A paralyzed Massachusetts woman picked up a bottle of coffee and sipped from it by moving a robotic arm with her thoughts, researchers reported Wednesday — the latest advance in the race to restore movement to people who have lost control of their muscles. Read full article > >

Here is the original post:
Paralyzed woman moves robotic arm with her thoughts

Scientists reported that a tiny brain implant allowed two quadriplegic people to manipulate a robotic arm with just their thoughts.

Link:
Bodies Inert, They Moved a Robot With Their Minds

Some say that President Obama’s seemingly well-timed trip to Afghanistan on Tuesday is a political move; others argue the visit is unrelated to the campaign. Today’s Trail Mix takes a look at both sides of the argument. What’s your take? Tweet us your thoughts with the hashtag #wptrailmix. Read full article > >

Continued here:
Osama bin Laden anniversary: Is the White House overplaying its hand? (Wednesday’s Trail Mix video)

In the second half of Wafaa Bilal’s exclusive two-part interview with Aslan Media contributing writer Amanda Rogers, he offers his thoughts on representing the United States in the 2011 Jakarta Biennale shortly before the “official” end of the war in Iraq, the impact of digital media on free expression in the Arab world and political art as a responsibility of “good citizenship.”

Link:
“Art is Politics”: A Conversation with Iraqi Artist Wafaa Bilal, Part II

Concerns have been raised about a new website that lets people post their thoughts on care providers.

Read more from the original source:
Concerns raised about care guide

Concerns have been raised about a new website that lets people post their thoughts on care providers.

Read more here:
Concerns raised about care guide

You aren’t imagining things — Christmas’s beady eyes are watching us closer than ever. It sees you when you’re paying 22.8 percent interest on your credit cards. It’s breathing hotly down your neck. It’s opening the doors to your Target earlier and earlier on Thanksgiving night. It’s reporting your thoughts and deeds back to the people who number-crunch the dreaded Consumer Confidence Index. One false move and the entire economy collapses, which will be your fault. Yes, you. Read full article > >

Continue reading here:
CBS’s ‘Elf on the Shelf’: Unwarranted Christmas surveillance techniques

Sally Shelton-Colby needed to watch the documentary with friends, for emotional support. Seated in a Washington movie theater in October, she flipped open a notepad, and, as the movie played, jotted down her thoughts. She filled out several pages. The film concerned a dead man she’s still in love with. And the movie was made by someone she rarely ever speaks to. The film: “The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby.” Its director and narrator: his second-oldest son, Carl Colby. Read full article > >

Continue reading here:
A film by the son of CIA spymaster William Colby has divided the Colby clan

If I have learned anything about nonfiction writing, it is that the challenge is not in finding a great story to tell. More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel. The difficulty lies in understanding the people you are writing about — not their actions, or even their thoughts, but their deepest character. It is not the famous events, the dramatic moments of public triumph, that define them. It is when their lives are difficult, even desperate, that their true nature is revealed. In those private moments, even the greatest men become understandable because those painful emotions are a universal part of human life — something that all of us, sooner or later, must face. Read full article > >

Continue reading here:
Candice Millard on the writing life

If I have learned anything about nonfiction writing, it is that the challenge is not in finding a great story to tell. More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel. The difficulty lies in understanding the people you are writing about — not their actions, or even their thoughts, but their deepest character. It is not the famous events, the dramatic moments of public triumph, that define them. It is when their lives are difficult, even desperate, that their true nature is revealed. In those private moments, even the greatest men become understandable because those painful emotions are a universal part of human life — something that all of us, sooner or later, must face. Read full article > >

See more here:
Candice Millard on the writing life

You might call it a tale of two clams, soft-shell and hard-shell. Or of two states, Maryland and Virginia. Or of watermen and entrepreneurs figuring out how to make the best possible living in a shifting environment. While seafood companies near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge are processing oysters from Texas and Louisiana and crabs from North Carolina, my thoughts turn to a plate of delicately fried steamer clams and a heaping bowl of spaghetti dotted with delicate steamed littlenecks. And, as luck would have it, the largest producer of farm-raised hard-shell littlenecks in the United States, Ballard Fish & Oyster Co., is harvesting those little jewels all along Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Read full article > >

Read the original:
Sourced: Clams, an open-and-shut case

Watching “Freedom Riders” — filmmaker Stanley Nelson’s laudably reverent but slightly stiff recounting of the historic bus rides that shamed a nation into dismantling its segregation laws — one is struck by how close yet distant all of it now seems. When it comes to an anniversary retrospective, 50 is the golden number: long enough ago to feel like history, but close enough to still include the thoughts and hindsight of those who lived it. Close enough to still make you wince with a mix of anger, pain and remorse. Read full article > >

Read the rest here:
TV review: On PBS’s ‘Freedom Riders,’ an opportunity to get on the bus once more

Open now to only a handful of users, Stellar could become a hit if Kottke can figure out how to make it complement existing services Playing around on Twitter, I came across @yo_stellar , the handle for Jason Kottke’s latest project. Intrigued, I followed a link back to his blog where Kottke, a former web designer who has been blogging at Kottke.org since 1998, explained the basics behind Stellar , a new web app/site designed to help you “discover and keep track of your favorite things online.” A combination of the best that other social media platforms offer, the app is a way of aggregating your favorite things online and sharing them with others. While Kottke is still working on some bugs and invitations are limited (there are only a few dozen people using it right now) he did post links to the pages of some current users. I contacted him to find out more, but because the project is small and still a bit fluid, he referred me back to the original post. I anxiously await my invite — I’m not one of the lucky few with access — but in the meantime I took a look at some of the sample, or “fave” pages, Kottke posted to get a sense of the project. From what I could tell, they look very similar to a Twitter feed and essentially serve a similar function. It’s a place to collect text, pictures or videos that you enjoyed in one place and share them with others. Unlike Twitter, where tweets can only link to images, Stellar shows everything on the page, similar to a Tumblr dashboard. Also like Tumblr, under each fave-ed post there is the source of the original and links to other users who liked it. In addition, Stellar has a ”best of” page where you can see a user’s posts that were most liked by others — kind of like the most e-mailed section on the New York Times or any other major media website. I like the idea of highlighting posts that others enjoyed: It’s a good way of keeping track of how highly people value your opinion. The last page to look at is the “info” page which conveniently doesn’t display a bio. Instead, it provides links to other social media sites that the user has accounts on – Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo, for example – confirming the idea that if you don’t have a web presence you might as well not exist. Stellar isn’t the first social media aggregator. There are many others — consider everything from OrSiSo to TweetDeck, both of which allow users to access and update their statuses on networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — but most require multiple, and often confusing, columns and tabs. Not a fan of the clutter and constant pop-up notifications, I use, instead, Mozilla’s Flock.com, a web browser with a sidebar that streams updates in real time. I prefer Flock because everything is blended into one feed and I can monitor updates while I’m working. Yet all of these options differ from Stellar in that they only benefit you in real time and aren’t helpful a few days, or even hours, later. Stellar is unique in that it doesn’t post everything. Rather, it seems like you pick and choose what you like best — a more selective group of your thoughts, critiques and images. While I wait for my invite, I’m curious to see how Stellar develops and distinguishes itself from the social media sites that it is essentially aggregating. For example, I’d love to see it link to apps like Instapaper so that others can see what you’re reading. I also wonder how Stellar will build a community: Will your Twitter followers automatically follow you to Stellar or will you have to create a new collection of friends? Most importantly, what does Stellar provide that Twitter and Tumblr don’t? It seems like Stellar is meant to be used in tandem with these platforms and to amplify the experience of using them, but what remains to be seen is whether it helps the experience or just adds another platform on which to express yourself. MORE ON STELLAR: Switched: Kottke Launches ‘Stellar’ Social Bookmarking Service All Things Digial: Jason Kottke Launches Stellar Bookmarking Site The Sly Oyster: Kottke Launches Stellar

See the article here:
Jason Kottke Launches Stellar, a New Social Bookmarking Site

Rep. Peter King’s scheduled hearing next week on the subject of Muslim radicalization is drawing criticism from one seemingly unlikely expert: Daniel Pipes, who no one (except possibly the lunatic Pamela Geller and her cadre of racists) could mistake for an apologist for radical Islam. Says Pipes, about these misbegotten hearings: “The U.S. government should investigate domestic Islamist radicalization,” Daniel Pipes, the Middle East Forum director who has written extensively on the threat posed by radical Islamists, said in an e-mail. “Unfortunately, Rep. Peter King has proven himself unsuited for this important task, as shown by the gratuitous controversy he has generated over the mere selection of witnesses.” The problem of radicalization is a serious one — obviously, the thoughts and actions of such men as Anwar al-Aulaki and Nidal Hasan suggest that, on the margins, radicalization of American Muslims is a problem demanding attention — but the vast majority of American Muslims reject the violence and extremism of Islamism, and they are right to fear the consequences (intended?)  of Rep. King’s probe, which does not seemed designed to generate light on the subject, and could only serve to marginalize the mainstream.

Excerpt from:
Peter King, Scholar of Islam

Unless IBM’s Watson can do more than play Jeopardy! , Garry Kasparov sees it as little more than a complicated toy. That’s what the Russian world chess champion said when asked for his thoughts on last week’s Jeopardy! contest between two champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and IBM’s new Jeopardy! -playing supercomputer. Kasparov reviewed the two-day contest and offered his initial thoughts exclusively to The Atlantic. The true test of Watson’s significance, Kasparov says, will be whether it can be translated “into something useful, something groundbreaking”—applied in a more meaningful way, beyond the game show. In the annals of man vs. machine competition (the topic of this month’s Atlantic cover story ), Kasparov holds the most prominent of historic places. The Russian world chess champion defeated IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1996, then lost in a six-game rematch in 1997 that surprised many and revealed a nascent truth: In closed-system contests of raw data computation, computer technology had evolved an edge over the most talented and disciplined human minds. Kasparov accused IBM of cheating in the match and requested a rematch but was denied. Find below Kasparov’s initial take on Watson, offered via e-mail through an aide: A convincing victory under strict parameters, and if we stay within those limits Watson can be seen as an incremental advance in how well machines understand human language. But if you put the questions from the show into Google, you also get good answers, even better ones if you simplify the questions. To me, this means Watson is doing good job of breaking language down into points of data it can mine very quickly, and that it does it slightly better than Google does against the entire Internet. Much like how computers play chess, reducing the algorithm into “crunchable” elements can simulate the way humans do things in the result even though the computer’s method is entirely different. If the result—the chess move, the Jeopardy answer—is all that matters, it’s a success. If how the result is achieved matters more, I’m not so sure. For example, Deep Blue had no real impact on chess or science despite the hype surrounding its sporting achievement in defeating me. If Watson’s skills can be translated into something useful, something groundbreaking, that is the test. If all it can do is beat humans on a game show Watson is just a passing entertainment akin to the wind-up automata of the 18th century. My concern about its utility, and I read they would like it to answer medical questions, is that Watson’s performance reminded me of chess computers. They play fantastically well in maybe 90% of positions, but there is a selection of positions they do not understand at all. Worse, by definition they do not understand what they do not understand and so cannot avoid them. A strong human Jeopardy! player, or a human doctor, may get the answer wrong, but he is unlikely to make a huge blunder or category error—at least not without being aware of his own doubts. We are also good at judging our own level of certainty. A computer can simulate this by an artificial confidence measurement, but I would not like to be the patient who discovers the medical equivalent of answering “Toronto” in the “US Cities” category, as Watson did. I would not like to downplay the Watson team’s achievement, because clearly they did something most did not yet believe possible. And IBM can be lauded for these experiments. I would only like to wait and see if there is anything for Watson beyond Jeopardy! . These contests attract the popular imagination, but it is possible that by defining the goals so narrowly they are aiming too low and thereby limit the possibilities of their creations.

See the original post:
Exclusive: Garry Kasparov on IBM’s Watson