betajames

A big problem for people accessing a meeting from a distance is the lack of socially dynamic context provided by text on a page. Gestures, for example, convey vast information that we intuitively acquire, but remains largely absent from the printed word. AMIDA developed software to record social dynamics of a meeting in real time.

The software can track gestures, indicate gaze and head movements, and add speech bubbles to indicate who is speaking to whom.

All this data is captured and available for later analysis and review. But beyond this value, the technology has a host of other potential applications like robotics, AI, and image recognition.

For example, there are thousands of CCTV cameras in most modern cities, but they currently act passively - they can be consulted after a violent crime, but it is very difficult to track them in real time. If software can detect gestures indicating violence or aggression, however, the police could be alerted to a possible crime in progress.

Long past being a mere arriving technology, the digital is at this point ensconced as a paradigm, fully saturating our ordinary language. Who can doubt that even when we are not thinking, when we are merely functioning in our new world, we are premising that world very differently than did our parents or the many generations preceding them?

What is the place of the former world now, its still-familiar but also strangely sepia-tinged assumptions about the self acting in a larger and, in frightening and thrilling ways, inexplicable world?

Every one of those "likes"—a billion statements of preference every day, 365 billion every year, at least—will get filed back at Facebook HQ. It is difficult to overestimate the value, to Facebook, of all this activity. Remember that the social network already has the world's largest database of connections among people. Now, very soon, it will also have the largest database connecting people to the things they enjoy, whether those things are news stories, restaurants, songs, books, movies, jeans, cosmetics, or anything else. Yes, lots of other firms mine our online activity, but Facebook's system will be all the more powerful because it is voluntary. We, Facebook's hordes, are actively filling in the slots in its database, giving the company an extremely accurate picture of ourselves and our friends. No other company will have anything like Facebook's towering database of human intentions and desires—not even Google.

There are also plenty of anonymous sexual innuendos like "you're cute" or "will you go out with me" questions, followed by "who is this?" as the answer.  There are also many more explicit versions of this, with some bordering on sexual harassment.  There are also anonymous posts that ring of bullying or harassment, from the relatively painless "you're fat" to the more crass "fuck you slut."  Finally, there are the ones that invite the participant to talk about a third party, often by full name (e.g., "don't you hate Kristen?").  Now, keep in mind that only questions that are answered are posted and participants have a choice in what they decide to answer.  So when you see crass questions followed by answers, the participant chose to answer the question and post it.  I don't even want to imagine the questions that they receive and don't answer...

According to a post on JP's blog, JP received a message from Twitter with a URL to the tweet that was being removed, noting that the reason was because of a DMCA takedown notice. The tweet in question was a link to a blog post on his site posted on April 20. The post described a leaked album by The National, a link to the Amazon page where the album could be preordered, and two links to MP3s from the album, both of which were hosted elsewhere (Box.net and Mediafire).

What's got us really excited, is that after nearly 100 years of debate about the function of dreams, this study tells us that dreams are the brain's way of processing, integrating and really understanding new information," explains senior author Robert Stickgold, PhD, Director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at BIDMC and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "Dreams are a clear indication that the sleeping brain is working on memories at multiple levels, including ways that will directly improve performance.

When objects of different kind encounter one another, the problem becomes that of one making sense of the other. This is what I’m really after, and I want my approach to work for humans making sense of microprocessors as much as I do for sand dunes making sense of siroccos.

It has provided useful (and sometimes surprising) demonstrations, for conference and meeting participants, of the engagement of broad and under-represented communities with issues under debate. It has brought divergent perspectives helpfully into play, sharpening discussion and leading to proposals with broader reach and impact. In a time of dwindling travel budgets, it has allowed key, already well-networked community members to participate in meetings from afar, with little technical overhead and less disruption to their working lives than formal, virtual participation would require through an interface like Second Life.

An academic monograph does not reach a large audience. This type of writing is necessary for tenure and promotion, for legitimacy within an elite group. It takes years to publish our work in the form of a book. We are often required to eliminate the most ground-breaking parts of our work and what we do write is often outdated by the time it is published. More and more, it seems that our books are written for tenure and promotion rather than for making a difference and/or changing the way people think.