Ali Kuru

RIKEN, a natural sciences research institute in Japan, and Tokai Rubber Industries designed a robot which can pick a person off the floor to his/her wheelchair, or vice versa. This is useful in Japan, where people often sleep on futon floor bedding or relax on floor tatami mats. “Riba II” named robot is able to lift off a person weighing as much as 176 pounds (approx. 80 kg for us, the SI system users).

Aging population is a serious problem especially for developed nations, and developers of the robot are hoping to help caregivers with the problems of nursing of elderly. According to RIKEN, caregivers on average lift patients from floor bedding into wheelchairs 40 times a day, adding that the elderly nursing-care population in Japan will hit 5.69 million by 2015.

RIKEN is set to test Riba II at nursing homes in Japan, and eventually bring the bear to market with price tag around $70.000, says CNET. Most important thing here is, this could be the first robot ever find its way into our houses! Japanese might just have been invented the very ancestor of T-800; the Homo erectus of Skynet :)

Check out the video after the break to see how Riba II operates.
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Remember my complaint about how slow is DealExtreme? I wrote in a post that it would probably take more than hundred days for them to deliver my item, and I think I owe them an apology now. I forgot to mention that my item has been arrived last Saturday, 2^nd of April to be exact, which means the DealExtreme were able to deliver my item in exactly 100 days, not more :)

Congratulations to them for sucking a little less than I expected.

I visit Android Market almost everyday, but never saw this till today. Looks like Google is trying to improve the search experience with filters on the Market. It is a nice touch, but it would be really great to see some other filters like download count or star rating.

And, it’s really weird not seeing anything related to “run free”, which obviously is my search term, on the result page. Apparently, they need to tweak their search algorithm a bit too :)

When my recently married brother asked my help for recovering his missing photos of their honeymoon from the memory card of their camera, I said him “don’t worry, I’ll figure something out”.

Because I always delete files with shift+delete combination, there have been several occasions in the past that I needed to un-delete the files which I mistakenly made disappear. In fact, once I deleted a directory containing all my close-to-finish PhD studies – years of work has gone in a blink of an eye! Thanks to Dropbox, which is a real life saver by the way, I was able to recover them all.

You probably know that files still remain on the filesystem in a masked state, even if you think you permanently deleted them. That in my mind, I always have a recovery software installed on my computers in case of an emergency.
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I’m using Firefox for almost 6 years now – since the v1.0 – and consider myself a fan but, after the 4th stable, I’m thinking that it may be the time for me to migrate to a better browser, like Chrome. Actually this is not the first time I’m thinking to switch to Chrome, which attracted my attention even from it’s initial release. Only thing preventing me is its lack of native proxy management, particularly SOCKS support. Hope they implement that future soon and save me from Firefox.

Anyway, here are the problems I’m encountering with Firefox 4 so far:

• It is slow.
  I read everywhere how fast Firefox 4 is, beats this on X test, smokes that on Y etc. Unfortunately, this is not the case for me. In my experience, Firefox 4 is a memory hungry piece of junk. I don’t care how fast is its new javascript engine or how effective its fancy hardware acceleration techniques, if it needs to consume more than half of the installed memory on my system to do that. I’m getting hard time to understand how a software, which drives the system to a swapping death, can be considered “fast”?
  I know, Firefox may seem slower to me because of my old PC and the plugins I’m using, but I’m not going to accept these as excuses. If I’m able to use the latest version of Chrome (+plugins) without any problems on the same computer and was satisfied with the performance of the previous version of Firefox, it’s the Mozilla to blame, not my PC.
• It fails to render Helvetica fonts correctly.
  Although it has been a known issue in the beta releases, looks like Mozilla didn’t care to fix it in the stable. Annoying.
• F6 is not working.
  I like using keyboard shortcuts and F6 was one of my favorites. It’s function was ( and still is on other major browsers like Safari, Chrome and Opera) to highlight the address bar for input. Now it only selects the current tab. Useless and annoying.

DealExtreme is one of those Hong Kong online retailers which you can find a lot of goodies at no price with free shipping. I’ve bought a lot of things from them in the past and, although their service was little bit slower than usual when considered to local sources, I was overall happy with their service. Their support were able respond you in a couple of days and they always returned with a reasonable solution.

Unfortunately, they appear to left those good days far behind.
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Our ridiculous consistency about nuclear energy as a nation despite the recent events finally made its way to international mainstream media :)

Wish the article published today on New York Times was a fine piece of satirical humor. On the contrary, it contains the sad but true facts about our ignorance on nuclear energy, from top government officials to the average Joe.

I quote:

“Nothing, absolutely nothing has changed in 25 years,” Mr. Gurbuz said Monday during an interview, referring to the Turkish government’s response to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, fallout from which hit Turkey’s Black Sea coast.

According to a Greenpeace report published in 1996, Cahit Aral, the trade minister at the time of the Chernobyl meltdown, coaxed Turks to drink tea from the contaminated harvest, telling them that “a little radiation is good for you.” Mr. Aral, now 84, drank the tea on television to persuade compatriots to follow his example. The then-prime minister, Turgut Ozal, proclaimed that “radioactive tea tastes better,” while Kenan Evren, then president, claimed radiation was good for the bones.

Even without a nuclear reactor, Turkey in 1999 rated a level 3 incident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event scale, classified as “serious,” when a container of highly radioactive Cobalt-60 turned up at an Istanbul junkyard, Mr. Gurbuz said.

You can read the full article here.