#he would also make simulations of all possible environments for missions and stuff

[keferon]

oh!! wait, prowl becoming autobot hq would be so cool though!!!! he'd have so much fun i feel making training courses and running the numbers, like you said. i could totally see him actually smiling for once like "holy shit. i finally. theres numbers. theres variables. theres shit to calculate" and everyone else see him smile (i imagine it'd probably look unnerving) and thinks "...is he ok" then jazz just hits them with the "oh yeah no hes just happy! lol"

Yep yep YEP

Like. Prowl is a machine. And machine’s natural state is to perform something. In his case being the operating system of the complex implies that there are people he has to take care of. Otherwise he would just have NOTHING to do. Leaving him alone at the end would be kind of cruel.

Also having a giant building that can shift and transform and rearrange itself as a headquarters? Cool as fuck~

Oh and Jazz lives inside the walls. There’s quite a lot of space in those. Perhaps that space was even left specifically for him. Who knows.

[cyangarden]

Technicalities

Lance learns something about his sniper rifle with the help of someone

~2.1k words

It was another day in the Castle, the members of the team doing their own things. Hunk was doing inspections of the Lions, Coran doing maintenance on the Castle, Shiro and Allura were talking to other coalition members for the next move. Lance in the shooting range, further honing his skill as the sharpshooter of the team. Pidge in the lab, scanning through various radio messages picked up by the Castle to see if there was anything interesting.

When Pidge nonchalantly called Lance the Sharpshooter one time during a mission, something inside Lance sensed something, something different. He somehow felt more complete, making him more confident being a Paladin. Yeah, Shiro acknowledge him before when they freed Slav from the Warden’s hands during their escape from Beta Traz, but when Pidge said it, it had a different meaning to it. It made Lance push further when it comes in training, even making his own routine rather than use one of the presets stored in the computer. Whatever it was, Lance was glad it was happening to him.

Pidge took a break, she left computer running the sorting algorithm automatically but set it to notify her if something of attention came up. When Lance and Pidge got the game console from the Space Mall, she noticed that by not spending so much time in the lab, she had more energy throughout the day instead of crashing down suddenly when night came. After that, she had scheduled breaks. Pidge usually went to Lance’s room to play the videogame, sometimes Lance would be there to play with her but sometimes, he’s not there so she plays on her own. Pidge typed the password to his room, but to only see it empty. She wanted to play with Lance, maybe he was somewhere. He went to the lounge then to kitchen, but he still wasn’t around.

Pidge thought about the shooting range, she did notice Lance spending more time going there after she called him Sharpshooter. Lance’s skill became more apparent after she called him the name one time. It amazed her and made her admire his skill, but she didn’t want to admit it out loud that he ended up being right about his name for him. Probably to avoid the teasing from Lance, she thought his head might get to big and he might not let it go. Though she thought she was a bit harsh on him when she doubted the use of the name. She wished she could do something to make it up to him. Lance was happy with his skill, but she felt she still needed to do something about that incident — or that was what she keeps referring to.

Lance moved cover to cover, engaging the targets along the way. His goal for training? Practicing fast transitions between targets to shoot them down as fast as possible. His reaction was something he wanted to work on after Sven almost tackled him down back in the alternate reality. Though nothing bad came out of it, he did not want that to happen again, especially if it would be someone else’s life. He was practicing against target plates rather than sentries, he added a shot timer to measure his reaction time. He had a goal set up of only having a maximum of 1.5 second reaction per target, from the target popup, to aiming his rifle then to shooting it. However, he would still give himself some allowance depending on the context of the target. Lance moved forward to shoot, until he heard a target popping up behind him. He thought it would be too slow to do a 180-degree turn and engage the target, so he spun around but decided to fall on his back. The move was intended to surprise the supposed enemy and might cause the shot fired at him to miss by suddenly presenting a lower profile. Lance fired two shots to the target when he hit the floor, then quickly stood up to scan for more targets.

“What’s the reaction time for the last shot?” Lance asked the shooting range AI.

The AI replied, “1.9 seconds.”

“That’s—” Lance was about to comment but then cutoff by someone.

“Not bad, impressive.” Pidge was standing on the doorway of the shooting range.

“Oh, yeah, I guess so.” Lance said.

Pidge gave Lance a small smile, “I see you’re spending more time here.”

“Well, it doesn’t hurt to train.” Lance winked at her. “By the way, what are you doing here? I thought you’re doing something in the lab?” Lance rarely saw her in the shooting range, he wondered why she was there.

Pidge gave out a heavy sigh, “I decided to take a break, it gets quite boring there really.”

“Wow, Pidge and taking a break? What a weird combination.” Lance joked.

Pidge got back at him, “Hey! I find it really good for me, plus playing KBP is more fun.” She almost forgot what she came here for, “I was actually about to invite you to play Killbot, but then I saw you’re busy… Next time?”

“How about later? You know, being the Sharpshooter here and working on something.”

Pidge smiled at him, “Yeah sure.” Then she remembered the incident back in Beta Traz, and talking about being the Sharpshooter, she asked him, “You wanna see something?” As Pidge went to the console to open a preset scenario.

“What is it?” Lance was curious.

The shooting environment switched to a long-range scenario and a small structure appeared with target sentries and a ‘friendly sentry’ inside.

Pidge instructed Lance, “Change your Bayard into a sniper rifle.”

“Okay, I see where this is going but how am I going to see the targets? They’re clearly obstructed.” Lance exclaimed.

“Just aim through your scope.” She told him.

“Is there something supposed to happen?”

“Hold on,” Pidge entered a command into the console, “There.”

The targets appeared in Lance’s scope, “Woah,” he was amazed that he could. Lance moved his scope around the building, checking the scan coverage of his scope. He wondered how it operated, “So how does this work? My scope seeing through the walls?”

Pidge explained, “Your scope is actually indirectly seeing the targets. The scope is not emitting anything but is receiving something over there.” Pidge pointed at the small structure.

Lance looked up to where she was pointing, “Really?”

Pidge continued, “Yep. There’s one sentry inside that’s ‘friendly’, it’s sending out a sonar signal that bounces around the room or obstacles to determine whatever is behind. When the signal returns, the suit forms the ‘map’ of the surrounding and it sends it to your scope. Remember how bats use sound to see in the dark or move around?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s pretty much the same principle but on a more refined scale.”

“You said the friendly sentry is sending out the sonar, does that mean you need to hack an enemy sentry to let me see through walls?” Lance questioned her.

“No, there’s no need to. I just simulated the capability in the sentry because our Paladin suits has it. The entire suit is a sonar array itself, capable of sending out an omnidirectional signal for proper 360-degree coverage. The suit actually has a phased array sonar to be specific.”

“What does the last part mean?”

“Phased array means that instead of having a single transceiver module to send out a signal, the system is composed of smaller modules that work together to send out the signal. Doing that increases image resolution, scan range and improves scan time. Also, kinda like an incandescent bulb versus an LED light, the latter one being better in general.”

“Wow, that sounds cool.” Lance sounded amazed from what he was hearing.

“Also, since the suit is sending out the signal, it’s able to ‘tag’ the contacts found by the suit to determine if it’s friendly or a bad guy. There’s already a tag information database in the suit of known contacts, but there’s still an option to add one if there are friendlies nearby. I’m still not sure about the specifics of the frequency used by our suits, but it’s high enough that the so called ‘image resolution’ would produce a good map. A high image resolution means that we or the system can distinguish contacts clearly. Like being able to determine that an enemy sentry is actually an enemy sentry instead of something like a support column. Whatever material the sonar would hit would produce a particular sonar signature that can be unique from one another, an algorithm is used to sort out that stuff. It’s a very useful thing.”

“If I’m getting these things correctly, the suit ‘maps’ out the surrounding area to see if there are contacts then the processed map goes to my scope? So, I’m able to see because of the suits?”

“Yeah, you got it.” Pidge added another detail, “By the way, the suit has around 20 feet of mapping distance. Any more than that, then you lose image resolution and the map wouldn’t be as good.”

Lance sounded astonished, “That’s a lot of things, I didn’t know it was that complicated.”

“There’s still the data link for the suit-scope communication which is a neat thing itse—” Pidge was cut off by a notification from her lab computer, “Oh, I have to go. Sorry for cutting this.” Pidge sounded a bit disappointed.

Lance replied, “Hey, don’t worry, I know I’m not good with those things, but I’m glad you still took your time to explain those things to me. I did my best to understand them and so far, I did get them all.”

Pidge placed her hand on his shoulder to help reassure him, “Don’t say things like that, Lance. You’re smart in your own way, don’t let anyone else say otherwise. And sorry for when I was being harsh to you when you just want to learn new things, I’m still getting used to making things explained simpler.”

“It’s alright Pidge, I know I sometimes get annoying.”

Pidge just gave him a hug, she wrapped her arms around her waist and pressed her face on his chest. She suddenly thought of doing it, maybe it was the right thing to do.

Lance was surprised when she did, but slowly dropped his arms and wrapped them around her. The hug gave him a slight blush on his face, but thankfully for him, they were facing away each other.

They stayed for a few seconds before pulling back.

“I didn’t know I needed that hug, thank you again.”

“Later, Lance?”

“Yeah, later, I’m waitin’ for you.” Lance gave her a smile.

With that, Pidge went back to the lab and Lance continued with his training.

Their interaction just made Lance more pumped up, suddenly feeling alive and ready for the challenges set.

~~

Lance, Veronica and Kinkade were in an overwatch position on top of an abandoned building. They’re providing sniper support for the ground team who are about to infiltrate a Galra stronghold.

Keith asked for the support team’s cover, “Lance, you ready to cover us when we get inside?”

Lance confirmed, “Ready to go.”

Pidge and Keith teleported inside the stronghold using Kosmo.

Pidge said, “We need to find a port where I can hack in. A control panel or a substation.”

“Got it.” Keith replied. Then two ran through the hallways.

Lance saw the two moving inside, “Got you, Keith. Scanning for hostiles,” Lance cautioned them, “Sentries on the other side of the east wall.”

Pidge and Keith teleported away from the hostiles.

Keith asked, “Lance?”

“You’re clear.” Lance replied.

Pidge and Keith stopped by the column where the tunnels were splitting in two directions.

Lance instructed them, “You guys are gonna have to take the right tunnel. But wait,” he warned, “There are sentries approaching both tunnels. Hold position.” Lance counted down, “Coming up to you in three, two, one.”

Pidge and Keith teleported behind the sentries then they moved towards their objective.

Back in the abandoned building, Kinkade asked how Lance was able to see through the walls.

“That thing pick up heat signatures?” Kinkade asked.

Lance explained, “It actually locks on to their suits’ sonar imaging and renders a 3D map within a 20-foot perimeter. It’s cool Paladin stuff.”

Even though there weren’t much stuff described, Kinkade was still amazed by it, “Must be pretty neat with all the advanced tech you have out there.”

Lance smirked, “Yeah, it is. Especially when someone teaches you about it. It’s amazing.”

Tfw you have to dig out the meta you have written because you forgot the explanation 😅

Here’s a more detailed explanation for how the Lance’s sniper scope works.

[lj-writes]

An alternate possibility behind the #FN2187 post

I’ve been thinking too much a little more about the picture of John’s hands from the Episode IX set, and specifically trying to think of possibilities other than a Stormtrooper uprising because it seems a little too good to be true that John is allowed to hint at major plot points so soon. I still hope an uprising is coming but I don’t want to be married to the idea, and even if it happens it won’t be the only major event in Finn’s story.

One possibility suggested to me by an uprising skeptic (whom I am, in fact, married to) is that this was a scene from Finn’s past, such as a flashback, that helps put into focus Finn’s decision to leave and his current resolve to fight.

I think we can rule out that possibility, though. Even aside from the fact that SW is not known for extended flashbacks and such a scene is hardly the groundbreaking sequence suggested by John, TFA and BtA together made it clear that Tuanul was Finn’s first engagement as a Stormtrooper and his last. There was nothing in his training or his mission to the mine from BtA that would have made his hands look like that, not least because he was either in computer simulations or wearing full armor. Even a flashback to Tuanul would not have covered his hands is soot, given the armor and gloves.

Hold that thought. Tuanul?

It’s well known that the EpIX crew filmed at Wadi Rum in Jordan last year. There have been speculations about what the fictional location is, with candidates including Tatooine, Jedha, and of course Jakku. It could also be a new planet altogether, of course.

I think it’s clear that of all the possible locations raised so far, a return to Jakku is the most emotionally resonant and would do the best job of tying up loose ends. Not only is it the setting of major events early in TFA, it’s also the place of major Imperial/Force-related setup in extended materials. It would be perfect place to return to, much like Luke and to an extent Leia returned to Tatooine in Return of the Jedi, if without the emotional resonance to show for it. Anakin also returned to Tatooine in Attack of the Clones to terrible tragedy. If Jakku is built up to be the Tatooine of this trilogy, we’re due for a return in IX.

Another possible narrative parallel: Returning to the desert planet they couldn’t wait to leave (”There's nothing for me here now,” “I hate sand”) was also the occasion for the protagonists of the two previous trilogies to further their connections to and destinies the Force, by revealing himself as a fully-realized Jedi in Luke’s case and by falling further into despair and violence in Anakin’s.

If the action returns to Jakku in IX, and more specifically to the ruins of Tuanul at some point, we would see Finn revisit the sight of his trauma and his life-changing, world-shaking choice to leave the First Order. It’s also worth noting that Tuanul looked like this the last we saw it:

Its ruins would be full of charred buildings and ashes--exactly the kind of substances that would make Finn’s hands look like the ones in the picture, this time without the gloves getting in the way. Could he have fallen, for instance, and gotten the mess on his hands? But what could have prompted that, and in such a spectacular way as John described?

Another piece of the puzzle: I think it was @fuckyeahrebelfinn who guessed that Adam, and thus Kylo Ren, was also in Jordan and therefore whatever Episode IX location it stands in for.

So what if Finn revisits Jakku and Tuanul for some reason at the same time Kylo Ren does? Tuanul was a Church of the Force community and perhaps there is a Force-related plot reason, in addition to all the other weird stuff going on in Jakku. He and Kylo might reprise their staring match from TFA, except this time it’s likely to be all-out battle, perhaps two on one this time with Rey. Ren might even have one or more of the Knights with him, which would make the fight more perilous for the heroes.

Remember how John implied that the scene where Finn’s hands got dirty was “visually crazy?” What if Tuanul, where Finn by all appearances awoke to the Force and Ren fixed him with that creepy stare, is where Finn’s Force powers awaken and he fights back using these powers? That would explain both the soot on Finn’s hands (the environment was covered with it) and John’s comment about the visuals of the scene (spectacular Force powers!).

Of course, this particular day took place in a studio rather than in Jordan, where I understand they wrapped up shooting long since. This leads me to lean more on the fire/ashes/soot being in an indoor setting such as a Star Destroyer and thus, in combination with the tag, Stormtrooper uprising baby. Still, the purpose of this post was specifically to think of an alternate possibility and I find this one intriguing as well.

[kathleenseiber]

Welcome to my world: the real right stuff

Test pilot Aaron How troubleshoots and simplifies planes, making them safer for all.

Any time a plane flies, silently assisting with the craft’s lift and trim is the huge group of people that made sure it was safe. Engineers, obviously, are essential, but there needs to be somebody directing proceedings at the intersection between the work of engineers and the pilots who’ll eventually be in control of the machine.

Enter Aaron How, Royal Australian Air Force test pilot.

Aaron How. Credit: RAAF.

“My role is quite specific,” he says. “I’m not a typical frontline pilot now that I’m into this area as a test pilot.”

Despite the apparent specificity – test the airplane – How’s role is incredibly diverse, because problem solving doesn’t happen only when the complete new aircraft is tested in flight. Instead, every change, update and part installation needs to go through rigorous examination. It follows that there is no ‘typical’ day.

“[My duties] can be from flying a brand-new aircraft for the first time, which is quite rare,” How says of his day-to-day tasks, “all the way down to a very small modification – like just changing the smallest thing, maybe a switch on [the] control sitting in a different place.”

So how does one get to the renowned, even exalted, role of test pilot?

How relates his background fairly matter-of-factly. He started flight training on PC-21 aircraft – a Swiss-built single-engine turboprop – at Sale, Victoria.

“I’m not a typical frontline pilot now that I’m into this area as a test pilot.”

“[To become] a useful pilot of the air force, doing operational missions, that takes about four years, four years of flying, plus or minus probably a year depending on what aircraft you go to,” he says. “And from there, I did a three year [duty] tour, which you have to do before you become a test pilot, because you have to have some operational background and know how the aircraft gets used in an operational sense, not just in the training sense.”

Then he spent a year at test pilot school. The RAAF sends candidate test pilots either to the Empire Test Pilots’ School, in England; or the US Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, in California; or the US Naval Test Pilot School at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, in Maryland.

Now, How says, “I do sort of a conversion of how we can apply that test pilot knowledge we learned at school to the Australian situation”.

“There’s no university requirements for my job,” he says. “But it’s very helpful to have background knowledge in engineering, so I did a Bachelor of Technology at ADFA. That’s helped me a lot as a test pilot.”

Fast facts: RAAF aircraft

The RAAF has over 250 aircraft, which fall into four main categories: combat, mobility (including VIP transport, refuelling, search and survivor assistance, medical evacuations), intelligence and surveillance, and aviation training.

The air force is currently in the process of replacing their Hornet craft with 72 new F-35 Lightning planes, which are being built overseas by Lockheed Martin and shipped to Australia.

By the mid-2020s, the defence force plans to have unmanned aircraft stationed at Edinburgh, SA, which will be flown from a ground station and used for surveillance.

The test-pilot caper isn’t just about giving a green light when a new update is deemed safe; the hidden part is making sure that the update is user-friendly. If a high-tech device is incorporated into an aircraft but its meaning and use are too difficult to comprehend, the new device is essentially useless.

“All the techniques we use are supposed to be simple to understand,” says How. “If you make them so complex that only an engineer can understand them, then things can get dangerous.”

Ultimately, the philosophy behind making a plane flyable is that it should be simple enough to understand for somebody with only a high school education.

“It’s actually quite a hard process to make something that’s normally quite complex – which a fighter jet [and] any aircraft we use in the air force [is] – and make it simple to understand,” How says.

This means that How needs to use a combination of skills: understanding the engineering of the plane, knowing how the plane should fly, figuring out whether other people would find it intuitive, and then translating that knowledge to multiple people from different backgrounds.

“All the techniques we use are supposed to be simple to understand. If you make them so complex that only an engineer can understand them, then things can get dangerous.”

“You can be the smartest engineer or smartest pilot out there, but if you can’t communicate your ideas to people, and not just communicating but communicating [in a] clear and easy way, then all of the skills you have inside [are] essentially useless,” he says.

After all, “none of what we do is individual, everything of what we do is in a team environment.

“We’re never really alone. We kind of work as a team with an engineer and a pilot to problem-solve any situations we come up with.”

This means he must communicate with makers and users – either through talking to them during and after a flight test, or through a report – while also constantly keeping up with new research.

“We work hand in hand with a flight-test engineer,” he says. “Those flight-test engineers have done that same school that I did, the test pilot school, but instead of flying the plane, they’re flying next to us or behind us, or [they’re] even in the telemetry room on the ground.

“We’re never really alone. We kind of work as a team with an engineer and a pilot to problem solve any situations we come up with.”

“They’re reading all the same publications we’re reading, and they’re helping whilst I’m flying to problem solve that bit of kit, or how to fly the aircraft, or the problems I’m facing with the aircraft.”

All very well: but is the job really as cool as we all imagine it to be? How certainly doesn’t go nuts trying to paint it that way – but the answer (hell yes) leaks through.

“Once whatever they’re designing for the aircraft comes to me, I assume that all of that work has been done,” he explains. “I look into the documentation of how it’s going to deal with the situation that we’re going to fly that piece of equipment on, and then it’s up to me to check that. So I validate what the engineers tell me is true.

“What’s so difficult about designing a piece of equipment for an aircraft [is that] the conditions [it] has to go through is so extreme. You know, it has to go from temperature extremes of probably minus 50 or 60 degrees, up to maybe plus 70 or 80 degrees. And if you’re going supersonic on a fighter jet, potentially even higher than that – you know, over 100 degrees.

“You’re going from pressures of one atmosphere down at ground level, all the way up to almost a complete vacuum, depending on how high you are, at 60–70,000 feet. You get some different environmental conditions – rain, hail; you might have bird strikes. You have to make sure nothing tears apart from the plane.

Aaron How. Credit: RAAF

“And the g-forces as well for fighter jets. You’re up to eight, nine, g, and down to maybe minus three or minus four, g.”

Like most others, How’s work was affected by COVID-19. Usually, he would travel to various air force bases around Australia to do his job, but he was stuck in Brisbane in 2020.

But being confined in one place didn’t mean his work was stalled. His in-depth knowledge of flight and engineering help him troubleshoot an important problem on the ground.

Flight simulators allow new trainees to get a feel for flying while remaining safely on the ground, but How explains that sometimes new pilots get up into the air and anticipate that the plane will behave as it did in simulation.

In reality, there may be many other factors, such as changing conditions, that affect how the plane will handle in the air, so the simulations need to be more reflective of what true flight is actually like.

“My job was to try to align that simulator to the aircraft, because we found deficiencies where the simulator would act in one way, whereas the aircraft will do [something] different.

“And one of those situations, for example, is when you stall an aircraft, you start to get turbulent flow over the wings. In that case, you’ll get some outcomes of the aircraft that are very difficult to predict.

“By [just] using the equations that the program is using, they won’t get you the exact solutions that happen in the aircraft.”

“The equations that the program is using, they won’t get you the exact solutions that happen in the aircraft.”

This comes down to programming. The instructions that are fed into the simulation’s governing program are not going to account for the plethora of changes and randomness that would be experienced when a plane stalls. Those “imperfections” need to be written into the simulation code.

Of course, programmers are not engineers, so How had to tell them exactly how the simulation needed to behave in order to better reflect true flight. That requires a deep knowledge of the engineering, and the ability to then achieve an outcome without having to rely on explaining the engineering to the programmers.

“I just try to tell them the outcome of what their programming is going to do to the students, you know, and what effect we want to give to the students,” he says. “We’re trying to align the aircraft as closely as possible.

“Sometimes you have to go back to the fundamentals of what we’re trying to fix here – because I get very wrapped up in trying to fix all the very specific cases. Whereas, the outcome we want might be a generic outcome.”

“The best pilots fly more than the others; that’s why they’re the best,” wrote Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff. Next time you step onto a plane, think about Aaron How and his dedicated band of flight-test collaborators. Your plane wasn’t passed “safe to fly” by accident.

Welcome to my world: the real right stuff published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

[sciencespies]

NASA probe has stared into the darkness of space and found unexpected light sources

https://sciencespies.com/space/nasa-probe-has-stared-into-the-darkness-of-space-and-found-unexpected-light-sources/

NASA probe has stared into the darkness of space and found unexpected light sources

In July of 2015, NASA’s New Horizons probe made history when it became the first mission ever to conduct a close flyby of Pluto.

This was followed by the spacecraft making the first-ever encounter with a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) – known as Arrokoth (AKA 2014 MU69) – on 31 December 2018. In addition, its unique position in the outer Solar System has allowed astronomers to conduct rare and lucrative science operations.

This has included parallax measurements of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, the two closest stars to the Solar System.

In addition, a team of astronomers led by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) used archival data from the probe’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) to conduct measurements of the Cosmic Optical Background (COB).

The study, which was recently accepted for publication by The Astrophysical Journal, was led by Tod R. Lauer of the NOAO. He was joined by Alan Stern (the PI of the New Horizons mission) and researchers from the SwRI, NASA, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI), the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), the SETI Institute, and multiple universities and institutions. 

Put simply, the COB is the light from all sources outside the Milky Way that is spread diffusely throughout the observable Universe.

In this sense, it is the visible light analogue of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and is an important benchmark for astronomers. By measuring this light, they are able to discern the locations of stars, the size and density of galaxies, and test theories about the structure and formation of the cosmos.

Accurately measuring the COB is important for several reasons. For starters, this background is integral to the history of star formation, star clusters, galaxies, black holes, galaxy clusters, and the large scale structure of the Universe.

Therefore, knowing exactly how dark the night sky is can provide insight into the formation and evolution of the Universe.

In addition, astronomers have sought to determine if there was a diffuse component to the COB (dCOB), a source of photons not associated with any currently known objects.

The presence of such a component would allow astronomers to test how much of the cosmic background light could be coming from objects in the low-density regions of the Universe, or objects that formed prior to the Universe organizing into its current patterns.

A dCOB could also reflect the production of photons by more exotic processes, such as the annihilation or decay of dark matter particles – therefore assisting in the ongoing search for this “invisible” mass.

Unfortunately, these types of studies present numerous challenges since Earth-based telescopes are subject to atmospheric distortion and space-based telescopes have to deal with interference from Zodiacal Light.

The trajectory of the New Horizons probe, which has taken it past Pluto and into the Kuiper Belt. (NASA/JHUAPL)

As a result, there have been serious discrepancies in the inferred brightness of the optical background over time.

But for spacecraft in the outer Solar System, these types of interference are not a problem. Hence why astronomers have relied on all previous missions that ventured beyond Neptune to conduct COB measurements – i.e. the Pioneer 10/11 and Voyager 1/2 missions.

Similarly, the Hubble Space Telescope also conducted measurements of the COB, but these were limited compared to what New Horizons was able to witness.

As Lauer, who is a former member of the Hubble Wide Field and Planetary Camera team, told Universe Today via email:

“NH can cleanly measure the total light flux emitted by the distant Universe. The Hubble is superb at adding up all the distant galaxies, but does less well for stuff not in galaxies that makes a diffuse background, which gets tangled up with the scattered sunlight bounced around by dust in the near Earth environment.”

Interestingly, this is not the first time that astronomers have used LORRI data to measure the COB.

In 2017, a NASA-led team examined LORRI data from four different isolated sky fields that were imaged between 2007 and 2010. This coincided with the NH’s cruise phase where it passed between the orbits of Jupiter and Uranus.

The location of the seven LORRI fields used in this work. (Lauer et al., arXiv, 2020)

For the sake of this study, Lauer and his team examined brightness levels observed by LORRI of seven high galactic latitude fields when the New Horizons mission was 42 to 45 AU from the Sun.

At this distance, the average raw light levels were 10 times darker than what Hubble was able to observe. After correcting for any remaining interference, the team ran a Monte Carlo simulation to model potential sources of light.

From this, they were able to discern the presence of a diffuse component of unknown origin, possibly caused by the presence of faint galaxies that remain undetected.

As Lauer and his colleagues concluded, this would suggest that the current census on faint galaxies falls short and at least half of those with an apparent magnitude level of 30 or more are unaccounted for.

This is not the first instance in recent years when the galactic census has had to be revised. Until a few years ago, astronomers were of the general consensus that there were 200 billion galaxies in the observable Universe.

This was based on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field observation campaign, from which astronomers created detailed 3D maps of the Universe.

But on revised calculations in 2016, astronomers now estimate that there are as many as two trillion galaxies in the observable Universe. Based on these latest results, it appears as though the count might need to be updated again.

Regardless, the work of Lauer and his colleagues demonstrates the utility of missions like New Horizons and the kinds of research they can perform in the outer Solar System.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

#Space

[agritecture]

BAMBOO REVOLUTION: DANIEL WAGNER AND NATUREPONICS

CONTENT SOURCED FROM SLUG MAGAZINE

In the shadow of Mt. Timpanogos, Orem-based NaturePonics creator/founder Daniel Wagner reveals his plan to change the world: “We would like to have a similar effect on the food industry that Tesla Motors has had on the car industry,” he says, comparing his natural approach to vertical gardening to the electric alternative to using oil. His aim is to make self-reliance a reality for everyone, creating an easy approach to vertical gardening that both beginners and experienced green thumbs can use. They range from smaller bamboo “towers” that can be hung from windows for herbs for the less experienced, to larger, residential and commercial builds that can grow everything from tomatoes to kale and zucchini. These “Boo Gardens” reduce the amount of water, soil and space needed to grow most plants, and have the potential to feed a family or even a community.

For Wagner, the need for self-reliance through vertical gardening became a personal issue during the stock market crash of 2008. As someone who had been in real estate up until that point, Wagner decided to shift his focus to incorporating more sustainable practices in his own life. During the 2008 crash, “I thought, ‘I’ve got to reinvent myself, and the last thing I want to do is go back into the world of unsustainable,’” he says. Wagner’s inspiration for vertical growing came from the Tower Gardens at Epcot Center in Disney World, where a diverse mixture of plants grow indoors in a version of vertical farming that involves aeroponics, which uses little soil and recycles much of the water to simulate misting or raining, reducing the amount of water used in growing specific plants. “I love all vertical gardening,” says Wagner. “I didn’t invent any of this stuff.”

NaturePonics BooGardens. (Photo courtesy of NaturePonics)  

However, one of the major problems of most of the vertical farms in existence, for Wagner, was that most were created out of plastic, which is not sustainable. “Vertical towers were beautiful to me, but the white, PVC plastic … just didn’t cut it,” he says. Wagner’s solution was to use bamboo, which he calls “nature’s PVC.” Wagner sources his bamboo from places such as the Philippines and Indonesia, where it can take only about three years to regrow, making it highly renewable. The bamboo products at NaturePonics are also sealed with shellac, a naturally occurring substance made from the secretions of the lac bug, which he sources from India and Thailand. “We’ve done the research and development over the last six years,” he says. “We didn’t want to take a bunch of natural wood and seal it with polyurethane on it or something. Seeking out shellac … was about figuring out how to take the natural product and [make] it durable.” Wagner’s own towers have weathered the last six years remarkably, despite the harsh conditions in Utah. The result is a product that uses natural resources in a way that is beautiful and sustainable while providing quality food.

This model of sustainability is something that Wagner has been working on in his own life, testing out his Boo Gardens for his own use before filing for patents and going public with his idea. NaturePonics boasts their own fully functional vertical farm, where they not only grow plants such as tomatoes, peppers and a variety of greens year-round but also raise fish, such as trout, and combine these two elements to form a symbiotic relationship with hydroponics and aquaponics. As Wagner shows pictures of 9-foot-high walls of tomatoes that intertwine and produce a bountiful harvest, he explains that NaturePonics also supplies food locally for places such as Sundance Resort and The Communal Restaurant in Provo. It’s also the main source of what Wagner eats himself. “Farm to table is still doable; it’s just a matter of thinking outside the box,” he says. “You don’t need 100 acres and a billion gallons of water anymore—we’ve changed that. We just want to turn organic back into normal.”

Wagner’s goal for NaturePonics is not to make a bunch of money, but to revolutionize the way we grow and source our food. For him, this means eradicating practices that destroy the environment by companies like Monsanto, who are also known for genetically modified food, and empowering people to cut down on what they need from the grocery store by growing it themselves. NaturePonics is already working with clients around the world, specifically in agriculture-rich countries such as India, helping people start their own commercial farms that can provide a cheaper and more sustainable alternative to shopping the organic section at the grocery store. Wagner is also planning on moving his farm to Sebastapol, California, to be able to work with more chefs, reach a wider market, and possibly work with the wine and cannabis industries in addition to growing food. “We’re doing this to provide jobs for the world and food for the world,”  he says. “Their success is the world’s success. Our success is the world’s success.” While Wagner often claims that the unhealthy and unsustainable practices used to produce food in the U.S. are the equivalent of “driving off of a cliff,” he has hope that providing a solution, a natural and practical way to garden vertically, will get society to turn back to nature for their food once again. To learn more about NaturePonics’ mission or to pre-order a boo garden, visit natureponics.net.

CONTENT SOURCED FROM SLUG MAGAZINE

[tsgmainlinephiladelphia]

PHAMILY ORTHODONTICS: WHERE EVERY PATIENT IS PHAMILY

We had the opportunity to sit down with our SCOUTED Orthodontist, Dr. Debbie Parnes of Phamily Orthodontics, so we may learn more about what makes Phamily Orthodontics such a special practice for our local community along the Main Line, and why you should consider using their services when the time is right for yourself and/or your children.  Here is what Dr. Parnes had to say...

We love Phamily Orthodontics and all that you offer your patients.  You've brought such a refreshing approach to patients who might not necessarily have enjoyed going to the Orthodontist in the past, and now feel so comfortable in the hands of you and the rest of your team! What would you say is your unique approach to making sure your patients are happy with each visit?

When I first joined Dr. Hill’s practice, I was drawn to its openness and that he seemed to know everyone. He would venture from clinic to reception to talk with patients and parents alike. It was important to me to continue to practice with this philosophy. When I acquired the practice and we were re-branding we came up with the tagline “where every patient is Phamily.” This is always our goal – treat everyone like they are family. I’m a mom, a relatively new one at that, and I consider myself a high-maintenance patient when I visit other doctor offices. I want every patient, adult and child, and every parent, to feel like they can be as high-maintenance as they need, and parents especially, as involved as they would like, in their children’s treatment. I understand that orthodontic treatment is a commitment – both a time commitment and a financial one. We have systems in place for our schedule to run as smooth as possible, but at the end of the day, we are a boutique office and cater to individual needs – if someone requires more time and attention to feel comfortable with their treatment, we will provide it. 

Tell me a little bit about your background and how you came to be a part of Phamily Orthodontics? 

I’m originally from the suburbs of New York City, an area very similar to the Main Line. I graduated from Cornell University and then moved to the Philadelphia area to complete dental school at the University of Pennsylvania. While I was in dental school, my husband was completing a co-op through Drexel University in the suburbs. He introduced me to areas outside of West Philadelphia, and I knew that we would want to settle and raise our family here. After dental school, I went on to complete my orthodontic residency at Temple University. While in residency, I met Dr. Hill. He wasn’t quite ready to have a second doctor in his office but we stayed in touch as I went on to work in private practice in NJ. After 3.5 years of private practice, Dr. Hill was ready for me to come on board. We worked together for a year before we swapped roles (#girlboss), and the office became Parnes and Hill Phamily Orthodontics. It’s such a blessing to be able to work side-by-side with someone who has years of experience, but loves to learn about new techniques. I love that our patients get to have two sets of eyes on them – seasoned and fresh! 

What would you say Phamily Orthodontics specializes in most that makes your practice stand out from other orthodontists in the area?

One offering in our practice that is really unique and special is that we offer an appliance called Inbrace. Inbrace consists of braces that go behind the teeth – so they are truly invisible, and a set of specially customized wires that have bends between each tooth to allow for easy flossing and hygiene. They are an awesome alternative to Invisalign, which I also love to work with in our office. Some patients just know that they will not be compliant with a removable appliance like Invisalign, and for those, Inbrace is a great esthetic solution. We are the first provider in Pennsylvania to be able to offer Inbrace to our patients and we are loving the results. I mentioned that we also work with Invisalign, of course. Earlier this year, Invisalign came out with a product called “Invisalign First,” which has unique features to accommodate our youngest patients. While we have traditionally worked with palatal expanders in our young patients and reserved Invisalign for teens and adults, we are excited to now be able to offer Invisalign to patients as young as age 7. Believe it or not, kids are excited about wearing Invisalign, just as they become excited to choose the color of their expander. And even more unbelievable to many parents, they actually wear their Invisalign! We’ve seen great compliance in our youngest patients and love that we can provide them with an option that makes oral hygiene really easy. 

What are the key services you offer your patients? 

We specialize in orthodontic treatment for children, adolescents and adults. We work with traditional metal braces, esthetic ceramic braces, Invisalign removable aligners, and Inbrace lingual appliances. We are an impression-free office (so none of that gooey stuff that may have made you gag as a kid) – we have replaced impressions with an intraoral scanner that essentially stitches together a video of the teeth to create a digital 3D model in just a few minutes. We can use this model to create appliances, as well as for treatment simulations for patients and parents to better understand treatment goals. We also offer digital radiography, which minimizes x-ray exposure. 

What kind of experience do you want each of your patients to have when visiting Phamily Orthodontics?

We want to create an environment that is friendly to all ages, children and adults alike. We want all of our patients to complete treatment with a smile that they enjoy and the feeling that the commitment to treatment was worth it. We are really appreciative of the fact that patients choose us for their orthodontic treatment and it is not an obligation we take lightly. When we have staff meetings and discuss the ins and outs of the practice, the conversation always comes back to what can we do to ensure that we are staying true to our mission that “every patient is Phamily.”

With two locations, one in Wayne and one in Paoli, Phamily Orthodontics has positioned themselves as a convenient and caring practice no matter where you live on the Main Line.  We have trusted Phamily Orthodontics as our scouted practice for TSG Main Line & Philadelphia for the last two years, and we would highly recommend their superb services for you and your family.  Tell them The Scout Guide sent you!

Your Editor,

Laurie M. Wightman

Phamily Orthodontics 

Wayne Location: 247 Conestoga Road, Wayne, PA 

Paoli Location: 250 W. Lancaster Avenue, Paoli, PA 

Phone: 610.644.1222

W: www.phamilyorthodontics.com 

Instagram: @phamilyorthodontics 

[dkppm]

HW 6 Case Question 3

HW 6 case Question 3

·       The fact of the case: Getting around this problem calls for a different tactic, many engineers say; most are attempting it by creating programs with explicitly formulated rules, rather than asking a robot to derive its own. Last year, Winfield published the results2 of an experiment that asked: what is the simplest set of rules that would allow a machine to rescue someone in danger of falling into a hole? Most obviously, Winfield realized, the robot needed the ability to sense its surroundings — to recognize the position of the hole and the person, as well as its own position relative to both. But the robot also needed rules allowing it to anticipate the possible effects of its own actions. In a virtual test of the ethical governor, a simulation of an unmanned autonomous vehicle was given a mission to strike enemy targets — but was not allowed to do so if there were buildings with civilians nearby.

·       Analysis: Given scenarios that varied the location of the vehicle relative to an attack zone and civilian complexes such as hospitals and residential buildings, the algorithms decided when it would be permissible for the autonomous vehicle to accomplish its mission. Autonomous, militarized robots strike many people as dangerous — and there have been innumerable debates about whether they should be allowed. So many researchers tried to analysis the actions of robot via giving them commands to hit on human or blast something near human area and they were ready to do so. But the experiments were never done because of no permission from the higher authorities. Computer scientists working on rigorously programmed machine ethics today favor code that uses logical statements, such as 'If a statement is true, move forward; if it is false, do not move.' Logic is the ideal choice for encoding machine ethics, argues Luís Moniz Pereira, a computer scientist at the Nova Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics in Lisbon. “Logic is how we reason and come up with our ethical choices,” he says.

·       My conclusions: By contrast, the machine-learning approach promises robots that can learn from experience, which could ultimately make them more flexible and useful than their more rigidly programmed counterparts. As, the conclusion I will say providing these kinds of power would not be safer for humankind or any living thing on the earth. Because robot is not a human who going to understand ethical stuff. Computer programmer are trying write program which involves ethical programming so they can fit that program in the robots. But they are not succeeded yet. They are still working on it. But robot should follow the robot ethics for the betterment of the world. How ethical robots are built could have major consequences for the future of robotics, researchers say. Michael Fisher, a computer scientist at the University of Liverpool, UK, thinks that rule-bound systems could be reassuring to the public. 

·       Future environment: After reading these I can see in the future the technology advanced comparing to todays technology in regarding robots. Computer programmer were succeeded to build the program which we can put in the robot, so they understand the robot ethics very well. Robots are behaving like humans. In the future robots can feel like us, so they do not turn against us. In the future I can see every robot in work zone humans are only monitoring them, all the robots are working in the factory beside humans. Humans are controlling them to work for them.

·       Future scenario: I guess this case will leave big impact for future researcher. Because after reading these they will understand the Robots ethics and, they can read all the research so far has been done on the robot and their behavior. In the future the researcher can take these as their notes and can research more about these topics. I guess in the future the researcher will have solution regarding these issues.

[shirlleycoyle]

How Facebook Trains Content Moderators

Monday morning, the Verge’s Casey Newton published a blockbuster investigation about Facebook’s reliance on American contract workers to moderate its platform. Contract content moderators at Cognizant, a “professional services” company with an office in Arizona, can make as little as $28,800 per year to moderate posts that can include hate, graphic violence and sexual content, and suicide and self injury.

Newton’s piece is a rare window into what it’s actually like to be a Facebook contractor; some of his sources say they’ve been radicalized by the content they click through on a daily basis, others have anxiety and panic attacks, and one moderator says that they’ve started sleeping with a gun. At Cognizant, contract content moderators for Facebook get nine minutes of “wellness time” per day to take mental health breaks. Some of them say they can be fired for having too low of an “accuracy rate.”

Last year, Motherboard senior staff writer Joseph Cox and I spent several months reporting an investigation about how Facebook makes its content moderation policies, and about how its larger apparatus works. As part of that investigation, I went to Facebook’s Menlo Park, California headquarters for on-the-record interviews with the people in charge of the company’s sprawling content moderation operation. One of those leaders was Brian Doegan, who at the time was Facebook’s “Global Learning Leader.” Doegan was in charge of Facebook’s content moderator training practices—essentially, he helped set up the guidelines by which all moderators would be trained, and the best practices for actually training them.

This interview took place at the end of June 2018. Doegan has since left the company. According to active job listings, Facebook has not yet replaced him. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Besides Doegan, Facebook spokespeople Carolyn Glanville and Ruchika Budhraja participated in the interview and added clarifications when necessary. Though Doegan has since left the company, this is still the most extensive interview Facebook has ever given about the specific protocols it has for training moderators and contract employees, as far as I know.

MOTHERBOARD: What is the onboarding process like for a content moderator? BRIAN DOEGEN: After the talent is placed for this role, and obviously we look at language ability, local marketability and things like that, but once the talent is placed, that’s when their learning journey begins. We start off by just acclimating folks to the Facebook culture, what we’re all about, what is our mission. From there, we engage in basically a three-phase approach. I bucket our training onboarding experience into three distinct categories. There’s pre-training which is your onboarding and shadowing, and I’ll say more about that, there’s your formal curriculum, so the comprehensive curriculum, and the materials that we leverage to have that conversation. And then there’s post-training and ongoing reinforcement.

The pre-training is we ensure that all of our reps have an opportunity to actually shadow and observe more experienced people that are actually doing this role. They get a real good sense early on for a day in the life. And there’s a lot of learning there, just by nature of the fact that they have the opportunity to really interact with people that are already doing that job well. So, when they segue into their formal curriculum, it’s several weeks, and it’s very comprehensive. We cover all of our comprehensive community standards, and that exchange, there’s an opportunity for practice, for discussion, for examples. There’s actually a conversation that happens around all of the material.

Does this apply to both contractors as well as… Yeah, it does.

So, everyone. And that’s one thing we’re really proud of is the consistency we have in that space. But on that, it’s really three things working together, right, training is never one and done. So, yes, there’s a healthy element of lecture, which most of us are familiar with just from having been exposed through academia, etcetera, but there’s also an on the job component, but very practical. So, trial and error.

We look at metrics, we actually give you an opportunity to assess your knowledge, in a very safe environment, so that we can provide individual coaching. So, really, lecture, formal training, on the job coaching and mentoring, and just really practical support. And it’s basically, we weave all of that together into a multi-week experience. And every abuse type is different, actioning hate is very different from actioning bullying, which is very different from sexual content. So, from a design perspective, we truly tried to get the right blend of modalities targeted at the right policy. And we’re always evolving that and revisiting that.

Do people specialize in different content types? On the whole, we upskill our moderators, our content reviewers so that they can action all of our abuse types.

“Hypothetically, if you’re struggling with hate, then we can look at the data based on your simulation results, and we can work with you on that topic.”

Even, the trainers, is it like, this is our expert on hate speech, this is the team that’s an expert on hate speech, this is the team that’s the expert on sexual stuff… We definitely have subject matter experts that do specialize in abuse types, and really, the goal of the training function right, is we partner very closely with our subject matter experts so that we can take that information and convert that into the best possible training experience, and then we deliver that to our sites across the world.

CAROLYN GLANVILLE: I’d also elaborate slightly on that…

BRIAN DOEGEN: Sorry if I misspoke.

CAROLYN GLANVILLE: You didn’t at all, you didn’t at all, I just wanted to get a little bit more. So, for our reviewers as he said, they’re trained on all of our community standards, when, what you talked to James about, you have that escalation channel, where they’re slightly more knowledgeable about certain policies, you have the policy team that can dig in on some of those things, all of the nuances are better served there. But, then you also have the markets team, and some of these things kinda go to there, but naturally through the process of our reviewers being onboarded for all our policies, there are certain areas where it takes a little bit more either training, or speciality, like, child exploitative images, that’s not going to be shared widely, there’s a specific subset who are going to be able to deal with those things and deal with them right, through the correct channels. But, training for him globally, is the masses, how do we make sure that the masses are moving together.

BRIAN DOEGEN: Right, and thank you for that, that’s a good point. Just on that for example, training and monitoring against hate in Turkey is very different from monitoring hate in Texas, just culturally, so, to Carolyn’s point, we do leverage what we call our market teams which is a body of professionals that specialize in certain markets and languages, and we often partner with them to make sure that our training has the most relevant examples.

“We don’t teach with an iron fist for lack of a better term”

This is a hard job, content moderator, super hard job, how is that portrayed to the employees when they’re getting started? Is there a period of time where it’s like, this is the type of stuff that you’re going to have to look at every day? This is how you’re going to be judged, is this right for you, is this not right for you, that sort of thing? BRIAN DOEGEN: And we recognize that it’s a hard job. I spend a lot of time monitoring the folks actually actioning this content too, so that I can stay somewhat relevant with everything that’s going on, and monitoring the learning experience. This job is not for everyone, candidly and we recognize that. In my mind, that starts at talent selection. Engaging just through the interview process and selection process, making sure that folks have a high level of understanding what it is that they would be getting into. We also do that through various assessments and other creative approaches to make sure that we’re getting the right people into the roles to begin with. From that point on, one of the reasons we engage in shadowing early on, is we want to give folks the opportunity to live the life of [a moderator], so that they get a realistic flavor of that. And of course, we’re supportive and one of the things I’m quite proud of is that we have such a broad resiliency program, so that everybody does feel supported, and they always have access to resources and services and things like that at any point during this process.

I’m certainly not an expert in HR strategies or training strategies, but I’m curious if the training that you give is modeled on anything like, modeled on an academic theory or modeled on some sort of best practices that have been seen in other industries, or other parts of Facebook, or was it built from the ground up specifically for content moderation? In some regards we’re very unique. We’re the only organization that is providing— this is what gets me excited about my job, right—this kind of training at this scale, based on a relatively emerging area, and of course training and corporate training has a lot of legacy models.

The one that we seem to have identified with the most is called the 70-20-10 model. And again, take the numbers aside for just a minute, but the elevator pitch of that model suggests that roughly 70 percent of what you know as a professional, as an editor, as a reporter, you probably learned through on the job, practice. 20 percent through coaching, and having had the pleasure of working with people who can show you the ropes. And 10 percent through formal learning. So, we try to balance the formal learning, on the job practice, and then coaching as well, so that model does fit very well in terms of what we’re trying to do, and we keep that in the heart of everything we do. Because, as we talked about, training is never a one size fits all, and it’s never one modality, it’s a mix of different kinds of formats.

Is there a period of time where people are making content moderation decisions on a dummy site or test site or something like that? Yes, we offer opportunity for practice, and a very valuable tool that we have at our disposal that we’re now introducing is a simulation mode that allows you to action true to life content. It’s a replica of the same system that these folks are using every day, purely for the purposes of learning and practice. So, the decisions made there don’t impact the community of 2 billion people, so, for us that’s been a really valuable tool because we get data and a practice opportunity, but we go beyond that, and that gives us a really great avenue to provide personalized coaching. So, hypothetically, if you’re struggling with hate, then we can look at the data based on your simulation results, and we can work with you on that topic.

We also launched assessments and tests, and again, they replicate, they look more or less just like the same application that folks are using [on the live site], so, alongside what we call the simulation mode, we have and we will continue to use assessments as well. You will get a sampling of let’s say, 20 jobs, 30 jobs, however many it takes in a certain abuse type, and that is our version of what we would call a classic assessment. That plus practice typically work together really well, I just wanted to get that plug in there, because I feel like that is a truly active ingredient that we use as well.

What is success for a content moderator, in terms of obviously you want 100 percent accuracy, but what are they shooting for realistically? What makes a good content moderator, is it 99 percent accuracy, according to someone who audits it later, or… I feel like we don’t publicize the actual metrics, like 100 percent is always the goal, and maybe Carolyn you can say a little bit more about that, but, that is always the goal. Because at the end of the day, behind every abuse type, around every report is a person and that’s what makes this such a challenging position.

“Whereas some it’s fine to just go walk across the hall to a counselor, and they don’t care, in other cultures, they don’t do that, they would do it off hours, and other people might not know about it.”

CAROLYN GLANVILLE: I think you would be surprised at how high the accuracy rate is, but the reasons that we haven’t really talked about it to date is because, like he said, those errors, that do exist, is a person, and those are the ones that get publicized, and those are the ones where people are upset, and so, no matter what our number is, it’s never going to be enough, and we’re always trying to work towards reaching that state of not having mistakes.

When you’re training people, or when you’re onboarding them, you obviously stress that you want 100 percent accuracy, but of course mistakes are going to get made, and I assume that working under the assumption that if I make any mistake, it could be catastrophic, is probably not realistic. So, how is that messaged to people? BRIAN DOEGEN: Learning is a safe environment, it’s just for the purposes of learning, right? So, we don’t teach with an iron fist for lack of a better term, and I can tell you, from design through execution through monitoring, my team is also consistently evaluating the quality of these programs, the focus is really on the community.

RUCHIKA BUDHRAJA: I wonder if some of that is on us to be setting expectations externally. Like, we aren’t going to be perfect, I think we say that a lot, but what’s the alternative of not being perfect? Everything being swept up by automation, you know, people don’t want that, and so when you need to have people, you’re going to have mistakes. I think we’re also trying to talk more about automation and our algorithms, so, maybe the two go hand in hand. If reviewers see us talking about this externally, then they’re not as overwhelmed internally.

CAROLYN GLANVILLE: I would say there’s probably very few cases, I can’t speak to specific examples, where someone is let go for making a mistake, from Brian’s world. If we start to see that mistakes are being made, that either means retraining needs to happen, or it’ll end up in kind of the other flow where we’re starting to see people making mistakes on this kind of content, maybe there’s something in our policy we need to look at, maybe there’s a gap in our tooling, maybe there’s some other thing that’s not quite identified yet. So, it’s not so much, I think the mistakes also help to surface some of those things, which is a good thing that we need to address.

“There’s actual physical environments where you can go into, if you want to just kind of chillax, or if you want to go play a game, or if you just want to walk away, you know, be by yourself, that support system is pretty robust”

Are most of the trainers content moderators who have just been through the ranks? BRIAN DOEGEN: Some are, yes, absolutely, because, that has been great for us because it also provides career pathing. Folks that are truly exceptional have a drive to do a little bit more, and have a drive for coaching and mentoring, often do come into the role of the trainer, or training lead, even.

As far as resiliency goes, I know a lot has already been written about that, this job is difficult, you’re looking at graphic images often, hate speech, things like that. But what do you offer? From a training perspective, we touch upon [resiliency] in each of our abuse types. It’s something we talk about, we revisit it early on, in that training module, so we don’t just radically expose you, but rather we do have a conversation about what it is, and what we’re going to be seeing etcetera, to make sure that we’re level set. I think the broader resiliency efforts for me, and what I admire is that at any point in this role, you have access to counsellors, you have access to having conversations with other people. There’s actual physical environments where you can go into, if you want to just kind of chillax, or if you want to go play a game, or if you just want to walk away, you know, be by yourself, that support system is pretty robust, and that is consistent across the board.

CAROLYN GLANVILLE: From the training perspective, I think one thing that’s interesting, not even so much from the training, but resiliency in general, I guess, you look at the global nature of what we do, we offer resiliency counseling to anyone that reviews content, but look at the cultural acceptance in certain places in the world, and it’s not necessarily culturally acceptable to take that sort of help, or to talk to someone publicly, so we have to work very closely with either our vendor partners or our sites or whatever it might be, whatever kind of setup it is, to make sure that their employees know what is available in a way that is also culturally acceptable for them. Whereas some it’s fine to just go walk across the hall to a counselor, and they don’t care, in other cultures, they don’t do that, they would do it off hours, and other people might not know about it. It’s just interesting that we have to take those cultural nuances into account, when ensuring that people even know about the resources that are available.

Do you have to do that in terms of the actual training as well, just like, people in this part of the world learn in this way, this is best practices in India, this is best practices in like… BRIAN DOEGEN: Learning is as much of an art as it is of a science. As an insanely data-driven company, right, it’s not down, to, like, there’s no research that says this is the way to teach in India, that doesn’t exist. But what we do though, is that people can see here, and interact with what they’re learning. Our goal is really to accommodate a wide variety of different cultural learning styles. And that’s why we place so much emphasis on different modalities. If that answers your question. But, you’re asking a question that no learning professional has been able to answer with military precision, I can tell you that. But it’s a great question, don’t get me wrong.

You mentioned that teaching is art, not science. Content moderation is art not science, as well… Or art and science. Yeah, there is a science, there’s a methodology for how we triage need and so on that we use, the ISD methodology.

Do you think that Facebook values the role of the human in this process? Absolutely, in my mind that’s evidenced based on the pure nature of, like, our scaling and growing, and we’re placing so many resources behind this to get it right. In my 17 year career, for what that’s worth, I’ve not quite seen an attempt to invest this highly in that function.

How Facebook Trains Content Moderators syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[smartwebhostingblog]

It’s Time to Rethink Who’s Best Suited for Space Travel

New Post has been published on http://webhostingtop3.com/its-time-to-rethink-whos-best-suited-for-space-travel/

It’s Time to Rethink Who’s Best Suited for Space Travel

In 1961, a college student named David Myers traveled from Washington, DC, to the US Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Florida to take part in a new experiment. “I had a very limited understanding of what I was getting myself into,” Myers told me recently over email. “So I was extremely curious and mildly excited that first day.”

Myers was one of 11 men specifically recruited by Dr. Ashton Graybiel to help test the feasibility of human spaceflight, at a time when nobody knew whether the human body could withstand a trip beyond our atmosphere. For nearly a decade, the US Navy put 11 eleven men through countless tests. Four of the men spent 12 straight days inside a 20-foot room that rotated constantly. In another experiment, they were sent out to notoriously rough seas off the coast of Nova Scotia. On the boat, the men played cards while the researchers were so overcome with seasickness that they had to cancel the test and go home. Others were sent up in the so-called “Vomit Comet,” an aircraft designed to simulate zero gravity. That’s the test Myers is still most fond of. “This free floating was a fascinating experience,” he says. “No other tests came close as my favorites.” But Myers and the other men would never go to space. In fact, they would never be allowed. They were recruited for these tests for the exact reason they would never pass the NASA astronaut qualification exams: All 11 men were deaf.

Rose Eveleth is an Ideas contributor at WIRED and the creator and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about possible (and not so possible) futures.

Now known as the Gallaudet Eleven, Myers and his colleagues were recruited from Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University), a school for d/Deaf students. (“Big D” Deaf refers to Deaf culture and community, while “small d” deaf refers to people who don’t identify with that community.) Ten out of the 11 men had become deaf because of spinal meningitis, an infection of the fluid in the spinal cord. The infection ultimately damaged each man’s inner ear, including their vestibular system, which also happens to be the system that is mainly responsible for motion sickness. This made the men perfect test subjects for a space program that was trying to understand what might happen to people in places where the inner ear can’t sense up and down. “Through their endurance and dedication, the work of the Gallaudet Eleven made substantial contributions to the understanding of motion sickness and adaptation to spaceflight,” wrote Hannah Hotovy of the NASA History Division. Harry Larson, another one of the Gallaudet Eleven, put it this way: “We were different in a way they needed.”

It’s no secret that it’s incredibly difficult to become an astronaut. NASA’s selection process is notoriously rigorous—strict enough that it was the most plausible kind of place to set the movie Gattaca, where only the perfectly genetically engineered get to board rockets bound for space. Writer Tom Wolfe documented the space program’s strenuous astronaut training program in his book The Right Stuff.

The assumption has long been that this training is a necessity—traveling to space is a mentally and physically grueling endeavor. We need the strongest, smartest, most adaptable among us to go. But strength comes in many forms, as do smarts. And if you want to find people who are the very best at adapting to worlds not suited for them, you’ll have the best luck looking at people with disabilities, who navigate such a world every single day. Which has led disability advocates to raise the question: What actually is the right stuff?

“Crip bodies were built for space travel. Crip minds already push the outer limits,” Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility Project, tweeted last year. “We already master usage of breathing apparatuses and can handle challenging situations.” Wong went on to coedit an issue of the literary magazine Deaf Poets Society called “Crips in Space” with writer and performer Sam de Leve.

Take, for example, people who use ostomy bags. Right now, pooping in space is actually an important technical challenge. During takeoff, landing, and spacewalks, astronauts wear diapers. While in the space station, they use a toilet that requires a fair amount of precision and training to use. Astronauts have told all kinds of stories about rogue poop, or situations in which the toilet has backed up or generally gone awry. In 2008, NASA spent $ 19 million on a Russian toilet for the International Space Station. None of this would be an issue for an astronaut with an ostomy bag. “I could plug into the wall and just empty the container that’s been collecting,” says Mallory K. Nelson, a disability design specialist who uses an ileostomy bag—a pouch that connects to her intestine and collects waste. “I’ve moved the output location of poop, which creates a lot more flexibility in the kind of systems I can have. I could attach it to a space suit.”

Or consider movement in space. You’ve certainly seen videos of astronauts zipping around the space station using their arms and legs to push off surfaces and direct their motion. This is a type of movement that people who use wheelchairs and other mobility aids are already familiar with. In fact, the various devices and ways of moving the body in space are likely more familiar to people with disabilities than to able-bodied people. “We move our bodies in so many different ways, and the disabled community has an exuberant amount of options,” says Nelson, who is an amputee and who has used crutches, a wheelchair, a scooter, and a prosthetic to get around. Nelson even coined a term for this recently: transmobility, the idea that there are lots of ways to get around besides putting one foot in front of the other.

Nelson also points out that most astronauts have no prior experience relying on technology for their movement and lives, whereas people with disabilities do so every day. In a space suit, for a space walk, an astronaut has to be trained in how to move their body in unison with a piece of technology. They have to get used to the idea that, if that technology should fail, they could be in grave danger. This, again, is an experience people like Nelson live with every day. “I’m always moving my body in motion with another object. That’s all we do,” Nelson says.

Or take blind astronauts. In a piece for Scientific American, Sheri Wells-Jensen lays out the case for designing spaceships for blind space travelers:

“After all, in a serious accident, the first thing to go might be the lights! This generally means that the first thing a sighted astronaut must do for security is ensure visual access to the environment. He hunts for a flashlight, and if emergency lighting comes on, his eyes take a moment to adjust. Meanwhile, the blind astronaut is already heading toward the source of the problem. In the fire aboard the Russian Mir space station, in 1997, the crew struggled as smoke obscured their view. The blind astronaut, while still affected by the lack of good air, would not be bothered by either dim lighting or occluding smoke. She would accurately direct the fire extinguisher at the source of heat and noise.”

In the Mir fire that Wells-Jensen mentions, one of the problems that arose was the sighted astronauts’ inability to locate the fire extinguisher through the smoke. Had the ship been laid out with a blind participant in mind, there would have been a nonvisual signal already built in to such a critical piece of equipment.

Or consider d/Deaf astronauts once again. The Gallaudet Eleven were tapped for their immunity to motion sickness—John Glenn even reportedly said he was envious of their ability to withstand the tests without getting sick—but there are other reasons why bringing a d/Deaf astronaut along could be useful. “Studies have shown that using sign languages confers cognitive advantages in one’s visual working memory, enhancing how we see, remember, and manipulate objects in our mind,” says Joseph Murray, a professor at Gallaudet University and the scholar behind the term Deaf Gain, the idea that deafness should not be considered a loss of something but, rather, a gain of a whole host of other things. “The challenge Deaf Gain offers for NASA and all workplaces is to rethink their automatic assumptions about deaf people’s capabilities,” Murray says. “If there is a mission need for people with advanced spatial processing skills who do not get motion sick, then there are quite a few deaf people ready and willing to serve.”

And it’s not just on a trip to space that people with disabilities might have an advantage. Take a situation in which astronauts are going somewhere to settle: Able bodies might no longer behave the way we expect. “Humans have an environmental niche on Earth, like all other creatures do, and we exploit it in different ways,” says Ashley Shew, a professor at Virginia Tech. Mars, or even a space station, is nothing like that niche. “The conditions in which our bodies have grown up are so drastically different that our existence in space will be much more like being a disabled person on Earth than like being an abled person on Earth.” Who better to send than those who are used to navigating environments not built for them—those who experience that every day on Earth? “Disabled people will fare better in space because disabled people have learned to negotiate hostile situations in ways that able bodied people are completely unaware of,” Shew says. Wong agrees. “The way we communicate, function, and exist with our diverse bodyminds sets us up as ideal space explorers and ambassadors of Earth, ready to make first contact with sentient beings,” she told me.

Whether this will actually happen is hard to say. NASA didn’t respond to my request for comment on their astronaut selection policy (like all government agencies, NASA personnel are currently not working due to the government shutdown). Nor did Mars One or SpaceX. Online, Mars One has a whole page of qualifications for candidates for their proposed Mars mission, stating, “In general, normal medical and physiological health standards will be used” and disqualifying anybody without “normal range of motion and functionality in all joints,” anybody with less than 20/20 vision, and anybody who is deemed not “healthy.” NASA’s FAQ section says that “for maximum crew safety, each crewmember must be free of medical conditions that would either impair the person’s ability to participate in, or be aggravated by, space flight, as determined by NASA physicians.”

Changing these requirements won’t be easy. Spacecraft are designed with certain assumptions about what kinds of bodies will be sitting in the seats and operating the controls. The opportunity to change those parameters is small and must be seized while ships are being designed, not down the road. Plus, many people with disabilities who might want to go to space can’t get access to the pipeline that delivers so many astronauts: “Astronauts come via the military and that’s a closed door for disabled individuals,” Myers says. “Those kinds of obstacles need to be removed for those individuals who are otherwise qualified.” And NASA itself has had no reason to rethink their stance, because no one has really pushed them to. Yet, that is.

But all that could change. In 2017, Johanna Lucht became the first Deaf engineer to work at NASA. Eddie Ndopu, a South African activist and humanitarian, has said he wants to be the first disabled person in space. He plans to book a flight on a commercial trip into space and deliver an address to the UN while he’s up there. (MTV is slated to film the entire thing.) Julia Velasquez, a Deaf woman from California, has gone through many of the steps traditionally taken by astronauts—she’s interned at NASA, recently received her pilot’s license, and even lived in a simulated Mars colony in Hawaii.

When I asked Myers if he ever wished he could have been an astronaut, he said, “Yes, absolutely. At one point I told Dr. Graybiel, ‘If you ever develop an experiment involving a flight into space, I want to be first in line.’” Myers likely won’t wind up in space in his lifetime. But he might live to see a disabled person make the journey, opening up space to a whole new set of uniquely qualified astronauts.

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It’s Time to Rethink Who’s Best Suited for Space Travel

New Post has been published on http://webhostingtop3.com/its-time-to-rethink-whos-best-suited-for-space-travel/

It’s Time to Rethink Who’s Best Suited for Space Travel

In 1961, a college student named David Myers traveled from Washington, DC, to the US Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Florida to take part in a new experiment. “I had a very limited understanding of what I was getting myself into,” Myers told me recently over email. “So I was extremely curious and mildly excited that first day.”

Myers was one of 11 men specifically recruited by Dr. Ashton Graybiel to help test the feasibility of human spaceflight, at a time when nobody knew whether the human body could withstand a trip beyond our atmosphere. For nearly a decade, the US Navy put 11 eleven men through countless tests. Four of the men spent 12 straight days inside a 20-foot room that rotated constantly. In another experiment, they were sent out to notoriously rough seas off the coast of Nova Scotia. On the boat, the men played cards while the researchers were so overcome with seasickness that they had to cancel the test and go home. Others were sent up in the so-called “Vomit Comet,” an aircraft designed to simulate zero gravity. That’s the test Myers is still most fond of. “This free floating was a fascinating experience,” he says. “No other tests came close as my favorites.” But Myers and the other men would never go to space. In fact, they would never be allowed. They were recruited for these tests for the exact reason they would never pass the NASA astronaut qualification exams: All 11 men were deaf.

Rose Eveleth is an Ideas contributor at WIRED and the creator and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about possible (and not so possible) futures.

Now known as the Gallaudet Eleven, Myers and his colleagues were recruited from Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University), a school for d/Deaf students. (“Big D” Deaf refers to Deaf culture and community, while “small d” deaf refers to people who don’t identify with that community.) Ten out of the 11 men had become deaf because of spinal meningitis, an infection of the fluid in the spinal cord. The infection ultimately damaged each man’s inner ear, including their vestibular system, which also happens to be the system that is mainly responsible for motion sickness. This made the men perfect test subjects for a space program that was trying to understand what might happen to people in places where the inner ear can’t sense up and down. “Through their endurance and dedication, the work of the Gallaudet Eleven made substantial contributions to the understanding of motion sickness and adaptation to spaceflight,” wrote Hannah Hotovy of the NASA History Division. Harry Larson, another one of the Gallaudet Eleven, put it this way: “We were different in a way they needed.”

It’s no secret that it’s incredibly difficult to become an astronaut. NASA’s selection process is notoriously rigorous—strict enough that it was the most plausible kind of place to set the movie Gattaca, where only the perfectly genetically engineered get to board rockets bound for space. Writer Tom Wolfe documented the space program’s strenuous astronaut training program in his book The Right Stuff.

The assumption has long been that this training is a necessity—traveling to space is a mentally and physically grueling endeavor. We need the strongest, smartest, most adaptable among us to go. But strength comes in many forms, as do smarts. And if you want to find people who are the very best at adapting to worlds not suited for them, you’ll have the best luck looking at people with disabilities, who navigate such a world every single day. Which has led disability advocates to raise the question: What actually is the right stuff?

“Crip bodies were built for space travel. Crip minds already push the outer limits,” Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility Project, tweeted last year. “We already master usage of breathing apparatuses and can handle challenging situations.” Wong went on to coedit an issue of the literary magazine Deaf Poets Society called “Crips in Space” with writer and performer Sam de Leve.

Take, for example, people who use ostomy bags. Right now, pooping in space is actually an important technical challenge. During takeoff, landing, and spacewalks, astronauts wear diapers. While in the space station, they use a toilet that requires a fair amount of precision and training to use. Astronauts have told all kinds of stories about rogue poop, or situations in which the toilet has backed up or generally gone awry. In 2008, NASA spent $ 19 million on a Russian toilet for the International Space Station. None of this would be an issue for an astronaut with an ostomy bag. “I could plug into the wall and just empty the container that’s been collecting,” says Mallory K. Nelson, a disability design specialist who uses an ileostomy bag—a pouch that connects to her intestine and collects waste. “I’ve moved the output location of poop, which creates a lot more flexibility in the kind of systems I can have. I could attach it to a space suit.”

Or consider movement in space. You’ve certainly seen videos of astronauts zipping around the space station using their arms and legs to push off surfaces and direct their motion. This is a type of movement that people who use wheelchairs and other mobility aids are already familiar with. In fact, the various devices and ways of moving the body in space are likely more familiar to people with disabilities than to able-bodied people. “We move our bodies in so many different ways, and the disabled community has an exuberant amount of options,” says Nelson, who is an amputee and who has used crutches, a wheelchair, a scooter, and a prosthetic to get around. Nelson even coined a term for this recently: transmobility, the idea that there are lots of ways to get around besides putting one foot in front of the other.

Nelson also points out that most astronauts have no prior experience relying on technology for their movement and lives, whereas people with disabilities do so every day. In a space suit, for a space walk, an astronaut has to be trained in how to move their body in unison with a piece of technology. They have to get used to the idea that, if that technology should fail, they could be in grave danger. This, again, is an experience people like Nelson live with every day. “I’m always moving my body in motion with another object. That’s all we do,” Nelson says.

Or take blind astronauts. In a piece for Scientific American, Sheri Wells-Jensen lays out the case for designing spaceships for blind space travelers:

“After all, in a serious accident, the first thing to go might be the lights! This generally means that the first thing a sighted astronaut must do for security is ensure visual access to the environment. He hunts for a flashlight, and if emergency lighting comes on, his eyes take a moment to adjust. Meanwhile, the blind astronaut is already heading toward the source of the problem. In the fire aboard the Russian Mir space station, in 1997, the crew struggled as smoke obscured their view. The blind astronaut, while still affected by the lack of good air, would not be bothered by either dim lighting or occluding smoke. She would accurately direct the fire extinguisher at the source of heat and noise.”

In the Mir fire that Wells-Jensen mentions, one of the problems that arose was the sighted astronauts’ inability to locate the fire extinguisher through the smoke. Had the ship been laid out with a blind participant in mind, there would have been a nonvisual signal already built in to such a critical piece of equipment.

Or consider d/Deaf astronauts once again. The Gallaudet Eleven were tapped for their immunity to motion sickness—John Glenn even reportedly said he was envious of their ability to withstand the tests without getting sick—but there are other reasons why bringing a d/Deaf astronaut along could be useful. “Studies have shown that using sign languages confers cognitive advantages in one’s visual working memory, enhancing how we see, remember, and manipulate objects in our mind,” says Joseph Murray, a professor at Gallaudet University and the scholar behind the term Deaf Gain, the idea that deafness should not be considered a loss of something but, rather, a gain of a whole host of other things. “The challenge Deaf Gain offers for NASA and all workplaces is to rethink their automatic assumptions about deaf people’s capabilities,” Murray says. “If there is a mission need for people with advanced spatial processing skills who do not get motion sick, then there are quite a few deaf people ready and willing to serve.”

And it’s not just on a trip to space that people with disabilities might have an advantage. Take a situation in which astronauts are going somewhere to settle: Able bodies might no longer behave the way we expect. “Humans have an environmental niche on Earth, like all other creatures do, and we exploit it in different ways,” says Ashley Shew, a professor at Virginia Tech. Mars, or even a space station, is nothing like that niche. “The conditions in which our bodies have grown up are so drastically different that our existence in space will be much more like being a disabled person on Earth than like being an abled person on Earth.” Who better to send than those who are used to navigating environments not built for them—those who experience that every day on Earth? “Disabled people will fare better in space because disabled people have learned to negotiate hostile situations in ways that able bodied people are completely unaware of,” Shew says. Wong agrees. “The way we communicate, function, and exist with our diverse bodyminds sets us up as ideal space explorers and ambassadors of Earth, ready to make first contact with sentient beings,” she told me.

Whether this will actually happen is hard to say. NASA didn’t respond to my request for comment on their astronaut selection policy (like all government agencies, NASA personnel are currently not working due to the government shutdown). Nor did Mars One or SpaceX. Online, Mars One has a whole page of qualifications for candidates for their proposed Mars mission, stating, “In general, normal medical and physiological health standards will be used” and disqualifying anybody without “normal range of motion and functionality in all joints,” anybody with less than 20/20 vision, and anybody who is deemed not “healthy.” NASA’s FAQ section says that “for maximum crew safety, each crewmember must be free of medical conditions that would either impair the person’s ability to participate in, or be aggravated by, space flight, as determined by NASA physicians.”

Changing these requirements won’t be easy. Spacecraft are designed with certain assumptions about what kinds of bodies will be sitting in the seats and operating the controls. The opportunity to change those parameters is small and must be seized while ships are being designed, not down the road. Plus, many people with disabilities who might want to go to space can’t get access to the pipeline that delivers so many astronauts: “Astronauts come via the military and that’s a closed door for disabled individuals,” Myers says. “Those kinds of obstacles need to be removed for those individuals who are otherwise qualified.” And NASA itself has had no reason to rethink their stance, because no one has really pushed them to. Yet, that is.

But all that could change. In 2017, Johanna Lucht became the first Deaf engineer to work at NASA. Eddie Ndopu, a South African activist and humanitarian, has said he wants to be the first disabled person in space. He plans to book a flight on a commercial trip into space and deliver an address to the UN while he’s up there. (MTV is slated to film the entire thing.) Julia Velasquez, a Deaf woman from California, has gone through many of the steps traditionally taken by astronauts—she’s interned at NASA, recently received her pilot’s license, and even lived in a simulated Mars colony in Hawaii.

When I asked Myers if he ever wished he could have been an astronaut, he said, “Yes, absolutely. At one point I told Dr. Graybiel, ‘If you ever develop an experiment involving a flight into space, I want to be first in line.’” Myers likely won’t wind up in space in his lifetime. But he might live to see a disabled person make the journey, opening up space to a whole new set of uniquely qualified astronauts.

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It’s Time to Rethink Who’s Best Suited for Space Travel

New Post has been published on http://webhostingtop3.com/its-time-to-rethink-whos-best-suited-for-space-travel/

It’s Time to Rethink Who’s Best Suited for Space Travel

In 1961, a college student named David Myers traveled from Washington, DC, to the US Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Florida to take part in a new experiment. “I had a very limited understanding of what I was getting myself into,” Myers told me recently over email. “So I was extremely curious and mildly excited that first day.”

Myers was one of 11 men specifically recruited by Dr. Ashton Graybiel to help test the feasibility of human spaceflight, at a time when nobody knew whether the human body could withstand a trip beyond our atmosphere. For nearly a decade, the US Navy put 11 eleven men through countless tests. Four of the men spent 12 straight days inside a 20-foot room that rotated constantly. In another experiment, they were sent out to notoriously rough seas off the coast of Nova Scotia. On the boat, the men played cards while the researchers were so overcome with seasickness that they had to cancel the test and go home. Others were sent up in the so-called “Vomit Comet,” an aircraft designed to simulate zero gravity. That’s the test Myers is still most fond of. “This free floating was a fascinating experience,” he says. “No other tests came close as my favorites.” But Myers and the other men would never go to space. In fact, they would never be allowed. They were recruited for these tests for the exact reason they would never pass the NASA astronaut qualification exams: All 11 men were deaf.

Rose Eveleth is an Ideas contributor at WIRED and the creator and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about possible (and not so possible) futures.

Now known as the Gallaudet Eleven, Myers and his colleagues were recruited from Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University), a school for d/Deaf students. (“Big D” Deaf refers to Deaf culture and community, while “small d” deaf refers to people who don’t identify with that community.) Ten out of the 11 men had become deaf because of spinal meningitis, an infection of the fluid in the spinal cord. The infection ultimately damaged each man’s inner ear, including their vestibular system, which also happens to be the system that is mainly responsible for motion sickness. This made the men perfect test subjects for a space program that was trying to understand what might happen to people in places where the inner ear can’t sense up and down. “Through their endurance and dedication, the work of the Gallaudet Eleven made substantial contributions to the understanding of motion sickness and adaptation to spaceflight,” wrote Hannah Hotovy of the NASA History Division. Harry Larson, another one of the Gallaudet Eleven, put it this way: “We were different in a way they needed.”

It’s no secret that it’s incredibly difficult to become an astronaut. NASA’s selection process is notoriously rigorous—strict enough that it was the most plausible kind of place to set the movie Gattaca, where only the perfectly genetically engineered get to board rockets bound for space. Writer Tom Wolfe documented the space program’s strenuous astronaut training program in his book The Right Stuff.

The assumption has long been that this training is a necessity—traveling to space is a mentally and physically grueling endeavor. We need the strongest, smartest, most adaptable among us to go. But strength comes in many forms, as do smarts. And if you want to find people who are the very best at adapting to worlds not suited for them, you’ll have the best luck looking at people with disabilities, who navigate such a world every single day. Which has led disability advocates to raise the question: What actually is the right stuff?

“Crip bodies were built for space travel. Crip minds already push the outer limits,” Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility Project, tweeted last year. “We already master usage of breathing apparatuses and can handle challenging situations.” Wong went on to coedit an issue of the literary magazine Deaf Poets Society called “Crips in Space” with writer and performer Sam de Leve.

Take, for example, people who use ostomy bags. Right now, pooping in space is actually an important technical challenge. During takeoff, landing, and spacewalks, astronauts wear diapers. While in the space station, they use a toilet that requires a fair amount of precision and training to use. Astronauts have told all kinds of stories about rogue poop, or situations in which the toilet has backed up or generally gone awry. In 2008, NASA spent $ 19 million on a Russian toilet for the International Space Station. None of this would be an issue for an astronaut with an ostomy bag. “I could plug into the wall and just empty the container that’s been collecting,” says Mallory K. Nelson, a disability design specialist who uses an ileostomy bag—a pouch that connects to her intestine and collects waste. “I’ve moved the output location of poop, which creates a lot more flexibility in the kind of systems I can have. I could attach it to a space suit.”

Or consider movement in space. You’ve certainly seen videos of astronauts zipping around the space station using their arms and legs to push off surfaces and direct their motion. This is a type of movement that people who use wheelchairs and other mobility aids are already familiar with. In fact, the various devices and ways of moving the body in space are likely more familiar to people with disabilities than to able-bodied people. “We move our bodies in so many different ways, and the disabled community has an exuberant amount of options,” says Nelson, who is an amputee and who has used crutches, a wheelchair, a scooter, and a prosthetic to get around. Nelson even coined a term for this recently: transmobility, the idea that there are lots of ways to get around besides putting one foot in front of the other.

Nelson also points out that most astronauts have no prior experience relying on technology for their movement and lives, whereas people with disabilities do so every day. In a space suit, for a space walk, an astronaut has to be trained in how to move their body in unison with a piece of technology. They have to get used to the idea that, if that technology should fail, they could be in grave danger. This, again, is an experience people like Nelson live with every day. “I’m always moving my body in motion with another object. That’s all we do,” Nelson says.

Or take blind astronauts. In a piece for Scientific American, Sheri Wells-Jensen lays out the case for designing spaceships for blind space travelers:

“After all, in a serious accident, the first thing to go might be the lights! This generally means that the first thing a sighted astronaut must do for security is ensure visual access to the environment. He hunts for a flashlight, and if emergency lighting comes on, his eyes take a moment to adjust. Meanwhile, the blind astronaut is already heading toward the source of the problem. In the fire aboard the Russian Mir space station, in 1997, the crew struggled as smoke obscured their view. The blind astronaut, while still affected by the lack of good air, would not be bothered by either dim lighting or occluding smoke. She would accurately direct the fire extinguisher at the source of heat and noise.”

In the Mir fire that Wells-Jensen mentions, one of the problems that arose was the sighted astronauts’ inability to locate the fire extinguisher through the smoke. Had the ship been laid out with a blind participant in mind, there would have been a nonvisual signal already built in to such a critical piece of equipment.

Or consider d/Deaf astronauts once again. The Gallaudet Eleven were tapped for their immunity to motion sickness—John Glenn even reportedly said he was envious of their ability to withstand the tests without getting sick—but there are other reasons why bringing a d/Deaf astronaut along could be useful. “Studies have shown that using sign languages confers cognitive advantages in one’s visual working memory, enhancing how we see, remember, and manipulate objects in our mind,” says Joseph Murray, a professor at Gallaudet University and the scholar behind the term Deaf Gain, the idea that deafness should not be considered a loss of something but, rather, a gain of a whole host of other things. “The challenge Deaf Gain offers for NASA and all workplaces is to rethink their automatic assumptions about deaf people’s capabilities,” Murray says. “If there is a mission need for people with advanced spatial processing skills who do not get motion sick, then there are quite a few deaf people ready and willing to serve.”

And it’s not just on a trip to space that people with disabilities might have an advantage. Take a situation in which astronauts are going somewhere to settle: Able bodies might no longer behave the way we expect. “Humans have an environmental niche on Earth, like all other creatures do, and we exploit it in different ways,” says Ashley Shew, a professor at Virginia Tech. Mars, or even a space station, is nothing like that niche. “The conditions in which our bodies have grown up are so drastically different that our existence in space will be much more like being a disabled person on Earth than like being an abled person on Earth.” Who better to send than those who are used to navigating environments not built for them—those who experience that every day on Earth? “Disabled people will fare better in space because disabled people have learned to negotiate hostile situations in ways that able bodied people are completely unaware of,” Shew says. Wong agrees. “The way we communicate, function, and exist with our diverse bodyminds sets us up as ideal space explorers and ambassadors of Earth, ready to make first contact with sentient beings,” she told me.

Whether this will actually happen is hard to say. NASA didn’t respond to my request for comment on their astronaut selection policy (like all government agencies, NASA personnel are currently not working due to the government shutdown). Nor did Mars One or SpaceX. Online, Mars One has a whole page of qualifications for candidates for their proposed Mars mission, stating, “In general, normal medical and physiological health standards will be used” and disqualifying anybody without “normal range of motion and functionality in all joints,” anybody with less than 20/20 vision, and anybody who is deemed not “healthy.” NASA’s FAQ section says that “for maximum crew safety, each crewmember must be free of medical conditions that would either impair the person’s ability to participate in, or be aggravated by, space flight, as determined by NASA physicians.”

Changing these requirements won’t be easy. Spacecraft are designed with certain assumptions about what kinds of bodies will be sitting in the seats and operating the controls. The opportunity to change those parameters is small and must be seized while ships are being designed, not down the road. Plus, many people with disabilities who might want to go to space can’t get access to the pipeline that delivers so many astronauts: “Astronauts come via the military and that’s a closed door for disabled individuals,” Myers says. “Those kinds of obstacles need to be removed for those individuals who are otherwise qualified.” And NASA itself has had no reason to rethink their stance, because no one has really pushed them to. Yet, that is.

But all that could change. In 2017, Johanna Lucht became the first Deaf engineer to work at NASA. Eddie Ndopu, a South African activist and humanitarian, has said he wants to be the first disabled person in space. He plans to book a flight on a commercial trip into space and deliver an address to the UN while he’s up there. (MTV is slated to film the entire thing.) Julia Velasquez, a Deaf woman from California, has gone through many of the steps traditionally taken by astronauts—she’s interned at NASA, recently received her pilot’s license, and even lived in a simulated Mars colony in Hawaii.

When I asked Myers if he ever wished he could have been an astronaut, he said, “Yes, absolutely. At one point I told Dr. Graybiel, ‘If you ever develop an experiment involving a flight into space, I want to be first in line.’” Myers likely won’t wind up in space in his lifetime. But he might live to see a disabled person make the journey, opening up space to a whole new set of uniquely qualified astronauts.

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It’s Time to Rethink Who’s Best Suited for Space Travel

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It’s Time to Rethink Who’s Best Suited for Space Travel

In 1961, a college student named David Myers traveled from Washington, DC, to the US Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Florida to take part in a new experiment. “I had a very limited understanding of what I was getting myself into,” Myers told me recently over email. “So I was extremely curious and mildly excited that first day.”

Myers was one of 11 men specifically recruited by Dr. Ashton Graybiel to help test the feasibility of human spaceflight, at a time when nobody knew whether the human body could withstand a trip beyond our atmosphere. For nearly a decade, the US Navy put 11 eleven men through countless tests. Four of the men spent 12 straight days inside a 20-foot room that rotated constantly. In another experiment, they were sent out to notoriously rough seas off the coast of Nova Scotia. On the boat, the men played cards while the researchers were so overcome with seasickness that they had to cancel the test and go home. Others were sent up in the so-called “Vomit Comet,” an aircraft designed to simulate zero gravity. That’s the test Myers is still most fond of. “This free floating was a fascinating experience,” he says. “No other tests came close as my favorites.” But Myers and the other men would never go to space. In fact, they would never be allowed. They were recruited for these tests for the exact reason they would never pass the NASA astronaut qualification exams: All 11 men were deaf.

Rose Eveleth is an Ideas contributor at WIRED and the creator and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about possible (and not so possible) futures.

Now known as the Gallaudet Eleven, Myers and his colleagues were recruited from Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University), a school for d/Deaf students. (“Big D” Deaf refers to Deaf culture and community, while “small d” deaf refers to people who don’t identify with that community.) Ten out of the 11 men had become deaf because of spinal meningitis, an infection of the fluid in the spinal cord. The infection ultimately damaged each man’s inner ear, including their vestibular system, which also happens to be the system that is mainly responsible for motion sickness. This made the men perfect test subjects for a space program that was trying to understand what might happen to people in places where the inner ear can’t sense up and down. “Through their endurance and dedication, the work of the Gallaudet Eleven made substantial contributions to the understanding of motion sickness and adaptation to spaceflight,” wrote Hannah Hotovy of the NASA History Division. Harry Larson, another one of the Gallaudet Eleven, put it this way: “We were different in a way they needed.”

It’s no secret that it’s incredibly difficult to become an astronaut. NASA’s selection process is notoriously rigorous—strict enough that it was the most plausible kind of place to set the movie Gattaca, where only the perfectly genetically engineered get to board rockets bound for space. Writer Tom Wolfe documented the space program’s strenuous astronaut training program in his book The Right Stuff.

The assumption has long been that this training is a necessity—traveling to space is a mentally and physically grueling endeavor. We need the strongest, smartest, most adaptable among us to go. But strength comes in many forms, as do smarts. And if you want to find people who are the very best at adapting to worlds not suited for them, you’ll have the best luck looking at people with disabilities, who navigate such a world every single day. Which has led disability advocates to raise the question: What actually is the right stuff?

“Crip bodies were built for space travel. Crip minds already push the outer limits,” Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility Project, tweeted last year. “We already master usage of breathing apparatuses and can handle challenging situations.” Wong went on to coedit an issue of the literary magazine Deaf Poets Society called “Crips in Space” with writer and performer Sam de Leve.

Take, for example, people who use ostomy bags. Right now, pooping in space is actually an important technical challenge. During takeoff, landing, and spacewalks, astronauts wear diapers. While in the space station, they use a toilet that requires a fair amount of precision and training to use. Astronauts have told all kinds of stories about rogue poop, or situations in which the toilet has backed up or generally gone awry. In 2008, NASA spent $ 19 million on a Russian toilet for the International Space Station. None of this would be an issue for an astronaut with an ostomy bag. “I could plug into the wall and just empty the container that’s been collecting,” says Mallory K. Nelson, a disability design specialist who uses an ileostomy bag—a pouch that connects to her intestine and collects waste. “I’ve moved the output location of poop, which creates a lot more flexibility in the kind of systems I can have. I could attach it to a space suit.”

Or consider movement in space. You’ve certainly seen videos of astronauts zipping around the space station using their arms and legs to push off surfaces and direct their motion. This is a type of movement that people who use wheelchairs and other mobility aids are already familiar with. In fact, the various devices and ways of moving the body in space are likely more familiar to people with disabilities than to able-bodied people. “We move our bodies in so many different ways, and the disabled community has an exuberant amount of options,” says Nelson, who is an amputee and who has used crutches, a wheelchair, a scooter, and a prosthetic to get around. Nelson even coined a term for this recently: transmobility, the idea that there are lots of ways to get around besides putting one foot in front of the other.

Nelson also points out that most astronauts have no prior experience relying on technology for their movement and lives, whereas people with disabilities do so every day. In a space suit, for a space walk, an astronaut has to be trained in how to move their body in unison with a piece of technology. They have to get used to the idea that, if that technology should fail, they could be in grave danger. This, again, is an experience people like Nelson live with every day. “I’m always moving my body in motion with another object. That’s all we do,” Nelson says.

Or take blind astronauts. In a piece for Scientific American, Sheri Wells-Jensen lays out the case for designing spaceships for blind space travelers:

“After all, in a serious accident, the first thing to go might be the lights! This generally means that the first thing a sighted astronaut must do for security is ensure visual access to the environment. He hunts for a flashlight, and if emergency lighting comes on, his eyes take a moment to adjust. Meanwhile, the blind astronaut is already heading toward the source of the problem. In the fire aboard the Russian Mir space station, in 1997, the crew struggled as smoke obscured their view. The blind astronaut, while still affected by the lack of good air, would not be bothered by either dim lighting or occluding smoke. She would accurately direct the fire extinguisher at the source of heat and noise.”

In the Mir fire that Wells-Jensen mentions, one of the problems that arose was the sighted astronauts’ inability to locate the fire extinguisher through the smoke. Had the ship been laid out with a blind participant in mind, there would have been a nonvisual signal already built in to such a critical piece of equipment.

Or consider d/Deaf astronauts once again. The Gallaudet Eleven were tapped for their immunity to motion sickness—John Glenn even reportedly said he was envious of their ability to withstand the tests without getting sick—but there are other reasons why bringing a d/Deaf astronaut along could be useful. “Studies have shown that using sign languages confers cognitive advantages in one’s visual working memory, enhancing how we see, remember, and manipulate objects in our mind,” says Joseph Murray, a professor at Gallaudet University and the scholar behind the term Deaf Gain, the idea that deafness should not be considered a loss of something but, rather, a gain of a whole host of other things. “The challenge Deaf Gain offers for NASA and all workplaces is to rethink their automatic assumptions about deaf people’s capabilities,” Murray says. “If there is a mission need for people with advanced spatial processing skills who do not get motion sick, then there are quite a few deaf people ready and willing to serve.”

And it’s not just on a trip to space that people with disabilities might have an advantage. Take a situation in which astronauts are going somewhere to settle: Able bodies might no longer behave the way we expect. “Humans have an environmental niche on Earth, like all other creatures do, and we exploit it in different ways,” says Ashley Shew, a professor at Virginia Tech. Mars, or even a space station, is nothing like that niche. “The conditions in which our bodies have grown up are so drastically different that our existence in space will be much more like being a disabled person on Earth than like being an abled person on Earth.” Who better to send than those who are used to navigating environments not built for them—those who experience that every day on Earth? “Disabled people will fare better in space because disabled people have learned to negotiate hostile situations in ways that able bodied people are completely unaware of,” Shew says. Wong agrees. “The way we communicate, function, and exist with our diverse bodyminds sets us up as ideal space explorers and ambassadors of Earth, ready to make first contact with sentient beings,” she told me.

Whether this will actually happen is hard to say. NASA didn’t respond to my request for comment on their astronaut selection policy (like all government agencies, NASA personnel are currently not working due to the government shutdown). Nor did Mars One or SpaceX. Online, Mars One has a whole page of qualifications for candidates for their proposed Mars mission, stating, “In general, normal medical and physiological health standards will be used” and disqualifying anybody without “normal range of motion and functionality in all joints,” anybody with less than 20/20 vision, and anybody who is deemed not “healthy.” NASA’s FAQ section says that “for maximum crew safety, each crewmember must be free of medical conditions that would either impair the person’s ability to participate in, or be aggravated by, space flight, as determined by NASA physicians.”

Changing these requirements won’t be easy. Spacecraft are designed with certain assumptions about what kinds of bodies will be sitting in the seats and operating the controls. The opportunity to change those parameters is small and must be seized while ships are being designed, not down the road. Plus, many people with disabilities who might want to go to space can’t get access to the pipeline that delivers so many astronauts: “Astronauts come via the military and that’s a closed door for disabled individuals,” Myers says. “Those kinds of obstacles need to be removed for those individuals who are otherwise qualified.” And NASA itself has had no reason to rethink their stance, because no one has really pushed them to. Yet, that is.

But all that could change. In 2017, Johanna Lucht became the first Deaf engineer to work at NASA. Eddie Ndopu, a South African activist and humanitarian, has said he wants to be the first disabled person in space. He plans to book a flight on a commercial trip into space and deliver an address to the UN while he’s up there. (MTV is slated to film the entire thing.) Julia Velasquez, a Deaf woman from California, has gone through many of the steps traditionally taken by astronauts—she’s interned at NASA, recently received her pilot’s license, and even lived in a simulated Mars colony in Hawaii.

When I asked Myers if he ever wished he could have been an astronaut, he said, “Yes, absolutely. At one point I told Dr. Graybiel, ‘If you ever develop an experiment involving a flight into space, I want to be first in line.’” Myers likely won’t wind up in space in his lifetime. But he might live to see a disabled person make the journey, opening up space to a whole new set of uniquely qualified astronauts.

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[technato]

Video Friday: Robot World Cup, New Co-Bots, and 1000 SpotMinis

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

Photo: Tech United Eindhoven

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

RSS 2018 – June 26-30, 2018 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USA

Ubiquitous Robots 2018 – June 27-30, 2018 – Honolulu, Hawaii

MARSS 2018 – July 4-8, 2018 – Nagoya, Japan

AIM 2018 – July 9-12, 2018 – Auckland, New Zealand

ICARM 2018 – July 18-20, 2018 – Singapore

ICMA 2018 – August 5-8, 2018 – Changchun, China

SSRR 2018 – August 6-8, 2018 – Philadelphia, Pa., USA

ISR 2018 – August 24-27, 2018 – Shenyang, China

BioRob 2018 – August 26-29, 2018 – University of Twente, Netherlands

RO-MAN 2018 – August 27-30, 2018 – Nanjing, China

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Robot soccer is getting really, really good. RoboCup (which just concluded in Montreal) is basically exactly the same as human World Cup, just with fewer writhing around on the ground and clutching of ankles. Tech United Eindhoven was there competing, and put together these highlight videos:

And here are the semi-final and final matches:

[ Tech United ]

These robot best friends make dumplings! And they have LITTLE CHEF HATS!

[ AIT ]

The new single-arm YuMi is ABB’s most agile and compact collaborative robot yet and can easily integrate into existing production.

[ ABB ]

At Hannover Fair 2018 we introduced the LBR iisy, KUKA’s next collaborative robot that rounds out our collaborative robotics platform. It’s small and lightweight – powerful enough for experts, simple enough for beginners.

[ Kuka ]

Who gets tired of listening to Marc Raibert talk about robots? Nobody, that’s who. This talk is from CEBIT, just this month.

Raibert said Boston Dynamics is testing SpotMini with a variety of potential customers, using the robot as a platform for security, delivery, construction, and home applications. The idea is turning SpotMini into the “Android of Robots.” It will be available starting next year, Raibert said, and so far they’ve built 10 units by hand and are now building 100 with manufacturing partners. By mid 2019, production will ramp up to 1000 units per year.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

Can you name all the robots in this video from Toyota Research Institute?

If you missed the Toyota HSR, that’s okay, so did I.

[ TRI ]

Although quadrotors, and aerial robots in general, are inherently active agents, their perceptual capabilities in literature so far have been mostly passive in nature. Researchers and practitioners today use traditional computer vision algorithms with the aim of building a representation of general applicability: a 3D reconstruction of the scene. Using this representation, planning tasks are constructed and accomplished to allow the quadrotor to demonstrate autonomous behavior. These methods are inefficient as they are not task driven and such methodologies are not utilized by flying insects and birds. Such agents have been solving the problem of navigation and complex control for ages without the need to build a 3D map and are highly task driven.

In this paper, we propose this framework of bio-inspired perceptual design for quadrotors. We use this philosophy to design a minimalist sensori-motor framework for a quadrotor to fly though unknown gaps without a 3D reconstruction of the scene using only a monocular camera and onboard sensing. We successfully evaluate and demonstrate the proposed approach in many real-world experiments with different settings and window shapes, achieving a success rate of 85% at 2.5m/s even with a minimum tolerance of just 5cm. To our knowledge, this is the first paper which addresses the problem of gap detection of an unknown shape and location with a monocular camera and onboard sensing.

[ UMD ]

What if we could control robots more intuitively, using just hand gestures and brainwaves? A new system spearheaded by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) aims to do exactly that, allowing users to instantly correct robot mistakes with nothing more than brain signals and the flick of a finger.

By monitoring brain activity, the system can detect in real-time if a person notices an error as a robot does a task. Using an interface that measures muscle activity, the person can then make hand gestures to scroll through and select the correct option for the robot to execute.

The team demonstrated the system on a task in which a robot moves a power drill to one of three possible targets on the body of a mock plane. Importantly, they showed that the system works on people it’s never seen before, meaning that organizations could deploy it in real-world settings without needing to train it on users.

[ MIT ]

All aboard for today’s mandatory Cassie video!

Cassie is an efficient, compliant, dynamic bipedal robot. Here in the Dynamic Robotics Lab directed by Prof. Jonathan Hurst we are researching control strategies that exploit the robot’s natural dynamics. The controller here is demonstrating robust blind walking over unperceived disturbances.

[ DRL ]

Robotic materials combines traditional camera-based perception with tactile perception to help robots be more effective at interacting with the world around them.

[ Robotic Materials ]

Thanks Nikolaus!

Mapping and navigation is one of the trickiest parts of doing robot stuff with a robot, but Misty’s got you covered.

[ Misty Robotics ]

I’m almost certain that this is the first robot I’ve ever seen with a built-in watermelon slapper.

A student-lead team designed the agBOT watermelon harvester to help aging farmers. The machine can autonomously identify and harvest ripe watermelons. A passive slapper mechanism thumps the watermelons in a way that is similar to how a person tests one at the supermarket, and an onboard microphone helps agBOT determine whether or not to harvest the watermelon.

[ Virginia Tech ]

In collaboration with DENSO Robotics, and in consultation with Innotech Corporation, Osaro is proud to publicly unveil FoodPick, which performs automated food assembly tasks using deep learning and other AI and robotics techniques.

[ Osaro ]

Musica Automata is a name of an upcoming album by Leonardo Barbadoro, an Italian electronic music producer and electroacoustic music composer from Florence known also under the alias Koolmorf Widesen. The album will include music for robots controlled from a laptop computer.

These robots are more than 50 acoustic instruments (piano, organs, wind instruments, percussions etc) which are part of the Logos Foundation in Gent (Belgium). They receive digital MIDI messages that contain precise informations for their performance.

If you like the sound of this, you can help make it happen on Kickstarter.

[ Kickstarter ]

Thanks Leonardo!

The project Entern is concerned with technologies for the autonomous operation of robots in lunar and planetary exploration missions. It covers the subjects of operations & control, environment modelling and navigation. The goal of the project is to improve the autonomous capabilities of individually acting robots in difficult situations such as craters and caves. On-board simulation is used within the project for this purpose. It allows the robot to improve the assessment of critical situations without external help.

[ Entern ]

Robots become every day more ‘intelligent’. What if robots will be so intelligent to say NO to war? This would be a happier future.

This short robot film is the result of the student project between Sheffield Robotics of the University of Sheffield and the Institute of Arts of Sheffield Hallam University.

[ DiODe ]

On this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, Per interviews Nicola Tomatis from BlueBotics.

Nicola Tomatis talks about his long road into robotics and how BlueBotics handles indoor navigation and integrates it in automated guided vehicles (AGV). Like many, Nicola started out tinkering when he was young, and then got interested in computer science as he wanted to understand it better. Nicola gives us an overview of indoor navigation and its challenges.He shares a number of interesting projects, including professional cleaning and intralogistics in hospitals. We also find out what someone who wants use indoor navigation and AGV should think about.

[ Robots in Depth ]

Video Friday: Robot World Cup, New Co-Bots, and 1000 SpotMinis syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com

[technato]

Video Friday: Security Robot as a Service, Robotic Mining, and Saved by a Drone

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

Photo: Mike Collett/Promus Ventures

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

Applied Collegiate Exoskeleton Competition – May 05, 2018 – University of Michigan, USA

NASA Robotic Mining Competition – May 14-18, 2018 – Kennedy Space Center, Fla., USA

ICRA 2018 – May 21-25, 2018 – Brisbane, Australia

Dynamic Walking Conference – May 21-24, 2018 – Pensacola, Fl., USA

RoboCup 2018 – June 18-22, 2018 – Montreal, Canada

RSS 2018 – June 26-30, 2018 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USA

Ubiquitous Robots 2018 – June 27-30, 2018 – Honolulu, Hawaii

MARSS 2018 – July 4-8, 2018 – Nagoya, Japan

AIM 2018 – July 9-12, 2018 – Auckland, New Zealand

ICARM 2018 – July 18-20, 2018 – Singapore

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Nothing is more secure than a workplace protected by prowling robots. Nothing.

But are the fish okay?

[ Cobalt ]

ElliQ, a social home robot for seniors, has been in the works for a while. It looks good in this video, but remember, all robots look good in videos like these.

[ ElliQ ]

Zuzana from Quanser wrote in to share this video of their new Autonomous Vehicles Research Studio:

We recently launched this complete open-architecture, multi-vehicle lab, with Intel Aero Compute-powered QDrones, QBot ground robots, OptiTrack camera system, and our QUARC real-time rapid control prototyping software for Simulink. We developed it to help researchers in the autonomous robotics space start their work faster. Rather than spending time on developing and integrating DIY drones, coding, or other low-level tasks, they can start testing their controllers and strategies indoors within hours.

[ Quanser ]

Thanks Zuzana!

Resources that future explorers could use to make rocket fuel, life support or building materials, are just below the surface of the Moon, Mars or other alien ground. Low-mass, high-performance and fully autonomous machines can bring these possibilities to the surface. Teams of college-level students from across the nation will put their excavator robots to the test during NASA’s 2018 Robotic Mining Competition. Catch the action May 16-18 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

[ NASA RMC ]

In an impendingly tiresome new world record, over 1,400 drones were airborne at the same time in China last weekend, making shapes and spelling words and stuff. The only reason we’re bothering to post about it is because something went wrong at the end, and drones started falling out of the sky:

It doesn’t look like anyone was hurt, but consider this a friendly reminder that drones of all shapes and sizes, carrying cameras or cargo or humans, can have bad days sometimes. And you don’t want to be under them (or in them) when they do.

[ ECNS ] via [ Gizmodo ]

Imagine a world… In which sending robots to Mars… Was made even more dramatic… Than you ever.

Thought.

Possible.

#lensflare 

[ Insight ]

It feels like I harp on this every single year, but I wish that competitions like VEX (and FIRST) would put some more emphasis on robot autonomy. They could do that, for example, by providing more points and time for the autonomous portion of each run, and de-emphasizing the human remote control aspect. Robotics is becoming a software problem more than a hardware problem, and to be successful in the field long term, understanding autonomy is arguably more important than being able to build a robot. Programming an autonomous robot can be challenging, but kids are smart. They can handle it.

[ VEX ]

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau manages to restrain himself from running over photographers with a robot:

The robot in question was created by Erin Kennedy, and it’s designed to be a super accessible way for people participate in environmental cleanup. Read more at the link below.

[ Robot Missions ]

To help get development on Misty gain momentum, Misty Robotics has been holding hackathons (robothons?) out in Colorado:

And here’s an example of how Misty does its own mapping:

[ Misty Robotics ]

In search and rescue operations, every minute counts. When two Polish tourists found themselves stranded on the side of a mountain in Northern Iceland, and the 112 emergency service was unable to locate them by GPS, the Dalvik Search & Rescue Team knew they could count on DJI Phantom 4 to save the helpless hikers.

[ DJI ]

Starship robots are now delivering food, drinks, parcels and other items on corporate and academic campuses around the world. This new service allows staff the freedom to choose how and where to spend their time during the day.

Starship’s initiative is the first large scale deployment of autonomous delivery services, supporting campuses by implementing robots to assist in work and school environments. The robots offer on-demand delivery anywhere on participating campuses via an app, offering employees the flexibility and convenience of having food delivery when and where they want, eliminating unwanted errands and waiting in line, or transporting items to and from other locations on campus.

[ Starship ]

The more data you have to train autonomous cars with, the better your results are going to be, especially in situations that you weren’t expecting. Oxford Robotics Institute took some vehicles to Iceland to gather some serious off-road data, while testing out some rugged new sensors at the same time.

[ Oxford Robotics Institute ]

Middle Size robot soccer is one of my favorite events to watch, and Tech United is among the best. Here are four matches from the recent Portugese Open:

[ Tech United ]

Rafael Hostettler is talking about the Roboy project with its new Roboy 2.0 and the agile hardware development organization behind the products.

[ Roboy ]

In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, Per interviews Andrew Graham from OC Robotics.

Andrew tells the story about starting OC Robotics as a way to ground his robotics development efforts in a customer need. He felt that making something useful gave a great direction to his projects. We also hear about some of the unique properties of snake arm robots: they can fit in any space that the tip of the robot can get through, they can operate in very tight locations as they are flexible all along and therefore do not sweep large areas to move, they are easy to seal up so that they don’t interact with the environment they operate in, and they are set up in two parts where the part exposed to the environment and to risk is the cheaper part. Andrew then shares some interesting insights from the many projects he has worked on, from fish processing and suit making to bomb disposal and servicing of nuclear power plants.

[ Robots in Depth ]

This week’s CMU RI Seminar comes from Vladlen Koltun, director of Intel’s Intelligent Systems Lab, on “Learning to Drive.” Robots learning to drive, we assume.

Why is our understanding of sensorimotor control behind our understanding of perception? I will talk about structural differences between perception and control, and how these differences can be mitigated to help advance sensorimotor control systems. Judicious use of simulation can play an important role and I will describe some simulation tools that we have built and deployed. Much of the talk will focus on autonomous driving as a compelling application domain for the study of coupled perception and control.

[ CMU RI Seminar ]

Video Friday: Security Robot as a Service, Robotic Mining, and Saved by a Drone syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com

[technato]

Video Friday: Security Robot as a Service, Robotic Mining, and Saved by a Drone

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

Photo: Mike Collett/Promus Ventures

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

Applied Collegiate Exoskeleton Competition – May 05, 2018 – University of Michigan, USA

NASA Robotic Mining Competition – May 14-18, 2018 – Kennedy Space Center, Fla., USA

ICRA 2018 – May 21-25, 2018 – Brisbane, Australia

Dynamic Walking Conference – May 21-24, 2018 – Pensacola, Fl., USA

RoboCup 2018 – June 18-22, 2018 – Montreal, Canada

RSS 2018 – June 26-30, 2018 – Pittsburgh, Pa., USA

Ubiquitous Robots 2018 – June 27-30, 2018 – Honolulu, Hawaii

MARSS 2018 – July 4-8, 2018 – Nagoya, Japan

AIM 2018 – July 9-12, 2018 – Auckland, New Zealand

ICARM 2018 – July 18-20, 2018 – Singapore

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Nothing is more secure than a workplace protected by prowling robots. Nothing.

But are the fish okay?

[ Cobalt ]

ElliQ, a social home robot for seniors, has been in the works for a while. It looks good in this video, but remember, all robots look good in videos like these.

[ ElliQ ]

Zuzana from Quanser wrote in to share this video of their new Autonomous Vehicles Research Studio:

We recently launched this complete open-architecture, multi-vehicle lab, with Intel Aero Compute-powered QDrones, QBot ground robots, OptiTrack camera system, and our QUARC real-time rapid control prototyping software for Simulink. We developed it to help researchers in the autonomous robotics space start their work faster. Rather than spending time on developing and integrating DIY drones, coding, or other low-level tasks, they can start testing their controllers and strategies indoors within hours.

[ Quanser ]

Thanks Zuzana!

Resources that future explorers could use to make rocket fuel, life support or building materials, are just below the surface of the Moon, Mars or other alien ground. Low-mass, high-performance and fully autonomous machines can bring these possibilities to the surface. Teams of college-level students from across the nation will put their excavator robots to the test during NASA’s 2018 Robotic Mining Competition. Catch the action May 16-18 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

[ NASA RMC ]

In an impendingly tiresome new world record, over 1,400 drones were airborne at the same time in China last weekend, making shapes and spelling words and stuff. The only reason we’re bothering to post about it is because something went wrong at the end, and drones started falling out of the sky:

It doesn’t look like anyone was hurt, but consider this a friendly reminder that drones of all shapes and sizes, carrying cameras or cargo or humans, can have bad days sometimes. And you don’t want to be under them (or in them) when they do.

[ ECNS ] via [ Gizmodo ]

Imagine a world… In which sending robots to Mars… Was made even more dramatic… Than you ever.

Thought.

Possible.

#lensflare 

[ Insight ]

It feels like I harp on this every single year, but I wish that competitions like VEX (and FIRST) would put some more emphasis on robot autonomy. They could do that, for example, by providing more points and time for the autonomous portion of each run, and de-emphasizing the human remote control aspect. Robotics is becoming a software problem more than a hardware problem, and to be successful in the field long term, understanding autonomy is arguably more important than being able to build a robot. Programming an autonomous robot can be challenging, but kids are smart. They can handle it.

[ VEX ]

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau manages to restrain himself from running over photographers with a robot:

The robot in question was created by Erin Kennedy, and it’s designed to be a super accessible way for people participate in environmental cleanup. Read more at the link below.

[ Robot Missions ]

To help get development on Misty gain momentum, Misty Robotics has been holding hackathons (robothons?) out in Colorado:

And here’s an example of how Misty does its own mapping:

[ Misty Robotics ]

In search and rescue operations, every minute counts. When two Polish tourists found themselves stranded on the side of a mountain in Northern Iceland, and the 112 emergency service was unable to locate them by GPS, the Dalvik Search & Rescue Team knew they could count on DJI Phantom 4 to save the helpless hikers.

[ DJI ]

Starship robots are now delivering food, drinks, parcels and other items on corporate and academic campuses around the world. This new service allows staff the freedom to choose how and where to spend their time during the day.

Starship’s initiative is the first large scale deployment of autonomous delivery services, supporting campuses by implementing robots to assist in work and school environments. The robots offer on-demand delivery anywhere on participating campuses via an app, offering employees the flexibility and convenience of having food delivery when and where they want, eliminating unwanted errands and waiting in line, or transporting items to and from other locations on campus.

[ Starship ]

The more data you have to train autonomous cars with, the better your results are going to be, especially in situations that you weren’t expecting. Oxford Robotics Institute took some vehicles to Iceland to gather some serious off-road data, while testing out some rugged new sensors at the same time.

[ Oxford Robotics Institute ]

Middle Size robot soccer is one of my favorite events to watch, and Tech United is among the best. Here are four matches from the recent Portugese Open:

[ Tech United ]

Rafael Hostettler is talking about the Roboy project with its new Roboy 2.0 and the agile hardware development organization behind the products.

[ Roboy ]

In this week’s episode of Robots in Depth, Per interviews Andrew Graham from OC Robotics.

Andrew tells the story about starting OC Robotics as a way to ground his robotics development efforts in a customer need. He felt that making something useful gave a great direction to his projects. We also hear about some of the unique properties of snake arm robots: they can fit in any space that the tip of the robot can get through, they can operate in very tight locations as they are flexible all along and therefore do not sweep large areas to move, they are easy to seal up so that they don’t interact with the environment they operate in, and they are set up in two parts where the part exposed to the environment and to risk is the cheaper part. Andrew then shares some interesting insights from the many projects he has worked on, from fish processing and suit making to bomb disposal and servicing of nuclear power plants.

[ Robots in Depth ]

This week’s CMU RI Seminar comes from Vladlen Koltun, director of Intel’s Intelligent Systems Lab, on “Learning to Drive.” Robots learning to drive, we assume.

Why is our understanding of sensorimotor control behind our understanding of perception? I will talk about structural differences between perception and control, and how these differences can be mitigated to help advance sensorimotor control systems. Judicious use of simulation can play an important role and I will describe some simulation tools that we have built and deployed. Much of the talk will focus on autonomous driving as a compelling application domain for the study of coupled perception and control.

[ CMU RI Seminar ]

Video Friday: Security Robot as a Service, Robotic Mining, and Saved by a Drone syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com