prosthetic knowledge
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Hands-Free Videophone
Prototype from Japan worn as glasses, with cameras INSIDE it capture and project real-time facial information onto a 3D avatar - via DigInfo:
NTT Docomo has developed the Hands-Free Videophone, which enables video calls without having to hold the camera. This is part of docomo’s research on creating future glasses-type devices.
The Hands-Free Videophone captures the user’s face with three cameras in each of the left and right sides of the frames. The video sent to the other person is created by combining the pictures with a pre-rendered 3D model of the users face.
“Each camera has 720p resolution, and a fish-eye lens, with a 180-degree field of view. This is the High Definition picture currently being captured in real time. If you look at the face, you can see it’s really distorted, because the fish-eye lens is so close. The distortion is compensated, and the picture is combined with a 3D model of the person in the computer. Currently, priority is given to the part around the eyes. As you can see when the man closes his eyes, the eyelids and the corners of the eyes appear quite realistic. Such a level of realism is hard to achieve with models like CG-based avatars, where parts are overlaid on the face.”
More at DigInfo here
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Between
Social network app designed specifically for interaction between you and your significant other:
Create your own secret community with ‘Between’!
Different from public SNS, ‘Between’ is a mobile service that provides a private community to share with your significant other.
‘Between’ organizes relationships with your lover and transforms it into your most valuable memories, by providing quick chat between couples, a photo album and message functions.
The contents shared through this application are fully protected through encrypting all shared data.
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Data Visualization: World travel and communications recorded on Twitter
By Eric Fischer
Green is physical movement from place to place; purple is @replies from someone in one location to someone in another; combining to white where there is both.
Reported trips to Null Island excluded; all other geotags trusted. Endpoints of trips are real data; routes in between are fabricated.
Data from the Twitter streaming API through September 1, 2011. Continent shapes from Natural Earth.
See larger versions of the above image here
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Mimicking the brain, in silicon (via MIT News)
New computer chip models how neurons communicate with each other at synapses:
For decades, scientists have dreamed of building computer systems that could replicate the human brain’s talent for learning new tasks.
MIT researchers have now taken a major step toward that goal by designing a computer chip that mimics how the brain’s neurons adapt in response to new information. This phenomenon, known as plasticity, is believed to underlie many brain functions, including learning and memory.
With about 400 transistors, the silicon chip can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse — a connection between two neurons that allows information to flow from one to the other. The researchers anticipate this chip will help neuroscientists learn much more about how the brain works, and could also be used in neural prosthetic devices such as artificial retinas, says Chi-Sang Poon, a principal research scientist in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. -
Official Google Blog: Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.
We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.
We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there. -
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Messenger Bacteria Could ‘Tweet’ Directions to Nanobots via Discovery News
Doctors would really like to fight diseases such a cancer in precise, directed ways. That means delivering cancer-killing therapies to ugly cells, while leaving healthy cells alone. One way that could happen in the future is by using super tiny robots — nanobots — that work together inside the body like an infantry of warriors armed to battle cancer.
But there are some big challenges. Among them, communication. Like any battlefield army, soldiers need to coordinate their attacks. And nanobots, in theory, would have a difficult time. They can’t use nano-sized cell phones, for example, because radio signals don’t travel through liquids. (What about sonar? Has anyone looked into nano-sonar?) And chemical forms of communications are not appropriate for distances longer than a few micrometers.
So, a team from the Nanonetworking Center in Catalunya at the Technical University of Catalonia are looking at a way to use bacteria as messengers that deliver instructions to nanobots wrapped in DNA. Researchers Maria Gregori and Ignacio Llatser encoded the cytoplasm of non-pathogenic strain of E. coli with a short DNA sequence. Think of it as a tweet.
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Teletext (or “broadcast teletext”) is a television information retrieval service developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. It offers a range of text-based information, typically including national, international and sporting news, weather and TV schedules. Subtitle (or closed captioning) information is also transmitted in the teletext signal, typically on page 888[1] or 777. (via Teletext - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lcxonoearJ1qzpy7ko1_500.png)
Teletext (or “broadcast teletext”) is a television information retrieval service developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. It offers a range of text-based information, typically including national, international and sporting news, weather and TV schedules. Subtitle (or closed captioning) information is also transmitted in the teletext signal, typically on page 888[1] or 777. (via Teletext - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
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Facebook set to launch ‘Gmail killer’ email system via The Guardian
Social networking firm expected to unveil @facebook.com email that could make it a serious rival to Gmail.
Just as Coco-Cola’s rival isn’t Pepsi, but water, Facebook’s rival is email, not Twitter …
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Mount Everest is now privileged with 3G mobile internet (via not.nu)
The Nepali mobile network operator Ncell has just installed the first 3G base station at the base camp of Mount Everest. Now Sherpas of the Khumby Valley as well as international climbers can all make calls, surf the internet and play online applications against one another while struggling with breath and exhaustion, together, on their climb up the sky-piercing rock formation.
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Video: Immaculate Telegraphy: How One Man Built a Telegraph Using Only Stone Age Materials via MotherBoard
Watch a preview here.
You may be proud of yourself for being able to camp, even build a fire, perhaps even read a compass. But all your merit patches probably wouldn’t amount to much if, say, you found yourself needing to restart civilization from scratch.
During the summer of 2009, artist Jamie O’Shea of the organization Substitute Materials set out to test whether or not electronic communication could have been built at any time in history with the proper knowledge, and with only tools and materials found in the wilderness of New Jersey.
Using the techniques learned during the project, called “Immaculate Telegraphy,” an entire telegraphic network could have been constructed in the Stone Age. Motherboard producer Kelly Loudenberg joined O’Shea as he sought to bring this miraculous, insane, and wonderful technology to life.
It’s the ultimate salvagepunk experiment, a DIY exploration of what makes innovation possible, and an attempt to prove that the future could happen at any time (even if the world isn’t always ready for it).
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The Chase
Abstract Comics is featuring work-in-progress comic, featuring no characters or entities, just visual dramatic signs.
All pages (1 to 6) can be found here
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“Decoding and interpreting signals, packets, gestures etc. is what we call communication. Since the birth of the computer, that viral mechanism has established a symbiotic relationship with their creators, to the point where humans cannot longer function as a society without them. As we merge and augment our senses, our machinic self takes over a majority of functions that we once considered essential for survival, including memory, the control of vital organs and appendices. Carbon and silicon, en route to the next evolutionary stage, collaborate to bring about the inevitable transformation. Telecommunications and the internet have become mobile. We are the nodes, the packets and the modems. We are still the storytellers, and we wish to share the magic around the digital fire. As we pull the curtain we discover that the Wizard is Us.” -
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China’s Twitter Clones - Written by Richard MacManus
via ReadWriteWeb
Since the closure of Twitter, Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu, other services have risen to take their place. Taotao (owned by the company that produces popular IM service QQ) and Zuosa.com are two examples.
However it is Weibo that has emerged to become the biggest micro-blogging service in China. It’s owned by Sina.com, a big portal company in China.
