Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Hollywood Increasingly Re-Animating Dead Actors
March 25th, 2015Via: The Hollywood Reporter: No actor is indispensable. That is the blunt lesson from the fact that Universal Pictures was able to complete its April 3 tentpole, Furious 7, following star Paul Walker’s death in a November 2013 car accident about halfway through the shoot. Beyond saying that brothers Cody and Caleb stood in for […]
Amazon Now Wanting to Automate Pick and Pack
March 25th, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review: Robots will use the latest computer-vision and machine-learning algorithms to try to perform the work done by humans in vast fulfillment centers.
Apple Patent Envisions Tracking People in Real Time
March 25th, 2015.gov has probably been doing it for years, so why not? Via: cnet: Apple’s current Find My Friends feature could one day expand into more of a Track My Friends feature. Granted to Apple on Tuesday by the US Patent and Trademark Office, a patent called “Sharing location information among devices” describes a process that […]
Technology and Persuasion
March 23rd, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review: The idea that computers, mobile phones, websites, and other technologies could be designed to influence people’s behavior and even attitudes dates back to the early 1990s, when Stanford professor B.?J. Fogg coined the term “persuasive computing” (later broadened to “persuasive technology”). But today many companies have taken that one step further: […]
Canada: False Flag Operations and Cyberwar
March 23rd, 2015Via: First Look: According to the Snowden documents, it has a range of “deception techniques” in its toolbox. These include “false flag” operations to “create unrest,” and using so-called “effects” operations to “alter adversary perception.” A false-flag operation usually means carrying out an attack, but making it look like it was performed by another group […]
The Little “Fighter” That Couldn’t: Moral Hazard and the F-35
March 21st, 2015And next up from the same imbeciles that brought you the F-35: Long Range Strike Bomber. Via: John Q Public: As Air Force senior officials prepare for posture hearings this week with the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, the subject of modernization promises to be front and center. Core to that discussion will almost […]
Caltech: Making Graphene at Room Temperature
March 21st, 2015Via: Caltech: A new technique invented at Caltech to produce graphene—a material made up of an atom-thick layer of carbon—at room temperature could help pave the way for commercially feasible graphene-based solar cells and light-emitting diodes, large-panel displays, and flexible electronics. “With this new technique, we can grow large sheets of electronic-grade graphene in much […]
U.S. Customs Quietly Launches Facial Recognition Experiment at DC Airport
March 20th, 2015Via: Vice: The next time you come back from overseas and flash your American passport at Washington, DC’s Dulles airport, customs officers might take a picture of you and use facial recognition technology to figure out if you really are who you say you are. On March 11, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) quietly […]
FAA Allows Amazon to Fly Drones Experimentally
March 19th, 2015Via: USA Today: The Federal Aviation Administration approved Amazon Logistics Inc. on Thursday to fly drones experimentally. The approval will allow the company to conduct research, development and crew training for deliveries called Amazon Prime Air. The company is required to fly remote-controlled aircraft lower than 400 feet during daylight hours, and the pilot must […]
Google’s New Facial Recognition System
March 19th, 2015Via: Fortune: New advances in facial recognition are a step forward for an artificial intelligence technique called deep learning. “I never forget a face,” some people like to boast. It’s a claim that looks quainter by the day as artificial intelligence research continues to advance. Some computers, it turns out, never forget 260 million faces. […]
