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Someday, this fishboat robot-thing could be surveilling the oceans.

It’s the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Of the many terrible lessons learned from the event, perhaps the most tragic is the shocking inadequacy of current cleanup technology. Given how often we spill oil this is an urgent problem.

Enter Protei: an open source, shapeshifting, oil-spill-cleaning sailboat drone. Developed by a globally connected network of designers, engineers, tinkerers, and makers who are hell-bent on finding a better way to clean up the ocean, Protei kicked off just after the Deepwater Horizon accident.

“I was working at MIT as project leader developing technologies to clean up the oil spill using patented expensive technologies for a distant future,” says project coordinator Cesar Harada. “I decided to quit my dream job to develop an Open Hardware, affordable, and realist technology to clean up oil spills.”

Protei prototype v008 set sail in March.

Harada left MIT and headed to New Orleans, where he worked with The Louisiana Bucket Brigade to map the spill. Meanwhile, he began designing Protei.

Oil skimming is an old technology. It hasn’t been much improved since the 1990 Exxon Valdez spill, which prompted regulations that oil companies maintain emergency skimmer fleets.

Dumped oil mostly floats on sea water and drifts downwind, away from the spill. The challenges of cleanup are multitude: Weather conditions on the ocean do not lend themselves to careful skimming; the work is dangerous, exposing people to incredibly toxic materials; and it’s hard to separate oil from water completely, so a lot of the slick gets left behind.

Protei attempts to address these problems by creating an autonomous sailing vessel that pulls behind it a long, oil-absorbent boom. Without a human crew, the drone poses no safety threats. The idea is that you could set a swarm of the robot skiffs out to sea, on the downwind edge of the spill. As they tack back and forth against the wind, their tails would collect oil.

Protei’s bow rudder makes steering easy, even with a heavy tail, and the boat has a shape-shifting hull, which allows it to twist and bend like a fish. “Fish — and their shape-shifting bodies — existed long before humans, so we know we’re on the right track,” says Harada. But his greatest achievement, he says, is having developed a community around the project, which makes it advance much more quickly than an invention with a single author.

“If you are developing environmental technology, you want to make sure it is going to reach the greatest number at the lowest cost possible, as fast as possible,” he says.

An introduction to the Protei community.

The biggest barrier to solving technical problems with any project isn’t the pace of discovery, Harada says, but the requirement of keeping a tight hold on intellectual property that comes with receiving funding. So he dispensed with the idea of a traditional company and launched the project on Kickstarter with an open hardware license.

The community is documenting the shifting design process and every prototype it makes. At each step of the way, it offers its lessons to the world.

“Version after version, we keep improving the design and discovering new properties,” Harada says.

If successful, Protei could go well beyond oil spills. “We have several hundreds of millions of tons of plastic in the ocean to collect. We need distributed surface instrumentation to study disappearing corals reefs, monitor shrinking fisheries, measure radioactivity leaks and much more,” Harada says.

“Saying we are ‘motivated’ is a weak word.”

All images courtesy Protei

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The U.S. Air Force is quietly assembling the world’s most powerful air-to-air fighting team at bases near Iran. Stealthy F-22 Raptors on their first front-line deployment have joined a potent mix of active-duty and Air National Guard F-15 Eagles, including some fitted with the latest advanced radars. The Raptor-Eagle team has been honing special tactics for clearing the air of Iranian fighters in the event of war.

The fighters join a growing naval armada that includes Navy carriers, submarines, cruisers and destroyers plus patrol boats and minesweepers enhanced with the latest close-in weaponry.

It’s been years since the Air Force has maintained a significant dogfighting presence in the Middle East. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq Boeing-made F-15Cs flew air patrols from Saudi Arabia, but the Iraqi air force put up no resistance and the Eagle squadrons soon departed. For the next nine years Air Force deployments to the Middle East were handled by ground-attack planes such as A-10s, F-16s and twin-seat F-15E Strike Eagles.

The 1980s-vintage F-15Cs, plagued by structural problems, stayed home in the U.S. and Japan. The brand-new F-22s, built by Lockheed Martin, suffered their own mechanical and safety problems. When they ventured from their home bases in Virginia, Alaska and New Mexico, it was only for short training exercises over the Pacific. The F-15Cs and F-22s sat out last year’s Libya war.

The Air Force fixed the F-15s and partially patched up the F-22s just in time for the escalating stand-off over Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program. In March the Air Force deployed the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s 104th Fighter Wing, flying 20 standard F-15Cs, to an “undisclosed” air base in Southwest Asia — probably either Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates or Al Udeid in Qatar. The highly-experienced Massachusetts Guardsmen, who typically have several years more experience than their active-duty counterparts, would be ready “should Iran test the 104th,” said wing commander Col. Robert Brooks.

Upgraded F-15Cs from the 18th Wing in Japan joined the Guard Eagles. The Japan-based fighters have the latest APG-63(V)2 and (V)3 radars, manufactured by Raytheon. They’re electronically-scanned radars that radiate many individual beams from fixed antenna clusters and track more targets, faster, than old-model mechanical radars that must physically swivel back and forth. The 18th Wing is working up a fleet of 54 updated Eagles spread across two squadrons. The video above, shot by an F-15 pilot, depicts some of the wing’s training.

F-22s followed this month. “Multiple” Raptors deployed to Al Dhafra, according to Amy Butler at Aviation Week. Air Force spokesman Capt. Phil Ventura confirmed the deployment. It’s not clear where the Raptors came from. If they’re from the Alaska-based 3rd Wing, they’re the latest Increment 3.1 model with boosted bombing capabilities in addition to the standard air-to-air weaponry. In any event, the Middle East mission represents the first time F-22s are anywhere near a possible combat zone.

The mix of old and upgraded F-15s and ultra-modern F-22s is no accident. When the Pentagon stopped producing the nearly $400-million-a-copy Raptor after 187 units — half as many as the Air Force said it needed — the flying branch committed to keeping 250 F-15Cs in service until 2025 at the earliest. Pilots began developing team tactics for the two fighter types.

“We have a woefully tiny F-22 fleet,” said Gen. Mike Hostage, the Air Force’s main fighter commander. So the flying branch worked out a system whereby large numbers of F-15s cover for small numbers of Raptors that sneak in around an enemy’s flank in full stealth mode. “Our objective is to fly in front with the F-22s, and have the persistence to stay there while the [F-22s] are conducting their [low-observable] attack,” Maj. Todd Giggy, an Eagle pilot, told Aviation Week.

One thing to look for is the presence in the Middle East of one of the Air Force’s handful of bizjets and Global Hawk drones fitted with the Northrop Grumman Battlefield Airborne Communications Node, or Bacon. The F-22, once envisioned as a solitary hunter, was designed without the radio data-links that are standard on F-15s and many other jets. Instead, the Raptor has its own unique link that is incompatible with the Eagle. Bacon helps translate the radio signals so the two jet types can swap information. With a Bacon plane nearby, F-22s and F-15s can silently exchange data — for example, stealthy Raptors spotting targets for the Eagles.

It’s the methods above that the U.S. dogfighting armada would likely use to wipe out the antiquated but determined Iranian air force if the unthinkable occurred and fighting broke out. The warplanes are in place. The pilots are ready. Hopefully they won’t be needed.

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By Mark Brown, Wired UK

The Aurora Borealis is beautiful from the ground, but what does it look like from the air? A team of atmospheric physicists sent 30 balloons with HD cameras attached up to find out.

“The project had three main goals,” says Ben Longmier, plasma physicist and rocket scientist at Ad Astra Rocket Company and lecturer in physics at the University of Houston. “Firstly, we were looking to answer some questions about the Aurora, to understand the physics and science around the Aurora and learn how to better predict it. Secondly, we wanted to develop new technology to enable us to answer these questions, this included developing HD imaging of the Aurora and new plasma instruments to stabilize the payloads for imaging. We also needed to develop a way to control the balloon buoyancy.

“Thirdly, education outreach, specifically highlighting the connection to science, technology, engineering and maths. The goal was to motivate students of all ages and to inspire them to understand that life in science doesn’t have to be mundane or boring and it can be cutting edge and take you to very unique environments.”

The team attached GoPro HD cameras to the high-altitude balloon rigs, and released them into the sky during the aurora. The results can be seen in the time-lapse video attached to this post. A second camera is in shot because the team needed one to capture the images and a second to flash and project light onto the first camera to make it possible to get the exposure right. Once the balloons got so high that the pressure popped them, they parachuted back to Earth, where the footage was recovered.

Longmier said, “Fresh powder and new snowfalls also made retrieving the balloons along with all the data and images they had gathered challenging. This slowed what would have been a simple three to five mile hike into anywhere between a three to 17 hour snowshoe and snowmobile adventure!”

He added: “We were lucky to get three exceptionally bright nights of the Aurora. We launched on two of the nights and managed to get three really good launches. One piece of footage looks fantastic. One piece we recovered but unfortunately the electronics failed so we didn’t get any data.

“Two more weren’t recovered and are somewhere in the Alaska desert — it would have required a 12-hour expedition to find them and our team didn’t have enough time. We were out of snow machine range and dog sledding and the helicopter couldn’t land in the area as there are too many trees. We are posting the co-ordinates online to allow local boy scouts, clubs or other groups to go their own expedition and find them. As a reward we will allow them to keep the camera, we just need them to return the GPS tracking devices and SD Cards.”

If that sounds tempting, Longmier says the coordinates will be posted online “soon”. Keep an eye on the Project Aether website for that.

Videos: WiredVideoUK/YouTube

Source: Wired.co.uk

A few months ago, the X Prize Foundation sponsored a video contest that asked a deceptively simple question: Why do you explore?

Exploration is a distinctively human trait and something that the Foundation has incentivized through large monetary rewards, but it is also a deeply personal endeavor that affects and inspires everyone differently.  Nonetheless, many entrants echoed similar refrains: to engage with other cultures, to learn something new, to experience beautiful parts of our planet.  The submissions ranged in production value, and the judges selected four finalists: dude explorer Ryan Van Duzer, whose narration begins, “I explore because it makes me feel ALIVE!” (emphasis his) and continues to describe his journeys to Honduras and the Himalaya; underdog Samantha Gary, who produced a delightful stop motion animation; Brit Alastair Humphreys, whose four-man row across the Atlantic Ocean captures the plodding monotony and accents of excitement that characterize many endurance pursuits; and Joe Capra, a time-lapse photography guru.

In the end, public votes crowned Capra the winner for his four-minute video compilation of time-lapse scenes he shot during a 17-day trip around Iceland.  The images capture Iceland’s raw power – thundering waterfalls, ice-capped peaks – in a colorful mash-up that may as well have been funded by Iceland’s tourism office.

(Capra’s video leads off this post; the other three are at the bottom.)

The Los Angeles-based Capra first became enamored with Iceland after seeing the work of another photographer online.  “I had to go,” he recalls, “so I saved up all of my vacation days and bought a ticket.”  He went during the summer, when the days never really end and the island is constantly bathed in a flattering light.  Photographers often speak reverently of the “golden hour” – the first and last hours of light during the day – as the ideal time to shoot, the time when the light is softer and shadows are longer.  But during the Icelandic summer, the golden hour becomes 5, 6, or 7 hours of every day, a photographer’s dream.

For Capra, however, it was a sleepless dream, as the midnight sun allowed him to shoot most of his 38,000 images between 11 PM and 6 AM.  A typical scene took about a half hour, and the resulting 300-900 images would be edited and compressed into a few-second clip.  Some shots use a stationary vantage point, but Capra prefers “motion control,” which pans or tracks across a landscape in a more natural, engaging way.

“Before this equipment was commercially available,” Capra recalls, “I had to custom make my own tracking device” that moves the camera smoothly and slowly along a track.  When the images are compressed and the half hour becomes 3 seconds, the tracking turns into a naturally paced movement.

Before setting out for Iceland, Capra had done urban time lapse pieces.  “Working in cities is tough,” he says, “because people come up to you, interrupt, knock over your stuff.”  But Iceland was an entirely different sort of adventure.  “It was almost as if I got picked up and dropped on another planet, all by myself, and I had the opportunity to explore it however I wanted.”  Capra would scale volcanoes and drop down into mossy valleys, experimenting with new photographic techniques along the way.  He may not have been trekking across continents in the traditional mold of a headstrong explorer, “but hopefully I’ve allowed people to see these places in a new way.  And that’s what exploration is all about to me.”

The Grand Prize includes $10,000 towards a National Geographic Expedition, and Capra is salivating over the possibilities.  The leading contenders are Antarctica, Patagonia, or Africa, and regardless of his ultimate choice, we can no doubt look forward to another edition of his trademark photography.

‘Tune into Radio and Experience the Power and Freedom of Desktop Web Publishing,’ reads Radio UserLand’s site. Image: Courtesy of Radio UserLand

When the blogosphere booted up at the turn of the century, I’d already been publishing online for years. So personal publishing wasn’t a revelation to me, though I knew it would be for many who hadn’t experienced it yet. But as bloggers came online, and as blogs began to intertwingle, the ensuing network effects did surprise and delight me. I was experiencing for the first time, with other bloggers, the sort of decentralized collaboration that Tim Berners-Lee had imagined from the start. Two key principles made it work: the publish-and-subscribe communication pattern, and ownership of data.

I knew how “pub/sub” could knit together software systems made of “loosely-coupled” parts. Now I saw that it would also enable people to interact with those systems, and with one another, in the same loosely-coupled way.

When Twitter came along years later there was much fanfare about a supposedly newfangled pattern called asymmetric follow. But there was nothing new about it. Twitter implemented the same pub/sub mechanism we’d known since the dawn of the blogosphere. I could subscribe to your blog, and/or you could subscribe to mine. Same with Twitter feeds, but now the data packets were smaller and faster so the activation threshold was lower. It was that, not the advent of a fundamentally new communication pattern, that triggered the phase change.

My first blogging platform was Dave Winer’s Radio UserLand. One of Dave’s mantras was: “Own your words.” As the blogosophere became a conversational medium, I saw what that could mean. Radio UserLand did not, at first, support comments. That turned out to be a constraint well worth embracing. When conversation emerged, as it inevitably will in any system of communication, it was a cross-blog affair. I’d quote something from your blog on mine, and discuss it. You’d notice, and perhaps write something on your blog referring back to mine.

This cross-blog conversational mode had an interesting property: you owned your words. Everything you wrote went into your own online space, was bound to your identity, became part of your permanent record. As a result, discourse tended to be more civil than what often transpired in Usenet newsgroups or web forums. In those kinds of online spaces, your sense of identity is attenuated. You may or may not be pseudonymous, but either way the things you say don’t stick to you in the same way they do if you say them in your own permanent online space.

The problem with cross-blog conversation was that it was too loosely coupled. So now blogs do have forum-style comments which concentrate discussion but recreate the original problems: attenuation of identity, loss of ownership of data.

Could we have the best of both worlds? Here’s how it might work. I want to participate in a comment thread on your blog. So I write my comment, post it to my personal cloud, capture its URL, and post the URL to your comment thread. Your blog’s comment system syndicates the text of my comment into the thread, identifying my personal cloud as the source.

Admittedly there would be challenges. How will your system decide whether to trust mine? What if my personal cloud doesn’t respond when the comment system invokes my URL? How can the comment system instantly gather comments from many sources? How will it know when I’ve made an edit that it should transclude? But we have technologies — OAuth, caching, notification — to meet these challenges.

There are also huge opportunities. Consider, for example, the as yet unconsummated marriage between blogs and scientific discourse. There are plenty of science blogs, including ones written by working scientists. But few scientist-bloggers can consider writing on their own blogs, or participating in blog discourse, to be the sorts of professional activities that count for reputation, advancement, and tenure. Which is tragic because the smaller/faster packets of data that flow in blog discourse ought to powerfully augment the more stately flow of ideas through the network of peer-reviewed journals.

One notable exception to the rule is Tim Gowers, a mathematician whose stature (he’s a Fields medalist) confers a level of autonomy that’s rare in the academy. Gowers suspected it might be possible to use the blog medium to harness the collective intelligence of a large group of mathematicians, and use that group mind to solve hard problems. Thus was born the Polymath project, chronicled by Michael Nielsen on his blog and in his important new book, Reinventing Discovery.

Thanks in part to a little-known feature of WordPress — its composition and rendering engines support LaTeX, the popular mathematical notation — Gowers’ intuition proved correct. Some hard problems did yield to intense and equation-rich discussion in comment threads on the Polymath blog.

In theory the contributions made by each participating mathematician are part of that person’s personal cloud and permanent record. In practice, because we don’t really own the words we post as comments to other people’s blogs, they’re not. But imagine if things did work that way. Each contribution would exist as a web resource named by an URL bound to the identity of the contributor. References to each contribution, whether from within the comment thread, from elsewhere on the web, or even from a journal not openly available on the web, would point to its canonical URL. Citation is the lifeblood of academic reputation. When citations are links to personal clouds, the influence of those clouds can be discovered and measured.

The web, like many technologies, evolves cyclically. We forget that Amaya, the first web browser, was a tool for writing as well as reading. When blogs introduced the notion of a “two-way web” it seemed new but wasn’t. The seed was there all along. Likewise when we can own all our words, while engaging in a pub/sub discourse that flows among our personal clouds and others, it’ll seem new but won’t be. The blogosphere planted important seeds, some of which haven’t yet grown and fruited. They will.

Firefox 13′s New Tab page

With Firefox 12 out the door, Mozilla is turning its efforts to polishing up Firefox 13, due out six weeks from now.

If you don’t want to wait that long, you can download Firefox 13 from the beta release channel today.

Perhaps the best new feature in Firefox 13 is what’s known as “tabs on demand.” Tabs on demand refers to the way Firefox restarts when you have multiple tabs open. Firefox will now only restore the currently selected tab, background tabs are not loaded. Tabs on demand is a welcome relief for those of us who browse with dozens of tabs open all the time. You no longer need to fear restarting the browser since you won’t have to wait while every tab reloads. Instead, tabs will load only when you select them.

Firefox 13 will bring a slightly new look to some parts of the browser, both the New Tab and the Home Page have been redesigned. The New Tab page now has links to your most recently and frequently visited sites. It looks more or less just like Opera’s Speed Dial, which Chrome also mimics. There’s an option to pin your favorite sites, as well as a button for rejecting sites you don’t want to see.

The default Home Page now has links to menu items like Bookmarks, History, Settings, Add-ons, Downloads and Sync Preferences. There’s nothing here that you can’t access from the menu bar, but it makes frequently used menu items easier for newcomers to find.

Web developers will be glad to know that Firefox 13 introduces support for Google’s not-quite-yet-a-standard SPDY protocol (technically the last two Firefox releases have supported SPDY, but this is the first to have it enabled by default). The SPDY protocol improves on HTTP and in many cases can significantly reduce page load times. SPDY’s other main advantage over HTTP is that all traffic is encrypted. Once Firefox 13 and the Opera 12 preview arrive in final form the majority of desktop browsers on the web will support SPDY.

The Firefox 13 beta also brings a number of improvements to the new Developer Tools. For example, the Page Inspector now allows you to lock in CSS pseudo-classes on inspected page elements — handy for checking out what’s happening in a :hover code block.

For more details on everything that’s new in the developer tools and the rest of Firefox 13, check out Mozilla’s release notes.

Over at The Atlantic Cities, I have an article about a data visualization project of mine. Working with my collaborators, DeDe Paul of ATT, Vincent Blondel of Belgium’s Université catholique de Louvain, and Dominik Dahlem of IBM, we set out to examine the complex borders that divide people, separate from all the geopolitical borders:

When we think about borders, we tend to think of administrative boundaries. Those demarcating lines, often grown out of rivers and mountain ranges or diplomatic quirks, govern our daily lives, and that’s doubly so if we live near a neighboring country or state.

We know that these boundaries are on some level unnatural. Driving around Kansas City, where I live, makes this abundantly clear. Gas price differences aside, it can be difficult to tell which state you’re in, Missouri or Kansas, and the small street of State Line Road does nothing to make it clearer.

But are there more organic borders, brought to life by our own actions and activities? I recently set out, along with a team from MIT and ATT, to see if I could find an answer. Previously, members of our group had collaborated to use mobile phone call and text message records to determine how tightly connected different counties are to each other. But communication is far from the only way in which we are connected or separated. We can be connected based on where we move, how we speak, and even what sports teams we root for.

We combined a variety of datasets, from politics to language to how people move and talk to each other to create the above map, in order to see if there were unified borders and regions in the United States:

We combined several maps into one to see if any patterns emerged. At first glance, the result seems incredibly messy, although there are certain borders that do jump out (such as the Mississippi River, for example). But when we zoomed in on smaller regions, it was easier to pick out a few natural borders.

For example, New England is incontrovertibly a single region, connected by interaction, mobility, and culture. Similarly, certain states such as Texas and Kansas are their own distinctive regions.

On the other hand, New Jersey and California have a distinct bisection that divides them, though not always in the same way or place.

The complete article, with lots of maps, is here.

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Add one more item to the list of challenges that returning soldiers face coming home after a deployment: driving on civilian roads.

A new study shows that in their first six months back home, members of the military have 13 percent more at-fault accidents than they did in the six months before they deployed. Enlisted personnel had 22 percent more accidents, non-commissioned officers had 10 percent more and officers 3.5 percent more.

The “Returning Warriors” study was commissioned by USAA, the financial services company that exclusively serves active military, veterans and their families. USAA is also a car insurer, so they had access to all their members’ records. During the course of the three-year study, they examined the before-and-after effects of over 171,000 overseas deployments. Full findings are due to be released soon.

The insurer chalks up the increased number of accidents to a phenomenon known as “carryover,” when returning soldiers bring home driving techniques they needed during deployment. For example, soldiers who had to keep an eye out for potentially deadly roadside bombs may drive more slowly, while those charged with covering as much ground as possible may still have a lead foot. And if military personnel have trained to follow another vehicle in a convoy, chances are they may have trouble yielding to oncoming traffic or stopping at intersections.

Compared to those in the Navy and Air Force, crash rates were far higher for those in the Marines and the Army, who have spent more time behind the wheel in the most recent wars. Additionally, according to claims data, the most common cause of an at-fault accident was losing control of a vehicle. There was also a dramatic increase in crashes related to an “object in the road” which, though vague, suggests that drivers either impacted an obstacle or had an accident while swerving to avoid it.

The study’s authors also found that returning soldiers under age 22 had more than three times higher crash rates than older drivers. Those with multiple deployments also had higher crash rates, and those who spent more time overseas were more likely to be in at-fault accidents.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to un-learn any driving habits – let alone ones that proved to be absolutely necessary for wartime survival.

“Like other traffic safety issues that require behavioral changes, there are no easy solutions with this one,” said retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner, president of USAA’s property and casualty insurance group.

Photo: Flickr/Nevada Tumbleweed

Doug Moorehead in the lab.Photo: Brian Ulrich

Take one Navy SEAL; add an MIT materials- science degree and a Harvard MBA. Result: one ass-kicking entrepreneur. Meet Doug Moorehead, a sharp, athletic guy from Cambridge, Ohio, whose military service took him to Iraq, South America, the Persian Gulf, and the South China Sea. Today, at 37 and retired from the special forces, he’s the president of clean-tech startup Earl Energy, where he’s using his unique skill set to develop a cheap solar-diesel generator that slashes fuel requirements on the battlefield.

Moorehead got interested in energy efficiency in Iraq. “I’d see huge generators running all the time yet powering very little,” he says. He also spent countless hours guarding fuel convoys. Carting diesel to remote bases in Iraq and Afghanistan can cost $35 a gallon or more, and one US soldier is killed or injured for every 24 fuel convoys.

To reduce fuel requirements, Moorehead’s new generator uses solar panels, but the really big savings come from a battery module. Instead of going constantly, the diesel engine only has to run for short bursts at maximum efficiency to recharge the batteries. “We take it from running 24 hours down to four or five hours a day,” says Moorehead, who worked for lithium-ion-battery giant A123 Systems before launching Earl Energy.

When the US Marine Corps tested his 18-kilowatt hybrid generator in the Mojave Desert, it cut fuel use by 93 percent. The Corps is now using a pair to power two frontline command centers in Afghanistan. The SEALs recently ordered several units. Fuel savings should pay for the devices in about five months. If trials go well, the US military could soon be using thousands of the generators. Moorehead is also developing a megawatt-scale system for the commercial shipping industry. For companies hesitant to try his tech, the special-ops vet says he has ways of making them reconsider.

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New Super Mario Bros. 2 for the Nintendo 3DS will be sold as a physical cartridge and as a direct download this August, Nintendo said Friday.
Image: Nintendo

Nintendo will sell New Super Mario Bros 2. and other games for 3DS and Wii U as both direct downloads and physical packages beginning in August, company president Satoru Iwata said in a financial briefing Friday.

The company has long offered two separate slates of game content — high-end games sold on discs and cartridges, and smaller games via download. Nintendo is expanding its digital business into games like New Super Mario Bros. 2 “in order to adapt to the changes in the circumstances surrounding the video game industry and to create a new business opportunity,” Iwata said.

Other Nintendo-published 3DS games, such as the Brain Age sequel currently in development, will henceforth be sold as both digital and physical products, Iwata said. Games for the company’s next-generation home console Wii U, to be released later this year worldwide, will also be available in both formats.

Customers will be able to get downloadable games for 3DS and Wii U in two different ways. They can purchase them directly from Nintendo’s eShop online store, or they can buy download codes from traditional game retailers. Nintendo will sell these at wholesale prices to the retailers, which can then set any price they desire. So if a physical game goes on sale, retailers can also mark down the price of the digital copy.

“By taking this approach, there will not be a situation like ‘there is no markdown for the digital products while markdowns are the norm for the packaged software,’” Iwata said.

However, Iwata also stated that when purchased through Nintendo directly, digital and physical media will be sold at the same price point. This differs from rival Sony’s PlayStation Store where digital versions of games tend to sell for less than their boxed counterparts.

Including retailers in this process was important because the act of buying a game in a store is “familiar” to a majority of consumers, Iwata said. It is also attractive to customers who are reluctant to share credit card information online, as well as give customers who have no credit cards an easy way to shop for games. By placing downloadable games in retail stores, it will increase customers’ awareness of the software library.

“If only the consumers who proactively visit the Nintendo eShop are aware of the digital download software that we deploy, there is no chance that our digital business can drastically expand,” he said.

Nintendo’s customers are ready to buy its games digitally, Iwata said: Over 70% of Nintendo 3DS handhelds in Japan and the United States have connected to the Internet, “the highest ratio among all the handheld video game systems Nintendo has launched.” While acknowledging that the Europe and Australia were trailing at only 50% connectivity, Iwata said that the situation in those territories has improved.

In his closing remarks, Iwata took time to clarify Nintendo’s digital outlook, particular in regards to add-on downloadable content. He said the company clearly distinguishes “digital distribution of packaged software from add-on content” and “we do not intend to offer any products that the consumers deem incomplete.” He made clear that Nintendo would never charge players a fee for a chance to win in-game items, a popular and profitable model used in social games. Japanese publisher Square Enix made a similar promise in this week’s Dragon Quest X Online announcement.

Iwata said “Nintendo does not believe such a business model can establish long-lasting relationships with our consumers,” and made a point to deny that the next Animal Crossing game, in development for Nintendo 3DS, would be centered around a microtransaction model.

The Army’s next truck should be smart, flexible, user-friendly, partially autonomous and affordable. In other words, the automotive equivalent of a gadget from Apple. At a trade conference in Virginia on Tuesday, Brig. Gen. Stephen Farmen, the chief of U.S. Army transportation, held up an iPhone. “How do we put the kind of power and technology like this into a wheeled vehicle and hit the right price point?” Farmen asked, according to a report by National Defense.

The “i-Tactical Wheeled Vehicle,” as Farmen called it, is still still years away. The Army just finished buying tens of thousands of medium transport trucks and mine-resistant battlefield transports. The branch’s new Joint Tactical Light Vehicle, a Humvee replacement, is in the final stages of design. A truck with iPhone-like capabilities designed from the wheels up might have to wait for the next round of truck replacements in 15 years or so. It’s possible by then that the Army won’t want or need a truck with smartphone-like qualities. After all, the military does tend to get caught up in the tech trend of the moment. Virtual-reality helmets, anyone?

Still, the basic technology development for a smart truck is well under way. Sensors, robotic controls and smartphone interfaces are all being tested out separately. The big challenge will be integrating all these different techs.

The resulting iTruck, as National Defense dubs it, should be optionally manned. In other words, it should be able to go on missions with an Army sergeant behind the wheel, all on its own, or in convoys mixing drivers and robots. The technology for that capability has been in development since at least 2007. That’s when a small company called Perceptek fitted several Marine-issue medium trucks with laser sensors, computer algorithms and a big red button, together called Convoy Active Safety Technology. With a press of the button, the truck’s computer brain took over from its human driver. Similarly equipped trucks lined up behind the lead truck, droning along behind it like baby ducks following their mama.

Acquired by Lockheed Martin, the CAST trucks have steadily tackled harder and harder road conditions, culminating in the desert test last year. The Army has talked about deploying the robo-trucks to Afghanistan for further testing, but that country’s relative lack of roads could squash the plan.

Human operators should be able to command their iTruck convoys using a smartphone, Farmen added. The Army has begun buying Android phones for the infantry. Meanwhile, the Navy (on behalf of the Marines) is developing Android-compatible controls for a robot cargo helicopter in development to replace the current K-MAX robo-copter.

Finally, the smart trucks should be able to beam video, mission data and even their own maintenance problems to other vehicles and to mechanics back in the motor pool. UPS proved that capability as far back as 1990, when it introduced the very first Delivery Information Acquisition Device, or DIAD — the brown tablet computer that every delivery person carries. The current DIAD V not only records signatures, it plugs into the delivery truck where it gathers, and transmits, data about the truck and its surroundings.

At the very least, the Army’s future truck should be as smart as today’s highly computerized civilian cars, Farmen said. “An Audi A8 can drive down the road and make 3,000 decisions in a mile of travel. How many decisions are the next generation of wheeled vehicles going to be able to make?” With the techs listed above, a lot. Assuming the Army can get them all to work together.

Is Microsoft’s Azure simply misunderstood by a younger generation of coders? Image: Carlos Gutiérrez G./Flickr

Among the world’s developers, Microsoft has a perception problem, writes Wired Enterpise editor Cade Metz. Judging from interviews with myriad coders over the past several months, Azure isn’t just off the Silicon Valley radar. It’s misunderstood. It’s misunderstood not only by the younger generation of coders who grew up on open source software and such languages as Ruby and Python. It’s misunderstood by many developers who have a long history with Microsoft development tools, Metz writes.

One example from the post:

Jeremy Howard sees Silicon Valley as an echo chamber. He recently moved to Northern California from Australia, looking to improve the fortunes of his startup, an ingenious operation known as Kaggle, and he soon found that most Silicon Valley software developers behaved like other Silicon Valley software developers. “In this echo chamber which is the [San Francisco] Bay Area, unless you follow what everyone else does, then there’s an assumption that you don’t know what you’re doing,” Howard says.

Silicon Valley types think that Jeremy Howard doesn’t know what he’s doing because he runs Kaggle on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s new-age cloud service that lets you build and operate massive applications without setting up your own hardware. Kaggle once ran on Amazon EC2 — the most popular cloud in the Valley and across the rest of the world — but a year ago, the company switched to Azure because it dovetails so nicely with Microsoft’s .NET development platform and its accompanying C# programming language, tools often treated with scorn by the Bay Area hackerati.

Howard tells Metz that in the Valley, most developers build their applications with Ruby on Rails, Python, or “if they’re a bit boring,” Java, and they look at him funny when he says that Kaggle uses Azure. “People say, ‘Oh, I’ll have to teach you about Java sometime, so then you’ll know the bright side.’ But I can code in somewhere between 16 and 18 languages, and I can assure you there is nothing like C#.”

But Microsoft is determined to change these perceptions — so determined that it’s embracing open source software and other technologies that it actively shunned in the past, Metz writes. Azure now runs such big-name open source platforms as Node.js and Hadoop, and though the world doesn’t seem to realize it, Microsoft’s cloud service has long handled development tools other than .NET and C#, including Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

Have a read of the full story, then weigh in: Has Microsoft changed, and is it simply misunderstood as not a cloud company? Is Azure looking better, and is Microsoft’s willingness to customize its cloud an asset or a worry? Is fear of lock-in making folks shun Microsoft justified?

Facebook found and purchased eight software patents for the sole purpose of “retaliating” against Yahoo for its pending patent lawsuit against the social networking giant, Yahoo argued in a strongly-worded court filing Friday that accuses Facebook of bad faith.

“No employee or officer of Facebook or any affiliated company conceived of, reduced to practice, or developed the alleged inventions claimed in the eight patents acquired from non-practicing entities,” Yahoo wrote, in a 37-page answer to Facebook’s counterclaim. “In fact, the applications for many of these patents predate Facebook itself.”

Yahoo’s lawsuit against Facebook alleges that the social media giant’s business infringes on 10 of Yahoo’s patents. The patents cover commonly used features of the social web: personalized advertising, customized portal pages and news feeds, recommendations to connect with other suggested users (and screen out spammers), social music and messaging applications, and authorizing some users (but not others) to see different sections of your content.

Facebook countersued April 3, alleging Yahoo infringed on methods of providing basic web functionality such as search, headline feeds, photo tagging, and, of course, advertising.

Yahoo claims Facebook lacked a “good faith basis” for its countersuit.

“On information and belief, many, if not all, of these patents were acquired by Facebook for purposes of retaliation against Yahoo in this case,” Yahoo said in the court filing.

Remember Turbo Teen? It was a really goofy cartoon from the ’80s that involved a teenager who got mixed up in a secret government experiment, which … okay, the point is that he was a teenager who could turn into a car. Seriously — you can find clips of it on YouTube.

Anyway, I’m sure Dave Roman and John Green knew about it, because their new graphic novel Teen Boat! draws from a similar ridiculous premise. Teen Boat (that’s not just his description; it’s his name) is a teenager who can turn into a boat. There’s no hokey scientific explanation here, though — apparently it runs in the family.

The book is a series of vignettes, almost like episodes of an after-school special. Most of them do chain together to tell an overarching story. Roman and Green borrow heavily from the tropes of high school TV shows: there’s the best friend-next-door who’s secretly in love with Teen Boat but he’s totally clueless about it; there’s the jock who seems to get all the girls that TB is interested in; there are bits about parties and school elections and getting a job. Every chapter has some variation of the tagline: “The angst of being a teen … the thrill of being a boat!”

Turbo Teen’s transformations were often based on temperature: when he got too hot, he turned into a car, and when he got cooled off, he turned back into a person. Teen Boat’s transformations can be intentional, but he also transforms into a boat when he encounters moisture (sometimes) and sometimes he changes back into a kid when it’s too cold. The transformation illustration is pretty funny, because it’s a cross between morphing and old-school Gobot transformations. Plus, he’s a boat.

One caveat for parents: Despite the kid-friendly appearance of the cover, I’d say this is really for teens and up. There’s some mild swearing, and occasional references that you might not want to explain to your younger kids like “making out” and “Skinemax.” Plus it’s pretty clear that TB is a bit of a jerk whose interest in girls is pretty shallow. (Oh, and a word of warning: turn on your Safe Search before searching for “Teen Boat,” or just use the links I provide here, because for some reason it leads to some very NSFW sites.)

In the end I wonder if Teen Boat will appeal more to teens or to adults who grew up on cartoons like Turbo Teen. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I haven’t tested it out on a teen to see what they think. Teen Boat releases on May 8, and you can pre-order it from Amazon. You can also read some of Teen Boat on Webcomics Nation, where it originally ran as a webcomic — but most of that is in black and white, and the comic has been fully colorized for the book.

Disclosure: GeekDad received a review copy of this book.

This is better. Hawkeye has full extension, an anchor and his elbow isn’t too high or out to the side. I give it a B+.

I got to see a preview screening of The Avengers Wednesday night, and I need to amend my earlier comments regarding Hawkeye’s archery technique a little bit. I can’t give you a review of the film, at least not yet, but there are a few points that need to be addressed.

First, most of what I talked about before is glaringly obvious in the publicity photos, but goes by very quickly in the film, usually while a lot of other stuff is going on. You have to really be looking for it to notice Hawkeye’s archery while Hulk, Thor and Iron Man are busily breaking things all over the place.

Second, it’s really easy to forgive the few really obvious gaffes because Renner is just so interesting as an actor. He sells the role, and his scenes with Black Widow have a genuineness and depth to them. He makes a convincing Hawkeye, and I’m sure that they will correct his form gaffes for the sequel.

Third, I suspect they may have corrected a few shots. I noticed that in a few shots, all of which are effects-laden scenes with no other humans in them, where Renner is blasting away at a plethora of baddies while destruction rains down around him, he’s not doing any of the things I pointed out. He’s shooting very well in a number of key scenes, and whether they were originally shot that way or not, he looks good. There are still a few scenes that make me twitch a little, but I let them go by because they are instantly replaced by some new scene of awesomeness. In the context of the film, they don’t matter so much, though they certainly will be a topic of discussion at a lot of archery ranges.

But even so, I think my original point stands. Renner said in an interview that the injury he suffered during the making of the film was during an archery sequence; perhaps receiving proper training on the set could have prevented that. Archery is not supposed to hurt. It would also make me very happy if he were to find that he enjoys the sport and decided to continue with it, as many other actors in the past have done: celebrity archers include Patrick Warburton; Dan Aykroyd; Tim Allen; William Shatner; Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.; Stana Katic; and Dr. Chang from Lost, Francois Chau.

Since writing the three archery articles last month (Brave and Hunger Games being the others) I have seen a dramatic upturn in public awareness of and interest in archery. Some clubs are reporting as much as a 75% increase in attendance at their lessons; my home club, Pasadena Roving Archers, is filled to capacity every week, and we have been featured on every local TV news program and in several newspapers and magazines. Every Louis Vuitton store in the world featured an archery-themed window display this month. Archery is the hot new sport (even though it’s one of the oldest activities known to man), and Avengers is only going to add to that.

With that in mind, I can only conclude by saying: Thanks, Jeremy Renner, for helping to boost our sport! Come out to the range some time and shoot a round with us, and you’ll look even more awesome in the inevitable Hawkeye solo movie.