Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Turn Around

Pooh's gotten all riled up about this one. Those of very little brain and too much tummy might get a tad disturbed by a very different bear of very great brain and too little tummy. The army has, for reasons one cannot quite pinpoint, created the Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot or, quite simply, BEAR. Note the adorable ears.

Gary Gilbert, from the US Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Centre in Frederick, Maryland, said that the teddy bear appearance was deliberate.

"A really important thing when you're dealing with casualties is trying to maintain that human touch."

The robot revolution is nigh. And it's adorable!

Thanks to Shaken & Stirred for the link.

Children's Book Fodder - Robot City

The title and byline are really all I have to write here.

Scientists to build robot society: Scientists in Dundee have announced plans to create a "robot village" in an effort to learn how different cultures emerge in society.

I can see the book. I can see the graphic novel. I can see the animated series. And if I squint really hard I can almost make out the figure of Shia LaBeouf in a robot costume. Publishers, you may call me at any time.

Via BB-Blog who also had a link to a piece of art that got my creative juices flowing even more.

Who Says I Don't Have an Editor?

This is how it's going to play out. Someday in the future I'll come home from a long hard day of reference work, plop down on my sofa, pull up my robot, and dictate to him (not her, cause that'd be weird) all the blog postings I want for the following day. A dream, you say? Not anymore.

NEC Corporation announced development of a new system for automatically creating multi-media blogs. The new system has been developed on NEC's prototype robot PaPeRo, and is initialized when a user begins a conversation with PaPeRo about the events of their day, which the system then records and analyzes. Following this, PaPeRo searches for suitable multi-media contents on the internet, including images, illustrations and music, which are automatically uploaded and edited along with the video recording on the user's blog. This new system facilitates ease of multi-media-rich blog creation.The novel system has been realized by integrating (1) large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition technology, which converts the speech content of the video message into text and extracts important keywords, and (2) natural language, text retrieval technology, which enables searching of contents on the internet.

The future is nigh and it is, not to put too fine a point on it, ADORABLE.

Thanks, of course, to the wonderful BB-Blog for the link.