Friday, August 26. 2011
StarCraft: Coming to a sports bar near you
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SAN FRANCISCO—One Sunday afternoon last month, a hundred boisterous patrons crowded into Mad Dog in the Fog, a British sports bar here, to watch a live broadcast.
Internet e-sports like Starcraft2 have big-name pro players, announcers who broadcast matches, and millions of fans who'd rather watch the action online or in bars than play themselves. WSJ's Amir Efrati reports.
Half the flat-screen TVs were tuned to a blood-filled match between two Korean competitors, "MC" and "Puma." The crowd erupted in chants of "M-C! M-C!" when the favorite started a comeback.
The pub is known for showing European soccer and other sports, but Puma and MC aren't athletes. They are 20-year-old professional videogame players who were leading computerized armies of humans and aliens in a science-fiction war game called "Starcraft II" from a Los Angeles convention center. The Koreans were fighting over a tournament prize of $50,000.
This summer, "Starcraft II" has become
the newest barroom spectator sport. Fans organize so-called Barcraft
events, taking over pubs and bistros from Honolulu to Florida and
switching big-screen TV sets to Internet broadcasts of professional game
matches happening often thousands of miles away.
Fans of 'Starcraft II' watch a live game broadcast in Washington, D.C.
As they root for their on-screen superstars, "Starcraft" enthusiasts can sow confusion among regular patrons. Longtime Mad Dog customers were taken aback by the young men fist-pumping while digital swarms of an insect-like race called "Zerg" battled the humanoid "Protoss" on the bar's TVs.
"I thought I'd come here for a quiet beer after a crazy day at work," said Michael McMahan, a 59-year-old carpenter who is a 17-year veteran of the bar, over the sound of noisy fans as he sipped on a draught pint.
But for sports-bar owners, "Starcraft" viewers represent a key new source of revenue from a demographic—self-described geeks—they hadn't attracted before.
"It was unbelievable," said Jim Biddle, a manager of Bistro 153 in Beaverton, Ore., which hosted its first Barcraft in July. The 50 gamers in attendance "doubled what I'd normally take in on a normal Sunday night."
For "Starcraft" fans, watching in bars fulfills their desire to share the love of a game that many watched at home alone before. During a Barcraft at San Francisco's Mad Dog in July, Justin Ng, a bespectacled 29-year-old software engineer, often rose to his feet during pivotal clashes of a match.
"This feels like the World Cup," he said. "You experience the energy and screams of everyone around you when a player makes an amazing play."
Millions of Internet users already tune in each month on their PCs to watch live "eSports" events featuring big-name stars like MC, who is Jang Min Chul in real life, or replays of recent matches.
In the U.S., fervor for "Starcraft II" is spilling into public view for the first time, as many players now prefer to watch the pros. In mid-July, during the first North American Star League tournament in Los Angeles, 85,000 online viewers watched Puma defeat MC in the live championship match on Twitch.tv, said Emmett Shear, who runs the recently-launched site.
The "Starcraft" franchise is more popular in Korea, where two cable TV stations, MBC Game and Ongamenet, provide dedicated coverage. The cable channels and Web networks broadcast other war games such as "Halo," "Counter-Strike," and "Call of Duty." But "Starcraft II" is often the biggest draw.
The pros, mostly in their teens and 20s, get prize money and endorsements. Professional leagues in the U.S. and Korea and have sprouted since "Starcraft II" launched last year. Pro-match broadcasts often include breathless play-by-play announcers who cover each move like a wrestling match. (A typical commentary: "It's a drone genocide! Flaming drone carcasses all over the place!").
Barcraft goers credit a Seattle bar, Chao Bistro, for launching the Barcraft fad this year. Glen Bowers, a 35-year-old Chao patron and "Starcraft" fan, suggested to owner Hyung Chung that he show professional "Starcraft" matches. Seeing that customers were ignoring Mariners baseball broadcasts on the bar's TVs, Mr. Chung, a videogame fan, OK'ed the experiment.
In mid-May Mr. Bowers configured Chao's five TVs to show Internet feeds and posted an online notice to "Starcraft" devotees. About 150 people showed up two days later. Since then, Mr. Bowers has organized twice-a-week viewings; attendance has averaged between 40 and 50 people, including employees of Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp., he said.
The trend ended up spreading to more than a dozen Barcrafts across the country, including joints in Raleigh, N.C., and Boston.
The "Starcraft II" game lends itself to sports bars because it "was built from the ground up as a spectator sport," said Bob Colayco, a publicist for the game's publisher, Activision Blizzard Inc. Websites like Twitch.tv helped "Starcraft's" spectator-sport appeal by letting players "stream" live games.
Two University of Washington graduate students recently published a research paper seeking to scientifically pinpoint "Starcraft's" appeal as a spectator sport. The paper posits that "information asymmetry," in which one party has more information than the other, is the "fundamental source of entertainment."
Wednesday, August 24. 2011
The First Industrial Evolution
Via Big Think
by Dominic Basulto
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If the first industrial revolution was all about mass manufacturing and machine power replacing manual labor, the First Industrial Evolution will be about the ability to evolve your personal designs online and then print them using popular 3D printing technology. Once these 3D printing technologies enter the mainstream, they could lead to a fundamental change in the way that individuals - even those without any design or engineering skills - are able to create beautiful, state-of-the-art objects on demand in their own homes. It is, quite simply, the democratization of personal manufacturing on a massive scale.
At the Cornell Creative Machines Lab, it's possible to glimpse what's next for the future of personal manufacturing. Researchers led by Hod Lipson created the website Endless Forms (a clever allusion to Charles Darwin’s famous last line in The Origin of Species) to "evolve” everyday objects and then bring them to life using 3D printing technologies. Even without any technical or design expertise, it's possible to create and print forms ranging from lamps to mushrooms to butterflies. You literally "evolve" printable, 3D objects through a process that echoes the principles of evolutionary biology. In fact, to create this technology, the Cornell team studied how living items like oak trees and elephants evolve over time.
3D printing capabilities, once limited to the laboratory, are now hitting the mainstream. Consider the fact that MakerBot Industries just landed $10 million from VC investors. In the future, each of us may have a personal 3D printer in the home, ready to print out personal designs on demand.
At the same time, there’s been a radical re-thinking about how products are designed and brought to market. Take On the Origin of Tepees, a book by British scientist Jonnie Hughes,
which presents a highly provocative thesis: What if design evolves the
same way that humans do? What if cultural ideas evolve the way humans
do? One example cited by Hughes is the simple cowboy hat from the American Wild West.
What if an object like the cowboy hat “evolved” itself, using cowboys
and ranch hands simply as a unique "selective environment” so that it
could evolve over time?
Wait a second, what's going on here? Objects using humans to evolve themselves? 3D Printers? Someone's been drinking the Kool-Aid, right?
But if you’ve read Richard Dawkins' bestseller The Selfish Gene,
you can see where Hughes is headed with his ideas. Dawkins coined the
term “meme” back in 1976 to express the concept of thoughts and ideas
having a life of their own, free to mutate and adapt, while cleverly
using their human “hosts” as a reproductive vehicle to pass on these
memes to others. Memes functioned like genes, in that their only goal
was to reproduce for the next generation. In such a way, evolved designs
are a form of "teme" -- a term first popularized by Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine, to denote ideas that are replicated via technology.
What if that gorgeous iPad 2 you’re holding in your hand was actually “evolved” and not “designed”? What if it is the object that controls the design, and not the designer that controls the object? Hod Lipson, an expert on self-aware robots and a pioneer of the 3D printing movement, has claimed that we are on the brink of the second industrial revolution. However, if objects really do "evolve," is it more accurate to say that we are on the brink of The First Industrial Evolution?
The final frontier, of course, is not the ability of humans to print out beautifully-evolved objects on demand using 3D printers in their homes. (Although that’s quite cool). The final frontier is the ability for self-aware objects independently “evolving” humans and then printing them out as they need them. Sound far-fetched? Well, it’s now possible to print 3D human organs and 3D human skin. When machine intelligence progresses to a certain point, what’s to stop independent, self-aware machines from printing human organs? The implications – for both atheists and true believers – are perhaps too overwhelming even to consider.
Tuesday, August 23. 2011
Your Two Things
Via KK
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In ten years from now, how many gadgets will people carry?
Apple would like you to carry 3 things today. The iPad, iPhone and MacBook. Once they would be happy if you carried one. What do they have in mind for the next decade? Ten?
I claim that what technology wants is to specialize, so I predict that any device we have today we'll have yet more specialized devices in the future. That means there will be hundreds of new devices in the coming years. Are we going to carry them all? Will we have a daypack full of devices? Will every pocket have its own critter?
I think the answer for the average person is 2. We'll carry two devices in the next decade. Over the long term, say 100 years, we may carry no devices.
The two devices we'll carry (on average) will be 1) a close-to-body handheld thingie, and 2) a larger tablet thingie at arms length. The handled will be our wallet, purse, camera, phone, navigator, watch, swiss army knife combo. The tablet will be a bigger screen and multi sensor input. It may unfold, or unroll, or expand, or be just a plain plank. Different folks will have different sizes.
But there are caveats. First, we'll wear a a lot of devices -- which is not the same as carrying them. We'll have devices built into belts, wristbands, necklaces, clothes, or more immediately into glasses or worn on our ears, etc. We wear a watch; we don't carry it. We wear necklaces, or fit bits, rather than carry. Main difference is being attached it is harder to lose (or lose track of), always intimate. This will be particularly true of quantified self-tracking devices. If we ask the question, ow may devices will you wear in ten years, the answer may be ten.
Secondly, the two devices you carry may not always be the same devices. You may switch them out depending on the location, mode (vacation or work), task at hand. Some days you may need a bigger screen than others.
More importantly, the devices may depend on your vocation. Some jobs want a small text based device (programmers), others may want a large screen (filmmakers), others a very blinding bright display (contractor), or others a flexible collapsible device (salesperson).
The law of technology is that a specialized tool will always be superior to a general purpose tool. No matter how great the built in camera in your phone gets, the best single purpose camera will be better. No matter who great your navigator in your handheld combo gets, the best dedicated navigator will be a lot better. Professionals, or ardent enthusiasts will continue to use the best tools, which will mean the specialized tools.
Just to be clear, the combo is a specialized tool itself, just as a swiss army knife is a specialized knife -- it specializes in the combo. It does everything okay.
So another way to restate the equation: the 2 devices each person will carry are one general purpose combination device, and one specialized device (per your major interests and style).
Of course, some folks will carry more than two, like the New York City police officer in the image above (taken in Times Square a few weeks ago). That may be because of their job, or vocation. But they won't carry them all the time. Even when they are "off" they will carry at least one device, and maybe two.
But I predict that in the longer term we will tend to not carry any devices at all. That's because we will have so many devices around us, both handheld and built-ins, and each will be capable of recognizing us and displaying to us our own personal interface, that they in effect become ours for the duration of our use. Not too long ago no one carried their own phone. You just used the nearest phone at hand. You borrowed it and did not need to carry your own personal phone around.That would have seemed absurd in 1960. But of course not every room had a phone, not every store had one, not every street had one. So we wanted our own cell phones. But what if almost any device made could be borrowed and used as a communication device? You pick up a camera, or tablet, or remote and talk into it. Then you might not need to carry your own phone again. What if every screen could be hijacked for your immediate purposes? Why carry a screen of your own?
This will not happen in 10 years. But I believe in the goodness of time the highly evolved person will not carry anything.
At the same time the attraction of a totem object, or something to hold in your hands, particularly a gorgeous object, will not diminish. We may remain with one single object that we love, that does most of what we need okay, and that in some ways comes to represent us. Perhaps the highly evolved person carries one distinctive object -- which will be buried with them when they die.
At the very least, I don't think we'll normally carry more than a couple of things at once, on an ordinary day. The number of devices will proliferate, but each will occupy a smaller and smaller niche. There will be a long tail distribution of devices.
50 years from now a very common ritual upon meeting of old friends will be the mutual exchange and cross examination of what lovely personal thing they have in their pocket or purse. You'll be able to tell a lot about a person by what they carry.
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Thursday, August 11. 2011
Does Facial Recognition Technology Mean the End of Privacy?
Via big think
by Dominic Basulto
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At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, researchers from Carnegie Mellon demonstrated how the same facial recognition technology used to tag Facebook photos could be used to identify random people on the street. This facial recognition technology, when combined with geo-location, could fundamentally change our notions of personal privacy. In Europe, facial recognition technology has already stirred up its share of controversy, with German regulators threatening to sue Facebook up to half-a-million dollars for violating European privacy rules. But it's not only Facebook - both Google (with PittPatt) and Apple (with Polar Rose) are also putting the finishing touches on new facial recognition technologies that could make it easier than ever before to connect our online and offline identities. If the eyes are the window to the soul, then your face is the window to your personal identity.
And it's for that reason that privacy advocates in both Europe and the USA are up in arms about the new facial recognition technology. What seems harmless at first - the ability to identify your friends in photos - could be something much more dangerous in the hands of anyone else other than your friends for one simple reason: your face is the key to linking your online and offline identities. It's one thing for law enforcement officials to have access to this technology, but what if your neighbor suddenly has the ability to snoop on you?
The researchers at Carnegie Mellon showed how a combination of simple technologies - a smart phone, a webcam and a Facebook account - were enough to identify people after only a three-second visual search. Hackers - once they can put together a face and the basics of a personal profile - like a birthday and hometown - they can start piecing together details like your Social Security Number and bank account information.
And the Carnegie Mellon technology used to show this? You guessed it - it's based on PittPatt
(for Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition Technology), which was acquired by
Google, meaning that you may soon be hearing the Pitter Patter of small
facial recogntion bots following you around any of Google's Web
properties. The photo in your Google+ Profile, connected seamlessly to
video clips of you from YouTube, effortlessly linked to photos of your
family and friends in a Picasa album - all of these could be used to
identify you and uncover your private identity. Thankfully, Google is not evil.
Forget being fingerprinted, it could be far worse to be Faceprinted. It's like the scene from The Terminator, where Arnold Schwarzenegger is able to identify his targets by employing a futuristic form of facial recognition technology. Well, the future is here.
Imagine a complete stranger taking a photo of you and immediately connecting that photo to every element of your personal identity and using that to stalk you (or your wife or your daughter). It happened to reality TV star Adam Savage - when he uploaded a photo to his Twitter page of his SUV parked outside his home, he didn't realize that it included geo-tagging meta-data. Within hours, people knew the exact location of his home. Or, imagine walking into a store, and the sales floor staff doing a quick visual search using a smart phone camera, finding out what your likes and interests are via Facebook or Google, and then tailoring their sales pitch accordingly. It's targeted advertising, taken to the extreme.
Which is not to say that everything about facial recognition technology is scary and creepy. Gizmodo
ran a great piece explaining all the "advantages" of being recognize
onlined. (Yet, two days later, Gizmodo also ran a piece explaining how
military spies could track you down almost instantly with facial
recognition technology, no matter where you are in the world).
Which raises the important question: Is Privacy a Right or a Privilege? Now that we're all celebrities in the Internet age, it doesn't take much to extrapolate that soon we'll all have the equivalent of Internet paparazzi incessantly snapping photos of us and intruding into our daily lives. Cookies, spiders, bots and spyware will seem positively Old School by then. The people with money and privilege and clout will be the people who will be able to erect barriers around their personal lives, living behind the digital equivalent of a gated community. The rest of us? We'll live our lives in public.
Geeks Without Frontiers Pursues Wi-Fi for Everyone
Tuesday, August 09. 2011
Help CERN in the hunt for the Higgs Boson
Via bit-tech
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The Citizen Cyberscience Centre based at CERN, launched a new version of LHC@home today.
You've probably heard of Folding@Home or Seti@Home - both are
distributed computing programs designed to harness the power of your
average home PC to number crunch data, aiding real scientific research.
LHC@home, as science fans will probably have already guessed, is a
similar venture for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The latest version
of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre's software, called LHC@home 2.0,
simulates collisions between two beams of protons travelling at close to
the speed of light in the LHC.
Professor Dave Britton of the University of Glasgow is Project Leader of
the GridPP project that provides Grid computing for particle physics
throughout the UK. He is a member of the ATLAS collaboration, one of the
experiments at the LHC and had this to say about LHC@home 2.0 and the
Citizen Cyberscience Centre:
'Scientists like me are trying to answer fundamental questions about
the structure and origin of the Universe. Through the Citizen
Cyberscience Centre and its volunteers around the world, the Grid
computing tools and techniques that I use everyday are available to
scientists in developing countries, giving them access to the latest
computing technology and the ability to solve the problems that they are
facing, such as providing clean water.
Whether you’re interested in finding the Higgs boson, playing a part in
humanitarian aid or advancing knowledge in developing countries, this is
a great project to get involved with.;
You can check out the LHC@home home page here. Have you taken part in Seti or Folding? Maybe you're already in the hunt for the Higgs Boson?
Monday, August 01. 2011
How an argument with Hawking suggested the Universe is a hologram
The proponents of string theory seem to think they can provide a more elegant description of the Universe by adding additional dimensions. But some other theoreticians think they've found a way to view the Universe as having one less dimension. The work sprung out of a long argument with Stephen Hawking about the nature of black holes, which was eventually solved by the realization that the event horizon could act as a hologram, preserving information about the material that's gotten sucked inside. The same sort of math, it turns out, can actually describe any point in the Universe, meaning that the entire content Universe can be viewed as a giant hologram, one that resides on the surface of whatever two-dimensional shape will enclose it.
That was the premise of panel at this summer's World Science Festival, which described how the idea developed, how it might apply to the Universe as a whole, and how they were involved in its development.
The whole argument started when Stephen Hawking attempted to describe what happens to matter during its lifetime in a balck hole. He suggested that, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, the information about the quantum state of a particle that enters a black hole goes with it. This isn't a problem until the black hole starts to boil away through what's now called Hawking radiation, which creates a separate particle outside the event horizon while destroying one inside. This process ensures that the matter that escapes the black hole has no connection to the quantum state of the material that had gotten sucked in. As a result, information is destroyed. And that causes a problem, as the panel described.
As far as quantum mechanics is concerned, information about states is never destroyed. This isn't just an observation; according to panelist Leonard Susskind, destroying information creates paradoxes that, although apparently minor, will gradually propagate and eventually cause inconsistencies in just about everything we think we understand. As panelist Leonard Susskind put it, "all we know about physics would fall apart if information is lost."
Unfortunately, that's precisely what Hawking suggested was happening. "Hawking used quantum theory to derive a result that was at odds with quantum theory," as Nobel Laureate Gerard t'Hooft described the situation. Still, that wasn't all bad; it created a paradox and "Paradoxes make physicists happy."
"It was very hard to see what was wrong with what he was saying," Susskind said, "and even harder to get Hawking to see what was wrong."
The arguments apparently got very heated. Herman Verlinde, another physicist on the panel, described how there would often be silences when it was clear that Hawking had some thoughts on whatever was under discussion; these often ended when Hawking said "rubbish." "When Hawking says 'rubbish,'" he said, "you've lost the argument."
t'Hooft described how the disagreement eventually got worked out. It's possible, he said, to figure out how much information has gotten drawn in to the black hole. Once you do that, you can see that the total amount can be related to the surface area of the event horizon, which suggested where the information could be stored. But since the event horizon is a two-dimensional surface, the information couldn't be stored in regular matter; instead, the event horizon forms a hologram that holds the information as matter passes through it. When that matter passes back out as Hawking radiation, the information is restored.
Susskind described just how counterintuitive this is. The holograms we're familiar with store an interference pattern that only becomes information we can interpret once light passes through them. On a micro-scale, related bits of information may be scattered far apart, and it's impossible to figure out what bit encodes what. And, when it comes to the event horizon, the bits are vanishingly small, on the level of the Planck scale (1.6 x 10-35 meters). These bits are so small, as t'Hooft noted, that you can store a staggering amount of information in a reasonable amount of space—enough to describe all the information that's been sucked into a black hole.
The price, as Susskind noted, was that the information is "hopelessly scrambled" when you do so.
From a black hole to the Universe
Berkeley's Raphael Bousso was on hand to describe how these ideas were expanded out to encompass the Universe as a whole. As he put it, the math that describes how much information a surface can store works just as well if you get rid of the black hole and event horizon. (This shouldn't be a huge surprise, given that most of the Universe is far less dense than the area inside a black hole.) Any surface that encloses an area of space in this Universe has sufficient capacity to describe its contents. The math, he said, works so well that "it seems like a conspiracy."
To him, at least. Verlinde pointed out that things in the Universe scale with volume, so it's counterintuitive that we should expect its representation to them to scale with a surface area. That counterintuitiveness, he thinks, is one of the reasons that the idea has had a hard time being accepted by many.
When it comes to the basic idea—the Universe can be described using a hologram—the panel was pretty much uniform, and Susskind clearly felt there was a consensus in its favor. But, he noted, as soon as you stepped beyond the basics, everybody had their own ideas, and those started coming out as the panel went along. Bousso, for example, felt that the holographic principle was "your ticket to quantum gravity." Objects are all attracted via gravity in the same way, he said, and the holographic principle might provide an avenue for understanding why (if he had an idea about how, though, he didn't share it with the audience). Verlinde seemed to agree, suggesting that, when you get to objects that are close to the Planck scale, gravity is simply an emergent property.
But t'Hooft seemed to be hoping that the holographic principle could solve a lot more than the quantum nature of gravity—to him, it suggested there might be something underlying quantum mechanics. For him, the holographic principle was a bit of an enigma, since disturbances happen in three dimensions, but propagate to a scrambled two-dimensional representation, all while obeying the Universe's speed limit (that of light). For him, this suggests there's something underneath it all, and he'd like to see it be something that's a bit more causal than the probabilistic world of quantum mechanics; he's hoping that a deterministic world exists somewhere near the Planck scale. Nobody else on the panel seemed to be all that excited about the prospect, though.
What was missing from the discussion was an attempt to tackle one of the issues that plagues string theory: the math may all work out and it could provide a convenient way of looking at the world, but is it actually related to anything in the actual, physical Universe? Nobody even attempted to tackle that question. Still, the panel did a good job of describing how something that started as an attempt to handle a special case—the loss of matter into a black hole—could provide a new way of looking at the Universe. And, in the process, how people could eventually convince Stephen Hawking he got one wrong.
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