A Blooper With Our Blimps

Oops, so this is one for the books...

The multi-billion dollar Raytheon-built military JLENS surveillance blimps are pictured above.

They are supposed to sense and alert us to a possible devastating surprise cruise missile attack on the U.S. eastern seaboard.

However, one of them lost its tethering and went sailing into the skies and had to itself be tracked by NORAD and two scrambled F-16 fighter jets. 

What was designed to surveil instead needed surveillance. 

The JLENS crashed landed in Amish country, Pennsylvania and took out the power to 20,000 people.

We need a strong, capable, and ready military!

If we are trying to improve our posturing with the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians--this is not the way to put our best blimp forward. ;-)

(Source photo: here with attribution to Bill Dickinson)

A Blooper With Our Blimps

Drones Made Easy

OMG, this is awesome.

This Lily Camera Drone is "throw and go" and simply lands in your hand. 

You can set it to follow you--almost like a guardian angel-- or to lead you where you need to go. 

Records video, sound, can do slow motion, and takes photos.

It has a tracking device.

It's waterproof.

Awesome for extreme sports or personal surveillance.

Would like to be able to communicate with it by voice command, and also see what it sees and hear what it hears with augmented reality glasses or on a smartphone or wearable.

Finally, if only it would come with a laser to zap anybody or anything bad that may come at us--that could be reassuring. 

Costs = $619 and ships in May 2016.

That was easy.  ;-)

Drones Made Easy

Laser Defense Offense

Similar to the U.S.'s new laser defense being deployed aboard the USS Ponce in the Gulf, there is a promising new missile defense technology--"Iron Beam"--using lasers from Rafael in Israel. 

This augments Israel's "Iron Dome" anti-missile defense system using intercept missiles. 

Iron Beam functions with air defense radars and thermal camera tracking that identifies incoming targets and uses 2 lasers with 100's of kilowatts of directed energy to destroy the attacking projectiles with 90% success rate. 

For a more surgical, faster, and economically capable military--next up laser defense goes offense. 

It's got to, we've all seen the movie. ;-)

Laser Defense Offense

Smart Electronic Skin

I liked this concept reported on in BBC Technology about using swarms of sensors to create a type of electronic or "smart skin."

Like nerves in our human skin, multitudes of sensors placed on anything that we want to monitor, could create a sensing/feeling and reporting mechanism for evaluating the health or condition of that thing. 

Rather than wait for something to fail or break, we could actively collect information on changes in "temperature, strain, and movement" and other environmental impacts to analyze and predict any issues and proactively address them with countermeasures, maintenance, or fixes. 

As human beings, we are architected with regular monitoring and self-healing biological systems to protect ourselves from daily dangers around us, we can develop homes, factories, transport, robots, and everything important around us with similar properties to be more durable, last longer and be more productive.  

When we emulate in our own development efforts what G-d has created for the good in the world, we are on the right track. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Smart Electronic Skin

Surveillance Society {Funny}

This was funny photo my wife and I took in a medical practitioner's office. 

Above the floodlights, was a picture of these staring eyes.

And it was simply thumbtacked onto the wallpaper. 

One of the receptionists asked why we were taking the photo.

We sort of giggled--uh, this was not exactly the typical surveillance scenario in the 21st century of CCTVs, drones, hidden mics, tracking devices, and big data--not even close!

But maybe it's just a reminder that someone is ALWAYS looking. ;-)

Surveillance Society {Funny}

Time To Spread The Magic

So I'm not the biggest fan of Disney theme parks -- maybe that is not a popular thing to write.

But to me, the rides alternate between fake or nauseating (when they're not broken down), the characters are outdated, the parks are hot, overcrowded, and the lines and wait times are long, and the ticket prices are sort of crazy for what you're getting (not). 

Let's see, a day at Disney or day at the beach--uh, I'll take the beach any day!

But Disney is doing something magical these days. 

Bloomberg Businessweek reports how Disney's new MagicBands are using technology to make the theme park experience more convenient, even if not more fun. 

The MagicBands are like an all-in-one electronic link between you and Disney:

- No need for an admission ticket, because the MagicBand does that.

- Reserve your favorite rides, use your wrist band. 

- Hotel room keys, that's right the band unlocks your door.

- Shopping at Disney kingdom, the band functions as your debit/credit card. 

- Being greeted by name or wished a happy birthday, the bands make your experience more personal.

What's more Disney uses the bands for "big data" analytics--for capturing your likes and preferences for rides, restaurants, food, and souvenirs--and this adds up to customer service enhancements like restocking shelves, opening up reservations, expedited queues, and even targeted mail and text messaging/advertising. 

The bands have radio frequency identification tag/chips (RFID) as well as GPS sensors, so Disney knows who you are, where you are, and even much of what you're doing. 

Spooky from a privacy standpoint--sure, you are really sitting there exposed in just about every way. 

But this technology has arrived, not just at Disney, but via embedded RFID in your smartphones or your body someday soon. 

The synthesis of man and machine...the mystery is gone in the magic kingdom, but maybe the service gets better. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Time To Spread The Magic

Gaming to Get More Bricks and Mortar

Farhad Manjoo has an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal on the gamification of the workplace. 

In office gamification, employees are treated like gamers--they are measured, given points, and recognized/rewarded for meeting objectives as if you are playing an arcade game or Angry Birds. 

The problem is that this is really nothing new and also not very motivating to the workforce. 

Already in the Bible the Egyptians oppressed the Israelites by giving them ever crushing quotas for gathering straw and building the great pyramids.

And if they didn't measure up, the Bible tells us that, "They made their lives bitter with harsh labor...the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly."(Deut. 1:14)

You see while measuring performance is a good and important part to managing and maturing processes and the workforce, tracking people in real life with plus ups for every good thing and minuses for every mistake or failure treats this whole thing as one big game, but it's not.

A mature adult workforce doesn't need points and bonus time for doing their jobs, and shouldn't be made to fear losing their jobs for not meeting their daily numbers.

Even Manjoo admits that he dreads working in a work environment where everything is measured and monitored to the nth-degree.

He says that even in a field like Journalism, he feels undue pressure to produce and that "every time I write a story that doesn't make the paper's most-popular list, I consider it a tiny failure. If I do that too many times in a row, I begin to wonder if I should look for a new line of work."

Now perhaps, many of you are saying, that if you can't perform at expectations, maybe you should be looking for another job, but the point is that performance measurement should be humane--working toward the long-term benefit of the company and the development of the employees--and not one miss and it's "Game Over!"

Gamification software, like Badgeville, that gives points for everything from creating a sales lead to responding to a lead and converting a lead to sales opportunities is nothing short of childish micromanagement.

Employees shouldn't treated like children working for points and prizes and titles like "Super Converter" or "Super Dealer" (like in the demo video), but rather should be treated as professionals, who work for the mission and based on an ethos of excellence, where they are committed to doing their best for the organization, and the organization is committed to developing them and making them a ever better and satisfied workforce--not making them feel like they are coming to a surveillance, tracking, and fear-inspired workplace. 

Can gamification have a place in creating some healthy workplace competition and fun? Sure, but when it's masquerading as a serious tool to engineer people to do their jobs and have a meaningful career, then someone in the C-suite has been playing Farmville a little too long. 

My father used to tell me, "You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar," and employees will be far more motivated if they know you are working with them as a team to "get to the next level" rather than infantilizing and prodding them with ridiculous amounts of workplace surveillance to force them to collect more straw and build more pyramids. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Gaming to Get More Bricks and Mortar

Touch Free, Just Use Your Head

Israel Innovation News is reporting a very simple but cool new technology for the disabled.

It enables them to "read, play games, search the web, and make calls without the need for touch."

Sesame Reader, from the Google App Store, "tracks your face and allows you to turn [eReader] pages with the movement of your head."

You can also dial a number or type of a keyboard by using movement of the head to control the cursor movement and by hovering over a button to "click it."

This helps people to function in a digital world, when otherwise they couldn't.

Hence, the name Sesame from Ali Baba's magic phrase "Open Sesame."

Now people can read, write, and interact with others online--even when they don't have use of their limbs because of neurological, muscular, and other structural defect, or if they simply want hands-free use.

Touchscreens, keyboards, and keypads are now accessible to anyone with the simple turn of the head--up, down, left, and right is all all it takes to navigate, touchless. ;-)

Touch Free, Just Use Your Head

Chicken Big And The Asteroids

The story of Chicken Little running around yelling that "The sky is falling" has become the epitome of those who "cry wolf" about the world ending--falsely worrying about and predicting catastrophic events.

However, the reverse can be true as well--where people say, "The sky is not falling," when it really is. This is a "Chicken Big" event--where people are afraid "big time" of admitting the truth and so they hide themselves and others from it. Sort of like saying "What I don't know can't hurt me!"

Yesterday was just such as Chicken Big--hide your head in the sand--moment.

Asteroid DA14 passed just 17,000 miles from the Earth--less than the distance from New York to Sydney! It was 140 foot long and 143,000 tons, and possessed the destructive power 700 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. According to the Wall Street Journal (13 Feb. 2013) it was able to devastate a region the size of the San Francisco Bay area.

While, thank G-d, this dangerous asteroid missed us, just a few hours earlier, a meteor about 55 feet long and 10,000 tons exploded over the Ural Mountains in Russia, with the destructive power of 33 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs injuring 1,000 people and damaging 4,000 buildings.  

Of course, it is a frightening reminder of what could've happened had asteroid DA14 hit as well. 

The Guardian reported that according to The European Space Agency "No link between the events is thought possible," and the Wall Street Journal (15 Feb. 2013) declared that it "was just a coincidence".

Interestingly, the Journal itself states that a meteor event such as that which exploded over Russia yesterday happens "every 100 years," and even more, the chances of the asteroid that passed very close overhead actually hitting Earth occurs "once every 200 to 1,000 years," with the next close pass over earth not expected again until 2046. Thus, these types of events don't happen exactly every day, do they?  

So what are the chances of these 2 events (one exploding overhead and the other a near miss) occurring simultaneously yesterday--just hours apart!

People need to know--deserve to know the truth about the dangers we face--not to cry wolf--but rather to help us as a society and civilization recognize the genuine dangers we face, so we can adequately take precautions and prepare ourselves. 

Interestingly enough, the WSJ states, "We have the technology to deflect these asteroids" with spacecraft to impact into them and "gravity tractors" to change their trajectory--the one thing we need is "years of advance warning."

Let's acknowledge the meteor explosion yesterday in Russia and be grateful that it wasn't over a heavily populated major urban area, where the effect could've been much worse, and of course the same with the near flyby of the asteroid--and resolve to invest in the monitoring, tracking, and defensive technologies to keep us safe from a future catastrophe where the sky really is falling.

Calling the two cosmic events yesterday a "coincidence" is a Chicken Big event--buck, buck, buck. ;-)

 (Source Photo: here with attribution to Sascha Grant)

Chicken Big And The Asteroids

A Seeing Eye

This video from NOVA is an amazing display of the surveillance capabilities we have at our disposal.

ARGUS-IS Stands for Automated Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System.

Like a "Persistent Stare," ARGUS provides continuous monitoring and tracking over a entire city, but also it has the ability to simply click on an area (or multilple areas--up to 65 at a time) to zoom in and see cars, people, and even in detail what individuals are wearing or see them even waving their arms!

Created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), ARGUS uses 368 imaging chips and provides a streaming video of 1.8 gigapixels (that is 1.8 billion pixels) of resolution and attaches to the belly of a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drone. 

ARGUS captures 1 million terabytes of a data a day, which is 5,000 hours of high-definition footage that can be stored and returned to as needed for searching events or people. 

The Atlantic (1 February 2013) points out how using this over an American city could on one hand, be an amazing law enforcement tool for catching criminals, but on the other hand raise serious privacy concerns like when used by government to collect data on individuals or by corporations to market and sell to consumers. 

What is amazing to me is not just the bird's eye view that this technology provides from the skies above, but that like little ants, we are all part of the mosaic of life on Earth.  We all play a part in the theater of the loving, the funny, the witty, and sometimes the insane. 

My Oma used to say in German that G-d see everything, but now people are seeing virtually everything...our actions for good or for shame are visible, archived, and searchable. ;-)

A Seeing Eye

Ready, Aim, Phaser

LASER stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation and their use in the military is advancing fast. 

I am not just talking about things like laser sights mounted on assault rifles, but actual portable high energy laser weapons for taking out ships, planes, drones, rockets, mortars, and surface to air missiles. 

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense Systems (HELLADS) is looking for smaller and lighter 150 kilowatt laser systems "enabling integration onto tactical aircraft to defend against and defeat ground threats" and is powerful enough to destroy aircraft!

Just about all science fiction weaponry relies on lasers to fight and defeat the future enemy whether the phasers and disrupters from Star Trek, turbolasers and laser cannons on Star Wars, and laser torpedeos and blaster turrets in Battlestar Galactica. 

According to Mashable (27 January 2013) "this year liquid-cooled, solid-state laser weapons will be installed on fighter planes" for testing.

Fast Company (8 March 2012) points out the challenges with laser tracking and killing including clouds, haze, and dust that weaken the laser.  However, these challenges no longer seem insurmountable. 

All the talk on gun control is so 20th century, the real conversation for the new era will be on laser weapons and whether phasers should be set on stun or kill. ;-)

(Source Photo: here with attribution to UK Ministry of Defence)

Ready, Aim, Phaser

Hiding Yourself In Plain Sight

I remember hearing that sometimes the best way to hide is in plain sight--just where no one would think to look.

Now there is a new clothing line being introduced by Adam Harvey for Stealth Wear that hides you using your own clothes. 

According to Slate (11 January 2013), the clothing line is envisioned to have:

- Anti-drone hoodies and scarfs:  These will be made with special metalized material that can shield you from things like drone thermal imaging technology, and I would imagine could also help against facial recognition along the lines of a prior project CVDazzle that uses face-painting and hair styling for concealment. 

- XX-shirts: These cover your upper body and can shield you from x-rays. I wonder how this will impact TSA scanning at airports?

- Pocket-blocks: A cell phone pouch made from "signal attenuating material" to prevent tracking and interception. 

Don't confuse this stealth wear clothing line with a Canadian company called StealthWear that makes a different type of protective clothing--padding for jackets, forearms, shoulders, torso, and so on for those working in "aggressive educational environments."

The new Stealth Wear, however, is a concept for a high-tech fashion line designed to provide counter surveillance and more personal privacy--in this sense, it's really the anti Big Brother. 

With more and more cameras, imaging machines, facial recognition, drones, and other surveillance tools out there--I suppose it is not surprising to see a cultural backlash in terms of everyday surveillance protection clothing coming to the fore. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Hiding Yourself In Plain Sight

Facial Recognition Goes Mainstream

Facial recognition applications are no longer just for the military and law enforcement to identify hostiles or criminals, but rather is going mainstream.

The Wall Street Journal (5 August 2011) reports from the bar scene to the television and from vampire gaming to celebrity match-ups, facial recognition software is now part of our everyday technology mix.

Facial recognition is "at a tipping point where some of these face-recognition technologies are not just gimicks, but are becoming useful." Moreover, the technology has become quite good with "frontal face images, the error rate of rejecting a legitimate claim--when the face image and name match-decreased to 0.29% in 2010 from a rate of 79% in 1993."

So here are some examples of how facial recognition is being used:

- SceneTap: Free app for iPhone and Droid "displays real time stats on the local bar scene...shows the number of people at the bar, the male-to-female ratio, and the average age of the patron"--all from facial recognition--this is not bad except for the bartender on a slow night.

- TVs with Viewdle: TV set-top boxes with facial recongition can "identify who is sitting in front of the TV then customize programming accordingly...displaying most recently watched or recorded shows"--can anyone say America's Got Talent!

- Third Eye: Facebook game that based on facial recognition identifies people as either vampires or slayers. Even without the app, I'd bet I'm one of the slayers :-)

- FaceR Celebrity: This iPhone app uses a picture and facial recognition software to determine which celebrities you most closely resemble. For me, it's Sylvester Stallone, all the way--I'm sure of it.

A lot of people are concerned about the privacy implications of facial recognition--collecting and storing images of faces and using it for surveillance and tracking and getting into your business...like knowing what bars or whereever else you are going to.

But apps like SceneTap say they don't collect personal information, nobody sees the video feed, and they don't match the images to photos on the web or Facebook to identify exactly who is entering the bar. This is sounding a little like TSA and the body imaging scanners they use--i.e. don't worry nobody sees your privates! :-)

But perhaps, whether or not they do or don't isn't the point, they could and that is a privacy concern.

Facial recognition technology, even though it is used in gaming, it is not kid's play, and it should be regulated to avoid a society where Internet "big brother" has virtually unlimited capability to track and match each and every facial you!

(Source Photo: here)

Facial Recognition Goes Mainstream

Advanced Biometrics for Law Enforcement

Homeland Security Today Magazine (March 2010) has an interesting article called “Biometrics on the Battlefield" about how the American military has had significant success in Afghanistan taking biometrics and in using it for “vetting, tracking, and identification.”

Here’s how it’s done:

The biometrics system uses HIIDE (Handheld Interagency Identity Detection System) devices, which is “similar in size to a large camera, [that] connects directly to the BATS [Biometrics Automated Tool Set] database and matches inputs against a biometrics watch list of 10,000 individuals.”

The database “BATS uses a combination of fingerprints, photographs and iris scans, in addition to an in-depth background examination” to “screen potential local employees, identify detainees, and differentiate friendly individuals from insurgents and terrorists.”

How successful has the use of biometrics been?

“The use of biometrics has clearly thwarted security breaches and helped prevent unwanted activities by the enemy. Additionally, in 2008 alone, hundreds of HVTs (high value targets) were identified through the use of this biometrics technology.”

The article suggests the application of this biometric system for domestic law enforcement use.

Currently, fingerprint cards or stationary scanners are common, but with the proposed military biometrics system, there is the technology potential to use mobile scanning devices quickly and easily in the field.

The article gives the example: “if an officer came into contact with an individual under suspect conditions, a simple scan of the iris would ascertain that person’s status as a convicted felon, convicted violent felon, convicted sex offender or someone on whom an alert has been placed.”

In this scenario, quicker and more accurate identification of suspects could not only aid in dealing with dangerous offenders and benefit the officers in terms of their personal safety, but also contribute to ensuring community safety and security through enhanced enforcement capabilities.

Of course, using such a system for law enforcement would have to pass legal muster including applicable privacy concerns, but as the author, Godfrey Garner, a retired special forces officer, states “hopefully, this valuable technology will be recognized and properly utilized to protect law enforcement officer in the United States. I know that I’ve seen it protect our sons and daughters on the battlefields of Afghanistan.”

We are living in an amazing time of technology advances, and the potential to save lives and increase public safety and security through lawful use of biometrics is a hopeful advancement for all.

Advanced Biometrics for Law Enforcement