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DIGITAL FAN DEMOCRACY You’ll soon be able to replay—and vote on—controversial sports plays Rewind to the eighth inning of Game 6 of the super-charged 2004 American League Championship Series between the rival New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. The Yankees lead the series 3-2, but the visiting Red Sox lead the game 4-2. Alex Rodriguez dribbles one to the pitcher, who drops the ball trying to tag him out. Derek Jeter scores from first base. Rodriguez is safe on second with the tying run. But the umpires huddle, and when they emerge, they reverse the call. Rodriguez is out and Jeter is sent back to first. Yankee fans go nuts, throwing beer bottles on the field. Riot police arrive. But the play also launches 25,000 mobile phone calls from Yankee Stadium— people calling TV-watching friends to find out what the replays show. And fans at home clearly saw Rodriguez swat the ball out of the Red Sox pitcher’s mitt as he tried to tag him out. Back in Berkeley, Patrick Riley ’01, MIMS ’05 noticed the cell phone calls, got an idea—and invented mReplay. Like TiVo for your cell phone, mReplay (short for mobile replay) captures televised feed, allowing fans to replay the last 15 or 30 seconds of a game or select from a list of captured replays. Riley’s device also allows fans to vote on the call. He dubs it “fan democracy.” Riley says mReplay is ready to go if he can get over some business snags. Cal Athletics naturally wanted to be the first outfit to offer mReplay, but instead Riley, now on a Fulbright Fellowship in Munich, plans to premiere mReplay at the 2006 World Cup. Whaddya think, Cal fans? Good or bad call? —April Kilcrease TIRED? GET OVER IT A clinical psychologist says insomnia is in your mind The problem with insomniacs—one-third of the adult population—is that they fret about their sleeplessness, says clinical psychologist Allison Harvey. And, she concludes, worry can decrease the quality of their waking lives and prevent people from sleeping. Considering insomnia a cognitive problem—and not caused by caffeine, exercising late in the day, or failing to use the bed only for sleeping—is a fairly new way of tackling the problem, Harvey says. In one study, the upbeat Australian researcher (who arrived at Berkeley in 2004 by way of Oxford) gave plastic wristwatch-like motion sensors (“very groovy,” she says) to subjects and told them their sleep would be monitored for three days. Regardless of what the monitoring actually revealed, some were told they had slept well and some that they had not. Subjects told they had been sleep deprived reported feeling worse as the day wore on than did those told that they slept well. Harvey’s solution?
—Lygia Navarro TAKE LAUGHTER SERIOUSLY A Berkeley researcher finds more than mirth hidden behind that expression Psychology doctoral student Christopher Oveis believes your laugh says more about you than you think. “It’s similar to aggression in animals, but human interactions are subtle—so laughter provides the context for displays of emotions and hierarchy,” he says. Oveis is creating what we might call a “laugh dictionary.” So far, he’s identified nine laugh types stemming from: dominance, embarrassment, wanting to validate someone else, love, amusement, feeling offended, desire to conform, nervousness, and conflict avoidance. His research could be useful in clinical psychology as well as in business and education, where being able to tell genuine from false expressions is essential. Imagine also using a “laugh dictionary” when buying a new car, a home, negotiating an international treaty—or playing poker. Scientific experiments for this oh-so-serious study involved a contingent of fraternity brothers. They were given a task: to make up nicknames for one another after having been given two letters (L.I., for example, became “Little Idiot”). In front of a camera, the brothers explained how they came up with the nickname, often recounting the previous weekend’s events. “[They] were really comfortable with telling a lot of embarrassing details about the others. So we ended up with a lot of great, naturally occurring laughter.” In a second group, couples were asked to recall the moment they met. Then they were asked to discuss their relationship’s biggest challenge. While talk during the lovey-dovey first part was punctuated by warm and joyous laughter, the latter part of the session brought out nervous and defensive laughter (“That was really a cruel thing to do,” Oveis says, chuckling). Oveis—whose peroxide-tipped spikes in his hair and the passion he shows for his work give him the appearance of a Gen-X mad scientist—then spent hundreds of hours in front of a TV screen trying to pick up laughter acoustics, behavior, and social clues. “On the street, I pay attention to people’s faces. I can’t get away from it,” he says. And his scrutiny isn’t limited to others, he warns: “It’s the worst when you’re with other researchers who do this kind of work because you psyche yourself out—‘Does that laugh sound fake?’” —Lygia Navarro WORLD’S TINIEST MOTOR It pulses. It fans. It doesn’t need oil In the 1960s sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage, miniaturized surgeons boarded a submarine and were submerged into a dying man’s blood stream to fight his disease. Following a similar narrative, physics post doc Chris Regan Ph.D. ’01 has taken a step toward eliminating fiction from science with his invention of the world’s smallest electric motor. The device measures 200 nanometers long (about 400 times smaller than the width of a human hair). Regan’s discovery opens many possibilities—like sending the tiny machine on an unmanned voyage into the body to deliver disease-fighting drugs. The motor has three components: a carbon nanotube, a large droplet of liquid metal, and a small droplet of liquid metal. The droplets sit adjacent to each other on top of the tube, and as an electric current is added, they increase and decrease in size in a pulsing motion For this motor to become useful, a tiny mechanical device resembling a fin or wing must be attached, which would swing back and forth in a fanning motion. The more electric current, the faster the pulsing, the more rapid the fanning motion. Regan is now collaborating with engineers at the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS) to develop applications such as drug delivery for the motor. “Our first mission was to see and understand how this motor works,” Regan says. “Now we are trying to see what we can do with it.” —Matthew Vree A WIRELESS FIREFIGHTER A tiny device will save lives and homes When David Doolin Ph.D. ’02 was 10, he and several friends lit firecrackers in the dry summer bush behind his home. “We started the mountain on fire,” says Doolin. Panicked, they chased the fire from bush to bush, stomping it out. But the memory of that day always stuck with him. Then in 1991, he witnessed the Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire, which spread and shifted direction with deadly speed, killing 25 and burning 3,469 homes. “Generations had grown up in those houses and it was all gone. The whole family history, everything,” he says. “It’s like losing your arm.” Today, Doolin and an interdisciplinary team of researchers lead by Nicholas Sitar, professor of civil and environmental engineering, may soon change the way wildfires are fought, with something very similar to your cell phone, and almost as cheap. Their invention, dubbed “FireBug,” is a wireless network of GPS-enabled devices that monitor temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure. Attached to trees or mounted on stakes planted ahead of the fire, individual FireBugs radio these measurements to laptops in fire department trucks. With it, fire commanders can pinpoint the flame front and better predict where it is headed. Clipped to firefighters, the system also can monitor vital health stats, including the level of smoke inhalation. Because the East Bay is especially prone to wildland fires—15 major ones since 1923—its hills seemed an obvious place to test FireBug using controlled burns. Beforehand, though, East Bay Regional Park District Fire Department asked the research team to take its 40-hour wildfire-fighting course. During the training, Doolin lit flames with drip torches and, as the fires grew, he again experienced the heat, disorienting smoke, and indescribable intensity of a wildfire. Visibility would get so bad that trainees couldn’t see people only a few feet away. The team realized that tracking personnel was just as important—if not more important—than monitoring the fire itself. In the past two fire seasons, wildfires have claimed 38 firefighters’ lives nationally. FireBug will enable commanders, away from the heat and the hacking, to spot danger and pull firefighters out before it’s too late. Doolin—who never admitted his firecracker follies to his instructors—says FireBug already functions well enough to be deployed; he and the researchers hope it will be available to real firefighters soon. —April Kilcrease |
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