Daft Punkโs Thomas Bangalter Talks About Making Music for Art Projects and Robot Life asย Performance
The French artist has a new album of music created for a ballet as well as a sound component to a public art project in Paris.
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ํํฐ ๋ณด๊ธฐํ์ฌ ์ง์
48.9
0 = ๋ถ์ ์ฐ์ธ
50 = ์ค๋ฆฝ
100 = ๊ธ์ ์ฐ์ธ
์ต๊ทผ 7์ผ ๊ธฐ์ค 10,362๊ฑด์ ๋ถ์ํ ๊ฒฐ๊ณผ, ๋ด์ค ์ฌ๋ฆฌ์ง์๋ 48.9(๊ท ํ)์ ๋๋ค. ๊ธ์ 1,027๊ฑด(9.9%)ยท์ค๋ฆฝ 7,480๊ฑด(72.2%)ยท๋ถ์ 1,855๊ฑด(17.9%)์ด๋ฉฐ, ์ค๋ฆฝ ๋น์ค์ด ๋๋ ทํ๊ฒ ๋์ต๋๋ค. ์ฑํฅ ์ง์๋ ์ข ํฉ 20.9(๋ณด์ ๊ฒฝํฅ)์ ๋๋ค.
The French artist has a new album of music created for a ballet as well as a sound component to a public art project in Paris.
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Israel and Iran traded attacks on Monday for the first time since a fragile ceasefire agreement was struck in April, sparking concerns of a resumed conflict in the Middle East. Israel said it struck petrochemical facilities in Mahshahr that produce โunique materials that serve as critical components for the development of ballistic missiles.โ Israeli forces...
India is launching on Friday a new fuel blend with an 85% ethanol component as part of the fuel flex mobility program of the world's third-largest crude importer to reduce dependence on imported oil. The E85 fuel was officially launched at a ceremony in New Delhi in the presence of India's Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Hardeep Singh Puri. On Thursday, Puri launched India's first flex-fuel passenger vehicle by Maruti Suzuki in New Delhi. Flex-fuel vehicles can operate on a range of ethanolโpetrol blends, from E20 up to E100. Indiaโฆ
The US had been reducing surface-level ozone, a harmful pollutant and the main component of smog, but that changed as wildfire activity picked up around 2015.
WiiM, the audio company that's challenged the idea that audiophile-level performance requires a small loan, is expanding its whole-home ecosystem with the WiiM Bar, which releases in July. Much like its other speakers and audio components, the WiiM Bar supports a bunch of streaming options and expandability at an affordable price - in this case, [โฆ]
Nvidiaโs Jensen Huang spoke highly of Marvell, and his comments are sparking broad enthusiasm for providers of optical components.
This weekโs Current Climate newsletter also looks at an emerging market for electric tugboats and boom times for a solar panel maker that doesnโt use Chinese components
Computex 2026 is underway in Taiwan, and we're expecting all manner of flashy computers with jaw-dropping pricetags (or no pricetags at all) as the entire industry navigates RAMageddon. But for desktop PC gamers, AMD has a different pitch. It's relaunching three old components alongside a big new promise: you won't need to buy a new [โฆ]
In 1987, Richard Greenhill, a British photographer who was fascinated by (but had no actual training in) robotics, decided he wanted to build a life-size humanoid that could do useful things, like carrying luggage. He was working at a startup called Intergalactic Robots, but he couldnโt convince anyone there to build such a machine, so he set about building one himself, in his attic. To help with his project, he organized a weekly get-together of a dozen or so like-minded folks. Every Wednesday night, his wife, Sally, would make a big pot of spaghetti, and the group would tinker with components scavenged from old printers and picked up from junkyards. They called themselves the Shadow Group. They eventually constructed several different robots, but their main project was the two-legged Shadow Walker. In 1987, photographer Richard Greenhill organized a weekly gathering of DIY enthusiasts to work on projects in his attic, including the Shadow Walker. Richard Greenhill and David Buckley Greenhillโs friend David Buckley, a robotics and animatronics expert heโd met at Intergalactic, sketched out a rough design based on medical textbooks of human bone structure and muscle movement. The robotโs skeleton, made of maple, was greatly simplifiedโonly one bone in the lower leg and a single wide toe on each foot. The ankleโs double-axis design allowed for two degrees of movement. The knee had no complicating kneecap. Greenhill didnโt want the robot to use motors, so its movement was controlled using compressed air to extend and contract 28 โair-musclesโโhis version of a McKibben muscle, invented in the 1950s to mimic musculature with pneumatics. The muscles were connected to the bones across eight joints (hips, knees, ankles, toes), which provided 12 degrees of freedom. RELATED: The Short, Strange Life of the First Friendly Robot The robotโs headless torso held the control valves, electronics, and computer interfaces. It stood 168 centimeters tall and 46 cm wide and weighed about 38 kilograms. The group managed to get the robot to stand up reliably and balance itself; it could even regain its center if pushed a little. But walking turned out to be more of a challenge. Rich Walker joined the group as a teenager and began writing software to get the robot to stand. He was particularly interested in using neural networks to solve balancing problems, although he ran into a number of hardware obstacles, including the unreliability of the sensors and the valves, and the robotโs overall fragility. Over time, Walker and the team developed a standard library of routines to control the robot. Walker wrote a detailed description of the Shadow Walker in 1999, which is available on David Buckleyโs website. The 1st International Robot Olympics By the time the Shadow Group began developing Shadow Walker, engineers in academia and industry had been working on robotics for several decades. The worldโs first industrial robot, the Unimate, debuted in 1961, and in 1967 Donald Michie and others began building a series of Freddy robots to investigate machine intelligence. The IEEE created its first dedicated robotics organization in 1984 when it established the IEEE Robotics and Automation Council, which became the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in 1987. Also in 1987, the nonprofit International Federation of Robotics was established to promote research, development, use, and cooperation in the field of robotics. As Shadow Walker pushed the limits for a DIY humanoid robot, industrial humanoids were also gaining ground. In 1986, Honda began working on its experimental (E-series) and later the prototype (P-series) humanoid robots, finally unveiling the P2 in 1996. The P2 stood 183 cm tall and weighed 210 kg. It was the first humanoid capable of stable, autonomous walking. This work eventually led to the development of the groundbreaking ASIMO. Greenhillโs friend, roboticist David Buckley, consulted medical textbooks to create Shadow Walkerโs humanoid design.Richard Greenhill and David Buckley In the late 1980s, the public was both fascinated and horrified by the potential of robots. Businesses saw robots as a way to increase productivity, while workers worried they would take their jobs. Children viewed them as wondrous toys, while people with disabilities embraced them as tools of liberation. Military experts hoped robots would fight wars without endangering human soldiers, while politicians pondered if robots might eventually get to vote. Philosophers thought robots could challenge our notions of intelligence (and stupidity), while the religious struggled with concerns about the human race in a robot-dominated future. Shadow Walkerโs simplified anatomy included only one bone in the lower leg and a single wide toe on each foot.Science Museum Group Peter Mowforth, cofounder of the Turing Institute in Glasgow, noted these disparate visions for robots when he announced the 1st International Robot Olympics, to be held in 27 and 28 September 1990 and hosted by the Turing Institute and the University of Strathclyde. The Olympics would round up the worldโs best robots and showcase them head-to-head. Mowforth himself thought all of the competing visions of robots were overblown. Steeped in machine learning research and robotics development, he knew firsthand the limitations of the state of the art: Robots rarely worked as intended, easily broke down, and glitched over seemingly trivial problems. He envisioned the Robot Olympics as a testbed to assess what the latest generation of robots could and could not do. At the 1990 Robot Olympics, held in Glasgow, Shadow Walker wore pants to conceal its pneumatic โair-musclesโ from competitors.Adam Hart-Davis/Science Source The call for participation was wide open. Instead of having predetermined categories of competition, the organizers opted to see who applied to compete and then group them based on their claimed capabilities. In addition to picking the winners of individual events, the judges would select an overall Olympic champion based on the quality of the hardware, the sophistication of behavior, and novelty. Other prizes were given for young competitors, technologies that showed commercial potential, and design. In the end, more than 50 robots were entered, from a mix of universities, industry, and hobbyist groups from Canada, France, India, Japan, Mexico, the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia. There were plenty of disappointments. Trolleyman, a golf-cart-like wheeled robot, suffered a power failure while carrying the opening Olympic torch through the streets of Glasgow. The pile rug in the arena tripped up many robots that had been trained only on flat, smooth floors. David Buckley later concluded that the events were too difficult, and that the Olympics didnโt push development forward. Of course, there were winners. In a surprise triumph for vintage technology, the fully mechanical 19th-century Japanese Archer from the Museum of Automata in York, England, won gold in javelin, beating out competitors more than 100 years its junior. The overall Olympic Champion was Yamabico, Shoji Suzukiโs entry from the University of Tsukuba, in Japan, which won bronze in obstacle avoidance and gold in wall following, but was disqualified in the talking category for not speaking English. The Shadow Group had high hopes for Shadow Walker. Unfortunately, though, it failed to take a step, and the biped race was won by the Cardiff University Biped. Shadow Walker now resides in the collections of the Science Museum in London. The Legacy of Shadow Walker In 1997, a paying customer in search of a robotic leg compelled the Shadow Group to get serious and become a registered company. Shadow Robot is now Britainโs oldest robotics company. Rich Walker, who had left the Shadow Group to earn a B.A. in mathematics and a diploma in computer science at the University of Cambridge, joined Shadow Robot in 1999 as technical director. Today heโs the director of the company. Shadow Robot specializes in durable robot hands rather than walking robots. But the focus on hands is also a legacy of the Shadow Group. Walker remembers that the Shadow Groupโs first humanoid hand in the late 1990s was impressive simply for being able to pick up a pint of beer (a smooth-sided, thin-walled glass). Today, Shadow Robotโs hands are testbeds for dexterity. Gone are the pneumatic muscles, replaced by actuators that move each finger with precision. The classic model contains 20 motors, allowing for abductive and adductive movement with 24 degrees of freedom. Shadow Walkerโs operator wore a data suit that captured his movements and allowed the robot to copy them.Richard Greenhill In a recent blog post, Sejal Parsotomo, senior marketing executive at Shadow Robot, wrote that while humanoid robots are great for public relations, specialized dexterity is key for success: A robot that can walk into your factory may be impressive, but a robot that can reliably manipulate objects is transformative. In its struggles to take more than a few steps, the Shadow Walker showed the inherent difficulty that robots had in mastering even low-level skills. In August 2025, Beijing hosted the World Humanoid Robot Games. Competing in sports such as gymnastics, soccer, and track events, as well as more โusefulโ tasks like hotel cleaning and sorting medicine, these robots could literally have run circles around the competitors in the first Robot Olympics 35 years earlier. And yet, there is still so much work needed in order for robots to navigate the human-built environment. Despite the astonishing progress, weโre still not all that close to actually useful humanoid robots. Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology. An abridged version of this article appears in the June 2026 print issue as โLearning to Walk.โ References Richard Greenhill gives an overview of his life and the founding of the Shadow Group in a post on Shadow Robotโs corporate website. David Buckley has a compilation of resources on the Shadow Biped Walker, including specifications from the 1999 iteration and a brochure from the 1st International Robot Olympics. There is coverage of the Robot Olympics worthy of a gossip sheet in La Repubblica and lovely footage of the competition in this TV-am interview of Peter Mowforth by Lorraine Kelly.
For some, artificial intelligence and its related components represent a boon for the human community. A tool of unimaginable power that will finally enable us to control almost every aspect of our lives โ even death and the afterlife. For others, it evokes a sense of impending doom. โDonโt worry about it,โ say the enthusiasts. [โฆ]
A pair of childrenโs shoes is an odd place to look for the changing dynamics of American power. But stick with me because, after the past year, it is one of the clearest places to see them.Long before those shoes reach a store shelf, tariffs have raised the cost of materials, components, and importation. Oil touches nearly everything else: synthetic fabrics, foam, adhesives, packaging, and freight. When both shocks arrive together, companies cut margins, cut orders, cheapen materials, delay investment, and eventually pass the pain on to consumers. Now, multiply that across the economy, and you start to see the The post Glass Jaw? The New Economic Fragility Recasting American Power appeared first on War on the Rocks.
As Apple tries to shrink Gemini for the iPhone, a cloud component is probably inevitable.
The Jets underwent a roster makeover this offseason and now a key component of their training center is about to undergo one of its own.
At least two owners have lost control of their vehicles after a critical suspension component broke. In both cases, the vehicles had been previously serviced.
The war in Iran and the accompanying shipping bottleneck are triggering a historic crisis in the aluminum market, with potentially devastating knock-on effects across sectors that depend on the base metal. Aluminum is the third most used metal in the world, behind only iron and steel. Aluminum is prized for its high strength-to-weight ratio, corrosion resistance, and excellent conductivity โ properties that make it essential for everything from beverage cans and cooking foil to aerospace components and power grids. Key sectors utilizing aluminumโฆ
This article is adapted by the author with permission from Tech Policy Press. Read the original article. South Africa is not just another developing country struggling to govern artificial intelligence; it is the exception with leverage, and the window to act on it is closing. It holds approximately 88 percent of global platinum-group metal reserves, critical inputs to parts of the semiconductor and data-center supply chains that make AI infrastructure possible. It hosts the largest data-center market on the continent. Its existing hyperscaler relationships give it procurement leverage that most African states will never have. And a major geopolitical contest over AI infrastructure is being fought on its soil right now, between Chinese and American technology companies competing for control of the systems that will underpin an entire continentโs public sector. In physics, leverage requires three things: a fulcrum, a lever arm, and the ability to apply force. The Bushveld Complex, the worldโs largest platinum-group metal deposit, is the fulcrum: a mineral endowment that gives South Africa a position in the semiconductor supply chain that no other African state holds. The since-withdrawn draft policy is the lever arm. The unresolved โOPTIONโ provisions in the policy are where force would be applied. Without a policy that specifies what South Africa wants in return for market access, the lever arm sits unused, and the weight of two of the worldโs largest technology ecosystems settles exactly where those ecosystems want it to settle. This makes South Africa a global test case. Not because its proposed means of governance is exemplary, but because it is the one developing country with enough structural leverage to negotiate genuinely different terms, and the one that is choosing, through inaction, not to. The recent announcement of a new panel to update the draft policy is an important opportunity. But the deeper failure is not that an AI policy contained bad references. It is that no verification process caught them before the document entered the public domain. That is a systems problem, not merely a political one. It points to a missing layer in how governments are adopting AI. The contest already underway Last year, Huawei pitched an emerging-product bundle to tech executives across the continent. Huawei was now bundling access to DeepSeekโs large language model with its own cloud and storage infrastructure. The price differential was starkโin some cases by more than 90 percent. At the same time, Microsoft announced plans to spend ZAR 5.4 billion ($300 million) by the end of 2027 on cloud and AI infrastructure in South Africa, building on a prior ZAR 20.4 billion investment. Google, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle already have cloud regions in the country. According to one analysis, the countryโs data-center market was valued at US $2.16 billion in 2024, the largest in Africa. These are not commercially neutral investments. Huaweiโs infrastructure reach has been explicitly linked to Chinese strategic objectives, including a documented track record of providing governments with surveillance infrastructure through its Safe Cities network. U.S. hyperscaler investment comes with its own dependency structure: closed models, pricing set unilaterally, and terms of access that no African government has meaningfully shaped. South Africa is being asked to choose between these dependency models without a policy that specifies what it wants in return. The leverage it has There is a particular irony in South Africaโs position. The country whose mines supply platinum-group metals essential to semiconductor manufacturing, and through them to AI compute, has drafted a policy that treats it as a consumer of AI systems rather than a stakeholder in their governance. South Africa digs up the minerals that make AI possible. It has no say over the AI built from them. The AI triad framework covers algorithms, compute, and data. South Africa has no frontier model development capacity. South Africa holds significant data assets in financial services, health care, and agriculture, with no clear framework for their sovereign management. South Africa possesses PGM (Platinum Group Metals) leverage of global significance on the compute axis, currently being transferred without meaningful condition. It also has exceptionally high solar irradiance and significant renewable-energy potential. A country that can offer both critical mineral inputs and the energy to power the infrastructure those minerals help build occupies a negotiating position of unusual strength. The Draft Policy proposes no minimum terms for hyperscaler investment, no data sovereignty requirements, no technology transfer conditions and no compute visibility mechanism. Multiple provisions are explicitly left unresolved, marked โOPTION,โ including the most consequential choices about how governance will function. Infrastructure decisions made now determine what is renegotiable later, and the answer is: very little. Three futures, one default The three infrastructure futures on offer each create a structurally different form of dependency, and only one creates sovereign capability. The Huawei-hosted DeepSeek integration offers low cost and open-source weights, but with data stored on infrastructure potentially accessible under Chinese legal frameworks, creating surveillance dependency in a pattern already documented across Africa. The second is U.S. closed-model dependency: higher capability, more reliable data protection, but complete API dependency on developers abroad. The third is locally hosted open-weight infrastructure: models governed under South African data-sovereignty rules, on infrastructure subject to minimum terms, developed with South African data. As Nathan Lambert at Interconnects has observed, open-weight models are likely the only realistic way to get sovereign AI off the ground as a real effort, enabling local communities and economies to integrate meaningfully with the technology. But this requires procurement conditions, not goodwill. What binding governance looks like The GovAI โGoverning Through the Cloudโ framework identifies four roles compute providers should accept as conditions of operating at scale: securers (protecting model weights and training data), record keepers (maintaining infrastructure usage logs), verifiers (confirming customer compliance with safety standards) and enforcers (restricting access when violations occur). These are operational requirements, not theoretical categoriesโspecific, enforceable, and well within the bargaining power of a market of South Africaโs size and mineral position. A detailed policy analysis submitted to the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (DCDT) identifies the specific provisions the final policy must contain: mandatory minimum terms for foreign compute infrastructure investments above ZAR 500 million (~$30 million); a compute reporting threshold; a National AI Safety Institute mandate covering defensive monitoring of AI capability accumulation; and National AI Champion Sector designations to create data assets for domestic model development. Each provision converts a structural advantage into a governance instrument before that advantage is foreclosed by market reality. Just as modern software security increasingly depends on knowing what components are inside a systemโmodel provider, training data, compute environment, evaluation methods, update cadence, human review points, and failure-reporting proceduresโpublic-sector AI governance requires a clear account of the stack before deployment, not after a problem surfaces. A public institution that cannot verify the sources in its own AI policy is unlikely to be ready to verify the AI systems it procures, deploys, or regulates. Why this is the continental test case South Africaโs choices will establish a regional precedent for what is commercially negotiable in AI infrastructure. If South Africa negotiates data-sovereignty guarantees and technology-transfer conditions as requirements for hyperscaler investment, it creates a replicable model. If Microsoftโs $300 million investment and Huaweiโs infrastructure expansion proceed on standard commercial terms, as they are currently, it normalizes extractive AI infrastructure across the continent. The lesson is not specific to Africa. Governments everywhere are producing AI strategies while lacking AI assurance infrastructure. South Africa is an early warning, not an isolated case. The public comment period closed when the policy was withdrawn. But a parallel process remains live: the National Treasuryโs Draft General Public Procurement Regulationsโthe legal instrument that will govern every government AI contractโcloses for comment on June 15. Those regulations contain no AI-specific provisions. South Africa has more AI leverage than any country on the continent. Some argue, with force, that governance requirements risk deterring the infrastructure investment South Africa urgently needs: compute capacity, reliable energy, venture capital, and talent retention. That concern deserves a direct answer. Minimum procurement terms, compute reporting thresholds, and technology transfer conditions are not barriers to investment. They are the conditions under which investment serves the host country rather than extracting from it. Infrastructure built without minimum terms produces dependency. Infrastructure built with them produces leverage. To serve the public interest, its AI policy must use it. When late last month News24 reported AI-hallucinated references in the draft AI policy, Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi withdrew the draft policy. That was a mistake that could cost South Africa and the rest of the continent the initiative on this urgent issue. His more recent constitution of an independent panel is a belated step in the right direction, if it can turn South Africaโs leverage into policy. The panelโchaired by Professor Benjamin Rosman of the Wits Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery Institute, and including Professors Vukosi Marivate and Alison Gillwald of Research ICT Africa and Dr. Jabu Mtsweni of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Researchโhas the technical and governance credibility to produce a stronger document. What it has not yet produced is a timeline. No revised draft has been scheduled. South Africa remains without a formal AI governance framework in the interim.
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Mastercard is in an elite club. Among S&P 500 components, only Nvidia and Apple shares have performed better over the two-decade span since the card companyโs IPO.
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