Archives for January 2012

The first publicly available overhead imagery that suggested North Korea was constructing a new nuclear reactor at its Yongbyon complex appeared on November 4, 2010. Charles L. Pritchard, a former special envoy for negotiations with North Korea and the president of the Korea Economic Institute, along with a delegation from the institute provided the first confirmation of this construction after a visit to Yongbyon that week. The following week, Yongbyon officials told PDF Stanford University’s John W. Lewis and two authors of this article (Hecker and Carlin) that the reactor was designed to be an experimental pressurized light water reactor (100 megawatts thermal, or 25-30 megawatts electric) to be fueled with low-enriched uranium fuel produced in a newly constructed centrifuge plant at the nearby Yongbyon fuel fabrication plant. The new reactor is being constructed on the former site of a cooling tower for a now-disabled, 5-megawatt electric, gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor that had been used to produce plutonium; the tower was demolished in 2008 as a step toward an eventual denuclearization agreement.
Via www.thebulletin.org

In keeping with our prediction that Google TV would be seeing something of an expansion this year at CES, LG’s first foray into the Google TV ecosystem has just been unveiled ahead of the show.As you can see in the picture, it’s got a new interface but the guts are still Google TV. This is probably something that we’ll be seeing more of: manufacturer-specific builds, like Sense and TouchWiz for your TV.The TV itself is of an unspecified size, but chances are it will come in large and extra-large sizes (42″ and 55″ or thereabouts) when it comes out later this year. It comes with LG’s “Magic Remote Qwerty,” which is, as you might expect, a combination of its voice-controlled Magic Remote with the magic of QWERTY. Or AZERTY, depending on where you are.I’m liking that it’s passive-glasses 3D; active glasses are a thing of the past and glasses-less isn’t quite there yet. Polarized is how you see it in the theater in general, and it’s the way to see 3D at home if you want to see 3D at all. Just stay away from its “built-in 2D to 3D conversion engine,” which sounds supremely awful.
Via techcrunch.com

Ford is heading to Silicon Valley to open a new research lab, and the car computers they hope to build will do a lot more than help you find radio stations more quickly or improve your gas mileage. The future of in-car computing looks not unlike the future of phones (all app-ready, cloud-powered and touchscreen-enabled) and to get there, it’s not only Ford that’s heading West to team up with companies like Microsoft and Apple. The Dearborn, Michigan, company is just the latest major car manufacturer to go all start-up by opening a technology office in the Bay Area, joining global brands like BMW, General Motors and Nissan-Renault. When you add the myriad Silicon Valley startups that would be eager to build business models around the multi-billion dollar automotive industry, you wouldn’t believe how futuristics cars can get. The way the spokespeople talk about it, it sounds like car computers are heading into Jetsons territory (if only the cars could fly, right?) but what exists so far tends to revolve around the radio quite a bit.
Via www.theatlanticwire.com