China's 'Gold Farmers' Play a Grim Game

I listened to this on the way to work the other day. Very interesting that people can make a living playing games and selling the virtual treasure that comes with it. There is controversy with it as those people playing the game for fun face inflation from these gold farmers. Just one more career that exists entirely online!

Listen to it here from NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10165824

"Morning Edition -May 14, 2007 · Playing online games for 12 hours is a fulltime job for thousands of Chinese workers. They're accumulating virtual money — or "gold" — which they can sell for real cash. But it's a dull and labor-intensive job with limited payoffs. "

Chipping In: Brain chip for memory repair closes in on live tests

Catching up on my Scientific American subscription had me reading this article from Feb. '07 this morning. It talks about BCI's (Brain-Computer Interfaces). A group is studying them in rats. It does say that we have modeled some portions of the brain so accurately, that the silicon replicas give 95% of the same outputs, given a set a of inputs, as the actual brain does (similar things have been stated in Kurzweil's last book). Right now there are a number of real BCIs being commercialized (www.cyberkineticsinc.com) and many more being studied. This is the closest to a two-way BCI that I've heard of though. Most either have the brain controlling something (like a robotic arm to grab or manipulate something, or a computer cursor), or exterior influences manipulating the brain (such as cochlear implants). But these guys are working on an implanted BCI that would augment your memory. Very Fascinating. The full article is only available online, but here is the teaser they make available:

January 14, 2007

NEUROTECH
Chipping In
Brain chip for memory repair closes in on live tests
By Anna Griffith

Supplementing the human brain with computer power has been a staple of science fiction. But in fact, researchers have taken several steps in melding minds with machines, and this spring a team from the University of Southern California may replace damaged brain tissue in rats with a neural prosthesis.

For the past few years, researchers have demonstrated the ability to translate another creature's thoughts into action. In 2000 neurologist Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University wired a monkey with electrodes so that its thoughts could control a robotic arm. Brain-machine interfaces developed by Niels Birbaumer, a neuroscientist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, already help some paralyzed patients move a computer cursor with their brain waves to select letters for writing a message....continued at Scientific American Digital

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=16D0349A-E7F2-99DF-3AE455BC30B67DB3&sc=I100322

Calling In The Virtual G-Men

Interesting blurb about how law enforcement is going to need to advance to handle "virtual crimes".

APRIL 16, 2007
Up Front
Edited by Michael Arndt

WEB WATCH
Calling In The Virtual G-Men

"The seedier side of Second Life—the online world where users spend real money to shop as well as gamble and misbehave—is coming under federal scrutiny. Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world, recently invited the FBI to visit its online casinos and clear up what's allowed under last year's Internet gambling bill. On Second Life, residents bet with Linden dollars, which are not real currency, Linden Lab argues. But virtual profits can be converted to hard cash, through PayPal. Is it offshore gambling? Depends on the scale. "The FBI needs to distinguish the professional gamblers from casual gamblers in Second Life," says Edward Castronova, a telecom prof at Indiana University and a virtual-economy expert."

By Aili McConnon

http://www.businessweek.com/@@6pT2kWQQ0hw0sRUA/premium/content/07_16/c4030011.htm

ROBOTICS: Worming Its Way Into Our Hearts

Interesting to think how close this is. They haven't begun human trials, but just the idea of robotics in our hearts is exciting. Although this is tethered to a human for surgical purposes, the idea of a small robot crawling though your veins to fix things is just the beginning. Remove the tether to a human, make it wireless, give it some AI, and you've got a full-time doctor helping you out. Baby steps...

MAY 7, 2007
Developments to Watch
Edited by Neil Gross

"Robots are getting more adept at procedures that can tax accomplished surgeons. The latest example is Heart-Lander, a tiny, 10mm-long robot that crawls like an inchworm across the heart.

Developed by Cameron Riviere and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute and Johns Hopkins University, the bot is connected by a tether to a joystick operated by a human surgeon. It's inserted through an entry point below the patient's rib cage, a minimally invasive procedure that doesn't require cracking open the chest. The bot then crawls to the desired location on the heart, unperturbed by the organ's rhythmic beating. Once in position, it can burn away diseased tissue, help place a needle to inject drugs, or attach electrodes used to stimulate heart muscle—all the while relaying visual and other sensory data back to the medical team.

The device has already been tested in open-heart surgery on pigs. The researchers have formed a company, HeartLander Surgical, to commercialize the breakthrough."

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_19/c4033088.htm

Science: Can Animals and Robots Be Self-Aware?

Here's a very interesting article sent to me about metacognition - "the ability to think about your thoughts, to engage in self-reflection, to introspect." It describes a few clever tests that show significant evidence of such self-awareness in animals, comatose humans and even computer programs. It challenges this last bastion of human uniqueness. Perhaps animals and future computers may one day state Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum" (Latin for "I think therefore I am"), and in some "real" way be as certain about their own existence as any one us can claim.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18108859/site/newsweek/

Full-Mental Nudity: The arrival of mind-reading machines

Great article. Makes me think about Minority Report and Blink. Do we have free will? The laws and rules of privacy are only going to get more relevant. Sent to me by Gayle (thanks!). Check it out!

http://www.slate.com/id/2161936/

Video: Numbers to Make You Think

A nice 5 minute video that has a cool perspective. Some great numbers to make you think. A good friend of mine sent this - thanks Ardi! I quote a number of these all the time. Just like the fact that China has more honor students than we have students all together. Even if China and India have lousy education percentiles compared to industrialized countries, they must realize their sheer size. They also discuss the exponential curves shaping our future and how quickly things will be changing. Nice introduction for people...

http://www.glumbert.com/media/shift

A Digital Life

New systems may allow people to record everything they see and hear--and even things they cannot sense--and to store all these data in a personal digital archive
By Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell

I’ve been reading and hearing about the possibility of recording your entire life. Every second, every word and every image. It just takes cheap cameras (still and video), microphones, storage, and most importantly, software. Software is the critical piece of the pie to actually make use of the mountains of data that would be captured. Well, I had no idea these guys over at Microsoft have been working on this for years. How nice will it be to have a small window pop up in your eye glasses giving you the name, some brief summary points from past conversations (kids, alma matter, hobbies, etc) of the “old friend” you just bumped into (at a grocery store, networking event, etc.)? How about all the medical insights of continually monitored patients and the physiological impacts of various environments and stimuli? It was great to find a succinct overview of the potential of this idea from Scientific American. Check it out!

Jeff Hawkins hacks the human brain

"The creator of the PalmPilot and the Treo isn't just making another gadget. He's attempting to fuse silicon and gray matter to produce the ultimate intelligent machine."

Here’s an interesting article I read today. From what I know, I agree that Numata seems quite aggressive. The human brain has many different regions which all work together in a myriad of ways. The neocortex is agreeably a very complex portion. I can’t help but wonder if simulating just this one region, they’re going to be missing a variety of important subparts of the brain that are integral to the functioning of the neocortex. I like the passion and the efforts and I can see that there are real applications for their efforts. Whether or not it’s doing what the neocortex is doing, their product sounds like a flexible and relatively easy way to program genetic algorithms. This is weak AI – even though the article kind of hints towards it becoming strong AI. It looks like a way to expand weak AI’s reach into new territory, so it sounds great to me! Pretty cool to see such a successful group of people putting real time, money and energy into such a product!

Mimicking how the brain recognizes street scenes

I've always enjoyed seeing interdisciplinary discoveries. When I was getting my undergraduate degree, they were just starting to link different disciplines together in the same course. Two classes that I took that weren't linked, but I took in the same quarter and were Physical Psychology and Epistemology. I was often utilizing information from Physical Psychology in the Epistemology class. In the end, it I suppose I just prolonged some discussions of how we get information from our senses as I could actually describe it in some detail, but fascinating as it was, this article's discovery from crossing neuroscience and computer science is exciting. I wander if these guys are going to be involved in the latest DARPA Grand Challenge (I noticed this research was practically funded by DARPA). This is almost pseudo reverse engineering of the brain - well it actually is, but one a rudimentary level.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-02/mifb-mht020607.php