X Men Cometh - Brain Control May Soon Be With Us

It may sound like something out of the world of X Men and Professor Xavier, but brain-control might be a reality in the next few years. 

Extraordinary advances in computer technology that can link with the human brain have been made in the past years. It is understood that some military applications are looking at so called “thinking caps” which can be used by trained soldiers to give them mental control over weaponry. This raises the prospects of war zones being controlled from thousands of miles away.

The extensive use of drones used by the American military is helping to focus minds on the idea that this prospect may be about to move out of the realms of science fiction. 

Not all potential applications focus on war, however. Neurostimulation techniques such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) and neural brain cell stimulation are undergoing medical trials.

It raise the prospects of someone being able to control a wheelchair with the power of their mind or give someone with locked in syndrome the power to communicate. It is also opening up possibility of new treatments for depression, strokes or speech problems. Some of the techniques under investigation are non-invasive but others are looking at the possibility of implanting computer chips into the brain.

The developments have prompted a fresh debate on the ethical dilemmas being faced by scientists, in particular, the prospect of soldiers controlling super weapons with their minds and paralysed people and dementia sufferers being able to regain control of their minds and bodies. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, which is based in the UK, has launched a world wide consultation on an industry that is said to be worth at least $8 billion and probably far more once medical treatments are included.

The ethical debate is being led by Prof Thomas Baldwin from York University. He says that developments are causing an equal mixture of hope and fear. He said the big challenge of enhancing the brain was to think about the fundamentals of what makes people human beings and why do we behave in the way we do. (Jane Harris 2012)

Improving the effectiveness of information retrieval with local context analysis

Techniques for automatic query expansion have been extensively studied in information research as a means of addressing the word mismatch between queries and documents. These techniques can be categorized as either global or local. While global techniques rely on analysis of a whole collection to discover word relationships, local techniques emphasize analysis of the top-ranked documents retrieved for a query. While local techniques have shown to be more effective that global techniques in general, existing local techniques are not robust and can seriously hurt retrieved when few of the retrieval documents are relevant. We propose a new technique, called local context analysis, which selects expansion terms based on cooccurrence with the query terms within the top-ranked documents. Experiments on a number of collections, both English and non-English, show that local context analysis offers more effective and consistent retrieval results. (Jinxi Xu, Jan 2000)

Recognizing and Locating Partially Visible Objects: The Local-Feature-Focus Method

According to Robert C. Bolles, a new method of locating partially visible two-dimensional objects is presented. The method is used to locate complex industrial parts that may contain several occurrences of local features, such as holes and corners. The matching process utilizes clusters of mutually consistent features to hypothesize objects and also uses templates of objects to verify these hypotheses. The technique is fast because it concentrates on key features that are automatically se lected on the basis of a detailed analysis of computer- aided design (CAD) models of the objects. The automatic analysis applies general-purpose routines for building and analyzing representations of clusters of local features that could be used in procedures to select features for other lo cational strategies. These routines include algorithms for computing the rotational and mirror symmetries of objects in terms of their local features.

Information Technology and the Future of Cities

Will improvements in information technology eliminate face-to- face interactions and make cities obsolete? In this paper, we present a model where individuals make contacts and choose whether to use electronic or face-to-face meetings in their interactions. Cities are modeled as a means of reducing the fixed travel costs involved in face-to-face interactions. When telecommunications technology improves, there are two opposing effects on cities and face-to-face interactions: some relationships that used to be face-to-face will be done electronically (an intuitive substitution effect), and some individuals will choose to make more contacts, many of which result in face-to-face interactions. Our empirical work suggests that telecommunications may be a complement, or at least not a strong substitute for cities and face-to-face interactions. We also present simple models of learning in person, from a written source, or over the phone, and find that interactive communication dominates other forms of learning when ideas are complicated. (Jess Gaspar, Edward Glaeser,1996)

Technological frames: making sense of information technology in organizations

According to Wanda J. Orlikowski 1994 In this article, we build on and extend research into the cognitions and values of users and designers by proposing a systematic approach for examining the underlying assumptions, expectations, and knowledge that people have about technology. Such interpretations of technology (which we call technological frames) are central to understanding technological development, use, and change in organizations. We suggest that where the technological frames of key groups in organizations—such as managers, technologists, and users— are significantly different, difficulties and conflict around the development, use, and change of technology may result. We use the findings of an empirical study to illustrate how the nature, value, and use of a groupware technology were interpreted by various organizational stakeholders, resulting in outcomes that deviated from those expected. We argue that technological frames offer an interesting and useful analytic perspective for explaining an anticipating actions and meanings that are not easily obtained with other theoretical lenses.

Local Geographic Spillovers between University Research and High Technology Innovations

This paper re-examines the empirical evidence on the degree of spatial spillover between university research and high technology innovations. The familiar Griliches–Jaffe knowledge production function is estimated at both the state and the metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) level and extended with more precise measures of spatial spillover. Alternatives based on the gravity potential and covering indices are formulated for Jaffe's “geographical coincidence index” and found to provide strong evidence of local spillovers at the state level. At the MSA level, a distinction is made between research and development activities and university research in the MSA and in the surrounding counties. Evidence is found of local spatial externalities between university research and high technology innovative activity, both directly and indirectly via private research and development. (Z. Acs, D. Audretsch ,1990)