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Posts Tagged computers

Consumer brain-computer interface Grant Jacobs Jul 25

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As you read this blog article, your brain is processing what it sees on the screen. The devices you interact with the computer are most likely a keyboard, mouse or trackpad.

Imagine instead thinking about what you want the computer to do and the computer responding to that.

Tan Le from Australian company emotiv in the TED lecture below presents what could be described as a commercial mind-reading device.

The headset can be purchased for $US299.

I was writing the other day that science fiction looks ahead to where the future might go. Who’s for picking more of this to be part of it?

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This is not the only mind-computer interface on the market; Wikipedia’s Comparison of consumer computer-brain interface devices page is one starting point to learning about competitor’s efforts.

Emotiv also has a Facebook page, where you might learn more about what they are doing. (Their latest post reports that interest in the TED lecture overwhelmed their web server.)

I would love to hear the experiences of anyone who has used any of these devices. It must be a remarkable experience when you first instruct a computer to do something directly with your brain.

Other articles on Code for life:

Walking with Rex (robotic legs for paraplegics)

iPads for the disabled (Perhaps a useful counterpoint to this post)

Temperature-induced hearing loss (Temporary loss of hearing during fevers or higher temperatures)

Describe your fantasy institute (The features of your ideal research institute are…?)

Basic fluid science on the space station (Video of simple, but intriguing science on the space station)

Web browsers (part not-quite 2) Grant Jacobs Jun 20

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Previously I wrote about the main web browsers that have versions running on both Windows and Apple’s Mac OS X. Here I’d like to show readers even more browsers!

But first, what’s with “part not-quite 2” you ask. Fair enough. It is odd, eh?

What has happened is that I have lost access to Windows.* Before all the Windows (or Linux) users rush off, please read the next section: the challenge applies to all platforms and is the underlying point behind me trying to point out the “other” web browsers. I think it’s worth thinking about regardless of what operating system you use.

A challenge

I’d like to challenge to readers adopt a task-oriented approach, using whichever browser is best suited to the specific task at hand.

Essentially all modern web browsers use one of the open-source rendering engines,** the software that takes the “code” for web pages and renders them into graphics. These rendering engines are top-quality and up-to-date. The effect is that even niche web browsers are as capable of presenting web pages as the better known browsers. It also frees the developer to focus on user features, rather than raw presentation of web pages. As a result there are many “smaller” web browsers, some with interesting and useful features.

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Web browsers (part 1) Grant Jacobs Jun 15

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For a diversion, I’m offering a brief round-up of web browsers with a one-paragraph introduction. I am not offering a review of all the differing features: that would take many days, time I don’t have. (Nor do I have enough interest.)

My main aim is to encourage people to try the alternatives. Download them, give them a run.

In a second post, I will introduce the real alternatives; here I’m going to cover the better-known players.

There is all sorts of noise about what is the “best” web browser out on the internet. Personally, what is best — beyond issues of standards compliance — is what works best for you.

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What is your relationship with your research notebook? Grant Jacobs Jun 11

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A rambling look at notebooks, with unexpected sidelines.

Scientist and novelist Jennifer Rohn, who writes the Mind the Gap blog at Nature Network, recently presented a photo-essay chronicling the life and death of a research project, In which I fail. As usually happens Jennifer’s post started a lively discussion that wound it’s way past swear words, a wish for a waterproof autoclavable upgrade to the iPad and scientists’ notebooks.

davinci-notebook-in-hands

One of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous notebooks. (Source: The Creative Science Centre, University of Sussex, UK.)

Scientists have intimate relationships with their notebooks.

They track their working lives and, for better scientists, live on after them.

The old notebooks of famous scientists are collector’s items and informal historical works, like Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks that I have illustrated this article with.

For the rest of us, they serve more modest, but still important, roles.

Another commenter writing at In which I fail — Erika Cule — raised the subject of preferring paper notebooks over computer-based ones saying that she, like me, preferred the paper kind finding it “useful for formulating thoughts and things.” In reply to her, Jennifer wrote:

I’m not sure I could ever keep an electronic notebook. My thoughts ebb and flow better when I use a pen in the lab. Oddly, when I write fiction the computer is essential. I never claimed I was internally consistent though! [...]

Like me, Jennifer carries her notebook with her wherever she goes. Some people dictate things; we scribble instead.

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iPads for the disabled Grant Jacobs Apr 19

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The touch interface of the iPad opens opportunities for affordable assistive devices for some disabled people.

In a funny way it’s appropriate following my recent posting of a video of a cat interacting with their owner’s iPad. If a cat can interact with the device, so could some disabled children. In the video below, a 2.5 year-old tries the iPad for the first time.

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Young children find the interface natural, which is being exploited by companies producing interactive “books” and teaching aids for young children.

I’m showing you this video because of a comment by sarahcooley to a blog post hosting the video:

This is amazing! When my mother first saw the iPad she immediately thought of my youngest brother who is developmentally disabled. She said “I wish people would create software for kids like Philip who are smart, but their fine motor skills are not the best, a touch screen would be perfect”

I wanted to thank you for sharing this video because it really demonstrates the power of the device and how simple it is to use!

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National Library of New Zealand Web Harvest 2010 Grant Jacobs Apr 08

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The National Library of New Zealand has announced that it will be conducting it’s Web Harvest for 2010 during 12th to 25th May. Details of the harvest are on their website. This will attempt to collect all websites under .nz and those websites under .com, .org and .net that can be determined to be physically located in New Zealand as well as a selection of sites that are hosted overseas. With the exception of the top page, which is always collected, their harvest will honour robots.txt files referring to the user ‘NLNZHarvester2010’. (For those not technically inclined, these are files that asked web “crawlers” not to visit some pages in a website, usually to spare them being indexed by search engines such as google.com.)

Help them keep a snapshot of New Zealand on-line for posterity.

Update

Meant to say, if your site is outside of .nz, you can send them your URL so that it will be included. A form is provided at their site.

Excuse the poor service of late, the workload is intruding.

Other articles on Code for life:

Wikipedia project available for a good home

The iPad: a device to consume, not produce

Aww, crap.

Bioinformatics S.O.C., Not Exactly Rocket Science moves, pop science book writing

Molecular biology in museums

The iPad: a device to consume, not produce Grant Jacobs Apr 04

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With the distribution of iPads to start this Easter weekend, there have been numerous reviews of the what the impact of the Apple’s iPad might be.

(Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

(Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

I’m particularly impressed with a point David Pogue writing in the New York Times makes about consuming content as opposed to creating it.

He distinguishes techies and your average “Joe” or “Jane”.

I’m going to distinguish these two as producers and consumers, terms Pogue introduces later in his article.

That’s not consumers as in spending money or producers as in movies.

By consumers I mean those that use goods or services provided by a computer, and by producers I mean those that create things on computers. (You could alternatively call producers creators but I don’t wish to confuse this with those that create in the sense of smaller tasks like simple drawings or short messages.)

Apple’s inclusion of their iWorks application (‘app’ in Apple parlance) and a yet-to-come add-on keyboard not withstanding, the iPad is clearly mainly intended as a device, not a “computer” in the traditional sense, for those that wish to consume—use not create—services provided by computers.

The reason this matters is that direct comparisons with laptops are meaningless.

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Internet news: Google redirects Chinese users to Hong Kong site Grant Jacobs Mar 23

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google_hk2

This is all over the internet already, but just in case my readers haven’t heard the news (exceedingly unlikely I know…), Google has moved to close it’s China website, redirecting users to the “open” website based in Hong Kong, as reported in a post on their official blog. Google points out this will mean that China is open to blocking the new Hong Kong-based site. It sounds almost like “dare you.”

Google have created a web page that presents a simplified summary of what internet services are currently available in China, which they say they will periodically update. You will notice that YouTube and Blogger are marked as blocked.

Other sources point to that in China Google faced strong competition from a local counterpart, Baidu.com, and that the China operation is a small part of Google’s total takings, balancing this against that Google risk losing a potentially large market in the longer term. (It would be interesting to understand the popularity of the Chinese competitor.)

Stories covering this can be found at Google’s blog, the New York Times, the BBC, and—according to Google news—at 1,111 other places. (Well, at the time I looked; it’s grown since. Good timing on my part to get the four ones lined up…)

On a side note, I wish newspapers would cite their internet sources. Provide links. This is the internet, right? It’s silly to have to track down a source through searching on the quoted passages.

The iPad, Apple’s new tablet and the textbook / reference market Grant Jacobs Jan 28

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As almost anyone interested in Apple devices knows, today Apple announced it’s tablet device.

Interest on internet has been high. To give the scale of interest, the Arstechnica website, normally a busy site, was unable to cope with the load. I watched a small portion of the presentation live, via TVNZ’s (Television New Zealand, for those outside New Zealand) live streaming on their technology news website.

Caveat: as “breaking news”, please realise there may be errors and there certainly will be omissions. As someone with a hearing “disability”, I would welcome the day when captions were more widely available, the streaming feed is very difficult to follow, so I’ve written most of this from running around the internet picking up other’s reporting, with all the flaws that come with that!

ipad

As expected, they use the 9.7″ screens (the rumour-mill started as Apple essentially bought out large volumes of the small screen, without having a product which used them). It features a style very similar to that of the current iMacs, with the screen itself surrounded by black backing, then a thin brushed aluminium border.

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Reproducible research and computational biology Grant Jacobs Jan 24

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A concern raised, which I have some sympathies with, is how to make computational science reproducible.

Modern science is largely grounded on the notion that findings can be repeated independently by others to verify them, or to extend them. In practice this can be easier said that done. You’d think that for computational sciences, like computational biology, it’d be cut and dried. It can be, but a lot of the time it isn’t.

Musical repeat sign

I’d like to point to three things discouraging development of reproducible research in computational biology and suggest that in addition to “open” coding and a suitable legal framework, self-documenting output that can be used as input may help.

To start as I did, read John Timmer’s article Keeping computers from ending science’s reproducibility and the slides (PDF file) from Victoria Stodden’s talk Intellectual Property Issues in Publishing, Sharing and Blogging Science.

It’s claimed that the term “reproducible research” was proposed by Jon Claerbout (Standford University) to encapsulate the idea that “the ultimate product of research is the paper along with the full computational environment used to produce the results in the paper such as the code, data, etc. necessary for reproduction of the results and building upon the research.” What both Timmer and Stodden write about follows this description and the abstract of the paper that the wikipedia entry points to:

WaveLab is a library of Matlab routines for wavelet analysis, wavelet-packet analysis, cosine-packet analysis and matching pursuit. [...]

WaveLab makes available, in one package, all the code to reproduce all the figures in our published wavelet articles. The interested reader can inspect the source code to see exactly what algorithms were used, how parameters were set in producing our figures, and can then modify the source to produce variations on our results.

WaveLab has been developed, in part, because of exhortations by Jon Claerbout of Stanford that computational scientists should engage in “really reproducible” research.

The full paper is available free on-line, via the abstract. (This is well worth reading if you haven’t already. It’s a light read if you skip lightly over the details of the product in section 4 & 5 and focus on the discussion.)

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