X PRIZE Vision

After the successful completion of Ansari X Prize space competition, new $10 million awards are announced such as Google X Prize for Lunar Landing, Archon X Prize for Genomics and Progressive Automotive X Prize...

X Prize Foundation

Windows Vista Indexing and Outlook 2007 Search

If you are having trouble finding newest items in your search on Windows Vista, you are not alone. Check the following links for known issues from Microsoft Support. It is a known problem that search indexing may stop on Windows Vista. Here's a list of possible reasons along with solutions:

You cannot search RTF e-mail messages in Outlook 2007
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;927595

You cannot index e-mail messages or search e-mail messages when you run Outlook 2007 by using elevated user rights on a computer that is running Windows Vista
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;923937

How to troubleshoot performance issues in Outlook 2007
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940226

No results are returned when you search for e-mail items after you enable Instant Search in Outlook 2007
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927676

For those adventurous souls, here are some last resort suggestions for search problems in Outlook 2007. May be one of them can work for you...

• Ran scanost.exe (for Exchange account) and scanpst.exe (for local Archive folder) and fix errors
  
• Uncheck both Mailbox and Archive data files in Outlook search options. Restart Outlook
• Check both Mailbox and Archive data files in Outlook search options. Restart Outllok
• Rebuilt Index
• Restore Default from Indexing Options and reboot
• Ran %windir%\system32\fixmapi.exe and reboot, then ran Rebuild index

Physicists Make Artificial Black Hole Using Optical Fiber

Physicists at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, report that they have created a black hole's event horizon using laser pulses and microstructured optical fiber. Such a tabletop black hole, made from a length of optical fiber and laser light, may prove invaluable in understanding the characteristics of these exotic astronomical objects.

Physicists and astronomers believe that black holes are formed when huge stars collapse in on themselves at the end of their lives. They exist at the centers of galaxies, where they act as giant engines that drive the motion of stars, according to astronomers. However, studying them is extremely difficult, particularly because in astronomy one can study only the information carried by light. In the case of black holes, the absence of light means astrophysicists have to rely on indirect means, such as inferring the presence of black holes by the way their gravity bends light outside their event horizons—a phenomenon scientists call gravitational lensing.

Having access to an artificial black hole in the lab will allow astrophysicists to test predictions made by theorists. Physicists would particularly like to test new theories such as quantum gravity, which seeks to reconcile Einstein’s theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics.

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Yazgac - A tool for typing Turkish...

There are special Turkish characters that are not part of standard US keyboard: (ç,ı,ş,ğ,ü,ö). For those living abroad and using a non-Turkish keyboard, usually dot-less versions of these characters are used (c,i,s,g,u,o) which is not correct or proper Turkish. Yazgac is intended to fix this problem.

Yazgac is a free desktop application, that allows you to type special Turkish characters without changing your keyboard layout or correct your text by automatically placing these characters. See its website for a presentation and video of its features and how it works.

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Netflix Prize

In October 2006, Netflix announced a grand prize of one million dollars for a better movie-recommending algorithm that is at least 10 percent better than its own. Within two weeks, the DVD rental company had received 169 submissions, including three that were slightly superior to Cinematch, Netflix's recommendation software. After a month, more than a thousand programs had been entered, and the top scorers were almost halfway to the goal. But what started out looking simple suddenly got hard. The contest is expected to continue until 2011.

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Open Yale - Free Yale College Courses Debut Online

Yale University is making some of its most popular undergraduate courses freely available to anyone in the world with access to the Internet.

The project, called Open Yale Courses, presents unique access to the full content of a selection of college-level courses and makes them available in various formats, including downloadable and streaming video, audio only and searchable transcripts of each lecture. Syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets and other materials accompany the courses.

Open Yale website: http://open.yale.edu/courses

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Mind Reading with Functional MRI

Scientists can accurately predict which of a thousand pictures a person is looking at by analyzing brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which is a brain imaging method that detects blood flow in the brain, giving an indirect measure of brain activity.

According to the study, published in the the journal Nature, scientists first gathered information about how the brain processes images by recording activity in the visual cortex as subjects looked at several thousand randomly selected pictures. Neurons in this part of the brain respond to specific aspects of the visual scene, such as a patch of strongly contrasting light and dark, so the activity recorded in each area of the brain scan reflects the visual information being processed by neurons in that area of the brain. The researchers compiled this information to develop a computer model that would predict the pattern of brain activity triggered by any image.

When volunteers were later shown a new image not included in the first set, the computer model was able to correctly predict which picture out of 120 or 1,000 possibilities the person looked at with 90 or 80 percent accuracy, respectively.

"They can do this with a surprising degree of accuracy," says Frank Tong, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, TN, who was not involved in the research. "People will be struck by how much visual information these researchers were able to extract from the brain."

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Wireless Power Transmission: Tesla Revisited

In the late 19th century, Nikola Tesla, among other inventions, dreamed up wireless electric distribution. He drew up plans for a tower, about 57 meters tall, that he claimed would transmit power to kilometers away. However, he run out of funding before he could finish towers.

Then, a few years ago, Marin Soljačić, an assistant professor of physics at MIT started searching for ways to transmit power wirelessly. Instead of pursuing a long-distance scheme like Tesla's, he decided to look for midrange power transmission methods that could charge--or even power--portabl­e devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and laptops.

So far, the most effective setup consists of 60-centimeter copper coils and a 10-megahertz magnetic field; this transfers power over a distance of two meters with about 50 percent efficiency. The team is looking at silver and other materials to decrease coil size and boost efficiency. "While ideally it would be nice to have efficiencies at 100 percent, realistically, 70 to 80 percent could be possible for a typical application," says Soljačić.

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