And Now For the Paranoids Among Us......

My computer was slowing a bit so I did some clean - up which usually at the end requires a reboot. Well this time, for a split second I swear I saw a purple page with a square with a unhappy smiley face on it and I swear, the words to the effect of "He's Dead Jim!" Well the paranoid in me was suspicious now so I began to watch the computer when it reset...and there it was again! Well for me it is straight to the web, and find out if this had happened to anyone else...Come to find out it did! Come to find out, what I saw was indeed a real result of a Chrome!

Here is the down-low:

• The fun play of the Google Chrome team never ends. Their latest adventure is on the sad tab, the page you see when a tab crashes. ”He’s dead, Jim!” is a catchphrase used by Leonard H. McCoy, a character from Star Trek.
• The message continues: “Something caused this page to be killed , either because the operating system ran out of memory, or for some other reason. To continue, press Reload or go to another page.”

Ha!  Now that is just plain funny!

Mind Reading Computer Program

The Guardian list an article that very well could help people who may have lost the ability to speak as a result of a stroke or other medical conditions.

Scientists have had some success in decoding the brain activity caused by words that they hear.  Quite literally,  the mental "thoughts" that go along with hearing spoken words.

This tech is of course still very much in the early phase, but ultimately - from  the article -

•  the work paves the way for brain implants that could monitor a person's thoughts and speak words and sentences as they imagine them. 

Check out the video here

BMU #287 Now On Line

Well rounded episode of Beam Me Up this week on episode 287. I lead of first with a new offering from Symphony of Science called Onward to the Edge, featuring excerpts from speeches made by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox, and Carolyn Porco and set to some great music.

Our first fiction offering is a brand new story arc from Jason Kahn and Cyberstudios online. Jason once again takes us to New Arden and our favorite physic detective Jack Garrett. This arc is In Plain Sight and episode 1 is “On The Mend” As you might recall with the last story, A New Beginning, Jack managed to solve the case, but took an amazing amount of damage in doing so. On the Mend literally picks up where a new beginning ended. But far from being lauded for his crime solving, it would seem that New Arden has a short memory.

The last story of the afternoon is part 2 of Elliot Bangs excellent story “This Must Be the Place.
Last week we found the main character Loren Wells seems to have secrets to keep. Foremost of all is every time Andria sees him, he appears to be a different age and sometimes he knows her, but often he has no clue! In part 2 and the conclusion Andria uncovers what has got to be one of the strangest retirement plans ever!

From the Beam Me Up Blog:

Orion crew capsule is scheduled for a mission in 2014! NASA reports that the plan is to send the capsule through two orbits, ending up farther from Earth than any craft intended for human transport has been since 1973. Then, Orion will return for a splash-down in the Pacific.

According to BBC news online the Russian space agency reports that shortly after launch, the Phobos Grunt probe failed to fire its' mains to launch it towards Mars and is now stuck in an Earth orbit and that engineers have two weeks to correct the fault before the probe's batteries run out.

And something I thought I would never hear - In a paper which will be published this week in Nature, Professors Christian Knigge & Malcolm Coe from the University of Southampton worked with Philipp Podsiadlowski of Oxford University to reveal how they have discovered two distinct populations of neutron stars... Two?!!!! I can just handle how weird the universe is just having one type of these monsters!

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Computer That Thinks Like a Person?

Are you familiar with the Turing Test? The Turing The Turing is measure of artificial intelligence. It is arrived at if a human can have a conversation with a machine and not know they are talking to a machine. If so the computer or more to the point, it's programming is thought to be as 'intelligent' as a human. In most cases however the programs simply mimic how a person reacts and is easily caught when asked to perform outside it's program parameters.

Now there is a program called "CLARION", a program that performs the same way human subjects does in cognitive tests. It provides results that are not so much what we think, as earlier programs did, but how we think. And that is a huge difference.

When programmed, Clarion was not filled with pat human responses but a set of rules instead that were modeled on how human subjects went about solving a problem.

From the IO9 article on how the results were formulated:

• When humans were asked to discuss their thoughts about the problem prior to giving a solution, they answered correctly 35.6 percent of the time. When they were assigned another task, interrupting their work on the problem before going back to thinking about it, they answered correctly 45.8 percent of the time.

This is what happened when Clarion was put to the same conditions:

• When CLARION solved problems under similar conditions, the results uncannily mirrored those of human subjects. Five thousand runs of the program returned a correct result 35.3 percent of the time when the scientists imposed conditions similar to a human 'discussing' their work, and 45.3 percent of a time when it was interrupted to work on another task.

Does this mean that the program is thinking just like a person? Well, not really, but it does show some of the possibilities and what we can expect from expert systems in the future.

Wiki Turing Test article complete IO9 article Wiki article on Cognitive Architecture

Voight-Kampff moot - Deckart out of work - Future androids will be empatic

IO9 always comes up with the most interesting stuff! If you remember your Blade Runner lore, The robotic Replicants in Blade Runner were indistinguishable from humans except for their lack of empathy. Now researchers are creating virtual human analogs that can detect human emotions through non-verbal cues and develop appropriate responses. This could lead to artificial life forms who are not only intelligent, but empathic as well.

Why you might ask? It is becoming more and more common to interact with machines in everyday life. From leaving messages, to being connected to the proper agent or becoming more common to complete a sale or service call start to finish with a machine.

However researchers at Paris' Institute of Technology have found that people frequently lose interest in some systems because they don’t seem sufficiently human in their responses. To create programs that keep humans engaged, teams at the Paris Institute of Technology are developing a virtual human that will recognize and respond to human emotions. They are training them to detect emotional expressions via webcam, and studying how flesh and blood humans react to the virtual's responses. They are hoping that this will improve the way that humans interact with them.

<- IO9 article ->

AI wins bronze Turing Award

British mathematician Alan Turing, if not the father of artificial intelligence, can at the very least be considered the father of methods of understanding and discerning if a machine is in fact capable of artificial intelligence. Turing came up with a subjective but simple rule for determining whether machines were capable of thought. Writing in 1950, Turing argued that conversation was proof of intelligence. If a computer talked like a human, then for all practical purposes it thought like a human too. His tests, and by extension, the yearly competitions that have been ongoing since 1991, consists of a subjective but simple rule for determining whether machines were capable of thought. Turing's test consists of a human judge who would swap messages simultaneously with a computer and another human, without being told which was which. If the judge had trouble telling his correspondents apart, Turing said, then the computer met the human standard of intelligence. This year's Bronze award (no software has yet won the silver or gold awards) handed out by organizer American scientist and philanthropist Hugh Loebner goes to the piece of software that best mimics human conversation in text form. That software was a "chatbot" called Elbot designed by Fred Roberts a Hamburg, Germany-based consultant. Elbot duping three out of 12 judges assigned to evaluate it.

<- read more in the Associated Press article ->

Father of "Eliza" Joseph Weizenbaum, Dead at 85

Joseph Weizenbaum, whose famed conversational computer program, Eliza, foreshadowed the potential of artificial intelligence, died on March 5 in Gröben, Germany. Eliza, written while Mr. Weizenbaum was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and named after Eliza Doolittle, who learned proper English in “Pygmalion” and “My Fair Lady,” was a groundbreaking experiment in the study of human interaction with machines. The program made it possible for a person typing in plain English at a computer terminal to interact with a machine in a semblance of a normal conversation. To dispense with the need for a large real-world database of information, the software parodied the part of a Rogerian therapist, frequently reframing a client’s statements as questions. Mr. Weizenbaum later said that he was stunned to discover that his students and others became deeply engrossed in conversations with the program, occasionally revealing intimate personal details. Often people failed to understand that they were talking to a computer program.

Click Here For the complete article from the New York Times