Full text of “Drone Army descends on New Orleans” Published in NEWStream and syndicated to all ReutAssoc membersites (retrieved December 21 2012 @ 13:34).

Drone Army descends on New Orleans

Contact with drones lost during drug wars, swarm slowly migrating north.

photo credit: l@mie

MERAUX, La. – A swarm of drones, known as the “Lost Army,” appear to have established themselves in the New Orleans area, the defence commissioner said. The autonomous force has been operating without human control for nearly a decade.

Three units were spotted by junkyard workers, about 10 miles from where the reconnaissance units were discovered in November, commissioner Baako Arceneaux said Wednesday.

Though the exact nature of the drones remains unconfirmed, goggle imagery provided by the workers matches the profile of constructor-type units.

This most recent sighting was close enough to last year’s location that the drones could have been part of the main swarm. But they might also have been blown ashore by hurricane Quinton or Stephanie, said Arceneaux in a news release.

“Although the full extent of the so-called Lost Army’s presence isn’t known, we have to assume that at least a portion is established in the area and people should be careful when travelling outside, hunting recreationally, or otherwise behaving in what could be perceived as an aggressive manner,” Arceneaux said.

Since the Michoacán incident, the Louisiana Department of Civil Defence has been upgrading surveillance stations along a north-south line through the state and at several key navigational choke-points to monitor for signs of the drones. Critics charge that the process has taken too long and that warnings are coming too late.

“This is just part of a larger failure on the part of the powers-that-be to properly fund national sanctity,” said Corporal J. F. Ruck, Minutemen spokesman, “They’re telling us to just sit back and let the drones fly on by, more of the extensive record of do-nothing politics by the government. We don’t even know where they are.”

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Built and deployed to police the Columbian jungle during the height of anti-drug paranoia, contact with the nearly completely autonomous collective was lost 9 years ago. The incident and subsequent massacre of a small unit of Panamanian security forces led to the immediate banning of high-autonomy drone units. The ban has ironically made the errant drones nearly impossible to contain.

“The problem is that our guys just aren’t as fast as these things,” said General Hussein, speaking from the Pentagon, “They do one thing really well and that is high speed 720 degree combat. You can’t expect a human operator to match that capability.”

After two disastrous attempts to retrieve or destroy the drones in South America, a containment policy was declared. However, jurisdictional issues have plagued the joint task force and as much as 50% of the army carrying up to 70% of the remaining ordinance remains unaccounted for. Despite efforts, they have been steadily migrating northward.

According to Lockheed Martin analysts, the drones appear to be in a patrol mode. Since the massacre at the alleged cartel fields in Michoacán, few violent incidents have been reported.

The drones carry a mixture of bio-explosive and conventional ordinance. Experts recommend that anyone confronted with drones disarm and seek cover immediately. People with weapons, home-based laboratories or certain kinds of farms are advised to take special caution. More information is available on the DoCD website.

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9.

Halfway down the block there is a gap between the houses. If you walk down this tiny alley you find yourself in the half-overgrown backyard. Bending down, you see that the remains of a herb garden grows between the weeds. Peering through the windows you see by the boxes that the occupants have just moved in. At night, three friends sit in the sun room. One reads, one writes and one draws. All three are comfortably silent as they listen to a playlist of songs selected especially for the occasion.

Listen, Jerry can you get Louisa on the line? I’ve got an idea here you kids don’t want to miss. This’ll be a use of your VC dollars that’s way better than that ridiculous gene therapy tech that Kurzweil sold you on.

Here’s the deal: It seems like all of the buzz for augmented reality is around layering images in real time over the world or a video feed of the world. That seems cool, but it’s all very new and pre-alpha and I feel like there has to be more to the AR stuff than just jittery lines and awkward French maids. In fact, I think that there is the tech for an app, RIGHT NOW that could provide a polished user experience using current-gen consumer devices. I’d like to pitch that product to you today. Now.

photo credit: babel`µx

Here’s the background: On day 10 of Dustin Curtis’ 30 Day Flight he sits next to a retired Disney audio Imagineer. Calls him Mr Q. They have a conversation. In 1968 this Q guy designed the ambient audio system for Disney World. It was the first theme park that had music playing on the pathways between the rides. Over time it’s gotten more and more sophisticated.

Listen to this:

He describes how he wrote some software for “manufacturing emotion” with the thousands of new speakers in the park. The system he built can slowly change the style of the music across a distance without the visitor noticing. As a person walks from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland, for example, each of the hundreds of speakers slowly fades in different melodies at different frequencies so that at any point you can stop and enjoy a fully accurate piece of music, but by the time you walk 400 feet, the entire song has changed and no one has noticed.

That’s Dustin Curtis explaining How Mr Q Manufactured Emotion

It’s a cool solution but it’s very 20th Century. Very infrastructural. It’s location dependent and expensive to reproduce. It asks everyone to hear the same thing. It doesn’t scale to the whole world.

Enter smart phones.

Jer, you know smart phones. Smart phones are your own private amusement park. They have headphone jacks, they let us load apps, they let us play sounds, they are location aware. We don’t need to install speakers throughout the city, people carry the speakers in their pockets. They’re listening to playlists and podcasts and these really ancient “we-don’t-know-from-new-tech-so-we’re-just-filming-plays” primitive stuff. Pre-modern stuff. Audio walking tours? Please, that’s Walkman stuff. Press play when you reach this sign post, whatever. We can reproduce Mr Q’s tech and we don’t need to lay a single inch of cable, don’t need to bolt in a single sub-woofer. We just need to paint in the sounds.

Pick an launch market. Somewhere filled to the gills with creative types who have iPhones, Palms Pre, and Android handsets. New York? Toronto? London? San Francisco? Call up some big names or some up and comings soundscape artists. Is Brian Eno available? What about DJ Someone-I’ve-Never-Heard-Of? Someone the kids are in to.

There’s two parts to this thing. The client sits on the phone, downloads a soundtrack – custom for the city – pulls from the location API, and mixes sounds according to the instructions. There’s cleverness sure, some audio gee-whizery secret sauce, all very patentable and proprietary that seamlessly pulls it together. As you make your way from uptown to downtown, the tone shifts gradually, like in Mr Q’s park but moreso. Mr Q is strictly last century, he’s amateur hour hacker hobbyist. It’s laying copper when we could be putting up cell towers in Africa. Disney doesn’t know from happiest place on earth.

On the server – wait’ll to see what we’ve got going there – it’s all very user-friendly, very drag-n-drop. We show you a map of the city and your uploaded audio files. You can paint-in areas, just like Photoshop, in fact we’re using one of those 2.0 cloud-based painting apps as a base tool. Colour your regions and associate sounds accordingly. We crowdsourced the names of neighbourhoods from Flickr to give you suggested outlines, if you just wanna throw something together, but the real artist can paint down to the nearest half-meter.

Oh yeah, of course it’s all socially networked. We’ve got Facebook integration and a Twitter feed and you can rate soundtracks and see what your friends are listening to and we’ll make a recommendation engine or just leverage someone else’s.

Financial model? We’ve got a financial model like you wouldn’t believe. Licensing opportunities for bands, official city soundtracks for the burgs that care about that kind of thing, pay-per listen, downloadable in-app micro transactions, the whole thing. Disney needs to talk to US. Why are they wasting time on a single soundtrack for the happiest place on earth? Why aren’t they selling Little Mermaid downloads for the girls and Pirates of the Caribbean for the boys? You know what I’m getting at: everyone’s happiest place custom-selected for the needs of the individual.

And that’s all 1.0 stuff. Pre-launch Beta. Let me tell you about what’s in the pipeline.

For one thing, imagine interactive soundtracks. We’ll throw up some time-of-day code in the 1.2 release, that’s easy stuff. Then we start pulling down weather data and incorporating that into the premium soundtracks. Maybe event-based too. Festival in progress? Why not throw in a caribbean undertone?

In the long run, as user adoption upticks, we see a sub-genre of tracks that react to what other users are up to. Who is nearby? Is a crowd forming? The app knows and revises the soundscape accordingly. We’re also looking at a game element – can you follow audio clues and visit all the right locations? Secret soundtracks, unlockable content, all the stuff that makes people crazy with desire.

That’s not it, there’s 3.0 plans too, stuff that’ll change your relationship with sound; military applications, fitness regimens all kinds of things. But before I get to that, you’re gonna need to sign the NDA.

This has been a weird week. I’ve spent much of it reading things by people smarter than me who have – for want of a better word – scooped me on ideas that I’ve been tossing around for awhile.

photo credit: mugley

Examples? Matt Jones’s The City is a Battlesuit, which ends on the subject of Jack Hawksmoor, a character I have been obsessing about for the past two months, collecting snippets and ideas but never pulling anything together. No need to now, Jones’s article is excellent and I commend it to you gladly.

Discovered today that BLDGBLOG scooped me by SEVERAL YEARS on the idea that parts of cities might need to go fallow in order to leave room for renewal. Check out this excellent interview with Jeff VanderMeer in which exactly this idea is explored admirably. Recommended reading.

As I write this, I am on a train zooming to Montreal. I wasn’t for awhile. For awhile I was on a train stranded on the tracks, while an accident involving a freight train and a fatality was being cleared up the line. This has had a chilling effect on the post I was working on, about how train travel seems pleasant and leisurely. This is a telling thing, I reflected, given that less than a century ago, thinkers were bemoaning the hustle and bustle brought on by trains. But now someone’s dead and I get a 50% discount on my next train ticket.

Primer is an excellent movie. Have you seen it? I think that you should. It’s very convincing low budget science fiction. It’s about nerds in their garages working on things, too busy poking towards a breakthrough to bother ensuring that the audience can keep up. You piece together the jargon and the series of discoveries (How hard is this? Roger Ebert and I disagree about just about every detail of interpretation in his positive review of the movie). It feels very real. It feels like the excitement and frustration of a start-up. I won’t say too much more about this, except for the genius insight that world-changing and breaking technology often comes from geeks who don’t know any better. Watch it. You’ll see what I mean.

Quiet Babylon. Tell your friends.

8.

Embedded in the sidewalk that runs along the outskirts of the park is a series of small copper plaques. Each one depicts a different species of fern (there are more than twenty in all) and gives its Latin name. No explanation is offered and the park itself contains no living ferns.