Tech Posters

My new technology presented to the course was the current result of the DARPA funded Cybernetic Insect research. The following video provides a good overview of the technology.



The most important aspects of this technology to me are the principles behind it. Rather than attempting to mimic animal flight, an extremely difficult, time consuming and expensive task, engineers are attempting to take advantage of natural selection designs with millions of years of evolution to do the task. Instead of training things to do tasks they can simply stimulate the brain to do them. Stimulation of only basic major functions and needs resulted in the insect's other neurons taking care of the rest.

It was also very interesting that they were able to intercept the signals from the insect's own sensors. They hooked a machine up to a moth and had the machine move in the direction that the moth wanted to go. The research is approaching things from both ways - having machines control the insects and the insects controlling the machines. Many things in nature have sensors much more sensitive than current technology such as moth's sensitivity to sex phermones or shark's sensitivity to blood. These have great potential to be tailored to specific tasks, but there will likely be severe hurdles with organizations such as PETA.

Proof of concept technologies such as these are also essential to securing funding and interest in the field so that it can continue to advance towards more complex tasks such as helping spinal cord injury victims. Understanding how to stimulate main nerves to control secondary ones and connecting neural pathways with circuits are essential components to viability of human cyborgs.


While presenting to others, the goal was for the poster to quickly grab their attention with highly visible and unique graphics to provide the opportunity to hold a conversation about the technology with them. I wasn't very pleased with the quality of the poster itself but lacked the budget for it to be printed in high quality. Video demonstrations would have helped greatly. In some cases people were quickly grossed out by the insects and moved on. I didn't see many people checking twitter very often. Most seemed to wander around the room until something caught their eyes. I attended the AUVSI Unmanned Systems International conference in Washington, DC earlier this year and the conference had provided everyone with badges that had scannable barcodes for contact information as well as the scanners. Much of the hype for different products came from the demonstration day and all of the supplemental discussions occurred at the networking lunches. Such a large scale conference with thousands of displays might benefit from a live feed like the one used in class.


I found many of the topics presented by the class to be very interesting and I will actually be using many of them in the future. Some such as google wave and voice I've previewed their BETA versions. With so many posters and a limited amount of time, those who received the most attention were the ones with eye-catching graphics large enough to be discernible at a distance. When walking by, those with displays, large and colorful subject lines, and eager presenters stood out the most. I especially enjoyed the artificial leg, silicon nanotubes, genetic tester, and iphone credit card scanner. When more than 4 feet away from many of the posters(which was often the case due to others already standing next to it) it was difficult to even read the subject line. There weren't many people who took time to research competition to their current technology and the ones that did were much more convincing.

Boingboing fundraising attempt

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/11/dr-peter-watts-canad.html


A Canadian science fiction writer was allegedly beaten at the US Border by the U.S. Dept of Homeland security and boingboing.net is attempting to help him raise funds to fight the case. This would be a good study on how well social media groups can raise awareness and their effectiveness in securing contributions to their cause.

Raisin Bran Ad

This is a new ad in appearing in Britain that has already made it to top weblink sites sugh as boingboing.net. It catches people's attention and the dialogue makes sure that people actually remember the product and not just the ad.

Intellectual Property

The class discussed copyright and intellectual property issues, and this could be a landmark case that could bring about sweeping change to the current rules.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/will-the-supreme-court-roil-the-software-industry-2009-11-09


In summary, someone applied for a patent for a method and was denied because there wasn't a physical device or transformation. This ruling in a federal appeals court could set a precedent which invalidates software patents since all software is just a method. Overly broad patents such as the use of training videos for people as well can stifle innovation, however no patents for an entire industry could cause serious issues. The majority of work done in fields such as dynamics and control is modeling complex motions and writing algorithms(methods) to control a system. Some of these algorithms take years of developement and refinement by teams with Ph.D's in the field and the lack of patent availability would cut into the funding for such research.

Ideo's Human Centered Design Toolkit

I thought this could be useful to ppl in the COM 435 course.

Cyborg Insects!

Here is a video showing some of the research results for the topic I presented on Monday.



It's interesting to note that not only are they working to use electrical impulses to stimulate the brains of the insects, but they are adopting the insects way of navigating through obstacles for robots as well.

Indianapolis courts threatening fines

http://www.carformance.com/indianapolis-threaten-2500-fine-for-challenging-traffic-tickets-12102517/


I thought this might be of concern to the many students who live in and visit Indianapolis. It appears that many of the traffic court judges have adopted the policy of fining those who appeal tickets and lose, regardless of the reasons for the appeal. This is a bit disturbing, though there is a lawyer challenging this policy, Paul K. Ogden.

video embedding test

Facebook sting operation

http://mddailyrecord.com/ontherecord/2009/11/25/police-conducting-facebook-drinking-stings/

The article discusses police in Wisconsin ticketing college students by soliciting facebook friend status and going through pictures. I'm pretty sure that the ticket could not hold up in court, given there's no way to prove that it's an alcoholic drink. I'm curious if this is a real event, and will be researching the source and updating the blog with the results.


Update with original source:
http://www.lacrossetribune.com/news/local/article_0ff40f7a-d4d1-11de-afb3-001cc4c002e0.html?mode=comments
Updates with responses from someone claiming to be one of the girls charged;

thatgirl13 said on: November 23, 2009, 2:39 pm

Okay, so I am one of the girls in the article. And I just wanted to make a comment. As I read all of your comments I see some of you said well you shouldn’t have posted any pictures of you drinking or pictures you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see. Well funny thing is I didn’t. Those pictures were taken off another girls facebook album so I had absolutely NO control over those photos up there. I was never friends with the under-cover cop on facebook, simply because I do not accept people I do not know. The girl whose facebook he got those photos from never got a ticket or called down by the cop. This whole situation is outrageous.
The cop who called me down, Iverson, emailed me and asked me if I would come down and it’s not a big deal and he just has a few questions for me. As the good citizen I am I went right down approximately 8:30pm on a Sunday night. The cop pulls out two pictures of me and my friend with beer cans in our hands. He asked if that was me and I said yes. Because obviously it was. He never once asked if I was drinking nor did I tell him I was drinking in that picture. I asked where he got the pictures from and he asked if there was any one who was out to get me or asked if I made any enemies during Oktoberfest, I said no, which I haven’t confused… and he told me that someone turned in my pictures to him so he had to investigate it. Later on finding out that he got those off of facebook so he lied to me about that, then, he wrote a statement that was in my file when I went to court that said I openly admitted to drinking in those pictures, which I NEVER admitted. He has no proof that I was drinking or that I have ever drank in my life. I am overall very disappointed in the La Crosse Police Department. Those pictures were over a month old for one, two, those were private pictures in a private house. I could even understand if it was pictures of me in a public place like a bar or something drinking, but I wasn’t. I think they should get off their lazy butts and go OUT AND FIND PEOPLE IN THE ACTION. Not sit inside creeping on the internet all day long. Just my opinion.

Wikimapia.org

http://wikimapia.org/#lat=32.8828488&lon=-117.2461367&z=17&l=0&m=s&v=9

I've mostly used Google Maps or Google Earth by themselves, but came across this site when trying to find aerial pictures for my friend who's visiting where I used to go to school(UCSD).

It seems to be google maps, but with users able to outline areas and tag it with information. Most prominent areas and buildings are covered, including my favorite hidden trail. I wonder how many more tourists are going down that place now that it's listed on the web and easy to find. The entrance was hidden by bushes so only the surfers used it, but I'd imagine more curious ppl will go there now. The cliff's are eroding, so there will definitely be more lifeguard rescues when wanderers go down that place!

Twitter feed for what's happening at Fort Hood: Live

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%22Fort%20Hood%22%20OR%20Hood

PR for BCS

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=4623676

Just a quick post from the phone. I thought ppl in PR might find this interesting.

Google Wave - New Collaborative Technology

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/28/google-wave-as-an-rp.html
http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

Google wave is a new online collaborative tool which combines the shared documents of google apps and google groups with the real time options of instant messenger and chat rooms. It is currently in the beta stage, and one of the first major uses for it among the tech savy beta testers is to organize for online RPGs.

People can get up to speed with what changes were made by playing document like a video. This could help with lack of thought process cues compared to face to face communication that I mentioned in my earlier blog about online communication in the design process.

The acceleration of time and space

Earlier in the course the theory that life appears to happen faster due to the increased rate at which information is available for processing. This can definitely apply to the design process in engineering projects and raises the issue of where to draw the line between one's professional and personal life.

With complex and multidisciplinary design projects, there is never truly a "final and correct" answer. The more time one has to put into the project, the more improvements can be made. If one is the leader of the project, prioritizing the time investment for each division can be very difficult and make or break the design. If the leaders are chosen for their experience and demand of success, they are more likely to be driven to know as much as possible about everything under their responsibility.

Technology has greatly assisted the ability to stay organized and bypass time and space constraints, but the managers now have so much available at all hours that their lives can disappear. Eventually a tipping point can be reached where the drive to succeed and overflow of information results in tunnel vision, decreased health, and much added stress that can greatly affect the ability to make effective decisions.

Cybervetting

http://www.management-issues.com/2007/10/18/research/cyber-vetting-managers-face-backlash.asp

The article is two years old and describes the developing hiring practice of cybervetting. This was one reason that people originally opposed the social networking site Facebook, becoming available to the general public. Facebook did add more privacy settings when going public, however many people fail to realize that there are many popular apps that are designed specifically for data mining. By participating in an application, you grant that application access to your information and it can be downloaded by the applications server without notifying you. This data can be used to target ads, study cultural trends, or allow easier identity theft. Over the last two years the idea of compiling a person's netprofile has expanded into these other realms quite a bit.

Course Discussion - Kuwaiti culture

The lab class discussed some arguments regarding the status of women in Kuwait.

Some view their situation as an example of hegemony, while others counter that the percentage of highly educated women and level of security offer more freedom than their Western counterparts.

Games as a form of education

In an effort to promote the importance of communication among team members, the university has adjusted a design course into a game. It is a novel approach to teaching and allows students to interact whenever, wherever as long as they have a computer.

The course material, however, is the student's first design based class that sets the majority of the framework for understanding why they are taking all of their prerequisite math, physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, and more advanced topics. Those topics alone can require intense effort to the exclusion of practical background material in the coursework. Without either background, the learning process can become plug and chug short term memory event. Years later, when all of the prerequisite learning is completed and people are given the task to solve a real problem from scratch, the associations necessary to break the problem down into workable steps have deteriorated if they were there at all. What good are the teamwork and communication skills when there is nothing to communicate?

While this is more an issue of an overall lack of background than the result of an online transition, it is important to note that for teamwork and design based problems, online interaction is not ideal. People only communicate when they think it is relevant, and many cues are missed during the communication - especially one's confidence in the work. When working at the same location, people are more likely see the process leading up to another's communication. During these times people can catch errors early as well as branch their own idea off a middle step and not simply an end organized communication.

Geocities Closure

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/10/geocities-closing.html


One of the first major websites allowing masses with very limited computer knowledge to publish contect on the web is closing.

Some of the intriguing aspects about geocities was many users desire to have their page in proximity to certain other pages in the same fashion as one chooses a neighborhood. While it was one of the most popular sites 10 yrs ago, it's closure shows how quickly internet fads can come and go, especially when tied to the extremely high pace technology market.


With the announcement of the closure, many people have assigned crawlers to save the site's information for historical purposes.

Geocaching

The 435 course ran a geocache competition this morning. 50 minutes did not appear to be sufficienct time to get to employ more complex communication techniques and strategies because the tasks themselves were so simple. If more time was allowed, then the intitial challenge clues found could include information on a second set of coordinates that the teams would have to work together to solve. Each team's clue would include information on the other teams coordinates, but that information would be described in a way that required some problem solving to get the actual numbers. They would then need to input those coordinates themselves to find the second location and would gain more familiarity with the technology.

Regarding the technology:
The GPS devices seemed dated regarding screen quality and processing power. Zooming in and out as well as scrolling along the map was a relatively slow process with 15-30 second waits after some commands. These were not GPS signal delays but device image processing delays. Getting the GPS coordinates and adding them to the iphone's google maps satellite images greatly increased the speed and ease of navigating. The larger screen allowed for a wider viewing angle with enough resolution to recognize landmarks. The iphone also had the ability to take video and pictures of the clue and it's context and use the Purdue Wi-fi network to quickly send information back to those in the classroom. On a final note, the accuracy of the GPS devices can be improved if they are updated to use Differential GPS(DGPS)
where availible.

MIT Social Network Analysis Study

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/20/project_gaydar_an_mit_experiment_raises_new_questions_about_online_privacy/?page=full

Students in a class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier have developed algorithms to make assumptions about a person based upon who they're networked to without accessing the persons own data. This raises concerns on how private the privacy restrictions for popular networking sites such as facebook and myspace really are. While a person can only provide access to their own page to people they accept into their network, those networks work by allowing public access to the basic network information of each user. The more widely available your network tags are, the more successful your networking abilities should become, however it also allows people to make inferences on your private life based upon that information.

Test Post

Testing the first blog post and hyperlinks.

http://www.purdueesc.org/