Swarm robots form landing pad for quadrotor | Crave. I love swarm robots, especially when they pull off tricks that you can easily imagine a robot army doing. Researchers at the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab have been having fun with small Khepera robots and a quadrotor. Ted Macdonald and colleagues previously taught the rolling bots to spell the lab's acronym, GRITS, as seen in this video.
Now they've made the bots form a mobile landing platform for the quadrotor. The vid below shows how the Khepera robots can be told to follow a leader bot and assemble into various formations. In discussing the algorithms he used, Macdonald notes that while the robots do not need to communicate, they do need to know the position of each of their fellows. Still, this kind of research could help groups of machines move around and execute tasks more efficiently. (Via Tech Crunch) TextBook Exchange Bags Top Honors in Alibris API Contest. Alibris, an online marketplace for Independent sellers of popular, collectible and bargain books, music and movies has announced the winners for its developer contest held in May.
The contest invited developers to make innovative use of the Alibris API with prizes for best overall application, Android application, mashup and most fun application. Liz Deer, COO of Monsoon Commerce, of which Alibris is a division announced the winners. The top honors went to TextBook Exchange written by Brady Emerson. TextBook Exchange is a Facebook application that eases the process of buying and selling textbooks among friends by pulling out purchase and rental prices from Alibris. The following applications emerged winners in their respective categories. An interesting prize that was handed out as part of the contest was one for Most Developer-Friendly code, which went to Rupak Ganguly for his Ruby Wrapper for the Alibris API. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Anonymous To Build Its Own Social Network Called AnonPlus. Hacker collective Anonymous is preparing to launch its own social network called AnonPlus. The move comes after Google banned Anonymous's Google+ account called "Your Anon News" due to a violation of its community standards. Details about the project are scarce. Currently, AnonPlus.com is merely a splash page, containing a message that explains the group's motives behind the project. "Welcome to the Revolution," it says, "a new social network where there is no fear...of censorship...of blackout...nor of holding back". Another message on the site explains that the project is for "all people not just anonymous," adding that the actual site will go up soon but it will not happen overnight.
A link to the developer forum, where a possible user interface and design ideas are discussed, shows that the project is indeed in a very early stage. Kindle textbook rentals arrive; used can still be cheaper. College students amassing piles of money to pay for textbooks this fall may get a reprieve with a new Amazon rental program that gets them up to 80 percent off list prices. Kindle Textbook Rental allows students to rent textbooks and read them via the free Kindle reading apps, with book annotations preserved in the cloud storage after the rental period is up. With Kindle apps available on several platforms—PC, Mac, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry—students who rent from Kindle Textbook Rental will have a number of offline viewing options. Students can choose their rental period as well, from 30 to 360 days. As rental periods get longer, the price goes up, almost prohibitively so.
While the rental price of books in the $100-120 range start at around $40, that cost can more than double for a semester-long rental to $80. Students can also still buy Kindle versions of textbooks, often at a hefty discount from list price. Gen Y’s Luxury Buys: Young People Crave Designer Brands. Gameloft accused of overworking employees. A former head programmer for mobile and iOS developer Gameloft has made some pretty damning accusations against the company in a complaint. Glenn Watson says that he was made to work over 100 hours a week sometimes, and that "it was after I worked four consecutive weeks of fourteen-hour days - including weekends - that I realised I needed to resign. " The issues didn't stop there, either -- after Watson resigned, he claims, he was asked to apologize for leaving others behind to do the work that he passed up. He says the best apology would be to make sure his fellow employees "never get put through the same rubbish conditions again.
" Other employees have backed up Watson's claims, apparently, and even the company itself says there are some long hours being worked, though they're all in line with regulations and employee contracts. HP Pavilion dm4-2070us laptop. Core-i5, 6GB RAM, 640GB HDD, $499.99 @ Staples after $150 ez rebates for students. Neighbor vs. neighbor as homeowner fights get ugly.
The Inlet House condo complex in Fort Pierce, Fla., was once the kind of place the 55-and-older set aspired to. It was affordable. The pool and clubhouse were tidy, the lawns freshly snipped. Residents, push-carts in tow, walked to the beach, the bank, the beauty parlor, the cinema and the supermarket. In post-crash America, this was a dreamy little spot. Especially on a fixed income.But that was Inlet House before the rats started chewing through the toilet seats in vacant units and sewage started seeping from the ceiling. Before condos that were worth $79,000 four years ago sold for as little as $3,000. And before the homeowners' association levied $6,000 assessments on everyone -- and then foreclosed on seniors who couldn't pay the association bill, even if they didn't owe the bank a dime.Normally, it's the bankers who go after delinquent homeowners. New Polymeric Car Paint Can Self-Heal Major Scratches, Dings. Professor Stuart Rowan at Case Western led a team of researchers to develop a self-healing coating.
(Source: Case Western Reserve University via YouTube) When exposed to UV light, the polymer disassembles and reforms, patching scratches or cracks. (Source: Case Western Reserve University via YouTube) The material is shown here, healing from a razorblade scratch. (Source: Case Western Reserve University via YouTube) New coating is ready for commercial applications A major emerging field of materials science is to formulate new materials which, like living organisms, can self heal from macroscopic or microscopic damage. Nissan implemented a primitive form of self-healing car paint in its EX and G lines, but the actual real world results of that endeavor have been mixed.
This new effort is comprised of teams from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, led by Stuart J. They have created a new self-healing coating that could be used as the basis of paint. Why Are Other Democracies Better Off than the U.S. Is. Saturday's New York Times contained an interesting op-ed piece by Charles Blow, titled "American Shame. " The main item was a table listing the 33 countries designated as "advanced economies" by the International Monetary Fund and comparing them on various social and educational characteristics.
Specifically, Blow charted income inequality, unemployment rates, level of democracy, the "percentage thriving" (according to the Gallup Global Well-Being Index), food insecurity, prison population, and student performance in math and science. The bottom line: The United States is at the bottom of the heap on most of these measures, and at or near the top in none. It's a sobering collection of data, to be sure, but I wish Blow had added two more columns to his chart: 1) percentage of GDP devoted to defense, and 2) defense spending per capita.
Country Defense $/GDP (%) Defense $/population (2008) And just for fun, let's toss in: P.R. Rod Lamkey Jr/Getty Images. It's the Inequality, Stupid. Want more charts like these? See our charts on the secrets of the jobless recovery, the richest 1 percent of Americans, and how the superwealthy beat the IRS. How Rich Are the Superrich? A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? Note: The 2007 data (the most current) doesn't reflect the impact of the housing market crash. Winners Take All The superrich have grabbed the bulk of the past three decades' gains. Download: PDF chart 1 (large) PDF chart 2 (large) | JPG chart 1 (smaller) JPG chart 2 (smaller) Out of Balance A Harvard business prof and a behavioral economist recently asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth is distributed in the United States.
Download: PDF (large) | JPG (smaller) Capitol Gain Why Washington is closer to Wall Street than Main Street. Congressional data from 2009. Sources. How Education Impacts Your Income (Graphic) California Foreclosures | ForeclosureRadar. New Sunlight Reactor Produces Fuel. The Mass Extinction of Scientists Who Study Species | Wired Science. We are currently in a biodiversity crisis. A quarter of all mammals face extinction, and 90 percent of the largest ocean fish are gone. Species are going extinct at rates equaled only five times in the history of life. But the biodiversity crisis we are currently encountering isn’t just a loss of species, it’s also a loss of knowledge regarding them. Scientists who classify, describe and examine the relationships between organisms are themselves going extinct. The millions of dollars spent globally on technology to catalog species may actually be pushing out the people we rely upon: taxonomists and systematists.
We’re like young children frantic to add new baseball cards to our collections, while the actual creators of the baseball cards themselves are vanishing. Take for example the aplacophorans, a rare rare group of invertebrates closely related to octopuses, squids, snails and clams. If 50 percent of the species of aplacophoran went extinct tomorrow, we would never know. Aplacophorans. The Environmental Impact of Cell Phones. Just in time for next month’s Verizon iPhone release, we present to you a bit of thought-provoking, guilt-tripping data. In this graphic by InfographicWorld was created for iAmGreen and brings to light some of the questions that nobody asks but everyone should. What happens to all of those cell phones that we simply stop using after we move on to the latest and greatest?
How much power does it take to keep all of these cell phones running? Is it likely that this graphic will make you toss out (in the recycling bin, of course) your cell phones and go back to the age of landlines? A Cookbook Is The Latest Weapon In Fight Against Lionfish Invasion : Shots - Health News Blog. Hide captionThe spiny, venomous lionfish can kill three-quarters of a reef's fish population in just five weeks, according to one study. Michael Dwyer/AP The spiny, venomous lionfish can kill three-quarters of a reef's fish population in just five weeks, according to one study. Those beautiful lionfish, native to Asian waters, are wreaking havoc in the Caribbean and off the coasts of a bunch of Southeastern states. The species got a finhold over here about 20 years ago.
Hurricane damage to a Florida aquarium may have let them loose, though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says it's not exactly clear how the lionfish got established in our territory. What is clear is the fish are gobbling up everything in sight — especially juvenile fish and crustaceans — and reproducing like mad. That superpredator is YOU! The idea is that you should make lionfish a part of healthy diet. NOAA has already thrown its weight behind a campaign to popularize lionfish as a taste treat. Midlevel Providers Fill Primary Care Doctors' Shoes. Cult Classic Peel P50 Microcar Returns : Gas 2.0. The Peel P50 was built on the Isle of Man in the 1960′s and powered by a 49cc gas engine that pushed the car to a 40 mph top speed and delivered more than 80 mpg.
It was the smallest production automobile ever built, and—despite only 70 examples being produced —has become wildly popular in microcar circles, especially since appearing in a 2007 segment of the BBC’s hit show TopGear. This new-found popularity and BBC visibility has breathed new life into the Peel concept, and new investment dollars mean that Peel is back in business! More, including the hilarious TopGear sketch, after the jump. Thanks to investment from another BBC show star (Dragon’s Den‘s James Caan) Peel’s Faizal Khan and Gary Hillman hope to produce a run of 50 new Peel microcars (faithful replicas to the original) in the hopes of re-launching Peel as a marketable brand, with marketing spin-offs and tie-ins to the car’s spiritual home at the Isle of Man. Enjoy! SOURCE: Isle of Man Today, BBC.
About the Author. Did Bankers Rob the Middle Class? In the last decade, a greater share of money flowed to our banking system than almost any time in American history. Meanwhile, middle class wages continued their 30 year freeze. Are the two related? Are the banks robbing the middle class? Kevin Drums suggests as much in a series of articles that accuse the new super-rich, which is disproportionately in the financial sector, of swindling the middle class. At one point, Drum quotes from a great essay on income inequality by Tyler Cowen: "It's as if the major banks have tapped a hole in the social till and they are drinking from it with a straw. " Great sentence ... but Cowen's analysis does not blame rich bankers for impoverishing the middle class. Drum lists other policies that might be contributing to the middle class wages freeze, and he acknowledges that rising health care premiums might be stealing some middle class wages.
So let's talk about education. Every statistic tells the same story: If you want to earn more, learn more.