n response to popular concerns with online credit card fraud, Visa Europe has announced a newly designed credit card, complete with a keypad and digital number display, according to the Daily Mail.

While the credit card is of the usual size and features a credit card number and magnetic strip for use with conventional card readers, it does not have a security code number in the traditional sense. Instead, cardholders will enter their PIN into the keypad, which will then generate a random number on the display. This random number will serve as the cardholder's one-time security code, which can then be entered to make online purchases.

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Intel claims it has improved the efficiency of a method for powering devices wirelessly. Intel's "Wireless Energy Resonant Link" (WREL), technology was demonstrated by transmitting electricity wirelessly to a lamp on stage and lighting a 60 watt bulb, which consumes more power than an average laptop computer.

This innovation is hoped to be embedded into tables and work surfaces so that as soon as a device is placed on the surface, it will be able to draw power. The technology uses magnetic fields to transmit up to 60 watts of power to a distance of up to two to three feet while only losing around 25% of the power during transmission.

A major concern of any wireless power technology is its possible effects on users. Fortunately during the demonstration the electricity was broadcast without electrocuting anyone who passed between the transmitter and the receiver. Intel’s lead researcher Josh Smith explained that, "The trick with wireless power is not that you can do it; it is that you can do it safely and efficiently." Magnetic fields, used by Intel’s WREL technology do not affect the human body (at least as far as we currently know), unlike electric fields, which might give the user a zap.

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The YouTube Presidency

By Jose Antonio Vargas
The White House has gone YouTube.

Today, President-elect Obama will record the weekly Democratic address not just on radio but also on video -- a first. The address, typically four minutes long, will be turned into a YouTube video and posted on Obama's transition site, Change.gov, once the radio address is made public on Saturday morning.

The address will be taped at the transition office in Chicago today.

"This is just one of many ways that he will communicate directly with the American people and make the White House and the political process more transparent," spokeswoman Jen Psaki told us last night.

In addition to regularly videotaping the radio address, officials at the transition office say the Obama White House will also conduct online Q&As and video interviews. The goal, officials say, is to put a face on government. In the following weeks, for example, senior members of the transition team, various policy experts and choices for the Cabinet, among others, will record videos for Change.gov.

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(PhysOrg.com) -- A world-wide expert on wireless communications, Professor Jri Lee of the National Taiwan University (NTU) and UCLA PhD conferred has created a system on a chip (SOC) with transmission speeds 100 times faster than WiFi and 350 times faster than 3.5G cell phones. Professor Jri Lee's team broke the speed record with the SoC design which is about 1/10th the size and cost of existing chips. Preliminary figures indicate the SoC chip can be massed-produced for less than $1 per unit.
A demonstration of Professor Lee´s SoC chip was conducted recently at NTU. The system on a chip combines Front-End Circuits and an antenna array to reach the ultimate transmission speed. In practice the SoC chip can download a 4-GB video in about 10 seconds. The same video would take up to 2-hours using WiFi, 1.5-hours using ADSL and 4.5-hours using Bluetooth to complete the download.

According to Professor Lee, as reported by Taiwan News, the new chip can be used to connect to all domestic audio-visual components like television, stereo, video recorder and transmit to TV screens anywhere in the home instantaneously. In airports and train stations, the SOC could download an entire movie to a cell phone in a couple of seconds and upload thousands of pictures from a digital camera to a computer in a blink of the eye.

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It was a high-voltage day for the Internet. I only have stats for a few sites, but rest assured that records were broken all over the place. Personally, I can't remember more than a few minutes (when I went to vote, e.g.) when I didn't have my laptop open, the better to surf around furiously with.

Twitter obliterated its own usage records. According to Biz Stone, the site's co-founder, Twitter's peak messaging rate (measured in messages per second) was 2-3 times higher than the previous record rate, set during the first presidential debate.

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By David Chartier | Published: October 31, 2008 - 01:50PM CT

Google has covered quite a lot of turf during the march toward its goal of making every last bit of the world's information searchable. But considering all the ground that has yet to be covered—especially in the realms of offline data and paper documents—we weren't surprised when Google began dabbling with OCR technologies over the last couple of years. Now, the search giant has officially launched its next attempt to handle some of this previously unsearchable content.

As announced on the Official Google Blog, the company is now performing optical character recognition (OCR) on documents that it indexes and identifies as scanned as PDFs. Google has indexed documents that were saved as text-based PDFs for quite some time. But many documents wind up being made into PDFs through scans, which store the text as images. Google has now decided that its open-source OCRopus technology, based on software called "Tesseract" that HP developed, is up to the task of indexing scanned documents that can contain any mixture of text, images, and coffee stains.

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