The Problem With Facebook

“Facebook stands in contrast to other social media like Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram where all content is shared with all followers …treating all entities on FB site as advertisers and charging them to share their content… This business plan backfires”

I can’t agree more with the assertions in this video from  2veritasium. If we think this is bad, wait till the auto-play videos on pages they are going to launch later this year appear. I can’t help but be reminded of MySpace background music and how much we hated those pages.

My prediction is FB will never go away just rot. Most people will keep their accounts and slowly replace their FB daily activity with a collection of other social media to communicate around Facebook itself.

Three-dimensional Mid-air Acoustic Manipulation by Ultrasonic Phased Arrays

Ancient Aliens need not apply. Amazing work in acoustic science proves sound waves have more potential than most would believe. I can only imagine the future interfaces and displays created with this outstanding tech.

The essence of levitation technology is the countervailing of gravity. It is known that an ultrasound standing wave is capable of suspending small particles at its sound pressure nodes and, so far, this method has been used to levitate lightweight particles, small creatures, and water droplets.

Our manipulation system has two original features. One is the direction of the ultrasound beam, which is arbitrary because the force acting toward its centre is also utilised. The other is the manipulation principle by which a localised standing wave is generated at an arbitrary position and moved three-dimensionally by opposed and ultrasonic phased arrays. We experimentally confirmed that various materials could be manipulated by our proposed method.

Yoichi Ochiai (The University of Tokyo)
Takayuki Hoshi (Nagoya Institute of Technology)
Jun Rekimoto (The University of Tokyo / Sony CSL)

http://96ochiai.ws/3DOFacoustic
contact: yoichi.ochiai@me.com