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"medical devices" entries
History of the Future, Managing without Managers, Intellectual Ventures, and Quantified Cigarette
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A History of the Future in 100 Objects — is out! It’s design fiction, describing the future of technology in faux Wired-like product writeups. Amazon already beating the timeline.
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Projects and Priorities Without Managers (Ryan Carson) — love what he’s doing with Treehouse. Very Googley. The more I read about these low-touch systems, the more obviously important self-reporting is. It is vital that everyone posts daily updates on what they’re working on or this whole idea will fall down.
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Intellectual Ventures Patent Collection — astonishing collection, ready to be sliced and diced in Cambia’s Lens tool. See the accompanying blog post for charts, graphs, and explanation of where the data came from.
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Smokio Electronic Cigarette — the quantified cigarette (not yet announced) for measuring your (electronic) cigarette consumption and uploading the data (natch) to your smartphone. Soon your cigarette will have an IPv6 address, a bluetooth connection, and firmware to be pwned.
Underground Economy, Continuous Integration, Chinese Cyber-Espionage, Prosthesis From The Future
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Using Silk Road — exploring the transactions, probability of being busted, and more. Had me at the heading Silk Road as Cyphernomicon’s black markets. Estimates of risk of participating in the underground economy.
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Travis CI — a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community. It is integrated with GitHub.
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Chinese Cyber-Espionage Unit (PDF) — exposé of one of China’s Cyber Espionage Units. (via Reddit /r/netsec)
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$250 Arduino-Powered Hand Made by a Teen — the third version of his robotic hand. The hand is primarily made with 3D printing, with the exception of motors, gears, and other hardware. The control system is activated by flexing a pre-chosen muscle, such as curling your toes, then the movement is chosen and controlled by a series of eyeblinks and an EEG headset to measure brainwaves. The most remarkable part is that the hand costs a mere $250.
SCADA 0-Day, Complexity Course, ToS Tracking, and Custom Manufacturing Prostheses
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Tridium Niagara (Wired) — A critical vulnerability discovered in an industrial control system used widely by the military, hospitals and others would allow attackers to remotely control electronic door locks, lighting systems, elevators, electricity and boiler systems, video surveillance cameras, alarms and other critical building facilities, say two security researchers. cf the SANS SCADA conference.
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Santa Fe Institute Course: Introduction to Complexity — 11 week course on understanding complex systems: dynamics, chaos, fractals, information theory, self-organization, agent-based modeling, and networks. (via BoingBoing)
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Terms of Service Changes — a site that tracks changes to terms of service. (via Andy Baio)
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3D Printing a Replacement Hand for a 5 Year Old Boy (Ars Technica) — the designs are on Thingiverse. For more, see their blog.
Regressive Future, Data Viz, Sterile Pump, and Javascript App Kit
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RebelMouse — aggregates FB, Twitter, Instagram, G+ content w/Pinboard-like aesthetics. It’s like aggregators we’ve had since 2004, but in this Brave New World we have to authenticate to a blogging service to get our own public posts out in a machine-readable form. 2012: it’s like 2000 but now we have FOUR AOLs! We’ve traded paywalls for graywalls, but the walls are still there. (via Poynter)
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Data Visualization Course Wiki — wiki for Stanford course cs448b, covering visualization with examples and critiques.
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Peristaltic Pump — for your Arduino medical projects, a pump that doesn’t touch the liquid it moves so the liquid can stay sterile.
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Breeze — MIT-licensed Javascript framework for building rich web apps.
3D Printed Drones, When Pacemakers Attack, N-Gram Updated, and Deanonymizing Datasets
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Home-made 3D-Printed Drones — if only they used computer-vision to sequence DNA, they’d be the perfect storm of O’Reilly memes :-)
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Hacking Pacemakers For Death — IOActive researcher Barnaby Jack has reverse-engineered a pacemaker transmitter to make it possible to deliver deadly electric shocks to pacemakers within 30 feet and rewrite their firmware.
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Google N-Gram Viewer Updated — now with more books, better OCR, parts of speech, and complex queries. e.g., the declining ratio of sex to drugs. Awesome work by Friend of O’Reilly, Jon Orwant.
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Deanonymizing Mobility Traces: Using Social Networks as a Side-Channel — a set of location traces can be deanonymized given an easily obtained social network graph. […] Our experiments [on standard datasets] show that 80% of users are identified precisely, while only 8% are identified incorrectly, with the remainder mapped to a small set of users. (via Network World)
Farm Servers, Federal GitHub Activity, Industrial Robots, and Crowdfunding Medical Appliances
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Business Intelligence on Farms — Machines keep track of all kinds of data about each cow, including the chemical properties of its milk, and flag when a particular cow is having problems or could be sick. The software can compare current data with historical patterns for the entire herd, and relate to weather conditions and other seasonal variations. Now a farmer can track his herd on his iPad without having to get out of bed, or even from another state. (via Slashdot)
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USAxGITHUB — monitor activity on all the US Federal Government’s github repositories. (via Sarah Milstein)
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Rethinking Robotics — $22k general purpose industrial robot. “‘It feels like a true Macintosh moment for the robot world,’ said Tony Fadell, the former Apple executive who oversaw the development of the iPod and the iPhone. Baxter will come equipped with a library of simple tasks, or behaviors — for example, a “common sense” capability to recognize it must have an object in its hand before it can move and release it.” (via David ten Have)
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Shift Labs — Shift Labs makes low-cost medical devices for resource-limited settings. [Crowd]Fund the manufacture and field testing of the Drip Clip […] a replacement for expensive pumps that dose fluid from IV bags.
DIY Medical Devices, 3D Exoskeletal Arms, Scientific Data Depository, and Zombees
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Why Toys Make Good Medical Devices (YouTube) — Jose Gomez-Marquez profiled by CNN. His group at MIT is Little Devices.
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3D Printed Exoskeletal Arms for Little Girl — researchers at a Delaware hospital 3D printed a durable custom device with the tiny, lightweight custom parts she needed. Good for iterations, replacements, and an astonishingly high number of “awww” moments in the video.
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Figshare — allows researchers to publish all of their data in a citable, searchable and sharable manner. All data is persistently stored online under the most liberal Creative Commons licence, waiving copyright where possible. figshare was started by a frustrated Imperial College PhD student as a way to disseminate all research outputs and not just static images through traditional academic publishing. It is now supported by Digital Science, a Macmillan Publishers company.
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Zombees — honey bees that have been parasitized by the Zombie Fly Apocephalus borealis. Fly-parasitized honey bees become “ZomBees” showing the “zombie-like behavior” of leaving their hives at night on “a flight of the living dead.” See also NPR interview.
Open Source Implants, Gut Fungus, Closed Source Damage, and Microtask Framework
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When Code Can Kill or Cure (The Economist) — I’ve linked to the dangers of closed source devices before, but this caught my eye: “In the 1990s we developed an excellent radiation-therapy treatment-planning system and tried to give it away to other clinics,” says Dr Mackie. “But when we were told by the FDA that we should get our software approved, the hospital wasn’t willing to fund it.” He formed a spin-off firm specifically to get FDA approval. It took four years and cost millions of dollars. The software was subsequently sold as a traditional, closed-source product.
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Gut Fungus (Wired) — the microbiome of bacteria in your body is being studied, but now researchers have scoured the poop of different species and found different mycological populations in each, and linked them to diseases.
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Evaluating the Harm from Closed Source (Eric Raymond) — whether or not you argue with his ethics, you will appreciate the clear description of the things you’re trading off when you choose to use closed source software.
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PyBossa — a free, open-source, platform for creating and running crowd-sourcing applications that utilise online assistance in performing tasks that require human cognition, knowledge or intelligence such as image classification, transcription, geocoding and more! (via The Open Knowledge Foundation)
Wearable Computing, Secure Implants, Budget Game, Restoring Democracy
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Adafruit Flora — wearable electronics and accessories platform. (via Tim O’Reilly)
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Killed by Code — paper on software vulnerabilities in implantable medical devices. Discovered via Karen Sandler’s wow-generating keynote at linux.conf.au (covered here). (via Selena Deckelmann)
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DIY London — fun little Budget-Hero game to make apparent the trade-offs facing politicians. Kids should play Sim* and Civilization games: you get a sense of tradeoffs and consequences from these that you don’t from insubstantial activities. More City Hall games, please! (via David Eaves)
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Lessig on How Money Corrupts Congress (Rolling Stone) — glad to see Larry’s profile rising. This is key: I lay out my own voucher program that tries to do that, but the challenge isn’t as much to imagine the solution as much as it is to imagine the process to bring about the solution, given how entrenched the cancer is and how much the very people we need to reform the system depend upon the existing system. (see also an excerpt from Lessig’s new book) (via Long Now)