If portable analyzers inspired by Star Trek's tricorder become affordable, the transparency goes in multiple directions, e.g. analyzing food, liquids and other substances sold commercially.
There was a time when mobile phones gained many sensors, and it all kind of stopped 10 years ago. I expected high-end phones by 2020 would measure distances and temperatures, air quality, UV exposure, radioactivity, infrared photography, etc. In essence, baby tricorders.
In fact, several of these they can already do with a combination of the existing hardware, but sadly, the market has laser-focused on visual social media.
CAT was branding a phone some time ago with a low-res thermal camera, but it was locked to some already-ancient version of Android and otherwise total lamesauce.
Sad, because I'd buy one if it was just a normal phone plus IR. Presently I make do with a plug-in accessory module.
I share your frustration. Consider a sled-backpack-case sort of thing with "all the missing sensors", instead of piecemeal accessories you carry a gaggle of and have to swap out. If it was like one of those extended-battery sled cases, you could just leave it on and write apps that expect it to be there...
You'd probably want the sensor pack to be separable from the phone case, so you can buy a new phone (whose shape changes every year, forcing new accessory purchases).
I do think it's simultaneously cool and ridiculous that instead of just adding a simple distance sensor, companies making measurement software for phones double down on the software-only approach with computer vision.
I think the killer app here will be... literal apps. While I'd love a tricorder in the abstract sense, I don't really know what I'd do with it. There need to be useful applications before the hardware can take off - and that probably means software.
What I find quite disturbing in all these privacy invading technologies is that they’re often marketed as fantastic problem solvers whereas the reality is that they have many confounding factors that put the innocent at risk. Even DNA testing is unreliable unless a lot of care is taken in the entire process.
The problem I see is that lawmakers and law enforcement want these to be taken as the gospel truth when obtained and provided as evidence in a court of law, while the judges or juries are usually not competent enough to understand the nuances and question the “evidence” to the extent necessary to not sentence an innocent person.
"The East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) ... buil[t] up a massive archive of people’s smells. Started in 1979, the collection was kept across East Germany, collected and evaluated by the Main Department XX, responsible for monitoring the East German cultural and media scene and the repression of the political opposition."[https://www.deutsches-spionagemuseum.de/en/sammlung/odour-ca...]
I recently had a strange thought about the human body as a bunch of different pots of soup.
They all sit on a large surface, and represent different types of fluids. One might represent the insides of your cells, another represents your blood. Another might represent the stomach, or another part of the digestive system, etc.
You have an input pot that represents what you eat, and that's the only one you can actually put ingredients in, and each pot cooks things in a different way. Your body is like a chef trying to keep the "cell soup" pot tasty, but it can only swap ladles of stuff between ajacent pots, mostly at random.
On the one hand it seems like a big mess, but on the other it feels like it has some sort of usefulness.
There really is a huge amount of chaos happening, and molecules are just kind of bouncing around and migrating randomly between regions. Using this soup-random model, it's easy to understand the wake we leave behind, as what is being spilled as things move around.
> The most common way of analysing metabolite content is gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. This technique sorts molecules by their weight, producing a pattern of peaks that correspond to different substances. But the same weight can be shared by many molecules, so the results may be ambiguous.
There's more to it than that. So basically you get a MS profile for each GC peak. But there are various ways to do MS. Some mainly give you masses of intact molecules, after ~gentle ionization. But some also give you masses of fragments, and that distinguishes among molecules with similar masses.
1) I ALWAYS try to post an unblocked version of stories from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist that I submit: if I can't do so, I don't post the article.
2) I used to rely on Outline as my #1 go-to for unblocking, but something changed there about 6 months to a year ago such that it stopped working completely so I stopped even considering it along my "trail of unblocked tears."
3) When I see a comment about blocked New York Times or Washington Post articles posted by me or others, I immediately post an unblocked version.
4) Having said all that, here are my go-tos for unblocking paywalled articles, best first:
Heh, hard to imagine what a dog can smell. My wife started bringing treats from a particular restaurant. So when she would come home from that particular restaurant our normally polite dog would run and check her bag.
We thought it was the bag she smelled... until she left the bag outside in the car. Our dog smelled her, asked to be let out into the garage, asked to be let out into the driveway, then asked to be let into the car, and then nosed her bag.
VPN services, Tor and I2P do a pretty good job at blocking "molecular wakes". But even that will fail, as the devices that people use incorporate GC (and eventually, GC-MS) sensors.
As I am wont to say, privacy in meatspace is dead. Or at least, getting deader every day.
Edit: And so this is another advantage of working remotely. In particular, as a consultant.
As a descriptive matter, yes. But from an interpersonal perspective, it is the raw material of a large change.
Like a lot of tech, it favors those already in a powerful position. If you make it cheaper and easier for a nosy boss to be nosy, they will be nosier. Cops will have a field day figuring out exactly how far courts will let them push things. And so on.
The potential for surreptitious sampling also opens up new angles for general snooping and blackmail.
I disagree. If these devices were free they would still increase the power divide between those who can wield force and those who can’t. Maybe even more so.
It could make it easier, but it takes a lot more effort and time for the “less well off” to expose “those in power” and be taken seriously enough to bring about change...that’s assuming they’re not harmed in the process of doing so. If information about those in power could solve problems of corruption and other evils, many problems we see today wouldn’t linger on for decades.
$50 spectrometers are already quite small, https://hackaday.io/project/143014-compact-25-spectrometer & https://www.tindie.com/products/onehorse/compact-as7265x-spe...
If portable analyzers inspired by Star Trek's tricorder become affordable, the transparency goes in multiple directions, e.g. analyzing food, liquids and other substances sold commercially.