RealityPrime

I had the good fortune to meet Pranav Mistry when he interned at MSR here in Redmond. I’d of course seen his amazing Sixth Sense work presented by his MIT adviser Pattie Maes at TED a few years ago. But here’s a much better presentation of his work given at TED India.

From a technical point of view, not all of the ideas he’s promoting would work as well in real life as they do in the video. But the interface conceptions are really extraordinary for their simplicity and elegance. I’m a fan. Once the tech could be made to work reliably (for everyone), I could really see these paradigms catching on.

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[via engadget, physorg, etc..]

For those of you who remember my post from three years ago, we asserted that the best way to deal with images of people, cars, and other moving objects in Street View (and by extension Microsoft’s own StreetSide product) was not to blur, but to remove them entirely. They could always be re-added in a variety of forms, ideally as dynamic 3D objects.

Looks like it’s taken a while, but the simplest method of removing people — comparing successive images for similarities — works pretty well. Congrats to the grad student who pulled this off. Nice work.

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You can’t make this crap up. The title of the article is "10 Everyday Items Hackers are Targeting Right Now." It’s claimed to be "science and technology" from the news organization whose pie charts regularly add up to greater than 100%.

So let’s summarize the list for the impatient few. Here’s what those crazy HACKERS are targeting RIGHT NOW:

1. Your Car(*)  –they can start your car electronically, because that never happened with 10 minutes and a pair of wire cutters under the dash.
2. Your GPS(*) — they can track you remotely, because hackers really want to know where the happening spots are and are too lame to use social networking.
3. Your Cellphone — they can take over your phone, which, if you use AT&T, will do exactly nothing.
4. Your Front Door(**)  — they can open it remotely, because smashing a window is too low-tech for most criminals. Let’s spend several hours cracking your crappy security system to steal a bunch of Hummels.
5. Your Blender(**) — they can turn it on. Ooh, killer frappes. Once they can turn it on and make it fly across the room, then I’ll be worried.
6. Your Printer(*) — they can print stuff remotely, maybe even see your crappy photos from last vacation. Extremely creepy… and useless, unless you regularly print your credit card number, in which case you should be more concerned about shredding your physical trash.
7. Your Digital Camera(*) — they can see what you snapped, maybe even photoshop the pictures and replace them before you download them. Fark contest anyone?
8. Your Electricity (i.e., power outlets) — they can… wait, it needs the smart grid for anyone to hack anything? Never mind. Ten years out (but yes, let’s make the smart grid smart about security. Good idea.).
9. Your Body(**) — they can hack into that high tech bionic arm the US government didn’t pay for when they got your real one blown off. Otherwise, you’re pretty safe for at least 10 or 15 years here.
10. Your Brain (**)  — never mind the fact that your brain is usually considered part of your body, they can use social engineering to make you fear everything and obey. Yes, like Fox is doing it right now. OMG! Hackers!

caveats:

*   if it allows wireless/automatic firmware updates over insecure networks that hackers can get you to use
** if it’s networked and allows remote operation that hackers can, um, hack.

Let’s add a few items to their list, shall we?

1. Your TV — FoxNews controls everything you watch, unless you change the channel or turn it off.
2. Your Government — remember the 2000 and 2004 elections? Eight years of Bush may be due to bad software and corrupt election officials with special compact flash cards (see Al Gore’s negative 16000 votes in Florida).
3. Your Life — why do you even listen to these people who tell you what to buy, wear, think, and vote? They don’t care about you. They don’t even like you. In fact, they think you’re retarded, and they like it that way.

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Nearly every single image you see selling you the magic of 3D displays is a lie.

Now, it’s not the same kind of marketing lie that tells you to buy an expensive car to attract women. Conceivably there could be a sexy woman who digs you for your car. Really. It’s happened. Once or twice, maybe.

But 3D Displays literally can’t do what they’re often depicted as doing: namely making 3D images appear in space. They just can’t, outside of science fiction.

[Read more →]

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All lasting social contracts must provide benefits to those who engage in them. This is common sense, right? If some parties receive no benefits in the bargain, the contract has a way of evaporating quite rapidly.

Social contracts work best when the benefits are clearly laid out. You pay your taxes and the government ostensibly protects your property, your greater economic interests, and even your life. It’s not entirely unlike Big Al’s cousin Vince and his baseball bat offering you protection for a modest fee, except in Vince’s case the only benefit is an absence of malice. The government does actually do some good for people, which is why we elect to keep it around, even though we may occasionally elect professional clowns who undermine that goal.

When it comes to internet companies, the bargain should be even more explicit. Many of these companies don’t bill you, so the true cost  (and I guarantee there is is one, if there is a benefit to the company) is murky at best. For Google, the employees honestly believe (and they could be somewhat right) that serving you better, more relevant ads is in your interest and is therefore totally win/win for everyone. If more relevant ads means fewer ads, then I’d tend to agree.

Of course, they make billions of dollars off your eyeballs and you may save only a little time or effort, so it’s hardly a 50/50 split. Microsoft is a little more up front about the bargain. Use Bing to buy stuff, they say, and they’ll give you a small cut of the proceeds, some "cash back." Well, they can certainly afford it. Who knows if it’s working, but at least it’s the kind of bargain I can get behind.

But Facebook is another story. I’ve been getting a lot more friend requests lately, and I never turn old friends down, even though I don’t ever use the site for actual social networking. I’m willing to grant Facebook knowledge of whom I know, but little else.

Why? Because they don’t offer much of a bargain. In fact, it’s kind of crappy. [Read more →]

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Update 5/14/2010:

Google just today announced it was suspending this data collection (not that my blog had anything to do with it). Google had previously and erroneously claimed they didn’t collect any wireless traffic, just SSIDs and MACs, but are stopping the entire practice (and intending to delete this data) just the same. This both shows good faith on the part of Google, but also highlights the dangers of unchecked data collection over personal privacy. It’s all too easy for mistakes and abuses to happen, even for well-intentioned companies in a hurry. [Read more →]

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There’s a lot of chatter on the nets about Apple’s new developer agreement that generally obliterates the use of 3rd party tools to make iPhone apps. It says, in a nutshell, you must use C, C++, Objective-C, and, okay, Javascript, to write — not ship, but write — your apps. Essentially, they might as well have said "no middleware."

The problem for Apple was that extremely cool packages like Unity3D and Adobe CS5 were poised to make it really easy for developers to write great apps in a safe clean sandbox and press a big orange button to deploy to iPhone.

This was formerly a very clever way around Apple’s previous requirement that all apps be native, as in rock solid compiled vs. flexibly interpreted/JITed like Flash and Silverlight. But Apple, clearly masochists the lot of them, wanted everyone else to use their circa-1980s-with-GUI-glued-on XCode development environment too. Or they just wanted to screw their whole ecosystem because they’re too arrogant to fail, right?

Well, unfortunately, that’s not really what’s going on here. Apple isn’t stupid. The problem with CS5 and Unity3D for Apply is that they are inherently cross-platform. The people inside Apple, I’m sure, don’t really care what you use to develop their apps as long as they make money (for Apple), sell more iPhones, iPads & iUnderwear, and the apps generally don’t suck (at least in aggregate).

But Apple does care when I write a game that runs as well or better on Android or WinMo7 or Netbook+Flash, with no added effort, and gives users a great set of choices, some of them free. For developers, this is exactly what we want — the most/cheapest outlets for our work. So Apple is forcing developers to choose. "You want our luscious money-printing (for a select few) platform, then we want 100% loyalty."

This is the same reason other companies, ahem, look for games that offer exclusives to their console. Do I like it? As a developer, of course not. As an employee, meh. Not my call. But it does work, more than it doesn’t, and helps build a brand instead of a commodity.

Where it fails, and where Apple is being stupid IMO (and only IMO) is when they no longer have the sexiest hardware or lion’s share of mindshare, which may be sooner than they think. When someone else has something more appealing, then Apple will be forced to help developers cross-develop onto Apple’s platform, as other companies do now for theirs, and as Apple once did for all sorts of creative apps like Adobe’s.

All of that said, I’m ditching my iPhone anyway — the only reason I got it was because there was nothing better at the time. I have no loyalty to brands, only people.

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There’s a post on Reddit today titled, "This is the first thing they should teach in Trigonometry," which is where I stole this gif.

I totally agree. Apart from equal triangles, various equivalences, etc.., understanding the nature of sine and cosine is monumental.

As a teenager, I was so excited by this knowledge, I not only took one point and rotated it in a circle, I then took four points, each 90 degrees apart, connected them by lines, and rotated a square.

Then I said, what happens if you rotate that square 90 degrees into the screen and say clone it a few times? Cool. I can rotate a cube. And what happens if you take that cube and add some parallax, such that things far away move towards a vanishing point?

Pretty soon, basic trig lead me to reinvent 3D graphics, the painters algorithm for drawing polygons, and I was off. In fact, the only thing I was missing as a kid was linear algebra and the knowledge that you could actually make a living doing fun stuff like this. Had I known the latter part, I’d probably have become a game developer at an early age.

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Update: my Israeli friends tell me this was a spoof.

Originally:

Here’s prime example of technology without context. What happens when a kid brandishing a fake gun, shooting at enemies only he can see, goes out in public and gets shot by police?

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The Lancet finally disavowed the original scientifically proven fraud that started the whole "vaccines cause autism" fiasco, which has undoubtedly cost childrens’ lives and done nothing to lower the rate of autism.

The author of the study had a financial interest in his so called findings. No one could reproduce those findings, though at the behest of concerned parents, many tried. And by now everyone of any integrity has disavowed the entire episode.

By that I mean to say that Jenny McCarthy claims the whole thing is a well orchestrated plot against the good doctor Wakefield who promoted the original autism/vaccine link. Yes, every scientist working for peanuts in terms of public money has decided conspire to ruin the life of one innocent man who stood to make considerable money from his so-called discovery. Brilliant plan! (reminds me of one not-too-bright former co-worker of mine who claimed the whole global warming debate was a devious plot by scientists to make more money).

Is it possible to issue a class action lawsuit against people who cause mass public stupidity leading to demonstrable harm? In my mind, it’s not much different than the fire in a theater scenario, especially when there is no fire.

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