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Mitsubishi Robot - Watchdog, Nurse, Annoying Friend
jomaree writes "The SMH Online reports that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have developed a robot (to run on Linux) with voice and face recognition capabilities. The robot would be able to connect to the Internet, contact you by e-mail or a mobile phone and, say, send you a message if it 'hears' a strange noise inside your home. It can also remember the side effects of medication. Reportedly, Mitsubishi claim that the robot 'will become a future house-sitter, caretaker, nurse and friend for the family'. Unfortunately the robot can also be programmed to ask 'You're home late. What have you been up to?' Don't we already have people for that?" The Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun has a story with pictures.
On November 19, 1954, the career of Sammy Davis Jr. almost came to a sudden and tragic close. While driving to Los Angeles to record the title tune of the Universal International picture "Six Bridges to Cross", Sammy was the victim of an automobile smash-up and narrowly escaped death. He was so seriously injured that his left eye had to be removed. In spite of the terrible shock, Sammy rallied and went on with his work; he even insisted that he was the "luckiest guy in the world".
Since his accident, Sammy's courageous spirit and ever-growing talent have won him increasingly enthusiastic audiences. Let's hear it for Sammy Davis Jr. !
Celebrate Negro Month 2003 with Slashdot.
I can hear it now:
"Tom? You there? It's dark here, and I'm scared. [pause]
Did you hear that? OMIGOSH (I'm lonely) COME HOME QUICK!!!"
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
Even now Michael Jackson is calling his surgery team to schedule more transformation. His nose is clearly no longer small enough.
(CNN) -- African-American music, writing and innovations have been forged in struggle -- filled with pain and elation, self-consciousness and self-realization, hurt and healing.
It is a true American experience -- manifest in a profound, groundbreaking and influential culture.
"African-American culture has defined American culture," says Craig Werner, a professor of African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Noting blacks' fight to realize supposedly all-American ideals [read: White values imposed by White society] such as equality and liberty, and their many expressions of courage and creativity, Werner adds, "People who had the most reason to reject the whole game, ironically enough, tend to be the deepest, purest expression of what America is about."
America has embraced black music, with blues, jazz, rap and rock 'n' roll making their way into the mainstream. Radio play lists reflect this fusion, and even the pop yardstick MTV nowadays is BET's cousin, with its abundance of black artists, says Tamara Brown, a historian at the Anacostia Museum, the Smithsonian's black history center.
African-American authors like Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison belong to the nation's pantheon of great writers. Black artists, scientists, engineers, chefs, religious and political leaders have profoundly shaped America's day-to-day existence.
The African-American experience is about ideals, and testing those ideals -- detailed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution -- to see whether those high standards extend to all Americans, and working to make sure they do.
One hundred years after W.E.B. Du Bois, in "The Souls of Black Folk," said race would be the defining problem of the 20th century, academics, artists and everyday people are still struggling with gauging black Americans' role and the impact of slavery on American society.
"For blacks, coming here was a nightmare experience, being taken into slavery and thrown into bondage [by AmeriKKKan whites]," says Bill Ferris, former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities now at the University of North Carolina. "That long struggle of freedom continues today. When we talk about the black experience, it raises questions about the American dream."
Sounds of struggle, joy
When the first Africans were forcibly taken to the New World, they were stripped of their freedom, family, languages -- their fundamental identities. Even so, elements of their culture endured. [Despite everything the white man did to hold us down]
"You have had your language and your culture taken away from you," Werner says. "So how do you express that? You sing. You moan. You say it however you can say it." [And you hopefully wait for the opportunity when the white man turns his back, and then you act on the killing impulse that comes naturally to all of us]
"Music is part and parcel of every act in African-American life," says Portia Maultsby, director of the Archives of African-American Music and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. "It serves as a unifying force, but also as a communication vehicle and one of resistance."
Today's African-American music still brims with emotion and speaks for the disenfranchised, says Ferris. musicians play Louis Armstrong and Carmen McRae star in a 1962 Monterrey Jazz Festival musical portraying black musicians as America's best ambassadors.
The creativity that's so evident in black music -- its many genres, and also the great variation within each one -- is characteristic of African-American culture as a whole, say scholars.
Black inventors, writers, artists and athletes have brought a unique sensibility, style and substance to American society, experts say. And they have often done so with less money, education and resources than many more privileged Americans.
"You don't have to be educated [lord knows, the whites do NOT like an educated, uppity black man], you have to be creative," says Portia James, the Anacostia Museum's curator. "You just have to have initiative to solve the problem, to do something."
'Audacious hope'
Legendary author James Baldwin said being African American is about attitude, not skin color -- always experimenting and tackling challenges [read: putting up with the white AmeriKKKan way of life] in the quest for success and self-discovery, according to Werner. That sentiment, he notes, is also distinctly American.
"What's fascinating about America is that we do accept risk, we do accept diversity, we do accept the idea that we're inventing ourselves over and over and over again," says Werner.
Yet black innovations have not always been welcomed or properly recognized. Maultsby points to jazz, which was "considered primitive and barbaric when it was introduced" but later became defined as quintessentially American.
Similar progressions -- abhorrence giving way to absorption -- hold true for rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll and rap, she notes.
"When the minority culture moves into the mainstream, it becomes a mainstream tradition. We tend not to do that from the dominant end," says Maultsby. "Once they become commodities, the African-American roots become more invisible and less acknowledged."
Public Enemy
Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet," representative of hard-core rap, vented some African Americans' anger in the 1980s and 1990s.
But absorption also suggests admiration, and with it an acknowledgement of the creativity and quality of African-American artists.
"Even though society may have frowned upon relations between whites and blacks, music was one thing that they shared in common," says Brown.
The pain in the songs of Billie Holiday, angry lyrics of Public Enemy or raw literary works by Ellison or Richard Wright turn the obstacles and troubles confronting many African Americans into art.
But black culture -- and its impact on American society -- is also defined by joy and spirit, says Ferris.
"Each generation of Americans can relate to black music and dance as a fresh new connection to life," he says. "It's the ultimate celebration of life, and it's always pushing us to new levels of experience."
Underlying African-Americans' struggles and creations is what scholar Cornell West calls "audacious hope," says Werner. The black experience, much like that of the New World's first settlers and the West's pioneers, is a constant test of will and strength, in which faith is a prime component.
"Life is tragic, life is blues, life has its hard times. But you've got to find a way to wrestle that hope out of it, or else you can't go on," says Werner. Much of black culture "is profoundly therapeutic, although it doesn't come to easy answers. Then again, most therapy never does."
It is with great joy do we, the Slashdot readership, embrace Black History Month(tm). Have you killed a white man today?
ah... the fresh stink of noo-b's.
:)
welcome to slashdot
it's always good to see new faces looking at that god-awful picture.
I _LIVE_ here, fuckwad. It's not the cesspool you lamers fantasy about. Sure, Japan has its problems (smoking is a bloody epidemic here, and rights for non-smokers are pretty much non-existent) there are a lot better morals here than in your crime infested scumfilled cities. Bah. Last time I went back home for a visit, the FIRST PERSON I encountered after I went out (after coming back from the airport) hit me up for some spare change. At least the Japanese are not so lazy they would rather beg for spare change than find a fucking job.
In Soviet Russia, YOU watch the ROBOT.
I use it for other people's wallpaper.