2007 – A “dazzling array” of technologies is bringing persons with disabilities into the workforce and integrating them further into society, an expert on assistive technologies said today at a forum at United Nations Headquarters in New York.
Technology helps employers to bring work to persons with disabilities, said the expert, Irene Morris-Sambur, Chief Executive Officer of Coraworks. “Assistive technologies currently exist,” she said. “They have to be brought to workers with disabilities, instead of trying to bring these workers to the workplace.”
At the first Global Forum of the UN Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), accessibility experts and executives of corporations such as IBM, Yahoo, Internet Speech, Deque Systems, NiiT Ventures and e-ISOTIS showcased new products – from video-descriptions to screen readers – and mapped out a field that is seeing a “significant beginning of venture capital investment,” according to to Barry Fingerhut of Synconium.
Government regulations are helping to fuel this development, said Larry Goldberg of the National Center for Accessible Media. Canada now requires that 90 per cent of TV programmes be captioned, and in the United Kingdom up to 5 per cent of TV programmes show a sign language translator. Japan, Mexico and Australia are preparing similar legislation to make TV more accessible.
However, industry vendors should incorporate accessibility features from the start of the product development, said Alex Leblois, Executive Director of the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICT. “A number of ICT vendors are well-intended, but tackle the issue of accessibility too late in the product life cycle,” at a higher cost.
Legislations and regulations should aim at creating unified markets for accessible products, he said, so as to encourage mass production at low cost. “The reason why people can make calls through a cell phone that costs very little is because the same telephone is being used in the United States, Kenya and Latin America. The same dynamics of mass production, standardization and harmonization can be achieved for assistive technologies, and for inclusive ICT products in general.”
Accessibility had multiple business values, said K. Anne-River Forcke of the IBM Worldwide Human Ability and Accessibility Center, such as “the value businesses organizations can realize as employers by adopting accessibility, and the value that organizations can realize when they address their constituents and their customers”.
“We have learned a tremendous amount from employing people with disabilities,” she said, “and we incorporate that into the software, the hardware and the business systems that we use internally at IBM today. We have learned that there are a number of best practices for the development of software, for hardware, and as we are learning more about the services science, we are learning how to ensure accessibility in the delivery of services.”
“The Web has the ability to be even more accessible than other parts of society,” said Judy Brewer, Director of the Web Accessibility Initiative at the World Wide Web Consortium, the leading technology standard organization for Web technology. Adaptable policy frameworks should be developed, she said, “because the technology continues to advance all the time, and it is important to keep the policy frameworks up to date with the technology.”
Solutions that were developed in a particular industry or standards organization should not be automatically made available in a country. “It is very important to partner with disability organizations within every country and try to make sure that those solutions are relevant locally,” she said. “That really yields the best solutions in the end.”
Hendrietta Ipeleng Bogopane-Zulu, a Member of South Africa's Parliament, recalled the “digital divide that still exists between people with disabilities and those who are non-disabled”, and said that beyond access to the Web, the problem for many developing countries was basically affordability. “Everything is imported,” she said, “and getting the technical assistance when a computer breaks or something happens is a nightmare. The problem is not only the access, it is also affordability, support systems and training.”
Some 200 representatives of industry, government, academia and civil society attended the Forum, which was organized by the UN Global Alliance for ICT and Development and the Boston-based Wireless Internet Institute in cooperation with the Secretariat of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Friday, April 20, 2007
Yoga, new technologies offer hope to Parkinson’s patients
Deepa Suryanarayan
Andheri resident Anubhav Mehta (name changed), 65, an engineer, was on the verge of retirement when the first symptom struck. “It was my son who first observed that I was having trouble with my right hand,” said Mehta. A battery of tests later, the neurologist gave the diagnosis. It was Parkinson’s disease (PD), a degenerative disease that affects the central nervous system.
Now, four years later, Mehta leads a relatively normal life. “The disease has not been crippling, as it has only affected my right hand and made my reflexes slower. But it was a blow as I have been a sportsperson all my life,” he said.
Today, Mehta continues to drive his car, goes swimming and even practices yoga. “Though it is difficult to accept the fact that you don’t have complete control over your movement, being diagnosed with PD doesn’t mean the end of one’s life,” he explained.
Mehta will be of 350 members of the Parkinson Disease and Movement Disorder Society (PMDS) who will participate in a yoga session on Wednesday, to observe World Parkinson’s Day on Wednesday.
The session will be conducted by Yogacharya BKS Iyengar, whose institute has carried out a scientific study to determine the efficacy of yoga in influencing the quality of life in patients with PD. The results showed that there was a significant improvement in patients’ movements and quality of life.
“PMDS, founded in 2002, aims at spreading awareness about the ailment and improving the quality of life,” said Dr Maria Barretto, coordinator of PMDS, adding that, “PD requires a multi-disciplinary approach. The focus right now is too much on medical treatment.”
On the medical front, Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is a new technique that offers hope to PD patients, say neurologists. A surgically-implanted, battery-operated medical device called a neurostimulator, similar to a pacemaker, delivers electrical stimulation to areas in the brain that control movement, blocking abnormal nerve signals that cause tremors.
The functional neurological centre at Jaslok Hospital, headed by Dr Paresh Doshi, has completed over 100 DBS surgeries — the highest in Asia. And Hinduja Hospital, has acquired new technology that enables this procedure to be performed with no risks whatsoever to the patient.
“We are the only hospital here with Stealth Neuronavigation system — a new software which allows the procedure to be done flawlessly,” said Dr Milind Sankhe of Hinduja Hospital.
Andheri resident Anubhav Mehta (name changed), 65, an engineer, was on the verge of retirement when the first symptom struck. “It was my son who first observed that I was having trouble with my right hand,” said Mehta. A battery of tests later, the neurologist gave the diagnosis. It was Parkinson’s disease (PD), a degenerative disease that affects the central nervous system.
Now, four years later, Mehta leads a relatively normal life. “The disease has not been crippling, as it has only affected my right hand and made my reflexes slower. But it was a blow as I have been a sportsperson all my life,” he said.
Today, Mehta continues to drive his car, goes swimming and even practices yoga. “Though it is difficult to accept the fact that you don’t have complete control over your movement, being diagnosed with PD doesn’t mean the end of one’s life,” he explained.
Mehta will be of 350 members of the Parkinson Disease and Movement Disorder Society (PMDS) who will participate in a yoga session on Wednesday, to observe World Parkinson’s Day on Wednesday.
The session will be conducted by Yogacharya BKS Iyengar, whose institute has carried out a scientific study to determine the efficacy of yoga in influencing the quality of life in patients with PD. The results showed that there was a significant improvement in patients’ movements and quality of life.
“PMDS, founded in 2002, aims at spreading awareness about the ailment and improving the quality of life,” said Dr Maria Barretto, coordinator of PMDS, adding that, “PD requires a multi-disciplinary approach. The focus right now is too much on medical treatment.”
On the medical front, Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is a new technique that offers hope to PD patients, say neurologists. A surgically-implanted, battery-operated medical device called a neurostimulator, similar to a pacemaker, delivers electrical stimulation to areas in the brain that control movement, blocking abnormal nerve signals that cause tremors.
The functional neurological centre at Jaslok Hospital, headed by Dr Paresh Doshi, has completed over 100 DBS surgeries — the highest in Asia. And Hinduja Hospital, has acquired new technology that enables this procedure to be performed with no risks whatsoever to the patient.
“We are the only hospital here with Stealth Neuronavigation system — a new software which allows the procedure to be done flawlessly,” said Dr Milind Sankhe of Hinduja Hospital.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Better Than X-Ray Vision
New technologies provide brain and heart surgeons with a much clearer view
By Josh Fischman
There are some worries surgeons don't share with patients before an operation. That they are going in blind, while carrying a sharp knife, is one of them. "It's kind of like a labyrinth. You can only see right in front of you, but not around the next bend," says Alexandra Golby, a neurosurgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Adds Christopher Moir, a pediatric surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., "You hope the structures look like what you've seen before, but you really don't know."
How can this be, in an era when technologies like computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging give unprecedented views of the inner body? Because, surgeons say, the scans omit crucial information. MRI and CT images that show the shape of body parts, for instance, don't capture electrical activity there; the section of a heart causing a dangerous rhythm can look just like normal muscle. And because most scans are done before surgery, they don't provide the real-time detail that would allow Golby, say, to shift an incision left or right by a millimeter or two-and safely remove a brain tumor without stealing a patient's speech.
Now, however, imaging is rapidly gaining new powers. Muscular computer programs meld images of anatomy with vibrant views of the structures in action, making "a lot of impossible things possible," says Richard Robb, head of Mayo's biomedical imaging lab. Robb has developed scans that reveal abnormal spots of electrical activity in the brain causing epileptic seizures, allowing surgeons to remove them from patients for whom, previously, surgery would have posed too great a risk. In experiments, combining multiple scans into one image has pinpointed deadly, rapid heart rhythms, too-and may turn a dangerous six-hour repair procedure, much of it spent poking around, into a relatively simple one-to-two-hour job.
Doctors have also moved magnetic resonance imaging to the surgical table, where scanning during the operation is already making brain surgery and prostate cancer surgery more precise. "This really is the dawn of a new surgical era," says Michael Schulder, a neurosurgeon at New Jersey Medical School University Hospital in Newark, who uses MRI during tumor surgery. "We're taking a lot of the guesswork away."
AN EPILEPTIC'S STORY
Michael Hutton certainly hoped for better than guesswork when his surgeons began cutting in 2004. "I told the doctors that I didn't have a lot of extra brain," says the insulation installer from Chippewa Falls, Wis. "So I couldn't afford for them to take out the wrong spot." He couldn't afford to skip surgery, either. Hutton, 45, was having 70 epileptic seizures a year, sometimes four in a day, and medications weren't helping.
But finding the exact spot to cut out was a challenge. A scalp electroencephalogram often isn't powerful enough to pinpoint misfires deep in the brain, says Elson So, a neurologist and epilepsy specialist at Mayo. Instead, Hutton benefited from an imaging technique pioneered by So and Robb in which an injected radioactive ink gloms on to blood flowing to an active seizure region. A scan sensitive to this ink, called SPECT for "single photon emission computed tomography,"
showed a big clump in Hutton's right temporal lobe. Once a computer program laid this image over an MRI of Hutton's brain anatomy, the surgeons were able to open a small hole in his skull and remove an area "smaller than the tip of my thumb," Hutton recalls. Today, he is seizure free on a low dose of medication. "I even got back into my favorite hobby," he says. "Sky diving."
By Josh Fischman
There are some worries surgeons don't share with patients before an operation. That they are going in blind, while carrying a sharp knife, is one of them. "It's kind of like a labyrinth. You can only see right in front of you, but not around the next bend," says Alexandra Golby, a neurosurgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Adds Christopher Moir, a pediatric surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., "You hope the structures look like what you've seen before, but you really don't know."
How can this be, in an era when technologies like computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging give unprecedented views of the inner body? Because, surgeons say, the scans omit crucial information. MRI and CT images that show the shape of body parts, for instance, don't capture electrical activity there; the section of a heart causing a dangerous rhythm can look just like normal muscle. And because most scans are done before surgery, they don't provide the real-time detail that would allow Golby, say, to shift an incision left or right by a millimeter or two-and safely remove a brain tumor without stealing a patient's speech.
Now, however, imaging is rapidly gaining new powers. Muscular computer programs meld images of anatomy with vibrant views of the structures in action, making "a lot of impossible things possible," says Richard Robb, head of Mayo's biomedical imaging lab. Robb has developed scans that reveal abnormal spots of electrical activity in the brain causing epileptic seizures, allowing surgeons to remove them from patients for whom, previously, surgery would have posed too great a risk. In experiments, combining multiple scans into one image has pinpointed deadly, rapid heart rhythms, too-and may turn a dangerous six-hour repair procedure, much of it spent poking around, into a relatively simple one-to-two-hour job.
Doctors have also moved magnetic resonance imaging to the surgical table, where scanning during the operation is already making brain surgery and prostate cancer surgery more precise. "This really is the dawn of a new surgical era," says Michael Schulder, a neurosurgeon at New Jersey Medical School University Hospital in Newark, who uses MRI during tumor surgery. "We're taking a lot of the guesswork away."
AN EPILEPTIC'S STORY
Michael Hutton certainly hoped for better than guesswork when his surgeons began cutting in 2004. "I told the doctors that I didn't have a lot of extra brain," says the insulation installer from Chippewa Falls, Wis. "So I couldn't afford for them to take out the wrong spot." He couldn't afford to skip surgery, either. Hutton, 45, was having 70 epileptic seizures a year, sometimes four in a day, and medications weren't helping.
But finding the exact spot to cut out was a challenge. A scalp electroencephalogram often isn't powerful enough to pinpoint misfires deep in the brain, says Elson So, a neurologist and epilepsy specialist at Mayo. Instead, Hutton benefited from an imaging technique pioneered by So and Robb in which an injected radioactive ink gloms on to blood flowing to an active seizure region. A scan sensitive to this ink, called SPECT for "single photon emission computed tomography,"
showed a big clump in Hutton's right temporal lobe. Once a computer program laid this image over an MRI of Hutton's brain anatomy, the surgeons were able to open a small hole in his skull and remove an area "smaller than the tip of my thumb," Hutton recalls. Today, he is seizure free on a low dose of medication. "I even got back into my favorite hobby," he says. "Sky diving."
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Visual-cortex simulator sees animals as humans do
April 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Celeste Biever
The human brain can tell the difference between a tiger and a moving branch in less than 20 milliseconds, an ability that can be crucial to survival. Now, a software model of the visual cortex is shining light on how we do it.
As well as offering an explanation for how we make such snap decisions, the software may also provide new ways to build intelligent vision software for robots and security cameras.
The human brain shows evidence of distinguishing between animals and non-animals and faces and non-faces even before a person is are aware of having seen anything. In 1989, Simon Thorpe, now at CNRS in Toulouse, France, first suggested that this extraordinary ability might be the result of an initial "sweep" of neuronal activity occurring before "feedback loops" inside the brain have time to kick in.
Now Tomaso Poggio and colleagues at MIT in the US have built a computer model that appears to support this description of how humans achieve rapid visual recognition. "I am very excited about this," says Thorpe, who was not involved with the work. "It confirms the hypothesis that I made in 1989."
The model contains a simulation of groups of neurons found in the human visual cortex and mimics the response of these neurons to visual features. Signals are passed from one group of neuron to the next in the same hierarchical fashion as in the brain.
Lines and edges
The process starts with neurons associated with basic feature recognition and moves up to ones that perform more sophisticated recognition tasks. The first set of neurons identifies lines and edges, while the next identifies different ways in which lines and edges intersect. This escalation in complexity continues through to neurons that fire when a particular category of objects – such as animals – is recognised.
Crucially, unlike the human brain, the model does not have the ability to do "back projections", where a signal higher up the neuronal chain is fed backwards to an earlier neuron group for more detailed analysis.
Nonetheless, when shown 150 animal images, and 150 non-animal pictures, the software classified them with the similar accuracy as human subjects. While the human brain performs this task in just 20 milliseconds, according to brainscans, the software takes much longer.
The fact that the software can assign the images without performing "back projections" suggests that humans rely on the same trick, as Thorpe originally suggested. "It confirms the conjecture that these very rapid categorisation tasks are done without the need for feedback," says Poggio.
Similar mistakes
The software even incorrectly classified the same images as human participants, strengthening evidence that the computer model is doing rapid visual recognition in the same way, says team member Thomas Serre: "It's not proof, but it's very strong evidence."
The next stage of the project is to teach the software how to perform back projections, to probe how humans recognise objects over longer periods.
"Poggio's work is really outstanding," says Luis von Ahn, a computer vision expert at Carnegie Mellon University in the UK, "both in terms of advancing our understanding how our brains work, and attempting to write a computer program that can see as well as we can."
The model may have practical applications. In a separate study published in February 2007 (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (vol 20, p 411), the team showed that such a model can efficiently recognise objects in street scenes.
Other computer vision systems do not closely mimic the neurons in the brain, so this offers a new direction for vision software. "This is the first time I have seen neuroscience able to teach something to computer science," Poggio says.
NewScientist.com news service
Celeste Biever
The human brain can tell the difference between a tiger and a moving branch in less than 20 milliseconds, an ability that can be crucial to survival. Now, a software model of the visual cortex is shining light on how we do it.
As well as offering an explanation for how we make such snap decisions, the software may also provide new ways to build intelligent vision software for robots and security cameras.
The human brain shows evidence of distinguishing between animals and non-animals and faces and non-faces even before a person is are aware of having seen anything. In 1989, Simon Thorpe, now at CNRS in Toulouse, France, first suggested that this extraordinary ability might be the result of an initial "sweep" of neuronal activity occurring before "feedback loops" inside the brain have time to kick in.
Now Tomaso Poggio and colleagues at MIT in the US have built a computer model that appears to support this description of how humans achieve rapid visual recognition. "I am very excited about this," says Thorpe, who was not involved with the work. "It confirms the hypothesis that I made in 1989."
The model contains a simulation of groups of neurons found in the human visual cortex and mimics the response of these neurons to visual features. Signals are passed from one group of neuron to the next in the same hierarchical fashion as in the brain.
Lines and edges
The process starts with neurons associated with basic feature recognition and moves up to ones that perform more sophisticated recognition tasks. The first set of neurons identifies lines and edges, while the next identifies different ways in which lines and edges intersect. This escalation in complexity continues through to neurons that fire when a particular category of objects – such as animals – is recognised.
Crucially, unlike the human brain, the model does not have the ability to do "back projections", where a signal higher up the neuronal chain is fed backwards to an earlier neuron group for more detailed analysis.
Nonetheless, when shown 150 animal images, and 150 non-animal pictures, the software classified them with the similar accuracy as human subjects. While the human brain performs this task in just 20 milliseconds, according to brainscans, the software takes much longer.
The fact that the software can assign the images without performing "back projections" suggests that humans rely on the same trick, as Thorpe originally suggested. "It confirms the conjecture that these very rapid categorisation tasks are done without the need for feedback," says Poggio.
Similar mistakes
The software even incorrectly classified the same images as human participants, strengthening evidence that the computer model is doing rapid visual recognition in the same way, says team member Thomas Serre: "It's not proof, but it's very strong evidence."
The next stage of the project is to teach the software how to perform back projections, to probe how humans recognise objects over longer periods.
"Poggio's work is really outstanding," says Luis von Ahn, a computer vision expert at Carnegie Mellon University in the UK, "both in terms of advancing our understanding how our brains work, and attempting to write a computer program that can see as well as we can."
The model may have practical applications. In a separate study published in February 2007 (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (vol 20, p 411), the team showed that such a model can efficiently recognise objects in street scenes.
Other computer vision systems do not closely mimic the neurons in the brain, so this offers a new direction for vision software. "This is the first time I have seen neuroscience able to teach something to computer science," Poggio says.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Electric Cars(where did they go?)
In 1900, most drivers preferred electric cars to gas or steam engines. After all, gasoline cars were noisy, smelly and, most critically, difficult to start. This changed radically with the invention of the self-starter for internal combustion cars in 1913. Within a few years, the electric car was almost completely wiped out, not to resurface for about sixty years.
The last few drivers of GM's EV1 bid farewell to their electric cars at a funeral held in Los Angeles in July 2003.
Largely spurred by the oil embargo of 1973 and a burgeoning environmental movement, backyard tinkerers started to test the limits of golf-cart batteries and plastic car bodies. These entrepreneurs picked up the challenge of increasing the speed and driving range that was left off six decades earlier, and as a result, learned a lot about batteries and electric vehicle technology.
ZEV Standards in California
In 1990, the auto industry was forced into the electric car business when California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) took the audacious step of establishing a Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) program:
2% of the vehicles produced for sale in California had to be ZEVs, increasing to 5% in 2001 and 10 percent in 2003
The carmakers immediately stepped up their anemic alternative fuel programs, while teaming up with oil companies to wage a multi-million dollar lobbying and advocacy campaign to fight the CARB mandates. They stirred up public fears of increased taxes and lack of automotive choice. By 1996, CARB backed down on the 1998 deadline. In 2001, the program relaxed its standards to include “partial” zero emission vehicles.
Based on further changes agreed upon in 2003, the ZEV program is now scheduled to restart in 2005 with a set of complicated rules and tables which allow carmakers to use low-speed, low-range electric cars, hybrids, full function electric cars and ultimately fuel cells to pass prescribed standards and quantities up through 2017. These ZEV mandates could significantly increase the number of hybrids on the road.
Fate of Existing Electric Cars
So what happened to the 4,000 battery-powered ZEVs placed in California by major automakers between 1998 and 2003? (Most of the cars were leased rather than sold.) Despite the overwhelming enthusiasm and advocacy of electric car drivers, Ford, GM, Honda, and Toyota have all scrapped their electric vehicle (EV) programs, saying there's just no market for the cars. At a mock funeral for their electric cars, a group of EV drivers expressed their condolences. One participant said, "Unfortunately, very few Americans had a chance to drive an electric car before it was canceled."
"Some of us still believe in electric drive and pure battery power," said Robert C. Stempel, the former GM chairman and chief executive who helped start the EV1 program. Forced out in the early 1990s, Stempel now runs a company that develops batteries and alternative automotive technology. Improvements in battery technology, especially with lithium ion batteries, may one day resurrect EVs by extending their driving range.
Many of the strongest EV advocates and engineers are now looking at gas-electric hybrids that, unlike the current commercial hybrid offerings, could be plugged in (so-called "plug-in hybrids") to provide much greater capacity for running purely on electricity.
The last few drivers of GM's EV1 bid farewell to their electric cars at a funeral held in Los Angeles in July 2003.
Largely spurred by the oil embargo of 1973 and a burgeoning environmental movement, backyard tinkerers started to test the limits of golf-cart batteries and plastic car bodies. These entrepreneurs picked up the challenge of increasing the speed and driving range that was left off six decades earlier, and as a result, learned a lot about batteries and electric vehicle technology.
ZEV Standards in California
In 1990, the auto industry was forced into the electric car business when California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) took the audacious step of establishing a Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) program:
2% of the vehicles produced for sale in California had to be ZEVs, increasing to 5% in 2001 and 10 percent in 2003
The carmakers immediately stepped up their anemic alternative fuel programs, while teaming up with oil companies to wage a multi-million dollar lobbying and advocacy campaign to fight the CARB mandates. They stirred up public fears of increased taxes and lack of automotive choice. By 1996, CARB backed down on the 1998 deadline. In 2001, the program relaxed its standards to include “partial” zero emission vehicles.
Based on further changes agreed upon in 2003, the ZEV program is now scheduled to restart in 2005 with a set of complicated rules and tables which allow carmakers to use low-speed, low-range electric cars, hybrids, full function electric cars and ultimately fuel cells to pass prescribed standards and quantities up through 2017. These ZEV mandates could significantly increase the number of hybrids on the road.
Fate of Existing Electric Cars
So what happened to the 4,000 battery-powered ZEVs placed in California by major automakers between 1998 and 2003? (Most of the cars were leased rather than sold.) Despite the overwhelming enthusiasm and advocacy of electric car drivers, Ford, GM, Honda, and Toyota have all scrapped their electric vehicle (EV) programs, saying there's just no market for the cars. At a mock funeral for their electric cars, a group of EV drivers expressed their condolences. One participant said, "Unfortunately, very few Americans had a chance to drive an electric car before it was canceled."
"Some of us still believe in electric drive and pure battery power," said Robert C. Stempel, the former GM chairman and chief executive who helped start the EV1 program. Forced out in the early 1990s, Stempel now runs a company that develops batteries and alternative automotive technology. Improvements in battery technology, especially with lithium ion batteries, may one day resurrect EVs by extending their driving range.
Many of the strongest EV advocates and engineers are now looking at gas-electric hybrids that, unlike the current commercial hybrid offerings, could be plugged in (so-called "plug-in hybrids") to provide much greater capacity for running purely on electricity.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Tireless, reliable physio-robots take on stroke paralysis
April 2007
Emma Young
Magazine issue 2598
TWO days before his 40th birthday, Michael Marin of New York suffered a stroke that left him paralysed on one side of his body. After three years of physiotherapy, he had regained control of his left leg, but not the use of his arm.
In an attempt to recover some arm movement, last August Marin began three months of therapy with two trial robotic rehabilitation devices. He is now able to do push-ups. "They're not perfect gym push-ups, but I'm getting there," he says.
Each year 700,000 people in the US and 130,000 in the UK suffer a stroke, making it the biggest cause of severe disability in both countries. Standard physiotherapy can work well for some people, but it is expensive so patients often spend only a short time with a therapist. The standard of therapy can also vary hugely between practitioners, producing variable results. Improving stroke rehabilitation could ...
The complete article is 1389 words long.
Emma Young
Magazine issue 2598
TWO days before his 40th birthday, Michael Marin of New York suffered a stroke that left him paralysed on one side of his body. After three years of physiotherapy, he had regained control of his left leg, but not the use of his arm.
In an attempt to recover some arm movement, last August Marin began three months of therapy with two trial robotic rehabilitation devices. He is now able to do push-ups. "They're not perfect gym push-ups, but I'm getting there," he says.
Each year 700,000 people in the US and 130,000 in the UK suffer a stroke, making it the biggest cause of severe disability in both countries. Standard physiotherapy can work well for some people, but it is expensive so patients often spend only a short time with a therapist. The standard of therapy can also vary hugely between practitioners, producing variable results. Improving stroke rehabilitation could ...
The complete article is 1389 words long.
Monday, April 2, 2007
New Bar Codes Can Talk To Your Cellphone
It sounds like something straight out of a futuristic film: House hunters, driving past a for-sale sign, stop and point their cellphone at the sign. With a click, their cellphone screen displays the asking price, the number of bedrooms and baths and lots of other details about the house.
Media experts say that cellphones, the Swiss Army knives of technology, are quickly heading in this direction. New technology, already in use in parts of Asia but still in development in the United States, allows the phones to connect everyday objects with the Internet.
In their new incarnation, cellphones become a sort of digital remote control, as one CBS executive put it. With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen.
“The cellphone is the natural tool to combine the physical world with the digital world,” that executive, Cyriac Roeding, the head of mobile-phone applications for CBS, said the other day.
In Japan, McDonald's customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. And film promoters can send their movie trailers from billboards.
Advertisers say they are interested in offering similar capabilities in the United States, but cellphones in the States do not come with the necessary software. For now, consumers have to download the technology themselves.
Still, big advertising and technology companies like Hewlett-Packard and the Publicis Groupe, an advertising conglomerate, are pushing to popularize the technology here.
Until now, in most parts of the world, Web surfing has been separate from everyday activities like riding the train, watching television and driving. But the new technology may erode that distinction.
“You’ve picked up this product, and you don’t want to go back to your PC,” said Tim Kindberg, a senior research at the Bristol, England, lab of Hewlett-Packard. “Or you’re outside this building, and you want more information. We call it the ‘physical hyperlink’.”
In much the same way that Web publishing took off because of the ability to link to other people’s sites, cellphone technologies linking everyday objects with the Web would reveal the digitally encoded attributes of tangible things on grocery shelves or newsstands.
“Everything in the physical world has information related to it somewhere electronically, including yourself and the desk you’re sitting in,” said Chas Fritz, chief executive of NeoMedia Technologies, a company developing these cellphone capacities.
The most promising way to link cellphones with physical objects is a new generation of bar codes: square-shaped mosaics of black and white boxes that can hold much more information than traditional bar codes. The cameras on cellphones scan the codes, and then the codes are translated into videos, music or text on the phone screens.
American universities and technology companies have been experimenting with the codes in their labs for several years. Now, as more cellphones come equipped with cameras and the ability to run small computer programs, the codes are beginning to appear on some state drivers’ licenses and on some mailing labels, mostly for commercial use.
There are other technologies being developed for consumers to scan objects, including radio waves, computer chips or satellite location systems, but the bar code technology is the most developed - and simple and cheap enough even for individuals to publish them on printed materials or on Web sites.
But Hewlett-Packard and the Publicis Groupe are meeting for the second time with cellphone companies in May to advocate for the technology. Technology companies like Motorola and Microsoft have also been researching uses for the codes.
In Japan, the codes did not become mainstream until the largest cellphone companies started loading the code readers on all new phones a few years ago. Now, millions of people have the capability built into their phones, and businesses, in turn, are using them all over - on billboards, street signs, published materials and even food packaging.
In the late 1990s, several dozen start-up companies tried to create devices that would scan print content and ads and then reveal extra information to the reader. But consumers balked at using a special device only to interact with publications.
But now the time seems right for cellphones, ubiquitous and increasingly sold with cameras, to be pressed into service as the scanners.
“There are three things you tend to carry - your keys, your wallet and your phone,” said Rishad Tobaccowala, chief executive of Denuo, a unit of the Publicis Groupe that focuses on emerging and future technologies. “I can see something in advertising in one place, scan it with my phone and recall it later when I am shopping. Or, imagine, I can buy it using my phone.”
About a third of the 84 million households with cellphones in the United States have phones that have cameras on them, according to Forrester Research, and that number is expected to grow as consumers replace their phones. But few people with those phones have downloaded the software to read the codes.
In Japan, some highway billboards have codes large enough for passing motorists to read them with their phones. Hospitals put them on prescriptions, allowing pharmacies to instantly scan the medical information rather than read it. Supermarkets stick them on meat and egg packaging to give expiration dates and even the names of the farmers who produced them.
One of the most popular uses in Japan has been paperless airline tickets. About 10 percent of the people who take domestic flights of All Nippon Airways now use the codes on their cellphones instead of printed tickets.
Yasuko Nishigai, 22, used her cellphone recently to buy a ticket from Tokyo to the Japanese tropical island of Okinawa. To board her flight, she waved the code on her cellphone screen over a scanner.
“I didn’t use a single piece of paper, just my phone,” she said.
The codes are “a natural extension of print,” said Nina Link, the president of the Magazine Publishers Association. “How many times have you engaged with a magazine and you’ve seen something and you’ve said, ‘Boy, I’d really like to remember to get that information.’ And you have to remember to write down the URL.”
The new technology would allow phones to read the codes from computer screens, too. Commuters rushing out the door could scan Web sites on their computer screens with their phones to take the content with them. MySpace users could put a code on their personal pages, so that their friends can quickly transfer the profiles to their phones.
The technology would also allow advertisers to do something they could never effectively do before: monitor the impact of their ads in old media like magazines and billboards by measuring how often their codes are clicked.
In the Philippines, the Daily Philippines newspaper has run ads with the codes. In Britain, News Group Newspapers, the division of the News Corporation that includes newspapers like The Sun, is testing the codes along with some of its sports articles. Readers can scan the code in the newspaper and then see videos relating to the article. Similarly, Economie Matin, a magazine in France, is testing the codes.
In the United States last fall, the Canadian alternative rock band Barenaked Ladies placed the codes on concert posters. The publisher Prentice Hall is including the codes in a new marketing textbook for undergraduates so that they can get updates on case studies using the codes.
Executives at Verizon, AT&T and Sprint declined to say whether they were in discussions with the companies that make the code reading technology. Bar code companies said the carriers stood to benefit from the codes because they might encourage consumers to add Internet service plans to their accounts and spend more time on their phones.
The wireless companies have other options to help cellphones interact with the physical world. They could, for instance, adopt image recognition software, which would allow phones to recognize anything - a Coca-Cola can, for example - and deliver related messages. Or, text messaging, currently the most common way that advertisers interact with consumers on their phones, has many advertiser applications.
Advertisers have also experimented with Bluetooth wireless devices and radio frequency identification to beam messages from billboards to consumers’ cellphones, but those technologies are more expensive than the codes.
Even if the wireless companies adopt the bar codes, they will have several formats to choose from. The most widely used ones have names like Semacode, QR Code and Qode.
Getting consumers to use new technologies like these codes takes a lot of marketing by the carriers, said David Oberholzer, associate director of content programming at Verizon Wireless.
He said Verizon is just starting to profit from the work it did to create interest in text messaging.
“The consumer needs a reason to do it,” said Jim Levinger, chief executive of Nextcode, a bar code company. “They don’t just wake up and say, ‘Hey, let’s go scan some bar codes.’ ”
Media experts say that cellphones, the Swiss Army knives of technology, are quickly heading in this direction. New technology, already in use in parts of Asia but still in development in the United States, allows the phones to connect everyday objects with the Internet.
In their new incarnation, cellphones become a sort of digital remote control, as one CBS executive put it. With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen.
“The cellphone is the natural tool to combine the physical world with the digital world,” that executive, Cyriac Roeding, the head of mobile-phone applications for CBS, said the other day.
In Japan, McDonald's customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. And film promoters can send their movie trailers from billboards.
Advertisers say they are interested in offering similar capabilities in the United States, but cellphones in the States do not come with the necessary software. For now, consumers have to download the technology themselves.
Still, big advertising and technology companies like Hewlett-Packard and the Publicis Groupe, an advertising conglomerate, are pushing to popularize the technology here.
Until now, in most parts of the world, Web surfing has been separate from everyday activities like riding the train, watching television and driving. But the new technology may erode that distinction.
“You’ve picked up this product, and you don’t want to go back to your PC,” said Tim Kindberg, a senior research at the Bristol, England, lab of Hewlett-Packard. “Or you’re outside this building, and you want more information. We call it the ‘physical hyperlink’.”
In much the same way that Web publishing took off because of the ability to link to other people’s sites, cellphone technologies linking everyday objects with the Web would reveal the digitally encoded attributes of tangible things on grocery shelves or newsstands.
“Everything in the physical world has information related to it somewhere electronically, including yourself and the desk you’re sitting in,” said Chas Fritz, chief executive of NeoMedia Technologies, a company developing these cellphone capacities.
The most promising way to link cellphones with physical objects is a new generation of bar codes: square-shaped mosaics of black and white boxes that can hold much more information than traditional bar codes. The cameras on cellphones scan the codes, and then the codes are translated into videos, music or text on the phone screens.
American universities and technology companies have been experimenting with the codes in their labs for several years. Now, as more cellphones come equipped with cameras and the ability to run small computer programs, the codes are beginning to appear on some state drivers’ licenses and on some mailing labels, mostly for commercial use.
There are other technologies being developed for consumers to scan objects, including radio waves, computer chips or satellite location systems, but the bar code technology is the most developed - and simple and cheap enough even for individuals to publish them on printed materials or on Web sites.
But Hewlett-Packard and the Publicis Groupe are meeting for the second time with cellphone companies in May to advocate for the technology. Technology companies like Motorola and Microsoft have also been researching uses for the codes.
In Japan, the codes did not become mainstream until the largest cellphone companies started loading the code readers on all new phones a few years ago. Now, millions of people have the capability built into their phones, and businesses, in turn, are using them all over - on billboards, street signs, published materials and even food packaging.
In the late 1990s, several dozen start-up companies tried to create devices that would scan print content and ads and then reveal extra information to the reader. But consumers balked at using a special device only to interact with publications.
But now the time seems right for cellphones, ubiquitous and increasingly sold with cameras, to be pressed into service as the scanners.
“There are three things you tend to carry - your keys, your wallet and your phone,” said Rishad Tobaccowala, chief executive of Denuo, a unit of the Publicis Groupe that focuses on emerging and future technologies. “I can see something in advertising in one place, scan it with my phone and recall it later when I am shopping. Or, imagine, I can buy it using my phone.”
About a third of the 84 million households with cellphones in the United States have phones that have cameras on them, according to Forrester Research, and that number is expected to grow as consumers replace their phones. But few people with those phones have downloaded the software to read the codes.
In Japan, some highway billboards have codes large enough for passing motorists to read them with their phones. Hospitals put them on prescriptions, allowing pharmacies to instantly scan the medical information rather than read it. Supermarkets stick them on meat and egg packaging to give expiration dates and even the names of the farmers who produced them.
One of the most popular uses in Japan has been paperless airline tickets. About 10 percent of the people who take domestic flights of All Nippon Airways now use the codes on their cellphones instead of printed tickets.
Yasuko Nishigai, 22, used her cellphone recently to buy a ticket from Tokyo to the Japanese tropical island of Okinawa. To board her flight, she waved the code on her cellphone screen over a scanner.
“I didn’t use a single piece of paper, just my phone,” she said.
The codes are “a natural extension of print,” said Nina Link, the president of the Magazine Publishers Association. “How many times have you engaged with a magazine and you’ve seen something and you’ve said, ‘Boy, I’d really like to remember to get that information.’ And you have to remember to write down the URL.”
The new technology would allow phones to read the codes from computer screens, too. Commuters rushing out the door could scan Web sites on their computer screens with their phones to take the content with them. MySpace users could put a code on their personal pages, so that their friends can quickly transfer the profiles to their phones.
The technology would also allow advertisers to do something they could never effectively do before: monitor the impact of their ads in old media like magazines and billboards by measuring how often their codes are clicked.
In the Philippines, the Daily Philippines newspaper has run ads with the codes. In Britain, News Group Newspapers, the division of the News Corporation that includes newspapers like The Sun, is testing the codes along with some of its sports articles. Readers can scan the code in the newspaper and then see videos relating to the article. Similarly, Economie Matin, a magazine in France, is testing the codes.
In the United States last fall, the Canadian alternative rock band Barenaked Ladies placed the codes on concert posters. The publisher Prentice Hall is including the codes in a new marketing textbook for undergraduates so that they can get updates on case studies using the codes.
Executives at Verizon, AT&T and Sprint declined to say whether they were in discussions with the companies that make the code reading technology. Bar code companies said the carriers stood to benefit from the codes because they might encourage consumers to add Internet service plans to their accounts and spend more time on their phones.
The wireless companies have other options to help cellphones interact with the physical world. They could, for instance, adopt image recognition software, which would allow phones to recognize anything - a Coca-Cola can, for example - and deliver related messages. Or, text messaging, currently the most common way that advertisers interact with consumers on their phones, has many advertiser applications.
Advertisers have also experimented with Bluetooth wireless devices and radio frequency identification to beam messages from billboards to consumers’ cellphones, but those technologies are more expensive than the codes.
Even if the wireless companies adopt the bar codes, they will have several formats to choose from. The most widely used ones have names like Semacode, QR Code and Qode.
Getting consumers to use new technologies like these codes takes a lot of marketing by the carriers, said David Oberholzer, associate director of content programming at Verizon Wireless.
He said Verizon is just starting to profit from the work it did to create interest in text messaging.
“The consumer needs a reason to do it,” said Jim Levinger, chief executive of Nextcode, a bar code company. “They don’t just wake up and say, ‘Hey, let’s go scan some bar codes.’ ”
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Radioactive Boy Scout
Teenager achieves nuclear fusion at home
by Stephen Ornes
In 2006 Thiago Olson joined the extremely sparse ranks of amateurs worldwide who have achieved nuclear fusion with a home apparatus. In other words, he built the business end of a hydrogen bomb in his basement. The plasma "star in a jar"—shown at the left—demonstrated his success.
For two years, Olson researched what he would need and scrounged for parts from eBay and the hardware store. Flanges and piping? Check. High-voltage X-ray transformer? Check. Pumps, deuterium source, neutron bubble dosimeter? Check, check, check. “I have cross-country and track, so during those seasons I don’t have much time to work on it,” says Olson, a high school senior in Michigan. “It’s more of a weekend project.” Last November the machine finally delivered the hallmark of success: bubbles in the dosimeter. The bubbles indicate the presence of neutrons, a by-product of fusion—an energy-releasing process in which two hydrogen nuclei crash together and form a helium nucleus. Fusion is commonplace in stars, where hydrogen nuclei fuse in superhot plasma, but temperatures that high are hard to achieve on Earth. Still, the prospect of creating all this energy while forming only nonradioactive helium and easily controlled neutrons has made harnessing fusion one of the most sought-after and heavily funded goals in sustainable energy.
Olson’s apparatus won’t work for generating commercial power because it takes more energy to run than it produces. But he has succeeded in creating a “star in a jar,” a tiny flash of hot plasma. “The temperature of the plasma is around 200 million degrees,” Olson says modestly, “several times hotter than the core of the sun.”
Robert Bussard, a nuclear physicist who has spent most of his career investigating fusion for both the government and private companies, applauds Olson’s ambition. “These kids are studying much more useful physics than what the country is spending billions on,” he says. “It causes them to think. They’re not going down the mainstream path to oblivion.” And, aside from using high voltage and emitting low-level radiation, the machine has been deemed harmless.
“About a week ago, the department of health from Michigan called my principal,” Olson says.
“They wanted to come over and inspect it. They did that, they were impressed, and it checked out.”
by Stephen Ornes
In 2006 Thiago Olson joined the extremely sparse ranks of amateurs worldwide who have achieved nuclear fusion with a home apparatus. In other words, he built the business end of a hydrogen bomb in his basement. The plasma "star in a jar"—shown at the left—demonstrated his success.
For two years, Olson researched what he would need and scrounged for parts from eBay and the hardware store. Flanges and piping? Check. High-voltage X-ray transformer? Check. Pumps, deuterium source, neutron bubble dosimeter? Check, check, check. “I have cross-country and track, so during those seasons I don’t have much time to work on it,” says Olson, a high school senior in Michigan. “It’s more of a weekend project.” Last November the machine finally delivered the hallmark of success: bubbles in the dosimeter. The bubbles indicate the presence of neutrons, a by-product of fusion—an energy-releasing process in which two hydrogen nuclei crash together and form a helium nucleus. Fusion is commonplace in stars, where hydrogen nuclei fuse in superhot plasma, but temperatures that high are hard to achieve on Earth. Still, the prospect of creating all this energy while forming only nonradioactive helium and easily controlled neutrons has made harnessing fusion one of the most sought-after and heavily funded goals in sustainable energy.
Olson’s apparatus won’t work for generating commercial power because it takes more energy to run than it produces. But he has succeeded in creating a “star in a jar,” a tiny flash of hot plasma. “The temperature of the plasma is around 200 million degrees,” Olson says modestly, “several times hotter than the core of the sun.”
Robert Bussard, a nuclear physicist who has spent most of his career investigating fusion for both the government and private companies, applauds Olson’s ambition. “These kids are studying much more useful physics than what the country is spending billions on,” he says. “It causes them to think. They’re not going down the mainstream path to oblivion.” And, aside from using high voltage and emitting low-level radiation, the machine has been deemed harmless.
“About a week ago, the department of health from Michigan called my principal,” Olson says.
“They wanted to come over and inspect it. They did that, they were impressed, and it checked out.”
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