A research team at Hebrew University in Israel has developed a computer program that can recognize sarcasm with about 77% accuracy:

To create such an algorithm, the team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm. The team then identified certain sarcastic patterns that emerged in the reviews and created a classification algorithm that puts each statement into a sarcastic class.

The algorithms were then trained on that seed set of 80 sentences from the collection of reviews. These annotated sentences helped the algorithm learn what sorts of words and patterns distinguish sarcastic remarks – those that mean the opposite of what they literally convey, or that convey a sentiment inconsistent with the literal reading.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-05/computer-algorithm-can-recognize-sarcasm-which-soooo-cool | Image: Fox

Previously:
Sarcasm Punctuation Mark
Sarcasm is an Evolutionary Skill

Robotics firm Anybots proposes that its robotic avatars could replace the physical presence of people at far away locations. In the future, you'll be able to attend workplace conferences and tour facilities remotely by controlling one of their robots:

You log in through the Internet and after a few keystrokes the 'bot, called QB, comes alive, leaving its charging station and ready to meet, brainstorm, greet visitors or just generally creep people out.[...]

The robot avatar isn't actually meant to replace videoconferencing, but the idea is to be able to participate in more than just meetings. With QB, you can observe a workplace, participate more directly in tasks, or just be there for those casual conversations — all from thousands of miles away.

Three years ago, Alex wrote about another invention of the Anybots company: the world's first dynamically balanced robot.

Link | Image: Anybots

Guitarist Cedric Paul Mamuri wanted to remember which notes to play on his guitar. So, naturally, he had them tattooed on his arm.

Link | Ink by J&J Elite Tattoos

Designer Nolan Herbut made a bench out of keyboard keys:

The Wolfgang keyboard bench is made up of 2000 keys imbedded into a layered Baltic birch wood. Each key is pressable and actually makes a clicking sound when pressed. The tactile effect of the bench also makes a playful interaction with the bench because you engage with the piece of furniture in a very up close and intimate manner while pressing in the keys.

This way you can get the sensation of sitting on a keyboard without damaging your computer peripherals.

Link via DudeCraft | Photo: Coroflot

English Russia is a marvelous blog filled with pictures of strange and inventive things from Russia. One offering in its archives is a post about "local globes" -- the practice of taking local maps and fitting them around globes so that one locality is imagined as a whole world:

In Russia and other post Soviet countries there were a real craze on independence after they finally got it with USSR collapse. Sometimes this took some weird forms like, for example, making the globes of their own country. Yes, those were just like regular globes we used to see on geography classes but instead the whole world only their own country was mapped on it.

These things were officially on sale and still you can buy something like “the globe of Ukraine” in shops of Kiev.

So then people went further and decided to make the globes of their local cities or even villages.

At the link, you can find instructions on how to make your own.

Link via Make | Image: Collage by Sean Michael Ragan of Make

Gabriella Nagy of Toronto is suing Rogers Wireless, her cell phone provider, for breaking up her marriage. She argues that the company disclosed her call history to her husband, which revealed her secret affair. He left her. Now Nagy wants $600,000:

In 2007, Gabriella Nagy had a cellphone account with Rogers which sent the monthly bill to her home address in her maiden name. Her husband was the account holder for the family's cable TV service at the same address. Around June 4, 2007, he called Rogers to add internet and home phone.

The following month, Rogers mailed a “global” invoice for all of its services to the matrimonial home that included an itemized bill for Nagy's cellular service, according to the statement of claim filed in Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

When Nagy’s husband opened the Rogers invoice, he saw several hour-long phone calls to a single phone number.

Link via Geekosystem | Photo: US Nuclear Regulatory Commission

(YouTube Link)

The elaborate one-shot music videos by the band OK Go have been an Internet sensation -- particularly their Rube Goldberg machine video for the song "This Too Shall Pass." The comedy troupe The Station responded by creating this video lampooning the children's game Mousetrap, which consists of building a Rube Goldberg machine as gameplay advances. It's called "Mousetrap Never Works."

via Urlesque

(YouTube Link)

A robot called the I-Fairy presided over the wedding of Satoko Inoue and Tomohiro Shibata in Tokyo:

The nuptials at this ceremony were led by "I-Fairy," a 4-foot (1.5-meter) tall seated robot with flashing eyes and plastic pigtails. Sunday's wedding was the first time a marriage had been led by a robot, according to manufacturer Kokoro Co.

"Please lift the bride's veil," the robot said in a tinny voice, waving its arms in the air as the newlyweds kissed in front of about 50 guests.

The wedding took place at a restaurant in Hibiya Park in central Tokyo, where the I-Fairy wore a wreath of flowers and directed a rooftop ceremony. Wires led out from beneath it to a black curtain a few feet (meters) away, where a man crouched and clicked commands into a computer.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jD8QFNdqGR97enD1iCdvMI4x7AWgD9FNQT4O0 via The Presurfer

Previously: Man Weds Virtual Girlfriend

Denis Smith is a photographer who makes light graffiti -- time lapse photography that allows artists to insert lights into spaces so that they appear to be free-floating. Smith has created a set of images depicting the travels of a ball of light through a darkened world.

http://www.denissmith.com.au/Portfolio/Pages/Ball_of_Light.html via DudeCraft

Amanda Greene of Woman's Day has compiled a list of fifteen strange diet fads, including a 1928 proposal by arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson (left). He proposed eating only meat in imitation of the Inuit:

Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson proposed a weight-loss plan that’s like an extreme version of the Atkins diet. After living in the northern tundra, Stefansson was amazed at how healthy the Inuit people were despite living off caribou, raw fish and whale blubber, and consuming hardly any fruits or vegetables. Stefansson was so intrigued by this diet—and claimed he had lived on it himself––that to prove its effectiveness he checked into New York's Bellevue Hospital, where doctors monitored his health for several months. After observations, he was declared healthy.

Greene also describes less successful diets, including "slimming soap", tapeworms, and cotton balls.

http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Health/15-Most-Bizarre-Diets-in-History.html via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: Stefansson Arctic Institute

(YouTube Link)

The Balancing Cube is a robot that can remain balanced on any one of its corners, even when pushed. Six motorized weights quickly move to keep the robot's weight balanced whenever it is in danger of falling over:

The Balancing Cube is an example of a distributed control platform. Each module....is a self-contained unit with a computer, battery, motor, and inertial sensors (a tri-axis accelerometer and tri-axis rate gyro). So instead of relying on a centralized controller, the modules share their inertial data through a bus network. Then each module combines its own data with the shared data to determine the orientation of the cube -- and command its motor accordingly.

Link via technabob

Sometimes it's better to just walk away from an argument. Or something like that.

A 23-year-old man jumped from a moving vehicle Thursday evening after his wife refused to "shut up," according to a Montgomery County Sheriff's Office report.

The report by Deputy Blake Neblett says the man, who was traveling with his wife and three children to Clarksville on Guthrie Highway, was arguing with his wife and told her to shut up.

When she refused, the man jumped from the moving vehicle

http://www.theleafchronicle.com/article/20100514/NEWS01/100514025/Husband%20bails%20from%20moving%20vehicle%20after%20wife%20refuses%20to%20%E2%80%98shut%20up via reddit | Photo (unrelated) from the US Department of Energy

deviantART user tblad makes sculptures out of pipe cleaners, including this lovely dragon. It's about ten inches tall and contains no glue or thread -- just pipe cleaners. She has similar works in her gallery.

Link | Gallery

The copepod is just a single millimeter long. But for it's size, it's the strongest, fastest animal alive. The ability to escape or resist predators is a major evolutionary advantage:

Together with researchers from DTU Aqua and DTU Physics and with the aid of high-speed video recordings, Thomas Kiørboe has been able to give a detailed picture of the copepods’ escape jump. The powerful jump has made an incredible impression upon the researchers.

“They jump at a rate of half a metre per second, and that’s within a few thousandths of a second,” says Thomas Kiørboe, continuing: “It shows that copepods - in relation to their size - are more than 10 times as strong as has been previously documented for any other animal or even man-made motors...”

Link via io9 | Photo: NOAA

Previously: Marine Biologists Filmed Copepod Going to the Bathroom

The Croy Brae or Electric Brae is a road in rural Scotland that can disorient drivers. Some people think that it's due to unusual variations in magnetism that pull cars uphill:

The road appears to slope downward, and drivers assume that the slope will accelerate the vehicle. Yet if they slow down, they are likely to grind to a complete halt. Despite every appearance to the contrary, the road runs uphill, not downhill. Unable to believe what has happened, many motorists stop-only to find that their cars begin to slide backward, a “uphill.”

Consequently, it's a popular spot for tourists in the area. But mathematician Philip Gibbs says that there's no paranormal or magnetic phenomenon at work. It's just an optical illusion:

There are several things that enable us to sense which way is up. The balance mechanism in our inner ears is one system we have, but visual clues are also important and can be overriding. If the horizon cannot be seen or is not level, then we may be fooled by objects that we expect to be vertical but that really are not. False perspective might also play a role. If a line of trees get larger or smaller with distance away, our sense of perspective is thrown off. Objects far away may seem smaller or larger than they really are.

People often overestimate the angle of a slope. If you are standing on a slope of 1 degrees it will seem like a slope of 5 degrees and if you stand on a slope of 5 degrees it may seem like you are on a slope of 30 degrees. Because of this effect the anti-gravity illusion can seem stronger than it should be even when you know the cause

Paranormal explanation and scientific explanation via The Presurfer | Photo: Ayrshire government