Cape Cod is tweeting

Interesting glimpse of what you can do with a combination of sensors and Twitter. From Tech Review.

If you want to know whether or not the tides are high enough to get your sloop out of Ockway Bay in Cape Cod, you could consult NOAA's tide tables. Trouble is, less'n you're a pipe-smoking old-timer who's handy with the lobster cages and a sextant, they're as likely to get you stuck going in and out of the bay as they are to tell you, with sufficient accuracy, whether the already-shallow draft below your boat is enough to let you safely navigate the muddy shoals of your home port.

That's where the internet comes in, and not the kind that's stuck behind a desk, twiddling with an iPad – we're talking about the Internet of Things. Using an ultrasonic level sensor to bounce sound waves off the sea surface in order to determine its height, an XBee radio to send that data to a receiver on shore, and most importantly, an ioBridge IO-204 to relay that information to servers in the cloud, Cape Cod resident and ioBridge hobbyist Robert Mawrey is able to broadcast to his entire community near real-time data on actual sea level.

Actually, in this particular case, the Americans are just catching up. See, for example, the stuff that Andy Stanford-Clark has been doing with south coast ferries.

The iPad? Well, it’s not exactly the Apple of my eye

This morning’s Observer column.

The essence of the iPad is that it's a good device for passive ‘consumption’ of preprepared multimedia content. That’s why the old media dinosaurs are salivating about it: it seems to offer them a way of regaining control of the customer – and of ensuring that s/he pays for content. And one can understand why they are so charmingly deluded about this: all apps have to come through the iTunes store and can be charged for. No wonder Murdoch & co love the device. They think it’ll rescue them from the wild west web, where people believe that content should be free. Yeah, and pigs will also fly in close formation.

It’s when one tries to use the iPad for generating content that its deficiencies become obvious. The biggest flaw is the absence of multitasking, so you have to close one app to open another, which is a bit like going back to the world of MS-DOS…

See also my diary of a week with the device.

BP: beyond irony

Stephen Hsu posted this image on his blog under the heading “BP advertisement from 1999”. The date (1999) seems improbable, in that BP didn’t enter the US market until 1998 (when it merged with Amoco) and the logo wasn’t launched until the company rebranded itself as BP plc in 2001. That doesn’t mean that the image of the ad is faked, only that the date attributed to it is wrong. Whatever the truth of the matter, it’s clever.

LATER: Mystery solved. Dermot Casey tweets that it’s from a t-shirt made by Despair Inc..

How the Grid can ruin your alibi

This is both creepy and fascinating — from The Register.

ENF [electrical network frequency] analysis relies on frequency variations in the electricity supplied by the National Grid. Digital devices such as CCTV recorders, telephone recorders and camcorders that are plugged in to or located near the mains pick up these deviations in the power supply, which are caused by peaks and troughs in demand. Battery-powered devices are not immune to to ENF analysis, as grid frequency variations can be induced in their recordings from a distance.

At the Metropolitan Police's digital forensics lab in Penge, south London, scientists have created a database that has recorded these deviations once every one and a half seconds for the last five years. Over a short period they form a unique signature of the electrical frequency at that time, which research has shown is the same in London as it is in Glasgow.

On receipt of recordings made by the police or public, the scientists are able to detect the variations in mains electricity occuring at the time the recording was made. This signature is extracted and automatically matched against their ENF database, which indicates when it was made.

The technique can also uncover covert editing – or rule it out, as in the recent murder trial – because a spliced recording will register more than one ENF match.

The Met emphasised that ENF analysis is in its infancy as a practical tool, having been used in only around five cases to date. Proponents are optimistic about its uses in counter-terrorism investigations, for example to establish when suspects made reconnaissance videos of their targets, or to uncover editing in propaganda videos.

Dr Alan Cooper, the leader of the Met’s ENF project, said the technique is proving invaluable in serious cases, where audio and video evidence and its authenticity is often questioned.

And man made life

From this week’s Economist.

Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, the two American biologists who unravelled the first DNA sequence of a living organism (a bacterium) in 1995, have made a bacterium that has an artificial genome—creating a living creature with no ancestor. Pedants may quibble that only the DNA of the new beast was actually manufactured in a laboratory; the researchers had to use the shell of an existing bug to get that DNA to do its stuff. Nevertheless, a Rubicon has been crossed. It is now possible to conceive of a world in which new bacteria (and eventually, new animals and plants) are designed on a computer and then grown to order.

That ability would prove mankind’s mastery over nature in a way more profound than even the detonation of the first atomic bomb. The bomb, however justified in the context of the second world war, was purely destructive. Biology is about nurturing and growth. Synthetic biology, as the technology that this and myriad less eye-catching advances are ushering in has been dubbed, promises much. In the short term it promises better drugs, less thirsty crops, greener fuels and even a rejuvenated chemical industry. In the longer term who knows what marvels could be designed and grown?

The abstract of the article in Science reads:

We report the design, synthesis, and assembly of the 1.08-Mbp Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 genome starting from digitized genome sequence information and its transplantation into a Mycoplasma capricolum recipient cell to create new Mycoplasma mycoides cells that are controlled only by the synthetic chromosome. The only DNA in the cells is the designed synthetic DNA sequence, including “watermark” sequences and other designed gene deletions and polymorphisms, and mutations acquired during the building process. The new cells have expected phenotypic properties and are capable of continuous self-replication.

The Economist has a rather good article on it (which is probably behind a paywall). It includes this elegant paragraph:

If it is a stunt, it is a well conceived one. It demonstrates more forcefully than anything else to date that life’s essence is information. Heretofore that information has been passed from one living thing to another. Now it does not have to be. Non-living matter can be brought to life with no need for lightning, a vital essence or a god. And this new power will allow the large-scale manipulation of living organisms. Hitherto, genetic modification has been the work of apprentices and journeymen. This new step is, in the true and original sense of the word, a masterpiece. It is the demonstration that the practitioner has mastered his art.

Sigh. Just when I was hoping for a quiet life. Still, it’s better than cloning Jeffrey Archer.

Volcanic exile

Wonderful FT.com column by Gideon Rachman, who found himself marooned in Tel Aviv.

My reaction to volcanic exile has been a bit like the bereavement cycle – grief, anger, denial, acceptance. The only time I succumbed to incredulous rage was on the flight home to London on Thursday, the first day of the crisis, when the pilot announced that we were turning back to Tel Aviv. Volcanic ash? What an absurd excuse. Surely, this couldn’t be happening? I had meetings to go to in London; articles to write; family coming to dinner that night. I had heard of the right of return to the Holy Land, but I had no wish to exercise it myself. The situation must be fixable. As soon as we got off the aircraft a colleague rang a travel agent in London and grabbed the few remaining seats on the next British Airways flight out of Israel. We congratulated ourselves on our quick reactions, went out to dinner and prepared to leave the following morning. But the following morning, the cloud hadn’t moved. It was getting worse.

After a while it began to occur to me that my gathering gloom might have less to do with missing my family and several appointments, than with the unfamiliar sensation of being thwarted. Wealth and privilege has made babies of us all. Of course I should be able to get anywhere in the world in 24 hours! There is always a flight out. There is no logistical problem that cannot be solved with a mixture of ingenuity and money. Yet the volcano seemed strangely indifferent to the fact that I have a large credit limit on my Visa card. Its effects are surprisingly democratic. The cloud of ash would not even part for Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, stuck in Portugal – who had to fly to Rome and drive.

What’s most interesting about the #ashtag crisis is what it reveals about our technological arrogance. We’re so accustomed to being in control that we cannot comprehend not being able to change things. As Rachman says, wealth and privilege — and, I would add, technology — has made babies of us all. Gratification has to be instant. Why not go to New York for a weekend’s shopping? (I’ve never done it, but I know people who have.) A few days in Donegal? Or Nice? A weekend in Amsterdam? (I’ve done those.)

The ash cloud is instructive not just because it reveals our naive dependence on technology, but also because it’s a dry-run for global warming. If you take James Lovelock’s view of this as expressed in Gaia’s Revenge then this is what it’ll be like. The earth is a self-regulating system, and it is going to self-regulate global warming. In doing so it isn’t going to pay any attention to our special needs. And there will be nothing, just nothing, that we can do to stop it. We just have to try and adjust to the catastrophe. Which is what Mr Rachman and thousands of other stranded travellers are having to do.

Analysing political discourse

The only thing more depressing than the actual TV ‘debate’ between Clegg, Brown and Cameron is the brain-dead mainstream media ‘follow-up’ this morning. (You know the pattern: get a few randomly-selected ‘ordinary’ people and ask them what they thought about the debate. Zzzz…) So it was encouraging to find that one of my OU colleagues, Simon Buckingham-Shum (who has done a lot of work on visualising discourse and reasoning using tools like Compendium) had done a cognitive mapping of last night’s discussion. You can find his interactive map here. He also has a blog post about it. Great stuff.

LATER: The Google Blog has an interesting post about what Brits searched for during the debate. Includes this chart:

On this day…

… in 1970, the Apollo 13 mission was crippled when a tank containing liquid oxygen burst. The Hollywood version of the crisis and its resolution (which starred Tom Hanks) is one of my all-time favourite movies. I often recommend it to kids who are thinking of studying engineering because it’s one of the best advertisements for the profession that I know of. It’s interesting also to think that if a similar crisis occurred today one of our strategies would be to ‘cloudsource’ the brainstorming.

My, my, MiFi

For over a year I’ve been using a 3G dongle to access the Net when on the move. My experience has been patchy, but one of the main irritations is having to hook the gizmo to a laptop using a USB cable. (Another grouse concerned the fact that the drivers for some Linux distros seemed erratic.)

So I’ve cancelled the network account for the dongle and bought this MiFi on a pay-as-you-use tariff instead. It’s a really neat gadget. It hooks up to the 3G network and then becomes a tiny WiFi hub which sits in your pocket but gives anyone around you a connection if you’re willing to let them have the password. This means, among other things, that my iPod Touch now has a serious mobile capability. And no more drivers to worry about: if your device does WiFi, then it can talk to this device. Why can’t everything be like this?

Full disclosure: it was the inimitable Michael Dales who gave me the idea.