TAIWAN: Mouser Electronics Inc. announced that its Lighting Applications site on Mouser.com covering the entire lighting ecosystem has been expanded to include featured products, a new application feature, and several of the latest lighting industry articles.

The updated site helps design engineers find the latest lighting advancements, trends, and supporting product information in as few clicks as possible. A new featured products section has been added, including products from leading suppliers such as Philips Lumileds, Cree and OSRAM Opto Semiconductors.

There is also a new featured application, the Instrument Cluster Backlight, with a block diagram and other supporting resources. The articles section has been updated as well to include the latest lighting articles by Philips Lumileds, OSRAM Opto Semiconductors, and Mouser.

“We always want to offer the newest lighting technology available from the world’s leading manufacturers,” says Kevin Hess, Mouser VP of Technical Marketing. “Our expanded Lighting Applications site makes it easier for engineers to identify the right lighting solutions for their newest designs. To keep you up-to-date on the latest technologies, we are frequently adding new products and technical resources to the lighting site, so check back often.”

Mouser’s lighting application training site is a comprehensive resource center spanning three areas: products, applications, and design engineering resources. The Lighting Product Selector Guide is arranged into five main product categories with a graphical interface to speed navigation. Engineers can quickly narrow down a set of products based on defined parameters/engineering standards geared to their specific design needs.

Among those of us who grew up with the Internet, some have found unexpected, outsize benefits.

Luo Gang, who grew up in the Fujian Province in China, remembered only that his hometown had two bridges. He was abducted one day on his way to kindergarten and taken to a family nearly 1,000 miles away. His new family treated him as their own, but he still reviewed his old memories every night before going to bed, he told the South China Morning Post.

When he became an adult, he joined a Chinese website dedicated to locating missing children and submitted a rough sketch of what he remembered about home. Information from the volunteers, plus satellite images from Google Maps, helped him find his actual hometown, Guangan in the Sichuan Province, the South China Morning Post reported from Nhaidu, a Fujian news website.

The Internet is now awash in warm fuzzies from his story. Luo eventually reunited with his biological parents, who had worried about terrible things like whether he was well clothed and fed.

Luo’s story echoes that of Saroo Munshi Khan, who fell asleep on a train when he was five and was borne away from his hometown, whose name he didn’t know. A nonprofit group eventually found him and put up a notice for him as a missing child. When no one responded, the group, the Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption, adopted him to an Australian couple.

Khan grew up in Australia. But after college, he began looking for his hometown on Google Maps, searching for landmarks a five-year-old kid would know. Like Luo, he eventually found and met his birth family.

[South China Morning Post]

Using data collected by drones, a research team is building 3-D maps of Norway’s geology to help companies track down hidden mineral wealth.

Members of the center’s Virtual Outcrop Geology group are employing an octo-copter loaded with all kinds of sensors—high-definition cameras, infrared sensors, LIDAR scanners, etc.—to map the geography and geology of the Norwegian landscape from above. The group used to do this by sending teams out into the wilderness with ground-based laser scanners and other equipment to create digital maps of the terrain from the ground. But given Norway’s diverse geography, such ground mapping was often impossible, which forced the team to lease helicopters to capture what they couldn’t get themselves, often at very high cost.

The new drones can perform the same aerial mapping tasks as helicopters, quickly reaching high elevations and other inaccessible areas to generate 3-D terrain maps that can be integrated with data from geological and seismological studies to produce three-dimensional pictures of the Earth’s crust. These in turn can tell geologists a lot about where oil is likely to be hiding both on land and underneath the surrounding seabed.

And of course the drones can do all of this at a fraction of the time and cost of more traditional methods—which is one of the most promising aspects of UAS technology regardless of application. By putting the means to conduct aerial survey in the hands of individual users at a relatively reasonable cost, everything from wildlife management to geological survey to infrastructure maintenance has the potential to become more precise, more effective, and ultimately less expensive. Virtual Outcrop Geology’s work is a case in point—even if cheaper oil and gas exploration methods aren’t going to translate into savings at the gas pump any time soon.

[University of Bergen]

Yahoo, a service people used to use, spends lots and lots of money on Tumblr, a service people use now. And by “people” we mean “teens.” Hence the purchase.

Yahoo has had a bad decade; the service was dominant in the early years of the internet with their “front page,” a list of news and weather and updates that would routinely be set as a user’s homepage. That led to other successes in search and email, but as Google became dominant in both those categories and the “front page” began to fall out of favor, Yahoo became a company with an aging and apathetic userbase. So they began acquiring other companies.

These have all turned out poorly. For an in-depth account, check out Mat Honan’s piece for Gizmodo about the acquisition and destruction of Flickr, but that’s just one of many. Geocities, del.icio.us, and so many more have also been nabbed by Yahoo.

Mayer, though, is a founding member of the early Google team, and was brought on to revitalize the brand. This is her first major acquisition, and man, is it a major one.

Tumblr is a blogging platform, but a closed system, unlike, say, WordPress. Blogs are customizable, but only to a point, and the format encourages images and videos (and, especially, GIFs) rather than long wordy posts. More importantly, it’s a massive social network, with 300 million unique visitors a month, commenting and sharing posts and joining and contributing to lots of little communities within Tumblr.

It’s largely used by the youngs, with its largest demographic in the 18-24-year-old range. And it’s a haven for the weirdest elements of internet culture, teen and otherwise–there’s porn, there’s objectionable content, and there’s an awful lot of copyright infringement, all of which are things Yahoo has typically not tolerated. (Here is one extraordinarily NSFW example. DO NOT CLICK THAT LINK.)

The concern is that Yahoo will, as they’ve done before, stomp out the personality of Tumblr, inject advertising, alienate the users, and kill the community. (Tumblr, it’s worth noting, has neither made nor seemed interested in ever making a profit.) Mayer seems determined not to follow this route, at least from her post, but Tumblr users are upset anyway. WordPress noted that tens of thousands of Tumblr users had exported their Tumblrs to WordPress after the announcement.

Ever since 2005, Ubuntu has delivered Mozilla’s Firefox browser as its default browser, which has made millions of Ubuntu users loyal users of Firefox. But Firefox is hardly the only browser choice that Ubuntu users have. If you’ve tried Chromium–the open source core of Google’s Chrome browser–you already know that it’s fast, clean and very stable. That has now produced a lively discussion going on online about whether Ubuntu 13.10, due later this year, should ship with Chromium as the default browser.

Much of the discussion surrounding making Chromium the default browser in Ubuntu sprang out of the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit, where many developers supported the switch. As Google made clear at its recent Google I/O conference, the Chrome browser has made huge market share gains in the past year, and Chromium presents an interface familiar to Chrome users. Development for Chromium is also robust and fast-paced.

But there is another reason why Canonical may want to tie Ubuntu development to Chromium development. Google has seen its Chrome strategy working on many kinds of mobile platforms, ranging from Chromebooks to smartphones. Canonical has ambitious plans for bringing Ubuntu to phones, tablets and other platforms. Chromium development may dovetail with these plans for Ubuntu in serendipitous ways, as Canonical seeks to deliver common interfaces and experiences for Ubuntu users on many kinds of devices.

Especially as Canonical moves forward with Ubuntu Touch and the other components of its mobile plans, watch for a switch to Chromium as the default browser. And, users of Firefox on Ubuntu may be surprised to hear that Chromium is absolutely competive with Firefox. I use both browsers on Ubuntu, and see many advantages to Chromium, including performance advantages.