NASA Examines the Cryosphere

NASA will intensify its focus on one of the most critical but remote parts of our changing planet with the launch of two new satellite missions and an array of airborne campaigns. The space agency is launching these missions at a time when decades of observations from the ground, air and space have revealed signs of change in Earth's ice sheets, sea ice, glaciers, snow cover and permafrost. Collectively, scientists call these frozen regions of our planet the "cryosphere." Ongoing changes with the cryosphere, while often occurring in remote regions, have impacts on people all around the world: sea level rise affects coastlines globally, more than a billion people rely on water from snowpack, and the diminishing sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean plays a significant role in Earth's climate and weather patterns.

Currently NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences are scheduled to launch the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission, twin satellites that will continue the original GRACE mission’s legacy of tracking fluctuations in Earth's gravity field in order to detect changes in mass, including the mass of ice sheets and aquifers. Then in the fall, NASA will launch the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), which will use a highly advanced laser instrument to measure the changing elevation of ice around the world, providing a view of the height of Earth's ice with greater detail than previously possible. Together the two missions will make critical, complementary measurements of Earth’s glaciers and ice sheets. Both missions will also make other key observations: for instance, GRACE-FO will measure groundwater reserves and deep ocean currents; ICESat-2 will measure sea ice thickness and vegetation height.



Credits:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-renews-focus-on-earths-frozen-regions

Ezfly -- A Better Way to Get to School?

Facebook apologizes

The Zapata Ezfly looks for all intents and purposes like a Segway of the sky. You stand on a small platform equipped with a series of jet thrusters, holding two handgrips that come up from the base, then rise up into the air and zoom around, steering with your bodyweight. It builds on the platform of Franky Zapata's Flyboard Air, a green goblin-style flying platform with no Segway-style handgrips. The Flyboard Air, like the water-propelled Flyboard that started this whole venture for Zapata, straps you in at the boots, and requires an extraordinary amount of core strength and balance to operate – which its inventor most certainly has.

The fact that Zapata was willing to put a range of people on board suggests that the Ezfly has a bunch of built-in stability gear, as well as potentially an altitude/distance from base limiter. You could even feasibly have a drone-style remote control to bring back a wayward pilot in distress. We'd love to know more, but Zapata hasn't yet responded to our enquiries. One thing we can be fairly sure it doesn't have is an active safety system, because nothing of that nature really exists as yet.

City of Atlanta's Computers Held for Randsom

City officials say Atlanta is dealing with a cyberattack that is holding internal systems hostage using ransomware, CBS affiliate WGCL-TV reports. Around 5 a.m., a written communication from the hackers warned that they had frozen the city's computer systems, CBS News homeland security correspondent Jeff Pegues reports. The attack caused outages on several computer systems. Online bill paying services and some law enforcement data was unavailable. According to WGCL-TV, a ransom note demanding payment in the cryptocurrency bitcoin was discovered Thursday morning. The letter states that all files had been encrypted, and require a key to regain access.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms tells CBS News the city is receiving assistance from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Microsoft and Cisco Security. "We are aware of the situation and have offered our technical expertise and support to the city of Atlanta, as is standard practice for any of our public or private sector partners," DHS officials said in a statement. "Information shared with the department for cybersecurity purposes is confidential, and so we defer to the city to discuss details of its networks." City sent a tweet in response to the incident, which reads in part: "The City of Atlanta is currently experiencing outages on various customer-facing applications, including some that customers may use to pay bills or access court-related information."



Credits:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/atlanta-ransomware-cyberattack-holding-computers-hostage/

Cambridge Analytica

In the latest revelation, Facebook announced on March 18 that University of Cambridge psychology lecturer and St Petersburg university professor Dr Aleksandr Kogan "lied to us and violated our Platform Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica, a firm that does political, government, and military work around the globe".

According to former Cambridge Analytica's parent company SCL employee Christopher Wylie, Kogan provided data on over 50 million Facebook profiles for Cambridge Analytica. Ironically, Wylie, who had nothing in common with his right-wing bosses -- hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and Trump's key adviser Steve Bannon -- was the one who came up with the programming, which enabled Trump's backers to use "Facebook to harvest millions of people's profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on."

It was never just the answers people gave to the quiz. The real crown jewel was the open access it gave Cambridge Analytica to their Facebook accounts. According to Wylie, hundreds of thousands of Facebook users took personality tests with the app. In doing so, users consented to their data being collected for academic use. Its use was to prove anything but academic. In partnership with Kogan's company Global Science Research (GSR), they did that by creating the app, "thisisyourdigitallife". This purported to be a personality quiz that was billed as "a research app used by psychologists". It was used to spread individually targeted political propaganda. This seemingly harmless quiz helped gathered, according to Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, "nearly 5 thousand different data points about you to craft and target a message".

Click here to access the video.

Know your Health IQ app

Data the app gets from me

How to prevent 3rd party apps from getting your data

Credits:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-cambridge-analytica-used-your-facebook-data-to-help-elect-trump/

Uber Halts Self-Driving Cars After Fatal Accident in Arizona

The technology behind autonomous vehicles has originated from coders in Silicon Valley, engineers in Detroit and academic researchers in Pittsburgh. Much of it eventually lands on the streets of Arizona, a state that’s done more than any other to welcome tests of unproven self-driving software to public roads. The death this week of a 49-year-old woman in Tempe, after she was struck by a self-driving Uber Technologies Inc. SUV, highlights the risk of the state's laissez-faire approach to the emerging technology. Developers flocked to the desert state in response to policies that were designed to encourage testing and minimize red tape. That approach has come under scrutiny after what’s likely the first pedestrian death linked to an autonomous vehicle.

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey issued an executive order in 2015 to allow self-driving vehicles to operate without a human backup driver behind the wheel. It was a calculated move to make the state a hub for self-driving tests. California further cracked open a window of opportunity the following year, when its Department of Motor Vehicles shut down an Uber pilot program in San Francisco, insisting that the company register its driverless cars and pay a fee. Ducey, a Republican, implored Uber to relocate.



Credits:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-20/arizona-became-self-driving-proving-ground-before-uber-s-deadly-crash

Basketball shooting Robot Hits Every Shot

Someone needs to tell Toyota to take its foot off the gas. Apparently, in the next installment of humanity hastening its demise to robots, Toyota engineered a robot that defeated pro players from Tokyo in a shooting contest. A basketbot, if you will. The robot was apparently inspired by a manga cartoon, according to RT News, but it only vaguely resembles a human.

Its name is "Cue," as in "cue the symphonies, I'm burning your world down." Its shot comes from an artificial intelligence, according to the Asahi Shimbun. The robot's height is 190 centimeters, or 6-foot-2. Here he is, outshooting humans who are good at basketball. Cue's form is a little stiff, but buckets are buckets. It hit 10 shots in a row, while the two players failed to sink the sixth. Even when they tried to contest him, Cue splashed the ensuing shots. Lucky for us, robots aren't really the most coordinated things. Although they're starting to open doors for each other, which isn't ideal.



Credits:
https://www.cbssports.com/general/news/toyota-developed-robot-wins-in-a-basketball-shooting-contest-against-humans/

Print A New House in Hours

Steven Hawking dies at age 74. 

In the near future, building a new home may be as easy as printing out an airline boarding pass. At South By Southwest today, New Story, a Y Combinator-backed charity that works to build houses for people in developing nations, and Icon, a robotics construction company in Austin, Texas, unveiled what is believed to be the first 3D-printed house that is fully up to code and permitted for people to inhabit.

The two organizations came together to show that it’s feasibly possible to build an easy-to-replicate house in under 24 hours. They plan to take this proof-of-concept and start producing small houses for families in countries like Haiti and El Salvador. The 800-sq-ft house cost around $10,000 to build using Icon’s proprietary Vulcan printer, but the company plans to eventually bring that price down to around $4,000. Theoretically, it could soon print one of the houses in about six hours, a representative for New Story told Quartz. But the process is still being ironed out—the house in Austin is the only one built so far.

AR TV -- Worse than RoboDogs

Well, we definitely don't want this in our living room! One inventive horror fan has recreated that scary scene from The Ring movies with augmented reality, and the hair-raising results are just a little too real. s reported by HuffPost, tech designer Abhishek Singh used AR to make The Ring's creepy ghost girl Samara Morgan crawl up from the well, out of the TV and into his life—just like in the movie! Whereas AR's merrily entertaining capabilities are flaunted in recent games like Pokémon Go, Singh is apparently using his AR-programming talent for a more ominous aim. We're horrified!

The monstrosity was created with Apple's new AR Kit, as noted by Screen Rant. If you're not familiar with The Ring films, all you need to know is that Samara stalks her prey seven days after they view a cursed video—the spooky premise sparked in Japanese horror flick Ringu (1998) and retooled for English-speaking audiences in The Ring (2002), The Ring Two (2005) and last year's Rings.

Credits:

https://www.altpress.com/news/entry/the_ring_movie_ar_augmented_reality.

Laundry Folding Robot

Engineers at Tokyo-based company Seven Dreamers started developing a laundry-folding robot called Laundroid in 2005, and now, there is finally a robot to show off at CES 2018. We haven't seen it in person yet, but we spoke with Seven Dreamers CEO Shin Sakane for a preview. The idea is: You drop clean, dry clothes into a box in a pretty home appliance, and then several hours later you can collect the folded, sorted items. Washing machines and dryers treat each item of clothing the same, but folding requires the appliance to identify garments and be able to physically fold them. Folding a towel is more complicated than it seems, and socks are currently impossible.

To tackle the tedious task of folding laundry, Laundroid consists of three technologies: Image analysis, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Even though there are multiple robot arms that fold the clothes, they are hidden inside a box that is styled like Italian luxury furniture, made of leather, wood, and glass. The materials are purposefully luxurious since the price point -- starting at $16,000 for the base model -- is much higher than most home appliances. It seems like someone who can afford an unnecessary $16,000 home appliance probably isn't doing their own laundry anyway, but Sakane says that nearly 500 people have already signed up to purchase a Laundroid. The price should drop significantly when the volume increases. Sakane tells us, "A lot of technologies are in our software, and software is expensive to develop but easy to apply for a mass production product."


Credits:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/laundroid-preview-robot-folds-sorts-clothes/

Amazon's Alexa Cackles Randomly ... Freaking people out.

Is your Alexa laughing at you out of the blue? You're not alone. Social media is awash with reports of Amazon's popular personal assistant chortling and chuckling at unexpected times, sometimes during an unrelated command and occasionally in the middle of the night, seemingly unprovoked. "So Alexa decided to laugh randomly while I was in the kitchen. Freaked @SnootyJuicer and I out. I thought a kid was laughing behind me," Twitter user @CaptHandlebar wrote Feb. 22 with a video of Alexa chuckling unprompted.

Even those who haven't experienced the unprompted laughter have been trying to get in on the fun -- if you can call it that -- posting videos asking Alexa to laugh on command for them. The personal assistant's laughs range from a dainty 'tee-hee' to a throaty, maniacal cackle, the same laugh that many users report hearing out of the blue. In a statement to ABC, Amazon acknowledged that Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase "Alexa, laugh," which it will soon disable. The company is working on a fix to change the laugh command to "Alexa, can you laugh?," which a company spokeswoman said is less likely to produce a false-positive response.

Click here for the video.



Credits:
http://abc7.com/technology/is-your-alexa-randomly-laughing-at-you-you-arent-alone/3186993/

Lots of companies talk about creating "green" products, but Goodyear apparently took the challenge literally. The company on Tuesday introduced the concept version of a tire that would integrate living moss to improve air quality. The concept tire, called Oxygene, debuted at the Geneva Motor Show, where auto companies are showing off some of their most futuristic technologies. While it's far from clear that the Oxygene will ever become a reality, Goodyear bragged that the tire demonstrates potential and environmental leadership. At a time when the world is grappling with how to recycle or discard millions of used tires, the Oxygene concept could potentially start a new chapter.

Oxygene's features include:

• Living moss in the tire's sidewall that allows the tire to absorb moisture through its tread, inhaling carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen into the air. 
• The ability to harness energy created during photosynthesis to power sensors, artificial intelligence and a light strip that uses different colors to alert drivers and pedestrians to the vehicle's maneuvers.
• A 3-D-printed structure made with rubber powder from recycled tires.
• Technology called visible light communications system, or LiFi, that would allow the tire to wirelessly interact with other cars and vehicle infrastructure, theoretically paving the way for autonomous cars.

Credits:
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/goodyear-oxygene-tire-alive-geneva-motor-show-auto/

Flippy the Fry "Chef"

The Caliburger chain can’t keep burger flippers employed — they quit too often, it says. So the plan is to try something new: A robot that has been programmed to flip hamburgers all day long. Named Flippy, the $100,000 machine is capable of flipping as many as 2,000 burgers a day. As of Monday, a human at Caliburger's restaurant here is making the burger patties and seasoning them, and then placing them in a tray for the robot. Flippy then pulls them out, places them on the griddle, monitors their temperature, flips them and then takes them off the griddle to cool. They then get placed by a human into buns for customers.

Whether it's burgers, cars or farming, robots are becoming capable of doing jobs that were once staples of employment. In late 2017, a study by the Pew Research Center showed three-quarters of Americans said it is at least "somewhat realistic" that robots and computers will eventually perform most of the jobs currently done by people, and the survey found respondents worried about the fallout, such as income inequality. Tests by restaurants using robots have been mostly viewed as a public relations stunt. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Zume Pizza chain uses a pizza-making robot to cook the pies while Sally the robot, also in the San Francisco area, makes your salad.

center>

Credits:

Cannon's newest Flash Uses AI

The 470EX-AI looks just like every other Canon Speedlite, but it has motors inside at the base and hinge, and a sensor in the corner of the face of the flash. When you double tap the shutter button on your camera, the flash points out at the subject, calculates the distance, then points itself at the ceiling and does the same. Right after that, the flash reorients itself one last time into what it “thinks” is the best direction to achieve the perfect bounce light for your subject.

The new flash is a delightful idea, the kind we’re actually starting to see slightly more of from Canon lately. But there are some limitations. For one thing, if you let the flash pick a spot, and then you move to recompose your photo, you have to do the whole process over again or else the light will bounce in the wrong direction. The flash can also only work its magic on ceilings — turn the camera sideways and it will still point up after it measures. There’s a 23-foot limit to the sensor, and if a ceiling is black it will just point straight up. There is something called “semi-automatic” mode, though, and while it’s not as flashy (sorry) it might be just as, if not more, useful for semi-pros. This mode essentially lets the photographer pick whatever angle they want to point the flash, lock it in, and then every time they double tap the shutter button the flash will turn itself back to that angle.

Click here view the video


Credits:
https://twitter.com/CNET/status/970087174388371456

eHang 184 Human Carrying Drone

The dream of flying taxis whizzing through the skies above our cities may be closer to reality than you think. Chinese company Ehang offered a glimpse this week of what could lie ahead, releasing its first video of passengers climbing aboard its autonomous drones and taking off with the push of a button. It's one of a bunch of companies racing to bring their different versions of computer-controlled airborne taxis to market. The contenders include big plane makers like Boeing (BA) and lesser-known startups. Ehang says it first managed to carry passengers in its drones back in 2015 and has since racked up at least 40 successful journeys. It hadn't shared footage of the flights publicly until this week.

This is a different game from helicopters. Smaller, electric-powered aircraft are changing the shape of flying. Rather than traditional gas-driven engines and large propellers or rotors for forward and vertical flight, new designs spread out the work across many small electric motors. They're giant, people-carrying versions of the small remote-controlled drones that have become hugely popular with consumers around the world. Ehang created a buzz at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas in 2016 where it showed off a prototype of its passenger drone, the 184. But it says the technology has come a long way since then.

Click here for the video.

Credits: http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/08/technology/ehang-self-flying-drone/index.html