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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 6, 2015)
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2015 I SERVING TEXAS A&M SINCE 1893 I ©2014 STUDENT MEDIA I ©THEBATTONLINE I > THE The softball team warms up Softball hits ground running in Cali series Tanner G_arzo_—JH^.g^XTAUON 1 THE GUYS Transfers Jones, House waste no time in making Reed their own By Carter Karels ■■ JH idway through the SEC slate, the Aggie HV mU offense lives and dies on a pair of juniors, ■ ■■H both of whom wore different colors last I al ■ season. And it’s working just fine. A six-game win streak — snapped Wednesday by Ole Miss — vaulted A&M into a tie for second in the SEC. In those wins, transfers Danuel House and Jalen Jones combined to average 33 points. In the loss, they mustered 14. The juniors each played two seasons elsewhere — House at Houston, Jones at SMU — before head coach Billy Kennedy scooped them up. “Well when we found out that they were leav ing, we got after them right away,” Kennedy said. Anxiety loomed within the program once the Aggies saw their leading scorer last season, Jamal Jones, depart the team after being eliminated by Il linois State from the CBI to finish 18-16. When House, a guard, and Jalen Jones, a forward, came into the picture, excitement began to spread. “I was really excited to get Danuel in here be cause I know him a little from high school and I played with him,” junior guard Alex Caruso said. “I had some familiarity with him, so I was really excited to get him in here because he’s a big time athlete and scorer.” Jones shined in his first couple years with SMU, and in his sophomore year, he was tied for first in scoring (14 points per game) and grabbed the most rebounds (7.7 per game) for the Mustangs. Jones said he and the new coaching staff weren’t on the same page, so he decided to leave and start anew. “I wanted to stay close to home,” Jones said. “My dad was going overseas to Iraq for the war and I wanted to stay close to my mom and my sister. For me, coming to A&M, I kind of wanted to stay in the Texas area and coach Kennedy and his staff showed me a lot of love when I was transferring. I came out DUO ONPG. 4 Softball is back — even if it’s a few states away from College Station. The No. 24 Texas A&M softball team will get its sea son underway this weekend at the SoCal Collegiate Clas sic in Los Angeles. The Aggies will begin the classic with a doubleheader Friday against the Utah Utes and tire No. 7 UCLA Bruins. On Saturday, the Aggies will face the Bruins again along with the San Diego State Az tecs, and will conclude the classic against Purdue. The opener against the SOCAL CLASSIC what Tournament to open the Aggie softball season where Los Angeles Utes will mean a little more for head coach Jo Evans. She not only was the former head coach at Utah before com ing to Texas A&M, she will be coaching against her alma mater. Evans said she looks for ward to seeing her club get SOFTBALL ON PG. 4 BUSINESS Prospective Mays dean to visit Friday By Sam King ^ Mays Business School ^ will welcome its sole can didate for dean, Eli Jones, to campus Friday. Jones, Class of 1982, who is dean of the Sam Wal ton College of Business and Leadership at the University of Arkansas, will kick off his two-week visit with a lecture entitled “Respecting the Past: Writing the Future,” which is open to the public. Cady Auckerman, chief of staff in the College of Agriculture Eli Jones and Life Sciences, said this is Jones’ opportunity to intro duce himself and talk about his ideas for Mays. “Traditionally what the JONES ON PG. 3 FCC to vote on broad net neutrality protection By Lindsey Gawlik ^ The Internet’s future lies in net neu- ^ trality secured by robust government regulation, if Federal Communications Chairman Tom Wheeler is able to put his latest plan into action. Wheeler announced Wednesday through a WIRED op-ed a proposal for a strong open Internet rule by reclassi fying broadband Internet access service — 1 which is any service users get from cable, phone and wireless providers — as a public utility rather than as an informa tion service. The FCC — the government agency in charge of regulating communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable — will vote on the proposal Feb. 26. In the proposal, Wheeler states plans to switch the Internet’s classification away from Title I of the Communications Act NET NEUTRALITY ON PG. 3 Q&A: Aggie-built robots mimic human movement iwii m l**'*Z. Wi Shelby Knowles — THE BATTALION AMBER 3 was designed by professor Aaron Ames (left) at A&M to mimic human movement. Connor Paetzotd, SciTech reporter, sits down with Aaron Ames, mechanical engineering professor and head of the A&M Bipedal Experimental Robotics Lab, to discuss his work with robots that mimic human movement and prosthetic legs. THE BATTALION: Why did you get into robotics; what interested you about it? AMES: It's just cool. Take locomotion — it's a simple thing we do all the time, but that simplicity shrouds an immense amount of complexity. So if we can understand this really complex problem and then realize this really simple, fluid behavior, there's a beauty to that. That simplicity on the far side of all that complexity is what has always appealed to me, there's a concrete answer that is beautiful if you're smart enough to figure it out. THE BATTALION: What is AMBER Lab currently working on? AMES: AMBER 3 is our current bipedal robot, it was built from scratch here at A&M. AMBER 3 is the third robot in the AMBER series. Every time we make it better, bigger, faster, stronger and we're currently able to test really advanced control methodologies. We also have AM PRO, a custom prosthetic device that is powered which means it has actuators at the knee and ankle. It has onboard processing and power so it is self- contained. THE BATTALION: Besides prosthetics, how is bipedal walking more useful than other forms of robotic movement such as wheels or four legs? AMES: Think of a disaster scenario — there's an earthquake and there's rubble everywhere and wheeled robots just cannot navigate this uneven terrain. So the idea is to improve mobility in these unstructured environments. Four legs in some senses is easier AMES ON PG. 3
