This year has seen a revolutionary turn in the automobile industry, in the form of the first ever partly automated Tesla’s autopilot system. Over the years, an on going debate has ensued that argues the viability of automated vehicles. Amidst the many prototypes developed by the likes of Google, Audi and Mercedes, Tesla’s Auto Pilot is the only road ready and implemented system we see today. Yes it is not a fully automated driving system, but what it does to the market is help develop trust between the people and machine. Tesla’s autopilot enables the driver to effectively let the car drive on its own in expressways without any inputs apart from instructions of lane changes. Though it has seen its own controversies, the network of Tesla cars constantly upload information helping the self learning process of the system.

Mercedes-Benz F015 Autonomous package of luxury.

How the Tesla Model S examines and implements a lane change in high speed expressway. Note that in the diagram the only autonomous vehicle is the one in Red tha is to make the desired change. The other vehicles can be either Man or Machine controlled.

So Autonomous Self Driving Cars, are they actually safe? 

A view from the Tesla Model S Cockpit

2020 has been earmarked as the year when completely self driven cars may finally make it into the mainline transport industry. But with just 4 years to go, are we really sure that these cars are safe enough to be allowed to run along with Man driven vehicles. Having both forms of vehicle poses the basic problem of a large number of variable, many of which cannot be pertained as they depend on individual driver actions, unlike when controlled by machines. The machine, or intact any one of us, cannot predict the behaviour of another being in the system, which can lead to undesired turn of events. Had the roads been a network of autonomous vehicles, where each car is connected to a central system, thus administering behaviour of each vehicle, it would have been a very stable system, but again not a viable one. 

A lot of work is going into development of systems that allow for autonomous vehicles. What do you think are the biggest problems?

Any autonomous vehicle, even partly has to have a complete field idea of its surroundings. A plethora of sensors all around the vehicle provide the data-streams.

Remember those times when you used to sit infront of your computer checking your scrapbook or testimonials eagerly? Or finding the silliest reasons to join a community? All these were a common phenomenon about half a decade earlier. But now, the scenario has completely changed. Social networking has emerged with a completely new face in the past half decade or so. And inevitably, the time has arrived for us to bid Orkut goodbye. On September 30 (coincidentally my birthday too :P ), Orkut will cease to exist except for the public communities out there whose archive will still be publicly available. And as it's end nears, let's take a deeper look at this social network which was one of the first popular social networking site.

Orkut founder 'Orkut Büyükkökten', the one-man army behind the creation of Orkut

In 2004, just a few weeks before the now in-trend Facebook(then TheFacebook) was launched, a Stanford Grad called Orkut Büyükkökten, sitting at the Google headquarters at California, had a great vision, which was

to connect all the Internet users so they can relate to each other which will make a difference to their lives.

 He was no stranger to social networks. He has been building and working on various social network projects since 2000. His project inCircle for Stanford Alumni became quite popular. After joining Google, he developed Orkut as a 20% project(where each Googler can denote 20% of their official work time to make something or do something of their own.). Thus, Google's first social networking site Orkut came up.

Marrisa Mayer and Sergey Brin

However, the inside story was not so smooth. Infact, when Orkut was first launched, it wasn't even launched as a Google product. The project had been built under the supervision of Marissa Mayer(now CEO of Yahoo). The project didn't become a part of Google Labs although it had immense potential. Despite it being developed as an experimental prototype, due to CEO Sergey Brin's insistence, Orkut was launched immediately without proper load testing, security reviews and privacy policy. And as a result, immediately after being launced, Orkut(which in Finish meant “multiple sexual climaxes”) was filled with spam and pornographic materials. This forced Google to take down the product immediately and relaunch it later. That was a big setback. Not only that, Brin and Mayer didn't even want the employees to publicly talk about Orkut. They gave very specific instructions to Googlers asking them to "neither confirm nor deny" a connection between Orkut and Google, if asked by reporters. Lastly, they agreed to use the phrase "in affiliation with Google" for Orkut.

All these factors resulted in a not-so-great start for Orkut. Surely, the social network were accepted by many but it didn't become a universal hit. For eg., it failed to make a mark in key market areas like US which was also the place of its origin. However it became quite popular in Brazil, India and in a few other states. A few weeks after Orkut was launced, in it's founder's Alma-mater dormitory, another social networking company named TheFacebook(which later became Facebook) was launched by a nerd (and later one of the youngest billionares) named Mark Zuckerberg. Although it's launch didn't provide any immediate threat to Orkut, but it was destined to be a great hit in the near future and to doom the prospects of many other social networks.

Fast forward 10 long years...

Orkut although has seen its popularity dwindling, sometimes linearly and sometimes exponentially, has successfully been able to hold on to a few local regions like Brazil and India for quite a long time. But, slowly Facebook overshadowed Orkut even in these traditional strongholds. Orkut's popularity rapidly started declining from 2009-2010 while Facebook's popularity continuously shot up.At the end of April 2010, Orkut had 19.7 million unique visitors compared to Facebook who had 18 million visitors worldwide. In India, Facebook grabbed the number one position for the first time in July 2010 with 20.9 million visitors, a growth of 179% in a year, whereas Orkut registered a paltry growth of only 16% in the same period.

Facebook Vs Orkut popularity in Brazil in the year 2012.

Today,social networking is not the same as it was a decade earlier. However, Google engineers were hardly enthusiastic about updating the features in Orkut nor was there any substantial innovation. One of the obnoxious reason was that Google engineers at first were not very pleased with the fact that Mr. Orkut had used Microsoft(non-google) tools to develop Orkut. Hardly did they bother to implement anything except for a few UI and Design changes. When they added one or two new features like photo tagging etc., it was already present on other sites like Facebook. And with the passage of time, the ever-increasing number of spam that the scrapbook was filled with made it all the more difficult and irritating to use Orkut.

Today, it is only a matter of time before Orkut ceases to exist. Now when you try to open Orkut, you might encounter a page like this(in case you are not signed in from a Google Account FROM WHICH AN ORKUT ACCOUNT ALREADY EXISTS.)

This is how a typical Orkut account's home page now looks

One quick glance through Orkut now is enough to give you a feel of it's present deplorable condition..One can very easily see the signs of negligence and that the product is simply "THERE" without any active development. The most striking one is the OLD Google bar on top corner which still remains in Orkut(perhaps the only Google product where it can still be seen.)There has been a slight effort though, to integrate some features of Google+ into it and now you can even post to both Orkut and Google+ simultaneously, provided you have an account in both from the same Google ID. Google has also decided to archive Orkut's public communities when the product as a whole ceases to exist. You can even create a personal archive of your Orkut profile before it ends, by following these steps.

As I try to pen down the last few lines for this post, my mind goes down the memory line. Orkut no wonder is a great social networking site and has touched the lives of many in different ways. But, when we compare Orkut to it's counterparts, it is certainly in a delusive, precarious situation. Perhaps the story could had been different, had it's parent company Google, been more enthusiastic about it and maintained it better. But unfortunately, reality says something else....

"ADIEU ORKUT...TIME TO BID YOU GOODBYE"

We've seen bits and pieces of technology that hint at the future of computing, but HP has just taken a big, big step toward bringing them all together. The company has unveiled The Machine (yes, that's the name), a processing architecture designed to cope with the flood of data from an internet of things. It uses clusters of special-purpose cores, rather than a few generalized cores; photonics link everything instead of slow, energy-hungry copper wires; memristors give it unified memory that's as fast as RAM yet stores data permanently, like a flash drive.


 

The result is a computer that can handle dramatically larger amounts of data, all the while using much less power. A Machine server could address 160 petabytes of data in 250 nanoseconds; HP says its hardware should be about six times more powerful than an existing server, even as it consumes 80 times less energy. Ditching older technology like copper also encourages non-traditional, three-dimensional computing shapes (you're looking at a concept here), since you're not bound by the usual distance limits. The Machine shouldn't just be for data centers and supercomputers, either -- it can shrink down to laptops and phones.



To HP, the platform opens the door to large-scale computing concepts that aren't even possible today, since devices can talk to entire networks to get things done. A doctor could compare your symptoms with that of every other patient on Earth, even while keeping everything private; smart cell towers would be aware of what's going on across other towers and react accordingly. The shift in thinking is significant enough that HP is writing its own operating system from scratch to handle what's possible with The Machine.
 It's also creating an optimized version of Android, so there is a chance you'll see Machine-based gadgets in your pocket.
 

The big obstacle at this point is simply timing. HP won't even have samples of the necessary memory until 2015, while the first devices using The Machine are expected to ship in 2018. However, the tech firm is also attempting the kind of fundamental shift that the industry hasn't seen in decades -- this is going to take a while as a matter of course.

"When modern humans fight hand to hand, the face is usually the primary target," said Carrier. "What we found was that the bones that suffer the highest rates of fracture in fights are the same parts of the skull that exhibited the greatest increase in robusticity. These bones also show the greatest difference between males and females in australopiths and humans. In other words, male and female faces are different because the parts of the skull that break in fights are bigger in males."The debate over the dark side of human nature can be traced back to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that before civilisation humans were "noble savages".

Recent studies and evidence from ancient ape-like bipeds suggests that the present human face evolved to minimise damage caused by fighting.

Scientists scrutinized the bone structure of australopiths, ape-like bipeds living 4m to 5m years ago which predated the modern human primate HOMO. They discovered that the Australopith’s faces and jaws were most resistive in just those areas most likely to receive a blow from a fist.

US lead researcher Dr David Carrier, from the University of Utah, said the australopiths had hand proportions that allowed the formation of a fist, in effect turning the hand into a club.

"If indeed the evolution of our hand proportions was associated with selection for fighting behaviour you might expect the primary target, the face, to have undergone evolution to better protect it from injury when punched."

The study, published in the Journal Biological Reviews builds on previous work indicating that violence played a greater role in human evolution than many experts would like to admit.

Carrier, a biologist, has investigated the short legs of great apes, the bipedal posture of humans and the hand proportions of hominins, or early human species. He argues that these traits evolved, to a large extent, around the need to fight.

The ideology that civilization corrupted the human race and made us violent has strong proof in social science, but however the facts did not fit in the theory.

Dr Carrier added: "The hypothesis that our early ancestors were aggressive could be falsified if we found that the anatomical characters that distinguish us from other primates did not improve fighting ability.

"What our research has been showing is that many of the anatomical characters of great apes and our ancestors, the early hominins (such as bipedal posture, the proportions of our hands and the shape of our faces) do, in fact, improve fighting performance."

Co-author Dr Michael Morgan, a University of Utah physician, said: "I think our science is sound and fills some long-standing gaps in the existing theories of why the musculoskeletal structures of our faces developed the way they did.

"Our research is about peace. We seek to explore, understand, and confront humankind's violent and aggressive tendencies.

 

"Peace begins with ourselves and is ultimately achieved through disciplined self-analysis and an understanding of where we've come from as a species. Through our research, we hope to look ourselves in the mirror and begin the difficult work of changing ourselves for the better."

Where are technologies heading in the next 30 years ? How will they affect our lifestyle and human society ?

Most adults alive today grew up without the Internet or mobile phones, let alone smartphones and tablets with voice commands and apps for everything. These new technologies have altered our lifestyle in a way few of us could have imagined a few decades ago. But have we reached the end of the line ? What else could turn up that could make our lives so much more different ? Faster computers ? More gadgets ? It is in fact so much more than that. Technologies have embarked on an exponential growth curve and we are just getting started. In 10 years we will look back on our life today and wonder how we could have lived with such primitive technology. The gap will be bigger than between today and the 1980's. Get ready because you are in for a rough ride.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI), SUPERCOMPUTERS & ROBOTICS

 

Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering, predicts that by 2029 computer will exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to that of a human, and that by 2045 computers will be a billion times more powerful than all of the human brains on Earth. Once computers can fully simulate a human brain and surpass it, it will cause an "intelligence explosion" that will radically change civilization. The rate of innovation will progress exponentially, so much that it will become impossible to foresee the future course of human history. This point in time is called the singularity. Experts believe that it will happen in the middle of the 21st century, perhaps as early as 2030, but the median value of predictions is 2040

Let's start with cognitive computing. IBM's Watson computer is already capable of reading a million books a second and answering questions posed in natural language. In 2011 Watson easily defeated former champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings at the TV game show Jeopardy!, reputedly one of the most difficult quiz competitions in the world. Watson's abilities are not merely limited to finding the relevant facts and answers. It can also make jokes and clever puns. Most remarkably, Watson can providebetter medical diagnostics than any human medical doctor, give financial advice, as well as generate or evaluate all kinds of scientific hypotheses based on a huge amount of data. Computer power increases in average 100 fold every 10 years, which means 10,000 fold after 20 years, and 1 million fold after 30 years. Imagine what computers will be able to do by then.

IBM Blue Gene

The X Prize Foundation, chaired by Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Singularity University in the Silicon Valley, manages incentive competitions to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. One of the current competitions, the Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE, aims at developing a smartphone-like device that can test vitals like cholesterol, blood pressure, heart rate or allergies, analyse your DNA for genetic risks, diagnose medical conditions, and predict potential diseases or the likelihood of a stroke. All this without seeing a doctor. The device could be used by you or your relatives anywhere, anytime. All this is possible thanks to highly sensitive electronic sensors and powerful AI.

Google is working on an AI that will be able to read and understand any document, and learn the content of all books in the world. It will be able to answer any question asked by any user. This omniscient AI will eventually become people's first source of knowledge, replacing schools, books and even human interactions. Just wonder about anything and the computer will provide you with the answer and explain it to you in a way you can easily understand, based on your current knowledge.

Once AI reaches the same level of intelligence as a human brain, or exceeds it, intelligent robots will be able to do a majority of human jobs. Robots already manufacture most products. Soon they will also build roads and houses, replace human staff in supermarkets and shops, serve and perhaps even cook food in restaurants, take care of the sick and the elderly. The best doctors, even surgeons, will be robots.

It might still be a decade or two before human-like androids start walking the streets among us and working for us. But driver-less cars, pioneered by Google and Tesla, could be introduced as early as 2016, and could become the dominant form of vehicles in developed countries by 2025. The advantages of autonomous cars are so overwhelming (less stress and exhaustion, fewer accidents, smoother traffic) that very few people will want to keep traditional cars. That is why the transition could happen as fast as, if not faster than the shift from analog phones to smartphones. Robo-Taxis are coming soon and could in time replace human taxi drivers. All cars and trains will eventually be entirely driven by computers.

AI will translate documents, answer customer support questions, complete administrative tasks, and teach kids and adults alike. It is estimated that 40 to 50% of service jobs will be done by AI in 2025. Creative jobs aren't immune either, as computers will soon surpass humans in creativity too. There could still be human artists, but artistic value will drop to zero when any design or art can be produced on demand and on measure by AI in a few seconds.

Once computer graphics and AI simulation of human behaviors become so realistic that we can't tell if a person in a video is real or not, Hollywood won't need to use real actors anymore, but will be able to create movie stars that don't exist - and the crazy thing is no one will notice the difference !

3-D PRINTING

Commercial 3D printers

3D printers are the biggest upheaval in manufacturing since the industrial revolution. Not only can we print objects in three dimensions, they can now be printed in practically any material, not just plastics, but also metals, concrete, fabrics, and even food. Better still, they can be printed in multiple materials at once. High-quality 3D printers can copy electronic chips in the tiniest detail and have a functional chip. High-tech vehicles like the Koenigsegg's One:1 (the world's fastest car) or EDAG's Genesis are already being made by 3D Printing. Even houses will be 3D-printed, for a fraction of the costs of traditional construction.

In a near future we won't need to go shopping to buy new products. We will just select them online, perhaps tweak a bit their design, size or colour to our tastes and needs, then we will just 3D print them at home. More jobs going down the drain ? Not really. Retail jobs were already going to be taken by intelligent robots anyway. The good news is that it will considerably reduce our carbon footprint by cutting unnecessary transport from distant factories in China or other parts of the world. Everything will be "home-made", literally. Since any material can be re-used, or 'recycled' in a 3D printer, it will also dramatically reduce waste.

3D printing is also good news for medicine. Doctors can now make customized prosthetics, joint replacements, dental work and hearing aids.

BIO-ENGINEERING

The other advances in robotics, AI, 3-D printing and nanotechnologies all converge in the field of bio-engineering. Human cyborgs aren't science-fiction anymore. It's already happening.

• There are artificial hand with real feeling controlled directly by the brain thanks to a nerve interface converting electric impulses in the nervous system into electronic signals for the robotic prosthesis. From that point on, any improvement is possible, like this drummer who got an extra bionic arm.
• Electronic membranes can keep the heart beating forever.
• Microchips implanted into the brain can restore vision in blind people and hearing in deaf people. Soon such chips will allow bionic humans to see and hear better than humans in their natural state. Equipped with one of these, humans will be able to see ultraviolet and infrared, hear ultrasounds like dogs, echo-locate like bats, and perhaps even eventually understand animal languages, including the whale vocalization. The potential for improvements is unlimited.
• We are on the verge of developing telepathic abilities. Placing microchips on the brains of two individuals, then connecting them with one another through the internet, one person can hear what the other hears directly in their brains. Studies with rats went further. Microchips implanted in their motor cortices effectively caused one rat to remotely control the movements of the another rat in a separate room.
• Neural prostheses have been used to repair a damaged hippo-campus inside a monkey's brain, and could be used in a near future to repair various types of brain damages in human beings too.
• Robotic exoskeletons like Iron Man will augment our physical capacities tremendously. The advantage of these exoskeletons is that they can be easily removed and don't require permanent changes to our body. Researchers at Stanford University are currently working on Stickybot, a gecko robot capable of climbing smooth surfaces, such as glass, acrylic and whiteboard using directional adhesive. It's only a matter of time (years, not decades) before a gecko suit enables humans to climb buildings like Spiderman. And what next ?
  

  

  Paraplegic Kicks Off World Cup In Exo-Skeleton

STEM CELLS & BIO-PRINTING

Regenerative medicine offers even more promises than artificial limbs and body parts. What if instead of having a robotic arm, you could regrow completely your original arm ? Sounds impossible ? It isn't. Lizard regrow their tails. Axolotls regrow severed legs. We now understand how they do it: stem cells. These pluripotent undifferentiated cells have the power to repair any body part. Using organ culture, stem cells can regrow any organ as fresh as new through. In the future it will be possible to regrow limbs or organs directly on a person, as if the body was simply healing itself.

Combing 3-D printing and stem cell regeneration paves the way to the printing of human organs, a field known as bio-printing (read articles on the topic in New Scientist and The Economist).

GENETICS

Genetics has progressed tremendously too over the last 15 years. From the sequencing of the first full human genome in 2003, we have now entered the era of personal genomics, gene therapy and synthetic life, and could be approaching the age of genetically enhanced humans.

Gene therapy is perhaps the most revolutionary of all the medical advances, as it will effectively allow to fix any disease-causing gene and to engineer humans that are better adapted to the modern nutrition, life rythmn, and technology-dominated lifestyle. Not only will all diseases and neuro-psychological problems with a genetic cause disappear, but humans will also become more resistant to stress, fatigue and allergens, and could choose to boost their potential mental faculties and physical abilities, creating "superhumans". This is known as trans-humanism.

Gene therapy also permits genetic modifications for purely cosmetic reasons, such as changing one's skin, hair or eye pigmentation. Gene therapy can be done over and over again, switching back or refining earlier modifications if necessary, just as one would edit text on a computer. Once the human genome is fully understood, we could even imagine applications that let people customize their physical appearance of a virtual avatar of themselves, then transcribe these changes to their DNA. This is the age of customizable humans, or rather the age of customizable life forms.

VERTICAL FARMING

Ecologist Dickson Despommier of Columbia University came up with the idea of using skyscrapers in New York for agricultural production, eventually founding the Vertical Farm Project. The virtues of vertical farming are manifold. Food can be produced in optimal conditions inside purposely-built skyscrapers, maximizing the amount of sunlight for photosynthesis. By controlling the inside temperature, and the amount of water and nutrients each plant receives, indoor farming can produce crops year-round multiplying by a factor from 4 to 6 the productivity compared to traditional farming. What's more all this is possible without using pesticides since skyscrapers are a closed ecosystem of their own, free of insects or rodents. Additionally, vertical farms free up agricultural land, which in turn prevents deforestation and allows for reforestation and the safeguard of the environment.

THE END OF THE CAPITALIST ECONOMY AS WE KNOW IT

Ironically it is the extreme success of the capitalist economy that will lead to its demise. The very nature of competitive markets that drives productivity up and brings marginal costs down, eventually to near zero, will make goods and services nearly free much sooner than we think. Accelerating factors include Moore's law of exponential growth in digital technologies and the fast development of 3-D printing. The Internet alone has already had a huge impact in providing billions of people around the world with an amazing range of free services, including for example online higher education such as Khan Academy.

The first step is providing free ultra-fast Internet to all the world. Google and Facebook are both working on different ways of achieving this, starting with developing countries where Internet connections are extremely sparse today, notably in Africa. Google's Project Loon plans to achieve this by launching high-altitude balloons into the stratosphere, while Facebook wants to build flying drones and satellites to beam Internet around the world. 5G mobile networks (coming around 2020) will be so fast (downloading a full HD movie in one second) that cable Internet connections will disappear. The merger that is under way between TV, computers, tablets, smartphones and game consoles will very soon result in a single universal type of device being used everywhere, all connected via 5G networks. In other words, telephone, cable TV and Internet Service Providers will all go out of business, as all TVs and phones will be connected through free mobile networks.

By 2035, humanity is likely to have achieved free electricity for all the world, mostly thanks to the exponential efficiency and decreasing prices to harness solar energy, but also thanks to 4th generation nuclear reactors and later fusion power.

The Internet of Things will connect all the electric and electronic devices in the world and optimally manage energy supply through a smart-grid known as the Enernet, expected to become a reality around 2030.

Over the coming decades the economy is going to be transformed by the rise of the Collaborative Commons, i.e. peer production coordinated (usually with the aid of the Internet) into large, meaningful projects mostly without traditional hierarchical organization. Almost any consumer product will be downloadable online and 3-D printed at extremely low cost at home, which ultimately will lead to the end of capitalism and the start of an unprecedented era of abundance, as Peter Diamandis of Singularity University convincingly explains in his remarkable book.

TOWARD THE SINGULARITY

As amazing as all this seems, keep in mind that all these advances in bio-engineering, genetics, robotics and 3-D printing are barely the what is being developed now and will become available to us within the next decade (horizon 2025). This isn't the singularity yet. Once the singularity has been reached, in 25 to 40 years, this is when everything will change beyond our wildest dreams (or nightmares).

This article was originally posted on Eupedia.com by Maciamo Hay.

Hey everyone.. It's football season and the FIFA World Cup Brazil 2014 has already started. And boy did we have some exciting matches! 

Whether it is Oscar and Neymar's goals in the first match or the 'Hammering' defeat suffered by Spain at the hands of the Dutch (seriously though, they lost 5-1!! That's the worst defeat suffered by any defending champ in the next WC), we all know football has some exciting moments...

Just look at Van Persie's amazing header in the last match..

Van Persie's first goal vs Spain in WC 2014

That is plain beautiful no matter how many times you see it!

So, to celebrate this FIFA fever, we here at Just Geeked have brought together our favourite football moments...(some of them atleast.. impossible to get all):

1. Top 5 Impossible goals.

2. Best of 2010 World Cup.

and for some fun, lastly we have,

3. 17 Craziest Field Crashers.

Well most of the last video are from football, but you guys can forgive the rest...

That's it folks, that's all we have for now. Stay tuned for more geek articles and follow us on Facebook and Google+, the links are on the bottom.

Until next time guys, Cheers!