Disinformation » Futurism

Newt Gingrich Is Right About Having A Permanent Moon Base

ralph — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:19:35 +0000

Yes, “Gingrich” and “right” in the same sentence is very strange: Saturday Night Live managed to successfully mock this derided idea in a recent well received sketch (which I thought was reminiscent of that show’s style from the ’70s). Here is a differing perspective presented by Robert T. Gonzalez on io9.com:

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has promised us a permanent Moon base by 2020. Many people have been calling Newt’s vow a publicity stunt, while others have chimed in by attacking the idea of a lunar base in and of itself, with assertions like “real scientists know [a Moon base] is fantasy.” We won’t speak to Newt’s political maneuverings, but we’re sure as hell not going to sit idly by while people bash the feasibility or scientific potential of a lunar settlement. In fact, we’ve got 185 reasons we should set a course straight away …

An Off-World Energy Source: We spoke to astrophysicist Michael Shara — curator of the astrophysics department at the American Museum of Natural History — about the scientific potential of a permanent Moon base, and one of the first things to come up was lunar resource utilization.

“Lunar geology is in its infancy,” he explained. “Helium 3 and rare earth element mining would be a major industry.” What is Helium-3? Remember the stuff they were mining in Duncan Jones’ Moon? That was helium-3 — a non-radioactive isotope of helium with huge potential in nuclear fusion research and alternative energy applications. Yes it really exists, yes it really is rare on Earth, and yes it really could make a one-way-trip to the Moon totally worth it. Not only would it make for a great off-world alternative energy source, it would also provide on-site support for expansion and development on the Moon itself.

Read More from Robert T. Gonzalez on io9.com

LAPD To Crack Down On Use Of Unmanned Drones By Real Estate Agents

JacobSloan — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:55:42 +0000

In a nightmarish scenario from the future, technology ostensibly created to spy on our “enemies” is now being turned against us by the most nefarious of forces — real estate brokers. The Los Angeles Times reveals:

The Los Angeles Police Department is warning real estate agents not to use images of properties taken from unmanned aircraft, saying the flying drones pose a potential safety hazard and could violate federal aviation policy.

The warning was issued this week after officers saw a television news report showing a basketball-sized object with multiple rotors hovering over an expansive Westside residence.

Real estate agents have been posting aerial photos and video of homes for sale in the Los Angeles area, according to the LAPD. The pictures have been taken from several hundred feet off the ground in the city’s crowded airspace — an altitude at which police helicopters often fly.

Are We Ready For A Morality Pill?

JacobSloan — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:00:18 +0000

In the New York Times, Peter Singer and Agata Sagan say it’s only a matter of time before we pinpoint chemicals in the brain that produce empathetic behavior. Will religion be rendered obsolete? And, when we develop an ethical-behavior-boosting pill, will it be recommended (or mandatory) that everyone take it?

If continuing brain research does in fact show biochemical differences between the brains of those who help others and the brains of those who do not, could this lead to a “morality pill” — a drug that makes us more likely to help? Given the many other studies linking biochemical conditions to mood and behavior, and the proliferation of drugs to modify them that have followed, the idea is not far-fetched. If so, would people choose to take it? Could criminals be given the option, as an alternative to prison, of a drug-releasing implant that would make them less likely to harm others? Might governments begin screening people to discover those most likely to commit crimes? Those who are at much greater risk of committing a crime might be offered the morality pill; if they refused, they might be required to wear a tracking device that would show where they had been at any given time, so that they would know that if they did commit a crime, they would be detected.

Fifty years ago, Anthony Burgess wrote “A Clockwork Orange,” a futuristic novel about a vicious gang leader who undergoes a procedure that makes him incapable of violence. Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie version sparked a discussion in which many argued that we could never be justified in depriving someone of his free will, no matter how gruesome the violence that would thereby be prevented. No doubt any proposal to develop a morality pill would encounter the same objection.

Last October, in Foshan, China, a 2-year-old girl was run over by a van. The driver did not stop. Over the next seven minutes, more than a dozen people walked or bicycled past the injured child. A second truck ran over her. Eventually, a woman pulled her to the side, and her mother arrived. The child died in a hospital. The entire scene was captured on video and caused an uproar when it was shown by a television station and posted online. A similar event occurred in London in 2004, as have others, far from the lens of a video camera. Yet people can, and often do, behave in very different ways.

Gingrich’s Path To Statehood For A Space Colony

JacobSloan — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:54:53 +0000

Wondering if the Constitution still applies when gravity does not? Newt Gingrich believes so. Buzzfeed dug up Newt’s 1981 bill laying out rules of governance for a future 20,000-person U.S. colony on the moon or Mars. At the moment he’s being bashed from all sides for this, but I think it’s fantastic:

Yesterday Newt Gingrich revealed his “weirdest idea ever” — to provide a path to statehood for a hypothetical lunar colony.

With the help of the skilled research librarians in the Library of Congress Law Library, BuzzFeed tracked down the bill, which Gingrich called the “Northwest Ordinance for Space,” or formally the “National Space and Aeronautics Policy Act of 1981.”

“The Congress declares that the United States is committed to the expansion of free people and free institutions into space,” the bill stated, calling for an array of near earth and solar space travel vehicles to be completed by 2010.

It also called for the creation of “an environmentally acceptable space to Earth power capability that is economically competitive with power generation on Earth,” by the year 2000.

Japan To Open Robot Farm In Disaster Zone

JacobSloan — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:36:11 +0000

A century or two from now, pretty much most of the world will be a flooded/radioactive zone being farmed by robots. The Telegraph reports:

The project, masterminded by the Ministry of Agriculture, will involve unmanned tractors working the fields of the farm on a disaster zone site spanning 600 acres. Robots will then box produce grown on the farm, including rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables as part of the “Dream Project” scheme.

An expanse of farmland in Miyagi prefecture, northeast Japan, which was flooded in last year’s tsunami, has been earmarked by the government for the project. Miyagi was one of Japan’s three worst hit prefectures in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, which left more than 19,000 dead or missing and triggered the world’s worst nuclear crisis in decades.

Farming was hit particularly hard by the disaster, with tsunami water leaving soil laden with salt and oil deposits, as well as radiation contamination as a result of the leaking Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

NYPD Developing Scanners To Detect Concealed Weapons

HAL9000 — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 06:11:46 +0000

Via the Gothamist:

Presumably sick of all the bleeding heart liberals whining about civil rights, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has devised an elegant solution to sidestep the controversy over his department’s stop and frisk policy. Speaking at a State of the NYPD breakfast this morning, Kelly announced that the NYPD is developing a kind of infrared technology that will enable police officers to detect whether individuals are carrying guns under their clothing. Sure, it’s not as badass as shooting down a plane, but at least cops will finally be able to see what’s under our clothes without having to get out of their cars.

The mechanism, which the NYPD is developing with help from the U.S. Department of Defense, currently only works at a short range of three or four feet. But Kelly thinks they can improve it to scan citizens from a distance of up to 25 meters away. He announced this morning that the gadget will be mounted on NYPD vans with “the infrared rays shooting up the street at the person,” as the Post puts it.

The device detects the radiation emitting from a person’s body, and it can’t penetrate metal, so a concealed gun can be spotted from the image captured by the detector’s lens …

The Future Of Personal Identification: Buttock Scanners?

JacobSloan — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:00:24 +0000

Apparently everyone has a unique “buttprint”. In the future, the driver’s seat of your car or your spot on the train may be reserved for a butt that the scanner recognizes. Via Yahoo!:

Put your fingerprint scanners away. Stand aside iris measurers. Buttocks are the new way to prove who you are.

A team of Japanese scientists claim their pressure sensor sheet can accurately identify an individual’s backside and when placed on a driver’s seat could be used as a last line of defence to stop someone else driving away your motor.

“The sheet has 360 sensors, which collect data for 39 features to recognise a person, such as pressure patterns and the dimensions of the buttocks,” said Dr. Shigeomi Koshimizu, who led the research.

Koshimizu, an associate professor at Tokyo-based Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology, said his device is 98 percent accurate and far less onerous than conventional biometrics as it requires nothing more than someone to sit naturally.

Seeing And Hearing In The Future

JacobSloan — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:08:54 +0000

In an interview with the Believer, key performance artist and electronic musician Laurie Anderson traverses a lot of ground. But one intriguing portion concerns her thoughts on sensory enhancement as the big advancement to come. If we can view, hear, and touch better and more intensely, will we be more alive?

Five thousand years from now — let’s say we didn’t find the God particle. We’re still looking. I think we probably won’t be making things of the nature that we are now. I think we’ll just be trying to appreciate things more. Maybe we’ll design better ears. I mean, our hearing’s crappy. We’ll have huge ears and we’ll be able to tune in to Mars, or we’ll have a hundred lenses through which we can look onto the surface of Mars with our so-called “bare eyes,” or look through our hands. We’ll be able to be in the present more effectively.

The Drones Are Coming Home

JacobSloan — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:40:44 +0000

Will baby-sized drones soon be used routinely for tracking residential property lines and other domestic purposes? With our nation’s adventures in Iraq coming to an end, unmanned drones will need to be kept busy doing something…via BLDG BLOG:

A post on sUAS News—a blog tracking the “small unmanned aviation system industry”—we read about the possibility of drone aircraft being used to enforce residential property tax.

Citing a recent court ruling in Arkansas that “has approved the use of aerial imagery to collect data on property sizes,” and making reference to the already-controversial state deployment of aerial surveillance tools, sUAS suggests that drones could someday be used to manage a near-realtime catalog of local property expansions, transfers, and other tax-relevant land alterations.

Whether enforcing local building codes—keeping an eye, for instance, on illegally built structures such as the so-called Achill Henge in Ireland—or reconciling on-the-ground property lines with their administrative representations back in the city land archives, how soon will drones become a state tool for regional landscape management?

“Imagine your local planning officer having access to your back garden at a moment’s notice!” sUAS writes with alarm. “With the pullback from Iraq and other spots under way, this scenario is much easier to imagine. Perhaps it’s already happening.”

What Is Coming After Capitalism?

JacobSloan — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Nothing developed by humans can withstand the test of time forever, and that includes capitalism. Via Jacobin Magazine, Pete Frase spins four possible scenarios, including the utopian, the distopian and the in-between, based on whether we run out of natural resources and whether machines take over all labor:

One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it.

The very existence of Occupy Wall Street suggests that the end of capitalism has become a bit easier to imagine of late. At first, this imagining took a mostly grim and dystopian form: at the height of the financial crisis, with the global economy seemingly in full collapse, the end of capitalism looked like it might be the beginning of a period of anarchic violence and misery. And still it might, with the Eurozone teetering on the edge of collapse as I write. But more recently, the spread of global protest from Cairo to Madrid to Madison to Wall Street has given the Left some reason to timidly raise its hopes for a better future after capitalism.

Rosa Luxemburg, reacting to the beginnings of World War I, cited a line from Engels: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” In that spirit I offer a thought experiment, an attempt to make sense of our possible futures. These are a few of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if we fail …

Read the rest at Jacobin

Mexico City’s 65-Story Inverted Skyscraper

JacobSloan — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:51:28 +0000

The Earthscraper is a conceptual design for a see-through 82,000-square-foot inverted pyramid proposed to be built underneath Mexico City. With space already filled in the world’s major cities, will the future be about building downwards? Via Ecomagination:

Earthscraper may have burst the bounds of the architectural world because it has taken a truly new approach to escalating megacity problems like planning for population growth, curbing sprawl, preserving open space, and conserving energy and water.

The inverted pyramid’s next 10 stories are intended for retail space, followed by 10 stories of apartments. The structure’s deepest, tapering 35 floors are pegged for office space. The interior design concept also incorporates a system of gardens occurring roughly every 10 stories, to help generate fresh air.

Naming Products Like Babies, And Babies Like Products

JacobSloan — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:00:34 +0000

Slate on how branding names and baby names converged. Are our consumer products becoming our babies, and our babies becoming branded items?

We’ve started naming our kids like products—and our products like kids. Parents approach baby naming a lot like product branding. Whereas in the past, names were typically chosen with an eye toward personal significance (a baby was named after a grandparent, say), today’s parents increasingly focus on the public image projected by the name.

Now, as companies introduce technologies that function like people—Siri being the most extreme example to date—they suddenly find themselves with the same kinds of naming challenges as today’s parents-to-be. They have to consider the complex web of cultural meanings that each name carries. They have to ask, as parents do, “What kind of person are we creating, and what name represents that?”

It’s no coincidence, then, that brand names and baby names have begun to converge, as in the case of the Sienna minivan and baby Siennas. Both corporate parents and real parents are trying to launch their offspring with the best possible positioning.

The idea of a talking machine with a human-sounding name isn’t new, of course, but Siri’s predecessors were mostly fictional. Think of the arch KITT, the silicon brain of a Pontiac Trans Am in the TV series Knight Rider; Joshua, the troubled NORAD computer in the film War Games; and most famously, the eerily calm HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey. These were mere characters, but they also reflected a universal human impulse: When we talk to something, or when it talks to us, we want to call it by a name. Have you noticed how many drivers give names to their GPS devices?

Using a human-style name reflects our relationship with the thing being named, and shapes it, too. Indoor pets, for instance, tend to be given more human names than outdoor animals. Assigning a name to a car or other possession is both a sign of growing affection and a spur to further bonding. Around my house, I’ve found that it’s nearly impossible to throw out any object that my kids have named. Names give objects emotional life. You say, “the iPhone” and “my iPhone,” but not “the Siri.” It—she—is simply Siri. The name makes the act of conversing with a metal slab feel natural. And that emotional connection seems to invite a powerful kind of consumer loyalty.

Scientists Develop Device To See Inside Dreams

JacobSloan — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:50:11 +0000

Suspect that your spouse is enamored with another? For a fee, you’ll be able to get a recording of their dreams to playback and double check. The Telegraph reports:

The secret world of dreams has been unlocked with the invention of technology capable of illustrating images taken directly from human brains during sleep.

A team of Japanese scientists have created a device that enables the processing and imaging of thoughts and dreams as experienced in the brain to appear on a computer screen.

While researchers have so far only created technology that can reproduce simple images from the brain, the discovery paves the way for the ability to unlock people’s dreams and other brain processes.

A spokesman at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories said: “It was the first time in the world that it was possible to visualise what people see directly from the brain activity.

“By applying this technology, it may become possible to record and replay subjective images that people perceive like dreams.” The scientists, lead by chief researcher Yukiyaso Kamitani, focused on the image recognition procedures in the retina of the human eye.

The Saga of Newt “Skywalker” Gingrich

ralph — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:01:48 +0000

I’m still waiting for Republican primary voters to get wind of all of Newt’s “big government” sci-fi ideas. Here’s a good history of them from Sharon Weinberger in Foreign Policy:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the surging candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has been simultaneously lauded for his devotion to technological innovation, and ridiculed for his warnings about futuristic weapons.

Gingrich, who has dabbled in science fiction and cited both futurist Alvin Toffler and the concept of “psychohistory” in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels as intellectual inspirations, has long been dubbed “Newt Skywalker” thanks to his vision of future warfare that blends fact and fantasy. This streak of futurism is, by his own admission, rooted in a political and philosophical belief about technology and power. ”I would rather rely on engineers than diplomats for security,” Gingrich told Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine in 1994, in reference to his support for missile defense.

Not all his futurism is a bad thing. Many of Gingrich’s early ideas, such as encouraging the Pentagon to fund bureaucratically stripped-down “Skunk Works“–type innovation are laudable.

eBook Readers Live in a Different Universe of Books

moezilla — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:30:05 +0000

Amazon’s released their list of 2011’s best-selling books, revealing that 40% of the best-selling ebooks didn’t even make it onto their list of the best-selling print books!

The #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks of the year weren’t even available in print editions, while four of the top 10 best-selling print books didn’t make it into the top 100 best-selling ebooks. “It couldn’t be more clear that Kindle owners are choosing their material from an entirely different universe of books,” notes one Kindle site, which points out that five of the best-selling ebooks came from two million-selling ebook authors — Amanda Hocking and John Locke — who are still awaiting the release of their books in print. And five of Amazon’s best-selling ebooks were Kindle-only “Singles,” including a Stephen King short story which actually outsold another King novel that he’d released in both ebook and print formats. And Neal Stephenson’s “Reamde” was Amazon’s #99 best-selling print book of 2011, though it didn’t even make it onto their list of the 100 best-selling ebooks of the year.

“People who own Kindles are just reading different books than the people who buy printed books,” reports the Kindle site, which adds “2011 may be remembered as the year that hundreds of new voices finally found their audiences.”

You Can Remotely Hack Someone’s Insulin Pump To Kill Them

JacobSloan — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:00:51 +0000

A McAfee researcher has shown that it is possible to remotely hijack an insulin pump implanted in someone’s body. We may someday have internal devices that keep our organs functioning into super-old age, but will live in fear of computer viruses that explode hearts by sending pacemakers into hyperdrive, et cetera. The Register writes:

In a hack fitting of a James Bond movie, a security researcher has devised an attack that hijacks nearby insulin pumps, enabling him to surreptitiously deliver fatal doses to diabetic patients who rely on them.

The attack on wireless insulin pumps made by medical devices giant Medtronic was demonstrated Tuesday at the Hacker Halted conference in Miami. It was delivered by McAfee’s Barnaby Jack, the same researcher who last year showed how to take control of two widely used models of automatic teller machines so he could to cause them to spit out a steady stream of dollar bills.

“With this device I created and the software I created, I could actually instruct the pump to perform all manner of commands,” Jack told The Register. “I could make it dispense its entire reservoir of insulin, which is about 300 units. I just scan for any devices in the vicinity and they will respond with the serial number of the device.”

The hack he has devised would allow an attacker to manipulate the diabetic’s insulin injections and could possibly be used to kill the pump user. Radcliffe said that at first he thought it was cool for a tech standpoint and then since he uses an insulin pump he had an instance of “sheer terror” that there is no security on the devices.

An attacker according to Radcliffe could intercept wireless signals and broadcast a stronger signal to change the readout causing the person to adjust their dose. He also said that a person could do this from quite far away such as a few hundred feet away the attacker could do this from the same floor of a hospital or from the same airplane.

Presenting Earth 2.0

JacobSloan — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:20:25 +0000

Is this where humankind will be living in a couple millenia? In a solar system 600 light years away spins the newly-spotted Kebler 22-b, a rocky planet with oceans covering two-thirds of its surface, and balmy temperatures approximating 70 degrees. The Herald Sun reports on the greatest hope for a replacement Earth:

A newly discovered planet about 600 light years from our little rock has scientists around the world in a spin, with many heralding it as the best chance yet of containing alien life.

The find, announced early last week by NASA, was uncovered by the US space agency’s Kepler spacecraft, launched on a planet-hunting mission in 2009.

The planet, Kepler-22b, is 2.4 times bigger than Earth, orbits a star slightly smaller than our sun and has an average temperature of 22C. It is also closer to its sun-like star, giving it a “year” of 290 days.

What makes this discovery so exciting is that it is the smallest planet right in the middle of what has been dubbed the Goldilocks zone, where it’s not too hot and not too cold to either boil or freeze water, vital for life as we know it.

“It’s very exciting,” said University of Sydney astronomer Dennis Stello, who works on the Kepler project. “This is the first time we have actually found such a small planet in the habitable zone.”

Insect Cyborgs May Be The Spies And First Responders Of The Future

JacobSloan — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:00:29 +0000

Airborne bugs equipped with sensors, microphones, and cameras will one day go wherever people cannot. Science Daily reports:

Research conducted at the University of Michigan College of Engineering may lead to the use of insects to monitor hazardous situations before sending in humans.

“Through energy scavenging, we could potentially power cameras, microphones and other sensors and communications equipment that an insect could carry aboard a tiny backpack,” Professor Khalil Najafi said. “We could then send these ‘bugged’ bugs into dangerous or enclosed environments where we would not want humans to go.”

The principal idea is to harvest the insect’s biological energy from either its body heat or movements. The device converts the kinetic energy from wing movements of the insect into electricity, thus prolonging the battery life. The battery can be used to power small sensors implanted on the insect (such as a small camera, a microphone or a gas sensor) in order to gather vital information from hazardous environments.

The university is pursuing patent protection for the intellectual property, and is seeking commercialization partners to help bring the technology to market.

A Nation Of Places Not Worth Caring About

JacobSloan — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:00:21 +0000

The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible. We can’t overestimate the amount of despair we are generating with places like this…the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world…there’s not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel okay about going down [these] blocks.”

In a classic TED talk, James Kunstler tears apart the architecture and public space design of post-World War II America, with pictorial examples of egregiously dismal cases, and explains why the suburbs are a sham:

Extreme Futurist Festival 2011

Haywire — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:31:34 +0000

Picture an event where the bridge between the counterculture and academia is finally crossed. From live tech demonstrations to futuristic presentations to provocative performance art to live music we will take you off the grid as we explore a new kaleidoscopic wonderland. If the original Burning Man was to meet the Singularity Summit, you would have Extreme Futurist Fest 2011.

The dance for the realization of the future begins in the corridors of art, literature, and culture. Only by connecting together the greatest visionary minds with the most innovative and rule-breaking forms of artistic expression and cultural mind-melding can we unlock the full potential of the Future and bring it into the Present. We offer you the bold new interdisciplinary movement of the 21st Century. A place where the right brain and left brain merge into a new “Undivided Mind”.

The future is all around us today. The explosion of the Internet and powerful mobile devices have transformed life in fundamental ways for billions of people. We need to increase our efforts to open source technology so that it becomes available to the billions who lack it. We must push the envelope of the latest p2p technology to enable new applications which bring us closer together as a society. We want a future-friendly culture that embraces technology and understands that technological innovation plays a central role in solving the world’s most persistent problems.

We encourage a new generation of thinkers who understand that fun and learning are not mutually exclusive and that the most complex topics can be grasped if there is enough curiosity, wonder, and enthusiasm for learning. Labs, companies, and startups around the world are making startling steps forward in the fields of nanotechnology, robotics, brain-computer interfacing, 3D printing, materials science, wearable computing, life extension, social networking, and more. We must understand these advances so that we can ensure that they benefit as many people as possible.

Join us for a profound exploration of what it means to be human. A first-hand look into the genesis of a powerful new intellectual and expressive culture.

In the video above Rachel Haywire talks about her ideas for the Extreme Futurist Festival and what she hopes to accomplish with this new event that takes place in Los Angeles on the 16th and 17th of December. Her dream of bringing the intellectual and artistic communities together in which the best minds of science, technology, and alt-culture unite was brought into reality through working with Michael Anissimov of the Singularity Institute. After working on the Singularity Summit Michael decided to give XFF his attention due to having a similar vision for Transhumanism.

Transforming the barriers between underground and mainstream the organizers of Extreme Futurist Festival are excited about the first year of their event. The festival will feature speakers, artists, bands, and performers ranging from Natasha Vita-More (Chairwoman of Humanity+) to Hanin Elias. (founding member of Atari Teenage Riot) Vendors include RE/Search Publications and comic artist Zac Finger.

In the video Rachel also reads some of her writing from the Disinformation book Generation Hex and discusses how it applies to the event. Tickets are on sale now.

Japanese Robot Girlfriend

JacobSloan — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:50:21 +0000

My prediction — in the future, if you do not meet a husband/wife by age 40, you will have the option of being given a robot boyfriend/girlfriend:

Pretty interesting where robotics is going. It will really get interesting with the merging of artificial intelligence, prosthetic development, innovative CPU processing developments, low cost storage (SSD) and a connected Internet…. the next 50 years will allow for some crazy and perhaps scary, developments.

The Evils Of A World Filled With Touchscreens

JacobSloan — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:34:46 +0000

All signs point to our heading towards a future in which we will exist surrounded by software-enabled touchscreens. Why this could be a grave mistake, via Slate:

What touchscreens lack is something called affordance — an object’s built-in ability to tell you how it works. A doorknob affords turning. The button on a car stereo affords pushing. A touchscreen affords nothing. It relies on software for any affordance, which in turn relies on total immersion for the user.

What we want, apparently, is to surround ourselves with touchscreens of varying size—tiny ones in our pockets, medium-size models for our laps and dashboards, and massive versions for our walls. We want tomorrow’s vintage shops to be lined with identical, blank, anonymous slabs. We want things to be vessels for software, and nothing more. Immersion is a fantastic quality while flicking virtual birds at digital pigs in your smartphone. Immersion at 80 mph is less desirable.

When the iPhone arrived in 2007, it was a revelation, redefining the phone and the computer in one deft swipe. With its iconic, monolithic design and touch-sensitive interface, the iPhone was science fiction made real—the beginning of a new era of gadget lust and device convergence. It was ridiculously popular, as well, dwarfing the sales of any other Apple product, and selling as many as 100 million to date. But in the past four years, the iPhone has created its own, dubious legacy. Its touchscreen transformed the way we interact with technology, and created a new industry standard for gadget design. While the multitouch capacitive display was the perfect interface for a smartphone—folding the functions of a mouse, keyboard, and desktop into a phone, without cramping the display or adding rows of buttons—its broader influence throughout the world of consumer electronics has been a minor disaster.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent touchscreens, nor did some faceless Apple engineer. The first prototypes showed up in the 1960s, a decade before Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded their company. The iPhone wasn’t even the first application of the multitouch technology. It simply made touchscreens irresistible, with an intuitive operating system that replaced the analog, button-studded face of other cellphones with a shape-shifting, digital playpen. Before the iPhone, touchscreens were exotic. Now they are everywhere—in cars, on refrigerators, beside CNN anchors.

The ubiquity of touchscreens has been even worse for other sorts of devices. It’s one thing to have to slow or stop mid-jog, and fiddle with an iPod so it performs its basic functions. It’s another to take your eyes from the road, and poke at the touchscreen in your car’s center console, tapping through menus, holding and dragging scroll bars, to access a specific radio station or playlist. That’s the state of the art in automotive infotainment, as the industry abandons decades of experience with analog controls for the sake of embedded, iPhone-like touchscreens. The allure, as always, is the infinite. Why should the designers at Toyota or Volkswagen commit to a row of radio station preset buttons, when that real estate could multitask instead? A smooth touchscreen can absorb the digital stand-ins for those old-fashioned buttons whenever it’s convenient, so you can order movie tickets or make dinner reservations instead.

Scientists To Clone Wooly Mammoth

JacobSloan — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:51:59 +0000

A cloned pet baby mammoth — Christmas gift craze of the year for 2018. CNN reports:

A team of scientists from Japan, Russia and the United States hopes to clone a mammoth, a symbol of Earth’s ice age that ended 12,000 years ago, according to a report in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun. The researchers say they hope to produce a baby mammoth within six years.

The scientists say they will extract DNA from a mammoth carcass that has been preserved in a Russian laboratory and insert it into the egg cells of an African elephant in hopes of producing a mammoth embryo.

The team is being led by Akira Iritani, a professor emeritus at Kyoto University in Japan. He has built upon research from Teruhiko Wakayama of Kobe’s Riken Center for Developmental Biology, who successfully cloned a mouse from cells that had been frozen for 16 years, to devise a technique to extract egg nuclei without damaging them, according to the Yomiuri report.

“If a cloned embryo can be created, we need to discuss, before transplanting it into the womb, how to breed [the mammoth] and whether to display it to the public,” Iritani told Yomiuri. “After the mammoth is born, we’ll examine its ecology and genes to study why the species became extinct and other factors.”

South Korea Rolls Out Robotic Prison Wardens

JacobSloan — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:43:36 +0000

Incarceration just got a lot more adorable. Via the BBC:

A jail in the eastern city of Pohang plans to run a month-long trial with three of the automatons in March. The machines will monitor inmates for abnormal behaviour.

South Korea aims to be a world leaders in robotics. Business leaders believe the field has the potential to become a major export industry.

The three 5ft-high (1.5m) robots involved in the prison trial have been developed by the Asian Forum for Corrections, a South Korean group of researchers who specialise in criminality and prison policies. It said the robots move on four wheels and are equipped with cameras and other sensors that allow them to detect risky behaviour such as violence and suicide.

Prof Lee Baik-Chu, of Kyonggi University, who led the design process, said the robots would alert human guards if they discovered a problem.

The Future Of History: 3D Laser Scanning Of Sites

majestic — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:24:11 +0000

Ben Cacyra tells CNN about CyArk, a nonprofit that seeks to digitally preserve cultural heritage sites worldwide:

When I was a boy, my father used to take me by the hand to visit the ruins of the ancient metropolis on the outskirts of our town. We would always stop by to visit the huge winged bulls that guarded the gates of the ancient city of Nineveh.

I was scared of the winged bulls, but at the same time, they excited me. Through them and the site, I learned the stories of the civilization that lived along the Tigris River in what was now Northern Iraq.

Many decades later, I started a technology company that brought the world its first 3-D laser scanning system and cloud of points software. The systems we developed were extremely fast and could rapidly collect millions of points with very high accuracy and very high resolution.

A surveyor with traditional survey tools would be hard-pressed to produce maybe 500 points in a whole day. These new systems would produce something like 10,000 points a second. As you can imagine, this was a paradigm shift in the survey and construction businesses, as well as in the reality capture industry.

In 2001, Cyra Technologies was acquired by Leica Geosystems. Right around that time, a terrible tragedy happened: The magnificent 160-foot-tall Buddhas in the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan were blown up by the Taliban. They were gone in an instant. Unfortunately, there was no detailed record of the site.

This devastated me, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the fate of my old friends, the winged bulls, and the fate of heritage sites all over the world.

My wife and I decided to start a project to digitally preserve world heritage sites…

[continues at CNN]

The Quest To Invent A Sarcasm Detector

JacobSloan — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:50:20 +0000

Sarcasm levels are ever-increasing in our modern world — perhaps a century from now, communications will contain more sarcastic expressions than sincere ones. So what is the value of being tongue-in-cheek? It involves more intelligence and creativity than straight-talk, and machines cannot (yet) understand or imitate it with complete accuracy. Thus irony may be our last and best weapon in the inevitable war against the robots. Smithsonian Magazine reveals:

For the past 20 years, researchers from linguists to psychologists to neurologists have been studying our ability to perceive snarky remarks and gaining new insights into how the mind works. Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving, for instance.

Sarcasm detection is an essential skill if one is going to function in a modern society dripping with irony. “Our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm,” says Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco.

Sarcasm so saturates 21st-century America that according to one study of a database of telephone conversations, 23 percent of the time that the phrase “yeah, right” was used, it was uttered sarcastically. Entire phrases have almost lost their literal meanings because they are so frequently said with a sneer. “Big deal,” for example. When’s the last time someone said that to you and meant it sincerely? “My heart bleeds for you” almost always equals “Tell it to someone who cares,” and “Aren’t you special” means you aren’t.

Sarcasm seems to exercise the brain more than sincere statements do. Scientists who have monitored the electrical activity of the brains of test subjects exposed to sarcastic statements have found that brains have to work harder to understand sarcasm.

There appear to be regional variations in sarcasm. A study that compared college students from upstate New York with students from near Memphis, Tennessee, found that the Northerners were more likely to suggest sarcastic jibes when asked to fill in the dialogue in a hypothetical conversation.

There isn’t just one way to be sarcastic or a single sarcastic tone of voice. In his book, Haiman lists more than two dozen ways that a speaker or a writer can indicate sarcasm with pitch, tone, volume, pauses, duration and punctuation. Despite all these clues, detecting sarcasm can be difficult. There are a lot of things that can cause our sarcasm detectors to break down, scientists are finding. Conditions including autism, closed head injuries, brain lesions and schizophrenia can interfere with the ability to perceive sarcasm.

It turns out scientists can program a computer to recognize sarcasm. Last year, Hebrew University computer scientists in Jerusalem developed their “Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification.” The program was able to catch 77 percent of the sarcastic statements in Amazon purchaser comments like “Great for insomniacs” in a book review. The scientists say that a computer that could recognize sarcasm could do a better job of summarizing user opinions in product reviews.

The University of Southern California’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory announced in 2006 that their “automatic sarcasm recognizer,” a set of computer algorithms, was able to recognize sarcastic versions of “yeah, right” in recorded telephone conversations more than 80 percent of the time. The researchers suggest that a computerized phone operator that understands sarcasm can be programmed to “get” the joke with “synthetic laughter.”

Cooling The Future: Artificial Glaciers?

JacobSloan — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:27:24 +0000

BLDG BLOG examines the emerging field of ice engineering, which may prove more and more useful as naturally-occurring ice formations recede:

The city of Ulan Bator, Mongolia, will attempt to keep itself cool over the summer by way of a kind of artificial glacier.

According to the Guardian, this “geoengineering trial” will try to “’store’ freezing winter temperatures in a giant block of ice that will help to cool and water the city as it slowly melts during the summer.” Project directors “hope the process will reduce energy demand from air conditioners and regulate drinking water and irrigation supplies.” The cool air will presumably be pumped through the city via a continuous and monumental network of ducts.

The project aims to artificially create “naleds” — ultra-thick slabs of ice that occur naturally in far northern climes when rivers or springs push through cracks in the surface to seep outwards during the day and then add an extra layer of ice during the night. Fascinatingly, naleds have already been used as foundations for infrastructural projects elsewhere; in North Korea, for instance, the Guardian reports, the military has utilized naleds “to build river crossings for tanks during the winter and Russia has used them as drilling platforms.”

Texas Scientist’s Invisibility Cloak Prototype

JacobSloan — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:33:50 +0000

The device created by Ali Aliev, a researcher at University of Texas Dallas, uses threadlike carbon nanotubes. When rapidly heated, they create a mirage effect similar in principle to a stretch of highway on a very hot day. Perfect for keeping a small object hidden:

Holograms You Can Manipulate With Your Hands

JacobSloan — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:06:13 +0000

The future will involving interacting with objects that aren’t actually there. The 2050 World Series will be played with a holographic non-real “ball” and your grandchildren’s toys will be mere fragments of light. Via PhysOrg:

A research project at Microsoft Research Cambridge has brought forth a prototype called Holodesk, which lets you manipulate virtual objects with your hand.

When Pollution Grows Terrible, The Elite Breathe Purified Air

JacobSloan — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:03:37 +0000

It has recently been noted that in the Chinese capital of Beijing, the air quality has grown so bad as to be off the charts of measurability. But the New York Times reports that the elite breathe special air thanks to purification systems — is this the global future, in which a breath of fresh air is a luxury item?

Ordinary Beijingers could take some comfort in the knowledge that the soupy air they breathe on especially polluted days also finds its way into the lungs of the privileged and pampered. Such assumptions, it seems, are not entirely accurate.

As it turns out, the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according to a Chinese company, the Broad Group, which has been promoting its air-purifying machines in advertisements that highlight their ubiquity in places where many officials work and live.

The company’s vice president, Zhang Zhong, said there were more than 200 purifiers scattered throughout Great Hall of the People, the office of China’s president, Hu Jintao, and Zhongnanhai, the walled compound for senior leaders and their families. “Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people,” boasts the company’s promotional material.

News that Chinese leaders are largely insulated from Beijing’s famously foul air comes at a time of unusually heavy pollution in the capital. In recent weeks, the capital has been continuously shrouded by a beige pall and readings from the United States Embassy’s rooftop air monitoring device have repeatedly registered unsafe levels of particulate matter.