Vanishing Privacy With Real-Time Facial Recognition

A recet article at the Modern Survival blog brings up the issue of privacy in an increasingly-connected world, technology that recognizes faces in real-time:

The latest is the ‘NameTag’ smartphone or Google Glass app, which enables a person to simply snap a picture of someone (purportedly who you want to connect with) and see their entire public online presence in one place… Everything about you…
 
Your most unique feature – your face, enables the real-time facial recognition technology to link your face to a single, unified online presence that includes your contact information, social media profiles, interests, and anything else which the app may discover about you based on your electronic footprints of online activities.

When someone passes you on the street (or anywhere), they don’t know who you are – unless they ask or already know. With this new technology they will apparently be able to discover all sorts of things about any stranger by simply pointing their smartphone at them (or apparently when wearing Google Glass or other such technology). So much for asking…

http://modernsurvivalblog.com/communications/vanishing-privacy-with-real-time-facial-recoginition

The idea that technology which can on one hand make the world a smaller place gives reason to be optimistic about the future, but privacy concerns might tarnish those advancements. New technologies need to continue to hold privacy at the front of efforts to digitize the analog world.

Environmental Disasters and Media Manipulation

From an interview by investigative journalist Greg Palast in his book Vulture's Picnic, in which we find that most scientists who supported the idea that the ocean cleaned up after BP oil spills is mostly false, and most of those biologists who support the idea were paid by BP itself as an effort to manipulate the population through media outlets like NPR...

"Now, without shame, BP and the Interior Department are using this same “Bugs Ate the Oil” stunt in the Gulf. They added a twist. Maybe it didn’t work perfectly in cold Alaska, but bacteria just love Mississippi.
This Mississippi island was impressively oiled, but I wasn’t impressed. Something was missing.
Habeus corpus picis? Where are the fish corpses, Professor?
In the water, Steiner explained. While we would see a couple of oil-packed fish carcasses on the beach, the big slaughter is actually going on way out there, in the fishing grounds and beyond.
The killer: BP, that is, Bacterial Plumes.
Steiner told me that bacteria were indeed eating up some of the hydrocarbon from the blowout, “but mostly the methane, not the heavy crude.” Bacteria certainly munch on some of it (good), which encourages bacteria to make bacterium babies by the trillions (bad). As the bacteria feast, said Steiner, they breathe, as all creatures do. The result: not much oxygen left in the water for fish. The fish can’t breathe and they drown."

The Neurogrid Artificial Brain

Inspired by GRAPE-6, a $60K supercomputer that has revolutionized astrophysics, Neurogrid provides an affordable option for brain simulations. It uses analog computation to emulate ion-channel activity and uses digital communication to softwire synaptic connections. These technologies impose different constraints, because they operate in parallel and in serial, respectively. Analog computation constrains the number of distinct ion-channel populations that can be simulated—unlike digital computation, which simply takes longer to run bigger simulations. Digital communication constrains the number of synaptic connections that can be activated per second—unlike analog communication, which simply sums additional inputs onto the same wire. Working within these constraints, Neurogrid achieves its goal of simulating multiple cortical areas in real-time by making judicious choices.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/neurogrid.html

Could a computer capable of greater processing capacity than the human brain in a smaller package replace our own minds? If those computers became self-aware...

Comet ISON Now Visible to Naked Eye After Cosmic Outburst

Next Monday morning (Nov. 18), ISON will be passing close to the bright 1st magnitude star Spica in Virgo. Using the handle of the Big Dipper, sweep an arc to the brilliant orange star Arcturus. Then continue that arc on to Spica. Using binoculars, ISON should still be readily be visible as a fuzzy star with a short tail.

More: Comet ISON Now Visible to Naked Eye After Cosmic Outburst

Look to ESE over the next few days to spot the comet near the ecliptic. Follow the latest Comet ISON news at Space.com.

An Out-Of-Control Satellite Is Plummeting To Earth Right Now

A European gravity-mapping satellite has begun its uncontrolled descent through the atmosphere, and there's a (incredibly minuscule) chance it could land on your head.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/jalopnik/full/~3/vsjU87uz4l8/@ballaban

My question is whether I get to keep if it lands on my property. 

Venus

Venus is shining brightly above the western horizon this evening. 

Travel Faster than Light with the Alcubierre Drive

In 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a method of stretching space in a wave which would in theory cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand.[1] The ship would ride this wave inside a region known as a warp bubble of flat space. Since the ship is not moving within this bubble, but carried along as the region itself moves, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation do not apply in the way they would in the case of a ship moving at high velocity through flat spacetime relative to other objects. Also, this method of travel does not actually involve moving faster than light in a local sense, since a light beam within the bubble would still always move faster than the ship; it is only "faster than light" in the sense that, thanks to the contraction of the space in front of it, the ship could reach its destination faster than a light beam restricted to travelling outside the warp bubble. Thus, the Alcubierre drive does not contradict the conventional claim that relativity forbids a slower-than-light object to accelerate to faster-than-light speeds. 

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Alcubierre_drive.html

Perhaps in a century or more we may actually be travelling arosss our own solar system, or even the galaxy.