2018
Year of the Pig
Islamic calendar 1438-39

World population stabilized at 9,000 million
23rd Olympic Winter Games in Zermatt, Switzerland
Introduction of commercial production in space of special materials
Virtual organizations account for 50% of global economy

The discreet charm of the invisible instrument
Forests set to become world's gene bank as genic pine proves capable of storing and reproducing plant and animal hereditary factors
Cable-operated crewless ferry goes into service on Helsinki - Tallinn run
A whale of a catch or an end to fishing? Experiments with sensory baits prompt angry response from Protect Our Oceans
Natural Development Association (NADA) tries to destroy age prevention therapy files in Quebec
EU Medical Commission warns cyberhotels dangerous for heart patients

Review in Compumedia Arts Digest 14.4.2018

The discreet charm of the invisible instrument

Yesterday's "invisitron" concert in Dallas left the audience stunned. Jack Michaelson is revolutionizing the way we experience music.

It is not often that this columnist is lost for words, but the concert arranged by Passport PLC in a disused downtown industrial lot in Dallas yesterday came very close. For a start, the choice of venue was masterly: the city's old Elm St. Industry Park, which has been allowed to return in the wake of the post-industrial revolution to a series of picturesque ruins set amidst grassy knolls and young trees. Interestingly enough, the concert was non-virtual, in that it was not distributed simultaneously through the datanets. The reason was that Passport have had one or two system teething troubles, and have not yet been able to produce hologram facsimiles for some of the concert elements.

The concert programme was put together with excellent taste from original recordings deriving from two different eras. Before the interval, we were treated to examples of music from the 19th and 20th centuries, while the second half was devoted to works by contemporary auteurs.

The proceedings opened in almost pastoral fashion with the arrival behind the invited audience of a 3-D pine forest, from the depths of which came the rich creamy sounds of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's D major Violin Concerto, composed 140 years ago this year. It is perhaps worth noting for younger readers that in the 19th and 20th centuries (and of course even before that time), compositions such as this were first written down on paper and then performed physically by large groups of individual musicians known as "symphony orchestras". The solo violin was also played by a physical individual, in this instance the Russian Oleg Kagan, and he was accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The piece was naturally recorded using very old analog technology, but nevertheless the sounds swelling out from the massed ranks of trees did have a certain charm, even if the rather archaic style of the music and the age of the recording were clearly evident. The generally pleasing overall effect was complemented by Stephanie Spielberg's hommage to a past era in the form of a hologram ballet, complete with forest sprites and goblins.

The second early work we were treated to was from a different genre, the short "pop music" ballad Michelle by The Beatles, a four-piece English ensemble popular towards the latter half of the 20th century. The simple music and the ethereal 3-D show that accompanied it, revolving slowly above the audience's heads, had a magnetic attraction, which was immediately obvious from the loud and sustained applause and calls for an encore. I have heard fragments of this tune in the past in synthesized versions used in one or two high-speed elevators and multimedia advertisements, but this was the first time I had been able to enjoy the original recording. Apparently The Beatles were enormously successful during the 1960s, and whilst the music had its limitations, clearly the members were talented and somewhat ahead of their time.

The second half of the concert began in total darkness, and then gradually on the left hand wall and above us there appeared the sky as seen from the surface of Mars. From somewhere high above our heads, those familiar crashing chord clusters heralded the opening of the Space Girls' long concerto I Wanna Make Love To You Baby Till I'm Blue In The Face On That Red Planet. The Girls themselves descended from a point in the centre of the Martian horizon and hovered over the audience. Their teasing artificial skin show (if it WAS artificial...) produced a storm of cheering and wolf-whistles, which was immediately recorded in the International Musicology Centre's memobank and lifted the group's market index by a full 8 points.

Before the final number, the developer of the "invisitron" Jack Michaelson came on to demonstrate the device. The visible elements of the instrument are a series of sound generators, which produce various ultrasound walls or overhanging wings. The ultrasound impulses act both as carrier waves, which when modulated allow the sound to travel along them, and as horizontal or vertical surfaces, from which the sound appears to be projected. By altering the angles and shapes of the surfaces, the sound can be made to seem as though it is all around one, close at hand, or even plunging downwards from kilometres above the audience.

When Michaelson then powered up the invisitron to play his own Virtual Dreams, a work originally written on a hand-composer, the impression was of sounds coming from the most astonishing places and directions. For me, the climax was a fortissimo section where the melody in the high register appeared simultaneously to be projected from a point roughly at arm's length and from several kilometres above my head, while the underlying bass motif came echoing at me from all sides at once. I can safely say that I have never experienced such a thrilling audio-spatial experience, even going beyond the so-called "mindfogging" sensations that can be achieved with some of the illegal psycho-servers.

All in all, the experience was a very pleasant surprise. It comfortably beat almost all my virtual trips to date. Whilst it is still early days for the device, I would imagine that the invisitron has a great future - particularly if Passport can overcome their virtual problems, and if one of the large media concerns can take it up and shape it into a suitably simple, portable, and commercially attractive product for consumers.

Reuters, Helsinki & Stockholm, 11.6.2018

Forests set to become world's gene bank as genic pine proves capable of storing and reproducing plant and animal hereditary factors

If the Finns and the Swedes are to be believed, the forests are set to become the world's gene bank. That is the view of the team of scientists led by Dr. Gunnulf Perkoi in the Swedish capital.

The genic pine is sprayed with the desired plant or animal hereditary factors when the pine seedlings are around one month old. The young tree stores, isolates, and in a sense capsulates the imported factors into its own cell tissue. As the tree grows, the capsules reproduce, without influencing the development of the pine itself.

The most remarkable and significant feature of the genic pine is that it inserts into its seeds the hereditary factors of the "stowaway" plant or animal, rather than its own. For this reason the research team has taken to calling the cones of the genic pine "cuckoo eggs", after the brood parasite behaviour of the Eurasian cuckoo.

The first crop of cones from the Scots pines being grown at the Viikki Agritech Research Centre of the University of Helsinki have now been available for study for around six months. Nearly all the studies carried out on the contents and growth of the seeds have shown positive results. It seems likely that in the future the genetic wrapping paper for many plants and animals may well be the humble pine-cone.

Perhaps most astonishingly, in germination tests carried out at the Viikki laboratories, many species of plants have started to grow directly from pine seeds. Also experiments into the "rebirth" of certain primitive animal species have almost always been successful and the method has proved to be a great deal simpler than traditional cloning.

Some of the results were published last month in Proceedings of the Royal Biomechanics Institute. As a result, the Swedish and Finnish research groups have entered into a cooperative agreement with the multinational UPM Forestry Inc., and have reproduced in the lab a million seedlings, which will suffice to cover an area of around 100 sq.km. of thinly-spaced forest when planted out. Thousands of trees have been ordered in advance for seed production by farms and horticulturalists.

One curious outcome of the "cuckoo" effect of secreting imported genes in the pine seeds is that the trees themselves refuse to insert their own genome into their seeds - not even after spraying. Hence the genic pines are technically sterile, and can only be reproduced by cloning.

The majority of the UPM Forestry seedlings at Viikki will be going to the Worldwide Fund for Wildlife. The Fund's programme for the preservation of natural biodiversity has found a very useful tool in the genic pine. The programme is collecting DNA samples of numerous threatened plant and animal species in a variety of forms, but it also includes the gathering of a genetic "bank" of existing species.

The WWF has particularly sought out methods to secure the survival of individual species which do not require heavy-handed and intrusive technological solutions. "We cannot allow ourselves to become too dependent on technology, which is in the final analysis very vulnerable in the face of natural forces", commented UN Under-Secretary Solange Bureau as she handed over a USD 15 million cashcard to WWF representatives at a ceremony in New York last week.

At the same occasion, Dr. Gunnulf Perkoi noted that the concept of a genic forest is not really such a novel one. "The old folk tales tell us that the forest has a long memory", he said. "Our research teams simply wanted to give concrete shape to this idea."

Compumedia 7.7.2018

Cable-operated crewless ferry goes into service on Helsinki - Tallinn run

The cable ferry C/S Kaapo (formerly the GTS Häkkinen) has been modified over the last two years to make the vessel suitable for cable navigation, and in the last three months it has undergone sea trials in the Baltic with crew on the bridge only in case of malfunctions or emergencies. In the course of the trials the vessel has not once misinterpreted or failed to understand cable signals, and no manual over-riding has been necessary at any stage.

The Finnish Board of Navigation announced at a recent press conference that the cable system suppliers Jungle Vib are also working on a similar project for road vehicles. The object is to design a car that does not require steering and which would never break traffic regulations or be involved in a collision.

Today the C/S Kaapo will be carrying several hundred invited guests and dignitaries on its maiden voyage from Helsinki to the Estonian capital, Tallinn, but from tomorrow it goes into regular twice-daily service on the short hop across the Gulf of Finland.

Further details on the vessel, along with booking information, can be had from sat.web.RL-09-222-KAA.

Cable network speaks fluent elephant

The first hesitant steps in cable navigation were taken back in the 1990s, but at that time the technology was not up to the task, and most ideas remained on the drawing-board. Also, the actual principle put forward for cable steering was extremely difficult to build and maintain in practice. In essence, the idea was to employ a cable laid on the sea-bed from one port to the next, along which would be sited at regular intervals relay stations that would operate rather as radio beacons do for air traffic. These underwater beacons would have directed the vessel on to the next checkpoint along the cable route. The method was plagued with difficulties, however, not least among them the reliability of the underwater stations and the question of how to get data to ports and to vessels in the case of a malfunction. In addition, the system would have been extremely expensive to implement, as it involved networking several computers and constant online failsafe checks. At the same time, scientists noticed that there were doubts over how to get the necessary power to relay stations, and given the highly stratified nature of the Baltic Sea there were fears that even if the beacons were working correctly, the signals would not be able to get through to vessels.

The cable now developed and put in place is based on a quite different approach. The sea-bed apparatus has three conductor cables, to which signals are transmitted from the port. The signals carried in these cables are asynchronous. In this way the cable direction gives the vessel an accurate image of its direction and the differential in the frequencies of the signals provides the distance to or from the port.

However, the final piece of the jigsaw - getting the data from the undersea cables into the vessel's onboard computers - proved to be the hardest. Electrically-based systems such as radio do not function underwater. The most commonly used means of communication underwater is ultrasound, but this again is hampered by layers of different temperatures or salinity in the water, a phenomenon found extensively in the Baltic. At the edges of such differing layers, the ultrasound signal could be reflected in the wrong direction, such that it cannot be received by the ship's computers.

The technicians scratched their heads, and came up with a solution that was based - believe it or not - on the elephant. Elephants converse using infrasound, in other words very low register signals at subsonic frequencies below that detectable by the human ear. A discussion among elephants travels along the ground as vibrations, and the others receive the message through their feet. However, infrasound waves of this type are in the frequency range of 2-12 vibrations per second, and notifying the position of the vessel would take anything up to 4 minutes in bit form. Things looked to have reached another impasse, but simulations showed that the ship's computer only needed data on its position relatively infrequently, and thus the infrasound signal would serve perfectly well. The energy requirement problems were also reduced by the smaller number of impulses required. The power that would have been used for as many as 10,000 ultrasound impulses could be channelled to a single infrasound burst.

If a fault appears in one of the three conductor cables, the signals do not arrive in the desired asynchronous pattern to the destination port, and hence the fault is observed immediately. In order to provide a failsafe fallback system, there is triple redundancy, with three actual cable bundles. Even if two of these should somehow fail at the same time, the third will guide the vessel safely into port.

Nature conservation organizations are nevertheless urging a ban on cableferries. A recent Free Baltica manifesto reads: "The infrasound pulses may cause pain and suffering to marine organisms and result in behavioural disturbances. In the worst-case scenarios this could lead to the complete breakdown of the delicate Baltic ecological system, and the loss of entire species."

SatWeb, 14.7.2018

A whale of a catch or an end to fishing?
Experiments with sensory baits prompt angry response from Protect Our Oceans

According to the Paris-based POO, the world's seas cannot sustain the sort of extensive fishing that is represented with the new baits now being tested. In addition, the organization argues that a large part of the gargantuan fishing hauls being recorded will go to waste or be used wastefully, because the technology involved is not yet able to distinguish between sought-after fish and other species, or even between young fish and fish of the correct size for foodstuffs uses.

In the Andaman Sea, off the coasts of Thailand and Burma, trials are currently underway on new fishing methods, based on audio-, vibration-, and smell effects, and on certain specific sounds, or "words", that researchers have discovered from studies into the way fish communicate.

The concept of marine creatures having a "language" is familiar enough from whales or dolphins, but more recently it has been observed that many other species have several parallel means of communication. For example, many small fish that move in shoals indicate external dangers by warning sounds that are well above the human audible range. In some species the warning signal may be a smell given off by one or more fish in the group, which spreads almost instantaneously to the surrounding members. Certain fish are capable of even more complex communication, for example in shepherding and directing the movements of the shoal.

A consortium of four large fishing concerns has pooled its resources under the declamatory banner of More Food For Children (MFFC), and is currently testing new fishing methods in the Andaman Sea. Reports have come in of huge underwater loudspeakers being used to transmit warning signals, at which all the fish of a specific type in a large area take off in the direction away from the sound source. Similar loudspeaker systems are set up as repeaters on the sides of the area being fished, and the stampeding fish are thus shepherded straight towards huge nets strung at the end of this "corridor". Catches are huge, but thus far the system has shown little in the way of real accuracy, as the nets have bulged with not only the fish being sought, but also many other types that have been panicked into trying to escape. Provisional figures suggest that these "spin-off" fish account for around 40% of the total catch, and naturally many of them are of little commercial or nutritional value.

Similar experiments have been carried out with vibrations in the water that resemble those of the movements of large predatory fish, again prompting panic among the smaller species. Catches in this case have been quite astronomical, up to hundreds of thousands of tons of fish in a single day.

Fears of entire species being wiped out

International fishing regulations do not as yet set any limits on this kind of fishing. Protect Our Oceans has warned, however, that these methods are so devastatingly effective that they will almost inevitably lead to the wiping out of entire species of fish from large areas - and in the case of localized fish, perhaps their permanent removal from the planet. The organization is thus proposing to the IFC and the United Nations that an immediate ban be placed on extensive sensory-bait fishing of this type.

MFFC has naturally moved to defend its position. The enterprise is backed not only by the four large fishery concerns referred to, but also by numerous international foodstuffs giants, who hold around 40% of the stock in the firm. These companies have already launched a broad-based multimedia campaign against POO, arguing that the environmentalists have no evidence to suggest fish species are threatened, or even that numbers of fish will decline materially as a result of the new methods. According to MFFC, there are still many species of fish in the oceans that have hardly been exploited at all, and MFFC is concentrating its attention specifically on these.

Political observers, meanwhile, are sceptical that attempts by groups like POO to restrict or ban such fishing practices will succeed, as the aching shortage of protein-rich foodstuffs is already posing a threat to the healthy growth of children in both the developing and the developed world.

NetWeb 9.8.2018

NADA tries to destroy age prevention therapy files in Quebec

According to reports coming in from Montreal, a team of activists from the Natural Development Association NADA broke into the Quebec City premises of BioMechanics last night in an attempt to destroy files stored in hologram memories.

The hit-team had posed as tourists on a day visit to the BioMechanics complex, and had managed to smuggle into the datacentre of the company's age prevention laboratory a group of nanobugs that were pre-programmed to infiltrate the centre's hologram units, search out any aluminium oxides they could find, and eat them. The synthetic ruby crystals in the hologram lasers are of the mineral corundum (Al2O3), in other words aluminium oxide. The result was that when the nanobugs found their prey, all the memory holograms crashed and the thousands of files contained in them were lost.

However, the company's management stressed in an immediate statement that the files are quite safe, since some of them were also kept in engraved form, and the remainder are available in back-up copies at the datacentre of the BioMechanics head office in St. Louis in the United States, where they are updated on a weekly basis.

NADA has this morning claimed responsibility for the attack. The Association steadfastly opposes all genetic and artificial improvements to the human species as unnatural and inhumane.

For many years now BioMechanics has been in the forefront of the search for an answer to the genetic code that causes ageing. Scientists have been able to unravel the mystery to such an extent that - at least according to the company's own press releases - a solution to the problem of getting old will be with us in a matter of two or three years. Research to date has already offered very promising results. The life-expectancy of the 5,000 individuals currently undergoing gene treatment therapy in the company's experimental age prevention programme has gone up by an average of around ten years.

Demographic revolution looms

Aside from groups like NADA, the company's research has plenty of opponents. A number of UN member-states have demanded the immediate termination of the research, although their reasons do not coincide with those of the Natural Development Association. Opponents charge that in the event that we are able to increase the age to which humans can live, even by as little as ten years, it will produce a whole clutch of global problems. In the first place, genetic treatment of this sort is extremely expensive and thus could only be afforded by the citizens of the richer, developed nations. The inevitable consequence of this would be that while the populations of the developing world will continue to increase through higher birth rates, in the richer countries' population levels will begin to rise again - in this case through lower mortality figures.

BioMechanics' research staff have claimed in medical journals that it is feasible to raise the average age at which a person dies to as much as 140 years. If - as they also claim - at the same time the age-span during which humans are fertile and able to reproduce is also "stretched", and 80-year-olds can conceive and bear children, this will undoubtedly cause an enormous demographic revolution in all social structures. A child could for instance have a sister who is "old enough to be her grandmother". As the average age of the population increases, pension systems will also be in even greater difficulties than they face today.

Deferred ageing will not fight off disease

One of the greatest problems envisaged by opponents of the process is nevertheless that of the explosive growth in the need for medical services. Even if the illnesses associated with the aged are to be "deferred" to a later date, we can still expect an increase in cancers, infectious diseases, and other environmentally-transmitted ailments, since with age the predisposition to suffer from environmental factors - for example carcinogens in the air we breathe - is likely to be cumulative. The implication of this is that whilst people may live longer, their lifespan is likely to include a greater number of diseases requiring treatment than before. Such a threat would bankrupt the entire healthcare system and bring it tumbling down on our heads, say the detractors.

In spite of all the arguments to the contrary, BioMechanics has announced that it will continue with its research programmes, which it considers will do humanity more good than harm in the long term.

NADA meanwhile remains defiant, and reports that it has many variants of the nanobugs used in the Quebec raid, and that the organization fully intends to use them in order to achieve its ends. The nanobugs in question are robots of less than 0.01mm in length, and similar devices have been developed and used by military forces to infiltrate and destroy enemy communications links and battlefield hardware.

Internet Now 20.11.2018

EU Medical Commission warns cyberhotels dangerous for heart patients

The European Union's Medical Commission, meeting yesterday in Warsaw, has issued recommendations that persons with health risks should avoid using cyberhotels. A total of 52 people have died of heart attacks this year in cyberhotels in the EU area alone.

The general view of the medical profession is that the deaths resulted from extreme tension and heightened emotional and physical functions. According to the Commission, anyone falling into a medical risk group should under no circumstances visit a cyberhotel alone. They should also avoid absolutely all exciting or potentially oppressive cyberenvironments. A particularly dangerous new trend has emerged in the so-called "cybersuits", as these are known to elevate emotional states to extremes, often beyond normal human tolerance levels.

Visits to cyberhotels have grown rapidly in recent months, particularly among older sections of the population, and many virtual office complexes have been converted into suites for cybertourists. Virtual travel in the home has acquired a major competitor from these cybertrips, even though as yet they are expensive and beyond the reach of most users.

The cyberhotels are all luxuriously appointed. All the walls and ceilings can be used to project 3-D moving images. In addition, artificial sensory and olfactory stimuli and the cybersuits and cyberrobes provided for guests heighten the impression of reality in a way that far outperforms the VR apparatus now widely available in households. Most cyberhotels provide guests with additional equipment on request, for example virtual helmets for underwater adventures or other experiscenarios, and in many cases parallel connections also allow cybertrippers to experience the doings of their partners. This has been the cause of several deaths, as older users have plugged in to a younger partner's VR adventure and their bodies could not take the strain.

Airlines unruffled by cybertravel

At a meeting of IATA members in Oslo last week, international airlines and air alliances reported that as yet cybertravel has not cut into passenger levels. According to a spokesman for Eurasair, the price levels for the cyberhotels are still so forbidding that there is no shortage of people wanting to fly to vacation destinations. The company does not foresee that the new fad will bring about a collapse in air travel of the sort which hit business flying with the spread of videoconferencing.

In fact, most carriers have announced higher capacity percentages on many routes, and suggest that private travel is growing. The reason is thought to be the changing concepts regarding work and leisure time. Telecommuting and teleworking no longer tie individuals to set dates and set locations. Many now spend much of their time on the move, and get their work done whenever and wherever in the world they feel like doing it. IATA Chairman Logan O'Hare envisages optimistically that this trend will only gather momentum over the next few years.

Hannula I. & Linturi R. 1998: 100 Phenomena.
Yritysmikrot Oy, Helsinki 1998. Copyright notices ISBN 952-9508-18-2