by Leigh Andrews on 26 November 2009

Neuromarketing is a relatively new field of marketing that is slowly gaining acceptance worldwide. In layman’s terms, an audience watched a pre-selected advert, and instead of verbally stating whether they liked the ad or not, their body’s physiological response to the advert is measured through sensors in specially-designed helmets and soft gloves – think scans to measure activity in certain areas of the brain; changes in heart and breathing rate; and galvanic skin response.

There are concerns about the use of neuromarketing, but generally only among those who do not fully understand its use – neuromarketing is not in place to glean hidden information from respondents, rather to improve the quality and accuracy of marketing survey results. While it provides deeper insight into the human brain, the results make for more effective advertising and brand loyalty campaigns, as marketers are able to pinpoint the specific aspects of the ad that stimulated a response in the audience – as well as whether the response was favourable or not.

For more on neuromarketing, click here.

What do you think the implications of neuromarketing will be? Feel free to post your comments below.

Cutecircuit, a London-based company has been fusing science and fashion to create unbelievable clothing.

The Hug Shirt was one of the first products the company designed. Doesn’t it look a bit strange?

The Hug Shirt uses Bluetooth technology to transmit “hugs” all across the globe. The orange circles on the shirt are sensors. The sensors record body temperature and pressure sensations. Hug yourself and the sensors will activate. You can text message a friend who has the Hug Technology downloaded on their phone. When you send the text message, your friend wherever he or she may be, opens the text and feels the same sensation of a hug.

It all sounds strange and a bit complex. Here’s a YouTube video showing and explaining the process.

Another project CuteCircuit has been working on is called the Galaxy Dress. It is a stunning dress made of 24,000 rainbow LED lights. It’s currently being featured at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago at an exhibit called “Fast Forward: Inventing the Future.”

Try getting through airport security with that dress!

]]> http://suzannejohn.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/ideas-on-paper/ Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:29:53 +0000 Suzie-Annie http://suzannejohn.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/ideas-on-paper/

I’ll be honest i took this idea with me to the project meeting, i was just too cautious to talk about it as it didn’t really seem to fit in with everyone else’s ideas, but now i don’t think that’s such a bad thing.

The image pretty much speaks for itself, it’s an idea about a different kind of ’screen’ to one which we’re maybe used to. A ’screen’ that’s not necessarily a screen…

Placing sensors beneath the ’screen’ would react to what’s happening on top of it.

I’ve touched on natural surfaces and i think i’d like to further explore this now, creating some kind of interactive surface which involves nature, perhaps and we think of it, or perhaps more man-made.

Lets go around the bases as we used to say in Little League…

§ The folks over at Digital Photography School have two things I find to my liking (I almost typed linking and then realized technically that is correct too). First of all, for those of you looking to get your photography into the public’s view, this article on 7 Ways to Get Your Photography Seen might be a big help. I just read someone else’s opinion that a photo isn’t really a photo until you print it and printing is definitely one great way down the road to showing off what you can do. Also, DPS is getting into the eBook game (which seems popular nowadays – it’s only a matter of time before you can buy my eBook on… I’ll get back to you). The DPS Essential Guild to Portrait Photography is the first title on the slate – but it looks pretty good AND it’s on sale this week for $14.95.

§ If you’ve made the jump, or are planning to make the jump to Windows 7, you may want to check out the ongoing forum article over at DPReview. It gives you the lowdown on all of you photographic software that will work… differently under the new MS OS. How will Nikon Capture NX2 do? What about Canon Photo Pro? Yeah – get the skinny on whatever software you use – or get a Mac as they say.

§ The always awesome Scott Kelby Holiday Gift Guide of Gonzoness is up. I could really use a few items on this list this year – particularly that first item on the list. If, ya know, anyone wants to take care of me. But actually, if you have another photographer to shop for – this list is always pretty primo.

§ Does Sensor Size Matter? Yep. It does. This article from the very well done Adorama blog gives you a good background on what different sensor sizes give you – and cost you. Worth a read if you’re new to all this.

§ Want to see an interesting post-processing technique, especially for landscape photography. Works for slides or for digital and it’s called the Orton Technique. Everything is very painterly (and thanks to Maria for pointing me in this direction).

§ Every time I look at the “Big Picture”, which I try and do every single time it comes out, I just get all fluttery. The latest post, featuring select images from the National Geographic International Photography Contest 2009 is definitely flutter-worthy.

§ The Photography Dictionary. A interesting take on a traditional concept – and maybe the nicest illustrated dictionary of all time.

Using technology to measure different levels of the forest structure

“Measurements of forest structure are important for wildlife habitat management. An optimal strategy for mapping forest structure would include detailed measurements of the vertical dimension, which are traditionally provided by field sampling, together with the broad spatial coverage afforded by remote sensing. While no single sensor is capable of delivering this at the present time, it should be possible to combine information from multiple sensors to achieve a reasonable approximation. In this study, we compare estimates of forest structural metrics derived from remote sensing to measurements obtained in the field (large tree maximum canopy height, mean canopy height, standard deviation canopy height, and biomass). We then statistically combine structural information from LiDAR, RaDAR, and passive optical sensors in an attempt to improve accuracy of our estimates. The results of this study indicate that LiDAR is the best single sensor for estimating canopy height and biomass. The addition of ETM+ metrics significantly improved LiDAR estimates of large tree structure, while Quickbird and InSAR/SAR improved estimates either marginally or not at all. The combination of all sensors was more accurate than LiDAR alone, but only marginally better than the combination of LiDAR and ETM+. Structure metrics from LiDAR and RaDAR are essentially redundant, as are ETM+ and Quickbird.”

Application of LiDAR’s to biology and conservation

Using acoustic sensors to measure wildlife abundance

Overview of remote sensing

“Present applications of remote sensing are numerous and varied. They include land cover mapping and analysis, land use mapping, agricultural plant health monitoring and harvest forecast, water resources, wildlife ecology, archeological investigations, snow and ice monitoring, disaster management, geologic and soil mapping, mineral exploration, coastal resource management, military surveillance, and many more.

One main advantage of a remote sensing system is its ability to provide a synoptic view of a wide area in a single frame. The width of a single frame, or swath width, could be 37 mi x 37 mi (60 km x 60 km) in the case of the European SPOT satellite, or as wide as 115 mi x 115 mi (185 km x 185 km) in the case of Landsat. Remote sensing systems can provide data and information in areas where access is difficult as rendered by terrain, weather, or military security. The towering Himalayas and the bitterly cold Antarctic regions provide good examples of these harsh environments. Active remote sensing systems provide cloud-free images that are available in all weather conditions, day or night. Such systems are particularly useful in tropical countries where constant cloud cover may obscure the target area. In 2002, the United States military initiatives in Afghanistan used remote sensing systems to monitor troops and vehicle convoy movements at spatial resolutions of less than one meter to a few meters. Spatial resolution or ground resolution is a measure of how small an object on Earth’s surface can be measured by a sensor as separate from its surroundings.

The greater advantage of remote sensing systems is the capability of integrating multiple, interrelated data sources and analysis procedures. This could be a multistage sensing wherein data on a particular site is collected from the multiple sources at different altitudes like from a low altitude aircraft, a high altitude craft, a space shuttle and a satellite. It could also be a multispectral sensing wherein data on the same site are acquired in different spectral bands. Landsat-5, for example, acquires data simultaneously in seven wavelength ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. Or, it could be a multitemporal sensing whereby data are collected on the same site at different dates. For example, data may be collected on rice-growing land at various stages of the crop’s growth, or on a volcano before and after a volcanic eruption.”

More on remote sensing

205433     ตัวรับรู้สถานะของแข็ง     Solid-State Sensors

การแบ่งจํ าแนกชนิดและศัพท์เฉพาะของตัวรับรู้ เทคโนโลยีขั้นพื้นฐานของตัวรับรู้  ตัวรับรู้ความร้อน ตัวรับรู้การแผ่รังสี ตัวรับรู้ทางกล ตัวรับรู้แม่เหล็ก ตัวรับรู้ทางเคมีและชีวภาพ ตัวรับรู้ชาญฉลาด

(Classification and terminology of sensors, basic sensor technologies, thermal sensors, radiation sensors, mechanical sensors, magnetic sensors, chemical and biosensors, smart sensors.)

(205433 มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์)

A sensing surface developed by Microsoft researchers offers new ways to use computers.

HP Labs has joined the race to build an infrastructure for the emerging Internet of Things. The giant computing and IT services company has announced a project that aims to be a “Central Nervous System for the Earth” CeNSE. Its a research and development program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of “tiny, cheap, tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors.”

via A Central Nervous System for Earth: HPs Ambitious Sensor Network.

The November 2009 INSIGHT-SPECTRA is now available. Topics covered include:

- Real world sensors have the ability imminently to flood databases and transaction processing
- Why users need ‘BigDB’
- The smart metering mistake that utilities, vendors and even the WSJ make
- Indra’s holistic approach to automated metering and energy efficiency
- To EA professionals and IT management: simply believing in EA is not enough

If you would like to receive a copy:

- either visit: c3bconsulting.com
- or email: requestcopy@insight-spectra.com

Among the more attractive non-telecom applications for photonic components on the come for the past few years has been spectroscopy and bio-sensing.  This morning on the Seeking Alpha web site, Larry Dignan highlighted advances in biochips at IBM.   In relation to this, we think it worth noting that the commercialization of biochips and microsensors will likely prove to be a boon to the leading edge of novel photonic devices. 

IBM Biochip: Reference Luc Gervais and Emmanuel Delamarche, Lab Chip, 2009, 9, 3330 (www.rsc.org)

The fundamental needs of portable and rapid analysis leads to the conclusion that photonic systems capable of chip-scale measurement will be part of the commercialization for chemical detection, blood diagnostics and other health oriented sensing applications.  Put another way, if you’re going to broadly adopt lab-on-a-chip capabilities for speed, sensitivity and portability, you’re not going to be using a large separate spectrometer to read the results.  That defeats the purpose. 

While some applications can succeed with electronic sensing, many applications will require chip-scale interfaces for portable spectrometers or perhaps even wafer-level optics for sensing.  In the example cited above, the lab-on-a-chip outputs to a fluorescence spectrometer.   In the future, that fluorescent spectrometer will need to be of a similar scale to the biochip itself. 

This dictates miniaturized photonic solutions.  One example of this is being developed by seed-stage company NanoLambda.  Their ”Spectrum Sensor” chip is a plasmonic device, selecting predefined wavelengths to construct usable spectra for sensing. 

Alternately, systems may utilized fiber optical sensing solutions targeted at specific wavelengths of interest.  Among the photonic companies capable of supplying compact optical channel monitors today are BaySpec and Aegis Lightwave.  BaySpec in particular has made significant progress as a provider of spectrometers.

On my continuing mission to take apart HiTechnic sensors and show you guys their guts, I present to you: The Gyro.  The little yellow/gold component on the right of the PCB is the actual gyro chip, the rest of the components most likely to deal with power conditioning.  There’s not a whole lot to tell about this board since there’s not a lot to it.  The other side of this board is completely bare apart from some writing, a couple of vias and the connector, of course.

Different acoustic sensors in Richmond, California.

Is this a step closer to Big Brother?

An entirely controller-free gaming experience for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 will be commercially available as early as Christmas 2010 for as cheap as $80, according to recently leaked information from a secret Microsoft tour in the United Kingdom. Known as Project Natal, the new technology will allow gamers to seamlessly interact with virtual worlds and characters by speaking, gesturing and presenting physical objects to a 3D camera.

According to the inside source, Microsoft already has 14 games in the works. One is called Ricochet, in which a player uses his entire body to bounce balls at blocks and score points. In Paint Party, gamers create an onscreen masterpiece by posing in the shape of a desired stencil, choosing colors through speech recognition, and splashing paint onto a virtual canvas with throwing motions.

This project vision video features some other possibilities, including martial arts between a gamer and an onscreen character—without the need for cumbersome sensors—and the ability to embody a Godzilla avatar on a destructive rampage.

In this earlier video, a woman interacts with a realistic virtual world and a pixilated boy named Milo, who can recognize the emotion in her voice, hold a conversation and even comment on a drawing she holds up to the camera.

The wizard behind these unprecedented gaming features is a small black box called the Project Natal sensor, which is compatible with existing Xbox 360 consoles. The magic box relies heavily on sophisticated software for human-computer interaction. “The human tracking algorithms that the teams have developed are well ahead of the state of the art in computer vision in this domain,” Johnny Chung Lee, a researcher in the Applied Sciences group at Microsoft, wrote on his blog. “The sophistication and performance of the algorithms rival or exceed anything that I’ve seen in academic research, never mind a consumer product.”

Working together, a depth camera, a multi-array microphone, and a set of specialized sensors enable full body 3D motion capture, as well as face, voice and object recognition. “Essentially we do a 3D body scan of you. We graph 48 joints in your body and then those 48 joints are tracked in real-time, at 30 frames per second,” project director Alex Kipman said in one interview. Not only will Natal register just how forcefully you kick a virtual soccer ball or how skillfully you jump on your digitized skateboard, it will recognize how many people are playing with you, distinguishing between familiar gamers and guests. Depending on how far away you are from Natal, the sensors can even differentiate the individual fingers on your hand.

The applications of such interactive technology are not limited to videogames. “These are not just the kind of experiences that you’re going to see with the 360,” Phil Spencer, general manager of Microsoft Game Studios, told The Seattle Times. “It’s a foundational event for the company, to think about how we will evolve our platforms.” If things keep going well, perhaps Microsoft will liberate laptops of keyboards and mice in time for Christmas 2011.

Stemmer Camera Has Monochrome CCD Sensors

Stemmer Imaging’s latest camera offering, the JAI AD-081CL, features two monochrome progressive scan CCD sensors mounted to a custom-designed optical prism. The prism-based design enables the camera to simultaneously capture two channels of 30fps video of the same field of view to within one-quarter pixel accuracy. A choice of operating modes allows the camera to be used for high dynamic range, high-speed operation or particle-imaging velocimetry.

Particle Imaging Velocimetry (PIV) is a planar-optical technique that measures the velocity of seeded particles (1-50um in air) in the flow of interest. Applications include vortex forming in artificial heart chambers, combustion analysis in engines and air-flow studies in wind chambers. The AD-081CL features a PIV mode that allows the camera’s two-channel operation to capture three closely spaced images on a single trigger instead of two, providing 50 per cent more data for improved analysis of ultra-fast events.

Independent control of shutter speed and/or gain for each channel provides the opportunity for wide-dynamic-range operation. This is especially useful in inspection applications where there is a particularly bright light background, such as LED inspection or welding. One channel is adjusted for the bright output, while the other channel is tuned for lower light output.

The two images can then be analysed separately or combined to produce a dynamic range nearly double the normal CCD response. This enables the camera to achieve dynamic-range levels as high as 20 bits per pixel (120dB) in a linear fashion, avoiding noise, shutter and compression issues. The versatile AD-081CL can also operate at an effective frame rate of 60fps, which is achieved by interleaving the images from the two sensors into a single-output stream.

This high-speed/low-noise mode does not increase in the clock frequency of the camera itself, keeping clock noise to a minimum. Each sensor has 1024 x 768 pixel resolution and 8 or 10 bit pixel depth. The camera features two configurable Camera Link outputs, allowing single-cable operation or separate cables for each channel. Other features include partial scanning and vertical binning capabilities, as well as analogue-video output to support auto-iris lenses.

I got a letter yesterday from my health insurance stating that they are no longer covering my Dexcom sensors, starting from August. I was confused because they’ve covered them in the past. Based on the code they listed, I assumed I had hit my DME cap for the year (this was my first full year on the sensors) and would need to appeal.

However, after spending 1 hour talking to 5 reps, I found out that the health insurance has randomly decided they are “disposable” since I throw them out after 7 days and they don’t cover “disposables”.  I imagine that “disposables” is intended to cover things like alcohol wipes and cotton balls, which they should rightly not cover.  However, 7 days is hardly “disposable”.

Edgepark (the company that provides the sensors) is already working it and their argument is that they’re not considered “disposable” since they are used in conjunction with a Durable Medical Equipment (the receiver).

I won’t know anything for at least 5 business days, but it is good to know that Edgepark is trying to regain my coverage.  I really cannot afford to either a) pay full price for the sensors or b) limit my use of them to every other week or similar.  I just hope this gets straightened out.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8349923.stm

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A/C not fixed = $20 (diagnosis/service)
If your air conditioning (A/C) is not fixed, the charge $20 to diagnose the problem.

A/C fixed + No parts = $50
(If your A/C is fixed and no parts are needed, the charge is $50 total.You will not pay more than $50 unless parts need to be purchased.)

A/C fixed + Parts = $50 + Cost of parts.
If your A/C is fixed and parts are needed, the charge is $50 + the cost of the parts.

Please note: Freon/refrigerant is a part and is not included in the service fee.

This is not an hourly fee – the labor fee is $50 no matter how long the repair takes. The charge is $20 if the A/C is not fixed.

Please note that the following services are not currently being offered: 1) coil change-outs, 2) compressor change-outs and 3) installations.

Here is a list of cities currently being serviced:

Boca Raton
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South Broward, West Broward and Miami-Dade County are not currently serviced.

Here is a list of some of the units that may be repaired…
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Any and all air conditioners have a possibility of repair.

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Goodman, Trane, Carrier, York, Rheem, Ruud, Fujistsu, American Standard, Lennox, Mitsubishi, Bryant, Payne, Duchane, Fedders, Heil, Janitrol, Armstrong, GE, General Electric, Honeywell, Amana, Comfortmaker, Tempstar, Briggs & Stratton, Kohler, Guardian, Generac.

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