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Tuesday, March 21, 2006 |
ATI's 1GB Video Card.  [Slashdot] result in floating point processing power that exceeds a 3GHz Pentium processor by a staggering seven times,
11:48:00 PM 
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In Gear Factor. RI-MAN: Helper Bot For the Edlerly Topic: Robots
 Anyone
can make a robot to take care of children. After all, they're small and
easily entertained. But researchers in Japan have created a bot to take
on the more challenging task of caring for the world's aging
population. RI-MAN is a 5-foot-tall, 220-pound caregiver covered in
soft silicon, which lets it carry a person without causing injury.
Built-in sensors detect a person's body position and weight, so the
robot can figure out how best to lift them. At the moment, RI-MAN can
only carry a 26-pound doll, but could be capable of lifting a 150-pound
person within five years.
[Wired News: Top Stories]
10:25:56 PM
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Microsoft Develops Version of Internet Software Tools. Microsoft faces a potent challenge as software is increasingly built and distributed as a service on the Internet. By STEVE LOHR. [NYT > Technology] -- watchout for the obnoxious ad in front of the article -- a devilish way to slow the system of information gathering while you wait for the propaganda to finish -- might be able to kill it by disabling the flash player. The times also still has the sidebar adds so it seems that some want the internet to be as bad as TV for ads to content -- BL
4:14:24 PM
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Ring Up My Bill, Please. Recently, American banks and wireless companies begun developing mobile payment products that would allow consumers to pay for goods via cellphone. By ERIC DASH and KEN BELSON. [NYT > Technology]
4:01:52 PM
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Internet's Gender Gap Narrows. Building websites targeted to women pays off for some pioneers, but studies say distinctions in how males and females approach the net are more subtle than we thought. Commentary by Joanna Glasner. [Wired News: Top Stories]
3:58:29 PM
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Aggression-related gene weakens brain's impulse control circuits. A version of a gene previously linked to impulsive violence appears to weaken brain circuits that regulate impulses, emotional memory and thinking in humans, researchers at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have found. Brain scans revealed that people with this version – especially males – tended to have relatively smaller emotion-related brain structures, a hyperactive alarm center and under-active impulse control circuitry.
read more [Science Blog -]
3:51:12 PM
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'Crash' Course in Visual Perception and Motor Control. What does baseball have in common with highway safety? That's what Robert Gray, a professor of applied psychology at Arizona State University, wants to know. Baseball players engage a series of rapid and complex visual-motor control strategies to intentionally create a collision between the baseball and the bat or glove. Motorists, on the other hand, use those visual-motor control strategies to avoid collisions with other objects.
read more [Science Blog -]
3:45:24 PM
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Evolutionary genomics my play role in autism. Scientists have described the first hypothesis grounded in evolutionary genomics explaining the development of autism. In a new articlethey explore the 'imprinted brain hypothesis' to explain the cause and effect of autism and autistic syndromes such as Asperger's syndrome, highlighted by the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which involves selective disruption of social behaviour that makes individuals more self-focussed whilst enhancing skills related to mechanistic cognition.
read more [Science Blog -]
3:42:58 PM
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Shaping the boundaries of self-projection. I've recently added a sidebar to my blog's template to report items I've bookmarked in del.icio.us. Someone asked me the other day how it works, and I promised to explain here. It's a simple one-liner that can be added to the template used with any blog publishing system:
You'll probably want to replace my del.icio.us username with yours, of course.
... [Jon's Radio]
3:32:34 PM
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OpenBSD Project in Financial Danger.  [Slashdot] this describes the peril of really good work -- it works in an invisible way and is taken for granted even though it still needs support for updates and development -- but is out of sight out of mind and now nearly out of cash. It seems like there is a place for government infrastructure support of public software that in some way avoids the recurrent need to seek attention in order to continue availablity. There would seem to be a couple of approaches: one is to declare software x as a public good and provide a pension to the creators to help them carry on, and a second approach to archive the software x code in the library of congress and pay the creators some public service royalty based on usage value annually, or third to develop a sunset process that freezes the code and officially ends the project so that the creators are moved on to new projects with appropriate recognition and ceremony. It is import for the open source culture to not punish successful projects and at the same time enable the continual development of project creators and collaborators in making technology relevant to our culture. --BL
3:29:21 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Bruce Landon.
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