Virtual worlds with real purposes

BBC - November 28, 2008, by Dan Simmons

The idea of having a virtual you following the real you around may seem rather strange - for those of us used to having our feet firmly on the ground.

But the creation of a virtual Berlin lets people be in two places at the same time - as 20km of the city has been faithfully replicated into an online world.

By the end of 2008, 50,000 buildings in the German capital are expected to have been copied into the virtual world.

"While Second Life and others worlds offer some stylised versions of cities - Twinity uses the 3D mapping data currently used for things like satnav and Google Earth," said Jochen Hummel, the chief executive of Metaversum - owner of Twinity.

"One by one each building is then made to look as it would in the real world," he said.

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Second Life bank crash foretold financial crisis

MSNBC - Nov. 21, 2008, by Jeremy Hsu

A string of bank collapses prompted Alan Greenspan, U.S. economic guru and former head of the Federal Reserve, to admit last month that lending institutions could not always be trusted to regulate themselves. He could have taken a cue sooner by looking at the 2007 collapse of Ginko Financial, a virtual investment bank in the online game "Second Life."

Virtual economies in games such as "Second Life" and "EVE Online" may seem trivial, but they actually can provide real-life lessons on the patterns of free markets and unfettered capitalism. Researchers and self-described virtual economists have observed how virtual entrepreneurs establish themselves and compete, as well as how a lack of self-regulation can lead to dramatic banking failures, scams and even corporate espionage.

"I don't view 'Second Life' as a game," said Robert Bloomfield, an accounting researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "I view it as a market space."

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IBM plans 'brain-like' computers

BBC - November 21, 2008, by Jason Palmer

IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains.

Part of a field called "cognitive computing", the research will bring together neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists and psychologists.

As a first step in its research the project has been granted $4.9m (£3.27m) from US defence agency Darpa.

The resulting technology could be used for large-scale data analysis, decision making or even image recognition.

"The mind has an amazing ability to integrate ambiguous information across the senses, and it can effortlessly create the categories of time, space, object, and interrelationship from the sensory data," says Dharmendra Modha, the IBM scientist who is heading the collaboration.

"There are no computers that can even remotely approach the remarkable feats the mind performs," he said.

"The key idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behaviour of the brain."

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A Soldier, Taking Orders From Its Ethical Judgment Center

NYT - November 24, 2008, by Cornelia Dean

ATLANTA — In the heat of battle, their minds clouded by fear, anger or vengefulness, even the best-trained soldiers can act in ways that violate the Geneva Conventions or battlefield rules of engagement. Now some researchers suggest that robots could do better.

“My research hypothesis is that intelligent robots can behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans currently can,” said Ronald C. Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, who is designing software for battlefield robots under contract with the Army. “That’s the case I make.”

Robot drones, mine detectors and sensing devices are already common on the battlefield but are controlled by humans. Many of the drones in Iraq and Afghanistan are operated from a command post in Nevada. Dr. Arkin is talking about true robots operating autonomously, on their own.

He and others say that the technology to make lethal autonomous robots is inexpensive and proliferating, and that the advent of these robots on the battlefield is only a matter of time. That means, they say, it is time for people to start talking about whether this technology is something they want to embrace. “The important thing is not to be blind to it,” Dr. Arkin said. Noel Sharkey, a computer scientist at the University of Sheffield in Britain, wrote last year in the journal Innovative Technology for Computer Professionals that “this is not a ‘Terminator’-style science fiction but grim reality.”

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Agent-based computer models could anticipate future economic crisis

Physorg.com - November 25, 2008

As the stock market continues its dive, economists and business columnists have spilled a lot of ink assigning responsibility for the ongoing financial calamity. While hindsight might be clear as day, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory are trying to create new economic models that will provide policymakers with more realistic pictures of different types of markets so they can better avert future economic catastrophe.

Traditional economic models rely heavily on "equilibrium theory," which holds that markets are influenced by countervailing balanced forces. Because these models assume away the decision-making processes of individual consumers or investors, they do not represent the market's true internal dynamics, said Charles Macal, an Argonne systems scientist.

"The traditional models don't represent individuals in the economy, or else they're all represented the same way – as completely rational agents," Macal said. "Because they ignore many other aspects of behavior that influence how people make decisions in real life, these models can't always accurately predict the dynamics of the market."

Macal and his Argonne colleagues have created a new set of simulations called "agent-based models" to better anticipate how markets behave. These new models rely on information gleaned in part from surveys that ask respondents about the factors that influence the way they make decisions. By gaining a more precise understanding of the behavior patterns of individual actors in a market – for example, how willing they are to accept risk, how strongly they value the future or how much time and effort they are able to spend making decisions – researchers and economists can better predict and avoid meltdowns.

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A Whisper, Perhaps, From the Universe’s Dark Side

NYT - November 24, 2008, by Dennis Overbye

Is this the dark side speaking?

A concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of satellites and experiments has led a growing number of astronomers and physicists to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter that makes up a quarter of creation but has eluded direct detection until now.

Maybe.

“Nobody really knows what’s going on,” said Gordon Kane, a theorist at the University of Michigan. Physicists caution that there could still be a relatively simple astronomical explanation for the recent observations.

But the nature of this dark matter is one of the burning issues of science. Identifying it would point the way to a deeper understanding of the laws of nature and the Einsteinian dream of a unified theory of physics.

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Nvidia Details ‘Personal Supercomputer` Design Based on Tesla GPU

eWeek.com - November 18, 2008, by Scott Ferguson

Nvidia is preparing to roll out a new high-performance computing design that will allow OEMs to create what the graphics maker calls a “personal supercomputer.” This HPC design from Nvidia will allow OEMs to build workstations that contain between two and four of Nvidia’s general purpose Tesla GPUs and allow researchers to run scientific and other massive workloads at their desks. Lenovo, Asus and Dell are three of several OEMs that will use this design to build these Nvidia HPC workstations.

Nvidia is looking to bring the power of a supercomputer cluster to the desktop.

At the 2008 Supercomputing Conference in Austin, Texas, Nvidia will demonstrate a new HPC (high-performance computer) design that will allow OEMs to pack between two and four Nvidia GP-GPUs (general purpose graphics processing units) with a workstation form factor.

Nvidia executives are scheduled to discuss the new HPC design Nov. 18.

This new HPC design, which Nvidia is calling the “Personal Supercomputer,” is the latest effort by Nvidia to bring its graphics technology into the supercomputing and high-performance computing markets. While most HPC clusters and supercomputers are powered by conventional CPUs, Nvidia is betting that its GP-GPUs can offer the types of performance that scientists, researchers and other workers in the HPC market need now to run these types of massive workloads.

Unlike a traditional CPU, a GP-GPU contains hundreds of smaller stream processing cores, which then allow an application’s instructional threads to run in parallel. Once the data is broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, the GP-GPU allows for higher throughput and better performance without relying on cranking up the clock speed to make the application run faster.

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How Google's Ear Hears

Technology Review - November 20, 2008, by Kate Greene

The new voice-search application for the iPhone marks a milestone for spoken interfaces.

If you own an iPhone, you can now be part of one of the most ambitious speech-recognition experiments ever launched. On Monday, Google announced that it had added voice search to its iPhone mobile application, allowing people to speak search terms into their phones and view the results on the screen.

In designing the system, Google took on an enormous challenge. Where an automated airline reservation system, say, has to handle a relatively limited number of terms, a Web search engine must contend with any topic that anyone might ever want to research--literally.

Fortunately, Google also has a huge amount of data on how people use search, and it was able to use that to train its algorithms. If the system has trouble interpreting one word in a query, for instance, it can fall back on data about which terms are frequently grouped together.

Google also had a useful set of data correlating speech samples with written words, culled from its free directory service, Goog411. People call the service and say the name of a city and state, and then say the name of a business or category. According to Mike Cohen, a Google research scientist, voice samples from this service were the main source of acoustic data for training the system.

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Bug-sized spies: US develops tiny flying robots

Breitbart.com - November 21, 2008, by James Hannah

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) - If only we could be a fly on the wall when our enemies are plotting to attack us. Better yet, what if that fly could record voices, transmit video and even fire tiny weapons?
That kind of James Bond-style fantasy is actually on the drawing board. U.S. military engineers are trying to design flying robots disguised as insects that could one day spy on enemies and conduct dangerous missions without risking lives.

"The way we envision it is, there would be a bunch of these sent out in a swarm," said Greg Parker, who helps lead the research project at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. "If we know there's a possibility of bad guys in a certain building, how do we find out? We think this would fill that void."

In essence, the research seeks to miniaturize the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle drones used in Iraq and Afghanistan for surveillance and reconnaissance.

The next generation of drones, called Micro Aerial Vehicles, or MAVs, could be as tiny as bumblebees and capable of flying undetected into buildings, where they could photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists.

By identifying and assaulting adversaries more precisely, the robots would also help reduce or avoid civilian casualties, the military says.

Parker and his colleagues plan to start by developing a bird-sized robot as soon as 2015, followed by the insect-sized models by 2030.

The vehicles could be useful on battlefields where the biggest challenge is collecting reliable intelligence about enemies.

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Hunting for a Brainy Computer

NYT - November 20, 2008, by Steve Lohr

Want a really intelligent digital assistant?
Computing

Well, it certainly won’t be ready for this holiday season, but that is the long-range goal of a $4.9 million grant from the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to five universities and I.B.M. Research.

The funds are for the first phase of an ambitious research venture in cognitive computing, an emerging field that lies at the outer edge of artificial intelligence. The leader of IBM’s cognitive computing program, Dharmendra Modha, describes the research as “the quest to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain.”

“It’s a quest like Dorothy looking for the Wizard of Oz,” he added.

Computers excel at tasks, even daunting ones, when they work in domains with clear rules, like chess (as in I.B.M.’s Deep Blue beating the chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997). But they do not excel at fuzzier problems, said H.-S. Philip Wong, a Stanford professor who will work on the Darpa-sponsored project. Mr. Wong cites the example of how a human devises a mental strategy for finding a car, whose exact location has been forgotten, in a busy parking lot. That task, he said, requires higher-level cognition — sensation, perception, learning and reasoning.

The time is right to pursue cognitive computing, according to Mr. Modha, because of advances in computing, nanotechnology and neuroscience. In neuroscience, for example, there has been a data-driven surge in research on neurons, synapses and neurotranmitters.

But will the brain and its workings, like so much else in biology, prove to be far more complex than foreseen, and thus resistant to the math-modeling of computer science?

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Artist envisions turning fake eye into bionic eye-cam

CNET News - November 18, 2008, by Elinor Mills
Photo Credit: Jonathan James

Three years after losing her left eye in a car accident, San Franciscan Tanya Vlach wants to make her artificial eye more useful: She's planning to put a video camera in her eye socket with the goal of having a bionic eye.

Asked in an e-mail what her inspiration is, Vlach wrote:

The Bionic Woman and maybe Bladerunner! Ever since I lost my eye I would fantasize about having a bionic eye. So I did research and I realized that as technology becomes increasingly smaller it seemed doable to engineer a miniature video camera small enough to put inside my acrylic prosthetic. And then finally I would have a device as close to an eye as I could get. Also, I love photography and video, this would be a true P.O.V (point of view) perspective.

Vlach, a 35-year-old artist and producer, is just getting started with her project and doesn't yet have a technology developer yet. She's actively seeking help with engineering, as well as funding.

Work is already under way in various places that could serve as a starting point for Vlach. For instance, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have created a contact lens that contains an electronic circuit and LEDs. And scientists at University of Illinois and Northwestern University, meanwhile, have developed what could be a precursor to a bionic eye, though it's unclear whether that eye has quite the Web functionality that Vlach is seeking. There's also work being done in Boston on embedding chips behind the retina.

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Billions of particles of anti-matter created in laboratory

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - November 17, 2008

LIVERMORE, Calif. – Take a gold sample the size of the head of a push pin, shoot a laser through it, and suddenly more than 100 billion particles of anti-matter appear.

The anti-matter, also known as positrons, shoots out of the target in a cone-shaped plasma “jet.”

This new ability to create a large number of positrons in a small laboratory opens the door to several fresh avenues of anti-matter research, including an understanding of the physics underlying various astrophysical phenomena such as black holes and gamma ray bursts.

Anti-matter research also could reveal why more matter than anti-matter survived the Big Bang at the start of the universe.

“We’ve detected far more anti-matter than anyone else has ever measured in a laser experiment,” said Hui Chen, a Livermore researcher who led the experiment. “We’ve demonstrated the creation of a significant number of positrons using a short-pulse laser.”

Chen and her colleagues used a short, ultra-intense laser to irradiate a millimeter-thick gold target. “Previously, we concentrated on making positrons using paper-thin targets,” said Scott Wilks, who designed and modeled the experiment using computer codes. “But recent simulations showed that millimeter-thick gold would produce far more positrons. We were very excited to see so many of them.”

In the experiment, the laser ionizes and accelerates electrons, which are driven right through the gold target. On their way, the electrons interact with the gold nuclei, which serve as a catalyst to create positrons. The electrons give off packets of pure energy, which decays into matter and anti-matter, following the predictions by Einstein’s famous equation that relates matter and energy. By concentrating the energy in space and time, the laser produces positrons more rapidly and in greater density than ever before in the laboratory.

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Jacking into the Brain--Is the Brain the Ultimate Computer Interface?

SciAm.com - November 2008, by Gary Stix

• Futurists and science-fiction writers speculate about a time when brain activity will merge with computers.
  
• Technology now exists that uses brain signals to control a cursor or prosthetic arm. How much further development of brain-machine interfaces might progress is still an imponderable.
  
• It is at least possible to conceive of inputting text and other high-level information into an area of the brain that helps to form new memories. But the technical hurdles to achieving this task probably require fundamental advances in understanding the way the brain functions.
  

The cyberpunk science fiction that emerged in the 1980s routinely paraded “neural implants” for hooking a computing device directly to the brain: “I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head,” proclaimed the protagonist of “Johnny Mnemonic,” a William Gibson story that later became a wholly forgettable movie starring Keanu Reeves.

The genius of the then emergent genre (back in the days when a megabyte could still wow) was its juxtaposition of low-life retro culture with technology that seemed only barely beyond the capabilities of the deftest biomedical engineer. Although the implants could not have been replicated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology, the best cyberpunk authors gave the impression that these inventions might yet materialize one day, perhaps even in the reader’s own lifetime.

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The Coming Wireless Revolution

Technology Review - November 14, 2008, by Kate Greene

Gadgets that operate over television frequencies promise to transform the wireless landscape.

If you believe some radio researchers and engineers, within the next couple of years, high-bandwidth, far-reaching wireless Internet signals will soon blanket the nation. Thanks to a decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week, megahertz frequency bands that were previously allocated to television broadcasters will be opened to other device manufacturers. The frequency liberation means that future wireless gadgets will be able to blast tens of megabits per second of data over hundreds of kilometers. They will cover previously unreachable parts of the country with Internet signals, enable faster Web browsing on mobile devices, and even make in-car Internet and car-to-car wireless communication more realistic.

The FCC announcement essentially lets wireless take advantage of unused frequencies in between channels used by broadcast television, so-called white spaces. "The announcement that the FCC will allow white-space devices has a lot of people feeling like this is a beginning of a wireless revolution," says Anant Sahai, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

For years, researchers have been toying with radios that are smart enough to hop from one frequency to another, leaving occupied channels undisturbed--an approach known as cognitive radio. But until the FCC made its announcement, cognitive-radio research was a purely academic pursuit. "You could do all the research you wanted on it," Sahai says, "but it was still illegal."

With the FCC decision, however, researchers and companies finally have the opportunity to turn prototypes into products, knowing that the gadgets could hit the market in the next couple of years. Companies including Motorola, Phillips, and Microsoft have all tested prototypes with mixed results and hope to have robust white-space devices soon.

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Pentagon Clears Flying-Car Project for Takeoff

Wired - November 13, 2008, by Noah Shachtman

Pentagon mad-science division Darpa is helping build thought-controlled robotic limbs, artificial pack mules, real-life laser guns and "kill-proof" soldiers. So it comes as no surprise, really, that the agency is now getting into the flying-car business, too.

Darpa hopes its "Personal Air Vehicle Technology" project, announced yesterday, will ultimately lead to a working prototype of a military-suitable flying car -- a two- or four-passenger vehicle that can "drive on roads" one minute and take off like a helicopter the next. The hybrid machine would be perfect for "urban scouting," casualty evacuation and commando-delivery missions, the agency believes.

Flying cars have been a just-around-the-corner promise for decades, of course. Today, several companies swear that they are just on the verge of manufacturing such machines. Terrafugia claims its folding-wing mini-plane will be ready to deliver by 2009. Pal-V has a three-wheeled gyrocopter thingy. Urban Aeronautics promises to do the whole thing without any wings or rotors at all. And let's not even get into the personal flying saucers.

Darpa says its Cessna-sized combo vehicle should be able to cruise at 60 mph on land, and 150 mphin the air. It should be able to stay aloft for two hours on a tank of fuel. "The challenge," the agency says, "is to define the major components of such a vehicle that would be suitable for military scouting and personnel transport missions, yet are small enough, inexpensive enough, and easy enough to operate that it can be widely used."

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Will the Next Ice Age Be Permanent?

NYT Dot Earth - November 13, 2008, by Andrew C. Revkin

A new analysis of the dramatic cycles of ice ages and warm intervals over the past million years, published in Nature, concludes that the climatic swings are the gyrations of a system poised to settle into a quasi-permanent colder state — with expanded ice sheets at both poles.

In essence, says one of the two authors, Thomas J. Crowley of the University of Edinburgh, the ice age cycles over the past million years are a super-slow-motion variant of the dramatic jostlings recorded by a seismograph in an earthquake before the ground settles into a new quiet state. He and William T. Hyde of the University of Toronto used climate models and other techniques to assess the chances that the world is witnessing the final stages of a 50-million-year transition from a planet with a persistent warm climate and scant polar ice to one with greatly expanded ice sheets at both poles.

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Top 10 Forecasts for 2009 and Beyond

The Futurist - Outlook 2009

1. Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030.

2. Bioviolence will become a greater threat as the technology becomes more accessible.

3. The car’s days as king of the road may soon be over.

4. Careers, and the college majors for preparing for them, are becoming more specialized.

5. There may not be world law in the foreseeable future, but the world’s legal systems will be networked.

6. Professional knowledge will become obsolete almost as quickly as it’s acquired.

7. The race for biomedical and genetic enhancement will-in the twenty-first century-be what the space race was in the previous century.

8. Urbanization will hit 60% by 2030.

9. The Middle East will become more secular while religious influence in China will grow.

10. Access to electricity will reach 83% of the world by 2030.

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Ericsson Predicts Mobile Phones With Full HD, 1 GHz Processor Frequency By 2012

Physorg.com - November 08, 2008, by Mary Anne Simpson

Mobile phones of the future will be equipped with a 12 MP to 20 MP cameras with full HD capability by 2012, according to Jonas Lundstedt, Director of Ericsson's Portfolio Management, Product and Portfolio Management.

New technologies aptly named HSPA Evolution and LTE which means long term evolution will increase the transmission speeds initially to 100Mbps and make possible the progression to full HD quality images. Ericsson plans to actively develop embedded modules, base station facilities and other products in order to bring about the future mobile terminal hand-held device, according to reporter Hiroki Yomogita published on November 6 by Nikkei Electronics.

Currently, HSPA technology has a maximum transmission speed of 7.2Mbps. Ericsson´s system has the lion´s share of commercial networks utilizing HSPA compatible terminals. Today, 805 kinds of HSPA-compatible terminals have been released from approximately 129 manufacturers. According to Hakan Eriksson, Chief Technology Officer at Ericsson, LTE will significantly enhanced the mobile broadband experience for users, who will be able to enjoy more performance-demanding applications like interactive TV, advanced games or professional services. It is expected that 1.8 billion people will have broadband by 2012 and of this amount 2/3 will be mobile broadband subscribers.

Wireless technology will be the predominant way of accessing broadband and Internet connectivity in homes, offices, schools and businesses. Initially, the developing world and other countries will rely primarily on HSPA. LTE is expected to pick up quickly relying on its relationship with the current GSM/WCDMA/HSPA technology family. Another key benefit of LTE is its performance and capacity. Ericsson has already demonstrated peak rates of 160Mbits/s. The future will deliver speeds 300Mbits/s and higher.

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World's Largest Truck Goes Robotic

* Blog author's note: Can't recall the name of it, but this is eerily reminiscent of a horror movie I watched as a kid about Caterpillar D-9s running amok.

Discovery News - November 6, 2008, by Eric Bland

The largest truck in the world is about to become the largest robotic vehicle in the world. Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up with engineers from Caterpillar to automate the 700-ton trucks, which are made to haul loads up to 240 tons from mines.

That's nearly two million pounds of metal, fuel and stone powered by a 3,550-horsepower, 24-valve engine moving at up to 42 miles per hour, with software and a robot at the wheel.

"Autonomous vehicle technology is pretty much in its infancy," said Tony Stentz, a professor at CMU involved in the project. Stentz expects that over the next five to 10 years, the technology will expand to areas beyond mining, eventually finding its way into consumer cars and trucks.

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Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes

guardian.co.uk - November 9, 2008, by John Vidal and Nick Rosen

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.'

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Scientists create tiny backpacks for cells

Physorg.com - November 5, 2008, by Anne Trafton

Image courtesy of American Chemical Society

MIT engineers have outfitted cells with tiny “backpacks” that could allow them to deliver chemotherapy agents, diagnose tumors or become building blocks for tissue engineering.

Michael Rubner, director of MIT’s Center for Materials Science and Engineering and senior author of a paper on the work that appeared online in Nano Letters on Nov. 5, said he believes this is the first time anyone has attached such a synthetic patch to a cell.

The polymer backpacks allow researchers to use cells to ferry tiny cargoes and manipulate their movements using magnetic fields. Since each patch covers only a small portion of the cell surface, it does not interfere with the cell’s normal functions or prevent it from interacting with the external environment.

“The goal is to perturb the cell as little as possible,” said Robert Cohen, the St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and an author of the paper.

The researchers worked with B and T cells, two types of immune cells that can home to various tissues in the body, including tumors, infection sites, and lymphoid tissues — a trait that could be exploited to achieve targeted drug or vaccine delivery.

“The idea is that we use cells as vectors to carry materials to tumors, infection sites or other tissue sites,” said Darrell Irvine, an author of the paper and associate professor of materials science and engineering and biological engineering.

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US Army to Push X-Files Tech Development, Invade World of Warcraft

Gizmodo - November 5, 2008, by Jesus Diaz

The US Army is ramping up the development of technology right out of the X-Files, "making science fiction into reality" as Dr. John Parmentola—Director of their Research and Laboratory Management—puts it. The list of things currently in the works is amazing: Regenerating body parts on "nano-scaffolding", telepathy through electronic impulses in the scalp, and self-aware virtual photorealistic soldiers that can be deployed in the battlefield through "quantum ghost imaging". To test these they want to use them into a massively multi-player online games like World of Warcraft or Eve online:

We want to use the massively multi-player online game as an experimental laboratory to see if they’re good enough to convince humans that they’re actually human, that can think on their own, have emotions and talk in local slang. I actually interact with virtual humans in terms of asking them questions and they’re responding.

Once they have them perfected, they want to "deploy" these soldiers using something called "quantum ghost imaging". This will allow to create photorealistic, non-cheesy-fake-CNN-looking holograms out of thin air by "pairing photons that do no reflect or bounce off an object, but off other photons," whatever that means. Parmentola explains it as "“like having a tracing tool … that goes over the image and that’s connected to another one on a piece of paper that exactly imitates what it is that you are tracing with the other pen" which leaves me scratching my head as well. He hinted that this is closer than we can imagine.

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Cloaking objects at a distance

the physics arXiv blog - November 5, 2008

One of the disadvantages of invisibility cloaks is that anything placed inside one is automatically blinded, since no light can get in.

Now Yun Lai and colleagues from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have come up with a way round this using the remarkable idea of cloaking at a distance. This involves using a “complementary material” to hide an object outside it.

Here’s the idea: complementary materials are designed to have a permittivity and permeability that are complementary to the values in a nearby region of space. “Complementary” means that the values cancel out the effect that that this region of space has on a plane lightwave passing through. To an observer, that region of space simply vanishes.

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Army Working on 'Ghost' Soldiers, Mind-Controlled Guns

FoxNews.com - November 6, 2008

Self-regenerating body parts. Intelligent "virtual soldiers." Mind-controlled weapons. Brain "wipes" to purge traumatic memories. "Quantum ghost imaging."

The U.S. Army's working on all of these concepts, according to a report on Military.com, a private military-oriented Web site.

"Making science fiction into reality" is the goal, says Dr. John Parmentola, the Army's director for research and laboratory management.

"You can imagine people who have horrifying memories, it would be great if we could eliminate them so this way they're not plagued by these memories uncontrollably," he says, explaining research into cleaning soldiers' minds of recollections that cause post-traumatic stress disorder.

Salamanders have long been known to grow back fingers and even limbs, and the Army's trying to figure out how.

"We're beginning to understand how this occurs and if we can, it holds the hope of, being able to regrow limbs on people," says Parmentola.

As for "quantum ghost imaging," it involves the strange but well-documented phenomenon of "twinned" particles that communicate instantaneously -- if something happens to one, the other reacts accordingly, no matter how far away.

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How the CNN Holographic Interview System Works

Gizmodo - November 4, 2008, by Jason Chen

CNN's holographic election coverage is fancy pantsy, but how did they manage to send 3D 360 degree footage of virtual correspondent Jessica Yellin from Chicago all the way to the station's election center in NY? As Arthur C. Clarke says, Magic. A magic made possible from technology Vizrt and SportVu with the help of forty-four HD cameras and twenty computers. Here are the details.

On the subject's side:
• 35 HD cameras pointed at the subject in a ring
• Different cameras shoot at different angles (like the matrix), to transmit the entire body image
• The cameras are hooked up to the cameras in home base in NY, synchronizing the angles so perspective is right
• The system is set up in trailers outside Obama and McCain HQ
• Not only is it mechanical tracking via camera communication, there's infrared as well
• Correspondents see a 37-inch plasma where the return feed of the combined images are fed back to them. Useful for a misplaced hair or an unseemly boogar
• Twenty "computers" are crunching this data in order to make it usable

On the HQ side:
• Only used on two out of 40-something total camera feeds that CNN has
• Wolf Blitzer really loves it (or loves Jessica Yellin):

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First Look: Intel's Nehalem Smashes Performance Thresholds

ChannelWeb - Nov. 03, 2008, by Brian Sheinberg

Intel's next-generation Nehalem processor lineup is so powerful that it simply destroys previous CPU benchmarks. An early look at the company's new chips shows they have the potential to drive current data center-class performance onto the desktop.

The Test Center has reviewed evaluation units of the chip giant's latest processors and motherboards over the past several weeks. Early results show nearly historic levels of improvement over previous generations of processors.

Intel, Santa Clara, Calif., made the evaluation units available to reviewers ahead of the platform's official launch, which is expected to happen later this month. ("Nehalem" is actually the former code-name of the platform, which includes its new Core i7 CPUs and X58 motherboards.)

Considered by some to have the most significant new architectural changes since the Pentium Pro, the microarchitecture will include future variants for server and mobile applications.

The Test Center took a first look at the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition, installed in Intel's "SmackOver" motherboard, the DX58SO Extreme Series.

Along with the DX58SO, our test kit included three Qimonda 1 GB memory modules, and a Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme cooling solution. An 80 GB, Intel High Performance SATA SSD was also supplied. After assembling the system, reviewers updated the BIOS to the latest version and installed Windows Vista Ultimate on the drive, followed by all drivers and updates.

From the moment the power was turned on, it was obvious that this was a fast machine. A complete boot of Vista took only 43 seconds from the time the power button was pressed and most of this time (27 seconds) was actually in the POST phase of the boot. From the moment Windows started loading, the OS was completely booted in just 16 seconds. Power draw was elevated from what we are used to seeing on our typical testbeds, averaging about 90 watts while idle and fluctuating between 130 and 180 watts when placed under load. This didn't come as much of a surprise since the three processors are spec'd at 130W TDP.

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First Look: Intel's Nehalem Smashes Performance Thresholds

ChannelWeb - Nov. 03, 2008, by Brian Sheinberg

Intel's next-generation Nehalem processor lineup is so powerful that it simply destroys previous CPU benchmarks. An early look at the company's new chips shows they have the potential to drive current data center-class performance onto the desktop.

The Test Center has reviewed evaluation units of the chip giant's latest processors and motherboards over the past several weeks. Early results show nearly historic levels of improvement over previous generations of processors.

Intel, Santa Clara, Calif., made the evaluation units available to reviewers ahead of the platform's official launch, which is expected to happen later this month. ("Nehalem" is actually the former code-name of the platform, which includes its new Core i7 CPUs and X58 motherboards.)

Considered by some to have the most significant new architectural changes since the Pentium Pro, the microarchitecture will include future variants for server and mobile applications.

The Test Center took a first look at the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition, installed in Intel's "SmackOver" motherboard, the DX58SO Extreme Series.

Along with the DX58SO, our test kit included three Qimonda 1 GB memory modules, and a Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme cooling solution. An 80 GB, Intel High Performance SATA SSD was also supplied. After assembling the system, reviewers updated the BIOS to the latest version and installed Windows Vista Ultimate on the drive, followed by all drivers and updates.

From the moment the power was turned on, it was obvious that this was a fast machine. A complete boot of Vista took only 43 seconds from the time the power button was pressed and most of this time (27 seconds) was actually in the POST phase of the boot. From the moment Windows started loading, the OS was completely booted in just 16 seconds. Power draw was elevated from what we are used to seeing on our typical testbeds, averaging about 90 watts while idle and fluctuating between 130 and 180 watts when placed under load. This didn't come as much of a surprise since the three processors are spec'd at 130W TDP.

Read source>>

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Invention: Universal detector

NewScientistTech - September 26, 2008, by Justin Mullins

* Blogger's Note: Is this the equivalent of Mr. Spock's tricorder?

Zap a metal with light and the electrons on the surface ripple into waves – known as plasmons – which emit light of their own. The frequency of that light reflects the electronic nature of the surface and is highly sensitive to contamination.

Kevin Tetz and colleagues in the Ultrafast and Nanoscale Optics Group at the University of California, San Diego, have designed a system to exploit that to test for any surface contamination on the surface of, well, anything.

Their idea uses a thin layer of metal drilled with nanoscale holes, laid onto the surface being tested. When the perforated plate is zapped with laser light, the surface plasmons that form emit light with a frequency related to the materials touching the plate. A sensitive light detector is needed to measure the frequency of light given off.

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Technopalypse - Preparing for the Singularity

Blogger's Note: Those who follow this blog are undoubtedly familiar with the concept of technological singularity, a term coined by Vernor Vinge "as an analogy between the breakdown of modern physics near a gravitational singularity and the drastic change in society he argues would occur following an intelligence explosion" (Wikipedia). For you,this video will prove to be exceptionally informative; for those who have yet to become aware of it, this video is simply a must-watch.


Technological Singularity and Futurism is updated often; the easiest way to get your regular dose is by subscribing to our news feed. Stay on top of all our updates by subscribing now via RSS or Email.

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TIME's Best Inventions of 2008

Time - by Jeremy Caplan, Kristina Dell, Andrea Dorfman, Laura Fitzpatrick, Justin Fox, Sean Gregory, Lev Grossman, Barbara Kiviat, Jeffrey Kluger, Richard Lacayo, Michael Lemonick, Lisa McLaughlin, Jay Newton-Small, Alice Park, Mark Thompson, Bryan Walsh and Rebecca Winters Keegan.

From a genetic testing service to an invisibility cloak to an ingenious public bike system to the world's first moving skyscraper — here are TIME's picks for the top innovations of 2008.

    * 1. The Retail DNA Test
    * 2. The Tesla Roadster
    * 3. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
    * 4. Hulu.com
    * 5. The Large Hadron Collider
    * 6. The Global Seed Vault
    * 7. The Chevy Volt
    * 8. Bullets That Shoot Bullets
    * 9. The Orbital Internet
    * 10. The World's Fastest Computer

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Expectation of Machine Intelligence Could Change Social Behavior, Says Economist

Wired - October 25, 2008, by Priya Ganapati

As computers get smarter machines could become more intelligent than humans within a few decades, leading to an event dubbed the Singularity.

Technologists are still debating the possibility but what if just enough people believed it is likely?

Whether the singularity occurs or not, just the expectation of it could significantly change human behavior, says James Miller, associate professor of economics at Smith College.

“Long before there is a singularity, people will come to expect it,” Smith told attendees at the Singularity Summit in San Jose. “And it is very likely that could happen within 20 years.”

The belief that a vastly different future is near could change how people make choices in life, education, investment and retirement, says Miller. “People will become very fearful of death, save less and invest differently,” he says.

Most significant among their choices would be the emphasis on extending life, says Smith. “If you think there will be a machine-driven future then your top priority is to survive long enough to make it to the singularity,” he says.

That means people force Governments to increase its defense spending in a bid to ensure the greatest chance of survival.

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Technological Singularity and Futurism is updated often; the easiest way to get your regular dose is by subscribing to our news feed. Stay on top of all our updates by subscribing now via RSS or Email.

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Expectation of Machine Intelligence Could Change Social Behavior, Says Economist

Wired - October 25, 2008, by Priya Ganapati


As computers get smarter machines could become more intelligent than humans within a few decades, leading to an event dubbed the Singularity.

Technologists are still debating the possibility but what if just enough people believed it is likely?

Whether the singularity occurs or not, just the expectation of it could significantly change human behavior, says James Miller, associate professor of economics at Smith College.

“Long before there is a singularity, people will come to expect it,” Smith told attendees at the Singularity Summit in San Jose. “And it is very likely that could happen within 20 years.”

The belief that a vastly different future is near could change how people make choices in life, education, investment and retirement, says Miller. “People will become very fearful of death, save less and invest differently,” he says.

Most significant among their choices would be the emphasis on extending life, says Smith. “If you think there will be a machine-driven future then your top priority is to survive long enough to make it to the singularity,” he says.

That means people force Governments to increase its defense spending in a bid to ensure the greatest chance of survival.

Read source>>


Technological Singularity and Futurism is updated often; the easiest way to get your regular dose is by subscribing to our news feed. Stay on top of all our updates by subscribing now via RSS or Email.

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