Alexis C. Madrigal

This thing is basically the centaur of gadgets.

Hartmut Esslinger via Design Boom

In the early 1980s, Frog Design founder Hartmut Esslinger had the freedom to create a new look and feel for Apple. In a new book excerpted on Designboom, he shows off his prototypes for what would become the defining Apple look in the pre-iPod era.

Among the old prototypes for what would become the Apple IIC and IIE, we find this strange contraption, the "Macphone." Part stylus-operated tablet, part (corded, landline?) telephone, there still isn't a gadget today that looks like it. And there may never be: the MacPhone is probably a dead branch on the technological evolutionary tree, despite its excellent handset shape.

UPDATE! VERY IMPORTANT UPDATE! I take it back. The MacPhone lives. Err. Lived. Mat Buchanan pointed out to me that Verizon marketed something like this thing in 2009 as the Verizon Hub. You can see for yourself what you think of it. 

And reaching deep into my own memory vault, I remembered that a Chinese company at CES 2011 also had something like this on display, though I do not think it ever came to market, at least on this side of the Pacific. 

Hartmut Esslinger via Design Boom

A plea to TV makers in 2013: give me radically simply voice-control for changing channels.

Imagine doing this on your couch in front of your friends. And yes, you have to wear the sweater. Be recognized (Samsung)!

I think I can explain all of this with a single thesis: smart TVs are the literal, biblical devil. (That may be overly broad. Perhaps they are merely demonic.) But the bottom line is that smart TVs typically have baffling interfaces that make the act of simply finding and watching your favorite stuff more difficult, not less.

Five simple reasons: Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Bruce Sterling (flickr/webmink, with some fiddling).

Many people use, as a kind of shorthand, The Internet to mean a wide variety of things related to this series of tubes. The Internet could mean the culture made and distributed on the Internet, the LOLCATZ, memes, etc. ("The Internet loves this kind of stuff.") The Internet could mean the infrastructure itself, its speed and distribution. ("The Internet is so sloooow right now.") The Internet could mean the industry that builds it, the consumer and B2B companies that effectively own all the quasi-public spaces through which we traipse. ("The Internet wants to disintermediate blahblahblah.") And there are a thousand other times when we find it easier to say, "The Internet does" or "It feels like the Internet is" or whatever rather than attempt to identify the specific actors of the play.

And maybe that was helpful. Maybe in such a distributed system it makes sense to use "The Internet" as a stand-in for causal agents that seem to inhere in the network without belonging to any individual node. Maybe it's like a mob or a gatheration of starlings; the dynamic relationships between the individuals turn out to be more important than the things themselves. 

But in 2012, that way of talking, if it was ever helpful, is no longer. 

And there are five reasons for that: Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft. Now, when we say, "The Internet" or "smartphones" or "computers" we usually mean something shaped by one of these entities, or all of them. 

At least that's how Bruce Sterling is thinking about things. In his annual conversation with Jon Lebkowsky on the WELL about the state of the world, he classed in "The Stacks," as he called them, with "some interest groups of 2013 who seem to be having a pretty good time."

Stacks.  In 2012 it made less and less sense to talk about "the Internet," "the PC business," "telephones," "Silicon Valley," or "the media," and much more sense to just study Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.  These big five American vertically organized silos are re-making the world in their image.  

If you're Nokia or HP or a Japanese electronics manufacturer, they stole all your oxygen.  There will be a whole lot happening among these five vast entities in 2013.  They never compete head-to-head, but they're all fascinated by "disruption."

What will the world that they create look like? Here's what I think: Your technology will work perfectly within the silo and with an individual stacks's (temporary) allies. But it will be perfectly broken at the interfaces between itself and its competitors. 

That moment where you are trying to  do something that has no reason not to work, but it just doesn't and there is no way around it without changing some piece of your software to fit more neatly within the silo? 

That's gonna happen a lot: 2013 as the year of tactically broken bridges. 

The Atlantic Tech's how-to guide for producing meaningful, in-depth stories in a resource-starved, time-crunched media age.

One way to think about media, courtesy of the 1970s art/activist collective, Ant Farm (Alexis Madrigal).

Today, we released an anthology of this blog's best stories for a variety of ebook platforms. You can download it for free until the end of the year. We selected a few dozen stories that we think showcase what we're trying to do here out of the 1,500 posts we did in 2012. 

And let's be honest: we're psyched about this project. I think we've developed distinctive ways of looking at the world. We do a different kind of writing from most of what you see on Techmeme or Google News.  

A beautiful way to read our best stories. Plus, the book is free! Free Download

I wrote an introduction to the book that attempts to explain how we think about technology and thank (some of) the people to whom we owe intellectual debts. It's reprinted here.

Perhaps it is our personal how-to guide for producing meaningful, in-depth stories in a resource-starved, time-crunched media age. 

* * *

Thank you for downloading The Atlantic's Technology Channel anthology for 2012. We're proud of the work in here and hope you find stories that you love. [Note: You should really go download this anthology now.]

But I have to admit that this project began selfishly.

I wanted to see what we'd done on a daily basis assembled into one (semi-)coherent whole; I wanted to see how, over the course of the year, we'd shared our obsessions with readers and continued to grope toward a new understanding of technology.

That process really began when I launched the Technology Channel at the The Atlantic in 2010. Back then, I knew that I wanted to build a different kind of tech site. I wanted to write things that would last. My friend Robin Sloan, who you see pop up on the site now and again, has a way of talking about this. He says that "stock and flow" is the "master metaphor" for media today. "Flow is the feed. It's the posts and the tweets. It's the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist," he's written. "Stock is the durable stuff. It's the content you produce that's as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It's what people discover via search. It's what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time."

To my mind, even the best tech blogs focus on "flow" for both constitutional and corporate reasons. They're fast, fun, smart, argumentative, hyperactive. Some of them do flow very well. And I knew we were not going to beat them at that game. But stock, that was something else. Stock was our game.

Looking at The Atlantic as a brand or an organizing platform or a mission, I see a possibility that verges on a responsibility to do things that resound over time. Resound. Things that keep echoing in your head long after the  initial buzzing stops. Things that resonate beyond the news cycle. After all, we're old! Born in 1857 out of the fires of abolitionism, The Atlantic has survived because it's been willing to change just the right amount. It's responded to the demands of the market, but never let them fully hold sway. And in the best of cases, we changed the way our readers thought, challenged our own convictions, and laid down some of the essential reporting in American history. This may all sound like big talk, but we have to own this history, regardless of what the information marketplace looks like right now. Recognizing this history gives us a duty to provide journalism that stands up over time--no matter how it gets consumed.

But how to create stock in a blogging environment? It may sound crazy as a content strategy, but we developed a worldview: habits of mind, ways of researching, types of writing. Then, we used the news to challenge ourselves, to test what we thought we knew about how technology worked. Embedded in many stories in this volume, you can see us going back and forth with ourselves over the biggest issues in technology. How much can humans shape the tools they use? What is the relationship between our minds and the tools we think with, from spreadsheets to drones? What is the potential for manipulating biology? How do communications technologies structure the way ideas spread?

Delve into almost any technological system, and you'll see the complex networks of ideas, people, money, laws, and technical realities that come together to produce what we call Twitter or the cellphone or in vitro fertilization or the gun. This book is an attempt to document our forays into these networks, looking for the important nodes. This is a first-person enterprise, but we couldn't do it alone.

So, I'd like to thank the wide variety of people who have shaped the way we think. These are some of the ideas that we've been trying to synthesize, although obviously not the only ones.

To Jezebel's Lindy West, we owe thanks for this remarkable distillation of the technological condition: "Humanity isn't static--you can't just be okay with all development up until the invention of the sarong, and then declare all post-sarong technology to be 'unnatural,'" she wrote this year. "Sure, cavemen didn't have shoes. Until they invented fucking shoes!"

To Evgeny Morozov, we owe gratitude for the enumeration of the dangers of technocentrism. "Should [we] banish the Internet--and technology--from our account of how the world works?" he asked in October 2011. "Of course not. Material artifacts--and especially the products of their interplay with humans, ideas, and other artifacts--are rarely given the thoughtful attention that they deserve. But the mere presence of such technological artifacts in a given setting does not make that setting reducible to purely technological explanations." As Morozov prodded us consider, if Twitter was used in a revolution, is that a Twitter revolution? If Twitter was used in your most recent relationship, is that a Twitter relationship? Technology may be the problem or the solution, but that shouldn't and can't be our assumption. In fact, one of the most valuable kinds of technology reporting we can do is to show the precise ways that technology did or did not play the roles casually assigned to it.

We are indebted to the historian David Edgerton for providing proof, in The Shock of the Old, that technologies are intricately layered and mashed together. High and low technology mix. Old and new technology mix. The German army had 1.2 million horses in February of 1945. Fax machines are still popular in Japan. The QWERTY keyboard appears on the newest tablet computer. We need simple HVAC technology to make the most-advanced silicon devices. William Gibson's famous quote about the future, "The future is already here--it's just not very evenly distributed," should be seen as the Gibson Corollary to the Faulkner Principle, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

To Stewart Brand and his buddies like J. Baldwin, we are thankful for cracking open outdated and industrial ways of thinking about technology, allowing themselves to imagine a "soft tech." They asked what it might mean to create technologies that were "alive, resilient, adaptive, maybe even loveable." They did not just say technology was bad, but tried to imagine how tech could be good. And in so doing, they opened up a narrow channel between technological and anti-technological excesses.

From the museum curator Suzanne Fischer and the philosopher Ivan Illich, we found ways of thinking about the importance of technology beyond market value. What if the point of tools is not to increase the efficiency of our world, but its, in Illich's phrase, conviviality? "Tools," he wrote, "foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user." Of course, these are ideals to aspire to. Ideals we may not even agree with or find too broad for our taste. But isn't it nice to have some ideals? We need measuring sticks not dominated in dollars.

We owe Matt Novak for his detailed dismantling of our nostalgic visions of the past. His work at Paleofuture lets us imagine decades' worth of solutions to today's still-pressing problems. His point is not that things are the same as they ever were. Because it's the details of these past visions that allow us to see how we've changed, not just technologically, but culturally.

What does all this add up to? A project to place people in the center of the story of technology. People as creators. People as users. People as pieces of cyborg systems. People as citizens. People make new technologies, and then people do novel things with them. But what happens then? That's what keeps us writing, and we hope what keeps you reading.

Thank you,

Alexis C. Madrigal
Oakland, California

A free ebook of our best work just in time for the holidays. Makes a great gift for wordy nerds! And much cheaper than a Battlestar Galactica box set.

A robot Santa. Sorry, *the* robot Santa (flickr/lilspikey).

Dear Robot Santa,

I'm just writing to let you know that I don't need anything for Christmas (or Hanukkah). I got married this year, so I'm straight stocked on Calphalon and dinner plates. Netflix, my cat, and Twitter provide for all of my entertainment needs. And I already have too many shoes. 

A beautiful way to read our best stories. Plus, the book is free! Free Download

So, this year, we want to give something back to the great rucksack in the sky. We went through the roughly 1,500 posts we did this year and picked out just a few. They are our finest work. We rolled those up into an easy-to-read anthology that people can download and read on their platform of choice.

In addition to work from me, Megan Garber and Becca Rosen, you'll find stories by some of our regular contributors like Ross Andersen, Ian Bogost, Yoni Appelbaum, Sarah Rich, Suzanne Fischer, Howard Rheingold, Robinson Meyer, and Alexandra Samuel.

Oh, and it's free. (At least until the end of the year, when the price will rocket up to $1.99.) *

This is a gift from your loyal correspondents to the community. Thank you. 

Thanks,

Alexis

P.S. If you want to read about why we did the book, I wrote an introduction that tries to explain what we do and how we do it. 

If you want to read about *how* we did the book, I'll have a post for you tomorrow about the most excellent tools you can use to create ebooks these days. 

We could not have completed the book without the gracious and amazing work of copy editors Janice Cane and Karen Ostergren, as well as the book's shepherds Geoff Gagnon, Betsy Ebersole, and Peter Elkins-Williams. We also want to thank our designer, Darhill Crooks, for taking a break from his magazine work to create the awesome cover you see right up there. 

*Update: We seem to be experiencing a glitch and the price has shot up to $1.99 for the Kindle version earlier than planned. We are hoping to get this resolved (and bring the price back to free) shortly. Apologies and thank you for your patience.

Don't worry: there'll be humblebrags all year round now!

A Christmas card (flickr/meanderingwa).

The number of Christmas cards appears to be dwindling, mailbox by mailbox, jolly Santa by red-nose reindeer. And there's something unnerving about that for some people. What will it mean if no one sends Christmas cards or letters? Nothing good, they'll tell you.

Nina Burleigh distills this sentiment for a nice essay in Time, pinning the blame for the decline on the ubiquity of social media in giving real-time access to one's friends and associates. "We already know exactly how they've fared in the past year, much more than could possibly be conveyed by any single Christmas card," Burleigh writes. "If a child or grandchild has been born to a former colleague or high school chum living across the continent, not only did I see it within hours on Shutterfly or Instagram or Facebook, I might have seen him or her take his or her first steps on YouTube. If a job was gotten or lost, a marriage made or ended, we have already witnessed the woe and joy of it on Facebook, email and Twitter."

Although the reason for the cards supposed decline is the rise in social interactions with one's people (sounds great?), the falling importance of Christmas cards remains, in Burleigh's mind, a bad omen. 

"[T]he demise of the Christmas photo card saddens me. It portends the end of the U.S. Postal Service. It signals the day is near when writing on paper is non-existent. Finally, it is part of a decline of a certain quality of communication, one that involved delay and anticipation, forethought and reflection," Burleigh continues. "Opening these cards, the satisfaction wasn't just in the Peace on Earth greeting, but in the recognition that a distant friend or relative you hadn't heard from in a year was still thinking about you, and maybe sharing news about major events of the past 12 months."

But if you look even just a tiny bit deeper into the history of Christmas cards and letters, they cannot carry the weight Burleigh (and many others) want them to. 

Take a look back at this article from 1978. It as already bemoaning that the salad days of Christmas cards were over! The 1960s were really the big growth period for cards. Why? "Back in those days, it was a lot more impersonal. Secretaries addressed their bosses' cards," the then-President of Hallmark said. "Now people may send fewer cards, but will put personal notes on them." 

It wasn't long ago that the Christmas letter, specifically, was reviled, not celebrated. An older writer on HamptonRoads.com, who had not gotten the memo it was time to celebrate the golden hour of the form, commented, "Every year I get those letters, the ones where friends brag about how Junior graduated from Harvard, Sister married the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Hubby got a promotion for the twentieth year in a row and the letter-writer was voted best Mom in the world."

Honestly, I'd always thought other people considered Christmas cards a necessary evil of maintaining reciprocal friendships with people who liked them. And to my mind, Christmas letters were a loathsome tradition sent into overdrive by photocopying machines and easy access to desktop publishing tools. And yet now we find sadness over the loss of this valuable form of literary output and emotional connection. 

Even a pre-mainstream-Facebook article about practice of Christmas letter writing in the Christian Science Monitor had to begin with a defense:

Around Christmastime a couple of years ago, one of my friends ranted about how much he hated those holiday "brag letters" people send out each year. After making a mental note never to send him one in the future, I began to wonder what it is that makes people so irate about the good fortune of others.

I actually like hearing about what the people who lived down the street from me 20 years ago are up to. Sure, it initially takes some remembering to figure out who they are and why they're sending me that card, but if it weren't for the annual tradition, it would be easy to lose touch.

What's the logic here? Someone keeps your name in a database Rolodex, dashes off a note or prints another copy of a letter once a year, and that's supposed to be some form of deep, analog connection?

So, what I find most fascinating about the decline of Christmas missives and its attendant celebration is that we are willing to imbue them with the power to connect us together, while denying that power to newer inventions. 

Imagine social media's critics casting their eyes on the enterprise of holiday-card writing: 

• Holiday cards are a stand in for real face-to-face interaction, allowing people to present a simulacra of emotional connection that hollows out the real thing. 
• The Christmas card list was the original "friend" list. 
• Holiday cards, in that you could count them, led to an early quantification of social relationships.  "How many Christmas cards are on *your* mantle?" 
• Christmas letters allowed people to cherrypick from their lives, allowing them to misrepresent the "real" person behind the letter. 
• Holiday cards were mostly maudlin crap wishing people "Peace on Earth" as if that could make any real difference for stopping wars. 
• Christmas letters mostly contained the mundane details about people trips, diseases, trumped up accomplishments, and hallucinatory future plans.
• Holiday cards merely serve to enrich the card companies. 
• Holiday cards are expensive for some people to purchase and send, reinforcing societal inequalities. 
• Holiday cards often served to shore up business networks and social alliances rather than to communicate real feelings. 
• The labor of holiday cards fell disproportionately to women, who were given one more laborious task and judged more harshly than men if their efforts fell short.

And on and on and on. 

Burleigh's an interesting writer and I don't think we can chalk up her Christmas card desires to simple nostalgia. There's something about the way we talk about technology and change that makes it seem like there are these discontinuous eras where -- SNAP! -- the whole world becomes different. And as we try to put things back together from this rhetorical future shock, the timeline gets jumbled. Memories of Christmas letters from the 1960s expressing timeless sentiments get grafted onto 1980s designs, which are pictured with 1970s stamps. Somewhere, there is the sound of a dot matrix printer putting ink on paper. 

This kind of remembering is something weirder than nostalgia. It's not looking back at one sunny era; it's a crazy mashup of varied history and technologies that create a chimera we can  compare, generally, to Twitter or Facebook. That's how Christmas cards somehow come to stand in for the existence of "writing on paper." We need a symbol of the past to compare with these symbols of the present. That's how we blow our own minds about how fast the world is changing.

Here's my optimistic thought, though: What if we stop thinking about "the way technology changes our lives" as less sudden. What if we look for continuities rather than breaks? 

For one, the death of the Christmas card is at least slightly exaggerated. The numbers are a bit confusing. First class mail around Christmas has fallen roughly 25 percent off its peak in 2006, according to the USPS. And a marketing firm suggests that fewer people are buying Christmas cards. 

On the other hand, despite the drop, the USPS will still send 2 billion pieces of holiday mail a year. And the companies that make Christmas cards are doing OK, too. "Is Facebook putting card sending out of business?" asked Kathy Krassner, a spokesperson for the Greeting Card Association. "Truly, it's helped. A lot of people, myself included, have reestablished connections with people that I would have never found. It's helped establish more connections." 

The precipitous drop for Christmas mailings came in the wake of the financial crisis and the near destruction of the global economy, not with rising Facebook penetration rates. The card industry's statistics back that up. The Greeting Card Association estimates that 1.6 billion Christmas cards will be purchased this year, a small increase from last year. A report from the research firm, IBISWorld, anticipates that cards and postage will be the highest they've been in five years -- $3.17 billion total. And finally, the card industry's biggest player, Hallmark, has had revenues of around $4.0 billion dollars since the mid-2000s, without much growth or decline.

Second, beyond the physical form of these cards, the spirit of Christmasness, of holidayness only grows more pervasive. No matter what time of the year, people now write contemplative letters with weird formatting to an ill-defined audience of "friends"; these are Christmas letters, whether Santa is coming down the chimney or not. There are reindeer horns on pugs in July. And humblebrags about promotions in April. There are dating updates in November. And you can disclose that you were voted mother of the year any damn day you please. 

For good or for ill, perhaps we're seeing not the death of the holiday card and letter, but its rebirth as a rhetorical mode.  Confessional, self-promotional, hokey, charming, earnest, technically honest, introspective, hopey-changey: Oh, Christmas Card, you have gone open-source and conquered us all. 

Instagram is providing a peek into the future of advertising. Let's see if you like it.

An Instagram of a restaurant that I would happily advertise.

When Instagram changed its terms of service, I envisioned a scenario where the company would use my photos near some place to advertise that place to my friends. Today, in response to some users' negative responses, co-founder Kevin Systrom put out this vision for his company's future business model: 

Let's say a business wanted to promote their account to gain more followers and Instagram was able to feature them in some way. In order to help make a more relevant and useful promotion, it would be helpful to see which of the people you follow also follow this business. In this way, some of the data you produce -- like the actions you take (eg, following the account) and your profile photo -- might show up if you are following this business.

How is this different from my scenario? Well, in Systrom's scenario, you've followed the brand explicitly. In mine, they've extracted your "implicit" fandom. But in both cases, your information will be used to help sell your friends on a business. 

And I admit, that is a big difference. 

On the other hand, what is to stop Instagram from advancing from their scenario to mine? Precisely nothing, as the terms of service lay out so nicely: 

To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.

Google Maps VP Brian McClendon put it like this: "We can actually organize the world's physical written information if we can OCR it and place it," McClendon said. "We use that to create our maps right now by extracting street names and addresses, but there is a lot more there."

More like what? "We already have what we call 'view codes' for 6 million businesses and 20 million addresses, where we know exactly what we're looking at," McClendon continued. "We're able to use logo matching and find out where are the Kentucky Fried Chicken signs ... We're able to identify and make a semantic understanding of all the pixels we've acquired. That's fundamental to what we do."

There are a lot of other ways to make money. Sell an ad in the stream. Sell an ad on individual users' pages. Sell an ad against search results, and another for tags that relate to upcoming events. Offer "pro" features -- like special filters or promoted profiles.

Good home page design is an art -- like the cover of a magazine, or a quick-reference card. 

Of course it depends on the readership. The CERN home page has to start with the CERN things to minimise the number of keystokes/clicks for the largest number of users. At the same time, it needs pointers for someone with a broader interest to rapidly find a wider topic, and it has to suggest to people what is behind it so that later they will use it again on another topic. The competition for the first 24 lines is hot! I have thought of having a "Latest additions" link, so that people who though they know the web can check for new bits.

There is also the question of whether to make the layout really open (lots of white space), with 5 well-explained links on each page, or to cram in as much as possible.

If you want to stop social networking services from exploiting your likeness for advertising, you've got to start paying up.

PLEASE BUY THESE MARIACHEESEY CHIPS, said my Instagram of them.

Instagram is changing its terms of use in January. Included in the new legalese is one section that has some power users, including The New York Times' Nick Bilton, feeling queasy:

Some or all of the Service may be supported by advertising revenue. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.

Note the key parenthetical -- "(along with any associated metadata)" -- which you could read as "location data." In essence, if you go to the Palms in Las Vegas and snap a pic... Facebook Instagram may use that photograph in an advertisement for the Palms that reaches your friends.

Not that any of this is all that surprising. It's a free service that's been focused on building user engagement, et cetera, in hopes of selling that engagement to advertisers.

Which reminds me of this wonderful mini-rant from Pinboard's Maciej Ceglowski, who identifies the key problem:

To avoid this problem, avoid mom-and-pop projects that don't take your money! You might call this the anti-free-software movement.

If every additional user is putting money in the developers' pockets, then you're less likely to see the site disappear overnight. If every new user is costing the developers money, and the site is really taking off, then get ready to read about those synergies.

To illustrate, I have prepared this handy chart:

	Free	Paid
Stagnant	losing money	making money
Growing	losing more money	making more money
Exploding	losing lots of money	making lots of money

Under these conditions, companies have to sell themselves because they do not have a sustainable business. And when they're sold, they either A) get shut down or B) become part of an advertising machine, like Facebook's. 

Truly, the only way to get around the privacy problems inherent in advertising-supported social networks is to pay for services that we value. It's amazing what power we gain in becoming paying customers instead of the product being sold. 

Here's an alternative version of what Instagram could have done before Facebook purchased them. Instagram has, what, 100 million users? If they got $5 a month from 20 million of those users, they'd be looking at $300 million in quarterly revenue. That's a nice chunk of change when you have a baker's dozen employees. You think those guys could split more than a billion dollars a year and call it good. Or hell, make the user numbers an order of magnitude smaller: 2 million out of 10 million users. That's still $30 million dollars a quarter for 13 guys. 

Prior to President Johnson's decision, instructions for the emergency use of nuclear weapons that both he and his predecessors had previously approved stipulated a full-scale nuclear counter-attack even if the initial strike were conventional, or the result of an accident, and both Communist giants would be targeted regardless of whether either of them had launched the first strike.

This predelegation of nuclear launch authority was real. And terrifying. It's no wonder that a generation grew up terrified of nuclear holocaust: The U.S. government had plans to wipe out Communist countries, even if they hadn't launched a nuclear attack on America.

Which just so happens to be a key plank in most greens' vision of the energy future.

What 1.3 million First Solar modules look like at the Sarnia Solar Farm in Ontario, Canada (First Solar)

I am not a huge believer ... in the idea that the centralized model of energy distribution is outdated and a more distributed model is what makes sense going forward.  Some degree of distributed generation does make sense. I believe community solar has a bright future. I believe off-grid has a bright future.

Taking it to the residential level, the difficulty is that storage is very expensive, and the difficulty is that unless you disconnect from the grid and use storage, then there is a huge subsidy inherent in a metering type of model. You also ignore the patterns of industrial use and the synergies between residential usage patterns and industrial usage patterns, and you lose that synergy when you got to highly distributed model, and I simply don't believe that the synergies of generation at a household level overcome the value of the generation on a centralized basis. 

[W]e believe we have a competitive advantage in engineering and power production   stand point.  We deliver a product that is well engineered and can deliver a highly predictable result for the customer. The rooftop market, the installations are too small and there are too many variables to do a system level power prediction with that degree of precision. In addition, you don't have meters and diagnostics to measure the output, so the quality measure for the rooftop panel is what does it flash test at, and the end user doesn't really know if they got what they paid for - you have different levels of soiling, of shading, of insulation, uncertainty over ambient temperature,  variability in installation circumstances.

I would rather sail into a market where there's a much stricter quality standard, as opposed to one that is more commoditised. And there are some major structural issues in most of the regulatory systems around the world with respect to rooftop installations. They are being facilitated with either net metering of feed in tariff programs. Neither of those, long term, is sustainable. You have to fundamentally restructure the regulatory system if you really want to accommodate rooftop at any sort of significant penetration level.

You never imagine it happens on a sunny day.

In this footage from Homs, Syria, a man trains a camera on a government jet flying overhead as it drops a bomb on his town no more than a mile from where he's standing.

This kind of video was not available in previous conflicts in close to real-time. I'm not sure that its availability is changing the nature of warfare, but it sure transforms the empathic experience of thinking about what war is like.

And it's terrifying.

Hallelujah!

We're looking back at the photos that defined the sociotechnical changes of the year.

An Israel Aero Space Industries (IAI) Heron 1 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) stands on the tarmac during a media presentation at the airbase in the central Swiss town of Emmen September 20, 2012 (Reuters).

For the last five years, the American drone fleet has been growing. The military now has more than 7,500 unmanned aerial vehicles, including everything from tiny, hand-launched Ravens to large, armed Predators. Then there's all the CIA and Homeland Security drones.

But in 2012, we began to see what should be obvious: the drone business will be global. While drone strikes are an American strategy now, these machines are relatively cheap and will only get more so. As we've said before, everyone who wants a drone will have one of some kind.

Most specifically, drones are not like nuclear weapons with a few countries controlling the resources to create them. No, the technologies for dronemaking will be widely distributed. Israel, a long-time manufacturer of UAVs, has beefed up its exports. Azerbaijan, for example, cut a $1.4 billion arms deal with Israel in February; dozens of drones were included in the package. Expect more and more alliances like this as these robots spread out across the globe.

Could human and machine forecasters work together to increase the intelligence agencies' foresight?

We would like to know what the future is going to be like, so we can prepare for it. I'm not talking about building a time machine to secure the winning Powerball number ahead of time, but rather creating more accurate forecasts about what is likely to happen. Supposedly, this is what pundits and analysts do. They're supposed to be good at commenting on whether Greece will leave the Eurozone by 2014 or whether North Korea will fire missiles during the year or whether Barack Obama will win reelection. 

A body of research, however, conducted and synthesized by the University of Pennsylvania's Philip Tetlock finds that people, not just pundits but definitely pundits, are not very good at predicting future events. The book he wrote on the topic, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, is a touchstone for all the work that people like Nate Silver and Princeton's Sam Wang did tracking the last election. 

But aside from the electorate, who else might benefit from enhanced foresight? Perhaps the people tasked with gathering information about threats in the world. 

You probably have never heard of IARPA, but it's the wild R&D wing of our nation's intelligence services. Much like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which looks into the future of warfare for the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity looks at the future of analyzing information, spying, surveillance, and the like for the CIA, FBI, and NSA. 

We wrote in-depth about a project they're running to better understand metaphors (yes, metaphors), and, now, one of their projects is to apply Tetlock's insights into expert judgment. In particular, while Tetlock found that most analysts were terrible, some were better than others, particularly those he called foxes, who were more circumspect in their pronouncements and less wedded to a hard-and-fast worldview. The work suggested that it might be possible to improve people's judgments about the future. 

His work matched up perfectly with a call for proposals that IARPA put out two years ago for a new program called ACE, Aggregative  Contingent Estimation. They wanted researchers to "develop and test tools to provide accurate, timely, and continuous probabilistic forecasts and early warning of global events, by aggregating the judgments of many widely dispersed analysts." Well, Tetlock thought, perhaps I can apply my research to this problem. 

So, after his proposal was selected, IARPA paid for he and his team to recruit 3,000 volunteers, who each agreed to participate in forecasting tournaments that asked them to make specific, testable predictions about the future and then provided them feedback. They are competing against four other teams who were also funded by IARPA to see who can forecast the best. Just within the year and a half that the research study has been running, Tetlock found that people could better, much better, at making predictions than he thought possible. 

Tetlock discussed the work in an excellent interview with Edge.org last week. Here's how he described it:

Is world politics like a poker game? This is what, in a sense, we are exploring in the IARPA forecasting tournament. You can make a good case that history is different and it poses unique challenges. This is an empirical question of whether people can learn to become better at these types of tasks. We now have a significant amount of evidence on this, and the evidence is that people can learn to become better. It's a slow process. It requires a lot of hard work, but some of our forecasters have really risen to the challenge in a remarkable way and are generating forecasts that are far more accurate than I would have ever supposed possible from past research in this area.

But here's the really fascinating thing from a technological perspective. Tetlock's work has shown in the past that computers tend to be better forecasters than humans, with some key exceptions. But what about the combination of humans and machines? What if cyborg forecasting is the way to go? That's precisely what Tetlock suggests in the Edge interview, although he hedges it carefully (like the fox that he is).

We don't have geopolitical algorithms that we're comparing our forecasters to, but we're turning our forecasters into algorithms and those algorithms are outperforming the individual forecasters by substantial margins. There's another thing you can do though and it's more the wave of the future. And that is, you can go beyond human versus machine or human versus algorithm comparison or Kasparov versus Deep Blue (the famous chess competition) and ask, how well could Kasparov play chess if Deep Blue were advising him? What would the quality of chess be there? Would Kasparov and Deep Blue have an FIDE chess rating of 3,500 as opposed to Kasparov's rating of, say, 2,800 and the machines rating of, say, 2,900? That is a new and interesting frontier for work and it's one we're experimenting with.

In our tournament, we've skimmed off the very best forecasters in the first year, the top two percent. We call them "super forecasters." They're working together in five teams of 12 each and they're doing very impressive work. We're experimentally manipulating their access to the algorithms as well. They get to see what the algorithms look like, as well as their own predictions. The question is-do they do better when they know what the algorithms are or do they do worse?

There are different schools of thought in psychology about this and I have some very respected colleagues who disagree with me on it. My initial hunch was that they might be able to do better.

It seems to be that IARPA might be happy with this work, but it remains to be seen whether it will actually get applied within the intelligence agencies. (Anyone seen Homeland? Saul is a total fox who threatens the hierarchy.)

Tetlock is convinced that his work has the potential to be dangerously destabilizing to bureaucracies of all types. Excitingly (at least to some of us), he sees these kinds of tools spreading throughout different kinds of organizations, which could have wide-ranging impacts on the existing hierarchies. From the nation's far-out spy researcher to your local middle manager, get ready for forecasting tournaments.

The long and the short of the story is that it's very hard for professionals and executives to maintain their status if they can't maintain a certain mystique about their judgment. If they lose that mystique about their judgment, that's profoundly threatening. My inner sociologist says to me that when a good idea comes up against entrenched interests, the good idea typically fails. But this is going to be a hard thing to suppress. Level playing field forecasting tournaments are going to spread. They're going to proliferate. They're fun. They're informative. They're useful in both the private and public sector. There's going to be a movement in that direction. How it all sorts out is interesting. To what extent is it going to destabilize the existing pundit hierarchy? To what extent is it going to destabilize who the big shots are within organizations?

Whole new categories of weird noise are being introduced into the news world as a result of Google's algorithm, whatever its virtues.

If something comes out of a computer on the basis of statistics, it must be objective, right? No bias is even possible, unlike the judgment of us flawed Homo sapiens!

But... that's not actually true. Over at Nieman Journalism Lab, Nick Diakopoulos has a great story about the ways that various algorithms introduce biases that are different from the human ones, but no less real. Looking at Google News, Circa, IBM Research, and a crop of other automated information tools, here's his thesis:

It can be easy to succumb to the fallacy that, because computer algorithms are systematic, they must somehow be more "objective." But it is in fact such systematic biases that are the most insidious since they often go unnoticed and unquestioned.

Even robots have biases.

His story is well worth reading for the ways in which it shows how many algorithms are now at play in the news ecosystem and the potential they have for bending the information people receive in one way or another.

What I want to discuss, though, is how the rather simple application of a series of rigid rules can introduce new and bad behaviors on the part of human actors who realize that they can exploit the system. Whole new categories of weird noise are being introduced into the news world as a result of Google's algorithm, whatever its virtues. 

Because the rules are quite rigid, e.g. newer is *always* better, different organizations try to have the newest stories about a given popular event. So, in the lead up to the early December snowstorm here in California, the Weather Channel's website published a great preview of the storm on November 29th or 30th. I read it on or about when it came out. *After* the storm on December 3rd, I went looking to see which of the predictions from the story had come true. I popped a few search terms into Google News and lo and behold, there was a December 3rd story from the Weather Channel. Excitedly, I clicked through the link and found ... the exact same preview with a timestamp that now read December 3, 2012, 9:08 AM.

Keep in mind that this now makes the story completely nonsensical. It is a preview of an event dated after that event has already passed. It's like a story dated November 7th story about who might win the presidential election. A Christmas preview on December 29th. 

In short, this is lunacy! At least to a human. 

But to a machine, this looks like a "fresh" story with lots of keywords about the Shasta snowfall. The machine can't tell that the article is written in the future tense or that it is worse than useless now. This type of thing actively degrades the news ecosystem, and it's only happening because of the way that Google's algorithm works. 

Granted, this is the lawless variety of optimizing for Google News. But there are a lot of examples and techniques that have developed solely because of the way the algorithm works. If you really want to peer down the rabbit hole, take a look at the depth of the analysis in this series of posts on the "Top 10 Most Important Google News Ranking Factors." It was assembled by a team of people at some top publications, agencies, and SEO shops. Keep in mind that some of these optimizations benefit human beings. Punny headlines are slowly dying, and I'm OK with that. But other factors that Google is looking for -- like keyword density -- reward people who write the way that everyone else does, using the same words and using them frequently. Google also rewards specialists over generalists. If you (as author or site) publish a ton on one thing, you're more likely to move up the rankings than if you take a more horizontal view of a field (say, technology). And lastly, take a look at the Google News front page now. It's almost exclusively traditional media outlets. It's actually shocking how little at least I see from media entities created after 2004. There's a shocking apolitical conservatism to however Google's algorithm works. 

My point in discussing these details at such length is to strengthen Diakopoulos' point about the lack of "objectivity" in algorithmic operations. Even if one could design some perfectly balanced system that had no observable bias when it began to run, the people who are producing the inputs to the system and dependent on the outputs will begin to adjust their behavior. They'll change to make themselves more legible to the machine, and those that do so best will prosper. 

Simply look at what happens with wire stories, say today's on Alan Alda. The local news sites have no disincentive to publish this work, regardless of whether their audience wants to read it. Some TV station in Charlotte might run a few dozen AP stories every few hours not because they improve the news system but because there is almost no cost to doing so, and it might get picked up by Google News and drive more traffic than a week's worth of regular content. Combined, all those individual decisions end up sending a signal to Google that a story is *really important* when there is no real signal; all we have is the aggregate hopes of news publishers for a low-probability traffic spike. 

I don't think Google News has ever taken enough responsibility for the cybernetics of the system it created. What is important is not just how the software works, but the ways it structures humans' thoughts and actions in new ways. To my eye, it created feedback loops with mostly deleterious effects not because the algorithm itself was bad, but because the service did not take the human repercussions seriously. That's not what Krishna Bharat, the product's creator, set out to do. But it's happened.