visual perception in darkness

Saskia & Pim choose to reseach ‘night vision’, an invention of William Edward Spicer -engineering professor at Stanford University-, being first used by the U.S. Army during WW2.
Night vision is the ability to see in a dark environment. Whether by biological or technological means, night vision is made possible by a combination of two approaches: sufficient spectral range, and sufficient intensity range. Humans have poor night vision compared to many animals, in part because the human eye lacks a tapetum lucidum.

Following McLuhan’s tetrad: night vision devices do not enhance really; instead they add a visual quality. It makes electric light obsolete and pushed to extremes one’s biorhythm can be disturbed due the absence of day and life. The medium probably retrieves the yearning for ‘normal’, polychrome perception with the bare eye.

blog about new ways of sensing/enhancement of sensing

This is a nice blog about new ways of sensing or enhancing our senses:

http://www.susannahertrich.com/notes/

e&s -Evolution and Senses-

About comments from last session yesterday the Tuesday 21th, I would like to refer to the cyanobacteria as an example of organisms that base their existence on the ability to cooperate effectively at oposition to development of the senses for survival, giving a clear example of the get right. The complexity of evolution as the exciting results in future to merge biology and technology (Cyborg) it doesn´t owe to the brain or the development of our senses in some other species. In fact just the opposite has happened.
As suggesting Gary F. Marcus, professor of psychology at the University of New York, just going through the experience of basic memory, decision making, language and happiness we can see the thousand and one flaws of evolution in all of the senses developed to survive.

The most dramatic and far-reaching innovations in the history of evolution, survival of the species, when everything pointed to a close, it was the intuition of some microorganisms newcomers two billion years after the formation of the Earth and the Solar system. It was a biomolecular feat, made it a pact between a bacterium and a host cell of the plant kingdom.

Chloroplast with which plants make food for themselves are actually housed in cyanobacterial cells of plants.


Cyanobacteria image: universe-review.ca

So I think it is grat, remembering that the greatest discovery we owe to these microbes called cyanobacteria with which plants make their own food is the partnership between a bacterium and the plant allowed photosynthesis; 'live from air', literally, instead of preying on the more complex or simple organisms.
An example of that is than in nature cooperation is a force more powerful than the competition and the development of the senses. Its success depends on knowing just cooperate.

To be sure, if there will be salvation in the future we have to understanding the possibilities of the molecular world.

Evolution of the ear ongoing

Our ears are still adapting to human speech, says anthropologist, who discovered that genes associated with hearing have changed in the most recent thousands of years.

“We’re still genetically adapting to language,” says John Hawks, an anthropologist and specialist in human evolution at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Wisconsin, in the USA. Hawks has discovered that eight genes associated with hearing show signs of having evolved over the most recent 40,000 years. Some of the gene changes took hold only two-three thousand years ago.

Speech a recent phenomenon

According to Hawks, the changes in the hearing genes indicate that our ears are still adapting to human speech, which evolution experts believe first developed about 50,000 years ago. At that time, humans had existed for more than two million years, making speech a relatively recent development. Speech is worthless without ears able to sense and discriminate sounds at the sound frequencies of speech. Our ears are still improving these abilities, according to Hawks. Hawk’s analyses of a data base with gene information from different continents indicate that many human genes besides the hearing genes have changed in recent human evolution.

Seed: www.hear-it.org

Music for Solo Performer (Alvin Lucier)

About last session -April the 20th- here are a re-interpretation of Alvin Lucier's sound piece using human brainwaves sensors and also I think that could be another clear example for coming thursday assignment

Kevin Warwick: I want to be a cyborg and I know I am not the only

This is from an interview I found on the web. The guy actually took a ultra-sonic sensor and fed the signals down on to his nervous system.

Kevin Warwick is the world’s first cyborg. The English scientist says that it’s time for us to overcome our human “limitations”. In the future and thanks to chip in our brains we will be able to use more than our 5 senses as the implants will stretch our ways of communicating with people and objects. Without any doubt, Warwick is a brave, charismatic borderline-scientist, but he has also risen a lot of criticism. In an interview he reveals why he thinks that humans will become a subspecies in a cyborg world.




The full interview can be found here:
http://www.nowpublic.com/health/kevin-warwick-i-want-be-cyborg-and-i-know-i-am-not-only

Mutsugoto

and a lot less off-topic, but also the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_islands/8004769.stm

sousveillance

This is off-topic, but today I briefly mentioned Steve Mann, one of the existing Cyborgs we will talk about on thursday. And here he is on the BBC site, today, with his concept of 'sousveillance':

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8010098.stm

buying arduino boards

We talked about buying a bunch of arduino boards together. Now is the time if you were thinking of buying one anyway.

here an overview of the types:
the Duomilanove This is the basic board. € 22,-
the Arduino Mini same number of connections as the basic board, but less memory. € 35,- (including USB-serial converter)
the Arduino Nano even smaller than the mini, but less connections too. € 44,-
the Arduino Mega many more connections, larger memory. € 49,-
the Arduino Lilypad an arduino version made to be incorporated into clothing (more fragile, however) € 21,-

if you have no preference, get a Duemilanove or a Arduino Mega.
Prices mentioned exclude VAT (BTW) and shipping.
To be 100% sure about pricing, check the information given by the manufacturer. Please let me know if you are aware of cheaper options: there are much more providers now than there were last time I ordered. Also please let me know if I made a mistake in summarizing the specifications.

You can order by commenting on this post; please mention which type. I will order on wednesday evening.

McLuhan references and assignment for thursday 23rd

the fragments we read in class today came from these books:

Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man",
Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. London, 1964.

Marshall and Eric McLuhan, "Laws of Media, The New Science",
University of Toronto press, 1988.

Marshall McLuhan & Bruce R. Powers, "The Global Village, Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century", Oxford University Press, 1989.

there is a good wikipedia page about McLuhan's 'Tetrad':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrad_of_media_effects

and there are zillions of sites about him and his theories ofcourse:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/



the assignment for thursday the 23rd is as follows:

In groups of two students, choose an existing project that tries to achieve an 'extra sense' in some way. Can be art, can be a scientific research project or something else.

Start a debate about this project with the two of you, where you reflect on the following questions:
- what does this extra sense communicate ? What is the content of this sense ? What is excluded by this sense ? (Think about the microphone example given by Edwin, the microphone captures airpressure changes, but through that is able to transmit speech, language and concepts)
- how would having this sense affect our sensorial balance ? What is the 'message of this medium' ? How would it affect our behaviour ? A good way to approach this question is by answering the four questions in McLuhan's 'Tetrad' (see link above).

Give a presentation together where you briefly present this project and your reflections on it. In total 10 minutes, so prepare what you want to say. A partial goal of this assignment is also to give you more experience in giving such a short presentation.

Consciousness

Yesterday we there was a small discussion about consciousness. One of the great names in consciousness is Daniel Dennet. On google there are a lot of interesting lectures from him. So if your interested in learning more about this subject. This is one of the video's:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9115535893922064429&hl=en

Also I watched a very interesting documentary about the Atom a while ago. It really made me think on how we perceive the world around us. It is very interesting that we have come so far in understanding the world despite our very primitive senses.

Here is the documentary:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7694154455816736507&hl=en

There are I think 3 parts!