Alexis C. Madrigal

Communication technologies affect the rate at which people lie, and remote television studios may actually encourage deception

People lie a lot. But the rate at which we lie is not constant. The technology we use to talk with each other influences how often we try to deceive one another.

That is to say, the medium -- phone, IM, email, Facebook -- changes the amount of deception that occurs relative to face-to-face interactions. Cornell researcher Jeffrey Hancock has found that people lie substantially more over the phone than they do in person and less over email and IM. A few key factors affect the rate of lying:

• People lie more during real-time (synchronous) interactions.
• People lie more when they are not in the same room with the people they're lying to.
• People lie less when an interaction is easily recorded.

This is why the phone is the favored technology of the liar: it's synchronous, long-distance, and not easily recorded. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to matter whether people are particularly good or bad at detecting lies in a given medium. That could be because everyone in the world is pretty bad at detecting deception in all communication, Hancock said.

This emerging body of research got me thinking about a ubiquitous feature of our media landscape: the pundit remote television hit. This strange technological system, in which experts are piped onto a TV news program from boxy little studios around the world, has a lot of the features of the phone call, which may make it easier for talking heads to lie regardless of their political persuasion.

This isn't an attack on Fox or NBC, but the system as a whole. In order to make a certain kind of television cheaper, the news shows may have built a system that encourages (or at least doesn't discourage) deception.

Here's what it's like to do a television hit from an "insert studio." You walk into a room where a cameraman or handler guides you into a chair, which is strategically positioned in front of a screen of some type. For viewers, the screen will render as a photo or video feed of an iconic scene from your city. A tiny earbud is inserted into your right ear and a mic clipped onto the left side of your tie. You are looking right at a camera and there are bright lights. You can't see the show that you're going to be on. Your only connection to the show is through the sound coming into your earbud. You stare into the camera and talk. Sometimes there isn't even someone in the room with you.

As a technological system, it's not the very worst that you could imagine to encourage deception. (That's the phone, remember.)  The video is recordable. But it's also not generally publicly available in a searchable format, which many text communications are. Imagine if blog commenters were out there critiquing pundit talking points in real-time, the way that you/they do our posts.

Hancock also noted that it may be difficult for people to viscerally believe that they're being recorded because of the isolated nature of the talking-head studio. "There isn't a lot of feedback and there is very little sense of recordability," he said. So, you get people potentially more willing to be deceptive or at least uninhibited."

It seems as if you're just talking into a camera -- not all the people watching the video feed -- which can actually have some other strange effects on your behavior. "We see this with stuff like Girls Gone Wild, where women do these things that they would never be caught doing normally," Hancock said. "You'd think the camera would make people wary, but it actually primed the performative sense."

If it is true that some technological systems encourage truth-telling or others discourage it, we should redesign this system. Why make it easier for pundits of all types to lie?

The first step would be public and fully searchable transcripts of everything said on political news shows. You could even show the real-time transcription to the person doing the television hit in the insert studio. Then they would know what they were saying was going into the permanent record.

It's important to note that this lying problem isn't about technology generally. Hancock's latest research finds that people's LinkedIn resumes are more likely to be truthful than the ones they create in Word. The network, he hypothesizes, acts as a constraint on people. For the same reason, he thinks Facebook is a "fairly honest space," so much so that he believes "Facebook could have, in the short term, an honesty effect."

Perhaps in the future, pundits will have to duke it out *on Facebook* and the truth-telling pushes and pulls will balance each other out, forcing them to be just as honest as they would be while standing in front of you.

Image: The Beyondpix studio in San Francisco, where I once sat staring into space.

Regular readers of my blog or my Twitter followers know that I feel about politics the way that Luddites feel about technology. So, permit me this brief detour into the political realm to note that Michelle Bachmann cannot control the price of gasoline in the United States.

This shouldn't really be something that has to be said, given that oil market is global and immensely complex, but Bachmann told a group of prospective South Carolina voters she could determine the price of gas. "The day that the president became president gasoline was $1.79 a gallon. Look at what it is today," she said. "Under President Bachmann, you will see gasoline come down below $2 a gallon again. That will happen."

This ignores the geological and geopolitical realities of the world oil market. It's just impossible to promise the price of gasoline at some future date several years from now. Well, actually, I shouldn't say that. Perhaps President Bachmann would institute price controls or spend massive sums to subsidize gasoline in an effort to drive gas prices down. The Chinese kept gasoline prices down for a while with heavy-handed efforts. But it's hard to see how that squares with her small government posture. (To say nothing about whether that would be a good way to spend public money.)

Politico notes that she mentioned shale development and is a long time proponent of more Arctic drilling, but let's look at the numbers. The United States Geological Survey estimates that there is a 50 percent chance of finding seven billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Sounds like a lot, no? But Americans use about 20 million barrels a day, so if we sucked out all of those billions of barrels, we'd use it up in less than a year. The shale guys are talking big, too, for sure. But we've already had one shale bust in this country. And most of the big successes have been with gas. And environmental tradeoffs still cloud shale's future. And the USGS pegged the oft-cited Bakken formation as having a few billion barrels of technically recoverable oil. And shale oil production in 2010 was a mere 275,000 barrels a day.

All of that to say: it is not credible for a politician to state they can bring the price of gasoline down under $2 with increased domestic production in the very near term.

So, you think public relations people are more aggressive now than they used to be in fighting for regulation that benefits them? You might want to rethink that. Check out what Norman Waters of the American Television Society said back in 1944 during FCC hearings on how to allocate spectrum for the nascent technology of TV:

It is my belief that it would be just as criminal to hold back television as it would be for a scientist to keep from the public a known cure for one of mankind's great ills, once he had discovered it. The analogy is fair, for Television will bring about the enlightenment of mankind, and may well hold within its grasp the solution of a lasting peace in the world.

That's some big talk. 

The new Kanye West and Jay Z album, Watch the Throne, brings together the two biggest stars in hip hop (sorry, Weezy) for one victory lap album.

The second track is not my favorite (it's "like Shia LeBoeuf in song form" as one reviewer put it) but it does feature a NASA sample that's obvious but hot.

About 3:18 seconds in, we get to hear the famous countdown sequence from Apollo 11, the first mission to land on the moon from 20 seconds on down. You can hear the original, which I synched up with the launch film above, or listen to the YeJay track below.

We know that robots can replace humans for a lot of tasks. Recently, Foxconn, manufacturer of the iPad and iPhone among other things, announced it would buy one million industrial robots. One million!

While, like most of the Internet, I worry consistently about a robot takeover of the world, industrial robots don't really bother me. The Kiva logistics bots are even cute enough that workers give them names and use them to deliver presents to coworkers. What harm could they do? No, stationary robots making iPads I'm cool with.

The robot in the video above, MABEL, is a whole different story. Look at the way that thing runs! Pay special attention to the knees and its gait. MABEL's creators at the University of Michigan like to emphasize that the bot spends 40 percent of its time up in the air just like a real human runner. Hats off to the creators of the technology, but this kind of human-like movement out of a bot is creepy.

MABEL has a top speed of 6.8 miles per hour, which means that most humans could outrun it (her?)... at least for a few miles.

Thank your lucky stars for the Pew Internet and American Life Project. They come out with all kinds of research about the digital divide, how mainstream Americans use the Web, and all kinds of other stuff. But today, they shed light on a truly important phenomenon:

Cell phones can help prevent unwanted personal interactions - 13% of cell owners pretended to be using their phone in order to avoid interacting with the people around them.

If you're of a certain age and position relative to a metro area, you have almost undoubtedly engaged in this practice. And now that Pew has identified it as a national-level behavior, we need to name it. Sarah Rich suggests "dodge dialing." Derek Thompson coined "the cell phone side step." And Becca Rosen likes "phaking." You got a better name? Something's gotta catch on.

Via @lrainey.

The tech world woke up to some stunning news: Google is buying Motorola for $12.5 billion. The software giant is buying the iconic mobile device maker, if regulators are sanguine about the deal, at least.

Most people think Google made the move for Motorola's 17,000 patents, not its actual hardware-making business, though the latter is a nice bonus.

The deal makes a lot of sense, especially given how much Google was willing to pay for the Nortel patent cache that Microsoft and Apple snatched up. In fact, one blogger, Staska at Unwired View put the whole thing together about two weeks ago. He nailed Google's rationale and made a deal sound imminent. It was. Here was his evidence, which was all lying around in the public domain.

• Google needed the patents. "Motorola's mobile business was hurting, especially relative to its Android-using competitors. "While Motorola's 80% Android device unit growth this year might seem impressive on the surface, it is actually very low. Their main Asian rivals are now growing much faster (HTC at 124% a year and Samsung at 400%) and from a higher initial unit base. Thus eating away at Motorola's market share and profits. After a few profitable quarters MMI started losing money again."
• Motorola's CEO signalled to investors that they might be ready to sell. " Staska quotes Motorola's CEO saying, " Do we expect Motorola to be an independent company? I don't know yet." Later, the CEO says he could see selling to a software outfit. Staska says, "And that "software outfit" they are talking about - can they mean anyone BUT Google here?"
• Motorola started talking up using their patent portfolio against 'new entrants,' i.e. Android. "[Motorola CEO] Sanjay Jha might be sending a veiled hint/threat to Larry Page: 'Just buy us, or else!'"
• The Motorola hardware R&D team would help Google improve Android. "Google will get a world class mobile device hardware R&D team, that can help push Android limits with a Nexus line. They then could use their Nexus devices as a state of the art reference models."
• Google could carve up the rest of Motorola to make some money. "As for the rest of Motorola business - the sales&logistics organizations, set top box business, etc; - they can sell it in pieces and make some nice profit in the end."

Staska concludes, "The more I think about it, the more Google buying Motorola makes sense. I'm actually struggling to find any reason for Google not to buy Moto. Can you name one?" It appears Google CEO Larry Page couldn't, even if he had to pay a 60% premium to the company's market price.

Peter Kafka linked to Paleofuture's wonderful video find from the Knight Ridder archives about a tablet that looks and acts roughly like an iPad... and was produced in 1994.

What's fascinating is how many people predicted something like a tablet newspaper. It makes me think that it was not that hard to imagine a big screened device that displays rich media. The bigger challenge was to imagine how news stories themselves might change in the web era. It was easier to deduce that the interface might change than that the words people would want to read would be different, too.

The kind of newspaper story that we grew up with in the latter half of the 20th century was historically specific. (If you don't believe me, take a look at the Chronicling America collection of newspapers from around the turn of the 20th century.) It was a genre like the 18th century novel or the epic poem. It had conventions and people who policed its boundaries. There were schools that taught you how to write news stories and tests that could see if you knew what you were doing. A story in the paper might have looked like the organic way of delivering a piece of new information about the world, but it wasn't any more natural than a television anchor's diction.

In the web era, there has been an explosion of different news genres that deliver information but are not "stories" as understood by the newspaper people of 1994 (or many today). There is the Matt Drudge headline. There is the Andrew Sullivan one-liner. There are the short, sharp blogs posts of web pioneers like some of my colleagues here at The Atlantic or alums like Matt Yglesias. There is the Gawker story. There is the one-paragraph Slashdot summary. There is the reported newsblog like Danger Room. There is the liveblog (which the Guardian takes to a glorious level). These are all ways of using text to deliver people what they want to know about the world. We have different names for all of these things and they all have conventions, but readers tend to group into the same cognitive space: news.

The video above proves that a team of smart people conversant with the latest technology and the news business could imagine News Corp's The Daily in 1994. That kind of change in information design makes sense. But this other one I'm talking about, the one in which the very text changes might have been outside the cone of foreseeable possibilities.

No one teaches how to Google. Through years of searching the Internet, we've all just figured out a set of strategies that work. In recent conversations around the office, we've realized that not everyone searches the same way. Some people search especially for PDFs or work out from a very specific search or drill down from a general topic. But as a bunch of practicing journalists, we're a weird sample.

We're curious about how you Google, so we created a simple survey that presents you with five hypothetical scenarios in which you want to know a specific piece of information. All you have to do is read the scenarios below and tell us what the first search string you'd enter in would be.

(A special thanks to fellow Atlantic senior editor, Derek Thompson, for suggesting this idea.)

Social media is disaggregating the body politic into a million noisy voices

You battled your way to the top of the an established political party with your charisma and cunning and connections. You figured out how to stare into the cameras, television and otherwise, and to "connect" with voters. The media loved you, and they hated you, but mostly they loved you because you made for good stories.

You hated the media, the way they took things out of context, caught you out saying stupid things, treated the whole of politics as some kind of a game instead of a very serious business. But then you made some friends among the ones who'd been around. You confided in a few and saw who burned you, confided again in those who didn't. They told stories that made you sound brave or smart or craven. But always you were a man of action with enemies who were other men of action and you went after each other like gladiators, with honor, for the good of the country. They were spectators who could only be ennobled by the grandness of your actions and so they saw in what you did the grandness of your actions. You were fundamentally on the same team, with everything that you'd worked for on the line. And you ate dinner in a lot of the same places, less since you'd taken over the country, but still, there was a landscape of power that you both had mapped and that knowledge made you bond as locals.

You were aware of social media. You laughed at the energy devoted to building networks. It all seemed frivolous in the developed world.

Somewhere, there were citizens of your country, who you liked very much in the aggregate. You loved them. The body politic was your raison d'etre, and you thought of it often, recalled it kindly, and had its best interests in mind. It had opinions that could be found out and needs to be satisfied. It wanted jobs and law and order and freedom. It wanted you to look after the country's interests and stay out its way when things were going well. Even when minds were divided, the body politic endured, and that helped you keep going, helped you remember that you were defending a civilized, good people who just wanted to be happy.

Occasionally, a face would be pasted onto the body in a television program or in a magazine. Someone would speak for the people, usually in the third or fourth graf (or TV equivalent), right when the scene had been set. What the body politic wanted was explicable and coherent and usually favored one or the other of the policies that you or one of the other great men were promoting. What they wanted was either what you wanted or what your opponents wanted. Your civilized battlefield with its 90-degree angles and aim-and-shoot conventions defined the boundaries of what people wanted. What the body politic wanted was the blue guys (or the red guys) and what everyone wanted was for the glorious nature of the country to be known by all. Even the 24-hour news cycles didn't disrupt all that. They just sped up the battles, as if we'd Tivo'd the Battle of ________ and played it back at triple speed.

There were other groups that told you about the people. Social workers, etc. They came back with horrible stories that were tallied into data tables that ended up in the appendices of the reports that you read the summary of the executive summary of. It's not that you didn't care, but there were a lot of reports and what could the leader of a country do for an individual?

The statistics and the body politic and the lead quote in the A1 newspaper story and the man-on-the-street TV interview were necessary fictions. They let one story speak for the masses, and the masses speak for the one.

And then, when necessary, you would take to the airwaves to speak one-on-one, leader to body politic, about what was happening. You could calm the people. You could move the people. The people watched you when the people watched the television. And you could be on the television whenever you wanted.

You were aware of social media. You laughed at the energy people devoted to building their networks. You knew that Facebook was sweeping the country. It all seemed frivolous in the developed nations, a time-waster. Like television without all the good pomp and circumstance. These people were spending all day *talking to each other* over the Internet. What a waste! There were great books written by great men to be read. There was serious business to attend to. Your media team could handle these things. You paid them to know how they worked. Who had the time for all this twatting or whatever you call it?

In late 2010, things started to go haywire across North Africa. Pockets of resistance to leaders very unlike yourself sprung up and you watched them with interest. You cheered them on as they organized outside the state-run media that merely regurgitated what the dictators told them. The loudspeakers metastasized into a thousand digital megaphones and people hit the streets in Tunis and Cairo. Not all the revolutions were as successful as those, but nonetheless, you had to give it to the Arab Street. They'd adopted the social media tools and used them to overthrow their oppressors by speaking as one. That was the lesson you took from it. Finally, the body politic in Egypt had been allowed to speak.

Then, one day, suddenly, without warning, there were riots in your own streets. Your police didn't know what to do. Your citizens were mad or scared or mad and scared. You hear reports that people were using their phones and these social networks to organize looting. You read some of the individual messages. You look at what the people are saying. And you are appalled. It's not just what the violent people in the streets are doing, it's what everyone is doing. There's no civility. Who are these people making all this noise while you alone know what the signal is? Why isn't the body politic listening when you go on television? Why do you feel so helpless? This thing is spreading in ways you don't understand.

You decide to threaten to shut down social media. You say to the people:

Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.

You have no idea how you might do this, but it seems like you should make a stand, say the words S_____ Y____. You also know that this will scare some people off of those places where people are talking to each other instead of looking at you. Because what the nation needs to do right now is look at you. You represent the nation, law and order. You protect the body politic, which is coherent and whole. It is not a million voices status updating and tweeting and Blackberry Messaging whatever the hell they want.

This is not just about how the riots were organized. It is about the need to battle chaos and anarchy, the need to perpetuate civilization. Society is in danger of being overwhelmed not just by violence but by the noise of innumerable neighbors all shouting at once. They are losing the story that held the nation together, the one that happens to have you in a leading role right at the moment.

As you drift off for a few hours of sleep, you let yourself wonder if the people have always been this writhing chaotic mass. Is there no such thing as a body politic? Is it all just noise? Have the places you've been and the people you've known been a simulacrum of reality? Then what of your actions and your speeches, your opponents and late charges to their flanks, your legacy?

You wake up. The city has mostly stopped burning.

Image: Reuters.

As the Dow has yo-yo'd through the past week, a familiar criticism has risen from the crowd. It's the computers fault!

Take this article from ABC, "High-Frequency Trading May Magnify Market Woes," in which the author leads with the idea that "experts believe that computer-driven high frequency trading is partially responsible for accelerating stock gyrations."

It's not that algorithmic trading couldn't have negative repercussions like last year's flash crash, but we know that there are so many human factors driving the markets crazy that we need real evidence for algorithmic hijinks before we should blame the bots. People like to scapegoat computers when the market starts doing things that are beyond any human's ability to tell a plausible story about. Dow down! Dow up! Dow down! Dow up! It must be the computers' fault!

Blaming computer-assisted trading has been a go-to strategy to explain market dips since the October 1987 market crash. "This computer-assisted trading trading has been credited with helping feed the remarkable run-up in stock values that began in 1982," the AP wrote days after the crash. "But in the wake of Monday's historic 508-point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial average, the technique was being viewed as a destructive force." The Miami Herald was less measured; its headline read, "Computers Bring Doomsday to Wall Street." Even technology evangelists like the ones featured in the video above take it for granted that computerized trading might one area where computers were dangerous.

A lively and still unsettled academic debate ensued about the role of algorithmic trading, or program trading*, as it was then known, during the crash. Did it cause or exacerbate or have no effect on the market collapse? Various investigators told different stories with different data, as summarized nicely in a 1989 paper by Dean Furbush. "There is still no consensus as to the role of program trading in the crash."

In the popular imagination, though, computers certainly played a role in the crash. In 1988, the New York Times wrote, "The story of last October's stock market crash featured one notorious villain: program trading." The Times also noted that the practice hadn't gone away. In fact, computerized trading strategies have only become more prevalent over the 24 years since that crash.

Now, computers execute something like 75 percent of the trades on the major exchange, and when the markets are running smoothly, they seem to have a salubrious effect. But as a generally positive academic paper on the computerized practices concludes, "it remains an open question whether algorithmic trading and algorithmic liquidity supply are equally beneficial in more turbulent or declining markets."

Whatever the reality of the situation, when all hell breaks loose, we don't really trust the machines. We want some wet, sentient mammal eyes staring back at us when the bad times come. We want traders who feel pain. Like these guys, courtesy of The Atlantic business team:

And yet here's what 80 percent of the trades really looked like, so it's about time we stopped relying on romantic or nostalgic notions about human traders.

*Furbush, for one, goes to great lengths to state that 'program trading' strategies antedated computerized trading, but I think for most of our purposes, the terms can be used interchangeably here.

Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC just purchased a controlling stake in Beats Electronics, the headphones company backed by rapper, producer, and entrepreneur Andre Romelle Young, aka Dr. Dre.

HTC paid $300 million for the 51 percent stake, and Forbes looked into what the deal may mean for Dr. Dre's net worth, which was last estimated at $125 million. By the magazine's back-of-the-envelope calculations, Dre may end up worth $300 million, meaning the deal just added $175 million to his fortune, or more than he ever made cutting records. Even really good ones like The Chronic and Doggystyle.

It reminds me of the old Chris Rock bit about race and wealth. "There are no wealthy black or brown people in America," Rock says. "Shaq is rich. The white man who signs his check ... is wealthy."

Well, with the HTC deal, I think we can officially move Dre into the wealthy category.

Every few years for the past couple centuries, even before the large-scale cultivation of marijuana, this idea occurs to someone: What if we towed an iceberg from the poles, where there are no people, to some dry, populous place and then melted it into freshwater?

In some cases, that person has ginned up a company to try to make it happen. In others, they've written reports for the RAND Corporation or turned the idea into the basis for a thriller mass market paperback. 

Long-distance iceberg towing is one of those ideas that will not die but never really springs to life either. It exists in a kind of technological purgatory, dressed up in whatever technology is fashionable during an epoch and resold to a happily gullible media. 

This happened again this week when Georges Mougin told the world that newfangled computer models just happened to confirm what he'd long thought: that icebergs could be transported economically to Africa. Here, we look back at the many failures and successes (there are some!) of towing icebergs from the early 19th century to today.

1825: Tucked in among various environmental schemes including one plan for "conveying by means of pipes and air-pumps, the sea breeze to London," we find this early 19th century author deriding "the old project of towing icebergs into the southern ocean, for the purpose of equalising the temperature of the earth." Now, that's some ambition. Where's that spirit gone in modern times?

1835: It's not just ships that tow icebergs, but the opposite can happen, too. A British expedition in the Arctic got stuck on an iceberg, which proceeded to get blown around the ocean.

It was perhaps the first time that an iceberg had the honor conferred upon it of towing a British ship, although we know that the direct contrary was once in contemplation, of towing the icebergs by British ships to the tropics, for the purpose of diffusing their refrigerating power on the countries situated between them.

Mid 1800s: According to the Encyclopedia of Antartica, small icebergs were towed from southern Chile up to Valparaiso as part of the brewery supply chain. A Chilean researcher said, "The icebergs were towed by ships of the conventional type. Sometimes the icebergs were supplied with sails to utilize the prevailing winds. The ice was used for refrigerating purposes in the breweries and was generally substituted for artificial ice." Apparently, the business continued until about the turn of the century.

August 22, 1863: Scientific American informs us of not one, but two, different schemes in one short article. "A genius in New Bedford is fitting up a steamer for the purpose of towing icebergs to India, where they sell for six cents a pound," the magazine wrote. "Another proposes to do still better--to fit a screw in the iceberg itself, and thus avoid the expense of ship-building. Cute chaps, both of 'em."

June 8, 1898: Printers Ink, an advertising rag, contains an announcement of an iceberg towing related hoax out of Colorado. The magazine reports:

The Mining and Industrial Reporter (Denver) has a little joke. In its February issue it printed the announcement of a concern called the Klondike and Cuba Ice Towing and Anti-Yellow Fever Company, supposed to be engaged in towing icebergs and collecting the gold dust believed to be in them as they melted. It was a hoax, intended as a caricature of Klondike advertisements; but the Reporter announces with glee that it received a largo number of inquiries and applications.

March 9, 1914: A short notice in The Washington Times describes a new iceberg towing operation being advertised in area papers. "The Northern Berg Ice Company is planning to tow icebergs into Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, exhibit them excursion steamers, and then dynamite the bergs into small pieces for market. No names of interested capitalists have as yet been made public, and the advertisements came as a surprise to ice dealers, who say the scheme is not practical."

Early 1940s: The British try to build a massive ship out of wood pulp and ice. They call it Project Habakkuk and it never really succeeds. 

1949: John Isaacs (above) is the godfather of the modern iceberg towing movement. In his first seminar at Scripps Oceanographic Institute in 1949, he suggested the enterprise and expanded on his original speculations for years afterwards. I particularly like his 1956 version in which he suggested "capturing an eight-billion ton iceberg, 20 miles long, 3000 feet wide, and 1000 feet deep in the Antarctic and towing it up to San Clemente Island off San Diego in a matter of 200 days." The way Isaacs saw it, the energy required to guide the berg up two continents was a mere fraction of the energy required to desalinate it, which was itself a popular idea for the third quarter of the 20th century.  

Isaacs was considered a force of nature, at least by his biographer. He spun out many, many ideas in oceanography, although he was best known for his speculative forays into icebergology. You can read all about the man in John Isaacs and His Oceans.

1960s: Oil companies developed a successful iceberg towing technology to keep the ice away from their oil rigs in the Labrador Sea between Canada and Greenland. "It was found that a floating bridle around the berg, attached to several tugs, was feasible and safe." Smithsonian profiled one of these "iceberg wranglers" in 2003 with an appropriate sense of drama, awe, and homespunism.

To round up an iceberg, Baker uses lengths of polypropylene towropes up to 1,200 feet long. "When the rope goes out, it's eight inches thick. It's only an inch thick in places when it comes back," he says. "The rope looks like a camel's been chewing on it."

May 1973: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists asks the logical question of iceberg towing -- "Manna or Madness?" -- in a long article that looked at the "quantitative appeal" of the process, particularly from Antarctica to the Atacama Desert. The result? Icebergs are manna. "The possibility of irrigating large areas of arid land in the Southern Hemisphere is certainly desirable." And one "super tug" capable of pulling the bergs around would be able to "irrigate a square field 126 kilometers on a side." Not bad.

October 1973: The RAND Corporation dives 96 pages deep on "Antarctic Icebergs as a Global Fresh Water Source" for the National Science Foundation. By far the most comprehensive scheme to date, J.L. Hult and N.C. Ostrander went far beyond previous speculations to create an actual paper model of how an "iceberg train" could work. This is classic RAND work with lots of math and appendices. It made them a national media story. "Bringing icebergs to where the water is needed was suggested by John Isaacs of Scripps Institute of Oceanography in the 1950s," Hult told the AP. "It is our job to show how practical it is." Their scheme was inspired more by theoretical least-cost equations more than common sense. For example, they suggested sending a floating nuclear power plant to provide power for the operation.

October 17, 1977: TIME Magazine reports on a conference of like-minded iceberg lovers. The most promising scheme was proposed by Prince Mohammed al Faisal, a nephew of Saudi Arabia's king.

Sponsored by Prince Mohammed al Faisal, a nephew of Saudi Arabia's King Khalid, the conference demonstrated that there is no shortage of ideas for using icebergs to slake the world's growing thirst. Prince Faisal's own company, Iceberg Transport International, is considering a plan to find a 100 million-ton iceberg off Antarctica,* wrap it in sailcloth and plastic to slow its melting, and then use powerful tugboats to tow it to the Arabian peninsula, where it would supply enormous quantities of drinking water. The journey would take about eight months and the project would cost around $100 million, according to estimates.

Iowa State University maintains the archive for the series of conferences, which continued into the early 1980s. The list of speeches demonstrate that the late 70s were probably the high point for modern iceberg towing mania. 

John Hult on "A pilot program for exporting Antarctic icebergs"

Matthew Clark and Earl Mathney on "A survey of legal issues relating to iceberg utilization"

Jerry Rosenberg on "An overview of the organizational, management, economic, and socio-political aspects of transporting icebergs from Antarctica to the United States"

Charles Goldman on "Ecological aspects of iceberg transports from Antarctic waters"

Prince Mohamed Al-Faisal and Dr. Shawkat Abdel-Kader Ismail on "Feasibility of using paddle-wheels for the propulsion of icebergs"

J.B. Job on "High efficiency iceberg propulsion systems"

G.R. Peters on "Iceberg towing for oil rig avoidance"

Wm. W. Bishop on "International law problems of acquisition and transportation of Antarctic icebergs"

Boris Sukhov on "Measurement of iceberg draft"

Edward A. O'Lenic on "U. S. Navy global ice analysis and forecasting"

R. Clifford Humphry on "Use of plastic pods for water transport"

April 1, 1978: The California legislature endorsed the idea of towing two icebergs to southern California, an idea long promoted by one Terry Spragg roughly forever. 

December 1, 1979: Don't think NASA would sleep on iceberg towing. As part of a far-reaching Ice and Climate study program, the agency noted that spacecraft would be an important component of any iceberg utilization program. And icebergs will be utilized, the reports informs us, because nuclear desalinization programs hadn't really worked out and water is really expensive in Saudi Arabia.

The towing of icebergs as a water resource, an idea which a decade ago was met with almost universal derision, is now under serious consideration as a means of alleviating water shortages ... The identification, tracking and studies of ablation of icebergs can most conveniently be conducted from spacecraft.

The new big problem for law enforcement is common to many industries: too much data

In June, Vancouver burst into violence precipitated by the Stanley Cup final. The riot rocked the beautiful city, leaving city leaders to piece together what happened. They appointed a task force, which called on citizens and businesses to submit their photos and video of the riot to the police. The 50-person team plans to release its initial findings at the end of the August, two and a half months after the night of rioting.

In some ways, that small civil disturbance and its aftermath presage the task that the London police will face in the coming months. And if their work is any indication, UK police have a brutal few months of investigation ahead of them. While the state of surveillance is very different in the two municipalities, they share a common feature: there is just too much video to review quickly.

In Vancouver, they had about 1,500 hours of video to review, according to the task force's most recent statistics. London police will undoubtedly have far, far more hours. As Becca Rosen explained yesterday, London is blanketed with 8,300 CCTV cameras that are supposed to serve as crime deterrents.

Let's look at some of the math. Imagine a quarter of those have seen some incident during this four-night stretch. That's 2,081 cameras filming for 32 hours (four nights worth). That's 66,576 hours of video.

Just to watch that video once through would require 8,322 person-days of work. Throwing a force of 200 at the task, you'd finish a once-through in 41 days. Then add in the precision work of finding the right screen captures and tweaking them for maximum visibility. Then imagine using citizen media like the Vancouver police did.

Of course, there have got to be all kinds of heuristics and shortcuts for cutting down the time it takes to search through tons of video. But the fact remains that the investigation will probably drag on for months and months.

Welcome to the future of law enforcement. The long-time problem of having too little information has transformed into its exact opposite, too much. Humans can produce more data than they can readily analyze. That's one reason why some are speculating that facial recognition technology will be deployed on a large-scale to solve this data problem.

But really, facial recognition is just the beginning. What investigator wouldn't want a Google for video? And that's actually what the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the spy agencies' far-out research wing, is trying to build. They solicited proposals on this topic last year. 11 companies responded including Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and several other defense contractors.

Image: Getty Images.

After a few years of strong growth and a few weeks of market turmoil, Apple briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil as the most highly valued company in the world during intraday trading today. In most ways, it seems like the companies couldn't be more different. Exxon sells planet-destroying fossil fuels oil and natural gas whereas Apple sells hipster credibility computing devices and software. We decided to see how the companies stacked up on a variety of important metrics, which we collected into the table below.

The eagle-eyed Adrian Chen of Gawker tweeted about an ugly trend at Amazon.co.uk: sales of bats are spiking. Sales of both aluminum baseball bats and police batons have jumped 5,000 percent in the last 24 hours. The top 10 on Amazon's "movers and shakers" list for Sports and Leisure are: a wooden baseball bat, another wooden baseball bat, an aluminum bat, a wooden bat, a kid's wooden bat, a tent, a work stand, and another bat. Every item on the list has seen its sales shoot up more than 720 percent.

Image: Amazon.uk.

Level 3 Communications, a fiber network company with 84,000 miles of cable, comes clean about the real danger to its business

Among the enemies of the future, we should count the common squirrel. According to Level 3 Communications, which maintains an 84,000-mile fiber network, the cute rodents do 17 percent of the damage to their fiber optic network.

Fred Lawler, a company vice president who "is passionate about fiber protection," wrote about the "furry little nut eater" problem in a blog post for Level 3.

Of all the animals in the whole world, almost all of our animal damage comes from this furry little nut eater. Squirrel chews account for a whopping 17% of our damages so far this year! But let me add that it is down from 28% just last year and it continues to decrease since we added cable guards to our plant. Honestly, I don't understand what the big attraction is or why they feel compelled to gnaw through cables. Our guys in the field have given this some thought and jokingly suspect the cable manufacturers of using peanut oil in the sheathing. If you have any new ideas on how we can combat these wayward rodents, I'd love to hear from you. We are always looking for ways to improve.

First of all, let's stipulate that this is ridiculous.

Ok, now, what could be causing squirrels among all rodents to go after these cables? In 2001, a repairman suggested it was the grease used in the sheathing. A 1989 patent suggests "chewing on objects which are tough in composition is necessary to prevent [rodents] ever-growing incisor teeth from overgrowing." Lawler himself suggested peanut oil.

Someone must have looked into this, no? Hasn't some animal behaviorist picked up some grant money to do some simple testing?

Image: Reuters photoshopped with horsepunchkid/Flickr. Via @rsingel.

Man, that drought down in Texas is getting bad. The new States of Change website is tracking climate impacts in individual states and they've pulled together some of the numbers from this year's nasty drought.

• 87.2: The average temperature for Texas this July.
• 6.53: Inches of precipitation by August 4th.
• 16.03: The historical average for inches of precipitation by August 4th.
• 99.93: Percentage of state currently in some amount of drought.
• 73.49: Percentage of the state that is in extreme drought.
• 38: Number of consecutive days this summer the temperature has risen above 100°F in Dallas-Ft. Worth

The bottom line is that this Texas drought is bad, very bad, and portends the era of extreme weather that climatologists expect is ahead of us.

Image: Reuters.

Late last month, mobile app designer Jonathan Stark decided to try a little experiment. He took his Starbucks card, which had $8.47 on it, and created a simple way to share it. People could simply scan the barcode at any store and pay for their drink for free. Or they could add money to the card, so that others could drink for free. He called it "Get a coffee, give a coffee" and created a Twitter feed (@jonathanscard) that allowed you to track how much money was on the card. What you see above is a chart of its balance over the last several weeks.

As you can see, at first, there was a minispike and a bunch of people used the card, driving the balance up over $50 and then quickly back down. It settled out into a steady pattern for the next few weeks, staying within a tight envelope between 0 and 25 dollars. Then, as knowledge of the card began to spike yesterday, the balance started to fluctuate wildly. The balance shot up all the way to $310 yesterday afternoon before being drained all the way down and then shooting up several more times. During the viral times when the link is spreading rapidly, it appears the pattern is that someone will put a bunch of money and then a group will draw it down before a new benefactor appears. In calmer times, the balance remains lower but more consistently.

Take a look at the Google Spreadsheet. Anyone else see any interesting patterns in the data?

Here's my annotation of the last day or so.

Financial news is pretty awful these days. The S&P 500 is down more than 11 percent since the start of the month and even the tech blue chips are hurting. Apple's down three percent just today. But since the market bloodbath began at the beginning of the month, tech stocks have actually been a pretty good place to be. Only Oracle, Yahoo, and Nokia have fallen more than the S&P average, whereas Apple, IBM, and Intel have all handily beat the market.

Then again, it takes a pretty awful week in the stock market to be celebrating seven percent retreats. 

Chart: Alexis Madrigal.