randform

Bad hair – do or day?

When looking at my unkempt twirls in the morning this rather scary variation of Rapunzel came to my mind.

Just two links to humanoid robot videos as an update (randform posts e.g. here or here).

One video is displaying a quite good jumping humanoid robot, the other video is displaying the already rather wellknown Jules of hansonrobotics.com…..Looking at Jules reminds again at the question about faces as interfaces and the uncanny valley, as e.g. discussed in this randform post.

A link to a site which organizes art around the G8 summit in May in Heiligendamm.

From the website “art-goes-heiligendamm”:

The supporting institutions in Rostock hope that the art interventions will have a de-escalating effect. An alliance of around 30 NGO’s have called for an alternative summit. ■ ART GOES HEILIGENDAMM is cooperating, through lectures and Multitude e.V., with the G8 coordination group, who have invited many prominent speakers such as the Nobel prize winners Wangari Mathai and Vandana Shiva; Jean Ziegler; Étienne Balibar; Madjiguène Cissé – a speaker from the Sans-Papiers organisation in France; John Holloway, author of “Change the world without seizing the power” and many more.

Kenneth Arrow and George Bush – Arrow receives the National Medal of Science, 2004

A previous randform post dealt with collective knowledges and in particular certain basic knowledges which were assumed to be connected with evolution. In the post it was asserted that collective knowledge may -among others- be hidden in the subconscious and that design/marketing may be a mean to detect something of it.

In this series of posts I haven’t yet really adressed the question of HOW a collective knowledge or preference assumes shape, but sofar rather focused on potentially involved mechanisms (maybe to be continued). And in fact the formation of collective preferences (related: the question of formation of coherence and focus) is a very, very difficult – but interesting – issue and this post here is only a first (and almost historical) glimpse into this matter.

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cool or cruel tool? “zwitterpartie” (crutchstilts) – randforms medgadget 2.0 of the day.

Berlin this morning in a wireless spot.

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Together with collegues from London and Tokyo neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes did an experiment (however up to now only with 21 test persons as it seems), where a person had to choose wether he/she wanted either to add or to substract two numbers. And even before the test persons saw the numbers and before they started to compute it was possible – by using a MRI brain scan – to tell with a 70% chance, what kind of desicion the person was going to make, or in other words: using the MRI the scientists could “read the mind” of the test persons (with a 70% chance). Freely chosen decisions are usually happening in the prefrontal cortex.

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In a recent randform post the role of faces, their outer features and interfacing properties were discussed. An interesting side aspect is the question of beauty. This aspect is interesting for the construction of humanoid robots, as well as e.g. for the fashion industry with repect to avatars to be used e.g. in shopping environments.

An interesting artistic discussion is given by the artwork 13 Most Beautiful Avatars by 0100101110101101.ORG (whose funny URL can be interpreted so (i.e. as it is) or soso (i.e. as a number). Their artwork reflects the real world of beauty contests like this russian miss atom beauty contest, where one should remark that this beauty contest has an age limit. This is a bit in contrast to the quite unlimited use of nuclear energy in russia, despite the limited resources.

And again this beauty contest is only for females not for males.

image form national institutes of health via wikipedia

Mice and men share about 90% of the genome. Therefore we are confident that one can safely assume to search one’s own brain when browsing the Allen Brain Atlas. (more…)