Monthly Archives: August 2009

Reimagining prosthetic arms; touchable holograms and brief thoughts on multimodal science communication; and nanoscience conference in Seattle

Reimagining the prosthetic arm, an article by Cliff Kuang in Fast Company (here) highlights a student design project at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Students were asked to improve prosthetic arms and were given four categories: decorative, playful, utilitarian, and awareness. This one by Tonya Douraghey and Carli Pierce caught my fancy, after all, who hasn’t thought of growing wings? (Rrom the Fast Company website),

Feathered cuff and wing arm

Feathered cuff and wing arm

I suggest reading Kuang’s article before heading off to the project website to see more student projects.

At the end of yesterday’s posting about MICA and multidimensional data visualization in spaces with up to 12 dimensions (here)  in virtual worlds such as Second Life, I made a comment about multimodal discourse which is something I think will become increasingly important. I’m not sure I can imagine 12 dimensions but I don’t expect that our usual means of visualizing or understanding data are going to be sufficient for the task. Consequently, I’ve been noticing more projects which engage some of our other senses, notably touch. For example, the SIGGRAPH 2009 conference in New Orleans featured a hologram that you can touch. This is another article by Cliff Kuang in Fast Company, Holograms that you can touch and feel. For anyone unfamiliar with SIGGRAPH, the show has introduced a number of important innovations, notably, clickable icons. It’s hard to believe but there was a time when everything was done by keyboard.

My August newsletter from NISE Net (Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network) brings news of a conference in Seattle, WA at the Pacific Science Centre, Sept. 8 – 11, 2009. It will feature (from the NISE Net blog),

Members of the NISE Net Program group and faculty and students at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University are teaming up to demonstrate and discuss potential collaborations between the social science community and the informal science education community at a conference of the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies in Seattle in early September.

There’s more at the NISE Net blog here including a link to the conference site. (I gather the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Nanotechnologies is in its very early stages of organizing so this is a fairly informal call for registrants.)

The NISE Net nano haiku this month is,

Nanoparticles

Surface plasmon resonance
Silver looks yellow

by Dr. Katie D. Cadwell of the University of Wisconsin-Madison MRSEC.

Have a nice weekend!

Flies carry nanoparticles; EPA invites comments; scientific collaboration in virtual worlds

A new study is suggesting that flies exposed to nanoparticles in manufacturing areas or other places with heavy concentrations could accumulate the particles on their bodies and transport them elsewhere. From the media release on Nanowerk News,

During the experiments, the researchers noted that contaminated flies transferred nanoparticles to other flies, and realized that such transfer could also occur between flies and humans in the future. The transfer involved very low levels of nanoparticles, which did not have adverse effects on the fruit flies.

It makes perfect sense when you think about it. Flies pick up and transport all manner of entities so why wouldn’t they pick up nanoparticles in their vicinity?

In other news, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has asked for comments on case studies of nanoscale titanium dioxide in water treatment and sunscreens. Presumably you have to be a US citizen to participate. For more information on the call for comments, check out this item on Nanowerk News. From the item,

EPA is announcing a 45-day public comment period for the draft document, Nanomaterial Case Studies: Nanoscale Titanium Dioxide in Water Treatment and Topical Sunscreen (External Review Draft), as announced in the July 31, 2009 Federal Register Notice. The deadline for comments is September 14, 2009.

Yesterday, I came across an announcement about scientific collaboration in a virtual world (specifically Second Life). It’s the first professional scientific organization, Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), based entirely in a virtual world.

This idea contrasts somewhat with the NanoLands concept from the National Physical Laboratory in the UK where an organization with a physical location creates a virtual location. (You can see my interview with Troy McConaghy, part of the original NanoLands design team, here.)  The project blog seems to have been newly revived and you can find out more about NanoLands and their latest machinima movies. (If you want to see the machinima, you need a Second Life account.)

What I found particularly interesting about MICA is this bit from their media release on Physorg.com,

In addition to getting people together in a free and convenient way, virtual worlds can offer new possibilities for scientific visualization or “visual analytics.” As data sets become larger and more complex, visualization can help researchers better understand different phenomena. Virtual worlds not only offer visualization, but also enable researchers to become immersed in data and simulations, which may help scientists think differently about data and patterns. Multi-dimensional data visualization can provide further advantages for certain types of data. The researchers found that they can encode data in spaces with up to 12 dimensions, although they run into the challenge of getting the human mind to easily grasp the encoded content.

Shades of multimodal discourse! More tomorrow.

Autonomous algorithms; intelligent windows; pretty nano pictures

I was reminded of watching a printer pumping out page after page after page after page of garbage output because I had activated a process I couldn’t stop when reading Jamais Cascio’s article Autonomy without intelligence? in Fast Company last week.  Cascio describes autonomous software systems operating without human intervention in the finance sector. Called, High-frequency trading (HFT), it relies on networked computers making billions of micro transactions to determine and eventually set the prices. From the Cascio article (an example referenced from a NY Times article by Charles Duhigg here),

Soon, thousands of orders began flooding the markets as high-frequency software went into high gear. Automatic programs began issuing and canceling tiny orders within milliseconds to determine how much the slower traders were willing to pay. The high-frequency computers quickly determined that some investors’ upper limit was $26.40. The price shot to $26.39, and high-frequency programs began offering to sell hundreds of thousands of shares.

The potential for abuse is huge as Cascio points out, exploiting legal loopholes left from “pre-computerized stock trading rules, illegal activities, and systems operating too fast for any human to oversee, let alone counter.” ( For more details about High-frequency trading, read the Cascio and Duhigg articles.)

Cascio then goes on to hypothesize the use of similar networked automatic programs for military purposes. Imagine programs (algorithms) being set into motion and our inability to oversee or counteract them in a military situation? The question hit home again when I found this article (Call for Debate on Killer Robots) by Jason Raimer on the BBC News. Describing one of the impacts of using drone planes that are piloted remotely (sometimes from thousands of miles away),

The rise in technology has not helped in terms of limiting collateral damage, [Professor Noel Sharkey, University of Sheffield] said, because the military intelligence behind attacks was not keeping pace.

Between January 2006 and April 2009, he estimated, 60 such “drone” attacks were carried out in Pakistan. While 14 al-Qaeda were killed, some 687 civilian deaths also occurred, he  said.

That physical distance from the actual theatre of war, he said, led naturally to a far greater concern: the push toward unmanned planes and ground robots that make their decisions without the help of human operators at all.

In fact, the article goes on to reveal that Israel is currently deploying the Harpy, an unmanned aerial vehicle that divebombs radar systems without any human intervention whatsoever. I gather everything is in the algorithms.

I recently came across the word intelligent as applied to windows. It’s a use for the word that contrasts strongly with Cascio’s where he implies that intelligence (in the context of the article cited previously) resides in humans. From the media release on Nanowerk News,

RavenBrick’s patent-pending products use nanotechnology to create an intelligent window filter that automatically blocks solar heat when the outside temperature is too hot, while delivering solar heat inside when the outside temperature is cold. RavenBrick smart-window filters use no electricity, wiring or control systems. They can cut building owners’ energy costs and consumption by as much as 50 percent. What’s more, RavenBrick’s smart-window filters make any interior space more comfortable by managing overheating on hot days, and significantly reduce drafts and cold spots on cold days.

What strikes me most about using the word intelligent to describe these new windows is that I would never have questioned it prior to juxtaposing comments from the Cascio, Duhigg, and Raimer articles. Many times I’ve heard the word intelligent or smart applied to systems or objects without every seriously questioning it. If words are important, than what does applying the word smart or intelligent to a window imply? I’m going to be playing with that one for a while.

To finish off, here’s a link to some pretty nano pictures from the SPmages09 competition which were posted on Nanowerk News. Here’s a sample of what you’ll find,

Human malaria infected red blood cells. Li Ang, National University of Singapore

Human malaria infected red blood cells. Li Ang, National University of Singapore

Swimsuit glory; more Oscar Pistorius; Canadian Science Policy Conference

A bunch of swimming records were toppled at the recent World Aquatic Championships (and according to some observers) all due to swimsuit technology. From an article by Jonathan Liew on the Telegraph.co.uk website,

Full-body polyurethane suits will be banned from 2010, but will remain legal for the forthcoming [no longer] World Championships [2009], where Britain’s performance director Michael Scott has predicted 99 per cent of world records will be broken.

Locally, a University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) student Annamay Pierse broke a world record for the women’s 200-metre breaststroke in her semifinal heat at the championships. (details here on the Vancouver Sun website) She later went on to win the silver medal. (details here on the Toronto Star website) Not a word about the swimsuit controversy was mentioned in the local coverage.  I did finally track this down in a CBC report,

A spokesman for Swimming Canada said Canadian swimmers have the choice to wear what suit they wish, with many wearing the Jaked suits.

The swimsuits are said to give an unfair advantage. They’re not constructed with textiles, they are bonded together by ultrasonic welding so there are no seams, and there are panels which compress the torso apparently giving the wearer added bouyancy. Swimmers need to roll these suits on and it requires a significant amount of time (figure 30 to 45 minutes). The best technical description of the swimsuit that I found was in the June 14, 2008 (US) edition of The Economist. (It’s behind a paywall so I can’t offer a link.)

Nanotechnology was not mentioned in anything I found about the swimsuits but I wonder. If anyone knows one way or the other, please do comment.

There is some more news about Oscar Pistorius (the South African paralympic who successfully petitioned the Court of Arbitration for Sports for the right to compete against able-bodied athletes) mentioned in my July 27, 2009 posting. The experts in biomechanics and physiology who studied Pistorius in action and whose work formed the basis for his appeal have published their findings. From the Science Daily report,

The IAAF [International Association of Athletics Federations] had claimed that the Cheetah Flex-Foot prostheses (J-shaped, high-performance prostheses used for running) worn by Pistorius give him an advantage over able-bodied runners.

The [research] team concluded that:

  • Pistorius’ energy cost of running is similar to that of accomplished male distance runners, but 17% lower than that of performance-matched male sprinters.
  • Pistorius’ ability to hold his speed over longer sprint races is identical to that of intact-limb athletes.
  • Pistorius sprinting mechanics are markedly dissimilar to intact-limb track athletes.

There are more details here at Science Daily.

At Don’t Leave Canada Behind, Rob Annan has published some more details about the Canadian Science Policy Conference which is being held Oct. 28-30, 2009 in Toronto, Ontario.  For Rob’s comments, go here and for the conference website, go here. Early bird registration by August 15, 2009.

Transparent aluminum and copyright gone crazy

Happy BC Day! This will be a shortish posting. Transparent aluminum (or aluminium as the Brits say), an imaginary metal seen in Star Trek movie no. 4, became a reality for 40 femtoseconds (femto = quadrillionth)  in an experiment run at Oxford University. From the media release on the Nanowerk website,

“For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminium atom into silicon: it’s almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light!’ [according to Professor Justin Wark]

Note the reference to alchemy. For more technical details, do visit Nanowerks.

I came across a maddening item on copyright about 10 days ago where a music professor tried to get permission from the original authors to quote sentences in a book about music.

I’ve been trying to get permission simply to refer to Fluxus pieces like La Monte Young’s “This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean,” and Yoko Ono’s “Listen to the sound of the earth turning.” And of course, Yoko (whom I used to know) isn’t responding, and La Monte is imposing so many requirements and restrictions that I would have to add a new chapter to the book, and so in frustration well past the eleventh hour, I’ve excised the pieces from the text.

The rest of the article is here on Techdirt. This piece hit home because when I was teaching about five years ago, I was told that giving attribution for every article I was using in my handouts wasn’t enough, I would have to get permission to use them. I had been teaching the course for a few years and suddenly I had  a new requirement. Why? One of the instructors had a lawyer as a guest lecturer and the lawyer raised all kinds of concerns scaring the programme admin staff who in turn insisted that instructors get permission for handouts. It was an exercise in frustration and futility. I gather from this article in Techdirt that the situation is getting worse.  So if  you have opinions on copyright and want to make yourself heard to the Canadian government, this is the time to do it. There is a consultation which is being run until Sept. 13, 2009 online as well as round table meetings and town hall meetings. Details are here.