Computers controlled by the mind are going a step further with Intel’s development of mind-controlled computers. Existing computers operated by brain power require the user to mentally move a cursor on the screen, but the new computers will be designed to directly read the words thought by the user.
If the plans are successful users will be able to surf the Internet, write emails and carry out a host of other activities on the computer simply by thinking about them. Director of Intel Laboratories, Justin Ratner, said it is clear humans are no longer restricted to using a keyboard and mouse, and mind reading is the “ultimate user interface.” He said he is confident any concerns about privacy will be overcome.
While many able-bodied computer users may hesitate to adopt a technology that operates a computer by reading their minds, people who are unable to use a keyboard or a mouse through disability should find the new technology gives them much more freedom and opportunities for communicating.
And we are back…thank you for the support. The exam is over and what a better way to celebrate than with an inspiring video.
About this talk (Via Ted)
In tough economic times, our exploratory science programs — from space probes to the LHC — are first to suffer budget cuts. Brian Cox explains how curiosity-driven science pays for itself, powering innovation and a profound appreciation of our existence.
About Brian Cox (Via Ted)
Physicist Brian Cox has two jobs: working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and explaining big science to the general public. He’s a professor at the University of Manchester.
First it was the GUI, Then Minority Report & The Iphone now this!
About this talk (Via Ted)
Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler demos g-speak — the real-life version of the film’s eye-popping, tai chi-meets-cyberspace computer interface. Is this how tomorrow’s computers will be controlled?
About John Underkoffler (via Ted)
Remember the data interface from Minority Report? Well, it’s real, John Underkoffler invented it — as a point-and-touch interface called g-speak — and it’s about to change the way we…
Gps research… the speaker is super intelligent and super cute!
“For transportation researchers, these distributions could be used to develop entirely new analytical calculations that can capture lots of information, like the likely diffusion of travelers within a known network, or the regularities of trips taken with smart cards.”
About (Via MIT World)
Researchers who wish to study mobility patterns might be reaching for your phone. Increasingly, cell phones are equipped with locational receivers (Global Positioning Systems or GPS) and their bread crumb trails are opening up entirely new ways to study and predict the dynamics of travel. “We are in the GPS revolution because most PCS of tomorrow will be in our hands in the (form of) the smart phone”, according to Marta Gonzalez. San Francisco is a city on the forefront of this revolution: there, willing cell phone users have voluntarily uploaded their GPS trajectories.
If that is the data of the future, it is still possible to study mobility patterns today, by conducting a secondary analysis of cell phone records. González cites an example from Europe, where she worked with cell phone billing data for 7 million customers. She examined a subset of 16 million records, which represented 100,000 users. Although individual locations could not be identified, Dr. González used a proxy variable, the cell phone tower from which a call originated or was received. Using a combination of parsing and data mining, the data was scaled from anonymous, individual call to identify aggregate mobility. The analysis shows that there are very powerful and stable underlying patterns. Travel did not follow a random walk; there was great regularity in the functions- – and in this dataset, just two locations, per person, could account for 65% of their movement, within an average area of 16 by 16 kilometers. This research uses a statistical “spatial language” to describe and model human movement. These measures include a “Levy flight” and a “ radius of gyration”- a quantitative measure of the average distance a person visits from a defined center-point. The radius of gyration can be used to predict, “what is the probability that a person will be in an expected place.”
Excerpted Introduction (via Andrew Odlyzko School of Mathematics University of Minnesota
Predicting the evolution of the Internet is an error-prone business. An instructive, as well as amusing, exercise is to read the previous January/February 2000 Millennial Forecast issue of Internet Computing. The authors were all Internet luminaries with sterling records. Yet, although there were many perceptive and accurate comments in their essays, most of their predictions turned out to significantly miss the mark. In many cases this came from overestimates of the speed of change. That is a tendency that is almost universal among inventors and promoters of new technologies. As just one example, Bill Gates predicted that books would “go digital … broadly in the next five years.” With the arrival of the Amazon Kindle and other ebook readers, we are probably finally seeing the start of this transformation. But it now seems safe to say that a broad move towards digital books is at least five years further out, fifteen years after Gates made his forecast. Many other predictions seem in retrospect to have been completely misguided. For example, Eric Schmidt, at the time head of Novell, touted a secure worldwide “distributed directory service” as the “master technology” of the next wave on the Internet. Yet such a service is nowhere in sight. Instead, Schmidt at his current position at Google has found how to gain profit and influence through insecure statistical approaches that serve sufficiently the needs of the public and the advertisers.
The lack of accuracy in the previous forecast issue should not be a surprise. History is replete with examples of the difficulty of forecasting how quickly technologies will advance, and how society will use them. Hence the most that we can do is speculate, and this essay should be taken with a grain of salt.
Although accurate prediction is hard, there are some broad patterns that are likely to persist, such as “a continuation of current trends in bandwidth and connectivity” mentioned in Stephen Lukasik’s essay in the 2000 issue. And, based on extensive historical precedents, some major misperceptions will govern many decisions about research, development, and deployment of new technologies. What is not well known, is that people can be remarkably oblivious to massive moves that are taking place around them and affect their industries. In the previous forecast issue there is just one discussion of voice, in the prediction (in Jim White’s essay) that voice browsers would become widespread and important. Yet the big communications revolution that was taking place then, and has continued over the past decade, overshadowing the Internet all the time, has been the growth in mobile voice.
This video was prepared by the UK branch of Dorling Kindersley Books and produced by Khaki Films (http://www.thekhakigroup.com/). Originally meant solely for a DK sales conference, the video was such a hit internally that it is now being shared externally. We hope you enjoy it (and make sure you watch it up to at least the halfway point, there’s a surprise!).
Companies across the media industry are racing to get their eReaders in the hands of consumers, which means big change for the publishing industry and the media business overall. Organizations are scrambling to ensure that their readership is not lost as the reading habits of their long-time consumers are redefined by the upheaval caused by the new wave of eReaders.
With Apple’s iPad release scheduled for April 3, the Paley Center gathered a group of senior media executives to discuss strategies for how the media industry can most effectively retain consumer loyalty as well as capitalize on one of the most talked about new gadgets of 2010.
I have to thank Paul Kedrosky for finding this article, it makes me think of many things. Primarily, that us value investors still have hope that is value investors focusing on rather dull, boring, not so sexy businesses.
We like to believe we live in an era of unprecedented change: technological innovation is proceeding at a rate with no parallel in all of human history. The information revolution and globalization are radically disruptive. Just as Barack Obama would like to be a transformational President, so the rest of us like the idea that we live in a thrilling epoch of transformation. But the truth is that we are living in a period of stagnation.
Surprisingly, this stasis is most evident in an area where we assume we are way ahead of our predecessors: technology. In fact, the gadgets of the information age have had nothing like the transformative effects on life and industry that indoor electric lighting, refrigerators, electric and natural gas ovens and indoor plumbing produced in the early to mid-20th century. Is the combination of a phone, video screen and keyboard really as revolutionary as the original telephone, the original television set or the original typewriter was?
About the Lecture
Few companies have endured such hardship, or risen to such heights in a brief span of time as Akamai Technologies. Paul Sagan tells how he became the CEO of this young firm, and helped it survive and then flourish despite “unimaginable adversity.”
Brought up in a Chicago newspaper family, Sagan trained for a life in journalism. He cut his teeth as a broadcast news producer and executive in the 1980s, and in the 1990s. He helped launch New York 1, a cable news network pioneering digital video technology, and later, an interactive TV project in Orlando that featured video on demand and customized newscasts. Over the years, says Sagan, he picked up critical lessons on running a business: Don’t count on the permanence of any customer, job, or venture. He also “glimpsed the digital future,” realizing that if “you married the interactivity and openness of the web with the bandwidth available from cable…you could change the way the internet worked.”
Should humans address man-made rising temperatures and sea levels by tinkering further with mother nature? A lively debate about geoengineering has burst into the mainstream recently with reference to Ken Caldeira’s work in the final chapter of the popular book SuperFreakonomics.
This panel takes a measured look at the good, bad and ugly of what could and should be done. What is technically feasible? How could new tactics be tested? Does the mere possibility of geoengineering diminish efforts to reduce carbon pollution? Our speakers share their distinct perspectives on this passionate environmental topic.
that is value investors focusing on rather dull, boring, not so sexy businesses.