The Three Body Problem Mobi

[Geraldine Ferraiz]

The non-invasive recording and analysis of human brain activity during active movements in natural working conditions is a central challenge in Neuroergonomics research. Existing brain imaging approaches do not allow for an investigation of brain dynamics during active behavior because their sensors cannot follow the movement of the signal source. However, movements that require the operator to react fast and to adapt to a dynamically changing environment occur frequently in working environments like assembly-line work, construction trade, health care, but also outside the working environment like in team sports. Overcoming the restrictions of existing imaging methods would allow for deeper insights into neurocognitive processes at workplaces that require physical interactions and thus could help to adapt work settings to the user. To investigate the brain dynamics accompanying rapid volatile movements we used a visual oddball paradigm where participants had to react to color changes either with a simple button press or by physically pointing towards a moving target. Using a mobile brain/body imaging approach (MoBI) including independent component analysis (ICA) with subsequent backprojection of cluster activity allowed for systematically describing the contribution of brain and non-brain sources to the sensor signal. The results demonstrate that visual event-related potentials (ERPs) can be analyzed for simple button presses and physical pointing responses and that it is possible to quantify the contribution of brain processes, muscle activity and eye movements to the signal recorded at the sensor level even for fast volatile arm movements with strong jerks. Using MoBI in naturalistic working environments can thus help to analyze brain dynamics in natural working conditions and help improving unhealthy or inefficient work settings.

Figure 1. (A) Experimental setup: top view of a participant standing in front of the screen. The setup comprised a motion capture system with six cameras (black rectangles) and 16 emitters (red dots), an EEG system with 156 wireless actively amplified electrodes (black dots), and the transmission system placed in a backpack (gray). (B) Task design. Top row: a black sphere moved over the projection screen and bounced off the walls of the screen. After changes to the target color participants responded according to the response condition either with a button press (button press condition) or a pointing movement towards the sphere (physical pointing condition). After a response or 4 s after a color change the sphere stopped and remained on the screen for 500 ms. Subsequently the next trial started. Bottom row: example of a trajectory of the sphere changing to the target color.

Figure 3. Pointing movement velocity profile as a function of time with corresponding markers. The y-axis displays the z-component of the velocity in m/s with positive values corresponding to motion towards the screen. The blue vertical line indicates a color change of the moving sphere to the target color. The green and magenta vertical lines indicate the movement onset and offset, respectively. The red vertical line indicates the velocity peak. The black vertical line indicates a distance between LED and projection screen below 10 cm.

Figure 4. Mean onset response times (threshold criterion 5% of subsequent max. velocity) for all participants in the physical pointing and button press condition. x-axis displays the participant index, y-axis the response time in ms. Error bars show standard deviation.

Copyright 2016 Jungnickel and Gramann. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution and reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

As you noted, each of these choices is justified by the historical context and by the individual circumstances of the characters. My hope was to have written all three of the characters empathetically, so that whether readers agree or disagree with their choices, they can understand those choices.

You open the story with a recursive statement, which plays out through the structure of the story itself, generationally and even geographically. Did you set out to write the story that way, or did the nature of the narrative lead you to it?

What structure might be interesting? I thought. Well, my favorite programming language is Lisp, which places recursion at the center of how to think about a problem. And so I decided that I wanted to write this piece like a Lisp program: The story would be divided into smaller versions of the same story, each delving deeper into the past, and the resolution would build up as we returned up the call stack.

I think too much of our fiction focuses on romance as the primary relationship for our characters, giving short shrift to friendship and kinship. I try to consciously resist that tendency in my own work. We are defined by many other relationships in our lives.

It is related to previewing sites locally before uploading using Firefox. I'm just providing a tip here LOL if anyone is experiencing issues. I do not work for Mobirise, I do not work for Firefox. OK shoot me down for trying to help with a possible solution.

This is no fix. The default setting causes the problem. Any body else trying to render your site in FF 68 is going to have the problem with your sites and won't know the fix and may not bother to fix even if they knew. Most users will simply go to another site if they have display problems with a site.

The problem was stated as being present with local previewing, but I would think the same would happen with normal rendering.

The problem was stated as being present with local previewing, but I would think the same would happen with normal rendering. I would think those involved with this problem would want to check it when it was on a server.

Taking the form of a retro-style arcade cabinet in the home base's medical bay, "Borderlands Science" has players shifting colored blocks between rows and columns to solve puzzles. Their successes are rewarded with in-game currency, which players can then use to better combat the aliens, mercenaries, machines and space cultists of the main game.

But Borderlands Science has a bit more than high-score calculations going on under the hood. The colored blocks and puzzles that it's serving players each represent nucleotides and fragments of microbial 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequences, all of which were collected from human stool samples contributed to and sequenced by an open research platform called the American Gut Project.

Rather, Borderlands Science's true goal is to help artificial intelligence iron out errors when organizing and analyzing those sequences en masse. By compiling the millions of matches that players are making, and then feeding them into a sequencing algorithm, the project aims to build a higher-quality body of data that researchers could someday use to develop novel health or wellness treatments.

"At first glance, the match between user base and scientific problem seems unlikely. The fast-paced, first-person shooter-looter game filled with dark humor is primarily designed for gamers seeking adventure and action," wrote contributors on the project from McGill University, videogame science company Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS) and Borderlands 3 developer Gearbox Studios in a recent nature biotechnology correspondence.

"But what could be a dead end turns out to be the strength of this initiative. A deployment in the Borderlands universe offers an opportunity to reach a public not particularly exposed to science, while at the same time it opens the door to a large and strong online community of players who can carry and amplify the impact of this initiative," they wrote.

Now nearly half a year in, Gearbox founder and CEO Randy Pitchford and MMOS cofounder and head of research and business development Attila Szantner tell MobiHealthNews that the output of Borderlands Science has far outstripped that of previous crowdsourced videogame research projects.

I consider Borderlands Science a milestone project," Szantner told MobiHealthNews. "We have proven before that such integration works beautifully in a game where both the player community and ... the game are science oriented. Borderlands Science has proven that a citizen science feature in a mainstream shooter/looter with a diverse audience can be super successful, can bring enormous value to the game, and can be an empowering and fun experience to players, all while substantially contributing to scientific research."

Borderlands Science benefits from a long heritage of citizen science projects, some of which embraced gamification design approaches to achieve their research goals, the team wrote in nature biotechnology.

These include Foldit, a puzzle game launched in 2008 to predict protein 3D structure; Stall Catchers, which has had participants review videos of mouse brain vessels to accelerate Alzheimer's disease research since 2016; and the aforementioned Phylo, developed by McGill researchers to map mammalian genes associated with diseases.

Szantner and MMOS's prior take on a citizen science research videogame was Project Discovery, which aimed to classify a large body of fluorescence microscopy images. Unlike other programs, Project Discovery was not released as a standalone game, but deployed within the sci-fi massive multiplayer online role-playing game Eve Online.

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