Month: May 2015

Power Bank phone

You couldn’t be further out of touch with your “iphone”. Uhe interesting developments aren’t going to happen in the places pundits obsess about.

1 thing that quickly became clear when I spoke to people is that the number 1 reason they bought the phone is to use it as a power bank. Ghana is currently experiencing a severe power crisis — city-wide blackouts of 36 hours or more have become the norm in the capital, and a brisk business has grown around selling power banks, which are small portable rechargeable batteries that can be used to charge small electronics such as MP3 players and, yes, phones.

London mystery mansion

If a vast and lavishly appointed house in Manhattan—a palace nearly 2x the size of the White House—were being redeveloped on the edge of Central Park, New Yorkers would want to know who lived there. Londoners are equally inquisitive, and concerted efforts have been made to uncover the identity of Witanhurst’s owners

Human-level object description

Computer vision isn’t just object recognition anymore. Our team has developed a deep learning system that can look at a picture and try to answer specific questions about it, such as “What is the color of the bus?” or even the more complex “What is there on the grass, except the person?” If you had told me 2 years ago we’d be able to do this today I wouldn’t have believed you.

Robots use trial and error

I never particularly enjoyed home improvement anyway.

Algorithms that enable robots to learn motor tasks through trial and error using a process that more closely approximates the way humans learn have been developed.

“They demonstrated their technique, a type of reinforcement learning, by having a robot complete various tasks — putting a clothes hanger on a rack, assembling a toy plane, screwing a cap on a water bottle, and more — without pre-programmed details about its surroundings.”

“The key is that when a robot is faced with something new, we won’t have to reprogram it. The exact same software, which encodes how the robot can learn, was used to allow the robot to learn all the different tasks we gave it.”

Let the Pantheon Crack

John Ochsendorf wants to tear down Rome’s iconic Pantheon. He wants to pull apart its 2000-year-old walls until it’s gorgeous dome collapses. Destroying it, he believes, is the best way to preserve it.

But the Pantheon that Ochsendorf, a professor of engineering and architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has in mind to destroy is less than 50 cm high, and it’s made of 492 3D-printed blocks. It’s designed from laser scans of the real building. A gaggle of MIT engineering students will place it on a table with a sliding base and pull the walls apart, then put it back together and tilt it until it crumbles.

Cavemen didn’t live in caves

What tells an archaeologist that Paleolithic people spent less time in caves than we imagined in the past?
1 big clue is seasonal occupation evidence, something archaeologists infer based on things like animal bones. For example, by looking at found animal teeth, we can tell you at what season of the year the animals were killed. Also, certain animals are only available at certain times—fish that spawn at certain seasons of the year, for example. Almost all caves are described by archaeologists as seasonal, namely as autumn or winter occupations. It’s clear that people were in caves for maybe a couple of months a year at the most.