Memory and the Forgiving Internet?

It is widely bruited about that both society and the internet are utterly unforgiving. That any nude photo or youthful indiscretion will be remembered until the galaxies go dim. That teen instagrams will scandalize potential mates and employers, ruining your life, forcing you to live in gutters. But this Atlantic article -- Naked on the Internet is Not Forever -- casts doubt on both assumptions…. that those photos hang around, or that anyone really cares. 

Patrick de Justo asks, “Why are the "experts" wrong about our Internet past sticking around forever? Is it that something has changed in the way we access information through search engines in the past 10 years? Or are these two examples—my unfortunate pictures and Ms. R.'s nude pictures — just weird anomalies?”

Long ago, in The Transparent Society, I suggested that a more relaxed and forgiving society had to be an outcome of vastly expanded information flows, and all evidence since has borne that out.  Only one criterion seems to carry a stench of opprobrium that sticks hard… hatred. Perhaps “haters gotta hate,” but they lose credibility and their patterns do not become accepted, with time. And those items, the hateful pictures and/or postings, tend to hang around.

What underlies this trend for acceptance of youthful errors and minor eccentricities? Our increasing willingness to shrug, providing it wasn't deliberately harmful... and maybe that some time has passed? The last thing that any cynic would expect. Basic self-interest. 

Is part of the solution to info age quandaries simply to “chill” and worry less?  Maybe, argues Anthony Rotolo, assistant professor of social media at Syracuse University. "There's a half life to the stuff that we share on line, and it's really short,” he says. “The Internet lives on moments. It lives on what is viral right now, whether globally (like Justin Bieber getting arrested), or viral within your own social network. Then it's over very quickly. What we're seeing is that your naked pictures from 10 years ago are nowhere near as appealing as someone else's new naked pictures, which will be forgotten tomorrow anyway." 

According to this article, Prof. Rotolo credits Facebook with helping to foster this change. “As recently as a decade ago, identities on the Internet were much more protected. It was seen as foolhardy to ever use your real name online, to the extent that people even had separate credit cards for their online purchases. Under those circumstances, it was easy to pretend that embarrassing Internet pictures were something that could never happen to the average person. Then Facebook came along, forcing everyone to use their real name. And in doing so, the blue F helped embarrassing Internet pictures become a normal part of being online. As Rotolo puts it, “Facebook made us realize that anyone claiming they haven't done embarrassing things on the Internet is probably lying.”

== But there’s a downside to amnesia ==

Vint Cerf and David Brin

Google's vice president -- the great and mighty and dapper Vint Cerf -- has warned internet users to print out treasured photographs or risk losing them.  Digital storage has ballooned, mostly for the good, but the media for storage has grown ever more volatile and -- well -- unreliable. This was made worse by the retirement of optical drives (though CDs and DVDs did have their own problems.)

In what may be an historical tragedy of mis-timed technology, the Flash Memory revolution came (I believe) just one year too early! If my old Hughes Aircraft office mate Eli Harari had founded San Disk just 12 months later, we would have had time to develop an interim storage technology of real value. BLU-RAY read-write drives, capable of storing a hundred gigabytes in non-volatile - though still somewhat perishable – form, were in the offing. They would have replaced onboard DVD-RW drives in laptops and desk-tops.  I’d have loved to have one of those, as one more storage option. Alas. Thanks, Eli.

In any event, Vint raises a good point. (He was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in San Jose, California… where I also was on the program, talking about the Search for ET Intelligence: SETI.  Having dinner with Vint was the highlight of the weekend.) We should be researching strongly non-volatile memories, such as I depicted in EARTH. Hard-etched storage systems that can be relied upon, for decades, even centuries or more.

Speaking of disk drives… The “Equation” hacker consortium has achieved technical feats unseen and unanticipated, using the secret internal configuration codes of hard disk manufacturers to create hidden residence sectors for their malware that are invulnerable even to a user-commanded disk wipe.

Seriously, what does it take for all of this to become a matter for the commons?  For politics (if it still existed in America) and a demand that hardware makers create and live by open and secure standards?

Indeed, at a future time I plan to broach what I think to be a matter of basic national and international public health -- offering a standard, yearly "flu shot" against bot-nets. Such matters have been left to the private sector far too long.  Worth a try... but Norton and Kaspersky aren't solving this. If your puter hosts a bot-net, you are a hazard to public health.  Get clean -- (and we'll make it easy) -- or stop coughing on folks by getting off the Net.

== The Internet of Things and Eavesdropping TVs ==

In this very interesting article -- Before we give doors and toasters sentience, we should decide what we're comfortable with first -- Ian Steadman offers an illuminating view of the coming Internet of Things and why we ought to start having an informed and imaginative conversation, now. For example: "… last year the New York Times reported that dozens of people across the United States are now waking up each day to find that their cars won't start. They've fallen behind on their monthly payments, and so dealers are able to remotely disable their vehicles as an "incentive" to fix their debts."

Of course the uproar over the latest Samsung televisions, with their voice command feature that can send eavesdropped conversation to their "partners," shows that one or another Orwellian pitfall lie right in our path. The author quotes liberally from fine and prescient science fiction novels, including Philip K. Dick's UBIK, which add layer and nuance to an interesting piece.

More from Ian Steadman's excellent article: "There's a movement towards what's called the "sharing economy" - instead of owning a car, for example, you rent one only on the days you need, summoned with an Uber-like app perhaps. Despite the benefits this shift may have for city congestion and air pollution (we'll only need a fraction of the current number of cars in the world we have now), a change from an ownership to a rental economy (where the companies that create and sell products retain ownership instead, importantly) is a world where individual control over consumer products is reduced even further."

Bruce Schneier plumbs into the Samsung eavesdropping imbroglio, writing, "Earlier this week, we learned that Samsung televisions are eavesdropping on their owners. If you have one of their Internet-connected smart TVs, you can turn on a voice command feature that saves you the trouble of finding the remote, pushing buttons and scrolling through menus. But making that feature work requires the television to listen to everything you say. And what you say isn't just processed by the television; it may be forwarded over the Internet for remote processing. It's literally Orwellian." He concludes, "This has to change. We need to regulate the listening: both what is being collected and how it's being used. But that won't happen until we know the full extent of surveillance: who's listening and what they're doing with it." 

True enough, as far as it goes.  But Bruce never goes deep. For example, HOW do you expect to accomplish all of that, in a world where Moore’s Law inherently expands and distributes every power of vision, exponentially? 

Ironically, the only way to gain this kind of control over elites - demanding they stop using prying eyes - is to make them feel it’s likely they’ll be caught, if they stare. 

Through Transparency.

Imagination, Skepticism and Memory

== Tis all in the mind ==

How and where does imagination occur in human brains? The answer, Dartmouth researchers conclude in a new study, lies in a widespread neural network -- the brain's "mental workspace" -- that consciously manipulates images, symbols, ideas and theories and gives humans the laser-like mental focus needed to solve complex problems and come up with new ideas. 

Especially provocative: "Understanding these differences will give us insight into where human creativity comes from and possibly allow us to recreate those same creative processes in machines."  

This type of research provides real grist for new explorations at two new centers devoted to the study of the science of imagination. The new Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California San Diego has a goal " to help society become more effective at harnessing imagination." Similarly, the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University brings writers, artists and scientists together "to reignite humanity's grand ambitions for innovation and discovery."  

What of the undiscovered country of the future? Can we use our imagination and creativity to speculate about the problems we will face: See my interview: Five Burning Questions at ASU's Center for Science & Imagination.

And how is imagination connected to creativity? Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, explores the creative process, profiling a hundred talented individuals -- artists, poets, scientists and inventors -- to see how the process can be cultivated. 

==Bias and Skepticism==

An essay in Scientific American, by SKEPTIC editor Michael Shermer, discusses motivational bias -- our tendency to warp our perceptions and inputs to fit the beliefs and narratives we already hold dear.  Liberals do this, leftists and rightists do it. Mass media cater to it. Science tries to combat it - teaching students to recite "I might be wrong" - but scientists (being human) do it too. 

In Shermer's case, the belief structure that he had to wrestle with is a strong libertarian bent -- a leaning that I well-understand because I share many aspects, including a deep respect for competitive endeavors like science and markets, that brought us all our great success.  Shermer discusses how his strong libertarian leanings made it hard for him to begin taking in enough facts to re-evaluate simplistic positions on climate change and gun control.

But the core lesson is bigger than that.  It underlies how we can be marshaled into "belief armies" that follow idea-banners instead of rationally compared evidence.  It is why we like to hear what we believe reinforced, instead of eagerly seeking the argument, contrary evidence and criticism that is the only known antidote to error. Scientists are trained to (often grudgingly) overcome motivational bias.  That may be why strong interests in society are financing the War on Science.

==Memory and Technology==

Ah but is Google wrecking our memory?  In his book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, Clive Thompson argues that our brains have always been bad at remembering details. But now we've begun to fit machines into a technique we evolved thousands of years ago —“transactive memory.” That’s the art of storing information in the people around us.

Or are digital cameras messing with our memory? The "Photo Taking Impairment Effect" finds that the act of taking a photograph decreases our ability to remember the moment.

== Browsing -- for just 20 years? Really? ==

Can you believe the web browser is 20 years old? Or that MOSAIC took the world by storm ONLY 20 years ago? Either way, it makes you blink, just to imagine the world of back-then. Have a look back via Frank Catalano's brilliant essay about the things we used to take for granted.

When did you first go online?  My first extensive use was while we lived in FRANCE, using their competitive Minitel system, which was better than Compuserve and in nearly every home in France. They were trying hard to get ahead of us with a unified, centrally planned approach and it worked well, if incrementally. Everyone could check the weather, get news and order tickets...

...Then Al Gore (yes, he did not lie) pushed a bill that unleashed the Internet on the world, taking government hands almost completely off. The opposite approach than the French -- and the greatest act of deregulation in the history of history... for which he get no credit, only mockery. From ungrateful fools.

See my talk: The Role of the Internet in the Future. 

== Science marches on, despite attempts to shut it down ==

Congratulations Elon and the SpaceX team for a vital and successful Falcon 9 launch from Vandenburg of the Cassiope research satellite into polar orbit. A secondary experiment -- to re-fire the first stage after cargo separation and test a possible rocket-based recovery process -- was only partly successful. But much was learned toward what might be a breakthrough cost-saving measure. Again congratulations on this vital milestone.

Will the year of the comets wreck Martian science?  'Three operational spacecraft currently circle Mars: NASA's Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), as well as Europe's Mars Express. NASA also has two functioning rovers, Curiosity and Opportunity, on the ground on Mars. All of these spacecraft will have ringside seats as Comet ISON cruises by Mars this year, followed by Comet 2013 A1 (Siding Spring) swooping within 76,000 km of Mars in November of 2014. The comet poses risks to orbiters circling Mars -- a prospect that may lead to re-orienting and maneuvering of the craft to protect them from comet particle strikes.'  Which will be - believe me - rather difficult.  I am worried about those orbiters.

NASA's Plutonium problem - could it end deep space exploration?  Plutonium 238 is special.  Can't be made into bombs, so there was little effort to create an industry producing it.  The isotope happens to be uniquely suited for long range missions beyond the realm where solar power works. I know some of the guys trying to come up with new methods.  Meanwhile, here's a fascinating article on the subject. 

Read a summary of a way-cool conference in Washington DC, hosted by David Grinspoon and the Library of Congress, that featured author Kim Stanley Robinson, NASA historian Steve Dick and other luminous minds, talking about the human future. Should humanity build "lifeboat" colonies in space? Or concentrate on Earth?  Or give up?

Can giant-galactic black holes grow by eating quantum foam? Marco Spaans at the University of Groningen says that black holes can grow by feeding on the quantum black holes that leap in and out of existence at the smallest scale. These quantum black holes are part of the so-called quantum foam that physicists believe makes up the fabric of the Universe.

Back in 1982, while I was a post-doctoral fellow at the California Space Institute, I created a report urging NASA to explore ways to do 3D parts fabrication in orbit, allowing space station personnel to create many of their spare parts, needing only to have the software patterns "beamed up" by radio from Earth. Several potential methods were described, including today's layer-by-layer build-up method… plus a few that to this day have gone under-explored.  Many unfortunate factors -- most of them non-technical - delayed this coming to pass.  Only, now see how NASA is preparing to launch a 3-D printer into space next year, a toaster-sized game changer that greatly reduces the need for astronauts to load up with every tool, spare part or supply they might ever need.

== Cool sci-miscellany ==

Mike Halleck - "The Engineer Guy" - disassembles and explains a wide variety of cool, everyday devices like a liquid crystal display.  Very well-done mini-documentaries.  Great diversion time that beats cat videos by a long way.

Okay, Boston Dynamics is damned scary.  Their latest  robotic"cheetah" can outrun any but the three fastest humans.

Two million years ago, a supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy erupted in an explosion so immensely powerful that it lit up a cloud 200,000 light years away, a team of researchers led by the University of Sydney has revealed.

Future spacecraft may be 3-D printed -- in space, by robots.

Kinda gruesomely-cynically funny.  Scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered yet another dead and lifeless planet drifting around a silent, pulsing sun-like star over 100 light-years away, feeding their growing sense of nihilistic despair. Okay... it's for laughs.  But still.

Transparency will abound. And possibly save us. UCLA engineers have created a 1/2-pound, portable smartphone attachment that can be used to perform sophisticated field testing to detect viruses and bacteria without the need for bulky and expensive microscopes and lab equipment.

I discussed starships and asteroid mining and what it might take to bring boldness back to our civilization, on David Livingston's syndicated radio SPACE SHOW, in September 2013.

In appraising the tradeoffs between competition and cooperation in an organism, these scientists are discussing in the real world what was also covered in my novel Earth.

Fly maggots, the wonder recyclers, will save the seas by replacing the wasteful way meal for fish farms is made by scooping everything living out of the oceans… and many other cool uses. This - plus algae farming and many other looming breakthroughs could just help us to squeak by.

A fascinating chart of the relative amounts of damage - to users and to society - done by abuse of various drugs, both legal and illegal.  Marijuana (canabis) is NOT harmless! While legalizing it, I would retain a presumptive right of families to meddle if a beloved zonker is on a death-to-ambition spiral. Still, recent trends toward sanity are signs that a new generation is ready, at last, to bring a sense of proportionality to an insanely destructive Prohibition.

A golden eagle attacks and kills an adult deer.  Yipe!

Earth may have had free oxygen in its atmosphere in appreciable amounts much earlier than we had thought… about 3 billion years ago rather than the more recent "Great Oxygenization" event of 2.3 billion years ago.

What did our distant ancestors sound like? Listen to the linguists' latest reconstruction of 6000 year old Indo-European.  Kinda fascinating.

Why are our bees dying?  This matters a lot!  Become educated about this threat to our food supply.  These are the "canaries" in our environment… and their loss may cost us a lot of money.  The chief counter-measures… to get farmers to plant varicultures, hedges and flowers just along the borders of theit fields and for us to plant…(icky)… flowers!  Watch this TED Talk by Marla Spivak.

Weizmann Institute scientists show that removing one protein from adult cells enables them to efficiently turn back the clock to a stem-cell-like state.  They revealed the “brake” that holds back the production of stem cells, and found that releasing this brake can both synchronize the process and increase its efficiency from around 1% or less today to 100%.  The researchers showed that removing MBD3 protein from the adult cells can improve efficiency and speed the process by several orders of magnitude. Such on-off switches are amazing and rare.

== Finally, how to fight anti-science politics ==

The biggest victim of the recent US government shut down may have been science, as crucial experiments were cut off - including the entire research season in Antarctica. To many of those who instigated this disaster, the harm to science was not a Flaw of their plan but a Feature.

This will be a long struggle though there are possible innovations.  For example Salon Magazine has featured my proposal for a unique and potentially effective way for individual voters - one at a time - to rebel effectively against the political crime called gerrymandering. It requires no changes in law, no court decisions or ballot initiatives. We could all start this rebellion tomorrow, without any cooperation from a corrupt political caste. It would benefit BOTH Democrats and Republics as well as third parties. Above all, it would reduce the radicalization of American politics that is tearing the country apart.

==And an announcement==

First, a useful announcement: The Next National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day is scheduled for October 26, 2013.  One or more of your local pharmacies will likely accept your old pharmaceuticals free, no questions.  It disposes of them safely and keeps them out of landfills or sewers where they apparently are having ever-worsening effects on water supplies -- for example putting female hormones from birth control pills into what you drink from the tap.  Go through your cabinet!

From Brain Imaging to Parasite Infestations

After three political postings in a row, let’s take a break for a bit. I spent the last week of March back at my old alma mater - Caltech - serving on NASA’s NIAC board of advisors, helping judge which fantastic new proposals would get initial funding - possibly leading to the great space technologies of tomorrow.  I will tell you what I can, pretty soon.

Meanwhile, how about a potpourri about science, technology and changes in society?

==April Fools' Day Technology==

Google's April Fools' Day "product releases" are infamous, but this is one I sure hope they actually implement as an app. (Anyone care to try it?)  "Tap" is an implementation of two-thumb texting that would let you exchange messages truly eyes-free... via Morse Code!  (Hey, I even portrayed this in my new novel Existence (June release) without knowing of Tap in advance!) Check out the advance features they "promise"--  which I hope they will implement. Not mentioned?  Using a phone's vibrate mode to *receive* Morse  incoming messages.  Wouldn't it be a hoot if this restored Morse usage and took off?

Meanwhile, Google promised a self-driving car for NASCAR, Richard Branson "announced" his plan to take passengers to the center of the earth, and Sony lives up to its slogan -- "Make. Believe." -- with its April Fools' Day introduction of quarter-sized laptop  "with a gorgeous .75-inch by 1.25-inch high-definition display."

==Brain Science: Fiction, Memories and Parasites==

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.  "Reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on the minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Read the article in The New York Times:

"Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica... The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters. ... Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined."

* In a new MIT study, researchers used optogenetics to show that memories reside in very specific brain cells, and that simply activating a tiny fraction of brain cells can recall an entire memory.  If you read the article - the generality of the result may be overstated.  On the other hand, this suggests intracellular computation really does take place.  And if so, the Singularity may require a LOT more computing power than today’s transhumanists expect.

* High-resolution brain imaging from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) indicates an elegant simplicity in the brain’s wiring. “Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain's connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables — folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric,” explained Dr. Van Wedeen of Massachusetts General Hospital -- a pervasive 3D grid structure with no diagonals.

* I have written before about the Toxoplasma gondii parasite that millions of humans get from close affiliation with cats. (It also features in my next novel, Existence.)  Rats who are infected with T-g develop unique neural and behavioral traits that make them easier for cats to catch.  Cats are the natural T-g hosts (where the protozoans breed). So what happens when humans are infected? (55% of French people and about 15% of Americans, for example.) T-g appears to cause many sex specific changes in personality. Compared with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted, suspicious, oblivious to other people’s opinions of them, and inclined to disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and rule-abiding than uninfected women. Infected men tended to have fewer friends, while infected women tended to have more. Those who tested positive for the parasite were about two and a half times as likely to be in a traffic accident as their uninfected peers. Now, more findings associate infection with schizophrenia.



Read the fascinating article in The Atlantic: How Your Cat is Making You Crazy. T-g is just one of many parasites that are being discovered to alter their victims' behavior and even neurology, in ways that Greg Bear seems to have foreseen in his deeply disturbing novel Vitals.  It is a new frontier that makes us wonder, might some of the calamities of human behavior not always be our fault?  Might our civilization benefit simply from the right antibiotics?

==Shifting Online Empires==

Visual displays of the rise and fall of internet empires. If you track the histories of MySpace, AOL, Yahoo, and several others... Facebook may be riding for a fall.  Indeed, the interface is so bad, so cumbersome and lobotomizing, that some group with wonderfully new approaches to social media ought to eat FB's lunch.

On Star's Family Link now offers real-time tracking of your family's automobiles, enabling you to follow cars driven by teens and/or spouses, with updates sent to your PC or smartphone. On Star is advertising "peace of mind"...  Yipe.  Both creepy and inevitable.  We are SO going to have to be agile in this coming age.

Creepy... and shades of the movie Gattaca! Employers are now asking for Facebook log in information.  So they can prowl through your past postings for pecadillos, and evaluate the kinds of people you hang with?  Mind you this is inevitable, at some level. (As they portray in Gattaca.)  But where is the effective ability to look back?  The human resources folk who do this judging should somehow have to answer to the people they are nosing into. Facebook responds that users should not have to share their passwords "or do anything that might jeopardize the security of your account or violate the privacy of your friends."

Hackers are winning: The FBI’s top cyber cop offered a grim appraisal of the nation’s efforts to keep computer hackers from plundering corporate data networks: “We’re not winning,” and the current public and private approach to fending off hackers is “unsustainable. Senior officials say there is not a single, secure unclassified computer network in the United States.

==Depressing==

If you haven't reached your full quota of depression and outrage yet, have a look at accumulating evidence that pesticides and plastics have saturated us with artificial hormones that are affecting the next generation in countless ways. e.g. the age of puberty in girls has been plummeting to around ten years old.  I do not know enough to be certain that the alarmists on this issue are right in the intensity of their warnings.  (In fact, I would bet good money they exaggerate by a lurid degree!) But suppose they exaggerate by even a factor of ten.  Even then, isn't it time to boost and unleash science, and not squelch it?

==Miscellaneous==

Take a gorgeous “street-view” voyage down the Amazon...

Three new studies of using aspirin to prevent cancer, led by researchers at Oxford University, raise the possibility that a daily low dose of the drug could be effective, not just as a preventative measure, but as an additional treatment for those with cancer. This follows the finding that aspirin can reduce the chances of tumors spreading.

You will find this entrancing & captivating:  500 years of female portraits.

Someone test SWIPE -- a new method to sift Wikipedia for more complex answers than a simple keyword search.  Report back to us!