Alexis C. Madrigal

The first one slid through the mail slot and onto the floor. My wife brought it into the kitchen and tossed it down on the table. "We've been made," she said.

Staring back at me was a little face surrounded by products for making that little face happy. This was it, the first real evidence that the world knew about our impending parenthood: a baby catalog, Right Start. And it was right on time. She was three months pregnant then, and we were finally allowing ourselves to imagine that this fetus might become a baby, and that that baby might desperately need any number of products that Right Start could sell us. Paging through the catalog, we realized to our dismay that whoever had sent us this thing knew us. They'd nailed our demographic precisely. They even knew what kind of convertible car seat we'd want! Who were these people, or should I say, machines?!

Because that's where my mind went immediately. I remembered Charles Duhigg's blockbuster story about how Target aggressively datamined for prospective parents. We were a high-value target, and clearly some data had given us away. I wanted to know what had happened, and I began a slow investigation.

First, I tweeted at Right Start (@RightStart), "We got a catalog before we had actually publicly told anyone about [the baby]. And I'm curious about the data behind that." To their credit, they got right back to me and asked for the "source code" on my catalog. It was right there are on the back of the catalog: S1303400. That was the first clue.

With that little code, Right Start's representatives went back to their database and found out that our data had come from a company called Marketing Genetics. "They provided us your info based off of past buying behavior," Right Start told me.

Marketing Genetics! This was getting good. Did they already know that our child was so genetically gifted that they were farming out our data to people who could supply what our kid needed (diapers, chess board, violin)?

I Googled the company, and got one of those lists of search results that clearly indicates you're in the B2B realm.

"All direct marketers are continually trying to identify and reach out to prospects that resemble their best customers, potential clients who possess the same customer DNA. They realize that this is no easy task," I read on the site. "Customer DNA is built from multiple purchase transactions, demographic and lifestyle data, credit information and self-reported buying preferences . . . collective characteristics that compel buying activity."

We had been made! Marketing Genetics is a data company based in Nebraska. They gather up data that companies share with each other about purchasing behavior and sell it to other companies that are looking for certain types of customers. They've got a database of 100 million people and more than a billion transactions (most of those from the last couple of years).

As they show in a sample report on their site, Marketing Genetics takes a company's data and creates a statistical profile of their best customers. Then they look for similar people within their own databases, so those companies can send these people catalogs or other direct mail. They call this Data Navigation Analysis (DNA). Here's what the beginning of the report looks like:

I do not have any particular expertise in the inner workings of the Wall Street Journal newsroom, but this chart speaks for itself. It shows the number of stories the Journal published that were over 2,500 words from 2002 to 2011. Dean Starkman of Columbia Journalism Review created the chart and referenced it again today. (He used to work at the publication.)

The Journal is not alone in this trend at the big papers, as CJR has also shown, but its numbers are the most startling. 

First, the caveats. Of course, story length is not the only indicator of quality journalism. Second, some of the stories that got shorter might have gotten better in the process. Third, the newsroom at the Journal is obviously filled with strong writers and editors. 

The number of words in an article has never been the barometer by which the quality of a publication or its value to readers should be measured. Every article is reported with unique facts and anecdotes that are needed to best tell the story. We consider those factors, while respecting our readers' busy lives, when determining the length of an article. Our very strong circulation numbers suggest that readers think we're doing a good job.

All that said, the editors in 2002 were not idiots. If they thought there were 200 stories worth running at that length, it stands to reason that many of the 2011 stories were not better shorter. At least some longer, deeper, and more complex stories are either being shortened or left out entirely. 

Some people might say: the Internet did this! But we're looking at numbers for the print publication alone here. (I'd actually love to see the numbers including WSJ.com.)

And what's most surprising to me as a journalist who was working through the period of the Journal's greatest decline is that longform has always worked for the publications for which I've written. At both Wired and The Atlantic, our most successful stories in terms of impact or audience size have almost always been the deep, definitive ones that get shared all over the Internet. 

Starkman suggests that Rupert Murdoch simply wanted to reduce the number of long stories.

I wonder how the Journal's hard paywall might change their incentives for producing longer work. Does the upside of these kinds of stories get dampened because their stories can't be shared as widely and easily? Perhaps it's more important to satisfy the core business news audience who pay for the (digital and print) publication with shorter news and analysis. 

Reuters/Alexis C. Madrigal

So, vigilantes have organized themselves on Reddit for a manhunt. They want justice served. And they're openly debating suspects on the site. They're gonna solve the case! Like real cops on television.

But they are not real cops. They are well-meaning people who have not considered the moral weight of what they're doing.* This is vigilantism, and it's only the illusion that what we do online is not as significant as what we do offline that allows this to go on. Imagine if people were standing around in Boston pointing fingers at people in photographs and (roughly) accusing them of terrorism.

In one case, they point out a man in a "blue robe" and how he's holding his backpack. "Also note that in the very far right pic, he is clutching his hand with a very tight grip as if the backpack is really heavy," one says. "That left hand is holding quite a lot of tension. The guy is trying to look nonchalant, maybe?" another replies. "Though, look at the angle of the shoulder straps. You would expect them to be pointing straight down if they were under the weight of 30-40lbs, not angled like that"

Guys, this isn't dissecting the quality of an animation on the PS3: this is a human being whose role in an act of terrorism is being debated in a public forum because of people's observations of the "tension" in his grip on his bag?

This is not how civil society works. There is a reason that police have procedures around investigations and evidence. Due process is important. It exists to systematize justice, and in doing so prevent the sort of excesses common when people take justice into their own hands. And if anything, we don't have *enough* due process in this country.

All of these statements are obvious. And it is possible to see what some set of Reddit users are doing as insubstantial or silly. At best, they help the investigation. At worst, it's a distraction. But we need to take both the rhetoric and actions of this group seriously. It doesn't matter that it's happening in a forum, and not around a burning cross.

One can make a defense of vigilantism in certain circumstances: say, "in the absence of foundations regulating social order." But this is not one of those cases. The FBI and other law enforcement officials are clearly looking for the bomber, and with access to far more information and technical resources. 

San Francisco, the city where Reddit grew up, has an ugly history of vigilantes deciding to track down and convict suspects. Racial, usually anti-Chinese, violence ran through the 19th-century movement, as it has in many vigilante causes. No one is saying the police are perfect or that the FBI is always fair, but they have an ethos, a set of rules they're sworn to uphold, and accountability if they make mistakes. And in any case, the way to fix the failings of our law enforcement procedures is not to create an even more flawed system.

Investigating these bombings is just not a job for "the crowd," even if technology makes such collaboration possible. Even if we were to admit that Reddit was "more efficient" in processing the influx of media around the bombing, which would be a completely baseless speculation/stretch/defense, it still wouldn't make sense to create a lawless space in which self-appointed citizens decide which other citizens have committed crimes. This would be at the top of any BuzzFeed list of the tried-and-true lessons of modern civilization. We have a legal system for a reason.

Digital dualism can blind us to the real and serious problems of online vigilantism. There's no excusing it with reference to bits or tubes: It is plain, old vigilantism with no place in our society.

* Dan Sinker pointed out, fairly, that there are debates occurring on Reddit about the appropriateness of the vigilante action. My counterargument would be that you can participate in the vigilantism without participating in the debate. That is to say, the existence of the debate proves that *some* people are considering the moral weight, but not necessarily the same people or all the people doing the finger-pointing. But to make it clear: this isn't an indictment of Reddit as a platform. This is about a very clear action taken by a small group of specific users within the cultural context that's developed at Reddit for certain types of collective action.

Update 4/18: Several people Redditors had cast suspicion on have turned out to be local people who, in the words of /findbostonbombers moderator, oops777, "appear to be innocent." While oops777 is wisely suspending further references to these men in the subreddit, their photographs and Facebook pages have (predictably) gotten out to other media. This is a bad turn of events. But when we think about this crowdsourcing process, we can't focus just on the negative results. Even if Reddit had gotten the right guy, I would have still thought this was a dangerous experiment that should not be repeated. My hope is that we sober up about when and how crowdsourcing should be applied in the investigation of criminal cases. And perhaps, in the future, people will find ways to crowdsource without spotlighting false positives in a public discussion forum.

I'm obsessed with oddity records. And at an estate sale this weekend, I found one of the best ever produced by a magazine: The Sounds of Space. 

After the successful Apollo 11 mission to the surface of the moon, National Geographic ran a special issue dedicated to the trip to the moon. Inside that issue, they included what's called a "Flexi disc," a very light piece of plastic that you could be mailed with the magazine and then stuck on a turntable. This disc featured astronaut Frank Borman narrating a (very, very) brief history of the space race from, roughly, Sputnik to the moon landing. It was the second time that National Geographic had mailed a disc; the first was an address by Winston Churchill. (Incidentally, the most popular was humpback whale sounds in the 1970s.) 

When I heard the record, I immediately thought I should create some way for you to experience it. There's just something about these old sounds: Radio Moscow celebrating Yuri Gagarin, the fear in John Glenn's voice as he heads for splashdown, astronaut Ed White's joy as he spacewalks, the check-off that preceded the Apollo 11 landing. 

The record runs about 11 minutes. I've used the multimedia authoring tool Zeega to create a kind of audio picturebook out of the Flexi disc. You can advance to the right to hear the next audio segment at any time. That is to say, it kind of works like a slideshow with a soundtrack. (Also, feel free to full-screen it for a much more immersive listening experience.)

As investigators try to figure out what happened today during the bombings at the Boston Marathon, they'll turn to video taken at the scene of the explosions.

In addition to any closed-circuit television cameras lining Boylston Street and its surroundings, The Bureau Chief of Public Information, Cheryl Fiandaca, called for members of the public to send in video from near the finish line.

Once the police have the prospective evidence in hand, they'll need to run forensic analysis on it. What we know from recent years is that the amount of evidence can be staggering large. For example, the Vancouver riot in early 2011 brought 1,600 hours of video streaming into that city's police department. Just to watch all that video through one time is a substantial task, let alone examining it closely or trying to find events or people of interest.

Right now, there is no video software that can do this type of analysis, not even in a first-pass way. IARPA (DARPA for the intelligence services) put out a call for proposals in 2010 for this kind of "Automated Low-level Analysis and Description of Diverse Intelligence Video." It described, in brief, the problem that investigators (or intelligence analysts) face:

Massive numbers of video clips are generated daily on many types of consumer electronics and uploaded to the internet. In contrast to videos that are produced for broadcast or from planned surveillance, the "unconstrained" video clips produced by anyone who has a digital camera present a significant challenge for manual as well as automated analysis.

So, at the moment, human investigators must watch and code each and every second of the video that they collect. While the Boston police may have the resources they need, chances are that they're going to be swamped with video from the scene, given the number of spectators and the prevalence of cameras. This is the future we live in: Major events are photographed and recorded by hundreds of people. 

Until we know more about the bombings, we don't know under whose jurisdiction the investigation will come. The Federal Bureau of Investigation analyzes video within its Operatonal Technology Divison, inside the Digital Evidence Laboratory by the Forensic Audio, Video, and Image Analysis Unit (FAVIAU). In 2010, that unit had just 26 agents.

If Federal or local police do need help, they could reach out to Digital Media Evidence Processing Lab at the University of Indianapolis, which is run by the Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association.

The lab has 20 video workstations running Ocean Systems dTective forensic video software. It's set up for training police in video forensics, but has been envisioned as a place that could serve as a headquarters for emergencies like the one in Boston.

After the Vancouver riots, police in that city brought the video they received from citizens to the lab. "Working around-the-clock shifts, analysts and technicians examined more than 5,000 hours of video while tagging more than 15,000 criminal events and individuals," trade journal Evidence Magazine wrote in 2012. "The approach proved quite powerful. Whereas investigators required four months to process just 100 hours of video after the riots in 1994, the thousands of hours of video recorded in 2011 were processed and initially tagged in just two weeks."

This will become the sad new ritual of mourning a tragedy: sending and processing the horrific memories of an event in hopes of finding evidence to bring criminals to justice.

Every year, the Social Security Administration releases its annual list of the most popular names in America. They've become a valuable source of data for researchers, as Ruth Graham brilliantly laid out in the Boston Globe this weekend.

The best thing about name data is that it is the perfect model system for researching how the mechanics of trends work. No one is marketing names or running advertising campaigns for Olivia. And yet, slowly, things change. Individual decisions made by individual families add up to large-scale shifts in what we call each other. And what I learned writing about baby names back in 2009 is this: you can't escape your demographic, so just pick a name you like without trying to game the popularity system. 

"What's hard for parents is that what feels like your own personal taste, it's everybody's taste," Laura Wattenberg, who built The Baby Name Wizard told me back then. "It's a no-win situation - if you pick a name you like, probably everybody else will like it too."

In any case, we can have these debates based on real data because the Social Security Administration cranks out these lists of popular names. And it turns out, Graham discovered, that this is the case because of one curious dad. This is an awesome anecdote.

Names research suddenly became much, much easier because of one curious dad. In 1997, Michael Shackleford was an employee of the Office of the Actuary at the Social Security Administration's headquarters in Baltimore; his wife was pregnant and he was determined to avoid giving the child a common name like his own. With his access to Social Security card data, he wrote a simple program to sort the information by year of birth, gender, and first name. Suddenly he could see every Janet born in 1960. He could see that the number one names in 1990 were Michael and Jessica. He realized this could be important. "I knew that my eyeballs were seeing this list of the most popular baby names nationwide for the first time," he recalled recently. "It was too good to keep to myself."

If you really want to dive deep on this topic, check out Harvard sociology professor Stanley Lieberson's book, A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashion, and Culture Change. The key mechanism Lieberson proposes is the "ratchet effect," wherein things become popular because they are similar but not identical to other very popular things. We like things that are "different, but not too different," as Cleveland Evans, an expert in onomastics (the study of naming) at Bellevue University in Nebraska, told me for that 2009 article.

Most Americans now know the feeling of typing something into a social media input box, thinking again, and deciding against posting whatever it was. But while it certainly seemed like a widespread phenomenon, no one had actually quantified the extent of this "self-censorship."

But now, new research based on a sample of 3.9 million Facebook users reveals precisely how widespread this activity is. Carnegie Mellon PhD student Sauvik Das and Facebook's Adam Kramer measured how many people typed more than five characters into Facebook content-input boxes, but then did not post them. They term this "last-minute self-censorship." The research was posted to Das' website and will presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's conference on Weblogs and Social Media in July.

The numbers are impressively large. Fully one-third of all Facebook posts were self-censored, according to the method Das and Kramer devised, though they warn they probably captured a substantial number of false positives. 71 percent of all the users surveyed engaged in some self-censorship either on new posts or in comments, and the median self-censorer did so multiple times. 

Perhaps the most interesting part of the study was the demographic correlations with self-censorship. Men self-censored more often, particularly if they had large numbers of male friends. Interestingly, people with more diverse friend groups -- measured by age, political affiliation, and gender -- were less likely to self-censor. 

While the researchers declined to speculate in this study about why people may or may not have self-censored, earlier research with a small group of users found five reasons people chose not share what they'd written: aversion to sparking an argument or other discussion, concern their post would offend or hurt someone, felt their post was boring or repetitive, decided the content undermined their desired self-presentation, or were just unable to post due to a technological or other constraint.

For Facebook users, the main takeaway here is probably: Feel free not to share. Facebook, on the other hand, has to have a more complex relationship to this research. Their interaction and business models depend on sharing, but it's not hard to imagine some circumstances in which it would be better not to share: racist content, say. So, Das and Kramer say that future research should address when the non-sharing is "adaptive," (which I think means good, in this context) and when, in the words of Das and Kramer, "users and their audience could fail to achieve potential social value from not sharing certain content, and the [social-network service] loses value from the lack of content generation."

For years, people have talked about the electricity consumption of data centers. Some people want to believe, somehow, that Googling is energy intensive. But it's not. Thanks to Koomey's Corollary to Moore's Law, computation has been getting more energy efficient: The number of computations per kilowatt-hour of electricity usage has been doubling every 1.5 years for decades. Relative to our society's other technological processes -- heating homes or growing corn or ground transportation -- computing's energy usage was and is a drop in the bucket. All of Google, all its servers and campuses and everything, require about 260 megawatts of electricity on a continuous basis, as of 2011. The US has about 1,000 gigawatts of capacity, or 1,000,000 megawatts. So, to put it mildly, I am sanguine about the electrical consumption of our computing infrastructure.

But, according to a new report from the University of Melbourne's Centre for Energy Efficient Telecommunications, the wireless networks that let our devices tap into those data centers might turn out to be another story.

In a new whitepaper, the CEET estimates that when we use wireless devices to access cloud services, 90 percent of the electrical consumption of that system is eaten up by the network's infrastructure, not the servers or phones.. The data centers themselves use one-tenth that amount of electricity. Worse, cloud services accessed wirelessly will continue to explode, leading to a ballooning electrical load as well. By 2015, they estimate this system could eat up between 32 and 43 million megawatt hours. In 2012, the figure was only 9 million megawatt hours.

Worse still, while computing has been getting more efficient at a fast and predictable clip, it's harder to tell whether the wireless access systems that the report fingers as the problem will advance as rapidly. They certainly have not advanced as predictably as computing along other metrics (reliability or bandwidth, say).

What portion of the system is using the bulk of the energy? It turns out to be the 4G LTE links. Looking at 2010 data, "the energy consumption of a 4G LTE wireless access link ranges between 328 micro-Joules per bit and around 615 micro-Joules per bit," according to this paper on the energy efficiency of cellular networks. Those numbers are improving 26 percent a year, the CEET writes. Given that range, I don't want to try to calculate too precisely, but roughly, downloading a megabyte of data over an LTE connection would use a couple of kilojoules of electricity. 

That's still not a lot, but imagine multiplying by the scale of YouTube or by the number of wireless Internet users in China. The numbers, as the CEET discovered, can get very big very fast.

I love Twitter, but it's a fast medium. If you follow a couple thousand people, like I do, there's no easy way to keep an eye on everything that people tweet. The same seems to be true more broadly: I'd reckon that 80 percent of the clicks on a story come in the 20 minutes after it gets tweeted. After that, it's off down the stream somewhere. (People have tried to measure this stuff with some success.)

This is a terrible way to keep track of thinkers who are working at slower time scales. And yet, I think a key value that our technology coverage can provide is connecting the kinds of thinking about technology I see in the academic literature with popular culture. We need a good way to keep track of historians, philosophers, and others who think about science and technology (in the broadest possible sense). And Twitter is not it.

So, I'm trying to reassemble an RSS feed filled with a very specific type of blog. I'm looking for researchers, scholars, and academics who don't post more than once per day. I don't care how specific or niche they are, as long as they're interesting on their own terms. 

Here are my exemplary blogs:

• Edible Geography: Nicola Twilley's spatial investigations of food.
• We Make Money Not Art: Regine DeBatty's explorations of aesthetics (and science and technology).
• Yoni Appelbaum: Brilliant, evocative historical investigations.
• Mind Hacks: Vaughan Bell on the (mis)understanding of brains and psychology.
• Wynken De Worde: Sarah Werner on books and early modern culture.
• Robert Hooke's London: Felicity Henderson's catalog of Hooke's experience of the city.
• Infranet Lab Blog: Thoughts at the edge of infrastructure by a fascinating research collective.
• 99 Percent Invisible: Not a blog and not created by an academic, Roman Mars' radio show is nonetheless exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for.

So, please, feed my Feedly! Put your own blog in the comments, if it fits the criteria and feel. Or send it to me in an email. Or @alexismadrigal.

As always, I'll collate and share what you send in.

P.S. There are all these science blog networks (like a half dozen of them!). Why doesn't a similar thing exist for science and technology studies blogs (or humanities more broadly)?

In a forum about the development of Mozilla's Gecko, the rendering engine for Firefox, we read that the browser may soon drop support for blinking text. In fact, many browsers already don't render the blink tag, as I found out trying to make the following text blink:

OH NO!

The web I grew up with in the 90s is already mostly gone, both its look and its ethos, but the blink tag had somehow managed to hang on, despite the fact that its creation was something between a mistake and a joke. 

Louis Montulli, founding engineer at Netscape, told the origin story on his personal website:

Sometime in late summer I took a break with some of the other engineers and went to a local bar on Castro street in Mountain View. The bar was the St. James Infirmary and it had a 30 foot wonder woman statue inside among other interesting things. At some point in the evening I mentioned that it was sad that Lynx was not going to be able to display many of the HTML extensions that we were proposing, I also pointed out that the only text style that Lynx could exploit given its environment was blinking text. We had a pretty good laugh at the thought of blinking text, and talked about blinking this and that and how absurd the whole thing would be. The evening progressed pretty normally from there, with a fair amount more drinking and me meeting the girl who would later become my first wife.

Saturday morning rolled around and I headed into the office only to find what else but, blinking text. It was on the screen blinking in all its glory, and in the browser. How could this be, you might ask? It turns out that one of the engineers liked my idea so much that he left the bar sometime past midnight, returned to the office and implemented the blink tag overnight. He was still there in the morning and quite proud of it.

At the time there were 3 versions of the browser that ran on UNIX, Windows and Mac operating systems. For a short 12 hours the blinking was constrained only to the UNIX version, but it didn't take long for the blinking to spread to Windows and then the Mac version. I remember thinking that this would be a pretty harmless easter egg, that no one would really use it, but I was very wrong. When we released Netscape Navigator 1.0 we did not document the blink functionality in any way, and for a while all was quiet. Then somewhere, somehow the arcane knowledge of blinking leaked into the real world and suddenly everything was blinking. "Look here", "buy this", "check this out", all blinking. Large advertisements blinking in all their glory. It was a lot like Las Vegas, except it was on my screen, with no way of turning it off.

Though very few people actually liked the <blink> tag, it didn't matter. Once the capability was in the system, it was very hard to extract. Here we are 20 years after a technical joke got embedded into the global information network, and we're still talking about how, precisely, to get rid of the damn thing. Call it an allegory.

Earlier this week, I told you the story of Lost Cat, a new book about pets, love, and GPS. So, of course, a vendor of pet GPS products got in touch with me. As a public service, in honor of National Pet ID Week, which begins April 15, I'd like to point out that the company Snaptracs sells Tagg, a real-time tracking system for animals.

This is not the homebrewed system that Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton used on their cat, but a commercial system with apps for your phone (Android and iOS) and a marketing program centered on puppies.

Snaptracs is owned by a Qualcomm subsidiary. And the Tagg's main competitors appear to be Garmin, which sells the pet-friendly GTU 10, and DogTracs, which is sold through Costco.

Does the Tagg work as advertised? 

Most Amazon reviewers seem to think so (and they give the Garmin unit decent marks, too). While some people complain about the monthly subscription's pricing scheme, the actual product seems to do exactly what people think it will. Here's a representative narrative:

On a single charge the tracker lasted 3 weeks and this included my dog being outside the Tagg zone about 6 times for a combined total of about 2 hours. Each time he left i got a notification about 3 minutes after i noticed he was gone. I would grab my ipad and jump in the car and setup the 'start tracking' feature which would update his location on the ipad app map every 3 minutes. Most of the time i was able to find him within 1-2 more updates and every time he was exactly where it indicated. 3 minutes might seem like a long time and it is if your tracking a car downtown but for a dog that's just wandering up the street it's more than enough.

As a newly converted cat person, I have to say that tracking your dog with GPS has none of the romance of tracking your cat. With a dog, you're dealing with an escaped prisoner that you're hunting down to return to your yard. With a cat, the GPS is a means of vicarious exploration. Cats know a neighborhood in ways that humans never will, but if you attach a GPS to a cat's collar, you can at least begin to understand the lives they lead.

Also, yes, of course, this is all ridiculous (until your own pet goes missing).

Kill Screen Magazine has a wonderful GIF guide to the moves you need to master to become a pinball wizard. For example, as illustrated above, the drop catch:

"The drop catch is similar to a bunt in baseball, where the player deadens the momentum of the ball by pulling their bat back. In pinball, this means dropping the flipper as the ball arrives. If timed correctly, the ball will have no momentum as the flipper comes to rest, allowing the player to either trap the ball or shoot immediately with greater accuracy."

The tricks with the flippers are neat, but the moves that required you move or shake the machine are the most interesting to me. They require thinking about the pinball game at a different level of analysis. The game world is not the only thing that matters; The machine in which the game world is embedded is playable, too. Like, check out this quasi-legal move, called the death save.

I grew up playing video games, not pinball, and so the physicality of pinball play has never been intuitive to me. It seems like cheating, not playing, to move the machine in order to get the ball to do something. But you need to: The flippers are not enough.

One consequence of the physical nature of the game: humans continue to be quite good at pinball relative to computers. A German team even built a custom pinball machine that took the sensor data from a pinball machine and fed it to a computer that controlled the flippers. The experiment does not seem like a smashing success:

The paper shows that a classical Pinball Machine is a hybrid system that has an inherent control problem of great difficulty. Especially if the controller only accesses the event sequences measured by the on board sensors of the Pinball Machine, the reconstruction of the actual position of the ball is a non trivial problem.

Another team built a self-playing pinball machine. They estimate it's about as good as a 3-year old.

Without some very good and very fast vision to track the ball or a hip to bump it out of trouble, it's hard for a computer to become the Deep Blue of arcade.

First, the series of images you made of that horse galloping are still what you're best known for. Sorry about that. 

Second, you rule the Internet! Your specific images are not that widely reproduced, but your style of motion-studies is trendier than a penny farthing in 1892 1882!* 

While you were nominally working in a scientific vein, the principle you operated on has proven to be general: viewing a series of frames in succession, we see things that we don't in real-time or in a still image. Nowadays, people use moving images called animated GIFs to isolate and reproduce small snippets of movement that can *say* something in the right context, or that are simply funny, like your work with that ostrich or those naked guys fake boxing.

Anyway, happy 183rd, Eadweard. That's a lot of candles. 

Oh, and other than your method's incipient popularity, things are pretty much the same, except Europe lost all its colonies, pornography is easier to access and you can put the text of all the books ever written into a little drive that fits in your pocket. Oh, and we went to the moon a few times, though we haven't been back for a while. 

* (Duh, the safety bicycle displaced the penny farthing and other designs in the early 1890s. Come on, Madrigal, get your bicycle history straight!)

An anti-drone protest in Pakistan (Reuters).

The Obama administration's drone attacks have not just targeted Al Qaeda leaders, but a wide variety of groups and individuals in Pakistan, according to classified intelligence documents obtained by McClatchy's Jonathan Landay.

"At least 265 of up to 482 people who the U.S. intelligence reports estimated the CIA killed during a 12-month period ending in September 2011 were not senior al Qaida leaders but instead were 'assessed' as Afghan, Pakistani and unknown extremists," Landay writes in the story, published today.

This is despite the administration's rhetoric about how the CIA is using its drones solely to go after high-ranking Al Qaeda officials. Landay notes that when John Brennan gave the longest defense of the program on record, he "referred to al Qaida 73 times, the Afghan Taliban three times and mentioned no other group by name."

While my colleague Conor Friedersdorf has repeatedly questioned the moral and legal logic of the drone war, Micah Zenko of the Council of Foreign Relations ponders another dark possibility in the McClatchy article. The United States is leading the creation and adoption of drone technology and forming the norms for their deployment in ad hoc, hypocritical way. So what's going to happen when other countries get their own large drone fleets?

Other governments "won't just emulate U.S. practice but (will adopt) America's justification for targeted killings," said Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations. "When there is such a disconnect between who the administration says it kills and who it (actually) kills, that hypocrisy itself is a very dangerous precedent that other countries will emulate."

The cat came back. 

But why? And what was he doing while he was gone?

These questions plague cat owners across the world, and they form the backbone of the new book, Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology. As author Caroline Paul and illustrator Wendy MacNaughton chart their discoveries in the feline world, they unfurl an uncommonly charming and wise tale. 

The narrative centers on Paul's two cats, Fibula and Tibia, and what happens when the latter mysteriously leaves home for six weeks -- and then returns. Paul becomes fixated on discovering where he'd gone (and where she suspects he continues to go) with the aid of technology. MacNaughton, Paul's partner, rides shotgun on the quest, documenting the trip in a series of improbably hilarious and profound drawings. There are so many good jokes and cute kitties, you can almost miss the terror of loving something (or someone) that provides the book's depth. 

There are twists and turns along the way (including a brilliant setpiece in an animal communication class), but a sly allegory emerges from all the drawing and writing: Technology can do many amazing things, but no GPS unit or CatCam can tell us what questions we should be asking in the first place. 

To be optimistic, though, the human process of piecing together the tech's failures and successes can build towards the kind of realization that Paul comes to at the end of the book. "I didn't need to turn on the computer and re-analyze the maps. I didn't need to scour the photos. I didn't need to have an animal-human conversation," Paul writes. "Clear and bright as the pink of a kitty trail on a satellite map was this final truth: Tibby had just not wanted to be at home."

I exchanged some emails with the duo to find out more about how they used technology to understand their pet, and to finally decide who is more of a crazy cat lady, me or Paul.

So let's review the basic story. Caroline, you get in a very gnarly (homemade?!) airplane crash, which puts you in the hospital for a while and then the couch for a while longer. What happened to Tibby during that time?

Paul: I crashed my experimental plane. A month into my recuperation, my beloved, shy, skittish cat Tibby disappeared. Weeks went by, no sign of him. We were sure he was dead. Then five and a half weeks after he went missing, he returned. He was fine! I was so relieved he was home. But I also wanted to find out where he had gone. He was cheating on me. So Wendy and I decided to follow him using GPS.

MacNaughton: No, you decided to follow him using GPS.

Paul: Okay, true. I became obsessed with discovering his secret life. Partly this was the vast amount of painkillers I was on. Partly this was a normal cat owner reaction.

MacNaughton (using exaggerated air quotes): "Normal Cat Owner Reaction."

Seems right to me. but does using GPS to track your cat actually work? This seems like something cat owners everywhere would like to know.

Paul: GPS works great. I recommend it for all cat owners who want to know what their cats do when they're not there, if you can stand the ridicule from your friends. But interpreting the maps was the bigger challenge. You think a cat sleeps all day. Not true! We contacted a department at Stanford University that studies GPS to help us. They were as stumped as we were.

Maybe you can describe the process you used to clean up the noisy GPS data. You know, like go into greater technical depth in case someone (like myself, say) were to want to follow your lead.

MacNaughton: We used the best technical program i knew how to use: Photoshop. We had a total of 22 maps. i created layers out of each one, placed them on top of each other, and decreased the transparency so you could see them all at the same time. That revealed the most frequented areas (aka the most pink lines) and the obvious outliers. We were able to narrow down the area he was hanging out to an area of about three houses.

You stuck a camera on Tibby, but say in the book that he did not return many interesting pictures. Tell me you got at least one great photograph from the CatCam.

MacNaughton: We thought tibby was going to come home with a photo of a scary catnapper. What we got were some great photos of him staring at himself in the window.

Since you started talking about this book, have you heard any really awesome Found Cat stories? Like, what actually works if your cat is lost?

Paul: Microchips and Hope. There are stories of cats who travel 200 miles to get home or are reunited after 7 years.

Why does the Internet love cats?

Caroline, you depict yourself as the ultimate crazy cat lady in this book. Which is incorrect: I am the ultimate crazy cat lady. If there were a crazy cat lady tournament, or like a videogame where crazy cat ladies fought it out, what would your special cat lady move be? (And it can't be attaching GPS to your cat; I tried to follow mine with a drone, so it'd be a wash.)

Paul: I went to an animal communications class to try to ask Tibby where he had gone. I learned how to Animal Mind Meld. I got you beat, Madrigal.

MacNaughton: But Caroline, you got a drone AFTER you heard Alexis got a drone.

Paul: That's true. It's a draw.

This book seems to indicate that kitty lovers are made, not born. I, myself, converted from a dog person into a cat person in early 2012. Do you have any advice for cat people who might be in a relationship with non-cat people and want to catalyze the transformation process?

Paul: Maybe you should answer this one.

MacNaughton: Well, speaking from a previously non-pet person's point of view, if you're going to get into bed with a crazy cat person you're going to get into bed with their cat. Literally. Every time you pretend to love the cat in order to impress your potential mate, you are in fact falling a little more in love - with their cat. And soon, you will care more about sleeping with the cat than the person you now call "babe."

If you spend any time looking for records at flea markets and garage sales, you come to recognize a variety of common vintage records: Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Barbra Streisand, box collections of "best of" classical music, the band America.

And then there are the rare finds, the albums that you would never expect to exist. My latest find at the Alameda Point Antiques Fair falls into that category. It's a 1961 record by Reprise Records that I found yesterday digging through crates: X-15 and Other Sounds of Rockets, Missiles, and Jets.

I knew the X-15 was a spaceplane, the fastest manned aircraft ever built. But how could you make an album out of its flights?

"We are indebted to the abilities and perseverance of the many sound technicians who operated those [recording] machines, past and present. To the nameless front-line technicians who recorded the sounds of World War Ii aircraft under every condition (using wire, disc, film, and primitive tape machines), gratitude is expressed for the sounds they recorded under super-human stress," the back of the album intoned. "To their successors, we give our thanks for preserving these historic sounds while fulfilling their primary mission of recording higher and faster flight." Narrated with patriotic brio by disc jockey Johnny Magnus, the album, is "a sound-picture of the North American X-15, her contemporary companions, and her gallant predecessors."

And it became my possession for $2. And now yours, via SoundCloud, for nothing.

The X-15 was built by a company called North American Aviation, which is now a part of Boeing via a sale to Rockwell International. The recordings saw the light of day because one of the company's employees, Martin Halperin, "who recorded, supervised, or revivified the sounds from their original sources." According to the album cover, "The sound department of North American Aviation, Incorporated (Los Angeles Division) has one of the largest libraries of documented aerial sounds on earth."

Before you listen to the title track, let me tell you a couple more things about the X-15. The rocket-powered plane was carried into the sky by a B-52 bomber. Once untethered and under its own power, it could reach speeds of 4,500 miles per hour and altitudes over 100,000 feet before gliding back to Earth. "The X-15 paved the way for America's piloted space program, setting unofficial world records for flight speed and altitude along the way," NASA says. Also, Neil Armstrong flew one. Here's one being dropped from a B-52.

And here's the test flight audio from the X-15, introduced with a wonderful guarantee: "The voices are actual. All things are as they occurred."

Another truly fascinating track was recorded in the nosecone of an Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile! "As a passenger in the nosecone of Atlas intercontinental missile, you will be on top of the result of more than a million man-hours of work," Magnus narrates. "In the uninterrupted sequence which follows, actually recorded in the nosecone, you will hear the following: the countdown and launch, the separation of the first stage at burnout, the intermittent sounds of the guidance rockets, the separation of the second stage, the separation of the nose cone, and the sound of the guidance rockets as they guide you to your final destination. Now get ready for countdown and launch!" 

Why the nose cone? One, that's where a warhead would have been placed. Two, the initial test of the Atlas missile had problems with the nosecone, leading one military officer to ask, "What's the value of shooting a missile 9,000 miles if the warhead is worthless when it gets there?" So they might have wanted as much data from that part of the missile as possible. 

Still, I have no idea how they made this recording -- or rather, I can imagine how they made the recording, but not how they recovered it. 

Though the Atlas eventually got converted to civilian duty, lofting astronauts into orbit not bombs across the ocean, it's worth reflecting on what "your final destination" would have been at the time this recording was made: some Soviet city. 

Another fascinating section of the record runs through the American defense capabilities. We get to hear missiles like the Nike, Minuteman, and Titan ("which fills the land and sky with thunder").

But I particularly liked the description of the Sidewinder air-to-air missile as possessing an "electronic brain the size of a football." 

The Sidewinder was the subject of a lot of media attention. Lt. Commander Glenn A. Tierney liked to give colorful quotes about it as in one 1957 United Press clipping: "The sidewinder will chase [the enemy] all the way home and under the bed." 

Of course, the brain wasn't too smart. "Tierney said the Sidewinder, which has been an operational arm of the Navy since last October, would make the problem of plane identification extremely important because the 'brain' of the missile makes no distinction between wing markings." 

The idea that the reporter thought the missile might be capable of distinguishing between wing markings is worth pondering. I wonder if we could reliably do that kind of advanced machine vision now, let alone in 1957. "If you cut [a Sidewinder] loose at your wing man by mistake, the only thing you can do is holler: 'Sam, you've got four seconds to eject,'" Tierney noted.

The oldest recording on the album features a French scout airplane from World War I known as the Nieuport 28. You could outrace that plane in a good sports car. Yet the sound of its 200-horsepower engine fills me with false nostalgia. 

There are a variety of other recordings on the album: a sonic boom, an old-school AT-6 fighter, a 707 taking off, some air-to-ground weapons, and a rocket firing on a test sled.  

I've snipped them all into little SoundCloud pieces for you below. And embedded below that, I've put both sides of the record just as they came off my turntable and the back cover of the album for all your contextual needs.

Side A and Side B:

Some friends of ours have been volunteering at the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) in Otjiwarongo, Namibia, and they've been keeping a blog about this work. 

Today, I was looking through and spotted this fantastic picture, which fits (roughly) into my favorite animal pic category: animal friends, or as it should be pronounced animal fwends. They labeled the photograph, "One of these does not belong."

It's Friday. Enjoy.

Embedded in a complicated paper Megan Garber covered for us, we found a survey of 623 people's reasons for using Facebook. A few caveats: 71 percent of the respondents were students and 69 percent were female, so it's a specific population of users. The respondents were asked to rate how often they used Facebook for various reasons on a five-point scale. What comes in dead last? "To express my political and/or social views." First? "To see what my friends are up to." And that's followed closely by, "To relieve boredom."

The rock music stopped. The lights dimmed. People in boots and heels scurried back and forth whispering. The music returned and faded away again. The Facebook "f" was projected on four screens in front of the room. A TV cameraman stood on a platform in the middle of the room. There were people in blue Facebook T-shirts behind me, and seven rows of journalists ahead of me. There was a hush. Excitement.

The executives walked out from backstage: Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Chou, CEO of HTC, Ralph De La Vega of AT&T, and three other Facebook higher-ups. The non-reporters to my left broke into applause. The gaggle of Facebook PR people whooped over my right shoulder.

"Hey," Zuckerberg said. The crowd laughed. "Today we're finally going to talk about that Facebook phone. Or more accurately, we're going to talk about how you can turn your Android phone into a great, simple social device."

We had gathered here today in Menlo Park to hear about a new, very deep integration between Facebook and the Android operating system that, for those who download it (it'll be available next Friday), will completely redefine their interactions with their phones. 

"Home" works like this: Instead of a traditional lock screen, visual content from the News Feed will be pushed to users. Once you unlock it, you'll see that same content, but you'll be able to interact with it. The pictures will flip automatically or you can do that part yourself. All messages will pop *over* whatever you're doing on the phone in little circles Facebook calls (seriously) Chat Heads. 

Facebook has not built its own operating system, if we take operating system to mean a way of running the guts of a computer. But if an OS is a way of interacting with a computer -- an interface and a philosophy -- then this is most certainly Facebook's entry into the OS wars.

"The home screen is really the soul of your phone," Zuckerberg said. "You look at it 100 times a day." And so, naturally, Facebook is going for the soul. But the biggest play here is not technical or strategic, but rhetorical. Facebook wants to change the way people think about technologies.

The human-centric nature of Facebook's approach remained at the core of Zuckerberg's pitch throughout the event. "What if instead of our phones being designed around apps, we flip that around?" he asked. "So that we made it so that our phones were designed around people first."

And by people, of course, Zuckerberg means "Facebook friends." Throughout Zuckerberg's talk, people and Facebook friends were used interchangeably. And for Zuckerberg and his employees, I think this is technically true. For them, all the people they care about are not only on Facebook, but active users who devote time and resources to building digital streams that are legible to other people as their lives.

So, while you can read the Facebook phone announcement as the story of the company's deeper integration with Google's Android operating system, I also read Facebook Home as a story of the integration that Facebook's employees have with their own product. And they'd like for the rest of the world to experience what they do. 

Really what I mean the business and accounting category of ROW, or Rest of World. With billions of people about to make the jump into Internetted life with a smartphone, not a computer, the very definition of 'computing,' is up for grabs.

"For more than 30 years, computers have mostly been about tasks. They were too expensive, clunky and hard to use for you to want to use them for much else," Zuckerberg said. "The modern computing device," by which he meant mostly phones, "is for making us more connected, more social, and more aware. And Home, by putting people first and then apps, by flipping the order, is one of the many small but meaningful changes with technology in time."

So Home is a move for the soul not just of the phone, but of the computer. "The very definition of what a computer is and what it should be [has not been decided], and when it is, I think a lot of that definition is going to be about people-first [i.e. Facebook friends first]," Zuckerberg said.

(Note the Borg Complex language: "is going to be about" rather than "we're trying to make be about.")

Why do I think it is so important not to allow Zuckerberg to redefine "people" as "Facebook friends"? Because we need to be able to evaluate this technology's impact very specifically within Facebook's culture and aims. 

Facebook Home is not a story about "making the world more open and connected," in general. This a story about Facebook "making the world more open and connected," with all the specific definitions the company brings to those ideas.

It's in that context, that you see industry watchers like Om Malik of GigaOm tweeting things like, "I am seriously concerned about Facebook Home and privacy challenges. They will know when we are sleeping. Where we live. Be careful," and Kashmir Hill, Forbes' privacy reporter, tweeting things like, "Facebook has come up with an excellent way to get people to have Facebook running on their phones all the time, collecting lots of GPS info."

Facebook does allow people to do things that they love to do. And that's what's great about the product. But it tries to hide the tradeoffs. 

 While Zuckerberg constantly calls on our desire to be social as a way of justifying the importance of Facebook, he refuses to think past the idea that Facebook is simply a tool for connecting with other people. It is a tool -- and that tool structure the way people experience each other. "There's this analogy where technology is a tool... one way I think about Facebook is that it augments your social sense," Zuckerberg said. "Humans are social."

It's not that I think Facebook communications are inferior to other ones, whether that's face-to-face, Twitter, talking on the phone, or standard text messaging. That's not the point. The point is that they are *not the same* as these other things.

As for the actual product itself, Facebook Home looks nice. It's pretty. The interface works in ways that will be easy to learn and understand. If it works as demo'd, I agree with Zuckerberg that it will be "the best version of Facebook there is."

Will it be worth opening up every part of your phone interaction to Facebook in order to access that experience? Do you want your definition of a computer to center on Facebook Friends and the limited et of actions you can take with them? I can't answer that for you, but I can say that it is a tradeoff, and the more you think about it, the better.

On the one hand, Zuckerberg will say, "Chat Heads give you this immediate personal connection to the people you care about." He'll then note, with a chuckle that's echoed by the audience, "The most fun thing is when you're done with them" -- that is to say these Chat Heads that are supposed to represent people -- "you just throw them away at the bottom."

Why take this chuckability seriously? Well, I'm only taking Facebook's ambitions seriously. They want these representations to *be* our friends. And then they have made throwing them away easy and fun, even going to the length to build realistic physics into the action.

Sure, it's fun. But it's also callow. 

Perhaps the public's obsession with zombies can be refracted from horror movies and towards health issues, suggests a new paper in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. 

The hope is that zombies can do for public health awareness what they did for Jane Austen: tack on some zombies and suddenly boring things turn exciting (see: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies*).

Rabies awareness, in particular, could benefit from the shambling hordes -- apparently because of the similarities between the actual symptoms of rabies and the fictional symptoms of zombies. "Zombie popularity may be a perfect opportunity to increase awareness of rabies," the UC Irvine team lead by Brandon Brown wrote.

The most prominent resemblance between those afflicted with rabies and zombiism begins at the mouth; both ailments are primarily transmitted through biting. While the pathogenesis for zombification is less consistent, rabies spreads through infected saliva entering the body. In addition, victims indicate infected status with increased production of fluid from the mouth; in the case of rabies, increased salivation occurs to improve chances of transmission. Rabies control in practice may be similar to hypothetical control of zombie outbreaks. For example, in 2008, Indonesian officials in Bali killed roughly 50,000 dogs in 5 days after an outbreak of rabies. This sparked a great deal of controversy, leading to the primary alternative of mass vaccination. If a zombie apocalypse were to occur, surviving humans might not have the capacity for mass vaccination. The sole option may be to kill the undead for human survival; however, the ethics of destroying something that was once human might be called into question.

And the paper draws on the successful outreach the Centers for Disease Control made in linking reports of zombie-ism to disaster preparedness to show that public health researchers can ride weird news to rech a greater audience. Zombies can be used as a thought experiment to probe the ethical dimensions of public health responses to disease outbreaks.

Or as the researchers put it, "We propose ... building on the popularity of zombies to increase public health awareness in the general public, and explore additional issues that may have not been considered in the past, such as infection control, mental health issues, ethics of disease, and bioterrorism potential."

* Actually, I love Jane Austen. Her narratorial control, the way she weaves subjectivities together, is subtle and thrilling. (And politically interesting.)