Twitter Streams: Top Tweets From Selected Accounts, Grouped By Topics

Twitter Streams: Top Tweets From Selected Accounts, Grouped By Topics

 

 Twitter has streams of tweets described at "Top Tweets" from Twitter-selected users for a number of different topics. They are made so people who don't have Twitter accounts can easily find interesting tweets, and thus find Twitter worth signing up for. The urls all start with "twitter.com/i/streams/stream" follow by a number. There are a number of them with low integer numbers like 1,2,3,5, but there are gaps like the missing 4. I suspect the missing numbers were once valid but removed, but this is just a guess. After a hundred or two of the low integers ID numbers, the numbers start back up with huge numbers like 686639666779426849, which is apparently the result of a switch in how Twitter numbers tweets, a change to using Snowflake IDs, announced in 2010 in a blog post Announcing Snowflake.  The name Snowflake ID comes from snowflakes being known of as unique, which is an essential property of Twitter ID numbers.



If you click these links while you are logged into Twitter, you will see an out of place looking login form. Just ignore it. If you log in on it, you will lose the nice list of top tweets from selected accounts twitter picked and you will be on your normal timeline.

I don't find these listed anywhere, and it seems like a useful list, and I've spent an absurd amount of time figuring this out, and I want to stop thinking about, so I am hopefully taking it out of my brain and putting it on the internet.

Limerick - There Once Was A Man From Nantucket

This is nothing special; just an attempt to write a clean language limerick, that scans properly, and record me reading it, and trimming it and publishing it, and I have succeed, so I am pleased.



There once was a man from Nantucket,
Who had a most wonderful bucket,
A straw in this pail,
Remained filled with ale,
No matter how long he would suck it.

Dallas Bombot: Killer Robot Or Not?

Was the device used by Dallas police to kill Micah Johnson a killer robot?

 

Transcribed from NPR's show All Things Considered episode "Robot Used By Dallas Police To Kill Gunman Sparks Debate"

When Dallas police chief David Brown announced last week that Micah Johnson was killed by a robot with a bomb, it raised a lot of questions that we've been trying to answer.
What kind of robot was it?
Has it been used this way before?
And, Is this use ethical?

Well new information today is filling in some of the blanks.

Lauren Silverman of member station KERA has more:

"After hours of negotiating with Micah Johnson while he was holed up in the parking garage of El Centro Community College, Dallas police chief David Brown said "Enough."

"I knew that at least two had been killed, and we knew through negotiation this was the suspect because he was asking us how many did he get, and he was telling us how many more he wanted  to kill."

Brown asked his team to come up with an idea. So they attached a pound of C4 explosive to their bomb disposal robot, and detonated it within a few feet of where Johnson was hiding.

"This [wasn't an] ethical dilemma for me. I'd do it again to save our officers' lives."

The heavy duty, mostly metal robot is about the size of a lawn mower, with hefty treaded wheels, cameras, and a large extendable arm.

It's made by Northrup Grumann subsidiary, Remotec.
To understand this robot, it helps to know some basics.

  

Howard Chizeck, an engineer at the University of Washington, says there are three types of robots.
First, the industrial ones, you might see on an assembly line, maybe putting together a car.

"They basically are tools that do exactly what they are told to do."

Then there are autonomous robots; these are the ones that tend to get the most attention, at least in Hollywood: think Robocop or Terminator.

Finally, Chizeck says, there are telerobots.  That's what the Dallas police used.

"Things like bomb defusing robots or drones, search and rescue robots, where there's a human in the loop."

These are all over the place. Think of drones flying over Pakistan, 

or robots that do micro-surgery

Tim Dees is a former police officer and tech writer for policeone.com. He says telerobots are a common tool among large law enforcement agencies, like the Swiss army knife of robots

"I've seen 'em with shotguns with water cannons, with uhh arms that... articulate enough to open a package, so... they're used for all sorts of things. "

Dess says bomb disposal units do routinely carry explosives with them.

"Unlike on TV, where ah you have some sweaty guy trying to decide whether to cut the red wire or the green wire, the more common way is to, what the bomb guys will call, "render it safe", which usually means blowing it up right where it is."

Arming a robot with an explosive to blow up a person, as was the case in Dallas, that was a first. Still according to Michael Horowitz, that doesn't make the device a killer robot, exactly.

"A killer robot would be something that was more autonomous, that was actually programmed, and could do things on it's own, without human supervision."

Horowitz is a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He says some people wonder whether this type of remote technology might make police more likely to use lethal force, since they're not directly in danger.

Another question has to do with security. Engineer Howard Chizeck says there's a risk that the robot could be hacked: "If somebody disrupts that information stream, right, they could potentially take over and command that remote  robot or just make it not work."

Chizeck says hacking probably isn't something we need to worry about, unless police start using remotely controlled robots more often.

For NPR News, I'm Lauren Silverman, in Dallas.

  

All Things Considered Staff

Esperanto - Pasporto Al La Tuta Mondo

The "Pasporto Al La Tuta Mondo", Passport To The World videos for beginning Esperanto Students, in a playlist, in numerical order.  I found the videos in a channel, but not in a playlist, and out of order, and I like things like this in order, and sometimes one searches for playlists, and than channel wouldn't in such a search.









I'm not real fond of this, but I did the Duolingo tree and don't find strengthening the skills is improving my Esperanto much. I think I need to spend more time hearing spoken Esperanto and I am extremely weak in responding. Recognizing written words, reading simmple sentences, and figuring out to how write sentences when you can cheat and look up words in Google Translate is immensely easier than understanding speech, even limited vocabularly speech, and that is much easier than pulling words up in your at a rate fast enough to have a conversation, evan a simple one, for me.

So while this video series so far isn't ideal, it doesn't seem to be helping me understand spoken Esperanto better.

If any has suggestion for good material or techniques for improving hearing and speaking other than Evildea, I'd like to know.