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Blog – Page 11907

Finally, the solution that I been looking for to combat Telemarketers.

TEXAS (CBSNEWS.COM) – We’ve all been there — usually right at dinner time, the phone rings and you pick up only to find out that you have now been roped into an unwanted conversation with a telemarketer. Have you ever wanted to give them a taste of their own medicine? Well, now, a developer is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to turn the tables and annoy those pesky callers.

The Jolly Roger Telephone Co., from developer Roger Anderson, is a robot voice that answers with “hello?” and keeps the conversation going. When you get a telemarketing call, you manually conference in the robot and then go on about your life. It stays on the line and any time it senses a moment of silence in the conversation, the robot voice jumps in and fills the gap with generic responses like “yes” or “right” or “hang on.”

On his blog, Anderson has posted recordings of robot vs. telemarketer phone calls. Some of the humans catch on quicker than others.

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I cannot wait to see India’s version of DARPA — it is probably going to be amazing.

India is unable to spend its defence modernisation budget, says a report in this newspaper. Out of a current year allocation of Rs 63,675 crore, 40% remained unspent by end-December. This is bad not just for upgrading defence capability but also for Indian research and development and for Indian manufacturing.

It is time defence reimagined its entire strategy for procurement, using a portion of its typically large outlays to stimulate R&D in universities and specialised labs and private companies, and to give Indian companies, big and small, a chance to become suppliers of parts and equipment on a scale much larger than what obtains today. The key is to create an Indian equivalent of the Americans’ Darpa.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was set up in response to the Soviet Sputnik, with the mission to initiate strategic technological surprises and not be caught off-guard by such surprises. Its size and budget are small. What it does is detailed assessment and forecasting of technology and contracting out of research in diverse areas, to universities, research contractors, companies and specialised labs, matching bits of the huge defence budget with the R&D capability available in the nation. Apart from stealth bombers and precision guidance of missiles, this effort has also yielded the internet and the geopositioning system now available on every smartphone.

Continue reading “India has to build its own capability in R&D” | >

A few years ago, my friend and I were brainstorming on some NextGen Technologies to look at for investment purposes. And, he suggested Polymer Coating. And, was he ever right. Google and others are using it for screen imaging on Lens, etc. Love this stuff.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have combined advanced nanometer-scale gratings and a Space Age-era thin-film polymer, to invent a novel technology. This technology can be used to fabricate routers and switches for optical signals, energy-efficient full-color video displays, and smart windows and coatings.

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Convert carbon dioxide from air (at low temp) to methanol fuel — why not!

The carbon dioxide-to-methanol process (credit: Surya Prakash)

Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute have created fuel out of thin air — directly converting carbon dioxide from air into methanol at relatively low temperatures for the first time. While methanol can’t currently compete with oil, it will be there when we run out of oil, the researchers note.

The researchers bubbled air through an aqueous solution of pentaethylenehexamine (PEHA), adding a Ru-Macho-BH ruthenium catalyst to encourage hydrogen to latch onto the CO2 under pressure. They then heated the solution, converting 79 percent of the CO2 into methanol.

Continue reading “How to efficiently convert carbon dioxide from air to methanol fuel” | >

AR Contacts — Google and Huawei are both doing some really interesting things in this space; and I cannot wait until I get my hands on this technology.

Research looking into polymer technology points us in a direction several steps beyond the doomed Google Glass experiment | contact lens.

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