Monkeys Made Smarter With Prosthetic Device
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mick Darling's posterousAll my blogging in one spot. (mostly)Monkeys Made Smarter With Prosthetic Device
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have successfully restored and, in some cases, enhanced decision-making ability in brain-damaged monkeys on cocaine by connecting a prosthetic device to their brains. 'In the study, the scientists trained five monkeys to match multiple images on a computer screen until they were correct 70 to 75 percent of the time. First, an image appeared on the screen, which the animals were trained to select using a hand-controlled cursor. The screen then went blank for up to two minutes, followed by the reappearance of two to eight images, including the initial one, on the same screen. When the monkeys correctly chose the image they were shown first, the electronic prosthetic device recorded the pattern of neural pulses associated with their decision by employing a multi-input multi-output nonlinear (MIMO) mathematical model, developed by researchers at the University of Southern California. In the next phase of the study, a drug known to disrupt cognitive activity, cocaine, was administered to the animals to simulate brain injury. When the animals repeated the image-selection task, their decision-making ability decreased 13 percent from normal. However, during these "drug sessions," the MIMO prosthesis detected when the animals were likely to choose the wrong image and played back the previously recorded "correct" neural patterns for the task. According to the study findings, the MIMO device was exceedingly effective in restoring the cocaine-impaired decision-making ability to an improved level of 10 percent above normal, even when the drug was still present and active.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Canadian Scientists Bind High-Temp Superconductor Components With Scotch Tape
First time accepted submitter halightw writes "Scotch tape really can fix anything according to a new study where it was used to induce super conductivity by taping two pieces of material together. A "proximity effect" occurs when a superconducting material is able to induce superconducting behavior in a second material — a semiconductor that does not typically enjoy superconductivity." All that and X-rays, too. Related: An anonymous reader writes "Scientist at University of Leipzig in Germany claim to have measured room-temperature superconducting in specially treated graphite grains. The measurements were reproduced independently before the announcement was made. More tests need to be done to verify the extent of superconductivity and whether the effect can be extended and scaled to be practical."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Secure Passwords Is a Simple Way to Generate Unique Passwords Using a Single Passphrase [Webapps]
Keeping track of passwords is a pain, and while services like Lastpass or 1Password are great for some people, they're not for everyone. If you want a dead simple way to create passwords based on a single passphrase, Secure Passwords does the trick. More »
Find Out if Your Suit Fits with Seven Simple Tricks [Clothing]
You may not be an expert tailor, but you don't need any special skills to know if a suit fits perfectly. All you need is your hands and a mirror. More »
Get a Bigger Hotel Room without Paying More (and Other Hotel Secrets) [Travel]
Want a more spacious hotel room or that Wi-Fi charge waived from your bill? Hotel receptionists share insider tips for these and other ways to improve your next hotel experience. More »
Behold! The a la carte pay TV model is coming to your mobile data planMobile operator 3 Hong Kong will offer its subscribers a WhatsApp Roaming Pass for $8 ($1 USD) a month that gives them unlimited access to WhatsApp services without counting it against their data caps, or a $48 ($6.19 USD) daily pass offering unlimited WhatsApp use and 5MB of service in 78 destinations around the world. WhatsApp, the popular texting app that has taken a huge chunk out of operators’ lucrative texting plans around the world, has been working to get closer to carriers. But this deal is worth paying attention to because if it succeeds in giving customers what they want while also helping carriers mitigate the margin-shaving effect of over the top services, it may be the future of mobile data plans. Instead of buying a bucket of bytes, what if users ended up buying a bucket of bytes and access to a few favorite apps? Then the mobile pricing looks more like an a la carte cable offering and less like forcing people to pay an arbitrary fee for a device ($40 for a smartphone!) in addition to the bucket of bytes as new plans from AT&T and Verizon do. The pros and cons of the WhatsApp offeringWhile there are plenty of people who want to buy an amount of data from their mobile operators and use it exactly how they please, for many carriers such a pricing plan would be financial suicide — cutting their profits to the bone. It’s possible that in competitive markets carriers will arise who can do this: Take the lower margins and still support their business. That would be awesome, but for now those options are few and far between. This is why carriers have killed off unlimited plans and are experimenting with family plans. It’s also why operators such as AT&T are thinking about how they work with popular app makers, with Ma Bell considering some kind of plan to charge app developers for the data their users consume. Consumers want their apps, carriers want to make money and appmakers want consumers to be able to use their apps without fear of ringing up a crazy bill. The WhatsApp pass solves a lot of these issues in a way that offers carriers a way to monetize an over the top application that’s threatening their revenue stream, gives consumers more security as well as the international roaming, but also steers clear of network neutrality issues because consumers don’t have to sign up for this plan to use WhatsApp. While 3 Hong Kong declined to discuss whether or not WhatsApp has to do to get this deal, if the terms were fair to WhatsApp, then even app makers should like this. For most normal customers who might use WhatsApp, but don’t want to worry about their data allocations, paying $8 a month for security and access to the app while they travel is a good way to offer value, above and beyond just bytes. And honestly, that’s what many carriers don’t seem ready to understand. So what apps would you pay for?
So then for consumers the question becomes what apps would you actually subscribe to? And for carriers the question is how many apps do they want to work with? For example, consumers might love a YouTube app, but because video consumes so much bandwidth, offering a reasonable rate to consumers that won’t blow an operator’s network might be a challenge. But, if Google and the carriers managed to work together to make the app less piggy on the bandwidth side, maybe something would work. Perhaps we’ll hear more about that next week at our Mobilize conference when Shiva Rajaraman, director of product management at YouTube, shares how to build a mobile video app. I for one would pay for a Google Maps everywhere plan simply for the security of not going over my data limits while traveling internationally or risk emptying my data bucket as I wander lost around my hometown of Austin (yes, I am that directionally challenged). I might also pay for an hour of guaranteed low-latency Skype or Tango video calling over the cellular network provided it wasn’t more than $5 a month. At that point, my mobile plan starts looking more like an a la carte cable plan and less like a bucket of bytes. If done well such plans could be good for operators, consumers and even app makers. Augmented HDR Vision For Welders (And Others)
jehan60188 writes about a research project (involving Steve Mann) that combines a welding helmet and realtime HDR image processing to give welders a clear view of what they're working on. From the article: "In this demonstration, we present a specialized version of HDR imaging (use of multiple differently exposed input images for each extended-range output image), adapted for use in electric arc welding, which also shows promise as a general-purpose seeing aid. TIG welding, in particular, presents an extremely high dynamic range scene (higher than most other welding processes). Since TIG welding requires keen eyesight and exact hand-to-eye coordination (i.e. more skill and more visual acuity than most other welding processes), being able to see in such extreme dynamic range is beneficial to welders and welding inspectors. ... We present HDRchitecture as either a fixed camera system (e.g. for use on a tripod), or as a stereo EyeTap cybernetic welding helmet that records and streams live video from a welding booth to students or observers, nearby or remote. By capturing over a dynamic range of more than a million to one, we can see details that cannot be seen by the human eye or any currently existing commercially available cameras. We also present a highly parallelizable and computationally efficient HDR reconstruction and tonemapping algorithm for extreme dynamic range scene. In comparison to most of the existing HDR work, our system can run in real-time, and requires no user intervention such as parameters fine tuning. ... Our algorithm runs at an interactive frame rate (30 fps) and also enables stereoscopic vision. Additionally, a hardware implementation, which uses FPGAs, will be presented. The initial hardware configuration comprises an Atlys circuitboard manufactured by Digilent Inc., which is small enough to fit inside a large shirt pocket. The circuit board includes two HDMI camera inputs, one being used for the left eye, and the other for the right eye, as well as HDMI outputs fed back to the left and right eyes, after processing of the video signals. The circuit board facilitates processing by way of a Xilinx Spartan 6, model LX45 FPGA."
The demonstration video is pretty cool, and you can read about the FPGA and details of the HDR algorithm in the research paper.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Beat Procrastination and Get Motivated with The Procrastination Equation [Productivity]
The next time you feel unmotivated, consult this handy flowchart for a cure. Based on the book The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel, the chart guides you to do one of four things associated with motivation and defeating procrastination. More »
Burning Man 2012 Recap #5.Artcars! These things really blew my mind. It’s rare that one gets to sit in one’s tent and have this slowly roll on by, squeaking. Every evening, Cricket and I would walk down to one of the main areas to see the lights and the artcars. If you remember correctly, the main reason I went in the first place was to (hopefully) see the snail artcar. There were a ton of them and they varied in size, from modified golf carts to full-length city buses. Once again, there were several popular choice themes. Ocean flora and fauna was big, as well as dragons/reptiles and boats/ships. I’ll go through the ones I saw during the daylight hours first. One particular artcar I was excited to see at Burning Man was the big dinosaur I saw at the entrance of Maker’s Faire. Here’s the blog entry on that. There was the chameleon tiki bar on wheels: The anglerfish: The beetle with all the detritus on top: As well as the Wonder Why toaster, the manface-mobile, the N’Awlins mask, and the hubcap-encrusted vehicle. (All these names are what I call them. I don’t know what the artists who made the artcars call them.) But wait! There’s more! The geometric dinosaur, the golden dragon, and the blorpfish with a RV-controlled mini-blorpfish hanging off the front (awww). The first morning we were there, the artcars were taking people on a tour of all that Playa art. Cricket and I arrived too late to get on to one of the vehicles, but while we were standing there the bestest thing shimmied out from behind one of the larger vehicles. LOOK AT THEM. They’re so beautiful! I never saw the twin serpents at night, but apparently they light up in a variety of ways and the black one shoots fire. Swoon. The first night we were there, we didn’t know any rules or anything. Luckily, our neighbors who had been to three previous Burning Mans informed us the next day that if you walk up to a stopped artcar and there looks like there is room, you can ask the driver for a ride and more often than not they will say yes. You don’t get to tell the driver where you’re going, but it’s super-cool nonetheless. I rode on two artcars. The first one was this gorgeous Viking ship that played Indian sitar music. Almost all the artcars play music they feel is appropriate for their vehicle. In this video I took of a traffic jam, you can hear bits of everyone’s tunes. The second time I rode on an artcar, I hopped on and it allowed me a much higher vantage point from which to see. As we slowly wound past some of the camps, we passed a camp called Empire of Dirt where the twin serpents were parked, and… what? What is that behind the OMG BBQ WTF MY SNAIL CAR. THERE’S MY SNAIL CAR. And it’s made by the same people who made the twin dragons! How fantastic! As soon as the vehicle we were on came to a halt (due to a giant speaker falling down, but whatever) I leapt off and ran back to where my beloved was sitting basking in the sun. And then promptly freaked out. See how my hands are balled up in fists? It’s because I want to touch SO BAD but you should not touch but I want to touch NNNGGG. The door was open so I could look inside. It’s quite spacious. They’ve built some kind of couch into the back part. The poor people who built all this stuff were sitting there trying to eat lunch and I ran up to them to tell them that I love them and I came to see the snail and I’m so happy now hooray snail! They were very nice to me. They also had a lovely trilobite. If I had to decide who are the winners of Burning Man, I would have to say the metal-smiths and welders. They made some really extraordinary things, and because those things are made of metal they could shoot fire without their beautiful creations charring or melting. Okay, night-time. I’ve already talked about the awesomeness, with the lights and the music and the whatnot. Now imagine cars with blinky hoo-hah all over them slowly meandering around the sculptures. There was the mushroom-mobile and the nautilus. A video of the mushroom-mobile and the nautilus. A spaceship (that played Mariah Carey’s “Hero” which is an interesting choice), a horse-n-carriage, a fish, and Hell in a Handbasket. How about some video footage of a lionfish covered with the same LED strips I used on my jelly-brella? How about if it’s playing “Proud Mary”? How about that? Here’s my beautiful chariot, the Viking ship, at night. In addition… the Flintstone car, two unicorns going at it under a rainbow, a sea-dragon, a cricket and two giant fake Volkswagens. I took the same basic picture twice because I loved how their colors kept changing. Here’s a dragon covered in old CDs blowing fire. You can hear Cricket in the background go “Wooooo!” I never actually saw this lotus-thing move, but I saw it parked in various places, so I’m going to assume it was a car, or at least mobile in some way. And there’s a jazz band playing in the background. Probably the most impressive of all the art cars was the cruise ship, solely based on its size. It was ENORMOUS. The base was a city bus, one of those crazy-long ones with the accordions in the middle. On top of that was a ship with multiple decks. That shot fire. And had a giant green laser that you could see anywhere on the playa. This is a nice overall video I found. It really shows the cruise ship bus off well. Here are a bunch of other videos I found on YouTube that show various artcars in action. Tomorrow I’ll talk about the temple, the various burnings I saw, and any other bits and pieces of the desert I have left. from design-newyork.com http://design-newyork.com/blog/2012/09/11/burning-man-2012-recap-5/Google releases Course Builder, takes online learning down an open-source roadGoogle is well-known for projects with unexpected origins. It's almost natural, then, that the code Google used to build a web course has led to a full-fledged tool for online education. The open-source Course Builder project lets anyone make their own learning resources, complete with scheduled activities and lessons, if they've got some skill with HTML and JavaScript. There's also an avenue for live teaching or office hours: the obligatory Google+ tie-in lets educators announce Hangouts on Air sessions. Code is available immediately, although you won't need to be grading virtual papers to see the benefit. A handful of schools that include Stanford, UC San Diego and Indiana University are at least exploring the use of Course Builder in their own initiatives, which could lead to more elegant internet learning -- if also fewer excuses for slacking. Filed under: Internet Google releases Course Builder, takes online learning down an open-source road originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Sep 2012 20:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink Google Research Blog, TechCrunch | Course Builder | Email this | Comments
from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/11/google-releases-course-builder/
|
|