Swiss researchers have produced a robot that runs like a cat, to be used in rescue missions.

Two Q&As about our leaker culture, in this time when no one–and no entity–is truly private: Edward Snowden taking questions from Guardian readers, and Russell Brand explaining at Gawker why he’s been speaking in support of Bradley Manning.

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From Snowden’s Guardian interview, moderated by Glenn Greenwald:

Question:

US officials say terrorists already altering TTPs because of your leaks, & calling you traitor. Respond?

Edward Snowden:

US officials say this every time there’s a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show was not unveiled by PRISM.

Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicion-less surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to achieve that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we’ve been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

Further, it’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

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From Gawker‘s Brand interview, conducted by Camille Dodero:

Gawker:

Why are you talking about Bradley Manning on your birthday?

Russell Brand:

I don’t know a great deal about international espionage, but sometimes one senses that an issue is drifting in a certain direction, and just by speaking out in a small way, you can make a subtle difference on that perception. Some people have made their mind up no matter what: “Bradley Manning is a traitor because of revealing classified information.” It’s very difficult to impact those people. W.B. Yeats said, The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity. But it might be nice, if I, from my gentle position—bouncing around on the Left elegantly and Englishly—suggest that it doesn’t seem like this person is acting particularly out of self-interest, but rather [Manning] was motivated out of a different kind of patriotism: a genuine love of the people of this country and concern for the people.

Gawker:

So what’s your realistic expectation when you lend your name to a campaign like this?

Russell Brand:

That you’ll get a a degree of abuse from people who are intrinsically opposed. The best you can do is draw the attention of people who are otherwise unsure or curious.

The culture has been expertly constructed so that what’s now regarded as esoteric information is everything except for stuff that directly concerns Kim Kardashian. So everything other than that, you might as well be speaking Aristotle in Greek. For me, I live, to a degree, in popular culture. So if I say, “Oh, that Bradley Manning seems that he was really trying his best to expose information he thought was important to American people regarding what was being done in their name,” all I’m hoping is that people who would otherwise entirely ignore it may have a flickering awareness, and some who would have had a flickering awareness would investigate further.•

I don’t have the hard statistics on this one, but I feel like I see more people crying in public these days than ever before. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is odd to see what are considered private moments burst through so openly. Is the world sadder now, with all our economic struggles? Is being connected to more people an opportunity for more disappointment? High school never really turns out right. Or are we just living privately in plain sight, existing within the smartphone in our hand or pocket without regard to what’s around us? As if we were in sort of a virtual phone booth. The latter is my suggestion of what it’s all about. We’re someplace else–maybe even some other time–even when we’re here and now.

The opening of “Connected, but Alone?” by Armando Duran at Medium:

“We live in the age of distraction with our multiple technological devices which in a way ‘give’ us the sense that we are connected to the world, to our friends, to our loved ones and to to the people that we share our lives with.

For a few months now, I have been noticing this behavior almost everywhere I go. Groups of friends and families gather to be together for multiple reasons. Yet their minds are elsewhere as most of the people have a device with which they can feel ‘connected’ with other people that are not with them in the present moment.

Technology has always inspired me as to what advancements we can achieve and how technology can make our lives easier. It is almost unstoppable the consumerism that has been built around getting the newest thing that there is.

I am not sure how much we, as intelligent human beings, stop and reflect on what is the impact in our psychology and our consciousness by the technological inventions we ourselves create. Sometimes the only way to make people reflect on something is when things start to go really bad.”

Time-shifting, largely an excellent thing, all began with the simple VHS vs. Betamax format war. From an Ars Technica article about the most disruptive recent technologies:

“Time-shifting (or why Jack Valenti is spinning in his grave)

Time-shifting content has been with us for a long time, driving the media industry nuts ever since the invention of the video cassette recorder. In 1982, Jack Valenti—then president of the Motion Picture Association of America—testified before Congress, saying, ‘The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.’ (See the Ars series on TV for more Valenti rage.)

But Betamax and VHS were just the beginning. It was a shaky beginning at that, as I can tell you firsthand from years of prying my kids’ mangled copy of half a season’s worth of Power Rangers episodes out of the maw of a VCR tape slot. When hard drives were eventually married to video recording, it did a lot more than just change the recording mechanism. Digital recording moved time-shifting of TV and other content off tapes, virtualizing and outsourcing the recording process to the point that broadcast times are almost irrelevant.

So in some ways, Jack Valenti was right about time-shifting, or at least prescient. The virtualization of broadcast content—its separation from the tyranny of network time slots and from recording media itself—has changed the acts of viewing and listening. It’s accelerated the disintegration of network television and hastened the creation of new media outlets made purely for the Internet. If it weren’t for the move from analog VCR to bits on a disk, things like Netflix’s on-demand service and its all-at-once release of the original series House of Cards would never have happened.”

••••••••••

Time-shifting in 1977:

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, who co-authored the “What They Know” series about surveillance for the Wall Street Journal, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

I’m as frustrated as anybody with what the government is doing. But i also know we need to be vigilant in trying to track and find out what real terrorists are doing. How can we strike the right balance between privacy and fighting against terrorism?

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries:

I might end up giving this answer a lot. But I think transparency is the key first step.

We can’t, as a society, decide if we agree with something if we don’t even know what that “something” is.

A couple senators on the Intelligence committee have been saying for some time, rather loudly, that there is a “secret interpretation of the law” that should worry us all. Turns out that secret legal interpretation is what allows this massive gathering of phone record information and so forth.

Those senators had been asking to have the legal reasoning be declassified, but they weren’t able to effect that change.

To me, if you can’t even declassify the way our own laws are being interpreted, that’s a huge question for our system. That’s not about protecting troop movements or activities. It’s about whether we as citizens get to know what the law says.

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Question:

Who else is watching me, besides the NSA? What are they doing with my information?

Every time I see someone wringing their hands about a tech company’s dominance, I advise just a little patience. It’s awfully difficult to maintain excellence in that sector. Journalist Wade Roush thinks that Apple, Google and Facebook are all already in their gloaming. Time will tell. Of the three, I have the most hope for Google, even though their non-search endeavors have yet to overwhelm. From Roush’s Xconomy post:

“At the risk of making myself into a pariah around Silicon Valley, I have a prediction to make. The storm has just about run its course. We have passed peak Apple, peak Google, and peak Facebook.

By which I mean: Apple will never again come out with a product as transformative as the iPhone. Google will never build anything more useful than its existing search engine, and it will never discover another business model as lucrative as search-based advertising. And Facebook may keep growing until every person on Earth with a computing device is a member, but it won’t ever be anything more than a place we share photos and links.

In sum, the next major advances in technology—the ones that will power the next cycle of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and the nation’s other tech hubs—will have to come from somebody else. To switch metaphors, the car is already out of gas; we just think there’s still forward progress, because we haven’t coasted to a stop quite yet. But we will.”

Steve Wozniak explaining, among other things, how putting information in the cloud is surrendering your rights.

I’m sure that feeding books into computers instead of reading them can tell us something about literature–and ourselves–but there are limits to quantitative methods when it comes to poetry. The opening of “Big Data Meets the Bard,” an article about “distant reading” by John Sunyer in the Financial Times:

“Here’s some advice for bibliophiles with teetering piles of books and not enough hours in the day: don’t read them. Instead, feed the books into a computer program and make graphs, maps and charts: it is the best way to get to grips with the vastness of literature. That, at least, is the recommendation of Franco Moretti, a 63-year-old professor of English at Stanford University and unofficial leader of a band of academics bringing a science-fiction thrill to the science of fiction.

For centuries, the basic task of literary scholarship has been close reading of texts. But for digitally savvy academics such as Moretti, literary study doesn’t always require scholars actually to read books. This new approach to literature depends on computers to crunch ‘big data,’ or stores of massive amounts of information, to produce new insights.

Who, for example, would have guessed that, according to a 2011 Harvard study of four per cent (that is, five million) of all the books printed in English, less than half the number of words used are included in dictionaries, the rest being ‘lexical dark matter’? Or that, as a recent study using the same database carried out by the universities of Bristol, Sheffield and Durham reveals, ‘American English has become decidedly more ‘emotional’ than British English in the last half-century’?

Not everyone is convinced by this approach.”

The dream of dying by telephone-wire decapitation lives on in Czechoslovakia. Information about a flying bicycle from Digital Trends: “The radio-controlled flight was made possible by the bicycle’s six battery-powered propellors, which makes the contraption look a bit like an enormous RC quadcopter. Though the bicycle looked pretty stable during its flight, its large propellors make it look cumbersome to ride and its size means such a bike would face limitations as to where it could go, especially in urban areas. And then there’s all those aforementioned overhead hazards to think about.

Speaking about the project to local news site Ceske Noviny, project participant Ales Kobylik said, ‘Our main motivation in working on the project was neither profit nor commercial interest, but the fulfillment of our boyish dreams.’

The team said they hope to stick a real life human in the saddle this fall, doing away with the need for a radio controller.”

Few endeavors are as top-heavy as the Hollywood film industry, and it has a history of its business model capsizing. Is it due another fall and reinvention, with tent-pole, global fare now the norm? Famous filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas may not be best poised to see what’s next, but they think titanic change is coming. From Paul Bond at the Hollywood Reporter:

“Steven Spielberg on Wednesday predicted an ‘implosion’ in the film industry is inevitable, whereby a half dozen or so $250 million movies flop at the box office and alter the industry forever. What comes next — or even before then — will be price variances at movie theaters, where ‘you’re gonna have to pay $25 for the next Iron Man, you’re probably only going to have to pay $7 to see Lincoln.’ He also said that Lincoln came ‘this close’ to being an HBO movie instead of a theatrical release.

George Lucas agreed that massive changes are afoot, including film exhibition morphing somewhat into a Broadway play model, whereby fewer movies are released, they stay in theaters for a year and ticket prices are much higher. His prediction prompted Spielberg to recall that his 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial stayed in theaters for a year and four months.”