azimir - Slashdot User

Comment Re:I see the golden lining (Score 1) 96

by azimir on Monday June 20, 2011 @12:18PM (#36501652) Attached to: High Tech Elder Care May Be Mixed Blessing

" Oddly enough I only see physical health gadgets. No gadgets for mental health at all. You'd think they could have made even a simple token gesture attempt. Perhaps the stereotypical video conferencing solution, or digital picture frames of the grand kids, or something, something at all."

FTA: "Rutherford is playing the word jumble game. The results of the game, as well as typos and even the intervals between keystrokes, are monitored for abnormalities that could foreshadow physical or mental infirmity."

"A few months ago, the former waitress even tested a robot with a Skype-like video monitor that lets faraway relatives check on loved ones."

They're doing some mental health work. OHSU is a teaching hospital and research facility so they're aware of all health aspects.

Every smart home research group has their own focus and interests. OHSU's BME group does a wide range and they're a very strong stable of researchers, but they still have to pick their battles. I spent a couple minutes trying to track down some of the video picture frames used in other projects, but I didn't find the really good ones that do conferencing with additional activity detection and status information.

What's almost more important:

"Neither Medicaid nor most private insurance policies cover these expenses"

-- This insurance issue is actually a serious sticking point in smart home tech development right now. Only a couple of states actually recognize it and have required the insurance companies to pay for preventative/monitoring tech.

Extinct Mammoth, Coming To a Zoo Near You 312

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 15, 2011 @08:31PM from the no-unauthorized-reproduction dept.

Techmeology writes "Professor Akira Iritani of Kyoto University plans to use recent developments in cloning technology to give life to the currently extinct woolly mammoth. Although earlier efforts in the 1990s were unsuccessful due to damage caused by extreme cold, Professor Iritani believes he can use a technique pioneered by Dr Wakayama (who successfully cloned a frozen mouse) to overcome this obstacle. This technique will enable Professor Iritani to identify viable cell nuclei, and transfer them to egg cells of an African elephant which will carry the mammoth for a 600 day pregnancy."

US Scraps Virtual Fence Along Mexican Border 437

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 15, 2011 @01:06PM from the but-that-money's-so-stimulatng dept.

Pickens writes "The Arizona Republic reports that the federal government has officially cancelled its multibillion-dollar plan to build a virtual fence along the border with Mexico as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano disclosed in a congressional briefing that the program known as SBInet was costing too much and achieving too little. 'SBInet cannot meet its original objective of providing a single, integrated border-security technology solution,' says Napolitano. Boeing was hired in 2006 to develop the system under a three-year federal contract with cost projections for full build-out as high as $8 billion but efforts were plagued by delays, glitches, budget increases and congressional criticism. Napolitano has ordered Customs and Border Protection to launch a more modest and geographically tailored effort using SBInet funds and existing technology such as mobile-surveillance systems, unmanned aircraft, thermal-imaging devices and remote-video surveillance with proven elements of SBInet including stationary radar and infrared-sensor towers. SBInet cost nearly $1 billion for development along 53 miles of Arizona border."

Play Pacman, Pinball, and Pong With a Paramecium 88

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 15, 2011 @12:08PM from the why-I-don't-bathe dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Science is rarely ever this cool! 'Physicist Ingmar Riedel-Kruse and his team from Stanford University have done just that by creating versions of classic games that you can navigate by physically controlling living organisms. A game called PAC-mecium is Pacman with a twist: players use a console to change the polarity of an electrical field in a fluid chamber filled with paramecia, which makes the organisms move in different directions. A camera sends real-time images to a computer, where they are superimposed onto a game board (see video above). By looking at the screen, a player can guide the paramecia to eat virtual yeast cells and make them avoid Pacman-like fish. A microprocessor tracks the movement of the organisms to keep score.' Also available are versions of Pinball, Pong, and soccer."

Ridley Scott Abandons Alien Prequel 170

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 15, 2011 @10:11AM from the he-must-be-infested dept.

An anonymous reader writes "With Ridley Scott and 20th Century Fox announcing that the much-vaunted 3D Alien prequel has now mutated into an original SF film project called Prometheus, starring Noomi Rapace, the author of this article recalls his 2007 interview with the late Dan O'Bannon, who presumably is happy about the news, wherever he is. Asked what he'd like to see happen to the xenomorph franchise, the Alien co-creator said: 'I'd like to see it stop. A horror movie's a fragile thing, and once you've gotten past the original, it isn't scary anymore. So you do a bunch of sequels to a horror movie, all they do is drain any remaining impact out of the original...it's not as effective as it would have been if you had just left it alone.'"

Military Aircraft To Get All-Fiber Network Gear 144

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 15, 2011 @03:17AM from the network-coriolis-effect dept.

coondoggie writes "Looking to significantly reduce weight, improve on-board communications and make it easier to upgrade avionics, the US military is developing prototype phonic gear for use in all aircraft. Behind such a drastic shift is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project with an ungainly moniker: Network Enabled by Wavelength division multiplexing Highly Integrated Photonics (NEW-HIP)."

Airborne Prions Prove Lethal In Mouse Studies 116

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 14, 2011 @07:29PM from the denny-crane dept.

sgunhouse writes "Wired has a story up on the lethality of airborne prions. It should be noted that prions (which cause 'mad cow disease' and similar disorders) are not normally airborne, and take a long time to kill the infected animal, but so far are 100% lethal if something else doesn't kill the animal first. So, they are not likely to be useful as a biological weapon (my first thought when reading their headline), but they present another safety precaution to consider."

Patriot Act Up For Renewal, Nobody Notices 463

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 14, 2011 @03:18PM from the wonder-how-long-we'll-put-up-with-it dept.

Ponca City, We Love You writes "When the Patriot Act was first signed in 2001, it was billed as a temporary measure required because of the extreme circumstances created by the terrorist threat. The fear from its opponents was that executive power, once given, is seldom relinquished. Now the Examiner reports that on January 5th, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) introduced a bill to add yet another year to the soon-to-be-expiring Patriot Act, extending it until February, 2012, with passage likely to happen after little debate or contention. If passed, this would be the second time the Obama administration has punted on campaign promises to roll back excessive surveillance measures allowed under the act. Last year's extension passed under the heading of the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act. 'Given the very limited number of days Congress has in session before the current deadline, and the fact that the bill's Republican sponsor is only seeking another year, I think it's safe to read this as signaling an agreement across the aisle to put the issue off yet again,' writes Julian Sanchez."

Palin's E-Mail Hacker Imprisoned Against Judge's Wishes 502

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 14, 2011 @11:09AM from the grizzly-justice dept.

Em Adespoton writes "It was a computer security story that made headlines around the world, involving the private emails of a woman who could have become Vice President of the United States. And now, it's ended with a young man sent to a federal prison, hundreds of miles from his family home. David C Kernell, the hacker who broke into Sarah Palin's personal Yahoo email account, is reported to have been sent to jail despite a judge's recommendation that he should not be put behind bars."

It's Surprisingly Hard To Notice When Moving Objects Change 140

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 07, 2011 @07:37PM from the sorry-officer-the-traffic-light-was-swinging-in-the-wind dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at Harvard have found that people are remarkably bad at noticing when moving objects change in brightness, color, size, or shape. In a paper published yesterday (PDF) in Current Biology, the researchers present a new visual illusion that 'causes objects that had once been obviously dynamic to suddenly appear static.' The finding has implications for everything from video game design to the training of pilots."

Deferred IT Maintenance Is a Ticking Time Bomb 186

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @05:25PM from the we'll-do-it-later dept.

snydeq writes "The underfunding of routine hardware replacement purchases and the degradation of aging enterprise apps pose systemic risk for many IT organizations, thanks to a ballooning 'deferred IT maintenance debt' in the decade since Y2K fears pushed enterprises to invest heavily in essential system upgrades, InfoWorld's Bill Snyder reports. And with sysadmins 'scrambling to keep systems up and running with budgets that barely cover the basics,' this 'IT debt' promises only to increase in the coming years, especially as IT continues to defer routine maintenance in favor of new 'cost-saving' initiatives, particularly around the cloud."

Linux 2.6.37 Released 135

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 05, 2011 @04:59PM from the new-and-improved dept.

diegocg writes "Version 2.6.37 of the Linux kernel has been released. This version includes SMP scalability improvements for Ext4 and XFS, the removal of the Big Kernel Lock, support for per-cgroup IO throttling, a networking block device based on top of the Ceph clustered filesystem, several Btrfs improvements, more efficient static probes, perf support to probe modules, LZO compression in the hibernation image, PPP over IPv4 support, several networking microoptimizations and many other small changes, improvements and new drivers for devices like the Brocade BNA 10GB ethernet, Topcliff PCH gigabit, Atheros CARL9170, Atheros AR6003 and RealTek RTL8712U. The fanotify API has also been enabled. See the full changelog for more details."

German Kindergartens Ordered To Pay Copyright For Songs 291

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday December 29, 2010 @01:56PM from the easy-as-taking-music-from-a-baby dept.

BBird writes "Deutsche Welle reports: 'Up until this year, preschools could teach and produce any kind of song they wanted. But now they have to pay for a license if they want children to sing certain songs. A tightening of copyright rules means kindergartens now have to pay fees to Germany's music licensing agency, GEMA, to use songs that they reproduce and perform. The organization has begun notifying creches and other daycare facilities that if they reproduce music to be sung or performed, they must pay for a license.'"

Cheaters Exposed Analyzing Statistical Anomalies 437

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday December 29, 2010 @12:42PM from the actually-they-do-prosper dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Proctors and teachers can't watch everyone while they take tests — not when some students can text with their phones in their pockets, so with tests increasingly important in education — used to determine graduation, graduate school admission, and — the latest — merit pay and tenure for teachers, Trip Gabriel writes that schools are turning to 'data forensics' to catch cheaters, searching for data anomalies where the chances of random agreement are astronomical. In addition to looking for copying, statisticians hunt for illogical patterns, like test-takers who did better on harder questions than easy ones, a sign of advance knowledge of part of a test or look for unusually large score gains from a previous test by a student or class. Since Caveon Test Security, whose clients have included the College Board, the Law School Admission Council, and more than a dozen states and big city school districts, began working for the state of Mississippi in 2006, cheating has declined about 70 percent, says James Mason, director of the State Department of Education's Office of Student Assessment. 'People know that if you cheat there is an extremely high chance you're going to get caught,' says Mason."

Apple's $1 Billion Data Center Mystery 244

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 28, 2010 @01:50PM from the it's-just-a-fruit-stand dept.

1sockchuck writes "One of year's most tantalizing technology secrets involves Apple's $1 billion investment in a new data center in North Carolina. Is it the Death Star in Apple's plan for galactic domination? Some Apple watchers predict it will be the hub for a 21st century broadcasting network. Other enthusiasts are doing flyovers to film videos of the 500,000 square foot facility. There's also an unofficial FAQ about the new data center. What is Apple up to with this huge facility?"

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