VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand PDS-ST441-VP

A close cousin to the more expensive Editors' Choice VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand Wi-Fi PDSWF-ST44-VP , the VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand PDS-ST441-VP leaves out the Wi-Fi that lets you check scan quality on a smartphone or tablet. However, it adds a one-inch color LCD that shows the image on the scanner itself, which is a lot better than not having any way to see the scan at all. If you like the idea of a completely self-contained wand scanner that can both scan and let you see the results without having to carry anything else with you, it may be your preferred choice.

As with all wand scanners, the PDS-ST441-VP scans without a computer, saving the results in this case directly to a microSD or microSDHC card. Unlike most, it doesn't make you wait until you've moved the files to your computer before you can see the results. Not only does it let you see the scan on its own LCD, it lets you zoom in to 2x, 4x, or 8x size to see details, like whether you can actually read text on a page you just scanned.

The ability to zoom in is a notable improvement compared with, for example, the preview feature on the Pandigital Portable Wand Scanner with Feeder Dock (PanScn09) , which also offers a display, but doesn't let you zoom in. Keep in mind that just having a display on the Pandigital scanner is a big improvement over not having any display at all. That puts even the Pandigital scanner way ahead of much of the competition, and the PDS-ST441-VP way ahead of the PanScn09.

Note that VuPoint Solutions offers the PDS-ST441-VP in several colors, with slightly different model names. The PDS-ST441BU-VP, for example, is blue. Aside from the color, however, all of the ST441 models are identical.

Basics, Setup, and Scanning
As with any wand scanner, the PDS-ST441-VP is highly portable, at 1.1 by 10.1 by 1.2 inches (HWD) and 6.9 ounces, complete with two AA batteries. Like other current-generation VuPoint Solutions wand scanners, it offers a 900 pixel per inch (ppi) optical resolution and comes with Abbyy FineReader 9.0 Sprint, a reasonably capable OCR program. Depending on where you buy the scanner, it may or may not come with a memory card to scan to, so you might want to check with the seller and, if necessary, get a card when you buy the scanner. Fortunately, prices on microSD and microSDHC memory cards are low enough so that won't add much to the cost.

Setup is typical for the breed. Install the two supplied AA batteries and plug in a memory card with a maximum 32GB capacity. Installing FineReader on your computer is optional.

Scanning is absolutely standard for a wand scanner. Start with the scanner at the top or side of a page and then sweep down or across. Rollers on the bottom make it easy to sweep smoothly and evenly in most cases. However, I found it hard to sweep smoothly with 4 by 6 photos, presumably because the photo is thick enough that the part of the scanner that sticks out beyond the width of the photo is suspended above the surface, keeping the rollers from doing their job.

In addition to letting you view your scans, menu choices on the PDS-ST441-VP let you set the scanner resolution to 300, 600, or 900 ppi; set the file format to JPG or image PDF; and set the color mode to color or mono (which translates to grayscale, rather than black and white). Very much worth mention is that the bright, backlit color LCD is easy to read, and the menu choices are mostly self-explanatory.

To scan, you simply choose your settings, press the Scan button, and move the scanner across or down the page. If you move too fast, the Scan status light will change from green to red, so you know you need to rescan without even looking at the result. The only time the light turned red in my tests was when I was scanning at 900 ppi, which requires a slower scan.

Once you've finished scanning, whether one page or several, you can use the menu commands to view a file and zoom in on it. The one-inch LCD shows less of the page than I'd like to see at once when it's zoomed in. However, you can navigate through the image, which lets you make sure that text, for example, is readable across a line, or that at least part of each line is readable as you scroll from the top of the page to the bottom.

Results
The application software that the PDS-ST441-VP comes with makes the scanner suitable for both optical character recognition (OCR) and document management applications. On my tests, it did impressively well with both.

On our standard OCR tests, using the scanner's default 300 ppi for the scans, the combination of the scanner and FineReader Sprint read Times New Roman text at 12 points and Arial text at sizes as small as 8 points without a mistake. At 600 and 900 ppi, it read both fonts at sizes as small at 5 points without a mistake. Just as important for both OCR and document management, although the scanner saves each page as a separate file, FineReader makes it easy to combine multiple pages into a single Word file or searchable PDF file.

Although the scanner doesn't come with photo software, I tried scanning some 4-by-6s just to get a sense of the photo scan capability. As with other wand scanners, the quality isn't terrific. It will give you recognizable images of photos, which can certainly be useful if you're scanning, say, a magazine page with photos, but it's not suitable for much more than that.

The biggest competitor to this scanner is VuPoint's own Wi-Fi wand scanner, the PDSWF-ST44-VP. Both scanners come with the same software, and both have the advantage over most of the competition of letting you see your scans on the spot, while you can rescan if you need to. For anyone who has a smartphone, the Wi-Fi version is the obvious choice, since it will let you see your scans on a bigger screen. For those who don't carry a smartphone, however, or would rather spend a little less, the VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand PDS-ST441-VP is a highly attractive alternative.

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?

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/6qWPmitRMEc/0,2817,2410674,00.asp

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Sprint suitor Son stands apart in sober Japan

TOKYO (AP) ? The Japanese billionaire behind a deal that will create the world's third-biggest mobile company spent his childhood in a slum, where he proudly rode in a stinking wheelbarrow filled with pig feed, pushed by his grandmother, a Korean immigrant.

The unlikely success story of Softbank Corp. President Masayoshi Son has taken another leap with his latest mega-deal, announced Monday, to take a 70 percent stake in U.S. mobile phone carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. for $20 billion.

The biggest foreign acquisition in the history of Japan Inc. underlines Son's unusual status in a corporate culture that has long favored stability over risk-taking. Yet Son has stood out not only for his big deals over the years.

He studied in the U.S., graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, and boasts American friends in high places such as Microsoft's Bill Gates. He was also close to Apple Inc.'s late founder Steve Jobs. But his willingness to acknowledge his Korean roots may be what most sets Son apart in Japan, which has a history of discrimination against its Asian neighbor.

Although initially met with some skepticism from credit rating agencies, Son's foray into the U.S. may serve as inspiration for similar moves by other Japanese companies as the strength of the yen makes overseas deals more affordable.

Son, Japan's second richest man with a fortune of $7.2 billion, according to Forbes, said he identified with the entrepreneurial spirit of older Japanese pioneers such as Soichiro Honda, who started the automaker that carries his name, and Sony Corp. co-founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka.

He acknowledged he had grown conservative over the past two years as Softbank paid back debt from earlier acquisitions. He didn't like that change in himself. He decided he was ready to take new risks.

"Taking up a challenge always entails a big risk," Son, 55, said at a joint news conference Monday with Sprint's chief executive Dan Hesse.

Son started making headlines in the 1990s with his aggressive acquisitions of companies, which eventually included the Japan units of Yahoo and Vodafone. He became a household name by pushing broadband services more than a decade ago, when the Internet was still relatively new in Japan. He then shifted his focus to the mobile Internet.

Son has always stuck out in a nation of "salaryman presidents," where decision making is customarily done by a team and the man at the top ? as it is almost always a man ? rose through the ranks by not rocking the boat.

Since the nuclear disaster last year in Fukushima, northeastern Japan, Son has also been unusual in speaking out against nuclear power.

While regular people are taking to the streets in droves protesting pro-nuclear policy, the business community which includes nuclear-plant manufacturers such as Toshiba Corp. and Hitachi Inc., has largely stayed a nuclear advocate. Son is behind solar panel projects to encourage green energy as an alternative to atomic power.

Son has never made secret of his Korean ancestry, which has historically led to tragic discrimination in Japan, the colonial occupier of the Korean peninsula until 1945. Taunting in schools and difficulty in finding jobs and marriage partners are common experiences for the descendants of Korean immigrants. Two years ago, Son made his downtrodden minority roots a central theme in a company presentation that was a tearful but proud homage to his family.

Japan has its share of successes from poor or minority backgrounds. But because Japanese culture frowns upon diversity and pushes homogeneity, such people rarely talk about it as a positive part of their success.

"This is someone who is very, very precious to me," Son told a packed hall in 2010 as he outlined the company's 30-year strategy, showing on a huge screen a fading black-and-white photograph of a woman, smiling in a dress. "She is my grandmother."

She emigrated when she was 14, married his much older grandfather, and raised hogs in an impoverished part of Kyushu, the third largest of the islands that make up Japan. As a child, Son was happy to ride around on a wheelbarrow filled with scraps for the pigs. But he began to feel ashamed of his Korean background as he grew older, and even rejected his grandmother. He took on a Japanese name.

It was not until his decision to go to the U.S. to study at age 16 that he vowed to become an entrepreneur, seeing it as a way to create a more inclusive world, he said at the end of his two-hour presentation, fighting tears.

Against that backdrop, Son triumphantly declared Monday that with the Sprint deal his company had truly beaten Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., a former government monopoly and an iconic symbol of old Japan, and was on its way, he hoped, to No. 1 mobile company in the world. The combination of Softbank and Sprint will be the world's No. 3 mobile company by revenue.

In Japan, Softbank was always an also-ran third to NTT DoCoMo, NTT's mobile unit, and KDDI Corp. That began to change after Softbank worked out a deal with Apple, thanks to Son's American connections, to be the first to offer the iPhone in Japan where the market was dominated by cellphones compatible only with the country's special network-linking formats.

Softbank users in Japan have grown to more than 30 million from 19 million in 2008, the year it began offering the iPhone. KDDI began offering the iPhone only last year. NTT DoCoMo recently acknowledged it won't offer the iPhone.

Analysts anticipate an even bigger exodus to Softbank with the ongoing rollout of the iPhone 5, potentially catapulting Softbank to No. 1 in Japanese market share in coming months.

"Some people have been waiting four years for DoCoMo to come out with an iPhone. They're fed up with waiting," said Hisashi Kamio, a consultant, who has written books on computer technology. "The iPhone 5 is dealing a serious blow to DoCoMo's brand power."

Daiwa Securities Co. analyst Koki Shiraishi said Son was making a smart move with its Sprint acquisition, noting the risks were minor compared with the 2006 takeover of Vodafone Japan, which Son transformed into a profitable company Softbank Mobile.

"The prospects for the latest deal are several notches better, considering the cash cow in its mobile business," he said.

___

Follow Yuri Kageyama on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/yurikageyama

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-10-16-Japan-Softbank-Son/id-a22be200f22543208c17f7c759003762

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Decades late, FDR memorial park is opening in NYC

This Aug. 24, 2012 photo provided by FDR Four Freedoms Park LLC, shows the New York City memorial park, honoring President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that has been completed 40 years after the original design was created. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on the southern tip of 2-mile-long Roosevelt Island - between Manhattan and Queens - is being dedicated Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012, in a ceremony to be attended by dignitaries including former President Bill Clinton and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (AP Photo/FDR Four Freedoms Park LLC, Paul Warchol)

This Aug. 24, 2012 photo provided by FDR Four Freedoms Park LLC, shows the New York City memorial park, honoring President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that has been completed 40 years after the original design was created. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on the southern tip of 2-mile-long Roosevelt Island - between Manhattan and Queens - is being dedicated Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012, in a ceremony to be attended by dignitaries including former President Bill Clinton and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (AP Photo/FDR Four Freedoms Park LLC, Paul Warchol)

This July 11, 2012 photo provided by FDR Four Freedoms Park LLC, shows an arial view of the New York City memorial park, honoring President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that has been completed 40 years after the original design was created. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on the southern tip of 2-mile-long Roosevelt Island - between Manhattan and Queens - is being dedicated Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012, in a ceremony to be attended by dignitaries including former President Bill Clinton and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (AP Photo/FDR Four Freedoms Park LLC, Steve Amiaga - www.amiaga.com)

This Aug. 24, 2012 photo provided by FDR Four Freedoms Park LLC, shows the New York City memorial park, honoring President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that has been completed 40 years after the original design was created. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on the southern tip of 2-mile-long Roosevelt Island - between Manhattan and Queens - is being dedicated Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012, in a ceremony to be attended by dignitaries including former President Bill Clinton and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (AP Photo/FDR Four Freedoms Park LLC, Paul Warchol)

NEW YORK (AP) ? It's been nearly 40 years since New York City started planning a memorial to President Franklin Roosevelt on an island in the East River. Welfare Island was renamed Roosevelt Island, and American architect Louis Kahn was commissioned to design a park honoring the 32nd president.

The memorial park was never realized ? until now.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, on the southern tip of 2-mile-long Roosevelt Island between the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens, is being dedicated Wednesday in a ceremony to be attended by dignitaries including former President Bill Clinton and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The park is named after Roosevelt's Jan. 6, 1941, State of the Union address, known as the Four Freedoms Speech. Given before America got involved in World War II, Roosevelt said the way to justify the enormous sacrifice of war was to create a world centered on four essential human freedoms: freedom of speech and expression; freedom of worship; freedom from want; and freedom from fear. The words were later incorporated into the charter of the United Nations, which Roosevelt helped create.

The park consists of a 4-acre triangular expanse of green, flanked by 120 littleleaf Linden trees leading to a colossal bronze bust of Roosevelt at the threshold of a square white-granite open-air plaza.

The statue is an enlargement of a 28-inch bust of Roosevelt, also a New York governor, created by American portrait sculptor Jo Davidson. It sits in a stone niche on the back of which a passage from the Four Freedoms speech is carved. The statue sits a mere 300 yards across the river from the United Nations headquarters.

"We hope visitors of different ages will understand that the four freedoms are the core values of democracy and that each generation has to be sure to protect them," said former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. William vanden Heuvel, chairman of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park LLC.

The park will open to the public once arrangements for its operation and maintenance are final, officials said.

Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor John Lindsay first announced creation of the memorial park and appointed Kahn as its architect in 1973. Vanden Heuvel, 82, who was there that day, said Kahn completed the drawings a year later but died of a heart attack. That same year, Rockefeller became vice president, and the city verged on bankruptcy. With no money, the park was shelved.

The project was revived by vanden Heuvel in 2005 after an Oscar-nominated documentary, "The Architect," about Kahn by his son, Nathaniel, brought renewed interest to the memorial.

Over the next seven years, $53 million was raised, $34 million from private donors. The rest came from the city, $11 million, and the state, $8 million.

The park had been embroiled in a legal dispute with two of its major donors over how prominently their names would be displayed at the site. The Alphawood Foundation, which donated $10.8 million, reached an undisclosed settlement, while the Reed Foundation, which gave $2.9 million, won a court judgment for its name to be engraved in an area near the memorial bust as spelled out in a contract. The park had argued that "such a placement would dishonor a great president and defile Kahn's great work."

In the next several years, the park hopes to transform a nearby abandoned 19th-century smallpox hospital into a visitor's center. About 15,000 people live on the northern end of the island, which is reachable by tram or subway. The park plans to work closely with Cornell University, which is planning a graduate center on the island, on a nearby dock to transport people via water taxi and ferry.

___

Online:

http://www.fdrfourfreedomspark.org

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-10-17-FDR%20Park%20Dedication/id-29fd52ab8ea346e893f00257ac2a6fd8

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Film Fan Files Class Action Lawsuit Over Theater Concessions

Six dollars for a box of gummy worms at the movie theater seems like highway robbery, but is it actually unlawful?

On behalf of all others who find the prices of movie theater concessions to be outrageous, Michigan resident Joshua Thompson has filed a class action lawsuit against his local AMC theater. He's suing because the movie house denied him the ability to bring his own soda and candy into the local AMC in an alleged violation of Michigan's Consumer Protection Act.

PHOTOS: Crazy Cases! 18 of Hollywood's Outrageous Entertainment Lawsuits

The plaintiff is a 20-something security technician in Livonia, Michigan, who according to the Detroit Free Press, was tired of movie theaters taking advantage of him. So he's suing.

Both AMC and the the National Association of Theatre Owners declined the paper's request for comment.

Although Thompson's lawsuit is winning sympathy from like-minded theatergoers who are being asked in a recession to pay big markups on wholesale prices, some legal experts doubt the plaintiffs stand much chance of buttering up a judge.

"It's a loser," said Gary Victor, an Eastern Michigan University business law professor, citing Supreme Court precedent that has given businesses an out from consumer protection liability in well-regulated industries.?

(Here's the decision that observers believe gutted Michigan's consumer protection law.)

If the plaintiffs manage to get around this, they'll force AMC to face a law that prohibits "charging the consumer a price that is grossly in excess of the price at which similar property or services are sold."

Exactly how much do movie theaters make on concessions? According to one Morningstar equity analyst, of every dollar spent on candy and soda in movie theaters, 85% is pure profit. Another review of the business of selling popcorn reveals that $30 worth of raw popcorn is worth as much as $3,000 to movie theaters.

Unfortunately, the economics of allowing consumers to bring their own gummy bears into the theater aren't quite so simple. If this lawsuit ever did get to trial, AMC would certainly bring their own experts that could testify that charging high prices is actually in the consumers' best interest.

As hard as that is to believe, researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the University of California, Santa Cruz, concluded in 2009 that "by charging high prices on concessions, exhibition houses are able to keep ticket prices lower, which allows more people to enjoy the silver-screen experience."

Is that any comfort to a family of six who paid nearly $100 for seats to see Dr. Seuss' The Lorax last weekend? Probably not. That's not even counting the concessions.

E-mail: eriqgardner@yahoo.com

Twitter: @eriqgardner

Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1924677/news/1924677/

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Study shows brain flexibility, gives hope for natural-feeling neuroprosthetics

Public release date: 4-Mar-2012
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Sarah Yang
scyang@berkeley.edu
510-643-7741
University of California - Berkeley

Berkeley Opening the door to the development of thought-controlled prosthetic devices to help people with spinal cord injuries, amputations and other impairments, neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Portugal have demonstrated that the brain is more flexible and trainable than previously thought.

Their new study, to be published Sunday, March 4, in the advanced online publication of the journal Nature, shows that through a process called plasticity, parts of the brain can be trained to do something it normally does not do. The same brain circuits employed in the learning of motor skills, such as riding a bike or driving a car, can be used to master purely mental tasks, even arbitrary ones.

Over the past decade, tapping into brain waves to control disembodied objects has moved out of the realm of parlor tricks and parapsychology and into the emerging field of neuroprosthetics. This new study advances work by researchers who have been studying the brain circuits used in natural movement in order to mimic them for the development of prosthetic devices.

"What we hope is that our new insights into the brain's wiring will lead to a wider range of better prostheses that feel as close to natural as possible," said Jose Carmena, UC Berkeley associate professor of electrical engineering, cognitive science and neuroscience. "They suggest that learning to control a BMI (brain-machine interface), which is inherently unnatural, may feel completely normal to a person, because this learning is using the brain's existing built-in circuits for natural motor control."

Carmena and co-lead author Aaron Koralek, a UC Berkeley graduate student in Carmena's lab, collaborated on this study with Rui Costa, co-principal investigator of the study and principal investigator at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Program, and co-lead author Xin Jin, a post-doctoral fellow in Costa's lab.

Previous studies have failed to rule out the role of physical movement when learning to use a prosthetic device.

"This is key for people who can't move," said Carmena, who is also co-director of the UC Berkeley-UCSF Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses. "Most brain-machine interface studies have been done in healthy, able-bodied animals. What our study shows is that neuroprosthetic control is possible, even if physical movement is not involved."

To clarify these issues, the scientists set up a clever experiment in which rats could only complete an abstract task if overt physical movement was not involved. The researchers decoupled the role of the targeted motor neurons needed for whisker twitching with the action necessary to get a food reward.

The rats were fitted with a brain-machine interface that converted brain waves into auditory tones. To get the food reward either sugar-water or pellets the rats had to modulate their thought patterns within a specific brain circuit in order to raise or lower the pitch of the signal.

Auditory feedback was given to the rats so that they learned to associate specific thought patterns with a specific pitch. Over a period of just two weeks, the rats quickly learned that to get food pellets, they would have to create a high-pitched tone, and to get sugar water, they needed to create a low-pitched tone.

If the group of neurons in the task were used for their typical function whisker twitching there would be no pitch change to the auditory tone, and no food reward.

"This is something that is not natural for the rats," said Costa. "This tells us that it's possible to craft a prosthesis in ways that do not have to mimic the anatomy of the natural motor system in order to work."

The study was also set up in a way that demonstrated intentional, as opposed to habitual, behavior. The rats were able to vary the amount of pellets or sugar water received based upon their own level of hunger or thirst.

"The rats were aware; they knew that controlling the pitch of the tone was what gave them the reward, so they controlled how much sugar water or how many pellets to take, when to do it, and how to do it in absence of any physical movement," said Costa.

Researchers hope these findings will lead to a new generation of prosthetic devices that feel natural.

"We don't want people to have to think too hard to move a robotic arm with their brain," said Carmena.

###

Co-author John Long, former UC Berkeley graduate student at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and member of the Carmena lab, also collaborated in this study.

The National Science Foundation, Multiscale Systems Research Center, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Marie Curie International, and the European Research Council helped support this research.

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 4-Mar-2012
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Sarah Yang
scyang@berkeley.edu
510-643-7741
University of California - Berkeley

Berkeley Opening the door to the development of thought-controlled prosthetic devices to help people with spinal cord injuries, amputations and other impairments, neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Portugal have demonstrated that the brain is more flexible and trainable than previously thought.

Their new study, to be published Sunday, March 4, in the advanced online publication of the journal Nature, shows that through a process called plasticity, parts of the brain can be trained to do something it normally does not do. The same brain circuits employed in the learning of motor skills, such as riding a bike or driving a car, can be used to master purely mental tasks, even arbitrary ones.

Over the past decade, tapping into brain waves to control disembodied objects has moved out of the realm of parlor tricks and parapsychology and into the emerging field of neuroprosthetics. This new study advances work by researchers who have been studying the brain circuits used in natural movement in order to mimic them for the development of prosthetic devices.

"What we hope is that our new insights into the brain's wiring will lead to a wider range of better prostheses that feel as close to natural as possible," said Jose Carmena, UC Berkeley associate professor of electrical engineering, cognitive science and neuroscience. "They suggest that learning to control a BMI (brain-machine interface), which is inherently unnatural, may feel completely normal to a person, because this learning is using the brain's existing built-in circuits for natural motor control."

Carmena and co-lead author Aaron Koralek, a UC Berkeley graduate student in Carmena's lab, collaborated on this study with Rui Costa, co-principal investigator of the study and principal investigator at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Program, and co-lead author Xin Jin, a post-doctoral fellow in Costa's lab.

Previous studies have failed to rule out the role of physical movement when learning to use a prosthetic device.

"This is key for people who can't move," said Carmena, who is also co-director of the UC Berkeley-UCSF Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses. "Most brain-machine interface studies have been done in healthy, able-bodied animals. What our study shows is that neuroprosthetic control is possible, even if physical movement is not involved."

To clarify these issues, the scientists set up a clever experiment in which rats could only complete an abstract task if overt physical movement was not involved. The researchers decoupled the role of the targeted motor neurons needed for whisker twitching with the action necessary to get a food reward.

The rats were fitted with a brain-machine interface that converted brain waves into auditory tones. To get the food reward either sugar-water or pellets the rats had to modulate their thought patterns within a specific brain circuit in order to raise or lower the pitch of the signal.

Auditory feedback was given to the rats so that they learned to associate specific thought patterns with a specific pitch. Over a period of just two weeks, the rats quickly learned that to get food pellets, they would have to create a high-pitched tone, and to get sugar water, they needed to create a low-pitched tone.

If the group of neurons in the task were used for their typical function whisker twitching there would be no pitch change to the auditory tone, and no food reward.

"This is something that is not natural for the rats," said Costa. "This tells us that it's possible to craft a prosthesis in ways that do not have to mimic the anatomy of the natural motor system in order to work."

The study was also set up in a way that demonstrated intentional, as opposed to habitual, behavior. The rats were able to vary the amount of pellets or sugar water received based upon their own level of hunger or thirst.

"The rats were aware; they knew that controlling the pitch of the tone was what gave them the reward, so they controlled how much sugar water or how many pellets to take, when to do it, and how to do it in absence of any physical movement," said Costa.

Researchers hope these findings will lead to a new generation of prosthetic devices that feel natural.

"We don't want people to have to think too hard to move a robotic arm with their brain," said Carmena.

###

Co-author John Long, former UC Berkeley graduate student at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and member of the Carmena lab, also collaborated in this study.

The National Science Foundation, Multiscale Systems Research Center, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Marie Curie International, and the European Research Council helped support this research.

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-03/uoc--ssb030112.php

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Hospital says Ind. toddler found in field dies (AP)

[unable to retrieve full-text content]AP - A hospital official says an Indiana toddler found in a field after Friday's violent tornadoes has died.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/weather/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120304/ap_on_re_us/us_severe_weather_toddler

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The challenges of bringing Siri to the iPad

Siri on the iPad would need to address connectivity, user interface scaling, and some long missing apps

I would love to have Siri, Apple's voice-controlled virtual assistant, on the iPad 3. I wrote in my iPad 3 event preview preview that I anticipate it, and not a day goes by that I don't instinctively reach for the Dictation button on the iPad 2 keyboard and then grumble when I realize for the umpteenth time that it's just not there. But as much as I love the idea of Siri on the iPad, there are some challenges Apple would need to overcome.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/kE0bzLoLXr8/story01.htm

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