Re:Overcomplication
on
Hospital Robots
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I can understand your viewpoint from the standpoint of document transferral -- tis much cheaper and efficient to do it electronically, however this robot has benefits that are realizable from a physical materials standpoint.
I used to work in a large switch manufacturing facility that used rover robots extensively to transpoint large amount of material or components all around the factory floor, and these rovers were very useful in that they seldom broke down, and when they did, the plant had people on hand to be able to fix them. They also weren't mission critical -- if they all broke down, the backup was to get out the forklifts and manually move items from site to site, but that expends a person's time, which is much more valuable than a machine which can work 24x7.
In a hospital environment, this would be useful for transporting daily medications from a central pharmacy to the various in-patient floors throughout a facility. I wouldn't trust it to deliver it directly to the patient, since drug administration should be carried out by licensed practitioners, but taking it to the nurses station would save time. Also, could be useful to transport materials such as instruments, bandages, gauze, etc, from a central storage to the nurses stations as well. I see lots of applications for this robot, and not just within the health care sector.
Homepage for "Tobor"
on
Hospital Robots
·
· Score: 4, Informative
AI finally gets a home
on
Hospital Robots
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Well, it only took 50 years, but looks like the commercial world has finally found a practical application for AI. It would be interesting to find out if the robot is adaptable to its surroundings, or if it is just a command follower -- like the automatons that rove around assembly plants and such. It sounds like it has a fairly decent forward motion detection module and that its mobility module is integrated into that nicely as well. I wonder though if it is capable of maze transversal, and other classical AI applications.
There are a lot of language that aren't likely to get the attention of translation system developers any time soon.
Right, which is why I mentioned that it will take a dedicated effort for it to become more functional than what is already available. I can see how this would be immensely popular for international trade, or for more mundane things like being able to travel to countries or lands that don't use your language. This kind of product would be a great help to the people of India for example, where there are literally hundreds of languages used within the country.
My concern is that while others may be able to devote time, money, and resources to their translation projects, but on the small scale, I wonder whether it would ever get critical mass enough to stay alive. I think it's a great idea, but it's going to take a lot of effort and dedication for it to really make a difference.
Babel Fish kinds of translators have already been out for quite some time. The distributed nature of this makes it mmore interesting, but there will have to be a concerted effort for it to supplant what has already been started elsewhere on Altavista and such.
City of Columbus Water & Sewer Department 700 Main Street Columbus, Ohio 43201
Mr. Smith:
We regret to inform you that due to the non-payment of your bill for the past three months that access to your toilets has been suspended. When sufficient payment has been remitted to our billing department, we will unlock the lids and allow normal operation to recommence.
If you wan't politicians to listen to you, bring cash. When your interests ($$$) becomes a more convincing than other clients' interests ($$$), then you'll get your point heard.
In one of his stories, SF author Larry Niven proposed a beer mug that had a matter transporter in the bottom. Instead of calling the bartender, it automatically, silently refilled itself from the keg.
Will this suffice? No universal generalizations made anymore, but I do believe that the above premise is a valid statement. You may not like it, and that's your opinion, but there are still many that do.
Mossberg has a point. I like Linux, just like the next techie, but if the product won't do what it is designed to do, then no amount of implementations of the hot buzzword technologies will help a product survive.
It may simply be immature at this point as a product, and can probably be revised, but as they say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Does it really seem like that should be considered a good thing? I mean, isn't that a little bit like telling people the airline doesn't have a pilot, thereby eliminating one more thing that might otherwise "siphon" money from the airline stockholders?
Actally, it's most like telling a heart patient that his pacemaker is nice and cheap, but let's just hope that battery never runs out, because we can't replace it...
Obviously, I'm somewhat of a minority in this aspect, in that I enjoy other things outside of the standard geek realm, especially something as barbaric as football. But anyway...
Think of this scenario. Multi-city access to your television set to watch every game being broadcast on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. TD! Change to FOX-NY. Incomplete. Change to CBS-LA. Run for 6 yards, 1st down. Change to CBS-Chicago. Click, click, click.....wow. It would be like having your own sports bar in your living room! Without the bar smell! Woohoo!
voice recognition software is where i see major strides coming from (that and a good education everywhere on correct phonetics). i've heard that most people talk at 100 wpm
Yes, but can you imagine a group of Perl programmers in a cubicle-maze all speaking out loud trying to write code on a Windoze machine with voice-recognition software?
Programmer: dollar-foo equal dollar-underscore semi-colon enter Computer: Ummm.....crash
Besides, with the archaic meta-syntaxes of most languages, it's far easier to just type in the code, and much faster with ten fingers on a keyboard than one hand on a pen. Just my $0.02....
It looks like they've changed more than the headers, as an attempt to go to an obvious bogus link on their site like http://www..../foo results in the standard IIS error page.
Of course now that we know that, who wants to predict how long until the site crashes? Perhaps Netcraft can track this as well...
Slashdot, a usually vibrant hotspot on the Internet for technical discussions, imploded due to the complete lack of content on Monday. Witnesses described a loud, sucking noise emanating from the once-intelligent gathering spot, stating that "once the pigeons flew overhead, we knew it was all over".
Slashdot founder Rob Malda was unavailable for comment....
Go to JunkBusters website for lots of information on how to beat the spam mailers, as well as other info on telemarketers, junk snail mail, and lots more. Fairly decent site...(no it's not my site)
Throughout history, anytime that we've introduced a new species to areas that could not cope with them, it has usually resulted in a major domino effect on all the other indigenous species in the area. Just look at the decline of Hawaii's native flora and fauna for examples.
Now we're talking about tampering with creatures for whom we have no idea of their capabilities nor their strengths or weaknesses in what will eventually be an uncontrolled environment. We have no idea if the mutations will take hold, if they will simply get breeded out of the gene pool, or if something else might occur to the modified moths that we can't forsee. Nature has a way of doing crazy things like that.
Usually, I don't fear the unknown too much, but something about doing this just frightens the heebie jeebies out of me.
Slashdot Mirror
I can understand your viewpoint from the standpoint of document transferral -- tis much cheaper and efficient to do it electronically, however this robot has benefits that are realizable from a physical materials standpoint.
I used to work in a large switch manufacturing facility that used rover robots extensively to transpoint large amount of material or components all around the factory floor, and these rovers were very useful in that they seldom broke down, and when they did, the plant had people on hand to be able to fix them. They also weren't mission critical -- if they all broke down, the backup was to get out the forklifts and manually move items from site to site, but that expends a person's time, which is much more valuable than a machine which can work 24x7.
In a hospital environment, this would be useful for transporting daily medications from a central pharmacy to the various in-patient floors throughout a facility. I wouldn't trust it to deliver it directly to the patient, since drug administration should be carried out by licensed practitioners, but taking it to the nurses station would save time. Also, could be useful to transport materials such as instruments, bandages, gauze, etc, from a central storage to the nurses stations as well. I see lots of applications for this robot, and not just within the health care sector.
Pyxis Corporation
Well, it only took 50 years, but looks like the commercial world has finally found a practical application for AI. It would be interesting to find out if the robot is adaptable to its surroundings, or if it is just a command follower -- like the automatons that rove around assembly plants and such. It sounds like it has a fairly decent forward motion detection module and that its mobility module is integrated into that nicely as well. I wonder though if it is capable of maze transversal, and other classical AI applications.
May be worth keeping an eye on in the future...
There are a lot of language that aren't likely to get the attention of translation system developers any time soon.
Right, which is why I mentioned that it will take a dedicated effort for it to become more functional than what is already available. I can see how this would be immensely popular for international trade, or for more mundane things like being able to travel to countries or lands that don't use your language. This kind of product would be a great help to the people of India for example, where there are literally hundreds of languages used within the country.
My concern is that while others may be able to devote time, money, and resources to their translation projects, but on the small scale, I wonder whether it would ever get critical mass enough to stay alive. I think it's a great idea, but it's going to take a lot of effort and dedication for it to really make a difference.
Babel Fish kinds of translators have already been out for quite some time. The distributed nature of this makes it mmore interesting, but there will have to be a concerted effort for it to supplant what has already been started elsewhere on Altavista and such.
City of Columbus Water & Sewer Department
700 Main Street
Columbus, Ohio 43201
Mr. Smith:
We regret to inform you that due to the non-payment of your bill for the past three months that access to your toilets has been suspended. When sufficient payment has been remitted to our billing department, we will unlock the lids and allow normal operation to recommence.
Sincerely,
U. Needa John, Head of Accounting
He who controls the medium, controls the media.
If you wan't politicians to listen to you, bring cash. When your interests ($$$) becomes a more convincing than other clients' interests ($$$), then you'll get your point heard.
how about a beer stein that can scan the crowd in the bar...and then keep ordering you beers until the ladies look good...
Of course, you're going home sober that night if the bar is already full of good-looking people and you're the troll...
In one of his stories, SF author Larry Niven proposed a beer mug that had a matter transporter in the bottom. Instead of calling the bartender, it automatically, silently refilled itself from the keg.
Why not just implant the device in my stomach?
Stealing unashamedly from Dilbert:
"People may think that IT is built on silicon and transistors, but foam rubber and plastic toys are equally important."
Let me rephrase then...
"I like Linux, as do many techies..."
Will this suffice? No universal generalizations made anymore, but I do believe that the above premise is a valid statement. You may not like it, and that's your opinion, but there are still many that do.
Nuff said...
Mossberg has a point. I like Linux, just like the next techie, but if the product won't do what it is designed to do, then no amount of implementations of the hot buzzword technologies will help a product survive.
It may simply be immature at this point as a product, and can probably be revised, but as they say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
We have got to install these in American courtrooms. Point them directly at the lawyers.
While we're at it, let's set these up around MTV studios in Times Square. Bliss.
Does it really seem like that should be considered a good thing? I mean, isn't that a little bit like telling people the airline doesn't have a pilot, thereby eliminating one more thing that might otherwise "siphon" money from the airline stockholders?
Actally, it's most like telling a heart patient that his pacemaker is nice and cheap, but let's just hope that battery never runs out, because we can't replace it...
Obviously, I'm somewhat of a minority in this aspect, in that I enjoy other things outside of the standard geek realm, especially something as barbaric as football. But anyway...
Think of this scenario. Multi-city access to your television set to watch every game being broadcast on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. TD! Change to FOX-NY. Incomplete. Change to CBS-LA. Run for 6 yards, 1st down. Change to CBS-Chicago. Click, click, click.....wow. It would be like having your own sports bar in your living room! Without the bar smell! Woohoo!
Yes, but can you imagine a group of Perl programmers in a cubicle-maze all speaking out loud trying to write code on a Windoze machine with voice-recognition software?
Besides, with the archaic meta-syntaxes of most languages, it's far easier to just type in the code, and much faster with ten fingers on a keyboard than one hand on a pen. Just my $0.02....
It looks like they've changed more than the headers, as an attempt to go to an obvious bogus link on their site like http://www..../foo results in the standard IIS error page.
Of course now that we know that, who wants to predict how long until the site crashes? Perhaps Netcraft can track this as well...
Slashdot, a usually vibrant hotspot on the Internet for technical discussions, imploded due to the complete lack of content on Monday. Witnesses described a loud, sucking noise emanating from the once-intelligent gathering spot, stating that "once the pigeons flew overhead, we knew it was all over".
Slashdot founder Rob Malda was unavailable for comment....
Ah yes, but pigeons are non-migratory...
If there were ever a better time for the Peregrine Falcon Recovery Plan to take off and kill these stupid pigeon-based April Fool's Day jokes....
You just know that some engineer at Verio who was tasked to setup this site is absolutely laughing his/her a$$ off right about now...
In a related story, Microsoft has suspended their funding for the Emperor Penguin exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo in North Seattle...
Go to JunkBusters website for lots of information on how to beat the spam mailers, as well as other info on telemarketers, junk snail mail, and lots more. Fairly decent site...(no it's not my site)
Wouldn't this provide one excellent scenario for an AEGIS-class cruiser to test out their capabilities on random targets?
Now we're talking about tampering with creatures for whom we have no idea of their capabilities nor their strengths or weaknesses in what will eventually be an uncontrolled environment. We have no idea if the mutations will take hold, if they will simply get breeded out of the gene pool, or if something else might occur to the modified moths that we can't forsee. Nature has a way of doing crazy things like that.
Usually, I don't fear the unknown too much, but something about doing this just frightens the heebie jeebies out of me.