Brain Computer Interface for $300?
March 3rd, 2008Can this be real? I used to work for a company that designed EEG systems. It was run by top shelf, Big Deal neuroscientists, etc., and those guys would would have viewed the system described below as reverse engineered alien technology from Area 51. That would have been 2000-2001.
But in 2008, there will be a viable brain computer interface available for $300!?
My guess is that the terminator industrial complex (universities with backing from DARPA) will use this cheap box to conduct rapid prototyping of new automated killing technologies.
Via: Overclock3D:
Codenamed the Neural Impulse Actuator (or nia for short), OCZ captivated audiences by seemingly being able to use brain power to control the motion of a character in the the popular FPS Unreal Tournament.
Neural Impulse ActuatorWhile details of how it worked at the time were quite sketchy with many people taking guesses at whether it was actually controlled by brainwaves or facial expressions/muscle movements, today (after seeing the device in action on a one-on-one basis) we’ve got some further information on the unit along with some pictures of what you can expect from the retail version once it starts shipping.
How does it work?
Obviously the biggest question that has been on everyone’s minds (excuse the pun) is how does it work? While it has to be said that a lot of the information fed to us by Dr. Michael Schuette (Neurobioligist & OCZ VP of Technology) went well over our heads (here we go again – Ed), we managed to extract from the conversation that the nia works by reading bioptentials. These include activities of the brain, the autonomous nervous system and muscles – all of which are captured using embrace sensors located on the nia’s headband, amplified and sent to the PC via USB2.0.
OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator
The biopotentials are broken into frequency specific components that allow a reasonably fine granularity of control for the novice user, after a short period of adaptation, the controls become essentially a streaming of body signals into the computer that don’t really require any further “thinking” but become sort of second nature.
Until recently this analysis required a great deal of processing power, meaning that in a uni-processor environment the game running on a users PC would often be competing for CPU resources against the nia application. However, thanks to the popularity of multi-core processors, the software is now able to offload a lot of the “decoding” to other cores in the processor improving the performance of the multi-threaded application.
Related: Pentagon to Merge Next-Gen Binoculars With Soldiers’ Brains
Nine Inch Nails in the Record Companies’ Coffins
March 3rd, 2008The new NIN album, Ghosts I-IV, has been officially released by the band on the Internet. One of the purchase options includes choices of high quality DRM-free files for $5.
I took the $5 option—there are lots of other options—but I have to wait until I get on a better connection to download it!
Well done, NIN, for releasing beefy files. I didn’t realize how beefy until I bought my download token and clicked through.
Check out these file sizes:
HIGH-QUALITY MP3 (273.1 MB zip file)
320kbps fully-tagged MP3 files.
FLAC LOSSLESS (607.9 MB zip file)
CD-quality lossless audio.
APPLE LOSSLESS (603.1 MB zip file)
CD-quality lossless audio.
That kind of thing wouldn’t have been a big deal for me back in 2005, when I had a high quality Internet connection in the U.S.
If only there was some way to do to Telecom New Zealand what NIN and Radiohead are doing to the music industry… Oh, it would be delicious and satisfying.
UK Banks Write Off Record £6.8 Billion in Household Debt
March 2nd, 2008Via: Telegraph:
Britain’s banks have been forced to write off a record chunk of household debt in the past year in the latest sign that families are struggling to keep up their repayments.
Lenders from around the country wrote off some £6.8bn in individual debts last year, statistics from the Bank of England reveal. It is the biggest annual total since records began in 1993, more than doubling in the past five years.
The news coincides with figures from Nationwide showing house prices are now suffering their worst streak since 2000, after falling for a fourth month in February.
With the credit crunch making it harder than ever for banks to seek funding in the City’s money markets, they are clamping down on borrowers both by raising their mortgage rates and increasing the pressure on borrowers to pay back their debts.
Alan Clarke, UK economist at BNP Paribas, said: “This is certainly a sign that households are already struggling. The debt burden is high, and you would expect write offs to rise as a result.
“But it’s still early days and there’s more bad news in the pipeline. We haven’t yet seen arrears starting to bite, and if these numbers look bad now, they’ll look even worse in a year’s time. There are plenty more dead bodies out there.”
Pentagon to Test Invisible Gases in Crystal City
March 2nd, 2008Via: Examiner:
The Pentagon is scheduled to release an odorless, invisible, and yes, harmless, gases into the city Thursday to test how quickly they spread through buildings, officials said.
The test is part of the military’s national security preparation for the capital area.
Over the past few years, the defense agency has worked with Arlington County to set up chemical sensors throughout the county, where thousands of defense employees work in leased office space.
The Pentagon has also supplied the sensors and accompanying monitoring equipment to Arlington for the county’s own use.
“Within minutes, if someone attacks the Pentagon, it becomes a problem for Arlington,” Pengtagon Force Protection Agency Director Paul Benda said.
The sensors scan broad areas, Benda said.
If weather cooperates, the Pentagon will release perfluorocarbon tracers, which are commonly used commercially to detect leaks, and sulfur hexafluoride, a common window insulator filling, near the Jefferson Plaza building at 10am on Thursday and Friday.
Officials in yellow vests will set up 80 battery-operated samplers – toolbox-looking cases with 12 air tubes inside of them – throughout Crystal City and will check the air samples in the tubes afterwards to evaluate how quickly and how high the gases spread.
The data will help the Pentagon and Arlington shape their lockdown policies for chemical and biological attacks or accidents, and will also help them determine the most effective locations for sensors.
“We want to place our sensors so we can detect this stuff as quickly as possible,” Benda said.
The test, dubbed “Urban Shield: Crystal City Urban Transport Study,” is similar to one conducted in Manhattan a few years ago, officials said.
Research Credit: EB
My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)
March 2nd, 2008It’s an opportunity for small operators.
See Path to Freedom:
Via: New York Times:
IF you’ve stood in line at a farmers’ market recently, you know that the local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.
But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.
As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know this because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand have been severely hampered by the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. As I’ve looked into the politics behind those restrictions, I’ve come to understand that this is precisely the outcome that the program’s backers in California and Florida have in mind: they want to snuff out the local competition before it even gets started.
Research Credit: Scott
HEAVY FIGHTING IN GAZA; ISRAEL SLAUGHTERS DOZENS OF CIVILIANS
March 2nd, 2008Via: Reuters:
Israeli forces killed 61 people in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, the bloodiest day for Palestinians since an uprising against Israeli occupation began in 2000.
Almost half the dead were civilians, including children.
Israel, which lost two soldiers, seemed ready to press home its fiercest air and ground assault since it pulled troops back to the borders of the coastal enclave in 2005. It blamed rocket attacks by the Islamist Hamas movement for provoking four days of fighting, in which 96 Palestinians have been killed.
The U.N. Security Council prepared to meet in emergency session. A U.N. official in Gaza appealed for international action to end the “inhuman suffering” of its 1.5 million people and said killing women and children would not help Israel.
U.S. President George W. Bush sounded more supportive of his Israeli allies. While regretting all loss of life, his spokesman said: “There is a clear distinction between terrorist rocket attacks that target civilians and action in self-defence.”
More: Guardian: Israeli Minister Threatens to Unleash “Holocaust” in Gaza
Israel’s deputy defence minister yesterday warned his country was close to launching a huge military operation in Gaza and said Palestinians would bring on themselves a “bigger shoah,” using the Hebrew word usually reserved for the Holocaust.
The choice of vocabulary from Matan Vilnai, an often outspoken former army general, was unusually grave – the word is not normally used for anything other than the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews.
Vilnai was speaking about his government’s plans to tackle the continued firing of makeshift rockets, known as Qassams, from Gaza.
“The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves,” he said, in a telephone interview with army radio yesterday morning.
His spokesman later tried to play down the force of his language, saying he meant only “disaster”.
“He did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide,” the spokesman said.
U.S. Researchers Trying to Create Pandemic Avian Flu
March 1st, 2008Cosmos
Issue 18
December 07/January 08
Pages 36 and 37
Here’s an excerpt:
Now that Gary Nabel, Director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, admits that his team is trying to engineer a pandemic strain of the H5N1 virus, here is some additional information to consider:
Health Minister of Indonesia: U.S. May Turn Avian Flu Into Bioweapon
The New PSYOP Payload: Bird Flu and the Collapse of the Internet
Bird Flu “Pandemic” Antidote: Wash Hands
Spanish Agriculture Minister: Bird Flu Sparking Human Epidemic Is “Science Fiction”
STRATFOR on Bird Flu: Calm Down
Flu Pandemic: New Zealand’s Martial Law Contingency Plan
U.S. Military Begins Planning for Avian Flu Pandemic
Finally, with U.S. scientists engineering pandemic strains of influenza and infecting animals that need to be kept in a level 4 biosafety containment facility, I suppose that it’s just a coincidence that British media is out with warnings about the increasing threat of animals spreading diseases to humans.
Metro: Health Risks from Animals Increasing:
Infectious diseases such as Ebola and Sars which spread from animals are an increasing threat to human health – but conservation of wildlife-rich areas could help prevent their emergence, scientists have said.
Around two-thirds of emerging infectious diseases come from animals and 71.8% of those come from wildlife, a study published in the journal Nature said.
Researchers from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), University of Georgia, the Consortium for Conservation Medicine and Columbia University said new infectious diseases were on the rise.
The scientists analysed 335 incidents of disease emergence between 1940 and 2004 and found they had risen significantly in that time.
And they said zoonoses – diseases that originate in animals – were an increasing and very significant threat to global health.
and…
Telegraph: Britain Is Hotspot of New Germs Says New Study:
“We are crowding wildlife into ever-smaller areas, and human population is increasing,” said coauthor Prof Marc Levy, a global-change expert at the Centre for International Earth Science Network. “Where those two things meet, that is a recipe for something crossing over.”
Some pathogens may be picked up by hunting or accidental means; others, such as Nipah virus, which recently emerged in Malaysia, go from wildlife to livestock, and then to people.
Humans have evolved no resistance to zoonoses, so the ailments can be extraordinarily lethal. The scientists say that the more wild species in an area, the more pathogen varieties they may harbour.
Research Credit: IL and HT
More Americans Using Credit Cards to Stay Afloat
March 1st, 2008Via: USA Today:
Seven years in the credit-counseling business didn’t prepare Ann Estes for the alarming trend she began noticing last fall: As her clients’ mortgage bills became unaffordable, a growing number of them began paying their credit card bills before — and sometimes instead of — their mortgages.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” says Estes, who counsels clients by phone from her office in Richmond, Va. “Their homes are at risk, and they know it. But people say, ‘I don’t want to let my credit cards go because that’s my cash flow.'”
Across the nation, credit counselors are reporting the same trend. Credit bureau analyses of consumer payment data show that financially squeezed borrowers have begun paying their credit card and car bills before their mortgages. That’s a striking reversal from the norm, one that reflects rising desperation. It suggests that some people essentially have given up trying to stay current with their mortgages and instead are focused on using credit cards to squeak by.
Bush Critical of Turkey’s Invasion of Iraq
March 1st, 2008One for your pot-kettle-black file folder.
Via: Reuters:
U.S. President George W. Bush urged NATO ally Turkey on Thursday to end its offensive against Kurdish PKK rebels in northern Iraq quickly, but Washington said it would not threaten to withdraw intelligence help.
The United States fears prolonging the Turkish operation, which began on Feb. 21, will undermine stability in the region, particularly Iraq, though it backs Ankara’s mission to crush the PKK and late last year began providing significant intelligence.
“The Turks need to move, move quickly, achieve their objective and get out,” Bush told a White House news conference.
His comments came shortly after U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrapped up a brief visit to Ankara, where he failed to pin down a possible timetable for a Turkish withdrawal.
Before arriving in Ankara he had made clear that he wanted the mission to be short — days or a week or two, not months.
Turkey’s military General Staff General Yasar Buyukanit was quoted by Turkish television as saying: “A short time is a relative concept, it could be one day or one year.”
Oil Hits Inflation-Adjusted Record High
February 29th, 2008Via: Reuters:
U.S. oil surged to a new inflation-adjusted record high on Thursday, surpassing the previous record of $102.53 set in 1980, according to the International Energy Agency.
The following table from the BP Statistical Review of Energy picks out key moments in oil market history. It gives average annual dollar-denominated oil prices in money of the day and the equivalent price in 2006 money.
