Working in Movement

Just ran across a blog that I'll be reading frequently. It's by Carl Zimmer and you can find it at The Loom. The reason I ran across it was reading the article What If There is Something Going On in There. The subject kind of creepy--is there more than minimal brain activity in people in a vegetative state? The article reports on one 24-year-old guy for whom the answer is yes. Neuroscientists had put this guy into an MRI machine and scanned his brain while playing a tape of his sister's voice. If I'm remembering the article accurately, they found almost normal patterns of brain activity. By the end of the article, the guy has crossed over into full consciousness, being able to communicate reliably by using his eyes.

As I write this, there's a controversial case of the removal of the feeding tube in Florida of a woman who's in a vegetative state. Normally, I wouldn't pay much attention to this sort of story, but in light of reading Zimmer's story, it has really gotten my attention. Indeed, what if there's something going on in there?

Of interest to movement educators: Zimmer reports that the neuroscientist is sometimes able to bring vegetative and minimally conscious subjects to momentary consciousness by putting his fingers deep into their musculature. When he takes his fingers out, they slip back. There is lots of information (and speculation) on movement and plasticity. We see it everyday, especially in tonic functions of clients. But here, there is such a profound effect. Like I said, the article both enlightened and disturbed me.

Say It Isn't So TIVO I love TIVO, as I wrote about on one of my first posts to this weblog. But I've always been puzzled that the technology hasn't taken off big time. Maybe it's just too complex for most non-techies. And there is the rather steep price as well, although I think it's a bargain for the functionality that you get. That may be about to change according to Can Cable Fast-Forward Past TiVo?. Cable companies and others are starting to combine DVR functionality with existing devices like cable boxes. And they are largely eliminating the initial cash outlay for equipment in favor of tacking on a few dollars to the monthly bill.

TIVO is aware of all this going on, and has a plan to adapt. Looks like they are moving toward a different business model than the hardware and services model they've been using. The product of the future is the software that controls the TIVO box. It might just be the smart thing to do.

"People traditionally might think of us as a company that builds a box and has a service with that box," Michael Ramsay, TiVo's chairman and chief executive, said in a telephone interview last week. "We have transitioned from that model much more to a pure software and services model for our company. We will spend less and less time on the hardware side of what we're doing, so that people who build the DVR hardware become our customers, not our competitors."[New York Times: Technology]