The battling bots in Hugh Jackman’s Real Steel look far too CG to get me excited over the idea of programmed pugilists battling to the death. But this real life set of giant, tele-operated robotic arms are without doubt the future of televised combat, and probably handy for doing real work too.
Built by Salt Lake City’s Raytheon-Sarcos, the massive arms are attached to a modified Ditch Witch making them fully mobile, and are controlled by a human operator who’s strapped into what’s often referred to as a Waldo system. The operator’s shoulder, elbow, wrist and hand movements are all translated to the robotic arms in real time, requiring absolutely no previous training. And the rig even provides force feedback as the user moves, so they know when the arms have lifted something particularly heavy, or hit something immovable.
Unfortunately the limited imaginations of the engineers who built the arms see it primarily being used in dangerous working conditions, even being remotely operated from miles away in situations that are inhospitable to humans. But I predict it won’t be long until we see a couple of these battling it out in a back alley.
Apple didn’t have much difficulty convincing people they needed to upgrade to the iPhone 4S yesterday. But the new phone’s biggest selling point, the voice activated Siri assistant, has apparently already succumbed to the pressure of being at everyone’s beck and call.
Over at the Cult of Mac, David W. Martin didn’t get around to really testing out Siri until this morning. And when he did, it seems like the backend servers that keep her responding and answering questions were already a bit strained. His first query resulted in a polite, but upsetting, “Sorry, I’m having trouble connected to the network” response. Followed by a “Sorry, I’m not able to connect right now” confirming that Apple’s servers are having a hard time keeping up with the initial demand.
Since Siri’s knowledge, wisdom, and voice recognition capabilities rely on a connection to those servers, we’re hoping Apple is already on top of this because as more iPhone 4S’s get into more hands, the demand on her is only going to increase.
Siri, the iPhone’s super sassy personal assistant, has some hilarious bite to her, doesn’t she? It wasn’t always like this! According to WSJ, Siri started with a “light attitude” until Apple bought it and then purposely gave it more of an edge.
Norman Winarsky, a co-founder of Siri before Apple’s purchase, says his original team had many conversations about “whether it should be gender neutral or should have an attitude”. They decided to go with a voice that occasionally had a “light attitude”. When Apple got their hands on Siri though, Apple wanted more edge, a realness that wasn’t vanilla. Yes, they wanted to keep Siri “friendly and humble” but they were more concerned with “how would we want a person to respond?”
And they did a pretty good job! What else can answer, “I’ve never really thought about it” to “Do you do anal?” or respond to an inquiry about Siri’s favourite sex position by snapping, “You’re not supposed to ask your assistant such things”. Now if only Apple spent as much time perfecting the voice as they did figuring out her attitude…
Since the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, Japanese companies have been focusing their efforts on creating products that can be useful in an emergency. And since batteries can be vital when a power grid’s been knocked out, Sanyo has been working to improve their shelf life.
On a full charge, their latest rechargeable nickel-metal hydride AA and AAA Eneloop batteries will retain up to 70% of their capacity after sitting unused for five years. And if you abandon them for just a year, they’ll have only lost about 10% of their charge. Improvements that come courtesy of a change in the crystal lattice structure of the hydrogen storing alloy. Exciting stuff! Sanyo has also managed to increase the numer of times the new Eneloops can be run down and charged back up. About 1,800 times, a 20% increase over the previous generation. They also come fully charged from the factory, exclusively with solar power, so they can be used straight out of the package. Available come November.
A team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame are working on a software that could identify criminals.
The technology is based on the thought that criminals are likely to visit their crime scene several times before or after a crime is committed. The U.S. military in the Middle East also indicated that IED bomb makers return to the locations of explosions to improve their designs.
Facial recognition that is not compared against an existing database can be used in a new technology to determine if certain people return to certain locations suspiciously often. It is up to law enforcement to determine what would be considered too often. Kevin Bowyer and Patrick Flynn of Notre Dame’s Computer Science and Engineering Department have been working on image-based biometrics since 2001. Together with Jeremiah Barr, a doctoral student in computer science and engineering, the team developed a “Questionable Observer Detector (QuOD)”, which records “face tracks” of individuals in videos and uses that data to identify people if they are appearing more than just one time.
Bowyer, Flynn and Barr admit that there are still “challenges” and there is work to do to overcome lighting issues as well as scenarios in which videos of faces are taken from different angles. However, they said they will be able to solve the problems and their software may provide law enforcement a new tool for identifying potential criminals.
New gameplay from Assassin’s Creed Revelations has appeared online courtesy of Game Trailers that shows Ezio maneuvering his way around the Galata Tower, a medieval stone pillar located in the Galata district of Constantinople. The Galata Tower is sure to give fans a chance to show off their parkour skills.
Samsung and Google last week revealed the launch date for Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest iteration of Google’s Android operating system. As is tradition, Google this week received a delivery of a giant Ice Cream Sandwich model for its front lawn in Mountain View. It’s a tradition that stretches back as far as the launch of Cupcake, also known as Android 1.5, and brings the number of food items outside Google’s HQ to seven. The desserts on display are a giant cupcake, a donut, an eclair, a bowl of froyo, a gingerbread man, a piece of honeycomb and, now, a huge ice cream sandwich.
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