The enormous donut-shaped ‘spaceship’ building is somewhat like the Pentagon near Washington, or Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), home of the UK intelligence services.  All of these buildings have a few common traits. They are all home to secretive organizations that are quite particular about their security, they are all isolated from surrounding communities, and they all look great from the air.  Look at them from ground level though, and they are not so impressive.  Indeed one would need to actually visit GCHQ to see what it looks like from the ground since just about every available photograph of the place in a Google image search is an aerial shot. From the street, the Pentagon looks as dull as any office block that would not look out of place in Soviet Russia. This is unsurprising since these buildings were designed to be admired by frequent flyers only, and with little consideration for how they look to the ground-based viewer. Apple most definitely does not want any neighbors admiring its handiwork since the building will be stashed behind a man made forest of 7,000 trees. The building itself will only occupy 20 percent of the site. In contrast to New York where towers rise unashamedly and unapologetically into the air in full view, this practice of treating buildings as an embarrassing blight to be hidden behind trees is common in much of Silicon Valley’s uninspiring vanilla architecture.

Planned Utopia

An example of this aerial photography-oriented architecture on a larger scale is the built-from-scratch city of Brasilia, a place that has garnered both acclaim and criticism for its utopian design.  Brasilia may be stunning to look at from your window seat after you stow your tray table and bring your seat upright, however at ground level it becomes a very different experience. The separation of pedestrians and motor vehicle traffic all sounds very safe and sensible, and the vast distances between buildings looks beautiful from afar, but from the point of view of the citizen trying to make use of the space it is an empty, barren, desolate landscape in which everything is so spread out that the car becomes the only feasible way of getting around.  The vibrant energy of the city street is completely absent. Anti-urbanist cities like Brasilia are a triumph of form over function.

In the UK in the 1960s there was a spate of construction of “new towns”, settlements designed from scratch, using the then fashionable ideas of urban planning in which amenities would be zoned and partitioned off in their neat clusters that would be separated from each other but linked by fast and efficient transport systems, mostly oversized sweeping roads that would be occupied by only a handful of cars at any one time, each powered by cheap gasoline. Milton Keynes in the south of England was one of the more successful experiments, but others did not work out so well.  Cumbernauld in Scotland has a “town center” consisting of a massive brutalist concrete shopping mall on stilts with a high speed expressway running underneath. Craigavon in Northern Ireland allows uninterrupted driving through dozens of roundabouts and tree-lined roads, but people are invisible since the roads are all isolated from where pedestrians are able to venture. The UK’s “new towns” experiment is today largely regarded as a failure.

Planned communities like these were products of a time when the settlement of the future was imagined as a tranquil garden city, a vast park with high towers jutting into the sky every so often and giant roads linking everything. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo soon put a stop to that way of thinking.

New Old Urbanism

In 1961, Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a seminal work that has become something of a bible for “new urbanist” advocates, a movement that pushes for a return to the basics of how cities were built for the thousands of years of civilization that existed before the invention of the automobile. Since earliest times cities were always organic entities that grew seemingly chaotically, their form dictated by the needs of the people living there on a spontaneous street-by-street and building-by-building basis. However Jacobs managed to see through the chaos and spot the patterns that made cities so successful.

Large open spaces look great on a planner’s drawing, but in practice they isolate people from one another, defeating the original purpose of a city. A large urban park far away from any buildings becomes a dangerous place at night, whereas a smaller park opposite a row of houses presents no such problems. A bicycle path running through a wooded area looks on paper like a paragon of tranquility, but in practice its isolation makes it off-limits to many people traveling alone, particularly women and particularly at night. The presence of windows overlooking the street has a positive influence on how people behave, giving people more confidence to walk along the street, even alone and at night. The presence of other people doing likewise makes the street safer still. Narrower streets are more easily traversed, and buildings that are not set back from it bring everything to within convenient walking distance. For those who do drive, a parking lot used by office workers in the day is used by people going to the movies at night, but mixed uses on the same block mean that more people can live, work, play, and get their groceries without having to use a car. Human interaction is encouraged and enhanced. The mutual proximity of citizens performing a variety of functions is what gives cities their strength.

Conversely, single-use zoning ordinances that were introduced in the post-war planning craze have forced people to drive just about everywhere just to get through a typical day.  Wider roads and buildings pushed farther away from each other by desolate parking lagoons make it all but impossible to walk anywhere. A giant parking lot in an office park becomes deserted at night while another single-purpose parking lot surrounding a movie theater is jammed by people looking for a free space. People have been isolated from each other, and the vibrancy of the city is lost.

There is a growing awareness that the single-use zoning norms of the 1960s were a mistake, and that suburban sprawl is not the result of the all-American free market in action. It is a result of numerous deliberate, if well-intentioned government policies designed to promote a certain lifestyle at the expense of others and to enforce conformity in urban planning. Zoning laws, tax incentives for home-buying, and the unbelievably naive belief that adding more traffic lanes will ease traffic, have all combined to the point where America’s inefficient land-use has turned it into the world’s largest consumer of oil, gobbling up a staggering 25 percent on behalf of 5 percent of the world’s population. The geopolitical repercussions of this oil dependency have been catastrophic.

Apple’s new headquarters are a last gasp of that era. It is an echo of a time when buildings were thought to be something that should be hidden behind trees, rather than standing proudly in the street and participating fully in civic life. It is the product of the imagination of a man who was a child of suburbia, and did not grow up experiencing the buzz of the traditional city in which creativity really thrives.

Undoing the Damage

Perhaps the supreme irony is that Apple employees have by and large rejected the kind of suburbia epitomized by the spaceship building in favor of living in traditional high density little streets, the nearest vibrant city of note being San Francisco.  Each day a huge chunk of the company’s workforce is ferried from the old city along Interstate 280 by a fleet of air-conditioned private buses, a one hour trip.

The city of Cupertino has come around to seeing the need for a vibrant urban core. A few blocks away from the new Apple campus, a high density mixed-use development is taking shape that will finally give the city a walkable central business district. The city fathers undoubtedly hope that this will be enough to attract at least some more Apple type employees to live in Cupertino, aided by its proximity to Apple and negating the need for the long commute from San Francisco.

Apple’s cohesiveness has always been a strength, but its insularity has also been a potential weakness. If the company’s workforce lives in a vibrant and diverse environment, then its creativity will continue to flourish, but it will not be because it spends the day in the giant donut-shaped isolation bubble.  It will be because it spends its evenings and weekends being exposed to the kind of cultural and social vitality that can only be found in the traditional urban setting that Steve Jobs did not seem to embrace.

We all know what happened next.  

iTunes and its music store were later made available on the Windows platform. Prices came down. More models with fewer features were introduced at lower price points. Before long, young urbanites were seen everywhere walking the streets and standing in subway trains wearing the iconic white earbuds. Apple’s “cool” credentials were solidified by the company’s association with whatever music people liked listening to. Unlike the Macintosh that was restricted to a desk in the privacy of a home or office, the iPod was highly visible everywhere, and had become a fashion item.

MP3 players were nothing new at the time, but it could be a skilled job learning to use them. With many small electronic devices, learning to use them can often require reading small print instructions in a small leaflet that unfolds into an intimidatingly large manual with the same convoluted instructions repeated in a dozen languages.  With Apple’s products, a manual is provided but seldom needed, such is the simplicity and intuitive design of the user interface. Despite the occasional technical hiccup, such as the iPhone 5 battery recall, Apple has generally given users a pleasant experience with a quality product and enabled it to build a brand with a clean, slick and urbane ambience. Microsoft tried this with products like the Zune, but has generally come across as trying too hard to emulate Apple, trying to put a veneer of coolness on a stodgy and clunky product. 

The Apple Watch has been greeted with the usual mix of reactions. Apple fans drool over it, while skeptical reporters predict a flop.  The company has never allowed skepticism to hold it back, and this is where Apple’s unique philosophy comes into play.  Leadership is not just about giving people what they want, often it is about giving people what they need, even if they do not know that they need it. The vision of Steve Jobs in the founding of Apple still rings true.  The idea of a computer for normal people to use in the home for everyday tasks was considered preposterous in the early 1980s, but Apple boldly launched the age of the personal computer, was emulated by the rest of the industry, and an entire way of life was changed. Apple is not afraid to create new markets.

That said, Microsoft cannot be accused of totally lacking in vision. Their proprietary Small Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) was an attempt to display useful information on everyday objects like coffee makers, and most notably in the SPOT Watch, an early attempt at a smart watch that was launched in 2004. Taking its data from a service called MSN Direct that broadcast FM radio signals in 100 metropolitan areas, the SPOT Watch could keep the user updated on weather, sports scores, news and other useful information. The expense of the service combined with the limits of the technology of the time and failed to provide an experience compelling enough to catch on.  It was discontinued in 2012.

By contrast, the advent of the smartphone, spurred in no small part by the iPhone which brushed aside the Blackberry, has transformed life by putting the power of the computer in just about everyone’s pocket. To sit on a train nowadays is to see everyone’s attention glued to a small screen where only twenty years ago it would have been everyone either looking out the window or reading a newspaper.  The Apple Watch could well usher in the era of people walking around looking at their watches.  It may even spark a renaissance of the wrist-borne device among younger people. Decreasing numbers of people in their early thirties or younger are wearing wristwatches, preferring to look at their phones when they need the time. However watches as a status symbol and piece of jewelry seem to be hanging in there, with sales steadily increasing year on year and holding on to 13 percent of the jewelry market. It would seem that people who relied on their phones to tell the time when they were younger tend to buy wristwatches as they get older.

More prestigious watches continue to sell, cashing in on a perceived value that remains high enough to convince some people to part with five-figure sums. Brands like Omega and Rolex have not lost their cachet.  Whether or not the Apple Watch captures the imagination of the younger generation remains to be seen. Apple has had many successes, but its history is also littered with products that either met mediocre results or flopped completely. The Pippin of 1996 was a games console developed in partnership with third-party manufacturers including Bandai, and it bombed spectacularly by being too expensive. The QuickTake that ran from 1994 to 1997 was a digital camera that failed to compete against more established companies in the photography market.  The Newton PDA was strangled shortly after birth when Steve Jobs returned to the Apple fold. Indeed many of the less successful Apple products existed during Mr Jobs’ absence from the company, a time when it seemed like it was losing its focus, and only with Jobs’ return did it regain the old magic. 

This may fuel a perception that Apple cannot continue rising to the dizzy heights of innovation without the wisdom of Jobs. 

Smart watches are not new by any means, and like the MP3 players of the 1990s there are plenty out there.  Whether or not the Apple Watch, the company’s first post-Jobs radical departure into a new market, does for wearables what the iPod did for music players, will be seen as a test of how Apple can fare in the post-Jobs era.

In December 2013 a blog posting on the Huffington Post copied and pasted the permissions used by the Facebook Messenger app, which are not much different from the permissions of many of the most popular apps on the Android platform, and built around it a story to appeal to the tinfoil hat-wearing crew. With the terrifying headline “The Insidiousness of Facebook Messenger’s Android Mobile App Permissions,” the social media paranoia machine soon took over and the post has enjoyed recurring waves of panic-sharing as people rush to delete the app from their phones. A cottage industry has sprung up of people re-hashing the article with “This will terrify you” click-bait headlines in an effort to drive more traffic to their websites irrespective of the veracity of the claims. A cursory read of the post would make it sound like the app is spying on users without their permission. Readers are led to believe that the microphone and camera will be switched on by remote overlords at Facebook headquarters, spying on their private and intimate moments.

There is just one problem: it is not true. The microphone cannot be used until the user requests it, nor can the camera or any other of the phone’s devices be activated without the user directly invoking them. Yes the app requests permission to directly dial contacts, but only because the app offers the ability to call one’s contacts through the app and speak over Wi-Fi or the mobile network.

Technology giants like Google and Facebook have been entrusted by the public with a vast amount of control over people’s data. While this is the price we all agree to pay in exchange for “free” services, it is good that these companies are held to account. However the Facebook Messenger scare is unfair and founded on poorly researched journalism and sensationalist click-bait reporting. The offending post, written by a Sam Fiorella who exhorts users to delete the app “now”, has so far been shared on Facebook nearly 230,000 times. Many of those shares have undoubtedly been on the main Facebook app, the permissions of which are not much different from those of the messenger app.

One of the strengths of the internet is that it has made information easier to access and distribute, but a side-effect is that it is just as easy to disseminate misinformation. Misleading information travels particularly quickly when combined with gimmicks that take advantage of the public’s lack of technical knowledge, press the emotional buttons, and exploit people’s fears.

A message that is worth sharing is that if an article calls for action out of fear, it should be first treated with skepticism, fact-checked through reputable sources such as Snopes, and definitely not shared before getting a second opinion.

The great liners of the early twentieth century were very different from modern vessels.  They were bigger than modern car ferries, designed for long hauls across oceans.  Today the ocean is part of the destination for most people traveling at sea for recreational purposes, but in days gone by it was a highway that had to be traversed as quickly as possible by vessels that were unmatched by any other machine in size, power and range.  Unlike modern diesel-engined cruise ships which are floating party hotels dawdling along at a leisurely pace, these coal-powered leviathans were like a combination of the Boeing 747s, Airbus A380s, Concorde, and space shuttle of their time.  Ever bigger, faster, and more opulent ocean liners were pinnacles of human achievement, representing national prestige, technological sophistication, and industrial might.  In the pre-jet age, the great liners of shipping lines like Cunard and White Star were the workhorses of transoceanic transport.  Their job was to get people from A to B as quickly as possible in opulence for those who could afford it and in the bare minimum of comfort for anyone else.

Four times longer than today’s jumbo jets, they were the largest man-made moving objects up to that point.  They were designed without the aid of computers, built without space age materials, and powered without today’s efficient diesel engines, yet were still faster than modern cruise ships.  They had sharp razor-like bows for slicing through the largest of waves, reinforced hulls to take the pounding of the North Atlantic, and massive and complex but reliable engines to punch through the water continuously for days on end.

Southampton and New York were the terminals of the world’s busiest and most competitive ocean route.  New York’s setting was particularly spectacular, the great ships steaming up the river in the shadow of the skyscrapers of Manhattan and seeming to jostle for position among the giant piers, packed with enormous crowds of cheering well-wishers seeing loved ones off or welcoming them home.  “Queen Mary arrives today” would be a typical weekly headline in newspapers, listing which celebrities were coming to town so that press photographers could go down to the docks and get pictures of prominent actors, politicians and businessmen.  The race to break records for crossing the ocean was such a prominent competition that it was a matter of huge public interest who won the Blue Riband of the Atlantic.  The competition reached its zenith in the 1930s with the famous high speed crossings of Britain’s opulent and classic Queen Mary and the French art deco masterpiece, the Normandie, in which the prize changed hands numerous times.  Every time a ship came in on its maiden voyage it would be welcomed by a flotilla of boats swarming beside it, even more so if it were a Blue Riband-winning crossing.

However it was the SS United States that would clinch the prize once and for all for America.  Liners like Queen Mary were constructed with wartime use in mind, and Queen Mary and her ill-fated sister Queen Elizabeth were said to have lopped a year off the length of the Second World War because of their troop carrying capacity when they were requisitioned by Britain’s Royal Navy.  They shipped hundreds of thousands of GIs across the Atlantic as part of the allied build-up to D-Day and took them home again after the war.  The US government saw the importance of ocean liners as being necessary not only for commercial passenger service, but also to have ready to use in time of war for mobilizing troops.  The government underwrote over half the construction cost with the United States Line putting in the rest.

The SS United States, and her almost identical sister the SS America, had design features that were kept closely guarded secrets for reasons of military security.  She was designed to be easily converted to a troop carrier capable of hauling 15,000 soldiers at a time.  The hull was heavily compartmentalized, engine rooms were separated, wood and other flammable materials were all but absent, and the steam turbines were the most powerful of any merchant vessel.  This, combined with extensive use of aluminum in the superstructure, gave her the greatest power-to-weight ratio of any passenger ship ever constructed to this day.

On her maiden eastbound voyage she knocked ten hours off Queen Mary’s record, and made the westbound crossing in 3 days 12 hours and 12 minutes at an average speed of 34.51 knots (63.91 km/h or 39.71 mph), securing the Blue Riband for the USA for the first time in a century.  The crossings were so fast that when she arrived in New York, it was found that paint had been scrapped off the lower hull.

The sight of a passenger ship bigger than Titanic slicing through ocean waves like a small powerboat at nearly 40mph is a sight that we will never see again.  By the 1960s, jet air travel had made the ocean liner obsolete.  The time taken to cross the Atlantic was now measured in hours rather than days, and as passenger numbers on the liners dwindled to the point where they were sailing into New York with more crew than passengers, the shipping lines found themselves operating at a loss.  Only by changing their business model to cruising could they stay in business, and that meant building ships that were specifically designed for that specialist task.

The SS United States has changed hands numerous times since it went out of passenger service in 1969.  Unlike the Queen Mary which now enjoys her retirement as a floating hotel and museum in Long Beach, California, various proposals to repurpose the SS United States have failed to come to fruition, and there have been bids from parties interested in the ship for its value as scrap. The SS United States Conservancy, a volunteer group dedicated to the ship’s preservation, has announced that there is a very real chance that the vessel can be towed to New York where it can be redeveloped and saved from the scrapyard.  It costs $80,000 per month to stay in Philadelphia, and much of the money needed to preserve the ship has come from auctioning off many of the vessel’s interior fittings and even selling the propellers.  This pays the rent, but it makes future redevelopment more expensive.

Dan McSweeney, managing director of the SS United States Redevelopment Project, has indicated that there are plans afoot for a waterfront redevelopment project in New York of which the ship could become a part.  Specific details are expected to be announced soon.

Historic ships are to be found in many American coastal cities, but a lot of them are military vessels. It would be good if ships that are notable for their passenger service in peacetime and for their engineering significance were treated with the same reverence.

Often described as garbage “patches” that give the misleading impression that the waste is concentrated into large clumps—it is actually scattered and very diffuse—plastic pollution in the oceans is a major environmental problem. Marine animals, incapable of distinguishing between food and floating trash, ingest the deadly litter often resulting in death by choking, intestinal blockage and starvation. Plastics do not degrade like organic matter, but they do eventually break into smaller and smaller pieces, causing other problems. Smaller plastic particles can be ingested by marine life without necessarily choking, but chemical compounds in the materials poison the food chain, which eventually have a knock-on effect on humans. Because of the robust properties of plastics, this is a one-way problem that ratchets upwards as more and more garbage makes its way into the seas, 80 percent of it originating on land and some of it washing up on shore where it causes more problems.

Traditional solutions take the form of ships moving through the water trailing large booms that gather up the rubbish like a minesweeper or trawler. Slat’s proposal is to save energy by letting the garbage come to the collector rather than the other way around. A large v-shaped floating boom structure would be moored offshore in a known path of plastic pollution, catch floating garbage as it flows along the gyre, and funnel it to a collection platform in the center where it is periodically emptied by a visiting ship. Marine life can pass safely underneath the boom. Smaller plastic particles can be separated from the water, without destroying plankton, using a centrifugal process. Slat maintains that the system can be automated, powered by renewable sources, and the sale of retrieved plastic can make the operation profitable.

A pressing problem, an attractive solution proposed by a young visionary, no apparent financial downside, and attractive renderings depicting the array sitting in calm waters beneath a blue sky have made this a prime candidate for social media sharing by well-intentioned people.

It has drawn the attention of Deep Sea News (DSN), a blog maintained by a group of scientists and PhD candidates. DSN has given a technical review of the proposal and subject it to scientific scrutiny. While lauding the drive and the vision of Slat, there are a number of issues with his proposal. Some sections of the feasibility study are said to be “incomplete and/or inaccurate”, and conclusions presented in the executive summary bear no relation to conclusions in individual sections. Design decisions have been made based on average ocean current speeds rather than extreme conditions that the structure is likely to face, and such an underestimation of forces could result in it being not robust enough to withstand the pounding of the ocean. The growth of marine life on the structure would have a considerable effect on its performance, and apparently this has not been adequately addressed. Structural deformation and mechanical loads on the moorings have not been calculated using a system that could have been used. The pilot study to investigate the depth at which plastic floats was deemed inadequate for determining the depth of plastic pollution in the ocean currents where this structure is expected to operate.

DSN diplomatically praises the enthusiasm for the project and speaks highly of its potential, but it also addresses an important point about how the project has been funded. Since Slat has gone down the crowd funding route, this is outside the normal grant-making process in which scientific peer-review is a prerequisite for funding. As a result, well-meaning members of the public may find themselves donating to a project the feasibility of which has not been adequately tested. The scientists at DSN have therefore provided a valuable service to Slat and his team who have responded positively to the feedback and agreed to take the constructive criticism on board.

If the public nature of such honest peer review creates a feedback loop that results in a revised design and a successful project, it could prove to be a model for how future projects could be developed. The benefits of crowd funding can be enjoyed, but also the benefits of qualified peer review can ensure that projects are subject to rigorous evaluation so that financial contributors can make a more informed decision.

It was a time when the threat of Soviet domination loomed large, and the two superpowers felt the need to demonstrate to the world which society was more advanced. The spread of communism was causing panic in the west, and anything that made it a more attractive proposition had to be undermined. If a communist people could prove themselves technically advanced enough to put people in space, the western world had better make sure to match them. The Americans had shown their ability to catch up with the Soviets, but if they were to steal the lead then they were going to have to pull off a spectacular, and planting the stars and stripes on the moon was the perfect stunt.

Apollo was one of the most ambitious programs ever undertaken by the United States. Launching a manned spacecraft and lander beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) with enough life support to last eight days required a rocket more advanced than anything ever devised before. Indeed to this day the Saturn V launcher has never been surpassed by any launch system in height, weight or power.

The technical spinoffs from Apollo are legion. Cooling suits provide comfort for people with certain medical conditions and workers in harsh environments. Kidney dialysis has been simplified thanks to Apollo’s waste treatment systems. Types of exercise equipment first developed to train astronauts are now used in physical therapy. Insulation materials for homes and food packaging can trace their origins to the need to protect Apollo’s astronauts and equipment from radiation and heat. Water filtration, freeze-drying food, hazardous gas detection, synergistic coatings used in laser manufacturing, flame resistant textiles, and a multitude of other innovations owe their existence to Apollo. The complexity of the task and the coordination of so many specialist teams led to the development of new management planning methods that are still in use in industry today.

Critics of space exploration sometimes bemoan the amount of resources spent on it, claiming that the money would be better spent on Earth feeding the poor and treating the sick. However this overlooks the fact that there are no cash registers in space. All the money is spent on the ground, and as well as creating jobs it leads to technical developments that spin off into all walks of life, making life better in a multitude of small ways that all add up. If the money were instead spent on social programs, it is doubtful that it would have as much of an impact. In any case, between six billion of us, it should be possible to work on more than one problem at once. Governments constantly work on ways to lift people out of poverty through international trade and promotion of democracy and the rule of law.

Some people question the need for manned spaceflight at all, saying that much of the scientific research could be more efficiently carried out by machines. The venerable Mars rovers are certainly simpler and easier to get to the red planet than any vehicles with a human driver, and there is no need for them to return. Humans are heavy, need all manner of life support systems and safety measures built around them, and need to be brought back safely. This all adds significantly to the cost and complexity of manned space flight compared to unmanned missions. However this criticism misses the point. The fact that manned spaceflight is difficult is part of the reason why we do it. It is a technological challenge, and in solving the problems associated with it we become better engineers and stimulate innovation that has benefits that go far beyond space exploration. There is also the value of inspiring future generations to enter careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). These skills are more important than ever, and human progress requires a steady supply of visionaries who are willing to apply their technical know-how to the greatest challenges of our time.

There is also the matter of where our long term destiny lies. Are we really doomed to live out the rest of human history on this single world when there is much more to explore out there?

NASA’s share of the US federal budget peaked in 1966 at 4.41 percent, and since then it has declined to less than half of 1 percent. By contrast, defense accounts for a whopping 18 percent. The defense industry is strategically placed in so many congressional districts that their lobbying power is enough to get event the most pointless and expensive boondoggles approved. If the level of resources that we now spend on the instruments of death and destruction, much of it unnecessary, were instead spent on NASA, the trail that was blazed by Apollo would not have gone cold.

In the 1960s it was assumed that the progress exemplified by the moon landings would have continued so that by the turn of the century people would be living permanently on the moon and have access to the rest of the solar system, a new era of human expansion. Instead we mark the forty-fifth anniversary of that one famous small step for a man as prisoners of our planet’s gravity while our resources are spent on much more dubious causes. Unless our priorities shift, it is difficult to see if this generation will get to bear witness to another moment of inspiration of the same magnitude as Neil Armstrong’s walk.

It is therefore alarming to privacy advocates that the British government is fast-tracking legislation through the House of Commons aimed at allowing the authorities to continue to access telephone and internet records. What critics are calling the “snooper’s charter” does not require companies to log the content of all communications, but it does require them to retain twelve months’ worth of meta data such as when calls were made, what numbers were dialed, internet browsing histories and so on. However it allows a “legal intercept” to be made, whereby a target can be identified for additional monitoring, in which case the contents of the communication can be monitored.

Why the rush?  In April the European Court of Justice struck down existing powers brought about by way of an EU directive, and David Cameron’s government wants British law clarified. Other EU member states are also going to have to make their own arrangements to clarify their laws in the absence of an EU-wide directive.  The British government is arguing that service providers are being threatened with legal action by privacy advocates if they do not start destroying data, and the feeling is that some of that data could be vital in criminal cases.

The Liberal Democrats and the opposition Labour Party have agreed to support the legislation, but with a considerable number of strings attached.  These conditions, which were initially resisted by Mr Cameron, include a range of measures to ensure “transparency and oversight.”  A Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board will be established to assess the impact on civil liberties, annual reports will have to be published on how the powers are used, the number of public bodies that can ask for communications data will be restricted, and other checks and other measures will be taken to prevent abuse.

In justifying the high speed legislation the Prime Minister raised the usual specters of organized crime, paedophiles, Isis, and al Shabab. This may play well with conservative voters who respond well to fear-based campaigning, but will meet with skepticism among others.  The catastrophic and unprovoked war in Iraq, waged on trumped-up charges, has made a lasting impression on people’s willingness to trust government warnings about threats from evil-doers.

The opposition Labour Party has expressed concerns about the rushed process to get the law on the statute books before the summer recess, but the party leader Ed Miliband has expressed support for the law and will support it.

However parliamentary support for the legislation is not unanimous.  David Davis, a Conservative backbencher and former shadow home secretary, has described the situation as a “theatrical emergency” and says that officials have been aware of the court’s ruling since April and there has been plenty of time for ministers to get a response through Parliament with proper scrutiny.  “This is complicated law, it needs to be got right,” he says.

The emergency law will lapse in 2016, after the next general election. After that, any renewal will be subject to review through the usual parliamentary channels, but skeptics will continue to wonder why such scrutiny cannot take place now, or why the opposition is not doing a more thorough job of testing government policy to destruction.

ARMD’s contests include such tasks as designing Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) for fighting wildfires, designing safer airports, and designing helicopters.  Competitions are aimed at various age groups ranging from K-12 school children up to university students.

One recent challenge for college students was the design of a UAV for tracking hurricanes.  The challenge was to improve on the flight limitations of drones currently used to track and gather data on hurricanes during the Atlantic storm season which runs from June through November. As climate change makes such extreme weather events more frequent and more violent, this is a pressing problem.

“The data gathered by UAS’s is crucial to refining computer models so we can better predict not just the path of these storms, but also the process of hurricane formation and growth,” said Craig Nickol, a NASA aerospace engineer and technical lead for the contest at the agency’s Langley Research Center. “This is where current systems fall short.”

Predicting the path and strength of storms requires several days of consistent measurement, but current drones have a limited flight time of 24 hours.  NASA’s challenge was for students to design a system that can fly for seven days straight. Eight colleges submitted entries with the top three winning prizes.

The University of Virginia took third place with a design that said to have a flight endurance of 7.5 days. The life of the aircraft was estimated at 15 years, with a total lifecycle cost of about $493.7 million.

Purdue University took second place with a hydrogen-powered UAS capable of seven days of uninterrupted flight. Its approximate costs include $310 million for design, $78 million for production and operating costs of about $17,000 per flight hour.

First prize went to Virginia Tech’s team of nine university seniors who proposed a system consisting of two aircraft, each with a flight endurance of 7.8 days and using a liquid hydrogen fuel source. The estimated cost of that system was $199.5 million for production and a ten year lifecycle.

The prizes were awarded based on the level of supporting detail and documentation of the decision making process.

The University Aeronautics Engineering Design Challenge has been running for a decade.  The three winners of this year’s contest will receive a cash award through an education grant and cooperative agreement with Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia.  Competitions like this are an illustration of how government agencies like NASA, without spending a fortune in tax dollars, can spur research and inspire people to pursue engineering careers.

Slim elevated tracks will have sleek pods hanging underneath, suspended from a rail that uses magnetic levitation to keep the supporting hook above the rail, and using linear motor technology to move the pods forward. Travelers will go up to elevated stations where they can call a pod like an elevator. When a pod arrives, passengers get in, shut the door and select their destination. There is no need to drive, or even stay sober, since the system is totally automated. Pods coming from behind will automatically slow down, in theory resulting in better flow since there is no stop-and-go braking that occurs in conventional traffic.

There are also environmental benefits such as lack of noise or pollution from internal combustion engines, and less space wasted by parking the vehicles in cities. The fact that there is no wheeled physical contact between the rail and the vehicle means major gains in efficiency. Pods moving in the same direction at the same time can be grouped together for even more energy savings. The safety advantages over automobiles are obvious.

The concept of Personal Rapid Transport (PRT) is not new. The idea is to combine some of the convenience of the private car with the advantages of a train. Instead of sharing a large vehicle that has to be stopped at regular intervals to embark and disembark fellow passengers, the PRT journey is non-stop and hence considerably faster. Frequency of service is less of an issue since it is on-demand, so the system works based on the needs of the passengers rather than passengers building their schedules around the convoluted operational logistics of the system. The use of smaller and lighter vehicles means lighter duty rail infrastructure that is cheaper and potentially less obtrusive than the likes of the elevated tracks of Chicago or New York. The lower cost per mile of the network should in theory make it easier to build more extensive networks reaching more nodes than a conventional mass transit system.

Various attempts at PRT prototypes have been proposed and built in the past, some resembling small bubble-shaped pods running on a rollercoaster-like rail system. Perhaps the most extensive study was carried out in Hamburg in the 1970s. Cabintaxi was a network of elevated tracks using a clever arrangement that had cube-shaped pods suspended underneath the track going in one direction, and other cube-shaped pods sitting on top of the track going in the other.

Over several years the experiment logged thousands of journeys in various conditions and remains the most extensive PRT study ever carried out. Installation costs were found to be less than ten percent of a subway system over equivalent distances, and a full feasibility study cleared the path for implementation of a thirty-mile (48km) system throughout Hamburg. However the project was discontinued in 1979 for budgetary reasons and it never saw commercial service.

An experimental system called Ultra Global PRT which uses rubber-wheeled pods on a concrete guideway was trialled on a 0.6 mile (1km) track in Cardiff, Wales, in 2001. The concept was proven and is now used at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5, with another planned for India where the Amritsar Golden Temple, a sensitive site where internal combustion engines are banned, will be connected to the local airport.

Since 1975 the Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit in West Virginia has connected the center of the city with the three campuses of West Virginia University, however this is not considered true PRT since the vehicles are closer in size to the larger people movers in use at many airports, and hence are more like a small bus. The construction of this, and the Cabintaxi system in Hamburg, was part of a mini PRT craze that came about as a result of the publication of the HUD Reports by the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA) under the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the 1970s. This series of studies in mass transit concepts led to numerous commercial enterprises conducting research in the area, but political change in the late seventies diverted funding to other causes.

The fact that any operational PRT systems, like other novel transport systems, can only be found in closed and controlled environments like airports indicates that the concept has had a hard time finding acceptance in the street. How well PRT fits into the city depends a lot on what lies beneath the rails. Elevated urban freeway structures are often a source of noise and urban blight, with nothing but dereliction and homeless encampments settling underneath. Elevated commuter train tracks in cities are not exactly discreet, but city dwellers are used to them and they have become part of the landscape.

The success of the PRT system slated for trial in Tel Aviv will depend a great deal on the public’s acceptance of its aerial structures. If it passes over existing roads, rivers, and other assorted fixtures rather than having derelict empty areas underneath, then it should not be a problem. However the public can be finicky about accepting new and unfamiliar objects on the landscape. People who object to the “eyesore” of wind turbines would scarcely notice the arguably much less attractive strings of electricity pylons that criss-crossing the land. Asterix, a children’s fictional comic book character set in Roman France, once walked past the construction of a large multi-arch Roman aqueduct traversing a valley and lamented “The Romans are ruining the landscape with all those modern buildings.”

PRT has had many false dawns in the past. Time will tell if the concept is finally ready for widespread adoption and acceptance.