December 16, 2009
Some Interesting End Of Year Technology Reading 2009
Annual Year in Ideas
The New York Times Ninth Annual Year in Ideas is an interesting review of the developments in science and ideas over the last year. It offers a number from psychology and the social sciences such as Literary Alzheimer's, Lithium in the Water Supply, Treating P.T.S.D. With Tetris, Cognitive Illiberalism, The Counterfeit Self, Drunken Ultimatums and more.
Link to NYT Ideas
Link to NYT Ideas Social Sciences
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Sixth Sense Technology
A brilliant next-generation technology for wearable computing from the MIT media lab. A very interesting video demo from Pattie Maes' lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry -- was the buzz of TED. It's a wearable device with a projector that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data.
TED presentation
Pattie Maes' lab at MIT
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New gestural computing system
This month, MIT researchers will present a technique for turning innovative new touch-screen displays into giant lensless cameras. They’ve also built a prototype that demonstrates one application of such displays: letting users manipulate on-screen images using hand gestures.
Current gesture systems have involved a roomful of expensive cameras or wearing tracking tags on your fingers but the MIT team have developed a new display. The goal with this is to be able to incorporate the gestural display into a thin LCD device like a cell phone and to be able to do it without wearing gloves or tracking devices.
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Increasing Speed of Processing With Action Video Games
An article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science demonstrated that "the very act of playing action video games significantly reduces reaction times without sacrificing accuracy. Critically, this increase in speed is observed across various tasks beyond game situations. Video gaming may therefore provide an efficient training regimen to induce a general speeding of perceptual reaction times without decreases in accuracy of performance."
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Practice Guidelines for Videoconferencing-Based Telemental Health 2009
American Telemedicine Association
New guidelines have been published by the ATA to aid in the development and practice of coherent, effective, safe and sustainable telemental health practices. The guidelines focus on two-way, interactive videoconferencing as the modality by which telemental health services are provided.
Link (pdf)
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Social Networking on a National Scale - DARPA’s Red Balloon Challenge
To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA had announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that explored the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.
The challenge was to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons were in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.
Of the 4,300 entrants who searched for the weather balloons, MIT Media Lab won by locating the balloons in just under nine hours using social-networking technologies.
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