Robonaut 2 - Building a Robot on the International Space Station

In 2010, the Robonaut Project embarked on a multiphase mission to perform technology demonstrations onboard the International Space Station (ISS), showcasing state of the art robotics technologies through the use of Robonaut 2 (R2). This phased approach implements a strategy that allows for the use of ISS as a test bed during early development to both demonstrate capability and test technology while still making advancements in the earth based laboratories for future testing and operations in space. While R2 was performing experimental trials onboard the ISS during the first phase, engineers were actively designing for Phase 2, IntraVehicular Activity (IVA) Mobility, that utilizes a set of zerog climbing legs outfitted with grippers to grasp handrails and seat tracks. In addition to affixing the new climbing legs to the existing R2 torso, it became clear that upgrades to the torso to both physically accommodate the climbing legs and to expand processing power and capabilities of the robot were required. In addition to these upgrades, a new safety architecture was also implemented in order to account for the expanded capabilities of the robot. The IVA climbing legs not only needed to attach structurally to the R2 torso on ISS, but also required power and data connections that did not exist in the upper body. The climbing legs were outfitted with a blind mate adapter and coarse alignment guides for easy installation, but the upper body required extensive rewiring to accommodate the power and data connections. This was achieved by mounting a custom adapter plate to the torso and routing the additional wiring through the waist joint to connect to the new set of processors. In addition to the power and data channels, the integrated unit also required updated electronics boards, additional sensors and updated processors to accommodate a new operating system, software platform, and custom control system. In order to perform the unprecedented task of building a robot in space, extensive practice sessions and meticulous procedures were required. Since crew training time is at a premium, the R2 team took a skillsbased training approach to ensure the astronauts were proficient with a basic skill set while refining the detailed procedures over several practice sessions and simulations. In addition to the crew activities, meticulous ground procedures were required in order to upgrade firmware on the upper body motor drivers. The new firmware for the IVA mobility unit needed to be deployed using the old software system. This also provided an opportunity to upgrade the upper body joints with new software and allowed for limited insight into the success of the updates. Complete verification that the updated firmware was successfully loaded was not confirmed until the rewiring of the upper body torso was complete

Proceedings of the 1st Annual CUNY Games Festival

Proceedings of the CUNY Games Conference, held from January 17-18, 2014, at the CUNY Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College. Topics in Game Design - Teaching with Virtual and Augmented Realities - Writing with Games - Breaking the Magic Circle: Games & Real Life - Interactive Game Design (What\u27s Your Game Plan? - Designing Ethical Games - Games and Gender - Gaming English Language and Literature - Game, Narrative, Literacy - Teaching with Games - Games, Storytelling, and Narrative - Games and STEM - Learning by Design - Students as Game Designers - Experiencing Reality in Popular Games - Making Educational Game

The FaceBase Consortium: A comprehensive program to facilitate craniofacial research

The FaceBase Consortium consists of ten interlinked research and technology projects whose goal is to generate craniofacial research data and technology for use by the research community through a central data management and integrated bioinformatics hub. Funded by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) and currently focused on studying the development of the middle region of the face, the Consortium will produce comprehensive datasets of global gene expression patterns, regulatory elements and sequencing; will generate anatomical and molecular atlases; will provide human normative facial data and other phenotypes; conduct follow up studies of a completed genome-wide association study; generate independent data on the genetics of craniofacial development, build repositories of animal models and of human samples and data for community access and analysis; and will develop software tools and animal models for analyzing and functionally testing and integrating these data. The FaceBase website (http://www.facebase.org) will serve as a web home for these efforts, providing interactive tools for exploring these datasets, together with discussion forums and other services to support and foster collaboration within the craniofacial research community

The normalisation of drug supply: The social<i>supply</i>of drugs as the “other side” of the history of normalisation

Aims: Describes how the relative normalisation of recreational drug use in the UK has been productive of, and fused with, the relatively normalised and non-commercial social supply of recreational drugs. Methods: Semi-structured interviews with 60 social suppliers of recreational drugs in two studies (involving a student population n = 30 and general population sample n = 30). Respondents were recruited via purposive snowball sampling and local advertising. Findings: Both samples provided strong evidence of the normalised supply of recreational drugs in micro-sites of friendship and close social networks. Many social suppliers described “drift” into social supply and normalised use was suggested to be productive of supply relationships that both suppliers and consumers regard as something less than “real” dealing in order to reinforce their preconceptions of themselves as relatively non-deviant. Some evidence for a broader acceptance of social supply is also presented. Conclusions: The fairly recent context of relative normalisation of recreational drug use has coalesced with the social supply of recreational drugs in micro-sites of use and exchange whereby a range of “social” supply acts (sometimes even involving large amounts of drugs/money) have become accepted as something closer to gift-giving or friendship exchange dynamics within social networks rather than dealing proper. To some degree, there is increasing sensitivity to this within the criminal justice system

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Predictors of treatment outcomes in anxious children receiving group cognitive-behavioural therapy: Pre-treatment attention bias to threat and emotional variability during exposure tasks.

Background and objectives: Pretreatment attention bias towards threat stimuli has been shown to predict treatment outcomes following exposure-based treatments. The extent of emotional variability experienced during exposure therapy has also been found to predict better treatment outcomes in anxious adults. The present study examined whether pretreatment attention bias towards threat stimuli and greater emotional variability during exposure activities were associated with stronger treatment outcomes in anxious children receiving group-based cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Methods: Twenty-six anxious children completed a visual probe task with emotional faces, followed by a 10-week CBT program in a group format. Children completed weekly within-session exposure activities during the last 5 weeks of group CBT. Results: Pretreatment attention bias towards threat stimuli, greater emotional variability and within-session habituation during exposure activities were significantly associated with reductions in clinician- and/or parent-rated anxiety symptoms after the 10-week CBT program. Treatment responders had significantly higher peak emotional distress ratings during exposure activities. However, threat attention bias and within-session exposure measures were not significantly related. Conclusions: Pre-existing individual differences in attention bias to threat cues and the degree of emotional reactivity experienced during exposure activities are both important independent predictors of treatment outcomes for anxious children receiving group-based CBT