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Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Study: Someday our bodies could 'talk' to gadgets - Tech News and Analysis [23Sep11] - 0 views

  • UW researchers say this new type of transistor could one day understand or even control body functions.
  • Materials scientists are looking at these proton-based microscopic transistors for future advances in prosthetics and biological sensing.
  • In the body, protons activate “on” and “off” switches and are key players in biological energy transfer. Ions open and close channels in the cell membrane to pump things in and out of the cell. Animals, including humans, use ions to flex their muscles and transmit brain signals. A machine that was compatible with a living system in this way could, in the short term, monitor such processes. Someday it could generate proton currents to control certain functions directly.
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  • A first step toward this type of control is a transistor that can send pulses of proton current. The prototype device is a field-effect transistor, a basic type of transistor that includes a gate, a drain and a source terminal for the current. The UW prototype is the first such device to use protons.
  • Because their device’s proton current can be switched on and off, it can act as its own kind of electronic current, according to Marco Rolandi, a UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering. The transistor itself is “a twentieth the width of a human hair,” or about 5 microns wide. It is made of a compound, chitosan, found in both crab shells and squid pen (the structure inside a squid’s body that muscles attach to).
  • The first applications of this research will come some time “in the next decade or so,” and will be aimed at direct sensing of cells in a lab, researchers say
  • But further out they could be implanted directly in living organisms to monitor or control bodily processes.
Dan R.D.

Bristol University News from the University - Body-centric conference [05Jul11] - 0 views

  • The event, held on 27 June, showcased the latest research on next-generation body-centric communications – wireless networks worn on the human body. Future communication systems will be worn on clothing rather than held in the hand as smart phones are nowadays, and will be made possible due to cutting-edge advancements in wearable electronics. Dr Paul, from the Centre for Communications Research (CCR), specialises in the design of antennas that can be integrated into textiles through electromagnetic numerical simulation. Applications range from smart clothing for sportswear, to soldiers’ and emergency workers’ outfits, and to monitoring devices for healthcare and telemedicine. Professor Joe McGeehan, Director of CCR, said: ‘We are delighted that Dr Paul has had the opportunity to present an invited paper on her novel research is this key area. Wireless networks worn on the human body will become more pervasive, particularly in applications such as medical sensor networks for an ageing population and healthcare.’
D'coda Dcoda

Cell Phones, EMF Negatively Altering the Brain | New Study [28Jan12] - 0 views

  • A new Greek scientific study has demonstrated how frequency electromagnetic fields, namely cell phones, portable phones, WiFi, and wireless computer equipment, alter important protein changes in the brains of animals. Exposure to electromagnetic frequencies is the result of our advancing technologies, but it is important to study these effects so people know exactly what they’re dealing with in order to take the necessary precautionary measures.
  • The study, entitled “Brain proteome response following whole body exposure of mice to mobile phone or wireless DECT base radiation,” was published in the journal Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine. Important areas of the brain such as the hippocampus, cerebellum, and frontal lobe are regions responsible for learning, memory, and other functions. These areas are negatively impacted by microwave radiation, even at levels below the safety guidelines put in place by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation protection
  • Researchers found that 143 proteins in the brain were negatively impacted by radio frequency radiation over a period of 8 months. A total of 3 hours of cell phone exposure were simulated over the 8 month time period, and the results showed that many neural function related proteins’ functional relationship changed the for worse.
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  • It is known that short term exposure of microwaves exuded from a cell phone, depending on how far the antenna is from the head, can penetrate as much as 1 1/2 inches into the brain, but this study focuses more on the long term effects and how EMF impacts specific brain proteins. This provides new evidence of the potential relationship between EMF and health complications stemming from EMF such as headaches, dizziness, sleep disorders, and even tumors and Alzheimer’s disease.
  • Another study conducted by a Russian team of researchers also showed that EMF and cell phones cause significant long-term cognitive decline in children. It may be time for parents to re-determine if young children should really be using these devices with growing bodies and developing brains.
  • A number of foreign countries are attempting to adopt precautionary protocols to limit cell phone use in an attempt to mitigate the number of adverse effects they have on human health. In 2011, the WHO/IARC released a report stating that cell phone radiation may have a carcinogenic effect on humans. In fact, the World Health Organization actually said that cell phones are in the same cancer-causing category as lead, engine exhaust, and chloroform.
Dan R.D.

India Predicts - Emerging trends in IT and how to spot them [15May11] - 1 views

  • Dorai Thodla, CEO of the US-based iMorph Inc. (http://bit.ly/F4TThodlaD), speaks frequently on the emerging trends in IT.
  • This Internet of things will cause another fundamental shift. The shift will be at several levels – at the chip level (hundreds of cores), at the device level (smart phones more powerful than your current laptops), at the interaction level (smart devices talking to each other), application level (smart applications leveraging all these sensors for different uses), and interaction level (caused by touch, gestures and voice inputs).
    • Paul Simbeck-Hampson
       
      nice clip!
  • In which areas of emerging IT do you see India playing a major role? India can play many roles both as a consumer of the technology and a producer.
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  • if we handle our innovation infrastructure right, we will participate in every major trend. We can detect them earlier now and we may be a causing a few of our own. For instance, one of the top 10 companies in cloud computing is from Chennai called OrangeScape. One of the best charting applications is Fusion Charts from Pune, and they moved faster from Flash to HTML5.
  • We can use some simple tools to gather information from tweets, blogs, web pages, portals and create information pipes. We can apply NLP, pattern mining and machine learning technologies to surface some of the weak signals.
Paul Simbeck-Hampson

Social Pedagogy - 0 views

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    "The educational principle of evolution demands in the educational field: respect for human nature and of the individual; its stimulation to full development, expression, activity and initiative; natural, hence joyful, experience of life; stimulation to develop the senses, strengthening the body, to explore, to be lucid and to discover things; providing the minds with suitable nourishment; constant progress. It forbids: arbitrary assumptions and manipulations of human nature; any encouragement to act blindly and mechanically; any kind of drill; rote learning; uniformity; force-feeding with subject matter that is not understood etc. (quoted in Günther 1994: 297)" There is still much to do to reverse the mistakes of the past; in this day and age we should know better.
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    Comments can be added too, that's useful...
Dan R.D.

The Growing Hipness of Mobile Wellness [01Nov11] - 0 views

  • Your mobile wireless carrier may soon have a say in the way you think about health and wellness. AT&T, through its Emerging Devices unit, plans to offer for sale health-tracking clothing equipped with wireless sensors that enable you to track your heart rate, body temperature and other vital signs -- and then send all this data to a site where a physician can access it. The first offering will be a version of the E39 body compression shirt, originally designed by Under Armour for the NFL scouting combines and other world-class athletic competitions. Now imagine yourself as a high-performance weekend athlete, effortlessly transmitting your heart rate, skin temperature and activity levels to the Web. That the “smart fitness” trend – which can be traced back to the Fitbit tracker – is now transforming into a broader “e-wellness” movement is not a coincidence. The biggest wireless network carriers - like AT&T – are under intense pressure to produce new revenue streams. The total mobile Internet penetration rates at these companies have hit a saturation point. They can advertise as much as they want, but there’s simply no one else who needs another mobile phone these days.
D'coda Dcoda

Microphone Turns Any Surface into Touch Interface - Technology Review - 0 views

  • Through gesture recognition techniques we detect different kind of fingers-touch and associate them with different sounds. In the video we used two different audio synthesis techniques: - physic modelling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws; - concatenative synthesis (audio mosaicing), in which the sound of the contact microphone is associated with its closest frame present in a sound database. To put it another way, the system is transforming the vibrations transmitted from touch through a rigid body into waveforms that a computer can, in real time, recognize and either transmute into audible sound or use as a triggering mechanism for other sounds. It's an ingenious approach, especially because Zamborlin has made the system clever enough to recognize the sound of particular gestures, so that the interface can accomplish more than just triggering actions when it "hears" a tap.
  • will touch interfaces of the future rely on sounds as well as capacitance? Perhaps sound would be a cheaper, more-durable option for certain kinds of interfaces, making touch interactions all the more ubiquitous.
D'coda Dcoda

Obama Tries to Bypass Congress with Deadly Global Internet Treaty ACTA [28Jan12] - 0 views

  • Before the American people were protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the president managed to sign an international treaty which would permit foreign companies to demand that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) remove web content in the United States without any legal oversight. Entitled the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the treaty was signed by Obama on October 1, 2011, but it is currently a subject of discussion because the White House is circulating a petition demanding that senators ratify the treaty.
  • the White House has done some maneuvering — characterizing the treaty as an "executive agreement" — thereby bypassing approval by members of Congress. Concerned by this action of the administration, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore., above left) sent a letter to President Obama in which he declared: It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law. But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law ... the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress' authority, absent congressional approval.
  • Similarly, TechDirt observes: ... [E]ven if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement? The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the President legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.
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  • Twenty-two EU member states signed the treaty at a ceremony in Tokyo on January 26. Other nations interested in signing the agreement have until May 2013 to do so. According to Wikipedia, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement “creates a governing body outside national institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the United Nations.” The scope of the agreement includes counterfeit goods, generic medicines, and pirated copyright-protected works.
  • The provisions of ACTA grant copyright holders direct powers to demand that ISPs remove material from the Internet, without the requirement of a court order, and permit foreign influence over ISPs in the United States. Advocates of the treaty seek to give copyright holders the ability to demand that users who do violate intellectual property rights have their Internet connections terminated as a punishment. To enforce such a system would require the creation of an individual Internet ID.
  • The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports: The same industry rightsholder groups that support the creation of ACTA have also called for mandatory network-level filtering by Internet Service Providers and for Internet Service Providers to terminate citizens’ Internet connection on repeat allegation of copyright infringement (the “Three Strikes”/Graduated Response) so there is reason to believe that ACTA will seek to increase intermediary liability and require these things of Internet Service Providers.
  • The EFF has been vehement in its opposition to ACTA, particularly regarding the secrecy surrounding the treaty negotiations. Likewise, Michael Geist, in writing for Copyright News, asserted that ACTA was “shrouded in secrecy.” He pointed out that ACTA negotiations did not include civil society groups or developing countries, noting also that “reports suggest that trade negotiators have been required to sign non-disclosure agreements for fear of word of the treaty’s provisions leaking to the public.” The European Commission denied this allegations in 2008, arguing, “It is only natural that intergovernmental negotiations dealing with issues that have an economic impact, do not take place in public and that negotiators are bound by a certain level of discretion.”
  • As noted on Wikipedia, opponents of ACTA also assert that it will impinge upon freedom of expression and communication privacy. A large number of the World Trade Organization’s 157 members have voiced concerns that the treaty would have a negative impact on trade. Others have pointed out that ACTA does not include provisions for legal safeguards protecting ISPs from liability for the actions of their subscribers. Without such provisions, ISPs will be forced to invade the privacy of their subscribers in order to protect themselves. Aaron Shaw, research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, stressed that “ACTA would create unduly harsh legal standards that do not reflect contemporary principles of democratic government, free market exchange, or civil liberties.”
  • The technology news and information website ArsTechnica.com argues that ACTA encourages ISPs to collect and provide information about suspects by providing for those ISPs “safe harbor from certain legal threats.” In protest against the treaty, the hacktivist group Anonymous hacked into the Federal Trade Commission’s cybersecurity advice website on January 24, replacing the homepage with the Anonymous logo, a rap song, and a message threatening more attacks if anti-piracy legislation in Congress were to pass. According to The Next Web: The message left temporarily on OnGuardOnline referred to the Stop Online Piracy Act, The Protect Intellectual Property Act and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. If they pass, the message said, "we will wage a relentless war against the corporate Internet, destroying dozens upon dozens of government and company websites."
D'coda Dcoda

Wireless bandwidth: Are we running out of room? [29Jan12] - 0 views

  • Wireless bandwidth is like land in Manhattan -- it's extremely valuable because they're not making more of it.
  • But we sure are using more of it. The wireless-industry association CTIA reported in October 2011 that the number of wireless devices in the U.S. had, for the first time, exceeded the number of people. And Mobile Future, a coalition of vendors and consumers, estimated in a March 2011 report that by 2014, voice traffic will comprise only 2% of the total wireless traffic in the United States -- a worrisome statistic because, as the report noted, smartphones consume 24 times more data than old-school cell phones, and tablets consume 120 times more data than smartphones. (See Data needs bandwidth, but how much? for details.)
  • The result: Wireless networks are edging near capacity, not just in the United States, but all over the world. Credit Suisse conducted a survey last year that revealed mobile networks in North America were running at 80% of capacity, with 36% of base stations facing capacity constraints. The average globally for base station capacity utilization, the report said, was 65%.
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  • The problem is going to get worse before it gets better. With advancements in connected cars, smart grids, machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, and domestic installations such as at-home health monitoring systems, wireless demands will only increase. As with all things mobile, there are no simple answers, if only because potential solutions rely on agreement among a sizable and incompatible array of players -- from spectrum owners (both telcos and broadcasters) and regulators to government agencies and, of course, consumers demanding the latest in cool devices and applications.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

Cool AR Concept for Xbox Kinect | Augmented Planet - 0 views

  • Immersive gameplay where you become the character in a game is an interesting concept and one that I think the Xbox Kinect will do pretty well at.  Below is an interesting video from a developer experimenting with augmented reality and the Kinect. There are some nice touches in there such as body mapping to paint the characters costume, object detection for the particle beams. Also watch out for the example of diminishing reality thrown in at the end.
Marc-Alexandre Gagnon

45 mobile operators announce support for SIM-based NFC [24Nov11] - 0 views

  • 45 mobile operators have pledged their support for subscriber identity module (SIM) based Near Field Communication (NFC) implementations in an announcement made by mobile industry trade body the GSM Association (GSMA).
  • The 45 operators involved account for nearly 3 billion subscriptions worldwide, and include China Mobile, Vodafone Group, América Móvil, Telefónica Group, China Unicom, Axiata, Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon Wireless, and AT&T.
  • Potential applications for this technology include mobile payments, public transit access, event ticketing, secure access to buildings or vehicles, identification, and person-to-person (P2P) data sharing.
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  • The GSMA has published interoperability standards for SIM-based NFC application programming interfaces (APIs) and protocols based on the Pay-Buy-Mobile specification for secure NFC mobile payments. Such standards pave the way for the development of contactless services across a variety of devices irrespective of their operating system (OS) while providing more detailed implementation protocols for the Java and Android platforms.
  • IHS Screen Digest research indicates that the 45 operators involved in the announcement serve 50.7 per cent of the world's mobile subscriptions. Since the NFC module is embedded in the SIM card, the operators expect users to be able to use existing handsets for contactless services without the need to switch to a high-end smartphone. Users of smartphones currently lacking NFC capabilities will also benefit from this technology.
  • The large existing user-base of low-cost, mid-tier, NFC-less feature phones popular in emerging markets is a prime target for this technology. However, technical difficulties have prevented the adoption of SIM-based NFC. As the SIM card slot is located behind the battery, radio signals to and from the NFC module are effectively blocked in many phones.
  • There is also the issue of cost. IHS Screen Digest estimates current SIM-based NFC modules to be a hundred times more expensive than traditional SIM cards. This would deter most operators from venturing into offering SIM-based NFC as an option to customers in emerging economies until economies of scale bring the associated costs down.
  • It is unlikely that operators will allow third-party "over-the-top" services outside of their value chain. As the implementation of some contactless services (e.g. mobile payments, public transit) depends on a close collaboration between operators and local third-parties, it is expectable that contactless services deployments and uptake will vary greatly across markets.
  • IHS Screen Digest does not foresee rapid adoption of SIM-based NFC mobile payments. Users will likely become acquainted with the contactless technology by way of other use-cases, as NFC experiences in Asia and Europe suggest--most notably the Octopus transit and stored-value card in Hong Kong, and the London Oyster transit card.
  • If NFC payment and transit cards schemes prove successful in more locations, the likelihood that such services will be increasingly incorporated into mobile devices will also increase.
D'coda Dcoda

Virtual, Mediated, and Augmented Reality [10Mar11] - 0 views

  • In the tradition of much post-Modern theorizing, “augmented reality” offers a new conceptual paradigm, seeking to implode/queer/do category work on the real/virtual dichotomy and make room for a more flexible understanding of social media that allows for recursivity between these two concepts.  A person embedded in augmented reality is a cyborg in the Harawaysian sense.  For this reason, the editors of this blog have proposed – somewhat tongue-in-cheek – that our research is best understood as “cyborgology.”  In augmented reality, the culture is hyper-literally super-imposed on the material.  Our bodies and all other objects in the world become canvases for the digital and its rapid circulation of signs and symbols.  In Bauman’s term, everything becomes a conduit of Liquid (post-)Modernity.  However, the symbolic order expressed through the digital does not emerge out of nothing; it is a reproduction or extension of what has always existed.  The digital and material are always in circulation and neither can be abstracted from the new order of social relations.  That is to say, society is neither online or offline; it is augmented.  Thus, augmented reality and the cyborgs who populate it are now the proper objects of sociological inquiry.
  • three distinct perspectives perceive the Internet as either virtual reality, mediated reality, or augmented reality.  I argue (in the spirit of Saussure) that these three perspectives are only fully comprehensible defined in relation to one another.
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    Re-frames the inquiry into virtual,mediated, augmented reality (vs. "physical world" reality) ... a liquid post-modern view
Dan R.D.

Qualcomm Talks Future of Mobile, AR, 3D, Sensors & More at Uplinq 2011 [01Jun11] - 0 views

  • People Don't Care about PCs...the Buzz is All About Mobile To paint an image of the very large scale of the mobile ecosystem, Jacobs talked numbers: There are 1.3 billion 3G connections worldwide, and there will be 2 billion more connections by 2015. Mobile data use will increase 10 to 12 times over the next four years. There are over 120 HSPA+ mobile networks and 180 commercial EVDO networks offering mobile broadband. There are 200 LTE networks planned, 20 of which have launched now.
  • Mobile Unleashing the "Greatest Wave of Creativity in History" And what is that? Only that mobile is going to unleash the "greatest wave of creativity in history." Dr. Jacobs said he knew that sounded like a "heady" proposition, especially because many mobile developers are just trying to build an app people like, he says. "But your app could reach hundreds of millions of users!" Now is the time to "think and act globally," Jacobs said. "Mobile is now the dominant computing platform, and it's never going back."
  • Augmented Reality Demoed as Marketing Tool AR, or augmented reality, was also at the forefront of today's keynote, with a sobering presentation from John Batter, Co-President of Production, Dreamworks Animation SKG. He produced data showing the decline of DVD sales over the years.
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  • He showed an example of this with the studio's new hit, Kung Fu Panda 2, which will be marketed using in-store signage at major retailers like Walmart and Target. The signs feature QR codes that, when scanned, make an AR-enabled app available to end users
  • Mobile is "Digital 6th Sense" Dr. Jacobs concluded the keynote by looking forward into the future of mobile, calling mobile our "digital 6th sense" which will become the primary way we interact with the world around us. Your phone will listen and see everything using the sensors connected to your body, sensors out in the environment, the people around you and more - and it will adjust itself accordingly. Imagine a phone that adjusts to your mood, or your vital signs, he said. "You are the creators of this experience," Jacobs said, speaking to the developers in the audience. Qualcomm just wants to "free you up to do what you do best: innovating."
D'coda Dcoda

EU to Recommend Location Data Protections [16May11] - 0 views

  • The European Union's data protection advisory body will reportedly recommend that location data about cell phone users be subject to strict privacy protections, a move that could challenge technology company practices
  • The panel will recommend that the location data that the mobile industry collects about users to provide location-based services and target advertising should be subject to the same protections as people's names, birthdays and other highly personal data.
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  • d not only need consent to collect the information, but should have to delete it after a certain amount of time and keep it anonymous, according the panel.
  • The recommendations are not binding in themselves, but are likely to inform national policy decisions in EU countries.
D'coda Dcoda

Windows 8 ARM Will Not Support Legacy Software [19May11] - 0 views

  • "Intel, speaking out of turn and damaging its intimate relationship with Microsoft, has revealed that legacy x86-compiled software will not work on the ARM version of Windows 8. Microsoft has promised that the Office suite will be available on Windows 8 ARM, but beyond that, nothing. While this means there won't be many compatible apps at launch, it also means this will be the first full-bodied version of Windows that won't (initially) be susceptible to viruses and malware..."
D'coda Dcoda

Faster fingers are making us weaker [25May11] - 0 views

  • For the emergent generation of adolescents and pre-adolescents, at least in developed economies, constant high-speed internet access and online networking have become the very air they breathe. A new study, however, has some cautionary advice.The study, published in Acta Paediatrica, has renewed concerns about how digital life has led children off the playground and into the computer room… permanently. The study concludes that the average 10-year-old today
  • For the emergent generation of adolescents and pre-adolescents, at least in developed economies, constant high-speed internet access and online networking have become the very air they breathe. A new study, however, has some cautionary advice.
  • Although the study found that Body Mass Index (BMI) had remained constant, BMI is notorious for not factoring in the composition of muscle and fat ratios in its results. According to Dr Gavin Sandercock, a fitness expert at Essex University, a constant BMI is all well and good but the results are still “worrying from a health point of view” because they show that “pound for pound, [children are] weaker and probably carrying more fat,” he told The Guardian.
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  • The study, published in Acta Paediatrica, has renewed concerns about how digital life has led children off the playground and into the computer room… permanently. The study concludes that the average 10-year-old today is far weaker physically than his counterpart just a decade ago. His arm strength has fallen by 26%, he can do 27% less sit-ups, and he is less likely to be able to hold his weight hanging from a bar.
  • For adults, the negative health effects associated with an increasingly digital-based lifestyle have been well documented. Inactivity, a bent or bowed posture, and perpetual screen-staring are taking a toll on desk-bound employees, ranging from short-term memory problems (and possible links to early dementia) to increased heart-health and muscular complications. And just when you thought your office space was the epitome of a modern sanitary workhouse, consider that microbiologists have tended to find more harmful bacteria on a typical computer keyboard than on a toilet seat.
D'coda Dcoda

Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics | Magazine - 0 views

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 18 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. Laser arrays cost a few thousand dollars and weigh several pounds, and the images they capture are only two-dimensional. Stereo cameras are less expensive, lighter, and can construct 3-D maps, but they require a massive amount of computing power. Until a reasonably priced, easier method could be designed, autonomous robots were trapped in the lab.
  • On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time.
  • A group from UC Berkeley strapped a Kinect to a quadrotor—a small helicopter with four propellers—enabling it to fly autonomously around a room. A couple of students at the University of Bundeswehr Munich attached a Kinect to a robotic car and sent it through an obstacle course. And a team from the University of Warwick in the UK built a robot that had the potential to navigate around post-earthquake rubble and search for trapped victims. “When something is that cheap, it opens up all sorts of possibilities,” says Ken Conley of Willow Garage, which sells a $500 open source robotics kit that incorporates the Kinect. (The previous non-Kinect version cost $280,000.) “Now it’s in the hands of just about anybody.”
Dan R.D.

'Ultrawideband' could be future of medical monitoring - 0 views

  • New research by electrical engineers at Oregon State University has confirmed that an electronic technology called "ultrawideband" could hold part of the solution to an ambitious goal in the future of medicine -- health monitoring with sophisticated "body-area networks."
  • Such networks would offer continuous, real-time health diagnosis, experts say, to reduce the onset of degenerative diseases, save lives and cut health care costs. Some remote health monitoring is already available, but the perfection of such systems is still elusive
  • "This type of sensing would scale a monitor down to something about the size of a bandage that you could wear around with you," said Patrick Chiang, an expert in wireless medical electronics and assistant professor in the OSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "The sensor might provide and transmit data on some important things, like heart health, bone density, blood pressure or insulin status," Chiang said. "Ideally, you could not only monitor health issues but also help prevent problems before they happen. Maybe detect arrhythmias, for instance, and anticipate heart attacks. And it needs to be non-invasive, cheap and able to provide huge amounts of data.
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  • Corventis and iRhythm have already entered the cardiac monitoring market.
D'coda Dcoda

Should internet users ever be cut off? [18Jun11] - 0 views

  • The internet is a tool which contributes to the "progress of humankind as a whole" and should be available to all.That is the view of Frank La Rue, the UN's Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression.
  • Mr La Rue was tasked with writing a report looking into global access to the internet as a medium for freedom of opinion and expression.
  • In the final document [PDF] presented to the Human Rights Council this week, he concluded that the removal of an individual's internet access should only take place in "few, exceptional and limited circumstances prescribed by human rights law".
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  • He went as far as to say that removing somebody's internet access is to deprive them of a key component for the basic human right of freedom of expression.
D'coda Dcoda

Virtual offices vs. virtual selves: overcoming isolation in a wired future [17Jun11] - 0 views

  • while workers want autonomy and flexibility, they also want social connection. In an interview, Yosh Beier of Collaborative Coaching summed this up, saying, “people want to have control over the where and when of their work experience, but they don’t necessarily want to isolate themselves.” How will this tension be resolved in the future?
  • Many point to technology to keep people connected across physical distance, tools “that will make the remote less remote,” in Beier’s words. He points to the mania for Foursquare in the consumer space as an example of people who are physically distant but use tech to “locate themselves.” The same is true for Facebook, which provides a virtual social connection and is a bit like a remote social gathering. Beier sees this trend of using tech to overcome the social isolation of web-enabled distance moving from consumers to web workers:
  • But instead of substituting virtual spaces for real ones (the Matrix model), some folks are focusing on substituting virtual selves for physical presence and meeting in real spaces (the Avatar model). Just look at our recent piece on robot avatars you can send to work or events in your stead and control over the Internet. Commenters on the post were skeptical, but Trevor Blackwell, CEO of Anybots (he’s also a partner in Y Combinator), which makes the robo-avatars pictured above, insisted in an interview that the idea wasn’t science fiction:
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  • People actually get a kick out of locating themselves. They want to know where their colleagues are. There will be more programs like Sococo. The idea is to have a virtual office on your screen. You see your virtual coworkers located in their “office” room, can “walk” to their room, when in the same room the mics let you talk and listen seamlessly, you have conference rooms with whiteboards, water coolers and tea kitchens for those in need of small talk, etc. People’s real location doesn’t matter, but they choose to locate themselves in respect to the virtual office so the team cohesion is supported.
  • The thing that’s far-fetched is robots with their own intelligence. Who knows if general purpose A.I. is ever going to happen? But robots that can move around in an office and be used as communication devices isn’t science fiction at all. Now we’re getting to the point where you can do it over a much larger distance because you can just do it over the internet, and the cost is low enough and reliability is high enough that it makes sense to do every day in an office. Our goal is to have 100,000 of these out there in five years.
  • Of course, both technologies boil down to an extension of video conferencing, with the likes of Sococo adding the possibility of spontaneity and easy initiation of contact, and robot avatars offering mobility and the ability to inspect locations. Still, whichever technological future you favor, there will still be a screen between you and your fellow humans.
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