The first song I heard of theirs was Fake Empire of a previous album, while I like that album okay when I heard this one it was like they had struck a chord I hadn’t heard before.  The combination of the lead singer’s voice with the poetic / non-sensical lyrics and a simple but layered musical sound is really unique.  That combined with the fact that I can put this on heavy rotation and not get tired of it, makes this my pick for best album of 2011.

The technique works through probability and by detecting pairs of keystrokes, rather than individual keys (which still is too difficult to accomplish reliably, Traynor said). It models “keyboard events” in pairs, then determines whether the pair of keys pressed is on the left versus right side of the keyboard, and whether they are close together or far apart. After the system has determined these characteristics for each pair of keys depressed, it compares the results against a preloaded dictionary, each word of which has been broken down along similar measurements (i.e., are the letters left/right, near/far on a standard QWERTY keyboard). Finally, the technique only works reliably on words of three or more letters.

For example, take the word “canoe,” which when typed breaks down into four keystroke pairs: “C-A, A-N, N-O and O-E.” Those pairs then translate into the detection system’s code as follows: Left-Left-Near, Left-Right-Far, Right-Right-Far and Right-Left-Far, or LLN-LRF-RRF-RLF. This code is then compared to the preloaded dictionary and yields “canoe” as the statistically probable typed word. Working with dictionaries comprising about 58,000 words, the system reached word-recovery rates as high as 80 percent.

(via /.)

(Image: Keyboard, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from bull3t's photostream)

In a tech environment where most venture cash seems to be going to consumer-facing startups on the application layer, Qwilt’s plan to introduce new technology into the network might seem peculiar. But the company seeks to solve a serious problem with its technology: How can network operators best deal with the explosion of video data flowing through their networks?

By 2012, video will make up about half of all network traffic, according to Cisco, and will grow to 62 percent by 2015. That’s growing substantially, particularly as more video publishers make their content available over the Internet and as more devices — like connected TVs, Blu-ray players and game consoles, make it easy to watch IP-delivered video in a user’s living room.

All that growth has operators up in arms about the amount of capacity needed to usher that video traffic over the Internet and into their networks. Until now, many have thrown capacity at the problem by upgrading their networks. But that gets expensive, and isn’t a very capital-efficient way of dealing with the problem.

Qwilt’s solution relies on transparent caching technology designed to ensure that popular videos from services like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube can be stored at the edge of the network. That means video files are served up closer to the end user, which results in better video quality, at the same time that it offloads traffic that otherwise would travel over aggregation and core network infrastructure. By doing so, Qwilt can reduce network overhead by 60 to 80 percent, CEO Alon Maor told me in an interview.

That message resonates with some ISPs who are happy to reduce the amount of traffic that flows through their pipes. Maor told me Qwilt is in conversations with about 50 ISPs and trialing the technology with five ISPs. The caching product, which is primarily software-based and can run on any commercial off-the-shelf hardware, will be sold to ISPs for placement in their edge networks. With trials underway, Qwilt expects general availability of the product in the first half of 2012.

Qwilt has about 30 employees, with an engineering team in Israel and sales offices in London and Silicon Valley. On Qwilt’s board are chairman Yuval Shahar, former CEO of P-Cube (which was acquired by Cisco in 2004); Accel Partner Richard Wong; former Accel partner Peter Wagner; Crecent Point partner Ohad Finkelstein; serial entrepreneur Giora Yaron. Former RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser is also an investor in the company.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up
• The Evolution of Over-the-Top Video
• Managing infinite choice: the new era of TV user interfaces

Here's a magical demonstration of superconductivity from Tel-Aviv University. Of course, superconductors are key to the future vision for high-speed maglev trains. (Thanks, Ariel Waldman!)

Jonas Pfiel's "Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera" sports 36 cameras and contains firmware that stitches their output together to form a global panorama; you throw it into the air and at the top of its arc, it takes a snap and processes it.

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Many people have explained what one can learn from Steve Jobs. But few, if any, of these people have been inside the tent and experienced first hand what it was like to work with him. I don’t want any lessons to be lost or forgotten, so here is my list of the top twelve lessons that I learned from Steve Jobs.

1. Experts are clueless.

   Experts—journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t “do” so they “advise.” They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one. They can tell you how to sell something, but they cannot sell it themselves. They can tell you how to create great teams, but they only manage a secretary. For example, the experts told us that the two biggest shortcomings of Macintosh in the mid 1980s was the lack of a daisy-wheel printer driver and Lotus 1-2-3; another advice gem from the experts was to buy Compaq. Hear what experts say, but don’t always listen to them.

2. Customers cannot tell you what they need.

   “Apple market research” is an oxymoron. The Apple focus group was the right hemisphere of Steve’s brain talking to the left one. If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, “Better, faster, and cheaper”—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can only describe their desires in terms of what they are already using—around the time of the introduction of Macintosh, all people said they wanted was better, faster, and cheaper MS-DOS machines. The richest vein for tech startups is creating the product that you want to use—that’s what Steve and Woz did.

3. Jump to the next curve.

   Big wins happen when you go beyond better sameness. The best daisy-wheel printer companies were introducing new fonts in more sizes. Apple introduced the next curve: laser printing. Think of ice harvesters, ice factories, and refrigerator companies. Ice 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Are you still harvesting ice during the winter from a frozen pond?

4. The biggest challenges beget best work.

   I lived in fear that Steve would tell me that I, or my work, was crap. In public. This fear was a big challenge. Competing with IBM and then Microsoft was a big challenge. Changing the world was a big challenge. I, and Apple employees before me and after me, did their best work because we had to do our best work to meet the big challenges.

5. Design counts.

   Steve drove people nuts with his design demands—some shades of black weren’t black enough. Mere mortals think that black is black, and that a trash can is a trash can. Steve was such a perfectionist—a perfectionist Beyond: Thunderdome—and lo and behold he was right: some people care about design and many people at least sense it. Maybe not everyone, but the important ones.

6. You can’t go wrong with big graphics and big fonts.

   Take a look at Steve’s slides. The font is sixty points. There’s usually one big screenshot or graphic. Look at other tech speaker’s slides—even the ones who have seen Steve in action. The font is eight points, and there are no graphics. So many people say that Steve was the world’s greatest product introduction guy..don’t you wonder why more people don’t copy his style?

7. Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence.

   When Apple first shipped the iPhone there was no such thing as apps. Apps, Steve decreed, were a bad thing because you never know what they could be doing to your phone. Safari web apps were the way to go until six months later when Steve decided, or someone convinced Steve, that apps were the way to go—but of course. Duh! Apple came a long way in a short time from Safari web apps to “there’s an app for that.”

8. “Value” is different from “price.”

   Woe unto you if you decide everything based on price. Even more woe unto you if you compete solely on price. Price is not all that matters—what is important, at least to some people, is value. And value takes into account training, support, and the intrinsic joy of using the best tool that’s made. It’s pretty safe to say that no one buys Apple products because of their low price.

9. A players hire A+ players.

   Actually, Steve believed that A players hire A players—that is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightly—my theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. It’s clear, though, that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players. If you start hiring B players, expect what Steve called “the bozo explosion” to happen in your organization.

10. Real CEOs demo.

    Steve Jobs could demo a pod, pad, phone, and Mac two to three times a year with millions of people watching, why is it that many CEOs call upon their vice-president of engineering to do a product demo? Maybe it’s to show that there’s a team effort in play. Maybe. It’s more likely that the CEO doesn’t understand what his/her company is making well enough to explain it. How pathetic is that?

11. Real CEOs ship.

    For all his perfectionism, Steve could ship. Maybe the product wasn’t perfect every time, but it was almost always great enough to go. The lesson is that Steve wasn’t tinkering for the sake of tinkering—he had a goal: shipping and achieving worldwide domination of existing markets or creation of new markets. Apple is an engineering-centric company, not a research-centric one. Which would you rather be: Apple or Xerox PARC?

12. Marketing boils down to providing unique value. Think of a 2 x 2 matrix. The vertical axis measures how your product differs from the competition. The horizontal axis measures the value of your product. Bottom right: valuable but not unique—you’ll have to compete on price. Top left: unique but not valuable—you’ll own a market that doesn’t exist. Bottom left: not unique and not value—you’re a bozo. Top right: unique and valuable—this is where you make margin, money, and history. For example, the iPod was unique and valuable because it was the only way to legally, inexpensively, and easily download music from the six biggest record labels.

Bonus: Some things need to be believed to be seen. When you are jumping curves, defying/ignoring the experts, facing off against big challenges, obsessing about design, and focusing on unique value, you will need to convince people to believe in what you are doing in order to see your efforts come to fruition. People needed to believe in Macintosh to see it become real. Ditto for iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Not everyone will believe—that’s okay. But the starting point of changing the world is changing a few minds. This is the greatest lesson of all that I learned from Steve.

If you think your memory has fallen off a cliff over the past ten years or so, it might not be memory loss due to aging. It might be due to the way Google restructures how our brains archive knowledge.

Why bother storing a voluminous amount of knowledge in our gray matter when we can instead remember a search query to pull the same information at a later date?  

This evolution of how we learn and retain details might allow us to be more efficient in our consumption of information, but what happens to society when we become overly reliant on Google to do the job our brains have always done? Check out this infographic designed by Onlinecolleges.net.

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Every Age Group Is Getting Poorer In America, Except For One
• REUTERS: Business Insider Sucks
• LEAKED MEMO: Jerry Yang Tells Yahoos The Company Is For Sale