Nope - this is photosynth type technology being used here. It's not a matter of registering one photo with another, but rather of recognizing the 3-D content of each and 3-D translating (and zooming) one to overlay on the other.
Don't forget that the starting point isn't even two photos that are known to the of the same thing (taken from different angles at different distances). All you have is a geo-location of the photo you are trying to 3-D map into the scene. You don't know what the photo is of - someone standing at that spot could be pointing the camera in any direction and zooming into god knows what.
Never mind years ago, I challenge you to show me just ONE other app today that can, for example:
1) Take a random geo-tagged photo (flikr photos in the demo) and integrate it in 3-D into it's EXACT (not just geo-coordinate) correct spot in a 3-D scene
OR
2) Integrate live video into a 3-D scene following the camera pan in real-time
And, no, Google maps "pin the tail on the donkey" displaying of photos at geo-tagged locations is not even remotely the same thing. An idiot could do that. Microsoft is recognising the map scene in 3-D and (itself an extraorinarily difficult task) correlating that to 3-D adjusted photo content. This isn't an "incremental improvement" unless you consider the space shuttle an incremental improvement to a cart pulled by a donkey.
Huh? Did you watch the whole presentation? The flickr images displayed in 3-D in-place in the street view? The LIVE video being overlayed in-place in the street view, following the camera pan in real-time? For that matter what about the smooth zooming in/out of the map itself vs Google Map's stop-and redraw at next level.
Bitch all you want about Microsoft, but it was a very impressive demo. Kudos to the software guys who developed this stuff.
As someone who's being developing software professionally for 30 years I tend to by cynical and blase, but stuff like this really is impressive and makes you stop and say "Wow!".
He built it for a cognitive robotics class, so the emphasis was on the software, not the hardware (it uses a webcam and optical flow calculation for movement detection, for feedback into the learning algorithm). The FOX article is a horrible source for this story, but if you Google a bit you can find that he used a 3-D printer to build his own legs for the slick version shown - definitely not a kit!
I'm sure they didn't do it the way this one does though - not enough compute power back then. This thing only uses a webcam for feedback to learn walking. It does onboard optical flow processing using Intel's OpenCV library to determine if it's (initially random/uncoordinated) leg movements are moving it forward.
I don't believe 90% either, but who knows.. maybe desktop PC's will seem quaint and ridiculously large before too long.
PC's in general are mass market. They outsold TV sets in the US in recent years!
I don't know how large the assemble-it-yourself crowd is, but note for example that there are only 1 milllion programmers in the USA compared to a (TV buying) population of 250-300 times that, so the hard core gees crowd probably really is a very small percentage of the whole PC market.
I doubt he did that using stuff that came in a chemistry set... More likely he bought a few extra supplies at the chemist - they used to sell all sorts of stuff quite freely!
DNA is what evolves - i.e. instructions to make proteins, not proteins themselves. Of course most random changes to the instructions are maladaptive or at best useless, but very occasionally not.
I think what happens in practice is that it's the "useless" changes (do no harm, but under current conditions do no good) that may play the largest role... these can accumulate in different populations of a species and become a differentiator when the environment changes (which is the real driver of evolution) and previously useless traits become either helpful or harmful.
Obviously "liquid carbon" is the proper name, but I guess why they are calling it "liquid diamond" is because they are exploring the pressure/temperature region of the phase diagram where it solidifies into diamond (ergo diamond floating in liquid carbon).
I don't get whey they are saying liquid Carbon may exist on Uranus though - the phase diagram indicates a minumum temperature for the liquid phase of 4.5 x 10^3 K, and even the core of Uranus is nowhere near that hot. Neptune, maybe.
Hospital delivery robots already commericaly exist - capable of moving about automomously between hospital floors (calling the elevator if needed), and avoiding obstacles like people walking down the corridoor.
I would think that in a hospital environment you want something that is smart enough to do a well defined job without screwing up (e.g. running into people or getting in the way), but not TOO smart... Do you really want a robot in a hospital trundling around on it's own initiative looking for a place to plug itself in (as the Willow Garage one can do)!? These seem like very nice machines, but more suited to research rather than life or death type environments.
In general I think you don't want robots to be too independent until AI has got to the point that they can avoid doing stupid things. In the meantime, we're better off with dumb ones that can do simple tasks like delivering drugs or fetching beer, maybe even driving cars, but not so smart that their behavior is no longer predictable.
Actually the reason us old fogies normally used XOR A, A rather than LD A, 0 wasn't because it was faster but rather because it was smaller - 1 byte rather than two bytes (instruction + immediate operand). On the old memory constrained 8-bitters, these assembly "tricks" were all about saving a byte here, another byte there...
I realize you were being sarcastic, but anyways the killer app is Google Maps Navigation : It's like buy a phone get a nice GPS for free, or maybe more to the point since you always carry your cell-phone you'll always also have a GPS in your pocket for getting directions.
You've got your head buried in the sand if you really believe that religion in the US isn't adversely affecting science.
Do you want your kid being educated in school that creationism is a valid alternative to science/evolution?
Do you want stem cell research in the US hobbled because of religious lobbyists? (who knows - maybe you do - but I bet that'd change in a heartbeat if your child needed a stem cell based treatment for an otherwise fatal condition)
Do you want American foreign policy to be heavily influenced by religion (Bush)?
They might do, but often the US is still the beneficiary due subcomponents used and corporate taxes paid. For example, although the iPhone is "manufactured" in China, China only benefits to the tune of $2-3 per unit, with the rest of the profit (~$150) coming to the US. This is because "manufactured" often just means "assembled" (from subcomponents).
Really - it's that bad now? I grew up in the UK and moved to America in 1987. Certainly back then it wasn't cool in the UK to be a moron or uncool to be taking engineering subjects in University.
What you're describing sounds much more like America (both then and now) rather than the UK I knew, although British society has slid so far since I left (not that I'm claiming cause and effect;-) that I'm not surprised.
I think you're exaggerating the earning power of arts degrees vs science. Acting, banking and politics are anways hardly mass employers! An MBA may get you into a higher paying managment job, but it's the nature of the management pyramid that there's more positions available at the bottom rather than the top, and getting an MBA with the hope of rising to the executive ranks therefore is not a realistic prospect for most people. Joe Average with a sciencce/math degree is likely to do better financially that Joe Average with an arts degree.
At the time I left the UK software salaries in the US were significantly higher in the US than the UK, but as far as I can tell they've essentially caught up. A senior software guy in the US can easily make $100K or more, but I wonder how easy it is for someone with an arts degree to make that (either in UK or US) unless they happen to be atypically lucky/sucessful?
It matters where it happens because the biggest application of science is industrial, and advances are closely held secrets not globally published and available to all. We're not talking about things like the discovery of DNA here, where indeed it doesn't matter (other than national prestige) where the discovery is made. We're talking about advances in material science, semiconductor manufacturing, genetic engineering and knowledge, etc, etc. The things that will allow America to maintain high wages and a high quality of life while competing with countries like China and India where wages are much less and absent technological leverage we're at a huge disadvantage.
If it's not appropriate for Tyson, a national stature scientist in the public eye, to make statements like this, then who is meant to be speaking up? There is no national science policy Tsar that I'm aware of, and if there is one they are flying so low under the radar that they may as well not exist.
In the current scientific/regligious climate in the US, where creationist nutjobs get their opinions into the national press, and their viewpoints are presented as being a valid alternative to science (in reality as valid as flat earth "alternative" view points), I'm glad that a few people are willing to stand up and speak for scientific literacy.
As Tyson says, it's a long slow slide, but one that affects us nonetheless. You better believe that science affects us in our everyday lives and not just in the ivory towers of academia. Where do you think the advances in material science, semiconductor technology, industrial automation/robotics, etc, etc, come from - the things that keep (or DID keep) America competetive on the world stage come from? How is America meant to compete with countries like China with lower salaries other than via technology/science that lets us leverage the productivity of American workers.
Never mind the extraordinarily practical advantages of science, do you really want the next generation (incl. your kids, if you have any) where America despite it's "superpower" status ranks 3rd or 4th, and sliding in terms of scientific achievement and breakthoughs... Where all the headline grabbing achievements are made by Europe, and Asia? Not America lands man on the moon, but rather China builds station on moon, Japan/Europe builds fusion reactor, etc, etc.
If you're charged with DWI it's because you failed a breathalyzer and sobriety test. You were drunk.
If you manage to get the DWI charger reduced to DWUI or anything lesser, or get the charge thrown out on some BS legality (maybe your cousin is the police chief) it doesn't change the fact that you were driving drunk and endangering the lives of your neighbors and their children.
Tough shit if you're embarassed by it being broadcast on Twitter.
Most managers just arn't going to assign one (uber) programmer 10x the workload of another, so the company doesn't get the benefit. What happens in practice is that the uber programmer is under-utilized and therefore benefits from his uber-ness not in terms of pay comessurate with what he can do but in terms of spare time comessurate with assignment completion times for what he was asked to do.
I can think of a couple of reasons it may be useful on x86 :
- Better debugging tools - Allows CUDA development without buying specialized hardware up-front (a lesson I've learnt - don't buy hardware until the software is ready)
It's also another option for multi-core programming. If the CUDA API is good, maybe it's an efficient way to develop certain types of parallel apps even if you never intend to use it on a GPU.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used photosynth which is the same technology. Have you? What makes you say it doesn't work?
Nope - this is photosynth type technology being used here. It's not a matter of registering one photo with another, but rather of recognizing the 3-D content of each and 3-D translating (and zooming) one to overlay on the other.
Don't forget that the starting point isn't even two photos that are known to the of the same thing (taken from different angles at different distances). All you have is a geo-location of the photo you are trying to 3-D map into the scene. You don't know what the photo is of - someone standing at that spot could be pointing the camera in any direction and zooming into god knows what.
Never mind years ago, I challenge you to show me just ONE other app today that can, for example:
1) Take a random geo-tagged photo (flikr photos in the demo) and integrate it in 3-D into it's EXACT (not just geo-coordinate) correct spot in a 3-D scene
OR
2) Integrate live video into a 3-D scene following the camera pan in real-time
And, no, Google maps "pin the tail on the donkey" displaying of photos at geo-tagged locations is not even remotely the same thing. An idiot could do that. Microsoft is recognising the map scene in 3-D and (itself an extraorinarily difficult task) correlating that to 3-D adjusted photo content. This isn't an "incremental improvement" unless you consider the space shuttle an incremental improvement to a cart pulled by a donkey.
Huh? Did you watch the whole presentation? The flickr images displayed in 3-D in-place in the street view? The LIVE video being overlayed in-place in the street view, following the camera pan in real-time? For that matter what about the smooth zooming in/out of the map itself vs Google Map's stop-and redraw at next level.
Bitch all you want about Microsoft, but it was a very impressive demo. Kudos to the software guys who developed this stuff.
As someone who's being developing software professionally for 30 years I tend to by cynical and blase, but stuff like this really is impressive and makes you stop and say "Wow!".
He built it for a cognitive robotics class, so the emphasis was on the software, not the hardware (it uses a webcam and optical flow calculation for movement detection, for feedback into the learning algorithm). The FOX article is a horrible source for this story, but if you Google a bit you can find that he used a 3-D printer to build his own legs for the slick version shown - definitely not a kit!
I'm sure they didn't do it the way this one does though - not enough compute power back then. This thing only uses a webcam for feedback to learn walking. It does onboard optical flow processing using Intel's OpenCV library to determine if it's (initially random/uncoordinated) leg movements are moving it forward.
I don't believe 90% either, but who knows.. maybe desktop PC's will seem quaint and ridiculously large before too long.
PC's in general are mass market. They outsold TV sets in the US in recent years!
I don't know how large the assemble-it-yourself crowd is, but note for example that there are only 1 milllion programmers in the USA compared to a (TV buying) population of 250-300 times that, so the hard core gees crowd probably really is a very small percentage of the whole PC market.
I doubt he did that using stuff that came in a chemistry set... More likely he bought a few extra supplies at the chemist - they used to sell all sorts of stuff quite freely!
DNA is what evolves - i.e. instructions to make proteins, not proteins themselves. Of course most random changes to the instructions are maladaptive or at best useless, but very occasionally not.
I think what happens in practice is that it's the "useless" changes (do no harm, but under current conditions do no good) that may play the largest role... these can accumulate in different populations of a species and become a differentiator when the environment changes (which is the real driver of evolution) and previously useless traits become either helpful or harmful.
Obviously "liquid carbon" is the proper name, but I guess why they are calling it "liquid diamond" is because they are exploring the pressure/temperature region of the phase diagram where it solidifies into diamond (ergo diamond floating in liquid carbon).
http://dao.mit.edu/8.231/carbon_phase_diagram.jpg
I don't get whey they are saying liquid Carbon may exist on Uranus though - the phase diagram indicates a minumum temperature for the liquid phase of 4.5 x 10^3 K, and even the core of Uranus is nowhere near that hot. Neptune, maybe.
Nowadsys Tinsel is made of plastic.
Hospital delivery robots already commericaly exist - capable of moving about automomously between hospital floors (calling the elevator if needed), and avoiding obstacles like people walking down the corridoor.
I would think that in a hospital environment you want something that is smart enough to do a well defined job without screwing up (e.g. running into people or getting in the way), but not TOO smart... Do you really want a robot in a hospital trundling around on it's own initiative looking for a place to plug itself in (as the Willow Garage one can do)!? These seem like very nice machines, but more suited to research rather than life or death type environments.
In general I think you don't want robots to be too independent until AI has got to the point that they can avoid doing stupid things. In the meantime, we're better off with dumb ones that can do simple tasks like delivering drugs or fetching beer, maybe even driving cars, but not so smart that their behavior is no longer predictable.
Actually the reason us old fogies normally used XOR A, A rather than LD A, 0 wasn't because it was faster but rather because it was smaller - 1 byte rather than two bytes (instruction + immediate operand). On the old memory constrained 8-bitters, these assembly "tricks" were all about saving a byte here, another byte there...
Huh? The corn has been modified to contain something that acts as an insecticide.
If it kills insects when they eat it, then why would it be at all surprising if it was bad for rats or humans too?
I realize you were being sarcastic, but anyways the killer app is Google Maps Navigation : It's like buy a phone get a nice GPS for free, or maybe more to the point since you always carry your cell-phone you'll always also have a GPS in your pocket for getting directions.
You've got your head buried in the sand if you really believe that religion in the US isn't adversely affecting science.
Do you want your kid being educated in school that creationism is a valid alternative to science/evolution?
Do you want stem cell research in the US hobbled because of religious lobbyists? (who knows - maybe you do - but I bet that'd change in a heartbeat if your child needed a stem cell based treatment for an otherwise fatal condition)
Do you want American foreign policy to be heavily influenced by religion (Bush)?
etc, etc.
They might do, but often the US is still the beneficiary due subcomponents used and corporate taxes paid. For example, although the iPhone is "manufactured" in China, China only benefits to the tune of $2-3 per unit, with the rest of the profit (~$150) coming to the US. This is because "manufactured" often just means "assembled" (from subcomponents).
Really - it's that bad now? I grew up in the UK and moved to America in 1987. Certainly back then it wasn't cool in the UK to be a moron or uncool to be taking engineering subjects in University.
What you're describing sounds much more like America (both then and now) rather than the UK I knew, although British society has slid so far since I left (not that I'm claiming cause and effect ;-) that I'm not surprised.
I think you're exaggerating the earning power of arts degrees vs science. Acting, banking and politics are anways hardly mass employers! An MBA may get you into a higher paying managment job, but it's the nature of the management pyramid that there's more positions available at the bottom rather than the top, and getting an MBA with the hope of rising to the executive ranks therefore is not a realistic prospect for most people. Joe Average with a sciencce/math degree is likely to do better financially that Joe Average with an arts degree.
At the time I left the UK software salaries in the US were significantly higher in the US than the UK, but as far as I can tell they've essentially caught up. A senior software guy in the US can easily make $100K or more, but I wonder how easy it is for someone with an arts degree to make that (either in UK or US) unless they happen to be atypically lucky/sucessful?
It matters where it happens because the biggest application of science is industrial, and advances are closely held secrets not globally published and available to all. We're not talking about things like the discovery of DNA here, where indeed it doesn't matter (other than national prestige) where the discovery is made. We're talking about advances in material science, semiconductor manufacturing, genetic engineering and knowledge, etc, etc. The things that will allow America to maintain high wages and a high quality of life while competing with countries like China and India where wages are much less and absent technological leverage we're at a huge disadvantage.
If it's not appropriate for Tyson, a national stature scientist in the public eye, to make statements like this, then who is meant to be speaking up? There is no national science policy Tsar that I'm aware of, and if there is one they are flying so low under the radar that they may as well not exist.
In the current scientific/regligious climate in the US, where creationist nutjobs get their opinions into the national press, and their viewpoints are presented as being a valid alternative to science (in reality as valid as flat earth "alternative" view points), I'm glad that a few people are willing to stand up and speak for scientific literacy.
As Tyson says, it's a long slow slide, but one that affects us nonetheless. You better believe that science affects us in our everyday lives and not just in the ivory towers of academia. Where do you think the advances in material science, semiconductor technology, industrial automation/robotics, etc, etc, come from - the things that keep (or DID keep) America competetive on the world stage come from? How is America meant to compete with countries like China with lower salaries other than via technology/science that lets us leverage the productivity of American workers.
Never mind the extraordinarily practical advantages of science, do you really want the next generation (incl. your kids, if you have any) where America despite it's "superpower" status ranks 3rd or 4th, and sliding in terms of scientific achievement and breakthoughs... Where all the headline grabbing achievements are made by Europe, and Asia? Not America lands man on the moon, but rather China builds station on moon, Japan/Europe builds fusion reactor, etc, etc.
If you're charged with DWI it's because you failed a breathalyzer and sobriety test. You were drunk.
If you manage to get the DWI charger reduced to DWUI or anything lesser, or get the charge thrown out on some BS legality (maybe your cousin is the police chief) it doesn't change the fact that you were driving drunk and endangering the lives of your neighbors and their children.
Tough shit if you're embarassed by it being broadcast on Twitter.
I was amazed at this massive politically correct FAIL! :
http://www.google.com/
Where's the Christmas tree? Where's Santa?
Throw Sol Invictus (Natalis Invictus) in there too for good measure if you like!
I bet they showed a Menorah on Hannukah, so what's up with not acknowledging Christmas as a *SPECIFIC* holiday too!
Massive Google SUCK.
Most managers just arn't going to assign one (uber) programmer 10x the workload of another, so the company doesn't get the benefit. What happens in practice is that the uber programmer is under-utilized and therefore benefits from his uber-ness not in terms of pay comessurate with what he can do but in terms of spare time comessurate with assignment completion times for what he was asked to do.
I can think of a couple of reasons it may be useful on x86 :
- Better debugging tools
- Allows CUDA development without buying specialized hardware up-front (a lesson I've learnt - don't buy hardware until the software is ready)
It's also another option for multi-core programming. If the CUDA API is good, maybe it's an efficient way to develop certain types of parallel apps even if you never intend to use it on a GPU.
Chalk one up for Bing