RFID tags, sometimes called "smart tags," hold a small amount of data and contain an antenna (that's the curly shape you see) that allows RFID reading devices to read at that data remotely. A reader can be a handheld device that people wave over the tag at the checkout counter, or a device hidden in a doorway that checks the tags on your clothing as you walk down the street.

According to a release about the ABI Research brief:

Previously limited to a small number of large-volume pilot tests, adoption of item-level RFID is beginning to permeate throughout the apparel sector and is increasingly evolving into full-scale implementations. According to Liard, "While installations at Marks and Spencer in the UK, American Apparel in the US, and Charles Vögele in Switzerland remain the largest contributors to market growth, scores of companies are now in various stages of implementation. RFID in fashion apparel is undoubtedly here and now."

Just remember, kids, all your American Apparel clothes contain antennae that broadcast information about you. And in 5 years, three times more "apparel items" will be likewise tagged. Neat, right? Let the zombie infestation begin!

via ABI Research

Specifically, dopamine is responsible for making you remember frightening experiences in the long term, rather than forgetting them right away.

Researchers studied the effect of dopamine on rats who had been terrified by having their paws electrically shocked. What the scientists discovered was that dopamine had no affect on the rats' memories if it was given shortly after the shock. But if the rats were given chemicals that reduced the amount of dopamine absorbed by their neurons about 12 hours later - roughly the time it takes for the brain to consolidate long-term memories - they forgot the painful experience quickly and walked right onto the foot-shocking device again. However, rats who received chemicals 12 hours later that enhanced the amount of dopamine absorbed remembered the foot-shocking device far longer than they might have otherwise. Their fear of foot shock remained quite vivid.

Let this be a lesson to all authoritarian regimes who want to rule with fear and drugs. Feed your population with dopamine promoters 12 hours after the public executions. Their terror and awe will last a lot longer, and you'll get a bigger bang for each buck you pay your death squads.

via Science

In this case, the mass e-book removals were motivated by copyright . A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they'd been downloaded. Amazon operators used the Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books from people's devices and refund them the money they'd paid.

An uproar followed, with outraged customers pointing out the irony that Amazon was deleting copies of a novel about a fascist media state that constantly alters history by changing digital records of what has happened. Amazon's action flies in the face of what people expect when they purchase a book. Under the "right of first sale" in the U.S., people can do whatever they like with a book after purchasing it, including giving it to a friend or reselling it. There is no option for a bookseller to take that book back once it's sold.

Apparently, until last week, Amazon claimed it wouldn't take back purchased books either: The New York Times' Brad Stone reports:

Amazon's published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a "permanent copy of the applicable digital content."

But this isn't the first time there has been a problem with secret deletings. Stone adds:

Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues.

Now that the public is up in arms over the Kindle deletions, Amazon is once again promising good behavior. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told reporters:

We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances.

That "in these circumstances" bit doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. Sounds like books will be removed again under other (undefined) circumstances.

Regardless of whether you believe Amazon's promise to leave your Kindle alone, the company has tipped its hand and shown us the dark side of a culture where books are only available in electronic form. If the WhisperNet service from Kindle allows the company to delete books silently from your device, what other information might they have access to? Can the company monitor what you're reading and when - and then hand that over to law enforcement? Can it replace a book file with a different file whose content is changed?

Perhaps more than anything else, this mass deletion of 1984 has made it clear that collecting e-books is going to require some technical know-how. No e-book is truly yours unless you can get it off your Kindle and onto your computer - hopefully a computer that isn't connected to the internet.

The smile-evaluating software takes a picture of Keihin employees every morning and assigns smile values to various parts of the face. It then adds those values and delivers a smile scan score. According to an article today in the Mainichi Daily News:

The device analyzes the facial characteristics of a person, including eye movements, lip curves and wrinkles, and rates a smile on a scale between 0 and 100 percent using a camera and computer.

For those with low scores, advice like "You still look too serious," or "Lift up your mouth corners," will be displayed on the screen.

Some 530 employees of the Tokyo-based railway company will check their smiles with Smile Scan before starting work each day. They will print out and carry around an image of their best smile in an attempt to remember it.

This just sounds like a workplace shooting incident waiting to happen. If I had to pretend to have the perfect smile on every morning - and got criticized if I "looked too serious" - I would definitely go Joker after a while.

via Mainichi Daily News (thanks, Klebert!)

A new demographic study conducted by Chinese researchers reveals that China has 32.7 million more males than females under the age of 20. Of course, some regions have higher male to female ratios than others, partly due to differences in how China's "one child" policy is enforced. In many regions, couples who give birth to a girl are allowed to have a second child, and tend to abort fetuses until they have a male. In urban areas like Shanghai with more education and greater social parity between the sexes, people are allowed only one child no matter what the sex. While there are still more boys born, the ratio is less extreme. You can see a breakdown of China's demographics by region below.

The study included over 4 million participants from across China, and was based on data gathered during the 2005 year. The Chinese government has expressed concern over the looming population imbalance among young adults, which is going to become more extreme over the next ten years or so. Most experts agree that the imbalance has largely been caused by access to ultrasound tests that can determine the sex of a baby before birth. (It's worth noting that China's current population control policies were implemented before the availability of these tests.) Though sex-based abortion is illegal in China, it is widely practiced.

So the male generation coming of age now in China is mainly the result of population control policies that didn't take into account changes in technology.

All kinds of solutions have been proposed, though of course it's too late to stop the ball rolling on demographic changes that have already happened to people who are teens and toddlers right now. When the male generation comes of age, there will not be enough fertile women to replace the current population and it will decline.

Some commentators have suggested that China gradually relax its population control policies, allowing people to create families of any size they like within the next ten years. Others believe that there needs to be a tweak in the policies of regions that allow a second child only if the first is female - these are the regions that have the highest male-to-female sex ratios. And there have already been efforts made to educate citizens about the value of girls via the fairly successful "Care for Girls" campaign that has halted the runaway ratios in targeted regions.

The pressing question now, however, is what will happen to this male generation? Ian McDonald asks this same question about India in his short story "An Eligible Boy," published in his new anthology Cyberabad Days. He imagines a world where the lack of women has broken down the caste system: Women are so valuable that men compete for women of every caste. They spend all their cash on dressing up, paying exorbitant amounts to matchmaking services, and trying vainly to interest the few women who remain single. The disappointed bachelors turn to videogames, soaps, and marriage-like relationships with other men.

Margaret Atwood asks this same question in her novel The Handmaid's Tale, which imagines a post-apocalyptic future where only a few women are fertile. Those who are fertile are rounded up and turned into breeding slaves for wealthy men. Essentially, every powerful male gets to have a harem that includes his (infertile) wife and a "handmaid," his breeding woman.

While both of these scenarios are extreme, the question of what will happen to both sexes in the male generation is pressing. Will men have to take on the traditionally female role of hoping to be noticed by the opposite sex, wishing for that lucky moment when women choose them? Or will men treat women like valuable but powerless objects, best when they are kept locked up and constantly pregnant? Or perhaps there will be a social transformation where women get to have male harems so that those extra 32.7 million men all get to have wives. No matter what happens, the next two decades in China are likely to foment a strange new kind of sexual revolution.

Read the full report on China's sex demographics here (it's a PDF). Or read a summary in the New York Times.

I recently got an email from a company called "Voss & Mauser" promoting their cool new implantable GPS devices, little chips that can triangulate their position using satellite signals. GPS technology is used in most cell phones these days, and allows you to use all those nifty mapping applications that tell you where you are (or where other people with smart phones are) on a map.

But Voss & Mauser say now you can locate somebody using this implantable GPS device, or by steathily feeding the tiny chip to somebody you want to track later. You can learn all about it if you visit to the slickly-designed Voss & Mauser site (sorry - it's in German, but anybody with a high school German class or Google Translate can get through it). You'll immediately see that Voss & Mauser's design - and their technology - is a bit too scifi to be true. It's a fun ARG-like experience, but I wanted to know more. So I wrote to their contact email, praising the site and asking if it were an ARG. I got back a form letter saying they'd had so much mail that I should just redirect all my questions to their "American distributor," whom they claimed is a company called Lightning GPS.

Now here's where things get interesting. Lighting GPS is actually a real company whose business model is only a tad less creepy than Voss & Mauser's fake one. They deal with law enforcement and consumers, selling stealth GPS tracking devices called "Nav Genius" that you can hide in the navigation systems of anybody's car. Lightning GPS recommend it specifically for spying on a spouse you think might be cheating on you, or restricting the movements of your teenager in his or her car (they point out that the device can be set up to send you an alert if the car goes into a "forbidden area").

I love the idea that the pranksters behind Voss & Mauser use their futuristic-creepy ARG to call attention to actually-existing technologies that help people invade each other's privacy in the most egregious way imaginable. You can bet that if Lightning GPS could build a swallowable, trackable GPS device, they would. And they'd sell it for "concerned spouses."

Check out Voss & Mauser, and then take a gander at Lightning GPS - this is social satire at its finest.

It’s pretty open-and-shut, to my mind; and frankly, I’m surprised to have seen any support at all for tweaking your kids’ genetic makeup to taste on a forum like this one, where the taste of the mainstream public is routinely derided. How much of science fiction teaches us that people, and especially large crowds of people, tend to make terrible decisions? Cripes, look at how much of history teaches us this:

Salem Witch Trials

Nazism

The Macarena

And why would we expect it to be any different when it comes to passing on our DNA?

And therein lies the problem. It can be entertaining and illuminating to delve into the philosophical points of whether we should choose a baby’s sex or eye color or give them a chocolate-flavored penis, and whether we even have the right to do so in the first place—but ultimately, we have to look at the practical aspects of the question, too. And one of those relevant realities, sad or not, is that people love fads.

On a small scale, that might not seem like such a big deal. Like, OK, so violet eyes become popular—and you know they would; we’d have preschools teeming with little purple-eyed monsters named Carson and Sequoia—but what’s the damage? And perhaps there wouldn’t be any, although there are many people still alive who remember when differences in color determined, say, which water fountain you got to drink out of.

Sex selection is more worrisome. Again, maybe it would just all pan out that about half of parents would choose boys and half would choose girls—although, as was pointed out in last week’s post, even without science that allows them to choose, there are people who clearly lean one way. Yes, you could argue that this is actually a point in favor of sex-selection technology (as commenter icelight did)—that if a culture is going to kill its daughters, for example, then letting them opt for sons from the outset at least keeps babies from being murdered. That’s a fair point, but there’s an inherent danger in it, beyond the fact that it could be seen as implicitly condoning the culture in question’s inherent sexism (which, for the record, is not what I think icelight was doing).

The danger, which figures into all questions of designer offspring, is simply that we might skew our genetic portfolio the “wrong” way—and I put wrong in scare quotes because, short of being able to predict the future, there’s no way to tell which attributes may or may not be valuable two or three generations down the line. Is it good to be tall? Sure, unless something bad happens to your planet and you have to move underground, in which case a population whose average height is six-foot-two is a gross inconvenience. Is it good to have a super-efficient metabolism that keeps you from getting obese? Absolutely, unless food for some reason abruptly becomes much less plentiful.

Even in the case of predetermining and preventing a child’s predisposition for disease or disability, I’m wary. When it comes to cancer, it’s pretty cut and dry, but what about autism or dyslexia? The case has been made that these aren’t inherently crippling conditions so much as different modes of perception that aren’t aligned with the traditional or mainstream way of experiencing the world. By eliminating them from the gene pool just because we’re sure they’re “bad,” we may risk cutting ourselves off from a valuable kind of knowledge.

The thing about nature is that it makes our genetic choices for us randomly, impersonally, and incontestably. We can assume with some certainty that by leaving our biological makeup in its hands, we’re not going to end up with too many tall people, too many women, too many redheads, or too many or too few of anything else. I’m all for scientific progress, but I’m even more in favor of caution, particularly when it comes to something as irreplaceable and still well beyond our understanding as humanity’s genetic constitution. We have not, in my opinion, demonstrated sufficient wisdom to convince me that we can be trusted to ensure our future as a healthy species once we start futzing around with the biology that determines it. Once we do, hey—give your kids all the chocolate-flavored penises you want.

Commenter Moff’s real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found at scribblescribblescribble.com/blog.

He writes:

Couples in the developed world, where gender discrimination and biases are less prominent, should be allowed to use gender selection for family balancing purposes. I'm absolutely flabbergasted that this is still not a right in some countries, including Canada where couples and their doctors face the threat of large fines and jail terms.

Admittedly, not all countries are ready for sex selection; India and China certainly come to mind. But that's not our problem, nor is it an indication of how sex selection would be used here. The idea that sex selection would significantly skew the gender balance here in the developed world is terribly misguided and not based on any real evidence. Given the 2 children per couple tendency, it's highly likely that most couples would opt to have a boy and a girl.

Another argument against sex selection is that it is prejudicial by its very nature — that the very presence of preference indicates that gender biases exist and will continue to be reinforced. While this is a more nuanced argument, it fails to take into account an undeniable aspect of the human condition: we are a gendered species and gender differences do in fact exist.

I think there are a few problems with his argument here. First, nothing good can ever come of an ethics policy that policymakers claim certain countries aren't "ready for." What does that even mean? That people in India and China are too savage to make ethical choices for themselves? That's simply an unacceptable formulation.

That basic issue aside, I think the idea of picking a child's gender is so distasteful to people because it brings up the idea of designer babies. If we pick our children's sex, what else do we pick? Intelligence, hair color, sexual orientation, a propensity for making bad puns?

I tend to agree guardedly with Dvorsky about this being an outdated prejudice, simply because I think that we are heading for a world where rich people can design their own babies, and will. Now might be the time to decide what it is and isn't OK to design into a baby. Maybe, ethically speaking, picking your child's sex isn't the same kind of problem as picking her intellectual capacity or her sexual orientation. I don't claim to have the answers here, but I appreciate it when people dare to raise the questions.

[via Sentient Developments]

Most countries in the world have already answered that question with a resounding "yes." The additive in question here is iodine, and you probably eat it all the time in your enhanced, iodized salt. Canada's micronutrient initiative is trying to bring iodized salt to countries like Pakistan and elsewhere, where iodine deficiency creates a range of problems from severe developmental disorders to lowered IQs.

Many would say that iodized salt isn't creating "enhanced" brains, only functional ones. But researcher Anders Sandberg points out at Oxford University's Practical Ethics blog that there is really very little difference between "enhancement" and "normalization" in this case:

It seems likely that in our historical past iodine deficiency has always been with us. People in inland areas would have suffered, and even when overt problems like goitre or retardation did not occur it is likely that deficiency prevented much of the population from reaching their full potential, generation after generation.

So, who is to say what is "normal" here? If generations of people all over the world (including today's estimated 2 billion people with insufficient iodine intake) have never been iodine-enabled, are we not in fact enhancing them?

From an ethical standpoint, Sandberg believes that this is just fine. In fact, he suggests we should be pushing beyond iodine enhancement to figure out other ways to enhance the intelligence of populations:

Using the assumption that 1 IQ point is worth about 1% increased income (a low estimate; when comparing IQs and GDP across countries the relation seems even stronger) this would mean an increase in average income by at least 10% - definitely nothing to sneeze at. Better, there seem to be strong network effects of cognition in a society: if more people are smart, educatable and healthy they will produce wealth more efficiently. Note that this calculation has not taken into account the effects of apathy and illness due to iodine deficiency, just the cognitive impairment - fixing those will probably have at least a comparable effect on their own.

Iodine supplementation can help people rise not just in living standard but health and mental ability, it is cheap and it is safe. It is very hard to argue against it (the only issue might be involuntary medication, but since education campaigns are part of the effort and people presumably can choose traditional, non-supplemented salt this would at most be an informed consent form of soft paternalism). It would seem that if we could find an enhancer that improved normal people beyond their historic level to this degree we would have an equally strong imperative to make it widely available if only due to the overall beneficial effects.

Of course, the next enhancer to come along might be distributed as unequally as iodized salt has. Right now, most developed countries have iodized salt, and many developing ones don't. Once the whole world has been iodine-enhanced, it's very possible that the richest nations will get salt that contains nutrients that boost IQs by 50 points, and therefore increases incomes respectively.

The Perfect Cognition Enhancer [via Practical Ethics]

Top image of iodized salt by Bobby Wong.

Many people, including the infamous bio-ethicist Peter Singer, would argue that there's a social benefit to knowing whether you're going to have a Down's Syndrome baby. The child will need lifelong care and supervision, which could be a drain on family (and the state). Presumably, having that information early in a pregnancy will allow the parents the option to terminate it and try for a child who will grow up to live autonomously. And indeed, researchers report in this week's British Medical Journal that the testing has clearly had this effect in Denmark, where the number of babies born with Down's Syndrome went down from 55 in 2000, to 31 in 2005, after the testing program was in place.

The Denmark program's main innovation was early, non-invasive testing for Down's Syndrome. If a pregnancy showed several symptoms of producing a Down's baby, the doctors would suggest a more invasive test that could determine beyond a doubt whether the baby would be born with the condition. Previously, the only tests available had been the invasive one and as a result fewer women opted to take the test. Even today, all Down's pre-natal testing in Denmark is opt-in for parents.

Let's say the idea of terminating a Down's pregnancy doesn't disturb you. But what about babies who will be born with holes in their hearts, a potential for cancer, or possible schizophrenia? Where does eugenics become genetic fascism? Given that this kind of pre-natal screening is aimed at helping parents make an informed decision about whether to terminate, what conditions should parents be allowed to screen for?

Impact of a New National Screening Policy for Down's Syndrome in Denmark [via British Medical Journal]

The release reads, in part:

"Security" is the word on everyone's lips these days, but there is more to this dramatic market growth than that. Video surveillance finds uses in a variety of vertical markets such as retail, education, banking, transportation and corporate business. And it's not always about security: new facial recognition software can analyze shoppers' behavior within stores, for example, tracking eyeball movements as shoppers view product displays.

European video surveillance markets are more mature than those in North America (some say the UK, with its 4.1 million surveillance cameras, is the most monitored society on earth), but massive deployments are also now taking place in North America and, in connection with the upcoming Olympics, in China . . .

But while digital technology offers advantages - higher resolution, easier searching and retrieval, and more efficient storage - many of the traditional security resellers of analog equipment are not yet comfortable with digital, and a massive retraining effort is going to be required.

"This is a modern version of the California gold rush," [ABI vice president Scott] Schatt concludes, "except that people are bringing cameras instead of pickaxes and shovels."

Ah, the future looks so bright. I'd better make sure I'm filming everything that happens in it with hidden cameras. Image via NYC Indymedia.

Video Surveillance: Explosive Market [ABI Research]

And of course, it's hilarious. Instead of spouting some speech about simulation Wachowski-Bros-style, Piper is basically dumbstruck. He finally lashes out at an old lady alien by telling her she looks like her face has "been in the cheese dip since 1957." Yup, those were the days, when high tech social control was solved with a nice wrassle and you didn't need any of them fancy computer hackers to do the job. If it were possible to force every human in the U.S. and Canada to watch this movie, I would do it. Using my MIND CONTROL BEAM.

They Live [Amazon]

According to the official Exmocare site:

By interpreting an information-rich, individually-tailored physiological context, we can determine the emotional state of a person wearing an Exmocare device. Emotional information, very simply, can be characterized in two dimensions.

* Arousal: How excited is the person?
* Valence: How positive is the person?

Different emotional states are revealed through patterns of these two dimensions. How? Any emotional state leads to a specific change in our body. We can detect these patterns, and to an even greater extent, differentiate between them.

The BT2 Control Panel runs silently from your taskbar in reporter mode. In reporter mode, the software checks your physiological and emotional data for dangerous situations and sends status updates and alerts to the website automatically.

From the Evaluation Kit website, you can monitor anyone's physiological and emotional data from anywhere in the world. You can also view their full history and assign and resolve alerts.

BT2 [Exmocare]

This is a story that requires few words to tell. Here's a larger map of the region. UN Satellites Photograph Human Exodus [War and Health]

AT&T is a sponsor of the project, and handed over reams of phone records to the group so they could link NYC with cities around the world based on phone calls and IP traffic. No, it's not a surveillance spree, though it's hard not to wonder about that given AT&T's recent eagerness to hand over its phone data to the government without warrants. But this project merely aims to show how busy NYC can be. And just how pretty busy can be. This will be part of the MoMa's "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition starting February 24th.Images by senseable city lab

New York Talk Exchange main page

The patented device uses "imaging radar," which bounces microwaves off your skeleton and obtains an image. The objective of the new system is to provide a fool-proof means of identifying people by their skeletons, which may be harder to spoof than fingerprints or other biometrics. The imaging system will be "compact and safe" for use on humans, the patent (#7317416) claims. Most of all, the system would provide "a means to identify individuals at a distance and/or without requiring direct contact."

Versatility is a big selling point of Leonard Flom and Ophir Almog's system:

The imaging radar may be at a security checkpoint (e.g., airport, secure facility, etc.). In other embodiments, the imaging radar is an active radar mounted on an aerial platform such as a satellite or an aircraft. The radar may also be mounted on a track and/or rail system (e.g., on the ground, a floor, and/or a roof) along which it can be moved rapidly.

Our evil video tool cut off the credits from this video, alas. So here they are. Starring: Jeff Grace and Blaise Miller. Directed by: Todd Berger. Written by: Jeff Grace. Produced by: Kevin Brennan and Jeff Grace. Cinematography: Helena Wei. Edited by: Todd Berger. Music: Kevin MacLeod. Production Assistant: Derrick Guyton. [The Vacationeers]

In point of fact, all the wines were exactly the same. But the results of the MRI scans showed greater neurological activity in people's pleasure centers when they were told they were drinking expensive wine. The best (creepiest?) part of all this is that the authors of the study hope to use these findings to manipulate consumers. The authors write:

Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.

Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness [PNAS]