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FIFA to retest nine goal-line technologies

It was England footballer Frank Lampard that did it. His infamous disallowed goal against Germany at the last World Cup in 2010 reignited the debate about whether goal-line technology has a place in football.

Now FIFA, the sport's world governing body, has announced that it is to test the nine best candidates to see which (if any) could be in place in time for the World Cup in 2014 in Brazil, according to the Associated Press.

However, the demands placed by FIFA on the candidate technologies - which have not been named but are all based in Europe - are pretty onerous. The referee must know within a second what the verdict is, either with a vibration or visual signal sent to something he wears on his wrist. Crucially, the verdict must be 100 per cent accurate, a condition that current systems have so far found difficult to meet.

The two main technologies involved include vision-based system like Hawk-Eye - already used in cricket and tennis at the highest level - which uses six high-speed video cameras to track the ball's flightpath. A second approach is to install a microchip in the ball which senses a magnetic field as it crosses the goal line, sending a signal to the referee.

The last series of tests in March were rather underwhelming: none of the nine technologies tested at Swiss Federal Institute for Materials Research managed to reach FIFA's required benchmarks. The new tests, at the same location, will take place between September and December this year.

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A web browser for your calculator

Smartphones, tablets, televisions and of course, the trusty old PC - these days you've got a lot of options when choosing how to access the web. Now there's a new option: the graphics calculator.

Gossamer is a web browser for Texas Instruments calculators created by Christopher Mitchell, a computer scientist at New York University. Websites are formatted and sent to the calculator by an external server. At the moment the browser can only access sites on a pre-defined list, but Mitchell is working on a new version that will let users input any URL.
As you might expect, the retro-browser isn't Mitchell's first venture into programming graphics calculators. He claims on his website to be the "world's most prolific graphing calculator programmer". He very well may be: He previously developed networking software that allows calculators to connect to other devices, an essential pre-requisite to a web browser, along with other programs including a media player and video games.

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Dizzy moon lander misses public debut

(Image: NASA)

It was billed as the beginning of a "new era" of private companies racing to reach the moon, timed seamlessly to coincide with the end of NASA's 30-year shuttle program and toasted with champagne, violinists, moon-shaped biscuits and even a song. But what was supposed to be the first public flight test of a commercially developed robotic lunar lander  - an entrant to the Google Lunar X Prize  - ended last night with a good dose of sod's law and more fizz than bang.

The flight test of the $40 million lander  - developed by the one-year-old Silicon Valley based start-up, Moon Express, and scheduled for demonstration in front of a crowd of luminaries, investors, and journalists - was called off at the last minute after engineers couldn't fix a problem with a new gyroscope. It meant the lander was convinced it was spinning in the opposite direction to the one it was actually turning. The expectant audience had to make do instead with video footage of the lander being privately tested last month.

The hiccup is a little disappointing admits Barney Pell, the former NASA research and development manager who co-founded the company and is its chief technology officer. But it is also not wholly unexpected given just how fickle high-tech projects can be, he says. The lander is supposed to be more precise, better able to avoid hazards when it lands and have more thrust for its lighter weight than any previous landers.

"It would have been nice to share with everyone," says Pell, "But the reality of engineering is that things take a while and whenever you are about to demo something it will break just at that moment."

The demonstration comes as the Google Lunar X Prize  - a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon - heats up. The 29 teams currently in the race have until 2015 before the money disappears.

Many are trying to create entries that will have a use and market beyond the contest and Moon Express doubtless has one of the most ambitious long term aims: to mine the moon for rare metals. There is more platinum on the moon than all of planet earth, notes Pell, adding he believes moon mining could be economical, in some cases now, and it has the added bonus of being environmentally benign because "nothing lives there".

Engineers plan to fix and re-test the lander today. We will make it to the moon, insists Pell.

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Spotting the flaws in casino card-shuffling machines

(Image: Etienne Ansotte/Rex Features)

Ever feel like others at your poker table seem to have an unfair advantage? Like you were up against a team of expert card counters like the notoriously successful MIT Blackjack team?

Well, you might be, but at least you can take comfort in the fact that a team of statisticians from Stanford University, US, are now making things fairer. They recently discovered that cards dealt by an automated huffling machine  - designed to deal a random set of cards - were more than twice as easy to predict than a human-shuffled pack.

Automated card shufflers have been helping inept - and unlawful - dealers since the 19th century, though it's only in the last 50 years that they have been widely adopted by casinos. Now, though, the machines are sophisticated devices, rented to casinos for around $500 per month per machine - and with one on every card table, that makes for a profitable industry.

Statisticians help casino equipment manufacturers ensure that their shuffling machines spit out cards that are entirely randomly ordered to help foil cheats - and give the average punter like you or me a passing chance at winning a hand.

But, like poker hands, not all automated shufflers are alike, and, like most of my poker hands, some don't work as well as others. The latest trend in card-shuffling circles is the shelf shuffler: a machine which replicates the human riffle shuffle by randomly placing cards on one of a number of shelves, before re-assembling the deck by taking piles from the shelves, again in random order.

The team of Stanford statisticians was contacted by a manufacturer of casino equipment to test a new shelf shuffler, which was already designed and built. The basic tests to ensure randomness of cards coming out of the machine had, apparently, been carried out by the engineers, and the results seemed satisfactory. All the manufacturers wanted to do was double-check that a deck could be passed through the machine and then be used without concern in the casino.

They did not, however, bank on getting the hand they were dealt.

The high-rolling statisticians at Stanford took the task seriously. They set about testing the statistics on which the machine was based, and performed tests to measure how random the machine's results were. They found that a knowledgeable player could guess about 9.5 cards correctly in a single run through a 52-card deck from the machine, compared to 4.5 for a properly shuffled deck.

That boiled down to some cold, hard advice for the manufacturers: their machine's shuffling was not random enough to be used in a casino. In fact, the statisticians have reported that the the president of the company responded "We are not pleased with your conclusions, but we believe them and that's what we hired you for."

Whatever your game, stopping crooked dealers and card-counting players has to be a good thing. Just make sure that, next time you visit the casino, you sit at a table with Stanford statisticians - and steer clear of those MIT card counters.

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Computers understand hand-waving descriptions

DESCRIBING objects is so much easier when you use your hands, the classic being "the fish was this big".

For humans, it's easy to understand what is meant, but computers struggle, and existing gesture-based interfaces only use set movements that translate into particular instructions. Now a system called Data Miming can recognise objects from gestures without the user having to memorise a "vocabulary" of specific movements.

"Starting from the observation that humans can effortlessly understand which objects are being described when hand motions are used, we asked why computers can't do the same thing," says Christian Holz of the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany who developed the system with Andy Wilson at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.

Holz observed how volunteers described objects like tables or chairs using gestures, by tracing important components repeatedly with their hands and maintaining relative proportions throughout their mime.

Data Miming uses a Microsoft Kinect motion-capture camera to create a 3D representation of a user's hand movements. Voxels, or pixels in three dimensions, are activated when users pass their hands through the space represented by each voxel. And when a user encircles their fingers to indicate a table leg, say, the system can also identify that all of the enclosed space should be included in the representation. It then compares user-generated representations with a database of objects in voxel form and selects the closest match.

In tests the system correctly recognised three-quarters of descriptions, and the intended item was in the top three matches from its database 98 per cent of the time. Holz presented his findings at the CHI 2011 meeting in Vancouver, Canada, in May.

The system could be incorporated into online shopping so users could gesture to describe the type of product they want and have the system make a suggestion. Or, says Holz: "Imagine you want a funky breakfast-bar stool. Instead of wandering around and searching Ikea for half an hour, you walk up to an in-store kiosk and describe the stool using gestures, which takes seconds. The computer responds immediately, saying you probably want the Funkomatic Breakfast Stool-o-rama, and it lives in row 7a."

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Welcome to the age of the splinternet

Openness is the internet's great strength – and weakness. With powerful forces carving it up, is its golden age coming to an end?

How quickly the world changes. In August 1991 Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, posted a message to a discussion forum detailing a new method for sharing information between networked computers. To make his idea a reality, he also set up a server running on one of CERN's computers. A mere two decades later, some 2 billion of us are hooked up to Berners-Lee's invention, and the UN General Assembly last month declared access to it a fundamental human right. It is, of course, the World Wide Web.

Today, most of us in the developed world and elsewhere take the internet for granted. But should we? The way it works and the way we engage with it are still defined by characteristics it has inherited from its easy-going early days, and this has left it under threat - from criminals, controlling authorities and commercial interests. "The days of the internet as we used to think of it are ending," says Craig Labovitz of Arbor Networks, a security software company in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Could we now be living in the golden age of the internet?

Though it was the World Wide Web that opened the internet to the world, the underlying structure dates back much further. That architecture took shape in the early 1960s, when the US air force asked Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, to come up with a military communications network that could withstand a nuclear attack. Baran proposed a network with no central hub; instead, information would pass from any point in the network to any other through many decentralised switching stations, or routers.

For Baran's plan to work, every message would be broken up into small packets of digital information, each of which would be relayed from router to router, handed over like hot potatoes. Dividing the message into packets instead of sending it whole meant that communication links would only be busy during the instant they were called upon to carry those packets. The links could be shared from moment to moment. "That's a big win in terms of efficiency," says Jon Crowcroft, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge. It also made the network fast and robust: there was no central gatekeeper or single point of failure. Destroy any one link, and the remaining routers could work out a new path between origin and destination.

Baran's work paved the way for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (see "Internet evolution"), which then led to the internet and the "anything goes" culture that remains its signature. From then on, the internet was open to anyone who wanted to join the party, from individual users to entire local networks. "There was a level of trust that worked in the early days," says Crowcroft. No one particularly cared who anyone was, and if you wanted to remain anonymous, you could. "We just connected and assumed everyone else was a nice guy." Even the hackers who almost immediately began to play with the new network's potential for mischief were largely harmless, showing up security weaknesses for the sheer technical joy of it.

These basic ingredients - openness, trust and decentralisation - were baked into the internet at its inception. It was these qualities, which allowed diverse groups of people from far-flung corners of the world to connect, experiment and invent, that were arguably the key elements of the explosive technological growth of the past two decades. That culture gave us the likes of Skype, Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

The internet's decentralised structure also makes it difficult for even the most controlling regime to seal off its citizens from the rest of the world. China and North Korea are perhaps the most successful in this respect; by providing only a few tightly controlled points of entry, these governments can censor the data its people can access. But less restrictive countries, such as South Korea, also splinter their citizens' experience of the web by restricting "socially harmful" sites. Savvy netizens routinely circumvent such attempts, using social media and the web's cloak of anonymity to embarrass and even topple their governments. The overthrow of the Egyptian regime in February is being called by some the first social media revolution. Though debatable, this assertion is supported in the book Tweets From Tahrir, an account told entirely through Twitter messages from the centre of the nation's capital.

It is tempting to think that things can only get better - that the internet can only evolve more openness, more democracy, more innovation, more freedom. Unfortunately, things might not be that simple.

There's a problem on the horizon, and it comes from an unexpected quarter - in fact from some of the very names we have come to associate most strongly with the internet's success. The likes of Apple, Google and Amazon are starting to fragment the web to support their own technologies, products and corporate strategy. Is there anything that can be done to stop them?

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