FROM THE DAILY MAIL

Your food's in the printer... the machine that lets you create and eat your meal from freshly squeezed syringes


First there were meals we had to make all by ourselves.

Then 'ready made' meals came along, making life that much easier.

But what if you could just print your dinner using food 'ink'?

Scientists at Cornell University in New York are developing a commercially viable 3D food printer which uses raw ingredients inside syringes.


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S.Korea schools get robot English teachers


Engkey, a white, egg-shaped robot developed by the Korea Institute of Science of Technology (KIST), began taking classes Monday at 21 elementary schools in the southeastern city of Daegu.

The 29 robots, about one metre (3.3 feet) high with a TV display panel for a face, wheeled around the classroom while speaking to the students, reading books to them and dancing to music by moving their head and arms.

The robots, which display an avatar face of a Caucasian woman, are controlled remotely by teachers of English in the Philippines -- who can see and hear the children via a remote control system.

Cameras detect the Filipino teachers' facial expressions and instantly reflect them on the avatar's face, said Sagong Seong-Dae, a senior scientist at KIST.

"Well-educated, experienced Filipino teachers are far cheaper than their counterparts elsewhere, including South Korea," he told AFP.

Apart from reading books, the robots use pre-programmed software to sing songs and play alphabet games with the children.

"The kids seemed to love it since the robots look, well, cute and interesting. But some adults also expressed interest, saying they may feel less nervous talking to robots than a real person," said Kim Mi-Young, an official at Daegu city education office.
Kim said some may be sent to remote rural areas of South Korea shunned by foreign English teachers.

She said the robots are still being tested. But officials might consider hiring them full time if scientists upgrade them and make them easier to handle and more affordable.
"Having robots in the classroom makes the students more active in participating, especially shy ones afraid of speaking out to human teachers," Kim said.

She stressed the experiment was not about replacing human teachers with robots. "We are helping upgrade a key, strategic industry and all the while giving children more interest in what they learn."
The four-month pilot programme was sponsored by the government, which invested 1.58 billion won (1.37 million dollars).

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FROM Popular Science Shills

Human-Sized German Workerbot Is Programmed to Be Happiest When It Stays Busy

A new cheerful factory robot aims to keep European industry competitive by working alongside humans, smiling when it accomplishes a task or when its bosses ensure it stays busy. The pi4_workerbot, developed at Fraunhofer labs, has fingertip sensitivity — it completes the perennially difficult robot task of grasping an egg — and a variety of facial expressions.

It is equipped with three cameras and two arms and stands as tall as an average human, so it can be seamlessly integrated into assembly lines, according to Fraunhofer’s Research News.

Although its torso is less dextrous than other humanoid bots like Robonaut, pi4’s hand and arm sensitivity could be useful for assembly line work. It can pick up two pieces — say, a gear wheel and a housing — and carefully fiddle with them until the two pieces engage. “The robot smiles, and places the correctly assembled part on the conveyor belt,” a Fraunhofer news release explains. The robot’s shoulders swivel, affording it several degrees of freedom, and it also has an rotating wrist, which allows precise hand movements.

Technology, Robot of the Week, Rebecca Boyle, assembly line, factories, robot arms, robot workers, robotic hand, robots, workersIt has a 3-D camera on its forehead to see its surroundings, and two other cameras allow it to inspect factory items with greater precision than a human eye. In an automotive factory, for instance, it could examine a chrome-plated object by studying how light reflects off the material. The robot is a product of the European Union-funded PISA project, which aims for greater industrial efficiency using robots.

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Imaging gear would give soldiers 'Terminator'-like vision

(Wired) -- No more will soldiers' vision be limited to the socket-embedded spheres that God intended. The Pentagon now wants troops to see dangers lurking behind them in real time, and be able to tell if an object a kilometer away is a walking stick or an AK-47.

In a solicitation released today, Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research branch, unveiled the Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras effort, or SCENICC. Imagine a suite of cameras that digitally capture a kilometer-wide, 360-degree sphere, representing the image in 3-D onto a wearable eyepiece.

You'd be able to literally see all around you, including behind yourself, and zooming in at will, creating a "stereoscopic/binocular system, simultaneously providing 10x zoom to both eyes." And you would do this all hands-free, apparently by barking out or pre-programming a command (the solicitation leaves it up to a designer's imagination) to adjust focus.

Then comes the Terminator-vision. Darpa wants the eyepiece to include "high-resolution computer-enhanced imagery as well as task-specific non-image data products such as mission data overlays, threat warnings/alerts, targeting assistance, etc." Target identified: Sarah Connor... The "Full Sphere Awareness" tool will provide soldiers with "muzzle flash detection," "projectile tracking" and "object recognition/labeling," basically pointing key information out to them.

And an "integrated weapon sighting" function locks your gun on your target when acquired. That's far beyond an app mounted on your rifle that keeps track of where your friendlies and enemies are.

The imaging wouldn't just be limited to what any individual soldier sees. SCENICC envisions a "networked optical sensing capability" that fuses images taken from nodes worn by "collections of soldiers and/or unmanned vehicles." The Warrior-Alpha drone overhead? Its full-motion video and still images would be sent into your eyepiece.

It also has to be ridiculously lightweight, weighing less than 700 grams for the entire system -- including a battery powerful enough to "exceed 24 hours [usage] under normal conditions." That's about a pound and a half, maximum. The Army's experimental ensemble of wearable gadgets weighs about eight pounds. And it is to SCENICC what your Roomba is to the T-1000.

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FROM FOX NEWS (*pukes)

Personalized TV Ads Coming, DirecTV Says
Published December 20, 2010
| The Wall Street Journal


For years, Dunkin Donuts "Time to make the donuts" slogan was all people would associate with the coffee and donut chain.

After years of promises and false starts, TV commercials targeted at individual homes may finally be ready for prime time.

DirecTV Group is planning the biggest rollout yet of "addressable ads," allowing advertisers to reach close to 10 million homes with commercials tailored to each household. Dog owners, for instance, could see ads for dog food, not kitty litter, while families with children could be shown minivan spots.

The satellite-TV service provider has struck a partnership with Starcom MediaVest, a unit of Publicis Groupe that buys ad time on behalf of heavyweight marketers such as Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola. Starcom has committed to spend $10 million to $20 million on the new service next year.


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FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

THE Postal Service recently announced it had lost $8.5 billion in the last year, despite cutting more than 100,000 jobs. Without new revenue and other changes to get it back on a firm financial footing, it said, it could face insolvency by the end of 2011.

Fortunately, the service has a unique asset that could allow it to make money by collecting valuable data that would contribute to the country’s safety and economic health: its far-reaching network of trucks.

The service’s thousands of delivery vehicles have only one purpose now: to transport mail. But what if they were fitted with sensors to collect and transmit information about weather or air pollutants? The trucks would go from being bulky tools of industrial-age communication to being on the cutting edge of 21st-century information-gathering and forecasting.

After all, the delivery fleet already goes to almost every home and business in America nearly every day, and it travels fixed routes along a majority of the country’s roads to get there. Data collection wouldn’t require much additional staff or resources; all it would take would be a small, cheap and unobtrusive sensor package mounted on each truck. (This idea is mine alone, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Postal Regulatory Commission.)

The key elements for the project already exist, including tiny, inexpensive G.P.S. receivers and radio uplinks, features found in today’s smart phones. The sensors would operate without distracting the drivers from their primary responsibilities. The service could also minimize startup costs by teaming up with a company to develop, install and operate the equipment. One company under contract with the National Weather Service is already installing environmental sensors on long-haul commercial buses to enhance weather forecasting.

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From Valley Wag

Facebook Can Hunt Down Your Face in Any Photo Now

Facebook knows what you look like, and the implications are staggering. Drawing on billions of labeled photos, the social network will now automatically recognize faces and suggest people to tag in photos you upload. That's probably just the start.

Under the new feature, Facebook will compare faces in photos uploaded by users to "tagged" pictures in its existing database. If it gets any matches it will suggest names to attach to the new photos. A company executive tells CNET the new feature is actually a privacy enhancement, since getting tagged will alert you to "a photo of you on the Internet that you didn't know about... you can remove the tag, or you... can write the person and say, 'I'm not that psyched about this photo.'"

Right, sure. Of course, you probably won't be so psyched.

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