Google’s Project Tango: Indoor 3D Mapping and Tracking
February 20th, 2014Because tracking you outside is so 1990s.
It’s not enough for the Legion of Doom to be able to track your every move outside. It now wants to map your indoor world, in 3D, and where you are in it.
NSA/NGA will love this.
Coincidence: Tango:
Tango
(U.S.) NATO phonetic alphabet for the letter “T” and for “Target” (or enemy). Example: “We have two Tango’s at 3 o’clock – I’ll take the right one.”
Have a nice day!
Via: Google:
Our current prototype is a 5” phone containing customized hardware and software designed to track the full 3D motion of the device, while simultaneously creating a map of the environment. These sensors allow the phone to make over a quarter million 3D measurements every second, updating its position and orientation in real-time, combining that data into a single 3D model of the space around you.
Inside DuckDuckGo, Google’s Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
February 20th, 2014Via: Fast Company:
“Every year, we’ve grown 200-500%,” Weinberg says. “The numbers keep getting bigger.” As of early February, DuckDuckGo was seeing more than 4 million search queries per day. One year ago, that number had just barely broken 1 million.
Surprisingly, the sudden success didn’t send the site crashing down. Nor did it change the company’s stripped-down, razor-sharp focus. Here’s how one small company is slowly, surely beating its way into the most monopolized category in technology.
Some Words in Voynich Manuscript Deciphered
February 20th, 2014Via: BBC:
A breakthrough has been made in attempts to decipher a mysterious 600-year-old manuscript written in an unknown language, it has been claimed.
The Voynich Manuscript, carbon-dated to the 1400s, was rediscovered in 1912, but has defied codebreakers since.
Now, Bedfordshire University’s Stephen Bax says he has deciphered 10 words, which could lead to more discoveries.
“Smart Cities”
February 20th, 2014Via: Fast Company:
Tech giant Cisco thinks there’s something to all this talk of ”smart cities”–and that connecting roads or license plate readers to the Internet is going to be big business.
In the latest installment of their ongoing expansion into the Internet of Things, Cisco recently announced an agreement with Swiss security firm AGT International to develop smart traffic systems for cities around the world.
In early February, Cisco and AGT unveiled the details of an upcoming Internet of Things-enabled traffic management system that incorporates sensors embedded in pavements, license plate-reading systems, social media feeds, and video cameras to “identify, respond to, and resolve” traffic incidents in real time. According to a press release, the system is designed to provide long-term analytics on traffic accidents and to allow different agencies to share video feeds.
Some people may find the AGT-Cisco product a bit creepy–after all, it’s a traffic management system that reads license plate numbers and integrates social media. Nevertheless, it’s part of a much larger trend in which city, state, and federal agencies use sensors to monitor the smallest aspects of everyday urban life.
Cambodia: Homemade Bamboo Trains
February 20th, 2014Via: YouTube:
Cambodia has one rail line. It is not well built, not maintained, and generally unsafe. For that reason, Cambodia no longer operates heavy trains. The people, however, have created an inexpensive and lightweight system to travel safely on the rails. These bamboo trains are pushed by small gasoline engines, and roll on two axles. They can be removed from the railroad or assembled in about a minute flat.
Brain Implant Lets One Monkey Control Another
February 20th, 2014Via: Live Science:
In work inspired partly by the movie “Avatar,” one monkey could control the body of another monkey using thought alone by connecting the brain of the puppet-master monkey to the spine of the other through a prosthesis, researchers say.
These findings could help lead to implants that help patients overcome paralysis, scientists added.
Chicago: Predictive Policing Experiments
February 20th, 2014Via: The Verge:
When the Chicago Police Department sent one of its commanders to Robert McDaniel’s home last summer, the 22-year-old high school dropout was surprised. Though he lived in a neighborhood well-known for bloodshed on its streets, he hadn’t committed a crime or interacted with a police officer recently. And he didn’t have a violent criminal record, nor any gun violations. In August, he incredulously told the Chicago Tribune, “I haven’t done nothing that the next kid growing up hadn’t done.” Yet, there stood the female police commander at his front door with a stern message: if you commit any crimes, there will be major consequences. We’re watching you.
What McDaniel didn’t know was that he had been placed on the city’s “heat list” — an index of the roughly 400 people in the city of Chicago supposedly most likely to be involved in violent crime. Inspired by a Yale sociologist’s studies and compiled using an algorithm created by an engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the heat list is just one example of the experiments the CPD is conducting as it attempts to push policing into the 21st century.
Predictive analytical systems have been tested by police departments all over the country for years now, but there’s perhaps no urban police force that’s further along — or better funded — than the CPD in its quest to predict crime before it happens. As Commander Jonathan Lewin, who’s in charge of information technology for the CPD, told The Verge: “This [program] will become a national best practice. This will inform police departments around the country and around the world on how best to utilize predictive policing to solve problems. This is about saving lives.”
But the jury’s still out about whether Chicago’s heat list and its other predictive policing experiments are worth the invasions of privacy they might cause and the unfair profiling they could blatantly encourage. As Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Verge: “My fear is that these programs are creating an environment where police can show up at anyone’s door at any time for any reason.”
Related: NYPD and Microsoft Team Up to Peddle Retroactive Surveillance System
Wal-Mart Earnings Miss; Weak Outlook
February 20th, 2014Ahh, the recovery seems to be continuing apace…
Via: AP:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. offered a weak profit outlook, signaling that it expects economic pressures to keep weighing on its low-income shoppers around the world.
The world’s largest retailer also said Thursday that its fourth-quarter profit, which covers the crucial holiday season, dropped 21 percent. Its Wal-Mart stores recorded their fourth consecutive quarter of declines in revenue at stores open at least a year.
NSA Will Expand Surveillance—Because of Lawsuits
February 20th, 2014
Via: The Hill:
The federal government may actually expand the controversial surveillance program that collects Americans’ phone records in a bid to preserve evidence for the multiple lawsuits filed against the National Security Agency, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
The decision comes despite President Obama’s instruction in a speech on American surveillance practices last month that government officials find a way to end the data collection program.
Obama tasked Attorney General Eric Holder and members of the intelligence community with finding a way to wind down the government program without eroding the government’s intelligence capabilities.
But, according to the Journal, government lawyers are worried that if they shut down the program, they could violate evidence preservation rules requiring them to maintain the databases amid ongoing litigation.
Civil liberties groups like the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed lawsuits charging the surveillance program is unconstitutional. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has also led a class-action suit against the government program.
In fact, concerns over the legal challenges could even effectively expand the phone record database. At present, the government only maintains five years of call data, purging older information at least twice per year. But the government may now opt to maintain that older data in the interest of preserving evidence.
Paxil May Promote Breast Cancer
February 20th, 2014Via: Los Angeles Times:
A team of researchers from the City of Hope in Duarte has developed a speedy way to identify drugs and chemicals that can disrupt the balance of sex hormones in human beings and influence the development and progress of diseases such as breast cancer.
In a trial screening of 446 drugs in wide circulation, the new assay singled out the popular antidepressant paroxetine (better known by its commercial name, Paxil) as having a weak estrogenic effect that could promote the development and growth of breast tumors in women.
This is important because as many as a quarter of women being treated for breast cancer suffer from depression — a condition most commonly treated with antidepressants known as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), including Paxil, which has been on the market since 1992. Almost a quarter of American women in their 40s and 50s are taking an antidepressant, mostly SSRIs.
