Tag Archives: Implants

You're never too old to be a cyborg

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Cyborg candidate. Photo: CC/Julie Kertesz

Cyborg candidate. Photo: CC/Julie Kertesz

Great news for geezers: Docs in NYC recently concluded that even the elderly can benefit from cochlear implant surgery.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d be the first in line for this procedure, after seeing the frustration my older friends and relatives have experienced with hearing aids. (Already, at 41, I am certain I have left much of my own hearing behind at hundreds of clubs and heavy metal concerts. Whenever I drop my six-year-old, Maeve, at her grammar school “cafetorium,” the din makes it hard to hear even the person in front of me.)

But companies such as Cambridge Consultants are proposing that implant makers piggy-back wireless monitoring systems onto their products. That will effectively make anyone with a pacemaker or a cochlear implant a wireless, internet-connected entity–part of the “Internet of Things.”

The National Institute on Aging estimates that about one-third of Americans between ages 65 and 74 have hearing difficulty – and that number increases to 50 percent in people 85 and older. In about 10% of the elderly, the impairment is so severe that conventional hearing aids provide little benefit. The inability to communicate interferes greatly with daily living and can lead to cognitive impairment, personality changes, depression, reduced functional status and social isolation.

via NYU Langone Medical Center study shows that cochlear implant surgery is safe for the elderly.

Albrecht nails cancer chip makers

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Mainstream reporters helped spread VeriChip “lies,” Spychips author says

(Katherine Albrecht, the world’s most influential opponent to the use of RFID tags for tracking humans, is driving another nail into VeriChip, and its MSM dupes, for promoting subcutaneous chipping. Photo: Anne Hellmond)

from Mark:

I always tell my journalism students that objectivity should not come at the expense of the truth.

Still, many reporters appear to take the corporate suits at their word, despite compelling evidence from grassroots technology opponents (link, excerpt, below).

A simple denial from VeriChip, for example, seemed enough to balance the scales for reporters at Time Magazine, Business Week, and RFID Journal, after Albrecht told an AP reporter about animal studies strongly suggestive of a chip-cancer link.

Industry and government are fairly adept at damage control. After I wrote a Wired story about Homeland Security human tracking scheme in early 2005, the agency enlisted a computer rag hack in an attempt to discredit my original piece.

VeriChip similarly reached out to Time magazine to soften the blow of the surprising findings of cancer in animals bearing microchip implants, which Albrecht brought to light.

Albrecht believes the VeriChip might be a precursor to the Mark of the Beast described in the Book of Revelation.

Verichip Cancer Report
VeriChip’s media efforts have done little to salvage the company’s public image or its financial performance, both of which plummeted after research linking the implantable microchip to cancer was first widely revealed by the Associated Press in September 2007. The same company that once predicted revenues in the “billions” earned just $3,000 from its microchip implant operations in the first quarter of 2008, as patients shun the device that many are now calling the “cancer chip.”

Investors have also distanced themselves from the failing company, with VeriChip’s stock plummeting from a high of $10.62 last year to just over $2.00 today.

Scientists prep mind reading device

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Screaming to be heard: Boston University claims its mind-reading device can get inside the heads of paralyzed patients.

by Mark Baard

New Scientist magazine, cited by the Beeb in this report (link and excerpt, below), often exaggerates the nature of scientific findings and discoveries.

That’s why I am just a bit dubious of the claim that electrodes implanted in the brain of a speechless man are unlocking his thoughts, and relaying them to a voice synthesizer.

But if the scientists at Boston University can indeed guess the guy’s thoughts accurately 80 percent of the time, that would be impressive.

Once they take this technology wireless, calling our thoughts our own might prove impossible.

news.bbc.co.uk
Scientists say they may be on the brink of translating the thoughts of a man who can no longer speak into words after a pioneering experiment.

Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been “locked in” – conscious but paralysed – since a car crash eight years ago.

These have been recording pulses in the areas of the brain involved in speech.

Now, New Scientist magazine reports, they are to use the signals he generates to create speech software.

Although the data is still being analysed, researchers at Boston University believe they can correctly identify the sound Mr Ramsay’s brain is imagining some 80% of the time
In the next few weeks, a computer will start the task of translating his thoughts into sounds.
“It’s very exciting that we are starting to be able to translate some basic thoughts, but we are lot further away from a universal mind reading machine than some people hoped – or feared – we may be five years ago.”

Is transhumanism a religion?

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Movement promises “an end run around mortality”


A real beauty, or virtually so. (Image: from the transhumanist book, The Perfect World Tour, by “A.R. Teest.”)

Natasha Vita-More does not appreciate being called a religious leader. (See her reply to a recent parallelnormal post here.) Vita-More and her husband, Max More, are leaders of the transhumanist and extropian movements, which advocate for the use of technology to transform the human into a “posthuman,” which they believe will be better than the originals.

But the movements, which have ties to the United Nations, and to Oxford and Yale universities, do offer hope to those who long for life “beyond our current biological limitations,” and for greater security in a dangerous world.

Transhumanism also has its share of famous followers, drawn largely from the fields of science, engineering and biology.

The transhumanists, after all, will need the help of scientists to realize their dream of creating a life form to supplant mankind.

Posthumans will replace ordinary, biological, humans with “completely synthetic artificial intelligence,” according to one scenario described by the Extropian Institute, Max More’s think-tank.

Such virtual life might arise from human brains being downloaded to computers, or humans being modified with multiple computer implants, the extropians add.

The inventor Ray Kurzweil and MIT artificial intelligence guru Marvin Minsky are transhumanists.

Kurzweil is not a religious man. But he does believe science might help him “live long enough to live forever.” He takes dozens of supplements daily, and spends a full day each month at a Massachusetts clinic, where he receives massive vitamin doses intravenously.

“The promise of eternal life through continuous upgrades obviously satisfies one of the chief needs of religious personalities — an end run around mortality,” my brother, Erik, told me last week.

Erik covered a meeting of the World Transhumanist Association at Yale for the Village Voice in 2003.

Erik does not share my belief that transhumanism might meet the deifinition of a cult. “But,” he said, “some vulnerable people attracted to it might be ripe for such exploitation.”

++

More information:

Red Ice Creations special report

Alan Watt’s Cutting Through the Matrix

Urban wireless to serve intel and PSYOP forces

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The government needs more nodes: Various agencies want to seed cities with wireless networking devices (image from a DOD document).

Despite the high costs and unproven social benefits for municipal broadband, dozens of U.S. cities are ignoring laws banning anti-competitive practices and getting into the internet business.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Defense is planning to build robots that configure themselves into ad hoc wireless networks within urban areas.

City mayors claim they want to provide free and low-cost Wi-Fi access to the poor and attract business travelers. Defense planners say they need to have broadband capabilities in urban war zones.

But rather than closing the “digital divide” (which many academics admit is being exaggerated), or providing a redundant service to traveling salesmen, it appears that officials aim to seize control of internet communications and track individuals in urban areas.

Military and law enforcement agencies will also use the wireless networks to stage “hard PSYOP” attacks against a brain-chipped populace, according to historian and commentator Alan Watt, who specializes in secret societies and government intelligence operations.

Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston, and Providence, R.I. are among the cities partnering with private companies and the federal government to set up public broadband internet access. Providence used Homeland Security funds to construct a network for police, which may be made available to the public at a later date.

None of the cities are expected to turn a profit anytime soon. Nor are the poor likely to benefit from the projects.

Subscribers to Philly’s “Wireless Philadelphia” service, for example, will pay up to 73 percent more than the rate promised to them two years ago.

“(Philadelphia) presented dangerously inaccurate estimates and figures for the costs and revenue” for its wireless network, according to a recent analysis by students at Harvard Law School. Continue reading →

RFID maker's "free chips" campaign

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He’s your hero. Now, don’t you want a chip, just like him?

RFID maker VeriChip Corp. is pressing forward with a “free chips” campaign, which began with Alzheimer’s disease patients and diabetics.

The company is now targeting emergency service workers.

VeriChip says it is implanting Florida EMS workers with RFID chips to “honor” their community service.

It’s a bizarre tribute, whose symbolism (portraying the chips as medals) was completely lost on the Palm Beach Post.

Instead, the paper ran a misleading article about the technology.

Arfids (RFID chips) track people and objects at a distance. That’s what they do. They can store anything from a 16-digit serial number to highly detailed, biometric data about any individual.

Yet the Post article credulously makes this statement about the VeriChip: “The chip is not a tracking device, nor does it carry any detailed information.”

clipped from threshinggrain.blogspot.com

VeriChip Expanding

PBC sergeant implanted with medical-information chip

Verichip and Wellington Regional since Monday have offered the implants for free
to emergency services personnel and their families in tribute to Emergency
Medical Services Week.

The sick and elderly: first targets for chipping

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This won’t hurt a bit. (At least, you won’t remember.)

An Alzheimer’s care facility in Florida will implant RFID tags into its patients, to help identify them in case they stray from “campus.”

Of course, it’s unlikely anyone who finds these test subjects wandering along the road will even think to scan them. Still, ABC News lapped it up.

Dozens of diabetics in Boston and Georgia have also been implanted with the subcutaneous RFID chips made by VeriChip.

The ABC News piece leading RFID opponent Katherine Albrecht. I have written extensively about Albrecht for Wired News and the Boston Globe.

Albrecht is an avowed Christian who believes that RFID tags (or arfids) may be a precursor to the Mark of the Beast described in the Book of Revelation. It’s an inconvenient angle for mainstream reporters, which, when the reporters quote her, invariably leave out of the story.

Personal note:

My relationship with Albrecht became strained after a Wired News editor reworded certain passages in my writeup of Spychips, a book Albrecht co-authored, and which includes quotes from me.

The Wired News editor wanted the piece to appear more skeptical of Albrecht’s book. He also tagged it as a review (under my byline), which it was never intended to be.

I regret not protesting the “review” tag at that time.