Enlarge / Prototypes of goggle-implant systems are already being tested.

Stanford.edu

In some forms of blindness, including age-related macular degeneration, most of the eye is perfectly fine. The cells of the retinal that convert light into electrical pulses may die off, but the cells that support them, including the nerves that process these signals and relay them to the brain, are still intact. This raises the prospect that the eye’s infrastructure can be used to help restore vision. Stimulate the remaining neurons in response to light, and they’ll happily take the signals and feed them into the visual centers of the brain.

There are a number of ways of going about this, but one of the more promising is some form of retinal implant. These devices can take incoming light, convert it into an electrical signal, and feed that directly into the neurons within the retina. The problem right now is that these things are bulky and complex, requiring wires, external power sources, and the like. In this week’s Nature Photonics, researchers report on a novel method to get rid of some of the complexity: implant a photovoltaic device directly into the retina.

This doesn’t entirely eliminate the complexity, but it makes the most important parts—the ones that reside inside the retina—significantly simpler. It also eliminates their need for an external power source. The idea is appealingly easy. Photovoltaic devices work by converting light energy into free electrons, producing a current. By injecting that current into the appropriate layer of the eye, it’s possible to use it to stimulate the nerves that were normally receiving signals from the retina’s light-receptive cells.

Read more on Ars Technica…

See the article here:
Wireless, photovoltaic retinal implants could recharge sight

Enlarge

Future U

• Future U: Classroom tech doesn’t mean handing out tablets

Textbooks are a thing of the past, says the common wisdom. Well, the common wisdom of the Technorati maybe. The problem with that thinking is that the number one publisher in the world is Pearson, a textbook publisher, who brought in $7.75 billion in 2009.

Pearson, as Tim Carmody noted in a January Wired article, owns 50 percent of the Financial Times, as well as the number two trade house: Penguin. The second largest textbook publisher, McGraw-Hill, owns Standard and Poor’s. To say textbooks are big business is like saying bullets are ouchie.

So writing the obituary for textbooks would be putting the cart before the horse. But pretending like they are not changing their shape, if not their nature, is to proclaim, from one’s buggy, that automobiles are a passing fad.

Read more on Ars Technica…

Visit link:
Future U: The stubborn persistence of textbooks

So Mac invulnerability to malware is a myth, at least according to security researchers from Kaspersky Lab. And although such a blunt statement may be a blow to the ego of some Mac users, it remains true. Security researchers from all walks have long argued that it was only a matter of time before the Mac became popular enough that virus, malware, and spyware makers would come calling, and the recent Flashback scare has only served as a reminder that overconfidence precedes carelessness. Especially when it comes to technology.

The Flashback flare-up happened less than a year after another malware spike, which came in the form of fake antivirus app Mac Defender. Though neither incident ended up infecting every single Mac, they both showed that malware on the Mac is ever-so-slowly inching its way into our public consciousness. “Market share brings attacker motivation,” Kaspersky Lab told the press last month, and Mac market share is definitely on the rise.

Is it time to begin installing antivirus software on our Macs? We leave that up to you to decide for yourself, but given the spike in questions we’ve been receiving about which antivirus software is the best, we thought we’d take a look at a handful of the most well-known apps out there for Mac users. Your mileage may vary, but here are our impressions of five different antivirus packages after installing and using each one. In no particular order:

Read more on Ars Technica…

Taken from:
Hands-on with five antivirus apps for the Mac

Barence writes “PC Pro has picked out its 30 best features of Windows 8. Its countdown includes features such as the revamped Task Manager, the option to run ISOs and VHDs natively, and Windows To Go, which allows you to take a portable installation of Windows 8 with you.” They’ve also listed ten features they’d like to see added to Windows 8, “including the return of the Start button on the desktop, virtual desktops and one-click sharing of optical drives.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the original:
The 30 Best Features of Windows

bmsleight writes “Does it count as a hack if you change your own system? Vanity Fair report that during the bidding process for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the London Streets Traffic Control Center followed each vehicle using CCTV, ‘and when they came up to traffic lights,’ [bid committee CEO Keith] Mills said, ‘we turned them green.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Continue Reading:
London Hacked Its Own Traffic Lights To Make Sure It Got the Olympics

The California office of In-Home Supportive Services, which provides health support to elderly and disabled people, reported on Friday that the personal records of some 700,000 caregivers and care recipients were either lost or stolen.

But this data loss was not due to a server breach, or some complex phishing attack—instead, the Social Services office said that Hewlett Packard, which manages the data controlled by the office, notified the IHSS of the breach after a physical package containing microfiche with thousands of entries of payroll data went missing from a damaged package that HP had shipped by U.S. Postal Service to the State Compensation Insurance Fund in Riverside, CA.

As the package arrived damaged and incomplete, it’s unclear whether the information was lost or stolen, but the state has launched an internal investigation and notified law enforcement in the hopes of resolving the issue, according to the Los Angeles Times. “The possibly compromised information, dating from October to December 2011, for 375,000 workers included names, Social Security numbers and wages. For 326,000 recipients, state identification numbers may be at risk,” the LA Times reports. The In-Home Supportive Services office is also sending out hundreds of thousands of letters to potentially affected parties.

Read more on Ars Technica…

Visit link:
HP loses hundreds of thousands of CA social services records—on microfiche

Last year, nearly half a million completed Dropbox‘s very first “Dropquest.” This time, designer Jon Ying and engineer Rajeev Nayak say they “honestly don’t know” how many people will participate, but with the company’s rapid growth, it’s a safe bet that the number will be bigger.

Nayak describes Dropquest as “a gift to our users.” It’s an online scavenger hunt where you solve logic puzzles while also learning about Dropbox’s key features. Everyone who finishes gets 1 extra gigabyte of free storage, and there are other prizes for the players who finish first — the grand prize winner will get a Dropbox employee hoodie, a Dropbox Hack Week T-shirt, a drawing signed by the entire Dropbox team, an invitation to write the next Dropquest, and a 100 gigabytes of free storage for life.

It sounds like you’re going to have to work for that free storage, however — the game is designed to take 12 hours to complete. That’s about how long it was supposed to take last year, too, but someone finished in three hours. This year, it’s longer and more challenging, thanks to additional, harder puzzles, but Ying and Nayak admit there’s still some debate about exactly how long it will take. Puzzles aren’t the only new feature: There’s also a post-apocalyptic science fictional storyline.

Dropquest is a product of the company’s Hack Week in March, where employees can work on whatever they want. This year, one week wasn’t enough to complete the game, so Ying and Nayak say they’ve continued working on-and-off on the game in the two months since.

The contest starts at 10am Pacific time and will be online for three weeks — but don’t be late if you want one of the big prizes. You can read more about Dropquest here and play the game here (the second link goes live at 10).

More:
Dropbox Kicks Off Its Bigger, More Difficult “Dropquest” Scavenger Hunt Today

An anonymous reader tips an article at CNN about the development of technology that automates the process of writing news articles. It started with simple sports reporting, but now at least one company is setting its sights on more complicated articles. Quoting:
“Narrative Science then began branching out into finance and other topics that are driven heavily by data. Soon, Hammond says, large companies came looking for help sorting huge amounts of data themselves. ‘I think the place where this technology is absolutely essential is the area that’s loosely referred to as big data,’ Hammond said. ‘So almost every company in the world has decided at one point that in order to do a really good job, they need to meter and monitor everything.’ … Meanwhile, Hammond says Narrative Science is looking to eventually expand into long form news stories. That’s an idea that’s unsettling to some journalism experts.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
Could a Computer Write This Story?

Nancy Schaar at the Times Reporter:

A 62-year-old Carrollton area man was found unconscious and unresponsive Thursday morning during an intense search overnight by Carroll County sheriff deputies, an Ohio State Highway Patrol trooper and the patrol’s airplane. [Sheriff] Williams said he attempted to use the man’s cell phone signal to locate him, but the man was behind on his phone bill and the Verizon operator refused to connect the signal unless the sheriff’s department agreed to pay the overdue bill. After some disagreement, Williams agreed to pay $20 on the phone bill in order to find the man.

The amazing thing about cellular carriers isn’t that they’re so nasty—it’s that they’re nasty in so many different, seemingly unrelated ways.

Though this case is from a while ago—operators are now made available to assist emergency services—it got me thinking about what makes carriers and telcos such horrible companies to deal with once you’re a customer. It’s because accepting a long term cellular contract is a lot like going a couple of grand in debt.

As a result, their corporate culture gravitates toward that of a collection agency. It’s inevitable, even if they try to avoid it, because that’s the economic bottom line of the customer-facing part of their business. If an operator is actually having to talk to you, you must be some kind of deadbeat.

Verizon, when asked by police to find a cellphone, suffered from a perverse blind spot: it could not see beyond the fact that the cellphone’s owner owed it money.

Unconscious Carroll man found after 11-hour search [Times Reporter via Reddit]

See more here:
Verizon refused to help police locate unconscious man unless they paid his phone bill