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Comment Re:Uh oh...Batman becomes real? (Score 1) 40

by n01 (#49909141) Attached to: UW Researchers Prototype Sonar-Based Contactless Sleep Monitoring
Starting with the iPhone 5, the iPhone actually has 3 built-in microphones. They are used to improve intelligibility during phone calls, but unfortunately on iOS an app can't record from multiple microphones directly (i.e. by getting 2- or 3-channel PCM sample data). I'm not sure how this is for Android phones. (Disclaimer: I'm the developer of the Sleep Cycle Sonalarm Clock app that I've referenced in the post.)

Comment Re:Uh oh...Batman becomes real? (Score 1) 40

by n01 (#49908691) Attached to: UW Researchers Prototype Sonar-Based Contactless Sleep Monitoring
Starting with the iPhone 5, the iPhone actually has 3 built-in microphones. They are used to improve intelligibility during phone calls, but unfortunately an app can't record from multiple microphones directly (i.e. by getting 2- or 3-channel PCM sample data). I'm not sure how this is for Android phones.

Comment Re:Uh oh...Batman becomes real? (Score 2) 40

by n01 (#49908667) Attached to: UW Researchers Prototype Sonar-Based Contactless Sleep Monitoring
I've had users report back that the Sonalarm app worked well for them while sharing the bed with their partner. You have a bit of directionality because both the loudspeaker and the mic are located at the bottom edge of the iPhone, and also range is limited to around 1 to 2 meters, depending on the selected sensitivity. (Disclaimer: I'm the developer of the Sleep Cycle Sonalarm Clock app that I've referenced in the post.)

Comment Re:Uh oh...Batman becomes real? (Score 1) 40

by n01 (#49908593) Attached to: UW Researchers Prototype Sonar-Based Contactless Sleep Monitoring
I've read on a German website about the UW prototype that it requires a smartphone that can record from two microphones at the same time, so this probably solves the directional discrimination. The UW prototype uses 18-20 kHz which most adults can't hear. I know the iPhone's frequency range and it goes right up to 20 kHz for both playback and recording (disclaimer: I'm the developer of the Sonalarm app that I've referenced in the post and my app uses the 18.5 - 20 kHz range, IIRC).

Submission + - Philae comet lander wakes up (bbc.com)

Submitted by techtech
techtech writes: "The European Space Agency (Esa) says its comet lander, Philae, has woken up and contacted Earth.
Philae, the first spacecraft to land on a comet, was dropped on to the surface of Comet 67P by its mothership, Rosetta, last November.
It worked for 60 hours before its solar-powered battery ran flat.
The comet has since moved nearer to the sun and Philae has enough power to work again, says the BBC's science correspondent Jonathan Amos.
An account linked to the probe tweeted the message, "Hello Earth! Can you hear me?""

Submission + - Software-only contactless sleep monitoring based on sonar

Submitted by n01
n01 writes: Researchers of the University of Washington are testing the prototype of their ApneaApp to diagnose sleep apnea, a health problem that can become life-threatening. To monitor a person's sleep, the app transforms the user's smartphone phone into an active sonar system that tracks tiny changes in a person's movements. The phone's speaker sends out inaudible sound waves, which bounce off a sleeping person's body and are picked back up by the phone's microphone. "It's similar to the way bats navigate," said Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, lead author and a doctoral candidate in the UW's department of computer science and engineering. "They send out sound signals that hit a target, and when those signals bounce back they know something is there." In technical terms, the app continuously analyzes changes in the acoustic room-transfer-function (sampled at ultrasonic frequencies) to detect motion. This is very similar to what the iPhone app Sleep Cycle Sonalarm Clock does, except that the UW researchers have improved the sensitvity of the method so it can precisely track the person's breathing movements which allows it to not only detect different sleep phases but also sleep apnea events. The advantage in both use cases is that the sleep monitoring is contact-less (there's nothing in the user's bed that could disturb their sleep) and doesn't require any additional hardware besides the user's smart phone.

Submission + - 210 Degree VR Headset with 5K Display Revealed by 'Payday' Developer Starbreeze (roadtovr.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Starbreeze Studios has taken wraps off of StarVR, a new VR headset with dual displays comprising a 210 degree horizontal field of view with a total resolution of 5120x1440. The headset's origins come from InfinitEye, a company working on a super-wide dual-display headset back in 2013 (http://bit.ly/1JNjqRy), which went into stealth mode for quite some time before being reborn as StarVR in partnership with Starbreeze Studios (http://bit.ly/1QwB0Nx). The studio is the developer behind the Payday franchise, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and now 'Overkill's The Walking Dead', which will have a VR component utilizing the new headset.

Submission + - Russia and China crack encrypted Snowden files. Britain responds

Submitted by garyisabusyguy
garyisabusyguy writes: According to Sunday Times:
RUSSIA and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services.
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.u...

And this non-paywalled Reuters version:
http://www.reuters.com/article...

MI6 has decided that it is too dangerous to operate in Russia or China. This removes intelligence capabilities that have existed throughout the Cold War, and which may have helped to prevent a 'hot' nuclear war.

Have the actions of Snowden, and, apparently, the use of weak encryption, made the world less safe?

Submission + - Amazon publishes opaque transparency report (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: Post-Snowden there is great interest in just what involvement the government has with technology firms. There are frequent requests from government agencies for information about users and the likes of Google, Snapchat and even the NSA itself have all release transparency reports that reveal, in broad strokes, the number of requests for data they have received.

Amazon is the latest company to release a transparency report — although the term really should be used in the loosest possible sense. The report includes scant details about the number of subpoenas, search warrants, court orders, and national security requests received in the first five months of 2015. The report is so vague as to be virtually meaningless.

Submission + - Past a certain critical temperature, the Universe will be destroyed

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: If you take all the kinetic motion out of a system, and have all the particles that make it up perfectly at rest, somehow even overcoming intrinsic quantum effects, you’d reach absolute zero, the theoretically lowest temperature of all. But what about the other direction? Is there a limit to how hot something can theoretically get? You might think not, that while things like molecules, atoms, protons and even matter will break down at high enough temperatures, you can always push your system hotter and hotter. But it turns out that the Universe limits what’s actually possible, as any physical system will self-destruct beyond a certain point.

Submission + - Brain imaging shows abnormal white matter areas in the brains of stutterers

Submitted by n01
n01 writes: Headline: "Brain imaging shows abnormal white matter areas in the brains of stutterers"
Stuttering — a speech disorder in which sounds, syllables or words are repeated or prolonged — affects more than 70 million people, or about 1% of the population, worldwide. Once treated as a psychological or emotional condition, stuttering can now be traced to brain neuroanatomy and physiology. Two new studies from UC Santa Barbara researchers provide new insight into the treatment of the speech disorder as well as understanding its physiological basis. The first paper, published in the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, finds that the MPI stuttering treatment program, a new treatment developed at UCSB, was twice as effective as the standard best practices protocol. The second study, which appears in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, uses diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI) in an MRI scanner to identify abnormal areas of white matter in the brains of adult stutterers. According to co-author Janis Ingham, a professor emerita of speech and hearing sciences at UCSB and co-author of both papers, the two studies taken together demonstrate two critical points: A neuroanatomic abnormality exists in the brains of people who stutter, yet they can learn to speak fluently in spite of it.

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