Prediction that 38% of jobs will disappear within 13 years

Watch out America, robots are coming for your jobs: Report finds 38% of US jobs will be automated by 2030

Ethanol and Meteorites... what could possibly go wrong?

Corn ethanol is useless, but we could have told you that...

Something else I'll need to beat to death when it shows up at my door...

The blind leading the blind.  What ignorance is doing to teaching evolution.

Cereal that looks you in the eye.

Oops... the NYPD attempts to hashtag its way to popularity.

Is the seafood you're eating illegal?

Tracking the meteorites that have hit Earth.

Tidbits

How you guys talk gives away where you are from....

Diplomacy is better than genocide, oddly.

Cats and engineers.

A cube.  That can stand on a point.  And jump.  And I need to beat it to death...

Pharmacies deliberately misinforming teenagers about emergency contraception.

Parenting done right.

Voices from prison.

Celebrating the Era of Stupid

Those elected to govern who don't know how and 13 reasons Washington is failing.

Justice Antonin Scalia.

CEOs and Wall Street figuring out how to loot pensions.

Watch out, California!

In the end, they will bring out their killer robots.  Then they will destroy the earth.  (Sorry. Getting silly)

And those who fight it:

Bernie Sanders vs. the Koch Brothers.

Paul Krugman.



And the world sits back and is amused by our antics.

Friday Follies

A good overview of the Steubenville rape trial.

Never forget what we did to Iraq.  Even though Donald Rumsfeld would like you to.

Transgender people speak out.

Steven Colbert about the voting rights act.

Yet another robot thing I will have to beat to death if it gets near me.

Dissolving our sea-shelled creatures.

Luke uses the force of his 9 year old self to fight off big corporations trying to take his city's water.

America's rape culture.

Ain't technology great?

Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

Hackers backdoor the human brain, successfully extract sensitive data

ANOTHER robot I'd need to beat to death when I see it...

Clock.

Aren't we already there?

Just ask the Afghans and Pakistanis... and the Iraqis, Yemenis...

The growing use of unmanned aircraft in combat situations raises huge moral and legal issues, and threatens to make war more likely as armed robots take over from human beings, according to an internal study by the Ministry of Defence.

The report warns of the dangers of an "incremental and involuntary journey towards a Terminator-like reality", referring to James Cameron's 1984 movie, in which humans are hunted by robotic killing machines. It says the pace of technological development is accelerating at such a rate that Britain must quickly establish a policy on what will constitute "acceptable machine behaviour".

Just like the horribly irresponsible misuse of Tasers by the police force, drones remove several inhibitors to killing when soldiers aren't on the ground and judging the situation up close. If we are to live with such devices, we need to make it harder for authorities to use rather than easier. To start with, a list of how many innocent people have died would be ... educational.

We've talked about this before.

This never ends well.

Uh oh.... you just know the first thing this will be used for

Will not be for legal purposes.

Video footage has been released of a robot that can leap over obstacles more than 7.5m (25ft) high.

Most of the time, the shoebox-sized robot - which is being developed for the US military - uses its four wheels to get around.

But the Precision Urban Hopper can use a piston-actuated "leg" to launch it over obstacles such as walls or fences.

The robot could boost the capabilities of troops and special forces engaged in urban warfare, say researchers.

h/t to Bryan of Why Now?

Personally, I think it would make an excellent clay pigeon....

One liners

Israeli soldiers begin to confess Gaza offenses.

Ethics Complaint #18 Filed Against Sarah Palin, you betcha also!

9 stupidest products.

And what our military is working on: Military EATR: Contractor Working On Horrifying Corpse-Eating Robots. Something that would be useful if you had say.. a nuke go off somewhere, right?

Learn Italian!

Exchange students live American nightmare

The Blob is back!! Big blobs of mystery goo floating off Alaska coast

Bits you will like and dislike about the newest Harry Potter movie.

Do not piss off your girlfriend...

It's WTF Thursday!

Ex-California Governor Jerry Brown is thinking of running ... for governor?!

San Diego Democratic women are highly dangerous beasts! As are pastors in Texas. They are the worst!

Explains why Bin Laden wanted to attack the US. He visited Indiana and Los Angeles. Sorry about that, guys....

Wonderfully awfully ironic ads from the past.

We knew this just from seeing the photos:

Israel inflicted "wanton destruction" in the Gaza Strip during its 22-day war on the coastal enclave in December and January, Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group has said.

In a 117-page report released on Thursday, Amnesty cited evidence that Israeli troops put children and other civilians in harm's way "by forcing them to remain in or near houses which they took over and used as military positions".

I really think Israel crossed the line on this and has lost an immense amount of worldwide support. The 'victims' have become the very thing that victimized them in the first place: bloodthirsty heartless thugs.

Banks and corporations are trying to tell us everything is fine and on the mend, we can go back to spending wildly. Odd that our 'recovery' seems to be a jobless one:

The American economy lost 467,000 jobs in June and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent in a sobering indication that the most painful downturn since the Great Depression has yet to release its hold.

And Europe hits a ten year high:

Unemployment in the 16-nation euro zone has climbed to 9.5 per cent, its highest rate in a decade, EU data show.

More than 15 million people are out of work across the zone, with around 273,000 jobs lost in May, the Eurostat data agency estimated.

The increase in jobless was expected, with the eurozone experiencing a 2.5 per cent drop in output in the first quarter of 2009.

"Deep and extended economic contraction, depressed business confidence and deteriorating profitability is pushing unemployment up sharply across the eurozone," Howard Archer, an economist at consultants IHS Global Insight, said.

The May eurozone unemployment rate was up from 9.3 per cent in April and 7.4 per cent in May 2008.

But if you do have a job...there is no escape from your office!

Obama administration being secret about Cheney's interview with the investigators over the Plame affair.

Ants are taking over the wooorrrrrlllddd!

And the most WTF moment of all: Cafferty asks: Good idea to allow guns in bars?

Kinda like the Terminator?

What could possibly go wrong with a big push to electronic warfare?

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. – For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the Army is updating its plans for electronic warfare, calling for more use of high-powered microwaves, lasers and infrared beams to attack enemy targets and control angry crowds.

The new manual, produced at Fort Leavenworth and set for release Thursday, also is aimed at protecting soldiers against remote-controlled roadside bombs and other nontraditional warfare used by increasingly sophisticated insurgents.

"The war in Iraq began to make us understand that there are a lot of targets that we should be going after in the offensive or defensive mode to protect ourselves," said Col. Laurie Buckhout, chief of the Army's electronic warfare division in Washington, D.C.

The 112-page manual, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press before its release at the Association of the United States Army meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., doesn't offer specifics on new equipment or gadgetry but lays out in broad terms the Army's fear that without new equipment and training, U.S. forces may be at a deadly disadvantage.

Maybe they should read this article by Nicholas Carr, The Artificial Morality of the Robot Warrior:

Related major research efforts also are being devoted to enabling robots to learn from experience, raising the question of whether we can predict with reasonable certainty what the robot will learn. The answer seems to be negative, since if we could predict that, we would simply program the robot in the first place, instead of requiring learning. Learning may enable the robot to respond to novel situations, given the impracticality and impossibility of predicting all eventualities on the designer’s part. Thus, unpredictability in the behavior of complex robots is a major source of worry, especially if robots are to operate in unstructured environments, rather than the carefully‐structured domain of a factory.

Troubling Failures.

The authors also note that “military robotics have already failed on the battlefield, creating concerns with their deployment (and perhaps even more concern for more advanced, complicated systems) that ought to be addressed before speculation, incomplete information, and hype fill the gap in public dialogue.”

They point to a mysterious 2008 incident when “several TALON SWORDS units—mobile robots armed with machine guns—in Iraq were reported to be grounded for reasons not fully disclosed, though early reports claim the robots, without being commanded to, trained their guns on ‘friendly’ soldiers; and later reports denied this account but admitted there had been malfunctions during the development and testing phase prior to deployment.”

They also report that in 2007 “a semi‐autonomous robotic cannon deployed by the South African army malfunctioned, killing nine ‘friendly’ soldiers and wounding 14 others.” These failures, along with some spectacular failures of robotic systems in civilian applications, raise “a concern that we … may not be able to halt some (potentially‐fatal) chain of events caused by autonomous military systems that process information and can act at speeds incomprehensible to us, e.g., with high‐speed unmanned aerial vehicles.”

I guess if your name isn't Sarah Connor, you don't have anything to worry about....

One more that I will have to beat to death

When it shows up on my doorstep...

Via wtfwjd? at the Tower of Dabble:



Update: Took a bit to find, but I had to repost this video:

And so the fun begins

Birds not migrating:

But in a sign of the blurring of the seasons brought on by climate change, one of the birds has this year shunned migration to Africa and instead spent all winter in Britain.

In what experts say is the first documented evidence of the species "overwintering" here, a solitary swallow has been monitored from November to the end of February in a village near Truro, Cornwall.

Paul Stancliffe, a spokesman for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), called the discovery "incredible".

[snip]

In the BTO programme, a single wheatear was found to have overwintered in Burniston, near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, instead of in west Africa. Some 5,000 chiffchaffs, which normally migrate there or to Spain or Morocco, spent the winter in Britain. Mr Stancliffe said: "These are birds that would ordinarily migrate south of the Sahara. We believe it is because our winters are getting milder and birds are actually able to survive here through the winter."

The bird atlas programme will run until 2011, with 50,000 volunteers reporting sightings. The last time the exercise was carried out, in the 1980s, fewer than 1,000 chiffchaffs were found to be overwintering in Britain.

As further evidence of climate change, volunteers have also recorded "early returns" by many migrants this year, as well as unseasonably early nesting by birds that ordinarily remain here.

Salmon are dying via Kirk Murphy at Firedoglake:

The largest salmon run in the largest estuary on this hemisphere's Pacific Coast has collapsed. Why care about a bunch of fish and a big marsh? Well, healthy salmon runs require healthy water: fresh and salt. Crashing salmon runs tell us something in the water(s) has gone terrribly wrong. SF Bay fresh water is sucked up to supply central California crops and communities and Southern California taps. With over 17 million people in the LA area alone, and with California producing over half the nation's fruit, vegetables, and nuts, SF Bay water affects the price of your greens - and the health of your family, wherever they live. And the salmon tell us the Bay is very sick.

Polar ice is melting faster than expected (via Sorghum Crow):

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The thickest, oldest and toughest sea ice around the North Pole is melting, a bad sign for the future of the Arctic ice cap, NASA satellite data showed on Tuesday.

But wait! We're saved! They've invented this:



Oddly it reminds me of the Mechanical Hound in Fahrenheit 451 .... which is why I want to beat it to death immediately.

I think I saw this movie

And we had to squish one in a honkin' big machine press:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- At the center of a black hole there lies a point called a singularity where the laws of physics no longer make sense. In a similar way, according to futurists gathered Saturday for a weekend conference, information technology is hurtling toward a point where machines will become smarter than their makers. If that happens, it will alter what it means to be human in ways almost impossible to conceive, they say.

"The Singularity Summit: AI and the Future of Humanity" brought together hundreds of Silicon Valley techies and scientists to imagine a future of self-programming computers and brain implants that would allow humans to think at speeds nearing today's microprocessors.

Artificial intelligence researchers at the summit warned that now is the time to develop ethical guidelines for ensuring these advances help rather than harm.

"We and our world won't be us anymore," Rodney Brooks, a robotics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the audience. When it comes to computers, he said, "who is us and who is them is going to become a different sort of question."

Um... This means the robot figured out how to walk and can tell if it's damaged....

The scientists explain:

We demonstrate, both computationally and experimentally, how a legged robot automatically synthesizes a predictive model of its own topology (where and how its body parts are connected) through limited yet self-directed interaction with its environment, and then uses this model to synthesize successful new locomotive behavior before and after damage. The legged robot learned how to move forward based on only 16 brief self-directed interactions with its environment. These interactions were unrelated to the task of locomotion, driven only by the objective of disambiguating competing internal models. These findings may help develop more robust robotics, as well as shed light on the relation between curiosity and cognition in animals and humans...

A short video showing the Starfish robot stretching and getting ready to walk.



Just so you know...if that thing came into my house, I'd beat it to death...

I hear Cheney is interested

In whole body regeneration....

Inhabiting shallow coastal waters, sea squirts form colonies of genetically identical individuals. Ram Reshef and Yuval Rinkevich of the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and colleagues took fragments of blood vessels from the animals and watched under a microscope.

Out of 95 fragments they examined, 80 underwent whole body regeneration (WBR). Cells first grouped into hollow spheres, then cell layers in-folded and organs developed until after two weeks an adult sea squirt had grown, capable of sexual reproduction.

Or maybe he'll just go totally bionic:

A robotic salamander with an electric "spinal cord" that controls both its walking and swimming has been developed by Swiss and French researchers. It could be a forerunner of robots with movements coordinated by artificial nervous systems, they claim.

Of course, there are some who don't think of what this kind of invention would do for handicapped people or exploration or science ... they think of the military uses:

Robots that can both walk and swim could have clear value for the military, says Ronald Arkin, a roboticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, US. "It would be great to have something that could transition smoothly from water to land," he says.

Update: Headline about soldiers of the future:

Heat-resistant. Cold-proof. Tireless. Tomorrow’s soldiers are just like today’s — only better. Inside the Pentagon’s human enhancement project.