terratogen wrote:
] It's the fourth day of a scientific conference in Denver—four
] busy February days in a huge rabbit-warren convention center
] with long hallways and fluorescent lighting and serious
] scientists giving serious PowerPoint presentations in darkened
] auditoriums; four days of breakthroughs and advances—nanotech
] to biotech, anthropology to zoology, the whole mind-spinning
] stew. Four days, for the assembled journalists, of making
] sense of it all and banging out stories on the fly—and now
] comes word of what could be a light interlude: Keep an eye out
] for the guy carrying the head. Say what? The robotic human
] head. The press people for the American Association for the
] Advancement of Science, the conference's sponsor, say the
] demonstration's on for tomorrow morning.

Looks just like a scene from Spielberg's "A.I.".

RE: The Man Who Mistook his Girlfriend for a Robot

] According to [Marshall] Brain's projections, laid out in
] an essay, "Robotic Nation," humanoid robots will be widely
] available by the year 2030, and able to replace jobs
] currently filled by people in areas such as fast-food
] service, housecleaning and retail. Unless ways are found
] to compensate for these lost jobs, Brain estimates that
] more than half of Americans could be unemployed by 2055.
]
] Dire, indeed. But Brain, a Raleigh, North Carolina,
] father of four and founder of HowStuffWorks, is probably
] not the kind of guy one would expect to see sounding the
] alarm bells over a futuristic robotic revolution.

Brain is his real name.

Wired News: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

] As devices get smarter, they can identify and adapt to
] individual users in a household, potentially making
] suggestions on everything from what to eat to how to
] dress. "Think of it as the electronic equivalent of an
] English butler," says Emile Aarts, vice-president and
] scientific program director at Philips Research
] Laboratories in Eindhoven. Those concepts may seem
] pie-in-the-sky now, but many are being tested in
] corporate labs -- and some are nearing commercialization.

Let's hope the telecom service providers don't screw this up.

Digital Homes

] robots compete annually in two international
] search-and-rescue tournaments, measuring their progress
] in diabolically difficult arenas designed by the National
] Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
]
] With current technology, negotiating an unstructured
] rubble- and debris-filled environment is about the
] hardest thing there is for a robot to do. That
] researchers even attempt it shows how far robotics has
] come in recent years. That it always fails, and sometimes
] spectacularly, shows how far it still has to go.

It appears that sensors are a limiting factor. Each type of
sensor can be confused or disrupted by some aspect of the
environment.

Search-Rescue Robots Test Their Mettle in Tournaments (TechNews.com)

] Researchers invited to bid for time on one of the world's
] top five supercomputers ...
]
] A total of 4.5 million supercomputing processing hours
] and 100 trillion bytes of data storage space on the most
] powerful computer for unclassified research in the United
] States is now up for grabs.

Total wall-clock time multiplied by the number of processors used. The IBM SP RS/6000, named Seaborg, has 6,656 processors.

The Scientist :: Call for big ideas

] I PROPOSE to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'

The origin of the Turing Test.

computing machinery and intelligence - a.m. turing, 1950

] Right now, $1,000 of computing power is between that of
] the brain of an insect and a mouse, at least in terms of
] hardware capacity. We will cross the threshold of the
] hardware capacity of the human brain by 2020 ...
Kurzweil proposes reverse-engineering the human brain as an
approach to machine intelligence.

eSchool News online

" Israeli scientists have devised a computer that can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC. The secret: It runs on DNA."

Computer Made from DNA and Enzymes

bucy wrote:
] ] The decision by the DHS to drum up publicity for security
] ] patch application, especially for 'critical' flaws, is
] ] seen as a direct response to well-known complaints that
] ] IT administrators have not been vigilant about installing
] ] fixes despite the clear danger of worms, viruses and
] ] intruder attacks.
]
] Ridge finally got beaten with a clue stick!

Windows Update is your friend.

RE: Homeland Security: Apply Those Patches!

] Moving Sensor Data onto the Internet
]
] A new XML encoding scheme may make it possible for you to
] remotely discover, access, and use real-time data
] obtained directly from Web-resident sensors, instruments,
] and imaging devices.
] ...
] Members of the Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC), including
] NASA, the National Imaging and Mapping Agency, and EPA,
] are developing a standard XML encoding scheme for
] metadata describing sensors, sensor platforms, sensor
] tasking interfaces, and sensor-derived data ...

Most interesting: SensorML aims to "archive fundamental properties and assumptions regarding sensor"

Sensors - April 2003 - A Sensor Model Language: Moving Sensor Data onto the Internet