iPhone Entertainment for Pets
Children can be effortlessly entertained for hours thanks to tablet and smartphone games, but these technologies also provide a solution for the lazy pet owner.
More videos of perplexed pets after the jump.
What is Next Nature?
With our attempts to cultivate nature, humankind causes the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and splendidly beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.
Posts Tagged ‘virtual-for-real’
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Effortless Learning
Matrix-style learning sounds like an impossibility, yet new research suggests it might become reality.
Boston University and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto have conducted experiments in which they demonstrated that they could induce brain activity patterns through a person’s visual cortex, thereby improving a subject’s performance on a visual task. The researchers used decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and neurofeedback to make the subject’s brain activity match that of another person who had previously learned the task.
The result, say researchers, is a novel approach to learning sufficient to cause long-lasting improvement in tasks that require visual performance. This research might some day lead to applications that could enable you to learn to shred a guitar like Hendrix while not even thinking about what you want to learn. According to lead author and BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe, ”We found that subjects were not aware of what was to be learned while behavioral data obtained before and after the neurofeedback training showed that subjects’ visual performance improved specifically for the target orientation, which was used in the neurofeedback training.”
Video explanation here: Researchers explain Decoded Neurofeedback
Via: www.nsf.gov
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Manko & Time [#13, The End]
Many things have been rumored about the artist called Manko since he vanished about a year ago. Some even went so far as to claim he had died. So it was all over the news when Manko came back from out of nowhere and started working on a giant installation for the brand new museum L’Œuvre in Paris.
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Browsing the Technological Sublime
In God’s Browser, Geert Mul uses scores of images pulled from the internet as the frames in an abstract film. Using specially developed image recognition software, Mul creates the illusion of motion between unrelated images. The same software also generates musical notes that vary with the speed and type of the image being displayed.
The result is a hypnotic experience that blends pictures of nature, culture, sunsets, skeletons and supermodels into a portrait of humanity’s collective visual consciousness. The visual power of God’s Browser emphasizes that, in an image-saturated society, the simulation can become just as valuable and meaningful as the “authentic” object. Mul’s work looks, and sounds, like the creation of a virtual world, where God could only connect to the universe from the internet.
Geert Mul will be presenting God’s Brower at the Next Nature Power Show in collaboration with philosopher Jos de Mul. Jos de Mul has previously been featured on Next Nature with his essay The Technological Sublime.
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Mastering Bambi
In the film Mastering Bambi, artists Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukacs have stripped the landscape of its cuddly, anthropomorphic characters. Over the course of the film, the camera pans across empty forest scenes and winter fields, accompanied by a chorus and orchestra. Using 3D photographic collages, the artists reconstruct elements of the backgrounds from the classic Disney film, which presented an unrealistically idyllic vision of nature. According to Broersen and Lukacs:
“…an important but often overlooked protagonist in the movie is nature itself: the pristine wilderness as the main grid on which Disney structured his ‘Bambi’. One of the first virtual worlds was created here: a world of deceptive realism and harmony, in which man is the only enemy.”
Does Mastering Bambi imply that the audience has finally mastered nature by eliminating all its inhabitants? It may be a more stark comment on the destructive capacity of humanity than Disney’s decision to kill off Bambi’s mom. Once the harmonious woodland inhabitants are gone, we are left to uncomfortably wonder if we are their only replacements.
Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukacs will be presenting Mastering Bambi at the Next Nature Power Show on November 5th.
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Occasionally Extinct and Virtually Alive
Japanese researchers are currently working on cloning a mammoth, and plan to produce a fluffy new prehistoric calf within four or five years. The bucardo, an extinct subspecies of the Spanish ibex, was resurrected for a few minutes in 2009 before the clone died. ‘Frozen zoos’ now keep the cryo-preserved tissues from dozens of endangered species to hedge their bets against future extinction.
Until we have the godlike knowledge to reconstruct a genome from the base pairs on up, our resurrected zoo will be limited to the animals that we have stored away for safe keeping. Sorry, no dinosaurs, but there are at least 500 stuffed and dried passenger pigeons, 731 thylacines, and one remaining dodo specimen with soft tissue remaining.
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Resizing Daddy
A little girl gets angry at her father, and uses her index finger and thumb to make a pinching motion. No, she’s not trying to hurt him. She’s using iPad sign language to say, “I want you to be smaller.”
PCs and cell phones required restricted motions, mostly clicking and typing. In contrast, the recent slew of computers, tablets, and smart phones utilize more expressive motions: swiping, flicking, squeezing. These gestures may enter the vernacular of common signs, like waving and shoulder shrugging, just as internet terms like ‘lol’ and ‘brb’ entered everyday language.
All great apes stick out their hands to beg for food, but only humans pinch if their friend won’t share.
Image via Gawker
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Social Microbial life
MyMicrobes, interestingly dubbed “Fecesbook” by ABC News, is the new social network for your gastrointestinal bacteria. For only $2,100 and a bit of poo you can become a member of this ingenious network which connects you to like minded people through your own gut bacteria.
Peer Bork, a biochemist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, created this network after receiving 50 to 100 emails from people having troubles with their stomach or having diarrhea. It might look strange to connect people based on their microbiomes, but researchers think it will help people with similar digestive profiles to share and gather information about their digestive health. In the meanwhile they hope to gather data which could help to guide treatments for various diseases.
Imagine telling your children you met your wife because you both had the same bowel problems.
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Sin free for just €1.59
For just £1.19 ($1.99, €1,59) you can download an app for your iPhone which offers tips and guidelines with the sacrament, “the perfect aid for every penitent” as the description reads. This, on itself, is not so special. There are dozen of apps which help you to confess, though this is the first which is officially approved by the Catholic Church.
The app allows users to keep track of their sins, and guides them through the sacrament (where Catholics admit their wrongdoing through). The app is launched shortly after Pope Benedict XVI gave the advice to embrace digital communication. Although he adds: “It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives.”
Hopefully there will be a ‘Pocket Pope’ app in the near future.
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The Non-Human Noosphere
The definition of the noosphere as “the sphere of human thought on earth” is woefully anthropocentric. It ignores that fact that our fellow sentient organisms have noospheres of their own. Elephants have their own social networks, maintaining close friendships and extended tribes, and keeping touch over long distances through subsonic rumbles.
If the noosphere can loosely be defined as the interaction and interconnection of conscious minds, then clearly cetaceans, wolves, great apes, elephants, and many species of birds have their own forms of a noosphere. Granted, these noospheres are not as large and complex as ours. Humans have telecommunications, the biggest brain-to-body ratio on earth, and the force of numbers – 7 billion of us, versus a few tens of thousands for African elephants, and a few hundred thousand for chimpanzees.
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Brainscan App
By hooking up a commercially available EEG headset to a Nokia N900 smartphone, Jakob Eg Larsen and colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby have created a portable system to monitor neural activity of the brain. Wearing the headset and booting up an accompanying app, creates a simplified 3D model of the brain that lights up as brainwaves are detected. The brain-image can be rotated by swiping the screen. Furthermore, the app can connect to a remote server for more intensive data-processing, and then display the results on the cellphone. The system might assist people with conditions such as epilepsy, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and addiction. One small step for science, but a giant leap for health care. Source: newscientist.com
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High Altitude
The rock formations in the High Altitude photo series don’t exist physically, yet they are very present in our society of simulations. The photos visualize the development of the leading global stock market indices over the past 20-30 years.
Each stock market index, such as the Dow Jones (shown above), Nikkei, Nasdaq or the more specific Lehman Brothers stock quote downfall, corresponds to a impeccably rendered unique mountain range. Photographer Michael Najjar used the images captured during his trek to Mount Aconcagua (6,962m) as the basis of the high altitude data visualizations.
Lehman 1992-2008
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Let the Algorithms Roam Free
In this TED talk, Kevin Slavin explains how computer algorithms are breaking free of their virtual habitats and changing the physical world to their liking. Through algorithms, humans are starting to understand the physics of culture. Can we use that knowledge to our advantage, or are we just spectators of a game we don’t quite know the rules of?
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Manko & Escape [#10]
The children looked startled.
‘Leaving?’, Askr asked. ‘But it’s not time yet!’, Embla said.
Manko had no clue of what was going on. Not yet time for what? The red ball turned purple and again a shock went through everyone in the room.
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Virtual Offline Shopping
As the second most hardest working people on this planet, Koreans obviously dread their weekly shopping for groceries. It is therefore that Home Plus (Tesco in Europe) plastered walls of a Korean subway station with virtual shelves, allowing Koreans to shop with their smart phones while waiting on the metro.
Each product has QR code which will place the product in an online shopping cart on your smart phone. When the transaction is completed the products will be delivered to the shopper’s home within the day.
The concept makes effectively use of the commuters’ waiting time, while combining the efficiency of online shopping with the rich context of offline shopping. In this way bus stops could be transformed in small AH To Go’s and train stations into shopping malls.
Via Gizmodo, Via Design Boom
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Essay: Back to the Tribe
Traditionally, technology is seen as a force that diminishes our instincts and puts us at a distance of nature. Increasingly however, we realize technology can also energize and amplify our deepest human sensibilities – even some we had forgotten about. Propelling us not so much back to, but rather forward to nature.
By VAN MENSVOORT
Almost two decades ago, Brian Eno – artist, composer, inventor, thinker – gave an interview in which he stated the problem with computers was that there is not enough Africa in them [1]. “Africa is everything that something like classical music isn’t. Classical – perhaps I should say ‘orchestral’ – music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitch wise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It’s all in little boxes.”… “Do you know what a nerd is? A nerd is a human being without enough Africa in him or her. I know this sounds sort of inversely racist to say, but I think the African connection is so important. I want so desperately for that sensibility to flood into these other areas, like computers.” … “It uses so little of my body. You’re just sitting there, and it’s quite boring. You’ve got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. That’s it. What about the rest of you? No African would stand for a computer like that. It’s imprisoning.”
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An Ecstatic Dialogue with Richard Doyle
When techno–optimist and fellow at the Hybrid Reality Institute, Jason Silva, meets with Richard Doyle, author of Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants and the Evolution of the Noosphere, we must buckle up for an Ecstatic Dialogue on language, reality, ancient Internets and how psychedelics make us human.
JASONSILVA: Your new book Darwin’s Pharmacy talks about the relationship between psychedelic plants and the accelerating evolution of the “noosphere”, which some define as the knowledge substrate of reality, the invisible, informational dimension of collective intelligence and human knowledge. Is this more or less accurate?
RICHDOYLE: The book features a set of nested claims about the evolution of mind, psychedelics (or, as I prefer and propose, “ecodelics”), and the evolution of the noosphere, but all of the claims can be understood via two claims:
(1) Ecodelics have been an integral part of the human toolkit, so suppressing them is like suppressing music, jokes or other aspects of our humanity. (Here I am following Samorini, Siegel, and others)
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(2) As integral parts of the human toolkit, ecodelics are best modeled as part of sexual selection – the competition for mates and the leaving of progeny. A careful look at Charles Darwin’s writings on sexual selection will show that sexual selection works through the management of attention – what we would now call “information technologies.” Think birdsong, bioluminescence ( the most widespread communication technology on the planet), poetry. The peacock is managing and focusing peahen attention with his feathers, so what we have called “mind” has been involved in evolution for a very long time. Mandrilles eat iboga before competing for mates.
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Pixelated Nature
What happens if your childhood experience of your environment has been solely through video games? According to artist Shawn Smith, “pixels became a sort of map from which to experience”. Hence he introduces old nature into next nature by transforming its imagery into 8-bit sculptures using hundreds of tiny wooden blocks.
In an interview with Wired Smith says “I have been around the depiction of objects and nature on screens all my life and I found myself wondering what these things look like in three dimensions.” Peculiar image of the week.
