FROM ABC NEWS

iPhone Pocket Psychotherapist Soothes Soul

Awareness, a new iPhone app that was launched just last week, allows the ever-stressed, particularly at holiday time, to find psychological solace.

The "pocket therapist" application is "like an angel sitting on your shoulder," sounding a gentle chant to remind you to get in touch with your feelings -- anywhere, the developer says.

Ronit Herzfeld, a holistic therapist from New York City, said her creation can help users discover inner peace in the routine of their daily lives.

So far 550 buyers have downloaded the application, and her developers are working on a new version for Google's Android that could be available in February.

"It's a next generation application which is more interactive and brings it back to the self, rather than just playing a game," said Herzfeld. "It's something the app can do for you and it's hitting a chord with people."


For $3.99 the user is reminded by up to 25 gong tones a day to take a deep breath and assess their mental state. The application asks how you are feeling and, based on your mood, it plays up to 20 videos with instructions on how to alleviate the stressors.

In addition, it provides up to 400 inspirational quotes suited to the emotion, such as "God gave burdens, also shoulders."

The gong can be switched off so as not to interrupt business meetings, although Herzfeld said one corporate executive who forgot to turn hers off, was pleased she got a reminder to tone down her frustration.

"It's been my life's work to helping people feel better and lead peaceful lives," said Herzfeld, who has spent 25 years in traditional psychotherapy, much of it in a mobile crisis unit. She worked with victims of the 1996 TWA crash off Long Island.

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FROM WIRED

Your local cops now use iris scanners from Iraq

In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. troops use handheld devices to take iris scans and thumb prints off of detainees and put them in vast databases to distinguish insurgents from civilians. Now your local cops are getting in on the action.

L-1 Identity Solutions, a four-year-old company, makes the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection System (HIIDE), a mobile device that digitally records someone’s iris, fingerprint and facial characteristics “to create a comprehensive database on the enrolled subject.” The tool, which has earned high marks in Iraq and Afghanistan, is marketed to cops, as a way to avoid taking suspects to booking stations, “where waiting time for results could be anywhere from three hours to three days” for a positive ID on warrant-jumpers.

Military technology has a tendency to trickle down to civilian applications, as evidenced by the fact that you’re reading this story on the internet that Darpa helped create. Usually that takes time, but police departments across the country are fielding tools that the military developed to keep tabs on insurgents are now in place to see if you’ve got any outstanding arrest warrants. That’s what the Washington Postfound for the latest installment of its series on the expanding surveillance state: Arizona’s Maricopa County, for instance, keeps a database sized at “9,000 biometric digital mug shots a month.”


Here’s how the proliferation of biometrics works, as the Post discovers. The Department of Homeland Security wants more data points on potential homegrown terrorists. Through Federal-state law enforcement “fusion centers,” federal grants help finance law enforcement’s acquisition of ID tools like HIIDE, as well as powerful surveillance cameras and sensors. Police incorporate them into their regular law-enforcement duties, picking up information on suspects and using them to cut down on the time it takes to figure out who’s evading arrest.

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FROM PHYSORG

Reading Avatar's DNA

You know when you're watching a pirated film downloaded from the Internet -- there's no mistaking the fuzzy footage, or the guy in the front row getting up for popcorn. Despite the poor quality, pirated video is a serious problem around the world. Criminal copyright infringement occurs on a massive scale over the Internet, costing the film industry -- and the U.S. economy -- billions of dollars annually.

 
Now Dr. Alex Bronstein of Tel Aviv University's Department of Electrical Engineering has a new way to stop video pirates. With his twin brother Michael and Israeli researcher Prof. Ron Kimmel, he has developed the ultimate solution: treating video footage like DNA.
Sequencing the video genome

"It's not only members of the animal and plant kingdom that can have DNA," says Dr. Bronstein, who was inspired by DNA sequencing tools used in bioinformatics laboratories. "If a DNA test can identify and catch criminals, we thought that a similar code might be applicable to video. If the code were copied and changed, we'd catch it."

Of course, video does not have a real genetic code like members of the animal kingdom, so Dr. Bronstein and his team created a DNA analogue, like a unique fingerprint, that can be applied to video files. The result is a unique DNA fingerprint for each individual movie anywhere on the planet.
When scenes are altered, colors changed, or film is bootlegged on a camera at the movie theatre, the film can be tracked and traced on the Internet, explains Dr. Bronstein. And, like the films, video thieves can be tracked and caught.

The technology employs an invisible sequence and series of grids applied over the film, turning the footage into a series of numbers. The tool can then scan the content of Web sites where pirated films are believed to be offered, pinpointing subsequent mutations of the original.
The technique is called "video DNA matching." It detects aberrations in pirated video in the same way that biologists detect mutations in the genetic code to determine, for example, an individual's family connections. The technique works by identifying features of the film that remain basically unchanged by typical color and resolution manipulations, and geometric transformations. It's effective even with border changes, commercials added or scenes edited out.

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From PHYSORG


(PhysOrg.com) -- Hugs and kisses exchanged under the mistletoe are among the human interactions which can now be automatically recognized by computers from video footage, thanks to new research.
 
The technology, developed at Oxford University, can also automatically recognize interactions such as handshakes and high fives. It is part of research to enable computers to automatically analyse the content of the vast amount of video footage generated from sources such as TV, films, YouTube and CCTV.

"Human actions and activities are of central importance in video analysis," said Alonso Patron-Perez of Oxford University’s Department of Engineering Science, who led the research. "This new work makes it possible to recognise two-person human interactions, such as hugs, kisses and hand-shakes, automatically. Once you can recognize these interactions the applications are numerous: for instance you could automatically search home videos and YouTube for kisses and handshakes or even fast forward CCTV to find incidents."

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FROM PHYSORG

“This study has implications for the fight against anti-social behaviour. For example if signs for CCTV cameras used pictures of eyes instead of cameras they could be more effective.”

Eye See you


Researchers at Newcastle University alternated hanging posters of staring human faces and posters of flowers on the walls of a cafe.  They then counted the number of people who cleaned their plates and rubbish away after finishing their meal in both situations.

In a paper, which is published this week online in the American Оournal Evolution and Human Behavior, the research team, lead by Dr Melissa Bateson and Dr Daniel Nettle of the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution, describe their findings.

During periods when the posters of faces were on the walls, watching over the diners, twice as many people cleaned up, compared to the periods when the pictures of flowers were overlooking the diners, when more litter was left for cafe workers to clear away. 

In a previous study in 2006 the same scientists looked at the impact of images of eyes on contributions to an honesty box in a tea room. They found that people put nearly three times more money in the box when there were eyes compared with flowers.

For this follow-on experiment, psychology student, Max Ernest-Jones, eager to explore whether the honesty box findings would extend to other forms of cooperation, spent many hours sitting inconspicuously in the corner of the café recording customers’ littering behaviour.

Dr Bateson, who led the research, said: “These findings reinforce the conclusion from our previous research, that the presence of eye images can encourage co-operative behaviour. We think that the images of eyes work by making people feel watched. We care what other people think about us, and hence we behave better when we feel we are being observed.

“We found that the impact of the posters was a lot greater at times when the cafe was quiet. This makes total sense, because we would expect real people to have the greatest effect on the feeling of being watched and hence swamp the effect of the posters during busy times.

“This study has implications for the fight against anti-social behaviour. For example if signs for CCTV cameras used pictures of eyes instead of cameras they could be more effective.”


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