igargoyle

Sealand Devastated by Fire

The totally cyberpunk country called Sealand, which housed the ultra cool data haven called HavenCo caught on fire yesterday. The country, which is based on an anti aircraft tower of the Essex coast of Great Brittian has come under attack on several occasions by people who wanted to lay claim to the tiny country.

“There have been a number of explosions on board as the fire has engulfed gas bottles and batteries. Only one person was on Sealand at the time, whom we understand to be a watchman whose job was to maintain the generators and equipment.

“A team of firefighters was flown to the scene but because of the damage to the structure they decided not to go on board.

“A firefighting tug sprayed the whole structure with water in the hope this would eventually cool the fire and starve it of oxygen.”

A spokesperson for Suffolk Fire Service confirmed the fire was left to burn itself out and was under control by 3.10pm.

Michael Bates of Sealand's royal family vows to rebuild. Good for him, Sealand has been around for a long time, and it would be a shame to see it disapear as it's one of the more successful "Start your own country" projects.

[ Link to original story. Link to followup story. Map of where Sealand is located. Via boingboing. ]

Power to the Cyborgs!

I found this quote from Network Publics, and found it very inspiring. Technology is being adopted at an amazing rate, and these days it's not uncommon to see people wearing computers on their belt. Even though technology like head mounted displays are still rare, the cyborg desire in our culture is moving at an incredible rate.

It was Japanese teenage girls, after all, who hijacked pagers and portable phones from salarymen in the early nineties, and went on to help shape what came to be known as the mobile revolution. But the story doesn’t stop on the streets of Tokyo, Seoul, or Helsinki. Nowadays, China and India are where the ambitions of mobile operators have turned. Its not just Japanese teens for whom the portable phone was the first personal computer. The wave of wireless and portable computing is engulfing countries that lacked widespread telephone usage, much less computer access. Computers for the masses! Power to the cyborgs!

[ Link ]

Geospatial Web Lecture

Some geowanker sent me this video of Mike Liebhold giving a lecture on the Geospatial Web. It's not from Where2.0, but Mike has some good stuff to say. This guy predicted the web, and is in the business of predicting trends for the Institute For The Future (IFTF). If you didn't catch his Where 2.0 keynote, I'd watch this.

[ Link to embedded quicktime video ]

Brain Chips

CNN reports on a couple of companies, Cyberkintic and Neural Signals, developing neural implants for the disabled and some of the impacts they are destined to have on the public at large..

"In this trial," he explains, "we've implanted a tiny chip in the brain and that tiny chip picks up signals about moving the arm." The signal is then converted into simple commands that can be used to control computers, turn lights on and off, control a television set. Or, as Donoghue explains, "control robotic devices like an artificial hand... or a robotic arm."

"You are going to have individuals who have super-power of memories, calculation abilities and communication abilities and be far superior than the rest of us."

[ Link ]

Spacesuit Art

Imagine a “very stuffy” museum. The images all over every wall are too much to process. Except for one small Flamenco dancer on the only canvas in one whole room of the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum. It was the only image Bradley Pitts related to. In a site-specific piece, the architecture at first dominated him, but in “Presence” (2002), he grew to fill the space; eclipsing it. Within 3 minutes, the fabric draped around the aerospace artist inflated to 12x12x9 feet. Then, after 2-3 times the duration, he disappeared into the deflated membrane on the floor. Marshall McLuhan described media as the extensions of mankind, including clothes which extend the thermal regulation of the body by the skin. With a Master’s Degree in what amounts to Spacesuit design from MIT, Pitts deals with the spaces on both sides of the epidermis and beyond. His works harken back to the days when scientific exploration was as much a meditation on personal philosophy as universal fact. Another performance, “Body Flux” (1996), suggested similarly soft skins of survival. Compartmentalized by womb-like isolation with voyeuristic vulnerability, it enveloped him in clear plastic, blinded him with cameras over his eyes, and collected his gasses and waste for an hour. Pitts feels that although the manned space program has aided a plethora of scientific and industrial experiments, it is a shame how much aerospace research has contributed to militaristic applications.

Spacesuits in Science Fiction have the luxury of looking slimmer than the Michelin Man in 1960’s moonwalk media, but they’re not strictly fictional. Bradley Pitts proposed a hybrid of several svelte designs so perhaps future astronauts revisiting the Moon en route to walks on Mars will not be using 50 year-old-plus designs. “Klein Suit” (2001) combines tighter-fitting concepts that date back to the Space Race themselves, but were not developed by NASA; perhaps due in part to the materials technologies available during the era. Every person has points on their skin that do not stretch when their bodies move. Lines drawn between these points are Lines of Non-Extension (LoNE). In 1964 A.S. Iberall proposed “The LoNE Restraint Layer”, tracing those lines with cables to cage in the body from being torn asunder in a vacuum, while maintaining mobility. Seven layers of snug Spandex that would make even David Lee Roth uncomfortable have also been found to help protect humans in a vacuum. Paul Webb proposed the “Space Activity Suit” (SAS) in 1971. The body breathes through the skin as well as the mouth and nose. Maintaining pressure is important not only for vacuum safety, but for blood circulation and its Oxygen concentration as well. While the Earth’s atmosphere exerts a certain pressure on us, it contains other gasses. If the body is provided with pure Oxygen, it can be done at lower pressure than our atmosphere.

G-suits help maintain pilots’ circulation when they experience multiples of Gravity’s force during certain maneuvers. In 2003, the Libelle Anti-G Suit by Prospective Concepts suit replaced the external pumps mounted within aircraft and their requisite octopus of hoses that interface to other suits. Water enclosed in channels moves via natural hydraulics to push blood automatically around the wearers’ extremities. Suits of many kinds have been designed for performing different tasks underwater, in multiplied gravity and lack thereof. “Klein Suit” combined the results of Iberall and Webb, 3-D scans and plastic molds of Pitts for his experiments: “The SAS provides the basic relationship between mechanical couterpressure, material tension, and radius of curvature. Combining results from Iberall and Webb defines material geometry and area of exposure.”

His wearable art tests the maxim that if you look far enough into space, perhaps you’ll return to your vantage point. This philosophy can be interpreted as karma, a cyclical universe, and introspection to name a few. In “Donning the Void”, Bradley performed mundane tasks; keeping the vacuum of space around his arm within the cloth, rigid cylinder and flexible rubber gaskets that comprised his “Vacuum Cuff”. In “Focus” he is designing an internally mirrored mask where the two focii of an ellipse focus the image of each eye into the other. Rather than seeing two separate eyes, the brain would perceive a composite third eye, or “Introspective Optics”. Preparatory models for “Focus” in turned balsa wood and Aluminum comprise physical conceptual "Objects of My Meditation” (2004).

He drew our attention to the work of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff and her binaural recordings, which use stereo microphones on or in the ears. Physically separated to approximate the shape, size, and density of the human head, the microphones can be worn or mounted within a model. She apparently recorded herself giving a tour through a museum and produced a CD for visitors. Carrying a portable CD player, visitors expereince similar auditory spatializations as Cardiff, and might hear children but not see them due to a temporal and perhaps spatial displacement.

In “Superimposition”, Pitts linked two stethoscopes headsets together with common tubing to “slip between” each other’s ears. He tried it with two pairs of linked noise-canceling headphones, but felt the image of the two stethoscopes was more impressive than the more technologically facilitated experience. Mr. Pitts is interested in preserving the live perception of his live works. He does not want to mediate the experience of the present so much that users feel like they might be sensing something that may as well be pre-recorded. I felt the final diagram he shared with us incorporated his interests in space with shared interpersonal experience. “Light Bridge” would divert the Athens sun up to an extra-terrestrial mirror and back onto the site of an Olympiad. It summarized his presentation of multiple ways to conceptualize “reflection”.

Check out images and words by the artist at http://bradleypitts.info.

[ Article thanks to Wareaware (wearaware at yahoo.com). ]

Bush Administration Fears Transhumanists

The Transhumanist right to be better than human (>H) is already under attack from those fearful of such potential. The Bush Administration's bioethics council has come out against people who want to upgrade themselves. It's one thing to become a cyborg if you've lost or were born without some core functionality, but to want to improve upon who we are as humans, is somehow unethical.

Transhumanism is being taken seriously by an increasing number of scholars. The fact that Stanford’s respected legal bioethics program hosted the 150 or so attendees from Europe, Asia, New Zealand and North America to discuss issues raised by human enhancement is testimony to how far transhumanism has come in from the fringe.

Even the government has taken a position — against — in the second report out of President Bush’s bioethics council. Titled “Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness,” the 2003 report suggested the need for regulations to prevent the use of biotech to give people powers they did not have naturally.

It's a shame that they wish to regulate what people do to themselves, but that's in line with much of the conservative agenda, like gay marrage, right to die, etc. My only hope is that like most tech law, it will lag beyond the technology itself, so all the laws will be regulating, is the past.

[ Link via Transhumanist Tribe. Image from MSNBC. ]

Spy Plane at Where2.0

No info on this unfortunately, but it's a spyplane that was on display at Where 2.0. This photo is taken from the front.

Photo by quinnums.

Wearable at Where2.0

This is graduate student Daniel L. Ashbrook from the Georgia Institue of Technology at the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, CA. Picture by James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media.

Where 2.0: Mike Liebhold's take on GeoWeb

I'm at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference, and I just heard a talk from Mike Liebhold, who is someone I know from the Institute For The Future (IFTF). The focus of the talk was the future of the geospatial web, and the current state of it, and it was particularly interesting to me because most of his slides incorporated wearable computing and/or augemented reality. The core struggle of the geospatial web seems to be labeling all this cartographic data out there, which is something that the web as a whole seems to be doing very well with simple systems like tagging. There are going to be many big jumps in the world of mapping, many of those to do with opening up of this data, community efforts (such as Open Street Maps), and hardware infrastructure improving.

As Mike says, "Investors, take the long road.".

Notes from Nat after the jump.

Big changes coming in 2008-2015, bunch of new GPS satellites going to be launched. Galileo going up, which is frequency compatible. GPS and Galileo are CDMA systems, number of vendors buliding compatible chipsets.
Russians talking about reviving their GPS system. Perhaps by 2015 we'll have cm accuracy that'll allow us to do real-time kinematics so device in motion knows where it is.
E911 and new wifi location services rquire you to submit the AP address and they'll look it. Even though they protect your privacy, you still have to query the network.
As far as E911, phone has GPS but hardware and telecom companies won't let me have access to it. Ease up, let us build the mobile web. Give us an API for the GPS in our mobile phones. [applause]
Smart phones could be decent platforms but they're not because they're walled gardens.
Automotive dashboards could be good, but growing feeling that CRTs are causing accidents. Perhaps audible web.
In the future, enhancements to bodies: HUDs and glasses.
New cartography. Experiments have been with 2D maps. Now with Google Earth and MSN Live Local 1st person view, A9 ... people are beginning to think about 1st person view of geospatial information. Augmented video view that exist only in lab.
Mockup: geospatial tags on physical reality. With the HUD view, can see fictional information draped across real world, in addition to scientific geodata and annotated hypermedia. New forms of entertainment ahead of us.
Mockup of research project oulu in FI. Project with Nokia.
To do all this, we need a cubic cartography. 3D cartography. As much as we'd like to have 2D coordinate systems to exchange data, have to begin to think about 3D and soon. Google's thinking about it, bought SketchUp. At a finer grain, we want location information that's located in a very small place. Very interesting things going on at Human INterface lab in Washington. AR Toolkit.
"hitlab" is the lab in Washington. Dozens of labs building apps using that toolkit.
Schuyler talks about dots on tiles pejoratively, like geospatial web is more about dots on tiles. I'm interested in what's happening on my dot. I'm standing on a map 1m square: what's with this place right here. Metaphor for this is tricorder. We should build a tricorder for planet Earth. 1m map with layers stacked over your head.
Would like to have MS and ESRI report back to us on how far along we are in building tricorder. Simple idea belies complexity of data mining and knowledge engineering required.
Lots of data need to be interoperable. Project for data excahnge in life sciences. Open source, Boulder Colorado. "Everything Globe". Visualization of a lot of stuff in one sphere.
Exchange knowledge for infrastructure. Katrina, 911, Tsunami, shows there's a need to integrate massive amounts of geodata from many sources. Huge challenge and a lot of funding coming to make geodata interoperable.
Also need interoperable data for consumer apps. You can walk into grocery store and see manufacturer's information, would work with RFID tags as well. Search on ingredients, consumer safety, price shopping.
Can have data interop for other kinds of location intelligence, enterprise apps.
To build a tricorder we need a search capability and we have a problem of huge magnitude. Lot of geodata out there. In baroque collection of repositories, one stops, gateways, etc.
some use web services, some use proprietary database queries. as michael goodchild says, there's very little metadata out there. spent time last week with a number of cartographers, and it's a problem they acknowledge. They don't label their layers, their geodata. They're just files with arcane filenames. ""ho ho, how many people comment their code?"
Even the collections themselves aren't labelled. The one-stops can't tell you what they've got. Google, ESRI, Microsoft-class problem.
Geodata has to be put into hierarchies and taxonomies. Translation problem: how do you map data from one discipline to another discipline. Web data and web geodata will probably have delicious or flickr style tags. People already tagging point annotations. Best way to view this is as a tag cloud.
How to merge formal and informal information is a challenge ahead. Lot of work to do to have interoperable data for our tricorder.
(big diagram)
Efforts going on to convert data. First gen of open standard map and feature servers, getting robust enough to be used. See osgeo folks for more about this. Some attempts to geocode the legacy web (data mining for addresses).
New geocoded web doesn't exist yet, no accepted standards. Lot of people building a lot of ways to tag web hypermedia. HOpe in the middle that XML, RDF, GML will melt the edges and make things more interoeprable.
Industrial GIS shops have more data than you can imagine.. but many don't even think about web services or know the term web 2.0.. hence one reason for lack of metadata/tagging
New standard in works, GeoRSS. RSS items can be geocoded and thenviewed.
Three versions of GeoRSS: simple (lat-long), GML version gives semantic riches of GML, and third version is original Yahoo! version.
If you can't exchange data, it's all play.
Industrial guys have reasons for domain specific knowledge, and I say to the geospatial people that OGC has been working with vendors to get layered cartographic data interop between vendors. On the other side, Google and others pursuing independent ways to mark up data. I don't care how it was created, I want to be able to read my data on everybody's client.
Platial makes their data available in GeoRSS natively. Great start.
One problem as we get going is spam. (great slide)
Serious problem, semantic problem, how to filter spatial spam the same way you filter email spam. Serious issues around location authentication.
Range of standards in the area, some are mature and evolving, some are open and unresolved.
Geocodes for hypermedia are in process. GeoRSS in fast track to be approved by OGC and have interest from W3C.
Web map servers, web feature servers. Lot of efforts to come up with standard metadata, though it's unclear people will use it. US Federal Geospatial Data Committee.
scalable vector graphics coming, people moving to Flash and Ajax and other ways to render data, so unclear SVG will be adopted
still need identity management and not just for spatial web but for our privacy, e-commerce, medical records. huge metaproblem
location privacy is a genuine problem.
APIs for device location a big problem.
And would be nice to have a gelocation beacon (wifi AP) database for download. PlaceLab great but not clear what Intel's intent is to make it a standard.
One critical policy: make free data free.
Lot of governments product geodata and won't 'let their own citizens hvae it.
US citizens blessed. Government very generous in making geodata public. Vast amounts of data you can download and use, starting from TIGER and many other kinds.
Aus, NZ, Canada have very generous policies for sharing geodata as well.
UK and Europe it's a point of contention, and in developing world it's hardly even reached threshold of an issue.
Map is a assessment readiness of world for geospatial web.
Investors: watch the tech curve.
Investors, take the long road.

Spiders - sousveillance web comic

Written in 2002, Spiders is a high-quality webcomic that uses an innovative layout to tell the story of what a war on terror might be like with universal surveillance technology available on the battlefield. This is a great thought-provoking piece and groundbreaking work with a webcomic. Check it out.

[ Link ]

Japanese Cyber Girl

From a glogger who was in the Japanese Nippombashi / Den Den town, the heart of Osaka's Otaku culture district.

[ Link via Glogger ]

Glog Roll on igargoyle

I've added a "glogroll" on igargoyle thanks to James Fung's help establishing a JSON API. The glogroll is a feed of all the latest images from glogger.eyetap.org, which I previously talked about here on igargoyle. If you post a personal moment onto glogger and it gets flagged as a featured item, it will now show up in the right hand corner and stay there until it gets pushed off by newer featured content.

The code is a bit rough, nothing I'm terribly proud of, but I will improve upon it soon, including more ajaxy stuff and smooth transistions as new content appears. Feel free to nab the code and improve upon it yourself though!

Tiny robots infiltrate roaches

Roaches: "There are robots lurking among us, controlling our behavior. They will lead us to our doom! I....I think Bill is one of them! AAAIIIGH!!"

Scientists have created miniature, insect-like robots that can change the behavior of cockroaches.

The "insbots" work by at first fooling the bugs into believing the devices are fellow roaches and then leading the insects away from darkness into light or other behaviors.

[ Link via Accelerating-Intelligence News ]

MicroOptical's new "myvu" Display

MobilitySite has a review of the new MicroOptical "myvu" personal video viewer, which retails for $269.00. They gave the viewer a 4.7 out of 5. I can't wait to try this thing out myself.

[ Link to review via engadget ]

Programmable Tattoos

Tattoos are cool, but for many there's that hungover realization that getting snoopy etched onto your ass was not the most intelligent move possible. If nanotechnoligists have their way though, instead of looking up a laser removal clinic, you could just reprogram it. I'm sure many will still opt for the old school way of injecting ink under the skin, but this kind of tech is cool, not only because you can change the branding on your skin, but also because it could be used for a display, like in the concept photo to the right. The concept? Millions of robots the size of dust motes moving under your skin.

The dermal display, still a theoretical idea based on fact, is being worked on by Robert A. Freitas, Jr., a senior research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in Palo Alto, Calif.

The display would consist of billions of light-emitting robots implanted under the skin and capable of rearranging themselves to spell out words and numbers and produce animations.

They would display data received from other nanobots in the body designed to monitor a person's vital signs. Instructions from the patient could be communicated by touch-screen-like finger taps on the skin.

No speculation on when this could become a reality, but here's hoping it's soon.

[ Link via Cliff. Thanks Cliff! ]

Implant battery powered by body heat

Life-saving medical implants like pacemakers and defibrillators face a big drawback: their batteries eventually run out. So every few years, patients need surgery to have the batteries replaced.

Now a company in New York state is planning to tackle the problem by providing patients with an implantable power source that recharges their implant's batteries using electricity generated by the patient's own body heat.

[ Link ]

Do You Believe In a Singularity?

<nym> do you believe in a singularity?

<anselm> no not really
<anselm> i think it looks like a singularity from the outside but from the inside it is just business as usual

So what do you think?

Wall Socket PC

This Wall Socket PC is pretty interesting. It's all the guts of a computer in one small unit designed to be used as a home PC with standard power. It uses an AMD RISC processor, and can come with up to 64MB of flash memory and 128MB RAM.

Why does this interest me? Well, like the gumstix, this thing is tiny. I could see it being useful for a wearable computer, even though that's not what it was designed for.

[ Link via Jobe Bittman on the Wear-Hard Mailing List ]