Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Daily Kos, Expert systems, General Musings, Government, Predictions, Privacy, Space, tech, Terrorism
Ah, great – the military has a new techno gizmo to use in the Global War on Terror: a hand-held lie detector! From the article:
FORT JACKSON, S.C. – The Pentagon will issue hand-held lie detectors this month to U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan, pushing to the battlefront a century-old debate over the accuracy of the polygraph.
The Defense Department says the portable device isn’t perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing. The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well. “We’re not promising perfection — we’ve been very careful in that,” said Donald Krapohl, special assistant to the director at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment, the midwife for the new device. “What we are promising is that, if it’s properly used, it will improve over what they are currently doing.”
Of course, there are all kinds of problems here. let’s just start with the next paragraph in the story:
But the lead author of a national study of the polygraph says that American military men and women will be put at risk by an untested technology. “I don’t understand how anybody could think that this is ready for deployment,” said statistics professor Stephen E. Fienberg, who headed a 2003 study by the National Academy of Sciences that found insufficient scientific evidence to support using polygraphs for national security. “Sending these instruments into the field in Iraq and Afghanistan without serious scientific assessment, and for use by untrained personnel, is a mockery of what we advocated in our report.”
Furthermore, the only tests which have been conducted on the devices has been done by the company selling them to the military. And that only involved a small group of paid volunteers (226 people, from the same MSNBC story). American volunteers. Here at home. Meaning without taking into consideration either cultural differences or the stress factors of a war environment.
Now, think about that for just a moment. They sold the military a bunch (94) of these units, even though they haven’t been tested for the situation where they’ll be used. That the military would leap at the chance to use such a thing without adequate data supporting it does not come as any surprise to me. Not at all. But look past the military, at a much larger market, where that data supporting the effectiveness of the devices *would* seem a lot more appropriate: used on Americans, here at home.
Never mind the fundamental problems with any kind of polygraph – that technology is already widely accepted as an investigative tool up to and including being accepted in some courts of law. Never mind that this device is much more limited than a conventional polygraph machine, and doesn’t require the operator to have extensive training to use it.
The device is being tested by the military. They just don’t know it. And once it is in use, some version of the technology will be adapted for more generalized police use. Just consider how it will be promoted to the law enforcement community: as a way of screening suspects. Then, as a way of finding suspects. Then, as a way of checking anyone who wants access to some critical facility. Then, as a way of checking anyone who wants access to an airplane, train, or bus.
Just how long do you think it will be before you have to pass a test by one of these types of devices in your day-to-day life? I give it maybe ten years. But I worry that I am an optimist.
Jim Downey
(Via this dKos story. Cross-posted to UTI.)
The ballistics testing is finished. Well, sort of. As I mentioned yesterday, the primary goal was to get through the barrel-chopping tests, get all the data from that, and to worry about the ‘real world’ guns sometime later. And we accomplished that. Early on, as we were cruising along, it looked like we might wrap up really early, perhaps mid-day.
Of course, it couldn’t possibly work out that way.
Just as we were down into the 3″ barrel lengths, disaster struck: the mounting rail for the laser busted loose. And not just a little bit – the mounting screws stripped out, and there was no way to fix it short of machining in new threads on the receiver. That’s not the sort of thing you can do out in the field.
Remember I said this, yesterday:
We have four more ‘flights’ of ammo to test today (we did six yesterday), going from barrel lengths of 5″ down to 2″. When we get to the point where the length of the barrel is less the the housing of the receiver (the pistol), things get tricky, but the aiming laser will help a lot.
Um, oops.
And of course, the thing didn’t fail all at once. We got to go through that wonderful process of noticing the impending disaster and trying to cope with it, using this or that strategy, each attempt sorta working for a little while before failing. That took about two hours. And just when we thought we had it secured, a shot with one of the powerful calibers (I think it was a .45 Colt) sent the thing flying in recoil.
Steve, who probably has the most experience as a shooter of any of us, figured that he might as well see if he could shoot the pistol, sans laser. And sans any other sort of sight. Even without the benefit of a barrel, since once we got to that point, the short little bits of barrel were *down inside* the housing of the Thompson/Center Encore pistol (look down to ‘Number 1842’ to get an idea of what just the housing looks like – it’s the part without a barrel or anything attached, off on the left side).
This, needless to say, was going to be a difficult accomplishment, for just a few shots. Doing it for a couple hundred data points (shots were only considered “good” if we got comparable readings from both chronographs), using always-changing types of ammo and different calibers, almost impossible.
But Steve did it. We decided that his secret ‘super power’ is the ability to shoot amazingly well in really dumb situations.
So, we got it done. Got all the data we considered critical for the project. Packed up the stuff we didn’t want stolen, and what needed to go back to Iowa with Jim K, came home. I’ll get the rest of the set up (tent, tables, et cetera) today. And Steve and I will go out sometime in the next week or so and do the ‘real world’ testing, using guns on the market with the same ammo as for the test, which will give us some benchmark comparisons to relate to the ‘ideal’ data.
Big project. The better part of $7,000 worth of ammo, and $5,000 for the custom barrels. Add in another three or four thousand for incidental stuff (lasers, chronographs, generator, chop saw, and so forth). Maybe 250 man-hours of labor for the actual testing component. And we’re still a long ways from being done. We still need to do all the data entry, design a website, write everything up so that all the information – warts, glitches, and errors – is available freely to anyone who is interested in seeing hard data about what the correlation is between barrel length and ammo performance. I’m guessing we still have several weeks before we can say that it is done.
But one hell of a big part of it is accomplished. And that feels really good.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Cassini, Enceladus, Health, NASA, Phil Plait, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Saturn, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Titan
Gah. I am either having a relapse of the very stubborn flu that had me laid low last month, or am fighting some new bug with similar (yet still considerably less severe) symptoms. This is highly annoying.
So, I’m about to go take a nap. But first a couple of quick notes, and then a bit from Phil Plait’s blog about a recent discovery that is very exciting.
Note one: downloads of the .pdf of Communion of Dreams have crossed 8,200 and downloads of the audio version continue to climb as well. That’s exciting.
Note two: heard nothing yet from the agent I mentioned contacting the other day. No surprise – I expect that it will take a month or so to hear from them. But I needed something else to note.
Now, about the news from space . . .
I have written previously about the Cassini probe’s 10 year mission to Saturn, and how there have been a lot of great images and information coming back to scientists about that planet and its moons. Information that helps to confirm what we knew when I was first writing Communion (since most of the action of the book takes place on and around Titan.) But there is news which would potentially require me to revise the novel slightly – not about Titan, but about its sibling Enceladus. You may have heard something about this, but I’ll go to the Bad Astro Boy himself for the news:
Life’s cauldron may be bubbling underneath Enceladus
A few days ago I wrote about how the Cassini Saturn probe dove through water ice plumes erupting from the surface of the icy moon Enceladus. The pictures were incredible, but it may very well be that the other detectors got the big payoff.
They detected organic compounds in the plumes.
Now remember, organic molecules don’t necessarily mean life. What Cassini detected were heavy carbon-based molecules, including many that are the building blocks for making things like amino acids and other compounds necessary for life as we know it.
Edited to add: Carolyn Porco, imaging team leader for Cassini, says:
[…] it is now unambiguous that the jets emerging from the south polar fractures contain organic materials heavier than simple methane — acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, propane, etc. — making the sub-surface sources of Enceladus’ dramatic geological activity beyond doubt rich in astrobiologically interesting materials.
Whoa. I mean, *whoa* . Seriously. It ain’t life, nor even proof of life – but it is *damned exciting*.
Now, a nap. All this excitement makes me tired.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Babylon 5, DARPA, Government, J. Michael Straczynski, JMS, movies, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Wired, Writing stuff
Of all the many wonderful characters created by J. Michael Straczynski for his Babylon 5 universe, I have always been particularly fond of the Technomage Galen. Why? Well, actor Peter Woodward is just plain cool (he understand real weapons and fighting like few actors or fight directors do – his ‘Conquest‘ series for the History Channel a few years back was one of the best such documentary series I have ever seen). But more than that, the character Galen uses *exactly* the kind of technology that I envision is commonplace in the world of Communion of Dreams: the cyberwear which allows the user a functional augmented reality.
Recently, I wrote about how researchers have made a first important step in this direction, with the development of “a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.”
Well, now Wired is reporting that – surprise, surprise – DARPA is interested in the development of this technology. From the article:
Today, a handful of soldiers with advanced gear can see a few digital maps, through helmet-mounted monocles. Some pilots can get data about their world, on heads-up displays. But one day, troops could see an info-“augmented” reality all around them, with contact lenses that provide “first-person shooter-type video game” environments to those that wear them. At least, that’s the idea behind the latest project from DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky science and technology division.
The agency’s Information Processing Techniques Office announced Wednesday that it’s looking for information on “the creation of micro- and nano-scale display technologies for the purpose of creating displays that could be worn as transparent contact lenses.” And not in some far-off future. But in “three to five years.”
Three to five years. As I said in that post in January:
Woo-hoo! I love it when my predictions start to become reality!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Cory Doctorow, NPR, Predictions, Press, Promotion, Publishing, tech, Writing stuff
NPR this morning had a segment on how publishers are starting to figure out that having electronic books posted for free download actually helps them sell conventional printed books.
Well, duh.
No, that’s not directed at NPR. It’s a comment directed towards the publishing industry in general, and a number of the large publishing houses in particular. As the NPR story indicates, there has been plenty of evidence that this works for at least several years, yet getting a large corporation to realize that their business model and mindset have been surpassed by technology is never easy. Just ask Cory Doctorow about his experiences in getting this done with his writing.
Anyway, I’m glad to hear that things are starting to sink in to the conventional publishing world. Downloads of Communion of Dreams are now approaching 8,000 – almost entirely by word of mouth. That has got to help my chances in finding a conventional publisher. And I have you all to thank for that!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, Book Conservation, movies, Podcast, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, Writing stuff
I have been *really* enjoying the audio version of Communion of Dreams, which I discussed in my last post. And I think you will too, once we work out some additional logistical things on the hosting end (the files are very large, relative to the .pdf files of the text, and necessitate increasing my bandwidth allotment significantly.) With a little luck, we should have that ready to go by this weekend. My friend’s interpretation of the characters is quite interesting – some of them have caught me a bit by surprise, though I cannot object in the slightest to his artistic decisions. And he is very good, really getting into the pacing and mood of the story the further he goes.
In fact, listening to the book, and the need to catch up on book conservation work from the long break last week through this weekend, is responsible for my not posting anything yesterday. And that’s OK, since I would have been tempted to do what just about every other SF blogger on the planet seems to have done: write a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Beyond being one of the best Science Fiction writers of the 20th century, Sir Arthur had an impact on the larger society, changing not only how we see space, but how we actually use it. It is completely understandable that everyone wants to write about him, and how his writing changed their lives (and writing). I did so in some discussion forums. And I have written about him here, and noted on my CoD site just what his influence has been on me as a writer.
But after I heard of his death all I really wanted to do was sit back and enjoy his vast vision. Tuesday night I popped open a beer, popped 2001 into the DVD player, and paid homage to the narrator of Tales from the White Hart.
Then yesterday, as I worked in my bindery, listening to my own story of humanity’s first encounter with an alien artifact, I thought about Clarke. A lot. And in thinking of him, and all that he accomplished, there was a danger, a tendency: to despair, to feel unworthy, to judge my own writing by his measure. Because I fall short, no matter how you look at it.
But that’s not what it’s all about. We all fall short of the best, at least in some areas. That does not negate the good work we do. Even Arthur C. Clarke had his failings. That does not change the fact that the world now is a poorer place for his absence.
Farewell, my old friend and mentor, though we never met.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Cory Doctorow, General Musings, Genetic Testing, Government, movies, Philip K. Dick, Predictions, Privacy, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Travel
Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.
Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.
‘If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,’ said Pugh. ‘You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.’
“We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society” . . . and turn them into criminals by the way we treat them from the very start.
The Minority Report, anyone? No, not the movie, which was OK, but the original short story by Philip K. Dick, which also shows the dangers of a post-war military regime/mindset to a civil society.
See, here’s the thing: people will largely react to the way you treat them (yes, I am generalizing.) If you take one set of people, and treat them like criminals from early childhood, guess what you’ll get?
I am constantly dismayed by just how much Great Britain has become a surveillance society, to the point where it is a dis-incentive to want to travel there. In almost all towns of any real size, you are constantly within sight of multiple CCTV cameras, and there is increasing use of biometrics (such as fingerprint ID) as a general practice for even routine domestic travel.
But getting DNA of all five year olds, under the excuse that it will better allow for catching criminals? Scary. To then match that up with the notion that you can predict the future behaviour of a 5 year old, based on someone’s model of personality development is just plain insane.
And you know that if they can pull this off in Britain, there will be plenty of people who think it should be instituted here.
Welcome to the future.
Jim Downey
(Via BoingBoing. Cross-posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Carl Sagan, Fermi's Paradox, Marketing, Phil Plait, Predictions, Promotion, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Society, Space, Survival, tech
What is it with big corporations turning to space-related gimmicks in order to promote their products?
Last week Phil Plait on his Bad Astronomy site did a post about a beer maker’s ‘plan’ to advertise using a laser to shine their logo onto the Moon. (The second comment in that thread remembered me, and I also posted a comment about my Paint the Moon project from years back when I was writing Communion of Dreams.) It’s really just an advertising trick – they’re not seriously going to try it from what I can tell. So, like my communal fantasy art project, no real harm nor foul.
More worrying is this bit via redOrbit:
Doritos to Broadcast First Ad into Space
The campaign to broadcast the first ever advert into space is launched today (Friday March 7) with University of Leicester space scientists playing a key part in the process.
The British public is being asked to shoot a 30-second ad about what they perceive life on earth to be as part of Doritos ‘You Make It, We Play It’ user-generated-content campaign. The winning advert in the competition will be beamed past the earth’s atmosphere, beyond our solar system and into the Universe, to anyone ‘out there’ that may be watching. The winning ad will also be broadcast on terrestrial TV.
Catch that bit about scientists from the University of Leicester being involved? Well, some of the facts reported in the long article strike me as being a bit dodgy, but there is little doubt that indeed the scientists have signed on, for their own reasons. From the article again:
Dr Darren Wright of the University of Leicester Department of Physics and Astronomy said: “The Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group and Department of Physics and Astronomy as a whole at the University of Leicester has a very high international profile in the area of Space Physics.
“An important part of this project is that it provides an additional component to the Physics and Astronomy Department’s ever increasing outreach program. The ad to be transmitted will be created by the public following a national competition thus increasing public awareness of space activities.
“The launch of this project as we embark on National Science and Engineering Week- with a range of activities taking place at the University of Leicester- is timely, and adds impetus to our efforts to interest people in science.
“The University is particularly committed to outreach programs along with the National Space Centre – the brainchild of the University of Leicester – and engaged in a number of programs with the wider public.”
(I could find nothing on the UL site about this, but it seems to not have been updated that recently.)
So, in order to better promote their university and outreach program, they are willing to join in on this gimmick with Doritos. The Doritos UK site (warning – it’s one of those Flash-heavy sites that assumes you have at least a gig of RAM running) even has this confirmation:
We’ll even beam the winning advert into space just for the hell of it. But if passing aliens pick up the message and invade Earth looking for tasty snacks, don’t blame us.
Hahaha! See, it’s all just another joke, like the Moon/Beer Sign! Hilarious!
The problem is, there are real issues to be considered in taking an active role in broadcasting messages out in space, as I noted in this post from last June:
And I guess that’s where I come down on the question of whether or not we should be broadcasting “contact” signals out into the cosmos, in the hope of connecting with some other intelligent life.
Just about every major science fiction author has dealt with the question of alien contact at some point or another. Sometimes it is handled with an assumption of happy-happy E.T. helping us out, being part of the big brotherhood of intelligent species. Sometimes it is having us be lunch. Sometimes we’re the bad guys, enslaving other races or having them for lunch.
I tend to agree with Carl Sagan’s position that we’re unlikely to be at anything resembling technological parity with another race (and this is the premise of Communion of Dreams). And I tend to agree with those who advocate a certain caution in making our presence known in the universe. Via MeFi, there’s a very good article on this very topic in The Independent by Dr. David Whitehouse, formerly the BBC Science Editor and a respected astronomer, that I heartily recommend. An excerpt:
The fact is, and this should have been obvious to all, that we do not know what any extraterrestrials might be like – and hoping that they might be friendly, evolved enough to be wise and beyond violence, is an assumption upon which we could be betting our entire existence. When I was a young scientist 20 years ago at Jodrell Bank, the observatory in Cheshire, I asked Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of Jodrell Bank and pioneering radio astronomer, about it. He had thought about it often, he said, and replied: “It’s an assumption that they will be friendly – a dangerous assumption.”
And Lovell’s opinion is still echoed today by the leading scientists in the field. Physicist Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has been for decades one of the deepest thinkers on such issues. He insists that we should not assume anything about aliens. “It is unscientific to impute to remote intelligences wisdom and serenity, just as it is to impute to them irrational and murderous impulses,” he says. ” We must be prepared for either possibility.”
The Nobel Prize-winning American biologist George Wald takes the same view: he could think of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a superior technology in outer space. The late Carl Sagan, the American astronomer who died a decade ago, also worried about so-called “First Contact”. He recommended that we, the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos, should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes. He said there is no chance that two galactic civilisations will interact at the same level. In any confrontation, one will always dominate the other.
Sure, our broadcasts have been leaking out into space for a hundred years. But using a sophisticated system such as proposed for this absurd commercial is another story – there may be almost zero chance that such a signal could ever be picked up (even if there is intelligent extra-terrestrial life). But it is still a foolish risk. It’d be terribly embarrassing to have some other civilization get our snack food commercial, let alone to have them show up and decide that we tasted even better than the chips.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 