Elon Musk opens up about the highs and lows of his life on Twitter – Firstpost

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A day in the life of Elon Musk isn't easy at all. The man is an active board member of electric car automakerTesla,aerospace manufacturing corporation SpaceX, neurotechnology company Neuralink, tunnellingcompany called the Boring company and also a key member in Non-Profit artificial intelligence startup OpenAI.

Elon Musk

Juggling so many companies at the same time can become a Herculean task.

Even though Musk is now valued at around $16 billion, his path has been one of extreme ups and downs. Responding to some questions about his life on Twitter, the Telsa Founder responded with frankness that we have not seen when it comes to other heavy weights from the technology community.

In a series of tweets Musk described why not many would want to trade places with him. Musk tweeted that his life has had its fare share of 'great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress'. On being asked about the latter two, Musk explained that"take the pain and make sure you really care about what you're doing", which by his own admission is not that easy to do.

Musk even claimed that he was bipolar while reply to a tweet. However, he clarified in the next tweet that his condition cannot be medically termed as bipolar. He added that "Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe real problem is getting carried away in what I sign up for". Finally, Musk said thattaking on so many stress-inducing responsibilities is his own fault.

These tweets come right after the official launch of Tesla's most affordable car the Model 3. Musk spoke about how the following months are going to be hell after possible manufacturing problems.

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Elon Musk opens up about the highs and lows of his life on Twitter - Firstpost

Ode: Divorced and dating again, childfree by choice | KWIT – KWIT

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"You must have babies so the Muslims dont take over!

Ally Karsyn tells her story live at Ode. The theme was "Stigmas: An ode to the power of opening up."

In the long-term parking lot, I meet a middle-aged woman wearing sunglasses, sneakers and yoga pants. Her hair is casually swept into a ponytail. Shes flying to Phoenix for business. Im off to Seattle for fun. She cant remember the last time shes gone on vacation. I go somewhere every year.

Something about our conversation makes her ask, Do you have any little ones at home?

No, thats why I can travel like this, I say. Just pick up and go anywhere.

Do it now, she says, because when you have kids

Her voice trails off. I smile politely. She said, When.

I didnt tell her that there wouldnt be a when for me. Im childfree by choice. I didnt tell her that Im divorced, after four years, and dating again.

Before my divorce was final, my well-meaning mother started saying things like, Oh, Id really like to see you find a nice guy. To which I replied, Ive got nothing but time. I don't have any biological clocks ticking! But then she said, If having kids has taught me anything, its never say never.

I'm probably not the daughter she expected.

In the small farm town where I grew up, it was acceptable, if not encouraged, to get married at 22 to the son of a farmer with a Dutch surname. (That was better than living in sin.) And it was acceptable to buy that house in the suburbs. Doing these things bestowed comfort and approval in the form of verbal praise, plus gifts.

But panic set in with each measuring cup and Tupperware container I received. What sent me over the edge was the shiny red, 22-pound KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer. It dictated I would be spending my weekends baking brownies like my mom did, not biking through rice paddies in Bali, shopping the souks in Marrakesh or eating tapas in Seville.

Being showered with kitchenwares brought back childhood memories of being told to dry the dishes while my older brother played computer games, less than 10 feet away. Id protest, Why cant he help you? Its just cause hes a boy!

I not only rejected the gendered household division of labor, I didnt have much interest in playing with dolls or Barbies. Instead, I took cat photos with my little yellow Kodak camera. I cut and pasted pictures out of magazines and wrote my own stories. I went on outdoor adventures with my three imaginary friends.

These quirks were cute when I was a little girl. Then I grew up.

In my late teens, when I first declared I was never having kids, a family member told me, You must have babies so the Muslims dont take over! Now in my late-20s, the most popular response has been: Youll change your mind.

This sweeping declaration doesnt take into account my underactive thyroid that occasionally hits me with debilitating fatigue or my susceptibility to anxiety and depression when diet, sleep and exercise are compromised. (But hey, kids wont affect that.) It doesnt account for the sense of purpose derived from my precarious journalism career or the desire to travel in order to better understand the world and my place in it.

When I was younger and far more insecure, my college boyfriend convinced me that few men would want to be with an ambitious, free-spirited woman like me. In rural Iowa, I was too different. He promised the kind of life I wanted. Every three to five years, wed move for my job. That was the agreement. That and no kids. I thought, This must be as good as it gets.

I married him.

But after a couple years, my stepping stone became his anchor. He had settled into a comfortable, well-paying technical career. And I was checking JournalismJobs.com every day. My incessant searching finally made him crack. I dont want to live like a nomad, he said. That and his affinity for alcohol made me leave. I took the 22-pound mixer with me.

Then, a strange thing happened. For the first time, I had people telling me, Good thing you dont have kids!

I could look at my starter marriage as a failure or a mistake. But I dont.

By getting divorced and essentially doing the thing I was not supposed to do, I freed myself from crushing expectations. I learned that the only real mistake would be believing Im unworthy of love. Or joy. Even it looks a little different.

Now, I get to try again.

I downloaded Bumble, Tinder and Coffee Meets Bagel. I hadnt been on a first date in more than seven years. Back then, these kinds of dating apps didnt exist. Now I stood in line at the grocery store and swiped through med students, airmen, farmers, truck drivers, pro-athletes and engineers. Never in my life have I seen more photos of men holding up dead pheasants, fish and deer. And then there were the ones with kids usually their nieces and nephews. Even that says, Im looking for the mother of my children. And thats not me.

I finally found a match on Tinder, but after 15 messages back and forth about weather and work, he brought up handcuffs and spanking. No thanks.

I had better luck on Coffee Meets Bagel and matched with Marcos the 31-year-old music-loving chef. Latino. Five-foot-10. Religion: Other.

When I asked Marcos what made him want to be a chef, he said, Usually, men arent in the kitchen if youre raised in a Mexican family, but since it was me and my two brothers, my mom taught us how to cook.

His enlightened response won me over. Our first date lasted six-hours, filled with coffee, crepes and great conversation. It ended with a goodnight kiss in the misting rain. We kept seeing each other, and after a couple months, I decided to tell my mom about the nice guy Id found, which begged the question, Whats his name?

Marcos.

Does he have a last name?

Vela.

Is heeeee

Mexican.

Oh, she said, I thought maybe he was Italian.

But she pronounces it, Eye-talian.

When Marcos had his big, black beard, he could have passed as Pakistani or Indian. (In fact, people have come up to him speaking Hindi.) But hes most definitely from Mexicoone of the Dreamers, tossed over a border fence by his teenage mother when he was 2 years old.

They left Acapulco. The coastal city in southern Mexico is part of a region densely populated with descendants of African slaves. Or people who, today, identify as Blaxicansblack Mexicans. A heritage he is proud of yet removed from.

A few weeks ago, we were walking through a flea market. In between the nostalgia-inducing model airplanes and My Little Ponies, he pointed to an illustrated reprinting of The Man Without a Country and said, Thats me.

Instantly, I knew that feeling of being out of place when you want to belong. But cant.

When I told my mother more about the talkative, well-groomed, fashion-savvy man Id foundthe one who can pick out my clothes and cook for meshe said, Just make sure he's not too different. Which I took to mean, Make sure he's not gay.

From our first date, I knew Marcos was different.

Over brunch, he answered a call from his mom. He was boyishly embarrassed at first but still told her, I love you, before he hung up. He apologized for the interruption and went on to tell me about his job at an upscale, modern American restauranthow he works from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. five days a week and teaches free music lessons in the Latino community on one of his days off. He shared his dream of opening his own restaurant, one in Australia, then Germany. He admired my confidence and wit, my independence and ambition.

Going against the advice on the Internet, I told Marcos that Im divorced and I dont want kids.

He stared at me with his deep brown eyes, reminiscent of two perfect little cups of coffee that I could drink in all day. His face softened into a smile and he said, Me, too.

---

Ally Karsyn is the arts producer and weekday afternoon announcer at Siouxland Public Media. She is also the founder, producer and host of Ode.

Odeis a storytelling series where community members tell true stories on stage to promote positive impact through empathy. Its produced by Siouxland Public Media.

The next event is 7 p.m. Friday, August 4 atBe Yoga Studioin downtown Sioux City. The theme is Little Did I Know. Tickets are available atkwit.org. For more information, visitfacebook.com/odestorytelling.

This story was produced as part of anImages & Voices of HopeRestorative Narrative Fellowship, which supports media practitioners who want to tell stories of resilience in communities around the U.S. and abroad.ivohis a nonprofit committed to strengthening the media's role as an agent of change and world benefit.

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Ode: Divorced and dating again, childfree by choice | KWIT - KWIT

Political Correctness: A 21st Century Stronghold Now Under Siege by Trademarks – Lexology (registration)

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The scene is set. Your mark is judged as disparaging. Can the Examining Attorney reject it? Fear not, because the Supreme Court in Tam cried: Free Speech! In recent years, the delimitation between First Amendment rights and trademark protection has resulted in repeated clashes, with inconsistent applications of the disparagement clause in Section 2(A) of the Lanham Act. As a result, it was little surprise that earlier this year the Supreme Court granted certiorari to consider whether the provision that bars registration of disparaging marks is facially unconstitutional, and to provide clearer guidelines to the US Patent and Trademark Office.

In 2011, Simon Tam filed an application with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to register the mark THE SLANTS for his rock band. Tam and his band were aware of the controversial nature of this term (slant being a derogatory epithet used to refer to persons of Asian ancestry), but they, as advocates and role models in the Asian American community, had hoped to reclaim the insult to empower their community much like other marginalized groups have done before them. Unfortunately, their hopes turned out to be in vain as the USPTO subsequently rejected their application.

In response to Tams challenge, the government advanced several reasons as to why the disparagement clause does not in their opinion - violate the protection of free speech under the First Amendment. First, it contended that trademarks constitute government speech and therefore fall outside the umbrella of the First Amendment. To persuade the justices, the government relied on the Walker v. Texas Division case, wherein a greatly divided court rendered a 5-4 decision finding constitutional a law that denied the use of confederate flags on specialty license plates. Interestingly, the dissenters in the Walker case constituted the majority in Tam, affording them an opportunity to curb the use of this doctrine, and declare that the Walker case delineates the outer bounds of the government speech doctrine, rather than its touchstone. In fact, in Tam, the court unanimously rejected the governments argument because, they found, the USPTO does not independently edit or cancel marks, lacking the intentionality and consistency of message sufficient to be considered government speech. On this, Justice Alito observed: if the federal registration of a trademark makes the mark government speech, the Federal Government is babbling prodigiously and incoherently.

The USPTO also argued that trademarks can be compared to similar government programs that subsidize speech expressing a particular viewpoint. The court noted, however, that all the cases advanced by the government involved the governments payment of cash subsidies or their equivalent, which is antithetical to the fee system in place for the registration of trademarks, where it is the applicant who pays fees to file and maintain the registration.

Finally, the government insisted that ultimately - the function of trademarks is to identify goods and services emanating from a particular commercial source, which classifies them as commercial speech and in turn grants limited First Amendment protection. True, trademarks are undoubtedly strictly intertwined with commercial activity, but even if trademarks were considered to be commercial speech - the issue is whether the disparagement clause could withstand the appropriate constitutional test. Specifically, restrictions on commercial speech must serve a substantial interest and be narrowly drawn. The USPTO contended that the first interest the clause advances is preventing underrepresented groups from exposure to demeaning messages in advertisement. The court clarified that the First Amendment however, protects speech that may be considered hateful just as strongly as any other speech. Then, the government explained that the orderly flow of commerce would be detrimentally affected by discriminatory conduct. Again, the court did not receive the argument and held that the disparagement clause is sufficiently broad to deny registration even to marks that oppose discrimination, rendering the governments argument moot.

Surprisingly, while the Court was unanimous (8-0) in reaching its decision, it was split in half as to the reasoning. Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan believed that the disparagement clause constituted viewpoint discrimination and is subject to rigorous constitutional analysis, which rendered consideration of any of the parties constitutional argument unnecessary. On the other hand, Justices Alito, Roberts, Thomas and Breyer agreed that trademark laws must at least survive Central Hudsons intermediate-scrutiny analysis. But the disparagement clause failed that test too.

By striking down the disparagement clause, the Court not only left free speech advocates and Simon Tam cheering, but also REDSKINS fans, who will see the fight against cancellation of their teams marks supported by a much stronger argument. Trademark litigants too, thanks to Tam, will now be in a better position to experiment and raise constitutional challenges to trademark law doctrines.

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Political Correctness: A 21st Century Stronghold Now Under Siege by Trademarks - Lexology (registration)

Big-headed gecko shows human actions are messing with evolution – Phys.Org

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August 1, 2017 by Jan Hoole Credit: Pixabay

Evolution doesn't have to take millions of years. New research shows that a type of lizard living on man-made islands in Brazil has developed a larger head than its mainland cousins in a period of only 15 years.

The group of insect-eating geckos from the species Gymnodactylus amarali was isolated from the rest of the population when areas of the countryside were flooded to provide hydro-electric power. This caused the extinction of some larger species of lizards on the new islands, leaving the geckos to eat insects that would normally have been mopped up by the bigger species. As a result, the geckos have evolved bigger mouths, and so bigger heads, that enable them to eat their larger prey more easily.

We've actually seen rapid evolution like this before, but usually in response to a natural disaster such as drought or climate change. What's different about the geckos is that they've evolved in direct response to an environmental change enacted by humans, demonstrating just how much impact we can have on the natural world.

The gecko study, published in PNAS, gives us an interesting demonstration of how evolution works, not just because the change has happened within our lifetimes. Those geckos among the original colony that had larger heads (and mouths) could eat a wider range of prey and so had more energy to put into survival and reproduction. As a result, they had more children and their genes for larger heads spread to a greater proportion of the next generation. This continued until larger heads had become a common feature of the group.

But why just those with bigger heads? Why didn't geckos whose whole bodies were bigger receive the same evolutionary advantage? Well larger bodies take more energy to maintain, so those individuals would lose the advantage that they gain by eating more food.

One of the most interesting things about this research is that the geckos on all five of the islands studied have evolved larger heads, even though they were isolated from each other. This suggests that increasing head size without increasing body size is the most efficient way to take advantage of the opportunity to eat a more varied diet than is normal for this species.

This kind of rapid evolution has been seen before, including among the finches of the Galapagos Islands that helped Charles Darwin formulate his theory of natural selection in the first place. One of these finches species reduced the average size of its bill in a period of just 22 years when a competitor with a larger bill colonised the island.

The larger species ate all the larger seeds with tough shells, a large bill that still couldn't compete became a disadvantage for the finches and so those birds with a smaller beak began to thrive. This is one of the fundamental principles of biology: if you don't need a particular structure you don't bother to grow it and save the energy instead.

A similar instance occurred in Florida when a lizard called the Cuban brown anole, which is much larger than the native green anole, colonised areas of Florida. The green anole promptly retreated up into the treetops and within 20 generations had evolved bigger, stickier foot pads, a helpful characteristic for the high life.

Human impact

Another example of rapid evolutionary change was found in Soay sheep on the island of Hirta in St Kilda off the coast of Scotland. After the residents of the island were evacuated in 1930, the sheep were allowed to run wild and, within 25 years, began to get smaller. The explanation put forward for this is that milder winters caused by climate change are allowing smaller lambs to survive, bringing down the average size of the whole population.

This suggests that we should expect to see many more examples of rapid evolution as the climate continues to change in response to greenhouse gas emissions. But the new study on geckos shows that localised human action can also interfere with the processes of evolution. Although the change in head and mouth size in the gecko seems benign, we should remember it came about because of the extinction of four other species of lizard in the area linked to the flooding. It's a timely reminder that climate change is not the only issue facing biodiversity and evolutionary processes.

Explore further: The world's largest canary

More information: Mariana Eloy de Amorim et al. Lizards on newly created islands independently and rapidly adapt in morphology and diet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1709080114

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Since evolution is a reaction to changes in environment, man is no more "messing" with evolution than naturally-occuring weather changes or volcanic activity. Imbeciles and propagandists.

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Big-headed gecko shows human actions are messing with evolution - Phys.Org

‘Tacoma’ Creators Talk Diversity, Evolution and ‘Gone Home … – RollingStone.com

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It has been more than three years since The Fullbright Company's game Gone Home captivated audiences, swept game of the year awards and sparked a debate about what it means to be a video game.

This week the studio releases Tacoma, its second game, to an audience which, to some degree, still seems hung-up on that singular definition. Fortunately, Fullbright's Tacoma looks like it wont make that question any easier to answer.

As with Gone Home, the game is a narratively-driven experience powered by emotion, evolving relationships and a solid mystery.

Gone Home told the story of a daughter returning home to an empty family house and the threads of story she finds there as she explores its familiar rooms.Tacoma takes the audience to outer space.

The new game opens with technician Amy Ferrier docking at the lunar transfer station Tacoma. She's there to figure out what happened at the station to cause it to be evacuated. Her only company is a malfunctioning artificial intelligence named Odin and the augmented reality recordings of the six evacuated crew members time on the station.

Player's float through the station, untethered from gravity, searching for clues and signs of the AR recordings.

The recordings play back the audio of conversations, substituting the now absent crew members with ghostly, colorful apparitions going through the recorded motions of the crew. The playback can be paused, rewound, fast-forwarded and watched from any angle in the ship.

Detached from time or sequence, these snippets seem as adrift in time as you are adrift in space. It's up to the player to reassemble the pieces of time into something that makes sense and sort out what exactly happened.

As with Gone Home, dropping into a mysteriously emptied living space, Tacoma manages to deliver an ever so slight sense of creeping dread without ever having to scare the player or deliver anything overtly menacing. Instead, it creates a vacuum within which the players own doubts and fears can reside.

While the Fullbright team worked to expand upon the core conceits of the original game, co-founder Steve Gaynor explainsTacoma isn't really meant to be an evolution of Gone Home's style of play.

"If you think of Gone Home as a foundation, our direction isn't to make the foundation bigger, nor is it to have a foundation of a ranch house and then add a Victorian on top of it," he tells Rolling Stone. "We have a foundation and it has these constraints."

Nor is the game meant to really be an expansion of those original ideas, says Fullbright co-founder Karla Zimonja.

"We think of it as a layering," she says. "We made Gone Home as a foundational game for what we do. Then we thought, 'What can we add to this? What can we lay on top and what can we tweak?'"

Where Gone Home received some criticism for being so light on meaningful, direct interaction, Tacoma has moments that offer challenges more akin to traditional puzzles. It still, though, hinges entirely on unraveling a mystery.

Fans of Gone Home will likely find more to reflect on in the way Tacoma delivers its story than its gameplay.

Because the player is left to wander the space station and find snippets of interactions, it feels less like the sort of storytelling found in a novel and something closer to the sort of performance art found in immersive performances such asSleep No More. This unusual presentation pushes the use of narrative forward but doesn't really tinker too much with the non-storytelling elements of the game.

This way of presenting story seems a better fit with what mostly motivates Zimonja, Gaynor and team: examining relationships. That focus on relationships also lends itself to creations by Fullbright that tend to feature a more diverse cast of characters.

"We are interested in people and relationships with one another," Zimonja says, "and there are a lot of people out there to explore. So it's satisfying to us to try and branch out."

According to Gaynor, that diversity in cast also tends to make for better story.

"It is always the most interesting for us to explore a variety of perspective and character types, people of different sexual orientations, different class backgrounds," he says. "We want to look at how people from different perspectives all relate in the fictional world we are creating. I think that primarily comes from me and Karla, from a story team being interested in wanting to talk about more and different kinds of people."

The team doesn't start a game by casting it, despite the importance they place on that cast.

"It's, 'What is our universe? What is the story?' and then we populate that with characters that our interesting to us and relevant to the experience," Gaynor says.

The hope, he says, is that players will get to know these characters and care about them. "Our goal is to take someone who is not invested at all in the game and its story and by the time they have played for awhile they don't want to put it down," Gaynor says.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Gone Home and Tacoma is where the team was coming from during the development of the titles.

Gone Home was a small passion project created by a team of developers who wanted to make something more personal, more intimate than what makes up the bulk of video game sales. It came out of nowhere, winning over players and critics alike with its unusual approach to gameplay and storytelling. The same can't be said for Tacoma: All eyes are on this, Fullbright's second game, and the studio knows it.

"More people are paying attention before we launch, Gaynor explains. "There's more pressure. All of that pressure is there, for sure, but we feel good about the game."

That pressure hasn't changed the team's design philosophy, Gaynor adds, instead it has inspired the team to see how they can take the success of Gone Home and push that into new territory that they haven't explored before. "And then hopefully, execute the game in a way that players will be excited about."

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Bio station lecture to focus on bird nest evolution – Petoskey News-Review

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PELLSTON Jordan Price, a University of Michigan Biological Station faculty member, will present a lecture about bird nest evolution at 7:30 p.m. today, Tuesday, Aug. 1, at the Gates Lecture Hall at the biological station near Pellston.

Perching birds of the order Passeriformes, such as warblers, sparrows, thrushes and finches, are considered by birders and ornithology enthusiasts as master nest-builders. Their abilities as nest architects are thought to have played an important role in how they evolved and diversified (through evolutionary radiation).

This group of birds originated in Australia, and they were so successful from an evolutionary standpoint that more than half of all bird species in the world are passerines. Their nests are likely an important factor in that success.

When analyzing nest evolution, biologists often assume that nest architecture became more complex over time, progressing from simple cup-shaped nests to more elaborate domed structures with roofs. But which came first? Thats the question Price will explore in his talk, The Surprising Evolution of Bird Nests.

Hell describe the evolutionary history of passerine nests, focusing on early Australian lineages and species found here in Michigan. In the process, hell explain what nest-building behavior can tell us about the evolution of bird behavior, in general.

Price is the Steven Muller Distinguished Professor of the Sciences at St. Marys College of Maryland and is the chair of the biology department. His research integrates techniques from behavioral ecology and molecular phylogenetics to investigate the evolutionary histories of animal traits, especially the behaviors, sounds, and color patterns of birds. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and bachelors degree from Queens University in Canada.

Price is the University of Michigan Biological Stations Hann Endowed lecturer for 2017.

The University of Michigan Biological Station entrance is located at the intersection of Riggsville Road and East Burt Lake Road. Follow the signs to parking near the Gates Lecture Hall. The event is free and open to the public. Staff ask that no pets be brought to the biological station, as they need to protect ongoing scientific research projects.

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Bio station lecture to focus on bird nest evolution - Petoskey News-Review

Dr. Wayne Podrouzek, Evolution in Research Interest and Undergraduate Psychology – The Good Men Project (blog)

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Dr. Wayne Podrouzek works as an Instructor for the Psychology Department ofUniversity of the Fraser Valleyand instructor in thePsychology Department ofKwantlen Polytechnic University. Dr. Podrouzek earned his a Bachelor of Arts in Child Studies and a Bachelor of Science (Honours) fromMount Saint Vincent University, a Master of Arts fromSimon Fraser University, and Ph.D. fromSimon Fraser Universityunder Dr. Bruce Whittlesea. Here is part 1 of an interview from a few years ago.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your current position in the Psychology Faculty?

Dr. Wayne Podrouzek:Im currentlyfull timefaculty and chair of the department.

Jacobsen: Where did you acquire your education? What did you pursue in your studies?

Podrouzek:I did my undergrad work in Nova Scotia at Mount St. Vincent U, although there is (was) aninteruniversityagreement therewheremany courses can be taken at Dalhousie, Saint Marys, or the Mount and simply count at the other universities, so I took many courses at the other schools. At Dal and SMU I did quite a bit of philosophy and religious studies, some bio at Dal, somebehaviouralstuff at SMU, etc. Its actually quite a good system. All the universities are within about a hour drive of each other, offer diverse courses, and therearea minimum of administrative obstacles.

I gotedjamacatedcause I was working with children and teenagers with the equivalent of the Ministry of Children and Families and the Provincial Attorney General (with teens who had been incarcerated) in Alberta and realized that to have more influence I would need some university education (I had obtained a diploma). Mt. St. Vincent had one of Canadas only two programs for working with children (Bachelor of Child Studies BCS) and so I sent back there to pick up that credential.

Jacobsen: What originally interested you in Psychology? If your interest evolved, how did your interest change over time to the present?

Podrouzek:As part of the BCS, we were required to complete a substantial number of bio and psych courses, and I became interested in psychology,subtypedevelopmentalpsychology,specifically child language development. I completed my BCS, then did a BSc Honours in Psych (minors in Math/Stats and Biology), and started a Masters in Education (I picked this up in my last year of my Honours as extra courses) and completed all the coursework but not the project. I was subsequently awarded an NSERC, and some other money, and was accepted into the MA at Simon Fraser, so abandoned my MEd to come out here. I kind of wish I had finished the MEd now but I really just didnt see the necessity at the time. Because of its emphasis oncounsellingand testing I could have used it to become registered in BC it would have opened some doors. Cant yall just seem me as a therapist? Hmmm, thats scary.

At any rate, I originally went to SFU because it was supposed to get some equipment to do acoustical analyses of language (which at the time was about a $60K piece of equipment called aSonograph, and today you can do the same thing with an A-D board that costs less than $100), and I had done my Honours Project on An acoustical analysis of pre-lexical child utterances in pragmatically constrained contexts (or something like that and wanted to continue that work.) However, the equipment fell through, so I switch to perception. I did my MA thesis in perception on the question of the order of visual processing (what do you process first, the global scene and then analyze for the bits, or the bits first and then synthesize them into the whole scene: the Global-Local question).

I began myPhDin perception, but then met Dr. Bruce Whittlesea, and became interested in memory theory, so I switched to that area and completed myPhDin his lab. I did my dissertation on Repetition Blindness in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Lists (an examination of the phenomenon that you tend not to see repetitions of words in quickly presented word lists).

Since myPhDI have become interested in how the blind spot gets filled in, subjective contours, retrieval induced forgetting, and for a brief time, the science underlyingneuropsychtesting.

Jacobsen: Since your time as an undergraduate student, what are the major changes in the curriculum? What has changed regarding the conventional ideas?

Podrouzek:Wow, thats a hard one so much has happened in so many areas. When I started as an undergrad (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth with people), the areasthenare usually considered the core areas now. These included methods, stats, measurement theory, bio, social, developmental, cognitive, andbehaviouralin the experimental areas, and testing, abnormal, and therapy in the clinical areas. We had rat labs in intro every student got two rats and we ran experiments on the rats and wrote the experiments up in the lab books (something like doing chem labs. Then we got to kill them). Consciousness was not discussed that was akin to studying magic. Evolutionary Psych did not exist (although its precursor, sociobiology did). Although Kuhn had published his controversial book The structure of scientific revolutions, his ideas were discussed but, I think, not taken to heart by most scientists.

Later, with other philosophers of science (e.g., Feyerabend, Lakoff), publishing works that in some ways augmented his, our assumptions and views of even methodologies changed. Of course, change your assumptions, change your methods, and you change your field. Things loosened up considerably. Areas ofenquiryand the acceptable methods and what could count as reasonable data become much more encompassing, and thus new areas of psychology emerged. We certainly didnt have courses on sex, for example, or prejudice, cultural, gender (other than straight up sex differences, other aspects of that field would have been taught in Womens Studies), and the list goes ever on.

When I attended university there were upper level specialty courses in Psycholinguistics (Chomsky) a brilliant, complex theory of language (particularly, syntax and transformations, and semantics), Piaget and Vygotsky, behaviour, modification (applied behavior analysis), parallel and distributed processing, and other things that are now of historical interest, but at the time were all the rage.

Original publication in http://www.in-sightjournal.com.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Scott Douglas Jacobsen founded In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. He works as an Associate Editor and Contributor for Conatus News, Editor and Contributor to The Good Men Project, a Board Member, Executive International Committee (International Research and Project Management) Member, and as the Chair of Social Media for the Almas Jiwani Foundation, Executive Administrator and Writer for Trusted Clothes, and Councillor in the Athabasca University Students Union. He contributes to the Basic Income Earth Network, The Beam, Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Check Your Head, Conatus News, Humanist Voices, The Voice Magazine, and Trusted Clothes. If you want to contact Scott: [emailprotected]; website: http://www.in-sightjournal.com; Twitter: https://twitter.com/InSight_Journal.

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Dr. Wayne Podrouzek, Evolution in Research Interest and Undergraduate Psychology - The Good Men Project (blog)

BMW C Evolution Electric Scooter Is Coming to California – The Drive

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BMW has been selling the C Evolution electric moped in Europe since 2014 and its finally coming to the U.S., according to Motorcycle.com. Across the pond, you can get a short-range model that goes 62 miles on a charge or a long-range model that goes 99 miles. To suit American tastes and our sprawling landscape, only the long range C Evolution will be available in the States.

For starters, American availability of the BMW C Evolution will only be in California where its expected to be popular. Its a pilot program that will expand to the rest of the BMW Motorrad dealer network in the U.S. as interest in the electric scooter builds.

Pricing starts at $13,750 with options that include an anti-theft alarm for $395, a comfort seat for $145, and heated grips for $250. Its powered by the same battery modules as the BMW i3 subcompact EV. You can get a full charge from an 110-volt socket in 9.5 hours or use a fast charge 220-volt accessory cable to achieve a full charge in four hours.

The C Evolution in the U.S. will have a top speed of 80 miles per hour and will hustle from to 0-31 MPH in 2.8 seconds making it a great city conveyance. Standard features include ABS, reverse assist, torque control assist, and four ride modes: Road, Eco Pro, Dynamic, and Sail. The only color available for now is Ionic Silver Metallic / Electric Green. If youre worried about the battery, you get a five-year, 30,000-mile battery warranty.

There arent any specific dates in the press release saying when its coming but expect the C Evolution to start trickling into California dealers very soon. If youre in the golden state, keep an eye out for this nifty scooter.

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BMW C Evolution Electric Scooter Is Coming to California - The Drive

26 photos that show Jessica Biel’s dramatic fashion evolution – INSIDER

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Both her hair color and her fashion choices have transformed. Jon Kopaloff and Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

Jessica Biel has undergone a pretty dramatic style transformation.

The 35-year-old actress was just 14 when she was cast on "7th Heaven," which premiered back in 1996. Since then, she's been known for her roles in films like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "The A-Team." Her most recent role is the lead character in the USA limited drama "The Sinner," which premieres August 2.

Here's a look through Biel's fashion choices through the years, from questionable crop tops to glamorous gowns.

She was cast when she was 14 years old. Brenda Chase/Getty Images

This was in 2002. David Klein/Getty Images

This was at the 2002 premiere of "The Rules Of Attraction." Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images

This was at the 2004 MTV Movie Awards. Mark Mainz/Getty Images

It was an interesting outfit choice. Kevin Winter/Getty Images

This was at the MTV Movie Awards. Frank Micelotta/Getty Images

She carried a cute clutch at her side. Evan Agostini/Getty Image

She still had her lighter hair. Kevin Winter/Getty Images

She was in the Oscar-nominated film "The Illusionist." Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

She starred in the film "Easy Virtue," which was shown at the festival. Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

This was in 2008. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

This was in 2009. Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

She paired it with a black clutch. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

It looks more purple in other lighting. Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

The theme was "The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion." Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images

She makes some weird outfit choices. Jason Merritt/Getty Images

Where does the dress end? Ian Gavan/Getty Images

Her hair was also darker. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

She also went with blunt bangs. Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

Her hair was lighter again. Jason Merritt/Getty Images

The two became parents in 2015. Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

It was an off-the-shoulder dress. Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

She went with her husband. Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Husband Justin Timberlake matched in black. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

Her clutch matched. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

She even switched out her clutch, too. Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

We can't wait to see what she wears next.

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26 photos that show Jessica Biel's dramatic fashion evolution - INSIDER

Amazon Robotics Challenge 2017 won by Australian budget bot … – BBC News

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Amazon's competition to create a warehouse robot is won by a machine with an unusual design.
Amazon's New Robo-Picker Champion Is Proudly Inhuman - MIT ...MIT Technology Review
Robots in the sand - KnowTechieKnowTechie

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Robotics camp lets Novi’s Frog Force girls pay it forward – Hometownlife.com

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Novi High students prep a robot for competition on July 21 on the final day of the Girls' Robotics Workshop. Staffed by volunteers from the school's Frog Force robotics team, the weeklong camp was designed to introduce middle school girls to the engineering and math required for robotics competition. From left are: Shana Gubbi, and siblings Anne and Leah George, right.(Photo: JOHN HEIDER | hometownlife.com)

Girls from Frog Force 503, the Novi High School robotics team, spent some time paying it forward this summer.

Fresh off a strong competition season in FIRST Robotics, the students planned, organized and taught a five-day robotics workshop in July for rising seventh- and eighth-grade girls, some of whom will likely join Frog Force themselves once in high school.

The idea was to inspire the younger girls to explore robotics and the FIRST program as well as to help them build confidence in STEM subjects (science, mathematics, engineering and technology), in which girls are underrepresented.

Community involvement has long been a part of Novi High's FIRST program. But this was the first all-girls workshop at the middle school level in Novi, said Janelle Moore, the Frog Force outreach mentor.

"Part of our mission is to let the community know about the FIRST program for younger ages, to mentor those teams, to help parents start those teams," Moore said. "Our high school girls wanted to start with the middle school because they felt that was the age to reach the girls."

The workshop was July 17-21, for 3hours a day, at the high school.

"They learned about electricity and circuits. They learned about gearing. They did a whole section on game strategy and analysis. ... Then they applied those things to their (robot) build," Moore said.

They also scrimmaged their robots in a game, STEM Gems, invented by the high schoolers. It was played on a 12- by 12-foot field, the standard size in FIRST Tech Challenge, the FIRST middle school program.

"You could really see those girls open up and blossom over the week," Moore said.

Robotic competition gets underway in the late morning at Novi High during the last day of the school's summer Girls' STEM Workshop. Teams were trying to place plastic boxes in the squares in a robot-version of tic-tac-toe.(Photo: JOHN HEIDER | hometownlife.com)

On the workshop's last day, parents got to stop in and see their daughters' projects.

At the middle school level, Novi has more than a dozen robotics teams, including an all-girls team that qualified for state competition in the spring.

"We'dlike to continue that and form another (girls) team," Moore said.

At Novi High, girls make up about 30 percent of Frog Force 503, which has about 115 members, she said.

"We're trying to reach 50 percent, which is a FIRST Robotics goal and a Frog Force goal," Moore said.

FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is a not-for-profit that encourages the study of STEM subjects.

Anne George works on a robot.(Photo: JOHN HEIDER | hometownlife.com)

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Why Co-Parenting With Telepresence Robots Could Be a Fantastic Idea – IEEE Spectrum

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Photo: Suitable Technologies The Beam remote presence system, from Suitable Technologies, allows you to "beam in" and visit family members from anywhere. Social roboticist Heather Knight argues that such technology could become a valuable co-parenting tool.

Theres always something heart-wrenching when parents have to be far away from their children. Sometimes parents travel. Sometimes separated parents split time with the kids.

Maybe telepresence robots can help.

This article explores some of the potential benefits and challenges of using telepresence robots as a co-parenting tool. To my knowledge, there is only oneresearch instance of this[pdf], so a lot of questions remain to be answered. What is clearis thatthere are reasons why co-parenting with telepresence robots could be a fantastic idea, and reasons that this could be terrible. Lets start with the fantastic.

Lets review some shortcomings of Skype, FaceTime, and similar applications when they are used for communicating with younger children.

Screens feel distant:The benefit of robots over screen-based communication is that they are physically present. A six-month-old might ignore mommy or daddy on the screen, but find parent-robot delightful. A more companionable parent avatar might help distant parents feel closer to their kids. The robot doesnt need to be particularly complexSkype-on-a-stick is a great way to beginbecause just the fact that it can move through the space will change the way kidsinteract with it.

The kids fight over the phone:I have 2- and 4-year-old sons, and they both want to hold the phone when I am traveling. If I had a telepresence robot, I could control the view myself, either moving the baseideally an omnidirectional robot so I can rotate in placeor moving an actuated head. No more fighting.

A child decides to watch Netflix instead:I dont know who came up with the idea of putting every application you can think of on a single device, but as a parent of two, I hate you! One of the major drawbacks of using a phone or iPad to Skype with your childrenis that these smart device super-users (a.k.a. 2-year-olds) might not be of the wait-to-eat-the-marshmallow variety, and realize they are just a button-and-two-clicks away from Clifford the Big Red Dog. Attaching your device to a projector generally helps, but a single purpose telepresence robot (hopefully with lots of fake buttons so they cant figure out how to turn it off) could also be the solution.

Kids dont like to sit still: If your child doesnt have the gift of the gab today, sometimes adult-like turn-taking conversations become dull and they might now talk to you for very long. Contrast that with a robot that can play tag, or chase a toddler across the house. Yay! Lets play tag! There could be a whole new market at the holidays for books addressing games you can play with your kids through telepresence robots.

Technology can be used and misused, so here are some guidelines and precautions for using co-parenting robots for positive impact.

Robots should not replace real parents:This might seem like a ridiculous newspaper headline from a dystopian future, but it is important to understand here that the purpose of social and socially-augmenting robots is to connect people, not replace human connection. Social networks dont replace in-person friendships and direct conversation, and similarly, parents should not use telepresence robots as an excuse to stay late at work every night or just watch sports/do their nails when they come home. The point is to make the times when youneedto be away from your children more satisfying. I tell my kids that one of the hardest skills to learn in the world is sharing, and so it is with parents who split the time with their kids.

Think about size:The telepresence robots out there today are not optimized for children. Having adjustable heights down to 2 feet or so would be great. Maybe someone can partner with Fisher-Price to make it childproofand hide the power/volume buttons. (Willow Garage, a fabled robotics company, now foregone, had a remote worker who would drive into peoples chairs when people turned his volume off. Im sure a child would find such a sequence entertaining too.)

Dont use robots for alienation of affection:Maybe Im biased, but I think robots are pretty cool, and a lot of kids do too. When someone goes out of town, thats often a chance for the other parent to be in chargeso maybe dont interrupt homemade pizza night with a super cool robot just when the kids were about to put on the toppings. Im not sure exactly how to incorporate this into a robot user interface or behavior system, but it would be a fascinating area for future research. How do we get robots to help us help ourselves? Sometimes we know the right thing to do, but a little notification here or there could make us pause for a second before we hit that robot call button.

Dont hack your exs robot:Im not a psychologist, but I am pretty good with technology. That being said, it seems pretty intuitive that hacking your exs telepresence robot is not going to benefit your co-parenting relationship. I suggest robot designers consider cyber-security a top priority in this sometimes high-emotion application context.

Lets let our imaginations run wild and think about future risks and benefits should such a technology truly take off. Im having fun here, but sometimes science fiction is exactly what inspires future technology designers.

Robots as mediators:Thinking back to the alienation of affection by robot (lawyers should have a field day with that one in custody battles), could a robot have a role in improving parent-to-parent or parent-to-child communication? This might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Cornell researcher Guy Hoffman and colleagues studiedmediated telepresence between conflict-ridden couples[pdf], including a robotic telepresence that cowered when someone spoke in angry tones. The robots reaction, at least in a user study context, did cue the participants to speak in kinder tones. In addition to reminding you when might be a bad time to call, they might be able to give you live feedback about a current call.

Applications for marriage therapy:Related to the above, perhaps annotated interaction logs (or extracted quotes?) could be sampled in marriage therapy or individual counseling to help peoplelearn to improve their communication patterns. Obviously privacy would be an enormous concern, so perhaps the parents would need to approve the clips ahead of time, host them on their own devices, and they would be automatically deleted after the session. Proceed with caution! However, these robots would be transmitting lots of personalized data, and just like with data-driven analysis, which is helping us solve problems from image classification to financial markets, I would expect future therapy practices to benefit from life-habits analysis.

What about privacy?With any technology that stores personal data, and as we have seen with the various hacked toys so far, co-parenting robots would need to have bulletproof data-protection. Just like when people thought they would never use credit cards on the internet, and now 75 percent of us do our holiday shopping online, people will get used to managing data privacy for social devices and general technology. Were too addicted to them to not make them work. Robots with social capabilities also raise particular privacy concerns: If the robot had some local intelligence or conversational capabilities, it might easily convince a small child or the other parent to reveal personal information as they bond with the system itself. (So much more to say on this topic, but lets save robot social manipulation for a future post.)

Remote co-parenting could leverage embodiment to help remote parents feel closer to their children via embodiment, spatial games, singular use devices, and improved engagement. Its risks include bad physical designs (in terms of both safety and interaction), misuse by parents who meant better but find it easier to call via robot than to come home early, or other parents who also use it to stalk their partner (Whosepair of shoes are thosebehind that door?). The future is exciting, and with balanced consideration, I hope robot designers consider all sides.

And yes I am in Silicon Valley for the summer, so if theres a company that wants to buy this idea and pay me lots of money to help them get it to work, Im happy to take this post down.

But right now, its my childrens bedtime

Dr. Heather Knightis currently the robotic artist in resident at X, the advanced technology lab of Googles parent company, Alphabet. Starting in fall 2017 she will bea computer science professor at Oregon State University, in Corvallis. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, non-verbal machine communications, and non-anthropomorphic social robots. She completed her PhD in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and holdsB.S. and M.S. degrees from MIT. Follow her on Twitter: @heatherknight

IEEE Spectrums award-winning robotics blog, featuring news, articles, and videos on robots, humanoids, drones, automation, artificial intelligence, and more. Contact us:e.guizzo@ieee.org

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Joe Jones, the inventor of the Roomba, argues that home robots will follow computers into the shadows 10Jul

The inventor of the Roomba tells us about his new solar-powered, weed-destroying robot 6Jul

With an easy-to-use interface based on MIT's Scratch, you can command Cozmo to do complex tasks without any programming experience 26Jun

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Billed as a Replacement for Man, the Hughes Mobot combined strength with a delicate touch 26May

At-home telepresence gets significantly more affordable, although it's still not cheap 13Apr

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Why Co-Parenting With Telepresence Robots Could Be a Fantastic Idea - IEEE Spectrum

Aussie Robotics Win Amazon Robotics Challenge – National Geographic Australia

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Two teams entered the skills robotics challenge which saw teams build their own hardware and software to successfully pick and stow items in a warehouse.

Amazon is known for being able to quickly package and ship millions of items daily from locations all over the world. But the company is yet to develop automated picking technology.

A total of eight teams made it the finals, the Aussie team the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, was placed fifth after the picking and stowing rounds. According to the Centres COO Dr Sue Keay, it was a tense few hours.

Our team top scored early with 272 points on the final combined stowing and picking task, but we then had to wait on the results for five other teams, many of whom had outperformed us in the rounds, before it became clear that we had won.

Not bad for a robot that was only unpacked and reassembled out of suitcases a few days before the event, with at least one key component held together with cable ties.

The winning robot: Cartman, was a Cartesian robot developed by the team. Cartmans movement is similar to that of a gantry crane, it can move along three axes at right angles to each other. The robot also features rotating gripper that enabled the robot to pick up items using a suction device or a simple two-finger grip.

The unique design of the robot was what won the team the prize. Juxi describes the robots design:

With six degrees of articulation and both a claw and suction gripper, Cartman gives us more flexibility to complete the tasks than most robots can offer.

The team made up of people from QUT, The University of Adelaide and the Australian National University travelled all the way to Japan to compete in the event. The team spent more than 15,000 hours developing Cartman.

The competition was made up of object recognition, pose recognition, grasp planning, compliant manipulation, motion planning, task planning, task execution and error detection and recovery challenges. The robots were judged on how well they picked and stowed in a set amount of time.

"We are world leaders in robotic vision, and we're pushing the boundaries of computer vision and machine learning to complete these tasks in an unstructured environment," says Juxi.

According to Dr Anton Milan, Cartmans vision system was the result of hours of training data and training time, We had to create a robust vision system to cope with objects that we only got to see during the competition.

Our vision system had the perfect trade-off of training data, training time and accuracy.....We only needed just seven images of each unseen item for us to be able to detect them.

University of Adelaide team member Dr Trung Pham agrees, "Our robot uses deep learning to see robustly and acts reliably due to smart design. The competition was a fantastic chance for us to truly test our state-of-the-art algorithms as well as opening up new real-world challenges that go beyond academic research.

It feels amazing to have accomplished this, says Anton. Excellent team effort. Looking at the overall performance across all teams, we see huge advances in robotics and AI. We definitely have very exciting times ahead of us.

Header:Team ACRV is ecstatic with a score of 272 points in the final round of the Amazon Robotics Challenge

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Aussie Robotics Win Amazon Robotics Challenge - National Geographic Australia

Robots should make money, save money, increase productivity, or deliver entertainmentand let humans be human – Quartz

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The age of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics is upon us, but the current fad of emotional humanoid robots is not headed in the right direction.

First, lets understand what robotics are based on:

Given the above, it is ludicrous to think that human-like robots will roam our homes any time soon. When a robot looks like a person, talks like a person, and has features like a person, home users will have unattainable human-capability expectations. The disappointment alone will doom any company hoping to bring science fiction to the living room in the next decade, not to mention the price-sensitivity for consumer markets.

Robotics must begin with utilitarianism in mindrobots should make money, save money, increase productivity, or deliver entertainment. There will be industrial robots that build other robots in high-volume, manufactured with todays technologies. There will be commercial robots that deliver economic value (such as replacing security, receptionists, and drivers). There will be consumer robots that mimic todays appliances and toys, requiring no consumer education, and causing no human-capability expectation.

These robots wont look like a person. The industrial robot is a giant factory run in the dark by machines (like at Foxconns most advanced factories), or a warehouse with smart forklifts (like our investment Dorabot). The commercial robot comes in various forms and applications. It might look like an array of cameras (like our investment Megvii) or an automated store (like our investment F5 Future Store). The autonomous vehicle will look like a car, except will be first deployed in low-speed, freight, or fixed-function transportsuch as in airport autonomous car-only lanes, or in transport from parking garages to shopping malls/theme parks (like our investment UISee). And the consumer robot may look like a speaker (like the Amazon Echo), a TV, a vacuum cleaner (like Roomba), an educational toy (like our investment Wonder Workshop Dash Bot), or a pad-on-steroids for family communications (like our investment Ainemo).

Will AI capabilities increase over time? Of course. Speech recognition will get better, computer vision will improve, SLAM will be improved to help the robot move around fluidly, and the robot will be able to translate languages, or have a dialog within limited domains. The robot may be able to read some of our emotions, or mimic certain human emotions. But this mimicking will go from laughable and entertaining to occasionally acceptableand generally not genuine. For decades to come, robots by themselves will be unable to learn common sense reasoning, creativity, or planning. They also wont possess the self-awareness, feelings, and desires that humans do. This type of general AI does not exists, and there are no known engineering algorithms for it. I dont expect to see those algorithms for decades, if ever.

Trying to make robots human-like is a natural temptation for robotics and AI scientists, and predicting humanoid robots comes naturally to science fiction writers. But we humans simply think differently from AI. We create and AI optimizes. We love and AI is stoic. We have common sense and AI learns patterns from big data in a singular domain. Simply stated, we are good at what AI is not, and AI is good at what we are not.

In the future, the human edge will be in creativity and social interaction. Therefore, we need to focus robotics development toward what theyre good at: repetitive tasks, optimization, and utilitarian value creation. We should also let people do what theyre good at: innovation, creation, human-to-human interaction, and performing services.

I am an advocate of making utilitarian robots, and encouraging people to go into service jobs. I am not an advocate of making humanoid service robotsit is too hard today, and will not meet peoples expectations; therefore they will likely fail. Whether or not my analysis is correct, we need to be reminded that in the next decade AI will replace a massive number of manual-labor, repetitive, and analytical jobs. We have a human responsibility to help create societal service jobsnot dream or plan a society in which all jobs come with a sign not applicable to humans.

Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Robots should make money, save money, increase productivity, or deliver entertainmentand let humans be human - Quartz

LIGHTNING STRIKES AGAIN! Robotics team wins inaugural … – Hometownlife.com

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When it rains it pours -- confetti, that is. The field is nearly hidden in a sea of confetti after Team 862 and its alliance members won the Festival of Champions.(Photo: Mike Saunders)

Not even the school year can contain Plymouth-Canton's Lightning Robotics Team 862.

Three months after capturing a world championship in St. Louis, Team 862 traveled to New Hampshire to team with its St. Louis alliance to win the inaugural FIRST Robotics Festival of Champions.

The competition the first of its kind in the birthplace of FIRST Robotics pitted the world championship teams from this spring's competitions in St. Louis and in Houston, Texas.

And the festival was won in epic style, with Team 862 and its St. Louis alliance Stryke Force from Kalamazoo, Cheesy Poofs from San Jose, Calif., and The Pascack PI-oneers from New Jersey scoring a record 588 points to win the best of five match, 3-2.

Team 862 faculty advisor Jay Obsniuk with the star of the show, Valkyrie.(Photo: Mike Saunders)

"It was the most amazing weekend," said Jay Obsniuk, the robotics honcho and faculty adviser to Team 862. "To meet (FIRST Robotics founder) Dean Kamenand all the leaders who attendedand then to go out and win was amazing."

Plymouth-Canton actually sat out the first two matches of the best-of-five series against the Houston champions teams from California, Arizona and Georgia then got back into the rotation for the third matches.

The St. Louis alliance came back to win the final three matches of the set to win the inaugural title.

"It was really exciting to come back and win three straight," Obsniuk said.

Vivian Clements, who starts her senior year at Canton High School next month, said the Festival of Champions is different from the world championships in St. Louis. For one thing, she said, you don't have to compete to find out whether you're chosen to be in an alliance.

Having a lot of those kinds of issues settled made for a quick, exciting competition, she said.

"In St. Louis, you're competing very hard for three days," said Clements, who served as a human player, collecting and feeding gears to the team's robot, Valkyrie. "The Festival of Champions is different. You already know who your alliance is, you just have to work hard and do your best. It was a whole big collaborative effort."

Theoretically, 2017 graduate Tyler Harris's robotics career should have been over. Harris, the team's pilot in the on-field airship,was part of the St. Louis alliance that captured Plymouth-Canton's first world titleand then put off starting at Kettering University in order to travel to New Hampshire.

Obviously, he's pretty happy he did.

"It's insane. ... When you go from just having an idea to having a full-fledged robot to working with your alliance ... it's mind-boggling," said Harris, due in a college classroom about 12 hours after returning from the trip. "I wouldn't trade that experience for anything."

bkadrich@hometownlife.com

Twitter: @bkadrich

An enthusiastic crowd of supporters welcomed Team 862 back from New Hampshire.(Photo: Brad Kadrich)

Pilot Tyler Harris, who is now off to Kettering to get his college career started, was all smiles after the Festival of Champions.(Photo: Mike Saunders)

Team 862 from Plymouth-Canton worked with its alliance to win the first Festival of Champions.(Photo: Mike Saunders)

Members of Team 862 show off the championship banner they brought home from the Festival of Champions in New Hampshire.(Photo: Brad Kadrich)

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South Dakota dairy looks to future with robotics – Rapid City Journal

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TABOR | If you travel about three miles northeast of Tabor, there is a hillside that is home to the Pechous Dairy. It might not look different from the average dairy operation on the outside, but inside it's a different story.

Housed inside the walls of the Pechous Dairy's newly built free-stall barn is a high-tech system of four robots working 24/7 to milk 230 cows an average of 2.8 times per day. The new barn and advanced machinery are investments in the family's legacy as dairy farmers for future generations. Tabor is in Bon Homme County, northwest of Yankton.

Having grown up and lived on dairy farms only two miles apart, Bob and Nancy Pechous took over Bob's parents' operation in 1980 before getting married in 1981. The couple started with 30 cows in a stanchion barn and had to physically haul their own buckets of milk to the cooler. In 1986, the couple expanded their operation and built a 12-station milking parlor with a pipeline for hauling milk. The upgrade allowed them to gradually begin increasing their herd size to around 125 cows.

"The addition of the milking parlor was great because everything became centralized," Nancy Pechous told the Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan. "We could have six cows on each side. Once we finished milking on one side, we could switch to the other side and rotate in six new cows."

The Pechous Dairy operated out of its 12-station milking parlor for the next 30 years with help from two hired hands and family support before changing to their current operation.

Out of their three children, only the Pechous' youngest son, Kyle, decided to join the dairy as a partner. Their oldest son, Justin, operates Pechous Repair in Tabor and their daughter, Jennifer, teaches in Brandon.

"Kyle was adjoined at the hip with Bob since he could walk," Nancy said. "We knew he was going to be our farmer. He was always helping out at the dairy as soon as he was old enough."

Kyle obtained a degree in diesel mechanics from Northeast Community College before returning home as a full-time partner in 2005. It was his idea to upgrade to the new robotic milking system in 2016.

"We got to the point where the old barn was falling apart," Nancy said. "We either needed to repair it or start new. Bob and I were actually thinking about getting out of the dairy business at the time, but Kyle came up with the idea to implement the new robotic system. We decided that we were all in this together and went full speed ahead."

Construction on the new barn and the installation of the robotic milking system began in January 2016 and finished late last September.

"We are now nine months into the new system," Nancy said. "For the first three months, we practically lived up in the barn after it was built. That's how long it took before the cows adjusted to the new system."

Built with the potential for expansion in mind, the new barn is divided into two main sections capable of housing 120 cows on each side. Both sections are outfitted with access to a feeding trough, back scratchers and bedded stalls. The barn is also outfitted with fans that create a constant five-mile-per-hour breeze that keeps the cows comfortable and the bugs out. Adding to the overall automation of the Pechous Dairy, manure is also automatically scrapped from the floors by a robotic system and pressed into dry bedding to be put on top of the rubber mats that cover the stall floors.

"We built this for future generations," Bob Pechous said. "We want to keep this dairy going and pass it down to our grandchildren."

Installed in each section are two fully-automatic milking machines, each with the capability of milking 60 cows. All the cows at the dairy have been trained to come to one of the four milking machines through the use of special protein pellets that are delivered by the robots. When a cow walks into the stall next to a machine, it reads the chip inside of a collar placed around the cow's neck. The cow is then weighed and fed according to how much milk it produces.

While the cow is feeding, the machine washes each teat and hooks up to them automatically, guided by lasers. The system records how much time each cow has been attached to the machine; it even measures down to the exact time that each teat is attached and how much milk each one produced. All the milk is then automatically transported from the machine to the cooler where it waits to be hauled out by truck every other day.

If something were to go wrong with the machine, like a computer glitch or a milking cup getting knocked out of position, the system automatically calls for assistance until someone responds. As an added safety net in case of power outages, the whole dairy is also backed up by a diesel generator to ensure that the system never goes offline and the cows are always milked.

The automated system also offers total monitoring of the herd from an office computer. It notifies the dairy of which cows are in need of artificial insemination and which cows need to be dried up. It also records the weight and body temperature of each animal, as well as notifies the dairy of abnormal milk, mastitis and other potential illnesses.

"The new system allows us to get to the cows before they get sick," Nancy said. "It helps us to head off a lot of things before they become a real problem."

Under the new milking robotic milking system, the Pechous Dairy has seen an increase of approximately 10 pounds of milk per cow. The daily average at the dairy is currently about 80 pounds of milk per cow. Overall, the dairy produces approximately 20,000 pounds of milk per day.

"My goal per cow was 86 pounds per day," Bob said. "We are not far from that right now. We actually have 33 cows producing over 100 pounds of milk per day, and our top producer is at about 145 pounds per day."

Currently, two-thirds of the Pechous Dairy's herd is first-time heifers who don't produce as much milk until their second lactation.

"Next lactation, we are going to probably get another 10 pounds of milk per cow from the majority of our herd," Nancy said. "After our first-time heifers have their second calf, they will produce more milk."

Already the largest of three dairies in Yankton County, the Pechous family said it wants to continue to lead local dairy production well into the future with the technological investments they have made at their facility.

"We want to help educate people on where their dairy products come from," Bob said. "A lot of people might not know what goes into the process of getting their milk from the cow to the table."

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South Dakota dairy looks to future with robotics - Rapid City Journal

From fubatics to robotics – The Boston Globe – The Boston Globe

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NuTonomys driverless car took a spin around in South Boston.

It was this time last year that it first occurred to me that the U.S. presidential election was a choice between two World War II acronyms: SNAFU (Situation Normal All F***ed Up) and FUBAR (F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition).

In essence, American voters faced a choice between a candidate who personified the political status quo under an arrogant and detached liberal elite and a candidate who promised the disruption of that status quo. With Hillary Clinton there was the certainty that nothing much would change. With Donald Trump there was the chance of quite a lot of change, but the risk that it would be change for the worse.

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This week, the time has arrived to break the bad news to those who voted for Trump. You wanted change. You got it. For only the second time since 1955, Republicans control both the White House and Congress. But the result is a political system that I can now officially certify as FUBAR. This is not politics. This is fubatics.

Fubatics is to politics what comedy is to news. Ever since Americans began to get their politics from comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the danger has existed that the politicians would respond by providing them and their scriptwriters with material for gags. We have now reached that point.

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On Wednesday, newly appointed White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci told a New Yorker journalist that his colleague, chief of staff Reince Priebus, was a (expletive) paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.He took to Twitter to imply that Priebus was guilty of a felony in leaking details of his financial disclosures. Meanwhile, their boss was also tweeting that he had lost faith in his very weak attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

For the White House, the attacks on the attorney general have touched off a serious problem on Capitol Hill when it did not need any other headaches.

Unified government? These guys are unified the way the cast of Reservoir Dogs were unified.

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, the plan to render most Americans and indeed most humans unemployed goes smoothly forward.

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If you dont live in northern California, you tend to assume that it will be decades before self-driving vehicles are the dominant mode of transport. Last week, British Environment Secretary Michael Gove announced that the sale of new diesel and petrol cars would be banned in the UK by 2040, to encourage people to buy electric vehicles. This time frame surely underestimates Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, not to mention the established car manufacturers currently chasing him in the race to bring electric cars to the mass market. Goves worries about diesel fumes remind me of the Times editorial in 1894 warning that, by the middle of the 20th century, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of horse manure.

Despite overwhelming evidence of the accelerating pace of technological change and its diffusion, we humans remain chronically bad at making realistic projections about our economic future. According to the American trucking industry, the number of jobs for heavy-truck drivers and tractor-trailer drivers will be 21 percent higher in 2020 than in 2010. The Bureau of Labor expects that growth to continue until 2024. Yet self-driving vehicles are already on the road in several states in the United States. The Tesla Model S that takes me to the airport is already fitted with an autopilot mode.

According to the American Trucker Association, there are 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the United States. It is the most common job in the overwhelming majority of states. But the stark reality is that truckers are sitting where the drivers of horse-drawn carriages were sitting a century ago: on the brink of unemployment. Nor are they alone. Nearly half of jobs in United States are at risk of being automated over next decade or two, according to Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxfords Martin School. Looking at global employment as a whole, the McKinsey Global Institute recently concluded that half of todays work activities could be automated by 2055, but this could happen up to 20 years earlier.

Trump voters thought it was globalization that destroyed the good jobs in American manufacturing. In reality, it was globalization and technology and now technology is getting ready to destroy the not-so-good jobs too.

As an economic historian, I cling to the hope that current predictions of the impending redundancy of humanity like similar predictions at earlier stages of industrialization will turn out to be wrong. As a reader of Dostoevskys Notes from Underground, I also expect bloody-minded humanity to put up more of a fight against the automation of the world than Silicon Valley expects. (That is probably what Steve Bannon is thinking, too.)

Yet I watch my son play gleefully with a new toy robot called RoboSapien. The G.I. Joe we gave him for Christmas lies forgotten in a corner of his bedroom. Suddenly I felt a sense of kinship with that poor, discarded doll.

The goings-on in Washington that I follow so closely are the politics of a distracted age. But the more attention we give to @realDonaldTrump on Twitter, the less we pay to the economic revolution going on all around us. The future belongs to robotics, not fubatics.

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From fubatics to robotics - The Boston Globe - The Boston Globe

Teenage Clicks – Slate Magazine

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Facebook subsidiary Instagram has courted Snapchat fans with its own Stories feature.

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Rohappy/Thinkstock and Thinkstock.

Facebook was supposed to be washed up by now. Four years ago, reports of a decline in usage by teens spurred a wave of predictions that it was headed the way of Myspace. Teens fickle taste was presumed to imply that no social network could keep its throne for very long.

Yet here we are in 2017, and Facebooks grip on social media is stronger than ever. The company reported last week that Facebook itself is used by an astonishing 2 billion people each month. Thats close to twice as many active users as it had in 2013, when the doomsaying began.

Perhaps more importantly for the companys long-term future, two of its subsidiariesInstagram and WhatsAppare still growing at impressive rates in their own right. And much of that growth is coming from the same young demographic that was once seen as a threat to Facebooks dominance. A recent study named Instagram the most popular app among U.S. teens age 1317.

At the same time, the types of upstart rivals that once seemed destined to overtake Facebook are floundering. Twitter went public in 2013, a few months after the Facebook isnt cool anymore narrative took hold. But its growth since then has essentially flatlined. As recently as nine months ago, industry watchers were touting Snapchat and its new augmented-reality Spectacles as a potential usurper of Facebooks crown. Then Snap went public, and the hype balloon popped almost immediately. Now Twitter and Snap are the ones enduring gloomy warnings about their future obsolescence.

How did Facebook do it? How has it managed not only to stay on top of an industry that was thought to be inherently topsy-turvy, but to continually widen its lead? The answer is a simple yet devastatingly effective strategy aimed at neutralizing upstarts before its too late: If you cant beat them, buy them. And if you cant buy them, copy them.

Facebook embarked on this strategy even before most industry watchers thought it was in any danger. In 2012, it acquired Instagram, the minimalistic photo-sharing app popular mainly with young people, for what seemed at the time to be an astronomical price: $1 billion. This despite Instagram having just a handful of employees, zero revenue, and no obvious path to profitability. The startup had been valued at an estimated $500 million just a few weeks earlier.

The move prompted a flurry of rage-quits from Instagram users who had viewed the service as a refuge from the increasingly corporate, adult-dominated social network. Some commentators praised it as farsighted; others criticized it as reckless. I did some of each, arguing that the move made sense on its own terms but signaled a broader strategy that might prove unsustainable. I concluded:

Facebooks strategy, it turned out, was more nuanced than I gave it credit for. The supply of potentially revolutionary startups may indeed be endlessYik Yak, Ello, Meerkat, and Peach are just a few of those that have gained attention as would-be Facebook killers over the years, only to flop soon after. Yet the company has proved to be as selective in its choice of targets as it is aggressive in pursuing them.

If you cant beat them, buy them. And if you cant buy them, copy them.

In some cases, it has simply ignored would-be rivals, confident in the power of its network to fend off a challenge from a direct competitor. This is especially true in the case of the anti-Facebookssocial networks whose core features mimic Facebooks own, such as Google Plus, Diaspora, Ello, Peach, and the many reincarnations of Myspace.

Facebook tends to pay much closer attention when a startup attracts large numbers of youngsters by offering a social experience substantially different from its own. Instagram may have only had 30 million users in 2012, but they werent just usersthey were addicts. They loved the simplicity of uploading and sharing photos on their phone, a functionality that Facebook itself had failed to master. (It was around that time that the company realized that it would be doomed if it couldnt make the leap from users desktops to their smartphones; Facebooks subsequent shift to mobile is one of the great business success stories of the era.)

In recent years, a select handful of other social media platforms have worried Facebook enough to prompt it to significant action. They include YouTube, Vine, Periscope, WhatsApp, and Snapchat. Each one brought a fresh element to online communication that was lacking from Facebook at the time: original video, looping videos, personal streaming video, group messaging, self-destructing messages, curated personal stories. The ones Facebook couldnt buyGoogles YouTube, Twitters Vine and Periscopeit blatantly copied instead, either within Facebook or one of its subsidiary apps, such as Instagram or Messenger. WhatsApp, with its loyal network of 430 million users around the world, might have seemed too big to buy. But Facebook wasnt satisfied with its efforts to copy it via Messenger, so it went ahead and paid an enormous premium$19 billionto acquire it anyway. Three years later, WhatsApp has more than doubled in size, and it has helped to make Facebook the leader in messaginga popular and still-growing category among teens.

Of all the would-be Facebook rivals, none more perfectly embodies everything that keeps Mark Zuckerberg up at night than Snapchat. Its users are overwhelmingly young; its growth has been meteoric; it is cool and insouciant and confusing to adults in a way Facebook may have once been, but certainly never will be again. On top of that, it has proved wildly innovative, pioneering a series of products that have changed how people interact.

In Snapchats case, Facebook tried first to buy it for $3 billionagain, far more than most observers thought it was worth. But Snapchats Evan Spiegel wouldnt sell, much the same way Zuckerberg repeatedly declined seemingly generous overtures from the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft on his way to surpassing them both. So Facebook resorted to Plan B, relentlessly copying Snapchats successful features. Here, too, it failed repeatedlyremember Poke? Or Slingshot? But it never stopped trying.

For all its efforts, the main Facebook app has yet to successfully copy a major Snapchat feature. Something about either the teams approach, the Facebook brand, or the structure of its network (in which kids are inextricably linked to their parents and other authority figures) has made it helpless to recapture the interest of Snapchats young users. This was exactly the sort of scenario those doomsayers had in mind back in 2013. Its hard to say exactly how much share of teens attention Facebook has lost over the past five years, since the company doesnt break out usage metrics by age group. But in a 2016 Business Insider survey on teens favorite apps, the big blue one didnt even make the list.

Heres the twist: Core Facebook hasnt been able to fend off Snapchat, but its subsidiaries have. In the space of nine months, Facebook copied Snapchats Stories feature on no less than four of its platforms: Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook. The first twoInstagram Stories and WhatsApp Statushave already eclipsed Snapchats original in active users. This is not just a case of Facebooks oldsters discovering the form anew: Reports suggest that Instagram Stories in particular are directly siphoning both users and stars from Snapchat. And now Snap is the one facing pressure from investors to show that it can survive the onslaught from Facebook.

In retrospect, the Facebook doomsayers underestimated both the company and the severity of its coolness problem.

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Which apps are pursuing the all-important 56-year-old white guy demographic? More...

Historically, big mergers and acquisitions in the technology sector have often been disastrous (think HP/Compaq, AOL/Time Warner, and pretty much any startup Yahoo ever acquired). Facebook managed to buck this trend by seeking not synergies or cost savings, but young and fast-growing user bases. And it was willing to strategically overpay to get the ones it targeted. Meanwhile, it proved adept at mimicking the best features of those apps it wasnt able to acquire.

At the same time, it turned out being hip wasnt actually the key to dominating social media. In a recent survey of millennials, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all ranked relatively low in coolness compared with other tech brands, including Snapchat. But Zuckerberg has always cared less about being cool than about being massive, and he has discovered that the latter doesnt necessarily depend on the former.

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Teenage Clicks - Slate Magazine

Europe’s virtual reality sector has grown to nearly 487 companies – VentureBeat

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Europes virtual reality economy continues to expand at a remarkable pace despite some overall skepticism about the technology, according to the second European Virtual Reality landscape released by The Venture Reality Fund and Belgiums LucidWeb.

The report identified 487 virtual reality companies operating in Europe, up from the 300 uncovered in the first report, released in February.

The companies are spread across the continent, but some hubs have started to emerge. The study identified 46 VR companies in the U.K., and 29 in France. With 19, Sweden jumped ahead of Germany, which had 15.

The VR industry continues to grow, and next to the United Kingdom and France, Sweden has now caught up in terms of the number of high-performing startups across the VR industry, said Leen Segers, cofounder and CEO at LucidWeb.

Silicon Valley-based venture firm The Venture Reality Fund has long measured investments in the augmented reality and VR markets. But earlier this year, it teamed up with LucidWeb to begin producing the semi-annual report.

The study includes VR companies that are making infrastructure, tools, platforms, and apps. The study noted that investment was on the rise in enterprise-related VR technologies but remained cooler for areas like healthcare and education.

Other notable findings:

Gaming remains the most crowded and competitive category.

User Input, which focuses on interactions in VR by brain, body, eyes, and feet, seems to be one of the fastest growing. This included a$23 million round raised byU.K.-based company Ultrahaptics.

Companies making 3D tools raised the most money. But then, this category includedU.K.-based Improbable, which raised a $500 million round inMay.

The report added a new category: advertising.

Sad, but inevitable, we suppose.

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Europe's virtual reality sector has grown to nearly 487 companies - VentureBeat

VIDEO: first look at The Shard’s completely terrifying virtual reality slide – Time Out London (blog)

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Youve heard of virtual reality art, violent virtual reality art, virtual reality flat viewings and virtual reality zombie apocalypses. But how about a virtual reality slide going around Londons tallest skyscraper?

Rather than turn The Shard into the worlds wackiest helter-skelter, Londons pointiest piece of architecture has gone VR. This summer, visitors to The View from the Shard will be able to feel the wind (machine) in their hair as they travel up to 100 miles per hour on virtual reality experience The Slide.

The Slide is joined by Vertigo, a VR experience in which The Shard falls away and leaves you suspended in the air, balancing on the scaffolding ofthe buildings early infrastructure. Its the sort of concept that makes your knees feel wobbly just thinking about it.

Together, they make up the UKs highest VR experience. Virtually youll feel like youre swooping through the air above the London skyline and also literally, because youll really be 800ft above London. You just wont be able to see that you are, because of the VR goggles. Confusing, right? But one thing's for sure: if youve got a fear of heights, its probably not for you.

The Slide and Vertigo are free with The View from the Shard ticketsuntil Aug 4. There will be an additional charge from Aug 5.

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VIDEO: first look at The Shard's completely terrifying virtual reality slide - Time Out London (blog)