New Florence. New Renaissance.

Beat your head against wall - version 2.0

"Chinook, in a slightly improved version, cannot ever lose (at checkers). Any opponent, human or computer, no matter how skilled, can at best achieve a draw...

But checkers — or draughts, as it is known in Britain — is the most complex game that has been solved to date, with some 500 billion billion possible board positions, compared with the 765 possibilities in tic-tac-toe.

Even with the advances in computers over the past two decades, it is still impossible, in practical terms, to compute moves for all 500 billion billion board positions. So, the researchers took the usual starting position and looked only at the positions that occurred during play."

New York Times

So, sure, try to figure out the positions that might, could still win. As the saying goes - it will feel good when you stop -)

Technology Innovation and Dams

Wired Magazine

"Civil engineers planning the demolition of the 60-year-old Matilija Dam on the Ventura River are enjoying an unprecedented preview of where 163 million gallons of pent up water will flow, thanks to sophisticated new computer modeling techniques now being used for a series of dam removal projects planned throughout the United States."

Of course, the biggest (and most controversial) dam project in the world, China's Three Gorges has had all kinds of engineering, environmental and other technology.

NASA's Landsat satellites have been tracking it since construction began in 1994.

Taiwan: Device Manufacturer to the world

New York Times

"With little fanfare, Taiwan companies are playing a big role not only in the production of Apple’s latest device (iPhone) but in a wide array of other communications equipment, including the broadband modems in homes across the United States and the next generation of high-speed wireless gear.

Taiwan companies also have a hand in making iPods and iMacs, they said, as well as game machines for Sony and Microsoft".

iPhones are just entering the market. Taiwanese companies like HTC have been delivering Windows Mobile devices to a large segment of the market for a while now.

Bluetooth 2.1

Business 2.0

"Devices will be paired in as few as three clicks. Encrypted data transfer means no need for passwords. And lower power consumption means that Bluetooth 2.1 devices will have as much as five times the battery life of their predecessors.

Users will be able to easily beam photos from cameras to printers or digital picture frames. Wireless keyboards, mice, and videogame controllers will get a boost too. Bluetooth 2.1 will be integrated with near field communication, or NFC, a standard for mobile payments, so consumers will have more opportunities to pay with their phones."

Computer Viruses turn 25

Elk Cloner - 1982 for the Apple II

We all wish this is one area where innovations would stop,,,

Update: iPhones and other PDAs are not safe either

Car rental as a utility service

Welcome to Zipcar. Rent by the hour, not by the day. Rates include gas and insurance.             Mostly downtown locations in major cities. Leverages Google Maps to tell you exactly how many cars available at each street corner. Walk to the car, hold your Zipcard to the windshield, doors unlock, and it's yours.

God knows how many times I have cursed myself for renting a car at LGA or SFO then paid for parking for the hours in Manhattan or downtown San Francisco I am sleeping. And got lost on way there. Or I have paid for a full day when I needed car for 3 hours. Or this service was available when I lived in London and chose to forego using the company car allowance and got a better apartment with the allowance.

Rates - about $ 8 an hour, $ 49 from 7 to 7 and $ 60 for 24 hours. Bit more on weekends. Don't forget - includes gas and insurance. And parking.

Business Model plus contemporary technology = innovation.

Korea's mobile WiMax

"Throughout the 30-minute (train) journey, I did not lose the signal once, although the speed did fluctuate somewhat. It would often drop when the train moved out of a station and increase again when it arrived at the next stop.

Web and e-mail access worked so well that I decided to try something a little more demanding and accessed streaming video news clips from the Yahoo Japan portal. The clips are encoded at 300Kbit/sec. and played without any problem, even while the train was in motion.

Equally surprising was that my little experiment did not draw the attention of the passengers sitting next to me. In a country where most high-end cell phones have TV reception, watching streaming video on the train doesn't seem to impress anybody."

Computerworld

Sherlock Holmes and Cellphones

"There is virtually no criminal case now that does not involve phone evidence," New Scientist (sub required)

DNA, Fingerprints, GPS data, cell tower tracking ...even evidence from cellphones recovered from bottom of lakes.

Better Hurricane Forecasting

I have written before about technology to forecast hurricanes

MIT Technology Review discusses the new forecasting model which is able to see the inner core of the hurricane, where the eye wall is located, better and in higher resolution than other models.

No Left Turns

I have written about UPS's use of technology before

Here is an update from New York Times

"Last year, it cut 28 million miles from truck routes — saving roughly three million gallons of fuel — in good part by mapping routes that minimize left turns. This year, U.P.S. began offering customers a self-service system for redirecting packages that are en route.And now the U.P.S. researchers are working on sensors that can track temperatures of packages, on software that can make customs checks more uniform worldwide and on scheduling processes that accommodate the needs of recipients as well as shippers."