April 2008 Archives

The six projects include one from Imperial College London that will explore how 'mirror neurons' found in the human brain can be translated into a digital application. 'Mirror neurons', discovered in the early 1990s, trigger memories of previous experiences when humans are trying to understand the physical actions of others. A separate team at UPF Barcelona will also work on iCub's 'cognitive architecture'.

At the same time, a team headquartered at UPMC in Paris will explore the dynamics needed to achieve full body control for iCub. Meanwhile, researchers at TUM Munich will work on the development of iCub's manipulation skills. A project team from the University of Lyons will explore internal simulation techniques - something our brains do when planning actions or trying to understand the actions of others.

Over in Turkey, a team based at METU in Ankara will focus almost exclusively on language acquisition and the iCub's ability to link objects with verbal utterances.

Watch this elephant, rescued from abusive treatment in Burma, now paint an amazing self portrait. You'll be amazed at how his talent unfolds.

So touched by their horrific backgrounds and loving personalities, ExoticWorldGifts.com now supports, "Starving Elephant Artisans" by selling their paintings so they can continue to have a new life in Thailand.

The teenager, who is the world's smallest girl according to the Indian Book of Records, has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia. Now fully grown, she weighs just 11 lb.

Far from being unhappy about her tiny size, Jyoti says that she enjoys the celebrity status her height has brought her.

"I am proud of being small. I love the attention I get," she told the Sunday Mirror.

"I'm just the same as other people. I eat like you, dream like you. I don't feel any different."

Jyoti attends her local high school, in Nagpur, India, where she studies alongside classmates of her own age, though she sits at a specially made miniature desk.

The US federal government currently spends about 21% of GDP. If John McCain wins the election and gets every single one of his economic proposals passed, the government would probably be spending about 18% of GDP when McCain leaves office. And if Obama wins and gets all of his economic policies passed, the government would probably be spending no more than 25% of GDP when he leaves office, and likewise if Clinton wins.



There's a real, substantive difference between taxes and government services at 18% vs at 25%, but it's a very modest difference relative to the range of government sizes among industrialized nations. The Swedish government, for instance, spends 53% of GDP, while the government of Singapore spends less than 10%. And in terms of the entire sweep of human history, the difference is more modest still. Sweden is neither the Soviet Union nor the Paris Commune, and Singapore is no 19th century United States.

Like many tax filers, you're probably asking yourself: Just where does my money go when the government gets its hands on it?

Alas, it's not as simple a question as it may seem. For those of you who have trouble balancing your checkbook, imagine trying to keep track of where $4.1 trillion goes. That's what was spent on your behalf at all levels of federal state and local government last year.

Even with armies of accountants and auditors, it's hard to know with certainty exactly where your taxes ended up. For starters, you pay taxes based on a calendar year; the government spends it based on a fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Even if the calendars matched up, the journey your tax dollars embark on depends a lot on things like how much you make, how you spend it and where you live. ....

So where did your money go after you sent it off to Tax Heaven? One way to find out is to look at the government's bills. If the government sat down at the kitchen table to try to see where its paycheck went, here's -- very roughly -- where it went in 2007.

To make the math a little easier, let's assume the government made $52,000 a year -- or $1,000 a week -- which is about the median household income in the U.S. (The real number was $48,200 in 2006. And keep in mind that $1,000 a week doesn't include taxes. But you're the government -- you don't pay taxes.)

The biggest government bill last year was for a category called "income security" ($220 of that $1,000 weekly paycheck) -- which includes Social Security ($115), along with other social services like welfare ($46), disability payments ($35) and unemployment insurance ($7). The next biggest chunk went to pay for health care ($203), which includes Medicaid and Medicare.

Keeping our country -- and your neighborhood -- safe cost almost $200 a week, including national defense ($132), along with spending on "public order and safety" ($65), which included police ($27), prisons ($18), courts ($12) and fighting fires ($8).

Education took the next biggest slice ($158) -- most of which went to pay for elementary and secondary schools ($117). Much of the rest helped pay for college ($28). About $2 a week of our $1,000 a week paycheck went to pay for public libraries.

Then there's "general public service" -- or the cost of government itself. Unfortunately, government -- like many Americans -- has been living beyond its means and spending more than it collects in taxes. To make up the difference, state and federal treasuries filled in the gap by selling more debt -- roughly the same as you or me using our credit cards. So the biggest single component of the $143 cost of running federal, state and local government last year was the interest on the money borrowed on your behalf ($90). Think of it as the minimum monthly payment on your government's credit card.

The cost of running all levels of government also included salaries and expenses for the executive and legislative branches ($21) and the cost of collecting taxes ($11).

After that, the bills looked pretty manageable -- but then you only had about $79 left. Those bills included highways ($25), agriculture ($8) air transport ($4), air and water quality ($7) and the space program ($3). Rounding out the list were housing and community service ($10) and recreation and culture ($7).

I reacted when I first saw this issue brought up in the blog-sphere. Shortly afterwards, though not in connection with my reaction, I saw in the comments to blogs several defenses for such a ban amounting basically to the following argument: 'Since I have never spanked my child, and since he or she is now a gainfully employed, law abiding adult, I know that the power to spank a child is not a necessary tool for child raising and that therefore it should be removed on the grounds that it is abusive to children.



But since the bill in question that first time around was a fringe offering, and as I felt that further attempts to 'defend' my right to employ what has throughout history been an acceptable tool for use in the raising of children serves to legitimize the claims of those who wish to deprive me of it, I chose not to respond to that argument nor to others equally specious.



This time around I will similarly not engage this wickedly harmful, power grab of an argument.



All I will say to the modern man, who sees a child not growing into an animal and winding up self supportive epitomizing parental 'success', " I will rebel before I allow you to condemn my children and the children of my people to modern man mediocrity through limiting my ability to educate."



That was what I was going to respond when I first read Dan's post. Then I read his link.

Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, has re-introduced a bill designed to crack down on hitting a child under 3 in the face or head.

Now the limited aim of this bill-not "hitting a child under 3 in the face or head"-makes this issue more complicated and, for this very reason, more dangerous.



Though I have never hit my children, most of whom are under three, in the face or the head, nor can I conceive at this time of any circumstances under which I would find it wise to do so, nonetheless, I want no one but G-d to place categorical limitations on my power when it comes to the raising, protecting, and the sustaining of my children. ....



Of course now, some will crow about the child abuse 'epidemic'. To them I will simply say that the epidemic that is the sorry modern state of 'raising, protecting and sustaining one's family' is of far more concern to me than a child abuse epidemic that, frankly, I do not believe exists. And one might remind these noble do-gooders, as some have already, that some of the more severe behaviors spelled out in Lieber's bill already are banned under state child-abuse laws.



But there is more. You see these know it all, do gooders get it:

"We want to build on the groundwork that was laid last year," Lieber said. "Last year we started out with 95 to 100 percent of reaction being negative. Once people



found out what we were trying to do with the bill, that was reduced to 85 percent negative. So we want to continue to move the discussion along.

There is no telling where this issue (not this bill) will end, but I"m fairly certain as to where it's headed. Beware, and never overestimate the common sense of modern



man.

The Defense Department mistakenly shipped secret nuclear missile fuses to Taiwan more than 18 months ago and did not learn that the items were missing until late last week, Pentagon officials acknowledged yesterday, deepening concerns about the security of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Officials with the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) sent four nose-cone fuse assemblies to Taiwan in August 2006 instead of four replacement battery packs for use in Taiwan's fleet of UH-1 Huey helicopters. The fuses help trigger nuclear warheads on Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles as they near their point of impact. It was unclear yesterday how the two very different items were mixed up at a warehouse at Hill Air Force Base in Utah and how they were shipped out of the country without notice.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates immediately ordered an investigation, the second such probe in the past year to examine serious lapses in the care of U.S. nuclear weapons and accessories. Gates learned of the erroneous shipment on Friday and informed President Bush, but officials waited until yesterday -- after Saturday's elections in Taiwan -- to disclose the incident. Pentagon and State Department officials have conferred with Taiwanese and Chinese diplomats over the past three days.

JANESVILLE -- A Rock County jury found a Janesville man with a history of sexually assaulting teenage girls to be a sexually violent person under Wisconsin's civil commitment law. ....

Budd was first convicted of a sex offense in 1993 in Rock County for having intercourse with a 14-year-old girl when he was 22. The victim became pregnant and later gave birth to a baby girl, according to the attorney general's press release.

On parole and caring for a disabled friend in 1998, Budd engaged in sexual activity lasting a year, including intercourse, with his friend's 12-year-old daughter. Upon conviction, Budd's prison sentence was withheld, and he was placed on three years probation, according to the release.

Budd committed another sexual assault in January 2001 when he had sexual contact with a 15-year-old female to whom he was introduced by his 1998 victim. On Dec. 4, 2003, Budd was sentenced to serve two years in prison and three years extended supervision.

Budd was scheduled to be discharged from the state Department of Corrections' custody in January 2006, but the corrections department recommended that the state Justice Department review Budd's case.

The justice department filed a petition Jan. 23, 2006, to commit Budd as a sexually violent person.

From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it's going to get worse fast. "It gives me goose bumps," says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. "It's like witnessing a rape." ....

"You can't protect it. There's too much money to be made tearing it down," he says. "Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work."

This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.

Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they're serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade.

The builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.

Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe's CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there's no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes. Nevertheless, they're bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as well as the court of public opinion.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is due for startup later this year at CERN's headquarters on the French-Swiss border. It's expected to tackle some of the deepest questions in science: Is the foundation of modern physics right or wrong? What existed during the very first moment of the universe's existence? Why do some particles have mass while others don't? What is the nature of dark matter? Are there extra dimensions of space out there that we haven't yet detected?