identification

Would you let a man who created a piece of furniture called the "scum chair" anywhere near your food? I would, as long as the man is design engineering student Hannes Harms from the Royal College of Art in London.

Harms has hatched a concept called NutriSmart that melds the tracking power of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags with the yumminess of Twinkies, Cheez Wiz, or just about any other food product you can imagine. The edible tags could hold information about where the food was grown or shipped from, what the ingredients are, how far it has traveled, and what the nutritional content is.

The NutriSmart prototype includes a smart plate that reads the RFID tags in the food. It can tell you how many calories it is costing you (150 for that Twinkie) and how it stacks up nutritionally in your diet.

Harms imagines a kitchen with a smart refrigerator that tells you when your milk is going sour or that it's time to replace that aging bottle of ketchup you haven't touched in a year. It could also be used to alert allergy sufferers when a potentially dangerous ingredient is present. … Read more

I'm just sooo happy to be sitting here reading through an eight-page PDF on algorithms. Seriously. Nothing in this world makes me happier than poring over phrases like "detailed results of the 5-fold cross validation of various components of the algorithm are summarized in Table 2."

If a new sarcasm-detecting algorithm out of Jerusalem's Hebrew University really knows what it's doing, it should be able to tell that I was just kidding there. Yeah, right. No, actually I was.

After an exhaustive look at word, syntax, and punctuation patterns in written user-generated content, the researchers came up with SASI (PDF), or Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification, which can recognize sarcasm in online sentences and assign each sentence to a sarcastic class (not all sarcasm is created equal, of course). Meager attempts at sarcasm aside, this is a pretty novel idea that could possibly aid those pure souls who lack a sarcasm and irony meter--and could even have commercial applications.

One idea here is that automated sarcasm recognition could help improve review summarization and opinion-mining systems, since the inherently subtle and ambiguous nature of sarcasm sometimes makes it hard even for humans to decide whether a comment is sarcastic. According to the researchers--Oren Tsur, Dmitry Davidov, and Ari Rappoport--studies of user preferences suggest some consumers find sarcastic reviews biased and less helpful.

The Hebrew University team--which will present its findings next week at the International Conference for Weblogs and Social Media in Washington, D.C.--closely examined some 66,000 Amazon reviews for 120 products including books, music players, digital cameras, camcorders, GPS devices, e-readers, game consoles, and mobile phones.

Identifying cues common to sarcasm in online communication (excessive use of capital letters as in: "Well you know what happened. ALMOST NOTHING HAPPENED!!!"; puns; and explicit contradictions), the researchers created a complex algorithm in which a small number of sarcastic sentences "teach" the software to recognize sarcasm. They say the software precisely identifies sarcastic sentences 77 percent of the time--no small feat given the elusive nature of sarcasm, its intractable relationship to cultural context, and differences between the spoken and written varieties. … Read more

ID Photo Maker provides a simple but impressive set of tools for creating the photos needed for various means of identification. We were constantly pleased with the program's thoughtful options for perfecting our ID image.

ID Photo Maker's interface immediately sent us the signal that it was a professional program. Its design is sleek and simple to navigate, so much so that we never even thought to read the Help file. The program contains the ID information for dozens of countries; we chose an American passport. After choosing which ID to make and employing the useful cropping feature, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--A widely used technology to authenticate users when they log in for online banking may help reduce fraud, but it does so at the expense of consumer privacy, a civil liberties attorney said during a panel at the RSA security conference on Thursday.

When logging into bank Web sites, users are typically asked for their user name and password. But that's not all that is happening. Behind the scenes, the server is taking measures to identify the device being used in an attempt to verify that the person logging in is the person whose account is being accessed … Read more

Shazam has been around for a few years now--CNET U.K. took note of the service back in 2006--but with today's launch of Apple's App Store, it could become a whole lot more popular. It has the potential to change how people discover and buy music.

The concept behind Shazam is simple: whenever you hear a song playing and can't identify it--on the car radio, at a friend's house, at a bar--you activate the Shazam application on your mobile phone. It "listens" to the song for about 30 seconds, then sends a text message … Read more

It seems logical to bestow the computer mouse with security features, as it's already a natural gatekeeper standing perennially at the ready like a loyal sentry guarding the palace. There have been a number of models on the market, for example, that authenticate fingerprints. But an iris reader?

Maybe it's just us, but we're not in the habit of peering into the mouse--or anything else on our desktop--closely enough for our eyeballs to be identified. That's what would apparently be required to get past this picky peripheral from Qritek Japan, which Plastic Bamboo says has a … Read more