Quantum Bits

Stewie on 50 Cent

2006-09-11T15:13:00.000-07:00

Stewie doing Porn music

2006-09-11T15:11:00.000-07:00

The Death of Science in the US?

2006-04-12T14:07:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to a material sciences and engineering lecture/dinner where my girlfriend was presenting her research. I first thought that I was at an international students event. Almost all the students there were Asian. A little bit of digging revealed that the materials sciences school appears to be 75% filled by non-Americans. The professors are all from other countries (India being prominent). The research papers presented were all really great. Titanium alloy foams, active matrix screens and research into thermoelectric materials (my girlfriend's filed). All really cool cutting edge stuff - but no Americans were presenting.

The US is going to loose out if they continue to make the visa permits tough. All of these students are going to go back to their home countries and compete directly against US industry. I have no hard numbers to back this up and the evidence is largely anecdotal.

Unspeak

2006-04-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

Unspeak is a neat book by Steven Poole. I haven't read the book yet but there's a nice blog which has some of the politically loaded language in which a sound bite implies an entire unspoken political argument. Some of my favorites:

Unitary Executive - sounds nice but basically implies that the President is the final person in charge.
Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism - the new term for the 'War on Terror'.
Repetitive Administration of Legitimate Force - also called torture - useful when somebody dies in custody - to fill in the cause of death.

If you have more examples of unspeak, do add them to the comments.

Welcome to the Matrix

2006-03-28T12:34:00.000-08:00

Wired Magazine has a brilliant article on Mind Control. No none of that tin foil and conspiracy stuff but the creation of an actual BCI (Brain Computer Interface). Matthew Nagle is paralyzed from the neck down and is one of the first human subjects to be hooked up to a BCI.

A bundle of wires as thick as a coaxial cable runs from a connector in Nagle's scalp to a refrigerator-sized cart of electronic gear. Inside his brain, a tiny array of microelectrodes picks up the cacophony of his neural activity; processors recognize the patterns associated with arm motions and translate them into signals that control the Pong paddle, draw with a cursor, operate a TV, and open email.

The details of the actual process of creating the BCI are pretty gory:

Using a small pneumatic inserter, Friehs tapped in the tiny array - 100 electrodes, each just 1 millimeter long and 90 microns across at its base. Friehs closed Nagle's skull with titanium screws, leaving a tiny hole. Through that he threaded gold wires from the array to an external pedestal connector attached to Nagle's skull. Matthew Nagle was now part biological, and part silicon, platinum, and titanium.

what's really fascinating is what Matthew can do with his BCI - play Pong on the computer, move a mouse around and flip channels on a TV. I also find the process that was used to train the system interesting. The training system works both ways - the computer 'learns' to interpret the tiny electrical signal from his brain and at the same time Matthew learns how the computer is interpreting his signals.

"For a while I was thinking about moving the mouse with my hand," Nagle replied. "Now, I just imagine moving the cursor from place to place." In other words, Nagle's brain has assimilated the system. The cursor is as much a part of his self as his arms and legs were.

The process of this two way training is well illustrated on early experiments conducted on monkeys.

In 2002, Miguel Nicolelis, a neurobiologist at Duke, provided the best evidence yet of the brain's plasticity. He and his team plugged 86 microwires into the brain of a monkey and taught the animal to use a joystick to move an onscreen cursor (the reward: a sip of juice). After the computer had learned to interpret the animal's brain activity, Nicolelis disconnected the joystick. For a while, the monkey kept working it. But he eventually figured it out. The monkey dropped the joystick and stopped moving his arm; the cursor still moved to the target. As the monkey calmly downed another swallow of juice, Nicolelis' lab fell silent in awe. The mammalian brain could assimilate a device - a machine.

Is this the next logical step in our evolution? It seems that our brains are perfectly capable of assimilating machines into our internal system and control them.

Almost a reality?

Face Value

2006-03-28T12:32:00.000-08:00

Researchers at Stanford are working on a study of the responsiveness of humans to faces which look most like ourselves:

The study consisted of three groups of respondents: one had their own photograph morphed into a picture of Bush, the second had their photograph morphed into a picture of Kerry, and the third was given un-morphed photographs of the two candidates.

The photographs of the respondents were acquired long before the study began; consequently none of the 200 respondents realized their own photographs had been morphed with the candidates.

The results demonstrated that respondents were significantly more likely to vote for the candidate with whom their face had been morphed (for both Bush and Kerry). This effect was stronger for people who did not have strong party affiliations (i.e., independent voters) than for strong partisans.

This is an interesting finding in light of the work done by various researchers who have tried to find the 'average' human face.

WebDweller is collecting thousands of images from all over the world and blending them together to create the 'average human face which slowly evolves over time as more pictures are submitted.

The average adult The average woman The average man

When you compare the faces of of John Kerry and George W. Bush, you find that Bush's face is much closer to that of the average male than John Kerry's. Given the findings of the Stanford study, that woudl make Bush far more persuasive than Kerry which coudl explains why people tended to beleive him more than Kerry and why he's considered the 'people's man' while Kerry is considered part of the elite.

Here's the three of them side by side for comparison

Bush clearly looks closer to the 'average' than Kerry.

Digital Evolution

2006-03-28T12:30:00.000-08:00

It is very difficult to scientifically test evolution - mainly because it takes such a long time. Controlled experiments are very difficult to do. Though I did recently see a Discovery Channel program on the work done on the Galapagos islands by two researchers on the size of finch beaks as the island went through drought and rain. However scenarios like that are difficult to find.

The Devolab at Michigan State University has created a computer program called Avida that attempts to simulate the three conditions of evolution - replication, variation (mutation) and competition rather in silico rather than in vitro.

Avida is arguably the most advanced software platform to study digital organisms to date, and is certainly the one that has had the biggest impact in the biological literature so far. Having reached version 2.0, it now supports detailed control over experimental settings, a sophisticated system to design and execute experimental protocols, a multitude of possibilities for organisms to interact with their environment, including depletable resources and conversion from one resource into another, and a module to post-process data from evolution experiments, including tools to find the line of descent from final organisms to their ultimate ancestor, to carry out knock-out studies with organisms, and to align and compare organisms' genomes.

Avida is available for download at Sourceforge.

I've downloaded the program and got it to run some basic simulations - will be fun to see if something interesting shows up.

Nice novel...

2006-02-24T14:06:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite clips from the Family Guy.

Coexistence of Science and Religion

2006-01-12T14:13:00.000-08:00

In the US, the Evolution Vs. Intelligent Design (ID) debate showed that the old animosity between science and religion still exists irrespective of all the advances that we have made. The Dalai Llama should be held up to the IDers as an example of a religious man who is willing to accept what science can prove over the superstitions of his religion without loosing faith in his own beliefs.

He actually proposed the use of religion to help scientists

Try to find reality with an open mind, he said, referring both to investigations in science as well as to studies in Buddhist thought. Without investigation we canÂt see reality.

Kyoto Alternative?

2006-01-10T16:28:00.000-08:00

I was a supporter of the original idea behind the Kyoto Protocol though I think it is just not economically viable and very difficult to enforce. The protocol has little or no value if the biggest emitters of Green House Gases - U.S., China and India are not on board.

There appears to be alternative which seem to be off to a good start. The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate seems to at least have got the major players on board and they seem to be investigating more economically viable alternatives with incentives for some of the polluters to actually participate as opposed to stand on the sidelines.

What's next for Google?

2006-01-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

There is a lot of speculation as to where Google is headed next. Some say Google will create an office suite to take on MS on the desktop. Others say they will continue to provide more content like Google Print and Google Video and become aggregators and organizers of information which is more in keeping with their mission.

The areas I see Google making some movement are:

Google Wallet - with identity theft rampant, there is an increasing need for a mechanism to provide a secure way to conduct financial transactions on the net. Google Wallet would be used like a disposable credit card, you only transfer the amount you need from your bank balance to your online wallet and it woudl of course work seamlessly with all the Google Services.
Google Calendar - this seems like a logical extension to Gmail though I don't see it replacing MS Outlook. I think there is a nice area for social scheduling - a couples coordinating their pickup up and drop times for their kids school activities, students deciding where to meet up for a beer etc.