Category Archives: Location

Attention unimaginative bloggers: IBM app spits out topics to write about

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Every writer could use a muse, sometimes. Photo: Ygor Oliveira/Flickr CC

You might think a roomful of monkeys could generate most of the blog posts you read.

But IBM Research has got it all down to a single program. Called Blog Muse, it generates topics for you to write about, based upon what audiences are asking for.

Blog muse isn’t an artificial brain. Rather than tapping that roomful of monkeys for raw material, however, it crowd-sources requests for stories from the naked apes in your community. (Read the paper about Blog Muse, which is being presented at computer conferences this winter and spring, below.)

IBMers Werner Geyer and Casey Dugan created Blog Muse.

Dugan studied at MIT, under the computer science giant, and Creative Commons founding director, Hal Abelson. She is working IBM’s Beehive Project, which aims to influence social networking behavior.

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Interested in tech from the Hub? Check out this week’s User Friendly

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407n-geyer

RFID scare? Blame the media

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Journalists “screw up” health story… trust business to fix the problem, says business blogger.

http://flickr.com/photos/daubentonia/ Creative Commons agreement: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en

(RFID tags didn’t cause his heart attack. But arphids can make matters worse. Photo: Daubentonia)

from Mark

Widespread reports this week that RFID signals could kill you in the hospital are false, a technology business blogger is claiming.

The blogger, at the technology website ZNDet, makes this bogus assertion: that hundreds of news outlets are twisting the results of a disturbing Dutch finding (published by the Journal of the American Medical Association): that RFID tags and readers can cause livesaving equipment to switch off.

In fact, Vrije University researchers reported total switch-offs and other severe malfunctions in its tests of pacemakers, dialysis machines and ventilators, operated within about ten feet of RFID tags.

The ZDNet blogger, Dana Blankenhorn, employing a condescending “now let’s set the record straight” voice, ignores the central findings of the Dutch study.  Instead, Blankenhorn says that hundreds of news reports, based on the JAMA report, “screw up” those facts.

Blankenhorn says a tweak in RFID standards — a process that could take nearly a decade, as today’s standards did (something he does not note) — is all that is needed to fix the EM interference problem.

But the RFID horse is already out of the gate: The tags are becoming as ubiquitous in hospital wards and operating rooms as they are on the street. (Click here for my Boston Globe report on RFID tags in hospitals.)

Lack of RFID standards leads to media panic | ZDNet Healthcare | ZDNet.com
There is a problem with RFID in hospitals. There is no standard that will tell hospitals what frequencies the tags are using. Thus they can’t tell when the frequencies being used by the tags might interfere with other gear.

This problem is very easy to fix. The industry gets together on an RFID medical standard, which specifies which frequency is to be used. My choice would be the upper range of 802.11, around 5.8 MHz. Medical devices don’t run there.

CCTVs don't cut crime

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They were supposed to fight crime–the ubiquitous cameras, which in London appear to be on every lamppost and crossing signal. But the billions the police have spent creating an all-seeing eye are proving worthless.

The police are building a database of CCTV images, however (see excerpt, below), which might have been their plan in the first place.

CCTV boom has failed to slash crime, say police | UK news | The Guardian
A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders.

· Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month.

· Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined.

Spy watch for insta-DNA testing?

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Parallelnormal is back on-line after a recent “health scare.” Please keep your comments and feedback coming! — mb

Scientists in authoritarian-ruled Singapore say they’ve developed a DNA identification assay-on-a-chip that also preps a drop of blood for sampling. This means any one of us might be just a pinprick away from being instantly Identified as a threat. (The watch, below, is one possible form-factor for the DNA tester.)

Wiley

From the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology:

…a rapid test for genetic diagnosis that combines the preparation of biological samples with a polymerase chain reaction PCR on one chip. As they report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the “laboratory device” for all steps in this system is a single drop containing magnetic nanoparticles, which is moved across the chip by a magnetic field.

Super RFID tags might "Impinj" on privacy

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Impinj, an RFID chip maker with a provocative name has developed a new chip that requires very little energy to be activated by a remote reader. (Image: from the Impinj website.)

The chip, called Monza, has a read range 40 percent greater than most currently used to track people and consumer goods

In other words, Monza chips can be read at distances beyond forty feet, conceivably making it easier for spies with handheld readers to hide around corners, or distances up to a quarter of a block away from their targets.

Low-cost RFIDs are called passive, because they draw power from the “read” signal from a reader device.

Impinj says the chips, which overcome water, metal and other RF-disrupting materials, are suitable for tagging individual store items. That will turn a can of Coke, a pack of smokes, into a tracking device.

RFID Journal – - RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Technology News & Features
March 27, 2008—With an eye toward supporting the tagging of products at the item level and at the point of manufacture, RFID chipmaker Impinj unveiled today a new version of its Monza chip made for passive UHF, EPC Gen 2 tags. Called the Monza 3, the chip is significantly more sensitive to radio frequency signals than leading Gen 2 chips from other manufacturers, as well as the currently available Monza 2 chip, which Impinj released in 2006, says Impinj president and CEO Bill Colleran, adding that this increase in sensitivity should translate into better-performing RFID tags.

Be on the lookout for "Minority Report" two-way ads

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Because they will be looking for you.

(Image: from the Ubicomp.org website. )

No need to wait. The technology already exists for interactive advertisements, which will see you, and make offers based on what they think about you. Hotels will feature the displays, from Samsung, in their lobbies this year.

Interactive advertising: A good thing?

Soon, a large advertising display will detect your round-shouldered frame several yards away, and offer you a coupon for a caffeinated pick-me-up. (That, or the display will see that you are about to take a swing at it, and call the cops.)



Europe talks of RFID curbs

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The International Herald Tribune reports that European retailers such as Metro take RFID privacy issues seriously. The article also notes that privacy rights activists have been receptive to some of the retailers’ ideas.

But the article also mentions, briefly (excerpt, below), that schoolgirl uniforms will still be tagged (no “opt-in” RFID scheme for kids), because parents want their kids tracked. — mb

Use of radio ID tags faces limits – International Herald Tribune
A British uniform supplier, Trutex (image, right, from the Trutex website), said it was developing clothing with chips to track schoolchildren, in part because of surveys that showed parents were favorable to the idea.

Intergovernmental org to rule over RFID data

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Call it a conspiracy theory. But I expect our personal information–about our health and habits–will soon be traded on the global markets.

–mb

(They took charge: Representatives from 20 nations signed the Convention on the OECD on 14 December 1960. Image: OECD)

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, an intergovernmental trade organization set-up to rebuild postwar Europe, will decide which privacy protections apply to the data governments and global businesses skim off the RFID tags in your wallet, and under your skin.

The OECD has its roots in a 1948 meeting in Paris, where 18 countries met to make their currencies convertible. Today, the OECD includes 30 countries, including Israel and Chile.

And just like NATO, the OECD’s mission continues to expand beyond its original mandates.

Indeed, the OECD is now eager to control tomorrow’s global currency: the data RFID tags provide about the products and people bearing them.

Continue reading →

NASA sats to ID disease hotspots

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The forecast calls for a flu outbreak, here. NASA scientists, social and behavioral scientists and epidemiologists believe satellite images can signal coming epidemics.

NASA’s satellite images of Earth ground temperatures and pollution will help epidemiologists and behavioral scientists, the space agency says.
NASA is partnering with a university public health laboratory (which is run by an Egyptologist, interestingly enough) to better understand the environmental causes of disease.

The Laboratory for Global Health Observation at the University of Alabama will study how water (presumably flouridated) affects dental health, as well as the links between lead, mercury, pesticides and the health of babies.

Tire fires (easily seen from space), for example, create ideal conditions for the spread of West Nile Virus, according to NASA.

More from NASA:

NASA – NASA Scientists Learn to Speak New Language

Studies sponsored by the lab have already led to critical research in fighting malaria. Infrared imagery from satellites is helping scientists locate warm standing water – fertile breeding ground for mosquitos. Then the problem areas can be treated effectively and precisely, stopping the spread of malaria.

Other researchers at the lab are using satellite imagery to correlate cases of West Nile virus with nearness to tire dumps — a favorite breeding ground for the virus-carrying mosquito.

This idea led UAB to create a remote sensing lab – in fact the first U.S. dedicated remote sensing lab for medical and public health use – to do just that.

The scientists from UAB and NASA realized that rocket science could be focused down to the level of microbiology and public health and yield huge advances in both.

And here is a temperature map of the type the new global health observation will use:

– Mark Baard 

2012: NASA sees start of "new solar cycle"

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A bumpy ride ahead for sats and power grids. (Image: NASA)

NASA today published a forecast for a “big and intense” new solar cycle in 2011 or 2012, which its suggests will wreak havoc on satellite GPS and telecommunications, power grids and air traffic.

NASA says the next solar cycle, Solar Cycle 24, “could make itself felt as never before.”

We are now at the end of Solar Cycle 23 (see graphic, and excerpts, below), according to the U.S. space agency.

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clipped from science.nasa.gov
Is a New Solar Cycle
Beginning
It may not look like much, but “this patch of magnetism could be a sign of the next solar cycle,” says solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.