Hi my name is Don Bishop and this is my “Deal” Today... Basically, anything that interest me. Music, Computers, Software, Apps, Linux OS's - Distros, Space, Science, Auto's, Trucks, 4x4's, Motorcycles and other slightly interesting info that I find on the Web. There may, or may not be, any correlation between my Posts. Just whatever interests me at the time. I hope someone out there finds some of this interesting too!:)
Technical Summary: The Park Ranger is an ultrasonic-ranging prototype designed to assist drivers who are backing into tight areas. The ranger uses ultrasonic pings to measure distance to the object behind and indicates this distance by sending audible tones to your FM radio. Optional panel-mount LEDs offer visual aid for calibration as well as warning drivers behind you.
The European Commission has approved the construction of three gigantic new research lasers, with the option for a fourth that would, for an instant, be several hundred times more powerful than the entirety of the power generated by our civilization. The hope is that this will be enough energy to actually conjure virtual particles out of nothingness.
At peak power, the fourth laser in Europe's Extreme Light Infrastructure project (or ELI) will combine ten beams into a single pulse measuring 200 petawatts. 200 petawatts is significantly more power that our entire race generates at any given moment, and in fact more total power than Earth receives from the sun.
Needless to say, this is not the type of laser that you just turn on and wave around for your cat to chase. The only way that this massive amount of power is able to be harnessed is if the amount of time that it's being used for is insanely small. The 200 petawatt pulses will only last 1.5 x 10^-14 second, which is about the same amount of time that it takes for light to travel from one side of a human hair to the other, if you shave the hair down by 90%.
Users to Have Social Networking Mandate? Your Choice.
How do you feel about a bill of rights for social network users? That’s the question that a group of IT specialists, lawyers, activists, journalists, and others are striving to get answered.
Escher has drawn a lot of strange pictures which describe an impossible reality , Waterfall is one of them. This instructable gives out a step-by-step guide to show how you can make a real-life version of Waterfall: make the impossible reality possible, for real! Since the Waterwheel spins forever "without power supply", you can get yourself a "perpetual motion machine".
Here's a video shows the completed model. This video was released at April 1st and we called it "Perpetual Motion Machine" on that day.
By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Perry Bacon Jr., Published: April 29
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Everything seemed set for a magic moment. The wounded congresswoman was in town. The president was on his way. The space shuttle’s huge external tank was fueled.
But moments before Commander Mark E. Kelly was about to board Endeavour on Friday, NASA officials scrubbed a launch that had drawn hundreds of thousands of people to America’s “Space Coast.” The cancellation — caused by a possible faulty auxiliary power unit heater — deprived injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, (D-Ariz.), of a chance to watch her husband command Endeavour on its final mission and the penultimate launch of the U.S. space shuttle program.
NASA Launch Director Michael Leinbach says the shuttle crew may give it another try as soon as Monday afternoon, though it’s not uncommon for delays to last much longer.
Giffords’ presence had lent an emotional grace note to preparations for Endeavour’s launch and even overshadowed the planned visit of President Obama and the first family — the first time a sitting president was to attend a shuttle launch since Bill Clinton in 1998. Giffords flew in two days earlier from Houston, where she has delighted doctors with the pace of her recovery after being shot in the head and nearly killed Jan. 8 in Tucson, Ariz. Grainy footage of Giffords climbing the stairs of her plane with only minimal help captivated viewers, and heartened fellow victims of the shooting, which left six dead and 12 others wounded.
“She is a miracle now,” Mavy Stoddard, who lost her husband and suffered three bullet wounds in the shooting, said in an interview from her Tucson home. “And miracles do happen.”
NASA has called off Friday's launch of space shuttle Endeavour because of a heater failure. (April 29)
Video
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was seen in public for the first time since the Jan. 8 shooting in Tucson. She boarded a jet in Houston to attend husband Mark Kelly's space shuttle launch, which was postponed. (April 27)
Emotiv System's only current product is the Emotiv EPOC, a $300 peripheral for gaming on Windows PCs. Emotiv Systems claims the headset will make it possible for games to be controlled and influenced by the player's mind, and facial expressions. It connects wirelessly with the PC, and may in the future work on other game platforms such as consoles. The Epoc was designed by Emotiv Systems in conjunction with the Sydney based Industrial Design consultancy 4design.[7][8]
The EPOC has 14 electrodes[9][10] (compared to the 19 electrodes of a standard medical EEG, and the 3 of OCZ'sNIA features and a multiple of NeuroSky's single electrode). It also has a two-axis gyro for measuring head rotation.
The headset must first be trained to recognize what kind of thought pattern equates to a certain action. It can measure four categories of inputs:[11]
Conscious thoughts (Cognitiv suite): Imagining 12 kinds of movement- those were in the demo application 6 directions (left, right, up, down, forward, and "zoom") and 6 rotations ([anti-]clockwise rotation, turn left and right, and sway backward and forward)- plus 1 other visualization ("disappear") that can be detected in µ rhythms. While the current driver may only be able to listen for any 4 of these at a time, the degrees of freedom are larger than a joystick's 2 df. Ideomotor responses ("I found myself inadvertently tightening my stomach muscles, or raising an eyebrow when I tried to make the box float. The Emotiv guy used his hands to try and cue himself to think the same way every time." (emphasis added)[12]) or the much stronger EMG currents aside, these thought commands effectively become hotkeys. Videos of Emotiv employees playing "The Game" show a high degree of difficulty in adapting and thinking right even as experienced users. Users can train the 13 visualizations to totally different thoughts than the ones specified, but detection ability will be worse.[citation needed] Due to the complex detection algorithms involved, there is a slight lag in detecting thoughts.[13] However, the technology may still be useful in a support role like calling up a minimap or radar in a FPS game.
Emotions (Affectiv suite): "Excitement", "Engagement/Boredom", "Meditation", and "Frustration" can currently be measured. Emotiv admits that the names may not perfectly reflect exactly what the emotion is, and says that they may be renamed before market launch.
Facial expressions (Expressiv suite): Individual eyelid and eyebrow positions, eye position in the horizontal plane, smiling, laughing, clenching, and smirking can currently be detected. Other expressions may be added prior to release. The expressions are detected by the EEG sensors picking up signals to facial muscles, rather than by reading brainwaves. Unlike reading mental activity, these detections are very fast (10ms)[14] conveying a decisive advantage and rendering them suitable for fast paced games in the FPS genre.
Head rotation: The angular velocity of one's head can be measured in the yaw and pitch (but not roll) directions. This is detected by gyros, and isn't related to the EEG features.
For compatibility with non-compliant software EmoKey would be provided in order to bind commands to keys or combinations thereof transforming the device into an HID.
EPOC can be used to get EEG data (the raw electricity measurements), with the Python Emokit[15] without the need for EPOC's proprietary software, Research, Research Plus or Enterprise Plus SDK licenses ($750, $2,500 and $7,500 respectively).[16]
Dr. Zoz Brooks mind controlling a car with EPOC.[17]
The Emotiv EPOC will ship with a game by Demiurge Studios, previously called "The Game", built on the Unreal engine. Videos of portions of the game have been shown at conferences and in media interviews. The game involves a first person view of the user walking around a virtual environment, with many different activities at different locations. The sky changes color according to the mood of the player. Demonstrated activities in the game include pushing and rotating giant stone structures into the shape of stone henge, then raising a temple from below the ground; levitating a large rock and some smaller ones; repairing a bridge; bending a tree; and scaring away glowing spirits with scary facial expressions.
The EPOC also includes "EmoKey" software used to emulate keystrokes based on combinations of thoughts, feelings, and facial expressions. Any EPOC detection can be paired with keystrokes or string of keystrokes through a simple user interface by the end user. Future versions will also emulate the mouse based on the gyros. This software allows most existing games, instant messaging programs, and other software to be controlled with the headset.
There is also a planned web site known as "Emortal", for listening to music, viewing photos, and other activities, modified based on what the user is thinking and feeling.
Another product is the Emotiv Control Panel, also seen in many videos, which allows users to train the various thoughts, such as "push" and "disappear", and test them on a floating, bobbing, cube. It also allows users to view their emotional state, such as "excitement", on a graph. It has a 2D blue avatar that allows the user to view their own facial expressions, and adjust the sensitivity of those detections.
A free SDK (called SDK Lite) is also available for download from the Emotiv website.[18] It includes software to emulate the Emotiv EPOC for developers who do not have one of the (beta version) headsets. A SDK interface will give Linux users[citation needed] a more powerful control for recoding and modification of the Emotiv head set for other game consoles and programs.
Emokit is an open-source Python library for reading out sensor data from the EPOC by Cody Brocious. It was built by reverse-engineering the encrypted protocol.[15]
At the Game Developers Conference 2008, in San Francisco an Emotiv headset was among the new video game input devices there. The demo played with the Emotiv was a puzzle where the player rebuilds Stonehenge. To do so, the wearer did hand motions such as pushing and pulling to restore Stonehenge.[19]
In July 2010, Tan Le gave a demo of the headset at a TED conference.[20]
The field of consumer BCI has three primary players, NeuroSky, Emotiv, and OCZ industries. The Emotiv EPOC has significantly more electrodes than its competitors and is not considerably more expensive, but is the only commercial EEG unit to still use wet sensor technology.
^Field report Memorable quote: "It worked ["levitation" thought command recognition from the cognitiv suite]. I laughed in surprise and the box immediately dropped back down again."
After testing an iPhone, an iPad and an eye-tracking device as possible user interfaces to maneuver our research car named “MadeInGermany”, we now also use brain-power. Neuro-signals are acquired using the commercial Emotiv EEG (electroenzephalogram) tool. After a few rounds of mental training with the virtual objects in the software-toolkit, the bioelectric signals measured by the wireless neuroheadset are interpreted as patterns which are associated with directions. Once a pattern can be linked with a command a software interface sends these to the Drive-By-Wire System of the car which turns the messages into actuation like steering or acceleration. Our test-drives on the former airport in Berlin Tempelhof showed that there is only a slight delay between the intended command and the actual reaction of the car. The “BrainDriver” application is, of course, a demonstration and not roadworthy yet but on the long run, human-machine interfaces like this could bear huge potential in combination with autonomous driving. For example when it comes to decide which way you want to take on a crossroad while the autonomous cab drives you home.
[Sam Fok], an engineering student at the Washington University School of Engineering wrote in to share a project he and his classmates [Raphael Schwartz, Mark Wronkiewicz, Charles Holmes, Jessica Zhang, Nathan Brodell, and Thane Somers] have been working on as their entry in the 2011 RESNA Student Design Competition. Their project, IpsiHand, is designed to help rehabilitate those who have suffered a stroke or other Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).
Most motor functions in the body are controlled by the opposite hemisphere of the brain, a process called contralateral motor control. When a patient suffers from TBI, they often lose control over some portion of the body opposite the injury. Recent studies have shown however, that while most motor control is contralateral, hand movements also create ipsilateral brain activity. This means that the uninjured side of the brain can effectively control both hands, with a bit of mechanical assistance.
Their process uses an Emotiv Epoch EEG headset, which we have discussed before, to monitor the patients’ brain for activity. The data is sent wirelessly to a computer which processes the data, singling out ipsilateral brain waves. The computer then actuates a modified hand orthosis to control grasping in real time.
We think their work is fantastic, and the team’s creation has a wide array of applications in the field of therapy and assisted living. We wish them luck in their competition, and hope to see this technology put to good use in the future.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — NASA on Friday was forced to postpone the launching of the shuttle Endeavour, four hours before it was to lift off on a two-week mission to the International Space Station.
Officials announced that the launching, which had been set for 3:47 p.m., would be delayed for at least three days while technicians try to fix heaters that are part of equipment that powers the movement of the shuttle’s engines and its flaps during its ride into space.
Planning for more advanced missions to other destinations in space poses new challenges for space suit engineers. Learn of some of the issues on Discovery Channel's "Spacewalkers: The Ultimate...(more info)
Planning for more advanced missions to other destinations in space poses new challenges for space suit engineers. Learn of some of the issues on Discovery Channel's "Spacewalkers: The Ultimate High-Wire Act."
I watched them all and they were a great trip down memory lane for me, since I grew up in the 60's and remember many of the events mentioned. I also learned many things I never new about Space Walking and Space Suites!:)
This looks like it could really help people. Hope they get it produced.
Don
Posted at 12:27 pm on Apr 29th, 2011 by Don