MY WRITING JOURNAL

Friday, October 27

Have you ever had a drink served by a robot? How about a pair of robots? That's the idea behind Royal Caribbean's Bionic Bar, an installation found on several ships in the line's fleet. It offers both classic and custom drinks mixed, shaken and stirred by what looks like something straight out of "The Jetsons."

When it debuted the Bionic Bar, Royal Caribbean was no stranger to groundbreaking bar concepts, having launched its Rising Tide Bar — a levitating watering hole — just a couple of years prior.

The first Bionic Bar rolled out on Quantum of the Seas in 2014, with the metal armlike bartenders going by names like "Shaken" and "Stirred." Since then, the bar has taken up residence on nine ships in the fleet.

Here's what you'll experience during a visit to the Bionic Bar.

The Bionic Bar, developed in partnership with Italian robotics company Makr Shakr, is a bar where the drinks are made by robots — robotic arms, to be exact. They extend from a back wall, where they use shakers to catch liquor dispensed from bottles that hang upside down overhead.

Once they've collected all of the requested ingredients from an order, they shake and rotate the metal cups before dumping them, unceremoniously and often sloppily, into plastic ones.

Although many passengers have criticized the bar for taking jobs from real people, crew members still need to clean the area and replenish bottles of spirits as they run low.

The Bionic Bar is a place you'd likely visit once, just to say you did it, rather than a bar that you'd go back to again and again. It piques cruisers' interest for sure, but once the gimmick has worn off, you'll find better-made drinks — and obviously more friendly, personalized service — elsewhere on board.

There can also be a bit of a backlog at peak times, which can make for a frustrating experience. READ MORE...

Pole Jumper

AI Becoming More Secretive

A damning assessment of 10 key AI foundation models in a new transparency index is stoking new pressure on AI developers to share more information about their products — and on legislators and regulators to require such disclosures.

Why it matters: The Stanford, MIT and Princeton researchers who created the index say that unless AI companies are more forthcoming about the inner workings, training data and impacts of their most advanced tools, users will never be able to fully understand the risks associated with AI, and experts will never be able to mitigate them.

The big picture: Self-regulation hasn't moved the field toward transparency. In the year since ChatGPT kicked the AI market into overdrive, leading companies have become more secretive, citing competitive and safety concerns."Transparency should be a top priority for AI legislation," according to a paper the researchers published alongside their new index.

Driving the news: A Capitol Hill AI forum led by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer Tuesday afternoon will put some of AI's biggest boosters and skeptics in the same room, as Congress works to develop AI legislation.

Details: The index measures models based on 100 transparency indicators, covering both the technical and social aspects of AI development, with only 2 of 10 models scoring more than 50% overall.

All 10 models had major transparency holes, and the mean score for the models is 37 out of 100. "None release information about the real-world impact of their systems," one of the co-authors, Kevin Klyman, told Axios.

Because 82 of the 100 criteria are met by at least one developer, the index authors say there are dozens of options for developers to copy or build on the work of their competitors to improve their own transparency.

The researchers urge policymakers to develop precise definitions of transparency requirements,. They advise large customers of AI companies to push for more transparency during contract negotiations — or partner with their peers to "to increase their collective bargaining power." READ MORE...

Hikers

USA Leads the World in Purchase of Illegal Drugs

THE TOP REASONS WHY PEOPLE USE ILLEGAL DRUGS...

1) Social Glorification
2) Peer Pressure
3) Self-Medication
4) Grieving After Loss
5) Reducing Stress
6) Thrill Seeking
7) Boredom

In a recent report:
The World Health Organization's survey of legal and illegal drug use in 17 countries, including the Netherlands and other countries with less stringent drug laws, shows Americans report the highest level of cocaine and marijuana use.

How does it feel to live in a country that has the highest consumption of illegal drug use?

Not all these drug users are wealthy and can afford their addition habit, so they must steal items to sell in order to pay for drugs.

BY DEFAULT - this raises the level of crime throughout the United States.

Can you imagine what all the illegal immigrants are going to be thinking when they finally realize they have entered a country with such a high drug use...

Maybe they won't care... I mean they are probably leaving a country because of the crime that results from a high drug use... I mean... it will be like they never left...

If there is that much drug use going on in the USA, what do these people do when they go to work... as I am sure some of them are working?

Are they physically capable of building a quality product?
Could they be a pilot for one of our major airline companies?
Could they be a teacher?
Or perhaps a judge, trying to render a critical decision?

I agree it would be hard to tell as most of them have had years of practice hiding their addiction.

Is drug addiction any different than alcohol addiction?

How many drivers do you think there are each weekend, driving home after a night of drinking, under the influence of alcohol or drugs or both?

Why is AMERICA such a drug capital???

What did we do or didn't do to cause this to happen in the greatest country in the world?

Maybe the USA is no longer the greatest country in the world...

EVER THINK ABOUT THAT?

Pandas

New Super lens Technique

Researchers have developed a potentially revolutionary superlens technique that once seemed impossible to see things four times smaller than even the most modern microscopes have seen before.

Known as the ‘diffraction limit’ because the diffraction of light waves at the tiniest levels has prevented microscopes from seeing things smaller than those waves, this barrier once seemed unbreakable.

Many have tried to peer below this optical barrier using a technique that researchers in the field term ‘superlensing,” including making customized lenses out of novel materials. But all have gathered too much light.

Now, a team of physicists from the University of Sydney says they have discovered a viable path that peeks beyond the diffraction limit by a factor of four times, allowing researchers to see things smaller than ever seen before. And the way they did, it is like nothing anyone else has tried.

“We have now developed a practical way to implement superlensing without a super lens,” said Dr. Alessandro Tuniz from the School of Physics and University of Sydney Nano Institute and the study’s lead author, in a press release announcing the achievement.

To accomplish this feat, the researchers placed their light probe a distance from the sample they wanted to image and collected high-resolution and low-resolution information.

According to the release, the probe gathered light “at terahertz frequency at millimetre wavelength, in the region of the spectrum between visible and microwave.” READ MORE...