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Microsoft's Courier Booklet - User Interface Video - Gizmodo

Microsoft's Courier booklet was surprising, mostly because it was so far outside of what everybody now expects from a tablet. This internal video shows how Microsoft thinks we'll use Courier.

Since publishing the first leak, several more people have come forward with details on the Courier project.

This video is produced by the same firm that collaborated with Microsoft's Pioneer Studios on the previous clip, and it walks through a slightly different (and more conservative/realistic) iteration of the Courier interface. While the first video showed a handful of use cases, this one actually provides an overview of the interface and Courier's features, and more of how you would actually use it if you are not a designer.

The heart of Courier appears to what's called the "infinite journal," which is what it sounds like: A journal/scrapbook that is endless, bound only by storage constraints (presumably). Hopefully they will call it something less awkward. The journal can actually be published online, and it's shown here as able to be downloaded in three formats: a Courier file, Powerpoint or PDF. There's also a library that looks a lot like Delicious Library, where things like subscriptions, notebooks and apps, are stored.

This interface does share a few things in common with the other one: In particular, the hinge between the screens is still used as a pocket to "tuck" items you want to move from one page to another. It also still revolves almost exclusively around using the pen for input: In 4 minutes of video, there's not a virtual keyboard in sight. Fingers are still used just to navigate, through flicks, swipes and pinches.

The interface has a few more traditional elements than the first video, with more of a Microsoft feel (fonts and titles bars) and less of the entirely handwritten journal aesthetic: a smart agenda, more defined folder system, universal search and multi-page web browsing. It feels more evolved and fined, and less convoluted, suggesting it's more recent.

It also begins to bring into focus Courier's priorities, and possible limitations: Other than the brief glimpse at the library and the web browser, there is basically nothing about viewing content, like watching movies, reading books, or listening to music. Courier, in this iteration, appears to be all about creating and writing with a pen, which is vastly different from what everybody expects out of the Apple tablet.

Courier is a real device, and we've heard that it's in the "late prototype" stage of development. It's not a tablet, it's a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They're connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.

Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft's brightest, like Entertainment & Devices tech chief and user-experience wizard J. Allard, who's spearheading the project. Currently, Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies.

Microsoft has a history of collaborating with other firms, especially in the E&D division: Zune and Xbox have both gone through similar design processes. (And plans for the Microsoft Store leaked through a third-party agency were confirmed as genuine prototype layouts and concepts.) This video is branded Pioneer Studios, a Microsoft division within E&D that specializes in this kind of work, working with another agency that's a long-time Microsoft collaborator on confidential projects.

The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple's tiger style. It's complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a "pocket" to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft's tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we've seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.

(via Gizmodo)

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Project ‘Gaydar’: MIT Experiment Raises New Questions About Online Privacy - The Boston Globe

Project 'Gaydar': At MIT, an experiment identifies which students are gay, raising new questions about online privacy

By Carolyn Y. Johnson September 20, 2009

It started as a simple term project for an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier.

Two students partnered up to take on the latest Internet fad: the online social networks that were exploding into the mainstream. With people signing up in droves to reconnect with classmates and old crushes from high school, and even becoming online “friends” with their family members, the two wondered what the online masses were unknowingly telling the world about themselves. The pair weren’t interested in the embarrassing photos or overripe profiles that attract so much consternation from parents and potential employers. Instead, they wondered whether the basic currency of interactions on a social network - the simple act of “friending” someone online - might reveal something a person might rather keep hidden.

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.

“When they first did it, it was absolutely striking - we said, ‘Oh my God - you can actually put some computation behind that,’ ” said Hal Abelson, a computer science professor at MIT who co-taught the course. “That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information - because you don’t have control over your information.”

The work has not been published in a scientific journal, but it provides a provocative warning note about privacy. Discussions of privacy often focus on how to best keep things secret, whether it is making sure online financial transactions are secure from intruders, or telling people to think twice before opening their lives too widely on blogs or online profiles. But this work shows that people may reveal information about themselves in another way, and without knowing they are making it public. Who we are can be revealed by, and even defined by, who our friends are: if all your friends are over 45, you’re probably not a teenager; if they all belong to a particular religion, it’s a decent bet that you do, too. The ability to connect with other people who have something in common is part of the power of social networks, but also a possible pitfall. If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t.

“Even if you don’t affirmatively post revealing information, simply publishing your friends’ list may reveal sensitive information about you, or it may lead people to make assumptions about you that are incorrect,” said Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights organization in San Francisco. “Certainly if most or many of your friends are of a particular religious or political or sexual category, others may conclude you are part of the same category - even if you haven’t said so yourself.”

The project, given the name “Gaydar” by the students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us. The applications run the gamut, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy or fat. The idea of making assumptions about people by looking at their relationships is not new, but the sudden availability of information online means the field’s powerful tools can now be applied to just about anyone.

For example, Murat Kantarcioglu, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Dallas, found he could make decent predictions about a person’s political affiliation. He and a student - who later went to work for Facebook - took 167,000 profiles and 3 million links between people from the Dallas-Fort Worth network. They used three methods to predict a person’s political views. One prediction model used only the details in their profiles. Another used only friendship links. And the third combined the two sets of data.

The researchers found that certain traits, such as knowing what groups people belonged to or their favorite music, were quite predictive of political affiliation. But they also found that they did better than a random guess when only using friendship connections. The best results came from combining the two approaches.

Other work, by researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park, analyzed four social networks: Facebook, the photo-sharing website Flickr, an online network for dog owners called Dogster, and BibSonomy, in which people tag bookmarks and publications. Those researchers blinded themselves to the profiles of half the people in each network, and launched a variety of “attacks” on the networks, to see what private information they could glean by simply looking at things like groups people belonged to, and their friendship links.

On each network, at least one attack worked. Researchers could predict where Flickr users lived; Facebook users’ gender, a dog’s breed, and whether someone was likely to be a spammer on BibSonomy. The authors found that membership in a group gave away a significant amount of information, but also found that predictions using friend links weren’t as strong as they expected. “Using friends in classifying people has to be treated with care,” computer scientists Lise Getoor and Elena Zheleva wrote. Continued...

via www.boston.com

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"Dr. Robot Will See You NOW" - The Impending Sci-fi Future of Surgery [VIDEO, PICS]

Advances in robotics are pushing the limits of what surgeons can achieve, whether in the form of worm-inspired capsules to crawl through your gut, or systems swallowed in pieces that assemble themselves inside the body.

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(Image: Royal College of Surgeons / Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna)

Creeping Camera Capsule

Designed to creep along inside a patient's digestive tract using springy "legs", the robot carries a camera and could provide an alternative to traditional endoscopy. The robot could be used to examine the inside of the gullet, stomach and duodenum for damage or ulcers, and was developed in the CRIM Lab at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy.

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(Image: The Royal College of Surgeons / Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna)

Swimming Camera Capsule

Driven by tiny propellors, this camera capsule is also designed to explore the human digestive system. After being taken by mouth, it would "swim" to inspect the area of interest.

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(Image: InTouch Technologies)

Distant Diagnosis

A doctor consults with a nurse, via the RP-7 remote presence robot.  As well as having a camera and screen that let the patient and a distant doctor see one another, the robot connects to stethoscopes, otoscopes and ultrasound scanners. This allows the remote physician as close to a real experience as possible.

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(Image: RIKEN Bio-Mimetic Control Research Center)

Muscle Machine

RI-MAN is a prototype hospital porter developed at the RIKEN Bio-Mimetic Control Research Center in Nagoya, Japan. As well as a soft, safe exterior, RI-MAN has touch sensors on its arms and torso to allow it to carefully lift and carry people.  In the long term, it is intended to take over the tasks human carers do for the elderly or infirm.

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(Image: Prosurgics Ltd)

Robot Cameraman

FreeHand allows surgeons to control, using movements of their head and feet, the laparoscopic camera used during minimally invasive surgery ("keyhole surgery"). This means they can reserve their hands for actually performing the procedure.

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(Image: Royal College of Surgeons / Imperial College London)

Prostate Robot

Probot is designed to let surgeons accurately resection enlarged prostates, with minimal effort. The surgeon specifies the volume to be excised, and the robot automatically cuts it out without further intervention.

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(Image: Royal College of Surgeons / Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna)

A Robot You Can Swallow

The ARES robots – for Assembling Reconfigurable Endoluminal Surgical System – can be swallowed or inserted through natural orifices in pieces. They then assemble themselves inside the body. The intention is to allow surgery with few, or no, external incisions. A patient will swallow up to 15 different robotic modules that can travel to the affected site inside the body. Once there, the component robots reassemble into a larger device capable of carrying out surgical procedures.

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(Image: Era Endoscopy)

Robotic Colonoscope

The Endotics robotic colonoscope uses a series of grippers and extenders to pull itself along the bowel, rather than being pushed by a doctor like a conventional colonoscope.

This exerts less pressure onto the bowel wall, reducing the patient’s discomfort. The robot's motion was inspired by the "inchworm" caterpillar of the geometer moth.

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(Image: Royal College of Surgeons / Imperial College London)

Blood-Sucking Robot

The prototype Bloodbot is designed to take blood samples. It was developed by Alex Zivanovic and Brian Davies at Imperial College, London. These robots and others are on show until 23 December 2009 at the Hunterian Museum in London.

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(via NewScientist)

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Groovy SQL Switch - GroovyCorp.com

The Groovy SQL Switch is parallel SQL processing software which runs on Intel multi-core servers. Unlike a traditional relational database, the SQL Switch is a real-time architecture meaning it stores and forwards data, as opposed to just storing the data.

The Groovy SQL Switch performs at real-time speeds and can compliment or replace a traditional relational database.

BENCHMARK - Orders Per Minute:

• MySQL 4,614 (21 Connections and 157 ms reponse time)
• Groovy SQL Switch 168,631 (60 connections and 4 ms response time)

See the AlwaysOn 2009 Stanford Summit Photo Hilites

The Groovy SQL Switch (GSX) - A Revolution in Relational Data Management

The Groovy SQL Switch is patent-pending parallel SQL processing software that provides a breakthrough solution for correcting the inability of relational databases to keep pace with significant hardware advances. Enterprises can implement the Groovy SQL Switch as a push layer to an existing or new database infrastructure, an accelerator to any database or as an alternative to a new database. The performance gains resulting from the Groovy SQL Switch result in a dramatic reduction in total cost of ownership, greater simplicity of scale and increased ease of adoption

The SQL switch solution is a relational data management system architected for the storage and forwarding of data, as opposed to the storage only approach of traditional relational databases.  It uses Groovy’s patented and patent-pending GroovySQL Virtualization technology to deliver extreme SQL performance. Finally, leveraging a technology partnership with Intel, the Groovy SQL Switch is delivered on an Intel server architecture powered by four six-core Intel processors. Combined, the Groovy SQL Switch delivered on Intel hardware that eliminates traditional database lag to produce a real-time experience that is the same at the point of origination as it is at the end user.

A SQL Switch can be implemented in one of three ways:

1. push layer to an existing/new database infrastructure
2. accelerator to any database
3. an alternative to a new database

Features of the GSX

• Real-time archtiecture eliminates polling, enabling Live Data through 'SELECT FUTURE' SQL Extension

• Self tuning, self organizing - requires no admininstration
• Parallelizes SQL queries across multiple cores
• Schedules SQL operations “near” data
• Builds parallel execution plans for SQL statements
• Constructs machine code representation of SQL query (performance)
• 10’s of thousands of SQL statements/second/core vs only thousands of SQL statements/second/system on a traditional DB
• Runs on standard Intel, multi-core hardware
• Allows your database to grow with a continuously falling cost per transaction
• Take full advantage of multi/many core systems vs databases which can’t double the performance of one core by adding 15 or more
•  Small hardware footprint => less power, fewer personnel, less physical space
•  Design once database and application => no need for re-engineering as the business grows (in memory database with durability)
•  Supports large DBs with in memory representation  (up to a TB/day, 10’s in the future)
•  Database can be reconstituted from disk in minutes
•  No need to read from disk to satisfy any SQL operation => in-memory performance
•  Read/Write symmetry => an SQL INSERT is no more expensive than an SQL SELECT
•  10x increase in connections over a traditional DB

 
SQL Switch - Sustained Advantage

• Performance increases as transistor density increases regardless of CPU packaging
• System performance follows the Moore’s law performance curve vs traditional DBs which do not (update hardware to get better performance)
• Install replacement, synchronise, failover => done in minutes not days (no lock in)
• Standards-based DB (pricing can include transaction volume to accommodate peak loads)
• Investment in the DB grows as the business grows
• Predictable costs for HW, Licences and Opetation costs all tied to business growth

Adoption

• Application porting/integration can be can be done in weeks (MySQL -> GroovyDB)
• JDBC, ODBC*, Hibernate, Active Record*, Comet, SQL ‘92 => standards based APIs for most applications
• Reuse not reinvest
• Can use current hardware (servers and storage) with reconfiguration [performance may vary]
• Delivers higher performance system using the same or less infrastructure

Product Information: GSX Appliances

Powered by Intel® S7000FC4UR Servers support four Intel® Xeon® 7200 and 7300 series processors which deliver leGroovyDB-24 Applianceading scalable performance within each server system. GroovyDB/S7000FC4UR offers expansive processor, memory, and I/O capacity and bandwidth; combine these benefits with proven enterprise-class dependability for consolidation and the S7000FC4UR becomes the best choice for your data-intensive computing needs.

The GroovyDB-24 will deliver the equivelant of 400 DB servers deliverying an outstanding 200,000 SQL operations per second, making the GroovyDB a serious contender to take out the #1 position in thDB-24 rear viewe TPC-C benchmark in the price/peformance category.

More Info:

• GSX-100 Download the Intel product brief
• View the Intel Server System S7000FC4UR flash virtual tour
• Podcast of the S7000FC4UR server

via Groovy Corp