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Researchers at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research are working on a new mathematical model to mimic the human brain's ability to identify objects. The model can predict human performance on certain visual-perception tasks suggesting it’s a good indication of what's actually happening in the brain. Researchers are hoping the new findings will make their way into future object-recognition systems for automation, mobile robotics, and other applications.

The R programming language was featured about a year ago in a New York Times article (http://bit.ly/iaqQ). I've been an R user since 2000, so I've collected some resources for people who want to get started with R.   The first place to start is the R Project web site at http://www.r-project.org/. Next, you'll actually want to install R itself. There are several options, depending on your environment.

The MATLAB team at MathWorks tested performance scaling of the backslash ("\") matrix division operator to solve for x in the equation A*x = b. In their testing, matrix A occupies far more memory (290 GB) than is available in a single high-end desktop machine—typically a quad core processor with 4-8 GB of RAM, supplying approximately 20 Gigaflops. Therefore, they spread the calculation across machines. In order to solve linear systems of equations they need to be able to access all of the elements of the array even when the array is spread across multiple machines. This problem requires significant amounts of network communication, memory access, and CPU power. They scaled up to a cluster in EC2, giving them the ability to work with larger arrays and to perform calculations at up to 1.3 Teraflops, a 60X improvement. They were able to do this without making any changes to the application code. Here's a graph showing the near-linear scalability of an EC2 cluster across a range of matrix sizes with corresponding increases in cluster size for MATLAB's parallel backslash operator:

We had to cover monads eventually, and there are many great monad tutorials out there (see, for example, here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Tutorials#Using_monads). In fact, there are web resources concerned solely with organizing the many monad tutorials available in the wild, and developing new monad tutorials seems to be a popular sport in the Haskell community.Today, Ralf Lämmel's lecture goes back to the roots, essentially revisiting Wadler's "The essence of functional programming"—the 1992 paper that discovered monads and popularized their use in functional programming. Ralf Lämmel's lecture and accompanying code distribution show Wadler's seminal insight: those original scenarios and observations still make sense today. Indeed, Simon Marlow (a Haskell/GHC high priest @ MSR Cambridge) recently noted: "it's still the best monad tutorial" (see http://twitter.com/simonmar/status/21397398061).

Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel. View the demos and sample applications to see a few of the visualizations that flare makes it easy to build. To begin making your own visualizations, download flare and work through the tutorial. You should also get familiar with the API documentation. Need more help? Visit the help forum (you'll need a SourceForge login to post). Flare is open-source software released under a BSD license, meaning it can be freely deployed and modified (and even sold for $$). Flare's design was adapted from its predecessor prefuse, a visualization toolkit for Java

At three separate industry events last week, engineers said they are gearing up to deliver in 2011 chips that can handle serial data streams running at 25 Gbits/second to drive next-generation 100 and 400 Gbit/second networks. But they say it's still a mystery how—or if—they can deliver follow-on components for the terabit networks today's Internet data centers are already demanding. The kinds of jobs required to run today's Web 2.0 services such as Google and Facebook can completely overwhelm current 10 Gbit/s Ethernet links in the warehouse-sized data centers those companies use. Such data centers could use hundreds of 100 Gbit/s Ethernet links today, although standards for such networks are still being completed.

For a company whose unofficial slogan is "Don't Be Evil," Google has been ignoring its so-called core value with alarming frequency as of late. And because of that, I decided to delete my Gmail account, along with all other Google services that I am able to do without. I have also deleted as much personal information as possible from my Google profile.

A deluge of high-energy physics data is headed toward servers in Geneva, Switzerland, later this month. That's because the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) now says it plans to restart its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) soon for a run that could last as long as two years at a collision energy of seven TeV (tera–electron volts, 3.5 TeV per beam). As CERN ramps up the world's most powerful particle accelerator to operate well beyond its previous best performance, the lab's computer systems must likewise be tuned so they can properly capture and analyze all of this new output.

The purpose of this essay is to examine whether or not there would be practical reasons for creating a conscious, emotional machine.  I will not delve to deeply into whether or not it is possible to create such a machine, as the argument as to what exactly would constitute a living conscious machine seems largely unsettled.  Rather I will concentrate on whether or not we should create such a machine, if the possibility becomes available to us.  Are there uses for such a machine that could not be satisfied by a complex automaton?  Is there anything about real emotional response that would be necessary for a machine to operate autonomously, and still interact with human beings?  What are the dangers? What are the ethical ramifications? It is questions such as these that will be the interest of this paper.

Apple just announced the launch of the iPad, Apple's rumored tablet computer. Judging from what we have seen so far, the iPad is basically a very large iPod touch with a modified interface. According to Steve Jobs, the device will be far better than an iPhone or netbook for browsing the web. The iPad will also feature most of the standard apps we have become used to on the iPhone platform, including maps, contacts and a calendar.

The IEEE has launched a new Web site that consolidates information about smart electric grids from it various societies. The portal is one of many activities from an IEEE smart grid initiative coordinating the organization's work on the transition to digital, networked power systems and services. The smart grid is "so interdisciplinary," said Wanda Reder, chair of the IEEE Smart Grid Task Force and former president of the IEEE Power & Energy Society. "We have the gamut covered in technical interests, but we needed a way to facilitate communications between our many entities to link information on all the conferences, papers and standards we have in this area," she added.

Google PowerMeter allows consumers to access their power consumption data through a secure, Web-based iGoogle™ gadget. As a Strategic Partner, Microchip incorporated the recently announced Google PowerMeter API to create a Reference Implementation, which makes it much easier to develop products that are compatible with Google PowerMeter. Microchip's Reference Implementation demonstrates the device's activation, data transmission and status messages using readily available Microchip development tools. It can be used as a template for developers' own designs.

A new chink has been found in the cryptographic armor that protects bank transactions, credit-card payments, and other secure Internet traffic. And although programmers have devised a patch for it, clever hackers might still be able to break through. The hack, presented in March at a computer security conference in Dresden, Germany, involves lowering the input voltage on a computer’s cryptography chip set and collecting the errors that leak out when the power-starved chips try and (sometimes) fail to encode messages. Crooks would then use those errors to reconstruct the secret key on which the encryption is based. More important, say the hack’s creators, the same attack could also be performed from afar on stressed systems, such as computer motherboards that run too hot or Web servers that run too fast.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new approach to software development that will allow common computer programs to run up to 20 percent faster and possibly incorporate new security measures. The researchers have found a way to run different parts of some hard-to-parallelize programs — such as word processors and web browsers — at the same time, which makes the programs operate more efficiently.

With the GA release of Scala 2.8 getting very close, David Pollak, the creator of the Scala-based web framework: Lift, has announced a Scala community initiative that  will have an equally large impact on Scala developers.  The Fresh Scala Initiative aims to address the issue of version fragility in the ecosystem.  You may have heard that Scala 2.8 is not binary compatible with the 2.7 branch.  Therefore, some community members have banded together to maintain a repository and provide nightly builds of popular Scala library collections to build against Scala 2.8.  

German researchers have built an anthropomorphic robot hand that can endure collisions with hard objects and even strikes from a hammer without breaking into pieces. In designing the new hand system, researchers at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), focused on robustness. They may have just built the toughest robot hand yet. The DLR hand has the shape and size of a human hand, with five articulated fingers powered by a web of 38 tendons, each connected to an individual motor on the forearm.

So after all that you are probably asking, “What is SimpleCV?” It is an open source computer vision framework that lowers the barriers to entry for people to learn, develop, and use it across the globe. Currently there are a few open source vision system libraries in existence, but the downside to these is you have to be quite the domain expert and knowledgeable with vision systems as well as know cryptic programming languages like C. Where SimpleCV is different, is it is “simple”. It has been designed with a web browser interface, which is familiar to Internet users everywhere. It will talk to your webcam (which most computers and smart phones have built in) automatically. It works cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc). It uses the programming language Python rather than C to greatly lower the learning curve of the software. It sacrifices some complexity for simplicity, which is needed for mass adoption of any type of new technology.

Researchers at MIT's Object Based Media Group (OBMG), led by professor Michael Bove, have developed a 3D hologram using the Xbox Kinect and a laptop. Three GPUs on a graphic card are used to generate diffraction patterns that produce a Star-Wars-Style hologram at 15 frames per second. More information is available in a PopSci web article.