Science/Tech

You are currently browsing the archive for the Science/Tech category.

“The French Data Is Available To The Various Police And Security Agencies”

July 5, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The Great Comedian once said this: “Gentleman, you can’t fight in here…this is the War Room,” the absurdity crystallizing everything within shouting distance. The modern equivalent might be this: “We know that you’re spying on us, because our spies told us.” 

In the wake of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden, a man so outraged by surveillance that he relocated to Russia, few people in this country or any country have dealt with our new reality very honestly. Everyone is spying on everyone, from individuals to corporations to governments. It’s only going to grow more prevalent. And if everybody is guilty, nobody is guilty.

Within a week of French President François Hollande deriding the U.S. for spying, Le Monde printed an expose implicating France for similar behavior. From Steve Erlanger in the New York Times:

“PARIS — Days after President François Hollande sternly told the United States to stop spying on its allies, the newspaper Le Monde disclosed on Thursday that France has its own large program of data collection, which sweeps up nearly all the data transmissions, including telephone calls, e-mails and social media activity, that come in and out of France.

Le Monde reported that the General Directorate for External Security does the same kind of data collection as the American National Security Agency and the British GCHQ, but does so without clear legal authority.

The system is run with ‘complete discretion, at the margins of legality and outside all serious control,’ the newspaper said, describing it as ‘a-legal.’

Nonetheless, the French data is available to the various police and security agencies of France, the newspaper reported, and the data is stored for an indeterminate period. The main interest of the agency, the paper said, is to trace who is talking to whom, when and from where and for how long, rather than in listening in to random conversations. But the French also record data from large American networks like Google and Facebook, the newspaper said.”

Tags: , ,

“…So We’re At Least Conscious Of Where We Are And Don’t Get Hypnotized Into Some False Universe of Pure Imagery”

July 5, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Allen Ginsberg in London in 1967, talking about how communication via technology changes the meaning, alters the context. And as the screens have gotten smaller and more ubiquitous, we’re not just lost in our own surroundings but in our own heads as well.

Tags:

“Blink, Blink, Blink, Found”

July 5, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A short passage about the recently deceased computer pioneer, Douglas Engelbart, from the landmark 1972 Rolling Stone tech article, “Spacewar,” written by Stewart Brand, who attended the “Mother of All Demos”:

“In one direction this means the automated office, replacing paper, desk and phone with an interactive console – affording the possibility of doing the whole of city work in a country cottage. The basic medium here is the text manipulation system developed at Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center, which, as Doug puts it, allows you to ‘fly’ formerly unreachable breadths and depths of your information matrix of your knowledge, Ask for item so-and-so from your file; blink, there it is. Make some changes; it’s changed, Designate keywords there and there; done. Request a definition of that word; blink, presented; Find a quote from a document in a friend’s file; blink, blink, blink, found. Behind that statement add a substatement giving cross-references and cross-access; provided. Add a diagram and two photos; sized and added. Send the entire document to the attention of these people; sent. Plus one on paper to mail to Washington; gzzaap, hardcopy, with an addressed envelope.”

Tags: ,

“What Can A Dead French Novelist Tell Us About New Technology?”

July 3, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Marcel Proust, who was a subject of photography after dying, was taken with telephony during life. The opening of Clara Byrne’s Forbes piece about the novelist’s relationship with this disruptive technology:

“‘The telephone, a supernatural instrument before whose miracles we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or order an ice cream,’ wrote Marcel Proust in his much discussed but less read novel In Search of Lost Time. So what can a dead French novelist tell us about new technology? As it turns out, the answer is quite a lot.

Proust was a keen observer and user of new technologies from the telephone to the motorcar and plane, all of which came into common usage over the lifetime of his epic novel. The author even subscribed to a service which allowed members to listen to plays and concerts over the phone, a sort of 19th century Netflix but he is at his sharpest on the social impact of that new communication technology known as the telephone.”

Tags: ,

“I Don’t Know Why We Call It A Mouse”

July 3, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Sad to hear of the passing of Douglas Engelbart, the computer pioneer most famous for his “Mother of all Demos” on December 9, 1968 in San Francisco, which introduced the mouse, video conferencing and word processing, among other pieces of the future. 

The mouse:

The whole demo:

Tags:

“The Internet Was Barely In Its Infancy When Richard Dawkins, A British Evolutionary Biologist, Coined The Term ‘Meme'”

July 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of an excellent piece by Christopher Mims at Quartz which explains the science of measuring the life spans of memes:

“More and more of the things that set the internet on fire are of that species of charmingly moronic pairing of text and image that allows even the post-literate to feel like they have partaken of a shared cultural moment. And now, scientists are beginning to understand how the curiously addictive visual tropes known as ‘memes’ are born, why they die, and whether or not it’s possible to predict which will ‘go viral’ and be harvested by the night-soil merchants up at meme warehouses like Cheezburger.

Treating memes like genes tells us which are likely to spread

The internet, of course, was barely in its infancy when Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist, coined the term ‘meme’ back in 1976. And he meant it as a much more nuanced concept, encompassing pretty much any idea that is good at propagating from one human brain to another—whether it is dialectical materialism or the tune to Happy Birthday.

But Dawkins was deliberate in his comparison of memes to genes. Like the molecular units of inheritance, memes ‘reproduce’ by leaping from one mind to another, ‘mutate’ as they are re-interpreted by new humans, and can spread through a population. The internet has radically accelerated the spread of memes of all kinds; but it has also led to the rise of a specific kind of meme, the kind encapsulated by a phrase or a picture. And importantly for scientists, the life of a such a meme is highly measurable.”

Tags: ,

“Photosynthesis Is ‘The Best Geoengineering Method We Have'”

July 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Slate piece by Michael Hertsgaard, Michael Pollan argues that we should clean up our environment utilizing the certainty of photosynthesis over the possibilities of terraforming. An excerpt:

“According to Pollan, photosynthesis is ‘the best geoengineering method we have.’ It’s also a markedly different method than most of the geoengineering schemes thus far under discussion—like erecting giant mirrors in space or spraying vast amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere to block the sun’s energy from reaching Earth. Whether any of these sci-fi ideas would actually work is, to put it mildly, uncertain—not to mention the potential detrimental effects they could have.

By contrast, we are sure that photosynthesis works. Indeed, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that photosynthesis is a major reason we humans can survive on this planet: Plants inhale CO2 and turn it into food for us, even as they exhale the oxygen we need to breathe.

What does all this have to do with eating meat? Here’s where Pollan gets positively excited. ‘Most of the sequestering takes place underground,’ he begins.

‘When you have a grassland, the plants living there convert the sun’s energy into leaf and root in roughly equal amounts. When the ruminant [e.g., a cow] comes along and grazes that grassland, it trims the height of the grass from, say, 3 feet tall to 3 inches tall. The plant responds to this change by seeking a new equilibrium: it kills off an amount of root mass equal to the amount of leaf and stem lost to grazing. The [discarded] root mass is then set upon by the nematodes, earthworms and other underground organisms, and they turn the carbon in the roots into soil. This is how all of the soil on earth has been created: from the bottom up, not the top down.’

The upshot, both for global climate policy and individual dietary choices, is that meat eating carries a big carbon footprint only when the meat comes from industrial agriculture. ‘If you’re eating grassland meat,’ Pollan says, ‘your carbon footprint is light and possibly even negative.'”

Tags: ,

“Animal Consciousness Is A Reasonable Default Assumption”

July 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It would really be much less messy for humans if other animals didn’t have consciousness, but they do and probably more than we’d like to believe. From Brandon Keim’s new Aeon essay:

“In the 1960s, Jane Goodall was mocked by her primatologist peers for speaking of chimpanzee emotions, such as a mother grieving for her dead infant. Even her use of gender-specific terms for individual chimpanzees was seen as anthropomorphic and unscientific. As the journalist Virginia Morell recounts in Animal Wise (2013), Goodall’s editor at the prestigious journal Nature tried to replace ‘he’ and ‘she’ with ‘it’ in her first manuscript. When the zoologist Donald Griffin wrote in The Question of Animal Awareness (1976) that biologists should investigate ‘the possibility that mental experiences occur in animals and have important impacts on their behaviours’, it was still a radical suggestion.

These days, Goodall is a hero, Griffin a prophet, and studies of animal intelligence ubiquitous: not just in chimpanzees, dolphins and parrots, but in octopuses, archerfish, prairie dogs and honeybees — a veritable Noah’s Ark of braininess. Caveats remain, of course. Intelligence is relatively easy to study, but it isn’t quite the same thing as consciousness, nor emotional life. It’s been less controversial to ask whether rats remember where they stored food than whether one rat cares for another.

Yet even rats, it turns out, feel some empathy for one another. A team at the University of Chicago found that rats became agitated when seeing surgery performed on other rats, and a follow-up study in 2011 found that, when presented with a trapped labmate and a piece of chocolate, rats free their caged brethren before eating. Those who study animal behaviour are still careful when talking about subjective experience — sure, Eurasian jays can guess what their mates want to eat, but who knows if they like each other? — but they’re being professionally cautious rather than dismissive. The average person can safely speculate away: animal consciousness is a reasonable default assumption, at least for vertebrates, and not just in some dim sense of the word, but possessing forms of self-awareness, empathy, emotion, memory, and an internal representation of reality.”

Tags: ,

“They All Came To New York To Take Advantage Of A Growing Black Market”

July 1, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If Robert Kolker’s book, Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, to be published this month, is anywhere near as good as his piece on the same topic in the New York Times, he’ll have turned out something pretty special. An excerpt from the NYT article:

“In 2010, Maureen Brainard-Barnes’s body was one of four uncovered close by one another in the sand dunes of Gilgo Beach, Long Island, wrapped in burlap. Three years later, the Long Island serial killer case remains unsolved, even as six more sets of remains have been discovered nearby along Ocean Parkway and farther east. The first four bodies were identified as women in their 20s — just like another woman, Shannan Gilbert, who had disappeared three miles from where the four bodies in burlap were found. These five women clearly had much in common. Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Shannan Gilbert, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello all grew up in struggling towns a long distance from Long Island. And they all were escorts who discovered an easy entree into prostitution online.

It had seemed enough, at first, for some to say that the victims were all prostitutes, practically interchangeable — lost souls who were gone, in a sense, long before they actually disappeared. That is a story our culture tells about people like them, a conventional way of thinking about how young girls fall into a life of prostitution: unstable family lives, addiction, neglect.

But in the two years I’ve spent learning about the lives of all five women, I have found that they all defied expectations. They were not human-trafficking victims in the classic sense. They stayed close to their families. They all came to New York to take advantage of a growing black market — an underground economy that offered them life-changing money, and with a remarkably low barrier to entry. The real temptation wasn’t drugs or alcohol, but the promise of social mobility.

The Web has been the great disrupter of any number of industries, transforming the way people shop for everything, and commercial sex has been no exception.”

Tags: , , , , ,

“So Much Depends On The Internet That Its Vulnerability To Sabotage Invites Doomsday Visions”

July 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I couldn’t disagree more with Robert J. Samuelson’s opinion piece in the Washington Post which states that the Internet isn’t worth the downside it brought, that its benefits have been meager, but he is right to be concerned about the potential of cyber warfare. So much depended on the red wheelbarrow, and now so much depends on the Internet. An excerpt from his WaPo piece:

“By cyberwarfare, I mean the capacity of groups — whether nations or not — to attack, disrupt and possibly destroy the institutions and networks that underpin everyday life. These would be power grids, pipelines, communication and financial systems, business record-keeping and supply-chain operations, railroads and airlines, databases of all types (from hospitals to government agencies). The list runs on. So much depends on the Internet that its vulnerability to sabotage invites doomsday visions of the breakdown of order and trust.

In a report, the Defense Science Board, an advisory group to the Pentagon, acknowledged ‘staggering losses’ of information involving weapons design and combat methods to hackers (not identified, but probably Chinese). In the future, hackers might disarm military units. ‘U.S. guns, missiles and bombs may not fire, or may be directed against our own troops,’ the report said. It also painted a specter of social chaos from a full-scale cyberassault. There would be ‘no electricity, money, communications, TV, radio or fuel (electrically pumped). In a short time, food and medicine distribution systems would be ineffective.’

I don’t know the odds of this technological Armageddon. I doubt anyone does.”

 

Tags:

“It Will Take Years To Know How To Think Of Snowden As A Historical Figure”

July 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Emily Bazelon, who writes about judicial issues at Slate, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. Some exchanges below about the NSA scandal, the Voting Right Act rewrite and journalism.

 _________________________ 

Question:

Given the limitations on what can be revealed about the usefulness of information obtained by the the NSA, do you think we’ll ever really know if Snowden did the right thing?

I’m torn between respecting that he believes he was revealing something we all needed to know and thinking he revealed nothing we didn’t already know and, as a result, violated his obligations for nothing.

Emily Bazelon:

I think Snowden did the right thing bec I think we’re better off knowing what he has revealed. I know the govt says he has seriously damaged nat’l security, but the revelations are broad enough that it’s hard for me to credit that claim. I guess I just wonder how many serious terrorists were using these major social media and web sites. That said, I agree that it will take years to know how to think of Snowden as a historical figure. Will he be remembered as an irresponsible maverick, or as someone w Daniel Ellsberg’s stature? In his own moment, Ellsberg was villified and faced serious charges. Those were thrown out bec the Nixon administration overreached. I wonder if we’d think of Ellsberg with respect now if he’d become a convicted criminal. I don’t think the US has much of a tradition of respecting people who go to prison. 

_________________________

Question:

Concerning the mining of people’s personal information, isn’t the NSA openly doing what a ton of other corporations and other Governments are already doing? Further, when individuals have willingly given out their personal information, is it an outside entity’s fault for obtaining information that individuals so willingly give? 

Emily Bazelon: 

The NSA yes is mining data that corporations mine, ie the tech cos. But the tech cos can’t charge us with crimes, right? So for the govt to do it is different. The potential for abuse is higher. I think there’s a distinction here about types of info and what ppl put out publicly v. what they have a reasonable expectation of privacy for. It’s one thing to assume that anything you post on twitter or FB is public. I think that’s the wise approach to take. But your email inbox? I think most of us assume that what we are writing on gmail, etc, is not available for public consumption.

_________________________

Question: 

Unlike “literacy tests,” voter-ID laws appear to be applied uniformly across the population in states where they are used. Does this make them okay, or just incrementally less bad than the bad old days? 

Emily Bazelon:

Not OK, because they have a disproportionate effect on depressing turnout and registration among young voters, and the elderly, and poor ppl, which means also a disproportionate effect on minorities. And they’re purpose seems suspect to me, since the voter fraud they are supposed to stop so very rarely happens. 

I just don’t believe in making it harder for ppl to vote. We don’t have high rates of voting as it is in the US! We should make the polls as accessible as possible without opening ourself to a lot of fraud. And if you think about it, in-person fraud is an incredibly inefficient way to influence an election. Person by person? that’s why no one does it.

_________________________

Question:

It seems everyday there are announcements of layoffs in big journalistic outlets, and the ones that are succeeding (The Atlantic, HuffPo) basically do so off free content. Will journalism still be a profession in 5 years? What will it look like? 

Emily Bazelon:

It will be more of what it is now–a tiered system in which there are stars who get paid a lot, and SOME working journalists in the middle, and then more and more unpaid or low-paid jobs, as you say. It’s a paradox: lots of ppl willing to write for free, esp opinion, and fewer places willing to pay for the reporting that’s the backbone of it all.

Tags:

“To Me, You Know, It’s Not Horrible”

June 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Steve Wozniak made some buzzed-about, revisionist comments about Apple at the “Go Further with Ford” conference last week, which no doubt contained a lot of truth, though as an outsider I can’t agree with it all. He pointed out Jobs’ flaws as a leader in his first go-around at the company and gave more credit to the vilified John Sculley and the forgotten Gil Amelio (who hired ace designer Jonathan Ive). All that’s good.

But I think his diminution of the MacIntosh isn’t particularly fair on some levels. I understand it wasn’t an immediate commercial success nor a perfect machine, but it was, more than any other, the computer that made the general public embrace the coming Digital Age and forget the horrors of working on Honeywells and the like. It showed what was possible even if it didn’t realize all the potential itself. 

Another topic the Woz addressed was Tesla’s electric Model S, which he passed on purchasing at last moment, much to the consternation of Elon Musk. An excerpt from the Verge:

“Question:

So give me thoughts on the Model S…specifically, I’m wondering about your thoughts on the center console.

Steve Wozniak:

Yes. To me, you know, it’s not horrible. If you take it into account, you can use it. I’m good for it. But for most people, I have so much trouble in a car, driving with touchscreens, that I worry about people trying to access the screen while they’re driving. I worry about that a lot, and I don’t think it’s that attractive. It’s not unattractive — not totally ugly at least — but the controls in the Mercedes are so ergonomic, they fit your hand, you never have to look at them, you can feel where your hand is. So I do have a reservation about that, but not enough to turn me off. I think it’s a great car, I think it’s the first electric car that was worth anything. I look at it as, all the electric cars so far have been very tiny so they get better mileage on smaller batteries, you know, they can go 30 miles… or they were sports cars. Well, this is the first one, it’s a luxury car, a big sedan that fits five people comfortably. Well, my gosh, those are the people that are going out and buying $100,000 Mercedes already, so a $100,000 car… money doesn’t matter. The fact that $40,000 is batteries, they don’t see it as much.

So I think they found the right market niche that might be permanent, might be enough to keep a company sustained. And the next step is to bring it to a lower-priced market. And the idea of the replaceable batteries means you buy your battery per mile. You lease the battery, you don’t own it. You only buy the car. That’s a step that’ll appease the other crowd. Luxury guys, I think, really want to own their own battery and don’t even want to swap it with somebody else’s — they want to know what they got.

But it is a problem because you do have to pay now for the battery, and you have to pay for the electricity. As opposed to, you know, just gasoline. So it’s going to probably be more expensive per mile that way, and the economic factor might come into play. But that makes me think, you know, just driving into this building, we passed Ford’s fuel cell research division and I thought, oh my gosh! The words we heard last night from [Ford CEO Alan Mulally] … he mentioned fuel cells, he mentioned electric vehicles. Well, those two go together perfectly. You have to lose energy if you know physics, but it transfers so efficiently to the wheels, that’s why it can still make sense economically. And then you don’t have to carry this huge weight of batteries and the huge cost of the batteries. There are different problems with that one, though.

You know, we keep trying to find the way to clean energy … I’m not smarter than all the people who work on it and research it and the scientists and the people and the laboratories, so it’s not like one person can have this beautiful vision nobody else has. It’s been a struggle my entire life to make better batteries, and all we ever really came up with was lithium ion. That was about it.”

Tags: , ,

“What Kind Of Noises Did Dinosaurs Make?”

June 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From an Ask Me Anything at Reddit with British paleontologist Dave Hone, an exchange about the type of “voices” dinosaurs had:

“Question:

What kind of noises did dinosaurs make? Hiss like crocs? Sing like birds? Croon like Elvis?

Dave Hone:

Probably all of the above, at least potentially. It’s hard to say as we can’t easily say if many were more bird-like or more croc-like: birds have special throats that help them make noises but nothing shows up in the bones – dinosaurs could have had them and we’re unlikely every to know. Certainly though across the whole range of species I’m sure there was a lot of variation in pitch, volume and style.

Question:

What are the chances, if you could even give it, that the T-Rex sounds exactly like it does in the film Jurassic Park?

Dave Hone:

Exactly like? Low. Big deep roar? Reasonable.”

Tags:

“Has America Passed Peak Driving?”

June 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Elisabeth Rosenthal argues that car-owning and driving in America may be on a long-term–perhaps permanent–downswing. You might reflexively assume that the decline began with the economic collapse, but it predated the bust by several years. The opening:

“PRESIDENT OBAMA’S ambitious goals to curb the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions, unveiled last week, will get a fortuitous assist from an incipient shift in American behavior: recent studies suggest that Americans are buying fewer cars, driving less and getting fewer licenses as each year goes by.

That has left researchers pondering a fundamental question: Has America passed peak driving?

The United States, with its broad expanses and suburban ideals, had long been one of the world’s prime car cultures. It is the birthplace of the Model T; the home of Detroit; the place where Wilson Pickett immortalized ‘Mustang Sally’ and the Beach Boys, ‘Little Deuce Coupe.’

But America’s love affair with its vehicles seems to be cooling.”

Tags:

“I Don’t Think There Is Anything Like This Collection”

June 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Omni magazine was the fascinating science journal turned out by pornographer Bob Guccione, whose face and pants were both made of leather. The singular publication was by turns brilliant and bullshit and batshit. Claire Evans of Vice recently got to visit an awe-inspiring archive of the defunct mag and filed a report. An excerpt:

“When I was given, offhandedly, in an email, a shot at poking through this collection, I’d imagined long tables stacked with documents and boxes brimming with unpublished science-fiction gems. I was told it was an archive, and, to me, the word ‘archive’ implied something academic, a facility staffed by white-gloved attendants. Instead, the OMNI archive is a nebulous assortment of filing cabinets, piles of paintings, folders haphazardly stuffed with printing acetates and doodles—all strewn about a medical-supply sales office in Englewood, New Jersey. There are attendants, but they aren’t librarians; they’re employees of Jeremy Frommer, a financier and fast-talking entrepreneur who came upon the collection accidentally, when a storage locker he bought on a whim last November happened to contain a sizable chunk of the estate of Bob Guccione, lord and master of the Penthouse empire and, less famously, publisher of OMNI magazine.

Guccione, if he is remembered at all, is usually mythologized as a kitsch tycoon dripping with gold chains, shirt open practically to his waist. His 27,000-square-foot home in Manhattan was the largest private residence in the city. He collected Van Gogh and Picasso paintings and filled his homes with busts of Caesar, Napoleonic sphinxes, and hand-molded brick shipped from Italy. He was a recluse, by some accounts. He shot the early Penthouse pictorials himself. And he loved science fiction. Jane Homlish, Bob’s personal assistant for 37 years, who I met in Englewood, explained it to me this way: ‘He always said that people with genius minds—and his mind was established as genius—were always as fascinated with sex as they were science.’

Bob Guccione died in 2010, by which point OMNI magazine was long gone—but in Englewood, they both live on. Sheet after sheet of slides are being dusted off, examined, and photographed. Original cover artwork from the magazine is being hunted down. Paintings are being uncrated. People like me are being brought in, simply to marvel at the goods. In one afternoon, I found cover drafts with greasy pencil notations, thousands of 35-mm slides, large-format chromes, magazines bundled with stapled paperwork, production materials, and untold amounts of photos and artwork. It’s chaos. Everything is still being fussed through and tossed around; after his storage unit mother lode, Jeremy got the bug, and the OMNI collection keeps growing. He has but one goal: to own the most complete collection in the world of ephemera relating to this largely forgotten magazine. ‘I don’t think there is anything like this collection,’ Jeremy told me. ‘I don’t even think it exists for a specific magazine, let alone the coolest geek sci-fi magazine of the 80s and 90s.'”

•••••

Guccione discusses Omni and other topics. Crappy footage but worth it.

Omni commercial from 1978, with a voiceover by the Gooch:

Tags: , , ,

“As The Crew Settles Into The Third Month In Its Domed Habitat On Mauna Loa, A Certain Concern Looms Large”

June 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Correspondence from Mars–“Mars, Hawaii,” that is–from an Economist correspondent taking part in a simulated space mission:

“AND on the 60th day there was much rejoicing. Candies, crackers, five-year gouda, flashing lights and an eclectic mix of music. The isolation experiment, a mock Mars mission, complete with research work and lava-field expeditions in simulated spacesuits, has reached its half-way point. You might expect the rest of the sojourn to be a downhill coast. However, as the crew settles into the third month in its domed habitat on Mauna Loa, a certain concern looms large. The psychological forecast is mixed with a chance of declining morale, increased irritability and dwindling motivation.

To be sure, the dire predictions are not specific to this mission or crew, which has got on remarkably well so far. They stem from the so-called third-quarter phenomenon, a documented condition experienced by members of isolated teams on long hauls in harsh places like the Antarctic. It occurs after a crew has got used to (or simply endured) the rigours and stresses of a mission’s early period, but when the end is not yet nigh.”

“Car Makers Believe Autonomous Driving Will Be Introduced Gradually”

June 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a Telegraph article by Jeevan Vasagar about Germany automaker’s plans to gradually sway drivers into giving up the wheel:

“Devised by a team at the Free University of Berlin, the self-driving VW Passat is a highly advanced autonomous car, capable of navigating a safe path through unpredictable city traffic.

It sees the world through a spinning silver cylinder mounted on the roof, a laser scanner, which generates one million data points per second to give the car’s computer a real-time map of its surroundings.

Cameras and radar sensors provide a further wealth of detail, alongside an ultra-precise GPS based on the navigation systems used in aircraft.

It will be many years before a car this sophisticated is commercially available. But Germany’s luxury car makers have begun introducing an array of autonomous features which enable some of their leading models to drive and steer themselves.

Rather than the sudden advent of robot vehicles, car makers believe autonomous driving will be introduced gradually.

Daimler, which owns Mercedes Benz, predicts that at low speeds – such as in traffic jams or parking – cars will operate with full autonomy ‘in a matter of years.’ At higher speeds, several manufacturers plan for highly automated driving within the structured environment of the motorway.”

•••••

The great Peter Stormare, representing Deutschland:

Tags:

“The Robotic Companion Was Made To Look Like A Harp Seal”

June 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Hopefully technology will soon be able to prevent, even reverse, dementia, but until then researchers are experimenting with robotic companions for people with faltering faculties. From Scientific American:

“A team of international researchers recently found that a therapeutic robot companion improved the quality of life for a small group of people with mid- to late-stage dementia.

In the real-life case, the robotic companion was made to look like a harp seal. It was fitted with AI software and tactile sensors that enabled it to respond to touch and sound. The robot could express surprise, happiness or anger and even respond to certain words. Patients who spent time with the robot seemed happier and less anxious.”

“Matthews Has Seen Crazy Ants Disable Scores Of Air-Conditioning Units Near Austin, Texas”

June 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Texas already has a crazy uncle and now it has crazy ants. From NBC News, a story by Douglas Main about the paratrechina genus, which swarm into electronics, disabling, even destroying them, perhaps threatening the nation’s Twitter output:

“Exterminator Mike Matthews got the call because the home’s air-conditioning unit had short-circuited. Why an exterminator for a problem with an appliance? Because of the crazy ants.

Matthews has seen crazy ants disable scores of air-conditioning units near Austin, Texas, where the invasive creatures have been a real headache. The ants swarm inside the units, causing them to short-circuit and preventing them from turning on. Often the switches inside them need to be replaced, thanks to the ants, said Matthews, who works for the Austin-area pest control business The Bug Master.

‘When you open these things up, you see thousands of the ants, just completely filling them up,’ Matthews said.

The ants first appeared in the United States in 2002 but have become more of a menace in the past few years, spreading to many areas of the Gulf Coast, particularly Texas and Florida. The ants are obnoxious because they reproduce in large numbers, sometimes outnumbering all other ants 100-to-1. That’s a problem since ecosystems depend on a wide variety of ants to perform different tasks; domination by one species is highly unusual, said Edward LeBrun, a researcher at the University of Texas. As the ants have advanced into new habitats, they’ve had the annoying habit of swarming inside electronics, such as air conditioners and farm equipment like pumps and occasionally destroying them, LeBrun told LiveScience.”

Tags:

“What Makes Wikipedia So Valuable For Users Is What Gets In Its Way Of Becoming A Valuable”

June 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

“Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire” is the title of Amy Chozick’s short, sharp New York Times Magazine portrait of the Wikipedia founder, a singular figure in the Information Age, who was right about crowdsourcing knowledge when almost everyone else thought he was wrong, when he was treated like a punchline. The collective nature of the virtual encyclopedia made it impossible for Wales to cash in, but somehow I think he’ll slide by. Let’s weep for others. An excerpt:

“Wikipedia, which is now available in 285 languages, gets more than 20 billion page views and roughly 516 million unique visitors a month. It is the fifth-most-visited Web site in the world behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook; and ahead of Amazon, Apple and eBay. Were Wikipedia to accept banner and video ads, it could, by most estimates, be worth as much as $5 billion. But that kind of commercial sellout would probably cause the members of the community, who are not paid for their contributions, to revolt. ‘The paradox,’ says Michael J. Wolf, managing director at Activate, a technology-consulting firm in New York and a member of the Yahoo! board, ‘is that what makes Wikipedia so valuable for users is what gets in its way of becoming a valuable, for-profit enterprise.’

Wales suffers from the same paradox. Being the most famous traveling spokesman for Internet freedom brings in a decent living, but it’s not Silicon Valley money. It’s barely London money. Wales’s total net worth, by most estimates, is just above $1 million, including stock from his for-profit company Wikia, a wiki-hosting service. His income is a topic of constant fascination. Type ‘Jimmy Wales‘ into Google and ‘net worth’ is the first pre-emptive search to pop up. ‘Everyone makes fun of Jimmy for leaving the money on the table,’ says Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia.

Wales is well rehearsed in brushing off questions about his income. In 2005, Florida Trend magazine reported that he made enough money in his brief stint as an options-and-futures trader in Chicago, before starting Wikipedia, that he would never have to work again. But that was before he had to pay child support and rent for homes in Florida and London. When I brought up the topic recently, Wales seemed irritated. ‘It rarely crosses my mind,’ he said. ‘Reporters ask me all the time and expect me to say: ‘I’m heartbroken. Where’s my billion dollars?’  On two occasions, he compared himself to an Ohio car salesman. ‘There are car dealers in Ohio who have far more money than I’ll ever have, and their jobs are much, much less interesting than mine,’ he said during one conversation. When his net worth came up again, he brought up Ayn Rand. ‘Can you imagine Howard Roark saying, ‘I just want to make as much money as possible?’ Wales asked rhetorically.

Wales likes to invoke the higher purpose of Wikipedia.“

•••••

Encyclopedia Britannica infomercial, 1992:

Tags: ,

“My Lovely Kitty”

June 26, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Taiwanese coffee kisok Let’s Caffe allows you to personalize your latte by printing the photo of your choice on it.

“Mr. Snowden Has Put Himself In A Terrible Spot”

June 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

As I pointed out on Sunday, Edward Snowden placed himself in a whole different category when he accepted refuge in Russia. If you hate spying and surveillance, you just don’t do it. Beyond the principal of the thing, there are practical matters. From spy novelist Alex Berenson in the New York Times:

“Faced with the prospect of decades in prison, Mr. Snowden panicked. Instead of waiting for the territory or its masters in Beijing to decide his fate, he packed his laptops and headed for Moscow. Now he gets to see a soft dictatorship (such a lovely phrase) up close. On Sunday, the willful naïfs from WikiLeaks who are ‘helping’ Mr. Snowden said that Sheremetyevo airport would simply be a stopover. But why would the Russian government let him go before it has squeezed him dry? In interviews, Mr. Snowden has said he has plenty of secrets left on his hard drives, and there’s no reason to doubt him. He has already disclosed details of American and British spying on a conference in 2009 in London.

Mr. Snowden has put himself in a terrible spot. Moscow will surely protect him for as long as it feels like irritating Washington. But by the time the Russians are finished sifting through his laptops, he’ll be their spy, whether or not he meant to be. Beijing may have already pulled the same trick; some intelligence officers believe that Chinese spy agencies copied Mr. Snowden’s hard drives during his Hong Kong stay.”

Tags: ,

“When You’re Racing, It’s Life”

June 26, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Nissan has entered an electric car into competition at Le Mans, which is, of course, a great thing. But I have a further question about such races.

You know I’ve said before that it’s difficult for me to wrap my brain around people surrendering the wheel to computers, no matter how amazing an improvement robocars would be, no matter how much safer. But what if it happens? What if the large majority of autos in the future are driven by software? Would auto races be remote control affairs, the winner being the team with the best programmers and engineers? Would the driver, that mythopoeic figure, be disappeared? Would he or she go the way of the horse that used to pull the cart?

“This Provides A Steady Stream Of Electricity To My Brain”

June 25, 2013 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Look at this amazing person, Andrew “Cyber AJ” Johnson, who’s had electrodes implanted in his brain to mitigate the motor symptoms of his Parkinson’s. (Thanks Krulwich.)

Tags:

“There Is An Immense—But Mostly Invisible—Cost To The Embrace Of Big Data By The Intelligence Community”

June 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Big Data as applied to terrorism (and more banal matters) is useful because it provides predictive behavior patterns without spending time and resources on locating the cause of the behavior. But should we abandon cause and just be concerned with potential effect? From Evgeny Morozov at Slate:

“The end of theory, which Chris Anderson predicted in Wired a few years ago, has reached the intelligence community: Just like Google doesn’t need to know why some sites get more links from other sites—securing a better place on its search results as a result—the spies do not need to know why some people behave like terrorists. Acting like a terrorist is good enough.

As the media academic Mark Andrejevic points out in Infoglut, his new book on the political implications of information overload, there is an immense—but mostly invisible—cost to the embrace of Big Data by the intelligence community (and by just about everyone else in both the public and private sectors). That cost is the devaluation of individual and institutional comprehension, epitomized by our reluctance to investigate the causes of actions and jump straight to dealing with their consequences. But, argues Andrejevic, while Google can afford to be ignorant, public institutions cannot. 

‘If the imperative of data mining is to continue to gather more data about everything,’ he writes, ‘its promise is to put this data to work, not necessarily to make sense of it. Indeed, the goal of both data mining and predictive analytics is to generate useful patterns that are far beyond the ability of the human mind to detect or even explain.’ In other words, we don’t need to inquire why things are the way they are as long as we can affect them to be the way we want them to be. This is rather unfortunate. The abandonment of comprehension as a useful public policy goal would make serious political reforms impossible.

Forget terrorism for a moment. Take more mundane crime. Why does crime happen? Well, you might say that it’s because youths don’t have jobs. Or you might say that’s because the doors of our buildings are not fortified enough. Given some limited funds to spend, you can either create yet another national employment program or you can equip houses with even better cameras, sensors, and locks. What should you do?

If you’re a technocratic manager, the answer is easy: Embrace the cheapest option.”

Tags:

« Older entries § Newer entries »