According a Pew Internet and American Life Project survey, the share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period.

The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January. These findings are striking because they come after a period from mid-2011 into the autumn in which there was not much change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers. However, as the holiday gift-giving season approached the marketplace for both devices dramatically shifted.

Source:
Pew Internet and American Life Project

One afternoon in June of 1903, a crowd assembled in the Royal Institution’s celebrated lecture theater in London. They came to see a demonstration of an emerging technology – a long-range wireless communication system called the telegraph, developed by the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi.

The goal was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Marconi was 300 miles away in Cornwall, UK and preparing to send a message to London.

Just before the demonstration began, the apparatus in the lecture theater began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of “diddling the public”. Their demonstration had been hacked – and this was more than 100 years before the mischief playing out on the internet today.

Read more about how and why.

Source: New Scientist

(Thanks Carl for sending)

The Bupa Health Foundation and Alzheimer’s Australia have announced the UK launch of a world-first brain health app, the latest digital tool to help in the fight against dementia.

Based on latest research that links brain health and a reduced risk of dementia, to a healthy heart and cardiovascular system, ’BrainyApp’ is the first dementia risk reduction iPhone app designed to help people monitor and improve their brain-heart health.

The new app, which was designed by Alzheimer’s Australia and Bupa Health Foundation, has already knocked Facebook off the number one spot in the Australia and New Zealand Top Free Apps list and has clocked up more than 130,000 downloads down under. Now available to people in the UK, ‘BrainyApp’ helps users monitor and improve the physical, mental, dietary and social aspects of their lifestyle.

According to Jeremy Hughes, Chief Executive, Alzheimer’s Society, “Most people know how to reduce their risk of heart disease, diabetes and stroke but they don’t realize that the same healthy lifestyle choices may also lower the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of dementia.  The idea is that what is good for the heart is also good for the brain.”

‘BrainyApp’ allows users to take a brain-heart health survey about their diet, exercise patterns and lifestyle. It then provides suggestions and ideas about how to make improvements to each. It also includes all-new brain games, and encourages users to build brain-heart points by staying physically and mentally active, socializing with friends and family, and sharing their progress on Facebook. One of the brain games – ‘Word Tennis’ – requires players to unscramble anagrams in order to move a paddle and hit a ball back to their opponent.

Director of dementia care for Bupa Care Services, Dr Graham Stokes, said: “There is evidence to show that keeping the mind exercised can stave off the onset of dementia but ‘BrainyApp’ highlights that good physical health also has a part to play. Best of all it’s good fun.”

App features:

• Brain health survey – see what your brain health score is and receive personalised recommendations on what you can do to improve your brain health
• Brain games – give your brain a work out with interesting and challenging games
• Activities – add to your brain health points with a range of activities including exercise, eating well, getting health checks, keeping your mind active and managing your smoking and alcohol intake
• Monitor your Brain Health Points and track your progress over time
• Get a daily fact sent to you from BrainyApp
• Share facts and your brain health scores with friends and family

This app is available for download from iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad only in the UK App Store but you can access and download here.

A video/demo of Brainy App can be seen here.

Source:
PR Newswire
Bupa Foundation

Patients want to use electronic communication to access health services more easily. Health authorities in several countries see this as a way to improve health care. Physicians appear to have conflicting opinions regarding the suitability of electronic communication in clinical settings. A study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research monitored electronic patient–physician communication. A total of 1113 messages from 14 participating physicians from 7 medical offices were analyzed. The length of questions and answers, and the time physicians spent answering the questions were recorded and analyzed.

Physicians spent an average of 2.3 minutes (median 2 minutes) answering questions from patients. The patients’ questions had an average length of 507.1 characters while physicians’ answers averaged 119.9 characters. The results show that the influence of patient question length on time spent responding was negligible. For the shortest 25% of the questions the answer time was 2.1 minutes, while it was 2.4 minutes for the longest 25%. Even extremely long questions had a minimal impact on the time spent answering them. A threefold increase in question length from patients resulted in only an 18% increase in physician response time.

The authors concluded that the study shows the potential clinical usefulness of electronic communication between patients and health care services by demonstrating the potential for saving time.

J Med Internet Res 2011;13(4):e79

Having the convenience of a touchscreen on any surface is what researchers from Microsoft have come up with. Two new touch interfaces that let you turn any surface into a touchscreen or control your phone through a trouser pocket.

OmniTouch combines a pico projector and a Kinect-like depth-sensing camera to create a shoulder-mounted device that can project a multitouch interface on to a wall, desk or even your own hand. Users can define the size and location of their own interfaces, or let the system decide the best choice of display.

If you don’t want to project your screen where others can see, PocketTouch lets you control your phone while keeping it in your pocket. The team created a prototype device with a grid of touch sensors that can detect finger strokes through cloth and developed a specific unlock gesture that reorientates the screen each time you use it – avoiding the need to flip your phone upside down before using the interface.

They found that the screen was sensitive enough to use existing Microsoft touch recognition software, making it possible to send a text by drawing characters one by one, or control your playlist with a few strokes of your thigh. Both systems are being presented this week at the User Interface Software and Technology symposium in Santa Barbara, California.

Source: NewScientist

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) announced today it is awarding up to 29 new grants, totaling up to $25 million over three years, to expand use of health information technology to increase access to behavioral health services.

This program will leverage technology to improve access and coordination of the treatment of mental and substance use disorders, especially for Americans in remote areas or in underserved populations. Web-based services, smart phones and behavioral health electronic applications (e-apps) will enhance communication between patients and health care providers to improve discussions about treatment options and decisions, and better manage health.

For more information

SAMHSA Grants

Researchers from Cornell University using Twitter to monitor the attitudes of 2.4 million people in 84 countries, found that people all over the world awaken in a good mood – but globally that cheer soon deteriorates once the workday progresses. A study published in the journal Science, tracked Twitter tweets over two-years which determined that work, sleep and the amount of daylight all play a role in shaping cyclical emotions such as enthusiasm, delight, alertness, distress, fear and anger.

Affective rhythms have been studied for many years, but research has relied on small homogeneous samples and have had no practical means for hourly and long-term observation of individual behavior in large and culturally diverse populations. Before the rise of social media, these kinds of results were inconclusive, according to the researchers Scott Golder, Cornell graduate student in sociology; and Michael Macy, Cornell professor of sociology.

Using Twitter in conjunction with language monitoring software, the authors discovered two daily peaks in which tweets represented a positive attitude – relatively early in the morning and again near midnight, suggesting mood may be shaped by work-related stress. Positive tweets were also more abundant on Saturdays and Sundays, with the morning peaks occurring about two hours later in the day. This implies people awaken later on weekends.

These patterns were reflected in cultures and countries throughout the world, but shifted with the difference in time and work schedule. For example, positive tweets and late-morning mood peaks were more prominent on Fridays and Saturdays in the United Arab Emirates, where the traditional workweek is Sunday through Thursday, according to the paper.

Golder and Macy also tracked global attitude on a seasonal basis to determine if “winter blues” is represented in Twitter messages. While no correlation was discovered between absolute daylight and mood, there was a correlation when examining relative daylight, such as the gradually decreasing daylength between the summer and winter solstices.

Science 30 September 2011

According to the Pew Research Center nearly three-quarters (73%) of American cell phone owners are texting, and nearly a third (31%) prefer texting to talking. That roughly matches recent data from comScore showing 70% of U.S. mobile subscribers use text message.

Young people are the most avid practitioners, with those between 18 and 24 exchanging an average of 109.5 messages on a typical day. That works out to more than 3,200 texts per month — and the typical or median cell owner in this age group sends or receives 50 messages per day (or 1,500 messages per month).

To put that in perspective, the average of 109.5 texts per day among 18- to-24-year-olds is more than double the comparable figure for 25-to-34-year-olds, and 23 times that for those 65 or older.

While texting remains the most pervasive non-voice mobile activity, the Pew study finds that among adults as a whole, usage is leveling off. Text messaging users trade an average of 41.5 messages on a typical day, with the median user sending or receiving 10 texts daily. Both figures are virtually unchanged from 2010. Similarly, cell owners make or receive an average of 12 calls on their cells per day, the same as last year.

“Interoperability has a lot to do with it–anyone with a phone can text anyone else without worrying whether or not the person they are trying to reach is on the same service–as does the fact that you can text from pretty much any type of cell phone,” noted Aaron Smith, a senior research specialist with Pew’s Internet & American Life Project. “After all, fewer than half of cell owners have smartphones, but even people on more basic phones can text-even if they don’t have access to some other tools you mentioned.”

Pew Research Center

Comscore’s list of top mobile phone activities from earlier this year

IBM announced that it has built two prototype chips that process data more analogous to the way humans digest information than the chips that now power PCs and supercomputers. The chips represent a significant milestone in a six-year-long project that has involved 100 researchers, a number of  academic institutions and funding from the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

The system is capable of “rewiring” its connections as it encounters new information, similar to the way biological synapses work. Researchers believe that by replicating that feature, the technology could start to learn. Cognitive computers may eventually be used for understanding human behaviour as well as environmental monitoring.

The SyNAPSE system uses two prototype “neurosynaptic computing chips”. Both have 256 computational cores, which the scientists described as the electronic equivalent of neurons. One chip has 262,144 programmable synapses, while the other contains 65,536 learning synapses.

In humans and animals, synaptic connections between brain cells physically connect themselves depending on our experience of the world. The process of learning is essentially the forming and strengthening of connections. We know a  machine cannot solder and de-solder its electrical tracks. However, it can simulate such a system by “turning up the volume” on important input signals, and paying less attention to others. Instead of stronger and weaker links, such a system would simply remember how much “attention” to pay to each signal and alter that depending on new experiences. A learning algorithm instructs the chip where to focus its attention.

Source:  IBM Unveils Cognitive Computing Chips

Thirty years ago, IBM created the first personal computer running Microsoft’s MS-DOS. IBM CTO Mark Dean was one of a dozen IBM engineers who designed that first machine unveiled Aug. 12, 1981.  He says PCs are “going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs.” Mr Dean writes on his blog, “I, personally, have moved beyond the PC as well. My primary computer now is a tablet. When I helped design the PC, I didn’t think I’d live long enough to witness its decline. But, while PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they’re no longer at the leading edge of computing.”

Dean writes, “PCs are being replaced at the center of computing not by another type of device—though there’s plenty of excitement about smart phones and tablets—but by new ideas about the role that computing can play in progress. These days, it’s becoming clear that innovation flourishes best not on devices but in the social spaces between them, where people and ideas meet and interact. It is there that computing can have the most powerful impact on economy, society and people’s lives.”

The story of IBM’s involvement in the PC market and foray into the post-PC era illustrates one of the core traits of our company: we’re always on the lookout for the next big thing. We anticipate changes and try to get out ahead of them—rather than waiting and reacting defensively. IBM has been on a path of constant transformation ever since we launched our turnaround in the mid-1990s. It’s one of the reasons the company is performing at its all-time peak level in our centennial year.Today, IBM brings value to customers and society through an integrated family of businesses and technologies. We conduct fundamental scientific research, design some of the world’s most advanced chips and computers, provide software that companies and governments run on, and offer business consulting. IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo in 2005.

While the Apple II, Commodore PET and other devices preceded the first IBM 5150 PC running MS-DOS but it was the IBM and Microsoft partnership that “was a defining moment for the computer industry and fulfilled “the dream of a PC on every desk and in every home. The first IBM PC even predates the Macintosh and Windows, which launched in 1984 and 1985, respectively.

The convenience of an easy-to-use, Internet-connected device in one’s pocket makes smartphones valuable but many tasks are cumbersome without a full, physical keyboard. Even social media, which seems as “post-PC” as it gets upon first glance, requires a lot of typing. Some people envision a future where a smartphone is the hub of all your computing needs, and simply hooks into a dock for those rare times you want a bigger screen, mouse and keyboard. Others talk about a future where any surface, whether a wall or table, is transformed into a touch-screen computer with a snap of one’s fingers.

For now, though, most people making these proclamations are typing their blog posts on PCs.

Sources:

Networkworld

Mark Dean’s Blog