Positive Technology Journal

Re-blogged from Smart Mobs

Technnorati has posted the State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006. [via Joi Ito]

As of October 2006, about 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there was a slight decrease quarter-over-quarter in the number of new blogs created each day.

...The total posting volume of the blogosphere has leveled off somewhat, showing about 1.3 million postings per day, which is a little lower than what we were seeing last quarter but still about double the volume of this time last year. ...

Via Mind Hacks 

A recent article published in The Washington Post focuses on the socio-ethical implications of the emerging neuroscience of lying. The article reports about a company called No Lie MRI Ltd that claims to use "the first and only direct measure of truth verification and lie detection in human history".

From the article:

No Lie MRI's Web site has proclaimed that the company hopes to revolutionize truth telling in America, offering "objective, scientific, mental evidence, similar to the role in which DNA biological identification is used," to everyone from the FBI, CIA and NSA to the Department of Homeland Security.

No Lie is not alone. Its Massachusetts competitor, Cephos Corp., has licensed competing fMRI lie detection technology from the Medical University of South Carolina.

The boundless desire for a way to dig through deception is why political consultant John Zogby, president of Zogby International, expects the new brain scanning devices to be in widespread use in the 2008 presidential election. He can clearly see a demand to discover what voters really think of candidates - and their commercials.

 

Brain-scan lie detection is now reliable enough that it is starting to be admissible in court.

Via Medline

Geriatricians from Saint Louis University have developed a new test for diagnosing dementia - the Saint Louis University Mental Status Examination (SLUMS) - which appears to be more effective than the widely-used Mini Mental Status Examination (MMSE). 

The study has been published in the current issue of the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry (14:900-910, November 2006)

From the news release

"This early detection of mild neurocognitive disorder by the SLUMS offers the opportunity for the clinicians to begin early treatment as it becomes available," says Syed Tariq, M.D., lead author and associate professor of geriatric medicine at Saint Louis University.

John Morley, M.D., director of the division of geriatric medicine at Saint Louis University, created the SLUMS to screen more educated patients and to detect early cognitive problems.

"There are potential treatments available and they slow down the progression of the disease," says Morley, who is a coinvestigator. "The earlier you treat, the better people seem to do. But families go through denial and sometimes miss diagnosing dementia until its symptoms are no longer mild."

The researchers found the new screening tool developed by SLU detects early cognitive problems missed by the MMSE.

"The Mini Mental Status Examination has limitations, especially with regard to its use in more educated patients and as a screen for mild neurocognitive disorder," Tariq says.

It takes a clinician about seven minutes to administer the SLUMS, which supplements the Mini Mental Status Examination by asking patients to perform tasks such as doing simple math computations, naming animals, recalling facts and drawing the hands on a clock.

From New Scientist tech

The social interactions that glue the World Wide Web together are now so complex it has outgrown the relatively narrow field of computer science..

read the full story here

Via Mindware Forum

Do the test here

I did the test and got 102, which corresponds to "average intelligence".

A score of 124 or higher is required to qualify for membership in the International High IQ Society. This means that I cannot become a member of this society :-(

From A VR Geek Blog

Evolving time fronts is a new approach for spatio-temporal warping of video developed by Alex Rav-Acha, Yael Pritch,  Dani Lischinski, Shmuel Peleg

The framework allows to set different playing speeds to different parts of the same movie.

Look at this demolition video

Clarkvision does the calculations.

The answer: 576 megapixels!

Via Mauro Cherbini's moleskin 

An experimental study of the emergence of human communication systems [pdf]

Author: B. Galantucci

Cognitive Science, (29):737–767, 2005.

The emergence of human communication systems is typically investigated via 2 approaches with complementary strengths and weaknesses: naturalistic studies and computer simulations. This study was conducted with a method that combines these approaches. Pairs of participants playedvideogames requiring communication. Members of a pair were physically separated but exchanged graphic signals through a medium that prevented the use of standard symbols (e.g., letters). Communication systems emerged and developed rapidly during the games, integrating the use of explicit signs with information implicitly available to players and silent behavior-coordinating procedures. The systems that emerged suggest 3 conclusions: (a)signs originate from different mappings;(b)sign systems developp arsimoniously; (c) sign forms are perceptually distinct, easy to produce, and tolerant to variations.

Via Wired (Associated Press 11:47 AM Oct, 01, 2006)

LOS ANGELES - Scientists frustrated by the iron grip that academic journals hold over their research can now pursue another path to fame by taking their research straight to the public online.

Instead of having a group of hand-picked scholars review research in secret before publication, a growing number of internet-based journals are publishing studies with little or no scrutiny by the authors' peers. It's then up to rank-and-file researchers to debate the value of the work in cyberspace.

The web journals are threatening to turn the traditional peer-review system on its head. Peer review for decades has been the established way to pick apart research before it's made public.

Next month, the San Francisco-based nonprofit Public Library of Science will launch its first open peer-reviewed journal called PLoS ONE, focusing on science and medicine. Like its sister publications, it will make research articles available for free online by charging authors to publish.

 

Read the full story  

The website of University of Twente (faculty of Behavioral Sciences) has a list of relevant journals in HC/ergonomics; ISI impact factors is also provided for most of them.

The complete list can be accessed here

Via the Neurophilosopher's blog 

Alexander Pines and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are working on a new laser-based MRI technique which may lead to the development of a cheap and compact scanning device.

The experimental technique is based on a method called atomic magnetometry, which allows to detect the magnetic signals produced by water molecules without the large magnets or complex cooling systems used in conventional fMRI.

From the LBNL website:

Alexander Pines and colleagues at Berkeley Lab have developed a method to improve NMR/MRI resolution either inside of poorly shimmed magnets or outside of portable one-sided magnet systems, which accommodate arbitrarily sized samples.  This technique will enable for the first time the collection of multidimensional NMR/ MRI information in cases where on-the-spot medical diagnosis is critical, where samples cannot be moved to or placed inside of a superconducting magnet, or where inexpensive, highly inhomogeneous magnets are being used.  Other ex situ systems give relaxation data and sometimes slice-selective images, but not spectra and true 3D images.

Via Medgadget

A New Zealand based medical device company is seeking FDA approval for their seizure detection algorithm. According to the company's press release:

Company's technology in a nutshell:

Connotea is a free online reference management service for scientists. It allows storing reference list online, making them accessible from every pc, and sharing them with colleagues. Researchers with similar scientific interests can be discovered by connecting to the collections of those with similar interests

More about Connotea...

Interdisciplines is a website for research in the social sciences, merging contributions from different fields in the humanities. One interesting feature of this site is that it allows to organize virtual conferences. The current conference is on Causality

Past conferences include very interesting topics, as mirror neurons, art and cognition, language and evolution.

Hubmed is an alternative interface to the PubMed medical literature database, with some powerful features, which include:

- Daily updates of search results via web feeds.

Science mag offers a streaming video presentation on this year's main breakthrough - it's amazing, don't miss it!

Via Action Potential

The December issue of Nature Neuroscience includes a special focus on computational and systems neuroscience highlighting research presented at the Cosyne meeting held this past March in Salt Lake City.

Here is the list of contributions included in the special focus:

A natural approach to studying vision pp1643 - 1646 Gidon Felsen & Yang Dan Published online: 23 November 2005 | doi:10.1038/nn1608 Abstract | Full text | PDF (108K)

In praise of artifice pp1647 - 1650 Nicole C Rust & J Anthony Movshon Published online: 23 November 2005 | doi:10.1038/nn1606 Abstract | Full text | PDF (159K)

Analyzing receptive fields, classification images and functional images: challenges with opportunities for synergy pp1651 - 1656 Jonathan D Victor Published online: 23 November 2005 | doi:10.1038/nn1607 Abstract | Full text | PDF (514K)

Via Neurodudes

From Eugene Izhikevich’s website

On October 27, 2005 I finished simulation of a model that has the size of the human brain. The model has 100,000,000,000 neurons (hundred billion or 10^11) and almost 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion or 10^15) synapses. It represents 300×300 mm^2 of mammalian thalamo-cortical surface, specific, non-specific, and reticular thalamic nuclei, and spiking neurons with firing properties corresponding to those recorded in the mammalian brain. The model exhibited alpha and gamma rhythms, moving clusters of neurons in up- and down-states, and other interesting phenomena (watch a 25M .avi or .mov movie). One second of simulation took 50 days on a beowulf cluster of 27 processors (3GHz each). Why did I do that?...

One such extension is provided by the new NIH-supported neuroinformatics initiative of the Society for Neuroscience, which supports the development of expert-derived terminology sets for several areas of neuroscience. Under a cooperative agreement, these term lists will be made available Open Source.

This site provides a complete description of BrainML, and it also serves as a public repository of BrainML models.

Pubmed, the service provided by the National Library of medicine that gives access to MEDLINE database and other life science journals now offers RSS feed to allow users to deliver database search results directly to their computer and retrieve new items from PubMed as soon as they are published.

To add PubMed searches to your collection of RSS feeds, just follow these steps: