Lorenzo’s Blog

By Andrew Webb
Technology reporter, BBC News

Classic comic hero Dan Dare fired the imagination of young Britons in the 1950s and heralded the birth of hi-tech Britain, an exhibition at the London Science Museum reveals.

 

A British-built nuclear bomb and a prototype of the BT Tower are on display as part of the show.

The museum says the Eagle comic’s space hero not only reflected but influenced the UK’s wealth of inventions during the 1950s and 60s.

Portable televisions and radio alarm clocks are among the collection, capturing the upbeat spirit of Eagle.

 

“Dan was packed full of… very credible technology that was in there in very minute detail”, Peter Hampson, the son of Dan Dare’s creator, Frank Hampson, told BBC News.

He said it enabled children to be inspired by science.

Nuclear arsenal

But nuclear weaponry highlights the more sinister and less well known aspect of British research in the 1950s.

Science Museum curator Ben Russell said the government emphasised the benefits of nuclear power, but in reality built reactors to ensure the country could create its own atomic bombs.

In later years the technology’s domestic uses became more prominent.

He said: “What Dan Dare was doing depended on the innovation and industry that was happening in Britain at the time. There was enormous drive to modernise and maximise output.

“The whole point of Dan Dare was that is was supposed to be very positive about technology. Unfortunately, in real life things were not quite as Frank Hampson might have hoped.”<p

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This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

New survey results show that only 29.5 percent in a sample of 1,015 adult Americans consider nanotech morally acceptable. Europe ranked significantly higher. The hypothesized reason? Religious beliefs.

The results of the survey were presented by Dietram Scheufele, professors of life sciences and communication, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on February 15th, 2008. Scheufele conducted the survey in liaison with his colleague Elizabeth Corley of Arizona State University (ASU).

According to Scheufele the participants of the survey were well informed about the benefits and nature of nanotechnology. This would include the potential to prolong our lives, cure diseases (nanotech is already improving our medicine), the immense impact on technology et cetera. Yet, oppose it they did.

Only 29.5% of 1,015 adult Americans considered nanotech morally acceptable

In a sample of 1,015 adult Americans, only 29.5 percent of respondents agreed that nanotechnology was morally acceptable.

In European surveys that posed identical questions about nanotechnology to people in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, significantly higher percentages of people accepted the moral validity of the technology. In the United Kingdom, 54.1 percent found nanotechnology to be morally acceptable. In Germany, 62.7 percent had no moral qualms about nanotechnology, and in France 72.1 percent of survey respondents saw no problems with the technology. [via ScienceDaily with ScienceDaily]

I imagine the percentage of people who find it acceptable would be even higher in Iceland, given the results of a 2005 survey of acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (Icelanders rank number one, see National Geographic’s chart).

Why the difference between Europeans and Americans?

The answer, Scheufele believes, is religion: “The United States is a country where religion plays an important role in peoples’ lives. The importance of religion in these different countries that shows up in data set after data set parallels exactly the differences we’re seeing in terms of moral views. European countries have a much more secular perspective.”

The catch for Americans with strong religious convictions, Scheufele believes, is that nanotechnology, biotechnology and stem cell research are lumped together as means to enhance human qualities. In short, researchers are viewed as “playing God” when they create materials that do not occur in nature, especially where nanotechnology and biotechnology intertwine, says Scheufele.

There are two things we must note. The first is that this is Sceufele’s educated guess. The second is that convergence of nano- and biotechnology can in some cases involve animal testing — which might play a part in people’s answers.

But given that the participants of the study were aware of how nanotechnology could catapult mankind’s well-being, and I dare say all the animal kingdom, Sceufele’s assumption sounds reasonable. Unfortunately.

Links & References

• Discovered via the Black Sun Journal’s “Religious Delusion Hampers Nanotechnology”

I recently came across news of a device that geeked me out. Its a neckband that can detect and analyze neural firings when we think about saying something, and translate them into audible words via speech synthesizer. Beyond the obvious use of bettering the lives of people who’ve lost their ability to speak, it could enable us to make phonecalls without having to actually talk (as is demonstrated in a video in this article). The creators of the device mention that they’ll have a product by the end of the year for people with ALS (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s Disease).

In my aforementioned geek-out craze I told my girlfriend about the device, called the Audeo, who immediately identified the problem of the device saying a thought you don’t actually want the other person to hear. You’re on the phone with your boss when you suddenly hear the device blurt out “Are you never going to shut up about those damn TPS Reports!?“.

Good point. But the creators say the device can differentiate between things that you’re thinking, and things that you actually want to say. You have to think about using your voice for the device to pick up on it.

I’m sure that this ability is a beneficial byproduct of making the device a “collar” around your neck monitoring the nerves that control muscles of the larynx.

Our Head’s Too Messy, Go for the Neck

The device is not a brain interface worn on the head, so it stands to reason that (a) they are monitoring neural activity to the muscles that control speech (larynx/voicebox), and (b) by doing so it’s easier to detect things that you actually want to say, as opposed to what you’re casually thinking.

 

 

The larynx is innervated by branches of the vagus nerve on each side. Sensory innervation to the glottis and supraglottis is by the internal branch of the superior laryngeal nerve. The external branch of the superior laryngeal nerve innervates the cricothyroid muscle. Motor innervation to all other muscles of the larynx and sensory innervation to the subglottis is by the recurrent laryngeal nerve.

However, I’m sure we’ve all been in situations where we are on the verge of saying something, perhaps in an emotionally colored debate, but think twice and eventually say something less aggressive. In such a situation I’m sure the device could accidentally be triggered. So the user must make sure to be perfectly balanced, one with himself and the universe before using it for important conversations. At least for now.

Writing this I get the idea that this problem could be overcome with AI; natural language processing could detect potentially insulting sentences or harsh language. The user could then be prompted to verify whether he meant to say a particular sentence (whether this would introduce too much lag is another question).

 

 

Voiceless Phonecalls

The device, currently able to recognize 150 words, is under development by Ambient Corporation, co-founded by Micahel Callahan who demonstrates the device in the following video at the TI Developer Conference’08 by placing a “voiceless phonecall”.

For the past few decades, humans have increasingly been extending their intellectual capacity with the use of machines. An example is using mobile devices to retrieve knowledge on the fly —

making each device-wielding human more intellectually capable than one 20 years ago. But this a matter of perspective, and many only see future invasive devices as “extensions of intelligence” (e.g. neural-interfaced memory storage device) and everything else as tools.

Modern technology is starting to blur this line between intellectual extensions and tools. The “Smartest Person in the Room” project is one of these: Using the Audeo, a person thinks of a question —

the question is consequently sent to a web knowledge-application, the answer found and tunneled back out through the speakers. Question never audibly asked, yet answered. Quite brilliant.

 

 

 

 

Looking forward to monitoring the developments of this project, feeding my interest in machine interfaces right along Emotiv’s Epoc and Neurosky’s non-invasive neural interfaces.

Links & References

• New Scientist on the Audeo