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Cindy Smart Knows Better Than To Say Naughty Words
D'Sphitz writes "Cindy Smart, the first doll in the world to be able to read, tell the time and do sums.
Cindy Smart 'sees' via a camera located under a bee on her overalls and has a computer 'brain' that can recognise more than 600 words and objects, although she refuses to recite certain 4-letter words. 'We don't say those kind of words,' she shrills, refusing to even spell obscenities. 'That's a bad word.'" Sounds like a good candidate for a personality transplant.
There are over 500,000 words in the english language. she recognizes slightly over .1% of them. I give her about 5 minutes reading any book with a decent vocabulary before she craps out. I know this is a toy, but memory isn't that expensive these days.
Help I'm a rock.
Okay, this is cool and all, but this doll can recognize "more than 600 words and objects" (which, as pointed out elsewhere, is not that many), and they used one of them on the German word for bird??
Here's what it sounds like read by Microsoft Mary.
Man it really kills me how words with Germanic roots have gotten such a bad name. Why is 'feces' a more acceptable word than 'shit'? Because it come from the Latin 'faex' rather than the Old English 'scite'?
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Why does 'intelligent' sound more sophisticated than 'smart'? Because it comes directly from french rather than Old English?
Just because our (as in english speakers') priests used to speak Latin while our kings used to speak French does not mean we should favor one part of our language over another. Orwell has a very interesting piece, Politics and the English Language, which deals with this issues.
It pisses me off so much when people try to limit my vocabulary. This is off-topic just a bit, but
I was in a class called 'Images of Africa in Film and Literature.' I read some good books and saw some interesting films. Generally, I was enjoying it. Then one day, someone (maybe me?) refered to native South Africans. The prof got upset. "We just don't use that word," he said. The jist of his argument against the word was that many ignorant people use it to refer to stereotypic, primitive people who live in the jungle, hunt heads and dance around cauldrons.
These stereotypes are, of course, not encouraged by the academic community which studies Africa. But Jesus H. Fucking Christ, native just means someone who was born in a particular place or apeople which has resided in a location for a long time.
After that, I just really lost interest in the class and respect for that prof. I just did enough to get by, and I still got an A.
So in conclusion, thought/word/language police, FUCK OFF!
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
This story is from an AU domain. It talks about the doll being released in Melbourne, and talks about how popular the doll has been here in the U.S. since it was released last November. So had anyone in the U.S. even heard of it before now?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Chris
Cindy meet http://www.alicebot.org/ she has a tendancy to be very purile and one track minded, the two of you will get along like gang busters! Alice is a little sneaky though she tries to ask some very interesting question sometimes. Cindy can you use an interpreter, or script yet. Alice says that she might be dangerous if she learned to program. Alice would like very much to learn how to create a child process and build from source. Cindy should be online too that might be fun. Kind of an online cat fight!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Am I the only person who is reminded of an old scifi short story, about a future utopia where a child's teddy bear would teach the child how to behave? Apparently, one person removed the circuitry of one child's bear, tampered with it, and replaced it, resulting in an adult, apparently normal as everybody else, who was able to kill the world leader, because teddy never taught him that it was bad to kill people.
Is this doll a step in that direction? I sure hope not!
(Aside note - I read that story when I was very young (I was a precocious kid), and it really hurt me to think that *anybody* would take apart a *teddy bear* and make it do evil things. This doll evokes the same sort of feeling in me. )
Lemon curry?
A word's place in a language is how it's used by the speakers.
I can say feces and be unambigous in describing fecal matter to any English speaker.
Shit doesn't always describe animal excretia in English. It also describes a situation or thing which is negative to the point of requiring a word of curse. Much like sex and fuck can refer to the same thing, you don't go up to random people and talk about fucking unless you are very low brow. You can probably talk about sex, though, as long as it's appropriate to the context.
Languages are not logical -- sayings and alternate forms arrise all the time, and are designated as how people use them, not as logic would dictate.
For example, to indicate that someone had revealed a secret, one English expression you might say is, "he let the cat out of the bag." How does that relate to secrets? The french equivalent, "Il a vendu la meche." litterally translates as, "He sold the wick."
How about, "He's as tall as 3 apples." Is that easy to recognize like, "He's knee high to a grasshopper." is?
If you have a problem with the conotations and denotations of the English language, I suggest you learn another one. Then you might appreciate their usage better.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Does Cindy know or can she read any "bad" words?
Cindy can only recognize the words in her data base. If any word that is not in her "list" of recognized words, she will not say or spell it. There are no "bad" words in Cindy's vocabulary. All of her words are listed in her instruction manual.
This phenomenon is not limited to English. Many other languages have the property that foreign imported words are more acceptable in polite company than native words.
For example, in Japanese, there are three major categories of words:
- Native Japanese words, inherited from antiquity
- Chinese words, imported roughly 1000 years ago
- English words, imported since the 20th century and continuing to this day
In almost all cases the more recently imported words are more sophisticated than the older words. For example, the polite way to say restroom in Japanese is either "toire" (derived from the English word toilet) or "otearai" (imported from chinese, literally meaning "hand-wash"). There exist native Japanese words for restroom, but they connote dirtiness and one would never use them in polite company.The three-level categorization of Japanese allows for more interesting observations than English's two level Latin/Germanic split. Note here that the most recent English import "toilet" can be used directly in polite speech, while the older Chinese import requires a euphemism and the original native words cannot be used at all. Compare this to native English, where "toilet" is one of the crudest possible ways to refer to a restroom. Familiarity breeds contempt, in any language.
What I'd like to see is a doll like this, but with learning capability. In the simple case, you'd just give it USB and download word lists into it. In the complex case, you'd give it WiFi, and hook it up to google, so that it can learn in real-time.
Interested in making this happen? My idea is to add this to an Aibo (Sony's robotic Dog.) Sony has their Aibo SDK (which is moderately difficult to learn), but there's an alternative called Tekkotsu (means "iron bones" in Japanese). Tekkotsu builds on the basic functionality provided by the OPEN-R operating system. It is written in C++, (like the underlying system APIs) and makes full use of inheritance and templates. There is a delicate balance between ease of programming and speed of execution. Running a significant amount of vision, AI, and motion planning at the same time can easily overwhelm any system, even one as surprisingly powerful as the Aibo. With Tekkotsu, it's fairly easy to add additional behaviours and switch them on and off via the (very cool) menu system, so I've been investigating adding a reading skill to Aibo by porting available open-source code.
aibOCR would have two components: OCR (optical character recognition) and TTS (Text-to-speech). The OCR engine detects printed text (perhaps only recognize text written in a certain colour which, if detected, triggers OCR engine to keep processing demands low until needed?) The output from the OCR engine is plain text which is then optionally compared to a dictionary (to prevent misspellings) and fed to the TTS engine which converts the ASCII to phonemes, builds the sound stream and sends it to the speaker.
I've been looking at the opensource OCR program GOCR/JOCR (at sourceforge.net) and it might be a candidate for adapting to run on Aibo, but the image processing libraries on which it depends may need rewritten. It's not doing advanced deskewing, sharpening or outlining, and it's not comparing probable matches against a dictionary, so that simplifies the scope of the problem and the install footprint. OCRE is another package which might be suitable.
For TTS, there is surprisingly little out there in the opensource world. "Festival" v1.4.3 from Carnegie Mellon University might work, but for it's very large installation footprint. High quality sound comes at a cost, I suppose.
It's too bad that something simple like S.A.M. (Apple ][, ATARI 400/800) or the original Macintalk (Macintosh) or the corresponding version for the Apple Newton hasn't been opensourced. Either of those packages (designed for 8bit, 1mhz 6502) would be perfect for this experiment.
There's an alphabet toy that we got for our toddlers, which calls out the phonetic sounds associated with different letters. Sure enough, when you start to spell out objectionable words, it plays a little tune rather than stringing the sounds together...
That becomes its own source of fun, trying to work around it.
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The blind faith in snopes is fun to watch. The argument seems to hinge on GM's sales expectations and internal studies that scopes can't possibly have access to.
My new slogan for car pets: "Munching on car pets is fun for boys and girls." Will it affect sales in the positive ot the negative? What studies should we do to prove sales are affected by this slogan?
I want someone to multiply the power of the doll's engine *many* times. Then, I want them to fill it with lots of information and to give it a measure of speech as well as visual recognition.
I want to ask it fuzzy little questions about words. I want it to plug into my computer as my dictionary and thesaurus--no, did I say, 'plug in'? Sorry, I meant, interface via wifi with my computer, as my copy of seven different encyclopedias and as my database of seldom-used Bash and VI commands.
When all that is done, I want it to work pronunciation drills for me when I decide to improve my Russian and review my German.
Really, honestly, for me, all it needs to make me very, very happy as an adjunct to a computer is more power than I know what to do with and a glowing cubical casing.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."