Mistrial by iPhone: Juries’ Web Research Upends Trials (NYT) Last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, directly violating the judge’s instructions and centuries of legal rules. But when the judge questioned the rest of the jury, he got an even bigger shock. Eight other jurors had been doing the same thing. The federal judge, William J. Zloch, had no choice but to declare a mistrial, wasting eight weeks of work by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers. “We were stunned,” said the defense lawyer, Peter Raben, who was told by the jury that he was on the verge of winning the case. “It’s the first time modern technology struck us in that fashion, and it hit us right over the head.” It might be called a Google mistrial. The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors gathering and sending out information about cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country, upending deliberations and infuriating judges. Jurors are not supposed to seek information outside of the courtroom. They are required to reach a verdict based only on the facts that the judge has decided are admissible, and they are not supposed to see evidence that has been excluded as prejudicial. But now, using their cellphones, they can look up the name of a defendant on the Web, or examine an intersection using Google Maps, violating the legal system’s complex rules of evidence. They can also tell their friends what is happening in the jury room, though they are supposed to keep their opinions and deliberations secret. A juror on a lunch or bathroom break can find out many details about a case. Wikipedia can help explain the technology underlying a […]

Discussing the singularity is often confusing because it makes claims about both technology and artificial intelligence, and its hard to see how the two fit together. In fact, some philosophers have argued that technology is entirely irrelevant to studying the mind using the techniques of artificial intelligence. The idea is that cognitive science is medium independent; it doesn’t matter if you run the program on my laptop or yours or a computer 10 years old, its the same program that can be explained by the same theory. So success in artificial intelligence is theoretically independent of technological advances. I don’t think anyone buys this story any more, but it raises the issue of exactly how the two are related. It is a long story, but this is how I see it: Machines can perform certain tasks better than people. When they do, we often replace the human labor with their machine counterpart. This has been part of the history of technology. Most advances in technology involve machines that can move faster, or stronger, or more durably than people. These machines don’t have to be ‘smart’, although they might be improved by making them smarter. But with the advent of computers, machines started processing information. And the going theory is that the human brain also operates as a kind of information processing machine. That doesn’t mean the human brain is a computer, or that computers are brains. It just means the two are explained by the same basic theory. And in fact, we can get computers to simulate various aspects of the information-processing routines that brains perform. Computer vision is one of the wild successes of this paradigm. The ‘singularity’ supposedly hits when computers are equivalent to the human brain. Why is this event special? Well, what does it mean for […]

Cory Doctorow gave the best speech hands down at the Singularity Summit a few years ago. But he isn’t really talking about the singularity; its pretty clear he just sees it as a beacon that attracts the similarly technologically inclined, perhaps as a means to form an interest group that takes digital rights seriously. He specifically mentions looking for a word to unite the ‘movement’. As it happens, one of my favorite discussions on this blog was about this very question. Anyone have any new ideas? I think the transhumanist terms of the singularity aren’t very good for what Cory is after; if we are inseparably twined with technology it doesn’t make for a good object of devotion. I have grown less partial to “artifaithful” over time.

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when it is so obvious I am right? From Robot Scientists Think for Themselves At Aberystwyth University in Wales, Ross King and colleagues have created a robot called Adam that can not only carry out experiments on yeast metabolism but also reason about the results and plan the next experiment. It is the world’s first example of a machine that has made an independent scientific discovery — in this case, new facts about the genetic make-up of baker’s yeast. “On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and we’ve checked that it’s got the results correct,” King said in an interview. “People have been working on this since the 1960s. When we first sent robots to Mars, they really dreamt of the robots doing their own experiments on Mars. After 40 or 50 years, we’ve now got the capability to do that.” Here’s the link to the article in Science, for posterity. edit: Thanks, Schaaf!

Tweenbots (via Gizmodo via Lally) The Tweenbot’s unexpected presence in the city created an unfolding narrative that spoke not simply to the vastness of city space and to the journey of a human-assisted robot, but also to the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions. But of more interest to me was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people’s willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone. As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining it’s destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot. Video after the break.

Bionic penguins take to the water – and the skies Thx Bill!

I’ve upgraded my wordpress install and reskinned the website, and as you can see I need to make some new title bars to give the blog the character and style it deserves. The theme I am using (Atahualpa) is just incredible, and it will let me cycle through title images. I want to generate a few of them to keep the site interesting. So help me out! Post some pictures of robots, technology, internet, science and anything else you think is appropriate for the site. Leave links in the comments, and I’ll do my best to work them into a title theme. Thanks for your patience.