Tensions of Data-Driven Reflection: A Case Study of Real-Time Emotional Biosensing

Biosensing displays, increasingly enrolled in emotional reflection, promise authoritative insight by presenting users’ emotions as discrete categories. Rather than machines interpreting emotions, we sought to explore an alternative with emotional biosensing displays in which users formed their own interpretations and felt comfortable critiquing the display. So, we designed, implemented, and deployed, as a technology probe, an emotional biosensory display: Ripple is a shirt whose pattern changes color responding to the wearer’s skin conductance, which is associated with excitement. 17 participants wore Ripple over 2 days of daily life. While some participants appreciated the ‘physical connection’ Ripple provided between body and emotion, for others Ripple fostered insecurities about ‘how much’ feeling they had. Despite our design intentions, we found participants rarely questioned the display’s relation to their feelings. Using biopolitics to speculate on Ripple’s surprising authority, we highlight ethical stakes of biosensory representations for sense of self and ways of feeling

Achieving high thermal conductivity in epoxy composites: Effect of boron nitride particle size and matrix-filler interface

For the thermal management of high watt density circuit layers, it is common to use a filled epoxy system to provide an electrically insulating but thermally conducting bond to a metal substrate. An epoxy-thiol system filled with boron nitride (BN), in the form of 2, 30 and 180 µm platelets, has been investigated with a view to achieving enhanced thermal conductivity. The effect of BN content on the cure reaction kinetics has been studied by differential scanning calorimetry and the thermal conductivity of the cured samples has been measured by the Transient Hot Bridge method. The heat of reaction and the glass transition temperature of the fully cured samples are both independent of the BN content, but the cure reaction kinetics is systematically affected by both BN content and particle size. These results can be correlated with the thermal conductivity of the cured systems, which is found to increase with both BN content and particle size. For a given BN content, the thermal conductivity found here is significantly higher than most others reported in the literature; this effect is attributed to a Lewis acid-base interaction between filler and matrix.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Potential mass surveillance and privacy violations in proximity-based social applications

Proximity-based social applications let users interact with people that are currently close to them, by revealing some information about their preferences and whereabouts. This information is acquired through passive geo-localisation and used to build a sense of serendipitous discovery of people, places and interests. Unfortunately, while this class of applications opens different interactions possibilities for people in urban settings, obtaining access to certain identity information could lead a possible privacy attacker to identify and follow a user in their movements in a specific period of time. The same information shared through the platform could also help an attacker to link the victim's online profiles to physical identities. We analyse a set of popular dating application that shares users relative distances within a certain radius and show how, by using the information shared on these platforms, it is possible to formalise a multilateration attack, able to identify the user actual position. The same attack can also be used to follow a user in all their movements within a certain period of time, therefore identifying their habits and Points of Interest across the city. Furthermore we introduce a social attack which uses common Facebook likes to profile a person and finally identify their real identity

Neural mechanisms of reactivation-induced updating that enhance and distort memory

We remember a considerable number of personal experiences because we are frequently reminded of them, a process known as memory reactivation. Although memory reactivation helps to stabilize and update memories, reactivation may also introduce distortions if novel information becomes incorporated with memory. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural mechanisms mediating reactivation-induced updating in memory for events experienced during a museum tour. During scanning, participants were shown target photographs to reactivate memories from the museum tour followed by a novel lure photograph from an alternate tour. Later, participants were presented with target and lure photographs and asked to determine whether the photographs showed a stop they visited during the tour. We used a subsequent memory analysis to examine neural recruitment during reactivation that was associated with later true and false memories. We predicted that the quality of reactivation, as determined by online ratings of subjective recollection, would increase subsequent true memories but also facilitate incorporation of the lure photograph, thereby increasing subsequent false memories. The fMRI results revealed that the quality of reactivation modulated subsequent true and false memories via recruitment of left posterior parahippocampal, bilateral retrosplenial, and bilateral posterior inferior parietal cortices. However, the timing of neural recruitment and the way in which memories were reactivated contributed to differences in whether memory reactivation led to distortions or not. These data reveal the neural mechanisms recruited during memory reactivation that modify how memories will be subsequently retrieved, supporting the flexible and dynamic aspects of memory

Opportunities and Challenges for Personal Heat Exposure Research

abstract: BACKGROUND: Environmental heat exposure is a public health concern. The impacts of environmental heat on mortality and morbidity at the population scale are well documented, but little is known about specific exposures that individuals experience. OBJECTIVES: The first objective of this work was to catalyze discussion of the role of personal heat exposure information in research and risk assessment. The second objective was to provide guidance regarding the operationalization of personal heat exposure research methods. DISCUSSION: We define personal heat exposure as realized contact between a person and an indoor or outdoor environment that poses a risk of increases in body core temperature and/or perceived discomfort. Personal heat exposure can be measured directly with wearable monitors or estimated indirectly through the combination of time–activity and meteorological data sets. Complementary information to understand individual-scale drivers of behavior, susceptibility, and health and comfort outcomes can be collected from additional monitors, surveys, interviews, ethnographic approaches, and additional social and health data sets. Personal exposure research can help reveal the extent of exposure misclassification that occurs when individual exposure to heat is estimated using ambient temperature measured at fixed sites and can provide insights for epidemiological risk assessment concerning extreme heat. CONCLUSIONS: Personal heat exposure research provides more valid and precise insights into how often people encounter heat conditions and when, where, to whom, and why these encounters occur. Published literature on personal heat exposure is limited to date, but existing studies point to opportunities to inform public health practice regarding extreme heat, particularly where fine-scale precision is needed to reduce health consequences of heat exposure.Reproduced with permission from Environmental Health Perspectives. The final version of this article can be viewed online at: https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/EHP556/#tab

Review of Web Mapping: Eras, Trends and Directions

Web mapping and the use of geospatial information online have evolved rapidly over the past few decades. Almost everyone in the world uses mapping information, whether or not one realizes it. Almost every mobile phone now has location services and every event and object on the earth has a location. The use of this geospatial location data has expanded rapidly, thanks to the development of the Internet. Huge volumes of geospatial data are available and daily being captured online, and are used in web applications and maps for viewing, analysis, modeling and simulation. This paper reviews the developments of web mapping from the first static online map images to the current highly interactive, multi-sourced web mapping services that have been increasingly moved to cloud computing platforms. The whole environment of web mapping captures the integration and interaction between three components found online, namely, geospatial information, people and functionality. In this paper, the trends and interactions among these components are identified and reviewed in relation to the technology developments. The review then concludes by exploring some of the opportunities and directions

Remote Sensing of Plant Biodiversity

At last, here it is. For some time now, the world has needed a text providing both a new theoretical foundation and practical guidance on how to approach the challenge of biodiversity decline in the Anthropocene. This is a global challenge demanding global approaches to understand its scope and implications. Until recently, we have simply lacked the tools to do so. We are now entering an era in which we can realistically begin to understand and monitor the multidimensional phenomenon of biodiversity at a planetary scale. This era builds upon three centuries of scientific research on biodiversity at site to landscape levels, augmented over the past two decades by airborne research platforms carrying spectrometers, lidars, and radars for larger-scale observations. Emerging international networks of fine-grain in-situ biodiversity observations complemented by space-based sensors offering coarser-grain imagery—but global coverage—of ecosystem composition, function, and structure together provide the information necessary to monitor and track change in biodiversity globally. This book is a road map on how to observe and interpret terrestrial biodiversity across scales through plants—primary producers and the foundation of the trophic pyramid. It honors the fact that biodiversity exists across different dimensions, including both phylogenetic and functional. Then, it relates these aspects of biodiversity to another dimension, the spectral diversity captured by remote sensing instruments operating at scales from leaf to canopy to biome. The biodiversity community has needed a Rosetta Stone to translate between the language of satellite remote sensing and its resulting spectral diversity and the languages of those exploring the phylogenetic diversity and functional trait diversity of life on Earth. By assembling the vital translation, this volume has globalized our ability to track biodiversity state and change. Thus, a global problem meets a key component of the global solution. The editors have cleverly built the book in three parts. Part 1 addresses the theory behind the remote sensing of terrestrial plant biodiversity: why spectral diversity relates to plant functional traits and phylogenetic diversity. Starting with first principles, it connects plant biochemistry, physiology, and macroecology to remotely sensed spectra and explores the processes behind the patterns we observe. Examples from the field demonstrate the rising synthesis of multiple disciplines to create a new cross-spatial and spectral science of biodiversity. Part 2 discusses how to implement this evolving science. It focuses on the plethora of novel in-situ, airborne, and spaceborne Earth observation tools currently and soon to be available while also incorporating the ways of actually making biodiversity measurements with these tools. It includes instructions for organizing and conducting a field campaign. Throughout, there is a focus on the burgeoning field of imaging spectroscopy, which is revolutionizing our ability to characterize life remotely. Part 3 takes on an overarching issue for any effort to globalize biodiversity observations, the issue of scale. It addresses scale from two perspectives. The first is that of combining observations across varying spatial, temporal, and spectral resolutions for better understanding—that is, what scales and how. This is an area of ongoing research driven by a confluence of innovations in observation systems and rising computational capacity. The second is the organizational side of the scaling challenge. It explores existing frameworks for integrating multi-scale observations within global networks. The focus here is on what practical steps can be taken to organize multi-scale data and what is already happening in this regard. These frameworks include essential biodiversity variables and the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON). This book constitutes an end-to-end guide uniting the latest in research and techniques to cover the theory and practice of the remote sensing of plant biodiversity. In putting it together, the editors and their coauthors, all preeminent in their fields, have done a great service for those seeking to understand and conserve life on Earth—just when we need it most. For if the world is ever to construct a coordinated response to the planetwide crisis of biodiversity loss, it must first assemble adequate—and global—measures of what we are losing