This clip shows a muscle-computer interface coupled to Microsoft’s Surface touch table.
Source: Technology Review
October 23rd, 2009
A monkey with a paralyzed arm can still grasp a ball, thanks to a novel system designed to translate brain signals into complex muscle movements in real time. The research, presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago this week, could one day allow people with spinal cord injury to control their own limbs.
Source: Technology Review
October 21st, 2009
Open Courseware Consortium
One of the primary aims of Occam’s Beard is to take a long look at education and what is possible to do with education with the technology at our disposal.
OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.
The Goals of the Consortium
- Extend the reach and impact of opencourseware by encouraging the adoption and adaptation of open educational materials around the world.
- Foster the development of additional opencourseware projects.
- Ensure the long-term sustainability of opencourseware projects by identifying ways to improve effectiveness and reduce costs.
No, you cannot get a degree this way, but if you’re willing to learn without accreditation, there’s lots of info here from courses in foreign languages all the way to quantum physics. Certainly beats tuition fees if all you want is the information and not grades.
July 20th, 2009
Universal Truths
As a species, we’ve come a long way. How did we get here, and where do we go from here?
If there’s one universal truth that I’ve found over the years it’s that people, in general, are lazy. Whether the laziness is frowned-upon like leeching from welfare or socially acceptable like buying the newest gadget, it seems to underlie nearly everything we do. Realistically, our society would not be where it is if not for laziness. We wouldn’t have built tools to make our lives easier. We wouldn’t have made buildings or air conditioners or iPods if not to satisfy the laziness of the species. Now you likely see a paradox there – in being lazy, we ended up doing more work in the short-term for a long-term gain. We’re not lazy then, we’re just efficient, right?
July 10th, 2009
Convergence
People keep talking about this convergence thing. What is it and why do we care?
Convergence is one of those buzzwords that has been circling around in tech circles for the last decade or two. The idea is that we’ve finally managed to build a piece of general-purpose machinery that does anything we program it to, so sooner or later all technologies should effectively converge onto a single device. Convergence is effectively about building a knowledge grid – as an electrical grid connects people and gives them access to things using electricity, a knowledge grid should give everyone everything built on knowledge. With the rise of cellular phones and portable electronics, that concept has gotten pushed a bit further. It’s not enough to be able to access everything anymore, but instead we also need to access it whenever and whenever we want. So let’s look at the convergence we already have from a couple of different levels.
June 6th, 2009
Occam’s Beard
An introduction
It’s an exciting time to be alive; rather, it’s always been an exciting time to be alive. Each generation, decade, year, or month presents us with new hopes and challenges. Advances in science, technology, and the arts are allowing us to realize our wildest dreams at an ever increasing rate. Bionic contact lenses and exoskeletons are moving from science fiction to real life, as are invisibility cloaks, bionic limbs, and neural computer interfaces. Already existing is the ability to have 3,000 CDs in your pocket, millions of books in a device smaller than a novel but with a print-quality screen, and the ability to access all of the public information in the world from anywhere at any time. When a year of uploads to Youtube outstrips one of the longest-running television station’s all-time broadcast catalog1, each of us has nearly infinitely more ability to learn and use information than the greatest thinkers in history. We can collaborate with colleagues from remote regions of the world, or we can talk with friends or family members on the other side of the globe with nearly no delay. For years we’ve been hearing that the world is shrinking, but now it’s getting more and more difficult to say even that. Each of us lives in a newly constructed non-physical city. Not a city constructed by buildings and roads, but a city constructed by ideas and communication.
There is no guarantee that the person who lives in the building next to you lives in the same non-physical city as you. We have the ability to insulate ourselves to the point that one’s personal existence as a human no longer needs to play on the stage of the physical world. Games like World of Warcraft command an audience of millions — millions of people who choose to live a large chunk of their day to day life through an avatar, and leave the physical world behind, if only for a few hours at a time. People write blogs and create podcasts and vlogs, presenting themselves to the world, stripping themselves temporarily of the life they live in the flesh. They present themselves to an audience of one or millions, never knowing who the viewers will be, when they will be viewed, or even if they will be viewed. Millions set their ego aside each day to interact and communicate in a world they cannot see or touch, to people they do not see or touch, oblivious of how much or how little they affect the lives of others. All this and it’s entirely possible or perhaps even likely that nobody that you interact with in the physical world on a regular basis knows you half as well as people from across the country or even across the planet. It seems that we, as a species, are able to process the world in such a way that previous notions of the Self, how one learns, how one acts in public, what “public” even means, or what “community” even means must be adjusted or perhaps even abandoned.