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Fossilised data - the ultimate back-up?
There's an interesting discussion on Slashdot today about how to store digital images underground in a format still readable 25 years later. There are some interesting suggestions.One person proposes avoiding problems with changing memory formats by putting a whole computer into the time capsule. Only a power supply would be needed to view them in the future.
Why Adam gets more spam than Eve
Email addresses that begin with letters towards the end of the alphabet receive less spam than those starting with letters towards the end, says Richard Clayton at the University of Cambridge.He looked at more than half a billion emails that arrived at one UK ISP over an eight-week period. After ignoring addresses that appear to be out of use, he showed that for those beginning with A 30% of messages are spam. Someone with an address starting with Z gets a smaller proportion - 20%.The exact reason for the difference is unclear. Clayton thinks it is down to spammers attempting to guess addresses.
Japanese or US Americans: who likes androids more?
US Americans do, according to Christoph Bartneck at the Technical University of Munich. He thinks that crossing the uncanny valley - overcoming the revulsion we feel towards robots that are almost, but not quite, human-like - is something that a society does together.Bartneck showed Japanese and US citizens a number of photos and asked them to rate them for likeability. Some of those showed the faces of real humans, some showed human-like androids, and some were simply photos of robot pets.
Shimmer vision binoculars see further thanks to heat haze
Heat haze usually blocks your view of distant objects. But a new kind of binoculars use it to see further than possible through clear air.The Super-Resolution Vision System (SRVS) is funded by the US military research agency DARPA. It exploits the fact that the distortions of heat haze can fleetingly act like a lens, magnifying a clear view of objects behind it.The SRVS binoculars automatically collects those "lucky regions" when trained on shimmering air. They can then be digitally stitched together into a single continuous view with more detail than possible without heat haze.
Photosynth goes live
Yesterday, Microsoft finally released the first public version of Photosynth, software that meshes many photos of the same place into a 3D landscape. There are already several synths on the Photosynth website - to view them you'll first need to download the software there. You can upload collections of your own photos of a place and have them get the Photosynth treatment. The video below gives you an idea of what you can expect.
Impressive though this week's public release is, there's a lot to look forward to in the future.
Robot tells human off for doing it wrong
The video below shows a scenario that is likely to become real as industrial robots improve: a human and a robot work together to assemble an object from its parts. But in the clip from the University of Minho, Portugal, not everything is going to plan. The human gets a stern warning from the robot that they are doing it wrong.
The pair are assembling a foam chassis with two wheels. Although the robot has already attached the wheel on its side of the chassis, the human offers it another. The robot - ARoS - is not impressed."Ah!
Deeper Beijing pool responsible for tumbling swimming records
Spectators at Beijing's Olympic swimming pool have witnessed some outlandish goings-on over the last couple of weeks: 25 world records have fallen, compared with eight at the Athens Olympics four years ago. Seven of them were broken by one swimmer, Michael Phelps of the US, while the UK's Rebecca Adlington improved on the 800 metres freestyle record - unchallenged for 19 years - by more than two seconds.Records have been tumbling in other sports too, but none at this rate. What's going on?
Handheld gadget offers a window on Rome's past
Visitors to Rome will no longer have to rely on their imagination to see the ancient city at its glorious peak. Just point TimeMachine, a new handheld gadget produced by Ducati Myers and the University of Bologna, at famous sites like the Colosseum and it automatically displays a 3D reconstruction of the building.The device is the first commercial application of the Rome Reborn project, an ongoing effort to reconstruct the city as it was in AD 320. The starting point of the project was an impressively detailed physical model of the city, some 15 meters across, built over a 40 years span in the twentieth century.
Robot tripod takes impressive panoramas
function FlashProxy() {}FlashProxy.callJS = function() {} At the SIGGRAPH graphics conference in Los Angeles I got the chance to look at GigaPan, a robotic tripod (pictured below) that lets photographers produce impressively large panoramas at the touch of a button.Check out the snowscape from Colorado above, taken by Jason Buchheim. Zoom in and you will appreciate how much detail GigaPan can capture. The image contains 1.91 gigapixels stitched together from 19 separate snapshots. A gigapixel is 1 billion pixels.Producing a GigaPan image is easy. The user clamps their camera to the tripod.
Just an illusion: still images that move
Earlier this week I found myself on a long-haul flight to the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Los Angeles. To pass the time I decided to catch up on some of the papers that are being presented here. But I had to stop when it came to the mind-warping, travel-sickness-inducing images that littered a paper from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan.For the full effect click the image left to enlarge or here.Ming-Te Chi and colleagues have analysed a number of hand drawn examples of these 'self-animating images'.
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