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Living in the past… literally

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a tomb in New DelhiVia Geoff “BLDGBLOG” Manaugh we discover that people in India long ago found a solution to a shortage of affordable housing – they colonise ancient tombs and monuments, much to the chagrin of archaeologists and historians.

The city [New Delhi] is also home to tens of thousands of homeless people, and millions more who are desperately poor. Many of the otherwise homeless have made the reasonable assessment that the stout marble walls of the tombs and shrines and mausoleums that litter the city make a much nicer home, especially in monsoon season, than the sidewalk.

Some seek only temporary shelter. But others such as nine families living inside a federally protected monument called the Atgah Khan tomb, built in 1566, are so thoroughly ensconced that they can produce title deeds going back generations. They have plastered the walls, had the crypt wired to run the television and installed a fine kitchen, with wood cupboards built into the handy arched recesses.

It’s a tough call to make; history must be valued and protected, but people have to live somewhere. How can you tell a homeless family that they can’t live in an otherwise unoccupied building – you, with your job in archaeology and your apartment to go home to? You do it because it’s your job, of course, and because you believe that history must be preserved – but it can’t be much fun. [image by varunshiv]

And as the world becomes increasingly urbanised, perhaps we’ll see this sort of behaviour occuring in comparatively affluent Western cities as the less fortunate arrive in droves to seek employment and shelter. Imagine the Lincoln monument thronging with a small town of migrants from the former corn belt, or the huge family tombs of London’s great cemetaries repurposed into ersatz condominiums, always occupied by a few of the family’s oldest and youngest members to prevent claim-jumping newcomers…

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Smart surveillance doesn’t bother you with trivia

surreal surveillance warning signsWhat could be better than complete panopticon-level surveillance over everything you own? Well, surveillance that only bothers you with issues you really want to know about, and which doesn’t send you an SMS every time the neighbour’s cat rubs itself against the garage door, of course!

The main difference with the Archerfish system is that alerts you by text or video footage only when certain “events” occur, which you define. Alerts can be sent to your cell or similar mobile device, as an email or to a customised web portal.

Unlike more conventional systems, you don’t need to monitor video around-the-clock or trawl through footage or rely on motion alarms.

Using a combination of video cameras, intelligent software (Smartbox) and a custom web portal (SmartPortal), Archerfish watches your premises for “events”. They can be defined as person, vehicle, intelligent object motion or external sensor trigger. This means the system can tell the difference between a human being and inanimate object like a car passing the camera.

At the same time, if the camera is triggered by human movement, you can check to see whether it’s a family member, an intruder or a delivery. You can also check live video through the SmartPortal, as long as you have access to a PC or web-enabled device.

Well, that’s a doozy… provided that you’re willing to trust the software not to goof. And that you’re willing to upgrade the software regularly. And that you’re willing to believe that no one will ever find a way to futz the cameras, or hack the backline hardware via that web portal… but other than that, complete peace of mind! Ain’t technology wonderful? [image by Cory Doctorow]

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“Superlenses” could lead to movies of molecules

neonFor a long time physicists thought it was impossible to see anything smaller than about half the wavelength of light.

That’s true if you look at the propagating component of light waves. But light also records smaller sub-wavelength details in its evanescent components, which do not propagate. At least not usually. What [John] Pendry showed [about 10 years ago] was that evanescent components can propagate in a material with a negative refractive index, and he pointed out that a thin film of silver ought to have just the right properties.

Since then, the race has been on to build superlenses. In 2005, Nicolas Fang at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created one that could record details as small as one-sixth of a wavelength. That was a significant improvement over the diffraction limit, but why not better?

Fang and company recently achieved resolution of only one-twelfth the wavelength of light. The theoretical limit is now pegged at one-twentieth a wavelength, which should be small enough to watch molecules in motion.

The impact of such “transparency” on the micro level opens up fertile realm for speculation: Surely drug designers, among others, are going to want superlenses of their own.

[Story: Technology Review physics arXiv blog; thanks for the tip, dpodolsky; London neon sculpture photo: clry2]

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Stross: how I ended up as a science fiction writer

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lifeCharles Stross is recounting the long journey to his current position has one of the stars of British science fiction, beginning with his first steps into education during the years of Thatcher:

I already knew (from an early age — 12 or so) that I wanted to be an SF writer. But there was a fly in the ointment — a fly called Margaret Thatcher. I turned 15 in 1979, the year the conservatives won an election and the Thatcherite revolution swung into action.

Unemployment soared from around one million to over three million in twelve months as the UK experienced the worst industrial recession since the end of the second world war (largely caused by Thatcher’s dramatic decision to cut most of the state-owned industries off at their knees, on the assumption that the workers would find new and more productive jobs sooner rather than later — a misplaced assumption, as it turned out).

I come from a middle-class background; I could expect to go to university, but not to rely indefinitely on parental hand-outs. “You’ll need some kind of way to earn a living while you’re trying to write,” the careers guidance teachers told me.

A familiar story, as this happy university dropout will affirm (except it was Blair instead of Thatcher and the economic collapse only really started after I left).
[image from The Wandering Angel]

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Crowdsourced justice, or just Vigilantism2.0?

Anonymous vigilantism against Kenny GlennThere’s been a steadily increasing number of stories about “crowdsourced justice” of late, a phenomenon that arguably started in China but which is spreading across the world to anywhere that has a population with ready access to the internet.

For example, you may have heard about the 4chan crusade against one Kenny Glenn, a teenager foolish enough to post videos of himself abusing a kitten; Anonymous doesn’t respect many things, but it sure loves cats, and swiftly unearthed enough information about Kenny to land him in very hot water (and to get the cats rescued, natch).

An article at H+ Magazine takes an in-depth look at the phenomenon, which the Chinese refer to as the “human flesh search engine”:

Fortunately, human flesh search engines don’t end the lives of their victims, like the witch-hunts or lynching of the past.

(Erm… they don’t yet.)

We will not know for some time how these cyber-hunts will shape the future of our privacy, freedom of speech and sense of justice and security. But there is no doubt that these cases are just the beginning a vast social change taking place right now. What we can see from these incidents is that the flow of information will no longer be controlled and that the power of public outrage will not easily be quelled.

Kitten Killer of Hangzhou and her cameraman will walk away from their brutal act.. An apology is hardly appropriate recompense for the death of the tiny tortured feline. But these small stories will remain a part of our collective human memory and help guide the decisions of future societies, because the Internet does not forget, does not forgive and cannot be stopped. Ever.

While containing more than a mote of hyperbole, that final sentence is very telling – not because it is de facto true, but because many people believe it to be true. It’s that motivation combined with the ease of acting upon it en masse that gives human flesh search engines their power. [image sourced from Anonymous’ Kenny Glenn site]

And via SlashDot we find that it’s not just animal abusers who can become the focus of public ire, even in censorship-ridden China: the China Digital Times has a report regarding the dissemination of personal information about one Chen Hua, a deputy director of the Beijing Internet Propaganda Office who was foolish enough to boast of his own corrupt practices to a girl he was seeing “in a personal capacity”. Whether the story is true or not is irrelevant; word got out, the human flesh search engines dug up a lot of Chen’s personal details, and Beijing is now trying to contain the viral spread of said information… which makes me wonder yet again about how effective the blackout on the Tiananmen massacre really is.

Much as with any other technology, the uses to which the internet can be put are decided by the people with access to it; most of these cases could be argued to be ethically justified to a greater or lesser degree (though the lines are as fuzzy as ever), but that may not always be the case. The lord of the flies tends to follow us wherever we go, and I can’t see the transition to the digital world slowing him down too much.

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