Science/Tech

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

“We Are Essentially Forest Dwellers”

February 11, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I recall Russell Baker, who can craft a sentence as well as anyone, once saying that the old, rigid copy-editing policies at the New York Times in his day used to make him drink and cry. Something like that. In his New York Review of Books piece on Jim Sterba’s Nature Wars, Baker writes about how technology and policy have led to a remarkable resurgence in forests and wildlife in America, one which may have gone too far. An excerpt: 

“During America’s first 250 years, early settlers cleared away some 250 million acres of forest. Yet the forest comes back fast. By the 1950s, one half to two thirds of the landscape was reforested. Most of us now ‘live in the woods,’ Sterba writes. ‘We are essentially forest dwellers.’ The new forests ‘grew back right under the noses of several generations of Americans. The regrowth began in such fits and starts that most people didn’t see it happening.’

Why did it happen? For one thing, because oil, gas, and coal replaced wood as the major fuel for heating and cooking. Because new building techniques and materials reduced wood’s importance to the construction trades. And because the family farm began to vanish, leaving the abandoned acreage to follow earth’s natural impulse, which is to produce wild grasses, weeds, bushes, shrubs, and small trees that turn into big trees.

Then, of course, even the bleakest urban areas may yield to a civic impulse to primp a bit with touches of greenery, as in New York where 24 percent of the city’s area is now covered by a canopy of 5.2 million trees. Nationally, Sterba reports, tree canopy covers about 27 percent of the urban landscape.”

Tags: ,

“It’s A Mock-Up Of The Skintight Spacesuit”

February 8, 2013 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

MIT aeronautics professor Dava Newman has invented new spacesuit to relieve astronauts of unwanted bulk.

Tags:

“We Are Rapidly Approaching A Historical Cusp”

February 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The problem I have with otherwise thoughtful people (like David Brooks, for instance) who seem to think that wealth inequality in America is fueled by sheer meritocracy is that Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump and Paul Ryan are not our best and brightest. While America strives for a level playing field in many ways, financial rewards often go to the worst among us or the plain lucky. And this issue of inequality has always existed and likely always will, so it needs to be addressed with policy. From “Return of the Oppressed,” Peter Turchin’s new Aeon essay:

“What, then, explains the rapid growth of top fortunes in the US over the past 30 years? Why did the wages of unskilled workers stagnate or decline? What accounts for the bitterness of election rhetoric in the US, the growing legislative gridlock, the rampant political polarisation? My answer is that all of these trends are part of a complex and interlocking system. I don’t just mean that everything affects everything else; that would be vacuous. Rather, that cliodynamic theory can tell us specifically how demographic, economic and cultural variables relate to one another, and how their interactions generate social change. Cliodynamics also explains why historical reversals in such diverse areas as economics and culture happen at roughly similar times. The theory of secular cycles was developed using data from historical societies, but it looks like it can provide answers to questions about our own society.

Our society, like all previous complex societies, is on a rollercoaster. Impersonal social forces bring us to the top; then comes the inevitable plunge. But the descent is not inevitable. Ours is the first society that can perceive how those forces operate, even if dimly. This means that we can avoid the worst — perhaps by switching to a less harrowing track, perhaps by redesigning the rollercoaster altogether.

Three years ago I published a short article in the science journal Nature. I pointed out that several leading indicators of political instability look set to peak around 2020. In other words, we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp, at which the US will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval. This prediction is not a ‘prophecy’. I don’t believe that disaster is pre-ordained, no matter what we do. On the contrary, if we understand the causes, we have a chance to prevent it from happening. But the first thing we will have to do is reverse the trend of ever-growing inequality.”

Tags: ,

“The Situation Is In Flux Due To The Rapidly Declining Demand For The Post Office’s Services”

February 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As the United States Postal Service cuts down to five days of mail delivery per week and some wonder what life would be like without the USPS, Foreign Policy (using an Oxford Strategic Consulting survey) ranked it the best in the world. Take that, Bhutan postal service! Fuck you! From FP‘s rankings:

“1.     The United States Postal Service

Efficiency may not be the first word that comes to mind when Americans think of the USPS, but U.S. mail carriers are better at using their limited resources than any of their counterparts, according to OSC’s study. In one year, America’s mailmen and women delivered 268,894 letters and 2,633 parcels per carrier — more than any other country — to 151 million addresses. All told, the USPS accounts for 40 percent of the world’s mail volume (yes, that figure counts your Victoria’s Secret catalogues). And despite complaints about customer service, when researchers in a different study tested 159 countries’ post offices on how fast an average letter sent to a fake address would be returned, the United States also came in first.

The Oxford authors acknowledge that the situation is in flux due to the rapidly declining demand for the post office’s services. The United States already lags behind other countries in 12th place on ‘provision of access’ — which measures the number of citizens per post office — and would likely worsen if the USPS follows through on its retrenchment plans.

The biggest obstacle to a more efficient post office may be the U.S. Congress, which has failed to approve reform efforts such as setting up retail outlets in post offices, raising prices, shuttering less-used offices, and ending six-day delivery. (As part of its new cost-saving measures, the USPS has managed to circumvent Congress by keeping only parcel service on Saturdays so that, technically, there’s still some service six days a week.)

And in case you American declinists were wondering, China ranks last on the survey.”

See also:

“George McDonald Is Already Better Than Any Mayor Has Ever Been At Addressing The Most Obstinate Social Problems In This City’s Modern History”

February 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two of the heroes in New York City’s ongoing struggle against poverty are Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem’s Children Zone and George McDonald of the Doe Fund. The opening of Hamilton Nolan’s excellent Gawker post about the latter organization, a homelessness-ending program started by McDonald, who is running a quixotic candidacy to be New York’s next mayor:

“The next mayor of New York City will not be George McDonald, though George McDonald is running for mayor. That’s OK. George McDonald is already better than any mayor has ever been at addressing the most obstinate social problems in this city’s modern history.

Homelessness. Poverty. Unemployment. These problems are usually seen as intractable, overwhelming, and hopelessly complex. They certainly can be, for those suffering their effects. But solving these problems is not a mystery at all. There is a nonprofit group in New York City called The Doe Fund that has developed perhaps the single most effective formula in existence for moving people from the streets to productive society.

Here is what they do: They take in homeless people, referred to them by places like Bellevue Hospital. Many of these people are fresh out of prison, with little safety net. They house them. They ensure they’re sober and make them abide by a schedule. They give them a job for starters—cleaning up trash around the city, for a month. The men in all-blue jumpsuits you see pushing brooms and emptying trash cans throughout New York are Doe Funders.

After that, the fund gives them classes in life skills and specific job training (they can choose between pest control, catering, building maintenance, and other specialties) for the next six months or so. There are mock job interviews, to get the pitch right. Then they send each one out to pound the pavement and find a job. When they find a job, they find them a place to live. By the time a year is up, the Doe Fund has transformed a homeless person into an employed person with a place to live.”

Tags: ,

“Yes, Dear Reader, Even You Will Have Your Job Taken Away By Machines”

February 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Kevin Kelly’s recent (and worthwhile) Wired cover story about the future of workplace robotization, “Better Than Human,” which I only now got around to reading:

“It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repairman, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.

It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation. Yes, dear reader, even you will have your job taken away by machines. In other words, robot replacement is just a matter of time. This upheaval is being led by a second wave of automation, one that is centered on artificial cognition, cheap sensors, machine learning, and distributed smarts. This deep automation will touch all jobs, from manual labor to knowledge work.”

 

Tags:

“We Can No Longer Risk Making An Expensive Film With A Star Who Isn’t Popular In Asia”

February 6, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Red Obsessions,” a feature article by Lars Olav-Beier in Spiegel about Asia trying to supplant Hollywood as the global Dream Factory:

“Not just China, but also South Korea and Russia have become more important in the film business in recent years. The Russian market grew by almost 20 percent in 2012, with a film like Ice Age 4 earning $50 million there, or more than half of its budget.

‘We can no longer risk making an expensive film with a star who isn’t popular in Asia,’ says Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Pirates of the Caribbean). While American films earned up to two-thirds of their revenues in North America in the 1980s, today it averages only about one third.

Hollywood has been beset by fears of a sellout, ever since Indian investment firm Reliance acquired the majority of the DreamWorks film studio and a Chinese company bought the second-largest movie theater chain in the United States. Finally, in mid-January the Chinese electronics company TLC bought the naming rights to Grauman’s Chinese Theater in the heart of Hollywood, one of the most famous movie theaters in the United States. It seems only a matter of time before the Chinese buy their first Hollywood studio.

It’s happened once before, now more than 20 years ago, that Asians, specifically Japanese companies like Sony, acquired a number of studios. ‘China wants something different from Hollywood than what Japan wanted at the time,’ says American industry expert Thomas Plate. ‘It isn’t as much about money as it is about know-how.’

Of course, money isn’t the only issue for Hollywood, either. America sees cinema as its very own art form, tailor-made for telling the world American stories and celebrating American values. ‘We’ll still be making movies about American football in the future,’ says Bruckheimer, ‘but with much smaller budgets. That’s because it’s almost exclusively American viewers who are interested in football.’ Bruckheimer exhorts his screenwriters to think internationally and write roles for Asian stars into films.”

Tags: , ,

“I’m The Least Scientific Of All The People On The Platform”

February 6, 2013 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Ray Bradbury, sage of the Space Age, sharing his feelings through poem about exploration of the stratosphere on November 12, 1971, the eve of Mariner 9 going into orbit at Mars. He was part of a symposium at Cal Tech, which also included Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan.

Tags:

“A Syndrome Characterized By Constant Anxiety In Relation To One’s Mobile Phone”

February 6, 2013 in Excerpts, Fake, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The choice for the best word of 2012 from the committee at the Australian dictionary, the Macquarie:

phantom vibration syndrome

noun a syndrome characterised by constant anxiety in relation to one’s mobile phone and an obsessional conviction that the phone has vibrated in response to an incoming call when in fact it hasn’t.

_____________________________

And the people’s choice:

First World problem

noun a problem that relates to the affluent lifestyle associated with the First World, and that would never arise in the poverty-stricken circumstances of the Third World, as having to settle for plunger coffee when one’s espresso machine is not functioning.

“It’s A Little Bit Like Science Fiction”

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

Via the BBC, a video of a “bionic man,” replete with artificial organs and synthetic blood. It seems like a prank, but it’s not a prank, is it?

“It Can Buzz The User When The Letter Shape Is Being Created Oddly”

February 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

An ingenious learning tool, the Lernstift pen vibrates when the user misspells a word or makes a grammatical error. If only we still used pens! From Wired UK:

“Currently a test prototype, the electronic pen is programmed to recognise movements associated with each letter form. In calligraphy mode it can buzz the user when the letter shape is being created oddly, while in orthography mode it can be used to pick up spelling or grammar mistakes — one buzz for spelling errors and two for grammar.

Creators Falk and Mandy Wolsky (an inventor and an education specialist, respectively) explain on their website that the invention was inspired by their son’s early writing attempts –‘From the very first words there were errors.’

By issuing corrections without a time delay and without the need for an instructor to be present at all times, the learning pen could cut down on the time taken to learn to write.”

Tags: ,

“There Is No Meat Sold At One Of The Largest Grocery Stores In Town”

February 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Emily Esfahani Smith’s new Atlantic article, “The Lovely Hill: Where People Live Longer and Happier,” a passage about the healthy lifestyle of one of the long-lived residents of Loma Linda, California, the 98-year-old surgeon Ellsworth Wareham:

“As a middle-aged man, Wareham spent a lot of time in the operating room cutting into one patient after another who had heart problems. There, he noticed something: patients who were vegetarian mostly had much cleaner and smoother arteries than those who ate meat. The arteries of meat-eaters tended to be full of calcium and plaque.

So he made a choice. He decided to become a vegan. That decision was not too hard to make given the fact that many of the inhabitants of his southern Californian community were already very health conscious. Consider: there is no meat sold at one of the largest grocery stores in town. In fact, as recently as a generation ago, meat was difficult to find in the grocery stores of Loma Linda, as the New York Times reports. On top of that, smoking is banned in the town; alcohol is scarcely available; and fast food restaurants are hard to come by.

But make no mistake: Loma Linda is not some bohemian enclave of free-spirited vegans. Rather, what makes the community remarkable — and remarkably health conscious — is that it is home to one of the largest concentrations of Seventh-Day Adventists in the world. A conservative denomination of Christianity founded during this country’s Second Great Awakening in the mid-1800s, the religion advocates a healthy lifestyle as a main tenet of the faith. This is a major reason why Wareham, a Seventh-Day Adventist, takes his health so seriously.”

Tags: ,

“What People Really Want Is To Tune In To Information”

February 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

David Gelernter, a computer genius with perplexing, reductive politics, believes the next wave of our online interconnectedness will see streams largely replace searches, something that has happened already to a certain extent. From his new Wired article, “The End of the Web, Search and Computer As We Know It“:

“Today’s operating systems and browsers — and search models — become obsolete, because people no longer want to be connected to computers or ‘sites’ (they probably never did).

What people really want is to tune in to information. Since many millions of separate lifestreams will exist in the cybersphere soon, our basic software will be the stream-browser: like today’s browsers, but designed to add, subtract, and navigate streams.

Searching content in a time stream is a matter of stream algebra, which is easier than the algebra of space-based structures like today’s web. Add two timestreams and get a third (simply merge the AP news feed and my friend Freeman’s blog streams into time-order); and content search is a matter of stream subtraction (simply subtract all entries that don’t mention ‘cranberries’ to yield all the entries that do). The simple, practical features of stream algebra have one huge benefit: giving us made-to-order information.

Every news source is a lifestream. Stream-browsers will help us tune in to the information we want by implementing a type of custom-coffee blender: We’re offered thousands of different stream ‘flavors,’ we choose the flavors we want, and the blender mixes our streams to order.

Every site’s content is liberated from the confines of space. It becomes part of a universal timestream. Instead of relying on Amazon the site to notify me if there’s a new Cynthia Ozick book or new books on the city of Florence, I can blend together several booksellers’ lifestreams and then apply my search since stream algebra allows any streams to be added (new and used books) and content (Florence, Ozick) to be subtracted.

E-commerce changes drastically. We shouldn’t have to work to find what’s new, yet the way the web is currently architected it’s no different logically than having to visit a thousand separate physical shops. The time-based worldstream lets us sit back instead and watch a single, customized fashion show across sites.”

Tags:

“Right Now The U.S. Is The Only Nation That Operates Drones On A Large Scale, But That Will Change”

February 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Drones will be used in the U.S. to deliver goods and aid police, but someday soon we might not be worried about a plane flying into a tower but instead a bird–wait, that is a bird, right? From a really good Time article by Lev Grossman about drones proliferating in the private sector:

“Drones are learning to think for themselves. Those University of Pennsylvania drones are already semiautonomous: you can toss a hoop in the air and they’ll plot a trajectory and fly right through it. (Whether or not you count Google’s self-driving cars as people-carrying, highway-borne drones seems like a question of semantics.) They’re also gaining endurance. In June, Boeing tested a liquid-hydrogen-powered drone called the Phantom Eye that’s designed to cruise at 65,000 ft. for four days at a time. Boeing’s Solar Eagle, which has a 400-ft. wingspan, is scheduled for testing in 2014. Its flights will last for five years.

This technology will inevitably flow from the military sphere into the civilian, and it’s very hard to say what the consequences will be, except that they’ll be unexpected. Drones will carry pizzas across towns and drugs across borders. They’ll spot criminals on the run and naked celebrities in their homes. They’ll get cheaper to buy and easier to use. What will the country look like when anybody with $50 and an iPhone can run a surveillance drone? Last fall the law schools at Stanford and NYU issued a report, ‘Life Under Drones,’ which was based on 130 interviews with Pakistanis. It makes for unsettling reading. ‘Drones are always on my mind,’ said a man from Islamabad. ‘It makes it difficult to sleep. They are like a mosquito. Even when you don’t see them, you can hear them. You know they are there.’

Right now the U.S. is the only nation that operates drones on a large scale, but that will change: flying drones is hard, but it’s not that hard. Singer estimates that there are 76 other countries either developing drones or shopping for them; both Hizballah and Hamas have flown drones already. In November, a Massachusetts man was sentenced to 17 years for plotting to attack the Pentagon and the Capitol with remote-controlled planes. (The drone equivalent of the Newtown, Conn., atrocity is simply beyond contemplation.) The moral ambiguity of covert drone strikes will clarify itself very quickly if another country claims the right under international law to strike its enemies in the U.S. There may come a day when the U.S. bitterly regrets the precedents it has set.”

Tags:

“Easy Answers Like ‘Skills Training’ Won’t Necessarily Help Much”

February 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Technological innovation leads to great wealth for a few but the struggle with creative disruption can last for most people for decades–until, at long last, hopefully, prosperity arrives. But until then–wow–painful! From a new Business Insider interview with Paul Krugman about the rise of the machines:  

“Whereas from about 1980 to 2000, the discussion about inequality was mostly seen as labor vs. labor (high-paid, high-skilled workers vs low-paid, low-skilled workers) the new story is about labor vs. capital a topic that is more taboo.

[Krugman] notes that there have been periods before where workers went several decades without reaping the benefits of capital-favoring technologies (the industrial revolution), and it’s possible that we’re in a period like that now, which unfortunately means that easy answers like ‘skills training’ won’t necessarily help much.’

As for the specific technologies that he’s intrigued by right now, he mentioned driverless cars and speech recognition, both of which use ‘big data’ to accomplish something that we previously thought required human intelligence.”

Tags:

“It Is Startling To Realize That Some Of Our Most Cherished Memories May Never Have Happened”

February 1, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Oliver Sacks’ new article in the New York Review of Books about memory distortion, a passage about Ronald Reagan “misremembering”:

“Daniel Schacter has written extensively on distortions of memory and the ‘source confusions’ that go with them, and in his book Searching for Memory recounts a well-known story about Ronald Reagan:

In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan repeatedly told a heartbreaking story of a World War II bomber pilot who ordered his crew to bail out after his plane had been seriously damaged by an enemy hit. His young belly gunner was wounded so seriously that he was unable to evacuate the bomber. Reagan could barely hold back his tears as he uttered the pilot’s heroic response: ‘Never mind. We’ll ride it down together.’ The press soon realized that this story was an almost exact duplicate of a scene in the 1944 film A Wing and a Prayer. Reagan had apparently retained the facts but forgotten their source.

215Reagan was a vigorous sixty-nine-year-old at the time, was to be president for eight years, and only developed unmistakable dementia in the 1990s. But he had been given to acting and make-believe throughout his life, and he had displayed a vein of romantic fantasy and histrionism since he was young. Reagan was not simulating emotion when he recounted this story—his story, his reality, as he believed it to be—and had he taken a lie detector test (functional brain imaging had not yet been invented at the time), there would have been none of the telltale reactions that go with conscious falsehood.

It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten.”

Tags: ,

“The New Research Seeks To Mine Web Data To Predict All Kinds Of Events”

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

Marshall McLuhan wondered how the new environment would be programmed in the Digital Age, but here’s another important question: How will use our new access to predict the future? Researchers are currently studying decades of newspaper archives in an effort to protect us from dangers in the queue. From Gigaom:

“Researchers at Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology are creating software that analyzes 22 years of New York Times archives, Wikipedia and about 90 other web resources to predict future disease outbreaks, riots and deaths — and hopefully prevent them.

The new research is the latest in a number of similar initiatives that seek to mine web data to predict all kinds of events. Recorded Future, for instance, analyzes news, blogs and social media to ‘help identify predictive signals’for a variety of industries, including financial services and defense. Researchers are also using Twitter and Google to track flu outbreaks.

Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Kira Radinsky of the Technion-Israel Institute describe their work in a newly released paper, ‘Mining the Web to Predict Future Events‘ (PDF). For example, they examined the way that news about natural disasters like storms and droughts could be used to predict cholera outbreaks in Angola. Following those weather events, ‘alerts about a downstream risk of cholera could have been issued nearly a year in advance,’ they write.

Horvitz and Radinsky acknowledge that epidemiologists look at some of the same relationships, but ‘such studies are typically few in number, employ heuristic assessments, and are frequently retrospective analyses, rather than aimed at generating predictions for guiding near-term action.’”

“What Did You Want That You Didn’t Get?”

January 31, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

An odd 1981 report from Mike Wallace about rebirthing, a personal growth technique that uses breathing to try to heal the supposed psychological trauma of the birth process. It was the decade that alternative medicines of the previous 15 years–many of them painfully narcissistic–began to receive their own section in even the most mainstream bookstores.

Tags:

“The Antennas Can Be Painted Onto Any Surface”

January 31, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Wired‘s “7 Massive Ideas That Could Change the World,” a piece of Rachel Swaby’s entry about spray-able Wi-Fi:

“By 2020, wireless technology is expected to have a global impact of $4.5 trillion. But growth depends on our ability to scale up. We need access that matches the number of devices demanding it.

Readily available Wi-Fi could help fix that problem. Internet and phone companies are already starting to deploy small cells—essentially tiny mobile phone towers that serve Wi-Fi along with 4G—in densely populated areas. But those companies have little incentive to build out the massive infrastructure required to connect the rest of the world.

One company has come up with a uniquely audacious solution—a Wi-Fi antenna in a spray can. Chamtech Enterprises has developed a liquid filled with millions of nano-capacitors, which when sprayed on a surface can receive radio signals better than a standard metal rod. With a router, Chamtech’s antennas can communicate with a fiber network, receive signals from targeted satellites, and set up a daisy chain with nearby nodes, potentially creating a mesh network of low-cost, broadband Wi-Fi hot spots. Because the antennas can be painted onto any surface, there would be none of the NIMBY-ism that greets every new cell phone tower. If that’s not fantastic enough, try this: No more cursing AT&T.“

________________________________

“We do nano-antenna spray-on material”:

Tags:

“Architecture Against Drones Is Not Just A Science-Fiction Scenario”

January 31, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From an interesting post at the Chapati Mystery blog which speculates on how to create a city with architecture that makes it impervious to drone strikes:

“The drone may conceive of itself – if it was armed with the ordinance of self-awareness – as a tool beyond architecture.In the end of the 1990’s society was able to get used to CCTV on street corners in stores and on the street. We were even able to accept the use of Tomahawk missiles, at least in Tom Clancy books. The strangeness of the United States treating its enemies this way, as though they were the New England colonies in a strange reuse of King Philip’s lexicography, was brushed off in the excitement over new uses of adaptable technology. However, security cameras and fly-by-wire missiles still were part of a world that defined itself with concrete walls, cliffs-as-barriers,and other principles of formal architecture. Drones scoff at such conventionalities.

Drones’ ability to move through extraordinarily varied environments for extraordinarily long periods of time is of course unparalleled. They can scoff at conventional architecture by waiting out the inhabitants (if the goal is to eliminate a single person or a small group) or to poke and prod at the space from infinite angles using any number of conventional or digital imaging systems. Or,alternatively, the drone operator has the opportunity to decide to simply blow the whole place up. Much of the publicized fear over the expansion of drone warfare and reconnaissance is not distress at the collateral damage in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere but rather the very real fear that we in the United States and United States-like environs have no native way to defend ourselves from them or their operators.

However, as those who depended on castle walls discovered against Ottoman artillery and as the finest horsemen discovered during trench warfare, no invincible force of arms stays that way for long. Architecture against drones is not just a science-fiction scenario but a contemporary imperative. Such creations are not needed for the John Connors but for the Abdurahman al-Awlakis. The successful check against the machines is not a daydream but an inevitability, and the quicker more creative solutions are proposed, the more likely such answers can be disseminated widely and kept from the patent-wielding hands of some offshore-utopian type. (Thanks Browser.)

“Some Of The Cats Need To Be Dead”

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

A lot of people tell me that I remind them of a cat, and that is NOT a compliment. Cats are horrible and I’m apparently not much better. But they get away with it all because they’re so cute and furry.

Unfortunately, free-ranging domestic cats are among the biggest murderers on the planet, killing billions of birds and millions of mammals each year, seriously damaging biodiversity. Perhaps it would be a good idea if it was illegal to let house cats roam and hunt at will, but Hannah Waters at Scientific American has a suggestion that is more Swiftian, though not intended as satire: Let’s humanely kill many of the feline population. I’m pretty sure that it will never happen, though I am completely sure that I’m glad I’m not Hannah Walters. From the essay:

“The obvious answer then is that, if we value biodiversity and wildlife and can manage to overcome our predilection for cute cat faces over cute bird faces, cat populations should be controlled through humane killing, just like many other invasive species.

But the funny thing is that no one suggests that. In compulsively researching this blog post, I read many papers showing that trap-neuter-release doesn’t work, or studies showing that, in computer models, euthanasia reduces cat populations more effectively than trap-neuter-release. But then in their concluding paragraphs, after providing evidence that current methods aren’t working, the action steps proposed by the authors are: (1) all pets should be neutered and (2) owners should be be better educated so they don’t abandon their cats.

What??

Look, I’m as sentimental as the next person. (I cried for the entirety of Les Miserables.) I love my cat and she gives my life meaning. But I also can admit that the science is staring us in the face. We can’t bear to talk about euthanizing cats because they are so friggin’ cute–but, if we’re honest with ourselves, the best solution to this problem is to kill cats. Kill them, with their cute little faces, their soft fur and their snuggles. Some of the cats need to be dead.”

_____________________

“Sounds like a male marking its territory”:

Tags:

“Are Your Powers Strong Enough To Fight Spider-Man Yet?”

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

Are you a British man who’s been injecting himself with deadly snake venom for 20 years because you believe it has healthy, youth-preserving properties? No? Well, just such a person, Steve Ludwin, did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. And apart from the rotting leg and heart attack, he does look fairly good. He describes his exploits thusly:

“Despite a stint in intensive care after an overdose from three separate venoms, a suspected heart attack brought on by cobra venom and a temporarily rotting leg, nothing thus far has put me off my passion for studying this highly evolved reptilian saliva.” You know, A-Rod is gonna start doing this shit. A few exchanges follow.

______________________________

Question:

Why?

Answer:

I started because I listened to a voice of inspiration that blasted into my head one cold night in Connecticut where I am from(20 mins from Newtown) I knew that night which venoms I was going to use and everything. I had a strong feeling that something good would come of it. Felt like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters or something.

______________________________

Question:

Have you ever tasted it? if so, what did it taste like?

Answer:

Hemotoxic venoms taste ok and sweetish but the neurotoxins taste vile and bitter. Go figure.

______________________________

Question:

What is your injection schedule like? You seem to have a pretty strong tremor in your video. Do you always have this, or just after injecting venom? If its constant, did it only start after you injected venom for the first time?

Answer:

I inject every couple weeks. Although sometimes there are periods of time where I “push it” and do it more regularly.

The shaking in the video I’ve had a lot of questions about, but in reality it was just that I was nervous. It was early in the morning, we had to have paramedics present and an ambulance team outside, in case anything went wrong, and I had two camera guys in the room with me… Oh and a big light so the room was lit up. None of which I’m used to when I’m doing this on my own!

Oh and a late night of partying the night before with my gf, Mary Jane, didn’t help. I shake when I am extremely nervous and I am also camera shy like Fred Flintstone. I never shake when I am alone and milking snakes. Everyone who thinks I have done neuro damage is wrong. I also was partying the night before.

______________________________

Question:

You had a ROTTING LEG and continued to do this?? Wtf. Did it stink?? 

Answer:

I had three of the most horrible decomposing stinkholes on my leg. It stank like death. Flies were coming to it.

______________________________

Question:

I read in an article that you don’t sterilize the venom before injecting it. Why don’t you sterilize it? And, do you have trouble walking with those enormous balls of yours?

Answer:

Yeah, I used to just use fresh raw venom until some herpetologist Dr. pointed the stupidity of that! I am now much more careful but still never had any real problems the old way. And my balls are not enormous by any means. Matter of fact I think all the venom has seriously shrunken them like raisins.

______________________________

Question:

Are your powers strong enough to fight Spider-Man yet?

Answer:

No, but hopefully Bear Grylls.•

Tags:

“If China Perfects A Driverless-Car System, It Could Export That System To The Rest Of The World”

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

shp

Will Americans give up their steering wheels any more readily than they’ll surrender their guns? It’s tough to say since both are about power, control and ego. From Chunka Mui’s new six-part series at Forbes’s hideously designed website about autonomous automobiles, a passage that offers three possible reasons why such driverless vehicles may reach critical mass sooner than later:

“I can think of three plausible scenarios that, based on the compelling societal benefits and business opportunities, might jumpstart adoption. 

1. Google Fiber Redux. Google is the most likely player to put hundreds or thousands of driverless cars on the road to prove their effectiveness and clear away short-term hurdles. Google has a tradition of having its employees use its prototype technologies, a practice known as ‘eating your own dog food.’ Given recently passed legislation in California legalizing driverless cars (with backup drivers), Google might deploy hundreds of Google cars to chauffeur Googlers around the state. Google could quickly log millions of miles and accumulate mountains of evidence on the safety and benefits of the car. (According to various news reports, the Google car has thus far been hit twice by other drivers and once caused a minor accident—while under the control of a human driver.) Google could then move to pilot the technology at a larger scale, perhaps in Las Vegas, because Nevada has also approved the car. Google could use its deep pockets to invest in the necessary infrastructure, take the liabilities issues off the table (by essentially self-insuring) and make the cars available in Nevada at competitive prices. Such an effort would mirror theGoogle Fiber strategy in Kansas City to demonstrate the viability of high-speed fiber networks to the home.

2. The China Card. Although there are too many imponderables and cross-industry conflicts to imagine that the U.S. federal government would get involved any time soon, one can imagine scenarios where more interventionist governments, like China’s, might intervene. China has greater incentives to adopt driverless cars because its rates of accidents and fatalities per 100,000 vehicles is more than twice that of the U.S., and its vehicle counts and total fatalities are growing rapidly. In addition, the Chinese government could be motivated to accelerate the adoption of driverless cars because of the trillions of dollars that it would save by building fewer and narrower roads, by eliminating traffic lights and street lights and by reducing fuel consumption. And then there is the competitive dimension. A driverless car initiative would fit into several of the seven strategic industries that the government is supporting. Chinese researchers have already made significant progress in the arena. And, of course, if China perfects a driverless-car system, it could export that system to the rest of the world.

3. The Big Venture Play. In this scenario, a startup steps into the market to launch a large-scale, shared, driverless transportation system. While this might appear to be the most outlandish of the three scenarios, the outline of the a profitable business case has already been developed. The business plan was designed by an impressive team led by Lawrence Burns, the director of the Program on Sustainability at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and former head of R&D at General Motors. The plan is based on expert technical and financial analysis and offers three sustainable market-entry strategies. For example, the team did a detailed analysis of Ann Arbor, MI, and concluded that a shared-driverless system could be fielded that offered customers about 90% savings compared with the cost of personal car ownership—while delivering better user experiences. Analysis of suburban areas and high-density urban centers, with Manhattan as the case study, also yielded significant savings potential and better service. Such dramatic results promise tremendous business opportunities for a ‘NewCo’:

This is an extraordinary opportunity to realize superior margins, especially for first movers. In cities like Ann Arbor, for example, NewCo could price its personal mobility service at $7 per day (providing customers with a service comparable to car ownership with better utilization of their time) and still earn $5 per day off each subscriber. In Ann Arbor alone, 100,000 residents (1/3 of Ann Arbor’s population) using the service could result in a profit of $500,000 a day. Today, 240 million Americans own a car as a means of realizing personal mobility benefits. If NewCo realizes just a 1 percent market share (2.4 million customers) in the United States alone, its annual profit could be on the order of $4 billion. NewCo’s Business Plan explains how this idea can be realized quickly, efficiently and with effective risk management.

There are of course many assumptions built into such plans, but my review leads me to believe that it is a robust platform for serious exploration of the Big Venture Play.”

Tags:

“I Chose To Learn About Computing By ‘Being’ A Computer”

January 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Decades before Google Glass, Steve Mann created his own augmented-reality goggles, becoming, likely, the world’s first cyborg. From “Eye Am a Camera,” his article from late last year in Time:

“My own engagement in this evolutionary process began way back in the last century in 1978. Thirty four years ago, I invented a ‘glass’ that caused the human eye itself to effectively become both an electronic camera and a television display. I used it to experiment with ways to help people see better, through ‘wearable computing’ in everyday life. I called this invention ‘Digital Eye Glass’ or ‘Eye Glass’ or ‘Glass Eye’ (people wearing it look like they have a glass eye) or just ‘Glass’ for short.

Back in 1978, computers were massive machines requiring large computer rooms. My high school had a computer. It processed stacks of paper cards and printed the results on paper in the next room.

But the personal computer revolution was just being born. My brother and I were the first in our school to have a home computer. And rather than have it sitting on a desk at home, I often wore it on my body, connected to various prototypes of my eye glass.

In some sense, I chose to learn about computing by ‘being’ a computer, and to learn about photography by ‘being’ a camera for more than 30 years. I call this ‘learn-by-being.’

As a teenager in the 1970s, I built a computer-mediated world of ‘augmediated reality.’ This was nothing like ‘virtual reality,’ which ignores the real world. Augmediated reality served to both augment and mediate my surroundings.

My ‘glass’ became so much a part of my everyday life that it became part of me — part of my mind and body. And it evolved from a cumbersome apparatus with some parts permanently attached (portions of its sensory network implanted beneath the skin) to something sleek and slender that slides on and off like ordinary eyeglass frames.”

Tags:

“The Actor Represents Himself To The Public Before The Camera, Rather Than Representing Someone Else”

January 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

Bruce Nussbaum’s essay about Apple takes inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s 1936 writing “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Here’s a piece from it, which talks about the difference in acting on stage and on film, which I mostly don’t agree with except for its most basic premise:

“For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else. One of the first to sense the actor’s metamorphosis by this form of testing was Pirandello. Though his remarks on the subject in his novel Si Gira were limited to the negative aspects of the question and to the silent film only, this hardly impairs their validity. For in this respect, the sound film did not change anything essential. What matters is that the part is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance – in the case of the sound film, for two of them. ‘The film actor,’ wrote Pirandello, ‘feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence …. The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.’ This situation might also be characterized as follows: for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.

It is not surprising that it should be a dramatist such as Pirandello who, in characterizing the film, inadvertently touches on the very crisis in which we see the theater. Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the film, founded in, mechanical reproduction. Experts have long recognized that in the film ‘the greatest effects are almost always obtained by ‘acting’ as little as possible … ‘ In 1932 Rudolf Arnheim saw ‘the latest trend … in treating the actor as a stage prop chosen for its characteristics and… inserted at the proper place.’ With this idea something else is closely connected. The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances. Besides certain fortuitous considerations, such as cost of studio, availability of fellow players, décor, etc., there are elementary necessities of equipment that split the actor’s work into a series of mountable episodes. In particular, lighting and its installation require the presentation of an event that, on the screen, unfolds as a rapid and unified scene, in a sequence of separate shootings which may take hours at the studio; not to mention more obvious montage. Thus a jump from the window can be shot in the studio as a jump from a scaffold, and the ensuing flight, if need be, can be shot weeks later when outdoor scenes are taken. Far more paradoxical cases can easily be construed. Let us assume that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without his being forewarned of it. The frightened reaction can be shot now and be cut into the screen version. Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the ‘beautiful semblance’ which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive.”

Tags:

« Older entries § Newer entries »