Quantcast
Channel: Popular Science | RSS
Viewing all 20161 articles
Browse latest View live

A Florida Man Woke Up In A Motel Room Speaking Only Swedish. Could It Happen To You?

0
0
A cheat sheet for the strange case of Michael Boatwright, the 61-year-old who reportedly forgot his native language.

Michael Boatwright, a Florida man found unconscious in a California Motel 6 months ago, woke up in a Palm Springs hospital in February speaking exclusively Swedish. News of Boatwright's strange memory loss has been making headlines in the past few days, garnering attention across the U.S. and in the U.K. and Sweden. The 61-year-old Navy veteran doesn't recognize himself in ID photos, has no memory of who he is, and calls himself Johan Elk, The Desert Sun reports.

According to the paper, he has been diagnosed with Transient Global Amnesia, an inability to make new memories, and as well as being in a fuguestate, a kind of blackout that can cause people to wander away from home unexpectedly and create new identities.

Though details on Boatwright's specific case are still pretty hazy, here's a quick rundown of what we know about conditions like his:

What is amnesia, really?
There are two broader categories of amnesias: those caused by physical trauma in the brain, and those caused by a psychological issue.

Real amnestics rarely if ever forget their own names.Organic amnesia is caused by brain damage--sometimes from seizures, brain inflammation or diseases like Alzheimer's. Much of what we know about it comes from a famous patient known by the initials H.M., one of the most important research subjects in brain science. He underwent surgery to treat severe epileptic seizures in the 1950s, and due to the removal of part of the medial temporal region of his brain, exhibited profound amnesia for the rest of his life. He couldn't form any new memories, though he could remember details of the 27 years of his life before the surgery.

Organic amnesia, resulting from brain damage, don't usually make people forget who they are. "They lose their most recent memories, not their oldest ones," cognitive neurologist Barry Gordon writes in his book Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Everyday Life. "Real amnestics rarely-if ever-forget their own names. What they cannot do is learn new names. They can hardly store any new information at all." Think Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates, rather than Anastasia in the animated movie.

Psychogenic amnesia, on the other hand, occurs without structural damage to the brain. It can be caused by mental or emotional stress. A fugue state, another one of Boatwright's diagnoses, is a psychogenic form of amnesia.

A fugue what?
A fugue state, sometimes referred to as dissociative fugue or psychogenic fugue, is a dissociative disorder, meaning it causes a breakdown in the normal function of memory, identity, perception, etc. I's a temporary bout of amnesia, usually lasting for a few days or perhaps weeks, that often induces someone to drop whatever they're doing and wander away from home or work. The person then will wake up in a different place, unaware of who he is or how he arrived there, as Boatwright seems to have.

The onset of a fugue state has been associated with severe stress. One case details a 28-year-old medical student in Nigeria who, faced with extreme economic and academic pressure, blacked out while studying alone in his room one night and came-to at his brother's house almost 400 miles away.

A 1999 study in Psychological reports described the fugue state as "one of the least common and certainly the least studied dissociative disorder." It's a pretty rare disorder, affecting an estimated 0.2 percent of the population, according to the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. Because of its relation to stress, its prevalence tends to increase during natural disasters and wars.

So what is Transient Global Amnesia?
Transient Global Amnesia--which Boatwright has also been diagnosed with--is characterized by a temporary, abrupt inability to make new memories, without any other neurological disfunction clouding consciousness, perception or identity. Patients remain alert, asking a lot of repetitive questions about their situation like "what am I doing here?" then immediately forgetting the answers. About 5 in every 100,000 people are affected by TGA.

After an average of four to six hours, the ability to remember new information typically returns. It can happen only once in a person's life, though in rare cases, it recurs.

What causes it precisely is still contested, but can be triggered by either physical or psychological stresses, and usually affects people older than 60, according to a 2012 study in The Lancet. "A great number of TGA attacks follow a series of potential precipitating factors and activities such as strenuous physical exercise, sexual intercourse, hot and cold baths or showers, emotional stress, driving or riding a motor vehicle, and medical procedures," one study notes. So that's basically everything.

OK, but how does that explain the Swedish?
Boatwright moved to Sweden in the 1980s and learned to speak Swedish, according to Aftonbladet, a Swedish newspaper that picked up the story.

Amnesia doesn't typically cause a loss of language."Amnesia doesn't typically cause a loss of language," Gordon says, though brain damage from strokes can often lead to language difficulties. Similarly, a 2012 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Neurology on three transient global amnesia patients found that there might potentially be a relationship between recurrent TGA and primary progressive aphasia, a degeneration of language and speech capacity. The patients studied struggled to find the right words and name objects correctly.

However, a few reports describe patients who, like Boatwright, could still speak well--just not in their native language.

Famously, there's the case of Anna O., a young Austrian woman whose treatment led to the rise of "talk therapy" in the 19th century. After the death of her father, she experienced a slew of psychiatric issues that caused, among other things, an inability to speak her native language. She spoke in English, and could still read French and Italian, but sometimes lost her command over her first language, German.

More recently, a study from 2004 in Neuropsychologia detailed the case of 33-year-old German man who was admitted to a psychiatric ward claiming no memory of his identity or location. F.F., as the paper calls him, spoke English with an accent and said he had no ability to either understand or speak his native language. He had disappeared from his home in Germany four months prior.

Less than a week after he was discharged from the hospital, he returned to Germany, and his father reported that he could communicate in German, though he was "somewhat dysfluent." The study noted that even as he claimed no knowledge of German, "he appeared to retain implicit knowledge of autobiographical facts and of the semantic or associative structure of the German language."

The authors noted difficulty in assessing how much language he actually lost:

[I]t is often difficult to distinguish between an amnesia that might be 'real' and one that is feigned, just as it is often impossible to be certain whether an amnesia is organic or psychogenic. It may even be the case that an apparent dissociative amnesia has both real and fabricated aspects. To be absolutely certain of any diagnosis of dissociative amnesia or fugue is thus, in most cases, extremely problematic.

As Gordon put it, "In medicine, it's always the case that strange things can happen."

    



Should Automakers Get Out Of The Infotainment Business?

0
0
Volkswagen iBeetle and iBeetle Cabriolet

Volkswagen

When Apple's App Store debuted in 2008, automakers saw change a-comin'. Since then, they've been scrambling to find ways to integrate apps into dashboards, and many are working hard to build proprietary app environments.

But is it a good idea for automakers to micromanage the infotainment experience? Do they have any business fiddling with operating systems and apps?

Consider these facts:

  • The average car on the road is 11 years old. Consumers purchase new mobile phones every 18 - 24 months.
  • We carry our mobile phones with us everywhere we go: to bed, to work, to the doctor's office, even to the can. We leave our cars parked in the driveway.
  • Cars are items of convenience, getting us from Point A to Point B. Sometimes, we spend long hours in them on road trips, but those occasions are few and far between. On the other hand, we get nervous if we're more than five feet from our cell phones. They're not devices, they're appendages.
  • We're using cars less. We're using cell phones more.
  • Any 10-year-old can bang out an app, which can, in theory, become an overnight sensation, something we can't live without. Hundreds of thousands of apps litter app stores, with many more arriving each day. On the other hand, it takes a new car years to come to market.
  • Upgrading software on your phone can be done anywhere, anytime: at a restaurant, at your desk, or even while you sleep. Updating software on your car, generally speaking, requires a trip to the dealership, or, at the very least, waiting for a jump drive to arrive in the mail, schlepping out to your car, plugging it in, and walking through the update.

Go back and read through those facts again. And a third time, if you like.

Now, answer this: why the heck are automakers bothering with infotainment systems at all?

Honestly, we don't know.

And apparently, no one else does either. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times makes it abundantly clear that automakers simply can't compete with smartphones-or rather, they can't compete with the flexibility of smartphone apps.

Cars are largely static things, meant to be used in one way: hauling the driver and others around town. Phones are hugely customizable things that can be configured to reflect the way that owners use them, whether that's as cameras, texting devices, e-readers, or, heaven forbid, phones.

When automakers do try their hand at apps and other infotainment features, they often bomb. Check out the most recent J.D. Power Initial Quality Study, which reveals that, on the whole, build quality is great these days; the problems customers most often have with their vehiclesinvolve clunky technology and design. Sometimes, the problems are so severe that consumers file lawsuits.

What does the future hold?

A little over two years ago, General Motors, Honda, and other major automakers seemed as if they were going to leave infotainment to the infotainment professionals. They launched the Car Connectivity Consortium, which sets rules for in-car apps.

Though the CCC doesn't preclude automakers from building their own apps, the organization's primary focus seems to be getting Terminal Mode adopted by all car companies. Terminal Mode-now known as MirrorLink-is a set of standards governing how apps are displayed on dashboard screens.

MirrorLink's guiding principle idea is that infotainment is centered around the smartphone. When a driver plugs her phone into the car, an optimized version of the home screen pops up-in much the same way that smartphones automatically display websites in a special mobile format optimized for smaller screens.

Thankfully, it appears that GM is sticking to the CCC guidelines: the 2013 Chevrolet Spark offered us a great preview of how smartphone apps could be incorporated into the driving environment. Sure, GM added its own BringGo app to the mix, but Spark drivers still have access to all their phone faves thanks to MirrorLink.

Will other automakers get the hint and follow GM's lead? Or are they too worried about losing control of their products-and losing potential boadloads of cash in the process?

We can't say. The only certainty is that the way we interact with our vehicles is changing. Let's hope car companies handle the looming paradigm shift with grace and dignity, without screwing over drivers in the process.

This article, written by Richard Read, was originally published on The Car Connection, a publishing partner of Popular Science. Follow The Car Connection on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

    


Free Software Tool Aims To Fight Government Secrecy

0
0
This crowdfunded Freedom Of Information Act algorithm seeks to liberate guarded knowledge.


The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), first enacted in 1966 provides a way for citizens, activists, and journalists to coax information out of the government. The Government doesn't make this easy, but a new, already-successful crowdfunding project hopes to provide a solution by largely automating the FOIA process.

Nine kinds of documents benefit from explicit exemptions to FOIA requests, including national secrets, personal medical information, and others. Those exceptions aren't the only obstacle to releases of public information. Labyrinthine rules, procedures that vary by state and agency, and the general absence of any desire to reveal more information faster than is legally required all create a challenge for the enterprising citizen looking to shed some sunlight on what happens behind closed government doors.

A project of the The Center for Investigative Reporting, FOIA Machine is a software solution to the nitty-gritty of submitting FOIA requests. Much in the same way that Turbo Tax offers a universal platform for navigating complex and varied state rules, FOIA Machine is a broad platform that can navigate the particular procedures of each state, as well as federal regulations.

FOIA Machine grew out of a project designed "to collect statistics on government response times to public records act requests." So the Center for Investigative Reporting plans to gather data on how the machine is used, and how responsive the government is to information requests.

Of course, the real fun will be when faster, better, and more frequent FOIA requests reveal the true nature of the Reptilian Illuminati running our government. Kidding! Maybe.

    


Machine Squeezes Drinking Water From Your Sweaty T-Shirt

0
0
Sweat Machine

UNICEF

Tasty

I think the question here isn't whether you'd drink your own, but whether you'd drink someone else's. One company has designed a system, called Sweat Machine, to wring sweat out of clothes and turn it into potable water.

The Sweat Machine heats and spins clothes to extract the liquid from them, then filters the extract with a membrane developed with the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Yum.

The filter is the most sophisticated part of the machine. It's "a bit like Goretex," one of the machine's designers, engineer and Swedish TV host Andreas Hammar, told the U.K.'s The Independent. Water vapor passes through the material easily, but it traps bacteria, salts and fibers from the clothes.

Fans watching the Gothia Cup, an international youth soccer tournament held in Sweden, will get to see the Sweat Machine at work during the game. Players Tobias Hysén and Mohammed Ali Khan have promised to drink a glass of water extracted from their own sweat, according to UNICEF. Anybody else interested in getting a taste can try, too.

The demonstration is supposed to draw attention to the fact that 780 million people around the world don't have access to clean drinking water. Contaminated water can be deadly, especially for children. UNICEF will be raising money for a more practical solution for those kids-water purification tablets.

Want to see a more practical water-recycler at work? The International Space Station hosts a system that captures astronauts' sweat and urine and turns it into potable water. The space station uses the same type of filtration as the Sweat Machine, Hammar told The Independent, but the Sweat Machine was a bit cheaper to build.

    


10 Electric Race Cars, From The Dragstrip To Pikes Peak

0
0
2014 Nissan ZEOD RC Electric Race Car


Click here to enter the gallery

Electric cars are certainly becoming a more familiar sight on the roads these days, but in the ultra-competitive world of professional motor sport they're also beginning to get a foot-hold.
Regular readers will be no stranger to many of these vehicles, tackling disciplines as diverse as crossing Australia on solar power, setting record times up the infamous Pikes Peak hill climb, and outrunning gasoline vehicles at the drag strip.

We've decided to pull some of these vehicles together into a gallery to celebrate their existence, because they're more important than you might think.

Motor sport has long been the arena in which top road vehicle technologies are developed, and the stresses and unique demands of the sport will do the same for electric vehicles.

Perhaps even more importantly, they have the potential to completely change the perception of electric cars for regular folk in the streets. If you see a top driver winning the weekend's race on the TV, it'll make you think in a whole new way about its showroom equivalent--and may convince you to take the electric plunge.

This article, written by Antony Ingram, was originally published on Green Car Reports, a publishing partner of Popular Science. Follow GreenCarReports on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

More from Green Car Reports:
It's Official: General Motors Now Sees Tesla As A Threat
2014 Chevrolet Spark EV: First Drive Report
2013 Ford C-Max, Fusion Hybrids To Be Modified To Boost MPG In Real-World Use

    


Mystery Animal Contest: Who Is This Long-Snouted Creature?

0
0
Mystery Animal Contest: July 19th, 2013

Wikimedia Commons

Guess the species (either common or Linnaean) by tweeting at us--we're @PopSci--and get your name listed right here! Plus eternal glory, obviously. Update: We have a winner!

So, here are the rules: To answer, follow us on Twitter and tweet at us with the hashtag #mysteryanimal. For example:

Hey @PopSci, is the #mysteryanimal a baboon?

And then I might say "if you think that's a baboon, perhaps you are the baboon!" But probably not, because this is a positive environment and all guesses are welcome and also this is not a very common animal so guess whatever you want!

The first person to get it right wins! We'll retweet the answer from @PopSci, and also update this post so your amazing animal knowledge will be permanently etched onto the internet. Show your kids! Your dumb kids who thought that was a baboon!

Update: The winner is...Seth Rosenthal, who correctly guessed that this creature is a gharial! The gharial is one of three crocodilian species native to India, along with the mugger crocodile and saltwater crocodile. It's the rarest of all crocodilians (the group also includes alligators and caimans), and one of the rarest animals in the world, period. It's critically endangered, with, at most, a couple hundred breeding adults left in the world.

And it's a fascinating creature; the only crocodilian that relies entirely on fish for its diet, its long and narrow snout immediately identifies it. The smaller surface area of the snout reduces water resistance as it thrashes its head through the rivers to catch fish. It's arguably the most aquatic of the crocodilians, too, and can't actually walk very well out of the water. That's awkward, because it's huge, up to 20 feet long. It's now illegal to kill gharials, but the outlook for the species isn't looking good. So look at 'em while you can. Hi gharial!

    


Listen To 130 Years Of Global Warming, Played On The Cello

0
0
A University of Minnesota undergrad turned more than a century of temperature change data into music.

This is one of the few instances when something really is better when expressed through song.

Daniel Crawford, an undergrad at the University of Minnesota, turned more than 100 years of climate change data from NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies into a musical composition to play on his cello. Each note corresponds to a year, and the higher the temperature rises, the higher his notes go.

The result is beautiful, even if the data it corresponds to isnot.

For those already dwelling on the sweltering heat today--well, at least's think about how pretty it could sound.

[Slate]

    


Private Company To Put A Telescope On The Moon

0
0
International Lunar Observatory

International Lunar Observatory Association/Moon Express, Inc.

Lunar citizen science by 2016!

Private space exploration is coming to the Moon, and soon. The world's first mission to the Moon's sunny South Pole will put a private telescope on a the lunar peak Malapert Mountain as early as 2015.

Moon Express, a private 'lunar commerce' startup, and the International Lunar Observatory Association, a nonprofit devoted to moon observation, have teamed up to put the International Lunar Observatory, a 2-meter radio antenna, on the Moon to observe the galaxy without the interference of Earth's atmosphere, which absorbs some kinds of radiation.

ILOA plans to start small, establishing a scientific presence on the Moon, and eventually move on to human exploration and settlement. A preliminary mission with a smaller telescope will launch in 2015.

The full observatory, slated to arrive in 2016, would provide "scientific research, commercial broadcasting and [enable] Galaxy 21st Century education and "citizen science" on the Moon," according to a press statement from the two organizations. Its access and controls will be available via the Internet to the general public, as well as researchers.

Moon Express will also send a small rover to prospect for resources, including metals, minerals and water, that could be extracted from the lunar surface and one day sold on Earth.

Though the timeframe for getting the observatory to the Moon has been described as a bit ambitious--even by the Moon Express CEO Bob Richards, according to Wired--Moon Express is in the running for Google's Lunar XPRIZE to land a robot on the lunar surface by 2015.

[Wired]

    



A Smooth, 3-D-Printed, Multicolored, High-Resolution Vase

0
0
ProDesk3D

BotObjects

No more lines in your 3-D printed objects!

Desktop 3-D printers often have a resolution problem. Resolution refers to the size of the stream of molten plastic laid down by the machine in layers; if the layers are too big, they become visible, so you can see and feel the grooves in the finished product. Not good! But the ProDesk3D from botObjects, an as-yet-unreleased 3-D printer, says they've conquered this problem.

The ProDesk3D has a 25 micron resolution, while the Makerbot's Replicator 2 is 100 microns. We haven't seen the botObjects printer in person yet, though the mockups look beautiful, but we're certainly intrigued by the high resolution and "full-color" abilities; botObjects says they're using different-colored cartridges, like an inkjet printer, to mix and print on the fly rather than having to swap out a single-color spool of raw plastic. It's not clear exactly how that works, though we suspect they're using ink to color the ABS plastic (the same material used by the Makerbot) as it prints. This is the first time we've seen a video of the printer in action--looks pretty cool! Check it out:

Read more about the ProDesk3D on botObjects's site.

    


The Week In Numbers: New Dinosaur Discovered, The World's Largest Virus, And More

0
0
Jang Bogo

Space Group and KOPRI. Ice Lab commissioned by British Council and curated by The Arts Catalyst.

2014: the year this aerodynamic, flying saucer-like research station is set to open in Antarctica

15 feet: the length of a new cow-like dinosaur discovered in Utah

1 week: the time it would take Earth's average global surface temperature to drop below 0 degrees Fahrenheit if the sun went out

$1,350: the price of this bio-inspired tarantula robot, which will crawl out of a 3-D printer and into your heart

520 billion: the number of gold nanodots per square inch on the thinnest light absorbers ever built

$495: the price of an "invisibility wetsuit" that hides you from sharks while you swim

12 miles: the diameter of a new moon discovered orbiting Neptune

44 pounds: the weight of the giant life-hunting bullets astronomers want to fire into Jupiter's moon Europa

$150: the price of a pair of 3-D printed custom shoes

$100: the bounty this Colorado town might pay you for shooting down a government drone

1.5 to 1.8 liters: the amount of liquid the average active person sweats in an hour (so… how much can a human body sweat before it runs out?)

$130: the price of a new portable head-up display from Garmin


2,556: the number of genes carried by a newly discovered megavirus, the world's largest known virus. By volume, it is 200 times bigger than the flu.

    


Awesome Future Job: Crew A Luxury Wind Turbine In The Middle Of The Ocean

0
0
Wind turbine loft concept

Is this the future caretakers of industrial-strength electricity generators or luxury condos? Both!

MORPHOCODE

New concept art imagines offshore wind farms with super-chic lofts for employees.

This design concept by Bulgarian firm Morphocode predicts a future in which gigantic offshore wind turbines come equipped with fancy, futuristic housing for workers. Part of the inspiration for these lofts was a European Wind Energy Association report estimating that by 2030, there will be 300,000 jobs in offshore wind power. Since commuting to the middle of the ocean everyday isn't exactly possible, maintenance crews and experts would live onboard the turbines, splitting their time between contemplating the vastness of the sea and keeping the generators running.

The concept draws from modern attempts to rehabilitate abandoned industrial buildings by turning them into loft residences. Skipping the "abandoned" stage, these lofts would make mechanical function and luxury living synonymous.

Unlike the swanky new lofts in a rapidly-gentrifying warehouse district, however, the turbine loft has an isolation more in common with the International Space Station, an arctic outpost, or an oil rig. The concept only addresses the aesthetic challenges of offshore life, which is fine. The logistics of supplying people at sea are much simpler than feeding them in space, and humans already have the latter challenge tackled quite nicely.

[Design Boom]

    


Will These Guys Kill The Computer Interface As We Know It?

0
0
End Of The Interface

David Holz [left] and Michael Buckwald have built a device called the Leap Motion controller that allows users to interact with computers with a wave of a hand.

Cody Pickens

How two grade-school friends created Leap Motion, a company that wants to turn mouse-clicks into waves of the hand.


David Holz took the main stage at this year's South by Southwest Interactive, the annual innovation conference in Austin, Texas, looking like a hobbit on casual Friday. He wore an oversize blue polo shirt and billowy khakis with a big wallet bulge in the front pocket and had a wild nest of curly hair that frizzed around a thinning patch in the back. Even at South by Southwest (SXSW), a gathering teeming with bright-eyed inventors with big ideas and little time for haircuts, the 24-year-old founder of the company Leap Motion, which makes a new motion-tracking controller for computers, stood out as a particularly glorious example of the species geek.

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk was scheduled to speak immediately after Holz, and Al Gore was up right after that, so eager fans were filing into the auditorium during the Leap Motion presentation, as if it were a kind of opening act-some background music as everyone picked their sight lines for the main event. Holz, who shared the stage with his co-founder and best friend, Michael Buckwald, didn't seem to notice. He spoke with a combination of barely contained enthusiasm and uncanny self-assuredness. The title of the presentation was "The Disappearing User Interface," and it called for a sweeping reinvention of how we interact with computers. "I should be able to log in to any computer and not have to know some language to use it," he said. "I should just do what makes sense to me intuitively. It's on the technology to understand me."

"It's becoming very clear that the thing holding back devices from doing more isn't their power or their cost or ubiquity or size," Buckwald explained. "It's that the way users interact with them is very simple. And that, unfortunately, leads to things like drop-down menus and keyboard shortcuts . . . elements that require people to learn and train rather than just do and create." The audience, many of whom were pecking away at laptops and tablets, perked up. And then Holz began his product demo.

The Leap Motion controller looked like a miniature iPhone and sat on a table in front of a computer onstage. Within an eight-cubic-foot cone of space above it, the controller can track motions as small as .001 millimeters, making it significantly more sensitive than Microsoft's Kinect. Holz started waving his hands above the Leap, and tracer lines danced across the computer screen. He wiggled his fingers, barely perceptibly, and zoomed in on the display until the tracers again filled it, only this time they were following movements within one centimeter of space. He panned around the display to show the tracers in three dimensions. A few people gasped. He stuck both hands out above the device, and a detailed 3-D picture of them appeared on the screen. He pulled up a block of virtual clay and, in a few seconds, sculpted a Bart Simpson-like character in thin air and spun it around for the audience to see from all angles. "I'm very proud that that is now possible," he said simply. The audience cheered.

In the days that followed, a stream of curious conference attendees flowed into the Leap Motion tent behind the Austin Convention Center. Most of them had never heard of the product before, but they understood its implications. Leap Motion is not about gesture control. As Holz explained in his demo, it's about ushering in a new era in which people interact with digital information as directly and naturally as if it were real. "Everywhere there's a computer can benefit from this type of interaction," he'd said. "That means things like tablets and phones but also things like robotic surgery."

One afternoon, hundreds of developers converged on the tent to try to get face time with Holz and Buckwald. A proud few showed off apps they'd already built-one, a security app that, instead of relying on passwords or retina scans, identifies people based on the unique biometric signature of their hands. Another developer set up behind a laptop in the corner and buzzed the crowd with a black quadcopter drone that he was controlling with his Leap by simply weaving his outstretched hand in the space in front of him, like a kid miming an airplane.

It all looked like magic, a roomful of people pawing at the air and grinning at the effects, as if the way they interact with computers would never be the same. To Holz, it was the beginning of a revolution he'd been planning for most of his young life.

Since before he could read or write, David Holz has been obsessed with technology. He grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in a coastal community of large homes, elderly people, and very few young families. Without friends nearby, Holz busied himself in the garage, taking apart any kind of electronic device he could get his hands on. "I accumulated this supply of electrical stuff from people in my town. Somebody would break their computer and give it to me," he remembers. He'd examine the parts of things he'd dismantled and try to figure out new uses for them.

Holz seems to have inherited the hacker mentality from his parents. When his mother was a girl, she tried to build a rocket; it left an eight-foot-wide crater in the ground. His father built a home chemistry lab as a kid, and after he left for college, his parents had to call the fire department to remove all the hazardous materials he'd been harboring. Shortly after marrying, the couple spent a few freewheeling years sailing around the Caribbean while David's father, a dentist, picked up odd jobs in his field.

Around the age of eight, Holz started channeling his curiosity into making things rather than taking them apart. "I was pretty good at building paper airplanes by then-I had already experimentally verified which ones were good in which ways," he says. But he needed to understand exactly how they worked, so he started fashioning wind tunnels in the garage, using Plexiglas, cardboard, big fans, and weighting and balance systems. His fascination with wind tunnels crescendoed in seventh grade, when he started building one that he hoped could break the sound barrier (it had compressed helium on one side and a vacuum chamber on the other). His parents stopped him before he finished, fearing for his safety. Holz simply switched projects. He read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and developed a simple way to test the theory of special relativity: by monitoring clocks he would send to places at various altitudes around the world.

In his experiments, Holz realized early on that computers were powerful tools. "I always felt like I was better with technology than without it," he says. But at a certain point, he started to notice the opposite effect. In middle school, he taught himself to use sophisticated design software and began building 3-D models of things he wanted to create. "I could mold a piece of clay in a few minutes, but it would take me, like, five hours to do so on a computer. And so I started saying, ‘Well, what's the problem here? Why am I worse with this technology?' "

There had to be a better way to mold virtual clay. "It's like, the computer is powerful enough, and I know what I want, so it's not me but the input system that's the problem," he says. "If I were to design the best way to mold the piece of clay, it wouldn't be to push a bunch of buttons. It would be to use my hands." Like that, the seed for Leap Motion was planted.

Meanwhile, at school, he had befriended a small group of other smart kids who had no interest in sports-among them, a young debate junkie named Michael Buckwald. The group started holding round-table sessions where they'd try to reimagine big ideas, such as the education system and presidential politics.

School itself was a challenge, though, because Holz couldn't get his teachers to answer his incessant questions, especially in math and science. One of them would explain, for instance, that the square root of a negative is an imaginary number, and Holz's hand would shoot up. "I'd be like, ‘Okay, I understand that that works, but why do we live in a universe that has that sort of mathematical construct?' Which is actually a very deep mathematical question, and there's a totally reasonable answer, but the teacher would say, ‘I'm not going to answer that.' "

College, at Florida Atlantic University, was a little better. Then he headed to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to pursue a Ph.D. in applied math. In some ways, Chapel Hill was a dreamland for Holz. There were mathematicians everywhere, and he was drawn to them because he felt they understood problems "all the way down." Even better, "UNC is the only place in the world where mathematicians have access to as much stuff as most physicists do," he says. "They had giant wind tunnels. They had a huge wave pool so people could understand the math behind waves."

But it wasn't enough. Holz started applying to join different research teams, taking on as many as a dozen projects outside of his studies. There were projects with NASA's Langley Research Center studying laser radars and methane on Mars, a neuroscience project with the Max Planck Florida Institute, a fluid-dynamics project at UNC.

And yet, he kept coming back to his favorite idea: building a new gesture-based way to interact with computers. He'd returned to it periodically since middle school, and by grad school he'd built a prototype. Between that, his other projects, and his graduate work, Holz was spread thin and had to make some decisions. "I sort of felt like, ‘These aren't the problems I want to be working on, and maybe I have the skills and everything I need at this point. Do I finish my Ph.D., go work at NASA, and use that position to eventually start a company? Or can I skip all that and just go straight to the company?'" He chose the latter and left UNC without a degree after only about a year.

A month after SXSW, Holz sits cross-legged in a black swivel chair in a conference room at Leap Motion's San Francisco headquarters, a bunker-like underground space across the street from the Bay Bridge on-ramp and less than a block from where he shares an apartment with Buckwald. Not that Holz really lives in the apartment-he eats catered meals here in the bunker and often sleeps on his beanbag chair. Some co-workers have taken to calling his hair "the nest."

Like any good digital start-up, Leap Motion has clever names for its conference rooms-in this case, various sci-fi spaceships. There's Galactica, Death Star, and the one we're in now, Enterprise. The name is apt. One of the longest-running plot devices on Star Trek was called the Holodeck, in which characters could interact with holograms-say, a scale model of a vintage New Orleans jazz club or a combat simulation-for R&R or training.

When Holz and Buckwald set out to create their company, they intended to build something akin to a Holodeck. The prototype wasn't pretty-about two backpacks full of electronics that took 30 minutes to set up-but the system's eight networked boxes were sensitive within an area large enough to create what Holz called a "holodesk." Holz had made some breakthroughs in the math behind the machine in college, and the core principles he developed then continue to drive the product today.

Buckwald, who is almost painfully shy, remembers discussing a potential company with Holz back in 2010 and realizing that as crude as the first device was, it represented a big opportunity. Buckwald was only 21 at the time, but since graduating early from George Washington University (with a double major), he had already started and sold an online listings company called Zazuba and spent a year in Madagascar, setting up operations for One Laptop per Child. The weekend of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, Holz came to visit Buckwald in Washington, D.C. The two spent long hours talking about the technology, much as they had discussed so many other transformative ideas in middle school. By the time Colbert packed off, they had decided to form a company. Holz would focus on the math, while Buckwald would help turn his friend's ideas into a business.

The dream of gesture control is not a new one, but it became reality only in the past few years. Nintendo's Wii controller, which came out in 2006, was the breakout device in some ways. And although it was a lot of fun, it was of limited use beyond gaming because users had to hold a special wand. There have been other attempts at gestural interface-other wands, wired gloves, and, more recently, an armband that reads electrical activity in muscles, developed by a company called Thalmic Labs. But until now, the state-of-the-art approach has been that of Microsoft's Kinect, which was released as a game controller for Xbox just days after Holz and Buckwald decided to start their company. It required nothing of the user other than moving around in the space in front of the device.

It's a new era in which people interact with digital information as naturally as if it were real.

At first the Kinect used a technology known as "structured light," in which it projected many points of light across a room and tracked how they were interrupted by a moving object. This works well when detecting relatively large movements, like a golf swing or a punch. But to track small individual finger movements, it would have to measure so many points of light that it would require prohibitively large amounts of processing power. This spring, Microsoft replaced structured light with "time of flight," which works more like radar. By projecting infrared light and measuring the time it takes to reflect off objects, the machine achieves a sense of depth perception and is able to build a 3-D image of what it sees. The new approach is more accurate than structured light, but it's not nearly as precise as Leap Motion's technology. The Kinect works best from a few feet away. Get up close to do fine work, and the accuracy degrades.

Leap Motion works completely differently. Holz compares the information a Leap gathers to that of an analog camera in soft light, which means it can detect subtle shadings that describe the curves and tiny nuances of an object. It then tracks how those shadings change as an object moves. The company has been silent about how exactly the device turns its image files into real-time 3-D motion, but the secret is in Holz's proprietary math. What's perhaps most impressive is that all the processing happens with virtually zero delay (whereas Kinect has long been dogged by complaints about lag time). "We're using only a small percentage of a single core of the CPU [central processing unit]," Buckwald says. "There's no special silicon in the device, and we're using off-the-shelf sensors, off-the-shelf cameras. Everything we do today could have been done 10 years ago"-if only someone had had Holz's math.

Bill Warner, the founder of Avid Technology, which makes multimedia editing products, learned the secret behind Leap Motion shortly after Holz and Buckwald's weekend in D.C. (he agreed to become the company's first investor on the spot). He describes the approach as head-slappingly straightforward. "As with any great invention, those insights are really hard to come up with, but once you hear them you go, ‘Of course!' You didn't think of it because you weren't looking at it that way." Holz managed to understand the problem of gestural control all the way down, which allowed him to see things everyone else has missed. "A lot of times with people as smart as David, it's hard to follow them and see what they are seeing and what they understand," Warner says. "That's not the case with David. Part of his brilliance is that he makes things really simple, even for himself."

With the math in place, the more immediate challenge for Holz was accessibility-turning his eight networked boxes into a viable product, either for regular consumers to buy or for other companies to embed in their products. Andy Miller, a former Apple executive, was working as a venture capitalist when he met Holz and Buckwald in 2012. He'd heard stories of these two genius founders, one with crazy Young Einstein hair, plunking backpacks full of hacky-looking but amazing electronics on investors' conference tables. He asked to see a demo. "David was looking extremely wacky that day," he recalls, "and Michael was sort of talking to me with his head down. I was expecting to see what I'd heard about, which was this big system, but they were like, ‘We're all set up, this is it.' It was just one little box, and it was pretty beautiful."

Miller invested a significant amount in the company and came on board as president a few months later. "The more time I spent with David, you know, you're just blown away," he says. "I've been fortunate enough to work with Steve Jobs, and David is one of these guys kind of like Steve, where he's a mile wide and deep."

After Miller joined Leap Motion, the company refined the design further, planned an Apple-like app store called Airspace, and created a demo video that went viral; 15,000 developers applied to build software for the device in the first week. "I spent an entire week going through every e-mail that came in asking about partnership opportunities," Miller remembers. "There were thousands. You know: ‘We think this can be a big help in automotive.' ‘We think this can help people with disabilities.' ‘Can you help us with our workflow at Jack in the Box?' "

In late March, a few weeks after SXSW, Victor Luo, a human-interface engineer from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California, stood in front of a Leap Motion controller in San Francisco and operated a one-ton space robot in a lab 350 miles away. The rover, called Athlete (shorthand for "all-terrain hex-limbed extraterrestrial explorer"), has six arms and can fly. NASA built an application that mapped the rover's limbs to a human hand, and Luo was able to move its arms by wiggling his fingers. Luo was performing this feat onstage at the annual Game Developers Conference. As he raised his hand, the audience watched the rover's jets fire on a big simulcast screen. The enormous machine lifted off the ground. Luo's colleague, NASA supervisor Jeff Norris, addressed the crowd: "I want us to build a future of shared immersive tele-exploration-everyone exploring the universe through robotic avatars, not just peering at a picture on a screen but stepping inside a Holodeck and standing on those distant worlds."

The NASA demo is one of the strongest votes of confidence for Leap Motion, and it's far from the only one. In the months since the company started sending out developer's kits and test units, there's been an influx of demo videos of early apps. Google Earth announced it added Leap Motion support, and a corresponding video showed a person's hand zooming Superman-style across the San Francisco Bay, through the courtyard of the Louvre, and out into space. An electronic musician named Adam Somers released a demo of something beautiful he called an AirHarp.

This spring, HP announced that it will start bundling Leap Motion controllers with some PCs and that it plans to one day embed the technology in devices. In the meantime, anyone will be able to buy a controller off the shelf and plug it in as a peripheral. Out of the box, the device will allow users to control some basic computer functions, like cursor movement, but improving existing systems is not really the point. "If we're successful and build something that is a fundamentally better way to interact with a computer, there are essentially an unlimited number of use cases," Buckwald says. "Eventually, anything that has a computer could be controlled with it-every laptop, every desktop, every smartphone, every tablet, every TV, every surgical station, every robot, potentially even a Leap in every car."

It's hard to say what kinds of applications gestural interface will enable.

In the history of computer user interfaces, there have been only two major sea changes: in the mid-1980s, when Apple replaced the old command line interface with the mouse-based graphical user interface, and, more recently, when Apple introduced the world to multitouch mobile devices. In both cases, the intent was to make human-computer interaction more intuitive, to minimize the barriers between man and machine. "If you think about the mouse, it extends your reach to the screen. And the touchscreen extends it further, so you're actually touching the screen," says Warner. "Leap Motion is extending your reach inside the screen."

It's hard to say what kinds of applications gestural interface will enable. Few could have predicted that multitouch would bring, say, Angry Birds. Gestural interface probably won't act as a wholesale replacement for existing interfaces, though. Just as multitouch improved certain functions (flipping through a digital magazine, for example) but not others (creating a digital magazine), Leap Motion controllers and devices like them will excel at some uses and not others. Manipulating a spreadsheet, for one thing, probably wouldn't be any easier with natural interface; the desktop experience is already pretty highly evolved.

And even the most naturally 3-D applications have their limits. One of the first things you notice when you start using a Leap Motion controller is the lack of anything tactile; there's no haptic feedback to help calibrate touch, as there would be in the real world. When I ask Holz about this, he shrugs it off. "Because it's digital, we can put more information in there than you might get in the real world," he says-lighting changes, for instance, can cue when your finger is touching something. And in time, Holz says, virtual haptic feedback is entirely possible, probably by means of focused ultrasound, a process developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo. "I think you may see a lot of that in the near future."

Another limitation: As a user moves his hands in three dimensions, the results appear on a two-dimensional screen. This can be disorienting. Short of building a real Holodeck, of course, it's unavoidable, and getting over that hump will require the development of better 3-D-display technology. Holz imagines Leap Motion integration with head-mounted displays such as Google Glass as maybe the best solution. "It's like I'm in a Holodeck without needing to have a Holodeck. You turn the space around you into a Holodeck." I ask him if the company is in talks with Google to create just that. "I don't think I can say details, but, uh . . . it would make sense," he says.

It's a heady vision, the kind of thing that gets Holz excited, and he spins off into talk of giving people superpowers-for example, the ability to "undo" virtual actions in this fused digital-physical world, the same way you can undo actions in, say, a Photoshop file. Or the ability to sculpt something in midair, then quickly replicate it with a 3-D printer, turning a thought into an object in a matter of moments.

"The idea is that we should be able to have the same sort of fine degrees of interaction with the virtual world as we do with the real world," Holz says. "And that gives us a lot more power. We can define the rules in a digital world however we want, so we can do a lot of things that we just couldn't before. It's one of those situations where, through technology, we can actually be better.

Tom Foster wrote about helmet technology and football's concussion crisis in the January issue.

This article originally appeared in the August 2013 issue of Popular Science.
    


FYI: Could A Human Beat A T. Rex In Arm Wrestling?

0
0
T. Rex Vs. Stallone

Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection; iStock

A paleontologist examines the evidence.

"First, we're assuming that the T. rex won't just eat the person, right?" asks Jack Conrad, a vertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Right. This is a sanctioned match, and killing your opponent is strictly against the rules. Who's coming out on top?

"Doesn't matter," Conrad says. "There's no chance that any human alive could win." The T. rex's arms might have looked wimpy, but they were extremely strong. Each was about three feet long and, based on the size of the arm bones and analysis of the spots where muscle attached to the bone, they were jacked. "The bicep alone-and this is a conservative estimate-could curl 430 pounds," Conrad says. Even the beefiest humans max out at around an embarrassing 260 pounds.

Surely an Over the Top-era Sylvester Stallone would put up a good fight? "Not even Lou Ferrigno in his prime would stand a chance," Conrad says. "They didn't just have big biceps. Their chest and shoulder muscles were huge too. They had huge arms and shoulders-bigger than my leg. They had the strength to rip a human's arm right out of its socket."

There is a chance, however, that your competition might not be able to put all that beefy muscle to use. There are dozens of hypotheses about what the T. rex used its arms for, Conrad explains, but the ones taken most seriously involve pushing itself up if it was lying on its belly, tossing big chunks of meat into its mouth, or holding onto females during what scientists suspect was a very vigorous mating routine. These ideas are favored because such actions required Barbie doll-like up-and-down motions of the arm, and fossil evidence indicates that the dino king was incapable of rotating or twisting its arms. "The T. rex probably couldn't have done the arm-wrestling move," Conrad says. "So maybe you could get him on a technicality."

This article originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Popular Science magazine.

    


Polio Vaccinators Face Deadly Risks In Pakistan

0
0
Polio Drops

A child gets polio drops during a vaccination campaign in Nepal.

Adam Bjork, CDC

In regions where polio is endemic, anti-vaccination views are tied to politics.

Here's another twist on "vaccine safety." Over the past year, Pakistani villagers have been shooting healthcare workers that came to give them the polio vaccine.

Foreign Policy has the exact numbers. Up to 22 workers may have been killed-one of the incidences was a roadside bomb, so it might have just happened to catch vaccinators-while 14 others have been bombed, taken for ransom, tortured, or otherwise injured. The violence likely stems from the Pakistani Taliban's opposition to vaccination, Foreign Policy reports.

Taliban leaders have a variety of reasons they're suspicious of the polio vaccine. They think vaccinators could be spies for the U.S. military--more on this later--or that they could be part of a plot to sterilize Muslims. Last year, Pakistani Taliban groups questioned why Americans fund both fatal drone strikes and life-saving vaccination programs. Leaders said they would ban vaccinators from reaching them until the U.S. stops using drone strikes.

One major setback to polio vaccination came when journalists began reporting that during the search for Osama bin Laden, one Pakistani doctor pretended he was giving townspeople the Hepatitis B vaccine. In reality, he took samples to DNA test, to search for bin Laden's relatives. Although the polio vaccine couldn't be used in this way because it's given as oral drops, the Taliban has used the hepatitis example to call for opposition to polio vaccination, saying healthcare workers could be working for the U.S.' C.I.A.

Pakistan is one of only three countries in the world where people still regularly contract polio. The others are Afghanistan and Nigeria. Yet experts worry that continued vaccination resistance in these places could bring about a resurgence of polio in countries where it's been eradicated, as international travel could spread infections far beyond country borders. A dozen prominent U.S. public health researchers have repudiated the false hepatitis campaign. As a May opinion piece in Scientific American put it, "the operation that led to [bin Laden's] death may yet kill hundreds of thousands more" from polio vaccine refusal.

The New York Times has a unique perspective, describing the towns where polio incidence is the highest and where some workers lost their lives. One doctor, a Muslim, took a journalist on a tour in April and talked about a fatwa placed upon him. In May, a gunman killed him and injured his one-year-old daughter.

    


Board Games Go Digital

0
0
Home Tabletop Computer

The glass screen can withstand an eight-ounce steel ball dropped from a height of 39 inches.

Sam Kaplan

A home computer that transforms into a tabletop game center

When Microsoft debuted the Surface tabletop computer in 2007, the company envisioned groups of people sitting around a giant screen, sharing videos and playing games. But the Surface and the second-generation Samsung SUR40 are hugely impractical-too large for the typical living room, and too expensive for the average consumer. The engineers at Lenovo circumvented this problem by modifying a full-featured all-in-one PC to convert into a Surface-like game table, called the IdeaCentre Horizon.

The base of the Horizon connects to a spring-supported hinge, which allows users to tilt the PC flat. When horizontal, the computer switches to Lenovo's Aura touch interface, which can capture 10 points of contact at once. Through Aura, users can browse photos and video or play games. The Horizon comes with four joysticks and four game pieces, each with a conductive pad that interacts with the touchscreen. The system even includes an accelerometer-equipped die that communicates with the board over the 2.4 GHz frequency. Lenovo and videogame studios, including EA and Ubisoft, are already using the Aura developer kit to code touch versions of new and classic games, such as Monopoly and air hockey. Players will be able to download more as they're published, eventually allowing the Horizon to replace both a computer and a closetful of games.

Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon

Screen size: 27 inches
Games at launch: Nine
Processor speed: From 2.0 GHz
Price From:$1,599

This article originally appeared in the July 2013 issue of Popular Science. See the rest of the magazine here.

    



UK's Anti-Pornography Plan Is Scary, Pointless Grandstanding

0
0
Cameron's Speech

via Prime Minister's Office

The U.K. Prime Minister today proposed a sweeping set of internet filtering--some would say censorship--laws. They will go nowhere.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron announced this morning that "By the end of this year, when someone sets up a new broadband account, the settings to install family friendly filters will be automatically selected." That means you'll have to adjust your settings to see things that your ISP, and indirectly the U.K. government, does not think you should see. Like porn. Or what the government thinks is porn.

In a long speech, which you can read here, Cameron laid out the argument for opt-out family settings and a call for search engines to block objectionable or illegal content. Some key points:

  • "Many children are viewing online pornography and other damaging material at a very young age and that the nature of that pornography is so extreme, it is distorting their view of sex and relationships."
  • Search engines should be held responsible for illegal material because they're "like the Post Office helping someone to identify and order the illegal material in the first place - and then sending it onto them in which case they absolutely would be held responsible for their actions."
  • "Child abuse images" are a major focus of the speech. Cameron wants "clear and simple signs warning [people who search for these images] that what they are trying to do is illegal and where there is much more accountability on the part of the search engines to actually help find these sites and block them."
  • "Put simply - there needs to be a list of terms - a black list - which offer up no direct search returns. So I have a very clear message for Google, Bing, Yahoo and the rest. You have a duty to act on this - and it is a moral duty."
  • After examples of younger sexuality, including viewing pornography and sexting: "Our children are growing up too fast."
  • "This has never been a debate about companies or government censoring the internet but about filters to protect children at the home network level."
  • The government is "making it a criminal offence to possess internet pornography that depicts rape."
  • The speech ends with "And I will do whatever it takes to keep our children safe."

So! There's an awful lot going on here, both explicitly and implicitly. Cameron is proposing a two-pronged approach: an opt-out filter, and working with search engines to block access to child pornography, simulated rape pornography, and possibly other unsavory or illegal materials.

The first is essentially is a family filter that's put in place by the internet service providers, or ISPs (the equivalent companies in the States would be Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, etc.). The filter can be adjusted or disabled entirely by an adult--not clear how the service will make sure it's an adult and not a child messing around with these settings--but it will by default be put in place. The filters will extend to any device connected to the network, including laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Those proposed filters comprise what the government plans to do, and what the government theoretically can do.

But in that second prong, Cameron urged international corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to adjust in accordance with his crusade.

There are significant problems with both prongs, falling into three categories: logistical, rhetorical, and, for lack of a better word, moral.

Logistical: This Is Not How The Internet Works

In his second prong, looking outside the U.K. government, Cameron chastises search engines like Google and Bing for making it easier to find, he says, child pornography.

"We need the search engines to step up to the plate on this," said Cameron. "And there's a further message I have for the search engines. If there are technical obstacles to acting on this, don't just stand by and say nothing can be done; use your great brains to help overcome them."

This is absurdly, insultingly presumptuous. A prime minister is demanding a foreign corporation kowtow to his demands and implement a childishly naive proposal based on his own showy morality. It's insane that Cameron would so condescendingly offer a foreign entity that's violating precisely zero laws itself an ultimatum. Google is under no obligation to do anything Cameron wants, and yet Google just last month pledged to spend $7 million to figure out new ways to stamp out child pornography. What makes Cameron think that his proposal--a blacklist of keywords--would be more effective than whatever Google's brilliant engineers are doing? We were indignant when China demanded Google censor itself there; how dare Cameron expect anything different, no matter how many times he hollers "it's for the children"?

Many of the illegal corners of the internet aren't indexed by Google, anyway. Try searching for child porn right now; you won't find any. Try searching for an online store that'll mail you heroin. You won't find that, either. But both exist, and you will find news stories or forums about both that can lead you there. Discussion of illegal activities isn't illegal, but makes any indexing restriction on Google pretty much worthless.

There are ample warning signs in this speech for anyone who's wary of government intervention in free speech.Many of these corners of the internet are only accessible via anonymizing software like Tor, which masks your identity and allows you to visit sites like the Hidden Wiki, which indexes sites that Google doesn't. Yelling at Google is grandstanding; Google is responsive--too responsive, sometimes--to laws and governmental requests. "We have a zero tolerance attitude to child sexual abuse imagery," said a Google spokesperson. "Whenever we discover it, we respond quickly to remove and report it." Google's got lots of problems, but it's naive to think that the scariest parts of the internet are accessed with a giant corporation's search engine.

Rhetorical: This Is Just Amateur Social Psychology

Cameron's speech does not go beyond platitudes like "we have to protect our children." He simply states as fact that "children are growing up too fast," that this is a result of readily available adult material, and that this is an unhealthy development. I don't agree or disagree with him, but those are an awful lot of giant leaps to make without any cited studies or research to back him up. "In a survey," said Cameron, "a quarter of children said they'd seen pornography which had upset them." Well, okay! I don't know which survey this is, or whether it's trustworthy at all, but let's accept that that's true. What percentage of children have seen something on the news which upset them? What percentage of children were upset when Lennie kills the mouse in Of Mice And Men?

The American Psychological Association notes that research about the effects of internet pornography on children is "scarce" and that what research there is tends to lean heavily on correlation.

It's not so much that Cameron is right or wrong in his opinion on exposing children to adult content. It's that he assumes his particular stance is empirically correct, and that it is his obligation to enforce it nationwide. That's sort of the base of all legislation, after all. But I object to his assumption that internet pornography has a studied, proven net negative effect on children. The research doesn't support that at all. And that point of view is the motivation for both his legal proposals and his moralizing in the direction of American tech companies.

Moral: Is This Censorship?

The other major concern, just as regards the opt-out family filter, is that this is the first step--and a big one--towards internet censorship. Pornography, like anything else that offends someone, is a vague term. What's offensive to one person isn't to another, and one person's "extreme pornography" is another person's tame fantasy. The fact that it is a government-mandated filter, the specific contours of which are not laid out in Cameron's speech, is unnerving.

"This has never been a debate about companies or government censoring the internet but about filters to protect children at the home network level," said Cameron in the speech. And, well, that's ludicrous. If this isn't a debate about companies or government censoring the internet, it sure as hell should be. We're naturally wary of slippery slope arguments, but a cursory glance into, say, the People's Republic of China's policy on internet censorship shows just how far awry this kind of thing can go. Cameron is proposing an opt-out filter, which is not the same as censorship. But his urging of ISPs and search engines to make certain items harder to find goes far beyond an opt-out option. If Google stops indexing something the U.K. government doesn't like, you can't opt back in and see it. It's just gone, at least from the single way that the vast majority of internet users uses to find things on the internet.

There are ample warning signs in this speech for anyone who's wary of government intervention in free speech. The repeated explanation that this is for the children--that's an easy way to stifle argument. Are you in favor of children seeing disturbing, violent pornography? That's the stance those in favor of this policy will take. The fact that Cameron phrases this as a "moral duty" is a red flag, too: whose morals, exactly, are we talking about? And the fact that legal and illegal material are being wound together is alarming. "Let me be clear," reads Cameron's speech. "These challenges are very distinct and very different. In one we're talking about illegal material, the other legal material that is being viewed by those who are underage." But the speech, and the major legislative push, includes both. By discussing illegal material first, material that hardly anyone would be willing to publicly defend, it makes Cameron's rhetorical argument against legal material that much easier to swallow. And that's a problem, because the line between the ability to view legal and illegal material should not be blurred or conflated.

"I really don't think you can have an algorithm for morality."The U.K. is far from the first nation to seek to filter the internet. In 2011, France fully authorized what's called the LOPPSI 2 law, which allows the government to filter the internet without judicial approval. French internet filtering relies on a blacklist of sites, theoretically, but its goal is merely to filter out child pornography sites in addition to those that promote terrorism or racial hatred. The law has attracted criticism; a spokesman for French internet liberty site La Quadrature du Net said, "Protection of childhood is shamelessly exploited by Nicolas Sarkozy to implement a measure that will lead to collateral censorship and very dangerous drifts." In accordance with these laws, in late 2011 a French court ordered the takedown of a site that showed pictures and videos of French police officers arresting suspects, sometimes violently. But that was passed years ago, before the Arab Spring and before PRISM. And France didn't bother calling on foreign corporations to do their "moral duty" in accordance with its own filter.

"Of course, a free and open internet is vital," said Cameron. Never has the call for a free and open internet sounded so much like lip service.

Logistical: You Can't Pass This Law

Danny O'Brien, the international director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says, "My prediction is that these set of proposals won't make it to the light of day." It's an empty set of proposals intended to have the public rally around something that, Cameron thinks, nobody could object to. Who would have a problem with protecting children from violent illegal pornography? But it's unlikely to go anywhere. "We see these proposals come by in other commonwealth countries like Australia," says O'Brien. "The more they go through the grinding mill of discussion, the more people realize the terrible consequences." People are protective of internet free speech, especially after the Arab Spring, and are unlikely to believe Cameron's proposals could possibly be as simple as he makes them sound.

Then there's the fact that, well, it won't work. "You're creating a censorship system that's not actually solving the problem that you're trying to solve," says O'Brien. "That content is still out there." And the attacks on search companies are just as ineffectual. "I really don't think you can have an algorithm for morality," he adds. O'Brien did not seem worried about the speech; he saw it as theatrical and not realistic.

Cameron's proposal is near-sighted, attacks the symptoms rather than the root causes of these problems, is based on shoddy understanding of social psychology and the way the internet works in general, and is highly unlikely to get passed in any sort of proper parliamentary bill in the first place. It's exploitative grandstanding, a big clumsy haymaker of a shot fired at what Cameron thinks is an easy target but what is in fact anything but. It's an example of just how clueless government is as to the day-to-day of the dark corners of the internet.

    


MIT Computer Software Makes The Internet 3 Times Faster

0
0
Every Day Of My Life Up-Close

Marcin Ignac

By generating algorithms that prioritize where to send data, the computer outwits human solutions to network congestion.

If you're reading this, you're probably using a version of the transmission control protocol, or TCP, a system that regulates internet traffic to prevent congestion. It works, and it's getting better all the time. But it was a system made by puny humans--surely our machine-overlords can do better.

Yes, and possibly as much as two or three times better, say the MIT researchers behind Remy, a system that spits out congestion-stopping algorithms.

To use Remy, an Internet-goer plugs in answers to a few variables (How many people will use this connection? How much bandwidth will they need?) and what metric they want to use for measuring performance (Is throughput, the measure of how much data is going through, the most important? Or is it the delay, the measure of how long it takes that information to travel?).

The system then starts testing algorithms to determine which works best for your situation. Testing every possible algorithm would be impractical, so Remy prioritizes, searching for the smaller tweaks that will result in the largest jump in speed. (Even this "quicker" process takes four to 12 hours.)

The resulting rules that the system spits out are more complicated than in most TCPs, according to Remy's inventors: while TCP programs might operate based on a few rules, Remy works out algorithms with more than 150 if-x-then-y rules for operating. The simulations sound impressive: doubled throughput and two-thirds less delay on a computer connection, and a 20 to 30 percent increase in throughput for a cell network, with a 25 to 40 percent slower delay.

But that really only makes Remy impressive on paper. The researchers haven't yet tested Remy on the wide-open Internet, which presents a whole new set of variables the researchers have to account for. It might very well turn out, as the researchers told PC World, that Remy just provides people with a new way to look at the problem, instead of a solution in itself.

[MIT]

    


How To Design Aircraft Carriers For Drone Warfare

0
0
X-47B successfully lands on the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush

U.S. Navy

Defense Tech has an intriguing story about the next generation of aircraft carriers. One of the bigger innovations in the upcoming Ford-class of carriers: They're designed to carry drones, with a new, electricity-intensive launch system replacing the steam catapults that sent carrier-borne fighters into the sky during the jet age. Designing carriers in this way reaffirms that unmanned drones are a crucial part of naval aviation in coming years.

The fundamental unit at the heart of the U.S. Navy is the aircraft carrier. It is a nuclear-powered runway, command center, hangar with at least 64 jets, and living quarters for everyone it takes to keep the whole operation running. Aircraft carriers are also built to last half a century, which means not only should they carry the technology of the year they're built, but they should be designed with enough foresight to accommodate the next 50 years of innovation. The last aircraft to be retired, the U.S.S. Enterprise, was a baby boomer: built in 1961, it retired in 2012 after a 51-year career. The oldest currently operating carrier in the fleet is the U.S.S Nimitz, which has been commissioned since 1975, placing it squarely inside Generation X--and it still has a few years of service left.

Long life spans mean that aircraft carriers have to be designed with the future in mind. Ford-class ships are the next generation of aircraft carrier, and they are very much designed for longevity:

The Ford-class carriers are built with a series of technological advances compared to their predecessors - to include a slightly larger flight deck, upgraded nuclear power plants, dual-band radar, improved landing gear and vastly increased on-board electrical capacity to include a new electromagnetic propulsion system for aircraft taking off the deck.

Rear Admiral Thomas J. Moore, head the U.S. Navy's Program Executive Office for Carriers, further specifies that Ford carriers will be "built with three-times the electrical generating capacity than the Nimitz" class that preceded them. Why? Freaking lasers! The Navy already plans to outfit the U.S.S. Ponce with a new directed energy weapon next year. A more-electrified design plan could accommodate future lasers as they are developed. Current laser weapons fire somewhere between ten and 100 kilowatts, and future laser weapons mounted on ships could have a power level measured in megawatts, which would take extraordinary amounts of electricity to make work.

Skepticism persists about a naval strategy so reliant on putting all eggs in one giant, sinkable basket, but the drone-and laser carrier of the future serves to mitigate that risk a lot. Electric-powered lasers cost-effectively protect the carrier from swarmtactics, where many small boats or drones attempt to overwhelm the defenses of a ship and exhaust its ammunition supply. A directed energy weapon counters this by having ammunition so long as it has electricity, and by blasting holes in ships or attacking drones nearly instantly.

Unmanned aircraft can also protect aircraft carriers against a different kind of threat, thanks to their increased range, which makes it easier for them to intercept long-range missiles. Another way drones could protect the aircraft carrier is through greater, longer, more persistent surveillance, all from a far perimeter around the carrier fleet.

If all goes according to plan with the Ford-class carrier, sometime in the next 50 years we'll enter an era of naval warfare where drones and lasers go from super-futuristic to completely routine.

[Defense Tech]

    


Check Out The First Trailer For Neil deGrasse Tyson's 'Cosmos'

0
0
Oh, man. Oh, man. (Please be amazing.)

It's awesome on its own that Neil deGrasse Tyson is hosting a new mini-series. It's doubly awesome that the astrophysicist/science educator/Jon Stewart-corrector is hosting the next generation of Carl Sagan's beloved 13-part science series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

Now the trailer for deGrasse Tyson's (also 13-part) Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey just premiered at Comic-Con, and we can say: it looks pretty neat! There's Sagan's voice, then deGrasse Tyson takes over for him (SYMBOLISM), and there's a levitating baby and a spaceship and some explosions and other stuff. Check it out!

    


THE SCIENCE OF ALCOHOL AGING [SPONSORED ARTICLE]

0
0
Glenfiddich®

The complete science of barrel-aging whisky is something we have only recently come to understand. In the 1970s we began to uncover the full details of what happens when the Glenfiddich distillery men lay the base spirit to rest in oak casks and store it in one of our 46 warehouses. Our Malt Master, Brian Kinsman, told me that every new cask of spirit has the same opportunity of becoming a 12-year-old Scotch as it does of becoming one of the extremely rare casks that make up our incredible 50 Year Old. While we cannot predict what will happen in each individual cask, we do know that approximately 70% of the flavor characteristics of Glenfiddich come from the wood and the time spent maturing in it. In Scotland, we predominately use two types of wood to mature whisky-American white oak (Quercus alba) and European oak (Quercus robur). American wood is the most popular, accounting for approximately 90% of casks used today, but it is important to remember that each different wood gives its own unique characteristics to the whisky. For example, Q. alba produces vanilla flavors (fruity, sweet) while Q. robur yields a rich, tannic kick. At the Glenfiddich distillery we take the base spirit, which comes off the still at 65.6% ABV, and add it into the casks. The wood casks perform three important functions to the aging of the whisky: ‘subtractive,' ‘additive,' and ‘interactive.' The relationship between the liquid and the wood is one of the many intriguing aspects of whisky. After all, that mysterious and storied past is part of the allure of Scotch whisky!

by Mitch Bechard, Glenfiddich Ambassador

To learn more about the fascinating world of single malts, visit
GLENFIDDICH.COM

SKILLFULLY CRAFTED. ENJOY RESPONSIBLY.
Glenfiddich® Single Malt Scotch Whisky is a registered trademark of William Grant & Sons Ltd.

"Every new cask of spirit has the same opportunity of becoming a 12-year-old Scotch as it does of becoming one of the extremely rare casks that make up our incredible 50 Year Old."
Brian Kinsman
Glenfiddich Malt Master

THREE MODES OF CASK AGING

SUBTRACTIVE:
Wood casks remove impurities within the whisky. The inside of American oak barrels is usually charred. Charcoal, with its billions of tiny pores, is a great purifier. It has the ability to remove unwanted components such as sulfur-containing compounds. On the other hand, European wood is only lightly toasted and therefore does not have the same pronounced subtractive qualities.

ADDITIVE:
Wood gives flavor and character to the whisky. Oak wood contains hemicellulose, lignin and tannins. These elements cultivate chemical reactions with the base spirit, adding aromatic molecules to produce flavors such as coconut, vanilla and fruit. Wood also varies the color of the whisky. We find that Scotch whisky matured in European wood will have a darker, more reddish hue to it than that which has spent most of its life in American wood.

INTERACTIVE:
Wood is semi-porous, meaning that the cask is always breathing and interacting with its warehouse environment. Around 2% of the volume of each cask-water and ethanol-evaporates from the cask each year. We call this "the angels' share." As we age the whisky, the alcohol content of the liquid drops. We must be mindful of this, as spirit below 40% ABV can no longer legally be called Scotch whisky.

    
Viewing all 20161 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images