Indian probe lands on Moon's surface

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16043-indian-probe-lands-on-moons-surface.html

India's first Moon probe has made it. Apparently it' sent back pictures but they haven't been released yet.

***Imported from old blog***

Ushahidi :: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS)

http://www.ushahidi.com/

Interesting site using SMS and Google Maps to report civil rights incidents in Africa's hotspots. Be great to mash-up with our Virtual Briefing Hub

***Imported from old blog***

Survivors - BBC TV - New Series

The new imagining of Survivors starts on the BBC this month. The old 70s series was stunning - even when we watched it again on video a couple of years ago. Let's hope they haven't ruined it.

***Imported from old blog***

Bloggingheads.tv - diavlogs - Jaron Lanier on AI

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/15555

Neat concept - one on one interview by webcam. This one is Jaron Lanier
Microsoft Corp., University of California-Berkeley, Jaronlanier.com and Eliezer Yudkowsky
Singularity Institute, Overcoming Bias.

Thanks @mendicott for the heads-up

***Imported from old blog***

The Loebner Prize from a judge's perspective

Interesting view of the Loebner/Turing from a judge this year. His approach is very much to find out if the bot is a human or not, rather than to see if he can have a "normal" conversation. Again this pushes me to the belief that we shoudl have a tiered approach to this:

- test where testers don't know there are any bots
- test where the testers know there are bots but have "normal" conversations
- full gloves-off test

His questions were very much reasoning tests of the third kind:

- if we shake hands, whose hand am I holding?
- I have a jewellery box in my hand, how many CDs can I store in it?
- he four capitals of the UK are three, Manchester and Liverpool. What's wrong with this sentence?

How many times do you ask those in normal conversation?

***Imported from old blog***

Michael Wesch's "A Vision of Students Today"