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Slate magazine has a special on mind development, brains, neuroscience, neurotheology and other brain-related issues appropriately named Brains! Lots of good articles on the latest developments in brain science. You should probably start with 5 biggest neuroscience developments of the year, which cross-links some other Slate articles compiled for this special. Train Your Brain is another article that describes how the humanity over the past century went from the idea of never-changing brain to an elastic brain that can be trained and improved with exercise.

Associated Press profiles NeuroSky, a company that started selling a brain activity sensor and an algorithm library to analyze it. The current application is better video games, where a golfer incapable of concentrating on the game would make an inferior move, or a scared Grand Theft Auto player would lose the precision in his aim. An EE Times article from 2005 says the company hired the top neuroscience experts from Moscow and licensed their inventions in order to produce a device that is capable of recognizing and interpreting brain activity.

Earlier this year some German scientists used brain surveillance techniques to determine whether the test participants decided to add or subtract a number, and reached 71% rate.

The New York Times today runs a story on a pretty exciting company that is playing to revolutionize the movie business. It’s no secret that the movie-going experience has been declining, while the number of HDTVs sold has been rising steadily. A company called Vudu, ran by a guy who started TiVo, is now building a box for peer-to-peer download of movies straight from the studios. Theoretically that enables the movie studios to make the movie securely available to the viewers on the day of the release, and improves on the download experience offered by other shops, like Amazon Unbox, MovieLink and others:

DVD sales began to stagnate because studios had finally plowed through their entire backlog of movies that could be released on the shiny discs. The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners. And outlaw services like the pirate Web sites that use BitTorrent technology demonstrated that digital piracy, which had consumed the music business first, now posed a real problem for Hollywood.

Even if you spent a single day in an Economics class, you’re probably familiar with a concept of supply and demand, where the price for a product has an impact on the demand and subsequent sales of it.

Associated Press runs an article on retailers employing mathematical models for price optimization, where some products are priced higher to generate higher margins, and some are discounted to generate larger volumes even at the expense of per-product margins. DemandTec, Oracle and SAP are some of the companies producing those mathematical models for retailers around the country, with AP listing some of the pricing optimizations employed currently.

Most of the time, according to the article, the calculations are not made in vacuum, but in comparison with existing sales and current product selection. So three power drills selling for $90, $120 and $130, all generate certain among of profit for the retailer. The higher the price, the higher the profit, as markup is universal among all the models. High-end consumers go for the $130, while bargain hunters think there’s nothing wrong with $90 drill. Result? $120 drill doesn’t sell that well. Pricing optimization places the second drill at $110, where it’s suddenly affordable for those who used to buy $90 drills. After all, it’s only additional $20.

There’s an older article in CFO Magazine justifying the cost of price optimization systems for CFOs.

Most of the widgets available for your Google homepage are pretty much the rehashes of the RSS readers - you can get this feed with a customized look, and that feed with pictures added in. So Callwave’s products are standing out from the crowd, as they’re pretty useful to have on your browser start page.

It’s a text messaging widget with support for US carriers for now, and a visual voicemail widget that actually accesses your mobile voicemail (in my case, Cingular) and displays the information on the caller, allowing you to play the voicemail within a widget as well. Pretty useful when you’re at work, see that voicemail pop up, but have no time to drop outside and call up your voicemail. They distribute their gadgets for Apple, Google, Microsoft Vista and Yahoo!

In IEEE Spectrum Jeff Hawkins, formerly of Palm, and now of Numenta, introduces everybody to his new programming platform. Trying to replicate the process of the human neocortex, Numenta developed Hierarchical Temporal Memory programming:

We’ve focused on the brain’s neocortex, and we have made significant progress in understanding how it works. We call our theory, for reasons that I will explain shortly, Hierarchical Temporal Memory, or HTM. We have created a software platform that allows anyone to build HTMs for experimentation and deployment. You don’t program an HTM as you would a computer; rather you configure it with software tools, then train it by exposing it to sensory data. HTMs thus learn in much the same way that children do. HTM is a rich theoretical framework that would be impossible to describe fully in a short article such as this, so I will give only a high level overview of the theory and technology.

Generally I am not too impressed with Will Ferrell’s recent filmography. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby was tolerable, and one would get a few chuckles here and there, but it was from being a comedy. Stranger Than Fiction is not a movie to remember either. Blades of Glory, however, manages to be a pretty funny movie without a central theme. I was afraid the whole movie was going to be based on the fact of two guys skating as a pair, but the script is heavy with gags here and there, making it overall a quite enjoyable comedy. The movie it mostly reminds me of is Zoolander, except Zoolander wasn’t funny. The same “serious look” into the world of professional skating, with Farrell’s character maintaining the same manly character that Ben Stiller was exhibiting in Zoolander.

There are quite a few strong messages that the market is sending to movie companies:

1. Consumers are increasingly avoiding the movie theaters, dissatisfied with high prices, level of service, and just general noise in the movies whenever you’re visiting something that’s been sold out. Cinema revenues are, however, still growing, but that’s propped by ever-increasing prices.
2. Studios are not exactly happy with the oligopoly on the national movie market, and frequently are trying to experiment with DVD releases coinciding with movie’s official release. Mark Cuban’s Landmark Theaters does it.
3. Consumers are buying increasingly larger television sets roughly at a rate of 7 mln new sets a quarter.
4. Retailers are not exactly thrilled with CDs and DVDs anymore either, and are looking towards movie downloads options.

Which makes the market pretty ripe for the movie downloads. Not the type that you can get on your PCs, since it’s just not that exciting to download a high-def movie to watch it on a 15″ screen, while your 50″ HDTV is right there in your living room. Companies that can arrange a download to your television screen are too entrenched into defending their little turfs, and with TiVo, Comcast or other proprietary DVR company you’re likely to get content limited to the platform you’re on. None of them has any critical penetration on the market yet, and consumer might get baffled by the cost of a new TiVo or Akimbo box. Maybe not so baffled with the cost of Comcast DVR, but the company has been known to open up its technology for outsiders either.

A winning solution would potentially deliver a low-cost device that’s capable of delivering a high-definition downloadable content to the TV screen. The problem is the low-cost part - if the device is subsidized, it certainly requires the manufacturer to lock in the content delivery in exchange for some premium pricing on content (Apple TV). An ideal solution would allow anyone like Amazon Unbox, MovieLink, NetFlix, Vuze or whatever to plug in and sell their content to the consumer.

Perhaps a dumb terminal with a small hard drive and a Wi-Fi chipset capable of hooking up to the home network, caching the content off the main PC hard drive and delivering it to the HDTV is the solution to go - reasonably cheap to build, something consumers are familiar with (adding a new client to their home wireless network), and something that could be advertised as a fairly sexy solution to watching Internet content on large screen in high definition.

Such device would even support some form of unique identification, thus enabling various DRM schemas and license acquisition, which is a must to please content providers for right now.

Ever since my doctor alerted me to the high levels of cholesterol, I started paying attention not only to the diet, but also to the technology and science surrounding cardiovascular system. MIT Technology Review now runs a story of Imaging Cholesterol Buildup in the Heart, where Mount Sinai researchers have finally figured out a way to monitor cholesterol buildup in blood vessels - something that was virtually impossible previously:

Directly labeling the plaque inside blood vessels with a marker that
can be detected by MRI, known as a contrast agent, could provide a
better picture. But getting these molecules across the vessel lining
has been a challenge. New research shows that contrast agents that
mimic a natural molecule–high-density lipoprotein (HDL), or “good”
cholesterol–could do the trick. Normally, HDL passes through arteries
and attaches to low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad” cholesterol,
carrying it out of arteries to the liver.

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