MacRumors has one of those nice heart-warming stories today about a nine-year-old girl called Holly, whose mum, Fiona, wrote to Apple CEO Steve Jobs to tell him about how Holly’s iPad helps to make it much easier for her to read. Holly has albinism, which, aside from affecting the colour of her skin and hair, also affects her vision. Previously she had to use a large magnifying glass if she wanted to read anything, but now that she has an iPad she can easily enlarge the text, meaning that she is now much more enthusiastic about reading, and is able to read for twice as long as she used to.
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June 2011
June 30, 2011
A Wristwatch that Monitors Blood Pressure
Now a new wireless monitor from Hewlett-Packard and a Singapore company called Healthstats aims to make it much easier for patients and doctors to monitor blood pressure. The device, which has the size and look of a wristwatch, can monitor pressure continuously—which provides a much more accurate picture than infrequent readings in the doctor's office. Until now, the only way to do such continuous monitoring has been with a cumbersome inflatable cuff for the arm or wrist.
The new monitor comes with related software designed to keep patients and doctors informed of the wearer's vital signs, including blood pressure. Data is transmitted from the device to the user's cell phone, and then to the cloud, where clinicians can review it. Patients and their doctors can view 24-hour graphs of blood pressure, and the system can sound alerts when it detects abnormalities in pressure or other measures.
June 28, 2011
Lua is more popular than JavaScript
TIOBE credits Lua’s growing popularity in mobile apps while traditional web scripting languages are having a “hard time.” They also reiterate something all of us already knew about Lua: “its small footprint and fast performance.”
June 27, 2011
Mini Maxwell
There are now about half a dozen Mini Maxes running around across the United States. As our software development is starting to calm down, I thought I would take a moment to showcase a few of the robot's features.
As you probably have guessed, this robot runs ROS (on a netbook). We're using an ArbotiX to control the arm and neck servos (7 AX-12s total), while the Create base connects directly to the netbook. Two demo buttons are attached through the ArbotiX allowing users to quickly add user input to programs.
http://www.showusyoursensors.com/2011/06/introducing-mini-maxwell.html
Seeing Robotics with New Eyes
Since Microsoft launched its Kinect motion-detecting system for video games, hackers have been eagerly repurposing the $150 device. Garratt Gallagher, a robotics engineer at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, used it to build a robot called the Bilibot that he is selling online for $1,200. The device, which is small enough for Gallagher to carry in his arms, can perceive its surroundings, move around, and manipulate objects.
June 23, 2011
Health Graph
In words, the Health Graph is...
- A system of individual health connections or interrelations - a digital map of your personal health.
- A record of the evolution of these items over time.
- Any body measurement stats and health/fitness related actions that impact your fitness and personal health are eligible for inclusion in your Health Graph.
http://developer.runkeeper.com/healthgraph
June 22, 2011
June 21, 2011
June 20, 2011
A Biologically Inspired Visual Search Engine
Cortexica's VisualSearch platform uses techniques inspired by the human vision system to compensate for different lighting conditions. It identifies key features of an object irrespective of their orientation, size, or how dark or light they appear in the image. This makes it possible to identify products at a distance or even while they are moving. Cortexica's technology can also spot logos and objects in videos.
...
The human vision system compares different points of an image with its neighbors—a phenomenon known as "edge extraction"—in order to identify features in a range of different conditions. "We have basically copied that architecture," says Bharath. Cortexica uses graphical processing units (GPUs) to handle the parallel processing.
Coping with variations and resolving them is a major issue in computational vision, says Ferryman. "It's crucial. If you can't have this invariance, then you can't do reliable matching," he says.
June 19, 2011
June 16, 2011
Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics – The Real Story Behind the Kinect
For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. Laser arrays cost a few thousand dollars and weigh several pounds, and the images they capture are only two-dimensional. Stereo cameras are less expensive, lighter, and can construct 3-D maps, but they require a massive amount of computing power. Until a reasonably priced, easier method could be designed, autonomous robots were trapped in the lab.
GPS without GPS
The board works on the basic principles of a cellphone network – the ‘cell’ network is a series of towers that are placed more or less equidistant to each other. Save for the most desolate parts of the country, a cell tower usually communicates with a phone one or two miles away. Usually, several cell towers can be seen, so the position of a cellphone can be pinpointed to within 200-350 feet. Translating cell towers to latitude and longitude is easily done by querying a Google database that was created for the mobile version of Google Maps.
June 15, 2011
Technology
One of ARDIC Instrument’s core technologies is the use of an astigmatism detection system (ADS). While the optical mechanism used in the ADS is different from the mechanisms used in traditional AFM optical units, the ADS is capable of achieving nanometer resolution images. By developing a patented method of using astigmatic detection for measuring the deflection and tilt of a surface in nanometer resolution, we are able to replace the traditionally bulky and expensive optical units in vibrometer, optical profiler, and SPM systems.
This offers the following advantages:
• Highest resolution at 0.035 nm
• Not easily influenced by environmental changes
• High bandwidth (~1MHz vs 100MHz)
• High scan speed (~100 s/frame vs 10s/frame)
• Thin profile allows flexible applications
• Thin and compact profile reduced thermal drift
• Less components result in higher durability
• DVD optical head technology is mature and reliable
• DVD optical head technology is precisely pre-assembled
• Reliable systems reduce service costs
• Does not require additional adjustments
• Easy to operate
• Small laser spot size (0.56 micron)
http://www.ardic.com.tw/tech.html
一家生物感測儀公司
June 14, 2011
Timon Singh Wave and Solar-Powered Robot
The Wave Glider is a solar and wave-powered robot designed by Liquid Robotics to serve as a platform for ocean observation, data collection, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. The project has just been awarded $22 million in Series D financing, which will go to further its development as it begins to explore the ocean blue.
June 09, 2011
The Search for E. coli Gains Speed
Bean sprouts were briefly added to the list of foods seen as potential sources of E. coli 0104—a new strain that has infected more than 2,300 people and killed 23 in Germany over the past three weeks. The list of potentially dangerous foods includes cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, and other raw salad vegetables.
The rapid reprieve for sprouts can be attributed to the availability of high-speed pathogen-specific tests. These assays, laboratory procedures that measure the biochemical activities of food samples, can now return reliable results in as little as 10 to 24 hours.
"As soon as we finished sequencing the DNA of this strain, we made the results public, like any ethical company would," says Nir Nimrodi, head of food safety at Life Technologies, which has developed a custom test for E. coli 0104.
AlienCortex AV multicore softprocessor development platform
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/794668827/aliencortex-av
Alien Xtreme-R is designed to be the ideal core for robotics enthusiasts. With four AVR8 Arduino-sketch compatible cores, you can now develop independently running code to interact with sensors, motors, and other I/O devices without contention.
June 08, 2011
June 07, 2011
Open source perception manager
The Perception Manager is a Java class that abstracts the raw Android Sensor API into higher-level ‘percepts,’ effectively translating hundreds of samples a second from the accelerometer and gyroscope into binary features like “shaking” or “upside down”.
June 03, 2011
Structural DNA Nanotechnology
DNA is an excellent system for studying self-assembly and fabricating complex nanoscale structures. This is due to DNA's extraordinary set of capabilities, including molecular recognition, large diversity of unique strand sequence space and its predictable (and programmable) secondary structure.
June 01, 2011
好路不愛走!
終於開始那件我一點也不想做的事 (就是寫一個PCBased的控制程式) 之前已經寫過一版了 只是這一版有更完整的指令 就是更多指令的意思 這樣的事我實在是做不來 拖拖拉拉的搞一個下午也沒完成多少 因為就是一個蘿蔔一個坑很無趣的工作 還沒做就知道結果了 我對這樣的事一點都提不起勁 我想我也是屬於過動的一種吧 康莊大道我是一點都不愛走 羊腸小徑我最愛!
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