I will protect my family.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Two FBI Agents Involved in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Arrest 'FALL' Out of Helicopter and Die
I have no idea how I missed this story from May 22nd:
The FBI agents, who eliminated Boston terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died as they fell out of a helicopter, the press service of the FBI said.
Two officers of the counter-terrorism department of the Federal Bureau of Investigation died on Friday, May 17. The incident occurred during training exercises conducted by the FBI at a distance of 12 nautical miles from the coast of the U.S. state of Virginia.
An official statement from the FBI says that special agents Christopher Lorek and Stephen Shaw fell out of a helicopter while training a complex exercise. The agents were supposed to be lowered on a rope on a ship from a helicopter. For yet unknown reasons, the two agents fell out of the helicopter and were killed in the fall.
"Like all who serve on the Hostage Rescue Team, they accept the highest risk each and every day, when training and on operational missions, to keep our nation safe. Our hearts are with their wives, children, and other loved ones who feel their loss most deeply. And they will always be part of the FBI Family," FBI Director Robert S. Mueller said in a statement, according to CNN.
More Info HERE
Like A Swede In ....Sweden?
'Jennifer Aniston Sex Tape' Draws 7.5 Million Views
What does it take for a bottled water brand’s Web video to become the Internet sensation du jour? Seemingly, not all that much. Smartwater’s“Jennifer Aniston Sex Tape” ranks a distant #1 on Advertising Age’s Viral Video Chart, at more than 7.5 million views. It contains no sexuality and isn’t even all that funny. But it does a brilliant job playing with the baser instincts of Internet users – and, in so doing, demonstrating…a) that there is a formula for viral success
b) that it’s really is as simple as you had always feared
The promise of celebrity skin + awkward humor + digital manipulation + a catchy title = gazillions of views
Grabbing attention is one thing, but will the views translate into sales? If the advertiser were a bank, a phone company, even an electronic gadget, the answer would likely be “no”. But this is an ad for bottled water, a relatively inexpensive product category where choices are often made on impulse. Bottled water is also a category where brand reallydoes matter a great deal – because there’s little to be had in the way of tangible benefits, and therefor little is expected. For SmartWater, the name of the game is to be top-of mind at point of purchase. To that end, “Jennifer Aniston Sex Tape” will likely deliver.
The Wi-Fi in your home can track your moves like Xbox Kinect
Devin Coldewey NBC News
Gestures made in mid-air are tracked by WiSee, a low-cost Wi-Fi-based technology.
Want to switch off the living room lights from bed, change channels while washing dishes, or turn the heat up from the couch? A team at the University of Washington has rigged a standard Wi-Fi home network to detect your movements anywhere in the home and convert them into commands to control connected devices.
Gesture recognition is the latest fad in games and tech, but even the newest systems require high-tech depth-sensing cameras or other special hardware. Microsoft's new Kinect, for instance, uses a photon-measuring method called "time of flight" sensing that was, until the Kinect was announced, limited to high-tech laboratories. And Kinect isn't small, either.
UW computer science students, led by assistant professor Shyam Gollakota, looked at the gesture-detection puzzle another way — specifically, how people affect the environment they're already in.
Our bodies distort the Wi-Fi signals we use to beam information to and from our laptops and phones. By watching those signals very closely, the team could determine not just what room you're in, but where you're standing and how you're moving your body. They call the system WiSee.
"By analyzing the variations of these signals over time, we can enable full-body gestures that go beyond simple hand motions," said Qifan Pu, a visiting student and one of the team at UW, in a video outlining the work.
That's no easy task: the "doppler effect" that our bodies have on the wavelength and path of the Wi-Fi signals is miniscule, meaning reliable measurement with consumer-grade hardware is difficult. But the WiSee team's expertise worked it out.
Once the sensing process was rigged up, the group combined the gesture recognition with store-bought home automation devices that wirelessly control lights, media players, thermostats, etc. Soon, they were using WiSee to perform simple tasks like playing a song or changing channels.
The system is also capable of tracking people as they wander through rooms or out of the house, turning off lights or adjusting music volume depending on their location.
YouTube / University of Washington
The WiSee system senses how Wi-Fi signals bounce off of or pass through people and obstacles on the way from transmitters like laptops.
The team put together a prototype piece of hardware to demonstrate WiSee, but any modern Wi-Fi router should do the trick, too, with a bit of custom software. With no special devices to buy, this could be the cheapest gesture-recognition tech yet.
Don't worry about anyone installing it surreptitiously on your router, though: It takes a bit of expertise and some specific "training" of the software before it can recognize anything at all, much less specific gestures or locations.
PhD student Sidhant Gupta and assistant professor Shwetak Patel, also on the project, have worked with Microsoft Research on similar body-tracking systems, but using soundwaves or radiation from electrical wires as the medium.
WiSee is currently in the proof-of-concept stage, but the creators hope to present it at the International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking in Miami later this year.
More information, including a technical description of the system, can be found at the project's website.
Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc.
Gestures made in mid-air are tracked by WiSee, a low-cost Wi-Fi-based technology.
Want to switch off the living room lights from bed, change channels while washing dishes, or turn the heat up from the couch? A team at the University of Washington has rigged a standard Wi-Fi home network to detect your movements anywhere in the home and convert them into commands to control connected devices.
Gesture recognition is the latest fad in games and tech, but even the newest systems require high-tech depth-sensing cameras or other special hardware. Microsoft's new Kinect, for instance, uses a photon-measuring method called "time of flight" sensing that was, until the Kinect was announced, limited to high-tech laboratories. And Kinect isn't small, either.
UW computer science students, led by assistant professor Shyam Gollakota, looked at the gesture-detection puzzle another way — specifically, how people affect the environment they're already in.
Our bodies distort the Wi-Fi signals we use to beam information to and from our laptops and phones. By watching those signals very closely, the team could determine not just what room you're in, but where you're standing and how you're moving your body. They call the system WiSee.
"By analyzing the variations of these signals over time, we can enable full-body gestures that go beyond simple hand motions," said Qifan Pu, a visiting student and one of the team at UW, in a video outlining the work.
That's no easy task: the "doppler effect" that our bodies have on the wavelength and path of the Wi-Fi signals is miniscule, meaning reliable measurement with consumer-grade hardware is difficult. But the WiSee team's expertise worked it out.
Once the sensing process was rigged up, the group combined the gesture recognition with store-bought home automation devices that wirelessly control lights, media players, thermostats, etc. Soon, they were using WiSee to perform simple tasks like playing a song or changing channels.
The system is also capable of tracking people as they wander through rooms or out of the house, turning off lights or adjusting music volume depending on their location.
YouTube / University of Washington
The WiSee system senses how Wi-Fi signals bounce off of or pass through people and obstacles on the way from transmitters like laptops.
The team put together a prototype piece of hardware to demonstrate WiSee, but any modern Wi-Fi router should do the trick, too, with a bit of custom software. With no special devices to buy, this could be the cheapest gesture-recognition tech yet.
Don't worry about anyone installing it surreptitiously on your router, though: It takes a bit of expertise and some specific "training" of the software before it can recognize anything at all, much less specific gestures or locations.
PhD student Sidhant Gupta and assistant professor Shwetak Patel, also on the project, have worked with Microsoft Research on similar body-tracking systems, but using soundwaves or radiation from electrical wires as the medium.
WiSee is currently in the proof-of-concept stage, but the creators hope to present it at the International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking in Miami later this year.
More information, including a technical description of the system, can be found at the project's website.
Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc.
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