Communications Media

A unique piece of software that will code any piece of recorded music, or speech, for any device, has been created by a team of European researchers.

The IST project, called ARDOR, developed a unique codec, short for COmpressor-DECompressor. Codecs are the engine under the hood of software media players.

“At the moment there are dozens of standardised sound codecs. Basically each application has its own dedicated codec and these codecs are optimised for specific input sig

We look at a Gothic cathedral in a different way than we gaze at a standard apartment block, and when we scrutinize paintings, our gaze slides along differently than when we look at a datasheet with numerals to be memorized. And how are training materials – manuals, video films and websites – perceived, when as much information should be gained from a glance? How should they be made up to work most effectively? Specialists of the Institute of Cognitive Neurology (Modern University for the Humanitie

The earliest “moving picture” of a magician – which was created for a scientific study on magic in the 1890’s – will be shown for the first time tonight, Wednesday 26 July, at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre in South Kensington, London.

The pictures were created during a study by famed psychologist and creator of the IQ test, Alfred Binet, as he investigated the psychology of magic.

Psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman, who discovered the pictures in a Paris archive, wi

“Reporters are surpassing doctors as a source of health information,” says Maria Simbra, a medical reporter for KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, United States, and a practicing physician, in a special debate in this month’s issue of the open access international medical journal PLoS Medicine.

For the debate, PLoS Medicine invited health journalists worldwide to give their views on the role that the media should play in spreading health messages to the public.

In her commentary,

Eat at Joes. Eat at Joes. Eat at Joes. Eat at Joes. Eat at Joes. Eat at Joes. So, where are you going to eat tonight?! Repetition is a hallmark of advertising, but the advertisements to which consumers are exposed are not simply repeated without a plan. Instead, the idea of “spacing” or how often to repeat an advertisement is considered when trying to elicit a consumer response. Research in the September 2005 Journal of Consumer Research finds that such repetition must come with variation to

Leading European players from the telecommunications, electronics, audiovisual and media industries have joined forces in an initiative to foster the development of new audiovisual and multimedia broadband services. This initiative, chaired by Thomson, is called NEM – Networked and Electronic Media. The NEM initiative was launched on 29 June in Brussels as an EU Technology Platform.

The founding members of this initiative are Alcatel, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Franc