Each question in the quiz presents some dialect options. You pick the option that feels most comfortable to you.
Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder.
Just watched The Fugitive with the fam, then saw this.
Chef Eduardo Garcia lost his left hand after being electrocuted in a hunting accident in 2011, but has since gotten a Bluetooth-activated bionic hand. Though he’s still getting used to its 25 different functions, Garcia says the prosthetic comes with a few benefits to his trade — he can now pick up hot things without getting burned, and doesn’t have to worry about accidentally slicing his fingers.
As a science geek, I couldn’t help but be delighted by this bit of tomfoolery (via Reddit). In a nutshell, the idea is to place a hot dog on the floor of your microwave (so it doesn’t rotate), then cook the hot dog until it starts to bubble. Use a ruler to measure the length of the burn marks, throw some math at it, and voilà, you have an approximation for the speed of light.
The Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control in Zurich has developed the Cubli, an incredibly cool robotic cube made up of motors and momentum wheels that can hop up onto one of its corners and stay there, even if you give it a push.
So very cool that we have a remotely controllable vehicle roaming the Martian surface. Sometimes I forget.
Data stickies is a design concept, but not necessarily a pipe dream. There’s some real science here.
dataSTICKIES are conceptualized to be made in graphene, a ground-breaking new material which is a flat mono-layer of carbon atoms tightly packed into a two dimensional honeycomb lattice with a minimum thickness of one atom. A paper thin sheet of graphene has the capacity to carry huge volumes of data.
Think about the physics involved in this bike trick. First, he flips the bike over. That pulls him into motion completing his first flip. And this gives him the momentum to complete the second flip. It’s all quite beautiful. Give it a watch.
The term Genetically Modified Food (or GMO) often produces a knee-jerk reaction in people. There are certainly causes for concern about the impact the foods have on our systems and on the farming ecosystem. But this article from MiT Technology Review focuses on the need for GMOs to feed the coming generations. Fascinating article.
Impressive achievement.
China landed an unmanned spacecraft on the moon on Saturday, state media reported, in the first such “soft-landing” since 1976, joining the United States and the former Soviet Union in managing to accomplish such a feat.
This is pretty damned cool.
Volvo has specific plans to put 100 driverless cars on actual commuter roads around Sweden’s second largest city. The project starts in 2014 with a goal of cars on the road by 2017.
SolarCity has an interesting business model. For years, they’ve provided the solar panels for free and charged you for the power you use. Since they charge less for the solar power than you’d pay the power company, it’s a good deal for you.
Now SolarCity is adding free batteries to the mix.
New capacitive sensing technique brings the concept of gesture detection into the real world.
I’m a sucker for this sort of trick. If you do try this at home, don’t blame me for any messes. But do post a comment if you get this to work.
Thoughtful analysis from MIT Technology Review that slices through the hype and paints a realistic picture of the limitations Amazon will face in bringing drones into service.
Spectrometers have been around a long time, but the TellSpec proposes to be a pretty fascinating implementation. Point it at your food and it runs a spectral analysis, sends details on its findings to an app on your phone. Pretty cool. If it really works.
Brennan Moore’s grandfather was an Apollo engineer. This is from his personal memoirs. It’s the story of a problem he helped fix during the launch of an unmanned Saturn V rocket on November 9th, 1967.
This is a time lapse of magnetic putty absorbing a rare-earth magnet. Taken over 1.5 hours at 3fps, played back at 24fps.
Taylor built a working nuclear fusion reactor (fusion, not fission) in his garage when he was 14, becoming the youngest person ever to do so. When he was 17, Taylor came in first in the prestigious Intel Science and Engineering Fair, also winning the Intel Young Scientist award. But this just scratches the surface. His goal is to improve on existing molten salt reactor tech to build a much safer and more efficient fission reactor. He’s been offered funding by the DOE and turned it down due to patent concerns. And remember, he is now just 19.
Spend a few minutes watching this young man speak. This video was a TED talk from earlier this year. Seems to me, he’s the real deal.
Know anyone with vision loss? Check out the video, perhaps this might be helpful to them. Love the advances being made in this field.
Any maths geek will certainly recognize the term fractals, the set of numbers that are infinitely recursive and self similar. This short film gives you the chance to meet the father of the fractal, Benoit Mandelbrot.
Increasing the storage density of batteries is one problem. Extending the lifespan of a battery is another. This Stanford linear accelerator lab work may have just made a leap forward in both of these areas.
Researchers have made the first battery electrode that heals itself, opening a new and potentially commercially viable path for making the next generation of lithium ion batteries for electric cars, cell phones and other devices. The secret is a stretchy polymer that coats the electrode, binds it together and spontaneously heals tiny cracks that develop during battery operation
Researchers worldwide are racing to find ways to store more energy in the negative electrodes of lithium ion batteries to achieve higher performance while reducing weight. One of the most promising electrode materials is silicon; it has a high capacity for soaking up lithium ions from the battery fluid during charging and then releasing them when the battery is put to work.
But this high capacity comes at a price: Silicon electrodes swell to three times normal size and shrink back down again each time the battery charges and discharges, and the brittle material soon cracks and falls apart, degrading battery performance.
”We found that silicon electrodes lasted 10 times longer when coated with the self-healing polymer, which repaired any cracks within just a few hours.”
The Er Wang Dong cave system was discovered in China’s Chongquing province. It’s huge, covering more than 50,000 square meters. More importantly, some of the caverns are tall enough to have their own weather systems. Follow the headline link. The pictures are phenomenal.
Welcome to the future. If you are flying through London’s Heathrow Airport, be on the lookout for the UltraPRT pods, little electric vehicles that run on a closed road, taking passengers from terminal to terminal, all with no driver. And Heathrow is not alone. A town in Buckinghamshire is about to get a fleet of taxis that follow a similar model. Google’s autonomous research program has a fleet of very recognizable Priuses and Lexuses out on the road as well. The closed loop model used by Heathrow is how this technology will spread. Good stuff.
Designed by an MIT research team, the so-called “seat-e” is a public bench that provides a range of services:
Installed recently at the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, each of these two sleek, backless benches has a solar panel on one side to provide power to recharge cellphones, a connection to the Internet, and for night lighting. Soon they also will have sensors to detect for air pollution — even telling whether someone nearby is smoking.
Love this.
This is amazing. This effort bridges the gap between sign languages such as ASL and spoken/written language. Watch the video. Brilliant.
Currently, all wireless broadcasting uses two frequencies, one for transmit, and one for receive.
The underlying technology, known as full-duplex radio, tackles a problem known as “self-interference.” As radios send and receive signals, the ones they send are billions of times stronger than the ones they receive. Any attempt to receive data on any given frequency is thwarted by the fact that the radio’s receiver is also picking up its own outgoing signal.
For this reason, most radios—including the ones in your smartphone, the base stations serving them, and Wi-Fi routers—send information out on one frequency and receive on another, or use the same frequency but rapidly toggle back and forth. Because of this inefficiency, radios use more wireless spectrum than is necessary.
The technique behind the startup is similar to that used in sound canceling headphones.
To solve this, Kumu built an extremely fast circuit that can predict, moment by moment, how much interference a radio’s transmitter is about to create, and then generates a compensatory signal to cancel it out. The circuit generates a new signal with each packet of data sent, making it possible to work even in mobile devices, where the process of canceling signals is more complex because the objects they bounce off are constantly changing.
Not sure if this technology is a game changer all by itself. This is useful when there’s a lot of back and forth, but not so much when receiving or sending large chunks of data. But I suspect it represents the overall direction of WiFi and cellular evolution.
Last month, I wrote about LADEE, NASA’s experiment in laser communication from the earth to the moon and back, replacing traditional radio communications.
Though there were a few glitches along the way, the experiment now works flawlessly and it looks like we have a much faster way to communicate with spacecraft near the Earth and, most importantly for potential Mars explorers, far from Earth as well.
“We could send 30 channels of HD video down from the spacecraft,” said Cornwell. “For example, you could do telepresence with this. Future missions to the moon or asteroids will have astronauts. They may need to see a doctor or need instructions on how to fix something and they could do it in HD video.”
A very important step for further space missions.
For science geeks.
Siri does a lot. But most of what Siri picks up follows some well defined rules.
“Siri, remind me to pick up some milk on the way home.”
There are primary and secondary verbs, as well as words that represent objects and locations. But this type of analysis is the tip of the iceberg in terms of natural language understanding.
A team at Stanford is working on the problem of neural analysis of sentiment.
During the summer the scientists started from a dataset of roughly 12,000 movie review sentences. They split these sentences into phrases, using automated techniques to “parse” groups of words into grammatical units of meaning. The result was 214,000 phrases and sentences. Each of these was read by three humans, who evaluated these expressions for intensity of like or dislike.
Computer scientists call this labeling the data.
Using the Stanford team’s NaSent algorithm, the machine “studied” this labeled data the way a student might study a grammar text.
Or, to be more accurate, the Deep Learning system assigned each labeled expression a set of mathematical attributes. Computer scientists call these numerical descriptions “feature representations.” They are roughly analogous to the concepts and definitions we understand as human beings.
This kind of analysis will move the ball forward, help make natural language systems like Siri much more sophisticated. Fascinating stuff.