British Crime Fighting Drones

MD4 UAV by Microdrones GMBH via Microdrones.com

Members of the British law enforcement community who think UAVs should be used to help stop crimes just got some new evidence to back up their argument, courtesy of the Merseyside PD. Yesterday, the Merseyside Police announced the first ever arrest assisted by a UAV, in this case a quad-rotor chopper-bot that helped track down a car thief.

The Merseyside police deployed the UAV, which they nicknamed the flying saucepan, after a car thief ditched his getaway ride to hide in some bushes. Using the thermal imaging power of the UAV, the bobbies managed to track the 16-year-old perp through the underbrush, and eventually find his hiding spot.

The UAVs used by the English cops are similar to the UAV used by the Scottish rugby team, cost $62,000 a pop, can are remotely controlled from as far away as 500 yards.

To watch the Merseyside PD operate their UAV (although not catch anyone), check out the video below:

[The Daily Mail]

Growing wires

Bacteria Buzz Grey, orange and white layers on the sea bed demonstrate that bacteria have carried on weeks of electrical collaboration in this glass of mud from the Bay of Aarhus. Nils Risgaard-Petersen

Earth lacks a living neural network that connects all living things, as seen in Avatar's Pandora. But apparently some bacteria at least grow their own tendrils or nanowires to form a giant natural battery, Danish researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

Scientists have known that bacteria can create electricity when mixed with mud and seawater, and have even built microbial fuel cells around the little buggers. Now they have begun figuring out just how bacteria create electrical networks that serve as long-distance communication, at least on the microbial scale -- the distances ranged up to 2 centimeters. Yet those few centimeters equal roughly 20,000 times the body size of individual bacteria.

A research team led by Lars Peter Nielsen of Aarhus University in Denmark looked at bacteria that live in marine sediment and use oxygen reactions to process organic material. Only bacteria at the top sediment layers have access to oxygen, while the bacteria near the bottom have access to the organic material. But somehow the oxygen consumption and food consumption appeared linked, so that electrons produced in the bottom layers get transported to the top layers and react with oxygen.

Whenever the researchers cut off surface oxygen, food processing in the lower layers also fell within less than an hour. That's too fast for it to be a normal chemical reaction, and so Nielsen's group suggests that this provides additional indirect evidence of a nanowire network that connects certain bacteria.

The nanowire theory still needs direct evidence, but researchers have found more indirect proof among bacteria that live in hydrothermal vents in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. Eventually humans might harness the tiny currents in the sediment to power monitoring buoys.

[Nature]

Underwater skyscrapers

Sarly Adre Bin Sarkum's Water-Scraper Sarly Adre Bin Sarkum, via eVolo

For the last five years, eVolo Magazine has hosted a futuristic skyscraper design competition. Usually, the entrants imagine giant buildings taller than anything under construction today. However, the most impressive entry in this year's competition goes the opposite route, by dropping the building straight into the sea. This floating building would generate its own electricity and food, house thousands, and plunge deep beneath the waves.

Designed by Sarly Adre bin Sarkum of Malaysia, the waterscraper would be about as tall as the Empire State Building, but with only a couple of stories exposed above the surface. The whole building would be a self-sufficient, floating, arcology. Wind, solar, and wave power would provide energy, hydroponics and the green space at the top would provide food and oxygen, and the structure would provide housing, work spaces, and areas for recreation.

Ballast tanks would keep the structure level, like in a submarine, as would the tentacles. The tentacles would also move around in the ocean tides, generating electricity from kinetic energy.

Adre bin Sarkum deliberately designed this building to contrast with the skyscrapers that dominate the rest of the competition, and to highlight sustainable architecture.

Obviously, no one has any plans to build anything remotely like this. But if global warming throws us into a WaterWorld like future, Adre bin Sarkum's aqua-condo looks like much sweeter digs than a rickety boat captained by a urine-drinking fish-man.

[eVolo Magazine, via Geekologie]

Make your OWN google map! DIY!

Open Source Portable Panorama Roy D. Ragsdale

Google is reported to have spent millions of dollars on its Street View project. Roy Ragsdale, a student at West Point, has done a pretty nice job of putting together a portable panorama camera setup that includes GPS and Google Earth file output for under $300, using exclusively open source tools.

Anyone who has ever tried to combine open source software with off-the-shelf hardware knows that a lot of challenges can arise. Does my version of Linux have drivers for this USB camera chipset? Can I use the video camera with software that expects still images? Can my Linux box talk to this GPS receiver? Roy has done the heavy lifting by determining a valid combination of hardware and software to achieve a successful panorama. I find it kind of ironic that Roy envisioned this sort of first-person perspective device to be used in combat, while I see it being ideal to be used in protests. In either case, it fits the purpose of his class, which is called "disruptive technologies."

Hardware:

8 cheap webcams ($23.50)
1 affordable GPS ($37)
2 D-Link USB hubs ($17)

Software:

This list shows not only the software that was used to capture the images from the webcams, but also the data flow from beginning to end. Roy needed to make some changes to luvcview to pull still images while in video mode. He also had a Python script that was collecting the images from each camera and writing them to a file. It would be nice to see his code.

• UVC driver - USB Video Class driver for Linux
• luvcview - tweaked it, to get still images from video
• custom python script to capture 8 JPEG images (takes 8 seconds)
• exiftool - inject date/time into JPEG images
• gpicsync - latitude/longitude from a GPS receiver, add coordinate data to image metadata
• autopano-sift - identifies common images then aligns on a horizon
• hugin - stitches images together
• gpicsync - GPS tag panorama and generate google earth file
• PTviewer - view panoramic images

Despite Roy not making his Python script and patches available, he did a great job of describing his setup. I expect to see a lot more DIY open source panorama setups in the near future, as Mr. Ragsdale tries to shrink his design down to the point where it can be worn in a headband.

[via IEEE Spectrum]

Orangutan posts pix on facebook

Nonja the Orangutan's "Portrait of a Friend" OK, I made up the title. Nonja the Orangutan

This photo was taken by Nonja. She is an orangutan. Like many of us, she is interested in keeping her friends up to date on what she's up to in her pen at the Schönbrunn zoo in Austria. She takes and immediately uploads photos to Facebook with her specially modified Samsung ST-1000 point-and-shoot (it dispenses raisins!).

Aside from its custom photo-taking-incentive system, the ST-1000 has built-in wi-fi and Bluetooth for automatically transmitting photos once they're taken. Good thing, because USB cables can confuse orangutans.

And here we were thinking the world had turned on its head when our parents joined and proceeded to comment on everything we do on Facebook. Now, we can watch for updates from a great ape. Join her 14,700 fans today!

[Nonja's Facebook Page via CNET, Daily Mail]

Bees recognize us, apparently

Bee and Flower aussiegall (CC Licensed)

Bees need not recognize human faces when going about their pollination business. Yet scientists have now found that they can train bees to recognize the arrangement of human facial features, by rewarding the classy striped insects with sugar. That could inspire new facial recognition systems, given that bees manage this feat with brains the size of a microdot.

The bee ability to distinguish between human faces was first noticed by Adrian Dyer, a vision scientist from Monash University in Australia. But biologist Martin Giurfa from the Université de Toulouse in France wanted to better understand how bees managed to learn facial features, and so he teamed up with Dyer to carry out a more systematic test.

It turns out that bees don't consciously recognize individual people, so much as the relative pattern that makes up a face. Researchers tested this by first training the bees to recognize simple faces made of dots and slashes, and then seeing if the bees could distinguish between two different faces. The bees passed the test.

Next, the research team gave the bees a choice between new faces and a random assort of dots and slashes. The bees still ended up homing in on the face-like patterns. Equally as impressive, the bees learned to recognize stick-and-dot faces against face-shaped photographs, and still identified the correct faces without the photo backgrounds.

Other insects have continued to prompt new research on full-color night vision for drivers. Butface-recognition technology has a special place in the hearts of governments and security agencies, so we'd expect to hear some follow-up on this.

Baseball Technologies

Keeping an Eye on the Ball Up to four cameras mounted on the light towers along each foul line send a live feed to a computer, where object-recognition software identifies each player and the ball and records their every movement as the play unfolds. Here, a sample data stream from a pop fly to left field. Graham Murdoch

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This could be the year that baseball-stat freaks finally crack the “Derek Jeter enigma.” A panel of coaches has awarded the New York Yankees’ shortstop four of the past six Gold Glove awards for fielding excellence. That drives statisticians nuts, because nearly every statistical model ranks Jeter’s defense below average.

But evaluating fielding is baseball’s hardest math. There are just too many unknowns in a play. How much ground did Jeter cover? How fast was the ball moving? In essence: How unlikely was it that he’d catch the ball?

This off-season, the broadcast-tech company Sportvision will install a new player-tracking camera system into ballparks that could finally help produce accurate defensive statistics.

Sportvision’s FieldFX camera system records the action while object-recognition software identifies each fielder and runner, as well as the ball. After a play, the system spits out data for every movement: the trajectory of the ball, how far the fielder ran, and so on. “After an amazing catch by an outfielder, we can compare his speed and route to the ball with our database and show the TV audience that this player performed so well that 80 percent of the league couldn’t have made that catch,” says Ryan Zander, Sportvision’s manager of baseball products. That information, he says, will allow a much more quantitative measure of exactly what is an error.

The tech could transform how teams scout players and dole out contracts, and it will provide more in-depth analysis during broadcasts this summer. But it’s the stat junkies who are really salivating for the data. “We can pick out systematically who’s good and bad, but there’s still guesswork with our models,” says Wharton School statistician Shane Jensen, who writes models for fielding stats. “We’ll certainly be able to settle who’s the best shortstop.”

AH HA! The Windows Phone

Gadget lovers are nothing if not fickle, always ditching their older tech for pretty young things. And recently, all the attention on the iPhone and Google's Android OS has made Microsoft seem a bit like Norma Desmond, wandering around the ruins of the Redmond campus muttering "I AM big, it was the platforms that got small."

But now, with the revelation of Windows Phone Series 7, Microsoft is once again ready for its closeup.

Windows Phone Series 7: via Engadget

Microsoft built this new smartphone OS from the ground up, with the Google and Apple influences plain to see. The entire look and feel of the system has changed radically from the older Windows Mobile OS, which replicated the desktop experience on a small device. Indeed, even the code is brand new, replacing the older, program-centric focus of Windows with a more relevant Internet app and social networking focus.

As can be seen from the home screen shot to the left, Phone Series 7 integrates Outlook email, Facebook, X-Box Live and Zune music functions with the regular phone duties of calling and texting.

Beyond the OS, Microsoft borrowed more than its aesthetics from Apple and Google. The Gates Crew will also dictate very strict hardware requirements for the OS, ensuring that Phone Series 7 devices appear and function similarly, regardless of which company makes the phone or which carrier supports it.

And what a range of carriers and producers! Microsoft has already announced that AT&T, Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange, SFR, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone will support Phone Series 7 devices, and that Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC, HP, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Qualcomm will be licensed to produce them.

Ultimately, that diversity may provide Microsoft with the leg up it needs to best Google and Apple. Both of those companies are notoriously stingy about what companies can distribute and support their products, which limits the iPhone and Droid's convenience and range of software. Microsoft's business polyamory, on the other hand, will allow for easier integration of cheaper and more creative third party products.

Will this "mPhone" allow Richmond to project its past desktop OS dominance into the future world of mobile computing? Or is Gates Co. once again playing catch up with its younger, more dynamic southern rivals? With the first Phone Series 7 devices slated to hit the shelves by holiday time this year, it looks like we only have to wait 9 months to find out.

[Engadget]