Flux and Flummox

Big brother likes your makeup

One more thing to be paranoid about. Widely available information coupled with facial recognition software apparently means that anyone from a stalker to the government to Mark Zuckerberg could read your face like a book. From Fast Company:

This week at the Black Hat security conference researchers from Carnegie Mellon University will demonstrate how facial recognition technology can be used to positively identify a person and possibly even to gain access to their personal information, right down to their social security numbers. It's just one example of how face ID tech could be about to change many things about your daily life.

And now Heathrow Airport is planning to use facial recognititon to screen travelers coming through its internatioal terminals.

To protect your privacy, you may want to adopt the beyond trendy anti-facial recognition makeup and hairstyles developed by facial recognition researcher Adam Harvey and explored in this layout called How to Hide From Machines in Dis magazine.

Here's how it works:

CV Dazzle is a response. It is a form of expressive interference that combines highly stylized makeup and hair styling with face-detection thwarting designs. CV, or computer vision, Dazzle is an updated version of the original dazzle camouflage from WWI, which was used to protect warships from submarine attacks. Like the original dazzle war paint, CV Dazzle is an unobvious style of camouflage because its eye-catching patterns and colors draw attention instead of hiding from it. As decoration, CV Dazzle can be boldly applied as hair styling or makeup, or together in combination with accessories. As camouflage, this facial markup works to protect against automated face detection and recognition systems by altering the contrast and spatial relationship of key facial features. The variations are limitless.

Although the CV Dazzle hair and makeup might confound the facial recognition software,  it is rather likely to slow your way through customs (not to mention confound your business associates.) But that's always the tradeoff, isn't it? We are willing to give up  information for a schmear of convenience, which makes it just that much easier to slide through daily life. An I-pass smooths the way through tolls. A credit card on file makes for easier online purchases.  An RFID tag in your drivers license makes for quicker border crossings. And none of it really matters much. Until it does.

Iceland's cool cyber-democracy

The recent debt ceiling disaster, which shaped up to be the battle of Dumb and Dumber vs. the Dumbest of All, was an embarrassing example of our dysfunctional democracy, in which our leaders "compromised" their way to a disastrous deal that made everyone unhappy.

But there is another way.  After their solvency crisis, the peaceful, well-educated and admittedly homogeneous citizens of Iceland took to the streets to defy an IMF-dictated solvency plan. Then they did something even more extraordinary. They crowd-sourced a new constitution.

"To write the new constitution, the people of Iceland elected twenty-five citizens from among 522 adults not belonging to any political party but recommended by at least thirty citizens. This document was not the work of a handful of politicians, but was written on the Internet. The constituent’s meetings are streamed on-line, and citizens can send their comments and suggestions, witnessing the document as it takes shape. The constitution that eventually emerges from this participatory democratic process will be submitted to parliament for approval after the next elections."

Certainly Iceland, a tiny country of people who are all related to each other, is a special case. But the land of Bjork's experiment in using technology to promote transparency, civic engagment and democracy itself is exciting, and it offers a vision of how democracy might actually move out of the smoke-filled back rooms and into the future.  The constitution, unanimously approved by the commission, has now been submitted to Parliament for approval.

Future of the Zeitgeist and vice versa

 

When we arrived at the Vancouver airport for the 2011 World Future Society Conference in July we were waved into the country by a young border clerk who asked us why we were in town.

"World Future Society? Really? Where is that?" He was surprised that he hadn't heard of it, since he was a bit of a futurist himself.

"I'm pretty into that stuff," he told us. "Have you heard of the Venus Project and "Zeitgeist"?"

I had, and although it is a huge, worldwide cadre of mostly young people, there seemed to be virtually no notice of the phenomenon by the surprisingly "mature" cohort of futurists that makes up the World Future Society. (This was my first WFS conference and I must admit that I was disappointed by the oddly retro feel of the event. For example: way too many Power Point presentations and no WiFi in the conference rooms until participants demanded it.)

While there were certainly a few mind-expanding presentations, there seemed to be very little effort on the part of the organization to engage the many young people around the world who are angsting over the future, whether they are pining for the retro-futuristic fantasies of Steampunk or rejecting consumerism, corporatism, nationalism and technology as anarcho-primitivists. Since the somewhat controversial* Zeitgeist Movement seems to be big in Vancouver, it would have been interesting for the WFS to include a presentation examining that.

Decline of the American empire

Korea says goodbye to heavy backpacks and anachronistic education.

By 2015, students will be carrying digital textbooks in lieu of paperback books in all schools in South Korea, according to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.

Taking advantage of cloud technology, the ministry said that it will invest KRW 2.2 trillion (US $2 billion) to convert textbooks to digital with links to various multimedia content, establish massive servers and WiFi networks in schools, and provide free tablets for students from low-income families, reports The Cosunilbo.

Meanwhile, the American Tea Party would like to kill the public education entirely. Republican House candidate David Harmer (he lost!) on killing the schools.

To attain quantum leaps in educational quality and opportunity, however, we need to separate school and state entirely. Government should exit the business of running and funding schools.

Super sonic crystals

 

After the gloom and doom of the last few posts, here's something to make you marvel at human inventiveness, creativity and generosity.

Bjork's latest project goes far beyond the "album" or "tour." Instead "Biophilia" is a sprawling, futuristic musical/conceptual constellation that will include a variety of interactive apps, music workshops for children, newly invented instruments and performances inspired by the nature and technology.

“What Bjork is doing feels a lot like the birth of cinema or the birth of opera,” said Scott Snibbe, a media artist and leading app developer who managed the “Biophilia” project and whose studio created three of the album’s apps. “We’re entering the age of interactivity. The passive, one-way media will become a blip in human history. Bjork had a complete, unified concept where everything was interconnected. The music wasn’t dominant, the image wasn’t dominant, the interactivity wasn’t dominant. Everything worked together the way a movie or an opera does.”

Obviously we are well into the age of interactivity,  in which digital reproduction and distribution means that any aural artifact can grow and reproduce and mutate like the crystals Bjork sings about in "Crystalline."

Already the reproductive remixing has begun. Here is Omar Souleyman's soulful take:

 

It's 2041....where is your power coming from?

Mix peak oil, climate change and population growth and you get war. That's how author and Hampshire College professor Michael T. Klare sees the next 30 years. 

Think of us today as embarking on a new Thirty Years’ War.  It may not result in as much bloodshed as that of the 1600s, though bloodshed there will be, but it will prove no less momentous for the future of the planet.  Over the coming decades, we will be embroiled at a global level in a succeed-or-perish contest among the major forms of energy, the corporations which supply them, and the countries that run on them.  The question will be: Which will dominate the world’s energy supply in the second half of the twenty-first century?  The winners will determine how -- and how badly -- we live, work, and play in those not-so-distant decades, and will profit enormously as a result.  The losers will be cast aside and dismembered.

In an very readable piece inspired by his new book,  Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, Klare gives a sobering but not apocalyptic prediction of how energy issues will change the geopolitical landscape. Although he predicts turmoil and a irrevocably damaged earth by the end of his 30 years war, his ultimate vision is remarkably upbeat, suggesting that we can look at the evolution of computer technology to see how the "winning" technologies of tomorrow will develop. 

Were I to wager a guess, I might place my bet on energy systems that were decentralized, easy to make and install, and required relatively modest levels of up-front investment.  For an analogy, think of the laptop computer of 2011 versus the giant mainframes of the 1960s and 1970s.  The closer that an energy supplier gets to the laptop model (or so I suspect), the more success will follow.

Hot air and grand schemes

One scheme has wind-powered ships shooting salt water into the air to make more clouds

 Maybe you bike to work, bring your own shopping bags and shun red meat. If so, the planet thanks you.

Unfortunately, that's not going to be enough.

We appear to be hurtling toward a global warming tipping point, despite the ignorant and convenient denials of renowned climate change experts such as Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, who asserts that CO2 cannot possibly be harmful because "carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of nature." (Check out this jaw-dropping  video in which the presidential contender and science fair drop-out explains why climate change is no threat to the earth.)

 

Scientists and policy analysts have begun to worry that our glacially slow efforts to address climate change are too little and too late, leading us to an abrupt, irrevocable tipping point and a cascade of mass extinction, mudslides, flooding, sea level rise and drought that cannot be stopped by reducing CO2 emissions. Recently, these experts convened to discuss the possibilities of geo-engineering--a set of radical and mostly theoretical interventions that could rapidly cool the planet.

These “geo-engineering” technologies, some seemingly plucked from the realm of science fiction, propose techniques to artificially reduce global temperatures and soak up excess carbon as an alternative to traditional fixes, such as green power and energy-efficient buildings. The proposals run the gamut from whitening clouds to capturing airborne carbon and deploying vast quantities of reflective materials into the orbit around Earth to deflect incoming solar rays.

About 60 scientists and international relations experts gathered this week in Lima to contemplate the rapidly growing body of geo-engineering science and, in effect, consider a once-unthinkable question: Should the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which oversees Kyoto (and its eventual successor), seriously consider geo-engineering as part of its arsenal for fighting global warming?

So while some scientists are discusscussing the feasibility of spraying salt water into the sky to increase cloud cover or covering the world's deserts with mirrors, other environmentalists warn of unintended consequences or argue that grand, man-made interventions are just the kind of human arrogance that got us into this predicament in the first place. Even the conference organizers, including Jason Blackstock, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ont., admits that consideration of geo-engineering demands weighing  “risk versus risk.”

With emissions at record levels and little hope of co-ordinated international mitigation efforts, the perils of inaction are equally troublesome, he says. “I don't think it's reasonable right now to take any option off the table.”

It is certainly omforting to think that we may be engineer ourselves out of catastrophe, and perhaps if mankind can put a man on the moon and a computer in your pocket we can reverse the overheating of the planet without causing equally dangerous side effects. But my guess is that the problem with these interventions will not be engineering problems. In the end they will be human problems. If there is "little hope of co-ordinated international mitigtion efforts," it seems unlikely that we can agree on which strategies to useor decide who's going to pay for them or profit from them.  It's a governance problem even more than an engineering problem.

Scientists can do a lot, but they still haven't come up with any engineering solutions for greed, short-sightedness, combativeness and stupidity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The feelies--coming to a theater near you?

  

After my post about how computers are learning to "read" human emotion through facial recognition and measurement with bio-sensors, I came across this video explaining the  "Emotion Jacket" created by Philips Research. Using haptic technology, the jacket employs the human response to touch to stimulate emotion.

The applications for movies and gaming are obvious,  and we may see jackets like this joining 3D glasses to create the real life "feelies" that kept people compliant and entertained in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." And I don't even need to mention the fact that the sex industry is always an early adopter--and driver--of technological innovation. (Check out the wikipedia entry for Woody Allen's orgasmitron. Devices that simulate/stimulate orgasm are fairly common in movies and science fiction.)  Beyond that, it doesn't take much to imagine how useful such technology might be for a torturer, who could put a victim through sheer hell but never cause lasting bodily harm.

Although many a dog lover would argue otherwise, most people assume that the ability to feel emotion and respond to the emotions of others is a core attribute of being human. I feel, therefore I am. Yet these technologies are rapidly erasing that distinction between man and machine. Once again we are forced to confront the question: What does it mean to be human? Or does that even matter if you get stars in your eyes and butterflies in your stomach everytime your new robot boyfriend touches your hand?

So what do you think? If it looks like love and feels like love is it really love, even if induced by skin conductance and a haptic interface?

 

 

Turning smiles into bytes (and bucks)

Computers can out-calculate any human, but they can't do many things the average baby can do.  One of those things is to reliably recognize human expression and emotion. Affectiva, a for-profit enterprise that grew out of facial recognition and affective computing research at MIT, is a company that is trying to make human emotion understandable to computers. One mode of research analyzes facial expressions, and is touted as a way to help marketers, movie makers and game designers analyze your second-by-second emotional response.

In an example hosted by Forbes.com, site visitors are told they can help computers learn to understand facial expression by watching three commercials and having their smiles "analyzed."

Help advance this research by watching the videos below in front of a webcam; you'll then see an analysis of your own smile and will be able to compare it to others. This new app is the world's first cloud-based technology for reading facial expressions. It began as an effort to help people on the autism spectrum who have difficulty reading emotion, and it is now being commercialized to help businesses understand their customers.

Better living through chemicals

If you were a teacher, and you had identified a study technique that helped your students concentrate better, study longer and do better on tests,  would you encourage your students to use it? 

What if it weren't a technique, but a drug?

Of course the drug exists, it's called Ritalin, and it has become more popular than beer pong on college campuses--at least during exam week. Like stimulants such as Adderall, Ritalin is commonly prescribed to treat ADHD. But it is widely available--and widely used off-label-- because it is a proven cognitive performance enhancer.

Stanford law professor Henry Greely was among several authors of a 2009 article in the science journal  "Nature" supporting the use of performance enhancing drugs to improve brain functions such as concentration and memory in healthy adults. In a later interview about the article, Greely was asked why people tend to belive such drug use would be "cheating."

Well, I think part of it is, drug is a dirty word. Somebody’s talked about our pharmacological Puritanism. It’s a very love-hate relationship, as all of us who enjoy a glass of wine know. I mean, our society is probably one of the biggest users of drugs that change mental states, and also one of the most negative toward them in this odd sort of way. Well, there’s some good reasons to be worried about drugs, and we’ve laid some of them out, particularly enhancing drugs: safeness, coercion and fairness. And those are appropriate concerns, but they’re not knee-jerk concerns. They’re not, “All enhancing drugs are bad in all circumstances at all times.” Right now, to the extent the public has thought about this issue at all, it’s kind of the knee-jerk “drugs are bad, enhancement is bad, let’s ignore it.” Not a good solution.

(Greely's point is a good one. Indeed if we were told that a common supplement such as Vitamin C was shown to dramatically enhance brain function, few people would consider it a moral issue. )