Four short links: 14 July 2020
Misinfo, Datalog in Clojure, WASM on Arduino, and Mobile Manipulators
- Neutralizing Misinformation through Inoculation — We found that false-balance media coverage (giving contrarian views equal voice with climate scientists) lowered perceived consensus overall[..]. Likewise, misinformation that confuses people about the level of scientific agreement […] had a polarizing effect […]. However, we found that inoculating messages that (1) explain the flawed argumentation technique used in the misinformation or that (2) highlight the scientific consensus on climate change were effective in neutralizing those adverse effects of misinformation.
- Datascript — An immutable in-memory database and Datalog query engine in Clojure and ClojureScript. Datalog fascinates me — a declarative query language that’s a subset of Prolog.
- WARduino — In this paper we investigate the feasibility of using WebAssembly to program Arduino compatible microcontrollers. Our experiments lead to extending the standard WebAssembly VM with: 1) safe live code updates for functions and data 2) remote debugging support at the VM level 3) programmer configurable (Arduino) modules in order to keep the virtual machine’s footprint as small as possible. The resulting WARDuino VM enables the programmer to have better performance than an interpreted approach while simultaneously increasing the ease of development. To evaluate our approach, we implemented a simple breakout game and conducted micro benchmarks which show that the VM runs approximately 5 times faster than Espruino, a popular JavaScript interpreter for the ESP32 microcontroller. This is clever! (Source code available)
- Mobile Manipulators — (IEEE Spectrum) Stretch has been relentlessly optimized to be the absolutely minimum robot to do mobile manipulation in a home or workplace environment.
