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tonyPick writes:

Make: has a report on the appearance of a MegaBots giant fighting robot at the Bay Area Maker Faire on Saturday. The article features a video of the bot in action.

You’ve probably heard about MegaBots, the proposed giant robot combat league — yes please! — but this is the first time we’ve seen the working prototype robot in action, moving, aiming, and firing. The prototype runs on tracks scavenged from a small bulldozer, but ultimately the plan is for MegaBots to walk on two legs like the giant humanoid mechs we’ve all seen in the movies. Even the tracked version is impressive: It’s got room for a 2-person crew inside — driver and gunner — and it rears up to an imposing height of 15′ when aggravated. The idea of squads of these monsters battling to the death in football arenas is just too good not to happen.

Also covered at Ars Technica (With an image slideshow), and the there is additional detail in an earlier Make: article.

More information at the Megabots Home page.

kaszz writes:

To detect stresses and deformations in large structures before they cause damage and deaths, the European Space Agency is working with the UK's University of Nottingham to monitor the movements as they happen using satellite navigation sensors. The team uses highly sensitive satnav receivers that transmit real-time data to detect movements as fine as 1 cm combined with historical Earth observation satellite data. By placing sensors at key locations on the Forth Road Bridge in Scotland, they detected stressed structural members and unexpected deformations

The global market for the installation of GeoSHM on existing and currently planned long-span bridges is worth in excess of $1.5 billion. The UK market alone is estimated to be worth in excess of £200 million and growing. China is expected to be the largest market. While GeoSHM is designed mainly for monitoring bridges with a main span greater than 400 m, it also has potential for shorter bridges, such as Hammersmith Bridge and the Millennium Bridge in the UK. “Eventually, GeoSHM could be deployed for monitoring offshore wind turbines, masts, towers, dams, viaducts and high-rise buildings, for example,” said Xiaolin Meng, GeoSHM team leader.

AnonTechie writes:

The built-in Windows games are a cultural phenomenon, and while the lineup has varied over the years, one game above all has come to define workplace boredom and Windows' ability to be there for you when you have nothing better to do: Solitaire.

sol.exe was first included with Windows in 1990's release of Windows 3.0. Since its introduction, its distinctive green baize has been the hallmark of the bored white-collar employee. Gaze across a sea of cubicles, and the presence of Solitaire, immediately visible even at a distance, will instantly reveal workspace slacking. The distracting time waster has probably single-handedly offset all the productivity gains that computers have enabled.

May 22 will be Windows 3.0's 25th birthday, and to celebrate Microsoft is running a Solitaire tournament. It's not immediately clear to me how you run a tournament for a single-player, non-competitive, randomized game where only around 80 percent of games are even theoretically winnable, but why not. Currently Redmond is running an internal competition, and on June 5 it'll be made public. The company promises that its best Solitaire experts will go "head-to-head" with the public.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/05/microsoft-celebrates-25-years-of-wasting-time-at-work-with-solitaire-tournament/

"gewg_" writes:

Common Dreams reports

Governments are failing to properly tax fossil fuel consumption, with enormous environmental costs, the IMF reports.

The fossil fuel industry receives $5.3 trillion a year in government subsidies, despite its disastrous toll on the environment, human health, and other global inequality issues, a new report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published [May 18] has found.

That means that governments worldwide are spending $10 million every minute to fund energy companies--more than the estimated public health spending for the entire globe, IMF economists Benedict Clements and Vitor Gaspar wrote in a blog post accompanying the report (pdf).

[...]Subsidies occur in two ways, IMF Fiscal Affairs Department directors Sanjeev Gupta and Michael Keen explained in a separate blog post published [May 18]:

"[Pre-tax]" subsidies--which occur when people and businesses pay less than it costs to supply the energy--are smaller than a few years back. But "post-tax" subsidies--which add to pre-tax subsidies an amount that reflects the environmental, health and other damage that energy use causes and the benefit from favorable VAT or sales tax treatment--remain extremely high, and indeed are now well above our previous estimates.

[...]If anything, the report's findings are "conservative", Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, told Common Dreams. "[It] doesn't include direct subsidies to fossil fuel producers, and it doesn't include things like the cost of military resources to defend Persian Gulf oil."

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

One of the most recognizable brands in the for-profit education industry is now facing fraud charges after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a civil complaint in an Indiana federal court on [May 12].

The agency claims that ITT Educational Services, Inc. and a pair of executives intentionally misled investors and financial analysts about the failure of ITT's private student loan programs. The court filing asserts that ITT even went so far as to start secretly making payments on behalf of students who were in default so as to avoid having to make far larger payments to the investors who had backed the loans. It's an unusual twist on a common story in the for-profit industry, where reliance on federal tax dollars for revenue means that companies have significant incentive to manipulate statistics about how their students fare.

An SEC victory would bring relief to ITT's investors, who suffered losses when the student loan information eventually came to light and sent the firm's stock price tumbling. But ITT's students and graduates, whose inability to repay their loans on time is the prime mover behind the alleged fraud, won't see their debts alleviated or their job prospects enhanced.

The company disputed the fraud charge in a statement Tuesday, calling it an "unfair case" and welcoming the chance "to have the court clear our reputation that has been unnecessarily endangered by the SEC's action."

takyon writes:

A team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has demonstrated a method for creating lots of graphene:

One of the barriers to using graphene at a commercial scale could be overcome using a method demonstrated by researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Graphene, a material stronger and stiffer than carbon fiber, has enormous commercial potential but has been impractical to employ on a large scale, with researchers limited to using small flakes of the material.

Now, using chemical vapor deposition, a team led by ORNL's Ivan Vlassiouk has fabricated polymer composites containing 2-inch-by-2-inch sheets of the one-atom thick hexagonally arranged carbon atoms. The findings, reported in the journal Applied Materials & Interfaces, could help usher in a new era in flexible electronics and change the way this reinforcing material is viewed and ultimately used.

"Before our work, superb mechanical properties of graphene were shown at a micro scale," said Vlassiouk, a member of ORNL's Energy and Transportation Science Division. "We have extended this to a larger scale, which considerably extends the potential applications and market for graphene." While most approaches for polymer nanocomposition construction employ tiny flakes of graphene or other carbon nanomaterials that are difficult to disperse in the polymer, Vlassiouk's team used larger sheets of graphene. This eliminates the flake dispersion and agglomeration problems and allows the material to better conduct electricity with less actual graphene in the polymer. "In our case, we were able to use chemical vapor deposition to make a nanocomposite laminate that is electrically conductive with graphene loading that is 50 times less compared to current state-of-the-art samples," Vlassiouk said. This is a key to making the material competitive on the market.

If Vlassiouk and his team can reduce the cost and demonstrate scalability, researchers envision graphene being used in aerospace (structural monitoring, flame-retardants, anti-icing, conductive), the automotive sector (catalysts, wear-resistant coatings), structural applications (self-cleaning coatings, temperature control materials), electronics (displays, printed electronics, thermal management), energy (photovoltaics, filtration, energy storage) and manufacturing (catalysts, barrier coatings, filtration).

Carbon Sciences, Inc. and the University of California, Santa Barbara also announced "the production of high quality graphene using a low cost chemical vapor deposition process." Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ORNL announced a technique to seal holes in graphene layers earlier this month.

kaszz writes:

NASA wants to use 3D printing technology to build deep space habitats onsite instead of bringing the materials with them. Towards that end they have announced the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge, in partnership with America Makes, as part of the ongoing Centennial Challenge program.

melikamp writes:

UK Royal Navy "Trident" nuclear weapons submariner William McNeilly, aged 25, who has been in communications with WikiLeaks since the beginning of May, has decided he wants to go public about the detailed nuclear safety problems he says he has been "gathering for over a year". An excerpt from William McNeilly's exclusive original report to WikiLeaks follows:

My name is William McNeilly. I am an Engineering Technician Weapons Engineer Submariner for UK's Trident II D5 Strategic Weapons System.

This is document will enlighten you to the shockingly extreme conditions that our nuclear weapons system is in right now, and has been in the past. It describes different threats and events that have happened and are threats that are highly likely to happen; each one individually should raise maximum concern. I need you to publish this document or send it to someone who will; please, for the safety of the people.

This will jump between things like food hygiene and a flooded toilets, till describing the complete lack of security, floods, a blazing inferno in the Missile Compartment etc. My aim is to paint an overall picture of what I've seen, and to break down the false images of a perfect system that most people envisage exists.

[More after the break...]

As the dev cycle for the first release of rehash winds down (one remaining bug before we're ready to deploy), I've turned my attention another large site-related project, specifically the possibility of internationalizing and localizing the site. Internationalizing a very large legacy codebase is a lot of work, and I want to gauge interest. For clarification, this work would translate the UI, and the site interface itself, and not the articles. Historically, I'm aware of two successful translation project, BarraPunto, and Slashdot.JP. However, both of those projects did so by simply rewriting the templates in their native language instead of using a more flexible system that would allow for dynamic processing.

After a few hours of cursing, I was successful in modifying rehash to use Locale::Maketext::Lexicon, and load translations dynamically from gettext when a template is loaded. The practical upshot is that if I continue with this effort, we will be able to import all the static strings in rehash, and translate them through any service that can handle standard gettext POT files (such as Launchpad Rosetta), then have rehash load the specific language on the fly depending on a user's settings, or their browsers preferences. This also has the benefit that translators would only require a minimal amount of HTML knowledge would be required to successfully translate rehash.

What I want to know is the following:

• Is there significant interest to prioritize this project?
• Are there enough people who are willing to engage in translating rehash to their native language?
• Assuming there is a successful translation committed and launched, would people be interested in running a version of SN in their own native language?

As long as the first two answers are yes, I'll push to get a localized codebase in place for the next rehash development cycle (likely landing in July or August). Please note there is a *lot* of strings to be translated, I'm expecting upwards of a couple thousand once I've finished scrubbing through all the templates and libraries. If you are interested in this, please note your native language below, and I'll get in contact with you once we're ready to start doing translation work.

frojack writes:

ExtremeTech has an article suggesting the International Space Station may add a Laser "CAN-non" in coming years.

The Extreme Universe Space Observatory (EUSO) is scheduled to be installed on Japan's ISS module in 2017. This is not by design a space-junk-killing piece of equipment. It's intended to monitor the atmosphere for ultraviolet emissions caused by cosmic rays.

However it might serve as an experimental platform for testing (at much lower power) the capability of slight deflections of orbiting space junk.

Also covered here.

We discussed the general problem of space junk here on Soylent News at the beginning of the month.

takyon writes:

Researchers at Aalto University and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya have created black silicon (silicon with nanopatterned "needles" on the surface, lowering the reflectivity) solar cells with an efficiency of 22.1%. Their research is published in Nature Nanotechnology. These solar cells can capture more light than traditional cells with the same efficiency:

"The energy conversion efficiency is not the only parameter that we should look at" explains Professor Hele Savin from Aalto University, who coordinated the study. Due to the ability of black cells to capture solar radiation from low angles, they generate more electricity already over the duration of one day as compared to the traditional cells.

"This is an advantage particularly in the north, where the sun shines from a low angle for a large part of the year. We have demonstrated that in winter Helsinki, black cells generate considerably more electricity than traditional cells even though both cells have identical efficiency values," she adds.

In the near future, the goal of the team is to apply the technology to other cell structures – in particular, thin and multi-crystalline cells.

"Our record cells were fabricated using p-type silicon, which is known to suffer from impurity-related degradation. There is no reason why even higher efficiencies could not be reached using n-type silicon or more advanced cell structures." Hele Savin predicts.

The development of the cells fabricated last year will continue in the upcoming "BLACK" project, supported by the European Union, in which Professor Savin together with her team will develop the technology further in cooperation with industry.

"The surface area of the best cells in the study was already 9 cm². This is a good starting point for upscaling the results to full wafers and all the way to the industrial scale."

"gewg_" writes:

The other day, we discussed a company that sees its workers as assets to be cherished and nurtured. Sadly, there are a lot of companies that see their employees as "human resources" to be used up and cast off. Maybe those enterprises need a better means to evaluate the wisdom of that tack.

Common Dreams reports

Employee turnover costs businesses millions of dollars each year. However, many employers don't accurately track this expense, which could be reduced by improving workplace conditions. To help business owners understand the cost of turnover, the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) and Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) have released an updated turnover calculator.[1] This dynamic tool allows employers to calculate turnover costs by responding to 10 simple questions.

When employees leave or are laid off, companies incur numerous expenses searching for and on-boarding their replacements; these include advertising, recruiting, background checks, benefits administration, training, and lost productivity while new employees become proficient at their jobs. Taken together, these costs can have serious implications for bottom lines. The turnover calculator allows businesses to input wages; weekly hours; and recruiting, hiring, and training costs to determine the financial impact for different categories of workers.

[1] The link(s) in the article redirect. I have provided a direct link in the summary.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A "unicorn" is Silicon Valley jargon for a pre-IPO startup with a valuation of 1 billion USD or more. Once a rarity (hence the name), there are now quite a few unicorns; the Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West has just concluded an examination of recent investment deals involving 37 of these hotshot companies. Fenwick & West noted that every deal, without exception, contained contract provisions of "liquidity preference" for the investors; i.e., in the event of liquidation, the new investors would recover their stake before common stockholders and (in some cases) before earlier investors as well.

Re/code's Arik Hesseldahl helps break down Fenwick & West's analysis for the benefit of those of us who haven't taken a crash course in pre-IPO financing. It turns out that the huge valuations, which probably do a lot (in the short term) for the egos and aspirations of the founders and employees, come with a catch; the deals that authorized those valuations were designed to minimize downside risk to the new investors. But that often means that the founders, rank-and-file employees - and angel investors only get their dream paydays if and when everything goes right.

For an even more graphic (though lengthier) explanation, venture capitalist Heidi Roizen posted a parable of a founder (note: fictional) whose startup was an almost instant hit, expanding rapidly with the help of several waves of venture investments. Then the company hit a wall of the type that many startups eventually run into, even the most successful ones. But because the investment deals contained "boilerplate" language for liquidity preferences and other terms protecting each successive investor from downside risk, the founder walked away with nothing.

takyon writes:

Google has sold the .car generic top-level domain to Cars Registry Limited, a joint partnership by domain industry companies XYZ and Uniregistry. In fact, Google appears to have walked away from many of the TLDs it once coveted:

With its deep pockets, many feared that Google was going to swamp the domain name industry with free names and so undercut and undermine everyone but established names.

However it is clear that last year the company decided to walk away from the names with "interesting and creative potential," as well as most of those that will "improve user experience," concentrating instead of its brand names and trademarks.

It has walked away from 40 domains, including several that would appear to be directly relevant to Google's business, including '.talk', '.cloud', '.store' and '.movie'.

And it struck deals with other large companies - in particular Amazon - to trade names of value that both had applied for. For example, in return for '.book' and '.talk', Google received '.dev' and '.drive' from Amazon.

It was the only applicant for 26 generic words like '.foo' and '.meme' and so has retained them - although if anyone else wants them, it is probably worth giving the company a call.

In fact, out of the 101 names it applied for, the only ones outside of its brands that Google has fought have been: map, app, search and phd. It paid the largest amount for any new internet extension - $25m - for dot-app. "Map" and "search" are pretty obviously valuable to Google. As for '.phd'? Who knows.

kaszz writes:

Creative Loafing Atlanta reports:

Baton Bob, Atlanta's self-proclaimed ambassador of mirth, lost some of his joy on June 26, 2013. Dressed in his finest wedding dress, the well-known street performer's celebratory routine following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to end the federal gay marriage ban was cut short when an off-duty Atlanta Police officer arrested him after what was initially described as an alleged "verbal altercation."

But Baton Bob — real name Bob Jamerson — later claimed the arrest violated his constitutional rights, so he filed a lawsuit against the city. Nearly two years after the incident, officials are offering a $20,000 settlement for Baton Bob's troubles. The Atlanta City Council's Public Safety Committee will take up the settlement this afternoon.

In February, Jamerson filed a federal lawsuit against the city, arguing that officers made a wrongful arrest that violated, well, nearly every constitutional right you can name. Those included Jamerson's "right to free speech, his right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, his right to remain silent while in custody, his right to be free from compelled speech, his right to counsel, and his right to privacy."

[...] Lt. Jeffrey Cantin, who was on duty with APD that day, emailed APD Public Affairs to work their "media magic with this case," according to the lawsuit. The filing says APD's internal investigators later discovered that Cantin proceeded to tell Jamerson to "post something positive" on his Baton Bob Facebook page. According to the lawsuit, APD officers told the performer that doing so was the only way he would be released from custody on a "signature bond."