I don't disagree that the Khepera is a useful and capable piece of equipment. I figure that 'calling shenaningans' is appropriate. The article has a throwaway quotation from one of the Meiji researchers which hints at the really interesting part of the whole thing, which seems to be an neural network-type architecture with 'taps' installed in the hidden layers that allow monitoring of their firing patterns.
The neural networks themselves seem to be trained to recognize and classify these firing patterns, which allows such a network to distinguish between 'self' and 'other'.
The cool part of all of that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Khepera, in this case, and entirely everything to do with some artful use of Matlab's neural network toolbox.
First off, this is NOT a new robot. The robot pictured is a commercially available mobile robot called Khepera II. These robots are fairly stupid, but are easily tethered to more capable machines via a 19200 baud serial link. Mostly, they're used in research (usually undergraduate) because there are whole hosts of Matlab libraries available to interface to these buggers.
bot=kopen([0,19200,1]); % open a connection to tethered robot on/dev/ttyS0 at 19200 baud with one second timeout
And so on and so forth. The Khepera robots have been available for many years, along with the k-team matlab resources.
That aside, what the robot in question seems to be doing is using the Matlab Neural Network Toolbox to recognize and classify behavior by observation.
Sorry folks, but kids at underfunded state schools do this as undergraduate work in AI. This is nothing new.
Your proposed experiment utterly fails to address the issue of whether or not the distraction posed by engaging in a telephone conversation is less distracting than a conversation in person.
The point you're missing here is that distraction != head movement.
"For one, the social interaction habits tend to make the driver want to look at the other speaker. A cell phone does not."
Clearly, to make such a bold assertion, you must have a body of evidence to support you. Obviously some heretofore unknown portion of the fossil record indicates that as Homo Sapiens were evolving, cellphones were growing on baobab trees, and so our brains learned to make distinctions based upon whether or not we're talking on the cellphone.
It seems that at the very least, we know this to be true: When the story first broke for Nature, Hwang denied having used eggs from his own research assistants. Yesterday (24 Nov, 2005) he admitted not only that some of the eggs were from at least one of his own researchers, but that he'd known about it all along, and lied about it.
This much seems clear - wherever the eggs came from, lying about ones research casts that research into serious doubt.
A compass, if you know how to actually use one with a map, can tell you a great deal about not only what direction you're headed, but where you are and, more importantly, it can do something that GPS Just Plain Cannot Do, namely, it can tell you where that unknown landmark is, which in Western Africa is an incredibly useful skill. The last thing in the world a foreigner should do is wander into an uncharted village. Best to get an intersection on it from range, record the position, and move on.
Now, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't use GPS. In fact, GPS can be used in conjunction with the intersection technique in order to give you your 'known points'. But don't rely on a single piece of equipment to find your way around some petty warlord's backyard.
Re:Except how to make an atom bomb
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Already published. About thirty years ago. Please go study a high school civics textbook, then come back and ask intelligent questions about civil liberties.
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I don't disagree that the Khepera is a useful and capable piece of equipment. I figure that 'calling shenaningans' is appropriate. The article has a throwaway quotation from one of the Meiji researchers which hints at the really interesting part of the whole thing, which seems to be an neural network-type architecture with 'taps' installed in the hidden layers that allow monitoring of their firing patterns. The neural networks themselves seem to be trained to recognize and classify these firing patterns, which allows such a network to distinguish between 'self' and 'other'. The cool part of all of that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Khepera, in this case, and entirely everything to do with some artful use of Matlab's neural network toolbox.
First off, this is NOT a new robot. The robot pictured is a commercially available mobile robot called Khepera II. These robots are fairly stupid, but are easily tethered to more capable machines via a 19200 baud serial link. Mostly, they're used in research (usually undergraduate) because there are whole hosts of Matlab libraries available to interface to these buggers.
/dev/ttyS0 at 19200 baud with one second timeout
bot=kopen([0,19200,1]); % open a connection to tethered robot on
And so on and so forth. The Khepera robots have been available for many years, along with the k-team matlab resources. That aside, what the robot in question seems to be doing is using the Matlab Neural Network Toolbox to recognize and classify behavior by observation. Sorry folks, but kids at underfunded state schools do this as undergraduate work in AI. This is nothing new.
Your proposed experiment utterly fails to address the issue of whether or not the distraction posed by engaging in a telephone conversation is less distracting than a conversation in person.
The point you're missing here is that distraction != head movement.
"For one, the social interaction habits tend to make the driver want to look at the other speaker. A cell phone does not."
Clearly, to make such a bold assertion, you must have a body of evidence to support you. Obviously some heretofore unknown portion of the fossil record indicates that as Homo Sapiens were evolving, cellphones were growing on baobab trees, and so our brains learned to make distinctions based upon whether or not we're talking on the cellphone.
I'd seen that, too.
It seems that at the very least, we know this to be true: When the story first broke for Nature, Hwang denied having used eggs from his own research assistants. Yesterday (24 Nov, 2005) he admitted not only that some of the eggs were from at least one of his own researchers, but that he'd known about it all along, and lied about it.
This much seems clear - wherever the eggs came from, lying about ones research casts that research into serious doubt.
A compass, if you know how to actually use one with a map, can tell you a great deal about not only what direction you're headed, but where you are and, more importantly, it can do something that GPS Just Plain Cannot Do, namely, it can tell you where that unknown landmark is, which in Western Africa is an incredibly useful skill. The last thing in the world a foreigner should do is wander into an uncharted village. Best to get an intersection on it from range, record the position, and move on. Now, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't use GPS. In fact, GPS can be used in conjunction with the intersection technique in order to give you your 'known points'. But don't rely on a single piece of equipment to find your way around some petty warlord's backyard.
Already published. About thirty years ago. Please go study a high school civics textbook, then come back and ask intelligent questions about civil liberties.