PARANOIA

Alpha Complex comes to life in Japanese photographer Joe Nishizawa's incredible photos of underground Tokyo.

(Via Chris Nakashima-Brown at No Fear of the Future.)

Loyal citizen Elle-R-KNO of Paranoia-Live.net forwards this Wired blog report of breakthroughs in Japanese smile-measuring technology:

The breadth of a smile can be measured by new technology from Japanese electronics and health care company Omron Corp. [...]

In a demonstration, a camcorder took videos of journalists covering the announcement. Percentage numbers indicating how much each person was smiling popped up in bold blue letters next to their faces on a monitor, flashing higher or lower as their expressions changed. The numbers ranged as high as 89 percent for a person who was grinning, while a somber face registered 0 percent.

Sony Corp. already has a similar Smile Shutter function for its digital cameras which automatically clicks the shutter when people in the image break into a smile.

But Kawamoto said Omron hopes to used its technology in the medical field, to assess the emotional state of patients, or pack it in mobile phones. Okao Catch can also be useful for people who want to perfect their smiles, or for robot communication to make it easier for machines to decipher human reactions, according to Omron.

Doubtless this tech will soon adorn an airport security line near you....

Labels: smile

The King's College London Institute of Psychiatry posted a story on April Fool's Day that seems not to be a joke: "Virtual reality tube ride reveals extent of public paranoia."

Researchers stuck 200 test subjects on a four-minute virtual-reality simulation of a subway train ride. "The carriage contained neutral computer people (avatars) that breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants." And lo and behold, the test subjects were spooked!

The research, led by psychologist Dr Daniel Freeman, and funded by the Wellcome Trust, demonstrates that suspicious or paranoid thoughts are much more common in the general population than was previously thought and that they are almost as common as anxiety and depression. [...]

Dr Freeman and colleagues found that the participants interpreted the same computer characters very differently. The most common reaction was to find the virtual reality characters friendly or neutral, but almost 40% of the participants experienced at least one paranoid thought. The participants were extensively assessed before entering the train ride, and it was found that those who were anxious, worried, focused on the worst-case scenarios and had low self-esteem were the most likely to have paranoid thoughts. [...]

"In the past, only those with a severe mental illness were thought to experience paranoid thoughts, but now we know that this is simply not the case," says Dr Freeman. "About one-third of the general population regularly experience persecutory thoughts. This shouldn’t be surprising. At the heart of all social interactions is a vital judgment whether to trust or mistrust, but it is a judgment that is error-prone. We are more likely to make paranoid errors if we are anxious, ruminate and have had bad experiences from others in the past." [...]

People who feared terrorism on the Underground tended to report more paranoid thoughts in the virtual train, possibly reflecting the after-effects of the London bombings on 7 July 2005. However, the researchers also found that people who regularly used the Underground experienced less paranoid thoughts in the virtual train.

Wow, science is really marching on at King's. Comments on the Slashdot topic "VR Study Says 40% of Us Are Paranoid" highlight the junk-science angle, especially this one from LighterShadeOfBlack:

A VR reproduction of the London underground? A place where you're crowded by people, a place which in all honesty does have a reputation for being a haven for pickpockets (whether that's deserved or not, I don't know), and oh yes, one other thing -- the site of the last major (successful) terrorist attack on Britain. [...] Being somewhat cautious in that particular situation is a world away from the headlines implicating that 40% of us are clinically paranoid all the time.

The new issue 55 of Mongoose Publishing's free online magazine Signs & Portents includes a short, pithy PARANOIA article by Gareth (The Traitor's Manual) Hanrahan. "Reasons to be Cheerful" has nothing to do with the Greg Egan short story of that name. Rather, the article lists an array of secret motives Troubleshooter characters harbor (escape, drugs, gaining mutations, "free thinking"), along with conditions that satisfy those motives. By achieving these hidden goals, players earn Perversity points, which may provide some consolation as your free-thinking character is hauled off for a deep brainscrub.

Gareth is all over this issue. He also contributed a one-page overview and a short scenario for the forthcoming Mongoose edition of Traveller, that languorous and idyllic project that has distracted him from writing the forthcoming PARANOIA bot book. Enough shilly-shallying, Gareth, get to work!

I hate posting on April Fool's Day, AKA "Internet Jackass Day," because anything I say is automatically discounted. But this happened to be the day loyal citizen Saul Resnikoff at Paranoia-Live.net forwarded to me a kind invitation from one Lisa Axelrod to look at ParanoiaFiles.com.

This site takes "paranoia in the real world" literally -- it's a collection of reports on technology from the viewpoint of, not PARANOIA RPG players, but literal sufferers of paranoid personality disorder. The surprise here is the humorous tone, similar to the "Illuminated Site of the Week" on Steve Jackson Games' Daily Illuminator blog.

Poke around ParanoiaFiles to find plenty of items suitable for R&D field testing, such as dental implants and encoded tire treads.