Global Media News is a weekly webcast covering media & technology news from around the world. This webcast is a production of Media Studies students from the SUNY College @ Old Westbury.
This week on the 'Digital Revolution' edition of Global Media News:
"Fact: The Digital Revolution in Information & News"
TV News in the Digital Age
Reading the News on an E-Reader?
Cell Phones Deliver the News
Search & the News
Sandy & Social Media
See you in next week for more news from the Digital Revolution!
Next on Global Media News:
Future Worlds: Science, Medicine & the Environment
Listen to our webcast streaming live on Thursdays @ 11am EST.
Can't listen live? Our next webcast will be posted by 2:00pm, Thursday, December 6, 2012.
Virtual Anatomy is the new way to look inside a human body without any invasive procedures. 3D glasses and technology are being used in Medical Schools to teach would be doctors about human anatomy through the use of virtual humans. According to Natasha Singer of New York Times “…the dead are imperfect stand-ins for the living. Death – and embalming fluid – take a toll. So, in an adjacent classroom, a group of students wearing 3-D glasses made by Nvidia…dissected a virtual cadaver projected on a screen.” Basically saying that death destroys some of the essential organs, if you have been studying damaged bodies knowing what a perfectly functioning body would look like is hard.
The use of the study of virtual cadavers is being applied in other ways also threw the use of virtual autopsies. These virtual autopsies are being used to uncover clues in murder cases. It is believed that these virtual autopsies are better than using a scalpel.
When using a scalpel you can compromise the integrity of the cadaver. According to Eric Bland of discovery news this form of autopsy is more humane he says “A real autopsy is a grim process. The body is laid face-up on a steel table. A forensic expert, usually a pathologist, makes a Y-shaped incision, down the chest and under each side of the rib cage. The skull is sawed off, exposing the brain. Each organ is removed and weighed, any surface injuries are recorded, and any foreign objects, such as bullets, are removed and saved as evidence.”
These digital autopsies also can help with the convictions of murderers because virtual cadavers do not decay. The virtual body is never touched and thus never compromised. These digital autopsies are performed first by taking a scan of the body using radiation to basically make the organs and systems glow. The radiation amount isn’t important because the person is already dead. And according again to Eric Bland “In less than 15 minutes the real body becomes a virtual body made up from six gigabits worth of information…[and] with a few finger flicks, a radiologist and a pathologist, working together, can instantly strip away skin and flesh to reveal broken bones or enlarge the arteries to measure plaque buildup.”
The virtual autopsies can also be used like virtual cadavers to help medical students learn more about the human body by dissecting it. Virtual autopsies have yet to take full effect but with how technology is moving it’s only a matter of time before all medical schools and all autopsies are done this way.
the video below is an example of a virtual autopsy.
With the digital revolution evolving and improving things
everyday, you have to wonder what will change next. With books becoming a thing
of the past and E-readers rapidly taking their place, it makes you think about
what might happen to newspapers. Well with E-readers hurting book sales, it’s
actually opening up a new market for E-readers that are made solely for the use
of newspapers.
With print media suffering due to the economy and the affects
of the Internet, Amazon is said to be creating a larger version of their kindle
manufactured specifically to accommodate newspapers and magazines. This
wireless device is due in next year and will present a screen that is around
the same size as a sheet of paper, even perhaps accommodating the use of
textbooks.
The switch from print to an E-reader would save publishers
millions of dollars. Newspaper and magazine industries wouldn’t have to worry
about spending money on the cost of printing and distributing their
publications. In a New York Times article, John Ridding, the chief executive of
salmon-colored British newspaper The Financial Times said,
“We are looking at this with a great deal of interest, the
severe double whammy of the recession and the structural shift to the Internet
has created an urgency that has rightly focused attention on these devices.”
This new E-reading device would allow publishers the
opportunity to support their articles with advertisements and to gain new
subscribers. Although the switch from the hard copy of a newspaper to a digital
device might be a tricky one, it’s one that would save newspaper and magazine
industries and allow them to rebuild their companies.
In a similar article found on New York Times entitled, New E-Newspaper Reader Echoes Look of the paper, the company Plastic Logic is also looking to create a device specially designed for important documents and newspapers. Kenneth A. Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive Media, said,
“We are hopeful that we will be able to distribute our newspaper content on a new generation of larger devices sometime next year. We have a very strong interest in e-newspapers. We’re very anxious to get involved.”
tion has tremendously hurt the
newspaper industry. Newspapers have been closing, reducing distribution
and laying people off. I was thought that the newspaper industry was
dying due to the increase of technology consumption. Well it turns out
that some newspapers have taken a turn for the better since last year
annual circulation reports.
According to New York Times Article “Digital Gains Help Newspaper Circulation Figures”
there has been a steady increase in digital circulation of newspapers
this year. Digital circulation of newspapers last year accounted for
9.8% of total average circulation while this year it is up to 15.3
percent. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations
that is more than a 50% increase from 2011 to 2012. Digital circulation
refers to tablets, smartphones, e-readers and metered Web sites.
For some newspapers it turns out that the digital revolution is helping
their circulation increase. Newspapers like New York Times and The
Wall Street Journal are among the most popular of the papers that are
benefiting. The New York Times increased their daily circulation
average with the help of digital circulation by over 40% from 2011 to
2012.
There was another New York Times article called, “Small Gain in Newspaper Circulation, Aided by Digital Subscriptions”
that discussed some very intersting facts in regards to the latest
statistics to be released. The article said, “Under audit rules,
newspapers can count paid digital subscribers more than once if they
have daily access to digital content on multiple platforms like mobile
apps or tablets as part of a bundled subscription package.” This
makes me wonder how accurate the latest statistics really are. Also it
makes me interested to see if the increase in circulation is reflected
in their profits for the year.
Overall
many are optimistic about digital circulation helping newspapers.
Which is a major turn from the articles posted a few months ago that
were feared the newspaper industry was on a downhill spiral. The chief
executive of the Newspaper Association of America, Caroline H. Little
said, “We’re particularly gratified to note that newspapers’ embrace of
digital platforms, as well as smart and efficient circulation strategies
for print products, are reflected in the numbers, which clearly
demonstrate positive trends in total circulation growth for publishers.”
Personally I would love to see if all of these numbers are correlating
to profits for the newspapers, or just helping them stay alive. It seem
to be a good thing for newspapers, but only time will tell if it leads
to a successful business plan for the future.
About.com.Journalism
gives a very good explanation of how newspapers can get remain
profitable in the digital revolution. In the article, “How Can Newspapers Remain Profitable In The Digital Media Age”
by Tony Rogers, it says that many newspapers require a print
subscription to receive online access. This is done because the online
advertisements do not pay enough for a digital paper to be profitable,
based on advertisements alone. The Democrat-Gazette is just one of the
papers using its website to essentially keep the printed paper alive.
The Democrat-Gazette believes that the money is in the printed press
not the online access. Walther E. Hussman, jr. is a third generation
newspaper publisher, and says “"The economics are still with the printed
newspaper" and he believes that many papers of lost their print
subscriptions because readers can access articles online for free.
It
is very interesting to see how different newspapers are using the
digital revolution to keep their companies alive. It seems that the
digital revolution nearly eliminated the printed newspaper, but many are
strategically learning to use the digital age to their advantage. I
wonder if these struggling papers will ever find a way to be as
profitable as they once were, or if it will be an ongoing battle with
the digital revolution.
To check out the future of newspapers, check out this Youtube video with John Temple. He discusses the transition of the newspaper industry to a digital forum. He introduces the idea of an inclusive paper, where readers and journalist together participate in the paper online. He feels that people will have an opportunity to read and participate in the topics they have an interest in. He feels that this participation is a great benefit of the digital revolution for papers.
The news cycle used to be a television broadcast at 6pm or the morning news paper. But now we live in a world where the news can be updated as it happens in the palm of your hand. The news today is delievered differently. It is geared for the on the go person as well as the television broadcast. We also see the once popular newspaper struggle because of the rise of the 24/7 news cycle as well as the tablet. The proportion of Americans who read news on a printed page like newspapers and magazines continues to decline, even as online readership has offset some of these losses. Just 23% say they read a print newspaper yesterday, down only slightly since 2010, but off by about half since 2000.
In an article by PeoplePress, CNN television viewership is down. Among individual cable news outlets, CNN’s regular audience has declined since 2008. Four years ago, nearly a quarter of Americans said they regularly watched CNN; that has fallen to 16% in the new survey.Regular viewership for both Fox News and MSNBC has not changed much in recent years.About one-in-five Americans say they regularly watch Fox News, while about half as many say they regularly watch MSNBC.
There is no doubt the news is changing. Can the news outlets adapt? If they don't, it seems like they no longer exist.
Due to the many advances in
science and technology there are becoming even more advances in medicine. From
medical scans that can produce thousands of images and terabytes of data for a
patient in little time, to virtual MRI’s, these advances have a tremendous
impact on our medical future.
In a TEDTalk entitled “Anders
Ynnerman: Visualizing The Medical Data Explosion”, Swedish scientific
visualization expert, Anders Ynnerman spoke about the effect visual graphics
have on the medical field. According to TED, “Ynnerman
studies the fundamental aspects of computer graphics and visualization, in
particular large scale and complex data sets with a focus on volume rendering
and multi-modal interaction”. During the
TEDTalk, Ynnerman spoke about a computer tomography machine that uses x-ray
beams to generate information about the body. According to Ynnerman, “this
machine can be used to improve healthcare…and looking at what we are doing
today with the machines that we have, we can get in a few seconds about 24,000
images of the human body”.
These medical scans produce
thousands of images and data that can help individuals in the medical field in
various ways. These advances in technology can help find a tumor on a patient,
or it could even help with finding the cause of a patient’s death. Virtual
autopsies allow the doctors to virtually go through the skin, flesh, and bones
of a person’s body to see what is going on with them internally. These virtual
autopsies could help distinguish metal artifacts in the body, damages in bone
structure, bullet wounds, and knife stabbings.
This not only helps with distinguishing ones cause of death, it helps to
direct the criminal investigation in the right direction.
In the talk, Ynnerman then goes
into more detail about advances that may come about in the future that will
allow doctors and scientists to virtually touch data, and receive resistance
and a feedback from what they touch. For example, a scientist would use their
pen to virtually touch the heart and feel the heartbeat and how to heart valves
are moving.
Another way of the future that
Ynnerman addressed is a functional MRI, which would allow doctors and
scientists to measure the structure of the brain, and the difference in
magnetic properties of oxygenated blood, and blood that is depleted. These
advances will allow doctors to virtually visualize his brain in real time.
Advances like these are truly a way
of the future, and are extremely exciting to learn about because once these
advances are widely implemented life would become so much easier for both
doctors and patients. This is mainly because the doctors will have more access
to beneficial information that could possibly save a patients life.
Below is the TEDTalk on Anders Ynnerman that I watched:
Growing up the idea of seeing 3D movies was fascinating. Nowadays it’s become a norm, with 3D movies released regularly and even video games are now 3D. But never did I expect even YouTube would be able to provide 3D videos also.
In an article by Marty Katz titled YouTube Will Now ConvertVideos to 3D for the NewYorkTimes it focuses on the fact that YouTube users will now be able to make already existing uploads or new uploads 3D. The reason they choose to make this change is because of the rise in uploads from consumers that have 3D capable phones. To please the people that use YouTube they essentially had to change the way in which they were able to view the video online to fit the format from of their phones.
If you’re like me I bet your wondering how exactly this 3Daffect works on YouTube of all places. Well in an article for PCMAG.COM by Mark Hachman titled YouTube Adds 3D Option for 1080p video it explains how this process would work. What would happen is "basically, stereoscopic 3D requires the left and right eye to "see" a slightly different, offset image, which the brain then combines to create the illusion of a 3D object. Google processes the original 2D video and creates a "depth map," looking for a combination of video characteristics such as color, spatial layout, and motion that it has "learned" from other, dedicated 3D videos uploaded to the site. The creation of the depth map adds the second image that's needed for the 3D video." Through this process people that use YouTube would be able to view video content in 3D.
I honestly never imagined something like that happening. The Digital Revolution has managed to take the concept of 3D which to me was very complicated and simplified it to the point where even someone like me can create a 3D video. I love that.
It is reported that “Currently, over 50% of us don’t get full benefit from the
pharmaceuticals we use, because we take the wrong dose or inconsistently follow
our prescriptions.” That is at least the conflict that the innovators at Proteus
Digital Health are trying to address in their mission statement.
A new technology called the “Proteus Digital Health Feedback System,” a blend of MEMS
and wireless data transfer, will allow doctors to know if their patients are
taking their medications.
The
Proteus Digital Health Feedback System is just an example of a larger
technological concept. The Proteus contains MEMS (MicroElectroMechanical),
also known
as nanomachines, which serves as a micro sensor. According to MEMS.ORG, a
community of experts on MEMS and Nanotechnology, describe the micro sensors as a
device that, “typically converts a
measured mechanical signal into an electrical signal.” In this case the Proteus
will be able to
relay a signal of binary code directly to a phone over Bluetooth. The
technicalities are pretty awesome in terms of how they will work and how it got
the green light from the FDA.
According
to Mark J. Zdeblick, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer,
“The
biggest question was, what types of materials would the FDA allow us to use? So
we decided to use [ones from] a vitamin.”
The
technicalities are as followed. “Small amounts of copper and magnesium conduct
enough electricity (1.5 volts) to power a one-millimeter chip. When a pill
containing the chip hits the stomach, the metals interact with stomach fluid to
generate a current. The current transmits to a 2.5-inch patch on the patient’s
torso, which relays the signal as binary code to his phone over Bluetooth.”
This system will help families
better monitor loved ones. According to George M. Savage, M.D., Co-Founder and Chief Medical
Officer stated that,
“the best applications will be
conditions where missing a few doses can have dangerous consequences, such as
schizophrenia and congestive heart failure.”
Already
several companies have already invested in the Feedback System, including
Novartis, maker of Ritalin and breast-cancer drug Femara. The FDA will need to
approve drugs with the chip on a case-by-case basis, so the first ones probably
won’t be available for another two years.
This
technology is an example of how the Digital Revolution has impacted the medical
field. Digital Technology has found its uses for working in conjunction to biology within
the human body. The Proteus seems like a great application in being a helpful
memory tool, but still it makes one think, where will this lead us when other
applications arise with nanotechnology?
For more on nanotechnology, I have embedded a video which sums it all up in a nutshell.
The beauty of our new digital age is the availability of science and knowledge at our fingertips. That's right, with a few clicks of our mouse we can have the answer to most of our science related questions in an instant. But what if a new understanding of our world can come from our digital knowledge?
Hogan, who is the director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center in Illinios, believes that he has figured out a way "to detect the bitlike structure of space." Hogan's machine, called the Holometer (holographic interferometer) which is still under construction, will attempt to measure the grainy bit-like nature of space. This machine is meant to be “the most sensitive measurement ever made of spacetime itself.”
According to Joanna Carver and David Nelson of Medill Reports Chicago, "the Holometer will measure gravitational waves at a scale smaller than any technology of its kind has yet been capable of doing. When looking at waves at such a small scale, quantum mechanics and general relativity no longer apply, making it possible to see whether the universe is flat and everyone’s eyes are playing tricks on them."
What these physicists are in fact doing, is trying to understand the universe using the digital bit-like structure. This is one of the first experiments we have seen that looks into the principle that the universe may emerge from information. This hologram is the first machine to be developed that will test the concept that what we are seeing is an intricate illusion. In essence, this holometer attempts to prove that the world we live in is a hologram.
According to Clay Dillow of PopSci, "they are trying to either prove or disprove the somewhat mind-bending notion that the third dimension doesn’t exist at all, and that the 3-D universe we think we live in is nothing more than a hologram."
If this experiment is sucessful it will shift the foundations of what we currently think we know about space and time, forcing scientists to look into a whole new kind of physics that could replace and change our current understanding of the world.
This digital age is changing what we currently know and see. Not only is it allowing science to be at our fingertips, it also giving us a key to understand it better. It's giving physicists a whole new way to theorize about our world, and giving them a way to test it too. In fact, it's allowing them to look into the possibility of a matrix. How cool is that?
Global Media News is a weekly webcast covering media & technology news from around the world. This webcast is a production of Media Studies students from the SUNY College @ Old Westbury.
This week on the 'Digital Revolution' edition of Global Media News:
"Creativity: The Digital Revolution in the Arts"
Museum Apps!
New Media Art
Digital Photography
Music & Piracy
See you in two weeks for more news from the Digital Revolution!
Next on Global Media News:
Fact: Digital Revolution in News & Information
Listen to our webcast streaming live on Thursdays @ 11am EST.
Can't listen live? Our next webcast will be posted by 2:00pm, Thursday, November 29, 2012.