Lie detection is all the rage on TV these days, with newcomer “The Mentalist” drawing viewers like flies to honey and “The Closer” and “Psych” burning up the Nielsens. And now a new show has joined the mix, called “Lie to Me,” about a man with a near-preternatural ability to tell when someone is lying.
The show stars Tim Roth (forever Mr. Orange) as Dr. Cal Lightman, a behavioral science expert who makes bank as a consultant for clients who want him to catch liars. His near-perfect skills supposedly come from interpretation of body language and facial expressions that let him in on whether this week’s murder suspect or shifty spouse is spinning a big one.
Both the main character and his skills are reportedly based on the persona and work of Dr. Paul Ekman, the facial expression expert who advises the Department of Defense on lie detection. Ekman’s method is based on what he calls “microexpressions,” small facial movements that he says present evidence of what you’re really feeling. We don’t necessarily know we’re doing them, so we can’t necessarily control them—say “I am saddened by my wife’s death” but flash a happy or disgusted microexpression, and a detective should take note.
The Cell is best known as the processor that lies at the heart of Sony’s Playstation 3 games console. But that was never intended to be the only home for the Cell processor, jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The Cell’s unique architecture make it incredibly good at chewing through multiple streams of multimedia data. Now, Toshiba appears to be finally getting a return on its investment with the unveiling of a prototype Cell-based set-top box for its line of TVs.
The set-top box is designed to attack a knotty problem for TV makers — watching non-HD media (such as a DVD) on a HD television set can often be a poor experience, as enlarging the low resolution material to fill the screen also enlarges flaws and video compression artifacts unnoticeable on earlier generations of TVs. The solution is known as upconverting, and it involves processing the incoming video feed in real time to smooth out flaws and interpolate new pixels to fill in gaps between original pixels. (As the resolution of TVs continues to climb, in a few years we’ll even need to start upconverting 1080p HD television signals!)
Toshiba is very proud of its upconverting technology, and hopes to improve it even further by taking advantage of the Cell’s video-crunching capabilities. The Cell can make three processing passes on a frame of video in the time it takes Toshiba’s current system to make one. The new set top box will also act as a DVR, allowing up to 6 HD channels to be recorded simultaneously, and be able to pull down video from the Internet. Toshiba hope to release the system sometime this year.
As Stephen mentioned yesterday, 3D HD TV is a big theme here at CES this year: Multiple manufacturers, including Sony, LG, Samsung, and Panasonic are all showing products. Panasonic is using LCD shutter glasses to make it happen–the glasses receive IR signals from the TV and alternately blacken each of the lenses to give each eye a slightly different perspective, and that binocular difference creates the 3D effect.
But perhaps most importantly, the glasses remind me of the classic 80s sci-fi B movie They Live, with super awesome wrestler-turned-actor Rowdy Roddy Piper (and one notoriously, ridiculously long fight scene) . Before The Rock, there was Roddy, God love ‘im.
DiscoBlog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's edited by Eliza Strickland, and written by Brett Israel and Andrew Moseman.
Lie detection is all the rage on TV these days, with newcomer “The Mentalist” drawing viewers like flies to honey and “The Closer” and “Psych” burning up the Nielsens. And now a new show has joined the mix, called “Lie to Me,” about a man with a near-preternatural ability to tell when someone is lying.
