Monthly Archives: March 2009

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Cleaning up in orbit: ways to remove proliferating orbital crud

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map of orbiital debris around Earth - courtesy NASASpace isn’t empty at all – it’s full of crap, much of it (unsurprisingly) put there by us. And much like the rubbish we leave elsewhere, orbital junk is becoming a serious problem:

The volume of man-made space debris has grown so large that scientists say garbage now poses a bigger safety threat to the U.S. space shuttle than an accident on liftoff or landing. The International Space Station occasionally fires thrusters to dodge junk.

So, what can you do? There are plenty of ideas, many of which sound like they were ganked straight from old sf dime novels:

Among the suggestions: launching big nets and large magnets to snag refuse, or using high-energy lasers to atomize debris. None of these ideas is feasible. Magnets would be useless because spacecraft contain almost no iron. Nets are almost uncontrollable. Blasting debris, meanwhile, would simply create smaller remains that would be tougher to track and produce a vast haze of shrapnel, experts say.

In short – the jury’s still out, and the problem still needs fixing. If this was a Ben Bova story, some plucky risk-taking entrepreneur would step in and make his fortune in short order…

… from which we can only conclude that life isn’t a Ben Bova story (at least, not yet). [via SlashDot; image coutesy NASA]

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Escaping the downward spiral of newspapers

printing pressYou know what they say about rats leaving sinking ships… but then again, you know what they say about rats being survivors. The sinking ship of newspapers is seeing a few of her passengers make a beeline for the portholes; now The Guardian has followed the lead of the New York Times and is opening itself up to the web with APIs rather than shutting the doors. [image by Baltimore City Paper, ironically enough]

As TechDirt points out, many Guardian staff are quite keen for competitors like the NYT to (as they keep threatening) start charging for access to content – because it would hand Teh Grauniad a naked advantage for no effort on their part.

That said, the NYT isn’t sitting on its hands:

“Paper is dying, but it’s just a device,” Bilton told Wired.com […] “Replacing it with pixels is a better experience.”

Bilton, a youthful technologist who programs mashups in his free time, is charged with inventing the future for the Gray Lady in an era of troubled times for newspapers. Fewer people are subscribing, classified ads are decamping for the internet and online revenues aren’t making up for lost print ads.

But Bilton envisions a world where news is freed from the confines of newsprint and becomes better.

It’s whether the shareholders and board of directors agree with him that counts, of course.

Also via TechDirt we see that Slate are using crowdsourced reportage (in this case photojournalism of Depression2.0, or whatever you prefer to call it) to lower costs and improve audience engagement at the same time. Contrary to the teeth-gnashing of industry pundits, newspapers aren’t going to die… but it’s clear the herd is going to be culled pretty seriously as it passes through the needle’s eye of technological and sociological pressure.

Unsurprisingly, younger members of the newpaper business believe that newspapers could save themselves by learning from the Silicon Valley approach – by embracing technology, change and way-out ideas rather than suppressing or ignoring them. They’d better move quickly, though.

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Alternate history of Gopher web

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linkRobert Topolski, chief technologist of the Open Technology Initiative suggests that but for a quirk of history we might all be using Gopher instead of Tim Berners-Lee‘s World Wide Web:

By the 1990s, there was just about enough power to allow access to text and image-based files via the internet, and Tim Berners-Lee‘s World Wide Web was born.

But network administrators at the time preferred a streamlined text-only internet service, says Topolski, using something called the Gopher protocol.

He suggested that if those administrators had had access to data filtering technology, like that becoming popular with companies and governments today, they would have used it to exclude Berners-Lee’s invention, and kill off the World Wide Web.

For other glimpses into possible alternate histories of hypertext check out this article in the New York Times about Theodor Holm Nelson’s Project Xanadu. Or even further back check out Memex by hypertext pioneer Vannever Bush.

[from Short Sharp Science][image from James Jordan on flickr]

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In defence of altruism – the unselfish gene

Is altruism a result of human societal values, or is it something innate that evolved biologically? Psychologist Dacher Keltner claims the latter may be the case:

Our research and that of other scientists suggests that the vagus nerve may be a physiological system that supports caretaking and altruism. We have found that activation of the vagus nerve is associated with feelings of compassion and the ethical intuition that humans from different social groups (even adversarial ones) share a common humanity. People who have high vagus nerve activation in a resting state, we have found, are prone to feeling emotions that promote altruism—compassion, gratitude, love, happiness. Arizona State University psychologist Nancy Eisenberg has found that children with elevated vagal tone (high baseline vagus nerve activity) are more cooperative and likely to give. This area of study is the beginning of a fascinating new argument about altruism—that a branch of our nervous system evolved to support such behavior.

If you want the opposite take (which, for what it’s worth, reads a lot less like the jacket copy for a spiritual self-help book), look no further than sf writer and biologist Peter Watts:

Men, like most male mammals, like to acquire resources. When they’re not especially horny, they’re as likely to go for furniture and big-screen TVs — i.e., major, nonportable items that remain in the home — as anything else. When they’re horny, however, they’d rather buy bling and fast cars — flashy stuff they can take on the road to attract mates. Also, when in a horny mood, they’re more likely to give publicly to panhandlers (also to indulge in risky/heroic behaviour). In other words, both conspicuous consumption and conspicuous generosity are just ways of attracting mates: hey baby, lookit me! I’ve got so much money I can just give it away!…

I wonder if we’ll ever be ale to answer this question definitively? Whether we’ll like the answer is another question entirely…

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Regulating military robots

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triple-gun robot droneFollowing on neatly from Tom’s post about the Pentagon’s future war brainstorms and the US Office of Naval Research’s recent report on battlebot morality, philosopher A C Grayling takes to his soapbox at New Scientist to warn us that we need to regulate the use of robots for military and domestic policing uses now… before it’s too late.

In the next decades, completely autonomous robots might be involved in many military, policing, transport and even caring roles. What if they malfunction? What if a programming glitch makes them kill, electrocute, demolish, drown and explode, or fail at the crucial moment? Whose insurance will pay for damage to furniture, other traffic or the baby, when things go wrong? The software company, the manufacturer, the owner?

[snip]

The civil liberties implications of robot devices capable of surveillance involving listening and photographing, conducting searches, entering premises through chimneys or pipes, and overpowering suspects are obvious. Such devices are already on the way. Even more frighteningly obvious is the threat posed by military or police-type robots in the hands of criminals and terrorists.

As has been pointed out before, the appeal of robots to the military mind seems to be that they’re a form of moral short-cut, a way to do the traditional tasks of battle and control without risking the lives of real people. But as Grayling says, that’s a short-sighted approach: it’s not a case of wondering if things will go wrong, but when… and then who will carry the can?

Call me a cynic, but I doubt the generals and politicians will be any keener to shoulder the blame for mistakes than they already are. [image by jurvetson]