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"drones" entries
Recognising Hand Gestures, Drone Conference, Stubbornly Open Codes, and Remote Mobile Display
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An Interactive Machine Learning System for Recognizing Hand Gestures (Greg Borenstein) — a mixed-initiative interactive machine learning system for recognizing hand gestures. It attempts to give the user visibility into the classifier’s prediction confidence and control of the conditions under which the system actively requests labeled gestures when its predictions are uncertain. (an exercise for his MIT class)
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First Drone Conference Takes Off (Makezine) — forgive them the puns, Lord, for they know not what they do … uble intendre. Write-up fascinating beyond the headline. Dr. Vijay Kumar of the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering spoke about socially positive uses for aerial robotics, such as emergency first responders. Dr. Kumar’s work focuses on micro aerial vehicles. He explains that, “size does matter.” As robots get smaller, mass and inertial is reduced. If you halve the mass, the acceleration doubles and the angular acceleration quadruples. This makes for a robot that is fast and responsive, ideal for operating indoors or out, and perfect for search and rescue missions in collapsed buildings or around other hazards.
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Standing Up to Mississippi (Carl Malamud) — yesterday we received a Certified Letter from the Attorney General’s Special Assistant Attorney General demanding that we remove these materials from the Internet and all other electronic or non-electronic media. There was no email address, so I proceeded to prepare a 67-page return reply with Exhibits A-L. I thought folks might be interested in the 7 steps of the production process. Give to his Kickstarter project, folks!
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Open Project (PDF) — A lightweight framework for remote sharing of mobile applications. Sounds like malware but is Google Research project.
Art and Money, Probabilistic Programming, Feature Flow, and Good Drones
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How Jim Henson Turned His Art Into a Business (Longreads) — When Henson joined on to the experimental PBS show Sesame Street in 1968, he was underpaid for his services creating Big Bird and Oscar. Yet he spent his free nights in his basement, shooting stop-motion films that taught kids to count. If you watch these counting films, the spirit of Henson’s gift shines through. I think any struggling artist today could count Henson among their ilk. He had all the makings of a tragic starving artist. The only difference between him and us is that he made peace with money.
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Probabilistic Programming and the Democratization of AI (YouTube) — talk by Brian Ruttenberg, examples in Figaro, a Scala library which is apparently open source despite hiding behind a “give us your contact details” form.
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Linux Panel — love the crossflow of features: “Embedded today is what enterprise was five years ago,” Kroah-Hartman said. “You have a quad-core in your pocket. The fun thing about Linux is all the changes you make have to work on all the things.” The advances in power management driven by mobile devices initially weren’t that interesting to enterprise developers, according to Kroah-Hartman. That quickly changed once they realized it was helping them save millions of dollars in data center power costs.
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A Drone’s View of the Colorado Floods (DIY Drones) — some amazing footage.
Drones Dismissed, Drones Denied, Passing PRISM, and Data Analysis and Mining
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UAV Offers of Assistance in Colorado Rebuffed by FEMA — we were told by FEMA that anyone flying drones would be arrested. […] Civil Air Patrol and private aircraft were authorized to fly over the small town tucked into the base of Rockies. Unfortunately due to the high terrain around Lyons and large turn radius of manned aircraft they were flying well out of a useful visual range and didn’t employ cameras or live video feed to support the recovery effort. Meanwhile we were grounded on the Lyons high school football field with two Falcons that could have mapped the entire town in less than 30 minutes with another few hours to process the data providing a near real time map of the entire town.
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Texas Bans Some Private Use of Drones (DIY Drones) — growing move for govt to regulate drones.
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IETF PRISM-Proof Plans (Parity News) — Baker starts off by listing out the attack degree including he likes of information / content disclosure, meta-data analysis, traffic analysis, denial of service attacks and protocol exploits. The author than describes the different capabilities of an attacker and the ways in which an attack can be carried out – passive observation, active modification, cryptanalysis, cover channel analysis, lawful interception, Subversion or Coercion of Intermediaries among others.
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Data Mining and Analysis: Fundamental Concepts and Algorithms (PDF) — 650 pages on cluster, sequence mining, SVNs, and more. (via author’s page)
Peruvian Archaeodrones, Drone Crash, PDF in Javascript, and Bipedal Robots
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Peruvian Archaeologists Use Drones (Guardian) — Small drones have been helping a growing number of researchers produce three-dimensional models of Peruvian sites instead of the usual flat maps – and in days and weeks instead of months and years.
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Drone Crashes Into Crowd at Great Bull Run (WTVR) — just what it says. (via DIY Drones)
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jsPDF — create PDF in Javascript on the client.
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Let’s Make Robots: BoB — instructions on building a bipedal robot. (via Makezine)
Better UIs, Dot Tricks, UAV Camera, and Writing Interactive Fiction
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Good UI — easily digested tips for improving UIs. (via BERG London)
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Mapping Millions of Dots — tips like The other thing that goes along with this brightness scaling is to draw fewer dots at lower zoom levels. By the time you get most of a continent on the screen, the dots are so much smaller than pixels and there are so many of them to draw, that it looks the same and is much faster if you draw half as many dots at twice the brightness apiece. (via Flowing Data)
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118g 10x Zoom Camera for Drones — little less than 800×600 resolution. (via DIY Drones)
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Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform7 (Amazon) — all you need to write your own Zork, or even do better. With foreword by my hero (I squee like fanboy when I remember meeting him at the first Foo Camp) Don Woods. Yeah, Colossal Cave Adventure Don Woods. WIN. (via Marshall Tenner Winter)
Good Dev, User-Hostile Patterns, Patent Victories, and Drone History
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What to Look For in Software Dev (Pamela Fox) — It’s important to find a job where you get to work on a product you love or problems that challenge you, but it’s also important to find a job where you will be happy inside their codebase – where you won’t be afraid to make changes and where there’s a clear process for those changes.
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The Slippery Slope to Dark Patterns — demonstrates and deconstructs determinedly user-hostile pieces of software which deliberately break Nielsen’s usability heuristics to make users agree to things they rationally wouldn’t.
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Victory Lap for Ask Patents (Joel Spolsky) — story of how a StackExchange board on patents helped bust a bogus patent. It’s crowdsourcing the prior art, and Joel shows how easy it is.
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The World as Fire-Free Zone (MIT Technology Review) — data analysis to identify “signature” of terrorist behaviour, civilian deaths from strikes in territories the US has not declared war on, empty restrictions on use. Again, it’s a test that, by design, cannot be failed. Good history of UAVs in warfare and the blowback from their lax use. Quoting retired General Stanley McChrystal: The resentment caused by American use of unmanned strikes … is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one.
Security Sensor, Mobile Speed, Rate Limiting, and Self-Assembling Drone
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Canary (IndieGogo) — security sensor with video, motion, temperature, microphone, speaker, accelerometer, and smartphone remote control.
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Page Speed is Only The Beginning — 73% of mobile internet users say they’ve encountered Web pages that are too slow. A 1 second delay can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
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Rate Limiting and Velocity Checking (Jeff Atwood) — I was shocked how little comprehensive information was out there on rate limiting and velocity checking for software developers, because they are your first and most important line of defense against a broad spectrum of possible attacks. It’s amazing how many attacks you can mitigate or even defeat by instituting basic rate limiting. (via Alex Dong)
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Self-Assembling Multicopter (DIY Drones) — The true accomplishment of this research is that there is not one robot in control – each unit in itself decides what actions to take to keep the group in the air in what’s known as Distributed Flight Array. (via Slashdot)
Spatial Verbs, Open Source Malaria, Surviving Management, and Paper-like UAV
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Operative Design — A catalogue of spatial verbs. (via Adafruit)
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Open Source Malaria — open science drug discovery.
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Surviving Being (Senior) Tech Management (Kellan Elliott-McCrea) — Perspective is the thin line between a challenging but manageable problem, and chittering balled up in the corner.
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Disposable UAVs Inspired by Paper Planes (DIY Drones) — The first design, modeled after a paper plane, is created from a cellulose sheet that has electronic circuits ink-jet printed directly onto its body. Once the circuits have been laid on the plane’s frame, the craft is exposed to a UV curing process, turning the planes body into a flexible circuit board. These circuits are then connected to the planes “avionics system”, two elevons attached to the rear of the craft, which give the UAV the ability to steer itself to its destination.
Binary Instrumentation, Drone-Laser Warfare, Rocking the Rewrite, and Quantified Inbox
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Pin: A Dynamic Binary Instrumentation Tool — a dynamic binary instrumentation framework for the IA-32 and x86-64 instruction-set architectures that enables the creation of dynamic program analysis tools. Some tools built with Pin are Intel Parallel Inspector, Intel Parallel Amplifier and Intel Parallel Advisor. The tools created using Pin, called Pintools, can be used to perform program analysis on user space applications in Linux and Windows. As a dynamic binary instrumentation tool, instrumentation is performed at run time on the compiled binary files. Thus, it requires no recompiling of source code and can support instrumenting programs that dynamically generate code.
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Lasers Bringing Down Drones (Wired) — I’ve sat on this for a while, but it is still hypnotic. Autonomous attack, autonomous defence. Pessimist: we’ll be slaves of the better machine learning algorithm. Optimist: we can make love while the AIs make war.
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Advice on Rewriting It From Scratch — every word is true. Over my career, I’ve come to place a really strong value on figuring out how to break big changes into small, safe, value-generating pieces. It’s a sort of meta-design — designing the process of gradual, safe change.
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Creating Gmail Inbox Statistics Reports — shows how to setup gmail to send you an email at the beginning of each month showing statistics for the previous month, such as the number of emails you received, the top 5 to whom you sent email, the top 5 from whom you received email, charts on your daily usage.
Social Science, YAKVS, Open Source Mail, and Tesla Coil and Quadrocopter Fun
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The Effect of Group Attachment and Social Position on Prosocial Behavior (PLoSone) — notable, in my mind, for We conducted lab-in-the-field experiments involving 2,597 members of producer organizations in rural Uganda. cf the recently reported “rich are more selfish than poor” findings, which (like a lot of behavioural economics research) studies Berkeley undergrads who weren’t smart enough to figure out what was being studied.
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elephant — a HTTP key/value store with full-text search and fast queries. Still a work in progress.
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geary (IndieGoGo) — a beautiful modern open-source email client. Found this roughly the same time as elasticinbox open source, reliable, distributed, scalable email store. Open source email action starting?
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The Faraday Copter (YouTube) — Tesla coil and quadrocopter madness. (via Jeff Jonas)