ENTRIES TAGGED "robots"
Raspberry Pi MITM, Industrial Robot SDK, Cheap Mill, and Open Source State Replication in Go
- Raspberry Pi Wireless Attack Toolkit — A collection of pre-configured or automatically-configured tools that automate and ease the process of creating robust Man-in-the-middle attacks. The toolkit allows your to easily select between several attack modes and is specifically designed to be easily extendable with custom payloads, tools, and attacks. The cornerstone of this project is the ability to inject Browser Exploitation Framework Hooks into a web browser without any warnings, alarms, or alerts to the user. We accomplish this objective mainly through wireless attacks, but also have a limpet mine mode with ettercap and a few other tricks.
- Industrial Robot with SDK For Researchers (IEEE Spectrum) — $22,000 industrial robot with 7 degrees-of-freedom arms, integrated cameras, sonar, and torque sensors on every joint. [...] The Baxter research version is still running a core software system that is proprietary, not open. But on top of that the company built the SDK layer, based on ROS (Robot Operation System), and this layer is open source. In addition, there are also some libraries of low level tasks (such as joint control and positioning) that Rethink made open.
- OtherMill (Kickstarter) — An easy to use, affordable, computer controlled mill. Take all your DIY projects further with custom circuits and precision machining. (via Mike Loukides)
- go-raft (GitHub) — open source implementation of the Raft distributed consensus protocol, in Go. (via Ian Davis)
Artificial Emotions, 3D Printing Culpability, Mr Zuckerberg Buys Washington, and Pirate Economics
- Nautilus — elegantly-designed science web ‘zine. Includes Artificial Emotions on AI, neuro, and psych efforts to recognise and simulate emotions.
- A Short Essay on 3D Printing — This hands-off approach to culpability cannot last long. If you design something to go into someone’s bathroom, it will make it’s way into their childs mouth. If someone buys, downloads and prints a case for their OUYA and they suffer an electric shock as a result, who is to blame? If a person replaces their phone case with a 3D printed one, and it doesn’t survive a drop to the floor, what then? We need to create a new chain of responsiblity for this emerging, and potentially very profitable business. (via Near Future Laboratory)
- Zuckerberg’s FWD.us PAC (Anil Dash) — One of Mark Zuckerberg’s most famous mottos is “Move fast and break things.” When it comes to policy impacting the lives of millions of people around the world, there couldn’t be a worse slogan. Let’s see if we can get FWD.us to be as accountable to the technology industry as it purports to be, since they will undoubtedly claim to have the grassroots support of our community regardless of whether that’s true or not.
- Pirate Economics — four dimensions of pirate institutions. Not BitTorrent pirates, but Berbers and arr-harr-avast-ye-swabbers nautical pirates. Pirate crews not only elected their captains on the basis of universal pirate suffrage, but they also regularly deposed them by democratic elections if they were not satisfied with their performance. Like the Berbers, or the US constitution, pirates didn’t just rely on democratic elections to keep their leaders under check. Though the captain of the ship was in charge of battle and strategy, pirate crews also used a separate democratic election to elect the ship’s quartermaster who was in charge of allocating booty, adjudicating disputes and administering discipline. Thus they had a nascent form of separation of powers.
Infographics Game, Streaming Money, Robot Interviews, and Inefficient Science Funding
- Metrico — puzzle game for Playstation centered around infographics (charts and graphs). (via Flowing Data)
- The Lease They Can Do (Business Week) — excellent Paul Ford piece on money, law, and music streaming services. So this is not about technology. Nor is it really about music. This is about determining the optimal strategy for mass licensing of digital artifacts.
- How Effective Is a Humanoid Robot as a Tool for Interviewing Young Children? (PLosONE) — The results reveal that the children interacted with KASPAR very similar to how they interacted with a human interviewer. The quantitative behaviour analysis reveal that the most notable difference between the interviews with KASPAR and the human were the duration of the interviews, the eye gaze directed towards the different interviewers, and the response time of the interviewers. These results are discussed in light of future work towards developing KASPAR as an ‘interviewer’ for young children in application areas where a robot may have advantages over a human interviewer, e.g. in police, social services, or healthcare applications.
- Funding: Australia’s Grant System Wastes Time (Nature, paywalled) — We found that scientists in Australia spent more than five centuries’ worth of time preparing research-grant proposals for consideration by the largest funding scheme of 2012. Because just 20.5% of these applications were successful, the equivalent of some four centuries of effort returned no immediate benefit to researchers.
Hi-Res Long-Distance, Robot Ants, Data Liberation, and Network Neutrality
- Millimetre-Accuracy 3D Imaging From 1km Away (The Register) — With further development, Heriot-Watt University Research Fellow Aongus McCarthy says, the system could end up both portable and with a range of up to 10 Km. See the paper for the full story.
- Robot Ants With Pheromones of Light (PLoS Comp Biol) — see also the video. (via IEEE Spectrum’s AI blog)
- tabula — open source tool for liberating data tables trapped inside PDF files. (via Source)
- There’s No Economic Imperative to Reconsider an Open Internet (SSRN) — The debate on the neutrality of Internet access isn’t new, and if its intensity varies over time, it has for a long while tainted the relationship between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Online Service Providers (OSPs). This paper explores the economic relationship between these two types of players, examines in laymen’s terms how the traffic can be routed efficiently and the associated cost of that routing. The paper then assesses various arguments in support of net discrimination to conclude that there is no threat to the internet economy such that reconsidering something as precious as an open internet would be necessary. (via Hamish MacEwan)
Bootstrap Fun, Digital Public Library, Snake Robots, and Aboriginal Data
- geo-bootstrap — Twitter Bootstrap fork that looks like a classic geocities page. Because. (via Narciso Jaramillo)
- Digital Public Library of America — public libraries sharing full text and metadata for scans, coordinating digitisation, maximum reuse. See The Verge piece. (via Dan Cohen)
- Snake Robots — I don’t think this is a joke. The snake robot’s versatile abilities make it a useful tool for reaching locations or viewpoints that humans or other equipment cannot. The robots are able to climb to a high vantage point, maneuver through a variety of terrains, and fit through tight spaces like fences or pipes. These abilities can be useful for scouting and reconnaissance applications in either urban or natural environments. Watch the video, the nightmares will haunt you. (via Aaron Straup Cope)
- The Power of Data in Aboriginal Hands (PDF) — critique of government statistical data gathering of Aboriginal populations. That ABS [Australian Bureau of Statistics] survey is designed to assist governments, commentators or academics who want to construct policies that shape our lives or encourage a one-sided public discourse about us and our position in the Australian nation. The survey does not provide information that Indigenous people can use to advance our position because the data is aggregated at the national or state level or within the broad ABS categories of very remote, remote, regional or urban Australia. These categories are constructed in the imagination of the Australian nation state. They are not geographic, social or cultural spaces that have relevance to Aboriginal people. [...] The Australian nation’s foundation document of 1901 explicitly excluded Indigenous people from being counted in the national census. That provision in the constitution, combined with Section 51, sub section 26, which empowered the Commonwealth to make special laws for ‘the people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any State’ was an unambiguous and defining statement about Australian nation building. The Founding Fathers mandated the federated governments of Australia to oversee the disappearance of Aboriginal people in Australia.
SSH/L Multiplexer, GitHub Bots, Test Your Assumptions, and Tech Trends
- sslh — ssh/ssl multiplexer.
- Github Says No to Bots (Wired) — what’s interesting is that bots augmenting photos is awesome in Flickr: take a photo of the sky and you’ll find your photo annotated with stars and whatnot. What can GitHub learn from Flickr?
- Four Assumptions of Multiple Regression That Researchers Should Always Test — “but I found the answer I wanted! What do you mean, it might be wrong?!”
- Tenth Grade Tech Trends (Medium) — if you want to know what will have mass success, talk to early adopters in the mass market. We alpha geeks aren’t that any more.
Silicon Beats Meat, Workers against Machines, Quora Design Notes, and Free Data Science Books
- Robots Will Take Our Jobs (Wired) — I agree with Kevin Kelly that (in my words) software and hardware are eating wetware, but disagree that This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that seems like drudgery will be done by robots. Civilizations which depend on specialization reward work and penalize idleness. We already have more people than work for them, and if we’re not to be creating a vast disconnected former workforce then we (society) need to get a hell of a lot better at creating jobs and not destroying them.
- Why Workers are Losing the War Against Machines (The Atlantic) — There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.
- Early Quora Design Notes — I love reading post-mortems and learning from what other people did. Picking a starting point is important because it will be the axis the rest of the design revolves around — but it’s tricky and not always the first page in the flow. Ideally, you should start with the page that serves the most significant goals of the product.
- Free Data Science Books — I don’t mean free as in some guy paid for a PDF version of an O’Reilly book and then posted it online for others to use/steal, but I mean genuine published books with a free online version sanctioned by the publisher. That is, “the publisher has graciously agreed to allow a full, free version of my book to be available on this site.” (via Stein Debrouwere)
Ethical Machines, Fault Tolerance, Offline HTML5, and Doomy Data
- Moral Machines — it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems. Your car is speeding along a bridge at fifty miles per hour when errant school bus carrying forty innocent children crosses its path. Should your car swerve, possibly risking the life of its owner (you), in order to save the children, or keep going, putting all forty kids at risk? If the decision must be made in milliseconds, the computer will have to make the call. (via BoingBoing)
- Hystrix — a latency and fault tolerance library designed to isolate points of access to remote systems, services and 3rd party libraries, stop cascading failure and enable resilience in complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable. More information. (via Tom Loosemore)
- Offline First: A Better HTML5 Experience — can’t emphasize how important it is to have offline functionality for the parts of the world that don’t have blanket 3G/LTE/etc coverage. (280 south from SF, for example).
- Disaster of Biblical Proportions (Business Insider) — impressive collection of graphs and data showing commodity prices indicate our species is living beyond its means.
Win95 Tips, Obama's Big Data, Aggregate Statistics, and Foxconn Robots
- Windows 95 Tips — hilarious tumblr showing the dark side of life through Windows 95 UI tips. (via Juha Saarinen)
- Everything We Know About Obama’s Big Data Operation (Pro Publica) — “White suburban women? They’re not all the same. The Latino community is very diverse with very different interests,” Dan Wagner, the campaign’s chief analytics officer, told The Los Angeles Times. “What the data permits you to do is figure out that diversity.”
- cube (GitHub) — time-series data collection and analysis. Cube lets you compute aggregate statistics post hoc. It also enables richer analysis, such as quantiles and histograms of arbitrary event sets. Cube is built on MongoDB and available under the Apache License on GitHub.
- 1M Robots to Replace 1M Human Jobs at Foxconn (Singularity Hub) — Foxconn plant opening, making manufacturing robots, and they appear to be dogfooding by using them in other plants. $25k each, 10k+ made, and fits into the pattern: the number of operational robots in China increased by 42 percent from 2010 to 2011.
Medical Data Commons, Verizon Sell You, Doctor Watson, and Weedkilling Drones
- Let’s Pool Our Medical Data (TED) — John Wilbanks (of Science Commons fame) gives a strong talk for creating an open, massive, mine-able database of data about health and genomics from many sources. Money quote: Facebook would never make a change to something as important as an advertising with a sample size as small as a Phase 3 clinical trial.
- Verizon Sells App Use, Browsing Habits, Location (CNet) — Verizon Wireless has begun selling information about its customers’ geographical locations, app usage, and Web browsing activities, a move that raises privacy questions and could brush up against federal wiretapping law. To Verizon, even when you do pay for it, you’re still the product. Carriers: they’re like graverobbing organ harvesters but without the strict ethical standards.
- IBM Watson About to Launch in Medicine (Fast Company) — This fall, after six months of teaching their treatment guidelines to Watson, the doctors at Sloan-Kettering will begin testing the IBM machine on real patients. [...] On the screen, a colorful globe spins. In a few seconds, Watson offers three possible courses of chemotherapy, charted as bars with varying levels of confidence–one choice above 90% and two above 80%. “Watson doesn’t give you the answer,” Kris says. “It gives you a range of answers.” Then it’s up to [the doctor] to make the call. (via Reddit)
- Robot Kills Weeds With 98% Accuracy — During tests, this automated system gathered over a million images as it moved through the fields. Its Computer Vision System was able to detect and segment individual plants – even those that were touching each other – with 98% accuracy.
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