Found on GigaOm, by : “Siri may be the hottest personal assistant since I Dream of Jeannie, but Apple’s artificial intelligence is only the tip of the iceberg as we combine ubiquitous connectivity, sensor networks, big data and new methods of AI and programming…
Kinect 2 accurate enough to lip read.
Sources close to website Eurogamer have revealed the next generation Kinect device will be so accurate it can read your lips, along with improved cameras, motion sensing, and voice recognition.
It will also track the pitch and volume of player voices and facial characteristics to measure different emotional states, and will be able to determine which direction players are facing.
Rumors suggest two versions of the new Xbox may be unveiled at E3 in 2012:
The first is a “pared down machine” to be released as cheaply as possible. It is likened to a set-top box, and will act as a Kinect-themed gaming portal.
The second is a “more fully-featured machine” with optical drive, hard disk and backwards compatibility. This would be aimed at hardcore gamers and released at a higher price-point.
Worthless? Probably. Really cool? Absolutely.
Yep. Someone built a giant megaphone for the iPhone.
I don’t neccessarily agree, but still good to consider!
“Newspapers, encyclopedias, they are just gone, at the touch of a hyperlink,” Mr. Weinberger said. The institutions of “education and politics – they’ll just shatter. How did they get to be so fragile?” With the pained glee of a scientist discovering very bad news, he added, “knowledge for my generation was at the center of the human quest. It is going the way of the recording industry. It is a term that won’t survive the generation.”[…]But more important where the destruction of the institutions that supposedly steward the development of knowledge is concerned, he said, is the Web’s ever-changing structure of links, which undermines hierarchical analysis by allowing everyone to see and contribute different points of view. “In a highly-connected medium we would expect knowledge to change. And it does,” he said, “the knowledge lives in webs and networks as it has in books.”This is an article from a lecture held by David Weinberger on the subject of his forthcoming book “Too Big to Know”. A key issue he was talking about was the ongoing and coming destruction of our institutions of knowledge due to the new structure of knowledge due to Internet and hyperlinking. Since I have been talking about this for some time I am very interested in getting hold of the book when it is released
Sydney man Marcus Schappi, 28, spent just over $120 on a gadget set-up which enabled him to hack Siri and use voice commands to turn on a lamp and open web pages.
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Full Story: The Age
Weird, Rare Clouds and the Physics Behind Them
Sometimes likened to UFOs, lenticular clouds are usually created by gravity waves. Chuang evokes loose shock absorbers to describe what gravity waves are.
“You take your grandma’s Cadillac and drive it over a speed bump, and after that it goes up and down for a while,” he said. “The reason you are going down is because of gravity, and then there are springs in the suspension that push you back up.”
In the case of lenticular clouds, the speed bump is usually some kind of topography, like a mountain, that gets in the way of air flow. As the air comes down the side of the mountain, it tends to overshoot and then springs back up. It oscillates like this for a while, and on the upward part of the waves, clouds form as rising air cools.
“Clouds mark the highest part of the oscillation,” Chuang said.
Lenticular clouds can also be caused by other speed bumps, such as tall thunderclouds, but because they often form on the downwind sides of mountains, they are also known as lee clouds, wave clouds or lee wave clouds.
A mountain range can form a series of long wave clouds, but if the speed bump is more isolated, like a single mountain, the result can be oval-shaped clouds that look like UFOs. Sometimes multiple ovals form that look like a stack of saucers.
Photo Credit: (1) cardiffjackie, (2) Daniel Breed. (3) Betsy Mason, Wired.com. (4)NCAR/UCAR.
“I’m headed to Nashville!” “I know…” information overload?
Thanks to Apple’s newest app “Find My Friends,” I can find my brother literally all the time. He is an Emory law student in Atlanta, I live in Nashville, and astoundingly I can see what part of the law library he is presently studying in with pretty decent accuracy. Admittedly, he has the same access to me all the time; I was more than a little bit impressed when he texted me “Welcome to Moe’s” right as I walked into the Moe’s restaurant next to Vanderbilt’s campus. No but seriously. That’s creepy. He came to suprise visit me in Nashville but unfortunately for him I watched his dot move on the map all the way from Georgia to Tennessee, ruining the surprise, but really escalating the usefulness of this new seemingly creepy stalker app.
I enjoy the constant access I have, but mostly as a joke. The overall usefulness for the everyday iPhone user is slight, and I’m not sure if the level of openness is optimal for anyone except parents checking to see if their child is sneaking out at night. The stalking capabilities are genuinely impressive, but possibly over the top. That being said, you must accept friends in “Find My Friends,” so only my brother can view my dot wandering around Vanderbilt’s campus, which is somewhat relieving.
Many criticize the information overload that is present in our society today. The 24 hour news cycle on TV and the up to the second information provided by the Internet have their critics, but I prefer to draw the line at a more personal level. The fact that I can see my brother walk to the grocery store in Atlanta as I sit in Nashville is just a bit more than I know how to handle. I might have to take a step back in the technological world and resort to the days when I didn’t have GPS access to my brother at all times, so I might actually pick up the phone and give him a call to see what he’s up to.
Technology isn’t all bad!
A heart-warming story that highlights the good that can come out of social networks.
From TheNextWeb:
Luis Matias, who is 78 and suffers from memory loss, went missing for two weeks in the Philippines after he walked out of his home, was located after a photo of his wife searching for…
Review of “Intuition” by Allegra Goodman
Allegra Goodman’s novel Intuition makes for a fascinating mix of a scientific journal, a melodrama, and a mystery. Set in a research lab in the northeast headed up by Doctors Sandy Glass and Marion Mendelssohn, this novel shows the reader the intricacies of the scientific process and its prominent struggles.
A dismayed post-doc Cliff is down on his luck, but as soon as he stumbles upon evident success in his cancer research, the scope of his discovery is blown out of control by those close to the lab before there is conclusive evidence to back it up. The scientists’ data is overshadowed by their intuition, causing premature announcements and scientific papers.
The plot thickens as romantic relationships within the lab cause jealousy and confusion, and motives become unclear. Even as the sexual tension muddles the discovery, the fact remains that another lab somewhere should be able to replicate Cliff’s data but this replication is elusive. Backs are turned, ties are broken, and allegiances are formed, all the while leaving the question of the legitimacy of Cliff’s data up in the air.
Overall, the novel is enjoyable, the characters interesting, the plot compelling. I greatly enjoyed the technical aspects of the setting and the incite into the life of a researcher. The frustrations inherent to the research field are explicitly and accurately defined, and this novel puts a real-life face on relevant research that is typically behind closed doors.
I didn’t enjoy the characters as much as I might have because I just never fell in love with any of them. I can relate to an Achilles’ heel as well as the next reader, but the negative traits of the characters in this novel were emphasized far beyond the positives, leaving a bad taste in my mouth, no matter who came out on top.
All in all, I recommend this novel. It’s an easy, pleasant, and informative read that will leave you respecting the scientific process and seeing the consequences of inconsistent procedure or false intuition.
Kristin Adams
