Monthly Archives: June 2017

Cyber crooks clean out MNC executive’s account – Times of India

Posted: June 3, 2017 at 12:32 pm

NEW DELHI: An MNC executive has lost Rs 1.6 lakh to cybercrime. According to police, crooks cleaned out his account in flat 11 minutes. They said the money was withdrawn in at least 12 transactionsthrough ATMs and net bankingon May 25. Cops are collecting details of bank transactions and have filed an FIR. The victim, A Kashyup, said that his SIM card was not deactivated, as was the case in some previous cases, and received alerts for the transactions on his mobile phone. He was at home when he started getting the messages around 9.30pm on May 25. Kashyup logged in to his net banking account immediately and blocked his ATM card, but transactions continued till 9.41pm. The initial probe has revealed that the money was withdrawn from ATMs in Meerut. Around Rs 50,000 were siphoned off through net banking. Police said the account to which the money was transferred has also been traced to Meerut. They are yet to procure the details of the account holders. Cops suspect that forged documents were used to open these accounts. A Delhi Police team will soon leave for Meerut to conduct investigations. Cops are also trying to obtain the IP address of the computer, which was used to transfer the money. Cybercrime experts say this could be a case of ATM card cloning. "The crooks may have swiped the card onto a skimmer when the victim used it at a petrol pump or any other outlet and saved the information," said an officer. According to sources, once the card is swiped on to the skimmer, it records details like card number, name and CVV number, stored on its magnetic strip. The data is either pasted on a blank card or used to carry out online transactions. Apart from this, the crooks may install cameras at ATM kiosks to record details.

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Evolution | Definition of Evolution by Merriam-Webster

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1 : one of a set of prescribed movements

2a : a process of change in a certain direction : unfoldingb : the action or an instance of forming and giving something off : emissionc (1) : a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state : growth (2) : a process of gradual and relatively peaceful social, political, and economic advanced : something evolved

3 : the process of working out or developing

4a : descent with modification from preexisting species : cumulative inherited change in a population of organisms through time leading to the appearance of new forms : the process by which new species or populations of living things develop from preexisting forms through successive generations Evolution is a process of continuous branching and diversification from common trunks. This pattern of irreversible separation gives life's history its basic directionality. Stephen Jay Gould; also : the scientific theory explaining the appearance of new species and varieties through the action of various biological mechanisms (such as natural selection, genetic mutation or drift, and hybridization) Since 1950, developments in molecular biology have had a growing influence on the theory of evolution. Nature In Darwinian evolution, the basic mechanism is genetic mutation, followed by selection of the organisms most likely to survive. Pamela Weintraubb : the historical development of a biological group (such as a race or species) : phylogeny

5 : the extraction of a mathematical root

6 : a process in which the whole universe is a progression of interrelated phenomena

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Solution: ‘Darwinian Evolution Explains Lamarckism’ – Quanta Magazine

Posted: at 12:31 pm

Our May Insights puzzle was inspired by recent discoveries of some rare, intriguing patterns of inheritance that hark back to Jean-Baptiste Lamarcks theory of evolution and its emphasis on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Elementary textbooks often present Lamarcks theory as a failed 19th-century rival to Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection. But reality, as usual, is far more complicated. There is indeed a great deal of evidence that most acquired characteristics are not inherited, but as the new findings have shown, this proscription is not absolute. The famous verkalix study, for example, showed that men who were exposed to a poor food supply between the ages of 9 and 12 were found, two generations later, to have conferred a measurably lower risk of diabetes and cardiovascular death to their grandchildren. Adaptive Lamarckian inheritance does seem to be possible, and epigenetic mechanisms for it have been found. These mechanisms modify DNA in ways that differ from those of heredity.

But at a deeper level this kind of inheritance can be naturally selected for in the traditional Darwinian way, provided certain environmental conditions are satisfied. So Darwinian natural selection remains the fundamental basis of evolution and can produce Lamarckian inheritance: The theories are not rivals after all! Using simple models, our puzzles show how natural selection can sustain Lamarckian inheritance. The requirement is that environmental conditions, such as famines, follow patterns that persist across several generations and are repeated over long stretches of evolutionary time.

Imagine there exists an animal that has a new generation every year. Every normal individual has an average of 1.6 surviving offspring in a normal year, which can be defined as the animals fitness (lets call itf), after which the animal dies. During a famine year,ffalls to 1.3.Now suppose there are a bunch of smaller individuals whosefvalues are 1.5 in normal years but 1.35 in famine years: Their smaller food requirement helps them survive famines better. How long would a famine have to last for the small individuals to do better than normal ones? How many famine years before small individuals make up 90 percent of the population?

The basic mathematics of natural selection is simple. For every group, you just multiply the fitness numbers across multiple generations. You then find the ratio between the numbers you obtain for the different groups. This gives you their relative populations, assuming that the initial numbers were the same. (Note that these numbers dont signify the actual populations of each group, but they indicate their relative success. If f is larger than 1, then the product may grow extremely large after many generations. In the real world, there are many checks on the population of a species, so at equilibrium, the population is actually stable. What does change are the relative ratios between the populations of the different groups, which are accurately reflected in the above calculation.)

For Question 1, assuming we start from a normal year, we have to find a positive integer n such that 1.5 x 1.35n > 1.6 x 1.3n. You can do this analytically using logarithms or by setting up a spreadsheet and reading off the values. After two years of famine, the smaller individuals already have a population over 50 percent. (If you want to bookend the famine with normal years on either side, then it requires four years of famine for the small individuals to be ahead of the normal ones a year after the famine is over.)

As Ty Rex noted, for smalls to make up more than 90 percent of the population, the number of famine years needs to be greater than [log(9) + log(1.6/1.5)]/log(1.35/1.3) ~ 59.9. So, 60 famine years are needed for smalls to make up 90 percent of the population.

Suppose there exists an initially normal mutant group of individuals called Epi2s, whose germ cells are affected by a year of famine in such a way that their progeny changes to the small type for two generations before they revert back to normal in the third generation, through epigenetic mechanisms. Consider a 13-year period that starts and ends with normal years but has a one-year famine, two two-year famines and a three-year famine in between. Which of the three groups (normals, smalls, Epi2s) will be most successful? Are there famine patterns in which Epi2s overwhelm the other two groups over the very long term?

As a couple of commenters noted, there is an ambiguity here: What happens when Epi2s that have changed to the small type encounter a year of famine? Is their status reset and do they continue to be smalls for another two years, or do they continue on their original timetable and revert to normals two years after the original famine year? Most commenters assumed the former. I had the latter in mind, because otherwise the Epi2s behave very much like smalls in extended famines. In any case, the choice of the assumption does not change the answer to this question. As Ty Rex noted, if we start with equal populations, the ratios between the normals, smalls and Epi2s become 85.5 to 83.8 to 86.1, assuming Epi2s reset, so the Epi2s do best by a small margin. If there are no resets, then Epi2s do even better, their relative ratio going up to 87.4. With no resets, Epi2s are adapted to famines that are three years long, so the pattern NFFFNFFF gives them an even larger advantage over the other two groups. With this pattern, Epi2s will make up 90 percent of an initially evenly divided population in 329 years.

Lets add another type of animal to the above: the Epi1s, which like the Epi2s switch to small progeny after a famine, but in this case the progeny revert back to normal after just one generation. Over a period of 20 years, can you come up with a famine-year schedule such that all four types of animals (normals, smalls, Epi1s and Epi2s) exist in virtual equilibrium over this time period?

For this question, note that the numbers of the normal and the small groups are only affected by the number of famine and nonfamine years and not their temporal arrangement. So we have to find a positive number of nonfamine years n such that 1.6n1.320-n is as close as possible to 1.5n1.3520-n. This happens for seven nonfamine and 13 famine years, which gives a relative ratio of 813 to 845 for normals to smalls. How do the years need to be arranged to equalize the numbers of Epi1s and Epi2s? As noted above, without resets, Epi2s are best adapted to famines that last three years, and similarly, Epi1s are best adapted to famines that last two years. So our 20-year pattern needs to have famines of both these durations. The pattern NFF NFFF NFF NFFF NFF NFN meets all the conditions mentioned and gives relative scores of 809 for Epi1s and 817 for Epi2s on the above scale, which are both within 0.5 percent of the number for normals. This seems to be the best approach to virtual equilibrium.

So what these simple models teach us is that it is possible to come up with environmental conditions that will lead natural selection to favor epigenetic inheritance across generations if the selecting factor (here, famine) occurred frequently enough in an animals evolutionary history in the right pattern. Furthermore, there can be patterns that maintain different groups of the species at relatively constant numbers, ready to take advantage of a change in climate, rendering the species as a whole more stable and prepared for several different eventualities.

As I discussed in the puzzle column, scientists have found molecular mechanisms that can implement these transgenerational changes by suppressing the activity of certain genes through the attachment of methyl groups (DNA methylation) or through changes in the configuration of the protein that packages the DNA (histone modification). Transgenerational inheritance is even easier in small organisms that do not go through a germ cell stage, such as bacteria. These organisms can use even more efficient mechanisms that have allowed the evolution of the spectacular DNA-cutting system called CRISPR, which is currently revolutionizing genetic engineering. This system uses bits of DNA called transposons or jumping genes that can jump around from one location to another in genomes. Its amazing what natural selection can achieve in evolutionary time!

Thanks to all who participated in this Insights puzzle. I enjoyed reading your comments and especially my dialogue with Josh Mitteldorf. The Quanta T-shirt goes to Ty Rex. Congratulations!

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Christian Pastor Blames Evolution for a White Student’s Alleged Murder of a Black Student – Patheos (blog)

Posted: at 12:31 pm

A couple of weeks ago, a white 22-year-old named Sean Christopher Urbanski was accused of fatally stabbing 23-year-old Richard Collins III, an Army Lt., who was black. The incident took place on the University of Marylands campus, which Urbanski attended.

Urbanskis membership in an alt-right Facebook group has led many to believe this was a racially motivated hate crime, though he hasnt been charged with that yet.

No need to think too much about the reason, though, because the Institute on the Constitutions David Whitney knows why it happened. He explained in a sermon at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church that the motivation was wait for it the teaching of evolution.

As in all public schools, evolution is inculcated and it teaches that there is no Creator God and that everything in the universe came into existence by chance and mistake, accident and is wholly without purpose and without meaning of any kind, Whitney preached. [Urbanski] was taught that mankind, including himself, was nothing more than a long compilation of mistakes and mutations and chance occurrences.

We should not be surprised then if Sean, with that background and education, concluded that life is meaningless, without any purpose at all, he continued. Or, if there is a purpose in life, it would be to advance and further the process of evolution; a process in which the strong destroy the weak and indeed, ultimately, that is the purpose for existence. Survival of the fittest therefore has some rather dastardly consequences which we see in the murder committed by a secular humanist of a Christian young man.

Evolution is also the basis of racism, [and] many assert that racism played a role in the motivation for this murder, Whitney said. You see, evolution is essentially racist. So where did Sean Urbanski learn racism? He learned it in his classes on evolution at the local public high school that his parents sent him to and his parents funded that school by the payment of their property taxes.

Thats not how evolution works. Its an explanation, not an excuse. It doesnt mean members of a species just kill each other for the sake of it or that a murder alters the course of how the process works. (Hell, you could make a compelling argument for why evolution promotes altruism and working together, too.)

Furthermore, Whitney never bothers to explain why the rest of us who understand and accept evolution arent running around killing everyone else or why there are so many Christians in jail. Its almost like theres more to an accused murderers mindset that a class he took in high school

But that sort of nuance is too complicated for this guy. Its so much easier to blame anything and everything else for a crime as long as youre not implicated in it.

(via Right Wing Watch)

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From Piranha to Great White Shark Evolution in the Digital Marketplace – The Merkle

Posted: at 12:31 pm

The marketplace is not unlike nature; both are filled with fierce competition, survival and extinction, tremendous diversity, changes to the environment, and seemingly infinite techniques to thrive.

Nowadays, were seeing species especially hard hit by climate change, like polar bears, or species threatened by changes in habitat, such as tigers and other large predatory mammals. And were seeing the marketplace equivalent with markets moving from brick and mortar to online, like the travel industry for example, and other industries natural habitats, if you will, are shrinking, like Western manufacturing.

John Cambers, chairman of S&P 500-listed company Cisco Systems, predicts that within the next 10 years 40% of all businesses will go extinct unless they modify their business models to incorporate new technologies.

Building on the wildlife metaphor, one finds three distinct species of online companies: great white sharks, piranhas, and swordfish. These digital beasts are the companies which can thrive in their new online environment.

The most obvious are the digital great whites. These are the massive online companies companies often native to their digital environments. Google, Facebook and Amazon, to name a few, are perfect examples of the digital great whites and are characterized by diverse product portfolios and massive assets. And with a substantial market presence, it follows that there tend to be very few of these behemoths, much like their aquatic versions.

Where the great white shark has a tremendous appetite to fit its size, a digital great white like Google has to stay competitive by having a presence in many industries. In entertainment, Google has YouTube and Google Play, the dominant Android app distributor. Google Fonts and Web Designer help Google stay competitive in designing software, an area traditionally dominated by Apple, another digital great white. In order to stay at the top R&D is often made a priority and to that end Google has been expanding their artificial intelligence portfolio of late.

The digital piranhas are the species that a digital David Attenborough might want to keep his or her eye on. Companies like these are small but highly competitive and aggressive towards their prey. BlaBlaCar, Shazam and slack are but a few in this school.

Most of these companies stay heavily focused on their products. Unlike the digital great whites, they stay focused on their specific, sometimes even niche, markets and prioritize specialization over diversification. Their competition is almost exclusively those companies that offer the same products. And like real-world piranhas they need to stay fast and fit to have a chance to dominate the market.

The iGaming industry is a perfect example of the fierce competition and product-centric business models that are so prevalent in this digital species. Online casinos bgo and Mr Green offer customers free spins and matched deposits in order to entice customers and stay competitive. The iGaming industry is further representative of digital piranhas inasmuch as they have yet to reach their maturity. By incentive and specialization they are hoping to corner the market and with such fierce competition their products and development can be some of the quickest.

Somewhere lying between piranhas and great whites are the swordfish. Not quite as agile as the piranha, not yet as diverse as the great white, companies like Airbnb, Netflix or Zalando are big and fast enough that they are rarely threatened.

Their market share means that its unlikely they will disappear anytime soon. While digital piranhas can come and go the chances of an Uber, for example, vanishing overnight is unlikely. Still more numerous than the great whites, a few companies tend to lead the way for whatever industry they are in.

IMG_0407(CC BY 2.0)byswruler9284

Nearly at peak growth, these companies still have a chance of growth, but focus on expanding their models on vertical-specific products. To take an example, as a company which started by posting DVDs, then broadband streaming, Netflix is poised to become a global TV and film producer. With series like Marseille, what would have traditionally been reserved to an exclusively French audience can now be viewed around the world thanks to subtitles. Netflix has come quite a way since those red envelopes.For the digital swordfish its vital that they remain innovative enough to begin branching out into industries complementary to their core competencies.

As it is in the animal kingdom, in the digital marketplace evolution holds a great many surprises and none can immediately say what will or wont succeed.

Image Source: 1, 2

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Evolution of mothers in cinema: Mum’s the word – The Hindu

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The Hindu
Evolution of mothers in cinema: Mum's the word
The Hindu
Did screen mothers ever come alive, get real, have a life, in the tiresome days of the Kheer Age? The climax of Johny Mera Naam (1970) is near. Sulochanawhite sari, dishevelled bun, Bombay cinema's widowed mother par excellencehas been ...

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The First Church of Darwin – Personal Liberty Digest

Posted: at 12:31 pm

Underlying much of American life and politics is an unshakeable faith in Darwinian evolution. Almost 60 percent of us mistake this theory for fact and, watching Congress, who can doubt that politicians at least are descended from apes? No wonder most Americans regard evolution as the basis of all modern biological science, supported by everything we know about geology, genetics, paleontology, and other fields and extol its importance as a unifying concept in science and its overall explanatory power. Even those who consider themselves Christians like their Bible diluted with Darwin: Half of Americans believe humans evolved, with the majority of these saying God guided the evolutionary process.

The assumption that our ancestor crawled out of primordial sludge pervades everything from health to entertainment. Our taxes pay to indoctrinate students with evolutionary theory while lobbyists insist its the only permissible explanation of our origins. Occasionally, schools also present creationism, but this doesnt necessarily refer to the account in Genesis: Mentioning a deity in any way while discussing mankinds birth apparently turns the topic creationist. No doubt even the most profane teacher avoids taking the Lords name in vain when inculcating Darwinism.

Yet evolution and the Biblical report of Gods creation are actually two sides of the same coin. Both require belief or what we commonly call religious faith since no human eyes saw the advent of man. Just as preachers tell their flocks that God created the heavens and earth, so evolutionists tell theirs that natural processes did. But sheep from neither fold can observe humanitys arrival to confirm the accuracy of these statements.

And observation is essential. The dictionary defines science as a systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation. Ergo, water boiling at 212 degrees Fahrenheit is a scientific fact. We can verify it by observation; we can experiment to see whether it boils at lower temperatures and demonstrate that it does not. But [t]he central ideas of evolution that life has a history it has changed over time and that different species share common ancestors is an opinion. Nor can we verify it because no one has observed millions of years of changes.

That misfortune compels evolutionists to extrapolate backwards from evidence they see in the natural world. But their reckonings could be as false as those of the global-warming nuts (note that the idea of climate change relies on studying current phenomena as well as historical data and yet proponents still argue about whats accurate and true. How much more unobservable events that lie entirely in the past?) Yes, the scientists screaming about rising temperatures had political incentive to do so. But so do evolutionists. They are hardly the disinterested pursuers of Truth that they fancy themselves; like anyone else, they cling to their opinions and prejudices.

And they rabidly defend both especially when Christians find strong proof for direct creation by God in the very data that supposedly upholds Darwins theory. Astoundingly, critics who refuse to acknowledge evolutionists preconceptions dismiss Christian interpretation of evidence because of bias! Such blatant double standards should sicken anyone sincerely interested in the truth.

Evolution, then, is no more than a religion masquerading as science. And since our era worships science, too many folks swallow whatever evolutionists say. They buy the bizarre idea that an infinitely intricate world evolved with no Designer while laughing at the gullible peons who ascribed to Roman Catholic dogma during the Middle Ages. What ironic hypocrisy!

Christianity and Darwinism share another characteristic: They answer mans most fundamental questions. How did the world come to exist, and what is mans place in it? Is there a god? Whats the meaning of life? The two faiths differ only in their answers chillingly so.

If eons of time and fortuitous chance produced the universe and life itself, we need no Creator. And the Book that claims to be His inspired Word is obviously false from its very first words: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Only fools would believe anything that follows such a whopper. There is no heaven or hell, no final judgment of our sins or salvation from them, no Creator who fashioned man in His image. Life is mere happenstance, not a divine gift that no man may arbitrarily end and when the strong kill those who are weaker or inconvenient, they do so without fear of eternal damnation. Likewise with our liberty: We have no rights, inalienable or otherwise, because no Creator endowed us with them.

Its no accident that historys most brutal regimes have espoused Darwinian evolution. Indeed, communisms authors embraced the philosophy precisely because it rejected God: Marx and Engels accepted evolution almost immediately after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Evolution, of course, was just what the founders of communism needed to explain how mankind could have come into being without the intervention of any supernatural force, and consequently it could be used to bolster the foundations of their materialistic philosophy. Should it surprise anyone, then, that communist governments massacre and torture millions? (Some of that blood lust is due to the nature of the State; non-communist and even Christian governments persecute and murder as well. But arming politicians with communism is like handing a serial killer hundreds of fully loaded machine guns rather than a penknife.)

Hitler and the Nazis endorsed Darwins ideas, too, particularly survival of the fittest and the justice of a superior races dominating inferior ones. Under such reasoning, butchery went from unspeakably heinous to justifiable: The Nazis alleged that their racial hygiene benefited not only Germany but humanity.

As Americans increasingly join the First Church of Darwin, theyre unlikely to resist the evils evolutionary theory brings in its wake. We already murder unwanted babies and the elderly; American governments at all levels destroy rather than protect our rights.

But perhaps evolutionists themselves will save us. After all, they continue insisting that religion has no place in the public square. We simply have to hold them to that creed.

Becky Akers

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STEM lab serves robotics, computer programming for lunch at Ontario junior high – Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

Posted: at 12:31 pm

ONTARIO >> At Woodcrest Junior High School, lunchtime means sandwiches, fresh fruit, robots and circuitry.

Here we go, said seventh-grader Adrian Agustin, 12, tossing a polystyrene ball at a hand-drawn target hooked up to a circuit board. The sensor behind Adrians target registered the impact, and on an attached 8-by-8 grid of lights, an illuminated +1 scrolled across. And another. And so on.

The kids have an opportunity to come in and explore, experiment, hang out with friends, have a safe environment to play with engineering, said Lisa Lista, an instructional coach at the school and one of the two women behind the schools lunchtime STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) lab.

The lab began in October, sharing space with another classroom, but soon became so popular that it needed a full-sized classroom of its own.

There are times when this classroom is so filled that we need to get help from other teachers, said Sarai Padilla, an instructional coach at the school and Listas partner in the lab.

Up to 30 kids will show up in the laboratory at a time.

I didnt know if kids would come, Lista said. Its during their lunch and their time for hanging out with their friends at the lunch tables. ASB usually has a lot of stuff going on: games, music. But thankfully, a lot of the kids want to come in. They want to do something, hands-on.

The lunchtime STEM lab participants run the gamut from special education students to honors students.

Its a safe place for everybody to come to, Padilla said. You dont have to have any engineering experience at all. They just come in and say Whats this about? and are curious.

The students build Lego Mindstorms robots, HyperDuino computer components and Little Bits modular electronics, like the ones Adrian was using.

Last year, I was using Little Bits in my classroom, with my fifth-graders, and wanted to be able to open up and branch out to other students instead of just my class, Lista said. We wanted a wider range of kids to be able to come.

While there are structured projects available, there are no grades and students are able to experiment and tinker with the labs technology.

We have a girl group who come in and they made an electronic nail file, Lista said, grinning. Its something that theyre interested in. Its easy for them to come in and explore and create.

One student has been so inspired that he and his brother now raid the trash from electronics stores for spare parts.

He has made a Bluetooth earphone set, Padilla said.

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Hes made a fan, Lista said.

... that you plug into your phone, Padilla said.

Hes made a cellphone charger, Lista said. He started here, with Little Bits.

It opened up a new world for him, Padilla said.

Thats awesome, Lista said.

Next year, the STEM lab will be back, sort of.

Its actually going to be a course, Lista said. Next year, its going to be an elective for the students.

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Apple’s Swift Playgrounds coding app now supports robots, drones, and toys – The Verge

Posted: at 12:31 pm

Apple today announced that its education programming iPad app, Swift Playgrounds, will soon support robots and drones. That means young kids and students will be able to write their own Swift code to control any number of real-world toys and machines. The company is launching the feature next Monday, partnering with a number of top toy and robotics companies including LEGO, automated BB-8 toy maker Sphero, and drone company Parrot. Other companies on board for the launch are toy robot makers UBTECH and Wonder Workshop, as well as Skoog, the maker of a music cube that relies on Swift code to teach children how to compose songs.

Swift Playgrounds, launched last year during Apples 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference, is effectively a video game that teaches kids how to code using Apples Swift programming language. It breaks down how code functions at the most fundamental level and uses colorful environments and visual guides product manager Tim Triemstra even uses the game industry term cutscenes to explain the effects of code and the power of programming. The code appears on the left side of the iPad screen, either automated by the app to teach a lesson or typed in directly by the user, while an animation the code can manipulate plays out on the right.

Kids can now use Swift to send commands to toy robots and drones

Since the Playgrounds launch, Apple has partnered with a number of educational institutions around the country to get Swift built into introductory computer science curriculums and to make its Playgrounds app a fixture in classrooms. The company says Playgrounds has amassed 1 million unique users since launch. When we were designing Swift, from the very first days we wanted it to be everyones first programming language, Triemstra says. We wanted it to be approachable.

Now, with a significant number of Playground users and Swift picking up steam as a lightweight and more elegant way to build iOS apps, Apple is trying to expand its educational focus from software to hardware. Because Playgrounds will support all manner of robotics, including flying drones, the company hopes it will give young kids a whole new reason to engage with programming and learn the secrets of code. It could also do wonders for the popularity of Swift among the next generation of coders, and help cement the language as a fixture for young and eager roboticists.

Given the popularity of success of the Mindstorms robotics series, its a no-brainer that Apple got LEGO onboard for Playgrounds. In a demo at the iPhone makers Cupertino office, a LEGO representative broke down exactly how a Mindstorms EV3 kit can work with Playgrounds, connecting any number of robot-controlling modules to an iPad via Bluetooth. From there, you can see real-time data provided by the robots actuators, motors, and sensors, as well as program commands for fleshed out LEGO bots to receive and carry out. In preparation for the partnership, LEGO says its also designed 10 hours of lessons specifically for the Playgrounds app for kids to run through with a Mindstorms kit.

Similarly, Spheros transparent SPRK+ orb, which is already used to teach kids elements of robotics and programming, will work with the app. Kids will be able to program movements and games for the orb, with exercises breaking down the step-by-step process of development, including a real-world Pong game they can play with their feet as the paddles and the SPRK+ as the ball.

French drone maker Parrot is also buying into Apples new Playgrounds initiative, adding support for its Mambo, Rolling Spider, and Airborne drones. In another demo at Apples offices, a Parrot representative showed off how the Playgrounds app can be used to input commands for the drones to turn, flip in midair, and land in the palm of a users hand.

Apple stresses that none of these new features and hardware tie-ins for Playground are dependent on brand new or tie-in hardware. With LEGO, all you need is a Mindstorms EV3 kit, released as far back as 2013. The same goes for Spheros SPRK+ and Parrots trio of drones so long as you have the supported product, it will sync with Playgrounds and allow you to start controlling it with your own code.

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Video Friday: Robot Dance Teacher, Transformer Drone, and Pneumatic Reel Actuator – IEEE Spectrum

Posted: at 12:31 pm

The week is almost over, and so is the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Singapore. We hope youve been enjoying our coverage, which has featured aquatic drones, stone-stacking manipulators, andself-folding soft robots. Well have lots more from the conference over the next few weeks, but for you impatient types, were cramming Video Friday this week with a special selection of ICRA videos.

We tried to include videos from many different subareas of robotics: control, vision, locomotion, machine learning, aerial vehicles, humanoids, actuators, manipulation, andhuman-robot interaction.Were posting the abstracts along with the videos, but if you have any questions about these projects, let us know and well get more details from the authors.

Well return to normal Video Friday next week. Have a great weekend everyone!

This letter presents a physical humanrobot interaction scenario in which a robot guides and performs the role of a teacher within a defined dance training framework. A combined cognitive and physical feedback of performance is proposed for assisting the skill learning process. Direct contact cooperation has been designed through an adaptive impedancebased controller that adjusts according to the partners performance in the task. In measuring performance, a scoring system has been designed using the concept of progressive teaching (PT). The system adjusts the difficulty based on the users number of practices and performance history. Using the proposed method and a baseline constant controller, comparative experiments have shown that the PT presents better performance in the initial stage of skill learning. An analysis of the subjects perception of comfort, peace of mind, and robot performance have shown significant difference at the p < .01 level, favoring the PT algorithm.

In this paper, we introduce the achievement of the aerial manipulation by using the whole body of a transformable aerial robot, instead of attaching an additional manipulator. The aerial robot in our work is composed by two-dimensional multilinks which enable a stable aerial transformation and can be employed as an entire gripper. We propose a planning method to find the optimized grasping form for the multilinks while they are on the air, which is based on the original planar enveloping algorithm, along with the optimization of the internal force and joint torque for the force-closure. We then propose the aerial approach and grasp motion strategy, which is devoted to the determination of the form and position of the aerial robot to approach and grasp effectively the object from the air. Finally we present the experimental results of the aerial manipulation which involves grasping, carrying and dropping different types of object. These results validate the performance of aerial grasping based on our proposed wholebody grasp planning and motion control method.

Unmanned rescue, observation, and/or research vehicles with high terrain adaptability, high speed, and high reliability are needed in difficult-to-reach locations. However, for most vehicles, high performance over rough terrain reduces the travel speed and/or requires complex mechanisms. We have developed a blade-type crawler robot with a very simple and reliable mechanism, which traverses uneven terrain at high speed. Moreover, the gyro wheel design stabilizes the success of this approach in improving the motion, ensuring robust traversal. The improvement in traveling speed and robustness over uneven terrain by our approach was confirmed by experiment.

Two less addressed issues of deep reinforcement learning are (1) lack of generalization capability to new goals, and (2) data inefficiency, i.e., the model requires several (and often costly) episodes of trial and error to converge, which makes it impractical to be applied to real-world scenarios. In this paper, we address these two issues and apply our model to target-driven visual navigation. To address the first issue, we propose an actor-critic model whose policy is a function of the goal as well as the current state, which allows better generalization. To address the second issue, we propose the AI2-THOR framework, which provides an environment with high-quality 3D scenes and a physics engine. Our framework enables agents to take actions and interact with objects. Hence, we can collect a huge number of training samples efficiently. We show that our proposed method (1) converges faster than the state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods, (2) generalizes across targets and scenes, (3) generalizes to a real robot scenario with a small amount of fine-tuning (although the model is trained in simulation), (4) is end-to-end trainable and does not need feature engineering, feature matching between frames or 3D reconstruction of the environment.

A 3 DoF parallel cable driven body weight support (BWS) system has been developed for the University of Utahs Treadport Locomotion Interface, for purposes of rehabilitation, simulation of steep slopes, and display of reduced gravity environments. The Treadports large belt (6 by 10 feet) requires a multi-cable support system to ensure that the unloading forces are close to vertical. This paper presents the design and experimental validation, including the system model and force control.

We present a policy search method for learning complex feedback control policies that map from highdimensional sensory inputs to motor torques, for manipulation tasks with discontinuous contact dynamics. We build on a prior technique called guided policy search (GPS), which iteratively optimizes a set of local policies for specific instances of a task, and uses these to train a complex, high-dimensional global policy that generalizes across task instances. We extend GPS in the following ways: (1) we propose the use of a model-free local optimizer based on path integral stochastic optimal control (PI2), which enables us to learn local policies for tasks with highly discontinuous contact dynamics; and (2) we enable GPS to train on a new set of task instances in every iteration by using on-policy sampling: this increases the diversity of the instances that the policy is trained on, and is crucial for achieving good generalization. We show that these contributions enable us to learn deep neural network policies that can directly perform torque control from visual input. We validate the method on a challenging door opening task and a pick-and-place task, and we demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms the prior LQR-based local policy optimizer on these tasks. Furthermore, we show that on-policy sampling significantly increases the generalization ability of these policies.

We define a system architecture for a large swarm of miniature quadcopters flying in dense formation indoors. The large number of small vehicles motivates novel design choices for state estimation and communication. For state estimation, we develop a method to reliably track many small rigid bodies with identical motion-capture marker arrangements. Our communication infrastructure uses compressed one-way data flow and supports a large number of vehicles per radio. We achieve reliable flight with accurate tracking (< 2cm mean position error) by implementing the majority of computation onboard, including sensor fusion, control, and some trajectory planning. We provide various examples and empirically determine latency and tracking performance for swarms with up to 49 vehicles.

This paper presents a system that consists of three robots to imitate the motion of top volleyball blockers. In a volleyball match, in order to score by spiking, it is essential to improve the spike decision rate of each spiker. To increase the spike decision rates, iterative spiking training with actual blockers is required. Therefore, in this study, a block machine system was developed that can be continuously used in an actual practice field to improve attack practice. In order to achieve the required operating speed and mechanical strength each robot has five degrees of freedom. This robot performs high speed movement on 9 m rails that are arranged in parallel with the volleyball net. In addition, an application with a graphical user interface to enable a coach to manipulate these robots was developed. It enables the coach to control block motions and change the parameters such as the robots positions and operation timing. Through practical use in the practice field, the effectiveness of this system was confirmed.

This paper contributes to quantifying the notion of robotic fitness by developing a set of necessary conditions that determine whether a small quadruped has the ability to open a class of doors or climb a class of stairs using only quasi-static maneuvers. After verifying that several such machines from the recent robotics literature are mismatched in this sense to the common human scale environment, we present empirical workarounds for the Minitaur quadrupedal platform that enable it to leap up, force the door handle and push through the door, as well as bound up the stairs, thereby accomplishing through dynamical maneuvers otherwise (i.e., quasi-statically) unachievable tasks.

We present a simple probabilistic framework for multimodal sensor fusion that allows a mobile robot to reliably locate and approach the most promising interaction partner among a group of people, in an uncontrolled environment. Our demonstration integrates three complementary sensor modalities, each of which detects features of nearby people. The output is an occupancy grid approximation of a probability density function over the locations of people that are actively seeking interaction with the robot. We show empirically that simply driving towards the peak of this distribution is sufficient to allow the robot to correctly engage an interested user in a crowd of bystanders.

Collisions between quadrotor UAVs and the environment often occur, for instance, under faulty piloting, from wind gusts, or when obstacle avoidance fails. Airspace regulations are forcing drone companies to build safer drones; many quadrotor drones now incorporate propeller protection. However, propeller protected quadrotors still do not detect or react to collisions with objects such as walls, poles and cables. In this paper, we present a collision recovery pipeline which controls propeller protected quadrotors to recover from collisions. This pipeline combines concepts from impact dynamics, fuzzy logic, and aggressive quadrotor attitude control. The strategy is validated via a comprehensive Monte Carlo simulation of collisions against a wall, showing the feasibility of recovery from challenging collision scenarios. The pipeline is implemented on a custom experimental quadrotor platform, demonstrating feasibility of real-time performance and successful recovery from a range of pre-collision conditions. The ultimate goal of the research is to implement a general collision recovery solution as a safety feature for quadrotor flight controllers.

State estimation techniques for humanoid robots are typically based on proprioceptive sensing and accumulate drift over time. This drift can be corrected using exteroceptive sensors such as laser scanners via a scene registration procedure. For this procedure the common assumption of high point cloud overlap is violated when the scenario and the robots point-of-view are not static and the sensors field-of-view (FOV) is limited. In this paper we focus on the localization of a robot with limited FOV in a semi-structured environment. We analyze the effect of overlap variations on registration performance and demonstrate that where overlap varies, outlier filtering needs to be tuned accordingly. We define a novel parameter which gives a measure of this overlap. In this context, we propose a strategy for robust non-incremental registration. The pre-filtering module selects planar macro-features from the input clouds, discarding clutter. Outlier filtering is automatically tuned at run-time to allow registration to a common reference in conditions of non-uniform overlap. An extensive experimental demonstration is presented which characterizes the performance of the algorithm using two humanoids: the NASA Valkyrie, in a laboratory environment, and the Boston Dynamics Atlas, during the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals.

In this paper, we propose an epoch-making soft sheet actuator called Wavy-sheet. Inspired by gastropods locomotion, Wavy-sheet can generate continuous traveling waves on the whole soft body. It aims to be applied to a mobile soft mat capable of moving and transporting without damaging the object and the ground. The actuator, driven by pneumatics, is mainly composed of a couple of flexible rubber tubes and fabrics. The advantages are: i) many traveling waves can be generated by just three tubes, ii) the whole structure can adapt its own shape to the outer environment passively, and iii) only 10 mm in thickness and can generate waves with larger than 10mm in amplitude. In this paper, first, we describe the basic concept of Wavy-sheet, and then show the configuration and the principle of wave propagation. Next, fabrication methods are illustrated and the design methods are addressed. By using a prototype actuator, several experiments are conducted. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed actuator and its design methods.

Part handling in warehouse automation is challenging if a large variety of items must be accommodated and items are stored in unordered piles. To foster research in this domain, Amazon holds picking challenges. We present our system which achieved second and third place in the Amazon Picking Challenge 2016 tasks. The challenge required participants to pick a list of items from a shelf or to stow items into the shelf. Using two deep-learning approaches for object detection and semantic segmentation and one item model registration method, our system localizes the requested item. Manipulation occurs using suction on points determined heuristically or from 6D item model registration. Parametrized motion primitives are chained to generate motions. We present a full-system evaluation during the APC 2016 and componentlevel evaluations of the perception system on an annotated dataset.

For collaborative robots to become useful, end users who are not robotics experts must be able to instruct them to perform a variety of tasks. With this goal in mind, we developed a system for end-user creation of robust task plans with a broad range of capabilities. CoSTAR: the Collaborative System for Task Automation and Recognition is our winning entry in the 2016 KUKA Innovation Award competition at the Hannover Messe trade show, which this year focused on Flexible Manufacturing. CoSTAR is unique in how it creates natural abstractions that use perception to represent the world in a way users can both understand and utilize to author capable and robust task plans. Our Behavior Tree-based task editor integrates high-level information from known object segmentation and pose estimation with spatial reasoning and robot actions to create robust task plans. We describe the crossplatform design and implementation of this system on multiple industrial robots and evaluate its suitability for a wide variety of use cases.

In this paper, we present the mechatronic design of our Tactile Omnidirectional Robot Manipulator (TOMM), which is a dual arm wheeled humanoid robot with 6DoF on each arm, 4 omnidirectional wheels and 2 switchable end-effectors (1 DoF grippers and 12 DoF Hands). The main feature of TOMM is its arms and hands which are covered with robot skin. We exploit the multi-modal tactile information of our robot skin to provide a rich tactile interaction system for robots. In particular, for the robot TOMM, we provide a general control framework, capable of modifying the dynamic behavior of the entire robot, e.g., producing compliance in a non-compliant system. We present the hardware, software and middleware components of the robot and provide a compendium of the base technologies deployed in it. Furthermore, we show some applications and results that we have obtained using this robot.

We present an object-tracking framework that fuses point cloud information from an RGB-D camera with tactile information from a GelSight contact sensor. GelSight can be treated as a source of dense local geometric information, which we incorporate directly into a conventional point-cloud-based articulated object tracker based on signed-distance functions. Our implementation runs at 12 Hz using an online depth reconstruction algorithm for GelSight and a modified secondorder update for the tracking algorithm. We present data from hardware experiments demonstrating that the addition of contact-based geometric information significantly improves the pose accuracy during contact, and provides robustness to occlusions of small objects by the robots end effector.

Soft compliant materials and novel actuation mechanisms ensure flexible motions and high adaptability for soft robots, but also increase the difficulty and complexity of constructing control systems. In this work, we provide an efficient control algorithm for a multi-segment extensible soft arm in 2D plane. The algorithm separate the inverse kinematics into two levels. The first level employs gradient descent to select optimized arms pose (from task space to configuration space) according to designed cost functions. With consideration of viscoelasticity, the second level utilizes neural networks to figure out the pressures from each segments pose (from configuration space to actuation space). In experiments with a physical prototype, the control accuracy and effectiveness are validated, where the control algorithm is further improved by an optional feedback strategy.

This paper presents a systematic approach for the 3-D mapping of underwater caves. Exploration of underwater caves is very important for furthering our understanding of hydrogeology, managing efficiently water resources, and advancing our knowledge in marine archaeology. Underwater cave exploration by human divers however, is a tedious, labor intensive, extremely dangerous operation, and requires highly skilled people. As such, it is an excellent fit for robotic technology, which has never before been addressed. In addition to the underwater vision constraints, cave mapping presents extra challenges in the form of lack of natural illumination and harsh contrasts, resulting in failure for most of the state-ofthe-art visual based state estimation packages. A new approach employing a stereo camera and a video-light is presented. Our approach utilizes the intersection of the cone of the video-light with the cave boundaries: walls, floor, and ceiling, resulting in the construction of a wire frame outline of the cave. Successive frames are combined using a state of the art visual odometry algorithm while simultaneously inferring scale through the stereo reconstruction. Results from experiments at a cave, part of the Sistema Camilo, Quintana Roo, Mexico, validate our approach. The cave wall reconstruction presented provides an immersive experience in 3-D.

This paper investigates how a robot that can produce contingent listener response, i.e., backchannel, can deeply engage children as a storyteller. We propose a backchannel opportunity prediction (BOP) model trained from a dataset of childrens dyad storytelling and listening activities. Using this dataset, we gain better understanding of what speaker cues children can decode to find backchannel timing, and what type of nonverbal behaviors they produce to indicate engagement status as a listener. Applying our BOP model, we conducted two studies, withinand between-subjects, using our social robot platform, Tega. Behavioral and self-reported analyses from the two studies consistently suggest that children are more engaged with a contingent backchanneling robot listener. Children perceived the contingent robot as more attentive and more interested in their story compared to a non-contingent robot. We find that children significantly gaze more at the contingent robot while storytelling and speak more with higher energy to a contingent robot.

In this paper, we show that visual servoing can be formulated as an acceleration-resolved, quadratic optimization problem. This allows us to handle visual constraints, such as field of view and occlusion avoidance, as inequalities. Furthermore, it allows us to easily integrate visual servoing tasks into existing whole-body control frameworks for humanoid robots, which simplifies prioritization and requires only a posture task as a regularization term. Finally, we show this method working on simulations with HRP-4 and real tests on Romeo.

For the past few years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been successfully employed in several investigations and exploration tasks such as aerial inspection and manipulations. However, most of these UAVs are limited to open spaces distant from any obstacles because of the high risk of falling as a result of an exposed propeller or not enough protection. On the other hand, a UAV with a passive rotating spherical shell can fly over a complex environment but cannot engage in physical interaction and perform power tethering because of the passive rotation of the spherical shell. In this study, we propose a new mechanism that allows physical interaction and power tethering while the UAV is well-protected and has a good flight stability, which enables exploration in a complex environment such as disaster sites. We address the current problem by dividing the whole shell into two separate hemispherical shells that provide a gap unaffected by passive rotation. In this paper, we mainly discuss the concept, general applications, and design of the proposed system. The capabilities of the proposed system for physical interaction and power tethering in a complex space were initially verified through laboratory-based test flights of our experimental prototype.

We present a weakly-supervised approach to segmenting proposed drivable paths in images with the goal of autonomous driving in complex urban environments. Using recorded routes from a data collection vehicle, our proposed method generates vast quantities of labelled images containing proposed paths and obstacles without requiring manual annotation, which we then use to train a deep semantic segmentation network. With the trained network we can segment proposed paths and obstacles at run-time using a vehicle equipped with only a monocular camera without relying on explicit modelling of road or lane markings. We evaluate our method on the largescale KITTI and Oxford RobotCar datasets and demonstrate reliable path proposal and obstacle segmentation in a wide variety of environments under a range of lighting, weather and traffic conditions. We illustrate how the method can generalise to multiple path proposals at intersections and outline plans to incorporate the system into a framework for autonomous urban driving.

We present the design, modeling, and implementation of a novel pneumatic actuator, the Pneumatic Reel Actuator (PRA). The PRA is highly extensible, lightweight, capable of operating in compression and tension, compliant, and inexpensive. An initial prototype of the PRA can reach extension ratios greater than 16:1, has a force-to-weight ratio over 28:1, reach speeds of 0.87 meters per second, and can be constructed with parts totaling less than $4 USD. We have developed a model describing the actuator and have conducted experiments characterizing the actuators performance in regards to force, extension, pressure, and speed. We have implemented two parallel robotic applications in the form of a three degree of freedom robot arm and a tetrahedral robot.

Humans utilize their torsos and arms while running to compensate for the angular momentum generated by the lower-body movement during the flight phase. To enable this capability in a humanoid robot, the robot should have human-like mass, a center of mass position, and inertial moment of each link. To mimic this characteristic, we developed an angular momentum control method using a humanoid upper body based on human motion. In this method, the angular momentum generated by the movement of the humanoid lower body is calculated, and the torso and arm motions are calculated to compensate for the angular momentum of the lower body. We additionally developed the humanoid upper-body mechanism that mimics the human link length and mass property by using carbon fiber reinforced plastic and a symmetric structure. As a result, the developed humanoid robot could generate almost the same angular momentum as that of human through human-like running motion. Furthermore, when suspended in midair, the humanoid robot produced the angular momentum compensation in the yaw direction.

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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Video Friday: Robot Dance Teacher, Transformer Drone, and Pneumatic Reel Actuator - IEEE Spectrum

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