Written on April 28, 2009 – 2:43 am | by keith kleiner |

What if people all over the world randomly decided to setup motion detection webcams and then send feeds from these webcams to a single website that would centralize the video data for anyone to search, view, and manipulate? Hot off of the heels of our story yesterday about the implications of cameras recording everything in our lives comes a website called Ugolog that does exactly this. The concept is both spooky and captivating all at once. The privacy implications are just out of control, opening the door to all sorts of immoral and illegal invasions of people’s privacy. On the other hand, the power and usefulness of such a network is extremely compelling.

When you go to the Ugolog website you are immediately impressed with the simplicity of the site (I sure hope they keep it this way!). No advertisements, no stupid gimmicks, no complicated interface. The site offers a bare bones, yet elegant design that allows you to do one thing quickly and easily: setup a motion detecting webcam and send the feed to Ugolog. No software is required, only a web browser and a properly configured camera. Don’t know how to setup the camera? No problem! The site has tutorials that tell you everything you need to know. Once Ugolog has a feed from one or more of your cameras, the data will be available for you and anyone else in the world to view along with all of the other feeds on the site.

Photo From Ugolog “how to build a spy camera” manual

No big deal, many will say! Its just like Justin.tv — the website that already carries thousands of live video feeds from all over the world, boasting more than 80,000 simultaneous viewers earlier today. Yet if you think about this a bit more, you will see that there is indeed a difference between Ugolog and Justin.tv. The difference is their focus — the type of content that the two sites will offer.

Justin.tv offers all sorts of video feeds, including news, sports, random idiots doing stupid random things, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. This is a useful and powerful model, yet Justin.tv’s focus on serving up all kinds of video leaves it open to attack by more narrowly focused sites. Ugolog focuses only on surveillance video. By targeting this specific category of video the site just might be able to carve out a unique niche in the online video space that can really gain some traction. Justin.tv could of course create a category on its site called “surveillance”, but a category on Justin.tv devoted to the surveillance might have difficulty competing with Ugolog’s website, community, and employees devoted completely to surveillance.

Highlighting the specialization available on the site Ugolog founder Alexander Uslontsev says “Compared to sites like Justin.tv and Ustream.com, that work with webcam only, Ugolog works with webcams AND ‘professional’ security cameras that can upload pictures via FTP or HTTP. In this case Ugolog acts only as ‘dropbox’ for images and expects all motion detection and scheduling to be done in camera.”

Ugolog is in beta now and has only recently launched, but the site could easily take off like a rocket in a short amount of time. The idea is powerful. The site is easy, simple, and free. Add this all up and you have a solid recipe for explosive growth in users and content.

Success is not guaranteed, however. Explosive growth can be its own curse, being extremely difficult and expensive to keep up with. Video is especially resource hungry and may keep the folks over at Ugolog (and their wallets) quite overwhelmed.

Another potential stumbling block is the intense legal scrutiny that the site will certainly encounter. We can envision massive feeds of video that invade privacy and break the law showing up on the Ugolog website, creating a virtual feast for lawyers everywhere. One way around this legal mess is probably to allow comprehensive controls over who can see what. Indeed, this appears to be the case at the moment, as most (all?) feeds seem to be currently viewable only by the owner. Yet clearly in the future it will take only the click of a single checkbox to “open a feed” to the public.

Focusing on the positive side for a moment, there are several interesting applications that can come from a site like Ugolog. One such application would be the fulfillment of truly legitimate surveillance needs. Ugolog allows individuals to quickly setup a powerful surveillance system for their own homes. Taking this a step further, perhaps a neighborhood would setup its own surveillance network to increase safety and monitor for theft and other crimes. Consider also more academic applications, such as researchers setting up cameras to monitor glacier growth, animal species patterns, and so on.

Of course the negative and destructive potential of surveillance a la Ugolog is hard to deny. Yet whether we like it or not, ubiquitous video is here to stay. We are increasingly likely to fall under the surveillance of one or more cameras multiple times throughout the day. Ugolog may come and go, but the trend cannot be stopped. Fight the trend if you want, but I for one intend to embrace it!

Working feverishly on the bench, I’ve had little time to closely track the ongoing spat between Dawkins and Nisbet.  Others have dissected this conflict and its ramifications in great detail.  What I want to discuss is whether scientists can or should represent their fields to non-scientists.

There is more than a dollop of truth in the Hollywood cliché of the tongue-tied scientist.  Nevertheless, scientists can explain at least their own domain of expertise just fine, even become major popular voices (Sagan, Hawkin, Gould — and, yes,  Dawkins; all white Anglo men, granted, but at least it means they have fewer gatekeepers questioning their legitimacy).  Most scientists don’t speak up because they’re clocking infernally long hours doing first-hand science and/or training successors, rather than trying to become middle(wo)men for their disciplines.

Experimental biologists, in particular, are faced with unique challenges: not only are they hobbled by ever-decreasing funds for basic research while expected to still deliver like before.  They are also beset by anti-evolutionists, the last niche that science deniers can occupy without being classed with geocentrists, flat-earthers and exorcists.  Additionally, they are faced with the complexity (both intrinsic and social) of the phenomenon they’re trying to understand, whose subtleties preclude catchy soundbites and get-famous-quick schemes.

Last but not least, biologists have to contend with self-anointed experts, from physicists to science fiction writers to software engineers to MBAs, who believe they know more about the field than its practitioners.  As a result, they have largely left the public face of their science to others, in part because its benefits — the quadrupling of the human lifespan from antibiotics and vaccines, to give just one example — are so obvious as to make advertisement seem embarrassing overkill.

As a working biologist, who must constantly “prove” the value of my work to credentialed peers as well as laypeople in order to keep doing basic research on dementia, I’m sick of accommodationists and appeasers.  Gould, despite his erudition and eloquence, did a huge amount of damage when he proposed his non-overlapping magisteria.  I’m tired of self-anointed flatulists — pardon me, futurists — who waft forth on biological topics they know little about, claiming that smatterings gleaned largely from the Internet make them understand the big picture (much sexier than those plodding, narrow-minded, boring experts!).  I’m sick and tired of being told that I should leave the defense and promulgation of scientific values to “communications experts” who use the platform for their own aggrandizement.

Nor are non-scientists served well by condescending pseudo-interpretations that treat them like ignorant, stupid children.  People need to view the issues in all their complexity, because complex problems require nuanced solutions, long-term effort and incorporation of new knowlege. Considering that the outcomes of such discussions have concrete repercussions on the long-term viability prospects of our species and our planet, I staunchly believe that accommodationism and silence on the part of scientists is little short of immoral.

Unlike astronomy and physics, biology has been reluctant to present simplified versions of itself.  Although ours is a relatively young science whose predictions are less derived from general principles, our direct and indirect impact exceeds that of all others.  Therefore, we must have articulate spokespeople, rather than delegate discussion of our work to journalists or politicians, even if they’re well-intentioned and well-informed.

Image: Prometheus, black-figure Spartan vase ~500 BCE.