A thought provoking article from Technology Review about teaching kids to understand and deal with the media that is involved in their lives on all levels.
– Media Literacy Goes to School (subscription required)
english
Scientists Have Found That Scientists Are Often Wrong
I tend to be very skeptical about news articles where the headline reads: “Scientists have found that…”. Too often the scientist or researchers involved aren’t even named and there is no way of digging in further to see if it was indeed professional scientific work that led to the conclusion.
This is especially annoying as research that makes headlines is usually negative and or contradictory stuff: something may cause cancer, something contradicts common beliefs, something radically new has been discovered or invented. And these are exactly the research findings that are most likely to be wrong. The criticism that may follow the new discoveries hardly ever makes the news so the public sits up with the headline as THE TRUTH and never learns that the research was fundamentally flawed or the “scientist” was actually a fabulation of a reporter at “The News Of The World”.
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Colors Used to Speed Neural Networks
Researchers from the University of Tokyo are using light with different wavelength to encode information to speed up information transfer in neural networks.
– Colors expand neural net
Robots and Humans Play Soccer Together
A research team from Carnegie Mellon University is exploring man-robot interaction by programming robots to play a special kind of soccer on teams with both human and robot players playing together.
– Bots, humans play together
Vibrating Gel Mimicks Animal Locomotion
A strip of gel on a vibrating plate can be made to mimic three types of animal style locomotion.
– Gels Gain Life-Like Motion
NASA Helps Biologists in Chameleon Research
NASA teams with biologists to predict the geographic distribution of 11 known chameleon species in Madagascar. The model also helped lead to discovery of 7 previously unknown chameleon species.
– NASA Helps Forecast Reptile Distributions In Madagascar
Robot Does Forest Research
A solar-powered robot helps scientists monitoring environmental changes in forests.
– ‘Robot Tarzan’ helps forest work
How the Brain Predicts Other People’s Actions
An article in Nature suggests that the brain actually simulates another person’s brain processes when trying to predict their actions.
– A system in the human brain for predicting the actions of others
AI Actors in Lord of the Rings
As “The Return of the King” is taking the world by storm I think it is suiting to point to this entertaining and informative article from Popular Science last November (after the release of “The Two Towers“). The article explains the AI system that is used to control the characters in the massive battle scenes.
Each orc in a battle has a “mind of his own” making decisions and responding to unexpected happenings. The same goes for every elf, man, uruk-hai, ghost, troll, ent and what have you. The decision trees that are used in the AI system are quite complex, and even though “intelligence” is hardly a word one would directly associate with an average orc, the AI orcs perhaps turned out to be more clever than intended:
“In another early simulation, Jackson and Regelous watched as several thousand characters fought like hell while, in the background, a small contingent of combatants seemed to think better of it and run away. They weren’t programmed to do this. It just happened.” (page 4)
Wetware Trendwatch: Week of December 15, 2003
This week’s Wetware related stuff in the media, including:
- Robots from the Victorian era
- Buildings get nerve systems
- AI helicopters
- BOINC for distributed computing
- Running robots
…and more.
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