Future Tense

Every Friday, Future Tense rounds up the week’s best robot videos—from dancing automatons to military machines. Have you seen a great robot video? Send it our way or leave it in the comments.

This week, meet three biology-inspired works of mechanical genius.

1. The Robo-Guide Dog

Though they do wonderful work, guide dogs (and seeing eye ponies) for the blind have some obvious drawbacks—including passers-by who on stroking animals in spite of clear “Don’t pet me, I’m working” signage.

Enter the guide robot. The latest prototype, the third created by the Japanese company NSK since 2005, can only move 3.8 kilometers per hour, so it isn’t quite ready for the fast-paced visually impaired. But in the future, the robot might be superior to the traditional canine in some ways—for instance, by coming equipped with GPS.

Via TechCrunch.

2. PETMAN

PETMAN, or Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin, was created by Boston Dynamics, with funding from the U.S. Army, to test “chemical protection clothing.” But the bot, which many are comparing to the Terminator, will likely have other uses as well. The president of Boston Dyanmics told IEEE Spectrum, "There are all sorts of things robots like PETMAN could be used for. Any place that has been designed for human access, mobility, or manipulation skills. Places like the Fukushima reactors could be accessed by PETMAN-like robots (or AlphaDogs), without requiring any human exposure to hazardous materials. Perhaps firefighting inside of buildings or facilities designed for human access, like on board ships designed for human crews."

Via Gizmodo.

3. The Gecko Bot

Technically, it’s a “tailless Timing Belt Climbing Platform (TBCP-II) utilizing dry adhesives with mushroom caps.” But calling it a gecko robot is simply more fun. The bot’s creators, from Canada’s Simon Fraser University, hope that it could eventually be used in everything “from inspecting pipes, buildings, aircraft and nuclear power plants to deployment in search and rescue operations.”

Via the Guardian.

Even by the standards of the Internet, which is so loaded with disturbing ideas and media, the video that allegedly shows Texas family judge William Adams beating his teenage daughter is horrifying. In the seven-minute clip, posted recently to YouTube, a man with a thick Texan accent uses his belt on the arms, butt, and legs of a screaming, crying teenage girl. (If you want to watch the video for yourself, which I can’t say I recommend, it’s here.) The crime she stands accused of: downloading music illegally via a peer-to-peer network. The video was allegedly filmed in 2004, when Hillary Adams was 16.

She posted the footage to YouTube with the following explanation:

2004: Arkansas County Court-At-Law Judge William Adams took a belt to his own teenage daughter as punishment for using the internet to acquire music and games that were unavailable for legal purchase at the time. She has had ataxic cerebral palsy from birth that led her to a passion for technology, which was strictly forbidden by her father's backwards views. The judge's wife was emotionally abused herself and was severely manipulated into assisting the beating and should not be blamed for any content in this video. The judge's wife has since left the marriage due to the abuse, which continues to this day, and has sincerely apologized and repented for her part and for allowing such a thing, long before this video was even revealed to exist. Judge William Adams is not fit to be anywhere near the law system if he can't even exercise fit judgement as a parent himself. Do not allow this man to ever be re-elected again. His "judgement" is a giant farce. Signed, Hillary Adams, his daughter.

Hillary Adams explained her decision to post the video now to a local Texas news station: “My father's harassment was getting really bad, so I decided to finally publish the video that I had been sitting on for 7 years.” Two weeks ago, before the video surfaced, users on the (not always dependable) community discussion site Topix alleged that Adams was known locally for being soft on child abusers.

The video disseminated rapidly across the Internet after being picked up by Reddit. Reddit can be a strange gathering ground, a place to find both the best viral videos and some of pretty vile behavior. The site was recently in the news for its controversial “Jailbait” section, in which users post pictures of clothed, but provocatively posed, teenage girls. The site operates by its own, sometimes peculiar code of ethics, and obviously this video offended their sense of morality. Once exposed, Redditers and others began taking their own revenge, posting Adams’ home address and phone number; many responded by ordering pizzas to be delivered to his house. On a Facebook page called “Don’t Re-Elect Judge William Adams,” one person also posted the information for the local sheriff’s department and encouraged others to call and report the video; when I spoke to police Chief Tim Jayroe, he said that they have been inundated with calls since last night—as many as five in 10 minutes, from people in New York, Pennsylvania, and Arkansas as well as Texas locals. Jayroe says, “We were made aware of the video last night, and there is an ongoing investigation.” Meanwhile, the pizzas will probably keep coming to Adams’ home. Justice can’t move as quickly as an infuriated Redditer.

There is a grand tradition around the world of offended Internet denizens punishing people for not behaving, an extrajudicial “human flesh search engine.” The term, which originated in China, refers to groups using the Internet to search for details of wrongdoers—their place of employment, their home address. In one 2006 case, a woman was filmed squashing a kitten to death with her high heel for a fetish video; the video left many shocked and offended, and groups banded together to reveal her identity and shame her. In South Korea, a girl who let her dog defecate on a subway had to quit university after her name and image were splashed around the country.

When a crime horrifies us, the Internet makes it easier to indulge curiosity. Certainly I’ve looked people up on Facebook after reading a news story about a criminal (or someone whose only crime was stupidity). But when it comes to exacting revenge—even in the relatively benign form of a pizza prank—the waters get murky. While the dog-poop girl of South Korea was merely violating social mores (and being gross, frankly), Adams’ alleged crime is heinous; if the video is an accurate portrayal of what happened, then the disgust expressed around the Web is certainly valid. Is Internet vigilantism ever OK? Is it fine to engage in a good old-fashioned pizza-ordering prank? If so, when does Internet vigilantism cross the line and begin interfering with the proper judicial system?

Update, Nov. 2, 1:30 p.m.: Since this posting, Adams has admitted that he is the man in the video but claims, "It's not as bad as it looks on tape." In response to the deluge of Internet vitriole (including alleged death threats against staffers at the county courthouse), Hillary Adams has tweeted, "It is my wish that people stop threatening my father and start offering professional help. That is what he really needs."

In Technology Review, Emily Singer looks at efforts to create avatars to interact with patients at hospitals. While at first blush you might suspect that people would be reluctant to embrace a virtual nurse, research suggests that there might not be much pushback. “[P]atients who interacted with a virtual nurse named Elizabeth said they preferred the computer simulation to an actual doctor or nurse because they didn't feel rushed or talked down to,” Singer writes.

In one study, a virtual nurse was placed in hospital rooms; on average, patients interacted with the faux Florence Nightingale 17 times per day. It seems that people are more honest with computer systems that involve a human-like avatar asking about their health than they are with a straightforward, text-based question-and-answer form. Researchers creating these virtual nurses are working to bring more humanity into their systems, programming the avatars to show facial expressions and ask small-chat questions about the weather and sports to help patients react.

Of course, avatar Elizabeth can't (yet) replace the real thing. But such systems could help ease the chronic nursing staff shortage problems by freeing up human health workers to respond to patient calls for help. As the New York Times reported in May, patients who need assistance—whether they are experiencing a new symptom or just want a glass of water—often have to wait too long for care. It’s easy to imagine a computer-based system that helps triage complaints and mete out instructions in a way that properly utilizes hospital resources, sending an orderly to help an elderly patient with blankets, a nurse to handle chest pains.

Innovative approaches to staffing hospitals will become more important in the future, as the aging baby boomers require health care.

Read more on Technology Review.

In the wake of the August unrest and looting in London, IEEE Spectrum asks how technology will change reaction to riots in the future. Law enforcement attempted to use facial-recognition software and other tech to track down the summer’s perpetrators, but Willie D. Jones writes that “they found traditional investigative techniques to be much more fruitful than software,” because bad lighting, plus hoods and scarves, made it difficult to make out rioters’ faces. However, such technology is virtually guaranteed to improve of the coming years, so future rioters had better beware. In addition to facial recognition, future surveillance technology may allow for authorities to search their video databases for particular actions—say, someone smashing a storefront window—to identify crimes without a human having to watch every second of footage. Of course, the wise rioter will prepare himself: The hooded sweatshirts that foiled the facial-recognition programs in August came into fashion among the U.K.’s less law-abiding citizens in response to the rise of closed-circuit surveillance cameras.

IEEE Spectrum’s Jones displays some remarkable restraint in his piece: He manages to quote Dr. James Orwell, who is “developing recognition and tracking systems,” without making the obvious joke about the researcher’s last name. I tried, but I can’t share his self-control. While it’s not quite a traditional aptronym (in which one’s name and profession seemingly match, like a neurologist named Henry Head), it’s still pretty amazing: If your last name were Orwell, would you want to go into the Big Brother business?

Read more from IEEE Spectrum.

In college, I had a friend who majored in meteorology. If jibed about his chosen profession, he would respond, “It’s the only profession where you are actually predicting the future.”

He wasn’t quite right. (Maybe that’s why he ended up becoming a gym teacher instead.) There’s another career path for those who would tell the future without using—or claiming to use—psychic powers. Futurologists or futurists combine instinct with seemingly scientific systems like cross-impact analysis and decision modeling in their craft. Their market is primarily big companies, which will pay handsomely for advanced information about upcoming market conditions. Governments, too, have been known to listen to futurists. But the would-be prophets aren’t keen to make terribly specific predictions.

The BBC’s Iaian Mackenzie writes,

They will never say "in ten years time we will all be wearing silver hover boots or using mobile phones with built-in egg whisks".

Instead they talk in generalities—"the growth of screens", "ubiquity of information" and the "nano revolution".

This is a business of broad trends forecasting. Details will always be left to inventors, politicians or the man on the street to devise.

Companies that contract futurists' services must be happy with their performance; otherwise, there would be no market. Yet it could be that their forecasts come to fruition not just because they can read the proverbial tea leaves, but because the prediction has been made in the first place. Mackenzie quotes one futurist, the Millennium Project's Jerome C. Glenn, as saying, "There is a phrase about colonising the future, if you fill up all the mental space of a people that this is the way things are going to go, you create self fulfilling prophesies that people go in that way." If futurists insist that there will be a trend toward bigger screens, and technological companies bet on it, we will certainly see "the growth of screens" prediction come true at least in part, as the gadgets fill up stores and consumers respond.

Read more from the BBC.

Beginning today, Future Tense will round up the week’s best robot videos—from dancing automatons to military machines—every Friday. Have you seen a great robot video? Send it our way or leave it in the comments.

This week, meet five works of mechanical genius.

The Bicycle-Riding Robot
This little guy's just enjoying a leisurely ride through the neighborhood. But where's his helmet?

Via Kottke.

The Passive-Walking Robot
It's not so flashy as a robot on a bike. What's incredible about this bot is that there is no power source. Just give it a little push (and make sure its path is downhill), and it can walk up to 15 kilometers.

Via Gizmodo.

The Trotting, Jumping, Kicking Robot
This quadraped, developed by researchers in Italy, can perform a squat jump and trot at up to six kilometers per hour. Its developers hope that it could be used for search-and-rescue missions in places too dangerous for a human to venture. "You could send the robot to navigate autonomously looking for victims, for example, or teleoperate it to investigate a disaster-stricken zone," says Wired's Automaton blog.

Via Automaton.

The Hand-Clapping Robot
As is so often the case with robot videos, there's something rather creepy about these disembodied hands clapping along to "If You're Happy and You Know It" (sung in Japanese). But it's impressive nevertheless.

Via TokyoTek.

The Beer-Pouring Robot
Since the debut of Siri, Apple's voice-activated assistant, we've seen her perform many tasks. But this hack, which allows Siri to direct a robot to pour you a beer, might be the best. Happy Friday!

Via Wired U.K.

Honorable mention for this week goes out to the robot Venus flytrap. Alas, there’s no film of the robot in action. What’s the point of a mechanical Venus flytrap? Researchers from Seoul, Korea, suggest that bug-eating bots could derive energy from ingesting insects.  

In the Washington Times today, Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars: The Plan To Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, sounds a scientific alarm: The Obama administration plans to massively cut funding for NASA’s planetary exploration program. Zubrin writes that Obama’s 2013 budget would permit the continuation of a couple of projects—the MAVEN orbiter and the Mars Science Curiosity Lab—but would otherwise leave planetary exploration without much of a budget. The space astronomy program, too, faces deep cuts. This is “an offense against science and civilization,” Zubrin writes; slashing the budgets of the planetary exploration and space astronomy programs “portends the destruction of the entire American space program.” Without those two divisions of NASA, the agency will be weakened, vulnerable to complete elimination.

Zubrin vigorously disputes the idea that such cuts are necessary given the government’s financial straits. NASA, he says, “helps the economy through scientific discoveries, technological innovation and the inspiration of youth to pursue careers in engineering.”

Zubrin has elsewhere spoken in favor of private space entrepreneurship, saying in July, “NASA's astronauts have gone nowhere new since 1972, but these four decades of wasteful stagnation need not continue. If President Obama were to act decisively and embrace [private ventures], we could have our first team of human explorers on the Red Planet by 2016.” But his Washington Times piece makes clear that he still sees a role for NASA even if private enterprise enters space exploration.

Just last year, Obama told a space conference, “The bottom line is, nobody is more committed to manned spaceflight, to human exploration of space than I am.” He set ambitious space exploration goals, including a manned visit to Mars by the mid-2030s.

Read more in the Washington Times.

Does it ever feel like your smartphone is permanently connected to your hands?

A British man has become perhaps the first person in the world to make the figurative literal: Born without a left arm, he has had a dock for his smartphone built into his prosthetic limb. The Telegraph reports that Trevor Prideaux struggled to text with only one hand; he often tried to balance his phone on his prosthetic limb while typing. Now, with a docking station carved into his prosthetic, it’s easy for him to text and perform other tasks on his Nokia C7. (He wanted his prosthetic built for an iPhone, but alas, “the communications giant refused to co-operate” by giving him a casing for the prosthetics designers to use to mold the arm.)

Prideaux says that his new arm took five weeks to construct and has made his life significantly easier: “Now when I get call I can either hold my arm up to my ear or put it on speaker phone. I can also take it out if I need to. Texting is also much easier and a lot safer.” But upgrading his phone once the Nokia C7 has become obsolete might be a bit of a challenge.

It’s been said that someday, when prosthetics are superior to natural limbs, the able-bodied may consider amputating their arms or legs to take advantage of the speed or energy efficiency offered by mechanical versions. Maybe someday we’ll all have smartphone docking systems embedded within us? I hope not. Then there’d be no excuse for not taking a call.

Read more on the Telegraph.

Have you ever eyed a pair of shoes on a website, only to find them haunting you at every next stop on the World Wide Web? Do you find it creepy? Then be prepared, because advertising online is about to become smarter.

The Economist reports that advertising companies like Realeyes are developing systems that would use your webcam to track your eye movements. If you see something you like and give a facial clue—say, smiling at that dress or pair of pants—the system will note it, and the product will keep appearing as you visit other sites. If you frown, though, the system will recognize the negative reaction and won’t serve the product for you again.

Clearly, this could raise privacy concerns. But many consumers are happy to swap personal information for something of value—even if it’s just a short web video; accordingly, the Economist suggests, “One way to persuade internet users to grant access to their images would be to offer them discounts on goods or subscriptions to websites.”

Read more on the Economist.

In honor of its 25^th anniversary this week, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is getting smacking around by organizations from both sides of the political spectrum, including the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and even Americans for Tax Reform. Also onboard: technology companies like Apple and Intel. United as the Digital Due Process coalition, these groups argue that the legislation is out of step with modern technology and in desperate need of an update. In its current form, the act gives too much power to the government to listen (or read) in on citizens’ communications.

On Ars Technica, Jim Dempsey, the vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, writes,

Although it was forward-looking at the time, ECPA’s privacy protections have remained stuck in the past while technology has raced ahead. … Citing ECPA, the government claims it can track your movements without having to get a warrant from a judge, using the signal your mobile phone silently sends out every few seconds. The government also claims it can read your e-mail and sneak a peek at your online calendar and the private photos you have stored in “the cloud," all without a warrant.

The government admits that if it wants to seize photos on your hard drive, it needs a warrant from a judge. And if it wants to intercept your e-mail en route, well, it needs a warrant for that, too. But once the data comes to rest on the Internet’s servers, the government claims you’ve lost your privacy rights in it. Same data, different rules.

Why? Because in the olden, pre-cloud days of ECPA’s inception, e-mail existed on the Internet’s servers only briefly before being downloaded to a computer. If an e-mail is six months or older and is stored on the cloud used by Internet servers, it’s considered abandoned and thus is not subject to a warrant—perhaps a fair assumption in the ‘80s, but not in this era of archiving everything in Gmail, as Wired’s David Kravets notes.

While differentiating between emails, photographs, and other files stored in the cloud and data stored on a hard drive may seem antiquated, that dichotomy is valuable to law enforcement, Tony Romm writes on Politico. Romm quotes a Department of Justice official who says that the legislation “properly strikes the balance of public safety and privacy the way it is.” But if Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has his way, the DoJ won’t be happy with the legislation for long. Earlier this year, he introduced the ECPA Amendments Act to “renew the commitment to the privacy principles that gave birth to the ECPA a quarter century ago.” In marking the ECPA’s birthday this week, he renewed his commitment to modernizing the law, promising movement on the legislation by the end of the year.

Till then, don’t forget to move your incriminating emails from Gmail to your hard drive.

Read more on Ars Technica and Wired.