Russia Developing ‘Terrorist-Killer Robots’ -

Russia Developing ‘Terrorist-Killer Robots’ - 



Russian experts are developing robots designed to minimize casualties in terrorist attacks and neutralize terrorists, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on Friday.
Robots could also help evacuate injured servicemen and civilians from the scene of a terrorist attack, said Rogozin, who oversees the defense industry.
Other antiterror equipment Russia is developing includes systems that can see terrorists through obstacles and effectively engage them in a standoff mode at a long distance without injuring their hostages, he said.
Rogozin did not say when the equipment might be deployed by Russia’s security and intelligence services.
Human Rights Watch has criticized fully autonomous weapons, known as "killer robots," which would be able to select and engage targets without human intervention and called for the preemptive prohibition on such weapons.
“Fully autonomous weapons do not exist yet, but they are being developed by several countries and precursors to fully autonomous weapons have already been deployed by high-tech militaries,” HRW said in a statement on its website. “Some experts predict that fully autonomous weapons could be operational in 20 to 30 years.”
“These weapons would be incapable of meeting international humanitarian law standards, including the rules of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity. The weapons would not be constrained by the capacity for compassion, which can provide a key check on the killing of civilians,” the human rights watchdog said. “Fully autonomous weapons also raise serious questions of accountability because it is unclear who should be held responsible for any unlawful actions they commit.”

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http://www.en.rian.ru/military_news/20130517/181208708.html

Robots deployed as home aides for elderly dwindle... -

Robots deployed as home aides for elderly dwindle... - 


In the opening scene of the movie “Robot & Frank,” which takes place in the near future, Frank, an elderly man who lives alone, is arguing with his son about going to a medical center for Alzheimer’s treatment when the son interrupts him. “I brought you something,” he says to Frank. Then the son pulls a large, white humanoid robot from the trunk of his car.

Frank watches in disbelief. “You have got to be kidding me,” he says as a robot helper, called the VGC-60L, stands in front of him. “I’m not this pathetic!”

But as Frank soon learns, he doesn’t have much of a choice. His new robot helper is there to cook, clean, garden and keep him company. His son, mired in family and work life, is too busy to care for his ailing father.

Just like Frank, as the baby boomer generation grows old and if the number of elderly care workers fails to grow with it, many people might end up being cared for by robots. According to the Health and Human Services Department, there will be 72.1 million Americans over the age of 65 by 2030, which is nearly double the number today. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the country will need 70 percent more home aide jobs by 2020, long before that bubble of retirees. But filling those jobs is proving to be difficult because the salaries are low. In many states, in-home aides make an average of $20,820 annually.

“There are two trends that are going in opposite directions. One is the increasing number of elderly people, and the other is the decline in the number of people to take care of them,” said Jim Osborn, a roboticist and executive director of the Robotics Institute’s Quality of Life Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. “Part of the view we’ve already espoused is that robots will start to fill in those gaps.”

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed Cody, a robotic nurse the university says is “gentle enough to bathe elderly patients.” There is also HERB, which is short for Home Exploring Robot Butler. Made by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, it is designed to fetch household objects like cups and can even clean a kitchen. Hector, a robot that is being developed by the University of Reading in England, can remind patients to take their medicine, keep track of their eyeglasses and assist in the event of a fall.

The technology is nearly there. But some researchers worry that we are not asking a fundamental question: Should we entrust the care of people in their 70s and older to artificial assistants rather than doing it ourselves?

Sherry Turkle, a professor of science, technology and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other,” did a series of studies with Paro, a therapeutic robot that looks like a baby harp seal and is meant to have a calming effect on patients with dementia, Alzheimer’s and in health care facilities. The professor said she was troubled when she saw a 76-year-old woman share stories about her life with the robot.

“I felt like this isn’t amazing; this is sad. We have been reduced to spectators of a conversation that has no meaning,” she said. “Giving old people robots to talk to is a dystopian view that is being classified as utopian.” Professor Turkle said robots did not have a capacity to listen or understand something personal, and tricking patients to think they can is unethical.

That’s the catch. Leaving the questions of ethics aside for a moment, building robots is not simply about creating smart machines; it is about making something that is not human still appear, somehow, trustworthy.

A recent Georgia Tech study found that older people were intrigued by the idea of robotic assistants in the home, but a robot’s appearance played a large role in what they will trust the machines to do. Older people want robots that look human for tasks that involve intelligence, like recommending which medicine they need to take. But they want a more sterile-looking machine for manual labor tasks, like cleaning and cooking, so they do not feel guilty bossing it about.

Wendy A. Rogers, a professor at Georgia Tech and director of the university’s Human Factors and Aging Laboratory, said concerns about older people developing relationships with their in-home helper robots were no different than the bond we develop with other inanimate objects.

Dr. Rogers has been experimenting with a large robot called the PR2, made by Willow Garage, a robotics company in Palo Alto, Calif., which can fetch and administer medicine, a seemingly simple act that demands a great deal of trust between man and machine.

“We are social beings, and we do develop social types of relationships with lots of things,” she said. “Think about the GPS in your car, you talk to it and it talks to you.” Dr. Rogers noted that people developed connections with their Roomba, the vacuum robot, by giving the machines names and buying costumes for them. “This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just what we do,” she said.

In fact, Mr. Osborn’s laboratory at Carnegie Mellon has designed a robot to work with therapists and people with autism. The machine can develop a personality and blinks and giggles as people interact with it. “Those we tested it with love it and hugged it,” he said. “You begin to think of it as something that is more than a machine with a computer.”

In the movie “Robot & Frank,” technologists have raced ahead of society’s collective conscience with their robot caregivers. But the movie still leaves its audience with a question: Will it one day be morally acceptable to unload your parents’ care to a machine?

As the actor Frank Langella, who plays Frank in the movie, told NPR last year: “Every one of us is going to go through aging and all sorts of processes, many people suffering from dementia,” he said. “And if you put a machine in there to help, the notion of making it about love and buddy-ness and warmth is kind of scary in a way, because that’s what you should be doing with other human beings.”

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Mercedes S-Class wows with 3D cameras and night vision -

Mercedes S-Class wows with 3D cameras and night vision - 



There was a time when luxury cars were defined by their sheer size and mass, their power, performance and, of course, exclusive details like leather seats and wood trim.

Those factors distinguish the 2014 Mercedes-Benz S-Class, but there’s more to the redefined German flagship that fit the changing nature of the auto industry. From its LED lamps to the 3D cameras, radar and night vision systems that allow the new sedan to virtually drive itself, the new S-Class is a technical tour de force that will likely have competitors racing to catch up.

The long-awaited remake of the classic full-size luxury sedan was staged at an Airbus factory in Hamburg, Germany – no surprise because parent Mercedes-Benz also holds a stake in the French airline manufacturer. But the venue was clearly chosen to underscore the technical sophistication of the new S-Class.

Mercedes officials noted that it will be the first automobile to dispense with conventional light bulbs, opting instead for more advanced LED technology for everything from the head to taillights, and all those small indicators, reading lamps and mood lights in-between. All told, there are 300 LEDs in the interior alone, 56 in each headlamp and another 25 in each taillight. Oh, and you can choose from seven different colors for the interior lighting, with five dimmer levels and four distinct lighting zones.

The mammoth, 104-page press release covering all the details of the new car is overwhelming. The section on sensors runs longer than most new car announcements.

There’s the latest version of the Mercedes Distronic technology, using both cameras and radar to monitor the vehicle’s surroundings. It allows the new S-Class to keep pace with traffic, come to a complete stop in a tie-up and then start rolling again. It triggers the brakes if a collision seems likely and even turns on the flashers when one does occur.

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Measles surges in UK years after vaccine scare -

Measles surges in UK years after vaccine scare - 



More than a decade ago, British parents refused to give measles shots to at least a million children because of a vaccine scare that raised the specter of autism. Now, health officials are scrambling to catch up and stop a growing epidemic of the contagious disease.
This year, the U.K. has had more than 1,200 cases of measles, after a record number of nearly 2,000 cases last year. The country once recorded only several dozen cases every year. It now ranks second in Europe, behind only Romania.
Last month, emergency vaccination clinics were held every weekend in Wales, the epicenter of the outbreak. Immunization drives have also started elsewhere in the country, with officials aiming to reach 1 million children aged 10 to 16.
"This is the legacy of the Wakefield scare," said Dr. David Elliman, spokesman for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, referring to a paper published in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues.
That work suggested a link between autism and the combined childhood vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, called the MMR. Several large scientific studies failed to find any connection, the theory was rejected by at least a dozen major U.K. medical groups and the paper was eventually retracted by the journal that published it.
Still, MMR immunization rates plummeted across the U.K. as fearful parents abandoned the vaccine — from rates over 90 percent to 54 percent.
Nearly 15 years later, the rumors about MMR are still having an impact. Now there's "this group of older children who have never been immunized who are a large pool of infections," Elliman said.
The majority of those getting sick in the U.K. — including a significant number of older children and teens — had never been vaccinated. Almost 20 of the more than 100 seriously ill children have been hospitalized and 15 have suffered complications including pneumonia and meningitis. One adult with measles has died, though it's unclear if it was the disease that killed him.
The first measles vaccines were introduced in the 1960s, which dramatically cut cases of the rash-causing illness. Since 2001, measles deaths have dropped by about 70 percent worldwide; Cambodia recently marked more than a year without a single case.
Globally, though, measles is still one of the leading causes of death in children under 5 and kills more than 150,000 people every year, mostly in developing countries. Measles is highly contagious and is spread by coughing, sneezing and close personal contact with infected people; symptoms include a fever, cough, and a rash on the face.
Across the U.K., about 90 percent of children under 5 are vaccinated against measles and have received the necessary two doses of the vaccine. But among children now aged 10 to 16, the vaccination rate is slightly below 50 percent in some regions.
To stop measles outbreaks, more than 95 percent of children need to be fully immunized. In some parts of the U.K., the rate is still below 80 percent.
Unlike in the United States, where most states require children to be vaccinated against measles before starting school, no such regulations exist in Britain. Parents are advised to have their children immunized, but Britain's Department of Health said it had no plans to consider introducing mandatory vaccination.
Last year, there were 55 reported cases of measles in the United States, where the measles vaccination rate is above 90 percent. So far this year, there have been 22 cases, including three that were traced to Britain. In previous years, the U.K. has sometimes exported more cases of measles to the U.S. than some countries in Africa.
Portia Ncube, a health worker at an East London clinic, said the struggle to convince parents to get the MMR shot is being helped by the measles epidemic in Wales.
"They see what's happening in Wales, so some of them are now sensible enough to come in and get their children vaccinated," she said.
Clinic patient Ellen Christensen, mother of an infant son, acknowledged she had previously had some "irrational qualms" about the MMR vaccine.
"But after reading more about it, I know now that immunization is not only good for your own child, it's good for everyone," she said.

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http://news.yahoo.com/measles-surges-uk-years-vaccine-scare-100011003.html

NYC lawmakers furious over 'Ghetto Tour' by Bronx bus company -

NYC lawmakers furious over 'Ghetto Tour' by Bronx bus company - 



Tourists are crowding onto a Bronx bus tour that promises “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO’ ” — and local politicians are furious.
Three times a week, Real Bronx Tours takes riders — mainly white Europeans and Australians — on a trip that includes stops at food-pantry lines and a “pickpocket” park.
Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard.
“Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?” she teased a couple from Paris.
As the bus idled across from historic St. Ann’s Episcopalian Church, Battaglia launched into a description of the crime, poverty and violence that plagued the South Bronx during the 1970s recession.
As she spoke, a line of two dozen poor people — including one man visibly agitated by the onlookers — waited for handouts from the church pantry.


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http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/bronx/ghetto_gawking_ffMgfDAaCD76GXNYDrth7L