Art Prof Lets World Peer Through His Surgically Embedded 3rd Eye - TechNewsWorld

For the next year, Wafaa Bilal, an assistant art professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, will record his life through still images taken at one-minute intervals by a camera surgically attached to the back of his head.

The photos will be sent to an art museum in Qatar which commissioned the work.

Bilal is known for controversial art projects, and this latest one has stirred up the faculty and staff at NYU.

His project could be seen as one type of "sousveillance" -- the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant.

Bilal had three titanium plates implanted under the skin in the back of his head at a body modification shop. The plates each have a post attached that sticks out through the skin when it's sewn back over the plates.

A 10-megapixel color digital camera measuring one inch by two inches was then screwed on to the posts.

The camera will regularly snap images, and the photos will be transmitted to his server via a cell phone worn on his body. Ultimately, they'll be sent to the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, which commissioned the project, called "The Third I." The museum, which will open Dec. 30, will display a live stream of the photos.

"No doctor wanted to do this, so piercing was my next best option," Bilal told TechNewsWorld. "It was done safely."

Bilal has already seen some fallout from his efforts. NYU asked him to cover the camera with a lens cap while he was on university property, in order to protect the privacy of staff and students. He has agreed to do so.

That might put a crimp in his ambition to document his life minute by minute for the next year, but Bilal has come up with a solution -- blank images tagged with the time,, date and GPS location will be sent back to his server when the camera lens is capped.

Apparently several acquaintances have taken him off their guest lists for future gatherings because of the camera as well.

Further, as can be imagined, Bilal has trouble when trying to sleep -- he can only sit up, propped up by pillows.

Bilal has racked up a bit of a reputation for himself with his projects.

Earlier this year, he reportedly received over 100,000 tiny tattoos on his back to commemorate those killed in the war in Iraq, where he was born.

The project, titled "... and Counting," consisted of his getting the names of Iraqi cities tattooed on his back along with 5,000 red dots to represent American military personnel killed there and 100,000 dots in UV ink to represent the official death toll for Iraqi citizens. The entire procedure was streamed live on the Web.

In 2007, his dynamic installation "Domestic Tension" had him sit in front of a paintball gun, with cameras streaming this over the Web 24 x 7.

A 2008 project, titled "Virtual Jihadi," consisted of a video game into which he inserted an avatar of himself as a suicide bomber hunting then-president George W. Bush.

Is Bilal really a publicity hound?

"I am nothing if not a storyteller," Bilal said. "All of my work to date has been concerned with the communication of public and private information to an audience so it may be retold and distributed. The stories I tell are political dramas."

Bilal's latest project may be thought of as a type of sousveillance. The term was coined by Steve Mann to describe the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant.

Mann's a professor in the University of Toronto's department of electrical and computer engineering. He worked at MIT, where he was one of the founding members of the Wearable Computers Group in the MIT Media Lab.

Dec. 24 was denoted World Sousveillance day in 2001. Sousveillance by citizens of a state has been credited with exposing problems such as electoral misdeeds or election fraud. For example, voters in Sierra Leone and Ghana used mobile phones to check electoral malpractice and voter intimidation during elections in 2007.

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Verizon Tiered Data Plan Starts Oct. 28, Runs Through Holidays - PC Magazine

Verizon Wireless will offer a 150MB smartphone data plan for $15 per month starting Oct. 28, a source with knowledge of the plans confirmed Monday.

The tiered pricing option is part of a holiday promotion and will continue through December, the source said.

Verizon's $29.99 unlimited monthly data plan will still be available.

News of the new data plans first surfaced Monday morning on Engadget. The blog said users on the $15 data plan will incur $0.01 overage charges for every additional MB consumed. It also said Verizon will ditch its $9.99 25MB option for feature phones but keep the $1.99 "pay as you go" per MB plan.

Last week, Verizon announced that it would start selling the Wi-Fi version of Apple's iPad at its retail locations starting Oct. 28. The tablets will be bundled with the Verizon MiFi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot in pricing packages that range from $629.99 to $829.99.

Users can purchase 1GB of data for $20, 3GB of data for $35, or 5GB for $50, according to a FAQ about the iPad promotion. Users on the 1GB plan will be charged $20 for each extra gigabyte they consume, while those on the 3GB and 5GB will be charged a $10 overage per gigabyte. Engadget said Tuesday that Verizon will also offer 10GB for $80, also with a $10 overage fee.

For MiFi, FiveSpot, and integrated notebook and netbook modem owners, Verizon will offer 5GB for $50 and 10GB for $80, with $10 overages per gigabyte, Engadget said. USB modem prices will stay the same.

In June, AT&T revamped its data plans and introduced two tiered pricing plans: 200MB for $15 per month and 2GB for $25 per month. Tethering is also available for $20 per month. Existing customers with unlimited data plans, however, can keep them for now.

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Better living through palladium - msnbc.com

Alan Boyle writes:This year's Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded for decades-old breakthroughs in the use of palladium to help synthesize useful compounds — a process that took the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 13 pages to explain. The easy way to explain it is to say palladium is a rare metal that acts as a catalyst or "matchmaker," marrying ingredients to produce all sorts of useful things for flat-screen displays, cancer drugs, asthma medicines and more.

"Any undergraduate who's taken chemistry is starting to see this in textbooks as really important chemistry," Joseph Francisco, president of the American Chemical Society, told me today. Francisco is a chemistry professor at Purdue University and hence a colleague of one of the laureates named today, Purdue's Ei-Ichi Negishi.

Negishi, along with the University of Delaware's Richard Heck and Hokkaido University's Akira Suzuki, were honored for their work in the 1960s and '70s to develop a technique called palladium-catalyzed cross coupling in organic synthesis. That's quite a mouthful, but it simply means they found a way to use palladium atoms to build smaller molecules into larger ones, The atoms act as "marriage brokers," in the words of Inside Science News Service's Steve Miller. Here's what Francisco told Miller:

"Think of palladium as the mutual friend who brings two people together for a handshake," Francisco said. "Palladium brings the right carbon atoms from two molecules together, performs the introduction, and then moves on."

The palladium atoms themselves emerge unchanged by the process, ready to introduce more carbon atoms to each other.

"The beautiful thing about this chemistry is it's very fundamental ... it can create new carbon bonds and certain functional groups that normally would be very difficult to create, in a very easy, very facile, very efficient way," Francisco told me.

Francisco said most chemists knew it was just a matter of time before Heck, Suzuki and Negishi won a Nobel for their work. "At the time, I don't think the Nobel laureates really anticipated just how broadly that chemistry would be applied, but it was," he said.

So what kinds of products have been created through palladium-catalyzed cross coupling?

Pharmaceuticals: Painkillers ranging from synthetic morphine to naproxen (which is marketed under brand names such as Aleve or Midol Extended Relief). Asthma medicines such as montelukast (marketed as Singulair). Anti-cancer drugs such as synthetic Taxol as well as the candidate drug discodermolide (a synthetic version of a poison found in a Caribbean marine sponge) and diazonamide A (which appears to be effective in fighting colon cancer). Potential anti-viral drugs such as dragmacidin F (which affects the herpes virus and HIV). Antibiotics such as modified vancomycin (to fight MRSA infections).

Plastics: Heck developed the chemical reaction that now bears his name in order to create styrene, a major component in polystyrene plastic.

Electronics: Reactions involving palladium are used to optimize the blue light in organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, which have found their way into ultra-thin flat-screen displays. The Heck reaction also comes into play for producing resins used in electronic fabrication (such as Dow Chemical's Cyclotene).

... And more: The Heck reaction is a key step in the production of the herbicide Prosulforon. The Suzuki reaction is used to manufacture a fungicide known as Boscalid. And strangely enough, researchers reported just this year that they put palladium together with graphene, the one-atom-thick form of carbon that earned two other researchers the Nobel Prize in physics this week. Palladium-graphene hybrids could be used as catalysts for the Suzuki reaction, to produce new strains of polymer circuitry and liquid crystals.

"What's exciting about this is it's a case where fundamental chemistry has led to innovations in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries that bring benefit to the general public," Francisco said. "What can be more exciting than using fundamental chemistry to improve the lives of people worldwide? That's cool stuff."

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