Tomorrow is Today

Historians Using Semantic Analysis To Improve Dating of Ancient Manuscripts 

Their approach is to use a subset of some 10,000 charters that are dated and to look for changes in language over time that could be used to date other documents.

For example, Tilahun and co say that the phrase “amicorum meorum vivorum et mortuorum”, which means “of my friends living and dead”, was popular between the years 1150 and 1240 but not at other times. And the phrase “Francis et Anglicis”, which is a form of address meaning “to French and English”, was phased out when England lost Normandy to the French in 1204.

However, the statistical approach is much more rigorous than simply looking for common phrases. Tilahun and co’s computer search looks for patterns in the distribution of words occurring once, twice, three times and so on. “Our goal is to develop algorithms to help automate the process of estimating the dates of undated charters through purely computational means,” they say. This approach reveals various patterns which they then test by attempting to date individual documents in this set.

They say the best approach is one known as the maximum prevalence technique. This is a statistical technique that gives a most probable date by comparing the set of words in the document with the distribution in the training set. Tilahun and co say their approach also has other applications. For example, the same technique could be used to work out authorship and to weed out forgeries, of which there are known to be a substantial number.

(via The Algorithms That Automatically Date Medieval Manuscripts | MIT Technology Review)

Researcher Calls for a Moratorium on Nanotech Patents

Joshua Pearce is a professor at Michigan Technological University, and he very explicitly argues for taking an open-source and open-access approach to nanotechnology research. But he also goes well beyond that, calling for a patent moratorium and a gutting of the law that governs tech transfers from government-funded university research.

At stake, he argues, is the growth of a field that could be generating trillions of dollars of economic activity within a few years. Pearce’s viewpoint may seem like a radical overreaction, but there are technical reasons that nanotech might be more prone to patent troubles than other fields.

Though often portrayed in science fiction as having something to do with tiny robots, nanotechnology is actually based on the premise that the familiar properties of materials in the world around us can be radically altered when those same materials are structured on nanometer length scales…

Normally, the natural properties of a material aren’t patentable. But in this case, there is often a well-defined innovation, in the form of a manufacturing process that is needed to create specific nanomaterials. And slight tweaks to the process can often have significant influences on the properties of the end product…

Pearce has found that there are over 1,600 US patents that mention single-walled carbon nanotubes. Intel has one that covers any with a diameter of less than 50nm; Rice University holds one for any material that is over 99 percent pure nanotube.

The nightmare faced by anyone attempting to innovate in that space should be obvious, but in case it wasn’t, Pearce cites an example where a small nanotech company faced legal fees that were a substantial fraction of its assets, and another where a jury hit a company with damages that were nearly twice its total value.

(via Stallman’s got company: Researcher wants nanotech patent moratorium | Ars Technica)

“Acoustic Tweezers” Manipulate Microscopic Organisms With Sound Waves

The device creates standing surface acoustic waves, or SAWs. The material that scientists want to manipulate is placed in a liquid medium and the SAWs create a pressure field in it. The SAWs are then tuned to either hold or move the material. Penn State University researchers, for the first time, used the technology to manipulate Caenorhabditis elegans, a 1-mm-long roundworm used for studying diseases and development in humans.

(via “Acoustic Tweezers” Can Manipulate Tiny Organisms Using Sound Waves | Popular Science)

Open ROV: Crowd-Funded Open Source Robotic Undersea Exploration Platform

It all started with a kid who wanted to explore a cave that was rumored to contain sunken treasure. 

OpenROV is an open source underwater robot for exploration and education. We’re a community of DIY Ocean Explorers committed to developing open source technology to empower more people to explore and study underwater environments…

We want this to be a sustainable adventure. Our plan is to get user feedback from people who build and operate OpenROV’s to make the design even better and more fitted toward the community’s needs. We plan to continue selling OpenROV Kits (and assembled OpenROVs) on our website as well as payloads and accessories for specific uses. We also hope that by building a strong community of people who understand the hardware and its applications, we’ll be able to develop ways of doing better science and exploration in more remote and interesting places.

(via OpenROV - The Open Source Underwater Robot by OpenROV — Kickstarter ht BoingBoing)

New Robotic Technique Improves Study of Brain and Neurons:

Kodandaramaiah and his colleagues built a robotic arm that lowers a glass pipette into the brain of an anesthetized mouse with micrometer accuracy. As it moves, the pipette monitors a property called electrical impedance —a measure of how difficult it is for electricity to flow out of the pipette. If there are no cells around, electricity flows and impedance is low. When the tip hits a cell, electricity can’t flow as well and impedance goes up.

The pipette takes two-micrometer steps, measuring impedance 10 times per second. Once it detects a cell, it can stop instantly, preventing it from poking through the membrane. “This is something a robot can do that a human can’t,” Boyden says.

Once the pipette finds a cell, it applies suction to form a seal with the cell’s membrane. Then, the electrode can break through the membrane to record the cell’s internal electrical activity. The robotic system can detect cells with 90 percent accuracy, and establish a connection with the detected cells about 40 percent of the time.

The researchers also showed that their method can be used to determine the shape of the cell by injecting a dye; they are now working on extracting a cell’s contents to read its genetic profile.

Karel Svoboda, a group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm campus, says he believes the technology will be widely adopted, as it removes the barriers that have prevented more researchers from using patch-clamp recording. “Humans can do it as well as the machine, but it’s extremely dull for a person. You get tired, you start to make mistakes. The robot just keeps on going,” says Svoboda, who was not part of the research team.

(via Robotic patch-clamping automates study of neurons | KurzweilAI)

The underground robot Library of the future

Research libraries are facing an unexpected challenge: too many books. Despite digitization, bound collections continue to grow. Some libraries house their stacks offsite, which can create multi-day delays between request and retrieval. Last June, the Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago, which accumulates about 150,000 books every year, introduced a system of robotic stacks capable of holding 3.5 million volumes in one seventh the space required by conventional stacks. The trick: Librarians sort books by size and not by Dewey decimal system. Engineers from Dematic, a firm that builds automated parts and storage-retrieval systems for Boeing, Ford and IBM, designed a five-story underground storage area managed by five robotic cranes. Dematic has built 17 automated library systems worldwide, but the University of Chicago’s is the most complex. The company has three more libraries under construction.

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(via futurescope)