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PhonePoint Pen Uses Accelerometer to Detect Movement of Hands 'Writing'

OPINION By LEE DYE

June 17, 2009 —





Wouldn't it be handy if you could write yourself a note in midair and have it safely stored where you could retrieve it later? Someday soon you may be able to do just that with nothing more than your cell phone.



Researchers at Duke University have created what they are calling a "PhonePoint Pen" that uses a modern cell phone's built-in accelerometer to detect writing in thin air, and then automatically send a note to a designated e-mail account. There are still some bugs to work out, but the researchers believe they've proven that the idea really works.



"We are convinced that this is feasible and this will become something that people will use," Romit Roy Choudhury, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke, said in a telephone interview.



Roy Choudhury said he began toying with the idea while he was still a grad student in 2005, back in the days of technological antiquity when the most common form of writing a personal reminder was with a sticky note.



"I used to keep forgetting things, and I thought there should be some way of jotting something down while I'm walking down the street, like calling someone when I get home," Roy Choudhury said. "By the time I get home, I've forgotten about it."





Accelerometer Detects Movement of Pen

"The existing technology wasn't all that great," he added. "And the idea struck me that maybe it's possible that I could have a pen with an accelerometer and I could just write in the air with the pen."



The accelerometer would detect the movement of the pen, and "then and I could press a button or something and the writing would get e-mailed to my mailbox. But getting a pen with an accelerometer was hard."



Fast forward three years and Roy Choudhury is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke. A lot had happened during that brief period, including the inclusion of accelerometers in state-of-the-art cell phones.



That's the feature that allows an image on the screen of an iPhone to change between portrait and landscape formats as the phone is rotated.





Cell Phone as the Magic Pen

As an assistant professor, Roy Choudhury had a gaggle of creative students at his disposal, and he suggested they try to figure out how to use a cell phone as the magic pen he had wanted in college.



At first, it was kind of a game, he admits, but Sandip Agrawal, an electrical and computer engineering senior, and Ionut Constandache, a grad student, made rapid progress.



One cell phone manufacturer, Nokia, donated "a bunch" of phones, and the students found that if they held the phone like a pen, grasped between the thumb and the forefinger, they could control it's movements well enough for it to recognize letters of the alphabet.



They had to be pretty big letters, about six inches tall, and the user had to learn how to write with no frame of reference other than an imaginary blackboard, but it worked well enough to jot down a phone number, or an address, or where the car was parked at the airport.





Phone Can Recognize Script

That's progress, but it's not good enough. The researchers now say they've figured out how to make the phone recognize script, and translate that into text before sending it to a designated e-mail account.



"The phone can track what you are writing," Roy Choudhury said, and even if your penmanship isn't perfect it should be able to figure out which letter of the alphabet you are trying to write. Meanwhile, the accelerometer will track other movements as well. It should be possible to "write" yourself a note while driving your car.



"There are a lot of signals that the accelerometer captures," he added. "From all those signals, we can pluck out the part that comes from the moving vehicle, because there is a particular signature from a car's movements, and we can subtract that. "



A moving hand, for example, can change direction much more frequently and more quickly, than a vehicle. So the car can be taken out of the equation.



That may not sound too safe, but it could be a lot better than trying to text-message yourself on a keyboard that just seems to get smaller and smaller.





Real-Time Alerts on Traffic Congestion Via Cell Phone

The device would also be able to clean up the signal while the user is walking, or doing just about anything else, he added.



The Duke researchers are also working on an idea that has intrigued many other scientists since the advent of cell phones with accelerometers. Theoretically, it should be possible for cell phones to provide real-time alerts on traffic congestion.



"Imagine you want to go to the airport and you want to know what the traffic on I-40 is like," Roy Choudhury said. "You could potentially get data from the accelerometer readings of all the phones that are traveling on I-40 at that moment."



The data could be captured by the cell phone network and fed into a computer that could plot traffic conditions over a wide area as events are unfolding. So before heading for the airport, check the Web to see which route would be the quickest at that precise moment.



These new uses for cell phones would not require changes to the phones themselves, he added. The changes would be in the software, not the hardware, and because accelerometers are always on, there would be no additional drain on the batteries.



There are still "issues" to be worked out, Roy Choudhury said, but his students have some tangible evidence that they aren't just toying around. They traveled to Chicago earlier this month to pick up the first Hoffman+Krippner Award for Excellence in Student Engineering.



Make a note of that.





Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

COMMENTS

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VAMPIREBLONDEE
13:07 Oct 13 2009

That would be awesome considering how forgetful I am.

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bloodmother12208
22:44 Oct 13 2009

It would be a major help!!!

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POST COMMENT

NASA's Hope: Frozen Water in Lunar Soil Would Boost Prospects for Future Moon Base

By NED POTTER

Oct. 9, 2009 —





NASA's LCROSS mission went plunging into a permanently shadowed crater near the moon's south pole this morning -- an empty rocket stage, followed four minutes later by a small satellite to see if the rocket kicked up ice in the lunar soil.



Did it find any? NASA could not, at least for now, say.



"We're not going to make any claims about water, no water, whatever," said NASA's Jennifer Heldmann, who coordinated data from more than a dozen of the world's most powerful telescopes, watching as the impact happened a quarter of a million miles away.



There was one image, from the LCROSS satellite tracking the crashing rocket, showing a white flash at the impact point. But it was just a few pixels across, and so far, scientists said they did not have images of the plume of debris they had expected.



"Life is full of surprises," said Anthony Colaprete, the mission's principal investigator, at a news conference this morning. "We have to look at a lot of data."



The scientists said they had reams of data to comb through, and pictures might not tell the story. Spectrometers -- instruments that detect the chemical composition of distant objects -- may be more useful after analysis. The process, said scientists, may take months.



One scientist conceded it is possible the rocket missed any pockets of ice that might be in the crater -- or that the theory could be wrong, and there are not large amounts of ice in the soil after all.



The space agency sent LCROSS (short for Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) to look for ice in the lunar soil -- which NASA hopes may be helpful to future astonauts trying to live long-term on the moon.



If they can prove it is there in sufficient quantities, it could be a boon to the space agency, which hopes in coming decades to build a lunar base and go on from there to Mars and the rest of the solar system. Such a base would be expensive and troublesome to supply -- but frozen water would make a big difference.



Melting the ice for drinking, washing and perhaps growing food in pressurized greenhouses would be the least of it. Water is, of course, H2O -- and can be broken down chemically to make hydrogen for fuel and oxygen for breathing.



"If we could live off the land, using this water -- if we discover it -- that would be a great benefit," said Jim Garvin, chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. "That would mean we don't have to bring it with us."



Impact came shortly after 7:3 a.m. ET on Friday, and indications were that instruments watching the crash were working properly. They included spectrometers, instruments that measure the chemical composition of the plume kicked up by the crashing rocket.



Useful data also was expected from the LCROSS satellite, flying a few hundred miles behind its Centaur booster. The satellite had four minutes to transmit its findings before it, too, hit the surface.



"If we find water there, it will change the course of exploration," said Rusty Hunt of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. "If there's water near the south pole, we'd go there." Hunt is a flight director for LCROSS, which was launched from Florida in June. He was the hands-on manager of the mission this morning.





Was Apollo Wrong?

In 1972, the last Apollo astronauts came home from the moon, and that was that. The consensus was that the rocks they had found were dry as dust -- even more so, in fact.



But the conventional wisdom has changed.



In 1994, a military space probe called Clementine, sent to map the moon as a way of testing sensors for possible Defense Department use, found evidence of ice in the shadowed corners of craters near the moon's south pole.



In 1998 a NASA probe called Lunar Prospector was sent to confirm Clementine's findings, and as it orbited the moon it found evidence of large amounts of ice in the lunar soil.



The working theory is that comets, crashing into the moon over the eons, left tons of ice. In most places, it would have vaporized quickly. But some craters near the moon's south pole are so deep -- and the angle of sunlight is always so shallow -- that ice could have remained frozen.





Crashing on the Moon: NASA Probe Looks for Ice

The earlier probes only took indirect measurements to suggest lunar ice. But could they be right? Engineers on Earth almost salivate at the thought.



That is because NASA's current mandate, laid out by President Bush and so far backed by President Obama, is to use the moon as a base for human exploration of Mars and beyond. As part of Project Constellation, they would set up camp in their Altair landing ships.



If there is frozen water there -- H2O -- it could be used for drinking, or broken down into its components of hydrogen and oxygen for fuel, air to breathe, and myriad other uses.





Exploring on a Budget

LCROSS, by NASA standards, is a low-cost mission, with a fixed budget of $79 million -- a good chunk of money, but remember that the movie "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" has grossed about $400 million since its release in June.



There has been long debate over the merits of sending astronauts back to the moon, but if LCROSS finds water, it will make the lives of future astronauts much simpler.



"It's a pretty simple mission with profound implications," said Hunt.





Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

HyGreen System Could Monitor Hand Washing in Hospitals 24 Hours a Day

OPINION By LEE DYE

June 10, 2009 —





Researchers at the University of Florida have developed a system that could save thousands of lives every year just by insuring that health care workers pay more attention to washing their hands. The system will monitor every time every nurse or doctor or technician washes his or her hands.



"This isn't big brother," said Richard J. Melker, a professor of anesthesiology who developed the system with several colleagues. But it will make it possible for everybody in the hospital, including patients, to know if the person who is about to lift their frock has clean hands.



The technology, called HyGreen, is surprisingly simple and has been tested in the intensive care unit of the university's hospital for several months. A number of hospitals have lined up to purchase the system, Melker said in a telephone interview. It is being manufactured by Xhale Inc., a university spinoff.



The cornerstone of the technology is a sensor that will "sniff" the soap and waterless cleaners used by the staff, and literally give the green light for the care giver to approach the patient. The technology addresses a basic problem that has bedeviled just about everybody in the health care business for some time now: How do you make sure people are washing their hands?





Millions Contract Illnesses From Health Care Workers

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 250 persons die in the United States every day from infectious diseases they acquired while in a hospital. And about 2 million persons get very sick from diseases like MRSA, which is usually transmitted by physical contact with a health care worker or another patient.



Those numbers, according to the CDC, the World Health Organization and several other organizations, could be cut in half just by proper hand washing. But how do you make sure people are living up to the rules?



The ideal way to do that, according to a 232-page report issued recently by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations, is to be sure that every time a worker washes his or her hands, the act is "observed by someone who is invisible, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year."





Surveillance Can Be 'Resource Intensive'

The commission noted that such surveillance is too "resource intensive" to be practical, but it will require health care organizations to come up with some sort of monitoring plan by the first of next year.



Melker and his colleagues think their technology will be even more reliable than having an invisible person follow each worker around. It will supply real-time information about who is washing their hands, and how often, and it could alert a patient if the nurse who is drawing near has washed his or her hands within the past 60 seconds.



For the sake of brevity, lets limit this to Nurse Ratchet. She enters a wash station, usually within a few steps of her patient's bed. Just above the sink is a small device with a motion detector. She splashes soap, or a waterless sterilizer, on her hands and rubs them briskly beneath the device for a second or so. Soaps used in hospitals have alcohol, some of which vaporizes and is sucked into the device by a small fan.



And bingo, a light on her name tag turns green. She continues to wash her hands for the required 15 seconds (much longer if she works in the operating room) and then moves on to her patient. As she approaches the bed, her nametag triggers a green light over the bed, telling the patient and anyone else in the room that Nurse Ratchet is clean.





Tech Can Be Used 24 Hours a Day

At the same time the info is sent to a central data system, so anyone else who needs to know can also see that Nurse Ratchet is clean.



If, however, her cell phone rang just before she entered the patient's room, and she paused to talk and thus delayed her arrival by 60 seconds, she wouldn't get that green light. Instead, a vibrator in her nametag would "buzz" her three times.



"We initially had some sounds, but you are going to use this 24 hours a day, so you don't want cute little musical tunes going off every time you enter the room, day and night," Melker said.



The exact cost is not yet known, but Melker claims that if it costs $3,000 per bed, the entire system will pay for itself within six months. It's likely, he said, that it will be used first in areas where the problem is greatest, like intensive care, and later expanded to the rest of the hospital.





Diseases Acquired in Hospitals Cost Billions

Infectious diseases acquired in hospital settings result in costs of about $20 billion a year, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Some estimates place that considerably higher, and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services ruled last year that it would no longer reimburse hospitals for the expense of treating the infections.



"And they cannot pass the cost along to the patient," Melker said, so hospitals are paying a great deal of attention to the problem.



Of course, it remains to be seen whether this is the right solution. Such a device does not require any kind of federal approval, so there is no data available on how well it works other than that supplied by the folks who hold the patent. But the alternative, Melker said, is "to have people walking around the hospital periodically checking to see if people are washing their hands."



That's not a real good solution to a problem that has been around for decades. Some people thought Ignaz Semmelweiss, a Hungarian physician, had gone over the edge when he suggested that if doctors washed their hands before moving from a cadaver to the maternity ward a lot of babies could be saved. That was more than 160 years ago.



It took a long time, but now just about everybody knows that clean hands are next to godliness, especially in a hospital where most people are already sick. But hospitals are sort of like war zones. Too much to do. Too little time to do it. Easy to forget to wash up.



Maybe Melker's team has found a way to give a green light to a technological solution.





Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

Girls More Likely Than Boys to Say They Are Expected to Intervene to Stop a Bully

OPINION By LEE DYE

May 6, 2009 —





Guess who's most likely to step in and defend a victim of bullying?



A girl.



Several studies have come to that conclusion in recent years, but new research takes the finding a step further. Girls are more likely to challenge a bully than boys are, but it's not just because they are girls.



"It has been thought that girls' sense of empathy and nurturing might play into their willingness to help the victim more often," said Jim Porter, who studied the subject for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Florida.



"But it looks as if it's peer pressure, not the gender," that compels girls to defend victims more often than boys, said Porter, who received his doctorate in psychology this May.



Porter surveyed 269 students (168 females and 101 males) in four middle schools in North Central Florida to see what they believed their parents, best friends and favorite teachers would expect them to do if they saw another student being bullied. The girls were much more likely than boys to say they'd be expected to intervene.





Peer Pressure Crucial in Getting More Girls to Stand Up to Bullies

In a telephone interview, Porter acknowledged that is a correlation, not necessarily a causation, but he believes his study shows that peer pressure plays a big role in getting more girls than boys to stand up against bullies.



Bullying has become a major concern in America's schools, especially in middle schools where it occurs most frequently.



In his dissertation, Porter noted that many studies had shown that bullies, and particularly the victims of bullies, accounted for some of the worst tragedies that have hit our schools in recent years.



One study by the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education concluded that most school shootings in the United States were committed by those who'd been bullied. And the World Health Organization found that 30 percent of students in the United States had bullied other children, been bullied, or both.



Many studies show that both sexes produce bullies and victims, although there are some differences.



One large study at the University of Illinois found that powerful, popular males were more likley to pick on weaker members of their own sex, whereas unpopular, aggressive boys tend to bully popular girls.





Social Expectations Play Big Role in Dealing With Bullies

Another study from Rhode Island's University of Warwick found that girls who are bullied are more than twice as likely to remain victims for a longer period of time than boys, but the nature of the bullying often changes from physical or verbal abuse to social exclusion.



Bullying has caught the attention of researchers only relatively recently. The first formal studies were conducted in Scandinavia in the 1970s, and even later than that in this country, Porter said. And nearly all those studies focused on either the bullies or the victims. Porter found only 13 studies that concentrated on students who came to the defense of a victim, and nine of those concluded that girls were more likely to defend than boys.



Porter believes his research shows that in the considerable effort to deal with bullying following tragedies like the Columbine massacre, one of the most important components has been underestimated.



"Social expectations," he said, may be a big player in dealing with bullies.



"We all talk about peer pressure being an important force, but when I first saw in past studies that girls were more likely to defend, and people said maybe it's just an innate helpfulness in girls and not in boys, I thought wait a minute," Porter said. "Don't tell me that boys are less innately inclined to help someone in a bullying situation."





Study Based on Self-Disclosure, More Research Needed

The difference, he said, may lie more in what's expected than in a gender-based empathy.



The findings are based on self-disclosure, so the accuracy depends largely on the candor of the participants. The results will need to be repeated by other researchers for the findings to stand.



In the survey, students said teachers and parents were more likely than best friends to expect them to try to stop a bully, but they were more likely to actually intervene if the message came from a best friend, Porter said. And a whopping 85 percent of the girls said their best friend would expect them to defend or help a victim, compared with 66 percent of the boys.



"My studies suggest tentatively that there are social influences that can be used in anti-bullying programs," Porter said. So instead of dealing with the problem entirely by punishing the bullies, some attention needs to be directed toward rewarding kids who intervene, he said. Of course, intervening can also be dangerous, so more research needs to be conducted before kids are advised to step into the middle of a fight.





Boys More Likely to Bully and Be Bullied Than Girls

This is somewhat of a personal issue for Porter, who moved to the mainland from Puerto Rico as a child. "I didn't know how to speak English, so I was getting picked on quite a bit," he said.





That left him with a "passion" for researching the subject because he "couldn't understand why you can be in the middle of school and get hurt by someone and nobody comes to help you," he said.





Gender does play a role, of course. Boys are much more likely to bully and be bullied than girls, and they are more physical in their punishment, but girls can also be bullies, he said.





"Girls do bully, and they are bullied, and it is very intense," he said. "Some of it seems to be a social bullying that's very nuanced and very powerful where girls will ruin each other's reputations, or cause someone to be ostracized, and that can lead to hopelessness and despair."





Effects of Bullying Linger for Years

Porter also measured "gender identity" in the students he studied. Students who rated themselves as "more masculine" were less likely to actually go out and defend a victim of bullying.



"I was surprised by that at first because I would think a boy would feel more comfortable jumping in and helping the victim," he said, but in fact the more masculine the boy feels, the less likely he is to defend someone else.



Although bullying is less frequent beyond middle school, the effects can linger for years, even into adulthood. Porter said that he remained fearful until recently, when he began working as a counselor and dealing with people who had been bullied, or were bullies.



"I started to realize that knowing different kinds of people more intimately has made me less afraid, and I really don't experience that sense of anxiety any more when I need to go out and confront a person or a situation," he said.





Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

Study Shows Flaws in Aggressive Dog Disciplining

OPINION By LEE DYE

Feb. 25, 2009 —





People who are overly zealous in disciplining their dogs will probably make the animals even more aggressive, not less, according to a new study by veterinarians at the University of Pennsylvania.



The study involved 140 persons who turned to the animal behavior experts at Penn because their dogs needed help. The findings are consistent with other studies showing that discipline may not be the best way to correct an errant pet's attitude, but some of the statistics are a little surprising.



It's not startling to learn that kicking a bad dog will probably make him or her angry and likely to bite, but it turns out that even yelling "no" can have the opposite of the desired effect.



"This study highlights the risk of dominance-based training, which has been made popular by TV, books and punishment-based training advocates," said Meghan Herron, lead author of the study, published in the current issue of Applied Animal Behavior Science. "These techniques are fear-eliciting and may lead to owner-directed aggression."



In other words, if you kick your dog because he tried to bite you, he might end up owning your foot.



The study involved dogs that were so problematical that their owners were willing to seek professional help. A high percentage of the dogs became even more aggressive when they were kicked (43 percent), or the owner growled at the dog (41 percent), or something was physically removed from the dog's mouth (39 percent), or the dog was rolled onto its back and held down (31 percent.)



In many cases it didn't take much to make the pooch more agitated.



The researchers found that 30 percent of the dogs became more aggressive when they were "stared down" by the owner. That's defined in the study as "stare at dog until he/she looks away." Only 13 of the owners admitted they actually "growled" at their dog, and nine of those dogs (41 percent) "responded aggressively."







Pitfalls of 'Confrontational' Training

The vets describe that type of treatment by the owner as "confrontational," and in all too many cases, it backfires.



An aggressive response by the dogs ranged from zero percent for pooches who had their noses rubbed "in house-soiled area" to 43 percent of the dogs who were hit or kicked.



Apparently, what it all comes down to is dogs, like children, are more easily trained when rewarded than when disciplined. The researchers point out that too much discipline leaves the dog frightened and riddled with anxiety.



"Frightened animals are often self-defensively aggressive," the study notes, so "it would not be unexpected, then, that dogs respond aggressively to such provocative handling."



Of course, an owner may not be able to talk a dog out of biting the hand that feeds it, and when all else fails, the vets concede, a muzzle might be necessary.



The study is the latest in a growing library of research into human interaction with canines, which began around 15,000 years ago, according to studies published a few years ago in the journal Science.



That's when man first domesticated the wolf, or as some researchers believe, wolf first domesticated man, who had a tendency to leave tasty scraps around the campfire.



Eurasian wolves, according to those studies, accompanied humans into the new world around 12,000 to 14,000 years ago, and became partners in the hunter-gatherer social order.



The animals probably didn't change all that much until about 500 years ago, when selective breeding started an avalanche of changes in the canine world, leading to everything from powder puff pooches to Doberman pinschers.



They have found their niche in everything from cheering the elderly to making their owners get out and walk, which by the way, is as good for the owner as it is for the dog, which is likely to be less aggressive if it gets more exercise, according to the Penn study.



Somewhere along the way, of course, the human-canine love fest got a little out of hand. Seriously, folks, one study out of the University of California, San Diego, confirmed a widely held belief that dogs and their owners do tend to look alike. Especially if the dog is a purebred.



But unfortunately, as the Penn study shows, the relationship is not always that harmonious.



A bad dog can be a serious threat to humans, especially children, and the vets caution that when a dog goes bad, professional help is essential. Kicking the animal won't help, and could make things worse.





Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

Many Think Dreams Are More Reliable Than Conscious Thought, Research Shows

OPINION By LEE DYE

March 5, 2009 —





Here's the scene: You wake up after dreaming about a horrible plane crash, and you're scheduled to board an aircraft later in the day for a long-awaited trip. Will that nightmare have any effect on whether you continue with your plans?



Possibly, according to a new multi-cultural study involving nearly 1,100 people around the world. You may not cancel your trip, but your dream will probably weigh as heavily on your thoughts as if there had been a real plane crash that day, not just a dream, according to the study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.



The study suggests that humans from a wide range of cultures believe their dreams are a window into the inner workings of the mind and that they may even influence our activities while we're awake. Dreams are serious stuff.



"Most people understand that dreams are unlikely to predict the future, but that doesn't prevent them from finding meaning in their dreams, whether their contents are mundane or bizarre," said psychologist Carey Morewedge of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, lead author of the study.





Do Dreams Really Mean Anything?

No doubt even the earliest humans were perplexed and fascinated by dreams that can sometimes seem as real as the world around us. Do they really mean anything? Scholars tended to dismiss them as little more than mental fireworks until the latter part of the 19th century. But when Sigmund Freud published "The Interpretation of Dreams" in 1899, he introduced science to the complex and bizarre world hidden in the human mind.



Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious," and for more than a century now, researchers have tried to travel down that road. We know now that dreams do mean something, and they are universal. The most common dream, according to some studies, occurs in all cultures, and it's virtually certain that anyone reading this article has experienced the same dream. Someone, or something, is in hot pursuit, and if the dreamer can't escape, the consequences will be deadly.



That universal dream usually means the person feels threatened, or under attack, or is recalling a time when an attack was real.







Dreams Contain 'Hidden Truths'

Nearly as common is that old dream of showing up in public and discovering that you forgot to put your pants on before leaving the house. It can mean different things, but usually the person feels exposed or vulnerable.



The interpretation of dreams is still a fuzzy area, and may always be so, but Morewedge and Michael I. Norton of Harvard University and a large team of associates wanted to move dream research into a new arena that is difficult to study: Do dreams actually influence our behavior?



The researchers carried out six studies in both Eastern and Western cultures (the United States, South Korea and India) that led them to conclude that people place considerable importance in their dreams, because dreams come from within the brain, not from outside sources, and thus contain "hidden truths."



Here are just a few of their findings:



A majority of 182 commuters in Boston reported that dreams affected their daily behavior. Some 68 percent said that dreams foretell the future, and 63 percent said at least one of their dreams had come true. "Participants were more likely to report that a dream of a plane crash would affect their travel plans than a conscious thought of a crash or a warning from the government," the study found.



Three-hundred forty-one pedestrians were surveyed in Cambridge, Mass., and people who believed in the Freudian theory of the subconscious were more influenced by their dreams than were nonbelievers, but "regardless of the theory of dreams that they endorsed, participants considered dreams to be more important than similar thoughts occurring to them while awake..." the study found.



Sixty undergraduate psychology students at Rutgers University were asked whether they believed in God on a five-point scale ranging from definitely to doubtful. "Not surprisingly, believers rated dreams in which God spoke to them as more meaningful than did agnostics," the study found. Also, not surprisingly, "agnostics reported that dreams were more meaningful when God suggested that they should take a year off to travel the world than when God suggested they should take a year off to work in a leper colony."







The Role of Dreams in Our Waking Lives

Consistent throughout the study is the thread that dreams do play a role in the waking lives of most people. They come from within and, thus, contain "hidden truths" that could be useful in real life, or so most of us believe.



The researchers end their report by cautioning that dreams can cause a bit of mischief.



"Dreams of spousal infidelity may lead to suspicious accusations, alienating one's spouse and potentially provoking actual infidelity," they cite as one example. But they go on to add that dreams of infidelity may also be based on fact.



"Dreams may integrate seemingly unrelated evidence -- unexplained credit card charges, smudges of lipstick, distant behavior -- into a correct diagnosis of infidelity," the study suggested.



But they are still just dreams. Not many psychologists would embrace the idea that dreams are a clear window into the inner self, and that they can predict the flight you are supposed to take later today is going to crash.



"We close by noting that, although dreams are unlikely to predict future world events, it is possible that they may provide some hidden insight into diurnal life in the way that laypeople believe they do," the study concluded.





Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

New Tools Help in Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

OPINION By LEE DYE

June 3, 2009 —





An innovative new radio telescope has given new life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, leading one of the leaders of the search to make a bold prediction.



"We'll find ET within two dozen years," Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, proclaimed in a speech at the California Institute of Technology. Shostak went on to say that he not only has a pretty good hunch about how long it could take, he thinks he knows what ET will be like.



But don't expect him to look like us.



"I think that if there's a conscious intelligence out there, it's synthetic," Shostak added. He's talking robots, folks. The argument goes like this: Darwinian evolution is a very slow process, and although it probably has occurred on many planets, it has it's limitations -- like us. Technological evolution, by contrast, can advance at warp speed, as we've all seen in the computers that are out of date by the time we get them out of the box.



Thus, any biological life, like us, will eventually lose out to the machines we create, and synthetic intelligence will take over where we leave off. The real challenge, of course, will be to keep the robots under control but still let them do our thinking for us, a neat trick if we can pull it off.



It's probably going to happen, Shostak said, because technological evolution "just blows Darwin away." So, ET not only should be out there someplace, he should be one really smart machine.



Now, predictions about how long it will take to find ET are not rare, since that's probably the most common question put to scientists at the SETI Institute, a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy. The institute has been the largest player in the search since NASA abandoned a formal program several years ago. The space agency has continued searching for other Earth-like planets, including the launching of the Kepler telescope last March, but it has shied away from looking directly for ET.



What makes the search different now is the creation of the Allen Telescope Array in a dusty valley 290 miles northeast of San Francisco that will, for the first time, look for ET 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Only 42 of the planned 350 radio dishes that will make up the array have been completed, but that's enough for scientists to begin combing the heavens for many secrets, including the hiding place of ET.



The array is a joint project by the University of California, Berkeley, and the SETI Institute. The primary financial support has come from Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, who put up $25 million in seed money in 2001.



The array is the first panchromatic, wide-angle, snapshot radio camera ever built, according to scientists at Berkeley. The design is based on the idea that it's cheaper to build a lot of small radio antennas that act as one than it is to build huge dishes.



As part owner of the new array, SETI finally has its own toolbox and scientists will no longer be forced to use "other people's telescopes, which is like doing cancer research with borrowed microscopes," Shostak said.



Shostak's optimism is based partly on the availability of the array, and partly on the fact that new planets are being discovered outside our solar system on about a monthly basis. They are not all capable of sustaining life as we know it, but some of them may be. That has lead many scientists to speculate that life, and possibly intelligent life, abounds throughout the universe.



But that contributes to one of the debates that have plagued SETI over the years. If there are lots of other planets out there like ours, with living creatures that are at least smart enough to build radio transmitters, why haven't we found them? SETI may not have had all the tools it needed, and funding has been scarce, but lots of very smart people have been looking very hard for ET for several decades.



Some astronomers dismiss those questions by noting that there's just zillions of places to look, and they are a long ways away, and no one is certain what to look for. So in the past, searchers have counted on finding radio signals that are beamed our way by someone on another planet who is looking for us.



It would probably have to be a directed beam because "leakage," like from television broadcasts, would be too weak. Besides, why would someone who is so much smarter than us broadcast over the air when fiber optics are more reliable and efficient? Our own electromagnetic signature is shrinking, Shostak noted in his talk, so we're not likely to stumble across ET's version of "ABC News with Charles Gibson."



But new tools, including the Allen Telescope Array, could open new ways to search for ET. Unlike other radio telescopes, the array can image a huge piece of the sky at once, or concentrate on a single star with an interesting planetary system. All objects in space emit radio waves, which can reveal much about their composition.



One way to narrow the search is to look for some of the things produced on Earth that would not be here if there had been no life. Methane, Shostak noted, would disappear from a planet's atmosphere in a relatively short time, so if it's there, something must be producing it.



"Much of the methane in this room is produced by what is politely called 'bovine flatulence,' and also by porcine flatulence, so this technique would at least allow you to find pigs in space," he added. But, of course, they would not necessarily be smart pigs.



It is widely believed that water would have to be present on another planet for it to support life, and scientists at the University of Washington have devised a technique that they say would determine if another planet has oceans. Using instruments aboard a NASA spacecraft, the scientists studied light intensities from Earth in seven bands of visible light from near ultraviolet to near infrared.



They found two dominant colors, blue and red, and surmised that the red came from land masses, and the blue from oceans. If they could detect the same colors from a distant planet, they would have evidence that the planet had huge areas of water, the scientists said in an article that is scheduled for publication in Astrophysical Journal.



"Liquid water on the surface of a planet is the gold standard that people are looking for," said Nicolas Cowan, a doctoral student in astronomy and lead author of the paper.



Of course, oceans do not necessarily mean life, especially intelligent life, but such a discovery would help focus the search on more promising planets. It will, however, require a new generation of space telescopes.



And if Shostak is right, we may already know by then.



"If we don't find ET within a generation, there is something very fundamentally wrong with our assumptions," he said in his talk, which was published in Caltech's quarterly, Engineering and Science.



It would make things a lot easier if ET would just give us a shout.





Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

Research Shows That a Certain Cat Parasite Affects Our Behavior and Mood

Aug. 9, 2006 —





Kevin Lafferty is a smart, cautious, thoughtful scientist who doesn't hate cats, but he has put forth a provocative theory that suggests that a clever cat parasite may alter human cultures on a massive scale.



His phone hasn't stopped ringing since he published one of the strangest research papers to come out of the mill in quite awhile.



The parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, has been transmitted indirectly from cats to roughly half the people on the planet, and it has been shown to affect human personalities in different ways.



Research has shown that women who are infected with the parasite tend to be warm, outgoing and attentive to others, while infected men tend to be less intelligent and probably a bit boring. But both men and women who are infected are more prone to feeling guilty and insecure.



Other researchers have linked the parasite to schizophrenia. In an adult, the symptoms are like a mild form of flu, but it can be much more serious in an infant or fetus. Oxford University researchers believe high levels of the parasite leads to hyperactivity and lower IQs in children.



Lafferty, who is a parasite ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is an expert on the role parasites play in the ecology of other animals.



Building on research by scientists in the Czech Republic, Lafferty took a long look at areas of the globe where infection levels are quite high, or quite low. In Brazil, for example, two out of three women of child-bearing age are infected, whereas in the United States the number is only one out of eight.



Lafferty argues in a research paper published Aug. 2 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biology, that aggregate personality types, or what cultures tend to be like, fit neatly with the effects that the parasite produces in individuals.



So that led to a basic question:



Can a common cat parasite account for part -- even if only a very small part -- of the cultural differences seen around the world?



From Lafferty's perspective, that's quite likely, although he admits his theory is a bit off the wall.



"It's kind of way out in left field," he says. "I think it's the strangest thing I've ever worked on."



Bizarre, perhaps, but less so considering the wily parasite that lays the foundation for Lafferty's theory.



Toxoplasma, he notes, is "frighteningly amazing."



It can change the personality of a rat so much that the rat surrenders itself to a cat, just as the parasite wanted.



The parasite's eggs are shed in a cat's feces. A rat comes along, eats the feces, and becomes infected. The behavior of the rat undergoes a dramatic change, making the rat more adventuresome and more likely to hang out around cats.



The cat eats the rat, and the parasite completes its life cycle.



That manipulation of the local ecology is not unusual for a parasite, Lafferty says.



"This is something that many parasites do," he says. "Many manipulate hosts' behavior."



So it wasn't much of a jump to the next question.



"We have a parasite in our brain that is trying to get transmitted to a cat," he says. "This changes an individual's personality."



So if enough personalities are changed in a given society, will the culture of that society also be changed?



He's not suggesting that it's a big player in cultural evolution. Lots of other things are more powerful, ranging from geography to weather to the availability of natural resources.



But if enough of us are infected and undergo personality changes, will that also alter our combined personalities or our culture?



Lafferty admits anthropologists are not likely to embrace his theory. A single powerful leader can have a dramatic impact on a culture. We can all think of examples. But can the collective personality have a similar effect?



"Anthropologists are not in agreement that you can drive a culture from the bottom up," Lafferty says.



But he sees that happening throughout the parasitic world, involving many types of animals, so why is it inconceivable that it could also be happening among humans?



It will be a long time before we have the answer to that, if we ever do, but in the meantime here's a bit of good news.



Cat lovers need not get rid of their cats. The chances are not great that a modern cat, kept on a diet of safe cat food and not left to feed off rats, will transmit the parasite to humans. It's possible, but not likely, Lafferty says.



He ought to know. As a kid he had cats, so after he got into this line of research he assumed he had been infected with the parasite.



"So after I submitted the paper I put down my 30 bucks and got a blood test," he says. "It came out negative. I was so surprised."



And that leads him to this final comment:



"This isn't about trying to freak cat owners out," he says. "Simply having a cat as a pet doesn't mean you're going to get infected, for sure."



Of course, maybe some other parasite is making him say that.





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