Two items: Japanese robot suit to let paralyzed move again. The robotic suit, which slips over a person’s upper body and arms, weighs only 1.8 kilograms (four pounds).When a person who suffered a stroke moves his or her active arm while wearing the suit, the paralyzed other arm will make the same motion by stretching and bending compressors that act as muscles. “By helping the paralyzed arm stretch and bend like the good arm, patients can remember the feelings of moving the arm themselves,” he said. |Link via Engadget| Uncrewed aircraft swarm together indoors A video shows one of the vehicles landing on a moving truck (wmv format), while using a camera to lock onto the target and landing pad. In another experiment, each UAV was programmed to automatically land on a stationary recharging station when running low on battery power. Another video shows two aircraft working together to track a moving ground vehicle. The UAVs automatically take turns tracking the target at low altitude. |Link via BoingBoing|

GideonTech: Top Ten Worst Portrayals of Technology in a film I’m not very happy with this list. Notably absent: The Net and Enemy of the State. Also, to this day I am envious of Boris’ ability to type with one hand.

Overheard on NPR: Potential recruits spend four times as long on average (roughly 16 minutes) talking to Sgt. Star than they do talking to a human recruiter in a chat room.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by GoogleBy Bruce Sterling And Shakespeare. I used to hate Shakespeare, because the teachers would park us in front of the webcam terminals, turn on the Shakespeare lessons and leave the building. But then, somehow, they showed us Macbeth, a play which actually MEANS something to us. Grown-ups don’t understand that (or they wouldn’t be teaching it) but Macbeth is the true authentic story of my generation. This is Macbeth’s world, and us teenagers just live in it. Dig this: those “Three Weird Sisters”, who mysteriously know everything? They can foretell anything, instantly, like Google? Plus, the witches make it all sound really great – only, in real life, it totally sucks? Well, those “Three Weird Sisters” are the “Internet of Things”, they’re “Ubiquitous Computation”, they’re “Ambient Findability”. The truth is written all over the page (or the screen – my school can’t afford to give us any “pages”). Just read that awesome part where they’re boiling pseudocode in their witch-cauldron! They talk like web designers!

Found in the alley behind Expresso Royale:

Item: The effects of oxytocin on the brain. In a risky investment game, experimental subjects given nasally administered oxytocin displayed “the highest level of trust” twice as often as the control group. Subjects who were told that they were interacting with a computer showed no such reaction, leading to the conclusion that oxytocin was not merely affecting risk-aversion (Kosfeld 2005). Apparently this is not only a standard experimental technique, but the interpretation of the results is also widely accepted.

(21:59:29) HappyEpsilon: i can’t believe you post3ed a blog patting yourself on the back (22:00:11) drcrawl: it wasn’t just patting myself on the back (22:01:29) drcrawl: I was patting myself on the back for posting the videos, sure (22:01:34) drcrawl: but I mean, that took effort (22:01:38) drcrawl: and I was proud of it (22:01:43) drcrawl: I think legitimately (22:01:44) HappyEpsilon: so does taking a dump (22:01:53) drcrawl: I’m proud of my dumps sometimes too (22:01:56) HappyEpsilon: haha (22:02:05) drcrawl: I’m not proud of all of them (22:02:12) drcrawl: but every once in a while it is satisfying (22:02:15) HappyEpsilon: dude, this post is total self congratulatory bs (22:02:21) drcrawl: and in fact I’ve posted blogs about satisfying dumps too

so good to me. Found a new link for the blogroll: Loving the Machine. Lots of mobile plastic goodies, mostly from Japanese robots (of course). The link was provided by Engadget for this article: Robot hospital opens in Osaka The Akazawa Roboclinic admitted its first in-patient recently, a humanoid shipped by courier from Bunkyo Ward in Tokyo. The hospital is a side business launched by machinery maker Systec Akazawa. It offers diagnosis and treatment for down-and-out droids. Well. Then.

I’ve had a few brief moments in the bright internet sun in my almost two year old blog. I got quoted in Slate once, and I’ve lured a few high-profile philosophers to battle it out on my pages. I’m somewhat proud of these moments, and they have generated a small amount of traffic for me, but I know that 4/5 of the regulars here are my friends, and that I only have 4 regulars. Still, somehow I manage to get over 100 hits a day not including my course pages (although a majority of them are vanity hits by Brandon). That’s not particularly impressive, but its something I appreciate very much. I am especially delighted everytime I get an email from someone I don’t know suggesting a link or article that they’d like me to respond to. It shows that someone is paying attention. In any case, my latest effort to pirate contribute to the Internet has wrought some further fame, and though it isn’t directed at me, I do feel rather proud of my work. In particular, the slugs mating video has (deservedly) garnered over 37,000 hits after only 4 days. Even if 7000 of those people are repeat watchers, that’s still over 30,000 people learning from the work I’ve done. The video has also generated some amusing discussion both in the YouTube comments and around the net. Perhaps I just haven’t become as cynical as I should be to the possibilities of the internet, but 30,000 people. It boggles the mind. That’s three times the size of the town I grew up in. Its like speaking to each one of the students here on campus. Its more people than I’ll probably ever reach professionally, or this blog for that matter. Now, I realize that I didn’t actually make […]

The robot is pregnant. It isn’t mine

David Attenborough is awesome. He is largely responsible for turning the BBC into the network it is today (including the move to color TV and building BBC2). But most people know him from his nature specials. If you’ve ever watched a nature special, you probably know who he is. He does nature specials better than anyone else, and has been all over the world to film its beauty for us. You can read more about him on his BBC page and his Wikipedia page. But you come to know Attenborough best by looking at his impressive body of work. To commemorate his awesomeness, I’ve put together the complete list of everyone’s 20 favorite Attenborough moments, along with a few other clips I like. Thats a lot of videos, so instead of embedding them into the page I’m just linking them. Enjoy! Edit: After 4 days of work and 2.11 gigs later, the list is now complete!!! Yay 1. Attenborough watching a lyrebird mimicking various noises (The Life of Birds) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CNi-EFWLpk 2. Mountain gorillas (Life on Earth) Video: Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–xJjzA3hQY Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT2q7VOErFU 3. Blue whale encounter (The Life of Mammals) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcLHFu2lZ6c 4. His description of the demise of Easter Island’s native society (State of the Planet) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84PTH8ceWvI 5. Chimpanzees using tools to crack nuts (The Life of Mammals) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii6I4nNPClw 6. A Grizzly bear fishing (The Life of Mammals) Video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=LXOSAZz6Px4 7. Imitating a woodpecker to lure in a real one (The Life of Birds) Video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=hgYQUBZUYSI 8. The presenter being attacked by a displaying male Capercaillie (The Life of Birds) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgP7K1PlNTQ 9. Chimps wading through water on two feet (The Life of Mammals) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrdU-3Uaq10 10. Observing a male bowerbird’s display (The Life of Birds) Video: Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yOL49n-j70 Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygz-SiqF-YA Part 3: […]

Novelty dance spawned by a 1962 hit. 11 letters. Answer This question is from a NYT crossword puzzle that was used in yet another Man vs Machine competition, this time pitting 25 humans against a single program, WebCrow. The machine had at its disposal a big database of past completed crowsswords, a dictionary, and the entirety of Internet. WebCrow beat the pants off the humans. A crossword-solving computer program yesterday triumphed in a competition against humans. Two versions of the program, called WebCrow, finished first and second in a competition that gave bilingual entrants 90 minutes to work on five different crosswords in Italian and English. The competition took place in Riva del Garda, Italy, as part of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. WebCrow took on 25 human competitors, mostly conference attendees, while more than 50 crossword enthusiasts and AI researchers competed online |Link via Engadget| Although this was more of a demonstration than an actual competition, the result is no small potatos. Although the program proceeds by trial and error, its not exactly brute force because you can’t guarantee a solution. Furthermore, solutions sometimes rest on puns or other word play that can confound any straightforward algorithmic approach and requires some understanding of the language involved. Of course, that understanding is freely available on Internet. But the AI researchers involved don’t want to give credit where due. Internet is just ‘shallow knowledge’, apparently. Tony Veale works on software that can deal with human language at University College Dublin, Ireland, and watched WebCrow in action. He told New Scientist he was impressed. “It’s part of a trend to use the web as a shallow source of human knowledge for artificial intelligence,” he says. The web is “shallow” because most content cannot be understood by a computer, Veale explains, but […]