Not the kind of first I was hoping for....

Original post:  Dec 18, 2014

After a productive trip to Boulder, I was trying to get back to Providence. While the airport is convenient, there are some drawbacks to using a smaller airport. If everything is going well, there are no issues. Today was not one of those days.

I got to the airport early. I thought it would be best to see if I could go standby on an earlier flight. While I knew that there was no earlier flight to Providence I could catch, I thought it would be better to get to Chicago so that I could avoid missing that flight. With air travel nowadays, you can never be too sure. Unfortunately for me, the airline wanted $75 to be on the standby list. Since I couldn't really justify the additional cost for the gain of only about 90 minutes to wait in Chicago, I decided to stick to my original flight.

My original flight was loaded and ready to go without any issues. We start down the runway. Just as the wheels are starting to inch off the ground, the pilot suddenly slams on the brakes. The aircraft decelerates quickly and we are still earthbound and slow to a stop about 100 yards from the end of the runway. The pilot announces that there was a microburst just ahead and he didn't want to take any chances. Sadly, he blew out the brakes and the plane would have to be towed back to the hangar.

We actually had to get off the plane onto buses back to the airport. Here is a photo:

We ended up arriving at O'Hare three and a half hours late. They put me up in a hotel for what will be about six hours before I have to catch my return back to Providence.

It's just another glorious chapter added to the wonders of modern air travel.

Optical illusions for computers

Original post:  Dec 17, 2014

As computers become better at accomplishing many things once thought impossible for them, it's becoming harder and harder to keep humanity one step ahead. That said, there are some intriguing new ways to help outwit our silicon friends.

This article gives one example. Here is how it opens:

Computers, like people, understand what they see in the world based on what they've seen before.

And computer brains have become really, really good at being able to identify all kinds of things. Machines can recognize faces, read handwriting, interpret EKGs, even describehttp://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/november/computer-vision-algorithm-111814.html what's happening in a photograph. But that doesn't mean that computers see all those things the same way that people do.

This might sound like a throwaway distinction. If everybody—computers and humans alike—can see an image of a lion and call it a lion, what does it matter how that lion looks to the person or computer processing it? And it's true that ending up at the same place can be more useful than tracing how you got there. But to a hacker hoping to exploit an automated system, understanding an artificial brain's way of seeing could be a way in.

Scientists at the University of Wyoming and Cornell have figured out how to present images that fool sophisticated computers (dense neural networks used for artificial intelligence) into seeing objects that show up as nonsense to humans. Here is an example of the images:

You may not see anything recognizable to you, but these neural networks are completely confident they see the titles shown below the pictures below!

One of the lead scientists explains the effect:

"To some extent these are optical illusions for artificial intelligence," co-author Jeff Clune told me via gchat. "Just as optical illusions exploit the particular way humans see... these images reveal aspects of how the DNNs see that [make] them vulnerable to being fooled, too. But DNN optical illusions don't fool us because our vision system is different."

Clune and his team used an algorithm to generate random images that appeared unrecognizable to humans. At first, Clune explains, the computer might be unsure about what it was seeing: "It then says, 'That doesn't look like much of anything, but if you forced me to guess, the best I see there is a lion. But it only 1 percent looks like a lion.'"

This might seem as if it is a harmless parlor trick. In actuality, it has very significant meaning:

To people in countries where governments restrict speech and publishing, citizens could theoretically communicate secretly by leveraging the opacity within deep neural networks. Clune: "People could embed messages discussing freedom of the press and get them past communist AI-censoring filters by making the image look like the communist party flag!"

Even when computers can be trained that what they're seeing isn't, as far as a human is concerned, the thing the computer thinks it sees—it's easy to retrain the computer to be fooled all over again, which, for now, leaves such networks vulnerable to hackers. Understanding such opportunities for exploitation will be critical as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly pervasive.

Here is a link to the full article:  How to Fool a Computer With Optical Illusions - The Atlantic

How kitty litter relates to innovation

Original post:  Dec 15, 2014

You may not have heard of Ed Lowe. Truthfully, before I read the article, I had never heard of him either. In 1947, he had the bright idea to take fuller's clay and sell it to farmers as nesting materials for chickens. Unfortunately for Ed, the farmers weren't all that interested.

Serendipity took over from there. A local woman came by asking for sand for her cat who would now be coming indoors for the winter. Ed sold her some of the fuller's earth. Because it had the ability to help neutralize the odor of kitty urine, it became an overnight sensation among the indoor cat community. Ed came up with the moniker "kitty litter" and the result is one major reason behind the enduring popularity of house cats.

Luck is important, but persistence is probably more important. When your invention runs into resistance, keep trying!

Here are links to two articles on the invention of kitty litter:

Kitty Litter's Invention Spawned Pet Cat Industry - Businessweek

How Was Cat Litter Invented?

Alternative energy reaching price parity

Original post:  Dec 10, 2014

In the New York Times, a recent article notes that solar and wind are reaching competitive price points to fossil fuels (at least for the production of electrical energy).

The cost of providing electricity from wind and solar power plants has plummeted over the last five years, so much so that in some markets renewable generation is now cheaper than coal or natural gas.

Utility executives say the trend has accelerated this year, with several companies signing contracts, known as power purchase agreements, for solar or wind at prices below that of natural gas, especially in the Great Plains and Southwest, where wind and sunlight are abundant.

Those prices were made possible by generous subsidies that could soon diminish or expire, but recent analyses show that even without those subsidies, alternative energies can often compete with traditional sources.

......

According to a study by the investment banking firm Lazard, the cost of utility-scale solar energy is as low as 5.6 cents a kilowatt-hour, and wind is as low as 1.4 cents. In comparison, natural gas comes at 6.1 cents a kilowatt-hour on the low end and coal at 6.6 cents. Without subsidies, the firm’s analysis shows, solar costs about 7.2 cents a kilowatt-hour at the low end, with wind at 3.7 cents.

The only issue with renewable energy is the inability to store the energy for the times when the wind won't blow or the sun doesn't shine. Work is currently underway to come up with low cost storage mechanisms.

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/business/energy-environment/solar-and-wind-energy-start-to-win-on-price-vs-conventiona…

How do I know that you're you?

Original post:  Dec 8, 2014

It seems like we are getting closer to eliminating one irritant in our daily lives. When was the last time you had to enter a captcha?

These types of screens ask you to enter a set of characters that are deliberately obscured to make it difficult for automated "bots" to read using optical character recognition. It's supposed to separate out the humans who you typically want from the spammers and evildoers who you don't. As with any plan, there are now some sophisticated programs that can use crowdsourcing and other techniques to get past the captcha. Meanwhile, the rest of us suffer through the puzzles every time we have to reset a password.

Google has come up with a new technique. It's quite simple. All you will have to do is click on a checkmark. Most of the time, that will be it. Based on the track of your mouse, it can make an educated guess that is 60-80% accurate about whether or not there is a real person making the click or an automated program.

Here's an excerpt from the Wired article on this exciting development:

“For most users, this dramatically simplifies the experience,” says Vinay Shet, the product manager for Google’s Captcha team. “They basically get a free pass. You can solve the catptcha without having to solve it.”

Instead of depending upon the traditional distorted word test, Google’s “reCaptcha” examines cues every user unwittingly provides: IP addresses and cookies provide evidence that the user is the same friendly human Google remembers from elsewhere on the Web. And Shet says even the tiny movements a user’s mouse makes as it hovers and approaches a checkbox can help reveal an automated bot.

“All of this gives us a model of how a human behaves,” says Shet. “It’s a whole bag of cues that make this hard to spoof for a bot.” He adds that Google also will use other variables that it is keeping secret—revealing them, he says, would help botmasters improve their software and undermine Google’s filters.

Unfortunately, this is only for desktop users (for now). Smartphone and tablet users might have a different challenge:

For smartphone and tablet users, Google hasn’t simplified its captcha to a single click. Instead, it will show users a collection of images and ask them to make distinctions that might be tough for bots. For instance, it might display a picture of a cat and ask the user to tap the images that match it among eight photos of other cats, dogs, gerbils and leaves.

One last quote:

But Google’s Shet points out that when its captchas appear on other sites, Google will only be able to track the user’s movements over the captcha widget, not the whole page. And he argues that captchas are, by their very nature, good for privacy: They provide a way to show you’re a good user, rather than an evil bot, without logging in to a service or coughing up identifying details. “You don’t have to verify your identity,” Shet says, “to verify your humanity.”

Here is the link to the full article:  Google Can Now Tell You're Not a Robot With Just One Click | WIRED

Mr. Scott, full power to the deflector shields

Original post:  Dec 3, 2014

"Star Trek" envisioned a futuristic world in the 24th century that made incredible technological advancements. Streaking across the galaxy in starships that could fly faster than the speed of light, there were many innovations shown on screen that seemed to be fantastical. It turns out that some of them may actually be rooted in real science!

This article from Discovery news discusses a recent finding that Earth itself uses shielding to protect us from high energy particles. This invisible barrier helps keep "killer electrons" from bombarding the surface of the planet.

Now, in a new study published in the Nov. 27 issue of the journal Nature, Baker and his collaborators have discovered an oddity at the inner edge of these belts: There’s an invisible barrier blocking the high-energy electrons from making contact with our atmosphere.

“It’s almost like theses electrons are running into a glass wall in space,” said Baker in a UC press release. “Somewhat like the shields created by force fields on Star Trek that were used to repel alien weapons, we are seeing an invisible shield blocking these electrons. It’s an extremely puzzling phenomenon.”

At first, scientists assumed that it was magnetism. They soon realized that it had to be something else that they are still attempting to understand.

Now the researchers are focused on a cold cloud of electrically charged gas that is known to surround Earth, starting at an altitude of 600 miles. This cloud, known as the plasmasphere, extends thousands of miles into the Van Allen Belts and may have a dramatic interaction with the high-energy particles, thereby blocking them from dropping close to our atmosphere. High-energy electrons are stopped in their tracks at an “extremely sharp” boundary approximately 7,200 miles in altitude.

Here is a link to the full article:  Raise Shields! Star Trek-Like Barrier Protects Earth : Discovery News

Side effects of consumerism

Original post:  Dec 1, 2014

Here in the US, we just followed up the annual celebration of Thanksgiving with a new American tradition. Black Friday was given that name because it's estimated that some stores can do 20% of their annual sales over the weekend following the Thanksgiving holiday.

Ironically, the roots of this decision go back almost eighty years. Thanksgiving was traditionally celebrated on the fifth Thursday of the month until FDR officially made it the fourth Thursday to help extend the Christmas shopping season for retailers.

Mondays are trash pickup days on my street. It's quite easy to tell who recently acquired a major purchase by watching the types of empty boxes that land on the curb. Unless you take the time to recycle, 50" flat screen TV boxes are pretty hard to hide!

As more corporations strengthen their environmental programs, they are beginning to find that reducing the amount of waste materials is not only good citizenship, it can also help the bottom line. One way to help control costs without affecting product quality is to streamline packaging. That can result in fewer raw materials used which can help lower transportation and storage costs. This article in the New York Times quotes a director at Cisco:

“It’s good for Cisco, it’s good for our customers and it’s good for the environment,” said Kathleen Shaver, director of sustainability, risk and compliance at Cisco Systems, which says it has eliminated 1.9 million pounds of packaging this year. “Costs are reduced, not just with material you’re not buying, but with the material you’re not shipping and the material you’re not disposing of.”

All of this push to generate higher consumer sales does add up:

The volume of packaging is still vast and growing. Globally, consumer goods are encased in about 207 million tons of packaging each year, worth $384 billion, estimated a 2013 report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, using analysis by McKinsey & Co. consultants. Packaging could increase 47 percent by 2025, driven by increasingly wasteful practices and the worldwide growth of middle classes with rising purchasing power, the report predicted.

In the United States, packaging makes up about 30 percent of all municipal solid waste, down from 36 percent in 1970, said Susan Selke, interim director of Michigan State University’s School of Packaging. The overall amount of municipal waste, though, has more than doubled in that time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says. “Industry is paying attention, but not enough attention yet,” Ms. Selke said.

To learn more about how companies are helping to reduce this waste through innovative efforts, follow the link below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/business/energy-environment/packaging-environment.html?ref=energy-environment&_r=1