David Lidsky's Blog, page 4648

Elon Musk's Broke, But His Big Rocket is Poised to Shoot Into Space

President Obama's plans for a more diverse and commercial company-inclusive space industry are primed to take a leap forward tomorrow, as SpaceX readies its Falcon 9 rocket for launch from Cape Canaveral. It's all subject to the weather, though.

Falcon 9 is SpaceX's flagship rocket, biggest in its Falcon rocket fleet. The vehicle will help ferry cargo up to the International Space Station in the years between NASA's retirement of the Space Shuttles and developing a new heavy-lift launch...

Dell Could Make Your Doctor's Handwriting Legible Again with Practice Fusion

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Dell might not be the first firm that leaps to mind when you think "high-tech medical practices" but maybe it should be: the company just introduced an all-in-one system for making digital medical records cheap and easy for doctors, called Practice Fusion.

Digital medical records bring a host of benefits over their older paper-based ancestors, not the least of which is easy data sharing between your local physician and hospital-based specialists, and the abolition of illegible (and

Conflict Kitchen: Making Peace with America's Sworn Enemies One Sandwich at a Time

Nothing says diplomacy like takeout.

Call it sandwich diplomacy. Conflict Kitchen, a new takeout joint in Pittsburgh, serves dishes exclusively from countries engaged in pissing matches with the United States, whether for enriching uranium,
being oil-rich socialists,
or acting like restless 12-year-olds who can't keep their hands off the torpedoes. The point is to offer some sort of antidote to cultural misconceptions (about people) borne of sour geopolitics (about power).

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The project's the...

Surveillance Cams Get Search-Engine Friendly

Big Brother surveillance technology just got a whole lot more clever, thanks to scientists from UCLA. They've developed a camera system that automatically generates a live text description of what it's seeing for better search-engine monitoring. 

The system is dubbed I2T, for "image to text", and it's a collection of extremely clever computer vision algorithms that analyze the ongoing video stream from a typical surveillance camera that you may see watching a store or a busy road intersection...

Infographic of the Day: America's Entrepreneurial Edge Over Europe

A chart comparing our economy against those of the major European countries.

Does America have a great edge over Europe, in Entrepreneurialism?

Maybe---though the gap isn't quite as broad as you might guess, according to this infographic produced by Grasshopper.com:

Let's zoom in the relevant details. According to the data, the U.S. is far ahead of any other country in the portion of our GDP that comes from entrepreneurship--11.3%, compared to our next closest competitor, the U.K., which...

Ford Is Giving Away 5,000 EV Charging Stations - There's Just One Catch

Here's one easy way to encourage consumers to adopt electric vehicles: offer them free in-home vehicle charging stations. The auto giant Ford
announced a partnership with Coulomb Technologies this week to provide nearly 5,000 free ChargePoint Networked Charging Stations to individual customers and public locations.

There's just one catch, of course. Customers can only get the free station if they buy the Ford Transit Connect EV, expected to roll out later this year. And only customers in...

Google Mobile Search Loves Apps as Much as You Do

Google announced today that mobile search is now just as app-happy as the rest of the smartphone world. Typically, to find an app, you'd have to go to your app app (well, isn't that awkward) like Android Market or iPhone App Store, then do your searching from inside the store. But why not use Google search instead?

It's a pretty good idea--while using your Google search on an iPhone or Android device, related apps on your platform will show up at the top of the normal search results. You can...

Nokia's Bicycle Charger Kit Could Be the World's Smartest Peripheral for Dumbphones

Nokia launched a quartet of basic cellphones for the developing world in Nairobi today, but the most interesting new offering is a peripheral device. The Finnish firm's Bicycle Charger Kit consists of a little bottle dynamo that you attach to the wheel of your bicycle to power up your phone as you pedal away. It comes with a phone holder that attaches to the handlebars using a hi-tech system composed of an elastic band and a plastic bag, in case of rain. Its price (in Kenya) is a little over...

Eastern vs. Western Medicine: IBM's Using Electronic Records to Compare Cure Rates

The benefits of Eastern versus Western medicine have been debated for decades. But the only way to really test the difference is scientifically--it's a difficult task, although there are plenty of ongoing studies. IBM's joining that fray with a tool to analyze medical records in collaboration with the Guang Dong Hospital of Traditional Medicine
(South China's largest traditional hospital).

Today at their Smarter Cities event in Shanghai, IBM's announcing that its Healthcare Information...

Rebranding the License Plate: 4 Designers Clean Up Graphic Road Kill

"Back to the future" best describes the new license plate issued by New York State in April. The "Empire Gold" design which is now appearing on streets, has been deemed "quite unappealing" by more than 80 percent of New Yorkers polled by WCBSTV.

New Yorkers:  Consider yourselves lucky.

Compared to some states, New York's design is a prize winner. Proof can be found at David Nicholson's Web site 15q.net. It examines the evolution of U.S. license plate design over the past fifty years from the...