Tech -- Culture -- Humour
I think most of us tend to forget the behind-the-scenes aspect of the technology we use. Take broadcast towers for example – some lucky person gets to climb to the very top of them, as you’ll get to see in the video below. It must take some courage to do that sort of work – certainly more than the average worker in a data centre or IT department.
Have a look for yourself, unless you have a fear of heights:
Like monkeys, everyone loves a robot, and they continue to evolve in complexity at an impressive rate. The ramifications for society more broadly are obviously huge and although I doubt we’ll be facing a Dalek / Terminator scenario in the near-future, there’s still plenty to ponder. Take the iCub for example: it’s the result of a five-year project funded by the European Commission through Unit E5 “Cognitive Systems, Interaction & Robotics”.
The purpose of the iCub project is:
to study cognition through the implementation of a humanoid robot the size of a 3.5 year old child: the iCub. This is an open project in many different ways: we distribute the platform openly, we develop software open-source, and we are open to including new partners and form collaboration worldwide.
Said iCub nailed a bulls-eye on its eighth attempt at Archery. How long can it be before it has a death ray and an attitude to match?
via [Technabob]
Virtual world Second Life has a vibrant arts community to say the least. Part of that community is the Avatar Repertory Theatre (ART). They have a few shows under their belt now, including Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Their latest is Oedipus Rex (Oedipus The King) by Sophocles. During October there’ll be six performances, with tickets costing L$500 (around US$1.50). That’s a pretty reasonable price for the whole theatrical shebang including music.
Here’s a short promo to give you a taste:
More information on the show over at the ART blog, or you can check out the theatre space itself in Second Life. If you haven’t checked out Second Life before, here’s a good excuse to do so.
via [Metaverse Journal]
Sleep Science Alarm – with iPsychologist is an application for iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch, released this week. Based on the press release I received from creator Brett Galbraith, he’s pretty excited about the launch as you’d expect.Â
Press release hype aside, this seems a pretty well fleshed-out alarm / sleep cycle analyser with some psychology-based options as well. One of those psychology sessions is a tongue-in-cheek piece on iPhone addiction -more on the app in the short review below. Back on the press release, some of its claims seemed a little overblown from a science  viewpoint, so I contacted Brett Galbraith to get some more information, which he promptly provided:
CT: You make the claim “A simulated sunrise means that the phone lights up a few minutes before the alarm to naturally increase your cortisol levels and wake you up naturally”. Can you explain how this occurs? My understanding of the research is that waking up in light does increase the cortisol response, but do you believe the level of illumination from the iPhone and its type of light allows that to occur? If so – do you have data to support it?
BG: Any type of light will begin to wake a person after they have been asleep. That of course is a big part of the reason why we awake as the sun comes up and why we find it so hard to get up in a dark room. The white screen (torch) of the iPhone is incredibly bright when in a dark room and is definitely noticeable. I only have circumstantial evidence that it works with an iPhone but it is fairly strong as scientifically it only takes quite a small amount of light to begin the chemical reaction ie the cortisol response, that triggers the natural waking process.
CT: Cortisol levels are higher for people under stress e.g. people of lower socio-economic status experience higher cortisol levels – so the quality of sleep and the quality of waking isn’t necessarily related to cortisol levels. Would you agree?
BG: Yes and no – people get used to or adapt to all sorts of different stimuli such as the sound of a train, snoring, a fan in the room (white noise) etc etc. If there is additional stimuli, i.e. more light, then this will assist the natural process of waking up. In saying this, the “Sunrise Simulator” is not the main method of allowing someone to awake refreshed, it is a mixture of using sleep science data as to sleep patterns in “normal” populations mixed with movement data we get from the iPhone’s accelerometer, to predict as accurately as possible, the optimum time to wake someone up. In future additions we will also change the “settings” based on other data around age, gender and potentially socio economic status – wouldn’t that be controversial!
CT: Are you able to elaborate on the iPsychologist feature. Specifically: which psychologist/s were involved, which approach is taken (I’m assuming CBT) and are you able to share any data on its efficacy?
BG: We used a local Psychologist who is also a University lecturer. They provided advice as to a number of different strategies and theories that could be used. As developers, the challenge for us was to develop a system that was able to be used and was useful, to a large range of users. Obviously some techniques would be better for different “conditions” so we had to go for one that was broadly helpful to all. Obviously self talk or autosuggestion has been around for 100’s of years. The Coue Method features heavily in our methodology. Basically it assumes the person is on the way to full health, they are getting better every day and that soon they will be much better and that there is light at the end of the tunnel. “Day by day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” We didn’t try to reconstruct our own research as the Net and medical journals are full of information backing the assumptions of the system we use and that was suggested by our Psychologist. It is also a “popular” method that users hear about every day as they watch a show like Oprah and Dr Phil.
CT: You make the claim that “The biggest problem Doctors face is determining the accuracy of their patients self assessment when it comes to their sleeping patterns and then determining the best course of action based on fairly unreliable data. Now their patients can use our system and the Doctors will be able to determine vastly more accurate sleep and awake times with advanced statistics including; REM sleep, sleep stages 1 to 4 and even how long and how often users awoke during the night. This is obviously pretty powerful and will lead to vastly improved advice and outcomes”.
I was just wondering how you felt the app would fit into a diagnostic regime i.e. if sleep disturbances have got to the stage of seeking medical advice, the current approach would be formalised diagnostics such as sleep studies. How do you see the app fitting into that equation?
Angry Birds addiction you need to beat?
BG: We spoke to a number of Doctors about the App without doing it to get information but just because they were friends and we were excited about the App. It came as quite a surprise that they were actually quite excited about how the App could assist them in their day to day jobs. If you ask anyone who grumbles about their sleep how much they have, chances are that they will exaggerate their real circumstances often subliminally and without any real or measurable or recorded data.
At a bare minimum, SSA provides the time they went to bed and the time they got up. This data alone is very useful for Doctors. The amount of times they use the torch is also helpful mixed with the awake or “considerable movement” setting to determine awake time as it shows how often they are getting up during the night. This has a large impact on REM sleep in particular and can mean that people are never reaching the REM phase and this can cause a number of additional issues not easily recognisable by a doctor. The other issue is the expense of diagnostic studies that measure brain wave activity and how unnatural it is to sleep when you are in an unusual place with wires attached to your body.
SSA is just another tool for Doctors and patients and in the future we hope to include some more powerful reporting options to assist users and Doctors further. At the end of the day, any strategy that can be used to educate people about sleeping issues and to provide better data to Doctors is a very good thing.
Having used the app for only a few hours, my impression so far is that this is a very polished piece of code. It looks good, it’s intuitive and it has a real depth of features. Â Whether it’ll improve your sleep or mental state is up to you. Like anything, if you maintain the discipline the approach requires, you may see some good results. I’ll certainly be trying it out over coming weeks and will give more impressions then. Kudos to Brett Galbraith as well for his detailed responses on the science behind the app.
Review score: 8/10
Cost: US$4.99 / AU $5.99
Get it here
For those of you that own an Apple Airport or Airport Extreme, you may find the Wii’s interface a little obtuse as far as connecting to that network. After spending a while twiddling I realised I was overestimating the complexity of the task at hand. So here’s how to get your Wii to connect directly to your AirPort:
1. Ensure you know your Airport’s ‘name’ – if you go to the Airport icon at the top right of your screen you’ll see the name of the Airport network you’re connected to. This is what the Nintendo Wii calls your SSID.
2. Turn on your Wii and navigate to the Wii settings (icon is on bottom left of the screen).
3. Go to the second page of settings and click on ‘Internet’, then ‘Connection Settings’. There you’ll enter your Airport network’s name. Then click on the blue arrow to the right of where you’ve entered the name and you’ll be presented with password options.
4. I had set a WPA2 password for my network so that’s the button I clicked and then entered my password. You may need to launch the Airport Admin utility (Applications -> Utilities) to confirm which type of password you’ve set.
5. Click ‘Ok’ then let the Wii do it’s connection test. It’ll tell you if it’s successful and if it’s the first time you’ve connected the Wii it’s likely to download an update, which may take a while.
6. That’s it!
Nintendo also have an official FAQ that may help no matter what type of router you have.
In the age of pretty websites, funky social media and 3D interaction, it can be easy to overlook those tools that just plain work. One such tool is Tableizer.
For Australians: if you’re like me, you may not have opened your hard copy phone book in months or years. At best it ends up a doorstop or footrest, albeit an unattractive one.
There’s now an option to cancel receiving them. Whether you want to save trees, space or both, go here to cancel your next phone book delivery. It gets you three years of non-delivery rather than it being a permanent arrangement, which is probably only fair given people can move house regularly.
So go save some trees – unless you’ll miss that sexy doorstop.
1. VentureBeat (USA) – Watch out, Disney, Fantage doubles its growth for kids virtual world. “Virtual worlds for kids have been volatile during the recession. Some have come and gone. Some have declined. So it’s worth noting that Fantage, a virtual world for kids who like playing games and staging fashion shows, has doubled its audience in the past year. The Fort Lee, N.J.-based company now has 3.3 million unique visitors a month, compared to 1.5 million nearly a year ago. To date, it has had 7.7 million registered users, compared to 3 million a year ago. That’s pretty good growth at a time when the competition for the attention of kids is growing.”
2. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Will games take over our lives? “In the film Mary Poppins, a scene in the nursery has the children distraught at the drudgery of tidying up. Naturally their nanny uses the moment to impart a life lesson. “In every job that must be done there is an element of fun,” she tells them. “You find the fun, and snap-the job’s a game.” It’s a trick most every parent has used: pureed vegetables arrive at an infant’s mouth via a spoon airplane, long car trips include “the quiet game,” and yard work Olympics determine who can gather the most weeds. In coming years, the idea of using games to increase good behaviour and happiness is going to explode into adult life, as insights and technology associated with videogames make their way into the larger culture.”
3. Wall Street Journal (USA) – On the Web, Children Face Intensive Tracking. “A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children’s websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults. The Journal examined 50 sites popular with U.S. teens and children to see what tracking tools they installed on a test computer. As a group, the sites placed 4,123 “cookies,” “beacons” and other pieces of tracking technology. That is 30% more than were found in an analysis of the 50 most popular U.S. sites overall, which are generally aimed at adults. The most prolific site: Snazzyspace.com, which helps teens customize their social-networking pages, installed 248 tracking tools. Its operator described the site as a “hobby” and said the tracking tools come from advertisers.”
4. Virtual Worlds News (USA) – Smith & Tinker Reinvent Nanovor. “Developer Smith & Tinker is launching a revamped version of its Nanovor offering from last year. The new version, called Nanovor Evolution, will be a full-featured browser-based virtual world. The toy arm of the franchise will be discontinued in favor of a Nanovor app for iOS that leverages the collection of Nanovor virtual insect robots that a player accumulates while dueling other players in the virtual world. Players’ Nanovor collections will be stored in the cloud. Where the original version of Nanovor emphasized the collecting and battling aspects of the franchise, Nanovor Evolution introduces customizable avatars, hub lobbies where users can interact in a virtual environment, and action mini-games that users can play to earn a new time-based virtual currency called Jolt Points. In Nanovor Evolution, users will be able to purchase new Nanovors and avatar customization pieces using both cash-based Nanocash and Jolt Points.”
5. Inside Facebook (USA) – Announcing Inside Virtual Goods: Tracking the US Virtual Goods Market 2010 – 2011. “With an up-to-$750 million acquisition of Playdom by Disney, an up-to-$400 million acquisition of Playfish by Electronic Arts, the acquisition of Tapulous by Disney, and hundreds of millions of dollars in venture investments, virtual goods are impacting businesses across the media landscape. Virtual goods, and the companies that create them, may be bringing the largest disruption entertainment, communication, and e-commerce infrastructure businesses have seen in years.”
6. CBC News (Canada) – Battle to preserve online anonymity rages in video game community. “Micah Whipple may not be a familiar name to the online masses, but in the World of Warcraft sphere, there’s no greater symbol of the need for privacy. The young man became a scapegoat for gamer outrage earlier this year when the owner of the massive multiplayer game announced it would require users to post their real names in official forums. The stated reason for the dramatic change: to oust “trolls” who were disrupting the chatrooms. A community manager who interacts with players, Whipple decided to show support for the new company policy and wrote a short post under his forum moniker, Bashiok, that revealed his true name. “Micah Whipple, at your service,” it said.”
7. The Guardian (UK) – PlayStation Move. “When Sony’s Move motion-sensing input system was unveiled, it attracted a certain amount of derision – it was accused of being a pale rip-off of the Wii remote, and of being clunky in comparison with Microsoft’s high-tech Kinect. Which just goes to show how first impressions can be misleading. It’s true that technologically speaking, Move is about as sexy as Norah Batty’s wrinkly stockings, but astoundingly, it makes much more sense as a purchase than Kinect. The main reason is that it actually works, whereas Microsoft’s attempts to keep Kinect’s price down means that it suffers terribly from terminal lag between your gestures and its response.”
8. Wall Street Journal (USA) – Microsoft Bullish on Kinect. “Microsoft Corp. is targeting global sales of more than three million units of its new Kinect motion-sensor gaming accessory for its Xbox 360 console in the first two months after the Nov. 4 launch in the U.S., providing a much needed holiday sales boost to the slumping overall market for videogames. In an interview ahead of this week’s Tokyo Game Show, Microsoft’s top videogame executive, Don Mattrick, said he expects Kinect will propel the company to have its “biggest holidays ever.” Mr. Mattrick said he expects Kinect, a camera and sensor technology which allows users to play videogames on the Xbox 360 through gestures and verbal commands, to eclipse the industry’s three million unit threshold by the end of the year.”
9. The Age (Australia) – Such a Tragic Waste of Life. “I have always been a little suspicious of social networking. When Facebook was introduced, I at first enjoyed the novelty of keeping up with friends and looking at happy snaps. Then Facebook got nicknames like Stalkbook and Creepbook. For lazy communicators, it’s a sinister kind of genius. Then Twitter came along. Letting others know your thoughts in 140 characters or fewer is perfect for short attention spans. I embraced it. Now I sometimes think I should write even less. With these two sites well and truly entrenched, I’d like to remind you of another world that had everyone talking back in 2005 called Second Life. In this virtual world, users could create a new persona for themselves and interact with others doing the same. For Brian in accounts who, on his night off, loved the idea of being half-Twilight-wolf, half-Arnold-Schwarzenegger in chaps, Second Life was a revelation. To me, it all felt (and I don’t want to offend anyone who still regularly plonks their ugg boots in there), well, a little unnecessary.”
(Note: click here for a great rebuttal of Warhurst’s article)
10. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) – Eviction game hits a nerve in China. “It may lack the sophistication and addictive power of Farmville or World of Warcraft. But an online game in which a family fights off a demolition crew with slippers and bullets has hooked Chinese internet users. The Big Battle: Nail House Versus Demolition Team has triumphed not through playability, but by tapping into anger about forced relocations. ”Nail houses” are the last homes left standing in areas slated for clearance, so called because they stick out when all around them have been demolished. Owners resist because they do not want to move or think that compensation is unfairly low, but wrecking crews often retaliate with tactics from cutting off power and water to violence.”
Recent Comments