Alexis C. Madrigal

The Environmental Protection Agency revealed new fuel-efficiency labels this week. What's remarkable about them is the care that went into their design. (Here's the full set of them in a PDF).

I think about all kinds of design as attempts to organize human behavior without mandating it, and the new labels are a great example of that idea.

They try to get consumers to think more clearly about the true costs of purchasing a car. What we've learned since the 1970s is that simply telling people, "Hey, that gas guzzler is going to be more expensive than a comparable model that's more fuel-efficient," doesn't work very well. People's brains just don't process the information very well.

"The old labels are just not good enough anymore," David Strickland, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration administrator, told the New York Times.

The hope with these labels is that improving their design could improve human understanding of the information presented to us. Then, we'd make more rational decisions and some of the problems of oil dependence would be mildly ameliorated.

That light-touch vision squares nicely with Administration advisers' like Cass Sunstein's idea that you can "nudge" people to socially optimal outcomes by presenting decisions to them in the right ways.

That could be tough, though. Research from the University of California Davis Institute for Transportation Studies found that despite whining about gas prices, few people actually know how much money they spend on fuel for their cars, and most overestimate how much money they spend each year on it.

I like the new labels, but our problems with oil are deeper than a window sticker can solve.

Via Clive Thompson

We're all moving to "cloud apps," whether we know it or not. These services, like Gmail or Google Docs, are integral to the ways that we do business. We develop routines for working with them that are as finely honed as a tennis swing.

And then they go and change the racket.

Gmail, for example, recently changed where the "Compose" button was. I didn't mind, but the first few times I went to write an email, I felt like a gawky teenager tripping over my own feet.

Our own James Fallows pointed out a few months ago that cloud apps may be a source of problems that we don't fully recognize yet. Sure, cloud app developers can make things better with no effort from the user, but they can also make things worse without you knowing.

You log in to your application and bang: something has changed. Dylan Tweney, the editor of Wired's Gadget Lab blog, captured the pith of the situation with this tweet:

Weekends bring out the avocation in people. Some rock-climb. Other people play in basketball leagues. Hobbyists build robots. My friends and I make magazines.

I co-founded Longshot Magazine with Mat Honan and Sarah Rich a few months ago. Our mission: to occasionally come together to write, edit, design, and ship a magazine in 48 hours. We accept contributions from all over the world and do it all with basically no money. It's sort of insane, but also tremendously fun and a great way to learn new skills. (We don't really make any money from it, but that's also completely beside the point.)

Everything we do is made possible by the new (free) technological tools out there. But we're the ones that have to figure out how to deploy -- in what constellations, in what order -- to actually run a magazine. Steel, engines, an assembly line, and some workers don't just make cars on their own; you have to figure out how it works.

Lesson 1: Magcloud makes it possible.

Magcloud is a print-on-demand service run by HP. They allow you to put out a 60-page glossy, perfect-bound magazine for about $10 (if you give them an ad on the backpage, etc). What they allow you to do is start a magazine without the money you'd need to actually print the thing. (More on the economics of it later).

Lesson 2: Twitter makes it work.

Twitter is the social ligature of our project, and (I would say) of creatives more generally. We pretty much only get the word out about Longshot through Twitter and an email list. Yet thousands of people have sent in submissions and more than a hundred have dedicated serious amounts of time to the production of the magazine.

The thing about Twitter is that it's interest-based, but the cost of following someone is low, so you tend to branch out beyond your tight work circle and your friend network. The end result is that these sparse networks grow and mature. One thing they lack is a focal point. I think Longshot (and other meatspace and/or short term events) distill these diffuse groups. Perhaps a better metaphor is that it allows us to conduct some of the electric serendipity of Twitter into a specific vessel. In the early days of batteries, they were called, "accumulators." Maybe Longshot is an accumulator for Twitter. (Or even a pocket accumulator, see below.)

Lesson 3: Workflow matters more than tools, but the tools help define your workflow.

After we've gotten the word out, and people start sending things in, the biggest challenge is managing all the photos, illustrations, and text coming in. Last time, we had a homebuilt reviewing system that did the job, but was still in pretty rough shape. This time we used Submishmash, an off-the-shelf tool, and it blew our minds. All of our submissions flowed through that tool. We could assign them to people for review and editing.

That said, it was having Erik Malinowski, a longtime Wired affiliate and lead blogger for the Playbook blog, acting as our managing editor that really made this issue much smoother. He took charge of assigning things and just making sure that Sarah, Mat, and I didn't do anything stupid (too often).

Our workflow was light years ahead of last time, but was far from perfect. You can't edit documents in Submishmash, so that required using an outside system. From there, all of the actual editorial work took place on Google Docs, which proved remarkably resilient. We had folders set up and as we pushed things forward, they got moved from 01 (selected by triage editors for further reading) to 02 (edited once) to 03 (selected for the magazine, edited, and ready for pick-up by design).

As you might expect, our biggest mistakes came from the breakdowns in communication between the Submishmash system and Google Docs. If there were a way to link the two, it'd be a dynamite, high-speed, media-making engine. (Update: Yes! In the comments, Mike Fitzgerald of Submishmash says, "We've completed a Google Docs prototype and plan on release sometime near the end of this month.")

Meanwhile, the designers, led by the incredibly talented Keith Scharwath, were figuring out where everything was going to go and getting things set up. Almost all of our interactions with them were face-to-face because that's just what worked. It would have been impossible to do what we did without working in the same room.

Particularly because at the end of the process, copy editors scrubbed the text on printed out pages.

Lesson 4: Streaming the production of a almost anything magazine is boring.

We kept a Ustream livefeed of the production areas going for most of the weekend, but to be honest, it was pretty boring. People making magazines are having fun and occasionally doing strange things like taking pictures of dogs with hats on, but most of the time they are staring at computers or printed pages. Every feed watcher said, "You guys are so quiet."

That's because there is a limitation to the event-as-media model. Mediamaking requires conscious dedication to something that only exists on a page. We're not dancing. We're not singing. We're writing and reading and, even communally, that's a private experience.

For what it's worth, I think our Twitter feed worked better, perhaps because it's also a collective reading experience.

Next time, I'm not sure how much we'll stream from the process. My vote would be, "not much." And not just because Gary Shteyngart convinced me streams are almost the opposite of art.

Lesson 5: If people matter, media isn't dying.

I spent 48 straight hours with a crew that ranged upwards of 50 people and included contributions from dozens more. Every single one of us cared deeply about the design and content of words on pages. We love making media and whether it's print or digital, it's just what we do and we'll continue doing it.

At a time when there is so much doom and gloom about the industry, I see Longshot as a kind of backstop for us. If the economics of our industry continue to fall apart and we all end up working in advertising, we could still do Longshot as often as we all wanted to. It doesn't cost anything but some blood and sweat. And it does something good for that part of us that got into media because we wanted to engage people with the truths of the world.

That's a drive that predates the Internet and that will happily live through and with it.

NASA has been at the forefront of social media use by government agencies, but it hadn't made a move onto Flickr Commons, where many institutions share public domain historical photos.

That changed today when NASA released a selection of its best photos around the theme of "beginnings." The Internet Archive already has a tremendous number of images from the space agency at NASAImages.org, but I think it's worth thinking of this group as a curated, searchable art show.

The images are split into three sections: Launch and Takeoff, Building NASA, and Center Namesakes. For pure visual appeal, Launch and Takeoff can't be beat, but Building NASA is surprisingly entertaining as an homage to Big Engineering. Namesakes is, predictably, a lot of older white guys posing for photos. But the early images of NASA leaders, like this one of Robert Godard at his launch shack, are stunning.

Is checking your email while you're waiting in line at the grocery store really hurting your ability to learn?

That's the basic premise of Matt Richtel's very popular New York Times story this week, "Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Valuable Downtime." The article couches its arguments in the language of science, but its actual scientific content is pretty sparse.

Only two studies are cited, and each gets just a few sentences and no caveats. No specific publications are given. One study suggested people learned better after a nature walk than a city hike, a proposition for which plenty of evidence exists. The other study, though, carried out in Loren Frank's University of California San Francisco lab was carried out in rats, a sometimes tenuous analog for humans, especially our brain activity. Richtel put it like this:

[S]cientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

This is the only scientific evidence the Times gives that our brains' ability to learn is limited by frequent exposure to digital devices. That's a lot to pin on a few studies in rats.

To get a little more nuance and context, I called up Dr. Frank and asked him more about what his work said about our attachment to our digital devices.

"Reading my papers and reading the article, there is a big jump there," he said. But he felt comfortable putting the idea out there because there is "a lot of converging other stuff" outside of his own work that suggests filling our little downtime moments with Tweeting or email checking might not be the best idea.

"As far as we can tell, the brain takes advantage of -- speaking colloquially -- 'downtime,'" Frank said. "It's no longer focused on the outside world. It's recapitulating past experience internally."

What really matters, though, is not whether we're using a digital device but whether we're focused externally or internally.

"I think it probably is true that we have limited attentional resources and we can choose how much of the time we're focused on something internal versus external," Frank said. "If you do spend all of your time focused on external things, you're less able to allow internal processes to happen. And my guess is that those internal processes are pretty important. But that's not specific to digital devices, that's anything."

Perhaps, Frank did suggest, digital devices might make it easier to distract ourselves.

"There is the potential for low level cognitive engagement with things that could hinder other processes," he said. "That seems reasonably plausible to me, and I' d be surprised if that weren't right in some way."

But other stuff can inhibit those same processes. Reading the paper, paying very close attention to other people talking on the train, listening to talk radio. All of these things could conceivably distract you from letting your mind rest. "My guess -- and this is just a guess -- is that it has much more to do with attentional state than what specifically people are focused on," Frank said.

The Times series may be called "Your Brain on Computers," but one device that predates the digital age may be the one that's particularly bad for your neurons.

"Television causes people's brains to enter a weird state where they are passive but focused," Frank said. "With Television, as far as I understand it, not a lot of higher thinking goes on."

And that's one thing missing from the Times article: a sense of the full breadth of choices humans can make, nearly all of which are technologically mediated.

In their version of the story, it's the lady who watches television and checks her email while on the treadmill versus the trail runner. But what about the person who runs in city streets listening to podcasts (like myself)? What about people who play basketball for exercise? Would they be better off running because the game distracts them from internal processes?

Another thing that's missing from the story: numbers. We don't really know what the scale of the problem we're dealing with is. Are devices impairing our learning a little or a lot? No one really knows, but the Times leaves the impression it's the latter without providing the evidence that that's the case.

If you want to learn more about Frank's work, head to his publications website, which has copies of about a dozen papers and book chapters.

If it's true that attention is a scarce resource, drawing attention to something ought to be worth something, right?

That's the idea behind a service that soft-launched this summer called PayWithATweet. It allows you to stash a piece of content (say, a website or an e-book) and only allow access to it after a user has tweeted something about it. In other words, it's like a paywall in which you pay by tweeting about something.

I encountered for the first time today in accessing Steve Daniels' book about Kenyan craftsmen, Making Do. Tweeting about the book (with my own verbiage) got me a digital copy of the beautifully illustrated book for free.

The "social payment system" was developed Leif Abraham and Christian Behrendt of the firm Innovation Thunder, who released the system in June when they put out their own book, Oh My God What Happened and What Should We Do?

The stats they compiled about using their own system are pretty good. After eight weeks, their book had been downloaded 113,000 times and they'd sold 1,300 copies on Amazon. It became a Twitter trending topic twice, and the only promotion they did for the book was Tweet a single time, "This Book helps you move into the Digital era of awesomeness. Download it for free" with a link to their site.

So far, 2,500 people have signed up to use Pay With a Tweet, but their own book remains the most successful use case. Abraham and Behrendt said that outside of authors, DJs and musicians appeared to be having the most success with the system.

So, cool idea? Yes. I love transactions that occur outside the money economy; your non-currency resources are shown to have a real value. On the other hand, if everyone put their content behind Tweetwalls, Twitter would really start to look like a mess.

I wondered aloud on Twitter earlier today, "Best tech movie of all time? (Feel free to construe tech broadly)" -- and the Internet exploded with responses. I collected them on Twitter, but realized that this post would be more useful for those playing along at home.

Here are the suggestions you all gave me. I floated up movies with commentary to the top, just for fun. Will add new ones as they come in (and link to all these movies on IMDB).

Hackers
(@erinbiba, @shoebox, @michellelegro, @waterslicer)
Comments: "I read passages of the novelization of Hackers before my last talk at DEF CON. It's silly, but I can't not vote for it." -- @shoebox
"But that's not good b/c of the tech so much as the use of Angelina Jolie and Massive Attack." -- @waterslicer

Tron
(@vtri, @jenniferkutz, @erikmal)
Comments: "Prescient, awe-inspiring, and forward-thinking, yet tongue-in-cheek and damn funny (at times)." -- @erikmal

2001
(@stevenleckart)
"Please. It's obviously 2001. From apes to space, with malfunctioning, hyper-intelligent, craft-controlling AI."

Sneakers
(@mps2003, @quinnnorton)
"Give me the box, Marty."

Minority Report
(@IDEASGlobal)
"Who did Spielberg ask about next tech?"

Charlie & The Chocolate Factory
(@joemfbrown, @ruthseeley)
"(Gene Wilder edition). Hands down. That or Ghost." -- @joemfbrown

War Games
(@loudandskittish, @craigmatsumoto),
"Older tech but (AFAIK) accurate hacking techniques, including a password hack" -- @craigmatsumoto

Rocky IV
(@motheroflight)
"All that sweet space age training equipment Drago uses = forefront of 80s fitness tech."

Jurassic Park
(@oliver_hulland)
"Can't say this enough. Techno-pessimism at it's finest. Also, Jeff Goldblum."

Back to the Future
(@johnpavlus)
"Every plot pt driven by tech, tech breakdowns/unintended consequences, actually."

Master & Commander
(@sciencehsu)
"For how it shows the interplay between humans, culture & tech"

The Man in the White Suit
(@kevinmarks)
"1950 movie that perfectly captures the disruptive geek sensibility"

GhostBusters
(@bfcarlson)
"Strict definitions be damned."

Topsy-Turvy
(@chrisfahey)
"The scenes with 19th century early adopters of the telephone and fountain pen are priceless."

Brazil
(@nicholsong, @alexismadrigal),

Solaris
(@mhbergen)
"Tarkovsky's"

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
(@phillydesign, @debcha)

Eagle Eye
(@jgold85),

Primer
(@_june)

Videodrome
(@myblankie),

Ghost in the Shell
(@Lokein).

Gattaca
(@evan_lerner),

The Lawnmower Man
(@oldhat),

They Live
(@quinnnorton).

The God's Must Be Crazy
(@tutatis),

Man With a Movie Camera
(@stassaedwards),

Starship Troopers
(@Mgkarayan)

Blade Runner
(@hush6)

Quest for Fire
@kcm74 

Metropolis
(@publichistorian, @ElPocho),

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(@ashleybotse, @kio_pio)

The Matrix
(@telesle)

Wall-E
(@kio_pio)

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
(@attilacsordas)

Mon Oncle
(@ElPocho)

Brainstorm
(@kio_pio)

Idiocracy
(@chrisfahey)

Koyaanisqatsi
(@ritajking)

This is more of a public service announcement than anything else: You can now stream Netflix movies to your iPhone or iPod Touch. iPad users have had the ability to streat Netflix movies since the device launched this spring.

If you've got an account, you just download the app and away you go. On my iPhone 3G, it streamed very well over WiFi. I watched the first 10 minutes of Fast Times at Ridgemont High with no problems. If you've got a good 3G connection, the streaming is passable, once you get past the initial buffering stutter. One thing I noticed is that when you switch from WiFi to 3G -- walking around your house, for example -- you get booted out of your movie (a dropped movie?). Mercifully, when you get back into whatever you were watching, the app skips you to where you left off,.

Combined with yesterday's announcement that you can make free phone calls through Gmail, we're having a golden week for ho-hum convergence. Without a ton of fanfare, suddenly you make phone calls from your web-based email and stream movies to your phone. No big deal.

As nice as these new tools are, I do find myself wondering if I'll really use them much because they largely duplicate experiences I can already have. But you never know. Lifehacker already has eight interesting uses for Gphoning, and some of them seem likely to come in handy.

You want a retro hobby with hacker cred? Try competitive lockpicking, which I'd bet is coming soon to a hipster bar near you.

Schuyler Towne is a graphic designer, maker, and lockpicker. That's him in the video up there showing off his tools. A week ago, he launched a project on Kickstarter, the micropatronage site, asking for $6,000 to begin manufacturing his own line of steel lockpicking tools. He's already gotten over $20,000 in contributions from more than 250 backers.

What explains the response? My guess is that people trained in (digital) security want to understand its physical manifestations, too. Add in the oft-expressed desire of the computer-chained to "work with my hands" and you've got a hot idea.

In a real sense, Towne is an analog hacker. He even got his start at the sixth annual HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference, where a competitive Dutch lockpicker had set up shop to teach people the basics of the dark art.

"I didn't know anything about locks. Didn't even know how they worked and didn't really care to know... [My friends] dragged me along to a talk that Barry Wels, the head of The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers, was giving. Barry is this very charming, very smart Dutchman who gave the most remarkable presentation. Watching him open locks on stage was like watching a very subtle, understated magic show," he told the Kickstarter blog. "His organization had set up a lockpicking "Village" at the conference and I went over there and picked the first lock I would ever open. By the end of the afternoon I was teaching the basics to other people who had gathered around. I was instantly hooked."

[Thanks to technology writer Quinn Norton for pointing out his success!]

We tend to associate campers with big trucks that pack serious horsepower. But what if you want to head out into the half-wilderness in your fuel-efficient little Bug? In this 1970s video, we see the answer to your eco-prayer. It's a camper made especially for what the TV announcer calls "microcars." The trailer actually attaches to the roof of the car and appears to offer 360 degrees of maneuverability. One interesting factoid: with a Beetle towing the trailer, the car operator was able to get 18-20 miles per gallon.

Radioactive elements on Earth are like geological watches. A radioactive isotope of carbon is used to date human civilizations, among other things, because we know that its half-life is precisely 5,730 years; count how much of the carbon 14 has decayed and you can get a pretty accurate measure of how old something is. (If half of the expected amount is left, you'd say, "This thing is likely 5,730 years old.")

But what if the rate of radioactive decay -- the watch -- was not constant? One minute, the second hand is moving at one speed, and the next it has sped up or slowed down. And what if what changed that rate of decay was solar activity on the sun, 93 million miles away?

That's what recent research at Purdue University suggests. In a slate of recent papers, physicists Ephraim Fischbach and Jere Jenkins argue that measured differences in the decay rates of radioactive isotopes cannot be explained by experimental errors. Instead, they seem to vary with the earth's distance from the sun and periodic changes in solar activity.

"We are led to suggest that nuclear decays may be intrinsically influenced by the Sun through some as-yet unexplained mechanism, possibly involving neutrinos," they wrote earlier this summer. The researchers got interested in the problem when a solar flare on December 13, 2006 (seen above) decreased the decay rate of a radioactive sample they were studying.

The work has not been followed up by other researchers, and certainly remains on the outskirts of thought about radioactive decay, but it's piqued the interest of Stanford physicist Peter Sturrock, who is attempting to understand the variations Fischbach and Jenkins observe. The radioactive decay data doesn't quite match up with most other solar patterns, which has led Sturrock to suggest that the sun's core, which produces neutrinos, rotates slower than the rest of the star.

But even if the solar physics all works out, there's still the problem that scientists don't know how neutrinos could possibly affect the radioactive decay rates of isotopes on Earth.

"It's an effect that no one yet understands," Sturrock told the Stanford Report, the university's well-respected house organ, this week. "Theorists are starting to say, 'What's going on?' But that's what the evidence points to. It's a challenge for the physicists and a challenge for the solar people too."

If and when scientists figure out what's going on, we could need to update one of science's basic premises about how to measure deep time -- and change the way we've thought about those barely-there particles, neutrinos.

While trolling the Internet for photos to illustrate an upcoming story, I came across this particular failed experiment in headgear. We have little information about what's going on other than what's provided in the Netherlands Nationaal Archief's bibliographic record. It indicates that we're looking at "Plastic face protection from snowstorms. Canada, Montreal, 1939." In Dutch, these things have a name: Plastic sneeuwstormbeschermer.

The triangular plastic snouts also make the young ladies appear to be fans of the Manichean main characters from that staple of Mad Magazine, Spy vs Spy.

Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history, created a unique laboratory for studying the long-term effects of radiation on living creatures. Turns out, things continue to grow pretty well
in the soil near the old reactor.

New biological techniques allow scientists to measure exactly how the plants are switching on and off their genes to respond to their unusual circumstances. You might expect that the plants are radically changing, but a new study in flax plants finds that they made only minor adjustments in their genetic expression profiles relative to a control group grown far from the site.

"Based on the observed changes, the proteome of seeds from plants grown in radio-contaminated soil display minor adjustments to multiple signaling pathways," wrote the authors of the new paper in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

When scientists look at the "proteome," they are measuring the proteins that are produced by an organism's genes. When we say DNA is our "genetic code," what we mean is that it encodes the instructions for how to make those proteins, which are the body's molecular machines. Of the 720 protein spots that the scientists looked at, only 35 of them differed meaningfully between the Chernobyl plants and their cousins planted in normal soil.

The work is part of an ongoing line of research into just how bad radiation is over the long term. We know from atomic weapons research that a lot of radiation is very bad for every living thing, but we don't know the precise impacts of lower levels of radioactive cesium and strontium.

Via C&EN

Citation: "Proteomics Analysis of Flax Grown in Chernobyl Area Suggests Limited Effect of Contaminated Environment on Seed Proteome"