Cutting Edge

A new DARPA contest is using balloons to test our social-networking skills.

After kicking off the Internet 40 years ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is again tapping into the Net for a new challenge. The DARPA Network Challenge will award $40,000 to the first person who can identify the latitudes and longitudes of 10 red weather balloons positioned at different parts of the sky across the continental United States.

The 8-foot balloons are scheduled to lift off on Saturday at 7 a.m. PST and remain in their locations throughout the day, until sunset. The contest will be open until December 14, so contestants will have a little more than a week to gather up and submit their answers.

But the contest has a twist. Since no one person can identify all 10 balloons across the States in one day, challengers will need to rely on social networks to team up with others to pinpoint the locations of the balloons. DARPA's goal here is not to see if people can answer the question but to gauge how we use social networks to resolve a problem.

DARPA plans to launch 10 red weather balloons, somewhat larger than the one shown here, around the continental United States, and competitors are invited to try to identify the precise latitudes and longitudes of all 10 balloons to win a $40,000 prize.

(Credit: U.S. Air Force photo/Chief Master Sgt. Gary Emery)

"We are not interested in the balloons. We already know where those are," Norman Whitaker, DARPA's deputy director of transformational convergence technology, said in a statement. "It's the techniques people use to solve the challenge we're focused on. We have people who are going to be actively watching from the sidelines to see how this plays out."

Whitaker is hoping the contest will offer insight into how the Internet and social networks can help people build teams and collaborate with each other to solve real problems and challenges.

DARPA is leaving it up to the contestants to best figure out how to work with others to track the balloons. One example posed by Whitaker is that of using a Web site to offer a portion of the prize to anyone who shares info about the locations of the balloons. Another idea is to work with a charity and donate your winnings. People can also naturally ask for help through Web-based tools such as Facebook or Twitter, connecting via computers or smartphones.

Although the challenge may be tough, Whitaker believes that at least one person will be able to solve it, whether it takes five minutes or all day. But if no one responds with the locations of all 10 balloons by the December 14 deadline, the agency will reward the $40,000 to the first person who tracked down at least five of them.

DARPA isn't sure yet what it will do with the information it finds. But that's never stopped the agency before. "We're DARPA," Whitaker said. "We like to do things that are really out of the box."

The agency enjoys a history of out-of-the-box challenges. Past contests have set up races between unmanned, robotic vehicles, including DARPA's 2005 Grand Challenge and its 2007 Urban Grand Challenge.

Are you willing to take the DARPA challenge? How would you use the Internet and social networks to win the prize?

The Soyuz TMA-15 spacecraft undocks from the International Space Station.

(Credit: NASA TV)

Outgoing space station commander Frank De Winne, cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, and Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk strapped into a Russian Soyuz capsule, undocked and fell back to Earth on Tuesday, braving icy weather in Kazakhstan to close out a 188-day stay in space.

Descending under a large orange-and-white parachute, Soyuz TMA-15 spacecraft made a rocket-assisted touchdown about 50 miles northeast of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, at 2:15:34 a.m. EST, about three hours and 20 minutes after undocking from the International Space Station.

Recovery forces, including U.S. and Russian flight surgeons, were near the landing site to help the returning spacemen out of the spacecraft's cramped descent module. Despite icy weather that forced authorities to ground the helicopters normally used, recovery crews in all-terrain vehicles reached the spacecraft within about 15 minutes of touchdown.

It was the first December landing of a Soyuz since 1990, but the Russians said the weather was acceptable for a safe descent.

Russian recovery teams surround the Soyuz TMA-15 spacecraft, helping extract the crew members.

(Credit: NASA TV)

Monitoring the re-entry and landing from the International Space Station were Expedition 22 commander Jeffrey Williams and flight engineer Maxim Suraev, who arrived at the outpost in early October.

"Four more months, guys, then it's your turn," De Winne said before departing. "Have a good flight. It's wonderful in space, enjoy it.

The Soyuz descent module landed upright, and recovery crews extracted Romanenko, Thirsk and then De Winne one at a time, transporting them on stretchers to nearby vehicles. All three were reported to be in good condition.

Because NASA is responsible for arranging Canadian, Japanese, and European Space Agency rides to and from the space station aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft, NASA flight surgeons and managers joined Russian recovery crews to assist the returning station fliers and carry out initial medical checks.

Frank De Winne waves as he is helped from the Soyuz descent module.

(Credit: NASA TV)

With the departure of Romanenko, Thirsk and Belgium's De Winne, the European Space Agency's first station commander, the International Space Station was left in the hands of Williams and Suraev. It is the first time since mid-2006 the station has been staffed by just two crew members.

But the solitude will not last long. Three more crew members--cosmonaut Oleg Kotov, NASA flight engineer Timothy Creamer, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi--are scheduled for launch aboard the Soyuz TMA-17 spacecraft on December 20. Docking is expected two days later.

I can understand why people are so keen to find alien life. It isn't so much a scientific fascination with what might be out there. It's more a pained hope that what is out there might be more enjoyable than what is down here.

So I am wrestled to the ground by a certain sympathy for Brad Niesluchowski.

According to the Arizona Republic, Niesluchowski was asked to resign after allegedly using his position at the Higley Unified School District to exercise his own (and our) need for an alien encounter.

This was not a case of uploading pictures of potential lady friends from Eastern Europe. No, this was a rather more imaginative downloading of software that searches for extra-terrestrial life.

The Republic's sleuths got their hands on documents that suggest Niesluchowski was encouraged to resign after he downloaded free University of California (the terribly forward-thinking Berkeley branch) software that uses idle computers to examine information collected by radio telescopes.

This would be information that might indicate that ET is, indeed, flying around in a bike basket somewhere out there.

Might someone out there try to correct this situation?

(Credit: Cc Joka2000/Flickr)

Niesluchowski, you see, enjoyed the authority to purchase all sorts of technology for his district. And his alleged downloading of alien-hunting software might well have used additional energy resources and caused other related damage or accelerated depreciation to the hardware. The school district estimates these losses at between $1.2 million and $1.6 million.

Specifically, Niesluchowski stands accused of downloading a program called SETI@home to every computer in the school district.

You might rather enjoy perusing the SETI Web site. One of its recent small steps for man was to launch a site for Iran so that Iranians might also co-operate in accelerating the incidence of Klingon contact.

However, SETI might not have been the only software Niesluchowski donated to Higley. The school district also claimed it had found another program, with the heavenly name of BOINC, that also emanated from Berkeley.

Perhaps Niesluchowski's alleged behavior was not entirely thought through. Perhaps he simply hoped no one would ever notice. But, using the moniker "NEZ" he had reportedly become one of the most active and admired alien hunters. The Republic suggests that he earned 575 million "credits,", representing the enormous hours he spent in the search for the next world.

I would, however, like to offer an alternative theory as to why he might have behaved in the way he allegedly did.

The Polish roots of the name "Niesluchowski" are the words "not" and "listening". It seems perfectly possible to me that Niesluchowski merely wanted to prove that, despite his name, he was doing more future-focused listening that anyone in the world.

(Credit: Crave UK)

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is one of the most ambitious experiments of all time and following a year of shutdown, it's finally started to do its business again. So we thought we'd have a chat to someone directly involved in the experiments to get a sense of what it's like to work in geek heaven.

Paul Jackson is a particle physicist from SLAC and Stanford University, based at CERN. He's working on the Atlas experiment, looking for the Higgs boson--the so-called "God particle." Read on to find out whether he's about to kill us, what would happen to you if you stood in front of the LHC beam and what CERN's favorite snacks are. (Also see our definitive guide to the collider, CERN and the Higgs boson.)

Will the LHC make a black hole in space that kills us?
"Yes, we might create black holes, but they won't be remotely dangerous...

Read more of "Interview: Inside CERN with an LHC scientist at Crave UK.

Screens show the LHC circulating two beams simultaneously for the first time on November 23.

(Credit: CERN)

The recently restarted Large Hadron Collider has become the world's most powerful particle accelerator, after setting a new record for beam intensity.

Scientists working at the particle collider successfully accelerated a beam of protons up to 1.18 tera-electron-volts (TeV) late on Sunday night, beating the previous record of 0.98 TeV, CERN has announced. In the early hours of Monday morning, both the clockwise and the anticlockwise beams were accelerated to 1.18 TeV, giving the protons a speed of approximately 0.9997 times the speed of light.

The previous record for beam intensity was 0.98 TeV, held by the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago since 2001...

Read more of "LHC sets world record for particle acceleration" at ZDNet UK.

Noisebridge co-founder Jacob Appelbaum

(Credit: James Martin/CNET )

SAN FRANCISCO--About 30 people listened intently on a recent Thursday night to short presentations on linear algebra and beer brewing, watched a demo of an iPhone cyberspace shooter game, and learned how to make a light staff (acrylic rod, LED, resistor, tape, no soldering required).

For the last talk, a speaker billed as "Dr. Baron Mikheil von Burstein, esq." explained how to pull off his interactive public art specialty--swings that hang in the aisles on the underground trains in the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system.

"I installed it publicly, illegally and got away with it," he boasted. He had materials with him to hang four swings, he said, adding "Let's install a swing right now on BART!"

At least half the crowd followed him, officially ending Five Minutes of Fame, an event held the third Thursday of every month at the Noisebridge Hacker Space.

Noisebridge is described on its Web site as a nonprofit "space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and of course, learning." It was conceived by Jacob Appelbaum and Mitch Altman while they were at a hacker conference in Berlin, Chaos Communication Camp 2007.

Noisebridge hacker collective (photos)

"Something clicked there and we both independently came up with the notion that we would make a hacker space happen in San Francisco," Altman, a computer security expert, said in a recent interview. Altman and Appelbaum spread the word to friends, and a group started meeting in cafes on Tuesday nights, until they found their first space. They quickly outgrew that spot, and in October they moved to their current 5,200 square foot space a block or so away in the heart of San Francisco's Mission District.

The large second-floor concrete warehouse space was packed with programmers, artists, writers, lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and urban hipsters with bike messenger bags for the open house party on a Friday night in early October. Electronic music played, people lined up to buy drinks, and a variety of digital toys were on display, including a computer-controlled mill someone was using to etch the Noisebridge logo into metal. A light display with a sign next to it said, "Hack me. I'm proprietary."

In a far back corner, a curious architectural feature stands out--a small room that houses the servers and is accessible only via a ladder and a crawl space near the ceiling. The back story, or at least part of it anyway, was revealed on a subsequent visit.

"This death trap is a response to a political battle," said Appelbaum. "There used to be a door here," he said, pointing to an area obviously boarded up and painted over. "But some people wanted to lock the server room and log access. So, what is the eventual outcome? This wall."

Noisebridge co-founder Mitch Altman shows people how to solder and work with electronics at his weekly Circuit Hacking workshop.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET )

Oddities and whimsy abound at Noisebridge. The handles on the door of the refrigerator (which is stocked with the hacker drink of choice, caffeinated Club-Mate) are on the opposite side from where it opens. A red pay phone is rigged up to be a voice over IP phone, allowing calls anywhere for free. And a laptop is precariously perched atop a wall divider that operates a touch panel designed to control the HVAC, lights, and building access.

Noisebridge members take their automation designs seriously. The front door can be opened remotely over the Internet by someone at home. The system also calls the cell phones of certain members the day before the weekly trash pickup, and whoever can respond is automatically connected to a phone at Noisebridge. Whoever picks up is asked to put the trash cans out front.

"It's funny that we have to have that [system] to manage the trash," joked one Noisebridge member.

It's very much a do-it-yourself space, with members building an induction stove, a custom tile countertop decorated with the Noisebridge logo, a dark room and optics lab, and an industrial shop. A cyborg group is working on augmenting reality with artificial senses and creating an anklet that lets the wearer feel which way is north. One person working on a genetically modified bacterium wanted to create a bio-hacking area, but that idea was rejected after some debate, according to one member.

There have been courses on sewing and crafting; workshops for French, German, Mandarin, American Sign Language, cryptography, creme brulee making, and, of course, lock picking. Coming up: a knot-tying workshop, a class on CPR, and an EFF presentation on hacker spaces and the law.

While the world of hacking traditionally is built around mystery and exclusivity, Noisebridge aims for more widespread appeal.

"We'd like to take hacking from the underground, where it's inaccessible, and make it accessible to everyone," Appelbaum said. "It's not just about bits and bytes...it's about the intersection of art and technology and changing the greater world around you."

"Hacker spaces have evolved in a good way," said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer of security firm Veracode who was in the L0pht Heavy Industries hacker group in Boston in the 1990s. He visited Noisebridge recently and noted that the group "has more resources, more space and equipment, and it seems like more diversity of people."

While there are about 100 members of Noisebridge (each paying $40 to $80 per month), L0pht typically had 7 or 8 members at any one time, primarily focused on hardware and computer security, according to Wysopal.

Noisebridge has an executive board whose members are elected, but decisions are made by consensus of the entire membership. The group's motto is "Be excellent to each other," a line from the movie "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure."

"It's more anarchy than anything else; people getting together to form temporary, smaller, organized groupings to perform a task," said co-founder Altman, who runs a circuit hacking workshop every week and makes the TV-B-Gone device that remotely shuts off TVs.

Members learn from each other and create things, but more importantly, they have a safe space to form a community that they can't get elsewhere, especially not on the Internet, according to Altman.

"A lot of us are introverted geeks who were bullied and even beaten up, like I was," he said. "Now, we can get together and celebrate our unique geekiness, share that with the world, and make the community around us better."

My colleague James Martin created an audio slideshow on Noisebridge:

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--The shuttle Atlantis dropped out of a crystal clear Florida sky and glided to a "picture-perfect" landing at the Kennedy Space Center Friday to close out a successful 11-day space station mission, bringing astronaut Nicole Stott back to Earth after 91 days in space.

The view through shuttle pilot Barry Wilmore's heads-up display as Atlantis lined up on runway 33 at the Kennedy Space Center.

(Credit: NASA TV)

With commander Charles Hobaugh at the controls, Atlantis executed a sweeping right overhead turn to line up on runway 33, pilot Barry Wilmore deployed the ship's landing gear and the shuttle settled to a tire-smoking touchdown at 9:44:23 a.m. EST.

"Houston, Atlantis, wheels stopped," Hobaugh radioed as the orbiter rolled to a halt on the runway center line.

"Roger, wheels stopped, Atlantis, that was a picture-perfect end to a top-fuel mission to the space station," replied astronaut Chris Ferguson from mission control at the Johnson Space Center. "Everybody, welcome back to Earth, especially you, Nicole."

Hobaugh, Wilmore, flight engineer Leland Melvin, and spacewalkers Robert Satcher, Michael Foreman, and Randolph Bresnik doffed their pressure suits for a traditional runway inspection about an hour and a half after touchdown.

"We really had truly an amazing mission," Hobaugh said on the runway. "It was not us, it was not any single group, but it was just an incredible team from all around the nation.

"We were lucky, I mean, part of it's luck and part of it's just pure, great skill, workmanship in processing Atlantis, getting it ready for us. We had no hitches, we went off on time, we landed on time. ... Nicole came back with us, she's doing great, she's headed back to see her family."

Atlantis settles to a smooth landing at the Kennedy Space Center.

(Credit: NASA TV)

Launched to the lab in August, Stott made the trip back to Earth resting on her back in a recumbent seat on the shuttle's lower deck to ease her return to gravity after 91 days in orbit.

Flight surgeons were standing by to help her off the shuttle and carry out initial medical checks before accompanying her to crew quarters for a more detailed exam. Looking comfortable and in good spirits, she told a NASA interviewer a few hours later that while her vestibular system had not yet re-adapted to gravity, she was in good shape and glad to be home.

"As you move, everything else seems to be moving around you," she said. "And it's not a spinning, dizzy feel, it's more if I get up, then everything else seems to want to move up. ... But other than that, the main thing was when they opened the hatch, it smelled like fresh, clean, fall air. And that was really nice."

Her husband and 7-year-old son were on hand to welcome her back to Earth and "I have the promise of a Coca-Cola with crushed ice in a styrofoam cup and some good food, Thanksgiving left overs, waiting for me upstairs. There are also nice, warm showers here so that's a definite luxury I think I will enjoy for some time."

Stott, Hobaugh, Wilmore, Melvin, Foreman, and Satcher planned to fly back to Houston early Saturday. Bresnik, whose wife Rebecca gave birth to the couple's second child on Saturday, flew home right away aboard a NASA training jet to meet his daughter for the first time.

Stott is the last space station crew member to launch and land aboard a space shuttle. With just five more shuttle missions before the fleet is retired next year, all future U.S. station astronauts will fly to and from the lab complex aboard Russian Soyuz capsules.

Stott's former station crewmates face a busy weekend in orbit preparing for the December 1 departure and landing of Expedition 21 commander Frank De Winne of Belgium, cosmonaut Roman Romanenko and Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk, who were launched to the lab May 27. They are scheduled to land in Kazakhstan aboard the Soyuz TMA-15 capsule around 2:16 a.m. EST Tuesday to close out a 188-day stay in space.

Expedition 22 commander Jeffrey Williams and cosmonaut Maxim Suraev, who arrived at the lab complex in October, will have the outpost to themselves until December 23 when three fresh crew members--cosmonaut Oleg Kotov, astronaut Timothy Creamer and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi--are scheduled to arrive.

A braking parachute is deployed as the shuttle Atlantis races down the runway .

(Credit: NASA)

Hobaugh and his shuttle crewmates delivered nearly 15 tons of spare parts and equipment to the space station, including two pallets loaded with large components as a hedge against failures after the shuttle is retired.

The gear included two orientation control gyroscopes, a spare pump module, nitrogen pressurization tank and ammonia coolant for the lab's external cooling system, equipment for the mobile transporter that carries the station's mechanical arm, a new latching end effector, or hand, for the space crane, and equipment for the lab's electrical system.

The astronauts also carried out three spacewalks to prepare the complex for the attachment of NASA's final major module in February and the eventual arrival of additional spare parts and equipment that will be ferried up next year. In addition, a high-pressure oxygen tank was attached to the station's Quest airlock module.

For the trip back to Earth, the shuttle carried 2,100 pounds of station gear, including a urine distillation centrifuge that failed shortly before Atlantis took off. A replacement will be carried aloft on the next shuttle mission in February.

Only five shuttle flights reamin on NASA's manifest between now and the end of September as the agency works to complete the space station and retire the fleet.

UPDATED at 4 p.m. EST: Astronaut Randy Bresnik flew back to Houston shortly after landing to meet his new daughter; adding comments from Stott.

The world's largest particle accelerator has performed its first collisions, and its first beam acceleration.

Progress on the giant experiment has been rapid in the four days since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was restarted, CERN director of communications James Gillies told ZDNet UK on Tuesday.

"These collisions are the first in the LHC at all," said Gillies. "We've been going into new territory. It's been going quite remarkably fast."

Gillies told ZDNet UK that not only had scientists recorded the first collisions of protons on Monday, but that overnight one of the beams had been accelerated....

Read more of "Beams all round as LHC progress accelerates" at ZDNet UK.

Global company IBM seems to have found a way for its employees to get past language barriers and communicate.

IBM employees are currently using text translation software that can instantly convert documents, Web pages, and even instant messages between English and 11 other languages. The software, christened "n.Fluent," is being "crowdsourced" or tested among IBM's 400,000 employees across 170 countries.

As IBMers use n.Fluent, the software learns from its mistakes and improves itself. As the entire company potentially taps into n.Fluent, volunteers within IBM refine each translated word for greater accuracy. In just two weeks this past summer, volunteers tackled around 1.3 million words, averaging around 100,000 per day. Overall, n.Fluent has translated more than 400 million words for Big Blue staffers.

The software works as a plug-in or add-on to other applications, making it fairly seamless to use. Plug-ins translate instant messages on the fly. Text from a word processing document or other presentation is copied into one field of the software, with the immediate translation popping up in another field. IBMers can use n.Fluent on their desktops, laptops, and even smartphones.

This "universal translator" can currently tackle English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Arabic.

"To become a smarter planet, the world needs a shared vocabulary for collaboration -- particularly the business community," said David Lubensky, an IBM researcher managing the n.Fluent project, in a statement. "We see n.Fluent as just such a tool, helping to expand commerce, cement relationships and make the world that much smaller, one word at a time."

Of course, free language translators, such as Google Translate, are already available. But IBM sees n.Fluent as a better alternative. The software is more secure as it runs behind a firewall. It's also adept at handling business jargon. Right now, n.Fluent is only being used internally. But like many of IBM's research projects, it's likely to find a home outside of Big Blue's walls.

IBM spokesman Ari Fishkind said there's no fixed date as to when it might be available externally. "It would be a reasonable assumption that there's a demand in the market for a translation tool that has very good security," he said. "And also this kind of tool is uniquely tuned for a business environment that has almost a language in itself."

Other language translation tools can convert individual words. Key to n.Fluent's success will be how it handles entire sentences and paragraphs as well as colloquialisms. But the company's field tests are geared toward those goals.

"The whole point is to continually refine the idioms and the syntax and the context by people who use the language every day," said Fishkind. "And that's part of this crowdsourcing idea where hopefully at the end of the day we're going to have a system that is not only intelligible but also fluent and fluid."