L’électron libre

Today, Norman AUGUSTINE, former CEO of the main US Defense Company LOCKHEED MARTIN, came to give a talk at NUS on the challenges that Developed Nations are facing. After introducing with the fact that the technological advances recently have suppressed a lot of distance between people, he went on saying that a lot of work in developed nations is being outsourced. If outsourcing reduces costs for a given company in ...

I want to applause with four hands that I don't have the speaker in this video. Dennis Wixon (Microsoft Surface) brings in this video an approach to predicting the future of any technology. His field of expertise is Human Machine Interaction, but the scientific approach he uses to foresee the coming technologies is really universal. Select a field, look deeply at the evolutions in the past that brought to the the ...

Microsoft Research and Microsoft Research Asia organize every year a conference called "Computing in the 21st century". The subtitle was "New Horizon of Computing". This year's version had no less than 3 Turing award winners (Turing awards are something like the Nobel Prize of computing), the Senior Vice President of Microsoft, and a Managing Director at Microsoft Research Asia and at the same time IEEE fellow (a very prestigious ...

There is a lot of buzz on Youtube on what is referred to as being a permanent source of energy: Perendev or Bedini motors. The mere idea of "free energy" and perpetual movement necessarily sounds idiotic to any scientist or researcher, yet the large popularity of any topic always leaves a glimpse of doubt to even the most sceptical and rigorous scientists. A plethora of videos indeed show motors ...

The financial crisis is expected to foster larger efforts in software security. This (not so) new finding about physical hacking (retrieving electromagnetic signal) however suggests that efforts will have to be made on the hardware as well. In the case of keyboards, it should not be anything too hard. Coating everything with a thin layer of metal and injecting electromagnetic noise to this shield should be enough. I ...

While browsing a commercial website today, I came across a skype-looking logo on the side saying "I'm offline". A few keywords in a popular search engine ( I am tryin to not say its name for a whole week) yield what I had been looking for : A way to include your skype status on a blog ! My brains are fusing with ideas of cool stuff we can do with ...

Research papers often present interesting results to the community by mentioning alongside the conditions under which they obtained these results. It is not generally advised to bring up the thousands of tries (generally failures) with a comprehensive list of the changes of parameters to obtain incrementally something successful. Some of those changes you do in experimental research may or may not yield any interesting improvement. But if people get to ...

Although Singapore and more specifically NUS seems to have absolutely NO IDEA what Linux is, you may want to set up Linux on your desk at some point of time. And a few days later you will, like me, realize you have not set your lab's printer and start struggle with that. I did, so you no need lah, just follow this: The printer is shared on a PC ...

There is 3 mobile phone networks in Singapore, by order of popularity : Singtel Starhub M1 They are said to be equivalent, I haven't really been through a serious study of their prices, I was at Starhub and paid on average 36 S$ per month for ton of sms and quite a lot of phone calls. Networks here haven't yet started selling bulk sms and minutes to subcontractors unlike they did in France ...

Here is a neat video of what Facebook would be like in real life: Embedded Video Other fun Facebook related videos: An off-Facebook group inviting to  boycott Facebook. Embedded Video A fake add,not bad. Embedded Video