Anhinga anhinga

This is a prototype of an elderly home care robot developed by a very small group at IBM (with the benign indifference from their employer corporation that does not want to deal with robots and headaches and liabilities associated with robots). Its ability to verbally communicate with a human and to learn from a human is very impressive (basically, one can program this robot to a large extent simply by talking to it). Here is a demo video from the talk at the AGI-12 conference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2RXDI3QYNU

The paper itself, "An Extensible Language Interface for Robot Manipulation", explaining to some extent how this works can be found here:

http://www.mindmakers.org/boards/18/topics/73

and the free online version of AGI-12 proceedings is here (scroll down to AGI-12 Contributed Paper Sessions):

http://www.mindmakers.org/projects/agiconf-2012/wiki/Schedule

Now the eye exam can be made without eye drops which dilate the pupils, so one can read or drive afterwards. Another good thing is that the resulting pictures are stored, so it is possible to track the changes over the years.

And the pictures are pretty cool and resemble some of pictures obtained from space telescopes, which is not so surprising, since the same methods of adaptive optics are used:

http://www.totalfamilyeyecare.com/optos.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_laser_ophthalmoscopy

( downsides )

Northrop Grumman says its new 15kW FIRESTRIKE continuous fire solid-state laser is ready for orders by US military services.

A 400lb relatively compact device, can be combined into a 100kW battery, continuous run-time as long as power and coolant are provided, "designed as a line replaceable unit (LRU) for battlefield applications".

"Energy efficiency for Northrop's chains is supposedly in the 20 per cent region. This suggests that a full-bore 100kW battle ray will weigh about 1.5 tonnes and require half a megawatt of power.. within the ballpark for modern combat vehicles." ( references )

http://slashdot.org/articles/05/10/12/1214248.shtml?tid=136

(via fr_news)

The question comes from this discussion (in Russian).

Certainly, there are some waterproof wireless headphones. I wonder whether anyone had some experience with them? Techno or trance music under running water must be a wonderful experience, if the equipment is at least somewhat good...

Any advices?