04-04-14 -- James Corbett - Michael Belfiore (MP3 & VIDEO LOADED)
Hour 1 - 3
2014-04-04 Hour 1 James Corbett from Ernest Hancock on Vimeo.
James Corbett has been living and working in Japan since 2004. He started The Corbett Report website in 2007 as an outlet for independent critical analysis of politics, society, history, and economics. Since then he has written, recorded and edited over 1000 hours of audio and video media for the website, including a weekly podcast and several regular online video series. He produces video reports for GRTV GRTV, the video production arm of the Centre for Research on Globalization, and BoilingFrogsPost.com, the website of noted FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. He is also an editorial writer for The International Forecaster, the weekly e-newsletter created by the recently deceased economic analyst Bob Chapman.
His work has been carried online by a wide variety of websites, his video productions are broadcast on the Next News Network in the US, and his videos have garnered over 15,000,000 views on YouTube alone. His satirical piece on the discrepancies in the official account of September 11th, “9/11: A Conspiracy Theory” was posted to the web on September 11, 2011 and has so far been viewed over 2 million times.
For more information about Corbett and his background, please listen to Episode 163 of The Corbett Report podcast, Meet James Corbett:
Uploaded on Sep 11, 2011
Transcript and sources: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=2594
Everything you ever wanted to know about the 9/11 conspiracy theory in under 5 minutes.
Hour 2
2014-04-04 Hour 2 Michael Belfiore from Ernest Hancock on Vimeo.
Michael Belfiore is an author, journalist, and speaker on the innovations shaping our world. He has written about game-changing technologies for the New York Times, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian, Air & Space, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and other outlets. He is an International Aerospace Journalist of the Year Award finalist.
Michael has appeared as a commentator on the Fox Business Network, Bloomberg Radio and TV, CNN, CTV’s Canada AM, NPR’s Marketplace and Morning Edition, Showtime’s Penn & Teller: BS!, and C-SPAN. He has delivered his message of change to audiences at Noblis, Medtronic, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Rutgers University, and other organizations.
Michael’s Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space is the first book to chronicle the birth of the commercial space age and show how innovative companies are radically changing how we reach space and creating potentially vast new markets in the process.
His book The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs is the first book to go behind the scenes at the Pentagon agency that gave us the Internet, the first satellite positioning system, and many other game-changing innovations.
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Aeon Magazine published my extended essay on humanoid robots today.
At 3.7k words, it’s feature length, and enough room for me to go into depth about the state of the art of these machines that are poised to invade our lives, and what the future holds for them.
The setting is the DARPA Robotics Challenge, or DRC, Trials held near Miami in December. Sixteen teams from around the world brought their robots to compete in such apparently mundane tasks as walking across uneven terrain, opening doors, and…driving a car.
But this is just the beginning. If the DRC goes the way of DARPA’s autonomous car races, we’ll see these bots clomping around in our streets, workplaces, and homes within a few years. They’ll respond to high-level commands from humans who direct them from afar, rather than remote-controlling them in the conventional sense.
Are we ready for autonomous humanoid robots? Like it or not, they’re coming.
From my story:
The robots of the DRC will be back on the field as early as this December, most likely much, much more capable than before, after their teams have a further year to work on improving the hardware and software that drives them. The eight best teams from the DRC Trials are in line for DARPA funding to help them along, but many of the others, including the all-volunteer team Mojavaton, will continue on their own dime, undaunted. Immediately at stake is a $2 million prize from DARPA. But more than that, the competition promises to launch yet another DARPA project from the realm of science fiction into the mainstream by once again proving the seemingly impossible to be, in fact, possible. The repercussions will be profound – our squeamishness about autonomous machines notwithstanding.
Hour 3
2014-04-04 Hour 3 Michael Belfiore from Ernest Hancock on Vimeo.
Space Travel and Exploration
Mobility Testbed Rover Completes First 100-Meter Drive Test
04-04-2014 • Astrobotic
Astrobotic’s rover development group at Carnegie Mellon University is developing the Mobility Testbed – a rover to facilitate testing representative of the rover that will fly on Astrobotic’s mission to the Moon’s Lacus Mortis region.
Space Travel and Exploration
Moon Express - We Return
04-04-2014 • Moon Express
WE ARE BLAZING A TRAIL TO THE MOON TO UNLOCK ITS MYSTERIES AND RESOURCES FOR THE BENEFIT OF LIFE ON EARTH AND OUR FUTURE IN SPACE.
Space Travel and Exploration
Map Registration Sensor Package
04-04-2014 • Astrobotic
Map registration is a technique that matches (“registers”) a location in an image to the identical location on a map. Astrobotic’s landing technology registers high-quality, real-time camera images taken during the lander’s descent with terrain maps
Space Travel and Exploration
Moon Express Unveils Breakthrough “MX-1” Commercial Lunar Lander
04-04-2014 • Moon Express
Moon Express, Inc., a privately funded lunar resources company, unveiled its “MX-1” lunar lander spacecraft today as a breakthrough robotic space vehicle capable of a multitude of applications including delivering scientific and commercial payloads t