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Why we programmed a robot to act like a sheepdog
Have you watched a sheepdog gather sheep on a hillside? The sheep move in waves and pulse back and forth, the dog weaving behind and around them. Squint a bit and it’s like watching iron filings on a piece of paper being drawn around by a magnet underneath, or a flock of starlings darting from an approaching falcon, or a school of fish evading an oncoming penguin. The patterns look similar between each event because the coordinated behaviour we see in sheep flocks or fish schools – where individuals are all closely packed and aligned in a certain direction – can reduce their chances of being identified or eaten by predators. What we found supported the long-standing assertion that individual animals respond to potential danger by moving towards the centre of a fleeing group – a theory called the “selfish herd” that was first proposed by the great evolutionary biologist Bill Hamilton in the 1970s. Dog rules We found that the dog appeared to be using two very simple rules. Robot shepherds
« Les réseaux sociaux nous poussent de plus en plus vers le pathos et de moin...
Pauline Escande-Gauquié est sémiologue et maître de conférences à Paris-Sorbonne-CELSA. Déjà auteur de Tous selfie ! Pourquoi tous accros ? (éd. François Bourin, 2015), elle a co-écrit avec Bertrand Naivin, théoricien de l’art et des médias, un livre paru en mars 2018, Monstres 2.0, l’autre visage des réseaux sociaux (éd. Revue des deux mondes – Votre livre, co-écrit avec Bertrand Naivin, fait le constat d’une désillusion. Pauline Escande-Gauquié – La culture hacker, web, a été escortée par une idéologie très forte, celle de l’accessibilité gratuite pour tous au savoir et à la connaissance. Revue des deux mondes – Il s’agit notamment d’une désillusion parce que l’autre visage des réseaux sociaux dont vous parlez dans ce livre est celui d’un monstre. Pauline Escande-Gauquié – Avec mon co-auteur, nous soulignons que le monstre, sur l’espace social, a toujours eu une fonction d’alerte, d’avertissement. Les réseaux sociaux sont un medium, c’est-à-dire une technique. (Photo : Pexels)
Is it better to rent or buy a home? ~ Get Rich Slowly
I’ve been a homeowner for 24 of the last 25 years. Based on this, you might think I’m an advocate of homeownership over renting. That’s not the case. In an editorial in the June 2007 issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Knight Kiplinger wrote, “It often costs less to rent. Today, let’s look at a handful of ways to evaluate the rent versus buy decision from a financial perspective. The Price-to-Rent Ratio One way to tell whether it’s better to rent or buy is by calculating the price-to-rent ratio (or P/R ratio). Find two similar houses (or condos or apartments), one for sale and one for rent.Divide the sale price of the one place by the annual rent for the other. For example, say you find a $200,000 house for sale in a nice neighborhood. Writing in The New York Times, David Leonhardt says, “A rent ratio above 20 means that the monthly costs of ownership well exceed the cost of renting.” Based on this info, I’d argue that: Nationwide numbers don’t tell the full story, of course.
mémoire "machine/soûl"
IBM’s machine argues, pretty convincingly, with humans
Media playback is unsupported on your device On a stage in San Francisco, IBM’s Project Debater spoke, listened and rebutted a human’s arguments in what was described as a groundbreaking display of artificial intelligence. The machine drew from a library of “hundreds of millions” of documents - mostly newspaper articles and academic journals - to form its responses to a topic it was not prepared for beforehand. Its performance was not without slip-ups, but those in attendance made clear their thoughts when voting on who did best. While the humans had better delivery, the group agreed, the machine offered greater substance in its arguments. That, IBM said, spoke to the heart of its goal: augmenting human beings to make decisions quickly and with more data than ever before. “I think it says actually very optimistic things about how humans respond to facts and figures,” said Noa Ovadia, one of the human debaters at the event. Offline thinking Project Debater was not hooked up to the internet.
Malcolm Lowry
Clarence Malcolm Lowry (/ˈlaʊri/; 28 July 1909 – 26 June 1957) was an English poet and novelist who is best known for his 1947 novel Under the Volcano, which was voted No. 11 in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list.[2] Biography[edit] Early years in England[edit] Lowry was born in New Brighton, Wirral, UK[3] the fourth son of Evelyn Boden and Arthur Lowry, a cotton broker with roots in Cumberland. He was educated at The Leys School in Cambridge [4] (the school made famous by the novel Goodbye, Mr. In autumn 1929 he enrolled at Cambridge to placate his parents. The twin obsessions which would dominate his life, alcohol and literature, were firmly in place. After Cambridge, Lowry lived briefly in London, existing on the fringes of the vibrant Thirties literary scene and meeting Dylan Thomas, among others. United States, Mexico, Canada[edit] The effort to save their marriage failed. Death[edit] Writings[edit] The Voyage That Never Ends[edit] The Ordeal of Sigbjorn Wilderness I Works[edit]
This Man Is Building an Armada of Saildrones to Conquer the Ocean
Every spring, thousands of great white sharks begin a mysterious migration. From up and down America’s West Coast, they head straight for a Colorado-size patch of the Pacific about halfway between San Diego and Hawaii. Once there, they hang for months at what marine biologists call the White Shark Cafe, frolicking and diving 1,500 feet or more. Each drone is a 23-foot neon-orange sailboat that catches wind with a solid wing more durable than a cloth sail. By early April, the saildrones arrived and began picking up signals from a group of 37 sharks that researchers had tagged with acoustic transmitters. “We’re talking about a place that is a long way from anywhere, that few people have ever been to,” Block says. The robotic vessels come from an Alameda startup called Saildrone Inc. This plan rests on Richard Jenkins, an engineer, sailor, and adventurer who invented the saildrone more or less by accident. Jenkins’s accent is tough to place, and for good reason. Take Superstorm Sandy.
Huggable | Personal Robots Group
“The Huggable”: Static Display of V2 Huggable Prototype. Star Wars Where Science Meets Imagination. International Touring Exhibit, 2008. “The Huggable”: Interactive Demonstration of Third Generation Prototype at the San Raffaele Del Monte Tabor Foundation (HSR), Milan, Italy, May 6-7, 2008.
"Synthetic human" CGI demonstrates eerie photorealism generated in real-time
On Wednesday morning at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Epic Games unveiled a remarkable demonstration of its latest real-time digital rendering system called Unreal Engine. The demonstration showed a completely digital copy of actor Andy Serkis reciting lines from Macbeth illustrating the incredibly rapid evolution of photorealistic digital effects. Back in 2016 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story delivered up a completely photo-realistic, computer-generated Peter Cushing, reprising his role from the original 1977 Star Wars. The latest state-of-the-art demonstration of illustrating where we are it with photorealistic digital characters comes through a combination of new technology from several different companies, blending volumetric capture advances with a new real-time rendering system. The result is full uncanny valley stuff, with an amazing depth of detail that replicates micro-muscular contractions on the actor's face in startling lifelike detail. View gallery - 3 images
