Google’s New All-Seeing Satellites Have Huge Potential—For Good and Evil

Building SkySat-1 in the clean room of Skybox in Mountain View, CA, in 2013. Photo: Spencer Lowell

The reach of Google’s online empire is hard to overstate. In a sense, the Google search engine is the loom through which the entirety of the public internet is woven. With tools like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs, the company also handles many of our private online tasks. Using the data generated by these services to target online ads, Google has built a business that generates tens of billions of dollars a year.

Now, with the $500 million purchase of Skybox, a startup that shoots high-res photos and video with low-cost satellites, Google can extend its reach far across the offline world. Thanks to its knack for transforming mass quantities of unstructured data into revenue-generating insights, the unprecedented stream of aerial imagery to which the company is gaining access could spark a whole new category of high-altitude insights into the workings of economies, nations, and nature itself.

But this acquisition will also demand assurances from Google that it will incorporate privacy safeguards into its vast new view of the world. Already Google gets a lot of flack for tracking user behavior online. With Skybox’s satellites, Google may gain a window into your everyday life even if you don’t use Google at all.

Really Big Data

In his WIRED feature story on Skybox, David Samuels describes some of the stunning ways high-resolution images shot from space are being used to unlock secrets about life on the ground. One company is tracking cars in parking lots to create retail forecasts. Images of pits and slag heaps reveal the productivity of mines. Pictures of property damage from above can tell insurance companies whether a claim is valid.

“Many of the most economically and environmentally significant actions that individuals and businesses carry out every day, from shipping goods to shopping at big-box retail outlets to cutting down trees to turning out our lights at night, register in one way or another on images taken from space,” Samuels writes. “So, while Big Data companies scour the Internet and transaction records and other online sources to glean insight into consumer behavior and economic production around the world, an almost entirely untapped source of data–information that companies and governments sometimes try to keep secret–is hanging in the air right above us.”

In a statement, Google has said that, in the short term, it plans to use Skybox’s satellites to keep Google Maps up to date. And, in the future, the company says, it could use them to help spread internet access to remote areas, something that will help improve the reach of its existing services. But imagine all the other things Google could do turns its artificial intelligence expertise onto a constant stream of images beamed down from above.

One Skybox insider told Samuels that satellite images alone could be used to estimate any country’s major economic indicators. Take, for example, this Skybox case study of Saudi oil reserves measured from space. Now consider the insights that could come from marrying that visual data with Google’s Knowledge Graph, leveraging all the company’s algorithmic might. Google could learn all kinds of new things about the world.

Gold Mine in Uşak, Western Turkey. Photo: Courtesy of Skybox

Military-Industrial Ties

But it could also learn all kinds of new things about you. Skybox can take photos from 500 miles up with a sub-one-meter resolution of the ground below. That isn’t not likely to sit well with privacy activists who already don’t trust Google. What does the right to be forgotten mean when Google can always see you anyway?

Skybox’s pedigree likely won’t help assuage anyone who likes a good conspiracy theory. According to Samuels, one of the company’s co-founders, John Fenwick, had previously worked as as a liaison in Congress for the National Reconnaissance Office, “the ultrasecret spy agency that manages much of America’s most exotic space toys.” A major investor had worked as an intelligence officer in the French army, while its CEO held previous jobs that brought him into close contact with the Department of Defense.

That’s not to suggest there’s anything nefarious about Skybox or its intentions. It’s hard to get anything into space without entreé into government and military circles. But Skybox CEO Tom Ingersoll told Samuels that the government is interested in his company’s imagery. “In the end,” Samuels writes, “the government will likely commandeer some of Skybox’s imaging capabilities under terms similar to those imposed on other vendors.” With Google now involved, that begins to sound a lot like the NSA commandeering the internet servers to spy on U.S. citizens.

Skybox or Skynet?

Even if a network of high-powered imaging satellites could give Google the power to track an individual from space, it probably wouldn’t. Setting aside any legal or moral constraints, there’s just no percentage in it. Monetizable insights of the kind that would interest Google or companies willing to pay Google for access to that data are derived from observing patterns and populations, not individuals. As geeks of all varieties are fond of pointing out, n=1 is a terrible sample size.

If Google finds ways of using these satellites that ends up making users’ lives more interesting and convenient, most people are unlikely to object, just like revelations of NSA surveillance haven’t exactly dented Gmail’s market share. But people may find the idea of Google looking down from the heavens on their physical selves more discomfiting than peering through their browsers at their virtual personas. After all, putting an all-seeing Google eye in space gives a whole new meaning to “do not track.”

Fantastically Wrong: The Surprising Truth Behind the Horrifying Banshee

A resting banshee, from Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1834). Flying around people’s houses and screaming at all hours of the night, it turns out, is hard work. And that castle over there has a ridiculous perimeter to cover. Source

In Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, the Grim Reaper visits a lovely little dinner party to inform the guests that unfortunately they’re dead. After refusing wine and poking a man in the eye, he leads them to heaven, where there is, of course, a nice musical number.

Fantastically Wrong

It's OK to be wrong, even fantastically so. Because when it comes to understanding our world, mistakes mean progress. From folklore to pure science, these are history’s most bizarre theories.

Browse the full archive here.

Conspicuously absent for a British production, though, is the banshee of Irish and Scottish mythology, an ugly, nasty hag clad either in white or gray. A kind of fairy, she’s said to soar around your house, screaming like a manic demon to not so subtly let you know you’re about to die, usually in a violent manner. But unlike the Grim Reaper, this lady doesn’t murder you herself. She’s more of a hands-off type of death omen.

A fixture in U.K. myth-telling for some 1,000 years, particularly among elite families with a penchant for making death particularly dramatic, the banshee can also take the form of a beautiful woman weeping instead of wailing, all upset about your looming death. Also known as the Washer of the Ford, she can sometimes be seen scrubbing her bloodied robe in a river and preening her long hair with a silver comb.

Have you seen this woman? Do you suspect she’s been buzzing your house? Here’s how to prove it.

Wait until night falls, then put a caged rat in your front yard (stick with me here). When you hear that banshee come screaming and rattling that cage, hit the lights. You’ll find one of the night’s most majestic creatures, the barn owl, probably looking a bit pissed off about its rudely inaccessible dinner.

This ghostly creature has gorgeously white underparts and a scream like you wouldn’t believe (have a listen below), and has for centuries served as the likely source of the banshee myth. Far from the legend, though, this is an exceedingly graceful critter whose wails echo across every continent save for Antarctica.

Headed to Bonnaroo? Here’s Everything You Need to See in Nashville

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The population of tiny Manchester, Tennessee, grows about 800 percent every June thanks to the Bonnaroo music festival. So it asks nearby Nashville for help. Last year, the country music capital started a shuttle service connecting the cities, and its hotels attract many of the tourists (and headliners, like Paul McCartney in 2013). “Sixty miles is nothing,” says Butch Spyridon, president of the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp. “It’s just a natural fit to collaborate.” And the Music City is a good business partner: While Bonnaroo nets more than $50 million for Tennessee, Nashville’s own music industry packs a walloping $5.5 billion.

SEE | Design nerds, behold 135 years’ worth of wood blocks and photo plates at 1 | Hatch Show Prints, which 4 made custom concert posters for Elvis and Hank Williams and now produces them for Modest Mouse and Jason Mraz. Gape at 2 | Sudekum Planetarium’s laser light shows set to ’70s and ’80s arena rock, EDM, and more. Built in 1897, the full-scale replica of the Greek Parthenon in 3 | Centennial Park features a 42-foot-high statue of Athena and doubles as Nashville’s art museum.

EAT | From skillet fried chicken to biscuits and gravy, 4 | Monell’s serves up comfort food from a menu that changes daily. 5 | Robert’s Western World is a self proclaimed “hillbilly success”: You can buy a pair of cowboy boots here or have a burger fresh off the grill—but you’ll never pay a cover charge.

DO | Catch dinner and a show aboard the 300-foot-high 6 | General Jackson Showboat, powered by two 1,050-horsepower engines. Check out the 7 | Lane Motor Museum, home to the largest collection of European cars in the US, including a 100-ton amphibious cargo vehicle. 8 | The Grand Ole Opry hosts the longest- running radio program in the world, 89 years strong.

Justin Mezzell

A New Way to Look at Law, With Data Viz and Machine Learning

Ravel displays search results as an interactive visualization. Image: Ravel

On TV, being a lawyer is all about dazzling jurors with verbal pyrotechnics. But for many lawyers–especially young ones–the job is about research. Long, dry, tedious research.

It’s that less glamorous side of the profession that Daniel Lewis and Nik Reed are trying to upend with Ravel. Using data visualization, language analysis, and machine learning, the Stanford Law grads are aiming to reinvent legal research–and perhaps give young lawyers a deeper understanding of their field in the process.

Lawyers have long relied on subscription services like LexisNexis and WestLaw to do their jobs. These services offer indispensable access to vast databases of case documents. Lewis remembers seeing the software on the computers at his Dad’s law firm when he used to hang out there as a kid. You’d put in a keyword, say, securities fraud, and get back a long, rank-ordered list of results relevant to that topic.

Years later, when Lewis was embarking on his own legal career as a first year at Stanford Law, he was struck by how little had changed. “The tools and technologies were the same,” he says. “It was surprising and disconcerting.” Reed, his classmate there, was also perplexed, especially having spent some time in the finance industry working with its high-powered tools. “There was all this cool stuff that everyone else was using in every other field, and it just wasn’t coming to lawyers,” he says.

Early users have reported that Ravel cut their overall research time by up to two thirds.

Telling the Story of the Law

Ravel started as the duo’s project for LaunchPad, a hugely popular course in Stanford’s venerable design school. The site, which has since garnered upwards of $9 million in VC funding, brings a number of powerful tools to the research process. Search results, instead of coming back as a block of text, are rendered as an interactive visualization. The cases take the form of bubbles, arranged by date. Landmark cases are nice and big; lesser cases are smaller. Lines join the circles, showing you how the cases are interrelated. You can filter these visual results in a number of ways, separating out, for instance, which rulings came from district courts, which came from circuit courts, and which were handed down by the Supreme Court itself.

Westlaw and Nexis, Lewis points out, have long reigned simply on the basis of access. They were gatekeepers to all legal history, and a subscription was an obligatory expense for any legal firm or law school. In recent years, however, much more of that information has become freely available. And with it, new tools have become possible.

As its creators see it, Ravel’s visual search offers myriad improvements over the old columns of text results. It better lets you see how cases evolved over time, and potentially lets you see outliers that could be useful in crafting an argument–cases that would languish at the bottom of a more traditional search. The visualization, Reed insists, “tells a lot more of the story of law than the rank ordered list.” (That might be true. When they first showed their visual search to a veteran judge, he looked at the complex map of circles and responded: “This is how my brain works!”)

Ravel also has some smart touches for processing cases once you’ve found them. A clean interface makes it easy to skim documents, for instance, with built-in tools for highlighting and annotating text. Early users have reported that Ravel cut their overall research time by up to two thirds, on some occasions.

Ravel’s reading interface. Image: Ravel

Mapping the Law

Ravel’s most ambitious features, however, are intended to help with the analysis of cases. These tools, saved for premium subscribers, are designed to automatically surface the key passages in whatever case you happen to be looking at, sussing out instances when they’ve been cited or reinterpreted in cases that followed.

To do this, Ravel effectively has to map the law, an undertaking that involves both human insight and technical firepower. The process, roughly: Lewis and Reed will look at a particular case, pinpoint the case it’s referencing, and then figure out what ties them together. It could be a direct reference, or a glancing one. It might show up as three paragraphs in that later ruling, or just a sentence.

Once those connections have been made, they’re handed off to Ravel’s engineers. The engineers, which make up more than half of the company’s ten-person team, are tasked with building models that can identify those same sorts of linkages in other cases, using natural language processing. In effect, Ravel’s trying to uncover the subtle linguistic patterns undergirding decades of legal rulings.

That all goes well beyond visual search, and the idea of future generations of lawyers learning from an algorithmic analysis of the law seems quietly dangerous in its own way (though a sterling conceit for a near-future short story!)

Still, compared to the comparatively primitive tools that still dominate the field today, Lewis and Reed see Ravel as a promising resource for young lawyers and law students. “It’s about helping them research more confidently,” Lewis says. “It’s about making sure they understand the story in the right way.” And, of course, about making all that research a little less tedious, too.

How Atari Plans to Bring Itself Back From the Dead

A screenshot from Haunted House for iOS, one of the recently released games from Atari. Image: Atari

For techies of a certain age, few brands inspire as much nostalgia as Atari. They remember the heyday in the 1970s and 80s, when its two-dimensional arcade game Pong was the epitome of fun and the Atari 2600 videogame console was the epitome of cool. But for many young gamers today, their closest brush with Atari is in the retro T-shirt section of their local Urban Outfitters.

Fred Chesnais wants to change that. As Atari’s new CEO and majority shareholder, Chesnais is leading what he hopes will be a turnaround of the 42-year-old brand, which emerged from bankruptcy proceedings last year. For Chesnais, who also served as Atari’s CEO between 2004 and 2007, it’s a second chance to make Atari relevant to a new generation.

Fred Chesnais. Image: Atari

His first step: let other people be Atari. Rather than immediately trying to reclaim Atari’s place as a top gaming company–a goal that has eluded many other CEOs with many different comeback strategies over the years–he’s planning on licensing that almighty brand to other studios who are already adept at building games for today’s audience. “Corporations die,” he says. “Brands like Atari don’t.”

It’s a plan that Chesnais says will allow his lean team of 10 employees to take on less risk and experiment with new products and mediums until they find a hit. If successful–and Chesnais knows as well as anyone that he may not be–he hopes that the dark days of Atari will have been nothing more than “a bad scene in what is a very good movie overall.” Here’s how he hopes to do it.

Games Are Dead. Long Live Games.

Games, of course, will still be part of Atari’s future. But this time, Atari is targeting the mobile and online gaming markets, not consoles. In other words, says Chesnais, “no boxes.”

The Atari team will create both new versions of older titles, as well as completely new games based on trends that have emerged in the gaming industry. For instance, after witnessing the rise of the survival video game genre, Atari is developing a new version of one of its classic titles, Asteroids, an arcade shooting game that was first released in 1979. In the new mobile game, players have to figure out how to survive on an asteroid after their spaceship crashes into it. “It’s social, so the more friends you have the better, and you can play anywhere because it’s on mobile,” says Chesnais, who started another gaming company called Microprose in 2007. “It’s just much more relevant.”

Since Chesnais returned to Atari, the company has released four new games, including Haunted House and Roller Coaster Tycoon, and it has a slew of additional games set to be released this fall.

Social Gambling

Online gambling for real money may be illegal in the United States today, but in Europe and elsewhere, the market is growing exponentially. One research firm, Juniper Research, recently estimated that by 2018, 164 million people will be playing mobile gambling games, from slot machine games to poker. “We want to be there,” Chesnais says.

To do that, Atari is partnering with two gaming startups already working in the gambling game space. FlowPlay, the company behind the game Vegas World, will work with the company to build Atari Casino, a social casino game in which players can play for virtual money, while another startup called Pariplay will build a game of the same name where players bet with real money.

Entering the mobile gambling market, Chesnais says, will let Atari reach audiences who might never otherwise have played one of its games.

Lights, Camera, Action

Perhaps the biggest departure for Atari is the launch of Atari TV, which will create original video content for YouTube and elsewhere. According to Chesnais: “We’re not just competing against gaming companies anymore. At the end of the day, it’s a competition for the user’s time.” For younger audiences, YouTube dominates that time.

The first big project for Atari TV is a daily video blog called TheRealPele.com that trails Pele, the soccer phenom, throughout the upcoming World Cup in Brazil. But this, Chesnais says, is just the entry point into what he sees as a booming online video market. “We have to be there,” he says. “We cannot ignore another revolution.”

Protein could put antibiotic-resistant bugs in handcuffs

Staph infections that become resistant to multiple antibiotics don't happen because the bacteria themselves adapt to the drugs, but because of a kind of genetic parasite they carry called a plasmid that helps its host survive the antibiotics.

Plasmids are rings of bare DNA containing a handful of genes that are essentially freeloaders, borrowing most of what they need to live from their bacterial host. The plasmids copy themselves and go along for the ride when the bacteria divide to copy themselves.

A team from Duke and the University of Sydney in Australia has solved the structure of a key protein that drives DNA copying in the plasmids that make staphylococcus bacteria antibiotic-resistant. Knowing how this protein works may now help researchers devise new ways to stop the plasmids from spreading antibiotic resistance in staph by preventing the plasmids from copying themselves.

"If plasmids can't replicate, they go away," said lead author Maria Schumacher, an associate professor of biochemistry in the Duke University School of Medicine. "This is a fantastic new target for antibiotics."

The work appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An essential part of biology, plasmids are so minimalistic they're not even considered alive by themselves. But they're good at ferrying genes from one kind of bacteria to another in a process called horizontal gene transfer. They also excel at adapting to environmental conditions more quickly than their bacterial hosts. Plasmids are able to develop new defenses to an antibiotic and then share that new trick with other bacteria.

Through several years of laborious structural biology to figure out the specific shapes of the molecules involved, the research team has mapped out the structure and function of a protein called RepA, which is crucial to the plasmids' ability to copy its DNA and make a new plasmid.

RepA is a protein that sticks to the beginning of the plasmid's DNA sequence and starts the copying process. "This protein is essential to everything," Schumacher said. "If you don't have it, the plasmid will quickly cease to exist."

Plasmids also need a mechanism to prevent themselves from making too many copies, which would strangle their bacterial host. The researchers have found that RepA is crucial to that function as well.

RepA naturally sticks together in pairs. When a pair of RepA proteins bumps into another pair, as when the cell is starting to get crowded with plasmids, the two pairs of RepA preferentially stick to each other. They form a complex back-to-back, with both having their DNA-grabbing parts facing outward.

When RepA forms this four-part molecule, the plasmids are said to be 'handcuffed,' because two rings of DNA are captured with the locked-up and non-functional RepA complex in the middle.

Once it is handcuffed like this, the plasmid will no longer replicate. Schumacher said this mechanism is apparently how RepA prevents the plasmids from overpopulating the bacterial cell.

Schumacher says RepA is ubiquitous in the plasmid world and doesn't bear much resemblance to other proteins, or to human proteins, making it an attractive drug target. She is hopeful the molecule could be a new site to attack with antibiotics.

"This has been a fun project because we saw many things we didn't expect to see," Schumacher said.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Duke University . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Multi-component, schmulti-component [Pharyngula]

I’m having a light dinner while traveling off to a visit with Humanists of Minnesota, and I thought I’d deal with a little email. I got a request to address a fairly common creationist argument–here’s the relevant part of the claim.

As a member of the Greater Manchester Humanists I was recently involved in a discussion with the Ahmadi sect of Islam with regards to evolution. They had asked me to look at a couple of chapters in a book entitled ‘Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge and Truth by their prophet Mirza Tahir Ahmad. One of those chapters was called ‘The Blind Watchmaker who is also Deaf and Dumb’ – riffing badly on Dawkins’s book, of course. Suffice it to say, there was very little of any of that in the book, but during the discussion one of their number said he did not believe in neo-Darwinism because he could not see ‘how all the supporting and connecting mult-component systems could all have evolved as, for example, the eye, as it progressed through geological time.’

He quoted the hagfish and work done by Prof Trevor Lamb to show ‘just how complex those multi-component systems are’ – but when I looked up Lamb’s work it is quite obvious that he is a supporter of evolution, and that he in no way suggests that such complexity is divine in nature….!

Yep, he’s got us. If evolution were sequential, linear, and goal-directed, this would be a serious problem. If you’re used to imagining that the only way complexity can possibly emerge is by purposeful, serial action to build an end result, rather like putting together your furniture from Ikea or building a model airplane, then gosh, it all seems so impossible.

Unfortunately for the follower of Mirza Tahir Ahmad, none of that is true, and this is just a variant of the “it’s too complicated to evolve” argument, with more sciencey sounding words and references to misinterpreted fragments of the scientific literature.

Let’s consider the major misconceptions in the question.

• 
  

  Evolution isn’s sequential. It’s massively parallel. Massively. Humans have about 20,000 genes, and all of them are evolving at once, with trial runs in about 7 billion individuals. New variants are arising all the time, and then they’re tested to destruction in multiple combinations over time. Scrap your weird idea that the pieces of a complex system must be developed one at a time — they can’t, and all of them are being constantly tinkered with. It is the most badly designed scientific experiment or engineering program ever, with no controls and every variable getting randomly tweaked at random intervals. So don’t be surprised that multiple elements are getting juggled.

  
  


• 
  

  Evolution doesn’t care how it arrives at a solution — all that matters is the final effect on the organism. In the case of the eye, the viable end result is an organ with sufficient resolution and contrast, and various special purpose detectors for things like motion or looming. The organism doesn’t know or care how that comes about — it is born with a combination of attributes, and lives or dies by their success. It may have accomplished its end by, for instance, refining the lens, or fine-tuning the receptor, or building in secondary signal processing elements…or all of the above and more. The organism doesn’t care and doesn’t have any control. And in a massively parallel system, probably every level is being tinkered with, and the final solution is going to be multi-component. It would be weird if it wasn’t.

  
  


• 
  

  Evolution is not teleological. An organ like the eye is not being assembled to a set of specific, detailed instructions — it just has to work, or the organism is at a disadvantage to other organisms with better eyes. So a hodge-podge of solutions is accumulated, and the end result has all kinds of complexity. But you don’t get to argue after the fact that the details imply some specificity of purpose.

  
  

  For example, here’s a number: 343767. It’s kind of big, you might be tempted to argue that it’s a fancier or more complex number than, say, 300000 (you’d be wrong), or you might want to argue for the significance of individual digits, or find a pattern in it. Humans tend to do that. But the reality is that I just went to a random number service and asked for a 6 digit number. Similarly, eyes wandered through a random space constrained by functional requirements and ended up at a somewhat arbitrarily complex configuration — and different lineages followed different paths.

  
  

OK, that’s my off-the-cuff explanation scribbled up while I nibble on a fruit salad at a cafe in Minneapolis. The whole multi-component problem is a red herring contrived by inadequate minds that can’t see beyond their preconceptions.