Weiye Loh's Library tagged Image → View Popular, Search in Google

Sep

2011

Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind

newscenter.berkeley.edu/...brain-movies

- Preview

Scientists Reconstruct Brains' Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment

UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen.

gizmodo.com/...ideo-clips-from-brain-activity

- Preview

Brain Image Media Simulacrum

They used three different subjects for the experiments—incidentally, they were part of the research team because it requires being inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging system for hours at a time. The subjects were exposed to two different groups of Hollywood movie trailers as the fMRI system recorded the brain's blood flow through their brains' visual cortex.

The readings were fed into a computer program in which they were divided into three-dimensional pixels units called voxels (volumetric pixels). This process effectively decodes the brain signals generated by moving pictures, connecting the shape and motion information from the movies to specific brain actions. As the sessions progressed, the computer learned more and more about how the visual activity presented on the screen corresponded to the brain activity.
After recording this information, another group of clips was used to reconstruct the videos shown to the subjects. The computer analyzed 18 million seconds of random YouTube video, building a database of potential brain activity for each clip. From all these videos, the software picked the one hundred clips that caused a brain activity more similar to the ones the subject watched, combining them into one final movie. Although the resulting video is low resolution and blurry, it clearly matched the actual clips watched by the subjects.

Jul

2011

Facial Recognition Software Singles Out Innocent Man | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

While a boon to police departments looking to save time and money fighting identity fraud, it’s frightening to think that people are having their lives seriously disrupted thanks to computer errors. If you are, say, a truck driver, something like this could cause you weeks of lost pay, something many Americans just can’t afford to do. And what if this technology expands beyond just rooting out identity fraud? What if you were slammed against a car hood as police falsely identified you as a criminal? The fact that Hass didn’t even have a chance to fight the computer’s findings before his license was suspended is especially disturbing. What would you do if this happened to you?

utopianist.com/...tware-singles-out-innocent-man

- Preview

Image Facial Recognition Law Technology

Gass was at home when he got a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles saying his license had been revoked. Why? The Boston Globe explains:

An antiterrorism computerized facial recognition system that scans a database of millions of state driver’s license images had picked his as a possible fraud. It turned out Gass was flagged because he looks like another driver, not because his image was being used to create a fake identity. His driving privileges were returned but, he alleges in a lawsuit, only after 10 days of bureaucratic wrangling to prove he is who he says he is.

Jul

2011

Greening the screen » Scienceline

For environmentalists trying to use entertainment to shape broad public attitudes and behaviors, nothing could be more important than understanding how to reach these hard-to-get people. Something that will speak to them, something that will change their minds, and most importantly, something that will incite them to action. A documentary might not be that something.

scienceline.org/...greening-the-screen

- Preview

Environment Media Image Entertainment Hollywood Cultural Industries Climate Change Narratives Emotion

Environmental films tend to “draw a pretty pre-disposed audience,” said Susi Moser, a fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University and climate change communications specialist. A 2010 study on The Age of Stupid (a hybrid documentary, drama, and animation on climate change) found that most filmgoers were already quite concerned about climate change, and motivated to mitigate it, even before seeing the film. For audiences that are already devoted to an environmental cause, these films merely confirm their pre-existing beliefs.
Documentary film director Louie Psihoyos anticipated this problem when he directed The Cove, a 2009 Oscar-winning documentary about mass dolphin hunting in Japan. His solution was to model the film after a popular Hollywood blockbuster.

“We wanted to do a ‘making-of’ style film that felt like Ocean’s Eleven,” he said. “That was a way in — to tell a dark story in a popular way.”
7 more annotation(s)...
- But not all documentaries take such a novel approach. Randy Olson, a marine biologist-turned-filmmaker at the University of Southern California, is a harsh critic of what he sees as a very literal-minded, information-heavy approach within the environmental film genre. Well-intentioned environmental documentary filmmakers are just “making their same, boring, linear, one-dimensional explorations of issues,” said Olson. “The public’s not buying it.”
- The problem may run deeper than audience tallies — after all, An Inconvenient Truth currently ranks as the sixth-highest grossing documentary in the United States. However, a 2010 study by social psychologist Jessica Nolan found that while the film increased viewers’ concern about global warming, that concern didn’t translate into any substantial action a month later.
- To move a larger audience to action, Olson advocates a shift from the literal-minded world of documentary into the imaginative world of narrative.
- One organization using this approach is the Science and Entertainment Exchange, a program of the National Academy of Sciences. The Exchange puts writers, producers, and directors in touch with scientists and engineers who can answer specific questions or just brainstorm ideas. For example, writers for the TV show Fringe changed their original plot point of mind control through hypnosis to magnetic manipulation of brain waves after speaking with a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.
- Hollywood, Health and Society (HHS), a program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, takes a similar approach by providing free resources to the entertainment industry. HHS connects writers and producers — from prime time dramas like Law and Order and House to daytime soap operas – with experts who can provide accurate health information for their scripts.
- HHS Director Sandra Buffington admits that environmental issues, especially climate change, pose particular challenges for communicators because at first glance, they are not as immediately relevant as personal health issues. However, she believes that by focusing on real, human stories — climate refugees displaced by rising water levels, farmers unable to grow food because of drought, children sick because of outbreaks of malaria — the issues of the planet will crystallize into something tangible. All scientists need to do is provide the information, and the professional creative storytellers will do the rest, she says.
- Olson also takes a cue from television. He points to the rise of reality TV shows as a clear indication of where the general public interest lies. If environmentalists want to capture that interest, Olson thinks they need to start experimenting with these innovative types of unscripted forms. “That’s where the cutting edge exists,” he said.

May

2011

About - TinEye

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. It finds out where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version.

www.tineye.com/about

- Preview

Image Search