Alexis C. Madrigal

Facebook has taken on more responsibility for your social life than you might think. I think most people assume they are seeing most of what their friends say, but they aren't, as a recent Daily Beast investigation showed.

The service takes all your friends and decides, based on a secret ranking system, which of the things they say should show up in your News Feed. Because that feed is the default way that most people see stuff on Facebook, that algorithm has become the de facto social filter for hundreds of millions of people. Even if you would never consciously consider using an algorithm to shape your friendships -- surprise! -- you already do.

And yet we don't know much about how Facebook's system actually works. So, the Daily Beast, led by editor Thomas Weber, devised a simple and interesting experiment. They got a Facebook newbie to sign up and twelve volunteers to friend him. When he updated his status or shared a link, they watched their own feeds to see if his posts showed up. Often, they didn't. It helped if he shared a link. And it helped a lot if he shared a photo or video. But those little, "Heading to the grocery store" tidbits? They were heading out into cybernothingness.

All of which leads me to the inevitable recasting of the old tree-forest question: If a Facebook user posts and the algorithm decides that no one should hear it, did he really write something?

Here's Weber's conclusion from the Beast:

For average users, cracking the Facebook code is something of a fun puzzle. But for marketers trying to tap Facebook--or individuals who see the service as a way to promote themselves--understanding how content propagates through the system is anything but a game.

But it also means that many users may not be aware of how much power they've put in the hands of this electronic mediator. (The very concept of the News Feed was controversial as soon as it was unveiled, as chronicled in David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect.)

You might think you've shared those adorable new baby photos or the news of your big promotion with all of your friends. Yet not only does Facebook decide who will and won't see the news, it also keeps the details of its interventions relatively discreet.

All the while, Facebook, like Google, continues to redefine "what's important to you" as "what's important to other people." In that framework, the serendipitous belongs to those who connect directly with their friends in the real world -- or at least take the time to skip their News Feed and go visit their friends' pages directly once in a while.

A photographic tour of Gordon Bennett's mid-century robot workshop

Gordon Bennett makes robots out of mid-century machine parts. They are beautiful and oddly human. You can read our story about him, which includes a video. Here's an excerpt:

When I first saw the robots, they were standing among the goods at City Foundry, a Brooklyn vintage store piled high with $400 chairs. I pressed my nose to the window and stared: thigh-high and remarkably evocative robots constructed solely from mid-century mechanical components looked back. Their legs were struts; car insignias formed chests. Everything fit. They were sculptures made from things no one makes anymore and most wouldn't recognize. They looked like characters from a lost sci-fi movie Pixar made in 1955. You just want to hug them.

I decided that I had to meet their maker. I wanted to see the workshop. I accosted the store's proprietor with my request and he told me I should just go to BennettRobots.com.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and I only had 24 hours left in town. So, when I saw the phone number on the site, I called it. To my surprise, a man answered. He was game. Within an hour, I was headed to a random street in a no-name neighborhood between Park Slope and Greenwood.  I was going to see a robot workshop in a basement! I got so excited that I left my phone in the cab.

In his basement, sculptor Gordon Bennett makes beautiful, oddly human robots out of mid-century mechanical scrap

When I first saw the robots, they were standing among the goods at City Foundry, a Brooklyn vintage store piled high with $400 chairs. I pressed my nose to the window and stared: thigh-high and remarkably evocative robots constructed solely from mid-century mechanical components looked back. Their legs were struts; car insignias formed chests. Everything fit. They were sculptures made from things no one makes anymore and most wouldn't recognize. They looked like characters from a lost sci-fi movie Pixar made in 1955. You just want to hug them.

I decided that I had to meet their maker. I wanted to see the workshop. I accosted the store's proprietor with my request and he told me I should just go to BennettRobots.com.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and I only had 24 hours left in town. So, when I saw the phone number on the site, I called it. To my surprise, a man answered. He was game. Within an hour, I was headed to a random street in a no-name neighborhood between Park Slope and Greenwood.  I was going to see a robot workshop in a basement! I got so excited that I left my phone in the cab.

Gordon Bennett answered the door in a plaid shirt. He and his apartment were unassuming, but nice. He led me downstairs, protesting that it really wasn't much to see. He said that it wasn't some special place.

But it was. This is it.

All these lamps and pipes and fans and radiators and knobs and toasters and juicers and cocktail shakers and lids and wafflemakers had been scavenged from the streets, dropped on his doorstep, bought at flea markets, or otherwise acquired and stored. None of it cost him more than $50. But this isn't junk and it wasn't collected randomly. Certain shapes and metals appeal to Bennett. Most of it is from the American mid-century industrial peak, back from when we made everything, and it was heavy.

"I'd love to stay within that design epoch, that aesthetic," he said. "Because the one thing that I want to do is that I want things to feel like they're from the past. Almost like if they did have robots back then, this is what they'd look like."

In that, he succeeds. The solidity and the craftsmanship make the robots seem from another era. Nothing is soldered because the different metals he works with melt at different temperatures. Everything has to fit exactly, and then it gets bolted together. Industrial items are converted into bespoke mechanical dolls, each one with its own story and architecture.

The best moments come when he finds two pieces of random stuff from different eras-- a lamp covering and something from a power plant -- and they just happen to fit together *just* right.In Bennett's hands, each machine part becomes like a metallic version of Plato's half-souls groping through the world, each looking for its chance to meet its match. It almost sounds mystical, this metalworking.

You can pan and zoom around this panorama of one of Bennett's shelves.

It's clear to me that Bennett's robots, which don't move or have any electronics, are art. Like a good impressionist painting can make you see the reality of light and color in new ways, Bennett's work shifts your perspective about the aesthetics of the mechanical world.

After you've spent some time with these robots, the flotsam of the machine age doesn't seem like scrap metal. The pieces don't seem broken, even though they can't fulfill their original tasks. You start to view the objects by their form, not their function. A curving pipe could be a shoulder. A wafflemaker an abdomen. A lantern a head.

Even after you look away and get back in the car and drive home, you can't help but see human forms in even the bleakest industrial settings.

Close of Business is a new video series that we're trying out. The idea is simple: at 5 p.m. (or thereabouts), we post a quick video summarizing the top three news stories of the day -- and give you one new Twitter or Tumblr to follow. Some of them we'll have written about; others will just be what people were talking about on the Internet.

Your Tumblr account of the day: HungoverOwls.Tumblr.com.

Links to stories mentioned in this video:

Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Lost to Tax Loopholes [Bloomberg]

Sex.com Sold for $13 Million [PC Mag]

Cracking the Facebook Code [The Daily Beast]

See more video from The Atlantic Technology Channel.

We tend to associate space exploration with hulking rockets and massive R&D budgets, but there's a strange thread through the last fifty years of outsider space exploration. We've seen it recently in people sending cameras into space on balloons and more seriously in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. One of the big competitors there is a Romanian team that wants to float a rocket-laden balloon, which will then blast off for the moon. It sounds funny, but it's a real endeavor -- and it's going well.

On the other hand, there are some efforts that were almost entirely fanciful. The Zambian space program in 1964 was one of these. Spearheaded by Edward Makuka Nkoloso, the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy had the goal of reaching the moon before the Russians or Americans -- and he used Zambia's recent independence to vault himself to a short-lived stint in the international press.

In an editorial, Nkoloso claimed that his crew of a "specially trained spacegirl, two cats (also specially trained) and a missionary" were all ready to go for a mission to Mars. This was obviously not the case.

Time magazine's description of the Academy, which was (obviously) not an official part of the new Zambian government, reads like a bizarre joke: "Nkoloso is training twelve Zambian astronauts, including a curvaceous 16-year-old girl, by spinning them around a tree in an oil drum and teaching them to walk on their hands, 'the only way humans can walk on the moon.'"

Maybe we could write off the press coverage as the sort of "Ain't it Weird!" kind of coverage that everyone loves. But that Time note was gratuitously tacked onto the end of an otherwise straight and serious narration of the country's independence celebration. In some hands, Nkoloso's "program" was a backdoor way for Westerners to mock African aspirations in the wake of the very real upheavals caused by independence. Time even ironically headlined its article, "Tomorrow the Moon."

But not all news agencies tried to tie the nation's independence to the ravings of some random guy. Sky Broadcasting's reporter acknowledged that the "space program" was not a reflection of the nation. "To most Zambians, these people are just a bunch of crackpots," he said, "and from what I have seen today, I'm inclined to agree."

Nkoloso, at least from the evidence we have to go on, was something closer to a cargo cult leader than a scientist. What remains fascinating to us today is that he drew on the sublimity of space travel -- not religious sentiment -- to win friends and influence people. It's a reminder of the power that space travel had in the popular imagination of the 1960s.

Explore the complete Old, Weird Tech archive.

Hat tip to Tim Maly.

The PopTech Conference is like an east coast TED with a slightly bigger heart. Wonderfully curated by Andrew Zolli, the gathering always seems to highlight fascinating people right before they hit the mainstream. That is to say, don't be surprised to see the folks presenting at PopTech this weekend showing up next year at TED or in the New York Times Magazine or on Charlie Rose.

The whole program is streaming live from Camden, Maine. You can check out the schedule here, but I wouldn't try to cherrypick the best talks. Just pop in and see who Zolli's team has found for you. Of course, I may be biased. I wrote a few times for the PopTech blog and really believe in the organization's mission to accelerate the diffusion of innovative ideas to increase social goods.

This year's theme is "Brilliant Accidents, Necessary Failures, and Improbable Breakthroughs." Poptech asked some speakers to deliver their take on the theme in just six words. (Six Word Memoir project founder Larry Smith will be speaking.) Here's what they came up with:

The inevitable triumph of the nerds. --Craig Newmark
Yes, you can edit my biography --Jimmy Wales
Threw spaghetti at wall; some stuck. --Larry Smith
Life is one big editorial meeting. --Gloria Steinem
Never put bananas in your still-life. --Susan Winslow
Father: 'Anything but journalism.' I rebelled. --Malcolm Gladwell

Oh, and keep an eye out for the PopTech Social Innovation Fellows. The fellowship is a great program that several friends (Leila Janah, Heather Fleming and Emily Pilloton) have been a part of. PopTech's selection committee seems to have a knack for picking people right on the cusp of doing Big, Important Things. Here's the class of 2010.

Image: University of Toronto psychologist Kevin Dunbar talking about the brain and mistakes.

Usually, Close of Business is our video series, which delivers you the day's top news in two quick minutes. Unfortunately, I'm stuck in the Denver airport with wifi that makes 3G look fast.

So, I'm going to recap your news using only the alphabet.

Obviously, the top tech story of the day was the string of announcements Apple made today. First, a new version of OS X will be out in Summer 2011. It's called Lion. Here's Apple's preview of the OS. The pitch is that they're integrating the features that have made the (iPhone and iPad) iOS a success and applying that to the desktop.

The other big Apple news -- at least to me -- is that they released a marketplace for desktop software modeled on the popular app store. The Mac App Store seems like a great idea because, let's be honest, I don't even know what software is available for my computers anymore.

Oh, and there are some beautiful new 2.9-pound Macbook Airs that will apparently have 30 days of standby power (though I'm not sure how much that matters).

In non-Apple news, Netflix may offer streaming-only subscriptions within the year. Apparently, they are testing the option now. No word on pricing, but I'd take that option in a second. I watch about 20x the number of things streaming as I do on a disc. Also: remember when Netflix was considered dead in the water? It's trading at over $150 a share, right at its all-time high.

That's your Close of Business. I'll be back with video tomorrow.

Last month, the New York Times reported that the Chinese government clamped down on its exports of rare earth metals, which are used in the manufacture of all kinds of electronics, to Japan. Now, it appears that a similar thing is happening with Western countries like the United States, the Times reports, though Chinese officials deny it.

The Chinese action, involving rare earth minerals that are crucial to manufacturing many advanced products, seems certain to further intensify already rising trade and currency tensions with the West. Until recently, China typically sought quick and quiet accommodations on trade issues.

But the interruption in rare earth supplies is the latest sign from Beijing that Chinese leaders are willing to use their growing economic muscle. "The embargo is expanding" beyond Japan, said one of the three rare earth industry officials, all of whom insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Chinese authorities.

They said Chinese customs officials imposed the broader restrictions on Monday morning, hours after a top Chinese official summoned international news media Sunday night to denounce United States trade actions.

As we said last time, the mechanics of any rare earth metal embargo is important to manufacturers and suppliers, but hard to pin down. What's important, policy-wise, is that we could have a domestic rare earth metal industry in the United States, but we have refused to support it in the belief that the market would always deliver what we needed from low-cost Chinese suppliers.

That works as long as you can muscle any other country into sending you its raw materials for cheap and on your terms. We can't do that to the Chinese any longer, and their ideas about how markets should work and the role of political intervention in them are as weird and idiosyncratic as our own.

The good news is that there is a long-term solution. Several pieces of legislation are before Congress to help restart American production of rare earth metals. We had a mine in Mountain Pass, California (see above), and we could have gotten it back up and running at any time. Unfortunately, you can't just flip a switch with these things. So in the short-term, we're kind of stuck. We'll work out some kind of compromise.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't get that legislation passed, though. Industrial policy is slower than the cable or blog news cycle. You make decisions with long-term consequences that put you in a better or worse positions years down the line. The Chinese understand this. Do we?

Update 1:27 pm: Atlantic correspondent Damien Ma and I had a little exchange about rare earths and I just wanted to share a short snippet of his thoughts and refer you to his piece on the issue: "My concern is that there are many folks across interest groups who dearly want to believe that this "sanction" narrative is true, not so much to promote US industrial policy (which I think is a good idea), but to just punish China as the solution. That's the real risk to me of [this] narrative."

Close of Business is a new video series that we're trying out. The idea is simple: at 5 p.m. (or thereabouts), we post a quick video summarizing the top three news stories of the day -- and give you one new Twitter or Tumblr to follow. Some of them we'll have written about; others will just be what people were talking about on the Internet.

Your Twitter account of the day: @ICHEG, the International Center for the History of Electronic Games.

Oh, and excuse the video quality. That's iPhone 4 video right there. We'll be back with normal quality on Thursday.

Links to stories mentioned in this video:

Apple's Fiscal Fourth Quarter Earnings [Apple]

Steve Jobs on the Future of the iPad [The Atlantic]

Microsoft Increases Cloud Offerings with 365 [Wall Street Journal]

Real Change: Biz Stone on Twitter and Activism [The Atlantic]

See more video from The Atlantic Technology Channel.

On Apple's earnings call, you probably didn't catch that Apple set a new retail foot traffic record last quarter, what with all the iPad supply fears and Steve Jobs ranting. But they did: more than 74.5 million people went to one of the 317 Apple stores across the world.

Only a small percentage of them actually bought anything, but that's the point. Apple has managed to transform *hanging out in their stores* into entertainment. Of course, kids have been loitering in malls for decades, but the Apple store experience is far more specific. It's about playing with all the neat Apple stuff.

The crazy thing is that the company's reach and popularity mean that a big chunk of the world's rich youth are all experiencing the APPLE STORE TRIP together. I think it will be a cultural touchpoint for decades -- like the cinema of Fellini's Italy or the department store in turn-of-the-century America -- even if Apple wanes.

Data sources:

1. Apple earnings call
2. Themed Entertainment Association annual report
3. Billboard
4. Opera America

Collective problem solving is a tough business. Just ask Congress. Or your partner. Now, extend your team to thousands of anonymous individuals and define your task as distilling knowledge about the world. That's Wikipedia.

For all its warts, Wikipedia is a testament to the power of decentralized collaboration. Almost uniquely among online spaces, the volunteer-edited encyclopedia has been able to retain a culture that is generally productive and civil.

The Berkman Center is a leading institution for important research into the uses and impacts of digital technologies. We'll be previewing their regular brownbag lunches here on The Atlantic Technology Channel.

Joseph Reagle wrote his PhD dissertation on the history and culture of Wikipedia. What emerged from his research were a few simple rules that he calls Good Faith Collaboration, which is also the title of his new book.

The Wikipedia community has a certain attitude toward knowledge, Reagle found. They actively work to maintain neutrality, even if that's sometimes nearly impossible. "Wikipedia is not the place to argue about what's right and what's wrong, what's true and what's false," Reagle said. "Wikipedia is just trying to say what's out there."

And the community also has a specific approach to people, which Reagle contrasts with Godwin's Law, which (humorously? tragically?) states, "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." Wikipedians, instead, promote basic civility and consensus decisionmaking. The number one rule? Assume good faith. The rest of the site's rules are largely extensions of kindergarten etiquette, but the idea that to find consensus, you must see your opponents as people like yourself is important.

"Something has to resist the tendency of our online conversations to the lowest common denominator, and the tendency to see each other as Hitler," he said. "I taught conflict management and a lot of this stuff is relevant and germane to conflict management."

Reagle, who will present on his work at the Berkman Center today, argues that the way Wikipedia users think about their project has its roots in the utopian visions of H.G. Wells and Paul Otlet, who thought that if only knowledge was accessible and organized, the world would be transformed.

"They were quite inspired by index cards, microfilm and loose-leaf binders. They thought that if you could pull information out of the boundaries of the book and -- in our terms -- mash it up, and make it available to the world, it would bring about global accord," Reagle said. "If we really knew and understood each other, there'd be no more war."

Obviously, Wikipedia has a slightly smaller mission than world peace, but perhaps some of the lessons about good faith the site teaches us can be applied to other realms. That's my hope, at least.

But it's going to be tough.

"If we look at politics, everyone can say, 'I'm not going to take any low shots,' but there is a huge reward for doing so," Reagle said. "I think there is less of a reward in Wikipedia."

The features of the software helps, too. It's easier to be relaxed about newcomers' editing or changes being made when you can hit the revert button and restore what came before.

But Reagle thinks the dominant factor in shaping what Wikipedia has become was the conscious choice of the founders to actively create a place where people could work together. "I think the founders were quite cognizant of the way things worked on USENET and Jimmy Wales said, 'We need something different,' and they set out to develop those norms."

Like Wikipedia itself, which seems to tap our natural urge to correct things that we think are wrong, maybe our politics will self-correct. Maybe this period of extra nasty divisiveness in politics will push us out of the USENET phase and into a productive period of Wikipedian civility.

Steve Jobs made the rather unusual move to join Apple's earnings call to talk smack about his company's smartphone and tablet competitors. He said Android was "going to be a mess for users and developers" and said he anticipated "the current crop of seven-inch [i.e. not the iPad] tablets will be DOA, dead on arrival."

Apple crushed analysts' earnings estimates but disappointing growth in iPad sales drove shares down in after hours trading. In response to an analyst's question about "the trajectory of the iPad," Jobs gazed into his crystal ball and came up with the following prognostication about the iPad's future.

Well, the iPad is clearly going to affect notebook computers. And I think the iPad proves it's not a question of if, it's a question of when. There's a lot of development and progress that will occur over the next few years, but we're already seeing tremendous interest in iPad from education and, much to my surprise, from business.

We haven't pushed it real hard in business and it's being grabbed out of our hands. I talk to people every day in all kinds of businesses that are using iPads... The more time that passes, the more I am convinced that we've got a tiger by the tail here and this is a new model of computing -- you know we've already got tens of millions of people trained on with the iPhone -- and that lends itself to lots of different aspects of life, personal, educational, and business. I see it as very general purpose and very big... One could argue about the timing endlessly, but I don't think you can argue it's going to happen.

Close of Business is a new video series that we're trying out. The idea is simple: at 5 p.m. (or thereabouts), we post a quick video summarizing the top three news stories of the day -- and give you one new Twitter or Tumblr to follow. Some of them we'll have written about; others will just be what people were talking about on the Internet.

Your Twitter account of the day: @N_E_I, the Nuclear Energy Institute, which I think provides timely and surprisingly balanced perspective on energy news.

Important links mentioned in this video:

Facebook in Privacy Breach [Wall Street Journal]

Microsoft's Billion-Dollar Bail Out Plan [All Things Digital]

October 18, 1985: Nintendo Entertainment System Launches [Wired]

See more video from The Atlantic Technology Channel.

Surely you've heard of Coal Oil Johnny, right?

Before J.R. Ewing, or the Beverly Hillbillies, or even John D. Rockefeller, there was Coal Oil Johnny. He was the first great cautionary tale of the oil age -- and his name would resound in popular culture for more than half a century after he made and lost his fortune in the 1860s.

A penniless orphan growing up, it was said Coal Oil Johnny once spent $100,000 in a day. It was said that he bought a hotel for a night. It was said he rode around in a bright red carriage adorned with a drawing of an oil derrick instead of a coat of arms. He lit cigars with hundred-dollar bills. Diamonds dripped from his fingers. "He one day found his coat so stuffed with greenbacks that it was uncomfortable," the New York Times recounted when he died in 1921. "He ran into a bank threw it at the teller and never came back again."

For generations after the peak of his career, he was still so famous that any major oil strike, particularly like the epoch-marking one at Spindletop in Texas in 1901, brought his tales back to people's lips.

His name was synonymous with lucking into a tremendous fortune -- and then pissing it all away. Coal Oil Johnny was to profligacy what Paul Bunyan was to strength. He even had a steed to match Bunyan's blue ox. She was a small horse named Bess, and she had fine tastes, too. Legend has it that one night in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Johnny rode her right into a bar on his way to a good time.

"He didn't know a soul but that didn't matter," the Perrysburg Journal of Ohio wrote more than 20 years later. "'I'm Johnny Steele. Close the doors and every one make a night of it with me. Give Bess a bottle of champagne to start with.' Bess was the beautiful little mare he rode and immediately interest was centered on the horse whom her owner said drank champagne. Bess, moreover, was the only sober one of the outfit some hours later."

John W. Steele, his real name, disputed the truth of some of these stories, but as in The Social Network, it's not really the facts that matter here. Coal Oil Johnny was a legend and like all legends, he became a stand-in for a constellation of people, things, ideas, feelings and morals -- in this case, about oil wealth and how it works.

Oil made common people rich beyond their wildest dreams. They did some crazy things with that wealth as the whole region got whipped into a frenzy. People spilled out of the oil regions crazed.

"Other misguided beings from the oil regions of Pennsylvania were scattered about the country doing foolish things, and many of their performances were afterwards credited to me," Steele himself wrote in his autobiography. "But as I had played the fool in so many directions, it was not strange that this was so, as possibly I was the 'king-bee' of the oil region spendthrifts."

And why wouldn't they buy crazy things? There was something about oil money that was slippery and dangerous and exciting. And besides, it was free! You could pump money out of the petroleum pools underneath land had been nearly worthless before.

"It was wealth from nowhere," said Brian Black, a historian at Pennsylvania State, who wrote the book Petrolia, about those early oil years. "Somebody like that was coming in without any opportunity or wealth and suddenly has a transforming moment. That's the magic and it transfers right through to the Beverly Hillbillies and the rest of the mythology."

And then the oil ran out, just a couple of decades after the first black gold came bubbling out of the underworld. The first oil region, like Coal Oil Johnny, ended up just as poor as it had been before the strike, even if the oil fat cats made a pretty penny.

"Coal Oil Johnny personifies what the whole country learned from the Pennsylvania oil boom," Black said.

And yet now we've forgotten this important peak oil parable. American crude production has dwindled to about 55% of its early '70s peak -- and the International Energy Agency thinks more than half of global production will come offshore by 2015. The time when striking oil required little more than some gumption is long over. The first oil well in America came from the hard work of a couple of blacksmiths with the backing of some investors. Now, we build offshore platforms, drag them miles out into the ocean, and pin them to the seafloor, so we can grind through thousands of feet of sediment to the oil pools beneath them. It's not the same playing field or the same sport.

I lucked into rediscovering Coal Oil Johnny. I have a thing for non-musical records, particularly energy-related stuff. So, a couple of weeks ago, when I headed out to an estate sale in Bethesda, Maryland, I couldn't help but purchase the $1 record called "Coal Oil Johnny."

Produced by Little People Records of British Columbia, I haven't been able to find anything about the production of this record, not even a date. Nonetheless, I was sure it would be some thinly veiled morality play, and indeed it is. You can listen to the whole 25-minute play right here thanks to my USB turntable.