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This article is about how blackberry phones could have a rhythmic touch to unlock them rather than a code or face unlock. I think this is really awesome because a lot of people are blackberry users and it would be fun to have. I have a blackberry so this would want me to have a touch blackberry just so I can have an unlock like they created. This tap unlock detects the location and magnitude of your touch. This relates to the course because the blackberry is the hardware and the actual program to detect the touch is the software. You need to program the actual app for the blackberry devices. 

Look at any famous active youtuber who uploads regularly, and it's pretty hard not to notice this. The view counter stops at 301, and only updates after a certain amount of time (a day), and then makes this giant leap to 10,000 or whatever. I took the liberty of looking this up myself, and here's a pretty brief explanation of  what's going on: Youtube stops the counter to verify the authenticity of the clicks on the video, and future clicks. They try to detect, and eliminate counterfeit views. This is some cool info right here, maybe Google is only getting started on identifying fakes. Something similar Google has done to this is changing your novelty nickname to a real name to comment on youtube. Start to a more identifiable internet, perhaps!

For about a century, scientists thought that human noses were able to recognize 10,000 different odours. Although this has been true for a number of years, new research shows that we can actually detect over 1,000,000,000,000 distinct scents. That is over a trillion different smells. Leslie Vosshall and colleagues, who work at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, says that the 10,000 number had to be wrong. They considered that the human eye perceives 10 million different colours using only 3 types of light receptors, and the human nose has 400 different receptor types in comparison. Vosshall and her team created an experiment to prove this new theory, but because testing a trillion different scents would take eternity, the team crafted never-before-smelled scents composed of 10-30 odour ingredients. Each volunteer in the experiment smelled 264 different groupings of odours and then the team used that data to determine how many different scents the average human could identify. This is very cool new information that I have learned because it shows us that we are capable of so much more than we expect ourselves to be capable of. Considering that the whole existence of the human race could be wiped out by one single infection, this information reminds me that humans are too awesome to go into extinction.

This article is about a location-aware Field Trip tour guide app for iOS. You can now download it from the apple app store. Previously, the app was only available for Android, arriving back in September 2012. Field Trip runs in the background on your phone, triangulating position via cell phone towers, and only notifies you when "get close to something interesting." This can include anything local businesses, historical facts, landmarks, art, or culture.You select the local feeds you like and the information pops up on your phone automatically as you move about. You can discover thousands of interesting places/experiences that fall under the following categories: Architecture, Historic Places & Events, Lifestyle, Offers & Deals, Food Drinks & Fun, Movie Locations, Outdoor Art and Obscure Places of Interest around you. Field Trip can detect when you're driving and automatically "talk" about interesting places and experience around you. I think that this is a cool app and should be used while you go on trips so that you can see all the places around you and choose where you want to go. 

This article is very interesting in many ways. Many people admire the movie Spider-Man and people would love to have something like this so called spider-sense robot suit. The suit is really cool because it uses many microphones to hear in coming objects, the suit then detects where this noise is coming from and pushes you away from the object. This is great for people that are blind or slow because the suit will move you from harms way and save lives. The suit was tested a number of times and it has a 95% success rate which is really good for the first of it's kind. I am really excited for this cause it brings us one step close to super human like characteristics.

This post is on cracking Wi-Fi WPA passwords with "Reaver." Many people know that cracking a WEP password is fairly easy, so they use the more bulletproof WPA security protocol. Reaver is a program that exploits a security hole in wireless routers and can crack most routers' passwords with relative ease. First off, you will need the BackTrack 5 Live DVD. Download the Live DVD from BackTrack's download page and burn it to a DVD. Next, you need a computer with Wi-Fi and a DVD drive. Lastly, you need a nearby WPA-secured Wi-Fi Network. Using four steps you can hack into a WPA Wi-Fi Network. Step 1: Boot into BackTrack, Step 2: Install Reaver, Step 3: Gather the Router's information, and Step 4: Crack the WPA password to the Wi-Fi Network. Now I will explain how you can protect against Reaver attacks. Since the vulnerability lies in the implementation of WPS, your network should be safe if you can simply turn off WPS (or, even better, if your router doesn't support it in the first place), however Reaver may still be able to crack your password, even with WPS manually turned off. You could also set up MAC address filtering on your router (which only allows specifically whitelisted devices to connect to your network), but a sufficiently savvy hacker could detect the MAC address of a whitelisted device and use MAC address spoofing to imitate that computer. The good news is that there is a way to surely protect against Reaver. You can get the open-source router firmware DD-WRT installed on your router. Reaver has been tested on routers with this firmware and it was not able to crack the password. As it turns out, DD-WRT does not support WPS, so there's yet another reason to love the free router-booster.

Though this only applies to Mac users mainly, a new free app has been released to detect and remove a harmful trojan called Flashback. The Flashback trojan has infected half a million of Mac users already but with this app it's a simple task of clicking and waiting for the diagnosis to see if you're Mac has been infected itself. Although I am not a Mac user, I still think this is helpful for the many that are in need of removing such a virus.

This system is used to detect peoples faces in a photo or video and then able to find the same face in other networks of photos and videos able to compare the target face against others at an astounding rate of 36 million faces per second.

This article is about a car that can be driven by blind people. Google's self-driving car has now completed 200,000 miles of computer led driving. They got a test subject, which is Steve, who is 95% blind. So in the video, a member of Google and Steve went on a driving test to see the capabilities of this new prototype. It uses cameras and lasers to detect is there is anything around it. Overall, the car looked liked it was being driven by a normal person.

This article informs the world of a computer program created by researchers from North Carolina State University, that allows a computer to have the tools to help, guide, and take control of a unpleasant driving experience. A computer with this program installed can understand what a camera is looking at and makes decisions based on what it sees. The program is highly intelligent because it can sort visual data and make decisions related to finding the lanes on a road, detecting how those lanes change as a car is moving, and controlling the car to stay in the correct lane. I find this program extremely fascinating and more importantly is also useful for lazy or bad drivers because if it just so happens you fall asleep at the wheel, this program acts as a lifesaver to prevent you and others from severe harm while you can trust you will be safe and secure with your computer taking over. This computer is essentially driving your car and is designed to notice a pedestrian or a stop sign and is assigned the appropriate action to complete. This could be the start in advances in technology where more computer programs can allow assistance and advisement when someone is struggling or in need of help. Something like this can definitively be cool and if it works effectively at all times, I believe this will be a huge invention that we all look back on one day. 

Nike decided to come out with a new app that helps you exercise and get prepared for sports. This app connects with a pair of shoes they made and it is able to detect your speed, jump height etc. As well, this app has various techniques and warm ups you can do. This app is for i-phones and is available in the summer. I feel this new technology is good for everyone because it makes you want to become physically active and you can learn new techniques for sports that you never knew before. As well, this relates to the course because the app is a software and sensors in the shoes are the hardware. They had to program the app for it to work and sensor properly. 

In British Colombia a research team with the help of satellite-imaging companies are able to monitor changes in the environment such as forestry. This satellite imaging will help detect threats to forests such a Wildfires, insect infections, and deforestation. I really like how today's technology is being used to help the environment rather than just creating pollution from CO2 and old computer parts. Also I believe that this kind of work is really important especially with the kind of deforestation we see in the Amazon. Also I believe that the money governments put into things that benefiting our environment should be research projects like this rather than final products. All in all I believe that this a great way to aid the planet and further our technology.

After half a billion tweets were analysed, it has been noted how moods tend to rise and fall 

Okay wait here's the description: After half a billion tweets were analysed, it has been noted how moods tend to rise and fall across the world. Based on the tweets sociologists and analysts have detected a pattern: positive feelings in the morning and evening, with dropping moods while users are at work. Many, however, would say that Twitter users can't simply represent humanity, but only a small part of it. All that's left is to figure out why user's moods change the way they do, and how to change that.

When most thieves commit a crime they try to get away from police. However looks like karma got back at a man who stole a woman's cell phone. He tried uploading a picture onto facebook through her phone but the phone was set to automatically post it to her wall. This gives police pretty much all they need to catch him.

Robotic Staffed Casino! and amazing display of today's robotics technology. People are having doubts of how this will work especially with the whole cheating prevention problem. People are wondering how it would work because in the past dealers and staff at casino's have been trained to detect cheaters and con artists, how will the robots be able to detect these subtle signs? Questions will hopefully soon be answered.

This article talks about new apps in apple called Magic Reader Flips. This app is used to turn pages without using your hands. By nodding your head, pages can be turned. You just turn your head left or right and MagicReader will move to the next or to previous page. Once it detects your face, you can move your face to change the pages. This app was was created for people who didn't want to flip pages with dirty hands. however it is only used on PDFs documents. This relates to our course because this app represents how much our technology has improved since the past and how much we are dependent on it because every app is becoming famous and is used to make our lives easier. This is kind of sad because we are too dependent on technology that we have hard time living without them and we use those technology to do such a simple tasks such as flipping pages. 

This article is about the Magic Reader, it is like an iPad but it responds to your head movement rather than the touch from your finger. The pro of this is that you wouldn't need to touch the screen and get it all dirty and greasy like what would happen on the iPad if you were reading on eReader. The Magic Reader takes one second to scan and recognize your face and every time you would nod the page will turn wherever you would nod your head towards. I think that it is convenient but after a while I think that I would get annoyed after constantly nodding your head instead of simply sliding your finger gently.

This article explains how a program created by scientists from the University at Buffalo, can allow a computer to determine whether or not a person is telling the truth in a conversation, strictly by accessing the speaker's eye movements. I found this invention extremely interesting and as I kept reading, it turns out a computer with this program was able to correctly spot various lies with 82.5% accuracy, but a trained human interrogator only manages a success rate of about 65%. Somebody who dedicated their entire life to studying human psychology and has done years of hard work and training in this subject was outsmarted by a computer who can do the same effort and work but in a better performance. These scientists really put the time and effort into creating this software to work as efficiently and be most successful as possible so just by the computer looking at your eyes, more specifically the movement pattern and the rate of your blinking, it can identify if you are telling the truth or not. This is a prime example of how technology is evolving all around us and how we are using our knowledge to further programs and devices to help and assist us perform tasks, be successful, and happy living our everyday lives. 

You know that scene in CSI and its ilk where the detective says, "Can you enhance the image?" and some faceless tech hits a few keys and suddenly the license plate is clear and readable? Nerds have been mocking those scenes for decades, but it might be time to stop.

Photoshop, the funniest and my favorite drawing program, just relesed a filter called "unblur" which does what it says, it's like the movies of how you see nerd's unblur a camera shot and find the license plates or what not, now it's time to stop looking at the movies and have the effect to yourself. But you can still use other things for photoshop...