"Haptic feedback has become a common feature of recent technology, but such systems usually rely on stimulation of parts of the user’s body via direct mechanical or acoustic vibration. A new technique being developed by researchers at the University of Bristol promises to change all of this by using projected ultrasound to directly create floating, 3D shapes that can be seen and felt in mid-air.
Building on previous work at the university, the researchers have used an array of ultrasonic transducers to create and focus compound patterns of ultrasound to shape the air at which it was directed. To make these shapes visible, the manipulated air was directed through a thin curtain of oil and a lamp was then used to illuminate it. According to the researchers, this results in a system that produces such accurate and identifiable shapes that users can readily match an image of a 3D object to the shape rendered by the prototype ultrasound system.
"Touchable holograms, immersive virtual reality that you can feel and complex touchable controls in free space, are all possible ways of using this system," said Dr Ben Long, Research Assistant from the Bristol Interaction and Graphics (BIG) department at the University of Bristol. "In the future, people could feel holograms of objects that would not otherwise be touchable, such as feeling the differences between materials in a CT scan or understanding the shapes of artefacts in a museum."
The system does not use the ultrasound frequency (around 40 kHz) to directly impinge on the surface of the skin when the haptic object is touched. Instead, vibrations are set up in the air upon which the array is focused to produce sensations oscillating anywhere from around 0.4 Hz to 500 Hz. In this way, when the various patterns are produced by the ultrasonic array, the user is able to discern the shape of an object in a similar way to feeling a solid article...."====http://www.gizmag.com/ultrasound-3d-hapt...ram/35032/
This is an interesting point I haven't considered: a sort of categorical consciousness created by our language that is false if not even demeaning. The "animal" as but another version of the "non-human"--a sort of second-rate, non-descriptive rank-name whose sole value is as justifying a generic devaluation and fictive inclusiveness of all non-human species.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Neu4kI_Yi0A
http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc...296&cn=139
EXCERPT: [...] C. P. Snow was talking and writing about what he famously called "the two cultures".
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had." -- C. P. Snow 1959
It is almost fifty years since Snow's warning about two cultures. The term two cultures has entered the general lexicon as shorthand for differences between two attitudes. These are:
1. the increasingly constructivist world view from the humanities, in which the scientific method is seen as embedded within language and culture; and hence relativistic.
2. the scientific viewpoint, in which the observer can still claim to objectively make unbiased and non-culturally embedded observations about nature.
And it is almost thirty five years [1979] since The Glyph published an exchange between John Searle and Jacques Derrida that called for people to pay attention to postmodernist theories of language and reality. I remember reading the exchange at the time and in the interest of objectivity I admit that I thought then and think now that Searle was the winner. I also should admit that I had no idea what Derrida was up to most of the time....
http://medienportal.univie.ac.at/presse/...-or-stick/
RELEASE: What motivates people to cooperate in collaborative endeavors? “First carrot, then stick”. Tatsuya Sasaki, mathematician from the University of Vienna, has put forth for the first time ever a mathematical proof of this process. The study is recently published online in the "Journal of the Royal Society Interface".
The new study establishes that the best combination for incentives and punishment that promotes cooperation are in the form of "First carrot, then stick". The mathematical proof shows how the combined sequential use of reward ("carrot") and punishment ("stick") promotes cooperation in collaborative endeavors, such as protecting social commons and maintaining mutual aid.
Rewards and punishments are the most tried and true approaches when trying to promote cooperation in collaborative endeavors. New research, in terms of evolutionary game theory, is examining a mixed policy of reward and punishment. In contrast, previous studies have only focused on either reward or punishment. As is well known, incentives can be costly and can be adjusted depending on a situation.
In this paper, Sasaki and his colleagues have taken a different approach and investigated what happens when maximizing evolutionary forces towards cooperation. Through game-theory analysis, the study finds that the best approach is to first reward minor cooperators, and then when a critical mass of cooperators is reached, completely switch to punishing free riders.
How is this applicable to contemporary issues? Take automobiles as an example where this hybrid approach can be implemented. Those who currently drive powerful gas-guzzling vehicles should switch to different engines and fuels that are more environmentally friendly. Sasaki and his colleagues mathematically show that a "first carrot, then stick" policy can drive cooperation toward a specific goal. "We have optimized the adaptive dynamics under a centralized incentive system. Therefore, fascinating future work would investigate how and when individuals voluntarily delegate the incentive control to a central authority", says Sasaki.
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Publication in Journal of the Royal Society Interface:
Chen X, Sasaki T, Brännström Å, Dieckmann U. 2015: First carrot, then stick: how the adaptive hybridization of incentives promotes cooperation. in: The Journal of the Royal Society Interface. December 2014.
http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/c...2/20140935
http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/12/0...-for-life/
RELEASE: Planets orbiting close to low-mass stars — easily the most common stars in the universe — are prime targets in the search for extraterrestrial life.
But new research led by an astronomy graduate student at the University of Washington indicates some such planets may have long since lost their chance at hosting life because of intense heat during their formative years.
Low-mass stars, also called M dwarfs, are smaller than the sun, and also much less luminous, so their habitable zone tends to be fairly close in. The habitable zone is that swath of space that is just right to allow liquid water on an orbiting planet’s surface, thus giving life a chance.
Planets close to their host stars are easier for astronomers to find than their siblings farther out. Astronomers discover and measure these worlds by studying the slight reduction in light when they transit, or pass in front of their host star; or by measuring the star’s slight “wobble” in response to the planet’s gravity, called the radial velocity method.
But in a paper to be published in the journal Astrobiology, doctoral student Rodrigo Luger and co-author Rory Barnes, a UW research assistant professor, find through computer simulations that some planets close to low-mass stars likely had their water and atmospheres burned away when they were still forming.
“All stars form in the collapse of a giant cloud of interstellar gas, which releases energy in the form of light as it shrinks,” Luger said. “But because of their lower masses, and therefore lower gravities, M dwarfs take longer to fully collapse — on the order of many hundreds of millions of years.”
“Planets around these stars can form within 10 million years, so they are around when the stars are still extremely bright. And that’s not good for habitability, since these planets are going to initially be very hot, with surface temperatures in excess of a thousand degrees. When this happens, your oceans boil and your entire atmosphere becomes steam.”
Also boding ill for the atmospheres of these worlds is the fact that M dwarf stars emit a lot of X-ray and ultraviolet light, which heats the upper atmosphere to thousands of degrees and causes gas to expand so quickly it leaves the planet and is lost to space, Luger said.
“So, many of the planets in the habitable zones of M dwarfs could have been dried up by this process early on, severely decreasing their chance of actually being habitable.”
A side effect of this process, Luger and Barnes write, is that ultraviolet radiation can split up water into its component hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The lighter hydrogen escapes the atmosphere more easily, leaving the heavier oxygen atoms behind. While some oxygen is clearly good for life, as on Earth, too much oxygen can be a negative factor for the origin of life.
“Rodrigo has shown that this prolonged runaway greenhouse phase can produce huge atmospheres full of oxygen — like, 10 times denser than that of Venus and all oxygen,” said Barnes. “Searches for life often rely on oxygen as a tracer of extraterrestrial life — so the abiological production of such huge quantities of oxygen could confound our search for life on exoplanets.”
Luger said the working title of their paper was “Mirage Earths.”
“Because of the oxygen they build up, they could look a lot like Earth from afar — but if you look more closely you’ll find that they’re really a mirage; there’s just no water there.”
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/12/0...ng-skills/
EXCERPT: When it comes to getting out of a tricky situation, we humans have an evolutionary edge over other primates. Take, as a dramatic example, the Apollo 13 voyage in which engineers, against all odds, improvised a chemical filter on a lunar module to prevent carbon dioxide buildup from killing the crew.
UC Berkeley scientists have found mounting brain evidence that helps explain how humans have excelled at “relational reasoning,” a cognitive skill in which we discern patterns and relationships to make sense of seemingly unrelated information, such as solving problems in unfamiliar circumstances.
Their findings, reported in the Dec. 3 issue of the journal Neuron, suggest that subtle shifts in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain are linked to superior cognition. Among other things, the frontoparietal network plays a key role in analysis, memory retrieval, abstract thinking and problem-solving, and has the fluidity to adapt according to the task at hand.
“This research has led us to take seriously the possibility that tweaks to this network over an evolutionary timescale could help to explain differences in the way that humans and other primates solve problems,” said UC Berkeley neuroscientist Silvia Bunge, the study’s principal investigator.
“It’s not just that we humans have language at our disposal. We also have the capacity to compare and integrate several pieces of information in a way that other primates don’t,” she added....
http://news.ubc.ca/2014/12/03/check-less...il-stress/
RELEASE: Is your inbox burning you out? Then take heart – research from the University of British Columbia suggests that easing up on email checking can help reduce psychological stress.
Some of the study’s 124 adults — including students, financial analysts medical professionals and others — were instructed to limit checking email to three times daily for a week. Others were told to check email as often as they could (which turned out to be about the same number of times that they normally checked their email prior to the study).
These instructions were then reversed for the participants during a subsequent week. During the study period, participants also answered brief daily surveys, including information about their stress levels.
“Our findings showed that people felt less stressed when they checked their email less often,” says Kostadin Kushlev, the study’s lead author and a PhD candidate at UBC’s Dept. of Psychology.
Changing inbox behaviour may be easier said than done, however. “Most participants in our study found it quite difficult to check their email only a few times a day,” says Kushlev. “This is what makes our obvious-in-hindsight findings so striking: People find it difficult to resist the temptation of checking email, and yet resisting this temptation reduces their stress.”
Kushlev’s inspiration for the study came from his own experiences with email overload. “I now check my email in chunks several times a day, rather than constantly responding to messages as they come in,” he says. “And I feel better and less stressed.”
He also notes that organizations may help reduce employee stress by encouraging their workers to check their email in chunks rather than constantly responding to messages.
The study, Checking Email Less Frequently Reduces Stress, is published online in Computers in Human Behavior. Kushlev’s co-author is Elizabeth Dunn from UBC’s Dept. of Psychology. Kushlev can be followed on Twitter at @HappyScholar.
The two-week study involved 124 participants; about two-thirds of these were graduate and undergraduate students, while the remainder worked in a range of industries, including health care, academia, finance, administration and information technology.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ore-155102
EXCERPT: [...] At least part of the schism between Republicans and Democrats is based in differing conceptions of the role of the individual. We find these differences expressed in the frequent heated arguments about crucial issues like health care and immigration. In a broad sense, Democrats, particularly the more liberal among them, are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding. Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party members on the ideological fringe, however, often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Self-described libertarians generally also pride themselves on their high valuation of logic and reasoning over emotion.
Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.
[...] in the eyes of many conservative Americans today, religion and evolution do not mix. You either accept what the Bible tells us or what Charles Darwin wrote, but not both. The irony here is that when it comes to our responsibilities to one another as human beings, religion and evolution nowadays are not necessarily on opposite sides of the fence. And as Matthew D. Lieberman, a social neuroscience researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, has written: “we think people are built to maximize their own pleasure and minimize their own pain. In reality, we are actually built to overcome our own pleasure and increase our own pain in the service of following society’s norms.”
While I do not entirely accept the norms clause of Lieberman’s claim, his observation strikes me as evocatively religious. Consequently I find it more than ironic that American individualism today — which many link closely with Christian fundamentalism — is self-consciously founded on 17th- and 18th-century ideas about human beings as inherently self-interested and self-centered individuals....
Case in point, Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously declared in “The Social Contract” (1762) that each of us is born free and yet everywhere we are in chains. He did not mean physical chains. He meant social ones. We now know he was dead wrong. Human evolution has made us obligate social creatures. Even if some of us may choose sooner or later to disappear into the woods or sit on a mountaintop in deep meditation, we humans are able to do so only if before such individualistic anti-social resolve we have first been socially nurtured and socially taught survival arts by others. The distinction Rousseau and others tried to draw between “natural liberty, which is bounded only by the strength of the individual” and “civil liberty, which is limited by the general will” is fanciful, not factual.
This is decidedly not what Enlightenment philosophers wanted to hear. According to Rousseau and others, our responsibilities and duties to one another as members of society do not come from nature, but instead from our social conventions. Their speculations about the origins of the latter generally asserted that the most ancient of all societies was the family. Yet in their eyes, even the family as a social unit was seen as ephemeral.
[...] In fairness to Rousseau it should be noted, as I observed earlier, that he may not have meant such claims to be taken literally.
[...] However pragmatic their motivations and goals, what Rousseau and others crafted as arguments in favor of their ideas all had the earmarks of primitive mythology. As the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argued almost a century ago: “Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances, and codifies belief, it safeguards and enforces morality, it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man. [...] Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or an artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom.”
[...] While as an anthropologist I largely agree with Malinowski, I would add that not all myths make good charters for faith and wisdom. The sanctification of the rights of individuals and their liberties today by libertarians and Tea Party conservatives is contrary to our evolved human nature as social animals. There was never a time in history before civil society when we were each totally free to do whatever we elected to do. We have always been social and caring creatures...
