New Florence. New Renaissance.

The New Paperless Office

From eBooks to mobile scanning services, BusinessWeek has a photo gallery of new products to reduce the paper jungle.

Shake it like a Polaroid picture!

"Beam a photograph from a cellphone to the printer and, with a gentle purr, out comes the full-color print — completely formed and dry to the touch.

The printer, which connects wirelessly by Bluetooth to phones and by cable to cameras, will cost about $150. The images are 2 inches by 3 inches, the size of a credit card.

Inside, no cartridges or toner take up space. Instead, there is a computer chip, a 2-inch-long thermal printhead and a novel kind of paper embedded with microscopic layers of dye crystals that can create a multitude of colors when heated.

The unusual paper is the creation of former employees of Polaroid who originated the process there. They spun off as a separate company, Zink Imaging, in 2005 after Polaroid’s bankruptcy"

New York Times

Healthcare: Back to the Future

I spent some time at the McKesson booth at HiMSS this week.

Mike Myers, SVP told me about the excitement in the industry about DNA markers and how they could revolutionize early detection of disease and also help customize solutions to each patient. Since the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, there has been growing progress towards predictive medicine. Mckesson has teamed with Proventys which "translates predictive data from traditional and emerging diagnostic tests, including genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, into clinical decision support solutions."

Then I walked over to see their "1080p, diagnostic image quality" front end to their Horizon Medical Imaging products. The touch-screen technology allows physicians to highlight and enhance images for viewing. Physicians have always loved to look at images this way and that. I know John Madden gets credit for popularizing the telestrator but you should see what physicians do to mark up images on the touch-screen.

Then, with a neat application of unified communications, with a sweep of the hand, they can send an image to a colleague’s iPhone. And using a bluetooth headset, also discuss it. There are plans to also integrate with billing and other applications.

Old genes - and old practices. Brand new technology.

Scanning for text to voice

"..by combining (HP)scanning technology with Mouscan's ability to optically recognize text, translate it and vocalize it, you have a brand new device about the size of a cell phone with a lot of cool potential. Imagine you're a traveler trying to read a foreign article, document or even a menu. You just wave the Voiscan over the document for a few seconds and it quickly organizes the text and begins reading it aloud. It can also output to another device so you can see the translation.

This is cool for travelers but also students trying to pick up another language. It presents a quick way of understaning a foreign language and seeing how it's used every day. The last scenario is for vision-impaired people, who will be able to gain information about printed documents that are not in braille."

The Tech Chronicles

The Last Supper: In 16 billion pixels

Da Vinci's masterpiece in all its digital glory.

So, is the person on the right of Jesus, Apostle John or Mary Magdalene? The details in picture will likely fuel even more controversy.

Marvel Comics Go On-Line

"It's a tentative move onto the Internet: Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded, and new issues will only go online at least six months after they first appear in print.

Still, it represents perhaps the comics industry's most aggressive Web push yet. Even as their creations -- from Iron Man to Wonder Woman -- become increasingly visible in pop culture through new movies and video games, old-school comics publishers rely primarily on specialized, out-of-the-way comic shops for distribution"

Yahoo News

High End Digital Cameras

"Just three days after Canon announced a pair of pro cameras, Nikon unleashed it’s own duo of high-end digitals: The ultra high-end D3 and the still really high-end D300.

It leads with the Deathstar of SLRs, the D3. The biggest change is, in fact, one of bigness. Nikon equipped the new camera with a 36x23.9-millimeter image sensor that’s nearly as large as an old 35-milimeter film frame."

Popular Science

Photo Clip Art

From Cargenie Mellon and Microsoft Research

"We present a system for inserting new objects into existing photographs by querying a vast image-based object library, precomputed using a publicly available Internet object database. The central goal is to shield the user from all of the arduous tasks typically involved in image compositing. The user is only asked to do two simple things: 1) pick a 3D location in the scene to place a new object; 2) select an object to insert using a hierarchical menu."

Wikipedia and other Eye Candy

"This paper aims to show how information visualization can be used to gain quick insights into the overlap structure and topical relationships between the monthly most visited Wikipedia pages. For example, the visualizations will help you see that a much smaller percentage of the popular Wikipedia pages is related to typical encyclopedic topics, such as geography, history or politics, than you would expect."

Not sure how you use the data, but the graphic representation (keep scrolling down) is pretty cool...

...also courtesy of Paul Kedrosky I found this Jonathan Cousins' (at NYU's Interactive Telecommunication Program) visualization of global immigration patterns. What may surpirse folks - the immigration into Russia. A number of immigrants from former Soviets republics, China and Turkey are flowing in.

Make a nice mashup to take Jonathan's map and track it to Wikipedia articles on immigration!

Relationships Among Scientific Paradigms

Courtesy of Charlie Bess of EDS I saw this map in Seed Magazine.

The map was "constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers."

see a fuller version on Flickr

Combine with "Many Faces" and we could see a revolution in intelligent art...