Mail Online has an in-depth look at “Jules,” the human-looking robot head, which can mimic real human facial expressions. And in real time no less.

Mail Online reports:

Jules mimics the expressions by converting the video image into digital commands that make the robot’s servos and motors produce mirrored movements.

And it all happens in real time as the robot can interpret the commands at 25 frames per second.

You can see plenty of images of Jules at that site, but you can also see Jules in action in the video embedded below.

Creepy, exciting stuff. For a look at fictional Terminator news, read my thoughts on the upcoming sequel.

Wow, this is a great day for SpaceX and the culmination of an enormous amount of work by a great team. The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion — middle of the bullseye — and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake.

I will have a more complete post launch statement tomorrow, as right now I’m in a bit of a daze and need to go celebrate

This is a pretty great day for any space enthusiast.  Another private company has gotten off of this planet.  I’m still of the opinion that while NASA’s research and their achievements shouldn’t be overlooked, what is going to get us off of this planet and into a permanent position in our solar system is going to be the private corporations.

This is great news!  If it weren’t for the past 4 days being completely cloudy, I’d be staring up at the skies right now.  Congratulations to those at SpaceX and all of the folks anywhere who labor and give towards the goal of getting up there.

Technorati Tags: spacex, falcon 1, orbit, space, successful launch, civilian space effort, blast off

Let’s hope for no explosions there either!  Way to go SpaceX!

Technorati Tags: spacex, space, civilian space flight, rockets, it really is rocket science

Click here for ultimate satellite tracking power!

This is not only fun for folks like me who could easily burn an hour or two finding out where sattelites are in real time but it’s also useful.  Planning on placing a bet on whether or not the Shuttle will collide with something on the way up?  Use this tool to calculate your odds before Vegas does it for you!  Want to create your own rocket/space program in your barn?  Well you’ll need to know what is up there so you can avoid it on the way up and down.

Once you launch the app, here are some useful shortcuts:

Shift+Click      Zoom In
Ctrl+Click     Zoom Out
Click on satellite     show trace
Click in list     show trace
Drag     rotate in 3d

While graphically this is no Crysis, the program is simple and easy to use.  You can track numerous sattlelites via a drop down menu or simply click on the dot in the app.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: space, science, nasa, sattelites, DIY Space Program, science geeks

Right?

Realistically, they’re just starting the long sequence of starting this massive thing up.  There won’t be any collisions until late October.  I read earlier this morning that one of the major players involved has received death threats related to this . . . which seems to me to be way over the top.

Either way, if there’s something you’ve really wanted to do, now might be the time to attempt it.  Tomorrow we see science taking a huge step forward.  Or we’ll see a quick flash and then. . .Half Life 2 folks.

If you want to watch it live, grab some popcorn and go here to the webcast.

Technorati Tags: lhc, end of the world, not likely, black holes, science, death threats, half life, science

The new book by Nick Sagan (son of Carl Sagan), You Call This the Future?: The Greatest Inventions Sci-Fi Imagined and Science Promised, is characterized by explanations of some of the fascinating technologies envisioned in classic science fiction along with explorations of the progress modern science has made towards achieving those visions. Classic science fiction references appear side-by-side with summaries of state of the art scientific research.

The book is divided into 5 broad chapters, each covering 10 technologies that we have made progress towards realizing. The chapters are Travel and Transportation, Computers, Cyborgs, and Robots, Communications, Weapons and Security, and Life, Health, and Sex.

The Pros

This book is very well written. Each technology is described with multiple fictional appearances as well as detailed accounts of modern advances involving that technology. I was also surprised at how realistic many of the concepts once considered impossible have become. There were also detailed diagrams and high-quality images for all of the sections, which made the content much more engaging.

The Cons

Some of the technologies in the book were much less interesting than others. In a desire to have the same number of sections in each chapter, some sections were added that probably could have been left out - language translators, watch toys, and sex toys, for example.

I definitely recommend this book. It was a quick read, and each section was engaging and interesting. The price is very reasonable, as well.

The Stats

Title: You Call This the Future?: The Greatest Inventions Sci-Fi Imagined and Science Promised
Author(s): Nick Sagan, Mark Frary, and Andy Walker
ISBN10: 1556526857
ISBN13: 978-1556526855
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Cost: $11.21 (from Amazon)
Format: Paperback, 160 pages
Published: April 1, 2008

Technorati Tags: Carl Sagan, Nick Sagan, Mark Frary, Andy Walker, science fiction, technology, books, book reviews, You Call This the Future?: The Greatest Inventions Sci-Fi Imagined and Science Promised

We have no way of knowing what it is that the inhabitants of the Death Star want, or even if they are friendly. But one thing is for certain. On the fateful day when we must finally engage our enemy in combat, the greatest weapon available to us will be Jeff Goldblum and his Macintosh of Doom.

Technorati Tags: Jeff Goldblum, Star Wars, Independence Day, Macintosh, Death Star, San Francisco, video

THE Singularity, that’s what he’s talking about.  You know, the point where machine intelligence jogs past human intelligence and brings us to a new era where combined computer cognition is the equivalent of a minor deity.  Not only that, but it’s Kurzweil, without the T.  I don’t know if that’s Intel’s fault or Cnet’s on the transcription.

What is the Singularity really?  It’s where machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence - even by just a tiny bit.  At that point, the machines, which are now more knowing than we are, can recursively improve on themselves in a never ending and rapidly accelerating cycle of getting better and better.

Kurzweil tones it down a bit and simply says it’s going to be a time where machines can manifest their own rapidly advancing technology.  The implications of a meteoric rise in technology, self replicating smarter than human intelligences and you know, superbeings. . . it’s all still there though.  Perhaps in Intel’s mind, the Singularity involves computers designing processors for their next of kin to the point where we have the 1nm Intel processors featuring 10,000 cores.

Is this something we really want to work towards?  Is it inevitable?  And will these machines become self aware?  No one really knows but it’s certainly an interesting concept to think on.

For their part, I’ve awarded the first ever ArsGeek Overreaching Statement Award to Intel.  Congratulations Intel! Stating that they are actively working on the Singularity goes a bit beyond miniaturizing processors and coming up with interesting ways to optimize code for multiple cores.  It’s a bit like casually stating that your experiments on family dog have yeilded a doberman with the intelligence of your or I and the ability to speak several languages.

Technorati Tags: singularity, intel, ray kurzweil, ai, overraching statement award, computers, technology, other geeks, our future overlords

Technorati Tags: space, mars, web cams, 90s, science, technology

One of the primary hurdles that Image Metrics faces on a daily basis is the Uncanny Valley.  The Uncanny Valley is a term that refers to the observed revulsion of people viewing objects demonstrating near lifelikeness.  You have experienced the Uncanny Valley any time you’ve been creeped out by a baby doll.

Technorati Tags: Uncanny Valley, animation, facial animation, Image Metrics

Technorati Tags: homebrew, fusion, reactor, fusors, science, nuclear

If You Use the Web, You May Have Already Been Enlisted as a Human Scanner
Those anti-bot security forms that slow you down when you’re entering information just might serve a larger purpose- Scientific American

By Adam Hadhazy

You’re just about ready to buy a pair of tickets on Ticketmaster, but before you can take the next step, an annoying box with wavy letters and numbers shows up on your screen. You dutifully enter in what you see—and what a bot presumably can’t—in the name of security.

But what you may not know is that you also have helped archivists decipher distorted characters in old books and newspapers so that they can be posted on the Web.

You might think that computer scientists would have figured out a way to get computers to decipher those characters. But they haven’t, so instead they’ve figured out a way to harness all that effort you’re making to protect your security. “When you’re reading those squiggly characters, you are doing something that computers cannot,” says Luis von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University (C.M.U.) in Pittsburgh.

Von Ahn and colleagues reported last week in the journal Science that Web users have transcribed the equivalent of 160 books a day—that’s more than 440 million words—in the year since researchers kicked off the program. The initiative is similar to “distributed computing” schemes like SETI@home, which take advantage of unused personal computer processing power to sift through signals received from space for those that might be generated by extraterrestrial intelligence or to figure out how proteins fold. But the difference with this system is that people, not processors, do the calculations.

“We are getting people to help us digitize books at the same time they are authenticating themselves as humans,” von Ahn says. “Every time people are typing these [answers] out, they are actually taking old books or newspapers and helping to transcribe them.”

Other large digitization projects, such as the Google Books Project and the Internet Archive, rely on optical character recognition (OCR) software. Basically, computers take a digital image of a book or newspaper page, then try to discern the individual letters, von Ahn says. But he and other C.M.U. researchers estimate that these programs misinterpret or fail to read up to one out of every five words on weathered, yellowed paper or on pages with faded or smeared ink. Such electronically illegible words and texts must then be manually transcribed by human workers at a relatively high cost, he says.

Von Ahn’s team’s method is a twist on the Web site tests known as CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), which have been in use since 2000. The new twist on CAPTCHAs is to use a set of letters from old, weathered books and newspapers that computerized transcribing programs cannot recognize. Much of the raw “fuel” comes courtesy of the Internet Archive project, which transmits words that its OCRs cannot recognize or do not appear in the dictionary.

About 40,000 Websites now use the service, called reCAPTCHA, which the project’s site offers for free. Facebook was one of its first major patrons.

Von Ahn estimates that at reCAPTCHA’s current rate of transcription (about four million words a day missed by OCR systems), the program does a week’s worth of transcription from 1,500 professional transcribers in a single day. This data is stored on hard drives at C.M.U. and then sent back to the organization that requested the transcription. (The New York Times, for example, has enlisted reCAPTCHA to digitize the newspaper’s archives dating back to 1851.)

Von Ahn acknowledges that the overall cost for reCAPTCHA is still a bit higher than just using OCR for more recently written, more easily scanned texts. He would not say exactly how much, citing nondisclosure agreements with clients using the software.

When the researchers compared how reCAPTCHA and OCR transcribed five Times articles, reCAPTCHA did a significantly better job—99.1 percent accuracy—than OCR of the sort that Google uses for its book project, which came in at 83.5 percent. (Google declined to comment for this story.)

But as is the way with most technology, today’s innovation is tomorrow’s VHS tape. Eventually computers will be able to decipher reCAPTCHAs, too. “We’ll get a few good years out of reCAPTCHAs,” says co-author Manuel Blum, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and key developer of some of the first CAPTCHAs.

OCR will continue to improve as well, Blum says, along with so-called machine learning in general.

Either way, with some 100 million books published prior to the dawn of the digital era, says von Ahn, that “makes for a lot of words.”

The best part of the video is when Adam breaks from the itinerary to show a slow-motion video of fellow co-host Jaimie Hyneman slapping him across the face in an attempt to sober Adam up.  While locating the file on his laptop, someone in the audience points out the somewhat suspiciously named “Batman The Dark Knight.avi” on Adam’s desktop, to which Adam responds, “Well, I hadn’t seen it yet.”

The video is an hour long, but totally worth watching.

Edit: It turns out the video in question was just the trailer of Batman.  But still, Adam is a Batman fan, he recreated a Dodo skeleton, he hand-drew a map of Middle Earth, and his official occupation entails blowing stuff up on TV.  He would be hard pressed to be any geekier (or cooler).

Technorati Tags: Mythbusters, hackers, H.O.P.E., Adam Savage