[Cyborg] hello list, random borg ideas

[travis+ml-cyborg at subspacefield.org]

Wow, this is a pretty cool group, I just found out about due to post
to NB-discuss.

Here's a few ideas I'd always had kicking around.

My dreams of predator-style visor with UV/IR spectra could
finally materialize.

I have a E/M sensor that detects the magnitude of the electric or
magnetic _field_ at a location (they're vectors so that's non-trivial).

Walking around with it in my apartment, I found some surprising
results.  SCSI cables generate very large magnetic fields but no
electric fields (I suppose because they're circuits), and the breaker
box obviously generated a lot of both (but more magnetic than
electric).

And of course, the E/M _waves_ we can see are such a small part of the
spectrum... Dawkins said it was like being able to see out of an inch
slit in a Burka miles long.

Dogs are most valuable in physical intrusion detection not necessarily
because their senses are better than ours - their vision is black and
white, for example - but because they're simply complementary to ours.

For example, they smell like we hear sounds - simply masking something
with a pungent odor does not work any more than we would be unable to
hear two sine waves at once.

I've also wondered whether deaf people couldn't benefit from a
real-time spectrograph - just a little DCT running continuously on
audio input, with some kind of AGC, and maybe some kind of logarithmic
scale 3-D graph.  They could then learn to recognize sounds by their
shapes - not just in pressure versus time (which would be trivial),
but frequency vs power vs time.  This could easily save lives -
for example, sensing automobile horns.

Professor Mann has a horrible web site last I checked, but his SIG-CHI
(computer-human interaction) has some awesome wearables.  I'm particularly
intrigued by his discussion of automatic face recognition.  Being horrible
at remembering where I've seen people before, and with Mann saying he can
annotate people with their names, that would be awesome.

With smart phones getting more and more powerful, I'm wondering if the
whole wearable thing is more practical now.
-- 
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