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May 18, 2005
The Interactive Internet
The Display Cam at http://www.blinkenlights.de/ is/was a building in Berlin tuned into a computer display. Viewers were invited to program an amimated sequence which would be displayed.
Blinkenlights.de is one of the web sites highlited by World Wierd Webcams of http://members.chello.nl/~a.horlings/ or camworld.ontheweb.nl.
Spotting was by John or Chris; can't recall which.
Posted by sjc at 5:34 AM | Comments (0)
May 6, 2005
East of the Blog, West of the Media
(The image is from a cool Brazilian blog I found, apparently written by a 16-year old.) found on yet a different blog,
Moore's Lore, May 4, 2005
This particular entry thinks about the narrowing difference between "professional" journalist (vetted by corporations) and "amateur" bloggers (vetted by each other). As blogs become main stream, they become credentialed, their authors come under scruitny, and eventually attack - both legal and physical.
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Moore's Lore is a riff on Moore's Law, which says that computer chips double in power every 18 months. Much more interesting, at least from my POV is Metcalf's La stating that the power of the network grows like 2**N, where N is the number of people connected to it. (Cf. Alice's restaurant)
The underlying process by which "blogs" evolve in public perception, is reminescent of McLuhan's First Law of Media - "The first content of new media is old media."
Posted by sjc at 6:02 PM | Comments (0)
Sony's Qrio robot attending nursery school in California
(Papero Child Care Robot)
TOKYO — Qrio, a humanoid robot developed by a Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratories Inc has been attending a nursery school in California since March to play with children up to 2 years of age in an experiment to help develop a robot that can "live in harmony with humans in the future."
Qrio spends time each day with more than 10 toddlers at the nursery school located in San Diego. Qrio is always accompanied by a researcher, who is in charge of making sure everything goes smoothly. While the children were at first apprehensive about Qrio, they now dance with it and help it get up when it falls. "The children think of Qrio as a feeble younger brother," researcher Fumihide Tanaka said. (Kyodo News)
Japan Today, Sony's Qrio robot attending nursery school in California, Sunday, May 1, 2005 at 07:15 JST, http://japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=4&id=335992
Posted by sjc at 1:30 PM | Comments (0)
May 5, 2005
すごうい ！ ！ ！ ！
Greetings, Human: Actroid, a robot, welcomes visitors to the World Expo in Aichi
May 9 issue - Norihiro Hagita recently put a 3-year-old girl and her mother into a room with a robot and kept them there for two hours. At first, the girl and the robot chatted and played. When the robot asked her to give him a hug, she happily complied. But after a time the two of them ran out of new things to do, and the little girl plopped down on the floor for a nap. The robot waited to make sure the girl had truly lost interest, then approached her mother and struck up a conversation. "Now here's the interesting part," says Hagita, pointing to the girl on videotape. "See how she sits up and watches? The robot is interacting with her mother and that's got her upset." He can't help but grin. "The robot has made her jealous."
While engineers in most of the world try to make robots that perform specific and usually unpleasant tasks, from fighting wars to performing deep-sea salvage, Japanese engineers are obsessed with making the machines more human. Having put the country squarely in the lead of the industrial robot market for the past two decades, they're now working on a new generation of robots that will serve as playmates, pets and social workers. Says Hagita: "The goal is to build an intelligent environment for the symbiosis of robots and humans in everyday life. The real challenge is to come up with robots that can actually communicate with people."
Christian Caryl, Dances With Robots, Newsweek International, [May 5, 2005]. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7692701/site/newsweek/
Posted by sjc at 3:45 PM | Comments (0)