The ultimate BCI !!
22 juli 2010
Humor and resilience
A nice story of humor as a way of resistance.
Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line he comes across a man who isn't saluting.
"Why aren't you saluting like the others?" Hitler barks.
"Mein Führer, I'm the nurse," comes the answer. "I'm not crazy!"
A new book about humour under the Nazis, Heil Hitler, The Pig is Dead, by Rudolph Herzog, gives some interesting insights into life in the Third Reich and breaks yet another taboo in Germany's treatment of its history. Jokes told during the era, says the author, provided the populace with a pressure release.
Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line he comes across a man who isn't saluting.
"Why aren't you saluting like the others?" Hitler barks.
"Mein Führer, I'm the nurse," comes the answer. "I'm not crazy!"
06 juli 2010
Go to Shanghai
02 juli 2010
I can feel my hart beat
When rest is important to a patient, being rigged up to a heart monitor or disrupted whilst they sleep and having a cold stethoscope placed on their chest isn’t ideal. To get around this problem, a team of scientists at the University of Sussex, UK have successfully developed sensors that are able to detect a heartbeat up to a meter away. The Electric Potential Sensors (EPS) are the world’s first electrical sensors able to monitor heartbeats accurately whilst patients relax in their bed, or rest at home. This breakthrough device gives medical teams and health workers the chance to administer patient-friendly monitoring with minimum impact on mobility or personal space. Read More
Although this looks like fantasy, the FAST program by the Homeland Defence Department is developing such a system aimed at SPOTTING suspect individuals at airports. What could be more suspect then a fast hartbeat at an airport where stress is virtually absent....
28 juni 2010
24 juni 2010
23 juni 2010
The hand that signed the paper
Now even Dylan Thomas sober would have difficulties telling which hand did the signing....
Can You tell real from cyberhand ?
Look here
Can You tell real from cyberhand ?
Look here
22 juni 2010
21 juni 2010
Flybot Brain
Understanding the mechanisms allowing brains to collect sensory input and control adaptive behaviour represents one of the most challenging endeavours in science. The goal of this symposium is to review progress towards an integrated understanding of the genetic, molecular, and neuronal basis of behaviour in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. We will examine how our knowledge about biological neural processes can influence (and be influenced by) the design of robotic neural systems. Our aim is to bring together researchers from the Drosophila and insect community with experts in computational neurobiology and robotics. We will promote discussion on how to quantitatively describe working hypotheses about brain functions and behavioural control, and how bio-inspired robots may be used to test the validity and limits of our current models.
read more
10 juni 2010
01 juni 2010
That safe feeling
Quantum crack in cryptographic armour
A commercial quantum encryption system has been fully hacked for the first time.
A hacker of quantum cryptography can disguise his interference as acceptable levels of noise.
In theory, quantum cryptography — the use of quantum systems to encrypt information securely — is perfectly secure. It exploits the fact that it is impossible to make measurements of a quantum system without disturbing it in some way. So, if two people — Alice and Bob, say — produce a shared quantum key to encode their messages, they can be safe in the knowledge that no third party can eavesdrop without introducing errors that will show up when they compare their keys, setting off warning bells.
In practice, however, no quantum cryptographic system is perfect and errors will creep in owing to mundane environmental noise. Quantum physicists have calculated that as long as the mismatch between Alice's and Bob's keys is below a threshold of 20%, then security has not been breached. Now, however, quantum physicist Hoi-Kwong Lo and his colleagues at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, have hacked a commercial system released by ID Quantique (IDQ) in Geneva, Switzerland, while remaining below the 20% threshold.
"Even with a relatively simple attack, the hacker can get the complete key, and nobody would know anything about it," says Lo.
Lo's hack works by intercepting the bits that Alice sends to Bob while creating the key, and resending a slightly modified version to Bob. In standard quantum cryptographic techniques, Alice encodes each bit using the polarization of photons. When she sends these bits out, the polarization should be perfectly oriented in one of four directions, separated by 45 degrees (north, northeast, east or southeast).
In a perfect world, any hacking attempt would disturb a significant fraction of the bits' orientations, introducing errors just above the threshold. However, in practice, Alice cannot switch orientations for successive bits instantaneously — each time she wants to send a bit with a new orientation, she has to change the voltage applied to the photon to shift its orientation. This gives the hacker time to swoop in and hijack the bit before it is sent out to Bob, measure it, and then send it on its way again.
However, if the hacker simply sends the bit to Bob along one of the four orientations that Alice originally defined, the hacker's presence will be discovered because his measurements will introduce random errors into the system that exceed the 20% limit. But Lo's team has now demonstrated that if the hacker sneakily sends the bits along slightly different directions, the errors introduced by his interference will fall just under the 20% threshold at 19.7%1.
Hack attack: read on....
A commercial quantum encryption system has been fully hacked for the first time.
In theory, quantum cryptography — the use of quantum systems to encrypt information securely — is perfectly secure. It exploits the fact that it is impossible to make measurements of a quantum system without disturbing it in some way. So, if two people — Alice and Bob, say — produce a shared quantum key to encode their messages, they can be safe in the knowledge that no third party can eavesdrop without introducing errors that will show up when they compare their keys, setting off warning bells.
In practice, however, no quantum cryptographic system is perfect and errors will creep in owing to mundane environmental noise. Quantum physicists have calculated that as long as the mismatch between Alice's and Bob's keys is below a threshold of 20%, then security has not been breached. Now, however, quantum physicist Hoi-Kwong Lo and his colleagues at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, have hacked a commercial system released by ID Quantique (IDQ) in Geneva, Switzerland, while remaining below the 20% threshold.
"Even with a relatively simple attack, the hacker can get the complete key, and nobody would know anything about it," says Lo.
Lo's hack works by intercepting the bits that Alice sends to Bob while creating the key, and resending a slightly modified version to Bob. In standard quantum cryptographic techniques, Alice encodes each bit using the polarization of photons. When she sends these bits out, the polarization should be perfectly oriented in one of four directions, separated by 45 degrees (north, northeast, east or southeast).
In a perfect world, any hacking attempt would disturb a significant fraction of the bits' orientations, introducing errors just above the threshold. However, in practice, Alice cannot switch orientations for successive bits instantaneously — each time she wants to send a bit with a new orientation, she has to change the voltage applied to the photon to shift its orientation. This gives the hacker time to swoop in and hijack the bit before it is sent out to Bob, measure it, and then send it on its way again.
However, if the hacker simply sends the bit to Bob along one of the four orientations that Alice originally defined, the hacker's presence will be discovered because his measurements will introduce random errors into the system that exceed the 20% limit. But Lo's team has now demonstrated that if the hacker sneakily sends the bits along slightly different directions, the errors introduced by his interference will fall just under the 20% threshold at 19.7%1.
Hack attack: read on....
29 mei 2010
I-Pad killer ?
Apps
The ExoPC UI Layer Development Kit makes it possible to create multi-touch applications using JavaScript and Flash, or to add touch screen support for existing applications written in any format.
25 mei 2010
Bye Bye Martin and thanks
Martin Gardner, who teased brains with math puzzles in Scientific American for a quarter-century and who indulged his own restless curiosity by writing more than 70 books on topics as diverse as magic, philosophy and the nuances of Alice in Wonderland, died Saturday in Norman, Okla. He was 95.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/us/24gardner.html
24 mei 2010
17 mei 2010
Life according to Brian
See him at Vimeo
The last cowboy...
A great man has left, a man who as no one before showed us that You can really live your dreams if You truly go for it and share those dreams with friends all over the world. He was always inspiring, genuine and sincere while entertaining and bringing the sound of joy to millions.
Bye Mr Whistler , the echo's of Your sound will forever reverberate in our harts and minds.
My sincere condolences to all his friends and his family.
The Twisted Arrow of Time
It's tempting to think of time as a linear sequence of events best captured by a straight line, the x-axis on a graph for example. But physicists have never felt constrained by such a definition, on the contrary they've never hesitated to mould time to their own ends. In thermodynamics, for example, the arrow of time comes about because of irreversible phenomena such as phase transitions, bifurcations and chaos. In relativity, space and time are as one, and Minkowski, in his famous formulation, used the idea of a 'causality cone' to explain the correlation between physical objects. In quantum mechanics, the notion of time becomes even more strange. Time is sometimes two-dimensional, sometimes reversible to maintain CPT (charge, parity, time) symmetry and at other times discontinuous and fractal-like.
In short, physicists reformulate time in whatever suits them, or at least in whatever way provides the best predictive or explanatory power. So why shouldn't biologists try the same trick? Today, they get their chance thanks to some innovative thinking by Giuseppe Longo at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris et deux amis.
Longo and co argue that biological entities require a non-linear formulation of time because their existence is characterised by rhythms and cycles rather than linear processes.
So the team has formulated a notion of time which captures the essential rhythms and cycles of biology.
read on...
16 mei 2010
Dunning Kruger effect
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it
Read about it in Mind hacks
rest assured that one of those days You will bump into it (in the form of a him/her DKP Dunning Kruger practitioner)
Read about it in Mind hacks
rest assured that one of those days You will bump into it (in the form of a him/her DKP Dunning Kruger practitioner)
12 mei 2010
Tribute to Roland Tack
Although this cannot be titled a pure neurocognitive entry fitted to this blog, some people deserve an exception due to the strenght of their personality and the sincereness of their mind.
Roland Tack was such a unique man and he deserves kudo's for what he was as a man and a judge.
Farewell, Roland. We will never forget You !
Kudo's to the man, whe were honored to know !
Dr. G. Otte
RIP Kim. Rest in peace Mr Rain man
Mr. Kim Peek,the man who inspired the figure of Rain man, recently died at the age of 58. His memory was fabulous and the contrast between his brain scan (a total mess with abcent corpus callosum and atrophic cerebellum ) and his phenomenal memory and cognitive capacities ( cfr musical abilities) still inspire the saying from another famous cognitive neuroscientist who states that "as long as man cannot figure out the brain potential of the "idiot savant" the real knowledge of the brain will stay a capacity yet to be discovered in this galaxy" (Mr Spock).
Rest in peace, Mr. Kim Peek. You were a monument to cognitive neuroscience !! We owe You !
Dr. G. Otte
Rest in peace, Mr. Kim Peek. You were a monument to cognitive neuroscience !! We owe You !
04 mei 2010
It's Spring(er) time again...
Are You a fast reader ? tehn hurry because there is a lot of free stuff to read in neuroscience from Springer. Stops on may 30 th. So...6...5...4..huh.....0.. LIFT OFF !!!!!
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