Japan takes another step in replacing humans with robots

Its makers, Kawada Industries and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), hope the robot will be a step towards creating a model that can help ease greying Japan's looming labour shortage.

"We designed a working robot in the image of a lean but well-muscled track-and-field athlete," Noriyuki Kanehira, robotic systems manager at Kawada, told a news conference to unveil the blue-and-white "HRP-4."

Designed to help researchers develop models that could replace humans in repetitive manual labour, the latest "athlete" model in a near 10-year-old series updates the feminine, catwalk-strutting, karaoke-singing HRP-4C.

But the tone this time is altogether more serious, according to a joint statement from its developers.
"It is Japan's urgent task for the early 21st Century to develop robots that could carry out simple, repetitive works ... in a bid to complement the workforce in a country that is rapidly ageing with fewer and fewer children".

Standing at 151 centimetres (59 inches) tall, the robot in a demonstration Wednesday stood on one foot, twisted its waist, struck poses, walked in accordance to given voice commands and moved its head to track objects.

The HRP-4 boasts joints that move more freely than its predecessors and can run a range of separately-developed software applications, its makers said.

Kawada and AIST will start selling the robot to universities and research institutes in Japan and abroad from January 2011.

The price tag for what is described as a "low cost" model is 26 million yen (306,000 dollars) each. Its creators hope to sell three-to-five units a year.

Now, a smartphone app that can measure pollutants in air

University of Southern California computer scientists hope that as many users as possible download and try it in order to improve the software.

Currently, the download works for smartphones running the Android system and soon will be widely available on Android app sources. An iPhone app is in the works.

The basic principle of the Visibility app is simple, according to the paper documenting the work by USC computer science professor Gaurav Sukhatme.

The user takes a picture of the sky while the sun is shining, which can be compared to established models of sky luminance to estimate visibility.

Visibility is directly related to the concentration of harmful "haze aerosols," tiny particles from dust, engine exhaust, mining or other sources in the air. Such aerosols turn the blue of a sunlit clear sky gray.

There is one caveat ” It has to be the right picture. The visibility/pollution models are based on the viewing geometry of the image and the position of the sun.

The Visibility app works because modern smartphones contain a rich set of sensors that include cameras, GPS systems, compasses and accelerometers, in addition to the powerful communication capabilities that are inspiring a slew of intelligent phone applications ranging from personal health monitoring to gaming and social networking.

Sameera Poduri, a postdoctoral researcher in Sukhatme''s lab, explained that the accelerometer in the phone - the sensor that tells how the user is holding the phone, determining whether it displays information vertically or horizontally - can "guide the user to point the camera in exactly the right direction."

The picture must be all or mostly sky, which makes a contribution from human user judgment critical.

"Several computer vision problems that are extremely challenging to automate are trivially solved by a human. In our system, segmenting sky pixels in an arbitrary image is one such problem. When the user captures an image, we ask him [or her] to select a part of the image that is sky," noted the research paper.

The accelerometers and the compass on the phone capture its position in three dimensions while the GPS data and time are used to compute the exact position of the sun.

The application automatically computes the camera and solar orientation, uploading this data along with the image ” a small (100KB) black-and-white file ” to a central computer.

The central computer analyzes the image to estimate pollutant content and returns a message to the user, as well as registering the information. (User identities are anonymized)

The system potentially can help fill in the many blanks in the existing maps of air pollution.

So far the results are promising, but they indicate that several improvements are possible.

Sukhatme said: "We''re sure we can improve it if we get people trying it and testing it and sending data." 

Alert!!! Be Aware While Using Public WiFi

People use public Wifi hotspots in Airports, Shopping malls and other places to connect internet to their laptops. They use internet to do online shopping and for online transactions with banks, for sending mails etc..

It is danger to access such Wifi hotspots as there is chance of accessing our PC by hackers. They can access our banking information and other important details easily through Wifi.An hacker can get the number of persons using the Wifi connection and they can easily enter into our PC if it is weak. If we dont have strong security it may leads to problem. Hackers can create free hotspots and we enter into their hotspot for browsing so that they can easily get hold in our PC.

It is better to use VPN network connection and it is strongly reccomended to use sufficient securities, firewalls etc to protect our valuable informations.

Hackers will sit in the same place and search for unsecured users and enter into their PC. TGhey can see the websites browsed by the user, Passwords entered etc...

So try to avoid public Wifi hotspots. If it is urgent then try to protect your PC with sufficient security softwares and use secured Wifi hotspots etc.. There may be several connections and among them some are secured and some are unsecured. Paid Wifis are some what secured than free.

Things to remember

Do not use free hotspots if you are using check whether it is genuine.
Use security softwares and Firewalls
Use VPN connections.
Dont keep or use banking sites using Wifi.

Eye Flu : Cause, Symptoms, Prevention and cure

Rainy season brings a lot of infections with it, One of the common infections is viral infection of eye called the eyes flu. Though eye flu can effect people of all ages but it is more common among children. Eye flue is an eye diseases also known as viral conjunctivitis.

Symptoms of Eye Flu.

• Red, swollen eyes.
• Watery discharge from eyes.
• Severe etching in eyes and/or pain in eyes.
• Blurring of vision.
• Lid Swelling.
• Feeling of discomfort.

Some facts about eye flu.

• The disease is caused by virus infection like adenovirus, herpes, simples virus, myxovirus and pox virus.
• The disease is highly infectious, so if somebody around you is infected there is a high risk of you getting infected. So take proper care in order to avoid the infection.
• There is a myth that the disease spreads just by looking into the eyes of an infected person. But this is not true.
• If somebody touches the infected eyes the fingers get infected and if it comes in contact of another person's eye he may get infected.
• One may also get infected from the swimming pool also.

Prevention of eye flu.

• Avoid going to a swimming pool which has regular chlorination of water.
• Avoid shaking hands esp. with the infected person. Wash your hand with soap after handshake with infected person.
• Clean your eyes with clean water 2-3 times a day.
• Don't use a common towel or handkerchief.

Treatment of eye flu.

• Wear dark goggles.
• Use anti-allergic eye drops three to four times a day.
• Close your eyes and apply ice wrapped in a cloth over the eye lids.
• The diseases are usually self limiting and normally go away in around three days.

Egg Test!!!!!

You must be aware of a simple process of checking whether that egg you bought to have a delicious omelet is stale or fresh. For those who don’t know, well you just need to put it in a glass of water. Stale egg floats in water while the fresh one sinks. So far so good.

But have you ever thought why this happens? Ok let me give you a hint. One thing that should immediately come to your mind is density. Since stale egg floats while fresh one sinks, that means it must be lighter than the fresh egg.

Now that we know what track to follow, let’s go into more detail and see what makes stale egg lighter than fresh one. As with any other fruit or vegetable, eggs also undergo decomposition with time. (In simple words, egg rots just like any fruit or vegetable rots with time). During the decomposition process water vapor and some foul-smelling gases are released (now you know how the phrase “smells like a rotten egg” came), which comes out of the porous egg shell. Thus the size of the yolk and egg-white reduces, its place being taken by air, thus making it lighter. This makes stale egg float in water.

I found an interesting  image from one of the sites showing how old an egg is depending on how it’s floating.

So next time when you get eggs from market, try this test out

Obama Uses 22 Pens To Sign!!!! Wondering

You must be aware that US president Obama signed the healthcare bill a couple of days back. But what you might not be aware of is the fact that he used not one or two but 22 different pens to sign the bill! Now that’s strange isn’t it? Even if he writes his complete name Barack Hussein Obama that comes out to be 18 characters. So that means he used more number of pens than letters in his name to sign the bill.




Before you start blaming the White House stationery supplier, let me tell you the reason behind using so many pens


The use of so many pens to sign was a result of a White House tradition wherein Presidents sign historical bills with multiple pens. The logic is clear. The pen used to sign a historical bill itself becomes historical and then these pens are given as souvenirs to people who played a vital role in creating the history.
The tradition was started by President Franklin Roosevelt and has been followed by others, though some, like George W. Bush, preferred signing bills with only one pen and then offering several unused "gift" pens as souvenirs.
If you think that 22 pens are too many for a signature, consider this- President Lyndon Johnson used 72 pens to sign the Civil Rights Act!
I was wondering how a signature looked like when signed with so many pens. So I searched for some picture showing Obama’s signature on the bill and finally I succeeded in getting one.

Just look at the letter ‘O’- it has so many breaks in it, indicating that the letters were not written in one shot. And for the record, it took one minute and 35 seconds to sign the bill !.