Human Brain Adopts Internet as Memory Substitute

By Mary Staub, InnovationNewsDaily Contributor

15 July 2011 11:11 AM ET
(originally published at www.technewsdaily.com)

Throughout history, curmudgeonly scholars have argued that information technology makes people more stupid. Socrates complained that the written word would lead to forgetfulness, and bookmakers of the Renaissance feared the printing press would lead to a loss of studiousness as cheap books fell into the hands of the unworthy. Recently, journalists and scientists have made similar claims about the Internet in general and search engines in particular. After all, why learn something when you can just look it up?

Now researchers have tested this notion through a number of experiments that probe the relationship between memory and the Internet. The results imply that people have shifted from remembering specific facts to remembering where on the Internet they can go to find those facts.

Although this memory-formation phenomenon applies to all information sources, from the written word to knowledgeable friends, the sheer scale of information available on the Internet makes it a mental crutch of unique scale.

"We found that if people have a lot of questions they can't answer, the automatic thing that comes to mind is the Internet or computers," said Betsy Sparrow, a professor of psychology at Columbia University who was the main author of the study.

According to a paper published online in Science Express, the researchers presented their subjects, a group of college students, with a number of trivia questions and with maps of computer folders where the answers to those questions reside. More students were able to remember where the information had been saved than remember the details of the information.

Most people have experienced this firsthand. For example, when you can’t remember the name of the lead actress in "Titanic" or the year "Gone with the Wind" was made, you know IMDB.com will have the answer.

It was a similar experience that led Sparrow to delve into this realm of research to begin with.

"I was watching 'Gaslight' and knew I’d seen one of the actresses before, but couldn’t remember her name," said Sparrow, referring to Angela Lansbury, then in her late teens. "I immediately turned to IMDB ― and then began to wonder what people used to do before the Internet when they didn’t know the answers to questions."

The study implies that if we think we’ll be able to look something up again in the future, we won’t bother to remember it when we first look it up. However, if we believe that the information storage is unreliable, such as a Web page that might get taken down or a file that might get deleted, then our brains automatically commit to remembering the actual facts in addition to the location.

"Participants were given trivia statements like, 'An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain,' and asked to type them into a computer," said Sparrow. "After each statement, they pressed 'enter' and were either told the statement had been saved or erased. They later better remembered the statements they thought had been erased."

Sparrow believes such experiences train the brain to turn other people, the Internet and reference books into external memory sources. But unlike Socrates in railing against the invention of writing, the researchers argue that relying on external memory sources (whether in the form of the written word or the Internet) is not necessarily detrimental.

"We've always used other people as transactive (i.e., external) memory," said Sparrow. "Let's say you work in a business where someone knows how to do a purchase order. You'll always go to that person and not learn it yourself. In some sense the Internet is more reliable and also more democratic because everyone has access to the same resources."

New Search Tool Lets You Voice Browse the Internet

By Mary Staub, TechNewsDaily Contributor

30 June 2011 10:24 AM ET
(originally published at www.technewsdaily.com)

Ring a bell, bang your fist, or merely approach your computer, and, with the help of the Verbalizer, a microphone-shaped open-source platform unleashed by the research lab and advertising agency Breakfast NY last week, you can now trigger Voice Search on your desktop’s Google Chrome browser.

The kit is aimed at tech-savvy tinkerers who want to push the boundaries of how people use their computers to find information online.

Although Google’s Voice Search has been a feature on mobile devices for several years, it entered the world of desktops just this month, and the Verbalizer already takes its capabilities several steps further.

“We were approached by Google creative labs to create something cool using Google's Voice Search for desktop, and we love the idea of using tangible devices to operate normally on-line only experiences,” explained Mattias Gunneras, Breakfast NY’s co-founder and tech director.

In its most basic form, the touch-sensitive Verbalizer connects to your computer via Bluetooth and, when triggered, wirelessly activates Voice Search in your Chrome browser and lets you speak into its microphone to perform a Google search. But the techies at Breakfast NY designed the Verbalizer to have the potential to allow more than just touch to trigger it into action. The device, built using the Arduino open source electronic prototyping specifications, allows anyone to modify it and add their own contraption to take it to yet another level.

“We wanted to make it easy for creatives, developers, hobbyists or artists to come up with and implement their own ideas of how Voice Search could be used,” Gunneras explained.

Anyone familiar with Arduino will feel at home playing around with the Verbalizer. “Users can attach any kind of sensors to the Verbalizer and modify the program that runs on the board,” Gunneras said. “This means you could activate Voice Search with anything from a big red button built into your desk to a genie lamp that you stroke with your hand.”

To induce people’s creativity to flow, Breakfast NY is currently holding an open call for requests for a Verbalizer from people looking to experiment with additional ways to trigger a search. They will distribute a limited number of Verbalizers to a select few based on short descriptions of what people would like to build with them.

“We want people to have some fun and do something creative with Voice Search on the desktop,” Gunneras said.

“I can't wait to see what creations we'll get from the people we give the boards to. We ourselves were experimenting with some vibration sensors earlier which triggered a search as you bang your fist on your table. We also made a HAL-looking device, inspired by the film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ With a proximity sensor, it greeted you and activated a voice search in a computer-made voice just as you walked up in front of it. Only your imagination stops you.”

Relaxing Video Games May Calm Players in Real Life

By Mary Staub, TechNewsDaily Contributor

13 June 2011 10:55 AM ET
(originally published at www.technewsdaily.com)

Video games may soon join the ranks of yoga and meditation as sources of calm and compassion, according to a new study that finds video games can have many psychological benefits.

“Our research shows that playing relaxing video games puts people in a better mood,” said Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University and co-author of the study.

“These games don’t only have a positive effect on the person who plays them — the effect reaches other people too because people who are in a good mood state are more willing to help others.”

Although Bushman has long studied the link between violent games and aggressive behaviors, this is his first foray into the effects of relaxing video games because, he said, this type of game simply didn’t exist before.

“Only recently have games focused on calming people down,” Bushman said. “There’s a new market for this which you see across the board. For example, for years we’ve had plenty of energy drinks to energize, but now we also have drinks to calm you down.”

One game that caters to this market of calm is “Endless Oceans” for the Nintendo Wii, in which players explore a non-threatening ocean environment of exotic marine animals and deep-sea treasures. The Ohio researchers found that players of this type of game became more calm and considerate during the game.

For two experiments more than 100 college students were randomly assigned to play a video game that was either relaxing (such as “Endless Oceans”), neutral (such as “Wii Sports Resort”) or violent (such as “Resident Evil”). Students had previously rated all these games as being equally enjoyable and exciting to play.

During the first experiment, participants were asked to compete against another player — who did not actually exist — in pushing a button as quickly as possible. The winner would be awarded a small financial sum; the loser would be punished with a brief noise blast. Before each trial, participants could determine how much their competitors would receive if they won, and how strong a noise blast they would receive if they lost.

“Those people who had played violent games punished their partners the most and rewarded them the least,” Bushman said. “Those who had played relaxing games gave the lowest levels of noise and most amount of money.”

For a second experiment, participants rated how strongly they felt various emotional states (such as pride, love, happiness, anger) after they had played their respective video games (relaxing, neutral or violent). Then, their experimenter told them their study was over, but that he would welcome their help sharpening pencils.

“Sharpening pencils is a pretty boring task, but people who did relaxing games were willing to help in their free time,” Bushman said. Playing relaxing games both increased players’ positive mood states and their willingness to help others.

“These results are very encouraging,” Bushman said. “For example, as a parent, if you want children to relax and be more cooperative with siblings and more helpful, it’s much more useful to have them play relaxing games than violent ones. Maybe even they’ll sleep better at night.”

The research will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Shielding Medical Implants from Cyberattacks

By Mary Staub, TechNewsDaily Contributor
17 June 2011 11:39 AM ET

(originally published at www.technewsdaily.com)

Millions of Americans rely on medical implants — defibrillators, pacemakers, drug pumps and more — and every year 300,000 more receive such devices worldwide. Most of these implants operate via wireless connections. This enables a patient’s doctor or caregiver to closely monitor vital statistics of a patient and administer and modify treatments as needed.

However, as with most any wireless device, these, too, can be hacked, researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst found in 2008.

“You might have people listening to a signal from a patient’s device to get private medical information from the patient or even send commands to the device,” said Dina Katabi, an associate professor in MIT’s department of electrical engineering and computer science. Attackers could, for example, instruct an implant to administer a lethal amount of medication or electricity.

Although no such attacks have occurred thus far, the potential is there and it spurred Katabi and her colleagues to take action. The team has created a system, which they will present at the upcoming SIGCOMM conference, that can prevent such attacks from occurring.

The system employs a second transmitter — which the researchers call a “shield – to handle encryption and authentication of wireless communications so that unauthorized messages never reach the medical implant itself.  The shield would be controlled by a patient’s doctor (just like medical implants are today).

“The shield serves as a secure gateway between doctor and patient,” Katabi said. “A trusted external device (i.e. the patient’s caregiver) that wants to communicate with the implanted device communicates authenticated and encrypted messages to the shield.  The shield then conveys these messages to the medical implant and also prevents non-authenticated messages from reaching the implant.”

In other words, only those people who have the shield’s key can access the implanted defibrillator, pacemaker or other medical implants. Unauthorized messages would never get beyond the shield because they wouldn’t carry the secret key.
Furthermore, the shield conveys the medical device’s encrypted messages to the patient’s doctor (the trusted external device) while preventing others from obtaining these messages.

The researchers designed the shield as an outside device for various reasons.

First, separating the shield from the pacemaker or defibrillator would allow patients already outfitted with such implants to receive shields retroactively. Second, the researchers didn’t want to overburden the medical devices themselves.

“One challenge was protecting the medical device without having to access it and alter its own functions,” Katabi said. “You don’t want to put more functions on a device than necessary because things like battery life are very important. An outside device has more capability.”

And last, putting encryption on a medical implant itself could have lethal consequences in an emergency. But these shields would be small enough to be worn as a necklace, bracelet or brooch, Katabi said, and could easily be removed.

“If you put the secret [key] on the pacemaker, for example, only the doctor who knows the secret [key] can access the pacemaker,” Katabi said. “In an emergency, a patient may be taken to a foreign hospital where the doctor does not have access to the secret key. This could be fatal if the key is within the implanted device.” With the shield as external necklace or brooch, by contrast, an emergency doctor can simply remove the shield and treat the patient.

It remains to be seen whether medical companies will see the need to deploy such a system, given that so far no attacks have occurred.  “But perhaps this is good timing because it is always good to have a solution before the attack starts," Katabi said.

Robots beat us at engaging people on Twitter

Experiments show how good they are at creating human interaction on Net (originally published at www.technewsdaily.com 05/10/11)
By Mary Staub

Robots are better than humans at fomenting human interaction on the Internet and creating online communities, according to recent experiments in social engineering.

The research was conducted by the Web Ecology Project, a community of researchers dedicated to better understanding Web culture through quantitative research.

“We wanted to see if it’s possible to design bots that have a statistically significant and reliable effect on the way people are connecting and talking online,” said Tim Hwang, WEP’s director and an organizer of the experiment.

During the two-week experiment, Socialbots 2011, hundreds of targeted Twitter users unwittingly conversed with the tweets of a robot.

Three teams had designed software to bring forth as many human responses and interactions as possible.

“People always say that they’re great at building communities online, but people are limited in some ways,” Hwang said. For example, “they only have so many hours in a day.”

‘Rock on’ The winning "socialbot," JamesMTitus, kept interchanges going for a record of 12 consecutive tweets and garnered close to 200 overall responses from targeted Twitter users in less than a week. Humans who had created new Twitter accounts in a similar experiment garnered at most 60 responses, Hwang said.

To achieve this, Titus, a bot with a “very promiscuous, yet lovable persona” and who is “obsessed with his pet cat,” according to the blog of one of its creators, tweeted a generic question to one of the Twitter users being targeted about every seven minutes.

If the human responded, the robot replied with its own generic response. For example, when Titus asked one user what his favorite Dr. Seuss book was, the person responded, “the older cartoon of the Grinch, but not the Jim Carrey version.” “Rock on,” replied the robot.

But Titus did more than fool people into revealing their views on Dr. Seuss to a robot, and this is what truly intrigued the researchers at WEP. Not only did Titus’s tweets elicit responses, they also served as a bridge between individuals and communities. Twitter users unknown to one another began to interact because of the robot’s tweets, and in that sense, Titus had a more lasting and valuable effect on the Twitter landscape.

“Bots have been trying to get you to do something minor like click on a link or buy Viagra for years, so the coding is not too novel,” Hwang said. “But we’re trying to get them to talk to someone who will then talk to someone else.”

Hwang’s team is now working to get networking bots to stimulate more than random interaction between individuals and mobilize them in a more targeted way. Rather than just getting people to exchange trivial tweets, they’d be rallying behind a cause.

“My dream is to make bots targeted agents to connect particular groups,” Hwang said. “If we want people to be more civically engaged, for example, we can try to build a bot that would achieve this. In the future, you can design the kind of community that you need for a cause. Or a bot could be used to inject a news story into communities and thus control the news cycle.”

Peoplebots
If all of this sound too cunning for comfort, Hwang retorts that this is no different than advertising.

“If you’re opposed to something like bots, you should be opposed to advertising. It’s using mass communication as a (form) of persuasion. It could be of great use,” he said.

“Certain people are great connectors, but they’re few and far between. Maybe bots can provide a synthetic version of this and make cool things happen that wouldn’t otherwise happen. They can create the social scaffold that allows people to do things that they would have wanted to do anyway, if only they’d known the other community existed.”