Tag: video

Inflatable robots

We can build a much wider range of machines with 1000x less material by building them soft. We can create materials and actuators that are soft – that act more like muscles and tissues found in nature that can exert tremendous forces while being flexible and low weight.

Interspecies communication

Bonobo understanding several 1000s words in English. Some of the candidate species with enough consciousness do not have the right vocal cords, so touch-based UIs might be the way forward for 2-way communication.

2014-01-25: Various species

A recent workshop on Analyzing Animal Vocal Sequences provided some illuminating views of what we know and what we don’t know about animal communication. In particular one notes the increased use of Machine Learning algorithms that are currently used to make sense of human interactions on the web. Talks at the workshop included:Unraveling dolphin communication complexity, Singing isn’t just for the birds, Automated identification of bird individuals using machine learning, A receiver’s perspective on analyzing animal vocal sequences, Animal communication sequence analysis using information theory, Machine learning for the classification of animal vocalizations and Information theoretic principles of human language and animal behavior

2015-05-23: Birds and Squirrels

squirrels understand ‘bird-ese,’ and birds understand ‘squirrel-ese.’ When red squirrels hear a call announcing a dangerous raptor in the air, or they see such a raptor, they will give calls that are acoustically “almost identical” to the birds

2019-11-07: Dog talk

Stella, an 18-month-old dog, can use a sound board to communicate using the 29 words she knows in short phrases and has been learning to ‘talk’ by pressing on buttons since she was 8 weeks old.

People.com interviewed Christina about Stella and how she can put words together to make simple sentences.

Using nose-activated vests and touchscreens, our canine pals are being trained to summon help for their handlers—and much more.

2023-01-31: Great apes (and humans?) share sign language. The research is plausible but the reported results hover around 57.3 ± 11.9%, so not very conclusive

All the great apes – chimps and bonobos – have an overlap of about 95% of the gestures they use to communicate. “So we already had a suspicion that this was a shared gesturing ability that might have been present in our last shared ancestor. But we’re quite confident now that our ancestors would have started off gesturing, and that this was co-opted into language.” The great apes use a whole “lexicon” of 80 gestures, each conveying a message to another member of their group. Messages like “groom me” are communicated with a long scratching motion; a mouth stroke means “give me that food” and tearing strips from a leaf with teeth is a chimpanzee gesture of flirtation.
Volunteers watched videos of the chimps and bonobos gesturing, then selected from a multiple choice list of translations. The participants performed significantly better than expected by chance, correctly interpreting the meaning of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures over 50% of the time.


2023-04-21: Sperm whales

We detail a scientific roadmap for advancing the understanding of communication of whales that can be built further upon as a template to decipher other forms of animal and non-human communication. Sperm whales, with their highly-developed neuroanatomical features, cognitive abilities, social structures, and discrete click-based encoding make for an excellent model for advanced tools that can be applied to other animals in the future. We outline the key elements required for the collection and processing of massive datasets, detecting basic communication units and language-like higher-level structures, and validating models through interactive playback experiments. The technological capabilities developed by such an undertaking hold potential for cross-applications in broader communities investigating non-human communication and behavioral research.


2023-04-22: Parrot video calls

A group of domesticated birds were taught to call one another on tablets and smartphones. The birds engaged in most calls for the maximum allowed time. They formed strong preferences—in the preliminary pilot study. Ellie, a Goffin’s cockatoo, became fast friends with a California-based African grey named Cookie. “It’s been over a year and they still talk”. The types of vocalizations the birds used suggested they were mirroring the call and response nature they engage in in the wild—“hello, I’m here!” in parrot-speak. The most popular parrots were also the ones who initiated the most calls, suggesting a reciprocal dynamic similar to human socialization. And while, in large part, the birds seemed to enjoy the activity itself, the human participants played a big part in that. Some parrots relished the extra attention they were getting from their humans, while others formed attachments for the humans on the other side of the screen.

High res aerial surveillance

I doubt it will take more than a few years before the large metropolitan police forces have these. The NYPD could deploy 2 of those to have 24/7 high res coverage of Manhattan. And thus the militarization of police and the application of military innovation domestically continue. I remember ordering the EU report An appraisal of technologies for political control back in 1998 it seems so dated now.

Book burning in Timbuktu

I hope those savages get utterly eradicated, like we eradicated smallpox.

The Timbuktu manuscripts have become a casualty of the war in Mali. A large collection of them has been destroyed by Islamist rebels when they burned the Ahmed Baba Institute to the ground. The manuscripts were priceless world heritage and had to do with art, medicine, science, and ironically included multiple old copies of the Quran.

“The literary heritage of Timbuktu dates back to the 15th and 16th centuries when the gold-rich kingdoms of Mali and Songhai traded across the Sahara with the Mediterranean world. In his Description of Africa, published in 1550, the traveler Leo Africanus marvels that in the bustling markets of Timbuktu, under the towers of its majestic mosques, the richest traders were booksellers.

When European empires scrambled for Africa in the 19th century, the continent was seen as illiterate and lacking in history, memory, or literature. Its art was seen as “primitive”, partly because it lacked a written art history.

Timbuktu is a palimpsest in the sand that proves otherwise. Libraries like the Ahmed Baba institute were rescuing Africa’s history from oblivion. Timbuktu is Africa’s city of books and learning that disproved racist myths about the continent. That luminous inheritance is what the Islamists have destroyed.”

UNESCO had been digitizing many of the manuscripts in the last 10 years… I just hope they got to these in time.

Video; Physicist Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the great leap in scientific knowledge that took place in the Islamic world between the 8th and 14th centuries. Its legacy is tangible, with terms like algebra, algorithm and alkali all being Arabic in origin and at the very heart of modern science – there would be no modern mathematics or physics without algebra, no computers without algorithms and no chemistry without alkalis.

2022-07-15: While the savages were unfortunately not eradicated, many of the books survived.

In a dramatic rescue, most of the documents that escaped the flames were smuggled out.
Now, after years of careful preserving, cataloging, and digitizing, more than 40k pages from one of Timbuktu’s biggest libraries have been made available for anyone to explore on Google Arts & Culture. “Africans knew how to write before many outside Africa did. These manuscripts can throw light on part of Africa’s past. There’s been very very little, marginal work on excavating the content of the manuscripts. What exactly can the manuscripts tell us about African history? What can they tell us beyond the different phases of African history, from spirituality to the field of science, to medicine, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, logic, philosophy, esoteric sciences?”

West Africa’s wealth of manuscripts provide evidence of extensive written traditions in the continent stretching back centuries — in contrast to past claims by Western colonialists and scholars who characterized African societies as oral rather than literate ones.