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MonthJanuary 2010

Taser adds mobile phone monitoring tool to its arsenal

January 11, 2010 /

Hot on the heels of this court decision, it looks like Taser is trying to diversify their product offerings:

Stun gun maker Taser wants to help parents, not with jolts of electricity but with a tool which allows parents to effectively take over a child’s mobile phone and manage its use.

“Basically we’re taking old fashioned parenting and bringing it into the mobile world,” Taser chairman and co-founder Tom Smith said at the Consumer Electronics Show here, where the Arizona company unveiled the new product.

“Because when you give your child his mobile phone you don’t know who they’re talking to, what they’re sending or texting, all of those things,” Smith told AFP.

The phone application, called “Mobile Protector,” allows a parent to screen a child’s incoming and outgoing calls and messages, block particular numbers and even listen in on a conversation.

A dashboard on a parent’s phone or a personal computer shows the mobiles being monitored and the permitted callers such as friends and family.

AFP: Taser adds mobile phone monitoring tool to its arsenal

(via Cryptogon)

The X-tra factor – grime and dubstep in the 00s

January 11, 2010 /

The hardcore continuum’s claim to pre-eminence has always been that it’s not just dance music. That’s no slight to dance music, but the truth is that there’s tons of it in the world, all different flavours, and if you fancied shaking your stuff in the noughties then you’d probably have been better off with hip-hop, or dancehall, or that hardy perennial house music. With jungle/garage/grime/dubstep, there’s always been something extra, an X factor that made it “dance music + _____”. The two main things that filled the blank were a) innovation, the idea that no other music around moved faster or mutated wider, and b) a relationship to “the real”, whether that was coded as “street knowledge”, “the dark side”, late capitalism/post-socialist Britain, etc. In the noughties, the danceability element even slipped somewhat: grime was more moshable than groovy, while dubstep could be a bit slow-skank sluggish and head-noddy. But more relevant to this survey is that the pulse of those X-tra factors seemed to grow fainter as the decade proceeded, or at least more indistinct and muddled. […]

This year’s array of post-dubstep sounds are no longer chained to realness but are much more about garish hyper-reality. “Purple”, the buzz-term for the Bristol-based micro-genre created by Joker, Guido and others, is colour rich in psychotropic associations, from Jimi’s Purple Haze to the “purple drank” cough syrup that Dirty South gangsta rappers love to sip.

Guardian: Simon Reynolds’ Notes on the noughties: Grime and dubstep – a noise you could believe in

(via Chris23)

20 Dynamic Paintings From The Italian Futurists

January 11, 2010 /

The Strength of the Curve Tullio Crali 1930

Cityscape Tullio Crali 1939

Nose Dive on the City Tullio Crali, 1939

20 paintings, and the history of the Futurist movement

Marinetti wanted Futurism to become the official artistic style of Italian fascism, but Mussolini resisted and encouraged a wide range of styles to keep artists of all types on the side of the regime. While Futurism would ultimately be linked to fascism, there were many socialist and anarchist Futurists, linked by an interest in political violence. Towards the end of the 1930s, Italian fascists were adopting the stance of their German counterparts, considering modern art to be degenerate and rejecting the Futurist movement.

20 Dynamic Paintings From The Italian Futurists

(via Mister X)

See also: Vorticist art collections

Augmented reality medical app

January 11, 2010 /

augmented reality medical app

(Image from Metaverse One on TweetPhoto).

I’m not sure if this is just a mockup or an actual working prototype (the latter would surprise me), but this “interactive educational augmented reality medical app” is a great concept. I found it via Bruce Sterling, and it reminds me of some of the stuff from his State of the Future 2010:

If patients end up doing their own diagnoses by aggregating patient data, using Web 2.0 style collective intelligence, and especially if they then start suing doctors who make demonstrable, dumb mistakes, the practice of medicine will be wrecked. Not improved, wrecked. It’ll be hugely damaged, in the same way that the music business was damaged by Napster, and newspapers were wrecked by Craigslist, or the Democratic Party was outmaneuvered and tamed by some Chicago guy who had social media and a digital fundraising machine.

Doctors do make dumb mistakes all the time. That’s the nature of a knowledge guild that restricts vital knowledge to a professional clique.

We didn’t want amateur brain surgeons because they are dangerous quacks without medical ethics. But there’s no physical reason why one couldn’t have amateur brain surgeons with instructables off Wikipedia,
and no reason why theses jaspers couldn’t do a sort-of-okay job, too. Not perfect, but cheap and fast and distributed and upgradeable, like Wikipedia compared to Encyclopedia Britannica.

That’s network culture. If medicine gets the big wikipedia treatment, you don’t get a computer-literate doctor, you get a doctor-literate web activist.

Strange and scary to think about – the current health care debate could be obsolete before we know it, with a whole new host of controversies to consider.

See also: Biopunk: the biotechnology black market

New Trend In Prison: Tattoo Your Eyes!

January 10, 2010 /

See also: World’s First Eyeball Tattoo

(via Neatorama)

Do vitamin supplements really do any good?

January 10, 2010 /

Vitamins—with their promise to bridge the gap between the nutrients our bodies need and those they get—have always seemed reassuringly simple: Just pop a multivitamin and let your body soak in those extra nutrients. But not any longer. During the past few years, study after study has raised doubts about what, if any, good vitamins actually do a body. They could even pose some real medical risks.
Half of all American adults take some sort of nutritional supplement. But research on a wide variety of patient populations and medical conditions has failed to find much evidence that multivitamins, the most commonly used of the lot, prevent major chronic diseases in healthy people. The most recent knock came this spring, when a study of more than 160,000 post-menopausal women, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that the all-in-one pills did not prevent cancer, heart attacks, or strokes and did not reduce overall mortality.

Individual vitamins and minerals haven’t fared much better under scientific scrutiny, with research debunking some of the reputed benefits of vitamin B6, calcium, niacin, and others. In 2006, the National Institutes of Health convened an independent panel of experts to evaluate the evidence that vitamins could prevent chronic disease. The scientists ultimately issued a report stating that studies “do not provide strong evidence for beneficial health-related effects of supplements taken singly, in pairs, or in combinations.”
The news on antioxidants, the darlings of the vitamin menagerie, is even more troubling. These compounds, which include vitamins A, C, and E, selenium, beta carotene, and folate, fight free radicals, unstable compounds thought to damage cells and contribute to aging. But not only do antioxidant supplements fail to protect against heart disease, stroke, and cancer; they actually increase the risk of death, according to a 2007 analysis of research on more than 232,000 people, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, as well as other studies.

Slate: Do supplements really do any good?

(via The Agitator)

Etymology of the word Zork

January 10, 2010 /

The lowdown on Zork’s name, inasmuch as a lowdown has been provided in print, was given by authors Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, and Tim Anderson in 1979 in the article “Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game,” Computer 12:4, 51-59 (April 1979):

The first version of Zork appeared in June 1977. Interestingly enough, it was never “announced” or “installed” for use, and the name was chosen because it was a widely used nonsense word, like “foobar.”

This is a clear explanation, but it raises the question of how this particular nonsense word came into wide use at MIT. It seems reasonable to pursue this question, and reasonable that there would be some discernable answer. After all, there’s a whole official document, RFC 3092, explaining the etymology of “foobar.” It could be interesting to know what sort of nonsense word “zork” is, since it’s quite a different thing, with very different resonances, to borrow a “nonsense” term from Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll as opposed to Hugo Ball or Tristan Tzara. “Zork,” of course, doesn’t seem to derive from either humorous English nonsense poetry or Dada; the possibilities for its origins are more complex.

Post Position: A Note on the Word “Zork”

(via Jorn Barger’s shared items)

MIT neuroengineers silence brain cells with multiple colors of light

January 10, 2010 /

Neuroscientists at MIT have developed a powerful new class of tools to reversibly shut down brain activity using different colors of light. When targeted to specific neurons, these tools could potentially lead to new treatments for the abnormal brain activity associated with disorders such as chronic pain, epilepsy, brain injury, and Parkinson’s disease. The tools work on the principle that such disorders might be best treated by silencing, rather than stimulating, brain activity. These “super silencers” exert exquisite control over the timing of the shutdown of overactive neural circuits – an effect that’s impossible with existing drugs or other conventional therapies.

“Silencing different sets of neurons with different colors of light allows us to understand how they work together to implement brain functions,” explains Ed Boyden, senior author of the study, to be published in the Jan. 7 issue of Nature. “Using these new tools, we can look at two neural pathways and study how they compute together. These tools will help us understand how to control neural circuits, leading to new understandings and treatments for brain disorders – some of the biggest unmet medical needs in the world.” Boyden is the Benesse Career Development Professor in the MIT Media Lab and an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.

escience: MIT neuroengineers silence brain cells with multiple colors of light

(via Fadereu)

Restoration of lost Scientology materials complete

January 8, 2010 /

More than 1,000 unreleased recordings of lectures by L. Ron Hubbard and reams of corresponding writings have been unveiled in the culmination of a 25-year project to locate, restore and transcribe lost pieces of the Scientology founder’s work.

Though sure to be derided by the church’s many critics, its followers say the materials amount to an opportunity to deepen understanding of the religion and to release the last known unpublished Hubbard works dealing with Scientology and Dianetics.

“It would be like discovering that Buddha, unbeknownst to anybody, had sat down and wrote down the entirety of his discoveries and it could be verified that he wrote it,” said Tommy Davis, the church’s top spokesman.

SF Gate: Restoration of lost Scientology materials complete

(via Religion News)

Court to Cops: Stop Tasing People into Compliance

January 8, 2010 /

Sometimes there is good news:

The use of Tasers has become increasingly controversial over the last year, following high-profile cases such as the Tasering of a 10-year-old girl who had refused to take a shower and video of a 72-year-old great-grandmother who was Tasered following a driving offense. Now a federal appeals court in San Francisco has set down new rules for when police officers are allowed to use Tasers. In particular, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Tasers can’t be used simply to force a non-violent person to bend to an officer’s will. The court’s reason was that Taser’s X26 stun gun inflicts more pain than other “non-lethal” options.

However:

It would be naïve to assume that there will not be any market response to the ruling. We have recently seen a rash of new devices aimed at police forces, including assorted laser dazzlers and pepper ball guns as Taser alternatives. There are also portable pain beams in prospect, both microwave and infrared laser varieties, not to mention various acoustic blasters. The ruling is likely to lead to more experimentation, both technical and in the courts, to find out just what the acceptable level of pain and suffering is and how it can best be delivered.

The ruling is also a potential boost for devices such as the LED Incapacitator, which does not rely on pain but other physiological effects (disorientation, loss of balance and nausea).

Court to Cops: Stop Tasing People into Compliance

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