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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.
It won't be long until some kid has her read "eye yam sofa king we todd did."
...but can she run Linux?
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
okay, now cindy, spell icup
Game Overdrive - Gaming News
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.
Ken says he'd rather have a beowulf cluster of Barbies.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The Sim Pal doll in The 6th Day was named Cindy. I wonder if this is more than just a coincidence...
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
'We don't say those kind of words,' she shrills, refusing to even spell obscenities
;)
I guess she won't be saying McBride or SCO anytime soon either.
it says she can do math, but will she recognize 8 / 0?
"We don't do that math", "That's a naughty divisor!"
My kid sister had this caterpiller toy that had buttons that would say the number, letter, or phonetic sound that was associated with the button. It took me about 30 seconds to figure out that if I hit the phonetic f key and the phonetic q key it would go fa que. Needless to say my kid sister thought this was hilarious, not because she knew what it said, but just to see every one elses reaction. I don't think my parents every replaced the battery in that thing....
Why can't we let the children be children while they are still young? Do they need all this tech?
Most girls would be satidfied with a old fashion doll without all this hihg-tech stuff.
So someone please think of the childre instead of trying to earn a buck by trciking innocent parents into buying these items.
Proud patriot and republican voter.
She doesn't know how to say 'no' either.
We don't click those kind of links... That's a bad link.
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??
The Furby can run PicoGUI.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
This sounds like the kind of doll that comes to life at night, eyes glowing red, saying "You must kill mommy and daddy," while its head spins completely around.
No, maybe we shouldn't
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'?
...
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
"Hi, I'm Cindy the seeing Doll powered by Windows CE. Before you can use me I need to tell you my EULA and you must say 'I accept' when I have finished. This process will take approximately three hours. At the end of this process you will be able to activate me by ringing a toll free Microsoft number and telling me my 16 digit activation number." ... three hours twenty five minutes later
"Hi Cindy, how are you today?"
"Hello, I'm Cindy the talking doll and I would like to tell you about the new range of Smart Screens available from Microsoft. This will take approximately three hours. Are you ready to start?"
consider coffee a lubricant that helps one penetrate the coding zone
Yes, it works at first.
But then the thing hits that pesky hyper-hypercube configuration, goes second-order sapient, and starts looking to increase its "cultural and technological distinctiveness."
The more pathetic sort of extropian might see getting uploaded into such a gestalt as a Big Win, but really, what's the worth of an ersatz immortality with an IQ of 97 (remember that fourth-order-cube limit) and a voice interface that randomly throws in phrases like "math class is harrrrrd!?
Play it safe. Stick with FurbyNets with 254 or fewer nodes, and keep some spray paint on hand to blank out those IR transcievers, just in case.
Stefan It's out! Jones.
Don't like to say certain words eh? We'll just see what me and my PROM burner can do about that.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I'd be giving it about an 80% chance of saying 'no! that's a bad word!' when presented with "sex". Yay. Pass the silly cultural hangups on to the next generation, and confuse 'em good and proper as well.
now can they make a bigger version, for us kids at slashdot ? We dont mind her not willing to say *certain* words as long as she understands what it means.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
We can only hope they've put in those safeguards*.
Worst case scenario: She succeeds in dividing by zero, and suddenly little Tiphany-Amber's bedroom becomes the center of a howling vortex of nonspace, frying the neighborhood with sparkling discharges of zero-point energy.
Stefan It's out! Jones
*The early pocket-calculator manufacturers only cut corners once. Remember that HP plant in Bennettown, CA? Tire fire my ass.
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.
Associated Press - The 6-year old daughter of an IBM engineer was killed after the Cindy Smart doll she received as a birthday present overheard the girl's father in the adjacent room yelling "F***! Where the hell did I put my Linux distro CDs?". Apparently, the doll immediately strangled the little girl in response. Although the police initially thought the doll's reaction was triggered by the use of the F word, it was later determined that the embedded version of Windows CE snapped on the utterance of the word "Linux". Microsoft could not be reached today. The toy's manufacturer canceled plans for a similar version for boys that was to be dubbed Smarmy Darl.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I find it fascinating that Slashdot A.) Found the story interesting enough to post, and B.) Automatically reached for reasons to deride it. I find it interesting that the idea of a doll that can't say "shit" or "fuck" offends the Slashdot ethos. Lurking behind this story being posted at all, and most of the comments on the subject thus far, seems to be the idea that parents trying to shield their children from obscenity isn't merely futile, but is, in fact, actively evil.
Why is that?
I get the impression that the vast majority of Slashdot readers don't have children. (Insert the obvious "don't have girlfriend" jokes on your own.) One doesn't have to be John Ashcroft or Oral Roberts to believe that maybe six-year-olds don't need to learn the word "cocksucker."
I am far from a prude. I've used lots of those four-letter words in my own fiction, when needed, and laughed my ass off at "Shut Your Fucking Face, Uncle Fucker" from South Park: The Movie. And I myself don't have kids. But oddly enough, despite that, I can still imagine why parents might want a doll that can't say obscenities. I find it rather interesting that, thus far, not a single Slashdot poster seems willing to consider the fact that such a doll might indeed have a useful purpose...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
All right, since when are we all so sick that the first things people think about when we talk about a kid's toy are the ways we can subvert it to our lecherous and or insane desires.
I remember, back when I was a kid, the best thing we had in talking things was the Jurrasic Park playset, all it would say for five days was, "Jurrasic Park Compound Secured" and then a light would flash. God damned, I barely even got new toys, I just got a bunch of modeling clay and pretended that they were new toys. Parents, I urge you, modeling clay is cheap (but a little messy) and it lets your children express their creativity. Don't just buy them a toy because it can do your parenting for you (and don't use television or computers for the same thing) because that's how the evil robots will take over the planet.
On a more serious note, I think that interactive toys are a nice touch, but I always thought that the point of getting toys was to make up your own adventures and envision how everything played out with a physical aid and your imagination. And yes, when I was younger (okay, like seven years ago) I did play with sticks and dirt, it's good stuff.
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!
Apparently political correctness is higher in their priorities than good education. "Those" is plural, but "kind" is singular. For $149, I expect proper grammar.
Maybe Cindy Smart didn't pass the child play test. I found it discounted from the original $150 MSRP down to only $29.21 at hsn.com.
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?
... but fuck that little soulless twat.
I remember a BBS a few decades ago where it was impossible to discuss the prime minister of japan. The man's name was takeshita.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
The Slashdots - Cindy
I met her in a Radio Shack in old Soho
Where you drink Coca Cola(r) and it tastes just like carbonated, caffeinated brown water
See-oh-el-aye cola
She walked up to me and she asked me to fisrt post
I asked her her name and in a dark Linux(r) voice she said Cindy
See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why Cindy la-la-la-la Cindy
Well I'm not the world's most technical guy
But when she squeezed me tight she nearly dumped my kernel
Oh my Cindy See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why
I'm not an AC but I can't understand
Why she walked like a doll and talked like a nun
Oh my Cindy See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why Cindy la-la-la-la Cindy
Well we drank Jolt and raved all night
Under electric high intensity discharge xenon candlelight
She picked me up and sat me on her plastic knee
And said dear boy won't you come home with me
Well I'm not the world's most passionate geek
But when I looked in her glass eyes well I almost fell for my Cindy
See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why
I pushed her away
I walked to the X-terminal
I fell to the pile of floppies
I got down on my knees
Then I looked at her and she at me
Well that's the way that I want it to stay
And I always want it to be that way for my Cindy
See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why Cindy
Girls will be dolls and boys will be geeks
It's a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why Cindy
Well I left my basement just a week before
And I'd never ever kissed a woman before
But Cindy smiled and took me by the hand
And said dear geek I'm gonna make you a kernel God
Well I'm not the world's most masculine geek
But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a geek
And so is Cindy
See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why
See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why See-Eye-Enn-Dee-Why
Judging from the way Ken dresses, I'd say he'd want a beowulf cluster of Kens. Go ahead. Think about it. I'll wait...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Goto?
That's bad code.
We don't code with those commands.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
But when you did, I thought to myself, "Whale oil beef hooked."
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I'm sorry, Dave, we don't say those kind of words...
when C++ is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
She will function just fine until the SoBig.F attack installs a backdoor in her. Before you know it she will be spewing spam transmitting voyeur video from a little girl's bedroom to paid websites.
... "Please dont vote for them. That is a bad word" "Bomb Iraq" "That is a wonderful sentence" "You are a good girl" "Join the navy"
Maybe her big brother will replace the code with a quake2 time demo and hand it a real gun.
I'll bet it has been designed with Republican propaganda... "Democrat"
What if it instructs the little girl to call a certain phone line at a certain date. Gotta love phone-line DDoS attacks.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
found from Froogle:x ?pfid=6564 62
http://www.hsn.com/cnt/prod/default.asp
Nice thing about froogle. I'd normally never look at places like HSN, but when they were dumping Zaurus's for under $200...
No Zen is good zen
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.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
For example, my daughter has an Alpha Bug (it's not exactly like that, but really close.) One of the first things adults do with this sort of thing is see what kind of bad words you can make it say ... but it won't do it. It'll go F ... U ... ohhh that tickles!
We mentioned this to a friend of ours who also had an Alpha Bug, and he must have had an earlier version -- while it looked identical, it *would* let you make bad word sounds. Oddly enough, as soon as we mentioned that we had an alpha bug, he immediately picked it up and starting showing us how it can say bad words (even before we got to that part. So obviously we're not alone in this :)
And yesterday, I bought some other Leap Frog toy for my daughter at a garage sale. It's a cylindrical thing that you can rotate the sides to pick letters, and it apparantly knows every 3 letter word, and even has recordings of somebody saying each and every one (it's not just speech synthesis.) If it doesn't know the word, it will spell out the sounds, but if it does it'll say it perfectly. (Pretty impressive for $2!) (It's very similar to this but not quite identical.)
In any event, it won't even spell out things that sound like a bad word -- it says `F ... U ... pick another word!'. (Oddly enough, even `JAP' is a bad word according to it. :)
In any event, if you have friends with young kids, but they're not really good friends, you buy them stuff like this -- stuff that makes noise. Very annoying :)
I spent some time in college studying Natural Language Processing. Amazing stuff. One of the coolest things about _all_ languages is that the frequencies of "tokens" (generally words) is mathematically predictable. If I remember correctly, the break down follows Zipf's Law, and is something like 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 etc...
Obviously the most common words occur much more often, but as the corpus (i.e. set of words you know) grows, you get rapidly dimishing returns. 500 words is a pretty good set of words if they are the most common words in the language. To lineraly increase the likelyhood of the doll knowing a random word the makers would have to add memory at a much greater than linear rate.
And all this so it won't say "shit, fart, damn, fuck". Ahhh science. I feel safer already.
Just what are we protecting our children from? When do they lose the benefit of that protection? Is shielding them from things that they're are GOING to be exposed to for the rest of their lives really protecting them at all?
In short, yes.
You have the air of a teenager who does not spend much time with children. The fact is that a six year old is not equipped to understand sex. With sufficient "education" they could probably pass a sex-ed exam, but that's "book learning"; they still don't understand it. Among other things, they are literally not physically equipped to understand what "sex drive" or "horny" really means.
You have forgotten this because you are now old enough to understand, but in your lack of empathy you forget that everyone is not like you, especially children.
The problem is that what a child does not truly understand will be filled in with something, and the odds of them filling it in correctly are effectively zero. Surely you've seen one of those humor postings that contains 20 or 30 "explanations" from children about how the world works, all very funny, all very wrong. Now imagine that with sex, where they don't have the first clue what it is.
While one does not necessarily need to go to extremes to shield a child (because mercifully they are rather uncurious about stuff they have no inkling even exists; most 5 or 6 year olds should be happy with the explanations that babies require a mommy and a daddy, and probe for only limited details beyond that), it is still better to shield them from stuff that they can not and will not understand, until they have a framework for handling it.
For a more neutral example, look at the number of Slashdot-type people who believe mystical things about Electromagnetism or Quantum Physics or other subjects they totally don't understand. Their ignorance is filled in with garbage.
Furthermore, unlike misunderstanding QM or EM, which is relatively harmless, a misunderstanding of sex has empirically verifiable negative effects on people, ranging from merely awkward moments that should't have been awkward to seriously maladjustments (often caused by early sexual abuse; remember I'm using this as an extreme) requiring years of therapy to address, if it can be addressed at all.
Shielding a child from these things is an attempt to prevent the child from experiencing these negative effects. Any parent who doesn't shield their kid to a large degree is doing their child a serious, potentially life-changing (negatively) misservice.
I'm a big believer that we seriously underestimate our children routinely and are harming them thereby. But this is an exception. Try to teach a third-grader calculus, and they won't get it (with rare exceptions; see Piaget's theories for reasoning on that), but the misunderstandings they will develop won't harm them significantly. That's not true for sex; it has real effects on relationships and understanding their place in the world.
For a humorous demonstration of this, there's a South Park episode where the kids learn about sex; I recommend it to you. It's not as far out as it might seem; the only reason that sort of thing doesn't happen in real life (except for the final silly Mad-Max-style assault bit) is that kids feed back to their parents what they learned, and some of the parents would have noticed sooner the misconceptions they were developing and taken steps to defuse them. Otherwise, the damage done to the children's relationships (and in the real world, it could be worse; it certainly wouldn't be artifically erased at the end of the episode when the Reset Button is pushed) would be real.
Well I, for one, welcome our... ..no wait, I can't say these words
How long until the All American doll comes around that teaches children "freedom is a naughty word" or "we don't talk about disobedience"?
Join Tor today!
Cindy sounds American...
radsoft.net
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..."