Month: January 2008

Bionic eyes

Want

Engineers at the UW have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights. “Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside. This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising.”

2008-01-24: I am really impressed. I only learned about this last week myself. Either I am becoming mainstream or the Economist has a very good nose of what is going on 🙂

Contact lenses are good at correcting vision. That, however, is not enough for Babak Parviz. Dr Parviz wants to get them to provide information, too. His model is the “head-up” displays of useful information on the windscreens of aircraft. Putting such displays into lenses might be valuable for both soldiers and civilians, but shrinking the technology to the point where it could be done has proved hard. Dr Parviz revealed that he was getting close.

2008-03-13: Retinal implants

A bionic device the size of a pencil eraser – the labor of 20 years for a group of visionary Hub doctors and scientists – is offering hope that some forms of blindness could be alleviated within a few years. The Boston Retinal Implant Project is one of 22 programs around the world working to restore vision to the degenerative blind. Their work: a bio-electronic implant that delivers images to the brain via a connector the width of a human hair.

2015-05-28: That’s a quick surgery

The tiny Bionic Lens would be inserted into the eye during an 8-minute surgery where the patient’s sight would be corrected instantly

Future Bionic lens could also include projection systems that will give the user capabilities of projecting their phone screen, or integrating NASA technologies to allow for better focusing resolution than anything seen before, or even installing a system that allows for slow drug delivery inside the eye.

2021-11-07: Retina stimulation

Our research allows us to bypass the damaged light-sensitive cells and stimulate the pathways that lead to the brain with tiny bursts of electricity. We send electrical impulses to specific locations within the eye. A spot of light is perceived and patterns can be formed. If we are successful in our research, this pattern vision can give blind people sight again.

2023-05-06: Science Eye

In genetic diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa or age-related macular degeneration, abnormalities in the layer of photoreceptors in the retina ultimately lead to their death. With the photoreceptors lost, light signals can no longer be translated to electrical signals, resulting in blindness. While the photoreceptors are lost in retinitis pigmentosa, the RGCs — and other cells in the retina — remain intact. The brain can still decode light signals. The idea behind the Science Eye is to modify these RGCs to become photoreceptive so they can be stimulated, by light, and send those signals to the brain.
Imagine a Science Eye implanted in a person with perfect vision. It might stimulate the brain in such a way that the person sees specific images or places, via fine control of the RGCs. You could see and interact with an entire world that isn’t there. It’s kind of like plugging in to a simulation, a virtual world plugged directly in to your eye. Alter the brain, alter reality.

Marriage and the Market

Trends in marital behavior reflect a common-sense response to the economic and social circumstances surrounding us. Just as we have deregulated the economy so that firms and businesses can deal with changing conditions, the long run trend in US family policy has been to deregulate the marriage market, and the book of rules governing who can get married or divorced where and when, has become much thinner. Yet much of the current political debate is precisely about re-regulating marriage. Our concern is that this re-regulation may actually be a force undermining the dynamic institution that is the modern US family.

from a union of production to a union of consumption

Long Term Travel

So you’ve decided to do it. You have a friend or family member who can store your belongings for an undetermined period of time, you’ve tied up loose ends, and your bags are packed. It’s time to start traveling long term! But now what? You have a few family members and distant friends who have offered up a couch if you’re in their neck of the woods, but surely they won’t appreciate your arrival on their doorstep with no planned departure date in sight.

maybe one day 🙂

MapReduce commentary

It is exciting to see a much larger community engaged in the design and implementation of scalable query processing techniques. We, however, assert that they should not overlook the lessons of more than 40 years of database technology — in particular the many advantages that a data model, physical and logical data independence, and a declarative query language, such as SQL, bring to the design, implementation, and maintenance of application programs. Moreover, computer science communities tend to be insular and do not read the literature of other communities. We would encourage the wider community to examine the parallel DBMS literature of the last 25 years. Last, before MapReduce can measure up to modern DBMSs, there is a large collection of unmet features and required tools that must be added.

We fully understand that database systems are not without their problems. The database community recognizes that database systems are too “hard” to use and is working to solve this problem. The database community can also learn something valuable from the excellent fault-tolerance that MapReduce provides its applications. Finally we note that some database researchers are beginning to explore using the MapReduce framework as the basis for building scalable database systems.

wherein mr. stonebraker disses mapreduce

Nanobacterium

a hypothetical class of living organisms; specifically cell-walled microorganisms with a size much smaller than the generally accepted lower limits for life, 200 nm for bacteria.

Scientists have captured the first detailed microscopy images of ultra-small bacteria believed to be about as small as life can get. The bacterial cells have densely packed spirals that are probably DNA, a very small number of ribosomes, hair-like appendages, and a stripped-down metabolism that likely requires them to rely on other bacteria for many of life’s necessities.

Playgrounds for Data

Mainstream media is often chided for not being hip with the latest in design technology. The New York Times, having started in 1851, is about as mainstream as you can get. Yet, in my opinion, they are a leader in creating interactive modules to accompany their news stories, often yielding in an impressive and fun experience.

indeed, the nyt is often breaking some new ground. good for them.

Volcano Boarding

We bring you to the base of the volcano “Cerro Negro” (Black Mountain). Together we climb for 40 minutes to the top, taking in the views of the Pacific Ocean and the surrounding volcanos in the area. From the top looking down, there is a 500 meter black sand slope at a 40 degree angle.

this weekend, bitches!

.aspx considered harmful

I guess I’m extra-sensitive to the .aspx thing now that I work for Microsoft, because I know that to folks outside the Microsoft ecosystem it screams: We don’t get the web. It’s true there are plenty of .php and other extensions floating around on the web. But non-Microsoft-powered sites are far more likely to suppress them than are Microsoft-powered sites, because you have to go out of your way to get IIS and ASP.NET to do that. I hope that cool URIs will become the default for Microsoft-powered websites and services. Meanwhile, there are a variety of add-on URL rewriters for IIS that can streamline and normalize web namespaces. I wish they were used more extensively.

Jon Udell it only took them 10 years to get clean urls. wtf?

Gaining Hearing

Michael Chorost became a cyborg on October 1, 2001, the day his new ear was booted up. His hearing was routinely upgraded with new software. A brilliant dispatch from the technological frontier, Rebuilt is also an ode to sound. Whether Chorost is adjusting his software in a desperate attempt to make the world sound “right” again, exploring the neurobiology of the ear, or reflecting on the simple pleasure of his mother’s voice, he invites us to think about what we hear — and how we experience the world — in an altogether new way.