Tuesday, March 21, 2006

AI In Gear Factor. RI-MAN: Helper Bot For the Edlerly Topic: Robots Anyone can make a robot to take care of children. After all, they're small and easily entertained. But researchers in Japan have created a bot to take on the more challenging task of caring for the world's aging population. RI-MAN is a 5-foot-tall, 220-pound caregiver covered in soft silicon, which lets it carry a person without causing injury. Built-in sensors detect a person's body position and weight, so the robot can figure out how best to lift them. At the moment, RI-MAN can only carry a 26-pound doll, but could be capable of lifting a 150-pound person within five years.  [Wired News: Top Stories] 10:25:56 PM    comment

gender Internet's Gender Gap Narrows. Building websites targeted to women pays off for some pioneers, but studies say distinctions in how males and females approach the net are more subtle than we thought. Commentary by Joanna Glasner. [Wired News: Top Stories] 3:58:29 PM    comment

violent Aggression-related gene weakens brain's impulse control circuits. A version of a gene previously linked to impulsive violence appears to weaken brain circuits that regulate impulses, emotional memory and thinking in humans, researchers at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have found. Brain scans revealed that people with this version – especially males – tended to have relatively smaller emotion-related brain structures, a hyperactive alarm center and under-active impulse control circuitry. read more [Science Blog -] 3:51:12 PM    comment

blog tech Shaping the boundaries of self-projection. I've recently added a sidebar to my blog's template to report items I've bookmarked in del.icio.us. Someone asked me the other day how it works, and I promised to explain here. It's a simple one-liner that can be added to the template used with any blog publishing system: You'll probably want to replace my del.icio.us username with yours, of course. ... [Jon's Radio] 3:32:34 PM    comment

open source OpenBSD Project in Financial Danger. [Slashdot] this describes the peril of really good work -- it works in an invisible way and is taken for granted even though it still needs support for updates and development -- but is out of sight out of mind and now nearly out of cash.  It seems like there is a place for government infrastructure support of public software that in some way avoids the recurrent need to seek attention in order to continue availablity.  There would seem to be a couple of approaches: one is to declare software x as a public good and provide a pension to the creators to help them carry on, and a second approach to archive the software x code in the library of congress and pay the creators some public service royalty based on usage value annually, or third to develop a sunset process that freezes the code and officially ends the project so that the creators are moved on to new projects with appropriate recognition and ceremony.  It is import for the open source culture to not punish successful projects and at the same time enable the continual development of project creators and collaborators in making technology relevant to our culture. --BL 3:29:21 PM    comment