Monthly Archives: April 2009

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DIY industrial-grade book scanner made from junk

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Have you ever fancied playing Google for the afternoon? How about starting your own book-scanning project?

If you’re thinking that’s too far out of your price-range, think again – as an entry to a contest on Instructables, a chap called Daniel Reetz built his own automated book scanner, predominantly using stuff he found in dumpsters alongside some cheap digital cameras.

Reetz's Model 2 book-scanner

OK, so even if you could get the parts, the techniques might be a bit beyond the reach of those of us who struggle to change a bicycle tyre… but that’s a pretty impressive display of resourcefulness and ingenuity on Reetz’s part. I wonder if he’ll let me borrow it in exchange for scanned copies of every book I own? [via Hack-A-Day]

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Rewriting Dune – arenaceous antidesertification architecture

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I’ve mentioned before that everyone should follow Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG, and this post pretty much sums up why; Manaugh manages to find the weirdest and most wonderful ideas from the fringes of architecture and interprets them with the mind of a life-long science fiction fan.

Sometimes, however, it doesn’t take him much interpretation or extrapolation to get straight into sensawunda territory, and Magnus Larsson’s “arenaceous antidesertification architecture” is a prime example. Take it away, Mr Manaugh:

Larsson’s project deservedly won first prize last fall at the Holcim Foundation’s Awards for Sustainable Construction held in Marrakech, Morocco. One of the most interesting aspects of the project, I think, is that this solidified dunescape is created through a particularly novel form of “sustainable construction” – that is, through a kind of infection of the earth.

Larsson has proposed using bacillus pasteurii, a “microorganism, readily available in marshes and wetlands, [that] solidifies loose sand into sandstone,” he explains.

[…]

But the idea of taking this research and applying it on a megascale – that is, to a 6,000km stretch of the Sahara Desert – boggles the mind. At the very least, the idea that this might be deployed for the wrong reasons, or by the wrong people, in some delirious hybrid of ice-nine, J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World, and perhaps a Roger Moore-era James Bond film, deserves further thought.

Indeed it does… but take a look at the concept art for the project (of which there is more in a Flickr set). Even before you start thinking about potential misuse, you can’t help but be impressed by the sf-nal visual impact of the idea.

arenaceous antidesertification architecture concept

You’d be best off reading the whole of the BLDGBLOG post for the low-down on how this concept would work (and then Larsson’s paper itself, from which the above image is borrowed), but here’s an excerpted explanation from Larsson himself:

The piles would be pushed through the dune surface and a first layer of bacteria spread out, solidifying an initial surface within the dune. They would then be pulled up, creating almost any conceivable (structurally sound) surface along their way, with the loose sand acting as a jig before being excavated to create the necessary voids. If we allow ourselves to dream, we could even fantasise about ways in which the wind could do a lot of this work for us: solidifying parts of the surface to force the grains of sand to align in certain patterns, certain shapes, having the wind blow out our voids, creating a structure that would change and change again over the course of a decade, a century, a millenium.

Beautiful? Undoubtedly. Practical or plausible? I really have no idea… but I don’t think there’s any harm in admiring a magnificent idea for its own sake every once in a while. After all, that’s one of the pillars of science fiction, isn’t it?

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Spam: good food for growing AIs

wall of SpamIf you’ve been groaning in terror at the seemingly ever-growing contents of your spam folder, here’s a silver lining to the internet’s perennial plague – the ever-increasing ability of spambots to solve CAPTCHA puzzles may end up advancing the cause of artificial intelligence research. You see, it turns out that crime actually does pay:

“[von Ahn, inventer of the reCAPTCHA test] has seen bounties as high as $500,000 offered for software to break it – enough to attract people with the skills to the task and five times more than the Loebner Grand Prize offers to the programmer who designs a computer that can truly pass the Turing test.

The demise of reCAPTCHA could, however, be beneficial.

It has users decode distorted text taken from historic books and newspapers that is beyond the ability of optical character recognition (OCR) software to digitise. Humans who fill in a reCAPTCHA are helping translate those books, and spam software could do the same.

“If [the spammers] are really able to write a programme to read distorted text, great – they have solved an AI problem,” says von Ahn. The criminal underworld has created a kind of X prize for OCR.

That bonus for artificial intelligence will come at no more than a short-term cost for security groups. They can simply switch for an alternative CAPTCHA system – based on images, for example – presenting the eager spamming community with a new AI problem to crack.

Indeed, it appears that the Google gang are doing exactly that:

“… the Google researchers were apparently able to come up with the new technique simply by looking into areas that computer scientists had identified as being problematic for computer-based solutions.

They apparently came up with image orientation. Humans can apparently properly orient a variety of images so that the vertical axis matches the real-world orientation of the photograph’s subject; computers can only handle a subset of these. […]

The basic idea behind their scheme is that any functional system will first have to eliminate any images that an automated system is likely to handle properly, as well as any that are difficult for humans to orient. So, for example, computers are good at recognizing things like faces in group shots, as well as horizons in landscape scenes, both of which provide sufficient information to orient the image. In other cases, the image doesn’t have enough information for either humans or computers to properly sort things out—the paper uses the example of a guitar on a featureless background, which could be oriented horizontally, vertically, or in the angled position from which it’s typically played.”

I wonder if there’ll ever be an end to this particular arms race? And, if there is, will it be heralded by the arrival of the Canned Ham Singularity? [image by freezelight]

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I think, therefore I Tweet

460px-EEG_32_electrodes WIRED reports on what “may be a modern equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell’s ‘Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.’:

Early on the afternoon of April 1, Adam Wilson posted a message to Twitter. But instead of using his hands to type, the University of Wisconsin biomedical engineer used his brain.  “USING EEG TO SEND TWEET,” he thought.

The research, which could provide a new means of communication for people locked in their own skulls by paralysis or other problems, is built on the BCI2000, a software tool pioneered by Justin Williams, head of the University of Wisconsin’s Neural Interfaces lab, and Wadsworth Center neural injury specialist Gerwin Schalk, which translates thought-induced changes in a scalp’s electrical fields to control an on-screen cursor.

Although it’s in wide use in labs, notes WIRED, “its communications applications have been largely restricted to messages appearing on a nearby screen. “

“A lot of these have been scientific exercises, geared to writing things out but not really doing anything with it,” said Williams. “We wanted to say, that’s not how a person would want to communicate, especially with the advent of online communications.”

Williams notes that emailing is relatively difficult and inefficient for someone using a brain-computer interface. Twitter, by contrast, “is very serendipitous. It handles all the things that we’ve been struggling to make easy for a patient to do. It puts messages where people can find them. Let the world know how you’re doing, what you’re thinking, and they’ll find you. And that’s perfect for these patients and their families.”

So brain-computer interfaces are already here for limited uses (Wilson and Williams will next install the program in the homes of 10 people already outfitted  with trial versions of the BCI2000). In the future, more advanced brain-computer interfaces could help people control prostheses, powered exoskeletons, humanoid robots…

Well, what would you do if you could control a computer with your thoughts?

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

[tags]brain, computers, disabled, Twitter[/tags]

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Lungs out of body experience

lungA new technique for storing lungs outside the human body has been developed by the Toronto General Hospital:

In an operating room at the hospital, the technology can keep a pair of human lungs slowly breathing inside a glass dome attached to a ventilator, pump, and filters.

The lungs are maintained at normal body temperature of 37 °C and perfused with a bloodless solution that contains nutrients, proteins, and oxygen.

The organs are kept alive in the machine, developed with Vitrolife, for up to 12 hours while surgeons assess function and repair them.

It is hoped that this process will mean lungs intended for transplant are more likely to be usable. According to the Technology Review article as few as one in ten lungs for transplant are usable with existing cooling-based preservation techniques.

[via Next Big Future, article from Technology Review][image from Technology Review]