Month: May 2016

Robot educators

Ms. Watson wrote things like “Yep!” and “we’d love to,” speaking on behalf of her fellow TAs, in the online forum where students discussed coursework and submitted projects. “It seemed very much like a normal conversation with a human being”. Shreyas Vidyarthi ascribed human attributes to the TA—imagining her as a friendly Caucasian 20-something on her way to a Ph.D. Students were told of their guinea-pig status last month. “I was flabbergasted”. “Just when I wanted to nominate Jill Watson as an outstanding TA”.

They’re easy to identify though: No one in academia answers emails right away. To look realistic, build in a 3 week response delay.

experiments in urban living

All of this seemed very far away on a Sunday night this winter, in the basement of a renovated 4-story brownstone in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. The building, Kennedy’s new home, is run by the co-living startup Common, which offers what it calls “flexible, community-driven housing.” Co-living has also been billed as “dorms for grown-ups,” a description that Common resists. But the company has set out to restore a certain subset of young, urban professionals to the paradise they lost when they left college campuses—a furnished place to live, unlimited coffee and toilet paper, a sense of belonging.

Searching for Hannibal

this is insane:

they were scouting for a spot that could have been a watering hole during Hannibal’s era. they found a layer of “churned” soil they call the MAD, for “mass animal deposition”—a euphemism for dung. they discovered genetic material from several types of bacteria, including a high concentration of DNA fragments from Clostridia, which is frequently found in feces. Clostridia are pervasive in soil as well, but the team also detected fatty compounds that come from the gut. That combination is what they would expect to see in a place where a great number—100s if not 1000s—of mammals had defecated.

Unified Weapons Master

fighters use a suit for 90-second bouts and then rest while they are cooled by compressed air blasted into a network of silicone tubes contained in the suit. The air passes out through 1000s of tiny holes held against the skin by an undergarment. Scoring is done by 52 sensors, which 10K times a second measure various forces, including blows, accelerations and vibrations, generated by the impact of hands, feet and weapons. The data are wirelessly transmitted to a computer to calculate the fractures, tissue damage and other injuries which are likely to have been sustained had the fighters been unprotected.

Can You Not PAC

We really want white dudes in urban districts to think hard about why they think they’re the most qualified option to represent their communities. We’re psyched that there are so many groups aimed at recruiting and supporting women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks running for office, and we think it would also be great if instead of spending $100Ks on democratic primaries, upwardly mobile straight white dudes would just take a step back.

Asperitas

that’s some rad-looking clouds

As the founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, saw these submissions trickle in, he realized his group had collectively stumbled onto something interesting: A new type of cloud. This formation wasn’t listed in the International Cloud Atlas, published by the World Meteorological Organization since 1896. So Pretor-Pinney devised a name for this cloud — “Asperitas”, derived from “a passage in Virgil describing a roughened sea”. He’s been working for years to get it accepted into the next edition of the Atlas.

Apple hostages

why you’d trust apple with this is beyond me. wake me up when they implement proper takeout of your data.

What Amber explained was exactly what I’d feared: through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted.