There is a whole lot more to innovation than thinking up a great new idea. A new study from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management suggests that when budding entrepreneurs get time off their normal activities to work on other things — dubbed ‘slack’ time — they use it to complete the less exciting jobs needed to bring a novel project to life.
Between starting a real estate technology company, Hightower, and completing in an Ironman, I’ve had my fair share of feeling in over my head. However, each of these adventures has taught me how to overcome an overwhelming challenge. Here are four humble pieces of advice for all of you crazy enough to do the same.
Last year, Google began experimenting with hardware-based schemes for user-authentication, while Apple added two factor authentication to iCloud and Apple ID users. They began sending a verification code to users via a mobile number registered in advance.
Security pundits know that two factor authentication is more secure than simple passwords. As a refresher, “Factors” are typically described like this:
The Google project may be just another method of factor #2. In fact, because it is small (easily misplaced or stolen), it simplifies but does not improve on security. I suggest a radical and reliable method of authentication. It’s not new and it’s not my idea…
Back in 1999, Hugh Davies (no relation to Ellery) was awarded a patent on a novel form of access and authentication. It capitalizes on the human ability to quickly pick a familiar face out of a crowd. Just as with passwords, it uses something that you know to log in, purchase, or access a secure service. But unlike passwords, the “combination” changes with every use, and yet the user needn’t learn anything new.
Hoping to commercialize the technique, Davies joined another Brit, Paul Barrett, and formed Passfaces (originally, Real User Corporation). Incidentally, it is quite difficult to research Passfaces and its history. Web searches for “face recognition”, “access”, “authentication” and “patent” yield results for a more recent development in which a smart phone recognizes the face of authorized users, rather than users recognizing familiar faces. (Google, Samsung and Apple are all beginning to use face recognition on mobile devices). In fact, the Passfaces method is quicker, uses less resources and is far more reliable.
I have long been disappointed and surprised that the technique has never caught on. It is a terrific method with few drawbacks. Used alone, it is better than other methods of 1 or 2 factor authentication. Add a second factor and it is remarkably secure and robust.
How it Works:
When accessing or authenticating (for example, logging into a corporate VPN or completing a credit card purchase), you are presented with a tiled screen of individual faces. I prefer a big 15×5 grid = 75 images, but Passfaces uses sequential screens of just 9 faces arranged like the number pad on an ATM.
Just click on a few familiar faces. That’s all! Oddly, Passfaces discourages the use of known faces. Their research, with which I respectfully disagree, suggests that users should train themselves to recognize a few faces from the company’s stock library. In my preferred embodiment, users upload a dozen photos of people they know at a glance—preferably, people that they knew in the past: A 3rd grade music teacher, a childhood friend who moved away, the face on an oil painting that hung in the basement until Dad tossed it in the fireplace. Now, add the boss who fired you from your first job, the prom queen who dumped you for a football jock, and that very odd doorman who stood in front of a hotel in your neighborhood for 20 years. Photos of various quality and resolution, but all scaled to fit the grid. Some are black & white, perhaps scanned from an old yearbook.
Using my preferred example of 75 faces, suppose that 5 or 6 of the images are from your personal shoe box of old photos. The rest are randomly inserted from all over the internet. How long would take you to click on 3 of the 5 or 6 familiar faces in front of you? (Remember: They are old acquaintances. Even a spouse would have difficulty picking out 3 faces from your early life—as they looked back then). Surprise! You will click them instantly, especially on a touch screen. You won’t need even a second to study the collage. They jump off the screen because your brain perceives a familiar face very differently and faster than anything else.
Of course, the photo array is mixed in different ways for each authentication and it incorporates different friends from your original upload. In fact, if a user sees the same faces in the next few transactions, it is a red flag. Someone has spied on the process, perhaps with a local camera or screen logger. In legitimate use, the same faces are not recycled for many days and are never shown together on the same screen.
Facebook uses a variant of this technique when their servers sense your attempt to login from new equipment or from another part of the country. They show you individuals that you have friended, but that were uploaded and tagged by other users. If you cannot identify a few of your own friends, especially the ones with which you have frequent social contact, than it’s likely that your login attempt deserves more scrutiny.
I don’t know why Passfaces or something like it has failed to catch fire. Perhaps the inventor refuses to license the method at reasonable cost or perhaps he cannot find a visionary VC or angel consortium to more aggressively promote it. If I had invented and patented facial-array authentication, I would attempt to market the patent for a short time focusing on very large network companies like Microsoft, Google, Cisco or Akamai. If I could not license or sell the patent quickly, I would hesitate to go it alone. (I have tried that route too many times). Instead, I would place it in the public domain and profit by being the first, and most skilled practitioner at deployment. I would train and certify others and consult to organizations that use or commercialize the technology.
I used this approach in promoting my own patent which describes an economic barrier to spam (after failing to exploit the invention with my own company). Later, I started with this approach in my research on Blind Signaling and Response and on Reverse Distributed Data Clouds. I recognized that rapid adoption of transformative technology like facial grid authentication, can be thwarted by defensive IP practice.
« Branching somewhat off topic, a developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, has published a proof that Saira Mohan has the world’s most beautiful face, irrespective of the observer’s race. That’s Saira at left. Her mother is French/Irish and her father is Hindoo.
__________
Philip Raymond is Co-Chair of The Cryptocurrency Standards Association [crypsa.org] and
chief editor at AWildDuck.com. He consults to cloud storage vendors in areas of security, pri–
vacy & network architecture, but has no ties to Passfaces or the authentication community.
“The maker of the Kindle is going to flip the formula used for reimbursing some of the authors who depend on it for sales. Instead of paying these authors by the book, Amazon will soon start paying authors based on how many pages are read—not how many pages are downloaded, but how many pages are displayed on the screen long enough to be parsed.” Read More
Gravity modification, the scientific term for antigravity, is the ability to modify the gravitational field without the use of mass. Thus legacy physics, the RSQ (Relativity, String & Quantum) theories, cannot deliver either the physics or technology as these require mass as their field origin.
Ron Kita who recently received the first US patent (8901943) related to gravity modification, in recent history, introduced me to Dr. Takaaki Musha some years ago. Dr. Musha has a distinguished history researching Biefeld-Brown in Japan, going back to the late 1980s, and worked for the Ministry of Defense and Honda R&D.
Dr. Musha is currently editing New Frontiers in Space Propulsion (Nova Publishers) expected later this year. He is one of the founders of the International Society for Space Science whose aim is to develop new propulsion systems for interstellar travel.
Wait. What? Honda? Yes. For us Americans, it is unthinkable for General Motors to investigate gravity modification, and here was Honda in the 1990s, at that, researching this topic.
In recent years Biefeld-Brown has gained some notoriety as an ionic wind effect. I, too, was of this opinion until I read Dr. Musha’s 2008 paper “Explanation of Dynamical Biefeld-Brown Effect from the Standpoint of ZPF field.” Reading this paper I realized how thorough, detailed and meticulous Dr. Musha was. Quoting selected portions from Dr. Musha’s paper:
In 1956, T.T. Brown presented a discovery known as the Biefeld-Bown effect (abbreviated B-B effect) that a sufficiently charged capacitor with dielectrics exhibited unidirectional thrust in the direction of the positive plate.
From the 1st of February until the 1st of March in 1996, the research group of the HONDA R&D Institute conducted experiments to verify the B-B effect with an improved experimental device which rejected the influence of corona discharges and electric wind around the capacitor by setting the capacitor in the insulator oil contained within a metallic vessel … The experimental results measured by the Honda research group are shown …
V. Putz and K. Svozil,
… predicted that the electron experiences an increase in its rest mass under an intense electromagnetic field …
and the equivalent
… formula with respect to the mass shift of the electron under intense electromagnetic field was discovered by P. Milonni …
Dr. Musha concludes his paper with,
… The theoretical analysis result suggests that the impulsive electric field applied to the dielectric material may produce a sufficient artificial gravity to attain velocities comparable to chemical rockets.
Given, Honda R&D’s experimental research findings, this is a major step forward for the Biefeld-Brown effect, and Biefeld-Brown is back on the table as a potential propulsion technology.
We learn two lesson.
First, that any theoretical analysis of an experimental result is advanced or handicapped by the contemporary physics. While the experimental results remain valid, at the time of the publication, zero point fluctuation (ZPF) was the appropriate theory. However, per Prof. Robert Nemiroff’s 2012 stunning discovery that quantum foam and thus ZPF does not exist, the theoretical explanation for the Biefeld-Brown effect needs to be reinvestigated in light of Putz, Svozil and Milonni’s research findings. This is not an easy task as that part of the foundational legacy physics is now void.
Second, it took decades of Dr. Musha’s own research to correctly advise Honda R&D how to conduct with great care and attention to detail, this type of experimental research. I would advise anyone serious considering Biefeld-Brown experiments to talk to Dr. Musha, first.
Another example of similar lessons relates to the Finnish/Russian Dr. Podkletnov’s gravity shielding spinning superconducting ceramic disc i.e. an object placed above this spinning disc would lose weight.
I spent years reading and rereading Dr. Podkletnov’s two papers (the 1992 “A Possibility of Gravitational Force Shielding by Bulk YBa2Cu3O7-x Superconductor” and the 1997 “Weak gravitational shielding properties of composite bulk YBa2Cu3O7-x superconductor below 70K under e.m. field”) before I fully understood all the salient observations.
Any theory on Dr. Podkletnov’s experiments must explain four observations, the stationary disc weight loss, spinning disc weight loss, weight loss increase along a radial distance and weight increase. Other than my own work I haven’t see anyone else attempt to explain all four observation within the context of the same theoretical analysis. The most likely inference is that legacy physics does not have the tools to explore Podkletnov’s experiments.
But it gets worse.
Interest in Dr. Podkletnov’s work was destroyed by two papers claiming null results. First, Woods et al, (the 2001 “Gravity Modification by High-Temperature Superconductors”) and second, Hathaway et al (the 2002 “Gravity Modification Experiments Using a Rotating Superconducting Disk and Radio Frequency Fields”). Reading through these papers it was very clear to me that neither team were able to faithfully reproduce Dr. Podkletnov’s work.
My analysis of Dr. Podkletnov’s papers show that the disc is electrified and bi-layered. By bi-layered, the top side is superconducting and the bottom non-superconducting. Therefore, to get gravity modifying effects, the key to experimental success is, bottom side needs to be much thicker than the top. Without getting into too much detail, this would introduce asymmetrical field structures, and gravity modifying effects.
The necessary dialog between theoretical explanations and experimental insight is vital to any scientific study. Without this dialog, there arises confounding obstructions; theoretically impossible but experiments work or theoretically possible but experiments don’t work. With respect to Biefeld-Brown, Dr. Musha has completed the first iteration of this dialog.
Above all, we cannot be sure what we have discovered is correct until we have tested these discoveries under different circumstances. This is especially true for future propulsion technologies where we cannot depend on legacy physics for guidance, and essentially don’t understand what we are looking for.
In the current RSQ (pronounced risk) theory climate, propulsion physics is not a safe career path to select. I do hope that serious researchers reopen the case for both Biefeld-Brown and Podkletnov experiments, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) leads the way by providing funding to do so.
(Originally published in the Huffington Post)
Tim Urban, of Wait But Why, recently received a phone call from Elon Musk’s staff asking if he would like to write about the automotive, aerospace, and solar power industries through personal interviews with Elon Musk and his teams. Tim Urban said yes, and the first three of essays / articles are already posted on his site.
“SpaceX just announced an official contest open to university students and independent engineering teams. The company will release detailed rules, criteria, and tube specifications in August. … The challenge will be to build “human-scale pods” to be tested on the Hawthorne, California test track that will be built next to the SpaceX headquarters, but the company is careful to note that no humans will ride in the pods. All the designs submitted must be open source.”
Uber, the multibillion-dollar on-demand rides company, wouldn’t be able to execute its global grand plan without the million drivers who have offered rides on its platform. Over the past five years, the company has relied on myriad tactics to lure new drivers in and keep them happy: rallies, ads, word-of-mouth, even a quarterly magazine. Now it’s trying another strategy: a videogame.
The company today released UberDRIVE, an iOS game that essentially mimics what it’s like to drive for Uber. Players “pick up” passengers and drive them from point A to point B. The more efficient the route they choose, the more points they can rack up in the game. If players earn consistently high ratings, they can unlock new cars and explore new areas of the city. The game also includes fun facts on important landmarks in the city, as well as a “trivia mode” where riders quiz drivers (the player) on certain destinations on the map. At launch, the game only includes a virtual San Francisco, though it’s available to play nationwide. If the game is successful, Uber says it will add new cities to the app soon. Read more
NASA said that if all goes to plan with these studies, it sees the first business-jet-sized supersonic planes going into production by 2025, and commercial planes by 2030.
“Another big trend at work: The Renault robots are ‘collaborative,’ designed to work in proximity to people. Older types of factory robots swing their steel arms with such force that they can bludgeon anyone who strays too close. Using sonar, cameras or other technologies, collaborative robots can sense where people are and slow down or stop to avoid hurting them.” Read more