Category Archive: Technolgy
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Electric Bicycle with Hydro-formed Frame
This thesis project by Vojtech Sojka for Superior Bikes looks to change the game without straying too far from the norm. It has a hydro-formed aluminum frame with the motor positioned in the bottom bracket, for a clean look and better weight distribution than a motor in the rear hub. The battery is also centrally located in the seat tube, and a carbon belt drive with a Shimano Alfine hub completes the drivetrain.
The designer explains:
“After trying the to design the frame with standard diamond look with a complicated dropout system, I decided to eliminate the seat stays which enables the user to put on the belt easily. This solution requires a small weight increase (about 200grams), but manipulating the belt is much easier. Also, it enables a little bit bigger deflection of the rear ‘triangle’, which improves rider comfort.” Speaking of comfort, the wide Schwalbe Super Moto 2.35” tires also cushion the ride. Even though they complicated the design of the short chainstays, Sojka felt like the extra tire clearance was a worthwhile feature work through in his design. His solution features rear facing dropouts and a pivoting brake caliper flange. “Compared to the other solutions, its much easier to set the right position of the rear wheel and the brake – the whole caliper simply moves with the rear wheel, so the brake will be always in the right position.”
Hopefully, Superior will move forward with the concept, and we will see continued development of Sojka’s design in the near future.
Designer: Vojtech Sojka for Superior Bikes
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How the Private Space Race Has Taken Off
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
Those famous words, uttered by President John F. Kennedy at Rice University in 1962, kicked off a decade of innovation and scientific progress that culminated with the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, a moment that has since defined humanity’s tenacity for science and exploration.
The last manned mission to the moon was in 1972, though. No man or woman has set foot on the moon for 39 years. Not only that, but NASA is retiring the Space Shuttle fleet. Space Shuttle Endeavour has flown its last mission and Space Shuttle Atlantis will fly the last Space Shuttle mission (STS-135) next month.
If you fear that innovation in space aviation is coming to grinding a halt though, think again. While the government is taking a break from manned space flight, the private sector is gearing up for a new kind of space race — one that made SpaceShipOne, the first manned commercial spaceflight. That’s only the beginning, though — companies across the world are working on everything from space tourism to commercial space stations.
Private manned spaceflight is set to revolutionize aerospace and give future generations the ability to visit the stars on the cheap. Here’s some background on what has been accomplished so far and what space technologies humanity can expect to come to fruition in the near future.
The First Private Manned Spaceflight & the Ansari X Prize
Space flight and commercial launches have been the domain of world governments for decades, particularly NASA and the U.S. government. It wasn’t until 1984 that commercial satellites could be launched with private expendable vehicles, thanks to the Commercial Space Launch Act.
In 1995, entrepreneur Dr. Peter Diamandis founded the X Prize Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to the creation of “radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.” Here’s how Diamandis explained the original X Prize during the foundation’s first press conference:
“We’re announcing something called the X Prize, a $10 million contest to privately build a spaceship that’s able to carry three individuals, fly to 100 kilometers in altitude and do that twice within two weeks.”
Diamandis was inspired by the 1919 Orteig Prize, a $25,000 award for completing the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris. It was eventually won by Charles Lindbergh with The Spirit of St. Louis. More importantly, the prize sparked a wave of innovation in aviation that Diamandis wanted to emulate in space travel.
The prize, eventually renamed the Ansari X Prize after donors Amir and Anousheh Ansari, was won finally won in 2004 by SpaceShipOne, a ship designed by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
By the time SpaceShipOne made its victory lap, more than two dozen teams had competed for the original X Prize. According to the foundation, these teams spent more than $100 million towards the pursuit of private spaceflight, sparking the beginning of a new era in space travel.
Virgin Galactic
Just a month before SpaceShipOne made its historic flight, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group signed a deal with Paul Allen and Burt Rutan’s joint venture (Mojave Aerospace Ventures) for the rights to create a fleet of ships based on SpaceShipOne’s original design.
Eventually a joint venture was created by Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites and Branson’s Virgin Galactic: The Spaceship Company. The joint venture would create SpaceShipTwo, a ship designed to carry six passengers and two pilots. Virgin Galactic would use the fleet of ships to create the world’s first private spaceliner, giving its customers the chance to make the trip into space and experience “zero G” from 110 kilometers above the earth.
The first SpaceShipTwo was unveiled in 2009 and has since made several test flights from Spaceport America, the world’s first commercial spaceport, based out of New Mexico. The joint venture is creating a fleet of five ships, with the first two already named (VSS Enterprise and VSS Voyager).
The first public flights are expected to take off by the end of this year or early 2012. More than 400 people have booked flights with Virgin Galactic for the not-so-small sum of $200,000 per ticket.
The Private Space Race
While Branson’s Virgin Galactic may be the best-known company in the private space race, it faces competition from a small group of companies trying to get their own spaceships into the air and above the earth. Still, the tremendous effort of getting anything into orbit, especially people, has proven to be a challenge of the highest order.
The only other commercial company to actually get a reusable spacecraft out of the Earth’s atmosphere is SpaceX, a private aerospace company founded by PayPal and Tesla Motors cofounder Elon Musk. The company achieved this with Dragon, a craft designed to carry seven people.
Dragon made its first flight in December 2010 and was successfully recovered, making it the first orbital flight by a private company (SpaceShipOne was a sub-orbital ship). Dragon has yet to make a manned spaceflight, but intends to make several in the next two to three years.
Dragon, along with the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rocket, form the core of SpaceX’s commercial spaceflight business.
While the company focuses on space transport (it has several lucrative contracts with NASA and others), Musk has made it clear that he wants to put a man on Mars. In the meantime, with the end of the NASA Space Shuttle fleet approaching, it will be up to companies like SpaceX to provide crew and cargo to resupply the International Space Station (ISS).
Other companies, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Bigelow Aerospace, are also in the private space race. Bigelow in particular plans to create two space stations in the next five to seven years.
What’s on the Horizon?
While we may not be living on the moon or going on interstellar adventures with Captain Jean Luc Picard, countless milestones have been achieved in private spaceflight during the last decade. And while a flight on Virgin Galactic will only be available to the rich and famous at first, the barriers to manned spaceflight will continue to drop as more companies innovate in the space (pun intended).
Concepts like the space elevator may seem far-fetched now, but so was the idea that traveling into space was even possible. And we doubt that the human race, known for its penchant for exploration, will be fazed by the challenges of reaching the final frontier.
The private space race is on.
Series Supported by BMW i
The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles; it delivers smart mobility services within and beyond the car. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.
Are you an innovative entrepreneur? Submit your pitch to BMW i Ventures, a mobility and tech venture capital company.
Lead image courtesy of Flickr, densaer
More About: Ansari X Prize, Dragon, elon musk, Global Innovation Series, Google, innovation series, NASA, Paul Allen, space, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, x-prize
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Cisco’s Tech Just One Of Many New Ways China Could Spy On Its People
Chongqing city, China, is about to get a giant Orwellian surveillance network of half a million cameras that will spy on (sorry, act to prevent crime in) areas like street intersections, parks, and neighborhoods. Cisco is rumored to be one of the key pieces in the network supplying, basically, the networking tech itself–the grease that’ll make the whole integrated shebang work. But there’s a fine line between “preventing crime,” using totally off-the-shelf Cisco gear, and re-purposing that same “Peaceful Chongqing” network of cameras to spy on the population. Here’s how all that other tech could work:
Recognizing Faces, Any Which Way You Can
The same surveillance grid that monitors for, say, traffic buildups or a break-in to a store at night could easily be adapted to actively surveil the public. All it would take is hooking up a face recognition system to the network, hooked to a public ID database (which China most certainly has). Add in algorithmic alarms to identify if two politically “questionable” people were meeting, or even if they were seen in what may be deemed as the wrong location, and it’s very powerful. This kind of technology is rapidly becoming feasible: Witness the fuss kicked up when Facebook instigated it for photos in its social network, and the fact that Google has had the capability to automatically identify faces in the billions of pages it crawls for its search indexing–but has refused to implement because of fears of abuses.
With enough computing power at its disposal, there’s no reason the government of Chongqing couldn’t try and recognize every single face the camera network sees. It could even get assistance with recognizing its targets by co-opting in tracking data from cell phone networks: The U.S. already mandates tracking cell phone locations at an operator level for later criminal investigation (and it’s amazingly detailed) and it would be easy to adapt a public surveillance face recognizer to get a “first fix” for who may be in the scene from which cell phones are present in a given area.
Eavesdropping On Voices, For Individuals Or Banned Words
In a nation with a censorship and surveillance ethos running through its political structure, it’s also highly plausible that the surveillance camera network could be hooked up to a cell phone call monitoring system that does voice recognition. That would require enormous computing power, to sample and check for the characteristic qualities of millions of user’s voices, but it’s not computationally impossible–particularly if you have enough supercomputers handy. Simpler would be a system that monitors for keywords or phrases–something China has been rumored to already have in place (and it marries with fantastical rumors about similar U.S. tech). Crowd-sourced voice patterns are now a well known trick, and are key to systems like Nuance’s newest voice-recognizing iPhone apps.
Tied to the camera system it could easily be used to build a case against a citizen for breaking laws about political dissent, since pictures tell a thousand words.
Recognizing Dissidents At A Glance
Failing all of these high-tech and fairly subtle systems, it wouldn’t be too far a step for Chongqing phase II to incorporate city-wide iris scanners for an even more personal and overt form of person recognition. After all, if a city in Mexico can try it, why not China?
The city of Leon, one of the largest in Mexico, is working with biometrics firm Global Rainmakers to install iris scanning tech throughout the city’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it the “most secure city in the world,” and the system will connect to train, bus, and ATM networks to make travel and cash access more secure. Criminals are automatically scanned, and the population has an opt-in incentive because it’ll make many things easier and possibly safer–the ultimate goal is to stamp on fraud. There’s a sop to the principles of an open society, with GR highlighting the benefits of adaptive digital advertising (Minority Report…honestly!) but when you have single unit scanner machines that can capture up to 50 irises per minute, what you’re talking about here is a large integrated person positioning system.
That sounds like something that could easily be integrated into Chongqing’s system–even if iris scanning only happens at sensitive locations. But that all depends on your definition of “sensitive.”
Gait Recognition
There’s is a passive surveillance trick you may never have heard of, and it could easily work on powerful computers monitoring Chongqing’s camera feeds: IDing folks from their gait. It turns out that they particular way we all walk–the cadence of our footsteps, the way we swing our arms and legs and so on–is about as individual as a fingerprint, and basically needs just enough seconds of video feed of someone walking to compare to a database.
The benefits of gait spotting include working from more angles, as people can’t be relied upon to stare at cameras for face recognition, and that it can work in the rain–when coats and umbrellas also obscure people’s faces. All you need is a positive ID (which could come, at first, from a face recognition algorithm connected to a clean video feed of an individual–say, as they walked through a turnstile) and a powerful computer. China’s not short of those.?
Facebook’s Dirty Little Data Feed
Meanwhile, consider the rumors that China wants to buy a “big piece” Facebook and that Facebook is exploring a launch in the nation. We already know that social networking is a fast-growing phenomenon in China, and that to some extent the absence of Facebook has pushed a raft of competing systems into existence–making it harder for the government to intervene. If Facebook were to officially launch in China, it’s impossible to believe it would be given free reign–it would certainly have to comply with the same legal censorship rules that forced Google to pull out of the nation. And whether it was legally complicit, or the authorities created their own entry point to the data, Facebook would be delivering a wealth of socio-political data to the government on its people, including tagged photos from every conceivable angle that would quite definitely aid a face recognition system hooked up to a public surveillance grid.
The Peaceful Chongqing project is but a single city, with a simple camera system that’s being efficiently networked. But considering how swiftly China’s blending its political needs with high tech, most of this kind of public monitoring is plausible, if not easy … and one city could easily be a test-bed for a broader plan. Furthermore, even without any of the super-high tech recognition tech–it’s completely possible that a low-tech approach could use the cameras to detect groups of people forming. If a group became too large, was in the wrong place or seemed to be blocking traffic, there’s no reason China’s security forces wouldn’t hold back wading in.
[Image: Flickr user soctech]
Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.