Science, Technology & Health: July 2007 Archives

The World Gospel Mission missionary group is looking for virtual missionaries to share Christianity in the Second Life game/community. From their email:

World Gospel Mission (WGM) has developed nearly 100 years of experience in the mission field by evangelizing the world beginning in China in 1910 and today has 300 missionaries and support staff serving on six continents and in more than 17 countries. And now WGM is the first to use this extraordinary missionary expertise to evangelize the “Virtual World.” WGM is the first to develop a comprehensive training manual, “Ambassadors to LindenLand Handbook,” to equip missionaries to evangelize “Second Life,” a 3-D virtual world inhabited by over 8.3 million residents from around the world. Second Life has grown into a prosperous online community where goods are bought and sold, people meet people, and members can even build their own houses. But, what about the spiritual aspects of the virtual world? Hubert Harriman, president of WGM, is available to discuss the challenges and the successes of evangelizing cyberspace as it relates to “Second Life.” Harriman can answer the following intriguing questions: How did you determine a need to evangelize cyberspace? How many missionaries do you have at Second Life? How do you train missionaries to evangelize online without getting caught up in the pitfalls of the online culture? Have you ever had any conversions to Christ online and how do you know they are real? What are your plans with Second Life? Do you intend to build an online church and hold services? What is the future of such online communities as they relate to missions work?

Interesting endeavor! (I know nothing about WGM's theology.)

I wrote about lead-tainted Mexican candy a couple of years ago, and now there's even more evidence linking lead exposure to criminality.

Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin said in an interview. "Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."

I don't find this hard to believe (though the WaPo's connection of this issue to Rudy Giuliani is interesting...). Lead is bad, especially for kids, and this itself isn't news: lead poisoning may even have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.

My brother sent me an article claiming scientific evidence for the idea that obesity is a socially-contagious disease.

The answer, the researchers report, was that people were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese. That increased one's chances of becoming obese by 57 percent.

There was no effect when a neighbor gained or lost weight, however, and family members had less of an influence than friends. It did not even matter if the friend was hundreds of miles away - the influence remained. And the greatest influence of all was between mutual close friends. There, if one became obese, the other had a 171 percent increased chance of becoming obese too.

The same effect seemed to occur for weight loss, the investigators say, but since most people were gaining, not losing, over the 32 years, the result was an obesity epidemic.

Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a physician and professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator in the new study, says one explanation is that friends affect each others' perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.

"You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you," Christakis said.

I doubt that perception is the major influencer of weight gain or loss... from personal experience, fat friends want to go out and eat crap all the time, whereas skinny friends want to eat healthy and have fun in physically active ways. Either way, there's on doubt that the friends you pick have a large influence on you -- food for thought!

DARPA's building a war-fighting equivalent of Deep Blue named Deep Green, and I think computer-augmented command structures are the wave of the future.

According to the DARPA call for ideas (available in full here (pdf), Deep Green will include technologies called "Sketch to Plan and Sketch to Decide", "Crystal Ball", "Automated Course of Action Generation"" and "Blitzkrieg".

The idea is that within three years DARPA will be able to run wargames using human headquarters staffs, but that the Deep Green equipped staffs will have only a quarter as many personnel. Performance will be graded by judges who don't know whether a given team was Deep Green equipped or not. ...

"The long-term vision of Deep Green is for options to be generated by both the commander and the computer... so that some options are generated by humans and others are generated by machines. Initially, DARPA expects the machine generation of options to be centered on making clever mutations of the human-generated options..."

One of the most fruitful directions of artificial intelligence research is writing software that augments the abilities of human decision-makers. AIs that can suggest options to generals and estimate outcomes will be invaluable in the battlespace of the future, largely because they'll have far more information awareness than a human staff could ever achieve.

My brother send along an article about an online random number generator that can supposedly supply truly random numbers instead of the pseudo-random numbers us computer scientists are used to.

The work on QRBG [Quantum Random Bit Generator] Service has been motivated by scientific necessity (primarily of local scientific community) of running various simulations (in cluster/Grid environments), whose results are often greatly affected by quality (distribution, nondeterminism, entropy, etc.) of used random numbers. Since true random numbers are impossible to generate with a finite state machine (such as today's computers), scientists are forced to either use specialized expensive hardware number generators, or, more frequently, to content themselves with suboptimal solutions (like pseudo-random numbers generators).

The Service has begun as a result of an attempt to fulfill the scientists' needs for quality random numbers, but has now grown to a global (public) high-quality random numbers service.

Incredibly useful for a host of applications. I'm going to download a huge batch of random numbers right now!

Aside from the sensationalism surrounding the Chinese brick-making slaves, the most notable aspect of the story to me is that Chinese peasants used the internet to force the Communist bureaucracy to heed their complaints.

The scandal surfaced last month after about 400 distraught parents posted a plea on the Internet about their children who had been sold into slavery in China's northern Shanxi province and neighbouring Henan.

They made their case public after police and local authorities refused to help find their children.

After the Internet postings prompted action from police and attention from the state-run press, disturbing images were broadcast of abused and emaciated workers being freed from brick kilns, with some young men too weak to stand.

I bet the Communists were surprised to find their iron boots slipping off the necks of their subjects. There's still some concern that government officials may have been involved in the slavery, but I bet those facts will come to light eventually, too.

However, human rights groups and some ordinary Chinese citizens on the Internet said those convicted could just be scapegoats, and accused the ruling Communist Party of trying to ensure that corrupt officials were not implicated.

Even the Luddites who oppose technology and civilization should cheer this victory for internet-empowered peasants.

A stationary cycle that hooks to your television to keep your kids entertained and healthy.

Instead of venturing outside, children can simply pedal away on the stationary bike while staring at a computer-generated image of a moving road on the TV screen.

And while manufacturer Fisher-Price claims the Smart Cycle is the ideal solution to concern about evergrowing child obesity, critics say it could be used as an excuse for parents who can't be bothered to take them out.

It also does nothing to combat worries that youngsters are spending too much time watching screens instead of looking at books or playing in the real world.

I certainly agree that many people spend too much time indoors, but there's nothing wrong with combining video games and exercise. If I found a game I enjoyed with a physical component I'd be happy to kill two birds with one stone.

My brother pointed me to this article explaining that gasoline pumps don't compensate for temperature (or, presumably, pressure), leading to considerable losses by consumers.

Think gas is expensive? It's even more expensive on hot summer days. Gasoline expands as temperatures rise. That means motorists get less energy from a gallon of so-called "hot fuel" than from a cold one.

When Brent Donaldson, a restaurant owner in Kansas City, Mo., discovered that fact earlier this year, he joined hundreds of consumers in more than a dozen states who are suing oil companies and gas retailers, alleging that they have been overcharged by billions of dollars.

"The consumer is repeatedly being ripped off and not given a fair deal," Donaldson says. He says he spends $60 a week filling his Acura.

The lawsuits allege that higher temperatures of gasoline cost consumers between 3 and 9 cents a gallon extra at the pump.

Pumps are apparently calibrated to 60 degrees, so if you get gas when it's hotter than that you're paying too much. Of course, if you get gas when it's colder than 60 you're reaping a benefit... but gas companies in cold climates already compensate when the error would be to their disadvantage!

However, the consumers' attorneys say that in Canada — where gas temperatures are generally colder, and the advantage shifts to the consumer — temperature-adjustment equipment already has been installed at the gas pump.

George Zelk, a Chicago attorney representing truck drivers in several states, says the oil industry wants it both ways.

"The industry has pushed for this temperature adjustment in Canada, where they lose money, where it's colder than 60 degrees, and opposed it in the United States where it's warmer than 60 degrees," Zelk says.

I had always assumed that gas pumps compensated for temperature and pressure... otherwise, high-altitude cities have been getting systematically screwed for decades!

Here's a story I missed from three years ago about a night club in Barcelona whose customers use RFID implants to identify themselves and pay for drinks.

Last week I headed for the bright lights of the Catalan city of Barcelona to enter the exclusive VIP Baja Beach Club.

The night club offers its VIP clients the opportunity to have a syringe-injected microchip implanted in their upper arms that not only gives them special access to VIP lounges, but also acts as a debit account from which they can pay for drinks.

This sort of thing is handy for a beach club where bikinis and board shorts are the uniform and carrying a wallet or purse is really not practical.

Pretty high-tech. I'm sure I'll get an RFID implant someday, but I'm not looking forward to the criminals who find some reason to extract them violently....

(HT: GeekPress and The DIY Guide to Becoming a (Real) Cyborg.)

My brother Nick sent me this link about RoboCup soccer... the title is pretty self-explanatory!

RoboCupSoccer

The main focus of the RoboCup activities is competitive football. The games are important opportunities for researchers to exchange technical information. They also serve as a great opportunity to educate and entertain the public. RoboCupSoccer is divided into the following leagues:

Simulation league

Independently moving software players (agents) play soccer on a virtual field inside a computer. Matches have 5-minute halves. This is one of the oldest fleet in RoboCupSoccer.
As a physical visualization sub-league, a visualization using thumb-size robots (Eco-be system) will be demonstrated in 2007.

Small-size robot league (f-180)

Small robots of no more than 18 cm in diameter play soccer with an orange golf ball in teams of up to 5 robots on a field with the size of bigger than a ping-pong table. Matches have 10-minute halves. This league focuses on the issues of multi-agent cooperation with a hybrid centralized/distributed system.

Middle-size robot league (f-2000)

Middle-sized robots of no more than 50 cm diameter play soccer in teams of up to 4 robots with an orange soccer ball on a field the size of 12x8 metres. Matches are divided in 15-minute halves. All sensors are on-board. Robots can use wireless networking to communicate.

Four-legged robot league

Teams of 4 four-legged entertainment robots (SONY's AIBO) play soccer on a 3 x 5 metre field. Matches have 10-minute halves. The robots use wireless networking to communicate with each other and with the game referee. Challenges include vision, self-localization, planning, and multi-agent coordination.

Humanoid league

This league was introduced in 2002 and the robots will have their third appearance ever in this year's RoboCup. Biped autonomous humanoid robots play in "penalty kick" and " 2 vs. 2" matches and "Technical Challenges". This league has two subcategories: Kid-size and Teen-size.

The cooperative artificial intelligence behind the scenes is in the same niche as my PhD dissertation, so the project is fascinating to me. I'm going to try to find out more and I'll let you know what I discover.

Building land on water isn't new. Much of New York (including the site of the World Trade Center) is built on landfill claimed from the ocean. Dubai is building islands and whole communities off its coast to expand its residential districts and attract wealth from around the world. But this story passed along from reader JV shows that Japan is taking artificial land to the next level by purposefully using man-made islands to expand its economic claims in the Eastern Pacific.

Japan has launched an innovative project to try to protect an exclusive economic zone off its coast.

Officials are planting coral to increase the land mass of rocky outcrops in Japan's waters.

Six colonies of coral have been planted around Okinotorishima, some 1,700km (1,060 miles) south of Tokyo. ...

They look like two concrete roundabouts, sitting in the middle of the sea off the southern coast of Japan.

map

Their combined land mass is just 10 sq m (12 square yards). But these rocky outcrops are important.

According to the Law of the Sea, Japan can lay exclusive claim to the natural resources 370km (230 miles) from its shores.

So, if these outcrops are Japanese islands, the exclusive economic zone stretches far further from the coast of the main islands of Japan then it would do otherwise.

To bolster Tokyo's claim, officials have posted a large metal address plaque on one of them making clear they are Japanese. They have also built a lighthouse nearby.

China isn't happy but America doesn't mind because this expansion ensures our Navy open access through the Eastern Pacific. It will be interesting to see how the situation develops.

(HT: BLDGBLOG, who has lots of pictures.)

I rather enjoy programming on interesting projects, but I loathe Makefiles. Because of Makefiles, I hate developing on any Linux variant. It's utterly painful.

Why do I hate Makefiles?

- Arbitrary organizational structures, or none at all! Every developer has their own Makefile style that's completely individual and probably not even self-consistent.

- Obfuscated behavior. One Makefile isn't sufficient to build anything substantial, so a single project is likely to have dozens of Makefiles in as many directories, all including each other and depending on globals and environment variables that are tedious to track down. It's every bad programming practice rolled together!

- Arcane syntax. What? You expected spaces and tabs to be interchangeable? Fool! And if you put the wrong number of whichever whitespace is expected you'll get an error, right? Nope, your command will just be silently ignored and you'll get some random fault in an entirely different area when something that depends on the ignored command fails. Furthermore, symbols and keywords have none of their traditional programming meanings, and procedural blocks are jumbled together with rules.

- Invisible influences. Directory paths are relative to who-knows-where. Most rules in a typical Makefile are implied rather than explicit. Most commands have unintuitive side-effects. Half the game is trying to prevent things you don't want from happening.

Don't get me started on autoconfig.

Here's an article with five reasons not to buy an iPhone. The most important to me is:

'VoIP,' or Voice over Internet Protocol.

For the uninitiated, this is the technology that allows you to make free, or nearly free, phone calls over any Internet connection. No, this isn't just geek stuff. Skype and Vonage (VG) are two widely used VoIP services, and there are now many more. The technology is growing rapidly. Free and open Wi-Fi networks are springing up like weeds in every city.

Sources close to Apple confirmed to me that the iPhone lacks VoIP technology. It cannot use Wi-Fi networks to make cheap calls over the Internet

(Stop the Presses: Steve Jobs has just revealed in a Wall Street Journal interview that he excluded VoIP from the iPhone because he didn't consider it a "breakthrough" technology. He has added, though, that a third party developer may produce a VoIP program for the iPhone in due course, to run through the browser.")

That's great news for AT&T, of course. It's bad news for consumers.

WiFi isn't universal yet, but it will be eventually and there won't be nearly as much need for the existing cellular infrastructure. The next phone I get will hopefully have VoIP built in.

Google has made Google Maps even better by implementing draggable waypoints so you can tailor your route and require it to pass through any intermediate points you choose. Extremely awesome.

(HT: Nick.)