SAN FRANCISCO — At a GDC event today, Sony showed off its new PlayStation Move controller, along with a number of games. The audience response was positive, but the demos shown, including sports games and sword-and-shield-style battles, seemed both inspired and informed by what the Wii has done before.

In fact, while Sony claimed that for under $100 you`ll be able to get the PlayStation Eye, a motion controller, and a game, almost all the demos were played with two motion controllers. There is also a second controller, much like the nunchuk, used during the SOCOM beta. Sony, it seems, will require you to have two Moves, and the secondary controller. 

The demos included archery, boxing, and golf, all of which are things we`ve seen on the Wii, and which will be bundled together in a game called, as of now, "Sports Champions." The other demo game looked very much like Eyetoy, but with augmented reality. You hold the controller, but on the screen you see a paintbrush or a tennis racket. It`s very impressive technology, and seems very solid. Another game turns the controller into a fan you use to blow chicks into bird nests. Very cute.

LittleBigPlanet is another Move demo; the player with the PlayStation Move helps the Sackboy get to the next area. "Motion Fighters," which is, again, a working title, is a fighting game. You can lean to make the fighter move, and you have to actually punch. The Move Subcontroller is the nunchuk, so you`ll need one of those as well. (This is getting expensive.)

SOCOM 4 is coming to the PS3, and you`ll be able to play with the Move and the Subcontroller. It looks just like Wii first- and third-person shooters, at least in terms of controls. The technology was integrated "very quickly, with very little overhead."

We`ll have a chance to go hands-on with these games at the event`s conclusion, so expect impressions and photos later. The technology looks solid, it`s real, but it all looks like things we`re already used to from the Wii. Sony is banking on consumers buying these products to get a motion-controlled experience with high-definition graphics. A risky gamble.

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By now, it`s practically a mantra that the biggest problem with corporate IT security is the employees themselves. However, we usually assume that`s due to ignorant users or poorly enforced policies. Not so for a chunk of the US working population—according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive, 12 percent admitted to knowingly violating IT policy in order to get work done.

The survey of 1,347 employed adults was conducted on behalf of Fiberlink, a company that hawks services that "help enterprises connect, control and secure laptops and mobile devices." Needless to say, the survey results fit perfectly into the company`s agenda, but they are hardly surprising. After all, how many of us know someone who has left a work laptop in an unattended vehicle, sent unencrypted e-mails without permission, or reused the same three passwords over and over instead of choosing new ones every 90 days?

Fiberlink CEO Jim Sheward warned of the obvious. "IT departments nationwide spend a lot of time and money on their compliance, usage, and access policies, but they only work if people follow the rules," he said in an e-mailed statement. [C]ompanies could face dangerous breaches that include the loss of sensitive data, competitive intelligence, or customers’ private information."

Harris` findings are supported by previous reports saying that leaky employees are a bigger threat than malware, that employees (not hackers) cause the most corporate data loss, and that employees` online activities pose the greatest threat to IT security. With 12 percent of those people actively working outside of stated IT policy (and plenty more who do so out of ignorance), IT admins certainly have their work cut out for them if they want to maintain a tight ship.

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Plastics became ubiquitous during the 20th century. They were hot topicsof industrial and academic research, and saw innumerable consumerapplications. While plastics can have a wide variety of mechanicalproperties, they are almost universally good insulators,both of heat and electricity. But a paper out of the Pappalardo Microand Nano Engineering Laboratories reports on a novel processingtechnique that aligns the polymer chains of polyethylene, which results in amaterial that has both a high thermal capacitance and a highelectrical resistance.

The researchers forced the polyethylene to form into this aligned morphology by slowly drawing the fiber out of solution using the tip of an atomic force microscope. Thenew fibrous form of polyethylene conducts heat well along thedirection of the fibers—so well, it beats out many pure metals, including ironand platinum.The resulting fiber was about 300 times more thermally conductive than normal polyethylene.This surprising ability to move heat could find uses in any number oftechnologies that currently rely on metal as a heat transfer medium.

Thisnew method differs from previous attempts at creating a more heat-conductive plastic in that it transforms the morphology of theunderlying material instead of using an additive. These prior attempts, while scalable, resulted in onlymodest gains, since there was high thermal resistance at theinterface between the plastic and additive. 

It`s not currently known how well, if at all, the process will beable to scale up to production. So far, the team has only producedsingle fibers in the laboratory, but they hope to be able to scale upto macro-scale production of entire sheets of this material.

Nature Nanotechnology, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/NNANO.2010.27  (About DOIs).

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