Lifeboat Foundation

The arrival of government-operated autonomous police robots does not look like predictions in science fiction movies. An army of robots with gun arms is not kicking down your door to arrest you. Instead, a robot snitch that looks like a rolling trash can is programmed to decide whether a person looks suspicious —and then call the human police on them. Police robots may not be able to hurt people like armed predator drones used in combat— yet —but as history shows, calling the police on someone can prove equally deadly.

Long before the 1987 movie Robocop, even before Karel Čapek invented the word robot in 1920, police have been trying to find ways to be everywhere at once. Widespread security cameras are one solution—but even a blanket of CCTV cameras couldn’t follow a suspect into every nook of public space. Thus, the vision of a police robot continued as a dream, until now. Whether they look like Boston Dynamics’ robodogs or Knightscope’s rolling pickles, robots are coming to a street, shopping mall, or grocery store near you.

Continue reading “Police Robots Are Not a Selfie Opportunity, They’re a Privacy Disaster Waiting to Happen” »

Summary: The genetics of neurocognitive skills were associated with higher tolerance of risk, delayed fertility, less healthy-risk behavior, and a greater willingness to forgo immediate gratification.

Source: Columbia University.

Noncognitive skills and cognitive abilities are both important contributors to educational attainment — the number of years of formal schooling that a person completes — and lead to success across the life course, according to a new study from an international team led by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, the University of Texas at Austin, and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Circa 2019

MIT’s Biomimetics Robotics department took a whole herd of its new ‘mini cheetah’ robots out for a group demonstration on campus recently – and the result is an adorable, impressive display of the current state of robotic technology in action.

The school’s students are seen coordinating the actions of 9 of the dog-sized robots running through a range of activities, including coordinated movements, doing flips, springing in slow motion from under piles of fall leaves, and even playing soccer.

Continue reading “Watch MIT’s ‘mini cheetah’ robots frolic, fall, flip – and play soccer together” »

Executive director & co-founder of kiss the ground, and producer of kiss the ground the movie, discussing regenerative agriculture for planetary regeneration.

Ryland Engelhart, is Executive Director & Co-Founder of Kiss The Ground (https://kisstheground.com/), a non-profit organization dedicated to planetary regeneration, and is the producer of Kiss The Ground, the Movie, recently released on Netflix.

Continue reading “Ryland Engelhart — Kiss The Ground — Regenerative Agriculture For Planetary Regeneration” »

The world is far from perfect, and 2020 did throw the proverbial spanner is the works, but the improvements we have made are not to be ignored!!

We are winning…

Continue reading “The Sustainable Development Goals Explained Clean Water And Sanitation” »

Ogba Educational Clinic promoting a greener Africa for all Africans.

On a high, dry terrace overlooking a green river valley in the Andes Mountains of Peru, sits a complex of American pyramids that may be older than the pyramids of Egypt. These structures are remnants of the ancient city of Caral, which some have called the oldest society in the Americas. Caral was built around 5000 years ago, give or take a few centuries, according to groundbreaking research published in Science back in 2001. That origin date places it before the Egyptian pyramids in Africa and roughly 4000 years before the Incan Empire rose to power on the South American continent. That history, and the shear scope of the site, prompted UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, to dub it a World Heritage Site in 2009.

These pyramids in Peru are older than the ones in Egypt, and predate the Incan Empire by roughly 4000 years.

It looks like virtual education(which is happening more now) is actually preparing students for the workplace of the future.

That said, there may be a silver lining to virtual classrooms and distance learning, which many universities and schools this academic year are defaulting to, in various degrees, due to the coronavirus. As students and teachers may have to compensate for logistic challenges, collaborating online might prepare high school students with the kind of organizational acumen, emotional intelligence and self-discipline needed for modern careers, particularly those that allow for the growing trend of working in remote, distributed teams. The sooner that students master those proficiencies, the better off they’ll be when they reach the job market.

Humans have taken spiders into space more than once to study the importance of gravity to their web-building. What originally began as a somewhat unsuccessful PR experiment for high school students has yielded the surprising insight that light plays a larger role in arachnid orientation than previously thought.

The spider experiment by the US space agency NASA is a lesson in the frustrating failures and happy accidents that sometimes lead to unexpected research findings. The question was relatively simple: on Earth, spiders build asymmetrical webs with the center displaced towards the upper edge. When resting, spiders sit with their head downwards because they can move towards freshly caught prey faster in the direction of gravity.

Continue reading “Arachnauts: NASA Sends Spiders to Space for Experimentation – Here’s What They Found” »