Pimp My HAL

The FDA Just Approved a Robotic Exoskeleton That Augments Your Strength
Jan 2018, futurism.com

Here's a lower body exoskeleton that senses your impulses to help you move better stronger faster. HAL stands for hybrid assisted limb.

And here's another one I found called SuitX, for $40k, and weighing 27lbs with an 8hr battery pack, and pictured above. You can walk 1 mph in it, which is about half speed. For reference, motorized wheelchairs are in the thousands of dollars, so we have a way to go before competing in that market, but the game is afoot.

And here's a bunch more mentioned, in case you're interested.

Back to HAL, this FDA-approved exoskeleton is for medical use, at least that's what they call it. This means it's for people with paralysis of their legs. Then, there's the non-medical version, and that's for anyone, and that's when we start to see people outfit their exoskeleton the way we do a car or a bicycle (or a wheelchair).

And on a more serious note, I remind readers of artist and former classmate of mine - Christina Symanski - who lost control of her lower body in her 20's and didn't make it to her 30's. Had she made it to her 40's, she might have been able to move her legs again.

In Honor of Christina Symanski

Earl of Sandwich

Is your sandwich bad for the environment?
Jan 2018, phys.org

According to the British Sandwich Association (BSA) more than 11.5 billion sandwiches are consumed each year in the UK alone.


British Sandwich Association

That's all.

And girls eating sandwiches is a thing, also.

Neuromorphs

NIST's superconducting synapse may be missing piece for 'artificial brains'
Jan 2018, phys.org

image source

Neuromorphic computers eh? Better than the real thing eh?

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built a superconducting switch that "learns" like a biological system and could connect processors and store memories in future computers operating like the human brain. ...

Even better than the real thing, the NIST synapse can fire much faster than the human brain—1 billion times per second, compared to a brain cell's 50 times per second—using just a whiff of energy, about one ten-thousandth as much as a human synapse. -phys.org

Notes on Time

Facebook invents new unit of time called a flick
Jan 2018, BBC

It's not as cool as it sounds at first. But I thought it might be nice to start recording instances of this attempt, because I had no idea that Swatch tried to reinvent global time at the dawn of the internet. (It was a marketing campaign that didn't hold up, and it wasn't the first attempt to decimalize time, most important of which was the 1792 French Revolutionary Time, and the most obvious being Chinese decimal time - they had it forever...just about as long as they were using chopsticks while Europeans were still eating with their hands.)

And since we're talking about time, I should take a moment to mention that time zones were created as a result of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860's. (I think about this every time my New Jersey Transit train is delayed.)

Prior that that time in history, there was no need to designate time zones, because we simply couldn't travel that fast, nor did we need to be so succinct about where and when we were.

Rail travel across such a large continetal landmass needed better coordination, or else trains coming from different places each using their own time standard would show up at different stations at different times. Very confusing. Things were finally standardized in 1883, and it was called "The Day of Two Noons" as each train station reset its local noon to the new standard noon.

Granted, Greenwich Mean Time has been around since the late 1600's and was needed for mariners. It can be seen as the first universal time, but the splitting of the globe into hour-long zones (4 minutes for every degree longitude) did not come until much later.

And a final note on time, there are two times we use here on Earth. The first is common, and it's the time as determined by the position of the Sun, or the Earth relative to the Sun. It's called solar time.

The second is less well known, and is determined by the position of our solar system relative to our galaxy. No, it's more specifically the position of the Earth relative to our galaxy. This is called sidereal time, or star time.

Sidereal time falls behind solar time by about four minutes per day, or one day per year. Who cares? Astronomers and astrologers, that's who. And no, they're not the same thing, although lots of people fail to recognize the difference.


Post Script
Astronomological
Network Address, 2015

Wiser Than You Think

The Crowd and The Life of Brian

Here at Network Address we've been interested in wisdom of the crowds for some time now. But as evidence like this starts to come out more, I wonder how much of this "wisdom of the crowds" thing has actually already been optimized by a kind of democratic voting system that we already have in place in a lot of developed countries? Like, have we known about Galton's ex-weighing trick for centuries and that's the reason why we vote the way we do? And we're just re-learning it again now because of an advance in technology?

And on the other hand, can we just translate all this to AI, because you know, they might do it better than us. (They?)

Crowds within crowd found to outperform 'wisdom of the crowd'
Jan 2018, phys.org


Post Script

The Wisdom of Crowds
James Surowiecki, 2004

Swarm A.I. Correctly Predicts the Kentucky Derby, Accurately Picking all Four Horses of the Superfecta at 540 to 1 Odds
Yahoo Finance, April 2016

2D 3D Alchemy

Something special about origami these days. Maybe atom-thin metamaterials that are more 2D than 3D. Maybe protein folding. Maybe because it can produce extremely complex forms out of relatively simple algorithms. Origami takes this place between flat and voluminous, delicate and robust (ever see those paper sandals?), and now between ancient and modern. Here we see origami helping to make super-strong soft robots, but previously there's been examples of it being used in programmable shapeshifting and DNA nanomanufacturing.

Origami robot muscles lift 1,000 times its own weight
Jan 2018, BBC

Artificial muscles which allow soft robots to lift up to 1,000 times their own weight have been developed by researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Inspired by origami, the muscles can be programmed a range of motions including twisting and rotation. -BBC

image source


Post Script

Origami Supreme
Network Address, 2016

DNA Nanomanufacturing
Network Address, 2012

Fakenstein

Man fools officers with car made of snow, gets fake parking ticket
Jan 2018, CBS News

I'd like to take a minute to relay a true story, so that you can say you know the guy who told you. Many winters ago, we went to visit a friend in Jersey City, one of those unofficial boroughs of NYC. It was a particularly bad winter for snow and Jersey City is a particularly bad city for parking, and we had to drive around and around and around the block. It has snowed let me see, I think a good 6 feet in a few weeks time, with the temperature below freezing for most of the time, and that's not normal at all for the NYC region. Finding a place to park was nearly impossible.

There were people parked on their front lawns, double-parked on the main ave, 45-degree angle parked on the corners, and cars parked on 45-degree angles up the side of snow banks. And then, and I shit you not (why would I lie about this), there was a car parked on top of another car. Yes. The car on the bottom was fully encased, entombed in a frozen sarcophagus of snow, from snowfall upon snowfall and snowplow upon snowplow. The only reason I even knew for sure that it was a car underneath was because you could unmistakabley see the side view mirror peeking out. The car on top, it was a Jeep, rode up a not-so-steep snowramp up the back and sat there, triumphantly, supported by the frozen block underneath it. Maybe this happens all the time in Canada or Buffalo, New York, but for us here, that was a sight to behold.

Quantum Quackery

Real-world intercontinental quantum communications enabled by the Micius satellite
Jan 2018, phys.org

Previously, the quantum communication distance has been limited to a few hundred kilometers due to optical channel losses of fibers or terrestrial free space. A promising solution to this problem exploits satellite and space-based links, which can conveniently connect two remote points on the Earth with greatly reduced channel loss, as most of the photons' propagation path is through empty space with negligible loss and decoherence. -phys.org

If you thought quantum  mechanics itself was crazy, how about when we start using it to make an internet?


But wait, there's more:
Artificial agent designs quantum experiments
Jan 2018, phys.org

I'm just going to copy most of this article, because the entire thing is absolutely nuts:

On the way to an intelligent laboratory, physicists from Innsbruck and Vienna present an artificial agent that autonomously designs quantum experiments. In initial experiments, the system has independently (re)discovered experimental techniques that are standard in modern quantum optical laboratories. This shows how machines could play a more creative role in research in the future.

The researchers wondered to what extent machines can carry out research autonomously. They used a projective simulation model for artificial intelligence to enable a machine to learn and act creatively. This autonomous machine stores many individual fragments of experience in memory, which are networked together.

The machine builds up and adapts its memories while learning from both successful and unsuccessful attempts. The scientists from Innsbruck teamed up with the group of Anton Zeilinger, who previously demonstrated the usefulness of automated procedures in the design of quantum experiments with a search algorithm called Melvin. Some of these computer-inspired experiments have already been performed in the lab of Zeilinger. Together, the physicists determined that quantum experiments are an ideal environment to test the applicability of AI to research. Therefore, they used the projective simulation model to investigate the potential of artificial learning agents in this test bed. They have published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cultural Behavior Modification - Perspicuity vs Deception

California's water saving brings bonus effects
Jan 2018, phys.org

California had a major drought, maybe a couple years in a row, circa 2016. Things got so bad they had to enforce water saving efforts. There were signs on people's lawns that said "Brown is the New Green".

They didn't hit their target, but they did a pretty good job. But the real news is that they did better than the energy efficiency efforts.

In other words, asking people to save water actually saved more energy than asking people to save energy.

This should be somewhat obvious to people who know something about public water infrastructure - it uses a heck of a lot of energy to run these things. So, obviously, saving water would mean saving energy.

This "discovery", however, leads one to imagine other ways of getting people to do things, or nudging people's behavior.

The drought made the water problem palpable. Brown literally was the new green. I flew to California during this time, and you could see the levels of the rivers and Lake Mead; you could see where they used to be. It was undeniable. Our energy crisis is a bit less palpable. The scale is too large, both in space and in time, for us to feel any urgency from it.

I mention this because perhaps the reason water-saving yields more results than energy-saving is the sheer visibility of the problem. But the more interesting possibility here is that people are not really that hard to manipulate, that is, if you're willing to be deceptive about what you want them to do. We can leave it at that.

image source

In Other Handwritten News

Can't unsee

Visa joins other major US credit card companies in getting rid of signatures
Jan 2018, The Verge

There's a local artist at my local cafe who signs the kiosk signpad with a different picture every time. Sometimes it's a duck, sometimes a sailboat. He doesn't care much for signatures.

I don't care much for signatures either. I wonder if every married couple has signed eachother's signatures on the check at a restaurant? I thought it was a common thing to do, until I tried it with a not-so-intimate partner and she got real mad at me. I apologized profusely, but in my mind I was like what the f is wrong w this chick, doesn't she know signatures don't really exist?? (I mean, you know, unless you're like Barack Obama, or Muhammad Ali.)


Anyway, it's official - signatures no longer exist.
And while we're at it, say goodbye to handwriting as we know it.
(And I'll always wonder if this has something to do with the rise of graffiti mid 2000's.)

Post Script

For what it's worth, check out this other blurb about fake font detectives and sports memorabilia signature experts:

Fake Fonts
Network Address, Oct 2017

Knowing is Half the Battle

Psychedelic toasters fool image recognition tech
Jan 2018, BBC

source: Adversarial Patch
Tom B. Brown, Dandelion Mané, Aurko Roy, Martín Abadi, Justin Gilmer, Dec 2017

The battle has begun - between us and the robots. If, by "robots", you mean recognition algorithms. We're already coming up with ways to trick these programs into seeing things that aren't there, and to camouflage things that are there.

"Adversarial images" are coming up in neural net news a lot these days. This is where an image, an adversarial image, can trick recognition software into seeing something that - as far as humans can tell - is not really there. And in this new piece, they can be tricked into not seeing something that is there.  [15, 5]

In their paper seen above, Adversarial Patch, the authors describe one of these adversarial images as "carefully chosen inputs that cause the network to change output without a visible change to a human".

In one of these tricky pictures, each pixel is changed very slightly to make something basically unrecognizable to humans, but super-recognizable to a image-recognizing neural network. One of the methods of finding or creating an adversarial image is called DeepFool, after Google's DeepMind. [10]

This approach can even be extended to 3D, where slight changes ("adversarial perturbations") to a 3D-printed object can make it "look" like something else to the computer. (see the Turtle-Rifle, where a 3D printed turtle was adversarially perturbed to look like a rifle - to you and I this would still look like a turtle, but to many image-rec algos out there it is seen as a rifle instead). [3]

The best example here is what's called adversarial glasses which fool face recognition algorithms. Wave to the NSA!  [13]

So what's the problem?

Unfortunately, the problems arise when a stop sign is adversarially perturbed. These slight changes, made by a teenage prankster in a calculated attack of graffiti-like behavior, can make it such that we see a stop sign, but our automatic car does not. [4]

This newest approach makes it such that the super-image (my own term here, not the researchers') can be printed out and placed near the image or object of interest, and thus fool the system meant to recognize the object.

From the same paper above, we see this picture of a banana with what appears as a funny looking psychadelic-metallic picutre next to it. The funny picture was generated by combining many pictures of toasters into one super-toaster picture.

The patch can be really small, again such that humans don't notice it, and yet it will distract, or attract undue attention from, the image recognition system.

As stated, the battle between us and the robots has begun. But really, it's the same old story, and as it always will be - the battle is really between us and ourselves, only this time using the robots to fight each other.


Post Script

I can't help but think about how graffiti/hackers in the mid-2000's started tagging major targets not in the real world but on Google maps. Tag the White House in real life? Probably not. But tag it in the virtual world and it has a pretty similar effect, perhaps even moreso.

Although this adversarial tech is with scientists in Google labs right now, tomorrow it will be with kids on the street.


Notes

I kept the notes from the original paper; there's a lot going on here.

[3] A. Athalye, L. Engstrom, A. Ilyas, and K. Kwok. Synthesizing robust adversarial examples.
arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.07397, 2017.
[4] I. Evtimov, K. Eykholt, E. Fernandes, T. Kohno, B. Li, A. Prakash, A. Rahmati, and D. Song.
Robust physical-world attacks on deep learning models. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.08945,
2017.
[5] I. J. Goodfellow, J. Shlens, and C. Szegedy. Explaining and harnessing adversarial examples.
arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6572, 2014.
[10] S.-M. Moosavi-Dezfooli, A. Fawzi, and P. Frossard. Deepfool: a simple and accurate method to
fool deep neural networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and
Pattern Recognition, pages 2574–2582, 2016.
[11] N. Papernot, P. McDaniel, S. Jha, M. Fredrikson, Z. B. Celik, and A. Swami. The limitations of
deep learning in adversarial settings. In Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), 2016 IEEE European
Symposium on, pages 372–387. IEEE, 2016.
[13] M. Sharif, S. Bhagavatula, L. Bauer, and M. K. Reiter. Accessorize to a crime: Real and
stealthy attacks on state-of-the-art face recognition. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC
Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pages 1528–1540. ACM, 2016.
[15] C. Szegedy, W. Zaremba, I. Sutskever, J. Bruna, D. Erhan, I. Goodfellow, and R. Fergus. Intriguing
properties of neural networks. In International Conference on Learning Representations,
2014.

Freedom Fever

David Uessem painted this.

Unfiltered Fervor: The Rush to Get Off the Water Grid
Dec 2017, NYTimes

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of living off the grid. I read Walden in college, I studied sustainability in grad school. I love chopping wood and growing my own food and tending my own livestock. Although right now I live in an apartment and do none of those, I support the general idea of sustainability.

But here's news to me - The water consciousness movement. It looks to rid the public of the bad things (flouride, chlorine) put into our water by our omniscient, flawless, and hyper-articulate government so they can dominate us and make us do whatever they want. Raw water is the answer.

"Raw water" has turned into a big market, and people are willing to pay big bucks for water that is pure and never been touched by an ill-intentioned government. And then they get hepatitis and herpes from the water.

But we should consider that flouride in water is one of the great public health interventions of our time, and that chlorine is in your water because it cleans your water. Even if you get your water from the rain, you're supposed to put chlorine in your cistern to kill the little buggers that would eventually grow there and give you diseases. Also, distilled water, by definition, has no minerals at all. But we need some of these minerals, albeit in very small amounts, to remain healthy.

On the other side, our public water infrastructure also tests our water to make sure it isn't contaminated by it's source. That testing is expensive, and I wonder how rigorously is this raw water is tested.

Then again, there is the lead thing, and that's a valid concern and a perfect example of where the government messed the f up, and should have a lot to do with why people don't trust their water supply. But the people affected by lead in their water are definitely not the people who can afford to buy this raw water. California tends to be a big market for this stuff.

In this context, it's hard to forget that California was (is?) a desert, and we basically picked up the Colorado River and threw it over the Rocky Mountains to create the largest man-made garden on Earth, which then feeds almost one-fifth of the entire world. [Hyperbole, for effect, but not entirely untrue, read up for yourself here.] Is this related? Not sure, but history should be part of a conversation about how we get our water.

I will give props to the company from Arizona that sets you up to extract water from your environment like one of those desert beetles. (Actually, more like rice in a salt shaker, according to the above nyt article).

On the flipside, Paris just fitted their public fountains with carbonated water, or bubbly water, as they call it.


And for the entrepreneurial at heart, I was thinking of selling rats that have been "liberated from science" to folks who are against animal testing. Despite the fact that many cosmetics put that little bunny rabbit drawing on their products to signify they haven't been tested on animals, it is against the law to sell cosmetics in the US unless they have been thoroughly tested on animals and then on humans, which means that label is totally bogus, and yet totally legal to put on the product, go figure.

So in the same vein, and to the same audience, you can buy the rats anywhere you want and just say they were taken from cosmetics-testing laboratories. You can raise them as your own cute little pets, and feel good about yourself, and you can even satiate them with water contaminated with herpes!

And, finally, in other news:

Rats free each other from cages
Dec 2011, Nature

Relevant updates as of 2021:

FDA slams “Real Water” linked to liver failure; water plant manager MIA - A lawyer for the water company said it can't find its plant manager or lead technician.

Apr 2021, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/water-company-linked-to-liver-failure-spars-with-fda-cant-find-plant-manager/

Alkaline “Real Water” linked to liver failure in kids—and reports are rising - The FDA has warned not to drink or use the water

Mar 2019, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/03/complaints-mount-after-5-kids-suffer-liver-failure-linked-to-alkaline-water/