I would disagree. There are a lot of Business applications out there which do some pretty advanced data modelling off of Spreadsheet/OLAP Data stores using Flash as the underlying technology. I have seen quite a few being used by some Financial Analysts. Check this out. The only way thing the average joe cares about is whether or not his stuff will work on Linux. And people who are users/consumers of such Flash-based applications/products/end-results are, more often than not, decision makers.
But Consider that on an average a business will not want to be placed on top for more than a few keywords. The Search spammers will then be able to spread out the cost of a few sites over a large number of businesses....
What I would like to know is, if the spam filter is more accurate than humans, then by definition, how have they detected 1 misclassification? maybe there were two misclassifications and they detected only 1? by definiton, they are worse off than the filter itself.....
I would love to see Rob get more involved and do this type of stuff....brings back memories of the old days when this was News for Nerds, Stuf that "MATTERS"
...it's a windows only product, but for organizing email on windows boxes, I would recommend Nelson. I use it at work, and it allows me to organize a single email using multiple classifications and has a ton of other feartures. Check it out.
Czech Republic: Humanoid Robot Livens Up Japanese Premier's Delegation By Kathleen Knox
Robots that walk and talk like humans have come a long way in the last few years. Now a humanoid robot has even been included in an official delegation accompanying Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to Prague.
Prague, 22 August 2003 (RFE/RL) -- With his white "suit" and standing at just over a meter tall, Asimo the humanoid robot resembles a diminutive astronaut.
"I am Asimo," he says. "I've come to the Czech Republic, the country where the word robot was invented, with Prime Minister [Junichiro] Koizumi."
Asimo -- or Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility -- can walk on two legs and climb stairs. He can recognize voices and follow simple instructions.
That makes him one of the world's most advanced human-like robots.
And he can also dance, as he showed a crowd of spectators in Prague's national museum today.
As Asimo noted, it was a Czech writer -- Karel Capek -- who first used the word "robot" in his 1920 play, "Rossum's Universal Robots."
That's why Asimo was brought along on Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi's visit to Prague this week.
He even attended the official dinner last night and toasted the Czech prime minister, Vladimir Spidla -- himself a bit stiff and robot-like, according to critics.
"Good evening, Prime Minister Spidla," Asimo said. "Pleased to meet you. I am a robot, a goodwill ambassador."
A robot delegate clearly has its advantages. He won't embarrass the host with off-color remarks, or get too tipsy on champagne.
But humanoid robots still have only limited uses, like for entertainment or publicity stunts.
Other robot technology, however, has made some exciting advances -- robot arms already help out in brain surgery. British scientists have developed a snake-like robot spy that can "evolve" and adapt to injury. A robot "suit" is in the works -- one that will help disabled or old people walk, climb stairs, or sit without a chair.
But it will be a while before humanoid robots are advanced enough to even do household chores, says German robot expert Helge Ritter.
"It may seem very difficult and sophisticated to assist in brain surgery, but there the task is carefully cut out and mainly formed in a way that it is largely positioning and high-precision application for very specialized tools. In a household, the problem is basically that there is no high precision around, you don't have any databases about where your objects are, the room can be not cleaned up, there will be objects around, pets and children, you will have deformable objects such as carpets, cushions. And to deal with such a variable environment poses a lot of challenges to robots."
It's almost comforting to see how hard robots find actions most of us take for granted -- like walking and climbing, or grasping objects with a hand.
So why make robots like humans anyway? Ritter says there are several reasons.
One is so they can fit into a world already made according to human needs. It's also easier for humans to figure out how a robot with hands and legs can perform a task than one with wheels.
And then, of course, there's the emotional side. Once robots have sufficiently advanced cognitive skills, a human-like form will greatly smooth communication.
"We use head movements, eye movements, body movements in order to run a dialogue. If someone looks at me I see that now he attends to my words, or I recognize that now it's my turn to step in and say something. And all these things can work in an effortless way only if we also endow our machines with a similar repertoire of reactions -- if we give them heads, or at least if we depict heads on a computer screen that can look at us and give us some feedback if the robot attends to me or a different speaker."
So, while the laughter and applause show what the humans thought of Asimo, unfortunately he isn't able to tell us how he enjoyed his visit to Prague -- not yet, anyway.
A new type of "smart" machine that could fundamentally change how people interact with computers is on the not-too-distant horizon at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories.
Over the past five years a team led by Sandia cognitive psychologist Chris Forsythe has been developing cognitive machines that accurately infer user intent, remember experiences with users and allow users to call upon simulated experts to help them analyze situations and make decisions.
"In the long term, the benefits from this effort are expected to include augmenting human effectiveness and embedding these cognitive models into systems like robots and vehicles for better human-hardware interactions," says John Wagner, manager of Sandia's Computational Initiatives Department. "We expect to be able to model, simulate and analyze humans and societies of humans for Department of Energy, military and national security applications."
Synthetic human The initial goal of the work was to create a "synthetic human" -- software program/computer -- that could think like a person.
"We had the massive computers that could compute the large amounts of data, but software that could realistically model how people think and make decisions was missing," Forsythe says.
There were two significant problems with modeling software. First, the software did not relate to how people actually make decisions. It followed logical processes, something people don't necessarily do. People make decisions based, in part, on experiences and associative knowledge. In addition, software models of human cognition did not take into account organic factors such as emotions, stress, and fatigue -- vital to realistically simulating human thought processes.
In an early project Forsythe developed the framework for a computer program that had both cognition and organic factors, all in the effort to create a "synthetic human."
Follow-on projects developed methodologies that allowed the knowledge of a specific expert to be captured in the computer models and provided synthetic humans with episodic memory -- memory of experiences -- so they might apply their knowledge of specific experiences to solving problems in a manner that closely parallels what people do on a regular basis.
Strange twist Forsythe says a strange twist occurred along the way.
"I needed help with the software," Forsythe says. "I turned to some folks in Robotics, bringing to their attention that we were developing computer models of human cognition."
The robotics researchers immediately saw that the model could be used for intelligent machines, and the whole program emphasis changed. Suddenly the team was working on cognitive machines, not just synthetic humans.
Work on cognitive machines took off in 2002 with a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a real-time machine that can infer an operator's cognitive processes. This capability provides the potential for systems that augment the cognitive capacities of an operator through "Discrepancy Detection." In Discrepancy Detection, the machine uses an operator's cognitive model to monitor its own state and when there is evidence of a discrepancy between the actual state of the machine and the operator's perceptions or behavior, a discrepancy may be signaled.
Early this year work began on Sandia's Next Generation Intelligent Systems Grand Challenge project. "The goal of this Grand Challenge is to significantly improve the human capability to understand and solve national security problems, given the exponential growth of information and very complex environments," says Larry Ellis, the principal investigator. "We are integrating extraordinary perceptive techniques with cognitive systems to augment the capacity of analysts, engineers, war fighters, critical decision makers, scientists and others in crucial jobs to detect and interpret meaningful patterns based on large volumes of data derived from diverse sources."
181.75 Polygraph tests of employees or prospective employees prohibited. Subdivision 1. Prohibition, penalty. No employer or agent thereof shall directly or indirectly solicit or require a polygraph, voice stress analysis, or any test purporting to test the honesty of any employee or prospective employee. No person shall sell to or interpret for an employer or the employer's agent a test that the person knows has been solicited or required by an employer or agent to test the honesty of an employee or prospective employee. An employer or agent or any person knowingly selling, administering, or interpreting tests in violation of this section is guilty of a misdemeanor. If an employee requests a polygraph test any employer or agent administering the test shall inform the employee that taking the test is voluntary. Subd. 2. Investigations. The department of labor and industry shall investigate suspected violations of this section. The department may refer any evidence available concerning violations of this section to the county attorney of the appropriate county, who may with or without such reference, institute the appropriate criminal proceedings under this section. Subd. 3. Injunctive relief. In addition to the penalties provided by law for violation of this section, specifically and generally, whether or not injunctive relief is otherwise provided by law, the courts of this state are vested with jurisdiction to prevent and restrain violations of this section and to require the payment of civil penalties. Whenever it shall appear to the satisfaction of the attorney general that this section has been or is being violated, the attorney general shall be entitled, on behalf of the state, to sue for and have injunctive relief in any court of competent jurisdiction against any such violation or threatened violation without abridging other penalties provided by law.
Slashdot Mirror
why the spurt in tech related crackdown?
and find me a girlfriend
.jpg
Let's just hope her name does not end in
err...To the Tonsils?
Actually, there were 11 such machines. Check this out.
More Images
I would disagree. There are a lot of Business applications out there which do some pretty advanced data modelling off of Spreadsheet/OLAP Data stores using Flash as the underlying technology. I have seen quite a few being used by some Financial Analysts. Check this out. The only way thing the average joe cares about is whether or not his stuff will work on Linux. And people who are users/consumers of such Flash-based applications/products/end-results are, more often than not, decision makers.
>>Maybe 2004 will be the year of Linux No, 2004 is the Year of the Monkey!
...now SCO has 45 days in which to produce the offending lines of code before IBM calls to dismiss the case. This is the beginning of the end.
But Consider that on an average a business will not want to be placed on top for more than a few keywords. The Search spammers will then be able to spread out the cost of a few sites over a large number of businesses....
Google Uses Linux, Not SCO Unix.
What I would like to know is, if the spam filter is more accurate than humans, then by definition, how have they detected 1 misclassification? maybe there were two misclassifications and they detected only 1? by definiton, they are worse off than the filter itself.....
I would love to see Rob get more involved and do this type of stuff....brings back memories of the old days when this was News for Nerds, Stuf that "MATTERS"
....does this dress make me look fat?
Find out yourself bitch!
..someone post the friggin reg-free link already....
>but the edvil is in the details of finding it
...You forgot,the first and the last characters have to be in the same place....
...it's a windows only product, but for organizing email on windows boxes, I would recommend Nelson. I use it at work, and it allows me to organize a single email using multiple classifications and has a ton of other feartures. Check it out.
...I know all the kbd shortcuts and rarely use my mouse....err... ...You Insensitive CLOD!
...I am here to take your daughter for dance.
Sure Son, here, Take my car.
..WILL be /.ed
Czech Republic: Humanoid Robot Livens Up Japanese Premier's Delegation
By Kathleen Knox
Robots that walk and talk like humans have come a long way in the last few years. Now a humanoid robot has even been included in an official delegation accompanying Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to Prague.
Prague, 22 August 2003 (RFE/RL) -- With his white "suit" and standing at just over a meter tall, Asimo the humanoid robot resembles a diminutive astronaut.
"I am Asimo," he says. "I've come to the Czech Republic, the country where the word robot was invented, with Prime Minister [Junichiro] Koizumi."
Asimo -- or Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility -- can walk on two legs and climb stairs. He can recognize voices and follow simple instructions.
That makes him one of the world's most advanced human-like robots.
And he can also dance, as he showed a crowd of spectators in Prague's national museum today.
As Asimo noted, it was a Czech writer -- Karel Capek -- who first used the word "robot" in his 1920 play, "Rossum's Universal Robots."
That's why Asimo was brought along on Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi's visit to Prague this week.
He even attended the official dinner last night and toasted the Czech prime minister, Vladimir Spidla -- himself a bit stiff and robot-like, according to critics.
"Good evening, Prime Minister Spidla," Asimo said. "Pleased to meet you. I am a robot, a goodwill ambassador."
A robot delegate clearly has its advantages. He won't embarrass the host with off-color remarks, or get too tipsy on champagne.
But humanoid robots still have only limited uses, like for entertainment or publicity stunts.
Other robot technology, however, has made some exciting advances -- robot arms already help out in brain surgery. British scientists have developed a snake-like robot spy that can "evolve" and adapt to injury. A robot "suit" is in the works -- one that will help disabled or old people walk, climb stairs, or sit without a chair.
But it will be a while before humanoid robots are advanced enough to even do household chores, says German robot expert Helge Ritter.
"It may seem very difficult and sophisticated to assist in brain surgery, but there the task is carefully cut out and mainly formed in a way that it is largely positioning and high-precision application for very specialized tools. In a household, the problem is basically that there is no high precision around, you don't have any databases about where your objects are, the room can be not cleaned up, there will be objects around, pets and children, you will have deformable objects such as carpets, cushions. And to deal with such a variable environment poses a lot of challenges to robots."
It's almost comforting to see how hard robots find actions most of us take for granted -- like walking and climbing, or grasping objects with a hand.
So why make robots like humans anyway? Ritter says there are several reasons.
One is so they can fit into a world already made according to human needs. It's also easier for humans to figure out how a robot with hands and legs can perform a task than one with wheels.
And then, of course, there's the emotional side. Once robots have sufficiently advanced cognitive skills, a human-like form will greatly smooth communication.
"We use head movements, eye movements, body movements in order to run a dialogue. If someone looks at me I see that now he attends to my words, or I recognize that now it's my turn to step in and say something. And all these things can work in an effortless way only if we also endow our machines with a similar repertoire of reactions -- if we give them heads, or at least if we depict heads on a computer screen that can look at us and give us some feedback if the robot attends to me or a different speaker."
So, while the laughter and applause show what the humans thought of Asimo, unfortunately he isn't able to tell us how he enjoyed his visit to Prague -- not yet, anyway.
..of the Jury, we own over 1 million line of code in the Linux kernel and many worms written over the years..err...
is right here
Wrong, India sent a man in Space over 15 years ago. Rakesh Sharma became the First Indian Astronaut in 1984 along with the Russians. Check this
A new type of "smart" machine that could fundamentally change how people interact with computers is on the not-too-distant horizon at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories.
Over the past five years a team led by Sandia cognitive psychologist Chris Forsythe has been developing cognitive machines that accurately infer user intent, remember experiences with users and allow users to call upon simulated experts to help them analyze situations and make decisions.
"In the long term, the benefits from this effort are expected to include augmenting human effectiveness and embedding these cognitive models into systems like robots and vehicles for better human-hardware interactions," says John Wagner, manager of Sandia's Computational Initiatives Department. "We expect to be able to model, simulate and analyze humans and societies of humans for Department of Energy, military and national security applications."
Synthetic human
The initial goal of the work was to create a "synthetic human" -- software program/computer -- that could think like a person.
"We had the massive computers that could compute the large amounts of data, but software that could realistically model how people think and make decisions was missing," Forsythe says.
There were two significant problems with modeling software. First, the software did not relate to how people actually make decisions. It followed logical processes, something people don't necessarily do. People make decisions based, in part, on experiences and associative knowledge. In addition, software models of human cognition did not take into account organic factors such as emotions, stress, and fatigue -- vital to realistically simulating human thought processes.
In an early project Forsythe developed the framework for a computer program that had both cognition and organic factors, all in the effort to create a "synthetic human."
Follow-on projects developed methodologies that allowed the knowledge of a specific expert to be captured in the computer models and provided synthetic humans with episodic memory -- memory of experiences -- so they might apply their knowledge of specific experiences to solving problems in a manner that closely parallels what people do on a regular basis.
Strange twist
Forsythe says a strange twist occurred along the way.
"I needed help with the software," Forsythe says. "I turned to some folks in Robotics, bringing to their attention that we were developing computer models of human cognition."
The robotics researchers immediately saw that the model could be used for intelligent machines, and the whole program emphasis changed. Suddenly the team was working on cognitive machines, not just synthetic humans.
Work on cognitive machines took off in 2002 with a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a real-time machine that can infer an operator's cognitive processes. This capability provides the potential for systems that augment the cognitive capacities of an operator through "Discrepancy Detection." In Discrepancy Detection, the machine uses an operator's cognitive model to monitor its own state and when there is evidence of a discrepancy between the actual state of the machine and the operator's perceptions or behavior, a discrepancy may be signaled.
Early this year work began on Sandia's Next Generation Intelligent Systems Grand Challenge project. "The goal of this Grand Challenge is to significantly improve the human capability to understand and solve national security problems, given the exponential growth of information and very complex environments," says Larry Ellis, the principal investigator. "We are integrating extraordinary perceptive techniques with cognitive systems to augment the capacity of analysts, engineers, war fighters, critical decision makers, scientists and others in crucial jobs to detect and interpret meaningful patterns based on large volumes of data derived from diverse sources."
"O
...we can breed like rabbits
Minnesota Polygraph Statute
181.75 Polygraph tests of employees or prospective employees
prohibited.
Subdivision 1. Prohibition, penalty. No employer or agent thereof
shall directly or indirectly solicit or require a polygraph, voice
stress analysis, or any test purporting to test the honesty of any
employee or prospective employee. No person shall sell to or
interpret for an employer or the employer's agent a test that the
person knows has been solicited or required by an employer or
agent to test the honesty of an employee or prospective employee.
An employer or agent or any person knowingly selling, administering,
or interpreting tests in violation of this section is guilty of
a misdemeanor. If an employee requests a polygraph test any
employer or agent administering the test shall inform the employee
that taking the test is voluntary.
Subd. 2. Investigations. The department of labor and industry
shall investigate suspected violations of this section. The department
may refer any evidence available concerning violations of
this section to the county attorney of the appropriate county,
who may with or without such reference, institute the appropriate
criminal proceedings under this section.
Subd. 3. Injunctive relief. In addition to the penalties provided by
law for violation of this section, specifically and generally, whether
or not injunctive relief is otherwise provided by law, the courts of
this state are vested with jurisdiction to prevent and restrain violations
of this section and to require the payment of civil penalties.
Whenever it shall appear to the satisfaction of the attorney general
that this section has been or is being violated, the attorney general
shall be entitled, on behalf of the state, to sue for and have injunctive
relief in any court of competent jurisdiction against any such
violation or threatened violation without abridging other penalties
provided by law.