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Ambient Presence

Venkat at RibbonFarm talks about ambient presence a concept that was new to me:

Let’s say you and your spouse work in different cities. You both sign up for a VoIP service like Skype, but instead of dutifully talking every evening, you just turn up the speakers on your respective computers, and leave the Skype connection on. You occasionally say something to each other; you can hear each other’s TVs and kitchen noises. That’s ambient presence. Communication technology becoming so cheap that you can afford to leave it on to create a passive background connection. It is a pretty darn cool concept, so let’s take a serious look at it.

See full article.

This seems to me like a rather powerful idea. Some people are already using this in the IM/chat context. Keeping an IM window open and randomly throwing out a few lines every once in a while is something people have started doing more and more. But if we could extend this to other media (like phones) that could change how we communicate with certain people.

Convert your photos into 3D models

Make-3D is a service out of Stanford that allows you to upload any photo and it converts it into a 3D movie (or more generally, a 3D model that you can explore if you have the appropriate browser plugin). I uploaded this photo:

and a few minutes later, I was the proud owner of this:

This is how it works:

Our software uses a breakthrough technology in machine learning. It estimates depths from the single image by using our monocular vision algorithm, developed in 2005. It captures a variety of monocular cues and learns the relations between different parts of the image using a machine learning technique called Markov Random Field (MRF). Our algorithm first divides the image into small patches and analyzes them at multiple scales to estimate each of the patches’ 3-d location and 3-d orientation. More details could be found here.

The smarter ones amongst you would have realized that what the above means is that the program is pretty much guessing. And it can make mistakes. For example, I uploaded this photo:

and ended up with this 3-D model:

As you can see, the algorithm seems to have put a huge hole in the tower, and Ronak appears to be doing more of a Spiderman routine than regular rappelling.

By the way, the site is very easy to use. Try it yourself.

Plants that sms you when they need water

These guys built a that sends you an SMS via twitter when it needs water.

Found: here.

Facebook meets ICICIDirect?

Cake Financial is a start-up that is trying to bring the concept of social networking to your investment portfolio:

Cake is the free online service that makes it easy to follow the real portfolios and the real trades of your family and friends as well as top-performing members within the Cake community.

The basic idea is that when you and your friends/family sign up with Cake, their actual investments are tracked by cake, and you are informed of who is buying what. Not a “virtual market”, but actual trades made by them with their actual money. Not the exact numbers (for reasons of privacy) but which stocks who invested in, and the percentage returns on their portfolio. The idea is that you can use this information to improve your returns on investment.

Why Don’t The French Get As Fat As Americans?

This article reports on new research that has the answer:

Because they use internal cues — such as no longer feeling hungry — to stop eating, reports a new Cornell study. Americans, on the other hand, tend to use external cues — such as whether their plate is clean, they have run out of their beverage or the TV show they’re watching is over.

See full article. (Found via boing-boing.)

The professor who lied

Overcoming Bias has this great post about a professor who used to lie in his lectures. I liked the post so much that I’ve “excerpted” pretty much the whole post (because I know you are too lazy to click on the link):

Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.” And thus began our ten-week course.

This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention - by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly checksum new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact. Early in the quarter, the Lie of the Day was usually obvious - immediately triggering a forest of raised hands to challenge the falsehood. Dr. K would smile, draw a line through that section of the board, and utter his trademark phrase “Very good! In fact, the opposite is true. Moving on … ”

As the quarter progressed, the Lie of the Day became more subtle, and many ended up slipping past a majority of the students unnoticed until a particularly alert person stopped the lecture to flag the disinformation. Every once in a while, a lecture would end with nobody catching the lie which created its own unique classroom experience - in any other college lecture, end of the class hour prompts a swift rush of feet and zipping up of bookbags as students make a beeline for the door; on the days when nobody caught the lie, we all sat in silence, looking at each other as Dr. K, looking quite pleased with himself, said with a sly grin: “Ah ha! Each of you has one falsehood in your lecture notes. Discuss amongst yourselves what it might be, and I will tell you next Monday. That is all.” Those lectures forced us to puzzle things out, work out various angles in study groups so we could approach him with our theories the following week.

Brilliant … but what made Dr. K’s technique most insidiously evil and genius was, during the most technically difficult lecture of the entire quarter, there was no lie. At the end of the lecture in which he was not called on any lie, he offered the same challenge to work through the notes; on the following Monday, he fielded our theories for what the falsehood might be (and shooting them down “no, in fact that is true - look at [x]“) for almost ten minutes before he finally revealed: “Do you remember the first lecture - how I said that ‘every lecture has a lie?’”

Exhausted from having our best theories shot down, we nodded.

“Well - THAT was a lie. My previous lecture was completely on the level. But I am glad you reviewed your notes rigorously this weekend - a lot of it will be on the final. Moving on … “

Found: here.

For those amongst you who give lectures and presentations, do you think this technique would be useful in your  presentation?

How Cognitive Science Can Improve Your PowerPoint Presentations

Harvard scientist Stephen Kosslyn studies how the brain works. And has decided to apply those insights into improving the Powerpoint presentations of the world. That resulted in the book “Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations“. See this article for some of his basic ideas. Excerpt:

The Rule of Four is a simple but powerful tool that grows out of the fact that the brain can generally hold only four pieces of visual information simultaneously. So don’t ever present your audience with more than four things at once. This is a really important piece of information for people who tend to pack their PowerPoint slides with dense reams of data. Never give more than four pieces of information at once. It’s not that people can’t think beyond four ideas — it’s that when we take in the visual information on a slide we start to get overwhelmed when we reach four items.

The Birds of a Feather Rule is another good rule for how to organize information when you want to show things in groups. “We think of things in groups when they look similar or in proximity to each other,” Kosslyn pointed out. Translation into PowerPoint? If you want to indicate to your audience that five things belong in a group, make them similar by giving them the same color or shape. Or group them very close together. This sounds basic, but it often means taking your data apart and reorganizing it. Kosslyn’s co-panelist, Stanford psychologist Barbara Tversky, explained that one of the fundamental principles of data visualization is, ironically, misrepresentation in order to get at the truth.

See full article.

Interactive science website for kids

Click here. From BBC. Go here for a lot more educational goodies.

Paul Graham’s Six Principles for innovation

See this post for Paul Graham’s philosophy for inventing something new and succeeding at it:

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly

See full article.

You could be in this book

See this post for:

Stolen from here.