History Fragments: Art Critic Or Vandal?

Recent hi-tech artists who have been manipulating and planting arphids around major urban centres – reprogramming them with neo-luddite, anti-capitalist or anti-commercial art slogans, and even arranging them to form invisible digital graffiti – often cite The Splasher as being a historical inspiration in showing how it was possible to use street art to spread memes and create copycats.

The only clues left behind in the paint assaults were bold manifestoes – phrases like “destroy the museums, in the streets and everywhere” – that appeared to critique the commercialization of art.

Now it appears that there may be more than one Splasher, and those claiming responsibility for the attacks have offered additional information about themselves.

Art Critic or Vandal? ‘The Splasher’ Leaves Clues, New York Times, 27th June, 2007

History Fragments: Recycling Plastic

A US company is taking plastics recycling to another level – turning them back into the oil they were made from, and gas.

All that is needed, claims Global Resource Corporation (GRC), is a finely tuned microwave and – hey presto! – a mix of materials that were made from oil can be reduced back to oil and combustible gas (and a few leftovers).

Giant Microwave Turns Plastic Back To Oil, New Scientist, 26th June 2007

History Fragments: Harnessing Untapped Brain Power

Desney Tan, a researcher at Microsoft Research, and Pradeep Shenoy, a graduate student at the University of Washington, have devised a scheme that uses electro-encephalograph (EEG) caps to collect the brain activity of people looking at pictures of faces and nonfaces, such as horses, cars, and landscapes. The pair found that even when the subjects’ objective wasn’t to distinguish the faces from the nonfaces, their brain activity indicated that they subconsciously identified the difference. The researchers wrote software that churns through the EEG data and classifies faces and nonfaces based on the subjects’ response. When a single person viewed an image once, the system was able to identify faces with up to 72.5 percent accuracy. Results were even better using data from eight people who had viewed a particular image twice: accuracy jumped to 98 percent.

“Given that the brain is constantly processing external information,” says Tan, “we can start to use the brain as a processor.” In one scenario, he explains, pictures would be placed in people’s peripheral vision, which doesn’t require focused cognitive attention, so they could go about their daily tasks.

Human-Aided Computing, from the Technology Review, 22nd June, 2007

History Fragments: The Beginning of an Agricultural Revolution

Morikawa says his engineers had their breakthrough idea right there in the orange grove. They realized that the task could be divided between two robots: One would locate all the oranges, and the second would pick them. “Once you know where all the fruit is, then it becomes an easy job to calculate the most efficient way to pick it all,” says Morikawa.

[…]

The farmers are willing to pay up because they’ve been rattled by a labor shortage over the past few years — California growers tell horror stories of watching their fruit rot on the trees as they waited for the picking crews to arrive. Last fall, growers rallied in front of the U.S. Capitol, frustrated that Congress still hadn’t created a program to ease the passage of foreign guest workers across the Mexico border.

With the supply-and-demand equation uncertain, growers see the robots as a better option. “You can predict what it’s going to cost to buy a machine and maintain it,” says Baskin. “You can’t predict the bargaining that we go through with contract labor,” he says.

Farms Fund Robots to Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers, from Wired Magazine, 21st June 2007