Category Archives: Blog

Blog

Robot toy can now recognize human faces, new torment for cats on the way

Zeno's paradox A new toy that’s been developed will be able to greet you and your family’s pet by name, as well as display emotions. The 17-inch doll comes in at 1/5 the price of the now defunct AIBO at $300, primarily due to the outsourcing of processing power to your computer, which it will connect to using Wi-fi. Zeno will be able to learn faces and names, as well as being fully mobile (walking, at least, no jump jets – yet). Its first debut was at Wired Magazine’s NextFest conference Sept. 13th-16th in LA. The developer’s website has an email list for those of you dying to keep track of its next appearance. [image courtesy Wikipedia Commons]

Zeno covers pretty much everything you need — vision, hearing, speech — to move about the world and the crafty outsourcing of computing power potentially allows for updates. Combine it with this guy and I’m definitely in!
(via PC World)

Blog

Anatomy of a bank run, offline and online

You may or may not have heard about the ‘bank run’ of panicking customers withdrawing their savings from beleaguered UK lending institution Northern Rock over the last few days. While the phenomenon of snowballing panic causing the initial problem to worsen is an old one, it has moved to populate the online world in parallel with the offline – so many customers are trying to access Northern Rock’s website at once that their servers can’t cope and return 404-page-not-found errors, adding to the impression of an institution in trouble. [Image from Getty, copied from BBC article]

As a side note, the Financial Times is predicting that this is the start of a rough period for finance on both sides of the pond – welcome to Crunch Week.

[tags]finance, banking, economics, internet[/tags]
Blog

Solved: someone found those pesky missing Dwarf Galaxies

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Circinus dwarf galaxy

Image courtesy of NASA via spacetoday

A big conundrum in astronomy and cosmology over the last ten years has been the ‘Missing Dwarf Galaxy’ Problem. Dwarf Galaxies are much smaller than normal galaxies and though this makes them fainter and harder to find, astronomers have still been finding far fewer than predicted. The prediction comes from the ‘Cold Dark Matter’ model. Dark matter, which is thought to make up around 22% of all substance in the universe compared to about 2-5% of the matter we can see, forms in distinct ‘halos’, in which real galaxies form. (The remaining 74% of energy density is the mysterious dark energy, responsible for the expansion of the universe.)

By studying the distribution of these dark matter halos, astronomers predicted that a large galaxy such as our own Milky Way should have a hundred or so smaller dwarf satellites. The problem is, until very recently only a handful had been seen. A lot of these could have no visible stars and it was difficult to see a way to detect them. Until now. Two astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii think they may have found a load more, possibly solving one of the biggest questions in our study of the stars.

Incidentally, the name for a galaxy smaller than a dwarf class is known as a hobbit galaxy. [via science daily]

Blog

Google Earth to Improve Resolution

earth.jpg
Photo Credit: NASA (via Wikimedia Commons)

DigitalGlobe, provider of imagery for Google Earth, will be launching a new satellite dubbed WorldView I next Tuesday, that will boost the accuracy of its satellite images to half-meter resolution. With that type of accuracy the satellite will now be able to pinpoint objects on the Earth at three to 7.5 meters, or 10 to 25 feet. Using known reference points on the ground, the accuracy could rise to about two meters. Additionally the satellite will be able to collect over 600,000 square kilometers of imagery each day, up from the current collection of that amount each week.

It seems that we are getting much closer to the CIC Earth application as envisioned by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, which was able to present real time satellite imagery.

[Via C|Net]

Blog

Future Surveillance Technology Can Tell How You Feel

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While the governments of the United States and Britain continue to deploy surveillance cameras at a startling pace, researchers in top universities and private laboratories are developing the next generation of surveillance technology.

The BBC recently published an article title “Big Brother is Watching Us All,” in which they highlight some of these new technologies:

Gait DNA, for example, is creating an individual code for the way I walk. [The] goal is to invent a system whereby a facial image can be matched to your gait, your height, your weight and other elements, so a computer will be able to identify instantly who you are.

And if being able to instantly identify an individual in a public crowd wasn’t enough, the same article reports on a tool under development that can look through walls and determine your emotional state:

Using radio waves, you point it a wall and it tells you if anyone is on the other side … and it turns out that the human body gives off such sensitive radio signals, that it can even pick up breathing and heart rates … “it will also show whether someone inside a house is looking to harm you, because if they are, their heart rate will be raised. And 10 years from now, the technology will be much smarter. We’ll scan a person with one of these things and tell what they’re actually thinking.” 

With this level of surveillance available within a decade, I can imagine whole industries springing up that will protect an individual’s privacy while in public and private spaces.  This begs two questions.  One, will governments allow such privacy protection products and services? And two, if you try to protect your privacy, will this just engender more surveillance of you because the government will assume you have something to hide?

[Via KurzweilAI.net]