photo by junigo

As reader Tzagash Shal-Goram said, on sending this in, File this one under “shriekyware“. I have to agree.

Developed to help caregivers monitor the mood of autistic children, it’s easy to see other uses for this – from personal alarms to livebloggin’ a night out.

More details from Technology Review:

[The] device developed by Affectiva, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, detects and records physiological signs of stress and excitement by measuring slight electrical changes in the skin. While researchers, doctors, and psychologists have long used this measurement–called skin conductance–in the lab or clinical setting, Affectiva’s Q Sensor is worn on a wristband and lets people keep track of stress during everyday activities. The Q Sensor stores or transmits a wearer’s stress levels throughout the day…

When a person–autistic or not–experiences stress or enters a “flight or fight” mode, moisture collects under the skin (often leading to sweating) as a sympathetic nervous system response. This rising moisture makes the skin more electrically conductive. Skin conductance sensors send a tiny electrical pulse to one point of the skin and measure the strength of that signal at another point on the skin to detect its conductivity.

More still in this video from Technology Review.

“We can only transform ourselves as fast as we can transform our language.” –Terrence McKenna

I have been processing this post by James Bridle, Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of Fiction, since seeing it re-tweeted by Matt Jones of BERGLondon fame the other night.  Between this, and Paul Raven’s post yesterday on Futurismic on the same subject, I am glad to see I am far from the only person quite taken by Gibson’s latest.  It tickled my brain in a way I haven’t felt since first watching Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales.  (But that’s another story for a different blog.)  What these two share are reminders that is the twenty-first century and we do things differently here.

As Bridle says early on, what Gibson has been doing with the Bigend trilogy is “Just-in-time futurism.”:

Zero History is happening right now. It’s as if all of his writing has been concertinaed down into today. Liveblogging the present.

Given publishing’s long lead times, this is quite an achievement. But writing anything that feels so explicitly now, almost to the day, is an achievement in itself. I’d go as far as to say that you have to have been writing future Science Fiction for 25 years in order to write so convincingly about the present.

Some people have complained about the predominant use of iPhones in the novel, but I agree with Bridle where he says that what Gibson is doing is time-stamping the period.  In five, ten, twenty years iPhone will mean what horse-drawn carriage does today;  immediately establishing the context for the story taking place.

But it’s more than just that.  Everyone knows what an iPhone is.  Everyone.  But the smaller details Gibson includes changes the reading experience depending upon their knowledge of them.   Because Futurism is still expected.  For Bridle that’s the Festo, saying “their strangeness seemed something truly of the future, authentically Gibsonian—but only a couple of days later someone twittered a link to the manufacturer’s video.”

Now, as our long time readers know, that was posted here early last year.  But who bothers remembering things any more?  We export our memories online and need only recall the keywords we tagged them with.  Twitter and forget.  When in doubt, Google.  Via Paul’s Futurismic post, we get this quote from Alex Vagenas’s take on Zero History:

The amount of googlable details is actually staggering. It creates a vertiginous impression that the novel, in a more heightened sense than traditional realism, acquires and maintains a truly reciprocal relationship to the world as it is filtered through the web, in a Borgesian continuum of mediation. Zero History springs from and redirects to myriad cultural minutiae that Gibson has been assembling and which will take on their arbitrarily imposed narrative significance once again, when the reader looks them up.

A new Realism for a new age.  Bridle appears to agree, as he continues:

In “Zero History” we have an echo of “No Future”: everything compressed into the present. This idea is what Zero History is really about. (This is the Order Flow: the future is defined by the present; who pinpoints the present controls the future.)

…it’s undeniable that something is happening, a network effect produced by the sudden visibility of just how unevenly distributed those futures are.

I want to give it a name, and at this point I’m calling it Network Realism.

Continuing still; and this is the part that formed new connections in my brain, that felt so instantly true (and that all the above has really been to contextualize):

Network Realism is writing that is of and about the network. It’s realism because it’s so close to our present reality. A realism that posits an increasingly 1:1 relationship between Fiction and the World. A realtime link. And it’s networked because it lives in a place that’s that’s enabled by, and only recently made possible by, our technological connectedness.

Zero History is Network Realism because of the way that it talks about the world, and the way its knowledge of the world is gathered and disseminated. Gibson seems to be navigating the spider graph of current reality as wikiracing does human knowledge.

He goes on to name several works that also fit within this category, but the only one I am familiar with is Makers – except it was called Themepunks then, when it was serialised on Salon.

To bring this all back to the Terrence McKenna quote at the beginning – living, as we are,  in a time of ever increasing change necessitates that we modify our language through the invention of new words (neologisms) and re-appropriate existing ones to form new concepts – as fast as we can, really.  Grabbing onto whatever’s nearest and hacking it to fit, so that we have placeholders to tweet with and can start using them to discuss building whatever comes along next.

Language is Humanity’s oldest technology; it must be continually upgraded.  If our fiction doesn’t reflect and include that, then it’s useless.  And that’s why everyone is so excited about Zero History.

Or, as Bridle ends:

We live in strange, new times. New eras require new forms, as Sydney Harbour Bridge reminds us—in fact, they produce them, out of themselves, out of their conditions. Network Realism feels, to me, like something genuinely new in literature, and we’re only just seeing the edges of it.

Thank you James.

*

Hah!  You thought I’d talk about Zero History without mentioning Atemporality.  Well, instead, I’ll quote straight from Paul, who’s, as always, spot-on (speaking on SF by any other name):

If we ever manage to define sf in a way that everyone can agree on, it’ll probably ossify and die within months. And you might even argue that it follows logically (in a way that Darwin might recognise) that sf has become interested in atemporality because atemporality is the best survival strategy available to it.

(Also, Southland Tales really is a very good movie; ignore the reviews and see for yourself.)

Photo © Jan Kriwol

via Schismatrix

From Italy Magazine:

Italian surgeons have achieved another medical first during a double hand transplant operation carried out on 52-year-old Carla Mari in the San Gerardo Hospital in the city of Monza [Lombardy].

Although this is not the first time that a double hand transplant has been carried out in the world, it is the first time that a new, anti-rejection technique involving cells from the patient’s own bone marrow has been used.

These cells were re-introduced into the woman’s body during the 24 hours following the operation. Dr Andrea Biondi of the San Gerardo “Cell Factory” told Corriere della Sera that these cells act, in a way that scientists do not yet fully understand, on the body’s immuno-suppressive system. In the coming days signora Mari will also receive a transplant of adipose tissue, again from her own body, and a skin graft from her back.

Signora Mari, who is married with two children, had undergone amputation of her hands and feet because she was suffering from sepsis, a whole-body inflammatory state with infection. The artificial hands with which she was fitted were causing her distress and she was placed on the list for hand transplants in 2008. On Monday night, a 58-year-old woman who died in Cremona became the donor.

(Pix by marcogiannini)

Previously:

• the man with the transplanted hands
  

Pioneer have prototyped windshield HUD technology:

It uses lasers. Therefore it is Science!

From Bruce Willis’s capsule apartment in The 5th Element straight to you.

Meet Resource Furniture’s Space Savers:

Perfect not just for Unhappy Hipsters but also denizens of underground bunkers, space stations and submarines.

via Josh Ellis

Word up cutting-edge body-mod enthusiasts!  Or should I say bleeding-edge?  Either/or.  For the long wait for implantable, “electronic tattoos” is nearly over.

Via PhysOrg:

Researchers in the US, China, Korea and Singapore have collaborated to develop flexible ultra-thin sheets of inorganic light emitting diodes (LEDs) and photodetectors for implantation under the skin for medical monitoring, activating photo-sensitive drugs, and other biomedical applications.

The PDMS substrate is flexible enough that the circuits can still function even if twisted or stretched by even as much as 75 percent. Rogers said most research has concentrated on organic LEDs (OLEDs), which are extremely sensitive to water and oxygen, but the flexible arrays are encapsulated in a thin layer of silicon rubber, which makes them waterproof and allows them to function well when implanted or completely immersed in biofluids. The design also eliminates the mechanical constraints normally imposed on such devices by the inflexible semiconductor wafers that support them.

Obviously, I’m filing the cosmetic uses for this under ‘other applications’. And, of course, early adopters beware! As cool as it will be to carve up your flesh and be the first at your local club to show this off, the tech will only improve from here. As always, I advise targetted leaps forwards with new technology. Unless you’re going for the future-retro-past look. Then, it’s perfect.

From Open The Future:

On Thursday, October 21, CBC TV will show Surviving the Future, an hour-long documentary on both the major challenges facing us over the next half-century and the amazing technologies and social shifts underway to meet those challenges. Directed by the award-winning documentarian Marc de Guerre, Surviving the Future is a rather intense piece of work, with interviews with a variety of scientists, writers, and other thinkers. They also talk to me. The trailer can be found here.

While CBC documentaries often end up on the “CBC Doc Zone” website weeks or months later, I know that some of you (hi Mom!) might want to hear what I have to say sooner than that. Since the producers were nice enough to send me a DVD ahead of time, I’ve managed to pull out the bits in which I appear.

 http://www.vimeo.com/15959445

Betabrand is proud to offer you the opportunity to own a piece of DARPA-class technology in hoodie form. For those unfamiliar with DARPA, it stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency–the government agency responsible for creating the Internet, Stealth fighter, and robots galore.

You’ll note some special differences between our hoodie and the common hooded coat. Most notably, the seams run in unique directions, thanks to an ingenious algorithm cooked up by our friends Jonathan Bachrach and Saul Griffith from Otherlab.

…At long last, you can own a coat that looks like the love child of Spiderman and a stealth fighter.

More in this interview on BoingBoing.

Thanks to Bruce Sterling’s twitterfeed we now a have a word for those things we see around us on a daily basis, but couldn’t concisely describe.

Thomasons: Stairs leading to nowhere. Protruding pipes and tubes connecting to nothing. The silhouette of an older building left in the one that consumed it.

It’s how the past haunts the present.

The name is taken from this Flickr pool:

I’m curious. What, if anything, have others previously used to describe this?

Via ~EvidencE~’s photostream.

Via suspiciousminds’ photo stream.

How about a selection of takes on the future, seen from completely different angles – a few general takes, two very specific ones and one bonus survival guide.

General looks ahead:

• Douglas Coupland’s A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years:
  

  The future isn’t going to feel futuristic

  It’s simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn’t feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong

• PARC attempts to look 40years ahead with The best way to invent the future is to predict it:
  

  …this next set of predictions takes the next, huge leap: from interaction, to seamless integration between humans, machines, and information. Enter neuro-bio-bionic-whateveritscalledthesedays computing.

  Some of the predictions involved synthetic biology and simulating the human brain, but most of them were focused on various means for direct inputs, cybernetic implants, and neural interfaces to the human brain – including “augmented perception prosthetics devices that you attach directly to your nervous system to provide data about your surroundings at the touch of a thought”.

• The Institute for the Future’s Map of the Decade (9MB PDF):
  

  The future is a high-resolution game. Never before has humanity been
  able to explore the emerging landscape in such detail, to measure the
  forces of change at such vast scales, and to fill in the details with
  such fine grain. But this high-resolution grid is not complete. It
  challenges us to envision and build the future we want. As both gamers
  and creators of the game, we will fill in the grid over the coming
  decade.

Specific looks ahead:

• The Future of the Televison Industry – My provocation to Channel 4: TV in a low-carbon, meaning-rich, networked era by Pat Kane, author of The Play Ethic:
  

  If we move beyond our consumerist identities, what are the opportunities for ingenuity, for learning new skills, for developing new lifestyles, for finding pleasure in other people in new ways?

  …can that be done while your business model depends on super-fantastic car ads and sofa promotions between the shows, stoking up exactly the same kinds of escapism-through-positional-goods that caused the problem in the first place? Or in concert with the industry, will you have to also start rethinking entirely the very function and purpose of advertising itself? What kind of information about products and services should people have in a post-consumerist society?

• The Future of Friendship – as seen from kids in “violent crime neighborhoods” – Chicago Kids Take on Bunker Mentality, No ‘Friends’:
  

  …they found that a kind of “bunker mentality” held sway at both schools, even to the point that the children, both boys and girls, routinely tested their peers and were conducting “background checks” to see whether they could be trusted, cross-checking their dependability with classmates and watching them for months and years.

Bonus:

• Mark Shepard’s Sentient City Survival Guide:
  http://www.vimeo.com/14205709

From New Scientist:

Dutch research organisation IMEC, based in Eindhoven, this week demonstrated a new type of wireless body area network (BAN). Dubbed the Human++ BAN platform, the system converts IMEC’s ultra-low-power electrocardiogram sensors into wireless nodes in a short-range network, transmitting physiological data to a hub – the patient’s cellphone. From there, the readings can be forwarded to doctors via a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. They can also be displayed on the phone or sound an alarm when things are about to go wrong, giving patients like me a chance to try to slow our heart rates and avoid an unnecessary shock.

Julien Penders, who developed the system, says it can also work with other low-power medical sensors, such as electroencephalograms (EEGs) to monitor neurological conditions or electromyograms to detect neuromuscular diseases. Besides helping those already diagnosed with chronic conditions, BANs could be used by people at risk of developing medical problems – the so-called “worried well” – or by fitness enthusiasts and athletes who want to keep tabs on their physiological processes during training.

…

IMEC’s technology is not the first BAN, but integrates better than earlier versions with the gadgets that many people carry around with them. IMEC has created a dongle that plugs into the standard SD memory card interface of a cellphone to stream data from the sensors in real time and allow the phone to reconfigure the sampling frequency of sensors on the fly. The associated software runs on Google’s Android cellphone operating system.

Taking the technology they created and licensed to Lockheed Martin to create the HULC, Berkeley Bionics have now developed a new product that lets paraplegics walk again.

WIRED tells us more:

the exoskeleton consists of a robotic frame controlled through crutches. The crutches contain sensors; putting forward the right crutch moves the left leg, and vise versa. The eLEGS battery can enable a user to walk for one day before it needs to be recharged, according to the product’s developer Berkeley Bionics.

…

Berkeley Bionics modified the HULC to make the eLEGS extremely user friendly with a Velcro strap, backpack-style clips and shoulder straps; anybody should be able to slip it on and off in a minute or two. The eLEGS will fit most people between 5′ 2″ and 6′ 4″, weighing 220 pounds or less, and Berkeley Bionics said it was especially important to make the exoskeleton thin, lightweight and very quiet when operated.

The London Futures project is a series of postcards from the future, an attempt to visualize the affects of climate change.

The Camel Guards Parade is just one of “14 arresting images..on display at the Museum of London from 1 October 2010 to 6 March 2011″:

Traditional rituals have altered beyond recognition, along with the climate. Here, on Horse Guards Parade, horses have been replaced by camels – animals that can withstand the heat of the parade ground. The change was controversial but the London Tourist Board argued strongly in favour. Tourism remains important for London’s economy.

Jeb Corliss is a professional wingsuit pilot and BASE-jumper – so I think the following video pretty much speaks for itself.  I don’t know about you, but I needed an extra injection of wonder and awesome, today:

Jeb Corliss wing-suit demo from Jeb Corliss on Vimeo.

This and many more amazing photos via n0t.nu who explains:

Dutch photographer Martin Roemers spent ten years compiling an incredible collection of images that expose the clandestine underbelly of the Eastern Bloc. Relics of the Cold War explores and documents underground tunnels, abandoned system control centers, former barracks, rotting tanks, and destroyed monuments.