Alright, I’ve been sitting on my ass for too long. If I’m going to be serious about procrastinating, then I’m going to put some effort into it goddamnit. Time to get back to what I do best: talking about robots.

The talking robotic doll tells its owner how much it loves her and welcomes her home when she walks back into the house.

The majority of buyers are retired women who live alone.

“Many elderly people buy these dolls, they think the dolls are actual grandsons and granddaughters,” says Yuko Hirakawa from Tomy.

“You can speak to the doll and she will tell you she loves you so much. If you hold the doll, the weight is the same weight as a small infant.”

Apparently, it provides comfort for lonely women who hold it in their arms. |link|

The only thing creepier than that doll’s soulless eyes is the BBC’s blunt way of talking about the elderly.

And for something completely different:

Dr Will Browne, of Reading’s School of Systems Engineering, together with Professor Ian Postlethwaite and Dr Liqun Yao (Leicester), created the system that fuses the human and computer knowledge of a rolling mill and uses that combined understanding to produce high quality plates of aluminium – potentially saving manufacturers millions of pounds.

…

Knowledge elicitation involves establishing important facts and heuristics (rules of thumb) from plant experts, whereas data mining is the process of analysing data, often using advanced artificial intelligence techniques, in order to identify patterns or relationships.

‘The fusion of these two techniques produced an expert system that successfully rolled aluminium plate without significant shape defects’, said Dr Browne.|link|

To all the doubters, I ask: why isn’t this genuine collaboration? Why are you so compelled to insist that this expert system doesn’t understand anything except metaphorically?