Word: pollacks
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...look a little closer at the work of researchers Hod Lipson and Jordan Pollack, you'd see their robot creation isn't ready yet to rule the universe. Even compared with other robots, it's primitive: using only four basic parts--plastic cylinders and ball joints, simple circuitry and small motors, along with rules for friction and gravity--it designed little self-propelled crawlers, like the toddler's insect...
Other scientists have created similar robots in their computers, to say nothing of systems intelligent enough to play championship chess, but Pollack and Lipson took a giant step out of the virtual world. After they hooked their computer to a $50,000 commercial plastic model-making machine, it produced actual offspring, not just a model on a computer screen. The only human intervention was installing the robot's little motor and computer-programmed microchip ("neurons...
...sheer non-fiction of the scene in the lab of Drs. Jordan B. Pollack and Hod Lipson at Brandeis gives one a metaphysical chill. Their primitive little creature, offspring of their robot, has one ability only: It crawls. Dr. Lipson tells the New York Times that the robot "walks something like a crab. It looks like it's crawling on the floor." This sounds eerily familiar...
...William Pollack, a psychologist who examines bullying in his book Real Boys' Voices, agrees that intimidation is too often rewarded. "Aggression, homophobia and violent behavior are looked up to in boys," he says. "Being artistic or musical is not." He cautions, however, that not all child bullies are the cool kids--some are among the most depressed students in a class and may be reacting to being bullied themselves. Pollack is also worried that the phenomenon is on the rise, partly because families spend less time together, which leaves boys fewer outlets for productive communication. "It's a national epidemic...
Curiously, neither new book asks much specifically of the fathers and other men who are so often absent in the daily lives of today's boys. Sommers blames women for the boy crisis while never asking dads to step up to the plate. And Pollack's boys in crisis would surely be helped by strong examples of true manliness...