An AI you can train like a dog

The Objectifier is a small device equipped with a camera and computer that runs a neural network. Using a simple mobile app interface, anyone can train it to associate the user’s actions with objects in their daily environment. For instance, you can train it to turn on the light when you wave your hand at it and turn off the light when you make a fist; to turn on the radio when you start dancing; or even to start the coffeemaker when you put your mug down in front of it. It’s totally up to the user to decide what the device “learns.”

In essence, the device is what Karmann described as an “extension cord with a eye”–you plug one end into the wall, and the other into the object you want it to control. As long as the camera, which breaks down the images it receives by shape, color, and depth, is positioned so it can see you, you can train the algorithm within about five minutes to associate any body movement with the object being controlled. Karmann says that simple tasks, like turning on a light using a hand gesture, might take as little as 30 seconds to train.

Karmann likens the training to how you might train a pet. “The dog trainers alive now might be the programmers of the future,” Karmann says. “They know the techniques. I realized how many similarities there are between dog training and machine learning.”

https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125136/if-youve-trained-a-dog-you-can-train-this-ai?utm_content=buffer05e9d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Finally someone sensible taking charge of things

Cometh the hour, cometh the intergalactic Star Lord.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...
The year was 2017. The Conservative forces under Commander T-May had just lost their majority after a turbulent election.
Exit negotiations with the European Empire were set to begin in just seven days.
The rebels were in jeopardy.
But, out of nowhere, a new hope emerged.

Yes, Lord Buckethead has agreed to lead negotiations on Brexit.

His offer comes just as Theresa May shakes up her cabinet. Lord Buckethead could make a fierce addition to her team.

His election manifesto called for "The abolition of the Lords (except me)", and for "Katie Hopkins to be banished to the Phantom Zone". The space traveller also demanded the "Nationalisation of Adele."

It's not all hardball with Buckethead though. He has displayed an ability to compromise, proposing, "A moratorium until 2022 on whether Birmingham should be converted into a star base."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/item/35e52bfa-8165-4de8-99b2-07898bce3dd4?ns_campaign=bbc-three&ns_mchannel=social&ns_source=FACEBOOK&ns_linkname=bbcthree

Fish use tools and solve problems

Clever fishies.

While diving off the Micronesian archipelago of Pulau, evolutionary biologist Giacomo Bernardi witnessed something unusual and was lucky enough to capture it on film. An orange-dotted tuskfish (Choerodon anchorago) uncovered a clam buried in the sand by blowing water at it, picked up the mollusk in its mouth and carried it to a large rock 30 yards away. Then, using several rapid head flicks and well-timed releases, the fish eventually cracked open the clam against the rock. In the ensuing 20 minutes, the tuskfish ate three clams, using the same sequence of behaviors to smash them.

Video here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A9FNua0Q_M

Scientists have noticed similar behavior in green wrasses, also called blackspot tuskfish (Choerodon schoenleinii), on Australia's Great Barrier Reef; in yellowhead wrasses (Halichoeres garnoti) off the coast of Florida; and in a sixbar wrasse (Thalassoma hardwicke) in an aquarium setting. In the case of the sixbar wrasse, the captive fish was given pellets that were too large to swallow and too hard to break into pieces using only its jaws. The fish carried one of the pellets to a rock in the aquarium tank and smashed it much as the tuskfish did the clam.

An archerfish can squirt water in a single shot or in a machine gun–like fusillade. Targets have included insects, spiders, an infant lizard, bits of raw meat, scientific models of typical prey and even observers' eyes—along with their lit cigarettes. Archerfish also load their weapons according to the size of their prey, using more water for larger, heavier targets. Experienced archers may even aim just below their prey on a vertical surface to knock it straight down into the water instead of farther away on land.

Archerfish live in groups, and they have fantastic observational learning skill. Their hunting prowess does not come preinstalled, so novices can make successful shots at speedy targets only after a prolonged training period. Researchers studying captive archerfish at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany found that inexperienced individuals were not able to successfully hit a target even if it was moving as slowly as half an inch per second. But after watching 1,000 attempts (successful and unsuccessful) by another archerfish to hit a moving target, the novices were able to make successful shots at rapidly moving targets. The scientists concluded that archerfish can assume the viewpoint of another archerfish to learn a difficult skill from a distance. Biologists call this “perspective taking.”

In May 2014 a study highlighted an example of innovative tool use by Atlantic cods being held in captivity for aquaculture research. Each fish wore a colored tag affixed to its back near the dorsal fin, which allowed the researchers to identify each individual fish. The holding tank had a self-feeder activated by a string with a loop at the end... Apparently some of the cods discovered they could activate the feeder by hooking the loop onto their tag and swimming a short distance away.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fishes-use-problem-solving-and-invent-tools1/

Recruiting a crowd of expert reviewers

Interesting and novel approach. Via Sakari Maaranen.

I am not proposing what is sometimes referred to as crowdsourced reviewing, in which anyone can comment on an openly posted manuscript. I believe that anonymous feedback is more candid, and that confidential submissions give authors space to decide how to revise and publish their work. I envisioned instead a protected platform whereby many expert reviewers could read and comment on submissions, as well as on fellow reviewers’ comments. This, I reasoned, would lead to faster, more-informed editorial decisions.

I recruited just over 100 highly qualified referees, mostly suggested by our editorial board. We worked with an IT start-up company to create a closed online forum and sought authors’ permission to have their submissions assessed in this way. Conventional peer reviewers evaluated the same manuscripts in parallel. After an editorial decision was made, authors received reports both from the crowd discussion and from the conventional reviewers.

This January, we put up two manuscripts simultaneously and gave the crowd 72 hours to respond. Each paper received dozens of comments that our editors considered informative. Taken together, responses from the crowd showed at least as much attention to fine details, including supporting information outside the main article, as did those from conventional reviewers.

So far, we have tried crowd reviewing with ten manuscripts. In all cases, the response was more than enough to enable a fair and rapid editorial decision. Compared with our control experiments, we found that the crowd was much faster (days versus months), and collectively provided more-comprehensive feedback.

https://www.nature.com/news/crowd-based-peer-review-can-be-good-and-fast-1.22072

Small victories

This gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Donald Drumpf has told Theresa May in a phone call he does not want to go ahead with a state visit to Britain until the British public supports him coming. The US president said he did not want to come if there were large-scale protests and his remarks in effect put the visit on hold for some time.

A Downing Street spokeswoman said it would not comment. “We aren’t going to comment on speculation about the contents of private phone conversations. The Queen extended an invitation to President Drumpf to visit the UK and there is no change to those plans.”

The White House said in statement: “The President has tremendous respect for Prime Minister May. That subject never came up on the call.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/11/donald-trump-state-visit-to-britain-put-on-hold?CMP=twt_gu

The DUP are awful but largely impotent

I'm not actually worried by the DUP deal. Yes, they are awful people, but they are awful people no-one's ever heard of before. There's no support for their anti-science hard-right rhetoric. More than that, there isn't even any call for a debate on their positions. They can't even (reportedly) vote on most issues because of the English Votes for English Laws ruling. So in most cases the worst they could do is start a debate on issues that everyone else already considers long since settled; if they wanted to get a "creationism in schools" thing going (or indeed any of their policies, it seems) they'd have to start from zero. They're not even populists, they're just unpopular. And any changes they somehow did try and enact would happen against a backdrop of an incompetent leader trying ineffectually to negotiate with the world's largest economic bloc. They are toothless. All they'll succeed in doing is making the Tories even more unpopular and triggering another election.

On that basis then, here's a poll I've signed and you might want to as well.
https://www.change.org/p/winston-theresamay-to-resign-no-to-the-the-democratic-unionist-party-dup-postmanpratt1

Quick predictions

A snap opinion on the election result without much in the way of proper reflection or any time to see how things develop :

May is in trouble. She'll try to form a minority government with the DUP, and it will work for a little while but not for long. Her campaign was initiated (purportedly) on the basis that we need to deal with Brexit by giving her a strong mandate in the negotiations; that hasn't happened. Although the largest party and entitled to try and form a government, the personal pressure on May is going to escalate. When Bexit negotiations start, other countries will laugh at the idea that we have "strong and stable" leadership, let alone are insisting on the hard Brexit that May was demanding to appeal to the lunatic fringe. And May does not do well under pressure; she called the election out of a peculiar sort of desperate opportunism, and we've seen her increasingly degenerate into robotic performances that make little or no sense. Sooner or later - probably sooner - she'll break.

Labour are harder to gauge. If Corbyn really does have any political sense at all, he'll go on the strongest attack possible against May. If he does that, he may yet rally his MPs to his leadership if not all his ideologies. If, however, he reverts to his chronic problem of doing bugger all at key moments, pretty soon Labour are going to realise they're in bad shape. They made respectable but ultimately modest gains in the election - they still have a very long way to go to challenge the Conservatives by themselves. Once they realise that and find that they're sliding back into the doldrums, all the old animosities will re-surface and they'll split.

But who knows, a meteor may strike or the Queen might abdicate or something, such is the nature of politics.

Why Parliament is so well hung

This is a nice, detailed description of why we're currently in the "no idea at all" phase of the proceedings.

http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2017-40209087

Bald men are filled with gold

Greetings, alien visitors ! Welcome to 21st century Earth, where we think bald men have heads filled with gold because that totally makes sense when you think about it.

Bald men in Mozambique could be the targets of ritual attacks, police have warned, following the recent killing of three bald men for their body parts. Two suspects have been arrested in the central district of Milange, where the killings occurred. "The belief is that the head of a bald man contains gold," said Afonso Dias, a police commander in Mozambique's central Zambezia province.

Albino people have also been killed in the region for ritual purposes. The suspects are two young Mozambicans aged around 20, the AFP news agency reports. "Their motive comes from superstition and culture - the local community thinks bald individuals are rich," Commander Dias is reported as having told a press conference in the capital Maputo.

A regional security spokesman, Miguel Caetano, told AFP that one of the victims had had his head cut off and his organs removed. The organs were to be used by medicine men in rituals to advance the wealth of clients in Tanzania and Malawi, Mr Caetano said, citing the suspects.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-40185359

Gay vultures adopt baby

A Dutch zoo says two male vultures in a long-standing relationship have become parents after successfully hatching an egg. Staff gave the gay griffon vultures an abandoned egg, which they cared for in their nest for two months. Zoo keeper Job van Tol said the two fathers are "a very tight couple" and are doing the job perfectly.

"We have had them for some years. They always build a nest together, bond and mate together," he told the BBC. "But, as two males, the one thing they could not do was lay an egg." So when staff discovered a lone egg that none of the other vultures would adopt, they first cared for it in an incubator, and then decided to place in the male couple's nest.

"It was a bit of risk as we had no guarantees of success, but we thought, finally, this is their chance," said Mr Van Tol. Artis Amsterdam Royal Zoo said the new parents are very protective of their fast-growing chick, which is now 20 days old, and they have been breaking up its food to make it manageable to eat. "As in some penguin species, vultures do everything the same, they alternate all the jobs. Females lay the eggs, but they breed together, they forage for food together. Males are programmed to have that duty of care," said Mr Van Tol.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40118134