http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11356853/Student-trapped-in-bizarre-deja-vu-time-loop-for-8-years.html

'Groundhog Day' student trapped in bizarre déjà vu time loop for 8 yearsA 23-year-old British man has become the victim one of the strangest cases of déjà vu ever recorded in medical history

The astronomical clock from the town hall in Old Town Square, Prague Photo: © Iain Masterton / Alamy

By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor

10:21AM GMT 20 Jan 2015

A student was forced to drop out of university after a bizarre case of chronic déjà vu left him unable to lead a normal life.

The 23-year-old even stopped watching TV, listening to the radio, or reading newspapers or magazines because he believed he had seen it all before.

He told doctors that he was "trapped in a time loop" and said he felt as if he was reliving the past moment by moment.

Details of the case have been revealed in a report published by the Journal of Medical Case Reports.

Doctors are baffled because the man does not suffer from any of the neurological conditions usually seen in people who normally suffer frequently from déjà vu - which is French for "already seen". *** silly statement – the issue is clearly neurological – in that even psychological problems are sourced at the neurological level ***

It is thought that panic attacks may have triggered the phenomenon. The condition may also have been exacerbated by LSD.

Report author Dr Christine Wells, a psychology expert from Sheffield Hallam University, said it could be the first case of a person experiencing persistent déjà vu stemming from anxiety.

** we previously built a déjà vu generator at AFIT – it took advantage of our ability to sometimes reliably predict the next saccade location and a fast updating of a display monitor **

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http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/facebook-offers-artificial-intelligence-tech-to-open-source-group/?ref=technology&_r=0

acebook Offers Artificial Intelligence Tech to Open Source GroupBy QUENTIN HARDY JANUARY 16, 2015 11:30 AM January 16, 2015 11:30 am 3 Comments

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Mark Zuckerber, chief executive of Facebook. By releasing tools for computers to researchers, Facebook will also be able to accelerate its own Artificial Intelligence projects.CreditJose Miguel Gomez/Reuters

Facebook wants the world to see a lot more patterns and predictions.

The company said Friday that it was donating for public use several powerful tools for computers, including the means to go through huge amounts of data, looking for common elements of information. The products, used in a so-called neural network of machines, can speed pattern recognition by up to 23.5 times, Facebook said.

The tools will be donated to Torch, an open source software project that is focused on a kind of data analysis known as deep learning. Deep learning is a type of machine learning that mimics how scientists think the brain works, over time making associations that separate meaningless information from meaningful signals.

Companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter use Torch to figure out things like the probable contents of an image, or what ad to put in front of you next.

“It’s very useful for neural nets and artificial intelligence in general,” said Soumith Chintala, a research engineer at Facebook AI Research, Facebook’s lab for advanced computing. He is also one of the creators of the Torch project. Aside from big companies, he said, Torch can be useful for “start-ups, university labs.”

Certainly, Facebook’s move shows a bit of enlightened self-interest. By releasing the tools to a large community of researchers and developers, Facebook will also be able to accelerate its own AI projects. Mark Zuckerberg has previously cited such open source tactics as his reason for starting the Open Compute Initiative, an open source

effort to catch up with Google, Amazon and Yahoo on building big data centers.

Torch is also useful in computer vision, or the recognition of objects in the physical world, as well as question answering systems. Mr. Chintala said his group had fed a machine a simplified version of “The Lord of the Rings” novels and the computer can understand and answer basic questions about the book.

“It’s very early, but it shows incredible promise,” he said. Facebook can already look at some sentences, he said, and figure out what kind of hashtag should be associated with the words, which could be useful in better understanding people’s intentions. Such techniques could also be used in determining the intention behind an Internet search, something Google does not do on its regular search.

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http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/facebook-looks-to-the-workplace-for-future-growth/?ref=technology

acebook Looks to the Workplace for Future GrowthBy VINDU GOEL JANUARY 14, 2015 8:49 PM January 14, 2015 8:49 pm 5 Comments

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If you do want a bit of privacy, you can create a group for, say, your team, to chat about projects, or use Facebook Messenger to send instant messages to specific individuals.Credit

Facebook doesn’t just want to be the world’s leading social network for people to communicate about their personal lives. It wants to host workplace chatter, too.

But can a consumer company that thrives on people sharing early and often make friends with businesses more interested in keeping information on a need-to-know basis?

The Silicon Valley company said on Wednesday that it had begun formal pilot testing of Facebook at Work, a corporate edition of its service intended to be a social network for individual companies and organizations.

“It’s the Facebook everyone knows and loves but adapted to work,” Lars Rasmussen, the director of engineering for the product, said in an interview.

The new service, whose existence was disclosed last year, is not quite regular Facebook. Your employer creates your account, which is

separate from any personal Facebook account you may have. You don’t “friend” people — everyone in the company is automatically in your network. Everything you post on your timeline is visible to everyone else on the corporate network, and your company owns all the content that you post.

If you do want a bit of privacy, you can create a group for, say, your team, to chat about projects, or use Facebook Messenger to send instant messages to specific individuals.

A news feed sorts through posts it thinks are relevant to you, based on familiar factors like how often you interact with the person posting it, who you specifically want to follow and how many comments or likes a particular item is getting. “We keep track of who in the past you’ve been interested in,” Mr. Rasmussen said.

Facebook, which has 1.35 billion individuals worldwide checking the service at least once a month, is entering a crowded and unfamiliar field with the workplace service. Big enterprise-oriented technology companies like Microsoft and IBM offer corporate social network products, and start-ups like Slack are also offering snazzy collaboration tools. Facebook’s archrival, Google, also offers a suite of business-oriented collaboration and communication tools.

What does Facebook bring to the party?

“That’s a good question,” Mr. Rasmussen said. “You can think of Facebook as a more efficient way of keeping in touch with people. At work, it’s the same thing —  you need to stay connected with the right colleagues. So using a social network turns out be a really efficient way of getting your work done as well.”

The company was inspired by how Facebook employees use the service internally, and it used that as the template for a broader public offering that was developed by Mr. Rasmussen’s team in London.

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http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/google-translate-app-gets-an-upgrade/?ref=technology

oogle Translate App Gets an UpgradeBy CONOR DOUGHERTY

JANUARY 14, 2015 3:01 AM January 14, 2015 3:01 am 39 Comments

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PLAY VIDEO|0:21Google Translate App Adds ToolsGoogle Translate App Adds ToolsThe upgrade makes it easier to have something resembling a natural conversation with a person speaking a different language by translating using a smartphone’s microphone.

The idea of a universal translator — a device that can seamlessly translate between languages — has been a longtime fixture inscience fiction.

Technology hasn’t quite gotten there, even on Earth, but Google has come one step closer with an upgrade of the Google Translate application, which is being released on Wednesday.

The first part of the upgrade is a voice tool that makes it easier to have something resembling a natural conversation with a person using a different language by translating between two languages, using the microphone on a smartphone. Google Translate has had voice controls for a few years, but the latest version works more seamlessly.

In this version, the app is supposed to pick up who is talking based on the language being spoken. So, say you wanted to order a slice of chicken pizza in Spanish. Using the app, you could walk into a pizza parlor, and, with your lips at an awkward proximity to the phone’s microphone, make your request, after which a robotic voice would spit out the question in Spanish.

Then let’s say the guy behind the counter asks if you want extra cheese. He could ask you that question in Spanish, and the phone would relay it in English. Respond “Yes” or “No” in English, and out comes Spanish again.

The app isn’t quite as natural or seamless as science fiction just yet. In tests, it worked best with short, jargon-free sentences and required a healthy pause between translations. But it’s certainly a step forward, taking one more brick out of the language barrier. After all, even a personal translator would require a few seconds.

The second tool is a visual translator. People can place signs or other text in a phone’s viewfinder, similar to the way they take a picture, then receive an instantaneous translation on the screen. We tested it on Tuesday’s New York Times, as well as a pizza menu.

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PLAY VIDEO|0:16Google Translate’s Visual TranslatorGoogle Translate’s Visual TranslatorThe tool allows users to place signs or other text in a phone’s viewfinder, similar to the way they take a picture, then receive an instantaneous translation on the phone’s screen.

Video by Deborah Acosta on Publish DateJanuary 14, 2015.

If the idea of a visual scanner sounds familiar, it’s because the technology comes from Word Lens, an app developed by Quest Visual. Google acquired the company in May, with the intention of putting the technology into its own Translate app. Now that has happened.

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http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/safety/has-robocar-safety-been-hyped

A study out today throws cold water on the accident-free paradise that proponents of autonomous cars have prophecied.

Not only may robocars never be as safe as the best drivers, their growing pains may temporarily lower overall road safety, say Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle, psychologists at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute.

They note that some accidents will still be caused when human beings make mistakes for which robotic cars cannot compensate. If, for example, a child darts in front of a car from out of nowhere, even instantaneous braking may not stop the car in time.

Nor is it a foregone conclusion that the strengths of autonomous cars will outweigh those of good drivers. True, autonomous cars never tire or get distracted, and they can respond to new information almost immediately, but these factors wouldn’t necessarily “trump the predictive experience of middle-aged drivers.”

Middle age is the sweet spot for safety, because by that stage in life drivers are less likely to take risks and knowledgeable enough to intuit what other people are likely to do.

Then there is the problem of system failures, which, even in today’s human-piloted cars, cause about 1 percent of fatal accidents. The researchers say that some failures—like a burned-out light—might not bother a self-driving car, which has many overlapping sensor systems. But other kinds of failures may become more common, because the sensing and information-processing hardware is so complex.

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http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2015/01/15/skydio-lands-3-million-to-keep-drones-from-crashing/

Skydio Lands $3 Million to Keep Drones from Crashing by Press • 15 January 2015

DEBORAH GAGE

YouTube is full of videos of drones crashing or running off course, and the Federal Aviation Administration has banned commercial drones in the U.S. while it figures out how to regulate them. Yet interest in the flying machines remains high.

Skydio Inc. is the latest drone technology startup to emerge, raising $3 million for software that its co-founders say should be able to keep flying drones on track. The seed funding is led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Accel Partners also participating in the round.

The company was founded last year by three graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—Adam Bry, who has a masters degree in Aero/Astro engineering; Abe Bachrach, who has a Ph.D. with a focus on applying machine learning and computer vision to autonomous vehicles; and Matt Donahoe, who has a masters from the MIT Media Lab.

Mr. Bry and Dr. Bachrach also co-founded Google GOOGL   -0.23% X’s Project Wing,  a system  that Google is developing to use drones to deliver goods. Skydio started out in Dr. Bachrach’s dad’s basement and has since relocated to Atherton, Calif.

Mr. Bry, who is chief executive, said Skydio is tackling the hard problem of developing algorithms and software that are able to extract 3-D structure from a 2-D image, allowing a drone to navigate and avoid obstacles.

“It’s easy for humans, but hard for computers,” he said. “We’re trying to build the visual cortex for drones, for seeing and understanding.”…

http://m.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-imprinted-brain/201302/why-early-blindness-prevents-schizophrenia

Summary:-Autism and Schizophrenia are opposite disorders.-You can reduce schizophrenia by encouraging autistic traits.-Blind born children usually exhibit autistic traits and never develop schizophrenia.-Impeding visual stimuli in children reduces the pruning of neurons.-Autism may have to do w/less neural pruning and schizophrenia with more.