Sunday Funnies

TOO CUTE

Togetherness...

T. G. I. F. Solitude

Take a load off...

Ending Human Life Possibly

Scientists have moved closer to being able to stop a huge asteroid colliding with the Earth and potentially wiping out human life.

Researchers at the University of Tennessee have discovered that blowing the space rock up could make the collision worse by causing several devastating impacts.

Instead, small changes could be made to its surface to disrupt the forces keeping it together and cause it to break up in outer space.

They were studying asteroid 1950 DA, which first became infamous in 2002 when astronomers estimated it had a one in 300 chance of hitting the planet on 16 March, 2880. 

However, the odds of a collision were later revised to a more reassuring one in 4,000.

The asteroid has a diameter of one kilometre and is travelling at nine miles a second relative to the Earth, which it would hit at 38,000 miles per hour.

The impact would have a force of around 44,800 megatonnes of TNT and cause a huge explosion, tsunamis and change the climate of the globe, devastating human life.

But with 35 generations to go until its possible arrival, scientists are confident that the disaster can be averted.

The findings, published in the science journal Nature, could prompt a change in tactics defending our planet.

Previous research has shown that asteroids are loose piles of rubble held together by gravity and friction but by calculating 1950 DA’s thermal inertia and bulk density, the team detected the action of cohesive forces that stop it breaking up.

Ben Rozitis, a postdoctoral researcher, said if only gravity were holding it together, the spinning would cause it to fly apart.

The rotation is so fast that at its equator, 1950 DA effectively experiences negative gravity and if an astronaut were to attempt to stand on the surface, he or she would be thrown off into space.

The presence of cohesive forces has been predicted in small asteroids but definitive evidence has never been seen before.

Filming Police

In recent years, there have been countless cases of police officers ordering people to turn off their cameras, confiscating phones, and, like Reilly, arresting those who attempt to capture footage of them. Despite a common misconception, it’s actually perfectly legal to film police officers on the job.

“There are First Amendment protections for people photographing and recording in public,” Mickey Osterreicher, an attorney with the National Press Photographers Association, told The Huffington Post. According to Osterreicher, as long as you don’t get in their way, it’s perfectly legal to take photos and videos of police officers everywhere in the United States.

The NYPD’s reminder comes as police activity is in the national spotlight. Just two days after Michael Brown’s death, cops in Los Angeles shot to death an unarmed black man who allegedly struggled with mental illness. And three weeks ago, a New York City police officer put Eric Garner in an illegal chokehold that left him dead after gasping “I can’t breathe!” A bystander caught the entire thing on video.

 “There’s no law anywhere in the United States that prohibits people from recording the police on the street, in a park, or any other place where the public is generally allowed,” Osterreicher said.

A number of states do bar people from recording private conversations without consent. But as long as the recording is made "openly and not surreptitiously," said Osterreicher, it's fair game. According to Osterreicher, "assuming the position of holding up a camera or phone at arm’s length while looking at the viewing screen should be enough to put someone on notice that they are being photographed or recorded."

So why do so many police officers still act like filming them is a crime?

Is World Peace Possible?

Green countries are the most peaceful

With the crisis in Gaza, the rise of Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria and the international stand-off ongoing in Ukraine, it can sometimes feel like the whole world is at war.

But experts believe this is actually almost universally the case, according to a think-tank which produces one of the world’s leading measures of “global peacefulness” – and things are only going to get worse.

The UK, as an example, is relatively free from internal conflict, making it easy to fall to thinking it exists in a state of peace. But recent involvement in foreign fighting in the likes of Afghanistan, as well as a fairly high state of militarization, means Britain actually scores quite poorly on the 2014 Global Peace Index, coming 47th overall.

Then there are countries which are involved in no actual foreign wars involving deaths whatsoever - like North Korea – but which are fraught by the most divisive and entrenched internal conflicts.

The IEP’s findings mean that choices are slim if you want to live in a completely peaceful country. 

The only ones to achieve the lowest score for all forms of conflict were Switzerland, Japan, Qatar, Mauritius, Uruguay, Chile, Botswana, Costa Rica, Vietnam, Panama and Brazil.

And even those countries are not entirely exempt from other problems that, the IEP says, could lend to conflict further down the line.

Switzerland is famously detached when it comes to any external conflict, and has a very low risk of internal problems of any kind – but loses a number of points on the overall index because of its proportionately huge rate of arms exports per 100,000 of the population.

Analysts from the Economist Intelligence Unit must be satisfied that it has “no conflict” within its borders. This rating on civil unrest cannot even include “latent” conflict involving “positional differences over definable values of national importance”.

The Global Peace Index measures the latest data up to the end of the year before – meaning that the state of international conflict right now is actually even worse than the study suggests. With the protests over the World Cup still vivid in collective memory, for instance, Brazil might find itself off the list of peaceful countries by 2015.

Speaking to The Independent, the director of the IEP Camilla Schippa warned that the state of peace in our time has been “slowly but steadily decreasing” in recent years.

 “Major economic and geopolitical shocks, such as the global financial crisis and the Arab Spring, have left countries more at risk of falling into conflict,” Ms Schippa said.

She added: “Continuing global unrest means that there is unlikely to be a reversal of this trend in the short run.”

Hump Day Art

Kovacs 

Anna 

Brigitta

Gyõr,

Hungary



Her Art...

Cooking Robots

A restaurant in China is electrifying customers by using more than a dozen robots to cook and deliver food.

Mechanical staff greet customers, deliver dishes to tables and even stir-fry meat and vegetables at the eatery in Kunshan, which opened last week.

"My daughter asked me to invent a robot because she doesn't like doing housework," the restaurant's founder Song Yugang told AFP.

Two robots are stationed by the door to cheerfully greet customers, while four short but humanoid machines carry trays of food to the tables.

In the kitchen, two large blue robots with glowing red eyes specialize in frying, while another is dedicated to making dumplings.

Song told the local Modern Times newspaper that each robot costs around 40,000 yuan ($6,500) -- roughly equal to the annual salary of a human employee.

"The robots can understand 40 everyday sentences. They can't get sick or ask for vacation. After charging up for two hours they can work for five hours," he added.

The restaurant, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, follows in the tracks of another robotic eatery which opened in the northeastern city of Harbin in 2012.

Rising labour costs in China have encouraged manufacturers to turn to automation, and the country last year surpassed Japan to become the world's biggest consumer of industrial robots.

The cooking robots -- which have a fixed repertoire -- exhibit limited artificial intelligence, and are loaded with ingredients by human staff, who also help to make some dishes.

But customers at the restaurant who tucked into fried tomatoes with egg, soup, and rice were thrilled with the experience.

"My children are really excited by the robots," said Yang Limei, a mother of three.

The round-headed waiter robots can only move along fixed paths, and politely ask customers to move out of their way whenever their routes are blocked.

"I've never seen a robot serving food before," said Yuan Yuan, nine. "I'm really surprised."

Dirty Names List

There is no doubt that slavery is still a thriving business across the world. 

According to the International Labor Organization, an estimated 21 million people across the world are trapped in some form of forced labor and other types of modern-slavery, feeding a booming industry in human exploitation generating profits of more than $32bn each year. 

The United Nations estimates that people-trafficking is the third biggest criminal industry behind guns and drugs.

In recent years there has been a growing awareness that modern-day slavery is largely a labor and economic, as well as a human rights issue, and that the worst forms of human exploitation continue to lurk in the murky depths of many global supply chains. Slavery isn't a word that any business wants to be linked with.

So far the association between global brands and slave labor comes largely from damaging media exposés – such as last week's story on the sugar giant Tate & Lyle, accused of child labor on plantations in Cambodia, allegations which the company has denied.

Yet interesting models for how to get businesses to engage with the problem of forced labor are starting to emerge. 

Since 2006, more than 170 global companies have signed up to the Athens Ethical Principles, where signatories pledge to ensure their own businesses are slavery-free and declare zero tolerance for dealing with other corporations benefiting from human trafficking.

In California the Transparency in Supply Chains Act, which came into force last year, legally requires companies doing business in California to report on what they are doing to eradicate slavery from their product lines. The act stipulates that larger companies must make this information public through a disclosure on their websites.

In Brazil an aggressive anti-slavery strategy launched by the government in the mid-90s has led to a controversial yet seemingly effective name-and-shame strategy towards eliminating slavery from major industries.

Thousands of Brazilians and laborers from neighboring South American countries are thought to be trapped in slavery in Brazil's booming agrarian, mining and materials sectors. 

Last year, Greenpeace released a report linking Brazil's charcoal industry, which fuels iron ore smelters producing metals for the international car manufacturing markets, to widespread environmental destruction and forced labor.

Sexual Slavery

Men, women and children are being kidnapped and held for months as slaves by militias in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Healthcare professionals working for Médicins sans Frontières in the gold and diamond mining regions of Okapi forest, Orientale province, say they have treated hundreds of women who had been seized from villages and held as sex slaves, many of whom have life-threatening injuries from sustained abuse. 

Men and children are also being kidnapped and made to work in the mines.

"They describe what they have lived through as hell," said Ana Maria Tijerino, an MSF psychologist who works in the nearby town of Nia Nia, to which thousands of people have fled to escape the violence. 

"I have trouble believing that such a level of horror is possible. Victims have been held as sex slaves – sometimes for months at a time – and sexually assaulted violently by several men, several times a day, often in front of their parents, husbands or relatives."

Between May and early July, MSF staff in Nia Nia provided 3,586 consultations to local people. They also gave psychological support to 143 women, three men and two children who had experienced sexual violence, and to more than 36 survivors of other types of violence, including torture and being forced to witness atrocities against relatives. 

Last month, the team treated 20 women in a single village who had been raped.

MSF says security and the rule of law have collapsed in recent months and that the military are struggling to overcome militiamen, many of whom are former poachers with detailed knowledge of Okapi's dense forested areas.

"After a militia leader was killed by the military in April, the level of violence, and the brutality, increased significantly, targeting both the mining communities and people in the surrounding villages," Kevin Coppock, MSF's head of mission in Orientale province, said. 

"Militia members simply show up, steal what they can and take men and women out of local communities who are then kept captive under the most horrendous conditions for months at a time."

Rural Electrification

 

In countries where the energy infrastructure is under-developed and few towns are adequately electrified, extending the grid is often not financially viable, and certainly not likely to happen in the short to medium term. 

And so 1.4 billion people are currently living without electricity. 

In sub-Saharan Africa, only 8% of the population in rural areas has access to mains electricity but mini-grids – localized generation, transmission and distribution of power – could change all that.

As the cost of solar energy in rural Africa, parts of India and other countries in Asia has fallen dramatically in recent years, setting up a mini-grid powered by renewable energy has become the cheapest way to provide electricity.

The people of Bellewakh, Lemcid, Loubeir and Lemhaijratt currently get by with candles, kerosene lamps and car batteries for lighting, and use costly and dangerous canisters of butane to power refrigeration units. 

Their new mini-grid will consist of 18 wind turbines of 15kW and will provide electricity for households, schools, health facilities, civic buildings, a desalination plant to produce drinking water and an ice-making plant.

Where mini-grids already exist but are currently powered by diesel Wouters says it is now a no-brainer for them to switch to renewables: "Where people are using diesel to generate electricity any renewable source of energy is at the moment more cost effective."

Hydroelectricity is by far the cheapest – where it is available – followed by wind power, and then solar panels. A report by the Alliance for Rural Electrification found that towns could save up to 60% of their bill if they switched from diesel to hydroelectricity or 16% if they switched to solar.

The cost effectiveness of renewable energy has really changed the marketplace. Before, says Wouters, people thought: "solar is nice for [communities that are] off-grid, but it's expensive, but that is not true anymore. It's now cheap as well as being reliable, clean and low maintenance."

Wouters says the first challenge has been making people aware of the falling prices. "When something halves in price every two years it's hard to catch up, but I think that we've reached the point where people understand. 

Potato Chip Bag Listening

Imagine someone listening in to your private conversation by filming the bag of chips sitting on the other side of the room.

Researchers at MIT did just that: They've created an algorithm that can reconstruct sound (and even intelligible speech) with the tiny vibrations it causes on video.

When sound hits an object, it makes distinct vibrations. “There’s this very subtle signal that’s telling you what the sound passing through is,” said Abe Davis, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and first author on the paper.

This particular study grew out of an earlier experiment at MIT, led by Michael Rubinstein, now a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England.

In 2012, Rubinstein amplified tiny variations in video to detect things like the skin color change caused by the pumping of blood. Studying the vibrations caused by sound was a logical next step. But getting intelligible speech out of the analysis was surprising, Davis said.

In one example shown in a compilation video, a bag of chips is filmed from 15 feet away, through sound-proof glass. The reconstructed audio of someone reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in the same room as the chips isn’t crystal clear. But the words being said are possible to decipher.

In most cases, a high-speed camera is necessary to accomplish the feat. Still, at 2,000 to 6,000 frames per second, the camera used by the researchers is nothing compared to the best available on the market, which can surpass 100,000 frames per second. And the researchers found that even cheaper cameras could be used.

“It’s surprisingly possible to take advantage of a bug called rolling shutter,” Davis said. “Usually, it creates these artifacts in the image that people don’t like.” 

When cameras use rolling shutter to capture an image, they don’t capture one single point in time. Instead, the camera scans across the frame in one direction, picking up each row at a slightly different moment.

 “It kind of turns a two-dimensional low-speed camera into a one-dimensional high-speed camera,” Davis explained. “As a result, we can recover sounds happening at frequencies several times higher than the frame rate of the camera, which is remarkable when you consider that it’s just a complete accident of the way we make them.”

There are definitely limitations to the technology, Davis said, and it may not make for better sound reconstruction than other methods already in use. “Big brother won't be able to hear anything that anyone ever says all of a sudden,” Davis said. 

“But it is possible that you could use this to discover sound in situations where you couldn’t before. It’s just adding one more tool for those forensic applications.”