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MIT’s Brainput boosts your brain power by offloading multitasking to a computer. A group of American researchers from MIT, Indiana University, and Tufts University, led by Erin Treacy Solovey, have developed Brainput — pronounced brain-put, not bra-input — a system that can detect when your brain is trying to multitask, and offload some of that workload to a computer. The idea of using computers to do our grunt work isn’t exactly new — without them, the internet wouldn’t exist, manufacturing would be a very different beast, and we’d all have to get a lot better at mental arithmetic. I would say that the development of cheap, general purpose computers over the last 50 years, and the freedoms they have granted us, is one of mankind’s most important advancements. Brainput is something else entirely though. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which is basically a portable, poor man’s version of fMRI, Brainput measures the activity of your brain.

Now, it’s easy to see how this could be extrapolated out into the real world. MIT crowdsources and gamifies brain analysis. There are around 100 billion neurons in a human brain, forming up to 100 trillion synaptic interconnections. Neuroscientists believe that these synapses are the key to almost every one of your unique, identifiable features: Memories, mental disorders, and even your personality are encoded in the wiring of your brain. Understandably, neuroscientists really want to investigate these neurons and synapses to work out how they play such a vital role in our human makeup. Unfortunately, these 100 trillion connections are crammed into a two-pound bag of soggy flesh, making analysis rather hard. At the moment we know that neurons trigger an electrical signal, and that hormones affect the speed at which signals cross between synapses, and that somehow this results in a mental image of a naked Kristen Bell from her Veronica Mars period, but that’s about it.

MIT wants to change all that by tasking thousands of people with analyzing a 0.3-millimeter slice of mouse retinal tissue. The Tao Of Programming. Translated by Geoffrey James Transcribed by Duke Hillard Transmitted by Anupam Trivedi, Sajitha Tampi, and Meghshyam Jagannath Re-html-ized and edited by Kragen Sittler Last modified 1996-04-10 or earlier Table of Contents Book 1 - The Silent Void Thus spake the master programmer: ``When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave.'' Something mysterious is formed, born in the silent void. If the Tao is great, then the operating system is great. The Tao of Programming flows far away and returns on the wind of morning.

The Tao gave birth to machine language. The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Each language has its purpose, however humble. But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it. In the beginning was the Tao. Programmers that do not comprehend the Tao are always running out of time and space for their programs. How could it be otherwise? The wise programmer is told about Tao and follows it. The highest sounds are hardest to hear. How Speeding The "Most Important Algorithm Of Our Lifetime" Could Change This Modern World. Last week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) a new way of calculating Fast Fourier Transforms was presented by a group of MIT researchers. It's possible that under certain situations it may be up to ten times faster than the current way we do these. At this point you are probably wondering: What the hell is he talking about? Let me explain, because improving these three little letters--FFT--may change your life.

Here's a quickie explainer: Fourier transforms are a mathematical trick to simplify how you represent a complicated signal--say the waves of sound made by speaking. How so? Now, you should remember that sound waves, and both picture and video signals, are all handled by processors in your TV, PC, and phone, and that the radio waves that whizz through the air to keep us all connected to the Internet need digital processing too.

So calculating FFTs up to ten times faster is a big deal. [Image: Flickr user hazure] The Hacker Manifesto. By +++The Mentor+++ Written January 8, 1986 Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"... Damn kids. They're all alike. But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? I am a hacker, enter my world... Mine is a world that begins with school... Damn underachiever. I'm in junior high or high school. Damn kid. I made a discovery today. Damn kid. And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found.

Damn kid. You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. Yes, I am a criminal. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. The Best Hacking Tutorial Sites - Learn Legal Hacking.