Arie Wijaya

On the Green, No Place For Choking

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:53:00 +0000

On the greens of the lovely Bethpage Black for this weekend's U.S. Open and golf courses across the nation, it’s a taboo never spoken about yet easily identified – the yips. Talented, sometimes elite-level golfers, suddenly unable to hold their putter straight for seemingly simple tap-ins. It’s like a virus infecting the golfer's mind, causing involuntary reflexes with no warning and no mercy. Cures for the yips are as unknown as its very cause. But two researchers are recruiting the inflicted and hoping that an MRI will shed light on a disease devastating weekend warriors everywhere.

Nobody is suggesting you can blame your choking on a torn meniscus or a weak labrum. Neuroradiologist Yair Safriel and Nick Dewan, a psychiatrist specializing in sports and neuropsychiatry, are planning to administer functional MRIs (fMRI) to look at the minds of golfers in Dunedin, Florida. Each subject will be placed in the fMRI and told to think about tapping in what should be a gimmie putt. The hope is that different parts of the brain will light up on those with the yips suggesting the ‘choke’ sector of the mind. Dewan hopes to start by analyzing 10 golfers, five with the yips and five without. We hear Southwest has cheap flights, so book now.

"Nobody has done a study like this," said Dewan to the St. Petersburg Times.

Dewan went on to express hope that the research can extend beyond golf to other sports where coughing it up under pressure is commonplace. Safriel even thinks the data could be used by professional teams to pre-screen for potential chokers. We can hear the player’s association calling their lawyers now.

Exactly what to do for golfers if and when such a region can be isolated is still unknown. Until a magic drug or therapy is created, those currently suffering might want to consider some Botox. Nope, not for the stress wrinkles on the forehead from shanking all the tap-ins: previous research suggests it might provide some temporary relief.

Coke's flavor changes ?

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:37:00 +0000

It doesn’t. That’s what Coca-Cola’s spokespeople say, anyway. “The great taste of Coca-Cola is the same regardless of the package it comes in,” they insist. Rather, they say, “the particular way that people choose to enjoy their Coke can affect their perception of taste.” Sure, most people would agree that the cola is indeed delicious and refreshing, and pouring it into a glass or serving it over ice could influence the sensation of its flavor. But is it possible that the subtle variation in taste that some notice among aluminum cans, plastic bottles and glass bottles is more than just a psychological effect of their soda-consumption rituals?

Given that the formula is always the same, yes, according to Sara Risch, a food chemist and member of the Institute of Food Technologists. “While packaging and food companies work to prevent any interactions, they can occur,” she says. For example, the polymer that lines aluminum cans might absorb small amounts of soluble flavor from the soda. Conversely, acetaldehyde in plastic bottles might migrate into the soda. The FDA regulates this kind of potential chemical contact, but even minute, allowable amounts could alter flavor.

Your best bet for getting Coke’s pure, unaltered taste is to drink it from a glass bottle, the most inert material it’s served in. Even that’s not a sure bet, though. Coca-Cola maintains strict uniformity in processes in all of its worldwide bottling facilities, but it concedes that exposure to light and how long the product sits on store shelves may affect the taste. So yeah, the packaging might mess with Coke’s flavor, but we’ll still take it any day over New Coke.

Twenty finalist " A Suburban Design Competition"

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:13:00 +0000

Residents of suburbia have long since awakened from the American dream to the downsides of tedious work commutes, bloated McMansions and lackluster civic life. Now a design competition wants to look at new ways to reinvigorate the suburbs with concepts ranging from airships to reclaimed backyard pools.

The competition has narrowed the field down to 20 finalists. Some standout favorites include a "T-trees" concept of stackable cube modules providing living space and even renewable wind power, and an "Airbia" vision of suburban, teardrop-shaped airships replacing that horrendous commute through traffic.One of the top vote-getters, an "Urban Sprawl Repair Kit," lays out a more practical plan for re-purposing or adding new structures instead of demolishing space-wasting gas stations, strip centers, restaurants and homes.

McMansions alone get two redesign proposals that would transform uninhabited homes into wetlands and green spaces. And another idea would create "Regenerative Suburb Medians" in the middle of wide roads that treat sewage, produce agriculture and boost social activity within neighborhoods.

So why wait on giving American beauty a makeover? Go here to vote on your favorites among the top 20 finalists

Get to know "Zero-Gravity Wedding"

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 07:24:00 +0000

Not inclined to wait for a suborbital ride on Virgin Galactic, Noah Fulmor and Erin Finnegan became the firt couple to be wed in microgravity this past weekend over the skies of south Florida.

They did it aboard G-Force One, a modified 727 similar to the Air Force's "Vomit Comet" which can provide periods of weightlessness lasting several minutes via a parabolic flight path. It's operated by Zero Gravity Corp., the first and so far only company cleared by the FAA to offer simulated-weightlessness flights to the general public.

The couple, of course, wanted to be married in space. But failing the availability of space tourism, they went with the next best thing. Richard Garriott, an actual space tourist who has flown to the ISS, officiated the ceremony for the lucky couple and their wedding party of ten. I'm jealous.

Via: ZeroGravityWedding.com

City Safety by Volvo XC60

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:43:00 +0000

Even the most attentive driver can become distracted, especially in city traffic. Now Volvo has your back with City Safety, a feature on the XC60 crossover SUV that can prevent or mitigate accidents and injuries at around-town speeds. They tested the technology in a dare-you-to-crash demo, steering the XC60 toward a bright-colored inflatable car at 10 mph and resisting the powerful urge to hit the brakes. The system worked like a charm, quickly stopping the 4,200-pound Volvo and avoiding a crunch with a few feet to spare.

This slow-speed experiment might not sound dangerous, but Volvo notes that 75 percent of all accidents occur below 19 miles per hour, and half of those cause whiplash or other injuries. And as anyone who’s set foot in a body shop knows, even minor collisions can mean costly repair bills or insurance rate hikes.City Safety calculates the distance and closing speed to the car ahead by beaming a laser mounted near the rearview mirror. A sensor detects reflections from a car’s tail lamps, license plate or body metal. Get too close, too fast, and the system applies up to 50 percent of the vehicle’s stopping power. It’s designed to come on late and hard—to be unpleasant enough that drivers won’t get lazy and let it handle everyday braking. The system shuts down at speeds below roughly 2 mph to avoid needless stops when you’re crawling in close traffic. At approach speeds between 10 and 19 mph, the system won’t always prevent that fender-bender, but sharply slowing the vehicle will reduce the damage.

As the manual warns, City Safety may not be entirely foolproof: As with adaptive cruise-control systems that use radar or lasers, heavy fog, rain or snow may block the sensor from picking up reflections from cars ahead, and City Safety doesn’t recognize people, animals, bicycles or most stationary obstacles. A sonar-based system, offered on the new S60 sedan next year in Europe and in 2011 in the U.S., will detect pedestrians and apply up to 100 percent of stopping power to prevent a human catastrophe.

Get It: Volvo XC60
Starts at $37,200

Via: Volvocars

Virtual Dental Implant Training Simulation

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:28:00 +0000

Video games may be good for your dental health. Not for the jaw-clenching or tooth-grinding action -- discuss these conditions with a professional if they persist in conjunction with gaming -- but because dentists will soon have access to virtual mouths before they get their hands on your chompers.

The Virtual Dental Implant Training Simulation is now in beta testing, and set for rollout next fall, when it will reach about 15,000 dental students in 25 universities around the globe that partner with Nobel Biocare of Sweden, the project's funder. Developed by Maryland-based game developer BreakAway in concert with the Medical College of Georgia, VDIT uses entertainment technology to simulate real-world scenarios. Serious gaming, as it's called, allows players to enter the virtual worlds of the military, corporate training and health care, and gain experience before they tackle real-time problems in the real world. Dr. Roman Cibirka, Vice President for Instruction and Enrollment Management Associate Provost for Academic Affairs, put the wheels in motion 18 months ago, after he attended a Games for Health conference.

This year he presented VDIT at the gathering in Boston.

The digital interface lets dental students put classroom lessons into action and build on the training they've done with medical mannequins. Cibirka said increased opportunities to exercise hands-on-mouth skills lead to better outcomes, on both sides of the dental chair. Speaking from Breakaway's high-security offices (the company has top-level security clearance because of its contracts with the military), producer Isaac Jeppsen said he situated the action in the dental office -- and in the patient's mouth -- to make it less complicated for first-time gamers. "You don't need to navigate down the hall and move into an office, you start the game where you need to be," said Jeppsen. Looking at a patient ensconced in a dental chair. He created a mouth, brought drills to life and input a series of questions that allow players to assess their patients' conditions before setting drills in motion.

Dentists-in-training start each round of the simulation game with a question-and-answer intake session to figure out if the person in the chair is well suited for an implant. Neglecting to ask a pixelated patient what brought her to the dentist will cause a player to fail.

"There's a very solid body of evidence that there are basically four patient profiles," said Cibirka. Those four profiles were starting points for the patients who appear in VDIT: two women and two men of different ages, backgrounds, personalities and implant considerations. A prosthodontist -- specializing in bridges, crowns, implants, and dentures -- by training, Cibirka is familiar with the pitfalls that can trip up both new dentists and experienced practitioners (the latter have also exhibited an interest in the simulation). He worked with Jeppsen and his team to build complexity into the virtual patients: each one appears in two to four scenarios that showcase different clinical problems and states of mind.

Before taking on the dental simulation game, Jeppson worked on Command and Conquer, a futuristic battle betweens humans and aliens. It's the same type of work, he said, just for a different audience. Jeppsen likens the dental simulation to choose-your-own-adventure games, "not totally cutting edge, but close enough that you get a feel for the person that you're interviewing."

Of course, there's a technical component to the work. VDIT players choose the sequence of the drills for the implant procedure and then watch it happen according to their instructions. Using the wrong drill in the incorrect order will make the virtual gums explode in blood.

Jeppsen wants more of that in the next iteration. Not for the gore factor, but to illustrate margins of error. "You could break the jaw if you over-torque it," said Jeppsen, "but it's not necessarily shown in the game."

Which goes back to a credo he picked up from Cibirka: "It's not the carpentry we're trying to teach, it's the decision-making process."

Get to know "Wi-Fi Fly"

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:15:00 +0000

In its attempts to quash weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon has been trying novel ways to track down dangerous materiel. For years, DARPA has been trying to train insects and bugs to sniff out toxic substances, providing more sensitive detection, as well as access that conventional sensors might not have. The newest twist on this concept is a plan to link up armies of the cyborg bugs in a peer-to-peer, or insect-to-insect, network that will allow them to communicate with each other and with their human masters.

Previous research into this field of detection included landmine-sniffing honeybees and mechanized remote-controlled insects. This next approach will implant insects with a chip that reads certain muscle twitches, which correspond to the presence of certain chemicals. The chips will then modify the chirps of insects like cicadas or crickets into an electronic signal that could be transmitted to other chipped insects in the area. Information about detected weaponized chemicals could bounce around this mobile insect network, and then be picked up by humans.

While the idea seems pretty far-fetched, the idea of creating a decentralized communication network between free-roaming insects could radically increase the bugs' range of detection. Still unclear, however, is if this insect Wi-Fi will allow the information-laden chirps to be more than 140 characters long.

Via: Wired

Olympus Pen E-P1

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:46:00 +0000

Sometimes looking to the past to inspire designs of the future is inspired by nothing more than fashion, but sometimes, it actually serves a functional purpose. Enter Olympus's freshly announced EP-1, which recreate a form factor we haven't seen a lot of since the film era: a sleek, compact body with interchangeable lenses.

This made possible by the Micro Four Thirds system--Olympus and Panasonic's joint specification for smaller digital cameras with electronic viewfinders, slightly smaller image sensors and interchangeable lenses. The only camera available now using the system, Panasonic's G1, retained all the design tropes of a traditional SLR camera, including the larger size and bulge up top for a pentaprism optical viewfinder, even though there was no pentaprism to be found.

The EP-1 though delivers on a new form factor lots of enthusiast photographers have been wanting (including, ahem, me)--a small camera they can stick into a small bag or even in large pocket for portability that still has interchangeable lenses. All of the lenses designed for the Micro Four Thirds system will work with the EP-1; and even more exciting is the availability of an adapter for the system that connects lenses with the Leica M-mount--some of the best rangefinder-style lenses ever made.

And the EP-1 also does something no vintage film camera could ever dream of--capture HD video at 720p/30fps.

The EP-1 will be out in July--$749 with the body only, $799 with a 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens, or $899 with a nice looking 17mm f/2.8 fixed focal length lens.

DP Review has a hands-on preview for more info.

Get to know "Autonomous City Explorer "

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:22:00 +0000

Your mother told you never to speak to strangers, but what if the stranger was a robot on wheels, who was lost and needed your help? Thirty-eight people in this very predicament chose to speak to the waylaid robot, whose task was to cross a busy city without a map or GPS. All it could do was ask directions.

Munich was the city it was crossing, and Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) was the robot, the brainchild of Martin Buss and his colleagues at the Technical University of Munich. Buss' team released the mobile robot outside the university and instructed it to find its way to the Marienplatz in the center of Munich, almost a mile away.

ACE was equipped with a camera for eyes, a touchscreen for a face, an animated touchscreen mouth with a synchronized speaker for a voice, and various sensors, which allowed it to recognize humans by their motion and upright posture, turn its crude face towards it and ask for help. If the person touched the screen indicating he or she was willing to help, ACE asked them to point in the correct direction and then used posture recognition software to analyze the response. ACE politely gave thanks and rolled in that direction.

While having robots traverse and map unknown terrain is not a new phenomenon, including humans in the process is -- a real bonus when the robot is navigating through environments that may be in flux. Teaching robots to communicate in human terms is essential for integrating them into the real world.

ACE took nearly five hours to traverse the mile -- this isn't the robot you want to be calling when your house is on fire. Its progress wasn't helped by curious passersby who interacted with it as it entered the denser part of the city.

And while most of the 38 strangers ACE encountered were kind, it did cross paths with someone who sent it in the wrong direction. The researchers have yet to prankster-proof their robot.

Via: IACE

130-Megapixel..?

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 06:57:00 +0000

Tinkerers have been turning flatbed scanners into cameras for a while, but this version by a Japanese modder is one of the finest I've seen--both in technical execution and the incredible quality of the massive 130-megapixel images it creates.

Basically, this is the digital equivalent of a large-format view camera. Only even bigger. A mechanical implement moves the scanner's CCD sensor over the image projected by the old Canon FD lens (he has other lens mounts, too). And here's a still life, all 13,068 x 10,173 pixels of it:

And a full-crop detail of the tiny print on the side of the battery:

Spyuge, the camera's creator, has a lot more amazing scan captures on his Flickr stream, including this one of a wristwatch. At high resolution, it's stunning. Amazing work.

Spyuge (Japanese) via Boing Boing Gadgets and Bouncing Red Ball

Tata Nano Coming to the US..?

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:31:00 +0000

Will US car buyers adopt a car the size of a laundromat dryer, that costs as much as a sofa? Ratan Tata, chairman of India's Tata Motors, hopes they will. Automotive News reports that Tata is floating plans to bring a version of the $2,500 Nano minicar to the US within three years.

Chairman Tata made such remarks this week at a Cornell University forum in New York City. Deliveries of the Nano to buyers in India, where only one in one thousand people own a car, are scheduled to begin in India next month.

A Nano sold in the US won't likely be the same as the model sold in India. Tata said a US-bound Nano will have to meet more stringent US emissions and crash standards. The four-seat Nano sold in India gets up to 65 mpg. Tata said the company is also developing cars that run on fuels other than gasoline, including diesel and biofuels, as well as electric models powered by batteries.

Tata also said the company will offer a European version of the Nano by 2011.

While it was rumored that the company might distribute the Nano to US buyers through the dealerships of Jaguar and Land Rover, two luxury brands Tata bought from Ford Motor Company in 2008, Automotive News reported that a spokesman for Jaguar Land Rover North America said Tata will not use those brands' distribution networks.

Via: Automotive News

Get to know " Harmonic Fluids "

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:11:00 +0000

The world certainly isn't simple, and trying to express real-world dynamics in the form of an equation has long been a challenge. Realistic computer-simulated sound has been particularly tough to get right, and some of the hardest dynamics to recreate have been the movements and sound of water.

Scientists at Cornell have now announced a system that can look at a 3-D motion rendering of water--waves, drops, anything--and algorithmically create the dribbles, gurgles and plops it would be sounding, were it in fact real.

I'll let the researchers describe the technology themselves. I think you'll understand why I'm leaving it to them:

"Sound radiation from harmonic fluid vibrations is modeled using a time-varying linear superposition of bubble oscillators. We weight each oscillator by its bubble-to-ear acoustic transfer function, which is modeled as a discrete Green's function of the Helmholtz equation. To solve potentially millions of 3D Helmholtz problems, we propose a fast dual-domain multipole boundary-integral solver, with cost linear in the complexity of the fluid domain's boundary."

In as many words: hyper-complex software that on its own re-creates an element of the natural world. Look for realistic-sounding synthetic liquids coming to a Michael Bay special effects scene or fly-fishing simulator near you, soon.

Cornell via : Boing-Boing Gadgets

New sensors enforce hospital staff hygiene

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 05:55:00 +0000

Hand-washing: it seems easy enough, but for whatever reason, we constantly shirk this simplest of duties. These days we have swine flu to remind us, but what about when that becomes old news? Microbes don't disappear just because they're not in the news every day.

A few University of Florida professors have invented a solution -- HyGreen, a sensor system that can sniff your hands to detect telltale soap fumes -- or the lack thereof.

The system is designed for use by hospital staffers. You'd think health-care workers would be over-the-top focused on sanitization, but apparently that's not the case. Several studies show that hospital workers only wash their hands following fewer than half of their direct encounters with patients. And hospital-acquired infections are a huge problem: over 2 million cases occur each year in the U.S., along with a daily 250 related deaths. If workers only remembered to wash their hands, half of these infections could be prevented.

So how does HyGreen -- the proposed solution, now in testing phase -- work? It's a little like a Breathalyzer, but for hands. Each time they soap up, health-care workers will have to pass their hands under a detector located by the sink. If the hands pass muster, a wireless signal coming from the worker's badge will set off a green light on the sensor. Later, back in the patient room, another monitor will check the worker's badge and again flash green if their hands are clean. If not, the staff member will get a vibration reminder -- and probably also a talking-to, since supervisors will be able to check the signal log in real time.

Via: HyGreen

Ugliest Space ?

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:58:00 +0000

Doesn’t it seem that all movies and television shows suggest that space will one day be populated by nothing but dashingly lithe men and buxom women? Well there’s a reason it’s called science fiction, because extended space travel could actually leave astronauts a gross, bloated, unattractive mess. Astrobiologist Dr Lewis Dartnel projects that long-term exposure to zero gravity has the potential to ravage your looks in the most unappealing ways.

NASA is recruiting “pillownauts”, people willing to stay in bed for months at a time to observe the effects zero gravity will have on the body. And the results aren’t pretty. Since you can float, little force is required to get around in space, leading to quick atrophy of muscles. Astronauts tend to lose bone mass fairly quickly making the body very brittle. The development of our circulatory system compensates for gravity, so without it blood starts pooling in strange places, like our heads. This leads to painful headaches, chronic congestion, and, given enough time, comically swollen heads. If the trip is extended into generational lengths of time, the results could become more severe. Muscles and bones may not develop correctly, making space babies short and fat. And living in filtered and climate-controlled environments could lead to an evolutionary phase-out of hair, which primarily functions to maintain body warmth and protect from foreign particles.

The fact remains: the human body wasn’t designed for space travel, but perhaps we’ll one day be able to overcome these negative effects. Perhaps our diet will have added supplements which will overcome bone loss. Perhaps we’ll create artificial gravity so our heads don’t blow up like a balloon. Perhaps we’ll find more efficient ways to exercise in space so we don’t lose muscles. Let’s hope because otherwise the future is beginning to look ugly.

Via: Telegraph

Cloning hair cells

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:40:00 +0000

Surgical solutions for restoring lush locks have always involved a painful trade-off — transplanting hairs from the rear of your head to the top could leave you thin in the back. But Bessam Farjo, a hair-loss specialist at the British company Intercytex, has devised a less barbaric fix: cloning patients' hair cells. "The concept is to create a limitless supply of donor hair," Farjo says.

Male pattern baldness is caused when some hair-producing dermal papilla cells begin growing thinner, less visible hairs. Standard transplant procedures involve plucking roughly 6,000 healthy cells, but Farjo takes only 100. He clones these in the lab until he has millions and then injects them into sparse scalp regions, where each can sprout a fresh hair and even encourage additional hair growth in neighboring scalp tissue. The procedure isn't just a matter of vanity; it could provide insight into how to clone other tissues for therapeutic uses.Farjo recently wrapped up a 13-man, 48-week clinical trial in which 40 percent of the implanted cells, paired with blood-flow-stimulating scalp massage, produced new hair. His next goal: growing complete hair follicles in the lab, which could make the transformation from Mr. Clean to Donald Trump even more certain.

Via Farjo Medical and Intercytex

An electromagnet save hundreds people dying

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:42:00 +0000

If your uncle says he's getting magnetic therapy, you might feel the urge to tell him to save his money instead for that tinfoil hat to keep the CIA from reading his mind. But if he's being hooked up to Don Ingber's magnet machine, it just might save his life.

Ingber's device magnetizes microbes and draws them out of the blood. It could save some of the 210,000 Americans—mostly newborns and the elderly—who die sepsis-related deaths every year. Sepsis sets in when bacteria or fungi invade the blood, which can cause organ failure before drugs have time to take effect. "Traditionally, you prescribe antibiotics and pray," says Ingber, a vascular biologist at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital. His machine operates more quickly.

In lab tests, Ingber's team mixed donor blood with the fungus Candida albicans, a common cause of sepsis, and added plastic-coated iron-oxide beads, each a hundredth of a hair-width in diameter and covered with antibodies that seek out and attach to the fungus. Next they ran the mixture through the dialysis-like machine, which uses an electromagnet to pull the beads, and any pathogens stuck to them, from blood into a saline solution. The device removes 80 percent of the invaders—enough so that drugs could knock out the rest—in a couple of hours.

Ingber will begin animal testing this fall to ensure that the method works in living subjects and doesn't hurt healthy cells. He might later modify the technique to pull cancer cells from blood or harvest stem cells. "This can sift through a patient's entire blood volume and pull out the needle in a haystack," he says.

See detail in Focus and The ingber Labs

You + the Virtual Boob Tube

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:24:00 +0000

There are a lot more clips out there than what turns up using YouTube's keyword-search function. On sites such as Hulu.com, you can watch free TV shows and movies. And "vertical content"Web sites focus on single subjects, whether bird-watching or extreme sports.

These sites don't actually scour the Web looking for videos, however. For a more in-depth result, check out Blinkz.com, a search engine that analyzes each video and constructs a transcript of the audio to better find what you're looking for. Also try MeFeedia.com, which uses social networking to help you find videos your friends are watching, and Truveo.com, which lets users see the most frequently Twittered videos.

There are a few video applications as well. Boxee, for example, can access video from many sources, including Hulu, YouTube and Netflix's streaming service. It's still in development, but since it was made to be used on multiple platforms — its interface is designed to be displayed on a TV — eventually it may be the best option for searching (and watching) Web video, wherever you want.

The global warming news for today.

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 05:30:00 +0000

In anticipation of a new United Nations resolution on climate change and security, two new reports and a statement from twenty Nobel Laureates highlight the direct impact of climate change on the world's most vulnerable populations. And the news is decidedly not good.

The first report, published by the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental organization funded by 125 countries to the tune of $1 billion a year, claims that climate change will produce 200 million refugees by 2050. The report concentrates on people fleeing regions struck by drought, but the New York Times story about the report focuses instead on island nations that are sinking into the sea.

The second report, courtesy of The Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF), a humanitarian organization founded by former UN chief Kofi Annan, calculates the deaths that result from the spread of disease, malnutrition and natural disaster caused by climate change. The report estimates that 300,000 people die every year from climate change related problems, with 300 million people already suffering from food shortages and expanded disease ranges. CNN has this story, and mostly just parrots what the report says.

Interestingly, the CNN story does note that the GFH report's dire predictions are based on a 0.74-2 degree Celsius change in climate. In a recent MIT study, change that small was listed as the BEST case scenario. Assuming both the GHF report and the MIT study are accurate, that means even if governments do all they can to reverse climate change and its effects right now, food prices could still rise by twenty percent over the next twenty years.

Underscoring these reports is a recent memo by twenty Nobel Prize winners urging governments to take the action needed to limit temperature change to a two percent increase over pre-industrial levels. According to the report, that would require a cut of carbon emissions by five to forty percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

The Nature News story singles out the United States as requiring particularly drastic action. The story compares Germany, which has already promised to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to forty percent below 1990 levels by 2020, with the US, who's new climate change bill only pledges a decrease of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

And before everyone starts writing apoplectic comments about how this is just America-bashing from a hater-aide chugging Europe, it's important to note that one of the twenty Nobel Laureates that signed the memo is US Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu. Chu told Nature News, "I hope we can deliver more than we've promised." So now even the US government is saying the US needs to do more to cut carbon emissions (which, given that just a few years ago an official acknowledgment of its very existence was considered progress- and considering the numbers of people affected by this fact- is decidedly good).

That's all the global warming news for today. Let the ill-informed comments and ad hominem attacks begin!

BMW's Emergency Stop Assistance System

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:00:00 +0000

A new autonomous vehicle-control system on the BMW drawing board could prolong drivers' lives behind the wheel, without sacrificing their own and others' safety. That's good news for elderly drivers. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reports crash fatalities among drivers over the age of 70 fell 21 percent between 1997 and 2006, despite a 10 percent increase in that population. The decline is likely due to elderly drivers self-limiting their driving. But hanging up their keys means a loss of independence and lower quality of life for older drivers -- especially in rural areas. This new system could give that independence back.

BMW's Emergency Stop Assistant system (now in development) detects when a driver is stricken by a serious medical problem, or otherwise loses motor control, and automatically activates an autonomous driving mode. The system flicks the hazard warning lights on and then maneuvers to the outer edge of the roadway -- accounting for the traffic around it -- before stopping entirely. At the same time, BMW's ConnectedDrive telematics system sends out an emergency call with data on the location and the driver's condition. The emergency stop system employs such existing assistance technologies as lane departure warning and active cruise control, which use sensors and software to detect other vehicles and objects on the road, and in some cases apply the brakes.

BMW officials say the emergency stop assistant will also aid younger drivers with maladies like diabetes and heart disease, and will initially be of best use on highways, where driving and roadway variables are fewest. The Emergency Stop Assistant is part of an ongoing research project, “SmartSenior - intelligent services for senior citizens” by Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

James Peret

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:02:00 +0000

The nondescript six-foot-tall box behind Finz restaurant in Dedham, Massachusetts, looks like a tool shed, but actually it's a self-contained grease refinery and five-kilowatt generator. Engineer James Peret's Vegawatt is the first all-in-one device that processes grease to continuously provide a building with electricity and hot water, heralding a significant change in alternative-fuel applications. "It's a brilliant idea," says Josh Tickell, author of Biodiesel America. "A waste stream to an energy source, with no intermediary."

Last December, after a year of 80-hour weeks on the development, Peret, 33, installed the first Vegawatt at Finz, a joint that offers loads of fried seafood. With patents still pending, he's reluctant to give specifics on its inner workings, but it begins with staff members pouring in 10 to 12 gallons of used deep-fryer oil each day.

Before going into the Vegawatt's generator, the bread-crumb-filled muck is deposited into a reservoir and undergoes a multi-stage cleaning, treatment and filtration process. At this stage, the oil is prepared for combustion with a method Peret devised that draws heat from the exhaust system. After that, the processed grease moves into a tank that feeds the modified 15-horsepower diesel generator. Heat from the Vegawatt's engine coolant is used to warm the water in the building's pipes, further reducing the restaurant's energy needs.

The Vegawatt can process about 80 gallons of grease a week (standard for large restaurants) and produces five kilowatts of energy an hour, which could translate to monthly savings of $1,000, a 10 percent reduction in power costs. Peret is now selling the machine through his start-up, Owl Power Company, pitching it as the perfect way to go green, save money, and serve delicious fish and chips at the same time.

How It Works: Dirty grease passes through a series of tanks and filters that scrub, heat, and refine it into fuel that burns clean in a diesel generator

City rats have their own neighborhoods ?

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:32:00 +0000

When the words "Baltimore" and "rat" appear together, they usually involve a discussion of the fate of The Wire's Wallace or a DVD featuring Carmelo Anthony. However, unlike the alleged turncoats, it seems that actual rodents really do hold down their block. According to a new study in Molecular Ecology by a team of Johns Hopkins scientists, Norwegian rats are as neighborhood-oriented as any of the bipedal residents of Charm City.

The study looked at 277 rats from across Baltimore, and found that the genetic makeup of the city's rat population varied significantly by neighborhood. East Side rats were more closely related to each other than West Side rats, rats from the Ashland neighborhood were closely related to the rats from the neighboring Northeast Market neighborhood than they were to rats from the more distant Winston-Govans neighborhood, and so on.

What makes this study useful is that the researchers found the rats limited their range because of opportunity, not capability. Some individual rats proved they could cross the entire city when spurred by danger, and vacancies left by exterminations were filled by rats from a diverse set of locations.

This means that, in the face of a rat-borne disease outbreak, a program of extermination may actually spread the disease by forcing infected rats into previously unaffected neighborhoods. As a result, public health officials who think they can solve problems with a quick dose of rat poison may need to look for more creative solutions.

An incredible 95 percent complete fossil

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:00:00 +0000

The term "missing link" first appearing in its modern connotation in 1863, and unfortunately, 146 years later, it hasn't lost any of its power. Massive media coverage, the American Museum of Natural History, a team of European paleontologists, and the History Channel unveiled a spectacularly preserved primate fossil that they dubbed "the eighth wonder of the world."

The fossil, a preserved specimen of the primate Darwinius masillae, has been rolled out like a summer blockbuster, prompting varied reactions from scientists and science journalists across the media spectrum.

On the one hand, you have outlets like the Daily News, which calls the fossil "...a breakthrough that could finally confirm Charles Darwin's theory of evolution." Right. Because worries that the swine flu might become resistant to antiviral medication isn't based on a confirmed theory, and definitely has nothing to do with evolution.

Conversely, The Wall Street Journal choose to ignore the hype, mentioning high up in the article that "In reality, though, all gaps in the fossil record are technically "missing links" until filled in, and many scientists say the term is meaningless." The WSJ focuses on the science, and refrains from repeating hyperbolic statements from the paleontologists who found the fossil that compared this specimen to the Holy Grail.The New York Times went an entirely different route, focusing on the media circus itself. And what a circus this is, as the History Channel is calling the specimen the most important fossil find ever, and as the NY Times notes, running comparing it to the Kennedy Assassination and the moon landing.

Seed Magazine's ScienceBlogs puts the debate on the front page, and most of their bloggers come out solidly on the anti-hype side. In Laelaps, Brian Switek questions whether this specimen is indeed a missing link, saying, "have yet to see the paper, but I am skeptical of this conclusion. First, one of the main authors of the paper is Philip Gingerich, who has been maintaining the evolution of anthropoid primates from adapids for years despite evidence to the contrary."However, the best quote comes from ScienceBlogs big wig PZ Myers, who, in his blogPharyngula, says, "The hype is bad news, not because Ida is unimportant, but because it detracts from the larger body of the fossil record — I doubt that the media will be able to muster as much excitement from whatever new fossil gets published in Nature or Science next week, no matter how significant it may be."

What do you think? Does the extensive, and at times exaggerated, coverage of the Darwinius fossil contribute to the public understanding of science by supporting evolution, or does the hype just lead to a general mistrust of science and the media? And how far is too far when publicizing a scientific discovery? I'm sure we all agree that comparing the discovery of this fossil to the moon landing cross the line, but I want to hear where you think the line is.

Via: The History Channel

Michael Callahan

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 02:00:00 +0000

When Michael Callahan was 17, he lost his short-term memory when he hit his head in a skateboarding accident. "The neural pathways were all wrong," he recalls. Within weeks, he was back to normal, but the incident left him thinking, how could he help people who had permanently lost abilities that most of us take for granted? Five years later, he came up with the Audeo, a tiny device that detects electrical activity between the brain and vocal cords and turns it into audible speech.

When we speak, three basic things happen: the lungs deliver air, the vocal cords vibrate to create sound, and the mouth moves. The Audeo helps people for whom at least one of the three processes malfunctions due to ALS, traumatic brain injury or other problems — those whose brains and vocal cords are intact but whose impaired motor skills prevent them from moving their lungs and mouth.

Here's how it works: Three pill-size electrodes on the throat pick up electrical signals generated between the brain and the vocal cords. A processor in the device then filters and amplifies the signals and sends them to an adjacent PC, where software decodes them and turns them into words spoken through the PC's speakers. By placing the electrodes on the neck and "speaking" silently through vocal-cord movements (but without moving the mouth), the wearer generates enough neural activity to trigger this chain of events.

Callahan started working on the Audeo at the University of Illinois, studying everything he could about signal processing and neuroscience. It took him four years to determine how to filter out unwanted electrical noise from the environment and the body (like the heartbeat) and detect only the signals needed for speech synthesis. He met his business partner, fellow engineering student Tom Coleman, in 2005, and the two formed Ambient Corporation later that year.

Callahan isn't the only one trying to perfect silent speech. NASA's Ames Research Center is working on a similar device to control rovers and help astronauts communicate even when there's significant distance or noise. That version, however, uses pattern recognition and can distinguish just preprogrammed words. The Audeo allows people to use all English-language phonemes (the roughly 40 sounds that make up words, like "aw" and "ch"), so there's no limit on what a user can say.

The technology does have room to improve. Right now, the Audeo can pick up a maximum of 30 words per minute, about one fifth the rate of normal speech. And learning the "language" of speaking in phonemes takes days of practice. Once mastered, though, the Audeo can do neat things like enable people to carry on phone conversations without making a sound. Ambient is also working on a cellphone interface, with the goal of scrapping the computer completely and reducing the price. "Eventually," Callahan says, "we want it to cost as little as a Bluetooth headset."

Via: Theaudeo

There will be nothing left to fish from the seas?

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:00:00 +0000

Great white whales. Schools of fish so thick they slowed boats. Sea monsters that could swallow a sailor whole. The last one may still be the stuff of lore, but scientists are using a curious series of census tools to gather evidence of an ocean that, as recently as decades ago, fairly teemed with marine life, far bigger and more plentiful that what's found in today's oceans.

Alone, the shipping logs and menus, woodcuts and photos, don't amount to much. But as a whole, the hundreds of thousands of documents being amassed for the Census of Marine Life project are proving uncomfortably telling.

Take whaling, for instance. In most locations, humans have had an effect on local ocean ecology for millennia, even if they only started noting it a few hundred years ago. In New Zealand, however, humans didn't arrive until the late 1200s, so there's a relatively small amount of missing information. The team analyzed 150 logbooks and other documents spanning centuries of New Zealand history, and say (with depressing certitude of 95 percent) that within a hundred years of the introduction of whaling, the southern right whale population had dwindled about 500-fold.

Whaling is just a single piece of the puzzle. One researcher culled 50 years' worth of Key West fishing trophy photos to find that fish diversity and size has dwindled to a shadow of its former self (compare the photo above with the one below). Another pinpointed the point in time when equipment became technologically advanced enough for humans to make a major dent while on deep-sea expeditions -- the introduction of two-ship drag-netting in the 1600s.And some of the documentation is just cool. A Sicilian text from 1153 mentions North Atlantic islanders who capture marine life so large they can build homes from the bones.

For years, scientists have been tolling the warning bell about sea life in general. One report marks 2050 as the end of sea fish. Whether that proves drastic or accurate has yet to be seen, but an understanding of the past may well be our best guide to the future.

"The History of Marine Animal Populations project gives a head start of decades and even centuries in anticipating trends -- both good and bad," says Jesse Ausube, director of the census project. "Forecasting and backcasting are two sides of the same coin."

Pranav Mistry and Pattie Maes

n21arie@gmail.com (Arie Wijaya) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:00:00 +0000

Remember that awesome scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise just wiggles his hands in the air to sift through information? When he's wearing the SixthSense, a combination miniature projector, webcam and notebook computer, Pranav Mistry can snap photos just by making the shape of a frame with his fingers. He can conjure a phone keypad in the palm of his hand and tap the virtual numbers to place a call.

The system can even recognize a book in front of the camera, retrieve its Amazon listing from the Web, and project its rating on the cover. Watching Mistry, a graduate student in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Arts and Sciences program, demonstrate the device is like witnessing a magic show. But he and his adviser, Pattie Maes, a digital-interface specialist at MIT's Media Lab, expect the SixthSense to do a lot more than evoke wonder. Within a few years, they hope, it will let people operate smartphones without touching a button, do instant research on objects around them, and generally offer the kind of enhanced-reality experience that's now confined to science fiction

Maes hit on the idea last October while discussing g-speak, a real-world version of the gesture-controlled interface in the movie Minority Report. She liked the notion of using hand signals to manipulate digital content but wanted something cheaper that you could walk around with, projecting content and interacting with it anywhere you liked. Mistry, nicknamed "Zombie" because of his aversion to sleep, turned out a prototype in just three weeks.

Although the system has evolved considerably since then, the basic concept has stuck. A pocket projector and a webcam hang on Mistry's chest, both wired to a laptop in his backpack, and he wears four different-colored marker caps or pieces of tape on his thumbs and index fingers. When he switches on the system, the webcam starts capturing video and streaming it back to the computer. Then the computer's vision algorithms take over. The real brains of this system, this software filters out background imagery, determines x and y coordinates for each cap or tape color in the video frame, and tracks them over time. The computer discerns which colors are moving which way, so it can follow freehand gestures. These, in turn, trigger various functions.

Say, for instance, Mistry wants to know the time. He traces a small circle on his wrist with his index finger, and the computer tracks the red marker cap or piece of tape, recognizes the gesture, and instructs the projector to flash the image of a watch onto his wrist. For book-recognition, Mistry activates the program with a gesture, and the system snaps a photo of the book, compares it with book-cover images it finds online, computes a match, and retrieves and projects the ratings. Future functions will similarly rely on computer vision algorithms. "It recognizes what's in front of the user and augments those things with relevant information," Maes explains.

This summer, Mistry will begin working with Samsung engineers to compress the entire system into one of the company's new smartphones, which has a built-in projector. With further improvements to the algorithms, eventually even the markers and tape could go away and the device could track fingers alone, making it even easier to enhance your surroundings anywhere you go.