Skews.Me

Robo-Roach

Skews Me — Wed, 01 May 2013 20:12:24 +0000


University of Tokyo

From the 1950s, José Delgado was creating remote-controlled animals including monkeys and cats. Concurrently, Robert G. Heath was studying brain implants in humans. After front page coverage by The New York Times in 1965, and a book published in 1969 as part of the World Perspectives series about the mind, as well as being featured in a 1985 CNN special, José Delgado has still remained relatively unknown to the world despite his breakthrough research into Physical Control of the Mind now a part Cybernetic Anthropology courses at various colleges and universities.

After the University of Tokyo announced their robo-roaches in 1997, the motion picture The Fifth Element released later that year featured one.

The possible uses of remote-controlled animals range from novelty items:

…to rescue personnel:

…to military applications:

We are Borg.
You will be assimilated.
Resistance is futile.

Professor Kevin Warwick notes that “if cyborgs are created with superhuman capabilities from a normal human start point, then it certainly brings about a threat to humanity itself. Perhaps the development of direct, military-style cyborgs might be possible to avoid. After all, when cyborgs exhibiting an intelligence that far surpasses that of humans are brought about, it will surely be the cyborgs themselves that make any decisions about how they treat humans.”
– Professor Kevin Warwick, I, Cyborg (London: Century, 2002), p. 239.

Project Pigeon

Skews Me — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 20:06:59 +0000

“Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born on 20 March 1904 in the small railroading town of Susquehanna, Pennsylvania,” writes Raymond E. Fancher in Pioneers of Psychology.” ¹ Thomas H. Metos notes in The Human Mind that “Skinner and others developed the learning theory known as operant (or instrumental) conditioning, in which the stimulus follows the behavior, as opposed to classical conditioning, in which the stimulus always precedes the behavior.” ²

Charles S. Carver & Michael F. Scheier explain in Perspectives on Personality:

Classical conditioning is a passive process. When a reflex occurs, conditioning apparently doesn’t require you to do anything.… Instrumental conditioning, in contrast, is an active process (cf. Skinner, B. F. (1938). The behavior of organisms. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts). The events that define it begin with a behavior on your part (even if the “behavior” is the chosen act of remaining still).³

“Skinner used two other tools in his operant conditioning to learning,” writes Metos:

One was the procedure called shaping, that is, using reward to guide the subjects natural behavior toward the desired behavior gradually. The other tool was changing the emphasis from rewards to reinforcers.

There are two kinds of reinforcers.… For humans, a positive reinforcer is approval, attention, money, or promotion, for example. A negative reinforcer for a rat is an electric shock that is stopped, thus becoming a reward. In humans, withdrawal of approval by parents may make a child study harder and get better grades. The basis of reinforcement is that whether a positive or a negative reinforcement is used, it strengthens the behavior of the laboratory animal or human.⁴


Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.	www.arischindler.com

Harvey Mindess relates in Makers of Psychology how “during World War II, Skinner conducted a series of experiments in which he trained sets of pigeons to navigate bombs dropped from aircraft so they would hit their targets accurately. The pigeons were to be harnessed inside the nose cones of the bombs.” ⁵

A web page that appears to have been removed from an all things vector website described the process:

The pigeons were trained with slides of aerial photographs of the target, and if they kept the crosshairs on the target, they were rewarded by a grain deposited in a tray in front of them. Skinner later found that the pigeons were less easily disturbed under confusing circumstances if they were fed hemp (marijuana) seeds rather than grains.⁶

Charles & Ray Eames provide in A Computer Perspective:

Skinner’s control system used a lens in the nose of the bomb to throw an image of the approaching target on a ground-glass screen.… If the target’s image moved off center, the pigeon’s pecking tilted the screen, which moved the bomb’s tail surfaces, which corrected the bomb’s course. To improve accuracy, Skinner used three pigeons to control the bomb’s direction by majority rule [Charles Eames and Ray Eames, A Computer Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 131].⁷

“These birds would have been the equivalent of modern guidance computers,” notes Robert I. Watson, Sr. and Rand B. Evans in The Great Psychologists.⁸ Mindess explains:

Bizarre as it sounds, the experiment apparently worked, and Skinner was eventually able to interest the army brass in observing a demonstration. The operation became known as “Project Pigeon” [compare "Project OrCon" ⁱ] and was classified until [1958 ⁱⁱ] It was never used, however, partly because the officers who considered it found it ludicrous, but also because by this time the U.S. was preparing to launch the atom bomb.⁹

“Skinner went home with 24 trained pigeons, which he kept in a dovecote in his garden,” according to the vector website on another removed page.¹⁰

Notes

ⁱ Silent video shows the project Skinner worked on during World War Two from B.F. Skinner Foundation, Project Pigeon (OrCon), at http://www.bfskinner.org/bfskinner/Project_Orcon.html (retrieved: 28 April 2013).

ⁱⁱ Cited in lecture notes by James H. Capshew, “Engineering Behavior: Project Pigeon, World War II, and the Conditioning of B.F. Skinner,” Technology and Culture, 34, 1993, at University of Dayton, OH, http://www.udayton.edu/~psych/DJP/histsys/pdfhs/hsbehavior2.pdf (retrieved: circa 2000).

Related books

Bee bots

Skews Me — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:24:15 +0000


BBC News

“The Pentagon’s defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions”, writes BBC news. “The idea is to insert micro-systems at the pupa stage, when the insects can integrate them into their body, so they can be remotely controlled later.”

– Gary Kitchener, “Pentagon plans cyber-insect army,” BBC News, 16 March 2006, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4808342.stm (retrieved: 27 April 2013).

Amid all the controversy over genetically-modified (GM) crops and their pesticides and herbicides decimating bee populations all around the world, biotechnology behemoth Monsanto has decided to buy out one of the major international firms devoted to studying and protecting bees. According to a company announcement, Beeologics handed over the reins to Monsanto back on September 28, 2011, which means the gene-manipulating giant will now be able to control the flow of information and products coming from Beeologics for colony collapse disorder (CCD).

– Jonathan Benson, “Monsanto buys leading bee research firm after being implicated in bee colony collapse,” NaturalNews.com, 26 April 2012, at http://www.naturalnews.com/035688_Monsanto_honey_bees_colony_collapse.html (retrieved: 27 April 2013).

every time I try to stand

Skews Me — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 04:37:59 +0000

I’ve been trying to explain how every time I try to stand, someone yanks the rug out from under me. This drawing captures it brilliantly.

But when I try to explain it, it comes out more like a web of tangents.

Keep America Beautiful

Skews Me — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:21:56 +0000

Keep America Beautiful is a U.S. based nonprofit organization founded in 1953. It is the largest community improvement organization in the United States, with approximately 589 affiliate organizations (similar to local chapters) and more than 1,000 community organizations that participate in their programs.

Keep America Beautiful focuses on three key issues: litter prevention, waste reduction/recycling and community greening & beautification. This is accomplished through a combination of community organizing, public education and the fostering of public/private partnerships.

- Wikipedia

Nightmare News

Skews Me — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 20:33:46 +0000

Orphan Black

Skews Me — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 21:07:59 +0000

ORPHAN BLACK – Ultimate Playlist

Writes BBC America:

Don’t miss ORPHAN BLACK — the smart, sexy and suspenseful conspiracy-thriller starring rising star TATIANA MASLANY (The Vow, Picture Day) as Sarah, an outsider and orphan whose life changes dramatically after witnessing the suicide of a woman who looks just like her.

Sarah assumes her identity, her boyfriend and her bank account. But instead of solving her problems, the street-smart chameleon is thrust headlong into a kaleidoscopic mystery. She makes the dizzying discovery that she and the dead woman are clones…but are they the only ones?

Sarah quickly finds herself caught in the middle of a deadly conspiracy, racing to find answers.

Michael Eisner presents alien abductions

Skews Me — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 03:12:01 +0000

“In [Februaryⁱ and] March of 1995, the UPN aired a most intriguing Disney-produced television special about UFOs, entitled ‘Alien Encounters from New Tomorrowland,’ writes the ForbiddenKnowledgeTV.com website. “This highly unusual broadcast presents UFOs and alien visitation to our planet as a matter of fact.” ¹

“The Disney company aired a major one-hour television Special, with no advance notice, on stations in only 5 US cities. Thanks to a few viewers who were able to roll their VCRs and capture it, we have a record of the startling quotes and statements it contained,” adds the UFOevidence.org website.²


Ronald Reagan on aliens

Matt Staggs writes for disinfo.com website: “It’s a worthwhile curiosity if for nothing else than to watch Michael Eisner utter this awkwardly structured phrase”:

“In a top secret military installation somewhere in the United States, there are those who believe that the government is hiding the remains of an alien spacecraft that mysteriously crashed to Earth.” ³

“Robert Urich, the legendary Jim Street in ‘S.W.A.T.’, is the host of this voyage around the UFO’s and its mystery,” the Internet Movie Database chronicles further. “From New Tomorrowland, in Disneyland, Urich talks about UFO, contacts, evidences of its arrives, abductions, military documents and other things what surround this controversial thematic.” ⁴

“Many in the UFO research field felt that Disney’s Alien Encounters documentary was an effort by the powers that be to prepare us for Disclosure – a subtle test of public reaction to an official declaration that we are not alone,” writes Robbie Graham for the Silver Screen Saucers blog. “But in the sixteen years since the documentary was produced, not one UFO researcher has attempted to contact the film’s writer and director, Andrew Thomas, in order to learn the truth of the matter. So, in February 2011, [Graham] decided to do just that”:

There were aspects of the Alien Encounters project, however, that even Thomas considered strange – not least of all was the fact that Disney CEO Michael Eisner took a direct interest in the documentary, personally vetting its content and even filming his own introduction for the piece:

“I thought it was really odd because to me this was kind of a minor marketing project, but they [Disney] put a lot of weight into it. I mean Eisner doesn’t have to stop walking down the street to pick up a twenty-dollar-bill – it’s not worth his time. But they had him look through this. And he filmed this intro to the show. I didn’t do that. He had his own film crew take him out to a sound stage and film his own intro, which I thought was just really surprising.”

Also surprising to Thomas was Disney’s inexplicable TV scheduling for the documentary, which he described as “completely counter-intuitive,” because “it played on independent stations in the afternoon at like 2 o’clock or 3 o’ clock, or some horrible time when no one would be watching it.…

NASA UFO accounts

Regarding Close Encounters, Thomas explained that marketing executives at Columbia Pictures were concerned that Spielberg’s chosen title for the film made it sound “suspiciously like a pornographic movie, because no one had any reference to what that vocabulary meant.” This was where Thomas came in:

“Eighteen months before the film [Close Encounters] was going to premiere… before we’d even sold it to audiences, we had a campaign to introduce that vocabulary and make it part of the vernacular, so when the film opened-up everyone would know what was being discussed, and there wouldn’t be any question. So what I did was I worked with a planetarium to create a planetarium show that was about twenty-minutes long… you sit down and a UFO shoots across the planetarium dome and then the audience is trained on how to figure out whether that was a meteor, a comet, or actually an extraterrestrial. We managed to bus-in tens-of thousands of kids from all around the country on the pretence of seeing an educational planetarium show, but what they really got was a sophisticated message to explain to them that extraterrestrials and UFOs are real and what an encounter of the first, second and third kind actually meant.” ⁵

Notes

ⁱ The documentary was aired in only a handful of US cities at seemingly random times on selected dates in February and March, 1995, with no advance notice – a rather odd marketing strategy considering its purpose was to promote a major theme park ride for families.… The ride itself seemed like an afterthought.^*
– Robbie Graham Silver Screen Saucers), “UFOs and Disney: Behind the Magic Kingdom,” UFO Encounters Live, 2011, at http://ufoencounterslive.com/ufonews_ufo_disney.htm (retrieved: 23 March 2013).

^* The War of the Worlds (October 30, 1938), The Mercury Theatre on the Air, at http://www.mercurytheatre.info, MP3 at http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/381030.mp3 (retrieved: 3 January 2011).

Dark Angel

Skews Me — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 22:00:44 +0000

IMDb writes:

A group of genetically-enhanced children escape from a lab project. Years later we meet Max, one of the escapees who now works for a messenger service in the post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest.

Disturbing Behavior

Skews Me — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 22:13:56 +0000

IMDB writes:

The new kid in town stumbles across something sinister about the town’s method of transforming its unruly teens into upstanding citizens.

Kevin J. Crosby, “Brain Implants,” SkewsMe.com, 1996, at http://www.skewsme.com/implants.html (retrieved: 31 March 2013).

Kevin J. Crosby, “Cloning,” SkewsMe.com, 1996, at http://www.skewsme.com/cloning.html (retrieved: 31 March 2013).

Orphan Black on BBC America (2013)

Dark Angel on FOX (2000-2002)

Skews.Me

Robo-Roach

See also

Project Pigeon

Notes

Related links

See also

Related videos

Related books

Bee bots

every time I try to stand

Keep America Beautiful

Nightmare News

Orphan Black

See also

Michael Eisner presents alien abductions

Notes

Related links

See also

Dark Angel

See also

Disturbing Behavior