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My friend Benny Blanco passed away this past weekend and I would like to send my condolences to his friends and family. I met Benny attending Five Towns College a few years back, he was one of the most knowledgeable musicians I’ve met in my life. Read more…
About a month ago, Rouslan Toumaniantz, a well known and sometimes notorious Belgium-based tattoo artist (of Tattoo Box in Kortrijk), and Lesya, a designer living at the time in Saransk, a city in central Russia started talking via chat (Rouslan speaks fluent Russian) and realized they had a lot in common, and quickly began falling head over heels in love.
Read more…
Intel is reportedly on the cusp of delivering something that consumers around the world have been wanting for a long, long time.
Kelly Clay at Forbes reports Intel is going to blow up the cable industry with its own set-top box and an unbundled cable service.
Clay says Intel is planning to deliver cable content to any device with an Internet connection. And instead of having to pay $80 a month for two hundred channels you don’t want, you’ll be able to subscribe to specific channels of your choosing.
Here’s the key paragraph:
This set-top box, said by industry insiders to be available to a limited beta of customers in March, will offer cable channels delivered “over the top” to televisions anywhere there is an Internet connection regardless of provider. (Microsoft Mediaroom, for example, requires AT&T’s service, and Xbox has limited offerings for Comcast and FiOS customers). For the first time, consumers will be able to subscribe to content per channel, unlike bundled cable services, and you may also be able to subscribe per show as well. Intel’s set-top box will also have access to Intel’s already existing app marketplace for apps, casual games, and video on demand. Leveraging the speed of current broadband, and the vast shared resources of the cloud, Intel plans to give customers the ability to use “Cloud DVR”, a feature intended to allow users to watch any past TV show at any time, without the need to record it ahead of time, pause live tv, and rewind shows in progress.
This is a holy-grail of sorts for people that subscribe to cable.
We’ve been skeptical of Intel’s ability to make a dent in the TV market. If it somehow manages to deliver this unbundled channel option, we’re more optimistic Intel could have success.
Before anyone gets too excited, Janko Roettgers at GigaOm is skeptical it happens. Roettgers knows the TV business very well.
The reason its unlikely to happen is that content companies don’t really want to see cable blown up. It’s been very good to them.
Last summer, Peter Kafka at All Things D poured cold water on the idea of Intel unbundling. Not only is going to be hard to make it happen, it’s unclear if it would even save money for cable subscribers:
Those bundles are core to today’s TV ecosystem. And the TV guys insist that consumers really don’t want “a la carte” programming, because if they do, the channels/shows they like today will end up costing much, much more.
Disney, for instance, charges TV distributors about $5 for every subscriber that gets ESPN. And, by some estimates, only about 25 percent of cable customers actually watch ESPN on a regular basis. So if you unbundled ESPN, the per-subscriber cost might shoot up to $20 or more, to account for the 75 percent drop in its customer base.
My boy Isaac Colinares aka C4 Sinistah wrote this about the recent tragedy in Newtown, Conn.
“Angels of Innocence” By Isaac Colinares
I am looking into my heart to find a piece of relevant words that will appear to give voice to what happened in Connecticut; There is nothing to give a parent back after taking the life of there babies the life spirit is attached and sync to that Child from and before Birth; we all have confirmation of loving someone beyond measures of understanding tonight we should all as Human Beings give all we can to those families effected in Sandy Hook Elementary School. A Kindagarten Class! the environment of early innocence a place where you will never break a curse word in, a place where you hold your first shapes and learn friends and key communication skills the little ones, our angels. This is a symbiosis of human failure at it’s highest, may hands from Gods purest take them away into a world with no violence or upkeep may the drifts of time. Never forget these children of Sandy Hook and may the tears of the world go with them into the next.
In peace with harmony ~ Bornvision~
(Phys.org)—Taiwan-based Macronix has found a solution for a weakness in flash memory fadeout. A limitation of flash memory is simply that eventually it cannot be used; the more cells in the memory chips are erased, the less useful to store data. The write-erase cycles degrade insulation; eventually the cell fails. “Flash wears out after being programmed and erased about 10,000 times,” said the IEEE Spectrum. Engineers at Macronix have a solution that moves flash memory over to a new life. They propose a “self-healing” NAND flash memory solution that can survive over 100 million cycles. Ads by Google Roark Management – Computer Support & Repair Small Business Technology Solutions – www.RoarkInc.com News of their findings appears in the IEEE Spectrum, discussing flash memory’s limitations and the Taiwan company’s solution. Macronix is a manufacturer in the Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) market, with a NOR Flash, NAND Flash, and ROM products. Before their solution announcement, though, many engineers inside and outside of Macronix were aware of a life-giving workaround: heat. The snag is that applying heat was not found to be practical. As the Macronix team put it, the “long baking time is impractical for real time operation.” Although subjecting the cells to high heat could return memory, the process was problematic; the entire memory chip would need heating for hours at around 250 °C. They redesigned a flash memory chip to include onboard heaters to anneal small groups of memory cells. Applying a brief jolt of heat to a very restricted area within the chip (800 degrees C) returns the cell to a “good” state. They said that the process does not have to be run all that often. According to project member Hang‑Ting Lue, the annealing can be done infrequently and on one sector at a time while the device is inactive but still connected to the power source. It would not drain a cellphone battery, he added. Macronix estimates that the flash memory cells could beat the 10,000 cycle limit by lasting for as much as for 100 million cycles but a commercial product is not imminent. Instead, Macronix will present their approach—very high temperature in a very short time— this month at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) from December 10 to 12 in San Francisco. This is the forum for presenting breakthroughs in semiconductor and electronic device technology. Lue observed that in coming up with the approach, his team would not be able to lay claim to any new physics principle. “We could have done this ten years ago.” He said it took merely a leap of imagination into a different “regime.” For their upcoming IEEE presentation, they said they propose and demonstrate a novel self-healing flash, where a high temperature (>800°C), and short time annealing are generated by a built-in heater. “We discover that a BE-SONOS charge-trapping NAND Flash device can be quickly annealed within a few milliseconds,” they said. Their presentation is titled “Radically Extending the Cycling Endurance of Flash Memory (to > 100M Cycles) by Using Built-in Thermal Annealing to Self-heal the Stress-Induced Damage.” The authors are H.-T. Lue, P.-Y. Du, C.-P. Chen, W.-C. Chen, C.-C. Hsieh, Y.-H. Hsiao, Y.-H. Shih, and C.-Y. Lu.
A 2-year-old boy was mauled to death today after falling into the African painted dog exhibit at the Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium.
Pittsburgh police Major Crimes Lt. Kevin Kraus said the boy’s 34-year-old mother placed the child in a standing position on a wooden railing overlooking the enclosure.
“Almost immediately after that he lost his balance, fell down off the railing into the actual pit and he was immediately attacked by 11 dogs,” Lt. Kraus said.
The incident occurred at 11:48 a.m. at the Highland Park complex, according to an emergency dispatch supervisor. The zoo was shut down within a half-hour of the incident and will remain closed indefinitely.
Zoo President and Chief Executive Officer Barbara Baker said at a news conference shortly after the incident that the child fell over the wooden railing and off of a mesh barrier where the painted dogs were on display. A zoo spokeswoman and police said the wooden railing is 4 feet in height and the lower mesh barrier is 11 feet 4 inches above the open exhibit space.
PG VIDEO“The screams just kept coming and coming: ‘Someone help. Someone has to do something,’” recounted Angela Cinti, 20, of Bethel Park, who was visiting the zoo today with her boyfriend Nick Kramer, 16, of Bethel Park.
Lt. Kraus said zoo personnel responded within minutes. The first personnel on scene were able to lure seven of the dogs away from the victim and into a secure and separated area. A second set of personnel began “throwing objects and some other techniques that they use” to secure three more dogs.
He said the final dog, which was acting very aggressively toward the victim and zoo personnel, was shot multiple times by two Pittsburgh police officers and died.
Lt. Kraus said none of the people who observed the child fall into the enclosure made an attempt to go after him. The news release from zoo officials noted that keepers attempted to enter the yard but were unable to reach the child.
One ineffective technique used by zoo personnel to lure the animals away from the child was to fire “dummy tranquilizer rounds,” Lt. Kraus said.
Information released from the zoo indicated that “unfortunately, the dogs were in pack mentality and not responding.”
The child was pronounced dead at the scene 12 p.m.
The incident is under investigation by police and the zoo. Lt. Kraus said it would be inappropriate to speculate on potential charges at this time and the bureau will continue to investigate to determine if anything could have been prevented.
Police said the boy and his mother are from Pleasant Hills and were visiting the zoo with relatives, an adult and another child, at the time of the incident.
Ms. Cinti described a horrifying scene that lasted a little more than 5 minutes but seemed like hours.
“We were on our way to the polar bear exhibit when we heard the most horrible piercing screams. … Someone was begging for help, asking someone to do something,” she said. The couple ran back in the direction they came from, passing the bear exhibits. The screams continued.
As they reached the painted dog exhibit, she saw a small crowd of distressed onlookers. “One woman with a baby in the stroller was screaming that someone needed to do something,” Ms. Cinti said. She said she could see the little boy’s apparently lifeless body lying on the hill inside the exhibit. “There were three dogs: one at his head, one on the left side of his neck and another one down by his leg. … A [zoo employee] got there and hopped over a fence with a rake and he was banging … trying to distract the dogs but they wouldn’t move,” she said.
Ms. Cinti, a student at Community College of Allegheny County, tracked the time frame with her cell phone, saying she made a call at 11:49 a.m. when she and her boyfriend first headed toward the commotion. She said her cell phone shows that the call was ended five minutes and five seconds later, when a half-dozen zoo employees arrived and dispersed the crowd.
Bart DePasquale, who was at the zoo today with his two children for a birthday party, was near the tiger exhibit when he heard screams coming from the direction of the African painted dogs exhibit.
“People were yelling ‘Get away,’ and ‘Stay away,’ and it wasn’t just one person, it was an entire group of people,” said Mr. DePasquale, 29, of Fox Chapel. “The screams sounded heavily distressed and the people were using profanity. They were shouting to zoo employees.”
Mr. DePasquale and Ms. Cinti said they were told to go inside the nearest buildings where they were kept there for about a half hour.
“We were locked down in the building and told to stay inside. … We thought it was a problem with one of the animals that got loose. Then we were told it was an incident with the wild dogs and that a child had been hurt.”
When patrons were told the zoo was closed and they needed to leave, Mr. DePasquale said, “On the way out, I saw a mother who was distressed and crying and other people who couldn’t even talk about it. … People and anyone who had been close were almost in tears, were walking out glassy-eyed. That’s when multiple people told me the dogs attacked a young child.”
Ms. Baker said the zoo initially declared a “code blue,” meaning an accident involving a human had occurred. That was followed with a “code red,” meaning that there was a serious human emergency.
Ms. Baker said no decision has been made about the future of the exhibit.
The African painted dog exhibit debuted after the October 2009 birth of the pups. A surrogate mutt was drafted into service for the nine pups after their natural mother died of a ruptured uterus. In the spring of this year, nine of the 11 painted dogs escaped a section of their enclosure causing a brief shutdown of the zoo.
Ms. Baker said at that time on May 5 that the dogs got into a 1.5-acre “backup yard” not visible to the public, but the dogs were not out of their exhibit.
African painted dogs are an endangered species.
In September, the zoo announced that it had again been accredited by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums after a review of its animal care, veterinary programs, conservation, education and safety.
AZA is a nonprofit organization with a team of professionals that inspect and review each zoo or aquarium seeking accreditation. Currently 224 facilities have been recognized and approved by the organization, including eight in Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh zoo has been recognized by AZA since 1986.The accreditation commission evaluates every zoo and aquarium to determine if they meet accepted standards for safety policies and procedures, security, physical facilities, animal management and care, health and nutrition, veterinary programs, involvement in conservation and research and education programs.
Read more: http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/12309/1274415-53.stm#ixzz2BItIqZcU
A man from Thailand recently married his dead girlfriend in a bizarre wedding ceremony that also doubled as a funeral for the young bridge.
Chadil Deffy, also known as Deff Yingyuen, and his girlfriend Sarinya “Anne” Kamsook met 10 years ago at Thailand’s Eastern Asia University.
The young couple had been planning on getting married in the future, but unfortunately, Anne unexpectedly died on January 3rd in a car accident before the couple could set a date.
During the unusual ceremony, which was recorded and photographed, Deffy, dressed in an all black tuxedo, can be seen kissing his late girlfriend and putting a ring on her finger.
Touching and creepy all at the same time.
The term “Crackberry” seems silly today — and not just because consumers OD’ed on Blackberry and moved on to iDealers. The term arose in an earlier “aughts” time when Blackberry dominated the smartphone market and lawyers and execs were nearly the only ones who had them, due to their need to be able to respond to email immediately. Things have changed. Now we all need to be able to respond to email immediately. And to tweet. And to instantly share our photos on Facebook. We’re all addicted to technology now, and not just to the Blackberry. We’re “addicted” to our iPhones, and Facebook, and Twitter, and Android, and Pinterest, and iPads, and Word with Friends, and fill-in-the-blank-with-your-digital-dope-of-choice.
The sudden and dramatic advent of social-media-enabling technologies into our lives seems to be causing some mid-digital-life crises. Not only has Silicon Valley developed a guilty conscience about addicting us to screens, we the users are starting to question how technology is changing us: making us fat, making us unhealthy, making us depressed, making us lonely, making us narcissistic, and making us waste time worrying about whether it’s making us fat, unhealthy, depressed, narcissistic and/or lonely. That’s leading some users to consider abandoning the whole enterprise. My colleague Haydn Shaughnessy gave up his smartphone last year. Now, inspired by the example of former Facebooker Katherine Losse, he’s considering giving up Facebook.
I am writing with some words of caution. I used to say that “if you’re not on Facebook, it’s possible you don’t actually exist.” I think it’s time to update that, courtesy of Slashdot: Facebook abstainers will be labeled suspicious.
Is Facebook Making You Lonely? Don’t Be Stupid.
Jeff Bercovici
Forbes StaffSitting is Killing You
Erik Kain
ContributorFacebook, Twitter? Can The Decline of Social Media Come Fast Enough?
Haydn Shaughnessy
ContributorWe’re All Internet Addicts, And We’re All Screwed, Says Newsweek
Jeff Bercovici
Forbes Staff
Slashdot flagged a German news story in which an expert noted that mass murderers Anders Breivik and James Holmes both lacked much of a social media presence, leading to the conclusion, in Slashdot’s phrasing, that “not having a Facebook account could be the first sign that you are a mass murderer.”That’s a tad extreme, but I’m seeing the suggestion more and more often that a missing Facebook account raises red flags. After a woman found out via Facebook that a man who’d ‘poked’ her in real life had a long term girlfriend, she turned to digital manners advice givers Farhad Manjoo and Emily Yoffe of Slate to ask whether she should tell the girlfriend. They said she should and then went on a digression about transparent romances in the age of Facebook:
Farhad: I think we’ve mentioned it before that if you are going out with someone and they don’t have a Facebook profile, you should be suspicious.
Emily: Wait a minute. You may have mentioned that.
Farhad: I think I’ve recommended that. You know why, though? Imagine if this guy didn’t have a Facebook profile. That’s why. You should be suspicious of someone who is not making your relationship known publicly on a site like Facebook. I’m going to go on record with that.
Emily: I’m fine with people not having a Facebook page if they don’t want one. However, I think you’re right. If you’re of a certain age and you meet someone who you are about to go to bed with, and that person doesn’t have a Facebook page, you may be getting a false name. It could be some kind of red flag.
via Transcript: Facebook stalker: Should I tell a cheating guy’s girlfriend that we hooked up? – Slate Magazine.
It’s not just love seekers who worry about what the lack of a Facebook account means. Anecdotally, I’ve heard both job seekers and employers wonder aloud about what it means if a job candidate doesn’t have a Facebook account. Does it mean they deactivated it because it was full of red flags? Are they hiding something?
The idea that a Facebook resister is a potential mass murderer, flaky employee, and/or person who struggles with fidelity is obviously flawed. There are people who choose not to be Facebookers for myriad non-psychopathic reasons: because they find it too addictive, or because they hold their privacy dear, or because they don’t actually want to know what their old high school buddies are up to. My own boyfriend isn’t on Facebook and I don’t hold it against him (too much).
But it does seem that increasingly, it’s expected that everyone is on Facebook in some capacity, and that a negative assumption is starting to arise about those who reject the Big Blue Giant’s siren call. Continuing to navigate life without having this digital form of identification may be like trying to get into a bar without a driver’s license.
Case in point: Katherine Losse, the ex-Facebook employee that quit the company and the social network after cashing in her stock options, and who inspired my colleague to consider UnFacebooking, couldn’t stay off Facebook for long. She wound up opening a new account.
“You can’t get away from it. It’s everything. It’s everywhere,” she told the Washington Post. “The moment we’re in now is about trying to deal with all this technology rather than rejecting it, because obviously we can’t reject it entirely.”
Well, you can, but it might lead to your being rejected down the line too.
NEW YORK (WFAN) – Yankees general manager Brian Cashman has insisted all along the target for Mariano Rivera’s return is 2013.
“It’s all about next year,” Cashman said in early May, days after the closer injured his right knee while shagging fly balls at Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium.
But what if “the immortal” one is ready this season? Is that even possible?
Rivera’s rehab doctor seems to think so. Dr. Keith Pyne recently told the New York Post that the 42-year-old is “working his butt off” and “itching to get back.”
Though the decision will belong to the Yankees, Rivera and renowned surgeon Dr. David Altchek, Pyne said the one-month delay before surgery may have actually helped the timetable for baseball’s saves leader.
“This is a very detailed guy and he did everything right (pre-surgery),” Pyne told the Post. “He strengthened, he got range of motion. He was very functional before surgery. I don’t want to put a percentage on it, but he reduced recovery time by a lot.”
Surgery to repair Rivera’s torn ACL was put on hold until June 12 due to a blood clot in his right calf. He was able to log pre-rehab work on the knee, which also turned out to have a partial tear, not a full one, according to Pyne.
Pyne gushed over the hard-working Rivera, who he called “special” and “in the top 10 percent of athletes I have worked with.”
“He’s got everything it takes to accomplish that,” Pyne said of Rivera returning in 2012. “If I was putting money on it, I would put my money on Mo.”
The doctor did admit to the paper, “Right now, he’s shut down until next year.”
Emphasis on “right now.” The five-time World Series champion may have a fighting chance to make his mark this October after all.
Run down
Very general run down. Basically for those of you not familiar with the situation. The catholic church had a mad amount of power in irish society, ran hospitals, schools, orphanages, basically everything bar the local pub. If your son became a priest it was a massive credit to your family and possibly even better than them becoming a doctor. The local priest(s) were royalty and treated as such.
A lot of abuse both physical and sexual happened at the hand of priests who held important roles in the society. It was basically hushed up, the child who was abused was ostracised because how could a priest do such a thing? Then the priest in question was transferred to a different diocese. The police were told to ‘lose’ the reports and nothing much was ever really done and people’s lives were ruined as a result.
Fast forward a few decades, more and more people start reporting sexual abuse as adults and are taken more seriously. In the mean time the catholic church and priests have lost a lot of credit. People call for an enquiry. It’s eventually done but not without serious pressure and objection (as seen in the video) from lawyers/barristers and the church itself. Most victims are trying to be made look like they’re after money and not justice for the atrocities.
Victims were eventually compensated to a degree, but the church had done irreparable damage to those poor people and to itself, in Ireland. The government in power at the time has also been thrown out.
A quick thought about the Ozzie Guillen situation. I don’t know how anyone can be offended about another persons opinion of someone else. So what ? he killed people now cant like him ? I mean, you can argue that it doesn’t say much about me as a person if I decide to support such a notorious figure, but that too would be an opinion. For arguments sake, let’s say you were childhood friends with Hitler. I mean close friends, like ya moms knew each other , you would go over each others house and play SEGA, sleep over and eat Totinos pizzas. Then something happens to this kid, he slips shaving and ends up with a lil mustache and a Jewish bully steals his bike or whatever and he decides to kill everyone. As his childhood friend, you not gonna be happy that he’s killing everyone, but are you just gonna end your friendship because of that ? It’s not like he killed you, and he still sends you tickets to events and what not since he’s famous now. I’m just saying, there’s a lot of fucked up people in our own families that we still support. Look at this pic of Lebron and Wade…. their excuse ” He sends us cigars” – AC
A model who became a champion gravy wrestler suffered serious eye damage after being hit in the face with a monkey wrench.
Elisa Sampson, 31, was hit in the face by her ‘best friend’ Sabina English, after arriving back at her home in Rossendale, Lancashire, and finding the single mother having sex with another friend on her sofa.
When kick boxer Elisa interrupted the two with a shout of: ‘What are you doing’, laundry worker English jumped up and hit her in the face with the garage tool, which was lying nearby on the floor.
The victim received two fractures around her right eye and a gashed upper lid, which needed surgery and 17 stitches to repair it and which resulted in a ‘deformity’ on the eyelid and long-term vision problems.
At Burnley Crown Court, Lancashire, English admitted grievous bodily harm and was jailed for two years.
She was also barred from contacting Elisa for two years under a restraining order.
The fight occurred last October, a year after blonde Elisa won the 2010 World Gravy Wrestling Championship, in which she wrestled other women and men in 2,000 litres of Bisto outside a pub near her home in Rossendale.
Miss Martine Snowden, prosecuting, said Elisa, English and Paul Greenwood who were all friends, were at the wrestler’s flat enjoying a drinks party.
Trouble began when Elisa Sampson went into her living room and found English and Paul Greenwood having sex.
Miss Snowden said: ‘Elisa was cross with what she saw, unhappy about their behaviour in her lounge and asked: “What are you doing?”
‘But English jumped up and Paul Greenwood got up and grabbed the victim around the throat and pushed her into the doorway.’
English’s brother who was also at the flat punched Elisa in the face a number of times.
The prosecutor added: ‘The victim was not really able to say what happened to her after that, but fought back to some extent and ended up on the floor in the bedroom, in pain and aware her eye was seriously injured.’
The other three fled and Elisa, who was unable to see out of her eye, sought help from a neighbour who called an ambulance. She was taken to hospital, X-rayed and had surgery.
English, of Stacksteads, near Rochdale, was arrested later but made no comment in police interview. She had a conviction for battery from nine years ago.
In mitigation her counsel Ken Hind told the hearing: ‘This is her best friend. They were very close. Socially, they did everything together.
‘Unfortunately, they had been drinking. It would appear everybody who had been there had been drinking all night.
‘Mr Hind said after she struck Ms Sampson, English turned up at Greenwood’s home, not wearing any trousers or shoes, half naked, with a towel around her.
‘She had left behind her phone, handbag, shoes and other things at her friend’s flat.
‘That would clearly indicate the state she had got herself into during the course of that night.
‘She does say she doesn’t drink very much and doesn’t know why she was drinking that night, but clearly she had consumed a great deal on that particular occasion.’
Mr Hind said it would appear English and Paul Greenwood ‘got very friendly and were about to make love to each other,’ when Elisa Sampson had come back into the room, protested and was really angry.
He said Paul Greenwood started the violence. English picked up a wrench off the floor and hit the victim once with it, with ‘devastating consequences’ for her.
Wrestlemania: Competitors challenged each other to matches in rings fulls of Bisto
The barrister said Elisa Sampson was a kick boxer and a World Gravy Wrestling Champion and was clearly ‘not somebody who is not able to handle herself.’
Mr Hind added that English had shown genuine remorse.
He went on: ‘This is a lady who is devastated about the infliction of these injuries. She has reduced her drinking.’
The barrister told the court the defendant was the sole carer for her children.
He added: ‘She is devoted to her children. She supports them. She looks after them.’
Sentencing, Judge Jonathan Gibson told English he accepted there was a lack of premeditation, he he was dealing with her on the basis she at least believed she needed to defend herself and the incident was isolated.
He added: ‘I also take into account you admitted the blow with the weapon when the prosecution may have found it difficult to establish who did it.’
English’s brother Amjad Hussain, 27, who had repeatedly punched Elisa was given a 12 month sentence after he pleaded guilty to assault causing actual bodily harm.
Paul Greenwood, also of Stacksteads, was earlier sent to prison for three months after being convicted of common assault.
In the annual wrestling championships at the Rose ‘n’ Bowl pub in Stacksteads, Bisto provided 440 gallons of gravy past its best before date for the contest, which raises money for the East Lancashire Hospice.
Local fire crews are called in to hose down the participants after their bouts in the wrestling ring. Wrestlers travel from all over the UK to compete.
If you venture into a coffee shop in the coming months and see someone with a pair of futuristic glasses that look like a prop from “Star Trek,” don’t worry. It’s most likely just a Google employee testing the company’s new augmented reality glasses.
On Wednesday, Google gave people 20/20 vision about a secret augmented-reality project called Project Glass. The glasses are the company’s first foray into wearable computing.
The glasses are not yet ready for sale. Google will, however, be testing them in public.
In a post shared on Google Plus, employees from Google X, including Babak Parviz, Steve Lee and Sebastian Thrun, asked people for input about the prototype of Project Glass. Mr. Lee, a Google engineer and creator of the Google mapping software Latitude, is helping build the location-based aspects of the glasses.
“We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input,” the three employees wrote. “Please follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?”
The prototype version Google showed off on Wednesday looked like a very polished and well-designed pair of wrap-around glasses with a clear display that sits above the eye. The glasses can stream information to the lenses and allow the wearer to send and receive messages through voice commands. There is also a built-in camera to record video and take pictures.
The New York Times first wrote about the glasses in late February, describing an augmented reality display that would sit over the eye and run on the Android mobile platform.
A video released by Google on Wednesday, which can be seen below, showed potential uses for Project Glass. A man wanders around the streets of New York City, communicating with friends, seeing maps and information, and snapping pictures. It concludes with him video-chatting with a girlfriend as the sun sets over the city. All of this is seen through the augmented-reality glasses.
University of Washington
Babak Parviz, who is working on Project Glass, developed contact lenses with pixels embedded in the display.
Project Glass could hypothetically become Project Contact Lens. Mr. Parviz, who is also an associate professor at the University of Washington, specializes in bionanotechnology, which is the fusion of tiny technologies and biology. He most recently built a tiny contact lens that has embedded electronics and can display pixels to a person’s eye.
Early reports of the glasses said prototypes could look like a pair of Oakley Thumps — which are clunky and obtrusive sunglasses — but the version Google unveiled Wednesday looks more graceful. There are reportedly dozens of other shapes and variations of the glasses in the works, some of which can sit over a person’s normal eyeglasses.
People I have spoken with who have have seen Project Glass said there is a misconception that the glasses will interfere with people’s daily life too much, constantly streaming information to them and distracting from the real world. But these people say the glasses actually free people up from technology.
One person who had used the glasses said: “They let technology get out of your way. If I want to take a picture I don’t have to reach into my pocket and take out my phone; I just press a button at the top of the glasses and that’s it.”
Project Glass is one of many projects currently being built inside the Google X offices, a secretive laboratory near Google’s main Mountain View, Calif., campus where engineers and scientists are also working on robots and space elevators.
According to a recent study headed by scientists from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the University of Granada, eating commercial baked goods (fairy cakes, croissants, doughnuts, etc.) and fast food (hamburgers, hotdogs and pizza) is linked to depression.
Published in the Public Health Nutrition journal, the results reveal that consumers of fast food, compared to those who eat little or none, are 51% more likely to develop depression.
Furthermore, a dose-response relationship was observed. In other words this means that “the more fast food you consume, the greater the risk of depression,” explains Almudena Sánchez-Villegas, lead author of the study, to SINC.
The study demonstrates that those participants who eat the most fast food and commercial baked goods are more likely to be single, less active and have poor dietary habits, which include eating less fruit, nuts, fish, vegetables and olive oil. Smoking and working more than 45 hours per week are other prevalent characteristics of this group.
A long-term study
With regard to the consumption of commercial baked goods, the results are equally conclusive. “Even eating small quantities is linked to a significantly higher chance of developing depression,” as the university researcher from the Canary Islands points out.
The study sample belonged to the SUN Project (University of Navarra Diet and Lifestyle Tracking Program). It consisted of 8,964 participants that had never been diagnosed with depression or taken antidepressants. They were assessed for an average of six months, and 493 were diagnosed with depression or started to take antidepressants.
This new data supports the results of the SUN project in 2011, which were published in the PLoS One journal. The project recorded 657 new cases of depression out of the 12,059 people analysed over more than six months. A 42% increase in the risk associated with fast food was found, which is lower than that found in the current study.
Sánchez-Villegas concludes that “although more studies are necessary, the intake of this type of food should be controlled because of its implications on both health (obesity, cardiovascular diseases) and mental well-being.”
The impact of diet on mental health
Depression affects 121 million people worldwide. This figure makes it one of the main global causes of disability-adjusted life year. Further still, in countries with low and medium income it is the leading cause.
However, little is known about the role that diet plays in developing depressive disorders. Previous studies suggest that certain nutrients have a preventative role. These include group B vitamins, omega-3 fatty acids and olive oil. Furthermore, a healthy diet such as that enjoyed in the Mediterranean has been linked to a lower risk of developing depression.
