This image from the study shows changes in degree of connectivity in the feedback group. Increases are shown in red/yellow and decreases in blue/purple. Decreases in connectivity are seen in limbic areas, and increases are seen in prefrontal regions.
People provided with a real-time readout of activity in specific regions of their brains can learn to control that activity and lessen their anxiety, according to new findings published online in the journal Translational Psychiatry.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Yale researchers displayed the activity of the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region just above the eyes, to subjects while they lay in a brain scanner.
Through a process of trial and error, these subjects were gradually able to learn to control their brain activity. This led both to changes in brain connectivity and to increased control over anxiety. These changes were still present several days after the training.
Extreme anxiety associated with worries about dirt and germs is characteristic of many patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Hyperactivity in the orbitofrontal cortex is seen in many of these individuals.
fMRI-driven neurofeedback has been used before in a few contexts, but it has never been applied to the treatment of anxiety. The findings raise the possibility that real-time fMRI feedback may provide a novel and effective form of treatment for OCD.
Michelle Hampson, assistant professor of diagnostic radiology, is senior author. Dustin Scheinost, a graduate student in the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science, is lead author. Other Yale authors include Teodora Stoica, John Saksa, Xenophon Papademetris, R. Todd Constable, and Christopher Pittenger.
Daniel Sierra’s animation done at School of Visual Arts, class of 2013, Computer Art MFA.. Music download link: soundcloud.com/dee-san
Software used: Houdini (animation), Reason (music), Nuke (comp), After Effects (final render), Processing (pre-viz)
A full description of the piece along with some still frames can be found at: dbsierra.com
Eidos consists of two pieces of experimental equipment that give you superhuman sight and hearing.
Eidos Vision enhances the way we see motion, while Eidos Audio lets us hear speech more selectively.
Eidos has broad application in areas where live audio and video analysis is valuable. For example, sportspeople can visualise and improve technique in real time. Eidos also has healthcare benefits where it can be used to boost or refine sensory signals weakened by ageing or disability. In the arts, Eidos can augment live performance such as ballet, fashion or music concerts. It allows us to highlight previously invisible or inaudible details, opening up new and customisable experiences.
When people create and modify their virtual reality avatars, the hardships faced by their alter egos can influence how they perceive virtual environments, according to researchers.
A group of students who saw that a backpack was attached to an avatar that they had created overestimated the heights of virtual hills, just as people in real life tend to overestimate heights and distances while carrying extra weight, according to Sangseok You, a doctoral student in the school of information, University of Michigan.
“You exert more of your agency through an avatar when you design it yourself,” said S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, Penn State, who worked with You. “Your identity mixes in with the identity of that avatar and, as a result, your visual perception of the virtual environment is colored by the physical resources of your avatar.”
Researchers assigned random avatars to one group of participants, but allowed another group to customize their avatars. In each of these two groups, half of the participants saw that their avatar had a backpack, while the other half had avatars without backpacks, according to You.
Text and image via Penn State News. Continue reading THERE
Scientists have built a digital camera inspired by the compound eyes of insects like bees and flies. The camera’s hemispherical array of 180 microlenses gives it a 160 degree field of view and the ability to focus simultaneously on objects at different depths.
Human eyes, and virtually all cameras, use a single lens to focus light onto a light-sensitive tissue or material. That arrangement can produce high-resolution images, but compound eyes offer different advantages. They can provide a more panoramic view, for example, and remarkable depth perception.
The new artificial version, created by by John Rogers and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and described in Nature, could potentially be developed for use in security cameras or surgical endoscopes.
“The resolution is roughly equivalent to that of a fire ant or a bark beetle,” Rogers wrote in an email to Wired. “With manufacturing systems more like those in industry, and less like the academic, research setups that we are currently using, we feel that it is possible to get to the level of a dragonfly or beyond.”
In an accompanying editorial, Alexander Borst and Johannes Plett of the Max-Planck-Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany suggest the cameras could also provide visual capabilities for tiny aircraft called micro aerial vehicles. “One major application is disaster relief,” they wrote. “Picture the following: a palm-sized MAV uses an artificial faceted eye to navigate autonomously through a collapsed building while other sensors on board scan the environment for smoke, radioactivity or even people trapped beneath rubble and debris.”
Presumably the engineers who build these future rescue MAVs will come up with a way to make sure the people they’re trying to help don’t mistake them for flies and swat them down.
Representative imaging results for four different line art images captured with a hemispherical, apposition compound eye camera and rendered on a hemispherical surface that matches the shape of the device.
Book-ish Territory: A Manual of Alternative Library Tactics by architect NIkki O’Loughlin is an exciting and interesting way of conceptualizing the idea of libraries as a public space not just for the public but by the public. Read it HERE
Geomorphic/Geologic Map of the Northern Hemisphere of Venus
(detail)
The Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VEXAG) was established by NASA in July 2005 to identify scientific priorities and strategy for exploration of Venus. VEXAG is currently composed of a chair and five focus groups. The focus groups will actively solicit input from the scientific community. VEXAG will report its findings and provides input to NASA, but will not make recommendations. The Lunar and Planetary Institute is a research institute that provides support services to NASA and the planetary science community, and conducts planetary science research under the leadership of staff scientists, visiting researchers, and postdoctoral fellows.
Celebrating the landmark 1977 Eames film, Powers of Ten™, The Powers Project invited 40 innovative artists from around the world to produce original segments for each power of ten using a variety of digital and film techniques. This new, collaborative homage playfully transplants the film’s journey from the physical universe to a unique, imagined universe of graphic abstractions.
The Powers Project is a wildly creative re-imagining of the film featuring the contributions of dozens of the most innovative artists working in moving image today. While the structure and narration of the original film remain, the visual journey is transplanted from our physical universe to an imaginary, collaboratively-created universe of dynamic and continually changing abstractions. Rather than a strict remake of the original’s realistic journey (a remake of a perfect film would be pointless!), this is more like Powers of Ten at a party. The Powers Project is a hearty nod to an important film, a celebration of Charles and Ray Eames’ love for creative play, and a reflection of the exponential influence of their landmark film over the past 35 years.
Cube with Magic Ribbons is a computer visual and synthesised sound composition for live performance. The piece takes its title from a drawing of M.C.Escher which is rich with contradictory perspectives but it is also inspired by the wrapped spaces found in the two dimensional graphics of early computer games such as Asteroids and Pac-Man. It was created using a custom visual sequencer SoundCircuit, which rather than employing a conventional DAW layout, allows multiple virtual tape-heads to travel through a two-dimensional wrapped space along tracks that can be freely inter-connected. As the tape-heads travel through the resultant network, the topological layout of the tracks comes to directly influence the macro form of the music. Furthermore, as the piece unfolds the nature of this already confusing space reveals itself to be increasingly elastic and complex, yet inexorably intertwined with the musical form.
This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past.
Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology in relation to other key media studies debates including software studies, German media theory, imaginary media research, new materialism and digital humanities.
What is Media Archaeology? advances an innovative theoretical position while also presenting an engaging and accessible overview for students of media, film and cultural studies. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary ties between art, technology and media.
Written by Jussi Parikka, a Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton).
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency based on an open-source, peer-to-peer internet protocol. It was introduced in 2009 by a pseudonymous developer, Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoins can be exchanged through a computer or smartphone locally or internationally without an intermediate financial institution. In trade, one bitcoin is subdivided into 100 million smaller units called satoshis, defined by eight decimal places.
Bitcoin is not managed like typical currencies: it has no central bank or central organization. Instead, it relies on an Internet-based peer-to-peer network. The money supply is automated and given to servers or “bitcoin miners” that confirm bitcoin transactions as they add them to a decentralized and archived transaction log approximately every 10 minutes.
A chemical treatment that turns whole organs transparent offers a big boost to the field of ‘connectomics’ — the push to map the brain’s fiendishly complicated wiring. Scientists could use the technique to view large networks of neurons with unprecedented ease and accuracy. The technology also opens up new research avenues for old brains that were saved from patients and healthy donors.
“This is probably one of the most important advances for doing neuroanatomy in decades,” says Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, which funded part of the work. Existing technology allows scientists to see neurons and their connections in microscopic detail — but only across tiny slivers of tissue. Researchers must reconstruct three-dimensional data from images of these thin slices. Aligning hundreds or even thousands of these snapshots to map long-range projections of nerve cells is laborious and error-prone, rendering fine-grain analysis of whole brains practically impossible.
The new method instead allows researchers to see directly into optically transparent whole brains or thick blocks of brain tissue. Called CLARITY, it was devised by Karl Deisseroth and his team at Stanford University in California. “You can get right down to the fine structure of the system while not losing the big picture,” says Deisseroth, who adds that his group is in the process of rendering an entire human brain transparent.
Excerpt from an article written by Helen Shen at Nature. Continue THERE
“The appeal of this extraordinary piece of furniture lies in its ability to overturn and question classical stylistic principles such as purity, cleanness and symmetry, while evoking a comforting feeling of deja-vù and a sort of primitiveness, matched by unquestionable craftsmanship.”
Of all the startups that launched last year, Fuzz is certainly one of the most intriguing and the most overlooked. Describing itself as a “people-powered radio” that is completely “robot-free,” Fuzz bucks the trend toward ever greater reliance on algorithms in discovering new music. Fuzz celebrates the role played by human DJs—regular users who are invited to upload their own music to the site in order to create and share their own “radio stations.”
The idea—or, perhaps, hope—behind Fuzz is that human curators can still deliver something that algorithms cannot; it aspires to be the opposite of Pandora, in which the algorithms do all the heavy lifting. As its founder, Jeff Yasuda, told Bloomberg News last September, “there’s a big need for a curated type of experience and just getting back to the belief that the most compelling recommendations come from a human being.”
But while Fuzz’s launch attracted little attention, the growing role of algorithms in all stages of artistic production is becoming impossible to ignore. Most recently, this role was highlighted by Andrew Leonard, the technology critic for Salon, in an intriguing article about House of Cards, Netflix’s first foray into original programming. The series’ origin myth is by now well-known: Having studied its user logs, Netflix discovered that a remake of the British series of the same name could be a huge hit, especially if it also featured Kevin Spacey and was directed by David Fincher.
Excerpt from an article written by Evgeny Morozov at Slate. Continue THERE
Amplifiers for the human brain, designed to allow people with paralysis to interact with the world, aren’t the most easily understood technology. So g.tec, the company that makes them, has come up with the following creative marketing strategy: Convince us that we’ll soon be interacting with computers through thought alone.
Here, for example, is a university project in which a student uses his brain to control a Rube-Goldbergian sort of etch-a-sketch, allowing him to write—albeit very crudely and slowly—without picking up a pen. And today at tech fair CeBIT, the company unveiled a new application that allows people, able-bodied and not, to paint pictures without lifting a finger.
Text and Images via Business Insider. Read full article HERE
For the first time in history individual piano notes have been made visible using the CymaScope instrument. The piano notes were painstakingly recorded by Evy King and then fed into the CymaScope one by one and the results recorded in high definition video. Click HERE to see sound.
Shannon Novak, a New Zealand-born fine artist, commissioned us to image 12 piano notes as inspiration for a series of 12 musical canvases. We decided to image the notes in video mode because when we observed the ‘A1′ note we discovered, surprisingly, that the energy envelope changes over time as the string’s harmonics mix in the piano’s wooden bridge. Instead of the envelope being fairly stable, as we had imagined, the harmonics actually cause the CymaGlyphs to be wonderfully dynamic. Our ears can easily detect the changes in the harmonics and the CymaScope now reveals them–probably a first in acoustic physics.
Capturing the dynamics was only possible with HD video but taming the dynamics of the piano’s first strike, followed by the short plateau and long decay phase, was tricky. We achieved the result with the help of a professional audio compressor operating in real time.
The Cymascope is an instrument that makes sound or music visible, creating detailed 3D impressions of sound or music vibrations. Here the rapidly expanding sphere is captured in a frozen moment. The interior reveals a beautiful and complex structure representing the rich harmonic nature of violin music.
An essay film in the tradition of experimental documentarians like Chris Marker or Harun Farocki, Remember Carthage takes the viewer on an epic journey in search of an abandoned resort town deep in the Sahara desert. However, one travels not through archival or personal images but through footage sourced from PS3 video games and Second Life, depicting ancient civilizations that seem at once familiar and totally fantastical. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Museum as Hub: Walking Drifting Dragging,” which centers on artist expeditions, Remember Carthage is a first-person journey through a historical fantasia that highlights the fictionalizing and exoticization of culture within gaming and virtual worlds.
The voyage begins on the swaying deck of a ship in unnamed waters and proceeds through a myriad of different landscapes, from arid deserts to the gaudy interiors of what appear to be Persian palaces, to barrooms and bedrooms—each new scene unfolding in sync with the narrator’s melancholic remembrances. As in other works by Rafman, a feeling of alienation and loneliness structures the story, with the narrator searching for a connection and yet unable to grasp what is real or stable around him. In Remember Carthage, the filmmakers emphasize how digital media makes history seem both totally accessible through archival information and, at the same, completely foreign to us. Here, the narrator’s search for the abandoned town is rendered increasingly futile as he traverses a landscape where markers of time and place often appear to be unmoored, floating signs. And, as his journey continues, he becomes unable to distinguish authentic sites from simulated versions.
The repetitive and circular sequencing of the film, with recurring locations and characters, furthers the protagonist’s sense of dislocation and interpolates the logic of gameplay—continual death and resurrection—into his journey. It is unclear whether the narrator in Remember Carthage ever arrives; despite constantly moving, he is caught in a horizontal, virtual dreamworld where his goals become ever more distant.
Jon Rafman is an artist, filmmaker, and essayist whose work explores the impact of technology on consciousness. His films and artwork have gained international attention and have been exhibited at the New Museum, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the Saatchi Gallery in London. Rafman’s work has been featured in Modern Painters, Frieze, the New York Times, and Harper’s.
Rosa Aiello is a writer and video artist. She has recently completed an MA at Oxford in literature and philosophy, and an artist’s residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Her writing and video practice deals with the limits of language, reason, and humanness. Aiello has been exhibited at the Museo d’arte contemporanea Roma and the Festival de Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal.
Every meteorite fall on earth mapped or at least those we know about. And where are the known meteorite landing places on earth? These impact zones show where scientists have found meteorites, or the impact craters of meteorites, some dating back as far as the year 2,300BC. The data is from the Meteorological Society and doesn’t show those places where meteorites may have fallen but not been discovered.
Heat maps of apartment rental prices. In June 2011 Jeff Kaufman made a map of Boston-area apartment prices. He says: I’ve made an updated version: $/room, $/bedroom. As before the data comes from the (awesome) site padmapper, which means it’s pretty close to all Boston-area apartments currently on the market.
Impact: Earth! is a visual and user-friendly impact calculator, developed and hosted by Purdue University. The original Earth Impact Effects Program is still available to calculate the effects a given distance from an impact. It uses exactly the same algorithms to estimate the impact effects. You can also try out a version of the original program that is still under development to map the effects of an impact somewhere on Earth. Note this site requires the Google Earth plug-in and is still being tested.
Myths used to be in our verbal traditions, in our religious parables, in our folk songs. Now, myths are in our movies, our plays, our pop anthems, our cat videos, our comics, our television shows as they spin out over decades, our political sound bites and our corporate press releases. They’re coded into every kind of medium, art form, aphorism and anecdote. Some are disguised as history and theory; others masquerade as universal themes, woven into specific stories by force of habit and intuition. It is the repetition of these stories in all these forms, stubbornly reciting the tautologies of our collective past, that makes them indispensable, the tensile layer between our levels of awareness.
Myths are in our history books, complete with footnotes and citations.
And myths are in our video games.
“Myths have no life of their own. They wait for us to give them flesh. If one man in the world answers their call, they give us their strength in all its fullness. We must preserve this myth, and ensure that its slumber is not mortal so that its resurrection is possible.” – Albert Camus, Prometheus in the Underworld, 1947
Excerpt from a text by Jesse Miksic at Berfrois. Continue HERE
At the moment, we are bound to the americans military GPS and network companies. As we are using digital maps empowered with GPS, which are curated and therefor have impact on our navigation and experience of our environment, we also have to think about the given technology. The technology is closed at the moment and can be curated or shut down at any time.
This navigation system is open. Which means it is not run by companies nor control. The goal is to gather interested people on the web platform openps.org to develop the necessary software, hardware and testing processes. Anybody who is interested, from beginner to professionals can participate and contribute their knowledge to the community and this system.
To use given things in cities and reuse them for the projects needs is one aim of this project.
The idea is to use seismic frequencies, produced by generators in power plants, turbines in pumping stations or other large machines running in factories. These generators, machines etc. are producing seismic activity, distributed over the ground.
The sensor prototype can detect seismic waves on the ground, walls or anything with enough contact to the ground. At the current stage of this project the sensor can detect and collect different frequencies.
To calculate the noise in a city out of the received signals from the ground, the sensor has to be tuned into a specific frequency. To get a specific frequency from one machine, turbine etc. the sensor has to be as close as possible to the seismic source to receive a clean and strong signal at least once.
When at least three signals and their positions on a map are known, one can calculate the position within these three signals.
In this early stage, the project will still rely on GPS and maps. With the process of expanding the new network of seismic sources, it can be possible to build an own positioning system.
Numbercult has created a series of visual music pieces that explore the use of Voronoi tessellation, and intersecting nodal networks using VVVV. The works are marked by a refined use of color, and a cross-wiring of sound and video resulting in narratives of pure geometric abstraction.
The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard documentary, which tells the story behind the embattled Swedish Pirate Bay project, is now available on YouTube. The film just premiered in Europe and was simultaneously launched on line at Youtube and for download on Pirate Bay.
It’s the day before the trial starts. Fredrik packs a computer into a rusty old Volvo. Along with his Pirate Bay co-founders, he faces $13 million in damage claims to Hollywood in a copyright infringement case. Fredrik is on his way to install a new computer in the secret server hall. This is where the world’s largest file sharing site is hidden.
When the hacker prodigy Gottfrid, the internet activist Peter and the network nerd Fredrik are found guilty, they are confronted with the reality of life offline – away from keyboard. But deep down in dark data centres, clandestine computers quietly continue to duplicate files.
CYBORG FOUNDATION is the Grand Jury Prize Winner in the $200,000 GE FOCUS FORWARD Filmmaker Competition. Watch the winners at focusforwardfilms.com/winners.
Neil Harbisson was born with achromatopsia, a rare condition that causes complete colour blindness. In 2004, Harbisson and Adam Montandon developed the eyeborg, a device that translates colours into sounds.
Harbisson has been claimed to be the first recognized cyborg in the world, as his passport photo now includes his device. In 2010, Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas created the Cyborg Foundation, an international organization to help humans become cyborgs. The foundation has also experimented with other sensory devices, including an “earborg,” which translates sound into color, and a “speedborg,” which allows people to detect movement through electronic earrings that vibrate.
The act of creation requires us to remix existing cultural content and yet recent sweeping changes to copyright laws have criminalized the creative act as a violation of corporate rights in a commodified world. Copyright was originally designed to protect publishers, not authors, and has now gained a stranglehold on our ability to transport, read, write, teach and publish digital materials.
Contrasting Western models with issues of piracy as practiced in Asia, Digital Prohibition explores the concept of authorship as a capitalist institution and posits the Marxist idea of the multitude (à la Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and Paulo Virno) as a new collaborative model for creation in the digital age. Looking at how digital culture has transformed unitary authorship from its book-bound parameters into a collective and dispersed endeavor, Dr. Guertin examines process-based forms as diverse as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, performance art, immersive environments, smart mobs, hacktivism, tactical media, machinima, generative computer games (like Spore and The Sims) and augmented reality.
We present a study of the relationship between gender, linguistic style, and social networks, using a novel corpus of 14,000 users of Twitter. Prior quantitative work on gender often treats this social variable as a binary; we argue for a more nuanced approach. By clustering Twitter feeds, we find a range of styles and interests that reflects the multifaceted interaction between gender and language. Some styles mirror the aggregated language-gender statistics, while others contradict them. Next, we investigate individuals whose language better matches the other gender. We find that such individuals have social networks that include significantly more individuals from the other gender, and that in general, social network homophily is correlated with the use of same-gender language markers. Pairing computational methods and social theory thus offers a new perspective on how gender emerges as individuals position themselves relative to audiences, topics, and mainstream gender norms.
Study by a trio of linguists and computer scientists (David Bamman, Jacob Eisenstein, Tyler Schnoebelen) that looks at the gendered expression of language online. PDF HERE
Image above via
According to Tuinbouw Technisch Atelier BV, a Dutch company that advertises itself as “a leading supplier of equipment for handling and selection of young plants and other equipment for growers and industries,” the Combifix (above) is your best choice for consolidation of young plant trays.
The advantage of repairing Young Plant trays is an optimum use of available space and uniformity in plant material. Consequently, the market is asking for 100% filled young plant trays for use with automated transplanting. There’s no other machine on the market available with a higher capacity for fixing trays. The CombiFix is designed as a moveable small single frame (3,8 x 2,2 meter) in which all processes occur.
How does the CombiFix operate?
The CombiFix conveys the plug trays into the machine where the trays are qualified by a Vision based selection system. Based on the Vision selection criteria, each cell are determined to be Go or No Go. Waste plugs are removed from the tray by way of a pneumatic extraction system. After extraction, trays are moved into a donor and receiving position. Subsequently, the TTA plant grippers pick up plants from the donor tray with use of a pusher pin system. At the receiving tray, the empty cells are replaced with plants until it is 100% filled.
From digital fingerprinting to iris and retina recognition, biometric identification systems are a multibillion dollar industry and an integral part of post-9/11 national security strategy. Yet these technologies often fail to work. The scientific literature on their accuracy and reliability documents widespread and frequent technical malfunction. Shoshana Amielle Magnet argues that these systems fail so often because rendering bodies in biometric code falsely assumes that people’s bodies are the same and that individual bodies are stable, or unchanging, over time. By focusing on the moments when biometrics fail, Magnet shows that the technologies work differently, and fail to function more often, on women, people of color, and people with disabilities. Her assessment emphasizes the state’s use of biometrics to control and classify vulnerable and marginalized populations—including prisoners, welfare recipients, immigrants, and refugees—and to track individuals beyond the nation’s territorial boundaries. When Biometrics Fail is a timely, important contribution to thinking about the security state, surveillance, identity, technology, and human rights.
When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity
by Shoshana Amielle Magnet
This image from the study shows changes in degree of connectivity in the feedback group. Increases are shown in red/yellow and decreases in blue/purple. Decreases in connectivity are seen in limbic areas, and increases are seen in prefrontal regions.
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