UMBC’s College of Engineering and Information Technology is using an Energy Education Award from Constellation Energy to provide energy research opportunities for a significant number of undergraduate students.

This semester, students in IS 420: Advanced Database Development received technology to collect the power consumption data of different appliances and devices. They are also working to build a web-portal (GUI), which will capture human actions, energy behavior and footprint over a specific period.

Project involvement encourages the students to think differently about energy systems and promotes advanced study and career preparation in the energy industry. The Constellation project helps students gain a greater sense of social awareness and deeper understanding of energy system technologies, as well as enhance their basic research and development skills through this hands-on experience. By combining their intrinsic research abilities and inspiration, the students will become conscious about the importance of being a responsible energy user in their daily lives and beyond.

Read more about the Energy Education Award here.

Startup Mighty Cast thinks teens may want a wearable computer with modular components.

A Montreal-based startup called Mighty Cast is working on an electronic bracelet to which modular charms can add new functionality. It hopes to start selling it for about $50 later this year.

A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

Gene Therapy’s Big Comeback
Gene therapy is attracting investors once again: companies have raised $618 million since the beginning of 2013, Forbes reports.
—Susan Young Rojahn, biomedicine editor

Want to learn the newest way to become a billionaire? Try sharing.

The founders of website airbnb (Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia) just became three of the worlds’ youngest billionaires, and the first to earn their fortune in the so-called “sharing economy.” 

Airbnb connects travelers to hosts in 192 countries around the world. The Airbnb client pays to stay in the home of an Airbnb host during their trip.

While some worry that the site cuts into hotel profits without being subject to the same regulations as the former, Airbnb trumpets the economic benefit of its service. 

Airbnb is just one manifestation of the fast-growing sharing economy. Relatively new companies such as Zipcar (car sharing, founded 2000), Capital Bikeshare (bicycle sharing, 2010), and Lyft (ride sharing, 2012) all do business  helping people share.

Book and tool libraries use a similar model, but without the element of profit. Similarly, many of our student readers probably have experience borrowing  items such as pans from their friends and residence halls.

What are the implications of all this?  

Not everyone is in favor. Some industries argue that businesses based on peer-to-peer sharing  are unfairly difficult to tax and regulate: Chicago cab drivers are suing the city in an attempt to force it to regulate ride-share service Uber.

 Conversely, environmentalists see at least one obvious benefit: less stuff consumed.

The environmental impact of buying a single vacuum cleaner to share with your neighbor is half that of producing two vacuum cleaners.  Finally, the sharing economy can benefit consumers by saving them money. 

Is the sharing economy a fad, or the future?

Share your thoughts below.

If you are a Google Glass user, you might have been greeted with concerned looks or raised eyebrows at public places. There has been a lot of chatter in the “interweb” regarding the loss of privacy that results from people taking your pictures with Glass without notice. Google Glass has simplified photography but as what happens with revolutionary technology people are worried about the potential misuse.

FaceBlock helps to protect the privacy of people around you by allowing them to specify whether or not to be included in your pictures. This new application developed by the joint collaboration between researchers from the Ebiquity Research Group at University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Distributed Information Systems (DIS) at University of Zaragoza (Spain), selectively obscures the face of the people in pictures taken by Google Glass.

Comfort at the cost of Privacy?

As the saying goes, “The best camera is the one that’s with you”. Google Glass suits this description as it is always available and can take a picture with a simple voice command (“Okay Glass, take a picture”). This allows users to capture spontaneous life moments effortlessly. On the flip side, this raises significant privacy concerns as pictures can taken without one’s consent. If one does not use this device responsibly, one risks being labelled a “Glasshole”. Quite recently, a Google Glass user was assaulted by the patrons who objected against her wearing the device inside the bar. The list of establishments which has banned Google Glass within their premises is growing day by day. The dos and donts for Glass users released by Google is a good first step but it doesn’t solve the problem of privacy violation.

Privacy-Aware pictures to the rescue

FaceBlock takes regular pictures taken by your smartphone or Google Glass as input and converts it into privacy-aware pictures. This output is generated by using a combination of Face Detection and Face Recognition algorithms. By using FaceBlock, a user can take a picture of herself and specify her policy/rule regarding pictures taken by others (in this case ‘obscure my face in pictures from strangers’). The application would automatically generate a face identifier for this picture. The identifier is a mathematical representation of the image. To learn more about the working on FaceBlock, you should watch the following video.

Using Bluetooth, FaceBlock can automatically detect and share this policy with Glass users near by. After receiving this face identifier from a nearby user, the following post processing steps happen on Glass as shown in the images.

What promises does it hold?

FaceBlock is a proof of concept implementation of a system that can create privacy-aware pictures using smart devices. The pervasiveness of privacy-aware pictures could be a right step towards balancing privacy needs and comfort afforded by technology. Thus, we can get the best out of Wearable Technology without being oblivious about the privacy of those around you.

FaceBlock is part of the efforts of Ebiquity and SID in building systems for preserving user privacy on mobile devices. For more details, visit http://face-block.me

As our websites grow more complex, web performance is becoming an increasingly important topic. There are many different strategies that you can employ to improve the performance of your websites. These include optimising images, combining multiple CSS files, or setting appropriate caching headers so that the browser doesn’t have to download resources multiple times if they haven’t changed.

In this blog post, you’re going to learn about data URIs, and how you can use them to increase the performance of your websites.

Let’s get started.

What Is a Data URI?

A data URI is a base64 encoded string that represents a file. Getting the contents of a file as a string means that you can directly embed the data within your HTML or CSS code. When the browser encounters a data URI in your code, it’s able to decode the data and construct the original file.

You can use data URIs for all sorts of different file types, but they’re most commonly used on the web for images (and sometimes fonts).

A data URI follows a certain scheme (as shown below) that includes some information about the encoded file — such as the mime type — along with the encoded data itself.

data:[<MIME-type>][;charset=<encoding>][;base64],<data>
    

You can use a data URI within your HTML or CSS code wherever you would have placed a file path before. For example you could use a data URI to specify a background image in CSS:

li { 
        background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAEAAAABFCAYAAAD6pOBtAAAABmJLR0QA/wD/AP+gvaeTAAAACXBIWXMAAAsTAAALEwEAmpwYAAAAB3RJTUUH3gMbBwwfAKopzQAAEfdJREFUeNrVW3uUHFWZ...) no-repeat;
    }
    

You can also use data URIs within the src attribute for an HTML <img> element.

<img width="64" height="69" alt="Treehouse Logo" src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAEAAAABFCAYAAAD6pOBtAAAABmJLR0QA/wD/AP+gvaeTAAAACXBIWXMAAAsTAAALEwEAmpwYAAAAB3RJTUUH3gMbBwwfAKopzQAAEfdJREFUeNrVW3uUHFWZ...">
    

Note: I’ve shortened the data URIs in these examples a bit. They tend to be very long!

Why Should I Use Data URIs?

The main benefit to using data URIs is that you can reduce the number of HTTP requests that your site needs to make to load the page. Each individual file referenced in your CSS or HTML code will create a new HTTP request. By using data URIs, you’re actually embedding the file data directly within your HTML or CSS file, so there’s no need to make a HTTP request to fetch the resource.

Making fewer HTTP requests ultimately means your web page will load faster as the browser does not have to load as many files. Aside from actually downloading the file, it takes time for the browser to establish a connection with the server for each HTTP request that’s made. Using data URIs eliminates this overhead.

It’s worth noting that the size of the data URI string is often around a third larger than the size of the original binary file. This means that you’ll be downloading a larger amount of data overall, but it will be compressed into a single file, with a single HTTP request. That’s OK, as it’s often quicker to download a large amount of data on a single connection than it is to download the same amount of data using multiple connections (due to the request overhead we spoke about earlier).

Remember: Not everyone has the speediest internet connections. Some zoom to the front of the pack, while others lag behind. Make sure you plan for those users, too. (Photo by Flickr user Stig Nygaard)

A drawback of using data URIs is that they’re not cached by the browser. As a result, the browser will have to decode the data URIs each time the page is loaded, consuming precious system resources. Mobile browsers can be slow to decode data URIs, so you need to weigh-up the network saving against the time taken to decode the images. If you’re using a lot of data URIs in your website, make sure that you test in a variety of mobile browsers to check that this doesn’t have a negative impact on performance.

How Do I Create Data URIs?

So now that you understand how to use data URIs in your web pages, and why they are useful, how do you actually create them? There are a few different options available.

Use an Online Converter

There are lots of apps available online that will convert a binary file to a data URI. One that I’ve found particularly useful can be found at dataurl.net.

The PageSpeed Module

If you’ve been following my posts on web performance in the past, you’ll probably know by now that I’m a huge fanboy of the PageSpeed module. Once you install this module on your Apache or Nginx web server, it will take care of applying a whole bunch of performance optimisations to your site without your needing to lift a finger.

The PageSpeed module includes a feature that will automatically convert small images referenced in your HTML and CSS files to data URIs, and then embed these into your code in place of the original file paths. This means that you don’t need to manually convert your files to data URIs, you can just sit back and let PageSpeed do all the work for you.

To ensure that this feature is turned on, add the following line to your server configuration.

For Apache web servers:

ModPagespeedEnableFilters inline_images
    

For Nginx web servers:

pagespeed EnableFilters inline_images;
    

Enabling the rewrite_images filter will also turn on inline_images alongside some other optimisations.

Compass

If you use Compass, you have access to a few helpers that will take care of converting your files to data URIs for you.

The inline-image() helper will convert an image file to a data URI. Pass in the path to your image file as the $image parameter. The $mime-type parameter is optional.

inline-image($image, $mime-type) 
    

You can also embed font files as data URIs using the inline-font-files() helper.

inline-font-files([$font, $format]*)
    

For more information, check out the Compass documentation on inline data helpers.

Creating Data URIs on the Server

Many programming languages have libraries you can use to convert a file to a base64 encoded string. All you need to do is prepend data:<mime type>;base64, to the beginning of the encoded string and you’ve got your data URI.

Check out this page for some examples of how to convert a binary file to a base64 string in commonly used programming languages.

Browser Support for Data URIs

Browser support for data URIs is generally very good. You just want to watch out if you need to support IE 5 to 7. If you do need to support older versions of IE, you could create an IE-specific stylesheet that switches out any styling rules with data URIs for ones that use standard file paths.

Support on mobile is pretty good too!

Source: http://caniuse.com/datauri

Final Thoughts

In this blog post, you’ve learned how to use data URIs to reduce HTTP requests and therefore increase the performance of your websites.

Web performance is something all web developers should spend some time looking into. It’s easy to forget that not everyone is afforded the same great broadband speeds you may have. A large proportion of the world’s population is just coming online, fueled by the adoption of mobile phones that rely on slow, cellular networks for access to the internet.

Next time you’re building a website, consider what you can do to ensure that you’re providing a great experience to all your users, regardless of how they’re connecting to your site.

Useful Links

• Can I use… Data URIs
• DataURI Maker

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