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.
I’m an unabashed Philip Larkin fan, thanks to my High School English teacher who set The Whitsun Weddings as one of our texts. If you like your poetry with a heavy dash of cynicism and an emphasis on mortality, he’s your man, although there’s a lot more to his work than that. Check out his poem ‘Ambulances‘ for a taste.
Larkin eschewed technology to a large degree, but as the video below shows, he did some recordings in 1981, that only came to light in 2007. It’s worth a look just for the shots of the home recording studio:
Imagine how many recordings that have been made over the past decade alone, that will pop up in the future as real finds. The question is whose hard drive is it sitting on? Share your stories of unearthed digital treasures in the comments below.
A story from our sister site, Metaverse Health
John Wilson has done an interesting interview with Edina Renfro-Michel from Montclair State University. The topic is the education of counsellors, and the outcome has been improved learning outcomes from students who took part in the Second Life than those who didn’t.
As Edina mentioned in the interview, the virtual worlds aspect improved overall knowledge i.e. those student integrated their wider learning from textbooks, podcasts etc as well. It’s a recurring and somewhat unsurprising theme: the 3D learning experience is improving outcomes.
Have a look for yourself:
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