China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

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Homeland Security tests automated "Hostile Intent" detector

An uncomfortable fact of modern security is that too many people go through transit hubs and to public events for all of them to be screened both efficiently and thoroughly. As a result, there has been a lot of attention focused on producing automated systems that screen crowds without the need for human intervention.

Automated biometric scans have serious limits, however, in that they can only identify people who have already been classified as threats. The Department of Homeland Security is hoping to overcome that limitation by automating the identification of individuals whose behavior suggests they pose a threat via a program dubbed "Hostile Intent."

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Eric Schmidt Defines Web 3.0

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was recently at the Seoul Digital Forum where he was asked to define Web 3.0 by an audience member.

Cellphones may take banking to the rural poor in the third world

In many third world countries, where bank branches are few and far between, the development that finally may make financial services practical for the rural poor fits in the palm of a hand.

Mobile devices like cellphones have the potential to effectively bring financial markets to the countryside, allowing banks and other lenders in urban areas to provide services like loans and savings accounts to a new population, according to a report by Vodafone and Nokia published last week.

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Spies watch rise of virtual terrorists

THE bomb hit the ABC's headquarters, destroying everything except one digital transmission tower. The force of the blast left Aunty's site a cratered mess.

Just weeks before, a group of terrorists flew a helicopter into the Nissan building, creating an inferno that left two dead. Then a group of armed militants forced their way into an American Apparel clothing store and shot several customers before planting a bomb outside a Reebok store.

This terror campaign, which has been waged during the past six months, has left a trail of dead and injured, and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars' damage. The terrorists belong to a militant group bent on overthrowing the government. But they will never be arrested or charged for their crimes because they have committed them away from the reach of the world's law enforcement agencies, in the virtual world known as Second Life.

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Biometrics Shifting from Defensive to Offensive Uses in Iraq

America's recently-passed 2007 supplemental defense funding bill (#2) included $320 million for an unusual weapon: biometrics. Fingerprinting, iris scanning, certain approaches to automated facial recognition, DNA, and more are all part of biometrics, which seeks to identify humans based on unique physical characteristics.

Auditory Nerve Implant Promises Better Hearing

Tiny array placed in auditory nerve may one day offer superior alternative to cochlear implants, U-M animal study suggests.

More than three decades ago, scientists pursued the then-radical idea of implanting tiny electronic hearing devices in the inner ear to help profoundly deaf people. An even bolder alternative that promised superior results — implanting a device directly in the auditory nerve — was set aside as too difficult, given the technology of the day.

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Web 2.0 Explained

'Field Sense' May Be Teachable

The likes of Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, and Diego Maradona, besides their athletic ability, have an incredible sense of the players around them, which allowed them to display incredible plays in their respective sports.

Peter Vint is a researcher at the US Olympic Committee, and showed Wired his research on how great players quickly adapt to their environments and how this can be taught to others.

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Ghost Cities Of 2100

For 900 years, Moenjodaro, a city in what is now Pakistan, was the urban hub of a thriving civilization, the New York or London of its day. Around 1700 B.C., residents suddenly abandoned the Indus Valley city, and it was lost in the sands of time until archaeologists began excavating it in the 1920s.

Today, visitors can wander for hundreds of acres among its deserted streets and homes.

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Text messaging could soon be the new way to call for help

Texting on your mobile could soon be the quickest way to call for police help.

The Government has given the go-ahead for a new 999 text-messaging emergency line which will work in tandem with the traditional call centre.

Soon typing in text speak "hlp 5-o sum1 hs brokN n2 my hous" - 'Help police, someone has broken into my house' - should summon an emergency response.


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Airline Sensor Could Pinpoint Germs

A new system that uses a computer program and sensors could identify passengers responsible for the release of chemical agents in a terrorist attack or the unintentional release of germs or a virus, such as the tuberculosis-infected man who recently flew on international flights.

"We can identify the location plus or minus one seat," said Qingyan Chen, principal director of the Air Transportation Center of Excellence for airliner cabin environment research at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

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ONARCHITECTURE- Intelligent design: Will robots take over architecture?

What if a building could build, repair, dismantle, and recycle itself? What if a building were equipped with sensors to track your movement through a space and could adapt its shape, texture, light, sounds, and heat to your presence? Finally, what if you could talk to a building and it could talk back?

Those are the kinds of questions students in UVA architecture professor Jason Johnson's Robotic Ecologies seminar are encouraged to ask and explore.

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Homemade Microwave Weapons

The US military is hard at work designing, building, and using directed energy weapons (HERFs -- high energy radio frequency or microwave weapons) for use against micro-electronics and fuel vapor.

Unfortunately, directed energy weapons are much more valuable to global guerrillas than nation-state militaries due to the target imbalance between nation-states and non-state foes. The technology needed to build these weapons is generally available and inexpensive (numerous experiments, including this one, scroll to bottom, with a converted microwave oven demonstrate this).

Homemade directed energy weapons will eventually become the weapon of choice for global guerrillas intent on infrastructure destruction.

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Online and offline worlds merge

Google has launched a tool designed to make it easier for computer users to use online applications offline.

One of the key limitations of web services such as e-mail, word processing and calendars, is that they require a net connection to function.

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China To Use Computer Viruses As Cyberwarfare First Strike

The Defense Department reports that the People's Liberation Army is moving beyond traditional battlefields and into cyberspace.

The People's Liberation Army in China is building up its cyberwarfare capabilities, even creating malware that could attack enemy computer systems in first-strike attacks, according to a report from the Department of Defense.

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A Smarter Web

New technologies will make online search more intelligent--and may even lead to a "Web 3.0."

Last year, Eric Miller, an MIT-affiliated computer scientist, stood on a beach in southern France, watching the sun set, studying a document he'd printed earlier that afternoon. A March rain had begun to fall, and the ink was beginning to smear.

Five years before, he'd agreed to lead a diverse group of researchers working on a project called the Semantic Web, which seeks to give computers the ability--the seeming intelligence--to understand content on the World Wide Web. At the time, he'd made a list of goals, a copy of which he now held in his hand. If he'd achieved those goals, his part of the job was done.

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TV Screen: Thin as Paper

In the race for ever-thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all - a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-color video. Sony Corp. released video of the new 2.5-inch display.

In it, a hand squeezes a display that is 0.3 millimeters, or 0.01 inch, thick. The display shows color images of a bicyclist stuntman and a picturesque lake. Although flat-panel TVs are getting slimmer, a display that's so thin it bends in a human hand marks a breakthrough. Sony said it has yet to decide on commercial products using the technology.

"In the future, it could get wrapped around a lamppost or a person's wrist, even worn as clothing," said Sony spokesman Chisato Kitsukawa. "Perhaps it can be put up like wallpaper."

Mapping Traffic Flow

New trafficking software will enable drivers to find the quickest route to their final destination.

Drivers are always searching for the fastest route--whether they are traveling home on a busy Friday afternoon or rushing to the airport for an early-morning flight. Now Tele Atlas, a Boston-based company that provides digital maps and navigational content, has integrated new trafficking software into its map database so that drivers can find the most optimal route based on speed rather than distance--for any stretch of road at any hour of any day of the week.

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Researchers use gene therapy to restore sight in mice

University of Florida researchers used gene therapy to restore sight in mice with a form of hereditary blindness, a finding that has bearing on many of the most common blinding diseases.

Writing in Nature Medicine, scientists describe how they used a harmless virus to deliver corrective genes to mice with a genetic impairment that robs them of vision.

The discovery shows that it is possible to target and rescue cone cells - the most important cells for visual sharpness and color vision in people.

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