Zombie Apocalypse Not Caused by Virus, CDC Claims

Rudy Eugene, 31, shot and killed after attacking homeless man and eating his face. (PHOTO:Twitter/Diario DiaaDia ‏)

christianpost.com | Jun 1, 2012

By Christine Thomasos

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) denies that there is any existence of zombies, despite public speculation stemming from various cases of cannibalism this week.

Last Saturday, a Miami man was shot dead by police after he was seen naked, growling and consuming the flesh of a homeless man’s face. On Sunday, a man in New Jersey reportedly stabbed himself 50 times before throwing his flesh and intestines at police officers. On Tuesday, a Maryland man told authorities that he had eaten the heart and brain of his roommates.

While many have been speculating about the events, “Zombie Apocalypse” became a trending term on search engines this week. Still, the CDC denies that zombies exist.

A zombie, by defition in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is: “A person held to resemble the so-called walking dead.”

When reports surfaced that many of the assailants involved in the recent crimes had consumed human flesh, news outlets began to refer to them as zombies.

“The CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” CDC spokesman David Daigle told The Huffington Post.

However, Gawker reported about a “mysterious rash” in a Hollywood, Fla., school earlier this month along with an unknown chemical that sent five people to the hospital at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. While the HazMat investigation crew was unable to provide conclusive data concerning the two incidents, some believed they were related to zombie activity.

However, Daigle said there are many factors that could cause a “Zombie Apocalypse” outside of exposure to chemicals and viruses.

“Films have included radiation as well as mutations of existing conditions such as prions, mad-cow disease, measles, and rabies,” the CDC spokesman said.

While authorities have stated that 31-year-old Rudy Eugene, known as the “Miami Zombie,” may have eaten the flesh of a homeless man’s face after ingesting a cocktail of drugs called “bath salt,” his friends do not believe this could have been possible.

“It had to be some sort of drug that somebody must have slipped on him, because Rudy wouldn’t so much as pop a Tylenol pill,” Eugene’s friend Bobby Chery told CBS.

The results of toxicology tests have yet to be determined in the cases of the men engaging in zombie-like behavior. Although the CDC has not acknowledged that any of the cases involved actual zombies, the agency still has available a zombie preparedness section on its website that features books and kits.

The section was launched earlier this year as part of a campaign to educate the public about preparedness for certain hazards.

“If you are generally well equipped to deal with a ‘zombie apocalypse’ you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack,” CDC director director Dr. Ali Khan said in a statement on the website.

Will Your Future Be Full of Robot Assassins and Spy Aircraft?

With Its “Roadmap” in Tatters, The Pentagon Detours to Terminator Planet

A Drone-Eat-Drone World

At the end of World War II, General Henry “Hap” Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Forces praised American pilots for their wartime performance, but suggested their days might be numbered.  “The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all,” he explained.  The future of combat aviation, he announced, would be “different from anything the world has ever seen.”

alternet.org | Jun 2, 2012

By Nick Turse

Today’s armed drones are actually the weak sisters of the weapons world.  Even the Reaper is slow, clumsy, unarmored, generally unable to perceive threats around it, and — writes defense expert Winslow Wheeler — “fundamentally incapable of defending itself.”  While Reapers have been outfitted with missiles for theoretical air-to-air combat capabilities, those armaments would be functionally useless in a real-world dogfight.

Similarly, in a 2011 report, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board admitted that modern air defense systems “would quickly decimate the current Predator/Reaper fleet and be a serious threat against the high-flying Global Hawk.”  Unlike that MQ-1000 of 2030, today’s top drone would be a sitting duck if any reasonably armed enemy wanted to take it on.  In this sense, as in many others, it compares unfavorably to current manned combat aircraft.

The Navy’s even newer MQ-8B Fire Scout, a much-hyped drone helicopter that has been tested as a weapons platform, has also gone bust.  Not only was one shot down in Libya last year, but repeated crashes have caused the Navy to ground the robo-copter “for the indefinite future.”

Even the highly classified RQ-170 Sentinel couldn’t stay airborne over Iran during a secret mission that suddenly became very public last year.  Whether or not an Iranian attack brought down the drone, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board report makes it clear that there are numerous methods by which remotely piloted aircraft can potentially be thwarted or downed, from the use of lasers and dazzlers to blind or damage sensors to simple jammers to disrupt global positioning systems, not to mention a wide range of cyber-attacks, the jamming of commercial satellite communications, and the spoofing or hijacking of drone data links.

Smaller tactical unmanned aircraft may be even more susceptible to low-tech attacks, not to mention constrained in their abilities and cumbersome to use.  Sergeant Christopher Harris, an Army drone pilot and infantryman, described the limitations of the larger of the two hand-launched drones he’s operated in Afghanistan this way: the 13-pound Puma was best used from an observation post with some elevation; it only had a 12-mile range and, though theoretically possible to take on patrol, was “a beast to carry around” once the weight of extra batteries and equipment was factored in.

Terminators of Tomorrow?

As for the future, the Air Force’s 2011-2036 Roadmap has already hit a major detour.  In 2010, Air Force magazine breathlessly announced, “Early in the next decade, the Air Force will deploy a new, stealthy RPA — currently called the MQ-X — capable of surviving in heavily defended airspace and performing a wide variety of ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance] and strike missions.”

Indeed, the 2011 Roadmap lists the MQ-X as the future of Air Force drones.  In February 2012 however, Lieutenant General Larry James told an Aviation Week-sponsored conference: “At this point… we don’t plan, in the near term, to invest in any sort of MQ-X like program.”  Instead, James said, the Air Force will be content simply to upgrade the Reaper fleet and watch the Navy’s development of its Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike or UCLASS drone to see if it soars or, like so many RPAs, crashes and burns.

The Holy Grail of drone ops is the ability of an aircraft to linger over suspected target areas for long durations.  But ultra-long-term loitering operations still remain in the realm of fantasy.  Admittedly, the Pentagon’s blue skies research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is pursuing an ambitious drone project to provide intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and “communication missions over an area of interest” for five or more years at a time.  The project, dubbed “Vulture,” is meant to provide satellite-like capabilities “in an aircraft package.”

Right now, it sounds downright unlikely.

While the Air Force has had a hush-hush unmanned space plane orbiting the Earth for more than a year, much like a standard satellite, the longest a U.S. military drone has reportedly stayed aloft within the planet’s atmosphere is a little more than336 hours.  Plans for ultra-long duration flights took a major hit last year, according to scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and defense giant Northrop Grumman.

In an effort to “to increase UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] sortie duration from days to months while increasing available electrical power at least two-fold,” according to a 2011 report made public by the Federation of American Scientists’Secrecy News, the Sandia and Northrop Grumman researchers identified a technology that “would have provided system performance unparalleled by other existing technologies.”  In a year in which the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster turned a swath of Japan into an irradiated no-go zone, the use of that mystery technology, never named in the report but assumed to be nuclear power, was deemed untenable due to “current political conditions.”

With the Pentagon now lobbying the Federal Aviation Administration to open U.S. airspace to its robotic aircraft and ever more articles emerging about dronecrashes, don’t bet on nuclear-powered, long-loitering drones appearing anytime soon, nor on many of the other major promised innovations in Drone World to come online in the near term either.

From Dystopian Fiction to Dystopian Reality

Until recently, drones looked like a can’t-miss technology primed for big budgetincreases and revolutionary advances, but all that’s changing fast.  “Realistic expectations are for zero growth in the unmanned systems funding,” Weatherington explained by email.  “Most increases will be in technical innovations improving application of delivered systems on the battlefield, and driving down the cost of ownership.”

Major Jeffrey Poquette of the Army’s Small Unmanned Air Systems Product Office talked about just such an effort.  By the late summer, he said, the Army planned to introduce more sophisticated sensors, including the ability to track targets more easily, in its four-pound Raven surveillance drones.  Put less politely, what this means is no roll-outs of sophisticated new drone systems or revolutionary new drone technology: the Army will simply upgrade a glorified model airplane that first took flight more than a decade ago.

Sci-fi it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean that nothing will change in the world of drone warfare.

The Terminator films weren’t exactly original in predicting a future of unmanned planes dominating the world’s skies.  At the end of World War II, General Henry “Hap” Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Forces praised American pilots for their wartime performance, but suggested their days might be numbered.  “The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all,” he explained.  The future of combat aviation, he announced, would be “different from anything the world has ever seen.”

The most salient and accurate of Arnold’s predictions was not, however, his forecast about drone warfare.  Pilotless planes had taken flight years before the Wright Brothers launched their manned airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, and drones would not become a signature piece of American weaponry until the 2000s.  Instead, Arnold’s faith in a “next war” — a clear departure from thesentiments of so many Americans after World War I — proved accurate again and again.  Over the following decades, American aircraft would strike in North Korea, South Korea, Indonesia, Guatemala, Cuba, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq (again), Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen (again), Libya (again), and the Philippines.  New technologies came and went, air strikes were the constant.

In Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and the Philippines, the U.S. deployed pilotless planes as per Arnold’s other prediction.  From Afghanistan onward, all of the countries that have experienced American air power have also experienced lethal drone attacks — just how many is unknown because figures on drone strikes are kept secret “for security reasons,” the Air Force’s Spires recently told TomDispatch.  What we do know is that drone attacks have increased radically over the years.  “More” has been the name of the game.

Still, barely a decade after our drone wars began, dreams of Terminator-esque efficiency and technological perfection are all but dead, even if the drone itself is increasingly embedded in our world.  Fantasies of autonomous drones and submarines fighting robot wars off the coast of Africa are already fading for any near-term future.  But drone warfare is here to stay.  Count on drones to be an essential part of the American way of war for a long time to come.

Air Force contracting documents suggest that the estimated five Reaper sorties flown each day in 2012 will jump to 66 per day by 2016.  What that undoubtedly means is more countries with drones flying over them, more drone bases, more crashes, more mistakes.  What we’re unlikely to see is armed drones scoring decisive military victories, offering solutions to complex foreign-policy problems, or even providing an answer to the issue of terrorism, despite the hopes of policymakers and the military brass.

Keep in mind as well that those global skies are going to fill with the hunter-killer drones of other nations in what could soon enough become a drone-eat-drone world.  With that still largely in the future, however, the Pentagon continues to glow with enthusiasm over the advantages drones offer the U.S.

Regarding the importance of military robots, for instance, the Pentagon’s Dyke Weatherington explained, “Combatant commanders and warfighters place value in the inherent features of unmanned systems — especially their persistence, versatility, and reduced risk to human life.”

On that last point, of course, Weatherington is only thinking about American military personnel and American lives.  Tomorrow’s drone warfare will likely mean “more” in one other area: more dead civilians.  We’ve left behind the fiction of Hollywood for a less high-tech but distinctly dystopian reality.  It isn’t quite the movies and it isn’t what the Pentagon mapped out, but it indisputably provides a clear path to a grim and grimy Terminator Planet.

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Shooting zombies is the fad among gun enthusiasts

Two young attendees get their picture taken with a zombie poster during the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) 141st Annual Meetings & Exhibits in St. Louis, in this April 13, 2012 file photo. The Hollywood-inspired zombie craze has extended to gun enthusiasts. REUTERS/Tom Gannam

Reuters | Apr 15, 2012

By Greg McCune

ST. LOUIS | One of Patrick Flanagan’s favorite movies as a kid was “Night of the Living Dead,” a 1968 horror film about a family trapped in a rural Pennsylvania house and attacked by zombies.

“I really dug zombie stuff since then,” said Flanagan, 23, an unemployed concrete worker from Alton, in southern Illinois.

So Flanagan combined his interest in zombies with another hobby – guns.

He was one of many gun owners crowded around a display of lifelike zombie paper shooting targets at the National Rifle Association’s Guns and Gear exhibition on Saturday during the NRA annual conference in St. Louis.

CDC Warns Public to Prepare for ‘Zombie Apocalypse’

The Hollywood-inspired zombie craze – featuring blood-soaked ghouls rising from the dead to attack the living – has extended to gun enthusiasts. At the huge NRA exhibition, vendors displayed zombie targets, zombie bullets, zombie paint coating for guns and zombie patches for a shooting jacket.

Firing ranges across the country are offering zombie-themed shooting events, some held as daylight fades for atmosphere, said Brad Ross, a division manager for Law Enforcement Targets, Inc, a maker of zombie targets.

Flanagan, who said he owns 19 guns, likes to drive out into rural areas to practice shooting. He is bored with shooting cans or simple bullseye targets and the zombie targets will be more fun, he said, clutching his roll of 40 poster-sized images.

Sales of zombie targets are booming and are expected to grow about 30 percent to a million targets this year, Ross said.

“It is absolutely dumbfounding,” said Addison Sovine, a salesman hustling on Saturday to keep up with the demand for the shooting accessory at the Law Enforcement Targets booth.

For the truly zombie-obsessed, Sovine demonstrated small packets of blood-colored liquid that can be purchased to attach to the back of the zombie target so that it bleeds when shot. If an explosion is desired, a grainy mixture is for sale that will blast like a firecracker when hit.

TAKING AIM ON “ZOMBILADIN” TARGET

Among the most popular of the 18 zombie target designs offered in its catalog are “Becky,” an image of a wounded, pale and dark-eyed female, and “ZombiLadin” a bearded and bloody likeness of the late al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, company officials said.

Ammunition maker Hornady introduced a zombie bullet last fall with a green painted tip and it was one of their most successful product launches ever, according to marketing communications manager Everett Deger. The bullets come in a bright green box saying “20 rounds certified Zombie ammunition” with a warning that it is not a toy.

Zombie-themed paint coatings for guns are among the 10 most popular camouflage designs offered by DuraCoat Firearm Finishes, which paints guns, said Operations Manager Amy Lauer-Potaczek.

Much of the interest in zombies has been fed by popular culture, such as the movie “Zombieland,” starring Woody Harrelson, and the “Walking Dead” television series about a group of people trying to survive in a world overrun by zombies. But Sovine said the obsession has gained momentum from “preppers” – people who are preparing for doomsday – and the belief by some that, according to the Mayan calendar, the world as we know it will end in December.

“As soon as we pass December if we are not all dead, we live on, and it is really not the end of the world … I think you will see it (zombie target sales) start to come back down the other side,” Sovine said.

In the future, I’m right: Letter from Aldous Huxley to George Orwell over 1984 novel sheds light on their different ideas

“The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”

Daily Mail | Mar 7, 2012

By Rob King

The novel 1984 predicted a different world to that envisaged by Aldous Huxley

They were both critically acclaimed writers who were ahead of their time, creating imaginative visions of the future in their novels.

But an enlightening letter sent by Aldous Huxley to his fellow author George Orwell more than 60 years ago reveals that the two men had very different ideas of how the world would change.

Huxley’s 1949 letter – the latest addition to a website that collects fascinating missives from the past – praises Orwell for the novel 1984, which offers a terrifying portrayal of a future totalitarian society.

But the late California-based author – who had coincidentally taught Orwell more than three decades earlier – went on to focus on the differences between Orwell’s vision and that revealed in his own masterpiece.

His novel Brave New World, published 17 years before Orwell’s, had foreseen a society characterised by medicated contentment, a widely accepted, eugenics-supported caste system, and a government-enforced obsession with consumerism.

But Orwell’s novel presented a nightmarish vision and gave birth to the phrases ‘Big Brother’, ‘thought crime’ and ‘double think’, all now commonly used to describe increasing state control.

The book was later made into a film starring John Hurt, Richard Burton and Suzanna Hamilton.

In the letter Huxley began by echoing the positive reviews for 1984, telling Orwell ‘how fine and how profoundly important the book is’.

Going on to focus on the differences between their predictions, however, Huxley wrote: ‘The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.

‘Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful.

‘My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.’

The letter was written at Huxley’s California home in October 1949, a few months after the release of Orwell’s book.

It has been added to the website Letters of Note, which gathers and posts fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.

The relationship between the two authors began in 1917, while Huxley was a tutor at Eton and Orwell was a pupil. Huxley taught French.

Huxley’s other students at Eton included the writer and scholar, Harold Acton.

ALDOUS HUXLEY’S LETTER IN FULL…

Wrightwood. California.
21 October, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book.

It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is.

May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution?

The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf.

The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.

Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful.

My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.

I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government.

Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations.

Another lucky accident was Freud’s inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism.

This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years.

But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.

The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.

Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sincerely,

Aldous Huxley

Our Frightening Future, Brought to You by Microsoft

Motley Fool | Jan 18, 2012

By Alex Planes

Hey, look! Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT  ) found a way to squeeze more functionality from the motion-sensing Kinect. Since many news-driven writers (including yours truly) are rushed and lazy, we often repeat pop culture references: You can open your files in Windows 8 by pointing at them aggressively, just like Tom Cruise in Minority Report!

But get this: Microsoft isn’t only jumping on board the Tom Cruise future-semaphore bandwagon. One new Kinect application is a creepy foot forward into the film’s more troubling technological advancements — specifically, its omnipresent and ominously precise biometric sensors. It might be good for the company’s bottom line, but quite threatening to the average person’s privacy.

A great algorithmic leap forward

The Kinect needed a certain level of hardware precision to work — but its software was the real breakthrough. That bleeding-edge programming package is so detailed that the Kinect’s next iteration is rumored to read lips and detect emotional cues when paired with more accurate sensors that track nuanced facial movements. The device is already accurate enough for Microsoft to use it to create a mall advertising system that that changes content based on who it thinks you are.

Why does that sound so familiar?

Aggressively targeted advertising

In the video, everything Tom Cruise passes changes to what it thinks he wants based on his personal information, which is accessed with eye scans. We might cringe at the unflattering personalized ads on Facebook. The filter bubble — a term for what you miss when Google (Nasdaq: GOOG  ) customizes its search results based on what it knows about you — has the potential to keep us in the dark. But as intrusive as these systems are, you can still opt out.

The only way to “opt out” of Microsoft’s individualized ads is to avoid places that use it. As long as these locations are on the fringe this isn’t a problem, but by 2054 (when Minority Report is set) things might look quite different. To build interest, Microsoft will do everything it can to further the personalization for passerby. Kinect-ed advertisements could send more detailed info to ad viewers’ Windows Phones. This might be done with devices that are enabled with near-field communication, raising major privacy issues — though the privacy issues raised by using biometric scanning in public for marketing purposes are probably somewhat larger.

Not quite science fiction

It’s hard to swallow the idea that biometric tracking could be this good this soon, but we’ve already seen plenty of signs that the film’s other signature technologies are fast becoming reality:

• Responsive gesture-based computing is already on its way. Microsoft built Kinect compatibility into Windows 8 and has lent support to a Kinect-centric start-up accelerator.
• Personalized ads? You’ve been reading this article, I hope.
• An eye-scanning system developed by nonprofit research firm SRI International can read irises from up to three meters away, and can process up to 1,800 people per hour.
• MIT and the University of Arizona created a semi-real-time holographic video system late in 2010. One of its key components was, unsurprisingly, a Kinect camera.
• Google’s already proved that automated cars work well enough to be street-legal.
• Electronic paper pioneer E Ink earned a billion dollars in revenue last year, and Universal Display‘s (Nasdaq: PANL  ) flexible organic LEDs featured prominently at Samsung’s CES booth earlier this month.

Many of the real-world analogues to Minority Report technologies could trounce Spielberg’s imagination by 2054. But Minority Report wasn’t really about any of these things. They were well-designed window dressing to the film’s main theme: Grievous crimes can be predicted and stopped with perfect accuracy before they happen.

There’s nothing to fear if you’ve got nothing to hide

“Precrime” technology might be furthest away from reality, but not due to any lack of trying. IBM (NYSE: IBM  ) boasts of its predictive crime-fighting solutions, which include blanketing a South Korean city with cameras and hooking them up to analytical programs. Data mining software from the jack-of-all-tech-trades also helped Richmond go from the fifth-most-dangerous American city to the 99th. It’s easy to imagine IBM upgrading from cameras to Kinects, or at least pairing visual cues with biometric analytics. It’s not a trio of all-seeing telepaths, but it’s a start.

Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. already use predictive analytics to reduce crime rates, but none of these work on an individual level. Scale up the resources, though, and solutions start to look more menacing. The Department of Homeland Security’s secretive pre-crime system uses biometric readings to detect potential ne’er-do-wells based on (among other things) emotional cues and physical attributes. Government researchers could probably save some taxpayer money by grabbing a few Kinects for the next build.

Why are we running?

Microsoft’s only doing what any sensible self-interested company would by seeking out new business opportunities. Combining Kinect capabilities with advanced analytics on a widespread scale could help the company overcome the PC’s slow decline and present a major recurring revenue stream, given significant global adoption. But how much intrusion will consumers — citizens, really — accept?

I found enough evidence to predict that targeted advertising will get pushier this year, and it looks as though Microsoft is going to prove me right. I can’t say I appreciate, from a privacy standpoint, the way this prediction is coming true, but such applications should have seemed inevitable. Without understanding how it works, the Kinect is essentially a magical stick that knows exactly what you’re doing and can tell if you’re sad. How could that not have wound up as a powerful marketing tool? I only hope it doesn’t become something much more dangerous in the name of security. By the time we find ourselves in that web, it’ll be much too late to opt out.

Samsung Transparent Smart Window makes sci-fi movies a reality

pocket-lint.com | Jan 12, 2012

By Stuart Miles

Imagine a world of see-through monitors, windows that are interactive, and car windscreens that relay all the information on the screen rather than the dashboard beneath it.

Now imagine that, rather than being the stuff of science fiction movies and pipe dreams, the technology that will allow this to become a possibility is going into production in just 20 days.

At CES in Las Vegas Samsung is demoing a new touchscreen display technology that is see-through.

Dubbed the Samsung Transparent Smart Window, the transparent touchscreen LCD tech can fit a window any size up to 46 inches and deliver a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels allowing full interaction at the same time.

Users will be able to supply content via HDMI or USB, and in our demo it reproduced video perfectly quickly jumping between different menu options like checking travel details, the weather, what was on television, or even just using it as an expensive blind to block out light.

Related

Samsung’s smart window brings “Minority Report” to life

There is no word on price or where we will see this next, but the possibilities are endless thanks to our love of glass.

One such possibility as we overheard during our demo at CES is in submersibles where you want to move the instrumentation out of the way of a glass viewing area. That’s really niche, but imagine car designers being able to remove the dashboard of your car altogether, or Minority Report style computers that are just sheets of glass rather than the big bulky monitors that you have in your office at the moment.

To show what’s possible beyond the window, Samsung was also showing off the technology with a smaller monitor. The same screen technology can be used to create smaller screens with higher resolutions. In this example it measured 22 inches and offered a higher resolution of 1680 x 1050 pixels.

And if you are worried that others will be able to see what you are doing from behind the screen. Don’t. Samsung says that the technology comes with a privacy screen that works like a one-way mirror.

Samsung Transparent Smart Window at CES

Real-life Minority Report: “predictive policing” to stop crimes before they happen

Real-life Minority Report: Analytics assist police in detecting crime

Police at the Los Angeles Police Department are trialling predictive analytics

computerworlduk.com | Nov 16, 2011

By Linda Rosencrance

Captain Sean Malinowski of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has just done something once unimaginable for a commanding officer: He’s given up control of deploying his beat officers to a computer.

Malinowski, commanding officer of the LAPD’s Foothill Community Police Station, is a pioneer in the field of “predictive policing.” That means using predictive analytics to analyse data, such as the times and locations of past crimes, to forecast where and when certain crimes are likely to happen in the future so police can stop them before they occur.

“We’re doing a rigorous examination, an experiment, for the next three months of predictive analytics and for the first time we’re going to rely 100 percent on the computer to forecast property crimes, which are the lion’s share of our crime,” he says. The experiment began 6 November.

Malinowski says he’s willing to make some sacrifices in terms of control if it means reducing crime in his jurisdiction.

“That’s unusual for me to do because, as a [commanding officer], I like to be in control of things, especially the mission,” he says. “But I’m going to give that up and I’m going to let the computer generate the geographic assignment of the missions.”

Across the country, police departments must fight crimes in the face of decreasing budgets and manpower. But in Los Angeles and Santa Cruz, California, the police departments are turning to new technologies like predictive analytics to help them save time and money by enabling them to prevent crime by more effectively deploying patrol officers.

The LAPD and the Santa Cruz Police Department are using a crime-fighting tool developed by researchers – social scientists and mathematicians – at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) to target property crimes such as home and business burglaries, as well as vehicle thefts and break-ins.
Like predicting earthquakes

The tool, which identifies criminal hotspots, is modeled on a mathematical algorithm used to predict earthquakes and their aftershocks because the researchers discovered that, just as aftershocks are in close proximity to the initial earthquake, criminals tend to commit crimes in close proximity to past crimes.

The technology grew out of a long-standing UCLA-based project looking at the mathematics of crime, says P. Jeffrey Brantingham, one of the UCLA researchers and an associate professor of anthropology at the school. For the first six years of the seven-year project, researchers focused on trying to figure out what models do a good job determining how and why crime patterns form in the way they do. Now that they’ve developed those models, the researchers are putting them into practice.

“We’re now testing these predictive analytics in the field and we launched a controlled, randomized trial in LA earlier this month,” Brantingham says.

The theory is that predictive analytics might work better on property crimes because the targets are stationary and the nature of the targets doesn’t change that much over time, he says, unlike crimes where the victims are mobile and change their behaviors.

Criminologists find it’s easier to predict these types of crimes because there are patterns regarding where and when they occur. For example, burglaries tend to be clustered in terms of time and location and the individuals committing these crimes tend to have predictable patterns – usually they commit them somewhere near their homes or near familiar locations.

Additionally, property crimes are not displaceable crimes, which means if police departments target these crimes in particular areas, the criminals won’t simply move two miles to another location.

Zach Friend, a crime analyst at the Santa Cruz Police Department, says his department is the “operational test case agency” for the system, although Santa Cruz didn’t set its program up as a controlled experiment, as did the LAPD.

“What [the researchers] did before was just test crime data, but we were actually willing to test it in the field,” he says.

Friend says data from the department’s records management system is fed into the computer program on a daily basis, and then transferred to Microsoft Excel software where it’s cleaned, ordered and geocoded. Next, the data is combined with a master Excel database of all pertinent crimes for the past seven years and run through the UCLA algorithm.
Hotspots on Google Maps

“We recalibrate on a daily basis and the algorithm produces 10 Google hotspot maps every day of approximately 500 feet by 500 feet where burglary or vehicle theft is likely to occur in our city on that day,” he says.

Officers are given the hotspot maps at roll call. The officers check those areas during their “free” patrol times, when they’re not obligated on other calls, and they document their activities for tracking purposes. Because the city of Santa Cruz is only 13 square miles, the hotspot maps significantly reduce the area that officers need to patrol.

“Law enforcement in the past has taken a reactive approach to enforcement – if crime occurs in one place you need to go to that place,” Friend says. “This is breaking that mold. You don’t necessarily have to go there. Maybe it will send you to a separate location to prevent the next crime from occurring.”

The point of predictive policing is not to make arrests but rather to reduce the numbers of the targeted crimes from happening in the first place. And it seems to be working in Santa Cruz.

“In the first month, July 2011, the only variable we introduced was the application of this model and there was a 27 percent reduction year-over- year of the targeted crime types, because there was a police presence in the area where maybe there wouldn’t have been a police presence at all,” Friend says.

The SCPD just finished it’s three-month analysis of the algorithm and the department learned a couple things: There isn’t enough crime in Santa Cruz to make a definitive statement about causality, but there was a correlation between the number of extra checks the officers ran in the hotspot areas and a reduction in the crime types the department was targeting.

Accurate predictions

“So for every extra 50 checks we ran in the city per week we found a two percentage-point decrease in the targeted crime types,” Friend says. “The predictions [based on the algorithm] where crimes will occur are 10 times more accurate than if you let an officer go where he wants to go.”

Malinowski isn’t impressed with the Santa Cruz department’s methodology.

“Santa Cruz will have a difficult time making a scientific claim that the [computer] forecast contributed to a reduction in crime, because I think they had very little in the way of crime analysis before,” he says. “And they didn’t set it up as an experiment. It takes a little more time and effort to do it the way we’re going to do it.”

Malinowski, who explains that his station is the only one in the LAPD currently engaged in the experiment, wants to be able to tell his counterparts at other LAPD stations that he went strictly by the computer forecast and realized, say, an additional 2 percent, 3 percent or 4 percent reduction in property crimes.

“We’re experimenting and we’ll see how it goes and if it will answer the questions: ‘Does the forecast add value to the process of assigning missions for patrol?’ and ‘Will it give us some information on how many officers we need in a certain part of our jurisdiction and for how long?’ and ‘Will it make an impact on property crime in a certain very small geographic space like a block?’ We’re going to be collecting data as well so we’ll be able to track that,” he says.

Malinowski says LAPD Chief Charlie Beck as well as former LAPD Chief William Bratton both support using predictive analytics to inform the department’s decision-making in fighting crime because they know that it’s getting harder and harder to slash crime rates.

Crime is down so dramatically in the Foothills “that we’re victims of our own success in some way,” he says. “Take burglary of a motor vehicle: [We're] down 25 percent year-to-date, so what else can I do? I’ve pretty much exhausted my arsenal, so if I want to eek out a couple more percentage points, then it looks like I have to use the data to do that.”

Malinowski says at some point he may think about using a commercial product, but for now the easiest thing to do is work with the UCLA researchers because they come with their own government funding–and unlike the vendors he’s talked to who are in it for the profit, the researchers’ motives are “more pure.”

It’s a win-win, he says. “We give the researchers the data and we’re a real-world laboratory for the researchers [and it doesn't cost us anything].”

But there may be a small downside. Malinowski acknowledges that the patrol officers who are assigned to do crime analysis worry that they’ll be replaced by the new system.

“It’s difficult for people to get their heads around the fact that the computer could generate these specific geographic locations where crimes are most likely to occur,” he says. “And it’s hard because they feel there’s a lot of special knowledge that they can bring to the forecast that the computer can’t.”

But the bottom line for Malinowski is to deny the criminal the opportunity to commit the crime he intended to commit. “He doesn’t get arrested and we don’t spend time booking him,” the commanding officer says, “and someone doesn’t get his laptop stolen out of his car.”

Minority Report style facial recognition rolling out in US cities

Smart signs using facial recognition software are scheduled for introduction in three cities this month. Immersive Labs

Immersive Labs in Manhattan has developed software for digital billboards that gauges the characteristics of passers-by in order to display ads likely to attract them.

Face Recognition Makes the Leap From Sci-Fi

NY Times | Nov 12, 2011

By NATASHA SINGER

FACIAL recognition technology is a staple of sci-fi thrillers like “Minority Report.”

But of bars in Chicago?

SceneTap, a new app for smart phones, uses cameras with facial detection software to scout bar scenes. Without identifying specific bar patrons, it posts information like the average age of a crowd and the ratio of men to women, helping bar-hoppers decide where to go. More than 50 bars in Chicago participate.

As SceneTap suggests, techniques like facial detection, which perceives human faces but does not identify specific individuals, and facial recognition, which does identify individuals, are poised to become the next big thing for personalized marketing and smart phones. That is great news for companies that want to tailor services to customers, and not so great news for people who cherish their privacy. The spread of such technology — essentially, the democratization of surveillance — may herald the end of anonymity.

And this technology is spreading. Immersive Labs, a company in Manhattan, has developed software for digital billboards using cameras to gauge the age range, sex and attention level of a passer-by. The smart signs, scheduled to roll out this month in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, deliver ads based on consumers’ demographics. In other words, the system is smart enough to display, say, a Gillette ad to a male passer-by rather than an ad for Tampax.

Those endeavors pale next to the photo-tagging suggestion tool introduced by Facebook this year. When a person uploads photos to the site, the “Tag Suggestions” feature uses facial recognition to identify that user’s friends in those photos and automatically suggests name tags for them. It’s a neat trick that frees people from the cumbersome task of repeatedly typing the same friends’ names into their photo albums.

“Millions of people are using it to add hundreds of millions of tags,” says Simon Axten, a Facebook spokesman. Other well-known programs like Picasa, the photo editing software from Google, and third-party apps like PhotoTagger, from face.com, work similarly.

But facial recognition is proliferating so quickly that some regulators in the United States and Europe are playing catch-up. On the one hand, they say, the technology has great business potential. On the other, because facial recognition works by analyzing and storing people’s unique facial measurements, it also entails serious privacy risks.

Using off-the-shelf facial recognition software, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University were recently able to identify about a third of college students who had volunteered to be photographed for a study — just by comparing photos of those anonymous students to images publicly available on Facebook. By using other public information, the researchers also identified the interests and predicted partial Social Security numbers of some students.

“It’s a future where anonymity can no longer be taken for granted — even when we are in a public space surrounded by strangers,” says Alessandro Acquisti, an associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon who directed the studies. If his team could so easily “infer sensitive personal information,” he says, marketers could someday use more invasive techniques to identify random people on the street along with, say, their credit scores.

Today, facial detection software, which can perceive human faces but not identify specific people, seems benign.

Some video chat sites are using software from face.com, an Israeli company, to make sure that participants are displaying their faces, not other body parts, says Gil Hirsch, the chief executive of face.com. The software also has retail uses, like virtually trying out eyeglasses at eyebuydirect.com, and entertainment applications, like moustachify.me, a site that adds a handle bar mustache to a face in a photo.

But privacy advocates worry about more intrusive situations.

Now, for example, advertising billboards that use facial detection might detect a young adult male and show him an ad for, say, Axe deodorant. Companies that make such software, like Immersive Labs, say their systems store no images or data about passers-by nor do they analyze their emotions.

But what if the next generation of mall billboards could analyze skin quality and then publicly display an ad for acne cream, or detect sadness and serve up an ad for antidepressants?

“You might think it’s cool, or you might think it’s creepy, depending on the context,” says Maneesha Mithal, the associate director of the division of privacy and identity protection for the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission. Whatever consumers think, she says, they should be able to choose whether to be subject to such marketing practices. (The F.T.C. is planning a workshop next month on facial recognition.)

ON Facebook, people who find the photo-tagging suggestion program creepy may turn off the system that proposes their names to friends who are uploading photos. If people opt out, Facebook deletes their facial comparison data, according to the site. Users may also preapprove or reject being listed by name in a friend’s photo before it is posted on their profiles.

Those options may suffice for many.

But in Germany, where German and European privacy regulations require private companies to obtain explicit permission from a person before they store information about that individual, merely being able to opt out does not go far enough, says Johannes Caspar, the commissioner of the Hamburg Data Protection Authority. (Although the United States has federal data protection laws pertaining to specific industries like credit and video rental, no general law requires that all companies obtain explicit consent before storing personal data about an individual.)

Mr. Caspar says many users do not understand that Facebook’s tag suggestion feature involves storing people’s biometric data to re-identify them in later photos. Last summer, he asked Facebook to give current users in Germany the power to delete their biometric data and to give new users in Germany the power to refuse to have their biometric data collected in the first place. In the long term, he says, such popular uses of facial recognition could moot people’s right to remain anonymous.

Mr. Caspar said last week that he was disappointed with the negotiations with Facebook and that his office was now preparing to take legal action over the company’s biometric database.

Facebook told a German broadcaster that its tag suggestion feature complied with European data protection laws.

“There are many risks,” Mr. Caspar says. “People should be able to choose if they want to accept these risks, or not accept them.” He offered a suggestion for Americans, “Users in the United States have good reason to raise their voices to get the same right.”

Jumping robot spider crawls out of 3-D printer

The robot spider’s legs are 20 centimeters long. Elastic drive bellows serve as joints. Fraunhofer IPA

Top contender for rescue missions moves like the real thing and is quite inexpensive

MSNBC | Nov 3, 2011

A rescue robot must have the mobility and balance to go where humans cannot, such as under the rubble of an earthquake-stricken city or inside the site of a nuclear reactor disaster. One of the best contenders has emerged in the shape of a jumping spider that bears an eerie resemblance to Mother Nature’s own creepy crawlies.

The robot moves around as a real spider would by keeping four legs on the ground at all times while the other four prepare for the next step. Such mobility comes from combining rigid parts with an elastic body — a design that also allowed German researchers to create the robot spiders inexpensively by using 3-D printing.

“Our robot is so cheap to produce that it can be discarded after being used just once — like a disposable rubber glove,” said Ralf Becker, a scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation, in Stuttgart.

The spider robot’s crawling and jumping abilities come from elastic drive bellows that act as joints. Instead of using muscles, the robot harnesses built-up body pressure to pump fluid into its legs to extend them. Bending the front pairs of legs pulls the robot spider along, and stretching its rear legs pushes it forward.

The current models have a control unit, valves and compressor pump in their body. In a disaster scenario, they could also carry video cameras, measuring devices and sensors to transmit information back to their human overseers.

The German team used 3-D printing to build up their robotic marvels layer by layer. During the process, a laser beam guided by a computer melts thin layers of polyamide powder to create the robot parts from the bottom up.

Minority Report – Spider Robots (2002)

Such economic manufacturing allows the robotics researchers to almost effortlessly make modifications for new models. “We can … produce one or even several legs in a single operation; this minimizes assembly effort, saves materials and reduces the time it takes to build a robot,” Becker said. “With the modular approach, individual parts can be quickly swapped as well.”

A prototype of the robot is scheduled to appear in Frankfurt at the EuroMold 2011 trade fair  (in Hall 11, Stand C66) from Nov. 29 through Dec. 2.

It’s work or die young in sci-fi dystopia ‘In Time’

In Time: Justin Timberlake Tries to Beat the Clock

This futurist parable, about the immortal 1% and the doomed 99%, has a great premise that doesn’t make a great movie

Time | Oct 27, 2011

By Richard Corliss

In the future topia (u- or dys-, you decide) of Andrew Niccol’s In Time, all the people look not a day over 25; they might be Hollywood’s target demographic that conquered the world and got rid of anyone old enough to run for the Senate or enjoy The Help. The human life span has been expanded to infinity, but not everyone can afford it. Because here, time is money. Workers are paid in time and, to buy things, they have to spend it. (A cup of coffee? That’ll be 4 minutes, please.) Hours, days, years are like $20, $100 or $10,000 bills. Scott Fitzgerald was right. The rich are different: because they have more money, they can live forever.

Some unseen government or mad-genius scientific cabal has set people’s biological clocks to expire shortly after age 25, unless they bank extra time by working longer, borrowing at usurious rates, or stealing time. It’s literally your money or your life. Each person has a phosphorescent tattoo on his forearm, ticking away, that tells how much time is left. It’s both a reminder of the bearer’s mortality and a temptation to vandals, known as Minutemen, who set upon the unwary and clean their clocks. Oddly, no one thinks to protect that information by wearing a metal sheath to cover the arm. That makes people as vulnerable to predators as a bejeweled matron walking through a rough neighborhood.

In Time Movie Trailer

Tantalizing premises—political satire masquerading as science fiction—are Niccol’s own movie currency. The New Zealander wrote The Truman Show, about a man (Jim Carrey) who doesn’t realize that his life is a carefully scripted reality program. Niccol’s films as writer-director include Gattaca, with Ethan Hawke as the rare home-made man in a world of genetically modified superfolks, and Simone, or S1mOne, in which a moviemaker creates a sexy new star out of a computer program. His hard-to-ignore theme: society’s attempts to engineer perfection are ethically egregious and doomed to failure. In Time is Niccol’s most explicit denunciation of inequality, and a parable of the rich getting richer as the poor lose time. It’s a great idea that Niccol can’t translate into a great movie.

Gattaca Movie Trailer

Will Salis (Justin Timberlake) is a wage slave in the working-class time zone of Dayton, where prices keep rising as wages remain stagnant, and where his mother (Olivia Wilde, who, since she hasn’t visibly aged, looks more like Will’s dream date) dies because her clock runs out and no one will, literally, give her the time of day. When a rich guy, Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer), is set upon by the Minutemen, Will saves him and takes him home. There he learns that Henry is 105, with another century still on his forearm, and tired of living. As Will sleeps, Henry transfers his time to Will, leaves and allows himself to die. A monitoring camera implicates Will in Henry’s death, and from then he’s on the run. His pursuer is the implacable Timekeeper Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy)—Javert to Will’s Jean Valjean.

Will drives from Dayton’s Zone 12 to the Zone 4 town where the super-rich supercentenarians live. It’s called New Greenwich, which might be the ritzy city in Connecticut or a reference to the London suburb that housed the Royal Observatory whose clocks set time for the world: Greenwich Mean Time. (To the 99% living outside that posh zone, time couldn’t be meaner.) In a casino out of an early James Bond movie, Will gambles against the world’s richest man, Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser, who plays spoiled Pete Campbell on Mad Men). When Philippe loses at the tables, he tells Will, “You’ve taken years off my life,” but no matter: Philippe is worth “eons.” He introduces Will to three women—his mother, wife and daughter—all looking indistinguishably young and fabulous, like classier Kardashian girls. Daughter Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried of Big Love and Mamma Mia!) becomes Will’s accomplice when he escapes from Philippe and the Timekeeper and heads back to Dayton to free time, so to speak. Robbing a bank and redistibuting precious hours to the poor, Sylvia and Will become the future’s Bonnie and Clyde—time bandits.

In Time, like last week’s Margin Call, has lucked into a historical moment when its message feeds off the headlines. As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads across the country, the Congressional Budget Office reports that in the past three decades the wealth of America’s top 1% has spiked by 275%. The 99%, toiling in all the Daytons of the country, get nowhere because the suave idlers in New Greenwich have hoarded the wealth. It’s Darwinian capitalism: only the rich survive—forever. ”For a few to be immortal,” Philippe says, “many must die.” But Will is a Robin Hood socialist who believes that “None should be immortal if even one person has to die.”

One problem with In Time is that it’s more fun to describe than to sit through. (Which is why I’ve lavished so much space on the plot synopsis.) Another is that Niccol’s direction of his cast is spotty at best. Timberlake has the steely visage and stubbled cheeks for a rogue hero, but Seyfried, always a watchable presence, has trouble connecting with Sylvia’s inner rebellious streak or, for that matter, lending urgency to her line readings. The film’s crucial failing, though, is that Niccol’s imagination is vigorously literary but not thrillingly cinematic. The movie exhausts its capital about halfway through—devolving, as the Timekeeper tracks the lovers on the run, into a series of car chases and foot races, none of them very spiffily executed. If you’re like me, you will be captivated by the first hour and, after that, impatiently checking your watch.

THX 1138 Movie Trailer