NASA Administrator Jim Bridenenstine Visits Our Lab

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The current NASA Administrator Jim Bridenenstine visited our lab yesterday. One of the highlights was having him drive our Restore-L engineering robot arm. It took a little convincing to pry him away since he was having so much fun.

His positive tweet following the visit:

https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/status/1022613804214042624

"I received a hands-on demonstration of the great work the @NASAGoddard team is doing to advance important satellite servicing capabilities today. This technology will extend the life of civil, national security, and commercial satellites, while also reducing space debris."

And pictures posted up on Goddard's public flickr site from the visit:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/sets/72157671610282448/

Swift Playground→

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After I saw the announcement from Apple about their new programming language called Swift and the lovely looking feature called Playground I was immediately remembering an article by Brett Victor that demonstrated similar ideas:

http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

Some more info has been coming out from Chris Lattner, the head of the Apple tools department, that Playground was heavily influenced by Victor's ideas. 

The devil is in the details, but this looks really good and the concepts are exactly what I think we need for robotics.

Heres some info on Apple's Playground.

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/recipes/xcode_help-source_editor/ExploringandEvaluatingSwiftCodeinaPlayground/ExploringandEvaluatingSwiftCodeinaPlayground.html

Surviving Technology→

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One of the questions that comes up a lot in my line of work is what will people do when technology obviates the need for their jobs?

Two thoughts come to mind. First, these technological transitions take time. They can certainly take place over a person's lifetime, but they don't happen overnight. The writing will be on the wall before they take your job. 

Second, we need to encourage a culture of lifetime learning. If you are constantly learning, you put yourself in a position to stay valuable and ride along with the changing winds. 

David Brooks has an incredibly cogent take on how to succeed as technology continues to advance. I particularly like this bit. 

"One of the oddities of collaboration is that tightly knit teams are not the most creative. Loosely bonded teams are, teams without a few domineering presences, teams that allow people to think alone before they share results with the group. So a manager who can organize a decentralized network around a clear question, without letting it dissipate or clump, will have enormous value." 

 

Automatic Learning

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The second paragraph says it perfectly:

The basic theory of “automatic learning,” according to Vanderbilt University, asserts that people learn actions for skill-based work consciously and store the details of why and how in their short-term memory. Eventually the why and how of a certain action fades, but the performative action remains.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/12/typists-who-clear-70wpm-cant-even-say-where-the-keys-are/