Vibrating mouse prevents computer-related injuries

Cornell University researchers are studying several innovative products, such as a massage chair and a vibrating mouse, to determine whether they may help prevent back and other problems that result from sitting in front of a computer for long periods of time.

Alan Hedge, professor of design and environmental analysis in the university's College of Human Ecology, has taken up this study at a time when the incidences of computer related injuries have increased in youngsters in their twenties.

"One-third to one-half of all compensatory injuries are repetitive-motion injuries associated with office-type work," says Hedge.

Back injuries, adds the researcher, also account for one-third of all workplace injuries.

Hedge says that most of these injuries were associated with heavy lifting a decade ago, but their biggest cause nowadays appears to be sitting in front of a computer all day.

He says that problems like carpal tunnel syndrome-a medical condition in which the median nerve is compressed at the wrist, leading to pain and muscle weakness in the forearm and hand-were usually reported by people in their late 30s to early 40s during the early 1990s.

However, he adds, the average age of onset of such conditions has dropped to the mid-20s these days.

"Now kids are using computers at age 2, so by the time they enter the workforce they'll already be primed for injuries. This is very serious because an injury can become life-changing; carpal tunnel, for example, is not curable. They'll have to manage this chronic condition for the rest of their lives," Hedge says.

Just to address these concerns, Hedge adds, his Cornell Human Factors and Ergonomics Research Group is studying innovative products.

The researchers have so far studied a vibrating mouse to see whether it could prevent upper extremity musculoskeletal disorders in computer users by signalling people to take their hand off the mouse to avoid overuse.

Reporting their findings at the Human Factor Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting in October, they revealed that though the subjects did remove their hands more often with a vibrating mouse than with a conventional mouse, they tended to hold their hand just above the mouse.

"This position is potentially more detrimental because of a potential increase in static muscle activity required to hover the hand," Hedge said, concluding that people should rest their hands on a flat surface when they felt the vibration.

In another experiment, the researchers examined the efficacy of an undulating chair whose seat made a continuous messaging, wavelike movements in alleviating back pain in people whose pain increases when they are seated.

Although their findings were mixed, Hedge and graduate student Erin Lawler concluded that the movable seat was a concept with promise, particularly for individuals with back problems.

"Everything we do can be summed up in the phrase: Good ergonomics is great economics. More than 90 percent of a company's costs are people costs, so making small investments in improving the workplace by using good ergonomic products pays huge dividends," Hedge says.

'Mathlete' smashes human calculation record: museum

LONDON (AFP) - The world's fastest human calculator on Tuesday broke his own record for working out a 200-digit number using nothing but brain power to produce the answer in just over 70 seconds.
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Alexis Lemaire, a 27-year-old Frenchman, correctly calculated the 13th root of a random 200-digit number from a possible 393 trillion answers.

The so-called 'mathlete' produced the answer of 2,407,899,893,032,210 in 70.2 seconds, beating his previous record of 72.4 seconds, at London's Science Museum.

A computer was used to produce a random 200-digit number before he sat down to calculate the answer in his head.

The museum's curator of mathematics, Jane Wess, said: "He sat down and it was all very quiet -- and all of a sudden he amazingly just cracked it.

"I believe that it is the highest sum calculated mentally.

"He seems to have a large memory and he's made this his life's ambition. It's quite remarkable to see it happen. A very small number of people have this extraordinary ability; nowadays there is only a handful."

Lemaire, who attends the University of Reims in northern France, began demonstrating his prowess by finding the 13th root of a random 100-digit number but gave up trying to improve his performance when he calculated an answer in under four seconds in 2004.

Like an athlete, he trains his brain daily for the far harder task of finding the 13th root of 200-digit numbers.

Light-using connectors may make supercomputers as small as a laptop

London, December 7 : A research by scientists at IBM has raised hopes for the development of supercomputers as small as a laptop.

The researchers say that the work they have completed may make it possible to do away with the copper wires, which are used to couple processing cores to each other.

The connectors produced by them uses light to pass data between the computational cores. This method is faster and uses less power than the method involving copper wires, say the researchers.

Described in journal Optics Express, the new device is smaller than previously demonstrated connectors that had shown promise to shrink computational clusters in future.

The report suggests that the device, called a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator, is many times smaller than previously produced convertors.

It is believed that the new device may replace the copper wires that connect cores with a device that converts electrical signals to pulses of light.

"What we have done is a significant step toward building a vastly smaller and more power-efficient way to connect those cores, in a way nobody has done before," the BBC quoted Dr Tze-chiang Chen, a spokesman for IBM's science and technology research division, as saying.

The researchers say that the new device may boost the power of coupled computational cores, for the speed at which data travels between the cores may be accelerated by using light.

Dr. Will Green, who led the research team, said that the use of light would enable the researchers to cut the amount of power required to move data between processors, and slash the amount of heat that a large computational cluster produces.

The researcher has revealed the technology is about 100 times faster than wires, consumes one-tenth as much power, and can be used to transfer data up to a distance of a few centimetres.

Dr. Green believes that the lower power requirement may help reduce operational costs for supercomputers.

Lenovo to launch $200-computer in India

New Delhi, December 4: Chinese computer maker Lenovo Tuesday said it would soon launch a new computer priced at $200 (about Rs. 8,000) in India.

"We will launch the product in China first. After getting a feedback, we will roll out the device in the Indian market," Lenovo Group USA President and Chief Executive Officer William J. Amelio said on the sidelines of India Economic Summit currently underway here.

Although Amelio did not specify a time for the product's launch, he indicated that the computer would be Internet-enabled.

He added that the firm could produce five million computers every year in India and may export computer parts and other hardware from the country.

Lenovo is also planning to export notebooks from its Baddi, Himachal Pradesh plant.

Amelio pitched a liberal and uniform tax regime for it to conduct its business in India and provide opportunity of greater investments.

Microsoft to tighten Windows Vista against pirates

Los Angeles, December 4: Microsoft Corp said Monday it would disable the two primary methods used by software pirates to illegally copy Windows Vista software in the next major update of the operating system.

The world's largest software maker loses billions of dollars to software piracy every year. Microsoft said new features built into Vista are reducing piracy levels by half compared with its previous operating system, Windows XP.

Microsoft plans to improve that one step farther still with changes built into Windows Vista Service Pack 1, the first major update to the operating system, which is due out in the first quarter of 2008.

The company plans to close a loophole that let pirates mimic activation used by some computer manufacturers to install Vista. Microsoft also will clamp down on a method of extending a "grace period" time between installation and activation.

According to trade group Business Software Alliance, about 35 percent of the world's consumer software is pirated. Windows, which sits on more than 90 percent of the world's computers, accounts for the bulk of those pirated copies.

Many software pirates sell illegally copied versions on auction sites and some small computer manufacturers install pirated versions of Vista on PCs sold to unknowing victims.

Microsoft said it would also change how it deals with pirated versions of Vista, whose users will now get recurring notifications that their version of software is fraudulent with a link to buy a genuine copy. Currently, Microsoft shuts down features in Vista when it finds a pirated copy.

If a user of pirated software wants to purchase a genuine copy of Windows from Microsoft, they can do so for $89 for the Home Basic version or $119 for the Home Premium version.

Reducing piracy is considered one major way for the $51 billion software maker to spur growth in its dominant software franchises. The company said improvements in reducing piracy helped to spur a 25 percent rise in Windows sales in the September quarter.

Microsoft declined to estimate the financial impact of its new measures. The company had sold 88 million Vista licenses as of the end of September.

China downloaders warned of "Lust, Caution" virus

Beijing, November 19: A Chinese anti-virus company has warned against free downloads of Ang Lee's steamy spy thriller, "Lust, Caution", saying several hundred sites offering the service were embedded with viruses.

The movie has been a big hit in China, reaping 90 million yuan ($12.12 million) in its first two weeks, despite losing seven minutes to the censors, and has been tipped by some to be the year's biggest box office success.

"People should be wary of Web sites that offer free downloading services because their personal passwords can be stolen," Li Ting, of Rising International Software Co. Ltd., told Reuters.

She said several hundred Web sites promoting "Lust, Caution" were embedded with viruses and 15 percent of download links were contaminated.

"Hackers are taking advantage of popular entertainment hotspots for movies and music to attack personal computers and spread viruses," she said.

An engineer with the compnay was first to encounter the virus last week -- his screen went blank and he lost his instant messaging password.

Set in World War Two Shanghai, "Lust, Caution," features long and sometimes violent sex scenes that director Lee has hinted were real.

Lee, who won the top award at the Venice Film Festival in 2005 for his controversial gay cowboy drama "Brokeback Mountain", won the best picture award for "Lust, Caution" at this year's Festival.

Intel unveils chips with smaller circuits

San Franciso, November 12:Intel Corp, the world's biggest microchip maker, unveiled fast new processors on Sunday made with new techniques that can etch circuitry nearly 200 times smaller than a red blood cell.

The chips are the first in the world to be mass-produced with a 45-nanometer process, about one-third smaller than current 65-nanometer technology. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.

"Across all segments we're increasing performance and increasing energy efficiency," said Tom Kilroy, general manager of Intel's enterprise group.

Known by the project name Penryn, the chips hold little in the way of fundamental design advances but are an important step in continuing the industry's track record of delivering chips that get smaller and faster every two years or so.

They use a new kind of transistor -- the basic building block of microchips -- that Intel unveiled earlier this year in what was hailed as one of the industry's biggest advances in four decades.

Penryn is the "tick" in Intel's "tick-tock" strategy of shrinking an existing chip design to a smaller size, then following up the next year with an all-new blueprint, known as a microarchitecture.

"They are taking a successful product and making it smaller, and in the process of making it smaller, it gets faster," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst of consultant Insight 64.

Brookwood said he reckoned the new chips, to be sold under Intel's Xeon and Core 2 brands, would be able to run most software up to 15 percent faster.

The 45 nanometer shift is also important to Intel because it means the company can make more chips from a single platter of silicon, boosting productivity and helping recoup investment on factories, which cost about $3 billion to build.

The company expects to make the majority of its processors on 45 nanometer by the middle of 2008, mirroring the progress of its 65 nanometer products, Kilroy said.

"We feel this tick-tock model is on track and our cadences allow us to ramp pretty fast," Kilroy said.

It cements Intel's manufacturing lead over rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc, which only started making chips on 65 nanometers earlier this year but plans to try to roll out 45 nanometer technology in 2008.

Intel will initially sell a dozen versions of the chips for server computers that power corporate networks, with prices ranging from $177 to $1,279. A version for high-end consumers such as gaming enthusiasts will sell for $999.

Now, computers can appreciate art too!

Washington, November 6: Researchers at the University of Haifa have developed a mathematical program that can enables computers to detect whether or not a piece of art has been created by a particular famous artist, as claimed by its seller.

"The field of computer vision is very complex and multifaceted. We hope that our new development is another step forward in this field," said Prof. Daniel Keren who developed the program.

With the help of their program, the researchers "taught" the computer to identify the artworks of different artists. The program enabled them to do so by turning the drawings of nature, people, flowers and other scenes to a series of mathematical symbols, sines and cosines.

Thereafter, the program enables the computer to master the individual style of each artist, and to identify the artist by looking at other works that it had never been exposed to earlier.

Professor Keren says that the program can identify the works of a specific artist even if they depict different scenes.

"As soon as the computer learns to recognize the clock drawings of Dali, it will recognize his other paintings, even without clocks. As soon as the computer learns to recognize the swirls of Van Gogh, it will recognize them in pictures it has never seen before," he said.

According to him, this new development is a step forward in the field of computer vision.

He, however, admits that the field of computer vision is still inferior to human vision.

"Human vision has undergone evolution of millions of years and our field is only 30 years old. At this stage computers still have difficulty doing things that are very simple for people, for example, recognizing a picture of a human face. A computer has difficulty identifying when a picture is of a human face or how many faces are in a picture. However, computers are very good at simulating and sketching 3 dimensional images like the arteries in the brain or a road network," said Professor Keren.

The researchers say that the new program may be helpful to someone who appreciates art, but not to a real expert in the field.