This Is The Bandigara Escarpment, In Mali. Although The Cliffs Have Been Inhabited Since The 200s BCE,

aurora and the milky way over the manistee lighthouse

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Me thinks there's something under the Rockies

Temperatures at a depth of 10 km beneath the contiguous United States

prayer circle for elder scrolls 6

Eugenics was massive in the US, however much we pretend it wasn't

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 decided, by a vote of 8 to 1, to uphold a state’s right to forcibly sterilize a person who was deemed unfit to procreate. The case  Buck v. Bell legitimized the eugenics movement – yes, the thing Hitler and the Nazis believed in – and directly led to the sterilizing of 70,000 American citizens against their will.

All the vampire superstitions! Except sunlight

Nice, old-timey church in a sleepy town in Slovakia. What could possibly be interesting about this place?

Prepare for field research mayhem

Things I Learned as a Field Biologist #584

Going back to the field after a long hiatus can lead to moments of both visible excitement and stupefaction (with a slight register of anticipated grossness). Like my face, above. In South Africa. Where I will be once again in less than 48 hours! TO SEE ALL OF THE ANIMALS (but mostly the monkeys)!

Yes: after an absence of three long years, I leave for the field tomorrow!

This summer, I’m very excited to be returning to South Africa to work with vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus), using a number of methods to get at how they forage, what they eat, and ultimately how their bodies adapt to their nutritional environments in three places I’ve been before and loved working in: Soetdoring Nature Reserve, Gariep Dam, and Shamwari Game Reserve. Some of this work will involve live trapping and release, so to ensure to welfare and health of the monkeys I’ll be doing this work in collaboration with the wonderful Dr. Adrian Tordiffe of the University of Pretoria Faculty of Veterinary Sciences.

I’m also taking two of my BU undergrads with me for their very first field experience! Also making his South African and primatological fieldwork debut: my dad (in a supporting role: aka building monkey traps)! And, of course, my most wonderful postdoc, Maryjka Blaszczyk (this ain’t her first rodeo by a long shot).

AND THAT’S NOT ALL: I’ll also be teaching a group of students all about fieldwork and Primate Conservation Genetics in my field course with the prolific Dr. Trudy Turner of the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

As you can see, it will be a packed summer, so I’ll be checking in more regularly to share all the new excitement (and yes, most likely a fair share of humorous mishaps and parasites) that a new field season in South Africa will bring. I’ll also be posting on Twitter and Instagram (@fuzzyatelin, #BUvervets16, #BlueScrotumSummer).

But as I hope you already know: I always save the juicy stories for right here…

A Brief Intro To Pre-historic Egypt

Humans have lived in the Nile River valley since at least 30,000 BCE. Stone age communities hunted, gathered, and fished in the fertile river valley. Then, around 5,500 BCE, agricultural communities emerged. Over the next 3,400 years the communities became self-governing. Each community developed independently and at different rates politically, economically, socially, and culturally.  Then suddenly, by 3,100 BCE, Egypt was politically unified with a highly efficient bureaucratic system and elaborate kingship rites worshiping a single ruler. How the transition happened between each of these stages of Egyptian history is an argument historians and archaeologists are still having.

Human-robot disaster response team successfully deploy robots in earthquake damaged monuments | Robohub

Human-robot disaster response team successfully deploy robots in earthquake damaged monuments

After the devastating earthquake in Amatrice, Italy, on August 24th, the Vigili del Fuoco (Italian fire brigade) requested assistance from the TRADR (Long-Term Human-Robot Teaming for Robot-Assisted Disaster Response) project (EU FP7 framework, grant No. 60963). TRADR deployed two Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) and three Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to assist the post-earthquake response in Amatrice.

The task was to use robots to provide 3D textured models of two churches, San Francesco and Sant’ Agostino, national heritage monuments from the XIVth century. Both were in a state of partial collapse and in need of shoring to prevent potential further destruction. The models should serve to plan the shoring operations and to assess the state of various objects of cultural value inside the churches, such as valuable frescos.

The UGVs successfully entered the San Francesco church, teleoperated entirely out of line of sight and partially in collaboration. For part of the mission, one UGV provided a view of the other one to enable maneuvering in very constrained space with low connection bandwidth. One of the UGVs operated in the church continuously for four hours. A UAV was also present for a short time in parallel and provided additional views of the UGVs.

De-automation is a thing | Robohub

We tend to assume that automation is a process that continues – that once some human activity has been automated there’s no going back. That automation sticks. But, as Paul Mason pointed out in a recent column that assumption is wrong.

Mason gives a startling example of the decline of car-wash robots, to be replaced by, as he puts it “five guys with rags”. Here’s the paragraph that really made me think:

“There are now 20,000 hand car washes in Britain, only a thousand of them regulated. By contrast, in the space of 10 years, the number of rollover car-wash machines has halved –from 9,000 to 4,200.”

The reasons, of course, are political and economic and you may or may not agree with Mason’s diagnosis and prescription (as it happens I do). But de-automation – and the ethical, societal and legal implications – is something that we, as roboticists, need to think about just as much as automation.

Several questions come to mind:

are there other examples of de-automation? is the car-wash robot example atypical, or part of a trend? is de-automation necessarily a sign of something going wrong? (would Mason be so concerned about the guys with rags if the hand car wash industry were a well-regulated industry paying decent wages to its workers, and generating tax revenues back to the economy?)