"bots" entries

Four short links: 28 March 2016

Four short links: 28 March 2016

Holoportation, Filter Your Bot, Curriculum for the Future, and Randomized Control Trials for Policy

  1. Holoportation (YouTube) — video of teleconferencing with the Hololens. I hope my avatar wears more pants than I do.
  2. Wordfilter — package to filter out slurs and the kinds of things you don’t want your bot saying on Twitter. (via How Not to Make a Racist Bot)
  3. Curriculum For the Future (iTunes) — in game form, you get to figure out how to sell your preferred curriculum (“maker!”) to the parents and politicians who care about different things. Similar game mechanic to Win the White House from Sandra Day O’Connor’s iCivics.
  4. Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomized Controlled Trials (PDF) — 2012 paper from the UK Cabinet Office talking about running real randomized control trials of policy. (I’d like to be part of one that looks at better health care!)
Four short links: 27 January 2016

Four short links: 27 January 2016

Generative Text, Open Source Agriculture, Becoming Better, and GA Slackbot

  1. Improva javascript library for generative text.
  2. The Food Computer (MIT) — open source controlled-environment agriculture technology platform that uses robotic systems to control and monitor climate, energy, and plant growth inside of a specialized growing chamber. Climate variables such as carbon dioxide, air temperature, humidity, dissolved oxygen, potential hydrogen, electrical conductivity, and root-zone temperature are among the many conditions that can be controlled and monitored within the growing chamber. Operational energy, water, and mineral consumption are monitored (and adjusted) through electrical meters, flow sensors, and controllable chemical dosers throughout the growth period. (via IEEE Spectrum)
  3. 10 Golden Rules for Becoming a Better Programmer — what are your 10 rules for being better in your field? If you haven’t built a list, then you aren’t thinking hard enough about what you do.
  4. Statsbot — Google Analytics bot for Slack from NewRelic.
Four short links: 15 September 2015

Four short links: 15 September 2015

Bot Bucks, Hadoop Database, Futurism Biases, and Tactile Prosthetics

  1. Ashley Madison’s Fembot Con (Gizmodo) — As documents from company e-mails now reveal, 80% of first purchases on Ashley Madison were a result of a man trying to contact a bot, or reading a message from one.
  2. Terrapin — Pinterest’s low-latency NoSQL replacement for HBase. See engineering blog post.
  3. Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot (Nautilus) — As the psychologist George Lowenstein and colleagues have argued, in a phenomenon they termed “projection bias,” people “tend to exaggerate the degree to which their future tastes will resemble their current tastes.”
  4. Mind-Controlled Prosthetic Arm (Quartz) — The robotic arm is connected by wires that link up to the wearer’s motor cortex — the part of the brain that controls muscle movement — and sensory cortex, which identifies tactile sensations when you touch things. The wires from the motor cortex allow the wearer to control the motion of the robot arm, and pressure sensors in the arm that connect back into the sensory cortex give the wearer the sensation that they are touching something.
Four short links: 2 September 2014

Four short links: 2 September 2014

Antilogs, Waitbots, Interactive Interactive Visualisation Book, IoTbot

  1. AntilogsThere are companies before you who have done something like you want to do that you can copy from, and others who have also done something similar, but that you choose not to copy from. These are your analogs and antilogs respectively.
  2. Korean Meal-Transport Robot (RoboHub) — the hyphen is important. It transports all meals, not just Korean ones. Interesting not only grammatically, but for the gradual arrival of the service robot.
  3. Interactive Data Visualisation for the Web — online (interactive, even) version of the O’Reilly book by Scott Murray.
  4. wit.aiNatural language processing for the Internet of Things. Startup, racing to build strategic value beyond “have brought voice recognition to irc bots and aimed it at Internet of Things investors.”