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QUEST Discussion Topics and Weekly News

Mar 26th, 2010

1.) Embodied Intelligence – Our first topic will center on a news article that we came across this week, titled ‘Mind over matter? How your body does your thinking’ from NewScientist. The article talks about the strong link between thoughts and actions, an issue that we have talked about in great detail in the QUEST group. If you are planning to attend or phone-in to the meeting tomorrow give the article a read (you can follow the link above or see a short summary in the news articles below for this week) and come prepared to discuss.

2.) 'Can computers help overcome limitations in human decision making?' - recent article by Maule. This is an area we have been concentrating on in our QUEST group and have taken the position that to 'integrate' humans and machines there needs to be 'alignable' representations by both the computer and the human. To design representations for a computer that a human can align to requires an understanding of human decision making/thinking. This article reviews some of the literature, we also have a ppt for this material as well.

Unanswered query from last week

The goal: Try to find this study through any means possible.

The study involves an analysis of what sort of nutritional regimen results in the biggest and best pigs. The researchers split the pigs into three groups, with three different sources of nutrition for each group. The first group of pigs was fed the standard pig grub (cornmeal, oats, etc). The second group of pigs was fed the output (read: excrement) from the first group. Finally, the third group of pigs was fed the output of the second group. They allowed this setup to run for awhile, and when they collected their results, they got some surprising results. The second group of pigs had grown to be the largest of the three, and the first and third groups were comparable in size.

Dr. Kabrisky believes that the study was conducted at a school of agriculture somewhere in the breadbasket part of the country (area bounded by Minnesota, Nebraska, Ohio, and Georgia). Pushed farther he believes that it may have originated from the Iowa Institute of Science and Agriculture or maybe from the University of Illinois. He thinks that it has been in his memory for at least 40 years, maybe longer.

Anyone interested in trying to track down the study, please try to keep track of the search path that you followed or any search terms that you used successfully. We look forward to another successful result from our social search experiment!

News Articles

Is voice becoming the new text (again)?



Voice-recognition technology is seeing resurgence on mobile phones… Mobile applications and improvements to voice tech may change things… despite the pop-culture parodies and the increasing popularity of the text message -- researchers say voice-activated technologies have entered a renaissance of sorts… Mobile voice-recognition technology now allows people to send text messages to friends by talking instead of typing… It's now possible to pick up your phone and press a single button and say, 'I want the review of the Capital Grille in Burlington, Massachusetts. Period… A number of phone apps, from ShoutOut to Dragon and Vlingo, now translate speech into text messages and e-mails…The technology works by listening to a voice, translating it into digital data and then anticipating what sorts of sounds or words will come next. That's different from early models of voice-recognition technology, which tried to understand every sound and used huge amounts of computing power as a result, he said… recent comparison test of four programs, Meisel found that technologies that translate voice into text are roughly 80 to 90 percent accurate. That's good enough for many common functions, like transcribing voice mail, he said…. almost perfect with phone numbers… technological hurdles… background noise…Google's Nexus One phone comes fitted with two microphones: one that records a voice and another that records interference noise and then subtracts it from the voice file, making it easier for the phone to determine what noise is human and what isn't… no two people speak alike… To be understood by computers, it's more important to speak clearly and consistently than to have a perfectly neutral accent… Not all phones have the computing power to handle voice recognition, said Tuong Nguyen… The biggest limitation that I see right now ... is processing power…

A. Firing on all neurons: Where consciousness comes from



21-year-old woman who had had a stroke,,, recording her brain activity as she was asked to respond to simple tasks, such as counting the number of times her name was spoken in a random string of first names, Laureys confirmed that the woman was aware of her surroundings… a year later she had recovered enough to be discharged from hospital… another clue to the patient's active mental state… signature of coordinated neural activity, present in the resting patient, which seems to appear in the brain of anyone who is conscious… a 30-year-old theory that claims to explain consciousness itself… global workspace theory… non-conscious experiences are processed locally within separate regions of the brain, like the visual cortex…we only become conscious of this information if these signals are broadcast to an assembly of neurons distributed across many different regions of the brain - the "global workspace" (see diagram) - which then reverberates in a flash of coordinated activity… integrated all the senses into a single picture, while filtering out conflicting pieces of information (see "Neural conflicts")…put the theory to the test in 2005 by studying a neurological phenomenon known as "inattention blindness", where we fail to see things that are before our eyes. They presented their volunteers with two strings of letters in quick succession. In some instances, they had to answer a question about the first stimulus just after they had seen it, which caused them to miss the second string of letters and only perceive them non-consciously… placing 128 electrodes on their volunteers' scalps, Dehaene's team teased out the differences in neural activity when they were conscious of the second stimuli, and when it escaped their attention… first 270 milliseconds the neural activity was roughly the same in both cases. After that there were stark differences. The neurons quickly stopped firing if the letters were perceived unconsciously. But when the subjects were conscious of the letters, the neurons in a number of brain regions thought to be part of the global workspace, including the frontal and parietal lobes, exploded into synchronous activity…explosion of coordinated activity was just what Baars had proposed, corresponding to the widespread "broadcast" of signals across the global workspace that he predicted would accompany conscious perception…measured the subjects' neural activity with scalp electrodes as they completed the task. As expected, conscious perception coincided with a burst of activity in some of the regions implicated in the global workspace model… researchers again found a 300 ms delay between presenting the stimuli and witnessing this explosion of neural activity…300 ms delay is one of the theory's key predictions, since you would expect any signals to take a while, relatively speaking, to reach the different parts of the global workspace, before we are fully aware of perceiving something… team studied people with damage to their prefrontal cortex, which should disrupt the long-distance connectivity in the global workspace… real proof of the pudding for any theory in neuroscience comes from precise measurements of brain activity taken by electrodes implanted in the brain - the most accurate technique available… to test the conscious perception of patients with epilepsy, who had electrodes implanted in various regions of their brains as part of exploratory surgery…, brain activity during both conscious and unconscious perception was similar for the first 300 ms, followed by increased and coordinated activity in distant parts of the brain whenever something was perceived consciously… scanned the brains of 14 people with brain damage and 14 healthy volunteers using fMRI. In a paper published in December 2009, they showed that the activity of the DMN dropped exponentially starting with healthy volunteers right down to those in a vegetative state…Rodrigo Quiroga at the University of Leicester, UK, may be famous for identifying the individual neurons that fire in response to the actress Jennifer Aniston, but his technique of using very small and precise electrodes to record the activity of single neurons has unearthed even greater treasures: patterns of single neuron activity that result in either non-conscious or conscious perception….. "The reason why one needs a single coherent interpretation is because you need to broadcast it, and you don't want to broadcast competing messages at the same time," says Baars. This could have been a deal breaker for Baars's theory, but luckily so-called binocular rivalry experiments provide good evidence that the brain does indeed actively select which information to send to our consciousness

SXSW a battleground for mobile 'location war'



Location-based mobile apps… frontrunner Foursquare and upstart Gowalla… services blend social networking with a location-based game… Facebook may eclipse both of them if the networking giant launches its own game… Foursquare, whose mobile app blends social networking with a location-based game. On the other: upstart Gowalla, a mobile networking service that offers ... well, pretty much the same thing… smartphone users "check in" at bars, restaurants and other hangouts and share their locations with friends while earning virtual rewards… neither scored a knockout punch, leaving New York-based Foursquare as the leader in the still-developing market and positioning Austin-based Gowalla as a solid runner-up…both services are just a year old, and make their SXSW appearances in the hopes that online trend-setters here will embrace their apps and spread the word after they fan back out across the United States and abroad… Both companies rolled out special SXSW features, such as letting festivalgoers check in at speeches, panels and booths, not just buildings or businesses…Foursquare made a splash when it debuted at last year's festival. With no big new launches at SXSW this week, Crowley feels like his application -- which some have called "the next Twitter" -- leveraged festival buzz to reach new levels of popularity… doing visualizations of dots on a map showing Foursquare check-ins versus other check-ins," he said. "There's a lot of Foursquare blue on those maps…future remains to be seen for both applications -- as well as other place-based tools like Yelp! and MyTown. With Facebook announcing that it's getting into location-based check-ins, it seems only a matter of time before the networking giant introduces a similar game… key may be whether the current players can continue to grow their usefulness as a social tool outside of events like SXSW…Foursquare has announced partnerships with Starbucks, Bravo and others, while Gowalla has inked a deal with the Travel Channel, some smaller companies and had SXSW-specific partnerships with Chevy and Palm… maybe if I check in some place I get a free drink or something? OK ... now it's starting to really get interesting

B. Rush is on to be first in iPad apps



small start-ups and big Internet and media companies alike, the iPad, and tablet computers in general, beckon as the next wide open technology frontier… getting apps onto the iPad will be a challenge, at least at first. Apple has provided only a few companies with iPads on which to design and test their software before the device’s release on April 3… with software running on a Mac that mimics the iPad… Apple has told all other developers who have downloaded its iPad programming tools to remain silent about their apps until later this month…Some companies are even opening up and talking about their iPad plans, risking Apple’s reprisal. Sure, they are salivating at the prospect of the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen and fast processor — but also at the demonstrated willingness of Apple customers to pay a few dollars to get apps onto their devices… Apple will offer its own iBooks app…Kindle app for the iPad, which Amazon demonstrated to a reporter last week, allows readers to slowly turn pages with their fingers. It also presents two new ways for people to view their entire e-book collection…new app will let users flip through books quickly with finger swipes and customize fonts in multiple colors and sizes. Mr. Gottlieb said the company was talking to publishers about adding multimedia to digital books… Some of the earliest developers to release programs for the iPhone were also the most successful… chance that an app that ran just fine on the simulator will have glitches or just feel wrong on a real iPad. Many developers say they do not want to take that risk…real-world factors that may go undetected with a simulator, like the weight of the device and how people hold it. To compensate, engineers have been printing out sample pages and pasting them onto magazines, “to get a feel for holding it in our hands… Mr. Pishevar said he believes that the large iPad screen will allow families to sit around the device and play turn-based Monopoly-type games….developing games that players will operate by linking an iPhone or iPod Touch to the iPad over a wireless network and using the smaller device as a game controller — somewhat like the motion-sensitive remote for the Nintendo Wii…existing apps for the iPhone will run on the iPad as is, either stretched to fit the screen or in a smaller window. But many developers are focusing on revamping their most popular iPhone titles for use on the iPad… game called Charadium where players draw items and take turns guessing what the picture is. It will get new controls and a roomier blank pad to draw on….

C. Iran’s opposition seeks more help in cyberwar with government



democracy advocates in Iran have been celebrating the recent decision by the United States to lift sanctions on various online services, which they say only helped Tehran to suppress the opposition…still a long way from the activists’ goal of lifting all restrictions on trade in Internet services, which opposition leaders say is vital to maintaining the open communications that have underpinned the protests that erupted last summer after the disputed presidential election… government has carried out cyberwarfare against the opposition, eliminating virtually all sources of independent news and information and shutting down social networking services…sanctions against online services — provided through free software like Google Chat or Yahoo Messenger — were intended to restrict Iran’s ability to develop nuclear technology, but democracy advocates say they ended up helping the government repress its people…new measure will enable users in Iran to download the latest circumvention software to help defeat the government’s efforts to block Web sites, and to stop relying on pirated copies that can be far more easily hacked by the government… need still more help in getting around the government’s information roadblocks… We need some 50 percent of people to be able to access independent news sources other than the state-controlled media… Web sites, social networking and satellite television became major sources of news and tools for organizing and mobilizing people… authorities came to realize the significance of the networking tools and began efforts to eliminate them… hackers redirected Twitter users to a page in English that read, “This page has been hacked by the Iranian cyberarmy.”… recent months the government slowed the Internet to a crawl… It has become impossible to post a video, and opposition Web sites have been blocked… government has jailed many cyberexperts in recent months, charging some with “waging war against God… opposition tried to fight back with software designed to circumvent the restrictions, but that became a losing battle after Internet service was slowed…leaders say they would like to have access to Internet hardware — any products made by Cisco Systems, for example, are subject to sanctions — and high-speed satellite Internet service, which experts say is generally harder to jam than broadcasts… Iran, which has no communications satellites of its own, is dependent on foreign companies for broadcasting all its local channels as well as English, Persian and Arabic channels… on one of its popular Hot Bird satellites, on a more advanced satellite that is resistant to jamming. But that required Iranians to purchase new equipment, which is illegal and hard to find… This is about democracy and the fact that when people have access to information, they can make wise choices. No one, even the current leaders of the opposition, can hijack the movement like the way the Islamists did in the 1979 revolution if people can have access to free information.”

D. Gene May Explain Non-Smokers Getting Lung Cancer



gene that may help explain why some non-smokers develop lung cancer has been pinpointed by researchers in the U.S…10 percent of all lung cancer patients worldwide are "never smokers," meaning they have not smoked a single cigarette or their lifetime's tally is less than 100 cigarettes… proportion is even higher in Asia, where between 30 and 40 percent of lung cancer victims are "never smokers…-thirds of the worldwide tally among "never smokers" are women… now found two telltale genetic variants in Chromosome 13 in a study of 754 "never smokers," with or without lung cancer… these variants boosts the risk of lung cancer by nearly 60 percent… appear to suppress levels of a protein called GPC5, which plays a role in cell proliferation… One theory is that someone with genetic vulnerability could develop lung cancer after a common, but as yet unidentified, trigger… Possible candidates include second-hand tobacco smoke, environmental pollutants, arsenic and the human papillomavirus… paper is published online by the journal The Lancet Oncology

E. Advice for budding game developers



One way to break into the field is to customize existing games like Sim City… entry-point recommendations for someone who is interested in creating video games but lacks a computer-programming background… Between console games, online games and social-networking games such as FarmVille, there are more computer games and genres today than ever before… Designing the next World of Warcraft or best-selling app for the iPhone might be a bit of a reach for most newbie game designers… tells beginners to become familiar with Gamemaker from YoYo Games… who believes game creators shouldn't aim for mobile platforms in the beginning but instead focus on designing for the Web… Web-based game design is generally much easier to maneuver than mobile platforms because many mobile devices are not Flash enabled.  Eventually designers can move to mobile… suggests that budding game programmers look for 24 hour 'game jams', weekend events where groups of designers collaborate on dynamic game-development projects.  "It's mostly simple games being built, but the process and experience is a great value,"…

F. Facebook traffic tops Google for the week



Facebook topped Google to become the most visited U.S. Web site last week, indicating a shift in how Americans are searching for content… social networking site surpassed Google to take the No. 1 spot for the week ended March 13… content sharing has become a huge driving force online… People want information from friends they trust, versus the the anonymity of a search engine… The study compared only the domains and -- not, for example, Google-owned sites like … traffic levels were close, Facebook's year-over-year growth far outpaced Google's that week… Tatham noted that when he added up traffic on all Google properties like Google Maps and YouTube, the company's sites comprised 11.03% of visits… Of course, the MySpace connection could be a bad omen for Facebook. MySpace enjoyed dominance on the social networking scene for years until it saw traffic plummet following Facebook's rise…

G. Facebook responds to massive phishing scheme



massive attempt to steal passwords from its users… spoofed email going around that claims to be from Facebook and asks you to open an attachment to receive a new password," read a post on the Facebook Security page. "This email is fake. Delete it from your inbox, and warn your friends.”… Facebook will never send users a new password in an attachment… messages claim to be from Facebook, with a return address that looks legitimate…McAfee security warned users in a blog post Wednesday that the link is a password stealer that becomes active when the user clicks on it. Once installed, malicious software, or malware, could potentially access all username and password information used on a computer, not just on Facebook, the post said… McAfee and Facebook urged users to not open the attachment and immediately delete the message, if up-to-date security software programs don't catch the message first

H. Dotty sensor sees in glorious technicolor



cameras need to ditch their colander-like image sensors. That's the basic idea behind a new sensor which claims to capture unparalleled amounts of light and colour… realised that the image sensors currently used in digital cameras and cellphones waste most of the light that hits them… metal tracks have to criss-cross their surface. These tracks, which carry signals from the photodiode, block much of the light, so just a fraction hits the pixels… would be better to have the sensing area above the connectors… revealed a prototype 2-megapixel "quantum film" sensor, whose entire surface senses light – with the troublesome tracks hidden safely away beneath it… sensing layer is a film of quantum dots – crystals of a semiconductor material just 2 nanometres wide… quantum dot nanocrystal confines electrons to a region so small that they no longer behave like electrons in a regular semiconductor… nanocrystal's light-sensing properties can be tuned simply by changing its dimensions… But InVisage faces "significant but surmountable" challenges competing with existing silicon technology on sensing speeds and cost… it will not be economically viable unless its developers can show the system works seamlessly with the other standard components used in imaging,

I. Daydreaming can improve your memory, study says



allow yourself to drift off into la-la land… study out of New York University found that people who performed several tasks without taking a break had a poor memory… But the people who took the time to let their minds wander were able to remember more… data suggests that if you are not allowing yourself, not giving yourself a break, it is costly…

J. Lightening War: Unfettered digital battlefield combat opposed by intelligence



Pentagon and intelligence agencies are at loggerheads about the rules that will control the unleashing of cyber-counterattack, a mission that could, with more investment, be conducted from aircraft against targets a half-world away… before airborne cyber-attack becomes a tactical weapon, resolution must be reached on the relationship between warfighters and intelligence and the authority to decide what is a valid target… unique characteristic of cyberwarfare—that weapons effects cannot be seen and often cannot be verified—means that the operator’s location near the battlefield may well become more important…Aircraft can create anti-electronic effects such as enforcing “cones of silence” on communicationsin a limited area or pre-detonation of certain types of buried explosive devices. Networks in other countries, or those employed by non-national irregular, criminal or terrorist organizations, can be monitored, tracked and exploited… dividing line between tactical and strategic cyber- or network attack is a battleground between intelligence and warfighting organizations…active, electronically scanned array (AESA) developed for long-range, high-accuracy radar also brings radio frequency-injection (data streams of algorithms fired into an enemy antenna) to the battlefield as a weapon. The radar in the F-22 and F-35 can be used for the task in limited frequency bands. But AESA antennas are being redesigned to cover a far greater frequency range and are expected to be a key element of the U.S. Navy’s Next-Generation Jammer, an example of sophisticated electronic attack entering the tactical battlefield…heavy hitters in cyberwarfare, such as the National Security Agency, say that any cyber-network attack for the foreseeable future will have to be analyzed for secondary or cascading network effects and approved by Washington and the NSA… such restrictions are often quickly ignored in wartime… There is a lot of contractor hype,” says a longtime U.S. Air Force airborne electronic attack specialist. “Most of what is described as combining jamming and cyber-attack is nothing more then the subtleties of smart jamming…. The challenge is providing ‘mission management’ of the multitude of collectors and jammers on the battlefield to avoid electronic fratricide… Someone has to decide whether it makes more sense to exploit, spoof, jam or kill the signal… Fewer and fewer airmen, specialized in electronic attack, will be flying over the battlefield…“So who is going to be controlling the EA activity?”… almost an unmanned [airborne electronic attack] platform. For a pilot[-only aircrew], an expendable [EA] weapon or a UAV, you need some type of coordinated battle management approach. Of course [automated decision aids can be used] from the ground, back home or from a flying platform that are automated [onboard], offboard or a combination…“If this nation does Internet attack, the majority of it will be done from Washington and [NSA at Ft. Meade],” says a senior industry executive and former NSA official. “The only time you need to involve the [military] services is when you need RF injection.”… That means that a radio frequency signal—specially modified to exploit or damage an enemy network—is packaged in a data stream that is fired into an antenna that is connected to the target network… some cases where you will need it, but I don’t think it will be a major player [except at the] tactical level… While I think the jammer capabilities that the services are developing will potentially be useful [for cyber-operations], I don’t think it will be used a lot now…. first step in getting to that organizational structure is to decide who’s in charge,” says Vice Adm. Steve Stanley, director of force structures, resources and assessment for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “That’s what Cyber Command does. We will then take direction from that commander, through the combatant commander, in this case Strategic Command, to define the way ahead.”

K. Is Digg the future of social news?



Digg announces it will give users home pages, similar to those on Facebook or Twitter…Digg wants to provide a personalized home page that filters the Web based on your friends' activities. These new features will be previewed in the coming weeks…But the Twitter and Facebook trend also provides an opportunity for Digg: While Twitter and Facebook are utilized to share links, ranking news stories is the core focus of neither. The site's new plan is to analyze the news stories, videos and images shared by your friends on these sites and rank them by relevance… Publishers, however, realized this system was a lottery of sorts: Littering your Web site with "Digg this!" buttons in the faint hope of hitting Digg's home page proved far less effective than encouraging readers to share links with small groups of friends on Twitter and Facebook…"Content curation" is a major Web trend for 2010. People are creating stories, photos and other "content" at a rate that is outpacing our ability to consume it… content tsunami growing faster than our ability to consume it, Digg seems perfectly positioned to solve the content consumption crisis… By aggregating activity on other social sites, it hopes once again to become the leader in social news… Digg's challenge: Prove that it can cut through the content mountain, rather than contribute to it…

L. More controversy: Breast cancer screening study



found no evidence that screening women for breast cancer has any effect on death rates… reductions in breast cancer death rates in regions with screening were the same or actually smaller than in areas where no women were screened… results are similar to what has been observed in other countries with nationally organized programs… It is time to question whether screening has delivered the promised effect on breast cancer mortality… Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide, accounting for around 16 percent of all female cancers. It kills around 519,000 people globally each year…Denmark, women are screened every two years from age 50, while in the United States mammograms are now recommended every one to two years for women aged 50 plus, and in Britain the policy is for women over 50 to be screened about every 3 years…Critics of widespread screening programs say they can be more harmful than helpful if the extra hospital time and costs they require, coupled with the stress and worry of false alarms, are not outweighed by the benefit of preventing more deaths… Britain, for example, experts say around 7,000 women get an unnecessary breast cancer diagnosis when screening picks up tumors that would never have caused them any problems… study showed this risk-benefit balance was not being hit in Denmark… Evidence now suggests that for every 2,000 women who are screened over 10 years, only one stands to have her life saved by the mammogram program… whereas the risk of getting an unnecessary breast cancer diagnosis is 10 times that… need to make women aware that the chance they will benefit from the program is very small… team compared annual changes in breast cancer deaths in two Danish regions with screening programs against non-screened regions across the rest of Denmark… women likely to benefit from screening (those aged 55 to 74 years) breast cancer mortality fell by 1 percent a year in screened areas and by 2 percent a year in non-screened areas…women too young to benefit from screening (aged 35 to 54 years), breast cancer mortality declined by 5 percent a year in screened areas and by 6 percent a year in non-screened areas during the same period…

New Bedometer iPhone App Counts the Calories You Shed Having Sex



London woman desperate to get her lazy boyfriend to exercise has invented an iPhone application that measures how many calories you burn off having sex… The download, called the Bedometer, analyzes the time and intensity of each sexual encounter—and you can post your results on Facebook… gizmo is put on the bed and measures raunchy activity using the iPhone or iPod Touch's motion sensor before adding up the calories…99 cent invention follows the Passion application which analyzes a user's bed moves and gives advice on how to improve… the life-saving iResus has become one of the fastest-selling apps ever. It tells users how to save heart attack victims

Animals do not commit suicide



We have argued that animals do have the quale of self. And I think that we agree that dogs, at least, cannot handle 7+/- 3, perhaps +/-1 and that precludes them for having the quale "after time" which subsumes the quale of suicide. A more interesting question would be: how old do children have to be to commit suicide

- Matt

The piece doesn't answer the question of whether animals can end it all, but is a fascinating look at how the idea that they can has gone in and out of fashion."

In case there's any confusion about whether animals can top themselves: they can't…. would first need to be shown to have a well-developed sense of self before we could even consider the idea that they might decide to voluntarily end their lives… is some evidence in a few animals for this, notably great apes, dolphins and elephants… but dogs, horses and cats? There's no evidence that these animals have a sense of self… readiness to believe that our pets might top themselves in grief after we die clearly says more about human vanity than animal behavior… There is one animal that if we stretch the point, could be said to "commit suicide": the Japanese foliage spider. Females allow their young to consume their own body…

M. Home 3-D: Here or hype?



Panasonic demoed its latest 3-D product: a 50-inch, high-definition 3-D plasma-screen TV, which goes on sale next month for about $2,499. Donning a $150 pair of glasses in the darkened room, I watched scenes of waterfalls and hiking in 3-D that was clearer and crisper than anything I've seen in theaters… consumers will soon be able to buy many different 3-D products: TVs, Blu-ray players, video games, even cameras and camcorders. A new Blu-ray standard for 3-D should also make it easier for companies to produce 3-D content that will play on all 3-D TVs… Given that it took about eight years for high-definition television to catch on, Perry predicts that it "will take about four to five years for one half of all televisions sold in the United States to have 3-D capability. Then it will ramp up very quickly after that."… all of these 3-D TVs--which can be switched to a regular 2-D mode--will mainly be used for 2-D viewing for now. "Most people who buy a 3-D-ready TV will not really watch it," she says. One drawback, Colegrove, says, is that some 3-D TVs don't work well under fluorescent or halogen lighting (the light interferes with the infrared emitter that communicates between the TV and 3-D glasses)… incompatibility of different 3-D TVs may also deter some consumers from upgrading their home entertainment systems. In the theater, users wear "passive" polarized glasses to transform the blurry image onscreen into a 3-D image. But in-home theaters generally require that users wear battery-powered "active" shutter-type glasses, which work by quickly opening and closing a screen in front of each eye (usually 60 or 120 times per second) in time with onscreen frames. The glasses stay in sync with the TV images usually via an infrared emitter and receiver. The problem is that shutter times and transmitting standards vary between TV sets (although a company called XpanD, which makes 3-D glasses for movie theaters, says it has developed universal 3-D glasses)… isn't a lot of 3-D content available. But TV stations such as DirecTV and ESPN have promised to start broadcasting in 3-D, and the first Blu-Ray 3-D movies are starting to roll out. TVs from Mitsubishi, Samsung, and Toshiba can convert 2-D content to 3-D by using algorithms that guess where depth should appear, but the results tend not to be as vivid as content filmed in 3-D. "My opinion is that these kinds of [converting] technologies will be very important, but right now they are not in high quality yet," says Colegrove… one of the biggest sources of 3-D content could be computer games. "There's no doubt that 3-D gaming should be a big driver for adoption of these products,"… company has converted over 400 PC games to 3-D. While the 3-D didn't pop quite as much as the other content, it was enough to make a racing game slightly more immersive… Manufacturers will be hoping that other products, including 3-D camcorders and cameras, will encourage people to create their own 3-D content…

N. MC-12 aircrews complete 2,000th combat sortie



MC-12 Liberty aircrews assigned to the 362nd Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron completed their 2,000th combat sortie recently from Joint Base Balad… We are the eyes in the sky for those guys. We are able to communicate and help them with their mission on the ground… MC-12, which allows the crew to support the ground troops, is a tactical ISR aircraft. The plane is operated by two pilots in the front of the fixed-wing aircraft and two enlisted members who gather intelligence by operating a sensor, a camera, located on the bottom of the plane. Having people in the aircraft allow adjustments to be made quickly. The adjustments allow a quick dissemination of information… As the signals operator, my job is to locate high value individuals and coordinate with the sensor operator to put the intel together… junior Airmen are constantly in situations where they (must) give correct info in a matter of seconds… In a split second they have to be able to decide if the guy they are looking at is holding a shovel or a rifle and then transmit it to the ground.

O. Mind over matter? How your body does your thinking



"I THINK therefore I am," said Descartes. Perhaps he should have added: "I act, therefore I think."… research suggests that our bodies and their relationship with the environment govern even our most abstract thoughts… includes thinking up random numbers or deciding whether to recount positive or negative experiences… new results suggest that our bodies are also exploited to produce abstract thought, and that even seemingly inconsequential activities have the power to influence our thinking… Clues that our bodies may play a role in thought can be found in the metaphors we use to describe situations, such as "I was given the cold shoulder" or "she has an excellent grasp of relativity"…. propose "metaphor theory", the notion that we think of abstract concepts in terms of how our bodies function. Now evidence for the theory has started to trickle in. In 2008, for example, researchers found that people made to feel socially excluded reported feeling physically colder…. have linked our ability to think of random numbers - an example of abstract thought - to bodily movements… asked 12 right-handed men to generate a string of 40 numbers, each between 1 and 30, in as random a sequence as possible. The researchers recorded the vertical and horizontal movements of the men's eyes as they spoke the numbers out loud to the beat of a metronome…. team found that the eye movements could be used to predict the size of the next number before it was spoken. If a volunteer looked left and downwards, he would typically chose a number that was smaller than the previous number, and if he looked up and to the right, he chose a number that was larger… extent to which he looked in a particular direction correlated with the extent to which the number was larger or smaller than the last. The result strongly suggests that abstract thought is tied to the physical movements of our bodies… "particularly beautiful example" of embodied cognition, says it is to do with how our ability to think develops during childhood… reckons that the volunteers are making use of two sets of metaphors for imagining numbers: that up is more and down is less, and that right is more and left is less. Such metaphors would have been learned and hard-wired into the brain at a young age… Separate brain regions that process quantity and height could then have been linked up in the growing brain… What's not clear from Loetscher's experiment, however, is if eye movements are driving the number selection, or if the number selection triggers particular eye movements… map our moods onto a vertical, spatial schema, with the good end 'up' and the bad end 'down'… team asked 24 students to move marbles from a box on a higher shelf to one on a lower shelf, or vice-versa, while talking about events that had positive or negative emotional significance - such as a time when they were proud or ashamed of themselves…. students were significantly faster at retrieving and retelling stories that chimed with the metaphor implied by their actions. So if they were moving marbles upwards, they were faster at retelling stories with positive emotional content than those linked to negative emotions, and vice versa… does physical movement have the power to change not just the speed at which people talk, but also what they choose to talk - or even think - about?... experiment found that it does… As the students were moving the marbles either up or down, they were asked neutral questions, such as "tell me what happened yesterday". In this task, the subjects were more likely to talk of positive happenings when they were moving marbles upwards, and narrate negative stories when moving marbles downwards… If bodily motions really are driving our thoughts, Casasanto reasoned that people who use their bodies differently should have different thoughts… questions asked students to circle one of each pair based on their judgement of its personal characteristics, such as honesty, happiness, intelligence and attractiveness. They were either worded positively (which Fribble is the most attractive) or negatively (which Fribble looks less attractive)…210 students showed a leftward or rightward preference and, of these, 65 per cent of the left-handers attributed positive attributes more often to the Fribbles on the left, while 54 per cent of the right-handers saw positive attributes in Fribbles to the right… if intelligent aliens exist, they may have very different bodies and therefore have developed very different abstract thought - even perhaps a different mathematical system. "People assume that mathematics is objective and that everybody will have the same math," says Lakoff. "But there is no reason to believe that."… Will thinking machines need bodies?... If our ability for abstract thought is closely tied to our physical selves (see main story), will intelligent machines also need bodies?... the physical bodies of robots and the way that they interact with the environment might be key to creating the capability for intelligent, abstract thought… Cynthia Breazeal at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her team has already created anthropomorphic robots that use knowledge of their own bodies to infer the mental states of humans… development of such robots can also further the study of embodied cognition - the idea that even abstract thoughts are rooted in the physical world… "Robots provide a unique perspective on embodied cognition because we can perturb any part of a robot - its body or its brain - and observe the impact on behaviour. This is something that is usually not possible with animals or people."… argues that machines endowed with mathematical models of reasoning and abstract thinking - but not bodies - might still be highly intelligent. "It's still an open question whether we need to cleave closely to human cognition to make human-level intelligence," he says.

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