Facebook has been working on facial recognition for years to auto-tag photographs, but has now reached a point where its technology is ‘ closely approaching human-level performance .’ In fact, in some ways it might even be better. Read more…
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Facebook’s Facial Recognition ‘Approaching Human-Level Performance’
Machines fill the floor of the Exploratorium , San Francisco’s beloved interactive science museum. Over there is a contraption called Bicycle Legs , in which visitors manipulate air pumps to replicate muscles we use when pedaling (it’s trickier than it sounds). A few hundred feet away is a perennial favorite, the Wave Machine , which demonstrates transverse waves with the turn of a crank (even I can manage that one). Read more…
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The Government-Surplus Machines Powering a Cutting-Edge Science Museum
While you might sometimes find it annoying that you can’t remember faces, names and details, forgetting is an important part of the brain if we’re not to become cognitively overwhelmed. And, it turns out, the brain takes a very controlled approach to how it goes about it. Read more…
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Your Brain Forgets Stuff Carefully and on Purpose
I have a theory. When it comes to new technology, there are a bunch of early adopters who start using it and everyone else sees the very worst in the technology, ultimately belittling, dismissing and making fun of those who use it. But in spite of this initial negative reaction the technology finds its way into the mainstream, after a time, and the early fears and misinformation fades away. Read More
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Why We Hate Google Glass — And All New Tech
Bennett Haselton writes with a bit of online detective work done with a little help from some (internet-distributed) friends: “A website that was temporarily inaccessible on my Comcast Internet connection (but accessible to my friends on other providers) led me to investigate further. Using a perl script, I found a sampling of websites that were inaccessible on Comcast (hostnames not resolving on DNS) but were working on other networks. Then I used Amazon Mechanical Turk to pay volunteers 25 cents apiece to check if they could access the website, and confirmed that (most) Comcast users were blocked from accessing it while users on other providers were not. The number of individual websites similarly inaccessible on Comcast could potentially be in the millions.” Read on for the details. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Crowdsourcing Confirms: Websites Inaccessible on Comcast
Every so often, a project slides across your screen that seems too cool to be truly feasible. But Tyler Short, the architecture student behind this incredible louvre system, says his system’s been worked out to the last mechanical detail. Someone, manufacture this thing! Read more…
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This Amazing Mechanical Shading System Makes Blinds Beautiful
sciencehabit writes “Most magnets shrug off tiny temperature tweaks. But now physicists have created a new nanomaterial–an ultrathin 10-nanometer layer of nickel grafted onto a 100-nanometer-thick wafer of a substance called vanadium oxide–that dramatically changes how easily it flips its magnetic orientation when heated or cooled only slightly. The effect, never before seen in any material, could eventually lead to new types of computer memory.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Nanomaterial May Be Future of Hard Drives
The Delhi police lost the password for a portal that hosted complaints that had been passed on by the Central Vigilance Commission after an initial vetting. 667 complaints had been judged serious enough to be passed onto the police since the password was lost in 2006, but none have been acted upon, because no one had the password. Now they have the password. Presumably, the 667 unserved complainants believed the police to be either too slow or incompetent to have gotten back to them. Each Delhi government department under the CVC, including the MCD, DDA and several investigating agencies, have a chief vigilance officer to look into complaints. If a complaint reaches the CVC, either it tackles it independently or it sends it to the concerned department. In 2006, a portal monitored by the CVC was created, putting the complaints it sent to departments online. Each department could access the portal with a password. Complaints regarding the Delhi Police were also sent to the portal. Every year, the CVC holds meetings with government departments to take stock of the complaints with them. Sources said that since 2006, the CVC had got no feedback on complaints pending with the police. Vigilance complaints pile up as Delhi Police doesn’t know password [Shalini Narayan/Indian Express] ( via BBC News )
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Delhi police lost password for complaints portal in 2006, haven’t checked it since
v3rgEz writes “Even as some police departments curtail their sue of license plate scanning technology over privacy concerns, private companies have been amassing a much larger, almost completely unregulated database that pulls in billions of scans a year, marking the exact time and location of millions of vehicles across America. The database, which is often offered to law enforcement for free, is collected by repo and towing companies eager to tap easy revenue, while the database companies then resell that data, often for as little as $25 for a plate’s complete recorded history.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
MTorrice writes “Lithium-sulfur batteries promise to store four to five times as much energy as today’s best lithium-ion batteries. But their short lifetimes have stood in the way of their commercialization. Now researchers demonstrate that a sulfur-based polymer could be the solution for lightweight, inexpensive batteries that store large amounts of energy. Battery electrodes made from the material have one of the highest energy-storage capacities ever reported” Litihium Ion batteries should maintain capacity for about 1000 cycles, whereas Lithium-sulfur batteries traditionally went kaput after about 100. But it looks like they are getting pretty close to something feasible, from the article: “The best performing copolymer consisted of 90% sulfur by mass. Batteries using this copolymer had an initial storage capacity of 1, 225 mAh per gram of material. After 100 charge-discharge cycles, the capacity dropped to 1, 005 mAh/g, and after 500 cycles it fell to about 635 mAh/g. In comparison, a lithium-ion battery typically starts out with a storage capacity of 200 mAh/g but maintains it for the life of the battery, Pyun says.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Sulfur Polymers Could Enable Long-Lasting, High-Capacity Batteries