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ellymackay · 4 years

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The Latest Science on How to Create Your Ideal Sleep Environment

The Latest Science on How to Create Your Ideal Sleep Environment was originally published to https://www.ellymackay.com/

Let’s face it, it’s pretty easy to take your bedroom for granted. Especially with everything going on right now, I bet a lot of people are falling into bed at the end of some very long days, worrying about life and the future, hoping that sleep will come quickly and last long enough to keep from feeling exhausted the next day.

Even in much easier times than these, it’s easy enough to lose sight of the importance of maintaining an optimal sleep environment. But it matters. A lot. Plenty of sleep problems arise directly out of our sleeping spaces, whether that’s from noise, or light, or temperature issues.

You’ve probably heard the advice to keep your bedroom like a cave: cool, dark, quiet. All good advice. But there’s more to it than that.

I wrote a while back about the fundamentals of creating an optimal bedroom environment. But we haven’t touched on the topic for a while. And there’s some recent research that gives new and actionable insights into just what works best for most people in a sleep space, when it come to light, sound, texture, noise and temperature.

Since we’re all spending so much time at home right now, it seems like a good time to take a fresh look at our sleeping spaces, and put into action what the latest science reveals about what makes the most sleep-friendly bedroom.

What is the best bedroom temperature?

Without a doubt, this is the most common question I get from people about their sleeping spaces. The ideal temperature varies by individual, and a lot of this does depend on individual preference and tolerance for heat and humidity, as well as individual health factors, including body weight, hormone imbalances, the stages of menopause, and conditions such as obstructive sleep apnea and GERD. Here’s a thorough rundown of how the body manages temperature during sleep, and the many factors to consider in maintaining ideal temperature for your night’s sleep.

That said, there is a range that likely captures nearly everyone’s optimal temperature—and there’s some new research that shows that range, as well as potentially ideal single temperatures within it.

I find people often tend to think about air temperature as a stand-alone factor in our bedroom environments. But temperature interacts with other factors in critical ways that affect how we experience the heat or coolness of our sleeping spaces.

Scientists at San Jose State Research Foundation and NASA Ames Research foundation did a review of scientific research about what creates the optimal sleep environment. They found the ideal temperature range to be very broad—between 17-28 degrees Celsius, which is 62-82 degrees Fahrenheit.

But they also found that other temperature-related factors heavily influenced the optimal temperature within that range. One of those factors is humidity. I know we all complain a lot about the humidity in general—but I’m not sure people pay enough attention to humidity in their sleep environments. In their analysis, scientists found that the optimal range for sleep is 40-60% relative humidity. Depending on where you live, what time of year it is, that can mean you need to add or subtract humidity from your bedroom to sleep at your best.

The other factor was the “bedding microclimate.” That’s right, your bed has its own climate! It’s affected by what you wear to bed, by your mattress and pillows, by your bedding itself—sheets and covers and all. These days, you’re not only able to influence your bed climate by the types of materials you use in your bedding (more scientific information on that in just a minute). You also can tightly control your bed climate with mattress pads that will keep your bed’s microclimate at an optimal temperature.

THE TAKEAWAY? Think about bedroom temperature—but don’t ONLY think about bedroom temperature. Take humidity and your bed climate into consideration, as well as skin temperature and air flow (more on those in a minute) and look at optimal sleep environment temperature as an interplay among these factors.

For a long time, I have recommended to my patients the Chilipad, a mattress pad that allows you to regulate the temperature within your bed. You can customize the temperature on your side of the bed, and your partner can do the same on their side, so each of you gets to sleep in the microclimate that’s exactly right for them.

Some other recent research looked at the impact of bedding climate on sleep, and specifically at the distribution of heat and the sensations of temperature across the body within bed. This study found the bed temperature around the body’s core is the best measurement for determining a comfortable, optimal sleep temperature. This research also found that when we sleep, we tend to experience a broader range of comfortable temperature sensations on our face, compared to the rest of our body.

THE TAKEAWAY? Your face can feel cool while your body feels warmer, and you’ll sleep well. You can keep your room on the cool side, and regulate temperature within your bed itself. Just don’t go too far in turning the heat down when it’s cold—a really cold bedroom will interfere with your sleep.

Keeping your head cool doesn’t just feel comfortable for sleeping—it can actually help you slow down the racing thoughts that interfere with your sleep. Surprised? Research has shown that cooling the forehead slows down activity in the frontal cortex, and helps people fall asleep faster, sleep more deeply, and sleep longer. High levels of activity in the frontal cortex are common in people who can’t sleep. This is the area of the brain where ruminating thoughts take place. My patients who have trouble calming their minds at night have had great success with EBB, a forehead cooling band worn at night. EBB cools the forehead to the optimal temperature range—15-18 degrees Celsius, as determined by scientific research. This cooling of the forehead reduces the metabolic activity of the frontal cortex, and quiets the mind so you can sleep.

Here’s one other piece of recent research I want to highlight on temperature. A study in China included both a large-scale survey and a field study about the effects of environment on sleep, capturing both objective measurements and the subjective impressions of sleepers about how their sleep quality was impacted by their environment. There are a few key takeaways here. The optimal sleep environment temperature was determined to be 24.2 degrees Celsius, or about 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Measurements taken in a field study showed a strong relationship between a person’s satisfaction with their sleep environment and their sleep quality. In other words, paying attention and care to your bedroom really does matter. And there are gender differences to explore in relation to sleep environments. Men in this study had lower sleep quality than women. (More on some other gender differences in just a minute.)

Some quilts will keep you warmer—and give you more restful sleep—than others

You might not have given much thought to the materials used in your quilt or bedspread. A lot of people think mostly in terms of light and heavy, for warm and cold sleeping weather. I’ve written before about how the materials in our bedding and sleep clothing—as well as our mattresses and pillows—can affect comfort in bed and the ability to sleep well.

Recent research zeroed in for a close look at how three different types of quilt materials performed in un-heated bedrooms, analyzing how each type affected sleep and sleepers’ thermal comfort. Scientists investigated the performance of quilts made of goose down, duck down, and cotton. They took objective measurements of skin temperature and bed climate, and collected subjective data about how sleepers perceived their sleep under each type of quilt.

Both subjective and objective data showed that the material of the quilt used had a significant impact on sleep quality and on sleep comfort. Of the three, the goose down quilt performed the best. EEG measurements showed that sleepers using goose down had longer periods of slow-wave sleep, the deep sleep stage in which the body does some of its most critical work to restore and repair cells and boost the immune system. Sleepers using goose down quilts also had higher skin temperatures and warmer bed climates. The cotton quilt was the least optimal for sleep, according to this research.

THE TAKEAWAY? For cold climates and winter months, it’s worth the investment in a down quilt. If you’re not able to tolerate down, consider hypoallergenic alternatives.

Your bedroom needs to be quieter than you think

How loud does noise need to be to disturb your sleep? All of us are different, of course. And different sounds create different responses. Someone who can sleep through a thunderstorm will jolt awake at the sound of their child crying in the next room. The researchers at NASA and San Jose State, in their optimal bedroom environment analysis, found that threshold level for bedroom noise is 35dB. That means, to maintain an optimal sleep space, all noise needs to be at a decibel level below 35. What does 35 dB sound like? Here are some decibel level comparisons for perspective:

An airplane taking off is 150 dB

Thunder? About 120 dB

A lawn mower is around 100 dB

A bird call is roughly 40dB

Regular conversation between people sitting at a dinner table? 60 dB

A whisper? That’s about 20 dB

Your own breathing—and your partner’s, if they don’t snore, is about 10 dB. So, 35 dB is not quite 2x as loud as whispering, and definitely quieter than normal conversation. That’s pretty quiet, definitely a lot quieter than the TV volume that so many of us fall asleep to. We’re most likely to awaken from sound that’s 50 dB or less when we’re in the lighter stages of 1 and 2 sleep; deeper sleep awakenings typically require louder noises.

I’ve written before about the different types of noise that interfere with sleep, everything from snoring, to fireworks to TV and electronics to environmental noise. Each form of noise takes different remedies to address. All of them are worth addressing. (That noise article of mine is a good roundup of suggestions for an array of disruptive sounds.) White noise machines are a great sleep tool for masking unwanted noise, reducing awakenings, and increasing sleep amounts.

THE TAKEAWAY? Total silence is not necessarily the solution, but an optimal bedroom is quiet. My patients have had success with sound machines, and I especially like the iHome Zenergy sleep system for introducing quiet sounds into the bedroom, to promote relaxation and help block other, more disruptive noises. Melatonin has also been shown to improve sleep quality against the effects of noise. In research, melatonin did a better job of protecting sleep quality in a noisy environment than earplugs. Earplugs can be useful, but people sometimes find them uncomfortable. And usingearplugs too frequently can lead to earwax buildup. When you do use earplugs, be sure they are clean (or new, if you’re using the disposable kind) with each and every use, to avoid exposing the ear canal to dirt and bacteria. If you suffer from tinnitus, I recommend avoiding using earplugs. Here’s how tinnitus can affect sleep.

I love using earplugs for travel, but wouldn’t opt to use them at home every night. I’d rather see people use a white noise machine or sound machine to mask the noises you can’t control, and also address the underlying causes of noise-related sleep problems, whether that’s partners’ snoring, or a TV that runs late into the night without a shut-off timer.

For men and women, the ‘optimal’ sleep environment is different

A couple of these recent studies shed light on the differences in how men and women experience their sleep environments. A 2019 study looked specifically at gender differences in relation to temperature, and use of thermoelectric cooling technology—that’s the tech that’s found in the Chilipad I mentioned above. This study found women preferred a warmer sleep environment than men, requiring less powerful thermoelectric cooling to achieve optimal sleep in warm temperatures. (That’s why it’s so cool and important that Chilipad let’s couples set their own individual cooling level within the same bed.)

And in the study of optimal bedding materials, scientists found some interesting differences in skin temperature for men and women during sleep. Women’s average skin temperature was higher than men’s, but their foot temperature was lower than men’s. That suggests women need to pay some extra attention to their feet (and their hands) during cold-weather sleeping.

There are key differences in the ways men and women sleep. Men and women’s circadian clocks run differently. Men’s tend to run later and a little longer, which means women are apt to have a preference for waking earlier and going to bed earlier, across different chronotypes. Women, on average, spend more time in slow wave sleep, which may explain why science has shown that women tend to perform better when sleep deprived and to rebound more quickly from short-term sleep loss. Women and men also experience different, gender-specific sleep challenges at different points throughout adulthood, including the impact of menopause. I’ve written extensively about menopause and sleep, and also about sleep throughout the decades of our lives.

THE TAKEAWAY? Don’t assume a one-size fits all approach is going to get both you and your partner the best sleep environment. You’ve got individual needs and preferences that may need individualized attention. Increasingly, sleep equipment is geared toward this level of individualization, whether for mattresses—here’s my just-released advice on choosing a hybrid mattresses—or the temperature of your sleep microclimate.

Optimizing air quality for sleeping

The recent NASA/San Jose State study found that the optimal air quality for sleeping occurs at sea level, with ventilation. Air quality in our bedrooms is another aspect of the sleep environment that tends to get overlooked. You can increase the oxygen in your bedroom by opening windows. It’s great to sleep with windows open when the outdoor temperature allows. Depending on where you live and the season, falling asleep to a cool breeze from outdoors can be terrifically relaxing and sleep enhancing. There are other options for promoting ventilation in your bedroom. If you’re in a noisy environment, or when the weather is too hot or too cold for open-window sleeping, open windows before bedtime to circulate air and enrich the oxygen in your sleep space. Leaving doors open to your bedro and throughout your house will increase ventilation, as will fans and air conditioners. Keeping plants in the bedroom—and throughout your house—is another natural, low-cost, easy way to boost oxygen levels. Plants pull carbon dioxide from the air, and can also filter out harmful chemicals. If you have pets and/or small children, do your research to identify what plants are toxic when ingested, and take care to place plants out of reach.

THE TAKEAWAY: The farther you are from sea level, the more you’ll need to pay attention to enhancing the oxygen levels in your sleep environment. Ventilate your bedroom as much as possible in ways that don’t introduce other interference with your sleep. Open windows and leave doors open when you can, and use fans and A/C to keep air moving.

Pre-bedtime light will disrupt your sleep—but not all light works the same way to suppress sleep

The San Jose State/NASA study of optimal sleep environments confirms what I talk about a lot here: inappropriately timed light exposure in the evening hours before bed has a significant negative effect on your ability to

fall asleep

stay asleep

get the optimal amount of time in each of the stages of sleep

stick to a consistent sleep schedule, night after night

Poorly timed light exposure exerts a disruptive effect on sleep in several ways. Light is arousing. It stimulates the brain. That’s the opposite of what we want when we’re going to bed. And when your light exposure comes along with mentally stimulating content—say, from reading social media or the news online, or watching a fast-paced TV show—you’re getting a whole other layer of stimulation that takes your brain in the opposite direction from sleep.

Light at night also throws off circadian clocks—the body’s pacemaker, which regulates our daily sleep-wake cycles, and suppresses melatonin. These effects push sleep back to later in the night and they alter sleep-wake routines for nights to come.

But not all light has the same effect on sleep. Blue light—the short-wavelength light found in high concentrations in digital devices—is especially aggressive in disrupting sleep. For example, the researchers point to a study showing that use of e-readers before bed is linked to longer time to fall asleep, and less time in REM sleep compared to reading a paper book by lamplight. The blue light from e-readers was shown to suppress melatonin, shift circadian rhythms, and stimulate the brain, resulting in less sleep and more next-day fatigue, with less next-day alertness.

THE TAKEAWAY? Limitations on light are essential to protecting sleep and creating an optimal sleep environment. Your bedroom should be dark for the duration of your sleep. No phones lighting up on the nightstand, no environmental light flooding in from outdoors. But your movement away from bright light—and especially blue light—needs to start before bed. That involves both limiting overall light exposure AND employing longer-wavelength light in your nighttime light sources. Red light, studies show, does not suppress melatonin and disrupt circadian timing as blue light does. You can easily install red light bulbs in your bedroom and in the areas of your house where you’re apt to hang out before bed.

Look, I know that asking people to stash their digital devices and turn off the TV at dusk is unrealistic. It’s a habit few people can actually sustain—myself included! That’s why I spent a bunch of time working with the smart folks at Luminiere to create blue-light blocking glasses, which filter out the blue light that’s keeping you up at night. They’re made with amber lenses let those longer, red light wavelengths through, while they block the sleep-disruptive blues. These glasses don’t darken your vision. They help you see at night with aid of the long-wavelength light that studies like this recent one by NASA show does not disrupt your sleep. Here’s where you can read up on all the details of what went into making these blue light blocking glasses, and why they’re so effective in protecting your sleep without having to give up on Netflix, some evening work on front of the computer or a little social media time before bed. (Just make sure you stash your phone outside your bedroom when it comes time to sleep.) And here’s where you can check out the blue light blocking glasses in all their cool, retro style.

Curating a restful sleep environment is one of the most rewarding and effective ways to protect and enhance your sleep. An investment of time and attention to your sleep space makes going to bed feel like a reward, and pays dividends in the form of deeper, sounder, more restful and restorative sleep.

Sweet Dreams,

Michael J. Breus, PhD, DABSM

The Sleep Doctor

www.thesleepdoctor.com

The post The Latest Science on How to Create Your Ideal Sleep Environment appeared first on Your Guide to Better Sleep.

from Your Guide to Better Sleep https://thesleepdoctor.com/2020/08/19/latest-science-on-how-to-create-your-ideal-sleep-environment/

from Elly Mackay - Feed https://www.ellymackay.com/2020/08/19/the-latest-science-on-how-to-create-your-ideal-sleep-environment/

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johnlee-designstudio · 4 years

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Mnemonic.

/nɪˈmɒnɪk/

Noun

“a system such as a pattern of letters, ideas, or associations which assists in remembering something”

Photography and cinematography has become regarded as an essential medium for preserving and passing on personal and cultural memory, relying heavily on the idea that ‘a scene, or what we call a ‘picture’ is worth a thousand words.’ Although these original connotations belong to the realm of analogue photography, they linger in our experience of most lens-based media, including digital photography and video. Part of the fascination of lens-based media is the way in which they are felt to resemble our own memories. The eye is commonly described as a camera and, in an extension of this metaphor, our memories become photographic recordings, stored and revisited in our minds. This common metaphor of memories as photographs, in turn, imbues actual photographs and videos with a sense of memory; our memories feel photographic / cinematic to us and become a database of external memories.

Alter Bahnhof Video Walk is an artwork by the artist duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller is site-specific art work, meant to be experienced in the main train station, which nowadays functions both as a train station and a cultural space. It explores the ambiguous and capricious ways in which memory and commemoration are shaped through photographic media and monuments. A novel approach is used to engage the visitor in the process of commemoration, moving beyond the passive contemplation of the traditional monument. In inviting the audience to critically consider the notion of memory, the work can be described as performative.

The video walk illustrates the blending of performance and performativity effectively in its reflection on the process of remembrance. The ‘forced’ creation of memory through the scripted performance of the artwork brings out the performative nature of memory in general. “On the stage a performance is safe, since it is clearly distinct from reality (the transvestite on stage does not threaten us). In the street, however, the performance is no longer theatrical, but becomes real and performative (hence the perceived threat when that same transvestite sits next to us on the bus)” (Judith Butler 1988)

It is this distinction that makes the video walk so interesting, since these realms start overlapping and bleeding into each other. The participants in the video walk are caught between theatrical performance and the real; while there is a script and the participant clearly plays a role, nonetheless this is real and the emotions and experiences are not scripted. This is not a performance, set up to please or entertain others, this is a performance set up to change the participant’s reality. And in the process, it becomes painfully clear that there is no way to correctly perform the ‘original’ memory.

The ‘experiment’ of the video walk left myself with an uncanny sensation of being stuck between reality and performance. Combined with the constant theme of Holocaust remembrance, this made me, consciously or unconsciously, question the balance between performance and reality in the preservation of memories from Holocaust victims. How much of this is or can truly be passed on and how much is constructed anew with every commemoration? In this work the artists have created a complex interplay between the fickle photographic media, the relation between performance and performativity and the enigmatic process of remembrance. Art can help nuance and bring to light the process of cultural remembrance, for it can do two things at once: help construct a cultural memory of an event and at the same time, on another level, comment on the performative process of constructing such memories, the dangers in using photographic media and the impossibility of truly understanding someone else’s memories.

Alter Bahnhof (2008) by Cardiff & Miller

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By taking this cinematic work as a base material, I produced similar replica to view the given site, Fort Lane, in a cinematic way. This is done by overlaying pre-recorded footages of different timelines with same itinerary repeatedly that will, in result, develop a performing and performative journey creating experiences of blurred line between reality of the physical space and ‘cinematic fiction’. From this, each individual constructs memories, both personal and collective ones, by taking up elements of personal expressions of memories seen elsewhere in mixture with the ‘forced’ mnemonic tool.

Fort Lane (2020) by John Lee

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The notion of performativity plays a crucial role in this week’s investigation. The video walk reminds us that memory is the result of a dynamic process and needs to be constructed with every instance of remembrance by the person doing the remembering. Despite the voice-over telling us that memory is ‘like filling a suitcase that we pull behind us and we open and close when we need to,’ the truth is that memory, individual or shared, cannot be quite as easily preserved or passed on. In fact, every instance of remembering is an instance of constructing. Moreover, every newly constructed memory is designed around the needs and desires of the person creating it rather than those of the person who experienced the original event. It is here that the notion of performativity can help us understand the process of remembrance, especially when brought together with the practice of performance, as in the video walk.

References:

Cardiff, J & Miller, G.(2008). DOCUMENTA, Alter Bahnhof

Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (1988) Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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ramajmedia · 5 years

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Wasteland 3 Preview: Prepare Yourself For The All-Mighty Kodiak

It’s hard to ever feel completely safe in the post-apocalyptic wilds, but driving the mighty Kodiak through the snowy crumbled terrain of Wasteland 3 feels almost cozy. This massive durable vehicle in the newest sequel to the historic franchise is one of its most compelling new features, but a special preview of the game offers up some additional developments in the tactical gameplay and exploration, and it all feels like a pronounced upgrade from Wasteland 2.

It’s fairly well known by now, but inXile’s sequel was an early-stage Kickstarter success story, raising nearly $3 million and attracting gobs of attention for the original Wasteland, a formative CRPG from 1988 developed by Interplay, and whose influences can be felt in multiple games to follow (Interplay would later develop the original Fallout). With Wasteland 3, though, inXile (whose studio was recently acquired by Microsoft Studios) seeks to court gamers from all walks of life, not just the very particular niche beholden to the CRPG banner.

Related: Wasteland 3 E3 2019 Trailer Turns Up The Heat In A Frosty Apocalypse

Their growing library includes such hits as the Planescape: Torment spiritual sequel, Torment: Tides of Numenera, and this proven track record carried Wasteland 3 to its successful Fig campaign, out-performing their Kickstarter goal for the prior game

The Wasteland 3 preview build offered us a mission for a Ranger Squad looking to bring balance to the wilds. The setting for the mission is Aspen, Colorado, but this time, players get a heavily armored vehicle to carry them to each new engagement. In a twist that is completely gob-smacking the first time, entering a hostile environment proves that the Kodiak isn’t just a mode of team transportation a la Final Fantasy’s classic airships, but a true-blue controllable combat unit which can crush enemies, fire at them from its mounted weapon, or provide immediate mid-fight cover.

It’s fascinating just to watch the Kodiak trundle into a battle, where it can pulverize otherwise viable cover to debris. Jeremy Kopman, lead level designer, needs to weigh and consider the increased potential offered to players with the Kodiak, beyond simply having a hulking war machine as a optional unit: "...with each [encounter], we want to ensure the player can use its overwhelming power in clever ways."

In some cases that might mean including larger than usual sections of cover and other objects that it can smash through, opening up new paths for the on-foot PCs to take, or closing off a path to funnel enemies into a kill box. In others, the player might be able to use gas grenades or other area denial weapons to smoke out fortified enemies, then run them down once they’re in the open. Smushing all the enemies in one run can be fun at times but would get repetitive after a while.

While we didn’t encounter anything as imposing as that during our time with the game, we did get to meet a cult of lunatics called The Breathers, ruled over by Victor Buchanan, the son of the Patriach. They’re holed up in Aspen, and are basically a violent and unpredictable faction of hallucinogen-huffing freaks in diving masks. Each member of The Breathers has a continuous stream of gaseous drugs pumped into their suits, and they’re accompanied by vicious robots, including buzz-saw-wielding metal spiders (these automatons are probably fully sober).

Combat in Wasteland 3 will probably look familiar to fans of the updated Shadowrun series or the recent tactical RPG Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, with the recognizable look of the AP-fueled movement in the former and the stealth potential from the latter. While you can go always go the guns-blazing route, enemy encampments with spread out snipers and guards can be whittled down one by one, an especially smart decision in areas where the Kodiak can’t travel and your team is outnumbered. Additionally, as is common to the Wasteland franchise, certain engagements can be circumvented or altered through the use of dialogue choices and such. In our playthrough, we were able to talk our way out of a boss battle, which required voluntarily taking hallucinogens and talking a psychotic rainbow-haired monster into accidentally blowing themselves up.

In another unique first for the series, Wasteland 3 will feature two-player co-op at launch, which is set to mix in with the turn-based gameplay in a way that can kind of be understood in single-player. Essentially, since entering combat only pulls in any enemy units within range, players can split up and take down an enemy fortress in pieces, locked into their own instanced battles. “Many scenarios already give an advantage to those who tactically spread their team out,” Kopman describes. “And, similarly, coordinating carefully with a co-op partner will give a distinct advantage such as flanking an enemy before combat begins. Similarly, if you leave guys behind (or your co-op partner is way off somewhere else) beginning combat with a split group could create a challenging situation. Communication is going to be key in either situation.”

For those who may not arrive to the game well-versed in CRPGs or turn-based tactics, inXile wants to draw in these players, the ones who never got into X-Com, the recent Pillars of Eternity games, or even the classic Fallouts. Just in our brief time with this build, Wasteland 3 sports a slick and friendly UI with a lot of approachable information and details sensibly positioned up front. There’s also what looks to be an exciting amount of loot, all of which affects a character’s look, allowing you to create a wild-looking squad sporting heavy armor, laser rifles, hobo shotguns, and baggy pants, with many wearable items affecting character stats and movement. At the start of a match, we were disappointed to discover that the heavy protective gear we had just put on only allowed us to take two steps per turn.

Upgradeable skills in Wasteland 3 involve your typical lock-picking and computer hacking and such, and the Animal Whisperer skill happily makes a triumphant return from Wasteland 2. This time, however, tamed animals can even pile into the Kodiak alongside your crew, which means you can fill it out with a menagerie and become some sort of deranged traveling Dr. Dolittle, if it suits you.

With a uniquely wintry post-apocalyptic setting, a fascinating armored vehicle, and the potential for some entertaining co-op tactical shenanigans, Wasteland 3 is one to watch out for.

More: The Outer Worlds Is What Fallout 76 Should've Been From The Start

Wasteland 3 is currently slated for release in spring of 2020, with versions planned for PC/Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One platforms.

source https://screenrant.com/wasteland-3-preview/

#screenrant

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dorotazabawa-blog · 5 years

Photo

Bleary-eyed, we raced over the plains of the Masai Mara, the chilly morning air whipping around us as we gripped our thermoses with one hand and the vehicle with the other. Far in the distance, our guide had spotted a cloud of dust rising from a rocky outcropping—to our untrained vision, yet another feature of the vast, otherworldly landscape, but to him, a clear sign of a recent predator chase. He radioed a fellow guide and they spoke in hushed voices to each other. We tried to pick out any familiar-sounding words, but as the car continued forward, our path remained unknown to us, our ignorance of Swahili protecting the mystery.

The car loudly bounced over the rutted tracks as we neared our target. As we approached, we looked eagerly around for any sign of drama: vultures circling overhead, a bloody carcass. Instead, we were greeted with two female lions lying in a bare patch of grass, eyes closed softly in resignation. Confused, we turned to our guide for an explanation. There had been a chase, but it had been unsuccessful, he said. The prey had escaped, and the lionesses were resting, contemplating their next move. A hopeful hyena paced the pathway nearby, but otherwise, the scene was quiet. We sat there in tranquil silence for a few minutes, the early-morning sun casting long shadows across the plains, before driving off to watch the next story unfold. Not every event could be observed or captured, but everything was new to us, and we trusted that soon our guide would reveal something completely unexpected.

Our safari experience traversed Kenya’s Masai Mara and the Okavango Delta in Botswana, two of Africa’s most distinct ecosystems. But the story that emerged anew every day on the plains and in the bush was at its core the same: birth, mortality, joy, and survival, a complex interplay of creature and landscape, with a smattering of humans lucky enough to witness it. As we grew to learn, the animals had their own schedule, carried out with complete disregard for the strange two-legged creatures excitedly watching them. But through it all, our guides were the portals to our entire experience, at once our storytellers and zoologists, our photography coaches, our translators and interpreters, and even our bartenders. In their vehicles, surrounded by the landscapes they knew intimately, we were at their mercy, but we trusted them implicitly as over and over again they led us to new discoveries.

In the few days we had on safari, we managed to absorb a small fraction of our guides’ knowledge, if not their intuitive sense of the ecosystem. One guide taught us that giraffes can see predators from far off and will all turn to look toward one if they see it, and that elephants dislike the scent of humans but will tolerate it anyway. Another let us get out of the vehicle to take photographs of hippos bathing in the river, but told us that the same animals on land were some of the most dangerous in Africa. Despite everything we learned, our knowledge paled in comparison to the vast expertise of our guides, and all we could do was observe in wonder as they led us through the wilderness.

Once, driving through a grassy field in the Okavango Delta, our guide stopped abruptly, directly in the path of an enormous bull elephant. With bated breath, we watched as the bull strode heavily toward our vehicle. I clutched my camera in my lap, scarcely daring to lift it. As he reached the vehicle, he turned his face in our direction. Would he flip the vehicle with his gigantic tusks? I thought. How dare we confront him like this? Holding onto the side of the vehicle, I tried to formulate a survival plan. At last, mere feet away from us, he gave a thundering, irritated snort, shaking his head sternly, ears spread wide—clearly communicating his disapproval at our impertinence. I did not release my grasp on the side of the Land Rover until he turned away from us, my fumbling hands managing to capture a photo of his retreating backside. Our guide, seasoned and secure in his expertise, laughed at the terror on our faces. The elephant would never have attacked, he reassured us. He couldn’t prove it, but he just knew. The elephant’s ways were as clear to him as much as they were a mystery to us, and he could read his body and face like the expressions of a familiar friend.

Later, we parked in an open field as the sun set slowly over the Delta, stepping gingerly out of the vehicle to stretch our legs. Our guide popped up the grill of the Land Rover, laying a gingham cloth over the metal surface. He deftly unpacked tins of cookies, a row of tumblers, and a bottle of gin, pouring out a practiced ratio of alcohol and tonic water and topping our drinks off with lime. It was yet another one of his seemingly-endless talents, honed after hours and hours in the bush each day, sharing his homeland with strangers.

The next day, we stopped in the middle of a dusty road as our guide stepped out of the car to observe a set of barely-discernable pawprints. Hoisting himself back into the driver’s seat, he set off to follow the tracks. They led us suddenly to a female leopard lounging woefully in the shade of a tree, and our guide pulled up expertly next to her at the perfect angle for our photographs.

Licking her chops, she gazed toward the other side of the clearing, where a satisfied hyena had snatched her kill and dragged it under another tree. The hyena guarded the fresh impala carcass, staring at us impassively as we judged him according to our moral standards, even as we realized they were impossible to apply here. After a while of watching the unchanging scene, we decided to drive off toward where a rare pack of wild dogs had just been spotted. The dogs—who, despite their friendly appearance, were more closely related to wolves than to domestic canines—began a pre-hunting bonding ritual. The puppies chased each other, tugging at each other’s ears; the adults sniffed each other purposefully as the alpha couple began to round up the group. Over a period of an hour or so, as the sun began to set, they assembled, cohered, and moved as one organism deeper into the bush. At last, they caught a scent on the air: the freshly-killed impala we had just left. The pack began to run toward their target, and we followed swiftly behind. Before our eyes, the drama played out: a group of dogs rushed toward the hyena, who abandoned the impala and escaped into the bush; another group of dogs surrounded the leopard, who clawed her way to safety atop her tree. The impala met its final destination in the mouths of the gleeful dogs as the leopard watched helplessly, and all we could do was sit quietly and take our photographs.

We had been lucky to see such a story unfold, and marveled out loud at our luck. With a small smile, our guide informed us that he had known all along what would happen, known from the outset that the dogs would pick up the scent of the impala, known who the victors and the losers would be. But it was part of the excitement, he said. He had been a guide for decades, but sharing the experience with guests made it new for him every time. We sat back in our seats, astonished, as he led us again down the path, toward whatever would come next.

The post Safari Guides: Storytellers, Zoologists and More appeared first on Travel Beyond.

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myrecordcollections · 7 years

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Prinzhorn Dance School

@2007 UK Pressing

******

Only 70% or so of Prinzhorn Dance School's debut album is made up of music. The rest is...well, it's hard to say. What do you call the space in a song that lingers between the guitar parts, vocals, and beats? It's not exactly empty space, since it takes on properties that change according to sounds in the surroundings. And it's not "negative space" as plied by sculptors, whose hold on nothingness needn't account for fluctuations in drama brought about by time. So what do we call this space, then? Is it material, immaterial? Is it music?

Questions like this rise out of Prinzhorn Dance School whether you want them to or not. For one thing, the album is extraordinarily sparse-- calling the instrumentation a simple mix of guitar, bass, and drums doesn't get to the half of it. In fact, "half of" the sound you might expect from such a lineup is more than transpires in a song like "Black Bunker". Centering on a simple two-note bass riff, the song lurches through a series of sudden guitar pricks and distended drums that materialize out of nowhere and vanish completely in a matter of seconds. It's a foreshortened blast of rock minimalism, more pent-up than even the Fall or Wire (two old bands who figure heavily in Prinzhorn Dance School's sound). And over it all, anxious vocals suggest that the "Black Bunker" itself is nothing more than an apartment in which "You're scratching and itching/ Trying to break on through?/ Or hanging round my kitchen?"

A similar sense of confused routine creeps into "Do You Know Your Butcher", repeatedly raising its title question while depicting a shop where "There's blood on the hands/ Fur on the floor/ Meat/ The smell of fresh loaves and pennies." It plays like a Don DeLillo supermarket scene as distilled in the language of Mark E. Smith. For all their debts to the Fall, though, the duo behind Prinzhorn Dance School traffic less in anger and indignation than in creepy evocations of the mundane: In their songs, everything simple is weird and conspicuous. One typical missive commands "Don't Talk to Strangers" for fear that "they'll find out who you are." Another fixates on "Eat, Sleep" before declaring, with a chirpy, deranged certainty, "there are monsters... in the deep."

The name Prinzhorn Dance School alludes to Hans Prinzhorn, a German psychiatrist and art historian who published a book in 1922 called Artistry of the Mentally Ill. It's hard not to relate the elder Prinzhorn's work-- and the knowing analysis of "outsider art" it fostered-- to songs so mannered and strange. But what could have been a mere exercise by a band angling to make a point plays out more as a sort of exorcism. Part of the album's power owes to the unerring discipline of the sound: Even in a comparatively busy song like "You Are the Space Invader", Prinzhorn Dance School rock hardest by way of restraint, with vocal interjections closely miked to capture chilling bits of mania and instrumental parts left dry and dark for the sake of atmosphere. The space in the mix owes to DFA producer/engineer James Murphy, whose work here falls closer to his past as a protégé of Steve Albini than to his present as a disco-rock don.

However meticulously arranged it sounds, Prinzhorn Dance School owes more of its effect to the moody interplay of the band itself. Coming off as both magically attuned and profoundly alone, Tobin Prinz and Suzi Horn-- a pair of artists from Brighton, England-- bait each other like two sides of the same brain. It plays out as much in certain interlocking instrumental passages as it does in stripped-down vocal harmonies that allude to hooks without straining for them. Prinzhorn songs abound with the kind of scattered beauty that rises out of old classics by Young Marble Giants. But they're darker and more pointed-- manic flashes from a conflicted brain that keep the line between the perceptive and the unhinged obscure.

#DFA #Prinzhorn Dance School #Indie #Dance #Rock #2007 #singer songwriter

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sheminecrafts · 4 years

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Facebook upgrades its AI to better tackle COVID-19 misinformation and hate speech

Facebook’s AI tools are the only thing standing between its users and the growing onslaught of hate and misinformation the platform is experiencing. The company’s researchers have cooked up a few new capabilities for the systems that keep the adversary at bay, identifying COVID-19-related misinformation and hateful speech disguised as memes.

Detecting and removing misinformation relating to the virus is obviously a priority right now, as Facebook and other social media become breeding grounds not just for ordinary speculation and discussion, but malicious interference by organized campaigns aiming to sow discord and spread pseudoscience.

“We have seen a huge change in behavior across the site because of COVID-19, a huge increase in misinformation that we consider dangerous,” said Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer in a call with press earlier today.

The company contracts with dozens of fact-checking organizations around the world, but — leaving aside the question of how effective the collaborations really are — misinformation has a way of quickly mutating, making taking down even a single image or link a complex affair.

Take a look at the three example images below, for instance:In some ways they’re nearly identical, with the same background image, colors, typeface, and so on. But the second one is slightly different — it’s the kind of thing you might see when someone takes a screenshot and shares that instead of the original. The third is visually the same but the words have the opposite meaning.

An unsophisticated computer vision algorithm would either rate these as completely different images due to those small changes (they result in different hashes) or all the same due to overwhelming visual similarity. Of course we see the differences right away, but training an algorithm to do that reliably is very difficult. And the way things spread on Facebook, you might end up with thousands of variations rather than a handful.

“What we want to be able to do is detect those things as being identical because they are, to a person, the same thing,” said Schroepfer. “Our previous systems were very accurate, but they were very fragile and brittle to even very small changes. If you change a small number of pixels, we were too nervous that it was different, and so we would mark it as different and not take it down. What we did here over the last two and a half years is build a neural net based similarity detector that allowed us to better catch a wider variety of these variants again at very high accuracy.”

Fortunately analyzing images at those scales is a specialty of Facebook’s. The infrastructure is there for comparing photos and searching for features like faces and less desirable things; It just needed to be taught what to look for. The result — from years of work, it should be said — is SimSearchNet, a system dedicated to finding and analyzing near-duplicates of a given image by close inspection of their most salient features (which may not be at all what you or I would notice).

SimSearchNet is currently inspecting every image uploaded to Instagram and Facebook — billions a day.

The system is also monitoring Facebook Marketplace, where people trying to skirt the rules will upload the same image of an item for sale (say, an N95 face mask) but slightly edited to avoid being flagged by the system as not allowed. With the new system, the similarities between recolored or otherwise edited photos are noted and the sale stopped.

Hateful memes and ambiguous skunks

Another issue Facebook has been dealing with is hate speech — and its more loosely defined sibling hateful speech. One area that has proven especially difficult for automated systems, however, is memes.

The problem is that the meaning of these posts often results from an interplay between the image and the text. Words that would be perfectly appropriate or ambiguous on their own have their meaning clarified by the image on which they appear. Not only that, but there’s an endless number of variations in images or phrasings that can subtly change (or not change) the resulting meaning. See below:

To be clear, these are toned down “mean memes,” not the kind of truly hateful ones often found on Facebook.

Each individual piece of the puzzle is fine in some contexts, insulting in others. How can a machine learning system learn to tell what’s good and what’s bad? This “multimodal hate speech” is a non-trivial problem because of the way AI works. We’ve built systems to understand language, and to classify images, but how those two things relate is not so simple a problem.

The Facebook researchers note that there is “surprisingly little” research on the topic, so theirs is more an exploratory mission than a solution. The technique they arrived at had several steps. First, they had humans annotate a large collection of meme-type images as hateful or not, creating the Hateful Memes dataset. Next, a machine learning system was trained on this data, but with a crucial difference from existing ones.

Almost all such image analysis algorithms, when presented with text and an image at the same time, will classify the one, then the other, then attempt to relate the two together. But that has the aforementioned weakness that, independent of context, the text and images of hateful memes may be totally benign.

Facebook’s system combines the information from text and image earlier in the pipeline, in what it calls “early fusion” to differentiate it from the traditional “late fusion” approach. This is more akin to how people do it — looking at all the components of a piece of media before evaluating its meaning or tone.

Facebook speeds up AI training by culling the weak

Right now the resultant algorithms aren’t ready for deployment at large — at around 65-70 percent overall accuracy, though Schroepfer cautioned that the team uses “the hardest of the hard problems” to evaluate efficacy. Some multimodal hate speech will be trivial to flag as such, while some is difficult even for humans to gauge.

To help advance the art, Facebook is running a “Hateful Memes Challenge” as part of the NeurIPS AI conference later this year; this is commonly done with difficult machine learning tasks, as new problems like this one are like catnip for researchers.

AI’s changing role in Facebook policy

Facebook announced its plans to rely on AI more heavily for moderation in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis. In a press call in March, Mark Zuckerberg said that the company expected more “false positives”—instances of content flagged when it shouldn’t be—with the company’s fleet of 15,000 moderation contractors at home with paid leave.

The pandemic is already reshaping tech’s misinformation crisis

YouTube and Twitter also shifted more of their content moderation to AI around the same time, issuing similar warnings about how an increased reliance on automated moderation might lead to content that doesn’t actually break any platform rules being flagged mistakenly.

In spite of its AI efforts, Facebook has been eager to get its human content reviewers back in the office. In mid-April, Zuckerberg gave a timeline for when employees could be expected to get back to the office, noting that content reviewers were high on Facebook’s list of “critical employees” marked for the earliest return.

While Facebook warned that its AI systems might remove content too aggressively, hate speech, violent threats and misinformation continue to proliferate on the platform as the coronavirus crisis stretches on. Facebook most recently came under fire for disseminating a viral video discouraging people from wearing face masks or seeking vaccines once they are available— a clear violation of the platform’s rules against health misinformation.

The video, an excerpt from a forthcoming pseudo-documentary called “Plandemic,” initially took off on YouTube, but researchers found that Facebook’s thriving ecosystem of conspiracist groups shared it far and wide on the platform, injecting it into mainstream online discourse. The 26-minute-long video, peppered with conspiracies, is also a perfect example of the kind of content an algorithm would have a difficult time making sense of.

On Tuesday, Facebook also released a community standards enforcement report detailing its moderation efforts across categories like terrorism, harassment and hate speech. While the results only include one a one month span during the pandemic, we can expect to see more of the impact of Facebook’s shift to AI moderation next time around.

In a call about the company’s moderation efforts, Zuckerberg noted that the pandemic has made “the human review part” of its moderation much harder, as concerns around protecting user privacy and worker mental health make remote work a challenge for reviewers, but one the company is navigating now. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is now allowing a small portion of full-time content reviewers back into the office on a volunteer basis and according to Facebook Vice President of Integrity Guy Rosen, “the majority” of its contract content reviewers can now work from home. “The humans are going to continue to be a really important part of the equation,” Rosen said.

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technicalsolutions88 · 4 years

Link

SimSearchNet is currently inspecting every image uploaded to Instagram and Facebook — billions a day.

Hateful memes and ambiguous skunks

To be clear, these are toned down “mean memes,” not the kind of truly hateful ones often found on Facebook.

Facebook speeds up AI training by culling the weak

AI’s changing role in Facebook policy

The pandemic is already reshaping tech’s misinformation crisis

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3cq1cXq Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

#Technical Solutions #SEO #Online Earning #Youtube Marketing #Android Developer

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legalseat · 6 years

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Book Review of “Prosecuting and Defending Fraud Cases: A Practitioner’s Handbook”

Grace Hession David and Jonathan Shime’s “Prosecuting and Defending Fraud Cases: A Practitioner’s Handbook” guides the reader through the unique complexities of a fraud proceeding. Grace Hession David has had a long and impressive career in criminal law in Ontario. She currently works with the Guns and Gangs Initiative as an Assistant Crown Attorney, prosecuting fraud and organized crime. Jonathan Shime has appeared before all levels of court in Canada, representing clients in criminal, quasi-criminal and regulatory matters of many kinds. He currently holds the position of an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, and has done award-winning work in the legal field relating to persons with HIV. Both authors are respected and distinguished members of the Ontario Bar. The General Editors of the book, Brian Greenspan and Justice Vincenzo Roninelli, are both highly respected experts in the legal field and have received many accolades for their work in criminal law.

Fraud cases are notorious for their scope and complexity, and as the authors recognise, can be overwhelming for even experienced counsel. This handbook helps the reader to overcome these complexities through explaining the unique aspects and considerations of fraud cases in a highly organized and easily digestible manner. It delineates specific considerations that may arise at the various stages of a fraud proceeding, making note of applicable statute, jurisprudence, and evidentiary rules. The result is that the reader is provided with a roadmap which clarifies what needs to be done or considered at each stage of a fraud proceeding, enabling him/her to gain a workable foothold and begin advancing through the morass.

The entirety of the Handbook considers fraud from both Crown and defence perspectives, offering advice for both. The chapters of the Handbook follow the stages of a fraud proceeding chronologically. Chapter 1 deals with pre-charge considerations. On the Crown’s side, these largely include ensuring that there is sufficient evidence to proceed with a charge, and ensuring that there is an understanding of what has been discovered and what it means. On the defence side, the considerations are more wide-ranging, including potential ethical issues, how to plead in various situations, and the influence of other non-criminal factors, such as the possibility of civil proceedings or workplace investigations. Chapter 2 examines bail. This chapter is rather short. It sets out the law relating to bail, with reference to the leading cases, and considerations relevant to the determination of bail conditions.

The third chapter deals with disclosure in fraud cases. Fraud cases rely heavily on documentary evidence, and the volume of disclosure can be staggering. The authors offer a method for sorting through disclosed documents to decide what is important and what is not, as well as what may be missing. Time is also spent discussing the form of disclosure and what is required of the Crown, with reference to case law. While form of disclosure is generally within Crown discretion, there are limits to this discretion in that disclosure must be meaningful. What this means may depend on the circumstances. The end of the chapter discusses the use of experts. Counsel must be careful to choose an expert who is properly qualified, and then be prepared to work closely with said expert and with the client.

Chapter 4 delves into the offence of fraud proper. There is a detailed discussion of the elements required to make out the fraud offence. The authors present and explain several cases which speak to the nuances of both the actus reus and mens rea of the offence. Important recent developments reducing the burden of the Crown in demonstrating reliance are highlighted, as are other important aspects of assessing a case on its merits, such as how to differentiate fraud from negligent misrepresentation, the impact a client’s reliance on advice in committing the alleged acts, and how a reasonable doubt may be raised where a case lacks the “badges of fraud”. All of these are important factors in both the prosecution and defence of a fraud.

Chapter 5 deals with admissibility of documents. As mentioned above, documentary evidence is a large part of fraud cases. Thus, it is crucial that counsel understand the rules of admissibility of the documentary evidence that they plan to lead. The authors detail the rules of admissibility surrounding several types of documents, explaining the specifically applicable provisions of the Canada Evidence Act 1 and the ways in which they can be used. Notable issues include: when a witness will need to be called to authenticate a document, or when an affidavit is sufficient; financial institution affidavit requirements, and; the obligation to provide reasonable notice. Appended to the end of the chapter is an example of a financial institution affidavit.

The next three chapters deal with sentencing and post-trial issues, such as restitution and forfeiture. The sentencing chapter considers the statutory regime behind sentencing and all of the factors that go into the determination of an appropriate sentence in a fraud case. Included is a table of various fraud cases and the assigned sentences, for use as a basic reference tool. Chapter 7 deals with restitution, a discretionary order that can be made by the sentencing judge. These orders require offenders to pay back a given sum to their victim(s). Issues such as factors determining the issuance of an order, quantum and enforcement are examined, among others. Chapter 8 deals with forfeiture. Unlike restitution, forfeiture is technically independent of sentencing. It aims to deprive offenders of the financial benefit of their fraudulent activities by either seizing property obtained with illicit funds, or imposing a fine. The authors give a brief but thorough account of the relevant considerations and issues relating to forfeiture orders.

The remaining chapters deal with miscellaneous fraud topics. Chapter 9 explains the separate offence of criminal organization fraud. The material elements, actus reus and mens rea of the offence are explained and examined, in a similar fashion to chapter 4. This offence bears close links to corporate law. Also considered are the differences between criminal organization fraud and conspiracy, and sentencing issues.

The penultimate chapter looks at myriad other regulatory issues that may arise when a client is implicated in a fraud. If the client is part of a professional association, such as a provincial bar for example, charges can lead to career and employment consequences, in addition to criminal ones. This may also be true where a regulatory body becomes involved, or a client’s employer. Counsel must be alive to issues such as employer compelled statements, which could impact criminal proceedings, and to the potential for their client to lose their employment or suffer professional censure. It is important for counsel to understand the interplay between the criminal and regulatory spheres in order to properly advise their client, or to look for other sources of potential evidence.

The final chapter considers fraud-related offences. These include breach of trust and secret commissions. These offences are commonly alleged alongside fraud. Detailed explanations of these offences’ material elements, actus reus and mens rea are provided, including the relevant Criminal Code 2 provisions and jurisprudence. The section on secret commissions deals with both frauds on the government and secret commissions in the private sector.

The Handbook is an exceptionally useful tool. It provides effective guidance to enable a practitioner to navigate a very complicated and oft intimidating area of the criminal law. Throughout the book, the authors systematically and efficiently refer back to the relevant statutory and case law. Explanations are clear and concise, and often followed by reasoned advice on practical application. The authors often rely on lists, compiling relevant jurisprudence into a single table describing all the factors to be considered when approaching a particular issue. These tables and checklists make the Handbook particularly useful as a quick-reference guide. The authors also undertake a more holistic view of fraud, offering guidance that goes beyond the immediate criminal law concerns to include potential ethical, civil, regulatory and employment issues that counsel may face.

“Prosecuting and Defending Fraud Cases: A Practitioner’s Handbook”, by Grace Hession David and Jonathan Shime, is a superb tool for any counsel that may find themselves tackling a fraud proceeding. It is clear, informative and insightful, and organized to allow readers to access specific content quickly. Above all, this handbook is useful: the hallmark of any great practitioner’s guide.

Endnotes

1 Canada Evidence Act, RSC, 1985, c C-5.

2 Criminal Code, RSC, 1985, c C-46.

Book Review of “Prosecuting and Defending Fraud Cases: A Practitioner’s Handbook” published first on https://divorcelawyermumbai.tumblr.com/

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legalroll · 6 years

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Book Review of “Prosecuting and Defending Fraud Cases: A Practitioner’s Handbook”

Endnotes

1 Canada Evidence Act, RSC, 1985, c C-5.

2 Criminal Code, RSC, 1985, c C-46.

Book Review of “Prosecuting and Defending Fraud Cases: A Practitioner’s Handbook” published first on https://medium.com/@SanAntonioAttorney

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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What if you could listen in on the chemical communication within your body?

Mike Thompson, Susana Cámara Leret and Dave Young, The Rhythm of Life, 2017. Exhibition view at STRP Biënnale 2017 in Eindhoven. Photo: Hanneke Wetzer for STRP

We all glow. All living cells of bacteria, plants as well as (human and non-human) animals emit biophotons, extremely weak light emissions which cannot be perceived by the naked eye and are used in cell-to-cell communication in living systems. Instruments like photomultipliers tubes (PMT), however, are such sensitive detectors of light that they can detect individual photons.

Back in 2015, Mike and Susana from Thought Collider teamed up with artist Dave Young and researchers at Leiden University to build a kinetic sound installation around a Photon-Multiplier Tube.

The Rhythm of Life, first shown at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, offered visitors a chance to listen in on the electrochemical messages transmitted by their bodies, hearing their emissions as complex percussive rhythms. But before placing their hands in the PMT and engaging with the work, the visitors had to agree to donate their personal body data to scientific and artistic research.

Although the transformation of the functional state of the living organism into sound was an important dimension of the work, the artists and designers were also interested in looking at the processes and authoritative gestures that legitimise the collection of personal information and how informed consent is attained and defined.

In the age of the quantified self, what does it mean to donate biological data? How much does it (or should it) matter to us that we can keep control over it? Does this biological data have more value for us than other types of data?

The artists and designers built a new version of The Rhythm Of Life for the STRP Biennale which closed recently in Eindhoven. This time, the visitors started the process by answering a few questions about their health and mental state (are they stressed? have they slept well? etc.) and in return they could sit down on huge beanbags and listen to the data performances of one of the original 56 participants whose data was the closest to their own. At least at that specific moment because light emissions from your body can fluctuate over time, depending on your mental, on your physiological state and of course on your honesty when filling in the questionnaire.

vimeo

Mike Thompson, Susana Cámara Leret and Dave Young, The Rhythm of Life, 2017. Exhibition view at STRP Biënnale 2017 in Eindhoven. Video by Thought Collider

Mike Thompson, Susana Cámara Leret and Dave Young, The Rhythm of Life, 2017. Exhibition view at STRP Biënnale 2017 in Eindhoven. Photo: Hanneke Wetzer for STRP

Unsurprisingly, i had many questions for the artists and designers:

Hi Susana, Mike and Dave! If i understood correctly, the rhythm of life questions what it means to donate your personal data. How different is giving consent to use biodata different from giving consent to use other types of personal data? Are there more restrictions and caveat to be aware of when drafting a consent form?

With the initial installation, the caveat was that your biodata was genuinely destined for use in scientific research. To this end, the notion of consent was both essential from a scientific perspective, and of artistic interest as it enabled our collaborators the Data and Ethics Working Group (of whom Thought Collider and Dave Young are additionally members) to probe the processes and authoritative gestures that legitimise the collection of personal information and how informed consent (written, verbal and implied) is attained and defined. The tension within the work was designed from the placing of a piece of scientific equipment within an artistic context (an art Museum) and the questions of legitimacy that this raises. Due to the nature of the biophoton data, there were certain practices participants were required to perform to ensure the “purity” of the measurements, such as sanitising their hands or wearing a pair of black gloves to block off ambient light. This placed considerable emphasis on the performativity of implied consent during the donation process. The written consent forms for the donation of the data were worded and designed to be as close to legitimate consent forms used within lab practice as possible. Participants had to be informed of the procedure regarding the interaction with the scientific equipment in advance. That said, given that the work is situated within the public context, the form was simplified for ease of use allowing us to quicken waiting times.

Completing The Consent Form. Photo via Thought Collider

And, as far as you could observe, do you think that people are more comfortable with giving consent to use biodata rather than other data? It does seem rather abstract after all…

Comfortable probably isn’t the word. We’ve certainly seen people nonchalantly answer the questions or complete the forms required within the artwork. The reality is, for most, there seems little thought toward the ultimate destination or ownership of their personal biodata, rather they are too preoccupied with gaining a unique experience with their bodies.

Interestingly, people were more hesitant in answering questions considered more “private”, for example, those related to personal income or the use of medication.

Mike Thompson, Susana Cámara Leret and Dave Young, The Rhythm of Life, 2015. Exhibition view at Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam

What did scientists do with the biodata collected in Rotterdam?

Good question. We are aware that, from a scientific perspective, the validity of the data might be disputed. The partnering artwork developed with the Data and Ethics Working Group deliberately probed the authoritative gestures associated with data consent and ownership, occupying a grey zone between subversive performativity and bureaucracy. In doing so, it operated around, rather than in strict accordance with, a typical clinical methodology demanded in scientific studies. For instance, the final question in the questionnaire asked how honest the participant was in their answers. What might a response to such a question indicate? What might it say about the “validity” of the personal data offered by the participants?

During your presentation at STRP, you explained that it seemed that people who have cancer were emitting more light than the ones who meditate. Are there specific rules, behaviours and conditions that determine how much of this biophoton emission the skin emit? Is this something an individual could manipulate or would want to manipulate for any reason?

Since photon emission is measured over a period of time, researchers are able to obtain more dynamic information about changes in the body. The oxidative degradation of lipids is known to be linked, amongst other things, to diabetes and cancer. The abnormal activation of phagocytes in blood, as a result of the production and damaging effects of oxygen radicals on tissues, led to the realisation that ultra weak photon emissions in blood could be a general marker for diagnosing health/disease. Measurements done in the 80s on blood samples from patients with carcinomas and diabetes, showed higher emission levels than samples from healthy people.

When mentioning meditation, we were referring to a paper written by our collaborators at Leiden University who previously researched its effects on biophoton emission. There does appear to be a direct correlation between those who meditate and a drop in biophoton emission, and vice versa, though the exact origin for this is still being researched. The ability to hear these emissions in real-time opens up a lot of questions regarding the potential of this biofeedback loop, possibly also as a self-regulating process. Exactly how this would work or whether one could or would want to manipulate this is still an open question which brings up thoughts regarding the sub-conscious effects of biofeedback processes, for better or worse. This is something we hope to explore further in the near-future.

Mike Thompson, Susana Cámara Leret and Dave Young, The Rhythm of Life, 2017. Exhibition view at STRP Biënnale 2017 in Eindhoven. Photo: Hanneke Wetzer for STRP

Dave Young developed the sound dimension of the work, right? I’d be interested to know more about the decision process behind the final setting. How was the data matched to the sound compositions? How do they correspond to each other? And why chose this set of instruments?

On a technical level, the rhythms are generated according to three pairs of algorithms (the signal intensity and fano factor slope of the left and right hands, and the asymmetry and correlation between them) which the team at Leiden University were using in their own studies of biophoton emissions. These algorithms are used to subdivide each beat into different rhythmic quantities: a higher intensity emission recorded from the left hand for instance would equate to a faster rhythm on the corresponding cymbal. Played out over the whole setup, you can hear for instance how rhythms played out on the left hand are echoed on the right hand moments later, whereas the rhythms on the asymmetry cymbal might create curious phasing effects with the correlation cymbal. In terms of the aesthetic qualities of the sound, our methods for translating data into rhythm are heavily inspired by the music of polyrhythmic percussion ensembles, and gamelan ensembles in particular. The cymbals were produced specifically to have a gong-like quality – each cymbal pair has a distinct resonant pitch that helps the participant to identify where a given rhythm is coming from, as well as creating a meditative interplay of tonalities. Additionally, we were very inspired by mid-20th century minimalism and systems music. Steve Reich’s Clapping Music is a good example of an algorithmic approach to composition – an incredibly economic idea that generates great complexity through offsetting simple rhythms against one another. We were trying to evoke such qualities in our approach to data-sonification.

Why did you think it was important to add a sound dimension to the experience? Why not stick to the visual aspect of the phenomenon?

Biophotons are emitted within the visible light spectrum and although sensors in our retinas can respond to individual photons, neural filters prevent us from eliciting a conscious response. They become “invisible” to the naked eye, to prevent us from constantly seeing too much noise in the low light range. Therefore as a communicative process, it exists beyond the range of our conscious (human) perception. As we mentioned above, there was an interest in the rhythmical qualities of biophoton emissions and, from the perspective of “sensing data”, we were triggered by possibility of making this communicative process perceptible. As sound is absorbed through the whole body, we were most triggered by the ambiguous experience of the fluctuations in these body emissions over time, to think more abstractly about the meaning and experience behind these rhythmical patterns.

This is the second iteration of the project. Are you planning to develop other versions of it?

The great thing about the work is that it was designed so that it can be easily reconfigured to pose other questions either of the existing data or via data collection. The performative aspect of the work is something we’re interested in, especially given that the installation is quite intimate and personal, yet simultaneously very public. Some time ago the idea was floated that if we had an identical second installation, two participants could experience their biophotons simultaneously, allowing us to monitor whether one individual’s emissions influence the other. We are hoping to to continue investigating the notion of biofeedback through these and other ideas.

Fatberg, MU Eindhoven

Fatberg

And since i have you here, could you tell us how things are shaping up for The Fatberg?

It probably looks like things went quiet but things are in fact quite the opposite. 2 weeks ago FATBERG moved into its new home at NDSM Shipping Wharf in Amsterdam Noord. Here, in the coming months, together with MU Artspace, Stichting NDSM, architects Space&Matter and construction company Autarkhome, we are working on a floating construction site, for building the island of fat, consisting of movable pontoons. To do so we are using an innovative foam concrete, allowing each pontoon to be designed and built with a specific function in mind, from the collecting and rendering of fat, to a visitors centre including a small lab and office facility. This all new floating FATBERG site will not only allow us to finally bring FATBERG to island size, but act as home for a public programme, where we will schedule events investigating fat and its cultural, economic and social relevance as well as to infuse it with new meaning. So please keep your eyes on the FATBERG website, and social media for updates – there will be a lot happening very soon.

Thanks Dave, Mike and Susana!

Previously by Mike Thompson from Thought Collider (together with Arne Hendriks): FATBERG. Building An Island of Fat. And by Dave Young: The Reposition Matrix.

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legalseat · 6 years

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Book Review of “Prosecuting and Defending Fraud Cases: A Practitioner’s Handbook”

Endnotes

1 Canada Evidence Act, RSC, 1985, c C-5.

2 Criminal Code, RSC, 1985, c C-46.

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