Word: vacuumers
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...that is how it is: the Pakistan Muslim League and the PPP combined normally get more than 50% of the popular vote, but now their camps are apathetic, producing one of the dullest campaigns in memory. What Musharraf did not expect was the force that has filled the vacuum: an alliance of six hard-line religious parties that calls itself the Muttahidda Majlis-e-Amal (MMA). The MMA is volubly anti- American, as Sumbal, the five-year-old anti-Yankee rabble-rouser, demonstrates. More worrisome for Musharraf: it has also become a focus for popular discontent against...
...There’s good reason for the display, but I hope people will learn about events in a way that doesn’t place them in a vacuum,” he added...
...meet Roomba, a new housecleaning robot spawned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab and built by a Somerville, Mass., company called iRobot. Roomba's function is a humble one: it's designed to vacuum your living room while you're otherwise engaged. But Roomba also represents a technological watershed: it's the first robot ever built that is designed to live in your home, serve a useful purpose and be priced for the mass market--at $199, it costs about the same as a mid-range vacuum cleaner. Roomba isn't quite Rosey the Robot...
...robot is essentially a computer with a body, but iRobot wanted to market its robots as household appliances. And it turns out people have higher standards for appliances than they have for computers. Appliances have to be cheap, simple and reliable; nobody is going to buy a $2,000 vacuum cleaner that requires a Ph.D. in engineering and has to be rebooted twice a day. Leaving the ivory tower for the iRobot team was a culture shock. "We had to learn about plastics," Angle sighs. "We had to learn about Far East manufacturing. We learned that if you haven...
...iRoboters also had to learn about a subject that most scientists never really study: cleaning floors. They got down on their knees and worked out the physics of how dust collects and circulates. Vacuum cleaners consume large amounts of electricity, so they had to invent a new kind of low-power vacuum that would allow Roomba to run on rechargeable batteries. They ran their baby bot over "torture tracks" to test its mobility. They spent a night in a Target store to watch industrial cleaners at work...