Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now

A 3-D Printed Fashion Show Inspired By Birds

Dan Nosowitz — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 17:30:00 GMT

Warning: do not attempt to use these pieces to fly. You cannot fly.

Last week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, designer Melinda Looi presented what's being billed as Asia's first 3-D-printed fashion show. The models wore nude bodysuits; the entire show was about Looi's five bird-inspired pieces, created using 3-D printing technology.

These weren't made with your everyday Makerbot console. The designs took up to eight people, including designers, engineers, and modellers. Those weren't in Malaysia; instead, Looi sent her designs off to Materialise, a Belgian additive manufacturing (aka 3-D printing) shop. (The show was also organized by Materialise, which in addition to its usual modelling work for architects and designers also maintains a museum of sorts.) Check out the gallery to see what Looi and Materialise came up with.

Scenes From Asia's First 3-D-Printed Fashion Show

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 17:30:00 GMT

Counterpoint: The U.S. Could Totally Kill Edward Snowden With A Drone Strike

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Here's how

In a recent PopularScience.com post, contributing writer Kelsey Atherton suggests that Edward Snowden is at no risk from a U.S. drone strike in Hong Kong because of Chinese air defenses and the risk of collateral damage in the densely populated city.

It’s true that a strike by a Predator or Reaper drone, which can’t penetrate air defenses and cause significant collateral damage with standard weapons, could be ruled out—but the military and the CIA have plenty of other drones up their sleeve.

A morbid thought experiment: Hong Kong is an island; it’s a port city surrounded by deep water. In 2008 the Navy demonstrated something called Submarine Over-The-Horizon Organic Capability—launching and controlling a lethal Switchblade drone from a submerged sub.

The Switchblade is a one-use drone, powered by a quiet electric motor, that weighs about six pounds and flies up to 50 mph for 15 minutes. Switchblade carries a high-explosive warhead that can blow up everything within a 1-, 5-, or 7-meter range around the drone; it can take out an individual, or a truck. A high-resolution video camera in the nose allows a human operator to verify the target before detonating the drone. This is a far less destructive than the 20-pound warhead on the Hellfire missiles fired by Reaper drones, which can cause considerable collateral damage.

Although they won't give operational details, the Switchblade has received good reviews from users in Afghanistan, where the drone has been deployed since late 2012.

If Snowden could be accurately located in Hong Kong, then a midnight Switchblade strike would be an option. Submarine launch means that the strike would be covert, and even if investigators piece together the exploded drone, it would be difficult to pinpoint where it came from (though most of us could probably guess). GPS guidance could take the Switchblade within visual range of a target, and then the human operator could steer it into, say, the window of Snowden’s hotel room.

The small size of the warhead means that collateral damage would be limited to anyone else in the room with Snowden. Switchblade can fly at a height of a few hundred feet, so it is unlikely anyone would notice or recognize a small, silent drone flying in the dark—especially in a busy place like Hong Kong.

Of course, Switchblade is comparatively well-known. Many of the details are classified, but it is an acknowledged project. The U.S. military and intelligence community also operate a number of other drones which have not yet been acknowledged, including some camouflaged as large birds and designed to operate covertly. These may even have far more impressive capabilities than the Switchblade.

Political considerations make a drone strike against Edward Snowden in Hong Kong highly unlikely. However, we should not underestimate the technical capabilities that already exist for carrying out such a strike.

(So why wouldn’t the U.S. government just send a guy with a gun to kill Snowden? First, they don't necessarily have an agent in place—and people leave a trail that can be traced back. As in Pakistan, drones are a lot more reliable and easier to control than local assassins. And James Bond doesn't exist....)

David Hambling is a London-based technology journalist and author.

How Surveillance Has Evolved In The United States [Timeline]

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 16:00:00 GMT

With PRISM, the tradition of surveillance in America only grows. Here is an interactive timeline.

Americans have been spying on each other since the earliest days of the republic. This interactive timeline is an attempt to highlight some of the most important events in that history, though it is by no means comprehensive: each event, in turn, has its own string of relevant events, nearly ad infinitum. Still, one spin through this timeline demonstrates that the most recent NSA scandal is far from unheard of, that public memory is depressingly short, and that significant public outcry is rare. Surveillance, by now, is an American tradition.

A Brief History Of The Demise Of Battle Bots

Kelsey D. Atherton — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:00:00 GMT

Blame the wedges!

Robot battling was poised to become a true sport of the future. It had all the right elements: mad science, gladiatorial combat, plucky garage inventors, and televised action. So what killed it? A brutally effective, utterly simple machine called the wedge bot.

The wedge-style bot killed robot wars because it was invincible, which in the end made it boring. Yesterday SB Nation published a fascinating full history of BattleBots, which is a great, though giant, read.

But the mechanical evil that is the wedge bot deserves special attention. Competitions originally focused on robots using arms and blades and blunt objects to bash and slash and break each other apart. Wedge Bots had one simple, cunning attack: slide a wedge under another robot, flip it onto its back, and watch it flail about like a dying cockroach. Here is the timeline of how it managed to make killer robot duels boring.

1994
An exhibition and competition of garage-built robot warriors begins in San Francisco. Wedge bots are mercifully absent.

1995
The wedge bot premiers! Compared with its blade-swinging, hammer-bashing competitors, it is a unique and clever alternative. No one knew what to make of it. It won handily, with speed and novelty making up for its admittedly dull design. Watch the death of the sport below:

February 1998
BBC creates a "Robot Wars" TV show that lasts for five years. Wedges are a constant presence.

August 2000
Televised robot competition "BattleBots" starts airing on Comedy Central. By the time the show ended in 2002, "robot Darwinism," the term coined by battling robot pioneer Pete Abrahamson, has left the field with only three major robot archetypes:
1. Lifters, which had wedged sides and could use forklift-like prongs to flip pure wedges.
2. Spinners, which were smooth, circular wedges with blades on their bottom side for disabling and breaking lifters.
3. Pure wedges, which could still flip spinners.

What should have been an exciting, diverse sport is stuck at rock paper scissors.

February 2013
Noting the design dead-end created by "BattleBots" constraints on weight, size, and power, SyFy channel show "Robot Fighting League" premiers, with an important, wedge-proof requirement: all robots must be bipedal.

Not only does "Robot Fighting League" ban wedge robots, but all of the machines are created by the same designer. If robot Darwinism made the game boring, maybe robot intelligent design can keep it intresting.

Nursing Home Tracks Residents' Every Move

Kelsey D. Atherton — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:15:00 GMT

It's geriatric Big Brother!

Using security cameras and algorithms, researchers at Carnegie Mellon created a nursing home monitoring system that "located individuals within one meter of their actual position 88 percent of the time." That's great news for people who want to be monitored all the time. For people who prefer to go about their business unobserved, it's another step toward a perfectly tracked future.

The system was inspired by the person-tracking Marauders' Map featured in Harry Potter books, and it's called multi-camera or multi-object tracking. Previous attempts at multi-object tracking have had limited success, accurate either one third or one half the time. But those systems were tested in tightly controlled labs. Carnegie Mellon decided to try a more organic environment. A nursing home is a great testing environment, the researchers say: cameras already exist and have to deal with realistic obstacles like inconvenient furniture placement, doors getting in the way, blind spots, and residents moving freely. It's also good because a tracking system in a nursing home reads as altruistic - it's important to be able to find and care for the elderly as soon as they might need assistance.

The technology works through a combination of facial recognition and color tracking. Colored clothing is a good way to identify people, because it is visible most of the time, but the same color shirt can look different under different lighting. Algorithms compensate for differences in color appearance under different light--they make it so that you can track someone wearing a red shirt as he moves from a dark hall to a brightly lit dining room. Facial recognition is the best way to identify people, but faces are rarely pointed directly at cameras, so it only works about 10 percent of the time.

That's why it's important to track both faces and colors at the same time. The process resembles how cell phones pinpoint personal location with different inputs. Signals sent to cell towers provide a constant, rough idea of where the phone user is, and occasionally a GPS double-checks the position and corrects it if need be.

Carnegie Mellon's program isn't yet ready for prime time. The researchers used 6 minutes of footage recorded by 15 cameras in a nursing home in 2005 to develop the algorithms and test the system. A live trial is still a long way off, but once the system completes identification in a real-time setting, expect it to move from nursing homes to prisons to casinos and then everywhere.

People wanting to say hidden from this might just turn to facial-recognition-thwarting makeup.

[Kurzweilai.net]

Researchers Can Now "Hear" The Exact Shape Of A Room

Dan Nosowitz — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:02:26 GMT

Be like the bat. Echolocate.

Researchers from American and French universities have discovered how to exactly map a room's shape solely by using a sense you wouldn't normally choose for this kind of task. Without sight or touch, this new technique can still reveal a room by using only the sense of hearing.

The system could fairly accurately be described as echolocation, just like bats use: it measures the time it takes for a sound to produce an echo at different points in the room. Essentially, what they've come up with is an array of microphones and an algorithm that picks up both the original source and its echoes. Our ears can't hear the tiny lags that make up the echoes in most sounds, but bats can, and so can this system.

From a single sound, they can reconstruct a room to within a few millimeters--provided the room isn't too complicated, at least for now. The system outputs a 3-D map, which until now could only be made with visual tools like LIDAR.

What could this be used for? Well, there are virtual reality possibilities--the Kinect, for example, might someday use audio as well as visual clues to more accurately map action. Or it could be used in forensics. A simple audio recording could reveal the shape of a room in which a crime was committed--a valuable clue to which we wouldn't have access before this.

The paper is published in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[via BBC]

Designers Make City Noise Actually Sound Good

Colin Lecher — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:00:00 GMT

"The Chime" is loaded with sensors for picking up ambient noise, then transforming that noise into music.

A city doesn't always sound great: car horns blare, people shout. But a new project from artist Marc De Pape makes music out of the noise.

"The Chime" is a wind-chime-shaped mass of sensors that pick up on the environment: if the sensors detecting something approaching, the device tinkles with xylophone notes; if something is moving away, it swells with the sound of strings; and the music all shifts key based on the temperature. The result is a changing, ambient soundtrack for a city. De Pape explains the project like this:

Inspired by Georg Simmel’s notion of the Blasé (an indifference towards the difference between things), I set out to explore the relationship between sensing technology and the routines of everyday life. I feel the city is all too commonly represented by abstract systems and maps, a tendency driven by a reductionist pursuit of efficiency, and one which ignores the idiosyncrasies occurring on street level. This is the noise in the system, the richness that ultimately renders cities generative landscapes. I thus set out to bring attention to the noise by building a musical instrument inspired by wind chimes: The Chime is a collection of 18 sensors measuring 27 parameters assembled to poetically translate the impulses and flows of the everyday city into sound.

You can check more videos of the project over at De Pape's site. It's much nicer to hear than people talking on their phones.

[Marc De Pape via Creative Applications Network]

All Of America's Waterways On One Map [Infographic]

Shaunacy Ferro — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:00:00 GMT

And you thought the U.S. had deserts!

Who knew America was so well hydrated? These maps, created by former Google engineer Nelson Minar using data originally from the U.S. Geological Survey, show America's extensive system of waterways, including streams, tributaries and creeks. Even in places you don't often think of as water-logged, it's a surprisingly expansive network.

As beautiful as the maps turned out, Minar created the project largely just as a tutorial on how to make a vector-based map. (His code and more background on the process are on GitHub.) "It’s mostly a demo project with readable source," he writes on his blog, "but it’s also kind of pretty."

This particular map includes all flow lines, which is why you see a lot more blue than you might expect in desert areas--it encompasses seasonal water flow, like creek beds that are dry for much of the year. Down in Florida, the Everglades don't have well-defined enough flow lines, so the swampy preserve isn't included, and the state looks mysteriously white in comparison to, say, New Mexico.

And here's California and some of the surrounding area (look how all the squiggles converge on the California Delta near the San Francisco Bay over at the left):

You can see the full zoomable map and pinpoint precise waterways here.

[Gear Junkie]

The 6 Most Important Things We Learned From Edward Snowden's Guardian Q&A

Kelsey D. Atherton — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:30:00 GMT

Two weeks ago, the Guardian published PowerPoint slides detailing a previously unknown, sweeping surveillance program by the National Security Administration. Shortly thereafter, the source of those leaks revealed himself to be Edward Snowden, a former security contractor now seeking asylum in Hong Kong. Yesterday he held an online question-and-answer session at the Guardian. Here are the six most important things we learned:

1. The NSA stores people's calls.
A leak revealed that the NSA had collected three months of phone records on all Verizon customers. Early analysis focused on the role of metadata, like when the call was and to what number, thinking that warrants protected the actual voice content of a call from being read. Snowden disagreed:
Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as "incidental" collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications.

Snowden was straightforward about NSA spying on the voice content of phone calls, which are stored automatically and accessed with warrants passed by the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court, which Snowden called a rubber stamp.

2. The extent of the NSA's access to tech company information is still unclear.
PRISM is a program that involves the NSA having access to information stored by nine major American internet technology companies. The most contested part of that program was a claim about the NSA having "direct access" to tech company servers, which most organizations named in the program have explicitly denied. According to Snowden:
The reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same. The restrictions against this are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time.
SIGINT is short for signals intelligence, which just means electronic communication. By this account, phone and email communications are stored and accessed by government agencies when needed. Left unanswered is how or where this information is stored; the best theory so far involves tech companies uploading raw data to specific NSA servers when asked. Snowden promised further revelations were forthcoming.

3. Snowden sought refuge in Hong Kong deliberately.
Fearing persecution and treatment similar to that of WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, he chose to flee the United States. Why Hong Kong and not popular bastion of freedom Iceland?

Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current US administration.

4. Snowden is confused by where cyberespionage starts and cyberwar begins.
Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people.
This is a confusing division! Snowden is attempting to describe cyberwar, but cyberwar is such a weird vague term that what he's actually describing here is mostly just espionage. The NSA is trying to track how people are connected, for reasons of national security, without the consent of foreign governments. That's sketchy, but that's because it is spy work, and all spy work is sketchy. Nations never feel the need to declare war before they start spying, and the U.S. has only ever declared war five times, which makes it a bad metric.

Snowden also objects to cyberattacks against civilian institutions, universities, and private businesses. It's worth noting that Snowden himself was working as a civilian in private business doing work for government on a contract. The lines between government, business, and private blur when it comes to online security. As cyber becomes a bigger part of the future, it's important to understand how the rules and norms of war will change. A great place to start is NATO's Tallinn Manual, a non-binding statement by legal experts on how the laws of war apply in cyberspace.

5. Snowden is disappointed in the TMZ-style coverage of him, instead of a larger conversation about the leak.
Stories that have focused on Snowden's girlfriend, his 19-year-old online profile, and a modeling photoshoot all detract from what was supposed to be a national debate about sweeping government surveillance powers. This is true! But the public's ability to put a face and a personality to the source of the leaks is perhaps what has made this already-compelling story that much more powerful.

6. Snowden thinks that "being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American."
He's also disappointed in Obama, noting:
Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.

Stanford's Artificial Neural Network Is The Biggest Ever

Shaunacy Ferro — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:54:01 GMT

It's 6.5 times bigger than the network Google premiered last year, which has learned to recognize YouTube cats.

Last summer, in conjunction with Stanford researchers, Google[x], the R&D arm where ideas like Project Glass are born, built the world's largest artificial neural network designed to simulate a human brain. Now Andrew Ng, who directs Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab and was involved with Google's previous neural endeavor, has taken the project a step further. He and his team have created another neural network, more than six times the size of Google's record-setting achievement.

Artificial neural networks can model mathematically the way biological brains work, allowing the machine to learn to think in the same ways that humans do--making them capable of recognizing things like speech, objects and even cats like we do.

The model Google developed in 2012 was made up of 1.7 billion parameters, the digital version of neural connections. It successfully taught itself to recognize cats in YouTube videos. (Because, what else is the human brain good for?)

Since then, Ng and other Stanford researchers have created an even bigger network, with 11.2 billion parameters, that only requires the computational power of 16 servers with graphics processing unit, or GPU, computing--compared to the 16,000 CPU processors Google's network required. The technology is being presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Atlanta this week.

From an AI standpoint, that means we're getting a smidgen closer to being able to give our robots (or drones) human-level intelligence. On the other hand--we should probably just accept the fact that we're that much closer to the sentient-robot takeover. Looking on the bright side, compared to what you're lugging around on top of your neck, 11 billion neural connections isn't that many--the human brain boasts some 100 trillion connections.

New DNA Fog Covers Crime-Scene Suspects With Evidence

Francie Diep — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:00:00 GMT

Forget dye packs. Banks and police agencies are trying out some interesting new DNA-based devices.

You know DNA makes proteins. It tells living things how to tick. It carries blue eyes and an early receding hairline from father to son (Sorry, son!). But beyond what it does biologically, it's also just a carrier for information—a barcode, but one that can barely be seen even under advanced microscopes.

Now, a few different companies are making devices that use DNA in that way, as an invisible bar code to tag people. The devices allow banks and police officers to spray or splat suspects with millions of copies of a colorless DNA tag at the scene of the crime. For example, Applied DNA Sciences of Stony Brook, New York, advertises a system that is able to spray a room with DNA-laden fog in case someone comes in, demanding money. Later, investigators may identify the criminal from those DNA bits, Discovery News reported.

The DNA tags are made with entirely artificial sequences, so that every tagging device may have a different sequence. The genetic material is difficult to wash off completely and lasts about two weeks, Discovery News reported.

Check out Discovery for some of the specific devices companies have made, from that fog machine to a kind of DNA paint gun.

Before it thought of misting bank robbers with DNA, Applied DNA Sciences also created genetic material-based barcodes for verified genuine luxury goods and for tracking stolen cash.

[Discovery News]

Meet NASA's Astronaut Class Of 2013

Dan Nosowitz — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:21:00 GMT

Say hello to the future of American spaceflight! (For more on how this crop was selected, click here.)

[NASA]

Meet NASA's Astronaut Class of 2013

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:21:00 GMT

Google Reveals Massive Iranian Phishing Scheme

Kelsey D. Atherton — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:30:00 GMT

A suspicious email attack leads to...nothing?

Government email spying in the United States may have all the headlines, but America hardly has a monopoly on privacy violations. Google revealed a massive phishing scheme against users of Google products in Iran last Wednesday.

Phishing is the malevolent cousin of Spam email. A phishing email looks legitimate, and contains a link that sends users to a page perfectly mimicking the actual official page, and then asks for login information. It's a technique criminals commonly use to get bank account information, but it can also give attackers access to a user's email, allowing them to log in as the user themselves and find everything normally kept away under lock and password. It's a costly problem for businesses. It's even more devastating for political activists; a government that can read activists' email can probably find statements of "propaganda against the system," which is both loosely defined and in Iran a criminal offense.

In the three weeks leading up to the Iranian presidential election, tens of thousands of phishing emails were sent to Google users in Iran. The email appeared to come from an email settings account at Gmail, which looked legitimate enough. The email requested a second email backup for the account from users, and contained a misleading link. Users who followed that link were prompted to enter account information, which the attacker would keep.

Google revealed the Iranian phishing attack last Wednesday, which was ominously timed in advance of the presidential election on Friday. Google is keeping quiet about how it detected the attack, so as not to tip off future attackers. And while the source of the attack is not known, the timing and the attacks' origin within Iran suggest it came from the Iranian government, Google says. As soon as Google detected the attack, Google notified the targeted people, warned of phishing, and recommended two-step authentication.

It's unclear how the attackers intend to use this information. The election went smoothly. The most moderate of the six candidates won, and unlike the protests that animated Iran following the messy 2009 election, this election was peacefully celebrated. The Supreme Leader of Iran accepted the results even though his preferred candidate didn't win. Google believes the target selection was "politically motivated" but whatever information was gained from the targeted phishing attempt, it certainly wasn't used this weekend.

Perhaps the Iranian government--or whoever is behind the attacks--is just collecting information through questionable means without a specific offense in mind, to ultimately be used later. Perhaps Iran and the United States aren't that dissimilar after all.

Unleashing Synonyms To Catch E-Book Pirates

Francie Diep — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:01:06 GMT

New software automatically changes words and grammar in e-books.

Sounds like a scenario that could have come straight from The Phantom Tollbooth's Dictionopolis. Researchers have created a program to catch pirates by their commas... to trap them with paragraph breaks.

The new program, still under development at the Darmstadt Technical University in Germany, automatically creates subtle alternative versions of an e-book by moving words around, using synonyms, or adding or removing grammatical marks, the blog Torrent Freak reports. If a pirated version of the book appears online, then publishers are able to narrow down its source by looking at which version it is. The program also creates some invisible marks to help track e-books.

If publishers adopt the program, it could be part of a system that protects copyrighted works while allowing people who have bought e-books to do some small-time sharing, such as copying the book onto all of their devices. One major potential problem is the possibility of mistakes—or just changing the literary intent of the author. I'm guessing Lolita wouldn't be the same with synonyms or re-phrasings, especially if created by a computer program.

[Torrent Freak via Wired UK]

Wearable Computer-Socks Guaranteed To Be The Smelliest Computers You Own

Dan Nosowitz — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:15:31 GMT

They look less silly than Google Glass. Less silly than those toe-shoes too, actually.

Fitness trackers are, slowly but surely, getting better. First there was the Fitbit (I mean, the Fitbit is still wildly popular, but it is the most basic type of tracker): a small pedometer with an app. Then there was the Basis Band, which added in real-world goals and more advanced sensors like a heart rate monitor and perspiration sensor. And soon, it seems, runners will have wearable computer-socks, called Sensoria, that may just be the most impressive tracker we've seen yet.

Sensoria, from a small startup in Redmond, Washington called Heapsylon, is a very special pair of socks indeed. It's a fabric embedded with pressure sensors--an "e-textile," in the language of the startup. It senses pressure from a few specific points in the foot, like under the first metatarsal (the bone that's connected to your big toe) and the heel. That seems to be all that's going on in the socks themselves--just pressure sensors.

Oh, and Redmond, Washington might sound familiar to you--it's also the home of Microsoft, and the founders of Sensoria are indeed Microsofties, from the world-class Xbox Kinect team.

Welcome to Sensoria from Heapsylon on Vimeo.

The Sensoria system beams this data to a small anklet, which handles the processing and beams it via Bluetooth to a smartphone. Heapsylon then analyzes the data, and it seems like it can do some pretty impressive things. If you're 5'11" and weigh 180 pounds, Heapsylon can take that mere pressure data and figure out that, say, your stride length is a couple inches shorter than the average for people of your height and weight. Why not try to lengthen yours?

Or it can potentially reduce injury by figuring out if you're landing too hard on your heel or at an unsafe angle. A large percentage of people have improper running or walking techniques, which can result in or exacerbate all kinds of medical problems, from plantar fasciitis to shin splints. Sensoria could actually alert you in real-time that you're doing something wrong. It'll deliver this information through a web client or app that'll look something like this:

The team insists that the socks feel normal, not scratchy or stiff, and that they can actually be put through a regular wash/dry cycle. They're hoping to sell the first pair for about $150, with a three-pack after that selling for about $60, starting sometime next year.

[Heapsylon via BusinessWeek]

Google Launches Balloon-Based Internet In New Zealand

Shaunacy Ferro — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:15:00 GMT

The project aims to spread affordable Internet access to even the most remote regions.

Last July, the United Nations' Human Rights Council declared that Internet access was a basic human right. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, has previously stated that everyone in the world deserves at least a low-bandwidth connection by default.

Still, only 41 percent of the world has an Internet connection, according to 2013 figures from the International Telecommunication Union. A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported hazy details of Google's ambitions to bring high-speed Internet access to sub-Saharan Africa and parts of southeast Asia where connectivity is sparse.

Now Google has come out with firmer details of at least one aspect of that plan: Project Loon, the balloon-powered endeavor from the Google[x] lab, aiming to spread affordable Internet connectivity to everyone in the world, even those living in the most rural and remote corners on Earth.

The balloons will carry "a network in the sky" over mountains, dense jungles and archipelagos, beaming connectivity to antennae on the ground. A pilot test launched in New Zealand this week, with 30 balloons and 50 testers commissioned testers in the area. The company plans to expand pilots to other countries at the same latitude as New Zealand sometime in the future.

The solar-powered balloons are carried by steady atmospheric winds 20 kilometers above the ground in the stratosphere, above weather and airplane traffic. A single balloon can provide connectivity at around the same speeds as 3G speed to a 40-meter wide area on the ground, according to the company.

"We imagine someday you'll be able to use your cell phone with your existing service provider to connect to the balloons and get connectivity where there is none today," project lead Mike Cassidy wrote on the Google Blog.

Floating our Internet connection around in the sky on balloons seems a little far off (Loon's name comes partially from the fact that the idea sounds pretty kooky), but Google's not the only company with their head in the sky. As we reported last week, Perseus Telecom is working on a transatlantic balloon network to transmit microwave data for for financial trading.

As we pointed out last month, Google stands to gain a lot by bringing web access to the masses--the company could become the sole Internet provider for huge swaths of people. World domination isn't that far off. (But at least it comes with cute balloon animations.)

Learn more about Loon on the project website.

[Google Blog]

The Difference Between A Geek And A Nerd [Infographic]

Colin Lecher — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:00:00 GMT

They're not the same. A data-geek (or nerd?) explains.

Are you a geek or a nerd? Because they're not quite the same. (It's okay to admit which one you are, by the way! Popular Science is a safe place.)

Burr Settles at SlackPropagation broke down the difference by using data. The methodology here is a little on the nerdy side (or is it geeky side???) but, more or less, Settles mined Twitter for the words most likely to appear near "geeky" or "nerdy." The higher along the y axis, the geekier the words; the farther along the x axis, the nerdier.

Academic words show up frequently on the nerdy side of the graph: "Harvard," "#studymode," "biochemistry." (Also, inexplicably, "goths.") On the geeky side, it's more about tangible objects: "iPod," [Joss] Whedon," #appletv." Star Wars falls on the geeky side, but only barely, because, hey, everybody likes Star Wars.

So what did we learn? Settles writes:

In broad strokes, it seems to me that geeky words are more about stuff (e.g., “#stuff”), while nerdy words are more about ideas (e.g., “hypothesis”). Geeks are fans, and fans collect stuff; nerds are practitioners, and practitioners play with ideas. Of course, geeks can collect ideas and nerds play with stuff, too. Plus, they aren’t two distinct personalities as much as different aspects of personality. Generally, the data seem to affirm my thinking.

An awesomely nerdy project. Although "infographic" does fall onto the geeky side of the spectrum.

[SlackPropagation via FlowingData]

Carbon-Fiber Cables Could Lift Elevators In Kilometer-High Skyscrapers

Francie Diep — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:58:22 GMT

New elevator technology pushes skyscrapers to new heights.

What's one of the most important limits to the heights of skyscrapers? How far up an elevator can go.

The way elevators are currently made, they can only be about a half-kilometer tall, according to the Economist. Now, however, a company has announced that it's developed an elevator cable, called UltraRope, that makes it possible to build a one-kilometer-tall elevator. The company, Kone of Finland, says it has tested UltraRope in real elevators and in a 333-meter-deep mineshaft it owns.

Of course, some buildings already deal with the limits of current elevators by having passengers switch to another elevator after a certain number of floors. But UltraRope means each of those intermediate elevators may be taller, making skyscrapers much taller overall.

UltraRope replaces steel with carbon fiber, the Economist reported. The carbon fiber is both stronger and lighter than steel. Elevators with UltraRope should use less power because their cables are so much lighter, according to Kone.

UltraRope elevators may also be shut down less often than steel-cable elevators. Right now, extra-tall elevators may get shut down during high winds, when their skyscrapers sway—as they're designed to—setting the elevators in motion, too. Carbon fiber doesn't resonate at the same frequency as steel and other common building materials, however, so it should stay steadier even when the rest of the building is swaying, according to Kone.

Besides elevators, are there other limits to the heights of buildings? Sure there are. The Atlantic Cities covered some of the limitations to building an ultra-tall sturdy structure last year. Among them is the need for a very large base, which would be difficult to fill with tenants. Nobody wants to have the office located in what's pretty much the center of the base of a mountain.

[The Economist]

Where To Go When The U.S. Government Is Chasing You

Dan Nosowitz — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:00:46 GMT

I hear Namibia is nice this time of year.

The U.S. government hasn't officially declared its intentions to extradite former CIA employee and PRISM leaker Edward Snowden back to the States, though that certainly doesn't mean it won't. Snowden is currently hiding out in Hong Kong, though where in that massive and complex city isn't clear.

Hong Kong isn't a great choice if you're trying to lay low and avoid extradition; it has an extradition law with the United States and is also, despite being technically a part of China, a staunch ally of the United States. The two governments obey a 1996 extradition treaty in which a US citizen residing in Hong Kong can be extradited if that person is suspected of violating both U.S. and Hong Kong law.

There are some exceptions; a fugitive can apply for asylum in Hong Kong to avoid extradition. The Hong Kong government looks kindly on asylum applications in which the applicant is likely to face torture or the death penalty in the US, or in which the crime is perceived as political. But that's unlikely. The only wild card is that Hong Kong is nominally under Chinese control, and the Chinese do have the authority to step in and prevent Snowden's extradition if they so desired. China has no extradition treaty with the United States; it's one of several, but one of only a few nations to lack a US extradition treaty with which the U.S. isn't openly at war. (Nobody would be surprised to learn that North Korea and Iran do not extradite to the US, either.)

Snowden, though, seems to know that Hong Kong isn't a U.S. refugee paradise. "People who think I made a mistake in picking HK as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice, I am here to reveal criminality," he said in a recent interview with the South China Morning Post. He did not say why he picked Hong Kong over, well, anywhere else.

That all said: perhaps the time will come when you want to flee your home nation and not come back. No judgments! I mean, maybe judgments, if you do something that hurts people, but in this hypothetical, let's just say you are a nonviolent violator of some American law Americans don't even like very much, and you have to beat it out of dodge. Here's where you should go instead.

Click to launch the gallery.

Let This Robot Teach You How To Be Less Awkward

Colin Lecher — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:00:00 GMT

MIT builds a virtual person to help people practice talking to other people, which already sounds like an awkward situation.

If you think you're awkward in social situations, and would like the solution to that problem to be as awkward possible, try this: have a robot coach you on how to interact with human beings.

The software/robocoach is called MACH (My Automated Conversation coacH). Besides a digital face, the MIT-developed MACH has speech- and face-recognition tools, allowing it to pick up on behavior, then advise people on how to correct awkward behavior. A camera, for example, logs how much a person smiles and maintains eye contact, while a microphone picks up on how clearly the person speaks or says "umm." After monitoring the person for a while, MACH gives feedback. (Being watched like that sounds very awkwardness-inducing.)

For a test run, the inventors took MIT students and had them do a fake job interview. The researchers then broke the students up into three groups: one got no training from MACH, but watched videos with advice on job interviews; one met with MACH, but didn't get any feedback; and one got the full feedback from MACH. A week later, all three groups went in for another simulated interview, and the students who got help from MACH, the researchers reported, did better, as rated by the people they interviewed with. The other groups didn't appear to change much.

MACH is designed to run on an ordinary laptop, so anyone who needs it will eventually be able to use it. But it might be a while before the program is released generally, so just keep talking in front of the mirror to prep for that big date.

U.S. Government Uses Early Knowledge Of Microsoft Bugs For Spying

Kelsey D. Atherton — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:30:00 GMT

Forget PRISM, this is real super-villain stuff.

Buggy software isn't just annoying—the right compromised code can leave private information vulnerable to clever hackers for as long as the problem is unnoticed. The only thing that could make bugs worse? Government agencies gaining access to the vulnerabilities before everyone else, and using spies to exploit them.

Before Microsoft releases a public patch of to a software bug, it passes along that information to U.S. intelligence agencies, say two sources familiar with the program.

Best case scenario, this information is used to protect critical government online infrastructure first, making sure that vital functions are the most secure. The official line from Microsoft is that this gives government "an early start" in stopping risks. But it also gives government agencies a window to exploit these gaps for intelligence collection purposes.

Microsoft software is both widely used and infamous for its bugs. Just this week, Microsoft released a patch designed to cover an image file exploit that let hackers look at special information. Disclosed in May, there's an exploit in Microsoft Office that could give an attacker a foot in the door to gaining full access to the attacked computer.

Microsoft is a huge company; that there are constantly new bugs being discovered isn't that surprising. Sometimes major software is released with "day-zero" bugs, like Internet Explorer 8, or Windows 8, or every version of Windows ever. It's a problem for all of the online world that uses Windows, and leaves an insecure ecosystem of software.

It's one thing to struggle with a product full of security vulnerabilities and potential for exploits. Handing that information over to the government first? Forget PRISM, this is real super-villain stuff.

U.S. Schools Are Dumb About Their Smart Devices, Report Finds

Francie Diep — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Just having an iPad for every kid isn't enough.

U.S. schools are spending money on laptops and tablets for their students, but they aren't checking what kinds of returns on investment they're getting, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress.

In addition, many schools end up using their expensive equipment for simple stuff, instead of trying more radical new ways of teaching, the report found. The problem is apparently worse in schools with lower-income students, who were more likely to say they use devices at school for basic drills, such as math facts, instead of learning higher-order skills, such as analyzing numbers in a spreadsheet or statistical software.

New techy devices are among the most expensive physical equipment a school can buy, so it'd be a shame and a great waste if schools aren't using them well.

What are some better ways of using these newfangled devices? The Center for American Progress—which was founded by a former staff member of the Obama and Clinton Administrations, but says it is nonpartisan—has some suggestions. One is to use Internet-enabled devices to beam in teachers known to be extra effective at a subject. This will give more students a chance to study with the super-effective teacher. Software programs may also let different students learn at their own pace and with slightly different types of lessons, giving the kind of individualized instruction that single teachers aren't able to.

Slate's Future Tense blog recently had another cool idea. A blogger visited a private Swiss school (Caveat: the school had way more money than American public schools do) where teachers had kids use iPads to make multimedia presentations about stuff they've learned. This contrasts with American classrooms, which often focus on the iPad's learning apps and games.

To explain what a "system" is, for example, one Swiss second-grader used her iPad to draw pictures and make a flowchart showing how books are checked out, read, returned and re-shelved at a library. She then recorded a little video of herself explaining her flowchart. The videos are an especial boon for getting into the heads of shy students, one teacher told Future Tense.

It seems that American schools need to be more creative in how they use technology. The Center for American Progress also suggests schools need to be held more accountable through return-on-investment measures, instead of just saying, as many schools do, that X number of classrooms have Internet access or devices. Just having those things around isn't enough.

Gallery: Nice Places To Flee To

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:26:14 GMT