Archive for the ‘Fun’ Category
Austin Stowell in Dolphin Tale
Austin Stowell helps a boy save a dolphin with the aid of prosthetic’s doctor.
Stowell, originally from Berlin, Connecticut has known he wanted to pursue a professional acting career ever since his high school days in Austin.
It was during his years at Berlin High he met and formed a strong relationship with Skytemple’s CEO, Curtiss Hayden. Stowell went on to graduate Berlin High School in 2003 and was accepted to the University of Connecticut where he pursued his love for acting in more depth, participating in many productions including, Julius Caesar, and It Can’t Happen Here. Currently, Stowell is well known through his acting on the ABC Family show, The Secret Life of the American Teenager. In his new movie, Dolphin Tail, Stowell finds himself playing oposite veteran actors such as Harry Connick Jr, Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman. It is an exciting and robust new role for Stowell who plays a disabled war veteran in the film.
The movie itself is based on a true story concerning a young boy named Sawyer who finds an injured dolphin washed up on shore. His dogged pursuit of helping the dolphin, who eventually loses it’s tail (providing the obligatory family film titular pun), leads him to one Professor Cameron McCarthy, played by Morgan Freeman, who’s work had been, up to that point, concerning human prosthetics.
As only a young boy with no money trying to save an aquatic animal in a family film could, Sawyer convinces the doctor who then convinces a prosthetics manufacturer to help his dolphin at no cost. At first the Dolphin rejects the tail, smashing repeated rebuilds until a new padding for the sock holding the tail to the dolphin is developed using a gel like material. A material that is now currently used to attach prosthetic limbs. The film itself has a wonderful message about determination and thinking outside the box and is at heart an incredible true tory of technology helping nature. Dolphin Tale is currently playing in theaters and in some places in 3D.
Mirror Mirror on the Wall
The mirror on the wall may soon reveal more than your appearance, becoming a two-way mirror for advertisers
Designed by MIT student Ming-Zher Poh, the Medical Mirror uses a complex algorithm to detect vital signs through optics with a simple camera
Two years ago, MIT student Ming-Zher Poh managed to turn his laptop’s webcam into a heart rate monitor. At the time he was looking for a way for doctors to check vital signs in the least invasive way possible. The method he came up with was fairly simple: As each pump of the heart sends fresh waves of blood through your veins, the light that penetrates your skin and bounces off your muscles fluctuates subtly. When these fluctuations are analyzed by a computer and camera, they can be translated into heart-rate data.
Although the technology is not new, Poh created a new algorithm which allowed a much less sensitive standard laptop webcam to isolate the blood flow light pattern from other light collected by the camera. Using an adapted process to extract single sounds from a noisy recording, Poh, managed to cleverly tie this into a way for even a lower resolution camera to isolate data and even track multiple subjects.
So what did he do with it? He built a mirror that could look inside of you.
A webcam mounted behind a two-way mirror monitors your vitals invisibly as you gaze upon your visage, displaying your heart-rate reading. Poh imagines improving the system further to measure other vitals such as respiratory rate and blood oxygen levels.
Still years away from the market, Poh plans to bring the mirror to consumers after, he hopes, he finishes his PHD later this year. Poh remains hopeful of the devices uses saying,”This shows your inner health. Maybe as people use it, they’ll say, ‘This is part of my identity. It’s not just how I look on the outside.”
Good News Everyone
Ming-Zher Poh goes on to imagine tele-medical screening tests over a webcam or even a cell phone and hands-free vital scanning of burn patients and newborns, all of which seem like positive applications for Poh’s research.
As with all new technologies though, other possible real life applications seem darker. Although Poh is currently developing the Mirror for medical uses, it’s hard to imagine the technology staying in the box, so to speak. If all it takes is an algorithm to turn a cell phone into a medical scanner, albeit a primitive one, what is in the way of this algorithm being added quietly to all devices via standard updates? If a Doctor can access your vital signs from as little as a built-in webcam who else might want this information?
While the answer to the first question might be a difficult web of consumer-protection issues, the latter question is easy to answer.
Advertisers, marketers and corporations have already spent a fortune in the field of figuring out what we feel before we do, and the tide seems far from abating.
As the recent acquisition of NeuroFocus (a company devoted to turning neurological research into useable market data) by Nielsen (of Nielsen Ratings) shows us, advertising and market analysts are taking serious Science’s promise of conquest through measure and number.
NeuroFocus grew out of a frustration by advertisers in their inability to predict what consumers wanted. And they take this quest very seriously. Just a few months ago NeuroFocus announced it had developed the worlds first wireless EEG headset, and it runs on bluetooth.
Looking a bit like something out of the movie Strange Days, the device can capture brain activity 2,000 times per second and relay that information via that bluetooth connection to your smartphone, tablet or home computer. The device has many uses, one being a hands free ‘mouse’ controlled in one incredible TED Conference video, by mere thought. Another is watching the brain for ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ readings as you scan your digital paper or watch a commercial to then relay that information to marketers and analytics teams to offer realtime insight for advertisers.
“NeuroFocus leverages ground-breaking neuroscience and expertise to measure consumer attention, engagement and memory retention through brainwave, eye-tracking and skin conductance measurements.” The company stated in a recent press release.
With so much hardware already in place, touchscreen phones can register the force of our taps and built-in cameras are in just about everything digital these days, how long will it really be before your computer can tell when you’ve had a long day and need some soothing music or maybe suggest a new restaurant based on your subconscious reaction to a commercial you recently saw for italian food?
All Streaming Viacom Content to Expire on Netflix
Breaking news from Reddit, The rapture is happening digitally for all shows from MTV, Comedy Central, and more. Read the full list below.
Expiring content:
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BET
CBS
MTV
Nickolodean
Paramount Films
We recommend pulling an all-nighter and watching the following if you’re not at a rapture party:
Shows
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Avatar: The Last Airbender
Aeon Flux
Chappelle’s Show
Invader Zim
Upright Citizen’s Brigade
The Guild
Mystery Science Theater 3000
Meerkat Manor
No Reservations
Movies
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Punch-Drunk Love
Fargo
The Fly
Cat People
The Shining
The Ten
The Terminator
Zombieland
Black Dynamite
Rashomon
Seven Samurai
Moat Mountain’s Made of Metal
Everybody loves a good IPA right? (Well, no, Mel and Jason think they’re too hoppy, but that is because they are dead inside).
But IPAs are the flagship beer of most breweries, and when we heard that Moat Mountain was releasing their Iron Mike IPA in a can, it made us wonder a few things: the first being, “can we have some?”, and the second being, “why cans?”
It turns out that there are many benefits to using cans over bottles. They block light, preventing a chemical process known as the skunk effect. Cans are also more environmentally friendly than glass, as the difference in weight saves gas and the recycling process of tin is more efficient.
Let’s raise a glass in celebration of Moat Mountain’s big step toward world domination!
“Rhymes with Orange” Cartoonist Appeared at UMass-Amherst on April 7th
Hillary Price, who does the strip “Rhymes with Orange,” appeared at UMASS-Amherst on Thursday, April 79th, 2011 at 5:00 PM in Room #249 of the Boyden Gym. We hope you are familiar with her work and know the strip in particular, as it’s a surreal masterpiece – and she’s wonderful, too! Take a look at the strip that accompanies this post and please share this info with anyone whom you think might be interested.
