Week9

Jan Borchers

I thought a lot of the projects he was currently working on to be quite interesting. I particularly liked the orchestra simulation and the ubiquitous snowboard instructor ones. Considering the sort of technology behind it,

I actually think the technology behind the ubiquitous snowboard instructor can easily translate to training in just about any other physical activity. For example, in baseball, it would be a great way for batting instructors to see exactly which part of a batter's swing is off, if it's because he cocks the wrists too early or follows through too early, if his feet are the incorrect distance apart, etc. If you had waterproof hardware, you could do the same for swimming. In fact, if you want to take it one step further, you can even use it for training in jobs that require someone to do physical things, like if you're a cook at a fast food chain restaurant. Unfortunately, the downside of allowing things like big business to get their hands into such technology is almost a guarantee of abuse of power. While in concept, it would be a good idea, in real life it would only allow employers to invade the privacy of their employees' even more.

Professor Borchers also mentioned tentative work with organic things, but organic technology is still very unstable at the moment because there haven't been any real breakthroughs in bioengineering that can really allow the cognitive science side to drive forward with innovations. However, I think Professor Borchers should keep an eye on the current movement to make electronic transistors carbon based. They've been able to successfully pull off making a carbon transistor, and they claim that using carbon transistors will require less electricity than silicon or germanium based transistors. Because the future of transistors may be carbon based, this might open the doors for a lot of bioengineering research. Unfortunately, there is still the electricity problem to contend with, and a lot of new organic technology (like glucose batteries that have a water bi-product) still cannot handle the electricity conductance problem.