Robots that recognize when people are stupid

Lost the remote? Use your face | NetworkWorld.com Community

By using a combination of facial expression recognition software and automated tutoring technology Jacob Whitehill, a computer science Ph.D. student from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering, is leading the project that ultimately is part of a larger venture to use automated facial expression recognition to make robots more effective teachers.

The researchers recently conducted a pilot test with 8 people that demonstrated information within the facial expressions people make while watching recorded video lectures can be used to predict a person’s preferred viewing speed of the video and how difficult a person perceives the lecture at each moment in time.

“If I am a student dealing with a robot teacher and I am completely puzzled and yet the robot keeps presenting new material, that’s not going to be very useful to me. If, instead, the robot stops and says, ‘Oh, maybe you’re confused,’ and I say, ‘Yes, thank you for stopping,’ that’s really good,” said Whitehill in a release.

Is there anything people can’t do with a little bit of image processing?

So one obvious missing detail

One big drug test for L.A.: sewage analysis - Los Angeles Times

Untreated sewage at all eight treatment plants tested in Los Angeles County contained cocaine metabolite, according to data obtained from the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. Palmdale and Lancaster had the highest concentrations, averaging 3.5 parts per billion. The lowest, averaging 1.4 ppb, were from Long Beach and Valencia.

In all the Los Angeles County locations, the cocaine metabolite was more concentrated than in Omaha and in Italian, Swiss and British cities, which all had less than 1 ppb, according to a comparison of several studies.

What’s the average water use, and how much of it goes down the sewers?

I can’t wait until they refine this to a house-by house basis, with little coke-sniffing robots running up everyone’s sewer pipes…

Worst science reporting ever?

Bizarre Properties of Glass Revealed | LiveScience

The finding could lead to aircraft that look like Wonder Woman’s plane. Such planes could have wings of glass or something called metallic glass, rather than being totally invisible.

Then the bit about how glass flows (it doesn’t) and about how the crystalline nature of metals brought down the De Havilland Comet (it didn’t, or at least planes built from the same materials don’t fall out of the sky nearly as often when not stupidly designed) and on to some really garbled stuff about three-dimensional Penrose tilings. The underlying discovery might actually be true for some class of materials somewhere, but you sure couldn’t tell from this article.

Dinowowza

Dinosaur Fossils Discovered in Utah - NYTimes.com

An excavation revealed at least four sauropods, which are long-necked, long-tailed plant-eating dinosaurs, and two carnivorous ones, according to the bureau. It may have also uncovered an herbivorous stegosaurus.

Animal burrows and petrified tree trunks 6 feet in diameter were found nearby. The site doesn’t contain any new species but offers scientists the chance to learn more about the ecology of that time, said Scott Foss, a BLM paleontologist.

This sounds incredibly cool, and makes me wish (as I have about once every five years since I was a kid) that I could be a palaeontologist.

I also really wonder what brought all those creatures together, or if the site was just a particularly fortunate burial ground for a few hundred or few thousand years. Definitely something to follow…

I want a fleet of these chairs

Robotic Chair: RFID Robotic Chair Follows You Around For Constant Seating

Dutch designer Jelte van Geest’s RFID-enabled robotic chair is for Openbare Bibliotheek Endhoven, and it’s fantastic. What you do is swipe your RFID-enabled library card in front of the chair’s sensor, which then follows you (or your card) around the library so you always have somewhere to sit.

Also imagine what kinds of information a space could get from (properly anonymized) traces.

Hey! Here’s an idea: instead of tracking customers by their cellphones, perhaps malls could issue them little personalized shopping-cart robots that would end up producing the same data without the serious privacy invasion.

Then again, with our luck this will be the basis of killbots that quietly track targets to some deserted venue by homing on on an rfid-enabled passport or driver’s license.

The entire human brain is designed around sex

BBC NEWS | Health | Scans see ‘gay brain differences’

A group of 90 healthy gay and heterosexual adults, men and women, were scanned by the Karolinska Institute scientists to measure the volume of both sides, or hemispheres, of their brain.

When these results were collected, it was found that lesbian women and heterosexual men shared a particular “asymmetry” in their hemisphere size, while heterosexual women and gay men had no difference between the size of the different halves of their brain.

In other words, structurally, at least, gay men were more like heterosexual women, and gay women more like heterosexual men.

First, of course, I would be loth to base anything on a study containing an average 22 and a half members of each group under study. But it really does seem strange to think that the entire design of both hemispheres — visual cortex, language centers, so on and so forth — would be geared toward deciding whom to have sex with. And that all the different modes of sexual interaction — butch vs femme, macho vs. nelly, attraction to tomboys vs glamour queens, studs vs milquetoasts and so on ad infinitum — would be all segment absolutely neatly along the division between penis and vagina.

I guess being bisexual must mean that you constantly feel your brain hemispheres ping-ponging back and forth in size.

Cool if true

CamSpace Creates a Wii For Everyone (Minus the Nintendo Console)

CamTrax’s core technology is a pure software solution that allows nearly any ordinary PC webcam (95% are supported) to track up to four objects—even as small as 5mm—in real-time and with very high accuracy and reliability. (It works only on Windows). Locking and tracking (X, Y, and Z axes and angle) are all automatic.

From the pic, it looks like you can’t do it with just any objects, but hey. Image processing is getting to be the new place.

It’s 2005 in Australia

Aussies deploy bovine facial recognition | The Register

University of Queensland researcher and cowcam co-inventor, Neal Finch, explained: “We use the unique side profile that every animal has and a software programme similar to facial recognition technology that allows us to identify animals to a species level. The camera can tell the difference between sheep and cattle and feral pests such as goats, horses, pigs, kangaroos, camels and emus.

“You could have a cattle station that has feral populations of horses, donkeys or camels. The watering points are there for the cattle, so the camera would let the cattle through, but if a goat or a pig tried to get in the gate would shut against it.”

That’s when this image-processing cat door made the rounds.

this is what it sees when Flo sticks her head in from the street. The image is captured as soon as the center of the picture becomes dark. At this point our software analyses the image to determine if Flo is carrying anything in her mouth.

Of course, unless the feral animals are good enough to come alone and never zip through underneath a cow or right after it, beforethe gate closes, this thing would be a great idea.

There’s enough image tracking and processing power around that you could just dart the offending critters when they try to come in.

Well, duh

Plants Found to Show Preferences for Their Relatives - NYTimes.com

If the sea rocket detects unrelated plants growing in the ground with it, the plant aggressively sprouts nutrient-grabbing roots. But if it detects family, it politely restrains itself.

The finding is a surprise, even a bit of a shock, in part because most animals have not even been shown to have the ability to recognize relatives, despite the huge advantages in doing so.

If an individual can identify kin, it can help them, an evolutionarily sensible act because relatives share some genes. The same discriminating organism could likewise ramp up nasty behavior against unrelated individuals with which it is most sensible to be in claws- or perhaps thorns-bared competition.

Why should anyone be surprised that this kind of stuff can evolve.

75% Effective against 40% of infectious agents

BBC NEWS | Health | Patch ‘halts holiday diarrhoea’

Their patch contains the poisons produced by E.coli, with the idea that this primes the immune system to cope better when confronted with the real thing.

Their study involved 178 people who were given either a placebo ‘dummy’ patch, or one containing the toxin, then sent off to continue their journey through Mexico or Guatemala.

A fifth of those with the “dummy” patches developed moderate diarrhoea, four times more than in the treated group. The difference was even more pronounced in cases of severe diarrhoea.

Even when someone with an E.coli patch fell ill, they got better quicker - half a day compared with two days on average.

Or you could just not eat random infectious foods.