The 3-D TV craze is dying. With top television maker Vizio's recent announcement that it will discontinue support for the technology, and last year's decision from ESPN to drop its 3-D channel due to limited interest, stereoscopic home entertainment is left without any major players in its corner. 3-D, it seems, has been abandoned entirely for the home theater's new darling: Ultra HD.

In a pre-CES briefing last weekend, Shawn DuBravac, chief economist for the Consumer Electronics Association, said that he expected up to 150 Ultra HDTV announcements at this year's show. Of course, adoption of the feature would be slow--being hot at a trade show doesn't mean consumers will rush out in droves to upgrade--but DuBravac was optimistic about it because of 3-D TV, not in spite of it.

"3-D TV has done really well," he said. "We've just stopped talking about it." He did point out, however, that most people aren't necessarily buying 3-D sets for their 3-D functionality. As a feature on higher-end and mid-range TVs, "consumers are adopting it by default."

3-D television won our living rooms by attrition, but has done little to capitalize on it. Perhaps it's because 3-D has almost always been novelty for novelty's sake. The format has done little in cinema other than raise ticket prices, as few films implement it in a way that improves the experience. As such, 3-D viewing seems to be doomed to a cycle of dormancy and resurgence, one that began long before films even had sound.

If the problem with 3-D is with its implementation and not the technology behind it, it remains unlikely that improvements to the tech will make it anything more than a forced add-on. But the technology still marches onward: Today both Sharp and Marvel Digital are teasing TVs that merge glasses-free 3-D--the holy grail of 3-D tech--and Ultra HD displays. Such a display could be breathtaking--or it could be another 3-D-capable device for which we leave the 3-D off on.

The fact remains that 3-D today operates on the same basic principle as it did in the early 1900s: Here is an image, and a method for tricking your eyes into believing that it recedes from or moves toward you. Now consider the rapidly improving Oculus Rift, which is based on an idea people have had for a while but lacked the means to achieve effectively until now.

That's what we look for in our technology: Something that will take us to where we've never been before.

If you're worried about the usability of your mobile app--and every developer should be--then design your mobile app for drunk people, advises blogger Terrence Eden. In a post this morning, Eden made light of a study conducted by Three Sheets Research, self-professed researchers and alcohol consumers who are dedicated to helping customers improve websites, marketing campaigns, and product concepts. (Their tagline: Choose Three Sheets Market Research. Because your customers drink.)

In the Cocktails and Customization study, they asked Samantha, a 21-year-old pharmacist, to visit three separate websites that offer customization with the goal to customize sneakers. The catch being that she had to drink several alcoholic beverages before and during her online navigation. The video below is Samantha's ill-fated run-in with Vans', Converse's, and Nike's websites.

Eden's thesis: "Users have many demands on their time--being distracted by a phone ringing, or an incoming email, or a bright and shiny object has the same effect as being drunk. They return to the user interface with reduced thinking capacity."

Step-by-step, Eden walks us through a night of drinking using his social app of choice, Untappd. He explains that as the night progresses and as does his beer intake, the app's interface becomes less and less usable. "By the end of the night," he writes, "the interface has morphed into this hot mess"; he can't differentiate icons and buttons even if certain ones are brightly colored. (As it turns out, brightly colored "tiles" aren't much better; check out this video, also by Three Sheets, about a drunk user encountering Windows 8.)

Eden proposes that fonts and texts need to be larger in the interface and that buttons should not, under any circumstance, be in close proximity to each other. Basically, it should be easier to select what you want on the page, but even in the off chance that you choose incorrectly, users should obviously have an "undo" option. Designers, developers, "it is your duty to adapt that interface!" Eden pleads.

Eden suggests that the next time you are considering a beta test on your app, don't go "up to strangers in a coffee shop to ask them" to do a trial run, "ask the folks popping up your local bar at midday. If they can use it, anyone can."

Ah, the hell that is audio transcription. For all the glorious efficiencies that technology has bestowed upon those of us who research and publish things for a living, the need to type out interviews hasn't gotten much easier. Expensive Mechanical Turk-powered sites like Rev.com do a decent job outsourcing the task--but what about an app that just helps you do it faster?

oTranscribe is a unified, browser-based app for transcribing audio. And while it doesn't do the heavy lifting for you, it does offer a comfortable place in which to complete your job's most tedious task.

At its core, oTranscribe is an audio player and a no-frills text editor stacked on top of each other. It's essentially the type of setup you'd use on the desktop, only it's self-contained in a single interface without the need to jump from app to app. The audio speed controls and keystrokes for quick formatting make the transcription process more efficient by reducing the need to remove one's hands from the keyboard.

Of course, transcribing will still be hellishly tedious. You'll still feel like you're ploughing through the interview, only to look up and realize that the audio timestamp has crept along at the pace of drunken snail. OTranscribe eliminates the tiny extra steps of switching between apps, using the mouse to rewind the audio and other tasks that require you to pull away from the keyboard. These little diversions can add up quickly, so the aggregate time savings in oTranscribe could be huge.

As a web-based solution, oTranscribe has some built-in disadvantages. We were pleased to find that turning off Wi-Fi didn't result in all of our hard work being lost (it saves everything as you go and has some offline functionality). That said, the minute you start clicking around the interface, you'll get a connectivity error. It works best with an Internet connection.

That also means that oTranscribe is just another tab, sitting alongside email, Twitter, and a flood of dinging notifications that can easily distract from the task at hand. For best results, we recommend giving oTranscribe its own window, minimizing everything else and, if possible, full-screening the oTranscribe window.

Here at FastCoLabs, we've had pretty good luck with Rev.com, which charges $1 per minute of audio, but oftentimes waiting 48 hours for a transcript means getting scooped by other outlets. We'll be taking oTranscribe for a spin.

Hat-tip:The Next Web

Have you ever wondered how many people are looking at your GitHub code repositories? Thanks to the service's new analytics feature, the guessing game is over.

GitHub's analytics feature, which launched on Tuesday, allows its users to view detailed, Google Analytics-style traffic graphs, referrer statistics, and unique visitor and page view counts, broken down by source code file. Members can see analytics for any repository they own or to which they have the rights to push code.

"Looking at these numbers for our own repositories has been fun, sometimes surprising, and always interesting," GitHub's Justin Palmer wrote on the company blog. "We hope you enjoy it as much as we have!"

GitHub, which provides hosting to more than 10 million code repositories including many of the web's most popular open source projects, already offers graphs and API access to statistics about contributions made to code repositories.

In the past year, the service has also added support for visualizing data files stored within hosted repositories without having to leave the web browser. GitHub added tools for viewing comma-separated value files as spreadsheets, automatically rendering geographical information from GeoJSON files as interactive maps, and even turning CAD data into rotating 3-D models.

The company also announced Tuesday that it's made its GitHub Pages web hosting platform faster and more secure by delivering pages through a global network of servers, with built-in defenses against denial of service attacks.

"Now, when someone visits a Pages site, rather than GitHub serving the content directly, the page is served by a global Content Delivery Network, ensuring that the nearest physical server can serve up a cached page at blazingly fast speeds," wrote GitHub's Aziz Shamim in a blog post.

A huge Twitter following can super-charge any career. Writers looking to land an agent, musicians trying to make it big, or anyone trying to raise their public profile can benefit from gaining lots of followers. Of course, that takes a lot of time--why try and curry favor with the digital masses when you can just buy it?

Today an infographic summarizing the still-quite-popular tactic of paying for an inflated follower count hit the web. Put together by the folks at Who Is Hosting This?, it illustrates how cheap, widespread, and easy it is to juice up your Twitter fame--the average cost is only $0.01 per follower, and the top 15 Twitter personalities have follower counts that are approximately 30% fake and 40% inactive. That includes President Barack Obama.

But the information also serves as a reminder of just how meaningless and ineffective purchased Twitter followers are. Since they measure engagement rather than a sheer follower count, social media metrics like Klout scores are totally unfazed by how many accounts follow you, and services like Status People and Twitter Counter can easily gauge how genuine your follower count is.

The practice of paying for Twitter followers came into the limelight during the 2012 election campaign, when Mitt Romney's follower count suspiciously rose by 116,000 people. Four months later, a New York Times report detailing the ways and reasons by which users juice up their follower count. Not long after, writer Seth Stevenson purchased 27,000 followers for $202:

"Confession: In the month or so since I bought all those followers, up until outing myself in this story, I've sometimes felt a small ego jolt at the thought of people noticing that impressive number next to my name. Which is creepy and absurd. Unlike my talented Twitter colleagues, I did absolutely nothing to deserve this feeling of pride and accomplishment. I very much did not build that."

It didn't take long for Twitter to get rid of them all.

There is a wealth of blog posts about how to buy followers, and almost all of them caution against it. But the practice isn't going away. In fact, the low cost for the huge dopamine rush and potential of a huge payoff has kept the follower farms in business. Besides, there's no real consequence to adding a few thousand followers, and a fake follower is actually quite close to the real thing, Twitter spokesman Jim Prosser told the New York Times.

"Forty percent of our user base only consumes content," he said. "What looks like a fake account to one individual could actually be someone who is on Twitter purely to follow people -- like my mom, who follows me and my brother, doesn't have a profile bio and has never actually Tweeted herself."

Turning one's daily activity into streams of data has never been easier. Fitbit and Jawbone, among others, have pushed the technology and price barriers so low that companies are now building activity tracking sensors into products you might not have expected. Like earbuds, for example.

Both Intel and LG separately announced earbuds that are designed for runners to track their heart rates, even using the data to then instantly inspire better results. Why track data through earbuds? Say you're on a run and you slip below your target heart rate--you're not running at the pace you'd like. Since the earbuds are monitoring your heart rate, they can switch to a song with a faster tempo to help keep you on track. Intel's earbuds will also be able to charge themselves through the headphone jack, eliminating the need for some weird adapter.

LG's smart earphones, as they call them, are similar in function to Intel's version, but LG is also capturing data about oxygen consumption which may affect how those exercising use the information to plan their activities. The earphones also have a small hardware piece they plug into which can clip on and transmit audio wirelessly.

Both Intel and LG will have their own apps, with LG promising support for popular third-party apps like MapMyFitness, RunKeeper, and MyFitnessPal. Intel is currently looking for partners to help bring this to market while LG should be releasing its version in the first half of this year.

It makes sense to have headphones track your activity and quantify that data, even if no one was asking for it. Going off the deep end trying to quantify everything leads to products like a smart mug, and connected baby onesie, both of which Intel showed off as part of its "wearable" future. The mug was mostly there for demo purposes and won't be shipping anytime soon. The onesie, on the other hand, is a real product and will be available shortly.

Embedded inside future onesies will be Edison, Intel's microcomputer. With a footprint no bigger than an SD memory card, Edison will do things like monitor the baby's body position, respiratory vitals, skin temperature, and amount of activity.

If all this tracking and monitoring sounds like too much, just wait for the smart mug to actually come to market so you can be notified via your morning coffee if your baby's too hot or cold.

A new investigation by Mother Jones, an independent news organization, is reporting that Reddit, while still owned by media giant Condé Nast, allowed the use of their trademark logo on several large orders of assault rifles, namely the AR-15, which was the same military-issue weapon used in the Sandy Hook shooting last year.

Reddit and Condé Nast parted ways in 2012, however the order for the logo-carrying firearms was placed back in May 2011 when the two companies were still linked.

In an email sent to Jena Donlin, a business development manager for Reddit, Redditor r1b4z01d inquires:

A group of about 35 (or so) members of the sub Reddit /r/guns want to engrave your alien logo in a lower receiver. We do not plan to sell the product and the vendor is not making a profit on the engraving or the lowers themselves. We are doing this as a group buy to save money. What would the licensing cost be to uses [sic] this for personal non-profit uses? A lower receiver is the frame of an AR-15.

R1b4z01d included a mockup of what the gun would look like and ensured that they would not use the logo without Reddit's permission, particularly since the motivation for manufacturing the engraved guns was "community pride."

Donlin vouchsafed the request but not completely. In her email she writes:

You have reddit's permission to engrave the reddit alien on the frame of the AR-15 given that it is a group not-for-profit buy. There is a lot of reservation on our team about the language on the safety. We would prefer that you keep the SAFE/FIRE language (rather than changing to downvote/upvote) to ensure the safety of all people who may come in contact with these guns.

The license went on to be used in the production of at least 93 AR-15s between 2011 and 2012, which appears to comprise part of three separate bulk orders placed for the imprinted gun.

Mother Jones highlights the language on Reddit's licensing page where they clarify that before granting use of their name on a product they ask interested parties, "Do we like the product?" And: "What are the risks associated with this?"

Reddit's communications director, Victoria Taylor, told Mother Jones that they "neither [condone] nor does not condone the buying and selling of firearms through the site, as long as users are not using the site to violate applicable US laws."

[Hat Tip:Gawker]

Apple lovers: Don't expect to be sporting around the iWatch anytime soon. New rumors suggest Cupertino is experiencing some manufacturing problems with the iWatch.

The Informationreports that the iWatch team is having a hard time deciding on a screen technology that works with its battery. MacRumorsreported the smartwatch showed battery life problems in 2013 while the company was trying to implement a longer-lasting battery that would allow the device to live without charge for up to five days. The smartwatch is said to have a 100mAh battery compared to the iPod Nano's 105mAh battery. The iPhone 4S and 5 also have a history of battery life problems.

The watch's rumored curved, glass display may also have something to do with the holdup. Last week, Apple supplier Corning announced it would be mass producing a curved version of its crack and scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass used in iPhones. Also a few months ago, rumors swirled saying that the iWatch would reportedly be equipped with a plastic, bendable OLED monitor.

Another sign of trouble comes from the confirmed rumor that Apple has been seeing less than a 50% yield rate due to molding issues. DigiTimesreported that the tech giant was having issues applying surface treatments to its metal injection molded (MIM) frames, which is said to occur when trying to mold a device into a particular shape. More difficulties came with manufacturing when trying to apply MIM components typically used on the inside of devices to the outside of the smartwatch.

Apple also reportedly ended iWatch's "advanced prototyping" due to unspecified manufacturing issues late last year. More trouble came when Apple lost significant iWatch team member Bryan James, who left the company for home mechanization company Nest Labs.

The combination of the quality demand, development process, and leadership rearranging may all contribute to the iWatch's stunted growth. But, despite production hurdles, the iWatch is still expected to launch in 2014--though probably later in the year--with a team of 100 reported "bright minds" working on it.

This week NASA announced three new findings revealed by images from its Hubble Space Telescope: the deepest image ever obtained of a galaxy cluster, four super-bright galaxies as they appeared 13 billion years ago, and a sample of small galaxies previously too faint and distant to be seen, which are thought to be responsible for most of the stars we see in the skies today. Here are some of the images which made these discoveries possible.

New Frontiers with The Frontier Fields

The Frontier Fields is a multi-year program using NASA's Hubble and Spitzer Space telescopes and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to peer deep into the universe. Astronomers are exploiting a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, a sort of celestial zoom lens, where the gravitational pull of massive galaxy clusters warp space so that objects beyond them appear magnified up to 20 times. The Frontier Fields program will focus on six such galaxy clusters and will be also be used to trace the distribution of the invisible dark matter, which accounts for the bulk of the universe's mass, within those clusters.

Deepest Ever View Of A Galaxy Cluster

This composite image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope takes advantage of gravitational lensing to use the immense gravity of the foreground galaxy cluster Abell 2744, commonly known as Pandora's Cluster, to capture the deepest ever view of a galaxy cluster. It shows almost 3,000 background galaxies as they would have appeared 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang. The image shows some of the faintest and youngest galaxies ever detected in space. Without gravitational lensing, most of these background galaxies would be invisible.

Bright Young Things: Ultra-bright Ancient Galaxies

This composite of Hubble images shows several ultra-bright young galaxies from 13 billion years ago. The four circled red objects--which appear red because their light has been stretched to longer infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the universe--are captured as they would have appeared a mere 500 million years after the Big Bang. These bright young galaxies are only one-twentieth the size of our own galaxy the Milky Way, but the brightest one is forming stars approximately 50 times faster.

Another View of Ultra-Bright Ancient Galaxies

These ultra-bright, young galaxies are 10 to 20 times more luminous than any objects from the same era which have previously been observed. Their star-making prowess and compact size makes them brighter than their contemporaries. The Hubble images enabled astronomers to measure star-formation rates and sizes for these galaxies. Using the Spitzer telescope, the astronomers were also able to estimate the stellar masses of the stars within the galaxies, by measuring their total stellar luminosity.

Smallest, Faintest Galaxies Ever Seen

Between 9 billion and 12 billion years ago, the universe experienced a baby boom of star formation, but until now most of the galaxies which gave birth to the stars we see every night were too small and faint to be observed. In this ultraviolet image Hubble has captured a sample of 58 small, young galaxies, which are 100 times fainter than those typically detected in previous deep-field surveys of the early universe, as they would have appeared 10 billion years ago. There are 100 times more of these smaller, fainter galaxies than of their more flashy, brighter cousins, making these galaxies are the smallest, faintest, and most numerous ever seen in the remote universe.

The Hubble Space Telescope

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and is the first major optical telescope to be placed in space. Since then it has captured more than 570,000 images of 30,000 celestial objects. Hubble has helped to discover dark energy, determine the age of the universe, and capture the the deepest views of the cosmos.

There's no silver bullet for hiring the right people. Like the employees you're hoping to find, your hiring process should be tailored to your company's needs. It's not an easy thing to do--even Google got it wrong. But a recent talk from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg suggests that most of the trappings of our traditional hiring process are worthless for judging a good hire.

Instead, Mullenweg suggests hiring by audition. For his company, Mullenweg gives potentials trial work for their desired position for a flat rate--$25 an hour, to be done whenever the applicant has time. It's time consuming and slow, but to Mullenweg, it's worth it.

"There's nothing like being in the trenches with someone, working with them day by day. It tells you something you can't learn from resumes, interviews, or reference checks. At the end of the trial, everyone involved has a great sense of whether they want to work together going forward. And, yes, that means everyone -- it's a mutual tryout. Some people decide we're not the right fit for them."

Other tech leaders agree. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journalinterviewed Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who shares Mullenweg's views on hiring:

"Simulating what it's like to work together is the best way to determine whether somebody has the raw talent to not just do the job but to grow into something bigger. It's not about doing 15 interviews with 15 different people."

Jeff Neilsen of Santeon Group, an IT services company, believes it's the only way to hire programmers.

"I am reminded of a little segment from Tom DeMarco's book, Peopleware, where he talks about this fictional story of trying to hire a juggler to work for your company. This juggler comes in and they ask him about his background, and his references, and what is his theory of juggling, but they never actually asked to guy to juggle. Well, we do the same thing when hiring programmers."]

Worth highlighting in Mullenweg's approach is the fact that he compensates his job candidates for the work that's done. The audition model is one that can unfairly exploit job seekers, and the onus is on them to make sure they aren't being taken advantage of. Being up front and fair will encourage them to be the same with you, and potentially make for a better evaluation of their skills. Remember that you're being evaluated too.

Even if you don't have the time or resources to audition every candidate, you aren't out of options: Our sister site Inc has a four-step process that lets you get pretty close. To quote Mullenweg once more:

"Nothing has the impact of putting the right people around the table. The aphorism is true: You can't manage your way out of a bad team."

The Affordable Care Act has spurred a frenzy of Internet activity over the past few years as partisans on both rabble-roused about the now-infamous technical failures of Healthcare.gov.

With the dust still settling, Facebook scientists released a paper on January 8 showing what made Obamacare memes spread. Namely: To get a meme to spread among liberals, zombies and sci-fi stuff is what primes them best. As for conservatives: They're more likely to hit the "Share" button if your meme includes alcohol.

In the publicly available paper, Facebook data scientists Lada Adamic, Thomas Lento, Eytan Adar, and Pauline Ng anonymized versions of 1.4 million Facebook status updates and analyzed them to see how their memes mutated and spread around the social network. The results show identifiable patterns in the way memes and status updates change as they spread from user to user. In the paper, the four researchers explicitly compare it to the way genes evolve through mutations.

Approximately 470,000 Facebook users posted the following status update in September, 2009:

"No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, post this as your status for the rest of the day." 

Using anonymized status updates pulled from Facebook's user traffic--basically, status update archives that had a unique identifier but that couldn't be traced back to a specific Facebook user---the team found 121,605 variant versions of that string of text which appeared in 1.14 million status updates.

The most popular variants inserted someone's name. For example, "Sam thinks that no one should die." Others made small linguistic changes, such as changing "the rest of the day" to "the next 24 hours," a variation Facebook's data team believes was made by a user in the late evening hours.

By tracking when the variant status updates were made and what the connections were between the people posting them, Facebook created a visualization that resembles a phylogenetic tree. In the chart shown below, blue variants are strings of text with "the rest of the day," red variants are "the next 24 hours," and purple variants have other wording altogether.

Then Facebook's data team discovered that small turns of phrase led to users posting memes to their status feeds much more often. As the table of 4-grams below shows, certain phrases, such as the use of the words "your status," led to users sharing these updates at a higher rate. But even more intriguingly--and not displayed on the chart--a negative correlation was found between mild spelling errors in a meme and its popularity. The more misspellings a variant had, the less likely it was to be shared by Facebook friends.

Even more interesting--though subjective--was the fact that variants which mentioned certain themes like booze or zombies skewed in one direction or another politically. As the chart below shows, science fiction-themed variants skewed liberal (blue), and alcohol-themed variants skewed conservative (red).

[Images: Facebook]

Chinese site CTech (C科技) posted pics of this alleged iPhone 6 case, which appears to be slimmer than its predecessors. Apple has a habit of launching new products in September, but that hasn't stopped the rumor mill from speculating on the design and features early on in the past.

So what can we actually surmise from the pics and gossip? Well, the iPhone 6, iPhablet, or possibly even the iPhone Air, will trim down the current iPhone 5S from 7.6mm to around 6mm, which could be related to Apple's exclusive rights to the product Liquidmetal, according to Macworld. In November, the California-based company published five patents relating to Liquidmetal, which can be produced in smaller quantities, is extremely durable, but maintains the "same level of build quality as aluminum." Basically, the phone will be equipped with a very thin battery, lessening the weight and width of it. (An artist mockup courtesy of Macworld below.)

Adding to the conjecture, is Apple's estimated expense of $578 million on sapphire glass that could lead to a bigger display; rumors are circulating about it ranging from 4.7in to 5.7in. Sapphire glass is currently integrated into the iPhone 5's Touch ID Home button as well as the cover of the of the rear-facing camera--the technology is said to be "virtually scratch free." Some speculation claims that the display will even be stretched to completely cover the front of the phone, making it borderless.

So the phone may be extremely thin, extremely durable, and extremely light. Unfortunately, we will all have to wait until the WWDC in June, at least--possibly even later--to substantiate any of the hearsay.

The first week in January is the busiest of the year for divorce lawyers and job sites. One U.K. poll showed that 42% of Britons plan to look for a new job this month. An increasing number of them will dream of starting a company or jacking it all in to become a yoga teacher. Forbes recently published a breathless article following lawyers and bankers who are quitting their highly paid jobs to launch startups. LearnVest discovered last year that CEO (36%) and entrepreneur (28%) were the most aspirational job titles of 2013, the new face of the American Dream.

It's no longer enough to just make lots of money, even as a CEO; you must also do "meaningful work," to quote Forbes. But is starting a company or making a radical career change really the route to work nirvana?

"I would love to start my own business."

After 10 years of working as a programmer in various startups in the Bay Area, Sonia Connolly had a revelation. "I was sitting at my desk one day, and had the profound sense that I had lost my path so badly that I didn't know which way to turn to get closer to it," she says. After some soul-searching Connolly took bodywork classes and opened her own practice two years later.

"I took part-time computer contracts as they came along," she says, "always thinking this would be the last one, but my practice never grew beyond half-time. I didn't know how hard it is to be a successful solo business owner. I figured if I tried hard enough and did the right things it would all work out."

Faced with a dwindling savings account, Connolly eventually took a permanent, part-time programming gig a year ago. "I still say the corporate environment doesn't suit me, but I have a different perspective on it, and part-time makes a big difference. I'm grateful for the steady income, the learning opportunities, and the ability to continue contributing to the world with bodywork."

Connolly loves the way bodywork makes a tangible difference in people's lives, and the best thing about starting her own business was the sense of possibility and openness it offered in contrast to the predictability of a 9-5 job, but that unpredictability was also the main downside. "The worst thing is the financial instability and sense of failure, " she says. "The number of clients varies wildly from month to month, which would be okay if the average income is high enough, but mine never was. Even that has its upside. I don't take corporate benefits for granted, and I understand the inequities in our society a lot better."

"It's great that you are doing what you love."

This writer never planned to become a journalist. After being laid off from my tech job and and then running out of unemployment benefits, I was left with no other option but creating my own job. I had been writing for fun for several years and started to write for profit.

More than a decade previously, I started working for tech startups, then more prosaically referred to as small tech companies. While there are many things I enjoy about both startups and writing, and I'm certainly rarely bored, I'm far from starry-eyed about either as a career move.

In contrast, friends who are still comfortably installed in corporate jobs tend to have romantic notions about both startups and "creative" careers, of which they refuse to be disabused, no matter how many times I mention that most months my income doesn't cover my bills. They are amazed when I point out that I have never said that writing was what I love. It's as if the prevailing meme of "doing what you love" overrides the reality of any individual story.

One friend, who is a corporate lawyer, trained as a personal trainer and nutritionist on the side with a view to eventually practicing full-time. Once she realized that she would never make anything near her current salary in her new career, the project was quietly shelved. She would have suffered the same the loss in status and income, which has been the most difficult adjustment for me.

Like Connolly, I can now appreciate the structure and other benefits my permanent jobs gave me, although I might have complained about the accompanying restrictions. I'm still not sure I will ever go back to a regular job, but if I do I'll certainly be wiser than before.

"I knew you would be a success."

Last year, two months after the birth of his first child, Neil Murray quit his job as a commercial manager at a FTSE 100 company in London and moved to Copenhagen. He started doing freelance sales work with startups and then created a platform to connect freelance sales people with companies who are looking for flexible sales staff.

"Considering I knew no one when I came and am now considered an active member of the Copenhagen tech startup community," says Murray, "I feel that this year has been a big success. However, in terms of finances, it has been near disastrous. It depends what you consider success, and whether you are looking short- or long-term."

Murray loves the freedom that comes with being his own boss. "I have found out that you don't have to live your life working a 9-5 in a job and earn a stable wage just because society tells you to," he says, "and that you will be happier earning less doing something you love rather than earning more doing something you hate. I wish more people would take the chance in discovering this."

In spite of his conviction that he is on the right track, Murray still struggles with his own and other peoples' ideas about success and failure. "People tend to consider you a success because you have set out on your own," he says, "when in fact I feel I am a long way from success, as I am not even sure what that looks like at this point. I feel like I am simultaneously heading toward success and failure, and I have no idea what will come first."

Something happens during our moments of unbridled bursts of rampant creativity that is difficult to quantify. A jittery warmth swells throughout our entire bodies down to the extremities. Emotions like "fulfillment," "satisfaction," and "optimism" have been proven to feel like they are affecting the physiology of your whole body. A lot of tech people call this feeling "being in the zone," a place where creativity just seems to flow out of you. For that brief period, you have it.

To be a creator in this flow state is effortless, filled with pride and excitement. Abraham Maslow, of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs fame, called these sessions of "extraordinary experiences" our peak experiences. We are at our most fulfilled, unified, aware. It is the physical manifestation of our true potential, he argues. Our imagination is so present that time becomes illusive. As Michael Leppo puts it in his blog post "The Builder's High," you made that thing "because you decided it needed to exist," and damn, it feels good.

This is how Scott Barry Kaufman, adjunct professor of psychology at New York University, describes the process taking place in the prefrontal cortex: The precuneus, the part of the brain associated with self-reflection and argued to be the most important for consciousness, is very active in these moments of creative output. Interestingly, the time it is most active is during sleep.

The precuneus is also considered to be the hub of the "default mode" network of the brain--the systems which work without you intentionally thinking about it. This mode is in contrast to the "executive faculty," which what psychologists call our capacities for attention and reason. During states of "normalcy," we are in control of our focuses and thought processes. When you're in the zone, this changes: Your inner monologue, co-opted by the default mode network, runs off in manic glee while the executive network effectively deactivates.

Even more interesting--the most creative people activate both of these networks at the same time, in a similar manner to schizophrenic and bipolar brains. Years ago, researches at the Karolinska Institute found the dopamine systems to be involved in this process as well, further linking theories of madness and genius, mental illness and creativity.

But not all painters are schizophrenic, and not all schizophrenics are prepared to write a masterpiece tome, but there is an in-between. A study from the Schizophrenic Bulletin acknowledges a "mild form of schizophrenia" called schizotypy. From the study:

Positive schizotypy is associated with central features of "flow"-type experience, including distinct shift in phenomenological experience, deep absorption, focus on present experience, and sense of pleasure.

The thing we're creating, the "contagion of the inner stream of consciousness," as Kaufman calls it, brings on intensely positive feelings. For example, philosopher Jacques Derrida theorized that only writing could distract him from the fears of his daily live. "Nothing intimidates me" when writing, he wrote.

A more modern example might be Beyoncé's self-proclaimed alter ego Sasha Fierce. In an interview the artist said that it's as if "something else comes into her" when she is occupying that persona. That's led to some jokes about 'Beyoncé satanism' on YouTube, but she's far from the only artist to feel this way.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, a poet himself, advised his correspondent:

Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must", then build your life in accordance with this necessity...

When we look outside of ourselves, things begin to look more bleak. Michael Leppo, whom I cited in the second paragraph of this story, also writes:

You're fucking swimming in everyone else's moments, likes, and tweets and during these moments of consumption you are coming to believe that their brief interestingness to others makes it somehow relevant to you and worth your time.

Why do we need to leech the happiness from other people's memories? Why must we appropriate ourselves as also having experienced a person's day at the beach? Because we are hardwired to be social beings; it's a result of evolution. When we daydream, our inner monologue wanders to the future and other minds, Kaufman says. In a study about social pain, participants played a ball-tossing game that was set up so that one person would stop receiving the ball at all. From the transcript of an interview of one of the researchers on NPR's Science Friday:

...When we looked at the brains of these individuals who had just been rejected, we saw two fascinating things. The first thing we saw was that the same brain regions that register the distress of physical pain were also more active when people were left out of the game compared to when they were included. And then the second thing we saw was that the people who told us they were more bothered by being left out of the game were the people who activated these brain regions the most intensely.

Keep in mind, these people were strangers, not a close friend or family member. That humans crave such social affirmation speaks directly to the overconsumption of our social networks. Leppo wonders:

Is there a Facebook update that compares to building a thing? No, but I'd argue that 82 Facebook updates, 312 tweets, and all those delicious Instagram updates are giving you the same chemical impression that you've accomplished something of value.

Well, actually, yes--when we use these social pits like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, our dopamine pathways are rewarded in ways similar to eating and having sex. Egos are not only exercised, but put on full flare--80% of "conversation" is spent on ourselves. A study revealed that many 18-35-year-olds thought abstaining from social media was more difficult than not drinking, smoking, or sleeping. Our habits have made us more impatient and stupid. Such degenerative binging brings on ennui within our psyches. This calls for more productive and rewarding mental ways to invest our time. Leppo says, "When you choose to create, you're bucking the trend because you're choosing to take the time to build."

Get to work!

Protestors have taken Google to task for their abuse of San Francisco's public transit system, and the company's response--rent a luxury yacht for its commuters--didn't rub anyone the right way. A greener public transit option is on display in Milton Keynes, a town 45 miles north of London, which will see a fleet of eight electric buses making the rounds starting January 19th. The U.K.'s quiet and environmentally conscious buses will drive along a 15-mile route that carries an estimated 800,000 passengers a year.

The Wrightbus vehicles run on a battery that is cable-charged overnight in a depot, but the real innovation lies in its ability to wirelessly charge the battery throughout its journey. Consequently, the commuter buses will never have to deal with delays in transit, at least not due to the need for recharging the battery. So you will be supporting green, efficient public transport--no need to feel shameful about those detrimental carbon emissions.

It will be charged as the bus hovers over a charging plate, replenishing two-thirds of the energy consumed by the vehicle in a mere 10 minute--long enough for the conductor to take a break. The plates, which are built into the road, have been placed at either end of the route.

Through inductive charging, "electricity passes through wire coils in the road plates, generating a magnetic field. This field induces a voltage across coils in the bus plates and the vehicle's batteries are charged," according to the BBC.

Electric vehicles have long been plagued by criticism due to a lack of efficiency (they typically can only drive 100 miles before needing a charge), and a dearth of infrastructure (there are currently not enough charging stations to accommodate them). Wrightbus's buses appear to resolve that issue by relying on the built-in infrastructure of the charging plates. They are supposed to be able to do everything a diesel-run bus can do, which is easier without having to stop to recharge.

Milton Keynes isn't the only city experimenting with electric buses. The city of Gumi, South Korea, began testing electric buses that wirelessly recharged in motion last year. Similar programs have been running in Genoa and Turin, Italy for a few years now.

Fitness trackers are set to run amok in the coming year, but they all have one unfortunate thing in common: They're not very good at quantifying activity outside of running, biking, and riding in a vehicle. Considering there is a much broader range of activities in the human repertoire, so limiting this activity reading to three sports reduces these devices to stylish accelerometers, unable to distinguish between the various things we do to stay fit. They allow for quantified-self workouts, but still require you to do most of the quantifying.

Two companies are trying to solve this problem. The first is the team behind Atlas wearables, which just launched an Indiegogo campaign to move their eponymous tracking device into mass production.

The Atlas team claims that what sets their fitness tracker apart from your average FuelBand or Fitbit is the way its sensors combine data from three separate axes along with your heart rate in order to identify what exercise you are currently doing, and whether or not you are using proper form. Used in conjunction with compiled data from other users and an accompanying smartphone app, Atlas aims to provide context to what it quantifies.

That context, says CEO Peter Li--who previously developed a motivational fitness at Johns Hopkins University--is a huge part of what makes Atlas special. He's joined by Mike Kasparian and Alex Hsieh, who worked at Philips Medical and Maxim Integrated, respectively. The team is actively working with personal trainers and fitness experts in their native Austin. "They're helping us compile data so that we can create a gold standard," says Li. That data would then be used to offer feedback to the user, along with a form score, offering advice for improvement.

According to Li, the Atlas as it currently exists is almost final. "We're looking to make a couple of changes to the binding mechanism so it's more robust but other than that it's all there; the modularity is there, the waterproofing, the display."

While Atlas is making its debut during this year's CES where wearable fitness trackers are all the rage, it's not the first startup to make this particular promise. A year back, a similar fitness tracker called Amiigo was announced, with an extremely similar feature set--we covered it at the start of its Indiegogo campaign as well. Whether or not it performs as well as advertised remains to be seen, as delays in production have lead to initial shipments being sent out sometime this month.

Where Atlas would differ is in its self-contained designed and its open-source API. The former, Li says, is the device's crown jewel and most significant development challenge:

"The algorithms and analytical engine that we built in to the device--it's all embedded, you don't need connection to your phone via Bluetooth. Of course, you can sync to your phone for the community thing--but a lot of time has been spent on building the analytical engine to not only combine the community's data but also to build a self improving algorithm so that the more the user uses it the better Atlas will understand every nuance in their style."

With Atlas's open-source API, developers would also be able to take the wider range of data that Atlas tracks and build applications that incorporate the device's biometric data. But as smartwatches open to developers too, being open source will only be a draw if the tech delivers.

Until either band is out in the wild, it remains to be seen if the promise of an ideal quantified workout device--one that requires nothing more than for you to start working out--will be a reality. Only one question remains, the same question we asked a year ago when we spoke to Amiigo cofounder Abe Carter: Why isn't everyone doing this?

"I've honestly thought that myself on a number of different occasions," Carter admits. "I saw the announcement of the FuelBand and my heart sank. I didn't know about the FuelBand before. I just don't know why Nike hasn't done this yet."

Have you ever lost your subway pass? Or been forced to swipe again by a bleeping turnstile? Or maybe you've had to pay a whopping $1 fee to get a replacement card? Well, thanks to the MTA, the MetroCard's death is nigh. Okay, so the program is forecasted for induction in 2019, but still, five years isn't too far off.

Kevin Ortiz, an MTA spokesperson, explained to Fast Company that "MetroCards is a system that is reaching the end of its useful life. Its equipment is on the verge of becoming obsolete." The flimsy paper and plastic cards are reportedly used by over 5 million New York commuters daily and as the MTA celebrates the card's 20-year anniversary, plans for integrating smartphones or contactless cards as a replacement are being put into motion.

In 1994, the MTA enlisted Cubic to provide vending machines supplying the subway passes that currently inhabits all metro stops, replacing the bygone token. After 20 years the system is definitely in need of a major overhaul.

In spite of the desire for a subway pass evolution, Ortiz said that technological advancements don't presently fit the demands of NYC riders--that's why they are waiting until 2019. For instance, a smartphone app is a viable option where metro travelers could swipe their phones as payment, but not everyone has a smartphone yet. And the other idea of using NFC and RFID payments where people tap credit cards instead of swiping them, would require that all credit cards or debit cards adopt an NFD or RFID infrastructure, which is also not in place at present.

Boston was the first city in the U.S. to launch a smartphone commuter rail system in 2012, proving that a smartphone payment structure could work. Portland followed suit by introducing mobile ticketing last year.

It is likely that the MTA "will issue a request for proposal sometime this year and grant the most promising tech company a contract 'most likely in 2015.'" Last year, Control Group was awarded a contract to design and deploy On The Go Interactive Way-finding kiosks in the subway and rail system to radically improve the display maps, system alerts, and advertisements underground. 90 of these installations are set to hit heavy-trafficked stations soon in the hopes of improving New Yorkers' and visitors' overall commutes.

Artist/coder Ramsey Nasser's latest creation is a programming language written entirely in emoji. It's called Emojinal, and he designed it in collaboration with Addie Wagenknecht, with whom he presented it at the recent Emoji Art and Design Show at Eyebeam last month.

"Emojinal is the next step after قلب," says Nasser, referring to Alb, the first Arabic programming language, which he created in 2012. Nasser says he's interested in English alternatives for coding because "a programming language based on any human language is alienating; code is not a conversation between you and the machine but rather between yourself and other coders," he says. "It's an expression of intent that a computer can act on."

Nasser commented that even in computer coding, "the tools we use carry cultural assumptions from the people that made them." When Nasser created قلب, he ran into trouble when he tried to translate the words "true" and "false" into Arabic. He ended up using "correct" and "incorrect" instead, and though the concepts did not exactly align, he said it "turned into an amazing conversation that [he] got to have with [his] parents and friends." Nasser aims at creating universality in coding: "Emojinal is an attempt to step away from cultural baggage."

Coding in Emoji

Emojinal is a conceptual project, but what does it mean in practical terms when you code in emoticons? Well, Nasser says, "it's funny because it's a set of glyphs not designed for programming. It's incredibly expressive in some parts, but I was so stumped on other things like, how [to] represent a loop or abstract things like the soaring of a value in a variable... emoji is very much about nouns. Programming is very much about things but also very much about verbs and other grammatical constructs."

To express abstract concepts and verbs, Nasser had to string together emojis to invent emoji "words." For example, the emoji up arrow means "the Y coordinate" of a dot and the emoji watch followed by the emoji up arrow means the "previous Y coordinate" of a dot. Decisions about how to represent computational concepts in emoji were bounced back and forth between Nasser and Wagenknecht, which Nasser described as an element of the project in which their differences enriched the collaboration. "I have a practical perspective," he said, "Addie has drafts where she used animals to represent numbers."

The language is difficult to read and write because, for starters, instead of a standard 105-key keyboard, you're working with about 860 emojis, which you scroll through to find each one you want. It's also a stack-based language with very little punctuation. To make matters worse, Nasser explained, "most code is syntax highlighted…that's what makes it readable. You can't really do that with emoji, they're already their own thing. You can't color them."

"We do not imagine Emojinal being widely used," Nasser said; "it's more a statement than anything else. A statement about what programming without natural languages looks like."

Where Nasser's Inspiration Comes From

In 2013, Nasser created God.Js with Ivan Safrin and Will Brand, a programming language that explores the similarity between scripture and computer code: that they're both instructions.

Nasser also creates games, for example, Swordfight in which "the goal is to press your opponent's action button with your joystick before the same is done to you." Oh, and your joystick (an original Atari 2600 controller) is strapped to your groin (with a harness for strap-on dildo). Nasser worked with Kurt Bieg at Eyebeam to create the custom circuitry for the game which, when played, looks like a masturbatory gaming-performance-art spectacle.

After completing his BS in computer science at the American University in Beirut--his hometown--Nasser wanted to "do more with code." In the small village where his family spends their summers in Lebanon, the government only provides five to six hours of electricity per day. In search of a way to smuggle in wind generators, Nasser found instructions online for creating a generator from a Pringles tin. It was a lesson plan from Parsons School of Design, where he ended up studying. There he says, he "found that other thing that [he] wanted to do with code."

As his MFA thesis project at Parsons, he created Zajal, "a language designed to reduce the friction between creative vision and functioning software." This would come to embody the mission behind much of Nasser's less conceptual work: creating user experience-oriented languages.

"It has been that engineers build languages and the machines have been central. But designers need to be more involved in it now…Programming languages are like user interfaces to computers to allow people to do interesting things. So people creating languages should be thinking, 'What do human beings need?' Languages should be built the way you would design an app: with the semantics that make the most sense to a human being," he says.

As wearable technology seems to be the emerging big trend out of this year's CES, PFSK and Intel have teamed up to present the forces behind the usefulness and vitality of its future. Three overarching themes seem to be the drivers of developments aiming to make strides in improving the human condition.

"Connected Intimacy"

What if our e-communication actually meant something? This is one of the advancements wearable tech is trying to make regarding our empathetic interactions and care-taking. Devices are promoting "long-distance togetherness" with wearable items like Jacket, intended to monitor a child's jitters from afar and offer a long-distance hug with the tap of a button, and the data-streaming Mimo, a onesie displaying your cribbed baby's mood on a connected coffee mug. Sure, it might be strange, the notion of robotic interlopers helping you express affection for your kith and kin, but Intel seems to think there's room for more electronics in those relationships.

"Tailored Ecosystem"

Prosthetics are another major growth area, says Intel and PSFK. Gadgets like Wristify, a wrist mounted body coolant, and Dextrus, which is an attempt in conjunction with the Open Hand Project to make prosthetic limbs accessible, could bring a new wave of customizable biometric wearables. Coaching devices like Lumo have users maintaining a postural relationship with their chairs to alert the way to a better sitting position.

"Co-Evolved Possibilites"

Here's where it really starts verging on science fiction: These "co-evolved possibilities" strive to better connect us with our devices, aggrandizing our sensory perceptions for an "authenticated self" that can be stored in cloud memory. Smart bracelets like Nymi can register each person's unique cardiac rhythm and use it as a password, allowing you to authenticate on everything from an iPad to your home HVAC system, just by being nearby (and alive).

Zoomable contact lenses, meant for those with less than perfect vision, enhance perception, and Kapture, a wristwatch that records audio throughout the day, grabs what we might have forgotten and tosses it in the cloud. (The combination of the two gets a little to close to the grain in an episode of Black Mirror for this writer's comfort.)

But do these and other wearable technologies have a future in ubiquity? Maybe not until consumers start imagining better ways to use them.

In a survey of 1,500 smartphone owners in 2013, 15% of people responded "I don't know" when prompted with "What is a smartwatch for?" The majority either felt it was for sports and activities or checking the time. Fewer thought it could be used for communication or information gathering over the Internet. Only 25% reported they would use a device they would wear as a wristwatch or attach to a piece of clothing, meandering down to 4% willing to put in smart contact lenses.

Despite what Intel says, too often it seems as if these sartorial devices are exploiting the laziness of humans through high-tech conveniences instead of solving legitimate problems. Do we really want to act out a door-opening gesture for Nymi to unlock our cars? Is Jacket fostering "long-distance togetherness," or are we coddling and conditioning children so that the only way they'll be able to overcome anxiety is from the pressurized sensation of a hug, simulated and otherwise? The devices with the most convincing punch are the ones like Dextrus, which offers a tangible solution to a real problem.

It leaked a few months back that YouTube would be launching some sort of music streaming service, but it wasn't clear what angle the company would take. Now, in a interview with Matt Pincus, a board member of National Music Publishers Association, it may be a little clearer how YouTube will officially step into the music space.

In the interview Pincus says lyrics will be a big part of the music market in 2014, perhaps alluding to the success of Rap Genius, the almost-fucked lyrics site. He also lets it slip that "Google has a platform they're launching that is lyric videos created by a program, which means kids can create their own lyric videos and put them on YouTube." With Google already providing a direct Spotify competitor with its All Access service, it makes sense for the company to harness YouTube's music influence in a different way. Lyric videos are also a popular form of fan expression on the video site.

Google already has a lot of the tools needed to make automated lyric videos happen, including annotations and music ready for video use--which all of the sudden puts them out ahead of Rap Genius, AZlyrics, and other popular lyrics destinations. Those sites get monstrous amounts of traffic--most of it via Google search--representing a huge market opportunity sitting right under search giant's nose. Part of the point that Pincus was making when he mentioned lyrics was that it was a big area of growth, but a small portion of revenue and licensing. Having Google join in and pay royalties into the pool would definitely be a big boon to legitimizing the practice of licensing lyrics.

Rap Genius had problems with licensing lyrics in the past as one of the most popular sites in the space in recent years. "They responded to it, because those guys are looking to build a legitimate business," says Pincus.

Mindie is another service looking to change what people think about when they hear the term "music video." The app allows you to select any song available on iTunes and record seven seconds of video to play during the song. Scrapping the idea that a music video needs to last the duration of the entire song, Mindie is betting that a song's hook is enough to encourage music discovery for the same users of Twitter, Circa, and Snapchat.

With YouTube's huge audience, even if it isn't able to revolutionize music videos, just contributing financially to legitimizing the lyrics business could be a huge win for the music industry.