Proteus Biomedical, a company based in Redwood City, California, announced on 13 January that it would be launching a “digital health product” in the United Kingdom in collaboration with the pharmacy chain Lloydspharmacy.
This product, called Helius, will include “sensor-enabled tablets” to monitor patients’ medication use. Compliance with doctors’ instructions has been identified as a problem area in medicine, especially when patients are prescribed multiple drugs that may need to be taken at different times.
“The most important and basic thing we can monitor is the actual physical use of the medicine,” says Andrew Thompson, chief executive of Proteus. “We have tested the system in hundreds of patients in many different therapeutic areas. It’s been tested in tuberculosis, in mental health, in heart failure, in hypertension and in diabetes.”
Botanicalls Kits let plants reach out for human help! They offer a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates to your mobile phone. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love. It comes as a kit so that you can hone your soldering skills (or teach someone else) while you build a line of communication between you and your houseplant!
This kit comes with everything you need to get your plant tweeting in no time. The ATmega328 comes pre-programmed, but you can customize it with your own messages. The only thing you need to provide is a plant, network connection (and Ethernet cable), and a power outlet.
RAVENS have a bad reputation. Medieval monks, who liked to give names to everything (even things that did not need them), came up with “an unkindness” as the collective noun for these corvids. Blake Hannaford and his colleagues at the University of Washington, in Seattle, however, hope to change the impression engendered by the word. They are about to release a flock of medical robots with wing-like arms, called Ravens, in the hope of stimulating innovation in the nascent field of robotic surgery.
Robot-assisted surgery today is dominated by the da Vinci Surgical System, a device that scales down a surgeon’s hand movements in order to allow him to perform operations using tiny incisions. That leads to less tissue damage, and thus a quicker recovery for patients. Thousands of da Vincis have been made, and they are reckoned to be used in over 200,000 operations a year around the world, most commonly hysterectomies and prostate removals.
But the da Vinci is far from perfect. It is immobile and weighs more than half a tonne, which limits its deployability, and it costs $1.8m, which puts it beyond the reach of all but the richest institutions. It also uses proprietary software. Even if researchers keen to experiment with new robotic technologies and treatments could afford one, they cannot tinker with da Vinci’s operating system.
A stream of very viscous syrup falls from a nozzle onto a moving belt. Initially, the belt is moving so fast that the thread is just pulled out straight. As the speed of the belt is reduced, the thread first bifurcates to a meandering state, and then to a “figure eight” state. Finally, the thread falls into a coiling motion similar to what it would do on a non-moving surface.
Guerrilla depaving is an illicit form of urbanism wherein impermeable hard surfaces are wholly removed or perforated to reveal the underlying soil bed. This site preparation precedes the introduction of agriculture, ornamental gardens, cryptoforests and other pata-artisinal land-uses, which alleviate the urban heat island effect. However, the primary goal is to mitigate urban stormwater runoff by facilitating soil infiltration and seepage.
Pickaxes, sledghammers and elbow grease are the usual tools of the guerilla depaver, but these are being gradually replaced by robotics as fast as DARPA can declassify its research. A popular depaver is the BigDog, as it is cheaply available, easily programmable and configurable, and can traverse rough terrain en route to its target asphalt or while escaping. In the video above, a very early prototype can be seen tippy tapping on a parking lot, somewhat auguring its future reuse.
So far, guerrilla depaving activities are concentrated on medium-sized municipalities suffering from depressed tax revenues and minimal federal aid. These twin crises have left them unable to provide basic infrastructural services. Faced with the prospect of failed sewers, stagnant pools and destructive flooding, the guerrilla depaver works to knit an alternative urban hydrology.
The current state of the newspaper industry is unsettled at best: more than two hundred newspapers have either folded or stopped publishing their print editions since 2007. Even the most acclaimed newspapers in the country are downsizing their newsrooms or suspending home delivery of physical newspapers. Even after embracing social media, newspapers are still struggling with paywalls and subscriptions. As a result, the typical argument calls for supporting newspapers historically have been based on the idea of newspapers as a sort of civic institution that we, as a society, must preserve in the name of ideals (always capitalized) like Truth. But what if, instead, we begin to think of newspapers in perhaps a more mundane manner — as algorithms for solving problems?
This idea of “newspaper as algorithm” builds on a larger secular trend: the widescale appification of the media industry. As Nicholas Carr pointed out in a brilliant piece for the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard in December, one of the biggest trends of 2012 will be the continued segmentation and splicing of online newspaper content into apps for mobile devices:
“Appification promises to be the major force reshaping media in general and news media in particular during 2012. The influence will be exerted directly, through a proliferation of specialized media apps, as well as indirectly, through changes in consumer attitudes, expectations, and purchasing habits. There are all sorts of implications for newspapers, but perhaps the most important is that the app explosion makes it much easier to charge for online news and other content. That’s true not only when the content is delivered through formal apps but also when it is delivered through traditional websites, which may themselves come to be viewed by customers as a form of app. In the old world of the open web, paying for online content seemed at best weird and at worst repugnant. In the new world of the app, paying for online content suddenly seems normal. What’s an app store but a series of paywalls?”
Written by Dominic Basulto at Big Think. Continue HERE
The Terasem Journals include The Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology and The Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness. They are the journals of the Terasem Movement, Inc., a not-for-profit charity endowed for the purpose of educating the public on the practicality and necessity of greatly extending human life, consistent with diversity and unity, via geoethical nanotechnology and personal cyberconsciousness.
As you read these words, try paying attention to something you usually never notice: the movements of your eyes. While you scan these lines of text, or glance at that ad over there or look up from the screen at the room beyond, your eyes are making tiny movements, called saccades, and brief pauses, called fixations. Scientists are discovering that eye movement patterns — where we look, and for how long — reveals important information about how we read, how we learn and even what kind of people we are.
Researchers are able to identify these patterns thanks to the development of eye-tracking technology: video cameras that record every minuscule movement of the eyes. Such equipment, originally developed to study the changes in vision experienced by astronauts in zero-gravity conditions, allows scientists to capture and analyze that always-elusive entity, attention. The way we move our eyes, it turns out, is a reliable indicator of what seizes our interest and of what distracts us. Scientists are now using eye-tracking technology to explore how we learn from text and images, including those viewed onscreen.
Written by Annie Murphy Paul for Time Ideas. Continue HERE
Over the past 100 years, the practices of agriculture have been radically altered in Western societies, spurred by development and application of a host of technologies designed to automate and monitor food production. Recently, however, many have called attention to the shortcomings of mainstream massive farming endeavors: large-scale agri-business may be producing more food, but the food itself is lacking in nutrition and the environment is suffering from these very farming practices. What is needed is a return to local and small-scale agriculture for both environmental and personal health concerns.
Engineering and design played a role in advancing the culture and practices of agri-business by producing products, systems, and services to advance and support large-scale corporate farming. The question we ask is, Can design and engineering now play a role in shifting us towards more sustainable modes of agriculture? What kinds of products, services and systems would need to be designed and engineered to enable that subversion and shift? How will technologies of automation and monitoring need to be refigured for these contexts – if indeed they are still at all useful? The growBot garden project explores these questions by bringing together designers, artists, farmers and other food producers to ask: How might robotics and sensing technologies be used in support of local small-scale agriculture? The growBot garden project is structured around a series of public and participatory workshops that bring together diverse constituencies to critically think about, discuss and debate, and re-make our near-term future. The workshops draw equally from practices of participatory design, critical design, social practice art, tactical media and hacking. More than a discursive platform, the workshops are design platforms: opportunities to collectively make speculative representations and prototypes of possible futures. These representations and prototypes are documented and shared through public forums to provoke consideration of new assemblages that might emerge at the intersection of technology and agriculture.
Bracket 3 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate the potentials when situations extend beyond norms – into the extremities. We are conditioned, as designers of the built environment, towards the organization of people, programs and movement. Indeed the history of modern urbanism, architecture and building science has been predicated on an anti-entropic notion of programmatic and social order. But are there scenarios in which a state of extremity or imbalance is productive?
Ulrick Beck, in “Risk Society’s Cosmopolitan Moment” suggests that being at risk is the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While risk produces inequality and destabilization, he argues, it can be the catalyst for the construction of new institutions. The term extreme is defined as outermost, utmost, farthest, last or frontier. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks to understand what new spatial orders emerge in this liminal space. How might it be leveraged as an opportunity for invention? What are the limits of wilderness and control, of the natural and artificial, the real and the virtual? What new landscapes, networks, and urban models might emerge in the wake of destabilized economic, social and environmental conditions?
Bracket [at Extremes] will examine architecture, infrastructure and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states. In such conditions, the status quo is no longer possible; systems must extend performance and accommodate unpredictability. As new protocols emerge, new opportunities present themselves. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks innovative contributions interrogating extreme processes (technologies, operations) and extreme contexts (cultural, climatic). What is the breaking point of architecture at extremes?
In January 2011, the Forum created the Future of Manufacturing project to serve as a high-level cross-industry platform for executives and policy-makers to build strategic insights into the key challenges and future outlook for the global manufacturing ecosystem. The project developed a data-driven narrative to articulate how advanced manufacturing drives economic growth, to identify the macroeconomic trends that are shaping global value chains, and to explore the role of government in different countries, building on workshops in Brazil, China, and India.
Are we hurting our noggins? Internationally, are there social customs, diseases, pollutants, school policies, parental choices, drugs, diets and philosophies that cause, or are correlated with, decreased intelligence?
Here are fourscore-and-a-trio of the mind-mangling menaces. A preponderance of the fearsome factors have undergone scientific scrutiny, with statistics filed in the massive archives of pubmed.gov.
Prenatal – Damaged before you’re delivered
Cousin Marriages – “Consanguineous” marriages between cousins or relatives more than triples the rate of mental retardation. One study shows an average IQ drop of 7 points; another reveals a loss of 11.2 points.
Avoiding PreNatal Diagnosis - Fetal Screening can determine if fetuses have birth defects or genetic diseases that cause cognitive damage. Recommended for older parents and those carrying genes of genetic disorders.
Prenatal Iodine Deficiency – The World Health Organization says iodine deficiency is the “single greatest preventable cause of mental retardation.” Average deduction is 10-17 IQ points.
Prenatal Folic Acid Deficiency - Infants with neural tube defects suffer a loss of 15 IQ points.
Prenatal Choline Deficiency – Can wreck spatial memory and hippocampal plasticity in adulthood.
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (Heavy Alcohol Exposure) - Children afflicted with fetal alcohol syndrome have an average IQ of 75.
Moderate Prenatal Alcohol Exposure - Gestating women who imbibe two alcoholic drinks per day hamper their child’s IQ with a 7-point loss.
Pesticide Exposure - Prenatal (and postnatal) exposure to organophosphate pesticides can cause a deficit of 7.0 IQ points.
Prenatal Cigarette Exposure - Loss of IQ is reported as 3.3, 6.2, and 15 points in various studies.
Prenatal Hydrocarbons (Smog) Exposure - Two studies showed IQ losses of 4.31 and 3.8 points.
Prenatal Cocaine Exposure - Boys exposed to cocaine had lower IQs at 4, 6, and 9 years of age.
Prenatal Methamphetamine Exposure – Meth exposure leads to weakened verbal memory, and damage to visual motor integration, attention, and long-term spatial memory.
Embryonic Malnutrition - Multiple infants sharing a womb are at risk of suboptimal nutrition. Lighter twins have verbal IQ that’s 7.5 points lower than heavier twins.
Maternal Stress – Children exposed to high cortisol levels in the womb, caused by maternal stress, suffer an average verbal IQ loss of 3.83 points.
Prenatal Valproate Exposure - Embryos exposed to Valproate have IQ scores up to 9 points lower than children exposed to other anti-epileptic medications.
Prenatal Excess Mercury Exposure - Reports vary, but one study concluded that excessive prenatal intake of mercury in fish costs children 1.5 points in IQ.
Prenatal Radiation Exposure – Embryos exposed to radiation had more speech-language disorders, emotional disorders, and borderline IQ.
Premature Birth - Babies delivered before 40 weeks have smaller heads and an IQ 4.9 points lower than infants delivered after 40+ weeks.
Breech Birth - Males born via breech birth have a 7-point lower IQ than boys who were born in cephalic presentation.
Stuart Karten: Imagine instant access to the latest market segment information at a meeting, or seeing the fourth quarter earnings for a company in (literally) the blink of an eye.
Although it might sound like something from a science fiction novel, scientists at the University of Washington are working on solar powered contact lenses with transparent LEDs embedded onto the lens. This technology could be applied in countless ways, from health monitoring to text translation right in front of the wearer’s eyes.
In 2006, my team at SKD designed a very similar concept for our “Cautionary Visions” project. Analyzing current trends in technology and popular culture, from emerging demands for constant connection to the increasingly blurred boundaries between natural and artificial, my designers imagined the dark alleys down which these trends could take us.
One of the results was an “Assisted Living Contact Lens” that would project helpful information, such as the calorie count for a chocolate scone, or a GPS map overlay locating the nearest gyms. Continue HERE
Electrical engineers Stephen Lyon (left) and Alexei Tyryshkin examine the casing that holds the silicon crystal they used to coordinate the spins of billions of electrons in work toward developing the technology for powerful machines known as quantum computers. (Photo by John Jameson)
The waves pulsed like distant music across the crystal and deep within its heart, billions of electrons started spinning to their beat.
Reaching into the silicon crystal and choreographing the dance of 100 billion infinitesimal particles is an impressive achievement on its own, but it is also a stride toward developing the technology for powerful machines known as quantum computers.
“Standard computers have come to their limit and cannot do some of the things we want,” said Tyryshkin, a research scholar in the Department of Electrical Engineering. “We are trying to find a different way of doing computing, using additional degrees of freedom involving quantum computing and things like spins.”
Using the spins of subatomic particles such as electrons offers a path to developing a machine that would apply the reality-bending rules of quantum mechanics to arrive at new and powerful ways to approach difficult mathematical problems. But maintaining that control for long enough to build a working computer has proven incredibly difficult.
Until recently, the best attempts at such control lasted for only a fraction of a second. But researchers at Princeton led by Stephen Lyon, a professor of electrical engineering, have found a way to extend their control over the spins of billions of electrons for up to 10 seconds.
The researchers, part of an international team, reported their results online Dec. 4 in Nature Materials. The research at Princeton was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Security Agency.
Lyon said the key to the new results lies in the use of a highly purified sample of silicon. The experiment uses a small silicon chip the size of a pencil lead made almost entirely of a particular isotope of silicon: silicon-28.
“Partly, it is an improvement in our measurements, but it is mainly the material,” Lyon said. “This is the purest sample we have ever used.”
Cell phones are the fastest spreading information technology (IT) in the developing world, with a penetration rate of over 61% [4]. Hence, there is a growing interest among governments, investors, banking industries, and retail giants like Wal-Mart to exploit this emerging channel of communication for offering services and expanding businesses to more than 3 billion poor consumers earning less than $2 per day. In response, a number of micro (individual), meso (community), and macro (regional/national)-level research inquiries and consumer surveys have investigated what makes cell phones a desirable and affordable technology for people earning less than $2 per day. These multidisciplinary studies and market surveys have revealed links between access to cell phones and socio-economic opportunities for disadvantaged populations from developing nations [9]. However, very few of the studies [1], [5], [10] have answered “why this link exists,” and “how this link works.”
In order to understand details of the link between cell phones and some of the most disadvantaged users in the world, a micro-level study presented in this article focuses on female cell phone users from the lowest socio-economic stratum in a male-dominated, hierarchical society of rural India. In particular, this socio-technical inquiry sought answers to: “Why do disadvantaged women earning less than a dollar a day use cell phones?” and “Are there any barriers to women’s access to, and usage of cell phones in a rural Indian setting? If yes, what are the barriers? And how do women cell phone users overcome those barriers?”
The study [6] was conducted in Bhor, a remote, rural part of India, a developing nation with more than 35% of its population living under $2 per day. One hundred and two female cell phone users earning less than a dollar per day at a domestic business setup, MGU, were surveyed, and twenty two of them were inter viewed in Marathi, the native language of the researcher and interviewees. Despite being offered relatively lucrative compensation ($0.50) for their participation, and despite mediation by a female manager working at MGU, a few potential interviewees succumbed to social and family resistance to participation and thus, stayed away from the study.
Humanity has long dreamed of perfection, striving to be faster, stronger and brighter, pushing nature to the limit. Four centuries before people were conceived in a petri dish, Swiss alchemist Paracelsus claimed flawless little beings could be grown in pumpkins filled with urine and horse dung, but there is no record he produced a crop.
With the birth of Louise Brown in 1978, the test tube finally succeeded where the pumpkin had failed, and the year she turned 11, scientists moved beyond making life in a lab: They found a way to peer into an embryo’s genes and predict what that life might be like.
That ability is now morphing into a whole new approach to baby-making, one that gives people an unprecedented power to preview, and pick, the genetic traits of their prospective children.
Just as Paracelsus wrote that his recipe worked best if done in secret, modern science is quietly handing humanity something the quirky Renaissance scholar could only imagine: the capacity to harness our own evolution. We now have the potential to banish the genes that kill us, that make us susceptible to cancer, heart disease, depression, addictions and obesity, and to select those that may make us healthier, stronger, more intelligent.
The question is, should we?
Written by Carolyn Abraham for Globe and Mail. Continue HERE
Cowbird is a small community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web.
Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today. Sagas are themes and events that touch millions of live and shape the human story.
Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance.
The claim by Ion Torrent on Tuesday that a reasonably affordable machine capable of mapping an individual’s complete genetic makeup for $1,000 will be ready by the end of the year has technology geeks in a tizzy.
The $1,000 genome has been hotly sought ever since a crude map of the human genome was first published in 2001. The Carlsbad, Calif. biotech company, part of Life Technologies, will sell its device to research labs and medical clinics for $99,000 to $149,000, compared to the current price of about $750,000 for existing sequencers, Reuters reported on its website Tuesday. According to Reuters, a doctor will be able to sequence a patient’s entire genome for $1,000, compared to the current rate of $3,000 just to test for breast cancer gene mutations, for example. And the company says its new machine can complete the genome analysis within a day, rather than the two months previously needed.
It’s widely believed this type of genetic analysis will revolutionize medicine, that patients will learn their risk profile for potential diseases by having their DNA read right in the doctor’s office. Drugs and vaccines will be designed to fit our genes, in order to maximize efficacy and minimize any side-effects. Newborn babies would have someone peek at their genes so parents could take steps to prevent genetic risks from becoming realities.
Steve Pinker: My first edict as global overlord would be to impose the following rule on pundits: No one may bemoan a decay, decline, or degeneration without providing (1) a measure of the way the world is today; (2) a measure of the way the world was at some point in the past; (3) a demonstration that (1) is worse than (2).
This decree would, first of all, eliminate tedious jeremiads about the decline of the language. The genre has been around for centuries, and if the doomsayers were correct we would now be grunting like Tarzan. But not only do we see vast amounts of clear and competent prose in everyday outlets like Wikipedia and Amazon reviews, but a gusher of superb writing appearing daily, as anyone who has lost a morning to sites like The Browser and Arts and Letters Daily can attest.
Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language. A century ago editors issued fatwas against barbarous innovations such as “standpoint,” “bogus,” “to run a business,” and “to quit smoking.” Decades ago they fulminated against “six people” (as opposed to persons), “fix” (for repair), and the verbs “to contact” and “to finalize.” Today this linguistic contraband is unexceptionable, if not indispensable. Also vilified is the seepage of new technological jargon into the language (leverage, incentivise, synergy). Yet old technological jargon (proportional, placebo, false positive, trade-off) has made it easier for everyone to think about abstract concepts, and may even have contributed to the Flynn effect, the relentless increase in IQ scores during the 20th century.
And speaking of technology, today’s Luddites have a short memory. Parents who lament the iPods and mobile phones soldered onto the ears of teenagers forget that their own parents made the same complaint about them and their bedroom telephones and transistor radios. The abbreviated prose in tweets and instant messages is no more likely to corrupt the language or shorten attention spans than the telegrams, radio ads, and advertising catchphrases of yesteryear. Email can seem like a curse, but who would go back to stamps, phone booths, carbon paper, and piles of phone messages? And now that dinner companions can fact-check any assertion on an iPhone, we are coming to realize how many of our everyday beliefs are false—a valuable lesson in the fallibility of memory.
But nowhere is the confusion of a data point with a trend more pernicious than in our understanding of violence. A terrorist bomb explodes, a sniper runs amok, an errant drone kills an innocent, and commentators ask “What is the world coming to?” Yet they seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” Continue HERE
‘Bufalino’ by German industrial designer Cornelius Comanns is a small camper which is equipped to meet the basic needs of one person. The concept behind the project is to offer absolute flexibility during periods of travel. The minimalist construction is based on the existing Piaggio APE 50 three wheeled light transport vehicle; a model chosen for its economic and fuel efficient benefits. however, the more complex structural components such as the frame, the chassis, and engine are derived from the original Piaggio model.
For “10,000 Pixels”, artists were asked to create three artworks using a 10,000-pixel “allowance”. The extremely low resolution becomes an aesthetic and conceptual challenge, resulting in ultra-low-resolution photographs, carefully crafted digital abstractions, blocky representations of physical objects similar to early Atari and NES sprites, or other unexpected solutions.
The Aesthetics of Low-Res
10,000 Pixels is about the creative strategies that emerge from limitations. For this exhibition, artists were given an “allowance” of 10,000 pixels and asked to create three images using only those pixels. The results range from tiny geometric forms, hotdogs/shit, tiny animations, and reminiscences of NES graphics and the early web.
We experience digital images in a kind of bracketed time. Current technologies look clean and crisp, whereas images from a few years ago seem inadequate and embarrassing. When looking at a video I made only a few years ago, I noticed the huge differences in quality between the older piece and more recent projects made in HD. Yet as a two-dimensional surface, even a seemingly low-resolution image contains a gigantic amount of information. A crummy YouTube video might have had 320×240 pixels, but even such an unacceptably low-resolution image contains 76,800 pixels [1]. The works in this exhibition explore the limitation of resolutions that are several orders of magnitude lower, having more to do with historical influences than the promise of 4k projectors.
Art Micro Patronage is an experimental online exhibition space enabling you to view and support artwork that is ideally experienced on the internet. Built on the generosity of people like you, AMP is a vehicle for a new generation of art patrons, who are willing to associate their appreciation of great work with actual dollar amounts, no matter how small.
Cubelets are magnetic blocks that can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. You can build robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light, sound, and temperature, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior. But instead of programming that behavior, you snap the cubelets together and watch the behavior emerge like with a flock of birds or a swarm of bees.
Each cubelet in the kit has different equipment on board and a different default behavior. There are Sense Blocks that act like our eyes and ears, Action blocks, and Think blocks. Just like with people, the senses are the inputs to the system.
Wearable displays have been used to make a high-tech game of tag, and some have been made into tattoos. One tinkerer in Arizona decided to make one that could be worn as a jacket and show his favorite characters from The Simpsons.
David Forbes, an electrical engineer by trade, wanted to build something really cool to wear at the Burning Man festival. So he re-purposed a relatively simple flexible circuit board covered with LEDs. He made the first with 30 rows of four LEDs each and then contracted a manufacturer to build 175 more of them. He attached them to an old coat and was able to build a display with a 160 x 120 resolution, which he notes on his blog is exactly
Part of the set-up is the same kind of chip used to scale down the images for security cameras, and another is the same type of chip used to control the big LED signs used for advertisements. Adding a small set of circuits that convert the video output of the iPod to the smaller resolution, he was able to put together his wearable display.
The only down side seems to be getting through airports. Forbes also noted that he wasn’t able to create a pair of pants, as the curves over the thighs proved complicated. But he has designed vests.
If you want a coat like this it will be expensive, largely due to the cost of the LEDs. For $39,995 Forbes will make you one that is a full wrap-around display; a front-only will set you back $24,995. Wait time is about four months.
Besides creating a walking billboard one idea is to attach a camera that transmits a picture of the scene on one side of the wearer, creating a kind of optical camouflage. On the other hand, it could be great dance club wear — this might be a big seller among trance music and Daft Punk fans. Text by Jesse Emspak. Via Discovery News
Monitored by scientists at Kessler Foundation, six people with spinal cord injuries tested Ekso, the new robotic exoskeleton from Ekso Bionics that enables wheelchair users to stand and walk. The six, each of whom has a different level of injury, participated in one week of preliminary testing in October 2011. In early 2012, the research team, headed by Gail Forrest, PhD, will commence a clinical trial in collaboration with Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation. While the trial will focus on the benefits of Ekso in rehabilitation settings, Ekso Bionics plans to explore the potential for home and community use.
“The history of the world’s languages is largely a story of loss and decline. At around 8000 BC, linguists estimate that upwards of 20,000 languages may have been in existence. Today the number stands at 6,909 and is declining rapidly. By 2100, it is quite realistic to expect that half of these languages will be gone, their last speakers dead, their words perhaps recorded in a dusty archive somewhere, but more likely undocumented entirely. (…)
The problem with globalization in the latter sense is that it is the result, not a cause, of language decline. (…) It is only when the state adopts a trade language as official and, in a fit of linguistic nationalism, foists it upon its citizens, that trade languages become “killer languages.” (…)
Most importantly, what both of the above answers overlook is that speaking a global language or a language of trade does not necessitate the abandonment of one’s mother tongue. The average person on this planet speaks three or four languages. (…)
The truth is, most people don’t “give up” the languages they learn in their youth. (…) To wipe out a language, one has to enter the home and prevent the parents from speaking their native language to their children.
Given such a preposterous scenario, we return to our question — how could this possibly happen?
One good answer is urbanization. If a Gikuyu and a Giryama meet in Nairobi, they won’t likely speak each other’s mother tongue, but they very likely will speak one or both of the trade languages in Kenya — Swahili and English. Their kids may learn a smattering of words in the heritage languages from their parents, but by the third generation any vestiges of those languages in the family will likely be gone. In other cases, extremely rural communities are drawn to the relatively easier lifestyle in cities, until sometimes entire villages are abandoned. Nor is this a recent phenomenon.
The first case of massive language die-off was probably during the Agrarian (Neolithic) Revolution, when humanity first adopted farming, abandoned the nomadic lifestyle, and created permanent settlements. As the size of these communities grew, so did the language they spoke. But throughout most of history, and still in many areas of the world today, 500 or fewer speakers per language has been the norm. Like the people who spoke them, these languages were constantly in flux. No language could grow very large, because the community that spoke it could only grow so large itself before it fragmented. The language followed suit, soon becoming two languages. Permanent settlements changed all this, and soon larger and larger populations could stably speak the same language. (…) Text via Lapidarium Notes. Continue HERE
This sound installation depicts the possible problems of the flow of information. It tries to reflect the human mis-audition, the lapse of information and the social problems which derive from these. The design is clear and it has a transparent structure. Using analog technology and ignoring complicated ones are all used to strengthen the expressiveness of installation.
After turning on the Walkman the tape starts to move. Each Walkman plays the sound, which is on the tape, in a different point. However, the sound is the same the constants are chaotic. The reading points are not the same distance from each other. Some Walkmans are louder while others are quieter so the consonants are not homogeneous. If you bend closer to the Walkmans you can easily notice where they are in the course of replay.
Cacophony was made by: András Pongor, Soma Pongor, David Tarcali. Photo above by Danyi Balázs.
This tool is being developed to provide a low cost, easy to use, and a safe method for making aerial image maps. Over the last two years, we’ve build a global community of mappers who are engaged in discussion around the development and use of these tools. Normally aerial image maps are made from satellites and airplanes. This activity introduces easy methods for making on-demand image maps. Our community is particularly interested in applying this to civic and environmental issues.
Applications and example uses
Residents of the Gulf Coast are using balloons and kites to produce their own aerial imagery of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill… documentation that will be essential for environmental and legal use in coming years. We believe in complete open access to spill imagery and are releasing all imagery from the oil spill mapping project into the public domain. Browse maps and data from the Gulf Coast in the Public Laboratory Archive
How to make your own
at least 1000 ft of string on a spool
a cheap digital camera with “continuous mode”
a balloon or kite
a rubber band
tape & scissors
leather or cloth gloves
How to use it
The illustrated guide includes lots of tips for a successful flight; print it and bring it with you!
Be sure to review the Balloon Mapping Regulations for the US, or the equivalent wherever you are planning to map.
Try to launch your balloon to at least 1000 ft for a good compromise of high resolution vs. large area.
Stay away from power lines, airports, and traffic.
Source: Public Laboratory. More info and download material HERE
An example without the mapping: iPad Survives 100,000+ Foot Fall From Space Near Area 51.
Fiber optic cables (pictured) could help prove the theories behind the new “space time” cloak concept. Photograph by Joe McNally, National Geographic
It’s no illusion: Science has found a way to make not just objects but entire events disappear, experts say.
According to new research by British physicists, it’s theoretically possible to create a material that can hide an entire bank heist from human eyes and surveillance cameras.
“The concepts are basically quite simple,” said Paul Kinsler, a physicist at Imperial College London, who created the idea with colleagues Martin McCall and Alberto Favaro.
Unlike invisibility cloaks—some of which have been made to work at very small scales—the event cloak would do more than bend light around an object.
Instead this cloak would use special materials filled with metallic arrays designed to adjust the speed of light passing through.
In theory, the cloak would slow down light coming into the robbery scene while the safecracker is at work. When the robbery is complete, the process would be reversed, with the slowed light now racing to catch back up.
If the “before” and “after” visions are seamlessly stitched together, there should be no visible trace that anything untoward has happened. One second there’s a closed safe, and the next second the safe has been emptied.
Text by Richard A. Lovett for National Geographic News. Continue HERE
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Fiber optic cables (pictured) could help prove the theories behind the new “space time” cloak concept. Photograph by Joe McNally, National Geographic
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