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- April 13, 2005
More Talking Heads
April 13, 2005Read moreWell, actually more David Byrne. He’s running a radio station on the Internet. In his words:
A friend who relocated to California from NY said she missed hearing all the odd variety of music that was played around the office here. “I miss hearing what you all are listening to,” she wrote. This “radio” is my response. It will stream for a few hours and then it will recycle. Maybe it will run longer in the future. The artists played here are respectful of one another and gunplay is forbidden.
Via BoingBoing.
- April 12, 2005
Dealing with Bandwidth Stealing
April 12, 2005Read moreRecently I noted some suspicious activity: some images were being retrieved from my web server without a corresponding page view. That usually means someone is stealing my bandwidth.
How does it work? Say someone has decided they like a particular image on my site, so they “link it” to some other website elsewhere. This means that they don’t have to PAY for the hosting and subsequent bandwidth use themselves. A typical use is to link an image as an “avatar” for your bulletin board identity; each message shows a little picture representing the person talking. For a busy bulletin board, this can add up to thousands of image loads a day: not an insignicant amount. Leeches!
- April 12, 2005
Uncanny Voices
April 12, 2005Read more
Continuing along the disembodied talking heads theme this week, my sister forwarded me this talking head demo from OddCast, a company that apparently specializes in online talking characters for marketing and sales purposes. You can enter in a phrase, and the head will say it surprisingly naturally after a few seconds. The browser interface is Flash; I’m guessing that the text is vocalized on a server, and the Flash front end loads the audio file dynamically when it’s done.
UPDATE: The demo link has been taken down or moved. Sorry!
- April 11, 2005
Work At Home!
April 11, 2005Read moreSince I’m working at home, I had been somewhat intrigued by those work at home! make money fast! schemes…exactly how to they purport to work, and how do they screw ya?
My credit union newsletter had a link to this article about the Work At Home scams operate, plus some variations based on the Internet (e.g.: “Read Email! Get Paid!”)
- April 11, 2005
The Creepy, Uncanny Valley
April 11, 2005Read moreThere’s a theory related to the simulation of human appearance called the Uncanny Valley by researcher Masahiro Mori. From Wikipedia:
This principle states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion the emotional response from a human being to robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached at which the response suddenly becomes strongly repulsive.
When I was a small child, I hated things like mannikins and wax museum figures. An episode of Speed Racer featuring a Robot Car driver terrified me. I absolutely hated the Bear Jamboree at Disneyland.
As an adult, I’ve recognized that this response is one of the genuine primal reactions I have, and as a result I’ve become somewhat fascinated by the subject. I’m still creeped me out, but it’s interesting to try to come to grips with it, particularly when combined with Robotics.
Recently on BoingBoing I saw this link to a movie from the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Nondestructive Evaluation and Advanced Actuators Technology Lab. This is hard core robotics research into “novel” technologies for sensors and making things move.
The movie is a tech demonstration of a talking human female head mounted to a wooden box. It’s apparently capable of understanding spoken speech and responded. The eyes, head, and mouth move, and facial muscles are also simulated. I find it very spooky.
I guess there’s no real point to the post other than I’m wigged out and have to write something down to get it out of my system.
