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Multiverse Theory by Dr Michio Kaku

// April 11th, 2009 // No Comments » // General, News, Science and Technology

Michio Kaku is a Japanese-American theoretical physicist specializing in string field theory, and a futurist. He is a popularizer of science, host of two radio programs, and a best-selling author.

Kaku has publicly stated his concerns over issues including the human cause of global warming, nuclear armament, nuclear power, and the general misuse of science. He was critical of the Cassini-Huygens space probe because of the 72 pounds of plutonium contained in the craft for use by its radioisotope thermoelectric generator.

Alerting the public to the possibility of casualties if its fuel were dispersed into the environment during a malfunction and crash as the probe was making a ’sling-shot’ maneuver around earth; he was critical of NASA’s risk assessment.

Ultimately, the probe was launched and successfully completed its mission. Kaku is generally a vigorous supporter of the exploration of outer space, believing that the ultimate destiny of the human race may lie in the stars, but is critical of some of the cost-ineffective missions and methods of NASA.

Dr. Kaku credits his anti-nuclear war position to programs he heard on the Pacifica radio network, during his student years in California. It was during this period that he made the decision to turn away from a career developing the next generation of nuclear weapons in association with Dr. Teller and focused on research, teaching, writing and media.

Dr. Kaku joined with others such as Dr. Helen Caldicott, Jonathan Schell, Peace Action and was instrumental in building a global anti-nuclear weapons movement that arose in the 1980s, during the administration of US President Ronald Reagan.

Dr. Kaku was a board member of Peace Action and on the board of radio station WBAI-FM in New York City where he originated his long running program, Explorations, that focused on the issues of science, war, peace and the environment.

The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including our universe) that together comprise all of reality. The different universes within the multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes.

The structure of the multiverse, the nature of each universe within it and the relationship between the various constituent universes, depend on the specific multiverse hypothesis considered.

Multiverses have been hypothesized in cosmology, physics, astronomy, philosophy, transpersonal psychology and fiction, particularly in science fiction and fantasy.

The specific term “multiverse” was coined in 1895 by psychologist William James. In these contexts, parallel universes are also called “alternative universes”, “quantum universes”, “interpenetrating dimensions”, “parallel worlds”, “alternative realities”, “alternative timelines”, etc.

Entertaining audio and visual blogs easily created by mobile phone

// April 9th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // General, News, Science and Technology

NEC develops technologies that assess and author’s feelings from text in order to create audio and visual blogs for immediate use April 6, 2009.

NEC Corporation announced today the development of two new technologies that evaluate an author’s feelings based on text data in order to automatically generate entertaining blog content. The technologies produce a variety of text decorations and feature an entertaining text-to-speech function that generate synthesized speech based on the positive or negative emotions expressed in a body of text.

The two newly developed technologies are represented by a “state of mind assessment technology,” which analyze text data in order to assess whether the feelings expressed by an author are positive or negative, in addition to a “variable voice tone synthesis technology” that uses the identified feelings to create diverse variations in the tone of of synthesized voices.

Following is an outline of the main features of these newly developed technologies.

1. State of mind assessment technology: Assesses an author’s feelings based on text data

For some time, NEC has been developing a “Reputation Extraction” technology that can identify the subject of evaluation expressions in a sentence, such as “expensive” or “small.” By applying this technology, the “state of mind assessment technology” judge whether the feelings that an author has expressed in text, including evaluation expressions, positive or negative. This technology is able to assess the author’s feelings based on both the evaluation expression and the subject of that evaluation, even when the sentence does not contain phrases that express emotion directly, such as “fun” or “frustrated”.

2. Variable tone voice synthesis technology: Achieve diverse voice synthesis

NEC has developed a technology that can synthesize smooth speech, even while dramatically changing a variety of parameters that express the speaker’s tone, such as speed, pitch, depth, and brightness, sentences for which the speaker’s feelings have been assessed using the state of mind assessment technology can be read out with the tone adjusted to match a combination of parameters, thus injecting a new of fun into text-to-speech functions.

Highly expressive and entertaining audio and visual blogs using newly developed technologies that assess an author’s feelings from text

Using these newly developed technologies, NEC has produced a system that allows users to create highly expressive and entertaining audio and visual blogs simply by sending a voice message and photograph by e-mail from a mobile phone. For example, a blog can be read out in a unique and enjoyable synthesized voice, and text can be embellished using a variety of text decorations. The flow of the system is as follow:

1. A user sends a voice message from a mobile phone, to be used for a blog posting. This message is converted into text data using voice recognition technology.

2. An author’s feelings are assessed from the text data using the “state of mind assessment technology”.

3. An author is able to easily create a highly expressive blog via a mobile phone, by using voice characteristics for text-to-speech reading of text data based on feelings assessed in 2), and with automatic settings for text color and size, as well as pictographs to be inserted into the text.

In recent years, blogs have evolved from a simple technique used by individuals as a mean of transmitting information to the level of a communication tool that bring people closer together. Recently, there has been a rapid increase in diverse blog formats that incorporate photographs, videos, and voice, and this has add a new level of energy to communications. Now that blog entries can be made from mobile phones, an increasing number of blogs are updated several times each day. Although users can easily take photos and videos using a mobile phone, until now, adding decorations to the text or editing the layout required complex operations, which made it difficult for authors to create truly expressive blog entries that effectively conveyed their feelings.

NEC’s technologies resolve these issues and make communications even livelier than in the past through a system that enables the creation of entertaining audio and visual blogs.

These newly developed technologies can be used not only to update blogs from a mobile phone , but also to provide a wide range of services that require highly expressive or entertaining content.

NEC believes that these technologies will contribute to user-friendly communication interfaces in support of universal networking. The company will therefore continue to enhance its research and development activities aimed at achieving practical applications for innovative new services in the future.

NEC Press

Chimpanzees Enter into Deals-Meat for Sex

// April 9th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // General, News, Science and Technology

Male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts.

This is a long-term exchange, so males continues to share their catch with females when they are not fertile, copulating with them when they are. The team describe their findings in the journal PLoS One.

Christina Gomes and her colleagues, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, studied chimps in the Tai Forest reserve in Ivory Coast.

She and her team observed the animal as they hunted, and monitored the number of times they copulated.

“By sharing, the males increase the number of times they mate, and the females increase their intake of calories,” said Dr Gomes.

“What’s amazing is that if a male shares with particular female, he doubles the number of times he copulates with her, which is likely to increase the probability of fertilizing that female.”

High Value

Meat is important for the animals’ diet because it is so high in protein. Since females chimps do not usually hunt, “they have a hard time getting it on their own,” explain Dr Gomes.

a male chimp will give up his hard-earned catch for sex

The “meat for sex hypothesis” had already been proposed to explain why male chimps might share with females.

But previous attempts to record the phenomenon failed, because researchers looked for direct exchanges, where a male shared meat with fertile female and copulated with her right away.

Dr Gomes’ team took a new approach. In a precious study, she had found that grooming exchange where the animals take it in turns to groom each other happens over long period, she related. “So we thought, why not meat and sex?”

“We looked at chimps when they were not oestrus, this means they don’t have sexual swellings and aren’t copulating.”

“the males still share with them - they might share meat with a female one day, and only copulate with her a day or two later.”

Dr Gomes thinks that her findings could even provide clues about human evolution.

She suggests this study could lay the foundations for human studies exploring the link between “good hunting skills and reproductive success.”

“This has got me really interested in humans,” she said. “I am thinking of moving on to working with hunter gatherers.”

Michael Gurven from the university of California in Santa Barbara studies human behavior in communities of hunter-gatherers in South America.

He told BBC news that the direct link between success and reproduction highlighted by this study could “help in our thinking about humans.”

Professor Gurven, who was not involve in this study, added that the nature of this exchange of meat for sex is “kind of live pair bonding in humans, because it’s long-term. This highlights something we haven’t seen in chimps before.”

Victoria Gill
BBC News