Innovation&Society

Via GIZMODO

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NASA officially granted permission to a group of scientists and enthusiasts who want to do what NASA can't afford: Make contact with a 36-year-old satellite called ISEE-3 that's still capable of taking directions for a new mission. It's the first agreement of its kind—and it could hint at where the space industry is going.

So, a little back story. As our sister site io9 explained last month, ISEE-3 was launched back in 1978 to study the relationship between the Sun and Earth. It enjoyed many more missions over the next three decades, but NASA officially cut the cord in 1997. Still, ISEE-3 kept on trucking.

It wasn't until a decade later that NASA discovered she was still at it, despite the lack of commands from her benefactors at NASA. Why not send her on a new mission? Well, that's the trouble: We have no way of communicating. The antenna used to contact ISEE-3 had been removed.

Enter the group of scientists including SkyCorp, SpaceRef, Space College Foundation, and others. They want to use a different antenna, at Morehead State University, to contact ISEE-3. "Our plan is simple: we intend to contact the ISEE-3 spacecraft, command it to fire its engines and enter an orbit near Earth, and then resume its original mission," said Keith Cowing, a former Nasa engineer and owner of Nasa Watch, told the Guardian.

The ISEE-3, (later ICE), undergoing testing and evaluation.

Sounds good, right? Well, it's not so simple. The group, which calls itself ISEE-3 Reboot, needs to essentially rebuild the entire software used to communicate with ISEE-3 back in the 70s. That means digging through archives to find the original commands, then recreating them. With zero funding available from NASA and only a month or two until the little satellite makes a close pass in mid-June. The technical challenges are huge:

We need to initiate a crash course effort to use 'software radio' to recreate virtual versions all of the original communications hardware that no longer physically exists. We also need to cover overhead involved in operating a large dish antenna, locating and analyzing old documentation, and possibly some travel.

But, the creators of the project explained in their pitch letter on Rockethub, "if we are successful it may also still be able to chase yet another comet."

If there was any doubt about whether modern Americans were still enamored with space, the results of their crowdfunding campaign squash it. The group blew through their $100,000 goal, and are currently getting close to a $150,000 stretch goal. There are only two days left to donate—and you should—but the fact that they've raised so much money in so short a time is remarkable.

The ISEE-3 Reboot mission patch.

NASA announced it has signed an agreement with the group called a Non-Reimbursable Space Act Agreement (NRSAA), which is a contract it signs with its external partners to describe a collaboration. It gives the group the green light to go ahead and make its attempt at taking control of ISEE-3—it essence, it gives Skycorp the right to take over the operation of a satellite that NASA built almost 40 years ago.

Here's what astronaut John Grunsfeld had to say about the agreement:

The intrepid ISEE-3 spacecraft was sent away from its primary mission to study the physics of the solar wind extending its mission of discovery to study two comets. We have a chance to engage a new generation of citizen scientists through this creative effort to recapture the ISEE-3 spacecraft as it zips by the Earth this summer.

It's an incredible development—and it tells us something about where space travel and research is going. NASA and other state-funded research entities are being strangled by downsized budgets, but the push into space amongst independent scientists, engineers, and citizens is booming. As Elon Musk sues to let commercial space companies compete for government contracts, students and scientists are launching their own satellites.

Over the next few decades, plenty of other NASA-built spacecraft will begin to age—just like ISEE-3. And unless something drastic changes about NASA's budget, it may not have the cash to keep them up. Imagine a future in which craft built by NASA in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, are inherited by independent groups of scientists and space companies who take over operations, just like Skycorp is. The privatization of space might not be so far away—and NASA might play a heavy role in its creation.

Via GIZMODO (paleofuture)

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Early rumors may have hinted that Apple had a fully integrated smart home up its sleeve. But after today's WWDC, we know that's not the case. And it's unclear what developers are going to do with Apple's HomeKit, a piecemeal tease that implies you'll soon be able to control your smart toaster with your iPhone. But in the meantime, we have this Microsoft concept video from circa 1999, showing the amazing interconnected smart home of tomorrow.

The video shows things like the ability to scan a carton of eggs to automatically add them to a shopping list. Even throwing away an item allows your smart trash can to remind your home computer system that you may need to order that item soon. Many of these technologies actually have come to pass, in one way or another, like Amazon's trial of their Dash magic wand.

But again, it's a far cry from the fully integrated smart home INTERNET OF THINGS OMG THIS IS THE FUTURE OF THE HOUSE we've been promised for so very long.

Image: Screenshot from the circa 1999 concept video by Microsoft

Via Quartz

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• Kleiner Perkins investor Mary Meeker's annual presentation on internet trends is always worth reading in full, which you can do below. But one chart in her new report particularly caught our eye because it's all about glass.
• As we've argued, media are best understood as a competition for attention on glass-panelled devices connected to the internet. Phones, tablets, PCs, television sets—it's all just glass. But, of course, it does matter what kinds of glass are attracting more attention.
• Meeker's chart breaks that down nicely‚ with the added benefit of explaining that the situation varies widely across countries. The US and UK, for instance, are quite different from Vietnam and Saudi Arabia. Or even just looking at Indonesia and the Philippines, which spend the most time staring at screens, provides an interesting comparison.

• More at the Atlantic: How the World Consumes Media—in Charts and Maps

  Here is Meeker's full presentation, which includes some other slides on the future of the television and internet video:
  

  KPCB Internet trends 2014 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Via The Verge

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Next week at the World Cup, a paralyzed volunteer from the Association for Assistance to Disabled Children will walk onto the field and open the tournament with a ceremonial kick. This modern miracle is made possible by a robotic exoskeleton that will move the user's limbs, taking commands directly from his or her thoughts.

This demonstration is the debut of the Walk Again Project, a consortium of more than 150 scientists and engineers from around the globe who have come together to show off recent advances in the field of brain machine interfaces, or BMI. The paralyzed person inside will be wearing an electroencephalographic (EEG) headset that records brainwave activity. A backpack computer will translate those electrical signals into commands the exoskeleton can understand. As the robotic frame moves, it also sends its own signals back to the body, restoring not just the ability to walk, but the sensation as well.

Just how well the wearer will walk and kick are uncertain. The project has been criticized by other neuroscientists as an exploitative spectacle that uses the disabled to promote research which may not be the best path for restoring health to paralyzed patients. And just weeks before the project is set to debut on television to hundreds of millions of fans, it still hasn’t been tested outdoors and awaits some final pieces and construction. It's not even clear which of the eight people from the study will be the one inside the suit.

The point of the project is not to show finished research, however, or sell a particular technology. The Walk Again Project is meant primarily to inspire. It's a demonstration that we’re on the threshold of achieving science fiction: technologies that will allow humans to truly step into the cyborg era.

It’s only taken a little over two centuries to get there.

The past

Scientists have been studying the way electricity interacts with our biology since 1780, when Luigi Galvani made the legs of a dead frog dance by zapping them with a spark, but the modern history behind the technology that allows our brains to talk directly to machines goes back to the 1950s and John Lilly. He implanted several hundred electrodes into different parts of a monkey’s brain and used these implants to apply shocks, causing different body parts to move. A decade later in 1963, professor Jose Delgado of Yale tested this theory again like a true Spaniard, stepping into the ring to face a charging bull, which he stopped in its tracks with a zap to the brain.

In 1969, professor Eberhard Fetz was able to isolate and record the firing of a single neuron onto a microelectrode he had implanted into the brain of a monkey. Fetz learned that primates could actually tune their brain activity to better interact with the implanted machine. He rewarded them with banana pellets every time they triggered the microelectrode, and the primates quickly improved in their ability to activate this specific section of their brain. This was a critical observation, demonstrating brain’s unique plasticity, its ability to create fresh pathways to fit a new language.

Today, BMI research has advanced to not only record the neurons firing in primates’ brains, but to understand what actions the firing of those neurons represent. "I spend my life chasing the storms that emanate from the hundreds of billions of cells that inhabit our brains," explained Miguel Nicolelis, PhD, one of the founders of Center for Neuroengineering at Duke University and the driving force behind the Walk Again Project. "What we want to do is listen to these brain symphonies and try to extract them from the messages they carry."

Nicolelis and his colleagues at Duke were able to record brain activity and match it to actions. From there they could translate that brain activity into instructions a computer could understand. Beginning in the year 2000, Nicolelis and his colleagues at Duke made a series of breakthroughs. In the most well known, they implanted a monkey with an array of microelectrodes that could record the firing of clusters of neurons in different parts of the brain. The monkey stood on a treadmill and began to walk. On the other side of the planet, a robot in Japan received the signal emanating from the primate’s brain and began to walk.

Primates in the Duke lab learned to control robotic arms using only their thoughts. And like in the early experiments done by Fetz, the primates showed a striking ability to improve the control of these new limbs. "The brain is a remarkable instrument," says professor Craig Henriquez, who helped to found the Duke lab. "It has the ability to rewire itself, to create new connections. That’s what gives the BMI paradigm its power. You are not limited just by what you can physically engineer, because the brain evolves to better suit the interface."

The present

After his success with primates, Nicolelis was eager to apply the advances in BMI to people. But there were some big challenges in the transition from lab animals to human patients, namely that many people weren’t willing to undergo invasive brain surgery for the purposes of clinical research. "There is an open question of whether you need to have implants to get really fine grained control," says Henriquez. The Walk Again Project hopes to answer that question, at least partially. While it is based on research in animals that required surgery, it will be using only external EEG headsets to gather brain activity.

The fact that these patients were paralyzed presented another challenge. Unlike the lab monkeys, who could move their own arms and observe how the robot arm moved in response, these participants can’t move their legs, or for many, really remember the subconscious thought process that takes place when you want to travel by putting one foot in front of the other. The first step was building up the pathways in the brain that would send mental commands to the BMI to restore locomotion.

To train the patients in this new way of thinking about movement, researchers turned to virtual reality. Each subject was given an EEG headset and an Oculus Rift. Inside the head-mounted display, the subjects saw a virtual avatar of themselves from the waist down. When they thought about walking, the avatar legs walked, and this helped the brain to build new connections geared towards controlling the exoskeleton. "We also simulate the stadium, and the roar of the crowd," says Regis Kopper, who runs Duke’s VR lab. "To help them prepare for the stress of the big day."

Once the VR training had established a baseline for sending commands to the legs, there was a second hurdle. Much of walking happens at the level of reflex, and without the peripheral nervous system that helps people balance, coordinate, and adjust to the terrain, walking can be a very challenging task. That’s why even the most advanced robots have trouble navigating stairs or narrow hallways that would seem simple to humans. If the patients were going to successfully walk or kick a ball, it wasn’t enough that they be able to move the exoskeleton’s legs — they had to feel them as well.

The breakthrough was a special shirt with vibrating pads on its forearm. As the robot walked, the contact of its heel and toe on the ground made corresponding sensations occur along parts of the right and left arms. "The brain essentially remapped one part of the body onto another," says Henriquez. "This restored what we call proprioception, the spacial awareness humans need for walking."

In recent weeks all eight of the test subjects have successfully walked using the exoskeleton, with one completing an astonishing 132 steps. The plan is to have the volunteer who works best with the exoskeleton perform the opening kick. But the success of the very public demonstration is still up in the air. The suit hasn’t been completely finished and it has yet to be tested in an outdoor environment. The group won't confirm who exactly will be wearing the suit. Nicolelis, for his part, isn’t worried. Asked when he thought the entire apparatus would be ready, he replied: "Thirty minutes before."

The future

The Walk Again project may be the most high-profile example of BMI, but there have been a string of breakthrough applications in recent years. A patient at the University of Pittsburgh achieved unprecedented levels of fine motor control with a robotic arm controlled by brain activity. The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago introduced the world’s first mind controlled prosthetic leg. For now the use of advanced BMI technologies is largely confined to academic and medical research, but some projects, like DARPA’s Deka arm, have received FDA approval and are beginning to move into the real world. As it improves in capability and comes down in cost, BMI may open the door to a world of human enhancement that would see people merging with machines, not to restore lost capabilities, but to augment their own abilities with cyborg power-ups.

"From the standpoint of defense, we have a lot of good reasons to do it," says Alan Rudolph, a former DARPA scientist and Walk Again Project member. Rudolph, for example, worked on the Big Dog, and says BMI may allow human pilots to control mechanical units with their minds, giving them the ability to navigate uncertain or dynamic terrain in a way that has so far been impossible while keeping soldiers out of harms way. Our thoughts might control a robot on the surface of Mars or a microsurgical bot navigating the inside of the human body.

There is a subculture of DIY biohackers and grinders who are eager to begin adopting cyborg technology and who are willing, at least in theory, to amputate functional limbs if it’s possible to replace them with stronger, more functional, mechanical ones. "I know what the limits of the human body are like," says Tim Sarver, a member of the Pittsburgh biohacker collective Grindhouse Wetwares. "Once you’ve seen the capabilities of a 5000psi hydraulic system, it’s no comparison."

For now, this sci-fi vision all starts with a single kick on the World Cup pitch, but our inevitable cyborg future is indeed coming. A recent demonstration at the University of Washington enabled one person’s thoughts to control the movements of another person’s body — a brain-to-brain interface — and it holds the key to BMI’s most promising potential application. "In this futuristic scenario, voluntary electrical brain waves, the biological alphabet that underlies human thinking, will maneuver large and small robots, control airships from afar," wrote Nicolelis. "And perhaps even allow for the sharing of thoughts and sensations with one individual to another."

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ComputedBy comments:

Now, the kick-off video:

Via Reuters

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Surfboards lean against a wall at the Google office in Santa Monica, California, October 11, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson

(Reuters) - Google Inc updated its terms of service on Monday, informing users that their incoming and outgoing emails are automatically analyzed by software to create targeted ads.

The revisions more explicitly spell out the manner in which Google software scans users' emails, both when messages are stored on Google's servers and when they are in transit, a controversial practice that has been at the heart of litigation.

Last month, a U.S. judge decided not to combine several lawsuits that accused Google of violating the privacy rights of hundreds of millions of email users into a single class action.

Users of Google's Gmail email service have accused the company of violating federal and state privacy and wiretapping laws by scanning their messages so it could compile secret profiles and target advertising. Google has argued that users implicitly consented to its activity, recognizing it as part of the email delivery process.

Google spokesman Matt Kallman said in a statement that the changes "will give people even greater clarity and are based on feedback we've received over the last few months."

Google's updated terms of service added a paragraph stating that "our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Jonathan Oatis, Bernard Orr)

Via TechCrunch

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There is no point in kidding ourselves, now, about Who Has the Power.
– Hunter S. Thompson, jacket copy, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The Internet wasn’t supposed to be so…Machiavellian.

In 1963, Stewart Brand and his wife set out on a landmark road trip, the goal of which was to educate and enliven the people they encountered with tools for modern living. The word “tools” was taken liberally. Brand wrote that “a realm of intimate, personal power is developing.” Any tool that created or channeled such power was useful. Tools meant books, maps, professional journals, courses, classes, and more.

In 1968, Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), an underground magazine of sorts that would scale in a way no road-weary Dodge ever could. The first issue was 64 pages and cost $5. It opened with the phrase: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

A year after WEC’s start, on October 29, 1969, the first packet of data was sent from UCLA to SRI International. It was called ARPAnet at the time, but with it the Internet was born. Brand and others would come to see the Internet as the essential, defining “tool” of their generation. Until its final issue in 1994, the WEC’s 32 editions provide as good a chronicle of the emergence of cyberculture (as it was then called) as you can find.

Cyberculture. It’s a curious and complicated term in today’s society, isn’t it? Cyberculture is at once completely outdated and awfully relevant.

As Fred Turner has argued, Brand is a key figure in the weaving together of two major cultural fabrics that have since split — counterculture and cyberculture. Brand is also immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test  as a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. And Brand famously assisted researcher Doug Engelbart with the “Mother of all Demos,” the outline of a vision for technology prosthetics that improve human life; it would define computing for decades to come.

The Merry Pranksters, still from the movie Magic Trip

Brand attended Phillips Exeter Academy — an elite East Coast high school, and an institution of traditional power if there ever was one. He was a parachutist in the U.S. Army. He graduated with a degree in biology from Stanford, studied design at San Francisco Art Institute and photography at San Francisco State. He also participated in legal studies of LSD and its effects with Timothy Leary.

That’s hardly the typical resume of a technologist or an entrepreneur or an investor. But it should be. The business of making culture has been for too long now controlled by people who live outside it.

It is my opinion that the Internet of today can and must be countercultural again, that cyberculture should — needs to be — countercultural.

That word, countercultural, carries with it the connotation of liberal idealism and societal marginalia. Yet, the new countercultures we’re seeing online today are profoundly mainstream, and drawn along wholly different political lines. The Internet is its own party. The Internet has its own set of beliefs. Springs have sprung the world over and this isn’t simply a nerd thing anymore. We all care passionately about Internet life and Internet liberty and the continual pursuit of happiness both online and off.

Yet if the Internet is a measure of our culture, our zeitgeist, then what does it tell us about the spirit of this age? Our zeitgeist certainly isn’t what’s trending; it’s not another quiz of which TV character you are; it’s not another listicle. I changed the global power structure and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. And Facebook. And Twitter.

What is this generation’s Rolling Stone? What is our Whole Earth Catalog? It’s an important question because if the Internet is defining our culture, and our use of it defines our society, then we have a responsibility to ensure and propel its transformative impact, to understand the ways cyberculture can and should be the counterculture driving change rather than just distracting us from it.

There are beacons of hope. I eagerly await Jon Evans’ fantastic column in these pages each weekend for reasons like this.

The Daily Dot, a publication I co-founded, documents today’s cyberculture through the lens of online communities — virtual locales in which we arguably “reside” more deliberately than any geography. You should also be reading Edge, N+1, and Dangerous Minds. Even Vanity Fair has turned its eye to this theme, successfully I think, with articles like this. Rolling Stone is doing a pretty good job of being Rolling Stone these days, too.

I’m terminally optimistic, and I believe that counter-cyber-culture is inherently optimistic, as well. Even despite the U.S. government’s overreaching on privacy and “protecting” us from data about our own bodies, despite Silicon Valley’s mad rush to cash in on apps rather than substantial technology, despite most online media’s drastic descent to the lowest common denominator and even lower standards of journalism, I remain…optimistic.

We have found a courage in our growing numbers online. People old and young can be be bold and defining on the Internet, underwritten by the emotional support of peers everywhere. We’re voting for what we want the world to be, and how we want it to be. Why do you think Kickstarter works so well? We fund things that without our help are unlikely to exist, but ought to nonetheless. Our “likes” and “shares” are ultimately becoming votes for the kind of future we want to live in, and I’m optimistic that we will ultimately wield that responsibility with meaning and thoughtfully.

Tumblr. 4chan. Etsy. YouTube. We have emigrated to these outlying territories seeking religious freedoms, cultural freedoms, and personal freedoms alike. We colonized, and are still colonizing, new environs each day and every week. We claim and reclaim the Internet like so many tribal boundaries.

We’re winning more often than not, thank goodness. Aaron Swartz heroically beat SOPA and PIPA against all odds. Yahoo won against PRISM. The Internet won against cancer…with pizza. My godmother knows what Tor is.

The virtual reality community rebelled when princely Oculus sold to Facebook, for the reason that VR is a new superpower and a new countercultural medium that we’re afraid might have fallen into the wrong hands (I don’t believe that’s actually the case, but that’s grounds for another post altogether).

So, yes. A countercultural moment all our own stares us in the face. Like Brand, I hope we can manage to be politically aware and socially responsible in a way that technology begs us to be, without giving ground to the idea that the Internet is anything but ours.

Civil disobedience is a different game when the means of production and dissemination have been fully democratized. We seek differentiated high ground from which to defend our values. We build new back channels to communicate unencumbered. Instead of making catalogues, we make new categories. We wield technology, perhaps unaware on whose shoulders we stand, but at the same time free from the anxiety of influence.

We aspire to be more pure in that sense. We want and we give and we need and we will have…pure Internet.

Editor’s note: Josh Jones-Dilworth is a co-founder of the Daily Dot; founder and CEO of Jones-Dilworth, Inc., an early-stage technology marketing consultancy; and co-founder of Totem, a startup changing PR for the better. Follow his blog here. 

Featured image by Kundra/Shutterstock; Hunter S. Thompson image by Wikimedia Commons user MDCarchives (own work) under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 license

Via Discover

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Complimentary Wi-Fi is so commonplace that a business advertising its “hotspot” in the window seems somewhat passé. But a new hotspot location should impress even the most jaded among us: For the first time, scientists have demonstrated it’s possible to beam a wireless Internet signal across the 238,900 miles separating Earth from the moon.

The demonstration, done by researchers at NASA and MIT, means that future moon explorers could theoretically check in at Mare Imbrium and post lunar selfies with greater speed than you do from your home network.

The team will present its findings June 9 at the CLEO laser technology conference in California.

Not Your Starbucks Wi-Fi

In order to bring broadband to the moon, scientists used four separate telescopes based in New Mexico to send an uplink signal to a receiver mounted on a satellite orbiting the moon. Each telescope is about 6 inches in diameter and is fed by a laser transmitter that beams information in coded pulses of infrared light.

Since our atmosphere bends the signal as it travels to the moon, the four telescopes transmit the light through different columns of air, each with different bending effects. This setup increases the chance that at least one of the laser beams will interact with the receiver, and establish a connection with the moon.

And if you’re fixing to binge on Netflix on the moon, the connection isn’t too bad, either. Scientists managed to send data from Earth to the moon at a rate of 19.44 megabits per second — on par with slower broadband speeds — and could download information from the moon at a rate of whopping 622 megabits per second. According to Wired UK, that’s over 4,000 times faster than current radio transmission speeds.

So, in light of all that, there’s really only question that remains… “What’s the password?”