D'coda Dcoda's List: Science & Technology

• Through gesture recognition techniques we detect different kind of fingers-touch and associate them with different sounds. In the video we used two different audio synthesis techniques:
  - physic modelling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws;
  - concatenative synthesis (audio mosaicing), in which the sound of the contact microphone is associated with its closest frame present in a sound database.

   

  To put it another way, the system is transforming the vibrations transmitted from touch through a rigid body into waveforms that a computer can, in real time, recognize and either transmute into audible sound or use as a triggering mechanism for other sounds.

   

  It's an ingenious approach, especially because Zamborlin has made the system clever enough to recognize the sound of particular gestures, so that the interface can accomplish more than just triggering actions when it "hears" a tap.
• will touch interfaces of the future rely on sounds as well as capacitance? Perhaps sound would be a cheaper, more-durable option for certain kinds of interfaces, making touch interactions all the more ubiquitous.

• The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.
• The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to “secure” anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

• Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities. They call this tipping point the singularity, because they believe it is impossible to predict how the human future might unfold after this point. Once these machines exist, Kurzweil and Vinge claim, they'll possess a superhuman intelligence that is so incomprehensible to us that we cannot even rationally guess how our life experiences would be altered. Vinge asks us to ponder the role of humans in a world where machines are as much smarter than us as we are smarter than our pet dogs and cats. Kurzweil, who is a bit more optimistic, envisions a future in which developments in medical nanotechnology will allow us to download a copy of our individual brains into these superhuman machines, leave our bodies behind, and, in a sense, live forever. It's heady stuff.

• While we suppose this kind of singularity might one day occur, we don't think it is near. In fact, we think it will be a very long time coming. Kurzweil disagrees, based on his extrapolations about the rate of relevant scientific and technical progress. He reasons that the rate of progress toward the singularity isn't just a progression of steadily increasing capability, but is in fact exponentially accelerating—what Kurzweil calls the "Law of Accelerating Returns." He writes that:

  So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity ... [1]

  By working through a set of models and historical data, Kurzweil famously calculates that the singularity will arrive around 2045.
• Kurzweil's reasoning rests on the Law of Accelerating Returns and its siblings, but these are not physical laws. They are assertions about how past rates of scientific and technical progress can predict the future rate. Therefore, like other attempts to forecast the future from the past, these "laws" will work until they don't. More problematically for the singularity, these kinds of extrapolations derive much of their overall exponential shape from supposing that there will be a constant supply of increasingly more powerful computing capabilities. For the Law to apply and the singularity to occur circa 2045, the advances in capability have to occur not only in a computer's hardware technologies (memory, processing power, bus speed, etc.) but also in the software we create to run on these more capable computers. To achieve the singularity, it isn't enough to just run today's software faster. We would also need to build smarter and more capable software programs. Creating this kind of advanced software requires a prior scientific understanding of the foundations of human cognition, and we are just scraping the surface of this.

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• The team which found that neutrinos may travel faster than light has carried out an improved version of their experiment - and confirmed the result.

   

  If confirmed by other experiments, the find could undermine one of the basic principles of modern physics.

   

  Critics of the first report in September had said that the long bunches of neutrinos (tiny particles) used could introduce an error into the test.

   

  The new work used much shorter bunches.

   

  It has been posted to the Arxiv repository and submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, but has not yet been reviewed by the scientific community.

• Just prior to the July 4th weekend the founding members of The Cydonia Institute were notified that their science paper -

   

  which reveals a geoglyphic formation on the surface of Mars - was accepted for publication by a peer-reviewed science journal.

   

  The science paper will be published in the Fall issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration... Updates to follow.