Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• Lou Basenese - Seeking Al...

  • According to the 21st Business Herald, citing sources close to the National Population and Family Planning Commission, “China may relax its one-child policy at end-2013 or early-2014 by allowing families to have two children if at least one parent is from a one-child family,” says BofA Merrill Lynch economist Ting Lu.
  • if the Chinese start (ahem) getting it on, we’re talking about an extra 9.5 million screaming mouths to feed each year, or about 170 million more Chinese by 2033. That’ll be enough to put the U.S. Baby Boom to shame. And then some

• Home | Mail Online

  • Watt a bright idea! Brazilian mechanic uses plastic water bottles and bleach to create LIGHT - illuminating 1million homes

• Devices Connect with Borrowed TV Signals, and Need No Power Source | MIT Technology Review

  • A novel type of wireless device sends and receives data without a battery or other conventional power source. Instead, the devices harvest the energy they need from the radio waves that are all around us from TV, radio, and Wi-Fi broadcasts.

    These seemingly impossible devices could lead to a slew of new uses of computing, from better contactless payments to the spread of small, cheap sensors just about everywhere.

  • The devices communicate by varying how much they reflect—a quality known as backscatter—and absorb TV signals. Each device has a simple dipole antenna with two identical halves, similar to a classic “rabbit ears” TV aerial antenna. The two halves are linked by a transistor, which can switch between two states. It either connects the halves so they can work together and efficiently absorb ambient signals, or it leaves the halves separate so they scatter rather than absorb the signals. Devices close to one another can detect whether the other is absorbing or scattering ambient TV signals.

• NBC News buys smartphone video streaming company in bet on user-generated footage | The Verge

  • enable real-time sharing of smartphone video, which chief NBC News digital content officer Vivian Schiller believes is going to be the next generation of news coverage

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.