Loebner Speaks AI

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 13:35:38 +0000

Mighty Squirrel writes “This is a fascinating interivew with Hugh Loebner, the academic who has arguably done more to promote the development of artifical intelligence than anyone else. He founded the Loebner prize in 1990 to promote the development of artificial intelligence by asking developers to create a machine which passes the Turing Test — meaning it responds in a way indistinguishable from a human. The latest running of the contest is this weekend and this article shows what an interesting and colourful character Loebner is.”

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It's all about the (smart) money - Newsday

admin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:00:56 +0000

It's all about the (smart) money - Newsday

SkySports

It's all about the (smart) money
Newsday,

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Esther Dyson To Train For Space Flight

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:35:37 +0000

DynaSoar writes “Esther Dyson, known to many as a founding and consistently guiding member of ICANN, and for working with the startups of Flickr, del.icio.us, Medscape and others, is now expanding her interests upwards. She recently announced that she will be heading to Moscow to train as backup astronaut for Charles Simonyi, who plans to fly aboard Soyuz TMA-14 next year. The US$3 million price tag won’t be her first cash contribution towards personal space flight. She’s already an investor in Space Adventures, the company that arranges the space tourist flights on Soyuz.”

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Housing market continues to slow - Australian Broadcasting Corp.

admin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:01:12 +0000

Housing market continues to slow - Australian Broadcasting Corp.
The Real Estate institute of Western Australia (REIWA) states Perth’s housing market is continuing to slow with the median home price dropping by four per cent in the September quarter. The president of REIWA, Rob Druitt, says the median price fell

Pendleton fire forces evacuations of base housing - San Francisco Examiner
27 mins ago: Pendleton fire forces evacuations of homes » 53 mins ago: Pendleton fire forces evacuations of base housing « 1 hr 22 ago: Pendleton fire forces evacuation of base housing This story ranks # 2,601 of 5,179 Related Topics: CAMP

Surprise: Condos one of greenest housing options - Arizona Daily Sun
DEAR EARTHTALK: I’ve followed the trends in “eco-homes” now for many years. Are there equally encouraging things happening in the world of condos? — Charlie Anderson, Seattle, Wash. Believe it or not, condominiums may be some of the most

Where to look for housing lessons - AZCentral.com
Where should you look for signs of hope in the Valley housing market? West, all the way to Estrella Mountain Ranch. Not just the Estrella of today, where the bust has knocked home prices down 35 percent over the past two years, but the Estrella of

Public housing’s Comcast contract costs $15,000 a year in red ink - Marin Independent Journal
A “bulk services” contract with Comcast for public housing generates about $15,000 in red ink a year because it allows some tenants to ignore bills and get cable service for free. Marin housing officials are dropping the contract when it expires in

CORRECTION: U.K September Housing Sales Sentiment Down 2.4 Points - RTT News
(RTTNews) - Housing sales sentiment in Great Britain declined in September, according to survey results released Tuesday by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). The RICS survey showed the seasonally adjusted net balance of member

Have I Got the Candidate for You! - Slate
TAMPA, Fla.—Driving central Florida’s foreclosure road is to see economic anxiety made concrete: miles and miles of concrete. Along the Interstate 4 corridor, aquatically named housing developments ( Bays , Beaches , Points , Isles , Vistas ) pile

Cash help coming, but for whom? - News.com.au
A SPECIAL Federal Cabinet meeting has signed off on a stimulus plan that is expected to include an increase in the first homebuyers grant. The Prime Minister will brief Labor MPs and senators on the stimulus package this morning. It is also expected

FEATURE-Oil dollars help Houston dodge U.S. economic woes - Reuters
HOUSTON, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Even after Hurricane Ike smashed thousands of windows in Houston’s skyscrapers last month, times couldn’t be much superior in the Petro Metro. While the ill wind of economic turmoil sweeps across America, Houston has been

Home price falls accelerate in Sept - MSN UK News
LONDON (Reuters) - The decline in British house prices accelerated in September and sales fell to the lowest level in at least 30 years, a survey showed Tuesday, in a sign the housing market slump might have some way to go yet. The Royal Institution of

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Algorithms Can Make You Pretty

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:34:12 +0000

caffeinemessiah writes “The New York Times has an interesting story on a new algorithm by researchers from Tel Aviv University that modifies a facial picture of a person to conform to standards of attractiveness. Based on a digital library of pictures of people who have been judged ‘attractive,’ the algorithm finds the nearest match and modifies an input picture so it conforms to the ‘attractive’ person’s proportions. The trick, however, is that the resultant pictures are still recognizable as the original person. Here’s a quick link to a representative picture of the process. Note that this is a machine-learning approach to picture modification, not a characterization of beauty, and could just as easily be used to make a person less attractive.” Note: As reader Trent Waddington points out, the underlying research was mentioned in an earlier story as well.

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Where money is safe — and insured — the new rules - Chester DailyLocal.com

admin — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:00:56 +0000

Where money is safe — and insured — the new rules - Chester DailyLocal.com

Nashville City Paper

Where money is safe — and insured — the new rules
Chester DailyLocal.com,

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Odd Planet Confuses Scientists

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 07:32:24 +0000

eldavojohn writes “While there’s been a lot of debate about what is a planet, there is a recent discovery that has scientists even more confused. COROT (COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits) spotted an object that appears to be the size of Jupiter yet is 21.6 times larger … and orbits its star in a mere four days and six hours. Now, the other piece of the puzzle is that the star it orbits is larger and only slightly more massive than our Sun. But they can’t describe this thing orbiting it. So far they think it is more prone to be a ‘failed star’ but have settled with ‘member of a new-found family of very massive planets that encircle stars bigger than the sun’ to describe it accurately.”

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National Debt Clock Overflowed, Extended By a Digit

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 05:00:12 +0000

hackingbear writes “The National Debt Counter, erected in 1989 when the U.S. debt was ‘merely’ a little $2.7 trillion, has been moving so much that it recently ran out of digits to display the ballooning figure: $10,150,603,734,720, or roughly $10.2 trillion, as of Saturday afternoon. To accommodate the extra ‘1,’ the clock was hacked: the ‘1′ from “$10.2″ has been moved left to the LCD square once occupied solely by the digital dollar sign. A non-digital, improvised dollar sign has been pasted next to the ‘1.’ It will be replaced in 2009 with a new clock able to track debt up to a quadrillion dollars, which is a ‘1′ followed by 15 zeros. That should be good enough for a few more months at least, I believe.” Adds reader MarkusQ, “I know Dick Cheney has assured us that ‘Deficits don’t matter’ but I can’t help wondering if we should be fixing the problem rather than the sign.”

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Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 21:32:03 +0000

An anonymous reader writes “US News makes a mint off its college rankings every year, but do they really give meaningful information? A pair of mathematicians argues that the data the magazine uses is all prone to be at least somewhat relevant, but that the way the magazine weights the different statistics is pretty arbitrary. After all, different people may have different priorities. So they developed a method to calculate the rankings based on any possible set of priorities. To do it, they had to reverse-engineer some of US News’s data. What they found was that some colleges come out on top pretty much regardless of the prioritization, but others move around quite a lot. And the top-ranked university can vary tremendously. Penn Say, which is #48 using US News’s methodology, could be the ideal university in the country, by other standards.”

money news blog

Loebner Speaks AI

It's all about the (smart) money - Newsday

Esther Dyson To Train For Space Flight

Housing market continues to slow - Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Algorithms Can Make You Pretty

Where money is safe — and insured — the new rules - Chester DailyLocal.com

Odd Planet Confuses Scientists

National Debt Clock Overflowed, Extended By a Digit

Mathematicians Deconstruct US News College Rankings

'It's choking the lifeline' - Boston Globe