The BBC recently reported on developments in prosthetic hand technology which include the addition of sensory feedback via a direct nerve interface. The research was part of the SMARTHAND project and was led by a team at Lund University, Sweden. According to CORDIS:

What is unique about the sophisticated prototype artificial hand developed by the SMARTHAND partners is that not only does it replicate the movements of a real hand, but it also gives the user sensations of touch and feeling. The researchers said the hand has 4 electric motors and 40 sensors that are activated when pressed against an object. These sensors stimulate the arm’s nerves to activate a part in the brain that enables patients to feel the objects. [CORDIS News]

The research strategy attempting to deepen the feedback and control may involve the use of nanotechnology to further miniaturise components of the interface between the hand and arm:

The hurdle they need to cross is to make the cables and electric motors smaller. Nanotechnology could help the team iron out any problems. Specifically, they would implant a tiny processing unit, a power source and a trans-skin communication method into the user of the hand to optimise functionality. [CORDIS News]

The story ran with the emphasis on the inclusion of sensory feedback. It often seems as though people are much more accepting of the mechanical side of prosthetic technologies than the sensory side (despite the availablility of cochleal implants). It seems to be a violation of intuition that adding sensory capacity might be the easy part of the problem - give a brain a signal and some feedback and it’ll detect patterns and correlate them with events in the world. It’s the giving of the signal and feedback that presents the greatest difficulties. It will be fascinating to watch for changes in what counts as intuitive as the availability of technologically mediated raw experience increases.

Sources:

• New robotic hand ‘can feel’ [BBC News: 18 October 2009]
• Innovation makes artificial hand seem real [CORDIS News: 9 October 2009]

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Clay Shirky expresses some very powerful ideas about the demise of newspapers and traditional publishing [Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable at Clay Shirky]:

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

[Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 9:22 pm]

The main thesis of the article is that the business models underlying print-based news are completely unsustainable, and newspapers are being kept alive solely by institutional inertia.

Shirky notes that the new content production models visible at the moment involve unremunerated writing and publishing produced by loose collections of enthusiastic amateurs:

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

[Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 9:22 pm]

The new model of journalism seems to have some worrying characteristics. Investigative journalism in the Woodward and Bernstein mould may be an idealistic model, but it was possible because of resources which might only be available to large institutions: teams of lawyers, a newspaper’s own political weight, institutional access to data etc. Investigations into the activities of large transnational bodies need to be supported by the tactical resources enabling them to withstand legal, financial and paramilitary defense mechanisms. It seems hopelessly romantic to imagine that networks of enthusiastic amateurs could achieve what the ideal models of investigative journalism seem to achieve. The new models look capable of producing vast amounts of shallow scrutiny, but they risk disabling the kinds of journalism that gave journalism what good name it has.

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The conflict between secrecy and marketing within defense/security contractors has led to some entertaining gaffs in the U.S. The Spy Who Billed Me has followed up on some of the organisations openly monitoring the blog and made some interesting findings. Security contractors have to advertise their wares whilst attempting not to give away too much about the work they already do. The Spy Who Billed Me has decoded the marketing on one contractor’s web site (referred to as ‘Heckle and Jeckle’), using only publicly available contextual knowledge to reach the following conclusions:

…Heckle and Jeckle teams stand ready, custom-designed high-tech gadgets in hand, for clandestine missions in enemy territory to covertly and remotely intercept foreign communications or penetrate information systems.  This can be done independently or in conjunction with SEAL or Delta or other secret squirrel teams on behalf of SOCOM and the CIA.

In other words, they set up black sites albeit a different type than has been in the news lately.  To put it into context, such black sites such as covert listening posts in hostile territories and even in friendlier ones where discovery could create international tensions count among the Intelligence Community’s blackest secrets.  And now, thanks to the About page on Heckle and Jeckle’s website, we know that the CIA is outsourcing this to Heckle and Jeckle, whose identity would make it somewhat easier to uncover the black collection sites.

…

Heckle and Jeckle also brag about a micro-electromechanical facility which becomes particularly interesting in conjunction with their job openings announcements.  Reviewing the skill sets they’re looking for, it quickly becomes apparent that they design and program their own computer chips, so they’re clearly creating proprietary cutting-edge gadgets.  It’s notable how frequently they’re searching for engineers with experience in one of the most miserable operating systems for mobile devices:  Windows mobile.  They’re also regularly seeking programmers versed in another mobile device language:  Symbian.  Now this information taken in conjunction with their specialty and their prior claims of micro-electromechanical facilities suggests they’re designing and creating a lot of mobile, hand held covert communications devices.

And here I’d venture a pure guess that these are probably designed to look like standard run-of-the-mill Treos and other smart phones, blending their “intelligent phones” into the mobile world.  The largest consumer of such gizmos is, of course, the CIA’s DS&T, adding to suspicions that Heckle and Jeckle is a major DS&T contractor.  The primary use of such covert communications gear is for communications with nonofficial cover officers (NOCs) and agents.  So the information on Heckle and Jeckle’s site suggests that they are likely designing and creating the latest must-have accessories for NOCs and agents, a far cry from the clunky COVCOM gear of yesteryear.   (And from the Agency’s point of view, knowledge of this would be a serious security breech.  Keep in mind the CIA does not even allow contractors to acknowledge their affiliation with the Agency, let alone divulge the programs they are working on, particularly such sensitivities ones.)

…

Not only have CIA programs been compromised, so have SOCOMs.  Judging from the job postings for positions in Florida, Heckle and Jeckle are doing data mining and analytical work for SOCOM.  Among other things that can be deduced, they search for relational patterns of terrorist activity and affiliations, looking at a wide array of seemingly innocuous relationships using open source and clandestinely gathered data, particularly focusing upon financial transactional data.  I’m betting they have a very sophisticated quantitative model that they’re constantly tweaking that underlies this process.

Again, Heckle and Jeckle job postings give us hints to other SOCOM programs.  It appears that Heckle and Jeckle are involved in tracking SOCOM assets worldwide.  Moving beyond Heckle and Jeckle’s own website to other open sources, it’s possible to learn some of the specs of related handhelds including whose low-earth orbiting satellites they use.  Digging a little deeper, it’s also possible to discover the code name of Heckle and Jeckle’s RF geolocation program…

[The Spy Who Billed Me]

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Graphical score for Gyorgy Ligeti’s electronic composition, ‘Artikulation’. The score was composed in 1958. The graphical score was produced by Rainer Wehinger twelve years after the original music was recorded. A video of the score accompanying the music is available on dailymotion.
[Radassemmbly via information aesthetics]

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MIT’s Technology Review reports on the development of a technique designed to prevent the damage caused by the metals in current neural interfaces, where ‘insertion of the rigid metal electrode into soft tissue triggers a cascade of inflammatory signals, damaging or killing neurons and triggering a scar to form around the metal’ [Technology Review].

“We hope to come up with a way to communicate across the scar layer and send information to and from the device in a way that is as friendly as possible,” says David Martin, a materials scientists at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, who is leading the research into the polymer coatings.

Martin and his collaborators coat the electrodes with an electrically conductive polymer originally developed for electronic devices, such as organic LEDs and photovoltaics for solar cells. The polymer coating increases the surface area of the metal-biological interface, which in turn boosts performance of the electrode.

Along with former lab members, Martin founded a company, Massachusetts-based Biotectix, to commercialize the materials developed in his lab. He says that he is already in talks with a cochlear-implant technology company about using his lab’s materials in their devices. [Technology Review]

[Technology Review via Technovelgy]

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The momentum of ostalgie grows. I particularly enjoyed k-punk’s comparison between Mark E. Smith’s autobiography, Renegade, and David Peace’s The Damned Utd - a novel concerned, in particular, with the character of the football manager, Brian Clough. k-punk concludes his article attacking the short-termism of neo-liberalism and re-enchanting the era of the cold war:

The puffed-up patricians who hounded Clough out of Derby have long since been replaced on the boards of football clubs by bland accountants representing corporate interests or pharaonic figures with vast personal capital available for potlach. The continuous upheaval of post Fordism has destroyed the long term in football, as everywhere else. In a perfect reflection of the general situation after thirty years of neoliberalism, the rich clubs have become richer, more remote, impervious. Derby, Forest or some other small club winning the Premiership is unthinkable. The grim Seventies - the Eastern Bloc as an era - has become a time of fairy tales. [k-punk]

An image of the architecture of Eastern Bloc fairy tails was serendipitously supplied by Frédéric Chaubin’s photography of future-orientated architecture in the old Soviet Union [pingmag]:

According to PingMag, Frederic Chaubin, chief editor of a French magazine, Citizen K, is considering a book about Soviet Architecture from the 1970s and 1980s.

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BBC News have reported on the imminent commercial release of Emotiv’s neural interface. According to the article,

The Epoc technology can be used to give authentic facial expressions to avatars of gamers in virtual worlds. For example, if the player smiles, winks, grimaces the headset can detect the expression and translate it to the avatar in game. [BBC News]

The article also reported that,

Emotiv is working with IBM to develop the technology for uses in “strategic enterprise business markets and virtual worlds”

Paul Ledak, vice president, IBM Digital Convergence said brain computer interfaces, like the Epoc headset were an important component of the future 3D Internet and the future of virtual communication. [BBC News]

…

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Putin’s Russia is continuing to breath life into old Cold War figures. In the space of a few weeks Russian submarines have planted flags under the north pole, claiming the territory as their own; soviet bombers have resumed Cold War face-offs with their old adversaries; the leader’s image has become an aggressive propaganda device; and the BBC news has been silenced.

Russia has staked an ownership claim on much of the North Pole - seizing the opportunity presented by global warming to access the mineral reserves that were inaccessible beneath the Arctic ice. Sergei Balyasnikov, of the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Institute, told the news agency, Ria-Novosti, that the mission was ‘risky and heroic’ and was ‘like putting a flag on the moon’ [Ria-Novosti via the BBC].

The propaganda effect of the mission was rather undermined when a Finnish teenager spotted that footage from the film, Titanic, was used by a Russian state TV station, Rossiya, to illustrate the Russian submarines under the North Pole [from The Guardian].

It looks like the approach to British airspace by Soviet bombers in June was an early example of the Soviet-style bomber patrols Russia has restarted [from the BBC].

Russian generals claimed that bombers approaching the American military base in Guam ‘exchanged smiles’ with American pilots [The Guardian]. The re-activation of flights by Russia’s ageing nuclear bomber forces has increased concerns that nuclear accidents are made far more likely as a result of the exercises.

Putin’s personal propaganda machine has moved up a few gears in recent weeks too. Photos of Putin on a fishing trip with Prince Albert II of Monaco have been circulating amongst the world’s media:

Meanwhile, The Telegraph has reported that the Russian state has revived yet another old Soviet spectre, the forced psychiatric treatment of dissidents.

BBC Radio has been forced of FM bands in Russia this week.

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A ghost from the cold war, in the form of a fighter-bomber dance just beyond the edge of the state, briefly appeared over the North Sea on Tuesday:

It was confirmed by the Ministry of Defence today that RAF jets were scrambled on Tuesday after two Russian aircraft were spotted heading towards British airspace.

“Two unidentified aircraft came towards British airspace. They turned round before there was an interception and before they entered British airspace,” an MoD spokesman said.

He confirmed that the two aircraft involved in Tuesday’s incident had been Russian, and said there was “nothing to suggest this was linked to any other issues”.[The Guardian]

According to the Telegraph:

As Moscow hesitated in its response to Britain’s expulsion of four Russian diplomats, two Tornado fighters raced to meet the Tu95 “Bear” bombers that had been dispatched from their base near the northern port city of Murmansk in the Arctic Circle. The planes turned back before they reached British airspace. [The Telegraph]

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The BBC have reported that the director of rehabilitation engineering services at NHS Lothian, David Gow , has developed a new prosthetic hand. The design and construction of the artificial hand was undertaken by Touch Bionics, Livingston. The hand has fully articulated finger joints and motors for each digit, allowing it to adapt to the shape of objects. The hands are intended to be available on the National Health Service in two to five years.

The hand is controlled my myoelectric sensors attached to the skin above nearby muscle tissue. There are some useful introductions to myoelectric control at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, New Brunswick, here.

A BBC news video is available here. The BBC news story is here.

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