Schwanksta :: Fuzzy Journalism

Note: I wrote this for a class

You can hear it from at least 30 feet away, a high-pitched buzz saw noise confusing you on your way to class.

“Nnnnnnnnnnnn-whrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”

From what I can tell, that’s the sound of initiative. It’s also the sound of an ECO 8 model helicopter starting up.

When Miles Moody, a second-year mechanical engineering student at the University of Florida, realized his summer robotics course had been cut, he took matters into his own hands.

Using eBay to procure the parts, Moody built a remote-controlled helicopter to learn more about robotics engineering, the field he wants to get into.

“You learn a lot by just taking it apart, fixing it and putting it back together,” he said of his project.

Teaching yourself can be costly, though. He estimates that he initially spent $300 on the kit (eBay, of course), plus at least an additional $100 in parts (also eBay). In fact, he’s created a bit of a side business on the auction site, selling things like video game systems to keep his ‘copter funded.

“I’ll sell anything I can buy for cheap,” he said.

The kit was used, and an 11-year-old design, but he likes it because the company hasn’t changed it since.

“That’s German engineering for you,” he said.

It uses an electric, brushless motor, which won’t wear out; a lithium polymer battery, which is a $100 battery he got for $25 off eBay; 2.4ghz wireless control, like a cordless phone; digital gyroscope to stabilize the rear rotors (”So you don’t have to constantly adjust it yourself,” he explains); and four servos, which control the various movement aspects (tail rotor pitch, pitch of main blades, as well as forward and back motions).

“Unfortunately, I’m not that great of a pilot right now,” he said, embarrassed, hovering it a little below the lip of the stadium.

He wants to add a camera to the design, meaning Moody could potentially control the device without seeing it. He’s already attached his camera phone and taken an aerial video over the stadium lawn, peering toward Ben Hill Griffin Stadium.

While the camera would be an accomplishment in its own right, Moody has more interesting plans for his helicopter. He wants to turn it into a fully autonomous drone.

He says the military has been into rotary systems lately, not only jet propulsion. The reason is rotary systems, like his ECO 8, can hover in an area and get a 360-degree view.

He’s very convinced of the future for fully autonomous vehicles like the one he’s building. He says camera-mounted helicopters helped the search after Katrina, allowing rescuers to see inside places they couldn’t reach.

He says he wants to get into defense research, partly because his father, Joseph R. Moody, created the Grip Pod: a vertical gun grip that extends a bi-pod, currently in use by the military and law enforcement.

“I guess I’m following in my dad’s footsteps,” he said, grinning.

Eventually, he wants to use a $2,000 research grant from his National Merit scholarship in a robotics lab at UF. But first, he has to get into it.

Here’s the video from Moody’s camera phone:

I know that it might seem I’m merely offended as a journalist on this one, but I’d say it’s offensive in the most universal sense. It seems sophomore State Sen. Jeremy Ring has decided that literacy, liberal arts and even business are no longer quite as important in Florida, and has proposed a tiered system for distributing the state’s lottery-funded scholarships.

In this brave new world of scholarship dividends, any student eligible for 100 percent tuition under the current law, yet not majoring in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, education or a health profession, is worth approximately 30 percent less to the state than his or her brethren.

Yeesh, now there’s a number to make you feel good about yourself. I guess you really can put a price on an education like mine, and that price is 80 percent of my tuition, plus $237.50 per semester for books and other materials. Those in the ostensibly “more important” fields, however, would get 110 percent of their tuition covered, and $330 per semester.

Here’s the kicker, though: those eligible for 75 percent tuition coverage currently (”Florida Medallion Scholars”) would now get an 85 percent scholarship if they go into these technical fields. Meanwhile, those poor bastards following their hearts and minds in other directions will get shafted, only receiving 55 percent coverage. For those of you playing along at home, that’s less than half of what a top-tier engineering student would get.

What blows me away is that despite the effort that goes into achieving a full Bright Futures ride, Ring is willing to give those with lower test scores and GPAs a larger slice of the scholarship pie — based solely on what you want to study. It’s just antithetical to the very idea of its scholarship; the state should be fostering education in all forms, not just those they choose. From its own website:

This Florida Lottery-funded scholarship rewards students for their academic achievements during high school by providing funding for them to pursue postsecondary educational and career goals in Florida.

I don’t see anything about abusing the system to promote specific careers anywhere in there, but maybe I missed it.

So this is what Sen. Ring really wants to say to Florida students not interested in his pre-approved paths: “I don’t care how intelligent you are, study this or cough up.” Awesome. If the state wants to pay some of its brightest students less, out-of-state scholarships might suddenly seem a whole lot more tempting. The last thing Florida needs is a brain drain and a geek influx.

Don’t think I’ve forgotten about business majors, either. Apparently, they don’t make the cut for top-tier degree seekers. Now tell me: how many people who want to get into business will settle for a sharp cut in scholarship funding? Probably not the brightest of the bunch.

Thankfully, the bill has no current House sponsors yet, and I hope it stays that way. What a whackjob.

Read the St. Pete Times’ The Buzz article here. Read the Alligator’s coverage here

According to an article in the AP, lead could be responsible for some of the mental decline we’ve come to expect as a “normal” part of aging.

Though careful to avoid giving the theory too much credence, the article says research indicates exposure to high levels of lead in the past can cause anywhere from 2 to 6 years of equivalent mental aging. From the article:

In brief, the scientists found that the higher the lifetime lead dose, the poorer the performance across a wide variety of mental functions, like verbal and visual memory and language ability. From low to high dose, the difference in mental functioning was about the equivalent of aging by two to six years.

“We think that’s a large effect,” Schwartz said.

Hu and his colleagues took a slightly different approach in a 2004 study of 466 men with an average age of 67. Those men took a mental-ability test twice, about four years apart on average. Those with the highest bone lead levels showed more decline between exams than those with smaller levels, with the effect of the lead equal to about five years of aging.

Nobody is claiming that lead is the sole cause of age-related mental decline, but it appears to be one of several factors involved, Hu stressed.

Read the article here.

I know there are a whole host of factors associated with mental decline, and according to the article nobody knows for sure what really causes it, but reading this makes me thankful that my generation has grown up without a lot of the same pollutants (including lead) that even my parents’ generation had to endure.

Legislation introduced Friday in Maryland that would redefine marriage as “…between two people, not otherwise prohibited from marrying,” has sparked state senators to draft a constitutional amendment in the name of “protecting marriage.”

Maryland’s Marriage Protection Act, designed to amend the state’s constitution to explicitly define marriage as between a man and a woman, will be voted on in the November general election by the state’s citizens. The bill, sponsored by 8 Republican state senators, would effectively neuter the all-Democrat-sponsored Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act.

The latter act would alter existing family law so that the state’s gays could marry as soon as October, and provides a clause that allows religious institutions that would otherwise feel pressured into performing gay marriage ceremonies to refuse based on First Amendment grounds.

SB169, Maryland’s Marriage Protection Act
Article XV – Miscellaneous
8.(A) ONLY A MARRIAGE BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN IS VALID IN THIS
STATE.
(B) A CIVIL UNION OR RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS OF THE
SAME SEX, BY WHATEVER NAME OR TITLE, THAT CONFERS THE BENEFIT OF
MARRIAGE IS NOT VALID IN THIS STATE.

Read Maryland’s Marriage Protection Act here.

Article - Family Law
§2–201.
(A) Only a marriage between [a man and a woman] TWO PEOPLE, NOT
OTHERWISE PROHIBITED FROM MARRYING, is valid in this State.

(B) THIS SECTION MAY NOT BE CONSTRUED TO INVALIDATE OTHER
SECTIONS IN THIS TITLE

Read the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act here.

Well, I guess either way marriage is getting protected. You can thank the inbuilt, twisted sense of humor that politicians all seem to share for that.

Read more: Baltimore Sun article, Washington Post article, 365Gay article.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the future of journalism as a profession, and everything I read, as well as everything I hear from my professors, leads me to believe that a journalist can’t survive without showing off their tech skills. 

Thankfully, that’s one area where I shine. 

Until now, however, I’ve just considered blogs a dinky tool for Mary Jo Smith to tell the world about her coinciding obsessions with Battle Star Galactica and her 2-year-old black tabby, Mr. Kittenpants. I can almost visualize the black, sci-fi color scheme and the section devoted to pictures of the poor creature (the cat, I mean) dressed as characters from her favorite shows.

But I’ve been tinkering with the idea, and I think I see the value of a website like this. Everyone’s not quite comfortable with the feel of it yet, but it’s definitely a simple and flexible way to publish news and opinions.

I’ll admit, even I get most of my news via RSS feeds and the Internet in general. I try to read at least my school paper, the Alligator, every day, but it’s really nothing amazing. Shining spots sometimes, but for the most part, I should be reading something else. The most readily available printed alternative, The Gainesville Sun, isn’t that much better.

So how can I continue to belittle online news blogs while simultaneously reading them more than I’d care to admit? I guess I can’t. So I’ve joined their ranks.

This phrase appears in a piece by the Asia times regarding US involvement in Muslim insurgencies in southern Thailand. The relevant part?

US and Thai officials will no doubt continue to try to disassociate the CIA’s torture prisons with the Thai military’s controversial tactics in southern Thailand, including the implementation of what some rights advocates refer to as “US-style” torture techniques. It is telling, they say, that the US has in the main remained silent about their Thai allies’ sustained and by now well-documented use of torture while interrogating Muslim militant suspects.

Read the article here

It’s a pretty good article, though I confess I haven’t read much on the US using Thailand as a stop off on the whirlwind US torture tour. Note: I first found mention of this article on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog, who got it from The Crossed Pond. Both sites mistakenly used the term “American-style torture.”