If you want a quick and easy way to stream music from your computer or phone to your home stereo and have an old Bluetooth headset lying around, Instructable user dex3844 has a simple guide to hack a stereo jack into it.

To follow the guide, all you need is a Bluetooth headset, stereo jack, soldering iron, hot glue gun and a thin wire. It's a simple, nine step process that only requires you to pop open the casing of your headset and solder a couple wires. His tutorial guides you through a mono installation, but if you have a stereo headset the difference should only be a single wire.

There are commercially available audio dongles that do the same thing, but if you're looking for a way to do it yourself on the cheap, you can find the full tutorial over a Instructables.

Bluetooth Headset Hack | Instructables

New Jersey soldier helps Afghan boy get life-changing surgery

Posted: Saturday, May 07, 2011, 12:05 AM

By Adya Beasley / The Star-Ledger The Star-Ledger
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A little over a year ago, while on foot patrol in Afghanistan, Army Major Glenn Battschinger came across Muslam Hagigshah, an Afghan boy born with his bladder outside of his body. Shocked by the boy's condition Battschinger arranged for Muslam to come to the US for a series of operations that would correct his birth defect. (Video by Adya Beasley / The Star-Ledger)

Tags: afghan, afghanistan, army, muslam, soldier, surgery

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NEW YORK (MainStreet)  –  The Department of Transportation released a beefed-up version of its airline passenger’s bill of rights Wednesday, requiring airlines to pay for lost luggage and disclose hidden fees, among other provisions.

“Airline passengers have a right to be treated fairly,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a written statement. “It’s just common sense that if an airline loses your bag or you get bumped from a flight because it was oversold, you should be reimbursed. The additional passenger protections we’re announcing today will help make sure air travelers are treated with the respect they deserve.”

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The new rules, first proposed by the DOT in June, had been posted in the Federal Register for public comment as they awaited formal approval. Now they’re set to go into effect August 23.

The rules expand upon regulations put forth in December 2009 that say domestic flights are not allowed to sit on the tarmac for more than three hours after boarding. Now international flights will be included as well, though with a limit of four hours. During that time, all grounded planes will now be required to provide basic services like access to lavatories and water.

The new regulations will also require airlines to prominently disclose all fees on their websites, including those for baggage, meals, canceling or changing reservations seat upgrades. 

Speaking of seats, passengers bumped from overbooked flights will now be entitled to compensation worth twice the price of their ticket (up to $800) if the passenger is delayed for two hours or less. Those who face longer delays after being bumped can receive up to $1,300 in compensation, according to the new terms.

The bill of rights will also require airlines to hold reservations at the quoted fare without payment, and allow consumers to cancel a reservation without penalty within at least 24 hours of purchase, so long as the flight was booked a week or more before its departure.

Additionally, airlines will now be required to notify consumers of delays longer than 30 minutes. And they won’t be able to impose post-purchase fare increases unless they are due to government-imposed taxes or fees.

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Facebook friends help scientists quickly identify nearly 5,000 fish specimens collected in Guyana

Posted on 24 March 2011

New Acquisitions, Research Topics, zoology

Last month, a team of ichthyologists sponsored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History performed the first survey of the fish diversity in the Cuyuni River of Guyana. Upon their return, they needed to identify the more than 5,000 specimens they had collected in less than a week’s time in order to obtain an export permit. Faced with insufficient time and inadequate library resources to tackle the problem on their own, they instead posted a catalog of specimen images to Facebook and turned to their network of colleagues for help.

 

Image right: A fish identified as Hypostomus taphorni, from the Guyana expedition.

In less than 24 hours, this approach identified approximately 90 percent of the posted specimens to at least the level of genus, revealed the presence of at least two likely undescribed species, indicated two new records for Guyana and generated several loan requests. The majority of people commenting held a Ph.D. in ichthyology or a related field, and hailed from a great diversity of countries including the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil.

By quickly tapping the collective expertise of their social network to help with the preliminary identification process, the expedition members were able to sort, pack and export the specimens to Washington, D.C. in a timely manner. The Facebook identifications also will speed the cataloging process and help make the material available for loan and study as quickly as possible.

 

Image left:  A fish identified as Guianacara cuyunii    from the Guyana expedition.

Such crowdsourcing of identifications would not have been possible five years ago, but increased internet access across South America and the massive recent growth of social networks has made tapping the world’s collective knowledge easier than ever. Based on this experience, Facebook offers a remarkably efficient free tool that can accelerate taxonomic identification substantially. –Brian Sidlauskas, ichthyologist Oregon State University, expedition leader and research collaborator of  Richard Vari, National Museum of Natural History, Department of Vertebrate Zoology. The expedition mentioned in this article was funded by the Natural Museum of Natural History Biological Diversity of the Guiana Shield Program and the Department of Vertebrate Zoology.

 

Related posts:

1. Smithsonian scientists discover seven new species of blenny fish
2. Smithsonian scientists to help identify and eradicate invasive species in Alaskan waters
3. New Acquisition: Namibian specimens come to the herbarium of the National Museum of Natural History

Tags | biodiversity, conservation, ichthyology, National Museum of Natural History

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• FlightAware: Flight 812 emergency landing route map

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Emergency landing

32.66 -114.61 33.44 -112.02

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YUMA, Ariz. (AP) — A Southwest Airlines flight from Phoenix to Sacramento, Calif., was diverted Friday to a military base in Yuma due to rapid decompression in the plane, federal officials said.

Ian Gregor, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman in Los Angeles, said the cause of the decompression wasn't immediately known, but some passengers on Flight 812 said there was a hole in the cabin.

"You can see daylight through it," a passenger identified as Brenda Reese told Sacramento TV station KCRA by cellphone.

In a series of Tweeted messages, passenger Shawna Malvini Redden called the flight "hands down the scariest experience of my life."

Redden said she heard an "explosion sound, then a rush of air." She described a "six foot hole in the skin of the plane five rows behind me."

Dallas-based Southwest said there were no injuries among the 118 people aboard.

Passenger Redden said one flight attendant was hurt and a couple of passengers passed out. She credited the skill of the crew in making a safe landing.

Gregor said the plane landed safely at Yuma Marine Corps Air Station/International Airport at 4:07 p.m., less than an hour after takeoff from Sacramento International Airport. It was due to arrive at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport at 5:30 p.m.

Passengers became aware there was a problem when they heard a noise and felt the rush of wind and oxygen masks started dropping in the cabin, according to Reese.

She said a few people passed out "because their oxygen wasn't working. It was scary."

Reese said flight attendants went around the cabin aiding passengers. Emergency medical technicians were on board the plane treating passengers after it landed in Yuma.

Gregor said an FAA inspector from Phoenix was en route to Yuma to investigate the incident.

Gina Swankie, a spokeswoman for Sacramento International Airport, said Southwest was sending another plane to Yuma to take the passengers to Sacramento. They were expected to get to Sacramento around 8:30 p.m. Friday.

"I want to get home and hold my three children," Reese said.

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03/25/2011

 

Nepal's Lost Daughters

Victims of Child Slavery Learning to Fight Back

By Dialika Krahe

 

  Photo Gallery: 5 Photos  

Hartmut Schwarzbach/DER SPIEGEL

Like many Nepalese girls from poor families, Urmila Chaudhary was sold into bonded labor until she liberated herself. Now 20, she works with a team of former victims, traveling throughout Nepal to free other girls from the clutches of their unrepentant masters.

 

The man who once bought Urmila squats on the threshold between her past and her new life, picking a piece of chewing tobacco from his teeth. He spits a black stream of saliva into a bucket next to him on the living-room floor. Urmila Chaudhary, who hasn't been his property for the last four years, kneels on the carpet at his feet and hands him a tray holding a cup of sweetened tea.

'); document.writeln(''); document.writeln(''); document.writeln(''); } // --> She ought to hate, curse and berate this man. But, instead, she bows to him and calls him "father."

Urmila was taken from her family and enslaved as a young child. Now 20, she has long, black hair and a gentle, melodious laugh. She wears blue smiley-face earrings and a colorful skirt with a red stripe along the hem, the traditional attire of women from Nepal's Tharu people. Her clothing says a lot about the story of Urmila and this man -- and about the thousands of other young girls who are sold every year as soon as they are big enough to look over the edge of a table and yet still young enough to grow into their new roles as servants.

Her former owner wears his black hair carefully parted, a bomber jacket and tracksuit pants. He was astonished when he saw Urmila on television and in a newspaper photo that depicted her standing next to the country's president.

"I thought you would have forgotten us," he says.

"No," Urmila replies.

Sold for 50 Euros

Urmila says she was five years old when this man, an attorney from a respected family, came to her village of Manpur, on the Rapti River, and made an offer that ended her childhood.

It was a day in January, just after the Maghi festival had begun, one of those cold days of the year when the Tharu celebrate the New Year. It's also the time of the year when they sell their daughters.

"I can still see him coming toward us," says Urmila. He was a man from the city, wearing sunglasses and a suit. "I had never seen such clothing," she says. She was sitting at the fire pit in front of the tiny mud-and-dung house where her family of 11 lived. Pumpkins grew on the straw roof, and pigs lay in shallow pits in the ground. Urmila was sitting there with her mother and brother as the man approached.

"I knew it was my turn," Urmila says. Her sisters and her sisters-in-law had all worked as kamalari, or slave girls. One sister had told her about the beatings she endured at the hands of the landowner who purchased her and the kitchen scraps she was fed. "I begged my mother not to send me away," Urmila recounts. Her mother said that she had no say in the matter.

Instead, the man spoke with her older brother because he was the one who supported the family. The man offered the brother money -- 4,000 rupees, or about €50 ($70) -- for his little sister Urmila. The family owed money to the landowner whose fields they farmed, there wasn't enough food and the children wore shoes made of bean pods tied to their feet with pieces of rope. Four thousand rupees. It was a lot of money. Urmila's brother agreed to the deal.

Millions of Child Slaves across the World

In Nepali, the word kamalari means "hardworking woman." But these aren't women being sold off and forced to work; they're children between the ages of five and 15, thin-armed girls forced to work 14-16 hours a day in the households of families, fully at the mercy of their owners and exposed to their moods and their beatings. About one in 10 of the girls is sexually abused.

Aid organizations estimate that 10,000 girls work as kamalari in Nepal. As long ago as 1956, the United Nations declared that forms of child labor and bonded labor were slavery and should therefore be outlawed. However, although human trafficking has been officially illegal in all countries for a long time, it still exists to a significant degree in about 70 countries. Indeed, roughly 27 million people across the world are victims of modern slavery -- living in debt bondage, as forced prostitutes and as bonded laborers. Between 40 percent and 50 percent of these are children, and many are in Asia.

In many poor countries, there is a tradition of using child slaves in private households. Children are practical because their personalities are flexible and their characters are as malleable as clay on the sculptor's wheel. Child slaves go by many names: the kamalari in Nepal, the restav�k</i> in Haiti and the abd in Mauritania.

'); document.writeln(''); document.writeln(''); document.writeln(''); } // --> The principle is almost the same everywhere. On the one side are the parents, who are unable to earn enough money to feed their children. On the other are the more affluent members of society, the landowners and businesspeople. In many cases, the people who buy children and raise them to suit their purposes are teachers, lawyers and politicians. The child slaves are rewarded with affection or extra meals, while punishments consist of being denied food, beaten and berated. In the end, they have no choice but to do their work without complaint.

Bought as a Present

Urmila was in the same position as most of the others. "Down there," she says, pointing to a door on the ground floor of the yellow townhouse, "down there in the room next to the kitchen is where I spent the first night." Her brother had taken her on the bus to Ghorahi, a noisy city in southwestern Nepal. With its cars and bicycle rickshaws, the place was completely unlike her village of Manpur. Urmila lay on a mat on the floor next to another girl the house's owner had bought. It was cold. A wedding was being held in the house. The son of the landowner had found a wife, and there were many relatives among the guests, including the owner's daughter. She lived in Katmandu, and Urmila had been bought as a present for her.

"She's so thin and small," the daughter said when she first saw Urmila. "How is she supposed to work properly?" From then on, Urmila was instructed to address the daughter as "maharani," or mistress, and her children as "prince" and "princess." A few days later, the daughter took Urmila with her to an apartment in Katmandu, where she was required to work for 12 people. It would be four years before she saw her parents again, and 11 before she was free.

 

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• Part 1: Victims of Child Slavery Learning to Fight Back
• Part 2: Facing Up to the Past
• Part 3: Victims Helping Victims
• Part 4: New Laws Bring Little Change

� SPIEGEL ONLINE 2011
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH

The Touch project has a new exhibition in collaboration with the Record project at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design.

In recent years we have witnessed the growth of a new breed of consumer products and services that are a hybrid of tangible atoms and online bits. This exhibition offers a selection of products, demonstrators, videos and art objects that highlight the ways in which online social media now are becoming an important part of the functionality, design and desirability of new products and services. As products and services become increasingly digital and disappear into screens, Hybrids exemplifies some alternative strategies, where some of the magic of the social web seep out into the physical world through tangible things.

There are a number of products and services on show, including a new project by Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen:

In this film, Wireless in the world 2, simple visualisations of radio ‘spaces’ are overlaid into urban spaces. The film has been made as a follow up to this video experiment and has been specifically designed for exhibition in HABITAR at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial.

Here is an excerpt from the exhibition description:

“Utopian and radical architects in the 1960s predicted that cities in the future would not only be made of brick and mortar, but also defined by bits and flows of information. The urban dweller would become a nomad who inhabits a space in constant flux, mutating in real time. Their vision has taken on new meaning in an age when information networks rule over many of the city’s functions, and define our experiences as much as the physical infrastructures, while mobile technologies transform our sense of time and of space.”

There are photos of the exhibition by Edgar Gonzalez here. The exhibition catalogue with essays by Anne Galloway, Usman Haque, Nicolas Nova and others is available to download here.

Related things:

1. Wireless in the world An ongoing Touch theme is about making invisible wireless technologies visible, in order to better understand and communicate with and about them (see a Graphic Language for RFID, Dashed lines and Fictional radio spaces).......
2. Immaterials: light painting WiFi “The complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis.” – Adam Greenfield (2009) Immaterials: light painting WiFi film......
3. Depth of field: Film in design research We’ve just had a new article (pdf) published as part of a Research by design issue at Form Akademisk. What follows is a summary of some of the key points, alongside the embedded videos......
4. Designing with film We’ve compiled a short sequence of some of the design experiments and tests in audiovisual media in the Touch project. Here we show some of the ‘behind the scenes’ tests and processes where we......
5. Magnetic Movie In the same vein as the Bubbles of Radio work from last year, Magnetic Movie is a film that explores visible and audible manifestations of radio fields. The film is by Ruth Jarman &......

This video is about exploring the spatial qualities of RFID, visualised through an RFID probe, long exposure photography and animation. It features Timo Arnall of the Touch project and Jack Schulze of BERG.

The problem and opportunity of invisibility

RFID is still badly understood as an interactive technology. Many aspects of RFID interaction are fundamentally invisible; as users we experience two objects communicating through the ‘magic’ of radio waves. This invisibility is also key to the controversial aspects of RFID technology; once RFID antennas are hidden inside products or in environments, they can be invoked or initiated without explicit knowledge or permission. (See here for more on the invisibility of radio.)

But invisibility also offers opportunities: the lack of touch is an enormous usability and efficiency leap for many systems we interact with everyday (hence the success of Oyster, Suica and Octopus cards). But there is also the ‘magic’ of nearness one of the most compelling experiential aspects of RFID.

As designers we took this invisibility as a challenge. We needed to know more about the way that RFID technology inhabits space so that we could better understand the kinds of interactions that can be built with it and the ways it can be used effectively and playfully inside physical products.

The experiments

In order to study the readable volume around an RFID reader, we built experimental probes that would flash an LED light when they successfully read an RFID tag. The readable volume is not the same as the radio field, instead it shows the space within the field in which an RFID tag and an RFID reader will interact with each other.

One version of our probe containing a tag and LED light connected to the RFID reader that is being studied.

In a dark room, the probes were moved around the various RFID tags and readers that we wanted to study, with a camera taking long-exposure photographs of the resulting patterns of light. In this way we could build up layers by slicing through the field in different ways, creating animations that clearly reveal the spatial properties of this interaction.

These experiments were carried out in order to help us flesh out our own models of the technology, and were not intended to be scientifically accurate. So although they accurately reflect the behaviour of the technologies in the situations that we work with, there were no controlled environments or settings for generalisable technical accuracy.

Innovations ID 20

The Innovations ID 20 RFID reader has become one of the standard components in a lot of our work, it is small, robust and relatively cheap. So it has been very important for us to gain an understanding of the readable volume it produces when we embed the reader inside products such as Sniff and Skål.

Details: Innovations ID20 low-frequency EM4102 reader, 20mm circular EM4102 tag.

The resulting visualisation shows the way in which we have mapped the boundary of the readable volume, although a tag will read anywhere inside this, we have only mapped the edge for the sake of clarity. From the animation (see the video) we start to clearly see that the readable volume is made up of a strong central sphere, accompanied by a smaller lobe that surrounds the edge of the reader.

Oyster card

Mifare cards are one of the largest public applications of RFID, used in many transit systems around the world such as the Oyster and Suica cards. It has become common to have to touch in and touch out of subway stations, and many people have become accustomed to this interaction. So what does the readable volume around an Oyster card look like?

Details: Standard Mifare Oyster card, probed with a Sonmicro high-frequency reader.

With a square antenna inside the Oyster and the Sonmicro reader, we get an elongated main volume, accompanied by long skinny lobes on each edge of the card. This looks very different from the ID 20 mapping.

Orientation

The first two mappings held the reader and the tag parallel to each other, but we predicted that there would be a higher degree of complexity in the relationship if the tag and the reader moved in different orientations. The rig below was built so that we could control the angle between the reader and the tag, which moved along the surface of the table.

Details: Innovations ID20 low-frequency EM4102 reader, 50mm circular EM4102 tag.

There is clearly enormous physical complexity in this relationship, in the animation we can see the volume growing and shrinking, lobes turning into spheres, and vice-versa. But the animation gives us a very clear picture of the ‘throw’ of the reader onto a single two-dimensional plane, almost like looking at it as a torch.

Parallel and perpendicular

To show the two extremes of the relationship between orientation and the readable volume, we created two mappings, one with the tag parallel to the reader, and the other with the tag perpendicular. We mapped them using two different colours of LED: green for parallel and red for perpendicular.

Details: Innovations ID20 low-frequency EM4102 reader, 20mm circular EM4102 tag.

This image is a composite of the two mappings (see the video for animations of the two mappings separately) and it is clear that the readable volume is significantly different. When the tag is perpendicular to the reader, there is a sizeable gap in the middle of the reader where the tag will not read, creating two readable volumes side by side.

Conclusions

We have been continually challenging the ways in which RFID technology has been framed. It is incredible how often RFID is seen as a long-range ‘detector’ or how little relevant information is contained in technical data-sheets. When this information is the primary material that we are working with as designers, this is highly problematic. By doing these kind of experiments we can re-frame the technology according to our experience of it, and generate our own material knowledge.

One of the early motivations in this project was the way in which the animations really captured our tacit, embodied knowledge of the readable volume in a visual way, it was almost as if you could wave your hand through the floating green LEDs and feel them. Of course we had felt it hundreds of times in experimenting with tags and readers, but we had never seen it captured in an image, in a way that was communicable to others without having them try an interactive demonstrator. With this visual material, we can communicate about RFID in ways that we couldn’t previously.

So we hope that this work goes some way towards building better spatial and gestural models of RFID, as material for designers to build better products and to take full advantage of the various ways in which spatial proximity can be used. And with this better understanding we hope to be able to discuss and design for privacy and the ‘leakage’ of data in a more rigorous way.

Field icon

Download a PDF file of the RFID icon.

This RFID icon is based on the shape of the ‘readable volume’. Created by Timo Arnall & Jack Schulze, it is licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Go ahead and use it!

Credits

The project was made by Timo Arnall and Einar Sneve Martinussen from AHO and Jack Schulze from BERG. Thanks to Jørn Knutsen for help in building the rigs.

Related things:

1. Making radio tangible Next week we’re launching some new work that explores the spatial aspects of RFID. So before we publish that, here is a quick summary of existing work on radio, sensors and space that I’ve......
2. Immaterials: light painting WiFi “The complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis.” – Adam Greenfield (2009) Immaterials: light painting WiFi film......
3. Wireless in the world An ongoing Touch theme is about making invisible wireless technologies visible, in order to better understand and communicate with and about them (see a Graphic Language for RFID, Dashed lines and Fictional radio spaces).......
4. New film: Wireless in the World 2 In this film, Wireless in the world 2, simple visualisations of radio ‘spaces’ are overlaid into urban spaces. The film has been made as a follow up to this video experiment and has been......
5. Fictional radio-spaces In spring 2007 interaction design students at AHO participated in a research-driven course called Tangible interactions that investigated themes around RFID, NFC and the Touch project. This is one of the projects that emerged......

Thousands of NASA Kennedy Space Center employees stand side-by-side to form a full-scale outline of a space shuttle orbiter outside the Vehicle Assembly Building on March 18, 2011. The unique photo opportunity was designed to honor the space shuttle program's 30-year legacy CREDIT: NASA/Kim Shiflett View full size image   NASA's 30-year space shuttle program has literally relied on a cast of thousands to launch astronauts into orbit. Those diehard space workers have given their passion form in a new photo that shows a life-size shuttle made only of humans. In the new photo, released March 18, thousands of shuttle workers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., gathered in an empty parking lot to pay tribute to the space shuttle program. A time-lapse video of the event shows the crowd gradually converging to create the life-size outline of a space shuttle surrounded by a ring of people. NASA's massive Vehicle Assembly Building provides a backdrop for the image. The 52-story structure is where space shuttles are attached to their external tanks and twin solid rocket boosters before launch.   "The unique photo opportunity was designed to honor the space shuttle program's 30-year legacy and the people who contribute to safely processing, launching and landing the vehicle," NASA officials said in a statement. NASA is retiring its three flying space shuttles (Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis) this year to make way for a new space exploration program aimed at sending astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit. The shuttle Discovery completed its final space shuttle mission, STS-133, this month after 39 spaceflights. Endeavour will fly its final mission in April, with Atlantis slated to launch on its final voyage in late June. [Photos: STS-133: Discovery's Final Mission] President Barack Obama has directed NASA to shift its space exploration goal from returning astronauts to the moon to sending a human expedition to an asteroid by 2025. NASA's space shuttle fleet began launching into orbit on April 12, 1981 when the Columbia orbiter blasted off on the first mission: STS-1. The space agency will have flown 135 missions by the end of the program. After their final missions, all three space shuttles will be retired to museums. NASA is expected to announce which museums will get the three space-flown shuttles, as well as the test orbiter Enterprise – which was used for landing tests only – on April 12.  You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter @tariqjmalik. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Researchers at Stanford University have shown it's possible to double the data rate of communication networks without the need for additional frequencies, something that could lead to significantly faster wireless networking.

Described by its inventors as "simple and effective," the new technique relies on three antennas, instead of the two found in the latest 801.11n wireless devices. It allows full-duplex communications on the same frequency (that is, simultaneous send and receive), something considered before now to be physically impossible.

The radio spectrum is becoming increasingly congested and boosting speeds without requiring additional frequencies is the Holy Grail of electrical engineering.

When a radio device transmits, its broadcasts are too strong for it to receive any signals. It's like two people conversing; if you're speaking, it's impossible to hear what another is saying. Both parties must take turns to speak, and generally speaking this is how radio transmissions have worked until now.

The trick behind doubling speeds is to use something akin to noise cancellation found in some headphones. Because the transmitting device knows exactly what it's sending, it can filter it out in order to hear weaker incoming transmissions. Thus, two-way communications on the same frequency can take place.

"Textbooks say you can't do it," says Philip Levis, one of the team behind the invention and assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford. "The new system completely reworks our assumptions about how wireless networks can be designed."

The team behind the invention showed it off at MobiCom 2010 last year, a gathering of mobile networking experts, and won a prize for the best demo. Fellow researchers told them they didn't expect it to work and, when it did, said it was so obvious that it had probably already been invented.

There's still some way to go before the technology will make it into consumer or business equipment. For example, the researchers are still working on a way for their invention to work over the kind of distances required for typical wireless networking.

Additionally, wireless networking relies on standards that are adopted by all manufacturers, which is why you can use an Dell laptop with a D-Link router, for example. These standards are controlled by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the invention would have to be cleared by the 802.11 working group before being formed into a new standard. That's likely to take many years to complete, although progress could be speeded-up by the lack of need to set aside new frequencies.

The team is also seeking a patent for its work--which could restrict implementations of the technology--and limit it to Artwork: Chip Taylorthose manufacturers who can afford to pay a fee. Because of this, the technology might manifest within future Wi-Fi devices as an extension to the existing wireless standards, usable only if the receiving computing device also has the extension.

This isn't uncommon among wireless device manufacturers, It's easy to imagine a company like Apple paying for the technology to be used in its AirPort base station and computers, for example, to double wireless networking speeds and give their products a competitive advantage.

Keir Thomas has been making known his opinion about computing matters since the last century, and more recently has written several best-selling books. You can learn more about him at http://keirthomas.com. His Twitter feed is @keirthomas.