Robots & Technology from a girl’s point of view!
Weehoo!
My 14 days of MANOI has now wrapped up. We haven’t yet finished cutting out the shells yet, but I got it all programmed to dance (weirdly), and to wave a flag so that it won’t bee too much of a rush for the science fair on April 1-2-3 
Here are some videos!!!
Hopefully everything will work out in the end! I attatched the legs backwards… I find they look and work better this way.
After being called “cynical” from a “friend”, I have decided to blog about probably one of the most bloggable subjects - Global Warming.
Before I stumbled upon this video, I was writing out why CO2 doesn’t account for global warming. However, now that I have seen this video, it covers everything, so I don’t have to write it out! You should watch it. It is captivating, it is accurate, and it is scientifically correct.
Although it’s only 4 bits, it’s still pretty cool. A guy named Viktor Toth made a 4 Bit Processor as a hobby project.
Although I can’t really wrap my mind over it, here the link!
I stumbled upon Shorpy.com today, and it is a really cool blog!
It has cool photographs. Here are some of my favs!
See em all at Shorpy.com
WOWEE!
I was going through old bookmarks and subscribing to their news feeds (Xcast is a SUPERB manager by the way!) and I saw a link on Makezine, which transported me to Robot Dreams (a site I went on often to see how the MANOI AT01 looks & acts) where they have an exclusive interview with Jin Sato, the creator of the Mibo dog!
This isn’t just any dog. It has 6 degrees of freedom, with 5 motors! It took him 3 months to build, and of course it made him famous. He was inspired to maki Mibo because he wasn’t able to get a Sony Aibo. He spent about 3000 Euros on it, because he wasn’t able to buy piece by piece, just in sets. He used long gear trains to move the back feet.
This is so cool. In fact, when I saw it on the lego mindstorms box, I knew that I want to make that one day- so hopefully I will! Here’s the video of the interview
Click here to read more.
I attatched some reinforcement pieces, and my dad began to cut out the plastic shells with his XACTO knife skills. 
It is starting to wrap up!
Although this is old news, it deserves to be bloggered. A few weeks ago, experts in South Korea said they were drawing up an ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa. Safety is always among the top issues, because they can be dangerous, however we still see ordinary people (like me-yay!) using them.
The three laws of robotics seem to cover the descisions of robots. Here are the three laws of robotics, incase anyone reading this might have forgotten them
But, one of the problems is, how would a robot tell a human apart from an animal, or even apart from a robot? Kismet the robot (above) can identify human qualities, but it has to run on 6 computers!
What about robot rights? If robots can express emotion, then would it make it ethical to not put them in the military?
Dr. Margaret Sommerville gave a captivating speech at our school, afterwards I ran up to ask her a quick question which was… Do you think the 3 Laws of Robotics will be sufficient enough to deal with the ethical issues regarding robots and their interaction with humans? Her answer wasn’t as strong as the other answers that she gave, maybe because she is more involved with the biological engineering side of ethics. Indeed, her answer was No, because in a book that she mentioned (and I can’t remember >.<”), written by the head of the AI lab at MIT, he shows how the robots can cause riots, even with the 3 Laws of Robotics in place.
But, since I can’t remember the name of the book, and therefore haven’t read it, I can’t confirm if the ‘obediance factor’ of the 3 Laws were changed. An example is in I,Robot, when the 2nd law’s tolerance is lowered just a tad, it throws off the whole balance.
Some might say that we have to be more realistic, however it is best to plan ahead because technology evolves exponentially.