Google Glass could spur wearable tech boom

Via the Washington Post:

Scan any waiting room, and you’ll probably get a good survey of the tops of people’s heads, with row after row of folks hunched over their smartphones. But heads up: That common sight may change as tech companies bet that users are so attached to their screens, they’ll start to wear them.

It’s more than sci-fi speculation. The first testers for Google’s Glass device — which puts Google Search, Maps and other services on a screen mounted in front of someone’s eye — are sporting the devices on sidewalks across the country. Other companies, such as Samsung and Pebble, are working to get apps and data streams to users’ wrists through Web-connected watches; some reports say Apple, Microsoft and other tech titans will also jump into the mix.

Deep Learning

Via MIT Tech Review:

When Ray Kurzweil met with Google CEO Larry Page last July, he wasn’t looking for a job. A respected inventor who’s become a machine-intelligence futurist, Kurzweil wanted to discuss his upcoming book How to Create a Mind. He told Page, who had read an early draft, that he wanted to start a company to develop his ideas about how to build a truly intelligent computer: one that could understand language and then make inferences and decisions on its own. 

It quickly became obvious that such an effort would require nothing less than Google-scale data and computing power. “I could try to give you some access to it,” Page told Kurzweil. “But it’s going to be very difficult to do that for an independent company.” So Page suggested that Kurzweil, who had never held a job anywhere but his own companies, join Google instead. It didn’t take Kurzweil long to make up his mind: in January he started working for Google as a director of engineering. “This is the culmination of literally 50 years of my focus on artificial intelligence,” he says. 

Kurzweil was attracted not just by Google’s computing resources but also by the startling progress the company has made in a branch of AI called deep learning.

Tamil writing proposal in closing, and, as a bonus, a Theory of History

It is now time to close this series of posts. I have had this proposal for a new way of writing Tamil kicking around my (many) laptops for a while but posted it to this blog only following the Pizza and Panini column for Indiatimes.com. Panini, in a sense, lives on!

Below are the links to all the posts on the Tamil writing proposal:

• Overview
• A modest proposal towards modernizing the Tamil language
• Response to some comments
• Harvard-Kyoto - an explanation
• More comments, examples
• A note of thanks

And in closing, something pretty. Below the fold is the brAhmI alphabet/alphasyllabary. It is, of course, studied by Buddhists for them to be able to understand ancient Buddhist texts, some of which were written in Pali. Just in and of itself, the brAhmI alphabet bears witness to the extraordinary influence that Panini still has around the world. I have a Theory of History which I have never posted about before. Want to know more? Click below to go to the rest of the post.

NASA uses smartphones as satellites

From InformationWeek:

Over the weekend, NASA successfully launched into space three satellites consisting mainly of smartphones aboard a rocket. The nanosatellites, known as PhoneSats, have been transmitting signals to ground stations on Earth and will remain in orbit for as long as two weeks.

Orbital Science's Antares rocket took off from NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia containing two PhoneSat 1.0 satellites, dubbed Graham and Bell, and an early prototype of PhoneSat 2.0, called Alexander. What makes the satellites unique is their use of commercial off-the-shelf smartphone components. PhoneSat 1.0 was built using HTC Nexus One, and PhoneSat 2.0 -- which has improved software and more sensors -- is powered by Samsung Nexus S.

Diamond shows promise for a quantum Internet

Via Nature.com:

Today's Internet runs on linked silicon chips, but a future quantum version might be built from diamond crystals. Physicists report today in Nature1 that they have entangled information kept in pieces of diamond 3 metres apart, so that measuring the state of one quantum bit (qubit) instantly fixes the state of the other - a step necessary for exchanging quantum information over large distances.

Entanglement, which Albert Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance', is one of the weird phenomena that make quantum devices promising. A quantum Internet would use entangled photons travelling down fibre-optic cables to in turn entangle qubits, with the aim of one day providing super-secure communications, or delivering software and data to future quantum computers.

DHS creates cyber security internship for community college students, veterans

Via NextGov.com:

The Homeland Security Department on Thursday announced a new honors program designed to draw students to cybersecurity programs at community colleges. 

The new Cyber Student Initiative, which is part of the Secretary Honors Program announced last fall, is an attempt to engage community college students, including veterans, in cybersecurity work at DHS. 

The program will begin at Immigration and Customs Enforcement computer forensic labs in 36 cities nationwide, where students will be trained and gain hands-on experience within the department's cybersecurity community. The unpaid volunteer program is only available to community college students and veterans pursuing a degree in the cybersecurity field.

Neal Barnard on diabetes

Dr. Neal Barnard on diabetes: