rsk: TechKnow

New Psychnotes

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 04:26:33 GMT

A new Psychnotes is available
http://psychnotes.com

The Emotions of Gaming

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 04:19:57 GMT

Infrared cameras will track eye movements and pupil dilation, pressure sensors measure contact on game pads and moisture sensors track excitement.

Experts will be studying the "sweaty palmed excitement" of people playing their computer and console games. Glasgow Caledonian University has set up its eMotion Laboratory as a living room with a two-way mirror. Researchers will discreetly observe game players' emotional interaction in their natural environment. Infrared cameras will track eye movements and pupil dilation, pressure sensors measure contact on game pads and moisture sensors track excitement.

Analysis of the information will be used to determine the emotional peaks and troughs of game playing. "Emotion is key to human performance. When a sportsperson becomes frustrated their skill level can suffer and the same is true with computer games. According to the researchers, it is essential that game creators and publishers understand why their products are successful, particularly as gaming becomes more cerebral and emotive. The sale of a computer game depends upon the initial five minutes of play and the eMotion Laboratory will help designers to determine which moments are emotionally stimulating, and which fail to impress. The success of games used in education and the work place will also be looked at to study how emotion is linked to learning and what makes programmes engaging. Computer games are no longer predominantly concerned with bashing other characters around, they are about creating an emotional link between the player and the game world.

World Community Grid

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 04:33:23 GMT

This week a shared computing grid called the World Community Grid was larunched. The mission of the World Community Grid's is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. The system is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Their success depends on individuals collectively contributing their unused computer time.

Individual computers donate their time when the computer is turned on, but idle. Like a screensaver, grid technology is easy to use, safe and free. When you are ready to use your computer, the grid connection will shut itself off until the next time your computer is idle. The combined computing power is used for projects that benefit humanity.

The project is supported by IBM and some of the world's leading science, education, and philanthropic organizations. The global grid computing project is aimed at harnessing unused global computing power to help solve a variety of health issues and other scientific problems. The new grid will be used for medical research to help unlock genetic codes that could help find cures for AIDS/HIV, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer, according to the group. It will also be used to conduct research to improve the forecasting of natural disasters and find new ways to protect the world's food and water supplies.

The concept has been used in the past for other cancer research and is similar to the SETI @ home project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which lets participants download a program that allows their PCs to look for radio signals in outer space in a quest to find intelligent life in other parts of the galaxy.

World Community Grid

PC World Article

The Millennium Technology Prize

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 03:48:18 GMT

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, was recently named as recipient of the first-ever Millennium Technology Prize. The award is given by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation as an international acknowledgement of outstanding technological innovation that "directly promotes quality of life, is based on humane values, and encourages sustainable economic development. The honor is accompanied by an award of one million euros. According to the award committee chair, "the Web is encouraging new types of social networks, supporting transparency and democracy, and opening up novel avenues for information management and business development."

Currently Berners-Lee works at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), in Boston.

RSS - The Next Big Thing

Sun, 29 Feb 2004 05:41:18 GMT

According the the Associated Press(AP), "e-mail is crippled, concussed by an irrepressible spam stream. Web surfing can be equally confounding, a wobbly wade through bursts of pop-ups and loudmouthed video ads.

And that may explain the excitement these days over a somewhat crude but nifty software tool that automatically delivers updated information to your computer directly from your favorite Web sites.

Enthusiasts see these Web feeds as sketching the outline of the next Net revolution.

The technology behind them is called RSS and I rely on it daily to consult The New York Times, the BBC, CNET News, Slashdot and a few dozen other Web sites that employ RSS to make the very latest news stories or bits of commentary available for the plucking."

The RSS (aka newsfeeds) is catching on everywhere. The AP article points out that information generators of all sorts - big media, government and non-profits alike - are embracing them. A popular newsfeed site Syndicat8.com, added 7,326 in January - its biggest monthly jump - to its collection of more than 53,000 information streams.

It is predicted that 2004 will be the year the technology goes mainstream.

Find out more:

AP Article

Introduction to RSS

RSS Tutorial for Publishers & Webmasters

Anonymity on the Internet

Thu, 19 Feb 2004 04:28:57 GMT

In a project funded by the National Science Foundation's Ethics and Values Studies Program, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has conducted a project that addresses the effects of anonymous and pseudonymous communications on the Internet.

Freedom vs Evil
This is an interesting debate since most people believe that anonymous communications are responsible for spam, viruses and fraudulent transactions on the Internet.

There are a number of case examples to highlight the issues.
Here is the document with recommendations from the AAAS

Thanks to Joi Ito for this info

Robot Speeds Medication Administration

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 18:42:35 GMT

A robot "pharmacist" by McKesson Corporation has been implemented at Cox Health Systems' Cox South hospital in Springfield, Mo. It is able to package and fill medication orders for as many as 400 patients per day. Physicians at Cox South enter prescriptions electronically which are sent directly to the robot. It moves through the pharmacy on two tracks, retrieves the prepackaged drugs with bar codes matching the order. The robot also creates envelopes with bar code labels and deposits the completed order. Pharmacy workers deliver the envelopes to the nursing staff.

The goal is to improve patient safety and reduce medication errors as well as to increase production and personnel efficiency. Instead of 4 technicians handling drugs, the hospital now as one technician packaging and bar coding drugs and another supervising the robot. The hospital reports a 99.9% success rate.

The Future of the Net

Sat, 03 Jan 2004 04:16:43 GMT

The Internet is set to become the basis for just about every form of communication, according to net pioneer Vint Cerf. He was asked by the BBC to describe important changes that are ahead for the Internet.

The next decade, he believes, will see the Net spread even further and start to become the basic communications infrastructure for almost anything. He belives that the Net will stop being a part of the telephone network. Instead the telephone network will become a part of the Net. We will see a fairly dramatic increase in services riding on top of basic internet infrastructure,with more and more layers of functionality showing up in the Net. One such could be Grid computing that virtualizes processing and storage resources and lets people use, or rent, the capacity they need for particular tasks.

According to Cerf, "If you have the ivory tower view that the Internet is good only if everything on it is good you are mistaken. The internet is a reflection of our society and that mirror is going to be reflecting what we see. If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society."

Mood Sensing Playstation

Sun, 30 Nov 2003 05:29:30 GMT

The next generation Sony Playstation will be able to sense a players mood and respond. The PS/3? will have an optical sensor built in for gesture and facial recognition. This is to permit affective game-design that detects and responds to players' emotional states.

Link

Human Connectedness Via Technology

Fri, 28 Nov 2003 20:32:31 GMT

The Media Lab Europe has devised a way to help families who are in different parts of the world maintain a connectedness. The basic idea in Habitat is that by using RFID tags to create an awareness of the other person's daily routines, it will offer a sense of awareness and reassurance that they are virtually present. To accomplish this, objects and furniture were tagged with the RFID tags. So that "unique RFID tags are embedded in objects typically placed on coffee tables at each site, such as cups, plates, books, and so on. Placing these items on the table causes messages to be sent to the remote table, which displays a graphical representation of the objects. The system operates in both directions, conveying impressions of presence and activity around the coffee tables at each site."

In family relationships, awareness of daily cycles and routines (or more importantly, deviation from these patterns) is particularly important. Habitat explores the potential of using household furniture as a network of distributed ambient display appliances for conveying this kind of awareness between family members separated by a distance.

Wireless Internet Access at Neuroscience 2003

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 03:23:49 GMT

This is the way it should be...

"As a service to its registrants, The Society for Neuroscience has arranged with the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans to provide free, wireless Internet access at the Convention Center during Neuroscience 2003. Meeting attendees who wish to use this service should bring their own laptop computer, or PDA, with a wireless network card installed. Please be advised that technical support will not be provided. Users of the wireless network should read the disclaimer and the FAQ before accessing the network. We look forward to hearing your opinions on this service, and we hope it serves as a valuable tool during your time in New Orleans. "

Four-dimensional Brain Imaging

Tue, 30 Sep 2003 04:06:18 GMT

Researchers from the Department of Neurology/Alzheimer's Disease Research Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital describe the development of a tool that enables direct, quantitative detection of the amyloid- deposits found in Alzheimer's Disease with the goal of providing a viable biomarker. This article demonstrates the real-time biodistribution kinetics of an imaging agent in transgenic mouse models of AD

The results and supporting videos are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Radio Chips in Health Care

Sat, 13 Sep 2003 23:55:26 GMT

RFID or radio frequency identification tags consist of silicon chips and an antenna that can transmit data to a wireless receiver. It is predicted that in the near future, virtually everything from soda cans to cereal boxes.will contain a traceable tag. Recently John's Hopkins Medical Center signed up to become one of the first hospitals to use radio-frequency ID tags to track drugs. These will be used to track intravenous fluid bags, which will contain the RFID tags on each IV bag label.

According to an article in Forbes, in addition to Hopkins, the Red Cross and pharmaceutical companies are looking into this technology.

Wired article about RFID tags

RSS vs E-mail

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 03:46:29 GMT

Things are changing in e-mail. Spam has taken its toll and individuals and businesses are seriously re-thinking their options. Spam filters work, only they work too well and often filter things that you don't want filtered. Many institutions/businesses who have traditionally used e-mail to send newsletters and information are now turning to RSS (really simple syndication or rich site summary) feeds. According to Internet News.com "As legitimate online publishers struggle to get e-mail newsletters into clogged inboxes, RSS is fast emerging as the answer to the spam nightmare."

For an explanation and brief history of RSS, O'Reilly's XML.com is the best source.

Flash for Medical Applications?

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 04:41:57 GMT

Health-care software maker Mitem Corp. has built a user interface for busy physicians in hospital settings, giving them patient information they need from a variety of sources without forcing them to learn a variety of "green screen" computer systems. Interestingly enough, the system is made from Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004, which was introduced this week.

The system is called Blue Iris and reportedly has ways of presenting more information on a single screen, with the capability of expanding the area of the screen that has the information that the doctor is interested in. Traditionally, Flash has been animation based and not generally considered for business applications. This new enterprise version is form based and has enabled developers to deliver rich applications that you expect on a desktop, but now they can cast them in a Web browser.

Features of this release of Blue Iris include:

Single view of patient information in a True SOAP progress note format
Real-time data access
Dynamic views of data that allow physicians to see ranges of data from hours or even weeks with the simple click of a button
Remote access that provides physicians with the ability to access patient data from anywhere as long as they have a secure connection to their organization
Imaging integration that allows physicians to see imaging data, such as X-rays, in context with the rest of the patient data

According to Mitem, Blue Iris has been painstakingly designed to match the way physicians and clinical staff work. Our goal was to create a product that is very intuitive and easy-to-use. We challenged the team to develop an application that clinical staff can learn to use within 5 minutes without training or documentation.

Mitem
Macromedia

Brain Atlas Launched

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 04:07:21 GMT

A decade in the making, a new brain atlas has been unveiled recently at UCLA. Researchers are trying to better understand what constitutes a "normal" brain by studying a newly compiled atlas that contains digitally mapped images of 7,000 brains. This atlas is freely available to registered users over the Internet.

In addition to mapping the brain in multiple dimensions, it also charts brain activity, with the goal of pinpointing the seat of functions such as speech, memory, emotion and language and highlighting how those locations can vary among individuals and populations. The sources of the brain images are individuals living in seven nations on four continents. Most are between the ages of 20 and 40, but some are as young as 7 and as old as 90.

In addition to normal brain images, there are those of people with Alzheimer's, autism, schizophrenia and other disorders. It is a work in progress as it is continually updated. All of the images have been manipulated to fit a standard reference so researchers can easily perform comparisons.

Part of the research goals of the project states that "we are currently focusing on the study of human cerebral white matter tracts, cerebral vasculature, chemoanatomy, and connectivity in the human brain using fMRI-transcranial magnetic stimulation-PET. We also have expanded our neuroinformatics tools for data sharing and have created a "Conforming Site System" that allows laboratories worldwide to contribute data to our evolving atlas.

UCLA Laboratory of NeuroImaging

Wi-Fi: As Free As The Foliage

Sun, 03 Aug 2003 02:43:21 GMT

There are increasing number of people who set up wireless Internet networks in their homes and businesses and -- sometimes unwittingly -- leave them open for anyone to share. Many colleges, geeks and city officials are making Wi-Fi as free as the foliage in public plazas. And now you can use Wi-Fi gratis in New York if you're a Verizon Internet subscriber or eating an Extra Value Meal at some McDonald's restaurants. There is a significant number of places where people with a properly outfitted laptop or handheld computer can get wireless Internet access without reaching for a credit card.

In addition to Wi-Fi use in homes and offices, the United States has some 5,000 public hot spots. That includes 2,700 operated by wireless phone carrier T-Mobile, mainly in Starbucks coffee shops and Borders bookstores. T-Mobile charges 10 cents a minute (the minimum cost is $6, however), $40 a month or $360 a year, though existing T-Mobile customers can sign up for $20 a month.

Nine businesses along Boston's Newbury Street have shelled out $350 each to share a high-speed data line that feeds their stores so they can transmit free Wi-Fi. The network has been running for more than a year, and no store has dropped out in disappointment.

It is predicted that similar models eventually will dominate. In that scenario, an Internet company like America Online would buy wholesale hot spot access for its customers from a provider like Cometa Networks Inc., a joint venture backed by Intel, AT&T Corp. and IBM Corp. Businesses point out that there's much more money to be had in selling more books, more coffee, many more bottles of wine, rather than trying to sell (Wi-Fi) access. The traditional payment plan of by the hour, or by the month, is eventually going to go away.

Because it uses unlicensed radio frequencies, Wi-Fi is relatively easy and inexpensive to operate. Many new laptop computers automatically detect Wi-Fi networks, while others easily can be made to do so by plugging in a wireless card. Many of the major cities such as New York or San Francisco have websites to help in getting WiFi access.

Medical School Goes Wireless

Sun, 27 Jul 2003 03:31:38 GMT

Wayne State University School of Medicine is transforming the traditional classroom experience into a dynamic interactive learning environment. Through a mobile applications and development company called CampusMobility, Wayne State will have mobile devices, educational and healthcare software, and a wireless infrastructure.

CampusMobility's technology willl also provide students with access to Web-based course content, course management and calendar tools, as well as reference information. It also will allow Wayne State University School of Medicine students, and their academic advisors, to track patients and their care.

New Long-range Speed Record with Next-generation Internet Protocol

Sun, 29 Jun 2003 21:19:45 GMT

As a follow up to a previous post, Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have set a new Internet2 land speed record using the next-generation Internet protocol IPv6. The team transferred one terabyte of data across 10,037 kilometers in less than one hour, from Sunnyvale, California, to Geneva, Switzerland. This corresponds to a sustained TCP rate of 2.38 gigabits per second for more than one hour. This is equivalent to transferring a full CD in 5.6 seconds.

Having multi-gigabit-per-second end-to-end networks can lead to new research and business models such as the formation of "virtual organizations" on a planetary scale. As speed and sustained throughput increase, people can begin sharing their collective computing and data resources. In particular, this is vital for projects on the frontiers of science and engineering, projects such as particle physics, astronomy, bioinformatics, global climate modeling, and seismology.

And of course, the entertainment industry will certainly be interested in helping to push this technology forward.

For more info

Technology's Next Step - Body Awareness

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 04:18:07 GMT

So what happens when we apply creativity + technology to health and healthcare?

It can best be described as "Tedmed" a conference that recently took place in Philadelphia. In the words of Richard Saul Wurman the conference founder, "people know more about their cars than their bodies. I also believe they spend more effort studying all the details (hotels, flights, museums, restaurants, etc.) to plan for their vacations than they do to understand their own bodies, and the options and alternatives of healthcare, including testing, diets, exercise programs, and multiple treatment and surgery specifics. I see the growth of huge new business opportunities to help people understand their bodies better than ever before possible with the combined efforts of scientific and medical researchers, engineers, and information architects. Knowing all we can about our bodies is necessary to enhance our greatest journey, that of designing our lives. "

This 3 day conference which has become a braintrust of imagination applied to medical technology has brought together such world class 'thought leaders' as Marvin Minsky (MIT), Walt Mossberg (WSJ), Kary Mullis (Nobel Laureate), Steve Case (Founder of AOL), Oliver Sachs (Neurologist) and many more scientists, business executives, artists, and musicians.

As described in a New York Times article, "Richard Saul Wurman's personal medical data was discussed and dissected, portrayed in multicolored graphs and 3-D images before an audience... The data did not come from any standard physical exam. Its sources included an analysis of Wurman's genetic profile, an armband that monitored his physical activity, a "life shirt" that recorded his stress level, and a full-body scan taken last month." People want to know," Wurman's refrain went, and one of the main themes of the four-day gathering that he organized focused on exactly that: With the aid of a growing number of technological tools, people can now know far more than ever before about the state of their health."

Stephen Case, the founder of America Online, remarked about Tedmed, "I have the same instinct I had when I got involved with the Internet world 25 years ago, which is that something is bubbling. And it's pretty darn interesting."

In a recent Forbes article, Wurman pointed out, "It's a missing multibillion dollar industry," He figures that he's a good person to remedy the situation. "My only business is making what interests me understandable. Other people sell their expertise. I sell my lack of expertise. I take information from the undecipherable to the decipherable category."

In the very near future, he predicts, all your past blood tests and other medical data will be stored in a handheld gadget, allowing you or your doctor to access them at a moment's notice and spot early signs of disease. When you get sick, you will simply enter your symptoms and test results into a laptop and get a customized survey of treatment options, with listings of good doctors who can perform the treatment.

A number of these technologies were demonstrated and discussed including a SenseWear wearable body monitor that enables accurate, wireless, free-living data collection. Worn on the back of the upper arm, it utilizes a unique combination of sensors that continuously gather the following data: movement, heat flow, skin temperature, ambient temperature, and galvanic skin response.

With this level of interest and cast of characters, Tedmed will be a conference that can change our approach to medicine and health.

History of Tedmed.

A New Ultrafast Internet

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 03:49:23 GMT

The promise of a really fast Internet is becoming a reality. Imagine being able to download a entire movie in 5 seconds. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, have developed a system called Fast TCP. In the current New Scientist, the technology of 'Fast TCP' is described. Essentially, fast TCP uses the same packet sizes as regular TCP, (approximately 1500 bytes) the hardware that carries messages around the net will still work. The difference is that the software and hardware on the sending computer will continually measures the time it takes for sent packets to arrive, and how long acknowledgements take to come back. This reveals if there are any delays on the line, giving early warnings of likely packet losses. The Fast TCP software uses this to predict the highest data rate the connection can support without losing data.

Since the packets are the same size as those used in TCP, none of the equipment along the internet itself will have to be modified, and no new hardware will be needed on computers receiving the data.

"The first practical test of Fast TCP took place in November at a supercomputing conference. Researchers from Caltech, Stanford and CERN near Geneva in Switzerland, sent data 10,000 kilometres from Sunnyvale, California, to CERN at an average rate of 925 megabits per second. Ordinary TCP managed just 266 megabits per second on the same routes.

By ganging 10 Fast TCP systems together, the researchers have achieved transmission speeds of over 8.6 gigabits per second, which is more than 6000 times the capacity of ordinary broadband links."

Einstein Goes Online

Mon, 26 May 2003 03:57:26 GMT

From Globe and Mail Technology, finally someone has put the Einstein collection online. The Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem are working on publishing 25 volumes of Einstein's writings. So far it has completed eight volumes.

Some documents, dating back to Einstein's youth, can be found on a Web site http://www.alberteinstein.info. The Web site also offers travel diaries and 3,000 digitized images. Einstein, who died in 1955 at the age of 76, left the original documents to the Hebrew University in his will.

This is an amazing collection of hundreds of Albert Einstein's scientific papers, personal letters and essays and it is now on the Internet.

New Faster Web Page Ranking

Thu, 15 May 2003 05:32:47 GMT

The magic behind Google is kept under lock and key but Stanford computer science researchers have developed several new techniques that together may make it possible to calculate Web page rankings as used in the Google search engine up to five times faster. This accelerated method may make it realistic to calculate page rankings personalized for an individual's interests or customized to a particular topic.

The papers will be presented at the Twelfth Annual World Wide Web Conference (WWW2003) in Budapest, Hungary, May 20-24, 2003 and was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Computing PageRank, the ranking algorithm behind the Google search engine, for a billion Web pages can take several days. Google currently ranks and searches about 3 billion Web pages.

Each personalized or topic-sensitive ranking would require a separate multi-day computation, so speeding up the mathmatical algorithm could dramatically reduce time spent searching.

To fully understand the sophistication behind web page ranking, the papers are available on the Stanford Database Group's Publication Server (http://dbpubs.stanford.edu/).

Life Imitates Star Trek

Sat, 10 May 2003 05:26:16 GMT

Remember Geordi La Forge in Star Trek? Even in the future, he had an advanced technology composed of retinal implants and special goggles/glasses. Described in the Trekie literature as "a VISOR (Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement) that gave him visual capabilities that spanned a major part of the electromagnetic spectrum, far beyond the normal visual spectrum of light."

Thanks to Medpundit, the first clinical trial of an artificial retina implanted into the eye showed that it worked well enough to allow the blind to distinguish light from dark and even to see simple objects. "The goal of this project is to develop an implant which is capable of allowing patients to see complex or even perfect images." The sub-retinal procedure is based on replacing an area of lost (dystrophic) photoreceptor rods and cones with an implanted micro-photodiode array (MPDA).

A number of research projects have as their goal to create some of the medical marvels that we have enjoyed in the episodes of Star Trek over the years. For example, one of the most famous was the tricorder, a medical body scanner. Interestingly enough, the BBC News reported a while ago that British scientists have developed a Star Trek style device which measures vital health signs without the need for skin contact. Researchers at Loughborough University believe their technology could one day be used to measure blood flow, monitor the heart and assess how well wounds and burns are healing. The technique involves shining a light on a specific part of the body. Potential health problems are identified by measuring how much light is absorbed.

And for those who want to know what else might be on the horizon, here are a number of the star trek medical devices and accessories that have started as science fiction and may end up as science.

Distributed Computing & SARS

Mon, 05 May 2003 05:01:33 GMT

from Tales of Hoffman

Can your computer find the cure for SARS? Maybe. According Wired Magazine, 15,000 people have already downloaded software from D2OL that uses your spare computer cycles in concert with others over the Internet to process data that purports to help find a cure.

Distributed computing, also called grid computing, can screen potential drugs much faster than researchers in a laboratory. "They (researchers) can't in a short time screen millions of compounds, but on the computer you can" according to the Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases.
Distributed computing works by individuals making their Internet connected computers available and during idle times the processing power is used to help solve complex equations. By linking thousands of our everyday computers, the raw power of a supercomputer can be generated.