I recall a few years ago watching a video of the first prototype Protate Gland removal robot in action (in the company of an aging robotician who was due into hospital a couple of dfays later to have the said operation done, but in a more conventional fashion). Excruciating. Plently of eye-watering links from google
"a method for getting those pesky Neural Nets to teach themselves to see"
Hmm. Well maybe I'm missing something, but it seem that the technique merely abstracts the training away from the functional network by one remove. The "Experts" still need training; the system does not appear to "teach" itself anything, but instead relies on the pooled opinion of already trained Experts.
It still seems to be missing the training bootstrap - how to we train ourselves in a system in which we are untrained?
Don't get me wrong; kudos to the researchers. But no brownie points at all to the journalists, slashdot or others, who appear to mistake an adept implementation of a pattern recognition system for something that it is not.
I guess it is to do with the mode of doing, rather than what is done, that has improved little or none since Grey-Walter's animats.
Walkers are interesting, sure; but so are the sort of mechanical puppets which so delighted the victorians. Legs or wheels is not the point. Sensing the environment and making use of the sensory data is the point. Grey-Walters animats did this very successfully. Brooks subsumption architecture robots did likewise, and with more cash spenbt on them, had more sensors, more end-effectors, did more... advanced the technological implementation... but... philosophically... did they move the state of the art on much? Arguably not.
What Brooks did successfully do is challange the heavy AI brigade, who wished to model the world and provide a priori plans to their robots; (again, arguably) much of their work sunk without trace (though there are idiots still labouring under the delusion - step forward Kevin Warwick). Brooks, after Walters, was more about reacting; not modelling; not planning; and as other posters have stated, getting emergent behaviours out of a set of simple behaviours. (And on that subject, I highly recommend a book by Braitenberg - Vehicles - Experiments in Synthetic Psychology which is a 150 page though experiment taking you through the sort of "emotions" that can arise out of simple combinations of sensors, wiring and end-effectors - including fear, love, hate, &c. Very powerful stuff.)
I remember a great deal of Behaviour based robotics stuff going on the mid to late 80's. Owen Holland, who rescued Grey-Walters animats, recalls behaviour-based robotics of the 50's. Here we are in the 00's, and, what we have are Lego Technics, BEAM, Sony's robots; the Sony and Toshiba walking robots... furbies... excellent technology... apparantly no nearer being able to make sense of their environment that the animats.
I think given the situation, the cable operators in Britain have done well, and they've made many an American cable operator look sluggish
Yes, but that it because the cable infrastructure in the UK is all relatively new, and was installed with bidirectional line amplifiers. US infrastructure is much older and was designed for broadcast not two-way comms, hence has unidirectional amplifiers. Viewed from that perspective, UK cable companies are doing okay at best; they certainly do not sparkle and there are still many cabled areas that do not offer cable-modem internet.
Perhaps the most classic quote or freudian slip was Home Office minister Paul Boateng saying the government would strive to get the balance right between the demands of industry and the demands of law enforcement. No mention, then, of the demands of the citizen for privicy in that balancing act.
CmdrTaco's mother has an equal and opposite concern. "I named him Robert, but the increasing use of spanish words in catering unhappily has influenced him to adopt a cod-spanish nickname", she said, gesturing ambiguously at a passing penguin.
I'm afraid the infiltration of english into other languages is one of those shit-happens things. In so far as English happily adopts any language it can lay its hands on, one has to advise the Spanish to get over it. The North American academics protest does seem a little reactionary; one is tempted to advise him to visit south-east Europe for a sojurn; I hear Spanish is flourishing in that area.
This whole story just smacks of credibility. not.
on
Son of HAL For Sale
·
· Score: 1
I should think HP is mostly indifferent to the tax premium, so long as it is applied to all CD burners. The reason for the tax may be galling, but to a corporate it is just another local tax like sales tax or import duty. It is naive in the extreme to think they would contemplate abandoning the German market to the benefit of their competitors.
It is for German consumers and business users to seek to advocate more liberal policies to their government. Of course, if the german business users do succeed then (cf another post on this strand) they could be construed to have replaced one plutocracy with another.
Fear of the law is overblown. It is perfectly legitimate to report that "my site/service was unable to connect to CNN / Yahoo-SMTP / Whatever, or to state that my site/service took x milliseconds to get to this site, y to get the that site."
>>>On the other hand, the chicks here are really good looking and they're really easy as well...:-)
Sadly a proportion of the men continue to be as repellent as ever...:-}
I'd disagree with you, but then I'm on the other side of the world. In UK Information Society circles (aka electronic government), actions in Australia are frequently pointed to as examples of best practise; such things as the multi-lingual dissemination of advice by your social services people, or the developing meta-data standards for legal information on the web.
Amusing as toilet humour is, the initiative under discussion here is in reality very welcome, and a further example of best practise. Albeit government tends to be a distributed hierarchical kind of an animal, it should be capable of arranging its information asset to that they can be joined together and turned into a resource useful to its citizens. This application achieves that aim. Other governments are doing similar things - such as UK Government's proposed Inforoute system, which will draw together sources of published government information. My view is that Australia steals a march on the rest of us by providing something of immediate practical use to all of its citizens, where the UK application will be appreciated by a small minority os citizens.
A final point. The toilet application verges on a mindset which thinks in terms of publishing everything by default, and restricting on a case by case basis. Certainly in the UK, the mindset still seems fixed on restricting by default, and publishing only on a case by case basis.
I went back to read the judgement on which the MPAA letter is predicated.
Wouldn't you know. The wording of the judgement and the wording of the letter do not match at all well. Gosh. What a surprise.
The Judgement prohibits "(c) knowingly linking any Internet web site operated by them to any other web site containing DeCSS, or knowingly maintaining any such link, for the purpose
of disseminating DeCSS. [my emphasis].
The implication is clear: a link to a DeCSS site for a purpose other than disseminating DeCSS (e.g. for the purpose of review of the whole issue, or of private study) is perfectly acceptable.
From time to time we may request that you provide us with certain personal information about you in connection with various services offered on our site. Google does not collect any personal information about you (such as your name, email address, etc.) except when you specifically and knowingly provide such information.
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And I think this is the biggest crock of shit opinion I have seen on slashdot in months.
The hand is one of *the* central parts of the body. So intimately connected to the brain is the hand, that it is more like an extension of a person's will. Upper limb loss is traumatic beyond belief. (Try keeping your dominant hand in your pocket and not using it for the next couple of days - you'll maybe start to understand.)
Mechanical prostheses are *very*limited, and often extremely uncomfortable to use. Myo-electric prostheses are - with few exceptions - primitive beyond belief.
Users of hands like ProDigits, the Utah hand, the Leverhume -Oxford hand, would (metaphorically) gladly take you outside and beat you to a pulp for uttering such a condiscending, ill-considered view.
You "just don't think its worth it" because you just don't know what you are talking about, and have not troubled yourself to apply the bare minimum of thought before mouthing off.
Dunno about direct brain control. This hand is using EMG sensors measuring changes in resistance on the surface of the skin of the forearm, as muscles flex. There is work in Sweden on ossio-integration of prostheses... attaching the prosthetic straight on to the bone; and direct electrical interfaces with nerve ends. Ossio-integration is nearer than useful nerve interfacing...
I can't find the figures right now; please take my word that myo-prosthesis have no strength problem - they're quite capable of crushing a human hand in a handshake.
It is not one strength fits all. The agenda is very much one of control - use of finger sensors to regulate the force exerted; and the application of microprocessor based adaptive control of the functionality of the hand, through a command-based interface (rather than switch control, or proportional control). And lots of other great stuff, from neural network based pattern recognition of EMG signals, through to diagnostic links allowing users to change hand parameters via their PC.
The major differece between ProDigit and previous hand prosthetics is that the motors and gearbox are housed in the finder, not in the palm area of the hand. I *think* the other major difference is that ProDigit has a curling finger action, whilst conventional myo-electric prostheses tend to have a prehensile grip in which the fingers do not curl. The hand has a more anthropomorphic design, in that the thumb abducts across the palm - conventional myos tend to have a straight opposing thumb.
There is more good stuff about - not sure how much is in ProDigit - such as better acquisition of EMG signals; use of sensors within the hand to augment the control function (e.g. incipient slip sensors which can tighten the grip without user intervention); adaptive control for different grip postures - precision, power and prehension...
Power is still a major issue; equally we all know battery technology has come on in bounds in the last ten years, and shaped batteries offer the prospect of further diminshing the package size.
One poster talked nonsense about "the indignity of being strapped to a machine". Roughly 102,000 persons in the US (251 M inhabitants = 1 in 2460) have absence or loss of an upper extremity. Myo-prosthesis are suitable for about 41,000 of them. In the western world, the market is about 132,000. Most users have had years of being supplied with crap prosthetics. ProDigits and its ilk *majorly* improve the functional capabilites of their users, & the work of David Gow and the PMR team is to be welcomed.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall a few years ago watching a video of the first prototype Protate Gland removal robot in action (in the company of an aging robotician who was due into hospital a couple of dfays later to have the said operation done, but in a more conventional fashion). Excruciating. Plently of eye-watering links from google
Hmm. Well maybe I'm missing something, but it seem that the technique merely abstracts the training away from the functional network by one remove. The "Experts" still need training; the system does not appear to "teach" itself anything, but instead relies on the pooled opinion of already trained Experts.
It still seems to be missing the training bootstrap - how to we train ourselves in a system in which we are untrained?
Don't get me wrong; kudos to the researchers. But no brownie points at all to the journalists, slashdot or others, who appear to mistake an adept implementation of a pattern recognition system for something that it is not.
Walkers are interesting, sure; but so are the sort of mechanical puppets which so delighted the victorians. Legs or wheels is not the point. Sensing the environment and making use of the sensory data is the point. Grey-Walters animats did this very successfully. Brooks subsumption architecture robots did likewise, and with more cash spenbt on them, had more sensors, more end-effectors, did more ... advanced the technological implementation ... but ... philosophically ... did they move the state of the art on much? Arguably not.
What Brooks did successfully do is challange the heavy AI brigade, who wished to model the world and provide a priori plans to their robots; (again, arguably) much of their work sunk without trace (though there are idiots still labouring under the delusion - step forward Kevin Warwick). Brooks, after Walters, was more about reacting; not modelling; not planning; and as other posters have stated, getting emergent behaviours out of a set of simple behaviours. (And on that subject, I highly recommend a book by Braitenberg - Vehicles - Experiments in Synthetic Psychology which is a 150 page though experiment taking you through the sort of "emotions" that can arise out of simple combinations of sensors, wiring and end-effectors - including fear, love, hate, &c. Very powerful stuff.)
I remember a great deal of Behaviour based robotics stuff going on the mid to late 80's. Owen Holland, who rescued Grey-Walters animats, recalls behaviour-based robotics of the 50's. Here we are in the 00's, and, what we have are Lego Technics, BEAM, Sony's robots; the Sony and Toshiba walking robots ... furbies ... excellent technology ... apparantly no nearer being able to make sense of their environment that the animats.
Yes, but that it because the cable infrastructure in the UK is all relatively new, and was installed with bidirectional line amplifiers. US infrastructure is much older and was designed for broadcast not two-way comms, hence has unidirectional amplifiers. Viewed from that perspective, UK cable companies are doing okay at best; they certainly do not sparkle and there are still many cabled areas that do not offer cable-modem internet.
Perhaps the most classic quote or freudian slip was Home Office minister Paul Boateng saying the government would strive to get the balance right between the demands of industry and the demands of law enforcement . No mention, then, of the demands of the citizen for privicy in that balancing act.
Or even south-west europe. Sorry; late night.
I'm afraid the infiltration of english into other languages is one of those shit-happens things. In so far as English happily adopts any language it can lay its hands on, one has to advise the Spanish to get over it. The North American academics protest does seem a little reactionary; one is tempted to advise him to visit south-east Europe for a sojurn; I hear Spanish is flourishing in that area.
The Register's angle on it.
Moravec has stiff competition in the "more intelligent than humans" stakes, from the UK's own Kevin Warwick
here's a timely article on "the options for companies that want to share some of the wealth with their workers" from The Observer, a UK broadsheet.
Looking *very* restrictive...not.
It is for German consumers and business users to seek to advocate more liberal policies to their government. Of course, if the german business users do succeed then (cf another post on this strand) they could be construed to have replaced one plutocracy with another.
Fear of the law is overblown. It is perfectly legitimate to report that "my site/service was unable to connect to CNN / Yahoo-SMTP / Whatever, or to state that my site/service took x milliseconds to get to this site, y to get the that site."
>>>On the other hand, the chicks here are really good looking and they're really easy as well...:-) Sadly a proportion of the men continue to be as repellent as ever...:-}
Amusing as toilet humour is, the initiative under discussion here is in reality very welcome, and a further example of best practise. Albeit government tends to be a distributed hierarchical kind of an animal, it should be capable of arranging its information asset to that they can be joined together and turned into a resource useful to its citizens. This application achieves that aim. Other governments are doing similar things - such as UK Government's proposed Inforoute system, which will draw together sources of published government information. My view is that Australia steals a march on the rest of us by providing something of immediate practical use to all of its citizens, where the UK application will be appreciated by a small minority os citizens.
A final point. The toilet application verges on a mindset which thinks in terms of publishing everything by default, and restricting on a case by case basis. Certainly in the UK, the mindset still seems fixed on restricting by default, and publishing only on a case by case basis.
Oz may not suck quite as much as you think.
Wouldn't you know. The wording of the judgement and the wording of the letter do not match at all well. Gosh. What a surprise.
The Judgement prohibits "(c) knowingly linking any Internet web site operated by them to any other web site containing DeCSS, or knowingly maintaining any such link, for the purpose of disseminating DeCSS . [my emphasis].
The implication is clear: a link to a DeCSS site for a purpose other than disseminating DeCSS (e.g. for the purpose of review of the whole issue, or of private study) is perfectly acceptable.
What Information Do We Collect?
From time to time we may request that you provide us with certain personal information about you in connection with various services offered on our site. Google does not collect any personal information about you (such as your name, email address, etc.) except when you specifically and knowingly provide such information.
Links to Other Sites
The sites displayed as search results or linked to by Google Search Services are developed by people over whom Google exercises no control. Other links, such as those for the Google-friends mailing list archive, are also on sites not controlled by Google. These other sites may send their own cookies to users, collect data, or solicit personal information. Google may choose to exhibit its search results in the form of a "URL redirecter." When Google uses a URL redirecter, if you click on a URL from a search result, information about the click is sent to Google, and Google in turn sends you to the site you clicked on. Google uses this URL information to understand and improve the quality of Google's search technology. For instance, Google uses this information to determine how often users are satisfied with the first result of a query and how often they proceed to later results.
With Whom Does Google Share Information?
Google may share information about you with advertisers, business partners, sponsors, and other third parties. However, we only divulge aggregate information about our users and will not share personally identifiable information with any third party without your express consent. For example, we may disclose how frequently the average Google user visits Google, or which other query words are most often used with the query word "Linux." Please be aware, however, that we will release specific personal information about you if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order.
The hand is one of *the* central parts of the body. So intimately connected to the brain is the hand, that it is more like an extension of a person's will. Upper limb loss is traumatic beyond belief. (Try keeping your dominant hand in your pocket and not using it for the next couple of days - you'll maybe start to understand.)
Mechanical prostheses are *very*limited, and often extremely uncomfortable to use. Myo-electric prostheses are - with few exceptions - primitive beyond belief.
Users of hands like ProDigits, the Utah hand, the Leverhume -Oxford hand, would (metaphorically) gladly take you outside and beat you to a pulp for uttering such a condiscending, ill-considered view.
You "just don't think its worth it" because you just don't know what you are talking about, and have not troubled yourself to apply the bare minimum of thought before mouthing off.
Dunno about direct brain control. This hand is using EMG sensors measuring changes in resistance on the surface of the skin of the forearm, as muscles flex. There is work in Sweden on ossio-integration of prostheses ... attaching the prosthetic straight on to the bone; and direct electrical interfaces with nerve ends. Ossio-integration is nearer than useful nerve interfacing...
It is not one strength fits all. The agenda is very much one of control - use of finger sensors to regulate the force exerted; and the application of microprocessor based adaptive control of the functionality of the hand, through a command-based interface (rather than switch control, or proportional control). And lots of other great stuff, from neural network based pattern recognition of EMG signals, through to diagnostic links allowing users to change hand parameters via their PC.
See: it doesn't make you look any happer.
There is more good stuff about - not sure how much is in ProDigit - such as better acquisition of EMG signals; use of sensors within the hand to augment the control function (e.g. incipient slip sensors which can tighten the grip without user intervention); adaptive control for different grip postures - precision, power and prehension...
Power is still a major issue; equally we all know battery technology has come on in bounds in the last ten years, and shaped batteries offer the prospect of further diminshing the package size.
One poster talked nonsense about "the indignity of being strapped to a machine". Roughly 102,000 persons in the US (251 M inhabitants = 1 in 2460) have absence or loss of an upper extremity. Myo-prosthesis are suitable for about 41,000 of them. In the western world, the market is about 132,000. Most users have had years of being supplied with crap prosthetics. ProDigits and its ilk *majorly* improve the functional capabilites of their users, & the work of David Gow and the PMR team is to be welcomed.
What are the seven taboo words? And should they be the subject of a slashdot poll? I think so.
Fuck is such a useful word. Doesn't your constitution provide for dealing with people who are a bit anal about the fuck word?
I don't feel like a Pioneer, I feel fine. :-)