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Surveillance as (dark) art – the Static Obesity Logging devive

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Benjamin Males\' Racial Targeting System in actionAs a contrast to my earlier post about the cyclist panopticon being a positive manifestation of the potential of ubiquitous surveillance, here’s a project from the Royal College of Arts in London that rather neatly illustrates the flipside.

According to we-make-money-not-art, the Static Obesity Logging device:

… can be installed almost anywhere. The casing of the innocent-looking device conceals a computer, digital and analogue inputs and outputs and a camera. The system is able to remotely calculate Body Mass Index and communicate the data via wired and wireless networks.

Given recent hints from the UK government (among others) that they may start legislating against obesity, this is pretty Orwellian stuff. But the other of Benjamin Males’ projects is even darker – it’s a Racial Targeting System.

The [RTS-2] is a fully portable real-time image-processing platform that has the ability to automatically find and follow faces and then analyse and store their race data.

I guess we should be thankful that we’re seeing these devices being made by artists as a commentary on current affairs rather than reading about their deployment on the streets where we live.

That said, one can’t help but worry that what has been implemented by an art student is very likely to have been at least conceived of by our terror-fied governments. [story originally spotted at Hack-a-Day; image borrowed from Benjamin Males’ website]

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Friday Free Fiction for 25th July

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Good grief, it’s Friday again – and Friday means free fiction! Here’s what flowed through town on the RSS river this week:

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From Manybooks.net:

  • “The Memory of Mars” by Raymond F Jones (“As soon as I’m well we’ll go to Mars for a vacation again,” Alice would say. But now she was dead, and the surgeons said she was not even human. In his misery, Hastings knew two things: he loved his wife; but they had never been off Earth!)
  • “Hail to the Chief” by Gordon Randall Garrett

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More Who stuff from FeedBooks:

And some shorts by Philip Francis Nowlan:

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Apex Online have a story by none other than Nick Mamatas, outgoing Clarkesworld editor: “Summon, Bind, Banish“.

Alick, in Egypt, with his wife, Rose. Nineteen aught-four. White-kneed tourists. Rose, several days into their trip, starts acting oddly, imperiously. She has always wanted to travel, but Alick

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Urban cyclists and the participatory panopticon

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bicycles and graffitiMy journey to my day job is just ten minutes of hard thrash across town on my BMX*, but hardly a week goes by without someone coming within inches of ending my life (or at least my ability to walk unaided) with their car**. [image by freebeets]

And Velcro City doesn’t have a patch on the traffic nightmares that bigger metropolises like London or Glasgow have to offer – cities where commuting by bike is increasingly common and increasingly dangerous. So smart cyclists have worked out a way to put the burden of attention back on the car drivers: helmet-mounted video cameras.

“Although the camera has not changed my commute to any great extent, it does make me feel safer and calmer. Now, instead of screaming in annoyance at motorists, I simply point at my camera. It’s amazing how quickly they back off when they clock it.”

I really love the passive elegance of this solution, and it’s a reminder that ubiquitous surveillance can actually work for the benefit of the little guy… even though he’ll have to be proactive instead of waiting on Big Brother for help.

I wonder what the other upsides to the participatory panopticon might be? Will muggings and similar violent crimes start to drop off the scale when we’re all lifelogging our daily lives?

[ * Yeah, I should probably grow up, but I rode BMX for so long as a kid that the geometry of regular bikes feels completely alien to me. ]

[ ** Usually a taxi driver, too. That’s not stereotyping, either; I keep a diary, and the percentage stats are very telling. ]

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New research on aging hints we might be able to prevent it

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800px-Adult_Caenorhabditis_elegans It appears the prevailing theory as to why we age could be wrong–and that would be good news for anti-aging research (Via PhysOrg):

Age may not be rust after all. Specific genetic instructions drive aging in worms, report researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Their discovery contradicts the prevailing theory that aging is a buildup of tissue damage akin to rust, and implies science might eventually halt or even reverse the ravages of age.

The “rust” the prevailing theory uses to explain aging is essentially the accumulated wear and tear caused by “toxins, free-radical molecules, DNA-damaging radiation, disease and stress.” But the results of the Stanford research, led by Stuart Kim, professor of developmental biology and of genetics, don’t fit that theory. Instead, they found that that hundreds of age-related genes in C. elegans nematode worms were switched on and off by a single transcription factor–a kind of signalling molecule–called elt-3, which becomes more abundant with age. Two other transcription factors that regulate elt-3 also changed with age. As a result, normal development becomes unbalanced in older organisms, something the researchers call “developmental drift.” And now that this mechanism has been found in one organism, scientists can look for it in others–including humans.

The idea that this developmental drift is behind aging rather than “rust” would explain why there are many animals that live far longer than humans:

Some tortoises lay eggs at the age of 100…There are whales that live to be 200, and clams that make it past 400. Those species use the same building blocks for their DNA, proteins and fats as humans, mice and nematode worms. The chemistry of the wear-and-tear process, including damage from oxygen free-radicals, should be the same in all cells, which makes it hard to explain why species have dramatically different life spans.

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If aging is not a cost of unavoidable chemistry but is instead driven by changes in regulatory genes, the aging process may not be inevitable. It is at least theoretically possible to slow down or stop developmental drift.

The research has been published in the July 24 issue of Cell; you can download the original paper in PDF format.

Having just celebrated another birthday and thus entered my 50th year on this planet, I can only say, “Faster, please!”

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]aging, biology, genetics, immortality[/tags]

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Dude, where’s my flying car?

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Jetson It’s become a cliche to ask why we don’t have flying cars yet, since they’ve been a dream of science fiction writers and gadgeteers for decades. It’s not easy to build a flying car, that’s why–but Moller International has been working on it for years and has announced that it is in the process of completing its fourth “Jetson”–well, they don’t call it a flying car, they call it a “volantor airframe,” but still–and expects to complete forty of them by 2009. And Moller, as a glance at its website will reveal, has much bigger plans down the road for their flagship design, the M400 Skycar. (Via Gizmodo.)

The two-passenger, saucer-shaped M200G Jetson is designed for operation at up to 10 feet above the ground (so its operators don’t need pilot’s licenses), uses fly-by-wire technology (meaning a computer takes care of all the tricky control stuff and you just have to point it where you want to go) and:

can take-off and land vertically, is the size of a small automobile, operates vibration-free with little noise and is also qualified to travel short distances on the ground as an automobile as well. The prototype M200X has completed over two hundred flights with and without a pilot on board and can be seen flying here. In addition to the M200G, the Company plans to offer the M200E, a kit-built version of its Jetson aircraft with sales beginning in 2010. The M200E will not have the same software enabled altitude constraints as the M200G and the Company expects the M200E to be operable as an Experimental class aircraft.

The eight rotary engines give the Jetson a cruising speed of 75 miles per hour, a maximum speed of 100, a range of 100 miles, and a cargo capacity of up to 250 pounds. The engines operate on unleaded gasoline and can also be configured to run on other fuels.

If you want one, you have to identify yourself as a

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