text:
I was introduced to my first sociable robot on a sunny afternoon in June. The robot, developed by graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was named Mertz. It had camera sensors behind its eyes, which were programmed to detect faces; when it found mine, the robot was supposed to gaze at me directly to initiate a kind of conversation. But Mertz was on the fritz that day, and one of its designers, a dark-haired young woman named Lijin Aryananda, was trying to figure out what was wrong with it. Mertz was getting fidgety, Aryananda was getting frustrated and I was starting to feel as if I were peeking behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz.
Mertz consists of a metal head on a flexible neck. It has a childish computer-generated voice and expressive brows above its Ping-Pong-ball eyes — features designed to make a human feel kindly toward the robot and enjoy talking to it. But when something is off in the computer code, Mertz starts to babble like Chatty Cathy on speed, and it becomes clear that behind those big black eyes there's truly nobody home.
In a video of Aryananda and Mertz in happier times, Aryananda can be seen leaning in, trying to get the robot's attention by saying, "I'm your mother." She didn't seem particularly maternal on that June day, and Mertz didn't seem too happy, either. It directed a stream of sentences at me in apparently random order: "You are too far away." "Please teach me some colors." "You are too far away."
Maybe something was wrong with its camera sensor, Aryananda said. Maybe that was why it kept looking up at the ceiling and complaining. As she fiddled with the computer that runs the robot, I smiled politely — almost as much for the robot's sake, I realized, as for the robot maker's — and thought: Well, maybe it is the camera sensor, but if this thing wails "You are too far away" one more time, I'm going to throttle it.
At the Humanoid Robotics Group at M.I.T., a robot's "humanoid" qualities can include fallibility and whininess as much as physical traits like head, arms and torso. This is where our cultural images of robots as superhumans run headlong into the reality of motors, actuators and cold computer code. Today's humanoids are not the sophisticated machines we might have expected by now, which just shows how complicated a task it was that scientists embarked on 15 years ago when they began working on a robot that could think. They are not the docile companions of our collective dreams, robots designed to flawlessly serve our dinners, fold our clothes and do the dull or dangerous jobs that we don't want to do. Nor are they the villains of our collective nightmares, poised for robotic rebellion against humans whose machine creations have become smarter than the humans themselves. They are, instead, hunks of metal tethered to computers, which need their human designers to get them going and to smooth the hiccups along the way.
But these early incarnations of sociable robots are also much more than meets the eye. Bill Gates has said that personal robotics today is at the stage that personal computers were in the mid-1970s. Thirty years ago, few people guessed that the bulky, slow computers being used by a handful of businesses would by 2007 insinuate themselves into our lives via applications like Google, e-mail, YouTube, Skype and MySpace. In much the same way, the robots being built today, still unwieldy and temperamental even in the most capable hands, probably offer only hints of the way we might be using robots in another 30 years.
Mertz and its brethren — at the Humanoid Robotics lab, at the Personal Robotics Lab across the street in another M.I.T. building and at similar laboratories in other parts of the United States, in Europe and in Japan — are still less like thinking, autonomous creatures than they are like fancy puppets that frequently break down. But what the M.I.T. robots may lack in looks or finesse, they make up for in originality: they are programmed to learn the way humans learn, through their bodies, their senses and the feedback generated by their own behavior. It is a more organic style of learning — though organic is, of course, a curious word to reach for to describe creatures that are so clearly manufactured.
Sociable robots come equipped with the very abilities that humans have evolved to ease our interactions with one another: eye contact, gaze direction, turn-taking, shared attention. They are programmed to learn the way humans learn, by starting with a core of basic drives and abilities and adding to them as their physical and social experiences accrue. People respond to the robots' social cues almost without thinking, and as a result the robots give the impression of being somehow, improbably, alive.
At the moment, no single robot can do very much. The competencies have been cobbled together: one robot is able to grab a soup can when you tell it to put it on a shelf; another will look you in the eye and make babbling noises in keeping with the inflection of your voice. One robot might be able to learn some new words; another can take the perspective of a human collaborator; still another can recognize itself in a mirror. Taken together, each small accomplishment brings the field closer to a time when a robot with true intelligence — and with perhaps other human qualities, too, like emotions and autonomy — is at least a theoretical possibility. If that possibility comes to pass, what then? Will these new robots be capable of what we recognize as learning? Of what we recognize as consciousness? Will it know that it is a robot and that you are not?
The word "robot" was popularized in 1920, in the play "Rossum's Universal Robots," commonly called "R.U.R.," by the Czech writer Karel Capek. The word comes from the Czech "robota," meaning forced labor or drudgery. In the world of R.U.R., Robots (always with a capital R) are built to be factory workers, meaning they are designed as simply as possible, with no extraneous frills. "Robots are not people," says the man who manufactures them. "They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul." Capek's Robots are biological, not mechanical. The thing that separates them from humans is not the material they are made of — their skin is real skin; their blood, real blood — but the fact that they are built rather than born.
What separates the current crop of humanoid robots from humans is something harder to name. Because if roboticists succeed in programming their machines with a convincing version of social intelligence, with feelings that look like real feelings and thoughts that look like real thoughts, then all our fancy notions about our place in the universe start to get a little wobbly.
Eliminating the Cognition Box
We already live with many objects that are, in one sense, robots: the voice in a car's Global Positioning System, for instance, which senses shifts in its own location and can change its behavior accordingly. But scientists working in the field mean something else when they talk about sociable robots. To qualify as that kind of robot, they say, a machine must have at least two characteristics. It must be situated, and it must be embodied. Being situated means being able to sense its environment and be responsive to it; being embodied means having a physical body through which to experience the world. A G.P.S. robot is situated but not embodied, while an assembly-line robot that repeats the same action over and over again is embodied but not situated. Sociable robots must be both, as well as exhibiting an understanding of social beings.
The push for sociable robots comes from two directions. One is pragmatic: if Bill Gates is right and the robots are coming, they should be designed in a way that makes them fit most naturally into the lives of ordinary people. The other is more theoretical: if a robot can be designed to learn the same way natural creatures do, this could be a significant boost for the field of artificial intelligence.
Both pragmatism and theory drive Rodney Brooks, author of "Flesh and Machines," who until the end of last month was director of M.I.T.'s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, home to the Humanoid Robotics lab that houses Mertz. Brooks is an electric, exaggerated personality, an Australian native with rubbery features and bulgy blue eyes. That mobile face and Aussie accent helped turn him into a cult figure after the 1997 theatrical release of "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control," a documentary by Errol Morris that featured Brooks — along with a wild animal trainer, a topiary gardener and an expert in naked mole rats — as a man whose obsessions made him something of a misfit, a visionary with a restless, uncategorizable genius.
As Brooks sat with me in his office and reflected on his career from the vantage point of a 52-year-old about to return to full-time research — a man going through what he called "a scientific midlife crisis" — a theme emerged. Each time he faced a problem in artificial intelligence, he said, he looked for the implicit assumption that everyone else took for granted, and then he tried to negate it. In the 1980s, the implicit assumption was that abstract reasoning was the highest form of intelligence, the one that programmers should strive to imitate. This led to a focus on symbolic processing, on tough tasks like playing chess or solving problems in algebra or calculus. Tasks that, as Brooks slyly put it in "Flesh and Machines," "highly educated male scientists found challenging."
But Brooks wanted to build an artificial intelligence system that did the supposedly simple things, not mental acrobatics like chess but things that come naturally to any 4-year-old and that were eluding the symbolic processing capabilities of the computers. These cognitive tasks — visually distinguishing a cup from a chair, walking on two legs, making your way from bedroom to bathroom — were difficult to write into computer code because they did not require an explicit chain of reasoning; they just happened. And the way they happened was grounded in the fact that the 4-year-old had a body and that each action the child took provided more sensory information and, ultimately, more learning. This approach has come to be known as embodied intelligence.
That's where the robots came in. Robots had bodies, and they could be programmed to use those bodies as part of their data gathering. Instead of starting out with everything they needed to know already programmed in, these robots would learn about the world the way babies do, starting with some simple competencies and adding to them through sensory input. For babies, that sensory input included seeing, touching and balancing. For robots, it would mean input from mechanical sensors like video cameras and gyroscopes.
In 1993, Brooks started to develop a new robot, a humanoid equipped with artificial intelligence, according to this new logic. His motivation was more theoretical than practical: to offer a new way of thinking about intelligence itself. Most artificial-intelligence programs at the time were designed from the top down, connecting all relevant processes of a robot — raw sensory input, perception, motor activity, behavior — in what was called a cognition box, a sort of centralized zone for all high-level computation. A walking robot, for instance, was programmed to go through an elaborate planning process before it took a step. It had to scan its location, obtain a three-dimensional model of the terrain, plan a path between any obstacles it had detected, plan where to put its right foot along that path, plan the pressures on each joint to get its foot to that spot, plan how to twist the rest of its body to make its right foot move and plan the same set of behaviors for placing its left foot at the next spot along the path, and then finally it would move its feet.
Brooks turned the top-down approach on its head; he did away with the cognition box altogether. "No cognition," he wrote in "Flesh and Machines." "Just sensing and action." In effect, he wrote, he was leaving out what was thought to be the "intelligence" part of "artificial intelligence." The way Brooks's robot was designed to start walking, he wrote, was "by moving its feet."
This was the approach that Brooks and his team used to design their humanoid robot. This one couldn't walk. The robot, named Cog, was stationary, a big man-size metal torso with big man-size arms that spanned six and a half feet when extended. But it was designed to think. Perched on a pedestal almost three feet high, it seemed to hulk over its human creators, dominating the Humanoid Robotics lab from 1993 until it was retired 11 years later and put on permanent display at the M.I.T. Museum. (It has been lent out as part of a traveling exhibit, "Robots + Us," currently at the Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago.) Its presence was disarming, mostly because it was programmed to look at anything that moved. As one visitor to the lab put it: "Cog 'noticed' me soon after I entered its room. Its head turned to follow me, and I was embarrassed to note that this made me happy."
Cog was designed to learn like a child, and that's how people tended to treat it, like a child. Videos of graduate students show them presenting Cog with a red ball to track, a waggling hand to look at, a bright pink Slinky to manipulate — the toys children are given to explore the world, to learn some basic truths about anatomy and physics and social interactions. As the robot moved in response to the students' instructions, it exhibited qualities that signaled "creature." The human brain has evolved to interpret certain traits as indicators of autonomous life: when something moves on its own and with apparent purpose, directs its gaze toward the person with whom it interacts, follows people with its eyes and backs away if someone gets too close. Cog did all these things, which made people who came in contact with it think of it as something alive. Even without a face, even without skin, even without arms that looked like arms or any legs at all, there was something creaturelike about Cog. It took very little, just the barest suggestion of a human form and a pair of eyes, for people to react to the robot as a social being.
In addition, Cog was programmed to learn new things based on its sensory and motor inputs, much as babies learn new things by seeing how their bodies react to and affect their surroundings. Cog's arm motors, for instance, were calibrated to respond to the weight of a held object. When a student handed a Slinky to Cog, the oscillators in its elbowlike joints gave feedback about the toy's weight and position. After a few hours of practice, the robot could make the Slinky slither by raising and lowering its arms. If it was given a heavier Slinky or a drumstick, it would be able to adjust its motions accordingly. The learning was minimal, but it was a start — and it was, significantly, learning derived from the input of motors, gears and oscillators, the robot equivalent of muscles.
Cog was able to learn other things too, including finding and naming objects it had never seen before. (The robot had microphones for ears and was equipped with some basic speech recognition software and an artificial voice.) But while Brooks showed a kind of paternal delight in what the robot could do, he was hesitant to give it the label of "learning" per se. "I am so careful about saying that any of our robots 'can learn,' " he wrote in an e-mail message. "They can only learn certain things, just like a rat can learn only certain things and a chimpanzee can only learn certain things and even [you] can only learn certain things." Even now, 14 years after the Cog project began, each of today's humanoid robots can still only learn a very small number of things.
Cynthia Breazeal came to Brooks's lab as a graduate student in 1990 and did much of the basic computational work on Cog. In 1996, when it was time for Breazeal to choose a doctoral project, she decided to develop a sociable robot of her own. Her goals were as much pragmatic as theoretical; she said she hoped her robot would be a model for how to design the domestic robots of the future. The one she built had an animated head with big blue eyes, flirty lashes, red lips that curved upward or downward depending on its mood and pink ears that did the same. She called the robot Kismet, after the Turkish word for fate.
How Smart Can a Robot Be?
Kismet was the most expressive sociable robot built to that point, even though it consisted of only a hinged metal head on a heavy base, with wires and motors visible and eyes and lips stuck on almost like an afterthought. Breazeal is now 39 years old, an associate professor at M.I.T. and director of the Personal Robotics Group. She retains a polished, youthful prettiness, amplified these days by a late pregnancy with her third child. When she talks about Kismet, she is careful to call it "it" instead of a more animate pronoun like "he" or "she." But her voice softens, her rapid-fire speech slows a little and it can be difficult to tell from her tone of voice whether she's describing her robot or one of her two preschool-age sons.
The robot expressed a few basic emotions through changes in its facial expression — that is, through the positioning of its eyes, lips, eyebrows and pink paper ears. The emotions were easy for an observer to recognize: anger, fear, disgust, joy, surprise, sorrow. According to psychologists, these expressions are automatic, unconscious and universally understood. So when the drivers on Kismet's motors were set to make surprise look like raised eyebrows, wide-open eyes and a rounded mouth, the human observer knew exactly what was going on.
Kismet's responses to stimulation were so socially appropriate that some people found themselves thinking that the robot was actually feeling the emotions it was displaying. Breazeal realized how complicated it was to try to figure out what, or even whether, Kismet was feeling. "Robots are not human, but humans aren't the only things that have emotions," she said. "The question for robots is not, Will they ever have human emotions? Dogs don't have human emotions, either, but we all agree they have genuine emotions. The question is, What are the emotions that are genuine for the robot?"
Unlike Cog's, Kismet's learning was more social than cognitive. What made the robot so lifelike was its ability to have what Breazeal called "proto-conversations" with a variety of human interlocutors. Run by 15 parallel computers operating simultaneously, Kismet was programmed to have the same basic motivations as a 6-month-old child: the drive for novelty, the drive for social interaction and the drive for periodic rest. The behaviors to achieve these goals, like the ability to look for brightly colored objects or to recognize the human face, were also part of Kismet's innate program. So were the facial behaviors that reflected Kismet's mood states — aroused, bored or neutral — which changed according to whether the robot's basic drives were being satisfied.
The robot was a model for how these desires and emotions are reflected in facial expression and how those expressions in turn affect social interaction. Take the drive for novelty. With no stimulus nearby, Kismet's eyes would droop in apparent boredom. Then a lovely thing happened. If there was a person nearby, she would see Kismet's boredom and wave a toy in front of the robot's eyes. This activated Kismet's program to look for brightly colored objects, which in turn moved the robot into its "aroused" affective state, with a facial expression with the hallmarks of happiness. The happy face, in turn, led the human to feel good about the interaction and to wave the toy some more — a socially gratifying feedback loop akin to playing with a baby.
Kismet is now retired and on permanent display, inert as a bronze statue, at the M.I.T. Museum. The most famous robot now in Breazeal's lab, the one that the graduate students compete for time with, looks nothing like Kismet. It is a three-foot-tall, head-to-toe creature, sort of a badger, sort of a Yoda, with big eyes, enormous pointy ears, a mouth with soft lips and tiny teeth, a furry belly, furry legs and pliable hands with real-looking fingernails. The reason the robot, called Leonardo (Leo for short), is so lifelike is that it was made by Hollywood animatronics experts at the Stan Winston Studio. (Breazeal consulted with the studio on the construction of the robotic teddy bear in the 2001 Steven Spielberg film "A.I.") As soon as Leo arrived in the lab, Breazeal said, her students started dismantling it, stripping out all the remote-control wiring and configuring it instead with a brain and body that operated not by remote control but by computer-based artificial intelligence.
I had studied the videos posted on the M.I.T. Media Lab Web site, and I was fond of Leo even before I got to Cambridge. I couldn't wait to see it close up. I loved the steadiness of its gaze, the slow way it nodded its head and blinked when it understood something, the little Jack Benny shrug it gave when it didn't. I loved how smart it seemed. In one video, two graduate students, Jesse Gray and Matt Berlin, engaged it in an exercise known in psychology as the false-belief test. Leo performed remarkably. Some psychologists contend that very young children think all minds are permeable and that everyone knows exactly what they themselves know. Older children, after the age of about 4 or 5, have learned that different people have different minds and that it is possible for someone else to hold beliefs that the children themselves know to be false. Leo performed in the video like a sophisticated 5-year-old, one who had developed what psychologists call a theory of mind.
In the video, Leo watches Jesse Gray, who is wearing a red T-shirt, put a bag of chips into Box 1 and a bag of cookies into Box 2, while Matt Berlin, in a brown T-shirt, also watches. After Berlin leaves the room, Gray switches the items, so that now the cookies are in Box 1 and the chips are in Box 2. Gray locks the two boxes and leaves the room, and Leo now knows what Gray knows: the new location for the chips and cookies. But it also knows that Berlin doesn't know about the switch. Berlin still thinks there are chips in Box 1.
The amazing part comes next. Berlin, in the brown T-shirt, comes back into the room and tries to open the lock on the first box. Leo sees Berlin struggling, and it decides to help by pressing a lever that will deliver to Berlin the item he's looking for. Leo presses the lever for the chips. It knows that there are cookies in the box that Berlin is trying to open, but it also knows — and this is the part that struck me as so amazing — that Berlin is trying to open the box because he wants chips. It knows that Berlin has a false belief about what is in the first box, and it also knows what Berlin wants. If Leo had indeed passed this important developmental milestone, I wondered, could it also be capable of all sorts of other emotional tasks: empathy, collaboration, social bonding, deception?
Unfortunately, Leo was turned off the day I arrived, inertly presiding over one corner of the lab like a fuzzy Buddha. Berlin and Gray and their colleague, Andrea Thomaz, a postdoctoral researcher, said that they would be happy to turn on the robot for me but that the process would take time and that I would have to come back the next morning. They also wanted to know what it was in particular that I wanted to see Leo do because, it turned out, the robot could go through its paces only when the right computer program was geared up. This was my first clue that Leo maybe wasn't going to turn out to be quite as clever as I had thought.
When I came back the next day, Berlin and Gray were ready to go through the false-belief routine with Leo. But it wasn't what I expected. I could now see what I had seen on the video. But in person, I could also peek behind the metaphoric curtain and see something that the video camera hadn't revealed: the computer monitor that showed what Leo's cameras were actually seeing and another monitor that showed the architecture of Leo's brain. I could see that this wasn't a literal demonstration of a human "theory of mind" at all. Yes, there was some robotic learning going on, but it was mostly a feat of brilliant computer programming, combined with some dazzling Hollywood special effects.
It turned out Leo wasn't seeing the young men's faces or bodies; it was seeing something else. Gray and Berlin were each wearing a headband and a glove, which I hadn't noticed in the video, and the robot's optical motion tracking system could see nothing but the unique arrangements of reflective tape on their accessories. What the robot saw were bunches of dots. Dots in one geometric arrangement meant Person A; in a different arrangement, they meant Person B. There was a different arrangement of tape on the two different snacks, too, and also on the two different locks for the boxes. On a big monitor alongside Leo was an image of what was going on inside its "brain": one set of dots represented Leo's brain; another set of dots represented Berlin's brain; a third set of dots represented Gray's. The robot brain was programmed to keep track of it all.
Leo did not learn about false beliefs in the same way a child did. Robot learning, I realized, can be defined as making new versions of a robot's original instructions, collecting and sorting data in a creative way. So the learning taking place here was not Leo's ability to keep track of which student believed what, since that skill had been programmed into the robot. The learning taking place was Leo's ability to make inferences about Gray's and Berlin's actions and intentions. Seeing that Berlin's hand was near the lock on Box 1, Leo had to search through its internal set of task models, which had been written into its computer program, and figure out what it meant for a hand to be moving near a lock and not near, say, a glass of water. Then it had to go back to that set of task models to decide why Berlin might have been trying to open the box — that is, what his ultimate goal was. Finally, it had to convert its drive to be helpful, another bit of information written into its computer program, into behavior. Leo had to learn that by pressing a particular lever, it could give Berlin the chips he was looking for. Leo's robot learning consisted of integrating the group of simultaneous computer programs with which it had begun.
Leo's behavior might not have been an act of real curiosity or empathy, but it was an impressive feat nonetheless. Still, I felt a little twinge of disappointment, and for that I blame Hollywood. I've been exposed to robot hype for years, from the TV of my childhood — Rosie the robot maid on "The Jetsons," that weird talking garbage-can robot on "Lost in Space" — to the more contemporary robots-gone-wild of films like "Blade Runner" and "I, Robot." Despite my basic cold, hard rationalism, I was prepared to be bowled over by a robot that was adorable, autonomous and smart. What I saw in Leo was no small accomplishment in terms of artificial intelligence and the modeling of human cognition, but it was just not quite the accomplishment I had been expecting. I had been expecting something closer to "real."
Why We Might Want to Hug a Desk Lamp
I had been seduced by Leo's big brown eyes, just like almost everyone else who encounters the robot, right down to the students who work on its innards. "There we all are, soldering Leonardo's motors, aware of how it looks from behind, aware that its brain is just a bunch of wires," Guy Hoffman, a graduate student, told me. Yet as soon as they get in front of it, he said, the students see its eyes move, see its head turn, see the programmed chest motion that looks so much like breathing, and they start talking about Leo as a living thing.
People do the same thing with a robotic desk lamp that Hoffman has designed to move in relation to a user's motions, casting light wherever it senses the user might need it. It's just a lamp with a bulky motor-driven neck; it looks nothing like a living creature. But, he said, "as soon as it moves on its own and faces you, you say: 'Look, it's trying to help me.' 'Why is it doing that?' 'What does it want from me?' "
When something is self-propelled and seems to engage in goal-directed behavior, we are compelled to interpret those actions in social terms, according to Breazeal. That social tendency won't turn off when we interact with robots. But instead of fighting it, she said, "we should embrace it so we can design robots in a way that makes sense, so we can integrate robots into our lives."
The brain activity of people who interacted with Cog and Kismet, and with their successors like Mertz, is probably much the same as the brain activity of someone interacting with a real person. Neuroscientists recently found a collection of brain cells called mirror neurons, which become activated in two different contexts: when someone performs an activity and when someone watches another person perform the same activity. Mirror-neuron activation is thought to be the root of such basic human drives as imitation, learning and empathy. Now it seems that mirror neurons fire not only when watching a person but also when watching a humanoid robot. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, reported last year that brain scans of people looking at videos of a robotic hand grasping things showed activity in the mirror neurons. The work is preliminary, but it suggests something that people in the M.I.T. robotics labs have already seen: when these machines move, when they direct their gaze at you or lean in your direction, they feel like real creatures.
Would a Robot Make a Better Boyfriend?
Cog, Kismet and Mertz might feel real, but they look specifically and emphatically robotic. Their gears and motors show; they have an appealing retro-techno look, evoking old-fashioned images of the future, not too far from the Elektro robot of the 1939 World's Fair, which looked a little like the Tin Man of "The Wizard of Oz." This design was in part a reflection of a certain kind of aesthetic sensibility and in part a deliberate decision to avoid making robots that look too much like us.
Another robot-looking robot is Domo, whose stylized shape somehow evokes the Chrysler Building almost as much as it does a human. It can respond to some verbal commands, like "Here, Domo," and can close its hand around whatever is placed in its palm, the way a baby does. Shaking hands with Domo feels almost like shaking hands with something alive. The robot's designer, Aaron Edsinger, has programmed it to do some domestic tricks. It can grab a box of crackers placed in its hand and put it on a shelf and then grab a bag of coffee beans — with a different grip, based on sensors in its mechanical hand — and put it, too, on a shelf. Edsinger calls this "helping with chores." Domo tracks objects with its big blue eyes and responds to verbal instructions in a high-pitched artificial voice, repeating the words it hears and occasionally adding an obliging "O.K."
Domo's looks are just barely humanoid, but that probably works to its advantage. Scientists believe that the more a robot looks like a person, the more favorably we tend to view it, but only up to a point. After that, our response slips into what the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori has called the "uncanny valley." We start expecting too much of the robots because they so closely resemble real people, and when they fail to deliver, we recoil in something like disgust.
If a robot had features that made it seem, say, 50 percent human, 50 percent machine, according to this view, we would be willing to fill in the blanks and presume a certain kind of nearly human status. That is why robots like Domo and Mertz are interpreted by our brains as creaturelike. But if a robot has features that make it appear 99 percent human, the uncanny-valley theory holds that our brains get stuck on that missing 1 percent: the eyes that gaze but have no spark, the arms that move with just a little too much stiffness. This response might be akin to an adaptive revulsion at the sight of corpses. A too-human robot looks distressingly like a corpse that moves.
This zombie effect is one aspect of a new discipline that Breazeal is trying to create called human-robot interaction. Last March, Breazeal and Alan Schultz of the Naval Research Laboratory convened the field's second annual conference in Arlington, Va., with presentations as diverse as describing how people react to instructions to "kill" a humanoid robot and a film festival featuring videos of human-robot interaction bloopers.
To some observers, the real challenge is not how to make human-robot interaction smoother and more natural but how to keep it from overshadowing, and eventually seeming superior to, a different, messier, more complicated, more flawed kind of interaction — the one between one human and another. Sherry Turkle, a professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at M.I.T., worries that sociable robots might be easier to deal with than people are and that one day we might actually prefer our relationships with our machines. A female graduate student once approached her after a lecture, Turkle said, and announced that she would gladly trade in her boyfriend for a sophisticated humanoid robot as long as the robot could produce what the student called "caring behavior." "I need the feeling of civility in the house," she told Turkle. "If the robot could provide a civil environment, I would be happy to help produce the illusion that there is somebody really with me." What she was looking for, the student said, was a "no-risk relationship" that would stave off loneliness; a responsive robot, even if it was just exhibiting scripted behavior, seemed better to her than an unresponsive boyfriend.
The encounter horrified Turkle, who thought it revealed how dangerous, and how seductive, sociable robots could be. "They push our Darwinian buttons," she told me. Sociable robots are programmed to exhibit the kind of behavior we have come to associate with sentience and empathy, she said, which leads us to think of them as creatures with intentions, emotions and autonomy: "You see a robot like that as a creature; you feel a desire to nurture it. And with this desire comes the fantasy of reciprocation. You begin to care for these creatures and to want the creatures to care about you."
If Lijin Aryananda, Brooks's former student, had ever wanted Mertz to "care" about her, she certainly doesn't anymore. On the day she introduced me to Mertz, Aryananda was heading back to a postdoctoral research position at the University of Zurich. Her new job is in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and she will still be working with robots, but Aryananda said she wants to get as far away as possible from humanoids and from the study of how humans and robots interact.
"Anyone who tells you that in human-robot interactions the robot is doing anything — well, he is just kidding himself," she told me, grumpy because Mertz was misbehaving. "Whatever there is in human-robot interaction is there because the human puts it there."
Nagging, a Killer App
The building and testing of sociable robots remains a research-based enterprise, and when the robots do make their way out of the laboratory, it is usually as part of somebody's experiment. Breazeal is now overseeing two such projects. One is the work of Cory Kidd, a graduate student who designed and built 17 humanoid robots to serve as weight-loss coaches. The robot coach, a child-size head and torso holding a small touch screen, is called Autom. It is able, using basic artificial-voice software, to speak approximately 1,000 phrases, things like "It's great that you're doing well with your exercise" or "You should congratulate yourself on meeting your calorie goals today." It is programmed to get a little more informal as time goes on: "Hello, I hope that we can work together" will eventually shift to "Hi, it's good to see you again." It is also programmed to refer to things that happened on other days, with statements like "It looks like you've had a little more to eat than usual recently."
Kidd is recruiting 15 volunteers from around Boston to take Autom into their homes for six weeks. They will be told to interact with the robot at least once a day, recording food intake and exercise on its touch screen. The plan is to compare their experiences with those of two other groups of 15 dieters each. One group will interact with the same weight-loss coaching software through a touch screen only; the other will record daily food intake and exercise the old-fashioned way, with paper and pen. Kidd said that the study is too short-term to use weight loss as a measure of whether the robot is a useful dieting aid. But at this point, his research questions are more subjective anyway: Do participants feel more connected to the robot than they do to the touch screen? And do they think of that robot on the kitchen counter as an ally or a pest?
Breazeal's second project is more ambitious. In collaboration with Rod Grupen, a roboticist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, she is designing and building four toddler-size robots. Then she will put them into action at the Boston Science Museum for two weeks in June 2009. The robots, which will cost several hundred thousand dollars each, will roll around in what she calls "a kind of robot Romper Room" and interact with a stream of museum visitors. The goal is to see whether the social competencies programmed into these robots are enough to make humans comfortable interacting with them and whether people will be able to help the robots learn to do simple tasks like stacking blocks.
The bare bones of the toddler robots already exist, in the form of a robot designed in Grupen's lab called uBot-5. A few of these uBots are now being developed for use in assisted-living centers in research designed to see how the robots interact with the frail elderly. Each uBot-5 is about three feet tall, with a big head, very long arms (long enough to touch the ground, should the arms be needed for balance) and two oversize wheels. It has big eyes, rubber balls at the ends of its arms and a video screen for a face. (Breazeal's version will have sleek torsos, expressive faces and realistic hands.) In one slide that Grupen uses in his PowerPoint presentations, the uBot-5 robot is holding a stethoscope to the chest of a woman lying on the ground after a simulated fall. The uBot is designed to connect by video hookup to a health care practitioner, but still, the image of a robot providing even this level of emergency medical care is, to say the least, disconcerting.
Does It Know It's a Robot?
More disconcerting still is the image of a robot looking at itself in the mirror and waving hello — a robot with a primitive version of self-awareness. A first step in this direction occurred in September 2004 with reports from Yale about Nico, a humanoid robot. Nico, its designers announced, was able to recognize itself in a mirror. One of its creators, Brian Scassellati, earned his doctorate in 2001 at M.I.T., where he worked on Cog and Kismet — to which Nico bears a family resemblance. Nico has visible workings, a head, arms and torso made of steel and a graceful tilt to its shoulders and neck. Like the M.I.T. robots, Nico has no legs, because Scassellati, now an associate professor of computer science at Yale, wanted to concentrate on what it could do with its upper body and, in particular, the cameras in its eyes.
Here is how Nico learned to recognize itself. The robot had a camera behind its eye, which was pointed toward a mirror. When a reflection came back, Nico was programmed to assign the image a score based on whether it was most likely to be "self," "another" or "neither." Nico was also programmed to move its arm, which sent back information to the computer about whether the arm was moving. If the arm was moving and the reflection in the mirror was also moving, the program assigned the image a high probability of being "self." If the reflection moved but Nico's arm was not moving, the image was assigned a high probability of being "another." If the image did not move at all, it was given a high probability of being "neither."
Nico spent some time moving its arm in front of the mirror, so it could learn when its motor sensors were detecting arm movement and what that looked like through its camera. It learned to give that combination a high score for "self." Then Nico and Kevin Gold, a graduate student, stood near each other, looking into the mirror, as the robot and the human took turns moving their arms. In 20 runs of the experiment, Nico correctly identified its own moving arm as "self" and Gold's purposeful flailing as "another."
One way to interpret this might be to conclude that Nico has a kind of self-awareness, at least when in motion. But that would be quite a leap. Robot consciousness is a tricky thing, according to Daniel Dennett, a Tufts philosopher and author of "Consciousness Explained," who was part of a team of experts that Rodney Brooks assembled in the early 1990s to consult on the Cog project. In a 1994 article in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Dennett posed questions about whether it would ever be possible to build a conscious robot. His conclusion: "Unlikely," at least as long as we are talking about a robot that is "conscious in just the way we human beings are." But Dennett was willing to credit Cog with one piece of consciousness: the ability to be aware of its own internal states. Indeed, Dennett believed that it was theoretically possible for Cog, or some other intelligent humanoid robot in the future, to be a better judge of its own internal states than the humans who built it. The robot, not the designer, might some day be "a source of knowledge about what it is doing and feeling and why."
But maybe higher-order consciousness is not even the point for a robot, according to Sidney Perkowitz, a physicist at Emory. "For many applications," he wrote in his 2004 book, "Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids," "it is enough that the being seems alive or seems human, and irrelevant whether it feels so."
In humans, Perkowitz wrote, an emotional event triggers the autonomic nervous system, which sparks involuntary physiological reactions like faster heartbeat, increased blood flow to the brain and the release of certain hormones. "Kismet's complex programming includes something roughly equivalent," he wrote, "a quantity that specifies its level of arousal, depending on the stimulus it has been receiving. If Kismet itself reads this arousal tag, the robot not only is aroused, it knows it is aroused, and it can use this information to plan its future behavior." In this way, according to Perkowitz, a robot might exhibit the first glimmers of consciousness, "namely, the reflexive ability of a mind to examine itself over its own shoulder."
Robot consciousness, it would seem, is related to two areas: robot learning (the ability to think, to reason, to create, to generalize, to improvise) and robot emotion (the ability to feel). Robot learning has already occurred, with baby steps, in robots like Cog and Leonardo, able to learn new skills that go beyond their initial capabilities. But what of emotion? Emotion is something we are inclined to think of as quintessentially human, something we only grudgingly admit might be taking place in nonhuman animals like dogs and dolphins. Some believe that emotion is at least theoretically possible for robots too. Rodney Brooks goes so far as to say that robot emotions may already have occurred — that Cog and Kismet not only displayed emotions but, in one way of looking at it, actually experienced them.
"We're all machines," he told me when we talked in his office at M.I.T. "Robots are made of different sorts of components than we are — we are made of biomaterials; they are silicon and steel — but in principle, even human emotions are mechanistic." A robot's level of a feeling like sadness could be set as a number in computer code, he said. But isn't a human's level of sadness basically a number, too, just a number of the amounts of various neurochemicals circulating in the brain? Why should a robot's numbers be any less authentic than a human's?
"If the mechanistic explanation is right, then one can in principle make a machine which is living," he said with a grin. That explains one of his longtime ultimate goals: to create a robot that you feel bad about switching off.
The permeable boundary between humanoid robots and humans has especially captivated Kathleen Richardson, a graduate student in anthropology at Cambridge University in England. "I wanted to study what it means to be human, and robots are a great way to do that," she said, explaining the 18 months she spent in Brooks's Humanoid Robotics lab in 2003 and 2004, doing fieldwork for her doctorate. "Robots are kind of ambiguous, aren't they? They're kind of like us but not like us, and we're always a bit uncertain about why."
To her surprise, Richardson found herself just as fascinated by the roboticists at M.I.T. as she was by the robots. She observed a kinship between human and humanoid, an odd synchronization of abilities and disabilities. She tried not to make too much of it. "I kept thinking it was merely anecdotal," she said, but the connection kept recurring. Just as a portrait might inadvertently give away the painter's own weaknesses or preoccupations, humanoid robots seemed to reflect something unintended about their designers. A shy designer might make a robot that's particularly bashful; a designer with physical ailments might focus on the function — touch, vision, speech, ambulation — that gives the robot builder the greatest trouble.
"A lot of the inspiration for the robots seems to come from some kind of deficiency in being human," Richardson, back in England and finishing her dissertation, told me by telephone. "If we just looked at a machine and said we want the machine to help us understand about being human, I think this shows that the model of being human we carry with us is embedded in aspects of our own deficiencies and limitations." It's almost as if the scientists are building their robots as a way of completing themselves.
"I want to understand what it is that makes living things living," Rodney Brooks told me. At their core, robots are not so very different from living things. "It's all mechanistic," Brooks said. "Humans are made up of biomolecules that interact according to the laws of physics and chemistry. We like to think we're in control, but we're not." We are all, human and humanoid alike, whether made of flesh or of metal, basically just sociable machines.


text:
|Bill of Rights
|Legal Articles
This is my personal home page. For information about my professional activities as a barrister, please refer to the website at my Chambers: www.8newsquare.co.uk
For a selection of my publications on political and constitutional issues, see Publications. Recent publications are on the subjects of the EU and our constitution, criminal justice and sentencing, how to safeguard our civil liberties through a new Bill of Rights for the United Kingdom, human rights and terrorism, and the ever growing threat to our ability to make our own laws from the expanding powers of the European Union.
Please click here for a selection of my legal publications, articles and lectures.
|Bill of Rights
|Legal Articles

subset: commoncrawl


text:
According to the Chinese Zodiac, the Year of 2013 is the Year of the Snake, which begins on February 10, 2013 and ends on January 30, 2014. The Snake, also called the Junior Dragon, is the sixth sign of the Chinese Zodiac, which consists of 12 Animal Signs. It is the enigmatic, intuitive, introspective, refined and collected of the Animals Signs. Ancient Chinese wisdom says a Snake in the house is a good omen because it means that your family will not starve. People born in the Year of the Snake are keen and cunning, quite intelligent and wise. They are great mediators and good at doing business. Therefore, you should have good luck if you were born in the Year of the Snake.
This is a year of water Snake, and all things will be possible. Saving money and being thrifty should be your top priorities. Delusion and deception are common in the year of water Snake. Stay alert! To gain the greatest benefits from this year, you must control spending and use your talents wisely. If you are planning to get married or to begin a business partnership, be sure to thoroughly investigate the other person's finances and background before you legalize the alliance.
The Sign of the Snake
People born in the Year of the Snake share certain characteristics: Acute, aware, charming, cunning, elegant, mysterious, passionate, proud, serene, and vain. They are attractive people who take cries with ease and do not become flustered easily. They are graceful people, exciting and dark at the same time. They enjoy reading, listening to great music, tasting delicious food, and going to the theater. They are fascinated with all beautiful things in life. Many of the most beautiful ladies and men with strongest personalities were born in the Year of the Snake.
Contemplative and private, Snake people are not outwardly emotional. They usually act according to their own judgment and do not follow the views of others. They can appear cunning and reticent and work very modestly in the business environment. They will plot and scheme to make certain things turn out exactly as they want them to. They are not great communicators and can become quite possessive when they set their minds on achieving the interest of a partner.
Snake people become easily stressed and have to avoid hectic schedules or noisy atmospheres. They need calm and quiet to thrive and succeed. They must have sleep, relaxation, and peace to live a long, healthy life.
People born in the Year of the Snake are usually very sophisticated and cultured in their choices for home decoration. They are elegant and graceful and place emphasis on their comfort when deciding what to decorate with. They are materialistic and need to have as many of everything as possible.
They become bored easily and therefore change jobs quite frequently. They are very conscientious and diligent at work. They are organized and precise, cautious and alert when doing business. They act confidently, calmly and have a strong sense of responsibility and clear goals. Sometimes, because they like to work alone, they can seem as though they are withholding information or being secretive about some important things.
Snake people are oversuspicious, which is their nature. They hide their suspicion, and acting as if nothing is on their minds. They like to think deeply, plan carefully and make a systematic and appropriate exposition of their views. They like to follow the fashion and be properly dressed. And, they usually speak with great care.
Snake people are passionate lovers and show a strong desire for control when associating with others. They will never forgive anyone who breaks a promise. They show their resentment with ice-cold hostility instead of bitter words. Some of the people born in the Year of the Snake may strike their enemies with a deadly blow.
It seems not easy to deal with a person born in the Year of the Snake, especially when he thinks one way and behaves in another. There always lies an alert heart behind his serene appearance. He has a strong will and will try his best to hold fast to his position. He is so cunning that when you think you may have seized him, he has already slipped away.
Snake people will face danger fearlessly and deal with unforeseen disasters. They are not annoyed by lack of money and are usually lucky enough to own everything they need. They can be successful as long as they avoid excess spending. Although they are intuitive, they should avoid dive right into decisions without weighing the consequences.


text:
Anniston, Alabama: In-Depth: Letter to Senator Shelby
January 10, 2002
The Honorable Richard Shelby
110 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Senator Shelby:
Recent feature articles in The Washington Post, Birmingham News and St. Louis Post Dispatch have exposed the shocking details of decades of PCB contamination of the citizens of Anniston, Alabama. We will post on our web site, in a searchable format at www.ewg.org, many of the key internal company documents that reveal decades of corporate cover up, as reported in these articles.
The documents are particularly alarming when you compare the Anniston case to other places where PCB contamination has been treated as a major public health and environmental threat. Contamination in Anniston is estimated to be ten times higher than levels in the Hudson River of New York. Even though EPA, with the aggressive advocacy of New York's United States Senators, mandated General Electric (a former customer of Monsanto) last month to pay over $450 million for a dredging plan to clean up PCB contamination of the Hudson River, the Agency has refused to consider similar steps in Anniston. Monsanto's "voluntary" agreement with EPA has resulted in only a $40 million remediation program that does not adequately address the cleanup and public health concerns of the Anniston community.
This obvious disparity between EPA's concern for the people of Anniston and those living in Hudson River communities demands Congressional attention. Hearings on the Anniston case are needed to:
- determine why EPA failed to act for decades;
- review state and federal documents used to draft the current cleanup plan; and,
- hear independent analysis of what steps are necessary to clean up the contamination and protect public health.
Given your position as the state's senior Senator and your service on the Senate appropriation committee dealing with environment and public health issues, we call on you to press EPA to undertake an effective and comprehensive cleanup plan that ensures the people of Anniston an environmentally safe, healthy and vibrant community in the future.
Kenneth A. Cook
Environmental Working Group
Washington, DC
David A. Baker
Community Against Pollution
Anniston, Alabama
cc: The Honorable Jeff Sessions, United States Senator
The Honorable Bob Riley, Representative for the 3rd district of Alabama


text:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - For former Williams-Sonoma finance chief Sharon McCollam, coming out of retirement to take the same job at struggling retailer Best Buy was not a tough decision.
The challenge of pulling off "the transformation of the decade in retail" pushed McCollam, 50, to return to the corporate battlefield, she said in an interview on Monday.
Investors welcomed the appointment of the seasoned retail executive, sending shares of Best Buy (BBY.N) up by 4.2 percent to $15.94 on Monday.
"I know that the company is going to reinvent itself and I came out of retirement because I believe that this is going to be one of the most exciting and important, beautiful transformations that you will see today," she said.
McCollam, who is well regarded on Wall Street, said retail is in her DNA. She has her job cut out for her.
Best Buy Co Inc, the world's largest consumer electronics chain, has posted same-store sales declines in eight of the last nine quarters.
Critics argue that its stores are hurting because they've become showrooms for Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) and other online chains as shoppers check out electronics like high-definition TVs, then buy them elsewhere for less.
McCollam argues that the threat of showrooming is overstated, echoing Best Buy Chief Executive Hubert Joly, who joined the company in September.
"I do not believe that people fall in love with websites," McCollam said. "When you try to create affinity with a customer, no doubt you will be more successful with bricks and clicks than you will ever be with just clicks."
During her tenure at Williams-Sonoma Inc (WSM.N), McCollam was instrumental in launching multiple e-commerce websites and new brands, revamping its supply chain and laying the foundation for international expansion.
"We believe McCollam's hiring is a major coup for Best Buy," BB&T Capital Markets analyst Anthony Chukumba wrote. "She is experienced in shrinking a retail store base and developing a higher-margin e-commerce distribution channel, two of Best Buy's most pressing needs."
When asked if she planned any immediate cuts in Best Buy's already-decreased number of stores, McCollam said it was too early to tell.
In late June, the company said it was looking to reduce the size of stores and close more stores beyond the previously announced plan to close 50 of its 1,100 large U.S. stores. When it announced those closings in March, investors said the plan was inadequate.
Chains should "optimize their square footage" to provide good service, make sure "the stores continue to be billboards for the brand," then use their "online capabilities to be able to serve that customer 24/7," she said.
Despite a thumbs-up on the appointment, Chukumba did not change his "hold" rating on the stock, citing a lack of visibility on the chain's near-term prospects and new senior management's turnaround plan.
Best Buy executives are due to meet investors and analysts on Tuesday in New York.
McCollam hopes to capitalize on Best Buy's business of giving product technical support to customers, and take advantage of the highly fragmented consumer electronics market. About half of the market is currently being served by competitors that each have less than a 4 percent share while Best Buy has a 16 percent market share, she said.
"When you add that to the fact that Best Buy has one of the largest customer house files (customer database) in retail today, we are not leveraging that as fully as we could," McCollam said.
McCollam will take over as the Minneapolis-based chain's chief financial officer, effective December 10, replacing Jim Muehlbauer, who is due to depart at the end of the fiscal year in early February.
She left San Francisco-based Williams-Sonoma earlier this year after holding various jobs at the chain for more than 12 years.
She is also excited about moving back to the Midwest, where she grew up.
"You cannot know how excited my husband and I are to be returning," she said.
Reporting by Dhanya Skariachan; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe


text:
This web site is a compilation of information on a wide variety of topics on life after death (the afterlife). You will find information about…
- Death and dying
- What happens when you die
- Reincarnation
- Proof of heaven
- Suicide and the afterlife
Numerous other topics about death, dying and communication with those that have died are also presented. In addition, concepts relating to a soul's life here on earth are covered in order to help you answer the age-old question of "What is the meaning of life?"
Using the questions asked on Afterlife101.com as a starting point, research was conducted using writings from respected authors like Michael Newton, Allan Kardec, Jane Roberts (Seth) and others. The results of the investigations currently reveal 94.5% agreement on a variety of very specific afterlife topic areas.
Currently, this web site contains the largest correlation of spirit communications about life after death, all from respected sources that are readily available for your perusal. You are invited to read through the information presented, explore the various sources used and consider other sources to learn more. In addition, you may want to wander through our companion web site AfterlifeLibrary.com.
Mailing List Signup
Can we keep you updated with our latest information?
We will never share, sell, rent, trade or otherwise disclose your private information.
Latest News
- We've recently been on several radio show interviews. Listen to the recent one on Transformation Talk Radio. We'll be posting more soon!
- We have launched Voices Across The Veil, our new research program. You can view the announcement in our newsletter or read the official press release.
Explore Information on Life After Death
Explore the 265 life after death topic questions by using the Sections page or by clicking on one of the general sections below. If you want to explore personal evidence of life after death through participation in our worldwide research project, visit our Voices Across The Veil program.
- Death Experience for Adults deals with the various ways that adult humans die: singly and in groups; from age, illness or violence.
- Death Experience for Children describes the various ways that children die including miscarriages, abortion, sudden infant death syndrome, disease, accident, and murder.
- Transformation from Human to Spirit discusses the set of events that take place just after a human arrives in heaven and is greeted by many individuals. It ends, for most spirits, when they arrive in their ultimate spirit family grouping.
- The Afterlife deals with the new life that is experienced by a spirit that has made its transformation from human form to living in its spirit home and with its spirit family group.
- Reincarnation describes the process by which the decision is made in the spirit world to reincarnate on earth.
- Life on Earth shows a wide variety of ways that humans interact with the spirit world, and ways that the spirit world affects life among earthlings, particularly through the efforts of spiritual entities such as angels and spirit guides.
Latest Data Updates
- We have begun adding material from Denise Lescano's book, The Messenger, to the sources of various topics.
- Robert Crookall quotes from The Supreme Adventure have been added to a variety of topics (not complete, but over 140 quotes assigned)
Own a Share of This Work!
If you'd like to participate in this work, please consider becoming a patron. We are looking for people who are passionate about understanding life after death. Just visit our Patreon page to learn more. Thank you so much!


text:
The Chicago Fire Soccer Club today announced that the club has acquired Salvadoran defender Deris Umanzor from Club Deportivo Águila of El Salvador. Umanzor will be added to the Fire's roster upon receipt of his International Transfer Certificate (ITC) and P1 work visa. Per league and club policy, terms of the contract were not released.
"We are excited to have Deris Umanzor join the Chicago Fire," said Technical Director Frank Klopas. "Umanzor will provide depth in the Fire defense. He brings additional experience to our backline after an impressive 12-year career in El Salvador."
Umanzor, 30, comes to the Fire after spending five seasons with CD Águila, where he was recognized as one of the top left backs in the country. He played for the El Salvador men's national team, recording 33 appearances and one goal since 2000. Umanzor was a regular starter during current Fire head coach Carlos de los Cobos' tenure with the Salvadoran national team from 2007 to 2009.
A native of Santa Rosa de Lima, El Salvador, Umanzor started his career in 1998 with Municipal Limeño at the age of 18 and spent six seasons with the Salvadoran club before being transferred to CD Águila.
Player: Deris Umanzor
Position: Defender
Height: 5'8" (1.72 m)
Weight: 149 lbs. (68 kg)
Born: January 7, 1980
Hometown: Santa Rosa de Lima, El Salvador
Citizenship: Salvadoran
College: N/A
Last Club: CD Águila (El Salvador)
How Acquired: Signed from CD Águila on April 7, 2010


text:
In the world of The Ether Chronicles, the Mechanical War rages on, and appearances are almost always deceiving . . .
The prim professor
Daphne Carlisle may be a scholar, but she's far more comfort-able out in the field than lost in a stack of books. Still, when her parents are kidnapped by a notorious warlord, she knows she'll need more than quick thinking if she is to reach them in time. Daphne's only hope for getting across enemy territory is an airship powered and navigated by Mikhail Denisov, a rogue Man O' War who is as seductive as he is untrustworthy.
The jaded mercenary
Mikhail will do anything for the right price, and he's certain he has this mission—and Daphne—figured out: a simple job and a beautiful but sheltered Englishwoman. But as they traverse the skies above the Mediterranean and Arabia, Mikhail learns the fight ahead is anything but simple, and his lovely passenger is not entirely what she seems. The only thing Mikhail is certain of is their shared desire—both unexpected and dangerous.
Product Details
|HarperCollins Publishers
|Publication date:
|The Ether Chronicles , #3
|Sold by:
|NOOK Book
|Sales rank:
|File size:
About the Author
Zoë Archer is a RITA® Award-nominated romance author who writes novels chock-full of adventure, sexy men, and women who make no apologies for kicking ass. Her books include the Hellraisers paranormal historical series and the acclaimed Blades of the Rose paranormal historical adventure series. She enjoys baking, Tweeting about boots, and listening to music from the '80s. Zoë and her husband, fellow romance author Nico Rosso, live in Los Angeles.


text:
The new Masonite ceiling gets installed, first by setting the ends in place.
Carefully start raising one side.
With one side up start raising the other side.
Getting ready for the final snap.
The new piece is in, ready for trim.
892 made it out in time for Ghost Train. Here it is just out of the paint shop.
Some additional interior work needs to be done this winter and the car should be in service for all of 2009.
With the exterior completed the interior nears completion.
With lots of elbow grease applied the interior woodwork shows its original luster.
Here's a detail picture of the stencil applied to the ceiling. The pattern was found on the original ceiling material under many layers of paint.
A clear coat gets applied as one final measure.
Another view of the detail.
The car still needs reupholstered, but the rest is done after a 2 year project.
The Monticello Railway Museum depends upon many sources of income to acquire, restore, maintain and operate the museum and we welcome donations. Donors help fund and facilitate many projects at the museum and provide income above and beyond train tickets, gift shop sales and membership dues.
While our volunteers perform the majority of the required labor for restorations at the museum, the need for money to purchase materials and equipment is increasing. Now that work on steam locomotive #401 is complete, the amount of consumable shop materials used is increasing. For example: acetylene and oxygen for the cutting torch; drill bits and cutting tools for the machine shop; grinding wheels and wire wheels for metal preparation and LP gas for heat to allow our volunteers to work during the winter are costing several-hundred dollars each month.
A gift donation towards restoration work would be greatly appreciated. In addition, thoughtful family members, in your name, can make a donation to the museum.
Either way, your donation is appreciated and contributes to our overall financial security and will help us collectively facilitate much needed improvements at the museum. As a reminder, the Monticello Railway Museum is a registered 501 (C 3) not for profit organization and all donations to the museum are tax deductible. All donors to the museum will receive a letter acknowledging the donation.
Contact Information:
Make a Donation now:


text:
The Second Annual Puna 'Ulu Festival—'Ulu a Niu will be held on Saturday, March 2, 2013 from 9 am – 3 pm at Ho'oulu Lāhui, the site of Kua O Ka Lā Public Charter School at Pū'āla'a, adjacent to the 'Āhalanui County Park warm ponds in Puna. The event is free and open to the public. The Puna 'Ulu Festival—'Ulu a Niu will celebrate 'ulu (breadfruit) and niu (coconut) with a cooking contest, breadfruit trees and coconut palm trees for sale, presentations, keiki activities, cultural demonstrations, music all day with Diane Aki, Bruddah Cuz and Ili Wai, and local food featuring breadfruit and coconut.
The day will begin at 9 am with an opening pule by Kumu Hula Auli'i Mitchell followed by a message from Governor Neil Abercrombie delivered by his representative Wendy Botelho-Cortez.
The buffet lunch will feature gourmet dishes by Casey Halpren of Café Pesto, Kanoa Miura of Aloha Mondays, and Mark Noguchi of Pili Hawaii and Taste. The tentative menu includes Fried 'Ulu Croquettes, Braised Big Island Beef, Vegetable Curry, Heart of Palm Slaw with Coconut Mayo and 'Ulu Chocolate Cookies.
Cultural activities include 'ulu and kalo poi pounding with Uncle Jerry Konanui and 'Anakala Isaiah Kealoha, kapa making with 'ulu bark by experts Wesley and Lehua Sen, crafting of pahu drums from coconut with Keone Turalde, coconut weaving, and making cordage from coconut fiber with Larry Kuamo'o. Keiki activities include games, face painting and block printing. Micronesians United will present traditional Micronesian preparations of 'ulu with coconut milk. Demonstrations of how to make coconut milk will be held throughout the day. Local coconut water, fresh out of the coconut, will be for sale.
Learning how to cook 'ulu and niu in new and traditional ways is one of the highlights of the festival. Cooking demonstrations will be given by local favorite Chef Mark Noguchi aka "Chef Gooch"; Shirley Kauhaihao will show how to select and prepare 'ulu fruit; Dr. Nat Bletter, Chocolate Flavormeister of Madre Chocolate will be demonstrating how to make exquisite deserts from 'ulu and niu; the Kua O Ka Lā students culinary arts class will present their award-winning spicy 'ulu poke and raw foods experts Laura Dawn and Noah Dan will demonstrate how to make 'ulu tortillas with a variety of sauces.
The public is invited to compete in the 'Ulu a Niu Cooking Contest in which the public can enter recipes in the categories of Appetizer, Main Dish/Entrée and Dessert. Entries must include both 'ulu (breadfruit) and niu (coconut), but the main ingredient must be 'ulu. Prizes will be awarded for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in each of these categories and for Healthiest Choice and Best in Show. Breadfruit Cooking Contest rules and entry forms can be found at www.breadfruit.info.
Educational presentations about the cultural and horticultural aspects of breadfruit and coconut round out the event. Kua O Ka Lā students will present a need assessment of the importance of 'ulu and niu in the community. Kumu Ryan McCormack will give two cultural presentations: 'Ulu: A Hawaiian Perspective and Niuolahiki—The Life Giving Coconut. Noa Kekuewa Lincoln of Stanford University will present his original research on Kaluulu—the Ancient Kona Breadfruit Grove. Agroforestry expert Craig Elevitch of Hawai'i Homegrown Food Network will speak about Home Gardens—Pasifika Style. Dr. Diane Ragone and Ian Cole of the Breadfruit Institute of the National Tropical Botanical Garden will be on hand to answer questions and will give presentations on Breadfruit and Sustainability and 'Ulu from Root to Fruit: Tree Planting, Care and Maintenance. A tree planting with Leila Kealoha will commemorate the event.
The Puna 'Ulu Festival is presented by Ho'oulu Lāhui, Kua O Ka Lā Public Charter School, Hawai'i Homegrown Food Network, the Breadfruit Institute of the National Tropical Botanical Garden. The festival is sponsored by the Hawai'i Tourism Authority's Kūkulu Ola—Living Hawaiian Culture Program administered by the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, Doc Buyers Fund at Hawaii Community Foundation, Kamehameha Schools, Suisan, Aloha Mondays, Madre Chocolate and Café Pesto. The Second Annual Puna 'Ulu Festival—'Ulu a Niu is a part of a larger statewide effort to revitalize breadfruit for food security called Ho'oulu ka 'Ulu. Learn more about the Puna 'Ulu Festival by visiting www.breadfruit.info or call 965-5098.
Filed under: Agriculture, aloha, Announcements, Big Island, Community, Education, Environment, Food & Drink, Hawaii, Hawaiian, Health, Kids, Sustainable Living | Tagged: Breadfruit Festival, Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, Jerry Konanui, Kamehameha Schools, Puna Ulu Festival Goes Nuts - Ulu a Niu | Leave a comment »


text:
- Lesbian truth or dare questions
- Backpage fort wirth
- Pictures of sandra locke
- Si swimsuit nude
- Sex pic pussy
- Gina carano fake boobs
You have been blocked Sorry, you cannot send any messages to this user, send a friend request, comment on his pictures or videos, or post on his wall. Terms Of Service Privacy Policy Content removal. Information Support 18 USC DMCA Parental Control. A dark trade - Rape videos for sale in India Police have analysed the footage and concluded there were four main attackers but they would be investigating the others who gathered to watch, Tariq added.
Police have charged the three men with sexual harassment and offences under India's internet laws for sharing the video on social media. You are using an outdated browser. Indian natural gay sex photos first time A Flag this video. From Karachi to Germany and back again A lawyer and his family fled death threats in Pakistan and came to Germany.
New Videos Best Of Hot Hits Tags Pictures Sex Stories Forum Pornstars UPLOAD. Top Rated My Favorite Pictures Categories Mobile Pictures Upload Your Pictures! Exclude keywords from your results Put 'NOT' in front of the words that you don't want to see results for.
Click here to download.


text:
Happy Hallowe'en 2016
It was certainly Fright Night at Garden Studios for this Autumn's party. We were amazed by how many people dressed up. Lots of spooky food, drink and decorations then a game of limbo. Not sure how that ties in with the theme but we loved it anyway!... read more


text:
When President Barack Obama sits down with business leaders Thursday to talk about the ailing job market, the question he'll ask is simple: How much more can — or should — the government do to get companies to start hiring again?
The answer is turning out to be anything but simple.
The recent slowdown in job losses is welcome but only marks the beginning of the difficult process of rehiring the more than 8 million workers sidelined by the recession. A wobbly economic recovery appears to be under way, but it now seems clear that the unemployment rate is going to remain stubbornly high for years to come.
U.S. & World
The day's top national and international news.
"That is not going to go down well, politically speaking," said John Lonski, chief economist at Moody's Investors Service. "Still, you have to ask yourself whether or not there's room for much more in terms of fiscal stimulus."
The $787 billion stimulus package passed this year is still working its way through the economy, but Congress may be asked to consider additional measures -- perhaps a tax credit for new jobs or other hiring incentives, which could be costly.
The good news in the jobs data is that the pace of layoffs appears to be slowing. The monthly employment report due Friday is expected to show that the economy lost 130,000 jobs in November, which would be the best showing since January 2008. Over the first half of the year the economy was shedding jobs at a pace of nearly 600,000 a month.
New claims for unemployment benefits also have fallen, signaling that the worst of the job losses is over, and the economy could begin adding jobs on a net basis soon.
That's about as far as the good news goes. The overall "official" unemployment rate stands at 10.2 percent, the highest level since the early 1980s. When so-called "discouraged" and underemployed workers are included, the jobless rate is pushing 18 percent.
More troublesome is the scope of job losses compared to previous recessions. With unemployment still rising, payroll levels have shrunk nearly 6 percent since the recession began in December 2007. That is nearly three times the level of job loss during the last recession in 2001.
After the 2001 recession it took 18 months to restore employment to pre-recession levels. At that rate, even if the economy began adding jobs next month, employment levels wouldn't return to pre-recession levels until June 2014.
There is no shortage of ideas about how to get Americans back to work job more quickly. The first is to try to stimulate demand and convince employers they need more workers to expand production to meet that demand.
That's one of the objectives behind a proposal to extend unemployment benefits further into next year.
"This is the most effective way to get money into the economy. It's given to people who are simply out of money," said Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., a key supporter. "They're spending it. They're not socking it away in a mattress somewhere."
Though Congress extended benefits in November, the law failed to lift a previously approved expiration date of Dec. 31. As a result, an estimated 1 million people will lose benefits by the end of next month; by March, some three million will receive their last weekly check averaging about $315 a week. (Subsidies to help pay for health insurance are also set to expire for millions of jobless workers.)
Letting those benefits expire could hurt the fragile recovery by dampening consumer demand. But opponents of another extension are balking at the cost, which could load another $100 billion onto an already swollen federal budget deficit and add to the $12 trillion national debt.
"Calling more government spending and more debt a 'jobs package' is laughable, and the Democrats' frantic push for more of the same is yet another acknowledgment that their trillion-dollar stimulus isn't working," said Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio.
The high-profile White House meeting Thursday with business leaders and economists, coming a day in advance of November's employment report, has taken on an element of political theater. Boehner announced this week that Republicans would be holding their own jobs summit "to provide a platform for economic perspectives that won't be heard at the White House event."
It remains to be seem how much will come of the dueling job events. Washington's gridlock over health care reform, carbon emissions caps and new financial regulations, among other issues, seems likely to limit any actions to fairly modest proposals.
There seems to be fairly broad support, for example, for measures to provide easier access to credit for small businesses, which traditionally have been the biggest job creators. One idea is to expand lending by the Small Business Administration. Such measures would be relatively cheap, but their impact would be correspondingly limited.
That leaves the question of whether government should undertake a broader jobs program —one that could include a combination of additional stimulus spending and tax cuts. Opponents of more spending argue that government does a poor job of creating jobs.
"Business creates jobs; the public sector, government, does not create jobs," said Heritage Foundation economist Alison Fraser. "When it does, it's horrible at them and very inefficient."
A better solution, argue opponents of more spending, would be tax cuts aimed at getting businesses in a hiring mood.
"I expect there will be a lot of popularity on Capitol Hill, maybe on both sides of the aisle, for a new jobs tax credit," said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich.
Beyond tax credits for new jobs, other hiring incentives under consideration are a 'holiday' on payroll taxes — which would help both workers and employers — and expanded credits for business investment.
Those measures also likely would add to the deficit. And they are no more targeted than programs that involve direct spending, said Joel Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisors.
"Every time you create an incentive, every business gets it whether or not they were going to be creating new jobs," he said. "It becomes extraordinarily expensive to do that."
But doing nothing could carry a bigger price tag.
"You don't want to go back into recession," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. "If you do, it's going to cost taxpayers a lot more. Because if we go back in recession we're not coming out in any graceful way. It's going to be very painful. So it makes some sense to run a larger deficit in the near term to insure that you don't go back into a recession."


text:
UniCredit Bank determined winners of the UEFA Champions League 2013/2014 collectors' coins sets
On March 11, 2015 UniCredit Bank held a drawing of promotional gifts in the frames of "Football Card MasterCard®UniCredit Bank" promotional offer. The unique UEFA Champions League 2013/2014 collectors' coin sets were raffled among participants of special offer for the period from 23 February till 1 March, 2015.
According to the results the lucky owners of collectors' coins set are Yakimov Mykola Vitaliyovych and Zhukov Harry Oleksandrovych.
Promotional offer is valid from September 1, 2014 to May 31, 2015.
The detailed terms of promotion are available at the link.
Ukrsotsbank is one of the largest universal banks of Ukraine, operating in the local market since 1990. The bank offers full range of services to individuals and corporate clients.
The renovated Ukrsotsbank emerged on 31 October 2016 as a result of strategic deal whereby 99.9% of Ukrsotsbank shares have been transferred from UniCredit Group to ABH Holdings S.A. (АВНН) in exchange for a minority 9.9% stake in ABHH. Thus, the bank has combined 26-year-old traditions of Ukrsotsbank's client-centric attitude, European quality of service inherent to UniCredit, as well as international banking expertise of ABHH in a number of European countries including CIS. Thanks to the successful synthesis and synergy of the two assets of ABHH in Ukraine, Ukrsotsbank and Alfa-Bank, the banking market of Ukraine will see the rise of a new stronger financial institution. This, in turn, will spur up technological advance, increase efficiency, improve quality of service for the clients, reduce cost of banking services whereas their range will inevitably expand.
The extensive retail network of Ukrsotsbank consists of 237 branches, its headcount reaching nearly 5 thousand employees.
Social networks:
Press-service Ukrsotsbank


text:
Saving foreclosed homes in north Minneapolis
On some streets in north Minneapolis, vacant homes almost outnumber occupied ones. But now, many of the foreclosed houses in the area are in some stage of renovation.
Bill Buelow, director of construction at the Greater Metropolitan Housing Corporation (GMHC), explained what the houses were like before he started fixing them up.
"All the copper was vandalized and taken, and holes in the walls, and the cabinets trashed," Buelow said.
The GMHC is one of the main non-profit groups helping the city in its effort to reclaim, rehab and resell foreclosed homes.
Buelow showed off a renovated two-story stucco house on Russell Ave. It has beautiful hardwood floors and a brand new kitchen. When Buelow first got it, there was no kitchen.
"Literally, the cabinets were gone. It was just a couple of pipes sticking out of the wall, and the same with the bathrooms," Buelow said. "A lot of the fixtures were removed. It was almost depressing, and it's like, where do you begin?"
This house is one of more than 140 properties in north Minneapolis seized by authorities more than a year ago after an investigation uncovered a massive mortgage fraud scheme. The fraud involved $35 million in mortgages across the metro area.
The scam landed the owners of real estate firm TJ Waconia in federal prison for using inflated appraisals to buy and resell the homes to investors for a profit.
The scope of the mortgage fraud scheme left a trail of destruction in its wake, according to Tom Streitz, Minneapolis housing director.
"From the neighbors' perspective it was the worst of all possible worlds, because you often had a house that was unmanaged with renters, and then you also had the equity leaving the neighborhood," Streitz said.
The vacant TJ Waconia homes added to an already bleak housing picture in north Minneapolis, where a surplus of foreclosures continues to keep home values way down.
Advocates fear the low prices could make the neighborhood vulnerable to another wave of shady investors looking to score cheap houses to flip for profit.
Streitz said it's critical to get the houses off the market and into the hands of responsible owners.
"Bringing a family in who can afford their mortgage payment, so we don't repeat the cycle of disinvestment that we have seen happen here over and over and again," Streitz said.
To help lure potential homebuyers to distressed neighborhoods like north Minneapolis, the city has offered down payment and closing cost assistance through a program called Minneapolis Advantage.
The program is widely seen as a success. But last week, the City Council moved to cut the program's funding in half. If approved, the cuts mean the city will have to make up the difference if it wants to keep the incentive program going.
But city housing officials say they don't just want to continue the program. They say that together, the wide array of foreclosure prevention and property improvement programs put in place to stem the foreclosure crisis has been so successful they want to expand it.
Along with Brooklyn Park and Hennepin County, Minneapolis has applied for another nearly $40 million in federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds for next year.
They hope $2 million of that would go straight to Minneapolis Advantage, which would nearly quadruple the size of the program.
So far, the city has used federal stimulus funds to purchase, demolish or renovate several hundred homes.
That may not seem like much, considering Minneapolis has had an average of about 3,000 foreclosures a year for the past three years. But every foreclosure they can rescue benefits the whole community, Streitz said.
"That ripple effect is extraordinary, so to me it's not a drop in the bucket," Streitz said. "It's a multiplier effect. One house, one block makes a huge difference."
Officials say they expect to hear about the next round of federal foreclosure recovery funds sometime early next year.


text:
New York City Events, Coupons, Reviews!
Subscribe to KidsScoop! The monthly family event and savings newsletter.
3000 Grapevine Mills Parkway Grapevine, TX 76051
GRAPEVINE, TEXAS (August 1, 2016) – If you could design your city of the future, what would it look like? LEGOLAND® Discovery Center Dallas/Fort Worth is asking children to help design the future city of Dallas-Fort Worth with their new project, DFW of The Future. The new exhibit aims to inspire the next generation of builders by giving them an opportunity to see their designs come to life out of LEGO® brick. The project asks children to imagine what their city of the future might look like and what could be done better.Children can submit their ideas for a chance to have them created out of LEGO brick in a special addition to the attraction's signature MINILAND exhibit, which features replicas of North Texas landmarks. The Master Model Builder will select designs and build them to scale for the new DFW of The Future model display, set to be unveiled early 2017. To enter, download and complete this form by August 31. Entries can be submitted by email to email@example.com, dropped in the LEGO Mailbox inside the attraction or mailed to LEGOLAND Discovery Center Attn: Master Model Builder 3000 Grapevine Mills Parkway Ste. 519 Grapevine, TX 76051. For more information visit www.LEGOLANDDiscoveryCenter.com/dallasfw.
Legoland Discovery Center Celebrates 40 Years Of The Lego Minifigure With A Birthday Bash
LEGOLAND Discovery Center and SEA LIFE Aquarium Celebrate Back-To-School With Special Offers
Dads Go Free On Father's Day At Legoland Discovery Center
LEGO Pirate-Themed Splash Pad Opens For The Season
LEGOLAND Parks and LEGOLAND Discovery Centers to Celebrate The LEGO Batman Movie Around the World
LEGOLAND DISCOVERY CENTER INVITES CHILDREN TO DESIGN FUTURE CITY OF DALLAS-FORT WORTH Futuristic L
Train To Be A Ninja Master At Legoland Discovery Center's Ninjago Weekend
LEGOLand Build - Play - Learn
LEGOLAND Discovery Center Dallas/Fort Worth Holiday Activities
LEGOLAND Discovery Center in Grapevine, TX
LEGOLAND Discovery Center Dallas Review
Fun For Older Kids
Free Child Tickets to Legoland Discovery Center - DFW Area
Having Family Fun in Grapevine, Texas with Legoland Discovery Center!
Adventures Await You At Legoland Discovery Center In Grapevine, Texas
(Spanish) Things to do in Dallas:Legoland
LEGOLAND Discovery Center
Make a visit to LEGOLAND Discovery Center
Family fun galore at LEGOLAND Discovery Center
LEGO Star Wars MINILAND Model Display NOW OPEN!


text:
Der Gottesbeweis
"Der Gottesbeweis" is a 41 page evangelistical pamphlet by Kornelius Novak sold as paperback pocket book. It's primarily sold to Christians as propaganda material. The author attempts to prove the existence of God logically. AFAIK the book's title was "Der logische Gottesbeweis" earlier.
Summary and rebuttal[edit]
- If we knew what the Bible really is we would read it all day long and not put it away again (chapter 1).
- "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God." (Matthew 22, 29) (page 6)
Scriptures: Numerous people including me, Matt Dillahunty and many more (add your name here if you wish) all share the same experience: The more you read the Bible and the better you know it, the more obvious it's blatant contradictions, factual errors, the barbaric and sadistic character and the fallibility of the god described therein become and the more it becomes obvious that the Bible can by no means be divinely inspired.
Power of God: It can't be observed or measured. We only have anecdotal evidence and testimonies which doesn't count.
- When Jesus talks about Scriptures he talks about many books. The author points out that the Bible consists of 66 different books written by 40 different authors over a period of several thousand years in all kinds of places like palaces, prisons, on journeys through the desert etc. (page 7)
The author fails to mention that 27 of the 66 books of the Bible are New Testament and didn't even exist in Jesus' times. When Jesus refers to "the Scriptures" he talks about the 39 books of the Old Testament and maybe the Apocrypha, depending on which flavour of Christianity Jesus prefers.
- The Bible is an enumeration of prophecies and fulfilments. They are evidence for the existence of God (page 7).
No, they don't. The only acceptable evidence for the Bible would be rock-solid extra-biblical facts like archaeological findings. Circular evidence and bronze age barbarians reinforcing each other's legends don't count.
- The Bible contains 6408 verses of prophecy, 3268 of them have been fulfilled exactly, about half of them will be fulfilled in the end times. (Page 8)
Fulfilled exactly – says who? Once again: The Bible. See above.
- The fulfilment of prophecy can be examined scientifically. (pages 8 and 11)
Please note: E-mail-correspondence with the author clarifies, that when he talks about "science" he also includes "spiritual sciences" which we would call "theology".
Looking at the Bible from a theological point of view doesn't count as "scientific examination". The fulfilment of biblical prophecies doesn't stand up to real scientific scrutiny using e.g. archaeological methods.
- Biblical prophecies come directly from God, extra-biblical prophecies don't. Example: Nostradamus (pages 9 – 10)
All prophecy, clairvoyance and oracles are nonsense. None of these have ever been established to be reliable and neither has biblical prophecy.
- Numerous scientists converted to Christianity. (page 11)
- Example: The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin asked "one of his best scientists" to prove the Bible wrong. He found Jesus in the process.
Argumentum ad verecundiam aka argument from authority – who cares?
Also: The author fails to name this "one of the best scientists" of Stalin presumably not knowing what he's writing about.
- The author explains the "prophetic logic" using an example: Jeremiah prophesised 70 years of captivity in Babylon (Jeremiah 25 ). Daniel reads about Jeremiah's prophecy (Daniel 9 ), acts accordingly and the prophecy is being fulfilled as a result. (page 13)
Once again: Biblical reports don't count as evidence. You could use the very same argument to affirm the Qur'an, the Bhagavad-Gita and all kinds of "holy books".
- The history of Tyrus has been fulfilled to the point thus being evidence for the validity of the Bible.
It hasn't. It isn't. Here's an analysis of Ezekiel's prophecies about Tyre.
- Fulfilled prophecies are evidence for God (chapter 7)
If there were any they would. However: There aren't any.
- Jesus himself fulfilled at least 330 prophecies (chapter 8)
- The most important prophecy of all is Jesus' sacrificial death, prophesised in Isaiah 53 (chapter 9)
- Jesus fulfilled more than 30 prophecies on the cross. (page 26)
- Jesus' resurrection is evidence for his godliness (page 31)
Jesus' existence, miracles, crucifixion and resurrection are to be doubted. There are literally no reports about Jesus outside scripture (including non-canonical Gospels and other spiritual writings). These books themselves have been written many decades after the actual events. There are no eyewitness reports, no archaeological evidence, Jesus is not mentioned in any contemporary documents. What reason is there to even believe he existed?
- We can observe the fulfilment of prophecies today (chapter 11).
Oh yeah?
- Worldwide expansion of Christianity
Finally a hit! But: Many founders of many cults have prophesised that their religion would spread worldwide. Many sects and cults have disappeared again. Here we have a cult that managed to survive and spread and we immediately talk about fulfilled prophecy. Nice!
- Persecution of Christians
Here comes the emotional part of the review:
Persecution? What persecution? Here we have a perfect case of the Munchausen-Syndrome. Those countries persecuting Christians also persecute about anything else. It is just as dangerous to be Hindu or Buddhist in Islamic countries as it is to be Christian. Only our perception is distorted massively because nobody in the western world gives a crap about persecuted Hindus and Buddhists and everyone cries "they persecute Christians".
It's the other way around. Look at the atrocities performed by Christians throughout history. The Christians performed the Crusades, the Christians performed the Inquisition, the Christians suppressed science threatening geniuses like Galileo Galilei with torture, death and hellfire. The Christians brought war, death and disease to the Americas almost eradicating the native population completely. It was a Christian who started World War II and tried to eradicate the Jews, exploiting their workforce in the process. You Christians even butcher each other - see Ireland. The list is endless and all of it happens in the name of God!
Oh, I know, that was that other sect. It's "that other sect" when it comes down to accepting responsibility - but it's "us" when we talk about statistics, ja? When suddenly 1/3 of the world population are Christians, ja?
And look at the behaviour of Christian bullies in the USA today. They try to suppress gay marriage by attempting to ammend the constitution, they try to suppress real science in school and replace it with "Intelligent Design", they bomb abortion clinics, again: The list is endless!
You don't get to cry "persecution" when officially sanctioned and led prayer is removed from school because it's unconstitutional. You don't get to scream blue murder and "persecution" when Dr. Kent Hovind gets thrown in the slammer for tax fraud. You don't get to lament "persecution" when a Catholic priest gets apprehended for molesting altar boys. You don't get to yell "persecution" when the churches get cut down to size during the Age of Enlightenment in Europe. You're not being persecuted, you liar, we just defend ourselves against you persecuting us!
- Example: Alleged report about the persecution of Christians and the current wave of conversion in China reported "recently in some socialist newspaper" (page 35)
First of all the author fails to mention his source. Secondly China persecutes all kinds of political dissidents. If they also happen to be Christians – bad luck. They also censor the internet massively but Anon doesn't complain about persecution, now, does he?
- The author doesn't fail to mention eternal damnation in hell (page 36). Very shortly, but still...
It would have been a real miracle if he didn't. Pascal's Wager all the way - someone call Jeff Dee!
- The rest of the book is the usual give-your-life-to-Jesus-mumbo-jumbo and largely uninteresting. I didn't even bother to read that part, the headlines were enough.
Bottom line[edit]
Most of the pamphlet employs the Bible as evidence for the Bible - circular reasoning deluxe! The few extra-biblical pieces of evidence he brings up can be and have been refuted numerous times. The author does not once provide any piece of evidence or sources that can be checked, but still he has the bowels to talk about science.
Book of Opinion, Chapter 1, Verse 1: I don't expect much of a paperback pocket book but this pamphlet is a waste of paper and completely worthless. Good thing he gave it to me for free when he learned that I'm an atheist, bad thing that trees had to die for the paper!


text:
City of Kenmore WashingtonHome Menu
Public Safety
The City of Kenmore is prepared and resilient against many types of emergencies. Kenmore has an emergency preparedness plan and volunteer team to act as leaders when needed. Make sure you are prepared too by getting to know some of our local officers in the fire and police departments. Learn how you can get involved as a police volunteer so you can help to serve and protect your community! You can also read about how to be prepared for an emergency or disaster, and who to contact in the event of one.