Brinkish

A Simulated Universe Game

2007-07-24T09:25:44-04:00

A technical virtuoso with boundless imagination, Will Wright has created a style of computer gaming unlike any that came before, emphasizing learning more than losing, invention more than sport. With his hit game SimCity, he spurred players to make predictions, take risks, and sometimes fail miserably, as they built their own virtual urban worlds. With his follow-up hit, The Sims, he encouraged the same creativity toward building a household, all the while preserving the addictive fun of ordinary video games. His next game, Spore, which he previews here, evolves an entire universe from a single-celled creature. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, CA at TED)

Do Birds like Rock n' Roll?

2007-07-23T12:08:58-04:00

Nature is a valued source of inspiration for artists. But what have artists offered the natural world? Would a bird even like rock and roll?

Conceptual sculptor Elizabeth Demaray, an assistant professor of fine arts at Rutgers University—Camden, is testing the musical tastes of our fine feathered friends with an exhibition featuring four 10-foot red perches offering what are considered to be the best in classical, rock, country, and jazz for local birds.

Demaray’s concept of art for the birds hatched from a conversation with co-creator John Walsh, a video artist, who sent Demaray sounds made by the catbird, an avid appreciator of human noise.

The Rutgers-Camden scholar makes art that interacts with natural surroundings –- imagine spotting a tree donning a sweater or finding a rock upholstered as a baseball. She decided to find out if rockin’ robins do exist.

“Humans have an impact on other animals around us. Catbirds and mockingbirds listen to noise we make, but we don’t know if they might respond to human sound,” says Demaray. While there have been no scientific studies on birds’ response to human music, anecdotal evidence suggests that certain species of bird listen to and replicate human song.

“My interest with the piece was to get us to think about the impact we have on the other species around us,” she adds.

The bird listening stations are part of the exhibition “Inside/Outside: Habitat” on view at the Abington Arts Center’s Sculpture Park in Jenkintown, Pa., through Wednesday, Nov. 21. Visitors of the interactive exhibit receive a schedule of songs emitting from each station, which will repeat approximately five songs each.

Birds can tune in to classics like Vivaldi’s “Concert in D Major,” Miles Davis’s “Blue and Green,” and Led Zepplin’s “Kasmir.” They may also hear songs about the winged life like “Marching Jaybird” by Etta Baker, “Birds” by Neil Young, and “I’m a Cuckoo” by Belle and Sebastian.

“If we’re going to give birds music, we might as well give them what we consider to be our masterpieces. But the only gauge humans have on what’s good music is our own interest,” says the Rutgers-Camden artist. “Of course, we may find that birds have their own criteria for assessing our music. So, to see it they might prefer Miles Davis to the Dixie Chicks, you should come see for yourself.”

Demaray’s fascination with perception originates from her early education in cognitive psychology and neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor’s of science degree. She then studied art at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in New York, before returning to UC-Berkeley to earn her MFA.

The recipient of the 2001-2002 National Studio Award at the New York Museum of Modern Art and a 2005 New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellow in sculpture, Demaray has shown her work in museums nationwide. She joined the Rutgers-Camden faculty in 2005.

http://ur.rutgers.edu

Facebook Teams Up with Mozilla Firefox Dudes

2007-07-20T10:53:22-04:00

Facebook has made its first acquisition: Parakey, a startup founded by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, co-founders of Mozilla Firefox.

Ross and Hewitt will join Facebook immediately to work on the Facebook Platform. These guys were featured in a Rolling Stone article along with Zuckerberg last November.

Below is a quote from Facebook’s Brandee Barker, brought to you by Justin Smith from Inside Facebook:

“Blake and Joe built the Firefox web browser and then turned to the developer community to build on top of the foundation they’d established, not unlike what we’ve done with Facebook Platform,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. “The work they’ve done with Firefox and Parakey and their approach to building products fit right in at Facebook.”

Ross and Hewitt are best known as the co-founders of Firefox, which has been downloaded more than 300 million times by people worldwide. Hewitt went on to build popular web development tools such as Firebug. In early 2006, Ross and Hewitt founded Parakey to build a platform bridging the gap between information on the web and the desktop.

“Facebook Platform is finally making it easy to share experiences with friends and family over the web, a goal Joe and I have worked toward for years,” said Ross. “We are thrilled to join the most innovative technology company in the industry.”

For the last two years Parakey has been developing a platform that will synchronize your documents and files across web and desktop applications. Ross spoke to IEEE Spectrum last November describing the service as a “Web operating system.”

Parakey is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive—e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars. In fact, it looks like a fairly ordinary Web site, which you can edit. You can go online, click through your files and view the contents, even tweak them. You can also check off the stuff you want the rest of the world to be able to see. Others can do so by visiting your Parakey site, just as they would surf anywhere else on the Web. Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too. Friends and relatives—and hackers—do not have direct access to your computer; they’re just visiting a site that reflects only the portion of your stuff that you want them to be able to see.

Parakey is Facebook’s first publicly announced acquisition. Facebook is not releasing financial terms of the transaction.

Source: Inside Facebook

Distraction Can Help You Win Bar Brawls

2007-07-18T12:45:17-04:00

The link between alcohol and aggression is well known. What’s not so clear is just why drunks get belligerent. What is it about the brain-on-alcohol that makes fighting seem like a good idea? And do all intoxicated people get more aggressive? Or does it depend on the circumstances?

University of Kentucky psychologist Peter Giancola and his student Michelle Corman decided to explore these questions in the laboratory.

One theory about alcohol and aggression is that drinking impairs the part of the brain involved in allocating our limited mental resources—specifically attention and working memory. When we can only focus on a fraction of what’s going on around us, the theory holds, drunks narrow their social vision, concentrating myopically on provocative cues and ignoring things that might have a calming or inhibiting effect.

The scientists tested this idea on a group of young Kentucky men. Some of the men drank three to four screwdrivers before the experiment, while others stayed sober.

Then they had them all compete against another person in a somewhat stressful game that required very quick responses. Every time they lost a round, they received a shock varying in intensity. Likewise, when they won a round they gave their opponent a shock.

The idea was to see how alcohol affected the men’s belligerence, as measured by the kinds of shocks they chose to hand out.

But there was more to it. Giancola and Corman also deliberately manipulated some of the volunteers’ cognitive powers. They required them—some drinkers, some not—to simultaneously perform a difficult memory task.

The idea was to see if they could distract those who were “under the influence” from their “hostile” situation. If they could tax their limited powers of concentration, perhaps they wouldn’t process the fact that someone was zapping them with electricity.

And that’s exactly what happened. As reported in the July issue of Psychological Science, the drunks who had nothing to distract them were predictably mean, exhibiting aggression towards their adversaries.

However, the drunks whose attention was focused elsewhere were actually less aggressive than the sober non-drinkers. This seems counterintuitive at first, but it’s really not: The sober men were cognitively intact, so they would naturally attend to both provocations and distractions in the room, resulting in some low level of aggression.

It appears that alcohol has the potential to both increase and decrease aggression, depending on where’s one’s attention is focused.

The psychologists speculate that working memory is crucial not only to barroom behavior, but to all social behavior, because it provides the capacity for self-reflection and strategic planning.

Activating working memory with salient, non-hostile, and health-promoting thoughts, in effect reduces the “cognitive space” available for inclinations towards violence.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org

Vitamin C Doesn't Help Common Colds

2007-07-18T11:08:05-04:00

Unless you run marathons, you probably won’t get much protection from common colds by taking a daily supplemental dose of vitamin C, according to an updated review of 30 studies.

Conducted over several decades and including more than 11,000 people who took daily doses of at least 200 milligrams, the review also shows that vitamin C (ascorbic acid) does little to reduce the length or severity of a cold, according to the researchers at the Australian National University and the University of Helsinki.

However, they found that people exposed to periods of high stress — such as marathon runners, skiers and soldiers on sub-arctic exercises — were 50 percent less likely to catch a cold if they took a daily dose of vitamin C.

For most people, the benefit of the popular remedy is so slight when it comes to colds that it is not worth the effort or expense, the authors say. “It doesn’t make sense to take vitamin C 365 days a year to lessen the chance of catching a cold,” said co-author Harri Hemilä, a professor in the Department of Public Health at University of Helsinki in Finland.

The review appears in the latest issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research. Systematic reviews draw evidence-based conclusions about medical practice after considering both the content and quality of existing medical trials on a topic.

Since the discovery of vitamin C in the 1930s, controversy regarding its efficacy in treating ailments from lung infections to colds has surrounded it. In the 1970s, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling popularized its regular use. His book, “Vitamin C and the Common Cold,” encouraged people to take 1,000 milligrams of the vitamin daily.

The current recommended daily allowance of vitamin C is 60 milligrams. An eight-ounce glass of orange juice has about 97 milligrams of vitamin C.

Despite early mixed results and later evidence against its efficacy, charismatic Pauling became the world’s vitamin C champion. “Pauling never recanted and never backed down,” said Wallace Sampson, founding editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine and emeritus professor of medicine at Stanford University.

Regardless of the evidence against it, vitamin C remains popular because many people —including those funding studies — want to believe that it works, said Sampson, who debated Pauling on the radio and in letters.

These days, there is less interest in studying vitamin C and the common cold, said Hemilä, who has studied the vitamin for more than 25 years. The Cochrane Review was originally published in 1998 and updated in 2004 and this year. The latest update includes a single new study on the Vitamin C-cold connection.

However, researchers continue to examine vitamin C alone and in combination with other vitamins and substances, such as Echinacea, for its efficacy in preventing and treating diseases and conditions, including cancer. This is not necessarily a good thing, Sampson said. “It’s broadside quackery.”

Hemilä said he sees little use in further study for colds for adults. However, he would like to see more studies on vitamin C and colds in children and vitamin C and pneumonia. Vitamin C is not a panacea, but it is not useless either, Hemilä said. “Pauling was overly optimistic, but he wasn’t completely wrong.”

http://www.cfah.org

Taking a Nap Mid-Workout Burns More Fat

2007-07-18T10:52:01-04:00

Taking a break in the middle of your workout may metabolize more fat than exercising without stopping, according to a recent study in Japan.

Researchers conducted the first known study to compare these two exercise methods—exercising continually in one long bout versus breaking up the same workout with a rest period. The findings could change the way we approach exercise. Who wouldn’t want to take a breather for that?

“Many people believe prolonged exercise will be optimal in order to reduce body fat, but our study has shown that repetitions of shorter exercise may cause enhancements of fat mobilization and utilization during and after the exercise. These findings will be informative about the design of [future] exercise regimens,” said lead researcher Kazushige Goto, Ph.D. “Most people are reluctant to perform a single bout of prolonged exercise. The repeated exercise with shorter bouts of exercise will be a great help [in keeping up with fitness].”

This finding is part of a study entitled Enhancement of fat metabolism by repeated bouts of moderate endurance exercise, found in the June 2007 edition of the Journal of Applied Physiology, which is published by the American Physiological Society.

It was conducted by Kazushige Goto, of both the Department of Life Sciences, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Komaba, Tokyo, Japan and the Institute of Sports Medicine, Bispebjerg Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark; Naokata Ishii, of the Department of Life Sciences, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Komaba, Tokyo, Japan; and Ayuko Mizuno and Kaoru Takamatsu, both of the Institute of Health and Sport Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan.

Summary of Methodology

The researchers used seven healthy (avg. body mass: 66.1, percentage fat: 17.6) men with an average age of 25 who were physically active and familiar with exercise and had them perform three separate trials:

* one single bout of 60-min exercise followed with a 60-min recovery period (Single)
* two bouts of 30-min exercise with a 20-min rest after the first 30-min bout, along with a 60-min recovery period at the end (Repeated)
* one 60-min rest period (Control)

The men performed each trial at the same time of day after fasting overnight. They exercised on a single ergometer (cycling machine) at the commonly recommended exercise prescription of 60% maximum oxygen intake.

The recovery and rest periods were conducted while the subjects sat in chairs. Blood samples were taken every 15 minutes during the exercise and every 30 minutes during the recovery period. Their respiratory gas and heart rates were monitored continuously throughout the trial.

Summary of Results

The Repeated trial showed a greater amount of lipolysis (fat breakdown) than did the Single trial.

This Repeated trial also had a pronounced increase in free fatty acids and glycerol (chemical compounds that are released when stored fat is used) concentrations in the final 15 minutes of exercise, whereas these concentrations only progressively increased throughout the Single trial.

Also, the second half of the Repeated trial showed a significantly greater epinephrine response while also having a rapid decrease in insulin concentration as a result of lower plasma glucose.

This combination of high epinephrine and low insulin concentration may have also increased the lipolysis.

There was also enhanced fat oxidation in the recovery period of the Repeated trial than in the Single trial, but this result may be because the free fatty acids concentration was already high before the recovery period.

Conclusions

The American College of Sports Medicine recommends moderate exercise for the duration of 45 to 60 minutes to ensure a sufficient amount of energy is depleted in obese individuals.

This has caused a greater focus on extending exercise sessions in order to burn more fat. However, this study shows that this method may not be the most effective way to enhance fat metabolism, as splitting up a long bout of exercise with a rest period burns more fat than a continuous bout of exercise.

This study could help with the practical application of implementing new exercise methods in order to better manage and control weight in individuals in the future.

However, Goto and his team of researchers plan on conducting further studies in order to explore the results in a variety of exercise durations as well as in different types of individuals.

http://www.the-aps.org

Driving on Mushrooms -- Road Trip Anyone?

2007-07-17T10:59:57-04:00

Researchers at the University of Warwick are co-ordinating a global effort to sequence the genome of one of the World’s most important mushrooms - Agaricus bisporus. The secrets of its genetic make up could assist the creation of biofuels, support the effort to manage global carbon, and help remove heavy metals from contaminated soils.

The Agaricus mushroom family are highly efficient ‘secondary decomposers’ of plant material such as leaves and litter –breaking down the material that is too tough for other fungi and bacteria to handle.

How exactly it does this, particularly how it degrades tough plant material known as lignin, is not fully understood.

By sequencing the full genome of the mushroom, researchers hope to uncover exactly which genes are key to this process. That information will be extremely useful to scientists and engineers looking to maximize the decomposition and transformation of plant material into bio fuels.

The mushroom also forms an important model for carbon cycling studies. Carbon is sequestered in soils as plant organic matter. Between 1–2 giga tons of carbon a year are sequestered in pools on land in the temperate and boreal regions of the earth, which represents 15–30% of annual global emissions of carbon from fossil fuels and industrial activities.

Understanding the carbon cycling role of these fungi in the forests and other ecosystems is a vital component of optimizing carbon management.

That however is not the end of the mushrooms talents; several Agaricus species are able to hyper-accumulate toxic metals in soils at a higher level than many other fungi.

Understanding how the mushroom does this improves prospects of using such fungi for the bioremediation of contaminated soils.

Agaricus bisporus is one of the most widely cultivated mushrooms and the genome research will also benefit growers and consumers through identification of improved quality traits such as disease resistance.

The University of Warwick’s horticultural research arm Warwick HRI will co-ordinate provision of genetic materials to the Joint Genome Institute in California for sequencing, will organize analysis of the sequence data and act as curator of the mushroom genome.

Agaricus bisporus has around 35 megabases of genetic information coding for an estimated 11,000 genes. The researchers expect to have a 90% complete genome within 3 years.

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk

Political Fund Raising -- Interactive Map

2007-07-16T16:23:53-04:00

The New York Times has a pretty sweet interactive map that let's you visualize campaign contributions for the presidential candidates.

You can see how different campaigns take off over time, and you can see where candidates are generating their nest eggs for 2008.

One thing is for sure -- middle America doesn't seem to be too interested in giving money to politicians, and it looks like the Northeast is one big money funnel.

Copyright System Outdated?

2007-07-13T09:54:59-04:00

Cambridge University PhD candidate Rufus Pollock has published a paper that takes a look at the economics of copyrights, and concludes that the optimum length of copyrights is 14 years, a fraction of their current length.

From Mark Twain through Mark Helprin, a lengthy lineage of authors hs argued that copyright should last forever. But that contention doesn't go far in the Internet age, says Rufus Pollock, a graduate student in economics at the University of Cambridge.

Pollock’s research (pdf) looks at the economic benefits of both copyrighted work and work that has entered the public domain, and the falling costs of creating new works.

Technological change has substantially reduced the costs of production and distribution of most copyrightable goods. On this basis our first theoretical result would imply that the level of optimal copyright is dropping. Similarly, given that several types of copyrightable work, for example films and recordings, are now well over fifty years old, the second theoretical result similarly implies that optimal term is falling.

Our estimate of optimal term (14 years) is far below the length copyright in almost all jurisdictions. This implies that there is a significant role for policymakers to improve social welfare by reducing copyright term as well as implying that existing terms should not be extended. Such a result is particularly importance given the degree of recent debate on this precise topic.

The research suggests that lengthy copyright terms effectively protect the status quo while stifling innovation.

via Ars Technica

NASA Finds Water Vapor on Scorched Planet

2007-07-13T09:30:06-04:00

A hellish-hot gas planet beyond our solar system is steaming up with water vapor, according to new observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

The planet, called HD 189733b, swelters as it zips closely around its star every two days or so. Astronomers had predicted that planets of this class, termed "hot Jupiters," would contain water vapor in their atmospheres. Yet finding solid evidence for this has been slippery. These latest data are the most convincing yet that hot Jupiters are "wet."

"We're thrilled to have identified clear signs of water on a planet that is trillions of miles away," said Giovanna Tinetti, a European Space Agency fellow at the Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris in France." Tinetti is lead author of a paper on HD 189733b appearing today in Nature.

Although water is an essential ingredient to life as we know it, wet hot Jupiters are not likely to harbor any creatures. Previous measurements from Spitzer indicate that HD 189733b is a fiery 1,000 Kelvin (1,340 degrees Fahrenheit) on average. Ultimately, astronomers hope to use instruments like those on Spitzer to find water on rocky, habitable planets like Earth.

"Finding water on this planet implies that other planets in the universe, possibly even rocky ones, could also have water," said co-author Sean Carey of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "I'm excited to tell my nephews and niece about the discovery."

The new findings are part of a brand new field of science investigating the climate on exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. Such faraway planets cannot be seen directly; however, in the past few years, astronomers have begun to glean information about their atmospheres by observing a subset of hot Jupiters that transit, or pass in front of, their stars as seen from Earth.

Earlier this year, Spitzer became the first telescope to analyze, or break apart, the light from two transiting hot Jupiters, HD 189733b and HD 209458b. One of its instruments, called a spectrometer, observed the planets as they dipped behind their stars in what is called the secondary eclipse. This led to the first-ever "fingerprint," or spectrum, of an exoplanet's light. Yet, the results came up "dry," probably because the structure of these planets' atmospheres makes finding water with this method difficult.

Later, a team of astronomers found hints of water in HD 209458b by analyzing visible-light data taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble data were captured as the planet crossed in front of the star, an event called the primary eclipse.

Now, Tinetti and her team have captured the best evidence yet for wet, hot Jupiters by watching HD 189733b's primary eclipse in infrared light with Spitzer. In this method, changes in infrared light from the star are measured as the planet slips by, filtering starlight through its outer atmosphere. The astronomers observed the eclipse with Spitzer's infrared array camera at three different infrared wavelengths and noticed that for each wavelength a different amount of light was absorbed by the planet. The pattern by which this absorption varies with wavelength matches that created by water.

"Water is the only molecule that can explain that behavior," said Tinetti. "Observing primary eclipses in infrared light is the best way to search for this molecule in exoplanets."

The water on HD 189733b is too hot to condense into clouds; however, previous observations of the planet from Spitzer and other ground and space-based telescopes suggest that it might have dry clouds, along with high winds and a hot, sun-facing side that is warmer than its dark side. HD 189733b is located 63 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula.

Other authors of the Nature paper include Alfred Vidal-Madjar, Jean-Phillippe Beaulieu, David Sing and Nicole Allard of the Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris: Mao-Chang Liang of Caltech and the Academia Sinica, Taiwan; Yuk Yung of Caltech; Robert J. Barber and Jonathan Tennyson of University College London in England; Ignasi Ribas of the Institut de Ciències de l'Espai, Spain; Gilda E. Ballester of the University of Arizona, Tucson; and Franck Selsis of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, France.

JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. JPL is a division of Caltech. Spitzer's infrared array camera was built by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The instrument's principal investigator is Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

For graphics related to this research and more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer