[accessibleimage] SETI, ESA, GPS

Hi,
Perhaps a heading for this list of articles is "getting around on earth and beyond...."
Mixed articles today. Profile of Kent Cullers, blind physist, director for SETI Research and Development.Talks about his background, technology - the Opticon and I think he talks about the Tiger (article is from 2002), doesn' t mention by name but describes. Also include some links to talks by him from the SETI oganisations site. Interesting about sound and description. Article about GPS with way descriptions from European Space Agency and a GPS project from India.
Included the full article about Cullers because interesting comments about science.

Regards,
Lisa

Cullers
http://www.earthsky.org/shows/edgeofdiscovery_profiles.php?id=48267
talks Cullers
http://www.seti.org/atf/cf/{B0D4BC0E-D59B-4CD0-9E79-113953A58644}/young_scientists.mov
sound and astronomy
http://www.seti.org/atf/cf/{B0D4BC0E-D59B-4CD0-9E79-113953A58644}/sounds.mov
http://www.seti.org/atf/cf/{B0D4BC0E-D59B-4CD0-9E79-113953A58644}/first_blind_physicist.mov

audio GPS
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM4MWK8IOE_index_0.html

Forwarding from another list
http://www.freelists.org/archives/accessindia/05-2005/msg00074.html


Profile: Kent Cullers

Posted: December 2002
David S.F. Potree

Kent Cullers has been involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) since 1980, the year he received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley. He received the NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal in 1993, and was named the 1994 Federal Employee of the Year. Cullers currently works for the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, where he is Director for SETI Research and Development.

"The fact is, the reason that I was the first totally blind physicist in the world is because the technology came along just at the time when I wanted to do it."

Portree: When did you decide to become a physicist? I've heard you called an astronomer, too.

Cullers: Both are fair. I got my Ph.D. in Physics, and I'm a member of the American Astronomical Society, so I'm both things. I thought I was going to be doing space and plasma physics, but I went into astronomy because I became absolutely fascinated by SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). The fact is that I wanted to be a scientist from very early on. Mostly I wanted to be a physicist, because my father was a physicist.

I'm one of those people for whom somehow the tree was bent very early. When I was very young, my father read to me a lot out of two books. One was The Golden Book of Astronomy, and the other was The Tales of King Arthur. What I discovered over time was, though I loved King Arthur, I never got any better at the magic mdash; but I did get better at the science and the math, so in the end, that's what I liked.

The Parkes 64 meter radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia. The Southern SERENDIP search is being carried out here.
My father was very, very good. He, of course, was sighted. I was blind adventitiously. As with many blind people my age, I had too much oxygen in the incubator as a premature baby. I have no memory of sight at all. But my father did such excellent descriptions of what the planets were like that I could imagine that I was touching the planets and actually being there. The same was true for King Arthur's court, but somehow I never got there.

It all came down to the thing that science is about, the thing which always seemed intuitively correct to me. I liked the fact that, if you understood science, you knew how the world worked. I always thought that there was really an external reality out there. I thought that you had to test whatever you believed against that external world. That was where magic failed the test. It was fun, I liked it, I wanted it to be true, but, when I got older, I found that didn't hold up to testing.

I always thought that it was fascinating that there might be other intelligent beings out there. It was, again, one of those things that fell into the category of things I wanted to believe. When I was nine or ten, I'd hear strange noises out in the distance, and I'd convince myself that perhaps those were UFOs landing. But, as I got older, I realized that there was no way to systematically decide whether there were alien beings out there. So I lost interest.

I didn't really get interested in SETI until I realized that there was a scientific test that you could do. I read a book called Project Cyclops - a NASA publication. It was reprinted recently by the SETI League.

Project Cyclops demonstrated that we could find a twin of our technological civilization among the nearest million Sun-like stars. I said to myself, "If that kind of experiment is possible, I've got to be part of that. That sounds like more fun than anything." I propagandized people for many years until I indeed became part of SETI. That was in 1980.

SETI Institute
Portree: I want to come back to how you became involved in SETI. Before we move too far from your early years, however, I wanted to ask: did anyone ever tell you that you couldn't become a scientist because of your disability?

Cullers: Interestingly enough, mostly not. It's not that it's never been said, but most of the people I believed didn't say it. My parents moved from Oklahoma to California, where there was a program with one percent blind students in classrooms with sighted students. I clunked along on a Braille writer, noisy as it was, and my classmates put up with it. I learned to type when I was eight so my teachers could read what I was writing.

My parents and teachers insisted that a blind person could do anything. Now, anyone knows that's nonsense. That is to say, unless you're a very brave individual, you wouldn't really want me as your brain surgeon. Nonetheless, it is a lot better to hear that as a child than to hear all the things that you probably can't do.

In college, things got very hard for a while, because I was in a technological transition. Standard Braille was easy to make. There was even a Braille mathematics that worked pretty well. But Braille diagrams were very difficult. It was very careful hand work that had to be done by individuals. Physics is very diagram dependent, and I had lots of trouble getting the diagrammatical information. Nonetheless, I did pretty well in physics at Pomona College, which was a fairly difficult college.

In graduate school a very bright professor actually told me that, "You know, Mr. Cullers, you really shouldn't be in physics. The field is overpopulated by brilliant students. You clearly are at a disadvantage, and you're not, in fact, the best physicist around anyway - why don't you do something else?"

Nonetheless, he sat and read me my exams orally. After telling me this stuff, he actually spent his own time with me. And, when I got my Ph.D., he shook my hand. Just a couple of years ago, I met him in Washington, D.C., and took his place in a taxi line. So there!

Yes, I was told by smart people from time to time that I probably couldn't do it, but you have to view that in the right way. What he told me was true, but I had to overcome those problems. Those problems were basically technological, and I had to solve them myself.

Portree: That touches on the next question I wanted to ask you. You mentioned the Braille writer — what other kinds of assistive technologies do you use?

Cullers: The fact is, the reason that I was the first totally blind physicist in the world is because the technology came along just at the time when I wanted to do it.

When I started grad school and really had to be able to look at diagrams and computer screens, there was a device called an Opticon. This basically was a camera that you scanned across the screen. The camera field of view encompassed about a print capital letter. It made an enlarged image of the letter on your finger tip using a piezoelectrically vibrating pin. You got a flow of data under your finger.

I was fast with the Opticon, but even the very fastest person can't read a hundred words a minute. If it's mathematics, it's much harder than that. Just about the time it was getting too difficult, the direct translators came out. ASCII to Braille came out, and ASCII to speech, and life became easy. Except for Windows!

Now there are some very new technologies that are incredible, that can make diagrams in Braille. Not only can they make Braille diagrams instantly, they make diagrams in "color" and "grayscale." You can actually understand pictures. I can take a GIF image and send it to my special printer, and bang, I have a picture of my daughter. When I run my finger over it, the resolution is fantastic. This stuff is three or four months old. It's going to change the world.

Cullers at work in the tub.
Portree: Speaking of changing the world - it's hard to imagine anything that would change things more for everyone than learning that there is another intelligent species in the universe. How did you get involved in the search for ET?

Cullers: The first thing was the Project Cyclops book in the 1970s, as I mentioned earlier. Let me do a digression here. I'm currently married to a wonderful visual artist named Lisa. My wife Carol, though, she died suddenly a decade ago. She was an economist. She was my reader. Our lives were very intertwined. The reason I tell you this is, we started reading Project Cyclops together. It's pretty long - about 300 pages - and she read it straight through. We literally read it in 24 hours. She was so excited about it, I was so excited about it.

I'm an expert on radar and certain kinds of weak signal processing. I was bouncing big signals off the ionosphere and doing analysis of regions you can't access with satellites or balloons. I was used to radar. The thing about radar is, only a small part of the signal is reflected by the target and returns. There's no possible way you could use radar to look for distant planets. I thought, "Forget it, radio is not the key."

When I read, though, that two intelligent species could trade signals across vast distances, I thought, "Why didn't I think of that?" What's more, Project Cyclops showed me that, even in the 1970s, there existed technology that could be systematically used to see if radio signals from other species were actually reaching Earth.

I am an amateur radio operator. I have been since 1961, when I was 11. SETI is like looking for that big DX — that really big, rare, desirable signal from a far-off land. It fit me psychologically as well as scientifically.

The other thing was, I went to a Greek wedding in 1979. I sat across from a woman named Jill Tartar. She was charming, the champagne was good, and I started chatting with her and trying to be charming, too. I said, "Gee, there's this incredible book called Project Cyclops." She said, "Oh, yeah, I work in the SETI program at NASA." Not only that, it turned out that her fiance was on my thesis committee! So, it's a small world. Jill said, "There's normally no money for this program, but there just happens to be a post-doc position available - why don't you apply?" And they've never gotten rid of me since.

Portree: Do you ever imagine what it will be like when we hear a signal from space, from another civilization?

Cullers: Yes and no. I'm writing an article for a book that's going to be published by MIT Press. I'm trying to imagine how amazing such a signal ultimately could be. But I've got to say that normally I don't do that, and I'll tell you why. I would like to stay away from preconceptions. I think that the SETI field is filled with preconceptions at the best of times.

But I have to say that, at the very, very simplest, one signal will demonstrate a great deal about our knowledge of the universe. Basically, it will tell me that we knew enough to speculate about the properties of the universe, to say that life is one of those properties, and that intelligent life is probable enough that we actually managed to detect it.

SETI 2020 book cover.
Even if we can't decode a single thing about that signal, we can work out things like the revolution and rotation of the planet from which it originates by using the Doppler shift. As the signal's planet of origin carries the signal source toward us, for example, the signal's frequency shifts up the spectrum. As it accelerates away, the signal shifts down the spectrum. We can measure those shifts. If you can know the length of the year and the length of the day, you can calculate the planet's temperature. Knowing the temperature, you can ask, do these beings have a carbon chemistry? If it's very hot on their planet, do they have something really weird, like a sulfur chemistry?

Even my attempts to minimally imagine these things contain preconceptions, however. What if the transmitter is at a pole of the Galaxy and essentially is not accelerating at all? There'd be no Doppler shift. What if they are correcting their beam, so that even if they are accelerating, we don't know it? That would make them easy to detect, but would give us minimal information about their civilization, unless they intended to teach us something.

So, you see, what I would call the "tree of assumptions" branches out so quickly that, except for having fun, I try to stay away from that, and try to become an expert in weak signal detection to try to give finding actual evidence our best shot. Dreaming is necessary in order to expand our current thinking toward things that might be possible. That's what visions are for. But what I mostly do is play with my computers all day, and try to think of new mathematics and new signal detection methods.

Portree: Do all SETI scientists do the same kind of work you do?

Cullers: What SETI scientists do in general is to build the next-generation detection system, which means incremental improvement on what currently exists. We're expanding on all the reasonable scientific fronts. We're trying to combine astronomy and SETI to build new sources of support. We're building big radio telescope arrays and taking advantage of the immense increase in computing power now available. We're trying to look for pulses of laser light from civilizations around other stars.

We're doing everything that we can that's reasonable. The argument for doing this is, if you do nothing, clearly you're going to fail. On the other hand, if you do something really expensive, like launch starships, and then you find out that by doing something that cost a millionth as much you could succeed next year, you would feel fairly silly. We're trying to hit what appears to most people to be a reasonable compromise.

A book that I just finished editing, called SETI 2020, shows why our search will grow exponentially, and why we can probably search the whole Galaxy within the next half-century. That's why I'm optimistic.

I think that a strength of the SETI community today is that it's not a unified, government controlled entity. I think that the multiplicity of approaches is the strength of the program.

Cullers taking a call in the bath
Portree: How many people are looking for signs of intelligent life in the universe?

Cullers: When we congregated to put together the ideas in SETI 2020, we had about 50 people. So, 50 people seriously think about it. About a hundred people in the world are seriously involved in one way or another. They analyze data, they go to conferences. It's an enormous community compared to what it was 20 years ago, but it's still small.

The community is becoming increasingly unified with bioastronomy. That isn't just SETI, that's search for primitive life as well. A recent conference in Australia had about half bioastronomy people. So the interested people are much more than a hundred people.

The charter of the SETI Institute says that we may look at anything associated with the Drake Equation. And what is the Drake Equation? It's basically an agenda of all the things you have to understand to know the probability of intelligent life in the universe. You have to assign values to the terms of the Drake Equation. You've got to understand everything about life, including formation of planets. That involves a lot of people.

Portree: What advice would you give to students who want to become involved in SETI? What advice do you have for blind students who want to become involved in science?

Cullers: There is one common theme in both of your questions. The thing I say to all students is: persist. You have to know your own problems, you have to solve them, and you have to keep trying, even when you think it's not possible to get a job that you want.

Whether it's wanting to get into SETI — a difficult field to enter, because it's small — or because you're disabled in some way, you've got to do better than everyone else in order to get noticed. That's sort of the entry criterion. Find something that you really, really love, that you're willing to work at twice as hard as anyone else, and then you will probably succeed.

More Information


SETI Institute


article
An e-Braille map for the visually impaired Staff Reporter CHENNAI: "The College of Engineering, Guindy, would like to involve its students in developing technologies on problems pertaining to society." In keeping with this principle put forth by Dean R. Ramaprabhu, three final year students have come with a concept for aiding the visually challenged. Titled "Dynamic e-Braille Map for The Blind" the model, developed by D. Lavanya, M. Krupa Devi and K. Prabhu of the Computer Science department, acts as a guidance tool that enables visually impaired people to find their way around without human assistance. The system has two units ? a mobile GPS (Global Positioning System) enabled transmitting unit held by the user, and a stationary server unit. Through the GPS system, the user's current position is conveyed to the server. Through voice signals, the user's destination is also conveyed to the system. The server uses an automated software tool to accept the positions, locate them on a pre-existing map, and find the most suitable path between them. This path is transmitted to a Braille map on the mobile unit, which the user can read, and correspondingly move. The system is automated and requires little human intervention. The students visualised the idea together with their final year project guide ? Dr. K. Vani. The Head of Department, Dr. T.V. Geetha, pointed out that fellow graduates had had similar ideas for their projects, simple but revolutionary. A paper on the model is due for presentation at various international conferences. Furthermore, the students and teachers have approached the Union Department of Science and Technology with a proposal to implement and correspondingly design the model to enable general use. The model in the present stage does have its limitations. source: hindu, may 10th, 2005.

article

Satellite guidance for the visually impaired

16 June 2006

A prototype satellite navigation system accurate enough to direct vision-impaired pedestrians to their destination has recently been successfully demonstrated in Madrid.

Seen from a distance, a blind man guided by his dog in the streets of Madrid seems quite sure of his way. In fact, he is not listening to music with his headphones but receiving directions to his destination: "turn to the right, turn to the left, continue straight ahead…" Thanks to a mobile phone combined with a position receiver and a voice synthesizer, he can walk confidently through the city while being guided by satellite.

Developed by ESA, with the Spanish firm GMV Sistemas, this device offers greater autonomy for the visually impaired. The system is not intended to replace a white cane or a guide dog but to complement them with an ‘audible map’. The user no longer needs to seek frequent guidance from other pedestrians; the guidance equipment follows his every move and advises him accordingly.

This system, designed with the advice of the Spanish National Organisation for the Blind (Organisacion Nacional de los Ciegos de España -ONCE), is based on EGNOS, a positioning system that processes GPS data to provide improved accuracy. This is rather important for a blind person, since a one metre localisation accuracy makes the difference between being on the path or in the road.


Additionally, EGNOS, a preparatory programme for Galileo, offers a guarantee of quality of service. This continuity is reinforced by another system being developed in parallel by ESA: SISNeT (Signal In Space via Internet). In an urban environment, buildings often prevent or interfere with reception of satellite signals. SISNeT overcomes this problem by providing data via the Internet.

In this application for the visually impaired, the processing of the positional data is performed by a central computer that then sends back information to the user. A handicapped pedestrian might be given directions to follow after programming his or her destination into the device.

The project is currently in a demonstration phase and the receiver exists only in prototype form. ESA, GMV Sistemas and ONCE intend to continue their work so as to develop a single device that will integrate all three technologies: an EGNOS/SISNeT receiver, a pocket computer and a mobile phone.


EGNOS, a joint project of ESA, the European Commission and Eurocontrol, consists of a network of around 40 ground stations scattered throughout Europe designed to record, adjust and improve data from the American GPS system. The modified signals are relayed by geostationary satellites to the receivers of system users. In contrast to the 15-20 metre accuracy offered by GPS, the European system is accurate to less than two metres, and unlike GPS (a military system), the European version offers guaranteed signal quality.

EGNOS, which is currently in pre-operational service, is Europe’s first step in satellite navigation as it prepares for Galileo, which will be the first fully operational civilian navigation system, with a network of 30 satellites.



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