plantimals.org

MIT scientists Michael Cima, left, and Robert Langer, creators of a microchip-based drug delivery system that has passed a trial treating 7 patients.

A remote drug delivery system has successfully been tested in a human trial. A microchip was implanted in 8 women and delivered a drug to treat osteoporosis once a day for 20 days. There were no adverse affects and, compared to a control group of women who injected the drug, the microchip-delivered treatment was just as effective.

The miniature chip, 5 cm long and 3 cm wide, was implanted under local anesthesia in just 30 minutes. It contained 20 tiny reservoirs, each of which holds 600-nanoliters of drug solution, over which a thin layer of platinum or titanium contained the drug. Upon dosing, a current is applied which melted the metal coverings and allowed for drug release. The chip’s actions can be programmed for drug release at specific intervals or on demand with the use of wireless communication link. The bidirectional communication also tells researchers whether the chip is working properly or not.

The drug-delivering chip is the realized 15-year old vision of MIT researchers Michael Cima and Robert Langer, now collaborating with MicroCHIPS Inc. to produce the chips. They published the results of the study in the Feb. 16 online edition of Science Translational Medicine.

An automated drug delivery system is highly desired among health professionals, especially in cases where a drug must be administered frequently, as on a daily basis. Patient compliance – how closely a patient follows his or her prescribed drug regimen – is a major problem. The teriparatide that is used to treat osteoporosis patients stimulates bone formation, but it must be taken daily. That typically entails sticking oneself with a needle on a daily basis. According to MicroCHIPS president Robert Farra only about one in four osteoporosis patients actually stick to their daily dose. Because the chip can be programmed to release doses regularly, patient compliance becomes a non-issue – not to mention they avoid the unsavory daily needle stick.

One concern for the researchers was the possibility that the body’s defenses would cause the implants to be enveloped in a protective, fibrous tissue, and prevent the drug from being released. This turned out to not be a problem as the drug was able to diffuse through the surrounding layer and enter the bloodstream. Before the chip can be widely used, however, researchers will need to demonstrate that it is durable and reliable, John Watson, bioengineer and found of the William J. von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Advancement at the University of California, said in an editorial about the study. Having the chip unexpectedly dump its entire drug load is a possibility they’d like to rule out as much as possible, as well as failure to release to patients whose life depends on the drug. In the last study one of the devices in fact did fail and was excluded from the data.

Confirming its effectiveness and safety would open the door for using the chip to treat other diseases. Other patients who require regular drug treatments, such as those with chronic pain or diabetes, could have their lives made much easier. The chip would become really handy for diabetics if it had the capability, like the Artificial Pancreas, to both measure blood glucose levels then automatically release the appropriate amount of insulin. And because it has an array of reservoirs, several types of drugs could be placed on the chip to meet all the patient’s pharmaceutical needs. An entire pharmacy under your skin.

Right now the wireless communication has a very limited range of only a few meters. But in the future we could see that range extended. Imagine, your doctor could one day read your blood chemistry and give you a “shot” from his office. That day’s probably a long way off, but as the company hopes to be in regulation testing by 2014, the day people like osteoporosis patients won’t have to deal with the pain of remembering and suffering injections may not be too far away.

[image credits: Businesswire, MIT]
image 1: MircoCHIPS
image 2: MIT
image 3: chip

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Governor Sandoval of Nevada exits one of Google's robot cars last summer. The bill he signed into law is now allowing automated cars on Nevada roads.

An extended campaign in Nevada by Google has led to a new host of provisions which will allow automated cars to legally drive in the state. Starting March 1st, 2012 innovators like Google can officially apply for a new kind of robot driver’s license that will give them permission to openly test their cars on the road. Automated vehicles will be able to travel the same streets and highways as human drivers, with only a red license plate marking them as robots. Once research on those automated cars is complete (which may take years), the Nevada Department of Motorized Vehicles will issue them a neon green license plate – an indication that the robot drivers are good to go. Google, whose robotic Prius cars have already driven 200,000+ miles in California quasi-legally, will undoubtedly take full advantage of Nevada’s openness and further develop their technology for general use. Just as important, other states like Hawaii, Florida, and Oklahoma may follow Nevada’s example, paving the way for robot cars to operate all across the United States.

Last June Governor Sandoval signed AB511 into law, making it explicitly legal for cars to drive themselves. That same bill, however, required the Nevada DMV to establish rules and regulations as to how companies would apply for permission to get their robotic vehicles on the road. As of February 15, those guidelines are now in place, and Nevada is ready to hand out red license plates to Google and other robotic car developers. Each vehicle will require a $1-3 million bond to insure against damages and will have to give the Nevada DMV a detailed report on what they are testing with each car. Whether or not those provisions will prove adequate has yet to be seen, but actually having concrete rules on the use of robotic vehicles goes a long way towards legitimizing them. In the eyes of Google and other automated car researchers, Nevada’s become a paradise.

There is some concern however, that the new automated car law could actually stifle innovation. Under some interpretations of the bill, cars with computers that automatically engage brakes may constitute a robotic car and thus need to go through further red tape before the general public can drive them. Such systems, already developed by companies like Volvo, represent a stepping stone towards fully automated cars and it would be a shame if Nevada squashed their use just as the state was opening up further research into robotic vehicles.

Nevada’s new bill will undoubtedly come with complications, but overall it is a very hopeful sign for the future of automated cars. Previously I had been very pessimistic about the legal and social hurdles these vehicles would have to clear before they could be accepted by the general public. Now, however, it seems that at least a few states are trying to prove me wrong, clearing the way for robot cars to take their rightful place on our roads. Along with Nevada, the Hawaii, Oklahoma, and Florida legistlatures are all considering bills to allow automated vehicles on their roads for research purposes (or more). The Florida bills (HB 1207 in the House and SB 1768 in the Senate) seem to have considerable support. It seems possible, perhaps even likely, that robot cars from companies like Google will be able to take over driving for humans much sooner than anyone had anticipated. Such a transition could save thousands or even millions of lives each year.

I’ll leave you with a video featuring Sebastian Thrun, the project lead for Google’s robot car. Both his motivation for automating cars, and his vision for the future are inspiring:

[image credits: Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles, Steve Jurvetson (modified)]
[video credits: Google via NPR]
[sources: Nevada DMV, NY Times, NPR]

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Go SH!

During the last few weeks the Singularity Hub Membership program has continued to offer an awesome experience for its members.  I wanted to share with you some of what has been going on.  We’d love to have more of you join in on the fun!

Tonight at 6pm PST we will be hosting a Google+ Hangout for SH members with Carl Zimmer.  SH members will be able to watch live as we speak with Zimmer, and many will even have a chance to join us directly on the hangout if they’ve got a webcam.  The hangout will be archived on video for members that want to watch the event at their leisure afterwards.

Tomorrow night at 7pm PST we’ll be hosting yet another Google+ Hangout, this time with Sonia Arrison, author of the recently published book “100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith”.

During the last week or so members had a great time hanging out with Aubrey De Grey and Michael Anissimov, and SH members have been treated to exclusive video coverage of presentations from Ray Kurzweil, Hans Keirstead, Ekso Bionics, Peter Diamandis, and more.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a vibrant email group for members that has immediately become an excellent resource to socialize, discuss, learn, and share.  We’ve got a great membership program, and it is only going to get better.  Thanks to all of you for reading SH, and I hope to see many more of you become part of our membership community soon.

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The workplace of the future is closer than you think.

A recent poll from Ipsos/Reuters shows the extent of workplace evolution as well as the fallout of globalization. Nearly 1 in 5 (17%) of the over 11,000 users from 24 countries polled online indicated that they work exclusively and/or consistently from home. Telecommuting is most popular in regions with emerging markets, such as Asia-Pacific (24%), the Middle East and Africa (27%), and Latin America (25%), while North America and Europe (both at 9%) lag significantly behind. But the winner is India with 82% telecommuting at least once a week and 57% working remotely on a routine basis. Compare this to the U.S. where 26% are working remotely at least once a week with only 10% respondents doing so consistently. Yet times are changing as the recession has spurred companies and employees to find creative ways to cut costs. More companies are seeing the benefits of telecommuting and some states are now starting to encourage it with tax breaks. Is this the beginning of the end for the physical workplace and, if so, what does a telecommuting world look like?

A closer examination of the poll results affords a picture of what a global telecommuting workforce will look like.

The poll, which was conducted during two weeks in October 2011, collected age, gender, household income, marriage status, and education level of users along with information about employment and whether the user was a business owner. While polling online users has an inherent bias in that not every worker has Internet access, especially in developing nations, the results can be taken as a good indication of where the world currently stands on telecommuting and its demographics.

The following key points serve as signposts for the future of the remote global workforce…call it The Good, The Bad and The Ugly:

The Good

1. Increased productivity — Two-thirds of workers (65%) claim increased productivity working at home (echoed by a Cisco survey as well), while the other third cite decreased supervision and more distractions as the reason for lower productivity. Countries in which the most workers agreed that telecommuting was more productive include Argentina (77%) and Poland (75%), but it was significantly lower in some countries, such as Japan (44%) and South Korea (51%). This goes against popular stereotypes that remote workers are goofing around all day because no one’s there to tell them what to do as well as casting a poor light on workplace efficiency. Additionally, it suggests that certain cultures are more adaptable to a telecommuting lifestyle, which has the potential of expanding job markets beyond local candidates to broad and diverse international workforce.

2. More female workers — 83% of all respondents felt (36% strongly agreed, 47% somewhat) that telecommuting keeps talented women in the workforce, instead of leaving temporarily or completely to raise children. U.S. users were slightly more skeptical about this with only 26% strongly agreeing and 53% somewhat. From a globalization point of view, entire workforces that couldn’t come into an office because of the “homemaker” label have increasingly entered the workforce as remote work allows for the multitasking of home and work life. This too expands the global workforce.

3. Less stress — In terms of commuting, 83% agreed that telecommuters have less stress because they don’t have to get to and from work every day. And less stress is always good.

The Bad

1. The loneliness number — Six of every ten users (62%) felt that social isolation among telecommuters was a problem, with 15% saying they strongly agree and 48% somewhat agreeing. Does this indicate that a primary benefit of the physical workplace is face-to-face time? Considering that over half of respondents (56%) also said that working remotely hurts the chance for promotion, it reflects the importance of both workplace socializing and office politics. Remote workers can be left out of the loop and miss important, unplanned interactions that become measures of job performance. Furthermore, since many people become friends with their colleagues, it’s hard to imagine that friendless workers are good workers. Technological improvements in video conferencing, however, is likely to improve this gap, but technology can only go so far in replicating real life interactions (the Bruce Willis film Surrogates comes to mind).

2. More opportunities needed — If the opportunity was made available by their employer, 34% of all respondents said they would be very likely to telecommute full-time. So what’s the problem? Opportunities, or the lack thereof. One-third of the global workforce is basically saying, “Let me work from home” but the option isn’t being provided. Now 21% of all users said that they had jobs that required their physical presence, but technological advances in automation from the Industrial Age to today have increasingly reduced the need for human presence. The big problem is that telecommuting is growing in the very regions where demand is the highest (see the chart below). At some point, the lack of telecommuting opportunities on a large scale is going to handicap economic growth.

The Ugly

1. What price, paradise? — While the general consensus is that remote workers are better able to achieve a balance between work and family (with 29% strongly agreeing and 49% somewhat agreeing), a majority agreed that telecommuting creates more conflict by reducing the boundaries between work and family life. Taken together, these two statements seem contradictory, but what is more important is what they imply: people seem to be more comfortable with a compartmentalized life, even if its skewed one way or the other. When work and home life become blurry, greater balance may be achieved in managing everything at the expense of family strife.

2. Another two-class system — In general, telecommuters have higher incomes and are more educated. One way of looking at this is that higher-paying jobs, which are often attained because of higher education, are offering more flexibility to workers who want to telecommute. Another way of looking at this is that the most educated, well paid workers will increasingly be absent from the physical workplace (like the two-thirds of government workers now telecommuting). This has the potential of creating another class system where telecommuting becomes equivalent to privilege afforded to the best or most capable workers, which could turn the workforce into something akin to what’s happening in schools with the segregation of students into gifted and regular learners. This would only exasperate issues related to the recently profiled class struggle that is seeing the withering of the middle class.

In summary, the future of telecommuting is bright, even though it clearly has its disadvantages. But for a long time, a paradigm shift has been occurring in the workforce. Attitudes about telecommuting are changing with very promising results. Considering that workplace environments and worker motivations differ from country to country, it’s no surprise that working remotely will be more successful in some countries that in others. But if telecommuting was made a priority by businesses and governments around the world and the infrastructures were built to support it, how different would the world look?

[Media: sxc]

[Sources: Ipsos, PC World, Reuters]

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Dr. Bud Frazier and colleague Dr. Billy Cohn of the Texas Heart Institute replaced the hearts of 50 calves with a pump before trying the procedure on a human.

By criteria doctors conventionally use to analyze patients, Craig Lewis was dead. He had no heartbeat, no pulse, his EKG was flatlined. Yet he left the hospital and returned home to his wife.

Drs. Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier from the Texas Heart Institute had deemed the condition of Lewis’ heart to be so dire from amyloidosis, a rare blood condition in which amyloid protein builds up in organs causing them to fail, that he would die within hours if they didn’t do something. That ‘something’ was to cut out the heart entirely and replace it with a centrifugal pump. Centrifugal pumps are used to pump water through pipe systems, Lewis’ would pump blood through his veins and arteries. The daring procedure was performed in March of last year. Cohn and Frazier first replaced the hearts of 50 calves before trying the procedure with a human. Following surgery, Lewis’ wife put her head to his chest. Instead of a heartbeat she heard the continuous whirring of rotor blades. Unfortunately, a new heart was just one of Lewis’ impending needs. While the pump performed as hoped, the amyloidosis continued its attack on Lewis’ liver and kidneys and he died in April.

The medical journey was captured by filmmakers Jeremy Yaches and Jeremiah Zagar in their short film documentary “Heart Stop Beating.” It’s a chilling depiction of two doctors seeing through an audacious idea.

The pump isn’t a technological breakthrough, but it is a break with current technology. Ventricular assist devices (VADs) like the Jarvik 2000 are being used by hundreds of people all over the world. Like Lewis’ pump, the Jarvik doesn’t beat. A rotor pumps the blood through. But the Jarvik is only meant to aid the heart’s lower chamber, the ventricle, do its normal job of pumping blood. Patients with the pump still have a pulse because the rotor blade action is timed to the normal beating of the ventricle, thus blood flow is still pulsatile. Lewis’ pump, on the other hand, isn’t an assist device – it’s a replacement. By adding two VADs instead of one – one circulates blood to and from the lungs, the other to and from the rest of the body – any amount of original heart tissue is simply not needed.

Nor is a heartbeat.

[image credits: Focus Forward Films]
[video credits: Focus Forward Films via Vimeo]
images: Heart Stop Beating
video: Heart Stop Beating

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The future of video games is in the hands of the crowd…and it looks like it’s going to be a great adventure. In the last week, Double Fine Adventure has become the highest grossing project on Kickstarter ever. Through internet based pledged donations it reached its goal of $400,000 in just eight hours, and raised $1 million in its first 24 hours. At the time of writing over 57,000 people have pledged nearly $2 million in backing – and there’s still 20+ days of fund-raising to go! With this money, Double Fine Productions will not only create a completely new video game for users to download on PC, MAC, Linux, iOS, and Android, it will also employ documentary filmmakers 2 Player Productions to record the entire process. Crowd-funding has now expanded to include million dollar video games and high quality documentaries. With talent like Double Fine leading the way, many more projects like this one could arise very soon. Once again Kickstarter has shown the power of wedding independent artists with the monetary might of the internet-based crowd.

What makes Double Fine Adventure so appealing? The project is headed by Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, the creators of such classic PC adventure games as Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, and Day of the Tentacle. Twenty years since such adventure games reached their peak, these titles still hold a special place in the hearts of their fans. Visit most popular video game discussion forums and you’ll be able to find threads raving about these classic games and lamenting their disappearance from the Western world. Double Fine noticed the demands of their fans and began their Kickstarter appeal to provide them with the means to release a proper adventure video game for the 21st Century. Little did they know how arduous their fans really were. The following clips show both the original Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter appeal and the update that followed the project rocketing past the million dollar mark.

Schafer’s zany and heartfelt pitch for the Double Fine Adventure project reflects the sort of madcap antics that populate the games his company produces. While still channeling the spirit of the now classic adventure games of the late 80s and early 90s, Double Fine’s latest projects reflect the superior graphics and interfaces today’s generation of platforms provide. Here’s a quick look at Stacking, the G4 XPlay Downloadable Game of the Year for 2011:

As Double Fine Adventure has far exceeded its goals, it’s now a near certainty that the company will at least try to make its yet-to-be-named new adventure title. As Schafer detailed in the update, that game will be available on most desktop and mobile platforms, and there will even be a DRM free version released to backers on Kickstarter. This new game, though there doesn’t exist a single screen shot or piece of concept art, attracted a great deal of funding from fans. Of the 57k+ backers on the Kickstarter project, more than 31,000 pledged just enough to receive a copy of the game as an award ($15). 2 Player Productions (the company documenting another great video game story: how Notch created MineCraft), had some pull as well. An additional 19,000+ backers gave just enough to receive both the game and the documentary around its creation.

Screen shot from Schafer's breakout hit, Day of the Tentacle. Could the unnamed Kickstarter Double Fine game be like this classic? No one seems to know or care, they just believe in Schafer.

In total, about 90% of backers in the Double Fine Adventure project treated the Kickstarter fund as a presales forum. In other words, those pledges are really a means of fans to reserve their copy of the product(s) ahead of time. This is the same phenomenon Singularity Hub has noticed with Kickstarter in the past. Donors are really like customers, only with more faith in the project team, and hope that they will be rewarded as promised. As we’ve mentioned before, Kickstarter occupies a strange position between traditional business models and charitable funding. Even Schafer, the head of this whole multimillion dollar operation acknowledges the fact that there’s no firm guarantee that Double Fine will be able to produce the game exactly as planned: “Here’s my promise to you – either the game will be great or it will be a spectacular failure caught on camera for every one to see.”

If there was any doubt that Kickstarter represents a shift in the way that art will be produced in the future, Double Fine Adventure should dispel it. $1 million raised in just 24 hours! Not for disaster relief, or a political campaign, but for a video game people want made on the creator’s terms. That’s an amazing change in the industry, one that should have traditional video game publishers thinking deeply about how they produce their wares. Artists (and producers) everywhere should take notice. The old way of getting a video game (or book, or album, etc) published is no longer the sole means of real success. In fact, it may not even be the most desirable path to success. Crowd-sourced funding is changing the way we make art, and that’s only going to become more pronounced in the years ahead.

And lest you think it’s all just video games and funny documentaries, Kickstarter hit a big milestone almost at the same time as Double Fine Adventure broke records. “Elevation Dock” was the first Kickstarter project to reach $1 million, and it did so just hours before Double Fine rocketed into history. But don’t ignore Elevation Dock just because it’s in second place, its completed funding garnered $1.4 M+ in pledges. Even more importantly, the project isn’t art at all, just a well designed iPhone accessory. It joins a growing number of companies that avoided the traditional path to retail success, using Kickstarter instead.

Art, gadgets, even financing – the crowd is going to alter these industries forever. Thankfully it seems like we’ll all have a great deal of fun along the way.

[image and video credits: Double Fine]
[source: Double Fine, Justin Kazmark (Kickstarter)]

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Joe's mighty team of miniature trucks has been excavating 2-3 cubic yards of dirt every year for nearly seven years.

One man’s incredible hobby is another man’s vision of the future. Since June of 2005, farmer Joe Murray has been excavating a basement in his home in Saskatchewan Canada using only radio controlled vehicles. The 43 year old R/C enthusiast has documented the process in great detail, creating 150 videos of his bulldozers, excavators, haulers, and other trucks working in his underground lair (see a few examples below). Nearly every step of the process is accomplished through R/C – trucks haul excavators to the site, drills and dirt crumblers break down the walls – there’s even a spiral ramp so dump trucks can unload the waste outside. Murray’s basement excavation is an incredible feat of radio controlled wizardry, but it may only be a small sign of things to come as humanity experiments with automation, robotics, and long range drones.

With 150 videos to choose from, it’s hard to pick just a few to showcase Murray’s amazing project. These four, however, give a pretty good idea of the range of work Joe’s miniature fleet of vehicles can accomplish. Feel free to skip around, or visit the LilGiantsConstruction YouTube channel to see all the footage of the years and years of R/C excavation. As monotonous as some of these clips may be, they are astoundingly popular, with the YouTube channel garnering more than 3.6 million views!

In interviews with Carscoop and News.com.au Murray has described some of the details of his unusual hobby. Each Winter he mines the walls of his unfinished basement and then hauls the dirt out each summer. He once had a conveyor belt, but now uses a spiral ramp for removal. Murray estimates that he has excavated about 2 to 3 cubic yards of dirt every year for the past seven years. The motivation behind the project is fairly simple: Murray like R/C, and he likes working in his basement over long cold Saskatchewan Winters. He first got interested in the craft back in 1996, and is now modifying and repairing his own vehicles (a skill he even applies to the full sized equipment around his farm), regularly discussing his work on the Scale 4x4RC forums.

For Murray, the R/C came first and the basement was just a neat project to work on. Yet in the future, humanity may reverse those goals. There are prototype flying robots that can erect rudimentary structures on their own. The US military is increasingly investing in long-range drones with both automated and R/C control capabilities. Full scale robot vehicles are now a standard part of warfare, but in a few years that technology is certain to work its way towards commercial application. Murray’s fun little dig is actually a good indication that automated or R/C construction is viable, and may even be better under some extreme circumstances (say in space exploration or in disaster relief). Eventually humans may not be directly involved in many construction projects, either directing semi-intelligent robots or controlling them from far away. In the mean time, Murray’s basement is nearing completion and the pioneering hobbyist is looking forward to the next R/C construction project. What’s next on the agenda? There’s a barn that needs updating.

Don’t stop what you’re doing, Joe. It’s just too amazing to watch.

[image and video credits: LilGiantsConstruction]
[source: Carscoop, News.com.au, 4x4RC Forums]

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KLIK not only knows where a face appears on the screen, it knows who that face belongs to.

I never forget a face. Neither, apparently, does my iPhone. KLIK, the exciting new app from Face.com, can automatically recognize faces through the smart phone’s camera. Just open the app, take a photo, and KLIK will search through previous pics to correctly tag the face(s). If linked to a Facebook account KLIK becomes even more powerful, correctly identifying friends based on their shared photos. KLIK is so fast that, with a good internet connection, it can accurately identify someone before a picture is taken. Not only that, but it’s absolutely free! After downloading the app on an iPhone 3S and testing it for several days, this writer is amazed at how quick and accurate KLIK can be…when it works. There are definite bugs to be worked out of the system. Still, Face.com’s foray into mobile facial recognition for social media is stunning when it succeeds, and its launch hints at the absurd power this technology will have in the very near future.

As Singularity Hub has discussed in the past, Face.com is a well known innovator when it comes to facial recognition. They are one of the leading sources (if not THE source) of facial recognition on Facebook, and their API allows for a wide range of applications. Automatic tagging of photos, locating faces for photo manipulation, even characterizing faces by their apparent emotions – Face.com can do it all, and it can do it very well. So well, in fact, that their technology has been used to help identify ‘anonymous’ looters from the most recent London riots. While Face.com technology isn’t fool proof when transforming blurry surveillance footage into quality court room evidence, it is remarkably powerful when dealing with the high quality pics taken by smart phones.

Which is readily apparent with KLIK. The new social app is free and available for phones running iOS 4.3 and beyond. After downloading KLIK I hooked it up to my Facebook account and then pointed it at a friend. While I was still getting the photo lined up, KLIK superimposed my friend’s name on the screen. I hadn’t even taken the shot yet. It didn’t matter, KLIK had automatically searched through my data and found that friend’s face. It suddenly became clear why this app’s development codename was “Project Badass”. Automatic facial recognition and photo tagging on my iPhone for free? Both my friend and I were suitably impressed. The word “scary” was bounced around more than once.

KLIK is aimed at making your photos social..

In the days since I have found that KLIK is both badass and fallible. It fails to recognize some of my close buddies on FB, even though they have plenty of clear photos available. Yet it also learns as I tag photos by hand, and the app can search through both the camera roll on the phone as well as online Facebook pics. KLIK can crash on the iPhone 3S seemingly without any warning, and the processing of images is sometimes horribly slow one minute then lightning fast the next. KLIK is aimed at making your photos social. You can share your pics through KLIK itself with locations powered by FourSquare. You can also upload photos (properly tagged, of course) to Facebook or Twitter. While KLIK can operate without being linked to social media, the interface prompts the user to share every time a picture is taken, and there is some worry that one could accidentally post a photo publicly while trying to maneuver through KLIK’s bare bones (and icon heavy) UI. That shouldn’t be surprising as, according to the Face.com blog, KLIK is “still in the initial stages of development but [we] wanted to share it with friends, get your feedback and continue to improve.”

Even if KLIK isn’t quite ready for prime time, the underlying technology of this app is not to be ignored. Automatic facial recognition tagging was going to come to mobile sooner or later (and has in other guises) but KLIK shows that “sooner” means “today”. Not only that, but KLIK is just the most overt application for this branch of facial recognition. Face.com’s real strength seems to be in packaging their software into accessible, and widely used, APIs. How long until something like KLIK is an integrated portion of every social media app? Facebook’s already using their tech on the back end, this mobile form of automatic tagging could clearly be a more overt feature offered very soon. Apple already has a similar sort of facial recognition embedded in their iPhone 4S (adapted from tech seemingly acquired from Polar Rose). The newest Android phones already let users unlock the devices with just their face as a pass code. It’s clear that smart phones can, with some nominal rate of failure, identify people quickly and effectively. That’s not years or even months in the future, that’s today.

KLIK is fun, but I don’t really need it in my day to day life, and I don’t see the app itself as becoming a household name. Yet there’s no doubt that this technology is a game-changer. Automatic tagging in mobile phones through augmented reality interfaces – as awesome and futuristic as that sounds, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Security applications for facial recognition have been widely discussed before, but again, this technology now seems like it could be universal in just months or years. The integration of facial ID with the social network is both amazing, and as my friend said “really, really creepy.” Is there a picture of you on the internet? Better assume it’s been automatically tagged with your name. Did someone point a smart phone at you in public? Same conclusion. While KLIK is limited to those photos shared by you and your friends on Facebook (or taken on your private camera roll) future versions of this tech are almost certainly going to be more widely applied. That means that in the next few years (maybe much sooner), any camera that sees you will know who you are. You are your face, and your face is public. If not today, then very, very soon.

Welcome to the future. We got rid of the old sense of anonymity with a single click.

[image credits: Face.com]
[source: Face.com Blog]

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You remember SH Horikawa Gear Robot, don't you?

There’s nothing like vintage toys to take us back to days gone by, and there’s nothing like vintage robot toys to take us back to nerdy days gone by. One toy collector, known in his small circle as Mr. Mercury, is a vintage nerd tour de force. He’s been collecting toys of all kinds for a long time now but caught a special interest in robots about ten years ago. He has a website with tons of photos, videos and animations to show off and share his collection with other robot toy enthusiasts. He even has a membership. From what I can tell his robots are pretty much all vintage. It’s quite a collection, although Mr. Mercury, located in the UK, says it’s relatively small “compared to others.” Still, if you go through his loads of pictures the robots start to look the same – as in all awesome! I admit I recognized just one robot, maybe two robots. I’ve never heard of Roto Robot or Answer Game Machine Robot or Miss Melody The Musical Girl Robot. If these names mean anything to you, this is your kind of website.

Here’s a video Mr. Mercury shot of his Robby the Robot toy. If you’ve never heard of Robby, it’s because the movie “Forbidden Planet” was shot in 1956 and, well, you’d rather watch “Transformers.”

[image credit: mrmercury.webs]
[video credit: mrmercury.webs]
images: Mr. Mercury
video: Mr. Mercury

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Drs. Albert Maguire and Jean Bennett followed up their promising 2009 gene therapy trial by injecting in the other eye, and again improved the vision of blind participants.

In 2009, 12 people participated in a clinical trial through which they received an experimental gene therapy for an inherited form of blindness. The correct form of the gene, meant to replace their faulty ones, was injected into the retinal cells of one eye. Limiting the injection to one eye was precautionary, since the researchers didn’t know if there would be any adverse affects. When the trial began all of the participants were legally blind, but two weeks after the injection their vision began to improve. Although their vision didn’t recover enough to be considered normal vision, half of the participants improved enough to lose their legally blind status. Doctors recently revisited the group and have injected the gene into the untreated eyes of three of the original participants. The readministration yielded even further improvement. All three of the participants showed improved vision in dim light as a result, and two of them could even navigate an obstacle course under low-light conditions. Importantly, none of them showed adverse effects to the additional gene injection.

At six months after readministration, the results are so promising that the research team, led by Jean Bennett, an opthalmology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has begun injecting the gene into the untreated eyes of the remaining participants. The study was published recently in Science Translational Medicine.

Leber congenital amaurosis is caused by a mutation in the gene RPE65. RPE65 normally encodes an enzyme that is produced by cells of the retinal pigment epithelium, the thin layer of cells that supports the health of the retina. In Leber congenital amaurosis, a mutated enzyme fails to convert vitamin A into a form needed for the photosensitive cells of the retina to detect light. The unconverted form of vitamin A builds up and kills cells in the retinal pigment epithelium. Vision loss occurs early, usually within the first six months of a child’s life. And it’s severe. People with Leber congenital amaurosis rarely retain a visual acuity better than 20/400 and far exceed the minimum detriment of 20/200 to be considered legally blind.

Injecting a healthy REP65 gene into young patients could prevent cell death and permanent vision loss.

Four of the participants were 11 years old or younger at the time of the original trial. Notably, the most significant improvements occurred in the young participants. Researchers speculated that their young retinas might not have gone through the same amount of dystrophy as those of the older participants. This is important in light of the fact that many children with LCA will rub their eyes which can lead to secondary problems.

To further quantify improvement to vision, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans were performed while a dim, flickering checkerboard pattern was projected in front of a participant’s recently treated eye. Comparing these scans to scans taken before injection of the second gene they confirmed that the vision-processing areas of the brain were being activated. What’s more, the area of the brain activated by stimulating the first eye showed even greater activity when both eyes were stimulated. The scientists hypothesize that signals now being sent by the second eye were combining with and enhancing signals from the first eye. Both eyes were working together.

Surprised by this result, the team was relieved by another. It remained possible that the initial injection could have acted like a vaccine, priming the immune system against the second injection. Being “immune-privileged,” however, the eye is more likely to tolerate a foreign substance without eliciting an immune response. Fortunate for the participants, the second injection indeed did not trigger an immune response.

A rare condition, Leber congenital amaurosis affects just 1 person in 80,000. Looking ahead, Bennett hopes to apply the same approach to other more common eye diseases. As for treating Leber congenital amaurosis, they plan to begin enrolling more participants of even younger ages, possibly as young as six months old. If the procedure proves safe in the very young it would be the ideal strategy to treat the disease early, before permanent damage is done to the retina.

The results of the current study are promising not only for the visually impaired but for gene therapies in general, constantly beleaguered by setbacks. Whether or not RPE65’s success can be applied to other types of gene therapies, we can only wait and see.

[image credits: Young Doctors Research Forum, Blindness.org, Nuffield Laboratory of Opthalmology]
image 1: eye test
image 2: Bennett
image 3: retina

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This X-ray/CT scan shows the placement of electrodes over the temporal lobe that scientists used to decode what the patient was hearing.

The day we can scan a person’s brain and “hear” their inner dialogue just got closer. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley recorded brain activity in patients while the patients listened to a series of words. They then used that brain activity to reconstruct the words with a computer. The research could one day be used to help people unable to speak due to brain damage.

It’s not every day neuroscientists get a chance to record activity from the human brain. A group of 15 patients suffering from either epileptic seizures or brain tumors were already scheduled to undergo neurological procedures. The patients, all English speaking, volunteered for the study. After neurosurgeons cut a hole in their skulls, the research team placed 256 electrodes over the part of the brain that processes auditory signals called the temporal lobe. The scientists then played words, one at a time, to the patients while recording brain activity in the temporal lobe.

The auditory features of a sound can be characterized by what’s called a frequency spectrogram that measures the strength of different frequencies within the sound. The scientists hoped to use the pattern of brain activity while the word “partner,” for example, was played to generate a second spectrogram. Were it perfect, this process, called “stimulus reconstruction,” would reconstruct a frequency spectrogram identical to the original. However, because the temporal lobe is only one of several brain regions that process sound, the scientists did not expect an exact reconstruction.

Brian Pasley, post-doctoral fellow and lead author of the study, devised two different computer models for the stimulus reconstruction. Each was created according to different assumptions about how the brain processes sound. One model outperformed the other, enabling the computer to reconstruct the original word 80 to 90 percent of the time.

A comparison of original and reconstructed frequency spectrograms for a test word.

The study was published recently in PLOS Biology.

That’s music to the ears of people who can’t speak because of brain damage. Strokes or neurodegenerative diseases such as Lou Gehrig’s disease can leave people’s language centers damaged and impair their speech. A critical link between the current study and potentially helping these people is the idea that hearing words and thinking words activate similar brain processes. There is evidence to suggest that this is indeed the case, but more research is needed to work out exactly how perceived speech and inner speech are related. Even so, the current study lends hope to a potential treatment. “If you can understand the relationship well enough between the brain recordings and sound, you could either synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking, or just write out the worlds with a type of interface device,” Pasley told the Berkeley News Center.

Just last year researchers used brain implants to improve memory in rats. Others used an implant to help paralyzed rats walk again. The current study paves the way for yet another domain in which neural interfaces could one day be used to improve our lives.

[image credits: Adeen Flinker via UC Berkeley and modified from PLOS Biology]
image 1: brain waves
image 2: figure

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Ray Kurzweil predicts that in the coming decades the term “life expectancy” will become irrelevant. By then medical advances and nanotechnology will be such effective tools with which to repair our bodies as they break down with age it will be as simple as car repair, changing out old parts for new and getting us back on the road again. Indefinitely. Even without the breakthrough technologies that allow us to regrow organs or reprogram faulty genes technological advances are making their imprint on our longevity. But a puzzling part to the equation has emerged. While humans are in fact living longer lives on average, the oldest age that the oldest people reach seems to be stubbornly and oddly precisely cemented right at 114.

Life expectancy nearly doubled in developed countries over the 20th century. Prior to 1950 the increase was due mostly to a decrease in infant mortality. After the 1950s it was a decline in old age mortality that provided the main life-prolonging force. Improvements to the social and physical environments and breakthroughs in healthcare underlie both phases of mortality decrease. A person born in the US at the turn of the 20th century could expect to live 49.2 years. Their ancestor born in 2003 could reasonably expect to see their 77th birthday. But while average lifespans continue to lengthen, the oldest of the old appear to be encountering a rather powerful limiting factor. As reported recently in Slate, the number of oldest supercentenarians – people 110 and older – has stayed at around 80 over the past few years. And the age at which they die hasn’t changed over the past few decades. Data from japan is used to illustrate this. In 1990 there were 3,000 people 100 or older, the oldest of them being 114. Twenty years later the number of people aged 100 and over had grown to around 44,000, but the oldest was still 114. Robert Young, a gerontologist working for the Guinness Book of World Records, estimates that “the odds of a person dying in any given year between the ages of 110 and 113 appear to be about one in two. But by age 114, the chances jump to more like two in three.”

Number of people living to 110 years or older in Switzerland.

This phenomenon of everyone getting older but the oldest dying at the about the same age is called “rectangularization of the mortality curve.” A mortality curve tracks the probability that a person will be alive at a certain age. At birth the value is 100%. By year one it begins to slope downward, and around 70s, 80s, 90s it drops at a faster rate. In decades past the curve looked like a ski slope, hitting zero around 114. But the fact that more people are living longer lifts the curve and pushes it to the right so it looks more like a cliff than a ski slope – and more like a rectangle.

During our last Google+ Hangout we got a chance to hang with longevity researcher Aubrey de Grey, author of “Ending Aging” who once proclaimed “the first person to live to 1,000 was probably born by 1945.” We asked him about rectangularization, why it was that the whole ski slope doesn’t just move to the right but instead comes crashing down at around age 114. “This is a fascinating phenomenon and nobody has really much idea of what’s going on. What we do know is that it’s absolutely essential to not jump to conclusions about what’s going on. Time and time again over the decades past demographers have been brutally misled by short-term phenomena, by statistics gathered only over a few years. Blips happen for all manner of impenetrable reasons. In this case we’re talking about people born in a small segment of time, around 1900, and most of them born in particular countries and going through certain types of life they might not have gone through had they been born 20 years previously or 20 years later. There are many factors called ‘cohort effects’ that can cause early life phenomena to have an influence on longevity.”

Bottom line: don’t believe the hype.

“At this point I’m not exactly losing sleep over the phenomenon you’re talking about. I think that we’re probably going to see a resumption of the trend of everything just moving to the right eventually.”

Rectangularization of mortality.

De Grey also adds that medical developments could make rectangularization, much speculated upon in the study of aging, a moot discussion. “I don’t really care about whether I’m right or not about what I just said because it’s all going to become completely irrelevant when we have therapies that repair the damage of aging. Those therapies are going to make the whole concept of life expectancy…the way it’s calculated today will no longer exist.”

Because therapies will make life expectancies of the future, de Grey argues, so much longer than they are today, today’s estimates will become irrelevant. Like trying to compare Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds to Babe Ruth. After steroids, all bets are off.

But that’s not stopping researchers from looking for the “longevity gene.” Sampling the genetic material of centenarians, researchers have seen strong correlations with several genes and the likelihood of living to 100. Two of them are involved in fat metabolism, a third in calcium metabolism.

Despite de Grey’s skepticism, if there really is a genetically-programmed limit around 114, seems to me that would make it all the more imperative to make good on the Longevity Dividend, the range of benefits to both individuals and society were we to stay healthier longer. Some argue that extending life will only postpone the inevitable disease and frailty that comes with old age. But if there were an upper bound that is not affected by current longevity trends, then the longest lifespans will not get longer but the period of age-related disease and frailty would be shortened.

Just my two cents for what they’re worth. Regardless of whether or not the upper bound is real, I agree with de Grey. Biologically, it is a fascinating phenomenon.

[image credits: dailygalaxy.com via Urban Times, Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, and Archives of Gerentology & Geriatrics]
image 1: old age
image 2: longevity
image 3: rectangularization

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Star Wars: The Old Republic immerses players in a universe that's an even longer time ago as it occurs thousands of years before A New Hope.

On December 20, 2011, a new chapter in the Star Wars universe was unleashed on the world. After 5 years in development at a cost estimated at around $200 million, Bioware, in partnership with Electronic Arts and LucasArts, launched its first massive multiplayer online (MMO) game, Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). Venturing into one of the most valuable intellectual properties in the world, Bioware took an enormous gamble. Internet chatter, which once lauded the game as the one MMO that could end World of Warcraft‘s reign, started raising concerns of a flop as the launch date came and went. Still, reviews for the game were some of the highest for any MMO ever, even more than Star Wars Galaxies, which Sony released in 2003. But was the gaming world ready for yet another subscription-based Star Wars MMO?

The answer is a resounding yes, at least for now. Electronic Arts recently reported that 2 million copies of the game have  sold and 1.7 million players have subscribed, signaling strong player retention for MMO players who are notoriously migratory. (Cue your favorite line from the movies here, such as “The force is strong in this one,” “Now this is podracing,” or “Do or do not – there is no try.”)

SWTOR preorders neared the 1 million mark days before its release and continued to sell copies after launch.

True, there have been some technical hiccups, including the Early Access fiasco, multi-hour wait times at launch, imbalance in the player-vs-player part of the game, and some rather serious exploits, some funny (/getdown should be a meme) and some making players incredibly wealthy. Yet, Bioware has handled these issues like a pro and squashed the bugs rapidly and conclusively. In other words, the game has had an incredibly successful launch. Furthermore, Bioware has already released its first update to the game and announced the release of a major update slated for March, which will bring new content, game systems, and improvements in the player-vs-player experience.

But now that the hype has settled down, it’s time to put the game into a broader perspective and ask, how innovative is SWTOR?

‘Innovation’ in the video game world is often just a PR term used for marketing. Players, however, gauge innovation by how different it is from other games and how much those differences enhance the fun. Because of the millions of dollars on the line, most games that are part of a franchise don’t try to rock the boat too much lest they go against player expectations from previous experiences. The safe approach is to give gamers more of what made prior games successful, update/improve the graphics, and perhaps push the story into new, but relatively comfortable places. The Bioware developers could have gone this route with SWTOR. However, they did make it clear that they wanted to make an innovative game, one that could compete with the big hitters in the MMO space and live up to what players expect when they imagine running a character around the Star Wars universe, noobs and fanboys alike.

Although some parts of the game are very much like other MMOs, Bioware made it clear that SWTOR would be the first story-based MMO, and the story lines receive some of the highest praises from players and critics alike. For the sake of immersion, thousands of voice actors were utilized to immerse players into the universe, rather than forcing them to read blocks of text to pick up a quest. Bioware also employed its homegrown “choose-your-own-adventure-esque” choice system that provides players with a decision tree when interacting with non-players characters, used in the popular Mass Effect games. Furthermore, players can make decisions that change their force alignment towards the light or dark sides of the force. Instead of solo players having to traverse planet-to-planet completely alone, each player has a crew that can craft or assist in questing. And while at times it has been criticized for such, it effectively hybridizes the best of the single-player game genre with a “true” MMO, which allows SWTOR to avoid some of the pitfalls associated with other games in its genre, such as endgame overemphasis, all-night raids, gear grinds, and so on. Finally, one of the best measures of an innovation is whether it can achieve that quantum-leap-like change, in which its hard to imagine going back to the way things were before. Indeed, the SWTOR forums are peppered with testimonies from players echoing this sentiment.

But why is Bioware being judged on whether it’s produced a truly innovative game?

The answer is that from the beginning, innovation and Star Wars have gone hand in hand. That was true when George Lucas made the original trilogy and the prequels. It’s been true of The Clone Wars animated TV series as well as every iteration of Star Wars video game ever made (and there are many). The merchandising campaign that has evolved throughout the years is also groundbreaking. And of course, the  Star Wars universe itself is a testament to technological innovation, from the light saber to the hyperdrive, and this technology has served to inspire technology in real life. In fact, one of the enduring legacies of the Star Wars franchise is the way that it immerses us into a future time, allowing us to try to imagine how life would be in that world. The best science fiction, including Star Trek which also has its own MMO, don’t merely provide a view of what the future could be — they define what they should be.

In a nutshell, SWTOR allows us to envision a potential post-singularity world and imagine finding our way in it, much like the old 1950′s cartoons that tried to depict what the future would look like.

SWTOR has a long way to go before it can be deemed a success in the long term (translate that as ‘profitable’). In fact, Bioware has stated that for the game to break even in addition to supporting the release of content updates every 2 months, it needs to maintain 500,000 subscribers. Coupled with this, the costs of updates is likely to be significantly higher than regular MMOs because of the voice acting. So gamers and investors both will be watching over the course of 2012 for any signs that the SWTOR player community starts dwindling significantly.

As long as Bioware continues to deliver a high-quality experience, SWTOR should have a long lifespan and just maybe, it will inspire yet another generation of young scientists and engineers to bring the technology of the future into today.

Check out this video from Bioware’s development team showcasing the story and decision tree in the Black Talon flashpoint:

[Media: Bioware, VGChartz]

[Sources: Bioware, CNN, Eurogamer, Gamespot, Massively, Reuters]

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The seats are empty, but class is in session with MIT's OpenCourseWare.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently announced an initiative to create a learning platform for online education. Preliminarily dubbed “MITx”, the initiative aims to take the MIT’s OpenCourseWare program, which provides nearly all MIT courses for free on the web, and build out an infrastructure that can be used by students to demonstrate mastery of a course and earn a certificate of completion, for a small fee. Furthermore, the platform will be open-source, allowing any educational institution to host their own courses. And while the certificates will not be equivalent to MIT course credits, it’s clear that they have to be earned through an assessment. A prototype is scheduled to go into beta during the spring semester with plans to launch the platform if all goes well. On its surface, this may seem like a way for MIT to make their free online course program profitable, but the heart of this initiative is an effort to change education forever as the educational system is at the breaking point.

In a nutshell, the United States has a higher education problem.

It's clear from the projections that demand for higher education will continue to rise.

On one hand, the Baby Boomer generation is approaching retirement age and there’s a growing need for a generation of trained, employable workers with 21st-century skills. That means young people need some kind of schooling and, in the model we’ve been in for years, that means college. Because of this, the National Center for Educational Statistics has projected continued increases in total enrollment at postsecondary degree-granting institutions through 2020:

But hold on a second. Skyrocketing educational costs are becoming prohibitive for younger Americans who want to attend college. This is a problem even for older Americans who are trying to return to school to acquire new skills for the shifting global economy.  Unfortunately for young and old alike, tuition has increased even faster than a handful of other consumer price indices, even healthcare.

As government funding has been cut to some schools and others struggle with donations and endowments, institutions are desperate for tuition dollars to cover their expenses, so they are left with little choice but to raise tuition rates (a trend called out by President Obama in his State of the Union address). As the country slowly pulls itself out of a recession and looks to the future for financial stability, it is a crucial time for something big to happen in the educational world.

For consumers, the rise of tuition has been worse than any other expenditure.

Enter MIT in all its innovative glory.

Now MIT has been at the helm of offering free courses on the Internet for 10 years. It’s OpenCourseWare program has set a benchmark and many other colleges including Standford have followed suit, including many top tiered schools. Online course aggregators, like iTunes U and Academic Earth, are helping to raise awareness as well as building up what will inevitably become a full course catalog of any major subject taught at a four-year university institution. Non-academic organizations like the Khan Academy are also offering educational resources for free, creating an enormous online video library that can serve as a virtual tutor.

However, all of these free resources are branded by academic institutions as being merely ‘supplemental’ for lacking the rigor to help students truly achieve mastery of a subject. Clearly, taking one of these online courses is really an exercise in self learning, so academic institutions are correct in identifying that true teacher-student interactions are lacking. But, as anyone who has attended a major university can attest, it can be enormously difficult for a student to have significant one-on-one time with a professor, especially in the first few years of a program, if the opportunity is even provided. In light of the economics of education, this argument is seriously falling apart and it’s only a matter of time before this snubbing will be empty.

Something has to give and the leaders at MIT are smart enough to see it on the horizon.

The truth is that the educational process, in many ways, is about becoming a self learner, something that has contributed to the rise of homeschooling as well. A self learner is a lifelong learner who must be versatile, resourceful, disciplined, motivated, and adaptable. Now, considering how globalization is transforming the job market, these kinds of skills are becoming increasingly desired as it is likely that no one will be able to have the same job for their entire life. Companies need these kinds of workers, even if the current employment paradigm only considers those with degrees.

Now, in case you think that MIT or other top universities have something to lose by giving away their education, ask yourself this: are they really jeopardizing what their in-seat experience offers or what a degree with their name on it is worth in the current marketplace? Not at all, and that’s not likely to change either regardless of how education evolves. And it’s only a matter of time before employers realize that they can hire people who have a similar knowledge base and skill set as someone with a degree from a top-tier university, but don’t have to pay them as much. In a job market rapidly changing and everyone looking to cut costs, how much longer can a lockout against non-degreed workers continue?

But the burning question is, will a free, self-learned, online curriculum provide a student the knowledge and skills to be employable? No one yet knows the answer, but blogger Scott Young is trying to find out. He’s taken up the challenge of learning M.I.T’s four-year computer science program on his own in 12 months and chronicling his progress on his blog. Check out his Week 10 vlog where he provides some insight into the process and breaks down the pros and cons of the process vs. traditional school:

This new initiative from MIT sends a clear message: education is changing. It’s becoming free, open and accessible, and it’s only a matter of time before the some kind of course mastery certificate becomes the equivalent of college credits or even a Bachelor’s degree.

[Media: Moody's Analytics, NCES, sxc, YouTube]

[Sources: BLS, Forbes, MIT, ScottHYoung]

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Jones studies RL7, the robot with a memory glitch in 'Archetype.'

What good is a killing machine that’s developed a conscience? In Aaron Sims‘ exciting new short film Archetype, RL7 is a devastatingly powerful military robot that seems to be remembering its past life…as a human and loving father. Running under seven minutes, the brief movie (embedded in its entirety below) grabs its audience with stunning visual effects and an immersive futuristic world. That’s no surprise considering Sims’ impressive credentials in film – his visual effects and design can be seen in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon, Green Lantern, and dozens of other blockbusters from the past three decades. Archetype is Sims’ breakout project, a self-produced short film that is aimed at attracting the right attention so that it can be extended into a full length feature. Singularity Hub spoke with Sims about the allure of robots with memories, the process of creating your own movie, and how Hollywood will be changed by the coming democratization of making films.

Presented with permission by Aaron Sims, here is the short film Archetype:

Sims got started in Hollywood in the 80s working on special makeup effects with the legendary Rich Baker. In the 90s he broadened his scope to general visual effects, incorporating more computer technology, and working for Academy Award winner Stan Winston (Jurassic Park, Aliens, Predator, etc). By the early 2000s Sims had garnered enough attention for his pioneering efforts in visual effects that he became the lead character designer for Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence: A.I. Sims’s willingness to embrace and innovate digital technology has helped the Aaron Sims Company become one of the leading design and effects firms in Hollywood today. Their portfolio includes films like 30 Days of Night, The Golden Compass, I Am Legend, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Incredible Hulk, The Green Lantern…the list goes on.

Unsurprisingly after all his years in Hollywood, Sims had his own idea for a film. The seed for Archetype started with the vision for the robot interrogation scene. Sims mentioned how impressed he’s been with research out of MIT on AI and social machines. He thinks there is “something so amazing about what might become of [humanity] as we live forever inside machines, not just in robots. What makes us a person?” RL7, a military robot that has somehow been created using a real human with real memories, is a comment on that question and how we may (or may not) think of such entities as “people”.

RL7 confronts Jones. His face is both incredibly exotic and wonderfully expressive.

Sims was a little reluctant to go into greater details about how RL7 was made, why he was made the way he was, and what he’ll do after he escapes. All of those questions, after all, are likely to be answered in a feature length version of Archetype, and Sims hopes to make that movie. In fact, the Archetype short reads as a sort of pitch – a seven minute preview of a film that a mainstream or independent studio may hope to pick up and produce. Sims has already received interest to that end, but he was measured in his hopes. Studio execs find it hard to “open doors for new concepts. It’s a business, and risk is difficult to take. That’s why you see so many remakes and sequels.”

Which is why it’s promising to have a project like Archetype get so much positive attention. Whether or not the short film gets picked up to be extended into a feature, Sims work shows how modern technology and innovative filming techniques can help new moviemakers get a foot in the door. Sims says that most of Archetype’s production was pretty standard: storyboards, shot planning, etc. On occasion, however, he had to get creative – limiting tracking for special effects shots by going back and shooting the camera shake separately. “Part of film making is in some ways tricks…thinking outside the box, and coming up with new techniques, to develop concepts on how to do things inexpensively.” If shot as a traditional Hollywood project, Archetype could probably have cost millions. Yet Sims leveraged his friendship in the industry to help create a film with a visual style equal to that of any mainstream production you’d see in a theater, only on a miniscule budget. The script for Archetype was appealing enough to attract actors like David Anders (RL7) and Robert Joy (Jones) so they would work for very little pay. Likewise for Sims’ colleagues who spent countless hours working on the special effects.

But what if you’re an aspiring filmmaker who doesn’t have decades of experience working in Hollywood? Sims thinks that opportunities are opening up there as well. “The [video editing] software is easier, more accessible, open to artists. Same with cameras.” Sims thinks that in the future, we could see projects like Archetype (short films aiming to attract attention and become something more) quite often. “Not only short films, but independent features. Anybody with a dream or idea, the tools are becoming available…It will be common…and I should say that I’m not the first. It’s an exciting time for everyone with dreams and passions to make films.”

I have to agree with Sims. While Archetype’s production value stands out as above and beyond most of the free films you’ll find online, there are many other examples of independent up-and-coming film makers exploring non-traditional avenues towards feature length movies. Freddie Wong and Brandon Laatsch not only produce weekly one to two minute shorts on YouTube, they also publish videos to discuss the special effect techniques they use to help their viewers with their own projects. As a whole, the upcoming generation of internet-enabled movie makers can do more on their own, and share their work much more easily than their predecessors. Aarons Sims and his team are the forefront of independent special effects, as seen with Archetype. Yet video editing and special effects software will only get better, and soon we could have even more world class independent projects making their way to your screen. Hopefully that blend of video technology and human creativity will be mirrored in the subject matter of the films themselves.

I mean, who doesn’t love watching robots go on quests of self-discovery?

A great look at Archetype's production process as actor David Anders is removed from the frame, replaced with a primitive model, and then with a finalized form of RL7.

[image and video credits: Aaron Sims Company]

[source: Aaron Sims]

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Kurzweil for President! Vote Ray! Elect the Transcendent Man! All the Way with Ray in 2012.

Ray Kurzweil has made a name for himself by forecasting important trends in consumer technology, global politics, and computer intelligence. Yet even Kurzweil couldn’t predict the latest disruptive event in his life: Ray’s running for US President in 2012! Well…kind of. The noted author, inventor, and futurist is a well known, and widely admired, figure in the Singularity community. He co-founded Singularity University, advocates the importance of understanding exponential growth in intelligence via lectures around the world, and has been featured in several documentaries. In other words Kurzweil has plenty of fans among futurists.

As it turns out, at least one of those fans thinks he should run for president, and has started the ball rolling using Americans Elect. AE is an online organization hoping to add a third party presidential candidate to the national ballot in 2012. The not-for-profit is open to electing anyone nominated (and supported) by their delegates – and any US citizen can be a delegate. So, as of 12:01pm PST on February 10, 2012, Kurzweil’s name is in the running to be AE’s candidate. Is he a serious contender? Ha! Note even close. I doubt Mr. Kurzweil even knows he’s been added to the list of potential nominees. But putting Ray’s name into the Americans Elect system highlights how easy and accessible that organization is…and how much potential they have to change American politics.

Just to be clear, Ray Kurzweil was added to the Americans Elect website as a draft candidate. He would need 5000 signatures in 10 different states to be actually considered for the AE primary in June. (Or maybe 1000 signatures in 10 different states, AE has different requirements based on candidate qualifications.) As of now, Kurzweil’s “campaign” has just two supporters and has raised no money. Sure, maybe the unwitting candidate will garner some serious cash and attention from his much beloved Singularity community, but that seems unlikely. His nomination, at this point, is mostly symbolic.

In fact, to confess, Singularity Hub isn’t completey uninvolved in his nomination. Kurzweil was submitted to Americans Elect by Frank Whittemore after a brief email conversation with compatriots on the Singularity Hub Members group email list. Are we generating our own news here? Not intentionally, but we’d be lying if we said we didn’t hope this sort of thing would be a regular product of our new membership community.

Whether one should consider Kurzweil’s nomination an inside joke or not really isn’t the issue. The potentially game changing power of Americans Elect is. Whittemore went from having an idea about a candidate to officially registering him for election over the course of a single morning. Taking the first step towards getting a candidate in the Americans Elect primary is remarkably easy. Which fits with what Americans Elect is all about: empowering US citizens to elect a president that really represents their interests. The following video explains more:

Americans Elect is very serious about the changes they want to promote in the US electoral system. They’ve already gathered more than 2.4 million signatures, over 80% of the 2.9 million signatures they’ll need to get on the presidential ballot in every state. As of February 6th, Americans Elect had been certified to appear on 16 state ballots (Arizona, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Kansas, New Mexico, Nevada, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont and Maine), had two certifications pending (Hawaii and Wyoming), and were at work to be added in 17 more (Alabama, Missouri, Georgia, South Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Montana, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Nebraska, Maryland, North Dakota, Idaho, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota). They’ve raised more than $20 million towards their goal of $30 million. They have more than 360,000 registered delegates who will vote in June’s primary, with likely many more to join in the months ahead. Just as impressive, perhaps, Americans Elect has had more than 2.4 million visitors and answered a whopping 17.8 million questions about their project.

Could AE candidates eventually win the US election? It’s very, very unlikely. As Singularity Hub discussed previously, the electoral college is an almost insurmountable barrier to third party candidates. Even Ross Perot, who received nearly 20% of the popular vote in 1992 didn’t get a single electoral vote. With the current state of presidential elections it seems almost impossible for someone outside the two party system to actually get elected. It’s not particularly cynical to point out that this is very much by design of the Republicans and Democrats.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Americans Elect won’t have a big impact on the 2012 election. Online activity is already shaping the electoral process. Candidates answer questions posted on YouTube, millions upon millions of dollars are raised via online donations, and politicians can live or die based on the news spread through the internet. What Americans Elect hopes to do is truly democratize the US presidential election at all levels of the process. It’s easy to become a delegate, it’s easy to add a candidate, it’s easy to find a candidate that agrees with your politics, and it should be easy to vote come the primary in June. The hard work comes in gathering signatures and raising funds for candidates, but that’s the sort of work that should be hard. Organizing an election, after all, is a sort of litmus test for who can organize the national bureaucracy as president.

By the time November rolls around and the US is heading to the polls, Americans Elect should have their candidate on ballots in the vast majority of states (if not all). That feat will demonstrate that a more open, and democratic, approach to politics is possible. There’s little chance that an AE candidate will win the election, but losing well could be just as rewarding for the nation. Eventually we may live in a country (global society?) where starting a campaign for a relative unknown candidate over breakfast isn’t such a far-fetched idea.

And for the record, Mr. Kurzweil, I suspect that if you actually ran you’d get the Singularity Hub endorsement. No contest.

[video credit: Americans Elect]
[source: Americans Elect]

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In the future your children won’t just be competing against other children, they’ll be pitted against robots and computers too. What’s a parent to do? Teach them about the best parts of being human: curiosity and creativity. Researcher Jonathan Mugan is bringing his specialty in machine learning to the nursery. His book, The Curiosity Cycle helps parents find simple ways of inspiring children to have the flexible thinking and boundless interest they’ll need to stay competitive in the 21st Century marketplace. It’s not about rote memorization or even developing specialized skills, it’s about raising kids who can understand the world through ever evolving models that they challenge and refine. An old school child will answer questions on a test because they are told they have to. A curious child will test themselves and their environment long before a teacher ever hands out an exam. Singularity Hub spoke with Mugan about The Curiosity Cycle and the science behind it. As machines take on bigger roles in society and the economy, humans will need to embrace the advantages of their humanity even as they take their rightful place at the top of the digital world.

Children aren’t born with degrees in psychology and computer science, but their brains seem to understand those principles all the same. The first two thirds of The Curiosity Cycle is largely focused on giving parents some subtle (and not so subtle) ways to inspire their children to approach the world with an adaptive and examining mindset. Mugan steps the reader through fun ways to introduce mathematical concepts, logic, patterns, and more, so that kids can have the foundation needed to build a complex understanding of how the world works. Many of the concepts will be familiar to those who have read books on developmental psychology, and other ideas will seem like well-articulated common sense. Still, Mugan’s first seven chapters serve as a wonderful reference in how to guide children towards self-education without necessarily resorting to overt lectures and lessons.

The last third of The Curiosity Cycle is where Mugan really distinguishes himself, however. He explains the subtleties of how computers “think” and the advantages children still have over machines that can perform millions of computations a second, but have difficulty in making useful assumptions. Mugan’s later chapters will help parents embrace the benefits of the digital age, learning the lessons that search engines and social networks have taught the world – mainly that holding knowledge is not as valuable as evaluating knowledge. The end of The Curiosity Cycle is a wonderfully insightful walk through augmented reality, cyborgs, The Singularity, and all the other emerging technological trends that our children will have to face. If Mugan starts his book with wisdom that would have been familiar to our grandparents, he ends it with wisdom that seems to come from our future grandchildren.

For those interested in learning more about The Curiosity Cycle, the first chapter can be read online for free, and the book is currently available on Amazon ($13 paperback, $10 Kindle). Or, you can learn more from Mugan himself in the following Q&A. Whether or not The Curiosity Cycle serves as your field manual, the world of the next generation is going to require focusing on some skills and forgetting others. Best prepare yourself and your kids for the new kind of education.

Singularity Hub: Hi Jonathan, thanks so much for answering our questions today. To start us off could you tell us a little about your background, your expertise, and your current work?

Jonathan Mugan: My background is in psychology and computer science. My PhD research focused on developmental robotics, which is the field of study dedicated to enabling robots to learn about the world in the same way that human children do. While doing a postdoc at CMU, I worked in the area of user-oriented machine learning to help users specify privacy policies.

To see some of Mugan's work in machine learning click the image and watch his presentation on Qualitative Learner of Action and Perception.

SH: What is The Curiosity Cycle, and what inspired you to transform the concept into a book?

JM: The Curiosity Cycle is a process for constructing knowledge that consists of identifying features in the environment, building models from those features, and testing those models to identify yet more features and models. I began my robotics research with the goal of applying theories from developmental psychology to robot learning, but I found that those theories were not specified in sufficient detail to be implemented on a robot. The Curiosity Cycle is the result of taking those ideas from psychology and making them concrete enough to be implementable. When my first son was born, I noticed that there were few books for raising intellectual children that were both grounded in psychological research and practical enough to be actionable for parents. My hope is that The Curiosity Cycle fills that gap.

SH: It seems like common sense for researchers in robotics or artificial intelligence to leverage lessons learned in child psychology in their work with machines. To what extent does your book take the opposite approach, and how has your experience in robotics affected your theories of human development?

JM: The goal of developmental psychologists is to describe how developmental learning takes place. By contrast, a major goal of developmental roboticists is to build a robot that exhibits such learning. By designing robot learning algorithms, I have come to appreciate the importance of knowledge and how we take it for granted. For example, if I move a table with a book on it, even a young child knows that the book also moves—robots don’t. Sure, you can tell robots that the book also moves, but there are a seemingly infinite number of such facts and basic-level deductions.

SH: The Curiosity Cycle has a rather extensive bibliography, but could you summarize the major studies or theories in developmental psychology that support the techniques you espouse in the book?

JM: In the mid-20th century, Jean Piaget proposed a now-famous theory of cognitive development whereby children constructed new knowledge from previous knowledge, and their development progressed in stages. More recently, Leslie Cohen proposed an information processing theory of cognitive development in which children are endowed with a domain-general information processing system that they use to bootstrap knowledge. Jean Mandler refers to this information processing that children do to construct knowledge as “perceptual meaning analysis.”

Developmental psychologists have also described learning as a process of active exploration. Eleanor Gibson proposed that human children are endowed with systems to allow them to explore and learn about the world. She emphasized that it was this exploration that enabled cognitive development. Alison Gopnik stresses that children explore to learn new things while adults are more rigid and exploit previous knowledge. Presumably, this is why it takes young children so incredibly long to put on the their socks and shoes.

SH: How have you applied the lessons you outline in your book to raising your own children?

JM: One thing I do is experiment with finding the right features to jump-start their curiosity cycles. For example, I recently stumbled upon a method to get them interested in learning Spanish. I told them that as they get older, it will be cool to speak Spanglish (a mix of Spanish and English) with their friends. I gave them some examples, and they thought the juxtapositions of the two languages were hilarious. Suddenly they were asking me questions to learn more and practicing what I had already taught them.

SH: What separates a good, but generic, book about raising children from a good book about raising children in the 21st Century?

JM: A book about raising kids for the 21st Century needs to tie deep principles of learning with the societal changes brought by technology. With the steady improvement in computer intelligence, some skills such as memorization should be de-emphasized, while others such as creativity are becoming more important. With smart computers like Watson being able to answer arbitrary questions of fact, the asking of insightful questions becomes more important.

SH: What role do digital (video) games have in raising the modern child?

JM: Video games prepare children for a future in which virtual worlds take on greater importance. Games also allow children to safely learn in simulated situations that might be dangerous in real life. But we need to be careful. More than simply being fun like movies, games are designed to trick our minds into feeling like we are being productive and working towards a real-life goal. This illusion is what makes the hours fly by.

SH: Online social interactions are becoming an increasingly large part of our children’s lives. In your opinion, can a digital social life be a fulfilling social life? Should parents accelerate or temper their child’s digital dependence?

JM: A digital social life helps to fulfill our need to share experiences and to have a record of our lives, but new communication mediums present new dangers. The digital records that your child creates may be seen by unintended viewers, such as future employers, and used against them. Also, it can be easy to fall into the trap of over-relying on the asynchronous nature of digital communication. Face-to-face communication with all of its speed and richness is a skill that takes decades to master, and a child would be severely constrained if he or she never fully developed that ability.

SH: As robotics and artificial intelligence advance, what will be the value of human capital? Will creativity be the only remaining human currency?

JM: We humans have brawn, brains, and dexterity. In the workplace, machines first replaced our brawn. They then started to replace the primitive aspects of our thinking ability such as number crunching. We have highly precise manufacturing and surgical robots, but we still don’t have affordable robots that can manipulate objects in unstructured environments. This leaves us with the creativity needed for the arts, sciences, and high-level strategic decisions, and the dexterous ability needed for tasks like hairstyling.

SH: Please share your thoughts on the possibilities of the Technological Singularity and what it may mean for our children, and for the families of the future.

JM: The Singularity seems to me to be both impossible and inevitable. But when the impossible occurs, I am cautiously optimistic that it will be positive for humanity. We evolved through a process of natural selection that favored aggressive action to overpower any entity that tried to dominate us. Because of our nature, we assume that machines will one day do the same. But machines did not evolve; they were designed by us to be helpful and insightful. Future machines will hopefully maintain that inherent nature even as they become increasingly intelligent.

[image credit: The Curiosity Cycle by Jonathan Mugan]
[source: Jonathan Mugan]

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Federico Pistono knows automation threatens jobs. To deal with it, he thinks we need to change our economic philosophies.

Growth is a good thing, right? It’s the buzzword on seemingly every politician’s lips, the answer to our economic woes. You know this if you watched President Obama’s latest State of the Union Address. Increase the production of goods and services and stimulate consumer spending, that’s how we get this downtrodden economy back on its feet. Makes sense to me.

To Federico Pistono, however, it does not. The 26-year-old, self-described computer scientist, author and social activist is currently working on a book with which he plans to poke gaping holes in the conventional wisdom of ‘growth is good.’ The book, titled “Robots will steal your job, but that’s OK – How to survive the economic collapse and be happy,” is part of a crowdfunding campaign and has received a lot of support. Multiple publishers have approached Pistono about the book, but when it’s finished he intends to distribute it freely to the public.

The Verona, Italy native questions those who pin the current recession on bad economic choices by CEOs and politicians and asks us to rethink what a healthy economy should – and could – look like. Yes, bad, damaging choices have been made. But human greed and short-sightedness, Pistono thinks, is secondary to limitations that are inherent to the global economy. He thinks that technological developments have finally driven us towards a choke point that will be reached within the next fifty years. Automation is taking jobs away faster than economic growth can replace them, and it’s only going to get worse. I recently spoke with Pistono about his book, robots, our economic future, and what it means to be happy.

How is our economy today different from the economy 100 years ago?

At the beginning of the 20th century we lived in an agrarian society that employed 98 percent of people. As technology progresses and old jobs are eliminated you kind of move through cycles of job elimination and job formation. At some point you run out of cycles where there are no more jobs to fill except for a very few highly specialized jobs, the kind of jobs that require many years of education.

But this is nothing new, new technologies have always driven demand for increasingly specialized workers to run those technologies

Now, it requires more time to be educated into these new sectors than it requires for the technological progress to advance. The thing is, we used to be able to keep up with the speed of technological progress because we were at the beginning of the exponential curve. At the beginning the doublings didn’t seem unsettling for the global economy because we could keep up with it. It’s within our mental capabilities to keep up with it. After some time when you reach a point in the curve when it becomes to fast.

What about future generations?

I don’t think education can be solved by governments or institutions of any sort because institutions by definition are institutionalized. They can’t make progress. But if you look at the Khan Academy, Udacity, open courseware, things like that can enable new generations to speed up the process of education and learn to be a biotechnologist, for example, in two years or three years for free at home.

So right now, if you don’t have a higher education already, it’s already too late?

I’m wondering about the millions of people who haven’t learned the most important thing: critical thinking and problem solving. They might have learned skills such as driving a truck or carpentry but they don’t know how to solve problems. In this type of economy I don’t know how you can educate these people to do these highly sophisticated, very challenging jobs that the new economy will require in five to ten years time. I just don’t see how a 50-year-old truck driver can reinvent himself in five to ten years.

What are the consequences of massive amounts of unemployed people around the world?

I think this whole thing is going eventually to collapse into an unsustainable social situation where you have riots. I mean, when people don’t have food, basic necessities and they don’t see a future for themselves or for their families they’re going to start to get really pissed off. They’re going to grab guns. I would like to avoid that.

What’s the solution?

The solution is to prepare for a change in the economic system. If we resist automation we are still going to see this problem. Companies need to be productive and in order to be productive you have to automate, that’s the only way to increase productivity. It’s been true for 200 years. The only way I can see out of this within this economic system is for the state to take over and just employ people for doing nothing or almost nothing. But states and governments are already broke, so I don’t see how that’s possible. Another way would be to just socialize. Many people have proposed a minimum wage just for living. So if you’re a citizen you get a thousand dollars a month. In Martin Ford’s book “The Lights In The Tunnel” he comes with very, very convoluted arguments like we’re going to pay people to read books because we want people to be smart and stay informed. I read that and I think, yeah, it makes sense within this type of culture, but I think it’s fundamentally corrupt and quite plainly insane. I think the only way out is to rethink the labor for income and income for survival cycle. And I think that the argument that it’s going to be either capitalism or socialism, I think those are 18th century ideas that are obsolete in world of interconnected, global information and economies where everything is instant and can be transferred. We have enabling technologies like 3D printing that makes the old way of thinking of manufacturing obsolete.

Where do we go from here?

One must start to wonder if this growth paradigm is even possible, in the physical sense. So I made some calculations that were confirmed by Tom Murphy, a physics professor who writes the blog “Do The Math,” where he proves mathematically and physically that continuous growth on this finite planet, even with all the efficiency mechanisms of the market system is physically impossible. Plain and simple thermodynamics, it’s impossible to grow at the current rate for more than fifty or sixty years. So on one side you have the physical impossibility of growth, on the other you say, wait a minute, even if growth was possible did we ever even stop and think if it was desirable?

Huh?

For hundreds of years there was a correlation of growth and quality of life, because you needed to go from having nothing to having a good standard of living. And once you’ve reached a certain point where you have enough to live by this correlation no longer holds. This is because it wasn’t a causation it was just a correlation. One did not directly cause the other. Once some enabling factors come in you have this decoupling of growth and happiness and quality of life. In fact research shows that it is inversely correlated when you increase by a large factor the wealth that a person has. If you make eighty or a hundred thousand dollars a year that’s enough for you to live by without having to worry about money. But if you make millions and millions you accumulate more stress. The monetary inequalities within a state is a very good indicator of that state’s social health. The more unequal the country is the worse the situation is. You have high crime rates, suicide rates, depression, everything.

How can I be happy without a capitalist economy?

It’s atrocious to think that the highest peak of a person would be to barely survive in an economy where we can create an abundance for basically everyone on the planet. I think it’s not only myopic, it’s morally corrupt and intellectually corrupt. It’s not just a technological problem, it’s a sociological problem, an ecological problem because it’s physically unsustainable, and an economic problem. I know it’s hard because many people have been educated into believing in this kind of system and don’t think any other is possible. We first have to move away from thinking that growth will solve our problems. That’s not true, we’ve known that for forty years, but we have deluded ourselves into believing that. I think the countries should recognize that an indicator of the wealth of a nation is not the GDP, but maybe some other indicators that have been developed like the GNH, which is Gross National Happiness or the quality-of-life index. Those are the things we should be maximizing. I agree it’s a harder thing to quantify than profit, but to think that with our current AI algorithms, computational power, and data that it would be too difficult to estimate the quality of life of a nation, I think it’s highly irrational.

[image credits: Indigogo]
[video credits: federicopistono via YouTube]
images: Indigogo
video: federicopistono

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Some herald it as the cure for terrorism, others deride it as mindless video game warfare, but few doubt that the American era of drone warfare has arrived. From short range surveillance craft like the Raven to missile packing hunter-killers like the infamous Predator, the US military is awash with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). According to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service, nearly one in three US warplanes are drones…and those machines are changing the way the world wages war. US soldiers in Afghanistan rely more and more upon intelligence gathered from drones, and President Obama recently lauded the precision and success of deadly drone-strikes against top terrorist targets in Pakistan. Meanwhile all advanced militaries in the world, from Israel to Russia, seem to be improving their own drone capabilities. Yet with this surge in robotic craft come rising concerns over the ethics, and liabilities, of UAVs. The rise of drones seems unstoppable, but will this shift in tactics improve or deepen the ravages of war?

Wired’s Danger Room broke the Congressional Report Service story earlier this month, calling out some of the most enlightening figures from the 50 pages study (mirrored here). About 31% of US aircraft are unmanned. That represents an amazing change over the past few years as such UAVs only represented 5% of the US total in 2005. Of course, the vast majority of these drone craft are relatively small, able to be launched by hand. The most prolific is the Army’s Raven, with 2200 on order and 1300 delivered. The most widely discussed, and feared, drones are the Predators and Reapers, which can carry heavy ordnance (including Hellfire missiles) and are often operated remotely by human pilots stationed in the US. However, CRS reports that there are only about 160 Predator and Reapers in service.

Why is the population of drones rising exponentially in the US military? Again, the CRS numbers are very revealing. While representing more than 30% of the total aircraft flown, drones account for just 8% of the warplane budget. Nearly forty Predator and Reaper drones have crashed in Afghanistan and Iraq (with the loss of small UAVs like the Raven being considerably higher), yet the accident rate for Predators has dropped significantly in the past few years falling from 20 cases per 100,000 hours in 2005 to just 7.5/100k in 2009. That accident rate puts the Predator (and Reaper) on par with the F-16! And pilot lives are never lost in a drone crash. On a case by case basis, individual UAVs may or may not be more cost effective than manned planes for a particular mission, but as a whole they seem to be a better investment. In fact, the US is on track to spend $26 billion on drone R&D between 2001 and 2013. A small fraction of the total US military budget, but possibly the investment that may yield the highest dividends.

No new technology can be borne into battle, however, without carrying with it some new dangers as well. Critics of the reliance on drones point to two large security risks, both in the handling of data. First, most aerial drones are not used directly as weapons, but as mobile platforms for intelligence gathering. Even the Predator comes packed with cameras to observe its surroundings in high definition and at high speeds. With the surge in the use of UAVs has come a tidal wave of video and sensor information, much of it streamed to remote locations far from the point of operation. There have already been a few well-reported cases of insurgents tapping into that data stream for use against US troops. Such risks are likely to increase as technology-use among opposition forces improves.

Second, whether a drone is operating under its own programming or being remotely piloted by a human, they are open to receive control commands. The possibility of drones being hacked is very real, and some claim that the recent capture of an RQ-170 spy drone in Iran was accomplished through such hijacking techniques. Whether or not that’s the case, UAVs are clearly susceptible to inflight theft in ways that manned vehicles simply are not.

The following video describes the RQ-170 and its recent capture by Iran:

Above and beyond technological concerns is the growing opposition to UAVs on ethical grounds. The issues raised by opponents are varied but can be categorized into three general critiques: that drones give the US (and other governments) unchecked ability to assassinate their targets, that drones developed for use in foreign conflicts may eventually be used against a nation’s own citizens, and that drones desensitize soldiers to killing (and that, by extension, a large number of civilians have been killed in drone strikes). Among those raising concerns on the growing use of drones is the ACLU, which has filed suit to gain access to the US’ so-called “targeted killing program” that seeks to eliminate high-value targets using Predators. Protestors in both the US and Russia have reported strange surveillance craft hovering during their demonstrations, reportedly the use of drones as domestic spies. Public opinion on drones in the UK, and much of the EU, is generally considered poor. While it is difficult to find a single source that articulates the wide range of outrage against drone warfare, the following news segment from Russia Today certainly tries:

Trivializing the concerns over the use of UAVs in war would be a mistake. Yet the armed forces of nations all around the world seem undeterred by opposition voices. As mentioned in the CRS study, the per year investment in drone R&D is increasing, projected to rise to $3.9 billion from the US Department of Defense. Among the upcoming vehicles expected to see launch is the Avenger, the successor to the Predator and Reaper, capable of flying higher, longer, and 50% faster and carry upwards of 50% more/heavier ordinance. Private companies are developing scouting UAVs armed with anti-personnel weapons for use by border agents and police. The US Navy is developing both unmanned jet fighters and automated turrets capable of destroying drones. Trade organizations for UAVs are attempting to recast their public image in the EU, Israel has its own UAV projects, and systems from China and Russia can be assumed to be developing on pace as well.

Simply stated, no matter what moral issues are raised, UAVs are not going away. The tactical and economic advantages are too large for any military to sacrifice. Accordingly, governments are becoming more vocal in the support of this technology. President Obama recently admitted to use of Predator drone strikes in Pakistan, which were long rumored to be killing Al Qaeda operatives, during a recent Google Hangout. Obama, however, denied that such strikes had high rates of collateral damage and generally supported the use of drones as precise (see clip below, full video available here).

US allies are likewise vocal about their support. Yemen has requested, and received, increased US drone patrols as the nation prepares to shift power from its president to its vice-president. It’s hoped that well-placed UAVs could curb the growing threat of terrorist groups hoping to influence the country during political volatile times. Even as Pakistan, and other nations have condemned US strikes as violations of the sovereignty of their air space they have requested access (sales) of the vehicles to their own militaries.

The fact that no armed force wants to sacrifice the use of drones should suggest the recent success and ongoing potential of this technology. Undoubtedly the growing reliance on UAVs has altered warfare and will continue to do so. With that change we should also expect battles over domestic use of these aircraft for it’s almost certain that law enforcement agencies will find the vehicles just as advantageous as their military counterparts. We may also fear that remotely targeting enemies will lend a certain “numbness” to soldiers around the globe. Yet that fear was raised with long range high altitude bombers in the Second World War, with nuclear proliferation in the Cold War, and perhaps with every military technological innovation since. Smart warfare seeks to remove soldiers from danger even as it makes those soldiers more effective. UAVs are no exception. If we must argue against unmanned warfare, let us argue against warfare itself, for it is the intention of deadly force, not the technology that delivers it, which ultimately bears responsibility for the death and destruction that follows. If we must use robots to fight, let us use them well, use them decisively, and then stop and transform them into something more productive. Ultimately it is the peaceful applications of such drones: search and rescue, novel construction, exploration, etc, that will hopefully form their lasting legacy.

[image credits: Public Domain image (Brigadier Lance Mans, Deputy Director, NATO Special Operations Coordination Centre), Congressional Research Service]
[video credit: PressTVGlobalNews, Russia Today]
[source: Congressional Research Service, Danger Room, WhiteHouse.gov]

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Today, genomic interpretation can be like looking at tea leaves, but the CLARITY Challenge is hoping to change that. (Image: micahb37/flickr)

Children’s Hospital Boston recently announced a $25,000 competition for the development of an interpretation and communication system that can deliver genomic information from the lab to physicians and patients. As the cost of genome sequencing continues to fall and may break the $1,000 barrier soon, the issue is no longer about acquiring genetic data but about what all the data means. Scientists around the world have been making progress interpreting the molecular language of DNA but, as the Human Genome Project revealed, the human genome contains at least 25,000 genes, so research can be slow going. Furthermore, what information is obtained and published in journals has a hard time finding its way into practices for physicians to understand and apply toward patient care.

At the heart of the challenge is a rather simple question: can genomic information be analyzed effectively and presented to a doctor in a way that helps the patient?

While the hospital could have just tossed more money at genetic research to promote advances, it’s chosen to host a competition to drive innovation. The CLARITY Challenge, which stands for the Children’s Leadership Award for the Reliable Interpretation and appropriate Transmission of Your genomic information, directs research groups and companies to focus on major bottlenecks in genomic medicine. Competitors will receive raw DNA sequence data from three de-identified children with confirmed, unknown genetic diseases and their families. The challenge is to develop a system to root out the underlying genetic basis for the disease and communicate that information in a way that guides physicians in caring for their patients.

The winner is scheduled to be announced in October.

Frankly, in the healthcare world, $25,000 is really not that much money, considering that research grants frequently are in the millions of dollars. But the prize that awaits the group that wins the CLARITY Challenge is what every researcher on the frontier of medicine can claim and reap the rewards from: being first. For something this significant in genomic medicine, odds are that whoever claims the prize will be winning for years to come.

[Media: micahb37/flickr]

[Sources: PR Newswire, Vector, WSJ]

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