What is Electronic Toll Collection? Simplify Your Commute with Xerox


Learn more here: http://xerox.bz/Transportation

Discover how Xerox is helping commuters and travelers get where they need to go, faster than ever before. Principal Scientist Peter Paul walks us through some innovative solutions in electronic toll collection

KGB in America: Cold War Russian Spies, Agents and Operations – Documentary Film


KGB (КГБ) is the commonly used acronym for the Russian: Комитет государственной безопасности​ (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security). It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time. The KGB has been considered a military service and was governed by army laws and regulations, similar to the Soviet Army or MVD Internal Troops. While most of the KGB archives remain classified, two on-line documentary sources are available.

Since breaking away from Georgia de facto in the early 1990s with Russian help, South Ossetia established its own KGB (keeping this unreformed name). The State Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus also uses the acronym KGB.

The GRU (military intelligence) recruited the ideological agents Julian Wadleigh and Alger Hiss, who became State Department diplomats in 1936. The NKVD’s first US operation was establishing the legal residency of Boris Bazarov and the illegal residency of Iskhak Akhmerov in 1934. Throughout, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its General Secretary Earl Browder, helped NKVD recruit Americans, working in government, business, and industry.

Other important, high-level ideological agents were the diplomats Laurence Duggan and Michael Whitney Straight in the State Department, the statistician Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, the economist Lauchlin Currie (an FDR advisor), and the “Silvermaster Group”, headed by statistician Greg Silvermaster, in the Farm Security Administration and the Board of Economic Warfare. Moreover, when Whittaker Chambers, formerly Alger Hiss’s courier, approached the Roosevelt Government—to identify the Soviet spies Duggan, White, and others—he was ignored. Hence, during the Second World War (1939–45)—at the Teheran (1943), Yalta (1945), and Potsdam (1945) conferences—Big Three Ally Joseph Stalin of the USSR, was better informed about the war affairs of his US and UK allies than they were about his.

Soviet espionage succeeded most in collecting scientific and technologic intelligence about advances in jet propulsion, radar, and encryption, which impressed Moscow, but stealing atomic secrets was the capstone of NKVD espionage against Anglo–American science and technology. To wit, British Manhattan Project team physicist Klaus Fuchs (GRU 1941) was the main agent of the Rosenberg spy ring. In 1944, the New York City residency infiltrated the top secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, by recruiting Theodore Hall, a nineteen-year-old Harvard physicist.

The KGB failed to rebuild most of its US illegal resident networks. The aftermath of the Second Red Scare (1947–57), McCarthyism, and the destruction of the CPUSA hampered recruitment. The last major illegal resident, Rudolf Abel (“Willie” Vilyam Fisher), was betrayed by his assistant, Reino Häyhänen, in 1957.

Recruitment then emphasised mercenary agents, an approach especially successful in scientific and technical espionage—because private industry practiced lax internal security, unlike the US Government. In late 1967, the notable KGB success was the walk-in recruitment of US Navy Chief Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker who individually and via the Walker Spy Ring for eighteen years enabled Soviet Intelligence to decipher some one million US Navy messages, and track the US Navy.

In the late Cold War, the KGB was lucky with intelligence coups with the cases of the mercenary walk-in recruits FBI counterspy Robert Hanssen (1979–2001) and CIA Soviet Division officer Aldrich Ames (1985-1994).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kgb

Pleasure


The process of letting go.

Pleasure


The process of letting go. Virtual Reality Version: youtube.com/watch?v=gtx20ZMO0Dc Senior Thesis @ RISD NYC x Design VR Showcase Melbourne International Animation Festival 2016

Movie Mind Machine

Egyptian Mummy time lapse


An Egyptian mummy comes back to life, from 3D print to life-like face. Sculpture by Jennifer Mann

Case IH Autonomous Concept Tractor


Case IH unveiled an autonomous concept vehicle today at the Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa. The concept vehicle is a cabless Case IH row crop tractor that can operate autonomously with a wide range of field implements.

If you love cars (and tractors) you should subscribe now to YouCar the world famous automotive channel: https://goo.gl/5i54Vg

All the Best.

RoboAction A1 D1 with Dragan Ilic

Home

RIGHT AND LEFT


Photobook by AdeY

Arctic Station Progression

arctic-_v2

I wanted to try to create something large-scale with Element 3D. And it can be pretty tricky! Having lots of smaller details in addition to large details helps give objects a sense of  scale. I started with some pistons from the Motion Design 2 collection. Then added things like pipes and mechanical components at various scales to give the object more small details. Also adding some normal map textures with various details helps give simple objects more greebles!

Things to try:

  1. Start with the large shapes
  2. Add some medium details
  3. Figure out your camera angle
  4. Add even more micro details: Lights, Pipes, Greeble
  5. Use texture to add grunge. The size of the grunge will help sell the scale!
  6. I moved the horizon down so it looked like the camera had to pan up!
  7. Doors, latters, crates are also good items to use that will give thingsperspective.

The lighting is similar to the recent rooftop tutorial. I used a parallel light with ray-trace Shadows and AO.  Here are some progressions of the angle of the shot and a deviation from industrial to sci-fi. I think adding blue lights turns it into the future.

screen_captures

versions_arctic

“Video Copilot” #throwback

A photo posted by Video Copilot (@andrewkramer) on Sep 4, 2016 at 11:16am PDT