Archive for the ‘Nature’ Category:
Halls Gap
Halls Gap
Took a weekend to go up the Halls Gap in the Grampians for a bit of time away. The drive wasn’t all that hard and roughly 3 hours out of Melbourne isn’t all that much to ask anyway. We did have a bit of trouble finding our way back to the M8 after we entered ballarat but that’s wasn’t too much of a drama.
I used to do a lot of bush walking back in high school and the Grampians was our place of choice, I’m not certain exactly why since there were other places we could have gone, the Dandenongs for one. But going back brought back quite a few good memories of the place and my time doing The Duke of Edinburgh Award.
We stayed at Gang Gang villas which was in our opinion absolutely excellent, the location is not too far out of the main halls gap town, has a very snug fireplace and layout, beds, cleanliness of the place were all top notch. Couldn’t recommend enough.
We did a few walks but because of the bush fires earlier this year most of the walking tracks are closed. But it was good to see a lot of the regrowth happening around the area.
Leading such a busy life I find it easy to forget the feeling of doing nothing and the sounds of silence, standing at the top of Mt William (not near the communications tower with the generator) and walking a little distance to the right of the lookout towards the edge I found total silence, I couldn’t even hear my own heart beat. It was for a single moment there was nothing and you were looking at absolutely everything that your eye could see, it may sound confusing to you but it was silence and peace to me at the same time and all together very relaxing.
Between climbing mountains or looking at the waterfalls we got to cook our own simple meals and just read, watch a bit of T.V (very little, Sunday night was the most) listen to music. I do feel a little guilty for going all that way and not experiencing more but it was jus so good to sit back and do nothing in particular, to wake up three days straight with an agenda for that day, nothing that had to be completed.
Although returning to Melbourne was a necessary evil the break made coping (for me) with the rest of the semester that little bit easier, but I guess that everything has a compromise, I am going to be be flat out this week with assignments which isn’t fun when you find yourself staying at Uni till 10pm at night 3 days a week.
Buy hey…that’s life.
Ethical Robots
I have just finished a semester doing a subject called ‘Professional Issues in Information Technology‘ which I found immensely fascinating and out of curiosity and a break from exam study I started looking up some topics relating to it on the Internet and I came across this article:
No sex please, robot, just clean the floor
I’ll just mention a few good quotes here:
“We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots.”
…identified key areas that include: ensuring human control of robots; preventing illegal use; protecting data acquired by robots; and establishing clear identification and traceability of the machines.
“Scientists must start analysing these kinds of questions and seeing if laws or regulations are needed to protect the citizen,” said Verruggio. “Robots will develop strong intelligence, and in some ways it will be better than human intelligence.
How far should robots be allowed to influence people’s lives? How can accidents be avoided? Can deliberate harm be prevented? And what happens if robots turn out to be sexy? “The question is what authority are we going to delegate to these machines?” said Professor Ronald Arkin, a roboticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “Are we, for example, going to give robots the ability to execute lethal force, or any force, like crowd control?”
The whole idea is that there will be a team drawing up a code of ethics for both robots/AI and the scientists who create them.
I totally agree with the article above but there are few things that got me thinking that I want to elaborate on.
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Scientific Whaling
I have a feeling of shock and disgust when I see pictures and film of the Japanese on their scientific whaling expeditions it, for me it was just my gut reaction saying that it just doesn’t make any sense, but since I’m a rational person I think that there are more plausible reasons why they don’t seem to be able to amply justify what they are doing. Since it is a scientific program a good measurement of its usefulness would be the quality of the output of papers that they are producing.
I’ll just summarise it here:
- In the 18 years that JARPA 1 has been running, it has produced 55 papers can be remotely classified as credible
- 14 of those 55 paper are relevant to scientific whaling
- 4 out of the 14 papers require the hunting and killing of whales to produce results
- How many whales were killed in 18 years: 6800
- Whales per credible scientific paper produced: 1700