Monthly Archives: February 2009

Blog

Traffic control learns lessons from leafcutter ants

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leafcutter ants on the jobNature’s still got plenty to teach us, it seems. The latest target for researchers seeking to improve traffic congestion is the routing behaviour of leafcutter ants:

When opposing streams of leafcutter ants share a narrow path, they instinctively alternate flows in the most efficient way possible. Studying how ants manage this could provide the basis for a system of driverless cars running on ant traffic algorithms.

Driverless is probably the key word there… and there’s a short story just waiting to be written! One about an abandoned future-city with a tireless transit system of ant-AIs driving empty vehicles in ever-more efficient cycles. Sounds like a job for Paul Di Filippo, maybe. [image by MacAllenBrothers]

Blog

How to encourage frugality: make it a contest

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sad face and happy faceThe New York Times reports on an intriguing – and apparently effective – method of encouraging consumers to curb their energy habits. A Sacramento utility company printed comparisons of energy use on their bills, and rated the consumers by comparison to their neighbourhood’s averages and best figures, labelling their success or failure with a happy or sad face respectively.

When the Sacramento utility conducted its first assessment of the program after six months, it found that customers who received the personalized report reduced energy use by 2 percent more than those who got standard statements…

Some clients complained and the utility stopped deploying the frowning faces, but the idea has apparently been taken up by other companies elsewhere. It’s interesting to note that this method is apparently more effective in encouraging efficient energy habits than emphasising the financial benefits or environmental impacts.

But of course, it’s playing on the urge to conformity, and there will always be those who react against such angles of attack. And while the end in this case is benign, it’s a strong reminder that anyone with a psychology (or marketing) degree has a lot more power to manipulate you than you might suspect. [story via WorldChanging; image by Emmaline]

Blog

The descent of robot: artificial evolution

wall_robotResearchers at the University of Aberdeen have developed a new method of designing complex robots using genetic algorithms:

The EA randomly creates large numbers of control “genomes” for the robot. These behaviour patterns are tested in training sessions, and the most successful genomes are “bred” together to create still better versions – until the best control system is arrived at.

MacLeod’s team took this idea a step further, however, and developed an incremental evolutionary algorithm (IEA) capable of adding new parts to its robot brain over time.

Further reading: an excellent non-fiction book that explores the idea of evolution as a general method of design is The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker.

[from New Scientist, via KurzweilAI][image from badjonni on flickr]

Blog

MIT researchers create cheap "sixth-sense" ubiquitous computing device

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800px-Augmented_reality_-_heads_up_display_concept The era of ubiquitous computing progresses apace (Via PhysOrg):

US university researchers have created a portable “sixth sense” device powered by commercial products that can seamlessly channel Internet information into daily routines.

The device created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists can turn any surface into a touch-screen for computing, controlled by simple hand gestures.

The gadget can even take photographs if a user frames a scene with his or her hands, or project a watch face with the proper time on a wrist if the user makes a circle there with a finger.

The MIT wizards cobbled a Web camera, a battery-powered projector and a mobile telephone into a gizmo that can be worn like jewelry. Signals from the camera and projector are relayed to smart phones with Internet connections.

According to the researchers, the gadget (unveiled by MIT researcher Pattie Maes at the Technology, Entertainment, Design [TED] conference currently underway in Long Beach, California) uses about $300 U.S. worth of store-bought components, and can do things like recognize items on store shelves, retrieve and project information about products, look at an airplane ticket and let the user know whether the flight is on time, or recognize books in a book store, project reviews or author information from the Internet onto blank pages, and recognize articles in newspapers and retrieve the latest related stories or video from the Internet. You can interact with the data using any surface–even your hand if nothing else is available. “Maybe in ten years we will be here with the ultimate sixth-sense brain implant,” Maes said.

Forgot about trekking to the Wizard. Dorothy should have got the Strawman one of these.

(Image: Leonard Low, Concept for augmented reality mobile phone, via Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]computers,augmented reality,technology,gadgets[/tags]

Interviews

ESSAY: JAMES MORROW on why he wrote Shambling Towards Hiroshima

James Morrow - Shambling Toward HiroshimaJames Morrow is a novelist with a reputation for satirising organised religion, but his new book Shambling Towards Hiroshima mashes up the original Godzilla movies with the nuclear attacks on Japan which ended the Second World War.

Given the opportunity to ask the man some questions, the first thing that leapt to my mind was to enquire as to why Morrow had decided to write about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and why he’d choose to mix in monster movies as a subtheme – despite the potential risk of being accused of irreverence or outright frivolity, or of resurrecting dead issues. It is Futurismic‘s very great privilege to play post to his response.

How I Shambled Towards Hiroshima

by James Morrow

Saint Thomas Aquinas famously remarked, “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” The same principle applies to classic American and Japanese monster movies. To one who loves this sort of cinema, no explanation is necessary. To one who does not, no explanation is possible.

As a school-age kid living in a sterile Philadelphia suburb in the late fifties, the culture of old horror films spoke to me in much the same way that God speaks to the theistically inclined. Thanks to my parents’ crummy little black-and-white television, plus my subscription to Forrest J Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland, I routinely enjoyed revelations from that wondrous and exotic celluloid realm. To see a chopped-up, truncated print of King Kong revived on late-afternoon TV was an authentically religious experience for me, and any broadcast of the 1956 Godzilla wasn’t far behind. Continue reading ESSAY: JAMES MORROW on why he wrote Shambling Towards Hiroshima →