Everybody loves elevators, right? They help us get up and down in buildings without taking the dreaded stairs. Well Mitsubishi Electric is constructing an elevator for the Shanghai Tower in China, which is 119 stories tall! The elevator is said to move 59ft/sec, which is a little over 40MPH! There will be 106 elevators in the building after the consturction is finished, 7 of these elevators will be the highspeed ones moving at more than 40 MPH. The building is supposed to open to the public in 2014. If China can have them so can we, right? Maybe after the building opens up to the public these fast speed elevators will become popular and come to the U.S. This would let us get scale the building at an extreme rate!
Rumors have come out that Apple will introduce a TV late in 2012. Steve Jobs hinted about Apple coming out with a TV at the All Things Digital Conference last year. There isin't much info about the expected release of an Apple TV out yet, but I'm sure that if Apple really does release a TV it will probably be able to do more things than any of the TV's out now can do. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if Apple pulls through with the TV or not. And if it does, I'm sure people will be going crazy during Christmas time trying to get ahold of the new Apple Television!
At Cornell University's Personal Robotics Lab scientists are working to make robot computers think like humans. They are trying to teach robots to learn new things by using what they are already programmed to know. They basically want robots to be able to generalize about things instead of having to program each and every thing individually. For example, instead of programming a robot to know that a specific kind of cup is a cup, they are trying to program the robots with general info about cups so that they will be able to recognize various types of cups. Also, it is easier for a robot to pick something up than put it down. When a robot sets something down they have to make sure that the surface they are putting it on is stable. It is easy for a robot to pick a plate up, but, to put it in the dishwasher upright is a bit more challenging. Cornell is working on making robots work as efficiently as they can without having to spend large amouts of time programming every task. I think that if they can basically perfect what the robot does then maybe some day in the future people will have robots in their house to clean and pick up after them. Humans are pretty lazy after all and a robot would be able to help out.
Apple comes out with new apps all the time. Here's one that's new. You can download an app called Postcard on the Run. All you do is take a picture of whatever you want to be on your postcard, write whatever you want to be on the postcard and the app turns it into a real postcard for you! It actually makes your postcard and will sent it to whoever you want! Maybe in the future noone will be postcards because everyone will be maing their own!
Will Apple Ever Learn?
One of apples employees took the iphone 5 prototype out and actually lost it! The employee left it at a bar in San Francisco. Apparently, the iphone 5 was sold on Craigslist for $200. Somehow apple traced the iphone to a house in San Francisco but the homeowners said they knew nothing about the phone. Last year the iphone 4 prototype was lost and now the iphone 5. You would think that apple wouldn't make the same mistake twice but they did! The iphone 5 is supposed to be released in October. I guess we'll see if that still happens now that the prototype is missing. We could be impacted because the lost prototype could cause a late release of the phone. I'm sure the iphone 5 will be able to do more things on a phone than any other phones out there and probably at a faster rate.
