A chip inside the eye that can help blind people see again is moving closer to reality as researchers at MIT work on a retinal implant that can bypass damaged cells and directly offer visual input to the brain.
Wired
September 24, 2009
September 23, 2009
The Future of Smoking
Have you heard of the "E-Cigarette"? If you haven't and you're a smoker or even a non-smoker, you're seriously missing out! It looks like a cigarette, feels like a cigarette, taste like a cigarette, but isn't! It's so much more! The E-Cigarette is really the healthier future of smoking. This high-tech electronic smoking device provides the nicotine you crave, in a completely non harmful manner! Non-harmful to yourself and to others around you!
The Future of Smoking
Thanks to Jonathan for this gem
The Future of Smoking
Thanks to Jonathan for this gem
September 22, 2009
September 15, 2009
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
September 11, 2009
Blogging begins turnaround for homeless woman
It may have a fairy tale ending -- a story of perseverance and second chances that's playing out live on the public stage of online networking. 
Brianna Karp's trailer now sits outside a friend's home near Los Angeles
But 24-year-old Brianna Karp's story started as a nightmare.
In a rocky economy, Karp was laid off from her Irvine, California, job as an executive assistant in July 2008.
She got by for a while on temp jobs and unemployment benefits. But when her savings dried up, she was no longer able to afford her rent.
The only answer she saw then was a trailer she'd inherited from her father -- a man she barely knew who had recently committed suicide.
"I was left with a truck and this camper, which I was going to sell but coincidentally this happened to me," she said. "I thought, 'Well, I have this.' "
Karp, who writes that she is also estranged from her mother, ended up camped in a Los Angeles-area Walmart parking lot.
Digital contacts will keep an eye on your vital signs
Forget about 20/20.
"Perfect" vision could be redefined by gadgets that give you the eyes of a cyborg.The tech industry calls the digital enrichment of the physical world "augmented reality." Such technology is already appearing in smartphones and toys, and enthusiasts dream of a pair of glasses we could don to enhance our everyday perception. But why stop there?
Scientists, eye surgeons, professors and students at the University of Washington have been developing a contact lens containing one built-in LED, powered wirelessly with radio frequency waves.
Eventually, more advanced versions of the lens could be used to provide a wealth of information, such as virtual captions scrolling beneath every person or object you see. Significantly, it could also be used to monitor your own vital signs, such as body temperature and blood glucose level.
Wikipedia’s Rapid Reaction to Outburst During Obama Speech
If journalism is the first draft of history, what is a Wikipedia entry when it is updated within minutes of an event to reflect changes in a person’s biography?
The New York Times
The New York Times
September 10, 2009
A new Turing test
IF A computer could fool a person into thinking that he were interacting with another person rather than a machine, then it could be classified as having artificial intelligence. That, at least, was the test proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing, a British mathematician. Turing envisaged a typed exchange between machine and person, so that a genuine conversation could happen without the much harder problem of voice emulation having to be addressed.
More recently, the abilities of computers to play games such as chess, go and bridge has been regarded as a form of artificial intelligence. But the latest effort to use machines to emulate the way people interact with one another focuses neither on natural languages nor traditional board and card games. Rather, it concentrates on that icon of modernity, the shoot-’em-up computer game.
Cell Phone Radiation: Top 10 Best and Worst
The Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, thinks you should know. To make things easy, this week the group released a list ranking more than 1,000 cell phones according to the radiation levels they emit.
Questions regarding health risks associated with cell phone radiation have persisted for years. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has stated that scientific evidence does not indicate negative health outcomes from exposure to radio frequency energy from cell phones.
But the Environmental Working Group disagrees.
September 3, 2009
Ground Control with Major Tom: Technoreliants in the hands of a fickle god
I am not an alarmist, but the recent Google outage, and my personal experience with AT&T's poor service for the iPhone has got this Modular Man to thinking. Or, pondering what I preach, at least.
There have been several articles lately raising a skeptical eyebrow about the future of cloud computing, where you "do not generally own the physical infrastructure serving as host to the software platform in question". I would like to take it to a more base level, and talk to the whole of cyberspace, or whatever we are calling it nowadays. We are at the whim of infrastructures not in our own hands. We don't truly own the land, we play in the space. When Google went down, my emails were gone to me. I have no backup of these threads back and forth (I guess I should start doing that...). The prophets of technology constantly cry for the future of the one omnipotent structure of data, making things faster and less cluttered, smaller and fashionable.
But what they fail to point out, just like with all other utopian ideals, is that the dream must rest upon some one, or something's shoulders, and inevitably, that someone or something is faulty.
It is true that in the days of yore, the connection of communication rested on the likes of the backs of the Pony Express. The horse could get shot out from under the rider, the letter may get waterlogged or burned by careless hands.
But is cyberspace anymore reliable?
It is very convenient, and I am reliant upon it, but I believe it would behoove us all to remember the ephemeral quality of the new age. It would take a house fire to destroy my whole library, but just the flick of a glitch to destroy my life in the cloud. My iPhone, my computer, they mean nothing in a digital black out. It is when we fail to realize these certainties that we take what we have for granted, and it is when we take things for granted that we lose sight of humanity in the cloud around us.
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