Technically Speaking

Professor Rusi Taleyarkhan, claims that he has been able to produce nuclear fusion. The scientific community is very skeptical of the results and are desperately trying to either reproduce Taleyarkhan’s experiment or expose him as a fraud. Taleyarkhan maintains that the data speaks for itself. Nuclear fusion on Earth would be an abundant, clean power supply for the world that would probably never run out.

It would be clean, last for ever and create no long-term nuclear waste. And Rusi Taleyarkhan claims to have achieved it using simple sound waves.

His breakthrough is based on something called sonoluminescence. It is a process that transforms sound waves into flashes of light, focusing the sound energy into a tiny flickering hot spot inside a bubble.

It has been nicknamed “the star in a jar” by researchers in the field.

The star in a jar effortlessly reaches temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees, which is hotter than the surface of the Sun. It was able to do all this by simply focusing the energy of the sound wave into a tiny hot spot.

In order to get fusion, temperatures inside the bubble had to be in the region of 10 million degrees. It seemed improbable that the tiny hot spots could be this hot. But if they were - or if a way could be found to make them so - then a new route to nuclear fusion would be opened up.

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Australia’s CSIRO research organization has released a ground breaking technology for delivering indexed video content. Annodex search tool provides actual video content with detailed summaries, interactivity through video, and hyperlinks to additional material. CMML is the dubbed name behind Annodex, and it allows for website to be constructed using video instead of text. This open source technology is free for download and is currently available in Debian GNU/Linux.

The CSIRO has dubbed the technology behind Annodex Continuous Media Markup Language, or CMML. According to the organisation, “CMML does for time-continuous media what HTML does for text. It allows the user to search, access, navigate and query”.

Project leader Dr Silvia Pfeiffer told ZDNet Australia this morning that the reason the organisation chose Firefox as a development platform over Internet Explorer (IE) was the fact that Firefox’s plugin architecture was easier to work with and the browser was supported across several platforms. The CSIRO had initially tried to develop Annodex for IE, but found that Microsoft’s browser had numerous security holes.

Currently the software only supports playback of media webs that are encoded using the open source Ogg Theora (for video) and Ogg Vorbis (for audio) codecs. Pfeiffer said that the choice to use the Ogg codecs was based on the need for Annodex to be royalty-free and available to all users. In contrast, formats such as MPEG2 or MPEG4 have licences that “have to be paid for”. In addition, according to Pfeiffer, while Theora does not have as high a compression ration as MPEG4, it is “quality wise as good as the MPEG2 format,” and only “one level of quality behind the top-level compression codecs”.

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Checkout the CSIRO website to try the technology for yourself.

If you all haven’t heard yet, iPod’s random feature is really random. MSNBC News ran an article investigating the randomness of the iPod. Apple basically chalks up all the hoopla to people only listening to th e first few songs of the random set. Or better yet, “We often interpret and impose patterns on random processes.”

Apple execs profess amusement. “It’s part of the magic of shuffle,” says Greg Joswiak, the VP for iPod products. Still, I asked him last week to double-check with the engineers. They flatly assured him that “Random is random,” and the algorithm that does the shuffling has been tested and reverified.

More specifically, when an iPod does a shuffle, it reorders the songs much the way a Vegas dealer shuffles a deck of cards, then plays them back in the new order. So if you keep listening for the week or so it takes to complete the list, you will hear everything, just once. But people generally listen only to the first few dozen songs. In theory, that sample should be evenly distributed among all the artists and albums in their collections. So why do you typically get three Wilco songs in an hour while Aretha Franklin waits in the wings forever?

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