Stories in Digital Media » Science

Beauty Experiment – Participants for a photoshooting wanted

derjan — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:34:28 +0000

A student needs further participants for his bachelor thesis !

To sum up in short, be part of a professional photo shooting (Saturday, January 23rd) and retrieve portraits for free afterwards!

(full resolution)

Translation of the description …

Nowadays all commercial images are heavily manipulated to achieve a certain level of quality. The “Beauty experiment” investigates the effect of retouching on our perception of aesthetics. If you participate in the “Beauty experiment”, a portrait of you will be professionally shooten, including make-up, hairstyling and clothing. Your best portrait will be digitally improven as well as deteriorated subsequently. All variants of this portraits, inclusive the original will be placed in an online quiz and evaluated by different people. The quiz is completely anonymous and will be online over a short period of time. You get all variations of your images in a printable quality for free afterwards. If you’re interested and fulfill the following criteria, write an email to velly@tzi.de, preferably with a photo of you.

CRITERIA FOR PARTICIPANTS:

tended appeal

european descent

age: 20 to 30

normal to sportive figure

face: no piercings and no tattoos

men: clean-shaven or scruffy

The photo shoot will take place on Saturday 23.01.2010 at the University of Bremen, within the 5th floor of the MZH.
In case of high interest, a second shooting would be possible.

Will Wright makes toys that make worlds

derjan — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:19:36 +0000

Just another Ted-talk. This time by Will Wright. The New Statesman describes him in these words :

“Will Wright – a legend among gamers, the nerd’s nerd, undisputed king of the simulation.“

He developed Sim City, The Sims and finally Spore. In this talk from 2007 he presented Spore as a preview.

A trail version of the Spore Creature Creator could be downloaded for Mac and PC for free, just check the link.

How social media can make history

derjan — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:19:51 +0000

Interesting TED-talk by Clay Shirkey

Global Game Jam ? Digital Media Jam !

derjan — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 11:10:03 +0000

Bremen will be a spot of the Global Game Jam, January 29-31, 2010.

What is that actually ? Have a look at the last years keynote !

Registration is already open, detailled informations on the event in Bremen, organized by the Digital Media Master freshmen are also online. Very easy, just register at globalgamejam.org and select the location (Digital Media Jam) within your profile settings.

Robots At War

derjan — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:47:43 +0000

Open talk on ethics and unmanned war machines by Prof. Dr. Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. University of Sheffield.

Tuesday, December 8th. 20:00, Haus der Wissenschaft, located here.

Just an announcement for a open scientific talk, related to the topic of ethics in computer science digital media. Might be of interest for the DM Master students, participating in Master Digital Media lecture at the university, as this talk is strongly related to artificial intelligence and ethics.

Internet: 40 years of history

Andre — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:43:49 +0000

In October 1969, a student typed ‘LO’ on a computer – and the internet was born

Unless you are 15 years old or younger, you have lived through the dotcom bubble and bust, the birth of Friends Reunited and Craigslist and eBay and Facebook and Twitter, blogging, the browser wars, Google Earth, filesharing controversies, the transformation of the record industry, political campaigning, activism and campaigning, the media, publishing, consumer banking, the pornography industry, travel agencies, dating and retail; and unless you’re a specialist, you’ve probably only been following the most attention-grabbing developments. Here’s one of countless statistics that are liable to induce feelings akin to vertigo: on New Year’s Day 1994 – only yesterday, in other words – there were an estimated 623 websites. In total. On the whole internet. “This isn’t a matter of ego or crowing,” says Steve Crocker, who was present that day at UCLA in 1969, “but there has not been, in the entire history of mankind, anything that has changed so dramatically as computer communications, in terms of the rate of change.”

Brown apologizes for Turing infamy 57 years ago, long due

Andre — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 03:32:38 +0000

Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal apology last night on behalf of the government to Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker who took his own life 55 years ago after being sentenced to chemical castration for being gay.

Describing Turing’s treatment as “horrifying” and “utterly unfair”, Brown said the country owed the brilliant mathematician a huge debt. He was proud, he said, to offer an official apology. “We’re sorry, you deserved so much better,” Brown writes in a statement posted on the No 10 website.

More.

Multitasking is inefficient

Andre — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:09:38 +0000

Procrastination is so easy these days. There’s a lot we can do when sitting in front of the computer. Checking Emails. Only one more video on YouTube, checking my subscribed Feeds, the weather, the stocks. Takes only a second.
Seriously, it gets even worse when we try to do all the things at the same time, to save time – while in fact it is actually inefficient, so does this study say.

“You don’t need eyes to see.”

Andre — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:29:05 +0000

A few years ago I saw an interface for blind people which consisted out of a camera which was recording the contours of what was in front of it and translated that to an array of little actuators inside a device which the blind person would attach between his eyes. Unfortunately, I forgot about the projects name shortly after.

Today I got to know BrainPort. It’s very similar. Instead of using the area between ones eyes it uses the tongue, which is much more sensitive and differentiating than the skin. It applies a electrotactile stimulation over an array of actuators. The composition of the signal then creates (over the course of a learning process) an “image” of the situation. See the amazing device in action in this demo video.

We reach the moon in 99h 28min!

Andre — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:48:34 +0000

The landing on the moon is one of the events in mankind I really would have liked to attend to. Well, no problem! The whole transmissions are played back in realtime, only 40 years after. Check it out here.