An App so You'll Never Forget

A language-learning application that's already big in Japan is coming to the U.S. in the form of a new iPhone app. Smart.fm, based in Tokyo, says that the adaptive-learning algorithms behind its software can help users memorize all kinds of information.

Smart.fm is one of several companies selling software designed to help users remember. The company's algorithms were inspired by research that shows people remember information more effectively they try to memorize it at key times, says founder and chairman Andrew Smith Lewis.

Those algorithms determine how often to present a piece of information to the user and in what context. For example, a completely new word and its translation are shown frequently, and a user is asked relatively easy questions about them, designed to jog the memory. But once the user has demonstrated the ability to recall that word and its meaning, this information will appear less often.

"Efficiency is the main thing," Lewis says. "We want to optimize the sweet spot between the minimum number of times you have to see an item and the maximum effectiveness of that presentation."

To use Smart.fm, a person selects an existing list of material--a dictionary of foreign words, for instance--or starts building a new list. The list could be text-only, but the system also supports images and audio. A user might match the names of birds to the sounds they make, or view images of different parts of the human brain in order to learn how to identify them. Someone who snaps pictures of the people she meets at a conference might use the software to commit those people's names to memory.

"Learning applications which present stimuli adaptively based on the forgetting curve are not new but still relatively rare," says Peter Brusilovsky, director of the Personalized Adaptive Web Systems Lab at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences. But Smart.fm's teaching methods can be applied to any type of material, Lewis says. "The adaptive-learning platform doesn't know if you're studying Russian painters or chess moves or French verbs," he says. "It just knows that these are individual objects."

Unlike other memory applications, Smart.fm takes a social approach, letting users share their lists and add comments to other lists. And in the future, Lewis says, there will be more ways to pull information into the system. The company is working on integrating with Freebase, a site that collects user-generated databases. Once the effort is complete, Smart.fm users who are interested in a particular topic should be able to access information about it from Freebase automatically.

"Education apps are one of the most interesting and growing areas of the iPhone app store," says Carl Howe, an analyst focusing on mobile research at the Yankee Group. Howe thinks Smart.fm was wise to broaden the scope of its material beyond just language learning. For education apps, he says, "the central aspect is knowing how to engage people's interest."

Howe notes that the top education apps for the iPhone are geared toward middle-school and elementary-school children. He believes there's a huge opportunity for college-level material, too. But companies designing e-learning apps may find themselves competing with material from established universities such as MIT and Stanford, which offer free material for self-directed study online

Smart.fm's business model is based largely on the prospect of collaboration with other companies and institutions that want to offer online learning. The company has already partnered with the Japanese telecom giant NTT, which has used the software to create learning sites focusing on specific topics.

Lewis hopes that such deals will become Smart.fm's main source of revenue, though he also suggests that Smart.fm may offer premium content to users for a price. The iPhone app, however, is and will remain free.

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Robofish

Borrowing from Mother Nature, MIT researchers have built a school of swimming robofish that slip through the water just as gracefully as the real thing, if not quite as fast. Mechanical-engineering colleagues Pablo Valdivia y Alvarado '99, SM '01, PhD '07 (above), and professor Kamal Youcef-Toumi, SM '81, ScD '85, designed the sleek and inexpensive robots to maneuver into areas where traditional underwater autonomous vehicles can't go. Fleets of them could be used to inspect submerged structures such as boats and oil and gas pipes; to patrol ports, lakes, and rivers; and to help detect environmental pollutants.

"Given the [robotic] fish's robustness, it would be ideal as a long-term sensing and exploration unit," says Valdivia y Alvarado. "Several of these could be deployed, and even if only a small percentage make it back, there wouldn't be a terrible capital loss."

Robotic fish are not new: in 1994, MIT ocean engineers demonstrated the four-foot-long Robotuna. Robotuna had 2,843 parts controlled by six motors, but the new robotic fish, which is less than a foot long, is powered by a single motor and is made of fewer than 10 individual components, protected by a flexible body. The motor, placed in the fish's midsection, initiates a wave that travels along the fish's body, propelling it forward. So far, the MIT prototype fish can swim as fast as one body length per second. That's much slower than real fish, which can cover up to 10 times their body length in a second.

As part of his doctoral thesis, Valdivia y Alvarado created a model that calculates how stiff each part of the robot's body should be to generate the desired speed and swimming motion. With this model, the researchers can use polymers to create a continuous fish body that is stiffer in some places and more flexible in others, instead of building each body section separately and then joining them together. "This philosophy can be used for more than just fish," says Youcef-Toumi. For example, it could help improve robotic prosthetic limbs.

This fall, the researchers plan to investigate more complex locomotion and test some new prototype robotic salamanders and manta rays, says Valdivia y Alvarado. This research should put their approach to a harder test.

Here's the link if you want to see the robofish in action:

http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=455

Web marketer ordered to pay Facebook $711M damages

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Facebook said Thursday a California court has awarded the social networking Web site $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace.

Facebook sued Wallace for accessing users' accounts without their permission and sending phony posts and messages. The company said on its blog that in addition to the damage award, the San Jose, Calif., court referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney's office for prosecution for criminal contempt of court -- meaning he could face jail time.

Wallace earned the monikers "Spam King" and "Spamford" as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s.

In May 2008, the online hangout MySpace won a $230 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members when a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled against Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, in another case brought under the federal anti-spam law known as CAN-SPAM. In 2006, Wallace was fined $4 million after the Federal Trade Commission accused him of running an operation that infected computers with software that caused flurries of pop-up ads, known as "spyware."

"While we don't expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals," said Sam O'Rourke, associate general counsel for Facebook, in a blog posting Thursday. "This is another important victory in our fight against spam."

There was no phone number listed for Wallace in Las Vegas, where he is believed to be living, according to the ruling.

The company said the judgment marks the second-largest anti-spam award ever. In November 2008, Facebook won an $873 million judgment against Adam Guerbuez and his business, Atlantis Blue Capital, who bombarded users with sexually explicit spam messages.

Web marketer ordered to pay Facebook $711M damages

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Facebook said Thursday a California court has awarded the social networking Web site $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace.

Facebook sued Wallace for accessing users' accounts without their permission and sending phony posts and messages. The company said on its blog that in addition to the damage award, the San Jose, Calif., court referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney's office for prosecution for criminal contempt of court -- meaning he could face jail time.

Wallace earned the monikers "Spam King" and "Spamford" as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s.

In May 2008, the online hangout MySpace won a $230 million judgment over junk messages sent to its members when a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled against Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, in another case brought under the federal anti-spam law known as CAN-SPAM. In 2006, Wallace was fined $4 million after the Federal Trade Commission accused him of running an operation that infected computers with software that caused flurries of pop-up ads, known as "spyware."

"While we don't expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals," said Sam O'Rourke, associate general counsel for Facebook, in a blog posting Thursday. "This is another important victory in our fight against spam."

There was no phone number listed for Wallace in Las Vegas, where he is believed to be living, according to the ruling.

The company said the judgment marks the second-largest anti-spam award ever. In November 2008, Facebook won an $873 million judgment against Adam Guerbuez and his business, Atlantis Blue Capital, who bombarded users with sexually explicit spam messages.

Paranormal Activity is the most profitable movie ever

The Blair Witch Project is no longer the most profitable movie in cinema history; Paranormal Activity has just taken that crown. Paranormal was shot for less than one days catering bill for a big Hollywood movie, at a mere $15,000.

Titanic may be the biggest earning movie in terms of turnover, but compared to its production costs Paranormal puts it in the shade. Having already taken over $65 million at the box office Paranoral Activity has made more than 400,000% profit.

The movie started quietly at only a dozen theatres, and slowly expanded to nearly 2000 screens, and it may not be over yet, as this weekend’s box office includes Halloween, which is always good for horror flicks it has presumably added to its box office numbers.

Of course on top of the tiny budget, the studio, Paramount, will have spent several million on marketing the movie, even so its returns are still enormous.

Want to Enhance Your Brain Power?

A little brain boost is something we could all use now and then. A new option may be on the horizon. Researchers at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, in Bethesda, MD, are studying how applying gentle electrical current to the scalp can improve learning.

Previous small-scale studies have suggested that a stream of current can improve motor function, verbal fluency, and even language learning. To explore how effective such stimulation can be as a learning tool, Eric Wassermann, a neuroscientist at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, is using an approach known as transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), in which an electrical current is passed directly to the brain through the scalp and skull. The technology for TDCS, which has been available for decades, is simple and fairly crude. (In the 1960s, it was used to improve mood in people with psychiatric disorders, although that effect hasn't been repeated in more recent studies.) And in contrast to people undergoing electroconvulsive therapy, a seizure-inducing treatment used for severe depression that requires anesthesia, people undergoing TDCS feel just a slight tingle, if anything.

The device is simple: a nine-volt battery that's been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for delivering drugs across the skin is connected to large flat sponges that are moistened and then applied to the head. It delivers a gentle 2 to 2.5 milliamps of current spread over a 20 to 50 square millimeter area of the scalp for up to 15 minutes. Little of that current actually reaches the brain--about half is shunted away from the target area, and the other half quickly dissipates as it gets farther from the scalp.

Wassermann's team targets part of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain area involved in higher-level organization and planning, as well as in working memory. Because activity in this region has been shown in previous imaging studies to predict an individual's ability to recall information, the idea is that giving it an electrical boost will enhance memory function.

In preliminary results from the new study, which is part of a larger government-funded project to examine TDCS for cognitive enhancement, researchers found that direct current stimulation could improve memory in participants asked to learn and then recall a list of 12 words. The effect was significant in the early learning stages: in the first few trials, in which participants were given the same list over and over again, people in the treatment group could remember more words. But the learning curve for those working without the device quickly caught up to the zapped learners. "Now we want to see if we can enhance recall, not just encoding," says Wassermann. "Ultimately, you'd just want to do the stimulation during encoding."

Electronic Wasteland

A policy analysis published Thursday in the journal Science calls our attention to something it's much easier to turn away from: what happens to outdated computer monitors, cell phones that aren't smart enough, cables that once powered discarded laptops, even old calculators. Much of this waste, which is largely a product of the developed world, ends up in the developing world, and the hazardous materials it contains accumulate in the food chain and in poor children's blood. In Africa, China, and India, markets for secondhand electronics are having a terrible impact. Children in Guiyu, China have high levels of lead in their blood and swamps in Nigeria overflow with discarded electronics.

So what can we do about it? The United States, one of the largest producers of electronic waste, is one of 23 member countries that has not ratified the United Nations' Basel Convention, which would regulate the movement of hazardous electronic materials across international borders. A bill in the Senate (S. 1397) would authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to award grant money for recycling research and ask the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create a database of green electronic materials. According to the authors of the Science article, the European Union and the state of California both have complex and inconsistent waste policies, but we can still learn from them:

For example, Californians are willing to pay extra for "green" electronics products (e.g., containing fewer toxic substances, capable of being economically recycled) and to drive up to 8 miles to drop-off products for environmentally sensitive recycling. In addition, political mandates and economic incentives are key tools for engaging manufacturers,who will need to assume greater responsibility for designing electronic products that contain safer materials and are easily managed after consumers no longer want them.

However, the long-term solution, the authors suggest, is to change the way electronics are made in the first place:

Bart Gordon, Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, said that "we need our future engineers to understand that whatever they put together will eventually have to be taken apart."