GoPro’s latest product is a move in a new direction: Up.After a year of rumors and teases, the action camera company finally announced its very first drone, the Karma ($800).
Source: GoPro announces its own drone GoPro — cameras sold separately – Sep. 19, 2016
If you’ve been looking for a way to test Amazon’s voice assistant/AI/Machine Learning gizmo Alexa, here’s the cheapest way yet to give it a try.
Amazon is unveiling an all-new, second-generation Dot today that’s priced at just $49.99. Just like the previous Dot, you can use the tiny puck-like device to add the Alexa voice assistant to existing speakers. Amazon is releasing the new Echo Dot in both black and white, with a more powerful, completely redesigned voice processor.
Source: Amazon’s cheaper Echo Dot improves voice recognition, available in black and white – The Verge
This looks like the sort of thing that you might find at Aviary…
Have we reached peak 3D printing? 3D printed drinks #arselectronica16 pic.twitter.com/7jSLbtLcmN
— Jesse LouisRosenberg (@nervous_jesse) September 9, 2016
PRINT A DRINK combines methods from robotics, life sciences, and design to explore a completely new field of 3D-printing. Rather than building up objects layer by layer, the process uses a high-end KUKA iiwa robot to accurately “inject” microliter-drops of edible liquid into a cocktail. Within a minute, PRINT A DRINK can build up complex 3D structures in a wide range of drinks – creating fascinating augmented cocktails using only natural ingredients.
Source: 3D-printed Drinks
Alphabet’s Project Wing, a branch of the behemoth tech company formerly known as Google, announced the tests today, which will include autonomous drones being monitored by human operators. But the drones won’t take off from Chipotle stores with orders. Instead, test participants will order from a special kiosk on campus, prompting the drones to take off from Chipotle food trucks and ultimately lower the packages to the ground.
Source: Chipotle Starts Testing Burrito Delivery Drones at Virginia Tech Next Week
Like other Disney creations, Jimmy looks rather magical.
While humanoid robots can be painfully slow, Jimmy moves with lifelike speed and grace. A video posted earlier this year shows the robot waving at people, doing a little dance, drumming on a table. Just as impressive, Jimmy can safely operate near people, and by “near” we mean in contact with them. In the video, the robot plays patty-cake with a kid and even pats her cheeks—something you don’t see very often in human-robot interaction experiments.
Source: Disney Robot With Air-Water Actuators Shows Off “Very Fluid” Motions – IEEE Spectrum
Way back in 2014 I wrote a Library Technology Report called 3D Printers for Libraries, one of the first long form works that set out to explain 3D printing to librarians. It is licensed under a CC BY-NC license, and 2 years seems like plenty of time for me to avoid linking to a copy here on the blog, so if you’re interested, here’s a PDF copy of it for you.
Since then, the market for 3D printers has exploded, but there have emerged a few new leaders that weren’t as well established when I wrote the LTR. Since that report was released, my favorite printers and the ones that I recommend for libraries are the Lulzbot Mini and Lulzbot Taz 6…they are spectacular FDM printers, capable and easy to use. Even better, they are certified Open Hardware and use Open Source software top to bottom, which means that they are easily repaired and have a myriad of options for printer management, slicing, and control.
One of those options is something that I’ve not seen recommended for libraries, but that I feel like they and others could get a huge amount of mileage from. Octoprint is an open source control program for 3D printers that runs on a variety of hardware (there are install instructions for Windows, OS X, and Linux) but by far the most interesting and useful method for using it is via the OctoPi project that uses a Raspberry Pi as a host for the Octoprint system and all its requirements. You can download pre-built images for a Raspberry Pi, flash an SD card, boot up the Pi, and have a robust and flexible management system for your 3D printer ready to go.
What does Octoprint do? For compatible printers (which includes nearly any that use the industry standard gcode instructions to print), Octoprint can control every aspect of the printer, including:
The best part? All of the above take place in a web browser. No client software needed, no keeping up with installs of Cura or other printer-specific software. Suddenly you can start a print or monitor your printer from anywhere on your network, or from anywhere in the world if you forward the appropriate port externally. I recently uploaded and started a new print on the printer in my basement while in a different hemisphere…
You can preset the available plastic types and quality settings through printing profiles for slicing of uploaded STL files. For my part, since my primary printer is a Lulzbot Mini, I just downloaded the profiles directly from the manufacturer and uploaded them to Octoprint, and can now upload any STL that I find directly to my printer, from anywhere I am in the world.
For most libraries, just the ease of statistics and usage tracking would be enough to make Octoprint useful enough to try out.
But add in the ability to control your printer(s) from any computer, to video stream the printing and watch for errors remotely, to be alerted when a print completes…it’s just a much more robust way of managing your 3D printing. And for the cost of a Raspberry Pi and maybe an hour of setup, you can be up and running.
This isn’t to say that Octoprint solves all 3D printing problems. It’s largest shortcoming in my opinion is its lack of plating tools…if you have an STL, you are stuck with just printing that single STL with Octoprint. If you need to plate several STL files together on a single print plate, you would have to do that in Cura or other program (you could even do it in Tinkercad if you wanted to stay in-browser I suppose) and then either save the collection as an STL or go ahead and slice it to gcode and upload the gcode directly to Octoprint. It is technically possible for a single install and Raspberry Pi to control more than one 3D printer, but it isn’t built in to the system and is something I’d only recommend to technical users. RPi’s aren’t expensive, and having one per printer isn’t the end of the world, but hopefully over time the OctoPi setup will evolve to handle multiple printers natively.
I’ve been using the latest version of Octoprint for months now, and it’s simplified so much of my work with my 3D printer. If you are responsible for running the makerspace or 3d printer service in your library, check out Octoprint. I’m guessing it will make your life easier.
I’m considering putting together a workshop on how to install and use Octoprint with your 3D printer…would anyone be interested in such a training? If so, leave me a comment and let me know, I’ll see if I can find a venue and do it sometime this winter.
The hackers would provide data proving the medical devices were life-threatening, with Block taking a short position against St. Jude. The hackers’ fee for the information increases as the price of St. Jude’s shares fall, meaning both Muddy Waters and MedSec stand to profit. If the bet doesn’t work, and the shares don’t fall, MedSec could lose money, taking into account their upfront costs, including research.
Source: Carson Block’s Attack on St. Jude Reveals a New Front in Hacking for Profit – Bloomberg
UPDATE: here’s a link to a second post that includes video!
This morning I had the great honor of delivering the opening keynote for Los Profesionales en Gestión de la Información y la Documentación de América Latina and their 3rd Congreso International GID. In beautiful Cali, Colombia, a few hundred librarians and information professionals gathered from all across Latin America to talk about the future of libraries.
Here are the slides and a video of my slides, and there will be a video (I am promised) of the presentation later. I presented for the first time with a live translator, which was an amazing experience and I am in awe of her ability to do that so well. I took questions and answered via the same translator, and overall I think it went very well. Aside from a few technical difficulties, I’m very happy with the way this came together.
Really amazing video demo of what’s possible these days with visual analysis and control systems….
Yesterday, Andromeda Yelton posted this excellent blog entry, Be Bold, Be Humble: Wikipedia, libraries, and who spoke. It’s about the well-known social sexism dynamic of meetings, where in a meeting that has both women and men, men speak more frequently, use fewer self-undercutting remarks (“I’m not sure….” or “Just…” or “Well, maybe…”), and interrupt others speech at a much higher rate than women in the same meeting.
The post got passed around the social nets (as it should, it’s wonderfully written and you should go read it now) and one of the results was this great exchange:
@ThatAndromeda I would love individual speaking time trackers at many events. Particularly for bad moderators who dominate.
— Kate Deibel (@metageeky) August 18, 2016
Which prompted me to reply:
@metageeky @ThatAndromeda I actually think that’s buildable using some cheap hardware. RPi + mic + web viz. *runs off to patent idea*
— Jason Griffey (@griffey) August 19, 2016
I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, which basically means that it needs to show up here on the blog. I thought all night about how to architect something like that in hardware/software as a stand alone unit. There is always Are Men Talking Too Much?, which Andromeda linked to in her essay, but it has the downside of requiring someone to manually press the buttons in order to track the meeting.
I’ve been basically obsessing over attention metrics for the last couple of years as a part of bringing Measure the Future to life. The entire point of Measure the Future is to collect and analyze information about the environment that is currently difficult to capture…movement of patrons in space. The concept of capturing and analyzing speakers during a meeting isn’t far off, just with audio instead of video signal. How could we built a thing that would sit on a table in a meeting, listen and count men’s vs women’s speaking, including interruptions, and track and graph/visualize the meeting for analysis?
Here’s how I’d architect such a thing, if I were going to build it. Which I’m not right now, because Measure the Future is eating every second that I have, but…if I were to start tinkering on this after MtF gives me some breathing room, here’s how I might go about it.
We are at the point in the progress of Moore’s Law that even the cheapest possible microcomputer can handle audio analysis without much difficulty. The Raspberry Pi 3 is my latest object of obsession…the built-in wifi and BTLE changes the game when it comes to hardware implementations of tools. It’s fast, easy to work with, runs a variety of linux installs, and can support both GPIO or USB sensors. After that, it would just be selecting a good omnidirectional microphone to ensure even coverage of vocal capture.
I’d start with that for hardware, and then take a look at the variety of open source audio analysis tools out there. There’s a ton of open source code that’s available for speech recognition, because audio interfaces are the new hotness, but that’s actually overcomplicated for what we would need.
What we would want is something more akin to voice analysis software rather than recognition…we don’t care what words are being said, specifically, we just care about recognizing male vs female voices. This is difficult and has many complicating factors…it would be nearly impossible to get to 100% success rate in identification, as the complicating factors are many (multiple voices, echo in meeting rooms, etc). But there is work being done in this area: the voice-gender project on Github has a pre-trained software that appears to be exactly the sort of thing we’d need. Some good discussion about difficulty and strategies here as well.
If we weren’t concerned about absolute measures and instead were comfortable with generalized averages and rounding errors, we could probably get away with this suggestion, which involves fairly simply frequency averaging. These suggestions are from a few years ago, which means that the hardware power available to throw at the problem is 8x or better what it was at that point.
And if we have network connectivity, we could even harness the power of machine learning at scale and push audio to something like the Microsoft Speaker Recognition API, which has the ability to do much of what we’d ask. Even Google’s TensorFlow and Parsey McParseface might be tools to look at for this.
Given the state of cloud architectures, it may even be possible to build our gender meeting speech analysis engine entirely web-based, using Chrome as the user interface. The browser can do streaming audio to the cloud, where it would be analyzed and then returned for visualization. I have a particular bias towards instantiating things in hardware that can be used without connectivity, but in this case, going purely cloud architecture might be equally useful.
Besides gender, the other aspect that I had considered analyzing was interruptions, which I think could be roughly modeled by analyzing overlap of voices and ordering of speech actors. You could mark an “interruption event” by the lack of time between speakers, or actual overlap of voices, and you could determine the actor/interrupter by ordering of voices.
Once you have your audio analysis, visualizing it on the web would be straightforward. There are javascript libraries that do great things with charts like Chart.js or Canvas, or if working in the cloud you could use Google Chart Tools.
If any enterprising developer wants to work on something like this, I’d love to help manage the project. I think it could be a fun hackathon project, especially if going the cloud route. All it needs is a great name, which I’m not clever enough to think of right now. Taking suggestions over on Twitter @griffey.
