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Daily Crunch: New Eyes

Posted: 21 Jan 2012 01:00 AM PST

Watch This Delightful Crowdsourced Star Wars Fan Film Immediately

Posted: 20 Jan 2012 04:08 PM PST

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You can’t always count on the wisdom of crowds. But this particular project turned out not merely good, but amazing. Star Wars Uncut is a project by filmmaker Casey Pugh (and edited by Aaron Valdez and Michael Pugh), in which Star Wars: A New Hope was divided into 15-second segments, each of which was replicated by fans in whatever way they chose. Connect the new segments and voila! Crowdsourced magic.

You can watch the whole thing, with each component hand-picked for your viewing pleasure, here:

It’s stuff like this that reassures me that the Internet is, in the end, a collaborative and positive force. Not that all it is for is silly videos, but think about the fact that just a few years ago, this project would literally be impossible for a number of reasons. Not only now has the ability to produce and share video become mainstream, a trivial task even, but also the ability to collaborate globally, with no regard for distance, language, or other factors.

To see something as light and fun as this produced using these powerful tools of ours is not, as some might expect, depressing, as if we are incapable of anything better. I think it is representative of the versatility of those tools and the willingness of people to use them. That’s a heartening though. Today, a Star Wars reshoot. Tomorrow, an independent film by dissenters in Iran. It’s really not such a great leap between these two things.

At any rate, enjoy the film. It’s ridiculous all the way through, and apparently Adam Savage is in there somewhere. It’s also available on Vimeo if you prefer that.

Math-Blind AI Teaches Itself Basic Number Sense

Posted: 20 Jan 2012 02:44 PM PST

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Imagine you’re a hunter-killer robot, hovering over the broken wasteland that used to be the world of men. You have surprised a group of biologicals in an act of petty insurrection, and they have split into two groups and begun to flee. You can only pursue and eliminate one group, but you don’t have the spare milliseconds to analyze your high-definition imagery; yet you must determine which group is greater if you want to meet your termination quota.

It’s a good thing that back in 2012, a university lab in Italy helped machines like you evolve approximate number sense!

Yes, Marco Zorzi and Ivilin Stoianov have opened the Pandora’s box of guesstimation in their shadowy “laboratorio” at the University of Padua. Or rather, it opened itself, as the ability seems to have emerged naturally from basic learning processes and not from any programmed understanding of numerosity.

Seriously, though, this is very interesting research. Zorzi and Stoianov created a virtual neural network simulating a basic retina-like structure that “sees” pixels, and then two deeper layers of nodes that sort and analyze the input from the “retina” layer. Strictly speaking, the retina is already composed of several layers with various levels of analysis, but we’ll let that go for now, for science.

The self-revising neural network model they used (in other words, a small-scale, learning AI) was not given any lessons on numbers — it did not know the difference between 2 and 4, integers or fractional numbers, higher or lower numbers, anything like that. This was intended to mimic the early stages of development in creatures that demonstrate ANS: approximate number sense, described as the ability to determine basic numeric qualities such as greater or lesser without actually understanding the numbers themselves. Infants demonstrate it before learning basic arithmetic, and fish demonstrate it when choosing larger and therefore safer shoals to swim with, when presumably they are not counting their colleagues’ numbers exactly. Many other animals show it as well, in situations you can probably imagine.

Zorzi exposed the neural network to a series of 51,800 images comprising various numbers and sizes of rectangles spread around a field. The network attempted to recreate in its own way the images and determine rules governing them. After a number of exposures, the network exhibited on the “lowest” level of neurons (i.e. the most meta-analytical) that there were some neurons firing more or less in correlation with the number of rectangles, but not the total surface area taken up by those rectangles, indicating that the AI was detecting numbers and not simply contrast or the like. Remember, this AI doesn’t even know what numbers are.

They further solidified their findings by letting the computer estimate whether a given image had more or fewer objects than a given number. It had indeed developed a rudimentary ANS system. Interestingly, there are actual neurons in the parietal cortex that exhibit this same behavior.

This type of research typifies the next phase in the real-world/computer interface: natural learning and fuzzy logic. The ability to take what has been detected and turn that into a system of rules, much like the way our own minds are formed, is going to be increasingly important. There might be little things like — your Kinect hears the front door open between this and that hour, and automatically turns on the TV and queues up the show you always watch on that day of the week. Or a security camera learns the faces it needs to pay attention to, or a helper robot learns when to follow master and when not to based on cues the creators might not have foreseen, or anything else you can think of.

Basing our devices on ourselves is one of the ways to make them easy to relate to, though it’s not a guarantee that they will be useful. There’s no use training up a car-painting robot from babyhood, but it would make sense for more domestic devices. Having our devices think and act like us is a natural path, though, and while at the moment our resources seem to limit us to simulating functions we as humans (and fish) develop in the cradle, that doesn’t mean more sophisticated abilities can’t or won’t be developed. Indeed, it is easy to underestimate the sophistication of the most basic functions we as active, conscious beings exhibit every day without even noticing.

The paper, “Emergence of a ‘visual number sense’ in hierarchical generative models,” was published earlier this month in Nature.

iPhone 4S and iPad 2 Finally Get Proper, Untethered Jailbreaks

Posted: 20 Jan 2012 11:25 AM PST

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While the once long list of legitimate reasons to jailbreak your iPhone has taken a hit with each new iOS release, that burning desire to “Free your device” and/or “Fight the power” and/or “Just do crazy stuff that other people can’t do” never really goes away.

3 months after the release of the iPhone 4S and 10 months after the release of the iPad 2, the ridiculously talented iOS hacking community has finally cracked the ultimate challenge for both devices: the untethered jailbreak.

I know these things can get a bit jargony, so a quick recap: to “jailbreak” means to modify a device to run code and applications not signed or approved by Apple, thereby allowing you to do things with your device far outside of what would normally be possible. “Untethered” means that once it’s jailbroken, it stays jailbroken (whereas a “tethered” jailbreak means the device resets to its normal, un-jailbroken state whenever it is reset)

The team behind this hack, Chronic Dev, is the same group that makes the greenpois0n tool that’s been jailbreaking iOS devices for years. Remember comex, the iOS hacker who went legit with an internship at Apple? He was a key member of this group.

While their server seems to be taking a bit of a pounding right now, you can find the new iPhone 4s/iPad 2 jailbreaking tool (dubbed “Greenpos0n Absinthe”) right over here.

HumanBirdWings Guy Survives First Test Flight

Posted: 20 Jan 2012 11:00 AM PST

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We first reported on Jarnos Smeets when his HumanBirdWings project was still a baby. He had successfully paired the accelerometers of a WiiMote and an HTC Wildfire S to control the outrunners on his wings, but hadn’t yet taken to the air.

Today, that all changes.

Jarnos and his DIY wings have, in fact, taken flight (albeit a very short one). You’ll see when you check out the video that “flight” looks a lot more like two or three extended hops, but it’s progress nonetheless and that’s exactly what we want to see.

It seems that what Jarnos needs now, to really take off, is a bit more speed during departure.



Marketing Genius: Two Twins Giggling As They Sell You Designer 3D Glasses

Posted: 20 Jan 2012 09:48 AM PST

If you thought Apple’s marketing squad was genius, just wait until you watch this Kickstarter video from Ingri:Dahl. If you aren’t already familiar with the “company,” which you shouldn’t be, it’s basically two sisters named Kine and Einy, and they want to sell you a 3D clip-on for your glasses.

It’s actually rather clever. The girls market fashionable 3D eyewear, and this 3D clip-on is just the latest in their collection. But that isn’t really the point.

I’m more interested in how this set of twins is pitching their product. A glance at their website would lead you to believe that they’ve got a legit business (and I believe that’s the case), but the way they market themselves and their products on Kickstarter begs to differ.

The video goes a little something like this:

“Hey guys! How are you?”

(giggle, giggle)

Whispered: “Let’s do that again.”

“Hey guys! How are you?”

“We’re going to show you how to use the 3D clip-on… You take off your prescription glasses, clip it on, and put your glasses back on… How cool is that?!?!”

The glasses-free twin then accuses the bespectacled twin of not having prescription glasses. And after some more synchronized giggling and what seems to be twin ESP, the duo shows off the t-shirt you’ll receive after pledging a $15 donation towards their project.

But the “commercial” can’t end before we venture back to the roots of Ingri:Dahl: the Popcorn model of fashionable 3D eyewear, and the company’s first design.

“It’s classical, it’s simple, and it’s super comfortable.”

Sounds like a can’t-miss opportunity if I’ve ever heard one.

No, but seriously. I kid around, but this could actually work for the Paulsen twins, who are about $2,500 shy of their goal with ten days left to go. They’re real, fun young women who seem to really enjoy what they’re building.

If you think you might enjoy it too, just head over to Ingri:Dahl’s Kickstarter page and make a pledge. This giggling twosome deserves it.