mind

As just about everyone knows by now, President Obama got the entire Internet in a tizzy this morning by seemingly mixing up "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" references and trying to pass them off as a clever "Star Wars" line.

It's been much reported that, speaking about his negotiations with Republicans over budget reform, he complained that he can't perform a "Jedi mind meld." Cue a million anguished Twitter users in outrage, jokingly insisting on impeaching the president over his inability to remember that the line is actually "Jedi … Read more

If there's an industry more stuck in the past than the music industry, it has to be book publishing.

It's with that in mind that a Pasadena, Calif., startup is trying to upend the traditional, often unpleasant publishing model that's more like a gauntlet than a process.

Authors typically have to beg an agent for representation, beg a publisher to take their book, hope for an advance that covers expenses, write the book, in many cases find their own editors because the publisher's editors are too busy to pay attention, do their own marketing and promotion … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Some of you may recall that one scene in "Back to the Future II" where Marty McFly travels forward in time to 2015 and plays a shoot-'em-up arcade game. After getting a seemingly great high score, a jaded youth remarks, "You mean you have to use your hands? That's like a baby's toy!"

I couldn't help but remember that quote when I slipped on Interaxon's Muse -- a lightweight headset that turns your mind into an input device by converting your brainwaves into digital signals. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Here at CES, we were able to sneak a quick demo of MindMeld, a unique voice and video-calling app developed by Google Ventures-funded Expect Labs. The app supports up to eight parties at once, and based on what I saw, I've got high hopes for it.

At first glance, MindMeld might seem like just another Skype clone, but the reality is that this voice-and-video caller offers a layer of functionality that I haven't yet seen in a communications app. What sets it apart is its ability to "listen" to your conversations and add streams of … Read more

PARIS -- Startup Interaxon today announced it'll ship a $199 headset called the Muse next spring that will let people use their brainwaves to directly control videogames and other computing operations.

Interaxon Chief Executive Ariel Garten announced the Muse at the LeWeb conference here, and she showed off one application she thinks direct brainwave input will help people: infusing e-mails with emotion.

"This is the first though-controlled device that's stylish and easy to wear," Garten said of the Muse.

Using LeWeb founder Loic Le Meur as a guinea pig, she showed an application she called Emotype … Read more

Computer software programmed to detect and report illicit behavior could eventually replace the fallible humans who monitor surveillance cameras.

The U.S. government has funded the development of so-called automatic video surveillance technology by a pair of Carnegie Mellon University researchers who disclosed details about their work this week -- including that it has an ultimate goal of predicting what people will do in the future.

"The main applications are in video surveillance, both civil and military," Alessandro Oltramari, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon who has a Ph.D. from Italy's University of Trento, told CNET … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--A new iPad app announced today aims to give users instant contextual information based on nothing more than what's being talked about during a voice conversation.

Launched out of stealth today, the eight-person San Francisco startup Expect Labs unveiled MindMeld, an app designed to interpret what people using it are discussing and instantly deliver sharable useful information about it.

For example, explained Expect Labs CEO Tim Tuttle -- who previously built and sold video search engine Truveo to AOL -- if several people using MindMeld were talking about going out to a Blue Bottle cafe in San Francisco, … Read more

Are the deepest secrets of your mind safe? Could thieves trick you into revealing your bank card PIN or computer passwords just by thinking about them?

Theoretically, it could happen.

Ivan Martinovic of the University of Oxford and colleagues at the University of Geneva and University of California at Berkeley describe research into that question in a paper entitled "On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks With Brain-Computer Interfaces" presented earlier this month at the 21st USENIX Security Symposium.

The research was inspired by the growing number of games and other mind apps available for low-cost consumer EEG devices such as Emotiv's EPOC headset, which lets users interact with computers using their thoughts alone. … Read more

This is the week that the torture test really comes into its own, I think. We decided to toughen up and test the brand-new 11-inch Apple MacBook Air. Yeah, I know. Yikes. But I really want to test portable devices, and the Air is the epitome of portable, is it not?

We're down to a good rhythm with heat, cold, dropping, and water, and we're really trying to figure out how to make the wild card tests true to life. So, when three or four viewers tweeted me and told me they had put their MacBook Airs on … Read more