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ChatBot or Human and Does it Matter? - Ep 98
191 Plays7 years ago
Today on the show Paul and I discuss chat bots and whether they can good, bad, or indifferent for heritage communication. We also discuss a Munsell reader and Paul’s new drone!
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 98
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 98.
Chatbots, Drones, and Tools Discussion
00:00:12
Speaker
I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk about chatbots. It's a little bit different discussion than we had a few episodes ago. We also talk about Paul's new drone, a Munsell capture tool, and standing desks. Let's get to it.
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everybody. Paul, how are you doing in this cold ass winter? Actually today, it's 60 degrees here in New York. A couple of days ago, it was zero and now it's 60. So yes, but it's not cold. Are you on the polar vortex aftershock? I don't know what this is. I just.
00:00:47
Speaker
All I know is we broke the world. So, congratulations, people. Nice, nice. Well, you know, when you're stuck inside and you got nothing else to do, the best thing to do is to just talk to yourself or talk to a chatbot. Oh, nice segue. And hey, that's what we're going to go
Chatbots: Functionality and Uses
00:01:01
Speaker
into today. So, on episode 94, which if my little cards here, right, released on December 13th,
00:01:07
Speaker
We talked about an article regarding heritage chatbots, and just to recap shortly what a chatbot is, a chatbot is just an automated system, like an AI, that somebody programs with probably simple, like if-then statements or, you know, really kind of choose your own adventure kind of statements that say, hey, here's a question, choose one of these options, you don't get to type anything in. Or there's the ones that you can actually type stuff in, and then it kind of tries to follow what you're saying.
00:01:34
Speaker
Mostly these are used on things like Facebook's Messenger. That's probably one of the more popular platforms. In 2016, Facebook released support for chatbots within Messenger and now there's all kinds of developer platforms out there for coming up with your own chatbots. And in fact, I found a few and I'm going to link to those in the show notes in case you have a company or service or field school or something. This can honestly, chatbots just from a PR standpoint and marketing standpoint, they can be a great way
00:02:02
Speaker
to immediately interact with your people cuz if you own like a business page on facebook or a club page or group page or something like that and somebody tries to message you while you can't be monitoring that twenty four hours a day seven days a week so.
00:02:16
Speaker
You can set up one of these chat bots to answer most of the common questions that somebody might have like, you know, are you guys open next week? What do you do? Uh, what kinds of projects do you do? You know, what, what, what have you found out there? I mean, things like that. And you can set it up to just be, like I said, like a choose your own adventure sort of thing. So Paul, I know we've been talking about doing this episode for a little while now. Um, what are your, what are your thoughts on chat bots since we did that episode back in January?
00:02:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it hasn't evolved a whole lot since then. I haven't had any significant interaction with the chatbot that I'm aware of. So if I have had a significant interaction with one that I'm not aware of, well, that's great. I would like to know what it was because they did such a good job of fooling me.
Chatbots vs. Expert Systems
00:02:57
Speaker
Yeah, we were discussing them back then. It was a lot like we were discussing phone trees and choose your own adventure books and some of the limitations that chatbots currently have in that they can be confused if you go too far off script, if you start asking them about things that they haven't been programmed to deal with. Yeah, no, my opinions haven't really changed. Have you had any significance? You've been playing with someones, haven't you? Yeah, a little bit. I'm very intrigued by creating them actually, just because I think from a process standpoint, I think I would
00:03:27
Speaker
I would really enjoy making one, the whole choose your own adventure thing, and creating this whole decision tree. I mean, it's the same way that I design forms on Wild Note. I'm not trying to plug Wild Note. This is actually real. Using conditional logic, which is all this is, is basically if-then statements. The user chooses this, you say this, and now you get these options. And I really like those
AI in Archaeology
00:03:49
Speaker
sorts of interactions. And there was a guy here at the Reno Collective where I'm at who presented at this thing called One Million Cups.
00:03:56
Speaker
A side note, if you don't know what 1 million cups is, look it up online and find a 1 million cups presentation near you. They're usually new businesses that are looking for support from the community, but they'll give a presentation. Pretty cool way to interact with people and find out about new things in your area.
00:04:12
Speaker
Anyway, this guy sam he presented one million cups with his it was a new while he was calling it a new kind of storytelling idea. It really is somewhat of a choose your own adventure sort of thing so it's not really new in that sense but it's new in the way that he had put it together for an app and i told him.
00:04:28
Speaker
And he was looking for authors to support the platform. And I went up to him after the presentation. I was like, man, I kind of can see this for archaeology. You know, I can kind of see this as like, hey, you know, I keep referencing every time we say stuff like this, I reference like Clippy from Microsoft Word of the 90s. And I'm like,
00:04:44
Speaker
it looks like you're recording an artifact. Is it prehistoric or historic? It's prehistoric. Is it a tin can? Is it a projectile point? And you just go from there and you work out this series of questions that somebody could actually really quickly go through and then drill down into exactly what it is and maybe even give you a little bit of information about it because
00:05:05
Speaker
as archaeologists, we often find ourselves really just pencil monkeys trying to get out there and record everything we possibly can, but not really learning anything. You know, I would like to drill down and say, OK, through all this series of questions, I know that this is an Elko side notch projectile point. Well, now it pops up just a quick little paragraph doesn't waste me any time and says, hey, these did generally date from this to this. They were used by these people. You know, here's some other stuff. Here's what precedes it. Here's what comes after it. You know, that kind of thing. So I would love to see that kind of thing.
00:05:35
Speaker
Well, that kind of interaction gets me to the questions that I think are more interesting, or they're interesting to me at least, about bots in general. The way that you're describing it makes it sound like some sort of an expert system. And that's something I don't have any experience in directly. My dad was a physician, an endocrinologist, and in the
00:05:56
Speaker
mid-90s, I guess, who was working on just such an expert system that was basically helping doctors without specific expertise monitor diabetes patients by asking a series of questions and help them drill in and help remind them to take certain kinds of tests and help remind them of certain things that they should inform their patients of. And so it was just a way of giving an extra boost. And so as you were describing, this artifact identification bot, it makes me think of that. And then I wonder,
00:06:26
Speaker
Well, what is it that makes a bot a bot versus an expert system? I'm going to ask the same question. What is it that makes a bot a bot versus a script versus an expert system versus whatever else we want to come up with as we go here? Because for me, it's not necessarily a discrete class of computer software. I mean, I don't think it is either. You're right. And I think we're going to have
00:06:51
Speaker
I think we're in a time period where there's two very different kinds of bots. One of them that I'll mention now that I just found earlier and I'll drop this in the show notes. I was just searching the word heritage on Facebook Messenger and I found one called Heritage Granny. Again, I'll link to this and Paul, if you want to check it out, it's in our Trello board, but it would cause you to use Facebook Messenger. So I'm not really sure you want to actually click on that link.
00:07:19
Speaker
going down the rabbit hole. But anyway, so I turned it on and it says, it said getting started and looking back through the messenger history here. And she says, hello, Sayang Chris. My name is Heritage Granny. I can teach you about Singapore's history and culture. My children call me by many names. What would you like to call me? And then there was all these like names that presumably they would use in Singapore, common names, things like that, but also just Granny. So the kind of cool thing is this was clearly written in English, right?
00:07:48
Speaker
and presumably other languages, but it's picking up English because of where I'm located more than likely. And unless it's just designed for foreigners, I don't really know because she keeps calling me Sayang, which must mean my child or something. I don't even know. But you can ask her different things. And I said, you know, teach me about monuments and then it shows me this thing.
00:08:09
Speaker
and I can click on it which takes me to an article or I can click tell me the story and then she'll get more into it. I said goodbye earlier when I was done and now my three options are disturb again, towns and monuments. So I'll click disturb again and now it looks like she's typing but she's not and it says tonight's dessert menu for you
00:08:32
Speaker
drops freshly. What is going on? Sand. It says sand. Tonight's dessert menu for you is sand. Let me click on towns and see what happens. What's this say? It's kind of bugging out a little bit here. Granny has many stories to tell you about these towns. Pick one and I will show you what I know. And it's Jurong, Chinatown,
00:08:54
Speaker
bras, Baza, boogus. Um, and there's a few other, there's, there's like three or four other options here. Anyway, you click on one of those and goes in. So my point is there's two different types. This is a choose your own adventure bot, right? There's no intelligence behind this thing. There's the, the map. It's got a mind map and it's like, you click this, you get these, you click this, you get these, but there are some AI bots out there. And we talked about those on that episode back in December, where it is really designed to,
00:09:21
Speaker
try to interact with you. It asks you questions and says, hey, where do you want to go from here? And you just type something in and it tries to figure it out. Now that just takes machine learning and the things trying to learn. But I think we're going to get there pretty quickly. I mean, there's plenty of customer service bots out there that still suck, but they're getting better. And it really just, the more we interact with them, the better they get, which is kind of the scary part right there. The more data they bring in, the more realistic they become.
00:09:51
Speaker
I don't know if there's a lock on that. Like how realistic do you want them
AI Safety and Customer Service
00:09:53
Speaker
to become? Yeah. Skynet. I think that's the sensible limit. Oh my God. Right. Right. I mean, that really is, you know, it's fiction, but I mean that, that is the poss one possible scenario or outcome of AI getting too smart, you know, and how can you really build in controls to project against that? Like as a mobs, three rules of, uh, what is it? Three rules of robotics or whatever you called it. Yeah. And.
00:10:19
Speaker
I mean, you can hard code that in, and I know it's a computer, but if you designed it to be intelligent, it would at some point realize that, hey, I don't really need this. I'm not gonna remove it. You know? It's been a long time since I've read those, but doesn't part of it revolve around one directive coming into conflict with another directive, or is that- Yeah, I think so. I don't know if I can do that with 2001. No, I think you're right. I think, like, one of them was don't harm humans, and the other one was like,
00:10:47
Speaker
I don't know, try to be good or something like that. And like he had to kill a human in order to be good or something, or I don't know what the deal was, but it was something like that. And that's why I think one of the, I think iRobot starts with like a earth detective coming up to space station or some planet or something like that, trying to figure out, God, it's been so long since I read those books. It's too high for me, I think. I know, right? So now anyway, I mean, I think
00:11:12
Speaker
I think overall I like the idea of bots if they're done well enough because we live in a world of instant information and we want answers now. I've gone to pages on Facebook before and messaged them and sometimes spent days or weeks waiting for a response.
00:11:28
Speaker
And maybe it was something really easy that they could have answered with a bot. And I know it's a bot. That's the thing. Don't try to pretend you're not a bot. Call it out as a bot. Don't call it John. Call it John bot or something like that. Really call it out and let me know what I'm dealing with here. And then I'll know what kind of answers I can get out of it. I'll probably try to mess with it a little bit too. But I'll know what kind of answers I can get out of it.
00:11:55
Speaker
Well, that also gets to how people react to things. If you feel like you're being deceived by having a bot presenting itself as a human, you get angry. I mean, that's how I would react and I think most people I know would react in the same sort of way. But if I'm dealing with a bot that I know is a bot and it's not doing what I expect, I'll go through frustration before I anger.
00:12:18
Speaker
I might linger on that frustration for much longer. I might never get to anger. But if I thought that it was a person at first, yeah, I would probably jump straight into anger. And that's probably not what you want to do if you're looking at this as a customer facing thing. I think along those lines that
00:12:33
Speaker
you know, if you're on a phone call and you're dealing with a customer service bot, because you're totally right. If I don't know it is, and I'm kind of fooled at the beginning into thinking that it's a real human, and then I realize pretty quickly that it's not, then I get angry. But I think with customer service lines, you almost always have the option of clicking zero enough times and actually getting a human, right? Which may
00:12:56
Speaker
which may or may not be better in some cases. I'm almost more frustrated by a human that just like reads from the book in front of them and won't listen to actually what I'm saying, but we're going down a rabbit hole now. Yeah, I would say, you know, for me, you're right. You can always get a human there, but for these ones online, you're not going to get a human if you have problems. It's just going to be an endless loop of frustration. So call it out as a bot and give it some information, some basic information. And the nice thing I like about these from our programming standpoint,
00:13:24
Speaker
is that theoretically you should be able to just go and continuously update them. So if you're running a museum or something, you can start out with a bot that just says, Hey, we're open on these days. You know, you can program with current time and your time zone and say, Hey, we're open right now for another 45 minutes. Come on in. It's free.
00:13:41
Speaker
And we've currently got an exhibit about this going on and then maybe a link to the exhibit or something like that. Super simple. But then as you go along, you can have somebody spend 15 minutes a day on it and just add in more decision trees and it just gets more complicated as you go along and contains more information. Of course, along those same lines, if you're talking about specific exhibits that are of course time sensitive, things like that, you got to go in and update it if you're, you know, you swap out exhibits or something.
00:14:07
Speaker
Right, that gets back to that old, we had an episode once last year, I think, on digital, what was the word? It was the things that go along with an exhibition, you know, online websites, for example, and what happens after the exhibition's done. We had to find that episode and put it that in the show notes, too, because that was an interesting discussion by an article, right, that was looking at what happens for the online component of expired exhibitions.
00:14:37
Speaker
That's also off topic here, isn't it? Well, that was an episode 94. That wasn't the same thing, was it? No, no, no. I think about a year ago. Yeah. I don't know what you're talking about now. Late winter or early spring of 2018, because here we are in middle of winter in 2019.
00:14:58
Speaker
Perhaps it was Day to Be on the Archive in Digital Archaeology. I've got that as a title. I don't know. We'll have to see. I'll look through it. If anybody knows, let us know. We don't know anything about our own podcast. No, no. I have the attention span when you flee. Nice. I feel like I'm talking to a bot. Anyway, I don't know if that's a compliment or not. It depends on which one I'm talking to.
00:15:23
Speaker
Some other resources here, I included, of course, there's a resource for this. So many people will capitalize on anything, but I'm including a link to Chatbots magazine, which did not prove to be incredibly useful for me. It really talks about the chatbot world. And I thought it would talk about like what interesting chatbots are out there. But it really talks more about creating them and that whole universe.
00:15:47
Speaker
And then along those lines, there's a website called Messenger Developers that you can go to to learn how to, and I think actually create chatbots right on the screen there. Like you do everything as a WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get sort of format for coding, just drag and drop kind of stuff and typing things in.
00:16:03
Speaker
and then it gives you the code to put out there. One interesting thing I saw for Facebook Messenger that I don't think I've ever seen this actually in practice, which tells me that either not that many people are using it, or you can rebrand it to a store it doesn't look like Messenger, but I've seen in my research that you can create an instance of Facebook Messenger on your website, and Facebook will give you the code for that. You just go in the settings for Messenger on your own platform,
00:16:30
Speaker
They give you the code and now you've got a little block that's basically Facebook Messenger on your website so people can interact with you there without actually going to Facebook if that's how you interact with your customer's clients or fans, groups, whatever you have.
Bots on Websites
00:16:44
Speaker
So that's interesting. So you could create a bot in Facebook Messenger, use their platform, use their money, and put it on your website and now have this little chat bot right on your website that actually never takes you to Facebook, which is sort of weird and generous to me.
00:16:58
Speaker
It's something to do, but that's crazy. I'm sure they're monetizing it somehow. It's Facebook. Well, I know. It's Facebook. They might be. I mean, they're monetized every time you walk into Facebook, or if you actually happen to click on that, you go into Messenger. Well, there's monetized messages in Facebook, Messenger now, that are like sponsored ads. Right.
00:17:18
Speaker
Yeah, one other one I'll mention that might be beneficial for people who travel a lot or archaeologists is the around me bot. Around me, I don't know if this is still based on the old app around me or if that's even still around, but it used to be an app that you just click on. It was like Yelp, but you click on it and it just shows you the stuff that's immediately around you. I mean, Yelp basically does this as well, but it's a little more confusing. This was specifically designed to just do that.
00:17:42
Speaker
Well, the around me bot and it's facebook.com forward slash around me dot bot. Um, and I think you've just type around me and Facebook messenger, you find it, but it says good for fighting local stuff around you. And again, it, it does it in a.
00:17:55
Speaker
conversational way, which might appeal to some people. So rather than just looking at a map and a list of things, it could say, what are you looking for? Bars, restaurants, coffee, you know, you type it in and then it starts showing you local things around there. You can click on it, you can go to it. So designed to make your life easier, but I don't know if it does or not. So any last thoughts on bots, Paul? Because I think we're going to move on in the next segment.
00:18:19
Speaker
Yeah, I kind of dropped this hint earlier, but I'm still unclear as to what makes a bot. Actually, before I go this way, we're deliberately, I think, avoiding the whole discussion of bots in light of the way that they're dealt with in the news a lot lately, which is
00:18:37
Speaker
you know, bots to persuade somebody one way or another or aggravate somebody one way or another over various political positions. Right. Right. So, you know, I'm on Twitter quite a bit and a lot of the discussions I'm on end up with people throwing accusations back and forth that the others are bots.
00:18:58
Speaker
I don't want to go down that rabbit hole because I don't think that pertains particularly directly to archaeology. The thing that I do want to mention is bots versus scripts. Maybe we take a little break and we come back and lead out with that to maybe just round out this discussion and then we can talk about some other stuff. Sounds good. Let's do that. Back in a second.
00:19:18
Speaker
All right, everybody. This is Chris and Paul jumping into the podcast here to talk about Team Black. Team Black is a website over at arcassert.black. There's no www, just a-r-c-h-c-e-r-t.black. And we have a full list of, well, we actually have eight
00:19:35
Speaker
webinars right now that run all month long and every month. So they repeat and they're on a variety of topics from digital workflow to drones and some free stuff related to jobs and things like that. Paul, you recently signed up for some Team Black webinars. What's your first experience with the website like?
00:19:51
Speaker
Right, so I heard the ad while listening to the CRM podcast, and you mentioned on that ad that the webinars that you had that were for getting people into the field for basic stuff about being employed as an archaeologist were free on the site. So I went to the site, arxert.black.
00:20:12
Speaker
and took a look. And you've got a couple here that are free ones that I signed up for. The two are FieldTech Basics, which is being offered on February 13th, and also CVS References and Networking, which is being offered the following week on the 20th. And first of all, the price is right.
00:20:31
Speaker
So, yeah, that's a nice intro. And then the other thing that I mean, I should say is that, you know, you might be wondering, I have a PhD in archaeology. Why would I be interested in this? What value might I see in this? And it's not just to poke around and find out about it. It's because I work at a school and I get four weeks of every summer and I haven't been in the field in quite a few years now. And I'm not going to be able to get into the field like I used to, which is, you know, for a couple months out someplace in the Middle East.
00:21:00
Speaker
So I thought maybe I can take these webinars and get some ideas of how I might be able to position myself, I guess is the right word, for a short term shuffle bum job during those weeks I have off in the summer, something fairly local to me in New York or in the Hudson Valley. We'll see if that pans out, but rather than me guessing what employers potentially would want, rather than me bugging everybody that I know
00:21:26
Speaker
I thought this, you know, this is being presented to me and might as well take a look at it. And hopefully I'll have some good things to say about it in a couple of weeks. Yeah, absolutely. So thanks for mentioning those Paul. Yeah, we're about to start a membership program as well that you'll be able to find at arczer.black, but it's also available to our professional members at the RKLG Podcast Network. So all these webinars are probably going to come off the live service sometime in the next month or two and be behind the membership wall here. But
00:21:54
Speaker
like Paul mentioned, field tech basics and the one on finding a job, CVs and references and things will be recorded and will be on the front page. So you can just go there and watch them anytime you want, which is pretty great. And I'm thinking because a lot of people usually have questions that either are related to those or are things I didn't think about or something like that. I don't want to take away that ability for questions. We might have like an open office hours for
00:22:15
Speaker
you know, for people either looking to get back into the field or just reignite their interest in the field after a long winter or something like that. You might just have some office hours presentations that are once a month or once every other month or something like that and you just come in.
00:22:28
Speaker
watch the webinars ahead of time and ask questions. So again, check this out at arxert.black, A-R-C-H C-E-R-T dot black. We're looking at $15 a month for the subscription service. That's not active yet, but I would like your feedback. Send me an email, chris at archaeology podcast network.com. And you can tweet me at team black or at archaeo webby and we'll answer your questions. Now back to the show.
00:22:53
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to The Architect podcast, episode 98. Today we've been discussing bots, mostly chat bots again. You know, I left off the last segment asking you, Chris, or warning you, I guess, that I was going to ask questions about bots versus scripts. And now this is one of the things that I always have trouble getting my head around.
00:23:10
Speaker
what makes a bot versus some other kind of computer program.
Bots vs. Scripts
00:23:14
Speaker
And scripts are what I think of quite a bit. And in fact, when I Googled bots versus, I think one of the top hits, if not the top hit was bots versus scripts. So what differentiates these things?
00:23:27
Speaker
I write scripts all the time as part of my job. I write scripts to import data from one database to another. I write scripts to send emails on times. I write scripts that do maintenance on various things. I program them. I set a cron job to do it every night or every week or whatever it's supposed to be. And it does its thing without me having to attend to it. And then I get a little email the next day that I also program that says, hey, I ran successfully. Yay.
00:23:53
Speaker
But to get to the crux of it, what really makes the difference between a bot and a script? What differentiates them? Is it a matter of intent? Is it a matter of length? Is it a matter of the language used? So you were talking about some of the bots that you could put together with the tools available, which sounded a lot like kind of click and drag sorts of decision trees. The scripts that I write are mostly Python, some PHP, a lot of shell, some OCC, whatever.
00:24:22
Speaker
You know, and that gets to the same sort of question. What makes a programming language? You know, C, C sharp, C plus plus, Java versus Python or Ruby or whatever. One is scripting language and the other a programming language.
00:24:38
Speaker
I don't think there's any good answer for those questions. But I think that the ones that really get to the heart of what bots versus scripts are is active versus reactive, right? So the things that I write are active. They're set to go do something.
00:24:58
Speaker
with minimal sort of error checking, minimal sort of decisions that they have to make. They check what date it is and if it's the right time and if their file's waiting for them and if so, they act on it and that's about it. Reactive is something I imagine more like the chatbots that are sitting there waiting for you, the human, to come and interact with it and then it starts its process.
00:25:19
Speaker
And then the other part, which we've gotten to a bunch of times here, is the mimicking of human behaviors. That really what differentiates a bot from some other kind of computer program. I mean, I just covered a whole bunch of things that just popped through my brain as I was thinking about it. But do you have any particular feelings one way or the other as to what differentiates bots versus scripts or other programs?
00:25:41
Speaker
Well, without offending a whole bunch of software developers out there, because I'm not one, I mean, I've done a little bit of stuff, but, you know, definitely wouldn't call myself a software developer. But my concept of this whole thing is, so a script is a set of instructions, basically, right? So a script is like, do this, um, it might be time-based, it might be whatever, but a script is basically a set of, uh, yeah, as a set of instructions. So to me, a bot is just basically a collection of scripts, right? Like you, but they require,
00:26:11
Speaker
some sort of input or interaction. So when I choose this, I invoke this script. When I choose this, I invoke this script. When I say these things and I have this sort of punctuation or maybe these keywords, this gets into the little more AI in the intelligent bots, then now it invokes this series or line of questioning. So
00:26:30
Speaker
I don't know that there is a difference i think just one more complicated form of another and that's why they're so powerful because the more instructions you put in the more options you put in the more. Opportunities you put in the smarter it's gonna be now the difference between.
00:26:47
Speaker
bots and like an AI, you know, like a, like a stupid bot that has just like a decision tree and a limited vocabulary and a limited framework. And something that can actually learn is, is the programming. And I'm not sure that has to do with scripting at all. Um, I think that's getting into actual programming and where, where a bot can take information it's learned and update certain, um, arrays of information and create new ones and then call those at a future time. That's what we do as humans, you know, I say something to you.
00:27:16
Speaker
you form new synapses in your brain and then you can recall that later, that's learning, right? And I think that's the challenge for programmers is to say, well, what can we learn? What's worth learning? How do we put that back into our code? And then how do we call that at a later date and actually know what the hell we're doing?
00:27:33
Speaker
So, um, I don't know if I answered your question or made it more complicated because I don't really, so you seem to be pointing to complexity of the program as his main thing. But that would, again, wouldn't be the only thing. Cause you know, Photoshop is a pretty complex program, but it's not a bot. You can script Photoshop and it's still not a bot. That's true. I mean, Photoshop would be great if I could just turn it on and say, Hey, draw me something fun that I can sell. And then it just started.
00:28:02
Speaker
I don't think it's there yet. You're right. There is a difference between complexity and intelligence for sure. I mean, that's 100%. That's a good example too. So if the intelligence is the crux of it, how many bots have you interacted with that you think are actually taking and reprocessing input and interactions to fine tune their own future input or interactions rather?
00:28:26
Speaker
Well, here's the thing. I don't think I've interacted with any that actually do that, but if I did and it was a good one, I wouldn't know it if I had.
00:28:34
Speaker
That's the whole point. The whole point is to not know you're talking to a bot. It's entirely likely that I've spoken to a bot and thought it was a human on a customer service line. It's entirely likely that I've chatted with a bot on somebody's page on Facebook because I do that actually a lot and didn't know it was a bot. There's a lot of times you just know it's a bot, especially when it comes up with these little bubble answers. But when it's just interacting back and forth,
00:29:00
Speaker
I mean, especially on text, it's really easy for a bot to pass the Turing test via text because you can't see, you can't hear its voice, you can't see its face, it has no face, has no expressions, so you can't read body language, nothing like that. That's why it's harder for an Android or robot type thing to pass the Turing test because it looks like a freaking robot. Like your brain is automatically saying, this isn't real. But just text back and forth when they make it look like it's typing,
00:29:27
Speaker
That one detail of having the three little dots, like it looks like somebody is typing, that one detail is enough to make your brain go, is this a human? Is this not a human? What is this thing? It's pretty crazy. It's a weird...
00:29:43
Speaker
It's a weird feeling and it's a weird world that we live in, you know, even this stupid granny heritage bot or heritage granny bot, she's clearly a bot and it says she's a bot and, you know, she looks like a bot, acts like a bot, but then it still has the three little dots and you're like, well, that's pretty neat. This little bot is typing in the background and composing its thoughts, you know? So I don't know. It's all about perception. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have a good answer to this. And this is, uh, well, it's something that has to be settled over beers, I think at some point because, uh,
00:30:14
Speaker
It's not something I'm going to get to the bottom of any time soon. I don't think I ever will, but it's the kind of stuff I like to think about, you know, when I'm thinking about computer software and thinking about the differentiations between things because sometimes it's important and sometimes you realize that the distinctions really aren't that important. I feel like there might be some here, some there, there rather with with bots.
00:30:36
Speaker
Yeah.
Drone Adventures and Challenges
00:30:37
Speaker
Well, let's hope not all electronic devices are capable of autonomous behavior in the sense that it learns and can do things on its own because you just bought a drone.
00:30:48
Speaker
Yeah, speaking of beer. Drink. Nice. The drone drinking game has begun. You'll be drunk in 10 minutes. Here we go. Yeah, so this is just going to be short and sweet. You know, we've brought up drones many times here. The only drone I've had before is one that I've mentioned here, a little indoor drone, which I like quite a bit. I've been playing with it as long as my dog's not around because it drives him absolutely insane.
00:31:16
Speaker
And then we had Kyle Olson on a few episodes ago to discuss the work that he was doing and the article that he published with a lot of just basic information about how to get drone mapping up and working on a medium-sized site. And I was so excited by that that I started looking on Craigslist afterwards to see if anybody was selling a decent drone for a decent price.
00:31:38
Speaker
And I wasn't looking terribly seriously, but after a week or so, I did in fact find one that looked like a good deal and it wasn't far from where I worked. So after work one day, I went down a few blocks from here.
00:31:55
Speaker
ended up $230 poorer and one grown richer. So I'm saying the price because that is slightly on the low end for what it is. It's a DJI Phantom 3 standard.
00:32:10
Speaker
So, it's not the fanciest. It's got a good camera that does 1080p video at 30 frames a second. So, it's not their highest quality camera. It doesn't have the longest range antennas, but it's one that is widely agreed to be a very solid drone. The price I've been seeing for similar ones in good condition like this one
00:32:34
Speaker
were generally $250 to $300 for a used one. I think that model came out in 2015, so we're dealing with something that's three to four years old right now. That's just basic parameters. If somebody out there is looking to get in a drone, I found that this thing, the initial setup was a little weird just because some of the terminology is odd.
00:32:56
Speaker
There are instructions as to what the switches on the controller do aren't clear. And unfortunately those switches can easily be bumped and get you in the wrong configuration. Don't ask me how I know. Yeah. But what I found was that this thing is dead easy to fly. It flies exactly like that little indoor $15 drone that I have in the house.
00:33:20
Speaker
With the added advantage that I've got my phone hooked up to it and and I can see what it sees And so I've flown it around the house. I've flown another around outside the house I flew it out over a lake a
00:33:35
Speaker
I flew it in single-digit weather, and when it was up at about 250 feet, the phone started yelling at me that the battery was critically cold and was going to die any moment, so I had to quickly land it. So I'm learning about how to use it. I haven't flown it very high. I haven't flown it very far, but I've flown it a few times around and taking videos and still photos with it, and I'm getting comfortable with it, and it's a lot of fun.
00:34:02
Speaker
I definitely am going to explore this a little farther. We did have an episode once about you want to be a drone pilot and the part 107 certification and I'm definitely thinking that that's something I probably will do. After I get a little more comfortable with the drone itself, flying it around the yard and then we'll see where we go from there and see if I can get this in any way brought into my bag of tricks and tools that I use archaeologically.
00:34:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's the real key there is as we mentioned every time we talk about drones is really learning the system and learning and getting into a comfortable area like a big baseball field or something like that where you can hit those buttons on the radio accidentally and and see it's not gonna be total chaos, right? No, like you don't want to do that in your driveway, but you but doing it like an open area
00:34:55
Speaker
Nice. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. So, you busted any blades yet? I did. On my fourth flight, I might as well explain how this works. So, the throttle is on the left and to shut the motor off, what you can do, the motor's off, you can hold the throttle straight down for a few seconds and then the motor's all quit together.
00:35:18
Speaker
Another way that you can shut the motors down is you can bring both of the sticks in to the inside corners, lower inside corners together. And so the first few times I flew it, that's what I did because that's the exact same way you kill the motors on the indoor drone I had. You bring the sticks in and down.
00:35:36
Speaker
You can usually start them like that too. Yeah, he started up like that, it was fine, made sense. I landed it on the dock and went to shut the motors down by pulling the sticks in and down and I must not have timed my thumbs right and it jumped up and off the dock and into the
00:35:54
Speaker
and into the ice on the lake. At least it was ice. A lot of little bits of white stuff. Most of it turned out just to be ice, but one of it was the tip of one of the blades. Then the very next flight, I tried to land it on the driveway and did the exact same thing. Then I went back to the drawing board and realized that I could also just hold that left stick down for three seconds and kill the engines. It wasn't a timing issue between my left and right thumbs, which worked fine the first few times and then stopped working for whatever reason.
00:36:24
Speaker
Well, does that one have a have a land button as well on the screen? It does. But our property is on a real steep slope. So I could probably do the land just fine out on the frozen lake. But but anyplace else, you know, there's too many trees around. There's too much stuff going on. I haven't used that that function yet.
00:36:45
Speaker
Well, not return to home necessarily, but just like it's hovering in front of you and just hit land. Yeah, it just comes down. I think it's part of return to home. I think it's part of the return to home on that one. All right. Yeah, sometimes it just depends on which version you have, because I know mine has an auto land and an auto take off. You can just use that if you want to, or you can start the props and take off on your own. Of course, once you're having fun, you like to land it on your own.
00:37:14
Speaker
Yeah, again, for me, I don't feel like there's a distinct advantage for me with the landing on my own versus having the machine landed for me. Taking off with the app versus taking off by myself, I don't really see any particular advantage at all. It's so easy with these. They're so docile.
00:37:33
Speaker
And just so long as you read the instructions and don't make some bad assumption about what you can do with the props, you can accidentally flip it off the dock and into the ice and break a prop.
00:37:45
Speaker
But it came with extra props. The guy I bought it from had had it, he'd upgraded to a Mavic and he realized he hadn't used this in a year and a half and so he might as well get it out of his apartment. There you go, there you go. I mean, I want to sell my Inspire Pro to get a Mavic Pro.
00:38:03
Speaker
I mean, they're just amazing drones for what they are, the size and the weight and the functionality. I mean, they're pretty awesome. So does the camera on that have a lens cap? I can't remember what style camera that has on the Phantom 3. It doesn't have a separate lens cap. Well, it came with one. I'm not sure if this is what it originally came with. There's supposed to be a plastic stop to keep the gimbal from moving. That wasn't in the box. He had all the other parts, but that had gotten lost somewhere.
00:38:29
Speaker
And he had kind of a clear rubber cap that I don't know if it was original or not. But that thing was so hard to get on and off the camera that I went for a few bucks, bought a little combination lens cap and clip that keeps the gimbal from rocking around. And so I'm using that.
00:38:52
Speaker
Okay. I was asking because the camera on mine is obviously a little bigger than it is on the phantoms and it has like an actual pinch in the middle lens cap that goes on there. Like you'd find on a regular camera. I've noticed I'm always taking off in dusty environments and I've just
00:39:09
Speaker
I've almost never, I've never went and bought the, um, like the landing area that you can get for these things. It's like this big, you know, almost like a tarp because that keeps dust off the camera. Cause when you're kicking up a lot of dust, when you're taking off and that keeps dust off the camera. So two things that I do is either I take off from the roof of my truck, I've got a canopy on the back of my truck and I just take off from the top of that and I land on the top of that. Um, or.
00:39:33
Speaker
I'll just take off in the dust because it's not that big a deal and then I'll let it hover in front of me and I reach up and I pull the lens cap off and And then when it comes back I let it hover in front of me and I reach up and I put the lens cap on and then I land the drone So that's little little tricks there that you can do if you're in dusty environments and don't have one of those mats the lens cap thing You're safe from the props I hope
00:39:58
Speaker
Well, yeah, yeah, because the camera, especially on the Inspire, hangs down way low. And if I was using a Phantom where the landing gear doesn't raise up, I would probably just make sure it was over my head. So I'm reaching up and at an angle towards the camera rather than straight out at the camera or down at the camera. You know, just keep those props as far away from you as possible.
00:40:17
Speaker
And, uh, and even put it, put it like over your head, you know, so you're reaching up and there's no chance of the, um, of the blades contacting your hand in that way, unless the drone suddenly loses altitude or something. But what do I, one thing I wanted to mention too, that cross controlling feature you mentioned, like where you go to the inside to kill the props. That was when I was first researching this drone and then learning how to fly it. That was the number one cause of failure was people accidentally doing that when the drone was like 200 feet up in the air, it just crashes down to the ground dead.
00:40:47
Speaker
Right, I saw that in the manual, but I didn't realize that I could hold that left stick down to also kind of props. And that's been my biggest complaint about the drone. I mean, I love flying it. I'm finding the software fairly easy, but the manual itself, I find a little confusing. It's not quite as clear. It says, oh, you can put this in F or P or S mode and you don't necessarily know what those modes are, you know, things like that.
00:41:12
Speaker
organization and sensible definition of terms that could be done better. But that's quibbling. It's been a blast to fly with it so far.
00:41:24
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, get used to FPNS cause it's on all their radios. And I'll tell you real quick, just for people listening, F is definitely just usually for their function modes. So they have all these programmed in flight modes that you could do. And you got to put the radio in F mode to basically turn those on on the screen and then enact those. And then, um,
00:41:46
Speaker
I think P is what I normally fly in and then S, I can't even remember. It's usually in the same mode all the time and I usually use one and then F. I can't remember what the other one is. I think P is the, well, I can't remember if you say that's the problem. It doesn't mean anything to me. No. The toggle switch all the way up is using the GPS. In the middle is using just the barometer for altitude.
00:42:08
Speaker
That's right. And in the bottom is that function, most special mode that you can have programmed flight paths and orbit around you and that sort of stuff. That's right. And I found myself a couple of times accidentally bumping that from using the GPS to not using the GPS for the altitude. And that's why I'd been a little nervous about using the automatic landing feature on it. Yeah, I'll tell you one thing. You take that thing out of GPS mode and you really realize how well
00:42:36
Speaker
how much that GPS works to keep that thing in one spot because even my drone, which is, I feel like incredibly stable, never been crashed, never been run into something. And yet the minute you turn off GPS mode, it starts to drift. It immediately starts to drift because there's no trim controls on these devices. Right. Most aircraft have trim control. So even the smaller ones, you know, because they don't have GPS, they have to have trim if you want to hover straight and level.
00:43:00
Speaker
But these don't have trim on the radios because they have GPS. And the minute you turn GPS off, you realize, hey, this thing isn't even trimmed out. And the GPS is working pretty hard. It's actually hovering it in front of you in a zero wind condition, if you can find one. And then turning off the GPS is a good way to find building problems with your motor stabilization. Like you might have motors that are getting a little off kilter or something like that. And you might need to replace one at some point if it's starting to get a vibration to it or if it's really starting to get off.
00:43:27
Speaker
Um, or your blades are going crazy. That's a good way to kind of troubleshoot is to just turn off the GPS. And if it just slowly drifts in one direction, but then like in a week, it drifts a little faster in that direction. And then in two weeks, it drifts a little faster. You're developing an issue. Yeah.
00:43:43
Speaker
Yeah. And the more the GPS has to work to keep it stable to counteract that, the harder your battery is working as well. So you're just going to be reducing your battery life the more you let that problem continue. All right. Well, I think that's it for this segment. Paul, I'm so glad you got a drone because we were getting ready to set up the GoFundMe campaign for Paul's drone. So we'll let him crash this one a few times before we get him a more expensive one. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll make sure I do that.
00:44:09
Speaker
I'm well on my way. Well, on your way. Nice. All right. Well, we will be back in just a minute for our shorter app of the day segment. Back in a second. Hey, everybody. Chris and Paul jumping back in to tell you about the membership system for the Archeology Podcast Network. We are trying to be a fully member supported network. Right now, we're still seeking advertising and underwriting and sponsorship and all those things because this costs money. But in the meantime,
00:44:33
Speaker
we're still building our membership program. So head on over to arcpodnet.com forward slash members to see what our membership levels are and how you can support the podcast. Paul, what are our membership levels? We have three different levels here. We've got supporting member, which starts at $5 a month or $42 a year up to professional member, which is $20 a month or $168 a year. And in between those two standard member at $10 a month or $84 a year. And each of these different membership levels gives you a different
00:45:01
Speaker
unlocks different features that are available to you. Do you want to tell everybody what these are? Yeah, so at the lower level of supporting member, you get a sticker, you get early downloads or high quality downloads. At the standard member, we'll send you a nice card, five show stickers, you get store discounts and other bonus content.
00:45:18
Speaker
And then at the professional level, you get all that stuff, plus I'll send you a swag package, which could be a coffee mug, t-shirt, all the stickers, and maybe some other things as well thrown in there, whatever we've got for that time period. But you also get access to our Slack team, podcast focus group, and more importantly, you get access to learning content, which is being supported by Team Black. So the previous ad that we had on the show, if you skip that, go back and listen to it, it's all about Team Black. ArcCert.Black is the address and the learning content that we'll provide.
00:45:48
Speaker
Head on over to arcpodnet.com forward slash members to support the archaeology podcast network, public education, and archaeological outreach today. Now back to the show.
00:45:57
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to the Arceotech podcast, episode 98. We're at the app of the day segment right now. And as I often do, I don't distinctly have an app of the day, but I do want to discuss a couple of things that we've discussed in the past.
Color Calibration and GPS in Archaeology
00:46:11
Speaker
We got an email recently from one Rebecca Harris, who was listening to the podcast a few episodes back where I mentioned a kind of very rudimentary Munsell color chart app on iOS.
00:46:25
Speaker
She helpedfully chimed in with a few stand-alone devices that do the exact same thing. The one that's most interesting probably to archaeologists is one that's called the Munsell Capsure, C-A-P-S-U-R-E.
00:46:41
Speaker
Forestry suppliers has that for about 850 bucks, which is not exactly cheap. But when you're already used to spending 150 or 200 bucks for the Munsell Soil Book, it's price commensurate with how Munsell prices their goods. And she mentioned a few other things, some by name and some just by class of device. And it reminded me that I didn't mention it at the time.
00:47:09
Speaker
some point back in the 90s, I think, probably early 90s even, as desktop publishing was becoming more prevalent and we're moving into color layout for magazines and things. I remember there was a series of different companies came out with
00:47:25
Speaker
color calibration devices that you'd stick on the front of your monitor so you can get a really accurate color so you can calibrate your monitor so it'd be as close as possible to what comes out on the print end. I do remember somebody at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, it may have been Leanne Bedall, but I'm not certain, was really looking into and may even have purchased one of these in order to use just the same sort of thing, use it to try to categorize colors and describe them in a way that
00:47:55
Speaker
took the human eye out of it as much as possible so that you could have some very consistent reproducibility of the results. And so these are all interesting. It's not a new idea, but where I was kind of getting at, probably incoherently, is that the app that I was reviewing made me think how nice it would be to have all these rolled up into one on the phone. Because, you know, this is something I've talked about many times. Actually, most of the apps of the day that I really like.
00:48:25
Speaker
Bring some sort of feature that used to be its own standalone device and bring it into the the cell phone that you're carrying Anyhow, you know, so we've kind of gotten used to that already with the camera obviously archaeologists have gotten pretty used to that with the GPS is in their devices and we rely on them quite a bit, you know, and we're just discussing the GPS in our in our drones and how accurate those are and You know, so it's it's
00:48:51
Speaker
It's interesting to see. When I'm flying the drone and I see the GPS, I see the map that I didn't have to tell it where in the world I was. It just shows me right there. It shows where the drone is in relation to me, in relation to the map, and so on and so forth. It's all rolling all these great functions that used to be standalone devices that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars into this one, not cheap, but not ridiculously expensive, multifunctional device.
00:49:17
Speaker
I also have talked about guitar tuners. That's not directly related to archaeology, but that's something that really I get a kick out of, that there's some very good guitar tuners that you just install on your phone and use instead of having to have your clip-on tuner or something else, or blowing into pipes like I used to when I was a kid. I had one of these little reed guitar tuners and then I had to tune it by ear, which I didn't variably fail at.
00:49:41
Speaker
Anyhow, the GPS brings me to the other thing that I wanted to discuss, which is I think a good year ago probably, I mentioned the app Trace Snow. And that's one that I use when I go skiing and it maps the runs and tells me how many jumps I did and what my max speed was and estimates of how many calories I burned and all sorts of great stuff. And it's one of a bunch of different apps like this.
00:50:08
Speaker
It's just the one I've used for a few years, so all my data are in it, though there are a couple that look like they may have superseded it. Anyhow, I'm bringing it up because of the GPS, because I was skiing a few times over the last few weeks, and one of the trails that I take at the ski place that I go to most often is a narrow trail that wraps around the western edge of the site. There I go, the ski area.
00:50:33
Speaker
It'll be a sight at some point. Yeah, at some point there's going to be a great archaeological excavation of early 21st century recreation activities among the North Americans. Nice. And when I looked at the traces of the runs that I took,
00:50:53
Speaker
One of them was right down. You can see it's overlaid upon the satellite image. It was right there. You can see that the cut through the woods and the track was right there. But the other two were way off. I mean, I would have been so badly beat up and bruised had I actually been 40 feet, 50 feet out into the woods like it looked like I was.
00:51:15
Speaker
I only bring that up because as good as these devices are, as multifunctional as they are, if you're using GPS on your phone, it's not always going to be as accurate as you want it to be. Take that as a warning that you probably already knew, but I have some empirical evidence to show that it's not always as good as it seems.
00:51:36
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that's always good advice when talking about GPS on phones and tablets. Although rumor has it, it's getting better this year and next year as more GPS satellites are opened up that your current devices will be able to read and also with rumored submeter devices, tablets and phones, submeter tablets and phones coming out in the next couple of years. So definitely be keeping an eye on that.
00:51:58
Speaker
I had to explain to one of my son's friends when we were skiing. He was a very bright kid. I didn't have to explain very hard. He said, yeah, so I put on two different ski apps on his phone and they always give me the exact same speed. I said, yes, because he's in the same exact GPS and he's like, oh, yeah.
00:52:18
Speaker
That makes sense. It's trying to compare one against the other to see which one was more accurate. The only way we're going to do that is if we have a few of us each with our own phones and we ski close to each other and see. And even then, if they're inaccurate because of bad reflections or bad satellite coverage, we're going to have a junky reading on yours and a junky reading on mine.
00:52:45
Speaker
Well, the one thing that developers can do, I'm pretty sure, because I've heard this before, I don't have a direct experience with it, but I've heard that they can do this, is they can decide based on battery life. If they want to conserve battery life, it will just call up the GPS.
00:53:00
Speaker
coordinates at a less interval, and it'll be less accurate. So I know for aircraft flying, the GPS interval can be less accurate because the aircraft is going so fast. So you're doing 100 knots, 80, 90 miles an hour, or obviously way faster. And using an app called ForeFlight, which a lot of pilots use, you don't need it to be paying in the GPS every second because in a second, you just traveled
00:53:28
Speaker
a half a mile. I mean, you're not going that fast, but you know what I mean. So so it can ping it less. So if you're down on the ground and some lazy developer said, well, I want to save battery power because I don't want bad reviews on my app. And they said, I'm going to ping the GPS fewer times to map this route out. Well, then you'll have a way less accurate route. So two different apps could actually give you a different route, but that doesn't mean they're less accurate. It just means they're not there's not enough points. Right. So it's going to be more angular, probably. So.
00:53:56
Speaker
Back to Munsell real quick before we go on to mine. I was looking on forestry supply here and I mean the Munsell, that capture thing for $845 seems pretty cool. And I think the Munsell book prices have either come way down or they've fractured them a little more and made them more unique. Like the standard Munsell soil color book is now $195.50 on forestry supply.
00:54:19
Speaker
And I swear to God, this thing was like $600 not very long ago, you know, maybe four or five years ago. And I could be wrong on that. Maybe I was looking at something else. The glossy edition is $1,150. I don't think anybody needs that in their lives. I know. And I remember seeing the Munsell geological rock color chart. So I think that's been around a little while.
00:54:37
Speaker
but I'm not sure I've ever seen this one before. The Munsell bead color book, which is really neat. Um, there's a lot of beads out on the California coast and in other areas with, uh, you know, bead trading traditions. And it just, uh, it just looks really cool. Oh, and it's a side note. Somebody just scheduled a wide note demo with me. Schedule your wild note demo now. Anyway. Um, I just saw that email come over. I thought that'd be cool. Anyway. Uh, I just wanted to mention that because the prices are really affordable on this Munsell stuff now. And, but I think,
00:55:06
Speaker
I think paying $845 for a device that will allow every single person on the site to use the same thing and give you the same numbers is extremely invaluable. So probably worth the money.
00:55:18
Speaker
We have links to those and I'll even link up to, I think it's called Trace Up Snow. I grabbed the link already. I'll link back to that again in our show notes so you can see what Paul was talking about and anything else we talked about today. One thing I'm going to talk about that I swear to God I've talked about before, but in our list of applications, it's still in my to-do list and not in my
Standing Desks for Productivity
00:55:37
Speaker
done list. If I've talked about it before, so what? You're going to hear about it again because it's amazing. If you've always wanted a standing desk and
00:55:44
Speaker
Let me back up a second and say that standing desks have been proven time and time again to be better for you. Not standing all day necessarily, which is why you want a motorized one. When I first started working on my own, I think it was about a year or two in, we moved into this other apartment complex and I created a standing desk for myself with these risers and I had this IKEA desk and it was currently standing. So I never had an option to sit. And then when I got here to the Reno Collective, I decided to
00:56:13
Speaker
modify that because they had a lot of the desks here did have a standing desk attachment that people had bought themselves. And that's when I realized I hadn't really looked into it before, but you could just get an attachment for the desk that you like as long as it's not some big wooden desk with built-in drawers. If it's just a top with legs, which is what mine was, I had the glass top IKEA desk, which again, side note,
00:56:34
Speaker
Glass top desks are amazing because you can draw them, draw on them and dry erase marker when somebody's on the phone and take quick notes and then erase it really fast. Oh my God. It just saves everything to just be able to draw on your desk. But anyway, so I went to this, I found online and I ended up buying it, um, standing desk range anywhere from 500 to thousands of dollars. And, um, I found this one from a company called autonomous.ai
00:56:57
Speaker
And they've gotten into a lot more stuff since Standing Desk a few years ago. But the page I'm linking to is their Smart Desk DIY Kit. And they've got the gray frame or white frame. I think I've got the white frame one, if I remember right. They've got a black frame now. But they're $250 for the gray, black, or white. And then there's the business edition. I'm not even sure what that means. That's newer. $350 in all three of those colors.
00:57:24
Speaker
But it's just amazing. My IKEA desk just sits, my glass top just sits right on top of there. I strapped it in and it comes with a little control unit that has four presets and then a manual so you can change that up and down. And it's just, it's a phenomenal desk. I mean, it's really great and it allows me to stand and sit throughout the day.
00:57:47
Speaker
And I love it. So for $250, you can convert your existing desk. If you have a compatible desk to a standing desk, to a really high quality one, or, uh, you know, buy the $250 add-on then run over to Ikea and spend less than a hundred dollars for a really high quality desktop and slap that thing on top of there and you'll be good to go. So, um, it's, uh, I can recommend it more, um, the autonomous.ai and now.
00:58:12
Speaker
They're getting into all sorts of things. They've got kind of like a spin cycle, spin bicycle that they're trying to advertise. They've got backpacks. They've got chairs. They've got, I don't know what they're doing. I thought they were a standing desk company when I first saw them, but now they're getting into the whole smart office category. So yeah, they're going nuts with everything.
00:58:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting when those standing tests first started coming out a few years ago and there were like articles I think in the New York Times and things, a lot of the administrators here at school started getting them for themselves and I thought at the time there's going to be a fad that they're going to get bored of pretty quick but most of the people who got them still use them a couple years later. So, there must be something to it.
00:58:54
Speaker
I know. And one of the things I'm a little sad about that they came out with, I still like my glass top, so I'm not that sad. And I like the size of mine, too. I mean, I've got two 27-inch Apple monitors on there and I've still got plenty of room for everything else. I don't have much else, but I've got basically a little recording studio on there, too, with my old mixer. One of the things they came out with after I bought mine, and this is $500, still a great deal for a standing desk, but their Smart Desk 3 AI standing desk. Ooh, we're talking AI again, Paul.
00:59:23
Speaker
I don't know what AI means, probably just autonomous AI, going back to their company name, but there's a built-in tablet at an angle, stuck right into the desk, you can't get it out, and I don't know what it hooks to, I haven't really done much research on it, but I know a few of the things it does, it'll be like, hey, you've been sitting for a while, it's probably time to stand, and it'll ping you on that. I don't think it'll raise the desk up automatically, that'll be a little weird.
00:59:47
Speaker
And then it'll do things like, hey, you've been standing for a long time. Maybe it's time to sit or have you eaten lunch yet today? You know, stuff like that. And it'll, I think it's designed to learn your schedules or something. I don't know. I haven't looked at it since it came out. But if you're in the market for a brand new desk entirely, I would almost recommend just getting one of their desks rather than DIYing it because they're not that much more expensive. You know, I mean,
01:00:08
Speaker
you're probably gonna end up spending this much anyway on a desk. Like the one without the AI kit, the home edition one is $2.99. It's an extra 50 bucks and you get the entire desk. So.
01:00:19
Speaker
I feel like it's a little smaller desk than I want, but it's got all the bells and whistles built in. It's got cable routing underneath. Mine doesn't have any of that. It's got the control panel mounted right in. Mine is suctioned onto the bottom of my glass top with the 3M Velcro strips, because I couldn't screw it into my glass top desk. So anyway, yeah. Autonomous AI, check out all their stuff. They are not a sponsor of the Archeology Podcast Network in any way, shape, or form, and I've actually never asked them.
01:00:46
Speaker
I just really like what they're doing. I think they have high quality stuff and I think they're constantly innovating and making their things better. So, you know, check it out. Cool. All right. Well, I think that's it for this episode. As I mentioned before, check out all the links in the show notes. I hope you guys like the dynamic ads that we're doing. I'm trying to do more of, I mean, I know you guys hate listening to ads, but we need to promote the other stuff that we're doing.
01:01:12
Speaker
so we can afford to keep this thing rolling. And when we get more paid ads and underwriters and things like that, then we'll try to make them interesting. So we only want to promote stuff that you guys want to go talk about anyway and want to go see. So hopefully it's of value to you. Try not to skip them if you don't mind. I skip them sometimes when I listen to podcasts too, but I try not to now that I'm a podcaster. But anyway, thanks a lot, Paul. Don't go shoot your eye out with your drone. Don't scratch your eye out.
01:01:42
Speaker
Don't crash it again. Don't crash it again. Get the carbon fiber blades. Yeah, that might help you when you do crash again. Of course, it'll also chop off your hand if you actually get your finger in there. Oh, I also wanted to say before we end, a quick thanks to Rebecca for listening to the show and sending us in a comment about the Munsell soil collection application. And she is actually the one that told us about the, as Paul mentioned, the forestry supplier link. So thanks for that.
01:02:07
Speaker
Please send in your questions and comments. You can comment on the website, arcpodnet.com forward slash archaeotech. And you can send me an email, chris at archaeology, podcast, network.com. And feel free to tweet both Paul and I at archaeo webby. A-R-C-H-E-O-W-E-B-B-Y. And Paul is at Lugol. L-U-G-A-L. So thanks a lot. And we'll see you next week.
01:02:34
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
01:02:59
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
01:03:21
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.