Growing up in Compton, California, the comedian and actor Travon Free had a close look at institutionalized poverty and racism in the United States. "The land of the free and the American Dream [are] only for certain people,” he says in this interview, filmed at this year's Aspen Ideas Festival.
philverney posted a photo:
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Sixty-three years ago today, on July 27, 1953, the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed, ceasing hostilities between North Korean Communist forces, backed by China, and South Korean forces, backed by the United Nations. The war had raged across the Korean Peninsula for three years, leaving hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians dead. The Armistice formed the famous Demilitarized Zone that still separates North Korea and South Korea, technically still at war with each other. On this anniversary of the armistice agreement, a look back at the people and places involved in the conflict sometimes called "the forgotten war.”
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The search for lifesaving antibiotics is on. Scientists have turned up one promising candidate in an unlikely place — the human nose.
Michigan State University engineers tried 3-D-printed fingertips and special conductive replicas of the victim's fingerprints to crack the biometric lock on his Samsung Galaxy phone.
Paul Kingsnorth urges us to follow the poet Robinson Jeffers in “unhumanising” our views, to open our (human) minds “from ourselves” (The call of the wild, Review, 23 July). He presents an inspiring list of novels to help us to acknowledge the sentience of other beings. Many ethnographers also help us to gain precious insight into other ways of thinking. From the 1930s Alfred Irving Hallowell adopted the phrase “other-than-human persons” in his exploration of relationships between entities such as rocks and humans among the Northern Ojibwe (Canada) and how these sentient others reveal themselves to people. More recently, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has been urging us to exchange perspectives not only with other human beings whose intellectual traditions differ from the “artifact[s] of western individualism” discussed by Kingsnorth but also with other sentient beings of the cosmos. In what he calls perspectival multinaturalism, Viveiros de Castro argues there is no one undifferentiated state of “nature” as western orthodoxy would have it. Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think is an example of an ethnography that dissolves human and non-human categories. He set himself the task of understanding the existence of forests as an emergent process in which human and non-human beings engage in making and communicating signs to each other.
Dr Penelope Dransart
Reader in anthropology and archaeology, University of Wales Trinity Saint David
In Bill Clinton's DNC speech Tuesday night, the former president talked about his wife Hillary, both as a person and as a public servant, challenging how that description squares away with the caricature that Republicans present her as: “The real one has done more change-making before she was 30 than most do in a lifetime in office. The other is a cartoon.”
The Late Show's Stephen Colbert took a rather literal interpretation of Bill's words, and the result was Cartoon Hillary Clinton, who made an appearance on the show shortly after the real Hillary achieved her historic nomination. The animated Hillary, with a strained grin, robotic mannerisms, and a desperate need to pander to the audience, embodies the qualities that haters see in her real-life counterpart.
Cartoon Hillary Clinton answered a few Republicans' questions and talked about her rival, Donald Trump (who Colbert also interviewed as a cartoon back in March). “That's what I love about America,” she said. “It's the only place where a Secretary of State, senator, and lifelong public servant can be put on equal footing with a screaming cantaloupe.”
The new Dyson 360 Eye does a great job picking up dirt—but has trouble reaching it.
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Robotics and Automation News (press release) (registration) | Rapid growth of online orders welcomes robotics technology, says Axium Robotics and Automation News (press release) (registration) Automated guided vehicles (AGVs), looking like driverless forklifts, carry pallets to and from transport trailers; there are articulated robot arms that de-palletize and palletize goods; autonomous shuttles bring goods to and from their shelves, while ... |
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You'd think that the first robot vacuum from a company like Dyson, who reinvented the vacuum, fan, and hair dryer, would rival R2-D2 when it came to functionality. But with the 360 Eye, Dyson instead focused on creating a robovac that did one thing very well: cleaning. It delivers as promised, but is that worth $1,000?
The no-frills approach to its robot vacuum is surprising when you consider that Dyson has actually been developing its robovac for close to 18 years now. Before the Eye 360, Dyson created the DC06 which, until recently, has only existed in a handful of leaked photos outside the company.
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It cleaned well, but the DC06's size, weight, less-than-amazing battery life, and price tag didn't quite meet the company's expectations. As a result, the DC06 was scrapped, the five working models the company created went into exile, and Dyson's robotics division then spent the next 12 years developing the 360 Eye instead.
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As far as form factor goes, small and tall is the best way to describe the 360 Eye. Compared to the Samsung POWERbot VR9000, which could easily play a droid in Star Wars, the 360 Eye looks like a tiny can of cookies. Of all the consumer-level robot vacuums currently on the market, the 360Eye has the smallest footprint, by a longshot, but it also comes at the cost of it being a little on the tall side.
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Life is all about trade-offs, and Dyson's engineers decided that being able to squeeze into the small gaps in-between your furniture was more important than being able to squeeze under your couch. As a result, the 360 Eye didn't even come close to fitting under my Ikea couch, but neither could Samsung's POWERbot VR9000, nor a Roomba. I even have trouble squeezing a mop under there, so I feel Dyson's engineers made the right decision by focusing on keeping the 360 Eye's footprint as small as possible.
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Instead it allowed the robovac to squeeze into tight areas that I assumed would always have to be cleaned by hand. Will the 360 Eye be able to clean every hard to reach area in your home? No. You'll still need to have a manual vacuum on hand to ensure every last inch of your floors get cleaned. But it should at least be able to autonomously clean the most visible areas, so your friends don't think you're a complete slob.
The 360 Eye's design continues Dyson's unintentional approach of creating appliances that look like science fiction props, with its silvery faux-metal plastic housing and bulging 0.33-liter dust bin on the front. But other than a large button on top that lights up with various patterns to signal what the 360 Eye is currently doing or what it needs (charging, connecting to your Wi-fi network, cleaning, etc.), the only real distinguishing feature atop the robovac is an ominous-looking dome that gives the bot its name.
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That dome is a 360-degree camera (looking eerily like HAL 9000's unblinking eye) that feeds a wraparound image of a room to the 360 Eye's processor. You might assume the panoramic camera on top photographs a room's ceiling so the robot can plot its course. But that's not how it works.
The 360 Eye takes a simpler approach to cleaning. Once the robot starts vacuuming it sticks to a five-meter square section of a room that it cleans by spiraling out from the center. Then it moves onto a neighboring square, and so forth, until a room is clean. This makes for more efficient use of its 45-minute run-time.
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The 360 Eye's camera can really only see as high as a room's walls, which it photographs up to 30 times per second. Those images are processed by a special algorithm to detect and track distinct corners, like you'd find on tables, windows, or even paintings on a wall, which the robot uses to keep tabs on where it is, where it's been, and what's left to clean.
A simple map of a room is built up as the robovac navigates a space, but is wiped from the bot's memory after a cleaning cycle is complete. This makes it better suited for a home where things are constantly getting moved, creating new obstacles for the robovac to navigate every time it starts cleaning.
The 360 Eye adds extra collision security in the form of infra-red sensors. For the most part, the combination of these two technologies worked seamlessly, and on many occasions I was surprised at how deftly the tiny robovac was able to tightly navigate around table legs and other hard-to-spot obstacles. Collisions did occur from time to time, but thanks to the bot's small form factor, there was barely an impact.
The 360 Eye met its match when cleaning underneath an Ikea chair. It ended up beaching itself on a wooden crossbeam that it didn't see coming. Before I got up to rescue it, the robot just sat there, happily sucking away without moving for about five minutes.
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It also had hang ups in dark spaces. On several occasions, while cleaning underneath a piece of furniture it was barely able to squeeze under, the Dyson 360 Eye needed rescuing. Presumably because its 360-degree camera was essentially blinded. The camera is a key part of its ability to navigate a room, and as a result, the robovac won't even turn on if there's not enough light for its camera to work. If you want to schedule it to clean the living room at three in the morning while you're asleep, you'll need to leave some lights on.
Yet these problems could potentially be resolved in future software updates, which the Dyson 360 Eye receives via Wi-Fi. The inclusion of Wi-Fi also allows the 360 Eye to be activated, monitored, and scheduled from the Dyson Link app on iOS or Android devices.
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Pairing the app to the 360 Eye was a little tricky, but only because the app looked like it had failed when in reality it had successfully connected to the robovac, and functionality is limited. The most complex thing you can do through the app is schedule the robot to clean throughout the week. It does show you the map of a room it created after a cleaning is complete, so you can see what areas it might have missed. But it feels like a half-feature because you can't then click on the map and direct the robot back to a certain area.
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On the underside of the 360 Eye you'll find a pair of metal contacts the robot vacuum uses for charging, its spinning brush bar, and a pair of bright blue rubber tank treads.
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They might be more complicated than a simple pair of wheels (more parts means more parts that can break), but the treads also provide better grip since there's more surface area making contact with your floors, and the large teeth improve the 360 Eye's ability to clamber over obstacles, and transition from hard floors to carpeting. They also help the robovac maintain a straighter course—taking the tiny bot smoothly to its tiny charging base, which easily unfolds and sidles up against a wall.
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Because it's first and foremost a Dyson vacuum, running off the company's tiny but mighty V2 digital motor, the 360 Eye sucks up dirt and debris as efficiently as any of the company's manual vacuums.
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The spinning disks of whiskers used by robots like the Roomba to sweep debris from the edges of the bot inwards don't exist on the 360 Eye. Instead it features the same edge-to-edge brushbar that the company's manual vacs use so that it cleans as close to the edge of a wall as possible. It still leaves about a half-inch gap, but its ability to suck in dirt and debris along walls easily outperformed other robovacs I've tested.
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After using the Dyson 360 Eye for some time, I can understand why the company decided to focus on its ability to clean. That's where its competitors have made compromises, which makes no sense for a product that's supposed to save you work and make your life easier. But there are a few features I would like to see added to help justify the 360 Eye's $1,000 price tag.
The ability to manually steer the robot from the app to hit missed spots, or move it to another room, would be helpful. For comparison, Samsung's $1000 PowerBOT VR9000 can follow a red crosshair projected on floors to help it navigate to a specific area. That's a genuinely useful feature—not a gimmick. There's also no way to limit where the Eye 360 is cleaning except for setting up physical obstacles in doorways to keep it contained, and notifications, or an alarm, for when the robot got stuck, would be useful too.
Of all the robot vacuums I've tested, Dyson's 360 Eye is the first that will genuinely clean your floors as well as a manual vacuum cleaner can. That being said, it won't completely eliminate vacuuming from your weekly chore list. It will save you a lot of time, though, which is what Dyson is really selling here for $1,000. The company's first robot vacuum feels a little light on features given the steep price tag, but through software updates and improvements to its app, eventually you could, one day, never need to touch a vacuum ever again.
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Replacing surgical staff with automated technologies is becoming a more realistic prospect
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Two fallow deer bucks at dawn as a red sun rose over the surrounding tree-tops.
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Naarden is a star fort in the Netherlands. The city was constructed in the manner seen here so that an attack on any individual wall could be defended from the two adjacent star points by shooting at the enemy from behind. Today Naarden is home to roughly 17,000 residents. /// Source imagery: @digitalglobe (at Naarden)
Think summer's hot on Earth? Space physicists tracking weather on Jupiter say the roar of the raging storm we call the Great Red Spot heats the outer atmosphere above it by more than 1,000 degrees F.
Jupiter's Great Red Spot may be responsible for stirring an atmospheric hotspot into a frenzy, causing it to be hundreds of degrees warmer than anywhere else on the planet.…
The Australian | Technology: facial recognition to eye scans and thought control The Australian And your home robot slinks around the corner, out of sight, having discerned you are in a filthy mood. This isn't telepathy. It isn't the distant future. It's part of how we are about to communicate with electronic devices. It's potentially our most ... |
BT.com | Scientists say last goodbye to Philae lander BT.com Scientists have said a goodbye for good to Philae, the European robot lander that made history by bouncing onto the surface of a comet. 0. Share this. Facebook; Twitter; Google plus; Email; Share. 0. The Philae lander became unresponsive and ... Rosetta's comet lander Philae sends final tweet before losing contact with EarthDaily Mail Farewell Philae: Earth severs link with silent probe on cometABC Online Goodbye to Philae: What did we learn from this comet hunter?Christian Science Monitor Phys.Org -NBCNews.com -NASASpaceflight.com -CNET all 49 news articles » |
