bodhi tree swaying » Technolust

Artificial telepathy comes one step closer

bodhipaksa — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:51:03 +0000

I know the Pentagon was keen on creating artificial telepathy, so that soldiers on the battlefield could compose and send messages by means of pure thought — and that prospect is closer now, as you can tell from this video, where the decoded thoughts are almost understandable.

Of course the thoughts that were translated were recorded with probes inserted into the brains of people undergoing neurosurgery, and it’s not likely many of us will be queueing up to have electrodes implanted so that we can text while driving, but it’s obvious that the technology is moving in the direction of our actually being able to “read” thoughts. Here’s the full New Scientist article.

But I would like to be able to write without typing

The clip below, which did the rounds a few months ago, and which you’ve probably seen, is in a way even more amazing:

Love these stamps

bodhipaksa — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 16:11:57 +0000

I love these stamps, which are from 1963 Poland. The inclusion of the orbits is a nice touch.

It makes me long for the days of confidence in space exploration, and I wonder if one of the reasons that the International Space Station does not fire the public imagination — despite being one of humanity’s greatest engineering achievements — is because it’s so damned ugly. Every one of these probes is esthetically interesting.

Via Planetary Folklore.

The new Dragon Dictate for Mac. Sad, sad, sad.

bodhipaksa — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 04:14:39 +0000

So far, Dragon dictate has been little different from using MacSpeech Dictate. It has the same quirks, including getting utterly confused if you move the cursor, and sometimes of randomly adding a letter to the end of everything you say. Tonight it insisted on adding a W after the cursor, and there was nothing I could do to delete it except intervene manually. O Perhaps it’s a Republican program. O

If you’re wondering what the strange O’s are, it’s because the program has now started randomly adding that letter to the end of what I’m dictating. It looks rather lyrical, don’t you think? I’m going to leave them in just for fun.

O
Using Dragon Dictate has so far been incredibly frustrating and irritating. David Pogue gave Dragon a great write-up in the New York Times. I can only assume that he was using the Windows version and that’s it’s much better than the Mac version. O

I opened Dragon, went through the training, and discovered that my profile had been labeled as “American.” Since I’m actually British, this wasn’t very useful. At no point was the given an option to select what kind of English I spoke. So I had to go back to the beginning, create a new profile, and do the training all over again. O

As with MacSpeech dictate, it’s not intuitively obvious how to train new words. The very first word I used in a Facebook status update was “Nagaloka.” This of course came out as gobbledygook. I had to search around in the menus to find the vocabulary training option, type in the word “Nagaloka,” and then repeat it three times so that the program would recognize it. There should be some easier way to do this. O

At one point, it mysteriously refused to enter anything I said on the page. I could see that my speech was being recognized correctly, but all I got was a sad “boink.” O

Oh, and the program crashed the very first time I try to dictate anything. O

On the whole, I’d say there is no point upgrading. This isn’t an upgrade at all. It seems to be just a rebranding of the same program with a few new quirks thrown in. O

Another reason I want a Kindle

bodhipaksa — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 15:38:26 +0000

I’m buzzed. I just heard that the Kindle edition of Living as a River is available on Amazon.com.

It doesn’t seem to be listed as a Kindle edition on Amazon.co.uk — can people in the UK buy from the US Amazon Kindle store?

Anyway, click here to see the Amazon.com Kindle listing.

I must say I’m tempted to buy the Kindle edition just to see what it looks like. I don’t have a Kindle, but I have the Kindle app on my iPhone and it would be lovely to be able to carry a copy of the book around in my pocket. And I hold out the hope that we’ll have enough money so that I can get a Kindle for my birthday or Christmas. Of course that hope extends to having enough time to actually read books again. What used to be my reading time is now my putting-children-to-bed time.

Welcome to the future

bodhipaksa — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 02:44:17 +0000

I showed this video to rapturous applause in my final class at Upward Bound. The speaker is Pranav Mistry, a young Indian technologist at MIT. He outlines the development of his Sixth Sense system of augmented reality. The video starts off rather slowly, but as we works through the evolution of his thinking and demonstrates more and more audacious applications of the technology, it becomes rather a thrill-ride. This technology has so many potential uses that it’s hard to believe that it won’t be in widespread use within a few years. I’d imagine the next step is having the augmentative imagery displayed in a head-up fashion, using glasses or even (eventually) contacts.

I especially appreciate the way that Mistry talks about us ceasing to be machines sitting in front of machines, and instead humanizes technology by making it a natural part of the way we interact with the world. In Mistry’s vision, technology is like air — ubiquitous and taken for granted. At the moment our digital world is confined within various rectangles. It’s rather as if we had to carry all our air around in bottles. Mistry allows the digital world and the analog world to blend seamlessly, so that we simply use it, the way we simply use oxygen.

Anyway, here’s the video. Enjoy!

Swype

bodhipaksa — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 04:18:12 +0000

This is pretty exciting, at least for a techno-fetishist like me:

Swype Beta on Nexus One from bcpk on Vimeo.

Wonder how long it’ll take to appear on the iPhone, if it ever does.

Vote For Hope video

Robert Wright on the emerging planetary consciousness

bodhipaksa — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:12:29 +0000

Interesting and provocative stuff from writer (and meditator) Robert Wright:

This autumn will see the publication of a book that promises to help us out here: “What Technology Wants,” by Kevin Kelly, a long-time tech-watcher who helped launch Wired magazine and was its executive editor back in its young, edgy days.

Don’t let the title of Kelly’s book terrify you. He assures us that he doesn’t think technology is conscious — at least, not “at this point.” For now, he says, technology’s “mechanical wants are not carefully considered deliberations but rather leanings.”

So relax; apparently we have a few years before Keanu Reeves gets stuffed into a gooey pod by robotic overlords who use people as batteries. Still, it’s notable that, before Reeves played that role in “The Matrix,” the movie’s directors gave him a copy of Kelly’s earlier book, “Out of Control,” as preparation. And Kelly does say in “What Technology Wants” that technology is increasingly like “a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.”

Well, I don’t know about the “urges” part, but it’s true that technology is weaving humans into electronic webs that resemble big brains — corporations, online hobby groups, far-flung N.G.O.s. And I personally don’t think it’s outlandish to talk about us being, increasingly, neurons in a giant superorganism; certainly an observer from outer space, watching the emergence of the Internet, could be excused for looking at us that way. In fact, the superorganism scenario is in a sense just the cosmic flip side of the diagnosis offered by Carr and other techno-skeptics.

Read the rest of the article…

The computer that wins at Jeopardy

bodhipaksa — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:00:19 +0000

An interesting thing is happening in the field of artificial intelligence: a computer that can beat humans in a natural-language general knowledge quiz:

‘Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it’s the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.”

This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge” ), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?

Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

With Watson, I.B.M. claims it has cracked the problem — and aims to prove as much on national TV. The producers of “Jeopardy!” have agreed to pit Watson against some of the game’s best former players as early as this fall. To test Watson’s capabilities against actual humans, I.B.M.’s scientists began holding live matches last winter. They mocked up a conference room to resemble the actual “Jeopardy!” set, including buzzers and stations for the human contestants, brought in former contestants from the show and even hired a host for the occasion: Todd Alan Crain, who plays a newscaster on the satirical Onion News Network.

Technically speaking, Watson wasn’t in the room. It was one floor up and consisted of a roomful of servers working at speeds thousands of times faster than most ordinary desktops. Over its three-year life, Watson stored the content of tens of millions of documents, which it now accessed to answer questions about almost anything. (Watson is not connected to the Internet; like all “Jeopardy!” competitors, it knows only what is already in its “brain.”) During the sparring matches, Watson received the questions as electronic texts at the same moment they were made visible to the human players; to answer a question, Watson spoke in a machine-synthesized voice through a small black speaker on the game-show set. When it answered the Burj clue — “What is Dubai?” (“Jeopardy!” answers must be phrased as questions) — it sounded like a perkier cousin of the computer in the movie “WarGames” that nearly destroyed the world by trying to start a nuclear war.

This time, though, the computer was doing the right thing. Watson won $1,000 (in pretend money, anyway), pulled ahead and eventually defeated Gilmartin and Kolani soundly, winning $18,400 to their $12,000 each.

“Watson,” Crain shouted, “is our new champion!”

Continued in the New York Times…

Readability: a simple tool for simplifying the web

bodhipaksa — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:56:54 +0000

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

It’s a simple bookmark that you put on your browser toolbar and then click when you want to simplify a web page. On a blog it removes all the sidebars and ads, allowing you to focus on the main content. On a regular site it can be useful for reformatting the font and column width. Here’s an example:

“Before”

Note the excessively wide “column.” Actually, the text runs right across the page width, meaning that your eyes have to work very hard to scan across the width of the text.

“After”

See how much easier it would be to read the text in a proper column?

Here’s another “before.”

Ironically, this one is in an article about website clutter. Note that the entire web page is off to the side of the browser rather than centered. The “sidebar” is actually in the center of the screen. And the article surrounded by distracting images, ads, and navigation. This makes it much harder to concentrate on the article.

And here’s “after.”

Centered, clean, simple.

This kind of tool is very useful when you want to use the connectivity of the web, but still maintain a sense of mindfulness and simplicity.

To enable Readability, just go to their site and follow the simple instructions (1. choose your settings, 2 drag the button to your browser toolbar, 3 click on the button when you want to simplify a page).

Incidentally, the new safari 4 browser from Apple has this as a built in option.

There’s an app for that…

bodhipaksa — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 16:32:22 +0000

Stumbled across this very witty spoof iPhone ad on BoingBoing.