iblog

Rushda: The person we often see on television programmes translating spoken words into sign-language could soon become a computerised avatar. Researchers at IBM have developed a technology that can detect and translate speech, then produce corresponding sign-language gestures, and this flexible new method may soon be used in a variety of different fields.

The system is called SiSi, short for Say It Sign It, and it was in fact created by a group of students. It uses speech recognition to animate a digital character. An intriguing video of it being used can be seen on this clip. The technology has gained approval from the Royal National Institute for Deaf people (RNID) who are excited by the developments. As a spokesperson from RNID, director of new technologies Guido Gybels says:

“RNID welcomes any development that would make the information society a more equal place for deaf and hard of hearing people. Sign language users are among the most disenfranchised citizens as a result of services and products not being designed with their needs in mind.”

He explains, however, that it may be quite a while before the system becomes common in everyday use as there is so much that needs to be done to boost the accuracy of the device and also make it easy to attach to appliances. Nevertheless, the technology is great news as there is a serious need in the UK for more facilities for the deaf, with a human interpreter not always being available. Computerised sign-language will eventually make it easy for meetings, radio and TV to employ automatic services for the deaf.

Rushda: Ipod lovers will be pleased to hear that another iPod is being added to Apple’s group of popular music players and like the iPhone it will sport a touch screen. Not only that but the sleek and nifty gadget will actually have wi-fi and a web browser built in so that you can even buy music whilst on the go.

The iPod touch was unveiled at a press conference where Apple’s Steve Jobs demonstrated the features of the new device. Like the iPhone, it has a clear and efficient touch-screen and contains an in-built Safari browser, with easy access to sites such as YouTube and Google as well as iTunes. Owners will be able to use the wi-fi in places such as Starbucks; Apple has in fact made a deal with the coffee chain which enables free wi-fi access using the iPod in any of the cafes. As Steve Jobs exclaims proudly:

“It’s one of the seven wonders of the world - it’s just incredible.”

The iPod will come in two versions - 8GB and 16GB of memory - with the larger costing $399 in the US and the smaller $299. It will initially be released in anticipation of the holiday season by the end of September in the US and will be available in Europe shortly after. Prices in Europe have not yet been announced.

Virgil: There is one CCTV camera for every 14 people living in the UK, and most Londoners are filmed up to 300 times every day. But by 2057 it has been predicted that there will be at least 1 million cameras or sensors for every individual person. These devices would form an intelligent network, potentially capable of recording every persons entire life, from birth till death.

The prediction was made by Martin Sadler of Hewlett Packard, who notes that the decreasing cost of parts, and the exponentially increasing storage capabilities of modern technology will fuel this massive growth. The technology will become huge because it is so useful, in both research and security, and even advertising. Saddler comments that:

“We imagine by 2057 our motorways, rivers and coastal defences, farms, businesses, homes and neighbourhoods and bodies will all be highly instrumented. We have some real choices that we can make over the next few years about how much we benefit from all this information… or how much it presents some sort of dark future for us.”

Sadler alludes to the moral consequences of such a system, where information you didn’t want recorded or sensored, or used as a piece of data, is unwittingly discovered by the network.

“Maybe the first time you know you are pregnant is when a targeted piece of advertising comes through on your computer screen offering you some baby clothes because somehow the smart toilet, or some other aspect of your environment, leaked that information.”

One MIT researcher has already set up a system in his own home where a set of 11 cameras and 14 microphones will record every waking moment of the first 3 years of his sons life, amounting to some 400,000 hours of data. Labelled the “Speechome Project“, it is an example of the use in research that surveillance has - in this case, discovering more about how babies learn language. Oliver Sparrow, advisor to the UK government, comments that devices will become

“Too small to see, … permeate your body, permeate the space in which we exist, record everything, know everything about you, transmit your reputation wherever you go. These kinds of things will be possible, whether we permit them, and which societies will permit them and which will not, and how this will polarise things remains completely unplottable.”

Both Sparrow and Saddler are encouraging public debate about the subject and how surveillance technology should be used in the near future. They warn that this will become possible, so we need to decide now what to allow.

Rushda: A study has found that Amazon is the still the UK’s most used online retailer, after coming top on the latest IMRG-Hitwise Hot Shops List which lists the top 50 online shops. Amazon UK, which was established in the UK around ten years ago after originally starting in the US, has become a reliable portal for everything from books to holidays and is the first stop for millions of UK customers. The study also revealed incredible statistics such as the fact that online sales in the UK totalled £4bn in July alone.

The list also contains firm and perhaps unsurprising favourites such as Argos, which came second place, and Tesco.com,which came third. Play which has rivalled Amazon in its huge selection of CDs and DVDs (with free delivery) has come in 4th place. Also included in the list were travel shops such as Thomson and LastMinute and of course, the Apple Computer online store.

What is most remarkable about all these shops is that their positioning has stayed more or less constant over the years with no notable new website overtaking them. As IMRG’s chief executive James Roper says:

“The stability of retailers’ positions on the list is extraordinary, and tells me two things: these market leaders are satisfying their customers pretty well, and competitors are having little or no effect on their progress.”

It is clear that online users in England have decided on what the best websites are for certain common products and it will be difficult for any other website to establish the same kind of reliability. Amazon has become a household name and is likely to remain one of the best online shops for years to come. For those interested in the full results of the study, the new list of the top 50 e-retailers can be seen here.

Rushda: Ever wanted to scale vertical walls like Spiderman? Well, according to a fascinating new study, humans may be able to achieve this using a special “spider-man” suit in future. Scientists have long been studying the natural abilities in spiders and geckos which adhere to walls and climb them at ease, and now researchers believe that we may indeed be able to reproduce such technology for humans and even allow them to hang upside down in the same way.

American scientists in 2002 showed that creatures like spiders have billions of tiny hairs which allow them to stick to surfaces and even support hundreds of times their own body weight. Now, research from Polytechnic of Turin in Italy has calculated how the same kind of stickiness could be generated for humans. This is obviously difficult to achieve as we are significantly larger than a spider or gecko and so would require an even higher adhesion strength. But, as head of research Professor Pugno explains:

“If we are able to make a surface a little bit stronger, so that the size effect vanishes, we might be able to make a suit with the same adhesion as a gecko.”

He proposes that we can replicate the effects of the hairs by using tiny carbon nanotubes which measure only a few billionths of metres across and are very strong. He also says that there are three requirements for any spider-man suit to work in humans: it must be strongly adhesive, be able to attach and detach from walls easily and also clean itself (so that dirt doesn’t get in the way). Such a rare combination of properties may seem impossible but we have already seen it work in scaling creatures. As Pugno says:

“To have all these mechanisms working together is difficult, because they are in competition with one another. But geckos and spiders provide a natural demonstration that this can be done.”

Now that research has shown us exactly what kind of material needs to be used, perhaps the days are not far away when humans will be able to demonstrate the powers their favourite superhero.

Rushda: For many avid downloaders of music who are conscious of the illegality of free downloads, nothing other than the iTunes music store will do - it is reliable and offers a huge library. However, worryingly ITunes has been dominating the world of music downloads for a long time now and there are a number of niggling problems with it. All tracks downloaded, for example, are in special format called Digital Rights Management (DRM) and so they cannot be transferred outside iTunes and Ipods with ease. Because of such problems, big names such as Universal and SonyBMG have started to release their own rival software that is supposedly better than what Apple has to offer.

One of the best programs that is coming out of these initiatives is Gbox by Universal, which is becoming hugely popular. Gbox sells tracks without being formatted with the copy protection technology which is the ultimate downfall of iTunes tracks. Not only are the tracks more flexible in this way than those offered in the iTunes music store, but each track also costs less, at around 50p per track (whereas iTunes charges about 79p). As Gbox starts becoming more popular, it is also benefiting from special advertising with Google, whereby when particular songs are searched for with the search engine, adverts for Gbox will appear. As Universal Music Group chief executive Doug Morris says,

“We’re committed to exploring new ways to expand the availability of our artists’ music online, while offering consumers the most choice in how and where they purchase and enjoy our music.”

Finally downloaders can rest assured that there are other programs available that will cut the cost of their downloaded tracks and make them easier to copy. Perhaps now that iTunes is losing its monopoly over music downloads, more people will be keener to stop music piracy by buying tracks at reasonable costs elsewhere.

Rushda: Out-of-body experiences are a common phenomenon people experience, especially in near-death scenarios. Many people in the past have claimed that they are genuine experiences of the paranormal. However, scientists have recently managed to recreate such feelings in a group of volunteers and are now able to provide explanations for this common phenomenon which affects a staggering one in ten people.

The experiments, conducted by two teams, one from University College London in the UK and the other from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, consisted of using virtual reality goggles on each volunteer. These work by tricking the brain to think that it is somewhere else. When the volunteer’s body was touched, they genuinely felt that they were outside the body as the sensation detached from their visual experience. From these studies, the scientists believe they have found a neurological explanation for such weird feelings. Indeed, they say that those who are depressed or not in tune with their own bodies are more likely to have such experiences. As Dr Henrik Ehrsson who led the team from London explains:

“This experiment suggests that the first-person visual perspective is critically important for the in-body experience. In other words, we feel that our self is located where the eyes are.”

Many have regarded out-of-body experiences with great suspicion before, not believing their apparent supernatural nature, and now finally scientists are showing that they were correct, by recreating the phenomenon themselves. As psychologist Dr Susan Blackmore from the University of the West of England says:

“Scientists have long suspected that the clue to these extraordinary, and sometimes life-changing, experiences lies in disrupting our normal illusion of being a self behind our eyes, and replacing it with a new viewpoint from above or behind.”

The results are fascinating and show great promise for science - the researchers say that with such technology in future we may we eventually be able to create computer games which accurately make you feel like you are part of the game. Not only this but the findings are finally shedding light on a mysterious phenomenon, often described by religious people, that may actually have a very ordinary explanation.

Virgil: Most of us will have heard of Google Earth, the neat application from search giant Google that lets you navigate around a 3D Earth, and zoom in to any point on the globe with impressive detail. Now Google have extended the same technology into the sky, providing amateur star-gazers with the best view of the heavens they’ve been able to get their hands on to date.

Google Sky is included with the latest version of Google Earth, adding a button to the interface which flips the camera up into the sky. Whilst the original Earth model looked down upon a sphere, the Sky model inverts this to look up onto the inside face of a much bigger sphere which the camera is inside. This inside face is plastered with thousands of images taken by agencies such as NASA, all compiled into a singular grand night sky. Dr John Mason, of the British Astronomical Association, praised the new application, saying:

“Light pollution and air pollution is now so bad in many areas that all you can see when you look up is a few dozen stars. If this helps people to realise just what they are missing, it is a jolly good thing.”

Whilst Google Sky isn’t the first program to offer stargazing, it appears to be all set to takeover the market. Whilst other options are also free, they do not provide the same interactive, free-moving camera that made Google Earth so popular, along with its rich integration of related data including routes and buildings. Sky offers clear views of over 300 million stars and galaxies, with various overlays to point out constellations and bring up further data relating to celestial bodies. Patrick Moore, the famed British astronomer, likewise sings the applications praises:

“This thing, Google Sky, seems to me the best way to learn your way around, and the stars become so much more interesting when you know which is which, and it’s a bloody good way to do it.”

The program goes alongside Google’s previous other forays into the heavens, Google Moon and Google Mars - I wonder how long it will be before we’re installing the seemingly inevitable Google Universe.

Rushda: A team of researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have recently estimated that the future of power could lie in paper batteries that are only slightly larger than a postage stamp! They have already produced flexible paper batteries that are able to release up to 2.3 volts of electricity - sufficient for a small light. But this is apparently only a glimpse of what is to come - indeed, the researchers say that their ambition is that one day even cars will be powered by paper batteries.

The research into the paper battery (which can be found in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) is very exciting news as it could prove to be very beneficial in a number of ways. Unlike a normal battery which contains separate parts, the paper battery is a single structure which makes it more energy efficient, something which could be of paramount importance in years to come. Professor Linhardt, who co-authored a report on the new technology says:

“Think of all the disadvantages of an old TV set with tubes. “The warm up time, power loss, component malfunction; you don’t get those problems with integrated devices. When you transfer power from one component to another you lose energy. But you lose less energy in an integrated device.”

He argues that because the battery consists mostly of carbon and paper, it could also be used inside the body, for example to power pacemakers, because unlike ordinary batteries there wouldn’t be a toxic threat.

Most are understandably amazed by the results of the study. Personally I’m very impressed at the way progress in technology is really going at phenomenal speeds - who would have even thought of the concept of batteries made of paper a while back? I really wonder how different the world will be in a couple of generations!

Virgil: Scientists convened in York are excited about the possibility of developing spin-based electronics, or ’spintronics’, which could offer potentially infinite speeds of computing.

Increasing the speed of computing is about trying to get more calculations done in less time - either by speeding up each calculation itself, having more of them take place simultaneously, or both. Conventional processors do calculations sequentially because they are based on the sequential flow of electrons through wires.

That’s why scientists have for a long time been excited about the idea of quantum electronics. Quantum phenomena suggest that electrons can actually have multiple states all at once, so the idea was to perform calculations on top of each other, harnessing more than just one of the superposed states of each electron. However this prospect has remained firm science fiction for a long time, as it was incredibly difficult to control and manipulate the electron states.

The new spintronics takes the same idea, but instead harnesses the different possible spins of electrons to manipulate more data at once. This builds on the fact that every particle is not just moving along staticly, but spinning around at the same time. Professor Awschalom of the University of California clarifies the idea saying:

“If you think about the spin of a particle, such as an electron, it can point up or down or at any superposition of the two; partially up or partially down. You can store an almost infinite number of bits of information in one particle space.”

The idea of putting particle-spin into the equation has already been used in hard-drives. A long time ago, 100 megabytes of disk-space sounded excessive; nowadays 10,000 is hardly enough. The massive jump in disk-space was in part due to the introduction of “spin-valves” in the drives; Dr Stuart Parkin of IBM invented the devices, and comments that they

“enabled a thousand fold improvement in the storage capacity of disk drives from when we introduced it in 1998.”

Spintronics offers a lot of promise. Maybe, sooner than we think, quantum-speed computing may be a reality.