If you’ve kept up with the literature about pseudophakes, you are probably already familiar with the study by Plotkinov and friends: “Objective assessment of pseudoaccommodation in pseudophakia” [article in Russian], I.A. Plotnikov, V. M. Sheludenko, and N. P. Narbut, Vestnik oftalmologii, vol. 123, no. 6 (2006): 35-37. BONUS: Also from the year 2006, Tarek Abd El-Basset […]
The tortoise and the touchscreen
Ig Nobel Prize winners Anna Wilkinson [pictured here, with a tortoise] and Ludwig Huber have now done an experiment with four tortoises and a touchscreen. (Wilkinson and Huber, together with colleagues Natalie Sebanz and Isabella Mandl, were awarded the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize for physiology, for their study “No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.”) The new study is: […]
Progress in Automatic Flirtation Detection
“Detecting human social meaning is a difficult task for automatic conversational understanding systems.” – explain a research team [pictured] based at Stanford University, who have investigated the viabilities of an automatic flirtation detector. “Our flirtation detection system uses prosodic, dialogue, and lexical features to detect a speaker’s intent to flirt with up to 71.5% accuracy […]
To deal with climate change… make people smaller
The plan to engineer a shorter, smaller human race to cope with climate change is almost as big and bold as the schemes of people working to convince themselves climate change won’t affect them. The plan, at this point still sketchy, has three engineers. S Matthew Liao [pictured here] is a professor of bioethics at New York University. Anders Sandberg and Rebecca […]