Circuit Explorations addresses the questions if any system has the potential to show emergent behavior as long as it follows the guidelines for emergence we learned from studying examples of nature and if the emergence of complex behavior can be made to appear by carefully tuning a systems parameter and setup.
A couple of years or so ago I was a guest on Start The Week, and I was authoritatively informed by a very distinguished journalist that the whole Internet thing was just a silly fad like ham radio in the fifties, and that if I thought any different I was really a bit naďve. It is a very British trait – natural, perhaps, for a country which has lost an empire and found Mr Blobby – to be so suspicious of change.
A streamlined version of 'negative-pressure' wound therapy is put to the test in Haiti — and could have 'enormous potential' across the developing world.
But widgets are still trapped in their cells, an endless catalogue of “things that fit.” The heroic stance of the maker is not generally enacted by the programmer, unless we redefine programmer to mean the programming of ideas—which don’t get too far if they’re in a box, even one with rounded corners. Besides, “people who use technology” is more or less everybody, and isn’t limited to computers—what about cars, clothes, agriculture, pills, ideas? Technologies all, and everywhere.
The two of us see the world as a stream of color, and in 2009 we finally had a chance to draw the river in our heads. We began with a collection of photographs of the Boston Common taken from Flickr. Using an algorithm developed for the WIRED Anniversary visualization, our software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel.
Computer scientist and Internet guru Lanier's fascinating and provocative full-length exploration of the Internet's problems and potential is destined to become a must-read for both critics and advocates of online-based technology and culture. Lanier is best known for creating and pioneering the use of the revolutionary computer technology that he named virtual reality. Yet in his first book, Lanier takes a step back and critiques the current digital technology, more deeply exploring the ideas from his famous 2000 Wired magazine article, One-Half of a Manifesto, which argued against more wildly optimistic views of what computers and the Internet could accomplish. His main target here is Web 2.0, the current dominant digital design concept commonly referred to as open culture. Lanier forcefully argues that Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia undervalue humans in favor of anonymity and crowd identity.
Welcome To Chat Roulette Map, an site that shows where Chat Roulette uses or located all over the world.
The good news is, we can now control a pinball machine's flippers with our brains, as this demo at Germany's ceBIT Technology Fair proves. The bad news is, it's not going to make aspiring pinball hustlers look cool in bars.
Intellectual Ventures researchers study flight dynamics of mosquitoes to look for novel ways to attack them. This video shows a technique called “Particle Image Velocimetry.” Tiny suspended water droplets, illuminated by a green planar laser, show the movement of the air around the mosquito’s wing.
The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.
Google doesn't reveal its search algorithms, but the company's engineers confirm that what we're looking at in [Google Suggest] is, essentially, a list of the most popular queries that start with a given prefix. A suggestion-enabled search is like an instant popularity contest. Just type in a couple of letters, and you've got access to oodles of data on what your fellow Web surfers are hunting for.
In sum, this mountain of data -- more than 350 gigabytes worth, not including the streaming audio and video -- is a replica of Bell's biological memory. It's actually better, he says, because, if you back up your data in enough places, this digitized "e-memory" never forgets. It's like having a multimedia transcript of your life.
Biologists have created a living computer from E. coli bacteria that can solve complex mathematical problems
In 1993, Vernor Vinge wrote that, "within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." Vinge's concept of a time when computers would surpass us in intelligence was based on calculations of human versus machine processing power, which, as both a math professor and an author of science fiction, he could integrate with plausible musings as to what things might be like if and when computers came "awake," as he put it.
Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.
Stephen Wolfram talks with Rudy Rucker about his Upcoming Release
Opening a car trunk or controlling a home air conditioner could become just a wish away with Honda's new technology that connects thoughts inside a brain with robotics. Honda Motor Co. has developed a way to read patterns of electric currents on a person's scalp as well as changes in cerebral blood flow when a person thinks about four simple movements—moving the right hand, moving the left hand, running and eating.
An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine.
But by 2006, Cinematch’s improving performance had plateaued. Netflix’s programmers couldn’t go any further on their own. They suspected that there was a big breakthrough out there; the science of recommendation systems was booming, and computer scientists were publishing hundreds of papers each year on the subject. At a staff meeting in the summer of 2006, Hastings suggested a radical idea: Why not have a public contest? Netflix’s recommendation system was powered by the wisdom of crowds; now it would tap the wisdom of crowds to get better too.
The singularity is supposed to begin shortly after engineers build the first computer with greater-than-human intelligence. That achievement will trigger a series of cycles in which superintelligent machines beget even smarter machine progeny, going from generation to generation in weeks or days rather than decades or years. The availability of all that cheap, mass-Âproduced brilliance will spark explosive economic growth, an unending, hypersonic, techÂnoÂindustrial rampage that by comparison will make the Industrial Revolution look like a bingo game.
Read This Thought: The U.S. Army is developing a technology known as synthetic telepathy that would allow someone to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. The concept is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph, or EEG.
Prof Snyder has been able to artificially induce savant skills in people who do not have autism using the inhibiting influence of low frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to turn off that part of the brain which controls all our inbuilt expectations.
When San Francisco couple Brynn Evans and Chris Messina heard of a new Web site called BedPost, they registered an account before the site was even out of beta. BedPost was created to map users' sex lives online -- everything from partner to duration of the encounter to descriptive words, which could later be viewed as a tag cloud.
Drugs that make soldiers want to fight. Robots linked directly to their controllers' brains. Lie-detecting scans administered to terrorist suspects as they cross U.S. borders. These are just a few of the military uses imagined for cognitive science -- and if it's not yet certain whether the technologies will work, the military is certainly taking them very seriously.
The Lucid Dream Machine is a pair of glasses that you wear while you are sleeping. About 4 hours into your sleep the AVR microcontroller pulse LEDs that shine through your eyelids. This half wakes you up. The flashing lights helps you become aware (in your sleep) that your are sleeping and dreaming, in doing so you become more likely to be able to control your dreams.
Originally included in MoMA's recent Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition, Beta Tank's Mind Chair has been transformed from a hacked polypropylene readymade into a working wooden prototype. The chair features an array of solenoids (electromagnetic coils) attached to the back and controlled by a video camera. The camera transmits information to the solenoid grid, which then inscribes the visual stimuli onto the user's back through a complex series of vibrations.
IEEE Spectrum magazine is the flagship publication of the IEEE, the world's largest professional technology association. It is a monthly magazine for technology innovators, business leaders, and the intellectually curious. Spectrum explores future technology trends and the impact of those trends on society and business.
This week's Nature has a feature article on how a new breed of computational linguists are attempting to understand the evolution of language by using high powered computer models. The traditionalists are not impressed, and accuse the new school of reducing language to numbers and oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness.
Technology can be used to combat this dangerous new environment – but also to escape from it. We already use mobile devices to provide on-demand escapism, channeling movies, music, and other distractions. Increased processing power and emerging technologies will enable holistic computing systems to be stored in wearable devices, providing a more immersive personal media experience. In a troubling future, these augmented reality devices would offer a new dimension - a virtual layer that could be used to “re-skin” the troubling outside world. A boundary between the wearer and the world around him, the device would become a sort of visual drug, used to make the world appear a better place – even if just for a moment.
A future that contains smarter-than-human minds is genuinely different in a way that goes beyond the usual visions of a future filled with bigger and better gadgets. Vernor Vinge originally coined the term "Singularity" in observing that, just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to model the singularity at the center of a black hole, our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human.
In the coming decades, humanity will likely create a powerful artificial intelligence. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) exists to confront this urgent challenge, both the opportunity and the risk.
Richard Bean wrote this piece about a chess match on MSN's Gaming Zone between ultragrandmaster Gary Kasparov and the entire rest of the world, with "the world's" moves being decided by online vote. But something went wrong after move #50, by move #58 MSN changed the rules so that only Windows users could vote on moves, and murmured complaints from disgruntled participants and observers about unfair move-selections and ballot-box stuffing (which MSN had originally claimed was impossible) rose to an online roar.
Are chip makers building electronic trapdoors in key military hardware? The Pentagon is making its biggest effort yet to find out.Feeding those dreams is the Pentagon's realization that it no longer controls who manufactures the components that go into its increasingly complex systems. A single plane like the DOD's next generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, can contain an “insane number” of chips, says one semiconductor expert familiar with that aircraft's design. Estimates from other sources put the total at several hundred to more than a thousand. And tracing a part back to its source is not always straightforward.
Recently there has been a notable increase in the number of research articles relating to the study of out-of-body experiences (OBEs) that have been published in the mainstream literature. Most of these articles have focused on the search for the areas of the brain that may be associated with one common feature of the OBE – seeing one’s own body from a distance.
Two Australian scientists have invented computer software that distinguishes a beautiful face from a less attractive one.
Thanks to recent breakthroughs in brain science, companies can now actually see what goes on inside our minds when we shop. Teams of academic and corporate neuromarketers have begun to hook people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to map how their neurons respond to products and pitches.
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have used a monkey's brain activity to control a robot on the other side of the globe. In what researchers tout as a first-of-its-kind experiment, monkeys' thoughts controlled the walking patterns of a robot in Japan.
In an adapted version of the Harry Potter video game, players lift boulders and throw lightning bolts using only their minds. Just as physical movement changed the interface of gaming with Nintendo's Wii, the power of the mind may be the next big thing in video games.
Futurismic is a website for people interested in the future and the effects of science and technology on the present.
The accidental breakthrough came during an experiment originally intended to suppress the obese man's appetite, using the increasingly successful technique of deep-brain stimulation. Electrodes were pushed into the man's brain and stimulated with an electric current. Instead of losing appetite, the patient instead had an intense experience of déjŕ vu. He recalled, in intricate detail, a scene from 30 years earlier. More tests showed his ability to learn was dramatically improved when the current was switched on and his brain stimulated.
The experiments, described last August in studies by H. Henri Ehrsson and Olaf Blanke and colleagues in Science, demonstrate that out-of-body experiences, previously confined to the realms of psychiatry, fiction and the occult, occur when the normal processing of sensory information is disrupted. This research provides an important tool to understand how the feeling of self is generated by the brain. Sherlock would approve.
Reality Sandwich is a web magazine for this time of intense transformation. Our subjects run the gamut from sustainability to shamanism, alternate realities to alternative energy, remixing media to re-imagining community, holistic healing techniques to the promise and perils of new technologies.
DISCREET REMINDER for medication, medical conditions, self-regulation, keeping focused, meetings, appointments, timing presentations, procedures, tests, parking, cooking, naps, laundry, timed voiding, pilots, service industry, and many other uses.
If you read any of my previous posts, you will see that I havn’t been particularly successful in the realm of LD. But, I have spent the last 14 or so years, reading, reserching and experimenting. After a lot of painstaking nights and moments of giving up and then, going back, I have finally had a LD. Hoorah for me! In fact I’ve had 3 LD in the past 2 weeks. And I’ve accomplished it by developing my own system. I’m thinking that if this system works for me, then it must be good.
Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space.
A new dreaming induction device based on the NovaDreamer it seems. Neither the site nor the description inspire much confidence in the product. Particularly, "Direct and be in your own Hollywood Movie".
"All of a sudden, you have the luxury--or the curse--of being able to ponder the meaning of life," Hong said. "You ask yourself, 'Why am I not happier given how lucky I've been?'"
Emergent structures are patterns not created by a single event or rule. Nothing commands the system to form a pattern. Instead, the interaction of each part with its immediate surroundings causes a complex chain of processes leading to some order. One might conclude that emergent structures are more than the sum of their parts because the emergent order will not arise if the various parts are simply coexisting; the interaction of these parts is central.
When DeMarse first puts the neurons in the dish, they look like little more than grains of sand sprinkled in water. However, individual neurons soon begin to extend microscopic lines toward each other, making connections that represent neural processes. "You see one extend a process, pull it back, extend it out – and it may do that a couple of times, just sampling who's next to it, until over time the connectivity starts to establish itself," he said. "(The brain is) getting its network to the point where it's a live computation device."
I was looking for a quote and came across this great 2002 entry from Tim O'Reilly where he talks about the future being all around us and what trends to look for.
Although I shy away from 'top lists', the TED conference always has amazing speakers and here is a list of ten solid videos that definitely are worth watching.
Microsoft applied for a patent to monitor user's brain waves to understand how good (or bad) their interfaces are.
Using fMRI's to deal with pain and other preventive type uses.
Classic Dennett. "Silicon machines can now play chess better than any protein machines can. Big deal. This calm and reasonable reaction, however, is hard for most people to sustain. They don't like the idea that their brains are protein machines."
A very low budget way to build a pair of dream goggles that uses swimming goggles and speaker wire.
Ramez Naam talks about using technology to connect people which in turn makes the entire culture smarter.
A highly intelligent and entertainment talk by Jeff Hawkins about the brain theory and how he is working to develop artificial brain-like intelligence.
Jeff Hawkin's company that is creating software based on the way the brain operates.
An older but classic entry article about the change in brainwave states of monks who meditate. There are much more in-depth articles and books about this.
A company that creates the 'Insight' CD that has Binaural Beats. Very professional site with not a lot of background on the company.
Spinning light flickering device meant to invoke hypnagogic states.
Sloppy entry on binaural beat technology.
A pretty hardcore lucid dreaming mask.
This is the web site for the mysterious NovaDreamer, it says a new version is coming soon.
Short article by Alan Worsley about creating a lucid dream machine with Keith Hearne. Good references at the bottom.
The Lucidity Institute's FAQ about technology, drugs, etc. Lots of good links to other resources.
