Thursday, September 27, 2018

Clumsy

The number and variety of sensors and actuators that A.s.a. H. Has available to it* have proven sufficient for symbol grounding** and concept formation but the present robots are best described as clumsy. We would need to deploy a larger number of sensors and actuators to address this issue.

* See, for example, my blog of 1 Oct. 2015. (note: During any given activity/experiment A.s.a. typically only makes use of a fraction of its sensors.)

** A major portion of my robotics laboratory might best be called an instrumentation lab.

Thursday, September 20, 2018

Student evaluations again

While doing some cleaning out in my office I came across some of my correspondence with ESU's former vice president Payne and with the Kansas board of regents on the subject of student evaluations. (See my blog of 2 August 2018 and the paper by Uttl, et al in Studies in Educational Evaluation, 54 (2017) 22-42.)

The future of jobs

The World Economic Forum's report The Future of Jobs 2018 (Geneva, 17 Sept. 2018) states that "By 2025 more than half of all current workplace tasks will be performed by machines..."

Monday, September 17, 2018

Councilism and a society of specialist agents

Rather than having a manager, CEO, mayor, governor, president, etc. I usually favor councilism and collective decision making. Kocher and Sutter, for example, report on experiments showing that groups make better decisions than individuals do. (January 2005 issue of the Economic Journal) Similarly, many of my A.s.a. H. AIs consist of societies of specialist agents as described previously.

Friday, September 14, 2018

More robots

A.s.a. H. can employ Dr. Kee's RileyRover and miniVEX robots (with gripper attachments) as mobile manipulators. Each robot can be fit with a couple dozen pain sensors. Assembly instructions are available at www.damienkee.com under "robots" or in Dr. Kee's books.

Monday, September 3, 2018

1 TB USB flash drive

I bought a 1 TB USB flash drive from Silkroad (through Newegg).
It works fine. Time will tell how reliable they are.