Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. One advantage of Cassie that has maybe not been properly appreciated? I like the explosives idea.

When it comes to defending against pesky drones, the French military has gone to the birds. These drone-hunting birds of prey are being trained at a French Air Force base in Southwestern France. They're literally born on top of drones, and kept there during early stages of feeding. When they're ready to fly, they're brought to a field to intercept drones. In turn, they're rewarded with meat.

Last week, a senior White House official shared a candid theory with me about why President Donald Trump and his team have been adrift since November: they've yet to adjust to the post-election reality, and they haven't yet learned how to operate without a single, common enemy--Hillary Clinton--to focus on. It was a frank admission that a team built for winning a campaign has so far failed at governing. Incoming Presidents usually trade in some of their political tacticians for experienced Washington hands when they take office, but Trump installed his entire senior campaign leadership into top positions in the White House, a place where few of them have ever worked before. In fact, one of the only senior Trump staffers with previous White House experience is Omarosa Manigault, the reality-star villain from "The Apprentice," who briefly worked in the Clinton White House when she was twenty-three years old. The early results of this experiment in governance by the least experienced have not been promising.

Mathematical models have been used to augment or replace human decision-making since the invention of the calculator, bolstered by the notion that a machine won't make mistakes. Yet many people are averse to using algorithms, preferring instead to rely on their instincts when it comes to a variety of decisions. New research from Cade Massey and Joseph Simmons, professors in Wharton's department of operations, information and decisions, and Berkeley J. Dietvorst from the University of Chicago finds that control is at the core of the matter. If you give decision-makers a measure of control over the model, they are more like to use it. Massey and Simmons spoke to Knowledge@Wharton about the implications of their research.

Last winter, as meteorologists warned of a monster El Niño, researchers at the Nature Conservancy in California prepared to mobilize. El Niño promised to bring in king tides that would raise the sea level by as much as one foot above normal during high tide, causing flooding along the coastline that researchers could study as a preview of climate change-induced sea level rise. But when a king tide arrives, it floods lots of pockets along the coastline at once. So they decided to try a new, distributed surveillance strategy: commercial drones, co-opted from a gung-ho statewide network of citizen scientists. The plan had a lot of advantages.

Mattel introduced its first Barbie doll way back in 1959, and she's found herself at the center of cultural controversy ever since. To her credit, she keeps adapting to the times. Today she is actually several Barbies, a gang of dolls more diverse and less infuriating in terms of body proportions. And she's enjoyed an enviable career path, with stints as an astronaut, a sk8er, the president and vice president of the United States, and a rapper, among other things. Now, at age 58, Barbie is a hologram.

Just because a worker isn't technically "alive" doesn't mean it can make money for nothing, according to Bill Gates. In a recent interview with Quartz editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney, the billionaire philanthropist explained that robot labor should get taxed just like human labor -- primarily as a way to maintain funding for society's many social services. "You can't just give up that income tax," Gates said. Economists and future-minded techies alike, Gates included, have been discussing the looming threat of robotic automation for several years now. An Oxford report from 2013 found robots could displace up to 50% of jobs between 2023 and 2033.

Stanford University has invited leading thinkers from several institutions to begin a 100-year effort to study and anticipate how the effects of artificial intelligence will ripple through every aspect of how people work, live and play. This effort, called the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, or AI100, is the brainchild of computer scientist and Stanford alumnus Eric Horvitz, who, among other credits, is a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. In that capacity, Horvitz convened a conference in 2009 at which top researchers considered advances in artificial intelligence and its influences on people and society, a discussion that illuminated the need for continuing study of AI's long-term implications. Now, together with Russ Altman, a professor of bioengineering and of computer science at Stanford, Horvitz has formed a committee that will select a panel to begin a series of periodic studies on how AI will affect automation, national security, psychology, ethics, law, privacy, democracy and other issues. "Artificial intelligence is one of the most profound undertakings in science, and one that will affect every aspect of human life," said Stanford President John Hennessy, who helped initiate the project.

Automakers Toyota and GM and ride-sharing firm Lyft called on the US government to create US-wide standards to ease the testing and adoption of autonomous cars. The problem, they say, is that rules vary widely across the country are more restrictive in some states (like California) than others (Michigan). "Self-driving cars won't drive while impaired by drugs or alcohol [and] they won't be distracted by a cell phone," GM VP Michael Abelson told a subcommittee on Tuesday. "We have the further opportunity to avoid crashes altogether." It's not as though the US Department of Transport (DoT) is doing nothing, as it released a policy document last September.

The future of federal IT belongs to CIOs who can build flexible, nimble organizations able to maximize the advantage of existing technologies like cloud services and automated machine intelligence while laying the groundwork for a range of emerging technologies on the horizon. That's according to a new report on government technology trends for 2017 published Wednesday by Deloitte. Researchers identified eight technologies they believe have an opportunity to disrupt and change the way the federal government leverages information, data and software over the next two years. Some are a continuation of existing trends that are already established, like IT consolidation and greater reliance on cloud-based software and services. Others, like artificial intelligence, mixed reality and nanotechnology veer more into the outer edges of what is currently possible today, but may have far more relevance a few years down the line.