Alexis C. Madrigal

The last year has been packed with tech stories: Competition among the tech giants, continuing fallout from WikiLeaks, the explosion of protest media, impending huge Internet legislation, the launch of the iPad 2, Kindle Fire, and a pack of good Android phones, as well as the continued dominance of Facebook and the insurgence of Reddit. We've covered many of these narratives here on The Atlantic Technology Channel, some in perhaps too much detail. Here, we peer into a murky 2012 wherein technological competition will continue to be fierce even as the world economy stumbles along and domestic politics takes center stage.

One thing we do know is that our capacities for computation and communication and control will continue to grow. The constant change in the technology industry makes it fundamentally different from the political world, say. It's never "same stuff, different year" in technology, which is why you should prepare yourself with our list of stories to be on the lookout for next year.

If you know someone who has a child and an iPad, there is no better gift than Moobnot Studios' The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. Not only is it the coolest e-book of any type, but Moonbot Studios may be the next Pixar and you'd be getting in on their work early. We visited them in Shreveport, Louisiana and were blown away.

Something special and creative is happening in that small city. The storytelling traditions of the Cajun south are being extruded through the new technical and business realities of the iPad app business. What's emerging is a potent mix of old and new, typified by Morris Lessmore an e-book about the value of paper books. It's almost a film, almost a game, certainly a book. Really, it's a story that's reaching out to become a new type of creation. As the Times UK put it, "It is not inconceivable that, at some point in the future, a short children's story called 'The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore' will be regarded as one of the most influential titles of the early 21st century."

So even if you don't have a kid or know any people with kids (and iPads), do yourself a favor and buy Lessmore anyway. It's what the future of stories looks like.

When people look back on the early 21st century, I hope that we'll stand out for our literature and art, music and science, our general cultural vibrancy. On the other hand, what might mark our time is the ridiculousness of our political and social debates in the YouTube era. Take this video, which was part of a "clean coal" marketing campaign a few years back. It features caroling pieces of coal, which seems like a reductio ad absurdum argument against viral marketing.

Check out these verses:

Frosty the coal man
getting cleaner every day
he's affordable and adorable
and the workers keep their pay.

There must have been some magic
Clean coal technology
For when they looked for pollutants
There were nearly none to see.

Let's go with the anthropomorphism for a minute. The coal carolers, meant to stand in for coal's political supporters, will actually be burned in the power plants to which they are singing praise. Truth in advertising!

Via Alan Nogee

If you ride a subway or train system in which you swipe a flimsy card through a reader, you are familiar with the experience of being left with 20 cents on a card. Sure, you could feed that card back into a machine and wring every last nickel from the card, but we know a lot of people don't. Instead, those cents get tossed into trashcans or left in wallets, hiding behind business cards from people whose startups have long been purchased by mid-ranking enterprise software companies. (Wait, maybe I'm talking about myself here.)

In any case, there is money on stored value cards and it's sitting out there and three enterprising graduate students at NYU's Interactive Communications Program want to put it to good use. They've hacked together a prototype for a system they call MetroChange. The current incarnation is a simple kiosk that allows you to donate the leftover value on your card and then recycle it. Designer Brad Dechter called it "a charity donation platform for using New York City subway cards," which is apt.

Here's a demonstration of how the system might work:

If you're interested in how they hacked together MetroChange, check out their blog, which lays out the various steps in glorious detail.

Via Ari Greenberg, who spotted it at ITP's Winter Show.

Facebook Timeline is finally rolling out to the mass of the service's users. As that happens, people are coming to terms with how they are going to manage the meaning machine.

Writer and photographer Cheri Lucas found a new appreciation for the movie about memory erasure, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, when she was confronted with curating her existence on Timeline. Her honest reverie is worth reading.

The process of (mechanical) self-creation that Timeline asks of its users is going to be difficult. We're talking about people's lives here, and if you haven't heard, life can be hard. Businessweek tech writer Brad Stone cut to the heart of the problem when he tweeted, "Facebook Timeline: Evidence that no one at Facebook has ever gotten fat, lost their hair or gone through a divorce."

But even people who haven't ever gotten fat, lost their hair, or gone through a divorce will be faced with hundreds of tiny decisions about how to depict themselves for public consumption. And that's what I love about Lucas' reflections. Her approach is provisional, introspective, and conflicted. There is something satisfying about deleting the past, and the past remains, a ghost without a machine.

Last night, I sifted through my entire Facebook history and deleted comments, hid status updates, and untagged or removed unflattering photos I'd forgotten about. I didn't delete much, as prior to 2011, I wasn't that active on Facebook: I'd deactivated my account numerous times and was nearly nonexistent from 2007 to the first half of 2010. Still, I combed my Facebook wall like I was meticulously proofreading a job at work. Why? Not because any of the content was inappropriate, or meant to be a secret, but because I micromanage myself. Because I'm a perfectionist.

And because sometimes I just want to erase: to forget in the same way I had wanted to forget everything associated with a past relationship and a hard, confusing breakup.

But my curation of my own history--the deleting of previous status updates, the "featuring" of particular posts--is strange. More so than before, I am able to highlight what is important in my life--or what I want others to view as important--and fill in missing details from today to when I was born:

And no, there is nothing new about telling my life story exactly the way I want. But with the memory erasing procedure in Eternal Sunshine fresh in my mind, I find Timeline--and my general ability to click "Delete"--fascinating. And at the same time, rather scary.

"Once you get timeline, you'll have 7 days before anyone else can see it. This gives you a chance to get your timeline looking the way you want before other people see it." Right here, in Timeline's instructions, I'm encouraged to pluck out my flaws and dismiss memories that aren't life-altering or amazing.

And yet Timeline isn't all about pruning and perfecting--we can note the end of a relationship, for instance, if we want to:

I can see how some people will find inputting missing details of their lives to be fun. But I sense a forced organization of things that can't--or shouldn't--be compartmentalized. And further digitization of my memories.

I don't know. After watching Eternal Sunshine again, and feeling good about it this time around, I kinda want to let my memories just be.

Searching for Christmas is like getting into a time machine that takes you back to a bizarro 2001 in which every single web surfer is a sucker

The military hearing that will determine whether Bradley Manning will receive a court martial for his alleged role in leaking documents to WikiLeaks took a strange turn. In a courthouse in Fort Meade, Maryland, a prosecution witness testified that he found thousands of State Department cables on Manning's computer, but those cables did *not* match those released by WikiLeaks.

If the cables found on Manning's computer don't match the ones WikiLeaks has, the defense can argue that Julian Assange's outfit may have had a different source for the documents. Wired's Kim Zetter was in the courtroom and filed a report on this dramatic moment, which could become a lynchpin of the defense's case.

Special Agent David Shaver, a forensic investigator with the Army's Computer Crimes Investigations Unit, testified Sunday that he'd found 10,000 U.S. diplomatic cables in HTML format on the soldier's classified work computer, as well as a corrupted text file containing more than 100,000 complete cables...

But Shaver said none of the documents that he found on Manning's computer matched those that WikiLeaks published.

Shaver wasn't asked how many cables he compared to the WikiLeaks cables. In re-direct examination, however, he noted that the CSV file in which the cables were contained was corrupted and suggested this might indicate that it had not been possible to pass those cables to WikiLeaks for this reason. The defense objected to this assumption, however, noting that Shaver could not speculate on why the cables were not among those released by WikiLeaks.

The revelation is a bit confusing, but it could be the first chink in the prosecution's forensic case against Manning.

The comic Louis CK has a dedicated following due to his television show and awesome rant about Wi-Fi on airplanes. So, with his latest comedy special, he decided to route around the established video distribution players and go direct to his audience on the web. He released a video of his work without any kind of restrictions (i.e. DRM). You pay $5 and you get a video file to do with what you will.

The experiment has been a resounding success. When The New York Times' David Carr spoke with him late last week, he already had sold 175,000 copies of the show. "He expected 200,000 total downloads by the weekend, which meant he would have grossed $1 million," Carr wrote. "After covering costs of about $250,000 for the live production and the Web site, that's a $750,000 profit."

Clearly, not everyone is Louis CK. Without an established fan base, it can be very difficult to drive visitors to a given website and get them to give away their payment details. But, the success reminds us of a key factor about the Internet. Here's how he put it:

"O.K., so NBC is this huge company and they have all these studios and these satellites to beam stuff out, but on the Web, both NBC.com and LouisCK.com have the same amount of bandwidth. We are equals and there are things you can do with that.

That is to say, the infrastructure of the Internet means that you can create an entirely new distribution channel nearly instantly that everyone in the world can access. It's not perfect for everything, but "there are things you can do with that."

Energy efficiency is about as sexy as a pile of granite. Put it this way, one easy way to save fuel is to drive slower. Not exactly live fast, die young territory.

However, in recent years, people in Silicon Valley have taken an interest in an area dominated by construction workers and mom-and-pop energy evangelists. And Apple being dominant these days, many are eager to preach from the gospel of Steve.

It's this confluence of trends that led to the creation of the Nest "learning thermostat." The thermostat is the brainchild of some ex-Apple employees including Tony Fadell who was senior VP of the iPod division. The pitch is simple: the Nest is a hot-looking gadget that should pay for itself in a few years by saving you money on your energy bills. Armed with six sensors, the Nest can tell if you're not home and turn down the heat. It's also got Wi-Fi built in, so it's connected to the Internet and you can change your settings via an iPhone app. And it plugs right into your existing thermostat controls. (The company says that if you install the device yourself, it should only take 20 minutes.)

Perhaps the most exciting thing about the Nest is that it's supposed to fix the problem of programmable thermostats, which is that no one ever programs them. Instead, you just turn it up or down and it figures out how you like your home climate to be conditioned. Every time you change the thermostat, that's a signal to the Nest's software that it needs to fix its algorithm. It learns.

There is only one problem with the Nest right now. The device is sold out through early next year. So, if you want to get this for the green Apple freak in your life, you'll have to give them an IOU and pick one up early next year.

Saudi Arabia's richest businessman, Alwaleed Bin Talal, announced today that he has invested $300 million in Twitter, the leading microblogging service in the west. A mustachioed nephew of the King Abdullah, Bin Talal has stakes in several other prominent companies including Apple, General Motors, and Citigroup. The prince gave his statement to the Saudi bourse today.

"Our investment in Twitter reaffirms our ability in identifying suitable opportunities to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact," he said in a press release.

Bin Talal has an estimated net worth of close to $20 billion and is hovering just outside the 25 richest people in the world. He has a massive yacht, gives money to Harvard and the Phillips Academy, and has several palaces that we hear are quite nice. In other words, not a bad guy to have supplying cash for your Internet company.

The prince's investment company's only other western-focused media company holding is News Corp.

We don't know much about the Prince's investment, but tech critic Evgeny Morozov filed it under the rubric, "How to preempt a 'Twitter Revolution.'" Where did he write that? On Twitter, of course.

In the competition between sliced bread and every other invention in the world, I usually come down on the side of sliced bread. After all, it makes sandwich artistry easier and I do love a good sandwich. However, when you match up Wi-Fi against sliced bread, Wi-Fi is clearly superior. It has untethered all of our gadgets, not just from ethernet cables, but from cell phone networks that would like to overcharge us for data. Wi-Fi makes every single modern device better, not to mention allowing the creation of a new and (to my mind) superior communal work culture.

But nothing is perfect and Wi-Fi has one key defect. It does not reach into every single nook and cranny of a large house. Now, I've never actually lived in a large house, but I can imagine how frustrating this would be. It's not a big problem, but you would encounter it each and every day. Luckily, there is a solution, one promoted by our own Jim Fallows. The Wi-Fi range extender. He recommends a Belkin Dual-Band Range Extender. I'll let him tell you about his experience:

The extender works by taking your existing Wi-Fi signal and re-propagating it to cover more of the house. Our existing dual-band router now sends out two signals, which I'll call Network1 and Network2. Nerds will know that one is 2.4GHz and one is 5GHz. The extender creates two new Wi-Fi signals, let's say Network1_xt and Network2_xt, which are broadcast from its new location. You just need to place it close enough to the original router to receive its signal -- and close enough to the now-uncovered areas to extend coverage to them.

Less than five minutes after I opened the box, no joke, the new gizmo was running*, and the two new networks extended coverage to all parts of our house. Now I have even fewer excuses for being so behind on email! Our original Wi-Fi router is also by Belkin, but the specs say that the extender should work with Linksys or other routers that produce a normal signal. Specifically, it requires an 802.11a/b/g/n router with 2.4GHz and/or 5GHz bands. That means: any mainstream Wi-Fi.

There may be other extenders that are cheaper or have some other feature; I didn't take the time for systematic research. I saw this on sale and decided to give it a try. Many people already use similar systems. But in case you'd been wondering whether they actually worked, I wanted to report that this one did, for me.

You're on Facebook one day when you notice that an acquaintance -- not someone really close, but a person with whom you're friendly -- posts a status update that seems despondent. Something like, "Man, life doesn't seem worth it. I can't take it." You look for an explanation on the person's profile, wonder if it's some kind of inside joke. But it dawns on you that it might be an honest expression of emotional pain, perhaps a cry for help.

What do you do?

It's a difficult social problem. It's not like you're a close friend of the person and would feel comfortable asking him to pour his heart out to you. Maybe you've only met him once. You very well might do nothing.

Facebook is trying to offer a new avenue to help you solve this new dilemma of the digital world. They have inserted the ability to anonymously flag someone as someone who might be suicidal. This is a very delicate user interaction design, obviously. On the one hand, Facebook wants people to be able to report real suicidal behavior, but they also don't want to create an obvious target for people who want to create mischief. Where they place the reporting mechanism as well as the behind-the-scenes processes for dealing with user reports could have very real consequences.

Let me spell out the compromise Facebook has come to. I think it is debatable, but there probably is no perfect answer in this situation. It's just weird to find ourselves in the situation of seeing expressions of suicidal ideation from people we don't know well.

The suicidal behavior reporting button is located within the normal mechanism for reporting questionable content. But it's *not* on the first menu of options, as you can see on the left. Instead, you have to mark something "Violence or harmful behavior" before you see the option to report "Suicidal Content." This seems suboptimal to me as I wouldn't think to put suicidal behavior into that category. A Facebook spokesperson told me, "We have been, and will continue to, work with the suicide prevention community and iterate on the placement of the Suicidal Content button."


Nonetheless, after someone makes this kind of report, they receive a followup email from an actual human being to whom they can respond. It reads like this:

We will do our best to assist you with this matter. Please describe the problem you are experiencing with Facebook in as much detail as possible and include any relevant web addresses (URLs). More detailed information will help us investigate the issue further.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

[Name]

According to Facebook, they have an internal "systems to prioritize the most serious reports, and a trained team of reviewers who respond to reports and escalate them." That's good because on this issue, it doesn't seem like an algorithm could make the subtle discriminations necessary to offer people the kind of help they need while filtering out pranks.

If the internal infrastructure finds that the person reported is exhibiting suicidal behavior, they'll be offered a private chat session with someone from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, as well as the organization's phone number.

You may know this person. She's got a huge flat screen TV. She's got a PS3 and an Xbox 360 and a Wii. She's got an iPad 2 and a Macbook Air and a Linux box. She's got a projector and a Kindle Fire and a delightful sound system. She's got a great DSLR camera, a micro four-thirds workaday camera, and a little Canon she carries around for snapshots. Wracking your brain to find some kind of gadget for this person, you would be forgiven if you gave up and resorted to a large stuffed wombat and a Snuggie.

But don't give up! I have the perfect gift for the gadget obsessed that turns their gift-receiving weakness (having everything) into a strength. Buy them HDMI cables. Think about this way: the more stuff you have, the more stuff you need to connect, and that means you need more cables. You can really never have too many. What kind should you get? Our friends at The Wirecutter, which aims to only recommend a single good product in a category, recommend the Monoprice cables that cost a mere $8. So, you could pick up three of them for less than the price of a decent iPad case.

WASHINGTON -- The Postal Service is a giant delivery machine. It bridges the physical and digital using any combination of humans and robots that works. The USPS delivers half the world's mail -- that's 563 million pieces each and every day of 2010. To do so, it employs 574,000 people and 10,000 pieces of mail-sorting equipment. If the Postal Service were a company, it would have been number 29 on the 2010 Fortune 500 list and Benjamin Franklin would have been its first CEO.

Think of all the problems that the USPS has had to solve to become and remain this massive country's only completely inclusive point-to-point network. And they did it under all kinds of different regimes. Horse and carriage? No problem. Railways? Sure. Exploding suburbs and road mileage? Great. This is an agency that saw the introduction of all kinds of competing communications systems: the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, UPS, and fax machines. And through it all, the volume of mail just kept going up, year after year, for 200 years.

This history is highlighted by a new exhibit at the National Postal Museum, Systems at Work. Any mail network relies on a system of people, machines, and shared information to get work done. And looking at the number of changes that have occurred over the two centuries, I find the Postal Service's ability to keep up astonishing.

Just one example: The Postal Service's OCR machines correctly translate the chickenscratch that passed for an address on 93 percent of hand-lettered envelopes. The rest of the most-excellent machines that the USPS has used through time are housed in the slideshow below.


Despite these successes, there have been some hard times for the Postal Service. The biggest crisis USPS faced probably came in the mid-1960s. During that time, which was before Richard Nixon signed a bill that made the service "self-funding," the Post Office could not get enough funds from Congress to buy the machines they needed to keep up with the post-War explosion in the mail. In October of 1966 the situation came to a head, when, as the museum exhibit put it, "a flood of holiday advertisements and election mailings choked the system." The Chicago Post Office, the largest in the country, "stopped delivering mail for three weeks."

Automation was the only way out. Zip codes, which were only introduced in 1963, became the linchpin in the automated postal system. Imagine life without them: a single person can't sort more than a letter a second, which is at best, 3,600 letters an hour. With the help of machines, postal workers could gain almost an order of magnitude of speed, sorting 30,000 letters an hour. Also, zip codes formed the occasion for this wonderful music video about the introduction of the system. I believe it reaches Pynchonian heights of lyrical genius.



Despite this impressive legacy, the Postal Service is now back on the ropes. While there are a lot of reasons, the key long-term challenge is simple. For 200 years -- TWO HUNDRED YEARS -- the volume of mail that the postal service had to deal with grew. Then in 2006, the annual volume of mail flowing through the system peaked (though, as noted below, it grew into 2007 before starting to decline).

"There have been enormous challenges in the past, I don't want to downplay that at all, but this is the biggest challenge. It's bigger because it's so different. It challenges the one thing that has always been true: mail volume goes up," Postal Museum curator Nancy Pope said. "Mail peaked in 2007, and now for the first time, they're looking at what happens when there is less mail. And nobody at the Postal Service is ready for that. It's just mindblowing. Everyone has grown up with this idea. 'Mail volume goes up.' If you think something bad is coming down the road in five years, a mail price increase will solve it because mail volume goes up."

At the same time as mail volume is decreasing, people still want the ability to receive mail at any time and at any address they choose. As a result, the number of individual delivery points increased by 735,779. That is to say, the costs of maintaining the ability to distribute mail are going up, even though the volume of mail (i.e. revenue) is declining. The USPS has massive fixed-infrastructure costs built into its core as a national service committed to serving everyone. 

That's why the decline in mail volume, spurred by the availability of that other point-to-point communications network, the Internet, is an existential crisis. Maybe one of the two big pieces of legislation ham-tying the USPS -- the 1970 Postal Service Reorganization Act and the Postal Act of 2006 -- will get changed and the immediate crisis for the USPS will abate. But in the long term, the Postal Service has got to deal with its revenues and its costs running in the opposite directions.

The baseline trend has shifted beneath the Postal Service, and like many 20th-century institutions, it has to shift its top priority from speed to resilience. I think the new challenge won't be to deliver mail as quickly as possible, but to preserve the core network of infrastructure necessary to be able to deliver mail to any address. And this time around, more machines and computers won't be the answer.

The BBC has produced the radio show, Desert Island Discs, since 1942. The basic format is to interview a famous cultural figure and ask them, as it was originally phrased, "if you were to be cast away alone on a desert island, which eight gramophone records would you choose to have with you, assuming of course, that you had a gramophone and an inexhaustible supply of needles?"

The online archive of the program now features 1,000 people including Norman Mailer, Lady Redgrave, William Gibson, Vidal Sassoon, Jerry Springer, Petula Clark, and a lot of old British stars that young Americans like myself have never heard of. What's brilliant about the series is that there is nothing retrospective about it. These people are picking the stuff of their times, not trying to assemble a list for perpetuity. And even if they were casting an eye towards how history would view them, most of the tracks they pick have long been forgotten by contemporary music listeners. Even in the best CD stores of yesteryear, you would have been hard pressed to find a fraction of the stuff people mention, especially from the early years.

Take the silent film star Bebe Daniels, whose interview was broadcast Monday, April 2, 1956. She picked a Bing Crosby record, some record called 'Coronation Scot' by Sidney Torch & His Orchestra, a piece by the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and a bunch of other tracks that belong to the category of music that you and I would call old-timey. It's the kind of music that makes you feel like drinking a highball at nightfall and being a good fellow.

So the entire Desert Island Discs archive is available for free online now, but you need a way to listen to (most of) what the obscure selections they pick. And that's what this gift is all about. Buy your friend or loved one a gift subscription to Rdio, a streaming music service with a huge catalog and a beautiful interface, and then send them a playlist of the songs from people you think they'd find interesting from Desert Island Discs.

This twist on the Rdio subscription will allow you to escape the, "Oh, you got me an online gift card... How thoughtful!" problem. And because they'll get access to Rdio's entire collection, the gift will let them listen to music far beyond your thoughtfully curated selection of old British celebrities. 

If you follow this advice, allow me to suggest that you start looking for music with Alice Cooper's picks. They are all fantastic from The Yardbirds to The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, not to mention the Dylan, Beach Boys, and King Crimson.

I walk to work every day through the streets of Washington, DC reading the news on my phone and weaving past other pedestrians doing the same thing. Nearly all of us have touchscreen phones, which is great until the temperature drops below freezing and we have to choose between frostbite or Twitter. (You know which option I choose; I've tweeted 16,000 times.)

There is a technological solution to this conundrum and it is called conductive thread. Glove manufacturers can sew this material into the fingertips of gloves, thus allowing you to remain warm while continuing to scroll and pinch.

There are easier solutions -- cut-off gloves, say -- but I think if you're going to use your phone in freezing temperatures, you should go with the nerdiest possible product. These North Face ETIP gloves certainly fit that bill and at $40, they are a big enough gift that few people are going to purchase them for themselves.

With all the ups and down in the energy business, it is sometimes difficult to see the forest through the trees. Solar module costs -- the actual energy conversion hardware -- have been falling for the past several decades and the past couple of years have seen sharp declines.

But there are a lot of other components in the cost of a solar installation. What you see above is a chart of all the solar installations since 2006 tracked by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for which cost information is available. What we see are substantial cost drops in the total installed cost of solar. In the last six months of 2006, the average project paid $8.58 per watt. In the last six months of 2011, the average project paid $5.91. Not bad.

All the data is available here.

Photographer Robert Shimmin has revived a 150-year old photographic tradition known as "tintype" in which photos are printed directly on a lacquered sheet of iron. The image you see is technically a negative; the dark parts are the metal showing through, while the light parts are formed by the emulsion.

Tintype initially got popular because it was a one-step process -- the negative is the print -- and that allowed photographers to pump out the images quickly. They were popular in public settings like amusement parks, where mobile photographers could snap your image and hand it to you after a few minutes.

But if you want to get a feel for why tintype is would be interesting as an artform, I think Shimmin nails it. There's something about our proximity to this technology that makes it more interesting than film or digital photography.

"Even shooting a modern subject, it almost looks like it's from another time period that you can't quite pin down," Shimmin says. "So you're looking at something that's of today but not necessarily of today."

In other words, using the older technique unmoors the image from the progression of photographic technology. The tintypes Shimmin makes could have been produced any time in the last 150 years. While normally it is the newest technology that blows us away -- the Lytro, say -- using the oldest tech can be sublime, too. And when you're talking about tintype in an HD video posted to Vimeo and linked via Twitter, your images suddenly say that you're not just up with recent times, you're up with all times.