Regulate armed robots before it’s too late (NS)

IN THIS age of super-rapid technological advance, we do well to obey the Boy Scout injunction: “Be prepared”. That requires nimbleness of mind, given that the ever accelerating power of computers is being applied across such a wide range of applications, making it hard to keep track of everything that is happening. The danger is that we only wake up to the need for forethought when in the midst of a storm created by innovations that have already overtaken us.

We are on the brink, and perhaps to some degree already over the edge, in one hugely important area: robotics. Robot sentries patrol the borders of South Korea and Israel. Remote-controlled aircraft mount missile attacks on enemy positions. Other military robots are already in service, and not just for defusing bombs or detecting landmines: a coming generation of autonomous combat robots capable of deep penetration into enemy territory raises questions about whether they will be able to discriminate between soldiers and innocent civilians. Police forces are looking to acquire miniature Taser-firing robot helicopters. In South Korea and Japan the development of robots for feeding and bathing the elderly and children is already advanced. Even in a robot-backward country like the UK, some vacuum cleaners sense their autonomous way around furniture. A driverless car has already negotiated its way through Los Angeles traffic.

In the next decades, completely autonomous robots might be involved in many military, policing, transport and even caring roles. What if they malfunction? What if a programming glitch makes them kill, electrocute, demolish, drown and explode, or fail at the crucial moment? Whose insurance will pay for damage to furniture, other traffic or the baby, when things go wrong? The software company, the manufacturer, the owner?

Most thinking about the implications of robotics tends to take sci-fi forms: robots enslave humankind, or beautifully sculpted humanoid machines have sex with their owners and then post-coitally tidy the room and make coffee. But the real concern lies in the areas to which the money already flows: the military and the police.

A confused controversy arose in early 2008 over the deployment in Iraq of three SWORDS armed robotic vehicles carrying M249 machine guns. The manufacturer of these vehicles said the robots were never used in combat and that they were involved in no “uncommanded or unexpected movements”. Rumours nevertheless abounded about the reason why funding for the SWORDS programme abruptly stopped. This case prompts one to prick up one’s ears.

Media stories about Predator drones mounting missile attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan are now commonplace, and there are at least another dozen military robot projects in development. What are the rules governing their deployment? How reliable are they? One sees their advantages: they keep friendly troops out of harm’s way, and can often fight more effectively than human combatants. But what are the limits, especially when these machines become autonomous?

The civil liberties implications of robot devices capable of surveillance involving listening and photographing, conducting searches, entering premises through chimneys or pipes, and overpowering suspects are obvious. Such devices are already on the way. Even more frighteningly obvious is the threat posed by military or police-type robots in the hands of criminals and terrorists.

There needs to be a considered debate about the rules and requirements governing all forms of robot devices, not a panic reaction when matters have gone too far. That is how bad law is made - and on this issue time is running out.

A. C. Grayling is a philosopher at Birkbeck, University of London

something i like to do.

I’ve always liked leaving my favorite websites for late at night to read, nothing to me is more enjoyable than icile-light-shrouded living room web surfing sessions. Maybe it’s the pulsing beat of music pouring out of my stereo or the cool shit i read on newscientist, slashdot, and arstechnia. I’ll tell you what though, I’m going to know how to defend the zombie invasion before you do…. lol. Twitterfags.

OH HELL YES.

By BEN FELLER and LAURAN NEERGAARD – 22 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Reversing an eight-year-old limit on potentially life-saving science, President Barack Obama plans to lift restrictions Monday on taxpayer-funded research using embryonic stem cells. The long-promised move will allow a rush of research aimed at one day better treating, if not curing, ailments from diabetes to paralysis — research that crosses partisan lines, backed by such notables as Nancy Reagan and the late Christopher Reeve. But it stirs intense controversy over whether government crosses a moral line with such research.

Obama will hold an event at the White House to announce the move, a senior administration official said Friday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the policy had not yet been publicly announced.

Embryonic stem cells are master cells that can morph into any cell of the body. Scientists hope to harness them so they can create replacement tissues to treat a variety of diseases — such as new insulin-producing cells for diabetics, cells that could help those with Parkinson’s disease or maybe even Alzheimer’s, or new nerve connections to restore movement after spinal injury.

“I feel vindicated after eight years of struggle, and I know it’s going to energize my research team,” said Dr. George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Children’s Hospital of Boston, a leading stem cell researcher.

But the research is controversial because days-old embryos must be destroyed to obtain the cells. They typically are culled from fertility-clinic leftovers otherwise destined to be thrown away.

Under President George W. Bush, taxpayer money for that research was limited to a small number of stem cell lines that were created before Aug. 9, 2001, lines that in many cases had some drawbacks that limited their potential usability.

But hundreds more of such lines — groups of cells that can continue to propagate in lab dishes — have been created since then, ones that scientists say are healthier, better suited to creating treatments for people rather than doing basic laboratory science.

Work didn’t stop. Indeed, it advanced enough that this summer, the private Geron Corp. will begin the world’s first study of a treatment using human embryonic stem cells, in people who recently suffered a spinal cord injury.

Nor does Obama’s change fund creation of new lines. But it means that scientists who until now have had to rely on private donations to work with these newer stem cell lines can apply for government money for the research, just like they do for studies of gene therapy or other treatment approaches.

The aim of the policy is to restore “scientific integrity” to the process, the administration official said.

“America’s biomedical research enterprise experienced steady decline over the past eight years, with shrinking budgets and policies that elevated ideology over science. This slowed the pace of discovery and the search for cures,” said Sean Morrison, director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Stem Cell Biology.

Critics immediately denounced the move.

“Taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for experiments that require the destruction of human life,” said Tony Perkins of the conservative Family Research Council. “President Obama’s policy change is especially troubling given the significant adult stem cell advances that are being used to treat patients now without harming or destroying human embryos.”

Indeed, there are different types of stem cells: So-called adult stem cells that produce a specific type of tissue; younger stem cells found floating in amniotic fluid or the placenta. Scientists even have learned to reprogram certain cells to behave like stem cells.

But even researchers who work with varying types consider embryonic stem cells the most flexible and thus most promising form — and say that science, not politics, should ultimately judge.

“Science works best and patients are served best by having all the tools at our disposal,” Daley said.

Obama made it clear during the campaign he would overturn Bush’s directive.

During the campaign, Obama said, “I strongly support expanding research on stem cells. I believe that the restrictions that President Bush has placed on funding of human embryonic stem cell research have handcuffed our scientists and hindered our ability to compete with other nations.”

He said he would lift Bush’s ban and “ensure that all research on stem cells is conducted ethically and with rigorous oversight.”

“Patients and people who’ve been patient advocates are going to be really happy,” said Amy Comstock Rick of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research.

The ruling will bring one immediate change: As of Monday, scientists who’ve had to meticulously keep separate their federally funded research and their privately funded stem cell work — from buying separate microscopes to even setting up labs in different buildings — won’t have that expensive hurdle anymore.

Next, scientists can start applying for research grants from the National Institutes of Health. The NIH already has begun writing guidelines that, among other things, are expected to demand that the cells being used were derived with proper informed consent from the woman or couple who donated the original embryo.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

did anyone see the fallout 4 trailer yet?

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Igor Panarin: U.S. Will Collapse By Next Year

MIKE ECKEL | March 4, 2009 04:39 AM EST |

Compare 04:39 AM EST03:13 AM EST and 04:39 AM EST03:13 AM EST versions

MOSCOW — If you’re inclined to believe Igor Panarin, and the Kremlin wouldn’t mind if you did, then President Barack Obama will order martial law this year, the U.S. will split into six rump-states before 2011, and Russia and China will become the backbones of a new world order.

Panarin might be easy to ignore but for the fact that he is a dean at the Foreign Ministry’s school for future diplomats and a regular on Russia’s state-guided TV channels. And his predictions fit into the anti-American story line of the Kremlin leadership.

“There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010,” Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats Tuesday at the Diplomatic Academy _ a lecture the ministry pointedly invited The Associated Press and other foreign media to attend.

The prediction from Panarin, a former spokesman for Russia’s Federal Space Agency and reportedly an ex-KGB analyst, meshes with the negative view of the U.S. that has been flowing from the Kremlin in recent years, in particular from Vladimir Putin.

Putin, the former president who is now prime minister, has likened the United States to Nazi Germany’s Third Reich and blames Washington for the global financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.

Panarin didn’t give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources.

He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world’s wealthiest country for more than a decade now.

But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other “social and cultural phenomena” led him to nail down a specific timeframe for “The End” _ when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control.

Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men.

Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington’s bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed.

“I was there recently and things are far from good,” he said. “What’s happened is the collapse of the American dream.”

Panarin insisted he didn’t wish for a U.S. collapse, but he predicted Russia and China would emerge from the economic turmoil stronger and said the two nations should work together, even to create a new currency to replace the U.S. dollar.

Asked for comment on how the Foreign Ministry views Panarin’s theories, a spokesman said all questions had to be submitted in writing and no answers were likely before Wednesday.

It wasn’t clear how persuasive the 20-minute lecture was. One instructor asked Panarin whether his predictions more accurately describe Russia, which is undergoing its worst economic crisis in a decade as well as a demographic collapse that has led some scholars to predict the country’s demise.

Panarin dismissed that idea: “The collapse of Russia will not occur.”

But Alexei Malashenko, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center who did not attend the lecture, sided with the skeptical instructor, saying Russia is the country that is on the verge of disintegration.

“I can’t imagine at all how the United States could ever fall apart,” Malashenko told the AP.

from newscientist.com

Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers

• 16:18 27 February 2009 by Ewen Callaway

Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.

A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

“When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,” says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

“Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” Edelman says.

Political divide

Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.

That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer’s postal code.

After controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states – online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog – and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest.

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. “The differences here are not so stark,” Edelman says.

Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

Old-fashioned values

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.

To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.”

“One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you’re told you can’t have this, then you want it more,” Edelman says

Europe names crew for Mars ‘mission’ (AFP)

The European Space Agency (ESA) on Friday named a Frenchman and a German who will join four Russians in an innovative 105-day isolation experiment to test whether humans can one day fly to Mars.

From March 31, the six “crew” will be locked inside a special facility in Moscow that replicates conditions of a space trip to Mars.

The simulation will be followed by a 520-day experiment, starting later this year, that would last as long as a real mission to Mars.

The two Europeans are Oliver Knickel, 28, a mechanical engineer in the German army, and Cyrille Fournier, 40, a captain with Air France who flies A320 airliners, ESA said in a press release.

The distance between Earth and Mars varies between 55 million kilometres (34 million miles) and more than 400 million kms (250 million miles).

Using current rocket technology, a there-and-back trip to the Red Planet would take at least 18 months.

Maintaining the crew’s mental and physical health is deemed by space scientists to be as challenging as gathering the money and technical resources for the historic trip.

The six guinea pigs will be scrutinised for stress, mood, hormone regulation, immune defences and sleep quality.

Researchers also want to know whether dietary supplements will sustain their health.

The simulation will include all the main elements of a simulated Mars mission, including travelling to Mars, orbiting the planet, landing on its surface and returning to Earth, ESA said.

“The crew will only have personal contact with each other, plus voice contact with a simulated control centre and family and friends,” it said.

“A 20-minute delay will be built into communications with the control centre to simulate an interplanetary mission and the crew will eat the same food as the astronauts on the International Space Station.”

The project is a joint venture between ESA’s Directorate of Human Spaceflight and the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP).

ESA and NASA have separately sketched dates around three decades from now for a manned flight to Mars.

Surrender To Can Can Candy (BRO)

Any time you can build a business around fun, go for it. Ernie Torres and Peter McLean, owners of a new small five and dime shop called Can Can Candy, have dreamed up a sweet recipe on Elmwood that they hope will inspire the kid in all of us.

The idea of the five and dime took root a few years ago when Ernie and Peter flew into Buffalo’s airport (from Texas) in order to make their way to Toronto. The two were, and still are, big fans of winter and found themselves miserably making due with the southwest’s scorching heat. The trip to Toronto, via Buffalo, had become routine until one fateful day, when they decided to drive through Buffalo instead of around it. It was then that they found themselves on Richmond Avenue ogling the robust rows of Victorians. “That’s when we saw the For Sale sign,” Ernie told me. “The sign read that the house was for sale for $87,500. We assumed that the house was really for sale for $875,000, and that there had been a mistake in the listing. All the same, we called the realtor and were stunned when we heard that the price was not a mistake. Unfortunately the house had already sold, but all the same we were determined to move to Buffalo.”

Ten years after moving to Buffalo, Ernie and Peter managed to open Can Can Candy just in time for this past Valentine’s Day. In preparation for opening day, the shop was stocked with ribbon candy, colorful suckers, seasonal gifts and sweets and name brand candies and chocolate bars. Many of the edibles are displayed behind old world antique display cases, which places an even greater importance on the inexpensive product. Not since the Pop Shop, once found at the corner of Elmwood and Bidwell, have I felt like… a kid in a candy shop? Maybe it was the whimsical decor that transported me back to my youth. In the back of the shop a faux performance stage has been built. On the stage a cancan dancer, frozen in time, can be seen giving a high kick in the direction of the Eiffel Tower. Midway through the shop a flatscreen TV, camouflaged by use of an elaborate gold frame, plays classic movies depicting an era gone by. I was happy to catch part of The Wizard of Oz while browsing over the displays.

Candy will be the main focus of this eclectic Elmwood addition, though there will also be plenty of gifts to be found. Ernie told me that he was still expecting a line of wind up tin toys to make an appearance any day. He’s also looking forward to the arrival of the vintage candy bars. I noticed ribbon and gift wrap behind the counter along with balloons and a helium tank. The owners are still on the lookout for a soda company to complete the five and dime experience - of course customers can’t expect to pay 5 and 10 cents anymore… that would be asking to much (or too little). I understand that Can Can Candy has made quite an impression on the Canisius High School students who make a daily pilgrimage to 822 Elmwood Avenue. Hey, I remember the days fondly… I just don’t remember them being so darn entertaining.

Can Can Candy and Gifts is located at 822 Elmwood Avenue. You can also find them online at CanCanCandy.com. Give them a shout at 716-883-3489.

[FROM BUFFALORISINGONLINE] [LINK]