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Friday, April 11, 2008
Biped robot resists abuse from humans
Here's a new video of a bipedal robot called Dexter dealing with some shoving and pushing from one of the engineers working on the robot (below or here).
In the new clip Dexter certainly appears steadier on its feet - which are sporting spiffy new white sneakers instead of the black shoes it wore before. Another recent clip shows Dexter jumping - it has not yet reached the grace of four-legged Big Dog (video) but it's not bad.
The BBC is under fire from one of the biggest ISPs in the UK - Tiscali - which is demanding money from the broadcaster to recoup the costs of serving users of the BBC's popular TV streaming service, iPlayer.
I find it hard to understand why Tiscali thinks it should receive money - other than the possibility that it perceives the BBC as an easy target.
The BBC estimate that the service has increased the UK's use of bandwidth by between 3 and 5%. That is puny compared to the effect of peer-to-peer file sharing - much of which is illegal. A report last year found that between 50 and 80% of all traffic in the countries studied comes from peer-to-peer.
Tiscali is among the many ISPs that use a technique called traffic shaping to reduce the bandwidth available for peer-to-peer programs. Doing the same to iPlayer traffic would be simple. But not very popular.
As yet Tiscali is the only one to grumble about the iPlayer. Other ISPs have said they are so far coping with the extra demand from the it and other video services. But as streaming video gets more popular and of higher quality - in part thanks to the success of the iPlayer - ISPs will likely feel the effects.
It is plausible that one result will be changes to the way "unlimited" bandwidth packages are sold. They will have to either get more expensive, or start to disappear, with customers paying for what they use.
Installation of optical fibre systems - which will be faster than delivering broadband over phone lines as most UK ISPs do - may also become more urgent.
But our increasing appetite for bandwidth may in future become a problem for cellphone networks too. The latest generation of devices like the iPhone will make using the mobile web much easier - and online video is already part of it.
So far, advances in the capacity of the infrastructure used by phones has kept well ahead of demand. But perhaps, not long from now, wireless network operators will also start to feel their bandwidth squeezed, as people stream TV during their commutes instead of listening to music.
One reader was so excited they commented that they intended to head out in their car and try causing one for themselves. But this online traffic simulator lets you make your own shockwave jams without ruining anyone's journey, or causing major pile-ups.
Shockwave jams happen when a single driver slows slightly, and that delay becomes magnified into a wave of congestion travelling backwards through the flow of traffic.
The video below shows the test-track experiment in Japan. To create your own similar shockwave jam using the simulator, visit this page, and click the "Ring Road" option at the top of the page.
The cars and trucks flow around a circular track like the one used in Japan. Pretty soon a shockwave jam emerges, travelling anticlockwise, against the flow of traffic. If you turn up the density of vehicles it happens sooner, and you can create multiple jams.
According to the notes that go along with the simulator, the wave is triggered by one of the trucks causing a "mild perturbation", just like a braking driver on a real road.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University say they have taught a computer to interpret attractiveness in women. The computer learned to judge attractiveness by mapping the geometric shape of facial features from 100 different images previously been rated from 1 to 7 in terms of attractiveness, by a group of 30 men and women.
By noting what features humans found attractive, the computer was then able to successfully identify good looking individuals in additional images. The ratings were also based partly on geometric symmetry in faces which have long been linked to attractiveness, as defined by humans.
The researchers say it could be used in reconstructive surgery, presumably to guide plastic surgeons in making patients as attractive as possible.
I wonder, however, if it could also be used to generate ratings on some yet to be developed website that provides an alternative to Hot or Not. Human generated ratings from the latter seem to be based more on how much skin one reveals.
Then again, robots might learn to like a little extra flesh as well.
Phil McKenna, New Scientist contributor
Posted by Will Knight, online technology editor at 4:02 PM
Boeing tests first hydrogen-powered plane and Hydrogen powered plane takes off are a few of the many headlines written in the last 24 hours about Boeing's first successful flight of a human-piloted, hydrogen-powered aircraft. I was one of about 30 journalists at the press conference held at the Oca??a airfield near Madrid in Spain, where the announcement was made.
Boeing's spin machine was definitely laying on the eco-credentials thick and fast, wheeling out John Tracy, Boeing's Chief Technology Officer, to hammer the message home. He told the BBC it was "a historical technological success??? full of promises for a greener future".
Well, yes, and no. And from where I was sitting, the future didn???t seem quite so mint-tinted. For a start, the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, a factor the experimental aircraft could not handle, meaning the demo flight had to be cancelled. To see the plane in action, you'll have to check out this video of a previous flight:
To make the aircraft, Boeing's engineers took the shell of a Dimona glider, packed it with an electric engine, an automotive fuel cell, a small tank containing compressed hydrogen, a lithium Ion battery pack and all the necessary control electronics. To add a margin of safety - lest the fuel cell should suddenly fail - the battery was used to supply just half of the total power (45KW) needed during take-off.
Most of the main components are modified off-the-shelf products, not designed for aviation purposes, admits Nieves Lape??a, the project's technical leader. At present no one makes these components for aircraft.
It???s an impressive feat, but will we be taking off on holiday in a fuel cell-powered aircraft any time soon? Not in a Boeing-made aircraft. Despite the project's success, "we don't see fuel cells as a primary power source," Lape??a told me.
Tracy echoed the view and implied that hydrogen-powered airliners are a pipe dream. He told me he thinks turbine engines are here to stay and that Biofuels are a far more likely way of mitigating the environmental impact of aircraft. This is certainly not a view shared by Greenpeace.
So what was the point of the exercise? A cynic might say a little "greenwash" wouldn't do one of the world's biggest aircraft manufacturers any harm in the current climate. Whatever the objective, Boeing's project has apparenlty reached the end of the road. Lape??a???s group is now going to investigate developing small, ultra-light, unmanned air vehicle (UAV) - weighing under 10kg - powered by fuel cells instead.
David Cohen, features editor
Posted by Will Knight, online technology editor at 4:03 PM
Last week an audio clip emerged that is apparently the oldest recording of the human voice in existence. It's a ten-second clip of a woman singing a French folk song, and was recorded in 1860 on a device called a phonautograph. You can hear it here.
The last two hundred years have seen huge advances in music technology, such as electronic music and even home recording software. Here are five of the key advances, in chronological order.
1. First synthesiser - 1876 To find the first synthesiser, we have to go back to the early days of the telephone. Inventor Elisha Gray had come up with a prototype telephone, but lost out to Alexander Graham Bell for the patent. While working on it, however, he built the first synthesiser, apparently by accident.
His device was called the Musical Telegraph and was based on a self-vibrating electromagnetic circuit. Gray discovered that he could control the sounds produced by these vibrations and built a device that would produce single notes if supplied with electricity. He assembled several steel reeds, each of which produced a different note, and transmitted the result down a telephone line. 2. First electric pickup - 1930
Pickups are the devices mounted on the bodies of electric guitars, under the strings. They contain magnetic coils in various arrangements and, when the strings are plucked, their vibrations cause disturbances in the coils' magnetic fields. These disturbances generate small currents, which are then transmitted to an amplifier and converted into sound.
The first pickup is generally credited to George Beauchamp, a vaudeville musician who experimented with several techniques for making louder guitars. After successfully attaching cone-shaped resonators to a guitar's body, he moved on to magnetic technology, and in 1930 put together the first pickup. He apparently worked on his dining room table, and used a sewing machine motor to wind the strings. The resulting instrument was eventually sold as the Rickenbacker.
Theremin's device was called the Rhythmicon. It creates different notes, rather than just drum sounds, each of which can be made to repeat at different frequencies, and with different timbres like "woodblock" and "triangle". It can therefore produce incredibly complex rhythms and counterpoints that no human performer can manage.
Modern recordings are made using multitrack technology. This allows artists to record different instruments separately and then mix them together however they choose. The first such recording was released in 1947. It was a track called Lover (When You're Near Me), and was created by guitarist Les Paul (who incidentally also invented the guitar of the same name). Paul worked the track up in his garage, recording onto wax disks rather than the usual magnetic tape.
As amplifiers and loudspeakers are pushed to higher volumes, the signal starts to break up into distortion, an effect beloved of genres such as hard rock.
Link Wray's 1958 track Rumble was almost certainly the first to use a distorted sound, which was apparently produced by pushing pencils through the front of the amplifier. Even though it's just an instrumental, its menacing tone got the track banned.
However the Kinks' You Really Got Me (1964) also deserves a mention. Its guitar sound is far noisier and more distorted than Wray's, largely because guitarist Dave Davies slashed the speaker cone of his amp with a razor blade and then shoved pins through it. The resulting track is a blueprint for rock musicians everywhere.
We all know that DARPA - the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - likes to think outside the box. And as any buzzword-dropping management consultant will tell you, going forward, that is A Good Thing.
After all, such thinking by the Pentagon's research arm has brought us the very internet you are playing with right now - and will one day bring us driverless cars, too, as previewed in nascent form in the DARPA Urban Challenge.
Other DARPA-led essentials, like robotic insects, cannot be far off. But DARPA is now set to get a whole lot more ambitious - moving from the electromechanical world to the quantum one.
Last Friday, the agency asked US scientists to propose ways in which systems using quantum entanglement can aid DARPA's mission.
"To maintain the technological superiority of the US military and prevent technological surprise from harming our national security by sponsoring revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and their military use."
Hmm. So where do quantum effects like entanglement offer a military advantage? As in any other field, I guess, they will one day offer massive, parallel computing power in a quantum computer - and astonishingly secure communications via quantum cryptography too.
The People's Republic of China is well into this already: it is thought to be spending upward of $30 million on one army-led project to perform quantum communications between ground stations and satellites - and satellite-to-satellite too.
Now that won't please DARPA any, especially in these days of anti-satellite weapons. Both China and the US have destroyed satellites in orbit in the last 15 months. Laser-based quantum communication of battle orders by entangled photons that cannot be intercepted will strike fear into the hearts of cryptanalysts.
DARPA's quantum research program is called QuEST - short for Quantum Entanglement Science and Technology. It wants to offer research grants for projects which address "the nature, establishment, control, or transport of multi-qubit entanglement." It also wants to work out how to convert between different types of qubits - presumably from one coded in an electron to one encoded in a photon - and to understand just how long entangled states can be preserved.
What is clear from DARPA's request is that it is not interested in pigeon steps: it's after game-changing effects - or "dramatic improvement" in what we know now, as they put it. A quantum leap, if you will.
"Specifically excluded is research which primarily results in incremental improvement to the existing state of practice or knowledge," DARPA says, it wants results soon. It cites the need for an "aggressive timeline" as absolutely essential to any research proposals it grants funding to.
Can you imagine some hectoring lab manager saying to Einstein: "Hurry up there, Albie; we are on an aggressive timeline with this quantum stuff, you know. Get a move on, there's a good chap."
Tech websites love April Fools' gags - I'm sure they are part of every Silicon Valley marketing manager's strategy. Here's a list of places to get fooled online today.
New Scientist is a victim of the last one - we were delighted to see our compelling video on cyborg insects featured on the YouTube front page until we clicked the link to see we had been RickRolled.
The BBC is under fire from one of the biggest ISPs in the UK - Tiscali - which is demanding money from the broadcaster to recoup the costs of serving users of the BBC's popular TV streaming service, iPlayer.
Last month we brought you video (below) showing that traffic jams that seemingly appear from nowhere in free-flowing traffic had been recreated on the test track for the first time.
We all know that DARPA - the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - likes to think outside the box. And as any buzzword-dropping management consultant will tell you, going forward, that is A Good Thing.
