Wednesday, October 28. 2009Little Buddy Child tracker makes spying on your kids easyWant to spy, er, keep track of your kids? Best Buy’s house brand, Insignia, recently released a new device that can help you do just that. The device, known as the Little Buddy Child Tracker (available here) is a small portable GPS tracker that can be stored (or snuck) into a backpack, lunchbox, or pencil case. Parents can then log onto the web and see where their child is at all times, or receive SMS alerts if they leave a designated area. It looks like you can track where your child is using a Google Maps Street View type feature, designate a perimeter that your child is supposed to stay in, and make a note of different destinations. The end result supposedly is that your kids are safer (assuming they don’t chuck the device onto the kid next to them on the bus or clip it to the family dog), because you can always know where they are. In reality, the idea — while attractive for the paranoid parent — is also a kind of creepy. I mean, what fun is it to be 14 and skip going to the library after school and instead hang out at Taco Bell with the high schoolers if your mom is going to be trying to track your whereabouts from her BlackBerry? Personal comment:
Is this good or is this bad? Hard to say isn't it? Muscle-Bound Computer InterfaceForearm electrodes could enable new forms of hands-free computer interaction.
By Kate Greene
Now, researchers at Microsoft, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Toronto in Canada have come up with another way to interact with computers: a muscle-controlled interface that allows for hands-free, gestural interaction. A band of electrodes attach to a person's forearm and read electrical activity from different arm muscles. These signals are then correlated to specific hand gestures, such as touching a finger and thumb together, or gripping an object tighter than normal. The researchers envision using the technology to change songs in an MP3 player while running or to play a game like Guitar Hero without the usual plastic controller. Muscle-based computer interaction isn't new. In fact, the muscles near an amputated or missing limb are sometimes used to control mechanical prosthetics. But, while researchers have explored muscle-computer interaction for nondisabled users before, the approach has had limited practicality. Inferring gestures reliably from muscle movement is difficult, so such interfaces have often been restricted to sensing a limited range of gestures or movements. The new muscle-sensing project is "going after healthy consumers who want richer input modalities," says Desney Tan, a researcher at Microsoft. As a result, he and his colleagues had to come up with a system that was inexpensive and unobtrusive and that reliably sensed a range of gestures. The group's most recent interface, presented at the User Interface Software and Technology conference earlier this month in Victoria, British Columbia, uses six electromyography sensors (EMG) and two ground electrodes arranged in a ring around a person's upper right forearm for sensing finger movement, and two sensors on the upper left forearm for recognizing hand squeezes. While these sensors are wired and individually placed, their orientation isn't exact--that is, specific muscles aren't targeted. This means that the results should be similar for a thin, EMG armband that an untrained person could slip on without assistance, Tan says. The research builds on previous work that involved a more expensive EMG system to sense finger gestures when a hand is laid on a flat surface. The sensors cannot accurately interpret muscle activity straight away. Software must be trained to associate the electrical signals with different gestures. The researchers used standard machine-learning algorithms, which improve their accuracy over time (the approach is similar to the one Tan uses for his brain-computer interfaces.) "We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the user to calibrate the device in an appropriate way," says Tan. The software learns to recognize EMG signals produced as the user performs gestures in a specific, controlled way. The algorithms focus on three specific features from the EMG data: the magnitude of muscle activity, the rate of muscle activity, and the wave-like patterns of activity that occur across several sensors at once. These three features, says Tan, provide a fairly accurate way to identify certain types of gesture. After training, the software could accurately determine many of the participants' gestures more than 85 percent of the time, and some gestures more than 90 percent. Especially in the early stages of training, a participant's gestures need to be carefully guided to ensure that the machine-learning algorithms are trained correctly. But Tan says that even with a small amount of feedback, test subjects "would fairly naturally adapt and change postures and gestures to get drastically improved performance." He says that having users trigger the appropriate response from the system became an important part of the training process. "Most of today's computer interfaces require the user's complete attention," says Pattie Maes, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT. "We desperately need novel interfaces such as the one developed by the Microsoft team to enable a more seamless integration of digital information and applications into our busy daily lives." Tan and colleagues are now working on a prototype that uses a wireless band that can easily be slipped onto a person's arm, as well as a "very quick training system." The researchers are also testing how well the system works when people walk and run while wearing it. Ultimately, says Tan, full-body control will lead to fundamentally new ways of using computers. "We know it has something to do with gestures being mobile, always available, and natural, but we're still working on the exact paradigm," he says. Copyright Technology Review 2009. -----
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology
at
09:47
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, design (interactions), devices, interferences, research, science & technology
Tuesday, October 27. 2009Computer versus bacteria
The Hamiltonian path is the shortest route between city A to city B along several other cities and at which every city is visited only once. This sounds easy, however this has caused a lot of problems to the navigation systems. If you want to go from Amsterdam to Rome and visit some other European cities, there are millions of possible routes and the system will have to calculate all the separate routes to come to the final solution of the Hamiltonian path. Now the researchers have used bacteria to get a direct overview, in which the bacteria consider all the routes simultaneously. In the research, they have modified the DNA of the bacteria and let them find the shortest route between three cities. Each city has its own combination of genes, which causes the bacteria to glow red of green. The possible routes between the cities were explored by the random shuffling of DNA. The bacteria that had found the best route fluoresced green and red, resulting in yellow colonies. Problem solved! Althought this is just a small test and it will be difficult to program a complex computer this way, the researchers are convinced this a proof that demonstrates the possibilities of using bacteria to solve these kind of mathematical problems. According to the researchers their results validate synthetic biology as a valuable approach to biological engineering. Having a computer infected with a virus will not quite be the same anymore. The study was published in the Journal of Biological Engineering. Related: Crash course on synthetic genomics, Bacteria that eat waste & shit petrol, Bacteria that turn CO2 into energy, Google tracks flue spread via sick searchers, Conversations at the doctor. ----- Via NextNature
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology
at
17:48
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, biotech, computing, interferences, science & technology
Thursday, October 22. 2009Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and CyberneticsBy Geeta Dayal on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 1:00 pm.
Eno was first exposed to concepts in cybernetics as a teenager in the mid-1960s, during his days as a student at Ipswich Art College. Several art schools in the UK in the '60s were incorporating ideas from cybernetics into their pedagogical approaches, mainly via Roy Ascott's infamous “Groundcourse” curriculum. Ipswich Art College, where Eno studied in the mid-'60s, was run by Ascott, an imposing presence who incorporated cutting-edge cybernetics principles into his offbeat teaching style. Before Ipswich, Ascott had been head tutor at Ealing, a nearby art school where a young Pete Townshend was studying. "The first term at Ipswich was devoted entirely to getting rid of those silly ideas about the nobility of the artist by a process of complete and relentless disorientation," Eno recalled some ten years later, in a guest lecture he gave at Trent Polytechnic. Ascott's teaching philosophy involved countless mandatory group collaboration exercises -- an echo of cybernetics' emphasis on “systems learning” -- and mental games. Very little of the teaching at Ipswich had anything to do with what the teenage Eno had ostensibly set out to do -- study the fine arts. Instead of daubing canvases with oil paints, Eno and his fellow students were instructed to create "mindmaps'' of each other. Eno became very interested in cybernetics, and possible ways to apply those ideas to music. As an art school student, he had gotten into observing life on a “meta” level, and looked at his own creative process with a bird's eye view. Cybernetics concepts challenged Eno to think in different ways about the process of making music, and these ideas infiltrated Eno's thinking on many of his 1970s albums in key ways. Groups of musicians working in the studio could be conceptualized, in some general sense, as cybernetic systems. A piece of music composed using feedback, or tape loops, could be construed using cybernetics principles, too. One of Eno's favorite quotes, from the managerial-cybernetics theorist Stafford Beer, would become a fundamental guiding principle for his work: ''Instead of trying to specify it in full detail," Beer wrote in his book The Brain of the Firm, "you specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go." Eno also derived inspiration from Stafford Beer's related definition of a “heuristic.” “To use Beer's example: If you wish to tell someone how to reach the top of a mountain that is shrouded in mist, the heuristic ‘keep going up’ will get him there,” Eno wrote. Eno connected Beer's concept of a “heuristic” to music.
Schmidt served as the music adviser to curator Jasia Reichardt for the landmark exhibition "Cybernetic Serendipity" at London's ICA in 1968, and his selection of computer music for the ICA show proved extraordinarily prescient. Schmidt had long been intrigued by electronic music, systems, and their connections to the visual arts. "Cybernetic Serendipity" showcased pathbreaking work by hundreds of artists, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, and Jean Tinguely, and was a huge success for Reichardt and the ICA, drawing somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 viewers and foreshadowing multiple major trends on the interfaces between art and technology. “Cybernetic Serendipity” also galvanized the interest in systems-based art. "The very notion of having a system in relation to making paintings is often anathema to those who value the mysterious and the intuitive, the free and the expressionistic, in art,” wrote Reichardt in 1968. “Systems, nevertheless, dispense neither with intuition nor mystery. Intuition is instrumental in the design of the system and mystery always remains in the final result."
(Courtesy of Lisson Gallery)
Eno and Schmidt released the Oblique Strategies cards together in 1975, when they realized that they had both been independently developing sets of ideas to help themselves come up with creative solutions to trying situations. “The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios -- tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working, and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach,” explained Eno in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian in 1980.
The work of Eno and Schmidt, and of many other artists who took inspiration from ideas in cybernetics and other ideas from the sciences, was never a literal interpretation of scientific principles. That was part of what made it interesting. "One night at dinner, John Cage handed me a copy of Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener, and said "this is for you"," remembered John Brockman in his book By the Late John Brockman, published in 1969. "Robert Rauschenberg encouraged me to read about physics, recommending The Mysterious Universe by Sir James Jeans, and One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow." Rauschenbergian physics and Cagean cybernetics were not, perhaps, the genuine article. These garbled transmissions from the sciences, mixed in ad-hoc ways into the arts, allowed for strange mutations to take root in culture, taking a life all their own. Geeta Dayal is the author of Another Green World (Continuum, 2009), a new book on Brian Eno. She has written over 150 articles and reviews for major publications, including Bookforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, The International Herald-Tribune, Wired, The Wire, Print, I.D., and many more. She has taught several courses as a lecturer in new media and journalism at the University of California - Berkeley, Fordham University, and the State University of New York. She studied cognitive neuroscience and film at M.I.T. and journalism at Columbia. You can find more of her work on her blog, The Original Soundtrack. ----- Via Rhizome.org Related Links:Wednesday, October 21. 2009Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Others Outline Support for Net Neutrality RulesThis week, the FCC is expected to reveal the details of its Net Neutrality plan, which Chairman Julius Genachowski has discussed numerous times over the past month. Now, a coalition of 23 of the world’s largest Internet and technology companies are formally offering their support for the new rules in a letter to the Chairman, posted to the Open Internet Colaition website.
While the major players on the Internet are seemingly united behind net neutrality, it could take “many months” for the rules to be formalized according to The Wall Street Journal. That’s because cable companies and ISPs will also have an opportunity to argue their case that a completely open Internet with no ability to cap bandwidth usage and costs is bad for business. In any event, it would seem that a battle that has been many years in the making is finally about ready to take center stage. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, enot-poloskun Personal comment: C'est drôle, Google, Facebook & co parlent un peu comme si le web leur appartenait (et qu'il fallait le protéger), non? Cela laisse un sentiment contraire au propos qui est développé par ces "grands acteurs", nouveaux consortiums data-médiatiques.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
at
12:50
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, science & technology
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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