26/10/2013 Click

The headlines: European Union leaders have warned that distrust of

the US over spy and could harm the fight against terrorism. A statement

issued following the EU summit in Brussels says that a lack of trust

could prejudice intelligence gathering operations. The US

acknowledged it had created certificate challenges and

tensions. JP Morgan has agreed to pay $5.1

billion for misleading US mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The bank struck the deal with the US mortgage regulator. JP Morgan is

still tried to settle with the Justice Department over similar

claims. Italian coastguard said more than

700 migrants have been rescued near Sicily in the past 44 hours. It was

part of the enhanced patrols that year the European Union started up

to 300 migrants died when their ship sank off the Italian coast earlier

this month. Now on BBC News, it is time for

Click. Welcome to Click. Welcome to one of

the most famous skylines on the planet. This week, we are on a tiny

island that is having an enormous impact. It may hardly show up on the

map, but the country punches well up its weight. This is Singapore. We

will be passing the fake border control and taking a peek at the

secrets behind your credit cards, all in the name of touch less

technology. We will journey whitespace, to take `` test a

project promising to bring Wi`Fi to everyone. And we will check out some

singularly Singaporean research, including a low`cost way to turn

your television into a touchscreen, and a lavatory that recycles

everything, and I mean everything. All that plus the latest news, and a

way to go sightseeing from the comfort of your own home in

Webscape. Time for Click to blast off from New

Broadcasting House in London and had 6000 miles south`east. We are off to

a citystate that is home to 5.5 million people. It is only 70 miles

wide and only 85 miles north of the equator, and it wants to put itself

at the centre of everything. Singapore has always positioned

itself as a hub, a meeting place for East and West. As far as progress is

concerned, being physically small does have its advantages. When you

are not covering a large area, rolling out new technologies such as

four G can happen very quickly and easily. Connecting up the new

high`speed, 1 gigabit per second broadband service is certainly made

easier when 80% of Singaporeans live in high`rise public housing such as

this. Welcome aboard the Singapore Flyer, the largest observation wheel

in the world. From the top of the ride, 165 metres up, Singapore does

look like tiny. The city does not serve much bustle as harm with

activity, like inefficient machine. It is part of a drive that has

happened in the last couple of decades, which has created one of

the highest standards of living in the world, and a population where

nine out of ten people have a smart phone. They are certainly used to

having the best, first. We only have so much new technology. Today a lot

of new products turn up on the same day as the US, or South Korea or

Japan. It is not just the roads and dated networks which seem to work

well, its small size and compactness and means that this is the ideal

place to while out a nationwide network which larger countries have

so far failed to do. It is a network that lets you do stuff just by

touching one device to an upper. It is called NFC, near Field

communication. We have seen this quite a few times on Click, but the

tech is not quite come in enough for everyone to get on board. `` common.

Would Singapore be the place where NFC does make it into the

mainstream? What they have done is grouping a group of players in the

ecosystem to come together to roll out services. It helps to cut out

the deployment time and development time. After all, your smart phone is

something that you keep on your person most of the time, and at this

NFC showroom, they are demonstrating other applications. Once you are in,

the same phone can be used to pass on and receive information using

NFC. Touch it to a poster, and you receive promotional vouchers to use

while you are shopping. Touch the smart poster, I want a ten kilo bag

of rice and I wanted delivered to the house, that is something you can

choose to do as a convenience. But sometimes your smart phone alone is

not enough. Which is why some passports are already fitted with

NFC chips. Couple this with fingerprint scanning to check that

the handholding the passport matches the hand stored within it, and this

is how we could be passing through airports the future. NFC is ready a

way of life in Singapore. You may not have considered how these cards

are made, but since hundreds of millions of them are made Singapore

every year, it would be rude not to take a look. It is tempting to think

of your credit card as a simple piece of plastic, but there are

quite a few components that are tightly pressed together. The

process happens in what is a pretty confidential procedure. This place

is so secretive that visitors are asked not to touch anything and to

not to come in with bags, mobile phones, data devices or cameras. Of

course, it is confidential for a reason. You do not want any one

comprising any stage of the production process, whether it is

the embedding of the chip, the choosing of the colour or even the

transparency of the plastic. One of the layers inside this card is a

thin, copper spiral. This is the antenna, and when you connect it to

the chip in the card, it gives it its NFC properties. Of course, it

goes without saying, that you can pay for your taxi ride using your

NFC enabled smart phone as well. But getting NFC to work in Singapore or

anywhere is not just about getting the infrastructure right, it is

about persuading people that it will make their lives easier. Talking of

an easy life, LJ Rich has found somewhere a little bit more relaxing

than this, to check out another type of future network, something called

whitespace. I am somewhere very relaxing. This

is guidance by the bay. I am here for a reason. That is all about

being connect dead in a public place. `` connected. This guidance

did not exist six years ago. They were built on we claimed land. ``

origins. A tranquil break from the frantic financial hub a few miles

away. Futuristic structures known as super trees quietly harness solar

power, so they can light themselves up at night. But there is something

amiss in paradise. Tourists wishing to tweet about their adventures are

out of luck, unless they have brought their own mobile data

connection, because as any traveller knows, there is rarely free internet

access went straight in from a home network. But this went to live just

a few weeks ago as a trial area for Singapore's super Wi`Fi whitespace

programme, the idea is to eventually roll out free public Wi`Fi across

the city. We have seen whitespace before on Click. It is the name for

a wireless network made available when old frequencies are repurposed

to carry data. With so many people online, traditional wireless

networks are getting congested. You are talking about just coverage,

that is in the order of 400 base stations which will be able to cover

the whole Singapore Island. If you need a certain capacity in certain

areas, you probably have to plan more base stations. Those whitespace

antennas pick up the raw internet signal, then it is converted to a

frequency that our smartphones will be able to use. You have to register

before you can use the service, but the countrywide roll`out is

scheduled for completion in two years, hopefully someone will have

sorted out our smartphones that Reliance by them.

`` battery life. LJ is back in a minute. We are

coming back to Singapore. Facebook has rued a videotape of a

woman being decapitated from the social media network, and issued in

your rules on what can be shared on the site. The U`turn came after the

BBC revealed that Facebook dropped a ban on extremely violent videos and

images. Facebook says it will allow some graphic content, but will take

a closer look at this context. Google says it wants to protect news

organisations and human rights groups from cyber attacks, with its

new Project Shield. The software aims to protect sites wriggly

subject to politically motivated distributed denial of service, or

DDOS attacks. It also revealed a proxy feature designed to bypass

government surveillance software. Apple has unveiled the next

generation iPad, the fifth`generation Air is a third

lighter and 20% thinner than the previous version. The iPad mini now

has what Apple calls a retina display, offering higher resolution

than its predecessor. A raft of upgraded laptops are predictably

thinner and faster, and there is another update to the Mac operating

system, Mavericks is now available at no charge. Microsoft has released

two new surface tablets with updates to its Windows OS, and Nokia has

revealed three new mobile devices, including its first tablet, dealer

meow 2520. After Microsoft decided to buy the finished out of it, it is

no surprise in they also run the Windows operating system. You can

decide what you want in all out of focus, after the shot has been

taken. As you know, there are more millionaires per head in Singapore

than any other country on earth. That is the financial district of

the country. But it is not all about making money. There is a flourishing

academic scene as well. This is Nanyang technological

University, and it is full of laboratories. Inside its impressive

architecture, there is some equally impressive thinking going on. How do

you find the research that is really going to change lives? This is the

place that developed a real invisibility cloak, which may be a

bit of a niche, but some trends, specifically take that can change

how we behave, are quite easy to spot. What do you have first? We

have sitting in traffic. It is part of driving in this densely packed

island. So the strappy prediction project takes GPS data from large

taxi companies and use it to predict where things get bunged up. As

traffic gets heavier, this conventional data analysis starts to

fall apart. Cars driving closely together start to behave more like a

liquid, the roads are like pipes, so the programme switches to a physics

`based model, using fluid dynamics. If you look at the top, it is coming

up to rush`hour, and predictably we have got lots of red bits. They mean

that traffic is moving between ten and 30 km/h, that is, quite slowly.

At the bottom, the prediction and run, and it is showing how accurate

the prediction data is. Lots of blooming is pretty good. Like the

weather, the further into the future you predict, the less accurate the

result. For a big city, you will need a lot more sensors, and you

probably have to break the city down into small areas. Efficiency is

important, especially in a place like Singapore. As well as traffic

issues, this place's compact nature has brought other environmental

issues to the fall. It is to save energy, reduce waste and save water,

most of which is currently imported from Malaysia. One team has a grand

plan to make our towns more sustainable, by creating localised

waste treatment centres, which take all forms of waste from nearby

housing, and converted into energy. And that is why I find myself

staring down the toilet. Researchers have found that pretty

much everything that goes down he can be turned into something useful.

The process works best if you can keep solid and liquid separate,

hence, this is being done in not exclude. It is divided into

sections, to keep one away from, well, two. It is combined with food

waste to make biogas, which can be used for cooking. This is used to

grow microalgae, that is the green stuff, which produces bio diesel.

So, only one question remains. How would we take to wait to let that

requires, shall we say, a little more discipline? Well, the first one

has been installed in the university itself. So, it is time for me to try

it out. Just, am, give me a few minutes, would you?

While Spencer is otherwise occupied, here is something that could convert

any surface into a touchscreen. Tapping on a board, in this case

made of wood or aluminium, sends a signal to this attached town sensor.

Placing more than one sensor on a flat object, makes it possible to

work out where it has been tapped, it was the sound take slightly

longer to reach the centre further away. That is the thinking behind a

low`cost touch surface. Fast forward two years from the boards, and you

have a working prototype. Instead of 1 cent, have 12. It is fired along

the top, find along the bottom, and one along the top. 12 sensors

mounted around the glass, make foray sensitive touchscreen. There are a

couple of real issues. First, in order for this to work, you have to

make an audible noise. Secondly, if you want to do swiping, you are

going to need some of these. Together with the cameras on the

top, this kind of works. I know there are many other products that

let you use touch and gesture to communicate with them, but this one

has the advantage of being very affordable. Now, the thing about

this system is not that it can do all of these things, but it can do

them at incredibly low cost. For example, this 12 sensors here, plus

the camera, plus the glass, currently is coming in at around 100

Singapore dollars, that is around 75 US dollars, or ?50. Real`life

applications could include making a cheap, interactive whiteboard for

schools. It will take another 18 months before this contraption is

streamlined enough to hit the mainstream. Now, Spencer is back

with a panda. These days we are sending more and more data around

our homes, whether it is syncing files between machines, or streaming

visitors like kung fu and. It is or is easier to do that wirelessly, but

wireless is prone to break up and interference. That is why this team

have developed something called next`generation wireless. This is

being sent over a system that has between two and six gigabits. That

is enough to stream a high`definition video. This has the

technology up to a range of eight metres at the moment, so the

transmitter sending this video feed is down there at the end of the

hall. Another restriction is that this system is line of sight. It is

extremely directional, meaning you have to point the transmitter at the

receiver for it to work. If anything thicker than a piece of paper breaks

the beam, the signal is lost and the panda freezes, as you can see. The

team are hoping to get around that problem by helping the signal to get

around the problem, by bouncing it for wall on for example. In the

future, they hope to get the range of high enough so that you can send

data on building to building, creating a kind of mesh network over

part of the city. They think that version of the technology might be

ready within the next year. Well in time for Kung Fu Panda three. Let's

find out what Kate Russell has in store for us this week.

Being an environmentally concerned member of the Click team, I am quite

happy not to be piling on the air miles, jetting off to shows and

exhibitions cross the world, especially when I can enjoy all the

sites in full 360 degrees glory with the new out from 360 cities. This

amazing app turns your mobile device into a 360 degrees window into the

world, using the gyroscope to let you spin your viewpoint around for

some of the most stunning landscapes on the planet. Who needs a trip to

Singapore anyway? It is not free, but just ?1 50 seems pretty good

value for such a powerful image tool. There are thousands of

visitors to explore, browsing by popular, recent or local images

posted by other users. You can also make your own, with a simple point

and turn function. If you are the kind of person that

wakes up in the morning and reaches for your smart phone to check what

is happening in the world, you are going to love this kind of 360,

News360.com. Connect it to all of your main accounts, and it analyses

what you like so it can feed the latest stories straight to your

timeline. Social networks are grey way of news on topics that interest

you and your friends, but you don't always want to get drawn into the

general chitchat. This is a perfect solution, as you only see links to

publish articles in subjects that you have expressed an interest in.

You can fine tune the categories that appear in your feed, and over

time, the get more about what interests you buy clicking like at

appropriate moments. You can also download the chrome plug`in, or free

apps for Android, Apple or Windows seven or eight. TEDed My name is.

This allows you to turn any video into a complete lessons, with

resources links and discussion topics to engage students in the

lessons in held by the videos. TED has been around for several years,

bringing together people who are leaders in their fields. It has

become synonymous with world changing ideas. This education

initiative sits perfectly inside that idea. Anyone can visit the site

and enjoy lessons already posted by the community, either by subject, or

just delving into the users. You are never too old to learn something

new, and this is a totally inspiring place to start. What if someone

thinks I'm awful, or an idiot. This is the fight or flight response.

Blackberry has been struggling for some time now, last month laying off

4.5 thousand staff. Despite these trying times, there are still a lot

of fans of the chat client, BBM, which at its height claimed over

75,000 active users. That has shrunk since enthusiasm has waned, but

there could be a revival, at least for the Instant Messenger. There is

a lot to love in this act, including live status updates, group

messaging, and privacy options that means you don't have to share your

personal details with everyone you connect to. What is not to love, is

that you will have to put your name down in a queue to have your account

activated, as more than a million people are reportedly waiting to

start chatting cross`platform on BBM.

If you missed any of those links, you will find them all at our

website. If you would like to contribute to a future web scape,

get in touch. That is it for this Singapore special, I hope you

enjoyed it. See you next time. We wouldn't normally start our look

at the weather by jumping 48 hours ahead, but then the prospects for

late Sunday morning into Monday are quite far from normal for the

British arms. The Met