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Although spills inside a lab can often spell trouble, a University of Washington scientist found a way to turn an accidentally doused conductive material into an inventive new sensor. The lab mishap led to a “smart†paper that conducts electricity and provides wireless detection of water pipe leaks.
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Schadenfreude is one of life’s simplest pleasures — especially when the victim in question is an email scammer. That’s the service Netsafe’s Re:scam provides. Simply forward your Nigerian prince emails to the service and it’ll use machine learning to generate conversations to waste the nefarious Nancy’s time. The idea is that any time jerks spend engaging with the bots is time that can’t be used to target hapless victims. People have passed some 6,000 emails Re:scam’s way this week alone, and apparently there were 1,000 concurrent conversations at one point. So far the longest email chain has involved 20 exchanges, according to The Guardian.
To keep things believable, each bot has a persona of sorts, ranging from an old man asking "The Illuminati" if they have a bingo night, to someone who replies in ALL CAPS and countless variations in between. For now, the benevolent bots speak with New Zealand colloquialisms, but with each successive use they’ll adapt to different lexicons.
Fighting scammers using tech isn’t anything new, but using machine learning to do it is pretty unique. For example, over the summer on YouTube user crafted a bit of code to flood the phone lines of ne’er-do-wells 28 times per-second with a pre-recorded message detailing exactly what was happening. That’s a bit of table-turning we can all probably get behind.
The video below strikes familiar if you’ve ever seen A Scanner Darkly; the morphing faces are basically a slow-moving version of the film’s scrambler suits. If you’re curious what the bots are capable of before you start forwarding your emails, hit the source link below for a quick demo conversation.
Via: The Guardian
Source: The Guardian, Netsafe, Re:scam
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The Game Awards, created in 2014 and produced by Geoff Keighley, is like the gaming equivalent of the Emmys or Oscars. The show airs live from the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on December 7th, and you can stream it on more than 16 different gaming and digital platforms. Better yet, you’ll be able to vote for your favorite games in "select categories" using Facebook Messenger, Google Search and Twitter DM starting November 14th. Engadget is one of the voting publications this year, and we’ll have the livestream posted for you, too.
The Game Awards reached over 8.5 million viewers last year, honoring both triple-A and independent games alike, including Battlefield 1, Doom, Overwatch, Titanfall 2, Uncharted 4, Hyper Light Drifter and Firewatch. "The Game Awards unites the global gaming community, no matter who you are, where you live, or what type of video games you enjoy," said Geoff Keighley in a statement. "This year we are excited to add even more partners to our distribution matrix, give fans new ways to interact with the show, and introduce several exciting new elements including The Game Awards Orchestra." The latter is an all-star group of orchestral and rock musicians that will debut a performance of video game music.
The Game Awards is of global interest, with live streaming partners to include South Korea’s AfreecaTV, Facebook, GameSpot, KakaoTV in South Korea, IGN, NicoNico in Japan, Mixer, PlayStation Store, Steam, China’s Tencent, Twitch, Twitter, UOL Jogos in Brazil, Xbox Live and YouTube. You can also catch the highlights via a Snapchat Live Story. If you want to start paying attention early, Facebook will have a 5-week behind the scenes documentary series, "The Road to the Game Awards," that will premier November 13th.
Source: The Game Awards
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It’s fascinating how little, everyday frustrations can stick in your brain forever. Like why isn’t there an apparatus that breaks spaghetti in half without throwing shards of raw noodle all over your kitchen? Or why aren’t there half-size spaghetti noodles? Anyway, a few weeks ago, I got a product that spoke to the very heart of me. It spoke to the part of me that has always hated tepid coffee.
A quick aside: I’m a coffee guy. I’ve written about coffee and coffee accoutrement many times for PopSci. As such, companies that peddle stuff for hot beverages often send me things to try out. I never promise coverage, and I’ve never written anything about the products individually because there’s never been one that I’ve had shout-it-from-the-rooftop kind of love for. What you’re reading about now is the exception.
The Ember ceramic mug changed the way I’ll drink coffee, and it can do the same for anybody who hates lukewarm swill and the flavor of overcooked coffee sludge. Here’s the deal: within the mug, a microprocessor-controlled heating system gathers information from four separate temperature sensors and activates its adaptive dual heating mechanism. This means no more unintentional cold brew.
I’m a total coffee snob, but even the best cups of coffee end with a few gross sips at the bottom. That doesn’t work for me. I want to taste the flavors that the roasters assure me are in their beans until the very last drop touches my tongue. The Ember ceramic mug allows you to set your ideal temperature preference—to the degree—and keep it there.
Most serious coffee drinkers know that the correct temperature for brewing falls between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit depending on the brew. Any higher and you will over-extract the coffee. Lower, you’ll under-extract, leaving the coffee sour and weak. The temperature at which you drink it, however, is much more subjective and is based on personal preference. The Ember mug allows you match your tastes.
There are other methods for keeping coffee warm, but they have their flaws. Hot-plate-style warmers generate uneven heat from the bottom. Vacuum-sealed, double-walled containers leak heat constantly, despite their best efforts to hold onto those precious degrees. The only thing a hot beverage has to be is not cold.
The Ember mug (10 oz.) is made of reinforced stainless steel and coated with a white ceramic. It comes with a matching coaster that acts as a charger—the cup holds a charge for about an hour—and has a built-in LED light to notify you when your drink is at the optimal temperature or running low on batteries. The LED light even has color options for multiple users or drinks.
Unlike the brand’s previous product—the Ember Travel Mug, which has an adjustable dial on the bottom of the device—the new mug connects to your smartphone or Apple Watch to adjust the temperature. It senses when there is no liquid inside, puts itself into sleep mode when not being used, and then uses a three-axis accelerometer to recognize movement and wake the mug back up. The mug is $80 and can be purchased on the Ember’s website or in most Starbucks throughout the United States and Canada.
I understand that not everybody cares to download an app to ensure the optimal temperature for their coffee. But if you’re a person who really enjoy coffee, it’s worth it.
Interested in talking about deals and gadgets? Request to join our exclusive Facebook group. With all our product stories, the goal is simple: more information about the stuff you’re thinking about buying. We may sometimes get a cut from a purchase, but if something shows up on one of our pages, it’s because we like it. Period.
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now http://ift.tt/2hi7ygG
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Re:scam is an artificial intelligence system developed to toy with scammers automatically for as long as possible. You just forward a scam email to me@rescam.org and the system will get started wasting a scammer’s time. Details while I forward literally every single work email I’ve ever gotten:
Re:scam can take on multiple personas, imitating real human tendencies with humour and grammatical errors, and can engage with infinite scammers all at once, meaning it can continue any email conversation for as long as possible. Re:scam will now turn the tables on the scammers by wasting their time, and ultimately damage the profits for scammers…
The aim is to waste the time of scammers, without wasting a second of yours. When you forward an email, you believe to be a scam to me@rescam.org a check is done to make sure it is a scam attempt, and then a proxy email address is used to engage the scammer. This will flood their inboxes with responses without any way for them to tell who is a chat-bot, and who is a real vulnerable target. Once you’ve forwarded an email nothing more is required on your part, but the more you send through, the more effective it will be.
Fun. I only wish you got a log of the conversation as it happens. I want to make sure my anti-scam bot is living up to my high standards of scammer-scamming, you know? I’m just saying, one time I scammed a scammer so hard he wired me his life savings AND I’m dating his mom now.
Keep going for a video about the service.
Thanks to mof and Erica J, who wish scamming scammers was a full-time job you could get paid to do, because that would be fun and rewarding.
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i always just write a fake auto-reply saying i’m dead
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just how many nigerian princes are there and how did they all get my email address?
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from Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome http://ift.tt/2yLoqHO
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Las Vegas’ self-driving shuttle service marked its return by getting into a minor collision, according to local NBC station KSNV News 3. French startup Navya‘s autonomous electric vehicle shuffles at around 15 MPH on a 0.6 mile circuit in the downtown Fremont East district. But, just an hour into its year-long trial (which follows a successful stint in January) the shuttle was hit by a delivery truck that was backing up.
None of the eight passengers aboard the driverless vehicle suffered injuries and neither did the truck driver. Instead, the front bumper of the shuttle took the brunt of the damage. A spokesperson for AAA, which is sponsoring the latest pilot program, said on Twitter that the accident was due to "human error" on the part of the truck driver.
Truck making delivery backed into shuttle, which was stopped. Human error causes most traffic collisions and this was no different. Driver of truck was cited. No one hurt except a bruised bumper!
— Mike Blasky (@blasky) November 8, 2017
A representative of the Las Vegas City government also posted a note on its official Tumblr page detailing the accident. "The autonomous shuttle was testing today when it was grazed by a delivery truck downtown," reads the post. It continued: "The shuttle did what it was supposed to do, in that its sensors registered the truck and the shuttle stopped to avoid the accident. Unfortunately the delivery truck did not stop and grazed the front fender of the shuttle."
Simply stopping obviously wasn’t enough to evade a collision in this case, which begs the question: Can the shuttle not move (or reverse) to avoid an object, even when the object is crawling towards it? KSNV News 3’s Kyndell Nunley posed that question to a representative of Keolis, the French private transportation company that owns Navya. He replied: "It’s designed to stop..and yield to the moving object…But, if the moving object keeps coming toward the shuttle it can back up, but apparently in this case the truck just kept on going, and went right in to the side of the shuttle."
The trial is set to continue, but the incident will do little to ease the concerns of those skeptical about self-driving cars. The free autonomous shuttle service was the first of its kind in the US. In addition, Navya’s 15-passenger Arma vehicles are also the stars of a similar program at the University of Michigan, and its tech will soon start powering driverless taxis (that can reach a top speed of 55 MPH). Let’s hope the company learns from this incident, and the remainder of the testing.
Source: KSNV News 3, City of Las Vegas (Tumblr)
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Car-hailing company Uber is heading to the skies. The company announced a partnership with NASA today to devise a plan to work together on making low-altitude flying vehicles that you can use to get around a city like Los Angeles.
A concept video for the new service shows how UberAir might work. In the situation presented in the video, you’d head to the "Uber vertiport" on top of a building to board your aircraft to take you where you want to go before landing at another port. Uber said this is more economically viable than things like roads, rail, bridges, and tunnels.
"So far we’ve been focused on ground-based transportation. For us, the natural next step was flight," Uber chief product officer Jeff Holden said. The executive explained that flying can be faster and better for the environment, while the price may not be as high as you think. Uber says its new service will cost the same as UberX at launch.
UberAir’s vehicles are called Electric Vertical Take-Off And Landing Vehicles or EVTOLs. "They’ll fundamentally change how are cities function and how we will live in them," Uber Aircraft Systems boss Mark Moore says.
Don’t expect to be flying around in Uber’s new air vehicles any time soon, however, as another Uber executive said in the video below that, "It’s very much the early morning on day one of this adventure."
"On-demand aviation has the potential to radically improve urban mobility, giving people back time lost in their daily commutes," the company said. "Uber is close to the commute pain that citizens in cities around the world feel. We view helping to solve this problem as core to our mission and our commitment to our rider base. Just as skyscrapers allowed cities to use limited land more efficiently, urban air transportation will use three-dimensional airspace to alleviate transportation congestion on the ground."
Los Angeles, Dallas, and Dubai are expected to be among the first cities to offer UberAir. In Los Angeles, Uber will install 20 of its Skyports around the city, including places like Los Angeles International Airport, Santa Monica, and Sherman Oaks. Operations in LA are expected to open in 2020. For what it’s worth, Blade Runner predicted we would have flying cars in 2019.
For lots more on UberAir, you can read the company’s whitepaper here and learn more at GameSpot sister site CNET.
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