January 7, 2010

Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley hypothesis holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness.

Wikipedia

Thanks Jonathan

Aldo Leopold

"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

A Sand County Almanac

Aldo Leopold

FTC reminds us that storing data in the cloud has drawbacks

Take Google's new Nexus One phone as a case study of the pros and cons of storing life details on remote servers. Nexus One phones can back up their complete settings to Google's servers, including data such as "Wi-Fi passwords, bookmarks, a list of the applications you've installed, the words you've added to the dictionary used by the onscreen keyboard, and most of the settings that you configure with the Settings application." Get a new phone and the data transfers easily.

But that data is now sitting on servers outside of your control, where it can be accessed far more easily by Google itself, hackers, and law enforcement than it ever could if kept within the device. Once data passes over the network, it gets much easier to access in realtime; once it is stored on a remote server, it gets much easier to access at any time.


ars technica