1/16/2015

Headline Jan 17, 2015/


''' TOTAL-TOTAL RECALL : 

STUDENTS TAKE HEED '''




AIR, Water, Earth, Fire, Explosives, Students, Teachers,  -this formidable, Pakistani Nation, stays soaked and numb in grief.

The brave students of Pakistan, return to schools and life. Life ticks away with resolve and unsung heroes. My judgement is:

Mourning and late reaction, of every kind,  will embitter the nations for a long, long time.

LEST I FORGET,  -and all students of the world take heed, that  one of these very fine days, when I am in great form-  

And at the very first possible opportunity, I am going to invite the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mian Mohammed Nawaz Sharif, to become a reader and a subscriber to  ''Sam Daily Times''.   

Mariam, Rabo, Dee, Saima, Haleema, Armeen, Paras, Sorat, Hussain, Ali, Ehsan, Faizan, Sanan, Anique, Zaeem, Haanyia,  Mustafa, Eman, Ibrahim, Shahzaib, Salar, Hamza, Rehan, Harris, Nayab, Asim,  Umer, Areesha, Anum, Ahsen, Aqsa, Hyder: 

*** Be Warned. ***

And make sure that every school, college, university and every student in Pakistan is aware of this, and informed too

And then later, and at the appropriate time, I will have the honour to extend the same invitation to other Heads of the States.

BRAIN SCIENTISTS have come a long way since the early-19th century, when they had to wait until patients died so that they could dissect their heads.

IN 1885  German Philosopher Hermann Ebbinghaus showed that two thirds of what we learn vanishes from our brains with an hour.

That disheartening  ''forgetting curve''  is the reason we paper our computer screens Post-it notes,   mumble mental shopping list like mantras and consult our PDAs at every single opportunity.

Sunil Vemuri, a graduate student,  at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab,  was hoping to fill in the holes left by our sometimes fickle minds.

How?

''Our focus''  he says,  ''is on audio recording everything in our lives.''

Vemuri has spent much of the year 2003 and a half strapped to a microphone and PDA, which picked up every word he uttered to friends,  colleagues, and family and beamed the information wirelessly to a server.

Voice  -recognition software converted converted the spoken word into text and delivered it to his laptop, where it was catalogued alongwith hourly weather reports, screen grabs, internet news sites-

His e-mail, every item on his daily calender and   -via a Global Positioning System chip in his PDA  -his whereabouts in the  lab building.

Later, when  Vemuri was trying to remember something, he found the passage in any number of ways. He could do keyword search or look up a particular date.

One of Vemuri's goals was figuring out how best to manage all that data.

If you are trying to recall what your wife said in a conversation, are you more likely to remember that you talked while walking through the Central Park, that it was  50 degrees and partly cloudy or-

That you had stopped to buy coffee beforehand?  (So far, weather is proving to be a less important factor than location and timing.)

At the time, and during this experimental research, Vemuri was also trying to assess the level of social acceptance for audio recording:

Are we ready to have people walking around tapping every moment of their lives  -and ours? We may soon be.

As security cameras proliferated, people began growing accustomed to constant video surveillance. In the united States, police department are already experimenting with neighbourhoodwide sound pickups that could transmit:

Audio back to headquarters, which could be useful, say, for pinpointing the location of gunfire.

Would constant  audio  surveillance be a good thing? Only for some.

It could help nostalgia seekers relive their youth, says Vemuri. ''My younger sister who often asks me about our childhood, would have a blast with it.  But I am not convinced everybody would.''

The technology might also be useful, at the office:

''Some people work in environment where they're given a lot of information, a lot of to - do lists,''  he says.

But because of the hectic nature of their jobs, the have an inability to write down notes in a timely fashion. A memory prosthesis would allow them to record it and then, later on,  have the ability to retrieve it.

Vemuri hopes his memory prosthesis will one day be a  ''wristwatch''   -size device. 

But first,  there are plenty of kinks to overcome:

Voice recognition software, at the time,  garbled about  90%   of what he said, batteries lasted  only two hours or so and memory chips held only a fraction of the data he would like to eventually store on them.

It will be  10 years,  he figured at the time, before technology caught up to his vision.

Until then go and  enjoy the  upside of your memory's fallibility:

That  ''automatic erase''   function for embarrassing moments. And by the way, there are  100  billion  Neurons  in a human brain.

Technology, at this moment of writing is at  the point where you best forget your PDAs and other smart devices.

The best way to remember life details may be to record them all. 

With respectful dedication to the brave students, professors, teachers and  people of Pakistan. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:


''' Brain Honours '''

'''Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

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