H3DAPI's Open Source Haptics 

http://www.h3dapi.org/

Ready or not, robots are racing into our lives," he said. "But for most people, the first time they're going to really notice those robots ... is when the systems go bad.

http://bit.ly/8RARme

In his own lab, he connected several electrodes to the nerves of his forearm. The actions that his arm is producing, is being fed to a remote server located inside the campus lab of Columbia University, in New York. The server is then networked to the robotic system, Warwick created in his lab, in the University of Reading. Interestingly, his experiment was a complete success.

full article http://bit.ly/7RsF5r

good stuff.

How would you feel about living with a robot?

feel free to contribute in the comments section.

Thinking Outside the Box: Web TVs Skirt Cable Giants

Content Built Into TVs Is Big Business -- but Not for Bypassed Operators

by Michael Learmonth 
Published: January 18, 2010

         

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Considering cutting your Cablevision subscription? It's not just the cable industry that would rather you didn't; it's also TV networks and studios that make bank off your monthly bill.

But device-makers from Samsung to Boxee to Apple TV have no such concerns -- and they're continuing to roll out products that bypass the cable box and dr aw content and services directly from the web, setting up what could be one of the entertainment industry's biggest business battles of the next few years. Think: the current print-media implosion, but with much more money at stake.

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Netflix in particular is in the midst of a push to be a native application on TVs and gaming consoles. Last week it announced a deal with Nintendo's Wii gaming console for its on-demand movie-streaming service; Netflix is already on Sony's PS3 and Microsoft's Xbox, not to mention TVs and Blu-ray players from Samsung, LG Electronics, Sony, Best Buy's Insignia and Vizio.

At the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, cable operators got a look at a device that could start to eat into another core business: TVs with built-in Skype access. LG and Panasonic announced partnerships to start shipping the sets later this year.

Selling point
The consumer-electronics industry has a long history of over-promising; years of chatter have yet to yield a line of affordable mass-market 3-D TVs you can buy in stores, for example. "A lot of manufacturers have come out and made announcements, but I don't think they really are in a position to erode the pay-TV subscriptions that the cable industry has today," said Park Associates research analyst Jayant Dafari.

Yet content and features built directly into the TV have become the selling point for the next generation of high-definition sets, gaming consoles and boxes. And none of it is coming from your cable operator.

"Still no evidence of cord-cutting, but as prices spiral higher, the stresses on the system are unquestionably growing," said Craig Moffett, senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.

But customers are cutting back on cable bills: while rates go up every year, the average amount consumers are paying for digital cable dropped from $79 a month in the third quarter of 2008 to $70 in the third quarter of 2009 as they drop additional channels and services, according to research from Centris.

Cable still has the most complete reserves of TV programming, films and video-on-demand, as well as a near-lock on live sports and news. But web-based devices are getting closer to offering the full deal. Avner Ronen, CEO of startup Boxee, estimates 60% of broadcast TV is available online free in some form, and 10% of cable TV.

Waiting for clampdown
The question is: When will cable put a stop to it? So far, the industry has been relatively laissez-faire about the situation, but one tech exec, who asked not to be named, predicted that the minute cable operators start to feel the disruption, they will clamp down and use their market power to keep TV and films from seeping into next-generation devices. They're already putting the squeeze on networks; any free distribution is an argument for lower cable distribution fees.

In the meantime, they insist that cable-cutting is more urban myth than reality. "We see some interesting stuff out there, but right now people are watching more TV than ever; cable-cutting is largely on the fringe," said Alex Dudley, spokesman for Time Warner Cable, the nation's No. 2 operator.

The audiences for these web-connected devices are starting to scale to the point at which marketers become interested. Parks Associates estimates that the consumer electronics industry will sell 80 million net-connected TVs by 2013, and there are already 20 million net-connected Xbox consoles in circulation. Recently, Microsoft said it had 2.2 million Xbox users online at the same time -- about the audience of an episode of "Gossip Girl." Within that experience, Xbox is selling traditional spots, branded entertainment and display advertising to brands like Sprint.

Boxee, which unveiled a set-top box at CES, first released its software on the web in 2007 and now has 850,000 registered users. It pulls video and other content from the web and displays it with an interface optimized for 10-foot viewing on TV.

Snubbing the box

So what did Boxee do? It added a web browser to its box, so users can simply surf over to Hulu.com and watch as if they were on their computer, an inelegant bridge, to be sure, but another incremental snub of the cable box.

In the coming weeks, Boxee will add the ability to sell subscriptions on a pay-per-view or channel basis, much like iTunes, Netflix or Microsoft's Zune service.

For the vast majority, devices like connected TVs, Boxee, Xbox, Roku, Netflix, etc., are additive to cable. "Personally, I think there is a style of TV viewing that is a more passive activity rather than the more active decision to use Apple TV or Xbox," said Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors.

But more and more, people don't care how their content is delivered, which is a scary thought for the cable industry and a key reason Comcast is acquiring its own content mill in NBC Universal, as well as pushing Comcast's own, proprietary web-TV plans. One thing the cable operators have on their side is they are cash-rich and can make acquisitions of media or technology companies that start to disrupt their models.

"For many people, cable works just fine; the quality is great; the DVR functionality is great; the only gripe they have is that they're paying for it," said Boxee's Mr. Ronen. But "there is a growing generation out there where the whole definition of entertainment is changing, and their main source of entertainment is the internet."via adage.com

Interesting to see that Netflix & Skype are all rushing to be built in apps on TVs

.

When Benjamin Feshbach was 11 years old, he was given a brainteaser: Which day would the vice president’s birthday fall on the next year?

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Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

To make Web searches easier, Benjamin Feshbach's idea is a Google robot.

Benjamin, now 13, said he typed the question directly into the Google search box, to no avail. He then tried Wikipedia, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com, also without success. “Later someone told me it was a multistep question,” said Benjamin, a seventh grader from North Potomac, Md.

“Now it seems quite obvious because I’m older,” he said. “But, eventually, I gave up. I didn’t think the answer was important enough to be on Google.” Benjamin is one of 83 children, ages 7, 9 and 11, who participated in a study on children and keyword searching. Sponsored by Google and developed by the University of Maryland and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the research was aimed at discerning the differences between how children and adults search and identify the barriers children face when trying to retrieve information.

Like other children, Benjamin was frustrated by his lack of search skills or, depending on your view, the limits of search engines.

When considering children, search engines had long focused on filtering out explicit material from results. But now, because increasing numbers of children are using search as a starting point for homework, exploration or entertainment, more engineers are looking to children for guidance on how to improve their tools.

Search engines are typically developed to be easy for everyone to use. Google, for example, uses the Arial typeface because it considers it more legible than other typefaces. But advocates for children and researchers say that more can be done technologically to make it easier for young people to retrieve information. What is at stake, they say, are the means to succeed in a new digital age.

“We’re giving them a tool that was made for adults,” said Michael H. Levine, executive director of the Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a nonprofit research center in New York focused on digital education for children. Allison Druin, director of the human-computer interaction lab at the University of Maryland, suggested expanding the concept of keywords. Instead of typing a word into a search box, children could click on an image or video, which would turn up results.

Ms. Druin said that parents played a big role in helping children search. She proposed that search engines imitate that role by adding technology aids, like prominent suggestions for related content or an automated chat system, to help children when they get stuck.

Children’s choices of search engines differ only slightly from the preferences of adults. Google ranks most popular among children, followed by Yahoo, Google Image search, Microsoft’s Bing and Ask.com, according to the research firm Nielsen. (Among adults, Bing is ahead of Google Image.)

Irene Au, Google’s director of user experience, said that rather than develop a specific product for children, her team used research findings to inform how it could improve search for all ages. “The problems that kids have with search are probably the problems adults experience, just magnified,” Ms. Au said. “It’s helped highlight the areas we need to focus on.”

For example, Google has long known that it can be difficult for users to formulate the right keywords to call up their desired results. But that task can be even more challenging for children, given that they do not always have the right context for thinking about a new subject. One 12-year-old boy searching for information about Costa Rica used the search term “sweaty clothes” because that was what he associated with the jungle.

“If we can solve that for children we can solve that for adults,” Ms. Au said.

One way Google aims to overcome that problem is by showing related searches. Ms. Au said Google had tried various placements since related searches were introduced in 2007 and had found that it could be helpful to introduce such queries — or other content like video, images or news — at the bottom of the page.

A search on the word dolphins, for example, shows a set of related searches, (sharks, bottlenose dolphins) and two YouTube videos of dolphins at play. Ms. Druin called the bottom of the screen “valuable territory” because children often focus on their hands and the keyboard when they search and see that space first when they glance up.

Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, said that for certain types of tasks, like finding a list of American presidents, people found answers 28 percent faster with a search of images rather than of text. He said that because Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children. Microsoft says Bing’s audience of 2- to 17-year-olds has grown 76 percent since May. “My daughter who’s 5, her typing skills aren’t great, but she can browse images of various dog breeds through visual search,” Mr. Weitz said.

In May, Google introduced Wonder Wheel, a graphical search tool aimed at making browsing easier. (To find it, click on “show options” on a page of search results; it appears halfway down the left column.) For a search on “apple,” the wheel shows prongs pointing to “apple fruit” or “apple store locator” in the left panel.

Children also tend to want to ask questions like “Who is the president?” rather than type in a keyword. Scott Kim, chief technology officer at Ask.com, said that because as many as a third of search queries were entered as questions (up to 43 percent on Ask Kids, a variant designed for children), it had enlarged search boxes on both sites by almost 30 percent.

In September, Google also increased the length of its search box and the size of its font for related searches. Google said the change was meant to enhance ease of use for everyone.

Future trends in search may also be helpful to children. The move toward voice-activated search like the Google voice search on iPhones and Android phones and audio and video search will prove beneficial to children with limited abilities, experts say.

Benjamin Feshbach, who’s now considered a power searcher, has his own ideas.

“I think there should be a program where Google asks kids questions about what they’re searching for,” he said, “like a Google robot.”

Sign in to Recommend More Articles in Technology » A version of this article appeared in print on December 26, 2009, on page B1 of the New York edition.