Drowse Prevention Alarm Warns Sleepy Drivers
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I would get one...........
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Via Engadget
I would get one........... When God sanctions violence
"To justify their actions, violent people often claim that God has sanctioned their behavior," said Bushman, faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research and lead author of the article reported in the March 2007 issue of Psychological Science. "Christian extremists, Jewish reactionaries and Islamic fundamentalists all can cite scriptures that seem to encourage or at least support aggression against unbelievers". Bushman, who is also a U-M professor of psychology and communications studies, and his colleagues at Brigham Young University and at Vrije University in the Netherlands, found the same relationship in two separate experiments detailed in the article. The first study involved Brigham Young University students, 99 percent of whom believed in God and in the Bible. The second study involved Amsterdam students, 50 percent of whom believed in God and 27 percent of whom believed in the Bible. After reporting their religious affiliations and beliefs, participants read a passage adapted from the King James Bible that described a woman's brutal murder and her husband's revenge on her attackers. Half the participants were told that the passage came from the Old Testament, half that it came from an ancient scroll found by archeologists. Half the participants from each of these groups read a version of the passage that included a sentence in which God commanded his followers to take arms against others......... Surgery Improves Outcomes For Baseball Pitchers
Less traumatic than the classic Tommy John surgery, the modified surgery called the docking procedure, with time, is likely to become the gold standard for treating these injuries. "This paper, in the largest series of patients ever published, shows that this particular operation in throwing athletes demonstrates better results than the classic operation," said David W. Altchek, M.D., senior author of the study and co-chief of the Sports Medicine and Shoulder Service at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) in New York. The study was presented at a special session of the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons, held during the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons annual meeting. MCL injury is most common in professional and amateur athletes involved in so-called overhead throwing sports, such as baseball, softball, football, lacrosse and tennis. These sports involve a throwing motion at high velocity that exerts an exceptional force at the elbow. Repeated over time, this motion can cause inflammation and microtrauma, which can eventually lead to an MCL tear. When this ligament is torn, an individual has a full range of motion and can go about daily life, but a professional or semi-professional athlete cannot perform at their usual level because they cannot exert a significant force......... A Zero-emissions Snowmobile
But for all their utility, snowmobiles are not very environmentally friendly. So, on March 19, 2007, four National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported teams will compete in the SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge in Houghton, Mich., to produce a zero-emissions snow vehicle. The challenge attracts teams of undergraduate engineering students from across North America with the goal of designing a snowmobile with lower environmental impact, less noise, fewer emissions and a lighter footprint--all without sacrificing the performance snowmobile enthusiasts love. The NSF-funded projects are coordinated by VECO Polar Resources, NSF's logistics contractor for Arctic research. The agency awarded the group $10,000 to support the four teams. The competition grew from the demand for cleaner snowmobiles in national and state parks and forests. One alternative to restricting or banning snowmobiles on public lands is to find appropriate technological solutions to noise and pollution problems. Now in its fifth year, the challenge is a competition for college and university student members of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) to encourage young engineers to design quieter machines that produce low emissions, but still "smoke" in the performance department. The students are given the opportunity to apply their engineering skills to a difficult problem, working in teams to develop real-world solutions......... wireless speaker system for iPod
Each speaker cube has its own Lithium-Ion battery pack, delivering up to 10 hours of music between charges. To charge, just place the speaker on its charging station. There's nothing to plug in, and nothing to unplug when you're ready to deploy the music. Each speaker features its own on/off switch, and an automatic sleep mode to conserve battery charge. To complete the wireless picture, Evolve comes with its own RF remote. The system works with all iPods, but there is a line-in in the back, so you can plug any music player into it (zune,. sansa, etc.). It'll retail for $349 in late spring/summer......... Older Adults Unreliable Eyewitness
The study, "I misremember it well: Why older adults are unreliable eyewitnesses," is published in a recent issue of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. "There are potentially significant practical implications to these results as confident but mistaken eyewitness testimony may be the largest cause of wrongful convictions in the United States," said Chad Dodson, the study's lead researcher and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. "Given that older adults will constitute an increasing proportion of the U.S. population, there may be a corresponding increase in the occurrence of wrongful convictions based on the testimony of highly confident but mistaken eyewitnesses". Dodson and U.Va. graduate student Lacy Krueger studied "suggestibility errors," instances where people come to believe that a particular event occurred, when in fact, the event was merely suggested to them and did not actually occur......... Photo software creates 3-D world
In a word, mainly a headache. "Anyone who has a digital camera has the problem that they have more photos than they can possibly navigate," says Steve Seitz, associate professor of computer science & engineering. "And it's always a problem to find the photo that you're looking for". Now experimental software developed by UW and Microsoft computer scientists, called Photo Tourism, turns the surfeit of images into a benefit. Hundreds of photos of a single scene can be mapped into a 3-D virtual world. The technology has potential not just for organizing photo collections, but for capturing scenes and, perhaps someday, creating a visual map of all the photos on the Internet. Over the past year the research has catapulted to the marketplace. Early work attracted attention in March at Microsoft's TechFest meeting. The project again made headlines in August when it was presented at a major graphics conference. Microsoft Live Labs signed a commercial license for the prototype software last August. Within a few months the company shipped a technology preview of a product that it called Photosynth......... Beethoven, Sibelius and Music Plus One
Christopher Raphael, associate professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics, will share center stage with Mimi Zweig, professor at the Jacobs School of Music. They're appearing together in Informatics Philharmonic at 3 p.m., Saturday (Feb. 24) at the Sweeney Lecture Hall in the Simon Music Center. Raphael is the creator of Music Plus One, a sophisticated computerized instrumental accompaniment program that responds in real time to a soloist's tempo changes and other expressive gestures. The accompaniment is drawn from recorded past rehearsals from, say, a concerto or sonata. As the musician plays, the accompanying music is synthesized through an audio recording. Zweig teaches violin, string pedagogy and heads the IU String Academy. She's also a former member of the American Symphony Orchestra, Syracuse Orchestra, Piedmont Chamber Orchestra and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. The concert features Yoo-jin Cho and Thomas Rodgers, who will play movements from the violin concertos of Ludwig Van Beethoven and Jan Sibelius. They will be accompanied by Raphael's Music Plus One "orchestra." Raphael, who once played for the Santa Cruz (California) Symphony, also will perform on the oboe......... Better Designed Roadway Intersections
Wider road shoulders, right-turn lanes that allow drivers to merge into traffic without stopping and angle intersections no sharper than 90 degrees all led to better driving performance by older and younger drivers involved in a UF study of roadway intersection design. "I think the research shows early support that environmental enhancements are conducive to older driver safety and improved performance," said principal investigator Sherrilene Classen, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions' department of occupational treatment. "But what we found is that it didn't just benefit older drivers, it benefited the younger drivers involved in the study, some of whom were between the ages of 35 and 54, which is also the safest group of drivers". In 2003 about one in seven licensed drivers was 65 or older. By 2029, that proportion is expected to rise to one in four drivers, as per the AARP Public Policy Institute. Eventhough drivers 65 and older have lower rates of crashes than younger drivers, they are at higher risk for injury or death because of increased fragility......... Turn your TV into abstract art
Lightascopes are made of the same lightweight, durable plastic as a credit card and are fixed to the TV screen using micro-suction tape. This makes for easy removal when there's actually something good on TV that you might want to watch instead of your new art piece. The Lightascopes also work when the TV's off. Lightascopes come in 3 different styles, each creating its own signature pattern. You can try out a selection of light and sound effects before you buy. Available in sizes 32"-50" for $135-$199. There's also a deluxe version with all 3 styles combined, which goes for a hefty $480......... |
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