NetLingo: The Blog - Improve Your Internet IQ

China is in the midst of a “handwriting crisis” according to Sheng Hui of Yanzhao Evening News.

We already know that many adults have begun to forget how to draw basic Chinese characters since, in this computer age, they type far more often than they write by hand. But an expose has revealed that our children aren’t even learning the characters in the first place. In one high school class, for example, fully one third of students couldn’t write “sauce,” and half couldn’t even draw the characters for something as basic as “acupuncture.”

Part of the reason is simply our technological society: Students communicate with each other and their parents via text message and email. But our schools are to blame as well. Calligraphy classes have been widely dropped in favor of math and science. And in urban areas, teachers hardly ever write on blackboards anymore; “they just click the mouse to display their lesson plans” on a screen.
Students simply aren’t exposed to the sight of an adult hand drawing the character strokes. China will have to set standards for handwriting education, including competitions and mandatory testing, at both primary and secondary levels. If we don’t, we will soon have to “apply for world cultural heritage status” for Chinese characters.

When robots look like people or pets, says Robert Ito, it’s hard not to develop feelings for them.

"The robot is smiling at me, his red rubbery lips curved in a cheery grin. I’m seated in front of a panel with 10 numbered buttons, and the robot, a 3-foot-tall, legless automaton with an impish face, is telling me which buttons to push and which hand to push them with: “Touch seven with your right hand; touch three with your left.”

The idea is to go as fast as I can. When I make a mistake, he corrects me; when I speed up, he tells me how much better I’m doing. Despite the simplicity of our interactions, I’m starting to like the little guy. Maybe it’s his round silvery eyes and moon-shaped face; maybe it’s his soothing voice—not quite human, yet warm all the same. Even though I know he’s just a jumble of wires and circuitry, I want to do better on these tests, to please him.

The robot’s name is Bandit. We’re together in a tiny room at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey, Calif., where Bandit regularly puts stroke victims through their paces. They’re very fond of him, says University of Southern California researcher Eric Wade, who has worked with Bandit and his predecessors for five years. The stroke victims chitchat with Bandit, chide him, smile when he congratulates them. “People will try to hug the robots,” says Wade. “We go out to nursing homes, and people ask, ‘When’s the robot coming back?’”

Bandit is one of a growing number of social robots designed to help humans in both hospitals and homes. There are robots that comfort lonely shut-ins, assist patients suffering from dementia, and help autistic kids learn how to interact with their human peers. They’re popular, and engineered to be so. If we didn’t like them, we wouldn’t want them listening to our problems or pestering us to take our meds. So it’s no surprise that people become attached to these robots. What is surprising is just how attached some have become. Researchers have documented people kissing their mechanized companions, confiding in them, giving them gifts—and being heartbroken when the robot breaks, or the study ends and it’s time to say goodbye.

And this is just the beginning. What happens as robots become ever more responsive, more human-like? Some researchers worry that people—especially groups like autistic kids or elderly shut-ins who already are less apt to interact with others—may come to prefer their mechanical friends over their human ones.

Are we really ready for this relationship?

There are over 100 different models of social robots worldwide. The family includes machines that can act as nursemaids and housekeepers, provide companionship, talk patients through physical rehabilitation, and act as surrogate pets. The most popular, Sony’s Aibo (Artificial Intelligence Bot) robot dog, sold more than 140,000 units before it was discontinued. The Japan Robot Association, an industry trade group, predicts that today’s $5 billion a year market for social robots will top $50 billion a year by 2025.

What makes these machines’ popularity all the more remarkable is that they are a long way from the charming pseudo-humans of science fiction, your chatty C-3POs or cuddly WALL-Es. Many of these helpmates are little more than animatronic Pillow Pets.

The Japanese-made Paro, for instance, looks like a plush-toy version of a baby harp seal. It coos, moves its head and tail, bats its long lashes—and that’s about it. Even so, people adore it. More than a thousand Paros have been sold since its creation in 2003, making it one of the most popular therapeutic robots ever produced. In one study, a few people in two nursing homes seemed to believe that the Paro was a real animal; others spoke to it and were convinced that the Paro, which can only squeak and purr, was speaking back to them.

Or consider the Roomba, a robot vacuum cleaner that has sold more than 6 million units. In a 2007 study, researchers from Georgia Tech’s College of Computing looked at the ways in which Roomba owners bonded with their gadgets. Though the machines have neither faces nor limbs, and do little more than scuttle around and pick up lint, users were noted speaking to them, describing them as family members, even expressing grief when they needed to be “hospitalized.”

“I love the silly thing,” says Jill Cooper, co-founder of the frugal-living website LivingOnADime.com. Cooper, like many Roomba owners, gave her robot a name (Bob), speaks to him, and shows him off to visitors. “I hate to get too deep here,” she says, “but it’s like trying to explain what it feels like to be in love to somebody who’s never been in love before.”

“I’ve had to say goodbye to a lot of robots,” laments Kjerstin Williams, a senior robotics engineer at the research-and-development firm Applied Minds in Glendale, Calif. “If you have animals as pets, you go through the same process: You grieve and move on, and you try to re-engage with the next animal, or the next set of robots. It’s just that socially, it’s perfectly acceptable to grieve over a dog and maybe never get another one. If you’re a roboticist, you can’t do that.”

And it’s not just social robots spawning teary farewells. When a U.S. Marines explosives technician in Iraq brought the blasted remains of Scooby-Doo, his bomb-disabling robot, to the repair shop, Ted Bogosh, the master sergeant in charge of the shop, told him the machine was beyond repair. Bogosh offered the Marine a new robot, but the mournful man insisted he didn’t want a new robot—he wanted Scooby-Doo back. “Sometimes they get a little emotional,” Bogosh told The Washington Post.

In another instance reported by the Post, a U.S. Army colonel halted an experiment at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona in which a 5-foot-long, insect-like robot was getting its many limbs blown off one at a time. The colonel, according to Mark Tilden, the robotics physicist at the site, deemed the spectacle “inhumane.”

If veteran military officers can get choked up over a mechanized centipede, how hard might, say, a stroke patient fall for an artificial roommate? “Imagine a household robot that looks like a person,” says Matthias Scheutz, a computer science professor at Tufts University. “It’s nice, because it’s programmed to be nice. You’re going to be looking for friendship in that robot, because the robot is just like a friend. That’s what I find really problematic.”

Robots already are used extensively in Japan to help take care of older people, which concerns Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

“The elderly, at the end of their lives, deserve to work out the meaning of their lives with someone who understands what it means to be born, to have parents, to consider the question of children, to fear death,” says Turkle. “That someone has to be a person. That doesn’t mean that robots can’t help with household chores. But as companions, I think it is the wrong choice.”

Then again, assistive robots for the elderly are a hot topic precisely because, as populations age, there are fewer human caregivers to go around. “Our work never aims to replace human care,” says Maja Mataric, director of USC’s Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems. “There is a vast gap in human care for all ages and various special needs. The notion that people should do the caring is not realistic. There simply aren’t enough people. We must find other ways to care for those in need.”

And the robots do seem to help. A 2009 review of 43 studies published in the journal Gerontechnology found that social robots increase positive mood and ease stress in the elderly. Some studies also reported decreases in loneliness and a strengthening of ties between the subjects and their family members.

But Turkle wonders if such human-robot relationships are inherently deceptive, because they encourage people to feel things for machines that can’t feel anything. Robots are programmed to say “I love you” when they can’t love; therapeutic robot pets, like Aibos and Paros, feign pleasure they don’t feel. Are programmers deluding people with their lovable but unloving creations?

“People can’t help falling for these robots,” says Scheutz. “So if we can avoid it, let’s not design them with faces and humanoid forms. There’s no reason that everything has to have two legs and look like a person.”

Unfeeling or not, a robot and its charms can be hard to resist. In the weeks following my meeting with Bandit, I find myself Googling his name and USC just to see if there’s been any news about him. I don’t think I miss him, really. I just want to know what he’s been up to.

Williams, the roboticist at Applied Minds, understands what I’m going through. As a graduate student at Caltech, Williams became attached to an Aibo, one of many that she would take around to local schools to get kids interested in robotics. She took this particular Aibo home, named him Rhodium (her husband is a chemist), played with him, learned his likes (a pink ball) and dislikes (having the antenna on his ear pushed the wrong way). But after graduation, she had to return Rhodium to the university.

“I do wonder where he went,” says Williams. “And I hope he still has his pink ball, because he’d be awfully sad if he couldn’t find it.” Sorry to say, the little robot dog undoubtedly misses his pink ball as much as he misses Williams—which is not at all.

An ongoing campaign of computer attacks on the U.S. this year has been traced to China. What are the hackers after?

Who has been hacked?
Government agencies, newspapers, utilities, and private companies—literally hundreds of targets. The cybersecurity firm Mandiant, which has been tracking these attacks since 2004, says data has been stolen from at least 140 companies, mostly American, including Google, DuPont, Apple, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, as well as think tanks, law firms, human-rights groups, and foreign embassies. A company that provides Internet security for U.S. intelligence was attacked; so was one that holds blueprints for the nation’s pipelines and power grids. Hackers even stole classified information about the development of the F-35 stealth fighter jet from subcontractors working with the plane’s producer, Lockheed Martin. Congressional and federal offices have reported breaches. In 2007, the Pentagon itself was attacked—and it won’t say what was stolen.

Who’s doing it?
Ten years ago, Chinese patriots working independently were behind many of the attacks. These young hackers were outraged by the 1999 U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, an accident during the Kosovo War. Using the name Honkers, or Red Guests, they launched a series of denial-of-service attacks on U.S. government websites. But within a few years some of them had begun working with the Chinese government, targeting Tibetan and Taiwanese independence groups, the religious group Falun Gong, and anyone in the West who communicated with Chinese dissidents. In recent years, says anti-malware specialist Joe Stewart, the number of hackers has doubled, with 10 major hacking groups in China. “There is a tremendous amount of manpower being thrown at this from their side,” Stewart told Bloomberg Businessweek. China’s government now appears to be directing the attacks. “We’ve moved from kids in their bedroom and financially motivated crime to state-sponsored cybercrime,” said Graham Cluley, a British security expert.

Why is China doing this?
China sees cyberwarfare as a valid form of international business and military competition, and is pursuing what it calls “information dominance.’’ Mandiant has traced many of the U.S. attacks to a Shanghai office building that appears to be the home of the People’s Liberation Army’s cyberwarfare unit. Thousands of hacks, including ones by two of the prominent aliases, Ugly Gorilla and SuperHard, were traced definitively to the district, and in recent years, that building has installed super-high-tech fiber-optic cables able to handle massive data traffic. About 2,000 people are estimated to be working in the building. This group appears to specialize in English-language computers, and hackers seem well versed in Western pop culture; one of the hackers used Harry Potter references for his passwords. China has issued a blanket denial, calling Mandiant’s claims “groundless” and “irresponsible.”

How do the hackers get access?
Mostly by the technique known as “spear phishing”. They send an email with a link that an employee of a targeted company then opens, activating malware programs that sweep through databases, vacuuming up information, including emails, blueprints, and other documents. Some phishing emails are recognized as spam by the recipients—but the Chinese are getting better at disguising them, sometimes using email accounts with real people’s names that are known to the recipient, and using colloquial English, so the emails read as plausible company business.

What does China do with the information?
The corporate secrets are worth a lot of money to Chinese business. Blueprints of advanced plants or machinery could help many Chinese industries, and so could data on corporate finances and policies. Energy companies, for example, can benefit from knowing what their foreign competitors are willing to bid for oil field sites. Chinese companies have already been sued for allegedly stealing DuPont’s proprietary method for making chemicals used in plastics and paints. More ominously, some of the information could be used to disrupt U.S. industry or infrastructure (see below). And while China is the main source of attacks, other countries also frequently hack U.S. sites, including Russia, North Korea, and Iran.

What is the U.S. doing to protect itself?
Congress refused to pass a comprehensive cybersecurity act last year because of opposition from business groups, which complained that new computer regulations would be costly and onerous. As a result, President Obama recently issued an executive order requiring Homeland Security to identify “critical infrastructure where a cybersecurity incident could reasonably result in catastrophic regional or national effects on public health or safety, economic security, or national security.” Those companies will have to beef up their cybersecurity by installing multiple layers of protection for the most sensitive systems. Right now, some companies have only a single firewall, and once that is breached, all the data is available. “The dirty little secret in these control systems is once you get through the perimeter, they have no security at all,” said Dale Peterson of security company Digital Bond. Hackers “can do anything they want.”

A worst-case scenario
Derailed trains. Air traffic control systems suddenly shut down with thousands of planes in the air. Exploding chemical plants and gas pipelines. Blackouts over large parts of the country, lasting weeks or even months. These are some of the apocalyptic events cybersecurity experts fear—hacks that could kill people and sow widespread panic. But what might be even more damaging, the experts say, is a coordinated attack on multiple banks in which hackers alter—not wipe—much of the financial data stored on their computers. With balances, debts, and other data changed, no transaction would be trustworthy. Nobody’s bank account or mortgage statement could be deemed accurate. “It would be impossible to roll that back,” said Dmitri Alperovitch of the computer security company CrowdStrike. “You could wreak absolute havoc on the world’s financial system for years.” Leon Panetta, the outgoing defense secretary, warns that hackers are now testing the defenses of banks, utilities, and government agencies, and figuring out how to launch a paralyzing attack. “This is a pre-9/11 moment,” Panetta recently told business executives in New York. “The attackers are plotting.”

Google Glass is no longer a rumor, said Tim Parker in Forbes.com. “It’s real.”

The company unveiled a prototype of its Internet-equipped eyeglasses in March 2013, announcing that it would give a selected bunch of “bold, creative individuals” the chance to purchase the first version this year for $1,500. The futuristic spectacles have a tiny screen located in the top right-hand corner of the frame, where Web data can be projected in front of the user’s eyeball. Using voice-activated technology, you can do a Google search, call up GPS directions, video chat with your friends, and even record what you’re seeing with a tiny mounted camera—all without fumbling for a cell phone. “Welcome to the future,” said John Moltz in MacWorld.com. “Wearable computing technology” is finally here.

If this is the future, then count me out, said Andrew Keen in CNN.com. Google Glass significantly steps up the company’s “digital war against privacy.” Not only will users be able to record or take pictures of people without their knowledge or consent, the “all-seeing eyeglasses” will act like all Google products and collect data to send back to the “Googleplex,” with no way to opt out. A “pooling of all our most intimate data” is the “holy grail” for advertisers. Before we know it, personalized ads will magically appear whenever our gaze lands upon a particular product. What a “terrifyingly dystopian” idea. And just think of what it will mean for walking down the street, said Caille Millner in SFGate.com. Too many people already bump into me because they can’t tear their gazes away from their beloved cellphones. What happens when these tech-heads start “wandering the streets with a computer plugged into their eyes?”

Try it—you’ll like it, said Joshua Topolsky in TheVerge.com. I was given a test trial of Glass, and found it to have “tremendous value and potential.” As I walked around Manhattan, I was able to get instant directions, following a “real-time, turn-by-turn overlay” of my own line of sight. The screen does not interfere with your vision, and the ability to get information like the weather forecast or a new email as you walk makes you feel “better equipped, and definitely less diverted.” Yes, it remains to be seen how quickly consumers will warm to this “alien and unfashionable” technology. But after a few hours of using Glass, for me “the question is no longer ‘if’ but ‘when.’”

See also: digital jewelry, smart clothes

Who needs pockets? Thanks to a new fabric developed by Swiss scientists, cell phones, tablets, and other mobile devices may soon be woven directly into clothing, said Chris Wickham in Reuters.com.

By mimicking “the way tendons connect to bones,” the polyurethane-based material is flexible enough to stretch without breaking but stiff enough to protect delicate circuits. The material “could revolutionize devices from smart phones and solar cells to medical implants.”

A Massachusetts start-up has used similar technology for a “flexible skullcap that monitors impacts to the head during sports.” The Swiss researchers say their product can also be used for artificial cartilage. “The vision is that you will be able to make materials that are as heterogeneous as the biological ones,” said Andre Studart of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

See also: digital jewelry, smart clothes, epidermal electronic systems

When we send a text or an email, we imagine ourselves in a “protected and anonymous” cocoon, says Frank Bruni of The New York Times.

"You’d think by now it would be screamingly obvious that “there’s no true, dependable privacy when we’re tapping or typing,” said Frank Bruni. Yet Gen. David Petraeus—like Rep. Anthony Weiner, Tiger Woods, and so many others before them—has fallen prey to “the greatest contradiction of contemporary life: how safe we feel at our touchpads and keyboards” versus “how exposed and imperiled we really are.” When we send a text or an email, we imagine ourselves in a “protected and anonymous” cocoon. No one seems to be watching, so “with a reckless velocity,” we express anger, share gossip and criticism, or indulge in flirtations and sex talk we’d never put into words in person or even on the phone. Who hasn’t said something in an email about a friend, colleague, or boss that, if revealed to the world, would cause great embarrassment—or even the loss of a job or a marriage? We succumb to this temptation for the same reason Petraeus and the other fallen stars did: “That glowing and treacherous screen in front of you is somehow the greenest light of all.”

Frank Langella thinks young people rely too much on technology when courting each other.

Frank Langella is worried about the state of romance, said Catherine Shoard in The Guardian (U.K.). Part of the problem, says the 75-year-old actor, is that young people rely on technology when wooing each other. “I think walking up to a pretty girl at a party and saying, ‘How are you? I’d like to take you for a cup of coffee,’ is much more exciting than, ‘Hey, I saw you last night at the whatever. Text me,’” he says. “Tech is giving people the opportunity to protect themselves from saying, ‘Thank you very much but I don’t like your looks and don’t want to go out with you.’”

In the first three months of 2012, the song “Tugboat” was played 7,800 times on Pandora. Tugboat's three songwriters earned 7 cents each.

The rise of streaming sites has made it impossible for most musicians “to earn even a modest wage through our recordings,” said Damon Krukowski in Pitchfork.com. My band, Galaxie 500, broke up in 1991, yet our single “Tugboat” was played 7,800 times on Pandora in the first three months of 2012. For that privilege, the song’s three songwriters earned 7 cents each.

“Spotify pays better”; the three of us earned a collective $1.05 for 5,960 plays there. In other words, “it would take songwriting royalties for roughly 312,000 plays on Pandora to earn us the profit of one—one—LP sale.” When I began making records, the idea was simple: You priced your recording at slightly more than the manufacturing cost and hoped it sold. Now streaming sites are simply “selling access” and aim only to attract speculative capital for themselves.

Robots are the only hope for “an aging country with more people who need help and fewer people to do the helping.”

The “robots are coming,” said Holman Jenkins in The Wall Street Journal. They’re the only hope, in fact, for “an aging country with more people who need help and fewer people to do the helping.” We’ve long known that aging Baby Boomers will trigger “giant unfunded long-term liabilities” for Social Security and Medicare. But a severe labor shortage could also keep those old people from getting the goods and services they want. Some businesses see opportunity here. “Following the logic of need,” an entrepreneur in Baltimore has spent seven years and $30 million developing robots that package prescription drugs for long-term patients in nursing homes and hospitals. Google is spending millions to develop a driverless car largely because it expects big demand from America’s retirees. Robots alone won’t save us, of course. We also need better incentives for people to “depend less on Uncle Sam.” And instead of “burying entrepreneurs in taxes” so we can pay for entitlements, we have to encourage “investors to bring us the robots that will make the future bearable.” The grim alternative is “a future in which older people receive Social Security checks but still go hungry.”

Aviation authorities are finally considering lifting the ban on passenger use of cell phones, e-readers, tablets, and other electronics. Why?

Why is there a ban in the first place?
The airline industry and the Federal Aviation Administration worry that electromagnetic waves emitted by passengers’ personal electronic devices—including MP3 players, laptops, smart phones, and cell phones—could interfere with an aircraft’s electronic controls, or avionics. Commercial pilots file dozens of reports every year detailing how their radios, GPS navigation systems, and collision-avoidance boxes suddenly went haywire, but began functioning again when passengers were asked to check that all their devices were turned off. That kind of circumstantial evidence led the FAA in 1993 to urge that laptops, audio players, and other electronic distractions not be used during takeoff and landing. Once an aircraft is above 10,000 feet, aviation officials say, a flight crew would have enough time and altitude to safely react to any electronic problem. The risk in allowing passengers to use their electronics at lower altitudes is tiny, said Boeing engineer David Carson, but since a freak occurrence could end in disaster, “why take that risk?”

Is there any evidence to support this fear?
It’s mostly theoretical. Any electrical device can generate interference as electricity flows through its wiring. Even those without wireless signals, like portable CD players, can emit potentially troublesome electromagnetic radiation. Devices that intentionally transmit radio waves, like cellphones, pose even greater problems. Some engineers think that such emissions could potentially drown out weak signals from radio navigation beacons on the ground or GPS satellites in space. Wireless industry spokesman Michael Altschul says such fears are baseless, since separate radio frequencies are assigned for aviation and commercial use. “Plus,” he said, “the wiring and instruments for aircraft are shielded to protect them from interference from commercial wireless devices.” In two decades of tests, government scientists and experts at Boeing and Airbus have bombarded planes with electromagnetic radiation, but have never succeeded in replicating the problems reported by pilots, or confirmed that electronic devices caused any equipment failure.

Do some fliers ignore the ban?
A recent survey found that 40 percent of air passengers didn’t bother to turn their phones off during takeoff or landing; 7 percent left their devices’ Wi-Fi and cellular communications functions active, and 2 percent surreptitiously used their phones to talk or text onboard. University of Illinois psychologist Daniel Simons estimates the odds of all 78 passengers on an average-size U.S. domestic flight powering down their phones completely as “infinitesimal: less than one in 100 quadrillion.” If personal electronics were as dangerous as the FAA rules suggest, “navigation and communication would be disrupted every day on domestic flights,” he said. “But we don’t see that.” In addition, flight crews now freely use iPads in the cockpit instead of bulky paper operating manuals. And above 10,000 feet, many U.S. airlines happily allow passengers to use the Internet via onboard Wi-Fi systems for a fee, with no reports of dangerous interference with airplane avionics.

Will the FAA ever ease up its rules?
It’s considering doing just that. As more and more people replace books and magazines with Kindles, iPads, and smartphones, pressure is growing to lift the ban. The FAA announced last year that it would conduct a thorough review of its electronic device policy—but didn’t say when that review would be completed. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D–Mo.) has warned the FAA that if it doesn’t soon relax its rules on e-readers and other portable electronics, she will introduce legislation forcing it to do so. “I’m big on getting rid of regulations that make no sense,” she said, “and I think this is one.”

When might the ban end?
Conceivably, within a year, although bureaucracies can move very slowly. Current guidelines require each airline to test every make and model of each electronic device it wants the FAA to approve for each type of aircraft in its fleet. But the FAA is now seeking to bring together airlines, aircraft manufacturers, technology firms, and the Federal Communications Commission to streamline the certification process for tablets, e-readers, and other gadgets, so entire classes of devices could be approved at one time. The ban on using cellphones to make calls or send texts in the air, however, is likely to remain for the foreseeable future.

Why single out cellphones?
The trouble there is possible interference with cellular networks, not with aircraft avionics. Cell networks operate on the principle that a cellphone is only within range of one or two cellular towers. A phone that’s moving at 500 mph at 30,000 feet, however, can shower signals on any number of masts, confusing the network’s software and potentially leading to dropped calls between land-based customers. Besides, surveys show that most passengers dread the thought of some jerk in the next seat being free to conduct annoying cellphone conversations from New York to Los Angeles. “An aircraft is one of the few places left on earth where you can actually escape from mobile phones,” said aviation and travel writer Benet Wilson. “I hope it stays that way.”

P.S. Many passengers ignore the electronics ban in flight, but those who get caught—and remain defiant—can pay a serious price. Actor Alec Baldwin was booted from an American Airlines flight in 2011 after he ignored a flight attendant’s repeated requests that he stop playing a game on his smartphone. Last November, half a dozen police cars raced onto the tarmac and surrounded a plane at New York’s La Guardia Airport as if there were a terrorist onboard. They were there to arrest a 30-year-old passenger who had refused to turn off his phone during taxiing. Scofflaws on foreign flights can risk more than ejection. In 1999, oil worker Neil Whitehouse refused to switch off and hand over his phone to a British Airways flight attendant, earning a year in jail. A Saudi Arabian passenger who flouted the cellphone ban two years later received an even harsher punishment: 70 lashes.