Mesmerizing Quake demake runs on a decades-old oscilloscope

Mesmerizing Quake demake runs on a decades-old oscilloscope From:  http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/29/quake-oscilloscope/

Effect of Police Body-Worn Cameras on Use of Force and Citizens’ Complaints

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-014-9236-3

The Effect of Police Body-Worn Cameras on Use of Force and Citizens’ Complaints Against the Police: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract

Objective

Police use-of-force continues to be a major source of international concern, inviting interest from academics and practitioners alike. Whether justified or unnecessary/excessive, the exercise of power by the police can potentially tarnish their relationship with the community. Police misconduct can translate into complaints against the police, which carry large economic and social costs. The question we try to answer is: do body-worn-cameras reduce the prevalence of use-of-force and/or citizens’ complaints against the police?

Methods

We empirically tested the use of body-worn-cameras by measuring the effect of videotaping police–public encounters on incidents of police use-of-force and complaints, in randomized-controlled settings. Over 12 months, we randomly-assigned officers to “experimental-shifts” during which they were equipped with body-worn HD cameras that recorded all contacts with the public and to “control-shifts” without the cameras (n = 988). We nominally defined use-of-force, both unnecessary/excessive and reasonable, as a non-desirable response in police–public encounters. We estimate the causal effect of the use of body-worn-videos on the two outcome variables using both between-group differences using a Poisson regression model as well as before-after estimates using interrupted time-series analyses.

Results

We found that the likelihood of force being used in control conditions were roughly twice those in experimental conditions. Similarly, a pre/post analysis of use-of-force and complaints data also support this result: the number of complaints filed against officers dropped from 0.7 complaints per 1,000 contacts to 0.07 per 1,000 contacts. We discuss the findings in terms of theory, research methods, policy and future avenues of research on body-worn-videos.

Workshop on Light Field Imaging to be held at Stanford on February 12, 2015

Workshop on Light Field Imaging 

February 12, 2015 

MacKenzie Conference Room, Huang Engineering Center

Stanford University

  

We invite you to join us on February 12, 2015 at Stanford University to explore the exciting area of research and product development in Light Field Imaging. 

The Workshop on Light Field Imaging will include a summary of the state-of-the-art research and a glimpse into the future of technologies designed to capture and create light rays in a three dimensional scene. Participants will leave with a better understanding of the concept of a light field as it is used in geometric optics, computer vision, computer graphics and computational photography.  The Workshop will include talks that summarize recent advances in light field cameras and light field displays, as well as applications of these technologies in entertainment, consumer devices, industrial applications and medical imaging. The Workshop will also include an interactive session with experts from industry and academics addressing questions about the killer applications and challenges in product development, new areas for research and graduate training, and the future of light field imaging.   There will also a technology demo session that will include presentations by research labs and startup companies.   

You can now register for the Workshop on Light Field Imaging that will be held at Stanford on February 12, 2014.  Registration is limited to 200 people, and we are rapidly approaching this limit, so you should register now if you intend to participate.

Visit our website to get updates on the program.  A list of companies that will participating in the Interactive Demo Session will be published in the coming weeks.

If you would like to receive future announcements about this event, be sure to subscribe to our mailing list at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/scien_events

lensfree holographic on-chip microscopy

Actually this shouldn't be that hard to do.  It is computational photography at it's finest.

It should be able to completely put to shame normal optical microscopes.
It is volumetric and 3D viewable and could even go multi-spectral. 

There's no information on the specifics of the optics, but the sample must go directly on the imaging chip or very close to it.

So cleaning and reuse are my only questions.

Lens-free microscope can detect cancer at the cellular level

UCLA researchers develop device that can do the work of pathology lab microscopes

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/lens-free-microscope-can-detect-cancer-at-the-cellular-level


 The latest invention is the first lens-free microscope that can be used for high-throughput 3-D tissue imaging — an important need in the study of disease.

“This is a milestone in the work we’ve been doing,” said Ozcan, who also is the associate director of UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute. “This is the first time tissue samples have been imaged in 3D using a lens-free on-chip microscope.”

The device works by using a laser or light-emitting-diode to illuminate a tissue or blood sample that has been placed on a slide and inserted into the device. A sensor array on a microchip — the same type of chip that is used in digital cameras, including cellphone cameras — captures and records the pattern of shadows created by the sample.

The device processes these patterns as a series of holograms, forming 3-D images of the specimen and giving medical personnel a virtual depth-of-field view. An algorithm color codes the reconstructed images, making the contrasts in the samples more apparent than they would be in the holograms and making any abnormalities easier to detect.

Wide-field computational imaging of pathology slides using lens-free on-chip microscopy

Alon Greenbaum, Yibo Zhang,  Alborz Feizi, Ping-Luen Chung, Wei Luo, Shivani R. Kandukuri and Aydogan Ozcan

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/6/267/267ra175

Optical examination of microscale features in pathology slides is one of the gold standards to diagnose disease. However, the use of conventional light microscopes is partially limited owing to their relatively high cost, bulkiness of lens-based optics, small field of view (FOV), and requirements for lateral scanning and three-dimensional (3D) focus adjustment. We illustrate the performance of a computational lens-free, holographic on-chip microscope that uses the transport-of-intensity equation, multi-height iterative phase retrieval, and rotational field transformations to perform wide-FOV imaging of pathology samples with comparable image quality to a traditional transmission lens-based microscope. The holographically reconstructed image can be digitally focused at any depth within the object FOV (after image capture) without the need for mechanical focus adjustment and is also digitally corrected for artifacts arising from uncontrolled tilting and height variations between the sample and sensor planes. Using this lens-free on-chip microscope, we successfully imaged invasive carcinoma cells within human breast sections, Papanicolaou smears revealing a high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion, and sickle cell anemia blood smears over a FOV of 20.5 mm². The resulting wide-field lens-free images had sufficient image resolution and contrast for clinical evaluation, as demonstrated by a pathologist’s blinded diagnosis of breast cancer tissue samples, achieving an overall accuracy of ~99%. By providing high-resolution images of large-area pathology samples with 3D digital focus adjustment, lens-free on-chip microscopy can be useful in resource-limited and point-of-care settings.

Toward giga-pixel nanoscopy on a chip: a computational wide-field look at the nano-scale without the use of lenses

Euan McLeod,   Wei Luo,   Onur Mudanyali,  Alon Greenbaum and  Aydogan Ozcan  

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2013/lc/c3lc50222h#!divAbstract


The development of lensfree on-chip microscopy in the past decade has opened up various new possibilities for biomedical imaging across ultra-large fields of view using compact, portable, and cost-effective devices. However, until recently, its ability to resolve fine features and detect ultra-small particles has not rivalled the capabilities of the more expensive and bulky laboratory-grade optical microscopes. In this Frontier Review, we highlight the developments over the last two years that have enabled computational lensfree holographic on-chip microscopy to compete with and, in some cases, surpass conventional bright-field microscopy in its ability to image nano-scale objects across large fields of view, yielding giga-pixel phase and amplitude images. Lensfree microscopy has now achieved a numerical aperture as high as 0.92, with a spatial resolution as small as 225 nm across a large field of view e.g., >20 mm². Furthermore, the combination of lensfree microscopy with self-assembled nanolenses, forming nano-catenoid minimal surfaces around individual nanoparticles has boosted the image contrast to levels high enough to permit bright-field imaging of individual particles smaller than 100 nm. These capabilities support a number of new applications, including, for example, the detection and sizing of individual virus particles using field-portable computational on-chip microscopes.

Michael Rubinstein: See invisible motion, hear silent sounds. Cool? Creepy? We can't decide | Talk Video | TED.com

http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_rubinstein_see_invisible_motion_hear_silent_sounds_cool_creepy_we_can_t_decide


Sent from my iPad

Facebook Deploys Robots to Save Blu-ray From Extinction

http://www.wired.com/2014/02/facebook-robots/

BPG image format judged awesome versus JPEG

http://phys.org/news/2014-12-bpg-image-format-awesome-jpeg.html#ajTabs

Netflix CEO Predicts Broadcast TV Will Die By 2030

http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/netflix-ceo-says-broadcast-tv-will-dead-16-years

Fwd: WORKING FOR IMDB SANTA MONICA!!

I have permission to share this.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Morales, Gerry
Subject: WORKING FOR IMDB SANTA MONICA!!

Hi John ,

My name is Gerry Morales. I am a recruiter on the IMDB team in Santa Monica, California. We will be holding an interview event on January 9th to interview Software Development Engineers who would be interested working for IMDB. We are looking for software developers that are passionate about writing high-quality code, solving big technical problems and delivering awesome customer experiences. We use a range of technologies and programming languages including Amazon Web Services, Java, HTML5/CSS3/JQuery and git. 

If you are excited about building the next generation of digital products that will be used by millions of people worldwide, please respond with your resume attached. I will then add your resume into our system and reach out to you to discuss the next steps in the process.

I look forward to hearing from you!

http://www.imdb.com/imdbjobs/

Gerry Morales  |  Technical Recruiter  at IMDB

morgerry@amazon.com

http://m.slashdot.org/story/211197

Sony Leaks Reveal Hollywood Is Trying To Break DNS

from the scorched-net-policy dept.

schwit1 sends this report from The Verge:Most anti-piracy tools take one of two paths: they either target the server that's sharing the files (pulling videos off YouTube or taking down sites like The Pirate Bay) or they make it harder to find (delisting offshore sites that share infringing content). But leaked documents reveal a frightening line of attack that's currently being considered by the MPAA: What if you simply erased any record that the site was there in the first place? To do that, the MPAA's lawyers would target the Domain Name System that directs traffic across the internet.

The tactic was first proposed as part of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2011, but three years after the law failed in Congress, the MPAA has been looking for legal justification for the practice in existing law and working with ISPs like Comcast to examine how a system might work technically. If a takedown notice could blacklist a site from every available DNS provider, the URL would be effectively erased from the internet. No one's ever tried to issue a takedown notice like that, but this latest memo suggests the MPAA is looking into it as a potentially powerful new tool in the fight against piracy.

Hollywood movies follow a mathematical formula

http://phys.org/news185781475.html

Leaked Emails Reveal MPAA Plans To Pay Elected Officials To Attack Google

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141212/12142629419/leaked-emails-reveal-mpaa-plans-to-pay-elected-officials-to-attack-google.shtml

from the holy-fuck dept

Okay, it's no secret that the MPAA hates Google. It doesn't take a psychology expert to figure that out. But in the last few days, some of the leaks from the Sony Pictures hack have revealed the depths of that hatred, raising serious questions about how the MPAA abuses the legal process in corrupt and dangerous ways. The most serious charge -- unfortunately completely buried by this report at The Verge -- is that it appears the MPAA and the major Hollywood studios directly funded various state Attorneys General in their efforts to attack and shame Google. Think about that for a second.

There's a lot of background here that's important (beyond just the MPAA really hates Google). First, as you know, the MPAA has certainly not given up on its SOPA desire to get certain websites completely blocked. The leaked emails reveal a lot more about that (which we'll get to). Second, a year ago, the MPAA hired a pitbull of an anti-piracy lawyer in naming Steve Fabrizio its General Counsel. Fabrizio has spent the last decade and a half or so deeply involved in litigating a bunch of anti-piracy battles at both the RIAA and the MPAA/RIAA's favorite big law firm, Jenner & Block. This is not a guy you hire if you're looking to innovate. This is a guy you hire if you want to get into knock-down, dirty legal fights.

Third, there is the role of state Attorneys General. A recent NY Times article detailed how lobbyists have figured out ways to effectively "lobby" state Attorneys General to do their bidding. Frequently, this is around getting the state AGs to drop investigations (and potential lawsuits) against companies. The article is somewhat eye-opening, as it's hard to distinguish much of what's discussed from straight up bribery. There is talk of lavish events, travel and dinners all paid for by corporate lobbyists for state AGs, often followed soon after with dropped, or reduced investigations. In one case, an AG told staff not to start an investigation into a public company without first getting his approval. Campaign funding is a big part of it as well, as these lobbyists dump lots of money into AG campaigns. And it's no secret that the state Attorney General position is often seen as a stepping stone to a Governorship or US Senate job.

We've discussed in the past that state Attorneys General are often the biggest grandstanders, as their main goal in certain investigations seems to be about generating headlines for themselves, rather than any real legal basis. More than four years ago, we wrote about Topix CEO Chris Tolles' experience being hounded by state Attorneys' General so they could get a bunch of headlines out of something in which everyone admitted Topix wasn't actually doing anything illegal. Along those lines, we've noted that popular tech companies have increasingly been a target for state AGs -- because they're almost sure to generate headlines. We've also noted that state AGs have been pushing for changes to federal laws, like Section 230 of the CDA, to allow them to further go after big tech companies for things like actions of their users.

Not surprisingly, Google has been a popular target for some state AGs. In the past, we've written about state Attorneys General from Nebraska and Oklahoma blaming Google for videos made by users, and about Texas' Attorney General going after Google for supposed antitrust violations(based on the same claims that the FTC later dropped entirely). But the state Attorney General with the biggest chip on his shoulder for Google has absolutely been Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, who seemed to think that it was Google's fault that he could find counterfeit goods via search. A few months later, he was back blaming Google for infringement online as well.

This was no accident. What's come out of the Sony Pictures Leak is not just that the MPAA was buddying up to state Attorneys General, but that the MPAA was funding some of this activity and actively supporting the investigation. The leaked emails reveal that rather than seeing that NY Times article about corporate/AG corruption as a warning sign, the MPAA viewed it as a playbook. But not for preventing investigations but for encouraging and funding them. This appears to goway beyond that NY Times article. This isn't campaign donations or inviting AGs to speak at lavish events and paying for the travel. This is flat out paying AGs to investigate Google (even on issues unrelated to copyright infringement) and then promising to get extra press attention to those articles.

Here's the Verge's summary of a key email (which the Verge doesn't even seem to realize why it's so damning):

May 8, 2014: Fabrizio to group. "We’ve had success to date in motivating the AGs; however as they approach the CID phase, the AGs will need greater levels of legal support." He outlines two options, ranging from $585,000 to $1.175 million, which includes legal support for AGs (through Jenner) and optional investigation and analysis of ("ammunition / evidence against") Goliath. Both options include at least $85,000 for communication (e.g. "Respond to / rebut Goliath's public advocacy, amplify negative Goliath news, [and] seed media stories based on investigation and AG actions.").

"Goliath" is the MPAA's rather transparent "codename" for Google. CID stands for a "civil investigative demand" -- which is a form of an administrative subpoena, demanding information from a company, related to an investigation.

What seems to come out from these emails is that the MPAA, in coordination with the major Hollywood studios, agreed to willfully pay tons of money indirectly to state AGs (and Hood in particular) to get them to investigate Google (using the time and labor of the MPAA's favorite law firm -- and the one that Fabrizio just left). That goes way beyond anything discussed in that NY Times articles, and certainly smacks of serious illegality. It's difficult to see how this isn't bribing a public official to attack a company they dislike.

Not only that, but it shows that the MPAA and the studios were aware of Hood's plans well before they happened, suggesting that he or his office has been coordinating with Hollywood on their plans and that the specific CIDs are actually written by the MPAA's lawyers themselves:

A report from the previous February suggests that the Goliath group drafted civil investigative demands (similar to a subpoena) to be issued by the attorneys general. "Some subset of AGs (3-5, but Hood alone if necessary) should move toward issuing CIDs before mid-May," the email says.

And, more recent emails (from just in October) show that they know that another CID is apparently coming and that the MPAA intends to use that CID for negotiating leverage against Google. This follows a claim that Google was pissed off at the MPAA for mocking its recent search algorithm changes to further push down sites that may link to infringing materials (it's not like we didn't warn everyone that the MPAA wouldn't be satisfied with Google's changes). Either way, the MPAA's Fabrizio brushes off concerns that Google has, telling the studios not to worry, that Google should be more willing to talk after Hood sends out his next CID:

After a dispute over Google’s most recent anti-piracy measures in October, Fabrizio suggested further action may be yet to come. "We believe Google is overreacting — and dramatically so. Their reaction seems tactical (or childish)," the email reads. "Following the issuance of the CID [civil investigative demand] by [Mississippi attorney general Jim] Hood (which may create yet another uproar by Google), we may be in a position for more serious discussions with Google."

While the Verge report is focused on the "sexy" topic of the MPAA having an "anti-Google' (er... "Goliath") working group, the real story here is that it appears that this infatuation with taking down Google has extended to funding state politicians in their investigations and attacks on Google, even when it's on totally unrelated issues (the initial CID was about counterfeit drugs -- which is an issue that the MPAA likes to mock Google over by totally misrepresenting some actual, but historical, bad behavior).

And beyond that, the MPAA is showing that part of its plan is to fund "media stories based on" the Attorneys General investigations. Remember, so much AG activity these days is driven by what's going to get them into the headlines. Setting aside nearly $100,000 from the MPAA to get a state AG some headlines for an investigation paid for by the MPAA, using administrative subpoenas written by the MPAA... all designed to attack a company they don't like (which actually has done pretty much exactly what they'd been asking for in downranking sites that lead to infringing works), is really stunning.

I get that it's natural to dislike a company or organization that has undermined your business model. It happens. But there are different ways to respond to it. One is to innovate and compete. Another is to use the legal process to throw hurdles in their path. This is the distinction between "market entrepreneurs" and "political entrepreneurs" that Andy Kessler has described. What the MPAA appears to have done in the last few months, however, certainly suggests that the organization, with the help of the major studios, went beyond just lobbying and political pressure, to actually funding elected officials to try to attack a company they didn't like. And, at the very least, this also has to raise serious questions about Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and who he takes orders from. Is he really "protecting" the people of Mississippi? Or is he focused on gobbling up Hollywood's money and promotion?

Bluetooth Handset Gloves - talk to the hand.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/f2c9/

A 1,000-piece CMYK Color Gamut Jigsaw Puzzle

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/12/1000-colors-jigsaw-puzzle/

Catherine Crump: The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track about you

http://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_crump_the_small_and_surprisingly_dangerous_detail_the_police_track_about_you




A very unsexy-sounding piece of technology could mean that the police know where you go, with whom, and when: the automatic license plate reader. These cameras are innocuously placed all across small-town America to catch known criminals, but as lawyer and TED Fellow Catherine Crump shows, the data they collect in aggregate could have disastrous consequences for everyone the world over.

FLIR Lepton minature Thermal Imager & Breakout Board

Flir Lepton Thermal Camera Breakout
https://www.tindie.com/products/PureEngineering/flir-lepton-thermal-camera-breakout-2/



FLIR Lepton Thermal Imager - Batch 4. Now with Breakout Board!
https://groupgets.com/campaigns/49-flir-lepton-thermal-imager-batch-4-now-with-breakout-board

The FLIR Lepton™ is the most compact longwave infrared (LWIR) camera core exclusively available here in small quantities for prototypers, makers, and hobbyists. It packs a resolution of 80 × 60 pixels into a camera body that is smaller than a dime. This Lepton is shutterless with a 51deg HFOV lens.


SystemPlus Publishes FLIR Lepton Reverse Engineering
http://image-sensors-world.blogspot.com/2014/12/systemplus-publishes-flir-lepton.html

Amazing Technology Invented By MIT - Tangible Media

Tested In-Depth: Structure Sensor 3D Scanner

Grand Jury Indicts The Man Who Filmed Eric Garner's Death

http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/highlight/grand-jury-indicts-the-man-who-filmed-eric-garners-death/548080ce78c90a91fb00034b

 

Grand Jury Indicts The Man Who Filmed Eric Garner's Death

 

On Wednesday, a Staten Island grand jury decided not to return an indictment for the police officer who put Eric Garner in a chokehold shortly before his death. A different Staten Island grand jury was less...

Class Says Comcast Piggybacks on Homes to Set Up Public Network

FROM: http://www.courthousenews.com/2014/12/08/class-says-comcast-piggybacks-on-homes-to-set-up-public-network.htm


Class Says Comcast Piggybacks on Homes to Set Up Public Network


SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - A federal class action accuses Comcast of surreptitiously making its residential customers bear the cost of using their wireless routers to set up a secondary public wi-fi network.
Lead plaintiff Toyer Grear sued Comcast on Dec. 4.
He claims that Comcast saw its millions of residential customers as an opportunity to compete with major cellular carriers such as AT&T and Verizon. Though Comcast does not have cellular towers, its customers' households "could be used as infrastructure for a national wi-fi network," the complaint states.
So Comcast supplied its residential customers with new wireless routers equipped to broadcast their home wi-fi signals and additional wi-fi signals for the public, selectively activating the routers to broadcast the secondary public network (the "Xfinity wifi hotspot") across the country, with the goal of enabling 8 million hotspots by the end of 2014, according to the lawsuit.
"Public" in this case does not mean "free," but that access is available to anyone who pays to use a particular wi-fi hotspot.
Grear claims that Comcast does not request customers' authorization to use their residential equipment and networks for public use.
"Indeed, Comcast's contract with its customers is so vague that it is unclear as to whether Comcast even addresses this practice at all," the lawsuit claims.
In using its customers' home networks to build a national network, Comcast
"has externalized the costs of its national wi-fi network onto its customers," Grear says in the complaint.
He claims that the new routers use much more electricity than regular routers, and that this is "a cost borne by the unwitting customer."
Engineers at Speedify, a technology company that increases Internet connection speeds, ran tests on Comcast's new routers and determined that "Comcast will be pushing tens of millions of dollars per month of the electricity bills needed to run their nationwide public wi-fi network onto consumers," the complaint states.
Based on the results of this study, Grear claims, Comcast's residential customers can expect electricity cost increases as great as 30 to 40 percent.
In addition, Grear claims, the Xfinity hotspots slow down the speed of customers' home wi-fi networks, since these home networks are available for use by strangers.
They also expose Comcast's residential customers' data to increased privacy and security risks, according to the complaint.
Comcast declined to comment.
Grear seeks certification of a class of all households in the United States that have subscribed to Comcast's Xfinity Internet Service, and a subclass of all California households that have subscribed to the service.
He also seeks declaratory judgment, an injunction, restitution and damages for violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act and California's Unfair Competition Law.He is represented by Gillian Wade and Sara Avila, with Milstein Adelman, of Santa Monica.

(Tele)Visions of Tomorrow

This is a great read:
(Tele)Visions of Tomorrow
    http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/worldsfair/enter-world-tomorrow-futurama-and-beyond/essay/essay-kalan-television

The introduction of television to the American public has long been one of the most-discussed aspects of the 1939 World's Fair. But did anyone there realize how important this moment would be?

The Official Guide Book of the New York World's Fair expends only two sentences on television. More space is given to Nature’s Mistakes, a barnyard freak show featuring a bull with “skin so transparent that the veins are visible.” It’s possible that the editors, confronted with crazy items like Elektro the Moto-Man and a transatlantic “rocket gun,” assumed television was just another pie-in-the-sky fantasy.



Introducing Television at the Fair
http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/worldsfair/enter-world-tomorrow-futurama-and-beyond/essay/essay-simon-television

The 1939 World’s Fair in New York was the coming-out party for television. For almost two decades before, networks and entrepreneurs were experimenting with the new electronic technology, hoping to perfect a mass communication system that would surpass radio.

ZANO, A Palm-Size Nano Drone With Built-In HD Video Capture

http://laughingsquid.com/zano-a-palm-size-nano-drone-with-built-in-hd-video-capture/

Computer Classic: "The Incredible Machine" 1968 Western Electric AT&T 15min

New optical technique extracts audio from video

http://phys.org/news/2014-12-walls-optical-technique-audio-video.html


Those formerly silent walls can "talk" now: Researchers have demonstrated a simple optical technique by which audio information can be extracted from high-speed video recordings. The method uses an image-matching process based on vibration from sound waves, and is reported in an article appearing in the November issue of the journal Optical Engineering, published by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics.

"One of the intriguing aspects of the paper is the ability to recover spoken words from a video of objects in the room," said journal Associate Editor Reiner Eschbach, a Research Fellow at Xerox Corp. "The paper shows that the sound creates minute vibrations in objects and that these vibrations ― given the right equipment ― can be picked up from a video signal. This is an interesting foray into a new application space and will, in my view, trigger interesting research in the field,"

The article, "Audio extraction from silent high-speed video using an optical technique," was authored by Zhaoyang Wang, Hieu Nguyen, and Jason Quisberth of the Department of Engineering of the Catholic University of America, and is available from the SPIE Digital Library.

The technique is based on the fact that sound waves are mechanical waves that cause air to vibrate when traveling, the paper notes. That vibration through air can cause vibration of objects located in its traveling path, especially if the objects are lightweight, thin, and flexible, such as a piece of paper. The vibrations, although usually with small amplitudes, can be detected and analyzed algorithmically, and audio reconstructed based on those calculations.

The authors used a subset-based image-correlation approach to detect the motions of points on the surface of an object, capturing target images with a high-speed camera and applying the Gauss-Newton algorithm and a few other measures to achieve very fast and highly accurate image matching. Because the detected vibrations are directly related to sound waves, a simple model was used to reconstruct the original audio information of the sound waves.

While other recent work in the area reports on more sophisticated techniques to compute motion signals, the authors chose a simpler image-matching approach to measure vibration. Because light can travel through air considerably farther than sound and can pass through glass, they anticipate that the technique may find applications such as the passive detection of conversations inside of a building from a far distance, Wang said. "We are currently improving the technique to increase its accuracy and sensitivity, make the measurements in real-time, and remove interference from other sources."

Explore further: Algorithm recovers speech from vibrations of potato-chip bag filmed through soundproof glass

FIREFOX VR - Experimental FIREFOX builds with VR interfaces.

FIREFOX VR

EXPERIMENTAL FIREFOX BUILDS WITH VR INTERFACES.

http://mozvr.com/


MozVR is our open lab, a VR website about VR websites, where we share experiments and code.

You will need a VR-enabled build of Firefox for Mac or PC, and an Oculus Rift headset. Support for additional devices coming soon. MozVR will also work with VR-enabled builds of Chromium. Once you have your VR-enabled browser and Rift, check our quick Read Me for configuration tips. On your first run, pressing "Enter VR" will prompt you to grant Fullscreen permission. Grant it and check the "Remember" option, if one is present. You will then be able to experience MozVR.

Paolo Favaro: Portable Light Field Imaging: Extended Depth of Field, Ali...

From ICCP11 Hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute

April 8, 2011



Abstract:



Portable light field cameras have demonstrated capabilities beyond conventional cameras. In a single snapshot, they enable digital image refocusing, i.e., the ability to change the camera focus after taking the snapshot, and 3D reconstruction. We show that they also achieve a larger depth of field while maintaining the ability to reconstruct detail at high resolution. More interestingly, we show that their depth of field is essentially inverted compared to regular cameras. Crucial to the success of the light field camera is the way it samples the light field, trading off spatial vs. angular resolution, and how aliasing affects the light field. We present a novel algorithm that estimates a full resolution sharp image and a full resolution depth map from a single input light field image. The algorithm is formulated in a variational framework and it is based on novel image priors designed for light field images. We demonstrate the algorithm on synthetic and real images captured with our own light field camera, and show that it can outperform other computational camera systems.



Bio:



Paolo Favaro received the D.Ing. degree from Universita di Padova, Italy in 1999, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 2002 and 2003 respectively. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the computer science department of the University of California, Los Angeles and subsequently in Cambridge University, UK. Dr. Favaro is now lecturer (assistant professor) in Heriot-Watt University and Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His research interests are in computer vision, computational photography, machine learning, signal and image processing, estimation theory, inverse problems and variational techniques. He is also a member of the IEEE Society.

Rambus Lensless Camera Demo

From: http://image-sensors-world.blogspot.com/2014/12/rambus-lensless-camera-demo.html

Rambus publishes a Youtube video with Patrick Gill showing the company's lensless camera operation:

Dr. Patrick Gill demonstrates a diffraction-based lensless imaging system

 Meanwhile, it appears that Rambus somewhat downplays its image sensor activities in its recent investor presentations. For example, in the Nov. 2014 presentation, imaging appears in only one slide #29:

Gangnam Style Has Been Viewed So Many Times It Broke YouTube’s Code

PSY’s Gangnam Style has been viewed so many times that it broke YouTube’s view counter, making it the very first video to break the reaches of a 32-bit integer.

The Digital Sex Industry

Soon, virtual reality is going to crash into our lives in a way we never
even imagined. Though dating and masturbating have long been
commandeered by the web, it's only been as a kind of middleman. Now
we're nearing the possibility of falling in love with your computer, as
meeting your dream partner could be as easy as slipping on Oculus
Rift—the most advanced virtual reality headset in the world.


The Digital Love Industry (Full Length)

Intel post promotional videos for its 3D camera-based RealSense

Another Two Video Promotions from Intel
 

Intel keeps posting promotional videos for its 3D camera-based RealSense technology. The first one shows refocusing capability similar to Lytro,  Pelican Imaging and some Nokia products:

second video demos 3D scanning:



http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/realsense-overview.html


https://software.intel.com/en-us/realsense/home    Intel® RealSense™ Developer Kit.

Haptic holograms let you touch the void in VR - New Scientist

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26640-haptic-holograms-let-you-touch-the-void-in-vr.html

Obama Calls For $75 Million In Funding for 50,000 Police Body Cameras

Today President Obama proposed $263 million in funding for law enforcement to help avoid another disaster like the ongoing mess in Ferguson, Missouri.


http://gizmodo.com/obama-to-provide-75-million-in-funding-f…

David Brin SAID:

Cop cams... a trend predicted way back in 1997... were resisted and resisted -- till they suddenly became a no-brainer obvious. Now: The Obama Administration is proposing " $75 million for a Body Worn Cameras Partnership, which would help states purchase and store the new equipment." Next step of course (also circa 1997)? Often-stopped youths will step out of the car armed... with their own cameras.