hole in the head

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Trepanation is an antiquated medical intervention in which a hole is drilled or scraped into the human skull, thus exposing the dura mater in order to treat health problems related to intracranial diseases.
(...)
Although considered today to be pseudoscience, the practice of trepanation for other purported medical benefits continues. The most prominent explanation for these benefits is offered by Dutchman Bart Huges (alternatively spelled Bart Hughes). He is sometimes called Dr. Bart Hughes although he did not complete his medical degree. Hughes claims that trepanation increases "brain blood volume" and thereby enhances cerebral metabolism in a manner similar to cerebral vasodilators such as ginkgo biloba. No published results have supported these claims.

(from Wikipedia)

Primitive cyborg? Wanted to expand his awereness by drilling a hole in his own head, and he died at the age of 70 (heart failure)

bodymonitor + urbansync

http://www.bodymonitor.de/

Our mission is to provide tools for real-time monitoring of body and mind responses in everyday life contexts.

As an efficient and cost-cutting tool we developed the smartband .

The smartband is a wearable textile band, with unobtrusively embedded microelectronic and sensors.

This smartband 'sense' a lot of things about the body and its context: electroderermal activity, puls volume, skin temperature, tri-axial acceleration , magnetometric direction, ambient light intensity, ambient sound intensity, infrared ambient detection of human body and ambient temperature... 10bit of resolution and ASCII recording to a 1GB SD-Card... its not clear its connectivity for realtime transmission of data to other devices...

Created by Georgios Papastefanou, it seems a quite experimental device, but already being used in some projects... I found it some time ago through UrbanSync, an ongoing project of multimodal signals gathering within urban contexts which is using it... in this case the physiological+context data are recorded on sync with other three streams: sound, sonification of the ghz range and gps trails. further sonification, visualization and data mining processes of the data collected are still on development in a collaborative way... the sync streams of data collected during three weeks of sessions in Porto last October have been made available online for those who want to experiment with them.

newham sensory deprivation map

Rechecking those emotion maps created by Christian Nold I found interesting one of the variations of the project, based on sensory deprivation of sight and hearing.

from the project background:

Normally we perceive our surroundings using 5 senses: Sight Sound Smell Touch Taste What happens when we explore our environment without Sight and Sound?

The Newham Sensory Deprivation Map (2007) is the result of an intensive workshop with 34 students from Newham Sixth Form College in London. The students were divided into pairs, one of whom was blindfolded and given ear defenders so that they could not see or hear. The other student was given a Global Positioning System as well as pen and paper. Together the two explored the local area around the college for up to an hour. The idea being that the blindfolded and deafened student verbally relates their sensory experience to the other student who is taking notes and making sure they are safe during the journey. On their return the geographical data from the GPS is downloaded and all the sensory observations made during the walk are spatially recorded. The final map combines all the annotations of the students and forms an alternative sensory map of Newham.

emotional cartography

Related with the lively discussion about 'emotion measurement' at the end of our Monday meeting, its a fun coincidence that I just stumbled upon a fresh new book (officially launched this coming Friday) called Emotional Cartography.

It is 'a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visulising intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology'.

Christian Nold is the guy who developed the community project Bio Mapping. During four years, this project created several 'Emotion Maps', registering the Galvanic Skin Response (an indicator of emotional arousal) of more than 1500 participants on sync with their geographical location.

Best thing is that the book has been published under CC license and it is freely downloadable (.pdf 44mb).

Vía: Infosthetics

The Adventures of the Nasal Ranger

Nasal Ranger is apparatus helping to measure intensity of smell.

In this silly video, an reporter tries to measure intensities of various smells on a fair:

http://blog.syracuse.com/video/2008/08/the_adventures_of_the_nasal_ra.html

acoustic location

Acoustic location is the art and science of using sound to determine the distance and direction of something. Location can be done actively or passively, and can take place in gases (such as the atmosphere), liquids (such as water), and in solids (such as in the earth)

Starting in 1880 with the Topophone, there is a bizarre collection of acoustic location experiments and artifacts, including hilarious wearable artifacts, some of them of doubtful precision.

1960 : Jean Auscher´s maritime acoustic locator

During WW1 and until the early years of WWII this technologies were developed by different countries for militar purposes, until its abandon when the sonar and radar came up, making them obsolete.

1921: USA - 2horn locator

Czech locator , test at Waalsdorp

Probably the most known example are the British acoustic mirrors, declared national landmarks recently.

+++ more info and historical survey on this site.

chicken head tracking

Chickens have a great ability to keep their heads stable. Our bodies use a gyro-like mechanism in our ears which has 3 mutually orthogonal inertial measurement devices. Modern motion processors use something called an Inertial Measurment Unit (IMU). These devices provide movement data which can be used to compensate for the movement. Chickens apparently have the same type mechanism only with a higher update rate.

comment on thursday

Last Thursday we talked about a way to compare our senses: space (distance). This was interesting, but on the other hand I found it a very subjective and a blurry comparison (it was scientifically seen just not right and not precise) . The result of such a schedule really depends on what you take as a reference. For all of the senses, I think the best reference is the place where the receptors actually are. So for touch is that the skin, and then the range wouldn’t be the radius of your arms, but the length of the hairs on your skin.

This was something I would like to add for now, more research information/personal development later! (otherwise I will influence my classmates too much regarding the fact that we had to do the assignments for Monday individually)

Bacteria sensing geomagnetic field lines

Here's a nice article about formation of Magnetosomes - cell organelles of magnetic field sensing bacteria:

http://www.calpoly.edu/~rfrankel/NatRevMicro.pdf

Early magnetic field orientation visualiser

The Museum of Pure Form

http://www.pureform.org/