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Input Devices

The Mouse Vanishes 292

Posted by kdawson from the yesterday-upon-the-stair dept.
countertrolling sends in a clip from Wired that begins "...researchers at MIT have found a method to let users click and scroll exactly the same way they would with a computer mouse, without the device actually being there. Cup your palm, move it around on a table and a cursor on the screen hovers. Tap on the table like you would click a real mouse, and the computer responds. It's one step beyond cordless. It's an invisible mouse. The project, called 'Mouseless,' uses an infrared laser beam and camera to track the movements of the palm and fingers and translate them into computer commands... A working prototype of the Mouseless system costs approximately $20 to build, says Pranav Mistry, who is leading the project."
Science

Neutrino Data Could Spell Trouble For Relativity 279

Posted by kdawson from the stay-put-will-you dept.
Science News has an exploration of the deeper implications of neutrino oscillation, one experimental confirmation of which we discussed last month. "The new findings could even signal a tiny breakdown of Einstein's theory of special relativity. ... MINOS [for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search] found that during a 735-kilometer journey from Fermilab to the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota, about 37 percent of muon antineutrinos disappeared — presumably morphing into one of the other neutrino types — compared with just 19 percent of muon neutrinos. ... That difference in transformation rates suggests a difference in mass between antineutrinos and neutrinos. ... With the amount of data collected so far, there's just a 5% probability that the two types of particles weigh the same."
Earth

MIT Says Natural Gas Best To Lower Carbon Emissions 284

Posted by Soulskill from the pelican-friendly-solution dept.
eldavojohn writes "This week MIT released a comprehensive, hundred-page report entitled 'The Future of Natural Gas' that outlined the many scenarios the United States faces when aiming to reduce carbon emissions. From the New York Times recap: 'The scenario goes like this, according to MIT: Nuclear power, renewable energy, and carbon capture and sequestration are relatively expensive next to gas. Conventional coal is no longer a major source of power generation in the United States. "Natural gas is the substantial winner in the electric sector: The substitution effect, mainly gas generation for coal generation, outweighs the demand reduction effect."' Will this urging help to produce a policy shift from renewable energy (like wind) to natural gas for the United States?"
The Almighty Buck

Visa Launches PayPal Alternative 141

Posted by samzenpus from the lesser-of-two-evils dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Visa has entered the micropayment processing space with payclick, a pre-paid hosted service that will compete with the likes of PayPal. Payclick is aimed at teenagers purchasing online content like music and games where the value of the transaction is likely to be less than $20. Like PayPal, payclick is an online money repository that people can pay into with a bank account or credit card (Visa or MasterCard) and then use the funds to purchase products online. The service was developed and launched in Australia with a view for global markets. PayPal integration is not there yet, but parents can monitor the amount of funds their under-18 children have to spend online. For e-commerce sites, an SDK is available for payclick integration."
Software

Seeing the Forest For the Trees 64

Posted by kdawson from the i-can-see-clearly-now dept.
swframe writes "A new object recognition system developed at MIT and UCLA looks for rudimentary visual features shared by multiple examples of the same object. Then it looks for combinations of those features shared by multiple examples, and combinations of those combinations, and so on, until it has assembled a model of the object that resembles a line drawing. Popular Science has a summary of the research. I've been working on something similar and I think this accomplishment looks very promising."
The Media

Rupert Murdoch Hates Google, Loves the iPad 412

Posted by timothy from the consume-consume-consume dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Register reports that News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch, speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, reiterated his disgust at how search engines handle news and called on old media to rethink how their stories are distributed on the web. 'It's produced a river of gold, but those words are being taken mostly from the newspapers,' said Rupert. 'I think they ought to stop it, that the newspapers ought to stand up and let them do their own reporting.' Murdoch added that the iPad was a 'wonderful tool' for listening to music, watching videos and reading newspapers. 'It may well be the saving of the newspaper industry,' by making it cheaper to distribute content to a broader audience, Murdoch said. 'I'm old, I like the tactile experience of the newspaper,' Murdoch said. '(But) if you have less newspapers and more of these, that's OK. It doesn't destroy the traditional newspaper, it just comes in a different form.'"
Biotech

Magnetism Can Sway Man's Moral Compass 586

Posted by CmdrTaco from the so-can-hot-chicks dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Discovery News reports that scientists have identified a region of the brain which appears to control morality and discovered that a powerful magnetic field can scramble the moral center of the brain, impairing volunteers' notion of right and wrong. 'You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior,' says Liane Young, a scientist at MIT and co-author of the article. 'To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgments is really astonishing.' Young and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to locate an area of the brain just above and behind the right ear known as the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ), which other studies had previously related to moral judgments. Volunteers were exposed to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for 25 minutes before reading stories involving morally questionable characters, and being asked to judge their actions. The researchers found that when the RTPJ was disrupted volunteers were more likely to judge actions solely on the basis of whether they caused harm — not whether they were morally wrong in themselves. The scientists didn't permanently remove the subjects' moral sensibilities and on the scientists' seven point scale, the difference was about one point, averaging out to about a 15 percent change, 'but it's still striking to see such a change in such high level behavior as moral decision-making.' Young points out that the study was correlation; their work only links the RTJP, morality, and magnetic fields, but doesn't definitively prove that one causes another."
Communications

If ET Calls, Who Speaks For Humanity? 371

Posted by timothy from the your-call-is-very-important-to-us dept.
EagleHasLanded writes "Who speaks for humankind if ET calls on us? Paul Davies, chairman of the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup, is a likely ambassador. But Allen Tough founded the Invitation to ETI Web site, which encourages ET to make contact via email (and also strongly discourages humans from impersonating ET). But an individual in the UK got over some of the hurdles designed to weed out hoaxers, before finally throwing in the towel."
Hardware

MIT Developing Self-Assembling Computer Chips 65

Posted by samzenpus from the so-easy-it-builds-itself dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on have released research detailing how molecules in chips can self-assemble, potentially reducing manufacturing costs. The researchers have developed a technique in which polymers automatically fall into place to create an integrated circuit."
Programming

"Mythical Man-Month" Supposedly Busted By MIT Startup 231

Posted by samzenpus from the many-eyes-and-fingers dept.
An anonymous reader writes "We all know about the Mythical Man-Month, the argument that adding more programmers to a software project just makes it later and later. A Linux startup out of MIT claims to have busted the myth, using an MIT holiday month to hire 20 college student interns to get all their work done and quadrupling its productivity."

Comment Re:So he was the CEO of a huge multinational compa (Score 2, Insightful) 241

by ebuck (#31426142) Attached to: Ex-Sun Chief Dishes Dirt On Gates, Jobs
The idea that a company is being threatened with a single lawsuit is enough to cause a small panic in the stock price. Repeat this multiple times, and you'll have a company with an undervalued stock price. While you are correct that such actions happen all the time, it's appropriate for a CEO not to mention them, as a CEO is interested in increasing the stock price.

Comment thinking calories (Score 4, Interesting) 276

by Speare (#31426092) Attached to: Study Shows TV Makes Kids Fat, Computers Don't

While shoving a mouse around and typing does not seem like significant exercise, I think there's a bigger energy expenditure in interactive thought. Zoning out at the television does not engage many areas of the brain, but chatting with friends or deciding where to browse next takes a bit more power. Brain activity burns calories. I've personally noticed that my head warms up more when I'm thinking, especially if the work or play is cerebral or there's a time pressure involved. It would be very cool to see a study on just how different these tasks are, with brain activity monitored objectively.

Comment Re:This is College (Score 1) 664

by starcraftsicko (#31425850) Attached to: Professors Banning Laptops In the Lecture Hall

Agreed, but the life and death wasn't the point. Regulation was the point. Over-regulation sucks. The question is whether the fact of regulation is reasonable.

You've indicated that life and death obviously merit regulation. And you've said that distraction might be just cause.

Banning screens is regulation. Maybe it is over-regulation. So what would be reasonable?

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