Samizdata

On The Fly Bottle, Will Wilkinson continues to put the boot in to arguments against cloning. It is also an issue that quite exercises Glenn Reynolds on Instapundit.

(a number of articles from various issues of the JPM Daily Tech)
Europeans adopt first cyber-crime treaty
The 43-nation Council of Europe adopted a non-binding treaty on cyber-crime, Reuters reported yesterday. It is the first international treaty on criminal offenses committed over the Internet. The treaty criminalizes activities, such as fraud and child pornography committed on the Web. It also sets up global policing procedures for conducting computer searches, intercepting e-mails, and extraditing criminal suspects. The treaty has to be ratified by individual states and its provisions incorporated into national law.

Score one for the good guys…
On the flip side, for the US readers this implies that Uncle Sam can dip into your cookie jar anytime he wants something to snack on, that pesky Fourth Amendment not withstanding.
Europe moves to protect data privacy, votes to ban cookies
The European Parliament snubbed a request by President Bush to allow authorities more access to Europeans’ private data, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Voting on a bill governing communications privacy issues, the Parliament overwhelmingly supported the European Union’s status quo, which bans the routine collection of data such as telephone and Internet-activity logs for any purpose other than billing. It also voted to ban Web-site operators from placing files on people’s computers without permission and commercial operators in general from sending unsolicited faxes and mobile-phone messages. It stopped short of banning spam.

This one could probably be subtitled as “I’m gonna break your metal face” is simply an expression of liberty and equality.
BattleBots see women and men competing equally in engineering
BattleBots are robots that attempt to destroy each other in tournaments. In BattleBots, women are full participants in designing, building, operating, and repairing the aggressive hunks of metal, Wired News reported yesterday. In the U.S. BattleBot tournaments are broadcast on Comedy Central.
At the latest BattleBot tournament, the first all-women’s collegiate team from the University of Tulsa competed in the superheavyweight division with their spinner bot, Hurricane. The Tulsa team, made up of about 15 engineering students, designed Hurricane in January and put it together over the summer. The Tulsa team plans to tour local schools with Hurricane to encourage kids to pursue math and science.

JPM DailyTech Editor’s comment: Unlike boxing or other sports where the sexes are divided, in BattleBots women and men compete against each other directly. At least, their robots do. BattleBots can weigh up to 350 pounds. No individual is picking one up, so brawn isn’t an asset. Women still are a distinct minority in these tournaments, but at least the playing field in this sport is level.
BattleBot tournaments are set in a fight format, but they are really challenges of engineering design and manufacturing skill. They are similar to stock car races, which are a test of engineering, but also a test of driver skill, physical strength, and stamina. In BattleBot competitions, which last only a few minutes, the driver’s outside the ring controlling the vehicle through a remote control device. No crash helmets needed.

And now, three for the drooling techno-philes in the audience (and you know who you are…) to whom the words “More! More! Faster! Faster!” mean something entirely different.
Intel funnels PC advances into motherboard
Intel displayed its next generation motherboard, code named Hannacroix, at this week’s Comdex show, CNET News reported yesterday. It’s a vehicle to demonstrate many technologies Intel hopes to see in future PCs, including the faster version two of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) connections, Serial ATA connections to hard drives, six-speaker audio, and 802.11b and Bluetooth wireless networking.
With Hannacroix, Intel decided to support both USB 2.0 and Firewire, two dueling standards for connecting devices such as digital cameras, MP3 players, network cards, and hard disks. USB 2.0 is much faster than the current version of USB, which is best for devices with low data-transfer demands, such as mice or keyboards. Microsoft initially snubbed USB 2.0 in Windows XP but later announced support.

JPM Tech Daily Editor’s comment: The new motherboard design is all about speed and connectivity. Addressing performance bottlenecks will help move the PC upscale into server and mainframe markets. Intel isn’t sure whether USB or Firewire will dominate external connections, so it’s supporting both standards. It’s not sure whether 802.11b or Bluetooth will become the wireless communication standard, so it’s supporting both.
Inside the computer, Intel is addressing another major communications bottleneck, the hard drive. Although processors, hard drives, and other components have increased in speed and performance, the conduits that connect these parts have not. This has resulted in the equivalent of traffic jams inside computers. Serial ATA will effectively double the bandwidth between disk drives and other PC components. It will also allow drives to communicate independently with the CPU. Most visibly, Serial ATA will get rid of the wide ribbon cables, an artifact of the original PC designs, which now impede airflow inside a computer.

IBM to build second Blue Gene supercomputer
IBM will build a supercomputer that is smaller and 15 times speedier than the current fastest computer, Reuters reported today. The new computer will be used for everything from weather modeling, to studying genomics data, and running commercial database applications. It is the second computer planned as part of an expanding five-year, $100 million project called Blue Gene that IBM began in 1999 with the intention of studying proteins. Blue Gene/L is expected to be completed in 2004, and will have a processing speed of 200 teraflops, or 200 trillion calculations per second.

Nanowires may help detect pathogens
Scientists have created transistors out of tiny crystal nanowires less than a millionth of an inch wide and several thousandths of an inch long, The New York Times reported today. Dr. Charles M. Lieber, who led the Harvard chemistry team that built the nanowires said that they might make good sensors for proteins, DNA, and other biological molecules. Among other things, that could aid the development of devices to detect pathogens like anthrax, he said.

Once perfected, you may want to be a bit careful about what you pick up. The nefariously minded can doubtless dream up a slew of innocuous methods to scan your prints and use them later for their own evil purposes. Just as facial recognition software will push the eyeglass and false mustache fashion, look to print scanners to herald the return of elbow length gloves.

Sensor-on-a-chip passes fingerprint test

from the Morgan Chase Tech Industry Daily
The EntréPad fingerprint sensor fits onto a single chip and is less than a centimeter square–small enough for use in cell phones and PDAs, ZDNet News reported yesterday. The device has low power requirements and uses under ten milliwatts when imaging. A finger to be identified is applied to the top surface of the chip, which has an especially hardened coating. Identification takes place in under a second.

The sensor works by detecting the pattern of living cells beneath the dead epidermis. It creates a low-power field of radio waves that are distorted by the conductive salty fluids in the skin cells. A matrix of sensors on the chip’s surface measures and charts this distortion, and the rest of the chip recreates the fingerprint image for analysis. The pattern of the cells beneath the epidermis is identical to that on the surface itself.

Comment: Because the sensor doesn’t react to the surface of the finger, it can’t be distracted by changes to that surface – calluses, dirt or ageing aren’t registered. The company said that as part of its tests, employees attempted to remove their fingerprints using abrasion, but this didn’t affect the accuracy of the measurements. Ouch. Startups, it seems, draw a very committed type of employee.

Biometrics–the science of identifying people through personal attributes–is increasingly being seen as an important part of security. Fingerprints and iris recognition are among the most accurate and reliable methods being considered. Voice recognition is also attractive — because it doesn’t require physical presence, it is more attractive for remote authentication — though, as a result, there are a lot more technical hurdles to overcome.

Articles like this are always useful when trying to make up one’s mind in the ever interesting ‘nature vs. nurture’ debate
—
UCLA Team Maps How Genes Affect Brain Structure, Intelligence
Source: Science Daily
Published: 11/5/2001 Author: University Of California – Los Angeles

UCLA brain mapping researchers have created the first
images to show how an individuals genes influence their
brain structure and intelligence.
The findings, published in the Nov. 5 issue of the journal
Nature Neuroscience, offer exciting new insight about how parents
pass on personality traits and cognitive abilities,
and how brain diseases run in families.

The team found that the amount of gray matter in the
frontal parts of the brain is determined by the genetic
make-up of an individuals parents, and strongly correlates
with that individuals cognitive ability, as measured by
intelligence test scores.

More importantly, these are the first images to uncover how
normal genetic differences influence brain structure and
intelligence.

Brain regions controlling language and reading skills were
virtually identical in identical twins, who share exactly
the same genes, while siblings showed only 60 percent of
the normal brain differences.

This tight structural similarity in the brains of family
members helps explain why brain diseases, including
schizophrenia and some types of dementia, run in families.

We were stunned to see that the amount of gray matter in
frontal brain regions was strongly inherited, and also
predicted an individuals IQ score, said Paul Thompson,
the studys chief investigator and an assistant professor
of neurology at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging.

The brains language areas were also extremely similar in
family members. Brain regions that were found to be most
similar in family members may be especially vulnerable to
diseases that run in families, including some forms of
psychosis and dementia.

The scientists employed magnetic resonance imaging
technology to scan a group of 20 identical twins, whose
genes are identical, and 20 same-sex fraternal twins, who
share half their genes.

Using a high-speed supercomputer, they created color-coded
images showing which parts of the brain are determined by
our genetic make-up, and which are more adaptable to
environmental factors, such as learning and stress.

To create the maps of genetic influences on the brain, the
UCLA scientists teamed up with the National Public Health
Institute of Finland, and the Finnish Universities of
Helsinki and Oulu.

In a national initiative, the Finnish team tracked all the
same-sex twins born in Finland between 1940 and 1957
9,500 pairs of twins many of whom received brain scans
and cognitive tests.

Their genetic similarity was confirmed by analyzing 78
different genetic markers. These individual pieces of DNA
match exactly in identical twins, and half of them match in
siblings.

Recent research has shown that many cognitive skills are
surprisingly heritable, with strong genetic influences on
verbal and spatial abilities, reaction times, and even some
personality qualities, including emotional reactions to
stress.

These genetic relationships persist even after statistical
adjustments are made for shared family environments, which
tend to make members of the same family more similar. Until
this study, little was known about how much individual
genotype accounts for the wide variations among individual
brains, as well as individuals cognitive ability.

The UCLA researchers are also applying this new genetic
brain mapping approach to relatives of schizophrenic
patients, and individuals at genetic risk for Alzheimers
disease, to screen them for early brain changes, and help
understand familial risk for inherited brain disorders
where specific risk genes are unknown.

Other UCLA researchers involved in the project are Tyrone
Cannon, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral and
human genetics, and Arthur Toga, professor of neurology and
director of the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging.
Images from the study are available online for viewing or
downloading from here

(Here is some interesting tech info sent to me by Walter earlier)

Ready, aim, wired — information is a weapon

U.S. armed forces are developing the strategy and systems to turn every
soldier into both a gatherer and a consumer of instantaneous information
about a battlefield environment, Darwin’s November issue reported. In
the not-too-distant future, soldiers in combat will connect to a
wireless communications network that tracks ground, air, and sea
military assets.

With so much information at their fingertips, soldiers in combat would
be able to make field-level decisions about how, where, and when to move
their troops. For the commander sitting miles away in a high-tech war
room, a wall-sized version of a soldier’s handheld map would provide a
complete tactical picture of the military operation. This eagle-eyed
view of the battlefield will give operation commanders highly detailed,
real-time situational information to make decisions faster and target
their troops and firepower with greater accuracy.

Editor’s comment: Given the power that information has to break down
hierarchies, how will the hierarchical military command structure adapt?
Will the brass jealously guard information and the status it provides,
or radically change its methods to build a different kind of soldier?
What happens when every squad leader in the field has the same
information as his commander? Will squad leaders continue to follow
orders without question or will they demand more input in the
decision-making process?

Corporations have discovered that ready access to critical information
enables decision making to be pushed down to lower levels and to occur
with greater speed. In turn, this enables the flattening of hierarchies
and a sharp reduction in middle management overhead. One of the
challenges to every organization is to change tactics and organizational
design in response to evolving technology. Superior technology won’t
yield superior results when it’s used in the old ways.

Digital doubles debut

Digimask has developed a method for creating a virtual twin, BBC News
reported yesterday. It can be used to accompany text messages on mobile
phones, turn e-mail messages into personalized greetings, act as an
animated screensaver on your desktop PC, and even represent you in
online game worlds. Unlike many other avatar technologies, the
three-dimensional model does not require a visit to a scanning booth.
Instead, it is created from just two digital images.

Face recognition effectiveness is challenged

The face recognition technology that airport officials are rushing to
install after the Sept. 11 attacks can be outsmarted by a pair of
sunglasses and is an invasion of privacy, Reuters reported yesterday.
“They say they’re going to use this to catch the bad guys, to catch the
terrorist,” said Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American
Civil Liberties Union. “Well, there is no database of terrorists. And
the terrorists are not exactly lining up to submit their photographs to
Langley.” A spokeswoman for Visionics, a face recognition technology
company countered: “What do you call the FBI ‘s 10 Most Wanted. …
Terror is not faceless.”