04.22.06
Posted in political gibberish at 7:59 am by shawnz
There is officially a gas station in Beverly Hills, full-service, that has reached $4 a gallon. This will be interesting to see the effects of the increased price of gas in LA, the driving capital of the world. There are of course, more reasonable prices out east, and I can still find stations at $3 a gallon. Democrats, some rights wingers, and even Ralph Nader are saying we need to fight back against Exxon and the other oil companies to cut their huge profit margins. I haven’t seen any environmentalists come out saying that the higher gas prices are a great incentive to switch to more gas efficient cars, to use public transportation, etc. Those arguments are usually made when gas prices are low, I suppose. I don’t think you can make that argument now without being tar and feathered, especially when people are paying $100 to fill up their tank.
But its true. If public transportation weren’t so much slower than cars, LA would have the perfect environment to promote public transportation. Will the public clamor for more express bus routes and shuttles? That remains to be seen.
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04.11.06
Posted in muzak at 11:17 am by shawnz
the title is a paraphrase of an arctic monkeys’ song. i saw these guys last october at the spaceland in silverlake. this was post-#1-album-in-the-uk, and pre-getting-played-on-kroq. at 19, these guys are quite talent songer writers and musicians. i wonder if i should’ve saved the ticket stub, as if this rebritish invasion might pay off in a few years.
in baseball, you can tell by the numbers a player puts up and his age what kind of career he will probably have. two players can have the same line, but are different in age by 2 years, and it makes all the difference in their projected futures. which is why a whole bunch of latin american players have lied about their ages in order to get signed to major and minor league deals.
if the same is true in music, then my money is on the arctic monkeys to be quite prolific.
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04.04.06
Posted in Cognition at 11:16 am by shawnz
the affect computing lab of rosalind picard @ MIT has a new device, specifically for autistics, that uses video feed to identify six emotions in people’s faces: agreeing, disagreeing, concentrating, thinking, unsure or interested. This is useful because autistics lack the ’social module,’ and are unable to pick up on these emotions themselves… which makes other avoid them. The prosthetic is a video camera mounted on eye glasses, along with a computer that processes the input. It uses machine learning that is trained on 8 second clips from actors.
Facial features are the most ripe terrain for abstracting emotional cues, and are how most of us infer other’s emotional states. Of course, vocal cues are also important. People can control their facial responses, but not very well, as some of the reponses are involuntary.
Cool research, especially for the very practical approach. I could see applications in automobiles and other AI uses.
>Link
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