How Dick Tracy Invented the Apple Watch

Apple CEO Tim Cook suddenly became a little boy again as he showed that Apple’s new smart watch will also send and receive phone calls.

“I have been wanting to do this since I was 5 years old,” Cook exclaimed. “The day is finally here.”

The 54-year-old Cook was harking back to 1965, when any American youngster could tell you that the coolest gizmo around was Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio.

The comic strip detective’s creator, Chester Gould, had introduced the futuristic device in 1946, after he scripted Tracy into a jam from which there seemed no credible escape.

Gould decided that he would go high-concept and have Tracy appeal directly to his inky-fingered creator. Gould figured he could then just extricate Tracy from the predicament Manus Dei.

But Gould’s employer, the Chicago Tribune, rejected the idea as a cheat.

Gould then recalled visiting the workshop of an inventor extraordinaire named Al Gross several weeks before. Gross had developed the walkie-talkie when he was barely out of high school. Gross’s more recent projects when Gould stopped by included a two-way radio that could be worn on the wrist like a watch.

Gould now got on the phone to Gross.

“He called and asked if he could use that idea on the wristwatch,” Gross would say in an interview years later. “I told him sure. And he gave Dick Tracy that wristwatch.”

As a token of his gratitude, Gould presented Gross with the first four panels in which Tracy begins using the soon-to-be-famous gizmo. The device proved to be just the thing for Tracy to extricate himself along with his creator from the predicament.

Do you remember the old dick tracy comics? we're not convinced that Tim cook got the idea from these comics, it's an interesting idea that the whole of apple was built on the idea that one day they would emulate the comic books.

In the comic strip, the two-way wrist radio is created by a young inventor named Brilliant. He develops another seemingly impossible gadget for Tracy conceived by the real-life Gross: a compact, battery-powered video surveillance camera. This is too much for one of the comic-strip mobsters, and Brilliant meets a bloody end in a 1948 installment.

As a token of his gratitude, Gould presented Gross with the first four panels in which Tracy begins using the soon-to-be-famous gizmo. The device proved to be just the thing for Tracy to extricate himself along with his creator from the predicament.

In the comic strip, the two-way wrist radio is created by a young inventor named Brilliant. He develops another seemingly impossible gadget for Tracy conceived by the real-life Gross: a compact, battery-powered video surveillance camera. This is too much for one of the comic-strip mobsters, and Brilliant meets a bloody end in a 1948 installment.

Gross did enjoy a continuing thrill that had been first sparked when he was still in grammar school. His parents took him on a cruise across Lake Erie from Cleveland to Buffalo, and his destiny was decided when he wandered into the ship’s radio room.

“The radio operator put me on his lap and let me put the earphones on,” Gross would remember. “I heard all of those dots and dashes, and I’ve been interested ever since.”

Wonderment was joined by wondering, and the result powered a lifetime of prophetic tinkering. Gross followed up the walkie-talkie during World War II with a ground-to-air radio system. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff credited it with “saving millions of lives by shortening the war.”

Yet the closest Gross came to fame was as a pioneering Citizens Band radio operator dubbed “the Father of CB.” Even in this he was best known not by his real name but by his handle, Phineas Thaddeus Veeblefetzer.

Not that Gross needed recognition. He was still busy in his workshop right up to the time of his death in late 2000, at the age of 82.



Childhood fascination was at the heart of it all, so it only makes sense that his two way wrist radio would have had a similar effect on youngsters over the years, these notably including little Timmy Cook in 1965.

On Monday, Cook said he had been wanting for half a century to unveil a real-life gizmo that worked just like the one in the comic strip of his youth.

One hopes Cook is aware that the two-way wrist radio was itself inspired by the real-life ideas of a visionary who should be as well-known to us as Jobs or Gates.

Gross observed in his later years, “‘If you have a cordless telephone or a cellular telephone or a walkie-talkie or beeper, you’ve got one of my patents.”

And now we can posthumously add the Apple Watch.

Source - http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/10/how-dick-tracy-invented-the-apple-watch.html

New Technology May Double Radio Frequency Data Capacity

A team of Columbia Engineering researchers has invented a technologyâ€"full-duplex radio integrated circuits (ICs)â€"that can be implemented in nanoscale CMOS to enable simultaneous transmission and reception at the same frequency in a wireless radio. Up to now, this has been thought to be impossible: transmitters and receivers either work at different times or at the same time but at different frequencies. The Columbia team, led by Electrical Engineering Associate Professor Harish Krishnaswamy, is the first to demonstrate an IC that can accomplish this. The researchers presented their work at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco on February 25.

CoSMIC (Columbia high-Speed and Mm-wave IC) Lab full-duplex transceiver IC that can be implemented in nanoscale CMOS to enable simultaneous transmission and reception at the same frequency in a wireless radio

“This is a game-changer,” says Krishnaswamy, director of the Columbia high-Speed and Mm-wave IC (CoSMIC) Lab. “By leveraging our new technology, networks can effectively double the frequency spectrum resources available for devices like smartphones and tablets.”

In the era of Big Data, the current frequency spectrum crisis is one of the biggest challenges researchers are grappling with and it is clear that today's wireless networks will not be able to support tomorrow's data deluge. Today's standards, such as 4G/LTE, already support 40 different frequency bands, and there is no space left at radio frequencies for future expansion. At the same time, the grand challenge of the next-generation 5G network is to increase the data capacity by 1,000 times.

So the ability to have a transmitter and receiver re-use the same frequency has the potential to immediately double the data capacity of today's networks. Krishnaswamy notes that other research groups and startup companies have demonstrated the theoretical feasibility of simultaneous transmission and reception at the same frequency, but no one has yet been able to build tiny nanoscale ICs with this capability.

“Our work is the first to demonstrate an IC that can receive and transmit simultaneously,” he says. “Doing this in an IC is critical if we are to have widespread impact and bring this functionality to handheld devices such as cellular handsets, mobile devices such as tablets for WiFi, and in cellular and WiFi base stations to support full duplex communications.”

The biggest challenge the team faced with full duplex was canceling the transmitter's echo. Imagine that you are trying to listen to someone whisper from far away while at the same time someone else is yelling while standing next to you. If you can cancel the echo of the person yelling, you can hear the other person whispering.

“If everyone could do this, everyone could talk and listen at the same time, and conversations would take half the amount of time and resources as they take right now,” explains Jin Zhou, Krishnaswamy’s PhD student and the paper’s lead author. “Transmitter echo or ‘self-interference’ cancellation has been a fundamental challenge, especially when performed in a tiny nanoscale IC, and we have found a way to solve that challenge.”

Krishnaswamy and Zhou plan next to test a number of full-duplex nodes to understand what the gains are at the network level. “We are working closely with Electrical Engineering Associate Professor Gil Zussman and his PhD student Jelena Marasevic, who are network theory experts here at Columbia Engineering,” Krishnaswamy adds. “It will be very exciting if we are indeed able to deliver the promised performance gains.”

This work was funded by the DARPA RF-FPGA program

Thankyou to columbia.edu for the tireless research, this really is an exciting invention, the possibilities if this can be brought to our industry are unbelievable.

Bill Would Allow Coloradans To Use 1 Earphone Behind The Wheel

Cellphone makers have come up with lots of devices that make it easier to drive with both hands on the wheel while using their technology, but in Colorado one common setup for going hands-free is illegal.

Using earphones while driving is illegal in the state, even if only one ear has an earbud in it or the headphones have audio coming out of only one side.

Rep. Jovan Melton, a Democrat who represents Aurora, says that’s a problem.

“I definitely understand and respect that they’re following the letter of the law, but people shouldn’t be punished for trying to drive safely by keeping both hands on the wheel,” he said.

Melton says Denver police has written 172 tickets in the past three years for people wearing earphones or a single earbud.

“It’s important that we clean this piece of the statute up,” he said. “Allow people to drive safely without having to worry about being fined or ticketed or pulled over for wanting to do the right thing.”

This is illegal in the US, and is also illegal here in the UK, it's not common to see drivers in the UK doing this. But the worrying rise in touchscreens in cars could increase the chances of more accidents.

Melton is carrying a bill that would allow motorists to use one earphone or earbud while driving.

“A lot of the earbuds that you get with your phone will come with two for music listening, but we wanted to make sure that you are only using one earbud so you can still hear emergency vehicles,” he said.

Melton’s bill doesn’t require hands-free devices like earphones when talking on the phone behind the wheel. Melton tried and failed to get such legislature approved last year. But he says he’s not giving up.

“I think if we can get this passed it’s just one more step in that conversation which will hopefully lead to a successful (hands-free) bill next year,” he said.

The one earbud bill has passed in the House of Representatives and it was approved unanimously in a Senate committee on Thursday. It now moves on to the full Senate.

Colorado has several laws currently on the books related to distracted driving:

â€" It is illegal to text and drive

â€" If you are under 18, you can’t text or talk on the phone

â€" You cannot have a TV or computer that shows entertainment, social media or email in a position in the vehicle where the driver can see it.



Source - http://denver.cbslocal.com/2015/03/05/bill-would-allow-coloradans-to-use-1-earphone-behind-the-wheel/