Airport Avian Control, the Korean Way

Give it up to the Koreans!!  When birds become a problem at military or civilian air_ports, are dogs or men with rifles or shotguns hired?  Nope,  The Koreans build the coolest military robot / tank, or the weirdest and ugliest car ever!

Erring on the side of the military we are introduced to the UGV - or unmanned ground vehicle.  The UGV is like the police or armed forces bomb disposal robot om steroids!   The six wheel UGV is equipped with  daytime and night cameras and non weaponized  lasers.   The lasers have a range of a little over a mile to help deal with any birds that are out of acoustic range by flashing patterns in the birds direction .

The unmanned UGV is equipped to autonomously avoid obstacles and return to specific locations , should the station becomes inoperable.   Though not a tank in size it still is a bit of a brute. It measures  eight feet  long and weighs 1.2 tons.  

Read complete article HERE on Gizmag

Flying Airport Would Never Land

Pretty bizarre idea huh? But leave it to Dvice to find the weird stuff. This isn't some 50s pie in the sky speculation either, but a contemporary idea. Huge nuclear powered lifting bodies would be in effect massive people movers that would allow planes from local airports to ferry passengers up from the ground, then return to their base to await another load or to ferry passengers back down from the high flying platform. Since none of the planes or the flying airport are using copious amounts of jet grade kerosene, there would be huge fuel savings.

Of course the article points out that we need to solve some major technological barriers before something like this could be possible but what a sight to see one of these bad boyz fly over huh?

Complete Dvice article here

New Tech being considered for airport security

Xnewsman sends in an article from the Los Angeles Times detailing some of the purposed technology being considered for airport security after the recent aborted attack Christmas Day.

Some of the purposed ideas have already been rejected as too costly or at risk of rights violations. But some, have still managed to garner enough interest to still be considered.
One of the most unusual is for all intents, mind reading. The system that Israeli-based WeCU Technologies has devised and is testing in Israel projects images onto airport screens, such ... symbols associated with a certain terrorist group or some other image only a would-be terrorist would recognize. The logic is that people can't help reacting, even if only subtly, to familiar images that suddenly appear in unfamiliar places.

Read the complete article for other ideas still being seriously considered

Control through Chaos

Armor(Assistant for Randomized Monitoring over Routes) is a Homeland Security-sponsored research project at University of Southern California that is already helping to tighten security at LAX airport in Los Angeles. It could soon be used across the country to "predict and minimize risk".

From the article:
"Here’s how it works: Computer software records the locations of routine, random vehicle checkpoints and canine searches at the airport. Police then provide data on possible terrorist targets and their relative importance. These data may change from one day to the next, or if there have been any security breaches or suspicious activity."

"The computer runs, and—voilà—police get a model of where to go, and when. The software comes up with random decisions that are based on calculated probabilities of a terrorist attack at those locations, using mathematical algorithms."

"The result: Security with airtight unpredictability. With the software, it’s extremely difficult to predict police operations."

“What the airport was doing before was not truly statistically random; it was simply mixing things up,” said computer science professor Milind Tambe. “What they have now is systematized, true randomization.”

But, wait: What if terrorists get hold of ARMOR and use the same information" Couldn’t they solve the predictability puzzle" Not really, Tambe said. “Even if they got the software and all the inputs, it’d be like rolling 50 different dice and expecting to correctly roll one combination of all 50 pairs.” Read the complete news release

ARMOR is reminiscent of Harlan Ellison's creation, the cyber overlord AM, isn't it?

image by Gary Larsen