Anonymous Activist Hackers Attack Wikileaks's Enemies, Bring Down MasterCard.com

Anonymous When members of Anonymous make their rare appearances, they often wear these masks, popularized by V for Vendetta. Vincent Diamante

"Anonymous," a group of hackers perhaps best known for their attacks on the Church of Scientology, have appointed themselves the protectors of Wikileaks. To that end, they've begun a full-scale attack on those who have harmed Wikileaks in the past. This is no cute hacker's mission--it's a full-on crusade that has already taken down Mastercard.com.
Several major companies have made the operation of Wikileaks much more difficult. Mastercard and PayPal both blocked all donations to the site, claiming Wikileaks dabbles in "illegal activities" (despite Wikileaks has never been formally charged with a crime). That's a major source of revenue for Wikileaks, the cessation of which is going to prove a serious problem for continued operation. Other targets of the wrath of Anonymous include Amazon, which briefly hosted the site before booting them due to concerns over terms of service violations (including proper ownership of stored documents and possible security concerns), the Swedish lawyer representing the women who are accusing Julian Assange of sex crimes, and the Swiss postal system's financial arm (which blocked Assange's accounts).
Anonymous is not really a traditional group, a fact easily divined from its name. There's no leader, and no real organization. Instead, various hackers (who often populate messageboards like 4Chan and wikis like the Encyclopedia Dramatica), working independently, identify under the "Anonymous" banner. The group, which has in the past targeted the Church of Scientology and, um, Gene Simmons, typically uses denial-of-service attacks, which flood the target's servers, often disabling them or shutting them down outright.
In this case, some 1,500 hackers operating under the name Anonymous decided to appoint themselves the defenders of Wikileaks and Assange, flooding their targets with denial-of-service attacks. Some, like Amazon, managed to fend off the attacks, but others weren't so lucky. Mastercard's site, thought to be extremely secure, has at the time of this writing been shut down for hours. (Side note: It's a nice quirk that the news coverage of this outage invariably points readers to mastercard.com--but if readers go there, they'll only be making Mastercard's recovery harder but adding more traffic to the pile!)
To Anonymous, all of these companies have been pressured politically to cripple Wikileaks in any way they can. Though Amazon, for one, has denied it, the group continues its attack, hoping to bring visibility to the fight for transparency and openness--or at least extract a little revenge. Hey, Wikileaks knows how to do security, so why shouldn't Mastercard, right?

Quality scores and ad auctions

There's some interest in how and why "quality scores" are used in search engine ad auctions. In this post, we will try to describe "why" we use quality scores; a later post will go into "how," including more information about bids.

When a user types a query into a search engine, it will typically return both natural search results and advertisements. Google and other major search engines use an ad auction to determine which ads are shown and how much advertisers pay for them.

In the auctions, advertisers enter bids that reflect how much they are willing to pay for a click on their ad -- this is called their maximum cost per click (CPC). Ads are then ordered by the product of the bid that is entered and the estimated ad quality score. People often ask why ad quality enters the formula -- isn't the bid per click enough? Why can't advertisers just buy their way to to the top ad position? To see why both components are important, let us look at a simple example.

Suppose that two advertisers are bidding on the keyword "jet airplane." Joe's Jets is selling actual jet airplanes, while Moe's Models is selling models of jet airplanes. Since jets are expensive, Joe is willing to pay a lot per click. But not many people can afford to buy jets, so Joe won't get many clicks. Moe, by contrast, is willing to pay a lot less per click, but he will also get many more clicks.

Which ad should be listed higher in the "sponsored links" section of the search results page?

What matters in this decision is not simply an advertiser's value for a single click -– the maximum CPC that the advertiser is willing to pay -- but rather the total estimated value of showing that ad: the value per click times the number of clicks that the ad is likely to receive.

The number of clicks that the ad is likely to receive depends on the historical clickthrough rate, which is an important component of the ad quality score. Thus the bid per click times the quality score gives us an estimate of the total value of displaying an ad over time. Joe's ad may have a higher value for a single click, but if Moe's ad gets a lot more clicks over time, it could easily have a greater total value. In that case, Moe's ad will be shown in the more prominent position. (Click on the image to view larger.)

The quality score gives search engines a way of aligning the incentives of the buyers, the sellers, and the viewers of ads. The search engine wants to sell ad impressions, but advertisers want to pay for clicks. The solution is for advertisers to bid on a cost-per-click basis, while the search engine estimates the total value of the ad over time: bid per click times the expected number of clicks.

This is a neat way to align incentives, but it has a problem: since the advertiser only pays on a per click basis, it may as well seek as many ad impressions as it can so that as many users as possible will be exposed to the ad. Joe might well want to buy the keywords "rocket ship" even if he only has jets to sell. Why not? Joe only has to pay if someone actually clicks on the ad.

This is where another distinct, but related quality issue arises: an ad that gets very few clicks shouldn't really be shown. It is just distracting from the viewpoint of users. The advertisers may not care much about annoying users but the search engine certainly does. Why? Because if it shows a lot of irrelevant ads, people will likely stop looking at or clicking on ads. They may develop a terrible affliction known in the trade as "ads blindness." Better ad relevance leads to a better user experience.

So search engines often apply a "disabling rule" that inhibits ads with very low clickthrough rates for a given query from being shown. Or they might set a relatively high minimum cost per click for ads that don't attract much interest from users as a way to discourage advertisers from showing ads that annoy users and deliver few clicks. A high cost per click can easily be consistent with a low cost per impression when clickthrough rates are low.

So why are quality scores important? Answer: they lead to a better auction by allowing advertisers to buy clicks, publishers to sell impressions, and users to see relevant ads.

New steps to protect free expression and privacy around the world

In a world where governments all too often censor what their citizens can see and do on the Internet, Google has from the start promoted global free expression and taken the lead in being transparent with our users. We've pressed governments around the world to stop limiting free speech and made it possible for dissidents, bloggers and others to have their voices heard.

As part of those ongoing efforts to promote free expression and protect our users' privacy, today we're announcing Google's participation as a founding company member of a new program called the Global Network Initiative. (The site, at globalnetworkinitiative.org, will be live within a day or so.)

This initiative is the result of two years of discussions with other leading technology companies, human rights organizations, socially responsible investors and academic institutions. Thanks to hard work and cooperation from all parties, the Initiative sets the kinds of standards and practices that all companies and groups should use when governments threaten internationally recognized rights to free expression and privacy.

The Global Network Initiative also offers an important commitment from all parties to take action together to promote free expression and protect privacy in the use of all information and communication technologies. We know that common action by these diverse groups is more likely to bring about change in government policies than the efforts of any one company or group acting alone.

Companies that join the Initiative commit to putting into effect procedures that will protect their users by:

• Evaluating against international standards government requests to censor content or access user information
• Providing greater transparency
• Assessing human rights risks when entering new markets or introducing new products
• Instituting employee training and oversight programs

These are things that Google does now, but joining the Initiative will help us refine our methods and maintain our leadership position. Down the road companies will be assessed on how they're doing in implementing the principles and the Initiative will report those results.

This Initiative is by no means a silver bullet or the last word, but it does represent a concrete step toward promoting freedom of expression and protecting users' privacy in the 60th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Now we're actively recruiting more companies and groups to join the Initiative and advance these critical human rights around the world.

Giving consumers control over ads

In her post to the Official Google Blog this morning, Susan Wojcicki, VP of Product Management, announced that we are making interest-based advertising available in beta for our AdSense partner sites and YouTube. Interest-based advertising uses information about the web pages people visit to make the online ads they see more relevant. Relevant advertising, in turn, has fueled the content, products and services available on the Internet today.

Providing such advertising has proven to be a challenging policy issue for advertisers, publishers, internet companies and regulators over the last decade. On the one hand, well-tailored ads benefit consumers, advertisers, and publishers alike. On the other hand, the industry has long struggled with how to deliver relevant ads while respecting users' privacy.

Last month, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission released its principles for online advertising. Likewise, other organizations interested in consumer protection and privacy also recently issued guidelines: The Network Advertising Initiative released its 2008 Self-Regulatory Code of Conduct in December; the Center for Democracy and Technology released its Threshold Analysis for Online Advertising Practices in January; and the Internet Advertising Bureau in the U.K. announced its Good Practice Principles last week. There is a consistent message in all of these guidelines: Consumers need and deserve greater transparency and choice when it comes to online advertising.

As Google prepared to roll out interest-based advertising, we talked to many users, privacy advocates and government experts. By listening to them and by relying on the creativity of our engineers, we built a product that's not only consistent with industry groups' privacy principles, but also goes beyond their requirements. We are pleased that our launch of interest-based advertising includes innovative, consumer-friendly features to provide meaningful transparency and choice for our users:

• Transparency in the right place and at the right time. When users see online ads today, they often don't know what information is being collected, who provided the ad, and sometimes who the advertiser is. We already clearly label most of the ads provided by Google on the AdSense partner network and on YouTube. With one click on the labels, users can get more information about how we serve ads, and the information we use to show ads. This year we will expand the range of ad formats and publishers that display labels that provide a way to learn more and make choices about Google's ad serving.

• Meaningful, granular, and user-friendly choice. For the first time, people will have a say in the types of ads they see by using our new Ads Preferences Manager. With this tool, users can view, add and remove the categories that are used to show them interest-based ads (sports, travel, cooking, etc.) when they visit one of our AdSense partners' websites or YouTube. To provide greater privacy protections to users, we will not serve interest-based ads based on sensitive interest categories. For example, we don’t have health status interest categories or interest categories designed for children.

• Tools that respect users’ choices. With one click in the Ads Preferences Manager or in the advertising section of our Privacy Center, users can opt out of interest-based ads altogether, although it means they will probably see advertising that's less relevant and useful on our partners' websites or YouTube. The opt-out is achieved by attaching an "opt-out cookie" — a small file containing a string of characters that stores a preference for opting out — to a user's browser. Opt-out cookies in the industry, however, have traditionally not been permanent. So Google's engineers also developed tools to make our opt-out cookie permanent, even when users clear other cookies from their browsers.

Transparency beyond privacy policies. With interest-based advertising, we’re continuing to explore new ways of communicating with our users on privacy. We've revamped the advertising section of our Privacy Center. And the Ads Preferences Manager features a video, embedded below, that explains in plain language how interest-based advertising works. All of the videos on the Google Privacy Channel on YouTube are open for comment and we look forward to hearing feedback from our users.

We’ve built our business by earning and keeping the trust of our users. And we’ll continue our dialogue with them and with other stakeholders as we develop new products to make the ads we show our users more relevant and useful.

Extending notice on the Google Book Search settlement

Last October, we announced a settlement agreement regarding Google Book Search that resolves class action lawsuits first filed in 2005 by the Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers. Last Friday, along with the authors and the publishers, we submitted a letter to the court asking for permission to extend what's called the "notice period" for an extra 60 days.

So what exactly does "notice" mean? Notice is an important part of due process. It helps inform class members of their rights under the proposed settlement and gives them a chance to opt out if they wish to. If you've ever received a letter in the mail from a credit card company or product manufacturer informing you that you're entitled to compensation under a class action, then you get the idea of what "notice" is about.

It's pretty easy for credit card companies to contact their cardholders -- they send bills to them all the time. The world's authors, publishers and their heirs are much more difficult to find. So, as the New York Times recently reported, the plaintiffs hired notice campaign specialists Kinsella Media Group to tell them about this exciting settlement, and Google has devoted millions of dollars to fund this notice campaign. Kinsella started by launching a website for authors and publishers and a direct-mail effort. Beginning in January, Kinsella published ads in newspapers and other publications all over the world from Fiji to the Cook Islands to Greenland. And of course, they also placed ads right here at home in the U.S., in publications as diverse as Writer's Digest and USA Today.

The settlement is highly detailed, and we want to make sure rightsholders everywhere have enough time to think about it and make sure it's right for them. That's why we've asked the court for permission to extend the opt-out deadline for an extra 60 days.

Google Book Search settlement will expand access

Over the last few weeks we've heard a number of questions about the Google Book Search settlement and what it means for readers. Over the coming days, we'll attempt to answer some of those questions on this blog, but first, we think it's important to explain how exactly the settlement will help expand access to books in the United States. We'd also like to remind authors and publishers who have questions that they should visit the settlement Notice website.

Have you ever gone to your local bookstore looking for a book only to be told that it’s not there? You look for it on Amazon; they don’t offer it. You go to your local library and it’s not there. But you know that it exists because you read it your freshman year in college.

Or let's say you’re a second generation American interested in reading books in your parents’ native language, Greek. Try finding more than a few books in foreign languages in most town libraries or bookstores in the United States.

Or you're a graduate student who has been doing research on your thesis for years. You think you've read every book there is to read on your topic, but then you type your query into Google Book Search, and you suddenly discover a new original book or monograph that you weren't even aware of before.

Until now, we've only been able to show these users a few snippets of text for most of the in-copyright books we've scanned through our Library Project. Since the vast majority of these books are out of print, to actually read them you have to hunt them down at a library or a used bookstore. And if you can't find them -- because the only known copy is at a library on the other side of the country--you're unfortunately out of luck.

Under the settlement that will change for users in the U.S.:

• When you find the book you're searching for, you’ll be able to preview 20% of the book over the Internet from anywhere in the U.S. If you want to look at the whole thing, you'll be able to go down to your public library where there will be a computer station with access to the whole book for free. And if you don’t want to leave home or want a copy for yourself, you’ll be able to purchase access to an electronic copy of the book. As always, if the book is old enough to be in the public domain, you’ll be able to download the whole book for free.

• If you’re at a university, in addition to your libraries' free access points, your school can obtain an institutional subscription that gives you access to most books that we've scanned. And scholars and students who don’t keep the same study hours as the library will be able to look at any book, anywhere, any time.
  
• If you are vision impaired, the settlement will open a world of books to which you've never had access. Visually impaired people will be able to search for books through the Google Books interface and purchase, borrow, or read at a public library any of the books that are available to the general public in a format that is accessible to the vision impaired.
  
• If you want to read in foreign languages, you will have access to tens of thousands of more books than you have today. Books in Spanish add up to almost 10% of the books already scanned. If you account for the difference in numbers between books in Spanish and English, the usage per book in Spanish is more than three times what it is for books in English.

The settlement won't just expand access to out-of-print books, either. Because authors and publishers will have the ability to let users preview and purchase their in-print books through Google Book Search, readers will have even more options for accessing in-print books than they have today.

For users outside the U.S., the Google Book Search experience won't change unless rightsholders specifically authorize additional uses of their books outside the United States. And while the Google Book Search settlement will only allow for improved access in the U.S., we believe that this will constitute an unprecedented test bed for the development of similar services around the world.

As the discussion continues, it's important to understand what readers stand to gain.

Wired's look at how Google sells and prices ads

Most policymakers are pretty familiar with how TV stations, magazines and newspapers sell advertising. Typically those organizations have a "rate card" with standard ad prices for a 30 second ad or a full-page print ad, and the advertiser pays the standard rate or negotiates a lower rate if they commit to buy ad space in bulk.

That's not how ad space on Google is sold. Instead, all advertisers -- big and small -- bid for their ads to appear when users search on Google for certain terms.

Admittedly Google's ad auction can be a bit difficult to understand because it differs so much from traditional ad models. That's why we have posted videos and tutorials on the AdWords Learning Center explaining how it works.

Now Wired Magazine's Steven Levy has a new article out in the June issue taking an even closer look ad the Google ad auction, and it's a must-read for policymakers who want to understand online advertising. Levy looks at how Google's auction model evolved, the role of algorithmic "quality scores" that ensure users see relevant ads, and how the "second price" auction means that advertisers don't overbid.

The National Broadband Plan and Small Business

Yesterday, I spoke at a panel with other tech companies about how small businesses can leverage the Internet to grow their business. The event was put on by the SBA and FCC through a program called SCORE, which, among other things, is seeking to accelerate small business growth through access to broadband. SCORE will create a comprehensive package of applications, training, and support to small businesses in the country's neediest areas.

One of the small business owners I met at the event, Emily McHugh of Casauri, spoke about how the Internet helped start and grow her business. Emily and her sister started their business in 1999 because they thought there weren’t enough good bags out there for tech gear. And they were right! With Emily’s business degree and her sister Helen’s design degree, Casauri took off. They’ve helped scale their business by leveraging the Internet. All of Casauri’s accounting, sales, and data storage is done online. This cloud computing approach makes their business more efficient and saves them money. But Emily cautioned, "the Internet doesn't mean anything to small business without access...dial-up doesn't count... it's all about speed!"

Emily and her sister are not alone. Lots of small businesses are tapping the Internet to grow their businesses and we believe SCORE will help boost digital literacy, online commerce capabilities, and usage of low-cost, cloud-based tools for small businesses across the country.

If you’re interested in learning about how to start a business or make it more efficient using low-cost or free online tools, you may want to take a look at our series of blog posts on entrepreneurship, which started yesterday on the Official Google Blog.

What people are telling the FTC about Google-AdMob

We’ve been talking with the Federal Trade Commission for the past six months about our planned acquisition of mobile advertising start-up AdMob, which we believe will bring new innovation and competition to mobile advertising. We’ve told the FTC about how new and highly competitive the mobile advertising space is, and the FTC has been talking to others in the industry about their views as well.

Some of those folks are sharing what they told the FTC. The developers of a mobile app called Wertago said they told the FTC that:

The internet and mobile technology sectors right now are perhaps the most (or among the most) competitive and fast-moving industries EVER TO EXIST. The web and mobile spaces have remarkably low barriers to entry. [...] And we think Google’s AdMob acquisition will have little if any effect on the competitiveness of the mobile advertising market space.

Wertago also talked about both the low entry barriers and non-existing switching costs in mobile advertising:

The crucial point here is 1) the marginal advertiser and the marginal developer, not the average or typical advertiser and developer, are who drive the competition, and there will always be a fight for them, especially because of the “long-tail” where lots of niche opportunities exist, and 2) the cost of switching ad networks in a mobile app is close to zero, and the cost of developing an ad network is not terribly high and easily bankrolled.

Industry analyst Greg Sterling also met with the FTC, and said that he told them:

I didn’t believe competition would be affected adversely and that advertising prices were not likely to go up. Indeed, mobile CPM prices have been falling in mobile. In short I said, yes Google becomes more powerful and effective but the deal doesn’t stifle competition. The market is dynamic and highly competitive, I told the FTC.

And:

I’m no laissez-faire capitalist but I think the mobile ad market is both very young and highly dynamic. It’s evolving quickly and definitely very competitive. If the objective of anti-trust law is to protect competition in the market then it is simply unnecessary for the FTC to intervene at this stage by blocking the AdMob deal.

Other analysts and observers have been weighing in too:

• Ad Age: Google Wins Industry Support for AdMob Deal
• eConsultancy: In case the FTC hasn't noticed, the mobile ad market is still anyone's game
• Paid Content: Why the FTC Should Allow the Google-AdMob Merger
• Wired: FTC Blocking of Google Mobile Ad Acquisition Would be Misguided
• Motley Fool: Why the FTC Should Keep Its Hands Off Google
• Tom Lenard, Technology Policy Institute: Google-AdMob: A Bad Precedent
• Ryan Radia, Competitive Enterprise Institute: FTC Should Green Light Google-AdMob Deal
• Silicon Alley Insider: The Real Reason Why the FTC Must Approve the Google-AdMob Deal Immediately

With Google and AdMob facing strong competition every day from businesses like Apple, JumpTap, Millennial Media, Microsoft, inMobi, Greystripe, Mobclix and many more, we agree that there’s vibrant competition in this space.

Update (5/5): Dow Jones asked a few players in the mobile industry yesterday what they thought about the deal:

Two of these people said the FTC staff didn't appear to be taking into account other companies like Millennial Media Inc., Greystripe Inc. and Jumptap Inc., all of which operate in-application advertising networks. By a broader definition, the mobile advertising market also includes corporate behemoths such as Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), which serve ads displayed on mobile websites.[...]

Industry insiders and analysts said an FTC antitrust challenge would be problematic for a number of reasons. One industry source argued that it was a "flawed theory" to distinguish between ads that appear within mobile-phone applications and those displayed on mobile websites. This person said the mobile-advertising market is at such an early stage that it is impossible to predict which companies will emerge on top.

Michael Chang, chief executive at Greystripe, acknowledged that the combination of Google and AdMob would create a stronger rival, but he agreed that the market is too new and too dynamic to predict how it will evolve.

"It definitely creates a stronger competitor, but we're in the second inning and it's going to be a long game," said Chang.

In Largest-Ever Launch Deal, SpaceX Will Carry Iridium's Satellites Aboard Falcon 9

Falcon 9 Launch 2

In a sign that President Obama’s vision for a private space industry might be gaining some legs, Iridium Communications has penned a nearly $500 million deal with SpaceX to send its next-gen satellites skyward aboard the private space carrier’s Falcon 9 rocket starting in 2015.
The two-year deal, valued at $492 million, is the largest single commercial launch agreement ever made and if successful could provide a framework for the future of commercial space flight. The flights will launch Iridium’s cargo into low-earth orbit from Vandenberg AFB in California.
For its part, the Falcon 9 proved itself up to the task just this month, launching into orbit successfully for the first time on June 4. Given the contract doesn’t kick in for another five years, SpaceX should have plenty of time to tweak, test, and refine its launch vehicle before it goes into service. SpaceX is also contracting with NASA to ferry supplies to the space station after Shuttle flights are phased out at the end of this year.

Iridium also announced that it’s conducting talks with at least one more private space provider, so there could be more lucrative news in the offing for America’s private space industry in coming months.
The company has plenty of work to spread around. The company's Iridium NEXT initiative calls for a constellation of 72 orbiting next-gen communications satellites (66 operational plus 6 orbiting spares) to be put into orbit between 2015 and 2017, creating a network that will cover 95 percent of the earth. Each satellite will have the capacity to host 110 pounds or extra payload, offering government agencies and research institutions the ability to launch sensor arrays and scientific instruments into orbit aboard their commercial satellites.

Chatroulette Plans Penis-Recognition Algorithm to Block Pervy Users

Chatroulette New software might make it easier to block out all the penises on Chatroulette. Then you could spend more quality time with Batman and Barack Obama. via Buzz Feed

There's something exhilarating about meeting someone new, whether it's in a coffee shop or online. That is, until your new pal pulls a Lyndon Johnson and gets really friendly.
That sort of behavior is pretty common on Chatroulette, where users can "meet" and chat with random people with a click of a mouse. But to cut down on the parade of penises, the service is planning to add image-recognition software that will filter out shots of male genitalia, TechCrunch reports.
Changes could also include a system that flags users who are consistently "nexted" -- skipped past -- presumably because they are exposing themselves or otherwise being disgusting.
TechCrunch also reports that Napster founder Shawn Fanning is working with Chatroulette's founder, Andrey Ternovskiy, in an uncompensated advisory role. It's not clear what Fanning is doing, but his credibility among social media users and investors couldn't hurt.
The story also quotes unnamed "interested investors" who advise that Ternovskiy needs to clean up his site before it is forever linked to creepiness. Only recently has it become easier to cut off offensive users; a New Yorker profile last month noted that Ternovskiy made some changes after Ashton Kutcher berated him about what his stepdaughter had seen on the site.
Chatroulette has long featured the rawest side of humanity -- copulating couples, men taking their pants off, and so on. But it also allows for a potentially rewarding (and potentially lucrative) random human connection, and that's what interests investors.
Although, come to think of it, there might also be a market for software that can quickly scan for penises and not filter them out.

Israeli Researchers To Host First International Robotic Handshaking Competition

Even Robots Need a Tender Touch Richard Greenhill and Hugo Elias of the Shadow Robot Company

Sure, you can make a robot walk or cook or even play beer pong, but can you make a robot friendly? Ben-Gurion University of the Negev wants to know, so the Israeli university will host the world’s first international competition to build a robot that can shake a human hand.
While such a singular gesture might seem simplistic given the diverse tasks we’ve programmed our bots to perform, when you think about it the handshake is quite complex. Our arms have varying degrees of motion that telerobotics have yet to completely conquer, complicated by the fact that the handshake is mutual rather than dictated by one side or the other – at least, ideally it is.

When two people clasp hands in greeting, they sense each other's motion, grip, and intensity. At least in the least awkward, most familiar cases, the handshake is a two-person, bi-directional operation. That’s why researchers are so interested in the gesture; they see it as a non-linguistic Turing test, one that tests machines for humanoid motor intelligence. Such a test is crucial if we’re ever going to create humanoid bots with characteristics that are indistinguishable from human traits.

Care to try your hand at claiming the whopping $1,000 purse? (The researchers behind the project admit this competition is less about the money and more about the scientific journal article that the winning humanoid will earn.) Get an idea over to Dr. Amir Karniel at Ben-Gurion by the end of August.

A New Physics-Based Algorithm Gives Footballing Bots the Power of Prediction

Carnegie Mellon's Soccer Bots Carnegie Melon University Computer Science Department

It can be very difficult to coax every individual on a soccer squad into stepping up the level of play all at the same time (just ask Australia's World Cup team). But at the RoboCup, the American team is doing just that, using a new physics-based algorithm that helps their footballing 'bots not only execute plays but to anticipate where the action on the field is likely to unfold next.
Developed at Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department, the team of American robots was designed to compete in the RoboCup, an annual tournament for soccer bots that aims to develop autonomous humanoid robots that can defeat the best human players by 2050. The current crop of robots are nowhere near that goal, playing on a very tiny pitch that they roll, rather than run, up and down.

The bots are controlled via a computer that watches from a camera above the field, and that camera is charged with positioning one of the five team America robots on the ball at all times. But where the robots used to play a purely reactive game, the new algorithm gives them a sense of where the ball will go next on both offense and defense. For instance, while dribbling the bots have a sense of when they might lose control of the ball and can compensate, giving them an edge over robots that can only react after the fact.

But the real value of the algorithm goes beyond helping small robots play a meaner match of soccer. Understanding ball dynamics and spatial mechanics mimics a human player's real intuition for where the ball is going next. That's a characteristic that not only mirrors real skills necessary to play soccer, but it brings researchers incrementally closer to creating the kind of machine intuition that could lead to true artificial intelligence, or at the very least a humanoid robo-Renaldo.
Watch the physics-based algorithm dominate below.

Hayabusa Probe Returns to Earth in Fiery Display, Hopefully Carrying First Asteroid Samples

Hayabusa Reentry The Japanese Hayabusa probe breaks up as it reenters the atmosphere over Australia Sunday. The bright dot at bottom right is a heat-shielded capsule that scientists hope contains samples from the surface of the asteroid Itokawa. NASA

A plucky Japanese probe burned up in a spectacular fireworks display Sunday, celebrating the end of a mission that found success despite being plagued with problems.
The Hayabusa probe overcame several obstacles to fly 3 billion miles to and from a tiny asteroid, land on its surface and (hopefully) collect samples. The spacecraft broke up in the upper atmosphere upon returning home, but not before it released a 15-inch capsule that might contain samples from the asteroid Itokawa. If it does, the sample will be the first material ever returned to Earth from a celestial body other than the moon.

In the video, the capsule looks like a bright star, as it falls ahead of its mother ship.
The capsule lay in the Australian desert overnight before scientists were given the go-ahead to retrieve it, once Aboriginal elders determined it had not landed in any sacred sites.
Hayabusa almost didn't make it this far. The capsule survived damage from a massive solar flare, problems with its thrusters, landing issues and communication problems that forced a three-year delay in its return to Earth.

But as Aviation Week points out, engineers from the Japanese Space Agency MacGyvered solutions to all those problems, including painstakingly using the spacecraft's ion engines to guide it home.

In 2005, Hayabusa ("falcon" in Japanese) reached the small near-Earth asteroid Itokawa, an object chosen precisely for its small size, orbit and proximity to Earth. It looks like a bean and is only a mile long, meaning its gravitational pull was negligible.
Hayabusa landed on the asteroid for a full 30 minutes, where it was supposed to collect samples, but the craft apparently failed to fire a metal bullet designed to dislodge the samples. Still, the spacecraft's successful landing and departure could inform other asteroid missions, including trips involving humans.
The craft's demise also provided clues for NASA and JAXA scientists observing from an airplane flying at 39,000 feet. Teams of scientists captured high-definition video and spectroscopic data as the craft disintegrated, and they'll use the data to inform computer models that examine spacecraft reentry.

Hayabusa: An artist's concept of the Hayabusa probe returning to Earth. Its sample return capsule will separate from the mothership and land in Australia Sunday.  JAXA via BBC

Why Isn't the Hubble Space Telescope Just Attached to the International Space Station?

This Old Telescope A servicing mission in May 2009 should keep Hubble running smoothly until at least 2014. Courtesy NASA

It’s a logical question. After all, it would be handy if every time the Hubble Space Telescope went on the fritz, an astronaut could reach out the window of the space station and give it a whack. Unfortunately, not only is that setup nearly impossible, being docked to the ISS would impair Hubble’s performance.
Hubble’s orbit is 350 miles above Earth and set at a 28.5-degree angle relative to the equator. Just bringing the scope to the ISS’s 52-degree orientation would require a tremendous amount of rocket power, but getting it to the station’s orbit 150 miles below would kill it. The descent would generate enough atmospheric drag to damage the scope’s solar panels. Worse, the space around the ISS is full of gases, liquids and other debris jettisoned from the station that could gum up Hubble’s optics.
Assuming that it could survive the trip, attaching it to the station would make it almost unusable, says chief Hubble engineer John Grunsfeld. It captures such highly detailed images because it’s free from any disturbances, atmospheric or otherwise. It’s designed to stay very, very still. “Once its camera locks onto an object, it’s unflinchable,” Grunsfeld says. The vibrations of gear on the ISS would make such observations impossible.
For now, Hubble will stay right where it is. As Space Telescope Science Institute news director Ray Villard puts it, “they just weren’t made for each other.

Prototype Hyperspectral Satellite Fast-Tracked to Begin Official Spy Work for Military

TacSat-3 The TacSat-3 satellite, which will start official military operations June 12, includes a sensor that detects spectral signatures across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. AFRL via Register

After a year of tests, a hyperspectral spy satellite is being called into service this weekend as a military reconnaissance tool, the Air Force says.
The Tactical Satellite-3, or TacSat-3, uses hyperspectral imaging to identify objects of interest in the ground and supply coordinates for them. Within 10 minutes of passing overhead, laptop-sized ground terminals can mark points of interest for combat troops, as the Register reports.
In its 13-month experimental flight, TacSat-3 assisted with earthquake relief efforts in Haiti and Chile, and took more than 2,100 photos with its Advanced Responsive Tactically Effective Military Imaging Spectrometer, or ARTEMIS.
Everything on the Earth's surface is being stimulated by energy from the Sun, and that causes everything to emit special spectral fingerprints. Hyperspectral sensors detect all those fingerprints. On board TacSat-3, complex computers sift through ARTEMIS' data, determining what the fingerprints represent and whether any of the objects or substances could be a target. There's no hiding from its prying eyes -- tricks that would defy optical or thermal sensors don't work with hyperspectral imaging.
After determining the nature of its targets, TacSat-3 beams coordinates to ground-based terminals, and troops can start marking plans.
TacSat-3 will start tactical operations Saturday, according to the Air Force Research Laboratory. TacSat-3 is part of the military's Operationally Responsive Space program, which seeks fast, flexible and cheap space-based support systems. Ideally, a military user can make a request and have a small tactical satellite in orbit within days, rather than months or years. TacSat-3 only weighs 880 pounds and was designed on a modular bus, meaning its body type can be used again.

As the Register notes, it's unusual for a military prototype to be but into service so quickly. But it was apparently very good at its job.

Just what sorts of objects and substances ARTEMIS is able to pick out is a military secret. But a 2006 AFRL document suggests that it could spot cave or tunnel entrances invisible from above, among other abilities.

South Korea's Second Attempt at Satellite Launch Explodes Shortly After Liftoff

South Korea's KSLV-1 Rocket

Another rocket launch on the Korean peninsula ended in failure today as South Korea’s second attempt to put a satellite into orbit exploded 137 seconds after takeoff. Footage of the launch shows the rocket successfully clearing the launch pad and heading for the upper atmosphere, but a bright flash captured by a camera-mounted rocket was among the last transmissions the rocket sent back to Earth before launch handlers lost contact with the rocket completely.
Cameras on the ground followed a white speck in the sky as it plummeted from an altitude of 44 miles into the sea. The loss of the $400 million rocket and its satellite payload could be a major setback for South Korea’s space ambitions, as this is it’s second space failure in a row. In August of last year the nation reached orbital altitudes but failed to put the satellite it was carrying into the proper orbit. For a nation racing to get into the commercial space game, its record appears less than reliable at this point.

The 108-foot KSLV-1 rocket was assembled partly in Russia and partly in South Korea, and at first glance appears to have suffered a malfunction during first stage ignition according to South Korea’s science minister.

There’s no word yet on how this might alter South Korea’s long-range rocketry plans, but it’s unlikely that the nation will give up on its efforts, at least as long as its not-so-friendly neighbor to the north continues to test long-range ballistic missiles – sorry, we mean scientific space rockets – every so often. North Korea naturally bristles every time South Korea makes another technological stride in rocket science, so no doubt if there’s anyone smiling over today’s launch failure it’s someone in Pyongyang (of course, you’d be smiling too if you’d just invented cold fusion).

U.S. Air Force Adds Undergrad UAV Training, Makes Drone Pilot a Full-Fledged Career Choice

The MQ-9 Reaper UAV

Further validating the increasing role that unmanned aerial systems (UAS) play in 21st-century defense, the United States Air Force announced yesterday that it will institutionalize the remotely piloted aircraft pilot service field, establishing undergraduate RPA training that will make UAV pilot less a specialization and more a full-fledged operational career.
The first undergraduate UAS class will begin in October of this year, with training taking the candidates from flight training in Pueblo, Colo., to instrument qualification at Randolph AFB in Texas.

Like pilot training for manned aircraft, the selection process for the program will be rigorous, including physiological and academic tests aimed at ensuring only the most qualified get behind the sticks of the Air Force’s unmanned fleet. The program will also offer RPA incentive pay equal to aviation career incentive pay, as well as require a six-year service commitment. (Perhaps after a stint in the service, they can fly passenger drones at home.)

Essentially, the USAF is assigning a distinction – and a level of operational importance – to the nation’s UAV pilots who are playing a critical role in joint warfighting tasks in Iraq and Afghanistan. This could have something to do with U.S. drone policy coming under increased scrutiny in recent months, underscored by a review of a February incident that saw 23 Afghan civilians killed after a drone crew mistakenly identified a convoy of women and children as militants on the move.
But more likely, it’s a tacit recognition that the future of both peacekeeping and war making is tied to the technological advantages granted to commanders and troops on the ground by their unmanned comrades in the sky. As such, the first generation of professional, career USAF unmanned aerial systems operators will emerge in the next few years ready to take to the remote battlefields of the future.

Costa Rica Discontinues Unproven Stem Cell Treatments

The Surgery Regenocyte cardiologist Zannos Grekos uses a catheter to inject the stem cells into a patient’s heart. The procedure takes about two hours. Courtesy Regenocyte

In Popular Science's July issue, we look at the phenomenon of stem-cell tourism: patients who head overseas for experimental medical treatments unavailable in the U.S. For the article, I spent a few days checking out Regenocyte, a Florida-based medical operation that coordinates experimental stem cell treatments in the Dominican Republic.
Now another developing country known for courting overseas patients -- Costa Rica -- has discontinued stem cell procedures at its biggest clinic, the Institute of Cellular Medicine (ICM) in San Jose, which has treated about 400 people since it opened in 2006.
The Costa Rican health ministry said it decided to halt ICM's stem cell treatments because there is no hard scientific evidence indicating that the treatments work. The procedures ICM offered -- including treatments for multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and spinal cord injury -- were not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, meaning they have not undergone a multi-stage human clinical trial process intended to establish therapeutic efficacy. "If [stem cell treatment's] efficiency and safety has not been proven, we don't believe it should be used," Ileana Herrera, chief of the health ministry's research council, told Reuters earlier this week. "As a health ministry, we must always protect the human being."
High-profile organizations such as the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) have issued warnings to patients regarding overseas stem cell treatment. The adult stem cells most commonly used abroad can produce a variety of different tissue types and are less likely than embryonic stem cells to cause side effects like tumors, but some doctors fear companies are taking advantage of desperate people by offering unproven therapies at high cost. Still, patients like Karen Velline -- who we shadowed during her Regenocyte treatment for degenerative lung disease -- claim they'd opt for stem cell treatment again in a second. "I'm really glad I did it," Velline told PopSci. "I've watched people get sick and die from prescription medications, and I've talked to people whose lives have been saved by these procedures.

Stem-Cell Tourism: Adventures at the Fringes of Experimental Medicine

Offshore Operations MDI-Digital

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon in the Dominican Republic, and Karen Velline, a 66-year-old grandmother from Cold Spring, Minnesota, is lying on an operating table, swaddled in sterile surgical sheets. She’s just moments away from a procedure so experimental that no doctor will perform it on U.S. soil. Yet she calmly stares up at the ceiling, more excited than anxious. Despite the controversy surrounding it, Velline believes that this procedure—which she has paid Regenocyte Therapeutic, a stem-cell company in Bonita Springs, Florida, $64,000 in cash to perform—could save her from a debilitating lung condition. After months of anticipation and planning, she’s ready for things to get under way.
Cardiologist Hector Rosario nods to his team and begins inserting a clear, narrow tube into a vein in Velline’s leg, slowly threading it all the way up to the right side of her heart. “That’s the catheter,” whispers medical supervisor Leonel Liriano, who has agreed to let me watch the surgery. I can see the tube moving on an x-ray imaging screen, inching closer to its final destination, the branched pulmonary arteries that supply blood to her lungs. With the catheter in place, Rosario reaches for a syringe filled with a solution of Velline’s own stem cells: the $64,000 potion. He inserts it into the catheter and depresses the plunger. A subsequent injection of saline serves as a chaser, ensuring that the cells migrate all the way to the lung vessels.
If the technique works as advertised, the cells—hand-couriered on a plane from Israel, where they were mixed with platelet growth factor to make them multiply, and delivered minutes ago to the operating room—will grow into the delicate gas-exchange regions of the lungs. Over several months, they should regenerate failing tissues that have been ravaged by Velline’s hypersensitivity pneumonitis, a degenerative lung disease caused by an allergic reaction to dust and chemicals that has left her dependent on three liters of oxygen a day. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota told her that the only hope of reversing her condition was a lung transplant, a high-risk procedure with a drawn-out recovery period. “That was something I didn’t want to consider,” she says.
Regenocyte presented an enticing alternative. Its glossy brochures and the effusive patient testimonials on its Web site offered hope that stem-cell therapy could not only keep her condition from getting worse but return her to her old self. If regenerative stem cells could help others, Velline reasoned, why couldn’t they help her too? As far as she was concerned, waiting years for the government to put its official seal of approval on the procedure wasn’t an option. She was dying.
Every year, hundreds of desperately ill Americans like Velline are making similar decisions, sidestepping government regulations and heading overseas to access a smorgasbord of stem-cell therapies unavailable in the U.S. Many of these treatments—offered by companies like Regenocyte, Germany’s XCell-Center and China’s Beike Biotechnology—involve autologous adult stem cells, meaning stem cells harvested from your own blood or bone marrow. These are thought to be safer than stem cells drawn from other donors or harvested from embryos, because they incur fewer risks of rejection or tumor formation. Just how safe, though, no one knows precisely, which is why the U.S. Food and Drug Administration insists on stringent regulations.

Insitu's ScanEagle Drone Boeing subsidiary Insitu will provide two unmanned aerial systems for the FAA's flight tests. Insitu

Insitu's ScanEagle Drone Boeing subsidiary Insitu will provide two unmanned aerial systems for the FAA's flight tests. Insitu

The Federal Aviation Administration wants you to fly the robot-friendly skies, but the regulatory overseer has more than a few challenges to overcome before it can extend that invitation in earnest. The FAA today announced it has added a research project aimed at figuring out exactly how the U.S. can safely fold unmanned aircraft into its national infrastructure and eventually the airspace it governs.
The research is but a small part of the FAA NextGen flight management system, an evolving set of goals directed at bringing America's aging -- and in some cases archaic -- flight infrastructure into the 21st century. As such, the FAA has to determine not only how to mix UAVs into existing commercial aviation, but also ensure that their flight systems and engineering are up to code with new air traffic control, navigation, and other infrastructure that will be rolled out in the coming decade and beyond.

Insitu, an independent Boeing subsidiary, has partnered up with the FAA, offering two of its ScanEagle drones as test aircraft for the review, which will be conducted in the restricted airspace above the New Jersey National Guard's Warren Grove Range. The point of the research will be to drive home to FAA regulators the particular nuances of unmanned aircraft design, maintenance, and behavior, which differ quite a bit from conventional piloted aircraft.

For the regulators, this is all going to be very important, naturally. More than 1,500 UAVs are in production around the world, and it will be up to the FAA to decide what's going to, literally, fly. Unmanned aircraft are already cleared to fly in the U.S. on a case-by-case basis, but for commercial UAV flight to take off the FAA will have to establish a set of across-the-board rules governing unpiloted flight.
That's not necessarily going to be easy. For one, no technology has been found that can replace the spatial awareness of an on-board pilot, and finding such a technology will be a challenge. Many unmanned craft, particularly the smaller variety, fly at low altitudes where they would share airspace with other small aircraft like gliders. These aircraft emit no electronic signals, so there's no easy way for UAVs to know their positions.
And that's just one example. When you talk about bringing UAVs to operate out of existing commercial airports where they are operating in the same lanes as manned flights, there's a whole new element of danger and difficulty involved. But Americans invented modern flight and then figured out how to get to the moon, so no doubt we'll overcome these technological challenges. The good news is the FAA -- an agency that has been criticized in the past for being, how should we say, sluggish -- has started the ball rolling.

Video-Stitching Surveillance Camera Gives DHS 360-Degree, 100-Megapixel Seamless Views

DHS's Imaging System for Immersive Surveillance DHS S&T

Big Brother was watching before, but soon he'll bewatching with a whole new set of high-tech eyes. The Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is creating a wide-eyed new camera system that captures video in 360 degrees, stitching together video in real time to provide a sweeping view of a secured area, which technicians can zoom into while still keeping one eye on the big picture.
The Imaging System for Immersive Surveillance, or ISIS, is less a wholesale breakthrough and more a combination of various video surveillance technologies into a single package that can be bolted to a ceiling or mounted on a high vantage point. Rather than employing a single camera, each ISIS module packs several individual cameras, allowing it to provide high-resolution video from edge to edge of wide vistas.

To do so, it relies on state-of-the-art video stitching technology that pulls disparate video feeds into one seamless picture in real time. Total resolution capability reaches 100 megapixels -- the equivalent of 50 full-HDTV movies playing simultaneously -- offering ISIS technicians to take in huge scenes with extreme clarity. Overlap between video feeds and a unique interface allows them to focus in on a particular person or point while still maintaining a view of the larger picture.

On top of the hardware magic, a collection of software apps are being developed that will allow ISIS to perform other high-tech tasks, like create exclusion zones that ISIS monitors automatically, alerting security personnel if the area is breached. It also will allow operators to tag a target, following a person or object moving across the landscape, panning and tilting as needed to keep visual contact with the target.
ISIS is being tested at Boston's Logan airport, but DHS is already eyeing a second-gen version of the system that has more sensors, longer-range cameras, infrared capabilities, and a more discreet frame that is smaller than a basketball. Which means that, unlike Orwell's Big Brother, this one could be watching and you might not even know it.

NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Sets Record for Acceleration in Space

JPL's Dawn, as Rendered by an Artist NASA/JPL

NASA has a fine track record when it comes to winning space races, so it should come as no surprise that the space agency's Dawn spacecraft has set a new record for velocity change produced by spacecraft propulsion somewhere out in the middle of the asteroid belt. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported yesterday that the ion-propelled Dawn has accumulated 9,600 miles per hour of velocity since separating from its final rocket stage, setting a record for engine-powered spacecraft.
The new record eclipses the previous record for change in velocity held by Deep Space 1, which launched in 1998 but had its ion propulsion engines shut down years ago. By earthly standards, the build-up to Dawn's record may not appear so exciting; it took the spacecraft four days to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour after separating from its final rocket phase (the numbers herein are all recorded after separation from the carrier rocket, as it wouldn't be accurate to attribute to the ion engines the thrust from the initial rocket launch).

Why the slow start? Ion engines are incredibly efficient, which makes them well suited to deep space travel. Accelerating 60 mile per hour consumes a mere 37 ounces of the xenon propellant on board, and that propellant has to last. Dawn is expected to operate for eight or more years, and there are no refueling stations out there.

But by firing its three ion engines one at a time over 620 days -- accumulating another 60 miles per each day -- Dawn has reached its current astronomical speed and has no plans of slowing down. The three ion engines will log 2,000 days of operation over the course of the mission -- a full five-and-a-half years of continuous service -- creating a change in velocity of more than 24,000 miles per hour (and 3 billion miles traveled) by the time all is said and done. That won't come close to touching the all time speed record in space -- the Helios probes, aided by the Sun's gravity, topped out at more than 150,000 miles per hour -- but for an engine-powered craft that's nothing to scoff at.
As for mission duration under powered space flight, Deep Space 1 gets to keep that record for another few months until Dawn eclipses that record as well on August 10. Dawn's mission will take it to the asteroid Vesta in 2011 and 2012, and to the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015. Scientific data will start rolling in sometime in mid- to late 2011, when Dawn enters Vesta orbit.

An Ordnance Disposal Robot Digs Up a Simulated IED A new laser sensor could help bomb disposal robots like this one sniff out hidden or buried bombs by detecting explosives' vapor trails in the air even at concentrations below ten parts per billion

An Ordnance Disposal Robot Digs Up a Simulated IED A new laser sensor could help bomb disposal robots like this one sniff out hidden or buried bombs by detecting explosives' vapor trails in the air even at concentrations below ten parts per billion.

Detecting explosives, whether they're tucked into the roadside rubbish on a narrow street in Helmand Province or stashed in someone's undergarments at the airport, can be difficult to do. But UK researchers have developed a potent new tool for sniffing out combustible contraband by creating a novel laser mechanism that can sense explosive molecules at concentrations below 10 parts per billion.
The new sensor tech relies on "pumping" a specific type of plastic called polyfluorene with photons. When polyfluorene is bombarded with light, it emits laser light. Molecules given off by TNT and similar explosives often present in improvised bombs react with that "plastic laser," interfering with the light it emits to a detectable degree. That interference suggests the presence of explosives in the very near vicinity.

Since the laser sensors have to be present more or less right on top of the explosives the tech is not ideal for human use, but it could help bomb disposal robots sniff out hidden threats when sweeping an area for explosives. The sensors could also be placed at security checkpoints and luggage screening areas in airports to seek out molecules that are the telltale signs of hidden combustibles.

The technology could also aid in the peaceful removal of land mines in regions like Southeast Asia that are still trying to remove ordnance left behind from decades-ago military conflicts. But perhaps best of all: the key ingredient in the sensors is plastic, so they should be relatively cheap to produce. Cheap is ideal, of course, for a product designed specifically to go where explosives are.

Anatomy of the Distributed Flight Array ETH Zurich Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control

Anatomy of the Distributed Flight Array ETH Zurich Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control

Two rotors are better than one, and if our recent excitement over UPenn’s quadcopter is any indication, four rotors is better than two. Sometimes. Researchers at the ETH Zurich recognize that different tasks call for different aircraft, and with that in mind they’ve designed the Distributed Flight Array, a flying platform consisting of multiple small autonomous single rotor aircraft that can dock with one another to create a larger, more powerful aircraft.
The DFA, developed by ETH Zurich’s Institute for Dynamics Systems and Control, consists of multiple fixed propellor aircraft, each with its own sensors and flight control system. Individually, the components fly somewhat erratically, but joined together they become a larger sensor-based flight platform, capable of maintaining level flight by rapidly sharing data between them. When docked together, if something disturbs the array’s level flight each individual rotor can compensate appropriately to bring the system back into balance.

While the current DFA is a proof of concept, such a scheme could have a variety of applications, not least of which is the relatively straightforward yet sometimes difficult task of picking stuff up. Since the DFA is modular, users could deploy enough lift to execute a task without wasting resources on overkill. Further, its modular nature allows for some degree of failure within the system. If one or two of the bots fail, the others could compensate and even reconfigure to allow fresh bots to swap into the places of those that aren’t working.
Swapping components mid-flight might seem like tricky business, but considering how far researchers are coming along with these kinds of autonomous vehicles it’s certainly feasible. Just check out the video below, also from ETH’s Institute for Dynamics Systems and Control. These two quadcopters don’t just hover with precision. Their movements are so well choreographed, they actually dance with each other. No, seriously.

In Largest Virtual Transaction Ever, Real Sale of Pretend Nightclub Nets Half a Million Dollars

Club Neverdie Club Neverdie, located on a virtual asteroid near a virtual planet in a virtual universe, just sold for $635,000 real dollars. via Forbes

The real-life housing market might be in the dumps, but a Hollywood real estate mogul is making a killing in the virtual world. Jon Jacobs, aka “Neverdie” in the massively multiplayer Entropia Universe, just sold a virtual nightclub for the actual price of $635,000.
Proceeds from the sale will fund Jacobs’ virtual planet-building ventures, which could in turn create actual revenue streams for Hollywood, the recording industry and traditional media sources. Really.
“Club Neverdie” is one of the hottest virtual properties in the Entropia Universe, the first virtual world with a real cash economy. An asteroid around Planet Calypso, Entropia’s first planet, is the club’s home. Jacobs bought the asteroid in 2005 for $100,000, after taking out a mortgage on his real-life house, according to Forbes.

Since then, Club Neverdie became a haven for other players visiting its bio-domes, nightclub, stadium and mall. Jacobs was making around $200,000 in actual cash every year from players purchasing virtual goods and services, Forbes explains.

That kind of profit helps justify the club’s selling price — as long as Entropia users keep spending money on virtual goods, the buyers will earn it back in short order. If Farmville’s popularity is any indication, virtual transactions settled with real dollars aren’t going away anytime soon.
In the recent sale, Jacobs sold off Club Neverdie in chunks, the largest of which went to an avatar named John Foma Kalun, who paid $335,000. Forbes says it might be the largest virtual transaction ever, beating the previous record set by Erik “Buzz” Lightyear, an Entropia resident who bought The Crystal Palace Space Station for $330,000 in 2009.
Jacobs’ story is the type you couldn’t make up if you tried. He’s the son of a former Miss United Kingdom and a British financier named “Mr. X;” he's a struggling actor and independent filmmaker; and his office is in Hollywood’s famous El Capitan Theatre building. Dude even has his own theme song.
He is working on a new virtual planet called Rocktropia, where players can listen to live virtual concerts or go on music-related quests, Forbes says. Jacobs is confident virtual worlds will become mainstream: “What typically happens with a new medium is that pop culture has to embrace it before it loses its real stigma of being narrow," he said.
The prospect of half a million dollars in pure profit certainly won't hurt.

China Plans Commercial Jet, Challenger to Boeing and Airbus

A Scaled-Down Model of Comac's C919 Boeing BlogsBoeing Blogs

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for the world’s two premier builders of large commercial jets. An Airbus A380, the new crown jewel in Airbus’s fleet, suffered an engine explosion after taking off from Singapore earlier this month, forcing a harrowing emergency landing. Then a test-flight of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner had to make an emergency landing after smoke filled the passenger cabin. But if the Big Two thought things couldn’t get any worse, they were wrong: China today unveiled the first full-sized models of its own large jetliner, the C919, a 156-seat passenger aircraft that will go toe-to-toe with Boeing and Airbus’s offerings by 2016.
The C919 isn’t a massive superjet like the Dreamliner or the double-decker A380, but a high-capacity, domestic-haul jet that will stack up against Boeing’s 737 and Airbus’s A320. With China itself being the world’s fastest-growing aviation market, that’s a tough pill to swallow for Boeing and Airbus. China will need an estimated 4,000-plus jets over the next 20 years, costing some $480 billion. Boeing and Airbus currently share the Chinese market fairly equitably, but that won’t be the case should the C919 prove successful.

And that is an “if.” Building jetliners is by no means child’s play, and the challenges of building and maintaining large passenger airplanes explains why there are so few players in the arena to begin with. But China isn’t starting from scratch. Although the C919 design belongs to Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China, the guts of the plane will come from some of the West’s biggest aviations technology company’s, including Honeywell, GE Aviation, and Eaton Corp.

China is leveraging its massive market to bring to bring the best in aviation technology to its shores by forcing Western companies who want a piece of the action to form joint ventures with Chinese companies. It’s a slick move; China offers access to its vast marketplace (THE marketplace of the next few decades), and in exchange Western companies supply technologies to Chinese companies that may one day be direct competitors.
But before we chalk up aviation as another industry the U.S. and Europe have lost to China, the C919 will have to fly. This isn’t China’s first attempt at getting into the aircraft game, but thus far Boeing and Airbus – with years of experience making massive metal tubes climb into the air – have remained atop the big jet business. China has a savvy plan to pull technologies into its orbit, but whether or not it can make a 156-seater fly in just five years is another challenge altogether.

The Largest Communication Antenna Ever Put Into Space Will Beam 4G Where Towers Won't

SkyTerra Under Construction at Boeing Boeing

Boeing has received the first signals from SkyTerra 1, a communications satellite it built for LightSquared that was hurled into orbit aboard a Proton rocket launched from Kazakhstan yesterday. The satellite, which will provide signal coverage where terrestrial towers can’t reach, is part of a new LightSquared 4G-LTE mobile broadband wireless system and boasts the largest antenna reflector ever launched into space.
The mesh structure on SkyTerra 1 is an ultra-wide 72 feet across, and the increase in hardware up there should lead to space savings down here. The larger reflector will reduce the need to build bigger antennas and receivers into next-gen 4G devices, so a larger footprint in the sky translates into real estate savings in your pocket.
Boeing and Lightsquared will next initiate on-orbit maneuvers to move the 6-ton satellite into its geosynchronous orbit. It will be joined by SkyTerra 2 next year, and over the next 15 years will augment LightSquared’s ground coverage of North America, which should serve 90 percent of the U.S. population by 2015 under a deal inked with the FCC.

Kinect Camera Data Could Be Sold for Ad Targeting

Kinect is Watching You Microsoft

When the multinational corporation began tempting us to purchase a network-connected camera to place in our living rooms, the Orwellian parts of us should have predicted this: Microsoft is hinting that it would like to use the Kinect to better target its content to users. That means gathering data from the camera – everything from basic demographics to what shirt you’re wearing – and use it to tailor its media offerings. That is, to better cater marketing to you by allowing marketers access to Kinect-driven data.
That’s not to say that Microsoft is toying with ideas that other companies like Facebook don’t already employ, nor does it mean your Kinect is spying on you right now (although it could be – it’s probably best just not to think about it). But at a conference last week Microsoft’s Dennis Durkin, a VP in the company’s interactive department, said at a conference he would like to use the Kinect to better target the media and advertising it presents to users.

Durkin's example: among people watching a sporting event, Kinect could differentiate between what jerseys they are wearing and deduce what team or teams they support (it would ostensibly do all this while also determining how many people are watching, the gender and age breakdown of the room, etc.). Advertisers could then target all or part of that group of people.

As DigitalTrends points out, that’s not so different from what Facebook ads do, though culling information from a public profile someone voluntarily puts on the Web is a bit different than watching someone watch TV in their skivvies at four in the morning.
Microsoft, in response, has made it clear that no data from the Kinect is being used for marketing purposes. But by toying with the idea that it might sometime in the future the company is more or less admitting that it could do so if it wanted to. This seems unlikely to go over well with privacy advocates, and may run afoul of President Obama’s new Internet privacy policy office, if and when one finally materializes.

President Obama Meets the Robots of Japan

Obama and Fembot The commander-in-chief with a Geminoid F. NECN

Along with meeting heads of state and talking free trade, President Obama made some new friends at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit last week. Before entering a meeting in Japan, he met a Geminoid F robot and a group of yowling robotic seals.
In the video below, Obama bemusedly listens to a speech by a Geminoid, as robotic seals are heard mewling in the background. He talks to Takanori Shibata, the creator of Paro, and acknowledges the seal 'bots could be helpful in hospitals or other places in need of a pick-me-up. Is the commander-in-chief stressed out? He seems particularly taken with the seals.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 Rocket Poised For First Flight Today [Update: Orbit Achieved]

Falcon 9 Launch

After launching their smaller Falcon 1 last summer (the first privately-developed liquid-fuel rocket ever to reach orbit), SpaceX is now ready for the first test launch of its larger, more advanced Falcon 9 rocket today. A four-hour, weather-dependent launch window begins now, and you can watch the countdown live. Update: Looks like the test was successful.
This first Falcon 9 is carrying a test version of SpaceX's Dragon capsule, a manned craft NASA has contracted (to the tune of $1.6 billion) to ferry cargo (and perhaps eventually astronauts) to the ISS in a post-Shuttle world.
The Dragon capsule on board today's test is a structural mockup without a heatshield, so it will not be returning to Earth. The test today is primarily for the rocket; SpaceX has learned the hard way that brand new launch vehicles often need the tires kicked, with several of their early attempts to launch the smaller Falcon 1 ending in misfires.

Falcon 9 Launch 2:

Update 2:55 PM EST: After a brief delay due to an unexpected system shutdown during the first countdown, Falcon 9 lifted off at around 2:45 PM EST. It appears that stage separation, the second stage burn and final orbital insertion went off without a hitch.
Excellent photos of the launch can be seen at Spaceflight Now, taken by Ben Cooper.

Could We Stop the Gulf Leak With a Nuke? Maybe, But We're Not Going To

Smoke on the Water

As the Gulf oil leak continues unhindered today, BP is trying yet another tactic to stem the flow of crude into coastal waters. But amid the news surrounding this latest effort -- it's another containment dome scheme like the two that failed before, in case you're keeping score at home -- comes this interesting bit of news via the New York Times: The U.S. government has actually addressed the proposed idea of sealing off the well with a nuclear blast. Their stance on the scheme: Absolutely not.
The idea of nuking the oil leak surfaced on various sites of dubious veracity over the past weeks as failure after failure to contain the leak rendered BP and U.S. agencies more and more desperate for a solution. It's rooted in the idea that, reportedly, the USSR used nuclear blasts to cap off five different gas wells from 1966 to 1981, with all of the attempts successful but the last.

Since then, the idea seems to have gained more and more adherents -- a Houston-based energy expert claimed Friday that "all the best scientists" are behind the idea (see video below) -- lending credence to the notion that the U.S. might attempt the tactic as other options seem to be running out. The fact that the New York Times actually asked DOE officials about it shows just how much traction the idea of dropping a nuke to the seabed off the coast of Louisiana has gained in the popular consciousness.

But just for the record, when the Times did ask, a DOE spokeswoman said the option never was, and is not, on the table. Aside from the fact that we would be entering technologically uncharted waters (all the alleged Soviet attempts to cap wells with nukes took place on land), to detonate a nuke in this day and age, even for peaceful purposes, would violate a variety of international agreements and perhaps undo whatever progress President Obama has made toward disarmament.
So no, we're not going to drop a nuke in the Deepwater Horizon wellhead. But if you're the type who enjoys mingling with the more sensational side of what the Internet has to offer, check out this article from Russia's Pravda, which kicked off discussion of the nuclear option in the first place (can we tempt you by noting that the film "Armageddon" is used as an analogy within the piece?). After that, it's probably a good idea to let this one die.