Here’s one of many videos showing the technique : http://youtu.be/-boCCGtwggk

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.

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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!)