This machine does read your mind...so you can play games!

I feel it's my job to keep this blog from getting too narrowly focused on politics and especially the Presidential election, thus I'm returning to one of my favorite themes: wild and cutting-edge technology.

Apropos of my recent post about a mind-reading machine, this is a mind-reading headset for computer games!

Imagine controlling a video game by thought alone. Two weeks ago at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Emotiv Systems showcased a new device, the Epoc, designed to help you do just that.

While Emotiv's futuristic, dueling-octopus looking headset will initially be developed for video games, it could eventually be used in medicine, virtual reality, robotics, education and many other areas.

The technology is based on electroencephalography, more commonly known as EEG. EEG has been around for over 100 years and is currently used to study sleep patterns and epilepsy by analyzing electrical activity in the brain. Until recently, though, EEG readings were regarded as too broad for most applications.

The breakthrough, notes Emotiv Systems' President Tan Le, is in the software algorithm that decodes a person's thoughts by analyzing the electrical impulses in the brain.

This is still very crude, and is not so much mind-reading as turning the non-random signals of the brain into some kind of signal in a computer, thereby manipulating a program. It's a totally different thing from the machine that recognizes what picture you're seeing, as one "understands" the information coming from your brain and the other doesn't. But it's amazing nonetheless. You can see immediate applications of this; for example using it to control wheelchairs and robots (which could be used by disabled people to do their work for them), vehicles, etc. It would open up worlds of mobility for the disabled. Of course being able to manipulate regular pc programs by thought alone is also just too cool. You'd need the other kind of mind-reader to manipulate words any more quickly than machines can do now, but at least with this you could do away with a mouse for the most part. Think of how fast you could respond in first-person shooters!

Anyway, that's your crazy technology for the day. Enjoy.

Mind-reading machines?

Not just yet, but still, this getting scarily close:

Using this model, the program then scanned a new set of 120 brand new pictures to predict what kind of fMRI patterns these would make in the visual cortex.

After that, the volunteers themselves looked at the 120 new pictures while being scanned. The computer then matched the measured brain activity against the predicted brain activity, and picked an image that it believed was the closest match.

They notched up a 92 percent success rate with one volunteer, and accuracy was 72 percent in the other. The probability of this happening on the basis of chance -- i.e. the computer picking the right image out of the 120 -- is only 0.8 percent.

In short, if the computer knows what the viewer could be seeing, it can guess what it is almost all the time. The numbers decrease over a longer sequence, but not to an insignificant number:

The ambitious experiment was taken a stage further, expanding the set of novel images from 120 to up to 1,000. The first volunteer took this test, and accuracy declined, but only slightly, from 92 percent to 82 percent.

"Our estimates suggest that even with a set of one billion images -- roughly the number of images indexed by Google on the Internet -- the decoder would correctly identify the image about 20 percent of the time," said Gallant.

That's very, very meaningful. If we extrapolate further, assuming a computer could catalog all the sensations a human could experience, it would be possible to train a computer to recognize the brainwaves associated with them. The better computers get and the better the programming get, the closer this becomes to an actual mind-reading computer. It'll be a while (at least a decade) before this becomes really practical, but in that time I can see this developing into a number of ways of controlling and manipulating computers. Very interesting.

Support Representative Edward Markey's Net Neutrality bill

Finally, a bill is being introduced which will legislate Net Neutrality into being. Massachusetts Representative Edward Markey is introducing HR 5353(pdf file). The essence of this bill is that it would prohibit "unreasonable interference from or discrimination by network operators" to "to preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of broadband networks".

Naturally the telecommunications companies are opposed to this bill:

Markey's proposal was greeted with skepticism by some telecommunications companies. An advocacy group that represents some of the companies, called Hands Off the Internet, said it had no objection to studying the issue but opposed any further regulations.

Such regulations "will create uncertainty for investors and Internet service providers that must build the infrastructure to meet consumer demands," said Hands Off the Internet.

(Read the comments on this post for more information about Hands Off the Internet.)

Read some of my older posts for discussions of Net Neutrality.

I have not changed my position: I strongly favor writing Net Neutrality into law and preventing any possible abuses before they occur, although some may have already. TWM officially endorses Mukasey's bill. If you want to offer your support, go here or look up your politicians through Project Vote Smart and make your voice heard. As always, you can make a difference, so don't be afraid to write your call your elected representatives.

Solar power update

Well, solar power has been a long time coming and many detractors still don't consider it even a realistic potential source. New technology, however, may make it possible for solar power to replace existing fossil-fuel based energy. Sci-fi authors have been talking about beamed solar power for a long time, but only recently has it become a possibility.

A proposal is being vetted by U.S. military space strategists that 10 percent of the U.S. baseload of energy by 2050, perhaps sooner, could be produced by space based solar power (SBSP). Furthermore, a demonstration of the concept is being eyed to occur within the next five to seven years.

Less sci-fi, but perhaps more practical, are new types of ground-based solar energy collectors, which, with new technologies, are expected to be able to take over enery production for a large part of the US grid.

If those claims stand up, however, solar-thermal plants could provide a significant chunk of the Southwest's—and potentially the nation's—electricity. "The maximum you can get into the grid is about 25 percent from solar," including photovoltaics, Mills says. But "once you have storage, it changes from this niche thing to something that could be the big gorilla on the grid equivalent to coal."

Furthermore,

Assuming that their storage system works, Mills and his colleagues calculated in a paper presented today at the Solar Energy Society World Congress in Beijing that such solar-thermal power plants could match the electricity needs of both California and Texas. And, by combining a system that would meet the needs of California and Texas, solar-thermal plants could supply 96 percent of the national electricity demand. "The entire energy use of 2006, the current technology including storage would use a patch of land 92 miles by 92 miles," O'Donnell says. "Ten percent of the [Bureau of Land Management] land in Nevada is enough."

It's not sci-fi anymore. The sooner we adopt this technology and cut free from fossil-fuels, the better.

Legislative Update VI

The Senate passed its version of the State Children's Health Insurance Program re-authorization, 68-31. The bill now needs to be reconciled with the House version, which is more expansive and makes changes to certain Medicare Programs too. Both face a veto threat from the White House, but if the conference report reflects the Senate's take it could possibly pass with a veto-proof margin, as it did in the Senate version tonight.

The House voted, 367-57, to approve the conference report for the America Competes Act that appropriates $33.6 billion over the next three years for science, technology, engineering and mathematics research and education programs across four federal agencies. The Senate is expected to endorse it as well before Congress leaves for its August recess. Last week, the House passed, 281 to 142, to increase money for NASA and Aeronautics.

The House also passed legislation to permit the importation of lower-cost prescription drugs from places such as Canada, Australia and Europe and require the FDA improve food safety procedures as part of a $91 billion spending measure funding farm subsidies and nutrition programs. That bill, passed by a 237-18 vote, is the final domestic spending bill to pass the House and faces a veto from President Bush. The Senate has yet to vote on it.

On Wednesday, the House voted, 381-40, for the water projects conference report filled with Army Corps of Engineers projects such as restoring wetlands in coastal Louisiana, improving hurricane protection in New Orleans and adding new drinking water and wastewater treatment plants. The Senate will likely also approve the negotiated version with a veto-proof majority that can override the threat from President Bush.

Senator John Kerry is proposing a bill that would ban the import and sale in the United States of illegally harvested timber and carry fines of up to 10,000 dollars in order to get at illegal logging rampant in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Similar legislation is expected to be brought up in the US House of Representatives. Email your Senators and reps in support.

The House Judiciary Committee also approved legislation that would create a federal shield law for journalists. Specifically, it would "prevent reporters from being compelled to provide testimony or produce documents, unless a court finds that one of several exceptions apply," according to CQPolitics.

Over in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chairman Leahy is considering asking the Justice Department's inspector general to examine "whether Gonzales' answers to questions from lawmakers amount to misconduct," according to the AP. That committee also unanimously advanced a bill like one that already passed the House that would tighten requirements for states to pass mental health information to the federal government for background checks for prospective gun buyers.

The Senate Budget Committee approved the nomination of former GOP Rep. Jim Nussle to run the White House budget office by a 22-1 vote. But Sen. Bernard Sanders, an independent from Vermont, said he would hold up the nomination. Sanders' threat of a filibuster is enough to delay final action in the Senate until September at the earliest, also according to the AP.

Lastly, Craig Crawford reports that Democrat Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Republican Chuck Hagel of Nebraska unveiled legislation that would rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure "just hours before the Minneapolis bridge collapsed yesterday." Their bill proposes a national bank charged with prioritizing projects and developing creative ways to finance them.

Rights for Robots?

A report by the British government has concluded that robots could someday advance far enough to demand the same legal rights as humans (unless of course they're terrorists, in which case they have no rights.)