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Static Helps the Deaf to Hear
OmegaGeek writes: "Jay Rubinstein, a researcher at the University of Iowa, has found a way to improve the signal processing algorithms of cochlear implants (and he's writing in FORTRAN - is this a leading indicator of a FORTRAN revival?). Adding static to the signal actually increases the dynamic hearing range in patients with a cochlear implant."
As a person with a considerable dedication to music, I am heartened by any progress in the area of hearing restoration. Too often the hearing abled take for granted what surely is the most emotive of the senses. This is a step in the right direction, and a strong step at that.
As for FORTRAN, that doesn't surprise me. FORTRAN has always been the language of choice for low-level signal processing, where the overhead of C libraries makes anything else impractical.
Carry on!
"I'm a rocket man / Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." - Sir Elton John
Actually, Fortran still is quite popular in the field of scientific computing. Fortran90/95 and High Performance Fortran that is, definitely NOT Fortran77. F90/95 is actually a rather easy language to program in, it is very similar to Matlab (the leading choise of many scientists for numerical analysis) in many ways, which makes porting from Matlab to Fortran easy. (Many projects start with a rough "first draft" code in Matlab and then move on to more powerful languages as the project advances and computational requirement increase.) Memory management, vector and matrix manipulation is also definitely a lot easier in Fortran than in C.
It still doesn't mean that Fortran is making a comeback. It just fills a particular niche.
It warms my heart.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Bio-engineering is nifty stuff. From intro undergraduate DSP if the brain doesn't treat each ear independently (kind of like stereo vision) I wonder if the brain is doing any covolution or difference between the signals to increase sensitivity.
It definitely does compare signals. This is where a large part of our perception of where a sound is loacated comes from (the rest is from sound interacting with the external part of the ear, which ends up attenuating different frequency bands by different amounts depending on the angle of incidence, if I remember correctly).
Is this perhaps the same thing as stochastic resonance ? I remember reading about it once; it relies on the idea that by adding white noise to a system you can push its behaviour over some detection threshold, and thus convey the signal better, even though you're actually adding noise. Quite interestingly counter-intuitive at first!
From the linked site above:
This post is strictly my own opinion and not necessarily that of my employer.
Actually, Fortran77 is still common in astronomy, partly (or mostly?) due to inertia. A lot of code is written in old Fortran, such as the NRAO Astronomical Image Processing System (AIPS).
During my degree we were taught Fortran90, but during my Ph.D. so much of the old code was Fortran77, and so many of the people you'd work with still used it, that many people ended up writing Fortran77 anyway. Of course, I'm not saying that's a good thing, that's just how it was :-)
It's starting to change, though... the new AIPS++ is written in C++, and I haven't written any Fortran for ages.
This post is strictly my own opinion and not necessarily that of my employer.