tagged w/ Massachusetts Institute Of Technology
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If Artificial Intelligence and automation is going to replace the world’s entire workforce, we’re all going to need to give up any hope of employment and become startup entrepreneurs and innovation investors instead. They couldn’t possibly automate those, could they?If Artificial Intelligence and automation is going to replace the world’s entire... more
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Nature chuckles at our feeble, stumbling efforts at computation. Its analog computing resources effortlessly deliver dazzlingly practical intelligence, even at the sub-microscopic scale, with zero tolerance for wasted energy.Nature chuckles at our feeble, stumbling efforts at computation. Its analog computing... more
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Apart from biology, our physical world is mostly either dumb, rock hard, or both. We use that hard, dumb stuff to make durable things like tools, vehicles and buildings. Biology, although soft, squishy and smart, somehow also manages to grow incredibly hard things, like shells and teeth. Maybe biology can teach us better ways to make hard stuff tooApart from biology, our physical world is mostly either dumb, rock hard, or both. We... more
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Can we build robots that can be taught in the same way that humans teach each other? That isn’t how we teach robots now. Will this make them more useful in natural disasters?Can we build robots that can be taught in the same way that humans teach each other?... more
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Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes a new image of a ring — not of jewels — but of black holes. This composite image of Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies located about 430 million light years from Earth, shows X-rays from the NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (pink) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue) produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute, or STScI.
http://ramanan50.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/giant-ring-of-blackholes/Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes a new image of a ring — not of... more
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For years, data analysis companies have attempted to link social media updates to specific television events. Wednesday, Bluefin Labs publicly launches machine learning technology that makes a direct, real-time correlation between the shows and ads audiences are watching on TV and what those audiences are saying about that content via social media streams.For years, data analysis companies have attempted to link social media updates to... more
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The New York Times
December 21, 2010
A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning
By JUSTIN GILLIS
PART ONE…
MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii — Two gray machines sit inside a pair of utilitarian buildings here, sniffing the fresh breezes that blow across thousands of miles of ocean.
They make no noise. But once an hour, they spit out a number, and for decades, it has been rising relentlessly.
The first machine of this type was installed on Mauna Loa in the 1950s at the behest of Charles David Keeling, a scientist from San Diego. His resulting discovery, of the increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, transformed the scientific understanding of humanity’s relationship with the earth. A graph of his findings is inscribed on a wall in Washington as one of the great achievements of modern science.
Yet, five years after Dr. Keeling’s death, his discovery is a focus not of celebration but of conflict. It has become the touchstone of a worldwide political debate over global warming.
When Dr. Keeling, as a young researcher, became the first person in the world to develop an accurate technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the air, the amount he discovered was 310 parts per million. That means every million pints of air, for example, contained 310 pints of carbon dioxide.
By 2005, the year he died, the number had risen to 380 parts per million. Sometime in the next few years it is expected to pass 400. Without stronger action to limit emissions, the number could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution.
The greatest question in climate science is: What will that do to the temperature of the earth?
Scientists have long known that carbon dioxide traps heat at the surface of the planet. They cite growing evidence that the inexorable rise of the gas is altering the climate in ways that threaten human welfare.
Fossil fuel emissions, they say, are like a runaway train, hurtling the world’s citizens toward a stone wall — a carbon dioxide level that, over time, will cause profound changes.
The risks include melting ice sheets, rising seas, more droughts and heat waves, more flash floods, worse storms, extinction of many plants and animals, depletion of sea life and — perhaps most important — difficulty in producing an adequate supply of food. Many of these changes are taking place at a modest level already, the scientists say, but are expected to intensify.
Reacting to such warnings, President George Bush committed the United States in 1992 to limiting its emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Scores of other nations made the same pledge, in a treaty that was long on promises and short on specifics.
But in 1998, when it came time to commit to details in a document known as the Kyoto Protocol, Congress balked. Many countries did ratify the protocol, but it had only a limited effect, and the past decade has seen little additional progress in controlling emissions.
Many countries are reluctant to commit themselves to tough emission limits, fearing that doing so will hurt economic growth. International climate talks in Cancún, Mexico, this month ended with only modest progress. The Obama administration, which came into office pledging to limit emissions in the United States, scaled back its ambitions after climate and energy legislation died in the Senate this year.
Challengers have mounted a vigorous assault on the science of climate change. Polls indicate that the public has grown more doubtful about that science. Some of the Republicans who will take control of the House of Representatives in January have promised to subject climate researchers to a season of new scrutiny.
One of them is Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California. In a recent Congressional hearing on global warming, he said, “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic.”
But most scientists trained in the physics of the atmosphere have a different reaction to the increase.
“I find it shocking,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the government monitoring program of which the Mauna Loa Observatory is a part. “We really are in a predicament here, and it’s getting worse every year.”
As the political debate drags on, the mute gray boxes atop Mauna Loa keep spitting out their numbers, providing a reality check: not only is the carbon dioxide level rising relentlessly, but the pace of that rise is accelerating over time.
“Nature doesn’t care how hard we tried,” Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist, said at a recent seminar. “Nature cares how high the parts per million mount. This is running away.”
CONTINUED…The New York Times
December 21, 2010
A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning... more
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June 28, 2010 | 1 comments
Shifty Science: Programmable Matter Takes Shape with Self-Folding Origami Sheets
A prototype sheet that folds itself into two different shapes may lead to objects that can assume any number of forms on command
By John Matson
Self-folding robotic sheet
SHAPE-SHIFTER: The segmented sheet created by researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can fold itself into a boat or an airplane shape in a matter or seconds.
The Harvard Microrobotics Lab
Researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) have invented a real-life Transformer, a device that can fold itself into two shapes on command. The system is hardly ready to do battle with the Decepticons—the tiny contraption forms only relatively crude boat and airplane shapes—but the concept could one day produce chameleonlike objects that shift between any number of practical shapes at will.
Self-folding sheets are just one facet of programmable matter, the attempt to build structures that can shape-shift on demand. The idea, says study co-author Daniela Rus, a roboticist at M.I.T., is bringing materials and machines closer together to make everyday objects that can be programmed, much like people program a computer. "Instead of programming bits and bytes," she says, "you program mechanical properties of the object."
The system, described in a paper published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, consists of a thin sheet of resin–fiberglass composite, just a few centimeters across, segmented into 32 triangular panels separated by flexible silicone joints. Some of the joints have heat-sensitive actuators that bend 180 degrees when warmed by an electric current, folding the sheet over at that joint. Depending on the program used, the sheet will conduct a series of folds to yield the boat or airplane shape in about 15 seconds. The folding-sheet approach is an extension of the field of computational origami, the mathematical study of how flat objects can be folded into complex, three-dimensional structures.
Although the design presented in the new paper takes only two shapes, the researchers say that in principle the system could produce many more. "We were looking for ways to embed a bunch of different functionalities into one low-profile sheet," says study co-author Robert Wood, an electrical engineer at Harvard University's Microrobotics Laboratory. "In the longer run we'd like to develop systems to bring this not to just three, four or five shapes but to a much greater scope of different achievable shapes."
Given a set of desired three-dimensional shapes, the group's algorithms determine how to fold the sheet to produce each of the final shapes and then how to accommodate those different folding sequences on a shared sheet. Another algorithm optimizes the sheet for its desired purpose, limiting the number of embedded actuators needed to produce the final shapes. On the airplane–boat prototype sheet, for instance, only half the joints have actuators.
The researchers note that although the algorithms produce a workable folding pattern to make a given shape, human experts are often able to design a more efficient scheme. "It doesn't know how to get creative, and sometimes human origamists can see a few moves ahead, like a chess player," Rus says. "You see patterns that are not obvious to a computer program that does a step-by-step process."
In the near term Rus envisions the computational origami technology forming the basis of three-dimensional display systems—for instance, maps that can reproduce the topography of a given region on demand. "You can imagine making machines that have the ability to give you three-dimensional views of the objects they render," she says. In the more distant future programmable matter applications might move beyond mere shape mimicry to involve programmable optical, electric or acoustic properties.
Video courtesy of the Harvard Microrobotics LabJune 28, 2010 | 1 comments
Shifty Science: Programmable Matter Takes Shape with... more
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Ever forge your husband’s signature? Wife’s? Parent’s? Client’s? Do you think the clerk behind the counter at Walmart is skilled in handwriting analysis? The fact is, a handwritten signature provides zero proactive security. If someone signs your name to a check, and you call the bank and say it wasn’t you, they look at the signature and determine whether it’s yours or not. From there they assign liability. That’s dumb.
http://information-security-resources.com/2009/12/09/signature-authorization-is-stupid-security/Ever forge your husband’s signature? Wife’s? Parent’s?... more
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Boffins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think they've discovered a way to tell if somebody is gay via their Facebook friends, even if that person hasn't revealed their sexuality online, by looking at the number of gay or bisexual friends that person is friends with.
Essentially the researchers is "the more gay friends you have, the more likely you are to be homosexual".
The study has raised concerns about privacy in the online networking world and raised concerns that some employers or silly narrow-minded idiots could use the theory to out people who don't want to share their sexuality publicly.Boffins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think they've discovered a... more
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richjm
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added this
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2 years ago
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