Month: January 2016

Boston Dynamics robots, from left to right: Little Dog (on pedestal), Spot, BigDog, WildCat, and LS3. (credit: Boston Dynamics)

As we reported in our 2016 Google preview, Alphabet's robot division is in a bit of a mess. The division was started inside Google by Android cofounder Andy Rubin, who aimed to quickly get the project up and running via an acquisition spree. He picked up Boston Dynamics, the DARPA Robotics Challenge winner Schaft, and about seven other companies. Then Andy Rubin left Google, leaving the collection of companies to fend for themselves. With no leader and not much of a direction, the group needed help.

Google has been searching for someone to replace Rubin and lead the Robotics group, and it looks like the group is finally getting some leadership in the form of Alphabet's newly renamed "X" group. A report from The New York Times says that the robot team will be moving to the X division, and Alphabet's moonshot group will "review the various projects and refocus them toward solving specific problems that would be reframed as a particular moonshot effort."

Moving the robot division into the X group reportedly wasn't Alphabet's first choice. The Information claimed Alphabet earlier tried to get Carl Bass, the CEO of Autodesk, to run the division, but questions about the group's relationship with the rest of Alphabet apparently caused problems.

Amir Hekmati (credit: FreeAmir)

As part of a prisoner swap this weekend, 32-year-old Iranian-American game developer Amir Mizra Hekmati has been released from Iranian custody after over four years of imprisonment. The US State Department confirmed yesterday that Hekmati and three other Iranian prisoners had arrived safely in Geneva, en route to a military base in Germany.

Hekmati, who was born and raised in the US, was first imprisoned in August 2011 after he purportedly confessed to high-level espionage for the US government. According to the confession, Hekmati's company, Kuma Reality Games, was working with the CIA to release "games with the aim of manipulating public opinion in the Middle East. The goal of the company in question was to convince the people of Iran and the people of the entire world that whatever the US does in other countries is a good measure."

Hekmati was initially sentenced to death in 2012, but that sentence was overturned by a higher court later that year. He was resentenced to a ten-year term after a secret trial in which Hekmati was not allowed to present a defense, according to his family.

The Democrats had their final presidential debate Sunday before the Iowa caucus in two weeks. There was the usual venom and posturing among the three candidates vying to win their party's nomination to run for president. And then there was a candidate who said there should be no encryption backdoors—or did he? Former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley couched his response during the Charleston, South Carolina debate that was livestreamed on YouTube.

Here's the dialogue after a YouTube "creator" asked about encryption.

Hi, my name's Marques Brownlee, and I've been making YouTube videos about electronics and gadgets for the past seven years.

I think America's future success is tied to getting all kinds of tech right. Tech companies are responsible for the encryption technology to protect personal data, but the government wants a backdoor into that information.

So do you think it's possible to find common ground? And where do you stand on privacy versus security?

"I believe whether it's a backdoor or a front door that the American principle of law should still hold that our federal government should have to get a warrant, whether they want to come through the backdoor or your front door," O'Malley replied.

(credit: Amazon)

In an interview with Yahoo News, Amazon has revealed a little more about its forthcoming drone-based delivery system. Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president for global public policy, said that the company has very specific targets for "Prime Air."

"So Prime Air is a future delivery service that will get packages to customers within 30 minutes of them ordering it online at Amazon.com," he told Yahoo News. "The goals we’ve set for ourselves are: The range has to be over 10 miles. These things will weigh about 55 pounds each, but they’ll be able to deliver parcels that weigh up to five pounds. It turns out that the vast majority of the things we sell at Amazon weigh less than five pounds."

And how will Amazon deal with drone haters with shotguns? Misener isn't worried. "I suppose they could shoot at trucks, too," he said. "We want to make the deliveries. And we believe that these Prime Air drones will be as normal as seeing a delivery truck driving down the street someday. So the novelty will wear off."

Did you drop something in that AGAIN? (credit: NASA)

Very occasionally, my imagination gets the better of me. When I encountered a paper entitled "How to Recover a Qubit That Has Fallen into a Black Hole," I envisioned a typical lab experiment. One student, having been given a precious quantum state, accidentally drops it into a black hole—"accidentally" in the same way that you accidentally break into the chemistry supplies cupboard and mix everything together under a fume hood just to see what will happen. Never mind, says the clearly annoyed lab instructor, who then performs some arcane maneuvers and recovers the carelessly handled qubit.

Reality has fewer students dropping quantum states into black holes but makes up for it with an excess of equally amusing theoretical physicists. The idea behind studying how to recover a qubit from a black hole is not to help future students avert a lab disaster but to understand the quantum state of a black hole.

Black holes are rather coy about what they have under their event horizons. Nothing that we send into a black hole is coming back, so the only information that comes directly from a black hole is the Hawking radiation it emits.