CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-17 12:30:33 (1 comments, 7 reshares, 22 +1s)

2013-04-05 11:39:02 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Finally there is a miracle cure for all your machine learning problems... ;-)

... should have posted this five days ago...

2013-03-11 16:36:44 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 24 +1s)

Happy Birthday to Douglas Adams. So Long and thanks for all the fish.

(great google doodle today too)
#DouglasAdams #42

2013-03-08 09:35:00 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 9 +1s)

This is not a cat video.
It's a video suggesting that the brain structures that perceive "optical illusions" are probably deeply rooted, or they would not be common to species as different as human and cat.

#neuroscience   #illusion  

2013-02-24 06:31:20 (59 comments, 291 reshares, 657 +1s)

This is a really cool idea, implemented by the Human-Computer Interaction group at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany. The group used a laser cutter to produce 3D objects in a fraction of the time of "traditional" 3D printing. (... using the word "traditional" in connection with 3D printing sounds really weird... ;-) )

Apparently there will be a paper about it in this year's CHI conference... :) Too bad, I won't be there. I'd love to learn more about how they built the system and what it can do. 

Here's their website with some more details: http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/baudisch/projects/laserorigami.html

2013-02-18 04:38:18 (1 comments, 5 reshares, 10 +1s)

2013-02-06 11:03:26 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

This really made me laugh today...

#leavingacademia #missingacademia

2013-01-29 05:10:11 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

NYTimes: Talking, Walking Objects
http://nyti.ms/SO5BIo

2013-01-24 09:38:40 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 6 +1s)

Computer data files stored accurately on DNA strands

A billion books can fit into test tube with this technique - and this is just the "hello Watson" phase of this new bio computing technology.

In my book +Content Nation I project a future in which organic cloud computer storage self-generates in subterranean "farms" and communicates via antennas to the world. Sounds like living forms of collective memory are on the way...

2013-01-19 15:51:18 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 2 +1s)

This is a great discussion about how robots will shape our future between Rodney Brooks of iRobot, MIT's Andrew McAfee and John Markoff of The New York Times.

The part, that I found most interesting was about the impact of intelligent robots on the labor market. There was one point in the discussion, that I find really important and that is often overlooked, when people talk about how robots are stealing humans' jobs: Many of the jobs, that robots will take away, are jobs, such as manufacturing, cleaning, etc. that most people prefer not to do anyway and it is a good thing if robots do these jobs and free up humans do more interesting things.

Personally, I think, the changes in the labor market are a problem that  politics and society need to solve by redefining what "work" is and redefining the value of art and creative work, rather than by slowing down progress in... more »

2013-01-17 14:52:34 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 10 +1s)

This looks intriguing. It's an engine for automatic discovery of patterns in big data. If true, it does the first step of the scientific method: "first you guess the relationship", the magic skill we call intuition. 

Via +Daniel Estrada and +Jeff Jockisch 

2013-01-01 14:26:02 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Happy new year, everyone!

... . it started really good for me with a shipping notification for my Makerbot Replicator 2 just a couple of hours after midnight in Japan and after "only" 8 weeks of waiting! :-))

2012-12-20 13:13:00 (0 comments, 8 reshares, 5 +1s)

This might be an interesting read for people, who have to read source code (and for everyone interested in both computer science and psychology). I am surprised that there hasn't been more research on this topic, yet.

2012-12-12 11:34:36 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

before you start buying your Xmas decorations you might want to consult these mathematical formulas so that you don't buy too much or too less;)

2012-12-06 05:50:31 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

2012-11-29 05:28:37 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 10 +1s)

Guide to Software Development...

2012-11-25 19:09:35 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 3 +1s)

I just found this website, when looking for some interesting Arduino projects: http://produceconsumerobot.com

The site belongs to Sean Montgomery and the projects, he showcases on his website, blend science, art and engineering in a really fascinating way.

The video below shows his "Thinking Cap", a brain-shaped hat, that visualizes EEG activity. Not that I'd wear this in public, but anyway, it's a really cool project and he describes in detail with code and circuit diagrams, how this and his other projects were built, just in case you'd like to try for yourself. :)

2012-10-22 08:18:36 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

The Robot Revolution is Upon Us

As we reach the theoretical Singularity date of 2045 I expect many of these technologies to advance at an increasingly rapid pace. Robots and Humans (eventually) will be virtually indistinguishable from each other in my opinion. 

The race is on to build robots for the consumer market. But are there consequences to co-existing with humanoid machines? 16x9 speaks to some of the world's most brilliant people while exploring the Geminoid Project, Nao Robot, Baxter and Dr. Robot. For more info, please go to www.global16x9.com

2012-07-26 10:52:57 (4 comments, 5 reshares, 8 +1s)

"Avatar" project aims for human immortality by 2045

Russian media magnate Dmitry Itskov is heading "Avatar," a tremendously ambitious and far-reaching multidisciplinary research project that aims to achieve immortality in humans within the next three decades. He plans to do it by housing human brains in progressively more disembodied vehicles, first transplanting them into robots and then, by the year 2045, by reverse-engineering the human brain and effectively "downloading" human consciousness onto a computer chip.

2012-06-27 17:53:55 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

＠Google I/O extended in Tokyo #IO12   #io12extended  

2012-06-17 17:06:56 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 12 +1s)

Lesson learned... :)

2012-05-16 14:15:05 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 11 +1s)

How Terms of Service Can Have an Impact on User Experience

I have previously mentioned the impact on user experience from terms of use and licensing agreements. In that they are difficult to understand for individuals who are not lawyers. This in itself is problematic when such terms of use have to be understood by a wide variety of users and enforcement itself is often not clearly understood.

Considering the increased integration of software into our lives, the legal aspects of software can present user experience issues.
This is a funny little video mixing the singularity with these agreements. This is a little food for thought for those who do product policy, but also to make people aware that user experience reaches beyond the service or application itself, but the rules for the application as well.

via +aimee whitcroft

2012-05-05 02:23:15 (4 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

A few of my coworkers and I put together the ultimate Google interview question:

You are trying to cross a river with a barman, a bear, a fox and a thousand rabbits.

You have a single row boat that travels at 99.9% the speed of light that can only carry you and two animals at a time. The row boat has only one instruction: Go forward. It returns true iff it managed to go forwards.

For every 5 minutes of wait time, the rabbit population on each side of the river will grow according to the Fibonacci sequence.
Also, each rabbit has a unique integer written on its back and you want to line them up in numerical order on the other shore but can only look at 100 rabbits at a time.

You can ask questions of the bear, the fox and the rabbits but the fox always lies, the rabbits always tell the truth, and the bear will eat you if it thinks your question is dumb.more »

2012-05-01 01:48:21 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

This is a really fascinating study conducted by the Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems Lab (HINTS) at the University of Washington. With this and other studies, the researchers investigate into bonding between people and robots and people's perception of robots as "mental, moral and social" counterparts.

In this study, children from age 9 to 15 were asked to play a game with a (teleoperated) Robovie robot, when one of the researchers came in and forced the protesting and "crying" robot into the closet. In a questionnaire, the researchers evaluated how the children perceived the robot as intelligent and emotional and what they thought about how robots should be treated.

I've found this on the IEEE Spectrum website. Please have a look there for more details: ... more »

2012-04-25 01:46:02 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 4 +1s)

Heisenberg was the best DOS hacker...

2012-04-18 06:52:15 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 10 +1s)

ENGINEERING • ROBOTICS • ACM-R5 Amphibious Robosnake
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The eight-kilogram reptile is powered by a 30-minute lithium ion battery, during which time the remote operator sets its general direction while sensors feeding a 32-bit microprocessor guide the actual underwater acrobatics and terra firma terrain negotiation. Like most technology, this will initially be used in a humani- tarian capacity to help locate victims of earthquakes and other disasters . . .
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Read more ► goo.gl/SY5i3

2012-04-04 17:33:39 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

... No, this is not a belated April Fool's joke... :-)

The plus page of the project is here: https://plus.google.com/111626127367496192147/posts

2012-04-01 09:57:04 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

Watch till the end (your heart rate might raise until then) and remember the date.

#allofmathematicsiswrong

2012-03-31 16:43:35 (6 comments, 3 reshares, 7 +1s)

Google has just launched a revolutionary new and improved version of Google maps! ;-)

Have a look at the video or just check http://maps.google.com . :)

2012-03-27 18:21:20 (3 comments, 4 reshares, 5 +1s)

This is a really interesting discussion on the ethical problems involved with brain-computer interfaces and other novel technologies and their applications in the military.

The guy in the video is Jonathan Moreno, a philosophy professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in bioethics.

2012-03-27 18:02:12 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 20 +1s)

... The result of today's crocheting session... ;-)

2012-03-20 04:49:48 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 10 +1s)

2012-03-18 16:15:21 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

This experiment from 2008 might provide some interesting background information to the previous post for those who haven't heard about it, yet.
It has been conducted by Henrik Ehrsson, a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and studied virtual-reality-induced "out of body experiences". In the study, researchers used virtual reality glasses and tactile stimuli to make the participants perceive another body - either one of a different person or a mannequin - as their own.

The website of the Ehrsson lab with some of their current publications and more experiments can be found here: http://www.ehrssonlab.se/

2012-03-18 15:41:34 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 5 +1s)

TELESAR V is a teleexistence robot, developed at Keio University in Japan. There have been some news about it, earlier this year, but I just saw this video today and thought, it would be worth sharing.

Like in the movie "Avatar" or "Surrogates", the pilot controls the robot by his/her own movements and sees and hears through the sensors of the robot while wearing a head-mounted display. TELESAR V even transmits fine-grained touch information back to its user, so that the user actually gets the impression of being inside the robot.

One of the aims of this project is to create a robot, that allows humans to work remotely in places, which are otherwise too dangerous, such as the Fukushima nuclear plant.

2012-03-06 06:46:35 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 12 +1s)

Asimov's quote "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny..."

2012-03-05 16:19:35 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 6 +1s)

I just stumbled upon the funf Open Sensing Framework. It's an open source framework, created by the MIT, that allows your Android phone to record, log and analyze data, such as GPS Location,
WLAN, Accelerometer, Call log, SMS log, Browser history etc. (yeah, a little spy in your pocket! Isn't that all you ever wanted? ;-) )

Anyway, according to their website, they took a lot of care to implement strong privacy protection in order to use it for academic studies and it's open source, so you can easily check, what it does before implementing any software on top of it.
I didn't get any further than downloading the source code today and I do not have much prior experience in programming for Android, yet, but I am sure this will be fun to try. :-)

2012-02-28 05:52:20 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 10 +1s)

Hmm.... I wonder if this is real. If it is, it's really cool, but from my hands-on experience with the Emotiv Epoc headset I doubt, that it it reacts fast and accurately enough to safely control a skateboard.

The explanations in the article are too vague to tell if their method is actually feasible or not, but this does not seem like it can be realized easily with the Epoc headset: "The skateboard can translate brain waves into action such that the user visualizes a point off in the distance and thinks about the speed in which to travel to get there." I'd love to be wrong, but at this moment, I don't believe that the board works as explained.

I'd really like to see more of the details. It is difficult to demo BCI systems in a way that doesn't leave any doubts, but the article mentions that Chaotic Moon Labs are planning to open source the software... more »

2012-02-26 14:36:25 (4 comments, 2 reshares, 9 +1s)

The humanoid robot NAO just got a big brother! :) ROMEO is 1,40 m tall and designed to function in an environment made for humans in order to assist elderly or disabled persons. It was developed by Aldebaran Robotics in cooperation with a couple of other companies and institutes. An overview of the project can be found here. http://projetromeo.com/index_en.html

Here's the article from the IEEE Spectrum, which has some more details on the robot: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/aldebaran-robotics-introduces-romeo-finally

2012-02-19 14:23:14 (1 comments, 3 reshares, 1 +1s)

The Secret You

Where did consciousness come from? What makes you, you? These are simple but profound questions that are so easy to ask, but so difficult to explain. This BBC Horizon documentary, hosted by mathematician Professor Marcus du Sautoy, explains how science sees and attempts to answer these questions. If you have 58 minutes to spare, you should watch this (or bookmark it for later!).

#sciencesunday curated by +Allison Sekuler and +Robby Bowles

2012-02-16 14:54:43 (3 comments, 1 reshares, 15 +1s)

... Just saw this on "the other social network". It's 100% true! ;-)

Image by Toni Knight

2012-02-07 09:39:13 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 11 +1s)

Do you know iCub? iCub is a robot designed to learn like a toddler through human instruction. For example, it learns to visually segment objects and is able to assign spoken names to objects. The video shows, how a human teacher teaches it to grasp different objects.

iCub is currently being developed at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) as a part of the project RobotCub. The video shows the CHRIS (Cooperative Human Robot Interaction Systems) project, which is focused on handling the issues, that need to be solved for safe Human Robot Interaction (HRI) from the motoric as well as cognitive point of view.

The iCub website with a list of all ongoing projects can be found at www.icub.org

The first part of the CHRIS project video: CHRIS 4th year demo, Scenario 1a

iCub introduction: iCub - Humanoid Platform

2012-02-04 10:09:24 (3 comments, 7 reshares, 17 +1s)

OK this is really cool. 3 types of robots work together to retrieve a book. There is the "eye" (flying) robot which scans the area and locates the book. Then there is the hand robot which is capable of grabbing and climbing but cannot move on it's own. That's where the feet robots come in.

2012-02-02 08:10:29 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 10 +1s)

Scientists at UC Berkeley have developed a method to reconstruct speech sounds and recognize spoken words from brain waves. While this in itself is amazing, the best thing about this research is its future potential, which Brian N. Pasley, one of the researchers, involved in the study summarizes as follows:

"There is some evidence that hearing the sound and imagining the sound activate similar areas of the brain. If you can understand the relationship well enough between the brain recordings and sound, you could either synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking, or just write out the words with a type of interface device.”

One little drawback: This technique requires putting electrodes directly on the surface of the brain. So if you have been looking forward to using this as your next Brain-Computer Interface in the near future, you might want to reconsider and hopet... more »

2012-01-31 16:38:54 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 7 +1s)

x_droids ;-)

2012-01-31 16:27:11 (3 comments, 4 reshares, 3 +1s)

... any similarities to persons living or dead or companies and their license agreements and privacy policies are purely coincidental. ;-)

http://www.bonkersworld.net/agreement/

2012-01-29 17:33:02 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

Uh oh, someone spilled the beans, and now you know our secret code.

2012-01-29 05:32:48 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

Over 175 Free Online Educational Resources (v.1.2)

Warning: Very long post. Please open in a new browser tab.

Here is decades' worth of knowledge freely available online for those who love to learn. Links that fit under multiple categories are listed only once.

What are your favorite sites to learn from? What sites would you add to this list?

(View the original post for any future updates: http://goo.gl/8HLFw)

CONTENTS:

I. Top Picks
II. Universities and Higher Education
III. General Collections
IV. How-to & DIY
V. Studying with Peers
VI. Online Books, eBooks, & Journals
VII. Computers, Software, & Programming (updated to v.1.2 on 1/26/12)
VIII. Science & Math (updated to v.1.2 on 1/26/12)
IX. Logic,... more »