monday morning. However, Twitter, unsure of Facebook's potential turned the company's offer down.

Though both companies are social networks, Facebook and Twitter differ in many ways from how the website works down to what each offers. Interesting that Facebook's seek to join with Twitter was turned down since Facebook's success doubled in the last year.

However, Twitter doesn't believe that Facebook has reached it's peak of success. Weird, I don't remember hearing about Twitter until Dr. Reis told us about it in class, so who are Twitter to turn anyone down?

Reportly, Facebook has gone down this year in users by 1% when compared to last year and Twitter believes they their company has the potential of growing on its own without partnership at this point in time. We'll see.

Ching

Holy Crap! These guys in Germany just cured AIDS!

This was a fun fun funny article that I found in Popular Science this week... So it's more about medicine than innovation... But hey, it's innovative medicine...I'm including the entirety of the entry with comments to follow because I think it is worth a read...

Of course, the procedure is so expensive, complicated, and risky that it's not replicable as a large-scale public health strategy, but we'll ignore that for a minute. Here's how they did it. Drs. Gero Hutter and Eckhard Thiel are blood cancer experts at the Charite Medical University in Berlin. Their patient, an American ex-pat, was suffering from leukemia as well as a full-blown case of AIDS. His case was so desperate that his doctors decided to get craaazy and give him a bone-marrow transplant--(this isn't the crazy part)--using blood stem cells from a donor who was immune to HIV (this is). About 10 years ago, doctors discovered that a few of their gay male patients never developed AIDS, despite engaging in risky sex with hundreds of partners. It turned out that they had a rare mutation called Delta 32 that blocks a molecule in HIV from adhering to the cell surface. Delta 32 must be inherited from both parents; it occurs at a rate of roughly 1 percent in European populations (it's more common in Northern Europe and much much, rarer--basically unheard of--in Africa and Asia), so it was difficult but not impossible for the doctors to find a donor in Germany who fit the bill. The patient was asked to stop taking his antiretroviral AIDS medication for the duration of the procedure with the understanding that he'd have to restart the meds fairly soon after the transplant was complete and the level of the virus in his bloodstream started to rise. But to everyone's surprise, it never rose, not at all. It has now been close to two years since the transplant, and there are still no traces of HIV in the patient's blood or brain tissues. So: success! A cure! For this guy, at least."

Now back to the caveats. A bone marrow transplant is dangerous and painful--it involves wiping out the patient's entire immune system with chemotherapy and radiation and carries a 30 percent mortality rate. The prospect is so daunting that one doctor joked to the New York Times that he'd rather just take antiretrovirals for the rest of his life. It's also not always possible to find a donor who is a good match for the recipient (if the donated cells are not taken from someone with similar human leukocyte antigens, a crucial part of the immune system, they are likely to be rejected or cause severe graft-versus-host disease) and is also happens to be resistant to HIV. This would be particularly tricky in Africa, where the mutation doesn't occur naturally. And carriers of Delta 32 might actually be more susceptible to certain other diseases, like the West Nile virus.

But even though this particular procedure doesn't offer a new standard of care for AIDS patients worldwide, it offers a lot more than just hope (although hope is nice). For one thing, researchers now have a clear path to a cure. If the steps taken by Hutter and Thiel can be refined, simplified, and made less risky, they could become a viable protocol for thousands of other people with AIDS. Eventually, this might entail bone-marrow transplants in which not all of the body's immune cells are killed, or "snipping" the segment of DNA that codes for HIV receptors out out of blood cells and transplanting them into AIDS patients. Eventually, patients' own cells could actually be engineered to resist HIV. These advances are probably decades away, but this breakthrough is confirmation that, once they're made, they could amount to something big.

Okay...Me again...

There are a few interesting implications that we need to discuss here on three levels. First the pharmaceutical industry, second, eugenics, and finally, validity of the discovery.

So first, this is the one are where I feel like a bit of a conspiracy theorist. Who, in the general population anyway, actually knows if there is already a cure for AIDS, outside of this little--or rather huge--discovery. If there is, which is a possibility, then the pharmaceutical industry, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the world, would be screwed. Billions of dollars go into AIDS research and treatment. The companies who make these drugs and do this research would loose a pretty penny if there was all of a sudden a cure for the THE incurable disease of our time. These companies also send funding and share political platforms with candidates who are in the public eye all the time. Just look at the issue of universal health care in this last election. I think it is entirely possible, however horrible, that the upety ups in the gov't wouldn't want to piss off some of their biggest contributors and flip the bird to the economy when all of the jobs created by AIDS research are suddenly unnecessary. In short... no cure for you silly dying people, sorry about your quality of life... or lack there of.

Second, eugenics is super fun! Hey, since this procedure is super invasive and takes very specific genes that occur in one percent of the population, we need to find all of the people with the immunities and create a super race of AIDS fighting babies. Just think of it--they'll be like super heroes. We could force men and women, who may or may not know each other, to procreate and essentially create drug babies that belong to drug companies in the name of science. We'll rip out their bone marrow... I mean "donate it" to dying people so they can live. Hey the baby might die, but it fulfilled its purpose. I know I know, the pro-lifers will not be happy--but hey, at least the conservatives livin' on the DL wouldn't have to worry about transmitting the plague to their wives anymore. (Okay, I know that was a super low-blow, but I think you are smart enough to get it).

And finally... Dun dunna nun!!! Who knows the validity of all of this anyway? Yeah, you've heard about this now, but if it is true shouldn't it be one of the top stories in the world? I mean, it only affects millions of people. Oh, wait... *see paragraph on pharmaceutical companies* Anyhoo, I would love to believe that these findings are accurate, but I am suddenly reminded of the only episode of South Park I have ever seen. In the story two young boys are infected with HIV and they go to Magic Johnson to find a cure. Turns out the cure was money. Yup, thousands of dollars injected right into their veins... funny that... Yes this is a comical twist on finding a cure for HIV, but we've all thought it. If we haven't, we aren't doing enough thinking.

Well, heres to hoping you are all immune like those lucky dogs from eastern Europe. If not, do your part to find those who are and let's get on the ball creating our super race of AIDS killing babies. So then we can focus on something really important, like what Palin did on her most recent huntin' trip.

--Roger

Sport Utility Bikes

Even though gas prices are decreasing, there is no certainty of when it will go up. Many people have taken another route on cars and have rushed to their local bicycle shops. Because of the high demand of bicycles, companies have utilized this demand and has developed many sport utility bikes. These bikes are longer and more expensive, as it could hold various items in the back. These are also known as "longtail bikes" or extra long SUB'S [sport utility bikes]. These are designed to hold extra heavy cargo and cold hold up to 200 pounds of cargo. The prices of these bikes may vary but is around $1,000.

For a list of different types of SUB's, go to: http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/green/la-he-gear6-2008oct06,0,2004149.story

-Nina

A New Look for McDonald's

Wait, what? McDonald's is getting ready to make the transition from its traditional packaging to a new look. The idea behind this remodeling of packaging and marketing is geared to "telling a story about each product." The chain also hopes that this new branding will influence the decrease in obesity, as some products will contain pictures of it on its packaging, to remind consumers that it is made out of real food. It hopes that consumers will keep in mind that McDonald's is known for quality and authenticity. The new packaging also consists of bold and crisp lettering. The remodeling is also developed to help further the brand to be a global brand, saying that it will appeal to more consumers.

The interior will also include some changes, as it will have flat screen televisions and plush chairs. I am excited about this upgrade, but I wonder if it will encourage more consumers to eat there. Will the branding have a tremendous affect on sales? I guess we will just have to wait and see.




Source: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/dec2008/id2008123_918813.htm
-Nina

Back to the Garage: How Economic Turmoil Breeds Innovation

An article in Wired Magazine by Daniel Roth explains a bad economy might be a good thing for innovation. The article said, “In periods of economic turmoil, people are hungry and work cheap, and entrenched companies often concentrate on in-house cost-cutting instead of exploring new markets, which can explode with the next turn of the business cycle.”

Lots of companies lay low and cut corners but work on new and innovative ideas when the market get rolling again.

The article talks about the Great Depression and how many companies made big gambles and became some of the most crucial business moves in modern history. The article said, “Du Pont told one of its star scientists, Wallace Carothers, to set aside basic research and pursue potentially profitable innovation.” The article went on to say, “What he came up with was nylon, the first synthetic fabric, revolutionizing the way Americans parachuted, carpeted, and panty-hosed.” The article talked about other great inventers such as, Thomas Watson built a new research center, Douglas Aircraft debuted the DC-3, and the creation of television.
"The wonderful growth of the post-World War II period was due largely to the tremendous backlog of innovation developed in the late years of the Great Depression," says Rick Szostak, an economics and technology historian at the University of Alberta.

The article made it clear that this doesn't mean that big new ideas emerge because of turmoil and data does not show a link between the two. The article does say there is something about tuff economic times that forces people to think more about there futures. But the benefit of a global money drought is that competition tends to vaporize. The article said, “Bill Hewlett of HP committed to building the pocket calculator—at the time, a supposedly impossible task—during the 1969-70 recession; the 2001 dotcom-led downturn presented the perfect launching pad not just for risk-taking, fresh-thinking startups like discount airline JetBlue and blogging juggernaut Six Apart, but also for Apple's iPod-fueled resurgence.”

For me personally It lets me know its the time to start getting into the stock market and the housing market. By the time I get older things should be back on top and one can buy in for less. It seems the new trend is not the consumer market anymore. The money is in conservation.


It this a recession or depression? I think its an American wake up call.

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-12/st_essay

President-Elect Obama wants to appoint a CTO

President-Elect Barack Obama plans to appoint a Chief Technology Officer when he takes office in January. The new CTO would be in charge of issues concerning new technology as we know it now and in the future. The CTO would also attempt to bridge the gap of communication between the government and citizens by using the internet.

By appointing someone to oversee technology, it allows the United States to stay current with technology in terms of dealing with safety concerns and the internet, as well as new innovation that can be useful to the citizens in which they govern.

Do you think a CTO is needed? and is this a good idea?

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/politics/obama-would-make-chief-technology-officer-a-cabinet+level-position-322797.php


Rashad L.

Money for Security

USA Today reported on the new two-factor authentication security system Bank of America has recently introduced to their patrons. With online banking, thieves are finding it easier to steal username and passwords of bank account holders, since that's all online banking requires for people to login to their online accounts.

Bank of America introduced a "SafePass card" which is a card with an embedded button that a person must press before logging onto their bank accounts online. The button will then create a one-time use number, which will appear on the card. People logging into their accounts will have to enter their username, password and this special number digitalized by the SafePass card.

Bank of America is the first major banking company in the United States to add extra security to online banking. The bank are not making this card mandatory because it would be too costly to supply over 25 million people who bank with Bank of America to receive a SafePass.

The SafePass card is $19.95. Some say that it's worth the extra 20 dollars a month to secure thousands of dollars in a banking account. But to others, perhaps that extra 20 dollars a month just isn't affordable.

Ching

Online Coupon Queens

In this time of economic hardship, everyone is looking for a bargain and people are definitely more on the hunt for a discount than usual this holiday season. And for those really looking for steep savings, online shopping and coupons are the way to go.

According to a NY Times article on Nov. 26, many shoppers are obsessed with finding these bargains and some coupon websites are making it much easier. Sites like Retail Me Not, Fat Wallet and Budget Fashionista offer promotional codes and discount tips for other shoppers for different companies' sites. And apparently this trend is really on the rise - "In October, 27 million people visited a coupon site, according to comScore Media Metrix, up 33 percent from a year earlier."

At first, some companies were not happy that their promotional codes were being freely handed out over the Internet, but most companies now help tip off the websites since it helps bring in more business and they generally do better when these coupons generate more traffic to their sites.

Just like the old coupon queens at the grocery store, I would feel no shame about using an online promotion code every time I checked out if it meant saving me big bucks!

Read the full article on NYTimes.com and start saving!!

- Jessica I.

Facebook Connect? What happened to privacy?!

The Internet's largest social network site, Facebook, now wants to take you across the web with your friends and show you their activity on other websites.

According to an article on the NY Times website on Nov. 30, the site is offering a new feature called Facebook Connect which "allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites." FB Connect will also allow members to broadcast what they are doing on those sites and where they are going on them to their friends. To promote this many sites that want a "social web" will become partners with Facebook and users information will be shared with these other sites.

Many of us probably joined Facebook as a way to keep in touch with friends and chat with people we know over the Internet, but now FB is expanding in a way that will broadcast our information very freely over the Internet. Although an example of how FB Connect will work sounds cool - "For example, a person might alert his Facebook friends to the fact that he is watching a video on CBS.com and invite them to join him there to watch together and discuss the video as it plays" - the idea of people knowing everything that I do on the Internet does not exactly sound appealing to me. Do you think this is a big issue of privacy?

Read the full article for more in-depth info about this Facebook update on NY Times.com

- Jessica I.

Hawaii's mass transit may be electric

As if we needed an excuse to go to Hawaii!

The Aloha State, and former home to our President-elect, will soon be installing an alternative transportation system. The system will be modeled after similar technology used in electric cars.

The system will couple the Internet and multiple charging stations to reduce the number of issues that come along with the technology (slow recharging and not enough stations).

However, I think the most fascinating thing about the project is the funding. So far it has been private investments being poured into the project.

Shai Agassi of Better Place L.L.C. in Palo Alto, Calif is spearheading it but has also received support from national governments, regional planning organizations and one major car company.

It is interesting to see the private sector merge and overlap what will essentially be a public benefit. I cant say I believe that this is the best way to operate public needs, but it may actually work in this case.

"Better Place would become a major customer for electricity and was also planning to invest in renewable energy sources that would be connected to the electric grid," reports the NY Times.

Hawaii has been called the perfect place for such a project, but I still have some questions. For example, there are many remote areas inland (maybe not as much on the Big Island), making it problematic.

It kind of irks me that the majority of these innovative technologies are never really questioned. The article talks about "working through the difficulties" but never explicitly says what those may be.

This article doesn't really ask the questions of feasibility, it really just reads like a press release. Dont get me wrong, I'm all for environmentally-friendly changes. But Hawaii's economy depends greatly on tourism, which is said to be down 14 percent in October compared to the previous year

But Obama's election is apparently starting to increase the tourism to the state. Sure, thats my excuse too.


-Erin

Roadtrip to Space, Anyone?

Beginning as early as 2011, space tourism will be as "cheap" as $95,000 a ticket aboard a Lynx craft, thanks to the development of this new rocket by XCOR Aerospace of California.  Tests flights are scheduled to begin in 2010, with paid flights beginning as early as 2011.  

This company is competing against Virgin Atlantic Airways offshoot, Virgin Galatica, which is currently developing a sever-person craft known as SpaceShipTwo, which sells seats for $200,000.  Over 200 people have already reserved seats aboard SpaceShipTwo and have put down their deposit of $20,000.

Lynx passengers ride along-side the commander during the 30 minute flight to 61 km above the Earth.  Although they are strapped down, they still experience about a minute of weightlessness and can look out the cockpit windows at the Earth below. 

More information can be found by clicking here.

-Michael Strachan

.Tel

A new domain name is in the works. Tomorrow is the first day where companies and organizations can register Web addresses with .tel, according to an article on the NYTimes.com. This new domain stores and encrypts contact information directly into the Domain Name System and has the potential to become a phone book for the Internet.

"A .tel domain name links to the contact information of businesses, organizations and individuals. Information can include telephone numbers; link to Web sites, including a Facebook or MySpace page; e-mail addresses; instant messaging names, and, if you wish, identities for virtual games such as Xbox Live or Second Life," the article reads.

Because this information is stored on a DNS, rather than a server, when a person updates some of their personal information like a phone number or address with that .tel account, it will be automatically updated in friends address books who also have their .tel information stored on their phone.

Lauren D.

From YouTube to Carnegie Hall

On Monday a new YouTube Symphony Orchestra project was announced in San Francisco, London and New York.  The goal of this project is to create an orchestra with 100 members from around the world, who will come together to perform April 15 at Carnegie Hall.  

The project will be conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony.  "YouTube is the biggest stage on Earth, and I want to see what the world's undiscovered musical geniuses will create on it,"  said Chinese-born composer Tan Dun, before appearing at the news conference at Google's London headquarters.  

The Orchestra will perform a new work by Tan, written for them and dubbed "Internet Symphony No. 1, 'Erioica.'"  

In the first phase, musicians everywhere are invited to learns Tan's "Eroica" by downloading their parts from the new orchestra's YouTube site at www.YouTube.com/Symphony.  

To compete for a spot, the musicians must record their performances and upload the videos to the site, then a panel of experts from different Symphony's will narrow the field to the best participants.  Anyone who watches YouTube can vote on their favorites, from the final picks.  

The winners will be then flown in April to a three-day music summit in New York, led by Tilson Thomas and culminating with the Carnegie performance.

After reading this article I began wondering what YouTube will com up with next?

-Carly Youngren 

Even More Fuel-Efficient Vehicles are on the Way

Even as gas prices continue to drop, teams of developers are still working to produce a car that is more energy efficient than anything out there.  One model is powered only by batteries that weigh less than two grown men while another features "doorless sides" to help reduce drag.

As stated on MSNBC.com, "In one recent study, scientists discovered a thermoelectric material that increases fuel efficiency by 10 percent or ore.  In another, engineers found that a simple electrically charged tube attached to the fuel injector could boost mileage by up to 20 percent."

While neither products are ready for production quite yet, both are helping to get the ball rolling in producing a car for the future.  Until then, lets continue to hope prices at the pump continue to fall.

-Michael Strachan

Internet for All!

December 18 will be the decision day for FCC to vote on whether or not to provide free broadband wireless internet service across the country. This is definitely something to be excited for.

While many Americans have internet access, whether it's at school or home, there are still many rural places where people either have very slow internet or no internet at all. FCC hopes to bridge the gap between those who have high-speed internet to those who don't.

This idea was first proposed in 2006 where airwaves would be sent across the United States to provide wireless internet for all. They call the airwave. AWS-3. Did I also mention that the idea proposed for wireless internet, for all, will be... free?

If FCC approves this plan, our computers, phones, or whatever people use these days to surf the web, might just detect internet connection anywhere in the United States within a year. Not to worry, intital usage of the free internet will need a confirmation of any persons 18 years or older in order to insure that children will not have access to adult contents on the web.

Internet carriers are not happy about this plan, which is why FCC has not gotten a chance to vote on this idea until they are sure it is best for the country, and the company that's sole purpose is to sell what might be offered to consumers for free.

Either way, it's exciting and it's great to see our country finally bridging the gap of technological innovations between those who can afford, to those who can't afford internet.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/2008-12-01-free-broadband_N.htm

Ching

Cyber Monday

Today was an official "Cyber Monday" according to a report by USAToday. The retailers in cyber world saw an increase in sales today after Black Friday sales was reported down by 5% and down 8% the day after this Thanksgiving.

Today, approximately 280 retailers online experiences 4.6 million visitors per minute as their peak. Retailers online have cut prices, not only nationally, but globally as well. Best Buy and Victoria's Secret experienced the most traffic on the sites from visitors all around the world.

Visitors are tracked through Web tracker Akamai Technologies'. Although this year's Cyber Monday is almost over, the National Retail Federation's promotes special deals on CyberMonday.com. Maybe we will experience another Cyber Monday after Christmas. Find the deals and grab them before someone else does.

Ching