Ruminations whilst home sick

So I'm home sick for the first time in a very long time. It started out Sunday as a slight headache and scratchy throat morphing into a sore throat yesterday AM and now one that is on fire complete with throbbing head and body aches punctuated with the occasional sneeze.

I probably could get some work done today and I still might - the joys of working from home - however I chose instead to see if I can sleep this away before it gets worse and working gets more challenging.

This would have been a complete non-issue had I been sleeping well - which is strange for me. Normally I sleep like an absolute bear and act the same when I don't get at least a solid 8 hours. However the past few nights I've found myself in this quasi dream-state where I'm not quite asleep nor awake but my mind's harddrive is spinning away on any number of various topics - a particular client at work, my favorite Doctor, or the technological ministrations of William Gibson all jumbled into a surreal journey of the mind.

I'm not on medications right now and don't seem to have any real stress points other than a forthcoming 3rd Quarter close at the end of the month so it's confusing to me why I cannot get needed shuteye to stave off the sick. Part of the problem is a slight affinity for soft drinks and not enough water - I think dehydration certainly contributed to my current state but, again, usually this is fixed once i rehydrate and "sleep it off".

So I'm off back to bed to see if I can get some dreamless sleep and allow the body to heal thyself. Hopefully in a few years I'll be able to publish this whilst lying in bed, eyes closed through a combination of subvocal recognition and minds-eye projection via wireless implant connection to my computer. Then I could simply keep my eyes closed, log out of the terminal service connection and fall to sleep.

BrainStream: Controlling a wheelchair with your mind and subvocally-controlled, augmented-reality geospatial interactions

I've been waiting to write about this all morning (via BoingBoing). It seems a bunch of intrepid researchers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago have taken work done on subvocal recognition (SVR) and applied it in such a fashion that one can drive/control a wheelchair through "thinking" about where they want it to move.

(NB: I've contributed heavily to the SVR wikipedia entry and liberally link to said service below. I acknowledge that most entries are not that of expert research so YMMV.)

I first got excited about SVR after reading Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" in which the protagonist makes phone calls and interacts with his PDA subvocally. That is to say, the device detects electric signals sent from his brain to his larynx which would normally be translated into speech in the vocal tract. NASA and DARPA both had done some work in the past few years through the subject wearing a collar which detects the signals.

I think my endgame with SVR is really what Cory had in mind in "Down and Out" - be able to not only talk silently on the phone but to control a PDA, surf the web etc.

The phone hardware or service would convert the signals to speech - think of it; ring-tones now and in the future voice profiles - make your voice sound like anyone in any language. Somehow I don't think the Intelligence Community would appreciate that. It makes it difficult to determine who is who on the phone and would kill Voice Stress Analysis. I'm guessing the FCC and/or the ITU would want to have some say in how that works. Other issues include protecting ones own voice profile and the damage this could do to voice-based biometrics.

I wouldn't worry - voice recognition as it stands today is still complete rubbish ( any thoughts on that from the accessibility side of things?). I still think the need to continually train any new piece of voice recognition software is a waste of time and they should all be required to adhere to a voice profile standard. Said standard would, in theory, allow you to train something once and export to an open format importing it into the same software (got to love the lack of portability of licenses!) or any other similar products. At a minimum, it should at least bring the user half-way to training the program to work well. The big risk again is someone stealing this profile to break voice-based biometrics. Surely that can be mitigated with some nifty encrypted token of some-sort with decent key recovery.

There has been some interesting work done on voice translation technology for the soldiers in the streets of Iraq that would have commercial applications in the future. Think of babelfish meets voice recognition and be able to speak with anyone regardless of their native language. Can you say "Universal Translator" ?

But back to the sci-fi. Combine subvocal recognition with augmented reality, GPS and gesture recognition (think Tom Cruise's manipulation of a multi-input virtual screen in "Minority Report") tied into a Net-connected PDA with a Head-Mounted Display (HMD). Hot damn.

The SVR would allow you to interact with the PDA silently. The GPS combined with augmented reality as visualized through the PDA's HMD would allow the user to view the entire physical world as annotated by Semantic Web, metadata addicts similar to some of the art installations touched upon in William Gibson's "Spook Country" (current reading). The gesture recognition which would be determined through sensors on clothes as well as the HMD would allow one to interact with the augmented reality to manipulate the objects only existent in the geotagged cyberspace environment. Absolutely mind-blowing.

Ye gods I love taking lunch to paddle down a brain-stream.

DanRad as the new Doctor? Uhhhh.....No.

Bookies may think that Daniel Radcliffe has "the look" of The Doctor but he most certainly does not have the acting chops and nor do I think we've seen him have the humour The Doctor needs to have. Please no. Please?