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Submission + - Robotic Pets Respond to Human Emotions (gizmag.com)

Zothecula writes: Sony’s Aibo may be discontinued, but robotic pets of all shapes and sizes continue to stake a claim in the hearts of people around the world. Despite the apparent intelligence of some of these robot pets, their behavior and actions are usually nothing more than pre-programmed responses to stimuli – being patted in a particular location or responding to a voice command, for example. Real flesh and blood pets are much more complex in this regard, even discerning and responding to a person’s emotional state. Robotic pets could be headed in that direction, with researchers in Taiwan turning to neural networks to help them break the cycle of repetitive behavior in robot toys and endow them with almost emotional responses to interactions.
Iphone

Submission + - Plane Finder App Identifies Planes In The Sky

andylim writes: recombu.com has written up an iPhone app that lets you identify planes in the sky: "Point the camera at a plane and you'll see the flight number, aircraft registration, speed, altitude and how far away it is!" It's based on an existing service called Plane Finder, which tracks planes using something called ADS-B — the signals transmitted by commercial airliners with all this data the AR adds augmented reality into the mix.

Feed Eye opening research into eye closing (engadget.com)

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Peripherals

Fabian's M.A. thesis is a bit hard to read if you take his advice: close your eyes. But despite that little problem, he seems to have come up with some clever applications for eye closing in a computing environment, specifically "How closing the eyes enriches visual media." You just have to peep the video showreel to see what he's getting at, but the basic gist of it involves using winks, squints and blinks to operate related computing tasks, such as closing your eyes to activate text-to-speech, or closing one eye to activate a sniper scope. Other applications get a little bit higher minded, such as using your imagination to improve video content, or merely blinking to shut off the screen and rest you eyes. If you want spy the rest of Fabian's research, you'll have to prop open your own peepers to get a view -- we're taking a nap.

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Feed Dell delays SEC filings - again (com.com)

Blog: At some point in the near future, Dell is going to dump a mountain of paper on the Securities and Exchange Commission.The company...
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Dungeons & Dragons and IT Part II: Tech Evange

boyko.at.netqos writes: "Network Performance Daily follows up on their first editorial about D&D and IT, which addressed why so many technical people like the game (or vice versa.) Now it goes into the relationship between players who stubbornly evangelize a favorite roleplaying system and IT staff who evangelize a specific hardware or software solution.

From the article: "It is no secret that the technically inclined — geeks for short — are often stubborn, opinionated and do not move from an idea. This is doubly true either when discussing a technical solution or choosing a particular roleplaying game to play. For the same reason. [...] Smart people, however, are often used to situations where they are told that they are wrong by large numbers of people only to be proven right at the end. [...] One of the problems with learning to stick to your guns because you're usually right is that you have a tendency to stick to your guns even when you're wrong.""

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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