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Obituary: printf("goodbye, Dennis"); | The Economist
Dennis Ritchie, a father of modern computing, died on October 8th, aged 70 EVERY time you tap an iSomething, you are touching a little piece of Steve Jobs. His singular vision shaped the products Apple has conjured up, especially over the last 14 years, after Jobs returned to the helm of the company he had founded. Jobs's death in October resembled the passing of a major religious figure.
One group of people has traditionally been left out of our modern tablet revolution: the visually impaired. Our slick, button-less touchscreens are essentially useless to those who rely on touch to navigate around a computer interface, unless voice-control features are built in to the device and its OS. But a Stanford team of three has helped change that. Tasked to create a character-recognition program that would turn pages of Braille into readable text on an Android tablet, student Adam Duran, with the help of two mentor-professors, ended up creating something even more useful than his original assignment: a touchscreen-based Braille writer. Currently a senior at New Mexico State University, Duran arrived at Stanford in June to take part in a two-month program offered by the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC).
Touchscreen Braille Writer Lets the Blind Type on a Tablet | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
New smartphone ultrasound device is (finally) available | VentureBeat
In February 2011, Mobisante got the green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its mobile, smartphone-powered ultrasound device. It took the medical device startup another eight months to meet the various FDA guidelines, but now its MobiUS SP1 Ultrasound System is finally available for commercial sales starting this month.
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