Peekaboom draws plenty of participants

Peekaboom, the new two-player Internet game featured in a story last Monday, already looks to be a success ("CMU online game will be used to help teach computers to see," 8/1/05).

The game, developed by Luis von Ahn, a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, is designed to produce images in which an object is highlighted and identified. These image/word pairs, or annotations, are used by computer scientists to train computers to see.

In the three days following Monday's article about Peekaboom, 6,700 people registered on the Peekaboom site and, by midnight Wednesday, more than 250,000 annotations had been generated. Some players had played for 10 hours or more.

"This is [I am pretty sure] by far the largest database for training computer vision algorithms in the world [and] it only took three days," von Ahn said. The quality of the annotations is still being evaluated, he noted, but the quantity of results and the number of hours people have spent playing seem to be good omens.

Play continues -- and the number of annotations grows -- at www.peekaboom.org.

It's time for the Perseids

The annual Perseid meteor showers are upon us, with peak activity predicted for Thursday and Friday nights when as many as 60 meteors might be visible each hour.

The activity usually is greatest between midnight and dawn. No special equipment is needed, but skywatchers will want to find an area far from lights and with a wide-open view of the sky.

The Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh also is sponsoring Star Parties on Friday and Saturday nights at the Wagman Observatory in Deer Lakes Regional Park, Frazier. The parties begin at sunset each night, but those wishing to see the Perseids should plan to stay until after midnight and perhaps bring a lounge chair and sleeping bag for comfort. For information, call 724-224-2510.

PSU to host climate center

Penn State University will be home to one of four new regional centers for the Department of Energy's National Institute for Climatic Change Research.

Kenneth Davis, associate professor of meteorology, will head the center, which will distribute almost $2 million over the next five years to institutions proposing climatic research. Other regional centers are at Duke University, Michigan Technological University and Northern Arizona University.

Davis said the Penn State center would place much of its focus on issues specific to the Northeast and its high population density, high concentrations of ozone and large amounts of urbanization, urban forests and abandoned agricultural land.

Roundup harms amphibians

The herbicide Roundup is not approved for use in water, but University of Pittsburgh biologist Rick Relyea continues to accumulate evidence of the consequences for amphibians when the chemical does get into ponds, bogs and streams.

In a pair of articles published last week in the journal Ecological Applications, Relyea and his students report that the widely used herbicide proved deadly to tadpoles and frogs at concentrations at or below those expected in nature. At the maximum exposure expected in nature, almost all tadpoles died within three weeks and 79 percent of frogs died within a day.