Scientist learn to read minds

Scientists have found they can pinpoint the location of a person within a virtual room by reading his mind with a brain imaging device.



"Remarkably ... we could tell where they were just by looking at the patterns of activity," said researcher Eleanor Maguire at a news conference prior to the release of the results Thursday in the latest issue of Current Biology.

The researchers scanned the brains of volunteers using a technique called functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow within the brain, showing which areas are more active.

However, Demis Hassabis, who co-authored the paper with Maguire and several others, said scientists are at least 10 years away from being able to use the technique to determine whether someone is lying about where they have been.

"It's going to require a leap of technology advancement," he said.

Maguire agreed, noting that the technique relies on the co-operation of the subject to train a computer to get familiar with their brain patterns.

"It's quite an involved process that's at a very early stage," she said. "It's probably quite ... far away from having social and ethical and probably forensic implications."

The results of the study do open up new avenues for understanding how other memories are coded in the brain, said Maguire, a professor at University College London. In the long term, that could help researchers understand how diseases such as Alzheimer's erode memory and lead to new ways to help patients, she added.

In the study, Maguire and her colleagues asked four male, right-handed volunteers to navigate as quickly as possible 14 times between four positions in a virtual room while they were monitored with an fMRI scanner.

All subjects showed activity in the same area of the hippocampus, the area of the brain known to encode spatial memory.

Most trials for each location were used to "train" a computer. Based on the training, the computer was able to recognize the pattern for specific locations, allowing the researchers to predict where the volunteer was on the "non-training" runs.

Similar techniques had been used in vision neuroscience before, but not to study memory, Maguire said.

Previously, spatial memory had mostly been studied by looking at just a few neurons at a time in the hippocampi of rats.

Maguire said the fMRI doesn't have very high spatial resolution, so the fact that it could pick out the patterns for different locations suggests that spatial memory is actually encoded over a far larger area than just a few neurons.

The study was funded by the Wellcome Trust, a medical research funding charity.

AMAZING high-def photo of Barack Obama's inauguration

This is just... amazing!! This high-definition panoramic photo was taken with a 1,474-megapixel robotic camera -- about 300 times more powerful than a standard 5-megapixel digital camera, yikes -- of the crowd at Barack Obama's presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C. last month.

Highly detailed, and you can zoom in and out almost anywhere on the image....

Using GigaPan's gigapixel technology, use your mouse to zoom in and check out the detail on the individual faces in the crowd. Prepare to be amazed by the level of detail this amazing camera offers.

Here is the image of the Obama inauguration.

Apple gets sued over iPhone screen technology

Two related companies are suing Apple over screen rendering technology used in the iPhone and iPod Touch, according to reports.

Picsel Technologies and Picsel Research, based in Glasgow, Scotland, filed a patent-infringement lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court in Delaware, Dow Jones reported. The suit alleges that Apple is violating a Picsel technology that accelerates the process of updating a device's display.

According to Macworld, the suit is focused on Picsel technology that people use to zoom and pan documents, sites, and images. Apple's devices wouldn't function as fluidly without the technology, alleges Picsel, which wants compensation for devices already sold.

Picsel's site says its customers include Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Palm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Sharp. According to Dow Jones, Apple declined to comment.

AMD to cut 1,100 workers and will further write down its ATI Technologies acquisition

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. plans to cut 1,100 jobs, write down the value of an ill-fated Canadian acquisition and slash the remaining employees' pay as the chip maker hopes its third round of layoffs in a year can help it get through a brutal market for computer sales.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said on Friday that 900 workers will have their positions cut. The rest of the reductions are coming from attrition and the previously announced sale of a business unit.

AMD also revealed in a regulatory filing that it plans further write downs on the value of ATI Technologies Inc., a Toronto-area graphics chip maker AMD acquired a few years ago for US$5.6 billion.

The U.S. technology company said it's reducing ATI's value by an additional US$684 million, which will appear in the quarterly results next week. AMD had previously slashed ATI's value by nearly $2.5 billion.
Taken together, the charges now mean AMD believes ATI is worth less than half what it paid for the Canadian company.

Friday's cuts at AMD affect nine per cent of the company's workforce.

The company has 15,000 workers currently, but it is spinning off its manufacturing operations, which have 3,000 employees who are not affected by Friday's announcement. So AMD's cut of 1,100 jobs amounts to nine per cent of the remaining 12,000 workers.

The firings represent AMD's third round of major layoffs in the last year. AMD cut 600 workers just last month, and earlier in 2008 jettisoned 1,600.

Pay for workers who survive the cuts will shrink. AMD's CEO Dirk Meyer and executive chairman Hector Ruiz, the former CEO, will see their salaries slashed by 20 per cent. Vice-presidents and other top management will have their pay cut 15 per cent, other salaried workers will lose 10 per cent of pay, and pay for hourly workers will fall five per cent.

AMD said the pay cuts are temporary. AMD was not specific about how pay would be cut in other countries.

AMD shares fell two cents, or 0.9 per cent, to US$2.24 in trading Friday on the New York Stock Exchange.

AMD is in the throes of a big restructuring that has seen it change CEOs, sell nearly a fifth of the company to an investment arm of the Persian Gulf state of Abu Dhabi, and agree to break off its factories in a moneysaving move.

AMD is the smaller rival of Intel Corp., the world's biggest semiconductor company, and has struggled with product delays, huge debt from its ATI Technologies takeover, and the inability to outspend Intel on developing new technologies.

AMD's announcement came a day after Intel reported fourth-quarter profits dropped 90 per cent and sales fell 23 per cent, a sign of the severity of the slowdown facing both companies, which provide nearly all the microprocessors for the world's PCs.

AMD, which reports its fourth-quarter results next Thursday, has already warned that its sales will come in 33 per cent lower than a year ago. Over the last eight quarters, AMD has lost $5.6 billion, and analysts aren't expecting relief any time soon.

Nortel files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Nortel Networks Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States on Wednesday, one day before it was due to make a $107 million interest payment.

The Toronto-based company and several of its affiliates made the filing in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware.

The move came shortly after the trading of Nortel's shares were halted on the TSX.

According to The Globe and Mail, Nortel is also expected to file for bankruptcy protection in Toronto.

"Bankruptcy protection keeps the creditors at bay while you reorganize or sell parts of the business," BNN's Michael Kane reported Wednesday.

The company's board of directors reportedly met in Toronto Tuesday to discuss Nortel's future.

On Thursday, the telecom firm was due to repay a $107-million interest debt on bonds, which would have amounted to about 10 per cent of the company's North American cash reserves.

"They don't have $107 million dollars just to make an interest payment," Kane said.

Canada's most valuable company at one time, Nortel stocks traded as high as $124.50 a share during the tech boom in 2000, said Kane.

On Tuesday, the stock closed at 38.5 cents a share.

"People who are close to the situation are saying to us that although there is a great deal of equity in the company the possibility of it staying together as the Nortel Networks we knew is fairly slim," Kane said.

"We're likely going to see it sold off in bits and pieces."

After the telecom bubble burst, the company failed to re-establish itself and was plagued by accounting scandals and weakening demand.

"It has been a changing landscape that Nortel has been unable to adjust to," Kane said.

Lower prices needed to drive tech sales

Technology companies will need to lower prices this year to appeal to consumers, says David Silverberg, managing editor of DigitalJournal.com.

There will be sharp discounts coming this year as companies struggle to sell products to buyers who are watching their cash in the face of the economic downturn.

"So there will be fewer big video-game titles this year because they are costly to produce, and "a lot more simpler games," he predicted. Karaoke-type games that can be played with friends, such as Guitar Hero, will continue to be popular," he said.

But even if consumers do hold back, there will still be new gadgets and applications this year.

"Communications-device companies Research in Motion and Nokia will jump on the applications bandwagon, following the path set by Apple Inc.'s iPhone," Silverberg said.

"GPS on cellphones "will really be huge," while organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TVs will come on strong, if the price comes down. At the moment, an 11-inch Sony OLED TV costs $2,500," Silverberg said.

"But OLED TVs "trump LCD big time," because the resolution and colours are much better, and they draw less energy," he said.

"Social networking will continue to be popular, and the next step may be corporate use of the sites to connect with customers and link staff," Silverberg predicted. But current users may feel that is an intrusion, he said.

This could be the year of the Blu-ray video format. After it beat out the competing HD format last year, manufacturers could put more money in to marketing and publicity.

"But lowering the cost of the players is key," Silverberg says.

Users baffled as Zune MP3 players freeze up en masse

Many Mp3 music consumers are left baffled and griping about a mysterious glitch that appeared to cause thousands of Zune music players to simultaneously stop working late Tuesday and early Wednesday.

message boards across the internet have been flooded with complaints about Zune's 30GB model Mp3 players freezing, prompting Y2K-like speculation about end-of-year hardware or software problems.

"It seems that every Zune on the planet has just frozen up and will not work," posted a Mountain Home, Idaho, user on CNN's iReport.com site. "I have 3 and they all in the same night stopped working."

Another on the same site said he was working the night shift at a Toys R Us store in Puerto Rico when his Zune player and the Zunes of four co-workers all failed about 1:30 a.m. ET Wednesday

"It froze and there was no way to turn it off so you just have to wait until the batteries went dead. You can't push any buttons or anything," says Carlos Colon. Colon said he owns a first-generation 30GB model.

Other users report their Zunes reboot but freeze when the startup status bar reaches 100 percent. A post on Zune.net titled "Help-frozen zune!!!!" had attracted more than 19,000 comments by Wednesday afternoon.

Some Zune users have dubbed the crisis "Y2K9" or "Z2K9," a reference to New Year's Eve and concerns over potential widespread computer failures on January 1, 2000 -- fears that ultimately were proved to be unfounded.

Zune users were still trying to discover the cause of the problem Wednesday afternoon.

Microsoft Corp., maker of the Zune, posted this statement Wednesday morning on the Zune Web site: "Customers with 30gb Zune devices may experience issues when booting their Zune hardware. We're aware of the problem and are working to correct it. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience!"

Contacted Wednesday morning by e-mail, a Zune spokeswoman said, "We are actively working now to isolate the issue and develop a solution to address it. We will keep customers informed on next steps via the support page on zune.net.

Microsoft released its first Zune 30GB music player, as a competitor to Apple's popular iPod mp3 player, in 2006. No widespread glitches have been reported this week in its second-generation 80GB or 120GB models.

After some more digging around on the issue, I was able to find a posting from a user who seemed to have discovered a fix for the problem:

IF ANYBODY STILL HAS NOT BEEN ABLE TO GET THEIR ZUNE TO WORK, THERE IS A SIMPLE SOLUTION: PRESS AND HOLD THE BACK BUTTON AND UP ON THE TOUCH PAD TO REBOOT YOUR ZUNE.

I personally do not own a Zune player, but for anyone reading this posting that may be having the same problem.. Give the fix a shot, hopefully it works for you as well... leave a reply post and let us know if it or anything else you've tried, does.....