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How to measure emotions

  
  
  
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Want marketers to measure your emotions? That technology's coming

 Are you a geek who has trouble “reading” people? Now there is new hope.

Research at the MIT Media Lab and the University of Cambridge to help people on the autism spectrum has spawned two new technologies to measure emotional response, along with a company called Affectiva to market them.

Q Sensor Curve is designed to wear on the wrist, so it is comfortable and unobtrusive to wear all day at work, play, or sleep. This makes it ideal for long-term measurement in clinical and therapeutic research. (Credit: Affectiva)

Researchers have shown they can use technologies to measure your emotional state of mind for market research, educational, and medical purposes. The technology could ultimately become part of a larger set of tracking tools that will help companies tailor products and services more precisely to people they’re targeting.                                                                             ...  read more

 Source: MIT Media Lab, Effectiva

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A "paper" smartphone? Welcome to the future

  
  
  
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Smartphones, laptops, and tablets will soon be as thin and flexible as a piece of paper.  This is not science fiction.  It’s already happening.

According to Gizmag.com: “Researchers from the Human Media Lab at Canada’s Queen’s University have created a fully-functioning floppy smartphone [that they call a] Paperphone.  The Paperphone can do things like making and receiving calls, storing e-books, and playing music. [It] conforms to the shape of its user’s pocket or purse, and can even be operated through bending actions.”

“This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper,” said its creator, Roel Vertegaal, who is also the director of the Human Media Lab. “You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen.”

In just a few short years (perhaps sooner) computers like the MacBook Air will seem like boat anchors…the iPad will feel like a cast-iron frying pan…and you’ll be able to carry your smartphone like a dollar bill in your wallet.  It’s all right around the corner.

Source: Eric Knight

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Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo Team Up to Advance Semantic Web

  
  
  
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Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have teamed up to encourage Web page operators to make the meaning of their pages understandable to search engines.

Web of words: This graph of linked phrases lets software understand the meaning of online content. The system is backed by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
Credit: Dan Brickley

The three big Web companies launched the semantic-Web-technology initiative, known as Schema.org, last week. It defines an interconnected vocabulary of terms that can be added to the HTML markup of a Web page to communicate the meaning of concepts on the page. This data will allow search engines to better understand how useful a page may be for a given search query.

Schema.org asks for semantic markup to be written using a format known as microdata, which is not yet a W3C standard, rather than RDFa, a more widely used W3C-approved alternative.

Source: Technology Review

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Search by Image - a new form of search

  
  
  
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Google has introduced Search by Image, a new form of search that lets you upload an image to find similar images. For instance, you can upload vacation photos of monuments you don’t recall the names of, and images of that same monument appear in search results, along with its name.

You can search by image in three ways: drag the image into the Google images search box, upload the image, or paste a URL of the image. Search by Image browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox are also available.

Google will also begin caching web pages that it predicts users will click, saving two to five seconds in most searches.

Killer Question: What do we want to do differently?

Source: Google

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The world's first three-dimensional plasmon rulers

  
  
  
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The 3-D plasmon ruler is constructed from five gold nanorods in which one nanorod (red) is placed perpendicular between two pairs of parallel nanorods (yellow and green).

Paul Alivisatos of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and colleagues have designed a first-of-its-kind ruler capable of measuring the configuration and movement of macromolecules, such as DNA.

The researchers constructed an “H”-shaped device out of five gold nanorods, the length and position of each of which could be controlled. They then looked for changes in spectra associated with plasmon coupling — the tendency for waves of free electrons associated with metallic nanoparticles to interact with each other.

As a molecule pushes or pulls pieces of the device, plasmons in the rods interact in distinct ways. By measuring the light scattered by the plasmon interactions, the researchers were able to deduce how the ruler, and anything attached to it, moves, in three dimensions.

The researchers say the rulers could be used to study protein folding and how DNA molecules interact with enzymes.

Killer Question: How do we more strongly incorporate innovation / creative problem solving into our day to day work?

Source: U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)

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Coming to TV screens of the future: Smell-O-Vision

  
  
  
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Researchers at UC San Diego and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) in Korea have demonstrated that it is possible to generate thousands of odors with a device small enough to fit on the back of your television.

Coming to TV screens of the future: Smell-O-Vision

This could make real “Smell-O-Vision” possible. “Smell-O-Vision” was a film technique that released smells during films, used for only one movie, The Smell of Mystery, released in 1960.

“For example, if people are eating pizza, the viewer smells pizza coming from a TV or cell phone,” said Sungho Jin, professor in the departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and NanoEngineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “And if a beautiful lady walks by, they smell perfume. Instantaneously generated fragrances or odors would match the scene shown on a TV or cell phone.”

The researchers found that it is possible to create a compact device which heats a small metal wire to vaporize an aqueous solution, such as ammonia or rose oil, releasing smells from a small chamber. The chamber is made of a non-toxic, non-flammable silicon elastomer.

The system uses 200 controllers to selectively activate as many as 10,000 odors. That pretty much covers the number of odors humans can distinguish, the researchers said.

Killer Question: How do we give recognition to people/teams with new fresh ideas? 

Source: University of California - San Diego

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