A malicious software program, the "Kneber botnet," has infected the computers of more than 2,500 corporations around the world. The purpose appears to be to gather login credentials to online financial systems, social networking sites and e-mail systems, and then transmit that information to the system's controllers. The investigation by NetWitness determined that the botnet has been able to compromise both commercial and government systems, including 68,000 corporate log-in credentials. It has also gained access to e-mail systems, online banking accounts, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail and other social network credentials, along with more than 2,000 digital security certificates and a significant cache of personal identity information. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/technology/19cyber.html)

Researchers from Children's Hospital Boston found that reprogramming skin cells from patients with a premature aging disease (dyskeratosis congenita) to an embryonic state lengthened the telomeres* in the cells. The researchers found that the induced pluripotent cell reprogramming appeared to activate a specific component of the telomerase enzyme, a discovery that they hope to use to develop new treatments for this and other telomerase-related diseases. Reprogrammed skin cells from patients with a premature aging disease (Suneet Agarwal) * A region of repetitive DNA at the end of a chromosome that protects it from destruction (Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24604/)

Why we should suspect that the brain has a limited ability to recurse, but prefers to daisy-chain instead:

The house the malt the rat the cat the dog the cow with the crumpled horn the maiden all forlorn the man all tattered and torn the priest all shaven and shorn the cock that crowed in the morn the farmer sowing his corn kept waked married kissed milked tossed worried killed ate lay in was built by Jack.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing a "100 Squared" initiative, which would bring 100-megabit-per-second broadband to 100 million U.S. households by 2020. (Source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/021610-fccs-100-megabits-to-the.html?page=2)

"Cyber Shockwave," which simulated a a massive cyberattack -- mobile phone worm and power grid attack -- on Tuesday, found that the U.S. is ill-prepared to handle a large-scale cyberattack. (Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222900723&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News)

Aaron Diaz, author of the webcomic Dresden Codak (one of the most scientifically and philosophically literate webcomics on the internet) and “Enough is Enough: a Thinking Ape’s Critique of Trans-Simianism”, a hilarious defense of transhumanism, has now written “Artificial Flight and Other Myths (a reasoned examination of A.F. by top birds)”, which pokes fun at those who think that Artificial Intelligence will require replicating every aspect of the human brain. Here is the opening:

Artificial Flight and Other Myths
a reasoned examination of A.F. by top birds

Over the past sixty years, our most impressive developments have undoubtedly been within the industry of automation, and many of our fellow birds believe the next inevitable step will involve significant advancements in the field of Artificial Flight. While residing currently in the realm of science fiction, true powered, artificial flying mechanisms may be a reality within fifty years. Or so the futurists would have us believe. Despite the current media buzz surrounding the prospect of A.F., a critical examination of even the most basic facts can dismiss the notion of true artificial flight as not much more than fantasy.

We can start with a loose definition of flight. While no two bird scientists or philosophers can agree on the specifics, there is still a common, intuitive understanding of what true flight is: powered, feathered locomotion through the air through the use of flapping wings. While other flight-like phenomena exist in nature (via bats and insects), no bird with even a reasonable education would consider these creatures true fliers, as they lack one or more key elements. And, while some birds are unfortunately born handicapped (penguins, ostriches, etc.), they still possess the (albeit undeveloped) gene for flight, and it is indeed flight that defines the modern bird.

This is flight in the natural world, the product of millions of years of evolution, and not a phenomenon easily replicated. Current A.F. is limited to unpowered gliding; a technical marvel, but nowhere near the sophistication of a bird. Gliding simplifies our lives, and no bird (including myself) would discourage advancing this field, but it is a far cry from synthesizing the millions of cells within the wing alone to achieve Strong A.F. Strong A.F., as it is defined by researchers, is any artificial flier that is capable of passing the Tern Test (developed by A.F. pioneer Alan Tern), which involves convincing an average bird that the artificial flier is in fact a flying bird.

Continue here.

… to boldly go where no man has gone before!

This final phrase of the classic Star Trek opening spiel had two problems with it, one as seen by people after the fact, and the other as seen by those who had gone before.

As seen by earlier generations, the phrase “to boldly go” is a split infinitive.  If E.E. Smith had written Star Trek in the ’20s, he would have written “boldly to go.”  Avoidance of split infinitives, like many elements of grammatical style, was a cognitively expensive signalling behavior that advertised, essentially, that the speaker or writer was in the educated classes in an era where being educated meant you knew Latin.  Infinitives in Latin are single words formed by inflection, rather than with a keyword such as “to” in English, so you can’t put an adverb in the middle of one.  Avoidance of split infinitives lasted in “proper” English at least until mid-20th century, but had begun to fade (to slowly fade ) away thereafter.

But there’s no real reason in English not to split infinitives.  They are completely understandable, and often less ambiguous than alternative constructions. Apart from being a cognitively expensive signalling behavior, they had no value, indeed a cost in cumbersome and ambiguous sentences.  Like many rules which were tacked onto the language by well-meaning grammarians, they were overly simplistic formalizations of a system, English grammar, which was and remains much deeper and more complex than anyone thought it was.

The lack of the ability of “hand-coded” grammar to handle real language is most clearly displayed in the early attempts at machine translation, which were an abject failure.  Only after 50 years of trying in natural language understanding, using statistically inferred models not formalized by humans, has serious progress been made (and there’s lots more progress needed before basic competence is achieved).

The other, retrospective, problem with the Star Trek blurb, that the phrasing was considered sexist, was corrected in later incarnations to the more politically correct “where no one has gone before.”  This, as it turns out, is another example where the unthinking application of a simple, formalized rule to “fix” something actually makes it worse.

In the ’60s, the use of “man” in such a context was standard and unambiguous.  It meant a human being (in fact, in my Websters from that era, “human being” is the first primary meaning, specialization to adult males being secondary).  Star Trek, if you remember or have studied these things at all, was in its time one of the most progressive, liberal science fiction shows ever.  It depicted a crew and implied a culture where barriers based on race and sex had been significantly lowered compared to the contemporary norm.  So in the original, “man” meant “human.”

Of course, the Enterprise went all over the galaxy seeking new life, new civilizations.  The citizens of these civilizations had been there before.  The distinction between “man” and these people is a fine one but one which can be reasonably be made consistent with the storyline.

But what happens if you switch from “man,” meaning human, to “one,” meaning, well, anyone. The term is intentionally more inclusive: it pushes the boundary from that between humans and non-humans, to that between someone and something.  But wait: doesn’t that mean that all the denizens of the strange new worlds, who have gone there before, are now not someones, but somethings?  Isn’t the new phrasing, taken out of the context of American academia and applied to Star Trek without thought or understanding, actually worse than before?  In classic Trek, the aliens are non-human people.  In PC Trek, they’re non-persons.

Just as was Victorian proper grammar, politically correct speech patterns are primarily a cognitively expensive signalling behavior.  They have exactly the same import: the speaker is educated, intelligent, and ambitious enough to pay the cognitive price to consciously modify the vernacular.  But as we have seen, PC speech is often yet another case of simplistic human-formalized rules, applied in a context-free way.  They fail on their own terms — implying just the wrong thing, as above — when context shifts.

In other words, simple human-formalized rules applied blindly to something as complex as grammar are brittle, a property they share with bureaucratic rules and AI programs.

Human ethics are similar to human language in their depth and complexity.  They are famously just as difficult to capture in simplistic formalism.  Indeed, given the examples of PC speech, it’s quite arguable that grammar and speech are a proper subset of ethics.  You can’t even reason about whether the Star Trek example is right or wrong without understanding language at a probably better than state of the art level.  And it’s certain that all the subtleties of ontology and epistemology are part of ethics, just as they are of language.

AI is just, in the past decade or so, beginning to get traction in the natural language field beyond the simple human-written formal rules stage.  As for ethics, we’ve just barely gotten into the simple human-written formal rules stage. But if you want a preview of what machine ethics will ultimately look like, study modern natural language processing.

Filmmaker Noah Hutton has released a mini-documentary on the first year of IBM's Bluebrain Project to simulate a brain in a computer.

Bluebrain | Year One from Couple 3 Films on Vimeo.

(Source: http://singularityhub.com/2010/02/12/10-year-documentary-to-follow-bluebrain-project-video/)

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a lightweight "metal foam" with an elasticity similar to bone. It could mean a new generation of biomedical implants that avoid the bone rejection that often results from more rigid implants. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news185537540.html)

Israeli company InSightec has developed a device that surrounds the head with an array of transducers that can focus ultrasound beams on a 4 mm spot in the brain to dissolve an artery-blocking clot without damaging the skull. (Thilo Hoelscher) (Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24548/)

Novozymes, the world's largest industrial enzyme producer, has launched a new line it says will yield ethanol from plant wastes at an enzyme price of about 50 cents a gallon -- a 80 percent price drop from two years ago. This will help bring cellulosic ethanol production prices to under $2 a gallon by 2011, a cost on par with both corn-based ethanol and gasoline at current U.S. market prices. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/02/16/16climatewire-economics-improve-for-first-commercial-cellu-93478.html)

If tissue engineers can provide the right physical environment, it should make it easier to transform stem cells into specific tissues and create complex, three-dimensional organs that are as good as the real thing, researchers say. Examples: Expose stem cells to flowing fluid and they turn into blood vessels. Grow human mesenchymal stem cells -- the precursors of bone, muscle and many other tissue types -- on gels. The cells turn into the tissue that most closely matches the stiffness of the gel. Rhythmically squeeze cartilage as it grows, mimicking the stress of walking, to grow cartilage that matches its natural counterpart strength for strength. Video: Regenerating bodies (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527471.100-healing-touch-the-key-to-regenerating-bodies.html)

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Here is the NYT article.

My understanding of the concept of anthropomorphism really “clicked” when I first read “Beyond anthropomorphism”, part of Creating Friendly AI, an early (2000) Singularity Institute document. I strongly recommend it for those who are interested in better understanding the concept of non-anthropomorphic artificial intelligence. Here is the opening:

If you punch a human in the nose, he or she will punch back. If the human doesn’t punch back, it’s an admirable act of self-restraint, something worthy of note.

Imagine, for a moment, that you walk up and punch an AI in the nose. Does the AI punch back? Perhaps and perhaps not, but punching back will not be instinctive. A sufficiently young AI might stand there and think: “Hm. Someone’s fist just bumped into my nose.” In a punched human, blood races, adrenaline pumps, the hands form fists, the stance changes, all without conscious attention. For a young AI, focus of attention shifts in response to an unexpected negative event - and that’s all.

As the AI thinks about the fist that bumped into vis nose, it may occur to the AI that this experience may be a repeatable event rather than a one-time event, and since a punch is a negative event, it may be worth thinking about how to prevent future punches, or soften the negativity. An infant AI - one that hasn’t learned about social concepts yet - will probably think something like: “Hm. A fist just hit my nose. I’d better not stand here next time.”

The more I study nature and biology, the more I see that anthropomorphism gets in the way of understanding animals as well. Certain birds, cats, dogs, and even rodents are intelligent, but thinking of their intelligence merely as inferior to humans is not the whole story. Different forms of intelligence have to be understood on their own terms — not through starting with an archetype of human intelligence and making incremental modifications to that archetype. That sort of thinking can lead to anchoring.

Tom McCabe at the Rational Futurist has a new article up; “The Real Story Behind Fusion Energy”. I suggest you check it out — it dispels a great many myths that we have been told about fusion power, and recommends the construction of thorium-powered fission reactors instead.

Foresight Institute Feynman Prize winner Dr. Ralph Merkle, perhaps better known to Nanodot readers for his nanotech work, has just won the IEEE’s Hamming Medal along with Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie:

Thirty-five years ago, Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle developed an easy method for sending secure messages over insecure channels. With the advent of the Internet, their technology, called public key cryptography, is now used continuously everywhere in the world.

“When a lock icon appears at the bottom of your browser, it’s using public key cryptography. Your computer and the merchant’s computer can talk back and forth across an insecure channel and exchange credit card information in a way that someone listening in cannot get it,” said Hellman, Stanford professor emeritus of electrical engineering.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named Hellman, Diffie and Merkle the 2010 Richard W. Hamming Medalists. Hellman said he was especially happy that the award recognizes the contribution of Merkle, whose early work on public key encryption didn’t get the acknowledgement it deserved.

“Ralph really deserves equal credit with us. I am really glad to see him being recognized on this award,” Hellman said.

Read the whole article for the interesting details and politics behind the work, and a great photo of all three back in 1975 (lots of hair).  Congratulations!  —Chris Peterson

Researchers at the University of Washington looked at signals on the brain's surface while using imagined movements to control a cursor, finding that watching a cursor respond to one's thoughts prompts brain signals to become stronger than those generated in day-to-day life. The finding holds promise for rehabilitating patients after stroke or other neurological damage. It also suggests that a human brain could quickly become adept at manipulating an external device such as a computer interface or a prosthetic limb. The new findings also provide clues about which brain signals to tap. Researchers compared the patterns in low-frequency signals, usually used to control external devices, and high-frequency signals, typically dismissed as noise. They discovered that the high-frequency signals are more specific to each type of movement. Because each one occupies a smaller portion of the brain, several high-frequency signals could be tapped simultaneously to control more sophisticated devices. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news185470589.html)

The number of cell phone subscribers will reach five billion people this year, and the number of mobile broadband subscriptions will exceed one billion this year, up from 600 million in 2009, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has said. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news185467439.html)

An implantable sensor designed to detect the release of dopamine and adenosine could help scientists measure the impact of deep brain stimulation and perhaps provide a way to enhance the effectiveness of the treatment for Parkinson's and other disorders. The device consists of a custom-designed sensor electrode that is implanted along with the stimulating electrode, a microprocessor, a Bluetooth module to send data to a computer, and a battery. Release of dopamine (lower green and purple band) and adenosine (upper green and purple band) chemical messengers (Kendall H. Lee, MD, PhD, director of Mayo Neural Engineering Laboratories, and Kevin Bennet, Chair of Mayo Division of Engineering) (Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24540/)

Self-publishing site FastPencil has launched a new program aimed at helping aspiring thought leaders publish the books in their heads:

A personal book authoring team to manage the entire book writing process. You run your business, they co-write your book.

Full print and eBook distribution services to Amazon and elsewhere.

Social media promotion services. (Source: http://venturebeat.com/2010/02/16/fastpencil-thought-leader/)