Tag: Nature, Space, Science, Tech

What A Great Decade

Terrorism, war, natural disasters, iPods: is this going to go down as the biggest loser of a decade of all time or what? Apparently Mother Nature is working on a real doozie to cap it off:

A silent tectonic event, so powerful it has shifted southern Vancouver Island out to sea, but so subtle nobody has felt a thing, is slowly unfolding on the West Coast. Scientists who are tracking the event with sensitive seismographs and earth orbiting satellites warn it could be a trigger for a massive earthquake — some time, maybe soon. But they are quick to add that the imperceptible tremors emanating from deep beneath the surface are sending signals scientists are not yet able to comprehend fully and “the Big One” might yet be 200 years off.

Hoo ray.

Update: Goodie…and what exactly were they doing so far?

Sciencenter, Ithaca, New York

This is the real reason we visited Ithaca last weekend – not the ice cream, not the fine beer store and certainly not the hotel which shall go nameless with the blinking light on the smoke detector. The Sciencenter is hard to beat for an afternoon with the kids. Basically, it is only about 150 experiments to jump on, pull the rope, splash in the water or crawl through. Kid heaven.



Unlike the Children’s Museum in the Canadian Museum of Civilization there are no dioramas explaining things, no helpful staff with FedCo logoed t-shirts, no museum of the postal service – every child’s joy. Unlike the Portland’s Children’s Museum of Maine, there are no sponsored grocery store interactive displays teaching your kid to shop. But, to be quite fair, unlike either of those, the Sciencenter did not have that stage area with a real curtain and a trunk full of dress up clothes for putting on a play which is the killer app for a six year old.



No, the Sciencenter was all about science and teaching through doing in the inside exhibits as well as the outside playground. Water is explained through a spashy duck run, sinks and toilets. Lots of giggles and paying attention. There is a simple insulated room where kids can scream on the inside and watch a sound meter record decibels on the outside. Hard to get the kids away from that one. Outside swings with different rope length side by side as well as swings with intervening beams explain waves and motion. A 150 metre length of PVC tubes looped back to its beginning explains the speed of sounds and what you say into one end is heard half a second later. Kids argue with themselves. You can lift Dad seated in a chair pulling different ropes attached along the other end of the see-saw they hang from. Again, do it again!


Smart stuff and at 20 bucks US for the say good value for money. The kids get a brainful and leave exhausted. You would think that a lot of the outside stuff could be incorporated into city park playgrounds on a smaller scale in insidiously inculcate kiddies with smarts. There was even my second example of one of the two story falling golf ball clangy thingies like the one at the Salmon Run Mall in Watertown. When I win the lotto, I am going to just build these and give them away. Watch a movie of it: [8.7 MB,.mpg file].

Coming up on Ithaca week: the Farmer’s Market and Buttermilk Falls.

Let My Hoodie Go!

Tony Blair, fresh from victory at the polls is taking on a new enemy – the hoodie:

Britain has a new public enemy: the teenager in a hooded sweatshirt. Hoods, no longer just an adolescent fashion statement, lie at the centre of a debate over what many people, including Prime Minister Tony Blair, see as an alarming rise in bad behaviour. Mr. Blair says rowdy public drunkenness, noisy neighbours, petty street crime, even graffiti and vandalism are top concerns. He is enthusiastically backing an English shopping mall’s ban on hoods, baseball caps and other headgear that obscure the face. “It is time to reclaim the streets for the decent majority,” Mr. Blair told the House of Commons. “People are rightly fed up with street-corner and shopping-centre thugs….”

You might think that something is amiss when a garment I and my children wear has become the icon of the evil in British Society. You might think that there is something else to this. Which of course there is. The knowing amongst you may know I did a wee thesis for my LLM a couple of years ago on the implications under Canadian law for distant biometric surveillance. The interesting thing is that the western nation most interested in using superfast cameras to gather biometric images of people’s faces and immediately cross reference them against databases of the known is the UK. No koo-koo wingnuttiness. That is just reality.

The hoodie over the face defeats this watching, making it difficult for the computers to figure out who you are through simply the cloaking and even the face down posture. So when he speaks of “the decent majority”, keep in mind that the UK government reserves to itself tools for the identification and logging of individual citizens which would be unacceptable under Canadian and US law, which, though the technolgy is here, still provide more by way of autonomy for the citizen from the state. Sure there are likely other aspects to it as there always are but keep in mindw who is watching and how they watch when the hoodie is separated out as the new evil.

Two Zoos

We went to two zoos over the weekend. Both are legacies from the best part of 100 years ago of communities creating exotic educational assets. Both are well into a shift away from mere collections of animals for your gawking pleasure to having a something of a greater purpose. At Watertown, NY, in the middle of town in the center of the park on the hill, you will find the New York State Living Museum. At Syracuse NY, in the middle of town in the center of the park on the hill, you will find the Rosamond Gifford Zoo. At Watertown, you find the animals of New York state and you have a sense from all the building hat there is lots of expansion to provide more space for bears, deer, lynx as well as reptiles and amphibians, rattlers rattling at you through plexiglass. Thank God for plexiglass. It is focused and educational and I will never camp in upstate New York again. At Syracuse, you get to see the animals of the world: mountain side clinging goats from Afghanistan, Indian elephants, middle range apes from South America. There is a difference in scale as well. Syracuse is about 5 times the size of Watertown and maybe less than a fifth the size of the Toronto Zoo.

The elephants bothered me but they exemplifiy the transition that a zoo like the one in Syracuse faces. Oddly, an elephant pacing in a laregly concrete space bugs me more than a lynx pacing in a cage with trees and grass. But its because you think about it, isn’t it – many of the elephants have been there for over 20 years and there is likely no other place for elderly pachyderms, there is no money to expand the facilities, there may be no reason to extend the life of the herd into a next generation from a zoological point of view. I may be wrong on each of these points but that is what it looked like. Syracuse is clearly working on the well being of the elephants. It also has a very frank timeline about its history and one thing that span of decades tells you that turning a zoo around takes a lot of time in addition to money. Some apparently do not make it as the gift shop indicated that memberships from the Utica zoo were no longer being honoured as that facility had been removed from a certification list of some sort.

Syracuse is looking like it has a fighting chance. It has moved into an expanded area with well laid out walkways and green space and is using that area to provide larger and rarer animals with access to that space. The tigers are a good example. The Toronto zoo’s collection included Sumatran tigars from Indonesia. In Syracuse, the tigers are Russian, from the coast facing the northern Sea of Japan.

Zoos also portray the change that has occurred in wealth and giving. The Maine children’s writer Robert McClosky, who wrote in the middle of the 1900s, in one of his early books writes about a poor kid nicknamed Lentil who kicks around the streets of a mid-western US town and finds himself in a celebration of the return of a prominent citizen retiring after a life of service. Half the town is named after this citizen as, frankly, he paid for half the town. The story itself is a little drummer boy tale as in the end Lentil plays his harmonica for the round, happy benefactor and all is well. That story almost makes no sense anymore as that same town today would either be gone or would be populated with a community of much more dispersed wealth through the combination of some socialism and and a much more diversified economy. Many more people would have disposible income surplus to their needs. But it would not be seemingly free money like the money of the man in Lentil.

The zoos of the early 1900s were paid for by the prominent as well as through public campaigns but perhaps not well enough at the outset as other demands were made on the trust funds, stock crashes intervened and likely generations just passed. Like the elephant, the function of that sort of wealth may have changed. Another key factor is, of course, secularization and individual reward worship. Many old time capitalists told themselves something of a story about charitable giving – it was their duty. It was also civic republicanism. The gifting was mandatory because the words read from the pulpit said so and it was adding to the greater good. And it was believed and it was done and then, over time, it was not so well believed and it was no so well done and all of a sudden there are more interesting things to do on the weekend with all our cash. All of a sudden, the folk who could be benefactors pretty much have become us.

So we have, on one hand, elephants and a few apes who are maybe not well served and, on the other, focused active preservation of species which may not exist elsewhere soon, like the Russian tiger. Zoos are on the move and many may pull out of the demanding curve like Watertown and Syracuse seem to be. Both worth going to, both worth reading up on before you go so you know what to expect.

Robots On Wheels

Here is Hitachi’s entry into the robot WARS!!! race and one that points out an actual use for the Segway concept. Why have all those chunky walking technology worries like nightmarish future soldier Honda’s Asimo.

Hitachi had a press conference introducing them yesterday:

Two wheel-based Emiews, Pal and Chum, introduced themselves to reporters at a press conference in Japan.

How nice. It kind of looks like Pal…or Chum…is holding a flamethrower Swiffer-brand duster to get at those difficult areas.

Five Percent Is Not That Bad

The BBC reports that five percent increase in fuel costs would ensure 10% green power for the UK:

During the 2003/4 financial year, the amount of electricity generated from inexhaustible natural resources was 2.4%, just over half the target of 4.3%. The government hopes to double the amount of electricity from renewables to 20% of the UK’s needs by 2020, cutting carbon dioxide emissions by between 20 million and 27 million tonnes. The policy’s centrepiece is a commitment to stimulate green energy by making sure those who produce it receive more than the market rate for electricity – known as the Renewables Obligation. In addition, the government is providing capital grants to offshore windfarms, and to power stations that generate electricity from biomass and energy crops.

All sounds reasonable, paying for what you want to avoid what you don’t…unless I suppose you are 17 and love self-help-guru, Miss Take-a-lot 1957 Ayn Rand aka i-me-mine.

Privacy Through Walls

A few years ago now, I wrote a thesis about a type of surveillance and included a quote from a 1928 dissent in the Supreme Court of the United
Justice case Olmstead v. U.S. 277 U.S. 438 (1928):

Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in Court, and by which it will be enabled to expose a jury to the most intimate occurrences of the home.

…

…as time works, subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy will become available to the government. The progress of science in furnishing the government with the means of espionage is not likely to stop with wiretapping. Advances in the psychic and related sciences may bring means of exploring beliefs, thoughts and emotions.

The Supreme Court of Canada recently reviewed a case, R. v. Tessling, similar at least in the use of such new intrusive technologies:

The RCMP used an airplane equipped with a Forward Looking Infra-Red (“FLIR”) camera to overfly properties owned by the accused. FLIR technology records images of thermal energy or heat radiating from a building. It cannot, at this stage of its development, determine the nature of the source of heat within the building or “see” through the external surfaces of a building. The RCMP were able to obtain a search warrant for the accused’s home based on the results of the FLIR image coupled with information supplied by two informants. In the house, the RCMP found a large quantity of marijuana and several guns. The accused was charged with a variety of drug and weapons offences.

The headnote to the Tessling ruling in summarizing the Court’s ruling states that the accused had a privacy interest in the activities taking place in his home and it may be presumed that he had a subjective expectation of privacy in such activities to the extent they were the subject matter of the search. However, everything shown in the heat-generated photograph exists on the external surfaces of the building and, in that sense, it recorded only information exposed to the public. Although the information about the distribution of the heat was not visible to the naked eye, the heat profile did not expose any intimate details of the accused’s lifestyle or part of his core biographical data. It only showed that some of the activities in the house generate heat. Thus, the Court held, when one considers the “totality of the circumstances”, the use of the technology did not intrude on the reasonable sphere of privacy of the accused.

It is interesting to note that the ruling in 2004 was about a fact situation in 1999 and 1999 technology. Despite this delay between the facts before it and its own ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada stated in Tessling:

In my view, with respect, the reasonableness line has to be determined by looking at the information generated by existing FLIR technology, and then evaluating its impact on a reasonable privacy interest. If, as expected, the capability of FLIR and other technologies will improve and the nature and quality of the information hereafter changes, it will be a different case, and the courts will have to deal with its privacy implications at that time in light of the facts as they then exist.

So what can Forward Looking Infra-Red see now? Ratheon sell it to the US Air Force promoting these features. SgmaTel made this press release last month. The US Army Research Laboratory announced this earlier this year. Not exactly a simple infra-red camera hanging from a police helicopter now. Smart image processing is occuring.

As was stated in the dissent in Olmstead,

…the makers of the US Constitution understood the need to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness, and the protections guaranteed by this are much broader in scope, and include the right to life and an inviolate personality — the right to be left alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men… It does not matter if the target of government intrusion is a confirmed criminal. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law.

This was written by Justice Louis Brandeis and conccurred with by Justice Oliver Wendle Holmes, two fairly strong swimmers. Do you believe that this is a relevant statement regarding the limits of surveillance given the advance of technology? Does a court that reviews the facts of a case five years after the fact inspire you with great confidence that the law has a good handle on advancing surveillance technologies and your privacy?