Apple's New Kid - iPhone

Though this blog is purely a technical one, i could not resist my temptation to write about this amazing digital device- Apple's New Kid - iPhone.


This is a great innovation in communications, i would put this par with the great Alexander Graham Bell's first ever telephone on 2nd june 1875. Coincidentally after almost 132 years.. on june 29, 2007 apple is launching this much hyped iPhone.


This blog is not about discussing the features of iPhone, you can find them at apple's URL
where you can download the video(almost 100MB 1:55mins) which explains the full features of this device.

Key Features : No Hardware Keyboard
2Megapixel camera
320X480 screen with multi touch input
4GB/8GB inbuilt flash memory
Inbuilt iPod supports iTunes Audio/Videos
Support to POP3 IMAP Mail
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/EDGE/Bluetooth
Google Widgets
Google Maps
Apple's SAFARI web browser(Full HTML support)

Apple iPhone getready??Apple iPhone = MAC PC + iPod + Mobile phone + many more

Negative Points : No 3G support
Bonding with AT&T (In U.S)

Note: only major features are listed, for full set of features

Acting Like a Kid

You hight have heard people saying this to you - "Dont act like a kid"
It may come to you as a surprise!!! i am gonna ask you to "act like a kid"

We can get a better insight into the brain and its behavior by considering a kid..

When i was discussing with my friend mayank, he just asked me a question after reading my post on "what makes human brain special?" The question is, how can a child understand same image? or how a person who has no knowledge of cricket understand the image?

well.. I am sure you will be yawning while reading this explanation..

Basically the human psycho visual system can be divided into 4 levels, namely V1,V2,V3 and V4.
The level V4 is the knowledge base, i mean all the information that we learned in this world through teaching/experience will be stored here. For example, Let us consider a person who is watching cricket since his 5th class. so all the players name, features(hair styles,mannerisms), rules and regulations everything will be stored at V4.

The visual information that we are perceiving will first reach the level V1 before getting transmitted to higher levels(V2,V3 and V4).

Now imagine a kid, it doesn't have any knowledge stored about cricket in V4. So the kid may get attracted to any arbitrary portion of the image, that region may contain any color which is contrast to other colors.

It is just like we perceive the images taken from MARS or MOON, we don't know which is desert and which is water body, we need someone to explain the scene...
In other sense, we need someone to feed the data into V4, so that the visual features and the cognition in V4 will combined to form a understanding of the scene in our brain.

So for kids and the people who is not accustomed to a specific environment will have no information in V4, so it cannot form any kind of understanding. So a person who doesn't know cricket will just see 3 persons(since his V4 has the knowledge of human visual structures) in the image frame, he cannot form any understanding of why their gestures. Not only cricket, any situation or any circumstance that we are understanding, will be only based on the cognition(V4 or Knowledge base).

What does this V2 and V3 do???,
Understanding a unknown environments!!!,
and How human brain learn things??..
This blog will try to answer these questions in the future... Just watchout

Note: Dont get confused reading the latest post.. Read previous ones for continuity

Hi Friends,
Since the articles i am posting are continuation of previous one.. i will be confusing if you start read them from latest.. So i recommend you read from the last post.

I would be happy to answer Your Queries and Comments at
sathishkumar.maddy@gmail.com

Have a look at this image
Do u see a bunch of black splotches ?...
Or
Do u see the word 'LIFT' ?

A study says that girls will give attention to the word LIFT and boys will see black splotches!!

What Makes Our Brain So Special?

Before start answering the question straight away, i would like to show a image...

Just look at the image of a baby, it is not a photograph. It is an artwork painted on a canvas..

On looking at this photo, what information do you gain?
Is this image looks mysterious or little unsettling? Many people will agree..

In fact if we take any art of a baby or any art that involves a face, eye is the most prominent feature. But here the artist made the eye almost non-existent. Why??

Because the artist wants us to focus on the prophetic gesture of the child instead of face. In other words, the aim of this portrait is to convey a gesture rather than a beautiful baby face.

Inference: - We always give our attention to the eye of an any portrait. Even though the entire image is in our frame of vision, the attention will always goes to eye. So if there is no eye(as in this case) our attention automatically shifts to the gesture. Remember we are not consciously doing this.

Let us see one more image,

In this image, our first focus of attention is the bowler and the second is batsman and third is the stumps and fourth focus is other things in the scene.

In other words, our brain understands this scene in the following way

1. Shane Warne is celebrating , why celebrating?
2. He took the wicket of Andrew Strauss , How?
3. With a big turning ball pitched way outside off stump and turned to dismantle the stumps..

So other details like the crowd behind the scene and the advertisement board carries very little information so we humans generally will not give attention to them.

Here the first object of attention (bowler) gets the higher priority and there is a shift in the attention after a second to the next object of attraction (batsman) and again a shift to third object(stumps).

The amount of details about each object gets into the brain is proportional to the priority of that particular object..

These are very simple cases, how about a scene with lots of objects and each one carries some information?? how do we respond? how attention shift takes place on a complex scene?

Connections Beteween The Human Eye - Brain - Action

Have you ever imagine how our brain processes the signals sent from retina??!!

Well let me give you few situations..

Situation 1: Just Imagine that You are waiting in the airport to receive your friend, and there are just too many people coming out.. In this situation, we will find ourself very difficult to identify the person that we are looking for. I mean in other sense the brain needs to do face recognition at high speeds since your eye sends 5 to 6 faces per second. Our eye will not be able to synchronize with our brain.

Have u ever felt this??

If your answer is yes!!

You agree that "there is a limit or boundary for human recognition speed"....

Situation 2: Imagine that you are driving a bike, Your friend is coming from opposite side of the same road and at a point you are waiting for the traffic signal to go green.. he is waiting opposite side of the road for his signal.. he is looking at you and you are also looking at him...

After reaching his office he sends a mail and asks whether you had seen him at the signal..
You are wondering..!!! Even though he is in your frame of vision, you did not recognize him..

Is any similar incident happened to you??

If your answer is yes!!

then you should agree that "all the objects fallen on our retina doses not go to brain"..


So how human brain intelligently processes the signals fed into them?
How the worlds fastest super computer works??

Well..
When you ask a digital computer to multiply two 8 digit numbers, it may give you result in less than a second..
But,
When you ask a computer to recognize your voice or face out of some 1000 faces in its data base , it will take time and will give you a result something like this- "you are 85.11% closer to personA and 84.91% closer to PersonB..

Imagine you shaved off your mush and beard, your computer may not recognize you..!!

It is obvious that there is no computer in this world that can beat recognition capability of human brain!! ( till today). Human brain is a highly parallel and Complex network and it understands things in hyper dimensions.. Till today researchers had very little success(1% or even less) in modeling the human brain..

what makes human brain so special? Why it is so difficult to model?