Company develops eye-control software for phones, tablets

 A Danish company hopes to clinch deals with major mobile phone and tablet makers after developing software that enables users to control their devices by moving their eyes, it said Wednesday.

"You can use it for basic control, such as turning to the next page in an e-book, and playing games with your eyes," chief executive and co-founder of The Eye Tribe, Sune Alstrup Johansen, told AFP.

The software uses infrared light reflected from the pupil of the eye, which is recorded by the device's camera, enabling users to scroll or click on their screens with their eyes.

When you are reading an e-book and get to the bottom of the page, the software will know to turn to the next page, or if you look away from the screen it will dim it.

The Eye Tribe is made up of four PhD students who founded the company a year ago. They received $800,000 (615,000 euros) in funding in August to develop the technology. Read more >>

Education After the Collapse – School When There Is No Classroom

For those of us paying attention to what’s happening in the world around us, the coming collapse is a foregone conclusion. All signs point to the inevitable: that an event, or series of events, will soon lead the world into what can be described as a modern period of the Dark Ages. Food will become scarce, violence will thrive, disease will spread, governments will turn on their people, and the fragile social fabric that has maintained relative peace throughout the Western world will  unravel.

As Todd Sepulveda writes in his latest e-book, Education After the Collapse:

It’s not too hard to make the jump from our nice manicured lawns, suburban neighborhoods, Starbucks, 401K lives. On any given day TEOTWAWKI (The end of the world as we know it) can happen. Yes, this happens frequently on an individual or family level: losing a loved one, major medical situation, loss of a job, etc. However, it is not in the scope of this book to talk about those specific situations, or on a small level. The focus of this book is on “the big one.”

The big one could be a great number of things. A quick search on the internet will bring you a wide variety of scenarios. Or, just take a look at Matthew Stein’s article “Six Trends Converging on Collapse.” (Stein)

Even if we don’t ever have the “big one,” we are living unsustainable lives in which at some point, it will all come to a head. Read more >>

Who inherits your digital books and music?

Many of us will accumulate vast libraries of digital books and music over the course of our lifetimes. But when we die, our collections of words and music may expire with us. Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated.

And one’s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. “I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,” says Evan Carroll, co-author of “Your Digital Afterlife.” “Legally dividing one account among several heirs would also be extremely difficult.” Part of the problem is that with digital content, one doesn’t have the same rights as with print books and CDs. Customers own a license to use the digital files—but they don’t actually own them.

Apple and Amazon grant “nontransferable” rights to use content, so if you buy the complete works of the Beatles on iTunes, you cannot give the White Album to your son and Abbey Road to your daughter. According to Amazon’s terms of use, “You do not acquire any ownership rights in the software or music content.” Apple limits the use of digital files to Apple devices used by the account holder. Read more >>