Could you fly a fighter jet with your mind

Jan Sheuermann can and she is quadriplegic, owing to a neurodegenerative disease. As part of Darpas Revolutionizing Prosthetics research track Jan was first trained to control a robotic arm with her mind alone and has recently been flying a F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (the US militarys next-generation attack jet) using a flight simulator. You can read more about this in a Wired article theres also a video.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

Put the internet to work for you.

Delete or edit this Recipe

Recommended for you

Read More..

How good you are in SQL Simple SQL Quiz

This is a simple online Quiz to test your knowledge in SQL. At the end you can see the result.
Every time you refresh the page you will see a new set of questions.

Powered by : http://www.sqlquiz.com

Read More..

What happens if your Government unfriends you

Sounds crazy right? Perhaps not if youre Chinese. China is launching a system that gives a score to every citizen. This is partially similar to the credit scoring systems that Western nations have used for years, but it also includes a component that measures the political trustworthiness of citizens. If you are a political critic of the Government your score will go down. But, whats really sinister is that if your friends have low ratings, your rating will be reduced. This social network may encourage people to "unfriend" any friends that show dissent. We in the west are perhaps used to, and certainly aware of the fact, that our spy masters have access to our social media accounts. China is taking this a step further by building a social network into the states functioning. Read this article from the American Civil Liberties Union for more on this story. Thanks to my colleague Mark Wilson for this story.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

Put the internet to work for you.

Turn off or edit this Recipe

Recommended for you

Read More..

Do you use Internet glue

Do you use Internet glue? Do you know what it is? Basically its a web service that links two web services together; hence the name Internet glue. For example, actions  you take in your webmail system could to update your ToDo list, or add a calendar reminder. Back in January I blogged about how I use IFTTT (if this then that) to create and disseminate these blog posts. Increasingly though these systems are starting to integrate with our smartphones. IFTTT can use the iPhones location to trigger actions and can integrate with iOS reminders, contacts and the camera roll.  IFTTT has now launched on Android with a deeper set of integrations with the OS than their iOS offering. This is possible because Android has a "more laissez-faire attitude when it comes to allowing apps to extend their tentacles into core OS functions."
If you havent started using IFTTT I highly recommend you do. Not only can it smooth your workflow but it can also be fun.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

Put the internet to work for you.

via Personal Recipe 895909

Read More..

Getting your fridge to order food for you with a RPi camera and a hacked up Instacart API

This is a detailed post on how to get your fridge to autonomously order fruit for you when you are low.  An RPi takes a picture every day and detects if you have fruit or not using my Caffe web query code. If your fridge is low on fruit, it orders fruit using Instacart, which is then delivered to your house. You can find the code with a walk through here:
https://github.com/StevenHickson/AutonomousFridge

Some of my posts are things I end up using every day and some are proof of concepts that I think are interesting. This is one of the latter. When I was younger, I heard an urban legend that Bill Gates had a fridge that ordered food for him and delivered it same-day whenever he was low. That story always intrigued me and I finally decided to implement a proof of concept of it. Below is how I set about doing this.

Hacking up an Instacart API

The first thing we need is a service that picks out food and delivers it to you. There are many of these, but as I live in Atlanta, I chose Instacart. Now we need an API. Unfortunately, Instacart doesnt provide one, so we will need to make our own. 

Head over to instacart.com and set up an account and login. Then right click and view source. You are looking for a line in the source like this:
FirebaseUrl="https://instacart.firebaseio.com/carts/SOME_HASH_STRING_HERE

That string is what you need to access your instacart account. Open up a terminal and type:

curl https://instacart.firebaseio.com/carts/YOUR_HASH_STRING.json

You should get back a response that looks like this:

{"checkout_state":{"workflow_state":"shopping"},"items":{"1069829":{"created_at":1.409336316211E9,"qty":1,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID}},"users":{"-JXAzAp6rgtM4u2dV2tI":{"id":YOUR_USER_ID"name":"StevenH"},"-Jj2_kFsu5hvZRhx4KX1":{"id":YOUR_USER_ID,"name":"Steven H"},"-Jp8VvDusSDOyEiJ0J5D":{"id":YOUR_USER_ID,"name":"Steven H"}}}

Now we just need to figure out what different items are. Pick a store and start adding items to your cart and run the same command. If I add some fruit (oranges, bananas, strawberries, pears) to my cart and then run the same curl request. I get something like this:

{"checkout_state":{"workflow_state":"shopping"},"items":{"1069829":{"created_at":1.409336316211E9,"qty":1,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID},"8182033":{"created_at":1.431448385824E9,"qty":2,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID},"8583398":{"created_at":1.431448413452E9,"qty":3,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID},"8585519":{"created_at":1.431448355207E9,"qty":3,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID},"8601780":{"created_at":1.424915467829E9,"qty":3,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID},"8602830":{"created_at":1.43144840911E9,"qty":1,"user_id":YOUR_USER_ID}},"users":{"-JXAzAp6rgtM4u2dV2tI":{"id":22232545,"name":"StevenH"},"-Jj2_kFsu5hvZRhx4KX1":{"id":YOUR_USER_ID,"name":"Steven H"},"-Jp8VvDusSDOyEiJ0J5D":{"id":YOUR_USER_ID,"name":"Steven H"}}}

Now empty your cart and we will make sure we can add all those things to your cart with a curl request. Take your response from earlier, and use it in the following line:

curl -X PATCH -d YOUR_FULL_CART_RESPONSE https://instacart.firebaseio.com/carts/YOUR_HASH_STRING.json

Now, your cart should be full of fruit again. Now we just need a way to recognize whether your fridge has fruit or not.

Detecting fruit in your fridge

For this we just need a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Project Board - 1GB RAM - 900 MHz Quad-Core CPU and a Raspberry PI 5MP Camera Board Module.
Set up your camera following these instructions and you will be ready to go. Set up your camera module in your fridge (or wherever you store your fruit).

We are going to use the Caffe framework for recognizing whether fruit is in the refrigerator drawer or not. You can read about how to do that here.
We are going to set this up similarly. Run the following commands to set things up:

git clone https://github.com/StevenHickson/AutonomousFridge.git
sudo apt-get install python python-pycurl python-lxml python-pip
sudo pip install grab sudo apt-get install apache2
mkdir -p /dev/shm/images
sudo ln -s /dev/shm/images /var/www/images

Then you must forward your router from port 5005 to port 80 on the Pi
Now you can edit test.sh with your info and run ./test.sh
Or add the following line to cron with crontab -e:
00 17 * * * /home/pi/AutonomousFridge/test.sh

This script takes a picture with raspistill and puts it in a symlinked directory in memory accessible from port 80. Then it sends that URL to the Caffe web demo and gets the result.
The Caffe demo shows how well it classifies the existence of fruit as shown below:

The end result of this is a script that runs every day at 5 pm. When your fridge doesnt have fruit, it adds a bunch of fruit to your Instacart cart. You can order it at your leisure to make sure you are home when it arrives. You could also use my PiAUISuite to get it to text you about your fruit status. It can be alot of fun to make a proof of concept of an old urban legend.

Consider donating to further my tinkering since I do all this and help people out for free.

Places you can find me

• Facebook
• Google+
• Linkedin
• Blogspot
• Google-Code
• Github
• YouTube
• Twitter

Read More..

Amazon at 20 what has the online giant ever done for retail

You may not have noticed but Amazon recently celebrated its 20th birthday. You may or not be a regular user (I certainly am). It was originally billed a the "Earths Biggest Bookstore" featuring over one million titles. Twenty years later it has over 270m active accounts and claims to have more than 2m third-party vendors selling millions of products through its marketplace platform. Amazon is comfortable with the term "disruptive." Its disrupted the bookshop and publishing industries and is disrupting other retail industries. The Guardian recently published an interesting article about the impact Amazon has had - recommended.




from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

Put the internet to work for you.

Turn off or edit this Recipe

Recommended for you

Read More..

Inside Facebook’s Quest for Software That Understands You

My colleague, Mark Wilson, brought this excellent article on Deep Learning in the MIT Technology Review to my attention recently, Titled Teaching Machines to Understand Us it gives a very good and detailed overview of the history, current developments and challenges of Deep Learning. I work in AI but I didnt know Facebook, for example, had such an interest in this. Recommended.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

Put the internet to work for you.

Delete or edit this Recipe

Recommended for you

Read More..

Should your car be programmed to kill you

Imagine this scenario; you are in your new driverless car and a situation arises (doesnt matter how) where the driver (the computer) has to decide between crashing into a group of young school children, probably killing several, or slamming the car into a wall and probably killing the passenger, i.e. you! Simple ethics would recommend taking a least harm approach, but that means maybe killing you. Would you buy a car programmed to kill you? Or would you prefer to buy one that would make the less ethical choice and always seek to protect the cars occupants. These ethical dilemmas are coming to the fore with the advent of autonomous systems. Several years ago the UKs Royal Academy of Engineers published a report on the ethics of emerging technologies and autonomous systems. More recently MIT Technology Review posted a piece titled Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill. My colleague, Paul Ralph, also just gave a radio interview on this subject.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

Put the internet to work for you.

Turn off or edit this Recipe

Recommended for you

Read More..

Why You Should Hire A Debt Collection Lawyer

By Jayne Rutledge

Those who are in the business world are facing challenging times. This is because clients are being offered credit but do not pay within the specified duration, or fail completely. In such a scenario, a business can lose a lot and the best way forward is to hire a knowledgeable collector. When looking for a skilled debt collection lawyer, it is recommended to search on the web.

Dealing with debtors is very stressful. This is because some of them will just keep postponing payments and this makes a business fail to perform the way it should. As a manager, when you are faced with such situations, it is necessary to hire a third party to deal with the debtors. There are many advantages of hiring these professionals and this article shows you some of them.

When you hire these professionals, you will not have to handle the complicated paperwork. The paperwork is purely legal and a lawyer knows what is to be filed in order to recover the money from a defaulting customer. If the case goes to courts, these collection attorneys will be your representatives so you do not have to worry about the process.

Law concerning debts is a topic that is challenging and most businesses usually get it wrong. Hiring an attorney is the best way to deal with such complex matters, as they know all about it. What you need to know is that debt law is different in every country, so a local attorney would know best how to handle such situations professionally.

When trying to recover what is owed to your business, regular communication with the debtor is highly advised. Unfortunately, some debtors who would not even pick your calls and this brings a big challenge to the whole process. The moment you notify the defaulter that he will be dealing with a lawyer, his attitude will change and may even pay what is owed quickly. So, let an attorney handle the communication with your debtors.

Searching on the web is a good way of finding competent lawyers. When online, you will get several law companies by reviewing their websites. The best thing is that, the whole process will take only a few minutes of your time. You should obtain information like the specialty of the law company, location and contacts for further communication.

The best law company to hire must be reliable. It is true that most law companies are preoccupied with daily court cases and if you appoint such a firm, your job might not be carried out quickly. It is essential to appoint a company that has adequate time for tracing your defaulters and make recoveries in the shortest time possible.

Operating a business in the current economy is tough, that is why most customers default. However, the business must push on and any customer who defaults must be made aware of the implications. Thus, hiring a competent debt collection lawyer is the best way to keep your business a float.

About the Author:

If you are looking for information about a knowledgeable debt collection lawyer, visit the web pages online here today. You can see details at http://collectionsnewyork.com now.

Read More..