Every brain has a soundtrack.

Every brain has a soundtrack. Its tempo and tone will vary, depending on mood, frame of mind, and other features of the brain itself. When that soundtrack is recorded and played back — to an emergency responder, or a firefighter — it may sharpen their reflexes during a crisis, and calm their nerves afterward.

Over the past decade, the influence of music on cognitive development, learning, and emotional well-being has emerged as a hot field of scientific study. To explore music’s potential relevance to emergency response, the Dept of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology Directorate (S&T) has begun a study into a form of neurotraining called “Brain Music” that uses music created in advance from listeners’ own brain waves to help them deal with common ailments like insomnia, fatigue, and headaches stemming from stressful environments. The concept of Brain Music is to use the frequency, amplitude, and duration of musical sounds to move the brain from an anxious state to a more relaxed state.

“Strain comes with an emergency response job, so we are interested in finding ways to help these workers remain at the top of their game when working and get quality rest when they go off a shift,” said S&T Program Manager Robert Burns. “Our goal is to find new ways to help first responders perform at the highest level possible, without increasing tasks, training, or stress levels.”

If the brain “composes” the music, the first job of scientists is to take down the notes, and that is exactly what Human Bionics LLC of Purcellville, VA does. Each recording is converted into two unique musical compositions designed to trigger the body’s natural responses, for example, by improving productivity while at work, or helping adjust to constantly changing work hours.

The compositions are clinically shown to promote one of two mental states in each individual: relaxation – for reduced stress and improved sleep; and alertness – for improved concentration and decision-making. Each 2-6 minute track is a composition performed on a single instrument, usually a piano. The relaxation track may sound like a “melodic, subdued Chopin sonata,” while the alertness track may have “more of a Mozart sound,” says Burns. (It seems there’s a classical genius—or maybe two genii—in all of us. Listen to an instrumental alert track at www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/multimedia/snapshots/st_brain_music_active.mp3.

via Newswise Science News | Brain Music.

Florida’s Trident Tailed Sea Monster

It has a large, somewhat mammalian head, clawed fins, and a trident-like tail…so they say of Florida’s sea monster, with sightings dating back to the 1800’s. There’s apparently more than one of these puppies, and they have the potential to move quickly with a lot of power. Hours of video footage exist by a guy named Sowerwine showing bits and pieces of the creature.

MonsterQuest went to an ocean-fed coastal lake in Florida to investigate such legends of a sea monster with a forked tail, but the lake was full of sediment, and the divers couldn’t see diddly. They did, however, have an intriguing sonar hit of something about 14 feet long moving quickly, although murky water conditions made it impossible to find the sucker.

One expert feels that the creature is a manatee, although the snout of the beast is skinnier and its eye and head structure appear different. Others feel that the animal is a seal of some kind following the Gulf Stream, possibly a Hooded seal or a Caribbean Monk seal, thought to be extinct.

- via Vulpesffb

The behavior is the same as mating manatees, but that’s not a manatee tail.

Update: According to the Underwater Times, this is a manatee with an injured tail:

 

Florida Fish and Wildlife biologists believe that the cold weather has helped to uncover a local mystery; the identity of the mysterious sea monster featured on the TV show MonsterQuest which airs on the History Channel.

As hundreds of manatees huddled to stay warm inside the channel of the Florida Power and Light Riviera Beach Power Plant, one of the gentle sea cows stood out due to a distinct feature of its anatomy.

Thought to have been injured by a boat propeller at some point in its life, the manatee’s tail grew back into three separate prongs.

Due to the unusual shape, the manatee leaves three separate wakes on the water’s surface while swimming just below.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission believes that this is the source of the sea creature shown during a segment last year on Monsterquest….

via under water times

Man foils bank robbery after assuming it was an April Fool

The problem now that I have the RSS Ticker working in Firefox… is that there is too much interesting stuff to read!  I’m also noticing a lot of stories that I missed, like the one below.

Customer Andrew Stewart was sitting down reading a newspaper in an Exeter branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland on March 31 last year when a raider burst in and demanded money.

Brian Davison, 32, put his hand inside his back pack then told cashiers:  “I’ve got a gun. Seriously I’ve got a gun – hand over the ******* money”. But as terrified cashiers prepared to hand over a bundle of notes, Mr Stewart calmly walked up to the robber and said: “It’s April the 1st isn’t it mate? It’s April Fool’s Day”.

When Davidson said to him “I’ve got a gun I will shoot you”, Andrew replied “go on then shoot me” and grabbed the bag from his hands.

He opened it in front of staff and after seeing it was empty sat down and carried on reading his paper, Exeter Crown Court heard.

Davison fled the scene but was later arrested and has now pleaded guilty to affray.

via Man foils bank robbery after assuming it was an April Fool – Telegraph.

100 points for Gryffindor for bravery and sheer luck in guessing that there was no gun.

Occult hit: Witches bucking religion trend

While most other major religions lost ground Wiccan — whose members Wiccans sometimes refer to themselves as witches — and other so-called “New Religious movements” grew by more than a million members since the last ARIS survey was published in 2001. They re now an estimated 1.2 percent of the adult population.

via Occult hit: Witches bucking religion trend :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Religion.

YouTube – UFO IN LONDON 15 APRIL 2009. very close!

YouTube – UFO IN LONDON 15 APRIL 2009. very close!.

I cant belive i filmed this on my mobile!
It was so close!
Did anyone else see it? NW10 area.
Was listening to Steve Vai at the time, as you can tell.

Virus mix-up by lab could have resulted in pandemic

It’s emerged that virulent H5N1 bird flu was sent out by accident from an Austrian lab last year and given to ferrets in the Czech Republic before anyone realised. As well as the risk of it escaping into the wild, the H5N1 got mixed with a human strain, which might have spawned a hybrid that could unleash a pandemic.

Last December, the Austrian branch of US vaccine company Baxter sent a batch of ordinary human H3N2 flu, altered so it couldn’t replicate, to Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, also in Austria. In February, a lab in the Czech Republic working for Avir alerted Baxter that, unexpectedly, ferrets inoculated with the sample had died. It turned out the sample contained live H5N1, which Baxter uses to make vaccine. The two seem to have been mixed in error.

Markus Reinhard of Baxter says no one was infected because the H3N2 was handled at a high level of containment. But Ab Osterhaus of Erasmus University in the Netherlands says: “We need to go to great lengths to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen.”

Accidental release of a mixture of live H5N1 and H3N2 viruses could have resulted in dire consequences. While H5N1 doesn’t easily infect people, H3N2 viruses do. If someone exposed to a mixture of the two had been simultaneously infected with both strains, he or she could have served as an incubator for a hybrid virus able to transmit easily to and among people.

via Virus mix-up by lab could have resulted in pandemic – Science – Health & Science – The Times of India.

Face Mining of Star Trek

Our face mining technology enables new video viewing experiences:

* Clickable navigation to scenes of interest

* Search for specific people

* Hyperlinking scenes of interest

* Embedding scenes of interest in other media (e.g blogs)

* Adding commentary synchronized with play points of interests

* Summarizing occurrences of single characters

* Summarizing co-occurrences of characters

Here we illustrate the face mining concept for the TV series Star Trek. Specifically, we applied our state-of-the art algorithms in face detection, face tracking and face recognition to 67 Star Trek episodes over three seasons. This process automatically extracts all visible face tracks, and clusters these into a small number of same-person groupings. Currently, we recognize frontal or near-frontal tracks. In the near future, we will extend our results to non-frontal tracks as well.

Given our face mining output, it took a person less than five minutes to assign names to all the main characters (Kirk, Spock, Mccoy, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu and Chekov) and a couple of minor ones (Janice, Nurse Chapel) across all 67 episodes. The above graph visualizes the relative face time for each of the main characters across all three seasons.

via Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition.

Test of the “RSS Ticker” add-in for Firefox

For those of you not using Firefox, one of the best things about it is that people are constantly writing new plug-ins you can easily add. Some are cosmetic, some improve security, and some improve your productivity and keep you better connected.

RSS is a technology you can use with Firefox to subscribe to a web site or blog’s posts. Firefox lets you click on a subscribed RSS feed and see the latest entries… but that wasn’t easy enough for me.

I’d like new posts show up when anything new is added for the sites I am monitoring.  RSS Ticker 2.0.3 seems like it might do just that.

In tests tonight, it did scroll my news feed and posts from my blog. I was able to dismiss everything as read. It also has a setting you can set to hide the bar when there are no unread items. I have it checking every 2 minutes. Will it find this new post and display the bar?

Results: Yes, it worked. I click to read the post and the ticker goes away. So cool.

What happens if I update a post?

Nothing, with regard to the ticker. Updates are not seen by the RSS Ticker as new entries, so they will not be re-displayed once they are dismissed.

Does the feed/ticker show title changes?

Yes, if you are blogging on WordPress.com and you make your change to your post’s title before the RSS Ticker loads it, the person will see the change to the title of your post.

RSS feeds (and the orange logo) are all over the place.  If you want to monitor news, blogs, job listings, or anything else with an RSS feed, I recommend Firefox with the RSS Ticker add-in.

A few neat feeds (I’ll add more as I find them). If you click the links below, you need a web browser that allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds.

RSS

• The CDC’s swine flu RSS feed (RSS).
• The most popular technology bookmarks (RSS) currently being tagged by people on the delicious social bookmarking site is fantastic and can lead you to great new places.  (Or try some other category to suit your interests.)
• Create an eBay search which is an RSS feed and watch for new items.

Farecast, back in August of 2006 had an RSS feed so you could monitor cheap prices. I can’t find it now. Perhaps it vanished when Micro$oft ate them?

Twitter: If you follow people on Twitter, you can keep track of all of them along with all of your other feeds by subscribing.  (You’ll need to enter your twitter username and password when you click to get the RSS feed.) The Above Top Secret twitter feed is the most interesting I’ve found so far and includes links to stories.

Here is an example of what you will see in Firefox if you click an RSS links (actually there are two feeds on this blog, one for posts and one for comments, the image below is me subscribing to the comments so I can see them scroll by in the ticker as I work on other things).

After clicking the RSS link, click [Subscribe Now]. You will notice that you can check the box to have this feed show up in the ticker or not.

Optical disc offers 500GB storage

It looks like a color tweaked button from a pair of Levis jeans, but it is really a new super DVD. A normal DVD holds 4.7 GB of data (8.5 GB if it is double layer).

A disc that can store 500 gigabytes (GB) of data, equivalent to 100 DVDs, has been unveiled by General Electric.

The micro-holographic disc, which is the same size as existing DVD discs, is aimed at the archive industry. But the company believes it can eventually be used in the consumer market place and home players.

Blu-ray discs, which are used to store high definition movies and games, can currently hold between 25GB and 50GB.

Micro-holographic discs can store more data than DVDs or Blu-ray because they store information on the disc in three dimensions, rather than just pits on the surface of the disc …

While the technology is still in the laboratory stage, GE believes it will take off because players can be built which are backwards compatible with existing DVD and Blu-ray technologies.

In a statement the firm said: “The hardware and formats are so similar to current optical storage technology that the micro-holographic players will enable consumers to play back their CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs.”

”GE’s breakthrough is a huge step toward bringing our next generation holographic storage technology to the everyday consumer,” said Mr Lawrence in a statement.

He added: “The day when you can store your entire high definition movie collection on one disc and support high resolution formats like 3D television is closer than you think.”

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Optical disc offers 500GB storage.

There are 2 TB drives (2000 GB) you can buy now for around $300, but 500 GB on a DVD is great.

Some facts from wikipedia:

• The U.S. Library of Congress Web Capture team has claimed that “as of May 2008, the Library has collected more than 82.6 terabytes of data”.^[1]
• Ancestry.com claims approximately 600 TB of genealogical data with the inclusion of US Census data from 1790 to 1930.^[2]
• Hitachi introduced the world’s first one terabyte hard disk drive in 2007.^[3]
• In 1993, total Internet traffic amounted to approx. 100 TB for the year.^[4] As of June 2008^[update], Cisco Systems estimated Internet traffic at 160 TB/s (which assuming to be constant comes to 5 Zettabytes for the year).^[5]

I hacked my first computer’s OS to display that it’s molecular hard drive has a 500 exabyte capacity.

“One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video.”^[18]

I’m upgrading to a 5oo xenobyte quantum hard drive powered by dark energy in 2013. Then I’ll go around saying, “I gotta lot a yottabytes,” because, of course, one xenobyte is 1000 yottabytes. (Pass the word!)

A yottabyte is 10 ²⁴ bytes.  That is 1 septillion, which is a 1 followed by 24 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

1,000,000 = one million (MB, megabyte)
1,000,000,000 = one billion (GB gigabyte)
1,000,000,000,000 = one trillion (TB terabyte)
1,000,000,000,000,000 = one quadrillion (PB petabyte)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 = one quintillion (EB exabyte)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = one sextillion (ZB zettabyte)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = one septillion (YB yottabyte)
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 = one octillion (XB xenobyte)

Jailhouse Tech Sniffs Out ‘Cell’ Phones

In prison, the cellphone is a deadly weapon: Inmates can use contraband phones to plot more crime, intimidate or kill witnesses or plan an escape. But the introduction of the Safe Prisons Communications Act of 2009 — which would amend federal law to allow the use of jamming technology to block smuggled cellphones — has prompted a showdown between jamming advocates and wireless communications companies.

Jammers, however, are not the only tool for battling contraband cellphones. Several companies are marketing cellphone detection as a smarter alternative to jamming. The principle is straightforward: Instead of blocking signals, prison authorities can use a network of sensors to detect cellphone transmissions, measure their use and triangulate their location.

… ITT Corporation… markets a system called Cell Hound. It’s currently installed in some state and federal institutions. According to Bittner, a system like Cell Hound is more of an intel tool. Illicit phones are often hidden with other contraband — and detectors can be used not only to locate phones, but to track the patterns of the callers. “You need to study the habit of the phone — who uses it most of the time, how it got in there,” he said. “They will never store the phone in a cell where they use it. They rent it out to other inmates. In some cases they won’t use the phone.” Cell Hound scans for the most common cellphone radio frequency signatures in North America; a central server then maps the location and gives a visual alert on a corrections officer’s workstation.

ITT is not the only company in this game, however. Israeli prisons also have a major issue with contraband phones (pictured here). Netline, an Israeli electronic-warfare firm, also markets a cellphone detection system with a central control. Cellphone detection could potentially have other applications, too: detecting illicit cellphone use inside secure conference facilities, or to aid a network in pushing marketing messages or alerts to mobile phones.

Typically, law enforcement and intelligence agencies don’t like to advertise what kinds of tools they use to counter or detect illicit communications. ITT, for instance, initially marketed Cell Hound in a very low-key fashion. But pending legislation in Congress, as Bittner described it, forced the company to “come out of the closet” with its technology.

via Jailhouse Tech Sniffs Out ‘Cell’ Phones | Danger Room.

Does anyone know what (if any) transmissions enter and exit a typical powered on cell phone when it is on but not making calls? Actually the “How it works” page says that step 1 in detection is: “A cell phone places or receives a voice or data call.”, so I assume they can’t track a phone until it is used?

Here is an image from the Cell Hound video: