Professor Ishikawa Komuro’s Tokyo lab is better known for robot hands that can dribble and catch balls and spin pencils between their fingers. Now, two researchers have taken this speedy sensing tech and applied it to the ripping of paper books.
Books are different from other kinds of media, like music and movies – it’s very hard to get them into a computer. There is no equivalent of CD or DVD rippers like iTunes or Handbrake. This not only makes piracy laborious, it also stops you from turning your own books into e-books.
This high-speed scanner changes that, at least if you have the room and tech skills to build one. By using a high-speed camera that shoots at 500 frames per second, lab workers Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe can scan a 200-page book in under a minute. You just hold the book under the camera and flip through the pages as if shuffling a deck of cards. The camera records the images and uses processing power to turn the odd-shaped pictures into flat, rectangular pages on which regular OCR (optical character recognition) can be performed.
The technique is unlikely to be coming to the home anytime soon (although ripping a book by flipping it in front of your notebook’s webcam would be pretty awesome), but it could certainly speed up large scanning efforts like Google’s book project.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com
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Why you should use percentages, not words, to express probabilities.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: hbr.org
The post If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is? appeared first on Antonios Bouris.
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30,000 years ago, a ground squirrel burrowed out a spot for itself, about 10 inches in diameter at its widest, where it brought back seeds and other grassy and fruited plants to nibble on. The place where the squirrel chose to make its burrow is now known as Siberia, and the burrow is close to 100 feet below the surface and in a layer of permafrost.
The squirrel, of course, is long gone. But tiny roundworms, a type of nematode, that also made their home there have lasted those tens of thousands of years, frozen and immobile. Now, though, scientists in Russia have revived them, making these worms—all of them female worms—the first multicellular organisms to have survived being frozen in Arctic permafrost.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.atlasobscura.com
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Trees are talking and sharing resources right under your feet, using a fungal network nicknamed the Wood Wide Web. CrowdScience presenter Marnie Chesterton reveals how plants use the system to support their offspring, while others hijack the network to sabotage their rivals.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.bbc.co.uk
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