Tuesday, August 08, 2006

New Psychnotes  A new Psychnotes is available http://psychnotes.com 11:26:33 PM    comment []

	Thursday, December 16, 2004

The Emotions of Gaming 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. 11:19:57 PM    comment []

	Wednesday, November 17, 2004

World Community Grid 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 11:33:23 PM    comment []

	Monday, April 19, 2004

The Millennium Technology Prize 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. 10:48:18 PM    comment []

	Sunday, February 29, 2004

RSS - The Next Big Thing 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 12:41:18 AM    comment []

	Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Anonymity on the Internet 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 11:28:57 PM    comment []

	Friday, January 16, 2004

Robot Speeds Medication Administration 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.  1:42:35 PM    comment []

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