"This website is dedicated to solving cyber crimes and create awareness about it. All you need to do is to post your complaints on the website which will be analysed by a team of ethical hackers, mostly city-based engineering students. The team will issue a list of suggestions for police on how the case can be solved effectively," said Vaghela.

These kinds of feats are nothing new for Vaghela, who at the age of 18 exposed loopholes like SMS and Call Forging in Mobile Networks. The technology that allowed to send SMS or Make Call to any International Number from any number of your choice. At 19, Vaghela found loopholes like "Session Hijacking" and "Cross Site Scripting" in popular social networking site Orkut.

Vaghela has mastered the art of cracking codes and extracting information from servers based in different locations. He gave the exact time and locations to the police department helping them in solving several cyber criminal cases. His biggest success was tracing the origin of the terror email sent by Indian Mujahideen minutes before the Ahmedabad serial blasts on July 26, 2008 and played a vital role in investigation of the same. In a bid to prepare a force of ethical hackers to expose the web fraudsters, Vaghela has imparted training in 10 engineering colleges of the city.

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You wouldn’t fly on a commercial jet plane unless you were confident that the pilot had logged some serious time in a flight simulator, preparing for every eventuality. Someday it may be just as inconceivable to undergo delicate surgery without assurances that your doctor has taken a few practice runs on a three-dimensional, interactive simulation of your own anatomy. Researchers at Stanford University are hastening that day by developing a training technology that allows doctors to rehearse surgical procedures before the patient reaches the operating room.

The demonstration project, called the Stanford Rhino­logical Virtual Surgical Environment (VSE), uses a haptic interface—mechanical feedback that simulates the sense of touch—developed by SensAble Technologies of Woburn, Massachusetts. The VSE system combines that interface with a set of detailed CT scans, taken before the operation, to create a digital “body double” of the patient. Using the patient’s own scans in the simulation could greatly assist doctors performing surgery near critical parts such as the optic nerve and carotid artery, where damage could cause permanent debilitation or death. In such operations, knowing the precise quirks of an individual’s anatomy is crucial to a successful outcome.

Kenneth Salisbury, a professor in Stanford’s departments of computer science and surgery, says that tactile feedback combined with the personalized information gives the VSE system a big advantage over current medical training simulations that use virtual surgery. “Existing systems allow you to move surrogate instruments around, watch how they look on the screen, and learn to make movements in the correct direction,” he says, adding, “It starts to get more interesting when you add the feeling and the reaction of tissue.”

The Stanford team has developed an enhanced haptic interface that can re-create essentially all of the physical challenges a surgeon would encounter in a procedure. From a clinical point of view, though, plastic training mannequins will probably always be useful. “It’s the same with an airplane,” Salisbury says. “You want a simulated plane that looks and feels like the one you’ll be flying.” Clinical trials of the VSE system are slated to take place over the next couple years.

——————————————————————————–

HOW IT WORKS

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Rendering of a surgeon’s work station for rehearsing sinus surgery with the assistance of haptic training technology.

A haptic-feedback device (A) operates in a way analogous to the graphics card in your computer monitor, but instead of creating an image, it renders the feeling of a physical object—in this case bone, cartilage, or a tumor. “Rather than controlling red, green, and blue pixels that are visible to the eye, the device controls the three-dimensional forces felt by the hand,” says Daniel Chen, chief technology officer at SensAble Technologies.

To create models of patients’ sinuses, multiple two-dimensional scans were taken of their sinus cavities to create a composite 3-D display (B) that is viewable on a standard PC. From the same data, physical mass, friction, and compliance properties are assigned to the anatomical parts within the sinus. The virtual sinus is then engaged by the haptics device, an armlike series of joints containing lightweight motors connected to an endoscope-tipped stylus (C). The device contains optical encoders that link the stylus’s movements with the image on the screen.

When the encoders sense that you have “bumped” into something, they signal the device to engage its motors so they respond with appropriate force. When a surgeon grazes the wall of the virtual nose, he or she will feel soft resistance; if the surgeon presses harder, the resistance will increase to mimic the feel of the underlying cartilage or bone.

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The future of computing may depend on embracing the chaos that defines human thinking.

Kwabena Boahen’s love affair with digital computers began and ended in 1981, when he was 16.

Boahen lived outside the city of Accra in the West African nation of Ghana. His family’s sprawling block house stood in a quiet field of mango and banana trees. One afternoon Boahen’s father rolled down the driveway with a surprise in the trunk of his Peugeot: a RadioShack TRS-80—the family’s first computer—purchased in England.

Young Boahen parked the machine at a desk on the porch, where he usually dismantled radios and built air guns out of PVC pipe. He plugged the computer into a TV set to provide a screen and a cassette recorder so he could store programs on tapes, and soon he was programming it to play Ping-Pong. But as he read about the electronics that made it and all other digital computers work, he soured on the toy.

Moving the Ping-Pong ball just one pixel across the screen required thousands of 1s and 0s, generated by transistors in the computer’s processor that were switching open and shut 2.5 million times per second. Boahen had expected to find elegance at the heart of his new computer. Instead he found a Lilliputian bureaucracy of binary code. “I was totally disgusted,” he recalls. “It was so brute force.” That disillusionment inspired a dream of a better solution, a vision that would eventually guide his career.

Boahen has since crossed the Atlantic Ocean and become a prominent scientist at Stanford University in California. There he is working to create a computer that will fulfill his boyhood vision—a new kind of computer, based not on the regimented order of traditional silicon chips but on the organized chaos of the human brain. Designing this machine will mean rejecting everything that we have learned over the past 50 years about building computers. But it might be exactly what we need to keep the information revolution going for another 50.

The human brain runs on only about 20 watts of power, equal to the dim light behind the pickle jar in your refrigerator. By contrast, the computer on your desk consumes a million times as much energy per calculation. If you wanted to build a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain, it would require 10 to 20 megawatts of electricity. “Ten megawatts is a small hydroelectric plant,” Boahen says dismissively. “We should work on miniaturizing hydroelectric plants so we can put them on the backs of robots.” You would encounter similar problems if you tried to build a medical implant to replace just 1 percent of the neurons in the brain, for use in stroke patients. That implant would consume as much electricity as 200 households and dissipate as much heat as the engine in a Porsche Boxster.

“Energy efficiency isn’t just a matter of elegance. It fundamentally limits what we can do with computers,” Boahen says. Despite the amazing progress in electronics technology—today’s transistors are 1/100,000 the size that they were a half century ago, and computer chips are 10 million times faster—we still have not made meaningful progress on the energy front. And if we do not, we can forget about truly intelligent humanlike machines and all the other dreams of radically more powerful computers.

Getting there, Boahen realized years ago, will require rethinking the fundamental balance between energy, information, and noise. We encounter the trade-offs this involves every time we strain to hear someone speaking through a crackly cell phone connection. We react instinctively by barking more loudly into the phone, trying to overwhelm the static by projecting a stronger signal. Digital computers operate with almost zero noise, but operating at this level of precision consumes a huge amount of power—and therein lies the downfall of modern computing.

In the palm of his hand, Boahen flashes a tiny, iridescent square, a token of his progress in solving that problem. This silicon wafer provides the basis for a new neural supercomputer, called Neurogrid, that he has nearly finished building. The wafer is etched with millions of transistors like the ones in your PC. But beneath that veneer of familiarity hides a radical rethinking of the way engineers do business.

Traditional digital computers depend on millions of transistors opening and closing with near perfection, making an error less than once per 1 trillion times. It is impressive that our computers are so accurate—but that accuracy is a house of cards. A single transistor accidentally flipping can crash a computer or shift a decimal point in your bank account. Engineers ensure that the millions of transistors on a chip behave reliably by slamming them with high voltages—essentially, pumping up the difference between a 1 and a 0 so that random variations in voltage are less likely to make one look like the other. That is a big reason why computers are such power hogs.

Radically improving that efficiency, Boahen says, will involve trade-offs that would horrify a chip designer. Forget about infinitesimal error rates like one in a trillion; the transistors in Neurogrid will crackle with noise, misfiring at rates as high as 1 in 10. “Nobody knows how we’re going to compute with that,” Boahen admits. “The only thing that computes with this kind of crap is the brain.”

It sounds cockamamy, but it is true. Scientists have found that the brain’s 100 billion neurons are surprisingly unreliable. Their synapses fail to fire 30 percent to 90 percent of the time. Yet somehow the brain works. Some scientists even see neural noise as the key to human creativity. Boahen and a small group of scientists around the world hope to copy the brain’s noisy calculations and spawn a new era of energy-efficient, intelligent computing. Neurogrid is the test to see if this approach can succeed.

Most modern supercomputers are the size of a refrigerator and devour $100,000 to $1 million of electricity per year. Boahen’s Neurogrid will fit in a briefcase, run on the equivalent of a few D batteries, and yet, if all goes well, come close to keeping up with these Goliaths.

The problem of computing with noise first occurred to a young neuro­scientist named Simon Laughlin three decades ago. Laughlin, then at the Australian National University in Canberra, spent much of 1975 sitting in a black-walled, windowless laboratory with the lights off. The darkness allowed him to study the retinas of blowflies captured from Dumpsters around campus. In hundreds of experiments he glued a living fly to a special plastic platform under a microscope, sunk a wisp-thin electrode into its honeycombed eye, and recorded how its retina responded to beams of light. Laughlin would begin recording at noon and finish after midnight. As he sat in the gloomy lab, watching neural signals dance in green light across an oscilloscope, he noticed something strange.

Each fly neuron’s response to constant light jittered up and down from one milli­second to the next. Those fluctuations showed up at every step in the neurons’ functioning, from the unreliable absorption of light by pigment molecules to the sporadic opening of electricity-conducting proteins called ion channels on the neurons’ surfaces. “I began to realize that noise placed a fundamental limit on the ability of neurons to code information,” Laughlin says.

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The world’s largest wind turbine is now the Enercon E-126. This turbine has a rotor diameter of 126 meters (413 feet). The E-126 is a more sophisticated version of the E-112, formerly the world’s largest wind turbine and rated at 6 megawatts. This new turbine is officially rated at 6 megawatts too, but will most likely produce 7+ megawatts (or 20 million kilowatt hours per year). That’s enough to power about 5,000 households of four in Europe. A quick US calculation would be 938 kwh per home per month, 12 months, that’s 11,256 kwh per year per house. That’s 1776 American homes on one wind turbine.

The turbine being installed in Emden, Germany by Enercon. They will be testing several types of storage systems in combination with the multi-megawatt wind turbines.

These turbines are equipped with a number of new features: an optimized blade design with a spoiler extending down to the hub, and a pre-cast concrete base. Due to the elevated hub height and the new blade profile, the performance of the E-126 is expected to by far surpass that of the E-112.

WiredForStereo of The Way explains the operation of these new turbines:

[The E-126]… has no gearbox attaching the turbine blades to the generator, in fact, the generator is housed just at the widest part of the nose cone, it takes up the entire width of the nacelle to generate power more efficiently, and provide longer service life with less wear.

Also like small turbines, these have inverters instead of synchronous generators, that is to say, a separate controller that converts the wild AC generated into something the grid can use. This means the rotor can run at more optimum and varied speeds.

Again like small turbines, this one does not shut right off at a predetermined speed due to gusts or just very high wind speeds. It simply throttles down by turning the blades slightly away from the wind so as to continue to generate power though at a lower production rate. Then the instant the wind is more favorable, it starts back up again. Many smaller wind turbines do something similar except have no blade pitch control, they use a technique called something like “side furling” where the whole machine, excepting the tail, turns “sideways” to catch less wind but continue operating.

Money, why else? Big things are cheaper per unit production. If you have 3 2 MW generators, you have to have three (at least) cranes to put them up, build three foundations, have to maintain three machines, and have three times the parts to fail. If you have one, it is larger and more expensive in itself to move, but not as expensive as having to move three smaller ones.

I don’t understand how people can be so concerned about birds becoming mush with modern wind turbines, especially ones this big. It only turns at 12 rpms. That means it takes five seconds to complete one revolution. That is slow but this is much bigger and easy to see compared to the whirring blades of old. The Altamont Pass turbines gave wind turbines such a bad name because they were built in the middle of the natural habitat of rare birds, the turbines were the small fast spinning type, and they were built using lattice towers, the kind birds love to nest in. These are slowly being replaced and all of the new ones are of the slower rotating kind. In the end, it comes down to this. Stationary buildings and moving cars kill literally millions of times more birds than wind turbines. And things like the Exxon Valdez spill kill millions of everything. So let’s go with the best option.

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At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop".

In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he'll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.\

Source : Times of India

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Unfortunately, neither the data nor the imagery is available in the API version of Google Maps. While Google provides programmatic access to driving directions, as well as walking directions — the third type, transit, has never been a part of the Maps API. The reason could be that there are extra factors, like fares and zones, that don’t quite fit the same structure as other directions.

Indeed, though Google receives hundreds of transit feeds from hundreds of agencies, only a handful have data accessible to other developers. This may not be Google’s fault, as I wrote in Why Aren’t There More Transit APIs? It’s easy to see the benefit of providing data to Google, but a harder sell to open up to any developers. Of course, some are better than others.

Developers don’t necessarily need Google or agencies to provide them with all the data. London Tube Journey Planner, for example, shows routes and plans trips. We currently list 91 transit mashups, several dating back to 2005.

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Yamaha's Tenori-on is a unique musical instrument that is pretty expensive with its rather hefty £800-plus price point, but good news to those who are interested – the Tenori-on Orange which will be released in time for Christmas will retail for a more affordable £649. Apart from that, the original Tenori-On will be receiving a firmware update from January next year onwards, addressing a range of areas such as synchronization of the Tenori-on to DAWs and also the MIDI sync implementation.

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10 fresh, beautiful, inventive and, hopefully, inspiring blog designs

 Jason Gray Music

Jason Gray’s blog was initially WordPress-based, but it now has a beautiful and original Flash appearance that we just couldn’t pass up.

The Pixel Blog

This exquisite blog belongs to a Web design and marketing company called The Pixel. Amazing graphics in the header and footer, along with a giant tree (the branches of which separate the posts), make this design pure eye-candy.

WorkAwesome

The neat desktop-themed design of WorkAwesome’s blog is definitely worth your attention.

Dustin Curtis

New to York

Abduzeedo

Abduzeedo, which is bookmarked by every Web design fan, was recently redesigned. The highlights are considerably enhanced usability and unique post teasers.

Trent Walton

Tumble 

Biggest Apple

The pure style of Biggest Apple’s website features a gorgeous sketch in the header and some pretty icons all around.

Stripturnhout.be

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If you liked the idea of the Sound Egg but not so much its aesthetics, say hello the Martin Emila's Media Chair. It's the same idea: a comfy chair set up with speakers focused right at your head, but one that looks a lot classier. You know, without all that sound-dampening foam stapled in there.

With the Media Chair, you get to pick the color of the chair itself as well as the color and pattern of the fabric of the seat. At least, in theory, as this is just a concept. Which I guess, in the end, gives the Sound Egg a leg up. Being real and all.

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