The Robotic Musicianship Group at Georgia Tech has been working on Shimon, a musical robot that can improvise melodic accompaniment, for about six years now. And for three years, they've added Shimi — a small, smartphone-connected bot that can respond to music with dance and sound — to the mix.
Search and rescue operations in more remote areas can benefit from advanced technology such as drones, but you can never count on the NSA being in the right place at the right time during an emergency. But even if they were, big drones suitable for either launching missiles at insurgents or delivering Amazon packages might not be cut out for getting into smaller areas. Also, there are times when there just won’t be enough room to fly (think inside a bunch of tangled cables or twisted metal) and you just have to hit the ground and walk. What could possibly handle such a task? Short answer: the vampire bat. And now we’re going to build some to take care of these critical jobs.
A robot inspired by vampire bats could carry out search and rescue operations in areas that most automobiles can not reach. How does it work?
DALER is a new robot made to look like a bat, which is capable of walking and flying. The device was created to be in a position to access different terrains, allowing the craft to conduct a wide wide variety of search and rescue operations.
The Deployable Air-Land Exploration Robot (DALER) is patterned following vampire bats. Wings of the robot are constructed of fabric stretched more than a versatile skeletal structure. This allows the limbs, identified as whegs, to play the roles of both wings and legs.
- The Long-tailed Duck is one of the deepest diving ducks, and can dive as deep as 60 meters (200 feet) to forage.
- Of all diving ducks, the Long-tailed Duck spends the most time under water relative to time on the surface. When it is foraging it is submerged three to four times as much as it is on top of the water.
We found this hawk sitting in a tree by the harbor. I don't know what it is yet.
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| EEZ Stripers? |
Thirteen commercial fishermen in North Carolina and Georgia have been charged in federal court in Raleigh for their role in the illegal harvest and sale and false reporting of approximately 90,000 pounds of Atlantic striped bass from federal waters off the coast of North Carolina during 2009 and 2010, according to the Justice Department.Commercial and recreational fishing for Striped Bass along the Atlantic Coast is legal within the State waters out to three miles under state laws, and illegal in the Federal Exlusive Economic Zone (EEZ) from three miles out to 200 miles.
The average retail value of the illegally harvested striped bass is approximately $1.1 million.
This investigation began as a result of the U.S. Coast Guard boarding of the fishing vessel Lady Samaira in February 2010, based on a complaint that multiple vessels were fishing Striped Bass illegally.
The individuals have been charged with violating the Lacey Act, which is a federal law that prohibits individuals from transporting, selling or buying fish and wildlife harvested illegally.
Additionally, 11 of these fishermen also have been charged with filing false reports in connection with the illegally harvested fish.
One of the fishermen is also charged with obstruction of a proceeding before a federal agency.
Specifically, the indictments allege that the commercial fishermen transported and sold Atlantic striped bass, knowing that they were unlawfully harvested from federal waters off the coast of North Carolina. In an effort to hide their illegal fishing activities, these fishermen falsely reported harvesting these fish from state waters, where it would have been legal.
Natural Resources Police report that the piracy and poaching of oyster sanctuaries in the Chesapeake Bay by the persons most likely to see a direct benefit of the effort to perpetrate oyster harvesting in the future continues.Could be being the operative word. In most cases, judges are reluctant to take away the livelihood of workers who are not exactly rolling in wealth. 14 bushels of oysters at $49 a half bushel (washed and delivered) isn't going to put a man on easy street. A government bureaucrat can make that much money in a day
Police say that two Crisfield watermen were charged Monday by the Maryland Natural Resources Police with illegally harvesting oysters from protected waters.
Using the Maritime Law Enforcement Information Network system of cameras and radar, two officers monitored Paul Franklin Tyler III, 29, and Jeffrey Alan Cuff Jr., 31, at 10 a.m. as they dredged for wild oysters in the buffer zone surrounding the Somerset Oyster Sanctuary near Tangier Sound.
Once Tyler, the vessel operator, saw the NRP officers, he quickly left the sanctuary buffer with the dredge still in the water. The officers stopped the vessel and saw 14 bushels of oysters on board.
The officers checked all four corner buoys marking the sanctuary boundaries to ensure that they were on station as defined in state regulation. The 14 bushels of oysters were returned to the waters of the state.
The two watermen are scheduled to appear in Somerset District Court on March 10. If found guilty, Tyler and Cuff each could be fined as much as $3,000 and have their tidal fish licenses suspended for six months up to a year.
I am embarrassed by the scientific community’s behavior on the subject. I went into science with the misguided belief that science provides answers. Too often, it doesn’t. Some physical problems are simply too difficult. Two scientists can examine the same data and come to exactly opposite conclusions about causation.Amen.
Reports that 2014 was the “hottest” year on record feed the insatiable appetite the public has for definitive, alarming headlines. It doesn’t matter that even in the thermometer record, 2014 wasn’t the warmest within the margin of error. Who wants to bother with “margin of error”? Journalists went into journalism so they wouldn’t have to deal with such technical mumbo-jumbo. I said this six weeks ago, as did others, but no one cares unless a mainstream news source stumbles upon it and is objective enough to report it.I doubt that most journolists have the statistics background to even understand a margin of error.
In what universe does a temperature change that is too small for anyone to feel over a 50 year period become globally significant? Where we don’t know if the global average temperature is 58 or 59 or 60 deg. F, but we are sure that if it increases by 1 or 2 deg. F, that would be a catastrophe?Read the whole thing.
Where our only truly global temperature measurements, the satellites, are ignored because they don’t show a record warm year in 2014?
What kind of people want to talk dirty to children? Perverts, and also government sex educators. But I repeat myself:People who want the understand how things work become scientist, people who want to make things work become engineers, bullies become police, jocks become athletes or PE teachers etc etc, Under this theory, what would be the ideal job for a pervert? Teaching sex ed to teenagers.
The former Ontario deputy education minister who oversaw the development of a controversial sex-ed program before facing child sex charges will plead guilty to a number of those charges.The guy in charge of developing the sex-ed curriculum is a child molester, but don’t worry about that, says his boss, the lesbian.
Benjamin Levin, born 1952, was arrested in 2013 in the wake of an international child porn sting that led to his North York doorstep. He was not only accused of making and distributing child pornography, but also of arranging for a sexual offense with a child, and with possessing and accessing child pornography.
Levin’s lawyer Clayton Ruby confirmed Friday in court that his client will plead guilty to some of the seven charges, without clarifying which ones, reported the Toronto Star. Ruby also indicated that a guilty plea means there will be no trial.
Levin will be sentenced in March.
Under his watch as Ontario’s top education official from 2004 to 2009, Levin oversaw the development of an update to the provincial sex-education curriculum. Critics immediately slammed the proposal for encouraging the early sexualization of children and promoting a homosexual agenda.
Under the umbrella of “sexual diversity,” the curriculum teaches children to question whether they are a boy or a girl, about masturbation, oral sex, and ‘diverse’ family structures. After strong backlash from outraged parents the curriculum was shelved by then-Premier Dalton McGuinty in 2010.
After Levin’s arrest, Premier Kathleen Wynne, herself an open lesbian, tried to distance Levin from the sex-ed curriculum, saying at the time he had no direct role in writing it.
Critics expect the latest sex-ed curriculum proposed by Wynne to largely resemble its shelved predecessor. Wynne has stated that the curriculum, slated for all publicly funded schools next fall, will teach children about giving “sexual consent” and what she calls “healthy relationships.” . . .
January Kristen Jones (born January 5, 1978) is an American actress and model. She is best known for playing Betty Draper in the television series Mad Men since 2007, as well as for roles as Cadence in American Wedding (2003), Elizabeth Harris in Unknown (2011), and Emma Frost in X-Men: First Class (2011).
Jones was born in Hecla, South Dakota, the daughter of Karen, who manages a sporting goods store, and Marvin Jones, a coach, gym teacher, and fitness director. She is named after January Wayne, a character in Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough.Which pretty much exhausts my interest in her life, although if that tweet is typical, might require I show a little more interest.
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A German court ruled in favor of mens' right to pee standing up on Thursday, after a landlord tried to retain part of a tenant's 3,000 euro deposit for allegedly damaging the marble floor of a toilet by sprinkling it with urine.$3000 euro deposit and marble floor? I'm inclined to agree with the landlord. Don't piss on the floor!
The debate about whether men should stand or sit is no laughing matter in Germany, where some toilets have red traffic-style signs forbidding the standing position. There is also a derogatory term for men who sit down to pee - "Sitzpinkler" - which implies that it is not masculine behavior.
Judge Stefan Hank in the city of Duesseldorf said men who insist on standing "must expect occasional rows with housemates, especially women" but cannot be held to account for collateral damage. "Despite growing domestication of men in this matter, urinating while standing up is still widespread," he said.
A number of regulations set to be published and take effect on Friday were pulled back just hours into the new administration of Republican Gov. Larry Hogan.We've seen this before when state's or the nation's executive changes parties. In fact, it's fairly routine for democrats to question rules that Republicans had planned to put in place, and vice versa. When G.W. Bush assumed the presidency, he stopped a number of regulations that were about to take effect, pending further review. One of these was the drinking waster standard for arsenic, which had been slated to go from 50 ppb to 10 ppb in Jan 2006. The Bush admin stopped the regulation from taking effect immediately, only to restore it after further review.
Hogan quietly withdrew the regulations, including the controversial phosphorous management tool, after being sworn in Wednesday as Maryland’s 62nd governor.
“The Governor has directed all agencies of state governmentt to begin a comprehensive review of all pending regulations,” said Shareese Churchill, a Hogan spokeswoman. “This review process is to allow public input, public hearing and full due process before regulations are finalized. All regulations that were scheduled for final publication on January 23 will not be published.”
Churchill could not immediately provide specifics on which proposed regulations were affected but confirmed that the phosphorous management tool was among those that will not go into effect. Those regulations, which are favored by environmental groups, would have limited the use of chicken manure on Eastern Shore farms as a way of controlling the amount of phosphorous that seeps into the Chesapeake Bay.
Farmers and the poultry industry opposed the regulations.
The news met with swift rebuke from groups such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Maryland Clean Agriculture Coalition.
Those Americans who didn’t get health insurance last year could be in for a rude awakening when the IRS asks them to fork over their Obamacare penalty — and it could be a lot more than the $95 many of them may be expecting.Insurance so good they have to coerce you to buy it.
The Affordable Care Act requires those who didn’t have insurance last year and didn’t qualify for one of the exemptions to pay a tax penalty, which was widely cited as $95 the first year. But the $95 is actually a minimum, and middle- and upper-income families will actually end up paying 1 percent of their household income as their penalty.
“People would hear the $95, quit listening, and make an assumption that that was what their penalty was going to be,” said Chuck Lovelace, vice president of affordable care for Liberty Tax Service. “I think that a lot of people will be surprised when they get in there and find out that their penalty is [based] on their household income.”
An unexpected $300 burden may not seem like much, but for many it is the lion’s share of their refund. Some tax preparers are convinced that millions of Americans remain unaware of the penalty (or tax, depending on your interpretation) associated with not purchasing health insurance.New privacy concerns over government's health care website
A little-known side to the government's health insurance website is prompting renewed concerns about privacy, just as the White House is calling for stronger cybersecurity protections for consumers.Government is just a thing that the liberals agree to do to you. Maybe they can fund the government by selling our private information.
It works like this: When you apply for coverage on HealthCare.gov, dozens of data companies may be able to tell that you are on the site. Some can even glean details such as your age, income, ZIP code, whether you smoke or if you are pregnant.
The data firms have embedded connections on the government site. Ever-evolving technology allows for individual Internet users to be tracked, building profiles that are a vital tool for advertisers.
Connections to multiple third-party tech firms were documented by technology experts who analyzed HealthCare.gov, and confirmed by The Associated Press. There is no evidence that personal information from HealthCare.gov has been misused, but the number of outside connections is raising questions.
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The privacy concerns come against the backdrop of President Barack Obama's new initiative to protect personal data online, a highlight of his State of the Union message scheduled for Tuesday night. The administration is getting the health care website ready for the final enrollment drive of 2015, aiming to have more than 9 million people signed up by Feb. 15 for subsidized private coverage.
Under the ACA, the Colorado insurance market is in chaotic flux. TheNYT reports that the premium for one standard midlevel silver ACA plan rose this year by 36 percent in one part of Colorado, while in another part a premium for the same plan dropped by almost 40 percent. Apparently many insurers set their prices low to attract customers, but it’s no longer clear if the low rates will be sustainable in the long-run:
Because buyers are so sensitive to price, the markets may experience cycles in which insurers alternately offer low premiums to attract customers and sharply raise them in later years to cover costs, experts said.
The volatility has created more uncertainty among people who must renew their plans, switch to new ones or buy insurance for the first time under the law.
Judy Greenfield, 55, from Denver, was notified in November by the Colorado marketplace that she would have to pay about $125 more a month next year for the same plan. She worked with a broker to figure out her options, and switched insurers to find a less expensive plan. “To have to go through this every year, selecting a new plan, is just a pain,” she said.
The results are now clear. The Affordable Care Act has done nothing to unravel the past mistakes that in large measure were (and still are) attributable to excessive regulation and transfer payments. To give but one example, the voluntary coverage supplied by employer plans has dipped sharply from about 60 percent in 1980 to 50 percent in 2010, which on an employment base of 150 million workers translates into a 15 million increase in the number of uninsured persons in the United States.To liberals, bad regulation is always a good excuse for more regulation. To wit:
It would be very difficult indeed to attribute this decline in health care coverage to some hidden form of market failure. What reason is there to think that employers have become more stingy, or employees more indifferent to their health care needs over the last 35 years?
The main point of Schumer’s recent speech was “Democrats must embrace government” as “what we believe in,” “what unites our party,” and as “the only thing that’s going to get the middle class going again.” He thought that Obamacare was regrettable to the extent it had complicated rather than furthered that fundamental purpose.
The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky strongly endorsed Schumer’s argument: Since “Democrats are the party of government,” the “one principle they all subscribe to is a belief that the federal government can and must intervene in the economic and social spheres to even things out.” The party will never create political openings for new government interventions, however, until it solves the public relations problem that afflicts existing ones. Democrats, he wrote, have done a “pathetic job” of getting people to appreciate “the dozens of ways in which the federal government already helps them and their communities.” The resulting “hatred of government we see in this country is sickeningly childish and hypocritical.”
The short version is that the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department warned NBC News that it could not possess an actual high-capacity magazine, but NBC News went ahead and did it anyway. The MPD recommended a warrant for Gregory’s arrest, but that request was nixed by the D.C. Attorney General Irvin Nathan because — my paraphrase — Gregory was just too nice a guy and had no other criminal intent.
That attitude stood in stark contrast to the D.C. Attorney General’s vigorous prosecution of other lesser-known people who also were nice people and had no other criminal intent, but violated D.C.’s gun laws.
We served a Freedom of Information Act request but D.C. held back numerous documents. So we filed suit.
We were assisted by attorneys Jim Peterson and Ramona Cotca of Judicial Watch, who did a great job. Everybody give them a round of applause.
D.C. eventually produced more documents, but refused to give us the Arrest Warrant Affidavit. We eventually won a court decision, and today D.C. produced the Affidavit, with some personal information redacted. (Affidavit Below)
The Affidavit demonstrates the facts as to NBC News’ open defiance of the law. This was no innocent error. Yet no prosecution.
Here is an excerpt from the Affidavit:
