Robots in INDIAN : The international finals of Robocon 2008.

In Upcoming times the robotic role of our all possibility making curious- furious, whatever ,
Beginning today, the city will play host to the international finals of Robocon 2008. To be held at the Maharashtra Institute of Technology (MIT) campus, the competition will see robotic Govindas recreating the traditional dahi-handi scene, and will be attended by 17 teams from 16 countries. Initiated by the Asia Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU), Robocon is a prestigious international event for engineering students, which involves participants designing robots that can perform tasks based on a given theme. The theme of this year's finals is the dahi-handi , which would require participants to build robots that can 'steal' the butter hanging from 3 different pots. Performing a 'robot pyramid ' symbolises team work. Each participating team will field robots that will perform the task of lifting each other to reach the handi. The first team to remove three cubes of butter will be declared winner. The competition has been organised in different countries for the last eight years. The organisers emphasise that the theme reflect the culture and tradition of the host country, at the same time not very complicated to understand for the other participating countries. It's the first time that India will host the finals. ABU deputy secretary, Nomuru Minami, who visited Pune to oversee the arrangements, said, "The theme of making human pyramids is interesting and not too difficult for the foreign teams to understand ." The competition will see participation by different countries from Japan to Egypt. The team representing each country is the national-level winner of Robocon in that country. India will be represented by Nirma Institute of Technology , Ahmedabad and MIT, Pune. The purpose of conducting this mega inter-collegiate competition is to motivate students to design and develop robots themselves . Robot-design needs multidisciplinary skills in the fields of mechanical, electrical and computer engineering. While promoting teamwork, it also seeks to promote innovation among the young engineers. Over 500 foreign academicians and delegates, along with a number of national academicians and other students, will visit the city during the competition. Those who cannot be present at the venue can catch all the action live on Doordarshan sports. Prasar Bharati CEO, B.S. Lalli , said, "As a mandate of a public broadcaster, it is our endeavour to provide a platform for the youth to showcase their abilities and compete internationally."

Electro Meets Mechanical

Software bridges the divide between electrical and mechanical, allowing you to automatically create accurate, fully populated models from ECAD data.

Printed circuit board (PCB) design has really evolved in the last 25 years. In the early days, PCB designers used sheets of Mylar, colored pencils, and crepe tape to lay out components and circuitry. With the advent of PCB design software, those days are long gone. One similarity to days gone by is the gap between the electronics designer and the mechanical or packaging designer. Integrating PCBs into a mechanical design often means re-modeling circuit boards from scratch, leading to possible errors and costly rework. CircuitWorks bridges the divide between electrical and mechanical, allowing you to automatically create accurate, fully populated models from electrical computer-aided design (ECAD) data. CircuitWorks was developed by Priware, a company recently acquired by SolidWorks. CircuitWorks is now available as part of the SolidWorks Office Premium package.
CircuitWorks Stand-AloneAs a stand-alone product, CircuitWorks is an intuitive tool for viewing, editing, and translating files created by ECAD systems. CircuitWorks reads and writes industry standard IDF (v2, 3, and 4) and PADS (.ASC). CircuitWorks can display the board outline, components, holes (plated and non-plated), keep-out and keep-in areas, as well as notes from the ECAD data. With IDF v4, even pads, filled areas, and traces are shown.
Once the ECAD data is open in CircuitWorks, changes to the data can be made. Components may be moved, filtered out, and features such as reference designators can be edited if necessary. Changes made to the imported file can be saved out in the IDF format for use in the original PCB design software.

WHERE am I? know by Xohm

Xohm

Location-based services are finally hitting the big time this year. With Apple's inclusion and promotion of location enabled features on the iPhone, the stage has been set for a mass market adoption. Sprint has announced that its upcoming WiMAX service dubbed Xohm (we reviewed a demonstration of the service last fall) will feature a wide range of location-based features and services that will be available to users of the service regardless of whether they're on a mobile device or a laptop.

Sprint has teamed up with uLocate to use the company's WHERE platform, which will integrate with Xohm's geospatial system composed of GPS and cell tower multilateration, and will provide access to several data brokers like Yelp (an online urban city guide with reviews of restaurants and other businesses), Topix (geotagged news aggregator), Eventful (a directory of local events), NAVTEQ (real-time local traffic), and AccuWeather (they do weather, oddly enough).
Perhaps surprisingly, Sprint is committed to opening up the location platform by creating an API for developers to integrate into their own software. Sprint claims that these APIs and location services will be available to all devices on the Xohm networks, whether they be cell phones, laptops, or music players.
The only limitation right now seems to be that Sprint has limited the information to being displayed and interacted with on a special web portal that the company controls. This could limit the types of applications that developers can create—standalone and native applications utilizing the location data as is done on the iPhone doesn't appear to be possible in the initial iteration of the service. As of yet, there is no word on the details and specifications for this API, or when it will be made available.
Xohm with uLocate's WHERE platform will launch in Baltimore next month, and Chicago and Washington, DC shortly thereafter.

Effect Of Veoh Decision On YouTube/Viacom Case Unclear

YouTube is cheering a new decision dismissing a copyright infringement lawsuit against Veoh Networks that is similar to a battle it's fighting against Viacom. But not everyone thinks the ruling will hurt Viacom in its $1 billion lawsuit against the video-sharing site.
In the Veoh case, a federal magistrate in San Jose, Calif. threw out a lawsuit brought by adult entertainment company Io Group. The court found that the video-sharing site was protected from liability by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The extent of that law's protections are key to several pending cases by traditional media companies against sites that rely on user-generated content including, most famously, Viacom's lawsuit against Google's YouTube.
At issue in the Veoh case were Io clips that users had uploaded to the video-sharing site without authorization. Io argued that Veoh should have done more to police its site, but Veoh countered that it was protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor provisions. Those protections generally give companies immunity from liability for copyright infringement as long as they remove pirated material posted by users upon request.
Federal magistrate Howard Lloyd agreed with Veoh's interpretation and ruled that the federal statute does not require companies to screen user-submitted content in advance. "Plaintiff's suggestion that Veoh must be required to reduce or limit its business operations is contrary to one of the stated goals of the DMCA," he wrote. "The DMCA was intended to facilitate the growth of electronic commerce, not squelch it."
Viacom's lawsuit is pending in federal court in New York, and the judge in the case is not legally required to follow the ruling of the San Jose court. But the judge in the YouTube case might still be persuaded by another judge's reasoning in a similar lawsuit.
Not surprisingly, YouTube immediately cheered the decision. "It is great to see the Court confirm that the DMCA protects services," the company said in a statement.
For its part, Viacom said in a statement that it still thought YouTube was liable for copyright infringement. "Even if the Veoh decision were to be considered by other courts, that case does nothing to change the fact that YouTube is a business built on infringement that has failed to take reasonable measures to respect the rights of creators and content owners. Google and YouTube have engaged in massive copyright infringement -- conduct that is not protected by any law, including the DMCA."
Some bloggers and industry observers, including the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the decision seemed to bolster YouTube.
Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, was among those who thought the court's reasoning could bode poorly for Viacom. "It's terrific news for YouTube," he said.
Goldman added that the court's rejection of the proposition that Veoh should have instituted measures to prevented pirated clips from ever appearing on the site is especially significant. "Can plaintiffs tell defendants how to run their business? This court's saying, 'Definitely not.'"
Another portion of the ruling that could help YouTube deals with the site's transcoding of videos into Flash. Lloyd held that automatically converting the clips into Flash doesn't deprive Veoh of immunity. "Veoh is not precluded from safe harbor ... by virtue of its automated processing of user-submitted content," he wrote.
Still, not everyone agrees that this case offers powerful support for Google's video-sharing site. "It's a factually different situation," said Bruce Boyden, an assistant law professor at Marquette.
One of the most significant dissimilarities is that Io never notified Veoh about the infringing clips. On the contrary, the first time Veoh learned of the alleged piracy was when it was served with the lawsuit.
But Viacom complained numerous times to YouTube about alleged copyright infringement on the site. YouTube has responded by taking down particular clips, but the problem is that users continued to upload new copies.
"Viacom, unlike Io, has been sending tons of Section 512 takedown notices to YouTube. The question there is going to be, what does YouTube have to do after it gets those notices other than just pulling down the one file that's complained about?" Boyden said.
Additionally, Lloyd noted in his ruling that Veoh did everything possible to prevent piracy. "Perhaps most importantly, there is no indication that Veoh has failed to police its system to the fullest extent permitted by its architecture," Lloyd wrote.
But one of Viacom's allegations against YouTube is that, prior to late 2007, the site had copyright infringement detection tools but made them available only to partners. If that's true, the decision in Veoh is not especially helpful to YouTube, Boyden said.

Amazon rainforest was giant garden city

Amazon rainforest was covered by a vast sprawl of interconnected villages between 1,500 and 500 years ago, according to a study that shows how nature has felt the impact of man for much longer than realised.
Explorers have long sought lost cities of the Amazon, now almost entirely obscured by forest. Today it turns out that the "garden cities", which date back 1500 years, were too spread out to make sense of on foot.

Aerial shot of an Amazon village showing central plaza and the roads radiating from the centre
Assisted by satellite imagery, researchers have spent more than a decade uncovering and mapping the lost and obscured communities to show they held more than 1000 people each and were once large and complex enough to be considered "urban" as the term is commonly applied to medieval European and ancient Greek communities.
In the Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon, these garden cities radiated out over a diameter of 150 miles, covering an area of 18,000 square miles that exceeds the sprawl of Los Angeles by 35 fold.
However, they only held around 50,000 people, compared with the 13 million in LA.
The extraordinary conclusion is reached by anthropologists from the University of Florida and Brazil, and a member of the Kuikuro, an indigenous people who are the descendants of the settlements' original inhabitants.
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"If we look at your average medieval town or your average Greek polis, most are about the scale of those we find in this part of the Amazon," said Prof Mike Heckenberger of the University of Florida, lead author of the paper published today in the journal Science.
"Only the ones we find are much more complicated in terms of their planning."
The paper also argues that the size and scale of the settlements in the southern Amazon in North Central Brazil means that what many scientists consider virgin tropical forests were shaped by human activity hundreds of years ago.
Not only that, but the settlements - consisting of networks of walled towns and smaller villages, each organised around a central plaza - suggest future solutions for supporting the indigenous population in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso and other regions of the Amazon, the paper says.
Around the communities the scientists found dams and artificial ponds that indicate the then inhabitants farmed fish, which today could be a valuable new food resource.
Prof Heckenberger and his colleagues first announced the discovery of the first settlements in 2003, revealing the largest date from around 1250 to 1650, when European colonists and the diseases they brought likely killed most of their inhabitants.
The communities are now almost entirely overgrown. But Prof Heckenberger said that members of the Kuikuro, a Xinguano tribe that calls the region home, are adept at identifying tell-tale signs of old settlements, from "dark earth" that indicate past human waste dumps or farming, concentrations of pottery shards and earthworks.
The new paper reports that the settlements consisted of clusters of 150-acre towns and smaller villages organised in spread out "galactic" patterns.
None of the large towns was as large as the largest medieval or Greek towns. But as with those towns, the Amazonian ones were surrounded by large walls - in their case, composed of earthworks still extant today.
Each settlement had an identical formal road, always oriented northeast to southwest in keeping with the mid-year summer solstice, connected to a central plaza.
The findings are important because they contradict long-held stereotypes about early Western versus early New World settlements that rest on the idea that "if you find it in Europe, it's a city.
If you find it somewhere else, it has to be something else," Prof Heckenberger said. "They have quite remarkable planning."
Because it means at least one area of "pristine" Amazon has a long history of human activity, the find could change not only how scientists assess the flora and fauna, but also how conservationists preserve the remains of forest so heavily cleared it is the world's largest soybean producing area. Explorers have long sought lost cities of the Amazon, now almost entirely obscured by forest. Today it turns out that the "garden cities", which date back 1500 years, were too spread out to make sense of on foot.

Aerial shot of an Amazon village showing central plaza and the roads radiating from the centre
Assisted by satellite imagery, researchers have spent more than a decade uncovering and mapping the lost and obscured communities to show they held more than 1000 people each and were once large and complex enough to be considered "urban" as the term is commonly applied to medieval European and ancient Greek communities.
In the Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon, these garden cities radiated out over a diameter of 150 miles, covering an area of 18,000 square miles that exceeds the sprawl of Los Angeles by 35 fold.
However, they only held around 50,000 people, compared with the 13 million in LA.
The extraordinary conclusion is reached by anthropologists from the University of Florida and Brazil, and a member of the Kuikuro, an indigenous people who are the descendants of the settlements' original inhabitants.
advertisement
"If we look at your average medieval town or your average Greek polis, most are about the scale of those we find in this part of the Amazon," said Prof Mike Heckenberger of the University of Florida, lead author of the paper published today in the journal Science.
"Only the ones we find are much more complicated in terms of their planning."
The paper also argues that the size and scale of the settlements in the southern Amazon in North Central Brazil means that what many scientists consider virgin tropical forests were shaped by human activity hundreds of years ago.
Not only that, but the settlements - consisting of networks of walled towns and smaller villages, each organised around a central plaza - suggest future solutions for supporting the indigenous population in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso and other regions of the Amazon, the paper says.
Around the communities the scientists found dams and artificial ponds that indicate the then inhabitants farmed fish, which today could be a valuable new food resource.
Prof Heckenberger and his colleagues first announced the discovery of the first settlements in 2003, revealing the largest date from around 1250 to 1650, when European colonists and the diseases they brought likely killed most of their inhabitants.
The communities are now almost entirely overgrown. But Prof Heckenberger said that members of the Kuikuro, a Xinguano tribe that calls the region home, are adept at identifying tell-tale signs of old settlements, from "dark earth" that indicate past human waste dumps or farming, concentrations of pottery shards and earthworks.
The new paper reports that the settlements consisted of clusters of 150-acre towns and smaller villages organised in spread out "galactic" patterns.
None of the large towns was as large as the largest medieval or Greek towns. But as with those towns, the Amazonian ones were surrounded by large walls - in their case, composed of earthworks still extant today.
Each settlement had an identical formal road, always oriented northeast to southwest in keeping with the mid-year summer solstice, connected to a central plaza.
The findings are important because they contradict long-held stereotypes about early Western versus early New World settlements that rest on the idea that "if you find it in Europe, it's a city.
If you find it somewhere else, it has to be something else," Prof Heckenberger said. "They have quite remarkable planning."
Because it means at least one area of "pristine" Amazon has a long history of human activity, the find could change not only how scientists assess the flora and fauna, but also how conservationists preserve the remains of forest so heavily cleared it is the world's largest soybean producing area.

New satellite imagery by google

Google has agreed to license imagery for their mapping products from a satellite due to launch on September 4th. This new satellite can take detailed imagery for an area the size of Delaware in one day. What does that mean? Well, you could get high resolution pan-sharpened imagery for the entire country in around 30 days. Impressive.
The level of detail will be approximately 50cm per pixel — that’s just under 20 inches. If you want to see what that looks like, take a look at this. Imagine having a Google Maps/Earth content that is this detailed, 100% complete and updated once a month — that’s powerful stuff.
“The GeoEye-1 satellite has the highest ground resolution color imagery available in the commercial marketplace and will produce high-quality imagery with a very accurate geolocation. It is our goal to display high-resolution imagery for as much of the world as possible, and GeoEye-1 will help further that goal.” — Kate Hurowitz (Google)
And for bragging rights, Google’s even got their logo on the side of the rocket as pictured above.
Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the cellular and electronics industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

A computer worm has been found on some astronaut's laptop on the International Space Station

A worm on the space station
A virus designed to swipe passwords from online gamers has inexplicably popped up in some laptop computers aboard the International Space Station.

The low-risk virus was detected on July 25, but did not infect the space station's command and control computers and poses no threat to the orbiting laboratory, NASA officials said.

"This is basically a nuisance," NASA spokesperson Kelly Humphries told SPACE.com from the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

According to a NASA planning document obtained by SPACE.com, the worm was identified as W32.Gammima.AG. The California-based retail anti-virus software manufacturer Symantec describes it as a Windows-based worm which spreads by copying itself onto removable media. It is capable of stealing passwords for online games and is classified as a very low risk, according to Symantec's Web site.

Humphries said that while NASA security protocols prohibit discussing details of the virus and efforts to combat it, a search is under way to find out how it got on board the space station more than 200 miles above Earth.

"We'll do our best to track down how it got there and close that gateway," Humphries said. "This is not a frequent occurrence but we have had viruses that have made their way on board before."

New flash memory cards due to launch to the station aboard a Russian cargo ship next month have been screened for the virus, the NASA document stated. Not all of the 71 laptop computers currently aboard the station run Windows, and those that do and are vulnerable to viruses could be updated, it went on.

The space station is currently home to three astronauts: Russian cosmonaut commander Sergei Volkov, cosmonaut flight engineer Oleg Kononenko and NASA flight engineer Greg Chamitoff. Volkov and Kononenko are due to return to Earth in October, while Chamitoff is slated to stay until his replacement arrives during NASA's planned November space shuttle mission.