The First Real Brain-Like Computer Could be Made of the Same Material That Makes DVDs

Scientists in the UK and in California may have found a holy grail of brain-like computing--a material that can both simulate the behavior of neurons and run on very low power--in an abundant and familiar medium. The very same phase-changing material that allows us to record on DVDs could be used to build a low-power brain-like processor capable of learning and adapting without the need for extensive pre-programming.

The material is GST--so named for the materials it contains (germanium, antimony, and tellurium--and it possesses just the kind of phase-changing properties that researchers are looking for. Phase-change alloys like GST can exist in various phases, ranging from crystalline, ordered structures to chaotic, amorphous structures. Their states depends on various external factors, like heat or charge.

In DVDs, GST allows discs to be embedded with binary ones and zeros that can later be read by a laser. That’s fine for film screening purposes, but GST can actually exist in various degrees of phase change between completely crystalline and completely amorphous, and thus it can store information across a wider range of values--just like a neuron, which fires only when a build-up of incoming signals reaches a certain threshold.

The GST neurons/synapses developed by the University of Exeter and Stanford team also can adjust the strength of the synapses between them--a key characteristic of inter-neuron communication--because of its inherent ability to modify its electrical resistance. This allows the GST neurons to adjust the strength of the connections between them to signify the importance of incoming signals and prioritize signals flowing through a neural network.

All said, those two qualities--the ability to store information across a range of phase states, and a low-power, adjustable-strength synapse--make for a pretty nice electronic analog for a working brain. But the work is very preliminary, and it’s one thing to have a few working synthetic neurons in the lab, and quite another to have a working network of thousands or millions (much less hundreds of millions).

In other words, it’s pretty amazing that DVD tech can do these things, but a proper brain-like computer is still many years and several breakthroughs distant

Google+ Circles: Illusion of privacy

Privacy control is one reason Google+, the new kid in the social media sphere, is getting rave reviews. It's intrigued me enough that I've signed up. But I'm not quite convinced that what appears to be a growing obsession with privacy will power the search engine behemoth's push in an arena dominated by Facebook which in 2010 had users comprising 10 per cent of the Earth's population.

In a Time edition in which Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was named The 2010 Person of the Year, Richard Stengel wrote: "All social media involve a mixture of narcissism and voyeurism. Most of us display a combination of the two, which is why social media are flourishing faster and penetrating deeper than any other social development in memory."

Signs of this abound on Facebook.

Why Facebook is popular?

Alone in your room at night, you open your News Feed, click on a post by a friend you've met through work correspondence, and find out she's enrolled in a pole dancing class. You marvel at the "discovery" for a few seconds or minutes, depending on your level of voyeurism and move on to important tasks.

Some Facebook users want more privacy controls on things they share, while others are glad the Zuckerberg idea of privacy clouds their stream of posts to blow their own trumpets.

Here comes Google+, a social media project that appears to be giving users the dial to regulate the level of their own narcissism and others' voyeurism. It is touted to be the archrival that is taking the cue from Facebook critics.

Introducing Circles. In Google+, you assign people to Circles. When you post, you indicate the people you're giving access to it by specifying a Circle. If you're the type who believes that everything you share is relevant to anyone, you pick "Public" before you click on the share button.

It works in cases when you want a discussion among specific people in your social graph. If you're the type who fusses about unintentionally giving the idea that you are vain, choosing Circles assures you you are not so egotistical to believe that what interests you is worth everyone's time.

Facebook music service 'Vibes' in the pipeline?

By analysing Facebook programming code, a software developer and researcher has found evidence of an unannounced music service called 'Vibes'.

Jeff Rose wrote on his blog that after the launch of Facebook Video Chat, he examined the code that the new feature requires to work. He found that it made reference to features called 'Peep' for video calling itself and also to 'Vibes'.

"I searched around to see what this is all about, and it seems that this is an unannounced feature that has yet to be released," the Telegraph quoted Rose as saying.

"The vibes app connects with a music download dialog in the page though, so I'm guessing that with this release we are seeing the seeds for Facebook's upcoming music offering," added Rose.

As Facebook Video Chat is not called 'Peep', it seems likely that any new music service could have a public name other than 'Vibes'.

Facebook, Skype, and Microsoft's savvy investment

Just after Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer announced plans in May to buy Skype, he and Skype Chief Executive Officer Tony Bates had one more order of business.

"The day we announced, we definitely came to see Mark," Bates said, talking of Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, at a press conference today announcing Facebook's plans to bake Skype's video conferencing technology into its social network. "It was for both of us, Steve and I, the most important strategic relationship."

As Google grows ever more powerful in techdom, and Microsoft's influence slips, the Redmond software giant is building closer and closer ties to Facebook. The Facebook-Skype deal today is more evidence that Microsoft and Facebook are in lockstep as they fight their mutual foe, Google. And it comes even while Microsoft awaits regulatory approval to conclude its Skype acquisition.

"We have a really good relationship with Microsoft, where we work with them on a lot of different stuff," Zuckerberg said at the press conference announcing the new video-conferencing feature. That stuff includes advertising, where Microsoft provides all the search advertising to Facebook. It used to provide display advertising, too, but Facebook took over that task last year.

Microsoft has been criticized for its many missteps on the Internet, ranging from leisurely upgrades of Internet Explorer to being slow to understand the importance of search. But its relationship with Facebook is something Ballmer & Co. got right. Microsoft cemented its bond with Facebook in 2007, when it bought a 1.6 percent stake in the company for $240 million. Today, if reported valuations of Facebook are to be believed--online privately held stock marketplace SharesPost currently has an implied value for the company at $82.4 billion--that 1.6 percent is worth $1.3 billion.

But the Microsoft-Facebook relationship isn't really about savvy investment, of course. It's about fighting off Google. Microsoft's Facebook deals, and you can include the new video chat feature from Skype, are all aimed squarely at the search king. And just as the Web search giant has changed the market dynamics to undermine Microsoft's power--helping establish the Web, not the PC desktop, as the heart of computing--so too is Facebook challenging Google. Its service, with 750 million users worldwide, is becoming something of an alternative Internet, a place where computer users spend huge chunks of time and never touch a Google service.

In May, Microsoft began including recommendations from Facebook friends into its Bing search engine, elevating results that receive a "like" from someone in the searcher's network. That way, when people search for a coffee shop in Los Angeles, for example, a java stop that won Facebook praise from their friends will rate higher in their search results, as long as they are logged in, than other nearby locations.

The Microsoft-Facebook deals are creating services that Google has yet to match. Google has tried to add social networking to search, creating its +1 button to shower favor on a news article, a company, or even a search result. But its network isn't the equal of Facebook. So clicking the +1 button doesn't have the same impact as clicking a Facebook "like."

Google temporarily disables 'Realtime' search

Google Inc has temporarily shut down a search engine feature that allows users to find real-time updates from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and other social networking sites.

A message posted early Monday on Twitter by the team behind Google Realtime says the search feature has been temporarily disabled while Google explores how to incorporate its recently launched Google+ project into the feature. The tweet tells readers to "stay tuned."

The company envisions including Google+ information along with other Realtime data from a variety of sources, said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman.

Google+ is the search giant's latest stab at entering the social networking segment of the Internet. The project was unveiled last week and lets users share things with small groups of people.

Ultimate Energy Efficiency: Magnetic Microprocessors Could Use Million Times Less Energy Than Today's Silicon Chips

Today's silicon-based microprocessor chips rely on electric currents, or moving electrons, that generate a lot of waste heat. But microprocessors employing nanometer-sized bar magnets -- like tiny refrigerator magnets -- for memory, logic and switching operations theoretically would require no moving electrons.

Such chips would dissipate only 18 millielectron volts of energy per operation at room temperature, the minimum allowed by the second law of thermodynamics and called the Landauer limit. That's 1 million times less energy per operation than consumed by today's computers.

"Today, computers run on electricity; by moving electrons around a circuit, you can process information," said Brian Lambson, a UC Berkeley graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. "A magnetic computer, on the other hand, doesn't involve any moving electrons. You store and process information using magnets, and if you make these magnets really small, you can basically pack them very close together so that they interact with one another. This is how we are able to do computations, have memory and conduct all the functions of a computer."

Lambson is working with Jeffrey Bokor, UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, to develop magnetic computers.

"In principle, one could, I think, build real circuits that would operate right at the Landauer limit," said Bokor, who is a codirector of the Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E3S), a Science and Technology Center founded last year with a $25 million grant from the National Science Foundation. "Even if we could get within one order of magnitude, a factor of 10, of the Landauer limit, it would represent a huge reduction in energy consumption for electronics. It would be absolutely revolutionary."

One of the center's goals is to build computers that operate at the Landauer limit.

Lambson, Bokor and UC Berkeley graduate student David Carlton published a paper about their analysis online in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Fifty years ago, Rolf Landauer used newly developed information theory to calculate the minimum energy a logical operation, such as an AND or OR operation, would dissipate given the limitation imposed by the second law of thermodynamics. (In a standard logic gate with two inputs and one output, an AND operation produces an output when it has two positive inputs, while an OR operation produces an output when one or both inputs are positive.) That law states that an irreversible process -- a logical operation or the erasure of a bit of information -- dissipates energy that cannot be recovered. In other words, the entropy of any closed system cannot decrease

Facebook set to introduce virtual currency in India

Facebook is set to move its 31-million Indian subscriber community to a new payment system called Facebook Credits next month. Facebook Credits is a virtual currency that facilitates transactions across games and apps on Facebook.

Users would now be able to feed in their payment information once and buy, earn and spend across different games or apps they use on Facebook (similar to Linden dollars in SecondLife). The move could also benefit thousands of brands that use Facebook to sell them products through their social pages.

Deb Liu, a platform marketing manager at Facebook, writes on the company’s official blog, “Facebook Credits is currently used in more than 350 applications from 150 developers, representing more than 70 per cent of the transaction volume in virtual goods on Facebook.” Liu adds developers get to keep 70 per cent of the revenue from virtual goods transactions using Facebook Credits. They can also offer special incentives such as early access to product features, premium promotion on Facebook and premium targeting for ads to developers who integrate the system in their apps.

Many leading developers like Zynga, Playfish, Digital Chocolate, PopCap, and Arkadium have already adopted Facebook Credits for in-game virtual goods. Social games such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Zynga Poker are already a big part of Facebook’s 700-million user base, of which almost 200 million play games on the social networking site each month.

Facebook’s most popular social gamemaker, Zynga (maker of Farmville), would now allow gamers to purchase virtual products using Facebook credits instead of the developer’s currency called Farm Cash. Electronic Art’s social games arm Playfish, which runs several popular games like Restaurant City, Pet Society and Hotel City has also abandoned its own virtual currency for Facebook Credits. Speaking to gamers on the Playfish blog, the company said, “Rest assured, you would not lose any of the Playfish Cash you have bought up to now.

We are making it quick and easy to convert it into the new currency of your favourite game to Facebook Credits by using the Playfish Cash Converter within each game.”

Developers have been testing Facebook’s new payment system for months. One such developer, Digital Chocolate, is one of the top five virtual goods gaming companies. Chief executive officer Jason Loia says, “People are less hesitant to buy virtual currency if it accompanies a consistent and trusted purchasing process so that there’s a lower barrier to entry and reduced friction in the payment process. Facebook’s involvement solves those problems for consumers.”

He adds when Digital Chocolate switched to Facebook Credits, the company was seeing a period of international growth. “So, we knew they were going to work on the problems we found ourselves dealing with, like finding monetisation partners internationally…Facebook does all the heavy lifting in terms of integrating and localising payments, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time,” he says.