NeatTrix

Not our usual fare, but pretty cool all the same. This apparently came from Music Hack Day, a music software developer event held in San Francisco last week. The creation of Tristan Jehan, Swinger, is a python script that converts any song to a swing song (See example below). By careful time stretching, the original tempois altered to create a novel version of the song. In some cases a great improvement. In some, well you decide.

More examples here.
Jehan’s Website here.

Every Breath You Take (swing version) by TeeJay

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We’ve talked about the Emotiv Systems EPOC headset before (Emotiv EPOC). Alex Blainey has put up an impressive video where he uses the EPOC to control a simple robot arm…and he uses another favorite of ours, NeatTools, to tie it all together. Great job!

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IBM has done it again: built a computer to challenge a human (or in this case two humans) to a battle of wits.  Only this time, the venture has clear commercial applications.  This is because when IBM built Deep Blue, the Garry Kasparov-besting, chess-playing computer, at the end of the day, all they had was a computer that could play chess.  I’ve already got a computer that can beat me at chess, and I didn’t have to spend millions of dollars to do it, it just came with my computer.  Their newest publicity stunt to raise stock prices computer will attempt to hold its own in a test of trivia: Jeopardy.  Unlike chess that has fixed and finite rules for manipulating a small number of discrete symbols, something computers are very good at, the Jeopardy playing computer, dubbed Watson, will have to parse a plain text question, accounting for things like puns, anagrams, themed questions and from its own database (it won’t be using the internet) produce an answer in under a second (the response time of human contestants).

An obvious venture into search engine technology, this is the obvious direction of the technology, if it works.  When a search engine will understand my questions and search based on my intent, not just matching keywords.   From there it’s a small leap to computers that understand voice commands, and not just a pre-selected list of commands, but any sentence, phrased however I choose.

“Computer, what is the nature of the universe?”
“The universe is a spheroid region, 705 meters in diameter.”

[PC Magazine Article]

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Mirror, mirror, on the wall, what will the weather be like next Tuesday, and do these pants make me look fat? As if your self-esteem wasn’t low enough, now you can get your weight, height, zoom in, even see the back of your head in this interactive mirror from Philips.

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From the MIT Media Lab, Siftables are both a computer interface and distributed computers in their own right.  They allow you to get literally hands on with your data.  The word and math applications I think are really interesting and have a lot of obvious applications in schools.

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Only mildly tech-related today. OK, there’s a pun near the end and that’s about it.

Bill Gates released a swarm of mosquitoes into the crowd at the TED talks going on in Long Beach, CA this week.  He was making the point that our medical research priorities are skewed (no kidding) in favor of the diseases of rich old men.  If I have to watch one more commercial with that grinning freak… but I digress.  Don’t get me wrong, I think it is a highly worthy cause.  Malaria kills more people than AIDS and it’s preventable.  Unfortunately it only seems to kill poor people in other countries, people not all that high up on our priorities.  I guess it’s a good thing his cause was Malaria in Africa and not Rabies. “I wanted to demonstrate what a serious problem Rabies is by releasing this pack of rabid wolves into the crowd.”  Actually Rabies is a scary, scary disease currently exploding in the animal population of the northeast United States but I digress again.  Further he alleges the mosquitoes he released were not carrying the disease, who can tell.  Are we just to take his word?  He’s probably using the mosquitoes as a new delivery system for his Kool Aid.  I certainly don’t trust him to keep me safe, and he has been know to release  a bug or twelve.

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Bell Lab’s demonstrated their first attempt to synthesize a human voice at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City with the Voder, and the attempt was rather an impressive one.  The quality of human voice replication hasn’t progressed much further until just a couple decades ago.  It did have it’s drawbacks however.  For one, it require a specially trained operator needing a year of training to master the complicated coordination of keys and pedals. (continue reading…)

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This concept is by the same guy who did the focus plus context screen. It uses a semi-transparent lcd screen to detect the user’s fingertips as an input device.  When holding the device you can manipulate the screen without getting your big hands in the way.   Just when those industrial designers thought the devices were getting too small to crap all the crap inside of them, this guy goes and takes away the area behind the screen.  Actually they don’t, while the narrator in the video says semi-transparent, careful reading of the predecessor’s page, reveals it is psuedo-transparent, not semi, creating a technology similar to active camoflauge.  Another added benfit of this type of interface is it hugely reduces the wear and tear on the actual screen.

Video After the Jump (continue reading…)

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Slightly more on topic than the last post. but not yet all the way home.   But I guess, it is about interfaces. Human-computer interfaces… ok I just found this interesting.  The website builtwith.com will tell you, usually pretty well, what technologies went into the creation of a website.  You enter the url, and it does it’s thing.  It’s moderately useful for web designers.  Being curious, I checked out the new whitehouse.gov site to see all the new improvements.  Having been to the previous site so infrequently, I was curious as to what had changed under the hood as well as on the surface, and came across this:

http://blog.builtwith.com/index.php/2009/01/21/whitehousegov-tech-post-inauguration/

a short comparison between the whitehouse.gov site on monday vs tuesday.

Politics aside, technology is awsome. And so is cake.

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