it it clear that you have no idea what this device is actually doing, but since the article was so bad i'm not suprised. i, on the other hand, am at the media lab and have seen it in action. it makes the entire world around you a touch-sensitive device that can be digitally interacted and augmented with.
For me, tuffmail has been super. I've used them for 3 years, no downtime, and they're even willing to restore my accidentally deleted trash from backup at no charge. They also have roundcube (ajax) available in addition to horde & squiremail.
Horray for an open phone..
except too bad the UI is dog slow and SUCKS, and basically requires a stylus, and it isnt multitouch. Oh and the built in web browser blows chunks, and it doesnt have most features you'd expect a phone to have, and its screen is depressed from the frame around it so you cant "click" on things on the side with your fingers, and and and......
(yes ive actually used one)
R&D is not about development, its about research. Good researchers are scarce. Go to any top university in the US and you'll see over half the people in PhD programs are foreign. This is actually a good thing, because they often stay and work in the US. Its a strength for the US to get the best and brightest from around the world to be educated and work here.
Don't be foolish. That's what happens when you don't directly and security support services that should and will exist. We are entering into a new era of computing by building applications on top of networks that reflect the real-world. Its about enchanced communication, and it's not about if but when. I applaud facebook for being proactive on this, even if they view it as a business move to increase their popularity. Ultimately its good for the consumer, especially not to unnecessarily fragment social networks by requiring everyone to rebuild a network for just 1 feature.
The problem here is not with the pattern recognition. Its the entire goal.
A rediculous amount of ethical issues aside, let me put my feelings in a way that most americans can understand: whatever we (the US military or allies) develop will eventually one day be used against us.
Technology has been horrible with war. I love how every modern technological advancment, TNT, Machine Guns, Nuclear Bomb, was developed with the mindset: "This will make war so horrible, it will guarantee peace." Haven't you guys understood the point of Dr. Strangelove?
Its quite obvious that computing is going in a direction where we won't say GPUs or CPUs, but rather serial processors and parallel processors, with the assumption of having both. The cell processors are a good example of this thought, although they're too heavy on the parallel side. Many tasks do not parallelize well, and will still need a solid serial processor.
Of course everyone is talking about the technological aspect of it and forgetting the social. The entire reason people like diamonds is because they're costly and rare. Same as gold (a somewhat ugly color that is often unflattering to the human skin). They are a social signal for status. Note even before these new 'pure lab diamonds' there were plenty of fakes like cubic zirconia that essentially appear to be the same. Without a chart from a professional jeweler you cannot evaluate a 'diamond's' authenticity. Yet diamonds still exist. They are a delicacy. Obviously this baffles the slashdot 'logician'.
Nobody seems to get it. The reason why Apple hasn't done wireless in the past is because it sucks up too much battery. I know this from speaking with one of the guys in the small core iPod team: they have an ultimate constraint for any feature that uses too much juice. If it reduces hours, it won't get implemented. Period. Wait until there's more battery friendly wireless, then see what Apple does.
This doesn't matter. What matters is what browser is already on the computer. Most people simply don't care--they just want what works without any extra work. Historically its also the case that IE better for corporations to deploy internally due to specific features including ActiveX, although this is starting to diminish.
I'm sure for you a regular email client is fine. However, the problems really appear in the corporate world where people are getting 500-1000 email messages a day, with varying degrees of context, relevance, and time-critical importance. In these situations it is important to understand who is emailing you, why, how to manage your responses to write, and prioritize the mental processing of loads of email. This is where typical filing/folder methods starts to break down--it doesn't allow you as a user to add & manage new state onto the emails themselves. In the paper mail world, when you receive a letter you are free to manipulate it in many ways. One might receive it in their inbox originally, but it is free to be written on, passed around, and sorted in temporary piles (for more background see Kirsh - Intelligent use of space).
Part of the main problem is that email has been repurposed in so many different ways, that its generic form is hard to depart from because it creates specialized interfaces that mentally constrain users into a specific task/mode/usage. Yet for enough people (mostly in the corporate world), their tasks/usages are well enough defined they not only could benifit from but require a better interface to cope with the volume and task-specific needs. Furthermore, email is socially-unaware. It doesn't understand how people connect together, collaborate, or how information flows across people and contexts globally. This is why we need more research into better email interfaces. As Edward Tufte said, to clarify add detail.
its only 'podcasting' in the sense that you're recording audio for others consumption. its much more about the discussions within a community (local physical/social context)....
What you are pointing to do has nothing to do with the goals of the system. There are many different technologies out there in computational fabrics--this system is more focused on the underlying social signaling issues and viral communication, which is why its just a 'pda in a bag'.
You're missing the entire point. Its about what is shown and how its shown--namely that images appear that signal your social status--how clse you are to the source of that particular image. For example, if you goto an underground rave/concert, they can hand out 100 limited copies of the image wirelessly. These can then be passed on within the communicative framework virally, but each time degrade purposely in quality, thus signalling how far you are from the source. This is coupled with tracing functionality, and you can have something like an inverted digg.com to understand how your image/social signal spreads in the wild. Just look how how customizing ring tones is so popular, and you might understand that this is about moving fashion itself from something that you buy every so often to something that you can digitally change and spread daily. Besides--the scope of this project is a masters thesis so don't expect a refined/commerical physical implementation. It simply isnt necesssary for research.
This fashion show is exactly the opposite of what you say. In fact, its purely conceptual about directions and designs for the future where technology is "seamlessly" integrated with fasion and appareal. So in fact, its super commoon sense to think in this direction because its where everyday people meet technology. But typical slashdot trolls, you wish you were cool enough to do something like this so you knock it instead since you don't understand....
Re:Just what you'd expect from MIT Media Lab
on
MIT Fashion Show Online
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Obviously you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. First of all, at the media lab, you're funded so you don't need to worry about grant money. Second of all, this isn't the real world. That is what is good about this. Seamless is put on to showcase the works of designers and other people (mostly not MIT people) who are interested in fashion and technology. It is mainly a CONCEPTUAL event meant for inspiring others into the different possible domains of interaction with fashion and technology. None of these items were meant to be bought off the runway. The designers were not engineers...but artists....
Not only do I agree with other children that the gov't already has plenty of social programs addressing poverty in a way that could have much more impact than MIT researchers could, but part of the whole point of the laptop is to be an e-reader than can provide books to millions that otherwise couldn't be done and updated. Books aren't cheap, are prone to being destroyed over time, and are heavy. One laptop that can have all a child's textbooks for the entire education process is a steal at $100.
I sent the link to my friend who's a cancer researcher, and this was his response:
good concept, but i don't think that it is a real solution for all cancers. while the concept of viral delivery is what most gene therapeutics aims for, selectivity is often a problem. it is interesting that this company uses reovirus to administer 2-aminopurine to cells to inhibit the ras pathway, which is often upregulated in cancer cells. the other problem is that this technique absolutely cannot be used on immunocompromised patients that have cancer (e.g., an AIDS patient with Kaposi's sarcoma, or an organ transplant patient who happens to be unlucky enough to develop cancer while under immune suppression therapy--a common method for organ transplant procedures). however, there are a few specific issues that are limiting to this approach.
1) i'm not sure whether it's true that all human cells have the viral response that is efficient enough for total viral clearance. i'm not all that familiar with reovirus... if it were the case that all normal human cells could completely neutralize and clear reovirus, then reovirus would not be able to continually inhabit the respiratory and bowel systems of human beings, as this company claims (because our cellular responses would have totally cleared it out).
on the other hand, if the reovirus is a natural part of the flora of our respiratory and bowel systems, then profusing patients with this reolysin would in theory cause a crapload of damage to those systems of our body (because then the engineered virus could "naturally" replicate and spread through those areas.
2) also, reolysin targets the ras pathway....while ras is often either constitutively active, or overexpressed in cancer cells, it is unfortunately not the only gene which is upregulated. many other genes are often overexpressed. these genes are called oncogenes (or tumor promoting genes). there are several other genes that are often overepressed, which are separate from the ras pathway. furthermore, there are another class of genes called tumor suppressor genes, which are often inhibited or permanently lost from cancer cells. unfortunately, stopping the ras pathway will not stop cancer cells which are driven by these phenomena.
however, i think that on a case by case basis, this may be a good therapeutic in combination with other therapies. otherwise, i think that using this therapy alone may be a way of selecting for cancers which do not depend completely on the activated ras pathway for propagation.
in any case, if their statistics are true from their clinical trials, it sounds promising, but definitely more basic science and clinical studies need to be done to ensure that this is a safe therapy for general cancer use.
another interesting and developing technology in both britain, and our institute as well as i think two or three other places in the US, is called peptide homing. basically our ex-ceo and another major british bigwig scientist have been mapping out the human body by protein sequence signatures that are specific to every organ, tissue, and even the specific blood vessels that pass through a specific organ. so rather than use viruses (which can often mutate and do things that we don't want), we use these nanoscopic spheres that are coated in antibody that specifically seeks out a certain protein sequence (kind of like a ball covered in velcro). the little spheres can hold payloads of anti-cancer chemicals or protein inhibitors which are then released at the target site. the limiting issue at the moment is how to get specificity of cancer cells. while these little nanospheres can deliver the drugs/inhibitors to a very specific area, it is ideal to have exact cell specificity. so scientists are now working really hard to identify surface molecules displayed on the membranes of cancers cells, but not normal cells.
1) This program is being aimed at allowing gov'ts to buy them for schools. This is not being done by the US gov't, so there isn't any "our own" to take care of first. The US govt is free to buy them, and I've heard Massachusetts is considering it.
2) This is being sold to gov'ts, not given to them. This just makes education and networking possible in areas were it wouldn't be otherwise, especially because the laptop can be used to read e-books. Food, shelter, and clothing are already attacked on different fronts (for years by rich govts), and aren't the aim or focus of the ML to provide. This is an additional measure that can radically transform the rest of the world unlike anything else thats been done.
Actually you're completely off since its not the US gov't, but the gov'ts that are purchasing the laptops like China, Brazil, India that the article is talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
it it clear that you have no idea what this device is actually doing, but since the article was so bad i'm not suprised. i, on the other hand, am at the media lab and have seen it in action. it makes the entire world around you a touch-sensitive device that can be digitally interacted and augmented with.
For me, tuffmail has been super. I've used them for 3 years, no downtime, and they're even willing to restore my accidentally deleted trash from backup at no charge. They also have roundcube (ajax) available in addition to horde & squiremail.
Horray for an open phone.. except too bad the UI is dog slow and SUCKS, and basically requires a stylus, and it isnt multitouch. Oh and the built in web browser blows chunks, and it doesnt have most features you'd expect a phone to have, and its screen is depressed from the frame around it so you cant "click" on things on the side with your fingers, and and and...... (yes ive actually used one)
R&D is not about development, its about research. Good researchers are scarce. Go to any top university in the US and you'll see over half the people in PhD programs are foreign. This is actually a good thing, because they often stay and work in the US. Its a strength for the US to get the best and brightest from around the world to be educated and work here.
Don't be foolish. That's what happens when you don't directly and security support services that should and will exist. We are entering into a new era of computing by building applications on top of networks that reflect the real-world. Its about enchanced communication, and it's not about if but when. I applaud facebook for being proactive on this, even if they view it as a business move to increase their popularity. Ultimately its good for the consumer, especially not to unnecessarily fragment social networks by requiring everyone to rebuild a network for just 1 feature.
The problem here is not with the pattern recognition. Its the entire goal. A rediculous amount of ethical issues aside, let me put my feelings in a way that most americans can understand: whatever we (the US military or allies) develop will eventually one day be used against us. Technology has been horrible with war. I love how every modern technological advancment, TNT, Machine Guns, Nuclear Bomb, was developed with the mindset: "This will make war so horrible, it will guarantee peace." Haven't you guys understood the point of Dr. Strangelove?
Its quite obvious that computing is going in a direction where we won't say GPUs or CPUs, but rather serial processors and parallel processors, with the assumption of having both. The cell processors are a good example of this thought, although they're too heavy on the parallel side. Many tasks do not parallelize well, and will still need a solid serial processor.
Of course everyone is talking about the technological aspect of it and forgetting the social. The entire reason people like diamonds is because they're costly and rare. Same as gold (a somewhat ugly color that is often unflattering to the human skin). They are a social signal for status. Note even before these new 'pure lab diamonds' there were plenty of fakes like cubic zirconia that essentially appear to be the same. Without a chart from a professional jeweler you cannot evaluate a 'diamond's' authenticity. Yet diamonds still exist. They are a delicacy. Obviously this baffles the slashdot 'logician'.
Nobody seems to get it. The reason why Apple hasn't done wireless in the past is because it sucks up too much battery. I know this from speaking with one of the guys in the small core iPod team: they have an ultimate constraint for any feature that uses too much juice. If it reduces hours, it won't get implemented. Period. Wait until there's more battery friendly wireless, then see what Apple does.
This doesn't matter. What matters is what browser is already on the computer. Most people simply don't care--they just want what works without any extra work. Historically its also the case that IE better for corporations to deploy internally due to specific features including ActiveX, although this is starting to diminish.
I'm sure for you a regular email client is fine. However, the problems really appear in the corporate world where people are getting 500-1000 email messages a day, with varying degrees of context, relevance, and time-critical importance. In these situations it is important to understand who is emailing you, why, how to manage your responses to write, and prioritize the mental processing of loads of email. This is where typical filing/folder methods starts to break down--it doesn't allow you as a user to add & manage new state onto the emails themselves. In the paper mail world, when you receive a letter you are free to manipulate it in many ways. One might receive it in their inbox originally, but it is free to be written on, passed around, and sorted in temporary piles (for more background see Kirsh - Intelligent use of space).
Part of the main problem is that email has been repurposed in so many different ways, that its generic form is hard to depart from because it creates specialized interfaces that mentally constrain users into a specific task/mode/usage. Yet for enough people (mostly in the corporate world), their tasks/usages are well enough defined they not only could benifit from but require a better interface to cope with the volume and task-specific needs. Furthermore, email is socially-unaware. It doesn't understand how people connect together, collaborate, or how information flows across people and contexts globally. This is why we need more research into better email interfaces. As Edward Tufte said, to clarify add detail.
There are other ways of navigating asynch audio. This research project is about that exact problem, not about trying to podcast audio.
livejournal doesnt have an interactive visual reprsentation of an audio chat space on a mobile phone.
better videos:
Version 4 in eLens - better movie big (58.5mb)
Version 4 in eLens - better movie small (22.3mb)
im the creator and i can tell you it was pc mag that used the term not i.
its only 'podcasting' in the sense that you're recording audio for others consumption. its much more about the discussions within a community (local physical/social context)....
For more info here's the project website
this was recently used in the elens project, and its video can be found here.
a live demo should be up this weekend
What you are pointing to do has nothing to do with the goals of the system. There are many different technologies out there in computational fabrics--this system is more focused on the underlying social signaling issues and viral communication, which is why its just a 'pda in a bag'.
You're missing the entire point. Its about what is shown and how its shown--namely that images appear that signal your social status--how clse you are to the source of that particular image. For example, if you goto an underground rave/concert, they can hand out 100 limited copies of the image wirelessly. These can then be passed on within the communicative framework virally, but each time degrade purposely in quality, thus signalling how far you are from the source. This is coupled with tracing functionality, and you can have something like an inverted digg.com to understand how your image/social signal spreads in the wild. Just look how how customizing ring tones is so popular, and you might understand that this is about moving fashion itself from something that you buy every so often to something that you can digitally change and spread daily. Besides--the scope of this project is a masters thesis so don't expect a refined/commerical physical implementation. It simply isnt necesssary for research.
It's called RESEARCH, you know, where you design PROTOTYPES and have a VISION. The commuicative framework is in development now, anyway.
This fashion show is exactly the opposite of what you say. In fact, its purely conceptual about directions and designs for the future where technology is "seamlessly" integrated with fasion and appareal. So in fact, its super commoon sense to think in this direction because its where everyday people meet technology. But typical slashdot trolls, you wish you were cool enough to do something like this so you knock it instead since you don't understand....
Obviously you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. First of all, at the media lab, you're funded so you don't need to worry about grant money. Second of all, this isn't the real world. That is what is good about this. Seamless is put on to showcase the works of designers and other people (mostly not MIT people) who are interested in fashion and technology. It is mainly a CONCEPTUAL event meant for inspiring others into the different possible domains of interaction with fashion and technology. None of these items were meant to be bought off the runway. The designers were not engineers...but artists....
Not only do I agree with other children that the gov't already has plenty of social programs addressing poverty in a way that could have much more impact than MIT researchers could, but part of the whole point of the laptop is to be an e-reader than can provide books to millions that otherwise couldn't be done and updated. Books aren't cheap, are prone to being destroyed over time, and are heavy. One laptop that can have all a child's textbooks for the entire education process is a steal at $100.
I sent the link to my friend who's a cancer researcher, and this was his response:
good concept, but i don't think that it is a real solution for all cancers. while the concept of viral delivery is what most gene therapeutics aims for, selectivity is often a problem. it is interesting that this company uses reovirus to administer 2-aminopurine to cells to inhibit the ras pathway, which is often upregulated in cancer cells. the other problem is that this technique absolutely cannot be used on immunocompromised patients that have cancer (e.g., an AIDS patient with Kaposi's sarcoma, or an organ transplant patient who happens to be unlucky enough to develop cancer while under immune suppression therapy--a common method for organ transplant procedures). however, there are a few specific issues that are limiting to this approach.
1) i'm not sure whether it's true that all human cells have the viral response that is efficient enough for total viral clearance. i'm not all that familiar with reovirus... if it were the case that all normal human cells could completely neutralize and clear reovirus, then reovirus would not be able to continually inhabit the respiratory and bowel systems of human beings, as this company claims (because our cellular responses would have totally cleared it out).
on the other hand, if the reovirus is a natural part of the flora of our respiratory and bowel systems, then profusing patients with this reolysin would in theory cause a crapload of damage to those systems of our body (because then the engineered virus could "naturally" replicate and spread through those areas.
2) also, reolysin targets the ras pathway....while ras is often either constitutively active, or overexpressed in cancer cells, it is unfortunately not the only gene which is upregulated. many other genes are often overexpressed. these genes are called oncogenes (or tumor promoting genes). there are several other genes that are often overepressed, which are separate from the ras pathway. furthermore, there are another class of genes called tumor suppressor genes, which are often inhibited or permanently lost from cancer cells. unfortunately, stopping the ras pathway will not stop cancer cells which are driven by these phenomena.
however, i think that on a case by case basis, this may be a good therapeutic in combination with other therapies. otherwise, i think that using this therapy alone may be a way of selecting for cancers which do not depend completely on the activated ras pathway for propagation.
in any case, if their statistics are true from their clinical trials, it sounds promising, but definitely more basic science and clinical studies need to be done to ensure that this is a safe therapy for general cancer use.
another interesting and developing technology in both britain, and our institute as well as i think two or three other places in the US, is called peptide homing. basically our ex-ceo and another major british bigwig scientist have been mapping out the human body by protein sequence signatures that are specific to every organ, tissue, and even the specific blood vessels that pass through a specific organ. so rather than use viruses (which can often mutate and do things that we don't want), we use these nanoscopic spheres that are coated in antibody that specifically seeks out a certain protein sequence (kind of like a ball covered in velcro). the little spheres can hold payloads of anti-cancer chemicals or protein inhibitors which are then released at the target site. the limiting issue at the moment is how to get specificity of cancer cells. while these little nanospheres can deliver the drugs/inhibitors to a very specific area, it is ideal to have exact cell specificity. so scientists are now working really hard to identify surface molecules displayed on the membranes of cancers cells, but not normal cells.
1) This program is being aimed at allowing gov'ts to buy them for schools. This is not being done by the US gov't, so there isn't any "our own" to take care of first. The US govt is free to buy them, and I've heard Massachusetts is considering it. 2) This is being sold to gov'ts, not given to them. This just makes education and networking possible in areas were it wouldn't be otherwise, especially because the laptop can be used to read e-books. Food, shelter, and clothing are already attacked on different fronts (for years by rich govts), and aren't the aim or focus of the ML to provide. This is an additional measure that can radically transform the rest of the world unlike anything else thats been done.
Actually you're completely off since its not the US gov't, but the gov'ts that are purchasing the laptops like China, Brazil, India that the article is talking about.