From the news@nature.com Web site:

News Published online: 13 October 2004; | oi:10.1038/news041011-9
Paralysed man sends e-mail by thought
Roxanne Khamsi

Brain chip reads mind by tapping straight into neurons.

An pill-sized brain chip has allowed a quadriplegic man to check e-mail and play computer games using his thoughts. The device can tap into a hundred neurons at a time, and is the most sophisticated such implant tested in humans so far.

Many paralysed people control computers with their eyes or tongue. But muscle function limits these techniques, and they require a lot of training. For over a decade researchers have been trying to find a way to tap directly into thoughts.

In June 2004, surgeons implanted a device containing 100 electrodes into the motor cortex of a 24-year-old quadriplegic. The device, called the BrainGate, was developed by the company Cyberkinetics, based in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Each electrode taps into a neuron in the patient’s brain.

The BrainGate allowed the patient to control a computer or television using his mind, even when doing other things at the same time. Researchers report for example that he could control his television while talking and moving his head.

The team now plans to implant devices into four more patients.

Brain waves

Rival teams are building devices to read brain activity without touching neurons. Neural Signals, based in Atlanta, has patented a conductive skull screw that sits outside the brain, just under the skull. Other researchers are developing non-invasive technologies, for example using an electroencephalogram to read a patient’s thoughts.

But BrainGate’s creators argue that such techniques only give a general picture of brain activity, and that the more direct approach allows more numerous and more specific signals to be translated. “This array has 100 electrodes, so one can theoretically tap into 100 neurons,” says Jon Mukand, an investigator on the team based at the Sargent Rehabilitation Center in Rhode Island.

This makes the technology faster and more flexible, he argues. “It’s far more versatile when one can get a larger number of neurons.”

But Stephen Roberts, an engineer at Oxford University, UK, who has worked on brain-computer interfaces, says the field is still waiting for a breakthrough. “We have to make something that works robustly and without a lot of patient training,” he says. “Most of these devices work well on a small subset of patients, but there’s a long way to go before getting them to work for the general population.”

(Any typos / mistakes in the above – and there’s at least one – are from the original article, not anything I introduced.)

I finally have a new job, and one that pay’s what I used to be making, is actually in Burlington, and which I think I’ll enjoy a lot better than any of the employement options I’ve had (including unemployment) for the past 3 years!

I got a call about a week after I “blindly” applied for the job. I say “blindly” because I never thought I’d hear anything back. I got a phone call from HR who gave me an initial short technical interview. Then I proceeded to talk to three senior technicians, their manager, and the world-wide IT director. I had to do all of this by “sneaking” out of work and waiting outside for them to phone me on my cell.

I actually thought it was somewhat like winning the lottery. As the interviews continued, I kept being told how much they wanted me to have the job – something I’ve never encountered before.

As I’ve already mentioned above and in previous posts, working at Microsoft was far from the ideal solution. The pay was half what the industry would normally give somebody for the equivalent amount of work (because it was all via a staffing agency rather than Microsoft actually bothering to hire full-time employees in Canada for some reason) and the commute, for me, was hellish. Additionally, there was a rather high degree of “drone” mentality, where employee review came down to simple metrics that really didn’t have all that much bearing on individuality – everybody there, as far as I know, was constantly looking for other work, and nobody really felt anything other than “expendable”.

In any case, my new job is with VMWare and I start on the 25th. I gave me 2 weeks notice (as required) but was not forced to work out those two weeks – so I’m now enjoying a couple of weeks off work.

I’ll be the first position to support the team I’ll be part of (the “hosting” portion of VMWare) and will need to be sent to Palo Alto, California for several weeks for training before actually doing anything. (I can’t say I’ll complain too much about that, although I’ll miss Michelle.)

As a follow-up to my last entry, I bit the bullet and bought a new printer. Ironically, this was purchased at Staples. Originally, Michelle and I were at Future Shop (we’d been in the area for something else and I dragged her in on an impulse) and spoken to an HP reprentative in the store at the time. There was a particular HP model I had my eye on, and almost would have bought it there and then but decided to do some comparison shopping first – and I’m glad I did. One of the things I’d asked was, roughly, how often HP models are discontinued. (Because that’s the situation I’d fallen into with my old Xerox and XP SP2.) He said no more often than models from other manufacturers.

On to Staples. It turns out that the very HP model I’d been looking at was due to be discontinued within the week! They already had the replacement for it, but had not yet put it on the shelves. Unfortunately, it was more like the next model up (and HP dropping the discontinued line altogether) because of how much more expensive it was. So much for any kind of sincerity on the part of the HP representative. There’s simply no way he couldn’t have known this information – and I’d asked him about discontinuing product lines directly, so there was no reason for him not to have told me about it other than to get a sale. (I’m happy to buy, but only if I’m being told the whole story.) A decent sales person would have been honest about the model being discontinued – but found a way to sell it to me anyway.

In the end, I ended up buying a Brother MFC 210c, a very compact, almost “cute”, printer and I’m quite happy with it. It has more features, is faster, and costs no more than the HP I’d looked at originally. Also, it just came out within the past month, so it’s not likely to be discontinued for a while. I just need to go over the user manual, because I don’t know, off the top of my head, how to use its fax functionality (something I wasn’t looking for but didn’t turn down).

My old printer will be given to my mother, Kay. Although she is running XP on her computer, she uses it for so little that I’m not terribly concerned about not getting SP2 on it – I’ll just make sure that she’s completely up to date with everything else, security-wise, when she visits on Thanksgiving with her computer so I can hook everything up.

I’ve now had some experiences with XP SP2 – Microsoft’s latest security fix. So far, I’ve noticed some good things and also some bad things. All in all, I think it’s better to have it than not to have it.

One bad thing that happened is that I installed in on our friend Andrea’s Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop. It immediately started running at about a quarter its normal speed. In the end I came across mention of this on Google and fixed it by backing out the CPU driver that SP2 had updated.

The other thing, which is still causing us grief, is that our Xerox WorkCentre XK35c printer will no longer print properly. It insists on popping up a cartridge cleaning wizard every single time you print – even if you’ve run it before, despite the assurance that it will only happen once. Further, this wizard always pops up in my login profile – never in Michelle’s. So, as far as she’s concerned, she goes to print and nothing happens at all. We may end up having to buy a new printer because of this – which would not be a good thing.

Some of the good things I’ve seen are more cosmetic than anything else, but I appreciate them. Graphic redraw between user profiles is better. I can now mute the sound in one user profile and not have the changed sound volume icon mess up in other profile, which it used to do. Similarly, sounds heard in an “inactive” profile now actually come through to the active one. Which is interesting – I don’t recall that happening before.

My layout changes are continuing on now to the other sections of this site.

Everything is formatting properly with Mozilla / Firefox. However, IE is still getting all sorts of things wrong in some places – so, if you’re looking at this in IE (Why?) don’t expect everything to work properly yet…

This sounds far too much like science fiction to me, but apparently it’s something that’s actually happened.

A patient, who’d lost his jaw due to cancer, managed to get a replacement “grown” from a muscle in his back – and then had it transplanted into the appropriate place so that he can eat again.

I won’t go into all of the details – you can read the actual news story here.

If I hadn’t read about it from an actual news site, I would have sworn that it was made up.

Okay, so last weekend my cable modem only intermittently had Internet access – then it finally gave up the ghost altogether. It wouldn’t even connect to my ISP (Cogeco) at all.

Talking to a technician resulted in the always popular “Have you turned it off and back on again? Did you reset it? What OS is it connected to?”. I may fall into the minority demographic of people who actually know what they’re doing when it comes to computers, but it’s always annoying to get this kind of a reponse. (Which is not to say that I don’t commonly ask those very questions of other people to whom I provide support. I can understand the reasoning behind it, it’s just annoying when you know, yourself, you don’t need to be on the receiving end of that particular exchange.)

In the end, I was told to get a replacement unit.

Several days later, Michelle got herself to the depot and picked one up. (A cute little RCA model.) I finally got home and plugged it in – while it connected to the ISP I got no activity at all.

I decided to plug it directly into my XP workstation (normally, it’s my Linux server) since that’s what, most commonly, these people want to deal with – even though actual connectivity between the modem and the ISP has nothing to do with the OS at the final, receiving end of things.

Switching my computer from its static IP to a dynamic IP resulted in it asking me to reboot (XP should never do this for such a change) and then some bizarre kind of RPC error. Obviously, there’s something wrong with my computer which I’ll have to deal with later – but it didn’t help that at the same time as my own computer was malfunctioning I had another technician on the phone.

Also, during my intitial contact with him, he asked me for my address. A quite simple request but, because of my flustered state, I drew a blank for about 20 seconds. It’s pretty embarrassing when you can’t tell somebody where you live…

Anyway, I finally set everything back to the configuration I normally have (with my Linux server getting an IP from the ISP) and read off the cable modem’s MAC address to the technician. It turned out that the woman who’d given Michelle the replacement unit must have typed it in wrong. She’d entered a “9” into the computer system rather than a “6”. So, while I was getting an IP, traffic to / from my connected system was blocked because my street address didn’t own that cable modem.

The technician fixed this and everything was then well. Almost.

I noticed that my Linux server was being flooded by strange “neighbour table overflow” messages. After 20 or 30 minutes of this, all networking on the server would stop. Some quick Googling, as well as some network traces, showed me that the problem was caused by an excessive amount of “ARP” traffic from the ISP, and a lack of the appropriate buffer memory on the server to handle it. A quick change to my server’s settings increased the buffer space from the minimum and that particular problem hasn’t happened since.

I can only wonder if this increased ARP traffic (which was not happening before) is somehow related to the failure of my old cable modem or not.

Aside from being offline for three days, and the frustration I went through, the only other downside is that we’ve lost some email – since our server was offline for longer than the normal “retry” period of time on messages that can’t get delivered.

!

(I’ll get to the whole story in the next day or so – but that just about sums up a recent experience I went through…)

I hate cell phones. Now that I’m commuting on a daily basis and exposed to them in public far more frequently than I was when I spent most of my time at home, I hate them more than ever.

I’m always disgusted every time I hear a phone ringing as I’m sitting on the bus or train to or from work. While there may be some people who need to have their phones on during such a public commute, I’ll wager a guess that it’s something like .01% of the population that really require this. Instead, I get to hear all about how some woman’s young daughter hasn’t eaten her breakfast, or about how Jimmy should be getting dressed for school now. Or, worse, having to know that “nothing much” is up with the person next to me and that they’ve just got off work, are on the train or bus, and should be home shortly. None of these things justify the annoyance to all of the people within earshot of this conversation.

It doesn’t help that, for some obscure reason, people actually raise their voices when they’re talking on their cell phones. I’m sure that this isn’t necessary either and that they’d be perfectly understandable to the person on the other end if they just spoke in a normal or, even better, slightly hushed voice. (Only once in the past 8 months have I actually not minded somebody speaking on their cell – it was a woman in front of me, and she was deliberately talking in such a quiet voice that I only knew she was talking if I made an effort to hear her.)

Something else that’s increasingly annoying me is the proliferation of all of these different rings. If somebody wants to put something “cute” on their phone, that’s fine. But don’t leave you phone on when you’re on the bus or train to have it played for everybody to hear. Because it will be played. Loudly (people don’t seem to know that there’s a volume control on their phones and that you can know your phones ringing without deafening everybody in the area), and for much longer than is really necessary (because everybody seems to have their phone buried under acres of paraphenalia in their purse or briefcase so that it take forever for them to dig it out and answer it – one would expect that if you think you are going to get a call you’d at least carry it with you in some fashion so that you could answer the call promptly).

Just the other day I had to sit next to some guy who actually spent 5 minutes “playing” with his ring, as he went from one to another, testing them all out to see which he liked best. He did eventually turn the volume down so that other people on the bus weren’t exposed to his experimentation, but he seemed oblivious to how annoying he was being for much longer than would be a seemingly normal and somewhat intelligent person.

I’d like to give all of these people a good thumping. Or at least their phones.

It’s all the more inexplicable to me because I know that I don’t like speaking on my own phone in public at all. I always leave it off and make any call I have to make once I’m in some quiet place where I won’t disturb other people, and there won’t be anybody around to overhear my private conversation. Only if I’m specifically expecting a call do I leave it on. And, even if it’s off, surely people have heard of voicemail…

According to a recent study conducted by the SANS Internet Storm Center, this is now the average amount of time that an unprotected PC, connected to the Internet, will be virus or malware free. After that, you’ll probably be hit by something bad. Apparently, this time used to be 40 minutes a year ago – enough time to download patches, virus definitions, etcetera (assuming that you have a high speed connection). But the now 20 minute time is, typically, not long enough for somebody unprotected to get protected before their computer is compromised.

This all just points to the need for computer software (at the basic OS level) to be more adaptable to problems and to be able to “fend off” unknown attacks, at least for a long enough period of time until you can get the right “medicine” in place to take care of it. In other words, computers need to behave more like our human immune systems.

While the situation is alarming in general, what’s even more alarming is that the average amount of time that an unprotected computer will be “safe” has decreased by 50% in only one year. It doesn’t bode well for the future.