Artificial Intelligence by accident

by Jess Thom, guardian.co.uk
December 14th 2012

I should say from the outset that my scientific knowledge is very limited. In most areas it stretches little beyond the rudimentary fragments that sank in at school. I can probably still do an annotated pencil drawing of a cell, take an educated guess at what colour an unborn mouse will turn out to be based on the characteristics of its parents, and create a dramatic looking sculpture using a Bunsen burner and a biro.

Given these questionable credentials you may be wondering what on earth I'm doing as a guest writer for this blog. Well, when it comes to experience of brains and flapping, or more accurately a brain that makes me flap, I have extensive knowledge.

I have Tourettes Syndrome, which means I make movements and noises I can't control. These are known as tics. My most prominent vocal tic is, "Biscuit" which, along with many other random words and phrases, I say involuntarily hundreds of times an hour.

Tourettes is a condition shrouded in myth. Lots of people have heard of it, but it turns out very few have any clear understanding of what it really is. To help change this, three years ago, I founded Touretteshero, an organisation that challenges misconceptions about Tourettes and shares the humour and creativity that can arise from it.

This autumn my mission to 'Change the world one tic at a time' took a giant leap forward with the publication of my first book: Welcome to Biscuit Land – A Year in the Life of Touretteshero. The book, based on my daily blog, shares my experiences of living with unusual neurology. I hope that by reading it people will get a better understanding of Tourettes and an insight into the funny, unusual, sad, surprising and uplifting experiences that it can bring. Above all I hope it makes people laugh.

The catalyst for Touretteshero was the surreal nature of my vocal tics. Anything I've ever seen or experienced has the potential to become a tic. Words and ideas get mixed together to create phrases that you'd never expect to hear. My tics are generally random and completely unconnected to anything I'm consciously thinking.

They:
• Make bold claims: "I'm a performing seal called Latitude."
• Question the universe: "Moon, did you get fat with the stars?"
• Suggest ideas for new businesses: "Urban Velociraptor Training Company."
• Re-work parables: "The wise man built his donkey on the sheep."
• Ask people to make difficult choices: "All of humankind or biscuits? Choose."

But many are just weird: "Rupert Bear Fondant Fondling Contest."

One of the biggest myths about Tourettes is that everyone with it swears involuntarily, this is not the case. In fact this type of tic, known as Coprolalia, is only a feature for 10% of people with the condition. I'm one of the 10%, but even for me rude tics make up only a tiny part of the things I say.

My vocal tics are a central part of the Touretteshero website. There are nearly 5,000 on there already and I update it regularly. Visitors can browse the tics, vote for their favourites, and make works of art out of them.

But this unique collection of tics has another important function – it's at the heart of my @ticbot account on Twitter. Let me introduce you.

@TicBot is a computer program, running on a machine in a cupboard somewhere in Nottingham. It does a few different things. It:

• Follows back (i.e. follows anyone who follows it)
• Unfollows back (i.e. unfollows anyone who unfollows it)
• Publicly tweets random tics from the collection, a few times a day
• Occasionally butts into the conversations of its followers with random tics
• Replies (usually) to anyone who directly talks to it

Very early on in the in creation of Touretteshero, I realised my vocal tics would work well on Twitter. Like lots of the best tweets they're concise, random and draw on all sorts of subjects.

I tweet as @Touretteshero and share a new tic every day using #dailyoutburst. But my tweeted tics will never truly reflect Tourettes because, unlike my real-world tics, I can, and sometimes do, censor them. For a truly authentic voice I needed a braver tweeter than me, so @TicBot was born.

Created by programming wizard @branespeaks, and based on my descriptions of the sensation and patterns of vocal tics, @TicBot randomly tweets things I've said as tics to people who follow him or engage him in conversation. These exchanges can be funny, angry, beautiful, sad or just plain confusing. But what's clear from reading through his mentions is that he makes people think.

The fact that I refer to @TicBot as a 'him' even though I know he's technically just a string of code is a testimony to the unusualness of this bot. Lots of people who chat with him don't realise he's a bot at all (despite the name). Even those who know very well that he's automated, still think of him as having a personality. I think of him as a naughty younger brother who I have to keep an eye on. To many others he's become a firm friend, and to just a few he's an enemy.

@TicBot is cared about and flirted with. He's received death threats and marriage proposals. A few recent interactions include:

@TicBot Kiss me ticbot!!
@TicBot It's PAST your bedtime...
@TicBot I'm going to hunt you down and fuck with your mind by secretly moving objects in your house to places where you didn't leave them.
@TicBot Incidentally this is the most surreal conversation I've ever had on twitter....
@TicBot is one of the loveliest things I've yet encountered on Twitter, it really is.
@TicBot understands everything I say to him/her/it. I know this to be true.

And it's this last sentiment that comes up again and again. Looking at many of the interactions I've seen, it appears @TicBot could be judged to have passed Alan Turing's famous test, deliberately or not.

In the Turing Test a human judge engages in a typed conversation with a human and a machine. The participants are separated from one another and if the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. Twitter meets these conditions: a mix of people and bots in many different locations, having short text-based conversations. While the majority of bots are easily identifiable as such, something makes @TicBot appear more human than most.

A conversation I had with his creator helped me to understand why this might be.

He said, 'TicBot isn't you - or even bits of you, but it bears your mark. @TicBot's like Plasticine you've stuck your thumb in. People are having surreal conversations with something that has a you-shaped imprint in it. A distant outpost of you - particularly your humour.'

One of the interesting things we noticed about @TicBot's ability to engage with people is that when we tried to make him more coherent – by programming him to match the text in someone's tweet and then getting him to reply saying something on the same subject, it didn't work as well as when his tweets were totally random. @TicBot doesn't have to mean anything; its human followers project their own meanings into his words.

The enigma that is @TicBot was probably best summed up by one of his followers:

'And of course everyone on Twitter should be following @TicBot, but what is his true identify? Who is Ticbot? A man or an idea?'

Either way, @TicBot is definitely an unusual way of encouraging a diverse audience to think more deeply about Tourettes. Social media sites like Twitter can sometimes feel like lonely places to be if you have no one to talk to; @TicBot always responds and this makes him a very appealing tweeter.

If you use Twitter but haven't met @TicBot yet, why not go and introduce yourself and see where the conversation leads you?

If you're interested in finding out more about my life with Tourettes check out my book Welcome to Biscuit Land – A Year in the Life of Touretteshero, which was published by Souvenir Press in October.

And as we're now in the festive season, why not check out my Christmas Message and hear some real human tics in action?

You can find out more about Jessica Thom's projects and outbursts at www.touretteshero.com/

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Gary McKinnon will face no charges in UK

m.guardiannews.com | Dec 14th 2012

Police and CPS say chances of convicting alleged computer hacker, who won fight against US extradition, would be poor

No further legal action will be taken in Britain against the computer hacker Gary McKinnon, the police and Crown Prosecution Service have announced.

The decision comes three months after the government moved to block his extradition to the United States (video) on human rights grounds.

A joint panel of the police and the CPS advised there should be no new criminal investigation into McKinnon – accused in a US court of committing "the biggest military computer hack of all time" – and that advice has been accepted.

McKinnon's mother, Janis Sharp, said: "I feel fantastic, it's just wonderful. The next thing I would like to get, impossible though it seems, would be a pardon from President Obama.

"I think it's possible because I think Obama seems like a good person and so does his wife."

She continued: "It's amazing because it's my birthday. Gary was tearful because of the relief – he was so scared. It's going to be such a nice Christmas not to have everything hanging over us.

"I feel the 10 years have been gruelling, it's been life-destroying. It's difficult to explain how bad it's been.

"To have this over is amazing. Gary's gone through enough. Other people have been accused of more serious hacking in this country and they've been given a £1,000 fine and a very short community sentence."Gary regrets what he's done. He wishes he hadn't done it. He wishes he hadn't upset the Americans. We all regret it. But I'm grateful to Theresa May that this is all over now."

A joint statement from Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, and Mark Rowley, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, cited the huge difficulties of charging him in the UK, and said the chances of conviction would be poor.

Nothing had changed since the original 2002 decision that the only appropriate place to try McKinnon would be the US, they said. McKinnon, 46, has been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome and depression. With his mother Janis Sharp , he has fought extradition since the US submitted a request in 2004, almost two years after he was indicted in his absence by a federal grand jury for seven counts of computer-related crime.He admits to trawling through Nasa and other US defence sites, but insists he was only looking for evidence of UFOs; he occasionally left messages in the system, such as "your security is crap".

McKinnon has been on bail but under threat for most of the time since he was arrested in 2005. After many twists and turns in the legal process, the home secretary, Theresa May, announced in October that he would not be extradited on human rights grounds, because medical reports warned he was at risk of suicide if sent to face trial in the US.

The statement said although the US had indicated it would co-operate on bringing a prosecution in England and Wales, it would present enormous difficulties.

"The potential difficulties in bringing a case in England and Wales now should not be underestimated, not least the passage of time, the logistics of transferring sensitive evidence prepared for a court in the US to London for trial, the participation of US government witnesses in the trial and the need fully to comply with the duties of disclosure imposed on the CPS. The prospects of a conviction against Mr McKinnon which reflects the full extent of his alleged criminality are not high. "None of the reasons for the original decision in 2002 that the appropriate place for Mr McKinnon to be tried was the United States have altered. So far as the evidence is concerned, the position in 2012 is the same as it was in 2002. Most of the witnesses are in the US, as is nearly all the physical evidence and the bulk of the unused material, some of which is sensitive.

"Accordingly, in November this year, the CPS and the police met senior officials from the US department of justice to discuss the possibility of bringing the US witnesses to England and Wales for trial and of transferring all the US material to this jurisdiction to be considered."

McKinnon's lawyer, Karen Todner, said: "I have mixed feelings about this: I am pleased he is not going to be prosecuted because I wouldn't want to think he would ever spend any time in prison given his mental situation.

"But I am disappointed because the extradition warrant is still outstanding because he can't travel anywhere outside of the UK and will have this hanging over him until it's resolved. We have discussed approaching president Obama and asking for a pardon."In a statement after the extradition was blocked in October, a spokeswoman for the US department of justice said: "The United States is disappointed by the UK home secretary's decision not to extradite Gary McKinnon, particularly given the past decisions of the UK courts and prior home secretaries that he should face trial in the United States."

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CTV Investigates: Understanding Autism

kitchener.ctvnews.ca | Dec 10th 2012 6:04 PM

A first word, a first hug, a first trip to the potty, all important milestones in a child's development. For many parents and their children those milestones are delayed because of autism. It’s become the fastest growing developmental disorder in the world.

Concerns have surfaced, that there aren't enough resources to help families and their children.

Jadie Beaudin loves playing with her three boys, two and half years ago her son Kaleb, was diagnosed with Autism.

“It was devastating, I spent a lot of time crying I just thought I was going to make mistakes playing with him, I thought I wasn't playing with him properly.”

After putting Kaleb on a waiting list for intensive behavior treatment and trying to change his diet reality set in for Beaudin.

“I realized that I won't be able to cure autism we're going to learn how to live with it and that was very hard for me how to look at Kaleb and love what he just loves everything about him instead of trying to fix him.”

Kaleb now five years-old still has difficulty responding to his name and is known to run off.

“Sending him to school that was my biggest fear. I was terrified,” says Beaudin “We have personally lost him ourselves and it's horrifying.”

Kaleb is a senior kindergarten student at Ryerson public school in Cambridge. He's been lost twice since the beginning of the school year and while Kaleb's parents say the teaching staff and principal are doing all they can, they say more support is needed from the school board and the provincial government.

The Waterloo District School Board won't comment specifically about Kaleb's case, but say they work with parents and staff to constantly improve safety plans.

School board officials insist, they’ve received a steady stream of funding over the past four years.

Laura Hodgins, superintendant of education, WRSB says “We have increased the number of our educational assistants over the past 4 years, we now have a hundred more educational assistants in place.

When it comes to dealing with autism spectrum disorder, the needs of a child varies.

“Sometimes there's an idea that support means one to one worker at all times and that's not necessarily they type of support that is the best for the student, we rely more on the team approach within a classroom” says Hodgins.

The Beaudin's wanted one on one attention for Kaleb and offered to pay for extra support but the school board said no. Beaudin says this is just one example of the constant fight to get the help they need.

“It's the struggles with the outside world, with the finances and trying to get help that are difficult, but inside the home if it was just me and my husband and the three kids we can take autism on" says Beaudin.

The statistics are staggering, two years ago one out of 150 kids in Ontario were diagnosed with autism, now the rate is one out of 88.

Just this week a local MPP John Milloy agreed more needs to be done.

“I’m the first to admit, there are still waiting lists, and there is still a need for more resources. So we need to look at where resources are going to be available, but also how they are being spent” says Milloy.

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Technology For Students With Autism

by Staff Report, myveronanj.com
November 19th 2012 7:23 AM

The Children’s Institute (TCI) is holding a free lecture on technology that can help students with autism. “Apps to Support those with Autism in the Home, School and Community” will be led by Randy Palmer, TCI’s computer specialist on December 5, from 7 to 9 p.m.

Palmer will cover iPod and iPad applications for communication augmentation for children with autism and speech and language delays, available social skills applications, activity scheduling software and self-regulation products that are available today for parents, educators, speech and occupational therapists as well as the latest technology available to increase independence for those with autism.

Registration is required; call 973-509-3050 ext. 233. TCI’s Verona campus is located on Sunset Avenue just off Bloomfield Avenue.

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Secret US cybersecurity program to protect power grid confirmed

yeoldefalseflag.com | Jan 6th 2013 4:25 PM
The National Security Agency is spearheading a program, dubbed Perfect Citizen, to develop technology to protect the power grid from cyberattack. The project worries privacy rights groups.

Newly released documents confirm that the National Security Agency (NSA), America's top cyberespionage organization, is spearheading a cloaked and controversial program to develop technology that could protect the US power grid from cyberattack.

Existence of the program, dubbed Perfect Citizen, was revealed in a 2010 Wall Street Journal article. But intriguing new details are revealed in documents released by the NSA last month to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), an Internet privacy group that petitioned for them in 2010 under the Freedom of Information Act.

Of the 188 pages of documents released by the agency, roughly half were redacted to remove classified information. Even so, the documents show Perfect Citizen to be in the fourth year of a five-year program begun in 2009. Valued at up to $91 million, the Perfect Citizen technology is being developed by Raytheon, the Waltham, Mass., the defense contractor in Waltham, Mass., that won it.

Recommended: How much do you know about cybersecurity? Take our quiz.
The released documents are the contract that the NSA drew up with Raytheon. A Raytheon spokesman referred all comments on the program to the NSA.
All along, the NSA has maintained that Perfect Citizen is "purely a vulnerabilities assessment and capabilities development contract" that "does not involve the monitoring of communications or the placement of sensors on utility company systems," according to an NSA statement released in 2010 – and now rereleased to the Monitor.

What the documents reveal is an apparently small but robust program authorized to hire 28 software engineers, program managers, and laboratory personnel. This includes a pair of "penetration testers" – essentially good-guy hackers who specialize in breaking into networks.

Their assignment as part of the team: discover vulnerabilities that lie in the electronic interface that connects the computer networks of utility companies. Then the team can come up with software and hardware plugs to patch those digital holes.

"Sensitive Control Systems (SCS) perform data collection and control of large-scale distributed utilities or provide automation of infrastructure processes," says the Perfect Citizen contract's "Statement of Work" document. "The protection of SCS is essential to mission operations and has become a significant point of interest in support of the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community."

Further, the document says, "prevention of a loss due to a cyber or physical attack, or recovery of operational capability after such an event, is crucial to the continuity of the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and the operation of [Signals Intelligence] systems."

While most might agree the program's national-security goal is laudable, the question of just how to go about protecting the power grid has been a controversial topic in Congress and among Internet privacy advocates leery of government control of the Internet. Of particular concern among such advocates is shielding privately owned corporate computer networks deemed to be "critical infrastructure" from potentially intrusive digital monitoring.

Citing unnamed sources, the original Wall Street Journal article said that the program did indeed involve placing sensors that can detect illegitimate cyberactivity. But the new documents don't clarify this point. Deploying such sensors would be especially sensitive since the NSA is an arm of the Pentagon charged with collecting and analyzing foreign communications and defending US government communications and computer networks – not domestic spying.

"This is a research and engineering effort. There is no monitoring activity involved, and no sensors are employed in this endeavor," the 2010 statement says.
Indeed, the NSA is not authorized to intercept the communications of US citizens unless specifically authorized to do so by a special court acting under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Yet The New York Times reported in 2005 that the NSA had been involved in conducting wiretaps of calls made by US citizens to persons overseas without first getting a warrant from the court.

"Any suggestions that there are illegal or invasive domestic activities associated with this [Perfect Citizen] contracted effort are simply not true," says the NSA's 2010 statement. "We strictly adhere to both the spirit and the letter of US laws and regulations."

Still, privacy rights groups remain worried the program is focused on digital filtering or monitoring – and developing systems to do that. The Statement of Work document, for instance, requires development of "Computer Network Defense best practices/capabilities that defend against vulnerabilities identified in a SCS."

"Previously the agency had said it was just a research program," says Ginger McCall, director of the Open Government Program at EPIC, which won release of the documents. "But we see in these documents that they do intend to conduct testing, actual research, actual vulnerability testing and develop software tools that could be operational."

Other experts say the documents are suggestive, but do not ultimately clarify Perfect Citizen’s scope.

"It's hard to say if the project is only research, only operational, or a combination of both," says John Bumgarner, a research director for the US Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit security think tank that advises government and industry. "The contract cost for the project seems way too low to be an operational program to, say, protect the entire US electric grid from cyberattack."

But EPIC's main concern is that Perfect Citizen could be already conducting, or planning to conduct, online digital monitoring of data without proper authorizations or having the program itself evaluated for privacy implications. When the Department of Homeland Security undertakes such projects, Ms. McCall notes, it is required to conduct privacy impact assessments. She questions what has happened in this case (which is not under the authority of DHS).

"It appears as though the NSA is trying to develop cybersecurity protective technology, but that as part of this contract, they're conducting testing already," she says. "This isn't merely research."
Others, however, applaud the project, saying such measures are needed.

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