While some companies are hiring people to promote the company brand on Twitter, others frown on their employees’ personal use of social networking during work hours. And now, it’s being reported that people waste so much time Tweeting/Facebooking/etc. that it costs British companies $2.2 billion a year, according to a survey put out by Morse. The results are based on 1,460 people surveyed, who on average used Twitter or Facebook for 40 minutes during the business week.

But is time spent on Facebook and Twitter really wasted time? As TechCrunch points out, there is a “difference between being productive and ‘not wasting time’:

I’d like to see more research in this field, but more focused on office workers who spend the majority of their day staring out the windows, yapping about last night’s television highlights with coworkers in the coffee and/or smoking room, attending meetings where no decision or progress gets made, or simply working on stuff that’s not particularly considered to be productive for their employer, the British economy as a whole, or the rest of planet Earth.

As a protective measure, some companies have banned the use of social networks by having the IT guy block access to the sites. The Washington Post put out guidelines on what to Tweet and what not to Tweet. Perhaps these tips could have prevented ABC employees from tweeting that Obama called Kanye a “jackass” during an off-the-record interview. Needless to say, basic Twitter etiquette will continue to evolve: In the meantime, don’t say anything that will get you fired.

And if you happen to be on Twitter, follow us — @discovermag.

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Image: flickr/ Mykl Roventine

Researchers have long been developing brain-computer interfacing (BCI) systems to enhance the quality of life for paralyzed or disabled people, enabling them to control gadgets such as computers and wheelchairs using only their minds. But the devices haven’t allowed humans to communicate with each other without speaking—until now.

Christopher James of the University of Southampton’s Institute of Sound and Vibration Research has devised a way to achieve brain-to-brain communication using BCI technology—effectively allowing a person to send his or her thoughts/brainwaves through the Internet.

The process involves two people who are attached to an EEG amplifier, two computers, an Internet connection, and one LED lamp. In the test, the first subject was asked to transfer his thoughts through a computer. The thoughts were hardly personal —the subject was simply asked to move his arm, meaning he had to think “move my arm.” His thoughts were translated into computer language consisting of a series of binary digits, zeros and ones. For example, when he raised his right arm, the computer read a one, and when he raised his left arm, the computer read a zero.

(more…)

Meet Emily Howell. She’s a composer who is about to have a CD released of sonatas she composed. So what makes her unique?

She’s a computer program.

Emily was created by University of California-Santa Cruz professor David Cope, who claims to be more of a music teacher than a computer scientist (he’s both). Cope has been working on combining artificial intelligence with music for 30 years—thereby challenging the idea that creating music should be limited to the human mind.

Prior to Emily, Cope created a program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI). It allowed the user to pick a composer like Mozart or Bach, then EMI would analyze the music and spit out a new piece that sounded like it had been created by the same composer. But the music EMI “wrote” still needed performers to play it—many of whom refused to perform music that hadn’t been written by a human.

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Our obsession with posting photos on Facebook, tweeting our every move, and surfing the Internet creates an electronic trail of our life, whether we like it or not. But 75-year-old Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell takes digital recording to a whole new level: He creates e-memories so he won’t have to remember a single detail of his days.

Bell lugs around video cameras and audio recorders to record every action and social interaction. Not only does he save receipts by taking digital pictures of them, he records every single bill, medical record, and conversation. So far he’s in his tenth year of living this digital lifestyle and has amassed more than 350 gigabytes of memory (not including the video storage).

If you’re jealous, the good news is that soon you might be able to make your own digital library of your life. Microsoft is creating a SenseCam, a device that would hang around your neck and take pictures.

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Image: flickr/ Aquillo

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• The “iFart” v. “Pull My Finger” legal battle comes to a close. The solution? Release a new app, “Clear the Air.”

• He’s ba-ack: Kirk Cameron defends his nutbag anti-evolution claims, and proposed vandalism.

• How Wal-Mart gift cards are being used to battle STDs.

• Can Xbox 360 fight heart disease?

• Indonesian woman gives birth to a 19-pound baby. As in, 19 pounds AT BIRTH.

• The Huffington Post launches No Impact Challenge: Can you make no environmental impact for a week?

That’s right—now you can get a diagnosis and a prescription by turning on your Web cam. Telemedicine has created virtual house calls for patients willing to give up face time with doctors. CNN Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen wanted to check out a “funky, little red mole” that worried her, so she went online and paid a doctor $40 for a ten minute session.

Watch a video of her visit here:

There are several states that are testing out the virtual program. Hawaii has launched America Well, in which residents can use a phone or computer to visit their choice of dermatologist, internist, or specialist anytime of the day. And for record-keeping sake, a transcript or stream of the video session is sent to the patient after the “visit.” Texas also offers a similar virtual consultation through My Healthy Access, but patients would have to visit a clinic set up at a Wal-Mart in order to use the service.

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Several MIT students have created quite a project for their class on “ethics and law on the electronic frontier” [ed note: Does no one take Modern British Poetry in college anymore?]. According to the Boston Globe:

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said.

Even their professor, a computer scientist, was amazed. The project, which was done in 2007 and dubbed “gaydar” by the class, has yet to be published in a scientific journal. The data plugged into the program consisted of the friend links of 1,544 men who said they were straight, 21 who said they were bisexual, and 33 who said they were gay. According to the Globe:

Gay men had proportionally more gay friends than straight men, giving the computer program a way to infer a person’s sexuality based on their friends.

Other similar programs have been created to ferret out info like political affiliations. Granted, less germane perhaps than How these programs are created is the question, Why would we want them to be?

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A shoebox sized, GPS-guided robot is under development for the U.S. military. Oh, and the robot has mad ups too: It can leap a 25-foot wall without breaking a sweat.

Robotics company Boston Dynamics, the same group that brought you PETMAN and BigDog, built the robot—known as the Precision Urban Hopper—for the purposes of scouting enemy territory.

BBC News reports:

Most of the time, the robot…uses its four wheels to get around. But the Precision Urban Hopper can use a piston-actuated “leg” to launch it over obstacles such as walls or fences. The robot could boost the capabilities of troops and special forces engaged in urban warfare, say researchers.

The work was funded by the US military’s research branch, and the robot is expected to enlist sometime in late 2010.

Here’s a video of the little bugger posterizing a helpless fence:

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Image: Sandia National Laboratories

Video: Sandia National Laboratories via YouTube/kusharax

Internet speed is awful in South Africa—so awful, in fact, that Unlimited Group, an insurance and financial company in Durban, has decided to use pigeons rather than e-mail.

Unlimited Group sent Winston, an 11-month-old pigeon, on a 50-mile trip with an encrypted data card attached to his leg. It only took the bird one hour and eight minutes to deliver the info to the main call center. That beats the six hours it would have taken to send four gigabytes of information over the Internet. And if the weather is bad, it can take as long as two days.

The Daily Mail reports:

Kevin Rolfe added: ‘For security reasons the information on the memory card attached to Winston has to be very thoroughly encrypted, as it contains personal details of people who call our centre.

‘With modern computer hacking, we’re confident well-encrypted data attached to a pigeon is as secure as information sent down a phone line anyway.

‘There are other problems, of course. Winston is vulnerable to the weather and predators such as hawks. Obviously he will have to take his chances, but we’re confident this system can work for us.’

Internet is so unbelievably slow in South Africa because of the shortage of bandwidth, but it should pick up soon after the 10,500-mile fiber optic cable system is set up next year. The idea of using pigeons in the meantime isn’t all that crazy, given that the birds were used in World War I to send messages—still, in our tech-crazed era, it’s nothing short of shocking.

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Image: flickr/ El Gavacho