A pint of my enlightened encephalon

The Gulf oil spill

2010-06-11T10:47:00.000-07:00

What lies beneath

New and valuable lessons are being learnt from the massive operation to stop the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

IT IS not the invasion of Normandy, but by peacetime standards the flotilla stationed about 65km (40 miles) off the Louisiana coast is a mightily impressive one. Where once the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig floated in solitary splendour, there are now two similar rigs, along with the Discoverer Enterprise, a drilling ship; the Viking Poseidon, which knows how to install things on the sea floor; four mother ships for remotely operated underwater vehicles; various barges and supply vessels; and the Q4000, a rig that specialises in repairing and closing wells. If the well that the Deepwater Horizon was in the process of closing off four weeks ago continues to spray oil into the sea for months to come, it won’t be for a lack of expensive, sophisticated and improbable-looking hardware a mile up above it.

It is that mile which is the problem. The oil industry has been fixing blowouts for more than a century. The challenge is doing it under 150 atmospheres of pressure with the tools and lights of a robot mini-submarine that gets its power and instructions by way of a cable. Under these conditions well-laid plans can come to naught, as they did when icy methane hydrates that form when natural gas gets mixed up with cold water at high pressure scuppered plans to funnel the leaking oil up to Discoverer Enterprise. The hydrates did not just clog the pipes, they also buoyed up the 125-tonne cofferdam that had been lowered over the leak, lifting it right off the sea bed.

On May 16th, though, oil did start to be collected, thanks to a subtler intervention. Oil is currently escaping from two leaks, one at each end of the well’s riser. The riser connected Deepwater Horizon to its blowout preventer, a stack of valves on the sea floor which marked the top of the well proper (see illustration). When the rig sank, the riser broke near the top while remaining attached to the blowout preventer at the bottom, bending itself like a pretzel in its subsequent collapse. Some oil is now flowing from where the riser and the blowout preventer meet; most is coming from the broken end of the riser, which has ended up about 300 metres away on the sea floor. It is from a tube slipped into that distal end that oil is now being pumped up to Discoverer Enterprise and its attendant barges.

The insertion device, about a fifth of the diameter of the riser itself, is not supposed to block the flow of oil completely. If it did, the pressure of the oil would blow it out of the riser like a cork in a hose. Instead it sucks at the oil flowing around it, but gauging how hard to suck is tricky. Without enough suction more oil than necessary would continue to leak out; too much and it will let in water which will make the formation of those pesky hydrates more likely. Other anti-hydrate measures include a small pipe feeding methanol, an antifreeze, into the maw of the riser, and hot water circulating through a sleeve to warm the pipe bringing the oil to the surface. According to Kent Wells, vice-president of BP, the oil company in overall charge of the project, the amount of oil coming up through the pipe had risen to 2,000 barrels a day by May 17th.

What fraction of the whole that represents is unclear. The American government has estimated that about 5,000 barrels a day are pouring out of the well. Other analysts reckon the flow rate may be five or ten times higher, on the basis of video images from mini-submarines and the area and thickness of the slicks at the surface. A well might produce 50,000 barrels a day. BP is keeping mum, but it does say that the plume of leaking oil looks significantly different now that suction is being applied. That suggests 2,000 barrels a day is a noticeable fraction of the whole.

Full fathom five hundred

The next step is to try to staunch the flow proper with drilling mud, a mixture of water and clay minerals. The well is gushing because of the pressure the oil is under in its reservoir 4,300 metres below the sea bed. If drilling mud can be forced into the well under even greater pressure—a technique called “top kill”—it will eventually reach a depth where the weight of the column of drilling mud exerts enough pressure to stop any oil flowing upwards. The tough bit is getting the requisite amount of drilling mud far enough down the well.

To do this, BP has been replumbing and rewiring the blowout preventer, paying particular attention to its choke pipe and the kill pipe. These provide access to the central bore of the well underneath most of the heavy valves which should have closed off the flow of oil, but for some reason did not. The two pipes, which originally went up to the Deepwater Horizon, have been reconnected with heavyweight hoses to a metal framework called a manifold that has been installed nearby. Above it the Q4000 rig and three attendant vessels have 50,000 barrels of peculiarly heavy drilling mud and pumps capable of providing 30,000 horsepower with which to muscle that mud into the well.

The blowout preventer’s control pod, which was also originally connected to the lost rig, has been taken up to the Q4000, where it has been tested and attached to new cables. The pod should soon be on its way back down for reattachment to the preventer. The Q4000 will then have control over the valves that connect the choke and kill lines to the well proper. One reason why all this is taking time is that there are now up to 14 remotely operated underwater vehicles working around the well. A “simultaneous operations” unit is needed to choreograph the complex dance of vessels, submersibles and rigs.

Mr Wells says that once the control pod has been reinstalled on the blowout preventer and the manifold is attached to the Q4000, the top kill could start. The control pod will open the valves that allow the drilling mud to be forced into the well. At that point the fluid-dynamics equivalent of a titanic arm-wrestling match will get under way, with the surface vessels’ pumps trying to push the mud down the well while the rising oil tries to push it out.

If the oil wins, then the team will try a “junk shot”. The manifold has two containers full of various sorts of rubber and plastic that are particularly good at gumming things up (Mr Wells prefers to call this a “bridging agent”). Open and close a few valves on the manifold and the drilling mud from the surface can squirt one of these junk shots down the pipes and into the blowout preventer. The oil pressure will force it up into the heart of the stack of valves. There, by making it harder for anything to get out of the top, the junk will give the drilling mud a better chance in a second bout of arm wrestling. The second container of junk provides another shot.

If both barrels fail there is the possibility of putting a new blowout preventer on top of the old one. That would mean cutting the existing riser, but now that the siphon inserted into it is bringing oil up to the barges it means risking a serious setback. So it may be wiser to wait for the relief wells that are being drilled to get down to the point, 4,000 metres below the sea bed, where they will intersect the existing well. At that depth stopping the flow with a deadweight of drilling fluid should create few problems, once the exceedingly difficult challenge of hitting the well is met. So far, the first relief well is only about 1,000 metres or so below the sea bed, and the second has only just been started.

Underwater spraying

Not all the remotely operated vehicles at the site have been involved in replumbing kill lines, hooking up manifolds and supporting the relief wells. Some have been swanning around spraying chemical dispersants into the oily waters. If the top kills do not work this spraying may also help limit the damage done by the oil before the relief wells are finished.

Dispersants consist of surfactants (which are like detergents) in a solvent. When applied to a slick of oil they are meant to break it up into tiny droplets which disperse widely and are broken down by bacteria. The use of dispersants reduces the chances of direct exposure to oil by birds, fish, sea animals and everything ashore, but it may increase the risks for things on the sea floor in some circumstances. This is why they cannot be used everywhere. They are also toxic, though a lot less so than oil itself. In the early days of the spill Corexit 9527, the manufacture of which requires a solvent that has been linked with health problems in workers spraying the stuff, was used because there was not enough of its less toxic version, Corexit 9500, to hand.

BP has been criticised for its exclusive use of these two chemicals, which have been around for decades. Inevitably companies have claimed to offer products that are more effective and less toxic. Although BP had at first said it was not considering any other dispersants, a source at the company says it is now evaluating four additional dispersants, already approved by America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and assessing the reliability of supply as well as toxicity. By mid-week some 582,000 gallons of dispersant had been sprayed since the emergency began.

Spraying dispersants in new ways, rather than using new formulations, may make more of a difference. BP thinks spraying dispersants into the oil plume where it leaves the riser may be 20 times more effective than waiting until it reaches the surface. If so, the 45,000 gallons so far sprayed at depth may have done more good than all the spraying at the surface. Three trials of this technique have been made by the EPA, the first two being inconclusive due to logistical difficulties.

The EPA has been trying to find out whether oil treated with dispersants at depth behaves in the way one would expect if dispersed higher up. It also wanted to make sure there were no problems with oxygen levels. The bugs which eat oil use oxygen to do so, so slightly lower levels would be a good indicator that they are at work. There is a risk, though, that the bugs might eat up all the available oxygen—which would harm other things and then stop any further oil-eating.

On May 17th, after the third of the trials at the well, the EPA approved the deep-sea use of dispersants, and BP is now preparing a ship to provide the analysis and monitoring that continuous spraying will require. Research into dealing with spilled oil is limited, and breakthroughs are scarce. If spraying at source really is as good or better than surface spraying, and requires a great deal less dispersant, it will be a boon.

There will be plenty of lessons to learn from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Once the leaks have been stopped, Mr Wells hopes to get the failed blowout preventer to the surface so that it is at last possible to see what really went wrong. It is not just the engineering response to future oil spills that will be affected, but also working practices, safety systems and regulation. The future safety of offshore drilling for both the roughnecks and the environment will be shaped by what happens a mile below.

The Economist Newspaper | Science and Technology

How to be urban

2010-06-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

Some enterprising architects grapple with the cityscapes of the 2030s

THERE is a hole in the green imagination about 20 years away. In the short term—the next ten years, say—the environmentalists’ vision is usually of a world similar to this one with a bit less of one thing (carbon dioxide) and a bit more of a panoply of others (windmills, forests, smartgrids and the like). In the far off future of 2050 and beyond, the world is meant to look very different indeed. Carbon-dioxide emissions should, by then, be less than half what they are now; in today’s rich countries they should have fallen by 90% or so. This means entirely new infrastructures and technologies, and perhaps entirely new ways of life, too.

That, however, leaves something of a disconnect around 2030. So there is a need to imagine a sort of bridge between the now-like near future and the Utopian not-so-near one. The Audi Urban Future Award, a project unveiled at a conference in London on May 28th, aims to help. Six innovative architectural practices have been asked to produce projects with a vision for 2030. The results will be revealed at the Venice Architecture Biennale later this summer, and the winner will receive €100,000 ($123,000).

The six competing firms are a cross-section of architecture’s youngish avant garde.Alison Brooks Architects, of London, has a strong background in urban planning. TheBjarke Ingels Group from Copenhagen is experimental and playful. Diller Scofidio + Renfroare perhaps best known for a building defined by a cloud of water droplets built for an expo in Switzerland. Cloud 9 of Barcelona looks for buildings that are sensitive to their local climate and conditions. Jürgen Mayer H, from Germany, has produced a remarkable roof for a market square in Seville. And Standard-architecture of Beijing gave a remarkable presentation of its city surrounded by green skyscrapers like man-made versions of the Guilin mountains.

There was, indeed, an odd orderliness about many of the presentations, not least in the way they dealt with cars. Pretty much all of the presentations assumed that cars would be self-piloting within 20 years, and that their interiors would, to some extent, be transformed into extensions of living spaces.

Some suggested a sort of descendant of the iPad offering an interface between car and passengers, an idea that seemed to emphasise the way in which the vehicles would feel like blank slates. But if the iPad was one of the common themes joining many of the presentations, reminding the audience that Audi is not the only company in the smooth, cool aluminium business, another repeated image was that of Steve McQueen behind the wheel of a Mustang in the film “Bullitt”, looking very unlike a man who just happened to be sitting in a room that moved. How the notion of power and autonomy built into the car and its associated desires can be domesticated in ever denser cities will be a crucial matter for at least some of these practices to deal with in their finished projects.

Another, more radical step would be to question the notion of personal mobility itself. At the moment, people need such mobility because there are things they want to bring home as well as places they need to get to. Electronic networks may change that. It is not completely far-fetched to imagine charming, vast and dense cities in which most human movement takes place on foot while most movement of goods is by robot delivery systems.

But perhaps the whole exercise is misconceived. Cities are perfect examples of the sorts of system that emerge from unplanned preferences even as they seem to demand large-scale planning. The question is whether the patterns of that emergence can be shaped by changing the objects of desire, or whether it is necessary to change the desire itself. If the former, then experts in beautiful buildings and sleek aluminium have a chance. If the latter, the question becomes a whole lot harder.

From Economist.com

Take a Peek Inside Facebook's New & Really Cool Office

2010-04-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

Designed by the folks at Studio O+A, the engineers at Facebook have now a new and really cool office located at Palo Alto, California, USA. Before the redesign and construction of the 150,000-square-foot office, each of every Facebook employees were consulted to find out what they wanted and what would their work experience better and more productive. Based from the photos taken below, the new office is indeed much more cozy and colorful. I personally love the DJ set and the bender on the wall!

Facebook’s New Office:

Facebook’s Old Office:

source : techxav.com

Who Are the Web Hosts behind the Top 20 blogs

2010-04-15T21:20:00.000-07:00

Do you have any favorite blogs which you love to read them often? Well, if it’s a popular blog, probably you know who are the guys (founder and editors) generating the interesting content. However, without a web host, that website will definitely not exist on the net. Many people are only aware who write or design the blog but only a small minority really care about the most important factor that guides a blog to success. This crucial factor got to be the web host!

Grabbing information from WhoIsHostingThis (a website that shows you the web host for every website you want to search for), I’ve created my own list of “Who Are the Web Hosts Behind the Top 20 Blogs?”. Although, the folks there has already came up with the idea of “The World’s Top 100 Blogs & Their Hosts“, but in here, I’ve done it using a differnet perspective. Also, the popular blogs are ranked based on the number of unqiue visitors per month and the source is from Compete (a web tracking platform).

1. Huffingtonpost

Number of Visitors: 6.53 million/month

Web Host: Datagram

2. TMZ.com

Number of Visitors: 5.65 million/month

Web Host: America Online

3. PerezHilton

Number of Visitors: 2.17 million/month

Web Host: Voxel

4. Gawker

Number of Visitors: 2.16 million/month

Web Host: Datagram

5. Gizmodo

Number of Visitors: 2.1 million/month

Web Host: Datagram

6. Boing Boing

Number of Visitors: 2.05 million/month

Web Host: Priority Colo

7. Engadget

Number of Visitors: 1.89 million/month

Web Host:Â America Online

8. TechCrunch

Number of Visitors: 1.76 million/month

Web Host: Media Temple

9. LifeHacker

Number of Visitors: 1.72 million/month

Web Host: Datagram

10. Mashable

Number of Visitors: 1.69 million/month

Web Host: Media Temple

11. FanHouse

Number of Visitors: 1.46 million/month

Web Host: America Online

12. icanhascheezburger.com

Number of Visitors: 1.14 million/month

Web Host: Layered Technologies

13. AutoBlog

Number of Visitors: 1.1 million/month

Web Host: America Online

14. TreeHugger

Number of Visitors: 1.01 million/month

Web Host: Pair Networks

15. Consumerist

Number of Visitors: 951,000/month

Web Host: Datagram

16. Smashing Magazine

Number of Visitors: 929,000/month

Web Host: Net-Build GmbH

17. ReadWriteWeb

Number of Visitors: 841,000/month

Web Host: Media Temple

18. Kotaku

Number of Visitors: 814,000/month

Web Host: Datagram

19. Joystiq

Number of Visitors: 754,000/month

Web Host: America Online

20. Jalopnik

Number of Visitors: 711,000/month

Web Host: Datagram

source : techxav

The History of Twitter in pictures

2010-04-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

All thanks to the excessive media coverage and the influence of several notable celebrities, Twitter has emerged from a simple start-up that has less than 100 users to one of the world’s most popular micro-blogging platform on the world wide web with over 22 millions unique visitors from the United States in June. Despite the fact that 60% of users quit after using a month, Twitter’s ever-reaching growth still continues on an upward trend.

Jack Dorsey first introduced the idea of a service that used SMS to tell small groups what an individual was doing, partly inspired by TXTMob to the other employees at Odeo, a podcasting company.

The original product name/codename for the service was named twttr; inspired by Flickr and the fact that American SMS short codes are five characters. The developers prototyped with “10958″ as short code, later changing it to “40404″ for ease of use and memorability.

Its “top secret” Alpha version was launched on March 21 2006 and Jack Dorsey was the first to post a tweet – “just setting up my twttr” at 12:50 pm Pacific time.

Private Accounts were born. This feature enables protected account owners control who is able to follow them, and keep their updates away from the public eye. Twttr had about 100 users at that time.

Twttr beta was launched to the public on July 15 2006, Evan Williams’ birthday.

In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corp and acquired Odeo and all of its assets – including Odeo.com and Twitter.com – from the investors and other shareholders. Below: co-founders of Twitter (Left: Jack Dorsey, Center: Biz Stone, Right: Evan Williams)

Originally, Twitter had no character limit and several issues were aroused. For example, users tend to compose tweets of over 160 characters (the default SMS carrier limit). As a result, they were split into multiple posts which didn’t look too good.

In March 2007, Twitter wins blog awards at South by Southwest Interactive Conference and Jack Dorsey thanked everyone in 140 characters. This had sparked the first media interest. The micro-blogging platform which normally carries around 20 thousand messages a day, broke 60 thousand a day that weekend. This traffic boost added a strong layer of new permanent users.

Twitter later spun off into its own company in April 2007 with Jack as the CEO.

United States first African President Barack Obama posted his first tweet on April 30 2007.

By the end of 2007, most of the tech world was talking about Twitter — and, not surprisingly, predicting its death. They were questioning Twitter’s business model but the folks there said Twitter will remain ad-free for the moment and continue to rely on its investments to support its server fees. The micro-blogging giant gradually loses its traditional way of asking users this question – “What are you doing?”. Many Twitterers especially bloggers or Internet marketers tend to share links on a frequent basis and the number of mundane updates decreases.

Twitter wins first-ever ‘Crunchie’ award under the “Best Mobile Startup” category held at the historic Herbst Theater in downtown San Francisco on January 2008.

Because of Twitter’s phenomenal growth, the folks at Twitter move their from their default web host to NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services on February 2008 in a bid to boost reliability. Some improvements had been made to their office.

On April 22 2008, Twitter tries to garner more tech-savvy Japanese to join the micro-blogging platform by creating an official Twitter Japan service. However, it comes with advertisements unlike the original English version.

On July 14 2008, Twitter acquires Summarize. Summize is a popular service for searching Twitter and keeping up with emerging trends in real-time. Like Twitter, Summize offers an API so other products and services can filter the constant queue of updates in a variety of ways. The Summize service and API will be merged with our own and integrated under the Twitter brand. As a result, Twitter Search is born.

When Twitter experiences an outage, users see the “fail whale” error message created by Australian artist and designer Yiying Lu, a whimsical illustration of red birds using nets to hoist a whale from the ocean. The message reads: “Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.”

Unlike the previous few United States Presidential elections, the candidates Barack Obama and John McCain tries to garner more fans by using the power of social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter during the crucial pre-election period. On the day of the United States’ 2008 election, signups were up 40.3% and updates increased 46% from previous Tuesday. Not surprisingly, Barack Obama won the election.

Twitter hits a milestone on November 12 2008 by surpassing the one billion tweet mark according to Popacular’s Gigatweet which grabs data from the public timeline. The one billionth tweet was actually a private message.

Later in 2008, Twitter was in the media spotlight whereby an increasing number of celebrities head to the micro-blogging platform to connect with their fans on the Web. One example would be Shaq, a famous basketball player in the NBA. He joined Twitter on November 20 2008, a fortnight after the Presidential election results were released.

Twitter has sparked off tons of discussions on the Web whether it offers more accurate and faster results and news as compared to search engine giant Google especially after the November terrorist carnage in Mumbai, India and Hudson River plane crash. These events brought Twitter to new heights.

All thanks to the presence of two influential celebrities – well-known prankster Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey, Twitter’s growth has boosted tremendously at the start of 2009. In the much-publicized duel, Kutcher’s Twitter account crossed the 1 million mark on Twitter about 2:13 a.m. ET Friday (April 17 2009), narrowly beating CNN’s breaking-news feed, which had 998,239 followers at the time. CNN passed the mark at 2:42 a.m. ET.

Twitter’s “small settings update” on May 12 2009 had sparked controversy on the micro-blogging platform with many users protesting against the new update. According to theÂ Twitter blog, “We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.” Thousands of Twitter users around the world were up-in-arms and organized their efforts with the #fixreplies hashtag, which was currently the top trending topic at that time.

NASA’s Mike Massimino makes history on Twitterverse for being the first person in the world to tweet from space. His status update reads, “From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!”

Plans for a Twitter-based reality TV show were the talk of Hollywood (and Silicon Valley) on Memorial Day, but 24 hours after the news broke, the Twitterverse is up in arms and even the micro-blogging site’s co-founder, Biz Stone, seems to be hedging. Celebrity couple and avid Twitterers Ashton and Demi were even frustrated with over the plans.

Twitter launches ‘Verified Accounts’ on June 12 2009 following the filing of a lawsuit by St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa over fake tweets made in his name. It features a special seal which enable users to find out whether the profile of a particular celebrity is genuine or not.

Twitpocalypse hits 2,147,483,647 on 2009-06-12 23:52:04 GMT. This number is the signed integer limit and apparently when some third-party Twitter clients start hitting it, the identifiers will start turning negative, and those apps are likely to crash as a result.

US computer giant Dell announced on June 12 2009 that it has generated over US$2 million in revenues from its Twitter outlet which currently stands at 830,000+ followers.

Twitter + World Of Warcraft=Tweetcraft. This is some great news for hardcore Warcraft gamers. With this in-game Twitter client, users are able to send and receive tweets in-game, upload screenshots to TwitPic, automatically tweet when you get an achievement, and more.

source : techxav

Orkin Design and Sony Show Off Roll-Up Laptop Concepts

2010-03-25T23:59:00.000-07:00

By Jeremy Hsu

Rolltop Computing Get ready to roll and go with this multi-touch laptop Orkin Design

Laptops keep getting thinner and lighter, but some concept laptops take portable to a new level. Orkin Design's Rolltop consists of an OLED display that can start as a rolled-up mat and deploy as a multi-touch 17-inch laptop. My beastly HP laptop just shed a tear of envy.

The Orkin laptop can also transform into a tablet PC operable with a stylus, or become a standup flat screen display. A power adapter and other features fit with the carrying canister that comes with a convenient holding strap.

Sony has also gotten in on the action with concept laptops, watches and MP3 players that take advantage of flexible OLED technology. All those went on display at CEATEC 2009 in Chiba, Japan.

source : popular science

The Quest to Read the Human Mind

2010-03-25T23:42:00.000-07:00

If a few very smart neuroscientists are right, with enough number crunching and a powerful brain scanner, science can pluck pictures—and maybe one day even thoughts— directly from your brain

By Lisa Katayama

The Mind Reader Coherent Images

It’s after dark on a warm Monday night in April, and I’m lying face-up in a 13-ton tube at the Henry H. Wheeler, Jr. Brain Imaging Center at the University of California at Berkeley. The room is dimly lit, and I am alone. A white plastic cage covers my face, and a blue computer screen shines brightly into my eyes. I’m here because a neuroscientist named Jack Gallant is about to read my mind. He has given me strict instructions not to move; even the slightest twitch could affect the accuracy of what he’s about to do. As I stare straight up, I notice an itch on my thigh. Don’t scratch it, I tell myself. I try to keep my thoughts blank as the beeping gets faster and the fMRI machine—the scanner that will detect changes in blood flow in my brain—powers up.

Gallant assures me that the random thoughts in my head will not affect his results. Today he’s just concerned with what I see and how that registers in the visual cortex, a region at the back of the brain that processes what my eyes take in. It doesn’t matter that I’m thinking about what to eat for dinner, or that I’m worried about getting a parking ticket on Oxford Street. The only important thing, he says, is for me to keep as still as possible, and soon he’ll have enough information to re-create the pictures I’ve been staring at without ever having seen the images himself.

For the past 10 years, Gallant has been running a neuroscience and psychology lab at Berkeley dedicated to brain imaging and vision research. He’s one of a few neuroscientists in the world on the verge of unlocking the key to mind reading through brain-pattern analysis using magnetic resonance scans and algorithms. By showing me a series of random photographs and evaluating fMRI readings from my primary visual cortex, Gallant says his technique can reconstruct imagery stored in my brain. His current method takes hours of analysis, but his objective is to hone the technology to the point where it can deduce what people are seeing in real time.

If successful, it could influence the way we do just about everything. Mind-reading machines could help doctors understand the inner worlds of people with hallucinations, cognitive disabilities, post-traumatic stress disorder and other impairments. Judges could use them to sneak a look into suspects’ brains by having them reenact the experience and reading their visions. Such machines could also determine whether someone using the insanity defense is faking it, or whether someone claiming self-defense truly feared for his life. On the flip side, the technology raises serious ethical concerns, with critics worrying that it could one day make our private thoughts vulnerable to snoops and hackers.

I ponder all this as I lie motionless in the brain scanner, staring straight ahead while Gallant and two of his lab researchers flash several dozen photographs in front of my eyes, a few seconds at a time. I see sheep grazing in a meadow, a rock formation, a pond and a profile of a guy who looks like Einstein. I’m not actually supposed to be looking at these pictures—my job is to stare at the white dot in the middle of the screen. “Seeing” doesn’t happen entirely in the conscious realm, Gallant explains. The visual cortex works like a camera, automatically absorbing information through the retina and registering the imagery in the brain.

Ten minutes feels like an eternity, but finally the fMRI announces the conclusion of its program with another loud beep. The researchers remove me from my bind and escort me to the control room, where a giant monitor is displaying 30 scanned images of my brain from different angles. I see bunches of white squiggly lines and light gray V shapes inside rows of gray circles. “That’s it? That’s my brain?” I ask, my head foggy from having tried so hard to stay still. It surprises me that all the goings-on in my mind can be reduced to a bunch of geometric shapes. Gallant tells me that brain activity is basically just a bunch of neurons firing—an estimated 300 million in the primary visual cortex alone, according to the latest research.

To help make sense of the shapes, the brain scanner divides them up into a grid of three-dimensional cube-like structures called volume pixels, or voxels. To me, each voxel looks like a random mix of whites, grays and blacks. But to Gallant’s computer model, which can see more-precise data in those shades, the voxels are a meaningful matrix of zeroes and ones. By crunching this matrix, it can transform the shapes back into a remarkably accurate rendering of the Einstein Guy or the grazing sheep. Gallant and his team didn’t have time to generate enough scans of my brain to make their algorithm work, but they showed me some convincing results from other volunteers. “It’s not perfect,” says Shinji Nishimoto, one of Gallant’s postdocs, “but we’re getting pretty close.”

Japanese Mind Reading Technology
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As I leave the lab, my thoughts secure in my head, I feel a bit uneasy knowing that they may not stay that way for long. Gallant’s “neural decoding”—a term he prefers to “mind reading”—is getting faster and more sophisticated all the time. In fact, last October, his lab managed to re-create entire video clips just by analyzing the brain patterns of people watching them. In one example, a reconstructed video of an elephant walking through the desert shows a blotchy Dumbo-shaped mass plodding across the screen. The fine details are lost, but the rendering is nonetheless impressive for having been pulled from someone’s brain. And it’s not just Gallant who’s making progress. Using similar technology, other researchers are unlocking memories and dreams.

Beyond the fuzzy realm of the paranormal, mind reading could simply be a question of having the right tools. “As long as we have good measurements of brain activity and good computational models of the brain,” Gallant wrote in a supplement to a paper he published in Nature in 2008, “it should be possible in principle to decode the visual content of mental processes like dreams, memory, and imagery.”

fMRI, How It Works: Your brain generates a unique pattern of activity for every image it sees. By analyzing thousands of fMRI scans [right], software can match patterns in your brain to specific objects. Kevin Hand

What's on your Mind?

Remarkably, scientists can predict with near-perfect accuracy the last thing you saw just by analyzing your brain activity. The technique is called neural decoding. To do it, scientists must first scan your brain while you look at thousands of pictures. A computer then analyzes how your brain responds to each image, matching brain activity to various details like shape and color. Over time, the computer establishes a sort of master decoding key that it can later use to identify and reconstruct almost any object you see without the need to analyze the image beforehand.

Head First: fMRI machines like this one are helping scientists decode brain activity. Courtesy Yukiyasu Kamitani/ATR Brain Activity Imaging Center

The Magic of the MRI

Gallant is a slight, wiry man with a horseshoe mustache and a Willy Wonka–esque energy about him. He tends to use friendly, vivid analogies when he talks. “The brain is a Thanksgiving turkey,” he said to me last summer during a visit to his bare-bones office at Berkeley. He was drawing furiously on the chalkboard, attempting to explain in simple terms the inner workings of the visual cortex. “The outside of the turkey is the skin, or the brain’s cortex. All the giblets inside are subcortical nuclei. This”—he tapped his chalk on the giant balloon-like cavity at the rear of his “turkey” diagram—“is the primary visual cortex,” the center of our vision system.

The brain employs a complex assembly line to construct the world around us. The primary visual cortex, or V1, connects to a maze of other regions known as V2, V3, and so on. (“Nobody knows exactly how many areas there are up there,” Gallant says, a finger to his head.) Each region performs specific vision-related functions, like distinguishing colors, discerning shapes, gauging depth, or sensing motion. When I look at a dog, for instance, I don’t just see the shape of a four-legged animal; I recognize that it’s the brown-and-white dog I owned as a child, romping in a familiar way in the backyard I grew up in. It might even trigger a memory of playing with him. Each of these aspects of “seeing” would be represented by different patterns in the visual cortex.

The key function of V1 relevant to Gallant’s research—registering visual stimuli—was discovered in the early 20th century, when soldiers with bullet wounds to the back of the head, presumably to their visual cortex, experienced partial blindness despite having healthy eyes. Experiments on rodents affirmed that the location and shape of things we see are replicated in V1. If I were to look at a tree, for instance, the back of the eye would register a representation of an upside-down tree onto V1. But it wasn’t until the late 1990s, when neuroscientists used a process called multi-voxel pattern recognition, that scientists were able to pinpoint these representations non-invasively in humans. The technique uses fMRIs to map the visual cortex into tiny structures—voxels—that correspond to patterns of blood flow. One pattern in the area responsible for shape, for instance, might suggest that a person is looking at a dog, while another pattern in the area responsible for color could suggest that the dog is brown.

Gallant’s project takes the technique to a new level, using a computer model to not only identify images but also reconstruct them. On the night of my fMRI session, I met five members of Gallant’s lab who, for the past three years, have been wrestling with probability theory to come up with the best algorithms to power the model. When I asked them how exactly they devised the code, Thomas Naselaris, a tall, curly-haired postdoc, put a long equation on the blackboard called Bayes’ theorem. It’s a fundamental tenet of probability theory that calculates how odds change in response to new information, he explained, and it’s the key to their technique.

To calculate the probability that someone’s brain patterns represent a particular image, the researchers must first prime their special equation with a sizable sampling of data, plugging in 1,750 of the subject’s fMRI scans. “For every possible image a person could be looking at, Bayes’ theorem tells you the probability that the image is correct,” Naselaris says. It’s a bit like trying to predict the make of a car concealed beneath a tarp: To come up with an accurate guess, you must first analyze all the available clues—the shape of the tarp, its size, maybe the type of person who owns the car, possibly the sound of the engine. The more information you have, the better your guess. Likewise, the more data you plug into the equation, the more accurate its predictions.

Dancing Bears

The ability to pluck a picture from someone’s brain is an impressive feat, but the far bigger challenge is figuring out the actual thoughts associated with that picture. Gallant would have no way to know, for instance, what I was thinking while I was lying in the scanner. That’s because thoughts, unlike pictures, are not neatly recorded at the back of the brain.

So where are they recorded? Tom Mitchell, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, along with his colleague Marcel Just, is using fMRI and multi-voxel pattern recognition to answer that question. By mapping the brain’s response to images, words and emotions, Mitchell believes his lab could be decoding thoughts, not just pictures, within the decade.

To pinpoint where thoughts live in the brain, during a recent study he put volunteers in an fMRI machine, showed them two objects—a hammer and a house, for example—and used software to analyze voxel patterns triggered in multiple parts of the brain, ultimately determining which object the subject was thinking about. Like Gallant, Mitchell can do this with 90 percent accuracy. “When you think about a hammer, you think about all aspects of it. You might think about swinging it, which would fire neurons in your motor cortex,” he says. “You might think about what it looks like, which activates the visual cortex.” His team also gathered fMRI data from the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex—areas that correlate with emotions like anger and love—to map out brain patterns that form when people hear words such as “love,” “justice” and “anxiety.”

Yukiyasu Kamitani, a computational neuroscientist at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Japan, believes he can take the technology even further and decode dreams. This summer, he plans to put sleeping people in the fMRI to read their brain signals and, like Gallant, reconstruct them.

Meanwhile, Gallant and Nishimoto are attempting to reproduce movies stored in the brain. After I finish my fMRI scans, Gallant showed me a video clip on his computer featuring psychedelic bears floating in front of mountains. Every few seconds, a new bear zoomed into the foreground and then floated away like a beach ball tossed in the air. Occasionally a colorful cube flew past the bears. Just looking at it made me dizzy. “This is a motion-enhanced movie,” Gallant says excitedly. “It makes your visual system go absolutely crazy, so you get lots of blood flow and signals.”

Nishimoto, the lab’s resident “motion guy,” is able to reconstruct from brain scans the colors, location and movement of these bears, generating reproductions of the original video footage. In a similar experiment, he asked a volunteer to watch two hours of movie trailers inside an fMRI machine. A com puter then matched the subject’s brain patterns to colors and moving shapes in the movie. To build up the computer model’s reference library of associations—to prime it—the researchers fed it thousands of hours of YouTube videos and asked it to predict how the person’s brain would respond to watching them. Then, when the subject watched a new set of videos, the computer was able to match the new brain patterns to images in its library to piece together a reproduction of the original video clip. The reconstructed video captured the general flow of motion, as well as shapes and colors, although it missed fine details such as facial features. The resolution will improve, the researchers say, as more data is added to the computer model. “Whenever I tell anyone we can do this,” Gallant says, “they say there’s no way.”

Thinking back to the rat’s nest of lines from my own fMRI readings—all that from looking at a simple black-and-white photo—it’s a little creepy to think that our mental processes can be reduced to binary code in this fashion. But then again, so is the notion of a mysterious black box of neurons controlling everything we do and think. “It’s all numbers,” Gallant says. “The trick is to do good bookkeeping.”

source: popular science

Top 10 Court Cases Against Google

2010-03-25T22:02:00.000-07:00

Google News Court Cases

A Belgian court pled Google guilty of illegally showing parts of articles of some Belgian newspapers on its News Service, ordering it to pay daily fines until it removes unauthorized content. The case has been reheard twice and both times the court said that Google is not an exception to the law. However, Google was not going to pay any fines and never agreed with the verdict.

That case was expected to trigger similar cases in European Union, as too many newspapers expressed resentment when Google used their articles without permission.

Google Street View Court Cases

Switzerland’s privacy watchdog took Google to the court after it had failed to comply with its request to ensure all the people’s faces and other private data shown on Google’s Street View Service are blurred in order to keep personal privacy protected. Google was also requested to inform the residents in advance about its intention to take pictures of their city. Finally Google blurred the faces and put in license plates, adding that all their actions were absolutely legal, but this appeared not be enough to satisfy Switzerland.

A couple from the US was also suing Google for causing them mental suffering after the making pictures of their house available to the public on their Street View Service. They accused the web giant of privacy invasion and diminishing their property (house) value. Google said in return that unless there are any clear expressions of the owners’ will to stay private (like fence or sign), they can go wherever they want and take pictures of whatever they want.

Google Gmail Court Cases

Google has lost the case in Germany and now doesn’t have the right to use "Gmail" trademark there, as the German-born, Monaco-based entrepreneur has registered resembling “g-mail” trademark in Germany 5 years before. The entrepreneur rejected to sell the trademark to Google for $250,000, because he’s more interested in developing his business. He also registered his trademark in Switzerland, Norway and Monaco, so Google can’t operate under that name there as well and uses “Google mail” term instead.

The similar case was heard in UK in 2005, where a small British financial research company IIIR claimed to have been using exactly the same trademark (“Gmail”) for 2 years before Google came to the country. However, the trademark was not patented and IIIR rushed to European Union’s offices to register it. Unlike the German opponent, UK company agreed to sell the name of the service, but asked for tens of millions dollars, which Google decided to reject and switched to using “Google mail”, as in Germany.

Google Orkut Court Cases

The celebrities often sue Google as well, and one of them was Rubens Barrichello, a Formula-1 Brazilian driver. Heaccused Google of making his fake online profiles available on social network Orkut. Although the final decision of Sao Paulo Court was in favor of Barrichello, his lawyer announced that $500,000 he has got are going to be donated to the charity.

Google YouTube Court Cases

Viacom company, the owner of Paramount Pictures and MTV initiated legal action worth $1 billion against Google saying that its YouTube Service is guilty of copyright infringement. Google reacted quickly by implementing filtering tools making copyrighted content unable to be posted on the site. The court ruled that Google has to disclose to the company all the details about removed video, including user’s logs, which was considered to be an over-reaching demand.

YouTube was also alleged by Frank Peterson, a German composer, of illegal use of his videos and other audiovisual repertoire. He claimed that since he has never assigned any synchronization rights to YouTube, he is entitled to demand Google to remove all the streams of his productions and ask for remuneration. The composer was not alone by suing Google, as the huge part of video, located on YouTube, infringes copyright, so new and new cases constantly arise.

Google Books Сourt Сases

It’s been several years when Google first faced its opponents in the court of New York at the hearing of the case concerning creating the global digital library. However, the case is still currently central, as there are 26 interested parties there, all outlining objections. Despite Google offered to create a special fund worth $125m for authors to be able to receive compensation, it seems like nobody will ever allow it to accomplish this project.

The case of the same matter was heard in the French court, but this one ended quickly – Google was demanded to pay €300,000 for violating the copyright law. The case was filed after Google Books Service had digitized French books from US libraries without permission.

Indian publishers also tried to move court against Google for illegal scanning Indian books without any authorization – whether for value or for free. However, in India Google and publishers arrived at a settlement instead of sending the suit to trial.

Google Earth Court Cases

"The Google threat" term was used at the hearing of the case against Google Earth Service in India. The service was alleged to be the tool used in deadly attacks on Mumbai, thus helping terrorists. In the Indian case, Google Earth provided images clearly showing the location of India's atomic research facility in detail, which was called "aid terrorists in plotting attacks."

The similar cases are the matter of worry for all other countries. For example, the buildings inside the camp of British base in Iraq were clearly seen on the pictures made at Google Earth. This time Google replaced the pictures with those taken before the base was built.

Google Privacy Rules Court Cases

3 employees of Google Italy has got 6-months imprisonment sentence, as the Court of Milan ruled. It pled them guilty of allowing to make a video with a disabled person harassed available online on Google Video Service. Google confirmed the intention to appeal the ruling.

Google Search Court Cases

Xerox Corp. accused Google of infringing the company's patents concerning Internet search. The company asked the court to prevent Google from using their technology in future and demanded compensation for using patented technology of generating queries and integrating information. Google declared they don’t believe they are infringing the patents and confirmed the intention to defend.

Another case related to searches was filed by Metropolitan International Schools company, who accused Google to be liable for showing a defamation information n its search results. However, the UK court has ruled that Google is not responsible for the other site’s content, as it only facilitates the access to it, but do not publish it directly.

Google Adwords and Adsense Court Cases

Daniel Jurin, California entrepreneur, brought a lawsuit against Google related to its AdWords program. He accused Google of false advertising and trademark infringement. However, a federal judge has dismissed his case, ruling that Google doesn’t sell keywords, just ad space.

Aaron Greenspan also sued Google for terminating his AdSense account with no reason and no money paid. When asked on the hearing about the reason for the account to be canceled, the Google’s representative said they have a right to terminate any publisher for any reason whenever they want. The judge asked if the reason was the plaintiff’s eye color and ruled in favor of Greenspan.

Google is now facing ten similar cases concerning AdWords and infringing trademark. No clear decisions were announced by the courts yet.

World's First Osmotic Power Plant Goes Live in Norway

2009-12-18T13:34:00.000-08:00

The groundbreaking plant produces about enough power to make a pot of delicious coffee

By Clay DillowPosted 11.24.2009 at 11:59 am

Osmotic Power

When it comes to harnessing the energy potential of the oceans, the Norwegians have no problem starting small. The world's first osmotic power plant opened today in Tofte, Norway, utilizing the properties of salty seawater to generate a whopping 4 kilowatts of electricity for the grid, or about enough to power a coffee maker. But the Norwegian company running the project,Statkraft, is a glass-half-full kind of company, claiming that eventually osmotic plants could draw half of Europe's electricity from the saltiness of the sea.

Osmotic power works by separating saltwater and seawater in two chambers separated by a polymer membrane that will only allow freshwater to pass through. The salinity of the seawater draws the freshwater through the membrane, creating a great deal of pressure on the seawater side. That pressure can be used to turn a turbine to create power.

Of course, the Norwegians have no problem going big on their maritime energy projects either. Norwegian energy giant StatiolHydro recently erected Hywind, the world's first floating full-scale offshore wind turbine, and Statiol's Snohvit field in the Barents sea is the world's most environmentally friendly liquid natural gas plant and boasts the world's longest undersea pipeline system.

Just as technological innovations made Hywind and Snovhit possible, advancements in membrane technology have vastly increased the efficiency, as well as lowered the cost, of osmotic power. The Tofte plant cost between $7 million and $8 million, not too shabby for a power plant if, of course, it can offer more than just a pot of coffee. One quick solution: implement osmotic plants near desalination facilities, which produce a briny water twice as salty as seawater as a byproduct.

Double the osmotic pressure potential, and suddenly we're up to two coffee makers. Slowly but surely, progress is made.

courtesy: popsci

The First Hybrid Sport Boat Cruises With More Peace, Less Pollution

2009-12-18T13:25:00.000-08:00

By Laura AaronsonPosted 09.12.2009 at 4:51 pm

Clean Water Act Epic 23e Hybrid Boat: Run time: Up to 3 hours on batteries, plus 30 hours on gas generator Recharge time: One hour Seats: 14 people Price: $150,000 Get it: epicboats.com Digital Imaging: Eric Heintz; Photograph: Courtesy Epic Boats

Boaters like spray and sun in their face, not exhaust. The first hybrid sport boat, courtesy of a co-designer of the Aptera electric car, delivers cleaner thrills.

Water resistance means that a 38mph boat requires as much power as far-speedier cars, and marine engineers have struggled to give a hybrid enough oomph. Chris Anthony and his team boosted an electric motor to 268 horsepower, partly by passing more cooling fluid over it to let it spin ultra-fast without overheating. Lithium-ion batteries (2,200 pounds of them), stored under the floor, feed the motor silently for up to three hours. When they run low, a gas generator kicks in. Even then, the system uses half the fuel (about three gallons per hour) and spews half the emissions of other wakeboard-ready motorboats, since the generator only needs to rev high enough to recharge the battery, not to move the drivetrain itself.

Shipping this month, the Epic 23e has a waiting list even at $150,000. Anthony expects the price to drop closer to gas models within two years as batteries become more common and as fuel costsand emissions limits turn the tide toward greener boating.

courtesy : popsci

Avatar Review: We Have the Technology. Now What?

2009-12-18T12:59:00.000-08:00

By John Scott LewinskiPosted 12.15.2009 at 12:30 pm

Avatar: Fox

It’s an intriguing paradox--the success of a film as technologically elaborate and ambitious as James Cameron’s Avatar will come down to a simple question: Will audiences marvel at the movie’s groundbreaking production methods enough to forgive Cameron's curious choice to frame everything on a script that is, almost above all else, obsessed with the evils of technology in the wrong hands?

Not only did Cameron wait more than a decade to make his more than $300 million passion project, but he spurred the invention of the cutting edge equipment to make his creation possible [read our January issue's feature on Avatar's 3-D tech here]. The construction of a new dual-lens 3-D shooting system and the development of an ever-improving motion capture and virtual camera system allowed Cameron to take his audience to the distant inhabited world of Pandora without compromising his ambitious vision for the place.

The film stars Sam Worthington as Jake Scully--a disabled corporate military veteran recruited to command a remotely controlled alien body--his avatar--in the hope of infiltrating Pandora’s native humanoid species, the Na’vi. At first, his mission is a peaceful one--intended to help negotiate a peaceful settlement between the natives and the human colonial settlers. The evil techno-corporate types came to Pandora to dig up a priceless natural element, Unobtanium. Curiously, the audience is never let in on what it does, but the villains need it and they’ll commit genocide to get it. Scully is the only hope to fend off what looks like unavoidable war.

Fortunately, he meets a Na’vi princess (Zoe Saldana) able to train him in the ways of her tribe. It’s only a matter of time before he falls in love with his new blue teacher--a love that leads him to question his allegiance.

The soulless keepers of the bullets and bulldozers are led by Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a one-dimensional, cliche-spouting parody of a modern Marine. If adventure films are as good as their villains, Avatar falls woefully short.

There’s no point to investing too much more on plot “spoilers.” Suffice to say, anyone who’s seenDances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, A Man Called Horse, Soldier, Pocohantas, Enemy Mine, or a host of other outsider stories should be able to call every plot point Avatar offers. In fact, it’s astounding how similar Avatar’s plot plays when compared to Kevin Costner’s Oscar-winningWolves.

But no such lack of creativity plagues the film’s action sequences, art design and 3-D effects. Every penny Cameron left unspent on story development poured into the film’s richly detailed world. And the details are essential as the high-def 3-D is ultimately unforgiving.

Unlike traditional 3-D techniques that allowed foreground objects “extend” out toward the audience’s perspective, Avatar’s image offers depth between the focused foreground and the surrounding environment. The battle scenes are packed with rapidly moving visual pieces--almost to the point of incoherence. But the 3-D invites the eye to roam the frame for its element of choice.

The CG characters are painstakingly rendered, but movie magic makers still haven’t found a way to make CG players look less like finely drawn cartoon characters. When CG-dominated films can create onscreen creatures indistinguishable from real-world humans and animals (without toeing the uncanny valley), a wall will come down. For this reason, Avatar remains visually impressive but not as groundbreaking as, say, George Lucas’ Star Wars, which pushed traditional special effects techniques to the next level.

Unlike Lucas’ more playful science fiction epic, Cameron reaches for a heavy environmental message. Avatar is every militant global warming supporter’s dream come true as the invading, technology-worshiping, environment-ravaging humans are set upon by an angry planet and its noble inhabitants. But the film’s message suffers mightily under the weight of mind-boggling hypocrisy. Cameron’s story clearly curses the proliferation of human technology. In Avatar, the science and machinery of humankind leads to soulless violence and destruction. It only serves to pollute the primitive but pristine paradise of Pandora.

Of course, without centuries of development in science and technology, the film putting forth this simple-minded, self-loathing worldview wouldn’t exist. You’d imagine Cameron himself would be bored to tears on the planet he created.
There are no movies on Pandora, so he’d be out of a job. The Na’vi rarely visit a multiplex. They sit around their glowing trees, chanting; they don’t build and sink titanic ocean liners, and they don’t construct deep-sea mini-subs enabling certain filmmakers to spend countless days exploring said cruise ships.

Even with this confused message, Avatar should make a healthy profit. International audiences love spectacle, and Cameron lathers it lustily into his comeback project. But, he (and 20th Century Fox) better hope those same audiences don’t think too much on the way out of the theater lest bad word of mouth does more damage to Pandora than the corporate marines.

courtesy: popsci

Google Demonstrates Quantum Algorithm Promising Superfast Search

2009-12-18T12:46:00.000-08:00

By Jeremy HsuPosted 12.11.2009 at 6:01 pm

Google's Foray into Faster Computing This D-Wave processor may or may not be a quantum computing device D-Wave/M. Thom

Quantum computing has long dangled the possibility of superfast, super-efficient processing, and now search giant Google has jumped on board that future. New Scientist reports that Google has spent the past three years developing a quantum algorithm that can automatically recognize and sort objects from still images or video.

The promise of quantum computing rests with the bizarre physics that occurs at the subatomic level. Different research teams have worked on creating quantum processors that store information as qubits (quantum bits), which can represent both the 1 and 0 of binary computer language at the same time. That dual possibility state allows for much more efficient processing and information storage.

To take an example cited by Google, a classical computer might need 500,000 peeks on average to find a ball hidden somewhere within a million drawers. But a quantum computer could find the ball by just looking into 1,000 drawers -- a nice little stunt known as Grover's algorithm.

Google has been using a quantum computing device created by D-Wave, a Canadian firm. But a lack of information about how D-Wave's chip works has led to outside skepticism regarding whether it does indeed count as a quantum computer.

"Unfortunately, it is not easy to demonstrate that a multi-qubit system such as the D-Wave chip indeed exhibits the desired quantum behavior and experimental physicists from various institutions are still in the process of characterizing the chip," wrote Hartmut Neven, head of Google's image recognition team, on the Google research blog.

Whatever D-Wave built has apparently worked for Google. Neven described a new algorithm based on the work of MIT that can sort images of cars from among 20,000 photos faster than anything running in a Google data center today -- although the team first trained the algorithm by hand-labeling cars in a test photo batch.

Google's image recognition team has previously made its algorithms work for better online image searches and automatic photo organization. Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that the Google folk have also delved into quantum computing, or at least something much faster than existing classical computing.

courtesy: popsci

Interview: James Cameron

2009-12-18T12:41:00.000-08:00

By John Scott LewinskiPosted 12.17.2009 at 11:30 am

Climb Into the Movie: Courtesy Mark Fellman/Twentieth Century Fox

Behind the 3-D magic is a director who won’t let even the laws of physics get in the way of an epic story

Science Advisers are Annoying:

I have just enough of a science background to get me in trouble. When I’m writing, I’m thinking: What can cause a mountain to float? Well, if it was made out of an almost-pure room-temperature superconductor material, and it was in a powerful magnetic field, it would self-levitate. This has actually been demonstrated on a very small scale with very strong magnetic fields. Then my scientists said, “You’ll need magnetic fields that are so powerful that they would rip the hemoglobin out of your blood.” So I said, “Well, we’re not showing that, so we may just have to diverge a little bit from what’s possible in the physical universe to tell our story.”

But Sometimes Scientists are Useful:
I wanted to put Pandora in the Alpha Centauri star system, but we haven’t found any large planets there. One of my astrophysicists said, “Well, if a planet’s ecliptic was inclined at 60 degrees to our line of sight, then the Doppler method would not work because the planet would perturb [the star] Alpha Centauri A or B on a different axis, and so we wouldn’t be able to see it. You wouldn’t be able to see it using the transit method, either.” So there might be planets there. But you can only have stable orbits out to about 230 million miles from Alpha Centauri A, so your planets have to be close in, blah blah blah. So we went through the steps of creating two possible solar systems there, because it’s a binary star, and gussied it up with technical research.

Audiences Will Like it Anyway:
My goal was to tell an epic story with visual power and to impress the crap out of the audience, like my goal is every time I make a movie. When it comes to the science behind the camera, what it took to produce the images—I think the viewer likes the idea that they’re being shown something new, but I don’t think they really care how you did it. I mean, I’m happy to talk about it, but I don’t think it sells the damn ticket.

courtesy : popsci

Inside the Scene-Stealing 3-D Technology Behind James Cameron's Avatar

2009-12-18T12:37:00.000-08:00

By John Scott LewinskiPosted 12.17.2009 at 11:30 am

The Na'vi: Courtesy WETA/Twentieth Century Fox

James Cameron is stubborn. He decided nearly a decade ago to film his humans-versus-aliens sci-fi adventure Avatar in 3-D, but he refused to start production until technology could convince the viewer that he or she could step through the screen and pick up a bow alongside the Na’vi, the film’s 10-foot-tall, blue, cat-faced alien protagonists.

To give scenes realistic depth, Cameron, who brought a computer-generated liquid-metal T-1000 to life in Terminator 2, and camera whizzes Vince Pace and Patrick Campbell built the Pace/Cameron Fusion Camera System to capture images the same way as a human eye does. Cameron then used a virtual camera to walk—or fly—around in the virtual world to record any shot of the Na’vi that he wanted and combined that with the real-life footage. Here, a guide to making the most convincing 3-D film yet (See also our review of the film here).

Build The Stage: Courtesy Mark Fellman/Twentieth Century Fox

How James Cameron Made a Truly Lifelike 3-D Movie

1. Build the Stage
An array of 72 to 96 cameras, depending on the size of the set, hang around the perimeter of a sound stage and are configured in a grid. Later, a computer replaces the studio walls, floor and ceiling with digitally rendered three-dimensional environments and structures. The grid is also marked on the floor to provide reference within this virtual world.

2. Capture Motion
Actors, weapons and props marked with reflective dots move around the stage while the camera grid tracks only the dots. A computer records the dots’ movement, triangulates their location, and assembles these data points into wire-frame skeletons that in Avatar will be “dressed” with computer-generated Na’vi bodies.

3. Shoot in 3-D

Capture Motion: Courtesy Mark Fellman/Twentieth Century Fox

Next Cameron films the flesh-and-blood characters in 3-D so that they will look at home alongside the Na’vi in the virtual 3-D world. Older 3-D tech used two cameras mounted side by side to create a left eye/right eye effect. Because of their bulk, those cameras were placed far apart and could shoot only straight ahead. The Fusion Camera System has two cameras, but by using small high-definition digital image sensors, the lenses can sit closer together than your pupils. The line of sight of the lenses is adjustable so that, during a shot, they can be angled closer together to focus on nearby objects, or farther apart for those in the distance, just as your eyes do. The system combines the images into a single image with realistic depth.

4. Climb into the Movie
After a computer inserts the motion-capture performances into the digital environment, Cameron carries a virtual camera—an LCD display with buttons and grips similar to a videogame controller—onto the set. As he moves, radio and optical detectors track the camera’s location and relay it to computers offstage, which render the virtual world as viewed from that vantage and send it to the tablet. This allows Cameron to walk through the virtual action to record any shot he wants—he can even set the vantage point to take shots that would require a crane or helicopter. Later, the 3-D footage of human characters can be added to these scenes.

5. Watch It
At RealD 3-D shows, a projector alternately displays the left-eye and right-eye images, each in an oppositely circular polarized direction, 144 times per second. Polarized glasses ensure that each eye sees only the image meant for it.

courtesy: popsci