Pennsylvania

Since researchers around the world are experimenting with Willow Garage's PR2 robot, it keeps acquiring cool new skills like bagging groceries, doing housework, and handling beer bottles.

Recently, engineers at the University of Pennsylvania gave PR2 some literacy skills. As seen in the video below, it can roam the halls of campus reading out posters on doors and walls.

Menglong Zhu and colleagues at the university's GRASP robotics lab tinkered with a Kinect-equipped PR2 dubbed "Graspy" and taught it to recognize printed text on paper and signs as well as handwriting on whiteboard.

First, it locates text on a nearby surface (including the floor and labels on household products). Then it performs text recognition using Tesseract OCR software, and reads the words aloud.

Graspy can handle various fonts and text colors, but its reading isn't smooth or perfect, missing the digits "50" on one poster--perhaps because they were stylized.

The skill isn't earth-shattering, and indeed humanoid robots have been reading text and even musical scores for years. Still, it's cute to see Graspy exploring its new ability to read just like a child does. … Read more

MILL RUN, Pa.--After seeing a few Frank Lloyd Wright masterpieces, you might expect to be a little jaded when it's time for the next one.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have spent time inside the Marin County Civic Center--a stunning Wright creation that was the set for the movie "Gattaca." I've visited Wright's Scottsdale, Ariz., architecture school, Taliesin West and have seen a few other of his buildings along the way.

But nothing prepared me for my Road Trip 2010 visit to the incredible Fallingwater, Wright's 1937 piece de … Read more

YORK, Pa.--Take the world's most iconic motorcycles. And take industrial geekiness at its best. Mix the two. And what you get is what I'm looking at: the production lines of the 2011 model year Harley-Davidson touring, Softtail and "trike" motorcycles.

I've come here as part of Road Trip 2010 knowing that there are few ways more popular among those who travel the highways of America than Harleys. When planning this visit, I had in mind the motorcycle version of the story and photo package I did on the Corvette assembly plant in Bowling Green, … Read more

EASTON, Pa.--Alongside Lego bricks, Crayola crayons may well be the most common playthings on Earth. Or so it seems. Every year, Crayola produces more than 3 billion of its famous coloring implements.

When I was planning my Road Trip 2010 to the East Coast, I knew I had no choice but to go and see how they're made. And on Friday, I was lucky enough to get to do so.

Click here for a full photo gallery on the Crayola crayon production process.

Unfortunately, the company doesn't allow observers at its actual production plant. But it has … Read more

WASHINGTON--As you probably know, we're about to hit the Fourth of July weekend, and that means plenty of fun and fireworks and barbecues and watermelon for most folks.

For me, being about a week into Road Trip 2010, my fifth annual journey around a region of the country in search of the best destinations related to aviation, space, architecture, military, technology, nature and so on, it's totally up in the air.

Each year, when I plan this trip, I meticulously plot out nearly every day of the trip. But figuring out what to do over the weekend of … Read more

Five state attorneys general have joined the opposition to Google's settlement with book authors and publishers, objecting to the way the settlement distributes unclaimed funds.

The attorneys general for Connecticut, Missouri, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington joined the chorus of opposition to the settlement this week, filing briefs with Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York before the October 7 hearing to determine whether the settlement should be approved. The states involved are not pleased with the way the Books Rights Registry set up as part of the deal appears to … Read more

Here's another offering from Boston Dynamics' zoomorphic line: the RiSE V3, a multi-legged, beaver-tailed robot that can skitter along the ground, shimmy up a pole, and then quietly cling there and stare at you.

The legs are powered by a pair of electric motors and equipped with small surgical needle micro-claws, which allow the unit to dig into and climb up textured, convex, cylindrical structures at a rate of 21 centimeters per second, or just under a half a mile an hour (PDF).

"RiSE V3 is the first general-purpose legged machine to achieve this vertical climbing speed," … Read more

There's a war of words brewing, with several Internet safety organizations, researchers, and social-networking companies on one side and some state attorneys general on the other.

Earlier this month, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, run out of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, issued a report stating that Internet predator danger to kids is not as high as some have claimed. The report was immediately criticized by a number of attorneys general including Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania. And on Monday, an Internet safety organization in Oregon published a study that claims that data from press releases … Read more

It seems that adults continue to be shocked that teens are choosing to use the technology at their fingertips not just to say 'I'll Be Home at 10' and 'I Love You' but to send naked pictures of themselves to members of their target sex.

Last summer, there was outrage in Colorado. More recently, it seems that parents have been waking up in all parts of the country, removing themselves from re-runs of Sex and the City and Law and Order and howling that little Jenna has exposed herself by digital means to that ruffian from the rough part … Read more