Once again, one more of these videos depicting a a group of individuals enacting harmonious interaction with devices. Oh the future! This one makes part of Corning’s vision for a glassy future. Corning Incorporated is the world leader in specialty glass and ceramics. The video was released early this year but we just came upon it.
Do you know what Object-Oriented Ontology is?
Text by Larval Subjects: We live in a world pervaded by objects of all kinds, yet nowhere do we have a unified theory or ontology of objects. Whether we are speaking of technological objects, natural objects, commodities, events, groups, animals, institutions, gods, or semiotic objects our historical moment, far from reducing the number of existing objects as alleged by reductive materialisms, has actually experienced a promiscuous proliferation and multiplication of objects of all sorts. Moreover, this proliferation has caused massive upheaval and transformation all throughout planetary, human, and collective life. Yet outside of a few marginal, yet elite, disciplines such as science and technology studies, the investigation of writing technologies, environmental theory and philosophy, media studies, as well as certain variants of feminism and geographical studies, this explosion of objects barely provokes thought or questioning, much less any sort of genuine or informed engagement at the level of praxis.
In light of this situation one is reminded of the epigraph to Heidegger’s Being and Time:
‘For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression “being”. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have no become perplexed.’
This epigraph could just as easily be rephrased substituting the word “object” for “being”. Where before we thought we understood what it means to be an object, now we are perplexed. It is this perplexity that drives the questioning of object-oriented ontology. Via Larval Subjects
Fireplace by Ted Martens is an interactive pixelated fireplace for Mac or PC. Type marshmallow, hotdog, eat, water, photo, or fireworks to enhance the interactive fireplace experience. The digital log burns down to ash in about 30 minutes.
Megan Erickson: The field of neuroscience evolved so rapidly in the past twenty years that it will pose unprecedented challenges to the legal system in the decades to come, changing the way we understand crime and punishment, says neuro-pioneer Joy Hirsch, director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Center at Columbia.
Functional imaging, for instance, has given scientists the ability to identify which specific areas of the brain are active during specific tasks. It’s a development that Hirsch compares to manna from heaven.
“I was at Kettering in 1991, when the blood oxygen level dependent signal – the primary signal of functional imaging – was discovered,” she says. “I had a feeling that this was going to change the course of neuroscience, because if that signal was real then it meant that we would actually be able to observe, physiologically, the function of the brain that we had made inferences about from more or less the black box system of study.”
By 2005, a technique utilizing this knowledge had been adopted by the AMA, resulting in widespread use in research and community hospitals across the country. Over the course of about five years, the way surgeons plan and execute operations was entirely revised.
Now, imaging technology creates a map of the patient’s brain, allowing his or her surgeon to pinpoint the areas most vital to the performance of tasks memory storage and sight in that individual patient. Before operating, a surgeon knows exactly where to cut and what to avoid.
“It’s [one] example of [an application] that has gone all the way from the bench stage, the place where the science actually happened, to the bed stage, where patients actually benefit from the new procedure,” says Hirsch. “We’ve begun to tap in to the dynamics of the language of the brain as opposed to just understanding specific areas.” Continue HERE
George Dvorsky, is a Canadian futurist, ethicist, and sociologist, who has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology—particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience. A founding member of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, he is the Chairman of the Board and is the founder and program director for its Rights of Non-Human Persons program. In addition, George is the co-founder and president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association and has served on the Board of Directors for Humanity+ for two terms. George has been interviewed by such publications as The Guardian, the BBC, Radio Free Europe, and Beliefnet. He made an appearance on the CBC’s The Hour and has been profiled in NOW and This Magazine. His work has been cited in such publications as the New York Times, Forbes, and Slate. He has also written for such publications as The Humanist, Canadian Freethinker, Cryonics Magazine and a number of Thomson & Gale university texts. He is also an avid CrossFitter, an ancestral health enthusiast, and an accomplished music performer, composer, and recording engineer. He blogs at Sentient Developments.
Wanderlust: There has been a recent increase of Internet videos (the ones above) that depict humans enabling their pets to “play” video games on smart-phones and video game consoles. Similarly, in order to gain new insight into animal behavior, scientists have been experimenting with multimedia-enabled devices in the last decades. Today, along scientists, game designers are trying to merge human spaces with pet spaces through pervasive computing interfaces.
Could these new technologies reduce anthropocentrism and blur the gap between different species?
G.D: There is no question that new technologies are allowing humans and animals to interact in more profound and novel ways. As a result, we are getting increasingly able to peer more deeply into the psyche of animals and gain a better understanding of how they perceive and engage in the world.
In some cases, these interactions re-enforce our suspicion that many animals are more intelligent and thoughtful than we have previously thought. We are finding that animals are quite ‘human-like’ in many respects. We share many traits, including the joy of play, applying skill, and winning games. No example captures this more effectively than the video of Kanzi, a bonobo ape, who discovers the sheer bliss of playing Pac Man. There is something intrinsically universal, at least among primates, about chasing and gobbling-up annoying little ghosts.
By showing that animals like to play as much as we do, our sense of empathy in increased. It helps us to relate more, and acquire an enhanced sense of the other.
But because we have previously suffered from a communications gap, and even a kind of interspecies disconnect, it has been all too easy for the dominant species to subjugate animals and belittle their capacities. By playing games with we are forced to interact with them in more intimate sort of way, which can only impart a stronger sense of their moral worth.
Now, that said, there is a risk that these sorts of technologies can be taken too far. In most of these cases, these are human games designed for humans. Or, they are designed for animals for the purpose of entertaining humans (take the iPad mouse game for cats — those poor cats are getting tortured!). It would be more interesting to see games that are strictly designed for a specific species. If we are going to do this right, we need to engage animal minds. Again, the challenge is to understand animal psychology, and cater to their particular tendencies and talents (including different sensorial bandwidths).
What I would like to see in the next generation of animal-and-human video games is a greater opportunity for collaboration between two players. The Pig Chase experiment is an early but unfulfilled attempt at this. For greater impact, game developers will need to learn about animal psychology and cognition. I am imagining, for example, a game in which success is dependent on the various strengths of two different species. It has been shown, for example, that some primates can perform memorization tasks better than humans (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071203-AP-chimp-memory.html). And obviously humans perform a number of cognitive tasks better than primates. It would be quite profound to create a game in which inter-species co-operation is a necessary requirement for success (to increase sense of bonding and camaraderie), and at the same time, still be a lot of fun.
We recently posted an article about the weight of the internet, however this other article presents an interesting new addition to the previous information.
Robert Krulwich: How could something so huge in our lives weigh so little?
The answer is the Internet runs on electrons. That’s how the information is stored. And electrons are very, small. But they do have mass. Einstein taught us that. So it’s possible to take all the energy (E) powering the internet and, using Einstein’s equation, (E=mc2) turn that energy into something we can weigh.
And it turns out a lot of energy doesn’t weigh very much. Read article HERE
Martin Fenner: Last Friday Gunther Eysenbach published a very interesting paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR):
Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact
Gunther Eysenbach analyzed a total of 4208 tweets citing 286 distinct JMIR articles. 60% of the tweets were sent the day the paper was published, or the day after:
Tweetation dynamics. From Eysenbach 2011, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.
There was a correlation between the number of tweets about a JMIR paper, and the number of citations in Google Scholar or Scopus (analyzed 17-29 months later). Highly tweeted papers were more likely to become highly cited, but the numbers were to small for any firm conclusions (12 out of 286 papers were highly tweeted).
This is a great study because it shows empirically what many of us felt already: Twitter is one of the fastest tools to discover newly published scholarly papers, and the number of tweets is an important measure of scholarly impact. This is an important paper for the altmetrics movement, even though Gunther Eysenbach in the paper says that he doesn’t like the term. In the paper he coins the term tweetations for tweets citing a paper – I personally prefer the term citation for all content linking to and discussing a scholarly work. Not surprisingly the paper has been tweeted more than 250 times in the first few days after publication, and will certainly become highly cited. Continue HERE
Rachel Kaufman: In a few years, you could be listening to an album of new songs featuring a duet between Elvis and Kurt Cobain. No, the two never cut a record together, but engineers and computer programmers are getting closer to being able to “resurrect” any singer’s voice for use in synthesized songs.
Yamaha’s been developing voice synthesizers for years — think Mac’s text-to-speech meets AutoTune — under the brand name Vocaloid. But to build a Vocaloid “voice library,” a singer typically had to sing every possible syllable, one at a time, in the target language. A computer later would synthesize the fragments into songs.
But now the Vocaloid team has announced that it has succeeded in building a library based on the voice of someone who couldn’t participate in the painstaking process: Hitoshi Ueki, a popular Japanese vocalist who died in 2007. The initial results were revealed on a Japanese video-streaming site earlier this year. Continue HERE
Graph Words is an online interactive English dictionary and thesaurus that helps you find the meanings of words and show connections among associated words. You can easily see the meaning of each by simply placing the mouse cursor over it.
Usage
To search for a word, type the word in the search box at the top of the window and press the “Draw” button. You may also press the enter key instead. After searching for a word, the main display will populate with many words and meanings. The word you searched for will appear in the center of the display, and will be surrounded with words and meanings that are related to it.
To save what is currently displayed in the Graph Words, you can press the “Save as image” button on the toolbar.
Underlayer
Underneath Graph Words lays the WordNet – a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. These meanings and semantic relationships are revealed graphically by the HTML5 canvas made available by Graph Words.
The Playing with Pigs project is researching the complex relationship we have with domesticated pigs by designing a game. Designing new forms of human-pig interaction can create the opportunity for consumers and pigs to forge new relations as well as to experience the cognitive capabilities of each other. The game is called Pig Chase.
The Playing with Pigs project is a collaboration between the Utrecht School of the Arts (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht), Wageningen University and Wageningen UR Livestock Research. Playing with Pigs is the outcome of a research project ‘ethical room for manoeuvre in livestock farming’, financed by the NWO program ‘ethics, research and public policy’. Pig Chase is being realized with support from Gamefonds. We are very grateful for the cooperation of Varkensbedrijf van der Vegt. We are also thankful for the help from The Village Coffee & Music, Niek Eilander, Michiel Korthals and Marc Bracke.
Designers Kars Alfrink, Irene van Peer and Hein Lagerweij:
“During the design process we discovered something that, to our knowledge at the time, animal scientists had not noticed until now: pigs like to play with light. For example, pigs are fascinated by the movement of reflected points of light, and are attracted to new light spots on a surface.
We are very fascinated by the idea of further developing the forms of play this offers, to experiment more with the idea of a symmetrical playspace, and forms of play that are actually cognitively challenging to pigs. Through a game we hope to establish a new relationship between pigs and humans, one that takes elements from the farm, the circus and domestic pets and mixes them in an interesting way.” Text provided by Playing with Pigs
TAMAR LEWIN: While students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands of dollars for courses, the university will announce a new program on Monday allowing anyone anywhere to take M.I.T. courses online free of charge — and for the first time earn official certificates for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught.
M.I.T. led the way to an era of online learning 10 years ago by posting course materials from almost all its classes. Its free OpenCourseWare now includes nearly 2,100 courses and has been used by more than 100 million people.
But the new “M.I.T.x” interactive online learning platform will go further, giving students access to online laboratories, self-assessments and student-to-student discussions. Continue NYT Article HERE
Jonah Brucker-Cohen: Alerting Infrastructure! is a physical hit counter that translates hits to the web site of an organization into interior damage of the physical building that web site or organization represents. The focus of the piece is to amplify the concern that physical spaces are slowly losing ground to their virtual counterparts. The amount of structural damage to the building directly correlates to the amount of exposure and attention the web site gets, thus exposing the physical structure’s temporal existence.
The project has been active in 9 countries (Ireland, Peru, Brazil, USA, Spain, Canada, Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands) to date.
Top Articles ranking on the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) (sorted by most-tweeted articles in November 2011).
Gunther Eysenbach: Tweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication. Social media activity either increases citations or reflects the underlying qualities of the article that also predict citations, but the true use of these metrics is to measure the distinct concept of social impact. Social impact measures based on tweets are proposed to complement traditional citation metrics. The proposed twimpact factor may be a useful and timely metric to measure uptake of research findings and to filter research findings resonating with the public in real time.
Citations in peer-reviewed articles and the impact factor are generally accepted measures of scientific impact. Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter, blogs or social bookmarking tools provide the possibility to construct innovative article-level or journal-level metrics to gauge impact and influence. However, the relationship of the these new metrics to traditional metrics such as citations is not known. Read paper HERE
Black hole extravaganza in 1080p. From ESOcast. Not long ago, watching something being ripped apart as it falls towards a giant black hole would be science fiction. This is now reality.
Observers under dark skies, far from the bright city lights, can marvel at the splendor of the Milky Way, arching in an imposing band across the sky. Zooming in towards the center of our galaxy, about 25000 light years away, you can see that it is composed of myriads of stars.
This is a pretty impressive sight, but much is hidden from view by interstellar dust, and astronomers need to look using a different wavelength, the infrared, that can penetrate the dust clouds. With large telescopes, astronomers can then see in detail the swarm of stars circling the supermassive black hole, in the same way that the Earth orbits the Sun.
The Galactic Center harbors the closest supermassive black hole known, and the one that is also the largest in terms of its angular diameter on the sky, making it the best choice for a detailed study of black holes.
This black hole’s mass is a hefty four million times that of the Sun, earning it the title of supermassive black hole. Although it is huge, this black hole is currently supplied with little material and is not shining brightly. But this is about to change.
Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, a team of astronomers has discovered a new object that is heading almost straight towards the black hole at vertiginous speed. The object is not a star, but a cloud of gas.
“The cloud consists mainly of hydrogen gas, gas which we see anyhow in the galactic center all over the place. This particular cloud weighs more or less three times the mass of Earth. So it’s a rather small and tiny blob only, but it glows very brightly in the light of the stars which are surrounding it .”
As the astronomers watch, the cloud has been picking up pace as it gets closer to the giant black hole. Its speed has doubled in the last seven years and it is now speeding towards the black hole at more than 8 million kilometers per hour.
The astronomers have already seen the cloud’s outer layers becoming more and more disrupted over the last few years as it approaches the black hole. But the exciting part is yet to come.
“The Black hole, imagine it sitting here, has a tremendous gravitational force and the cloud, as it comes in, it will be elongated and stretched, it will become essentially like spaghetti. It will be elongated and falling into the black hole.”
“The next few years will be really fantastic and exciting because we are probing the territory. Here this cloud comes and gets disrupted, but now it will begin to interact with the hot gas right around the black hole. We have never seen this before.”
No one knows what will happen next. The cloud will probably heat up and may start to emit powerful X- rays as it gets disrupted. In the end the material will eventually disappear by falling into the black hole. For the scientists, this event is truly a unique chance to probe the hot gas around the black hole.
“But this process of how material gets into the black hole really is not clear to us we don’t understand it in any detail. And here in the galactic center we have an opportunity so to speak to have a probe of this process. How material really gets added to the black hole, and what the physical processes are, how the interactions happen in this very central region. That’s a fantastic opportunity.”
This animation compares the X-ray ‘heartbeats’ of GRS 1915 and IGR J17091, two black holes that ingest gas from companion stars. GRS 1915 has nearly five times the mass of IGR J17091, which at three solar masses may be the smallest black hole known. A fly-through relates the heartbeats to hypothesized changes in the black hole’s jet and disk.
Data from NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite has identified a candidate for the smallest-known black hole. The evidence comes from a specific type of X-ray pattern — nicknamed a “heartbeat” because of its resemblance to an electrocardiogram — that until now has been recorded in only one other black hole system.
Named IGR J17091-3624 after the astronomical coordinates of its sky position, the binary system pairs a normal star with a black hole that may weigh less than three times the sun’s mass, near the theoretical boundary where black-hole status is first becomes possible. Flare-ups occur when gas from the normal star streams toward the black hole and forms a disk around it. Friction within the disk heats the gas to millions of degrees, which is hot enough to radiate X-rays.
Many black hole binaries show distinct and highly structured patterns of X-ray changes, which scientists distinguish by Greek-letter names. But to date only IGR J17091 and one other system, named GRS 1915+105, exhibit so-called rho-class oscillations that astronomers describe as a ‘heartbeat’ reflecting the accretion and ejection of matter.
It’s thought that strong magnetic fields near the black hole’s event horizon eject some of the gas into dual, oppositely directed jets that blast outward at nearly the speed of light. The peak of its heartbeat emission corresponds to the emergence of the jet. Changes in the X-ray spectrum observed by RXTE during each beat in GRS 1915 reveal that the innermost region of the disk emits enough radiation to push back the gas, creating a strong outward wind that staunches the inward flow, briefly starving the black hole and shutting down the jet. This corresponds to the faintest emission. Eventually the inner disk gets so bright and so hot that it essentially disintegrates and plunges toward the black hole, re-establishing the jet and beginning the cycle anew.
In GRS 1915+105, which at 14 solar masses is by for the more massive of the two, this cycle occurs in as little as 40 seconds. It occurs eight times faster in IGR J17091.
WiFi at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design
YOUrban: “It has been very exiting to see how our film ‘Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi’ has being linked to and discussed across a broad range of audiences, disciplines and fields of research, including urbanism, technology, architecture, advertising and art.
A common question, particularly from interaction design and technology communities is how we designed and built the WiFi measuring rod. So we thought it would be a good idea to go into some details about the design and development of the probe and the techniques, and also point towards how design research can contribute to understanding immaterial phenomena of networks and the city.”
Making WiFi measuring rod
“In 2009 we started investigating the concept of ‘immaterials’ in a collaboration between the AHO based research-project Touch and the design studio BERG from London. ‘Immaterials: Light painting WiFi’ is is a continuation of our explorations of intangible phenomena that have both have implications for design and effect how products and cities are experienced. Jack Schulze of BERG explains that:
‘The products we design now are made with new stuffs. Service layers, video, animation, subscription models, customisation, interface, software, behaviours, places, radio, data, APIs and connectivity are amongst the immaterials for modern products.’
Jack Schulze (BERG)
Jack’s colleague Matt Jones have summarised and discussed the concept of ‘immaterials’ further, and uses sociality, data, radio and time as key examples. The networked city is filled with several forms of intangible phenomena that can be described as ‘immaterials’, such as data from embedded sensors, GPS signals and RFID travel cards. Radio and wireless communication are a fundamental part of the construction of networked cities. In my ongoing PhD research, entitled ‘Pockets and cities’, I specifically want to get at the material, spatial and contextual qualities of these immaterials of the networked city and how they relate to daily city life.” Continue HERE
This video is about exploring the spatial qualities of RFID, visualised through an RFID probe, long exposure photography and animation.
It features Timo Arnall of the Touch project and Jack Schulze of BERG.
Artists have begun searching the space of simple computer programs for algorithms that generate music. Now they want to crowdsource the problem.
The composition of music that has the power to move and stimulate us is one of the great artistic pursuits. Indeed, composers are honoured in all societies for their creative genius. We know good music when we hear it but most of us have trouble creating it.
So the work of Ville-Matias Heikkila, a Finnish artist and computer programmer, might come as a shock. In the last year or so, he and others have been experimenting with the audio output of simple computer programs in an infinite loop. The output is a modulated stream of pulses that, when played through an audio speaker, sounds melodic.
Today, he outlines this work and some of the techniques and tools that he uses to generate the code, listen to it and even visualise it. He’s posted some of these tunes along with their source code on Youtube. Continue HERE
Jenna Sauers: The bodies of most of the models H&M features on its website are computer-generated and “completely virtual,” the company has admitted. H&M designs a body that can better display clothes made for humans than humans can, then “dresses” it by drawing on its clothes, and digitally pastes on the heads of real women in post-production. For now — in the future, even models’ faces won’t be considered perfect enough for online fast fashion, and we’ll buy all of our clothing from cyborgs. (This news sort of explains this.) But man, isn’t looking at the four identical bodies with different heads so uncanny? Duly noted that H&M made one of the fake bodies black. You can’t say that the fictional, Photoshopped, mismatched-head future of catalog modeling isn’t racially diverse. Via Jezebel
NSF/December 8: New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It’s the kind of thing seen in Hollywood’s “Matrix” franchise.
Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person’s visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.
Think of a person watching a computer screen and having his or her brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete or modified to recuperate from an accident or disease. Though preliminary, researchers say such possibilities may exist in the future.
“Adult early visual areas are sufficiently plastic to cause visual perceptual learning,” said lead author and BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe of the part of the brain analyzed in the study.
Neuroscientists have found that pictures gradually build up inside a person’s brain, appearing first as lines, edges, shapes, colors and motion in early visual areas. The brain then fills in greater detail to make a red ball appear as a red ball, for example. Continue HERE
View a video showing researchers explaining Decoded Neurofeedback.
Courtesy of Randy Buckner and Bruce Rosen of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Visualization group, Laboratory of Neuro Imaging
A pair of initiatives to improve brain imaging is revealing how its structure differentiates humans from other animals and could lead to cures for mental illness.
Anita Slomski // The MGH Research Issue 2011: Using a new technology called diffusion spectrum imaging, scientists are able to see for the first time—and in stunning detail—how neural fibers crisscross the brain and connect its regions. The imaging technique, developed at Massachusetts General Hospital, greatly increases the power of conventional scanners and uses mega-magnets to map the way water molecules move in the brain’s gray matter, delineating in real time which neurons are activated and in which direction they are sending impulses. Continue HERE
Stanford University: Remember a few days ago we promised that we’d have a lot more to say about the links between our hotshot social media and the information explosions that rocked previous centuries?
Well, here goes, my article earlier today:
If you feel overwhelmed by social media, you’re hardly the first. An avalanche of new forms of communication similarly challenged Europeans of the 17th and 18th centuries.
“In the 17th century, conversation exploded,” said Anaïs Saint-Jude, director of Stanford’s BiblioTech program. “It was an early modern version of information overload.”
The Copernican Revolution, the invention of the printing press, the exploration of the New World – all needed to be digested over time. There was a lot of catching-up to do. “It was a dynamic, troubling, messy period,” she said.
Public postal systems became the equivalent of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and smartphones. Letters crisscrossed Paris by the thousands daily. Voltaire was writing 10 to 15 letters a day. Dramatist Jean Racine complained that he couldn’t keep up with the aggressive letter writing. His inbox was full, so to speak. Continue HERE
Waterwheel investigates and celebrates this constant yet volatile global resource, fundamental element, environmental issue, political dilemma, universal theme and symbol of life. It encourages you to explore and discover, share and collaborate, contribute and participate. Waterwheel calls on everyone—performers and artists, scientists and environmentalists, students and academics, you and me, anyone and anywhere—to test the water, dive in, make a splash and start a wave. It provides a platform and forum for experience and exchange, expression and experimentation. Waterwheel draws together different people, practices, places, media and modes of expression. There are no borders or boundaries. Waterwheel flows along its natural course.
You can engage with Waterwheel in many different ways.
Radu Iorga: Samsung has big plans for the future and while it may not follow Apple’s advice on not using a rectangular shape on tablets, the company surely has some tricks up its sleeve. One of them is using flexible panel technology for the next generation tablets and their displays. The result could look like the foldable, flexible slate below. Via Tablet News
RjDj is a music application for the Iphone. It uses sensory input to generate and control music you are listening to. RjDj is mainly consumed with headphones. Think of it as the next generation of walkman or mp3 player. The consumer experience of RjDj is similar to the effects of drugs. Drugs affect our sensory perception, so does RjDj.
Michelle Legro: When Gunther von Hagens put together his traveling display of half-stripped bodies playing sports, chess, fencing, riding a similarly half-stripped horse, and generally acting like their human counterparts, audiences were horrified and fascinated. Bodyworlds was gross anatomy on parade, and to some it might have felt more like body snatching than an education in muscle mass and movement. But Von Hagens, for all his showmanship, emphasized that these bodies, preserved hopefully forever, were for learning. The entertainment was incidental.
The image that opens the Patrick Gries and Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu’s stunning book Evolution takes Von Hagens horse and rider and strips it completely, bone against black in a beautiful high-resolution photograph. The result is somehow even more animated, more eternal, and the quote paired with it, from the eighteenth-century naturalist Comte de Buffon, reveals the project at hand:
Take the skeleton of a man. Tilt the pelvis, shorten the femurs, legs, and arms, elongate the feet and hands, fuse the phalanges, elongate the jaws while shortening the frontal bone, and finally elongate the spine, and the skeleton will cease to represent the remains of a man and will be the skeleton of a horse…” Continue HERE
WJ-SPOTS is a project that was conceived of and designed by media curator Anne Roquigny, in which artists, critics, thinkers, inventors, researchers, curators, organizers and producers of cultural events are invited to look back on 15 years of Internet history.
The interviews are conducted inside the WJ-S multi-screen environment www.wj-s.org, transformed for the occasion into a space for thought and investigation. Online browsing of a selection of emblematic websites, chosen by the speakers, take place simultaneously on 3 big screens. Real time surfing is like a magnified and augmented thought presentation, offering multiple of points of view while the participants answer a series of 5 questions.
QUESTIONS
/ Who are you ? can you tell us in a few words what you have been doing these last years ?
// You have been involved in network activities or netbased projects for many years. From an artistic perspective, what has happened in this field ? what have you witnessed or found interesting about the internet ? What is your experience and feeling about the birth and the adolescence of the internet ?
/// From a social, political, artistic or philosophical point of view. what is the impact of this concept of network ? How has the Internet and the idea of network changed your attitude and practice, your relation to space and time and the way we behave, work, think, share, exchange, collaborate, create… ?
//// In the future do you think internet will still be an interesting territory to explore ? Do you think it can be a fertile space for creation ? Do you think it will produce some kind of interesting artistic mutating forms where the physical world and the virtual world can hybride, mutate, merge, fuse or collide ?
///// What are for you the most important, emblematic, essential, exemplary websites of the last 15 years ? They will be presented and browsed through live by the WJ-SPOTS team on big screens while you will be answering the previous questions.
WJ-Spots Brussels – part 1
BLR_VFX: Directed by Carl E. Rinsch, ‘The Gift’ Belongs to the “pararell Lines” Phillips Cinema campaning. Placed in Russia, The Gift is a Sci-Fi short with a savage Chase sequence on it. We made more than 20 full CGI shots for the short. Check out the animated pictures to see how it has been done. We also made the vechicles and some characters desings. We enjoyed creating such an unusual atmosphere and sense. Not the regular Sci-fi film we are used to see…
The starting view of ASE after loading all the papers matching the query “Dependency Parsing” (DP) from the ACL Anthology Network dataset. Credit: Cody Dunne, Robert Gove, Ben Shneiderman, Bonnie Dorr and Judith Klavans. University of Maryland.
Ellen Ferrante and Lisa-Joy Zgorski: The National Science Foundation- (NSF) funded Action Science Explorer (ASE) allows users to simultaneously search through thousands of academic papers, using a visualization method that determines how papers are connected, for instance, by topic, date, authors, etc. The goal is to use these connections to identify emerging scientific trends and advances.
“We are creating an early warning system for scientific breakthroughs,” said Ben Shneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland (UM) and founding director of the UM Human-Computer Interaction Lab.
“Such a system would dramatically improve the capability of academic researchers, government program managers and industry analysts to understand emerging scientific topics so as to recognize breakthroughs, controversies and centers of activity,” said Shneiderman. “This would enable appropriate allocation of funds, encourage new collaborations among groups that unknowingly were working on similar topics and accelerate research progress.”
ASE is not itself a product, but rather “a scientific research study that shows some potent new features that could be added to bibliographic systems to support more powerful functions,” said Shneiderman.
This project is unique and provides “powerful network visualization, integrated with search techniques, statistical methods and text analytics to provide automatic summarization of closely related document clusters,” he said. Continue HERE
Functional imaging package.
Tweetation dynamics. From Eysenbach 2011, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.
Top Articles ranking on the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) (sorted by most-tweeted articles in November 2011).
WiFi at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design
Making WiFi measuring rod
Courtesy of Randy Buckner and Bruce Rosen of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Visualization group, Laboratory of Neuro Imaging
The starting view of ASE after loading all the papers matching the query “Dependency Parsing” (DP) from the ACL Anthology Network dataset. Credit: Cody Dunne, Robert Gove, Ben Shneiderman, Bonnie Dorr and Judith Klavans. University of Maryland.
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