Monthly Archives: October 2009

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What are you thinking about?

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deep in thoughtIt’s a simple question, and one we ask each other all the time… but it comes with a whole lot of psychological baggage, not least that of the barrier between the thoughts you choose to communicate and those you choose to keep confined to your own cerebrum. So here’s the trigger for your next Phildickian moment of existential paranoia – brain scanning procedures developed by scientists in the specialist neurological field of “neural decoding”show promise of eventually being able to analyse what you’re thinking about:

Last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Jack Gallant, a leading “neural decoder” at the University of California, Berkeley, presented one of the field’s most impressive results yet. He and colleague Shinji Nishimoto showed that they could create a crude reproduction of a movie clip that someone was watching just by viewing their brain activity. Others at the same meeting claimed that such neural decoding could be used to read memories and future plans – and even to diagnose eating disorders.

Go read the whole article; neural decoding has the smell of a technology that’s about to get much bigger very quickly, especially when the military types hear about it and start throwing money in its general direction. And take note of the fact that although the success rates for algorithms guessing the correct connections between thoughts and subjects are pretty low at this point, they’re still above raw chance… and way above what most “professional psychics” can muster.  [image by mararie]

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Blurbflies – airborne insectoid advertising

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OK, so the blurbflies from Jeff Noon’s novel Nymphomation were little flying critters that sang or chanted their advertising copy at you, but this is the first time I’ve seen anything along the lines of using actual insects as an advertising medium, even if via the surreal yet lo-fidelity marketing method of gluing tiny banners to the tushies of everyday houseflies:

Top marks for slightly gross innovation, if nothing else. Knowing the way the marketing business grabs trends and runs with them until they become ubiquitous to the point of infuriating banality, animal-based advertising will probably be massive by next summer and deader than last season’s butterflies by early 2011. So I’m going to grab the opportunity while it’s still fresh; if anyone needs me, I’ll be wandering the Canadian hinterlands, stencilling the Futurismic logo onto climate-refugee polar bears with photo-reactive spraypaint. [hat-tip to Geoff ‘BLDGBLOG’ Manaugh]

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The Uncanny Valley kicks you in the ass: freaky-weird disembodied robolegs

A brief scan of the intertubes shows that I’m pretty much the last person to see this, but just in case you haven’t seen it either here’s footage of Petman, a walking robot prototype from Boston Dynamics [via grinding.be, and loads of other places]:

That’s just… hell, I don’t know what it is, I don’t have a word for it. Creepy, awesome, strangely intimidating? All of the above? Anyway, Boston Dynamics (whose name makes me feel like I should be in an episode of Fringe) are the people who brought you BigDog, the strangely pathetic headless canine pack-mule robot which has been bouncing in and out of the geek quarter of the blogosphere since around 2006. According to Technology Review, Petman will be used for research into protective clothing for military personnel, hence its inbuilt ability to sweat in response to environmental changes.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking; we don’t even have robots smart enough to fetch our breakfast yet, but already they’ve designed one with the ability to sweat. I can’t help but feel there’s something deeply and disappointingly wrong with this development curve.

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Machine-making machines making more machine-making machines…

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RepRap 'Mendel' self-replicating machineVia Michael Anissimov we hear that the second generation of the RepRap self-replication machine, codenamed “Mendel”, is nearly ready for public release. Meaning that you could buy one (if you found someone who’d sell you one), but you could also build your own from the free open-source plans found at the RepRap website; the parts will cost you around US$650. [image from the RepRap wiki]

While such homebrew 3d printers aren’t currently much use for high-detail work and commercial finishes (like reproductions of your favourite World of Warcraft critters, maybe), they can make functional devices without any major problems. If there really is an increase in demand, you could probably assemble a Mendel and set it up to simple print a copy of itself. Then set up the copy to do the same, get a few generations of fully-functioning clones built, and then start churning ’em out and selling them to local buyers…

Integrating electrical and electronic circuits into physical parts is beyond these current home fabbers, but where big industry leads the homebrew crew will follow. Xerox has just invented a conductive silver ink that works without the need for a clean-room environment, meaning you can print off circuits onto a flexible substrate just like any other continuous-feed document. It wouldn’t take much for someone to buy some of that ink and find a way to use it in cheap and/or homebrew kit… hey presto, you’ve suddenly got the capability to replicate the electronic parts of a more complex self-replicating machine.

So go a bit further, integrate the two functions, have one machine that can print both inert blocks and electronics. Now we’re cooking! Now shrink ’em down, maybe speciate them so that different versions are specialised toward specific types of printing or assembly. But you’ll need to train them to pass off tasks they can’t do onto a machine that can, so you give them some sort of rudimentary swarm intelligence that communicates over something like Bluetooth… and then all of a sudden you’ve got an anthill of mechanical critters that have learned to procreate, cooperate, and deceive. DOOM.

Yeah, I know, it’s not very likely – but allow a guy a flight of robo-dystopian fancy on a Thursday, why don’t you? 🙂

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Private security forces on the rise in Detroit

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run-down Michigan real estateDetroit is arguably the reluctant poster-child for the bleeding edge of economic decline in the US, and as such it’s the place to watch to see how things might begin developing elsewhere. Which means that as the police – stretched by underfunding and escalating workload – concentrate their attentions elsewhere, we might start seeing an increase in private security firms patrolling some neighbourhoods. [via GlobalGuerillas; image by jessicareader]

Detroit’s problems come chiefly from its huge number of vacant foreclosed properties, which act as a magnet for criminality. The residents of those neighbourhoods who’ve managed to hold on to their homes (despite their plunge in value) are keen to see that their value doesn’t drop further, and so they’re willing to pay for surveillance and a visible presence – up to $30 per month, apparently.

But the line between surveillance and enforcement is a thin one, and as new security outfits proliferate, it’s not a stretch to imagine persons of less than scrupulous morals getting in on the only booming business in a broken town. And then it’s a short step to checkpoints at the barricades between neighbourhoods, armed patrols, CCTV saturation as only ever previously seen in the happy-go-lucky UK… sure, it’s a pessimistic scenario, but I wouldn’t say unrealistically so.

More likely is that the potential  threat of such an outcome will allow the gated community business model to proliferate. After all, property is cheap in the worst affected areas… so you go in, you by up a few streets, repair the broken buildings, install security infrastructure, and let out the properties with privacy and law enforcement served as a side-dish, paid for as part of the rent or mortgage payments. Hello, burbclaves.