Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
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Needing assistance with your most basic of senses is never something anyone wants to advertise. Thus we’ve come up with handy ways of making them socially acceptable. Enough nerdy kids like myself needed glasses that they’ve become fashion accessories in and of themselves. And modern hearing aids usually focus on being tiny and out of sight. But Oticon out of Denmark has something new on the market. The Agil may not be the stealthiest of assistive listening devices, but it holds a new sound processing algorithm designed to reproduce sounds much more realistically. This handy little things is designed to: “Minimize the cognitive energy expended in typical listening environments without compromising sound quality and speech understanding.” So what does that mean you ask? It essentially does your brain’s work for it. Capturing sound, deciding what’s important (separating speech from other sounds), and keeping track of it in your current environment. This frees up your brain’s functionality much like a streamlined piece of software frees up your CPU. But wait, there’s more! Some handy technology dubbed Speech Guard, allows users to “lock on” to a certain speaker in their current environment. By picking out subtle speech cues and patterns, the Agil makes that target easier to hear despite extraneous noise. And if both speakers are using the Agil, the devices will wirelessly sync with each other, both optimizing to the environment. And it gets even better. The Agil will link to your phone, MP3 player, or what have you allowing you to stream music to the headphones you never take off. Fascinating, what we can do now days, isn’t it? via [ MedGadget ]
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
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Call Greenpeace , they’ll want to hear this. Today marked the end of 120 years of mass-produced incandescent bulbs for Toshiba. They had planned to stop manufacturing a year from now, but seems the timetable got moved up in favor of those more efficient LED bulbs. High fives all around people. Believe it or not, but Toshiba has a proud and rich history when it comes to making incandescent bulbs. Way back in 1890 when their daughter company Hakunetsu-sha was the first to do so at 10 bulbs a day. The peak came in 1973 with 78 million bulbs for the year. Regulations all around the world are starting to tighten, meaning we should see incandescent bulb production come to end within a few years. Yay the environment! [ PCWorld ]
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
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Greenpeace now officially hates Samsung . The environmental organization has taken issue with Samsung’s inability to remove Brominated Flame Retardants , or BFRs, from its products. BFRs have been linked to environmental damage, and specific types have been banned from Europe altogether because of the potential for human harm. Greenpeace singling out companies is nothing new. The last big example I can think of is when it defaced HP’s headquarters —effective at getting the word out, I suppose. That being said, Greenpeace’s new beef with Samsung is a little odd in that, back in 2004, Samsung was the first company to agree to Greenpeace’s new, BFR-free guidelines. Whether or not Greenpeace should be charged with developing this or that standard is something for a long law blog to tackle. Samsung was supposed to get its BFR-free act together by January 1, 2010, but clearly we’ve flown by that date. Hence, Greenpeace officially in freak-out mode. But don’t give up hope! Samsung says that it will, indeed, have BFR-free MP3 players and digital cameras by June, 2010, and BFR-free laptops by January 1, 2011. We’ll see, said the blind man, we’ll see.