Technology

Move over Abbot and Costello!

You all know about the honey bee waggle dance. A bee finds some nectar, returns to the hive, does a dance that communicates information about where the nectar can be found to other bees, and off the workers go to get the nectar. Techies at Georgia Tech have applied this method to developing a better way to run servers. After studying the efficiency of honeybees, Craig Tovey, a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, realized through conversations with Sunil Nakrani, a computer science colleague visiting from the University of…

[hat tip: Joe]

Seems it 'tis the season for warnings about the security of cryptosystems. The New York Times has an article on the latest issue here. It seems that Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) has a note out describing how faults in chip hardware could render cryptosystems insecure. It's not at all clear to me how this differs from analysis where the faults are injected into the hardware (such as described here) because the article doesn't contain any real details.

At the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego last week, a group of researchers presented data on a speech prosthesis which they say could soon enable a paralyzed man to talk again. The device, which consists of 3 gold recording wires, was implanted into the brain of Eric Ramsey, who was completely paralyzed in a car accident 8 years ago. Ramsey is said to be "locked in" - he is fully conscious but is unable to communicate in any way.  The implant is located 6mm below the surface of Ramsey's brain, in a part of the left premotor cortex, where it records the activity of 41 cells…

A little news, a couple of tips. First, this news: Ubuntu is extremely popular on the desktop, but it's made comparatively little progress on servers. That's about to change. Dell is expected to announce in the first quarter of 2008 that it has certified Ubuntu Linux for its server lines. In an interview with Rick Becker, Dell Product Group's vice president of solutions, Becker said that Dell is currently in the process of certifying Ubuntu for all its server lines. "But we are still several months away from announcing a certification. I'd say it'll be announced in Q1 next year." [source]…

Do you use gmail as your primary (or only) email server? Well, you'd better be careful because several dozen gmail users per month have been experiencing problems recently -- problems such as mysteriously losing some, most or all their email messages. What does Google have to say about this? According to a Google spokesman, as far as Google is concerned, "most issues like this are a result of phishing attacks or compromised passwords -- or sometimes simply messages mistakenly deleted or marked as spam -- not a data corruption issue." But unfortunately, the missing email problems at Google…

I like to report advanced technology that runs open source systems, like LInux. From Manufactum of Germany, we have a two pound PC, running Linux, of course, just over seven inches maximum dimension. It runs at 500 MHz, can handle a gig of RAM (default 512 MB) and an 80 gig hard drive. It is pre-loaded with Debian with KDE as your desktop. That part is totally configurable, of course. Imagine replacing all the computers in your lab with something the size of a Tom Clancy novel. That would leave piles of room for, say, a bigger fridge in which you can store samples. And beer.

Can you be arrested for stealing furniture in a virtual world? The source of this question: Philip K. Dick? Nope, NPR: A teenager faces charges of stealing furniture that doesn't exist. The youth in the Netherlands was on one of those Web sites where you create virtual people to wander around virtual buildings spending what amounts to real money. You pay cash for credits to spend online. The 17-year-old allegedly stole $5,800 worth of imaginary furniture. Real police arrested him. They suspect other teens of receiving the stolen goods.

I'm currently getting trounced in Scrabble on Facebook, though I'm playing the game under protest: How can they possibly say that "ZA," "KA," and "AE" are English words, but "KABOOM" is not? The stupid thing is rigged. Anyway, I've been playing around with this social network business for a little while now, and it's kind of weird. Because I'm well past the target demographic, I've got a really strange distribution of "friends"-- a total of 67, with no more than 5 in any one network. It's an odd assortment of people I know from work, people I know from Usenet, bloggers and blog readers, and a…

D-wave systems, whose paracomputer, err, I mean quantum-maybe computer, which sparked quite a bit of controversy earlier this year, is back in the news. This time D-wave is at the big superconducting conference (SC07) being held in Reno, Nevada and is demonstrating a 28-qubit quantum-maybe computer. Paint me an ivory tower skeptic, but I don't think their system will work as they expect it to. Of course, this being, D-wave, the news article makes for some entertaining reading. First up we have this beautiful quote from Geordie Rose, D-Wave founder and CTO, "We have been collaborating…

This is such a cool and novel idea - to let the public have a say in what gets patented and what not! Check out the Peer-To-Patent homepage, download and read this paper by Beth Noveck (another SciFoo camper) which explains the process and sign up to participate.

I'm fascinated by watching the developments in touch and movement based computer interfaces over the past few years. From the Apple iPhone to the Nintendo Wii, it seems that there is a great deal of excitement over these new interfaces. Nearly every week I see something interesting in this domain. Here, for example is a neat little video demoing how to do IR tracking with Nintendo Wii's sensor and some IR reflecting tape on your fingers: Whenever I see these new interfaces, I immediately think of the cortical homunculus which is a representation of the primary motor cortex, weighting the…

The Los Angeles Times reports on "Robo-moth", a cleverly designed contraption, built from cheap off-the-shelf parts, which was presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego earlier this week. Robo-moth is a 6-inch-tall wheeled robot to which attached tobacco horn moth has been attached. A microelectrode inserted into the insect's brain records the activity of a single visual motion detection neuron, which exhibits directional selectivity and which is involved in steadying the visual field during flight.  The moth is immobilized inside a cylinder covered with vertical stripes…

Ethan Zuckerman (who is on the Wikimedia Advisory Board) has a post discussing Wikipedia's recent fundraising drive, with some comparative numbers: In the past 17 days, the [Wikimedia] Foundation has raised over $478,000 in online gifts. That's a pretty amazing number, on the one hand, and a concerning one, on the other hand. If Global Voices could raise that much money online in a month, I'd be out of a job, as our annual budget is not much higher than that sum, and I spend far too much of my time convincing generous individuals, corporations and foundations to support our efforts. On the…

The Brainloop brain-computer interface, demonstrated at the VisionSpace laboratory for perception and cognition at FH Joanneum, University of Applied Sciences in Austria. (Photo by Miha Fras, courtesy of Aksioma/ Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana) What will they think of next? First, there was the brain-computer interface for controlling Second Life avatars, and yesterday I mentioned a gig in which the music is controlled by the audience's brainwaves. Now, researchers from Austria and Slovenia have developed a device called Brainloop, which can be used to navigate in Google Earth:…

James Fung, a musician and computer engineer at the University of Toronto, has developed a program that can convert EEG recordings into music. Fung is involved in the Regenerative Brain Wave Music Project, which "explores new physiological interfaces for musical instruments." As part of the project, he staged a concert in which the music and lighting were controlled by the audience's brainwaves. There's more information, and some footage of the concert, in the film clip below. [Via Mind Update]

Every so often, I encounter a technical advance that is simply so crazy-cool that I have to talk about it. Dombeck et al. publishing in Neuron offer such an advance. They found a way to image the activity of whole fields of neurons using two-photon fluorescent microscopy -- a technique that I will define in a second. They can do this with in mice that are actually behaving by mounting the mouse in an apparatus that lets the mouse run on a track ball floating on air -- just like air hockey. (I want to meet the person who came up with that. There had to be high-fives all-around.)…

I ordered a tablet PC a little while back (Lenovo X61, with all the options maxed out, because, well, book advance). It shipped a couple of days ago, so I've been tracking it via UPS, where it has experience some odd delays. The strangest by far is this message from today: LOUISVILLE, KY, US 10/31/2007 6:04 P.M. BROKERAGE RELEASED SHIPMENT. SHIPMENT IS SUBMITTED TO CLEARING AGENCY FOR FURTHER CLEARANCE 10/31/2007 6:04 P.M. A SPECIAL CUSTOMS DELAY IS REQUIRED FOR THIS LIVE ENTRY "Live entry?" I realize it's coming from China, but what can they possibly be making these things out of? Can I…

This is so cool. A one-millimeter long spider (Cenotextricella simoni) encased in amber gets "digitally dissected" using Very High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography. The paper is online in Zootaxa 1623:47-53 but requires a subscription.