Positive Technology Journal

Previous 'mind-reading' studies have differentiated patterns of brain activity without understanding the underlying processes. A new study in Nature uses a model of neural encoding mechanisms to identify brain activity patterns

link (journal subscription needed to full-text access)

OpenSpime is a project of a pervasive technology infrastructure that allows individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors.

A brainchild of Leandro Agrò, Roberto Ostinelli and David Orban, OpenSpime was inspired by Bruce Sterling's vision of "Internet of Things". Sterling describes a new type of technological device called "spime", a physical object that is part of the internet as it becomes trackable in space and time, through pervasive RFID communications and GPS navigation.

The first spime they've designed is a sensor that can measure the CO2 level in parts-per-million in the surrounding air, and through a wireless connection can send that information back to the OpenSpime servers. There they can be mashed up and aggregated on Google Maps.

check it out the concept video:

Cognitive processing and motor skill learning in motor-handicapped teenagers: effects of learning method.

Somatosens Mot Res. 2007 Dec;24(4):163-9

Authors: Deviterne D, Gauchard GC, Lavisse D, Perrin PP

Assessing human reorientation ability inside virtual reality environments: the effects of retention interval and landmark characteristics.

Cogn Process. 2008 Mar 20;

Authors: Bosco A, Picucci L, Caffò AO, Lancioni GE, Gyselinck V

The purpose of the present study was to assess the navigational behaviour of adult humans following a disorientation procedure that perturbed their egocentric frame of reference. The assessment was carried out in a virtual reality (VR) environment by manipulating the disorientation procedure, the retention interval, the relative positions of target and landmark. The results of experiment I demonstrated that adding a physical rotation to a virtual disorientation procedure did not yield an additional decrease in searching performance. The results of experiment II showed that shortening the delay between study and test phase decreased the errors more markedly for geometric than landmark ones. An orientation specificity effect due to the manipulation of the relative position between target and landmark was discussed across the experiments. In conclusion, VR seemed to be a valuable method for studying human reorientation. Moreover, the virtual experimental setting involved here promoted knowledge of the relationship between working memory and spatial reorientation paradigm.

Planned publication date: September 2008

Google has launched a dedicated portal of Google services for non-profit organizations.

Google for Non-Profits offers “a one-stop shop for tools to help advance your organization’s mission in a smart, cost-efficient way.” This site includes ideas and tutorials on ways Google tools can be used to promote non-profits, raise money and operate more efficiently.

Event Date: 9 July 2008 to 11 July 2008
Are you a presence researcher or PhD student? Are you looking to find out more about the latest presence research, technologies and applications? If so then the second PEACH Summer School is for you.

PEACH is an EU FP6 Coordination Action on Presence. Its objective is to stimulate, structure and support the presence research community, with a special focus on the challenges associated with the interdisciplinary character of the field. It also has the objective of producing visions and roadmaps to support ongoing and future research. The Summer School is the ideal place to join the leaders in the field for a series of lectures and presentations. There are also working groups, which will focus on the latest technologies and applications along with poster/demo sessions where you will present your work to other attendees and experts.

SPEAKERS INCLUDE
Prof Mel Slater, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (PRESENCCIA IP-EU Project)
Prof Franco Tecchia, PERCRO - Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
Prof Mavi Sanchez-Vives, Institut d'Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (PRESENCCIA IP-EU Project)
Prof Selim Balcisoy, Sabanci University
Prof Benoit Macq, Université catholique de Louvain
Dr Xavier Marichal, Alterface S.A.
Dr Ralph Schroeder, Oxford Internet Institute
Dr Eric Meyer, Oxford Internet Institute
Prof Jeremy Bailenson, Stanford University
Prof Dominic Massaro, University of California, Santa Cruz
Prof Miriam Reiner, Technion (PRESENCCIA and IMMERSENCE IP-EU Project)
Fulvio Dominici, Ultramundum Foundation
Gianluca Zaffiro, Telecom Italia
Prof Igor Pandžić, University of Zagreb
Dr Marco Gillies, University College London
Dr Rod McCall, Fraunhofer FIT (IPCity EU Project)
Claudia Redaelli, ITIA
Prof. Martyn Bracewell, University of Wales, Bangor

The deadline for registration is the 18th April.

Source: Eetimes 

Passing the Turing test - the holy grail of AI (a human conversing with a computer can't tell it's not human) - may now be possible in a limited way with the world's fastest supercomputer (IBM's Blue Gene) and mimicking the behavior of a human-controlled avatar in a virtual world, according to AI experts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "We are building a knowledge base that corresponds to all of the relevant background for our synthetic character--where he went to school, what his family is like, and so on," said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer's Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project. The researchers plan to engineer, from the start, a full-blown intelligent character and converse with him in an interactive virtual environment, like Second Life.

read full article here

Via Medgadget 

Frost & Sullivan has awarded Exmocare, Inc. with 2008 North American Emotion Monitoring Technology Innovation of the Year Award for "developing the ExmoCare physiology and emotion monitoring platform that aids in understanding the physiological state of a person through monitoring the expression of emotion patterns. The platforms developed by the company Exmocare, Inc. are unique in that they are the first of their kind to become a first-stop solution for vital sign monitoring , emotional monitoring, and online reporting."

Press release: Exmocare Taps into $200 Billion Industry - Maker of Award-winning 24/7 Bluetooth Vital Signs Wristwatch

Product page: The Exmocare BT2...

From NewScientist 

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a "voiceless" phone call for the first time.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

Google unveiled a browser version of its Google Sky application

The browser version of Google Earth software allows you to zoom in and out and pan around the celestial bodies, search for planets and galaxies and view the sky through infrared, x-ray, ultraviolet, and microwave views.

Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation.

Trends Cogn Sci. 2008 Mar 6;

Authors: Lutz A, Slagter HA, Dunne JD, Davidson RJ

Meditation can be conceptualized as a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory training regimes developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance. Among these various practices, there are two styles that are commonly studied. One style, focused attention meditation, entails the voluntary focusing of attention on a chosen object. The other style, open monitoring meditation, involves nonreactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment. The potential regulatory functions of these practices on attention and emotion processes could have a long-term impact on the brain and behavior.

Action verbs and the primary motor cortex: A comparative TMS study of silent reading, frequency judgments, and motor imagery.

Neuropsychologia. 2008 Feb 2;

Authors: Tomasino B, Fink GR, Sparing R, Dafotakis M, Weiss PH

Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was applied to the hand area of the left primary motor cortex or, as a control, to the vertex (STIMULATION: TMS(M1) vs. TMS(vertex)) while right-handed volunteers silently read verbs related to hand actions. We examined three different tasks and time points for stimulation within the same experiment: subjects indicated with their left foot when they (i) had finished reading, (ii) had judged whether the corresponding movement involved a hand rotation after simulating the hand movement, and (iii) had judged whether they would frequently encounter the action verb in a newspaper (TASK: silent reading, motor imagery, and frequency judgment). Response times were compared between TMS(M1) and TMS(vertex), both applied at different time points after stimulus onset (DELAY: 150, 300, 450, 600, and 750ms). TMS(M1) differentially modulated task performance: there was a significant facilitatory effect of TMS(M1) for the imagery task only (about 88ms), with subjects responding about 10% faster (compared to TMS(vertex)). In contrast, response times for silent reading and frequency judgments were unaffected by TMS(M1). No differential effect of the time point of TMS(M1) was observed. The differential effect of TMS(M1) when subjects performed a motor imagery task (relative to performing silent reading or frequency judgments with the same set of verbs) suggests that the primary motor cortex is critically involved in processing action verbs only when subjects are simulating the corresponding movement. This task-dependent effect of hand motor cortex TMS on the processing of hand-related action verbs is discussed with respect to the notion of embodied cognition and the associationist theory.

Call for Papers

PHYSICALITY AND INTERACTION
A Special Journal Issue of Interacting with Computers
Planned publication date: September 2008

Following the successful Physicality 2006 and Physicality 2007 International Workshops, which demonstrated the growing multi-disciplinary interest in this area of work, we invite submissions for this special issue on Physicality and Interaction for the interdisciplinary journal Interacting with Computers.

We live in an increasingly digital world yet our bodies and minds are naturally designed to interact with the physical. The products of the 21st century are and will be a synthesis of digital and physical elements embedded in new physical and social environments. As we design more hybrid physical/digital products, the distinctions for the user become blurred. It is therefore increasingly important that we understand what we gain, lose or confuse by the added digitality.

Augmented physical artefacts can be tailored and adapted to operate within a wide range of ecological settings. However, they also become more complex and require a fairly intensive design process to make them not simply practical and functional but also engaging. As a result, the need becomes even more pressing to comprehend the underlying computational intricacies, the physical form, properties and behaviour, the physical and social contexts, and the issues of aesthetics and creativity.

The issues in this field impact many areas of study: architecture, art, cognitive science, geography, human�computer interaction, philosophy, product design, sociology, tangible interface and ubiquitous computing.

We invite contributions that address physicality at various levels, including:

� design at the physical-digital frontier
� the philosophy of physicality
� artefact-focussed social interaction
� physically-inspired interaction in virtual worlds
� creativity and materiality
� interactive art and performance
� digital emulation of the physical
� the evolving role of digital artefacts in material culture

SUBMISSION DETAILS
Length guide: 4000 - 7000 words
Paper deadline: 1st April 2008
To expedite the reviewing process prospective authors are encouraged to send an abstract at their earliest convenience.
Detailed author guidelines can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/525445/authorinstructions
Note: For the initial submission a single PDF copy will suffice, i.e. text and figures need not be separate.
Any further queries, please contact Devina@physicality.org

GUEST EDITORS
Devina Ramduny-Ellis, InfoLab 21, Lancaster University, UK
Alan Dix, InfoLab 21, Lancaster University, UK
Joanna Hare, National Centre for Product Design & Development Research, UWIC, UK
Steve Gill, National Centre for Product Design & Development Research, UWIC, UK

Via Networked Performance

Electrohype 2008 will present works by 5 - 8 artists or artist groups. To give the exhibition a broad perspective we are looking for Nordic as well as international artists. Electrohype has since the start in 1999 focused on what we choose to call computer based art. Art that runs of computers and utilizes the capacity of the computer to mix various media, allow interaction with the audience, or machines interacting with each others etc. in other words art that can not be transferred to “traditional” linear media. This might seem as a narrow approach but we have discovered that it gives us a better focus on a genre that in no way is narrow.

We are not looking for “straight” video art (even if it is edited on a computer) or still images rendered on computers and other material that refers to more “traditional” media forms. Forms were the traditional tools have been replaced with computers and software.

Curators for the biennial are Anna Kindvall and Lars Gustav Midbxe.

Practical: You can submit with our online form or download the application form as PDF-file. You have to use one of these two forms to submit to our call. This can be found on this address. NOTE: Please do NOT send documentation material as attachments via e-mail. Put your material online and send us the download URL or ftp address, or send us a CD or similar in the mail. Do NOT send 8 pages CVs and only complement with enclosures if it is necessary. Please read the form and follow the guidelines. We receive a large amount of proposals and all of them are reviewed closely. To be able to do this we ask you to follow the structure in the application form and the topics mentioned above.

Financial: Due to a limited budget we will encourage everyone submitting material to look for possibilities for local funding to help cover costs for transport, travel and rent of technical equipment. This is not a requirement but a request; external funding can help us during the financial planning. The quality of the artwork will always be the determining element.

Electrohype covers all expenses, within reasonable limits, and also pays an artist honorarium to participating artists. Electrohype does not support development and production of unfinished artworks.

In previous exhibitions we have managed to keep a high level both in artistic content and exhibition design, even on a modest budget. It is therefore very important for us to avoid unpleasant surprises, so please keep this in mind when filling out the various posts in the form, especially when it comes to technical requirements, transport weight etc.

Improving quality of life using compound mind-body therapies: evaluation of a course intervention with body movement and breath therapy, guided imagery, chakra experiencing and mindfulness meditation.

Qual Life Res. 2008 Mar 7;

Authors: Fernros L, Furhoff AK, Wändell PE

Objective Assess changes in quality of life and in sense of coherence (SOC), after an intervention involving a self-development course using mind-body medicine (MBM) activities. Design A questionnaire study using a health-related quality of life (HRQOL) instrument, the SWEDQUAL, with 13 subscales and scores ranging from 0 to 100, combined with the SOC-13 scale, healthcare utilisation, medication and sick listing data. Setting A training centre for MBM. Eligible course attendants (study group, SG, n = 83) assessed their HRQOL before and 6 months after a 1-week course. A control group (CG) of individuals who had previously attended the course (n = 69), matched for age, sex and length of course time to the SG, also made assessments. Main outcome Changes in HRQOL and SOC in SG and CG. Results Of the 13 HRQOL subscales, eight showed clinically significant improvement in the SG (>9%, p < 0.01), namely, General health perceptions (9%), Emotional well-being [negative (45%) and positive (26%)], Cognitive functioning (24%), Sleep (15%), Pain (10%), Role limitation due to emotional health (22%) and Family functioning (16%). Sexual, marital and physical function and role in the SG as well as all CG scores were similar to average population values. The assessed SOC also improved in the SG after intervention (p < 0.01), challenging previous statements of 'the stableness of SOC'. Use of psychotropic medication was slightly reduced in the younger aged SG participants after intervention. Conclusions This group of men and women (SG), starting from a clinically significant low health assessment, had improved their HRQOL and SOC after the course intervention.

Blood Pressure Response to Transcendental Meditation: A Meta-analysis.

Am J Hypertens. 2008 Mar;21(3):310-6

Authors: Anderson JW, Liu C, Kryscio RJ

BackgroundPrior clinical trials suggest that the Transcendental Meditation technique may decrease blood pressure of normotensive and hypertensive individuals but study-quality issues have been raised. This study was designed to assess effects of Transcendental Meditation on blood pressure using objective quality assessments and meta-analyses.MethodsPubMed and Cochrane databases through December 2006 and collected publications on Transcendental Meditation were searched. Randomized, controlled trials comparing blood pressure responses to the Transcendental Meditation technique with a control group were evaluated. Primary outcome measures were changes in systolic and diastolic blood pressure after practicing Transcendental Meditation or following control procedures. A specific rating system (0-20 points) was used to evaluate studies and random-effects models were used for meta-analyses.ResultsNine randomized, controlled trials met eligibility criteria. Study-quality scores ranged from low (score, 7) to high (16) with three studies of high quality (15 or 16) and three of acceptable quality (11 or 12). The random-effects meta-analysis model for systolic and diastolic blood pressure, respectively, indicated that Transcendental Meditation, compared to control, was associated with the following changes: -4.7 mm Hg (95% confidence interval (CI), -7.4 to -1.9 mm Hg) and -3.2 mm Hg (95% CI, -5.4 to -1.3 mm Hg). Subgroup analyses of hypertensive groups and high-quality studies showed similar reductions.ConclusionsThe regular practice of Transcendental Meditation may have the potential to reduce systolic and diastolic blood pressure by approximately 4.7 and 3.2 mm Hg, respectively. These are clinically meaningful changes.American Journal of Hypertension (2008) doi:10.1038/ajh.2007.65American Journal of Hypertension (2008) doi:10.1038/ajh.2007.65.

Kinesthetic Imagery and Tool-Specific Modulation of Corticospinal Representations in Expert Tennis Players.

Cereb Cortex. 2008 Feb 21;

Authors: Fourkas AD, Bonavolontà V, Avenanti A, Aglioti SM

Specific physical or mental practice may induce short- and long-term neuroplastic changes in the motor system and cause tools to become part of one's own body representation. Athletes who use tools as part of their practice may be an excellent model for assessing the neural correlates of possible bodily representation changes that are specific to extensive practice. We used single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation to measure corticospinal excitability in forearm and hand muscles of expert tennis players and novices although they mentally practiced a tennis forehand, table tennis forehand, and a golf drive. The muscles of expert tennis players showed increased corticospinal facilitation during motor imagery of tennis but not golf or table tennis. Novices, although athletes, were not modulated across sports. Subjective reports indicated that only in the tennis imagery condition did experts differ from novices in the ability to form proprioceptive images and to consider the tool as an extension of the hand. Neurophysiological and subjective data converge to suggest a key role of long-term experience in modulating sensorimotor body representations during mental simulation of sports.

Clinical Assessment of Motor Imagery After Stroke.

Neurorehabil Neural Repair. 2008 Mar 6;

Authors: Malouin F, Richards C, Durand A, Doyon J

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate: (1) the effects of a stroke on motor imagery vividness as measured by the Kinesthetic and Visual Imagery Questionnaire (KVIQ-20); (2) the influence of the lesion side; and (3) the symmetry of motor imagery. METHODS: Thirty-two persons who had sustained a stroke, in the right (n = 19) or left (n = 13) cerebral hemisphere, and 32 age-matched healthy persons participated. The KVIQ-20 assesses on a 5-point ordinal scale the clarity of the image (visual scale) and the intensity of the sensations (kinesthetic scale) that the subjects are able to imagine from the first-person perspective. RESULTS: In both groups, the visual scores were higher (P = .0001) than the kinesthetic scores and there was no group difference. Likewise, visual scores remained higher than kinesthetic scores irrespective of the lesion side. The visual scores poststroke were higher (P = .001) when imagining upper limb movements on the unaffected side than those on the affected side. When focusing on the lower limb only, however, the kinesthetic scores were higher (P = .001) when imagining movements of the unaffected compared to those on the affected side. CONCLUSIONS: The vividness of motor imagery poststroke remains similar to that of age-matched healthy persons and is not affected by the side of the lesion. However, after stroke motor imagery is not symmetrical and motor imagery vividness is better when imagining movements on the unaffected than on the affected side, indicating an overestimation possibly related to a hemispheric imbalance or a recalibration of motor imagery perception.