Author Archives: 7MelansonHayden940

Robots Get Their Own Internet

by 7MelansonHayden940 Posted on March 22, 2013

Meet Robby the Robot, who totally doesn’t look anything like the Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet. Photo: RoboEarth

Rapyuta. Remember that name. That is the name of a new shadow internet intended only for robots, designed by the international organization RoboEarth. Rapyuta is a cloud-computing engine, designed to let robots share the things they learn about the world with each other and to offload computational tasks to far more powerful computers allowing them to solve problems more complicated than they ever could on their own. The mind-melding system, says New York Magazine, won’t bring about the end of humanity, because its creators say so.

[Rapyuta] sounds fine in theory — if you trust robots. But for those convinced that providing robots with a common brain will only hasten the arrival of the robot uprising against mankind, then Rapyuta is more like a dark harbinger of the apocalypse. We happen to be one of those people, so we reached out to Dr. Heico Sandee, RoboEarth’s program manager at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, to reassure us that Rapyuta will not lead to our destruction.

“That is indeed an important point to be addressed,” Sandee acknowledged in an-email. But he assured us that robots will use Rapyuta for no such thing.

I mean, just look at this helpful promotional video released by the people at RoboEarth:

“Meet Robby the Robot,” says a soothing female voice. “One morning, Robby decides to try something new. The RoboEarth cloud engine.” “With the RoboEarth cloud engine, Robby can now take on many more tasks around the house instead of only making breakfast.”

But, sure. Just because robots will be able to coordinate and share and think beyond their means doesn’t mean much—they’ll still only really be able to do the tasks that some human, somewhere, programmed them to do.

But wait!

Wired‘s Danger Room reports that the Pentagon’s advanced research projects division is “readying a nearly four-year project to boost artificial intelligence systems by building machines that can teach themselves.”

[T]the agency thinks we can build machines that learn and evolve, using algorithms — “probabilistic programming” — to parse through vast amounts of data and select the best of it. After that, the machine learns to repeat the process and do it better.

The task is hard, but that’s the goal. Self-educating robots. (Feeding into the global robot consciousness.)

But maybe, says Wired, the worry comes not from robots learning to think and teach and desire for themselves, but rather in what would happen should our robot friends learn to control these new machinae.

[W]ith all the paranoia about machines, we’ve ignored another possibility: Animals learn to control robots and decide it’s their turn to rule the planet. This would be even more dangerous than dolphins evolving opposable thumbs. And the first signs of this coming threat are already starting to appear in laboratories around the world where robots are being driven by birds, trained by moths and controlled by the minds of monkeys.

But even still, says xkcd’s Randall Munroe,  the odds of a successful robot uprising (even with all these advances) are pretty slim (at least given the current state of things).

More from Smithsonian.com:

NASA Uses Interplanetary Internet to Control Robot in Germany
Robot Apocalypse Inches Closer as Machines Learn To Install Solar Panels

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Robots Get Their Own Internet

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9 Bucks and Age 4

by 7MelansonHayden940 Posted on February 13, 2013

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In the end, I didn’t get to hear Obama’s SOTU speech at all. Things just didn’t work out, somehow. Still, I note this morning that he was unusually non-fuzzy about a few things. First, he wants to raise the minimum wage to $9 and index it to inflation. Bravo! When it comes to anti-poverty measures, I’m in favor of doing lots of little things, rather than putting all my eggs in a few baskets. An economist might sniff that the minimum wage isn’t the most efficient way to help low-income workers, and it probably isn’t. So what? At modest levels (and $9 is a modest level), it helps a lot of people and almost certainly does little or no harm to the broader economy. It’s also very visible, very easy to understand, viewed as very fair, and politically popular. That stuff matters a lot.

Keying it to inflation is also interesting, but for a subtle reason: Obama is putting good policy ahead of good politics. Indexing the minimum wage to inflation will help the working poor, but it comes at the cost of allowing Democrats a cheap and easy issue to bang on every few years. Typical Obama.

Obama’s other proposal dear to my heart was his call for universal pre-K.The truth is that age four is too late. Age two would be better. Age one would probably be better still. But starting at age four makes the most political sense. But if Congress does act on this (unlikely, I know, but humor me), I hope they put in place extensive experimentation requirements. What we really want to know is what kind of pre-K programs work best, and we’ll only find out with a rigorous, fairly well-controlled program of experimentation. On this issue, I’m a Manzi-ite.

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One step forward, one step back for tar-sands protesters

by 7MelansonHayden940 Posted on January 28, 2013

One step forward, one step back for tar-sands protesters

By Susie Cagle

It’s a bittersweet moment for direct environmental action against nasty tar-sands pollution. (So many moments are bittersweet in the fight against nasty tar-sands pollution …)

On the sweet side, Canada’s Idle No More movement has gone global today, mobilizing protests around the world to highlight mistreatment of indigenous peoples and the environment. The movement has been galvanized by plans to pipe tar-sands oil across First Nations land in British Columbia and by the Canadian government’s attempts to roll back environmental protections for most of the country’s waterways. Actions are already rolling across Canada, at U.N. headquarters in New York, and as far away as Australia and Greenland.

“This day of action will peacefully protest attacks on Democracy, Indigenous Sovereignty, Human Rights and Environmental Protections when Canadian MPs return to the House of Commons on January 28th,” organizers said in a statement.

But for the bitter: The Tar Sands Blockade, which is fighting ongoing construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas, faced a significant setback in court on Friday.

In a lawsuit against 19 individual activists as well as the groups Tar Sands Blockade, Rising Tide North Texas, and Rising Tide North America, pipeline builder TransCanada sought $5 million in damages, stating that the activists had disrupted pipeline construction and caused financial losses for the company (despite at other times claiming they had no impact at all). Activists settled the lawsuit without paying damages, but agreed not to trespass on Keystone XL property in Texas or Oklahoma.

“TransCanada is dead wrong if they think a civil lawsuit against a handful of Texans is going to stop a grassroots civil disobedience movement,” said Ramsey Sprague, a spokesperson for the Tar Sands Blockade.

Sprague is right. This court loss might be bitter, but I wouldn’t count out the blockaders in this fight. And when even the Sierra Club is preparing to tape up and jump in the ring, you know the real shit is still yet to go down.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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2012 was a record year for worldwide crop insurance claims

by 7MelansonHayden940 Posted on January 25, 2013

2012 was a record year for worldwide crop insurance claims

By Philip Bump

We get so caught up in the economic damage wrought by Sandy that we forget the damage done by last year’s other major environmental crisis in America: the drought. Last year’s record dryness spurred a massive increase in crop insurance claims here — but extreme weather events dropped crop yields in other countries as well. The end result was the most expensive year in history for insurers.

From Bloomberg:

Global crop insurance claims were the highest ever last year after drought cut yields in the U.S., historically the biggest grower of corn and soybeans.

Claims worldwide were worth about $23 billion in 2012, with $15 billion going to growers in the U.S., said Karl Murr, who heads the agriculture unit at Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurance company. About 85 percent of farmland is insured in the U.S., compared with 20 percent globally. …

As of Jan. 21, U.S. farmers had collected about $12.35 billion in insurance claims since the marketing year began, surpassing the $10.84 billion at the same time a year earlier, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency.

Patrick Emerson

Dry lakebed near Stull, Kan.

That $15 billion is actually slightly less than was projected a few weeks ago, but still massive. Other countries experienced similar weather-related crop disasters, pushing the global bill into record territory.

Dry weather also damaged crops in the past season in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Argentina and Brazil, while Poland suffered from a cold snap and the U.K. had its second-wettest year on record. Flooded fields probably cost British farmers about $2.1 billion (1.3 billion pounds) in damage, much of which wasn’t insured, Murr said.

The drought in the U.S. continues. Yesterday, Reuters reported that the drought-stricken area in Kansas expanded over the last week. The entire state is experiencing severe drought conditions.

USDA

Kansas is generally the top U.S. wheat-growing state, but the new crop planted last fall has been struggling with a lack of soil moisture. Without rain and/or heavy snow before spring, millions of acres of wheat could be ruined.

But a new climatology report issued Thursday showed no signs of improvement for Kansas, or neighboring farm states. …

Kansas typically makes up nearly 20 percent of the total U.S. wheat production with a production value that hovers around $1 billion.

But many farmers worry this year that a severe shortage of soil moisture will decimate production.

If that happens, insurers — namely, the Department of Agriculture — will again need to step in to provide economic support to farmers. And this drought, the worst in almost 80 years, is only the beginning of what the Plains states can expect over the next century as the country gets hotter.

National Climate Assessment

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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U.N. launches new fight against food waste

by 7MelansonHayden940 Posted on January 23, 2013

U.N. launches new fight against food waste

By Susie Cagle

No one can agree on just how much food we’re wasting. But it is so, so much.

sporkist

The United Nations and its Food and Agriculture Organization say it’s a third of all food produced, while other studies say it’s closer to 40 or 50 percent. After it leaves the farm, a lot of food is chucked because it’s not pretty, or it’s past its expiration date, or it simply falls through the cracks. According to the EPA, food waste makes up 21 percent of the garbage bound for landfills in the U.S.

This is not news — we’ve known for a while that our modern foodprint is massive. What’s noteworthy is that people are actually maybe kind of starting to do something about it.

Today the United Nations launched a campaign to reduce global food waste, which it estimates at 1.3 billion tons a year.

“In a world of seven billion people, set to grow to nine billion by 2050, wasting food makes no sense — economically, environmentally and ethically,” said U.N. Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.

The campaign, “Think-Eat-Save,” calls on eaters to take some logical steps — steps so seemingly obvious that it’s sad we need a campaign to promote them. E.g. make a shopping list and avoid impulse buys and “marketing tricks.” Also: Freeze leftovers, donate to food banks, and don’t be afraid to buy “funny” looking fruit and veg (if they even make it to the store shelves, that is).

This is all good stuff, but I reiterate my sadness. This is a problem of the incredibly privileged. According to the U.N., European and North American consumers waste upwards of 10 times what African and south Asian consumers do. Restaurants are particularly bad at this, even though cutting down on waste could save them thousands of dollars.

One campaign probably won’t do much to change our wasteful habits, so long as those habits are generally good for big business, and so long as that campaign is organized by the toothless U.N.

“Think” is a good place to start, but what else can we do? Sit back and celebrate when fancy real estate firms get a pat on the back for turning their food waste into fertilizer for their fancy gardens? Please, please no. Ugh. I’ll be out back fishing bagels from the dumpster, a-gain.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Poll: Record High Support For Legal Abortion in the US

by 7MelansonHayden940 Posted on January 22, 2013

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A record-high 70 percent of Americans now oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that affirmed a limited consitutional right to abortion, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. And for the first time since the Journal and NBC started asking this question in 2003, a majority of the country believes abortion should be legal in all or most cases:

WSJ.com

A simple explanation:

The shift is mostly the result of more Democrats backing the decision—particularly Hispanics and African-Americans—and a slight uptick in support from Republicans.

But the poll showed a consistent tension in Americans’ attitudes toward the decision. Almost seven in 10 respondents say there are at least some circumstances in which they don’t support abortion.

The news of Roe’s newfound support comes on a big day—the milestone abortion-rights ruling had its 40th anniversary on Tuesday. The decision last saw its highest levels of support during the early ’90s—around the same time the Supreme Court issued the 1992 ruling Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which affirmed the constitutionality of certain restrictions on abortion access.

MoJo editor Mike Mechanic has a good round-up of handy infographics from the Guttmacher Institute. Here’s one that demonstrates the challenges women still face in trying to gain access to safe, legal abortion in the US:

And here’s one on how abortions in this country have become concentrated primarily among the poor:

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Poll: Record High Support For Legal Abortion in the US

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