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Technology

Technology Quarterly 62

Posted by michael from the three-months-of-excitement-compressed-into-one-day dept.
LarsWestergren writes "There is an unusually interesting Technology Quarterly available for free from The Economist where they discuss some of the more interesting new areas in the area of science and technology. Of most interest to Slashdot might be Open source's local heroes, or perhaps playing Pac-Man on thought-controlled computers. Among the other articles this month: Predicting microweather, transparent magnetic memories, smart robotic transplants, how to bake the perfect chip, and Benoit Mandelbrot - the father of fractals."
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  • Furthermore, it takes an expert about 45 minutes to attach a 128-electrode EEG to someone's head. Worse, it also requires the use of conductive gel, which hardly makes for a consumer-friendly product.

    Yikes. But towards a possible solution:

    "So we need EEGs where you don't need the gel," says Dr Muller. "You put some electrodes in a baseball cap and you have a wireless downlink. But there is still a hardware problem. Brain signals measured non-invasively, and without gel, have very small voltages. So you need a powerful low-noise amplifier."

    • Re:From the "thought-controlled computers" article (Score:4, Interesting)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Friday December 12, 2003 @07:21PM (#7706835) Homepage Journal
      i was at a demonstration recently about this.

      it took like ~3-5mins to attach some 6 or so sensors(a the cap took some time first up front and then getting the contact good on all of them by wiggling). the biggest cap they had was 256 channel(also maximum for that system).

      for demonstration i guess the most obvious things you could make out were the sensors related to eye movement. and the activation or something bump up in another test where the subject was shown pictures and told to press space bar everytime a motorcycle picture came up.

      though, the enmg(?) was more fun, that's used to measure conduction in nerves(that they work, sometimes vital to know if nerves don't work or not when the patient is unconscious), it was more fun because of the shocking effect that could be used to shock your arm(so that you would swing your arm unwillingly, that would be fun in force feedback).

  • Though Controlled Computers (Score:5, Funny)

    by sirReal.83. ( 671912 ) on Friday December 12, 2003 @06:24PM (#7706285) Homepage
    ha! no need to type one-handed anymore! ;)

    sorry.

  • Measuring data (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Isopropyl ( 730365 ) on Friday December 12, 2003 @06:27PM (#7706320)
    AROUND five exabytes (5 billion gigabytes) of information was created in 2002, up from around two exabytes in 1999, according to the latest "How Much Information?" survey produced by the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California in Berkeley.

    How does one go about measuring this? It seems wildly inaccurate; either they're using a complex algorithm to model data creation, or they're taking a shot in the dark.

    Because of the difficulty of estimating such figures, however, all of their numbers have wide margins of error.

    I'll say! Give or take, say, five exabytes or so...

    • Re:Measuring data (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cgranade ( 702534 )
      I'll say! Give or take, say, five exabytes or so...
      Haha. Hahaha. Er, no. We know that some data was created, that's for damn sure. Look at /. over the last year. How much did the database expand? OK, now look at SourceForge. How many newe projects and releases? Now, the estimation of that in total is another matter, but we can make order of magnitude estimates fairly easily.
  • how to bake the perfect chip...
    i have done that before, and its not that hard. all you do is start your system without realizing that the heatsink is every so slightly off the core from poor shipping...that bakes your chip nice and toasty.
    incidentally, if you do bake your chip, it makes a pretty good gottee comb....yesh, sounds weird, but try it...

    xao

  • Similiar. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 12, 2003 @06:28PM (#7706343)
    "Benoit Mandelbrot - the father of fractals"

    Hmmm...all his later work seems so similiar.

  • Wow (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blackmonday ( 607916 ) * on Friday December 12, 2003 @06:30PM (#7706371) Homepage
    ...Match this with the heads up display from the earlier article and the possibilities are endless. Imagine checking your email using nothing more than your glasses and your brain wave mouse! Where do I invest my pennies?

    • That won't get money into HUD's. What will get money into HUD's will be sex.

      As soon as the VR vagina [onzin.nl] is invented as an accesory to the VR glasses, you're going to see guys lined up around the corner to spend an intimate moment with their favorite girl [fateback.com] from DOA3

  • "Computers that can read your mind" (Score:5, Funny)

    by theneb ( 732287 ) on Friday December 12, 2003 @06:32PM (#7706384)
    mate....eat....mate...eat.

  • The article I liked best (Score:4, Informative)

    by bartash ( 93498 ) on Friday December 12, 2003 @06:36PM (#7706421)
    One of the Economist's annual prizes for innovation [economist.com] went to Raymond Damadian for his role in creating NMR. But another fascinating article about who was responsible for creating NMR [economist.com] explains how Raymond Damadian [radiolog.nm.ru] missed out on the Nobel prize.
    • The NY Times recently has been featuring numerous full page (and even double page) adds on the subject of Damadian's exclusion from the Nobel prize... the cost is clearly in the 100's of thousands; I wonder who's paying the bill?

  • AI Robots aren't bad enough (Score:5, Funny)

    by burgburgburg ( 574866 ) <splisken06&email,com> on Friday December 12, 2003 @06:38PM (#7706437)
    AI Robots that time travel and try to kill John Conner aren't bad enough. Self-replicating nanobots overrunning the planet aren't bad enough. Computers that can lip read and know that you're going to shut them down so they send one of the pods to kill your fellow astronaut and then won't open the pod bay door aren't bad enough.

    Let's build computers that can read our minds.

    Okay, I'm getting my family and we're going up to the hills. I mean it this time. Who's with me?

  • Slashdot heaven? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ziggyboy ( 232080 )
    It looks like a site for a lot of potential Slashdot topics...lol...

    Maybe they're intentionally trying to get Slashdot readership?

  • The Economist (Score:5, Informative)

    by Infonaut ( 96956 ) <infonaut@gmail.com> on Friday December 12, 2003 @06:42PM (#7706484) Homepage Journal
    The Economist is one of the few news weeklies you can obtain in the US that doesn't assume that you have the mental capacity of a sea urchin.

    In a recent subscriber survey they sent to me, I told them, "Whatever you do, don't follow Time, Newseek, et. al. and dumb yourself down to post-literate status. For the love of God please, please, please, don't ever put one of those ludicrous 'conventional wisdom' boxes in your publication."

    • Re:The Economist (Score:5, Informative)

      by JAYOYAYOYAYO ( 700885 ) on Friday December 12, 2003 @07:38PM (#7707002)
      indeed. their www site has an article, 'A Nation Apart', [economist.com], discussing the idea of American exceptionalism. one of the most fascinating articles ive read recently.
      • Thanks for pointing that article out.

        Jaysyn
      • That's the sort of article you'd never see in the American press, outside of the Troika mentioned by ThreeToe (The Atlantic, Harpers, and the New Yorker). The Economist has a rather unique point of view - they are very Atlanticist and seem to have a better grasp of America's strengths and weaknesses than most American publications do. They're also not afraid to call it like they see it, without resorting to the simplistic and often sophomoric bias found in Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, et. al.
    • Agreed. As for publications originating on the left side of the pond, we've got Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker...
      • Thank God for the Troika. I'm with you in your assessment. In particular I think the Atlantic has been kicking ass in the stories it's carried since 9/11. I got a subscription to the National Review just to try and expand my view, but it's such a piece of crap that I can hardly bring myself to open it when it arrives in my mailbox.

    • Agreed, but I find the Economist more than a little pleased with itself. It makes a big play of covering all the angles and looking at both sides but in the end, its conclusions are rather pedestrian. A memorable TQ article discussed at length the future of software development in terms of 'Java versus .NET'. All its usual tricks came into play: a sober sounding evaluation of each product's pros and cons peppered with knowing quotes from industry insiders. But in the end, it just regurgitated the market

  • what about the learning curve? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by whovian ( 107062 ) on Friday December 12, 2003 @06:51PM (#7706573)
    Did you know that your brain was preparing for that movement a full half-second before it actually took place? Even more spookily, your mind knew which hand it was going to lift before you made the conscious decision to lift it.

    This sounds rather interesting, but it seems it would apply to people who have already learned a task. Therefore, the neural connections would already be "connected" and trained.

    But what about teaching somebody a new task using an EEG hat or such? You'd then use this device to find out how the brain learns. I mean, originally....the first bootstrap, so to speak.

    I don't think it would be entriely useless to apply to learning new experiences either. Although your brain would draw on that which was previously learned, it would still be trying to absorb a wealth of new information.
    • Experiments on this have been done. People have learned monkeys to control robotic arms with their thoughts. They had the monkeys in a lab with a joystick, a computer screen and a robotic arm. They showed the monkeys that if they used the joystick to steer a dot into a target area, the robotic arm would take a monkey snack and drop it where the monkey could get it. The monkeys had sensors on their heads meanwhile, and they did it for some time until it became routine.

      Then the scientists removed the joystic

  • Thought-controlled Pacman (Score:4, Interesting)

    by attonitus ( 533238 ) on Friday December 12, 2003 @07:01PM (#7706652)
    This seems like more fun:

    Human Pacman [nus.edu.sg]

  • I thought that the headliner about Open Source software being easily translatable was particularly interesting. I've been trying to learn German through email (my pronunciation is horrible!) with my friend in Leipzig, while she works on her English.

    We've both been using babelfish.altavista.com for the occasionaly translation help, but it often just causes confusion. Why is this? Wouldn't an Open-Source translation database with open API's be fairly easy to create?

    Bear in mind that I'm not volunteerin
  • mmm... baked chips [yahoo.com]

  • Mandelbrodt is NOT the father of fractals! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mark_in_Brazil ( 537925 ) on Friday December 12, 2003 @07:27PM (#7706907)
    Benoit Mandelbrodt is NOT the father of fractals! Yes, he did coin the term, but his work built on the work of two men who have at least as much claim to the title of "father of fractals" as he does, and did their work before he did. As the article states, his work in the 1970s was based on the earlier work of Gaston Julia, a French-Algerian mathematician who described the fractal sets that now bear his name without the benefit of computers and won the Grand Prix de l'Academie des Sciences for his paper on the subject, entitled "Memoir sur l'iteration des fonctions rationnelles." Julia wrote that paper at age 25. Interesting side note on Julia: he lost his nose as a soldier in World War I and did mathematical research during an extended hospital stay due to that injury. He was eventually forced to wear a leather cover over the place where his nose had been, held in place with straps tied behind his head. Pictures of him are a bit strange because of that.
    Mandelbrodt came along in the 1970s, rediscovered the works of Julia, which had been all but forgotten, and used computers to do things like determine which Julia sets are connected and measure the Hausdorff Dimension [wikipedia.org] of some fractal sets. He also coined the term "fractal." Contrary to what the article says, Mandelbrodt did not invent the concept of non-integral dimensions... given that the measure used is called the Hausdorff Dimension, does anyone want to guess who invented it? The answer is here [wikipedia.org].
    Hausdorff, being a Jew, suffered and ultimately died during World War II. His work was deemed "Jewish" and "un-German" by the Nazis, and he lost his professor post at the University of Leipzig. In 1942, he, his wife, and his sister-in-law committed suicide when they couldn't escape being sent to a concentration camp.
    Mandelbrodt did make significant contributions, especially to the visualization of fractals and the study of fractals and their properties on computers, but to call him the "father" is to ignore the contributions of the giants on whose shoulders he was standing (to borrow a famous phrase). Mandelbrodt is a good self-promoter, which should be obvious to anyone who RTFA. In the article, the familiarity of his work is compared to that of Newton and Einstein. While it never says his work is as important as the work of those two greats, it doesn't take a big mental leap to get to that idea. When Mandelbrodt discovered the set that now bears his name, he was smart enough not to give it that name himself. Instead he called it the "M set," leaving it to somebody else to add "andebrodt" to the name. Both of these things remind me of Hawking's A Brief History of Time, in which there are brief biographical blurbs of Newton, Einstein, and Hawking, in that order. I'd have loved to see Mandelbrodt and Hawking write a book together. It would be the battle royale for the title of biggest self-promoter in the sciences. I'm not saying they didn't make significant contributions (nor that Hawking's contributions aren't all the more amazing due to his debilitating disease), but this kind of self-promotion shouldn't be necessary. I wouldn't put Hawking or Mandelbrodt on my list of the top ten scientists and mathematicians of the 20th Century, but they would definitely make the list of the top ten best known.
    A friend once told me a really nerdy joke that just came back to mind. He asked me if I knew which letter was most used in the English language. I told him I did-- it's "E." My friend said "that's correct, except in the work of Mandelbrodt, where the two most used are "I" and "M" (getting use from "me," "my," and "M," the name he gave the now-famous set).
    I'm sad to report that I laughed as much at that one as I did at "assume a spherical cow." Damn, I'm nerdy.
    I found the use of the phrase "under our noses" in the article a bit offensive, a slap in the face to Julia. Oops. Now I've done it too. :-b

    --Mark
  • No more carpal tunnel syndrome...the managers will be pleased.

  • Uh oh (Score:3, Interesting)

    by E1v!$ ( 267945 ) on Friday December 12, 2003 @08:28PM (#7707400) Homepage

    LIFT your left hand. Did you know that ... your mind knew which hand it was going to lift before you made the conscious decision to lift it. ..... Car manufacturers might even develop vehicles that integrate the driver's thoughts with the braking or steering system. In a crash, that half-second could be the difference between life and death.

    So now, even before I realize I'm thinking about smashing into the car infront of me (because they keep jamming on their brakes for no reason) my car will do it? Road rage will take on new meaning.

    "Honestly officer, it was the software...."

  • Believe it or not... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NodeVoltage ( 732421 ) on Friday December 12, 2003 @09:28PM (#7707749)
    I had the same kind of idea a couple of years ago for a design project for school. I got the idea from a program I saw on Discovery, they were using the EEG as a lie detector kind of deal. I thought that was dumb and figured reading brain waves would be more useful for controlling things like a game :]. The equipment was a little to expensive for me and I was unable to secure a grant so I gave up on the idea, but not after doing a little research. I was pleased and jealous to read the article that someone was actually working on this. At least it clarifies some of my theories. The main problems I thought would be difficult to solve would be reading the small amplitudes of the beta brain waves, 5-50 mV (if I recall correctly), without that icky gel crap, filtering out any outside noise, deciphering the right brain signal (i.e. "move left"), adjusting the device to be able to read different persons brain signals (since everyone's brain is wired differently), and moving all this stuff off the "baseball cap" so it doesn't weigh 50 lbs. I had thought the hardest would be creating software to read the brain signals and to adjust to different people, but I guess they solved that. I had also thought of another side effect that I'm sure they must have thought of. If one was able to correctly read a persons brain signals, would it not be possible to reverse the process and send signals to the person?

  • OpenEEG (Score:3, Informative)

    by CyberDruid ( 201684 ) on Saturday December 13, 2003 @06:19AM (#7709658) Homepage
    I'm surprised that no one has mentioned this yet, but the OpenEEG project over at:
    http://openeeg.sf.net/
    is an attempt to give all us geeks the chance to experiment with mind interfaces.

    I want my commercial cheap-and-easy-to-use 128 node EEG machine, though. That would rock ;).

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