Comment Ban open models (Score 2) 41
Guarantee this will primarily push the banning of open models as they can have alignment trained out after release. I can't believe they had to scrape around for a Liz Truss hanger-on for credibility.
Submission + - Some Super-Smart Dogs Can Learn New Words Just By Eavesdropping (npr.org)
An anonymous reader writes: [I]t turns out that some genius dogs can learn a brand new word, like the name of an unfamiliar toy, by just overhearing brief interactions between two people. What's more, these "gifted" dogs can learn the name of a new toy even if they first hear this word when the toy is out of sight — as long as their favorite human is looking at the spot where the toy is hidden. That's according to a new study in the journal Science. "What we found in this study is that the dogs are using social communication. They're using these social cues to understand what the owners are talking about," says cognitive scientist Shany Dror of Eotvos Loránd University and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. "This tells us that the ability to use social information is actually something that humans probably had before they had language," she says, "and language was kind of hitchhiking on these social abilities."
[...] "There's only a very small group of dogs that are able to learn this differentiation and then can learn that certain labels refer to specific objects," she says. "It's quite hard to train this and some dogs seem to just be able to do it." [...] To explore the various ways that these dogs are capable of learning new words, Dror and some colleagues conducted a study that involved two people interacting while their dog sat nearby and watched. One person would show the other a brand new toy and talk about it, with the toy's name embedded into sentences, such as "This is your armadillo. It has armadillo ears, little armadillo feet. It has a tail, like an armadillo tail." Even though none of this language was directed at the dogs, it turns out the super-learners registered the new toy's name and were later able to pick it out of a pile, at the owner's request.
To do this, the dogs had to go into a separate room where the pile was located, so the humans couldn't give them any hints. Dror says that as she watched the dogs on camera from the other room, she was "honestly surprised" because they seemed to have so much confidence. "Sometimes they just immediately went to the new toy, knowing what they're supposed to do," she says. "Their performance was really, really high." She and her colleagues wondered if what mattered was the dog being able to see the toy while its name was said aloud, even if the words weren't explicitly directed at the dog. So they did another experiment that created a delay between the dog seeing a new toy and hearing its name. The dogs got to see the unfamiliar toy and then the owner dropped the toy in a bucket, so it was out of sight. Then the owner would talk to the dog, and mention the toy's name, while glancing down at the bucket. While this was more difficult for dogs, overall they still could use this information to learn the name of the toy and later retrieve it when asked. "This shows us how flexible they are able to learn," says Dror. "They can use different mechanisms and learn under different conditions."
[...] "There's only a very small group of dogs that are able to learn this differentiation and then can learn that certain labels refer to specific objects," she says. "It's quite hard to train this and some dogs seem to just be able to do it." [...] To explore the various ways that these dogs are capable of learning new words, Dror and some colleagues conducted a study that involved two people interacting while their dog sat nearby and watched. One person would show the other a brand new toy and talk about it, with the toy's name embedded into sentences, such as "This is your armadillo. It has armadillo ears, little armadillo feet. It has a tail, like an armadillo tail." Even though none of this language was directed at the dogs, it turns out the super-learners registered the new toy's name and were later able to pick it out of a pile, at the owner's request.
To do this, the dogs had to go into a separate room where the pile was located, so the humans couldn't give them any hints. Dror says that as she watched the dogs on camera from the other room, she was "honestly surprised" because they seemed to have so much confidence. "Sometimes they just immediately went to the new toy, knowing what they're supposed to do," she says. "Their performance was really, really high." She and her colleagues wondered if what mattered was the dog being able to see the toy while its name was said aloud, even if the words weren't explicitly directed at the dog. So they did another experiment that created a delay between the dog seeing a new toy and hearing its name. The dogs got to see the unfamiliar toy and then the owner dropped the toy in a bucket, so it was out of sight. Then the owner would talk to the dog, and mention the toy's name, while glancing down at the bucket. While this was more difficult for dogs, overall they still could use this information to learn the name of the toy and later retrieve it when asked. "This shows us how flexible they are able to learn," says Dror. "They can use different mechanisms and learn under different conditions."
Submission + - How Bright Headlights Escaped Regulation — and Blinded Us All (autoblog.com)
schwit1 writes: Modern LED technology promised safer roads. Instead, it’s creating a blinding menace that regulators refuse to address.
- Headlight brightness has doubled in a decade, with widespread driver complaints and frustration.
- Regulatory loopholes allow manufacturers to increase brightness because of outdated federal standards.
- Regulations capping maximum brightness for LED headlights have still not been formulated.
- Headlight brightness has doubled in a decade, with widespread driver complaints and frustration.
- Regulatory loopholes allow manufacturers to increase brightness because of outdated federal standards.
- Regulations capping maximum brightness for LED headlights have still not been formulated.
Comment Free Upgrade (Score 3, Insightful) 22
Totally local, cloud-free seems like a massive improvement!
I'm still happily using a house full of discontinued original SlimDevices/Squeezebox hardware players from 2006-2010 thanks to them having open source local server support from the start and absolute stars like Michael Herger, CDrummond and many other contributors not just keeping them working but fully containerized and using modern web UIs and an enormous range of plugins.
Comment Re:The only true private browser is (Score 5, Informative) 60
Firefox has had the whole container system built in for a long time: Firefox now runs sites such as Facebook in "containers", effectively hiving the social network off into its own little sandboxed world, where it can't see what's happening on other sites
There are several popular extensions that use this facility to allow you to always assign particular sites to a particular container, such as to keep work related things that have a singe sign on together.
Comment Re:There's only three choices. (Score 1) 108
For software, quality is often negatively correlated with price.
Especially if it's a major consultancy providing software services to public bodies for some reason...
Comment Great summary (Score 1) 48
I'm impressed at what a comprehensive and comprehensible summary was provided for this article.
Comment Re:It's the corporate / Windows mindset. (Score 1) 48
To be fair Windows has rather regressed in this approach. A long time ago the vision was that embeddable COM objects would provide just that kind of editable content inside compound documents.
WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS was meant to be the next step as a relational filesystem that allowed documents to be formed from related data and any application understanding a particular schema to edit that part.
Comment Re:Is this how far Slashdot has descended? (Score 1) 112
Goldeneye is two years older than Contact, the telescope makes up much less of the plot, and it's certainly much less related to "News for nerds".
And Slashdot is also that old...
Comment Is this how far Slashdot has descended? (Score 3) 112
Goldeneye, not Contact, as the example for the Slashdot audience? Really?
Comment Re:Tomorrow's World 2020 special (Score 1) 54
Yes! One of the many frustrating examples of the BBC not releasing their back catalogue of culturally and historically significant programmes like this.
Comment Re:Wrongly blaming jaywalking (Score 1) 325
I know. I really want to believe the comments to the effect that "she deserved it as she crossed in the wrong place" are made by astro turfing bots, but I suspect even the bots would display better aparent empathy and logic.
If only Asimov was still alive.
Comment Wrongly blaming jaywalking (Score 1) 325
It's disturbing how many comments in the media have tried blaming the pedestrian for crossing at the wrong spot. There seems to a be a bit of an astroturfing campaign â" Reddit is full of such comments.
In much of the world (where auto makers have not managed to buy a change the law) this is not illegal and in fact standard practice, such as in the UK for example. Any self driving technology must clearly be able to deal with this, not least for handling unpredictable young children in residential areas.
Comment Re: Does Anyone Use That? (Score 1) 474
Yep it's like someone is testing a bot designed to drown out reason, much like the comments on news sites seem to be these days. People are pushing BSD and no one has even mentioned netcraft. Not like the old days at all.
Comment Re:Wouldn't be a problem -if-... (Score 3, Informative) 452
Actually the BBC failed miserably to debunk the lies. In its typically misplaced idea of "neutrality" it would typically avoid making a factual statement and instead have interviewees on to make opposing points. The effect of this was to dignify the lie and place it in the centre ground.
They've done this consistently for years, especially since coming under significant pressure from the Blair government around the Iraq war time (regarding the dodgy dossier, David Kelly etc). And now the threat of the Conservatives scrapping or reducing the licence fee appears to make them particularly timid about calling out political lies, for example never questioning the premise of austerity and the blame placed on the previous labour government.
With the advent of 24 hour news the factual content is even more diluted and it's 90% speculation and sensational interviews with nutters.
Channel 4 News in the UK does a much better job of fact checking and challenging, as does BBC Newsnight, but sadly they mostly only attract the educated and more liberal demographic that is less likely to be misled in the first place.
