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Tuesday, March 21, 2006 |
In Gear Factor. RI-MAN: Helper Bot For the Edlerly Topic: Robots
 Anyone
can make a robot to take care of children. After all, they're small and
easily entertained. But researchers in Japan have created a bot to take
on the more challenging task of caring for the world's aging
population. RI-MAN is a 5-foot-tall, 220-pound caregiver covered in
soft silicon, which lets it carry a person without causing injury.
Built-in sensors detect a person's body position and weight, so the
robot can figure out how best to lift them. At the moment, RI-MAN can
only carry a 26-pound doll, but could be capable of lifting a 150-pound
person within five years.
[Wired News: Top Stories]
10:25:56 PM 
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Ring Up My Bill, Please. Recently, American banks and wireless companies begun developing mobile payment products that would allow consumers to pay for goods via cellphone. By ERIC DASH and KEN BELSON. [NYT > Technology]
4:01:52 PM
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Shaping the boundaries of self-projection. I've recently added a sidebar to my blog's template to report items I've bookmarked in del.icio.us. Someone asked me the other day how it works, and I promised to explain here. It's a simple one-liner that can be added to the template used with any blog publishing system:
You'll probably want to replace my del.icio.us username with yours, of course.
... [Jon's Radio]
3:32:34 PM
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OpenBSD Project in Financial Danger.  [Slashdot] this describes the peril of really good work -- it works in an invisible way and is taken for granted even though it still needs support for updates and development -- but is out of sight out of mind and now nearly out of cash. It seems like there is a place for government infrastructure support of public software that in some way avoids the recurrent need to seek attention in order to continue availablity. There would seem to be a couple of approaches: one is to declare software x as a public good and provide a pension to the creators to help them carry on, and a second approach to archive the software x code in the library of congress and pay the creators some public service royalty based on usage value annually, or third to develop a sunset process that freezes the code and officially ends the project so that the creators are moved on to new projects with appropriate recognition and ceremony. It is import for the open source culture to not punish successful projects and at the same time enable the continual development of project creators and collaborators in making technology relevant to our culture. --BL
3:29:21 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Bruce Landon.
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