Category Archives: Technology

Very Cool Wearable Computing Gadget from MIT

Pattie Maes presentation at TED shows a very cool prototype for wearable, useful computing spearheaded by Pranav Mistry (who received a standing ovation at TED). It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment.

The prototype of the system cost only $350. The software, created by them, obviously is the key, but how amazing is that, $350 for the hardware used in the prototype! There is a useful web site on the Sixth Sense project.

The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques.

The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.

Eric Schmidt on Google, Education and Economics

Eric Schmidt, March 6th, 2009 interview by Charlie Rose:

“From our perspective, I think the YouTube acquisition and the Doubleclick acquisition, which are the two large acquisitions we did last year, and the year before, have been phenomenally successful.”
He also mentioned the idea of teachers today creating online hubs of information on educational areas, as well as lesson plans. See our Education Resources for Science and Engineering
And Flu Trends
“We needed the stimulus package, because the stimulus package had, among other things, $20 billion for science and education funding… Real wealth is created by businesses, not by financial engineering, and by businesses that provide new products that solve new problems.”
Why do you assume the best students in the world are going to come to America? “Because they choose to come here right now… That is a brilliant [actually not brilliant at all] strategy take the best people hire them in American universities and then kick them out” It happens. “Its shocking.” It happens. “I know we are fighting against it.” “We America remain, by far the place of choice for education, particularly higher education.“
Technologists as a group tend to be more analytical, more data driven, more personally liberal (more willing to tolerate the differences among people, more global in their focus… [technologists] as a group believe you can literally change the world from technology.”

Jon Stewart Explains Twitter and John Hunter on Twitter

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM – Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Jon Stewart does a great job of explaining Twitter. Still, for some reason I am going to try Tweeting. Follow curiouscat_com if you are interested.

Problems Using Corn as Biofuel

The pluses and (mostly) minuses of biofuels by Robert Sanders

one ripple effect from the stampede to create more ethanol from corn in the United States. As corn prices skyrocketed several years ago, soybean fields were converted to corn, and the price of soy rose. As a result, farmers in Brazil, one of the main countries with the soil, climate and infrastructure to make up the difference, began to bulldoze rainforest to grow more soybeans.

“If reduced U.S. soybean production results in a parallel increase in Brazilian soybean production, a potential net release of 1,800 to 9,100 Tg (trillion grams) of CO2-equivalents of greenhouse gas emissions due to land-use change is possible,” Coe wrote in a summary of his talk. That is equivalent to more than 9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Toyota Software Development for Partner Robots

Toyota Discusses Software Development for Partner Robots

Yamada: What was unique about the software development for the partner robots exhibited at Aichi Expo was the fact that Toyota entirely disposed of its assets from the past.

Toyota owned some software assets because it had been developing partner robots for some time before developing the robots for the exposition. But those assets were all one-offs. No one but the developers themselves could comprehend their architectures.

As Toyota was developing more than one partner robot for the exposition, the number of developers involved increased. Considering that we can never complete any development if we use the past assets that rely on an individual developer’s skill, we made everything, including the platform, from scratch again.

Toyota developed the platform focusing on promoting design review by visualizing the control logic. Therefore, the company thoroughly separated control sequences and algorithms. To be more specific, it used state transition diagrams.

Each algorithm is stored in a different block in a state transition diagram. With such diagrams, developers can easily comprehend the flow of the control and review the design even if they do not understand each algorithm. The company employed this method because each algorithm such as a bipedal walking algorithm is too complicated for anyone but their developers to understand it.

Google Aids Green Action

Google has a focus on energy as I have discussed previously. Google has been working to provide a way for people to get information on energy use in their homes that can be used to reduce your energy use.

Power to the people

studies show that access to home energy information results in savings between 5-15% on monthly electricity bills. It may not sound like much, but if half of America’s households cut their energy demand by 10 percent, it would be the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road.
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We’ve been participating in the dialogue in Washington, DC and with public agencies in the U.S. and other parts of the world to advocate for investment in the building of a “smart grid,” to bring our 1950s-era electricity grid into the digital age. Specifically, to provide both consumers and utilities with real-time energy information, homes must be equipped with advanced energy meters called “smart meters.” There are currently about 40 million smart meters in use worldwide, with plans to add another 100 million in the next few years.
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Over the last several months, our engineers have developed a software tool called Google PowerMeter, which will show consumers their home energy information almost in real time, right on their computer. Google PowerMeter is not yet available to the public since we’re testing it out with Googlers first.

Lunacy – FIRST Robotics Challenge 2009

The For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Robotic Challenge is a great way to get high school students involved in engineering. Lunacy is the 2009 competition which mimics the low friction environment on the moon (using a slick surface and slick wheels on the robots). For more information see the competition manual and related documents.

MRI That Can See Bacteria, Virus and Proteins

IBM team boosts MRI resolution

The researchers demonstrated this imaging at a resolution 100 million times finer than current MRI. The advance could lead to important medical applications and is powerful enough to see bacteria, viruses and proteins, say the researchers.

The researchers said it offered the ability to study complex 3D structures at the “nano” scale. The step forward was made possible by a technique called magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM), which relies on detecting very small magnetic forces.

In addition to its high resolution, MRFM has the further advantage that it is chemically specific, can “see” below surfaces and, unlike electron microscopy, does not destroy delicate biological materials.

Now, the IBM-led team has dramatically boosted the sensitivity of MRFM and combined it with an advanced 3D image reconstruction technique. This allowed them to demonstrate, for the first time, MRI on biological objects at the nanometre scale.

That is very cool.

Science Commons: Making Scientific Research Re-useful

Science Commons is a project of Creative Commons. Like other organizations trying to support the advancement of science with open access they deserve to be supported (PLoS and arXiv.org are other great organizations supporting science).

Science Commons has three interlocking initiatives designed to accelerate the research cycle – the continuous production and reuse of knowledge that is at the heart of the scientific method. Together, they form the building blocks of a new collaborative infrastructure to make scientific discovery easier by design.

Making scientific research re-useful, help people and organizations open and mark their research and data for reuse. Learn more.

Enabling one-click access to research materials, streamline the materials-transfer process so researchers can easily replicate, verify and extend research. Learn more.

Integrating fragmented information sources, help researchers find, analyze and use data from disparate sources by marking and integrating the information with a common, computer-readable language. Learn more.

NeuroCommons, is their proof-of-concept project within the field of neuroscience. The NeuroCommons is a beta open source knowledge management system for biomedical research that anyone can use, and anyone can build on.

Moving Closer to Robots Swimming Through Bloodsteam

Pretty cool. Tiny motor allows robots to swim through human body

James Friend, of Monash University, said that such devices could enter previously unreachable brain areas, unblocking blood clots, cleaning vessels or sending back images to surgeons. “The first complete device we want to build would have a camera,” Professor Friend said.
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Professor Friend said they had shown the motor, which is a quarter of a millimetre wide, had enough power to navigate this type of nanorobot through the bloodstream of a human artery. Tests of their prototype device in a liquid as viscous as blood were also promising. “It swam.”
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The team plans to conduct animal tests of a nanorobot driven by their motor later this year or early next year. But Professor Friend cautioned that many technical hurdles needed to be overcome.

Their miniature motor was connected to an electricity supply and a way would need to be found to power it remotely. The construction of the flagella also needed refinement.