I haven’t watched 60 Minutes in years now, but Lifehacker has a link to the story below from last week on controlling computers with thought and I was blown away. I’ve known there was research going on in this direction, but some of what they show here is amazing. Using just surface-level sensors one device can sense the brain pattern of “recognition”, allowing people to type or select words based as they are flashed onto a computer screen. The interface for that is pretty cool – I expected from the description a series of letters shown one at a time but instead there is a huge grid of every letter, number, and symbol you might want and they are highlighted on and off very quickly in quick succession. When they get to what is possible if you actually embed sensors in someone’s brain, we start to see monkeys controlling robot arms to feed themselves and people being able to drive mechanical wheelchairs with just their thoughts. It’s a very well done story – worth watching!
60 Minutes: Brain Power
The Lifehacker entry about the video speculated that while this is being used now to help people who are paralyzed, this technology would eventually reach a point where this was our standard interface with our computer. Clearly there would need to be significant changes – it seems that right now the ability to move objects with thought is accomplished by attempting to move your own arms and the brain interpreting those signals – the monkey has to have his arms restrained for this to work. It is unclear how this would work if you could move your arms. Is visualizing the motions sufficient or are the actual mental activities that take place when you legitimately attempt to move required? It also seems clear that people will be more willing to consider brain implants when it gives them back a lost ability to communicate and interact with the world than the would be simply to streamline their interactions with their computer.
Star Trek fans might also like the tachyon
If you liked Giant Microbes but are really more of a physicist (or a bit of a hypochondriac) you will love Particle Zoo’s subatomic particle plush toys. These cuddly interpretations of the basic components of matter are filled with different materials to reflect the differences in weight between, say, a top quark and a muon. The proton/neutron pairing is pretty cute, as are the quarks. I like that they have prefab gift packs of the various meaningful sets of particles that you might want to buy together. The “whole zoo” of 33 particles (quick quiz: can you name 33 subatomic particles?) looks really cool, though also really pricey.
Now I will be able to understand R2-D2!
This is one of those do-it-on-yourself experiments that makes you realize your brain is doing all sorts of processing you have no awareness of.
First, listen to this audio clip: Sine Wave Speech. Listen to it until you either make out what is being said or conclude that you will not be able to.
Now, go listen to this audio clip: Clear Speech. After you listen to it once, go back and listen to the first clip….
Think that it only worked because you heard the “decoded” audio? Go listen to this second piece of Sine Wave Speech…
You can hear other examples and read more about the phenomenon at thisintroduction to Sine-Wave Speech. [via Boing Boing] These examples are meant to illustrate perceptual learning or perceptual insight. Even without getting that far into the explanation, I think it is a remarkable illustration of how good our minds are at identifying patterns and generalizing them based on remarkably sparse data.
So much fun I might start doing the off years
As promised, I spent part of Tuesday wandering around my local area taking some photos documenting the election. I’ve put together a representative sample in this year’s election photo collection. It was interesting to note that while I went to many of the same places that I did in 2004, I came across fewer demonstrations or evidence of particular political stances this time around, besides the expected yard signs. The sentiment out there was more one of “make sure you vote”.
But what if it starts swinging independent?
I somehow have the feeling the internet is going to be rife with election-related fun today. I won’t have time for a good websurf until later because I’m trying to get to the polls to vote before class, but this caught my eye: string red and blue lights up around your house for your election party and use this
python script to scape CNN’s election results and indicate how the election is trending to change which lights are on so your lightly reflects the trending of the election. Your house will start out purple and end up…. well, slightly less purple? Looking at the code there is some normalization going on, so it might end up having more of a range to spread over. There’s nothing in this code that is specific to the lighting application either, so go ahead and grab it and build your own election tracking toy!
Copyright and Documentary through Comics
Two Duke law professors and an expert in the public domain have written a comic, available under a Creative Commons license, about the impact of current copyright culture and its impact on creativity. They are particularly focused on how a trend towards a positive obligation to “clear copyright” and show that use of another’s work is fair use is, in reality, stifling fair use as studios refuse to take risks on including fair use content without permission and individuals cannot afford to defend legal cases if their fair use is challenged. There is example after example given of individuals filming reality and having to edit or cut scenes because they cannot get permission to include an icon or a background song that was in fact there at that time. They point out that with the expense of actually creating a film dropping with cheaper equipment and video editing, this is going to become more of a problem as more people will be able to create film without the backing of a major funding source. As one might expect given the Creative Commons licensing, it is clear from the start that they will not be arguing to throw out the ideas of copyright and intellectual property entirely. This is in the end an argument for Creative Commons licensing and giving more flexible control over how content is and is not reused by others to the people who have created it. It’s a familiar argument if you have read about this topic much at all, but this is a very nice and fairly entertaining presentation of it.
Four more days
Hey, did you notice there is an election in the US coming up next week? Seems like a good time to clear the queue of some election-related links!
Worried about what might go wrong with eVoting? A Rice professor has been exposing the vulnerabilities in the system Texas uses, showing that brief unsupervised access to the machine can compromise the integrity of the software.
In fact, while I haven’t seen any authoritative explanation for how this has happened or how widespread it is, evidence does seem to be coming in that straight party ticket voting may result in inaccurate vote counts including not having a vote registered for a presidential candidate. The article also points out that straight-party voting can be result in undervoting if there is a race in your precinct that does not have a candidate running in your party of choice.
There are also technical concerns about voter registration databases. Generally these databases require a match with a federal database to certify voters as eligible – but if there is not a match how often is it a result of an error? In some places, these checks may not occur enough in advance of the election for people who are deemed ineligible to contest that ruling.
There is an entire weblog dedicated to a linguistic analysis of the presidential campaign. The most recent analysis looks at the degree of “language style matching” between presidential candidates and their interviewers. Interestingly, the degree of matching does not necessarily reflect ideological agreement, but is theorized to reflect engagement in the conversation as compared to being cool-headed and objective. Other articles interpret variations in speech length and word choice in candidate speeches.
On the language front, Google Labs has a fun tool In Quotes that takes a word or phrase of your choosing and returns matches from speeches by major national political candidates, showing the results for two candidates side-by-side. It’s an interesting way to get primary source content about candidate’s opinions.
If you really are still undecided on who to vote for, or if you are looking for a last-minute sanity check that you are making the right choice, check out this article on how to pick a president. It’s a nice mix of theory and actual things to do to focus your research into the candidates if you feel overwhelmed by the amount there is to consider.
If it’s the local politics that you have trouble following, Ballotpedia is a community wiki that helps you research what’s on the ballot in your state and find both the text of the questions and commentary and options on the issue.
Finally, keep your eyes open for the every-four-years (is there a word for that? there should be….) Election Day Photo Essay! Previous editions linked here.
Cute little robots….
if you are one of the students who came on the field trip to visit the CMU Robotics Institute two springs ago, you may recognize Dr. Wettergreen in this photo from a story about CMU’s new lunar rover. Can I say first how much it entertains me that the Post-Gazette has to translate “lunar rover” into “moon robot” for a lay audience? The technology is pretty cool though. Scarab is intended to drill into the moon’s surface to collect samples looking for water ice on the moon. This means it has to be designed sufficiently low to the ground and with a wide enough wheel-span to have the leverage to drill, but at the same time has to be suitable for navigating over a rocky lunar terrain, including being able to climb hills and descend into craters. It also has to be able to operate in the darkly shadowed conditions of a lunar crater. There are some cool movies of trial runs with Scarab on their site – I particularly like the first one listed.
One vote per person, more or less….
I have been reading a fair bit about electronic voting machines recently because we are talking about them in one of my classes. While I’ve waded through some pretty dry accounts of the vulnerabilities of these machines, this report with an associated video showing the ease with which Sequoia voting systems machines can be hacked using a brief exposure the the configuring computer with a USB drive. [via Boing Boing] The video also shows how various types of exploits might look to the voter and could be designed to even work in the face of physical paper-tape confirmations of the voters ballot. The demos of how fast it is to circumvent some of the physical security on these machines is also pretty compelling.
Of course my favotite commentary on electronic voting machines is probably still this.
No Boom Yet
I had a few students express relief yesterday that the world did not end. Being the kill joy that I always am, I pointed out something that the media coverage did not seem to focus on – the risk of the world ending was only supposed to come when they started colliding particles at near-light speeds, which isn’t scheduled to happen for a few weeks still. So, if you are inclined that way, keep your panic hats on…
For those interested in knowing a little more about the collider without jumping headfirst into the CERN documentation, I’d recommend checking out this week’s PHD Comics: Tales from the Road about visiting CERN. And if you are one of my students thinking about applying to grad school, you might want to click through the archives for a snapshot of grad school life.