Category Archives: tech

Rachel Tyrell Gets a Job

Premier Health Plans, a a health insurance broker, employs a rather elaborate chat bot to collect a customer’s basic information and interests before sending the potential customer to a real person to close the deal. It’s really a clever chat bot, but the odd thing about it is that it insists that it’s a real person. Clearly someone at Premier Health Plans, thought that a chat bot made good business sense, but at the same time didn’t think it was quite convincing, so they added in scripts to respond to questions like, “Are you a robot?”, with the idea that if they just deny it, that would placate enough curiosity and automaton-phobia to hold a potential customer on the line long enough to close.

Think about this for a second. At some point there was a discussion that went something like:

Analyst: In order to get n conversions per day, we need x telemarketers, which costs y dollars.
Manager: Hmm, y is a lot of dollars, and that initial part of the conversation is where we lose most of customers. What can we do bring down this cost?
Analyst: What if we used a robot?
Manager: Not a phone tree. I hate those press-one-for-English type things.
Analyst: No a really smart robot, like Siri.
Manager: Yeah, a sexy robot, like Siri, but it would have to be smart. Can we make it smart?
Analyst: That can be done, and it would only cost z dollars, which is much less than y dollars.
Manager: Good. Good. Let’s do it.
Analyst: I just thought of something. You know how people don’t like to leave voicemails, or deal with phone trees. What if they don’t like the robot?
Manager: Well, we’ll just have robot lie.

Sadly, the phone number and website, premierhealthagency.com are now disabled.

Emergent Pong

At SIGGRAPH91, graphics researcher and digital artist Loren Carpenter stood near the front of an 5000 seat auditorium in a Las Vegas hotel. In the seats in front of him, the attendees held cardboard paddles, one side of which was red, the other green. Behind him was a giant screen covered in blinking and shifting red and green dots. After a few moments, the audience figured out what Loren already knew. A camera was trained on the auditorium and was feeding images into a computer that then displayed the color and polishing of every paddle in the room. The audience cheered and began to wave back and forth in unison.

The screen changed to classic video game Pong. The only difference was that instead of all white paddles, the paddles were two-toned, with a green upper half, and a red lower half. Loren took the stage and addressed the crowd. “Okay guys. Folks on the left side of the auditorium control the left paddle. Folks on the right side control the right paddle. If you think you are on the left, then you really are. Okay? Go!”

The ball began to move across the screen and the paddles twitched to life. The paddles move to a height calculated from the relative number of red and green paddles. If everyone shows the same color, then the paddle will move to either the extreme top or the extreme bottom. However, if some show the opposite color, then paddle will stop somewhere in the middle. Surprisingly quickly, the crowd began to play effectively, even when the speed of the ball increased.

Aerographite

Aerographite, is lighter than air. Yes, lighter than air. Recently discovered by German scientists in 2012, aerographite is 75x lighter than Styrofoam but the same strength. It is made up of a mesh of interwoven, linked chain of carbon tubes which are 15nm in diameter. 1kg of the material takes up around five cubic meters of space. Think about this, it is insane. I can envisage airships that don’t use hydrogen or helium but use a “solid” tank of aerographite, meaning there would be no risk of explosions from the flammable hydrogen and lower risk of bursting the blimp. Also, you would not need to refill the blimp with hydrogen/helium leading to greater long term efficiency and potential applications that don’t require landing (e.g. surface imaging).

You might ask yourself, how are you going to come back down to earth if you cannot release some of the hydrogen/helium? One could use a high capacity water condenser to condense water vapour into tanks to use as a ballast and/or use engines to guide the airship down.

Typically, a standard Goodyear blimp will has around 200,000 cubic feet of helium creating around 12,500 pounds of lift. Helium is around 7x lighter than air. Aerographite is also around around 6x lighter than air. So we can say that the size of this aerographiteship would be slightly bigger than a normal airship.

The material also has an interesting property: after 95% compression of the material, it is possible for the material to return back to its original shape. This means the blimps could be packed into a deployable unit 20x times smaller for later expansion.

Another application could be high altitude wind turbines that hold their position high up without having to refill expensive helium tanks. An advantage of being high altitude would be the wind speed is fast and constant. Altaeros energies Inc should also think about this material for future builds.

Normally it takes around 20 years to get materials into mass production (see history of carbon fibre). The main question remains, when will we have aerographite in mass production?

One other limitation will be creating aerographites that can support themselves with the air inside the material “pumped” out of it (to truly achieve being lighter than air). In practice, getting a real blimp to work will probably be made out of a future version of aerographite or another aerogel that is super strong and light, one that could self support itself without collapsing in on itself if the air between the meshes of nanotubes is pumped out. A partial vacuum will have to be created inside the aerographite structure without crushing the aerogel. This may be the fatal flaw to the idea or at least the next problem to solve (i.e. given that the material is superhydrophobic, maybe a thin shell of water could be put around the aerogel or some similar exotic solution).

Credit to Millennium Airship Inc for the image.

via Jude Gomila

This Message Has Been Approved By Seatac Astronomy

Me thinks Larry Page and the Zuckster have same ghostwriter at the NSA.

Google Facebook
Dear Google users—

You may be aware of press reports alleging that Internet companies have joined a secret U.S. government program called PRISM to give the National Security Agency direct access to our servers. As Google’s CEO and Chief Legal Officer, we wanted you to have the facts.

First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.

Finally, this episode confirms what we have long believed—there needs to be a more transparent approach. Google has worked hard, within the confines of the current laws, to be open about the data requests we receive. We post this information on our Transparency Report whenever possible. We were the first company to do this. And, of course, we understand that the U.S. and other governments need to take action to protect their citizens’ safety—including sometimes by using surveillance. But the level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish.

Posted by Larry Page, CEO and David Drummond, Chief Legal Officer

I want to respond personally to the outrageous press reports about PRISM:

Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn’t even heard of PRISM before yesterday.

When governments ask Facebook for data, we review each request carefully to make sure they always follow the correct processes and all applicable laws, and then only provide the information if is required by law. We will continue fighting aggressively to keep your information safe and secure.

We strongly encourage all governments to be much more transparent about all programs aimed at keeping the public safe. It’s the only way to protect everyone’s civil liberties and create the safe and free society we all want over the long term.

You don’t need to go in through the back door when you go in through the front.

RIP Carbon Motors

Recently, I read some sad news, Carbon Motors has folded. I can’t say I’m surprised. Starting a car company, especially a niche car company is hard. It is sad because E7 concept seemed really thought out, and that’s what I liked about it. I’m a bit disappointed I didn’t write more about Carbon Motors three years ago when they first showed up on my radar. The E7 was was billed as the only purpose built police car in the world. The front seats had cutouts for utility belts and a sucky to blow cool air on the driver’s neck. The rear seats had suicide doors and seatbelts rigged with the latches records the outside so that officers didn’t have to lean over prisoners when securing them in the back. The car also was supposed to come full of gadgets like nightvision cameras and NBE detectors (no doubt to enable police departments to offset the cost of the vehicles through antiterrorism grants).

Apparently getting enough orders and/or bringing the manufacturing cost down for profitability became a problem for Carbon, because they eventually ditched the patrol car, and started shopping around a rather boring paddy wagon.

Sadly, Carbon Motors’s online presence is completely gone, save for the wayback machine.

A salvaged picture of the paddy wagon is after the jump.

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Robotic Couture

Dutch designer and V2_ collaborator, Anouk Wipprecht and Austrian hacker Daniel Schatzmayr (thingiverse twitter) dress features a hexpod perched around the shoulders of wearer, or perhaps it’s a dress with tripod epaulets. Normally the legs simply slowly wave, but when something triggers the proximity (sonar?) sensors, the legs suddenly pull in tight, as if the dress has become scared.

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