Personal Infrastructure

I especially like the part about sensors harvesting power from “the ambient radio power from television , FM radio and WiFi networks. Props to Tesla…”

“Researchers have devised a way to write memories onto the brains of flies, revealing which brain cells are involved in making bad memories…They modified the neurons by adding a sort of trigger, or receptor, to each one. This receptor was activated by a chemical called ATP.”

“All cell phones will come packed with an RFID chip by next summer — giving your phone the possibility of also becoming the keys to your car or house. That was the prediction of Ericsson’s vice-president of systems architecture, Håkan Djuphammar, speaking at the company’s Business Innovation Forum in Stockholm on Tuesday.”

New York Times Book Review noted yesterday the impetus of Iraq and Afghanistan troops coming home with limbs lost to IEDs to drive brain interfaces to artificial limbs.

“The Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 (RP 2009) team developed the first fully integrated prosthetic arm that can be controlled naturally, provide sensory feedback and allows for eight degrees of freedom—a level of control far beyond the current state of the art for prosthetic limbs. Through RICs Neural Engineering Center for Bionic Medicine, several researchers completed limb system includes a virtual environment used for patient training, clinical configuration and to record limb movements and control signals during clinical investigations.”

A review of the new Mattel “Mind Flex” toy. Sensors read your brainwaves and adjust a fan that lifts or lowers a foam ball. It’s matching activity to some basic brainwave patterns, so it’s not well beyond biofeedback in the 1970s. But still, the idea’s got an iressistible attraction to it.

see also www.mindflexgames.com

According to Francis Heylighen:

“There is an interesting new method to measure how happy or sad people feel by analysing the “feeling” words that they use in their texts (blogs, song texts, presidential addresses, …).

Common words are given a “valence”, i.e. an average value on a scale ranging from most happy (e.g. “love”, “hope”, “proud”, “hug”…) to least happy (e.g. “death”, “lonely”, “rape”, “afraid”, …). The average valence of a text is calculated as an average (weighted by frequency) of the valence of the words it contains.

By analysing millions of blogs it is possible to measure the average valence on any given day, or in specific groups, like countries, age groups, or genders. These valences can fluctuate quite a bit, being high on days like Christmas or the Obama election, and low on days like anniversaries of 9/11 or the death of Michael Jackson. They also tend to be lower for teenagers and pensioners, and higher in middle age.”

This is one is notable for the mobile nature of the group interplay. Feels more organic – I guess organisms are mobile, nervous systems are constantly circulating.

DOD test of mesh networking of RFID tags. Kind of Phildickian – hundreds of little boxes traveling together and staying in touch with each other and their leader – kind of hive-like.

http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/view/5087

Pachube is a great site for hands-on work on the embedding of intelligence in the world.

Sixth Sense, out of MIT, hit at TED.