"What credit card do you want to put that on?"
"Caash, prease."

Test shows possibility to see what others do

An undated image of the human brain taken through scanning technology. The s...

Wed Mar 5, 3:19 PM EST

WASHINGTON — Brain imaging may make it possible to someday see what others are seeing, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

Such a device would make it possible to decode brain signals and track attention. It may even be possible to "see" someone else's dream, the team at the University of California Berkeley said.

"Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone," Jack Gallant and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the journal Nature.

"Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience at any moment in time, and perhaps even provide access to the visual content of phenomena such as dreams and imagery."

Gallant's team did not get that far but they used a type of real-time imaging called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to predict which photograph a volunteer was looking at.

For the first step, they calibrated their experiment by having two members of the team look at 1,750 photographs while being scanned by fMRI.

"The content of the photographs included animals, buildings, food, humans, indoor scenes, man-made objects, outdoor scenes, and textures," they wrote.

For the second stage, the two researchers looked at 120 new images while the fMRI machine was on. The research team then tried to figure out which photograph each one had been looking at.

They got the right answer 92 percent of the time for one researcher and 72 percent of the time for the second.

When they worked with a set of 1,000 images, accuracy dropped only a bit, the Berkeley team reported.

They acknowledged it is a long step from being able to tell what a person is looking at to being able to look at brain activity and reconstruct what someone is seeing. But they said their experiment shows it is, in principle, possible.

"Identification of novel natural images brings us close to achieving a general visual decoder," they wrote.

"The final step will require devising a way to reconstruct the image seen by the observer, instead of selecting the image from a known set."

(Reporting by Maggie Fox; Editing by John O'Callaghan)

Dr. Jacoby's link page:  http://www.konakai.com/  Clothes, culture, travel, art, barware, decor and more!

(Happy Spring Break, all.  I'm off to Disney World!)

Pixilation Animated GIFs... with your webcam!

Logic Hat Online- logichat.org

Logic Hat Online- logichat.org

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/community/news/debary/orl-monkeys0708apr07,0,1838817.story

A pet monkey as surrogate child, Teeth-aching cuteness, people.

Rat on cat on dog street stunt- these are happy critters:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/offbeat/2008/05/21/natpkg.rat.cat.dog.kcoy

Daphne Oram: electronic music pioneer

Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was a pioneering electronic musician and sound engineer at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. She established a workshop to develop experimental techniques for composing radio soundtracks. Oram is best known for her invention of Oramics, a system of converting drawings on 35mm film into sound textures. You can hear samples of her her music here. As part of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's 50th anniversary, The Guardian recently profiled Oram and included a slide show of terrific vintage photographs. From The Guardian:

Oram was one of the first British composers to produce electronic sound, a pioneer of what became "musique concrete" – music made with sounds recorded on tape, the ancestor of today's electronic music. Her story makes for fascinating reading. She was born in 1925 when Britain was between two world wars. She was extremely bright, and studied music and electronics – unusual at the time not only because electronics was an exciting new industry, but also because it was a man's world.

She went on to join the BBC, and, while many of the corporation's male staff were away fighting in the second world war, she became a balancing engineer, mixing the sounds captured by microphones at classical music concerts. In those days, nearly all programmes went out live because recording was extremely cumbersome and expensive. Tape hadn't been invented, and cheap computers were half a century away.

Yet when tape did come along, in the early 1950s, Oram was quick to realise that it could be used not simply for recording existing sounds, but for composing a new kind of music. Not the music of instruments, notes and tunes, but the music of ordinary, everyday sound.

Daphne Oram profile, Daphne Oram slideshow (via Further: Strange Attractor and Beyond)

The reason men cannot be agony aunts......

Dear Neville,

I hope you can help me here. The other day I set off for work leaving my husband in the house watching the TV as usual. I hadn't gone more than a mile down the road when my engine conked out and the car shuddered to a halt.

I walked back home to get my husband's help. When I got home I couldn't believe my eyes. He was in the bedroom with a neighbour lady making mad passionate love to her. I am 32, my husband is 34 and we have been married for twelve years. When I confronted him, he tried to make out that he went into the back yard and heard a lady scream, had come to her rescue but found her unconscious. He'd carried the woman back to our house, laid her in bed, and began CPR. When she awoke she immediately began thanking him and kissing him and he was attempting to break free when I came back. But when I asked him why neither of them had any clothes on, he broke down and admitted that he'd been having an affair for the past six months.

I told him to stop or I would leave him. He was let go from his job six months ago and he says he has been feeling increasingly depressed and worthless. I love him very much, but ever since I gave him the ultimatum he has become increasingly distant. I don't feel I can get through to him any more.

Can you please help?

Sincerely,
Mrs. Sheila Usk


Dear Sheila,

A car stalling after being driven a short distance can be caused by a variety of faults with the engine. Start by checking that there is no debris in the fuel line. If it is clear, check the jubilee clips holding the vacuum pipes onto the inlet manifold. If none of these approaches solves the problem, it could be that the fuel pump itself is faulty, causing low delivery pressure to the carburetor float chamber.

I hope this helps.

Neville

Letter to Santa leads to man's molestation arrest

19 hours ago
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PHARR, Texas — A Texas man has been arrested after a 9-year-old girl wrote to Santa Claus asking that a relative stop touching her and her sister.

The Monitor of McAllen reports that a man from the town of Pharr was arrested Friday and is in the Hidalgo County jail.

A criminal complaint says the girl turned the letter in at Cesar Chavez Elementary School. Authorities interviewed the girl after a school counselor reported the letter.

The complaint says investigators believe the molestation occurred over a period of four years.

The man is charged with continuous sexual abuse of a young child and could face as many as 99 years in prison if convicted.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The Art of Glenn Mason