Alexis C. Madrigal

Ever since the first extrasolar planet was discovered in 1995, astronomers have had their sights set on a much more difficult target: finding an Earth-like planet.

Now, two scientists have made the fairly bold prediction that we're going to find a watery, warm planet such as our own in the first half of next year!

"In the past decades, the number of known extrasolar planets has ballooned into the hundreds, and with it the expectation that the discovery of the first Earth-like extrasolar planet is not far off," writes Greg Loughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz and Sam Arbesman of Harvard. "Here we develop a novel metric of habitability for discovered planets, and use this to arrive at a prediction for when the first habitable planet will be discovered. Using a bootstrap analysis of currently discovered exoplanets, we predict the discovery of the first Earth-like planet to be announced in the first half of 2011, with the likeliest date being early May 2011."

Of course, we want to find another Earth because we want to find ourselves, intelligent life -- or failing that, just life. Judging by the organisms we have here on Earth, that knocks out nearly every spot in universe, except for the trillions of planets orbiting stars at just the right distance and with the right elemental composition. The easiest planets to discover turn out to be the worst for hosting life because they are big and very close to their home stars.

It's exceptionally difficult to find the habitable ones that we want to. We generally find planets by detecting the way they distort their star's orbit (the wobble method) or by measuring the very slight dimming that occurs when a planet passes in front of its star (the transiting method).

Neither of these is an easy task under any circumstances, but if you're looking for something like Earth in a solar system with a star like ours, you're trying to detect a planet that is 300,000 times less massive than its star.

Astronomers developed special techniques and telescopes to aid the quest. As the years have gone by, we've gotten better and better at spotting smaller and smaller planets hanging out in orbits more conducive to liquid water's presence. We even launched a space telescope called Kepler with the express mission of finding earth-like planets. The Kepler group will release the data on their 400 best planetary candidates next February, which is awfully close to the May 2011 date the Loughlin and Arbesman came up with, a fact that did not escape them.

"It does seem to accord well with outside considerations," Arbesman told me.

The paper was posted to arXiv, a repository for papers in math and physics, and will be published early next month in the open-access journal PLoS One.

Beyond the stunning topline of the paper, it's fascinating to see the field of scientometrics, which tries to measure science quantitatively, in action. It got me wondering: could we use a similar methodology to predict other scientific discoveries or breakthroughs? A better way of asking the question is really: in what circumstances could we imagine trying to extrapolate from current data to some future date?

"It makes the most sense in pretty carefully delimited and defined areas, where we have a very good sense of the properties of that discovery. We know the contours and shape of that discovery," said paper co-author Arbesman.

For other areas, like "finding a cure for cancer," it's not so easy to know what you'd need to discover or create to have a solution. "When will a cure for cancer occur? It will be a lot of successive small things. It's hard to know how to quantify it," Arbesman said.

[via @Brainpicker]

Image: NASA rendering, i.e. not a real photo.

When we ran the story yesterday about Netflix users who've rated tens of thousands of movies, I was hoping that one or more of them would come out of the woodwork.

And so one has. Meet Brian Dear. He's writing a book about PLATO, which he describes as the first online community in the world. And he's rated 20,348. You can decide for yourself which is the more impressive accomplishment.

In any case, after he posted in the comments about how many movies he'd rated, I got in contact with him, asking for an explanation of his motivation and method. Turns out that one reason he did so much rating was as part of his project to evaluate the Netflix user experience earlier this decade. He documented all that. The idea was to get Netflix to change. So not only was he a power user of the rating system, he sought to change the company that built it, too.

Here's why and how he rated 20,348 movies in his own words -- and what he thinks about Netflix's algorithm after all that effort:

Netflix was relatively new back in 2002, and I felt there were lots of good things and a few not so good things about the user interface, and pointed them out and made suggestions for improvement. It wound up getting the attention of the Netflix execs and product team and we had some good exchanges and I felt "mission accomplished."

I rated movies I'd never seen to tell Netflix "no interest" -- in the hopes that if it knew what I did *not* like, as well as what I *did* like, it could only help in terms of recommendations. Another major motivation was that back in those days, one was not able to tell Netflix that one did not want to see **anything** in a particular genre. You can block entire genres now (thanks to my prodding, perhaps). So the only way back then -- so I thought -- to drill home the point to the Netflix recommendation engine that I didn't, say, want sports movies, or TV programs, was to say "not interested" to everything in the genre.

It didn't help, amazingly. I might say "not interested" to 500, 1000 movies or programs in a particular genre, and it would STILL recommend stuff from that genre, which only emboldened me more :-) And to my surprise, all that effort wound up breaking their recommendation engine! To date, they've never fixed it. Something I once pointed out to Reid Hastings, when I bumped into him at a conference. He laughed and told me forget it, they'll never fix it. And so, years go by and I keep renting occasionally from Netflix but I never get any recommendations from 'em.

I haven't rated many movies since 2005. Prolly a dozen or two. In other words, this isn't an ongoing preoccupation.

Take a look at the attached screen grab -- note that Netflix is broken. I've rated 20348 movies, but it cannot make any suggestions, and tells me to rate more "so we can help you find movies you'll love".

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James Watson, credited with the co-discovery of the structure of DNA, is a bombthrower. He loves to cause a stir and make a scene. In his golden years, he's sometimes put that impulse to startlingly off-key effect, such as his comments about race a few years ago. But back in 1971 Watson took a look at the possibilities for human cloning and called on his fellow scientists to step up and come up with a way to deal with its social implications. The subheadline put forward the key question of his Atlantic piece, "Is this what we want?"

The top of this story is a bit of a tough read, peppered with hard nuggets of genetic jargon. But plow through and you'll be rewarded with some deliciously weird stuff about the possibility of the Shah of Iran genetically cloning himself.

Looking back, though, what's most fascinating about Watson's story is that human cloning has not really been an issue. To many people of the time, it seemed damn near inevitable that people would try to clone themselves (or someone). And here we are decades later with a de facto moratorium, despite spotty legal treatment around the globe.

Activation of such eggs to divide to become blastocysts, followed by implantation into suitable uteri, should lead to the development of healthy fetuses, and subsequent normal-appearing babies.

The growing up to adulthood of these first clonal humans could be a very startling event, a fact already appreciated by many magazine editors, one of whom commissioned a cover with multiple copies of Ringo Starr, another of whom gave us overblown multiple likenesses of the current sex goddess, Raquel Welch. It takes little imagination to perceive that different people will have highly different fantasies, some perhaps imagining the existence of countless people with the features of Picasso or Frank Sinatra or Walt Frazier or Doris Day. And would monarchs like the Shah of Iran, knowing they might never be able to have a normal male heir, consider the possibility of having a son whose genetic constitution would be identical to their own?

Clearly, even more bizarre possibilities can be thought of, and so we might have expected that many biologists, particularly those whose work impinges upon this possibility, would seriously ponder its implication, and begin a dialogue which would educated the world's citizens and offer suggestions which our legislative bodies might consider in framing national science policies. On the whole, however, this has not happened. Though a number of scientific papers devoted to the problem of genetic engineering have casually mentioned that clonal reproduction may someday be with us, the discussion to which I am party has been so vague and devoid of meaningful time estimates as to be virtually soporific.

Does this effective silence imply a conspiracy to keep the general public unaware of a potential threat to their basic way of life? Could it be motivated by fear that the general reaction will be a further damning of all science, thereby decreasing even more the limited money available for pure research? Or does it merely tell us that most scientists do live such an ivory-tower existence that they are capable of thinking rationally only about pure science, dismissing most practical matters as subjects for the lawyers, students, clergy, and politicians to face up to?

Read the rest of Watson's "Moving Toward the Clonal Man."

Revisit more pieces from The Atlantic's archives with the Technology Channel.

It's really easy to take the infrastructure of television and radio for granted. They're old technologies; most innovation activity has moved to other sectors. But what we forget is that the system has to be maintained. Things break. Replacement parts have to be made and installed. Storms deliver damage. This video is perhaps the most dramatic visualization of the importance of operations and maintenance that you're ever likely to see. In it, a technician climbs to the top of a tower more than 1,700 feet tall. Most of the time he's not using a rope (which is allowed by safety regulations) and he's dragging a huge bag of tools as he goes up, up, up. You should definitely watch the video. Go all the way to the end. If you're even a little bit afraid of heights, you'll get the emotional fear response that we need to stimulate people into maintaining and rebuilding the country's infrastructure. Last time the nation's engineers told us about the hazardous state of our dams, bridges, roads, levees and pipelines, few listened. Maybe in its own weird way, this video can help us remember that we can't take the things we built in the 20th century for granted.

[via Boing Boing]

It has become a cliche of the cell phone age to hate that other people carry on their conversations in public. Something about hearing half of a dialogue seems to irk those with even the slightest tendency to be tech reactionaries. They are a sign of the particular brand of decline associated with new things. "Why did those phones seem like the embodiment of everything I had to escape?" complains Philip Roth's narrator in Exit Ghost. "They were an inevitable technological development, and yet, in their abundance, I saw the measure of how far I had fallen away from the community of contemporary souls."

But lest you think that it was only the mobile telephone that flummoxed and annoyed early observers, we bring you Mark Twain's wonderful 1880 piece, "A Telephonic Conversation."

Sage Stossel, one of our contributing editors and a living memory bank of The Atlantic's archives, described the piece like this: "In 1880, Twain, bemused by this new device that permitted eavesdroppers to hear only one side of a conversation, wrote an amusing description of overhearing his wife talk on the telephone."

There is something fundamentally wrong about a one-sided conversation, "the queerest of all the queer things in this world," as Twain puts it. It's speech detached from its surroundings and social environment, existing fully only on the electrified line connecting two people.

Twain, of course, makes the dislocations of the new communication mode funny. His liberal use of incongruity feels snarky, but not in a bad way. And maybe that's because he wasn't opposed to the telephone, even if he found some of its aftereffects odd. His family was one of the first to install a telephone in the city of Hartford.

Without answering, I handed the telephone to the applicant, and sat down. Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world, -- a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don't hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay. You can't make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says. Well, I heard the following remarkable series of observations, all from the one tongue, and all shouted, -- for you can't ever persuade the gentle sex to speak gently into a telephone

Read the rest of Twain's "A Telephonic Conversation."

Revisit more pieces from The Atlantic's archives with the Technology Channel.

How to Think About... is a video series that provides you with quick frames for thinking about the world's blizzard of technologies and services. The idea is simple: imagine we're having a beer and you ask me, "What do you think about X?"

I switch on the camera and respond. These videos are informal, extemporaneous affairs and we hope they feel like the start of a talk. We'd love to hear how you think about these things, too.

So, you think you've honed the Netflix recommendation engine by rating a thousand movies? That's nothing, according to the company's internal statistics.

Several hundred Netflix members have rated more than 50,000 filmed entertainment programs. 50,000! To watch all those at a pace of one movie or TV show per day, it would take 136 years.

But those users are just the extreme end of a broader behavioral pattern. About a tenth of one percent (0.07%) of Netflix users -- more than 10,000 people --  have rated more than 20,000 items. And a full one percent, or nearly 150,000 Netflixers, have rated more than 5,000 movies. By contrast, only 60 percent of Netflix users rate any movies at all, and the typical person only gives out 200 starred grades.

Who are the subset of users who choose to make evaluating movies into an obsession instead of a casual exercise? They are nurturing the Netflix algorithm, training it. But why?

The two biggest raters I was able to track down had each reviewed in the neighborhood of 6,500 programs. Both are long-time users and neither intended to end up putting so much data into the system. But they were aware that there was an algorithm out there awaiting their input to reshape itself to their desires.

Mike Reilly, a producer, has rated more than 6,500 movies. At first, he just rated movies as they showed up, but then he heard about the Netflix Prize, a high-profile competition to improve the accuracy of the service's predictions.

"I became fascinated with the concept, the different approaches people were taking, and the practicality of these applied theories," Reilly told me.

He didn't employ a consistent methodology, rating in spurts and usually while searching for something to watch. What's fascinating is that Reilly noticed changes in the quality of the Netflix predictions as he rated more and more movies.

"The recommendations are better by far [than at the beginning]. I would say that from 0 to about 500 was pretty useless, at 1,000 to 2,000 it got a lot better -- then tailed off to about 5,000. From then on it's been pretty fantastic," he said. "It's really difficult to find something you simply don't know about -- this new system not only finds it, but can really pinpoint why it thinks you'd like it -- there's not just content, but the context as well, and that's really helpful."

That said, even after 6,500 ratings, the system still recommends bad choices occasionally.

"At this point it's just throwing, like, every Star Trek episode at me -- I've never really seen [that program] and am not interested, but it's like 'this is all that's left so we're going to keep asking, oh, and are you sure you still don't want to watch Mystery Science Theater 3000?'" Reilly said. "It's the same with kids movies."

Lorraine Hopping Egan, a book author, has rated 6,471 movies, but feels that the recommendations she gets aren't commensurate with the time she's invested.

"When I first joined, I went into a ratings frenzy because it was fun to say 'I saw that! I loved that! Overrated!' But mostly, I've rated movies as they popped up, in part so that they would stop coming up and I'd see more missed gems," she wrote to me. "But after 10 years, the recommendations are pretty thin and off-track."

Egan has found herself relying on regular old word-of-mouth and professional movie critics more than the algorithmic recommendations.

Some less intense users seem to get better results. Josh West, a developer here at The Atlantic, had a particularly elegant way of training his algorithm. He got to 416 ratings and consciously stopped starring movies.

"I felt like it knew my taste perfectly. It would predict I'd give a movie 3.6 stars -- and that is exactly how I would feel about it," West told me. "It predicted my rating more precisely than I could because you can only give something 3 or 4 stars, so I just stopped doing it."

Other people have adopted more complicated training techniques. Culture writer and co-founder of HiLoBrow.com, Josh Glenn, rated 2,638 movies in a single morning.

"I decided to rate as many as I could, really quickly, because I was sick of having movies suggested to me that I've either seen already or would never want to watch," Glenn wrote to me in an e-mail. "So I rated every movie I don't like or don't want to see with one star -- for some reason, I don't like clicking the NOT INTERESTED button. I try to save four stars for my all-time favorites. I don't have a system for two vs. three stars, and I don't use half stars."

His system may have worked too well. Now, Glenn, who only watches the movies available online from Netflix, gets very few recommendations. But that doesn't bother him too much.

"Maybe I'm an enabler, but I make excuses for Netflix," he said. "I watch a lot more movies than most people (I think) so I understand why they can't keep me satisfied."

The practice of rating Netflix movies can be hypnotic. If you go into the official page for rating movie, it displays your number of reviews in the upper right. As you rate movie after movie, your score goes up and up. When you really think about it, the Netflix rating system works on the world's simplest game mechanic: do something, get a point, move to a slightly more complex situation.

It's not unlike a casual game, perhaps like Zynga's smash hit, Farmville, a Facebook game in which you raise virtual crops. Except in this case, what you're growing isn't a virtual representation of wheat or tomatoes, but your own personal movie-picking servant, a savant twin of yourself that knows nothing but you and movies.

We'd love to hear your algorithmic training methodologies, or about any extreme feats of Netflixing. Get in touch in the comments or send an e-mail to me at amadrigal[at]theatlantic.com.

H/T to Mike McCaffrey for suggesting the idea of algorithmic farming on Twitter one day.

I had a chance to sit down with Mark Frauenfelder, MAKE Magazine's Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of BoingBoing, in Los Angeles to talk about his piece in October's Atlantic, "School for Hackers." We cut our conversation down into a little five minute video, so you can get a taste of how Mark's life has changed by entering maker culture.

If you're unfamiliar with the term "maker," it's the label for an emergent group composed of people who like to build their own stuff. They learn technology by tearing it apart and rebuilding it, gutting it and remaking it. As their numbers have grown, they've gotten more self-conscious, and I actually think they could become a real social movement.

I love that makers *do* stuff. Their enthusiasm is creative. They aren't just painting signs and rallying; they are out there building new things and systems that change their lives. What's really important about that isn't just that these attempts find new solutions, but that you come to understand problems better when you try to solve them yourself.

In his magazine piece, Mark focused on the maker approach to education, which sorely needs new thinking.

So it makes sense that members of the DIY movement see education itself as a field that's ripe for hands-on improvement. Instead of taking on the dull job of petitioning schools to change their obstinate ways, DIYers are building their own versions of schools, in the form of summer camps, workshops, clubs, and Web sites. Tinkering School in Northern California helps kids build go-karts, watchtowers, and hang gliders (that the kids fly in). Competitions like FIRST Robotics (founded by Segway inventor Dean Kamen) bring children and engineers together to design and build sophisticated robotics. "Unschooler" parents are letting their kids design their own curricula. Hacker spaces like NYC Resistor in Brooklyn and Crash Space in Los Angeles offer shop tools and workshops for making anything from iPad cases to jet packs. Kids in the Young Makers Program (just launched by Maker Media, Disney-Pixar, the Exploratorium, and TechShop) have built a seven-foot animatronic fire-breathing dragon, a stop-motion camera rig, a tool to lift roofing supplies, and new skateboard hardware.

So, check out his full story. He's a great thinker with a unique perspective.

[Aside: Mark's story was the first that I helped bring to The Atlantic print edition, so I will probably remember it forever.]

Turns out Twitter is a website after all.

Since shortly after its launch, Twitter had seemed more like a web service. Many users, though certainly not all of them, rarely or never went to Twitter.com, using the service through third-party applications like Tweetdeck and Thwirl on their phones and computers.

But over the last year, the company has been trying to stuff the cats (i.e. users) back into its bag. First, they launched new retweet functionality that worked best on the website. Now, they've revamped Twitter.com in the largest update to the user-facing side of the site in years. In general, the changes help improve the experience, but as Peter Kafka (and others) immediately realized, the revision is likely to change Twitter's business as much as its usage.

Twitter wants to keep you on Twitter.com and the redesign seems shaped around that goal.

For you, the big change is that you can view video and pictures right on the site now. Click on the arrow to the right of a Tweet and the photo or video shows up. The same arrow allows you to find out more about the Tweeter, other people mentioned, and hashtags used. It's an elegant solution to the problem of keeping the site's feel familiar while providing new functionality.

But perhaps the most noticeable thing about the new redesign -- as pointed out by the Times' Jenna Wortham -- is all the blank space in the right toolbar. That looks to me like a great spot for some ads.

How to Think About... is a video series that provides you with quick frames for thinking about the world's blizzard of technologies and services. The idea is simple: imagine we're having a beer and you ask me, "What do you think about X?"

I switch on the camera and respond. These videos are informal, extemporaneous affairs and we hope they feel like the start of a talk. We'd love to hear how you think about these things, too.

It's not easy to map the shape of the changes that technology brings to our minds in real-time. We often start from our own experience of using something -- a car, a phone, a computer -- and spiral outward talking to friends, looking for evidence. Nicholas Carr took exactly this path in charting how he thought the Internet was changing the way we read.

"Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going--so far as I can tell--but it's changing," Carr wrote. "I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore."

Noticing his own inability to dig deeply in long articles, he began to wonder what was happening. The article that resulted still receives something like 1,000 visitors a day. Carr's argument style, branching out from anecdote to evidence, has bothered some, but clearly his experience mirrored that of many readers over the last decade.

Carr has drawn some prominent critiques from the likes of Stephen Pinker, who argues that we "shouldn't bemoan technology but... develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life."

You can draw your own conclusions about the importance of the hyperlinked text for your brain, but it's worth checking out some new apps that help you control your reading habits online over on The Toolkit. (Tech taketh away and tech giveth.) 

First though, check out this excerpt of Carr's wonderfully crafted story:

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking--perhaps even a new sense of the self. "We are not only what we read," says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. "We are how we read." Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts "efficiency" and "immediacy" above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become "mere decoders of information." Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It's not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter--a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche's friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. "Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom," the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his "'thoughts' in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper."

Read the rest of Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Revisit more pieces from The Atlantic's archives with the Technology Channel.

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The practice of recording the ambient sound of cities has exploded over the last few years. Every one with a smartphone is carrying around a fairly high-quality audio recorder that can upload instantly to the internet. Combined with mapping tools, people have built unprecedented archives of how our cities sound.

Seoul, Barcelona, New York, Madrid, Vancouver, Toronto, Berlin, New Orleans. All these places have active soundscape mapping projects. All over the world, people are walking outside and recording whatever is happening. Then, a different set of people is putting on their headphones and plunging into the aural world of a jamon shop in Spain, glasses clinking all around.

Tools like Audioboo, a simple service that lets you geolocate and upload recordings from a smartphone, are enabling whole nations to be enlisted as distributed recorders. Earlier this year, Scion partnered with The Smalls to launch a US soundmapping initiative called Street Sounds. The British Library teamed with Audioboo to create a nationwide sound archive of the United Kingdom this year, too.When people look back at 2010, they will have a pretty good idea about the noises dense agglomerations of people make in our time.

Touring the sound of these cities across the globe, I began to wonder if I could do the same thing in time. Could I go back a hundred years and listen to New York or Paris?

When it comes to film, you can see all kinds of old places. Sometimes even in high resolution, thanks to the work of archivists like Rick and Megan Prelinger. These films are incredibly important records for historians and citizens alike. They give us eyes in the past.

There's an amazing film sequence of San Francisco in 1905. A camera was placed on a streetcar and driven down Market Street, the diagonal that cuts through the city's core. Pedestrians, cars, carts, horses, the whole dizzying array of urban life before electricity and the automobile turned our cities inside-out. We recognize our buildings, but not our city. Similar recordings exist of most major cities.

I figured that there had to be similar documentation of the metropolitan soundscape, or any soundscape really.

But there isn't.

 

---

 

You could easily be fooled into thinking that a very early recording of a city exists. At the University of California Santa Barbara, the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project holds a brown wax recording labeled, "Urban scene- newsboys yelling "Extra, extra"; car horns; and other sounds of the city, sometimes in non-English language." It was made between 1890 and 1902.

Listen to it.

It's scratchy and difficult to discern independent sounds, but maybe we hear a bell ringing, some horns and some vrooms, the clop-clop of horse hooves, a couple of people singing. When Suzanne Fischer, an archivist at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit sent me this link, I thought I had found my city soundscape! And it was just like I thought it would be. Horse hooves and horns, people singin' in the streets.

But this earliest recording of a city is actually fake. Or perhaps that's too harsh a term. What we hear is a performance of an urban soundscape. A banal radio play.

Actually recording the sturm-und-drang of a city would have been next to impossible impossible. "It would have been very difficult to do an on-the-spot actuality recording," explained Matt Barton, the curator of recorded sound at the Library of Congress. "It was very difficult to do the kind of documentary recording that would be analogous to filming."

We have to go back to the actual physical recording technologies used to understand why we couldn't record cities.

 

---

 

Sound was evanescent until 1877 when Thomas Edison brought out the phonograph. People went nuts for it. Phonograph parlors began to dot large cities. You'd go in, record your voice, and then get to hear it played back. There was something almost mystical about the experience.

His invention was followed quickly by two others, the graphophone and the gramophone. While each differed in its details -- the gramophone's ability to record to discs instead of cylinders would prove decisive -- they required the same recording setup.

To make the fake city recording, the unnamed creators would have had to gather these sound effect actors around a giant horn. To "mix" the sound, people would have actually been distributed and moved through the room.

As they made noise, the acoustic horn would funnel the vibrations down to a diaphragm, which would move a stylus up and down, creating grooves of different depths. The sound was being physically etched into the wax -- carved like letters into a tree -- for later playback.

And that's the problem: the range of sound that could be picked up by the acoustic horn and then etched was narrow. The devices were also finicky and heavy and awkward.

Even recording musicians, who were trained to direct their noises into an acoustic horn, was incredibly difficult. Here's Mark Katz describing the recording booth in his 2004 book Capturing Sound: how technology has changed music:

"The room was usually small, windowless, overheated, and empty, save for a large megaphone-shaped horn and a small red light or perhaps a buzzer attached to one wall. During the performance, musicians had to be careful not to make extraneous, recordable noises, not to gesture unduly (lest they knock the equipment over), and not to sing or play too loudly or softly."

Only certain types of musical instruments recorded well. Horns were great; violins not so much. Certain singers recorded well; the best learned to move their heads and bodies around the horn to create the right kinds of effects. Women's voices, particularly on the higher end, were hard to pick up, too, as pointed out by historian Lisa Gitelman, into the late 1890s.

"The Boswell Company of Chicago offered its 'high grade original' records in 1898 with the assurance that 'At last we have succeeded in making a true Record of a Lady's voice. No squeak, no blast; but natural, clear, and human,'" she wrote. "The Bettini Phonograph Laboratory in New York similarly claimed "The only diaphragms that successfully record and reproduce female voices."

Obviously, these recording setups were not made for fieldwork. You couldn't just take them outside and flip a switch. It wasn't until the 1920s, Barton said, that microphones were developed. They could electronically amplify sounds and enabled the recording of soundscapes. From the very first, film could be used as a documentary device, easily recording ambient scenes. Sound recording, on the other hand, required performance for its first 50 years.

This timeline, when you match it up with other technological changes, has some very important consequences.

There will always be a large gap between our visual and audio historical records. Decades when we can see our places, but not hear them. We will never know what New York, Los Angeles, or any other city sounded like before the automobile hit the streets and electricity was commonplace.

Some things, like what it sounded like for a million Americans to live together without internal combustion engines on wheels, can be lost forever.

Images: 1. MadridSoundscapes.org 2. Library of Congress. 3. New York Public Library.

MIT innovation expert Eric Von Hippel is putting economic rigor behind the intuition of a generation of technologists that the Internet and computing more generally were leveling the playing field between large producers and other types of innovators.

In a talk on Tuesday at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Von Hippel will lay out his idea that individual users of products and open source collaborations are becoming more competitive with the traditional manufacturing engines of the economy.

Economists have long looked at big producers with many users -- say, a car company -- and said that the reason they built individual innovators is that they can spread their costs over a large number of users. "A manufacturer can spread his costs over all his users and that means that the manufacturer should be able to innovate more by spending more money than users," Von Hippel told The Atlantic.

But the two major components of innovation -- designing something and telling people about it -- are both dropping.

"I can design with tools as good as those that the car companies use, that Intel uses. It's just cheap software that lets me design, simulate and test," he said. "Communication costs are also dropping because of the Internet. That lets users actually undertake bigger problems because each one does a chunk of the work. I can do part of Linux. You can do another part of Linux."

The net effect is that you need less money to accomplish the same amount of innovation -- and producers are no longer the only route towards accomplishing some product goals. New areas are opening up where individuals and groups of people can compete head-to-head with large companies in the pursuit of making new things.

The shift is already underway, Von Hippel thinks, and that's a good thing. Now the government needs to play policy catch-up to support small and open innovators, particularly around intellectual property laws.

"What's happening is that the whole IP system is placing a tax on open people," he argued. "People who want to be open have to prove that somebody else doesn't own the damn thing. So, yes, there are in-built biases in the system. The system was designed for big-company, industrial kind of things and policy is not properly designed for this new era."

Even if you've heard similar arguments before, what's important about Von Hippel's work is that he's translated technologist jargon into economist jargon. He's formalized what small and open innovators do and why they're important.

If you'd like to hear more about Von Hippel's ideas, check out the livestream on Berkman's website tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. EST. You can also check out Von Hippel's most recent paper, Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innobation.

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