The research programme has now ended at Lancaster University and I would like to say thank you to all those who have contributed & been involved throughout the year.
CCTV security systems could soon spot an assault on a bus before it happens, according to a major research project.The system, part of which has already been tested in laboratory conditions, looks for suspicious behaviour associated with crime. It would be able to send live CCTV pictures to operation rooms, from where controllers would be able to intervene. The Queens University Belfast team say the software could make a significant impact on crime on transport. Although much of the work is currently at the theoretical stage, the team from the university’s newly-founded Centre for Secure Information Technologies predict that within five years their software will be able to profile people as they board a bus.
As the recession continues to bite the armed forces are experiencing an increase in the number of new recruits – which has risen 10% on last year. This surge of interest is seems not only to be a product of the recession but the Forces increasingly extensive and sophisticated self-promotion.
In addition to the web and TV based ‘Start Thinking Soldier’ campaign are a whole host of offline, regional events. Potential young recruits are being targeted at consumer events, shopping malls and schools using experiential events and arcade-style virtual reality simulators. Even in my local shopping arcade is a shop dedicated to promoting the exciting adventures a soldier will embark on with the added excitement of virtual reality gaming and cool buggies to drive.
The RAF have also launched RAF Altitude – an online magazine portal for young teenagers to sign up and learn about RAF career options. The interface includes areas to register and ‘Dive In’ to learn about RAF survival techniques, RAF history and a Youtube channel dedicated to promoting the cool life of an air force cadet.
To sew the seeds of military ambition at an even earlier age are Hasbro’s ultra realistic Action Man dolls (seen here in the window of Hamleys in April 2009). Hasbro recently reintroduced the dolls with special permission from the MoD. The figures will now come equipped with accurate replicas of the weapons used in the Iran and Afghanistan wars as opposed to the more fanciful inline skates, water pistols and snowboards.
‘The MoD says it hopes the figures will boost the profile of Britain’s serving forces. [It’s] an ideal opportunity to raise public awareness of the armed forces and what the personnel do day-by-day,” says Squadron leader Stuart Balfour. “We feel by children playing with these toys, it promotes things like discipline, sense of belonging to a wider organisation and team work.’
British scientists have developed a portable microwave scanner to help police identify individuals carrying concealed guns and knives. It is small enough to be used covertly, at some distance from the subject. The device is based around microwave radar technology and is designed to pick up the “reflections” of weapons concealed beneath clothing. from bbc
On August 21, the 60-year-old unemployed resident of Izu, central Japan wrapped his 1.7-meter tall, 50-kilogram silicone girlfriend in a sleeping bag, drove to a remote wooded area, and dumped her. Two weeks later, a couple while out walking their dog spotted the body and frantically called the cops. The doll body had been wrapped in a bag and bound around the neck, waist and ankles. A head of black hair was visible from one end of the bag. via Guardian
Every police force in the UK is to be equipped with mobile fingerprint scanners – handheld devices that allow police to carry out identity checks on people in the street.The new technology, which ultimately may be able to receive pictures of suspects, is likely to be in widespread use within 18 months. Tens of thousands of sets – as compact as BlackBerry smartphones – are expected to be distributed.
One example of an electronic product that is specifically desigined for safe living is the GlucoBoy.
The Glucoboy is claimed to be the first ever glucose level measuring machine to be designed specifically for children and teenagers. It gives a glucose level reading in 10 seconds using only a 0.6µL sample of blood. But the key draw to the meter is that it can be integrated with the Nintendo Game Boy Advance System to encourage kids to give blood samples. To access the video games, the Glucoboy must be inserted into the cartridge slot on a Nintendo Game Boy Advance System, or into the Game Boy cartridge slot on a Nintendo DS.
The design team behind the device has also set up GRiP (Guidance Reward Platform), which is a web community that diabetes sufferers can join to talk to each other, but also win points for each time they test their glucose levels. These points can be used to unlock games or converted into games currency, like arcade tokens.
New Sciences of Protection Conference: Plenary 4 with Sheila Jasanoff ‘Taking Risks for Safety: The US Discourse on Precaution’ and conference closing.
Sheila Jasanoff led the final plenary session. Through a comparison of the regulation and governance of embryonic stem cell research in the UK, US and Germany she dissected how different cultures of risk and safety are produced. Jasanoff drew on her own experiences as a member of the Harvard Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight (ESCRO) Committee and compared these with the differing articulations of safety surrounding embryonic stem cell research in the UK and Germany. To think and work in terms of safety is a kind of world making which inevitably involves boundary drawing, safety for whom, safety from what. Yet this politics of safety, or in this case the politics of the safety of embryonic life forms, and of the lives which embryonic stem cell research can purportedly make safe, is often presented in depoliticized terms. Comparative study reveals safety as a contested, political, terrain. From within one cultural milieu questions of safety, arguably because of their fundamentally existential character, often appear as either technical or ethical (but not political) questions. Committees of ‘experts’, either ethical or technical (or both), thus take control of the decision making process. The comparison of these depoliticized ‘expert’ spaces certainly reveals the undecidable elements in the experts’ designs for safe living, giving pointers to where the spaces for political action might be. Despite this, however, the new sciences of protection charged with the design of safe living remain stubbornly closed to interruptions and interventions from outside these spaces of expert design.
The closing discussions revolved around the following themes: how to critique designs for safe living without generating fear, the motor of ever-more hysterical designs for safer and safer living; how to atone for the excesses of unsafety inevitably created by designs for safe living; the problem of generating alternative imaginaries of living safely in difference; the study and illumination of already existing alternative imaginaries of living safely in difference; the importance of studying the actual sites of designing safe living, or of studying the sites of power; the intimacy of utopian and dystopian imaginaries; the future of the interrelations being forged between design, political philosophy, and science and technology studies.
Thank you to our fabulous Joseph Rigby for this great summary
New Sciences of Protection Conference: Theme Panel 4 with Drew Hemment ‘Loca: Location orientated Critical Art’ and Andrew Clement ‘Total Transparency Solutions Inc’
Drew Hemment introduced the work of ‘Loca,’ or location orientated critical art (http://www.loca-lab.org/). Loca is an artistic practice which seeks to explore the often ambiguous ethical implications of pervasive surveillance. It “looks at what happens when it is easy for everyone to track everyone, when surveillance can be effected by consumer level technology within peer-to-peer networks without being routed through a central point.” We could say that, following John McGrath, Loca seeks to stimulate reflection not on whether we want to inhabit ‘surveillance space’(for we already do), but on how we want to inhabit it.
Andrew Clement’s ‘Total Transparency Solutions’ also probes the ethical implications of inhabiting surveillance space, a space which is neither public, nor private. In particular, and as the name suggests, Total Transparency Solutions addresses the problem of transparency for the ethics of surveillance space. Relations of visibility in surveillance space are often asymmetrical, with the watched not usually being able to see the watchers. Total Transparency Solutions, who also provided the ID card scheme and safety infrastructure for the New Sciences of Protection Conference, argue that without the symmetrical visibility of watcher and watched surveillance space faces a crisis of legitimacy. They seek to address imbalances in transparency and accountability through the use of public signs like the ones below. In the absence of such ‘checks and balances’ the stratifications of surveillance space – the social sorting effected by surveillance – are without justification. It could be argued that, following Lincoln’s famous maxim for representational government, Total Transparency Solutions propose a kind of surveillance of the people, for the people, by the people.
Thank you to our fabulous Joseph Rigby for this great summary
New Sciences of Protection Conference: Plenary 3 with Tim Luke (Design as Defence) and Benjamin Bratton (Dissimulation and Terrorism)
Tim Luke and Benjamin Bratton discussed the architecture of safe living in both its actual and virtual dimensions. ‘Architecture’ is concerned with both the concrete material structuring of a space, but also with the projection of form, with a particular social-political-technical imaginary. ‘Architects,’ Benjamin Bratton reminded us, are concerned with both actual and possible cities. Discussing the architecture of designs for safe living thus involves a double-referent: to the actual architecture of the design and to the promise of safe living which is always to-come.
New Sciences of Protection Conference: Plenary 2 with Lucy Suchman (Making Deign Safe for Living) and Patricia Clough (Scenes of Secrecy, Scales of Hope).
Lucy Suchman and Patricia Clough both explored the implications which the new sciences of protection have for our understandings of intimacy and human contact. Amongst other things they discussed proposals to fit anti-terror cameras in airline seats, the unmanned surveillance and combat drones currently deployed in Afghanistan, and changing modes of population management in Carona, Queens, New York. The central theoretical problem was how contemporary designs for safe living, which increasingly facilitate, and rely upon, the coordination of action-at-a-distance, are reconfiguring the relationship between intimacy and power. Remotely-controlled unmanned drones in Afghanistan keep soldiers bodies safe and simultaneously extend the combative capacities of these bodies. Those proposing the installation of anti-terror cameras in airline seats boast how new technologies allow for the surveillance of ‘mood,’ a system which could purportedly detect anxiety in a would-be-terrorist and alert the appropriate personnel. The panel tried to de-mythologize the design of ‘action-at-a-distance’ by showing how action at a distance is always also an affection of intimacy through distance. Power relations always require intimacy, ‘touching’ in one form or another, be it subtle coercion or explicit duress. The panel discussed how the mythology of ‘action at a distance’ is perhaps the ultimate ideological support for various designs for safe living, effectively separating the experience of safe living from both its consequences and real foundations.
Brazilian prison authorities have discovered carrier pigeons being used to deliver drugs and mobile phones to inmates. Officers were alerted to the scheme at a prison near Sao Paulo, when they noticed some of the birds experiencing difficulty flying.
The international conference will be held at the conference centre in Lancaster University from 10th – 12th July with a variety of keynote and panel session speakers. Subjects raised include Genomics and Design, Designing Safe Citizens, Design , Body and Control, etc. To view in more detail about the topics that will be discussed check out the programme here>
Keynote speakers:
Fiona Raby (Royal College of Art, London, UK and dunneandraby designs, author of Design Noir) Professor Lucy Suchman (Lancaster University, UK, ‘Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions 2nd Edition’)
Lynn Hershman Leeson (Director of ‘Strange Culture’) this will be conducted via Second Life
Benjamin H. Bratton (Director Advanced Strategies Group at Yahoo!, SCI_Arc and UCLA Design|Media Arts, author of Design and Terrorism)
Timothy W. Luke (Virginia Polytechnic University, author of ‘Vectors of Visualization’)
The 3rd Space™ Vest from TN Games takes gameplay beyond sight and sound, creating spatial awareness of the world your characters inhabit. The 3rd Space™ Vest gives you precise impact of bullet fire or a pounding blow. A built-in system of eight pneumatic microcompressors permits simulated blows of about 30 pounds per square inch, so gamers feel a punch but don’t sustain injury. The technology for this vest was originally developed for medical use to assist with physical examinations conducted remotely via closed-circuit “tele-medicine” TV channels. TN Games is a subsidiary of TouchNetworks Inc., and its founder, Mark Ombrellaro, is a vascular surgeon. He said in an interview last year that the gaming version of the vest was devised in part to help bring attention to his company’s technology.
Eco coffins are made from environmentally sound plain cardboard (they can be customised too) to cater for a non wasteful funeral and your last dying wish.
Reflecting a worldwide trend towards environmentally friendly burials, eco burial sites are popping up all over Australia. Relatives and friends will require a satellite navigation device to find graves of loved ones in New South Wales’s first eco-burial site. The deceased will be buried in biodegradable coffins between gum trees in a protected koala sanctuary on bushland attached to Lismore Memorial Park Cemetery in the Northern Rivers region. The company LifeArt provide a range of cardboard coffins that can be ordered via participating funeral parlours in Australia.
The London based “Natural Death Centre” recently hosted the green funeral exhibition at the Conway Hall where exhibitors from all over the UK displayed diverse examples of biodegradable coffins, shrouds and jewellery as well as offering funeral specific green advice and services.
s the recession continues to bite the armed forces are experiencing an increase in the number of new recruits – which has risen 10% on last year. This surge of interest is seems not only to be a product of the recession but the Forces increasingly extensive and 
New Sciences of Protection: 
