Skipping the Barcode Tattoo

The Human Genome Project was an effort to sequence the entire human genome. The human genome contains about 23,000 genes and 3 billion base pairs. The project was completed in 2003, took 13 years and cost over 3 billion dollars.

Today a human genome can be sequenced in about 6 weeks at a cost of $60,000. Researchers who predicted that the cost may be as low as $1000 in three years have been leapfrogged by two companies who claim to be able to do it in one day for $100. At this cost it will soon become part of the standard physical.

The Department of Homeland Security is set to begin collecting the DNA of any citizen who is arrested and any foreigner who is detained. As usual, the U.K. is way ahead on this. British police want to collect the DNA of potential criminals including children as young a 5 years old if they exhibit anti-social behavior.

The Stuff We Leave Behind

The European Space Agency has just published some pictures of the space debris surrounding Earth. Ancient civilizations have often been identified by the garbage heaps they leave behind. I guess it’s no different in space.

Your Next Surgeon May Be Robot.

Carnegie-Mellon University has developed a snake-like robot called the CardioArm. It is inserted into an incision in the chest and is then guided by joystick. The robot’s “head” has both a camera and end effectors capable of performing cardiac ablation, a procedure that delivers electrical pulses to the heart and can destroy problematic tissue.

In 2006 an Italian man in Milan had heart surgery performed by an autonomous robot. The surgery was initiated and monitored by a surgeon in Boston, but the robot performed the surgery without further intervention. Knee surgery[video] is often performed by a doctor sitting at a console and manipulating a 3D image.

Robots are not just getting smarter, they’re getting smaller. Brain researchers use tiny gene probes that seek out specific areas of the brain, allowing an fMRI to monitor activity. They enter the body as eyedrops. “Liu and his colleagues hitched a common MRI probe to a DNA sequence….” The military has developed a surgical robot small enough to carry into battlezones. The robot is controlled remotely by a surgeon in a safe location. Nanoparticles[video] can be guided to specific areas in the body where they release microdoses of drugs. Since the drugs are delivered directly to the problem area the doses can be as much as one thousand times lower.

[Obligatory grovel]
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

eHarmony’s Dissonant Chords

I’ve tried a few online dating services over the years, but never got too serious about them. The dates that I did go on never led to a second one. The matches were poor and if I had to go by the flattering photos alone I’d have never recognized the woman in a crowd. Of course, that doesn’t stop all the services from sending me recruitment spam. I doubt that I’m part of their target demographic. I am not interested in the “Hot 23 year old in YOUR AREA!” or “Russian beauty looking for love!”

Regardless, I find something oddly appealing about creating profiles. Maybe it strokes my ego and iconoclastic nature to see that few people share my array of interests. Maybe it’s a way to look like my ideal self. Most of these services allow you to check off negative properties in your match preferences but I’ve yet to see any that allow you to describe yourself as lazy, drug addict, egotistical, reclusive, pedantic, sloppy, fat, depressive, or psychotic – not that I’m any of these things, mind you.

These dating profiles usually languish after an initial rush, just like my Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Google, and drive-by forum profiles. I can’t even remember many of them.

It was a slow day and I didn’t feel like pursuing my latest essay (a history of drug advertising.) The eHarmony dating service has been pestering me of late to take their FREE personality analysis. In the past I’ve found these things to be about 50% accurate or so general that they’d fit most anybody, but I was bored. I waded through the several pages of multiple choice questions. As expected, some of it was accurate, some way off. Undoubtedly, my aversion to pigeon-holing and my general ambiguity has something to do with this. I tend to see things from several angles which makes generalization difficult.

In addition to the personality analysis eHarmony has an extensive checklist of profile descriptors. In most cases there is an “other” field for free-form text entry.

The matches they recommend don’t always “match.” They use something called “Flexible Matching” which will ignore any preferences marked less than “very important”. The result is quantity over quality. As they explain it, you should look beyond your expectations. Good advice, but no matter what they say I’m not going to begin a relationship with someone on the other side of the country or who thinks that a good weekend is seeing the wilderness from the window of an SUV.

eHarmony utilizes something called “Guided Communications”. When a match is made, both parties are informed. One party initiates communication by sending a list of five questions chosen from a set. The other party answers then sends their own five questions. The next step involves the two of you exchanging “Must Haves” and “Can’t Stands”, checklists of qualities you look for in another person. Another round of questions ensues, again chosen from a pre-packaged list, but this time they are essay-type rather than multiple choice. Finally, after reading an essay by the founder of eHarmony, you are allowed open communication.

Managing my account has started to feel like a job. Every day I get a half-dozen matches. As soon as I clear those, another half-dozen shows up. Currently there are thirty of them. eHarmony keeps prodding me to participate, often by using one of their extra, additional-fee services. My inbox is filled with emails from them.

I gotta go. Debbie from Dallas has some questions for me.

Console Wars, Round Two

There is no doubting that the Wii has out sold by an enormous margin both Microsoft’s XBox and Sony’s Playstation. Nintendo’s focus on it’s innovative controller instead of shinier graphics allowed it to reach beyond the core gaming market and into the hands of the casual, first-time gamer.

Now they are ready to break open the market for downloaded games. The Wii Store has two channels, the Virtual Console for purchasing games of yesteryear, and WiiWare for purchasing new content. Established gamers may purchase childhood favorites from the Virtual Console but new gamers are unlikely to get excited about the original Mario Brothers, Kirby or Street Fighter. Until now the new content offerings from the WiiWare channel have been limited to updates and the Opera web browser.

On May 12 (U.S. projected date) all that is going to change. Nintendo has been hard at work lining up developers to produce downloadable games. This in itself is not a new idea; Microsoft and Sony consoles both offer downloadable games. But Nintendo’s Wii has several aspects that are attracting developers. First, by not jumping on the shiny graphics treadmill they keep development costs down. It takes thousands of man-hours to create all that high-polygon, texture-rich content required on the XBox and Playstation, content that a small studio cannot afford. Second, their Software Development Kit(SDK) is one half to one quarter the price of the other consoles. The Sony SDK is notoriously difficult to use. According to one developer, “The cost of making a game for WiiWare can be significantly less than that of an XBLA [XBox Live Arcade] or PSN [Playstation Network]game, firstly because the hardware is a lot cheaper and secondly because the SDK Nintendo provides is very detailed.”

But lower cost isn’t the only thing attracting developers to the Wii. Nintendo has adopted an open arms approach to third party games. Instead of exerting strict control they have given the responsibility of quality assurance (QA), maturity ratings and marketing to the development studios. As Nic Watt of Nnooo games put it, “We found trying to get a downloadable title approved on other platforms prohibitively expensive as we needed to supply artwork and demos to be looked at and if that demo is not signed we could have spent three to six months worth of development money and be nowhere. Nintendo’s stance has been about getting studios with good ideas and letting them decide what content to make rather than trying to dictate everything which goes on the channel.”

Simple and casual have been the watchwords for many of the Wii titles, but some studios are thinking beyond the party game. As the cost of a WiiWare game will be between $5 and $15, some have been thinking about long form games in episodic form, where both play and story can get as complex as a traditional boxed game.

In the end, it will be the consumer who decides the success or failure of the WiiWare channel, but if developer excitement is any indication, Nintendo has another genre-bending success on their hands.

Develop Magazine’s WiiWare Week Roundup

Speaking Without Voice

I recall hearing about this tech a few years ago. When one “pronounces” words in their head the vocal chords are activated to a minute degree. The idea is to capture the neurological signals on their way to the vocal cords and send them to a speech processor. At the time they were only able to distinguish “yes” from “no”.  A company called Ambient now has a device call Audeo. The sensor is built into a thin, easily donned neckband, making the person look like they are wearing a turtleneck collar. Audeo can currently recognize about 150 words.

Michael Callahan, co-founder of Ambient Corporation likens their progress to the early days of speech recognition. Given the acceleration of technological development we can expect a cheap commercial version of Audeo in about 5 years. Ten years ago commercial speech recognition software was expensive ($400-$1500), needed a powerful computer and required each-word-be-spoken-discreetly. Today, the average home computer can run continuous speech recognition software for $99. In fact, if you try to use discrete speech today, you’ll just confuse the program.

This new tech get surprisingly close to telepathy, although it should be noted that it cannot read thoughts (you need an fMRI for that). It takes a fair amount of concentration and can only read words that are intended to be spoken. Still, once these words are digitized they become just another packet of data, able to be transmitted or manipulated like any other. Imagine a crowded room where everyone has a cellphone and bluetooth headset. Twenty conversations could be occurring at the same time but an observer would see a room of silent, blankly staring people.

Let’s hope they can do some work on vocal nuance or in ten years we’re all going to sound like Stephen Hawking.

A Brain The Size Of A Tractor

Researchers in Switzerland are collaborating with IBM to build a brain inside of a computer. The Blue Brain, a variant of IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer, can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. These operations will be used to model the biological behavior of individual neurons, modeling a brain from the bottom up.

Begun in 2005, the project has just completed its feasibility phase. Most of its critics fell silent when they were able to simulate a rat’s neurocortical column. This structure is one of the repeating functional units of the neocortex. The model contained 10.000 neurons with 30 million synaptic connections.

[An entire neocortical column lights up with electrical activity. Modeled on a two-week-old rodent brain, this 0.5 mm by 2 mm slice is the basic computational unit of the brain and contains about 10,000 neurons. This microcircuit is repeated millions of times across the rat cortex and many times more in the brain of a human. Courtesy of Alain Herzog/EPFL (via www.SeedMagazine.com - mugly)]

 

This reductionist approach differs from the functional models used by most researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) and computational neuroscience. “What they typically do is begin with a brain function they want to model and then try to see if they can get a computer to replicate that function,” says Henry Markof, director of the Blue Brain Project. He continues, “These models might help us think about the brain, but they don’t really help us understand it. If you want your model to represent reality, then you’ve got to model it on reality.”

The computational demands for this model are incredibly high. A single neuron requires 400 independent simulations. A rat’s brain has about 200 million neurons. Compare that to a human brain which has between 50 and 100 billion neurons, or 500 times that of a rat.

Markham hopes to have a rat brain modeled in a few years, a human brain in ten. It may be both sooner and later than that. Ray Kurzweil observed that scientists are often too optimistic in the long run, but too pessimistic in the short run, In other words, short term projections are often too long, and long term projections too short.

Blue Brain Project at IBM
Article at Seed Magazine
Article at Technology Review

Scary Tales + Politicians = Rushed Legislation

Lead is bad. Everyone knows that. We should keep it out of our water and our air. Until recently lead was used in solder, which means that every electrical or electronic device contained lead. Enter the European Union and their RoHS Directive. In July of 2006 lead solder was banned from the EU. Manufacturers have been forced to find replacements, usually an all tin solder instead of the lead/tin solder formerly used.

Many engineers have raise concerns. Tin solder has a number of drawbacks – it is brittle; it has a tendency to cause shorts; it requires more heat; it doesn’t “get along” well with other types of solder on the same board. This last issue can cause problems with repairs and with electronics that are composed of parts from multiple manufacturers.

Although the RoHS only applies to the European Union, it affects us all. Manufacturers cannot supports different processes for different countries. Assembly lines have been switched over to the new soldering techniques whether they are making radios or communications satellites or medical equipment or airliners.

It’s too early to tell if this will cause problems, although anecdotal evidence suggest that it has. Studies on Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) have been hampered by manufacturers who are unwilling to let their failure rates be documented. Meanwhile, the manufacturers are blaming hot-headed environmentalists for possible failures and environmentalists claim that greedy industry welcomed the change because failures sell more product.

Cringley’s column has more to say

One Step Forward, One Leap Back

I finally decided to give Skype a try, but it wouldn’t hear my microphone and the headphones wouldn’t mute my speakers. I know how to fix that, I know where the settings are – except they weren’t. Where my speaker setup should have been listed there was nothing, just a blank list.

Fine. I’ll uninstall/reinstall my soundcard driver, except it wouldn’t. Instead it would reboot the machine halfway through the process. So, I got the latest drivers, except it’s the driver only without all the nifty extras I’ve come to rely on. With the new drivers maybe I could complete the install of those extras from the original CD. I could and it did. Except now I have this grey square in the middle of my desktop and my volume control goes funky when I click on it.

OK, I can live without the nifties because that grey square is going to drive me nuts. Uninstall. Restart. Uh oh. The splash screen comes up in 640×480, 16 colors. Gah! Windows starts re-installing every driver on the system. Now all I get is a Blue Screen. Oh, well. I knew it was time to upgrade from Win2K to XP. After all, XP is supposed to be yanked from the shelves in April.  It should be here tomorrow. Curses, I hate giving money to Microsoft.

Satellite Target Practice

What’s behind the U.S. shooting down a malfunctioning satellite?
Here are some things to consider
* The U.S. strongly objected to the Chinese test of anti-satellite weaponry when they shot down one of their satellites in January, 2007.
* The stated reason for the U.S. shooting down this malfunctioning satellite is to protect people from a possible toxic cloud of gas from the on board fuel. This is preposterous. Both fuel laden satellites and booster rockets are commonly left to fall to earth. Any possible cloud of gas would impact an area of about 2 football fields and the chance of anyone being hurt is about as likely as getting hit with a meteorite.
* The Russians and Chinese are trying to restart the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space treaty discussion which would ban space weapons.
* A low orbit satellite is an impressive test subject since it travel much faster than one in high orbit.
* A new administration may not give the Missile Defense Agency the top-level advocacy that it currently has. A successful test increases the likelihood of program refunding.