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Sokirajuci skeneri na aerodromima
Shock tactics
Patents filed by an Israeli inventor Amit Weisman and US company Yardeni Associates of Connecticut make scary reading for nervous travellers.
Airport security guards already use hand-held electromagnetic wands to detect metal hidden under clothing. The same wand can also sniff for traces of the gases some explosives emit into the air.
If the passenger is a suicide bomber who realises the wand has found something, the guard might not have enough time to pull out handcuffs or a gun. So the new wand will have a hidden secret – a transformer which steps the detector’s battery power up to 100 kilovolts and feeds it to disguised metal electrodes at the end of the wand.
If the wand gives a silent warning of explosives, the guard can then subtly slide the pads onto the passenger’s neck or hands and press a shock button. The patent reassures that the effect is “temporary and reversible”.
So an innocent traveller who “happened to have a significant amount of metal on his person or happened to treat explosives legally” should wake up shaken but unharmed.
Speaking up
Ever struggled to hear what’s being said on the phone while you are in a noisy car or a rowdy pub? Someone at the Philips research labs in Eindhoven obviously has because the Dutch company is filing world patents on a new way of making speech more easily understood in noisy surroundings.
In everyday speech the hissy consonants – like "s" and "sh" – are more important for intelligibility than the vowels – like "a", "e" and "i". But the vowels are usually louder than the consonants.
So if the overall level of speech is amplified to try to make it stand out from background noise, the vowels become much too loud, overload the ear and drown out the consonants. The words become even harder to understand.
The new technology from Philips continually – and very rapidly – increases the amplification as the background noise level rises, but treats the vowels and consonants differently. The weaker, higher frequencies that form the consonants are amplified by about twice as much as the louder, lower frequency vowels – making the words more intelligible.
The selective boost system can be built into cellphones, laptop PCs and TV sets, says the company.
Chameleon-phone
The cellphone industry is always looking for new must-have features to encourage people to junk their existing phones and buy new ones. Sony Ericsson’s latest idea is to sell phones which automatically change the way they behave, depending on the time, date and place.
For example, the wallpaper display on the screen shows pumpkins when the phone’s calendar sees the date is Halloween, and Christmas puddings on December 25th. Network roaming, or GPS, can tell a phone what country it is in, so the ring-tone might change to a reggae tune as the plane touches down in Jamaica, for example.
A restaurant could use short-range Bluetooth signals to deliver the specials menu direct to the phone's screen, and a cinema or church could use Bluetooth to switch it to silent mode. Stockbrokers could enable an option to display the latest share prices every 10 minutes and golfers could use continually updated weather forecasts for wallpaper.
Priority coding lets some automated controls override user settings. So if you are a golfing stockbroker praying in church for sunshine during a wet Christmas in Jamaica, the phone won’t interrupt the sermon with a burst of Bob Marley.
Ovde
Fantomski auto
Using in-car satellite navigation on unfamiliar roads, in bad weather or in heavy traffic can be a bore. But soon it could be as simple as following the car ahead, if a patent filed recently by Microsoft takes off.
Instead of studying an on-screen map or listening to spoken instructions, the system lets a driver pursue a cartoon car projected onto the windscreen in front of them. The navigation system checks a car’s location and calculates a route in the usual way, but the driver follows the ghost car as if it were the leader of a convoy.
The on-screen car could also convey traffic and weather information by changing colour or size. And its ghostly cartoon character should make it sufficiently distinguishable from real cars and traffic as seen through the windscreen, the patent says.
Calling code
Apparently innocuous phone and radio chat could soon carry secret messages.
Patents filed by the US Air Force Research Lab in New York, US, reveal plans to burry secret messages in ordinary, unprotected communications by adding tones that can be deciphered at the other end of the line.
A normal speech channel would be chopped into 60 packets per second, and each packet analysed for overall sound level. A pair of steady tones, too faint for a human to hear, could then be added to each packet. Modulating these tones according to a pre-arranged cipher would transmit the secret message.
Although the tones are inaudible, they could be electronically detected by filters finely tuned to the exact frequencies.
To detect and decode a secret message, a hacker would first need to know which innocent phone call or broadcast to analyse, and precisely what tones to focus on. If these were changed regularly, it would things even more difficult for an eavesdropper.
Memory accelerator
A clever way to make computers boot up and start programs more swiftly has been patented by SanDisk of California, US.
In today's PCs, volatile Random Access Memory (RAM) provides a temporary buffer for data stored permanently on a magnetic hard disc. But information not held in RAM takes much longer for the computer to retrieve.
The SanDisk system uses flash memory, which works in microseconds but has limited storage capacity, as an intermediary memory bank between RAM and the hard drive, increasing the speed at which a computer starts a program or opens a file.
Data is sent to the flash memory component for rapid access. As this fills up, most of it is moved to the hard disc at slower retrieval. But particularly relevant bits of information, such the description of a file and its location on the hard drive, may be held in flash for longer.
When the computer boots up or launches a program, it gets the initial data from flash while the hard disc searches out the next batch of information. Overall, access time should be reduced substantially, say SanDisk.
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Dopuna: 12 Okt 2005 11:42
Telefon koji zna da vibrira
This week's inventions include a cellphone that knows just how violently to vibrate, a car that heals superficial dents in its bodywork and a system that can spot military camouflage from a distance.
For over 30 years, Barry Fox has trawled the world's weird and wonderful patent applications, digging out the most exciting, intriguing and sometimes terrifying new ideas. His weekly column, Invention, is now available exclusively online.
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