Oregon always seems to be an interesting place.
Last week we happened to be in Portland and I thought Dustin might enjoy a ride on the Tram.
It was cloudy, rainy, and windy (I mean, after all — it’s Oregon … right?) — Dustin was somewhat concerned that the Tram was rocking back and forth in the wind, but he had a great time anyway.
World’s smallest bot takes flight.
Insect-sized robots have long held promise in the minds of sci-fi nerds.
They could poke through treacherous rubble in search-and-rescue missions, discreetly snoop on the guilty and innocent alike, and sometimes, just maybe, form into giant swarms that block out the sun and do the bidding of larger, less agile, robotic overlords.
“As far as we can tell, this is the world’s smallest flying robot,” Kevin Ma, a graduate student at Harvard’s Wyss Institute and a member of the robot team, told NBC News.
“It’s hard to argue that anything is more agile than a housefly — I think anyone who’s tried to swat one would agree,” said Rob Wood of the Wyss Institute at Harvard, and the lead researcher on the project. “This is the first controlled flight of an insect-scaled robot.”
Two mechanical muscles on the robots control the flapping and twisting motion of the wings. Previous versions of this robot would crash soon after they took off, but the most recent model has motion capture sensors and guiding algorithms that corrects its movements as it takes off.
In its current form, it’s mostly suited to help physicists and biologists study the dynamics of motion in a controlled environment. Woods estimates we’re still about 30 years away from being able to pack in the power and sensors required for a truly environment-aware robo-bug.
“This proof of concept design … gives us hope that we can develop insect-scale flying robots some day,” Vijay Kumar, professor at University of Pennsylvania who has worked with swarms of tiny quadracopters, wrote to NBC News in an email.
While bug-sized robots working individually or in giant swarms could be helpful — to serve as surrogate bees in pollination efforts, or sniff out dangerous chemicals in the atmosphere — they’d also make stealthy snoopers. This makes them a favorite target of privacy activists who frequently bring up stealthy miniature bots in discussions about technology and privacy.
“Presumably at some point you could have one the size of a mosquito that has a battery that operates for weeks and you could have the mosquito following you around and not be aware of it,” Al Franken, D-Minn, said. “God help us if an adolescent boy gets hold of one of these.”
It’s not just adolescent boys who dream of robo-insects. Sci-fi movies are full of them. There are the spidery critters that chase Tom Cruise after his eyeball transplant in “Minority Report,” the wriggling “bug” that invades the belly button of Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix,” and the wire-tapped cockroach that gets smushed a moment too late, in the cheesy Bruce Willis favorite, “The Fifth Element.”
But battery power and sensors pose gigantic hurdles for a pea-sized robot. For one, “You have to build everything from scratch,” Wood says, as motors and actuators aren’t manufactured in their size. The engineering also gets complicated. “When you scale things down like that things flex differently and experience forces that the material reacts to differently,” said Rick Cory, a roboticist at Disney Research.
For now, the robotic fly is powered and guided by batteries and sensors that aren’t built into its body. Instead, they are tethered to control and power systems by fine copper wire. While Wood’s group is developing a sturdy body that’ll stay in the air, collaborators around the country are busy shrinking sensors. Still others are working on ways to network them for the day when they will interact as a swarm. “It’s roughly broken down into: body, brain and colony,” Wood says.
And they’re toiling towards the same goal. When the “brains” of the bot are small enough and powerful enough to be hoisted onto a tiny robot frame, Woods and his team hope to have a ready, steady, unswattable robo-fly on their hands.
Vangelis developed an interest in music at age four, composing on the family piano and experimenting with sounds by placing nails and kitchen pans inside it and with radio interference.
At six his parents enrolled him for music lessons, but Vangelis later said that his attempts to study “failed” as he preferred to develop technique on his own.
He considers himself fortunate to have not attended music school, as it impedes creativity. He learned to play from memory. “When the teachers asked me to play something, I would pretend that I was reading it and play from memory. I didn’t fool them, but I didn’t care”, said Vangelis.
He studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts.
He also found traditional Greek music as particularly important in his childhood, but at twelve developed an interest in jazz and rock.
At fifteen, he started to form school bands, not to cover other musicians but to have fun. He acquired his first Hammond organ at eighteen. In 1963, both he and three school friends started a five-piece rock band The Forminx (or The Formynx), playing cover songs and original material largely written by Vangelis with English lyrics by radio DJ and record producer Nico Mastorakis. After nine singles and one Christmas EP, which found success across Europe, the group disbanded in 1966.
In 1980, he agreed to record the score for Chariots of Fire (1981); he accepted because “I liked the people I was working with. It was a very humble, low-budget film.”
The choice of music was unorthodox as most period films featured orchestral scores, whereas Vangelis’s music was modern and synthesiser-oriented. It gained mainstream commercial success which increased Vangelis’s profile as a result. The opening instrumental title piece, “Titles”, later named “Chariots of Fire – Titles”, was released as a single which reached No. 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart for one week after a five-month climb.
Google is currently the largest ad server on the planet — The writing was on the wall for Google, when in April, 2007, it bought DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion.
Google, as a Search Engine, has been on the decline every since that time. The mantra, “Do No Evil” no longer applied as Google integrated DoubleClick into it’s core ads function.
“DoubleClick is often linked with the controversy over spyware because browser HTTP cookies are set to track users as they travel from website to website and record which commercial advertisements they view and select while browsing. DoubleClick is considered to be malware by several commercial organizations (Adaware, Symantec, Spybot) which detect it and provide the tools to block/remove it.
DoubleClick has also been criticized for misleading users by offering an opt-out option that is insufficiently effective. According to a San Francisco IT consulting group, although the opt-out option affects cookies, DoubleClick does not allow users to opt out of IP address-based tracking.
DoubleClick with MSN were shown serving malware via drive-by download exploits by a group of attackers for some time in December 2010.”
Google, in it’s early years, stood out to most, as a shining city on the hill when it came to search. Over the years however, Google has wandered away from it’s core as a search engine. It began the shift upon after the purchase of DoubleClick.
I used to block out the DoubleClick. I’d remove DoubleClick’s influences from my local machine at every opportunity. I’ve since even refused to use Google’s toolbar (or any toolbar) and Google’s Web Browser Chrome.
Ad servers are just that — ad servers. And over the years it’s become quite evident to me that this is what Google has become — the largest ad server in the world.
“In other words, the search results that we supposedly value so highly are themselves paid placements, just like Google’s keyword ads. It’s just that in the case of search results, link owners have paid for SEO (search-engine optimization) to get Google’s attention instead of paying for SEM (search engine marketing) to make Google give their links prominence. Either way, though, searches are mostly just producing ads by any other name.” This, according to Peter Yared of CNET
The article above makes references to the Google+ and of how it’s felt that Google is Ditching Search.
There’s no money in search.
All of the greats, HotBot, Alta Vista, Excite — all of them failed as a result of not being able to make search pay for itself. As soon as the venture capital left, so did they. No one has ever quite figured out how to monetize search. This is why Google bought the technology of DoubleClick — it needed an out, even as early as 2007.
Should there be a price to pay in the form of a tip, even for bad service?
By now, the workers at the La Fisherman restaurant in Houston, Texas are probably wishing they would have just let the whole thing go. But they didn’t, and now the story has been splattered all across the internet.
In case you missed it, a family went into the establishment for dinner and decided that the service they received was not worthy of the required 17% tip for parties over five. When Jasmine Marks informed the waiter that she wasn’t going to pay the gratuity, the staff responded by locking the doors and calling the police.
Is it illegal not to tip?
Marks wanted to know if it was against the law not to tip, but when the HPD arrived, even they didn’t know what to do.
In the end, Marks took the high road and paid the bill, gratuity included, just to end the stand-off.
Obviously, the folks of La Fisherman forgot that we’re living in a world of immediate and widespread news … thank you very much internet!
Regardless of who’s in the wrong, this couldn’t have been a positive PR move for the headstrong restaurant.
Rewarding bad service is a bad idea
Personally, it’s hard not to side with the consumer here. If you’re going to assume that a mandatory, predetermined tip amount is necessary, then you better make sure your service is up to that expectation.
Marks claims the wait staff messed up their orders and were rude in the process. So fine, losing track of what someone ordered is one thing , but the rudeness needs to be addressed, and most certainly shouldn’t be rewarded.
The opposition will claim that a business has the right to enforce it’s own policies, and if you don’t like it, eat somewhere else — but is that really the point?
What’s the point of tipping?
Tipping used to be defined as a social custom, and voluntary, depending on how you felt about the service provided to you.
I understand that in the present economy, those working in the customer service business are feeling the same strains that we all are feeling, and most likely, many waiters and waitresses are working for far less than they should.
The flip side is, consumers are more careful with spending, and less likely to pay for something they don’t feel is deserving of their hard earned money.
So what about the cops?
Well, although the law was unclear in Houston, the Bethlehem Township police department in Pennsylvania had a different interpretation of the law in 2006 when they arrested a couple for denying a mandatory tip due to their dissatisfaction in service.
What was the charge?
The charge was theft, but eventually the case would be dropped by the police department, but the young couple still got to experience being handcuffed and booked for their trouble.
Should there be a price to pay in the form of a tip, even for bad service?
Feel free to sound off in the comments below.