Alexis C. Madrigal

Are you paying your children below market rate for their teeth? Here's an app that can relieve you of this troubling anxiety.

Gorelova/Shutterstock/Rebecca J. Rosen

I can't decide if the following news is grisly, hilarious, or postmodernly depressing. So, let me quote the USA Today article that broke the story about Visa's baby-tooth-value calculator app:

Nobody wants to be the parent whose child is "the talk at recess," because of a frugal Tooth Fairy, says Amy Moncarz, a second-grade teacher at Lucy V. Barnsley Elementary School in Rockville, Md. Discrepancies in tooth price can lead to a conversation parents might want to avoid: the existence of the Tooth Fairy itself.

To help parents calculate the going rate for teeth, Visa on Tuesday is launching an app for iPhone and iPad and a calculator on its Facebook page. The app uses the survey's data to determine the average payoff a child can expect based on a parent's gender, education, location, age and income. The app also shows how much the recommended dollar amount was worth when the parent was 8.

Visa says the average across the country is $3 per tooth. I played a bit with the app, holding age, gender, and location steady while playing with the household income and education level variables. The smaller the amount I put in for household income, the greater the size of the average tooth fairy's gift. In fact, I was only able to get calculator to output $5 by setting my household income to $20k per year and selecting that my highest level of educational attainment was high school. Grad school degree holders making more than $150,000 per year gave their kids an average of $1 per tooth.

While parents have wanted their kids to fit in for a lot longer than Visa has been making iPhone apps, this kind of computational conformity is newly available to parents. You want your kids to fit in? Now you can make sure they do -- in a statistically valid way! 

But in measuring something like this, you may change it. As a business consultant told USA Today, "The app would be a driver of tooth inflation, not a tracker. I would predict a psychological bidding game." Next stop: The Twenty-Spot Tooth Fairy. 

We're coming to the upper midwest to check out the startup scene in Chicago, Grand Rapids, Lansing, Ann Arbor, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh.

In two weeks, Sarah Rich and I are hitting the road for Start-Up Nation, our annual trek to a region of the country to check out its start-up businesses and culture. Last year, we burned rubber across the south, racing from Washington DC all the way to Shreveport before concluding our trip in New Orleans. Along the way, we were helped by entrepreneurs, development groups, and startup mentors. They helped us dig into what makes a place tick from the local coffeeshop where everyone meets up to discuss deals to the incubators where promising ideas can grow up.

Ideas and Entrepreneurs on the Leading Edge
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This year, we're starting the trip in Chicago and finishing up in Pittsburgh. Call it a Rust Belt Tour, if that's not a pejorative. If you're starting a business along this route (or even near it), we want to hear from you. While we're primarily interested in tech (very broadly construed), interesting entrepreneurs of all types should feel free to get in touch.

And stay tuned because we're working on putting together a few events, so that we can meet as many people as possible. 

This year, we want to build maps of the startup scene in each city we visit. That means we want to map not just where startups have their offices, but also where they get coffees and beers and meetings and employees and money. I've created a map here -- http://goo.gl/maps/yYvx6 -- and we're planning on adding these kinds of details as we drive along. But note that I've made that map editable by anyone. So, add your business, add your friend's company, add the tech incubator that your city set up.

Or, as always, you can get in touch via Twitter and email. Feel free to tweet at @alexismadrigal or @sarahrich or to email me at amadrigal[at]theatlantic.com. We'll be using the hashtag #startupnation2012.

P.S. Like last year, we want food recommendations, too. We love to eat.

Even without a roof over their heads, young adults find ways to access the Internet.

Reuters

In a small but intriguing study, social scientists found that 75 percent of the homeless youth they surveyed use social networks and that their usage patterns were remarkably similar to college students. 

Led by the University of Alabama's Rosanna Guadagno, they surveyed 237 college kids and 65 homeless youth, both with an average age of a little over 19 years old. While a greater percentage of the students were on social networks (over 90 percent), both groups of users reported spending more than an hour per day using Facebook, Twitter, and the like. 

Guadagno argues that the results should lead us to rethink the concept of the digital divide of Internet haves and have nots. "To the extent that our findings show a 'digital divide' between undergraduates at a four-year university and age-matched participants in a program for homeless young adults, it is mainly in types of Internet use and not access to the Internet, and that divide is relatively minor," we read. "Since it is clear that the proportions of undergraduates and homeless young adults accessing social networking sites are similar, we assert that the term digital divide is not descriptive of the young adult population."

The work appeared online this week in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

Our moon landing may have been grand, but our astronauts did not go far.

As we've reflected on Neil Armstrong's death* and the Curiosity Rover's arrival on Mars, I've found myself trying to comprehend two radically different scales: 1) the sheer immensity of our solar system and 2) the tiny scale of our actual missions to other celestial bodies. 

I'm not sure I'll ever be able to think in the hundreds of thousands (or millions) of miles. At a certain size, the numbers seem so large they become arbitrary. 

The second scale, though, is graspable. The problem is that we don't have an intuitive sense of distance on the Moon or Mars. Particularly with Curiosity, we have nothing we can use as a reference size. The same is true for certain Apollo photographs, particularly because they've been distorted by the lens of time, too.

So, I appreciate that Maria Popova brought back this fantastic visualization of the Apollo 11 mission at Ex.plore.com. It presents the mission's travels superimposed on a baseball diamond. German space enthusiast Thomas Schwagmeier created the map for NASA's History office and it's not only revealing, but beautiful. The original "traverse map" on which it was based is seen below. (You can click on them both to see them at full size.)

A new app-store rejection should remind us that Apple's gatekeeping may not be good for journalism.

Danger Room reports that an app that reports drone strikes to your phone has been rejected from Apple's store for various reasons that seem to boil down to this one: Apple doesn't like it. The student-designed app simply presents existing media accounts of strikes in our open-secret war. It plots them on a map and can push those updates to you. That's it. And yet Apple ultimately found it "objectionable and crude," after issuing a series of rejections with other rationales. 

Apple controls a large chunk of the smartphone market and as part of their end-to-end service, they filter every app that developers would like to present on the iPhone. The company's gatekeeping for the app store helps tamp down the number of crappy apps, but it has long been a theoretical restriction on the free flow of information. 

The company says it's just trying to keep "objectionable" apps off the iPhone, but what does that word mean to Apple's corporate mind? 

Journalists, specifically, seemed at risk of running afoul of the Apple authorities.

"The most important issue is whether news organizations should get in bed with a company that makes unilateral and non-transparent decisions like the ones Apple has been making about content in all kinds of ways," Dan Gillmor asked back in 2010. "I say they should think hard about it, and answer either in the negative or insist on iron-clad contracts with Apple that prohibit the hardware company from any kind of interference with the journalism, ever."

Brian Chen at Wired's Gadget Lab warned Apple could end up in charge of the news and issued a call for transparency in the way the app store handled journalistic apps.

"Working with Apple's current opaque policy, we're left to trust that Apple will do the right thing," Chen wrote. "And time and time again, Apple's App Store reviewers have been proven fallible, as recently shown by the rejection of Mark Fiore's Pulitzer-winning cartoon. Apple rejected the toon because it 'ridicules public figures,' and after coming under fire in the press, the company approved the app. But in reversing its decision, Apple still did not make its content policy clear."

But Apple did not really make the policy clear and media organizations continued to flock to the app store and the issue largely went to the backburner. But this problem has not gone away. Two big differences between now and 2010, though, are 1) Android has become a legitimate competitor to Apple's iOS and 2) mobile-optimized HTML5 sites can deliver much of the functionality that apps can. Android is known for much looser app approval policies and anyone can build an HTML5 site on the open web, so we've got more options than we once did. 

But that's not going to change Apple's behavior until or unless their customers begin to drop the app store for more open waters.

It's hard to look at a company that investors value at $630 billion and not think that irrational exuberance is propping up its share price. But a new analysis by Reuters shows that, at least compared with Microsoft, Apple's not overvalued. In fact, the company's price-to-earnings ratio has, generally speaking, dropped as its market cap grew.

Reuters

As Felix Salmon explains:

What this says to me is that the market in Apple shares looks a lot more rational than the market in Microsoft shares. Investors will pay huge multiples for Apple shares when the company looks cheap, but not when the company looks expensive. When Apple breaks the half-trillion barrier, that's despite the fact that its p/e ratio is low; when Microsoft breaks that barrier, it's because its p/e ratio is high.

A few minutes ago, I received an email proclaiming the opening of a new cultural institution, "The Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History."

Several artists are showing work in the Tipton Three Exhibition Space, and there's a critical studies center as well. If you look up the place on Google Maps, you can see it right there.

But The Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History is not actually a real place, but a clever alternate reality fiction predicated on the idea that Gitmo's closed and that Americans wanted to come to terms with what went on there.

"The museum, located at the former site of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba, is an institution dedicated to critically remembering the U.S. prison which was active between 2005 and 2012 before it was permanently decommissioned and closed," we read in the press release. 

But more than 150 prisoners remain at Gitmo. And last I checked, most Americans were not blocking off their evenings and weekends to explore the civil-rights abuses of the war on terror.

While creating imaginary entities is a tried-and-true protest technique, its application in this specific case is brilliant. Gitmo is a peculiar invention that only exists thanks to a tangle of legal rulings that allow Americans to pretend that Gitmo is not a part of America, even though it's governed and controlled by Americans. No one really gets to see the place, as reporters' and other visitors' experiences are crafted by the authorities. The detention camp, as a place where people are held and interrogated, remains an imaginary place for all but the prisoners and the national security officials who operate it. 

The imaginary museum draws its power from this resonance: If Gitmo exists because of one fiction, perhaps it can be closed by another? Or put another (augmented) way, germane to this digital project: if we change Gitmo's website, can it actually change its physical and legal reality? That's what the museum's organizers are hoping. 

"The museum is the result of a collaboration between artists/theorists and is meant to act as both a critique of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility as well as assert the possibility of its closure," Rene Guerne, one of its organizers, told me in an email. "In this sense, it is a 'real' museum, although I cannot promise that there is a physical building in Guantanamo Bay."

Zach Teutsch/Rosen-Teutsch, Inc.

The smartphone market is not all that complicated right now. When you look at operating profits, as Asymco has done, it's clear that Apple makes almost all the money, while Samsung and HTC fight somewhat successfully for the scraps. 

But actually selling phones for profit is not the only success factor in the industry, as Samsung found out last week. You've got to have some patents to protect yourself from lawsuits and competitors.

So, with that in mind, above is a radically simple way to look at the mobile phone industry. Which is one reason that the operating profits chart looks like this:

You have probably heard that the Arctic has less sea ice right now than humans have ever recorded. The new record, set yesterday, beat the previous low, which was measured in September 2007. 

"By itself it's just a number, and occasionally records are going to get set," said National Snow and Ice Data Center scientist Walt Meier in an official statement. "But in the context of what's happened in the last several years and throughout the satellite record, it's an indication that the Arctic sea ice cover is fundamentally changing."

There are two odd things about this sad record of global change. 

First, it's only late August, several weeks before the traditional time when the sea ice melting stopped. That could mean that the melt is stopping earlier and could begin to recover earlier. Or we may have several weeks to go of melting, in which case, this year's low could not just break but shatter 2007's record. 

Second, if the melt continues for days or weeks more, the melt will end up catastrophically lower than anyone anticipated.

After 2007's low -- which scared many Arctic scientists into statements like, "The Arctic is screaming" -- the sea ice up north recovered, though not to pre-2007 levels. Counting this year, the six years with the least sea ice on record all occurred in the last six years. 

In that sense, it is not a monumental surprise that 2012 did not see an overabundance of sea ice or return to the norms of earlier this century. On the other hand, the catastrophic drop off of sea ice in the last few weeks was not something that was easy to model or predict. 

What happened?

***

Each year, a program called the Sea Ice Outlook gathers predictions about sea ice from different teams of scientists. The groups use different techniques to predict what the next summer's ice melt season might look like. Some do straight statistics, others build models, and other groups use heuristics or a combination of methods. Teams can submit in June, July, and August. In all cases, they are all trying to guess how much sea ice will be left in the Arctic come mid-September, which (as noted above) had traditionally been the low point. The measure that scientists use to describe the sea ice's extent is the millions of square kilometers of ice that our satellites can see from orbit.

In May of this year, it looked as if the Arctic was going to have a year much like the past four, if a little worse. A lot of ice would melt, more than in any of the years before or since 2007's record-setting low, but none predicted a catastrophic year. The median guess was 4.4 million square kilometers of sea ice would be left, and the band was pretty tight around that number, with only a single group predicting a sea ice extent of 4.1 million square kilometers or lower. A few numbers for comparison: The average low from 1979 to 2000 was 6.7 million square kilometers. In 2010 and 2011, 4.9 and 4.6 million square kilometers of sea ice remained in September. The record low was 4.17 million square kilometers of sea ice in 2007.

And it is this last number that the Arctic crashed through this week with a measurement of 4.1 million square kilometers of sea ice left. 

Now, the modelers may not turn out to have been wrong if, as we mentioned above, the sea ice melt season ends early. "We'll see how September turns out," Robert Grumbine, an ice modeler with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who worked on three of the predictions, told me. "It isn't unheard of for the annual minimum to be about now, rather than in September."

Some of the more recent (July and August) predictions for the Sea Ice Outlook have revised their estimates downwards on the basis of the early summer. Nonetheless, it still stands: going into this summer, we were not expecting a record low for sea ice.

And now here's the most recent data. 

What's befuddling about 2012, relative to 2007, is that the Arctic has not seen the kind of ice-melting weather that 2007 did. "I'm at a loss at this loss," wrote sea ice blogger (yes they exist!) Neven Acropolis. "The 2007 record that stunned everyone, gets shattered without 2007 weather conditions."

Unknown unknowns aside, one frightening possibility exists. For years, scientists have been warning that Arctic sea ice is thinning. Thinner ice melts more quickly. But when we traditionally measure sea ice, scientists aren't looking at the mass of the ice, just the surface extent. 

Unfortunately, as the University of Washington's Polar Science Center explains, we can't monitor sea ice volume easily.

Sea ice volume is an important climate indicator. It depends on both ice thickness and extent and therefore more directly tied to climate forcing than extent alone. However, Arctic sea ice volume cannot currently be observed continuously. Observations from satellites, Navy submarines, moorings, and field measurements are all limited in space and time.

So, scientists have to take these limited readings and build a model that estimates the sea ice volume. They call it PIOMAS, a catchy acronym for the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System. Obviously, as with any model, there are limitations to its predictive power. But in recent years, and even more dramatically in recent weeks, PIOMAS has been showing a major anomaly relative to the longtime average in ice thickness. Even where there has been ice in the Arctic, it's much thinner than it used to be.

If this year's melt continues and the amount of sea ice in the Arctic reaches even lower, it may be confirmation that the ice really is that thin and easier to melt, perhaps introducing other dynamics that seem poised to accelerate the decline of the system. The climate change signal, in other words, is growing stronger as the Arctic moves toward ice-free summers. Or here's Jennifer Francis of Rutgers, as quoted on Dot Earth:

The fact that the ice is so dramatically thinner now than it was only 20 years ago means that it is vulnerable to any abnormal weather event or fluctuation in ocean currents. If the "perfect storm" of atmospheric and oceanic conditions that led to the 2007 record, or the patterns that reduced ice this summer, happened back in the thick-ice era, sea-ice loss would not be making headlines. Following this summer's new record ice loss, the Arctic will enter a winter with even less ice than ever before, leading to even thinner ice, which barring any monumental external events like a major volcanic eruption, will likely perpetuate the trend in sea ice decline.

We are all trying to understand a system that has entered territory never seen before, and I think scientists are naturally cautious in their interpretations and predictions of what's to come. Models were formulated with understanding of the familiar system, which may explain why some model simulations lag observations in losing ice.

Even better photographs of Mt. Sharp, the rover's eventual science destination.

Google's data-driven management might just be able to find the right set of incentives and work arrangements to make careers easier on moms.

Reuters

Amid all the handwringing about what technology companies can do to recruit and retain women in their ranks, we don't hear a lot of solutions. But here's an obvious thing that tech companies can do: increase the length of maternity leave and pay a full salary for its duration. 

It makes a huge difference in keeping female employees, we read in The Times.

Another time Google was losing women was after they had babies. The attrition rate for postpartum women was twice that for other employees. In response, Google lengthened maternity leave to five months from three and changed it from partial pay to full pay. Attrition decreased by 50 percent. 

We'll be checking up on the other big tech companies' maternity-leave policies, but let's note that this particular problem is not specific to the technology industry (though it is somewhat specific to the United States). That said, the tech industry may be more likely than most to solve it. If they choose to optimize for this particular variable, Google's data-driven management might be able to find the right set of incentives and work arrangements to make post-partum careers better.

Everybody who makes or buys cell phones will be affected by Apple's big patent win over Samsung. We break down the winners and losers.

A lion's roar doesn't tell you much about whether an animal is a king of the jungle, or a joker.

These lions just mated (Reuters).

A lifetime of Disney movies has trained me to have certain expectations about animal sounds, most especially with regard to the King of the Jungle, the lion. The best lion has the best roar. Them's just the rules.

But now, courtesy of Ed Yong's eagle eye, we have scientific evidence that a lion's roar says very little about an animal's role in the jungle's hierarchy. A team analyzed the roars of 24 lions collected over decades in an effort to discern whether there were meaningful correlations between the features of the roar and the animal's sexual fitness. 

"No evidence that acoustic variables were related to male condition was found, indicating that sexual selection might only be a weak force modulating the lion's roar," the researchers concluded in a 2007 paper. 

The vocalizations of the male lions were not highly correlated with other characteristics either, not even how nice and shiny (and dreamy!) his mane is. 

"The acoustic features of male roars neither varied with mane color nor with mane length," they wrote. "Both mane color and mane length are signals of male status and have been characterized as costly signals, because larger manes and darker hair increase the surface temperature and decrease the rates of heat transfer, which can harm sperm production."

About the only thing the researchers could tell from was whether the lion was a male or a female. The smaller females roared with a slightly higher fundamental frequency (195 Hz versus 207 Hz). 

The researchers do have another theory about what a lion's call signals: "Lion roars may have mainly been selected to effectively advertise territorial boundaries," the paper speculated. Not come hither, but step off.

N165 is the (un)luckiest bit of basalt on Mars. Which is saying something because there is a lot of basalt on Mars.

It's been a few days since the Curiosity rover sent back a stunning image of the Martian landscape. We were getting impatient, actually. But no longer! Check out this view of the lower reaches of Mt. Sharp, which the rover uploaded late to JPL.

This is our best view yet of the layered formations to which the Rover is headed. John Grotzinger, project scientist of the Mars Science Laboratory, called it a "thrilling image" in a teleconference with reporters this afternoon. 

"If the surface of the crater looks like the Mojave," Grotzinger said, "This looks more like the Four Corners area of the Western US, or Sedona Arizona, buttes and mesas."

Grotzinger followed up on the photo later in the call. "These are the foothills of Mt. Sharp," he said. "There are hills there that are the size of 2, 3, 4 story buildings with canyons running through them."

Here's some context for the image above. It's taken roughly in the area of the red box, based on Grotzinger's direction.

The new image is a much better view of the area than we previously had, as you can see from the decidedly lower-resolution (and grayscale!) panorama that was released earlier this week below.

The top image is probably taken from near where you see the red box in the panorama below.

And, this is roughly the direction that the Rover is looking, towards its target area.

A new app, Picle, offers a new form of mobile story production that feels just right.

Walking through my neighborhood, I passed a local school: The sound of children playing popped out its open windows and into my ears. For a split second, I could remember being that age, laughing that way, running with that cadence. 

"This is a good feeling," I thought. "I'd like to share this nostalgic moment." But no photo, no matter how well Instagrammed, could capture the sound of the kids, and @altissima aside, Twitter poetry doesn't normally work. 

What I needed was sound! Not video, but sound. 

So, I tweeted, "An iPhone app that captures a photo and 10 seconds of either A) ambient sound or B) what's in your headphones. Exists?"

Several people (thanks @joecorcoran, @brownpau, @gilfer) responded that such an app did exist, at least for Part A of my question. 

It's called Picle ("pickle").

I've been playing with the Picle app for the last day now, and I'm convinced that this is a fantastic idea that may be the unexpected winner in this contest to find the "Instagram of video." At the very least, it's a great tool for exploring the frontiers of mobile storytelling. 

At the core, Picle -- the work of the London creative agency Made by Many -- is exactly what I asked for: you take a photo and either simultaneously or serially record up to 10 seconds of audio to accompany it. These are then presented in a (hot) visual interface. This video should give you a pretty good idea of the different ways you could use it:

Weddings, birthdays, hikes, talking to yourself about inequality, concerts, street performances, sporting events, kids stuff, etc. The stuff of Instagram, but also a whole new category of things. Cute kids + cute kids saying cute stuff. Busker + busker's music. Etc. 

Looking at "picles" is initially disconcerting. When you hit the play button and start to hear sound, it's almost as if the image is broken because it is not moving in time with the soundtrack. 

But, then the experience started to change. The unsyncing of the sound and image helped me concentrate on the photograph. You can't just flip past the image with another thumb flick. You have to really look at it while the sound finishes playing. (Look at your fish image!)

These objects are, in a sense, the inverse of the animated GIF. Weird thought, let me explain. Both GIFs and picles take the idea of video (pictures + sound) and slice its components in different ways. GIFs take away the sound and focus your attention on a few frames of visual motion. Picles take away the motion and add the sound. 

What does that do? I think these objects focus your attention on the narrative that led to the creation of the photo. And it's this psychological trick that I think makes Picle like Instagram. Filters are a way to infuse your subject with a feeling that suggests a story. Here, the audio channel -- rather than the visual effect -- delivers the emotional message. 

In that, as Made by Many's Will Roissetter pointed out, Picle approximates the way your memories actually work.

"Like your memories, they are snapshots: sea crashing against the rocks and that beautiful sunset," Roissetter said. "Memories are made up of moments. They don't flow like a seamless video."

Picle soft launched at SXSW and it turns out they are on the verge of a major revamp as its makers get ready to turn it into an actual product. They entered SXSW with 15 users and left with 30,000. Now, they're up to about 60,000. 

But the thing about Picle as it is currently constituted is that it is not primarily a social network. It could have two users and still be interesting as a way of producing a new kind of digital object. In fact, the networking features only exist on the website and are only sort of functional (e.g. you can "follow" users but only if you type the URL of their profiles into your browser; there's no search functionality).