IBM's Doctor Watson?

From USATODAY.com

"IBM's supercomputer system, best known for trouncing the world's best "Jeopardy!" players on TV, is being tapped by one of the largest U.S. health insurers to help diagnose medical problems and authorize treatments.

WellPoint Inc., which has 34.2 million members, will integrate Watson's lightning speed and deep health care database into its existing patient information, helping it choose among treatment options and medicines."

The WellPoint application will combine data from three sources: a patient's chart and electronic records that a doctor or hospital has, the insurance company's history of medicines and treatments, and Watson's huge library of textbooks and medical journals.

IBM says the computer can then sift through it all and answer a question in moments, providing several possible diagnoses or treatments, ranked in order of the computer's confidence, along with the basis for its answer.

Previously IBM developed Deep Blue, "a massively parallel computer, to be applied to the study of biomolecular phenomena such as protein folding."

New mathematical model aids simulations of early universe

New mathematical model... SMU Research "Together the scientists built a computer model of events during the 'Dark Ages' when the first stars emitted radiation that altered the surrounding matter, enabling light to pass through. The team tested its model on two of the largest existing NSF supercomputers, 'Ranger' at the University of Texas at Austin and 'Kraken' at the University of Tennessee."

"By forcing the computational methods to tightly bind these processes together, our new model allows us to generate simulations that are highly accurate, numerically stable and computationally scalable to the largest supercomputers available," Reynolds says."

GR: Computers don't just make certain kinds of work easier -- in some cases they make it possible.

Plan to teach military robots the rules of war - tech - 18 June 2009 - New Scientist

Plan to teach military robots the rules of war - tech - 18 June 2009 - New Scientist: "Technology has always distanced the soldiers who use weapons from the people who get hit. But robotics engineer Ron Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, is working to imagine wars in which weapons make their own decisions about wielding lethal force.

He is particularly interested in how such machines might be programmed to act ethically, obeying the rules of engagement.

Arkin has developed an 'ethical governor', which aims to ensure that robot attack aircraft behave ethically in combat, and is demonstrating the system in simulations based on recent campaigns by US troops, using real maps from the Middle East."

Simulated brain closer to thought

BBC News Simulated brain closer to thought: "A detailed simulation of a small region of a brain built molecule by molecule has been constructed and has recreated experimental results from real brains.
The 'Blue Brain' has been put in a virtual body, and observing it gives the first indications of the molecular and neural basis of thought and memory."

Google Earth to include Oceans, Historical Imagery

Google Earth Goes Deep With Ocean Simulations NYTimes.com "Two and a half years ago, the software engineers behind Google Earth, the searchable online replica of the planet, were poised to fill an enormous data gap, adding the two-thirds of the globe that is covered by water in reality and was blue, and blank, online.

But until then all of the existing features on Google Earth — mountains, valleys, cities, plains, ice sheets — were built through programming from an elevation of zero up.

“We had this arbitrary distinction that if it was below sea level it didn’t count,” recalled John Hanke, the Internet entrepreneur who co-created the progenitor of Google Earth, called Keyhole, and moved to Google when the company bought his company in 2004.

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch - New York Times: "Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims."

'Virtual Iraq' Simulation To Study Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

'Virtual Iraq' Simulation To Study Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: "Weill Cornell Medical College researchers are using a virtual reality simulation called 'Virtual Iraq' to better understand how symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) develop. In their ongoing research trial, participating Iraq War and Gulf War veterans with and without PTSD are shown a brief, 3-D virtual-reality simulation of an urban combat scenario. They wear a headset, through which they hear, see, and — using a keypad — 'move' through a 'virtual world' in which images change in a natural way along with head and body movement."