7 tiny solar-powered homes

By Cat DiStasio

Want to see the state of the art in solar-powered architecture? Then head to the Solar Decathlon in Southern California where the US Department of Energy challenges students from around the world to create the most efficient solar-powered house. These tiny, high-tech homes are designed to be affordable and attractive while utilizing solar energy for all the amenities of comfortable indoor living, including temperature control, hot water and household appliances. In all, each home is expected to produce at least as much energy as it consumes, which is also known as “net zero” energy status. Read on for a look at some of the most incredible houses from this year’s competition.Slideshow-332233

America’s drone strike program needs a low-tech fix

Last week, The Intercept released a trove of classified documents (provided by an unnamed source) relating to America’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as weapons of assassination. These activities took place between 2011 and 2013, throughout both active combat areas in Iraq and Afghanistan and nations like Yemen and Pakistan. And while plenty of people are discussing the shortcomings of human-controlled UAVs, nobody’s talking about how to fix them. Could the answer be more technology like the fully autonomous weapon and surveillance platforms that the Department of Defense (DoD) is developing? Or, when it comes to aerial assassinations, is less more?

The US government has been conducting drone strikes outside of declared war zones since 2002. The CIA has traditionally carried out these covert operations. However, since the start of the Second Iraq War, the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has aggressively positioned itself to be a player. This has created a turf war of sorts between the two groups with each side vying for operational control of the program.

“Our entire Middle East policy seems to be based on firing drones,” Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Intercept. “They’re enamored by the ability of special operations and the CIA to find a guy in the middle of the desert in some shitty little village and drop a bomb on his head and kill him.”

Regardless of which agency is planning the strike, the overall process of identifying, tracking and killing a target is the same. Targets are usually discovered through Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Communications Intelligence (COMINT) — specifically eavesdropping on mobile communications by tracing cellphone calls and skimming SIM card data.

Task forces first work alongside intelligence agencies to “develop” a target — that is, identify someone high up in the al-Qaida chain of command based on SIGINT work. This information is then condensed into a mini-dossier, called a “baseball card,” which works its way up a lengthy chain of command comprised of various cabinet officials and diplomats until it eventually lands on the president’s desk. Once the president approves the assassination, JSOC has a 60-day window in which to find and kill the target. The entire process is known as “Find, Fix, Finish” in JSOC nomenclature.

These strikes, according to a very broad legal framework the Barack Obama administration put forth in 2013, are only supposed to be undertaken if specific criteria are met, including: The operation has to have a “near certainty” that the target can be killed; the agencies feel that the target cannot be captured; and the target is an “imminent” threat to the US and its interests.

These criteria, however, are not being examined without bias. As a US Army-Surgeon General Study conducted between 2005 and 2007 found that less than half of soldiers and Marines felt that non-combatants deserve to be treated with respect. More than a third of respondents believed torture is acceptable if it saves the life of a team member. Another problem with those criteria is that they’re being applied by the same people that came up with them, so fudging numbers is an issue. “I know the actual number is much higher,” The Intercept’s source said of the government’s tally of civilian casualties. “But they make the numbers themselves so they can get away with writing off most of the kills as legitimate.”

That’s assuming the special operation forces and CIA actually have the guy they’re looking for. These agencies prefer to have an Eye of Sauron-style intelligence-gathering platform — that is, a constant, unblinking view of the target from the moment they’re spotted until a drone strike turns them into a smoldering crater. However, the massive distances that UAVs have to travel from their bases of operations to operation sites limit the number of electronic eyes they can keep on a target. This issue is known as the Tyranny of Distance and it has very real implications on America’s intelligence-gathering abilities.

For flights over Iraq, most UAVs only have to travel about 100 km. For operations in Yemen, that average jumps to 500 km and in Somalia drones must travel more than 1,500 km per leg on average. They can sometimes spend more than half their flight time in transit, rather than loitering over their target, leaving precious little time to perform much meaningful surveillance. What’s more, these distances lead to “blinks” wherein intelligence agencies temporarily lose sight of a target during the handover when a new UAV or manned aircraft relieves the current one.

“I think that having [more drones capable of sharing intel] could improve the situation in some ways. There’s a lot of talk in the papers about blinks, which is a nice euphemism for gaps in the surveillance coverage,” Dr. Ryan Jenkins, associate professor of Philosophy at the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, told Engadget. “It’s clear how deploying a fleet of drones that can eliminate those gaps would improve the reliability of the intelligence. But a lot of the intelligence picture that The Intercept tries to build is using methods that seem unreliable by their nature.”

“[US intelligence services] identify people by their cellphones or they identify people by their gait, as they did with Osama bin Laden,” Jenkins continued. “And it’s not clear how using autonomous weapons would allow us to make more reliable use of that kind of intelligence — whether the person holding the cellphone is the person you think it is, and there’s no guarantee that an autonomous weapon would have keener insight into that than a human would.”

Disconcertingly, SIGINT is even less reliable than tailing a target from overhead as “these sources,” an ISR Task Force study points out, “are neither as timely nor as focused as tactical intelligence.” For example, in 2012, half of the data that went into identifying and tracking targets in Somalia or Yemen came from an average of just 160 and 50 calls per month, respectively.

Essentially, the issue is that US intelligence services are trying to determine a target’s culpability (and in turn, decide whether or not to execute them over it) based on a single, easily foiled data source. “I could get on the telephone from somewhere in Somalia, and I know I’m a high-value target, and say in some coded language, ‘The wedding is about to occur in the next 24 hours,’” Flynn told The Intercept. “That could put all of Europe and the United States on a high-level alert, and it may be just total bullshit.”

The CIA and JSOC will confirm a target’s identity via drone-mounted video feeds. However, when this study took place, only the MQ-9 Reaper drone (the Predator’s less common cousin) could capture high-definition video. What’s more, very few UAVs have the necessary “dial number recognition” capabilities to accurately corroborate the video feeds with SIM card data. This results in a whole lot of holes in American intel, and that lack of knowledge can have deadly consequences.

This tactic poses another, larger problem: You can’t extract information from a dead Taliban commander. Since the strikes are being undertaken remotely, the US government has no access to the target’s knowledge, laptop, cellphone or any other source of information that could be used to disrupt terrorist activity. And given that an estimated 75 percent of kill/capture operations end up killing the target, the government is leaving a whole lot of tactical dead ends for itself. In response, JSOC and the CIA are forced to rely more heavily on often spotty SIGINT data or the intelligence from shady host nations. What’s more, these strikes are universally unpopular in the nations that they occur in, not only further hampering efforts to employ more reliable human intelligence (HUMINT) to validate SIGINT data, but also empowering extremist groups to more effectively recruit new fighters.

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Image Credit: AFP/Getty Images

These strikes are “not just inspiring new people to the cause, but they are also turn people off for a lifetime to being sympathetic to US roles in the Middle East or having any allegiance to the US,” Jenkins told Engadget. “Even people that don’t join extremist organizations will harbor deep resentment against the United States for the rest of their lives.”

What’s more, Jenkins explained, replacing human-controlled drones with fully autonomous models could actually make matters worse. “If people are worried that it is ‘disrespectful’ to assassinate people with remotely piloted drones,” he points out, carrying out assassinations with machines that make their decisions based wholly off of workflow algorithms, “seems like it’s only going to make matters much worse.”

Regardless of its shortcomings, the use of drones in “targeted killings” appears to be here to stay. “It is the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no US casualties, gives the appearance of toughness,” Adm. Dennis Blair, Obama’s former director of national intelligence, told The New York Times in 2012. “It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.”

For as fast and loose as the Obama administration is wielding these weapons, they remain a viable alternative to putting the lives of US servicemen and women in danger or funding proxy wars. “I’m very hesitant on backing foreign militaries or paramilitary forces or militias,” Clinton Watts, a former FBI special agent and executive officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, told The Intercept. “I’ve seen that up close before and you’re backing rape-and-pillage campaigns through the countryside, usually. You can’t control them and you don’t have transparency over what they do and it blows up in your face the same way that a bad drone strike does.”

Considering an unending string of unpopular wars in far-off lands, living under constant threat of terrorist activities domestically and a program of morally ambivalent, state-sponsored assassinations against people the government is only pretty sure it should be targeting, the best answer might actually involve less technology, not more.

[Lede image credit: Getty Images]

Source: Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo

Jabra Sport Pulse wireless earbuds review

The Jabra Sport Pulse is your go-to wireless Bluetooth sports earbuds to bring to the gym or when training outdoors. They do come at a premium price of $200; however, the high price tag is worth it if you want to take advantage of all of the great features offered. They’re equipped with high-quality sound paired with a decently deep base, a built-in clinical-grade heart rate monitor, solid fitness app integration, as well as military grade sweat/rain, dust and shock resistance. On top of those features (and unlike most wireless earbuds), the Sport Pulse is designed to fit comfortably in your ears and, most importantly, stay tucked in even during workouts that involve sudden movements.

Audio Quality

The Sport Pulse sound performance is excellent. The earbuds offer high-quality Dolby-powered sound with a good base. There is definitely no loss of performance over Bluetooth, but the base is not the deepest for those who value a punchy base. Comparing them to the PowerBeats 2 by Dre, I can safely say that the Sport Pulse is on par with them in terms of sound performance.

Wireless earbuds often suffer to stay securely fit in your ears during heavy workouts. Sweat appears along the way, and certain sudden movements usually results in your earbuds falling off your ears or causes a loose fit which leads to a poor sound. Fortunately, the Sport Pulse comes with four sets of ‘EarWings’ stabilizers and four sets of ‘EarGels’ eartips in four different sizes to make sure the Sport Pulse can fit perfectly in your ears. The fact that they can stay tucked-in your ears throughout a workout is essential as a tight seal is key to maximize sound quality, base and sound isolation. This results in an immersive sound, even during outside runs where I could not hear traffic or distant noises. The Sport Pulse is also great for casual listening and in fact have replaced my PowerBeats 2 due to their greater sound isolation capability.

Features

One of the main features of the Sport Pulse is its heart rate monitor and fitness tracker. The heart rate monitor is powered by PerformTek technology and the company claims that they deliver clinical-grade heart rate monitoring precision. The Sport Pulse measures your heart rate throughout your workout and the fitness app’s voice coach will periodically inform you of your heart rate, average heart rate, as well as your total distance, total calorie burn and pace. This information can also be accessed by clicking on the left earbud’s button. The companion app lets you change what you want the assistant voice coach to tell you when clicking that button.

The fitness app also analyzes your workouts, to keep track of your training zone (light, fat burn, cardio, intense and maximum). In addition, you can set time, distance, cadence goals as well as other fitness training zones that the earbuds will track and let you know if you are training accordingly. The voice-coach prompts play over your current music, and can run simultaneously while listening to music with Spotify, Soundcloud or other music streaming services. One thing that can be annoying along the way is that if you move the earbuds to adjust their fit or they simply lose their fit, the voice-coach will tell you to readjust the left earbud to detect the heart rate and it sometimes take up to a minute for them to detect your heart rate again.

Finally, the Jabra Sport Life fitness app can use your phone’s built in GPS to map out your runs, and share your workout stats to your friends. The Jabra Sport Life fitness app is definitely a great feature to reinforce your workouts, as it lets you monitor/evaluate your performance, let you know if you are training in the right training zone and help you achieve your fitness goals. It is worth to mention that the Jabra Sport Pulse can also work with other fitness apps such as Endomendo and Runkeeper.

Play Store Download Link

The Sport Pulse has an IP55 military-grade durability certification. This means that they will resist sweat, rain, dust and shock. This should ensure that they last you longer than other non-certified earbuds and withstand heavy workouts. The earbuds have also an in-line remote/microphone that allows you to turn the earbuds on, answer calls, skip tracks, and raise and lower volume.

They also come with built-in NFC tap-to-pair technology, which is supported by many of the latest Android phones and makes the hassle of pairing your smartphone a lot easier. The earbuds are of course compatible with both Android and iOS.

Battery Life

One crucial component of Bluetooth wireless earbuds is their battery life. The Sport Pulse’s small size does not offer room for a large battery, and most wireless earbuds will give you about 5 hours max of music playback time. Jabra claims that the Sport Pulse give you up to 5 hours of music/talk time. While testing them, they did last for a maximum of 4.5 hours when listening to music slightly above the safety level (loud).

Closing

After using the Sport Pulse daily for about three weeks in and out of the gym, I can highly recommend them to anyone looking for high-end wireless earbuds to bring to the gym, runs, or any type of outdoors physical activity. They work with a great range of fitness apps, and the Jabra Sport Life app provides you with audio coaching, GPS tracking for distance running and other fitness tracking features that inform of how you’re doing during your workout. These earbuds will definitely help you take your workouts to the next level and offer you high quality sound to get you through tough training sessions.

If you value the heart rate monitor and fitness app integration and are willing to pay $200 for a pair of earbuds, then the Jabra Sport Pulse is definitely a great choice. They are by far the best sports wireless earbuds out there, and go on par with other high-end wireless earbuds such as the PowerBeats 2 in terms of sound quality. They have an incredible fit, something that other wireless sports earbuds suffer from, and come with a great set of fitness tracking features.

[Jabra] [Amazon] [Best Buy]

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Back to the Future: how mobile has changed in 10 years

Happy Back to the Future day, fellow DeLorean time-travellers. As Marty and Doc prepare to descend upon October 21st 2015 (which is today as you might have guessed), we’ve decided to go the other way, albeit not as far as the mighty time travellers.

In our very own Back To The Future special, we’re taking a look at the mobile industry and how it’s changed over the past 10 years. It might seem like inconceivable but ten years ago, touchscreens were a fad, the iPhone and Android hadn’t been born yet and Nokia’s Symbian ruled the roost. How times have changed eh?

Nokia’s heyday

There’s a reason that Nokia will always be one of the most iconic names in mobile; in 2005, it was firmly in its heyday and dominated the mobile industry in a way that’s unlikely to be repeated anytime soon. 2005 saw Nokia release the Nokia 7110 which looks suspiciously like the phone used in the 1999 film, The Matrix (although it actually isn’t).

2005 was also when Nokia’s N-series made its debut with the Nokia N70, N90 and N91 all making their bows on the market. The N90 especially looked quite futuristic (above) for its time: imagine if a company bought back this crazy design; would you buy it?

Touchscreens… but not as you know them

Anyone who has been in mobile for a few years will remember the short-lived lifespan of the resistive touchscreen, which was Nokia’s (and others, including Sony) answer to the iPhone’s capacitive touchscreen. Requiring a stylus to operate – which is where Steve Jobs probably got the inspiration for his “If you see a stylus, they blew it” quote – resistive touch screens were pressure sensitive and basically, rubbish.

Pinch to zoom? Nope. On-screen keyboards? We wish. Slim phones? Not a chance. Thank god OEMs saw sense – can you imagine having to press down hard on a screen in order for it to do something? Oh wait… we do have that.

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There’s an app for that

Where would mobile be without the Apple iPhone? Honestly? In a very, very, very bad place. Like it or hate it, the iPhone saw the market shift towards the current capacitive screens in use and in 2008, the concept of the app was born.

As the folks at Microsoft would tell you (having been beaten with this stick numerous times), the lack of apps can destroy a platform before it’s even had a remote chance of being a success. As BlackBerry found out – sometimes it’s just easier to go with an established platform than try to build your own competitor (no matter how good it actually is).

The rise of Asia

Ten years ago, the thought of people buying a phone from an Asian OEM in a Western market was almost unheard of, unless of course, you were buying an entry-level handset. The big OEMs in that day were BlackBerry (aka RIM), Motorola and Nokia who dominated a market where brand loyalty was a big factor in purchase decisions.

Fast forward ten years and these companies have pretty much ceased to exist as we know them; Nokia sold its devices division to Microsoft (and swiftly made an Android device); Motorola has been the subject of a game of pass-the-parcel between various owners but is now a subsidiary of Lenovo (after Google took its valuable patents); BlackBerry still exists but has decided that no one wants BlackBerry 10 and is instead, about to treat us to its first Android device in the form of the stunning BlackBerry Priv (aka the Venice).

Fast forward ten years and 7 of the world’s top 10 leading mobile manufucturers are from China with only one (Apple) from outside Asia and there’s likely to be no change of the status quo for many years. While some are based solely in Asia, most operate around the world, serving up the flagships – such as the S6 Edge, Xperia Z5, Mate S, G4 and more – that most of us call our own.

Mobile in 2045 – the future is a scary place

What will mobile phones be like in 2045 and will they even exist? Is it even possible to predict what consumer technology will be like in 2045? What do you think we’ll see from mobile devices in 30 years and will we even have mobile phones?

Let us know what you think mobile will be like in 30 years and we can all revisit this post on October 21^st 2045 to see who was able to predict the future. If you’re worried about the future (or even if you know), there’s no better way to go Back to the Future than with the Doc himself: