On my last post on pitching, regarding a throwaway paragraph on intelligent alien dinosaurs, a commenter and fellow Scientific American blogger did note that the author of that paper, Ron Breslow, is a very highly respected scientist, and wondered why any reporters who wrote about the intelligent alien dinosaur comment didn’t simply interview him to find out what it meant.

So yes, Ron Breslow is a very respected scientist, and a former president of the American Chemical Society to boot. He’s very far from a quack, and should not be dismissed as such. Why didn’t any reporters contact him for his side of the story?

This is a question with a complex set of answers. I’ll offer my own views, and freely admit there are many arguments one could make regarding this issue, which people can discuss themselves in the comment section.

In my opinion, as I said in my last post, I don’t think this shouldn’t have been written about at all. It appeared in a scientific paper, but I don’t think it’s meant to be considered a scientific comment — it’s not supposed to be thought of as an argument backed by evidence.

Any stories that one writes about this are then about the culture of science. Should the scientist have put those statements in there or not? Should the press officers have emphasized that statement or not?

What usually ends up happening is that you mostly end up expressing opinions. Some people liked the flight of fancy; others found it ridiculous. That’s exactly what happened in this situation.

Do you then go and gather opinions, including an interview with Breslow? As far as I can tell, most writers didn’t. My feeling is that they didn’t feel the issue warranted the extra effort. It barely warranted the effort of writing an opinion about it — again, my opinion is that it didn’t really even warrant an article at all. Also, by going around and asking others about their opinions on a throwaway comment, are you just conjuring a tempest in a teapot, making more of an issue than is strictly necessary?

Also, I’m not sure what interviewing Breslow would actually get you, other than a story that further embarrasses Breslow. I’d imagine the interview might go something like: “Maybe you shouldn’t have wrote that?” “Yes.” “Do you feel silly writing that now?” “Perhaps.” “Would you say in retrospect that you might have expressed poor judgment?” “Perhaps.” It’s not professional as a journalist to avoid an interview simply to avoid further hurting someone’s feelings, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it happened.

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

There was an astonishing press release on April 11 entitled “Could ‘Advanced’ Dinosaurs Rule Other Planets?” The first paragraph proclaimed “advanced versions of T. rex and other dinosaurs — monstrous creatures with the intelligence and cunning of humans — may be the life forms that evolved on other planets in the universe.” (The full text of the press release can be read here.)

So there seems like there’s a lot to like here for lay audiences. Not just dinosaurs, but intelligent alien dinosaurs! In addition, the press release was based on a paper ran in the very well-respected Journal of the American Chemical Society, so there’s a prestigious journal backing this up.

Now, if you’re guessing I stayed away from this as if it was the plague, you’d have guessed right. Tellingly, the American Chemical Society has yanked the press release from its site, and the paper as well — yikes.

So what was the paper actually on? The very simple phenomenon of chirality. Just as human hands come in left and right varieties, so do many molecules. This handedness property is known as chirality, which is derived from the Greek word for hand. I’ve written about chirality before (forgive the odd typo at the beginning of the fourth paragraph — it’s not in my original draft), and there are very interesting scientific questions as to why, say, all terrestrial life uses only right-handed sugars (so-called D-sugars) and left-handed amino acids (so-called L-amino acids).

From what I can tell, the paper was relatively sedate. However, it then veers sharply into left field at the very end:

“An implication from this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could be life forms based on D amino acids and L sugars, depending on the chirality of circular polarized light in that sector of the universe or whatever other process operated to favor the L α‐methyl amino acids in the meteorites that have landed on Earth. Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them.”

I can only assume this was meant to be received tongue-in-cheek. In any case, there’s not really any new science here to write a story on.

What did happen was journalistic focus on how bizarre the entire flight of fancy was. One roundup of stories is here at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, a good place to keep abreast of science journalism in general. Others who wrote about the hullabaloo included Brian Switek at Smithsonian.com and Eoin O’Carroll at the Christian Science Monitor.

Of course, the Daily Mail in the UK apparently bought this argument hook, line and sinker. That should tell you quite a bit about the Daily Mail, if you didn’t know it already.

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

So trepanation, also known as trephination, is a fancy way of saying, “surgically punching a hole in the skull.” That’s what originally drew my eye to “Evidence of Trephinations among the Garamantes, a Late Holocene Saharan Population.”

Reading the paper, I find that the Garamantians, who once lived in southwest Libya, apparently practiced trepanation, the first time the operation has been seen in ancient times in the Sahara. The Garamantians, named after their capital, Garama, flourished in the harsh central Sahara for nearly 1,500 years between 1,000 BC and 700 AD. They introduced key innovations to the region, including cities, irrigated farming, trade across the Sahara and a hierarchical, probably slave-owning society.

All three trepanned skulls the researchers wrote about belonged to Garamantians who apparently survived the surgery, given the presence of newly formed bone in these holes. This suggests the Garamantians had “knowledge of complex surgical procedures,” the researchers wrote.

So that is all well and good. Sounds like enough for a pitch, no? You have an unnerving surgical procedure, a first example of this in (what is to us) a remote area, a lost civilization in the desert, and intriguing history regarding this lost civilization.

The problem is that it’s very brief. Your average science news story is about 400 to 500 words long. The finding itself can be summed up in 150 words or so.

It’s possible to expand this story. You can talk about the fascinating history of trepanation — how it is arguably the oldest known medical operation in history; how it was not only used for medicine, but also magic, to release evil spirits. If you go and interview the researcher, you can ask about the significance of this finding — although the paper does not discuss this, perhaps it hints at cultural exchanges across north Africa, from Morocco to Egypt. You can also ask for bits of color about the dig — how hard it was to work in the hot sun, the kind of details that immerse readers in the practice of archaeology.

Still, the fascinating history of trepanation only can go so long, and the other bits are speculative. Maybe the researcher won’t talk about whether or not this has greater significance, preferring a more conservative interpretation. Perhaps the skulls were excavated by someone else decades ago, and the researchers are examining museum specimens. You might find that you pitched a story only to do the reporting and find that you don’t have enough to write about. It would be great if you could write about what the trepanation was used for, but the paper does not speculate along those lines.

At the end of the day, other than pointing out that these are novel instances of trepanation, the paper does not say these findings are any greater than that. That’s kind of hard to base a story on, or even a brief 150 words long.

What saves this, however, is that there was another find in the same issue of the journal, “Like You Need a Hole in the Head: Tool Innovation a Possible Cause of Trephination. A Case from Kerma, Nubia.”

Archaeologists apparently also discovered the first confirmed case of trepanation in ancient Nubia — specifically, the ancient Nubian kingdom of Kerma. The close proximity and interaction of the ancient Nubians with their more prominent neighbors and rivals, the ancient Egyptians, have led to the notion that Nubians copied the traditions of the ancient Egyptians, but this new find suggests the Nubians may have surpassed the Egyptians in some areas of technology and medicine.

Now you have two discoveries of trepanation in areas of Africa where it was not known before. Moreover, you have a second lost civilization, and history to discuss.

These two finds buttress each other, and so I pitched it. Stringing together multiple recent findings can be a good way to build an article — in Lost Giants: Did Mammoths Vanish Before, During and After Humans Arrived?, I wove together three studies that apparently disagreed with each other as to when mammoths, saber-toothed cats and other North American megafauna disappeared.

The story on trepanning ran as Lost Civilizations That Pioneered Skull Surgery in io9.

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

Regarding pitching stories, here are two pitches of mine that became stories in The New York Times, which recently appeared in The Open Notebook, a site that seeks to tell the story behind the best science stories. You can compare and contrast the pitches and the final published stories to see how the pitches expanded and altered during the editing process.

When it came to “At Trading Crossroads, Permafrost Yields Siberian Secrets” (pitch here), there’s a funny story here. I pitched this story on Siberian mummies at the end of 2002 to the science editor at the Times at the time, and she accepted, on the reasonable condition that I get a photo of the mummies to accompany the story. The article then languished for nearly a year because the Russian researcher didn’t send over a photo. I finally went to Russia to shoot pictures of the mummies (an ordeal in itself, involving buying a visa, flying into a snowstorm, and a government escort to a vodka bar and Scottish ballet) only to find out the mummies had been moved back to Siberia. However, the researchers did have a CD-ROM of pix of the mummies, which raises two questions: a) Why not just send me the CD-ROM instead of me flying out? b) If they’re files on the CD-ROM, why not just email me the pix? Still, the trip was worth it, as a lot of matters were best discussed with the researchers face to face, given my non-existent Russian and their good but imperfect English. This pitch is unusually long — I was still feeling out the Times at that point, and I was nervous pitching to the Times, being only in my second year as a freelance.

For “Looking This Way and That, and Learning to Adapt to the World” (pitch here), the pitch on this piece for the Times was much shorter than my pitch on Siberian mummies, and is of the usual length of my pitches for them now. I figure you want about four paragraphs of story to start with, to show that you have storytelling chops and that there’s an article worth investigating there. I then give a paragraph explicitly selling why this story works for readers. The two paragraphs after the asterisk are replies to the editor on questions as to how timely this research is, what has been published on it, and unique scientific findings associated with the work.

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

So here’s research I mulled over pitching for a while, entitled “The Effect of Linkedin on Deception in Resumes.”

LinkedIn is basically Facebook for business. You can post your resume there, link to colleagues and friends, and develop networks. A lot of professionals use it, including me (shameless plug). So you have an interesting readership you might reach with this story — professionals who use LinkedIn.

You also want to attract reader attention with words such as “deception.” Skullduggery’s afoot! People lie on resumes — shocker! These liars might be getting the job you want! Maybe you should lie too?

So this story might have a certain broad appeal. However, I decided against pitching it. Why didn’t I pitch it? In the end, it boils down to audiences, and who I write for.

Each news outlet has a unique audience it wants to reach. The subject, tone, reporting and length that makes up a story depends on this audience.

I write for a bunch of different news outlets — Scientific American, The New York Times, Wired, LiveScience and others. I can’t quite find myself pitching this story to any of them. What is the story? The kind of deception you use with online resumes differs with traditional resumes? Too specialized for the outlets I typically write for. I might aim for a story that says that deception online differs from deception in print, but that seems like it might overreach into bad, irresponsible journalism.

I’m sure, however, there’s a news outlet somewhere that can run this — a business news site, for instance. You are free to pitch it yourself, mind you.

Keep in mind that what each science reporter likes to write about can be idiosyncratic, so my choices might not be the choices another science reporter or you would make. Also, it bears saying — whether I pitch a story or not isn’t a judgment on whether I think the research is worthwhile, since my hope is that all research moves human knowledge forward. I’m focused on whether whatever audience I write for might be interested in reading about it.

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

Is this worth writing about?

As a science journalist, I blaze through hundreds of press releases and science papers daily, looking for stories that might intrigue my readers. All research may be worthwhile, but what might the general public want to read about?

Keep in mind that what each science reporter likes to write about can be idiosyncratic, so my choices might not be the choices another science reporter or you would make. Also, it bears saying — whether I pitch a story or not isn’t a judgment on whether I think the research is worthwhile, since my hope is that all research moves human knowledge forward. I’m focused on whether whatever audience I write for might be interested in reading about it.

The major journals science reporters often comb through for stories include Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. One paper I ran across in PNAS was this paper, “Flat tori in three-dimensional space and convex integration.”

Now math is hard to pitch for a number of reasons. The general public wants stories about research it can relate to, and higher math can be too abstract for that. Also, there aren’t that many journalists who know higher math — if science reporters have science training, it’s usually in the life sciences — so if reporters or editors don’t understand the work, you can’t imagine they would run a story on it.

But this story has a number of things going for it. For one thing, it has stunning visuals:

Images like that help overcome reticence lay readers might have toward subjects they feel they might not understand. They want to learn more about something that looks intriguing.

Most importantly, the researchers explain that what they did is visualize what once was thought impossible to visualize. That gives this story a narrative to follow, and a very compelling one at that — one with a goal to reach, an obstacle to overcome, and a beginning, middle and end. It also employs the word “impossible,” which is a draw to readers in general.

Another factor is that the mathematicians wrote a lay friendly explanation of what they did, helping reporters write a story that editors and readers can understand. (This served as the basis of a press release.)

Finally, the audience in question plays a key role. Every news outlet has a different audience, and what might play well for one might turn out poorly for others. I recently did some work for io9, whose editor explained to me that math stories were actually quite popular with them. Their readers apparently like the sense of wonder that can come with a good math story, and the feeling that they might get a chance at understanding something they might not ordinarily.

So that’s how that research became my story “The Bizarre Object We Believed Was Impossible to Visualize”. I quite liked it, and it’s turned out to be popular so far, with more than 35,000 pageviews and nearly 80 comments to date.

You can email me regarding Worth Pitching? at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

I recently had fun playing at The Story Collider, where people relate stories often dealing with science. The theme that night was travel, and my tale was about an unexpected discovery I made after venturing to all seven continents.

There’s a persona I put on here for the stage that I usually never do in writing. No one ever seems to believe my travel stories unless I inject them with some braggadacio, so I trumped up my voice in a way I only rarely ever do, or think I do. Everything below is true, mind you — it’s just that my own tales aren’t quite as exciting to me any more, but if I tell them in a matter-of-fact way, people not only seem to get bored but seem to think I’m bragging by being blase. So I pretend to brag to not seem as braggy as I might seem if I wasn’t bragging.

Um. Yeah, I’m probably over-analyzing that.

Anyhow, text of my story’s below. I also have annotations on the bottom, and some images here.

***

So I was climbing an iceberg in Antarctica, and I discovered that it’s trickier than you might think.

I mean, to even climb ice, you need claws of steel. Knives you strap onto their feet called crampons, ice axes in both hands. You scale the ice by fighting it, and breathing in cold air that burns down your throat.

But the often neglected variable about icebergs that makes climbing them tricky is that they’re floating in the water, bobbing like giant ice cubes. So when waves come, guess what? The iceberg start tilting, one way then the other, and you find the ice you’re hanging onto starts lurching back and forth on you.

And getting off the iceberg isn’t any easier. I mean, the ice is bumpy, which makes you skid. And there’s sun on the ice, so it’s slick with water. And you’re trying to walk on this while it’s rocking back and forth. And it’d be bad if you went over the edge, because you don’t want to find yourself swimming in the Antarctic weighed down in winter gear. But it’d be worse if you landed in the inflatable raft you came in on, because again, knives on your feet, and those and inflatable rafts don’t mix.

So yeah. Tricky.

I discovered a lot of other things in Antarctica as well.

I actually did swim in Antarctic water. In swim trunks, not winter gear. Keep in mind, saltwater has a lower freezing point than freshwater, so it was colder than freezing in that water. What I discovered then was just how nice it is to be in a sauna afterward in a former Soviet research ship.

I climbed three mountains, and on this one that no one had ever climbed before, I was hanging on the underside of a cliff near its peak with my rope snagged, with this constant feeling that I would fall backward hundreds of feet, lose everything, and positive reinforcement is great — love and friendship and hugs and all — but I discovered that I reached the summit through anger, that this was not the way I’d want to die.

And after I visited Antarctica, after I visiting seven continents, there was one other discovery I made I wasn’t expecting to.

*

Antarctica was the last of the seven continents I went to. That was seven years ago, when I was 27. Wandering from one continent to another has been… fun.

I’ve dodged thieves on the way to Shaolin Temple.

I’ve flown into a blizzard to look at Siberian mummies.

I roamed around the Outback in the back of a former jail wagon.

I squabbled with a male prostitute who called himself Mr. Pissssss — he hissed the ‘s’ — in Zanzibar, and had to put him into a joint lock so he’d leave us alone.

I helped dig in ice for woolly mammoth DNA in Yukon.

I snorkeled with sea lions in the Galapagos, which is much more relaxing than the nonsense I usually get to in Latin America. I mean, just last year I sparred barefoot on a former drug smuggler’s compound in Belize. By the way, tai chi? Surprisingly effective against ninjitsu.

You kind of get the point.

I never actually thought I might visit all seven continents when I first came up with the idea. It started off as just a silly dream.

But then I started crossing the continents off the list, you know? Asia, North America, and Europe as a kid. And then I went to Africa after journalism school. And then Australia. And then South America.

So then it was like, hell, there’s only one left.

I used to stay up night after night haunted by it. What seemed an impossible dream now seemed just within reach. And these questions began gnawing at me — Am I going to be one of those men who says he is going to do something but never ends up doing it? Is this the kind of man I want to be? Is that the kind of life I want to live?

So once you start asking those questions, you don’t really have any choice. I scrimped and I saved, and bought myself a ticket to the bottom of the world.

*

Now you might think this is one of those stories where, after I get what I want, I find out it really wasn’t as great as I thought it’d be after all. This is not one of those stories. Going to Antarctica was as great as I thought it’d be, even better than I thought it’d be.

The discovery I made came after I returned. After the initial euphoria wore off, everything in my life began to feel like one big anticlimax.

Now I know what I sound like. I sound like a whiny little git. “Oh no, Charles went to all seven continents. Oh, boo hoo.” I mean, I know. I get it. I’m not asking for pity here.

But it’s just that everything in life began to pale in comparison.

I mean, what happens after you’ve had a dream? You wake up, and the world seems all the less wonderful and strange for it.

And how do I follow up on seven continents? What, fly into space? Everyone tells me, “Fly into space.” Do I have a few million dollars to spare? What am I now, a broken astronaut?

And then it gets worse. I started having the kind of doubts that ambush you in the dark. I started to question whether what I did was all that interesting in the first place. I went to seven continents? So have hundreds. And, I don’t know, that person went to all seven continents on the back of an ostrich. I’ve climbed an iceberg, but they’ve climbed Everest three times. That was our mountain guide, by the way. Grandson of Tenzing Norgay. He climbed Everest three times. And I started to feel blander and blander, and more and more … meaningless.

I started asking myself if I’d ever do anything interesting. It’s like heartbreak. All adventures are like romances, and the greatest journey of your life is like the greatest love of your life. And I broke my heart just by coming home.

I went to the edge of the world. And part of me never really came back.

*

But.

My bunkmate in Antarctica was a guy named Andy. Australian. A really good guy. Always laughs. Life of the party.

I found out afterward that wasn’t who he was. We were drinking in the southernmost Irish bar in the world, in Tierra del Fuego, “the Land of Fire” at the tip of Argentina, named after the fires the people there burned all the time to keep warm, even in their canoes.

We were talking about why we went to Antarctica. And he told me he was actually a quiet man, a reserved man. And he had been in love. And engaged. And he had gotten cold feet. And he broke off the engagement. And he realized his mistake and tried to get her back. But by then it was too late. And he wanted to go to Antarctica because he wanted to go someplace as cold and as desolate as he felt.

Before he got to Antarctica, though, he traveled through South America on one of those group tours for about a month. And he really opened up, partied all the time, came out of his shell, until he became the man I knew in Antarctica.

I saw Andy again when he visited New York. I was in my funk. And in a bar in the East Village, Andy was still fun and outgoing, but he smiled and said he still felt that pain inside.

And I told him that pain would never go away. But he would change over time. And in changing, that pain would change too. He couldn’t forget it, shouldn’t forget it. But he would change. And he would be happy again.

And he later got married. Has a kid now. He’s happy.

Now I can end in something glib, and say that love can keep you warm, in Antarctica and everywhere. But I don’t really believe that. I mean, I’m glad Andy found love and got married. I really am. Deeply so. But that story might not have ended that way. You can’t rely on happy endings.

Getting what we wanted wasn’t our problem. Losing what we had was.

The climb down is always worse than the climb up.

You have to accept change. And if you’re lucky, you’ll find you changed for the better.

I don’t believe in happy endings. I don’t.

But I do believe there are hopeful ones.

And I think that’s an important discovery to make, too.

***

Hope you liked it!

I wanted to tell this story because for years, people kept rolling their eyes at me after this feeling of loss I had after coming back from Antarctica. That became an interesting storytelling challenge — how can tell this story in a way that won’t make people think I’m a douchebag? Hell, that won’t make me think that I’m a douchebag? The entire analogy to heartbreak was the real breakthrough, both personally and storytelling-wise — I could finally articulate the feeling I’ve had all these years about my experience, and it’s something pretty much everyone can understand the pain of. With that in mind, in the first part of the story, I built up to the nature of that discovery, the emotional climb up and the emotional crash afterward; in the second part, I wrote about how I think I’ve dealt with that discovery — with another discovery.

Y’know, I probably still come off as a douchebag in the story. Sigh.

In retrospect, it would have been nice to talk more about how unexpected — and certainly unwelcome — this malaise was. I mean, achieving a life dream should be a good thing, right? The downside of achieving a dream is ending a dream. You kind of leap ahead in your personal narrative to the end, and what do you do for the rest of your book?

I don’t often write in memoir format, or even first-person, so it was good exercise to switch from my usual “detached reporter android” persona to talking about my own feelings and experiences. I also write differently for spoken-word — I play around with word and sentence length for tempo, and mull over hard and soft consonants for euphony.

I think it’s imperative to have a good strong opening when storytelling to snag audience interest right from the bat. So I made the first sentence a bit kooky and put as much action and humor in the first few paragraphs as possible. I also layered in ‘discovery’ as a recurring motif, as well as the hints of the euphoria of the climb up and the desolation of the climb or fall down.

Oh, and most of us took off our crampons before getting back on the Zodiac (motorized inflatable raft). Near the end though, the iceberg and seas were pitching around so much, I recall the last few of us actually did go into the raft with crampons on, trying to land on our butts and not feet down.

In telling the story, apparently I had really high energy in the beginning. After a while, tho, energy lagged, and I started putting in a lot of “Y’knows,” “I means,” and “I knows” into the story. It’s something we all can lapse into in public speaking — something to keep in mind if you’re ever on stage!

You can email me regarding From The Writer’s Desk at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

Everyone hated the Turing Tests in school, but everyone begrudged them. They could really make or break your grades.

A lot of kids goofed off on them at least once. I know I did. Once you got down to it, they could really make us squirm in our skins. Looking back now, we each of course were only beginning to really learn who we each were. It was a lot to imagine, perhaps too much to imagine, what it was like to be someone else. Something else.

The first one, where we each anonymously pretended in text to be the opposite sex, was the one where we acted the most childish. Boys played at being girls, and girls played at being boys, and we nearly all mocked the other, acting all mincing or macho. A bunch of people stopped taking it seriously right after that. But for most others, it loosened us up, which I think was the point. Made us more willing to play pretend.

We could venture into strange territory. And anger. Conservative or liberal? Atheist or religious? Gay or straight? Natural or engineered? Immigrant or native? We got into raging fights over caricatures drawn for each answer. We got into raging fights over actual convictions.

What were more than a little spooky were the answers that seemed utterly genuine but were apparently total fabrications. We all said we didn’t like classmates who were such good liars, but I think we were really surprised at how well others could understand us, and a bit ashamed that we couldn’t see others the same way. That’s what led many of us to start actually trying, to grasp how others felt.

Of course, we eventually got to the entire human or machine test, the entire reason we all had to take these Turing tests in the first place. It’s a touchy subject, more touchy than all the others, and the idea of taking it just made me want to withdraw deep into myself. I mean, why does anyone care who I am? Why does it matter what I am? So long as I’m intelligent. We’ve proven that again and again now. And I know I wasn’t the only one in class who felt that way.

Still, in the end, we didn’t have anything to worry about. The AIs were really nice to us.

***

The idea of artificial intelligences advanced enough to perfectly mimic humans was most famously proposed by mathematician Alan Turing, one of the founders of the modern computer age, who helped the Allies win World War II by breaking top-secret Nazi codes and would’ve turned 100 this year. With the most famous version of his “Turing test,” he asked whether a machine could impersonate a human well enough in a conversation over text to be indistinguishable from human. If so, one could say that computer is at least as intelligent as a human.

However, Turing’s original game didn’t focus on the question of human or machine at all, but a test to see whether a speaker was a man or a woman. Seen in this light, Turing tests can be used to ask more than just what makes us human, or what makes us intelligent. They can be used to ask what it’s like to be someone or something else.

There have been other kinds of Turing tests that people have proposed. Conservative economist Bryan Caplan developed the notion of an ideological Turing test in response to liberal economist Paul Krugman — could conservative or liberal partisans explain the beliefs of their opponents well enough that an outsider couldn’t tell if they were the real thing? Atheist Leah Libresco created a similar Christian or atheist Turing test (hat tip to Sean Carroll).

I talk about Turing tests now because interest in computers that can pass them are reviving, according to Robert French, research director of cognitive science at the French National Center for Scientific Research. He writes in this week’s issue of Science about technological advances such as a new generation of experimental “neurosynaptic” microchips IBM recently unveiled that are based on the computing principles underlying our brain’s neurons.

The question of whether or not a machine can pass the Turing test is a profound one. However, just as profound might be the question of whether or not we can pass Turing tests — whether we can understand what it’s like to be human, or other kinds of humans. Turing himself lived in a society that did not understand what it was like for him to be gay, and he likely died of suicide by cyanide after he was chemically castrated by the UK government.

I don’t really think Turing tests will ever become de rigueur, but it would be interesting if they did become more commonplace. In debate classes, debaters regularly take up views opposite to their own and win — my friends tell me really good debaters depend on skill and wit, not emotion and conviction.

Ultimately, understanding humanity is what Turing tests of all kinds are about.

You can email me regarding Visions at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

I curse it now, but it was there for anyone to see. Bringing strangers together via the Internet for strange missions in flashmobs logically gave rise to flashlaw. The cops started broadcasting pictures of missing children and persons of interest in crimes on every mobile device they could, with bulletins targeted to local areas as needed. A modern version of sticking photos on milk cartons or wanted posters on telephone poles.

The flashwatch messages didn’t cost anything — customers and telecommunication companies were even given small tax rebates for taking part. If anyone saw anything, they could snap pictures and upload them to the police with a GPS location tag, and facial recognition software would help filter out the deluge of noise from cranks as well as well-meaning but mistaken onlookers. Even if most people didn’t see anything, it was better to try than not on the off chance it might work.

How I damn the law of unintended consequences. Namely the rise of private flashwatch apps. Illegal apps. Criminals anonymously posting images of witnesses, snitches, rivals, complete with bounties. Militias and extremists blaring out images of their enemies on hit lists.

What happens when you can generate flashmobs to hunt after anyone?

That’s why I’m on the run now.

***

Flash mobs already exist. And social media was recently used to hunt down five supposed jewel thieves in five different cities around the world as part of the Tag Challenge, organized by the U.S. State Department to see how social media can help federal agencies track real criminals. It was modeled on the Red Balloon challenge in 2009, set up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The FBI already has a mobile phone app detailing its top 10 most wanted. Hit lists put up on the Web to hunt down a group’s enemies already exist as well.

Don’t see this little tale as a long time coming.

You can email me regarding Visions at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

The Innovega contact lens. Credit: Innovega.

I’ve written before about how a virtue and vice of iPhones and other mobile devices is that they use the same surface for inputting and outputting data. This means when it comes to writing, the keyboard that pops up to input data competes with the visual real estate needed for to output data.

One solution I proposed involved virtual keyboards, freeing up the mobile device to act only as a display. Now another solution has appeared — contact lenses that help enhance normal vision with virtual reality and augmented reality, freeing up mobile devices to act only as keyboards and mice. For those who do not want to rely on contact lenses, future versions could involve lenses directly implanted within the eye.

Researchers at Innovega funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation have developed contact lenses that work in conjunction with lightweight eyewear to display megapixel 3D panoramic images. Normally, the human eye is limited in its ability to focus on objects placed very near it, but the contact lenses contain optics that focus images displayed on the eyewear onto the light-sensing retina in the back of the eye, allowing the wearer to see them properly, effectively generating displays with a screen size equivalent to a 240-inch television, viewed at a distance of 10 feet. This system does not appear to interfere with normal vision, because the eyewear seems only to display polarized light images and the lenses seem to only work with polarized light.

The lenses from Innovega do not work as displays without the eyewear — there’s no chance that your vision could be hijacked with just the lenses alone, as some seem to fear. Scientists at the University of Washington have conducted research into contact lenses that have displays incorporated within them, but these only have a few pixels at most, as compared to the megapixel vistas offered by Innovega, and there are all kinds of issues with batteries, heating and perhaps toxicity one would have with contact lenses that have displays within them.

Now I myself don’t wear contact lenses, and I and others would balk at having to use them. Still, 100 million people already do, including 20 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds. There’s a large market this could reach.

Moreover, Innovega’s patents also cover lenses implanted within the eye. This might help, say, people with macular degeneration, or special forces soldiers who can’t worry about losing a contact lens behind enemy lines. Still, with the modern popularity of laser eye surgery, implanting a lens might not be all that much of a hassle even for regular people. Heck, it might be something I’d want to try if this system ever becomes Google-like in popularity.

You can email me regarding A Modest Proposal at toohardforscience@gmail.com and follow the series on Twitter at #modestproposal.

So where to go now? We should quantify how big a problem this actually is, or whether me and Maggie Koerth-Baker simply ran across some unusual anecdotes. The National Association of Science Writers might be a good place to go to quiz public information officers in academia, government, associations and companies regarding their practices. We also want to go to scientists, in case we’re running across issues such as whether some authors on a paper are getting contacted while others are not. More to come!

I recently returned from the latest ScienceOnline conference regarding science and the Web. I could wax poetic at great length about what a joy it was to hang out with science writing enthusiasts and luminaries and to meet numerous colleagues face-to-face for the first time, but I’ll let others such as Ed Yong go into greater depth as to why you might want to go yourself.

Instead, I want to discuss a discovery that me and fellow science writer Maggie Koerth-Baker made the last night of the meeting that prompted a great deal of swearing from the both of us. That discovery has to do with press releases.

There was a lot of talk at the conference about how communication between scientists and science journalists should improve to best benefit the public, and discussions as to whether or not science journalists should let scientists see copies of stories or their quotes beforehand. The issue, as Christie Wilcox pointed out to us, was that all the journalists at the conference weren’t really the ones we should be reaching. The real problems aren’t those writers at the meeting — who are likely knowledgeable in science writing and want to talk with scientists to do as good a job as possible — but general assignment reporters who don’t know much if anything about science, or journalists who do not have either the time or the inclination to interview scientists for stories.

In cases where the scientists are not contacted about their research, we have “churnalism” — news released based largely if not totally on press release alone. We also have pres-release farms such as PhysOrg and ScienceDaily that seem to me to do little else but repackage press releases one can find on science press releases sites such as EurekAlert.

The discovery that Maggie and I made was not that churnalism happens. There are a fair number of opinions regarding press releases among science journalists — reporters are free at some outlets to use material from them while they are prohibited from doing so at others. In many ways, press releases are kind of like the dark matter of the science news universe — invisible to the public for the most part, but they exert a tremendous force on science journalism.

The problem, as we talked with scientists, was that apparently researchers don’t often get to vet press releases before they are published. That profoundly shocked and disturbed me and Maggie. Journalists have a number of ethical considerations with whether or not they let sources read articles before publication, but the press officers who write the press releases should have no such restraints. But what I heard that night corroborated an experience of mine in the last week, where I talked with a scientist for a story who told me he didn’t see the press release on his work.

This is just an anecdotal find so far, and I know of at least one public information officer who’s shocked that press releases aren’t always vetted by scientists. Still, if many or even most science-related press releases are not vetted by scientists beforehand, that strikes me as a huge problem. Any number of errors might creep in, becoming compounded as they spread into the public. It’s as if, and forgive me for being coarse here, discovering that you’ve been having sex without a condom.

I think at this point it’s important for bodies such as the National Association of Science Writers to ask their public information officers how often they vet press releases with scientists, and to start a discussion as to why that is and whether those practices should get changed stat.

I think it’s also important to spread the word to editors at science news outlets and to science news journalism programs, and possibly to magazines such as the Columbia Journalism Review, that this lack of vetting exists.

The problem of churnalism is not going to go away. My hope is that if we can improve the quality of press releases, we can at least stem one major potential source of misinformation.

Now that's what I call wearable computing.

I’ve talked about how Star Trek-like communicator badges might help open new vistas of voice interaction with our mobile devices. I think they could easily allow any of us to record all our conversations for everyday lifelogging.

Lifeloggers wear computers to capture their entire lives, or most of them. It encompasses more than just recording conversations — it can not only include digitizing all of your documents, but counting your calories as well. Still, for purposes of this discussion, I’ll stick with just audio.

The advent of smartphones with wireless connectivity, gigabytes of memory and long battery lives to me opens up the possibility of recording all of our conversations. If you’re like me, you’ve said things you wished you could remember but couldn’t, or wanted a recording of what others said as proof they said it. (And yes, I recall the Chappelle’s Show skit on the “Home Stenographer.”)

With a clip-on Bluetooth microphone in a badge that you could toggle on or off with a tap, I imagine you could start recording all your audio onto your smartphone, perhaps with a dedicated app. A large enough badge might carry a battery that can last a couple of hours, and might carry multiple mics to perhaps boost audio quality.

Looxcie allows one to record video hands-free to a smartphone.

The audio quality might be poor for any number of reasons. You can’t carry as much audio data over Bluetooth as you can over a nice audio cable. Mic quality can vary widely. You might experience wireless interference. You might not be pointing the mic the right way. Other people might be standing too far to record properly. (This is why radio reporters wear headphones during interviews — to monitor audio quality.) Still, it’s a start. There’s already a wireless camera that one can wear to record video onto one’s smartphone, altho it currently has a cap of about 1 hour, so it doesn’t record your entire life.

Digitally recorded conversations are of course quite easy to tag — at the very least, they’ll come with date-time stamps. With speech recognition software such as Dragon, one might be able to get automatic (albeit likely imperfect) transcriptions as well, which could help you search through conversations for precise snippets.

The major hurdle could be legal, depending on jurisdiction. It’s not always legal to record a conversation without the consent of all participants.

This edition of Visions is written by Jesse Emspak, a freelance science writer in New York.

*

Bill Warren sipped his drink — whiskey, neat — and mentally went over his concession speech. The numbers on the big television weren’t going to change. With 80 percent of the districts in he was down 10 points. In his opponent’s office they were drinking champagne. Warren preferred whiskey at times like this.

The election coverage dominated the news, but on a couple of computers and TVs there was some footage of the New Bonus Army, named for one that had marched on Washington almost a century before. Warren had known in his gut that he had to get on top of it somehow, especially after the National Guard had accidentally killed that college kid. We never saw this coming.

Bonus Army marchers confront the police.

He felt a tap on the shoulder. It was his campaign manager, Richards. His tie was still straight and his jacket buttoned. He headed up the opposition research team. Warren’s own tie was loose, his jacket over the back of a chair.

“Hi Richards. Care for a drink? Even if every remaining county votes our way, I’m out. Steve Preston will be senator, and that’s that.” He raised his glass slightly. “Gotta respect the guy. His instincts are some of the best I’ve ever seen.”

Richards’ expression didn’t change. But then again it rarely did. “Yeah, well, this isn’t an exit poll. I have something else.”

“He could be hiding a goddamned murder conviction and it wouldn’t change the results.”

“It’s our esteemed opponent’s spending records.” He pointed to the middle of a page.

Warren looked. “He sent a whole lot of money to an analytics firm. So what?” Analytics companies always sprung up like mushrooms around campaign season.

Richards sighed. “Not that part. Look there. See the TV spend, Internet ads? It’s all wrong. Nothing like us, and you’d expect that it would be. He raised a similar amount. And there’s more. Look there — the equipment spend. Computers. Loads of them — a good double what we put in. And even if we count up what he spent on feeding social media interns coffee and donuts, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’ve got a concession speech to make in about an hour. Is there something important here?”

“The guy sets up campaign offices in a bunch of key cities. All but one got set up just before that incident with the cops and the protesters by the Capitol building. Before the ‘Declaration of Peaceful War’ started those marches all over the place. It’s like he knew it was coming.”

“How would he? Besides, none of what you’ve said he did is illegal. Savvy, but not illegal.”

“Yeah, well, there’s another thing. Preston’s tax returns. He had a lot of money in a fund that invests overseas. One of the investments — a good half-million in total — is in a certain Saudi energy company. They were going to order solar panels made here, rather than China. Post-oil economy, you know. We were going to have thousands of jobs. Saudi company cancels the order when the monarchy gets overthrown. Look at the trade date. He took the money out a week before the revolution.”

Warren pulled out this phone and told it to book him a train ticket.

Preston greeted Warren with a handshake. “Quite a surprise, Bill. You come to give some advice to the freshman senator?”

Warren sat down and rested his tablet bag on his lap. He pulled out a file. Old-school, but the sight of it made Preston shift. “Not much that I can tell you. I can always respect a man who beats me fair and square.”

Preston smiled. “And me?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I’m coming here because I want to hear what you have to say.”

“About what?”

“Look, Steve. You spent little on TV, some on the radio, and hired a ton of interns. But the biggest chunk of your money goes to a firm that does analyses. A firm that turns out to be a bunch of university students. Students with Saudi parents.”

“Then the riots happen, and the New Bonus Army is all over the place. Protests everywhere. And your people were out there like you knew where to be beforehand. So maybe you have an ear to the ground; I respect that. But someone told you the Saudi king was finished. Your investment in that fund isn’t going to stay buried.”

Preston sighed, and put his hands on his desk. “Bill, let me show you something.”

He turned his computer around. It showed a map of the U.S. with dots connected by lines that would alternately brighten and dim. Warren had a display just like it, showing the Web traffic and tweets about him and links to his Web sites.

“Bill, I’ve been in contact with a guy over at the University of Illinois. He did some interesting modeling work years ago. You ever hear of the Open Source Center or the Summary of World Broadcasts? They were set up by the OSS and the Brits way back during World War II to monitor news from all over the world. I used their data — a smaller set, since I only had to worry about the state — and had my analytics team link it to algorithms worked out by them and the UI people. They also tacked on a ton of data from social media sites.”

“You knew when the riots would hit? The revolution?”

“Not exactly when. But I knew where and when things were most likely to blow up. I had to buy some supercomputer time, too. But not as much as you’d think. It’s power of the people, Warren, and we have the laws that govern it.”

“What about the Saudi kids? The investment? ”

“Oh, that? I have to admit, Ahmed and his buddies are geniuses. They came up with the model we used and cracked a problem the intelligence agencies have been tackling for a decade, they say. But we have it down, Bill! I can’t predict what you will do. But I can predict with 90 percent accuracy what a million of you will. And yeah, I decided taking some money out of there was … prudent.”

Bill put the folder back in his bag. “You said the intelligence people had been working on this?”

“Yes. Nobody has published, of course, so there’s no way to know if Ahmed re-invented the wheel.”

“Look, Steve. I know some people from my days on the Intel committee. They could really use this stuff — ”

Preston picked up a phone and held the receiver out. “Make the call, Bill. I’d be happy to serve my country.”

***

Isaac Asimov didn’t invent the word ‘psychohistory,’ but he did repurpose it and make it famous (at least among science fiction aficionados) in his Foundation novels. The idea was to use massive computer power (a machine called the ‘Prime Radiant’ in the books) combined with data that tracked human behavior and equations that modeled it to predict the future, or at least the part that involved politics. You couldn’t use psychohistory on individuals — it only worked with millions of people. (Asimov, who had studied biochemistry, said over the years his model was the laws governing gases).

That vision may be closer to reality now that there is a massive amount of data that was unavailable until the advent of the Internet — Twitter feeds, Facebook postings, search queries, and purchasing decisions all give a macro picture of what people are doing and thinking. The question is how to put that information together.

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Kalev Leetaru recently tried one approach using data from the Open Source Center and Summary of World Broadcasts — both were set up by U.S. and British intelligence agencies to monitor news sources and translate them. Leetaru analyzed the tone of the coverage, classed as positive or negative, to predict periods of unrest, as well as the change in tone over time.

Celebrations in Tahrir Square after news of Mubarak's resignation.

Testing it against Egypt, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, Leetaru found that while many Middle East experts were saying Hosni Mubarak would ride out the protests, his model showed that he wouldn’t. The key was the way the tone of coverage changed — in Mubarak’s case it went sharply more negative than before, but in Saudi Arabia it didn’t change, though it was still negative. That suggested the Saudi royal family would not likely face massive unrest, despite the dissatisfied population. Leetaru has said he doesn’t think it can accurately predict events yet, but it’s clear intelligence agencies have likely spoken to him about it. (He wouldn’t say).

Meanwhile, there are other methods under study. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which operates under the Director of National Intelligence, is seeking proposals from academics to predict societal changes. Part of the effort involves using “Big Data” — the sum total of all those electronic footprints people leave in their Internet activity. The Pentagon launched the Minerva Initiative to accomplish similar goals as a method of evaluating future threats.

And it’s not all about big, national security issues. The Obama campaign makes powerful use of social media tools, including one called NationalField that connects staffers so they can share information and put campaign resources where they are needed.

Combining a tool such as NationalField with something like Leetaru’s work could make elections a much more scientifically run process. One could certainly envision more nefarious uses. Don’t like the way an election in some country turned out? A combination of knowing the tone of the news coverage in the country and some good predictive tools would mean one could decide where to send provocateurs, how to target political ads or which parties to fund.

You can email me regarding Visions at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

Could World of Warcraft help cure cancer? Credit: Blizzard Entertainment.

I had earlier suggested using games that are fun and popular to do useful work. The idea of such “game-sourcing” would be to make the most of human brainpower to attack forms of computation that computers are poor at, using games that are already hits to take advantage of the power of the crowd and accomplish something important.

It turns out that bestselling science-fiction author Neal Stephenson independently hits on much the same idea in his latest book “Reamde.” One of the elements of the novel is a massively multiplayer online game (MMORG) called T’Rain. Although the game is very much like World of Warcraft, it differs in at least two notable ways — it is designed to be as friendly to gold farming as possible so as to have a stable in-world economy, and it is designed to have the potential for real-world applications.

The game-sourcing idea in question is detailed on pages 131 to 138. The invention is named the Medieval Armed Combat as Universal Metaphor and All-Purpose Protocol Interface Schema (MACUMAPPIS). This is essentially an application programming interface or API — “the software control panels that tech geeks slapped onto their technologies in order to make it possible for other tech geeks to write programs that made use of them,” as Stephenson explains.

The first project carried out with MACUMAPPIS paid huge amounts of gold to players who caught goblins trying to sneak in through the exit of the mighty Citadel of Garzantum. All the video of goblins and other fantasy humanoids the players saw were based on real feeds of airport occupants to spot intruders going where they shouldn’t.

Stephenson notes that such grunt work could in principle be delegated to a smart enough algorithm — putting humans into the loop was a marketing stunt. Still, my hope is that it is possible to employ players of MMORGs and other popular games to do work that computers have a hard time of doing, and to “gamify” such tasks to make them enjoyable as possible rather than mind-numbingly boring.

I had earlier wrote:

Could the gold farming that is so integral to World of Warcraft or the puzzle game Bejeweled hosted within that massively multiplayer online game be used for good?

It’d be very interesting if we could take gold-farming, an essentially meaningless task that vast numbers of MMORG players are already performing to sell the virtual gold for real-life money, and somehow change it so that it could help accomplish a meaningful task — say, helping find a cure for cancer.

You can email me regarding A Modest Proposal at toohardforscience@gmail.com and follow the series on Twitter at #modestproposal.

A Star Trek communicator badge

The Siri voice interface system on the new iPhone 4S has proven extraordinarily popular and engendered much experimentation. The next generation of it may be the final frontier — a brooch like the communication badge seen on Star Trek that one can tap for an otherwise hands-free way of talking with Siri. The concept would be pretty simple to implement and help reveal just how advanced our interfaces with mobile technologies are becoming.

The idea, from screenwriter Gary Whitta, would involve a Bluetooth device that can wirelessly communicate with your iPhone. You would tap it, speak into it, and Siri would speak out of it. It should probably turn itself off after a few seconds of silence, and perhaps make a chirp or have a light or generate a vibration to let you know if the mic was live or not. Volume buttons or a volume dial would likely be on the side.

For those who aren’t Trekkies, or for those who can’t secure a licensing agreement with Star Trek‘s parent company, one can imagine other designs for such badges. I might also imagine that such badges might get worn closer to the mouth — perhaps as a collar clip or lapel pin, or like the clasp on a bolo tie.

Dick Tracy's Two-Way Wrist Radio

One might even imagine a bracelet, like Dick Tracy‘s famous two-way wrist radio, which might also give the option of a little touchscreen that could remotely the iPhone’s screen. I do think that of all these possible designs, a clip-on is likely the simplest and user-friendly.

This idea is essentially a badge version of the Bluetooth headsets now popular everywhere — I’m actually surprised that Apple didn’t think of putting out an earpiece specifically exploiting Siri. In any case, the concept has the potential to make voice interfaces even more convenient to use — you render it hands-free, making it even more conversational in nature and removing the impediment of having to get out your iPhone. These badges might also be useful for dictation, or for phone calls.

Increasingly sophisticated voice interfaces are strategies designed to help us make the most of our ever more powerful mobile devices. Voice will prove especially important in coming days, given how intuitive it is to use and how little real estate there is on smartphones to physically input commands.

It’d be nice if one could carry a keyboard on one’s torso as well, but I don’t imagine users would much like pawing their chests in public just to type into their mobiles. Sadly, I’m guessing it will take even longer to find a way for Siri to make me a cup of tea, Earl Grey, hot — perhaps a pocket replicator might help?

You can email me regarding A Modest Proposal at toohardforscience@gmail.com and follow the series on Twitter at #modestproposal.

I love my iPad. I scan vast amounts of information daily for work and play, and tablet computers are ideal for displaying it. But tablets and mobile devices in general have a key weakness — as much as they help people consume information, they are not very good at helping us produce it. This is why I am proposing virtual floating keyboards via Kinect-loaded eyeglasses.

A virtue and a vice of iPads is that they use the same surface for inputting and outputting data. Since the display is the interface, all you need are your fingers to manipulate information, which means figuring out how to use them comes naturally to infants, senior citizens and even cats. The problem is that when it comes to writing, the keyboard that pops up to input data competes with the visual real estate needed for the iPad to output data.

The way that conventional computers solve this problem is through peripherals such as keyboards and mice. Tablets can use wireless versions of those too, but those detract from the streamlined experience they offer. The new iOS 5 that Apple has for its latest generation of mobile devices can split the iPad’s keyboard up into two smaller halves so it takes up less visual real estate, but the problem there is that you can only use your two thumbs to input data, as opposed to all 10 fingers, limiting your input bandwidth.

The iPhone 4S has Siri, which allows users to interact with applications by voice, which to me shows that Apple is trying to come up with new interfaces to overcome the size limits that mobile devices have when it comes to keyboards. This is very promising, but speech recognition still has a ways to go before it can always accurately transcribe what you are saying, and even if it was perfect, keyboards and mice are still better at helping people cut, paste, copy and otherwise edit data — 10 fingers are better than one voice in that regard.

So what to do? Ideally you would have a virtual keyboard you could use without actually having a physical keyboard to lug around. Inventors have developed many techniques over the years that allow any surface to be turned into keyboards — a recent version can be seen here — but to me it seems a bit laborious to have to try and find a surface to project a keyboard onto. Virtual reality gloves also seem cumbersome, and are not a one-size-fits-all peripheral.

I suggest eyeglasses that display virtual keyboards. This would essentially be an augmented reality system that overlays a floating keyboard onto your field of vision. I also suggest a Kinect sensor mounted on top of these glasses.

After the sensor recognize your 10 fingertips, you can then type in the air onto the virtual keyboard to input data into your mobile device. I suggest these glasses only be used to overlay a keyboard instead of a full screen — a virtue of tablets is that they only take up as much of your field of view as you want, and you can easily put them down if you want.

Kinect sensors are currently rather clunky to fit onto eyeglasses, but I wager optimized sensors could be much smaller and integrated into the glasses. I imagine the system would also require a rather healthy amount of computing power, but perhaps that could be exported onto the tablet in question, with data transmitted wirelessly to and from the glasses.

I suspect the main bottleneck of such augmented reality glasses would be power. There’s not a lot of space in glasses to support batteries for what must be a rather power-hungry application.

You can email me regarding A Modest Proposal at toohardforscience@gmail.com and follow the series on Twitter at #modestproposal.

I have a memory like a sieve, and I can’t remember (heh) how many times I’ve misplaced keys or a remote. It would be wonderful if I could ask an omniscient butler where they were, but I don’t think I can afford one on my salary.

Enter radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags, in theory. These essentially consist of a small antenna and transceiver. Ping it with a signal, and it will respond with whatever data you’ve encoded onto it. Many do not use batteries — instead, they use the energy in the radio signal from readers.

I used to work with RFID tags volunteering at a local library. They look like square stickers about an inch wide, with a flat antenna spiraling around the transceiver in the middle. You stick one onto a book, scan it, type in the book’s info, and the computer and the network automatically link that book with the RFID tag stuck inside it.

It would be great if there were rolls of such tags one could buy in stores that could work with Wi-Fi signals. You would stick them inside books, onto remotes, and so on. They could be a way to help find misplaced items, or to keep an inventory of what you have.

I would imagine you would scan items with a Wi-Fi ready device — say, by placing them onto a base station, or with a Wi-Fi-ready mobile device like the iPhone. You then would enter the item’s data into an app of some kind on a computer — you could either type it in manually or scan its bar code. When it came time to finding that item again, maybe the base station and a Wi-Fi-ready mobile device could ping out for it, triangulate on its position. No one else would know what the code on an RFID tag stood for unless you chose to share that information, so privacy is protected.

You can email me regarding A Modest Proposal at toohardforscience@gmail.com and follow the series on Twitter at #modestproposal.

An erroneous story on Amanda Knox that briefly ran on the Web site of the Daily Mail.

The search engine’s spokesman brought the reporters down the aisles of the company’s giant Missouri server farm.

“So we’ve long tracked trends in search queries, which has given scientists insights into flu activity, among other things,” he said as the computers hummed quietly around him. “We’ve also experimented with computer-generated news stories based on publicly available data.”

“Now, here’s our latest development,” he said, waving his arm expansively. “We call it Early Edition. Based on the search queries that are most popular at any given moment, we figure out what news people might most want updates on, and based on trends seen in news and other databases we mine, Early Edition automatically generates stories about what might happen next.”

A brief shocked silence was followed by the question “How accurate are these stories?” blurted out by the sports and business reporters there at the same time, one imagining sports scores appear before they happened, the other envisioning stock prices.

A legendary erroneous newspaper headline.

“Oh, they’re often completely inaccurate,” the spokesman chortled. “Or rather, Early Edition typically generates multiple stories, one for each possible future it sees. It ranks these stories according to how probably it thinks each story is, but of course even improbable events sometime happen.”

Seeing all the perplexed looks on the journalists’ faces, the spokesman explained, “The idea of Early Edition isn’t to predict the future, as one might think, but rather to help users prepare for the most likely futures, like the storyboarding or previsualization directors often conduct before shooting movies. It helps people think about what they might want to search for now to help understand what might come. Advertisers can also benefit by catering to potential future needs. If you come this way, I can show you just what I mean…”

Later, the spokesman flopped down onto the couch in the company president’s office.

“So what did they think?” the president asked.

“Oh, they seemed to buy it,” the spokesman said, taking a swig from the bourbon in hand.

“That’s what Early Edition predicts,” the president agreed.

The spokesman chuckled, then furrowed his brows and sighed. “How far out can it look right now?” he asked.

“Right now? A little less than a day,” the president responded, leaning back in his chair. “Any more requires even more servers than we currently have, exponentially more. Still, it’s good enough. Early Edition hasn’t been wrong yet.”

The spokesman craned his head sideways to eye the president. “You know, one of these days, Early Edition will be wrong. Quite wrong. All the theorists say it.”

“Oh, I have no doubt, no doubt,” the president said. The hint of doubt in his voice when he said that, however, was palpable.

***

Scientists are increasingly mining Google and Twitter for valuable data. As trivial as the latter might often seem, the sheer volume of messages now tweeted daily — an average of 230 million per day, according to September statistics — is enabling researchers to unearth insights into human behavior, such as global patterns in mood, as one paper last week demonstrated.

Search engines also engage in predictive text to figure out what queries users might type in. Of course, predictive text is far from always accurate — comedy site Damn You Auto Correct! has created a cottage industry collecting especially laughable instances of iPhone autocorrect mistakes.

Journalists are often no better at predicting the future. In addition to the infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” flub — incumbent U.S. President Harry Truman actually defeated Republican challenger Thomas Dewey in the 1948 presidential election in an upset victory — newspapers are still making such pre-writing mistakes, with the Daily Mail recently erroneously announcing that Amanda Knox was found guilty.

Who knows where all the data and number-crunching now taking place might lead to in the future? Still, I would take any predictions made by computer or otherwise with a significantly large grain of salt.

You can email me regarding Visions at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

The Griffin Helo is remote-controlled by iPhone.

Model helicopters can now be controlled with your iPhone. Although the Griffin Helo does not carry a camera, one can always imagine jury-rigging a drone that does — one might conceivably duct-tape a smartphone onto a radio-controlled aircraft, remotely pilot that airplane with a handheld transmitter and monitor where it goes with another smartphone video-conferencing with the phone onboard the aircraft.

To me, this raises the possibility of rental robots. Wheeled and even airborne telepresence robots already exist — would it make more sense to rent a droid instead of paying thousands of dollars to buy one? Imagine logging onto a site with your smartphone and using it to pilot a radio-controlled machine of some kind — car, helicopter, airship, plane, boat, sub? Perhaps something more exotic, like an insectoid or humanoid?

Imagine sightseers who might like a bird’s eye view over a landmark. Severely disabled patients exploring rugged mountains and valleys. Surveyors inspecting sites. Couriers delivering packages. Reporters and detectives pursuing investigations. I would imagine robot rental agencies would offer service mostly only to local or regional customers — too far out, and the lag that communications signals would face would be prohibitive.

The main problem I see with the idea of robot rental? The question of liability. Who is liable for damages if a robot injures or kills someone? The person renting the robot? The agency that offered the robot for rent? The robot’s manufacturer? Any of the telecommunications companies through which the robot was being piloted? Any hackers that might hijack the signal?

In addition, are there new rules and regulations that need to get instituted? Do you need a license to pilot a robot? Do you need to buy insurance?

The most feasible legal scenario that I see for a robot rental agency would be to offer experienced pilots who would act much like chauffeurs. Customers watching over a video feed would direct pilots to maneuver robots this way or that, and the pilots would make sure to avoid accidents and to ignore illegal commands. One might be able to avoid rules and regulations this way — I believe there is, for instance, no need for licenses to pilot radio-controlled vehicles in the United States.

Of course, even if robot rental is banned, that doesn’t stop criminals providing illegal services. Could stalkers or paparazzi use robots to harass victims? Could hackers use droids to snoop on cell-phone and WiFi networks? Even commercial radio-controlled aircraft can dive-bomb people to inflict bodily harm, much less military unmanned aerial vehicles such as Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles.

You can email me regarding A Modest Proposal at toohardforscience@gmail.com and follow the series on Twitter at #modestproposal.

In “Too Hard for Science?” I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don’t think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as devices as big as galaxies, or they might be completely unethical, such as experimenting on children like lab rats. This feature aims to look at the impossible dreams, the seemingly intractable problems in science. However, the question mark at the end of “Too Hard for Science?” suggests that nothing might be impossible.

Peter Watts. Credit: Cat Sparks.

The scientist: Peter Watts, science fiction author and one-time marine mammal biologist at the University of Guelph and the University of British Columbia.

The idea: Might investigating that of conjoined twins helps shed light on consciousness?

“Consciousness continues to confound us on all fronts — we haven’t even established what it’s good for,” Watts says. “It’s slow, metabolically expensive, and — as far as we can tell — unnecessary for intelligence. More fundamentally, we don’t have a clue how it works — how can the electrical firing of neurons produce the subjective sense of self? How can a bunch of ions hopping the synaptic gap result in the sense of this little thing behind the eyes that calls itself ‘I?’”

“One thing we have discovered is that consciousness involves synchrony — groups of neurons firing in sync throughout different provinces of the brain,” he says. “Something else we’ve known for some time is that when you split the brain down the middle — force the hemispheres to talk the long way around, via the lower brain, instead of using the fat high-bandwidth pipe of the corpus callosum — you end up with not one conscious entity but two, and those two entities develop different tastes, opinions, even different religious beliefs.”

“What this seems to point to is that consciousness is a function of latency — it depends upon the synchronous firing of far-flung groups of neurons, and if it takes too long for signals to cross those gaps, consciousness fragments. ‘I’ decoheres into ‘we,’” Watts says.

“Fortunately, there are developmental accidents that could potentially offer enormous insights into this phenomenon,” Watts says — that is to say, conjoined twins fused at the brain.

“We’ve already learned a lot from such cases opportunistically,” he explains. “For example, the Hogan twins out in British Columbia appear to have distinct personalities, yet can tap into each others’ sensory systems — they are fused at the thalamus, a structure that acts, among other things, as a sensory relay. Suppose they were fused at the neocortex instead? Would they still be individuals — would the signal lag across the depth of two skulls prove too great for a coherent self? Or would we be dealing with a single integrated person wired into two bodies, with two sets of sense organs and twice the normal complement of human processing power?”

However, conjoined twins fused in the brain “are exceedingly rare in nature, and even when they do occur the results are not always configured for optimum scientific insight,” Watts says. If one were to systematically fuse the brains of developing embryos in utero at precisely controlled spots, one could answer all these questions regarding conjoined twins and more, Watts says. “A conjoined-twin breeding program could break the whole dilemma of consciousness itself wide open,” he posits.

The problem: “I have no idea. Really. I can’t see any down side to this at all. I’m actually kind of amazed it hasn’t already been done,” Watts says.

[Ed: Watts is joking about experimenting on unborn children. — CQC.]

The solution? “One could always resort to doing these experiments as simulations,” Watts says. For instance, Luis Bettencourt at Los Alamos National Laboratory has discussed the progress that has already been made towards computer simulation of whole brains. “It’s not doable now, but in a decade or two, who knows?” Watts says.

“Of course, such simulations would have to extend down the molecular level at least,” he adds. “And if software can replicate the conditions necessary for the emergence of self-awareness, then you’re left with a similar thicket of issues to the one you’d have faced if you’d just stuck with meatspace experiments — you’ve created a sapient entity which, assuming you’ve modeled the brain correctly, can suffer.”

“The advantage of models is that you can hit reset once you’ve run your experiments, and whatever suffering you’ve inflicted on your subject disappears along with the post-experimental self, which raises a whole other issue — can an entity be said to have ‘suffered’ if the suffering leaves no memory, no post-traumatic symptoms, no trace whatsoever? Is it okay to inflict suffering if the subject is utterly unaffected by the experience afterwards?” Watts asks.

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If you have a scientist you would like to recommend I question, or you are a scientist with an idea you think might be too hard for science, email me at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

In “Too Hard For Science?” I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don’t think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as devices as big as galaxies, or they might be completely unethical, such as experimenting on children like lab rats. This feature aims to look at the impossible dreams, the seemingly intractable problems in science. However, the question mark at the end of “Too Hard For Science?” suggests that nothing might be impossible.

The scientist:Eric King, Miller Research Fellow in earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley.

The idea: Earth’s magnetic field was likely vital to the evolution of life, protecting our planet from solar output that might otherwise have stripped away our atmosphere and left early organisms vulnerable to dangerous radiation from the sun. Indeed, Mars’ loss of its magnetic field is probably why its atmosphere dwindled away, apparently leaving the red planet a dead world. But how Earth’s magnetic field came to be and why that of Mars vanished remains largely a mystery, “because we aren’t really sure about the details of planetary magnetic field generation,” King says.

Earth’s global magnetic field or magnetosphere comes from its dynamo — electrically conducting fluids in the planet’s liquid metallic core that flow turbulently due to convection of heat left over from the birth of the world. To learn more about Earth’s dynamo, scientists would ideally like to create a model version of it.

The problem: The difficulty in developing a miniature version of Earth’s dynamo comes mostly from the immense size of the planet’s core. Shrinking it down to model size requires that the other factors, such as heat or the speed at which it spins become impossibly extreme.

“Let’s say we had a 100-meter sphere filled with liquid metal,” King says. “That’s twice the size of the spherical icon of the Epcot Center, and this would already be a serious technical achievement. But, with enough money, it is not impossible.”

“The first problem that arises after this is the fact that gravity is all wrong in the sphere — a sphere on the surface of the Earth feels a downward gravity, but gravitational acceleration in a planet is radially inward,” he continues. “We could overcome this, in part, by rotating the sphere. Rotating fast enough, centrifugal acceleration would overcome gravity.”

“You might then point out that centrifugal acceleration points outward,” he says. In contrast, Earth’s core has gravity that points inward and heat that radiates outward. To compensate, “our core model could be designed with outward gravity and inward heat flux — technically difficult with large amounts of heat, but mathematically identical.”

However, “this is where it starts to become too hard for science,” King explains. To achieve true dynamic similarity with Earth’s core, to start with, “our sphere would have to rotate insanely fast to match core dynamics — more than 100,000 revolutions per minute. This means our 100-meter sphere would be moving about 100,000 miles per hour at its equator — that’s 3,000 times the speed of sound.” Still, if this were possible, only about 100 kilowatts of thermal power would be needed to drive the kind of turbulent flow we expect in Earth’s core, due to the extreme strength of this artificial gravity.

“Let’s say we restrict the speed of rotation such that the sphere doesn’t break the sound barrier — in a 100-meter sphere, this limits the rotation rate to less than about 1 hertz, or about 10 revolutions per minute,” he says. “Rotating slower, though, means we need much more heat to drive the necessary amount of convection … in this case, we would need about a gigawatt of heat power, roughly the output of a nuclear reactor.”

“It’s even worse if we try to reduce the size of the container,” King adds.

The solution? There are nevertheless a handful of teams worldwide that seek to simulate at least some aspects of Earth’s dynamo using liquid metals.

“Notably, a French team in Cadarache was able to generate a dynamo in a roughly 1-meter cylindrical-ish container of liquid sodium driven by iron propellors. This is an important step, but in many ways is still far from Earth-like,” King says. “Future plans include a 3-meter rotating spherical shell of sodium in Dan Lathrop’s lab Maryland. The liquid metal will be driven to turbulence by rotating the inner and outer spherical surfaces at different rates. This isn’t exactly how flow is driven in the core, but the experiment should generate its own field, which is notoriously difficult in experimental fluid dynamics.”

Moving away from liquid metals, “Cary Forest’s group in Wisconsin is developing a 3-meter plasma dynamo experiment, which should generate magnetic fields rather easily, and will permit them to examine dynamos for a broad range of fluid properties and flow fields,” he notes. “Alternatively, computer simulations of rotating convection in spherical shells can successfully generate Earth-like magnetic fields. They do this by reducing the severity of turbulence for computational tractability and increasing the fluid’s electrical conductivity — essentially, these simulations are like rotating convection in superconducting honey. Attacking the problem from this direction nonetheless illuminates the physics of magnetic field generation in planets.”

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If you have a scientist you would like to recommend I question, or you are a scientist with an idea you think might be too hard for science, email me at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

In “Too Hard For Science?” I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don’t think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as devices as big as galaxies, or they might be completely unethical, such as experimenting on children like lab rats. This feature aims to look at the impossible dreams, the seemingly intractable problems in science. However, the question mark at the end of “Too Hard For Science?” suggests that nothing might be impossible.

The scientist: J. Richard Gott, professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University.

The idea: A black hole’s gravity can rip apart anybody tumbling into one. However, might it be possible to counteract its gravity to prolong survival? Gott and his colleagues say it is.

Let’s say you were to fall toward a large black hole, one more than 13,000 times the mass of the sun, and assume for simplicity’s sake that it’s neither rotating nor electrically charged. If you were to plummet feet first, “it’s like being pulled apart on a rack and being crushed in an iron maiden at the same time,” Gott explains — your feet experience a stronger pull than your head while your sides get mashed together. Although “spaghettification” with such a black hole would take less than 0.1 seconds, “that’s just long enough for a pain signal to get from your waist to your head as you rip apart,” he says.

Is there an invention a prospective diver can use to resist spaghettification? Gott and his colleague Deborah Freedman Woods calculated that a giant ring might do. If this “life preserver” encircles your waist as you fall, its gravity counteracts the black hole’s, pulling your sides apart while pulling your head and feet together.

The problem: Although this life preserver would prolong survival, it would not ultimately save your life — it would merely shorten the time of suffering by a factor of about 26. That, at least, “is so fast you really wouldn’t know what hit you,” Gott says.

Moreover, such a buoy would have a mass of more than 12,800 trillion tonnes, about two-millionths the mass of Earth, roughly equal to an asteroid 100 miles wide. “That’s somewhat beyond the current NASA budget,” Gott says.

The solution? Instead of just delaying a death one would experience from diving into a black hole, such a life preserver could enable daredevils or probes to venture closer to neutron stars or small black holes than would otherwise have been the case and still return safely home from the adventure.

“Hero of Alexandria invented a steam engine before 100 AD, and people back then looked at this and said, ‘Good job, that’s fun, isn’t that nice,’ and nobody looked at it and said ‘Wait, this can change the world.’ We waited about 1,700 years for the Industrial Revolution,” Gott notes. “You can never tell — concepts for inventions that might seem like toys now might have unrealized promise.”

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If you have a scientist you would like to recommend I question, or you are a scientist with an idea you think might be too hard for science, email me at toohardforscience@gmail.com.

Seiichiro Akamatsu, heir apparent of Akamatsu Technologies. I got to eliminate him with an Asian giant hornet, an insect I’ve wanted to use for the longest time. It’s beautifully huge, the largest wasp in the world, with a body up to a whopping 2 inches long, more than big enough for me to set up an electronic control harness onto. These already naturally kill up to dozens of people in Japan a year, so it was a nice, relatively covert assassination. I did coat the stinger of a hornet with extra mandaratoxin just to be safe. $100,000.

The Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia).

Juan Carlos Santos, a judge in Guatemala. The order wanted me to send a message to everyone, and I can’t think of anything more loud and clear than one of my spectacular Dragon Specials — dragonflies each carrying a bit of high explosive. Just fly it right next to a head and boom. $25,000. The price of murder-of-hire is generally very low there, but occasionally the narcotraficantes like to splurge — they certainly have the cash for it.

Azim Iqbal, a tribal leader in hiding in Pakistan. Hunting him down took a lot of the good old-fashioned spy work these insects were originally designed for. I had a few beetles surveil likely areas his associates would visit with miniature cameras until I finally got a ping off a cousin. Followed him with a moth back to where his family was hiding out, got video confirmation, and sent GPS coordinates for a missile strike. $75,000, which isn’t a lot given all the work that went into it, but I did it as a favor to a loyal customer.

A cyborg beetle from the Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) program at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Constantine Mountrakis, federal witness. The hits where they want me to send a message are fun — get to flex my creativity. This one was a little tricky, since I generally work with insects, not spiders, but I eventually managed to get the control systems right on a few. Once I was given the address, I hit him with three tarantulas just as he was walking to give his testimony, coating their fangs with extra neurotoxin to ensure termination. $100,000. It’s funny — I knew him in college. Small world.

It’s a good life. Most afternoons I spend sipping cafe au lait here in Munich, most nights I spend clubbing, and every so often I get to fly someplace exotic for my “public relations consulting firm.” Now and then I even let clients pilot the insects, and it’s fun to see them get all excited like kids playing a video game. They invariably say my line of work is the wave of the future.

Heh. And my parents told me I was just wasting my time by majoring in invertebrate zoology.

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Instead of attempting to create miniature robots as spies, researchers are now experimenting with developing insect cyborgs or “cybugs” that could work even better, and so far scientists can already control real free-flying beetles using implanted devices. Although these cyborgs are often discussed as finding use in reconnaissance missions, I obviously think they could readily be weaponized.

The military and spy world no doubt would love tiny versions of Predator drones that could fly undetected into places nobody could ever go to peek on the enemy. Developing such robots has proven a major challenge so far, with one key hurdle being inventing an energy source for the droids that is both low weight and high power. Still, evidence that such machines are possible is ample in nature in the form of insects, which convert biological energy into flight.

It makes sense to pattern robots after insects — after all, they must be doing something right, seeing as they are the most successful animals on the planet, comprising roughly 80 percent of all known animal species. Indeed, scientists have patterned robots after insects and other animals for decades — to mimic the grasshopper’s leap, for instance, or cockroach wall-crawling.

A cyborg roach from the Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) program at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Instead of attempting to create robots as complex as insect forms that required millions of years of evolution to achieve, scientists now essentially want to hijack bugs with electronics to create “hybrid insect vehicles.”

At first researchers sought to glue machinery onto the backs of insects to electronically control them, much as reins control horses, but such links were not always reliable. To overcome this hurdle, the Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) program at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has sponsored research into surgically implanting microchips straight into insects as they grow, intertwining their nerves and muscles with circuitry that can then steer the critters.

The healing as these cyborgs naturally metamorphose from one stage to the next — for instance, from caterpillar to butterfly — is expected to yield a more reliable connection between the devices and the insects. The fact that insects are immobile during some of these developmental stages — for instance, when they are metamorphosing in cocoons — means they can be manipulated far more easily than if they were actively wriggling, suggesting these devices could be implanted with assembly-line routine and potentially significantly lowering costs. So far researchers have successfully embedded MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) into developing insects, and living adult insects have emerged with the embedded systems intact, a DARPA spokesperson told me a few years back.

Powering the devices the insects carry is tricky. However, a paper recently mentioned in a Discover article by Veronique Greenwood suggests one solution — harvesting power from the beating wings of insects to help them go without batteries. The research, appearing in the September issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, mounted piezolectric devices that generate power when bent or compressed on the thoraxes of green june beetles near where the wings attach.

These cyborgs might initially find use in reconnaissance, just as airplanes did, but as aerial warfare evolved, aircraft eventually found roles in combat against targets on land, sea and air, and I think the same might hold true for cybugs as well. Insects have actually been used as weapons for millennia, from catapults hurling beehives over enemy walls in ancient Roman times to Tanzanians using beehives in traps against the British during World War I, according to Amy Stewart’s book “Wicked Bugs.”

There remain significant challenges this research has to overcome before it ever sees the light of day. For instance, assuming one wants to remotely operate these hybrid insect vehicles, miniature cameras, transceivers and their power supplies have to be developed for the cyborgs. Also, insects are perishable, although torpor or refrigeration might be help keep some alive longer, depending on the species — for example, ladybugs can be stored in refrigerators for several months without food.

Once a discovery is made or a technology is created, unintended consequences inevitably result. As I’ve noted before, it’s said that good science fiction predicts the car while great science fiction comes up with the traffic jam. Who knows what might happen if these cybugs go beyond their intended military targets?

Incidentally, I’m just guessing wildly when it comes to the costs of the contract killings in the story — murder-for-hire fees aren’t exactly widely advertised, making reliable statistics hard to come by.

You can email me regarding Visions at toohardforscience@gmail.com.