Innovation&Society

Via PCWorld

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NEC is working on a suitcase-sized DNA analyzer, which it says will be able to process samples at the scene of a crime or disaster in as little as 25 minutes.

The company said it aims to launch the device globally in 2014, and sell it for around 10 million yen, or US$120,000. It will output samples that can be quickly matched via the growing number of DNA databases worldwide.

“At first we will target investigative organizations, like police,” said spokeswoman Marita Takahashi. “We will also push its use on victims of natural disasters, to quickly match samples from siblings and parents.”

NEC hopes to use research and software from its mature fingerprint and facial matching technology, which have been deployed in everyday devices such as smartphones and ATMs.

The company said that the need for cheaper and faster DNA testing became clear in the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that devasted much of Japan’s northeast coastline last year, when authorities performed nearly 20,000 samples.

NEC pointed to growing databases such as CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) in the U.S. and a Japanese database of DNA samples.

The company said it is aiming to make the device usable for those with minimal training, requiring only a cotton swab or small blood sample. NEC aims to make a device that weighs around 35 kilograms, measuring 850 millimeters by 552mm by 240mm, about the size of a large suitcase. The unit will run on a 12V power source.

NEC said it will be able to complete three-stage analysis process using a “lab on a chip” process, a term for for technology that recreates lab processes on chip-sized components. The basic steps for analysis include extracting DNA from samples, amplifying the DNA for analysis, and then separating out the different DNA strands.

The current version of the analyzer takes about an hour for all three tasks, and NEC said it aims to lower that to 25 minutes.

NEC it is carrying out the development of the analyzer together with partners including Promega, a U.S. biotechnology firm, and is testing it with a police science research institute in Japan.

Via DVICE

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Via Mashable

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Politics Transformed: The High Tech Battle for Your Vote is an in-depth look at how digital media is affecting elections. Mashable explores the trends changing politics in 2012 and beyond in these special reports.

Big Data. The very syntax of it is so damn imposing. It promises such relentless accuracy. It inspires so much trust –- a cohering framework in a time of chaos.

Big Data is all the buzz in consumer marketing. And the pundits are jabbering about 2012 as the year of Big Data in politics, much as social media itself was the dizzying buzz in 2008. Four years ago, Obama stunned us with his use of the web to raise money, to organize, to get out the vote. Now it’s all about Big Data’s ability to laser in with drone-like precision on small niches and individual voters, picking them off one by one.

It in its simplest form, Big Data describes the confluence of two forces — one technological, one social. The new technological reality is the amount of processing power and analytics now available, either free or at no cost. Google has helped pioneer that; as Wired puts it, one of its tools, called Dremel, makes “big data small.”

This level of mega-crunchability is what’s required to process the amount of data now available online, especially via social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Every time we Like something, it’s recorded on some cosmic abacus in the sky.

Then there’s our browsing history, captured and made available to advertisers through behavioral targeting. Add to that available public records on millions of voters — political consultants and media strategists have the ability drill down as god-like dentists.

Website TechPresident describes the conventional wisdom of Big Data as it relates to elections:

… data is dominating both the study and practice of political campaigns. Most observers readily acknowledge that the 2012 presidential campaign will be decided by the outcome of a handful of battles in just a few key swing states — identified thanks to the reckoning of data scientists and pollsters.

There are two sides to the use of Big Data. One is predictive — Twitter has its own sentiment index, analyzing tweets as 140-character barometers. Other companies, like GlobalPoint, aggregate social data and draw algorithmic conclusions.

But Big Data has a role beyond digital clairvoyance. It’s the role of digital genotyping in the political realm. Simply find the undecided voters and then message accordingly, based on clever connections and peeled-back insights into voter belief systems and purchase behaviors. Find the linkages and exploit them. If a swing voter in Ohio watches 30 Rock and scrubs with Mrs. Meyers Geranium hand soap, you know what sites to find her on and what issues she cares about. Tell them that your candidate supports their views, or perhaps more likely, call out your opponent’s demon views on geranium subsidies.

Central to this belief is that the election won’t be determined by big themes but by small interventions. Big Data’s governing heuristic is that shards of insight about you and your social network will lead to a new era of micro-persuasion. But there are three fallacies that undermine this shiny promise.

Atomic Fallacy

The atomic fallacy is the assumption that just because you can find small, Seurat-like dots in my behavior which indicate preferences, you can motivate me by appealing to those interests.

Yes, I may have searched for a Prius out of curiosity. I may follow environmental groups or advocates on Twitter. I may even have Facebook friends who actively oppose off-shore drilling and fracking. Big Data can identify those patterns, but it still doesn’t mean that Romney’s support of the Keystone pipeline will determine my vote.

There are thousands of issues like this. We care about subjects and might research them online, and those subjects that might lead us to join certain groups, but they aren’t going to change our voting behavior. Candidates can go down a rabbit hole looking for them. Give a child a hammer and everything is a nail; give a data scientist a preference and everything is a trigger.

And then when a candidate gets it wrong — and that’s inevitable — all credibility is lost. This data delinquency was memorialized in a famous Wall Street Journal story a decade ago: “If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here’s How to Set It Straight.”

Big Data still hasn’t solved its over-compensation problem when it comes to recommendations.

Interruption Fallacy

I define the interruption fallacy as the mistaken notion that a marketer or a candidate (the difference is only the level of sanctimony) can rudely insert his message and magically recalibrate deeply ingrained passions.

So even if Big Data succeeds in identifying subjects of paramount importance to me, the interruption fallacy makes it extremely unlikely that digital marketing can overcome what behavioral psychologists call the confirmation bias and move minds. Targeting voters can reinforce positions, but that’s not what pundits are concerned about. They’re opining that Big Data has the ability to shift undecideds a few points in the swing states.

Those who haven’t made up their minds after being assaulted by locally targeted advertising, with messaging that has been excruciatingly poll-tested, are victims of media scorch. They’re burned out. They are suffering from banner blindness. Big Data will simply become a Big Annoyance.

Mobile devices pose another set of challenges for advertisers and candidates, as Randall Stross recently pointed out in The New York Times. There’s a tricky and perhaps non-negotiable tradeoff between intrusiveness and awareness, as well as that pesky privacy issue. Stross writes:

Digital advertisers working with smartphones must somehow make their ads large enough to be noticed, but not so large as to be an interruption. And they must be chosen to match a user’s interests, but not so closely as to induce a shiver.

But that shiver is exactly what Big Data’s crunching is designed to produce– a jolt of hyper-awareness that can easily cross over into creepy.

And then there’s the ongoing decline in the overall effectiveness of online advertising. As Business Insider puts it, “The clickthrough rates of banner ads, email invites and many other marketing channels on the web have decayed every year since they were invented.”

No matter how much Big Data is being paid to slice and dice, we’re just not paying attention.

Narrative Fallacy

If Big Data got its way, elections would be decided based on a checklist that matched a candidate’s position with a voter’s belief systems. Tax the rich? Check. Get government off the back of small business? Check. Starve public radio? Check. It’s that simple.

Or is it? We know from neuromarketing and behavioral psychology that elections are more often than not determined by the way a candidate frames the issues, and the neural networks those narratives ignite. I’ve written previously for Mashable about The Political Brain, a book by Drew Westen that explains how we process stories and images and turn them into larger structures. Isolated, random messages — no matter how exquisitely relevant they are — don’t create a story. And without that psychological framework, a series of disconnected policy positions — no matter how hyper-relevant — are effectively individual ingredients lacking a recipe. They seem good on paper but lack combinatorial art.

This is not to say that Big Data has no role in politics. But it’s simply a part of a campaign’s strategy, not its seminal machinery. After all, segmentation has long enabled candidates to efficiently refine and target their messages, but the latest religion of reductionism takes the proposition too far.

And besides, there’s an amazing — if not embarrassing — number of Big Data revelations that are intuitively transparent and screechingly obvious. A Washington Post story explains what our browsing habits tell us about our political views. The article shared this shocking insight: “If you use Spotify to listen to music, Tumblr to consume content or Buzzfeed to keep up on the latest in social media, you are almost certainly a vote for President Obama.”

Similarly, a company called CivicScience, which offers “real-time intelligence” by gathering and organizing the world’s opinions, and that modestly describes itself as “a bunch of machines and algorithms built from brilliant engineers from Carnegie Mellon University,” recently published a list of “255 Ways to Tell an Obama Supporter from a Romney Supporter.” In case you didn’t know, Obama supporters favor George Clooney and Woody Allen, while mysteriously, Romney supporters prefer neither of those, but like Mel Gibson.

At the end of the day, Big Data can be enormously useful. But its flaw is that it is far more logical, predicable and rational than the people it measures.

Personal Comment:

Via Human Rights Watch

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(Washington, DC) – Governments should pre-emptively ban fully autonomous weapons because of the danger they pose to civilians in armed conflict, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. These future weapons, sometimes called “killer robots,” would be able to choose and fire on targets without human intervention. 

The United Kingdom’s Taranis combat aircraft, whose prototype was unveiled in 2010, is designed strike distant targets, “even in another continent.” While the Ministry of Defence has stated that humans will remain in the loop, the Taranis exemplifies the move toward increased autonomy.

© 2010 AP Photo

The 50-page report, “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots,” outlines concerns about these fully autonomous weapons, which would inherently lack human qualities that provide legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians. In addition, the obstacles to holding anyone accountable for harm caused by the weapons would weaken the law’s power to deter future violations.

“Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield would take technology too far,” said Steve Goose, Arms Division director at Human Rights Watch. “Human control of robotic warfare is essential to minimizing civilian deaths and injuries.”

The South Korean SGR-1 sentry robot, a precursor to a fully autonomous weapon, can detect people in the Demilitarized Zone and, if a human grants the command, fire its weapons. The robot is shown here during a test with a surrendering enemy soldier.

© 2007 Getty Images

“Losing Humanity” is the first major publication about fully autonomous weapons by a nongovernmental organization and is based on extensive research into the law, technology, and ethics of these proposed weapons. It is jointly published by Human Rights Watch and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic.

Human Rights Watch and the International Human Rights Clinic called for an international treaty that would absolutely prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons. They also called on individual nations to pass laws and adopt policies as important measures to prevent development, production, and use of such weapons at the domestic level.

Fully autonomous weapons do not yet exist, and major powers, including the United States, have not made a decision to deploy them. But high-tech militaries are developing or have already deployed precursors that illustrate the push toward greater autonomy for machines on the battlefield. The United States is a leader in this technological development. Several other countries – including China, Germany, Israel, South Korea, Russia, and the United Kingdom – have also been involved. Many experts predict that full autonomy for weapons could be achieved in 20 to 30 years, and some think even sooner.

“It is essential to stop the development of killer robots before they show up in national arsenals,” Goose said. “As countries become more invested in this technology, it will become harder to persuade them to give it up.”

Fully autonomous weapons could not meet the requirements of international humanitarian law, Human Rights Watch and the Harvard clinic said. They would be unable to distinguish adequately between soldiers and civilians on the battlefield or apply the human judgment necessary to evaluate the proportionality of an attack – whether civilian harm outweighs military advantage.

These robots would also undermine non-legal checks on the killing of civilians. Fully autonomous weapons could not show human compassion for their victims, and autocrats could abuse them by directing them against their own people. While replacing human troops with machines could save military lives, it could also make going to war easier, which would shift the burden of armed conflict onto civilians.

Finally, the use of fully autonomous weapons would create an accountability gap. Trying to hold the commander, programmer, or manufacturer legally responsible for a robot’s actions presents significant challenges. The lack of accountability would undercut the ability to deter violations of international law and to provide victims meaningful retributive justice.

While most militaries maintain that for the immediate future humans will retain some oversight over the actions of weaponized robots, the effectiveness of that oversight is questionable, Human Rights Watch and the Harvard clinic said. Moreover, military statements have left the door open to full autonomy in the future.

“Action is needed now, before killer robots cross the line from science fiction to feasibility,” Goose said.

Via Fast Company

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The Israeli military issued the world's first announcement of a military campaign via Twitter today with the disclosure of a large-scale, ongoing operation in Gaza. The Twitter announcement was made before a press conference was held.

Via BBC

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Governments around the world made nearly 21,000 requests for access to Google data in the first six months of this year, according to the search engine.

Its Transparency Reportindicates government surveillance of online lives is rising sharply.

The US government made the most demands, asking for details 7,969 times in the first six months of 2012.

Turkey topped the list for requests to remove content.

Government 'bellwether'

Google, in common with other technology and communication companies, regularly receives requests from government agencies and courts around the world to have access to content.

It has been publishing its Transparency Report twice a year since 2009 and has seen a steady rise in government demands for data. In its first report in 2009, it received 12,539 requests. The latest figure stands at 20,939.

"This is the sixth time we've released this data, and one trend has become clear: government surveillance is on the rise," Google said in a blog post.

The report acts as a bellwether for government behaviour around the world, a Google spokeswoman told the BBC.

"It reflects laws on the ground. For example in Turkey there are specific laws about defaming public figures whereas in Germany we get requests to remove neo-Nazi content," she said.

"And in Brazil we get a lot of requests to remove content during elections because there is a law banning parodies of candidates.

"We hope that the report will shed light on how governments interact with online services and how laws are reflected in online behaviour," she added.

The US has consistently topped the charts for data requests. France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK are also in the top 10.

In France and Germany it complied with fewer than half of all requests. In the UK it complied with 64% of requests and 90% of requests from the US.

Removing content

Google said the top three reasons cited by government for content removal were defamation, privacy and security.

Worldwide authorities made 1,789 requests for Google to remove content, up from 1,048 requests for the last six months of 2011.

In the period from January to June, Turkey made 501 requests for content removal.

These included 148 requests related to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk - the first president of Turkey, the current government, national identity and values.

Others included claims of pornography, hate speech and copyright.

Google has its own criteria for whether it will remove content - the request must be specific, relate to a specific web address and have come from a relevant authority.

In one example from the UK, Google received a request from police to remove 14 search results that linked to sites allegedly criticising the police and claiming individuals were involved in obscuring crimes. It did not remove the content.