Fridaygram: open source mentors, robotic fish, cooperative children
By Scott
Knaster, Google Developers
Blog Editor
Google Summer
of Code, now in its eighth year, is a wonderful program that releases eager
university students onto open source projects. To help participants succeed, the program
connects students with mentors to guide them on their open source way.
Google Summer of Code wouldn’t work without a great bunch of mentors, and the program is
now
accepting applications from open source projects that want to provide mentors to
participants. If you’re involved in an open source project, this is an excellent way for you
to find and teach new developers, and of course to get them interested in your project in
particular. The deadline for mentor applications is March 9, which is next Friday, so if
you’re interested, don’t delay.
All Google Summer of Code mentors are required to be human for now. But experimenters are
looking into what it takes for a robot to be a leader – of fish. To test their ideas,
researchers at Polytechnic Institute of New York University
built a robotic
fish. By varying the way its tail moved and the speed of its swimming, the
scientists were able to get their robot to assume a leadership role, with other fish swimming
behind.
Finally, if science fiction movies have you concerned that humans might someday lose their
leadership status to other primates, you can take comfort in a study that showed
human
children working together, while chimps and monkeys didn’t share tasks at all. In
fact, adult non-humans didn’t even help their young: one of the study’s authors said that
parents simply stole their offspring’s food. So, go humans!
On Fridays we (mostly) take a break from the real news and do a Fridaygram post just
for fun. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds.
We’re happy to have you reading Fridaygram, whether you’re human, ape, robotic fish, or
other.
