Giggle du Jour: A Look Back

Teenagers trying to figure out a rotary phone:

Today's Must-Read: Would You Let This Man Into Your Brain?

The future isn't here yet -- quite -- but Facebook is working on it:

There was this promising new technology, [Zuckerberg] explained, a brain-computer interface, which Facebook has been researching.

The idea is to allow people to use their thoughts to navigate intuitively through augmented reality—the neuro-driven version of the world recently described by Kevin Kelly in these pages. No typing—no speaking, even—to distract you or slow you down as you interact with digital additions to the landscape: driving instructions superimposed over the freeway, short biographies floating next to attendees of a conference, 3D models of furniture you can move around your apartment.

There's a lot of potential in this -- the possibilities for, for example, stroke victims or paraplegics are exciting -- but given Facebook's history with privacy issues, and the common practice among the tech companies of selling users' personal information -- not to mention say, Fifth Amendment issues, which the article mentions -- I would say that, as a species, we're not mature enough for this.

Saturday Science: RIP Kepler Space Telescope

Interesting article on the long life (well, longer than expected) of the Kepler Space Telescope, which is finally shutting down:

Image:  NASA

This afternoon [Oct. 30], NASA officially bid farewell to the Kepler Space Telescope, a pioneering spacecraft that helped discover thousands of planets beyond our Solar System. After years of service that extended long beyond its initial four-year mission, the spacecraft finally ran out of fuel.

Engineers realized that Kepler was almost out of fuel earlier this summer. At the time, they put it in safe mode for a brief time to focus on getting the scientific data that Kepler had already connected safely back to Earth. They managed to turn it on and collect more data, but they knew at the time that the spacecraft was nearing its end.

Kepler launched with enough fuel on board to last for more than six years; it lasted nine. “We filled it up with fuel to let it go as long as it could,” says Charlie Sobek, project system engineer for the Kepler spacecraft.

Read it -- it's pretty interesting, especially for space nerds. We are not alone. Probably.

Yeah, I'm Still Here

Somewhere. I've been apprised that my absence has been noticed. It's nothing serious -- just that the news is more of the same, only kicked up an order of magnitude, and the combination of Kim Davis (who got an award for breaking the law) and the Republican presidential wannabes is sort of paralyzing.

This, however, interested me. Via Digby:

One 15-year-old I interviewed at a summer camp talked about her reaction when she went out to dinner with her father and he took out his phone to add “facts” to their conversation. “Daddy,” she said, “stop Googling. I want to talk to you.” A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. One college junior tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together that’s the problem.”

The fallout from this is pretty substantial:

In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.

Across generations, technology is implicated in this assault on empathy. We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.

I have so far resisted that sort of connectivity -- I don't have a cell phone, and I've avoided getting involved in most social media -- no Facebook, no Twitter, none of that. I do notice, however, the number of people I see -- mostly younger people, but by no means exclusively -- who are on the bus, or walking down the street, or in coffee shops or restaurants -- who aren't really there. They're on their phones. I remember seeing people on rollerblades with their ears stopped up with earphones while they were 'blading down the sidewalks or streets, and thinking "These people must be nuts -- that's a great way to get killed." Phones aren't quite that extreme (although a lot of these people are listening to music), but still. . . . They're not only shutting themselves off from human contact, but from the world around them.

I have seen this resilience during my own research at a device-free summer camp. At a nightly cabin chat, a group of 14-year-old boys spoke about a recent three-day wilderness hike. Not that many years ago, the most exciting aspect of that hike might have been the idea of roughing it or the beauty of unspoiled nature. These days, what made the biggest impression was being phoneless. One boy called it “time where you have nothing to do but think quietly and talk to your friends.” The campers also spoke about their new taste for life away from the online feed. Their embrace of the virtue of disconnection suggests a crucial connection: The capacity for empathic conversation goes hand in hand with the capacity for solitude.

In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other people for who they are. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other people for who they are. If we are not content to be alone, we turn others into the people we need them to be. If we don’t know how to be alone, we’ll only know how to be lonely.

Bus rides are part of my "alone time" -- I seldom even read on the bus: I watch the world outside, and the people riding with me. But then, I've always been an observer. And I have a high tolerance for being alone.

I wonder if it's a fear of being alone that drives part of this technological connectedness. After all, we're social animals, hard-wired to travel in groups. Being alone is something that a lot of people avoid, I think, even in situations like running errands or riding the bus -- so, grab your phone and stay connected. Except you're not, really.

It's sobering to realize how much of our communication relies on the nonverbal -- facial expression, body language, tone of voice -- that you don't get on a phone or on the Internet. That's what really does the damage. (Why do you think emoticons were invented? An attempt to replace some part of what we're missing by face-to-face contact.)

There's a lot more to be said on this topic -- I find myself tempted to wander off on all sorts of tangents, but I'm not going to. Read both the Times article and Digby's post, and you can wander off on your own tangents.

Creepy

It had to happen, I guess: now someone has developed an app that will allow users to access all sorts of information about total strangers just by looking at them.

A new app for Google Glass called NameTag uses facial recognition to end privacy as we know it. Originally announced in December of 2013, the new app will make real-time facial recognition a reality for anyone who owns a pair of Google Glasses, iPhone or Android device.

Most of us have been in the awkward social situation where you encounter someone you recognize, but you can’t quite put your finger on their name. You try to steer the conversation to discover a hint as to where you know this individual from, but before long, you have to ask the somewhat embarrassing question, “I’m sorry, but who are you again?” However, FacialNetwork.com and NameTag hope to give you an easy and somewhat disturbing solution to this problem.

The solution comes part and parcel with Google Glass, the wearable tech that is already changing our culture before it even arrives for public consumption. As a wearable screen with a camera, Google Glass has given an exciting look into the future of integrated technology.

It has also generated a good deal of controversy, centered around privacy concerns. The device is designed to have a light on the front that is clearly visible when anything is being recorded, but as with most technology, there are ways around these safety measures. . . .

NameTag uses facial recognition technology that will allow you to take a snapshot of the person you forgot or the cute person at the bar and send the picture to NameTag’s servers, where it will be compared to pictures available on social media sites. If a match is found, then the picture is sent back with the person’s name, as well as other significant personal details, including hobbies, interests, and even their current relationship status. If a criminal record is also found in the public record, it will flash in nice big red letters.

And apparently, the developers just don't get it:

Once you get past the impressive part of how NameTag uses facial recognition, the naivete or just plain apathy of the developers beings to show through. “I believe that this will make online dating and offline social interactions much safer and give us a far better understanding of the people around us,” said Kevin Alan Tussy.

As the creator of NameTag, he believes that it is easier to get all the information we would normally find out in a conversation at the push of a button, or as E! Online reported, a wink of an eye.

OK -- is that classic nerd, or what? Frankly, I'd rather get that information through a conversation, thank you very much, in which both parties get to choose how much they reveal at any given moment.

Another reason to avoid social media.

Via Joe.My.God.

Privacy? What's That? (Updated)

From the Washington Post:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

Also, check out this series of graphics that explains just how it works and who's involved.

If you really want to get your blood pressure up, read the whole article -- it's a combination play by the NSA, the Bush and Obama administrations, Congress, and the courts. It's too lengthy and detailed to summarize here, and there are links to related articles -- WaPo has been on this one for a while (and it's nice to see WaPo actually committing journalism).

And of course, it's all under the battle-cry of "National Security!!1!eleventy!"

Assholes.

The Guardian also has a story.

Here's a reaction from the editorial board of NYT. Also worth a read.

Update: Also read Digby, here. It's not "open and transparent" if the American people don't know what you're doing.

And another comment from Digby:

Someone should introduce Senator Feinstein to Senators Udall and Wyden because she just went on TV to explain that all of this is well known and that nobody in the government objects. It's all very above board, legal and by the book.

See my comment above about who knows what.

Update II: It seems Glen Greenwald broke the story in the Guardian.

Computer Woes

Still going on. Working from the tablet, which has limits. I did manage to figure out how to access my full list of bookmarks, though, which helps.

And it looks like I'll have the computer back this afternoon, with everything that it's supposed to have.

(cross fingers)

This Could Be Big

Ir probably will be -- computers that operate on light:

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have made an important advance in this frontier of photonics, fashioning the first all-optical photonic switch out of cadmium sulfide nanowires. Moreover, they combined these photonic switches into a logic gate, a fundamental component of computer chips that process information.

The nano-wires can manipulate light to make switches, the basic component of computers. Did you get that? Nano-switches. As in really, really, really tiny.

Vernor Vinge wrote a novel a few years ago, Rainbow's End, that postulated people being able to access the Internet through their clothes. Sony, I think, has already debuted a prototype of a computer built into eyeglasses. With this, they could build computers into contact lenses.

It's an amazing world. It's sort of sobering to realize that we're living in a science-fiction novel.

Evolution in the Widest Sense

A couple of fascinating essays by Susan Blackmore at NYT, here and here -- a transposition, if you will, of the evolutionary idea of "copying" and how it plays out in memetics, with particular reference to what Blackmore calls "temes" --- that is, technological memes, a way of describing the information explosion.

I haven't really digested these essays yet, but they're fascinating reading.

And, under the category of "first thoughts," what Blackmore is describing echoes quite strongly the mechanisms of folklore as described by Joseph W. Campbell in The Flight of the Wild Gander -- a tribal story travels to a neighboring tribe, is embellished with elements of their own history by the members of that tribe, and finds its way back to the original tribe with the embellishments. A sort of cultural equivalent to the way that genetic variation travels through populations in biological evolution.