Words into Touchdowns

Predicting success of NFL quarterbacks by their speech using research to identify terrorists. [Link]

That's the assertion, mission, and business plan of an Ohio-based company called Achievement Metrics. It analyzes the speech of star college players, looking for traits such as "conceptual complexity," "need for power," and "deliberativeness." It compares similar players and correlates these traits with future performance. College wide receivers whose speech shows low levels of distrust, for example, have a greater probability of becoming Pro Bowlers than their less-trusting counterparts.

That may sound batty, but it's closely related to established social science. For decades, political scientists have counted the words and analyzed the grammar of political speeches in order to understand a leader's state of mind. In recent years, this process has become both automated and refined by algorithms and data crunching. Achievement Metrics has grown out of a company called Social Science Automation that does most of its work for the U.S. government. It is attempting to bring text analysis to nontraditional areas, like the CEO's corner office and, yes, the scouting of pro athletes.

The analysts at SSA don't say a lot publicly, as much of what they do is classified. You can get a flavor of their work, though, in a 2005 paper titled "The Distinctive Language of Terrorists." The paper discusses the technique of remote assessment, which involves gathering samples of speech and determining whether someone is likely to be a terrorist. The paper demonstrates the validity of remote assessment by analyzing the speech of political leaders and known terrorists and scoring them in such categories as self-confidence, task orientation, and distrust of others. Remote assessment sorted out the bad guys from the good with impressive accuracy—although, like all probabilistic models, it was not perfect. John Kerry, for example, was classified as a terrorist. (The speech that the study sampled came from the months in the 2004 campaign when he went negative.)

The speech cues that SSA considers important are not the obvious ones—"I want to kill all Americans!"—but rather instances of words like I and we, as well as the use of qualifiers—I maybe think I want to kill some Americans, perhaps. While that's a crude presentation of the work, you get the idea: Subtle, almost undetectable patterns can be analyzed to determine how likely a political figure is to engage in terrorist activity. Roger Hall, a consulting psychologist for SSA and CEO of Achievement Metrics, claims, "If you give us unidentified speech text, we can distinguish terrorists with 90 percent accuracy." Now you understand why they don't talk publicly about their work. Is the leader of that new group in Afghanistan blowing hot air or is he trouble? That's the kind of question the intelligence community is interested in.

Back to football. About five years ago, SSA analyst Steven Hofmann and a colleague started thinking about how their work could be applied to the NFL. At the time, the league was having trouble with a rash of arrests and suspensions, and coaches and scouts wanted to know who they could count on to stay on the right side of the law. Hofmann began collecting interviews with college stars—he needs only about two pages of text to do his analysis.

In Soviet Russia, Bad Movie Makes Fun of You

Russian MST3K ripoff. [Link]

Just how much does the Russian TV show Project Popcorn ape Mystery Science Theater 3000? Check out the theme song. Something tells me nobody from the original MST3K was consulted on this.

Even the plot appears to be ruthlessly cribbed from MST3K. In short, Stephen the protagonist needs money, so he signs up for an experiment run by the nefarious Professor Zamishlavkin. The Professor imprisons Stephen and forces his captive to watch bad films to study the effect on his psyche.

Ship mounted laser shoots down drone while at sea

I expect naval deployment of energy weapons before ground forces do. Ships can carry bulkier equipment easier than tanks can. [Link]

It’s certainly not the first time lasers have shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle — last year, the Air Force zapped several drones with beam weapons in a series of tests at China Lake, Calif. — but this test brings an additional bit of realism — and an extra technical challenge. Laser beams can lose strength as they move through the moist, salty sea atmosphere above the sea, so the Navy needs directed-energy weapons that can work effectively on ships.

The LaWS is essentially a laser upgrade to the MK 15 Close In Weapon System (CIWS), a.k.a. the Phalanx gun, a radar-guided autocannon that is already installed on Navy surface combatants. According to NAVSEA, the system tested (shown here) fired a laser through a beam director installed on a tracking mount, which in turn was controlled by a  Mk 15 CIWS. That’s the basically same system that controls the Phalanx.

It represents a possible next step for the Phalanx system, which is currently limited by the range of its 20mm autocannon (Raytheon, manufacturer of the Phalanx, is also marketing a missile system to replace the gun). The Phalanx is a last line of defense against sea-skimming anti-ship missiles and hostile aircraft, but the laser wouldn’t replace the gun completely. Theoretically, directed energy weapons would increase the range of the system, but you would still have the gun as a backup if the laser fails to do the job

New technique keeps transplant organs viable for 10 days instead of 4 hours

Amazing. [Link]

Science fiction is fraught with mad scientists who discover strange chemicals that can empower the human body or even reanimate the dead. Well, Harvard has come about as close to that scenario as anyone would want them to. Prof. Hemant Thatte has developed a cocktail of 21 chemical compounds that he calls Somah, derived from the sanskrit for “ambrosia of rejuvenation”. Using Somah, Thattle and his team have accomplished some amazing feats with pig hearts. They can keep the organ viable for transplant up to 10 days after harvest – that’s incredibly longer than the 4 hour limit seen in hospitals today. Not only that, but using low temperatures and Somah, they were able to take a pig heart that was removed post mortem and get it to beat 24 hours later in the lab.

British Military working on force fields

I can immediately see how to work around this; launch two projectiles, one that will be deflected and the other that will get through before it recharges again. [Link]

When a threat from incoming fire is detected by the vehicle, the energy stored in the supercapacitor can be rapidly dumped onto the metal plating on the outside of the vehicle, producing a strong electromagnetic field.

Scientists behind the project claim this would produce a momentary "force field" capable of repelling the incoming rounds and projectiles.

Although it would last for only a fraction of a second, if timed correctly it could prevent rocket propelled grenades, which detonate on impact, from reaching their target. The supercapacitor could then be rapidly recharged ready for another attack.

The idea is similar to the force fields portrayed in science fiction movies which produce an invisible protective shell around a vehicle or object.

Professor Bryn James, head of Dstl's armour and protection science and technology centre, said the electric armour had the potential to dramatically decrease the weight of military vehicles and tanks.

Currently few tanks are able to carry enough armour needed to resist impacts from RPG rounds, which produce jets of molten copper capable of punching through more than foot of solid steel upon impact.

He said: "The supercapacitor material can be charged up and then discharged in one powerful event to repel incoming fire.

"You would think this would require huge amounts of energy, but we have found it can be done with surprisingly small amounts of electrical power.

"Conventional armour is just a lump of metal but an RPG round can punch through more than a foot of steel. Carrying around enough armour to protect against that is extremely heavy.

"The real advantage to the electric armour is how light it can be by comparison."

The Cluckassic: When Chickens Walked the Earth!

Genetically modifying chickens to make them like dinosaurs. [Link]

Macleans, canadian newsmagazine, has coverage on "the quest to build a dinosaur"

Larsson is experimenting with chicken embryos to create the creature Horner describes: a “chickenosaurus,” they call it. If he succeeds, Larsson will have made an animal with clawed hands, teeth, a long, dinosaurian tail and ancestral plumage, one that shares characteristics with “the dinosaur we know that’s closest to birds, little raptors like the velociraptor,” Horner says.

The chickenosaurus will be a conversation piece, he says, sparking a public debate about evolution by winding its tape backwards for all to see. “Let’s put it this way,” Horner says. “You can’t make a dinosaur out of a chicken, if evolution doesn’t work.”

Blind man sees after having a TOOTH implanted into his eye

Amazing. The procedure has been around since the 60s. [Link]

When Martin Jones met his wife four years ago, he never imagined that one day he would get to see what she looked like.
The 42-year-old builder was left blind after an accident at work more than a decade ago.
But a remarkable operation - which implants part of his tooth in his eye -  has now pierced his world of darkness.
The procedure, performed fewer than 50 times before in Britain, uses the segment of tooth as a holder for a new lens grafted from his skin.
'The doctors took the bandages off and it was like looking through water and then I saw this figure and it was her,' he said today.
'She's wonderful and lovely. It was unbelievable to see her for the first time.'

More info here. [Link]

The specific surgery is called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis and was first pioneered in Italy in 1963. Essentially, a tooth and a small portion of the jaw is removed from the patient. A small hole is drilled into the tooth and a lens is attached inside. The tooth construct is implanted in the cheek to allow it develop a blood supply, and then later is implanted into the eye. Despite how unwieldy this procedure seems, it has a shockingly high success rate over time. In this survey of 181 patients, 85% retained functional use of their eye after 18 years, with approximately 55% retaining the best postoperative functionality.

Invisibility Cloak for Earthquakes

Neat. [Link]

Borrowing from the physics of invisibility cloaks could make it possible to hide buildings from the devastating effects of earthquakes, say physicists in France and the UK.

The “earthquake cloak” idea comes from the team led by Stefan Enoch at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France. They were the first to show that the physics of invisibility cloaks could have other applications – designing a cloak that could render objects “invisible” to destructive storm waves or tsunamis. …

The new theoretical cloak comprises a number of large, concentric rings made of plastic fixed to the Earth’s surface. The stiffness and elasticity of the rings must be precisely controlled to ensure that any surface waves pass smoothly into the material, rather than reflecting or scattering at the material’s surface.

The Radioactive Wasps that ate Washington

For reals. [Link]

Workers, who have been digging out the nests with heavy machinery for relocation elsewhere in the landfill, think the nests date to 2003, when part of the site was landscaped, providing fertile ground for wasps nests. The wasps and their nests — both active and inactive — are contaminated the radioactive isotopes of caesium and cobalt, due to their use of radioactive mud to construct the nests.

No reports of giant wasps or wide-scale disappearances have yet been reported.

Henchman's Helper

What every Bond Villain needs. [Link]

Today's Very Short List reviews Henchman's Helper: a webpage filled with live video cams and weather information from around the world.

The site’s attractions include 42 live webcams from around the world, 9 constantly updated weather graphics, and a large, ominous-looking infrared satellite image of North America.

Soviet Nuclear Lightouses

Cool. [Link]

So, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to build a chain of lighthouses to guide ships finding their way in the dark polar night across uninhabited shores of the Soviet Russian Empire. So it has been done and a series of such lighthouses has been erected. They had to be fully autonomous, because they were situated hundreds and hundreds miles aways from any populated areas. After reviewing different ideas on how to make them work for a years without service and any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up those structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses. Those small reactors could work in the independent mode for years and didn’t require any human interference, so it was very handy in the situation like this. It was a kind of robot-lighthouse which counted itself the time of the year and the length of the daylight, turned on its lights when it was needed and sent radio signals to near by ships to warn them on their journey. It all looks like ran out the sci-fi book pages, but so they were.

Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses did it job for some time, but after some time they collapsed too. Mostly as a result of the hunt for the metals like copper and other stuff which were performed by the looters. They didn’t care or maybe even didn’t know the meaning of the “Radioactive Danger” sign and ignored them, breaking in and destroying the equipment. It sounds creepy but they broke into the reactors too causing all the structures to become radioactively polluted.

Those photos are from the trip to the one of such structures, the most close to the populated areas of the Russian far east. Now, there are signs “RADIOACTIVITY” written with big white letters on the approaching paths to the structure but they don’t stop the abandoned exotics lovers.

Perfect for a super villain hideout.

Army hosts Mad Scientist conference

Really. [Link]

"The objective of the seminar was to investigate proliferating technologies with the potential to empower individuals and groups in the next 10-25 years," according to an unclassified summary of the Mad Scientist gathering, obtained by Danger Room.

As you'd expect from such a colorfully-titled gathering, the collected brains predicted a world in which individuals would have easy access to everything from ray guns to nano-bots to bioengineered weapons to arms for creating international chaos online.

"The U.S. must accept the reality that it can no longer assume technological superiority over the rest of the world. Ready access to scientific information and technological know-how has and will continue to level the playing field," the Mad Scientist summary notes. "In the operational environment of 2030 and beyond, the destructive/disruptive capability of the individual and small group will be more effective, more lethal, more easily developed/acquired, more efficiently delivered, and more easily concealed and transported... Individuals with access to the global information grid can easily acquire the knowledge needed to develop lethal bio agents, literally in their kitchen sink. Nanotechnology and robotics will offer opportunities to introduce and spread bio and chemical agents into targeted populations."

The amount of damage a single person or small group can cause keeps getting magnified by technology. I'm not sure what could be done that would not be worse than the cure.

The Observer on Fringe

Every appearance so far by The Observer on Fringe, a mysterious person who is around many strange events. [Link]



I love this show. John Noble is great as Walter Bishop, a mad scientist specializing in fringe science. He would be a Son of Ether in Mage the Ascension. It's sort of Lost meets Alias which isn't surprising considering it's a J.J. Abrams show.

Minion Want Ad

For Sean [Link]

[Hmm … I see that Jeff is looking for minions but the picture of the want-ad isn't big enough to read and gosh darn it, I've always wanted to know how such minions are recruited. I'll have to ask Jeff next time I see him … ]

Here you go:

Minions Wanted

☠ Do you enjoy the "Graveyard Shift"?
☠ Do you enjoy getting your hands dirty?
☠ Are you not a "People Person"?
☠ Can you follow orders blindly?
☠ Do you have what it takes to be a minion?

Minions are very important to the Mad Scientific Process. Many would "Kill" to have such a prestigious job opportunity. If your brain is at least 1300 cubic centimeters in volume and you have questionable morals and you have your CCM (Certified Craven Minion), you may be qualified to be a Mad Scientist's Minion.