Cornell’s website can ID bird species through photos

Casual birdwatchers may want to bookmark Merlin Bird Photo ID, a website created by Cornell University and the Visipedia research project. Thanks to powerful artificial intelligence techniques, the website can identify birds in photos you upload, so long as they’re species found in the US and Canada. You will need to draw a box around the feathered creature, click its beak, eye and tail, as well as identify where and when you took the picture. But after that, the system will do the rest: it will sift through the numerous photos taken by other birdwatchers, including the 70 million images in the eBird.org database, to find ones that match your image.

It will then present you a list of the best matches “within seconds,” along with their photos and recordings of the sounds and songs they make. Like any other system that uses machine-learning tech, the more people use it, the better it becomes at identifying different species. As Cornell Tech Computer Science professor Serge Belongie said:

Computers can process images much more efficiently than humans-they can organize, index, and match vast constellations of visual information such as the colors of the feathers and shapes of the bill. The state-of-the-art in computer vision is rapidly approaching that of human perception, and with a little help from the user, we can close the remaining gap and deliver a surprisingly accurate solution.

The website is open to anyone and free to use, but it doesn’t work on phones and tablets yet. However, its creators promise that when it does become good enough to ID birds in smartphone photos, they’ll add the feature to Cornell’s Merlin app for Android and iOS. That application helps you identify avian species, as well, but it’s by asking five questions about the bird you spotted.

Filed under: Science

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Via: Physorg

Source: Cornell University

‘Better Re’ Kickstarter finds a use for old cellphone batteries

Better Re hasn’t exactly smashed through the boundaries and who even knows if designer Enlighten is here to stay, but it did exceed its $50,000 Kickstarter goal for a project that’s on the greener side of things. The idea is that the Better Re will repurpose the battery from your old smartphone (so long as it’s of the removeable sort) into an external power source for your phone, tablet and from the looks of it, even your laptop. The pitch video claims that at the average rate we typically replace our smartphones — every two years — their batteries still are about 80 percent efficient. That’s quite a bit of wasted and unharnessed power that could serve a purpose instead of us mining for more lithium as demand increases. So, for $39 you can tap into that energy and use it to get extra time out of your gadgets.

The base tier includes the shell that turns your lithium-ion battery into an external power source and a USB cable, while $55 nets you the “full” package. That gets you the case, a USB cable, a used battery and engraved panels for the case. Enlighten knows that phones with built-in batteries (like the Nexus 4 or Galaxy S6) threaten its business, but says that it’s working to develop batteries of its own to counter that. It also seems pretty confident that if batteries shrink it can adjust the size of Better Re to fit ’em. Early bird options are still available, so you might want to get on that if you’re looking for a cheaper option than a Mophie or Anker external power supply.

Filed under: Cellphones, Peripherals, Mobile

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Via: Fast Company

Source: Kickstarter

The LightSail solar spacecraft is in dire straits once again

Unfortunately, the LightSail spacecraft’s recovery wasn’t quite as miraculous as its creators first thought. The Planetary Society reports that it hasn’t heard back from its sailer since Wednesday, shortly after the vehicle deployed its solar panels. The ground crew suspects that the failure might be due to a battery glitch, since the energy cells largely stopped drawing a current after the panels deployed. Attempts to wake up LightSail with “blind” commands (that is, without confirmed contact) haven’t helped, so there’s no simple fix.

Unlike the last catastrophe, it’s not so likely that the craft will simply revive itself if given enough time. There’s hope that this is a “chronic undervoltage condition” that will fix itself once LightSail enters an orbit with significantly more sunlight. If there’s something else to blame, however, this initial test run might just come to an unceremonious end — and the team will have to learn some hard lessons to prevent similar trouble with future flights.

Filed under: Transportation, Science

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Via: Popular Science

Source: The Planetary Society, Jason Davis (Twitter)