Siri - Voice Recognition Software and its Integration into our Everyday Life

I have been a Siri user for only about a month, so I was interested to research the history of voice recognition programs, and how modern society has approached this concept. Technology developers have been working with this subject for almost a century. 
We have moved from primitive systems that can only understand a few words to sophisticated programs like Siri who answer your questions with snide remarks. 

Siri is still primitive, however. She almost always gets exactly what you say, but the way she synthesizes the information, and tries to answer your questions is often clunky. 

The aesthetic of the program fits with Apple's long history of creating great looking products. They grey color and the font adds to the aesthetic. 

I anticipate the release of Siri by Apple will open the floodgates of companies and innovators creating similar and possibly even better products. 
The next step is full integration into all devices people use. There is great potential for even basic physical items to become digital tools of convenience and efficiency. I imagine being able to tell my phone to tell my coffee maker to have a pot made when I get home, or my phone telling me what's in my fridge when I am at the store.

People have been quickly adopting Siri because it's an Apple product, but I'm hoping Apple has the motivation to continue to improve it. With other companies joining in and creating competition progress is inevitable.


-Jessica Rae Huber

The Tablet Interface and Multiplayer Gaming

Nintendo has begun development on the next console to come out in 2012: the Wii U. This console will use the idea of the tablet to control different variants of the game being shown on the screen and will provide an extra perspective and tool to enhance game experience. The idea of using the tablet with a game console caused me to think about the possibilities with this new technology. In particular, I considered the future advances within multiplayer gaming in role-playing games.

Using a tablet, which provides an extra screen, each player could devise their own characters, which interact with one another on the TV monitor. Each player could use the controller to expand their view of perspective. Pointing the camera down, the player would see the ground in the game, and the system would support each character’s unique location within the mother game.

Each player could make decisions and interact, much like you would with a main NPC, but instead it’s your friend sitting next to you with real opinions and personalities reflected in their character. Such as in the game Dragon Age, games that allow the player’s decisions to effect the storyline would work really well in this environment. Each player’s actions would be taken into account and intertwined to create a unique narrative and outcome for the game.

-Kristin King

K Computer from Japan does 10 quadrillion calculations a second to become the worlds fastest computer

Japan's "K" computer company Fujitsu has created the worlds fastest computer. It is capable of computing 10.51 quadrillion calculations in a second, or 10 petaflops. Just how big is 10 quadrillion you ask? A quadrillion is 1000 x 10 trillion.

Fujitsu used it's own processors called SPARC64 that are made especially for super computing. It spans 88,000 interconnected CPUs that all work together.

It was commissioned by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, with the intention of breaking the 10 petaflop barrier.

The developers are enjoying their moment of fame, because they know in the world of computer programming, they will be outdone by someone soon. IBM is building machines predicted to reach 20 petaflops by next year.

One of the most expensive aspects of the K computer is the power it takes to run it. Fujitsu was not able to give the official power consumption of the K computer, but in June it consumed 9.89 megawatts which cost $9.89 million dollars.

Wearable Technology

Wearable technology is becoming an increasingly common topic of scientific research and display, specifically close to home here in Boston. The Boston Science Museum recently held a fashion show by a company called Seamless, which develops clothing designs that incorporate technology in some way. Some great examples at the show were

• a dress that stores kinetic energy from the body's movement, which can be used later to charge phones, iPods, or laptops
• a ring that displays the number of Google hits a famous person has
• a dress that lights up to show the strength of a nearby WIFI signal
• jackets with scrolling LED light messages on the back
• jewelry with solar panels that collect and store light so that the pieces glow when placed in the dark

Another notable site for wearable technology is felehoo.com, which sells "wearable digital technology." This is basically a computer screen with backpack straps on it and was developed for advertisement purposes.

The future of wearable technology is wide open, and I think that we will continue to see advances, especially in the advertising world. I think designs like the LED banner jacket will be more popular for spreading a message than the wearable computer, which seems bulky and unrealistic. However, I think we will also continue to see an increase in jewelry technology, specifically touch screen bracelets and necklaces for watching videos and playing games.

Here's a link to the fashion show video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoyNqCsksdg&feature=fvst

Degas and The Nude

The main point of Berger’s essay is to discuss how visual art, specifically European oil paintings, emphasize the woman as a sight to be gazed upon by a man, and a man as an active owner of the woman and her appearance. To a woman, she herself is nothing more than what she appears to be to a male observer. She is on display for the man, who ultimately has power over her. She is owned by not only the owner of the painting, but also by every spectator and by the painter himself. Berger says, “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.” In some ways, this describes a selection of Edgar Degas’s paintings of the nude. He places the woman in a setting that would normally allow for nudity without seeming sexual (the bathroom) and permits himself and the male viewer to spy on the woman in her most private moments. He invades her space in a way that allows the viewer to feel as though he deserves to look at her and that she would not be positioning herself the way she is if he were not watching her. The unrealistic nature of the way the woman’s body is contorted in Degas’s After The Bath (Woman Drying Herself) only confirms Berger’s theory that the woman cannot do any activity without thinking about how it is being visually represented to a man. No woman in real life would dry herself that way, and this painting suggests that she knows someone is watching her and it is her duty to make a mundane task as sexual as possible for his pleasure. It also becomes absurd when a group of nudes is painted together, such as in Degas’s Dancers, Nude Study. I find it hard to believe that a group of naked woman is dancing around for his viewing pleasure. Degas is living out his own fantasies and indulging the fantasies of other men, so that it seems “right” and normal for women to be expected to act that way in real life. A woman is expected to be sexual in real life because that is how women are depicted in art. One notable difference between Degas and the European art that Berger discusses is that Degas often portrays the woman from behind rather than from the front. The viewer is shown her back or her side and sometimes part of her is covered with a towel. Far from lending Degas credibility as something more than a nudist painter however, the woman’s bodily positions only add to the amount of power the man exerts over her. With her back turned she is in a vulnerable position and the man can feel free to do whatever he wants to her. As stated before, it seems as though Degas is saying that men deserve to intrude upon the woman while she is bathing. She’s not really bathing to clean herself but so she has an excuse to take off her clothes for a man.

If you were to substitute a man instead of a woman in many of the Degas pieces, the result would be utterly confusing. It has become so accepted and normal to see a woman bathing herself in a mirror that if you were to replace it with a man, it would have to be considered homosexual art for it to be acceptable as attractive. I don’t even think a heterosexual woman would find a painting of a nude man bathing himself to be alluring because it suggests that the man is in a weak and vulnerable state, and we are conditioned to believe that only strong and powerful men are attractive.

Degas & The Nude

One concept that really stood out at me at Degas's exhibit was his portrayal of women in uncomfortable positions. Degas's After the Bath (Woman Drying Herself), pictured above, conveyed to me the relationship of women to society at the time. To bathe is a personal activity generally meant for cleansing and renewal, but in this painting, the woman is clearly struggling, and does not appear to be enjoying this activity at all. I cannot tell if Degas meant to establish whether or not the woman knew she was being watched, but her discomfort is obvious and symbolizes the discomfort experienced in a woman's daily life.

Berger discusses the idea of presence in men and women and how they are presented through either their exterior or interior beings. Throughout Degas's exhibit, it is evident that women were inferior to men, and could only establish presence when bared to nothing but skin. A woman's presence was depicted through physical essence and everything that her body represented emotionally and psychologically. A man's presence, however, was depicted through the physical female body. In other words, the nude woman was not there to portray just herself, but was there to serve "her man," and her presence represented only who she was in relation to this man. Without the man present in the painting, one had to assume the spectator was male...just because..you had to.

Naked or Nude

Rolla by Henri Gervex

After reading John Berger's essay, "Ways of Seeing", on nudes and nakedness, I can say that Henri Gervex's, Rolla (featured in the Degas Exhibit), is a quintessential nude painting. The naked woman has been clearly painted for the enjoyment of the spectator. Although there is another man in the painting, he is passively in the background, with his body in an open position, as if allowing the spectator to have his fill of the woman. The sexuality of the piece is enhanced by the European tradition of painting the woman hairless. Her pristine, supple, fair skin is very alluring and allows the spectator to "feel that he has the monopoly"(Berger) on the sexual passion.

What is included in the painting is the full bed, with its lavish bedding, and a partial window. This gives the spectator a nice setting for which he himself could place himself with the woman. The environment is as luxurious as the woman and really helps to activate the bodily senses; you can feel the silky sheets and smell the fresh breeze coming through the window.

After reading Berger's essay, I understand now that a nude painting is not just a picture of a naked woman. The naked woman has to be an object of desire for it to qualify as a nude. In Berger's words, the nude is "to appeal to his [spectator's] sexuality". The woman is obviously the object in the painting, as accentuated by the gaze of the man looking at her. She is an object to be beholden. Her eyes are closed almost as an invitation for the spectator to watch and look without shame or embarrassment.

Going through the Degas exhibit there were other paintings of nudes. Each expressed varying degrees of sexuality. And if I was looking at a fully naked woman, but felt no sexual excitement, I then concluded that I was looking at just a naked woman and not a nude. Before reading Berger's essay, I thought that nudes were just an excuse for artists to bring sexual perversion into society and this was a VERY uneducated perspective. But now, with an understanding of what nudes are, I do see them as being art. By using specific techniques, nudes are meant to elicit a sexual response from the viewer; and if it truly is a nude it will successfully do that. This meditated execution makes it art.