Monday, 2 June 2014
New microchip 9,000 times faster than a typical computer
A new microchip modelled on the human brain is 9,000 times faster and more efficient than a typical computer.
The
development offers greater possibilities for advances in robotics and
computing and a new way of understanding the brain, researchers said.
For all their sophistication, computers pale in comparison to the
brain. The modest cortex of the mouse, for instance, operates 9,000
times faster than a personal computer simulation of its functions.
Not
only is the PC slower, it takes 40,000 times more power to run, said
Kwabena Boahen, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford
University.
Boahen and his team developed
Neurogrid, a circuit board consisting of 16 custom-designed "Neurocore"
chips that can simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synaptic
connections.
The team designed these chips with
power efficiency in mind. Their strategy was to enable certain synapses
to share hardware circuits.
By switching to modern manufacturing processes and fabricating the
chips in large volumes, he could cut a Neurocore's cost 100-fold -
suggesting a million-neuron board for $ 400 a copy.
With
that cheaper hardware and compiler software to make it easy to
configure, these neuromorphic systems could find numerous applications,
researchers said.
For instance, a chip as fast
and efficient as the human brain could drive prosthetic limbs with the
speed and complexity of our own actions - but without being tethered to a
power source.
New application turns smartphone into health monitor
Researchers have developed a new smartphone app that monitors how heart and lung patients walk and can alert doctors when their symptoms worsen.
GaitTrack, an app developed by researchers at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the U of I at Chicago, turns a
smartphone into a sophisticated medical device.
Unlike
other apps that merely count steps, GaitTrack uses eight motion
parameters to perform a detailed analysis of a person's gait, or walking
pattern, which can tell physicians much about a patient's
cardiopulmonary, muscular and neurological health.
According to Schatz, gait is sometimes called the "sixth vital
sign" - after temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate
and blood oxygen level.
Gait speed involves
several systems of the body working together in coordination, so changes
in gait can be a sign of trouble in one or more systems.
Doctors often use an assessment called the six-minute walk test for
patients with heart and lung disease, such as congestive heart failure,
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma.
The Illinois team used GaitTrack to administer six-minute walk tests to
30 patients with chronic lung disease and found that it monitored more
accurately - and more cheaply - than the medical accelerometers.
The phone would periodically collect data, analyse it and keep tabs on
the patient's status, alerting the patient or patient's doctor when it
detects changes in gait that would indicate a decline in health so that
treatment could be adjusted responsively.
Few websites for music lovers
The internet has changed the way we acquire our music. You don't even have to visit your neighbourhood record store any more. Simply sign-up for an account, pay by card, and download the tunes you want. But did you know there's more on offer for music lovers on the web? Here are some amazing sites that every aficionado should know and bookmark...
Free downloads
www.myspoonful.com
This site is backed by a team of curators that sift through a bunch of fresh artists every week to recommend the best of what's new.
www.rollingstone.com/music/daily-download
If you love music, you might have at least heard of Rolling Stone magazine. But did you know that its website has a 'Daily Download' section? Okay, so you don't get a song a day, every day, but RS regularly updates this section with tunes every couple of days.
www.1classical.com
This resource is an aggregator of classical music. You can browse its tunes by composers such as Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Handel, Mozart, and Wagner - or you can choose to download compositions based on the instrument it was written for.
www.gaana.com
If you're looking for tunes closer to home, you might want to consider Gaana. It boasts of a huge collection of songs in practically every regional language - from Hindi to Kannada and Marathi to Bengali. A free account lets you create your own playlists, and you can even 'like', comment on, and share songs with friends through Twitter and Facebook.
www.stereomood.com
Right at the top of the main page on Stereomood, you will find a
text box that asks you to describe your mood. And you can type
practically anything: angry, aggressive, loved, beautiful, sad,
sleepy...
Stereomood accordingly creates a playlist for you.
neverendingplaylist.com and www.jiggyape.com
In the old days, if you wanted to listen to a song, you needed to
own the vinyl, cassette, CD, or request the track on the radio. Now,
simply head to Never Ending Playlist or JiggyApe, enter the name of the
artist you want to hear, and hit enter.
The site trawls through YouTube and automatically creates a playlist for you.
www.musicovery.com
Each song listed on Musicovery has been curated and categorized
using 40 parameters. The site's algorithm then plots the song - in the
form of coloured dots - on a 'mood map'.
The benefits of a truly open cloud
In truth we're nowhere near understanding the true potential of the cloud or the Internet of Things and the scope it offers developers, nor has anyone grasped the range of possibilities that it will open up for either businesses or consumers.
Gone are the old ways
The old days of managing PCs and servers with monolithic on-premise products are over. Cloud services and the mobility, scalability and flexibility they offer are now starting to appeal to businesses of all sizes, and vendors need to respond fast.We need to enable our customers to bring in best in class solutions easily and affordably rather than creating needless barriers or anti-competitive walls. We need to be flexible and open to collaboration or integration.
For me the concept of all-in-one products has reached its zenith and it's time to move on. There are just too many smart kids entering the market nowadays for that kind of strategy to work and not to be knocked down and replaced by more specialised services; those with a narrower focus, but more broad and robust interfaces to allow deep integration and collaboration within an ecosystem of like-minded offerings.
Let's also not forget that today's developers are being brought up in an 'appified' world. People collect and organise multiple apps on mobile platforms that allow just enough sandboxing to ensure security and data privacy, but an otherwise open field for co-operation between complimentary apps.
Why would these same people change their approach when designing enterprise services?
You can see how we got here. Historically, product leaders faced with high penetration have needed to add to their portfolio to maintain growth and consolidate their position.
Hey, if you make great taps, and sell a lot of them, you might as well sell plugs as well, right? And then sinks and baths, showerheads, and what about toilets too.
The problem is, unless your products all work with your competitor's products, you'd better make sure that each and every one of them is the very best.
And therein lies the problem. No company can be the best at everything, forever. Sooner or later there will be a start-up in a garage that will make a better tap and it won't work with your pipes.
When it comes to offering your customers what they want, I'm a big believer in accepting that sometimes somebody else might offer them something that you either can't, or choose not to. Technology vendors shouldn't try to be something they aren't.
Cloud makes it easy
It seems like a no-brainer to me and cloud computing makes it easy. No longer will customers have to search for one technology that does everything and inevitably fails to do much of it well.SaaS technologies, combined with private or published APIs, allow customers to choose the best technology fit for their business and seamlessly integrate them, without the need for extortionate professional services.
I don't pretend to know the answer, but I'll offer an alternative scenario, and the success of iOS and Android in the mobile market provides a great insight.
I would argue that their current dominance over competing platform such as Windows Phone and Blackberry 10 is not down to whizzier feature sets or a flashier UI; but rather due to their provision of a superior platform for application interchange – and that includes both the technical and commercial aspects.
Fix Buffering Problems in Youtube
you’re watching a YouTube video when all of a sudden it pauses and starts buffering, especially right when the video starts getting good. This problem isn’t uncommon and it happens to the best of us.
There are things that you can try in order to make YouTube videos play better on your computer or mobile device before you throw it out the window.
How YouTube Videos Work
Video files take up storage space; you probably know this because after you’ve recorded so many videos on your smartphone, it starts to fill up and you eventually need to free up storage space.
YouTube videos are no different, and while they are stored on YouTube’s servers, they still use up your internet bandwidth so that they can be delivered to your computer from YouTube’s servers. This essentially means that while you’re watching a YouTube video, YouTube will slowly send you the data needed to play the video (that way you don’t need to download it all first, and then watch it. This is called streaming).
What You Can Do to Fix Buffering Problems
Check to see if anything else is hogging up bandwidth-If YouTube videos are sputtering, check to see if there’s anything else on your home network that might be hogging up bandwidth.
Plug into an ethernet connection if you’re on a laptop-A hard-wired connection is always faster and more reliable than a wireless connection, so if you’re having problems with YouTube videos playing nicely, plug your laptop into ethernet to get the best possible connection.
Sit closer to the router - If you can’t connect to ethernet because you’re on a mobile device, like a smartphone or tablet, the next best thing to do is sit closer to the router. The farther you are away from the router, the weaker your internet connection gets, especially if there are walls between you and the router.
Update your software -Usually we wouldn’t necessarily suggest users update their software in order to fix a buffering YouTube video, but it can work sometimes. Updating your web browser and other pieces of software that deal with video (such as Adobe Flash) could possibly fix issues that you’re having with unstable video, but more often than not, it’s usually just an internet connection problem.
When all else fails, restart everything in a proper way.
IBM Patents Browser-Based Fraud Detection Technology
What you do in your browser now forms a second factor of authentication for e-commerce transactions, thanks to IBM.
A user's online actions and behaviors inside of a browser can help define who they are. That's the basis of a new patent from IBM researchers designed to help limit the risk of e-commerce fraud."At a high-level what we have patented is the ability to help prevent fraudulent transactions before they occur," IBM Master Inventor Brian O'Connell told eSecurityPlanet. "We look at a lot of Web browser metrics that we transmit to a server on the backend and before a transaction takes place. We compare the transaction to a profile based on previous interactions from the user with the website."
Twist on Two-factor Authentication
Based on an existing profile, it is possible to make a determination on whether or not the transaction is legitimate, O'Connell explained. The system is fundamentally a form of two-factor authentication for users, he added.The user behavior that IBM examines involves a number of different attributes. Those attributes include how long a user typically hovers their mouse over a link before it is clicked, how a user scrolls through a page, and whether he uses the page-up/page-down keyboard buttons or just the mouse wheel.
"By measuring the attributes we are able to determine how likely a person is who they say they are," O'Connell said.
In a two-factor system, a user needs a second password (or factor) in order to gain access to a site or service. With IBM's invention, that second factor is the user's own browser behavior. In other forms of two-factor authentication, the user is typically aware of the factor being used, explained IBM Master Inventor Keith Walker.
"In this case, people are exhibiting behaviors as they interact with a Web page entirely subconsciously," Walker said.
Fraud detection systems have long leveraged anomalous behavior to help identify potential fraud. Noticing if a user is making a transaction from a different location than normal is a common fraud detection tactic today. The IBM patent is complementary to the traditional approach to fraud detection, Walker said.
More Patents on the Way
"In our patent we do reference current technology, so if a user is making a transaction and it's 3 a.m. and it's atypical for them, then that is an indication fraud might be going on," Walker said. "All this technology can work together."Walker and O'Connell originally filed the patent for a "user-browser interaction-based fraud detection system" in April of 2006. U.S. Patent #8,650,080 was officially granted in February of this year, though IBM is only now officially announcing the patent. Walker noted that the time it takes for patents to be granted varies and is beyond his control. That said, he added that parts of the invention are now found inside IBM's Trusteer Pinpoint technology.
IBM has many more inventions that are patent pending to further mitigate the risks of online fraud. Walker noted that there is a patent in the system now related to fraud detection on mobile devices, for example.
"We took the concept of user behavior detection and thought through how to implement the invention in a keyboard-less touchscreen interface, where user behavior is very different than on a keyboard," Walker said.
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