Tomorrow is Today

Smart-Dikes and Sand Engines: The Netherlands’ Approach to Rising Sea Levels

On a freezing winter day along the south-central coast of Holland, two beachcombers, hunched against the wind, stroll along a crescent of sand extending more than half a mile into the North Sea. Nearby, a snowkiter skims over the 28 million-cubic-yard heap of dredged sediment spreading along the shore. If all goes as planned, the mound will eventually disappear, rearranged by ocean currents into a 12-mile-long buffer protecting the coastline for the next two decades.

This is the Sand Engine, one of the latest innovations from Dutch masters of flood control technology and designed, as the national water board Rijkswaterstaat says, so that “nature will take the sand to the right place for us.”

After having constructed the country’s vaunted system of sea gates and dikes, Dutch planners and engineers are now augmenting it with new technology enlisting nature to keep the water at bay. “Normally, there is a lot of erosion here,” says hydraulic engineer Mathijs van Ledden, sweeping an arm toward the snow-covered spit snaking around an elongated lagoon. Van Ledden is a flood risk reduction specialist with Royal HaskoningDHV, a Dutch engineering consultancy involved in creating the Sand Engine, currently 2.2 miles wide.

“This big reservoir of sand should re-nourish the rest of the coast in time,” he says, gesturing toward the skyline of The Hague, several miles away.

(via To Control Floods, The Dutch Turn to Nature for Inspiration by Cheryl Katz: Yale Environment 360)

Anonymous PWNS The Fed

The Federal Reserve said on Tuesday that one of its internal websites had been briefly breached by hackers, though no critical functions of the U.S. central bank were affected by the intrusion.

The admission, which raises questions about cyber security at the Fed, follows a claim that hackers linked to the activist group Anonymous had struck the Fed on Sunday, accessing personal information of more than 4,000 U.S. bank executives, which it published on the Web.

“The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product,” a Fed spokeswoman said.

“Exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system,” the spokeswoman said, adding that all individuals effected by the breach had been contacted.

(via Fed Confirms That Hackers Breached Its Internal Site - Business Insider)

(via Where U.S. R&D Dollars Go | MIT Technology Review)

DARPA Funded Research Aims to Automate Video Surveillance, Teach Computers to Identify Suspicious Behavior

This approach relies heavily on advances by machine vision researchers, who have made remarkable strides in last few decades in recognizing stationary and moving objects and their properties.

It’s the same vein of work that led to Google’s self-driving cars, face recognition software used on Facebook and Picasa, and consumer electronics like Microsoft’s Kinect.

When it works well, machine vision can detect objects and people — call them nouns — that are on the other side of the camera’s lens. But to figure out what these nouns are doing, or are allowed to do, you need the computer science equivalent of verbs.

…that’s where Oltramari and Lebiere have built on the work of other Carnegie Mellon researchers to create what they call a “cognitive engine” that can understand the rules by which nouns and verbs are allowed to interact. Their cognitive engine incorporates research, called activity forecasting, …which tries to understand what humans will do by calculating which physical trajectories are most likely.

They say their software “models the effect of the physical environment on the choice of human actions.”

Both projects are components of Carnegie Mellon’s Mind’s Eye architecture, a DARPA-created project that aims to develop smart cameras for machine-based visual intelligence. Predicts Oltramari: “This work should support human operators and automatize video-surveillance, both in military and civil applications.”

(via U.S. looks to replace human surveillance with computers | Security & Privacy - CNET News)

White House Confirms Successful Spearphishing Attack:

Hackers Linked to China the intrusion “took place earlier this month and involved unidentified hackers — believed to have used computer servers in China — who accessed the computer network used by… the president’s military office in charge of some of the government’s most sensitive communications, including strategic nuclear commands.” Politico reported this morning that an unnamed White House official confirmed the intrusion, but downplayed its impact, saying no damage had been done and no classified networks appear to have been breached. …If the reports are accurate, this intrusion would be the latest round in a clandestine cyberwar that has been raging for the last few years between the United States and China.

I have two very cynical, mutually-contradictory responses to this report.

China has reportedly pwned half of all private networks in the US, yet the US’ top cybersecurity priority is …Iran? Is this strategic leaking domestic psyops to create a causus belli to justify expanded operations against China?

(via White House confirms ‘spearphishing’ intrusion | Security & Privacy - CNET News)

Defense Authorization Bill Amended to Lift Ban on Domestic Propaganda

An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.

The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the independent Broadcasting Board of Governors, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website. The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.

The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.

(via Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban)

International Policy Needed for Recycling Rare-Earth Metals

An international policy is needed for recycling scarce specialty metals that are critical in the production of consumer goods, according to Yale researchers in Science. “A recycling rate of zero for specialty metals is alarming when we consider that their use is growing quickly,” says co-author Barbara Reck, a research scientist at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Specialty metals, which include rare earth elements such as indium, gallium and germanium, account for more than 30 of the 60 metals in the periodic table. Because they are used in small amounts for very precise technological purposes, such as red phosphors, high-strength magnets, thin-film solar cells and computer chips, recovery can be so technologically and economically challenging that the attempt is seldom made.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2012/09/international-policy-needed-recycling-metals

via laboratoryequipment

Analysis: Kurzweil AI on The New Kindles and Silo Culture

This ought to be a formidable platform for education, but no, it will be yet another dumbing down device milking the consumer.

[T]his trick to lock you in a silo of possible purchases from the seminal acquisition of the device, has been pioneered by Apple with the Macintosh strict GUI guidelines and its specific market place, but at that time it was a more open process as Apple didn’t control the entire market stack. Individual software brands could thrive without special ties with Apple.

Then, the model has been emphasized by the big Telcos with their subscription plans where they made no money on the (smart)phone itself but on the services.

Now, it’s epitomized by Amazon and its Kindle brand. But with the ever expanding capabilities of consumer electronics, the trend is going from bad to worse now that the device is constantly spying on you, reporting your habits, location, reading patterns (e.g. from monitoring page shuffling, the new Kindle will present you at the bottom of the screen an estimated time before chapter completion!).

In our soft Orwellian world, dominated not by an all-powerful state but by a cartel of mega corporations dictating their vision of “progress”, the way to push technology is not through collective empowerment anymore. Instead, in an unabated promotion of individualism, people are lured to technology by teasing of their lower instincts. Abiding to this trend, yesterday Amazon didn’t present devices for empowerment but yet another mean aiming at narcissistic entertainment fulfillment for dumbed down consumers.

(via SSS | KurzweilAI)