Innovation&Society

Via PC World

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Via motherboard

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Humanity just made a large, DIY step towards a time when everyone can upgrade themselves towards being a cyborg. Of all places, it happened somewhere in the post-industrial tristesse of the German town of Essen.

It's there that I met up with biohacker Tim Cannon, and followed along as he got what is likely the first-ever computer chip implant that can record and transmit his biometrical data. Combined in a sealed box with a battery that can be wirelessly charged, it's not a small package. And as we saw, Cannon had it implanted directly under his skin by a fellow biohacking enthusiast, not a doctor, and without anesthesia.

Called the Circadia 1.0, the implant can record data from Cannon's body and transfer it to any Android-powered mobile device. Unlike wearable computers and biometric-recording devices like Fitbit, the subcutaneous device is open-source, and allows the user  full control over how data is collected and used.

The Circadia device before being implanted in Cannon's arm.

Because a regular surgeon wouldn't be allowed to implant a device unapproved by medical authorities, Tim relied on the expertise of body modification enthusiasts, who had all met in Essen for the BMXnet conference. The procedure itself was so delicate that not only were we not allowed to film the thing, but we were not even able to share where exactly it took place.

One of the pioneers in body modification is Steve Haworth, who conducted the surgery. Despite a family background in medical device engineering, Haworth turned to the more experimental side of altering the human body in the early 90s, first with piercing and tattoo studios in Phoenix and later by developing modifications like 3D tattoos and the metal mohawk. Haworth used his own tools for the surgery, and as he's not a board-certified surgeon, was not able to use anesthetics. He did assure me that "there are pretty amazing things we can do with ice." It sounded convincing at the time.

Tim Cannon.

Circadia 1.0 was built by Tim and colleagues from his company, Grindhouse Wetware. This team of hackers and artists—self-taught and trained in the traditional sense—has become well-known for converting garages and basements in Pittsburgh into their laboratory for developing the man-machine future.

In its first version, the chip can record Cannon's body temperature and transfer it in real time via Bluetooth. Three LEDs built into the package serve as status lights, and can be controlled to light up the tattoo in Cannon's forearm.

It's a humble beginning, but updates are on the way. Grindehouse Wetware have already completed the development of a pulse monitoring device, and he's also been able to shrink the size of the Circadia system, which will make the procedure quite a bit more user-friendly. He's also working to automate communication between the chip and the internet of things.

"I think that our environment should listen more accurately und more intuitively to what's happening in our body," Cannon explained. "So if, for example, I've had a stressful day, the Circadia will communicate that to my house and will prepare a nice relaxing atmosphere for when I get home: dim the lights, let in a hot bath."

So Cannon is essentially trying to integrate the body into the growing quantified and connected universe. But unlike the life-loggers and step-counter-users, biohackers take the concept of self-improvement to the next level. Why would one literally hack his body?

According to Cannon, the developments are not about simply trying to insert gadgets into one's body for a performance enhancement. The end goal is to transcend the boundaries of biology, and try to hack evolution itself.

As hacking, both for good and bad, has become pervasive in society, and as the appropriation of communication networks has become a common battleground, biohackers like Cannon are trying to take the fight for self-determination into the realm to the technologized body.

It's as if there a new dimension has been added to Michel Foucault's terms biopolitics and biopower, which he developed in the 1970s. Through biopower, Foucault described the emergence of a new form of power and politics as an extension to traditional state power in the 20th century, which takes the body as an object of quantification and the reproduction of society's power structures. His point seems valid today, as the political fights of our time not only take place in legal discourses, but are also being staged over what's legal to do with one's own body.

In the future, hackers' and activists' disputes with restrictive governments may not only be about communication, information, and digital infrastructure, but may also shift into debates about our own technologically-improved physical beings. In the face of companies and governmental agencies developing implants that are protected by patents and secret test procedures, the question of how to remain in control of our bodies may turn out to be a very real pressing social issue, something Cannon is preemptively trying to push against.

Cannon does hold the human body as imperfect and failing in many ways, and refuses to obey the "established medical industry's artificial ideas about what 100 percent is." He has also decided to pause theoretical and academic discussions on immortality, and is focusing instead on what he terms practical transhumanism. In essence, he aims to use open-source and networked research approaches to define the capabilities of his body and to find out how far he can upgrade himself.

The security risks are real, as we've learned with Dick Cheney's heart. At the same time, complex medical products tend to be mostly restricted to those who can afford them. Even though the former vice president may dislike the thought, a bunch of biohackers aim to prove that a well-connected and enthusiastic underground culture of self-taught garage tinkerers may be able to increase the safety and accessibility of medical devices. The Linux community stands as proof enough for Cannon that open source implant can be developed safely and securely.

Building on the much cheaper development costs of an open coding-network, Tim wants to realize his goal of offering cheap organs for everyone in a near future. "We have been working on the Circadia Chip for 18 months, needing only a fraction of the costs that big companies would use for this," he said. "The same will go for our next projects and an artificial heart is a goal for us for the next decade."

Tim Cannon demonstrates the prototype of the Circadia and the control commands on his tablet device.

In a few months, the first production series of the Circadia chip should be ready. With an expected price of around $500, the chip should be relatively accessible for just about any enthusiast, and will mainly be distributed through the networks of the body modification community. That means that if you find the right local establishment, you could have your own chip installed. Haworth told me that he would charge roughly $200 for the procedure itself.

The question of whether or not we'll blur the line between man and machine, of whether or not we'll enhance the human body, has long been answered in the affirmative. Now it's a question of who will break new ground, and when. As to whether or not the roboticiziation of humans is found in better hands with DIY enthusiasts or the medical establishment, and who will make farther strides, only time will tell.

In the meantime, there are just slight battery difficulties to be resolved:

Via The Verge

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For some time Facebook has studied your Likes, comments, and clicks to help create better ads and new products, but soon, the company might also track the location of your cursor on screen. Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin told The Wall Street Journal about several new measures the company is testing meant to help improve its user-tracking, like seeing how long you hover your cursor over an ad (and if you click it), and evaluating if certain elements on screen are within view or are off the page. New data gathered using these methods could help Facebook create more engaging News Feed layouts and ads.

The Journal notes that this kind of tracking is hardly uncommon, but until now, Facebook hadn't gone this deep in its behavioral data measurement. Sites like Shutterstock, for example, track how long users hover their cursors over an image before deciding to buy it. Facebook is famous for its liberal use of A/B testing to try out new products on consumers, but it's using the same method to judge the efficacy of its new testing methods. "Facebook should know within months whether it makes sense to incorporate the new data collection into the business," reports the Journal.

Assuming Facebook's tests go well, it shouldn't be long before our every flinch is tracked on the site. So what might come next? Our eyeballs.

 

Via The Guardian

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Newly discovered mechanism could help researchers understand ageing process and lead to ways of slowing it down

Via BBC

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Via TechHive

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Hollywood likes to paint movie pirates as freeloaders without morals, but maybe those so-called dastardly downloaders are simply under-served.

A new website called PiracyData.org tracks the most pirated movies of the week, as reported by TorrentFreak, and taps into Can I Stream It? to show whether file sharers could have bought or rented the movie online instead.

As PiracyData's chart below shows, four out of the 10 most pirated movies cannot be purchased legally online. Out of the remaining six movies, three are available for full-priced purchase, but not for rent. None of the top 10 movies can be watched through subscription streaming services such as Netflix.

On its face, it looks like a missed opportunity for the movie industry. Viewers may feel pushed toward piracy when they can't purchase or at least rent the movies they want to watch.

But it's also worth noting the release timing of these movies. Every single movie on the list came out this year, but is no longer showing in major theaters. With the exception of three films, most of these movies are now in an awkward stage where you can buy them on DVD, but cannot rent them online.

DVD sales are plummeting. People are growing accustomed to pressing a button and streaming a movie instantly. The idea of withholding new movies from digital rental just to juice DVD sales looks increasingly antiquated as people move beyond the optical disc. For disposable films that people only want to watch once, a mandatory $15 or $20 purchase is undesirable as well.

Of course, there are exceptions. People do have rental options for The Lone Ranger, After Earth, and This is the End, yet they remain popular to download on BitTorrent. Unscrupulous freeloaders do exist, and are not going away. But when the only legal options are DVD or mandatory purchase, it's no surprise that potential paying customers will turn to piracy instead.

Via Mashable

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The world of Big Data is one of pervasive data collection and aggressive analytics. Some see the future and cheer it on; others rebel. Behind it all lurks a question most of us are asking — does it really matter? I had a chance to find out recently, as I got to see what Acxiom, a large-scale commercial data aggregator, had collected about me.

At least in theory large-scale data collection matters quite a bit. Large data sets can be used to create social network maps and can form the seeds for link analysis of connections between individuals. Some see this as a good thing; others as a bad one — but whatever your viewpoint, we live in a world which sees increasing power and utility in Big Data’s large-scale data sets.

Of course, much of the concern is about government collection. But it’s difficult to assess just how useful this sort of data collection by the government is because, of course, most governmental data collection projects are classified. The good news, however, is that we can begin to test the utility of the program in the private sector arena. A useful analog in the private sector just became publicly available and it’s both moderately amusing and instructive to use it as a lens for thinking about Big Data.

Acxiom is one of the largest commercial, private sector data aggregators around. It collects and sells large data sets about consumers — sometimes even to the government. And for years it did so quietly, behind the scene — as one writer put it “mapping the consumer genome.” Some saw this as rather ominous; others as just curious. But it was, for all of us, mysterious. Until now.

In September, the data giant made available to the public a portion of its data set. They created a new website — Abouthedata.com — where a consumer could go to see what data the company had collected about them. Of course, in order to access the data about yourself you had to first verify your own identity (I had to send in a photocopy of my driver’s license), but once you had done so, it would be possible to see, in broad terms, what the company thought it knew about you — and how close that knowledge was to reality.

I was curious, so I thought I would go explore myself and see what it was they knew and how accurate they were. The results were at times interesting, illuminating and mundane. Here are a few observations:

To begin with, the fundamental purpose of the data collection is to sell me things — that’s what potential sellers want to know about potential buyers and what, say, Amazon might want to know about me. So I first went and looked at a category called “Household Purchase Data” — in other words what I had recently bought.

It turns out that I buy … well … everything. I buy food, beverages, art, computing equipment, magazines, men’s clothing, stationary, health products, electronic products, sports and leisure products, and so forth. In other words, my purchasing habits were, to Acxiom, just an undifferentiated mass. Save for the notation that I had bought an antique in the past and that I have purchased “High Ticket Merchandise,” it seems that almost everything I bought was something that most any moderately well-to-do consumer would buy.

I do suppose that the wide variety of purchases I made is, itself, the point — by purchasing so widely I self-identify as a “good” consumer. But if that’s the point then the data set seems to miss the mark on “how good” I really am. Under the category of “total dollars spent,” for example, it said that I had spent just $1,898 in the past two years. Without disclosing too much about my spending habits in this public forum, I think it is fair to say that this is a significant underestimate of my purchasing activity.

The next data category of “Household Interests” was equally unilluminating. Acxiom correctly said I was interested in computers, arts, cooking, reading and the like. It noted that I was interested in children’s items (for my grandkids) and beauty items and gardening (both my wife’s interest, probably confused with mine). Here, as well, there was little differentiation, and I assume the breadth of my interests is what matters rather that the details. So, as a consumer, examining what was collected about me seemed to disclose only a fairly anodyne level of detail.

[Though I must object to the suggestion that I am an Apple user J. Anyone who knows me knows I prefer the Windows OS. I assume this was also the result of confusion within the household and a reflection of my wife’s Apple use. As an aside, I was invited throughout to correct any data that was in error. This I chose not to do, as I did not want to validate data for Acxiom – that’s their job not mine—and I had no real interest in enhancing their ability to sell me to other marketers. On the other hand I also did not take the opportunity they offered to completely opt-out of their data system, on the theory that a moderate amount of data in the world about me may actually lead to being offered some things I want to purchase.]

Things became a bit more intrusive (and interesting) when I started to look at my “Characteristic Data” — that is data about who I am. Some of the mistakes were a bit laughable — they pegged me as of German ethnicity (because of my last name, naturally) when, with all due respect to my many German friends, that isn’t something I’d ever say about myself. And they got my birthday wrong — lord knows why.

But some of their insights were at least moderately invasive of my privacy, and highly accurate. Acxiom “inferred” for example, that I’m married. They identified me accurately as a Republican (but notably not necessarily based on voter registration — instead it was the party I was “associated with by voter registration or as a supporter”). They knew there were no children in my household (all grown up) and that I run a small business and frequently work from home. And they knew which sorts of charities we supported (from surveys, online registrations and purchasing activity). Pretty accurate, I’d say.

Finally, it was completely unsurprising that the most accurate data about me was closely related to the most easily measurable and widely reported aspect of my life (at least in the digital world) — namely, my willingness to dive into the digital financial marketplace.

Acxiom knew that I had several credit cards and used them regularly.

Acxiom knew that I had several credit cards and used them regularly. It had a broadly accurate understanding of my household total income range [I’m not saying!].

They also knew all about my house — which makes sense since real estate and liens are all matters of public record. They knew I was a home owner and what the assessed value was. The data showed, accurately, that I had a single family dwelling and that I’d lived there longer than 14 years. It disclosed how old my house was (though with the rather imprecise range of having been built between 1900 and 1940). And, of course, they knew what my mortgage was, and thus had a good estimate of the equity I had in my home.

So what did I learn from this exercise?

In some ways, very little. Nothing in the database surprised me, and the level of detail was only somewhat discomfiting. Indeed, I was more struck by how uninformative the database was than how detailed it was — what, after all, does anyone learn by knowing that I like to read? Perhaps Amazon will push me book ads, but they already know I like to read because I buy directly from them. If they had asserted that I like science fiction novels or romantic comedy movies, that level of detail might have demonstrated a deeper grasp of who I am — but that I read at all seems pretty trivial information about me.

I do, of course, understand that Acxiom has not completely lifted the curtains on its data holdings. All we see at About The Data is summary information. You don’t get to look at the underlying data elements. But even so, if that’s the best they can do ….

In fact, what struck me most forcefully was (to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt) the banality of it all. Some, like me, see great promise in big data analytics as a way of identifying terrorists or tracking disease. Others, with greater privacy concerns, look at big data and see Big Brother. But when I dove into one big data set (albeit only partially), held by one of the largest data aggregators in the world, all I really became was a bit bored.

Maybe that’s what they wanted as a way of reassuring me. If so, Acxiom succeeded, in spades.

 

Via PCWorld

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Via TechCrunch

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Once upon a time there were things called jobs, and they were well understood. People went to work for companies, in offices or in factories. There were exceptions — artists, aristocrats, entrepeneurs — but they were rare.

Laws, regulations, and statistics were based on this assumption; but, increasingly, what people do today doesn’t fit neatly into that anachronistic 1950s rubric. I’ve had the pleasure of trying to explain to border officials that my “job” consisted of contracting in Country A for a client in Country B, while also writing books and selling apps. I don’t recommend it.

This disconnect will just keep getting worse. The so-called “sharing economy” mediated by sites and apps like Lyft, TaskRabbit, Thumbtack, Postmates, Mechanical Turk, etc etc etc., replaces “consistent work for a single employer” with “an agglomeration of short-term/one-time gigs.” That doesn’t really map to the old-economy assumptions at all. And even relatively high-skill professions are now being nibbled at by shared-economy software; consider Disrupt winner YourMechanic.

I say “so-called” because, let’s face it, “sharing economy” is mostly spin. It mostly consists of people who have excess disposable income hiring those who do not; it’s pretty rare to vacillate across that divide. Far more accurate to call it the “servant economy.” (Not to be confused with the “patronage economy” — Kickstarter, Indiegogo — which deserves its own post.)

It’s not surprising that relatively-wealthy techies like me have created apps and services which make relatively-wealthy techies’ lives a little better, instead of solving the real and hard problems faced by poor people. But it is a little surprising that these apps effectively echo what’s happening on a massive scale in the corporate world.

Did you know that “the hiring rate of temp workers is five times that of hiring overall in the past year” and “The number of temps has jumped more than 50 percent since the recession ended”? Meanwhile, in the UK, “The median hourly earnings for the self-employed are £5.58, less than half the £11.21 earned by employees.”

The Harvard Business Review points out:

This “ephemeral workforce” phenomenon isn’t just American; the UK has also set records in the contingently employed. Something profoundly structural is going on. Even healthier economic growth won’t make it go away.

We already know how software will eat manufacturing (robots and 3D printing) and transportation (self-driving vehicles.) This new servant economy shows us how software will eat much of the service sector; by turning turn many of its existing full-time jobs into a disconnected cloud of temporary gigs.

In many ways this is inarguably a good thing. I may not think much of Uber’s CEO’s politics but I think even less of the insane medallion system that rules taxi industries across America for no good reason. (Anyone who believes taxi companies’ claims that they’re safer probably also believes the TSA’s claims that security theater keeps you safe.) I applaud the leveling of that demented regulatory wall.

What’s more, when the New Temps no longer require companies like Manpower to connect them to their actual employers, but can pick and choose on the fly among competing third parties, that too will be a huge benefit for all concerned. It’s entertaining to read Manpower’s CEO dismissal of this trend as “somewhat niche…I don’t think it’s going to take over the world” in a recent Wall Street Journal piece. I suspect that quote will sound fantastically dense in ten years’ time.

And yet this trend makes me uneasy. The slow transformation of a huge swathe of the economy from steady jobs to an ever-shifting maelstrom of short-term contracts with few-to-no benefits, for which an ever-larger pool of people will compete thanks to ever-lower barriers to entry, in a sector where most jobs are already poorly paid…does this sound to you like it will decrease inequality and increase social mobility? Maybe, it certain specialized high-skill areas. But across the spectrum? I doubt it.

It does sound like it will reduce prices…but, unlike Wal-Mart, servant-economy providers are rarely servant-economy customers. (As prices drop, their incomes drop too, keeping the now-cheaper services still out of reach; a vicious circle.) The people who benefit are, surprise, surprise, the techies, the professionals, the bankers, the steadily dwindling middle class. You know. People like you and me. And, of course, the companies hiring the armies of temps.

I don’t want to sound like a pessimistic Luddite; I do believe that this will ultimately be better than the status quo for most people. But it seems to me that — like many of the other economic shifts triggered by new technologies, as I’ve been arguing for some time — the vast majority of the benefits will accrue to a small and shrinking fraction of the population.

Is that inequality such a bad thing? If the techno-economic tide is lifting all boats, does it really matter if it lifts the yachts higher than the fishing boats, and the super-yachts into the stratosphere? It seems to me that the answer depends in large part on whether the fishing boats have any realistic prospect of achieving yachtdom:

Unfortunately, social mobility is actually significantly lower in America than in other rich nations…and so far I see no reason to believe that the combination of tomorrow’s technology and today’s economic architecture will change that. In fact I have a nasty gut feeling that the opposite is true, both in America and worldwide.

Via Mashable

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The war veteran who recoils at the sound of a car backfiring and the recovering drug addict who feels a sudden need for their drug of choice when visiting old haunts have one thing in common: Both are victims of their own memories. New research indicates those memories could actually be extinguished.

A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found a gene called Tet1 can facilitate the process of memory extinction. In the study, mice were put in a cage that delivered an electric shock. Once they learned to fear that cage, they were then put in the same cage but not shocked. Mice with the normal Tet1 levels no longer feared the cage once new memories were formed without the shock. Mice with the Tet1 gene eliminated continued to fear the cage even when there was no shock delivered.

“We learned from this that the animals defective in the Tet1 gene are not capable of weakening the fear memory,” Le-Huei Tsai, director of MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, told Discovery News. “For more than a half century it has been documented that gene expression and protein synthesis are essential for learning and forming new memories. In this study we speculated that the Tet1 gene regulates chemical modifications to DNA.”

The MIT researchers found that Tet1 changes levels of DNA methylation, the process of causing a chemical reaction. When methylation is prominent, the process of learning new memories is more efficient. When methylation is weaker, the opposite is true.

“The results support the notion that once a fear memory is formed, to extinguish that memory a new memory has to form,” Tsai said. “The new memory competes with the old memory and eventually supersedes the old memory.”

Experts in the study of memory and anxiety agree.

“This is highly significant research in that it presents a completely new mechanism of memory regulation and behavior regulation,” said Jelena Radulovic, a professor of bipolar disease at Northwestern University. The mechanism of manipulating DNA is likely to affect many other things. Now the question will be whether there will be patterns that emerge, whether there will be side effects on moods and emotions and other aspects. But the findings have real relevance.”

Radulovic, who was not directly involved in the study, says the primary significance of the findings have to do with eliminating fear.

“The results show us a very specific paradigm of learned reduction of fear,” she said. “This could mean that interference with the Tet1 gene and modification of DNA could be an important target to reduce fear in people with anxiety disorders.”

For her part, Tsai is most encouraged at the ability to approach anxiety disorders at the molecular and cellular levels inside the brain. “We can now see the bio-chemical cascade of events in the process of memory formation and memory extinction,” said Tsai. “Hopefully this can lead to new drug discoveries.”

Meanwhile, research in memory extinction is progressing quickly, largely due to new discoveries through traditional experimentation, augmented by advances in technology, Tsai said.

Elsewhere, parallel research is focusing more on physiological processes that cause memories, rather than epigenetics (the study of how genes are turned on or off). At the Scripps Research Institute, researchers are studying what causes a methamphetamine addict to relapse when confronted with familiar triggers that a person associates with drug use.

“Substance users who are trying to stay clean, when exposed to the environment where they used the drug have all kinds of associations and memories in their minds that are strong enough to elicit cravings,” said Courtney Miller, an assistant professor at the Scripps Research Institute, who led the research. “The idea is to try to selectively disrupt the dangerous memories but not lose other memories."
“We taught rodents to press a lever to get an infusion of meth, and that puts the drug delivery in the animal’s control,” Miller told Discovery News. “They were put in an environment that was unique to them every day for two weeks, where they could press the lever and get meth. They learned to associate that environment with the meth, the place where they could ‘use.’”

The animals were then injected with a chemical that inhibited actin polymerization and placed back in their home environment.

“The process of actin polymerization happens when neurons contact each other, and that is how information is passed,” Miller said. “Think of it like a Lego project. There are little pieces that contact each other. The receiving point on a neuron, called a dendritic spine, enlarges when a memory is stored. It gives more surface areas so you can have more neurotransmission.

"Actin controls that, enlarges the spine and keeps it large. In a normal memory, pieces come off the top and circle around and add on to the bottom very slowly. In a meth memory the piece comes off the top, wraps around and comes back much faster. We gave a drug that takes the pieces away and they are not added back on. The point of contact falls apart and the memory is lost.”

The process, called depolymerization, means that memories are no longer stored.

Longtime memory researchers are highly supportive of Miller’s findings.

“The findings here are real game changers,” said Gary S. Lynch, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at University of California School of Medicine. “What this points to is a completely new strategy for treatment of addiction. For the past 10 years there have been many challenges to the notion that memories are cemented in. But this study shows that memory really is still a dynamic, malleable business and that there can be another way of dealing with dependency.”

Lynch is particularly taken with the study’s findings regarding the role of actin.

“Actin is the most prevalent protein in the body,” said Lynch, who has studied memory issues for more than 30 years. “Now to find that it is so critical to dependency is breathtaking in its implications.”

In the future, it's possible the process can be generalized to other addictions, such as nicotine, Miller said.

As for how distant that future may be, Tsai believes we are still many years from applying the current research to human beings with psychiatric disorders.

“I would like to believe that through cognitive behavior therapy or some new medication, eventually — not five or 10 years from now, but eventually — a lot of the mechanisms are going to be solved,” Tsai said. “We’ll know how good memories form, how bad memories form. But the brain is an organ that is not very accessible to manipulation, unlike most other organs. My prediction is that progress on memory research, including memory extinction, will speed up considerably because of the emerging technology.”

That technology, Tsai says, includes a new 3-D, high-resolution brain imaging called CLARITY, developed by a research team at Stanford University. CLARITY essentially makes it possible to view the brain in a transparent way, allowing researchers to see in detail its complex fine wiring and essential features.

Image: Flickr, Chris