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?

I can’t wait to hack this building

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Dubai plans ‘moving’ skyscraper

The 420-metre (1,378-foot) building’s apartments would spin a full 360 degrees, at voice command, around a central column by means of 79 giant power-generating wind turbines located between each floor.

And I sure hope they’ve done the analysis to prove it’s stable against interesting turn sequences.

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.

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.

Poor Guy

Gothamist: Avid Subway Enthusiast Arrested Again

Darius McCollum, the minor cult figure among train buffs and subway enthusiasts, was arrested again this morning after being caught in a restricted area at Columbus Circle . McCollum is such a well known figure, that police recognized him on sight boarding an uptown 1 train at Times Square wearing a blue transit worker-like uniform and gloves that bore a NYC Transit patch. They followed him when got off the train at Columbus Circle and arrested him when he bypassed a barricade at the station.

This probably means that the hardest non-working man in NYC Transit could be headed back to Sing Sing. He pleaded guilty to attempting to steal a locomotive when caught in a LIRR railyard in 2005, but was released in 2006. He was re-imprisoned for violating his parole when he was caught possessing railroad property.

It really is sad that they can’t just hire him and be done with it.

Bruce Schneier and the King of the Crabs

The singularity goes horribly awry

“Ah,” said Bruce, before he rightly thought it through. “Seems some firearms would be more useful than these little swords of yours.”

The king, who was already turning away, froze in his tracks. He didn’t have to turn back, because the eyes of crabs already look in all directions, but Bruce could tell – he had gotten the renewed and full attention of his royal highness. And he winced mightily, because that was the one and only time in his life that Bruce Schneier had made a security-related mistake.

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.

You get what you pay for

Wonk Room » The Politics Of Wired: Saucy, Ignorant Contrarianism

So it takes 25 organic cows to make as much milk as 23 industrial ones. More cows, more cow emissions. But that’s just the beginning. A single organically raised cow puts out 16 percent more greenhouse gases than its counterpart. That double whammy — more cows and more emissions per cow — makes organic dairies a cog in the global warming machine.

Recollect that conventional agriculture is petroleum-based agriculture. Which means what didn’t factor into the Wired author’s accounting were:

– The carbon footprints for the oil exploration and refining, coupled with the carbon footprints involved in the manufacture of the fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides demanded by conventional agriculture.

– Nor were the carbon footprints calculated for the transportation of these components of factory farming from manufacture to feedlot; nor was the general carbon footprint of Big Ag factored in, where GMO (again, petroleum-based) rules.

There’s another point here: when you’re talking about 60-80% reductions in CO2, even a 25% difference in the output of your dairy cows (assuming it’s not negated by the cost of trucking in the oil-fertilized feed and so forth) is not going to get you anywhere. That’s the difference between needing to cut down to 4 cows versus 5, not 23 versus 25. (Then of course there are the details about methane actually being useful as a feedstock, but that’s even further down in the weeds.)

I could pass this

Crooked Timber

Philosophy Exam – First Year