Innovation&Society

Via ars technica

It was November 4, 1952, and Americans huddled in their living rooms to follow the results of the Presidential race between General Dwight David Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, Governor of Illinois. We like to think that our time is a unique moment of technological change. But the consumers observing this election represented an unprecedented generation of early adopters, who watched rather than listened to the race on the radio. By that year they had bought and installed in their homes about 21 million copies of a device called the television—about seven times the number that existed just three years earlier.

On that night they witnessed the birth of an even newer technology—a machine that could predict the election's results. Sitting next to the desk of CBS Anchor Walter Cronkite was a mockup of a huge gadget called a UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer), which Cronkite explained would augur the contest. J. Presper Eckert, the UNIVAC's inventor, stood next to the device and explained its workings. The woman who actually programmed the mainframe, Navy mathematician Grace Murray Hopper was nowhere to be seen; for days her team had input voting statistics from earlier elections, then wrote the code that would allow the calculator to extrapolate the contest based on previous races.

To the disquietude of national pollsters expecting a Stevenson victory, Hopper's UNIVAC group predicted a huge landslide for Eisenhower, and with only five percent of the results. CBS executives didn't know what to make of this bold finding. "We saw [UNIVAC] as an added feature to our coverage that could be very interesting in the future," Cronkite later recalled. "But I don't think that we felt the computer would become predominant in our coverage in any way."

And so CBS told its audience that UNIVAC only foresaw a close race. At the end of the evening, when it was clear that UNIVAC's actual findings were spot on, a spokesperson for the company that made the machine was allowed to disclose the truth—that the real prediction had been squelched.

"The uncanny accuracy of UNIVAC's prediction during a major televised event sent shock waves across through the nation," notes historian Kurt W. Beyer, author of Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age. "In the months that followed, 'UNIVAC' gradually became the generic term for a computer."

That's putting it mildly. By the late 1950s the UNIVAC and its cousin, the ENIAC, had inspired a generic sobriquet for anyone with computational prowess—a "BRAINIAC." The term became so embedded in American culture that to this day your typical computer literacy quiz includes the following multiple choice poser:

Which was not an early mainframe computer?

• ENIAC
• UNIVAC
• BRAINIAC

But the fact that this question is even posed is testimony to the other key component of UNIVAC's history—its famous trajectory was cut short by a corporation with a much larger shadow: IBM. The turbulent life of UNIVAC offers interesting lessons for developers and entrepreneurs in our time.

The machines and their teams

During the Second World War, two teams in the United States were deployed to improve the calculations necessary for artillery firing and strategic bombing. Hopper worked with Harvard mathematician Howard Aiken, whose Mark I computer performed computations for the Navy. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert's Electronic and Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) rolled out rocket firing tables for the Army.

While both groups served extraordinarily during the war, their leaders could not have thought about these devices more differently. Aiken viewed them as scientific tools. Mauchly saw their potential as commercial instruments.

After the conflict, Aiken obstinately lobbied against the commercialization of computing, inveighing against the "foolishness with Eckert and Mauchly," at computer conferences. Perhaps there was a need for five or six machines in the country, he told associates; no more. But Aiken's assistant Hopper was fascinated by the duo—the former a graduate student and the latter a professor of electronics.

Eckert was "looking way ahead," Hopper recalled. "Even though he was a college professor he was visualizing the use of these computers in the business and industrial area." The University of Pennsylvania sided with Aiken. The college offered Eckert and Mauchly tenured positions, but only on the condition that they sign patent releases for all their work. Both inventors resigned from the campus and in the spring of 1946 formed the Electronic Control Company, which eventually became the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation.

Over the course of five years, the two developers rethought everything associated with computational machines. The result was a device that went way beyond the age of punch card calculators associated with IBM devices. The UNIVAC, unveiled in 1951, was the fruit of this effort.

"No one who saw a UNIVAC failed to see how much it differed from existing calculators and punched card equipment," writes historian Paul E. Ceruzzi:

It used vacuum tubes—thousands of them. It stored data on tape, not cards. It was a large and expensive system, not a collection of different devices. The biggest difference was its internal design, not visible to the casual observer. The UNIVAC was a "stored program" computer, one of the first. More than anything else, that made it different from the machines it was designed to replace.

These characteristics would enable the UNIVAC to perform thousands more operations per second than its closest rival, the Harvard Mark II. And its adaptation of the entertainment industry's new tool—magnetic recording tape—would allow it to store vastly more data. UNIVAC was quickly picked up by the US Census Bureau in a $300,000 contract, which was followed by another deal via the National Bureau of Standards. Soon a racetrack betting odds calculator company called American Totalisator signed on, purchasing a 40 percent interest in the company.

You could see and hold it

But Eckert-Mauchly could not handle this volume of work on its own. Its principals drastically underbid on key contracts. After a plane crash killed the corporation's board president, the inventors and Totalisor clashed over the viability of the project. The duo then went to IBM for backing and met with Thomas Watson Junior and Senior, but could not convince the elder executive of the UNIVAC's viability.

"Having built his career on punch cards," Watson Jr. later reflected, "Dad distrusted magnetic tape instinctively. On a punch card, you had a piece of information that was permanent. You could see it and hold it in your hand.... But with magnetic tape, your data were stored invisibly on a medium that was designed to be erased and reused."

So EMCC turned to its second choice—the Remington Rand office equipment company, whose founder James Rand expressed outrage when he saw a reworked IBM typewriter rather than a Remington hooked up to the UNIVAC. "Take that label off that machine!" Rand declared on his first visit to an EMCC laboratory. "I don't want it seen in here!"

The tenderness over an IBM logo aside, Remington Rand brought an important innovation to the UNIVAC—television advertisements. The longer infomercials came complete with symphony orchestra introductions and historical progress timelines that began with the Egyptian Sphinx. The shorter ones extolled the role that UNIVAC was playing in weather prediction. "Today UNIVAC is saving time and increasing efficiency for science, industry, business, and government," one ad concluded.

But while that was certainly true about what the machine did for its clients, historian Beyer notes that it didn't extend to Remington's management of EMCC. Most of the office company's top staff, like its founder, didn't understand the device, and related more to punch card machines. The man put in direct charge of EMCC, former Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves, tossed Mauchly to the sales department when he flunked a company security clearance test (apparently he had attended some Communist Party meetings in the 1930s).

On top of that, new management did not sympathize with EMCC's female programmers, among them Grace Hopper, who by 1952 had written the UNIVAC's first software compiler. "There were not the same opportunities for women in larger corporations like Remington Rand," she later reflected. "They were older companies, and the jobs had been stereotyped."

Then there was Groves' marketing strategy for the UNIVAC, which amounted to selling less of the devices, even as they were being hawked on TV as exemplars of technological progress. He ordered a fifty percent annual production quota drop. "With such low sales expectations, there was little incentive to educate Remington Rand's sizeable sales force about the new technology," Beyer explains.

The biggest blow, however, came when IBM began to rethink its aversion to magnetic mainframe storage.

Left in the dust

Despite Remington/EMCC's internal chaos, interest in the UNIVAC exploded after the 1952 CBS demonstration. This created more problems. Hopper's programming staff was now besieged with attractive offers from companies using IBM gear, creating a brainiac drain within EMCC itself. "Some members of Dr. Grace Hopper's staff have already left for positions with users of IBM equipment," Mauchly noted in a memo, "and those of her staff who still remain are now expecting attractive offers from outside sources."

Customer service and support became more and more of a challenge. Still, the UNIVAC was highly competitive with IBM equipment. The question was whether EMCC could beat Big Blue in government contract bidding, specifically for the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) defense communications network.

The SAGE project amounted to an early-warning radar system designed to pick up enemy bomber activity around the nation's borders. It was the brainchild of Jay Forrester, director of MIT's Sernomechanisms Laboratory, and central to the idea was a network of digital computers to integrate the network, dubbed "Project Whirlwind." In three years Forrester's team had pioneered real-time, high-capacity access memory for the mainframes. The government now offered a contract to build 50 Whirlwind computers. IBM quickly rallied its forces for the contest.

"I thought it was absolutely essential to IBM's future that we win it," Thomas Watson Jr., who had none of Senior's allergies to digital computing, later explained. "The company that built those computers was going to be way ahead of the game, because it would learn the secrets of mass production."

Forrester gave the matter some thought. Remington Rand had UNIVAC. And it had the prestige of Manhattan Project Director Leslie Groves. But Remington did not have IBM's scale of operation or its production capacity. Indeed, under Groves' direction, it had scaled that capacity down. In 1953, the government offered the contract to IBM. Historian Beyer explains the consequences of this decision:

Not only did IBM take away knowledge about random-access magnetic core memory; they also learned how the Whirlwind team had pushed the technological envelope in a number of other areas. Forrester's staff had figured out a variety of ways to lower the frequency of vacuum-tube failure, thus increasing system reliability. Cathode-ray-tube displays were ingeniously employed to display processed information, index registers made programming easier, and real-time information from radar sensors could be processed without the need for a slow input medium such as punch cards.

IBM quickly integrated these discoveries into its next rollout of commercial computers. The market loved them and ordered thousands. "In a little over a year we started delivering those redesigned computers," Watson Jr. later boasted. "They made the UNIVAC obsolete and we soon left Remington Rand in the dust."

Aftermath

Sensing the dust around it, in 1955 Remington merged with the Sperry Corporation and became Sperry Rand. No less than General Douglas MacArthur ran the new entity. This gave the UNIVAC a new lease on digital life, but one that operated in the shadow of the company that had once sworn that it would stick to punch tape: IBM.

In the meantime, a slew of firms jumped into the high-speed computing business, among them RCA, National Cash Register, General Electric, and Honeywell. "IBM and the Seven Dwarfs," they were dubbed. UNIVAC was now a dwarf.

Grace Hopper continued her work. She became an advocate of the assumption inherent in her UNIVAC compiler which she called "automatic" computing—the notion that programs should emphasize simple English words. Her compiler, later called FLOW-MATIC, understood 20 words.

Her contemporaries patiently informed her that this number was enough. Hopper "was told very quickly that [she] couldn't do this because computers didn't understand English," she later noted. Happily, she did not believe this to be true, and advised a team that developed the COBOL programming language, which she championed and furthered through the 1960s and 1970s. US Navy Rear-Admiral Grace Murray Hopper died in 1992.

Having fattened IBM on government grants for decades, the Department of Justice launched an antitrust suit against the corporation in 1969. This initiative was suddenly withdrawn by the Reagan administration in 1982—as the company once again jolted the industry by jumping into the PC market.

As for UNIVAC, its complex birth 60 years ago remains the moment when we discovered that computers were going to be part of our lives—that they were going to become integral our work and collective imagination. It was also a moment when information systems developers and entrepreneurs learned that innovation and genius are not always a match for influence and organizational scale.

"Howard Aiken was wrong," historian Paul Cerruzi wrote in 2000. "There turned out to be a market for millions of electronic digital computers by the 1990s." Their emergence awaited advances in solid state physics. Nonetheless, "the nearly ubiquitous computers of the 1990s are direct descendants of what Eckert and Mauchly hoped to commercialize in the late 1940s."

Further reading

Most of the material in this essay comes from Kurt W. Beyer's must-read book, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (MIT Press). Also essential is Paul E. Ceruzzi's History of Modern Computing.

Photograph by stereotype441

Most monitoring of tumor growth is currently done via CT scans, MRI, and other forms of external imaging. "The advantage of an implant over external imaging is that you can monitor the tumor on the go," says Sven Becker of the Technical University of Munich. "This means patients would have to pay fewer visits to the hospital for progression and postsurgery monitoring of tumors. They also wouldn't have to swallow contrast agents."

While the device is currently calibrated to monitor oxygen, its chips can also be used to monitor other signs of tumor change or growth. "Oxygen levels are one of the primary indicators of tumor growth, but we have also found a way to activate the pH sensors by recalibrating the device from outside the body," says Grothe.

Via big think

By Dominic Basulto

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Far too many people are walking around with their heads immersed in their tiny mobile devices, or communicating affectionately with their tiny smart phones while out in public with perfectly acceptable human companions. The only problem, of course, is that humans are not evolutionarily equipped to act like this – and that inevitably leads to awkward scenes like people running into things on a city street or couples awkwardly texting with other people while having dinner "together." Tiny screens, while useful for monitoring the electronic minutiae of our daily lives, are not so useful for keeping our heads up and making eye contact with other humans. Fortunately, a number of tech companies are thinking of ways to make Looking Up the new Looking Down.

Mobile device makers, encouraged by the rapid adoption of tablet technologies and people's embrace of post-PC screens, are busy developing new ways of interacting with these smaller screens that are not "inappropriately immersive." Finland’s mobile phone giant Nokia, bowed and bruised after failing to keep up with Apple in the development of sleek new mobile devices and other objects of consumer lust, is exploring a new strategy to take on Apple: developing cleverly-designed phones that enable you to make eye contact and become aware of the environment around you. As Nokia's head designer Marko Ahtisaari explained to the Wall Street Journal, "When you look around at a restaurant in Helsinki, you'll see couples having their heads down instead of having eye contact and being aware of the environment they're in... Designing for true mobility... is an example of what people would not explicitly ask for but love when they get it."

Nokia is still being mysterious about what it has in store for future mobile users, but most likely, a "Look Up mobile device" (for lack of a better word) would be designed to combine the viewing potential of big screens with thr easy-to-operate interface of a smaller device. This is actually harder than it sounds. According to usability expert Jakob Nielsen, there are five different screen experiences – what he refers to as TV, mobile, desktop, "very small" (i.e. screens no larger than an RFID chip) and "very big" (i.e. screens as large as buildings). It's not enough, though, simply to translate a "very large" screen experience to a "very small" screen -- the usability considerations change, according to the different screen experiences. That's why it's always been so frustrating to browse the Web on a mobile phone - there are very different usability characteristics once you shrink a screen.

So what would a Look Up phone experience feel like? The answer might be a hybrid form of experience that uses mobile screens for mobility and geo-location, but takes advantage of larger viewing surfaces. Take U.K. retail shopping giant Tesco, for example, which has been experimenting with "virtual shopping walls" that users can interact with while using their mobile devices. While these shopping walls are completely mobile-enabled, all the activity takes place with shoppers tilting their heads up. Think of bounding out of a subway car and ordering groceries for dinner as you exit the station, all via a mobile device -- and all while keeping your ahead aloft.

The transmedia experience - formerly the exclusive domain of entertainment brands and Hollywood - is starting to blend over into every aspect of our lives. Transmedia – which refers to seamless storytelling across different online and offline platforms – has been re-interpreted by mobile designers to include surfaces and screens. When done right, this cross-surface storytelling leads to entirely new types of interactions and experiences. BERG London, in collaboration with Dentsu London, for example, has been experimenting with "incidental media" that transform everyday objects into interactive surfaces. One thing is certain -- the future is sure to turn a few heads - or at least, tilt them upward for awhile.

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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.

"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."

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.

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.

Via OStatic

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Recently, you may have heard about new efforts to bring online access to regions where it has been economically nonviable before. This idea is not new, of course. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative was squarely aimed at the goal until it ran into some significant hiccups. One of the latest moves on this front comes from Geeks Without Frontiers, which has a stated goal of positively impacting one billion lives with technology over the next 10 years. The organization, sponsored by Google and The Tides Foundation, is working on low cost, open source Wi-Fi solutions for "areas where legacy broadband models are currently considered to be uneconomical."

According to an announcement from Geeks Without Frontiers:

"GEEKS expects that this technology, built mainly by Cozybit, managed by GEEKS and I-Net Solutions, and sponsored by Google, Global Connect, Nortel, One Laptop Per Child, and the Manna Energy Foundation, will enable the development and rollout of large-scale mesh Wi-Fi networks for atleast half of the traditional network cost. This is a major step in achieving the vision of affordable broadband for all."

It's notable that One Laptop Per Child is among the sponsors of this initiative. The organization has open sourced key parts of its software platform, and could have natural synergies with a global Wi-Fi effort. 

“By driving down the cost of metropolitan and village scale Wi-Fi networks, millions more people will be able to reap the economic and social benefits of significantly lower cost Internet access,” said Michael Potter, one of the founders of the GEEKS initiative.

The Wi-Fi technology that GEEKS is pursuing is mesh networking technology. Specifically, open80211s (o11s), which implements the AMPE (Authenticated Mesh Peering Exchange) enabling multiple authenticated nodes to encrypt traffic between themselves. Mesh networks are essentially widely distributed wireless networks based on many repeaters throught a specific location.

You can read much more about the open80211s standard here.  The GEEKS initiative has significant backers, and with sponsorship from OLPC, will probably benefit from good advice on the topic of bringing advanced technologies to disadvantaged regions of the world. The effort will be worth watching.

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?