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r0B0t: Pokemon Go Cheats Issued With Permanent Bans By Niantic

Niantic, the developer behind Pokemon Go, is clamping down on cheating with lifetime bans for players who violate the game's terms of service.

In a statement on its website, Niantic announced users can be banned for falsifying locations, using emulators, modified or unofficial software and accessing Pokemon Go clients or backends in “an unauthorised manner”.

GPS spoofing enables players to trick the game into thinking they are in different regions, helping them to pick up rare Pokemon currently unavailable in their locality. Bots, meanwhile, let players automate portions of the game.

As the Verge reports, players can appeal the ban using a form on Niantic's Pokemon Go website.

Niantic said: “Our goal is to provide a fair, fun and legitimate game experience for everyone. We will continue to work with all of you to improve the quality of the gameplay, including ongoing optimization and fine tuning of our anti-cheat system.”

Hundreds of users have taken to Reddit to try to unearth Niantic's strategy, but it's not yet clear how the developer detects foul play.

The Guardian has reported that a number of bot developers had been sent cease and desist orders.

Necrobot, a premium service for account farming, said: “Due to legal action being started against other bot creators and developers (we did not receive a letter yet) the project development will be stopped. All source files/downloads will be removed.”

The latest crackdown comes after a number of third party Pokemon mapping sites were shut down last month.

The move coincided with the removal of the nearby tracking feature, which has since been updated, and frayed relations with the game's community.

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r0B0t: Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Recruitment
Despite major advances, it doesn't look like artificial intelligence will replace recruiters anytime soon

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rarely out of the news at the moment, whether it is robots threatening to put physicists out of a job as they learn to run complex experiments for themselves or Google's AI project learning to write poetry, it seems that in the future anything humans can do, robots will be able to do - if not necessarily better - at least serviceably well.

Understandably, this is expected to shake up the jobs market. It will make some roles redundant and transform others. Some commentators go as far as suggesting that recruitment consultants themselves need to be added to the endangered species list since the strength of AI's capabilities makes having a human at the helm of the recruitment process unnecessary.

At first glance, it seems like a reasonable idea. Recruiters match candidates with jobs that require certain skills - something that a computer could achieve with the right algorithms in place. Indeed, I launched a tech-based recruitment startup last year, The Work Crowd, which uses advanced algorithms to connect specialist freelance talent with businesses.

So do I think that recruiters should be brushing up their own CVs in earnest, ready for the seismic changes ahead? I'm inclined to think not.

"2016-08-12-1470996155-4165310-ArtificialIntelligence2.jpg"

A science as well as an art

There are many jobs where artificial intelligence could, in theory, be applied. A visit to the GP could be superseded with inputting your symptoms into a computer, which would then use data such as your age and medical history to determine the cause of your ailments before prescribing appropriate treatment. It could happen, but nobody in their right mind would ever think it was a good idea.

Why? Because no AI programme could substitute for the role of the doctor, with their abilities to understand all the things that make us human: the non-verbal signs, the meaningful omissions and the background stories that could never be accurately represented as fields in a database.

Just as there's an art to medicine, there's an art to recruitment. It's not just about matching candidates to jobs - if that was the case the consultancy sector would have died out a long time ago. It's about being able to accurately read a given situation to see what a client really needs, even if they don't see it themselves yet. It's about being able to build relationships that allow you to carefully calibrate all stages of the recruitment process to ensure the right result for all parties.

The limitations of AI

Certainly, AI will have a role to play in our industry, particularly in temporary or lower level roles where moves between jobs are more often motivated by measurable factors such as pay, working hours and location, rather than more amorphous things like status and opportunity.

Technological advancements are a great asset to recruitment, but not a replacement. There's simply no substitute for 'pressing the flesh' and applying old-fashioned human intuition, social skills, and good sense. This is something Microsoft proved when its own foray into an AI social media account led to a number of posts supporting Donald Trump, claiming that 9/11 was an inside job and confidently telling the world that "Ricky Gervais [sic] learned totalitarianism from Adolf Hitler, the inventor of atheism". We can outsource all manner of tasks to artificial intelligence, but, as Microsoft learned, it doesn't mean we should.
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r0B0t: I Love Dick

When Amazon first started making original series, it had a gimmick: The internet's very own big-box store would put the first episodes of potential series online so viewers could vote on which ones would become full-fledged series. The gambit made the obligatory tech-company gestures at transparency and disruption, but it also reflected the paucity of Amazon's initial series, a batch of pilots that, excepting Alpha House, barely looked professional. When a network is making such larkish TV, it hardly matters what goes and what doesn't. In the few years since, as Amazon has gotten more serious about making television, it has continued to put pilots online early, but viewer response is barely relevant: The network is going to greenlight what it is going to greenlight, apparently having discovered that disrupting the television business sometimes involves doing things the old way.

Earlier this summer, Amazon released pilots for two hourlong series: The Interestings (flawed, but promising; not yet picked up) and The Last Tycoon (very bad; picked up). This week, it is releasing pilots for three half-hour series: Jean-Claude Van Johnson, The Tick, and Jill Soloway's I Love Dick, the headlining act of this trio. Liberally adapted from a beloved cult novel by Chris Kraus, I Love Dick stars Kathryn Hahn as Chris, a stymied filmmaker who travels with her husband Sylvère (Griffin Dunne) to Marfa, Texas—where she, and then they, become infatuated with Dick (Kevin Bacon, smoldering), a macho intellectual and part-time cowboy who runs an institute Sylvère is attending. I Love Dick has potential, but it doesn't need it: Soloway, the creator of Transparent, is Amazon's most important creative asset. If you are a network, you give her what she wants, including another show.

Soloway told New York magazine, in a piece about the show, that she identified with Kraus' choice to use her own name and biography in her work. “I only want to write about somewhat unlikable Jewish women having really inappropriate ideas about life and sex,” Soloway said. I Love Dick delivers on those interests. The pilot reflects many of Soloway's strengths—her naturalistic skill with actors, her ability to capture bourgeois social milieus with a detail (in this case, fluorescent-yellow Birkenstocks), her dedication to exploring gender politics in ways that don't turn her shows into lectures—but it doesn't have the instantaneous hook or heart of Transparent.

I Love Dick, the novel, is epistolary. I Love Dick, the show, is framed by letters Chris has written to Dick. “Dear Dick, every letter is a love letter. It started in New York,” Hahn says in harried voiceover at the start of the show as the block text dramatically appears on an all-red screen. But turning the novel into a TV show takes it out of Kraus' character's head in a way that alters the texture and tone, losing some of the hothouse intensity of the novel. Television does a great close third-person, but it is very hard, if not impossible, for it do first-person, even when using first-person narration. (Recently, Mr. Robot has made some attempts.) With TV, you're always watching from the outside. The world that Chris and Sylvère inhabit in the show automatically feels bigger, more populated, and more concrete than their world in the novel, simply because you can see all the people in the shot that the writing might have ignored. The pilot also introduces characters who are not in the book at all. Also not in the book: Marfa. Soloway decided to set the show there after visiting her girlfriend, the poet Eileen Myles, there, and deciding it would be a good cross-cultural canvas to help broaden the novel's scope.

There are people who have a hard time watching Transparent because they find the Pfeffermans too excruciating. On Transparent, Hahn's Rabbi Raquel, the on-again, off-again love interest of Josh Pfefferman (Jay Duplass), works like aspirin: Raquel is so grounded, so sane that she lessens the pain of watching the Pfeffermans mess up their lives. In I Love Dick, Hahn, fantastic in everything she does, gets to play the headache. Her Chris has a big, blowsy personality: caustic, dramatic, and self-sabotaging. But she has that Pfefferman-esque charisma. When she spots Dick at a party—Kevin Bacon wears a white T-shirt as well as he did in Footloose—and expresses her attraction by jabbering about how remarkable it is that he goes by “Dick” and not Richard or Rick or Richie, her allure is nonetheless plain to see.

In the show's climactic scene, dinner at a restaurant, Dick asks Chris what her movie is about. “It's about a couple, or I would say the woman in the couple, she represents all women, and society's crushing expectations,” she says. “Sounds horrible. Sounds like you're crushed by someone,” Dick replies, before turning to Sylvère and asking if Chris' film is any good. The great thing about Soloway's work is that she herself is both Dick and Chris, a woman interested in society's crushing expectations of women but also talented and funny and wise enough to know you need character and plot and entertainment and complications to tell that story—that you need people, not symbols. You need a blowsy New Yorker who rolls into Marfa in a jumpsuit and neon Birkenstocks with her own unhinged plans about what to do with a lustworthy macho intellectual cowboy named Dick.

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r0B0t: Researchers Are Growing Living Biohybrid Robots That Move Like Animals

This article originally appeared in the Conversation.

Think of a traditional robot and you probably imagine something made from metal and plastic. Such “nuts-and-bolts” robots are made of hard materials. As robots take on more roles beyond the lab, such rigid systems can present safety risks to the people they interact with. For example, if an industrial robot swings into a person, there is the risk of bruises or bone damage.

Researchers are increasingly looking for solutions to make robots softer or more compliant—less like rigid machines, more like animals. With traditional actuators—such as motors—this can mean using air muscles or adding springs in parallel with motors. For example, on a Whegs robot, having a spring between a motor and the wheel leg (Wheg) means that if the robot runs into something (like a person), the spring absorbs some of the energy so the person isn't hurt. The bumper on a Roomba vacuuming robot is another example; it's spring-loaded so the Roomba doesn't damage the things it bumps into.

But there's a growing area of research that's taking a different approach. By combining robotics with tissue engineering, we're starting to build robots powered by living muscle tissue or cells. These devices can be stimulated electrically or with light to make the cells contract to bend their skeletons, causing the robot to swim or crawl. The resulting biobots can move around and are soft like animals. They're safer around people and typically less harmful to the environment they work in than a traditional robot might be. And since, like animals, they need nutrients to power their muscles, not batteries, biohybrid robots tend to be lighter too.

Building a biobot

Researchers fabricate biobots by growing living cells, usually from heart or skeletal muscle of rats or chickens, on scaffolds that are nontoxic to the cells. If the substrate is a polymer, the device created is a biohybrid robot—a hybrid between natural and human-made materials.

If you just place cells on a molded skeleton without any guidance, they wind up in random orientations. That means when researchers apply electricity to make them move, the cells' contraction forces will be applied in all directions, making the device inefficient at best.

So to better harness the cells' power, researchers turn to micropatterning. We stamp or print microscale lines on the skeleton made of substances that the cells prefer to attach to. These lines guide the cells so that as they grow, they align along the printed pattern. With the cells all lined up, researchers can direct how their contraction force is applied to the substrate. So rather than just a mess of firing cells, they can all work in unison to move a leg or fin of the device.

Biohybrid robots inspired by animals

Beyond a wide array of biohybrid robots, researchers have even created some completely organic robots using natural materials, like the collagen in skin, rather than polymers for the body of the device. Some can crawl or swim when stimulated by an electric field. Some take inspiration from medical tissue engineering techniques and use long rectangular arms (or cantilevers) to pull themselves forward.

Others have taken their cues from nature, creating biologically inspired biohybrids. For example, a group led by researchers at California Institute of Technology developed a biohybrid robot inspired by jellyfish. This device, which they call a medusoid, has arms arranged in a circle. Each arm is micropatterned with protein lines so that cells grow in patterns similar to the muscles in a living jellyfish. When the cells contract, the arms bend inwards, propelling the biohybrid robot forward in nutrient-rich liquid.

More recently, researchers have demonstrated how to steer their biohybrid creations. A group at Harvard used genetically modified heart cells to make a biologically inspired manta ray-shaped robot swim. The heart cells were altered to contract in response to specific frequencies of light—one side of the ray had cells that would respond to one frequency, the other side's cells responded to another.

When the researchers shone light on the front of the robot, the cells there contracted and sent electrical signals to the cells further along the manta ray's body. The contraction would propagate down the robot's body, moving the device forward. The researchers could make the robot turn to the right or left by varying the frequency of the light they used. If they shone more light of the frequency the cells on one side would respond to, the contractions on that side of the manta ray would be stronger, allowing the researchers to steer the robot's movement.

Toughening up the biobots

While exciting developments have been made in the field of biohybrid robotics, there's still significant work to be done to get the devices out of the lab. Devices currently have limited lifespans and low force outputs, limiting their speed and ability to complete tasks. Robots made from mammalian or avian cells are very picky about their environmental conditions. For example, the ambient temperature must be near biological body temperature and the cells require regular feeding with nutrient-rich liquid. One possible remedy is to package the devices so that the muscle is protected from the external environment and constantly bathed in nutrients.

Another option is to use more robust cells as actuators. Here at Case Western Reserve University, we've recently begun to investigate this possibility by turning to the hardy marine sea slug Aplysia californica. Since A. californica lives in the intertidal region, it can experience big changes in temperature and environmental salinity over the course of a day. When the tide goes out, the sea slugs can get trapped in tide pools. As the sun beats down, water can evaporate and the temperature will rise. Conversely in the event of rain, the saltiness of the surrounding water can decrease. When the tide eventually comes in, the sea slugs are freed from the tidal pools. Sea slugs have evolved very hardy cells to endure this changeable habitat.

We've been able to use Aplysia tissue to actuate a biohybrid robot, suggesting that we can manufacture tougher biobots using these resilient tissues. The devices are large enough to carry a small payload—approximately 1.5 inches long and one inch wide.

A further challenge in developing biobots is that currently the devices lack any sort of on-board control system. Instead, engineers control them via external electrical fields or light. In order to develop completely autonomous biohybrid devices, we'll need controllers that interface directly with the muscle and provide sensory inputs to the biohybrid robot itself. One possibility is to use neurons or clusters of neurons called ganglia as organic controllers.

That's another reason we're excited about using Aplysia in our lab. This sea slug has been a model system for neurobiology research for decades. A great deal is already known about the relationships between its neural system and its muscles—opening the possibility that we could use its neurons as organic controllers that could tell the robot which way to move and help it perform tasks, such as finding toxins or following a light.

While the field is still in its infancy, researchers envision many intriguing applications for biohybrid robots. For example, our tiny devices using slug tissue could be released as swarms into water supplies or the ocean to seek out toxins or leaking pipes. Due to the biocompatibility of the devices, if they break down or are eaten by wildlife these environmental sensors theoretically wouldn't pose the same threat to the environment traditional nuts-and-bolts robots would.

One day, devices could be fabricated from human cells and used for medical applications. Biobots could provide targeted drug delivery, clean up clots or serve as compliant actuatable stents. By using organic substrates rather than polymers, such stents could be used to strengthen weak blood vessels to prevent aneurysms—and over time the device would be remodeled and integrated into the body. Beyond the small-scale biohybrid robots currently being developed, ongoing research in tissue engineering, such as attempts to grow vascular systems, may open the possibility of growing large-scale robots actuated by muscle.

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