Reuniting owners with seized wartime property

This article on nbcnews.com is pretty remarkable. It is well known that during WWII, the Nazi regime seized the belongings  including property, of the citizens it deemed undesirable. For decades it was all thought to be lost, however detailed records were, surprisingly, maintained over all this time. In one of the examples given in the article, it was compensation for the property as opposed to the property itself.

Now, using database technology that is available to everyone, records are being matched up with the properties' original owners and being returned, if not to them to their heirs.

It is carried out using standard family-tree making software. My mother took a class recently on genealogy  and students used Ancestry.com to trace their lineage. She made many discoveries and found many documents shedding light on many aspects of her history she didn't know, and she already knew a lot. My father's side of the family fled Romania, leaving behind an oil field in the process, to avoid the advancement of the Axis powers in the area. Now, using databases of information along with the ability of this genealogy software to trace family lines, more seized property is being returned o its rightful place after decades of being lost.

I need to make one minor clarification, however - the linked article claims 'social media' is helping the cause, but email and data mining are not actually social media. It's standard communications media that we have always used.

Digitally haunted house

Recently, I was notified by NVEnergy that I qualified for a free upgrade to my thermostats (which are just standard mercury-controlled numbers for now) through a program called "mPowered Home Energy Management."

I just use the old-fashioned ones. No breaking in to these.

The deal is that they install these flashy digital thermostats, and that gives them the ability to remotely adjust your settings by +/- 4 degrees. In other words  they have remote control of that aspect of your house. Even so, they would never shut off your climate control if it were very hot or very cold, or make radical adjustments, but the thought of someone else being able to access and manipulate any aspect of my own house is unsettling.

How NVEnergy wants to do it.

This is especially true as the idea of a smart grid becomes more and more of a reality. What the linked page is ultimately telling you is that appliances and electrical infrastructure inside your house will be connected to an electrical grid that can gather data about them and allow for them to be controlled remotely, ostensibly by you.  But it leads to a whole host of other problems. For example, digital haunting.

Consider this article in Forbes, in which security experts hacked into houses and gained the ability to turn lights on and off, as well as the TV, and even gather information about the house itself and in one case a child who lived there. They would actually call the people, tell the people they had gained access to their house's automated control, then proving it by doing some pretty ghostly things. It's more an issue of the poor security designed into the products than the invalidity of the products themselves.

See, this is why I stick to the manual climate control. It's all me.

Robots are one thing, but how about THIS?

The things robots can do are pretty amazing, but we've also seen the amazing ability of prosthetic limbs to transform lives. Now, we have computers capable of doing some very low level types of mind-reading. It's not what it seems, they can't pick up on complete sentences or type papers from your thoughts, but just as a prosthetic limb can by manipulated by a person simply thinking about it, which is how our actual limbs are moved anyway, they are now able to identify individual letters from our thoughts and extend the ability of our movements from thought.

To see something truly amazing, watch this segment form 60 minutes. It shows how machines can read and interpret letters and even intent from thought. If you're queasy, be aware there are a couple of very mild scenes where a restrained monkey has electrodes implanted into his brain (you can't see that, though) and a lady who suffered a stroke has been fitted with a coupler attached directly to her skull.

But what it shows is really amazing, and keep in mind this was from 2009! Not only that, a year earlier scientists in Japan were able to determine images someone was seeing based solely on their brain activity. Truly incredible stuff.

Going to Disneyland/World?

Have fun! And in case you're worried you won't, the land of mouse has been using the FastPass system there for a long, long time. This system, originally developed in the mid-'90s and put into service in late 1999, allows visitors to essentially pre-book a time on a ride so they don't have to wait in what can be excruciatingly long lines.

From my personal archive!

Even so, Disney has decided to keep up with available technology, and is now experimenting with what may become the futuristic successor to FastPass, a wristband that would be created just for you, and is capable of transmitting wireless signals to receivers placed at strategic locations throughout the park. It can also pass as a payment system and hotel door key. According to this site (which also has a nifty image of the receiver), a smart-phone app will let you know when it's your time to ride.

I'd give you more info, but there isn't much to offer. In testing at Disney World, apparently guests spent more because they "had fun with the technology." I can also offer this website which shows the bands in different colors. Be aware that the linked site has a list of items under the heading "Here is how it works" but it doesn't actually state how it works, it simply says what you can do with it. Reading that list, though, one might deduce that the bands would most likely operate using Radio Frequency ID (RFID) or Near-Field Communications (NFC), the latter even more likely since it was suggested you could use them to make payments.

Until then, don't try to game the FastPass system, Disney isn't putting up with that crap anymore!

Who's better at fantasy football - robots or humans?

Now, I'm not a huge sports fan as the misleading title would indicate, but since we talked about artificial intelligence, and building on the previous post, I thought I'd share with you a story about an AI program that can play fantasy football (in this case meaning soccer) better than any human being. Well, not every human being, but almost.

In the ieee Spectrum, there is a story about a team of computer scientists whose program can beat 99 percent of all human fantasy football players. In case you're unfamiliar, fantasy football players create teams from all players in a sport, and when the actual player makes a play the fantasy player is awarded points for the team.

That still leaves the 2500 players the system *can't* beat, and these people must be serious fantasy football players. Now, whether or not this is an AI or an expert system would depend on how it was programmed, how its rules are implemented, and how it makes its choices, it could even be a combination of principles from both.

It's when any of the following start to think for themselves that we're in trouble:

This is just a picture, but the terror is very real.

Robots!

Ever wanted to see a robot swagger? Strut? It's actually surprisingly easy. Just dub 'Stayin' Alive' over a video of what is a monumental robotic feat, walking and regaining balance when pushed. Suddenly, the triumph of the technology takes a backseat to the fact it's almost perfectly in sync with the beat. If only the light on it's head flashed to the rhythm.

Actually, this is an early build of what was known as ATLAS, built by Boston Dynamics and DARPA (the latter also being responsible for development of the Internet!). The purpose was to continue the evolution of self-balancing and increasing the advancement of robots, and it has most recently evolved into what is affectionately yet creepily known as Petman. You can find much more information about Petman at this link, but to give you an idea, it can do some advanced calisthenics and even change its body temperature in response to outside stimulus.

DARPA also developed another well-known, self-balancing robot to assist soldiers in the field known as Big Dog. It has an incredible ability to regainits balance after being impacted or even losing its balance on ice. If you thought the previous video was impressive, Big Dog will knock you out. Video of its capabilities is below.

If that's enough, you can always go see Pacific Rim! Those robots are apparently piloted by humans and not autonomous, but I'm still hoping we get them soon.

Scam alert

This article on Ars Technica talks about a scam where people cold-call you on your phone, claim they are 'calling from Windows,' and they need to help you get rid of multiple viruses they have found on your PC. Needless to say it's a scam, no one calls form a product (they would be calling from Microsoft, not Windows), and some people are being taken for hundreds of dollars and worse, as they convince you to install software that allows them to gain remote access to your system and ALL of your files.

The main hook they use is the Windows Event Viewer, which often lists errors and warnings for system events, but they are normally benign and don't impact you or your use of the machine in any way. I have pasted an example of my own below:

As you can see, there are many errors and warnings, and that's fine. If you looked at your own it would look very much the same. It's an administrative tool that allows investigation of any system trouble that causes serious problems, but these rarely do. It looks serious, however, and I can understand why someone would fall for a caller claiming it shows a seriously compromised system.

These scammers are patient, and persistent. The best thing to do if you get a call like this is to tell them you know it's a scam, they'll scream profanities, and hang up. If you know anyone who might fall for it let them know as well, otherwise they could find themselves out of money and their sensitive data posted online.

Or, you could just turn the tables (this article, and the comments, are hilarious yet sad. I encourage you to read it to see what these people will do to get at your system and the clever ways people foil them).

Want to see something nifty?

MacPaint

All computer programs are written in a programming language. There are many different types of language, and the're all an attempt to make it easier to give the computer instructions. In other words, instead of having to program in the actual ones and zeros that a machine understands, we would use a programming language that was closer to our own in terms of syntax and structure to tell it what we wanted it to do.

Over time, different languages were developed to make the process easier; Assembly, Fortran, BASIC,  COBOL, C, and that's just to name a few. Many of these languages evolve into similar yet more functional versions (for example, C evolved into C++ which further evolved into C#).

Of course, a computer doesn't understand any programming language, it only understands machine language; the ones and zeros of its circuits. So once a program is written, it has to be 'compiled' into machine language by a compiler, or in the case of assembly language, an assembler.

In case you have ever wondered what programming actually looks like, there are many resources online that can not only show you, but teach you! However, I thought you might be interested to see this page about Mac Paint and Quick Draw at the website of the Computer History Museum (I don't know if I need to disclose that I'm a member, but I am).

What's fascinating about this page isn't just the history of these programs, which is actually very interesting, but also that it provides a link to the actual source code used to create them - so the lines the programmer typed in to create those programs can be downloaded from that very page. If for whatever reason you have trouble, I have hotlinked them here. They are written in assembler, which was normally platform specific, meaning a program written in that language couldn't be used on any other system.

They are in a zip file because there are 5 different programs that create the single experience of running Mac Paint. In order to view them properly, you will need to right click on one of the programs from the zip file, choose 'open with' from the menu that appears, and view it in a text editor such as Notepad (in Windows) or TextEdit (on the Mac).

It's amazing to think that just by typing in lines, the result could be something as advanced, for its time anyway, as Mac Paint.

I completely support electric cars

Even when they're a mesmerizing shade of shiny blue and cost a gasp-worthy $500,000. According to this article on Engadget, the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG E Cell will be available for the money-burning-a-hole-in-their-pocket crowd mid-2103.

Seeing as AMG is the high-end version of regular, low-end, cheap-seats, run-of-the-mill Mercedes-Benz's, and since electric cars are always more expensive, a high price seems understandable. But the technology and approach to turning the wheels is novel; it has an electric motor for EACH WHEEL. 750 horsepower as a result. Very nice.

Even so, you'd have to drive a long time before you saved that amount of money in gas.

Remember Blackberry?

Research in Motion used to have THE digital device on the market, the Blackberry. In fact, it was so much the dominant device that it was actually referred to as the 'Crackberry.' It has the distinction of being the first mass-produced electronic device in which owners and users showed signs of addiction. Its communication and messaging services were unparalleled, and it ushered in the era of the smartphone even though it really wasn't one.

My how times have changed.

While Apple's iPhone is the most popular smartphone and Android the most popular mobile operating system, RIM has been left in the dust. The headline of this Ars Technica article says it all: "RIM Deathwatch: Blackberry subscriptions in 'downward spiral.'"

I know people who still use Blackberry's and love them, but there's no doubt that Android phones and especially the iPhone have blown past them. They once were the industry leader, bu their inability to keep up looks like it will prove their undoing (which ht always does).

Anyone still use one? I do still see them around.