The twin Mars rovers are getting wiser with age.
Engineers have transmitted new flight software to the rovers’ onboard computers – just in time for the third anniversary of their landings. The software is aimed at boosting their intelligence and independence so that they can roll around the Red Planet with less help from humans.
“We’re teaching an old dog new tricks,” said John Callas, the mission project manager with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the NASA agency in charge of the rovers.
Among the rovers’ new skills is the ability to automatically recognize and transmit to Earth photographs that they take of swirling dust devils or floating clouds. They can also independently decide whether it is safe to extend their robotic arms to sample rocks.
Before, scientists had to painstakingly dissect thousands of images just to find the frames they need and decide for the rovers whether to use their arms. The high-tech upgrades should help save time – as much as a day because scientists on Earth don’t have to study a rock before sending commands to the robot to use science instruments on it.
If successful, the changes could get incorporated into future Mars missions.
Spirit and Opportunity were also fitted with a new navigation system that allows them to think several steps ahead when faced with an obstacle, allowing them to back out of a dead end or even navigate a maze on their own, Callas said. The robot geologists have previously tackled one problem at a time.
Wikipedia blocks entire nation: Web encyclopedia Wikipedia has inadvertently blocked people in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar from editing and contributing entries at least four times since November, computer logs from the site show.
Visitors still could read articles but they weren’t able to participate – a crucial task for a collaborative encyclopedia whose core premise is to allow anyone to add, edit or even delete entries, regardless of expertise.
Wikipedia administrators had responded to an unusually high level of spam and fraudulent posts by blocking contributions from the numeric Internet address tied to those posts.
But that resulted in the accidental blocking of the entire nation because Qatar’s sole telecom, Q-Tel, funnels all Internet traffic through that single address, a practice that allows the country to monitor and censor its users, said David Gerard, Wikipedia’s London-based spokesman. Administrators reversed the block once they discovered the scope.
“Our apologies to the people of Qatar,” Gerard said on Wednesday. “It was a mistake. We won’t do it again – unless somebody slips up, in which case it will be remedied quickly.”
Energy-rich Qatar, the size of Connecticut with about 900,000 inhabitants, is the Middle East’s wealthiest country on a per-capita basis. It is the home of the Al-Jazeera satellite TV network and the U.S. military’s Central Command forward headquarters overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Wikipedia’s block logs provided by Gerard show Qataris also were shut out of participating in the encyclopedia’s news pages, portals, articles and all other forms of posting on Nov. 22, for 48 hours; on Nov. 25, for 31 hours; and Dec. 28 for 24 hours.
Amazon treads on trail Google abandoned: Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. is trying to beef up its user-driven research site, just weeks after Google Inc. abandoned its 4-year-old effort.
Amazon’s Askville.com site, like others in the online answer service niche, allows visitors to post questions to be answered by other users.
Askville has been in testing for a few months and opened to the general public in December. Like leader Yahoo Answers, Askville is free, and participants can earn points based on the quality of answers they provide.
Participants will also earn a virtual currency called “Quest Coins,” which Amazon says will be redeemed for unspecified prizes on the still-inactive Questville.com.
The new answer service is the latest in a growing portfolio of Web-based services from Amazon, which is best known for selling a vast array of consumer goods.
“We’ve got different types of customers who use our Web sites and our technology,” Amazon spokesman Craig Berman said. “I think Askville is a service for a new type of customer, for people who want to find information quickly, easily and inexpensively.”
Another of Amazon.com Inc.’s Web offerings – the Mechanical Turk research service, where users collectively solve labor-intensive tasks like identifying specific objects in pictures and translating text – will play a part in Askville by guaranteeing at least one answer for each question asked, according to Askville’s Web journal.
Amazon also operates a separate search engine, called A9. But Amazon has dropped some of A9’s most widely touted features, including the ability to remember everything a user has ever searched for and a service that showed detailed, street-level images of major cities.
Askville’s public unveiling quickly followed November’s announcement that Internet search leader Google was dropping a similar service.
New York tries to map cell dead zones: Ever wanted to stuff that “Can you hear me now?” guy into the trunk of your car and take him on a tour of those maddening spots where your cell phone won’t work?
One telecommunications company has plans for a mechanical equivalent.
New York’s taxi commission recently authorized Swedish mobile-phone equipment maker LM Ericsson to place mobile sensors in the trunks of at least 50 cabs in an attempt to better map dead zones in wireless networks.
The small devices, about the size of a cigar box, will automatically feed information about signal strength and clarity to engineers.
Because taxis in New York are on the road all day and all night, and ostensibly reach every corner of the city, Ericsson executives said they can cheaply cover vast amounts of territory with limited effort.
Ericsson has set up similar programs in several other cities since the 1990s using a variety of vehicles.
“We have used trains, trucks, buses, delivery vehicles, limousines, pretty much anything that is moving and has electricity in it,” said Niklas Kylvag, Ericsson’s manager of fleet services.
“I have myself done testing in the Swiss Alps with this on my back at a ski resort.”
Kylvag said he likes the taxi best “because of the randomness in its circulation.”
Despite its relative compactness and plethora of tall places to put an antenna, getting a strong signal into every corner of the nation’s most populous city isn’t as easy as it might sound. Kylvag said finding just the right pattern of radio frequencies to spread over a calling area is an art still being mastered by network engineers.
Laptops coming to Rwandan students: Rwanda is the eighth developing country to join the One Laptop Per Child initiative aimed at giving away inexpensive computers to all young students.
The nonprofit project said Wednesday it will provide Rwanda with initial test laptops and technical support at no cost within a few days.
Starting late this summer, Rwanda will begin receiving hundreds of thousands of computers at an initial cost of about $150 apiece. The government will cover the cost, with a goal of providing one laptop per child to all primary school children within five years.
The laptops come as part of an agreement reached during a meeting Tuesday between the central African nation’s president, Paul Kagame, and Nicholas Negroponte, who launched the initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab two years ago.
Similar agreements have been reached with Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Thailand and Uruguay. Organizers of the Cambridge, Mass.-based project are in talks with several other countries.
Though initial units now cost about $150, the computer developed by the project has been known as the $100 laptop because of the ultra-low cost its creators eventually hope to achieve through mass production.
MIT formed One Laptop as a nonprofit organization to oversee the project, which seeks to improve education by giving children brightly colored computers that have wireless capabilities and sport a hand-pulled mechanism for charging batteries.
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