A raised eyebrow, quizzical look or a nod of the head are just a few of the facial expressions computers could soon be using to read people’s minds.
An “emotionally aware” computer being developed by British and American scientists will be able to read an individual’s thoughts by analyzing a combination of facial movements that represent underlying feelings.
“The system we have developed allows a wide range of mental states to be identified just by pointing a video camera at someone,” said Professor Peter Robinson, of the University of Cambridge in England.
He and his collaborators believe the mind-reading computer’s applications could range from improving people’s driving skills to helping companies tailor advertising to people’s moods.
“Imagine a computer that could pick the right emotional moment to try to sell you something, a future where mobile phones, cars and Web sites could read our mind and react to our moods,” he added.
It’s not surprising that an expert hired by EFF should produce an analysis that supports the group’s case against AT&T. But last week’s public court filing of a redacted statement by J. Scott Marcus is still worth reading for the obvious expertise of its author, and the cunning insights he draws from the AT&T spy documents.
An internet pioneer and former FCC advisor who held a Top Secret security clearance, Marcus applies a Sherlock Holmes level of reasoning to his dissection of the evidence in the case: 120-pages of AT&T manuals that EFF filed under seal, and whistleblower Mark Klein’s observations inside the company’s San Francisco switching center.
If you’ve been following Wired News’ coverage of the EFF case, you won’t find many new hard revelations in Marcus’ analysis—at least, not in the censored version made public. But he connects the dots to draw some interesting conclusions:
wired
THE scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is to publish a book explaining why he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real.
Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”.
His book, The Language of God, to be published in September, will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. “One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been created that science and religion have to be at war,” said Collins, 56.
Sunday Times
As I explore the subtle changes in each moment, endless varieties of bliss are revealed to me. The richness of these experiences is too vast to ever articulate it justly. But what I have learned over the past few years since mastering this process, is that beyond the mind and body, attachments, ego fixations, and other cognitive constructs known as the “self”, lies a freedom of consciousness that is overwhelmingly blissful, confirming, and reassuring to our deepest being. From these experiences I know there is no such thing as “death” as we might understand it. There is no oblivion, or void outside of what we make it. Existence itself is already perfection incarnate, and any concept we harbor in conflict with this basic reality, is our own “make-wrong”, “karma”, or whatever you want to call it. When we let go of our attachments, and surrender to the experience of each moment, the true universe reveals itself to us. This universe is utter perfection beyond our wildest imaginings. Any notion/experience I’ve ever had that doesn’t align with this always turned out to be one of my own impermanent creations. When “I” get out of the way, this bliss of self-realization reveals itself again long enough for to run into my next “make-wrong”, etc.
by fromfuturehi
According to this well done Swedish news piece, the USA has threatened Sweden with trade sanctions through the US dominated WTO if Sweden refuses to close down the file-sharing website “thepiratebay.org”. ThePirateBay has been considered legal under Sweden’s fair use laws, and many Swedish support their right to freely distribute media such as music and movies; similar to their laws which allow them to pick mushrooms and lingamberries on other peoples land. Bowing to international pressure, on May 31st more than 50 Swedish police raided 10 locations and confiscated all the servers which supported the torrent-tracker. Persecution is pending, the site is running at some level, and there is a huge political stink escalating in Sweden over this issue right now. Check out this news report and decide for yourself what’s up…
news report from youtube
Recognize that familiar United Parcel Service truck with the trademark brown paint job? Look twice. The government released its model Wednesday, replete with a new hybrid hydraulic system built for the Environmental Protection Agency by Cleveland-based Eaton Corp.
“With this new system, I guess you can say brown is the new green,” said EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, standing in front of a UPS truck that will test the system on the streets of Detroit starting in August.
The new system replaces a truck’s transmission with hydraulics and that, combined with a low-emission diesel engine, yields a 60 percent to 70 percent saving on fuel use.
“We work on a lot of different hydraulic equipment for aerospace and this fits in very well,” said Ben Hoxie, Eaton’s engineering manager for the project.
red orbit
A major drug company is blocking access to a medicine that is cheaply and effectively saving thousands of people from going blind because it wants to launch a more expensive product on the market.
Ophthalmologists around the world, on their own initiative, are injecting tiny quantities of a colon cancer drug called Avastin into the eyes of patients with wet macular degeneration, a common condition of older age that can lead to severely impaired eyesight and blindness. They report remarkable success at very low cost because one phial can be split and used for dozens of patients.
But Genentech, the company that invented Avastin, does not want it used in this way. Instead it is applying to license a fragment of Avastin, called Lucentis, which is packaged in the tiny quantities suitable for eyes at a higher cost. Speculation in the US suggests it could cost £1,000 per dose instead of less than £10. The company says Lucentis is specifically designed for eyes, with modifications over Avastin, and has been through 10 years of testing to prove it is safe.
Is the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which did so much to promote the invasion of Iraq and an Israel-centred “global war on terror”, closing down?
In the absence of an official announcement and the failure since late last year of a live person to answer its telephone number, a Washington Post obituary would seem to be definitive. And, sure enough, the Post quoted one unidentified source presumably linked to PNAC that the group was “heading toward closing” with the feeling of “goal accomplished”.
In fact, the nine-year-old group, whose 27 founders included Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, among at least half a dozen of the most powerful hawks in the George W. Bush administration’s first term, has been inactive since January 2005, when it issued the last of its “statements”, an appeal to significantly increase the size of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to cope with the growing demands of the kind of “Pax Americana” it had done so much to promote.
As a platform for the three-part coalition that was most enthusiastic about war in Iraq—aggressive nationalists like Cheney, Christian Zionists of the religious Right, and Israel-centred neo-conservatives—PNAC actually began breaking down shortly after the Iraq invasion.
It was then that the group’s predominantly neo-conservative leadership—Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, PNAC director Gary Schmitt, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace analyst Robert Kagan—began attacking Rumsfeld, in particular, for failing to deploy enough troops to pacify the country and launch a true nation-building exercise, as in post-World War II Germany and Japan.
common dreams
Tell an old Aymara speaker to “face the past!” and you just might get a blank stare in return – because he or she already does.
New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.
Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.
ucsd.edu
The Constitution does not require the government to forfeit evidence gathered through illegal “no knock” searches, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday, in a far-reaching ruling that could encourage police with search warrants to conduct more aggressive raids.
The 5 to 4 decision broke with the court’s modern tradition of enforcing constitutional limitations on police investigations by keeping improperly obtained evidence out of court. The “exclusionary rule” has been imposed to protect a series of rights, such as the right to remain silent in police custody and the right against warrantless searches.
But the broadly worded majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., suggested that the nation has moved into a new era of improved policing in which such strong medicine may no longer be justified.
infoshop
An effort to build a suborbital spaceport destination to cater to space-hungry tourists and families is pushing forward in Singapore, where aviation authorities are developing a homegrown set of regulations for commercial spaceflight.
The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CCAS) is laying the groundwork here for the rules to govern flights out of Spaceport Singapore, a planned $115 million (SGD $191 million) project to offer suborbital spaceflights and a host of other experiences to adventure-seeking tourists.
Slated to open in 2009, Spaceport Singapore is the brainchild of a consortium of investors and the Virginia-based adventure tourism firm Space Adventures, which announced the project – alongside plans for a United Arab Emirates spaceport and a fleet of suborbital Explorer spacecraft– earlier this year.
space.com
Yahoo! News is reporting that two labs are currently competing to design the first new nuclear bomb in twenty years. The new bomb was approved as a part of the 2006 defense spending bill. From the article: ‘Proponents of the project say the U.S. would lose its so-called “strategic deterrent” unless it replaces its aging arsenal of about 6,000 bombs, which will become potentially unreliable within 15 years. A new, more reliable weapon, they say, would help the nation reduce its stockpile.
yahoo
A 16-week trial of patients with heart disease found that those who practiced meditation had significantly better improvements in blood pressure, glucose and insulin levels and a more stable functioning of the autonomic nervous system than those who were entered in a standard health education program.
“These physiological effects were accomplished without changes in body weight, medication, or psychosocial variables and despite a marginally statistically significant increase in physical activity in the health education (control) group,” lead author Maura Paul-Labrador of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles wrote.
The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Archives of Internal Medicine.
physorg
A for-profit home builder has constructed a house priced under $200,000 that, in an average year, costs nothing to power or heat.
The so-called zero-energy home, built by Norman, Oklahoma-based Ideal Homes, is priced affordably even though it incorporates some of the latest technology and energy-efficient construction available today.
“I think Americans have this concept in their head that a zero-energy house costs a million dollars,” said Vernon McKown, co-founder of Ideal Homes, who partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building America program for the project.
discovery
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