Alexis C. Madrigal

Our brains can't forecast what the technologies of tomorrow will do with the information we are uploading today.

Face.com

Here's a problem with uploading your life into the cloud: you're sending it Internetward with an understanding of today's technologies -- and tomorrow always comes.

So, you upload photos to Facebook thinking about how easy it is for your friends and family to see them. You are not thinking about people a year or two years down the line being able to search through every photo you've ever uploaded by face, not name.

Yet that's the future that we're steadily marching towards. Last week, Facebook acquired the facial-recognition software company Face.com. Of course, Facebook had already been working with the company, and a Face.com app had long been available. But the acquisition signals a deeper integration between a facial-recognition technology company and social network with the largest repository of photos of people in the world.

This is just another step to a world in which digital content of all types -- not just text -- is searchable. Take a look at where Google has been moving YouTube, steadily increasing the ability to auto-caption videos uploaded to the site. How long will it be before we hear about Google or another large video repository acquiring a transcription service like dotSUB? How long after that will Google, Facebook, or Microsoft acquire Betaface, a "facial recognition-based media indexing platform for searching and monetizing multimedia content" or eyealike, which bills itself as at "the forefront of visual-based search"?

These are 'when' questions, not 'if' questions. The technologies are improving and companies that have the incentive to deploy them will use them. That's the logic of an advertising-based, user-generated web. The playing field must be tilted towards accessibility, which is to say reach, and that means making as much as possible searchable either within a walled garden (Facebook) or on the open web (Google).

There is so much latent information in what we've uploaded or said on social networks. The technologies are under development to unlock it, but our brains can't forecast what that will mean for our privacy.

I'm reminded of the one-liner that Alexia Tsotsis (who is Internet famous for something else today) delivered a couple years ago:

"We'd have lived our lives differently if we had known they would one day be searchable."

Or maybe I'd rephrase it: "We won't live our lives different if they will only will be searchable some day."

It's as if Hemingway were an astronaut about to descend through the Earth's atmosphere in a Russian transport vehicle.

The globe's astronauts are prolific social media users, particularly Twitter. Their position in orbit around the earth makes even their "this is what I had for breakfast" tweets piquant. So I've seen my fair share of good stuff shared from space. But today, the Dutch astronaut André Kuipers snapped the photo you see above and wrote this little poem:

I will return in this Soyuz. From 28.000 to 0 km/h. We sit in the middle section. The rest will burn up.

That's Hemingway from space, as far as I'm concerned. Also, that last line should be the title of a forthcoming book by someone; stick any subtitle on that thing and it's a surefire New York Times bestseller.

Facebook's desire for efficiency means democracy is out and technocratic, developer-king rule is in.

Reuters/FakeTV

Let's stipulate that Facebook is not a country, that real governments fulfill many more functions, and that people are not citizens of their social networks.

Nonetheless, 900 million human beings do something like live in the blue-and-white virtual space of the world's largest structured web of people. And those people get into disputes that they expect to be adjudicated. They have this expectation in part because Facebook has long said it wants to create a safe environment for connecting with other people. (How else can you get people to be "more open and connected"?) But people also want someone to be in charge, they want an authority to whom they can appeal if some other person is being a jerk.

Except in this case, the someone really is a corporate person. So when you report something or someone reports something of yours, it is Facebook that makes the decision about what's been posted, even if we know that somewhere down the line, some human being has to embody the corporate we, if only for long enough to click a button.

Any individual decision made by Facebook's team -- like taking down this photo of a gay couple kissing -- is easy to question. Ars Technica's Ken Fisher detailed a whole bunch of one-off problems that people have encountered with Facebook's reporting system. In each, there is an aggrieved party, but we're only hearing one side of the conflict when these problems bubble up. Across many single events, you have two people (or entities like businesses) with conflicting desires. This is a classic case where you need some sort of government.

It's not hard to imagine making one or 20 or even 200 decisions about photographs or status updates in a week, but it's mindboggling to consider that Facebook has to process 2 million reports per week, and that's not including simple "mark as spam" messages.

How do you design a system to deal with that workload? I spoke with James Mitchell, who helms what Facebook calls "site integrity" within its user-operations department, and Jud Hoffman, the company's global policy manager about the reporting process. They are the architects of Facebook's technocracy.

"The amount of thought and debate that goes into the process of creating and managing these rules is not that different from a legislative and judicial process all rolled up into one," Hoffman, a lawyer, told me. "And James has the executive/judicial element. I don't think it is a stretch to think about this in a governance context, but it's a different form and we take it really, really seriously."

The key step, Mitchell told me, was to put some structure into the reporting process. Back when he started in 2006, there wasn't any form to complaints from users. That meant there was a massive queue of undifferentiated problems. So, he and his team started to think about what kinds of problems they received and created categories of problems, which they refined over time.

That allows the reports to be channeled through a complex set of processes and teams so that they arrive in front of human beings or computers that know what to do with them.

Facebook has revealed this infrastructure for the first time today. It's the product of more than five years of work by several teams within Facebook, who have worked to make the process of handling this flood of user inquiries as efficient as possible. (Click the graphic to enlarge it.)

At the end of many of these reporting lines, there's a person who has to make a decision about the user's message. Some of these decisions are binary -- Does this photograph contain nudity? -- and those are generally outsourced to teams that can apply simple and rigorous formulas such as asking, "Is this person naked?" Other decisions are complex in ways that make machines very good at dealing with them. (For example, there are more than 50 signals that Facebook's algorithms look at to determine whether a profile is spam, and the automated responses are more accurate than human ones would be.)

But the bulk of the reports are fielded by a faceless team of several hundred Facebook employees in Mountain View, Austin, Dublin, and Hyderabad. These people and the tools they've built have become the de facto legislators, bureaucrats, police, and judges of the quasi-nation of Facebook. Some decisions they make impact hundreds of millions of people in some small way; other decisions will change some small number of people's lives in a big way.

What's fascinating to me is that Facebook has essentially recreated a government bureaucracy complete with regulators and law enforcement, but optimized for totally different values than traditional governments. Instead of a constitution, Facebook has the dual missions of making "the world more open and connected" and keeping users on its site by minimizing their negative experiences. Above all, Facebook's solution to all governance problems have to be designed for extreme efficiency at scale.

As stipulated above, real-world governments have to fulfill all kinds of functions aside from disputes between citizens, but just look at the difference in scale between Facebook's government and Palo Alto's government. Palo Alto has roughly 65,000 residents and 617 full-time employees. Facebook has 900 million "residents" and a few hundred bureaucrats who make all the content decisions.

Facebook's desire for efficiency means democracy is out and technocratic, developer-king rule is in. People don't get to vote on the rules, and even when Facebook offered its users the opportunity to vote on a new privacy policy last week, voter turnout was 0.038 percent. People know that Facebook controls a large slice of their digital lives, but they don't have a sense of digital citizenship. And that apathy gives Facebook's technocracy a chance to succeed where its historical antecedents did not.

The original technocrats were a group of thinkers and engineers in the 1930s who revived Plato's dream of the philosopher-king, but with a machine-age spin. Led by Thorstein Veblen, Howard Scott and M. King Hubbert, they advocated not rule by the people or the monarchy or the dictator, but by the engineers. The engineers and scientists would rule rationally and impartially. They would create a Technocracy that functioned like clockwork and ensured the productivity of all was efficiently distributed. They worked out a whole system by which the North American continent would be ruled with functional sequences that would allow the Continental Director to get things done.

Technocracy, as originally conceived, was explicitly not democratic. Its proponents did not want popular rule; they wanted rule by a knowledgeable elite who would make good decisions. And maybe they would have, but there was one big problem. Few people found the general vision of surrendering their political power to engineers all that appealing.

With Facebook, people seem to care much more about individual decisions that Facebook makes than the existence of the ultraefficient technocratic system. They are not challenging the principles or values of the system, so much as wanting them to be applied quickly to resolve their particular dispute. And desire for speed, of course, drives the efficiency-first mindset that makes it hard to deal with nuanced problems. None of the accusations leveled at Facebook's administrative system read to me like criticisms of its core structure.

I mean, of course Facebook's governance isn't perfect. Of course the people who run it make mistakes, mistakes that they use every bit of data to squeeze out of the system. These problems are a consequence of running our social lives through a centralized, corporate social network with a set of rather staid goals: openness, connectedness, and the minimization of negative experiences. Given these goals, Facebook has come to a rational set of structures for dealing with social problems within its walled garden. It is a gated community with some CCRs and if you don't like it ... Well, there's always Brooklyn!

That is to say, the real question is whether Facebook's goals -- and the systems it uses to promote them -- reflect one's own desires. Do you want a clean, well-lighted place that works without any effort on your part? If so, Facebook has the governance structure for you. You want a more permissive place with fewer rules? Allow me to introduce you to 4chan.

There's a lot more to Google's Knowledge Graph than might be apparent from what you see in a casual search.

The ugly truth is that computers don't know anything. They have no common sense.

This idea had been circulating in Metaweb co-founder John Giannandrea's head since 1997 when he was working at Netscape and thinking about how to reveal what you did not know you didn't know on the web. If you were looking at search results for a hiking trail, say, what other hiking trails might you look at? Giannandrea called it "going sideways through the web," and he loved the idea, even if he couldn't execute it back then.

Years later, in 2005, Giannandrea teamed up with Danny Hillis and Robert Cook to cofound Metaweb, which had a simple premise: "What if we could make a catalog of all the stuff our computer should know?" Giannandrea told me in a recent interview. "We were interested in building a model of the world. Our computers are remarkably dumb about the stuff that we take for granted. You learn about stuff. You have some context for understanding. Our computers don't work that way because we don't have any loaded context."

With remarkable confidence (hubris?), he and the other founders said to themselves, "Teaching computers all the discrete stuff in the world seems like it should be doable," so they set out to make a machine-readable catalog of everything in the world.

Last month, their project was finally let loose into the wild as the Google Knowledge Graph, which you now see showing up in your search results on the right of your screen. But there's a lot more to the creation of the Knowledge Graph than might be apparent from using it in casual searches.

This is one of those human knowledge projects that is ridiculous in scope and possibly in impact. And yet when it gets turned into a consumer product, all we see is a useful module for figuring out Tom Cruise's height more quickly. In principle, this is both good and bad. It's good because technology should serve human needs and we shouldn't worship the technology itself. It's bad because it's easy to miss out on the importance of the infrastructure and ideology that are going to increasingly inform the way Google responds to search requests. And given that Google is many people's default portal to the world of information, even a subtle change in the company's toolset is worth considering.

And that's how I found myself on the phone with John Giannandrea discussing mojitos and semantic graphs. "Take the drink called the mojito," he said. "Mojito has ingredients and mint, rum, ice. We'll create a catalog entry for that entity for that human concept 'mojito' and then we'll create a connection between the mojito and its ingredients." The key difference between their catalog and a standard database is that the connection between the mojito and mint is itself an entity, an entity that says, "This thing is an ingredient in this other thing." The edge between the two nouns contains meaning and that makes all the difference. "We can talk about the representation of knowledge with the knowledge itself," Giannandrea said. Whoa, Meta! I thought. Hence, Metaweb.

But there's at least one problem. If you're going to build a catalog of all common sense things in the world, where do you start? The answer was simply, "Somewhere." They added bodies of water and bridges, which go over bodies of water, and highways which the bridges are a part of, and the length of those highways and the states through which the highways run, and the capitols of those states, and the populations of those capitols, and the population of the United States, and the population of every country in the world, and the dates in which those countries were founded, and so on and so forth and so on and so forth.

They built tools to import data from other sources, so that if they got a database from the French cheese association, they could crank out the sodium levels in those cheese and also tell you a bit about the regions they came from.

After five long years, they had 12 million objects in the database. And they were purchased by Google. In the first year after the acquisition, they had 25 million things. What did Google bring to the acquisition, aside from money? Data, of course, of a very specific kind. Before, they were just guessing at what people might want to know (cheese, rivers, highways, etc). With Google's search data, they *know* what users are after, so they can go about finding and making that information available.

With Google's help, their database has grown rapidly to over 500 million items objects. That's orders of magnitude larger than previous attempts to educate artificial intelligences like the Cyc project out of the University of Texas. (Though it should be noted that Cyc has some capabilities that the Knowledge Graph does not.)

In the end, what is most significant to Giannandrea is that "we're taking a baby step in teaching all our computers at Google something about our human world." As for what comes next, he can't say, but the idea is that it will become a resource that all Google developers can call on, the core of common sense at the center of Google's vast web.

The open-secret weapon of magazine cover models everywhere can now be yours for just $59.99.

You never have to look bad in a photograph again. Seriously. You may look like a cyborg or a mannequin, but you'll never look old or blemished if you don't want to. Let me explain.

A few days ago, I got a random PR email offering me a trial of an airbrushing software package called, Portrait Professional Studio. Now, we get a lot of these kinds of offers, but this one was intriguing. Airbrushing is a gift that used to exist solely in the offices of Vogue, and here these people were offering this elite reality-distortion mechanism to the hoi polloi?! I couldn't wait to get my hands on it and test it out.

I didn't have a great portrait of myself to hand, so I went to the Reuters archive and downloaded candid shots of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. I decided to put Romney through the airbrusher first.

The process was simple. The software leads you through a series of steps in which I identified Romney's facial features ("Click on the left corner of the left eye of your subject," "Click on the tip of your subject's nose"). After I finished -- the whole thing took two minutes -- the software created a map (which I could tweak) of the Romney's face.

The map allows you to "edit" individual facial features, making his nose thinner or his eyes brighter, etc. But I wanted the automagic solution. So, I simply selected a preset profile from a drop-down box: "Man 50+ Glamorous." Then I ran through the same process with the president. You can see the results of this three-minute experiment above. While Obama looks roughly the same, Mitt Romney goes from a well-maintained older dude to a pretty dashing younger man. I'd say it shaved 10 years off of him, which is almost enough to move him from Nixon to Kennedy.

Of course, this software not perfect. Running people through this magical machine tends to make them look a little bit weird, too smooth. It's like approaching the uncanny valley from the other side, dehumaning humans. And this provides a rather depressing conclusion to the long-running saga over airbrushing on magazine's covers. Instead of making the people on magazine covers look more like Homo sapiens, we're going to make ourselves look more like the creatures on magazine covers.

Yet, I'm betting that what is easy to deride in/on principle is difficult to turn down if it's made available to you. People will use this tool to make themselves look good. And if airbrushing your Facebook photo opens the gap between real humans and their likenesses a teensy bit wider, so be it! At least you'll look good.

Portrait Professional Studio retails for $60.

The way the Border Patrol created its drone-surveillance program practically guaranteed ad-hoc mission creep.

A few years ago, the Border Patrol started buying unarmed Predator drones. By the end of 2011, they had 10 of these $18 million machines, and very little idea of what exactly they wanted to do with them.

That's my takeaway from a new report released by the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security. The drones only flew 37 percent as often as they were supposed to, logging 3,909 hours in the air in a 12-month period that should have seen them in the air for more than 10,000 hours.

One big problem, according to the report, is that there weren't enough ground stations and support. This is like signing an expensive free-agent running back but forgetting you need offensive linemen. Drones are sexy! The ground control stations that run the drones, not so much.

In essence, Border Patrol has a management problem, the inspector says:

[Customs and Border Patrol] had not adequately planned resources needed to support its current unmanned aircraft inventory... This approach places CBP at risk of having invested substantial resources in a program that underutilizes resources and limits its ability to achieve Office of Air and Marine mission goals. CBP needs to improve planning of its unmanned aircraft system program to address its level of operation, program funding, and resource requirements, along with stakeholder needs.

This is a problem for their management, but I see a bigger problem embedded in how CBP went about its drone purchasing. In buying more drones than they knew how to fly or had a need for, they nearly guaranteed that there would be mission creep. I mean, take a look at the various kinds of missions they've flown:

• Provided NOAA with videos of dams, bridges, levees, and riverbeds where flooding occurred or was threatened;
• Provided FEMA with video/radar images of flooding;
• Provided surveillance over a suspected smuggler's tunnel, which yielded information that, according to an ICE representative, would have required many cars and agents to obtain;
• Provided radar mapping, or overlying radar images taken a few days apart, to show changes in location of flooding, allowing the National Guard to deploy high-water vehicles and sandbags to where they were most needed;
• Participated in joint efforts with the U.S. Army to leverage capabilities of unmanned aircraft and test new technology; and

Not that these are bad things, but not all of them have a ton to do with customs or border patrol. In fact, no process exists for how to organize requests from outside agencies, as the inspector noted:

CBP's planning has not adequately addressed coordination and support of stakeholders. Although CBP identified stakeholders and has flown missions on their behalf, it has not implemented a formal process for stakeholders to submit mission requests and has not implemented a formal procedure to determine how mission requests are prioritized. It also does not have agreements with exterior stakeholders for reimbursement of mission costs.

So, to sum it up, Border Patrol bought too many expensive surveillance drones for use within our country and then lent their services out to other agencies without any formal process for the submission of those requests. This seems to virtually guarantee that the drones will be used in ways that were not anticipated by the Congress that gave CBP the money to purchase these machines.

An investor makes a strong argument that screens are too small and people are too distracted for mobile marketing to ever be effective.

Reuters

There's a common wisdom among start-up watchers like Mary Meeker or the guys at Business Insider that mobile phone advertising is a HUGE OPPORTUNITY. That's because people are spending a lot of time on their phones and very little advertising revenue is being generated during those hours. By the iron laws of the universe, where the people spend time, advertising dollars will follow. 

But there is another possibility, of course. It could be that advertising is simply inimical to the smartphone experience. In a great post at Monday Note, investor Jean-Louis Gassée explores this hypothetical and comes away convinced. The screens are too small and people are too distracted to pay any attention to the ads on their phones. And the seeming virtues of location-based ads don't seem that way to the people who'd be receiving them. Mobile ads just aren't going to work, Gassée concludes:

If the industry hasn't cracked the mobile advertising code after five years of energetic and skillful work it's because there is no code to crack. Together, the small screen, the different attention modes, the growing concerns about privacy create an insurmountable obstacle.

The "$20B Opportunity" is a mirage.

This would be a huge problem for just about every company that depends on Internet advertising. Most of them/us are seeing increased mobile usage, which means less and less of the time people spend with their brands is monetizable at the (already paltry) rates they'd come to expect on the web. Also don't forget that hundreds of millions of people in the developing world primarily access the Internet through their phones. So, it's not impossible that the mobile revolution may actually represent a doomsday for free ad-supported content and services.

To whom it may concern: an off button should also be an on button.



Somewhere in a low-slung office park with mirrored windows, Person X had an idea about how to make a better remote control.

Tucking in his golf shirt, this designer or engineer or inventor marched into his manager's office, rapped loudly on the door frame, and announced, "I've solved the on-off button problem, sir."

"The on-off button problem?" the manager responded, looking up from his General Tso's chicken. He hadn't heard of such a problem, but it was plausible that such a problem existed.
And that he should know about it.

"Yes!" Person X shouted. "People shouldn't have to think about whether their device is on or off! That's an anachronism! What is this, the 20th century? They should pick up the remote and simply see a touchscreen that says, 'Watch TV.' Just think about it: They don't want to turn a device on, they want to watch TV. Let's give them what they want."

Person X handed his manager a sketch he'd drawn on the back of a TPS report cover. "THIS," he said.

"This," the superior responded, "This is brilliant. Just touch what you want to do. This is the end of the on-button era!" The manager quickly dashed off an email up the chain, which he figured would forever establish his reputation as an incubator of creative people and ideas.


I've obviously made up the names, people, and dialog, but this bizarre logic is real. Look at this remote for the television where I'm staying this week. That upper-left button, which is in precisely the same place as all previous on-off buttons on similar remotes and features the icon that means 'power,' will not turn the television on. Someone stripped out the standard on function of the button, which has existed for decades.

Why? I HAVE NO IDEA. It's just another example of a solution to a problem that didn't exist in our overinnovation nation.

An apocalyptic future trajectory for the world, as reflected in a beloved old comptuer game.

I grew up playing the computer game Civilization and its successors. The games provide kids and adults alike with a playable introduction to world history: You come up with metallurgy, invent religions, discover the forms of government, war against neighboring countries, etcetera.

When I was a kid, it felt like some expansive History of All Time, except that it was a turn-based computer strategy computer game. Which is why a 10-year game of Civilization II has struck a chord around the Internet today: if you could learn a history of western civ from the game, then its vision of the future feels oddly significant.

Here's what happened. Some human being kept playing the same game for a decade and then posted screenshots to Reddit along with a narrative explanation of where the gameworld stands. Lycerius, the user, begins his history of the future:

• The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.

• There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.

He goes on to note all the awful things happening in the world. But what's most amazing is that he really wants to end the war and bring the world back.

"My goal for the next few years is to try and end the war and thus use the engineers to clear swamps and fallout so that farming may resume. I want to rebuild the world," he concludes. "But I'm not sure how. If any of you old Civ II players have any advice, I'm listening."

Now, of course, the Reddit community has decided to help him find ways to end the war. They've started up a new discussion thread solely dedicated to the topic: /r/theeternalwar. We look forward to world peace.

A new art expedition aims to record qualitative and quantitative data with a custom-built set of tools on a year of trips through some of the most fascinating places in America.

Venue's graphic treatment was created by Atley Kasky and Keith Scharwath of Outpost.

I want to introduce you to an incredible new project that we'll be featuring here on The Atlantic over the next year. It's an art roadshow, an exploration of America, a traveling pop-up installation, and a data-logging machine. It's called Venue and it's one of the most exciting projects I've seen in years and years. For me, it recalls the almost-reckless experimentation of the media collective Ant Farm, which I think anticipated our strange and wonderful Internet. But what makes Venue special is that it is not nostalgic or a reconstitution of previous attempts to document what this continent is. This is something new and weird and brilliant.

Let me tell you about it.

Technically, Venue is a project of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, Future Plural, and Columbia University GSAPP's Studio-X NYC.

Practically, it is the brainchild of Nicola Twilley (of Edible Geography) and Geoff Manaugh (of BLDGBLOG), partners who co-direct Studio-X NYC. In different phases, Twilley and Manaugh are going to travel the country taking down different kinds of data. They'll be interviewing people and doing public events and taking different types of measurements with various custom-designed instruments.

In an interview with Wired, Nicola called their mission to take "a cultural core sample." Geoff compared it to the surveying expeditions of yore, which set out into some kind of unknown and turned it into information through instruments, trigonometry, and grit.

But it's easier to show you than tell you about it because I doubt you'll have seen anything like this expedition. I know I haven't.

Up first, we see their very low-frequency antenna, which they built from a kit developed by Stephen McGreevy with Christopher Woebken's design. The antenna captures the sounds of spaceweather, the nice name for the environmental conditions created by the sun casting particles at the Earth. As Geoff told me, "You can walk right up to the tripod, put on green headphones, and zone out to the otherworldly whistles and pops of the Earth's magnetosphere."

The Venue VLF (Nicola Twilley).

This here is a special device called a cyanometer. It measures the blueness of the sky:

This is Nicola's design based on the Institute for General Theory's. This is how it works:

The cyanometer is an incredible piece of graphic design: various shades of blue, or cyan, are arranged in a square that's then held up to the sky. With the center of the paper cut out, you can gauge by direct approximation which shade of cyan matches the sky above--from overcast white to cloudless summer blue--and the results, equal parts poetic and scientific, will be noted in our logbooks.

They won't solely be measuring the landscapes they're crossing either. They'll also be introducing their own interventions. In particular, the duo is packing a radar reflector designed to be the opposite of stealthy. Here's Geoff again:

While radar profiles are usually seen as something to reduce or minimize in the pursuit of stealth, it's interesting to look in the opposite direction, at objects that maximize their own radar reflectivity and thus punch above their weight, so to speak, in the landscape. We're pretty captivated by the idea of objects that, when introduced into otherwise barren, apparently empty terrains, produce outsize results when seen through radar; you can imagine a series of all but invisible objects that nonetheless ping back at near-Godzilla scales, their radar profiles creating a kind of parallel landscape nested inside the one you can actually see. 

And outside of their custom instruments, they'll have a standard crazy scientist's cabinet of wonders:

• A Sony camcorder
• Two DSLRs (one Nikon, one Canon!),
• A Marantz audio recorder with two Shure microphones (according to the Museum's executive director, we have the exact model used by Mick Jagger)--
• Some bonus Lomo film cameras (a super wide-angle panoramic Sprocket Rocket and their 360 Spinner)
• A wind sock
• Munsell soil color charts
• Some iPhone apps (an ambient noise meter and an altimeter)
• A Gaussmeter (for measuring magnetic fields)
• A pocket projector (for slide shows and screenings)
• A matched pair of infrared and normal cameras plus helium balloon for aerial surveys and vegetation analysis from the Public Laboratory.   

And two-thirds of American counties had no bookstore at all.

Some Ivy League graduates feeling superior, 1939 (New York Public Library).

I'm reading a fascinating book called Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America, published in 1984 by the popular historian Kenneth C. Davis. I picked it up because many of the changes that social media and the Internet are supposed to have wrought on culture are ascribed to the rise of the paperback in this book.There's all this talk in the book about "the Paperback Revolution" that "enabled American writers to find American readers by the millions" among the "Paperback Generation." Mass-market paperbacks, we're told, "made an enormous contribution to our social, cultural, educational, and literary life."

I haven't gotten far enough along in the book to tell you how Davis argues the story, but early in the book, I was absolutely dumbfounded by his description of the publishing business in 1931. He draws on a "landmark survey of publishing practices" carried out by one Orin H. Cheney, a banker, as a service to the National Association of Book Publishers.

Among the normal complaints about book publishers selection processes, we find this staggering stat about the retail business of selling books (emphasis added).

"In the entire country, there were only some four thousand places where a book could be purchased, and most of these were gift shops and stationary stores that carried only a few popular novels," Davis writes. "In reality, there were but five hundred or so legitimate bookstores that warranted regular visits from publishers' salesmen (and in 1931 they were all men). Of these five hundred, most were refined, old-fashioned 'carriage trade' stores catering to an elite clientele in the nation's twelve largest cities."

Furthermore, two-thirds of American counties -- 66 percent! -- had exactly 0 bookstores. It was a relatively tiny business centered in the urban areas of the country. Did some great books come out back then? Of course! But they were aimed only at the tiny percentage of the country that was visible to publishers of the time: sophisticated urban elites. It wasn't that people couldn't read; by 1940, UNESCO estimated that 95 percent of adults in America were literate. No, it's just that the vast majority of adults were not considered to be part of the cultural enterprise of book publishing. People read stuff (the paper, the Bible, comic books), just not what the publishers were putting out.

It's my contention -- and I've made this point in other ways -- that when people look at the sprawling mess of Internet publishing and decide that the quality of writing has declined, they are comparing apples to oranges.

They're taking the most elite offerings that could be imagined, which were based on the tastes of the most educated people in 12 cities, and comparing them to the now-visible reading habits of everyone on the Internet. That's just not a good way to draw smart conclusions about the relationship between technology and culture. Perhaps "the Internet" has made writing worse, but you'd never prove it by comparing F. Scott Fitzgerald to Thought Catalog.

Despite companies' hamfisted, male-focused marketing efforts, women are the dominant users of a wide variety of new technologies.

A young man contemplating his decreasing significance on the world stage (Shutterstock/Tracy Whiteside).

If you're a man between the ages of 18 and 35, you used to be tech industry's most coveted prize. You were the one who decided what products failed and what products succeeded. That's why companies like Asus tweet ridiculous, sexist stuff. That's one reason why less than 10 percent of venture capital-backed companies have female founders and there is a massive gender gap in tech. The technology industry's focus on men is reflexive and all too intuitive to the men who run the companies. And it's built on a plain wrong reading of the reality of the market.

I hate to tell you/us, but we're not as important as we thought. The body of evidence amassed by Intel researcher Genevieve Bell indisputably shows that men's role in technology adoption continues to be overstated. Here's a summary she gave of her work in a "Big Ideas" talk last month at Australia's Radio National:

It turns out women are our new lead adopters. When you look at internet usage, it turns out women in Western countries use the internet 17 percent more every month than their male counterparts. Women are more likely to be using the mobile phones they own, they spend more time talking on them, they spend more time using location-based services. But they also spend more time sending text messages. Women are the fastest growing and largest users on Skype, and that's mostly younger women. Women are the fastest category and biggest users on every social networking site with the exception of LinkedIn. Women are the vast majority owners of all internet enabled devices--readers, healthcare devices, GPS--that whole bundle of technology is mostly owned by women.

Sit with this for a minute. Let me break out the categories where women are leading tech adoption:

• Internet usage
• Mobile phone voice usage
• Mobile phone location-based services
• Text messaging
• Skype
• Every social networking site aside from LinkedIn
• All Internet-enabled devices
  
• E-readers
• Health-care devices
• GPS

Also, because women still are the primary caretakers of children in many places, guess who controls which gadgets the young male and female members of the family get to purchase or even use? More from Bell:

Furthermore, most consumers don't own devices just by themselves, those devices exist within social networks. Consumers share devices in families, so that a mobile phone is owned by multiple people, a laptop is used by multiple people, an email account is used by multiple people.

All this to say: there are clear business reasons for technology companies to focus their efforts on women. But few do. In fact, I'd contend that women are using these technologies despite the advertising and ethos of many tech and Internet companies.

Even advertisements that nominally target both genders sometimes do so in ways that are subtly sexist. Take this analysis by Emma Nicoletti of Apple's ads introducing Facetime, which featured a series of four vignettes.

"Two are a man reassuring a woman regarding her looks, one is about a woman procreating, and one doesn't have a woman in it at all," Nicoletti wrote. "Was the assumption that we, the female iPhone consumers, would think 'well would you look at that. If I buy an iPhone, my boyfriend/husband/whoever will be there for me when I need him! And maybe even tell me my hair looks cute!'? If so, did they think that that would be enough? It's not, Apple."

But let's be fair here: Apple's done better than most. Their ads rarely make gender-specific appeals and the iPhone audience is now admirably balanced, appealing nearly equally to men and women. Nintendo, too, has had great success with products that men and women both alike, effectively doubling their addressable market. It's the great mass of other tech companies that seem to cater almost exclusively to a marketer's fantasy of a young man's interests: machines, scantily clad ladies, etc. At this week's E3 conference or January's Consumer Electronics Show, there really are still "booth babes" who are paid to hang around in revealing clothing chatting up the male nerds.

How can an industry get its market so wrong?

One huge reason is the relative lack of women at major venture capital firms, startups, electronics makers, and Internet companies. The other huge reason is the historical erasure of women's roles in the history of technology, as Xeni Jardin pointed out in response to a New York Times article that overemphasized the role men have played in the creation of the Internet. When you look around, it *seems* as if technology is by and for dudes, but the reality is much more complicated than that.

But even if you are the biggest sexist in Menlo Park, even if you believe that only men create technology, even if you are real-life Jack Donaghy hell bent on profits alone, you'd still want to change your approach to women as technology consumers. Follow the money and follow the users: you'll find yourself in a female-dominated landscape.

Bell concludes:

So it turns out if you want to find out what the future looks like, you should be asking women. And just before you think that means you should be asking 18-year-old women, it actually turns out the majority of technology users are women in their 40s, 50s and 60s. So if you wanted to know what the future looks like, those turn out to be the heaviest users of the most successful and most popular technologies on the planet as we speak.

Science shows that looking at cute things makes your fine motor skills a little better.

The Puppy Cam is back. Its annual relaunch with a new set of shiba inu babies has become like the budding of the trees in Central Park, a milestone of another year passed on the Internet.

If you don't remember it, the puppy cam was and is a livestream of shiba inu puppies growing up. Tens of millions of people watched the last few go-rounds. Time wrote them up. The New York Times wrote them up. And for good reason.

The puppy cam, when it launched in 2008, and through its subsequent incarnations, is simple and wonderful. You just watch puppies being puppies. There are no bells and whistles. It's not high-definition. It's just baby mammals growing up. And show me the mortal who is immune to the charms of a tiny thing and its siblings and its mama.

Given that millions of people are going to watch this thing over the next few months, I started to wonder: could watching puppies (spooning, falling asleep on their backs, kissing each other's heads, annoying their mom) have some sort of real effect on the world? Could this mass injection of cuteness into the mindstream of America do something to us? I'm sixty-five percent not kidding here.

It turns out that there is at least one fascinating effect. Back in 2009, researchers Gary Sherman, Jonathan Haidt, and James Coan recruited a group of 40 women at the University of Virginia and asked them to play the game Operation. You remember that one, right? There are these 12 plastic organs placed in this cardboard man gameboard; each one is set in a little cavity that is lined with conductive metal, and the point of the game is to extract the organs with a pair of tweezers without hitting the metal around the edges. (I still remember the horrible buzzing noise the game made when you did so, too.)

Then, after they'd played Operation once, they showed the women a "high cuteness" slideshow filled with puppies and kittens or a "low cuteness" slideshow filled with grown-up cats and dogs. Then they were asked to play Operation again. A day at the office, you say? No, this is science, y'all!

The experiment might seem absurd, but the scientists wanted to investigate the effects that cuteness might have on our care in executing a task that requires fine motor skills. Why?

Well, they hypothesized that babies are fragile little things. You need to handle them carefully. So wouldn't it be a nice evolutionary adaptation if *looking* at a baby mammal made you a little better at dealing with a delicate animal? Wouldn't it be nice if cuteness triggered one's ability to handle the cute thing?

Well, it turns out that it does, according to the paper the published on the research in the journal Emotion, "Viewing Cute Images Increases Behavioral Carefulness."

In both the initial experiment and another that followed with men included, people who saw really cute slideshows instead of sorta cute slideshows performed better on Operation. On average, the people who looked at kittens and puppies were able to get more than one extra organ out of that confounded game after looking at the high-cuteness slideshow. (The women-only group got an average of 1.8 more organs out!)

The effect couldn't be explained by any other factor, like that the high-cuteness slideshow made the people who saw it feel overall much better or by a simple physiological response (the researchers captured a bunch of biometrics as people did these tasks).

No, the researchers said, it really was the cuteness: "The effect of cuteness on participants' carefulness in executing fine-motor movements was likely due to the images' cuteness and tenderness-inducing qualities rather than their general positivity or interestingness."

What's wonderful about this study is that it shows that cuteness doesn't just make you want to squeeze a little baby to your chest, but makes you better at doing so. Again, I love the way they put it:

This behavioral shift toward increased carefulness makes sense as an adaptation for caring for small children, and is consistent with the view that cuteness is a releaser of the human caregiving system. Moreover, this finding suggests that cuteness does not just influence one's willingness to engage in caregiving behaviors but also influences the ability of one to do so. That is, cuteness not only compels us to care for cute things but also prepares us to do so via its effects on behavioral carefulness.

What's that mean for you? Well, the next time that you want to do a very delicate task in Photoshop, you may want to dose yourself with a few minutes of Puppy Cam (or BuzzFeed) before you attempt to put Ruth Bader Ginsburg's head on the catcopter's body, or whatever.

A place to meet and consume crab-generated content from crustaceans like you.

Fresh off the news that GOOD Magazine is being transformed into a Reddit-wannabe for "social good," I would like to let you in on my new plans for this blog. I am thrilled to announce that I'm pivoting away from producing expensive content and reinventing myself as the leading social network for Caribbean hermit crabs.

These amazing creatures live on the tiny island of Carrie Boy Caw off the coast of southern Belize. We (I just hired an intern a few seconds ago via Twitter) believe we can help these creatures strengthen their communities, so that they can find more and better hermitages throughout their lives, which largely consist of eating eating overripe fruit, animal remains, and feces while stealing abandoned shells and looking creepy.

We were drawn to this lucrative demographic by an article in Scientific American we read today while coming up with our business model that described the difficult situation that hermit crabs find themselves in. In previous years, most hermit crabs on the island "were living in shells that were a tight fit or had one too many holes." Naturally, these aspirational consumers were always on the lookout for "more spacious dwelling[s]."

But these hermit crabs aren't just out for themselves. No, they are looking for win-wins for everyone. They band together in "social networks" in which the crabs all move up the chain together. If you give them a new shell, the researchers discovered, the crabs will wait until the crab that fits perfectly into it comes along, then they'll all trade up, each acquiring roomier digs. These crabs want to do well by doing right, just like today's human entrepreneurs. They don't just want to change shells, they want to change the world.

And that's why, beginning soon, we'll be creating advertorials with several leading shell companies. This "content" will go viral and, building from our core audience of hermit crabs on that island off Belize, infect a whole ocean... with enthusiasm for our brand that is! The energy and excitement they bring to the crab generated content they produce will be a key to leveraging our core competency as a technology platform.

Of course, you might counter that hermit crabs can't read or that human conceptions of consumption and value are unique to our species. You might say that you can't build a media empire based on advertising to small ocean creatures. But look around, fool! The Internet changes everything and all you really need are a devoted community of organisms with pulses, and you can make anything happen.

That's right. Our military had two, unflown, better-than-Hubble space telescopes just sitting around.

NASA

NASA's been wracked by budgetary concerns as it tries to figure out how to do research into the origins of everything *and* loft human beings into orbit with big rockets. In particular, the space agency has been dealing with cost overruns on the next-generation Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, which have been eating up the science budget.

Now, we get word from the Washington Post that the Department of Defense has gifted two better-than-Hubble telescopes to NASA. That's right. Our military had two, unflown, better-than-Hubble space telescopes just sitting around. This story is almost unbelievable; it feels like a hoax. But it's not.

The U.S. government's secret space program has decided to give NASA two telescopes as big as, and even more powerful than, the Hubble Space Telescope. Designed for surveillance, the telescopes from the National Reconnaissance Office were no longer needed for spy missions and can now be used to study the heavens.

Three thoughts here.

RELATED VIDEO



Enhanced Hubble Imagery Reveals the Birth of a Star
• First, hooray! NASA needs all the help it can get, especially around its scientific missions, which get dwarfed by the space-travel components of its work. Plus, Hubble's quality is going to start deteriorating in the coming years, so these are nice to have.
  
• Second, if the DOD didn't need these two birds, which are both better than any civilian telescope, what *do* they have? Are drones replacing space telescopes? Are there much better telescopes already up there?
• Third, how did this happen? Were two satellite scientists out at brunch and the military lady turns to the civilian guy and says, "You know, we have a couple telescopes in the shop, if you guys need them."
  

Of course, like any good gift, these telescopes do come with a catch. NASA has to outfit them with cameras and instruments. NASA also has to come up with the money to pay the scientists to run them. To get that done could take until 2020, the Post says.

This is the state of our military-industrial-scientific complex in miniature: The military has so much money that it has two extra telescopes better than anything civilians have; meanwhile, NASA will need eight years to find enough change in the couches at Cape Canaveral to turn these gifts into something they can use. Anyone else find anything wrong with this state of affairs?

Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch*ding*ding*ding"

Modem dialup by John Pemberton

Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It's the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.

I heard that sound again this week on Brendan Chillcut's simple and wondrous site: The Museum of Endangered Sounds. It takes technological objects and lets you relive the noises they made: Tetris, the Windows 95 startup chime, that Nokia ringtone, television static. The site archives not just the intentional sounds -- ringtones, etc -- but the incidental ones, like the mechanical noise a VHS tape made when it entered the VCR or the way a portable CD player sounded when it skipped. If you grew up at a certain time, these sounds are like technoaural nostalgia whippets. One minute, you're browsing the Internet in 2012, the next you're on a bus headed up I-5 to an 8th grade football game against Castle Rock in 1995.

The noises our technologies make, as much as any music, are the soundtrack to an era. Soundscapes are not static; completely new sets of frequencies arrive, old things go. Locomotives rumbled their way through the landscapes of 19th century New England, interrupting Nathaniel Hawthorne-types' reveries in Sleepy Hollows. A city used to be synonymous with the sound of horse hooves and the clatter of carriages on the stone streets. Imagine the people who first heard the clicks of a bike wheel or the vroom of a car engine. It's no accident that early films featuring industrial work often include shots of steam whistles, even though in many (say, Metropolis) we can't hear that whistle.

When I think of 2012, I will think of the overworked fan of my laptop and the ding of getting a text message on my iPhone. I will think of the beep of the FastTrak in my car as it debits my credit card so I can pass through a toll onto the Golden Gate Bridge. I will think of Siri's uncanny valley voice.

But to me, all of those sounds -- as symbols of the era in which I've come up -- remain secondary to the hissing and crackling of the modem handshake. I first heard that sound as a nine-year-old. To this day, I can't remember how I figured out how to dial the modem of our old Zenith. Even more mysterious is how I found the BBS number to call or even knew what a BBS was. But I did. BBS were dial-in communities, kind of like a local AOL. You could post messages and play games, even chat with people on the bigger BBSs. It was personal: sometimes, you'd be the only person connected to that community. Other times, there'd be one other person, who was almost definitely within your local prefix.

When we moved to Ridgefield, which sits outside Portland, Oregon, I had a summer with no friends and no school: The telephone wire became a lifeline. I discovered Country Computing, a BBS I've eulogized before, located in a town a few miles from mine. The rural Washington BBS world was weird and fun, filled with old ham-radio operators and computer nerds.  After my parents' closed up shop for the work day, their "fax line" became my modem line, and I called across the I-5 to play games and then, slowly, to participate in the nascent community.

In the beginning of those sessions, there was the sound, and the sound was data.

Fascinatingly, there's no good guide to the what the beeps and hisses represent that I could find on the Internet. For one, few people care about the technical details of 1997's hottest 56k modems. And for another, whatever good information exists out there predates the popular explosion of the web and the all-knowing Google.

So, I asked on Twitter and was rewarded with an accessible and elegant explanation from another user whose nom-de-plume is Miso Susanowa. (Susanowa used to run a BBS.) I transformed it into the annotated graphic below, which explains the modem sound part-by-part. (You can click it to make it bigger.)

This is a choreographed sequence that allowed these digital devices to piggyback on an analog telephone network. "A phone line carries only the small range of frequencies in which most human conversation takes place: about 300 to 3,300 hertz," Glenn Fleishman explained in the Times back in 1998. "The modem works within these limits in creating sound waves to carry data across phone lines." What you're hearing is the way 20th century technology tunneled through a 19th century network; what you're hearing is how a network designed to send the noises made by your muscles as they pushed around air came to transmit anything, or the almost-anything that can be coded in 0s and 1s.

The frequencies of the modem's sounds represent parameters for further communication. In the early going, for example, the modem that's been dialed up will play a note that says, "I can go this fast." As a wonderful old 1997 website explained, "Depending on the speed the modem is trying to talk at, this tone will have a different pitch."

That is to say, the sounds weren't a sign that data was being transferred: they were the data being transferred. This noise was the analog world being bridged by the digital. If you are old enough to remember it, you still knew a world that was analog-first.

Long before I actually had this answer in hand, I could sense that the patterns of the beats and noise meant something. The sound would move me, my head nodding to the beeps that followed the initial connection. You could feel two things trying to come into sync: Were they computers or me and my version of the world?

As I learned again today, as I learn every day, the answer is both.

Apple turns over its inventory once every five days.

That's part of why a new report from the technology research firm, Gartner, ranked Apple's supply chain the best in the world. And it's pretty amazing when you think about it. This is a company that sells hundreds of millions of hardware gadgets all over the world and yet it doesn't actually need to stockpile its goods.

The only company on Gartner's list of 25 companies that turns over its product faster is McDonald's, which is not exactly in the electronics business. Dell and Samsung rank two and three in Apple's category, turning over their inventory roughly once every 10 and 21 days respectively.

We calculated these times from the report's "Inventory Turn" metric, which estimates the number of times a company's inventory is sold in a given time period. Apple's number is 74, according to Gartner (or 76, according to Forbes). From there, it's a common practice to divide by 365 to "estimate the number of days [of] sales sitting in inventory."

Fascinatingly, if you read about that inventory turn metric, you will find things like this: "Although results vary by industry, typical manufacturing companies may have 6-8 inventory turns per year. High volume/low margin companies (like grocery stores) may have 12 or more inventory turns per year or more."

So a typical company in manufacturing might do 8 inventory turns. Samsung does 17. Dell, which practically invented hardcore electronics supply chain management, does 36. Apple is doing 74!

Via @courtenaybird

The excellent Los Angeles quarterly Slake posted a photograph of some sidewalk stencil art this morning.

Slake

Compare:

flickr/bixentro

Me, I'm a resident of the Bay Area, so I would like to remind you to use environmentally friendly spray paint.

These smells might not belong together after the environmental movement, but that's how they appeared in a 1948 textbook.

San Francisco Public Library

There is no end to the treasures that lurk in Rick and Megan Prelinger's Library, which has a physical home in San Francisco and a virtual one at archive.org. Just a minute ago Rick Prelinger tweeted a page from a 1948 school textbook that includes a list of pleasant things to smell in the city. They include:

• "The beautiful flowers in Golden Gate Park"
• "The cooked lobster and crabs and shrimp along Fisherman's wharf"
• "The coffee roasting in factories near the Ferry Building"
• "Delicious chocolate" from "the factories near Aquatic Park"
• "Vegetables in our great wholesale district"
• "The salt of ocean spray" and "The clean, washed air of the Pacific Ocean"
  
• "Oil from ships along the piers by the Embarcadero"

Hmmm... Which one of these does not belong?

At least that was my thought on first inspection. But then I started to think about the way these smells are framed. Humans are responsible for nearly all of them. It's not just chocolate it's chocolate from a set of factories; it's not just crabs, but cooked crabs. It's not just oil, but the oil that powers ships that bring goods to the city and leave with its salable cargo. These students are not smelling the California landscape so much as the goodness of humanity's own creations from fuel to farmed vegetables. 

In fact, the primer leaves it to a talking seagull (?) to deliver the ode to ocean spray and clean, washed air. Nature appreciated nature. Humans appreciated humans.

What's odd about it to the modern reader is that it's missing any kind of consciousness about the possible unforeseen repercussions of oil (relative to chocolate and veggies). There is no sense that it might end up in a different category in our time.

This was still a city (and an America) that had a simpler relationship to the artifacts of civilization than we have now after a few more decades of environmental problems and solutions.

If you were awesome and monied in 2004 and you wanted the latest in mobile gadgetry, you would have wanted two excellent gadgets: the Motorola Razr and some version of the Blackberry, which was the dominant way to send and receive corporate email. With these two devices, you could have powered a mobile office! Some bankers could type faster on the Blackberry's tiny keyboard than on their laptops and the Razr was undeniably sexy.

The Razr was a flip phone, which meant that when you finished a call firing someone or making a date with a model, you could slap that baby shut, like, "Yeah, I was talking but now I'm done, so, OHSNAP, I'm Audi." The rest of us just had to push some nerdy red END button with a 1960s telephone icon on it.



Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson posted a photo of a Razr to flickr in November of that year captioned like this:

The most popular phone at our conference was the Motorola V3 Razr.

Made of various metal alloys, it seems like a fine fashion accessory to the Powerbook.... Thinner than my pinkie when folded, it weighs under 100 grams. The backlit alloy buttons depress slightly for a pretty good ergonomic experience.

A fine fashion accessory to the Powerbook, indeed!

Meanwhile, back then, holding a Blackberry was like holding a 60" sword in the 15th century. It meant power! It meant importance! It meant that people back in the office just could. not. deal. without YOU. The 1.3 million Blackberry subscribers of 2004 were power players. They were ballers. They answered emails with simple replies: "Fire the missiles!" or "Buy me Nextel. No, not one stock. The company." They were not mere mortals tethered to desktop computers and lame keyboards. They could send emails from steakhouses.

My, how the mighty have fallen. Nowadays, I bet bankers with Blackberries get the odds stacked against them in credit card roulette. And if you somehow still had a Razr and someone saw it at Goldman, they'd have license to fire you on the spot, even if they weren't your boss. Like a citizen's arrest but for total lameness. (Next time they checked in on your Facebook page, they'd find you're selling walking shoes in Hoboken at the dirt mall.)

First Motorola, the maker of the Razr, was sold for parts and patents to Google, albeit for a decent chunk of change ($12.5 billion). Because Motorola had lost $1.7 billion during the past three years, most observers thought that Google was just buying patent protection through Motorola's cache. Now, there are signs Google might make more use of Moto. Either way, it's a sad ending for 2004's hottest cellphone's maker.

And today, Research in Motion, makers of the Blackberry, are warning they're going to have a nasty first quarter and have called in the bankers to "review" the company's chances. Their share price over the last year would make an excellent downhill skiing course. Get this: on May 31, 2011, RIMM was trading at $42 a share. (And that was already down from earlier highs.) In after hours trading tonight, they are looking at a per-share price of about $10.40. I hope your pension fund wasn't heavily invested in the company.

What happened to these once-awesome outfits? There are a lot of things you could point to over the last eight years, but no single event had as big of an impact as the launch of the iPhone in 2007. Just look at the smartphone bloodbath that followed the Jesus phone from August of 2007 onward. It'd look even worse if Apple's massive rise weren't throwing off the Y-axis.