A wireless brainwave-driven system for daily-life analyses and applications

Smartphones have become more popular in our lives. We will no longer need to use our hands to control phones to do such things as take pictures, switch music, or make phone calls in the future; we will use our brains: all that can be controlled with the use of brainwaves instead. In this study, we implement a novel system that contains the most commonly used functions of a smartphone, including camera use and music play, with an app that uses brainwave controls. In addition, we also provide an essential daily-use function which can remind us to concentrate when we drive, study, or do something important. Under the proposed system, when the wireless brainwave instrument is worn, brainwave signals transfer to the smartphone via Bluetooth automatically and execute the aforementioned functions. Experimental results indicate that the present system is effective and suitable for such applications in our lives. In the future, some more related applications will be developed with brainwave control for practical daily-life uses.     

Next-generation optical networks as a value creation platform

In this article we discuss the role of the next-generation optical networks and introduce enabling technologies that support network evolution. The role of networks is undergoing change and is becoming a platform for value creation. In addition to providing new services, networks have to accommodate steady traffic growth and guarantee profitability. We envision a next-generation optical network as the combination of an all-optical core and an adaptive shell operated by intelligent control and management software suites. Possible technological innovations are introduced in devices, transmission technologies, nodes, and networking software, which will contribute to attain a flexible and cost-effective next-generation optical network. New values will be created by the new services provided through these networks, which will change the ways we do businesses and go about our private lives.     

What ails broadband?

Consumers are offered technology for the sake of technology instead of real services. Do people really want broadband Internet access in their homes? It has been five years since household broadband Internet connections first became available. Yet only 4 percent of US homes with Internet-capable PCs have a broadband connection. In Europe, the figure is a paltry 4 percent. Why would not everyone want broadband? It delivers bits at blinding speeds and it will improve our lives in countless ways. We know that because the "techies" have told us so. And that is the problem. Most people do not care about bits per second, packet switching, and latency. They care about how the technology is going to specifically affect their lives-for the better, hopefully. It is the techies who love technology for its own sake, and they are still running the telecommunications industry, as they have for the past 120 years.     

May The Force of Light Be With You

Countless research institutions contributed to the digital, wireless, and mobile technologies that underpin our modern world. But none contributed more than Bell Telephone Laboratories, which logged an astonishing share of the key advances of the 20th century, including the transistor, the cellphone, the digital signal processor, the laser, the Unix operating system, and motionpicture sound. We no longer have Bell Labs to fund research with long-term payback. That has prompted many to wonder: Who will pay for such research now, and where will it be done? We say: Governments and corporations must share the burden, and they must do it in structured collaborations among universities, companies, and government agencies in which intellectual property is freely available to all participants. We also say, the sooner we can get started, the better. The recession has left R&D spending in free fall. This year, the global semiconductor industry is expected to spend just US $200 billion on research-$50 billion less than in 2008. And times are really tough in the semiconductor equipment industry, whose R&D operations will shrivel like a salted leech from $34 billion in 2007 down to a pitiful $10 billion in 2009.     

Top Management's View of the Purchasing Function

Thus, purchasing and materials management apparently are highly-visible activities in only about half of the companies that we studied. Computer cross-tabulations showed that purchasing and materials management played a markedly stronger role in these companies than in the others. In such companies, for example, there was a considerably higher probability that the top purchasing official could be identified as playing a role in decisions that have no immediate or direct impact on purchasing. Our subjective impressions from interviews also lead us to believe that these organizations employ the most-capable purchasing executives. Managements obviously get what they are willing to pay for. Those who want first-rate purchasing can get it by hiring the right executive and giving him the responsibility and authority needed to do his job. Other managements obviously don't care and, from our observations, they also get what they pay for.     

Bioethics & the brain

Microelectronics and medical imaging are bringing us closer to a world where mind reading is possible and blindness banished - but we may not want to live there. New ways of imaging the human brain and new developments in microelectronics are providing unprecedented capabilities for monitoring the brain in real time and even for controlling brain function. The technologies are novel, but some of the questions that they will raise are not. Electrical activity in the brain can reveal the contents of a person's memory. New imaging techniques might allow physician to detect devastating diseases long before those diseases become clinically apparent. And researchers may one day find brain activity that correlates with behavior patterns such as tendencies toward alcoholism, aggression, pedophilia, or racism. But how reliable will the information be, how should it be used, and what will it do to our notion of privacy? Meanwhile, microelectronics is making access to the brain a two-way street. The same electrical stimulation technologies that allow some deaf people to hear could be fashioned to control behavior as well. What are the appropriate limits to the use of this technology? Ethicists are only now beginning to take note of these developments in neuroscience.     

The technosphere, the biosphere, the sociosphere Their systems modeling and optimization

In this article the author presents some suggestions as to how we may bring a systems approach to bear on analyzing?and perhaps optimizing?our problems in the broad areas of the geosphere, biosphere, technosphere, and sociosphere, in other words, in the complex world in which we live today. He points out that while we enjoy the advantages of the energy and information revolutions, we must make sure that the structures of our society are flexible enough to adapt to the impact of technological change.     

如何对照系列化版本中版图图形的变动

现在单一的产品已经不能满足客户多样化的需求,所以系列化的产品比较多,而这些系列化的产品往往在版图上只有少量的差异。同时,老产品的改版次数也很多,除了逻辑上的修改可以很容易根据LVS做出来之外,很多版图上的优化或者修改就看不出来,很多时候很不方便。常用的LVL命令只能检查电路门级的不同,不能验证图形的变化。通过文中提到的方法,改版的时候可以做这项检查,了解哪些地方的版图图形发生了变化,以免误操作而修改了不需要修改的层次。文章就以一个倒相器为例,说明这个方法的操作过程。     

Beyond Deliberation: New Directions for the Study of Informal Political Conversation from a Communication Perspective

The past 2 decades have witnessed important contributions to our understanding of political conversation and its effects. However, in many ways we have yet to scratch the surface of what we need to learn. We argue that the emphasis of the literature on political conversation as a weak form of deliberation or as an afterthought from the media effects perspective has led to neglect of important aspects of the interpersonal communication process that require careful consideration. Here we briefly review the political conversation literature, followed by a detailed consideration of limitations of current research that point to new directions that more appropriately take into consideration what we know about individuals and their lives as communicators.     

Mobile application market: A developer’s perspective

Major software companies, such as Apple and Google, are disturbing the relatively safe and established actors of the mobile application business. These newcomers have caused significant structural changes in the market by imposing and enforcing their own rules for the future of mobile application developments. The implications of these changes do not only concern the mobile network operators and mobile phone manufacturers but also bring additional opportunities and constraints for current mobile application developers. Therefore, developers need to assess what their options are and how they can take advantage of these current trends. In this paper, we take a developer’s perspective in order to explore how the identified trends will impact the mobile application development markets. Our preliminary analysis leads us to suggest eight propositions which summarize our findings and can be the starting points for future empirical research.     

From the editor: Competitive intelligence

This issue of EMR is devoted to learning by observing our peers - that is, Competitive Intelligence. Such an obvious activity has only recently evolved into a management technology. We all know that imitation is the best form of flattery but do we take advantage of this insight and make an effort to sense our environment to discern what our peers are doing and how are they doing it? If we elevate our own strategic planning to include the lessons learned by our competitors then might our limited thinking be improved?     

Market and Technology Drivers for Cellular Infrastructure Modem Development

Cellular Infrastructure seems to be a fertile ground for new and sometimes not so new architectural ideas. Start ups as well as mature companies propose variants on software defined radio, reconfigurable architectures and dedicated chip sets. However the bulk of modems today have remained a combination of digital signal processors and ASICs. The demise of the DSP has been predicted many times over the last decade and yet it remains a strong part of cellular infrastructure. So what changes are really happening? In this paper we take a methodical approach to this question by first identifying the forces that are driving the industry today, and then deducing the architecture evolution implied by these forces. We discover that software defined radio and reconfigurability do indeed play a role but perhaps not in the way many suspect.     

Simple sensors provide inputs for cognitive robots

Machines and robots that have the ability to solve an everincreasing number of tasks will continue to be integrated into our everyday lives. What is still lacking for a real breakthrough is a suitable degree of fl exibility and adaptability that will allow a cognitive robot to deal with dynamically changing environments and situations that cannot be designed a priori. In this paper, we review a series of ?show-case cognitive robots? in which sensors measure di s tance, contac t , or visual data to provide a suitable input for emergent behaviors that will provide solutions to specifi c goals. In most of our simulations or experiments we created models that follow biological principles found in insects. First, we review two paradigms for animal locomotion: the Central Pattern Generator (CPG) and a refl ex-based approach. We show how simple, contact sensors are able to provide effi cient feedback for sophisticated and adaptive locomotion strategies. Next, we show how some simple (lower level) sensors can be used to train more complex (higher level) ones with data (which are initially nothing more than clusters of pixels) that associate ?meanings? to visual details by using bioinspired processing algorithms. The last example shows the emergence of cognitive schemes in spatial-temporal nonlinear neural lattices that are induced by sensory events.     

What do I do now: suggestions for the frustrated mid-career professional

Librarians, like most professionals, may arrive at a stage in their careers when they start questioning themselves about their job satisfaction and importance. The reasons are many, from not being challenged by their work to abrupt changes in the workplace dictated by management and the economy. At this stage, professionals may begin to feel unappreciated by management and not in control of their work environment. In this piece, I offer some suggestions that could help mid-career librarians to re-energize themselves and survive in a workplace that is in constant flux. How you react to the anxiety of "job disconnect" will affect the rest of your career life. Should you become more proactive at your job, increasing your responsibility and value to your institution? What does your personality have to do with how you adjust to management changes? Does tenure fit into this equation? Should you even think about changing your job at this stage of your career? What other factors could "spice" up your career? Specific strategies and options for each of these questions will be discussed.     

Der PC in zehn Jahren und seine Auswirkungen auf die Gesellschaft

In this article it is argued that in ten years’ time personal computers as we know them now won’t exist anymore — all their functions will by then be integrated in mobiles which will be our steady companions. As such, mobiles will change our lives to an enormous extent. Technology as well as consequences will be discussed in this paper.     

A Fairer, Faster Internet

The Internet is founded on a very simple premise: shared communications links are more efficient than dedicated channels that lie idle much of the time. And so we share. We share local area networks at work and neighborhood links from home. And then we share again?at any given time, a terabit backbone cable is shared among thousands of folks surfing the Web, downloading videos, and talking on Internet phones. But there?s a profound flaw in the protocol that governs how people share the Internet?s capacity. The protocol allows you to seem to be polite, even as you elbow others aside, taking far more resources than they do.     

How to Measure Software Reliability and How Not To

The paper criticises the underlying assumptions which have been made in much early modeling of computer software reliability. The following suggestions will improve modeling. 1) Do not apply hardware techniques to software without thinking carefully. Software differs from hardware in important respects; we ignore these at our peril. In particular-2) Do not use MTTF, MTBF for software, unless certain that they exist. Even then, remember that- 3) Distributions are always more informative than moments or parameters; so try to avoid commitment to a single measure of reliability. Anyway- 4) There are better measures than MTTF. Percentiles and failure rates are more intuitively appealing than means. S) Software reliability means operational reliability. Who cares how many bugs are in a program? We should be concerned with their effect on its operation. In fact- 6) Bug identification (and elimination) should be separated from reliability measurement, if only to ensure that the measurers do not have a vested interest in getting good results. 7) Use a Bayesian approach and do not be afraid to be subjective. All our statements will ultimately be about our beliefs in the quality of programs. 8) Do not stop at a reliability analysis; try to model life-time utility (or cost) of programs. 9) Now is the time to devote effort to structural models. 10) Structure should be of a kind appropriate to software, e.g. top-down, modular.     

Reproducible research in signal processing

What should we do to raise the quality of signal processing publications to an even higher level? We believe it to be crucial to maintain the precision in describing our work in publications, ensured through a high-quality reviewing process. We also believe that if the experiments are performed on a large data set, the algorithm is compared to the state-of-the-art methods, the code and/or data are well documented and available online, we will all benefit and make it easier to build upon each other's work. It is a clear win-win situation for our community: we will have access to more and more algorithms and can spend time inventing new things rather than recreating existing ones.     

From engineering management/R&D management, to the management of innovation, to exploiting and exploring over value nets: 50 years of research initiated by the IEEE-TEM

We now have the research-based insights and tools to help firms to both innovate and exploit today's success, as well as explore into the future to sustain tomorrow's success. We have deep insights into managerial and organizational dynamic capabilities. Our field has the tools to help managers diagnose to roots of engineering and innovation pathologies, as well as to take strategic action to shape the nature of technological change and in turn, innovation streams. Yet, while our field knows much about the phenomena of engineering and innovation management, we do not have substantial impact on the actual practice of engineering/innovation management.     

Technology as a catalyst for acquisitions? Year 2000 preparedness for the astute executive

• How will Year 2000 technology problems create acquisitions opportunities? • If we are heading towards deflationary times, will the Year 2000 problem further exacerbate the cycle? • What are the technology action items today, so we can be prepared to buy our competitors if the regulators shut them down? • If, due to the Millennium Bug, our targets fail as going concerns, what does it take to plug them into our technology environment? © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.