Father-daughter duo have the world’s first brain-to-brain ‘telepathic’ conversation

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143148-father-daughter-duo-have-the-worlds-first-brain-to-brain-telepathic-conversation

It should be fairly obvious why, all technological considerations aside, there has been much more research into letting machines extract our thoughts, rather than insert them. Mind reading is a scary-enough concept all on its own — but mind writing? It calls to mind the hacker deities of cyber punk novels; skinny, trench-swathed Neos projecting e-thoughts into the skulls of passing civilians. With such basic issues of privacy on the line, it took the trusting relationship between UK scientist Christopher James and his adventurous young daughter to give us our first stab at developing real telepathic, brain-to-brain communication technology.
James’ process of telepathic communication is rough, its results shaky, but the principle of brain-to-brain (B2B) communication is unquestionably met. It begins with the by-now standard collection of mental information, achieved in this case with electrodes placed against the skull. “I only used scalp electrodes on my daughter, since my wife wouldn’t let me drill holes in my daughter’s head,” James told the Times of India.
In the experiment, the sender imagined a series of binary digits, broadcasting their choices by imagining movement in their right arm or their left. The resulting patterns of brain activity were recorded and expressed by an LED — one frequency to represent a one, another to represent a zero. The patterns are simply too arcane to be useful to the conscious mind, too quick and complex, but they’re not meant to be read like Morse code, in any case.

Dr. James conducting a preceding experiment in 2009.

When the LED signal travels to the recipient, it flashes into a very specific part of the eye (which part doesn’t matter much) and so the resulting optical signal is sent to a predictable section of the visual cortex. Surface electrodes just like those that originally recorded the signal are much better than people at making sense of the quick-flash LED language, seeing in the recipient’s brain more data than does the recipient themselves.
Once the pattern has been reverse-engineered from LED back to arm-waving, the telepathic process is said to have concluded. “The key idea to grasp,” said Dr. James, “is that a person’s eyes cannot distinguish between the different frequencies of flashing lights but a part of his brain, [the] visual cortex, can.” For more serious results, the electrodes would have to be implanted on the surface of the brain, a procedure for which he had neither governmental nor spousal approval.
All in all, this advance will take some time to spawn any dystopian mind flayers or Inception-style dreamscapes. This advance has to do with the translation of thought to binary data, and the ability to technically induce that data in the brain of another person. The glaringly absent piece of the puzzle is any ability to induce much more sophisticated visual images; multi-pixel messages that appear in the mind’s eye, as opposed to the physical one.
That sort of sophistication could come through a better understanding of just how stimulation of the visual cortex influences images in the mind, or in teaching brains the language of light bulbs. With LED technology now finding its way into contact lenses, this technology seems well-suited to the (possibly) upcoming brain-machine revolution. It’s unclear was uses this tech might find in such a future, especially when it steps beyond the constraints of fatherly affection.

Microsoft sells 40 million Windows 8 copies in the first month, defying skeptical expectations

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/141667-microsoft-sells-40-million-windows-8-licenses-in-the-first-month-defying-skeptical-expectations

In surprising but wholly welcome news, Microsoft has announced that, since its release one month ago, it has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses — roughly the same number of Windows 7 licenses sold in the same period three years ago. Furthermore, in terms of upgrades, Windows 8 is “outpacing” Windows 7′s first month.
Before you hang primary-colored rectilinear bunting everywhere and warmly welcome our new Metro overlords, however, we have to drill a little further into these figures. As before, with the news that Microsoft sold four million copies of Windows 8 in its opening weekend, we still don’t know how many of those 40 million licenses are actually installed. There is the distinct possibility that many of those licenses are still sitting on retailers’ shelves.
It’s also important to note that Windows 8 is being deeply discounted at launch — much more so than Windows 7. It’s possible that people are ponying up for Windows 8 while it only costs $40, but waiting to see how the cross-paradigmatic Metro/Desktop train wreck plays out before actually installing. We also don’t yet know the impact of Microsoft’s accidental giveaway of free Windows 8 Pro license keys, though presumably these freebies aren’t being factored into the 40 million.

Despite our hesitant hedging, though, it’s clear that Windows 8 hasn’t been a complete flop — in fact, so far, it has been rather successful. Without further info from Microsoft, we don’t know why Windows 8 has been a success — but seemingly that’s just a cross we’ll have to bear until Microsoft feels slightly more comfortable. Are Windows 8 desktops flying off the shelves? Tablets? Or are the 40 million licenses predominantly upgrades from XP, Vista, and 7? Who knows. For what it’s worth, Microsoft still hasn’t released sales figures for its own Surface tablet.
In other news, Tami Reller, the Windows division’s CFO and CMO, shared some interesting tidbits on a call with industry and financial analysts. Microsoft’s early telemetry shows that 90% of users find the Charms bar on their first day, 85% open the Desktop, and 50% visit the Windows Store — where, apparently, some apps have already been downloaded one million times. Maybe that video of an old guy navigating Windows 8 for the first time (embedded below) was just a tad on the hyperbolically skeptical side.

Nokia’s Asha dumbphones are a cheap way for developing countries to stay connected

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/141464-nokias-asha-dumbphones-are-a-cheap-way-for-developing-countries-to-stay-connected

With the smartphone market growing quickly, it’s easy to forget about feature phones or dumbphones. A huge number of people still won’t or can’t drop hundreds of dollars on a device on top of an expensive data contract. This is especially true in smaller and emerging markets. Yesterday, Nokia announced two new dumbphones that are quite compelling in a number of ways, but won’t be available in the United States.
The Asha 205 (pictured above) and 206 (below) are both slated to be released by the end of the year for a mere $62 a pop, but only in markets not well represented with Nokia’s Windows Phone offerings. The Asha 205 features a landscape 2.4-inch screen, a physical QWERTY keyboard, Bluetooth 2.1 (EDR), and a rear-facing VGA camera. The Asha 206 features a portrait 2.4-inch screen, a standard numerical keypad, Bluetooth 2.1 (EDR), and a 1.3 megapixel rear-facing camera. Facebook and Twitter are integrated heavily on these devices, but that will be slow-going with only 2G capability. Considering its target markets, however, this doesn’t seem like such a hindrance.

We’re currently in a strange place with the cellphone market. It’s clear that eventually all phones will be smart, but the devices and data plans are just too expensive for a segment of the world. During this interim period, it’s brilliant for companies like Nokia to offer lower-end devices for people on a budget who still want to be able to stay connected with their friends. They won’t be playing Letterpress or editing a Word document on the go, but these Asha phones have a lot of potential for markets like India with a growing number of middle class people wanting to stay connected.
While these phones aren’t meant to compete with iPhones or Android devices at all, they do serve a purpose. In fact, they have a rather ingenious feature that takes advantage of local sharing instead of relying on the cell networks. Instead of pairing two devices together, an owner of one of these Asha phones can choose to use Nokia’s “Slam” to send a picture to whatever the nearest Bluetooth-enabled device is. It works over the standard Bluetooth 2.1 EDR spec, so any other Bluetooth device can receive the image without needing to pair. In a way, it works very similarly to Bump on smartphones. This is a nice workaround for easily sharing photos without the use of a cell connection. Not to mention that the device is available for a relatively cheap unsubsidized price. This allows flexibility for the user, and fosters competition in the market.

As a member of the Western world, it is far too easy to project your environment on the rest of the world. Dumbphones are still a useful product, and they’re fast becoming smart. It’s good to see Nokia serving this market — selling this as a stepping stone so that one day these markets will be using full-fledged smartphones. Anything that helps developing nations stay connected with the rest of the world at a reasonable cost is worthy of notice, so Nokia‘s Asha phones get a big thumbs-up.

Smartphones become capable of sensing human emotion

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/142486-smartphones-gain-the-ability-to-sense-human-emotion


Smartphones are amazing. They tell us where we’re going, let us know if it’s going to rain, and even act like personal assistants. Now, a new research project out of the University of Rochester aims to make your phone capable of sensing your emotions just from measuring how you’re speaking — not based on what you’re saying.
This research, titled the Bridge Project, focuses on small changes in the human voice. Rather than using the traditional methodology of self-reporting and monitoring body language, this new method is based on automatic passive emotion detection. This technology can always be listening and monitoring a patient’s emotional state without any work on his or her part — providing a bigger picture on the patient’s entire status.

The basics of the system involve measuring twelve different aspects of speech, and then mapping the data onto six different emotions. Wendi Heinzelman, professor of electrical and computer engineering, said that the project analyzed completely emotionless phrases of speech, such as saying dates of the month. Impressively, they are able to reach an 81% accuracy rating with this model while previous attempts were only around 55%. By having actors read scripts with certain performances, the researchers are able to tweak their algorithm to associate certain pitches, volumes, and harmonics to a specific emotional state.
While this is undoubtedly an invaluable tool for psychologists and medical researchers, it also has huge potential for consumers. Take a look at Apple’s Siri. It’s designed to appear more human-like by offering humorous answers, apologizing, and using more realistic speech, like “Let’s hear some Beatles,” instead of something with less flare, like “Now playing: The Beatles, track one.” This gives us a better experience because it mimics human interaction. Now, think about this technology integrated into Siri. When you’re getting frustrated, it could offer simple hints on how to interact better. When you’re sad, it could throw in compliments.

In Dr. Oliver Sacks’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, he tells a story about a group of patients suffering from aphasia — an inability to understand words. In the story, he details how very capable these patients are in detecting emotion through speech. In fact, they are able to use sound cues to effectively communicate with their loved ones and doctors despite not being able to understand the words directly. He even notes that it is extremely difficult to execute a lie in front of an aphasiac because they are so adept at picking up the hidden emotion. This story truly illustrates how much of our emotional states are expressed verbally, and just how useful this research really is.

Think you have a big screen TV? Check out these monster video walls

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137543-think-you-have-a-big-screen-tv-check-out-these-monster-video-walls

In honor of National Big Screen TV Day, aka Black Friday, we thought we’d share a couple massive screens unveiled by GE and by Stony Brook University that you can drool over. Now that CNN-sized interactive displays have become fairly commonplace, GE has upped the ante, unveiling a 180-degree, 40-foot, interactive video wall in its Toronto Customer Experience Center (CEC). Made by Prysm, Inc. of San Jose using Laser Phosphor Display (LPD) technology, the display will allow visitors to take a guided tour of GE products and technologies in an immersive setting.
Prysm’s proprietary LPD technology relies on a 405nm laser, similar to that used for Blu-ray, which is modulated as it is projected onto a phosphor layer. The phosphor layer is unusually thin, providing for a claimed industry-leading 178-degree viewing angle. Rather than attempt to light an entire large display with one laser, Prysm’s display walls are built from multiple tiles, each with its own laser engine, laser processor, and phosphor layer.

The 10-foot-high video wall is constructed from more than one hundred 320×240 integrated LPD display tiles. The tiles support viewing from a full 178-degree field of view and are much lower power than a backlit projector system of similar size, or an LCD array like the one Sharp uses in its 5D attraction. Another advantage of the Prysm system over a multi-projector-based system like HP’s Photon is that it can support a variety of screen shapes — like the curved wall used by GE in this installation.
While the LPD display is not touch-enabled, it is controllable from an iPad used by the visitors’ GE host. GE and Prysm aren’t revealing the cost of the display, but it probably won’t be the deal of the day on LogicBuy any time soon.

Stony Brook takes you around the world — virtually

While the magic of the GE video wall is largely in the display technology, a research project at Stony Brook University pushes the envelope in processing power to create what it calls a “Reality Deck.” Featuring a record-shattering 1.5 billion pixels on 416 screens, the $2 million deck is powered by over 220 TFLOPS of processor power.

The Deck actually has four walls, although of course we can only show three in this picture. 416 separate screens make up the walls, all driven by a massive graphics supercomputer, with 240 CPU cores, 80 GPUs and 1.2TB of memory. The display has what is called an “infinite canvas” feature, allowing it to change what is shown as a viewer walks around the deck area.
Source material for the Reality Deck can come either from massive muti-gigapixel panoramic images or architectural models which can be visualized in real time. To complete the experience, the system features a sound system with 22 speakers and four subwoofers.
The Reality Deck’s $2M price tag was funded by the National Science Foundation and Stony Brook University, as part of a project aiming to enable breakthroughs in healthcare, national security and energy research.
For those who thought the system in Minority Report was cool, or that a 4K 3D display would be as good as it gets, these systems point to an exciting future of Black Fridays full of discount video wall promotions.

3D-printed consumer electronics just became a reality

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/141669-3d-printed-consumer-electronics-just-became-a-reality

Embedding sensors and electronics inside of 3D objects in a single build process has been a long sought after goal in 3D printing (3DP). A group led by Simon Leigh, at the University of Warwick in England, has now done just that. Leigh’s group developed a low-cost material they call carbomorph – a carbon black filler in a matrix of a biodegradable polyester.
In addition to being conductive, carbomorph is piezoresistive. This means which that when it is bent or stressed, its resistance changes. Typically the resistance increases as the object is bent because the conductive grains are spread further apart. Piezoresistive strips of carbon nanotubes have been created previously by other groups and used in the measurement of movement, but printing them is something new.

The goal of Leigh’s group was to completely print a motion sensing glove in a single unbroken run. This required a machine with multiple heads, and their Bits from Bytes BFB3000 fit the bill. In one head they used used polylactic acid (PLA) to print the main body of the glove. The other head contained the carbomorph for the embedded sensing strips in each finger. The cross section of embedded strip was only .25 square microns yet proved sufficient for getting a robust piezoelectric signal to compute the bend angle.
In an effort to make their work freely available they published it in the open access journal PLoS ONE. The piezoresistive measurements were done using the popular Arduino Uno interface board and captured with Processing, an open-source software package for visualizing and manipulating data.
The group also printed capacitive buttons of the kind used in many common touch sensors, or as mouse replacements for human interface devices (HIDs). Capacitive measurements were also carried out with an Arduino, and implemented with the CapSense code library. The ability to print capacitive sensors potentially opens up 3DP to new areas including accurate measurement of distance, humidity, or acceleration.

For the group’s final demonstration, things start to really get interesting. Two vertical capacitive sensor strips were embedded in the wall of a 3DP mug. This “smart vessel” yielded a reliable capacitance measurement which scaled linearly with the height of the fluid in the cup. One might imagine inexpensive party cups which report and summon a refill whenever a guest’s drink falls below a certain level.
Conductive 3D-printed materials, by nature of their composition, have only a fraction of metal or carbon’s electrical conductivity. Therefore at any interface with other electronics, where there will already be some unavoidable loss of any signal, extra care must be taken. It is for this reason that high-end audiophiles are willing to spend the extra money for gold-plated contacts — more signal is transduced and less is absorbed or reflected back to induce ringing or other unwanted noise.

In the case of capacitive button sensors, the group got around this problem by printing high-surface-area contacts in the shape of the commonly used banana-style plug. On the smart vessel they opted instead to use copper pads connected with silver conductive paint. There is no reason why copper or other metals might not someday also be printed. For example, several cancer treatments, like cisplatin, are basically metals bonded to chemical groups which make them soluble. This allows them to pass across membranes into cells or to be miscible with other solutions. Printing them in hydrophobic solvent which evaporates leaving behind the metal may one day be possible.
One thing yet to be done is to test the durability of the devices over time. If they are able to maintain the essential characteristics over many use cycles, and trips to the dishwasher, then these devices could find widespread application. Then again, if your product lifetime is only a couple of hours, like for a red Solo cup, they would already be perfect.