UniversityOfWarwick
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Artist uses GPS to map things the old-fashioned way: walking around
Back in the day, our homeboys Magellan, Lewis, Clark, Rand, and McNally didn't have anything better to do than walk around, look at stuff, and make some maps. Then along came people like Google, hell-bent on semi-automating via satellite what used to be a really down-to-earth task. In 2010, mapmaker and artist Jeremy Wood has found a way to get his kicks via satellite and pedestrianism. His latest project Traverse Me is a simple enough idea: walk around in the defined area with a GPS unit and end up with a 1:1 scale map of where he walked. Wood traversed the University of Warwick (avoiding paths and roads when possible) over 17 days and ended up with a plot of a very human-looking 238 miles. While they certainly aren't very useful for getting from point A to point B, Wood's maps unveil a weird new kind of topography. They don't particularly want to make us visit the University of Warwick, but we certainly wouldn't mind hanging prints of some of these bad boys on our living room walls.
Computer scientist mods Xbox 360 to detect heart attacks, girls still mysteriously elusive
We've seen so many mods around here that sometimes it's truly hard to get excited over the minor stuff. Well, this doesn't fall into that category in any way. A computer scientist at the University in Warwick has developed a method to use Microsoft's Xbox 360 to detect heart defects and help prevent heart attacks. Based on a demo created by Simon Scarle a few years back when he worked at Rare studio, it's based on a modded chip that -- instead of producing graphics for the game -- now produces data tracking how the electrical signals in the heart moves about damaged cells, creating a model of it. The model can then be used to help doctors to identify defects and disturbances in the heart's beating. This significantly decreases the costs and complications of creating a model of the heart, which is currently done by supercomputers and is very expensive. Scarle's project and findings were just published in the August issue of the Journal of Computational Biology and Chemistry. Looks like we'll all have a response the next time someone tells us that gaming is good for nothing, right?
