I am … unhindered by talent

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

Damn :-)

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Wow - this is quite amazing. About mid-way through Big Dog (a defense project from Boston Dynamics) slips on some glaze ice and recovers without actually falling down, which involves some super cool real-time responses. The video is long-ish, but definitely worth the investment.

I’d love to know what the burn out rate for the joints and motors are. One of the amazing things about biological organisms is that we can balance muscles against each other to hold a position without wearing ourselves out. Many walking robots, on the other hand, end up exerting so much force in simply maintaining their position that they tend to burn out key components really quickly. Given the responses and forces involved in Big Dog’s movement and balance, you’d think they’d have this problem in spades. If these trials go on for any length of time, however, they presumably managed to handle this to some degree. Their web site says “BigDog’s legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next.”; the idea of recycling energy back into the motion (use it instead of fight it) certainly looks promising.

The research is being funded by DoD money, with the hope that robots like this could help carry material in the field. I could imagine nice civilian applications, however. An infirm person in Morris, for example, might be capable of walking to the grocery store, but not capable of carrying a shopping load home. A smaller, electric version of this could be a nice alternative to cars in that situation.

Thanks to Sub-Evil for the pointer!

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Much chops to Bad Science for pointing out Phun, a simulation environment/game/construction engine thingie that (judging from the videos) is just super fun (ho, ho, ho) to fiddle with. It seems a wonderfully open-ended platform for making stuff, which is of course the great strength of a pad and paper, or a bucket of Legos. This demo video gives a sense of the range of possibilities:

There’s a YouTube group devoted to this thing, and the number and variety of little clips there also speaks well to the Phun’s flexibility. We even have one person building a binary adder, and another a working pinball machine. Very, very cool.

The sad, sniffle, miserable bit is that Phun doesn’t run on Macs at the moment. It supports for Linux and Windows, though, and there are people working on a Mac port, so my fingers are crossed. It just seems like it would be too damn much fun to play with.

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You all know I stay up late at night worrying about possible career opportunities for Our Fearless Leader upon his impending retirement from the Oval Office next year. Given his broad-minded and impeccable taste and his keen intellect, I’d rather fancied him as a gallery director, maybe for something like MoMA, which would benefit from both his gravitas and sense for the cutting-edge.

This video, however, pretty much scuppers that plan. Never good to be caught making up completely fictional and inaccurate provenance for a painting, especially one that has pride of place in that most public of home offices.

I’ll obviously have to get my thinking cap out and consider the matter further. Ideas?

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Is it just me, or is this a desparately classic case of old folks (i.e., people my age) just not realizing that the world has moved on a wee bit?

The University of Minnesota Office of Information Technology is proud to announce that the University of Minnesota is soon to become a member of ResearchChannel. ResearchChannel was founded by a consortium of leading research and academic institutions to share the valuable work of their researchers with the public through a cable television distribution network. ResearchChannel is now available to more than 30 million U.S. satellite and cable television subscribers and more than 1.6 million people who visit the ResearchChannel Web site at http://www.researchchannel.com each year. The channel also is available on 70 university and school-based cable systems in the United States…

Cable TV was cool when I was college age a zillion years ago (back in the 80’s), and we thought MTV was pretty darn cool.

That was then, though, and now is different. Sub-Evil’s generation don’t channel surf through the cable offerings, amazed that they have more than 4 options. They just don’t watch TV like we did. They time shift like mad, and cruise through a vastness of on-line offerings that make those early cable days seem positivity puny by comparison.

And now the U decides to get excited and pipe its research out to students on a cable television distribution network?!?

Uh, sorry, but I have my doubts. 30 million U.S. satellite and cable television subscribers?

Ooh.

Ahh.

Yawn.

In fairness, however, they do almost address this, even if in the tone of an afterthought:

…and was recently launched on iTunes U and YouTube.

w00t! YouTube! They get it!

Well, sort of.

You see, a quick look suggests that what they’re providing is honking great collection of lectures. They’re almost all long (mostly on the order of an hour, some closer to two), and seem to be largely academic “talking head” videos. Just what a college student wants to unwind with after a long day of…um…lectures.

Thus it’s hardly surprising that ResearchChannel’s most viewed video on YouTube has only been viewed (as of 2 Mar 08) 1,592 times, and their 10th most viewed has only been viewed 153 times (so a very steep drop in views). For comparison, the video of Sub-Evil’s performance of “Taco Man” at the ASA Talent Show 1.5 years ago has been viewed 1,033 times. It’s 1.5 minutes long, was shot will a cell phone from the audience, and only shows the second half of the song. But it would place a solid fifth in view count amongst the 166 videos that ResearchChannel has on Youtube. To be fair, it doesn’t look like any of the ResearchChannel videos has been up for much more than a month. Sadly, though, I suspect that the fragmentary “Taco Man” video will continue to hold its own against most of these even if we check back in a year or two, even with whatever marketing and promotion ResearchChannel and the associated universities might put into this.

And that video of the cute kid summarizing Star Wars? Almost 4 million views in less than two weeks.

I’m a big fan of serious content vs. sound bites, and I think ResearchChannel has their heart in the right place. There are cool examples of videos generated by university types that really take advantage of the medium and are successful in reaching an audience. I have grave doubts, however, about the likelihood that this simplistic mapping of the old lecture model onto (semi-)new technology is gonna get any traction with our son’s generation. I’m sure that some are quite good, and I can imagine that some might be quite popular/successful. But I’m guessing that those are the exceptions rather than the rule, in large part because this model just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

It’s like TED, but four times as long-winded, with less quality control, and worse production values.

Ought to just pull in droves of kids.

Really.

Droves.

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Most of you have probably already seen this, but it’s just so fun that I felt that I had to give it a plug. Also, posting this proves that I’m alive without actually requiring much mental function.

And remember…

Don’t talk back to Darth Vader - he’ll getcha!

Actually, I love the this as an example of how kids see the world. Great stuff.

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And the day after I get around to posting this, he announces that he’s not running after all. Sigh. The reasons he gives in his new video are clear and convincing, however, and there’s always the possibility that he might run in the future when the notice is not so short.

It’s probably old news for some of you that Lawrence Lessig is considering running for Congress, but I only just had time to watch Lessig’s video, and I definitely want to put in a plug for it, and for him, and for his possible campaign. Lessig has written some excellent books (Arne Kildegaard and I have used both Free culture and The future of ideas in our interdisciplinary network economics course), and is a wonderfully clear thinker with a powerful grasp of what’s necessary to effect change (rather than just make noise). (He’s been a key player in the Creative Commons movement, for example.)

I couldn’t claim to have done the sort of homework needed to make any concrete statements on his policies or particulars, but I can say that he’s a smart, effective guy who’s trying to address real and important problems. And that seems to be a pretty good pedigree for someone running for Congress. I quite like the message of the video as well, and think it would be quite fascinating to see him take on an extremely experienced and successful (his words) politician.

I’m also impressed by his willingness to actually stick his neck out, because I know that I find that hard. I’ve thought, for example, about running for school board in Morris, but I’ve never quite screwed up the courage to try it. It’s obviously very important, and I care a lot about (and frequently disagree with) the Board’s actions. I also know, however, that it would take a lot of time to do well, and probably be pretty frustrating (you’ll never make everyone happy, and there’s likely to be a shortage of easy answers). Thus nothing has actually happened (at least so far).

So well done to Lessig, and best wishes.

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As many of my students can attest, I’ve always loved emergent behavior where you have a whole bunch of “stupid” agents working with simple rules, but the end result is amazingly complex and wondrous. There are termites, for example, that by following simple rules (and with no “leader” in charge) manage to build large mounds with extraordinarily precise climate control in certain chambers where they farm special fungi. If you held a gun to my head and told me to use dirt, sticks, and other bits lying around to build a chamber that would be nearly constant temperature day and night, winter and summer, I’d have to tell you to pull the trigger. Yet these insects, with no blueprint or foreman, pull it off over and over again across thousands of years. (Doesn’t evolution just rock!)

No surprise, then, that I was smitten with this recent TED video (of a talk from four years ago) where Deborah Gordon talks about her research into how ants figure out how to allocate tasks (i.e., who does what when).

If you want to play with this sort of thing, I recommend both NetLogo and Breve, as well as this cool Breve-based screensaver, which evolves walking creatures while you’re momentarily distracted from your random web surfing. Both NetLogo and Breve can happily suck up way too much of your life (there are literally days to be spent playing with all the canned models in NetLogo), but it’s great fun, and working with tools like this can really help build your intuition for how complex systems of agents can work.

Below the fold I list some of my favorite NetLogo simulations that I often use in demos.

Read the rest of this entry »

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The video is from 1948, the music is by kugelplex, and the vocals are by Jewlia Eisenberg from the wondrous Charming Hostess.

If we’re gonna have the silliness of the season, we might as well have people singing about Santa in Yiddish :-).

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A wonderfully nerdly performance of mental arithmetic. I found his use of word mnemonics to remember large numbers quite cool.

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