Return of Soon gamers won't even have to give their thumbs a workout!

Awesome!

An Australian company is gearing up to release a computer headset that allows people to control video games using only the power of their minds.

Emotiv Systems, founded by four Australian scientists in 2003, will release the $US299 ($315) EPOC headset on the US market this year. Australians will be able to order it online.

Featuring 14 sensors that measure electrical impulses from the brain, the headset - which plugs into the PC's USB port - will enable games to register facial expressions, emotions and even cognitive thoughts, allowing players to perform in-game actions just by visualising them.

The headset works in a similar way to voice recognition, in that it must first be calibrated using Emotiv's software to recognise patterns in the user's electrical brain impulses, which are used to perform 30 preset actions.

When the player performs those same thoughts in the game the software knows to associate them with the correct action, such as rotate object or push object.

The ability to control what your character is doing just by thinking about it is interesting. But perhaps the coolest part of the article discusses the possibility of the mood-reading part of the hardware:

The headset could also detect the players' emotions - whether they're bored, angry, engaged, happy, stressed, etc - and adjust difficulty levels, in-game music and the game environment accordingly.

Characters could also react to a player's emotional cues.

In horror-themed games, enemies could intelligently select the perfect time to startle a player based on how they feel, rather than having opponents in the same positions every time a mission is reloaded.

Wouldn't that be awesome?? Tell me it would not be, and I will ban you for being a filthy liar!
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Well, waddya know?

Davis has already apologized for his earlier remark about Obama:

Republican Rep. Geoff Davis apologizing to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Monday after referring to him as "that boy."

...

Davis' campaign said it sent a letter to Obama apologizing for the remark, which was widely reported on blogs and newspaper Web sites, including the Lexington Herald-Leader.

"My poor choice of words is regrettable, and was in no way meant to impugn you or your integrity," Davis wrote in the letter delivered to Obama's Washington office Monday afternoon. "I offer my sincere apology to you and ask for your forgiveness."

[Edit] Although, as Matt Yglesias points out, nobody was upset that Davis might have called Obama's integrity into question. It was the racist nature of those remarks that we objected to. Well... most of us. [/Edit]

Also, I watched the video on that page on the same issue, but before it played the news clip it showed me an advertisement. Mr. T was the spokesman for World of Warcraft.

Damn, now it's actually tempting to get the game.
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Well, duh

People who are your "friends" on Facebook aren't really friends:

A British judge has made official what many of us have long suspected - that being "Facebook friends" with someone doesn't necessarily make you their friend.

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"The wheel turns, does it not, Ambassador?"

Even Microsoft executives can't get Vista to work:

Private Microsoft emails unearthed during a US court case have revealed that even the software giant's own executives struggled to get Windows Vista running smoothly.

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One executive, Mike Nash, complained he was "burned" so badly by compatibility issues he was left with "a $2100 email machine".

Steven Sinofsky, the Microsoft executive in charge of Windows, struggled to even get his home printer working with Vista. In an email to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in February last year, Sinofsky outlined reasons why Vista struggled at launch.

He said hardware and software vendors never "really believed we would ever ship [Vista] so they didn't start the work [on updated drivers] until very late in 2006".

"People who rely on using all the features of their hardware (like Jon's Nikon scanner) will not see availability for some time, if ever, depending on the [manufacturer]," Sinofsky wrote.

Ballmer responded with a terse "Righto".

The "Jon" referred to is Microsoft board member and its former chief operating officer Jon Shirley, who experienced compatibility problems with his Epson printer and scanner and his Nikon film scanner.

He could not even get some of Microsoft's own MSN software products to work on Vista and refused to upgrade his other computer to the operating system.

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It does get ridiculously convoluted

An interesting and handy summary for those of us who don't really follow economics: Mark Chu-Carroll explains the sub-prime crisis.
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"Yes, if by 'allow' you mean 'force'."

They've finally done it! They've built a vest that allows gamers to feel their characters getting hit:

A US surgeon working on a "tele-health" breakthrough has devised a way for video game warriors to feel shots, stabs, slams, and hits dealt to their on-screen characters.

A vest designed by doctor Mark Ombrellaro uses air pressure and feedback from computer games to deliver pneumatic thumps to the spots on players' torsos where they would have been struck were they actually on the battlefields.

The "3rd Space" vest will make its US debut in November at a price of 189 dollars. It will be launched with the first-person shooter game "Call of Duty" and a custom-made title.

Excellent. Now nerds can get beat up without ever having to leave their homes.
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I think we should get this for my younger brother

...whom I've known to talk on two phones at once:

It may be something of a teenage nightmare: limits on when a wireless phone can make and receive calls and to whom, restrictions on text messages and talk time, and set allowances for ring tones and other downloads — all at a parent's fingertips. AT&T Inc., the nation&339;s largest wireless carrier, will launch a service Tuesday giving parents that kind of wide-ranging control on almost all of its 63.7 million subscriber lines.

"We were certainly hearing from parents who were dismayed at overuse of text or phones," said Carlton Hill, vice president of voice products for AT&T's wireless unit and the mother of two teenagers. "We want to find a way for kids to use phones without having to take the phone away."

Many parents want their children to have access to cell phones for safety reasons, but they don't want them making or receiving non-emergency calls during the school day, chatting away all the shared family-plan minutes or bloating the bill with text messaging charges, Hill said.

...

The functions, ranging from call blocking and hour limits to text message and download allowances, will be set through a Web site. Calls to or from a parent's number can be made to override the restrictions, and calls to 911 can be made anytime.

The AT&T service also allows filtering of Web sites parents don't want their children accessing from their phones, but that function will not work on Apple Inc.'s iPhone because of the browser, said AT&T spokesman Fletcher Cook.

The Web site filter will also be inoperable when a phone is using a Wi-Fi network because AT&T can only block content delivered over its wireless networks.

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I think there's a wee difference between our cultures

In America, we have the government create and release a free computer game about the army. In Soviet Russia, computers make a game out of the army.

No, wait.

In China, they create a game about torturing and executing corrupt government officials:

An online game in which players can torture and kill corrupt officials that Chinese authorities set up to teach people about the perils of graft is a roaring success, state media said today.

"Incorruptible Fighter", developed by the government of east China's Zhejiang province, was launched just over a week ago and has been downloaded more than 100,000 times, the Southern Metropolitan Daily reported.

...

The game, which lets players get ahead by killing officials by means of "weapons, magic or torture," is based on well-known incidents taken from Chinese history.

But the parallels in modern China of people struggling against seemingly insurmountable corruption are clear.

To advance to a new level, the player must enter an "Anti-Corruption College" to be lectured in more detail about ancient cases, the Southeast Business newspaper said.

The game is so popular that the server it was on crashed.
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But can it compute the power of love?

I'm not entirely sure I understand this article, but it seems that there were (at least) two competing theories for how an infant learns sounds: one said that it was hard-wired in the brain, and another said that the child picks it up. Well, apparently someone made a computer program modeled off a child's learning patterns, and discovered that the computer picked up vowel sounds as well as the child did, giving some credence to the latter theory.

"The debate in language acquisition is around the question of how much specific information about language is hard-wired into the brain of the infant and how much of the knowledge that infants acquire about language is something that can be explained by relatively general purpose learning systems," said James McClelland, a psychology professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

McClelland says his computer program supports the theory that babies systematically sort through sounds until they understand the structure of a language.

"The problem the child confronts is how many categories are there and how should I think about it. We're trying to propose a method that solves that problem," said McClelland, whose work appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Expanding on some existing ideas, he and a team of international researchers developed a computer model that resembles the brain processes a baby uses when learning about speech.

He and colleagues tested their model by exposing it to "training sessions" that consisted of analyzing recorded speech in both English and Japanese between mothers and babies in a lab.

What they found is the computer was able to learn basic vowel sounds right along with baby.

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"Not every problem can be solved with chess, Deep Blue. Someday you'll learn that."

A computer, Chinook, has perfected the game of checkers:

An invincible checkers-playing program named Chinook has solved a game whose origins date back several millennia, scientists reported Thursday on the journal Science's Web site. By playing out every possible move — about 500 billion billion in all — the computer proved it can never be beaten. Even if its opponent also played flawlessly, the outcome would be a draw.

Chinook, created by computer scientists from the University of Alberta in 1989, wrapped up its work less than three months ago. In doing so, its programmers say the newly crowned checkers king has solved the most challenging game yet cracked by a machine — even outdoing the chess-playing wizardry of IBM's Deep Blue.

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Checkers — or draughts, as the game is known in Britain — is played on a board of 64 dark and light squares, though each opponent's 12 game pieces are allowed to move only diagonally along the dark squares. Chinook was not designed to "think" through all permitted strategies on its own but to memorize the consequences of every possible move, allowing it map out a start-to-finish strategy that would, at worst, result in a draw.

With assistance from some of the world's best checkers players, Schaeffer and his team introduced rules of thumb into their massive computer program and then allowed it to capture information about winning and losing moves, tweaking it along the way. In building the database, the program assembled the 39 trillion pieces of information needed to determine all possible outcomes when 10 or fewer checkers remain on the board.

Next, the team built a database of beginning moves that would eventually lead players to the endgame. The final challenge was to forge tight links between the game's start and finish.

"The whole strategy in solving a game is to shrink that middle part until it disappears, so your beginning game and your end game connect," Littman said.

On April 29, Chinook did exactly that when it determined that perfect play by both sides would always lead to a draw.

I think it's clear that the next step is global domination. We have no choice but to surrender to our robot, checkers-playing overlords.
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Who indeed?

A German man who threw his computer out the window in the middle of the night got nothing but sympathy from the police:

Police in the northern city of Hanover said they would not press charges after responding to calls made by residents in an apartment block who were woken by a loud crash in the early hours of Saturday.

Officers found the street and pavement covered in electronic parts and discovered who the culprit was.

Asked what had driven him to the night-time outburst, the 51-year-old man said he had simply got annoyed with his computer.

"Who hasn't felt like doing that?" said a police spokesman.

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This post brought to you by Sony

A while ago, Terry Pratchett had to switch publishing companies for the people putting out his books in Germany from Heyne to Goldmann. The reason? They were inserting ads into the copy:

"There were a number of reasons for switching to Goldmann, but a deeply personal one for me was the way Heyne (in Sourcery, I think, although it may have been in other books) inserted a soup advert in the text ... a few black lines and then something like 'Around about now our heroes must be pretty hungry and what better than a nourishing bowl'... etc, etc.

My editor was pretty sick about it, but the company wouldn't promise not to do it again, so that made it very easy to leave them. They did it to Iain Banks, too, and apparently at a con he tore out the offending page and ate it. Without croutons."

That website has a scan of the offending book here. And a commenter here says that this also happened to German translations of Star Trek novels.

Why do I bring this up? Because it seems that this power may also now be in the hands of ISPs:

Texas based ISP Redmoon has implemented software that hijacks pages being visited by their customers by placing Redmoon's own ads on these pages.

The technology is provided by NebuAD, which boasts that ISP delivered advertisements are an untapped source of revenue.

Every single web site owner is affected by NebuAD's technology: whether a site is running ads or not makes no difference, Customers of any ISP evil enough to run NebuAD's platform are going to see ads on every page on every site; ads that don’t benefit the content creator. It is important to note that these ads are NOT pop-ups, and this is not a free internet service; the ads are served as if they were part of the page, to paying internet customers who are NOT made aware that these ads have been inserted by their ISP.

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Soon gamers won't even have to give their thumbs a workout!

Scientists are developing devices that can read brain-waves... for incorporation into toys.

A convincing twin of Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light saber. But this is no chintzy Halloween costume. It's a prototype, years in the making, of a toy that incorporates brain wave-reading technology.

Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user's forehead and reads the brain's electrical signals, then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the saber, which lights up when the user is concentrating. The player maintains focus by channeling thoughts on any fixed mental image, or thinking specifically about keeping the light sword on. When the mind wanders, the wand goes dark.

Engineers at NeuroSky Inc. have big plans for brain wave-reading toys and video games. They say the simple Darth Vader game — a relatively crude biofeedback device cloaked in gimmicky garb — portends the coming of more sophisticated devices that could revolutionize the way people play.

Technology from NeuroSky and other startups could make video games more mentally stimulating and realistic. It could even enable players to control video game characters or avatars in virtual worlds with nothing but their thoughts.

Adding biofeedback to "Tiger Woods PGA Tour," for instance, could mean that only those players who muster Zen-like concentration could nail a put. In the popular action game "Grand Theft Auto," players who become nervous or frightened would have worse aim than those who remain relaxed and focused.

NeuroSky's prototype measures a person's baseline brain-wave activity, including signals that relate to concentration, relaxation and anxiety. The technology ranks performance in each category on a scale of 1 to 100, and the numbers change as a person thinks about relaxing images, focuses intently, or gets kicked, interrupted or otherwise distracted.

...

While NeuroSky's headset has one electrode, Emotiv Systems Inc. has developed a gel-free headset with 18 sensors. Besides monitoring basic changes in mood and focus, Emotiv's bulkier headset detects brain waves indicating smiles, blinks, laughter, even conscious thoughts and unconscious emotions. Players could kick or punch their video game opponent — without a joystick or mouse.

"It fulfills the fantasy of telekinesis," said Tan Le, co-founder and president of San Francisco-based Emotiv.

The 30-person company hopes to begin selling a consumer headset next year, but executives would not speculate on price. A prototype hooks up to gaming consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360.

...

CyberLearning is already selling the SmartBrain Technologies system for the original PlayStation, PS2 and original Xbox, and it will soon work with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The EEG- and EMG-based biofeedback system costs about $600, not including the game console or video games.

Kids who play the race car video game "Gran Turismo" with the SmartBrain system can only reach maximum speed when they're focused. If attention wanes or players become impulsive or anxious, cars slow to a chug.

I'm already imagining an Avalon-style RPG.
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Luddites--I mean, computer scientists demand the destruction of the internet!

An interesting idea: scrap the internet and start over.

One of the biggest things computer scientists have to deal with is backward compatibility. For example, suppose a company has created a program that connects to their remote server and performs some operation. If the company decides to update their server, and radically change the way it operates, they can't just write completely new code. If they did, then all the clients who were using their old software could no longer interact with the new server. So the company has to keep this in mind and make sure that the new server can also accept the same commands that the old server did.

This is one of the reasons that the Internet is rather messed up. The internet's precursor was very lax about things like security and authentication:

The internet's early architects built the system on the principle of trust. Researchers largely knew one another, so they kept the shared network open and flexible — qualities that proved key to its rapid growth.

But spammers and hackers arrived as the network expanded and could roam freely because the internet doesn't have built-in mechanisms for knowing with certainty who sent what.

The network's designers also assumed that computers are in fixed locations and always connected. That's no longer the case with the proliferation of laptops, personal digital assistants and other mobile devices, all hopping from one wireless access point to another, losing their signals here and there.

Engineers tacked on improvements to support mobility and improved security, but researchers say all that adds complexity, reduces performance and, in the case of security, amounts at most to bandages in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse.

The internet, at its core, is not a very secure thing. Protocols have been added on top of it to try to add security, but its all very ad hoc. So these people are proposing replacing the current internet with something that is secure at its very core:

Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the internet, some university researchers with the US federal government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over.

The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a "clean slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on September 2, 1969.

They may be right, but it'll be almost impossible to actually do it.

A new network could run parallel with the current internet and eventually replace it, or perhaps aspects of the research could go into a major overhaul of the existing architecture.

These clean-slate efforts are still in their early stages, though, and aren't expected to bear fruit for another 10 or 15 years — assuming Congress comes through with funding.

Guru Parulkar, who will become executive director of Stanford's initiative after heading NSF's clean-slate programs, estimated that GENI alone could cost $350 million, while government, university and industry spending on the individual projects could collectively reach $300 million. Spending so far has been in the tens of millions of dollars.

And it could take billions of dollars to replace all the software and hardware deep in the legacy systems.

It would be an interesting development, though....
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An interesting innovation

Google has come up with an interesting idea: linking Google Books with Google Maps. That is, when a book describes a location, they provide a link to their map software so a person can visualize the location.

Google Books has started to "animate the static information" in written works by linking location references to its interactive Google Maps software.

Clicking on words pinpointing certain places in books will connect readers to maps of the spots, according to Google engineer David Petrou.

"Why not visualize places mentioned in books on a map?" Petrou asked rhetorically in a weblog on the company website.

"Now you can. Fact, fiction, old and new, we seek to present maps when helpful across all kinds of books."

Titles already augmented with interactive maps include Around the World in Eighty Days, War and Peace, The Travels of Marco Polo, and The 9/11 Commission Report, according to Google.

"We hope this feature helps you plan your next trip, research an area for academic purposes, or visualize the haunts of your favorite fictional characters," wrote Petrou. "Above all, have fun."

Although given the format Google Books is in, that might be kinda awkward.
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Really? You don't say.

Julie Amero is a substitute teacher in Connecticut. Apparently during one seventh-grade class, her computer popped up with dozens of pornographic images, which the kids saw and reported. She was convicted of "four felony counts of 'injury or risk of injury to, or impairing morals of, children.'" Each count has a maximum sentence of ten years in prison.

The defense tried arguing that a great deal of malware was responsible for the flood of pornographic pop-ups--a possibility the police didn't even check. Their expert witness, Herb Horner, determined "that the machine had been infected with multiple pieces of malicious software before she arrived at the school, and that these hidden programs were responsible for the pornographic deluge." The expert witness for the prosecution, Detective Mark Lounsbury, "a computer crimes officer at the Norwich Police Department", ran a program called ComputerCOP Pro to analyze the activity of the machine Ms. Amero was using. He countered that Ms. Amero was clearly guilty because--get this--the computer visited porn websites.

ComputerCOP scans the hard drive and reports on when each file was created or modified. Lounsbury says he is satisfied that Amero intentionally viewed porn in class because the logs show that her computer accessed various inappropriate sites while she was sitting at the computer.

"I take that at face value," Lounsbury told Alternet. "It's evidence. It speaks for itself. The pop-up defense is a Twinkie defense."

Lounsbury said that Amero must have navigated to pornographic sites in order to have infected her computer with obscene popups. "You've got to get that ball rolling," he said.

That defense transforms this from tragedy to farce. I am personally offended by that statement.

The article specifies that ComputerCOP "is not designed to definitively distinguish between user-generated clicks and the effects of malware." Saying that the computer "accessed various inappropriate sites while she was sitting at the computer" means nothing other than that porn popped up on the screen, which nobody has denied. Obviously the computer visited these sites, but that doesn't mean that Ms. Amero did so herself. On the contrary, Horner discovered that a "program called Pasco showed that malware had automatically redirected Amero's browser. Horner stressed that this particular form of hijacking is invisible to ComputerCOP Pro."

Via Tom Tomorrow
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The American education system at work!

The people at Verizon don't know the difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents.

No, literally. I will quote, verbatim, from the clip, about 15 minutes in:

George: Do you recognize that there's a difference between 1 dollar and 1 cent?
Manager: Definitely.
George: Do you recognize that there's a difference between half a dollar and half a cent?
Manager: Definitely.
George: Then, do you therefore recognize that there's a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents?
Manager: No.

Mind you, this is around the fifth person he has talked to with this problem, and the second in that sound clip. And at the end, she claims that their disagreement is a "difference of opinion". Frankly, that reeks of creationist ideas to me--where opinions are allowed to be substitutes for facts.

If you don't want to listen through a 25-minute recording, a transcript has been posted here.
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Success!

Well, it took me all of yesterday and several hours of today, but I created a program that will automatically download pages from GoogleBooks to my hard drive. Several hours spent to be able to download three hundred pages in a matter of moments. Well, okay, I only downloaded the 188 pages of The Negro at Home that I didn't download previously, but still.

Although this will just add to the great amounts of books I don't have time to read....
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Manly gaming

I'm sure y'all are familiar with the brouhaha over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Well, the company that made the game, Take-Two Interactive Software, is courting some new controversy with boys courting boys:

The video game maker that sparked uproar over a hidden sex scene in "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," is courting new controversy with its latest schoolyard title "Bully" -- featuring boys kissing.

...

"Bully" stars 15-year-old Jimmy Hopkins, who must navigate cliques, fights and young love at his new boarding school, along the way winning brawls, completing missions and plying girls with candy and flowers in exchange for kisses.

But Jimmy can also use the same approach with boys. When Jimmy approaches a tall, blond boy with some flowers, the boy replies: "I'm hot. You're hot. Let's make out."

The article cites some LGBT people claiming that this is progress--game-makers are allowing for homosexual and/or bisexual romance in a medium that had been dominated by heterosexuality for so long. And it probably is, at that, although I fear those opposed to such a thing could just point to other objectionable content from these game-makers as "proof" that this is some sort of plot to decay society's morals. "This comes from the same people that made a series of games solely devoted to beating people up and stealing their cars! They let you recover hit points by hiring prostitutes! They allowed other people to make a patch for their game that allows players to simulate sex! This is just the latest in their pernicious assault on morals!"

That, however, was not the tactic taken by one person:

"I can't have my kids playing this game. This is morally reprehensible. GTA (Grand Theft Auto) is a real man's game, Bully is a disgrace," wrote a poster using the handle spideRRR on GameSpot.com.

So... letting your kid hire hookers, shoot people, steal cars, blow things up, elude the police... all this is fine, because that's what a "real man" does? Hoo-boy.
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I came across this awesome article showing how quantum mechanics are apparently connected to the series of prime numbers. Nothing overly technical--in fact, I'd prefer if the author had gone into more detail--but a fascinating read nonetheless.
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