EXTRATERRITORIAL RIGHTS ZONE

JAPAN CONSIDERS SENDING "SUSHI POLICE" TO LOS ANGELES

The Japanese agriculture ministry has stirred unease among restaurateurs in Los Angeles with its plan to send food experts to judge the authenticity of Japanese eateries, an idea that has been dubbed "the sushi police." Los Angeles is home to more than 500 restaurants that claim to be Japanese. Officials of the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, claiming that some of the food served in Japanese restaurants abroad is not recognizable as Japanese, announced late last year that they planned to create a panel of food experts to travel abroad and inspect restaurants for authenticity.

http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/400998

A long but thoroughly enjoyable article.  I wonder if the "police" will wear long white lab coats and latex gloves?

CYBERZONE

START-UP FEVER SHIFTS TO ENERGY IN SILICON VALLEY

Former dot-com entrepreneurs have found a new purpose in transforming the $1 trillion domestic energy market. Silicon Valley's dot-com era may be giving way to the watt-com era. Out of the ashes of the Internet bust, many technology veterans have regrouped and found a new mission in alternative energy: developing wind power, solar panels, ethanol plants and hydrogen-powered...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/technology/14valley.html?th&emc=th

SILICON VALLEY's TECHNET WANTS BIG PUSH FOR ALTERNATIVE ENERGY

Silicon Valley lobbying group TechNet threw its weight behind the emerging "green tech" industry Wednesday, proposing dramatic changes in federal energy policy to help the sector grow. The group, which represents many...

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/03/15/BUGPEOL7I91.DTL

PERSONAL RADIO TAKES TO THE AIRWAVES

Slacker's new radio service that will work through PCs and through pocket-sized receivers priced from $150 to $299, will offer more than 10,000 radio stations that can be completely customized. Slacker's basic service, while free, will have ads. Users can choose a premium Slacker service, sans ads, at a fee of $7.50 monthly.

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=032003MQSXUO&nl=2

ONE-TO-ONE IN ALASKA

In the remote Alaskan interior, students are reaping the benefits of laptop computing. Each school, district, or state has a unique set of circumstances and obstacles to deal with in implementing a one-to-one laptop program. That is especially true of Denali Borough School District in Alaska.

Located in the Alaskan interior, it encompasses Denali National Park (with North America's tallest mountain), covers more than 12,000 square miles (roughly the size of Maryland), and serves about 300 students in its three buildings. In 1991 the Alaska State Department of Education instituted standards-based learning, and in the last few years, Denali has implemented an Expeditionary Learning model in its schools.

http://techlearning.com/showArticle.php?articleID=196604313

CLIMATE CHANGE ZONE

REPORT: BURYING GREENHOUSE GASES WILL BE KEY

To halt catastrophic climate change, the US has less than a decade learn how to capture and store carbon dioxide.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0315/p02s01-sten.html?s=hns

SNEAK PREVIEW OF MAJOR REPORT: "CHANGE IS ALREADY SHOWING UP"

The second report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts massive humanitarian crises.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0315/p04s01-sten.html?s=hns

SCIENTISTS THREATENED FOR "CLIMATE DENIEL"

Scientists who questioned mankind's impact on climate change have received death threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community. __They say the debate on global warming has been "hijacked" by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/11/ngreen211.xml

SEE ALSO: SITE CITE, BELOW

HEARING IMPAIRED INNOVATIONS ZONE

SIGN LANGUAGE VLOG: A GREAT IDEA

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/300001

LIP READING SOFTWARE

Researchers at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) are developing computer lip-reading software and hardware systems that could be used for fighting crime. As well as law enforcement, there could be other potential uses for the technology, such as installing a camera in a mobile phone, or on the dashboard for in-car speech recognition systems. The project will collect data for lip reading and use it to create computerized methods that automatically convert videos of lip motions into text.

Human lip-reading can be unreliable and the number of trained lip readers is falling, mainly because people tend to be taught to sign instead.

http://link.abpi.net/l.php?20070227A2

TED CONFERENCE ZONE

FOLLOW-UP TO LAST WEEK's ITEM ON TED

By David Pogue, N.Y. TIMES

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=2404760n ted.com/tedtalks http://www.bumptop.com

(a radical new concept for the computer desktop) http://www.wefeelfine.org (a visual, real-time emotion meter that depicts the Internet's bloggers) http://www.bmwworld.com/hydrogen/ (BMW's fleet of hydrogen-powered cars) http://www.davidpogue.com

SCIENCE ZONE

SCIENTISTS TURN ALGAE INTO SILICON

Scientists say they have found a way to convert the delicate exoskeleton of single-cell algae into silicon, the gold standard of electronics.

http://abc.net.au/science/news/stories/2007/1866128.htm?tech

GRID DONATIONS ARE ACCELERATING MEDICAL RESEARCH

A project that allows the public to donate idle computer time to a grid computing system is helping scientists more quickly solve complex medical problems. For example, the World Community Grid has helped researchers dramatically speed efforts to develop new drugs to treat HIV and to identify new treatment paths for people with several different types of cancer.

IBM launched the community grid in late 2004 to allow computer users worldwide to donate idle computer processing power to a grid tasked with performing medical research. Since then, its users have donated the equivalent of more than 78,000 years of research time, according to IBM.

The grid today includes 265,000 members and 530,000 devices. It has helped researchers compile about 60 million research equations, officials said.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9013038&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1

LANGUAGES FOR SUPERCOMPUTING GET "SUPED" UP

For years, the name of the game in supercomputing has been raw speed, with hardware and software designers striving to boost the number of instructions per second -- FLOPS -- that could be crunched. Gigaflops computers gave way to teraflops machines, which are now yielding to petaflops models -- those able to execute 1 quadrillion computations per second.

But those performance ratings are misleading, because they ignore a huge portion of the time required to solve a problem with these multiprocessor computers -- the hours, weeks or even years it can take for software designers to formulate a solution and for programmers to code and test it.

That's why the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2002 changed the name of its High Performance Computing Systems program to High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS). DARPA hoped that its contractors -- Cray Inc., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. -- could come up with programming languages and tools to improve software development productivity tenfold.

http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/1352557/1176609/55046/2/

WORLD's FIRST TRANSISTOR-PRINTING PLANT OPENS http://go.theregister.com/news/http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03/13/nanoident_opens_transistor_printing_plant/

STUDY PROBES ODOR, SLEEP AND MEMORY LINK

Researchers have found that an odor smelled while in deep sleep might help consolidate some kinds of memory if the same odor was used during learning.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/03/11/national/w030501S95.DTL&type=politics

ASIA PACIFIC ZONE

IS CHINA POISED TO CLOSE THE TECHNOLOGY GAP?

Monday's news that a Chinese firm aims to build large jetliners renews concern about US competitiveness. By Mark Trumbull http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0314/p03s03-usec.html?s=hns

CHINESE HACKERS ALLEGEDLY SEEK U.S. ACCESS

New forensic analysis of a cyberattack on a U.S. military computer system has deepened concern about cyberspying and the security of the Internet's infrastructure.

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=03000118HVW0&nl=2

CHINA NETCOM SIGNS COMPETITION AGREEMENT WITH CHINA TELECOM

China Telecom (CHA) and China Netcom (CN), the two fixed telecom service providers in China, have signed an agreement to limit competition between them. China Telecom and China Netcom have probably inked this deal to better meet challenges from the mobile operators like China Mobile and China Unicom. But they might also want to seize more power in the amalgamation of the telecom network, broadcasting network and Internet network.

According to the central government's plan, the three networks' amalgamation is the final goal of China's telecom reforms. Interestingly, this means that after the reform, China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (which controls the content) and the telecom operators (which control the networks), which have opposed each other for years, will be in similar positions with similar assets, Full Article from ChinaTechNews

WIRELESS ZONE

CLEARWIRE RAISES $600 MILLION IN IPO

Clearwire sells more stock than estimated at high end of range: The Craig McCaw firm brought in $600m by selling 24m shares; they trade under the ticker symbol CLWR. The firm raised the money to continue its very expensive rollout of pre- and soon actual-mobile WiMax service nationwide. Clearwire currently operates in 34 US markets and in Belgium and Ireland, and has 207,200 subscribers, mostly in the US. It raised $2b before the stock offering.

http://wimaxnetnews.com/archives/2007/03/clearwire_raise.html

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003606832_clearwire08.html>

SITE CITE

MELLOWING THE YELLOW

Since the 1960s, some 400 nuclear reactors in about 30 countries have produced around 200,000 tonnes of radioactive wastes and another 10,000 tonnes are added each year. We don't have a permanent solution for storing the waste, but nature does. There were nuclear reactors on our planet two billion years ago, and their radioactive wastes stayed safely buried from then till now.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s1859758.htm