The Snarchitect

If your grandmother was in pain and asking for help, how would you want her robot caretaker to treat her? It may not be as long as you think until society has to confront the thorny question of robot ethics.

It’s a shorter leap than you might think, technically, from a Roomba vacuum cleaner to a robot that acts as an autonomous home-health aide, and so experts in robot ethics feel a particular urgency about these challenges. The choices that count as “ethical” range from the relatively straightforward — should Fabulon give the painkiller to Sylvia? — to matters of life and death: military robots that have to decide whether to shoot or not to shoot; self-driving cars that have to choose whether to brake or to swerve. These situations can be difficult enough for human minds to wrestle with; when ethicists think through how robots can deal with them, they sometimes get stuck, as we do, between unsatisfactory options.
Among the roboticists I spoke to, the favorite example of an ethical, autonomous robot is the driverless car, which is still in the prototype stage at Google and other companies. Wendell Wallach, chairman of the technology-and-ethics study group at Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, says that driverless cars will no doubt be more consistently safe than cars are now, at least on the highway, where fewer decisions are made and where human drivers are often texting or changing lanes willy-nilly. But in city driving, even negotiating a four-way stop sign might be hard for a robot. “Humans try to game each other a little,” Wallach says. “They rev up the engine, move forward a little, until finally someone says, ‘I’m the one who’s going.’ It brings into play a lot of forms of intelligence.” He paused, then asked, “Will the car be able to play that game?”

www.nytimes.com

Sports viewers have always been obsessed with data, and now analytics is changing the viewing experience, in real time.

Beyond internal use, this information could also be used by broadcasters during television broadcasts to give viewers a more detailed analysis of what’s going on. However, there could be issues with teams using the data for their own use versus releasing that information to the public. It’s something that the NFL is dealing with as it tests its own new player-tracking system this season with small RFID tags embedded inside the shoulder pads of every player.
Panasonic and SAP aren’t the only companies trying to track athletes during games. Last year, the MLS installed three cameras in every stadium to track player movement. The NBA did something similar, too, when it signed a deal with STATS last year to gauge player fatigue, movement and other information not previously quantifiable.
This is yet another example of new technology being used in sports to help make strategic changes and improve player technique. We’re seeing it already in the NFL, with players and coaches using Microsoft’s Surface tablet to review past plays on the bench. And at CES, this trend was prevalent from the sensor-laden basketball that helped improve our jump shot to learning about the German national soccer team using wearable trackers to make important strategic in-game decisions during the World Cup.

www.geekwire.com

Why 2014 was a big year for retail cyber-theft — especially in the U.S.

The attacks started in December 2013 with US retailer Target. Throughout 2014 other stores, including Home Depot, Staples, Sears, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom to name but a few, all fell victim to the till-tapping gangs.
As well as liberating tens of millions of credit card numbers, the attacks cost some senior executives their jobs and left those that were hit with a bill that often ran into the tens of millions of dollars to clean up. Home Depot said the bill for clearing up after its breach would hit $43m (£28m).
There were so many attacks that the FBI issued a three-page confidential warning to American retailers telling them to watch out for malicious programs aimed at them.
The key word in that last sentence is “American”. Almost all the big thefts of customer data were from large US stores.

http://www.bbc.com/

A new smart football helmet has been developed which knows how many times it, and the head contained within, have been hit. (Video, 3 mins)

Coaches from around the nation learned about the latest developments in helmet safety Sunday at the American Football Coaches Association Convention in Louisville.
It’s an initiative that Jefferson County Schools are also looking into, because as football rules and regulations evolve, so do ways to protect athletes.
Schutt Sports unveiled the “Smart Helmet” at the convention. The helmet is geared to help prevent sport head injuries.
The brand new helmet was developed by Brain Sentry, a sports sensor technology company who partnered with Schutt Sports.
CEO of Brain Sentry Greg Merril explained the new helmet development, “Just like in baseball how they count pitches to protect kids arms, this technology counts head impacts to help coaches address which players are excessively hitting with their heads.”

www.wlky.com