good java

top: DIY jewellery by Peilin; bottom: Peilin's purse detail

The fantastique visions of Michael 'Pooch' Pucciarelli

QR code for this blog, generated at http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Thinking inside the square

THE prospect of flashing a mobile phone at a movie poster to get screening times and buy tickets might seem fancifully futuristic to most.

So, too, the idea of aiming a handset at a business card to spare the hassle of manually entering the details.

But the technology that allows this to happen is on its way to Australia.

Known as QR (Quick Response) Codes, the square bar codes on flyers, newspapers or T-shirts provide a direct link to a web page.

When mobile phones with internet capability are swiped over the top, the user is taken directly to a related web page.

The technology was pioneered in Japan. Advertisers started placing the codes on billboards, magazines and shopfronts in 2000.

Since then, it has been embraced by almost every retail industry and adopted by consumers to encode personal details on business cards, where they can be scanned and read by software provided in almost every one of Japan's 100 million handsets.

Some people, like 25-year-old Yuta Horai, even emblazon personal QR Codes on their clothes.

"It's just a quick and easy way to link to a mobile internet site about anything - restaurants, movie times - on your mobile anywhere," says the Tokyo artist, who sometimes wears a T-shirt with a code that links to a website promoting his friend's band.

Special phone software is needed to read the codes. In some cases this can be downloaded from the internet, but Telstra says it is planning to release a range of QR Code-compatible phones "in the very near future".

"It makes the internet more directly accessible - you scan a code to get access to the content that you want when you want it," the executive director for consumers and channels, Tim Copper, said. The Herald will be Telstra's media partner in the the new phones.

Even Facebook has taken an interest in QR Codes, in a sign this two-dimensional technology, designed in 1994 by Denso-Wave to track parts in Japanese car manufacturing, has finally pricked the global consciousness.

The social networking site produces T-shirts and bags with personalised codes that new friends can scan to add the code-owner as a Facebook "friend".

In Japan, mobile phone users only have to position the code inside a square viewfinder on their screen to be taken directly to a corresponding website.

The process allows them to easily obtain restaurant locations, book taxis, find nutritional information, listen to music, enter competitions and sign up for giveaways.

Lawrence Cosh-Ishii, director of digital media for the online publication Japan Wireless Watch, said: "The iconic QR Code symbol has served as a trackable call to action for businesses engaging with potential customers."

Japan's McDonald's puts the codes on hamburger wrappers. Supermarkets put them on meat and egg packaging to provide information about the farms that produced them.

According to a survey, 73 per cent of consumers have used QR Codes. Among teenagers the figure rises to 90 per cent.

from smh
QR code entry on wikipedia
check out semapedia while you're at it

Beatles may rile aliens

SCIENTISTS have warned that transmitting songs into deep space could put the Earth at risk of an alien attack.

They voiced fears that advertising humanity's place in the universe – as happened last week when NASA broadcast a Beatles song towards the North Star – could attract the attention of aliens who are less friendly than ET.

"Before sending out even symbolic messages, we need an open discussion about the potential risks," Dr Douglas Vakoch, of the SETI Institute told New Scientist magazine.
SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – plans more broadcasts from its base in Mountain View, California. For the past 20 years, it has used radio telescopes to scan for alien radio messages.

Now, they say, we should be actively sending out friendly signals to the stars. "SETI's big mistake is that it's relying on ET to do all the heavy lifting," said Dr Richard Gott, an astrophysicist from Princeton University.

Barrie Jones, an astronomer with the Open University, said there was an "unofficial embargo" about alerting potentially unfriendly species. "The chances are slight, but the consequences would be huge – the end of life on Earth," he said.

"If they have the technology to cross interstellar space to reach us, they will be so much in advance of us humans that there is nothing we could do to resist them."

However, other astrophysicists point out that humanity has been advertising itself to neighbouring stars since the first commercial radio transmissions of the 1920s. By now, those early broadcasts will have travelled nearly 90 light years – some 540 trillion miles. And at least one physicist at SETI is confident that "first contact" will be more like Steven Spielberg's friendly encounter in ET and less like Ridley Scott's horrifying Alien.

Dr Seth Shostak said that if there are extraterrestrials listening out for us, they will have already had plenty of experience of Earth's culture. He is sanguine about the possibility of unfriendly attention, saying: "It's quite paranoid, given that the one thing we know about aliens – if they do exist – is that they are very, very far away.

"Military radar signals have already penetrated deep into space and early broadcasts of Star Trek and I Love Lucy are washing over one star system a day. "If they're listening, they already know we are here."

from news.com.au