falstaff sentimental

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Health Tip: Help Your Feet Beat Summer's Heat

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Friday, June 15, 2012

5 portrayals of Anne Boleyn in pop culture

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AI Takes Baby Steps: RoboBaby Learns Words

In 1998, a strange fad swept the nation. Standing a mere 5 inches tall, the gremlin-esque talking robots known as furbies became the season?s must-have toys for kids (much to Hasbro?s delight). The most compelling aspect of furbies wasn?t their strange, half hamster, half owl aesthetic or even their ability to talk; it was that, from the beginning, furbies were advertised as learning robots. A newly purchased furby starts out speaking an entirely made up language called Furbish, but, over time, was said to ?learn? English by talking to its owner. As the the instruction manual touted: ?The more time you spend with me, the sooner I will be able to speak your language.?

While it was a neat trick, the fact is, furbies didn?t really learn. English phrases were in their memory from the get go ? their programming simply dictated that the use of these phrases increased over time. Still, even faked robot learning was cool enough to sell over 40 million furbies in the first three years.

While the furby fad might seem silly in retrospect, their sudden popularity revealed a lot about how people feel about robotic brains. Whether through fear or fascination, we are fixated on the idea of true artificial intelligence (AI). Our obsession with AI is why we applauded when Deep Blue beat chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, and why we were transfixed as we watched IBM?s Watson trounce both the biggest all-time money winner and the record holder for the longest championship streak on Jeopardy!.

Now, the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire have created a real-life (and significantly less creepy) furby of sorts. In a new article published today in PLoS ONE, they reveal DeeChee ? a robot that, like a small child, can learn words through human interaction.

Most robots outperform people in tasks which require extreme levels of computation. That?s how Deep Blue won at chess ? the machine was simply able to calculate possible follow-up moves at alarming speed. The Holy Grail of AI, though, has always been language. When you break it down, language is difficult to learn. Even we, as intelligent beings, have trouble learning other languages. The constant shift of context and structure makes defining language in an algorithmic way near impossible, and thus robots can?t learn to talk simply by being super computers.

A six to fourteen month old child, though, learns to discriminate between words and phrases readily with time. It was this early stage of language learning, when children first turn babble into words, that the research team from Hertfordshire sought to emulate with iCub robot DeeChee.

?Since our work concerns the acquisition of a human language by a robot we are inspired by the process in humans,? explain the authors. ?The basis of our experimental work is a real-time interactive situation where a human participant talks to a robot, using his or her own spontaneous words.?

The team told volunteers, who were varied in age, occupation, gender, experience with children and familiarity with computers, to talk to DeeChee exactly how they would if they wanted to teach a real child the words for colors and patterns. This YouTube video shows an example interaction between DeeChee and a volunteer:

DeeChee, in turn, was programmed to hear the teacher?s speech as small units of speech called phenomes, not syllables. To DeeChee, the phrase ?a red box? might contain any of the following phenomes: a, ar, re, red, e, ed, bo, box, o, ox. By listening for and responding to praise in response to its babble, DeeChee attempted to piece together what words the teachers were trying to get it to say.

What was interesting about these experiments was not only whether or not DeeChee would succeed at learning words, but also how the volunteers themselves varied in their abilities. ?We wanted to explore human-robot interaction and were deliberately not prescriptive,? explain the authors. ?However, leaving participants to talk naturally opened up possibilities of a wide range of behaviour, possibilities that were certainly realized.?

Like in a real teaching setting, the teachers ? and DeeChee?s learning ? varied. ?Some participants were better teachers than others: some of the less good produced very sparse utterances, while other talkative participants praised DeeChee whatever it did, which skewed the learning process towards non-words.?

Overall, though, DeeChee learned. As you can see in the video, the robo-baby was able to pick up simple, one-syllable words like red, green, and heart. DeeChee?s success suggests that similar mechanisms may explain how human babies learn to talk.

Modeling children is only the first step in creating truly intelligent robots, of course. There are still a number of hurdles between cooing the names of colors and shapes and being able to learn language to fluency. But DeeChee is non-living proof that computers may be capable of the complex and intricate process of learning language.

?It is known that infants are sensitive to the frequency of sounds in speech, and these experiments show how this sensitivity can be modelled and contribute to the learning of word forms by a robot.?

I, for one, welcome our infant robot overlords.

?
Reference: Lyon C, Nehaniv CL, Saunders J (2012) Interactive Language Learning by Robots: The Transition from Babbling to Word Forms. PLoS ONE 7(6): e38236. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0038236

Furby image c/o Wikimedia Commons

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Friday, June 1, 2012

Obama campaign assails Romney?s record

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Why Chris Christie wants to cut income tax instead of sales tax

RE: Why Chris Christie wants to cut income tax instead of sales tax

Where I live in AZ our sales tax is over 8%. And this year, the state tried to get us to pay tax on internet purchases by putting a line on the tax forms to report the amount of online expenditures. Our tax accountant advised us not to put anything there. He said there was no way for the state to prove what we bought online other than by auditing all our records which would end up costing the state more than what they could possibly collect in the tax.
I understand compliance with the misbegotten law was so low that the state will remove the line from the tax forms next year.

"I give thanks for this perfect day. Miracle will follow miracle and wonders will never cease."

"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican."
H. L. Mencken

[Image: obama2012-1.jpg]

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Teen in Mexico due to ?Leap Day? error can return home

By Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com

Elizabeth Olivas, who came to the U.S. illegally at age 4, went to Mexico to get a green card or visa to fulfill requirements of U.S. law and has not been allowed to return since she missed the deadline by a day.

Updated 3:45 pm EST -- A teen stuck in Mexico because she missed an immigration deadline due to a ?Leap Day? error received a visa on Thursday that will allow her to return to the US just in time to give the salutatorian speech at her high school graduation this weekend, her lawyer said.

Elizabeth Olivas, who came from Mexico when she was four, failed to meet the visa requirement by one day due to it being a leap year and had been stuck in Chihuahua, Mexico, for the last six weeks while she awaited a decision from the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez, according to her lawyer, Sarah Moshe.

?Just got out visa in my hands. I?m coming home!? she wrote in a text message to Moshe. ?I?m soo happy!?

Moshe said in an email statement that she also received electronic correspondence from the State Department, reading: ?The waiver was approved, and we just finished issuing and printing her visa.?

Olivas, who is eligible for a green card because her father is a U.S. citizen, faced a possible three-year bar from entering the country because of the calendar error. People in her situation are allowed 180 days unlawful presence in the country after their 18th birthday, but after that time would need a waiver, said Moshe, who did not have any details about Olivas? mother.

Olivas traveled from her home in Indiana to Mexico on April 17, the day she believed was her last chance to be within that180-day window. Not knowing how long it might take to get an appointment once she was in Mexico, Olivas and her lawyer decided she should chose to stay in the U.S. for as long as she could beforehand, Moshe told msnbc.com.

?I would never have sent her had I had any question in my mind,? Moshe said Wednesday evening, noting two legal calculators they had used said Olivas would need to be in Mexico on April 17, not April 16, to apply for an immigrant visa. ?It was a very innocent mistake ? we were aware within days essentially and tried very hard to work in that timeframe but to no avail.?

Olivas, who turned 18 on Oct. 18, 2011, had sought the expedited waiver after learning about the error. She is graduating from Frankfort High School in Frankfort, Ind., with a GPA over 3.9, was winter homecoming queen and has already been accepted into nursing programs. As part of the 400-page waiver application, she submitted at least 25 letters of support from her instructors, Moshe said.

Almost-deported valedictorian helps introduce immigration reform bill

Waiting at her paternal grandparents? home in Chihuahua, Mexico -- relatives she had not met before -- she had experienced the highs and lows of the slow-moving immigration process. She has also missed her prom, Moshe said.

?In the past, on the days when there?s been no movement, it?s been really hard for her,? Moshe said before the decision. ?Dealing with huge government agencies, there are days when nobody responds to email or returns a phone call. But she?s really excited right now, I mean she?s really hopeful.?

Principal Steve Edwards told the Indianapolis Star that Olivas has done her homework online while she has been in Mexico and her grades had not been affected.

Can an illegal immigrant become a lawyer?

"This is a very skilled, talented, beautiful young lady. This hurts me and is one of the hardest things I've ever dealt with in my life," he said.

For the waiver application, Moshe argued that Olivas? absence would prove a medical hardship on her father, who suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure, among other ailments.

?Last time he was in my office, he literally put his hand in front of me and stuck a finger out and said take my finger if you need to, just do anything,? Moshe said.

Mom of deported teen runaway files federal lawsuit

Maria Elena-Upson, a Dallas-based spokeswoman for USCIS, told the Indianapolis Star that the agency normally took applications as they came in and not out of turn. The process typically takes two to three months.

"I can sympathize with this situation, but it would not be correct," Elena-Upson told the newspaper.

Moshe had said she would appeal if the consulate denied Olivas? waiver application ? a step that?s no longer necessary.
?She will certainly enjoy a well-deserved graduation celebration on Saturday!? she wrote in an email.

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