Cop Who Shoved Cyclist Fired by NYPD, Faces 4 Year Sentence

Written by Alex Felsinger

The police officer who was infamously caught on camera tackling a bicyclist in New York City was fired on February 10th, seven months after the original incident.

As we reported here on Planetsave, former officer Patrick Pogan, 23, has been arraigned under charges of falsifying records. We’ve now learned that he has plead not guilty to the charges in Manhattan court and could face up to 4 years in prison if convicted.

The Manhattan District Attorney said that the YouTube video footage along with witness accounts clearly contradicted Pogan’s claim that the cyclist was “obstructing government administration” and resisting arrest. The cyclist had charges dropped soon after the video became available.

Pogan was a rookie officer and he has still not given a legitimate explanation as to why he tackled the cyclist. We have learned that he was an offensive lineman on his high school football team — perhaps that could explain a bit?

The power of YouTube footage also came in handy recently with the case of a teenage boy who decided to upload footage of himself torturing a cat. Once the video spread, people from various message boards and social media websites traced the boy’s name and location, eventually resulting in his arrest. He and his brother, who filmed the abuse, have been charged with two counts of animal cruelty.

If you’re not one of the 2 million people who have seen the footage of the cyclist tackle, check it out below.

UPDATE: The New York Times is reporting that Pogan’s lawyer claims that Pogan “resigned” from the force and was not fired, contrary to the statement released by the police department. Also, I’ve made a small correction — it has only been about 7 months since the incident, not over 18 months. Silly me, I’ll have to use a calculator next time I try such a tricky math problem late at night.

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V. Williams upsets her top-ranked sister

The world No. 6, Venus Williams from the United States returns the ball from her opponent, the world No. 4, Elena Dementieva from Russia, during the quarter finals of the Women's Dubai Championships, Thursday February 19, 2009. Williams won the match 6-3, 6-3. (UPI Photo/Norbert Schiller)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Feb. 20 (UPI) -- Venus Williams won a third-set tiebreaker Friday, upsetting her top-ranked sister Serena in the semifinals of the $2 million Dubai Tennis Championships.

Venus Williams, ranked sixth in the world, dominated the first set but Serena was strong in the second before the match evened out in the third set. Venus was able to get an advantage early in the third-set tiebreaker and claim a 6-1, 2-6, 7-6 (7-3) win.

The match was the 19th time the Williams sisters played each other in WTA action, with the win giving Venus a 10-9 series advantage.

Venus didn't lose a point on serve in taking the first set but took just 52 percent of the points on serve in the second. The third set was tight throughout, with Venus winning four more total points in the set -- the difference in the tiebreaker -- to claim the win.

She will face unseeded Virginia Razzano in the finals. Razzano knocked off second-ranked Dinara Safina and fifth-seeded Vera Zvonareva in getting to the semifinals. On Friday, she ousted 16th-seeded Kaia Kanepi 6-1, 6-2. Razzano broke Kanepi's serve six times in 11 tries.

Venus Williams owns a 2-1 series advantage over Razzano, who won the last time the pair met.

The winner of Saturday's title match will take home $350,000.

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'Cyber Soccer Players' Cloned

RoboCup competition. (Credit: Aler et al / SINC)

A team of IT scientists from the Carlos III University in Madrid (UC3M) has managed to programme clones that imitate the actions of humans playing football on a computer, according to a new article. The clones learn the players' behaviour and apply this knowledge in order to avoid their opponents and score goals.

"The objective of this research is to programme a player, currently a virtual one, by observing the actions of a person playing in the simulated RoboCup league," Ricardo Aler, one of the authors of the study and a researcher in the Computer Sciences Department of the UC3M, tells SINC.

RoboCup is an international football championship (known as soccer in the U.S.) held to promote the development of artificial and robotic intelligence. The competition's promoters are trying to develop a team of totally autonomous robots able to beat the best team of human footballers by 2050. "It's like what happened with the Deep Blue computer when it managed to beat Kasparov at chess in 1997," says Aler.

The researcher explains that there are various leagues within RoboCup, including a league of real robots, but that his team participates in the simulation league, using a software model called Robossocer. "The human player plays Robosoccer as if it were a video game, and the system observes both the stimuli that the person is receiving from the screen as well as the actions he or she is carrying out on the keyboard in order to shoot or pass the ball," he adds.

Later, the researchers use automatic learning techniques in order to construct this person's model of play, and this model is used to create the "clone agent", which imitates the human player. The results of the study show that the cloned player is able to tackle opponents and score goals in the opposing goal, in a similar way to human players.

Both the real and virtual robots in the Robocup league are normally programmed by hand by researchers, but the Spanish scientists are aiming to do this automatically. Although they have so far managed to get the clones to a point where they can carry out "low level" actions, such as moving forward, turning and shooting, their objective is to ensure they can learn "high level" actions, such as tackling or passing the ball to the most appropriate team member. In addition, they want to give the models human cognitive capacities such as being able to remember or predict the position of the ball or an opponent.

One of the fundamental ideas behind this study was that it is more interesting for a human player to challenge an opponent with the same level of skills and disadvantages, rather than playing against an adversary with robotic behaviour.

This type of study falls within a field of computer science called behavioural cloning. The objective of this discipline is to construct a model for a clone agent that can learn from the behaviour of the other agent (which may be human) by observing the stimuli this agent receives and the actions it takes in response to them.

The first studies on this subject showed that a system of neuronal networks can learn to drive a vehicle by observing a driver (ALVINN project), or to control a flight simulator by analysing the behaviour of a pilot. Today, the use of behavioural cloning is also being researched in Internet-based videogames, as well as in competitions such as RoboCup.

The last international robotic football championship event was held in Suzhou, China, and the next one will be held this summer in Graz, Austria, alongside RoboCup Rescue, a simultaneous competition based developing robots designed to help rescue people in natural disasters.

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