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Tag: Oxford

  • Emma Watson Criticizes Fashion Industry

    Actress Emma Watson, best known for her role as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter franchise, recently opened up about being hounded by British paparazzi during her time at Brown University, and also commented on her disdain the impossible standards of beauty projected by Hollywood and the fashion industry.

    Watson, 23, calls the pressure to look perfect surrounding showbiz “dangerously unhealthy,” and complained of her failed attempts to blend into the student body while attending Brown. Though, the actress commented that with age, she’s been better able to roll with trappings of her fame. “As a younger woman, that pressure got me down, but I’ve made my peace with it. With airbrushing and digital manipulation, fashion can project an unobtainable image that’s dangerously unhealthy. I’m excited about the ageing process. I’m more interested in women who aren’t perfect. They’re more compelling.”

    At the New York premiere of her new film Noah, Watson tweeted that she did “NOT wake up like this!”

    Watson began her studies at Brown in 2009, and has sporadically taken time off to complete film work. “After Harry Potter, all that mattered was university,” she said, adding that “It wasn’t always easy to break down barriers, as having men from the British press following me with cameras didn’t help my mission to integrate.” Watson went on to say that the American press allowed her a high degree of privacy, but she was instantly recognized by her fellow students.

    In March 2011, after 18 months at Brown, Watson left for a couple semesters, and became a visiting student at Worcester College, Oxford for the 2011-12 academic year. In March, 2014, Watson told David Letterman during an interview that she would be graduating from Brown in May..

    While describing her initial time at Brown, Watson stated, “On the first day, I walked into the canteen and everyone went completely silent and turned around to look at me. I had to say to myself ‘it’s OK, you can do this.’ You just have to take a deep breath and gather your courage.”

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Tetris May Relieve Post-Traumatic Stress

    Doctors at Oxford University have discovered that playing Tetris after a traumatic event can significantly reduce the occurrence of flashbacks in Post-Traumatic Stress sufferers.

    The research team at Oxford claims playing the video game immediately after a traumatic occurrence reduces the number of PTSD flashbacks that occur later on.

    The study was presented at the British Psychology Society Annual Conference and was lead by Oxford psychiatry expert Dr. Emily Holms. According to Holmes, playing Tetris after a traumatic experience acts as a “cogniative vaccine” innoculating against flashbacks. The process of playing Tetris puts demands on the brain that interfere with the ability to form and retain memories associated with PTSD.

    The team exposed 60 participants to a film depicting “traumatic scenes and death”. Thirty minutes later they were divided into three groups. One group played Tetris, another group took a trivia quiz and a third group sat quitely doing nothing. They were then asked to log their flashback occurance over the course of a week.

    The group that played Tetris reported far fewer instances of traumatic remembrences than any of the other groups. On average, they experienced two flashbacks. The group that sat quitely experienced an average of 4.5 and the group that took the quiz suffered from 8 flashbacks.

    The “traumatic film” was comprised of footage of car crashes and surgery. To me, these hardly replicate the horror and fear of war. And in a real life situation, a soldier is not going to have the wherewithal to sit down and play Tetris in a life or death situation. Even if he is taken to safety immediately after the incident, it is not likely he will even have the desire or ability to play a video game.

    This also does not address people suffering from post traumatic stress for years after the fact. Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will not benifit from a treatment that must be performed immediately after a traumatic event.

    But if in fact it does work, it is worth a try. Preventing memories from being stored is probably better than the massive amounts of prescription medication some PTSD sufferers are given for treatment.

    [Source: wired]

  • Google Glasses Already Made By Oxford Developer

    Google (and maybe even Valve) are working really hard to bring augmented reality glasses to market. There’s a lot to be done in terms of testing the technology, software R&D, getting it approved, etc. The point is that there is a lot of hoops that these larger companies have to go through to bring new hardware like the Google Glasses to market. If you’re a single designer with some spare time on your hands, you could totally beat Google to the punch with your own pair of AR glasses.

    That’s just what happened as Will Powell, an AR developer for Oxford, created his own pair of Google Glasses. Well, they aren’t exactly Google Glasses as Google probably imagines them. He used already available hardware and software to create a close approximate that works just as well.

    According to Powell’s blog post on the matter, he used a combination of Vizux Glasses, Microsoft HD Webcams, mic headset and the Dragon naturally speaking software. Not exactly the most elegant hardware solution, but it gets the job done. The use of Vizux glasses are definitely the real hero though as it allows for the display of the images you see in the video.

    While we already know that Google’s Project Glass will look vastly different from Powell’s creation, it gives us a good idea of what Project Glass we be like once it ships later this year.

    [h/t: Slash Gear]