West, Donavon West

The Politics by Design exhibit opens today at the Dissident Display Gallery. One of my works titled "run hope" is featured, along with the works of various other poster designers. Dissident Display Gallery is located at 416 H Street NE in Washington, DC. For more information, call 202-332-3346 or visit http://www.dissidentdisplay.com.

Revel Carlberg West was born at 7:07am on Christmas Day. He weights in at a respectable 8 lbs 7 ozs and 21 inches long. Both baby and Mommy are doing fine.  According to my count, he has 10 fingers and 10 toes, but we're having that looked into by a specialist. :)

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Microsoft Virtual Earth and MSNBC are changing the game this year when it comes to tracking Santa. You’ve all seen the NORAD Santa Tracker and while that’s been fun over the years, well, it has gotten a bit stale. So, a few of us here in the Virtual Earth Product Group decided it was time to spice things up and build a more immersive 3D tracking mechanism for Santa and his reindeer. Not only that, but we went ahead and recreated a 3D version of Santa’s Village at The North Pole.

read more on Chris Pendleton's Virtual Earth blog

One of the Obama posters that I designed and submitted to the website Design for Obama has been chosen to be featured in a gallery exhibit.  It's titled "run hope" and will be shown during the month of January 2009 at the Dissident Display Gallery in Washington DC. The exhibit will be rather timely with Inauguration Day coming on January 20th.

My day job is that of a computer consultant. I've never been involved with a gallery showing so this is not only unexpected and a great honor, but pretty damn cool!

President-elect Barack Obama plans to name former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack as his choice for Secretary of Agriculture at a news conference Wednesday. How is former Governor of Iowa qualified to be Secretary of Agriculture? He can see corn from his house!

From the Windows Live team log:

About three months ago, we released public betas of the Windows Live Essentials – our suite of downloadable programs for your Windows PC, including Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety.

Since then, we’ve received a ton of great feedback and we’ve been using that information to update these programs. We’re getting very close to the final release. But before we get there, we’re refreshing the beta versions one more time to make sure we’ve ironed out all the kinks. You can get the latest betas from: http://download.live.com/.

We’re working hard to get the final versions ready to go as soon as possible. So let us know what you like and don’t like, and if you’re running into any issues that we need to take care of before we take the “beta” tags off.

- The Windows Live team

Now cool is this!? [Source: Chunichi]

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.

Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity.

For now, the system is only able to reproduce simple black-and-white images. But Dr. Kang Cheng, a researcher from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, suggests that improving the measurement accuracy will make it possible to reproduce images in color.

“These results are a breakthrough in terms of understanding brain activity,” says Dr. Cheng. “In as little as 10 years, advances in this field of research may make it possible to read a person’s thoughts with some degree of accuracy.”

The researchers suggest a future version of this technology could be applied in the fields of art and design — particularly if it becomes possible to quickly and accurately access images existing inside an artist’s head. The technology might also lead to new treatments for conditions such as psychiatric disorders involving hallucinations, by providing doctors a direct window into the mind of the patient.

ATR chief researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani says, “This technology can also be applied to senses other than vision. In the future, it may also become possible to read feelings and complicated emotional states.”

The research results appear in the December 11 issue of US science journal Neuron.

Google has of course bought the technology and is trying to figure out how to include AdSense. :)