Positive Technology Journal

Via Mobile Community Design

The MBW-100 watch lets you answer or reject calls, displays caller ID info, and even lets you play, pause and skip music tracks. The device connects to selected Sony Ericsson handsets (including K790 and K610 models) via Bluetooth 2.0. The stainless-steel, 6.6-ounce watch boasts analog dials and an OLED screen, and it lets you control a variety of phone functions, such as call handling (you can answer, reject or mute calls) and music playback (play, pause, and skip tracks)

Via Human Productivity Lab

Teliris, a company that develops telepresence solutions, has announced its 4th generation offering. From the press release:

The VirtuaLive(TM) enhanced technology provides the most natural and intimate virtual meeting environment on the market, and is available in a broad set of room offerings designed to meet the specific needs of its customers.

Building on Teliris' third generation GlobalTable(TM) telepresence solutions, VirtuaLive(TM) provides enhanced quality video and broadband audio, realistically replicating an in-person meeting experience by capturing and transmitting the most subtle visual gestures and auditory cues.

"All future Teliris solutions will fall under the VirtuaLive(TM) umbrella of offerings," said Marc Trachtenberg, Teliris CEO. "With such an advanced technology platform and range of solutions, companies can select the immersive experience that best fits their business environment and goals."

VirtuaLive's(TM) next generation of Virtual Vectoring(TM) is at the center of the new offerings. It provides users with unparalleled eye-to-eye contact from site-to-site in multipoint meetings with various numbers of participants within each room. No other vendor offering can match the natural experience created by advanced technology in such diverse environments.

The neural basis of narrative imagery: emotion and action.

Prog Brain Res. 2006;156:93-103

Authors: Sabatinelli D, Lang PJ, Bradley MM, Flaisch T

It has been proposed that narrative emotional imagery activates an associative network of stimulus, semantic, and response (procedural) information. In previous research, predicted response components have been demonstrated through psychophysiological methods in peripheral nervous system. Here we investigate central nervous system concomitants of pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant narrative imagery with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects were presented with brief narrative scripts over headphones, and then imagined themselves engaged in the described events. During script perception, auditory association cortex showed enhanced activation during affectively arousing (pleasant and unpleasant), relative to neutral imagery. Structures involved in language processing (left middle frontal gyrus) and spatial navigation (retrosplenium) were also active during script presentation. At the onset of narrative imagery, supplementary motor area, lateral cerebellum, and left inferior frontal gyrus were initiated, showing enhanced signal change during affectively arousing (pleasant and unpleasant), relative to neutral scripts. These data are consistent with a bioinformational model of emotion that considers response mobilization as the measurable output of narrative imagery.

Science & Consciousness Review, the online webzine/journal for the review of the scientific study of consciousness, is back online after a crash that occurred several months ago

Via IEET 

Have a look at this thought-provoking article by Russel Blackford on affective communication in mediated environments:

One of the main conclusions I’ve been coming to in my research on the moral issues surrounding emerging technologies is the danger that they will be used in ways that undermine affective communication between human beings - something on which our ability to bond into societies and show moment-by-moment sympathy for each other depends. Anthropological and neurological studies have increasingly confirmed that human beings have a repertoire of communication by facial expression, voice tone, and body language that is largely cross-cultural, and which surely evolved as we evolved as social animals.

The importance of this affective repertoire can be seen in the frequent complaints in internet forums that, “I misunderstood because I couldn’t hear your tone of voice or see the expression on your face.” The internet has evolved emoticons as a partial solution to the problem, but flame wars still break out over observations that would lead to nothing like such violent verbal responses if those involved were discussing the same matters face to face, or even on the telephone. I almost never encounter truly angry exchanges in real life, though I may be a bit sheltered, or course, but I see them on the internet all the time. Partly, it seems to be that people genuinely misunderstand where others are coming from with the restricted affective cues available. Partly, however, it seems that people are more prepared to lash out hurtfully in circumstances where they are not held in check by the angry or shocked looks and the raised voices they would encounter if they acted in the same way in real life.

This is one reason to be sightly wary of the internet. It’s not a reason to ban the internet, which produces all sorts of extraordinary utilitarian benefits. Indeed, even the internet’s constraint on affective communication may have advantages - it may free up shy people to say things that they would be too afraid to say in real life.

 

Read the full article

The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) Prizes. Winning the Netflix Prize improves our ability to connect people to the movies they love

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  

Via Pink Tentacle

Via infosthetics

Color of My Sound is an Internet-based application that allows to assign colors to specific sounds. The project is inspired by the phenomenon of synesthesia, the mixing of the senses.

In CMS, users choose a sound category. Then, after listening, they can choose the color to which they are most strongly drawn. finally, they can see how others voted for that particular sound.

The Color of My Sound's original prototype has recently won a Silver Summit Creative Award, and is up for a 2006 Webby, in the NetArt category.

see also music animation machine & wolfram tones.

Re-blogged from information aesthetic

SCACS is a "Social Context-Aware Communication System" that collects information on social networks (i.e. academic co-author relationships networks) & visualizes them on wearable interfaces to facilitate face-to-face communications among people in physical environments. RFID sensors sense the identity of specific people (i.e. authors) nearby, & a wearable computer transforms the complex social network graphs into treemaps, which are then shown as augmented reality on a wearable interface (or head-mounted display).

link: aist-nara.ac.jp (pdf)

Via Medgadget

By luis on Opportunities + Events + Resources

What role do videogames play in our lives today? As the boundaries between the virtual and the real blur more and more in the new gaming worlds we have come to inhabit, new conditions arise.

With the theme Gaming Realities, medi@terra 06 aims to explore the different dimensions and developments in the gaming fields and the impact they have on the different fields of society today. This year's Festival and International Conference set up to explore the diverse ideas, narratives, and ideologies involved in the video games.

Videogames express and reflect today's world, its aesthetics and technologies, give rise to new identities and new mentalities. Medi@terra Festival has invited individuals who have realised the importance and dimensions which this field has acquired, asking them to deposit their viewpoints and experiences with regard to the connections of the game to society, the identity and psychology of the player, the space and narration of the game, new technologies and conceptions and possibilities for the computer game to comprise the key art of 21st century.

'Gaming Realities: the Challenge of Digital Culture' is a three days International Conference [6-8 October, Athens] organised by Fournos Centre for the Digital Culture.

Re-blogged from Networked Performance 

Increasing cortical activity in auditory areas through neurofeedback functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Neuroreport. 2006 Aug 21;17(12):1273-8

Authors: Yoo SS, O'Leary HM, Fairneny T, Chen NK, Panych LP, Park H, Jolesz FA

We report a functional magnetic resonance imaging method to deliver task-specific brain activities as biofeedback signals to guide individuals to increase cortical activity in auditory areas during sound stimulation. A total of 11 study participants underwent multiple functional magnetic resonance imaging scan sessions, while the changes in the activated cortical volume within the primary and secondary auditory areas were fed back to them between scan sessions. On the basis of the feedback information, participants attempted to increase the number of significant voxels during the subsequent trial sessions by adjusting their level of attention to the auditory stimuli. Results showed that the group of individuals who received the feedback were able to increase the activation volume and blood oxygenation level-dependent signal to a greater degree than the control group.

Endoscopic eye tracking system for fMRI.

J Neurosci Methods. 2006 Sep 13;

Authors: Kanowski M, Rieger JW, Noesselt T, Tempelmann C, Hinrichs H

Here we introduce a new video-based real-time eye tracking system suitable for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) application. The described system monitors the subject's eye, which is illuminated with infrared light, directly at the headcoil using an endoscopic fibre optical system. This endoscopic technique assures reliable, easy-to-use and fast adjustment. It requires only a minimal amount of equipment at the headcoil and inside the examination room. Moreover, the short distance between the image acquisition optics and the eye provides high spatial tracking resolution. Interference from physiological head movement is effectively reduced by simultaneous tracking of both eye and head movements.

Utilizing Gamma Band to Improve Mental Task Based Brain-Computer Interface Design

IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, Volume 14, Issue 3, Sept. 2006 Page(s): 299 - 303

Palaniappan, R. 

A common method for designing brain–computer Interface (BCI) is to use electroencephalogram (EEG) signals extracted during mental tasks. In these BCI designs, features from EEG such as power and asymmetry ratios from delta, theta, alpha, and beta bands have been used in classifying different mental tasks. In this paper, the performance of the mental task based BCI design is improved by using spectral power and asymmetry ratios from gamma (24–37 Hz) band in addition to the lower frequency bands. In the experimental study, EEG signals extracted during five mental tasks from four subjects were used. Elman neural network (ENN) trained by the resilient backpropagation algorithm was used to classify the power and asymmetry ratios from EEG into different combinations of two mental tasks. The results indicated that 1) the classification performance and training time of the BCI design were improved through the use of additional gamma band features; 2) classification performances were nearly invariant to the number of ENN hidden units or feature extraction method.

Brain-computer interfaces for control of neuroprostheses: from synchronous to asynchronous mode of operation.

Biomed Tech (Berl). 2006;51(2):57-63

Authors: Müller-Putz GR, Scherer R, Pfurtscheller G, Rupp R

Transferring a brain-computer interface (BCI) from the laboratory environment into real world applications is directly related to the problem of identifying user intentions from brain signals without any additional information in real time. From the perspective of signal processing, the BCI has to have an uncued or asynchronous design. Based on the results of two clinical applications, where 'thought' control of neuroprostheses based on movement imagery in tetraplegic patients with a high spinal cord injury has been established, the general steps from a synchronous or cue-guided BCI to an internally driven asynchronous brain-switch are discussed. The future potential of BCI methods for various control purposes, especially for functional rehabilitation of tetraplegics using neuroprosthetics, is outlined.

Via New Scientist Tech

Anthony Boucouvalas and colleagues at Bournemouth University in the UK have created a system that contorts an image of a user's face to express different emotions, New Scientist reports. According to Boucouvalas and coll., the system might be used to enrich text-based internet chat.

From the article:

A user first uploads a picture of their face with a "neutral" expression. Then they use their mouse to mark the ends of their eyebrows, the corners of their mouth and the edges of their eyes and lips. The software uses these points to morph the face to express different emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. A user can select an emotion and one of three intensity levels when using the system.

 

Read the full story here

See also Illustrations from Smiley Arena

Via Textually.org

The Australian company SMS Development has announced the world's first truly mobile GSM watch phone.

The watchphone has SMS capabilities with an internal antenna, is tri-band and comes with bluetooth functionality; talk time is 80 minutes.