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Americans are woefully unprepared for retirement…  The retirement squeeze

For a while, it seemed that Wi-Fi was becoming a victim of its own success. In many cities, there are numerous active Wi-Fi networks on those preciously few non-overlapping channels—that's in addition to microwaves, bluetooth, cordless phones, and baby monitors, which all share the 2.4GHz band. But since about 2007, Apple has also built support for 802.11n Wi-Fi on the 5GHz band into its computers and Airport line of Wi-Fi base stations. Now, the iPhone 5 and the latest iPod touch also have that support. (The iPad has had it since day one.) So, how do you set up a Wi-Fi network that makes the most of this confluence of Wi-Fi bands? Not created equal First of all, it's important to realize that the two bands are created very differently. The 2.4GHz band suffers from lack of non-overlapping channels and interference from other devices. But the lower frequencies pass through walls and floors reasonably well. The 5GHz band on the other hand, has a much larger number of channels—and they don't overlap—but the higher frequencies have reduced range, even in open air. In addition to this, Apple only supports using two channels as a single, double-speed wide channel in the 5GHz band. If all else is equal, 5GHz is twice as fast as 2.4GHz. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

When massive, open-pit mines like the Minera Escondida —in Chile's Atacama Desert—need to pull millions of tons of minerals out of the ground each year, they rely on fleets of huge, "Ultra-Class" haul trucks. The ETF Haul Train, however, pulls four times the minerals of these stone-toting behemoths with just one driver. More »

Douglas sez, 18 months ago Boing Boing posted about EFF's effort to get Ubuntu to make full disk encryption (FDE) easy upon install. EFF has delivered. I'm sure many of us have had and continue to have the experience of trying to nudge someone (or ourselves) over from OS X or Windows to GNU/Linux and LUKS full disk encryption, but the process got roadblocked at some point because using the alternate installer to config the partitions and all for FDE was just too much of a hassle for parties involved. Now in Ubuntu 12.10, FDE is just a tickbox in the default installer. How cool is that? This means it's a good time to donate to EFF . And if you're using Ubuntu 12.10, don't forget to fix the privacy problems for which EFF provides a tutorial (thanks again!). ( Thanks, Doug ! )

It's unlikely that you speak Mandarin, but that doesn't mean you won't need to at some point. Now, Microsoft has created software that can analyze your speech, translate it and then spit out a new recording of your very own voice speaking in a different language. More »

We've all heard the expression "haste makes waste," but how about waste making energy? At the fourth annual Maker Faire Africa in Lagos, Nigeria, a quartet of teenage girls ages 14 through 15 have created a urine-powered generator. This eco-friendly energy source cranks out six hours of electricity for every liter of human bodily fluid by separating the excretion's hydrogen with an electrolytic cell. While this method of human waste disposal seems promising, the device has the potential to be a pee-powered biobomb and will need more than its limited safety measures before you're able to pick one up at your local hardware store. However, if this can help us save a few bucks on our energy bill, then we need to introduce these girls to these guys posthaste. Filed under: Science , Alt Urine-powered generator produces six hours of electricity per bathroom break originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Nov 2012 22:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink   Psfk  |  Maker Faire Africa  |  Email this  |  Comments

In an effort to boost its tourism industry, South Korea is considering a project that would see the construction of a $275 billion mega-city built on the islands of Yongyu-Muui in the port city of Incheon, next to Incheon International Airport. Called 8City, the attraction is expected to create 930,000 new jobs and attract 134 million tourists (mostly from China). But given the cost, it's an open question as to whether it will ever get built. More »

The Maya civilization was among the most advanced in history, and its disintegration has perplexed researchers for ages. One of the most compelling theories to date suggests that a shifting climate, playing puppeteer to sociopolitical marionettes, had a devastating role in the Maya's downfall. Now, researchers have combined remarkably detailed climate data — recorded in a Central American stalagmite — with historical records to help determine what really happened to this mysterious Mesoamerican society. More »

At Gizmodo, Jeff Wise writes about antivirus firm MacAfee founder John McAfee’s bizarre life in Belize, holed up with heavily-armed gang members, "garbage bags full of Viagra," 17 year old local girls, did we mention lots and lots of guns, and many unanswered questions.

As you might have noticed, we've had quite a bit of Asian design coverage lately (with a few more stories to come): between the second annual Beijing Design Week , a trip to Shanghai for Interior Lifestyle China and last week's design events in Tokyo , we're hoping to bring you the best of design from the Eastern Hemisphere this fall. Of course, I'll be the first to admit that our coverage hasn't been quite as quick as we'd like, largely due to the speed bump of the language barrier. At least two of your friendly Core77 Editors speak passable Mandarin, but when it comes to parsing large amounts of technical information, the process becomes significantly more labor-intensive than your average blogpost... which is precisely why I was interested to learn that Microsoft Research is on the case. In a recent talk in Tianjin, China, Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid (no relation to Karim) presented their latest breakthrough in speech recognition technology, a significant improvement from the 20–25% error of current software. Working with a team from the University of Toronto, Microsoft Research has "reduced the word error rate for speech by over 30% compared to previous methods. This means that rather than having one word in 4 or 5 incorrect, now the error rate is one word in 7 or 8." An abridged transcript of the talk is available on the Microsoft Next blog if you want to follow along: In the late 1970s a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University made a significant breakthrough in speech recognition using a technique called hidden Markov modeling which allowed them to use training data from many speakers to build statistical speech models that were much more robust. As a result, over the last 30 years speech systems have gotten better and better. In the last 10 years the combination of better methods, faster computers and the ability to process dramatically more data has led to many practical uses. Just over two years ago, researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Toronto made another breakthrough. By using a technique called Deep Neural Networks, which is patterned after human brain behavior, researchers were able to train more discriminative and better speech recognizers than previous methods. Once Rashid has gotten the audience up to speed, he starts discussing how current technology is implemented in extant translation services (5:03). "It happens in two steps," he explains. "The first takes my words and finds the Chinese equivalents, and while non-trivial, this is the easy part. The second reorders the words to be appropriate for Chinese, an important step for correct translation between languages." Short though it may be, the talk is a slow build of relatively dry subject matter until Rashid gets to the topic at hand at 6:45: "Now the last step that I want to take is to be able to speak to you in Chinese." But listening to him talk for those first seven-and-a-half minutes is exactly the point : the software has extrapolated Rashid's voice from an hour-long speech sample, and it modulates the translated audio based on his English speech patterns . Thus, I recommend watching (or at least listening) to the video from the beginning to get a sense for Rashid's inflection and timbre... but here's the payoff: (more...)