Monthly Archives: March 2013

M - projects

Just In Time Watch

 

JIT Watch offers the solution to that problem. JIT Watch is a thinking watch…

It is integrated into the user’s Personal Area Network and has the capability to connect via Bluetooth with e.g. cell phones. This provides the watch with the following services: The watch knows the wearer’s actual position coordinates via GPS, GSM-tracking or other techniques. In addition to that the cell phone enables a data connection with the www. Appointments with site coordinates can thus be synchronized. They were entered in advance e.g. into the cell phone or into the computer with a calendar tool like iCal. Furthermore the watch can access web-based navigation-, timetable- and traffic information services.

 

Ref: Just in Time Watch – Martin Frey (via betaknowledge)

T - ethics, W - now

If A Driverless Car Crashes, Who’s Liable?

Some number of years from now, the technology may exist for cars to drive themselves. This could save thousands of lives a year (90 percent of fatal car accidents involve human error).

But getting the technology right won’t be enough. Governments and courts will have to figure out lots of new legal and regulatory issues. One key question: If a driverless car crashes, who’s liable?

[…]

One possible solution comes from the vaccine industry.

In the 1980s, the rising threat of liability prompted vaccine manufacturers to pull out of the business. So Congress stepped in and created a new system for people who are injured by vaccines. Cases are handled in special hearings, and victims are paid out of a fund created by a special tax on vaccines.

With the threat of liability reduced, more companies started making vaccines again.

 

Ref: If A Driverless Car Crashes, Who’s Liable? – npr

T - war

The Overly Documented Life

I’m acting healthier. I walk my ten thousand steps, I pass up my son’s offer of pink ice-cream-filled Oreos.

And yet, sometimes my Mood Panda drops to 3. I feel like I’m getting a preview of a dystopia worthy of a young-adult novel. When we all start extreme recording, we’ll all have to censor ourselves. We’ll all be as careful as politicians, knowing that we risk making our own version of Romney’s 47 percent remark. We’ll all have to worry more about hackers and Big Brother poaching our data. It will be a world with a lot less mystery, which might mean a lot less fun. How do you plan a surprise party when all your friends know exactly where you are at all times?

And yes, you’ll have a full record of life — but will it be the record of a lesser life? Because that’s the problem with reality — it’s not really life. Reality is messy, nuanced, repetitive, and dull.

 

Ref: The Overly Documented Life – Esquire (via Fresser)

T - domestic, W - now

Google Flu Trends Algorithm was Wrong

Google Flu Trends has continued to perform remarkably well, and researchers in many countries have confirmed that its ILI estimates are accurate. But the latest US flu season seems to have confounded its algorithms. Its estimate for the Christmas national peak of flu is almost double the CDC’s, and some of its state data show even larger discrepancies.

It is not the first time that a flu season has tripped Google up. In 2009, Flu Trends had to tweak its algorithms after its models badly underestimated ILI in the United States at the start of the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic — a glitch attributed to changes in people’s search behaviour as a result of the exceptional nature of the pandemic (S. Cook et al. PLoS ONE 6, e23610; 2011).

Google would not comment on thisyear’s difficulties. But several researchers suggest that the problems may be due to widespread media coverage of this year’s severe US flu season, including the declaration of a public-health emergency by New York state last month. The press reports may have triggered many flu-related searches by people who were not ill. Few doubt that Google Flu will bounce back after its models are refined, however.

 

Ref: When Google got flu wrong – Nature

T - politic, T - war, W - future, W - now

Lies Detector U.S. Border

 

Since September 11, 2001, federal agencies have spent millions of dollars on research designed to detect deceptive behavior in travelers passing through US airports and border crossings in the hope of catching terrorists. Security personnel have been trained—and technology has been devised—to identify, as an air transport trade association representative once put it, “bad people and not just bad objects.” Yet for all this investment and the decades of research that preceded it, researchers continue to struggle with a profound scientific question: How can you tell if someone is lying?

That problem is so complex that no one, including the engineers and psychologists developing machines to do it, can be certain if any technology will work. “It fits with our notion of justice, somehow, that liars can’t really get away with it,” says Maria Hartwig, a social psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who cowrote a recent report on deceit detection at airports and border crossings. The problem is, as Hartwig explains it, that all the science says people are really good at lying, and it’s incredibly hard to tell when we’re doing it.

 
 

Ref: Deception Is Futile When Big Brother’s Lie Detector Turns Its Eyes on You – Wired

T - war

Algorithm Learns How to Revive Lost Languages

 

Like living things, languages evolve. Words mutate, sounds shift, and new tongues arise from old.

Charting this landscape is usually done through manual research. But now a computer has been taught to reconstruct lost languages using the sounds uttered by those who speak their modern successors.

The system was able to suggest how ancestor languages might have sounded and also identify which sounds were most likely to change. When the team compared the results with work done by human specialists, they found that over 85 per cent of suggestions were within a single character of the actual words.

 

Ref: Algorithm learns how to revive lost languages – NewScientist
Ref: Automated reconstruction of ancient languages using probabilistic models of sound change – PNAS

T - war, W - now

U.S. Cities Relying on Precog Software to Predict Murder

 

New crime-prediction software used in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and soon to be rolled out in the nation’s capital too, promises to reduce the homicide rate by predicting which prison parolees are likely to commit murder and therefore receive more stringent supervision.

The software aims to replace the judgments parole officers already make based on a parolee’s criminal record and is currently being used in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Richard Berk, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who developed the algorithm, claims it will reduce the murder rate and other crimes and could help courts set bail amounts as well as sentencing in the future.

“When a person goes on probation or parole they are supervised by an officer. The question that officer has to answer is ‘what level of supervision do you provide?’” Berk told ABC News. The software simply replaces that kind of ad hoc decision-making that officers already do, he says.

To create the software, researchers assembled a dataset of more than 60,000 crimes, including homicides, then wrote an algorithm to find the people behind the crimes who were more likely to commit murder when paroled or put on probation. Berk claims the software could identify eight future murderers out of 100.

The software parses about two dozen variables, including criminal record and geographic location. The type of crime and the age at which it was committed, however, turned out to be two of the most predictive variables.

Shawn Bushway, a professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Albany told ABC that advocates for inmate rights might view the use of an algorithm to increase supervision of a parolee as a form of harassment, especially when the software produced the inevitable false positives. He said it could result in “punishing people who, most likely, will not commit a crime in the future.”

 

Ref: U.S. Cities Relying on Precog Software to Predict Murder – Wired

T - domestic, W - future, W - now

Human Intelligence is Declining According To Stanford Geneticist

 

Dr. Gerald Crabtree, a geneticist at Stanford, has published a study that he conducted to try and identify the progression of modern man’s intelligence. As it turns out, however, Dr. Crabtree’s research led him to believe that the collective mind of mankind has been on more or a less a downhill trajectory for quite some time.

According to his research, published in two parts starting with last year’s ‘Our fragile intellect. Part I,’ Dr. Crabtree thinks unavoidable changes in the genetic make-up coupled with modern technological advances has left humans, well, kind of stupid. He has recently published his follow-up analysis, and in it explains that of the roughly 5,000 genes he considered the basis for human intelligence, a number of mutations over the years has forced modern man to be only a portion as bright as his ancestors.

“New developments in genetics, anthropology and neurobiology predict that a very large number of genes underlie our intellectual and emotional abilities, making these abilities genetically surprisingly fragile,” he writes in part one of his research. “Analysis of human mutation rates and the number of genes required for human intellectual and emotional fitness indicates that we are almost certainly losing these abilities,” he adds in his latest report.

From there, the doctor goes on to explain that general mutations over the last few thousand years have left mankind increasingly unable to cope with certain situations that perhaps our ancestors would be more adapted to.

“I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas, and a clear-sighted view of important issues. Furthermore, I would guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues. I would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas, of perhaps 2000–6000 years ago. The basis for my wager comes from new developments in genetics, anthropology, and neurobiology that make a clear prediction that our intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprisingly fragile.”

According to the doctor, humans were at their most intelligent when “every individual was exposed to nature’s raw selective mechanisms on a daily basis.” Under those conditions, adaption, he argued, was much more of a matter than fight or flight. Rather, says the scientists, it was a sink or swim situation for generations upon generations.

“We, as a species, are surprisingly intellectually fragile and perhaps reached a peak 2,000 to 6,000 years ago,” he writes. “If selection is only slightly relaxed, one would still conclude that nearly all of us are compromised compared to our ancient ancestors of 3,000 to 6,000 years ago.”

 

Ref: Our Fragile Intellect – Stanford
Ref: Human intelligence is declining according to Stanford geneticist – RT