Damn, I hate this.

Besides its surprisingly good action cinematography, ‘Minority Report’ owes its huge success to the deep discomfort it created in viewers. The movie constructs a future world where law enforcement makes use of ‘Pre-Cogs’ — humans who have been given the gift of foresight through genetic modification, so that they can see crimes before they happen. When a crime is predicted, the purported criminal is promptly apprehended and the crime prevented. The movie forces the viewer to confront a host of questions that have troubled philosophers for millennia.

If the future is predetermined, in what sense can we be said to be free? Central to our commonsense conception of freedom is the inherent possibility of doing otherwise. If the future is closed to alternate possibilities, then there is no sense in which a murderer could have acted differently and then it seems that  the act of murder is not a free act. Relatedly, if a person cannot do otherwise, is there a sense in which the person is morally responsible for the action? Hume, most famously, articulated the seemingly essential relationship between the notion of moral responsibility and the possibility of freely choosing your actions. ‘Ought implies can,’ he said. One is morally obligated to act in a certain way only if one can in fact act in such a way. If the future is predetermined, then in a clear sense the murderer could not have failed to murder. But then what sense is there to the claim that the murderer ought not to murder? And if there is no sense to be given in response to this question, there is little reason to hold the murderer morally responsible. The murderer is no different from a person who happens to slip on a banana, land on an innocent bystander, and accidentally snap his neck. The person is causally responsible for the unfortunate killing, but, since the person could not have done otherwise, is not morally responsible for it.

These are deep and disturbing questions mainly because of the centrality of the notion of freedom in our conception of our selves as persons (rather than objects or ‘mere’ animals). (An influential and interesting response to this set of problems was developed by Harry Frankfurt. Well worth a read.)

Though such sci-fi scenarios don’t really need to be considered seriously, the questions that they raise do call for greater attention. This is especially true given recent advances in cognitive psychology and brain imaging technologies. In the last few years, cognitive psychologists using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have discovered a variety of differences between the brain activities of people who are lying and those telling the truth (see for example R. Henig’s article in the NY Times, and G. Stix’s article from Scientific American). fMRI can then be used as a lie detector superseding the traditional polygraph. Even more interesting is a recent study (by T. Baumgartner et al., published in Neuron) reported in NewScientist which suggests that fMRI technology can reveal a person’s intention to break a promise, an intention to cheat at some future time. Such technology, according to the report, could be used to assess the intentions of criminals who are up for parole. It would indicate whether criminals intend to keep their promise to avoid a life of crime, or whether they intend to cheat the system.

Of course, even assuming the adequacy of the technique, ‘reading’ a person’s intentions for future action is not yet to foresee that person’s action. This fact raises many pertinent questions. Most clearly: Should people who aim to cheat the system be held morally (and legally) responsible for acts they have yet to perform? Insofar as an intention is not yet an action, what weight should be assigned to such fMRI data in assessing a criminal’s petition for parole? To penalize people, by denying them parole, for example, on the basis of their current intentions, is to strip them of what is most essential to their being persons. It is to treat them as lacking the freedom to have, and also change, their intentions; to treat them as lacking the freedom of self-determination. On the other hand, it might be argued, the current parole review process assesses petitions in part of the basis of a criminal’s self-report regarding his or her intentions. fMRI data can then serve as supplemental data to assess the veracity of that report, which could then feature as part of the deliberation process.

Though we are still far from the scenarios of ‘Minority Report’, it is clear that as scientists peer deeper into our minds, clarity on the nature of personhood, of freedom, and of moral responsibility, becomes increasingly urgent.

Related articles:

Recent Work on Free Will and Moral Responsibility
By Neil Levy and Michael McKenna, University of Melbourne Florida State University
(Vol. 3, November 2008)
Philosophy Compass

Legal and Moral Responsibility
By Antony Duff , University of Stirling
(Vol. 4, November 2009)
Philosophy Compass

Causation and Responsibility
By Carolina Sartorio , University of Wisconsin at Madison
(Vol. 2, November 2007)
Philosophy Compass

A NewScientist publicou na semana passada um artigo fantástico falando sobre o relacionamento da Física e os jogos eletrônicos. Para aumentar os gráficos e o realismo em geral — incluindo sons –, o estudo vai a fundo.

Um vídeo foi produzido exemplificando os objetivos. Bolas de vidro para medir os reflexos e os comportamentos resultantes, um cachecol deslizando para identificar as formas que se pode tomar e um fantástico estudo da acústica da água e todas as probabilidades sonoras que ela pode reproduzir.

Veja!

Fonte: Jovem Nerd

Via KurzweilAI.net — And if quantum amnesia is a real phenomena without a solution time travel would be a one-way affair. I’m not sure if anyone would sign up for a one=way ticket to an uncertain future.

Quantum amnesia gives time its arrow

NewScientist Physics & Math, Aug. 26, 2009 The forward-only direction of time is the result of quantum-mechanical amnesia that erases any trace thattime has moved backwards, says Lorenzo Maccone of MIT. Read Original Article>>

Via KurzweilAI.net — Multidimensional research is always fun.

Beyond space and time: Fractals, hyperspace and more

NewScientist, Aug. 26, 2009 NewScientist explores dimensions from zero to 10D string theory in a special feature.   Read Original Article>>

Kasparov's mind

When is a thing or process a part of a person’s body or bodily process? It seems that though human beings are not normally born with large titanium deposits, a titanium knee implant at a certain point of one’s life is part of one’s knee, part of one’s body just as much as one’s hand, spine, or brain. Similarly, when a person undergoes heart transplant it seems clear that the ‘new’ heart is now a genuine part of her body. Having undergone the transplant successfully, it would be tremendously odd to say that her body was heartless, but connected to some other person’s heart. It is her blood that the heart is in the business of circulating.

When is a thing or process a part of a person’s mind or mental process? As technology advances, we find an increasing amount of mental processes or functions being ‘offloaded’ to external devices. Almost everyone in the developed world has a laptop, and almost everyone has a cell phone. Learning the table of multiplication, remembering your friend’s phone number, or your spouse’s birthday (embarrassing, but you know it’s true), are all becoming things of the past. One click on the phone and there it is before you. We are so comfortable with our favorite piece of technology, an iPhone, a Blackberry, a Palm, or what have you, that we hardly even notice how much we rely on them in our daily life. Nonetheless, we become more and more helpless when they are gone.

However, perhaps such mental processes, multiplication, remembering, and so many others, are not becoming things of the past, but are merely undergoing a transformation. Rather than thinking of the process of remembering a phone number as something that is necessarily done within the cranium, now that same process, remembering a phone number, involves manipulating a few buttons on a piece of technology. It turns out that remembering a phone number is not (and, presumably, never was) essentially confined to a brain. Admittedly, it is somewhat counter-intuitive at first to think that merely carrying around a cell phone constitutes remembering all those phone numbers, addresses, and birth-days. Nonetheless, it is not clear what is wrong with this way of thinking. Would the intuition that something must be wrong with it be less upsetting if we made the phone much smaller and tucked it nicely within the confines of the skull? Perhaps it would. But then it seems this same intuition is on rather shaky foundations in the first place. After all, why would location alone make any difference to something’s being a mental process?

As technology advances, it does seem that our minds are becoming more and more extended into the extra-cranial world. Is this something we should be concerned about, or should we instead embrace it with excitement?

For more, see ‘Appland: How smartphones are transforming our lives’ by Richard Fisher in this week’s NewScientist.

To read more about the extended mind, see these online papers by Andy Clark.

Related articles:

Semantic Externalism and Psychological Externalism
By Åsa Wikforss, Stockholm University
(Vol. 2, April 2007)
Philosophy Compass

This Argonne supercomputer visualisation shows the mechanism behind the violent death of a short-lived, massive star.

The image shows energy values in the core of the supernova. 

Different colours and transparencies are assigned to different values of entropy. 

By selectively adjusting the colour and transparency, the scientists can peel away the outer layers and see what is happening in the interior of the star.

Physicists at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago have used the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer to model the extreme physics of a supernova explosion.

[Link: NewScientist - Snapshots from inside an exploding star]

According to NewScientist, a study employing 14 cotton-top tamarins and nonsense words broadcast over speakers indicates the primates may intuitively recognise some rules of grammar. The findings suggest some of the skills required for language may be linked to basic memory functions.

The addition of syllables, either at the beginning or at the end of a word, is found across many languages. Researcher Ansgar Endress and colleagues at Harvard think this structure might be linked to basic memory functions that are independent of language. If their findings prove true, it will provide insight into how children learn grammatical structures.

New Scientist, insanoğlunun Ay’a ayakbasmasının 40’ncı yıldönümü nedeniyle bir yarışma düzenliyor. Yarışmayı kazanan kişi Ay Taşı’nın sahibi olacak.

İSTANBUL – New Scientist, 20-21 Temmuz tarihlerinde Neil Armstrong’un Ay’a çıkışının yıl dönümü için 40’ncı yıldönümü için bir yarışma düzenliyor.

Bu tarihi olayla ilgili olarak düzenlenen yarışmada kazananın ödülü ise: bir Ay taşı…

Yarışmaya katılmak için yapılması gereken ise çok basit: Neil Armstrong’un hafızalara kazınan meşhur sözü, “İnsan için küçük, insanlık için büyük bir adım” cümlesinden  daha fazla hafızalara kazınabilecek, durumu anlatan daha iyi bir söz bulmak.

Yarışma kurallarına göre, cümlenin boşluklar da dahil olmak üzere 75 karakteri aşmaması gerekiyor. Daha önce yapılmamış ve yeni bir yazı olması büyük önem taşıyor. Kazanan, 29 Haziran’da saat 17’de belirlenecek ve 17 Temmuz’da açıklanacak.

Ödül olan ay taşı, Yemen’de yaşayan Fransız bir koleksiyoncu olan Luc Labenne tarafından bulundu. Labenne, taşın ağırlığının 1.4 gram olduğunu ve ay taşlarının 1 gramının 1000 dolar değerinde olduğunu belirtti.

Yarışmamya http://www.newscientist.com/contact/person?recipient=fdbk adresinden başvurabilirsiniz.

Students in my class take part in this discussion here.

Comments on this post have been disabled.

As we follow the story of the swine flu Influenza A(H1N1) outbreak on the news and the internet, we start to become overwhelmed with information. In all cases related to health, it is vital that we practice critical thinking and take the time to evaluate our sources of information. The more controversial or the higher the impact of a story, the more likely it is for people to be discussing and disseminating (spreading) misinformation. Misinformation can be due to simple misunderstanding, poor communication of facts or delusion and the intention of misleading others.

In this task, we will look at some of the resources related to the swine flu Influena A(H1N1)outbreak and evaluate their usefulness and reliability. We will see how this outbreak relates to syllabus areas of IB Biology and in particular look at the genetic aspect of the evolution of the pathogen.

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Here we go – read and watch these resources and try to pick out information that will help you answer the questions below.

Short news clip with Dr. Joe Bresee from the Centre for Disease Control:

What do I need to know about Swine Flu? from NewScientist

Interactive world map of cases and a Swine Flu Timeline from the Guardian

What are the phases of the WHO’s pandemic alert?

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The progress of the story (oldest to newest):

Guardian News, 25th April: “Swine flu epidemic kills 16 in Mexico city“

Guardian News, 25th April: “Swine flu symptoms similar to human flu“

PrisonPlanet, 26th April: “Swine flu a beta-test for a bioweapon“

NewScientist.com, 27th April: “Is swine flu a bioterrorist virus?“

Nature.com, 27th April: “Swine flu spreads the globe, genes could contribute to rapid spread“

Wired.com, 29th April: “Swine flu from pigs only, not humans or birds“

Guardian News, 29th April: “Governments must prepare for a pandemic“

Guardian News, 29th April: “Global race to produce swine flu vaccine“

BadScience, 29 April: “Swine flu and hype – a media illness (a risk is still a risk)“

BBC News, 30 April: “WHO raises pandemic alert level“

NewScientist, 2 May: “First genetic analysis of H1N1 shows potecy – and potential weakness“

BadScience, 2 May: “How effective is Tamiflu, really, at stopping the aporkalypse?“

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Discussion questions:

1. Reading the articles from Wired, NewScientist and Nature, can you explain briefly how the new form of swine flu has spread to humans?How does this relate to our Biology syllabus?

2. Which of the sources used above do you consider most reliable? Where should we turn for the most reliable and up-to-date information on health issues?  Why?

3. What do you feel is the ethical (most responsible) way to report global diseases in the media? Why?

4. How could irresponsible journalism make the impacts of an outbreak or pandemic more serious? How would you balance the public demand for information with the possibility that giving out too much information might lead to harm?

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Your task:

Take part in at least two of the discussion questions. Make use of the sources provided and show evidence of reading around the subject. Address the guiding questions and build on them with your own ideas, supported by research from reliable sources.Make a minimum of three posts in each of two discussions. Pay attention to netiquette.

Here are some quick reminders of the Biology in action:

Crossing over (recombination) animation

The influenza pandemic of 1918 – what might happen now?

NewScientist is running a story with the lead; “Why we shouldn’t hide our problems from ET”. In summary director of interstellar message composition at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Douglas Vakoch; states that prospective messages to the stars should point out we aren’t perfect, that such messages should also contain our shortcomings and frailties as well as conveying hope and generally just saying “Hi”.

I agree that in the unlikely case of a dialogue being opened between us and another civilization that the Issues facing Earth should not be hidden and the problems we face should be transparent. But this is one step removed from broadcasting them across the galaxy in a one-way advert. Various media of war, poverty, atrocities, crime and hate aren’t exactly good conversation starters with strangers.

Imagine placing an advert on a friendship/dating site along the lines of “Hi, I’m 4.5 billion years old. I enjoy; moonlit strolls along the beach while children starve to death, Croquet and genocide, Hiking whilst destroying natural habitats, Watersports while Nuclear testing. I’m looking for something long-term, someone I can really talk to… about exciting new technologies for military application so as to gain a subversive upper hand on my fellow human beings.” Does that sound like an Ad you’d answer?

My point is, In getting to know someone (or something else) we should strive to apply our unspoken Human tradition of; small steps and common ground first. Because a traditional human greeting is all we’re capable of after all.

I don’t agree with Douglas in that “If we continue to dodge controversy, we risk sending messages that are both brief and boring” I just don’t see how receiving a message from across the vastness of space could be boring.

Though I suppose this is all one big moot point; Basically we’ve been sending signals into space since TV has begun broadcasting. That’s right, everything from news to sports to random television sitcoms are right now beaming across the blackness of space. Something like 60 years of television has created an imaginary ‘globe’ of radiowaves emitting from the earth, light years in diameter passing through countless solar systems.

Of course the further such radiowaves get, the less power they carry. But there has been concentrated broadcasts purposely directed for space.

In February 2008. NASA aimed its eye towards the North Star, 431 light years away. And began playing The Beatles – Across the Universe. Yes, apt indeed.

Besides broadcasts though, us Earthlings do have another presence in Space. Pioneer 10 & 11 and Voyager 1 & 2 carry information (symbolic, mathematical, cultural) physically on the spacecraft themselves. And every second they’re hurtling through space, further and further from home (more on them sometime soon)

If you could have chosen one song to beam into space, what would it be and why? Or what about your thoughts on a default Earth greeting?

You can submit your greeting ideas to SETI because they’re opening their doors and accepting greeting ideas from around the world very soon. The greetings won’t be broadcast (as yet) It seems they’re just testing the waters, gathering data, listening for input.

It’s good that such an initiative has been taken, Perhaps before NASA go attaching Golden Records to things they should conduct some type of Music pole to see what Sounds best represent Earth. But more on that another time.

A base de luz natural,  un conjunto de nanotubos es capaz de convertir una mezcla de dióxido de carbono y vapor de agua en gas natural a un ritmo sin precedentes.

Este dispositivo ofrece una nueva forma de obtener dióxido de carbono de la atmósfera y convertirlo en combustible o en otros químicos para detener el efecto de emisiones de combustibles fósiles en el clima mundial, dice Craig Grimes, de la universidad estatal de Pennsylvania.

Aunque otros grupos de investigación han desarrollado métodos para convertir CO2 en compuestos órganicos como métano utilizando frecuentemente nanopartículas de dioxido de titanio como catalizadores, ellos necesitan luz ultravioleta para llevar a cabo las reacciones.

Los avances de investigación han desarrollado un método que trabaja con la mas amplia gama de frecuencias dentro de la luz solar.

Mas información en NewScientist

NewScientist Article – Born Believers

Ah, science.  The use of our intelligence to explain away our intelligence.  Don’t misunderstand – I’m not trying to bash science, but I am certainly a foe of the way science is tossed about these days in an attempt to force naturalistic explanations upon every aspect of the world.   God, the scientists say, is not a scientific question.  What they mean is, God is not a scientific question unless they’re trying to explain it through naturalistic means.  You see, science has a very convenient position these days.  While preaching in words that science can’t prove or disprove certain things, scientists nevertheless make statements of superiority through intellect which infer the opposite.  This article is a prime example of this.

Early on in the article we are told:

It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

So without really getting into the article, you basically have their summary.  Religious belief is clearly inferior to the vast intellect of those who have overcome their silly inclinations.  And in fact, if we see a rise in belief right now, it should be no surprise since we’re going through tough economic times.  But wait! Lest you feel offended at their snide comments, they’ve left a nugget of joy – all centered around the words “finely tuned.” We’ll get back to that in a minute.  First, let’s examine some of research they’re talking about.

Notice what we’re told from the beginning:

“There’s now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired,” says Bloom.

Much of that evidence comes from experiments carried out on children, who are seen as revealing a “default state” of the mind that persists, albeit in modified form, into adulthood. “Children the world over have a strong natural receptivity to believing in gods because of the way their minds work, and this early developing receptivity continues to anchor our intuitive thinking throughout life,” says anthropologist Justin Barrett of the University of Oxford.

So how does the brain conjure up gods? One of the key factors, says Bloom, is the fact that our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things – things with minds, or at least volition – and inanimate objects.

This separation happens very early in life. Bloom and colleagues have shown that babies as young as five months make a distinction between inanimate objects and people. Shown a box moving in a stop-start way, babies show surprise. But a person moving in the same way elicits no surprise. To babies, objects ought to obey the laws of physics and move in a predictable way. People, on the other hand, have their own intentions and goals, and move however they choose.

I find it absolutely fascinating that from childhood, human beings have an inclination to believe that there is more to the world than just natural laws and physical elements.  They can tell that there is a difference between animate and inanimate.  Now, while I’m sure I’ve had some influence on my baby girl in these first 4 months of her life, there’s not much I can do to teach her the difference between a block and myself.  I can imagine it now:

Me: Here’s a box – see? No life! Now look at daddy! Life! Do you get it?

Baby: *puke*

The fact is, on her own, she can tell that there’s something different about me – something that says that I can choose to do things, while a block should do things in a fairly consistent nature.  But Dr. Bloom takes it even further – he is willing to state that we have a “common sense dualism.”  In other words, it is naturally within us to assume that there is an innate separation between mind and body.  After all, we’ve all probably had some type of imaginary friend.  The fact that we can even attribute a personality to something that is otherwise inanimate is pretty fascinating in and of itself.  Of course, this must be an evolutionary adaptation:

…Without it we would be unable to maintain large social hierarchies and alliances or anticipate what an unseen enemy might be planning. “Requiring a body around to think about its mind would be a great liability,” he says.

On the other hand, the idea that someone can be planning anything seems to be based upon the idea that they have a mind that I cannot predict.  The idea that I have an alliance with someone seems based upon the idea that we have chosen to work together.  Even if their body was around me 24/7, how could I possibly know what they were planning unless they tell me?  Forcing the bottom-up approach can really end up being problematic in these kinds of areas.

The interesting thing is, these defaults about how we view minds carries over into our defaults about God:

Based on these and other experiments, Bering considers a belief in some form of life apart from that experienced in the body to be the default setting of the human brain. Education and experience teach us to override it, but it never truly leaves us, he says. From there it is only a short step to conceptualising spirits, dead ancestors and, of course, gods, says Pascal Boyer, a psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Boyer points out that people expect their gods’ minds to work very much like human minds, suggesting they spring from the same brain system that enables us to think about absent or non-existent people.

The ability to conceive of gods, however, is not sufficient to give rise to religion. The mind has another essential attribute: an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect which primes us to see purpose and design everywhere, even where there is none.

I love that line – “education and experience teach us to override it.”  Recall that I mentioned earlier this notion of religious inferiority to “scientific” superiority.  That same bias shows up again here.  Sure – it’s our natural, inborn inclination to assume that there’s more to life than just physical things working in physical ways according to physical laws, and that there really is design and purpose in life, but that’s just something you overcome, if you’re smart enough.  I guess they’ve got a point – Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Newton, and so many others in history who have contributed to science were educated and experienced enough to realize that we’re just matter in motion and God is just a delusion.  Wait a second…

Furthermore, we all know how much the God of the Bible is like the pagan gods.  Yes, existing eternally, expecting holiness, rewarding the righteous, condemning evil, loving everyone, etc. – it’s pretty similar to how human minds work.  You would think Isaiah 55:9 would be enough to disprove that theory.  No point in confusing scientists with the facts though, I suppose.

As we go through this article, things become clearer and clearer:

Olivera Petrovich of the University of Oxford asked pre-school children about the origins of natural things such as plants and animals. She found they were seven times as likely to answer that they were made by god than made by people.

These cognitive biases are so strong, says Petrovich, that children tend to spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention: “They rely on their everyday experience of the physical world and construct the concept of god on the basis of this experience.” Because of this, when children hear the claims of religion they seem to make perfect sense.

Two things are clear here.  Firstly, Romans 1:20 is proven correct.  Secondly, Romans 1:21 is proven correct.  Rather than come to the obvious conclusion that something within us leads us to God – that we naturally search for God even outside of our supposed indoctrination – we must conclude that all this is just an accident of nature.

As the article draws to its close, they expound on something we saw earlier:

So if religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work, where does that leave god? All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it.

Indeed so – researchers would not want to commit the genetic fallacy, so they are hasty to admit that their findings say nothing of the truth or falsity of the claims.  Yet, what does the rest of the article really tell us about how they feel?  It’s a blatant inconsistency.  While they admit they cannot disprove God, they really seem to feel that this is just what they are doing.  And they look down on the believer for his ignorance on such things.  But in the end, what have they really proven?  Only that the reality of God should be obvious to man.

Just think about it for a second.  Does a person suddenly decide to climb up something large without proper safety equipment, or must he first overcome/ignore some innate concerns about his safety?  Does a person randomly decide to deprive themselves of food, or must they first feel there is a good reason to ignore their innate needs?  Point being, it takes a lot of work to ignore those things that are naturally within us.  But the ability to ignore those things does not necessarily make us better off for it.  Safety is important, and it can be achieved.  Our bodies need food, and hunger/thirst can be quenched.  So why is it that suddenly this one great part of who we are is the one thing which we must persist in ignoring?  Do you think you will wind up any better for it? Why are we told this is the one natural desire that cannot be quenched?

I will leave you with the wonderful words of a wonderful man – C.S. Lewis:

Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? “Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.” But I think it may be urged that this misses the point. A man’s physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a sexless world.

The fine folks at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) are demoing a new touchscreen system that may make small devices easier to use. An extension of their LucidTouch technology, NanoTouch has a small screen on the front and a touchpad on the back. Their test unit features a 2.4inch screen. The screen displays where the user’s finger is on the back touchpad as if the display was transparent. The user’s finger no longer obscures the screen surface, so it’s much easier to hit small buttons. In testing, researchers showed that targets just 1.8mm across were easy to hit. That’s much smaller than the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard. Here’s a video demonstrating the new device.

[via Engadget]