Just us birds

Remember it's just us birds.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=964

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/
personal_tech/article1447178.ece

From Times OnlineFebruary 27, 2007

[quote]
Scientists create remote-controlled pigeon

Chinese scientists have succeeded in implanting electrodes in the brain of a pigeon to control the bird’s flight remotely, state media have reported.

The Xinhua News Agency said scientists at the Robot Engineering Technology Research Centre at Shandong University of Science and Technology in eastern China used the micro-electrodes to command the bird to fly right or left, and up or down.

The implants stimulated different areas of the pigeon’s brain according to electronic signals sent by the scientists via computer, mirroring natural signals generated by the brain, Xinhua quoted chief scientist Su Xuecheng as saying.

It was the first such successful experiment on a pigeon in the world, said Mr Su, who conducted a similar successful experiment on mice in 2005. [/quote]

http://www.notbored.org/the-L-magazine.html

Here's Looking at You

With Urban Eyes Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Angesleva also use preexisting technology embedded and unseen in our cities, CCTV surveillance cameras. Instead of computer programmers, they have enlisted pigeons as their conspiratorial message carriers. Kirsch and Angesleva feed pigeons seeds containing RFID tags that communicate with a city's CCTV cameras; as the birds fly near a CCTV camera, a photograph is recorded and sent to a distinct URL. Here's an incarnation of the messenger pigeon -- photographing the city from above, alerting us to invisible eyes. The best part? The project is eco-friendly; digested devices are shat out like so many stones some 12 hours later.

Absurd and, perhaps, minor (Urban Eyes has won prizes but not funding; conspiracy, anyone?), these projects are a new form of sabotage. Ultimately, however, NameBase and Urban Eyes merely reverse the camera angle of surveillance: they say, "see, now we can spy on you" or "look, a pigeon can do this, and then shit out your technology." And the result of the pigeons' work, while a mockery of the government's surveillance program, produces what it critiques, more city surveillance pictures.
----------------------------------------------------

Pigeon CCTV Public Surveillance - a use for pigeons!

Everyone complains about pigeons, that there's too many in our cities and they're a pest - thus could give them a use?Mount small wireless camera's in a pigeon and thus the centrally located operations centre could view the pigeon's whereabouts and if they see anything suspicious take a snap shot from the pigeon closest!

Think about it, something dodgy going on and a plain clothed spy would only need drop some corn on the floor and the pigeons would descend!
Also by getting pooed on by a pigeon, may give a new meaning to 'just been caught'!
Findus, Mar 22 2007
-------------------------------------------------------
Oddly, I had almost the same idea at the beginning of the week. Retrofitting pigeons with either audio or video or stills low-power equipment that sends encrypted information to the web periodically - the mass of pigeons and the wisdom of crowds would allow an aggregate pervasive immersion to be built up.
I.T., Mar 22 2007
------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------

http://www.singsign.com/blog/pigeon-bloggers/

Pigeon cyborg bloggersFebruary 10th, 2006

Environmentally aware pigeons become bloggers. Carrying GPS and simple mobile transmitters, 20 pigeons traverse the skies of San José, transmitting air pollution levels, photos and create a dynamic map of air quality. This is pretty brilliant use of blogs and pigeons, methinks!

------------------------------------------------------

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-12-26-spy-gear_x.htm

The CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology is celebrating its 40th anniversary by revealing a few dozen of its secrets for a new museum inside its headquarters near Washington.
Keith Melton, a leading historian of intelligence, calls it "the finest spy musuem you'll never see." It is accessible only to CIA employees and guests admitted to those closed quarters.

Besides the jungle transmitter, the exhibits include a robotic catfish, a remote-controlled dragonfly and a camera strapped to the chests of pigeons and released over enemy targets in the 1970s. The secret gadgets currently used by CIA are left to the imagination of visitors.

The pigeons' missions remain classified, made possible only after the CIA secretly developed a camera weighing only as much as a few coins. An earlier test with a heavier camera in the skies over Washington failed after two days when the overburdened pigeon was forced to walk home.
"People don't think of a pigeon as being anything more than a rodent on top of a building," said Pat Avery of Newalla, Okla., who runs the National Pigeon Association and loves to recount decades-old exploits by famous military pigeons such as "Spike" and "Big Tom."

But as surveillance technology improved, the need for CIA pigeons diminished. "They're pretty passe now," she said.
------------------------------------------------------

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_intelligence

Pigeon intelligence

Pigeons have featured in numerous experiments in comparative psychology, including experiments concerned with animal cognition, and as a result we have considerable knowledge of pigeon intelligence. Pigeons can remember large numbers of individual images for a long time, e.g. hundreds of images for periods of several years. Pigeons can be taught relatively complex actions and response sequences, and can learn to make responses in different sequences.
-------------------------------------------------------

http://www.video-surveillance-guide.com/3021-wireless-spy-cam.htm

Evolution to a wireless spy cam

Some fun facts from The Spy Museum:

In 1917-1918, aerial surveillance cameras consisted of pigeons strapped with tiny cameras that continuously clicked away. In 1949, clever spies in Germany used a wristwatch camera that took pictures when the spy pretended to check the time. In the 1970’s, KGB spies wore coats wired with buttonhole cameras. In the 1980’s, the East German security service was known to use a “through the wall” camera for spying in hotels.

What would these spies have thought if they knew that now they could have a wireless spy cam that has a pinhole-sized lens? These systems have become so affordable that we can look back on the old spy methods and chuckle at the extreme lengths they took to do something that can now be said to be quite ordinary.

http://www.pimall.com/nais/e.menu-bb.htmlhttp://www.pimall.com/nais/pencilerasercam.html

-------------------------------------------------------

It's just us birds.