Microsoft Surface

The software giant announced today at the D5 conference that it’s built a new touchscreen computer—a coffee table that will change the world. Go inside its top-secret development with PopularMechanics.com, then forget the keyboard and mouse: The next generation of computer interfaces will be hands-on.

Interactive Guide to Climate from NPR & National Geographic

Click on the Picture for interactive Guide to climate or here to view the link

Click on the banner below here if you want read more about climate on NPR

Final Assembly Begins on First Boeing 787 Dreamliner

EVERETT, Wash., May 21, 2007 -- Final assembly of the all-new Boeing [NYSE: BA] 787 Dreamliner began today with a ceremony in Everett, Wash.

"Today we begin assembling the first airplane of a new generation," said Scott Strode, 787 vice president of Airplane Definition and Production. "The 787 not only will revolutionize air travel, it represents a new way of building airplanes."

With 568 firm orders from 44 airlines, the 787 is the fastest-selling new airplane in aviation history. The 787 production system was designed using Lean manufacturing techniques in a simplified final assembly process.

"The 787 production system is the culmination of the lessons we've learned building previous airplanes," said Steve Westby, 787 vice president of Manufacturing and Quality. "Using composites on the 787 airframe has a number of manufacturing advantages. We are able to build huge structure in just one piece, which means we essentially have six major end items coming together in final assembly -- the forward, center and aft fuselage sections, the wings, the horizontal stabilizer and the vertical fin. "

Since the 787 is assembled from these large assemblies rather than many smaller pieces, traditional monument assembly tools are not necessary. Portable tools, designed with ergonomics in mind, move the assemblies into place. No overhead cranes are used to move airplane structure.

"A composite airframe also means less waste in production and fewer hazardous materials used during the assembly process," Westby said. "This is good news for the environment and for our team of manufacturing technicians building the airplane."

Although the first airplane will take about seven weeks to assemble, the 787 team looks to continuously improve flow time as production ramps up. Ultimately, a 787 will roll out of the factory every three days.

The first 787 will roll out of the factory on July 8, 2007.

Learn Counting backwards from the movies

Pretty cool

Splenda not natural and settles lawsuit

Merisant lawyer Gregg LoCascio said in his closing argument Thursday that Splenda's makers chose not to use the phrase “does not contain sugar” on packaging, because “it was good for business.” He says Equal unfairly lost millions in sales and profits...read more

More from AP--

Settlement talks began after jurors asked the judge for a calculator and expert reports from both sides on how to determine damages. Lawyers rushed to the judge's office to try to delay the jury's announcement and then huddled in a courthouse meeting room.

McNeil's own consultants said its slogan confused potential customers, some of whom thought that Splenda was sugar without the calories, Merisant's attorneys said. McNeil rejected a plan to add the phrase "does not contain sugar" to the front of Splenda's yellow box, which might have cleared up the confusion, Merisant said.

Text-to-speech application on the web

2010 update on text-to-speech read more here

There aren't may text-to-speech application available online. It would be great if it could read you the complete webpage. NPR does it by allowing your to stream content of each page one after another (but then they are a radio station). So why not have website that will read you all the article in the page without having to buy any software.



Bluegrind and new web 2.0 website in beta stage (serious beta stage!) will read you a news article, blog and they claim its like having a personal news anchor reading the news to you every day. It doesn't just stop at your computer, you can take it with you wherever you go.




What are the other Text-to-Speech (TTS) web application out there? Not many but we have found some cool research sites that let you read text. The best of them all AT&T research website. Yes AT&T. This application will read in 15 voices/language, there is a 300 character limit to the text you can input a a given time.

IBM's Research into TTS
This page demonstrates some of IBM's work in unconstrained text-to-speech research. IBM's system generation process is automatic and can be built for any custom voice. From each voice recording, small segments of speech are extracted and stored in there speech database. During synthesis, these speech segments are assembled using specially crafted algorithms to generate any word in the language. Type in your text  and check it out.


Oddcast demo website uses sitepal to create a TTS application check it out

Investments Book - John C. Bogle - Common Sense Investing

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing as your guide, you’ll discover how to make investing a winner’s game:

• Why business reality—dividend yields and earnings growth—is more important than market expectations
• How to overcome the powerful impact of investment costs, taxes, and inflation
• How the magic of compounding returns is overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs
• What expert investors and brilliant academics—from Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham to Paul Samuelson and Burton Malkiel—have to say about index investing

More Links
Search at ugenie for the lowest price (ISBN: 0470102101). Read more about it at Amazon. Read more about it at other blogs - ValueBlogReview & SeekingAlpha. Also listen to or read the transcript to John Bogle's interview at marketplace money.

New Comparison Shopping website Ugenie and more

Searching for the best deal on books especially textbooks? Well there are quite a few sites that you can go to search for books. Recently an new website ugenie (still in BETA) claims that it not only finds the best price on a single product, but on groups of products which it calls a 'bundle'.To do so ugenie has developed an algorithm that searches about 40 web sites for information about prices of books, movies, music, and games to come up with the cheapest bundles that consumers can buy from these shopping sites. To search for textbook on Ugenie click here.

Other Books search website


The book search engine that allows you to comparison shop
more than 40 online bookstores including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders.
You can expect the most complete book search and the best price Internet-wide when you use AddAl



CampusBooks searches dozens of bookstores, thousands of sellers, and millions of new and used textbooks to find you the lowest textbook prices on the Internet. Compare prices on your textbooks now using the search box, or find textbooks at your campus using your school booklist below.




Search for text books at Half.com



AbeBooks, the world’s largest online marketplace for books, lists over 100 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books from more than 13,500 booksellers. This great selection delivers value for all: readers find bestsellers, collectors find rare books, students find textbooks, and treasure hunters find books they’ve been seeking forever.

Caltech Students Strike Oil - Olive Oil

Heard on NPR ...

California Institute of Technology sophomore Dvin Adalian and junior Ricky Jones, about their successful olive oil production, from olives collected from the campus's trees.hear more...

From LA Times

...In October, the ripening crop snagged the attention of students Ricky Jones and Dvin Adalian. They began an exercise that might date to Socrates' pupils in ancient Greece: whacking olive trees with a stick (in this case, a plastic pipe) and collecting what falls....

Heard on Campus

...Caltech students and grounds maintenance crews got a lesson in olive cultivation recently, when Craig Makela, the president of the Santa Barbara Olive Company, came to campus. His visit was part of the Institute's new sustainability venture to turn dozens of its ornamental olive trees into a cash crop of fruit-bearing olive trees. The Institute plans to hold an olive harvest festival in the fall, which the Caltech community will be invited to participate in. After the olives are picked, they will be crated and trucked to Santa Barbara, where they will be turned into olive oil. The oil will then be bottled and returned to the Institute for distribution. If all goes as planned, Caltech will have about 300 gallons of extra virgin olive oil to sell, Makela said. The enterprise developed after two undergraduates, Dvin Adalian and Ricky Jones, spent a day picking olives last fall and then made a batch of oil, some of which they presented to Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau and his wife, Carol Carmichael, senior counselor for external relations and faculty associate in Engineering and Applied Science. In return, the students and some of their friends were treated to dinner at the president's house.