Dr. Brainlove, dubbed "The Most Burning Man Thing Ever," is a school bus-size brain that changes color based on neurological activity. For Playa revelers, it was a source of wonder. For Misfit Wearable senior engineer Rachel Kalmar, it was research.

Kalmar, who helped bring Dr. Brainlove to life, is working to make wearables blossom into the popular devices they were meant to be. In order break free of the one-dimensional data silos of today's step-counting world, she is building algorithms and databases that track contextual information and look for patterns in order to achieve long-term improvements for users.

"Right now it's just like the early days with cell phone cameras, which kind of sucked," Kalmar tells Co.Labs. "But the best camera was the one that was in your pocket and today, the best data is the data that you have now."

Though still in the early stages, the Misfit team is working on ways to make data run in the background in a passive manner similar to that of Google Maps or Waze. As well as predictive health and activity suggestions such as the internally brewed ETA engines we are seeing from companies like Lyft and Uber.

"What would motivate me to get up from my computer is if my activity tracks both my activity and my Internet," she says. "If my Internet gets slow then that gets me to close my laptop and step away."

But there is a fine line between prediction and automation in activity tracking. A fellow Misfit employee who also worked on Apple's Siri recalled that internal testing showed that users lost confidence in the product when the AI misunderstood them. "That's a challenge not just for Misfit, but I think for the field," she says.

That challenge becomes more acute as wearables companies race to become smaller and cheaper than their competitors. Misfit took the first steps into accessibility with the Shine--a small, magnetic tracker that could be put anywhere on your body for targeted activity tracking. But the growth of that entire sector is stunted right now, says Kalmar, in part because the data is only accessible to those who can afford it--most devices cost more than $100.

Their new tracker, the Flash, which is priced at $50, represents an attempt to attract a different consumer market. It has the same functionality as the Shine but without the cost barrier. "We wanted everybody to be able to have a device and we know that price plays a role in that decision or in that conversation," Kalmar says.

Misfit also partnered with women's fashion brand Chromat--a cool kid in the fashion industry--for a high fashion accessory line, positioning itself for use over its uglier wearable counterparts.

But the design rule on both ends of the wearables spectrum is to make devices smart enough that you'd wear them even if you weren't doing anything. More wearable body parts mean more use and more precise data. "If you make devices that people want to wear," says Kalmar, "and you make them passive, then you have that data for free."

What people often forget is that wearables essentially make you a connected device, part of the broader Internet of things ecosystem. Better environmental data can be used to categorize more interesting behaviors and patterns, like seasonal affective disorder.

Though not yet in the production phase, Kalmar says she'd like to see a well-designed ring communicate with home devices--taking products like Netamo's sun exposure bracelet a step further. "The ring would tell the lighting of my house how much light I've had exposure to and automatically tell it to compensate for shorter days."

In order to gather that kind of data, these devices will have to communicate with each other, and not just rely on its own data the companies are deploying them today. "Data by itself, is not nearly as useful as if we understand what you as a person are trying to do, your goals, your values, and your patterns and that doesn't come from any single device," she says.

"I think that it's now become obvious that we need to work together," says Kalmar. "Because all of our devices collectively are much more interesting than any of our devices individually."

To understand why, just look at Dr. Brainlove. This year the brain was responding to MRI input from a single participant. But next year, Kalmar wants to see the interactive bus controlled by wearables worn by the people in attendance.

"If you are using your arms, that data can show how it's affecting the cerebral cortex." says Kalmar. "If everybody is wearing something like the Shine or a Flash or an activity tracker, then you can get the brain to do different things based on sensor input."

And what better way to celebrate wearable data's coming of age than with thousands of Burning Man attendees. Wearing nothing but a bracelet.

Compact discs are over 30 years old and as likely to be used as a Metallica desk clock as a way to cue up Master Of Puppets. But it turns out that we may not have even come close to reaching the capacity of optical storage mediums.

Instead of the 4.7 gigabytes of data a DVD holds, or 700 megabytes a CD currently holds, Dr. Zongsong Gan and his team at Australia's Swinburne University of Technology have figured out how to store 1,000 terabytes of data on a single DVD, and were recently awarded a Victoria Fellowship for the work.

The current limitations of writing data to optical discs is what's known as the refraction limit of light. Since light can't be broken down smaller than 500 nanometers, it was assumed that lasers (light) couldn't write bits of information smaller than 500 nanometers either. That's apparently not true, as Dr. Gan and his partners figured out that using two light beams, they can shorten the writing light down to just 9 nanometers.

This is the difference between drawing on a piece of paper with a huge Sharpie and a fine-tip pen. The fat maker can't include the same amount information and drawing details that the pen with a small tip can--same for the beam of light writing bits to a disc.

Cleverly, the reachers used two light beams, both 500 nanometers themselves. One was used for writing bits of information while the second purple circular beam was used to block all but a point of light 9 nanometers in width.

The benefits of this technological advancement are pretty obvious, like being able to put higher resolution video on a single disc. But there are still some serious problems these advancements raise as well.

"Putting so much information on a single disc makes it easier for people to destroy huge amounts of data and thus cost more to protect the disc," says Dr. Gan. "Also, we are now working to speed up for data reading and recording. If we're still using the current DVD speed, how long it will take to write 1,000 TB of data onto a disc?"

In addition to the entertainment benefits, like video sizes, Dr. Gan is also highly focused on the implications for general purpose data storage. Being able to radically increase data storage, either on optical discs or another format, will go a long way toward what the researcher imagines for the future.

"In my mind, I have an vision for our society in the future where everyone will have a data bank account just like we all have a bank account today," Dr. Gan explains. "We'll save all of our data in the data bank. Everyone no longer needs the same things today as phones, iPads, or laptops. We only need a soft touch screen, any data processing, while storage is done remotely."

Every day we make complex inferences based on our surroundings. Is that a safe street to walk down? Is the nearest McDonald's to the left? We use a contextual understanding and judgments about our environment to look beyond merely the "visual scene" and decide what stores and services we expect to find nearby, and even the likely economic climate of the neighborhood.

Now a computer can do the same thing by simply looking at a picture from Google Street View.

A deep learning project by researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) fed 8 million images from Google Street View into an algorithm. The result is a computer that can accurately predict the distance to the nearest McDonald's in the fewest steps possible, and the crime rate of an area, by looking at an image.

This represents a change in the way we should think about image recognition. "A lot of the existing computer vision research to date has focused on what's inside an image--for example, does a particular image contain a cat or part of face?" says Aditya Khosla, a fourth-year computer science PhD student who worked on the project. "We wanted to look at what we can learn from the image through inferences."

The study started with Khosla and his three colleagues picking eight cities from around the world--including Boston, Chicago, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, and San Francisco. Each of these cities was divided into a series of locations roughly 16 meters apart. For each point, four images were taken showing the view from north, south, east, and west.

Next the team obtained the location of establishments of interest using Google Places. Despite having a range of possibilities to choose from, they settled on McDonald's restaurants as their reference point of choice--largely because McDonald's were found in all eight of the cities they had chosen.

"We wanted something that would be found everywhere but would also be slightly tough to guess the location of," says Joseph Lim, a fellow PhD student who also worked on the project. "At one point we considered Nike stores, but these often tend to be located in the shopping mall, which is typically in the center of a city. We wanted an added level of complexity."

Aggregated crime data, meanwhile, was gathered from organizations like San Francisco CrimeSpotting. This allowed the construction of crime density maps, which could be used for training. Of the 8 million image samples from Google Street View, half were used for training the algorithm, and the other half for testing it.

Results have proven impressive. Using deep learning tools, the team was able to create an algorithm that recognized what it was looking at, and could use this to draw conclusions. While humans proved better at navigating to their nearest McDonald's in the fewest possible steps, the algorithm consistently outperformed people when being shown two photos and answering which scene takes you closer to a Big Mac.

A demo of the human vs. algorithm experiment can be seen here.

"The opacity of the algorithm means that it's hard for me to know exactly what the high-level descriptors are which suggest a McDonald's is nearby," Khosla says. "An example might be the ratio or number of taxicabs, though, which suggest that you are in a highly populated commercial part of a city--or if the algorithm detects an ocean in the image, which means we are likely on the outskirts of the city."

However, Khosla admits that the project was more about kick-starting research than creating an optimized algorithm. "It's a complex task for machine learning because of the abstraction involved," he says. "What we're trying to do is show that studying images should be about more than just analyzing what is visible. If the goal of artificial intelligence is to build machines that can mimic human intelligence, this level of abstraction is the obvious next step."

The team also has some ideas about where research could go next--and how this could be scaled into a real-world project.

"I can see one useful application being to town planners," says Lim. "It may be, for example, that instead of approximating how close you are to a McDonald's restaurant it would be possible to pinpoint the public services people would expect to find in a location--but which may not exist. You could work out where a school or hospital would be most beneficial, and then build it there."

Another possible application relates to context-aware maps, which could be of interest to companies like Google and Apple. Rather than simply confirming the physical artifacts around you, this map could fill users in on the high-level subtleties about the place they're traveling through. "If you're driving around, it may be useful to be made aware of the likelihood of crime in a particular area," Khosla says. "Since all of the Google Street View data is available, it would be possible to make those maps crime-aware. If you're plotting a route you might want to avoid areas above a certain crime threshold."

Because the algorithm is able to take findings from one place and apply it to another, it would even be possible to draw conclusions about parts of the world that do not routinely publish crime or other statistics.

Ultimately, what is needed to move this research forward is more data. "I think we could apply this to everything from property prices to the political inclination of an area," Khosla says. "What is needed is more data. Because of the current gaps in our data, some of these things are much harder to verify than others. The more data you could build into our model, the more accurate it would be."

Technical documentation can have a huge impact on the success of any platform. So when a Hacker News user asked "How do I write good documentation?" the response was swift. The user's particular need was for a PHP framework, but the advice and recommendations provided by commenters should be useful to anyone looking for similar help. Here are five responses that stand out as good take-aways for anyone in the same situation.

1) Be Clear And Concise

Figure out who the documentation is meant for and speaking clearly to that user. From user junto:

Make it well-structured, consistent and concise.

One of the best examples I've come across is the documentation for Rackspace Cloud Files: (PDF)

2) Write Good Code

Writing good documentation is assisted by writing good code in the first place. The better the code, the less work it should take to document it.

User martianE points out the different role documentation can play with clearly written code.

In fact the best documentation I've seen (say flask, django) most of the documentation acts as support for reading the code.

This is backed up by user znt:

Simpler & more succinct code is also easier to document.

3) Read Other Documentation

How do you become a better writer? Read more. It's common advice for all writers, which applies to those writing code documentation as well. User jschulenklopper adds links to other documentation for some extended reading. 

Discover what choices the writers made (implictly) and what works for you w.r.t. structure, clarity, completeness, conciseness. In your case, look for documentation of other (web) frameworks with a large audience, for example:

- Django: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/
- Symfony: http://symfony.com/doc/current/book/index.html
- Rails: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ and http://api.rubyonrails.org/

User atsaloli also added a link to the article "The 7 Rules For Writing World Class Technical Documentation," which confirms a lot of the advice commenters were giving.

4) Show Examples

People looking to learn new languages or different development techniques are also looking for good examples of the code in use. While some people like to read their way through the process, others prefer to get hands-on as quickly as possible.

From user progx:

php-documentation is really beginner friendly because of the small examples and the comments

5) Sell Your Code

Code documentation doesn't have to be dry and boring as pointed out by user chatmasta. For developers interested in the code with the possibilities of using it in the future, don't forget to highlight some main features and show them why they should be using it too.

Don't lie or use gimmicky methods for enticing users, but make a TL;DR intro, which quickly gets people interested.

From user samelawrence:

Even once you've managed to convince a developer to use your tool, he or she may need to convince their management of the same thing, so good documentation can provide them with the "sales" points they need to get your framework adopted by their company / team / project lead.

Good documentation not only informs and excites the end user of the tool, but should also provide a basis of value for any other stakeholders in the outcome of its usage.

Since March 2012 artist James Kerr has been creating somewhat absurd, but decidedly brilliant animated GIFs based on Renaissance paintings. His Tumblr and alter ego Scorpion Dagger has amassed over 700 of the images and some 125,000 followers. With tongue firmly in cheek, Kerr has found a way to mock the original subject matter as much as our contemporary culture.

Now Kerr has teamed up with independent art book publisher Anteism to raise money on Kickstarter and produce a printed art book. Not just any coffee table art-book-and-dust-collector, Scorpion Dagger will boast augmented reality features that make Kerr's GIFs come alive on the page.

When a smartphone with the book's companion app is held over a page of artwork, the still image on the page will play out in full animation on the reader's device.

From Analog To Digital

Until a couple years ago, Kerr's work as an artist had primarily been what he calls "more or less traditional collages" on board or canvas hung on walls. Looking for an artistic change, Kerr decided to teach himself how to animate. Scorpion Dagger was born as a side project while picking up that skill.

Kerr played with remixing whatever images were on hand into short video clips. He first considered the potential for GIFs as artwork when he workshopped his videos with a friend who works as a professional animator.

"My friend thought it was silly that I was sending two-second videos," says Kerr. "He suggested I make GIFs out of them."

The choice of Renaissance paintings for subject matter was pragmatic more than conceptual. Kerr needed a readily available stock of images in a similar style that he had legal permission to remix.

"When I was learning how to animate I ran out of stuff to use for my portfolio, so I started looking on the Internet for stuff to cut up and collage," he says. "I kept coming across these Renaissance paintings and thought it would be interesting to do something with them."

Kerr quickly developed his unique style and committed to making one GIF a day for a year. And thus Scorpion Dagger was born. Over time, the work began to take on more meaning for Kerr.

"I'm kind of into this idea that we think of ourselves as advanced--and we definitely are technologically--but we haven't really progressed as a people culturally," says Kerr. "And you can kind of see it in those paintings. The work plays on this idea that the subjects of these paintings aren't so different from us. We're still bumbling around the world like idiots trying to figure things out."

From Digital to Analog

The animated GIF is a compelling format for Kerr's work precisely because it plays into this tension between culture, technology, and progress. The Scorpion Dagger book will complete a cycle from the analog world to the digital and back again.

"The interesting thing is that when I first started using Renaissance paintings I was actually scanning some images from books," says Kerr. "I scanned a painting, digitized it, re-purposed it, made it into a GIF, and posted it online. I think it's a funny circle that now I'm actually gonna put it back into a book."

To complete the cycle, Kerr's physical book critiquing technological progress will be embedded with augmented reality features.

"When you change the painting from being just a static image all of a sudden it becomes much more immersive," says Harley Smart, Anteism's publisher. "It becomes a responsive and interactive work of art. I always loved pop-ups that unfold out of books and paper engineering. It feels like augmented reality is taking us in this kind of direction."

Emphasis On The Art, Please

As fun as the playing with the tech and digital to analog conversions is, Smart is quick to point out that the book is still an art book before anything else.

"This isn't just going to be a gimmick book that you have to have your phone to read," he says. "We're making this a full monograph as much as we can. We're thinking of this as an art book for Scorpion Dagger that also has augmented reality features if people are interested. To read the book you won't need a phone. Anybody can pick up the book and it's gonna be a great read."

Their emphasis on quality avant-garde art books is a large part of why Kerr chose to go with Anteism, even if another company might have more experience with cutting-edge tech like augmented reality.

"I love how they're a small operation," he says. "Most of the stuff they do is completely handmade. It's gorgeous, really nice quality work. Plus I like that they're local, right up the street from me."

In fact, the hardcover limited edition of Scorpion Dagger will be hand-bound and include handmade decorative elements--a rare low-tech touch on a high-tech project. That attention to detail comes from the fact that Anteism and Kerr are not technologists trying to make art, but are rather incorporating technology into the art they produce.

At a time when the publishing industry and bibliophiles are bemoaning the fact that the physical book might be erased once and for all, Anteism is finding success by making technology physical once again.

"I'm obsessed with this idea of taking a digital work of art and turning it into an analog piece," says Kerr. "I think it's really neat that you can take this digital stuff and stuff it back into a tangible object that you actually can hold and play with."

One such tangible object is the "giphoscope," a handmade GIF player that displays GIFs frame by frame, powered by a hand crank. Anteism is offering Kickstarter backers their choice of Kerr's GIFs in giphoscope form, a suitable mixture of formats for Kerr's project.

In a world of information overload and filter failure, Smart is embracing the ability to manage the flow of an experience much more explicitly.

"With a website you always have the freedom to click anywhere and go in any direction, whereas in a book form you can curate the experience," he says. "You have the physical, tactile action of turning the page. There's a linear direction as you turn the page and you can really choose what is presented to the reader."

As for the future of the GIF, Kerr is optimistic that it can claim its place in the pantheon of so-called legitimate art.

"Not all animated GIFs are art obviously, just like not all photographs are art and not all video is art. Most people haven't even considered the potential for the GIF to be an artistic medium," he says. "They think of GIFs as a guy getting hit in the nads or One Direction GIFs. I see this field as where digital art was 10 years ago," noting that these different media become more accepted over time.

Throughout it all, Kerr sees the ability of him and other artists to experiment in this space right now as a privilege. "We get to fuck with all the different realms in which these images exist traditionally and where they will exist in the future."

Sometimes it feels like we have people telling us that 3-D printing is going to change just about everything: Fashion. Health Care. Architecture. Violence. Your dinner. Now we can add one more thing to the list: Music.

A group of students at Lund University in Sweden recently became the first band to play 3-D printed musical instruments together in a live setting. The headline-grabbing stunt--together with other music-oriented 3-D printing projects--alludes to the future of how musical instruments are designed and played.

"I initially started the project just to see if it could be done, and started to blog about it on my website," says Olaf Diegel, the Lund professor who spearheaded the instrument-printing project. "But a lot of musicians contacted me and said they liked the idea so I turned it into a little spin-off business."

Diegel used a type of 3-D printing called selective laser sintering (SLS) to build custom-designed guitar bodies, drum shells, and the exterior to a keyboard. Like traditional 3-D printing, SLS distributes one thin layer of powder after another, but in this case the process uses a laser to melt the powder in the appropriate places. After an 11-hour print job, he takes off-the-shelf hardware--the neck, knobs, strings, and electronics--and pieces everything together much like he would if the body had just come off of an assembly line.

Diegel is by no means the first to dabble in the art of printing instruments. F-F-Fiddle is an open source, printable electronic violin designed by OpenFab PDX founder David Perry. A lifelong musician, Perry was inspired to build a violin of his own after visiting a violin luthier's workshop a few years ago. He assumed the dream would have to wait until he retired and had the time to learn the complex craftsmanship of forging a violin out of wood. Then he bought a 3-D printer.

"I was working on a computer-modeling tutorial for a guitar," says Perry. "As the guitar really started to take shape I said, 'Shoot, if I can model a guitar on the computer, I could model a violin.'"

The end result is a fully functional, playable electric violin. Perry has made the blueprints and digital files available as a kit that he sells online, effectively open-sourcing the construction of a new breed of musical instrument.

As is typically the case with 3-D printing, one major advantage here is cost savings. Like Perry's F-F-Fiddle, other examples like this giant, bass-range recorder can be printed and constructed more affordably than the traditional route allows. For $30, you can print a perfectly functional version of an instrument that normally goes for a few thousand dollars.

But perhaps most interesting are the new, virtually unlimited design possibilities that the process opens up. "3-D printing allows some unique features on the instrument, like curvy internal wire routing and easy configuration of the internal resonance structure," Perry says.

Then there's aesthetics. Just as drummers have long emblazoned personalized logos onto their bass drums, now the entire band can customize the look and feel of their entire instruments.

"Musicians are highly individual, so 3-D printing is perfect for that as it's ideally suited to customization," says Diegel. "It doesn't cost any more to make every guitar different than to make every guitar the same, so you might as well make every one different to suit the musician."

While the 3-D printing for a complex instrument is currently limited to the body, Diegel foresees a future in which more parts of the guitar--from the knobs to the neck--can be custom-designed and printed.

"It would be pretty easy, for example, to scan your head and make guitar knobs in the shape of your own head," says Diegel. That may sound incredibly weird, but would you put it past any member of KISS?

Just as in every other field touched by 3-D printing, as the technology advances, the possibilities expand. Before long, musicians will be designing and printing their own new instruments from scratch.

At MIT, researcher Amit Zoran has been exploring the impact of 3-D printing on the creation of musical instruments for years. He's already successfully printed a functional flute and created an as-yet-unprinted prototype design of an experimental, multi-horned trumpet. The finished product may or may not produce a sound anyone wants to hear, but the concept demonstrates how 3-D printing can one-up the old-school way of doing things.

"The way a trumpet's pipes are banded, you cannot have multiple pipes one inside the other," explains Zoran. "But the 3-D printing machine won't care and can make it easily."

The future potential is hard to miss. Since 3-D printing allows for the creation of intricate designs that wouldn't be possible with wood, brass, or even traditional plastics, it stands to reason that the process can give birth to new acoustic possibilities. Tomorrow's new instruments will not only look different, but may be capable of producing new timbres and tones--with or without the aid of electronic sound synthesis.

To be sure, the geeks and makers occupying the intersection of music and technology are already thinking about 3-D printing. At Music Hack Day in Boston last year, developer Christopher Barthle combined music and 3-D printing by taking a visual breakdown of the audio from a Katy Perry song, fine-tuning some parameters, and printing out a physical representation of the track.

Barthle's hack wasn't itself a playable instrument, but it's only a matter of time before additive manufacturing finds its way into the creation of new instruments, which are already being conceived and built at Music Hack Day and similar events all around the world.

Happy National News Engagement Day! Today is the day that our forefathers Jesus Christ and Albert Einstein set aside for Engaging With The News, when they met with Napoleon on Elba and determined the International Schedule of Bogus Holidays by which we still plan the bogus days and weeks of our bogus lives. David Carrengaged with the Washington Post, giving them a pat on the back and a really nice certificate for still existing:

Great Jeorb!

Adrianne Jeffries is engaging with VICE's Motherboard, which is a big loss for The Verge. NYC phone booths have been engaging with your phone for a few months, which partly explains why phone booths even still exist. A few hours after the Buzzfeed report, the city said "lol whoops" and ordered them removed so they can be reinstalled within weeks after a token "review" process. #Brands are engaging with Ello, so I've already moved to Owdy.co, the only social network that "doesn't let content get in the way of what truly makes for a good social experience: rushing to get your username before everybody else."

In Hobart, Elizabeth Ellenengaged with the alt-lit controversy in a personal essay so completely awful that even I would have politely ignored it except that Malloryengaged with it. Engaged with it real hard.

Sometimes it seems like people will never stop having opinions about Lena Dunham! Ross Douthat, who should stop having opinions altogether, thinks she is secretly proving reactionaries right. How can you literally call your own side of the political spectrum "reactionary?" We should be a lot more troubled by Ross Douthat than we are, and we are already really troubled. VICE's Kaleb Horton tricked Douthat's fellow reactionaries with the dastardly tactic of attributing a page of words to Dunham that was really obviously not by her. And finally, if you read nothing else in this graf, do read Jia Tolentino's review of "Not That Kind of Girl" which is that best and rarest kind of Dunham Take: a thoughtful reading of the book itself.

Today in Tabs: "Why I Left New York" is already the most basic genre of personal essay, but Vogue's Jonathan Van Metertakes it to another level with an exemplar of the form that strays pretty far into unintentional self-parody. Blake Lively's artisanal pregnancy raises awareness that pregnant women literally must hold their wombs onto their bodies at all times lest they fall off and roll under the reclaimed barn wood picnic table. Pumpkin Spice Condoms were apparently Caitlin Kelly's fault, like so much else. World not yet replete with dicks, say scientists. CDC's Ebola playbook is apparently just: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

What do you think, Bij, got any good ideas on Ebola?

Did U Know: Kangaroos fight like white girls at the mall [via Jessica Roy]

Today's Song: Beyoncé released a video for "Flawless (Remix) ft. Nicki Minaj"

~This tab, flawless, my tab, flawless, I woke up like this~

Today in Tabs was off yesterday, you didn't miss it. We're four days a week now, in accordance with my lifelong distaste for hard work. To get the tabs very slightly more than half of each week, subscribe by email and add kuro5hin.rusty@gmail.com to your contacts. Or you can read them on FastCoLabs where there's embedded video and other world wide web type fillips of jouissance. Follow @TodayinTabs for tabs news and @rustyk5 for all manner of other garb.

Printed human skin sounded like some kind of sci-fi fantasy when the idea first emerged a decade ago. Now, like so many futuristic ideas that have come to fruition, bioprinting is not only here but it's become cheaper, faster, and smaller. It may soon be ready for mainstream use.

PrintAlive is a compact bioprinter, about the size of a hardcover book, that can print synthetic skin much more quickly and affordably than any other competing device on the market. Designed by PhD students at the University of Toronto, it recently won the 2014 James Dyson Award.

PrintAlive uses a patient's own skin cells to produce a skin-like material--complete with hair follicles and sweat glands--without them having to endure the painful process of having skin grafted from another part of the body. In addition to minimizing pain for patients, the device also promises to reduce another critical metric for burn victims and others in need of new skin: speed.

"The write speed of our bioprinter is between 10x to 100x higher than the commercial counterparts," says Alex Guenther, the University of Toronto professor who oversaw the development of PrintAlive.

The device is still limited to academic research usage, but by the time it's ready for a commercial release, PrintAlive will be competing against several incumbents. Organovo, EnvisionTEC, and RegenHu have been working on bringing the rapid prototyping revolution to human flesh for years. And the U.S. military is aggressively testing its own bioprinting devices for battlefield skin grafts and other regenerative medical applications.

Yet there are several features that make PrintAlive stand out from its competition. In addition to being significantly faster, smaller, and cheaper than existing bioprinters, it's also mechanically more efficient.

"Our printer does not require a motorized stage," says Guenther. "In fact, it does not possess any moving parts, except for the printed tissue that is collected on a rotating drum. Only the bio-ink moves by controllably flowing within a proprietary printer cartridge."

Borrowing from the model of desktop printers, those cartridges are going to be the key to how PrintAlive makes money. Guenther thinks that the company will be able to charge between $10,000 and $20,000 for the printer itself (existing options are as much as $250,000) and drive revenue the old-fashioned way: By charging around $150,000 for the cartridges.

PrintAlive will also be more mobile than existing bioprinters, another crucial detail for a device that could be used in medical emergencies, especially in developing countries. The device takes up about as much space as a hardcover book, Guenther says, compared to commercial bioprinters that tend to be the size of microwave ovens, if not bigger.

The long-term vision for those dabbling in bioprinting is as universal as it is sci-fi-sounding: The goal is to print entire organs. In time, there's little reason to doubt that the technology will enable doctors to fabricate new livers, lungs, or even hearts out of synthetic flesh. But that's not what PrintAlive or established bioprinting startups are promising just yet.

Most bioprinting efforts are still focused on giving pharmaceutical companies a viable way to test drugs without relying on the traditional, yet imperfect method of testing them on animals. Since these devices print human cells, the results can be much more accurate than those derived using members of a different species, such as mice. Organovo has already succeeded in mimicking cancer networks using 3-D printed biomaterials. Later this year, the company is expected to release a printable liver tissue for drug testing and other medical research.

Similarly, PrintAlive is already being used in two academic research labs to test drugs. Before the end of the year, Guenther expects to have the printer set up inside pharmaceutical companies to test its viability for drug testing purposes in the private sector.

So what about printing skin? The team behind PrintAlive has succeeded in grafting its synthetic skin onto a mouse. The next step is to churn out a fleshy new coating for a pig and eventually, people. "In terms of clinical applications more research is needed on our end," says Guenther.

Unlike pharmaceutical testing, which is fairly straightforward from a regulatory standpoint, actually printing human flesh in a clinical setting is going to need government approval. That fact, combined with the additional R&D needed to perfect the process, means we're probably a few years away from seeing 3-D printed skin grafts in the wild.

Picture computer programmers, and you probably think of workers at individual workstations, each working on their own sections of code. Naturally, the truth is more complicated than that: Developers routinely test, patch, and review each other's code, and swap notes to make sure different sections of programs operate together.

And some programmers even take things a step further, working in pairs. They sit side-by-side at one monitor, or sharing a screen from across the Internet. Advocates of pair programming say that while the practice might seem to boost costs, with two programmers instead of one writing each line of code, the benefits to code accuracy and knowledge sharing far outweigh the price in labor.

"You might be doing it one way, and having somebody there to kind of question you, or sometimes you might be kind of stuck and they might give you some ideas," says Joanne Daudier, the cofounder of CoderMatch, one of several services that connect programmers interested in collaborating.

The critical trait for would-be pair programmers is patience, says Daudier, who says she learned a great deal as a novice programmer from pairing up with more experienced developers.

"I'm sure advanced coders would probably think the same way--if they have someone more advanced than them," she says.

That's also the idea behind Hackerbuddy, a service that connects coders with people who have different skills. David Peiris, its creator, says when he was building Recon.io, a site that tracks Twitter brand mentions, he was able to use Hackerbuddy to connect with a Rails optimization expert with questions about specific sections of code that were running slow.

He didn't pair-program the entire site, just the section requiring specialized knowledge he didn't have.

"So in short, I think pair programming works extremely well when you have people who specialize in one main thing (like performance-tuning), as it helps you learn creative and interesting techniques that you otherwise wouldn't pick up on your own," Peiris wrote in an email.

And while that kind of pairing might seem to help the programmer in Peiris's shoes more than his counterpart, Daudier says there's generally benefit on both sides.

"In general, if you're explaining something to someone, it helps you learn," she says.

And even more experienced coders can often learn something from their newly minted counterparts, says Joseph Moore, a developer and pair-programming advocate who blogs about the practice.

"There's certainly an aspect that anybody can learn from anybody," says Moore. Recent computer science graduates sometimes have experience with newer software or academic research that their more experienced counterparts lack, for example. "The more I know, the more I'm aware of the things I don't know, and the more value I get out of working with people of all experience levels."

Pair programming's grown in popularity since Moore entered the field in the 1990s, he says, partially due to improved remote collaboration tools like the screen-sharing utility Screenhero as well as pairing platforms and social media. There's even a Twitter hashtag for the practice, #PairWithMe.

Within a company, pair programming is often used to get new coders up to speed on a project, says Moore, though senior programmers should make sure they're prepared to learn from junior colleagues.

"It might be harder for them depending on the personality to switch back and forth between the teaching role and, say, the learning role," he says.

Would-be pair programmers should also be prepared to put their egos aside, he says, since each section of code is inherently the work of more developers, whether coders remain in permanent pairs or switch off from day-to-day and task-to-task.

"There's certainly an aspect of ownership that many people miss if they're doing only pair programming," he says. "You're always attributing all your work to a group of people."

On the other hand, the code is sure to be understood and approved by the entire group.

"When you combine with, say, having a group of four people who rotate pairs every day," he says, "then you're producing code that's not only stronger or more well understood by just two people, you're producing code that four people agree is really well produced."

Working together also has another advantage: keeping programmer minds from drifting during the workday, its advocates say.

"When you have somebody next to you it's really hard to slack off when they're just watching you," says Daudier. "It's also very draining because you're completely focused during that time, and it can be very intense."

Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo picked a hell of a subject for his first English-language film. After his audacious 2007 debut Timecrimes brought him to the attention of American audiences (it won Best Picture at the Austin-based genre film festival, Fantastic Fest), he followed up with the 2011 sci-fi romantic comedy Extraterrestial. Now, with his latest, most high-profile, film, he's taken the opportunity to tell a story grounded in the real-world--and now troublingly topical--issues of celebrity, hacking and privacy.

"The producers asked me to make a movie in which the Internet has a big presence on screen," he says. Vigalondo decided to interpret that as a feature that takes place entirely on a computer screen. "It turned an interesting idea into this big mess," he laughs. "It became a theory--to make this insane movie in which everything is told through the Internet. Could I tell a story about the format itself?"

The resulting film, Open Windows, hit VOD this month. With Elijah Wood and Sasha Grey in its lead roles, the film takes some aspects of the Internet that have been in the news lately--the violation of the privacy of famous actresses and the entitlement of some of their fans who want to see them naked--and pushes them to extremes.

In Open Windows, Grey plays movie star Jill Goddard, while Wood stars as Nick Chambers, her biggest fan. When a dinner that Chambers won with the star gets canceled at the last minute, he finds a mysterious stranger on his computer screen offering him a different opportunity: the chance to watch Goddard in her most private moments. When Chambers accepts that opportunity, he finds himself in way over his head--in ways that put himself, Goddard, and others at risk of real harm.

The parallels between Goddard's situation and that of Jennifer Lawrence and the other stars whose cell phones were hacked last month are abundant. At one point, a website counts down to a teased, gross invasion of Goddard's privacy, almost identical to the one that launched in September regarding Emma Watson.

We talked to Vigalondo about the challenges of telling a story that unspools on a laptop screen, and making a movie that anticipated a most timely, unpleasant aspect of Internet and celebrity culture.

Asking The Right Questions

Instead of focusing on the hows and whys of people who hack celebrity accounts, Open Windows wisely casts its focus elsewhere. The mysterious voice that instructs Nick on how to spy on--and later interact with--Goddard isn't the focus of the film. Instead, it's Nick himself, the voyeur who's only interested in watching what's available to him.

Vigalondo recognizes that his film is unexpectedly timely, but he explains that he settled on the focus he did because he hates the way that the media too often talks about situations like the celebrity photo leaks--and wanted to examine the role of the viewer. "You love when your movies are talking about relevant stuff that is in the news, but on the other hand, it's really horrifying that the situation gets repeated and repeated and repeated. And they're getting worse. I think things are getting worse," he says. "I don't want to talk about the criminals who leaked these photos to the big audiences--I'm really horrified by the thought that a lot of people around us, they don't have empathy at all. They share the photographs, they behave like it's not a crime. Why are we always talking about network security? If we talk about ethics, we're involved in a more serious way, and we realize that we are not fully innocent. When I made this movie, I didn't want to make a strict cautionary tale about how wrong things can be on the Internet--I wanted to explore these things, and I'm so sad that this is more relevant than ever."

Much of Open Windows involves mistaken identities, anonymity, and disguises, and these are the themes that Vigalondo thinks empower the troubling Internet culture we've created, and that the film comments on. It's a delicate balance for a film that is very much a thriller, and at times Open Windows gets lost in its shifting identities (there's a reason Vigalondo describes it as a "big mess")--but that's also a reflection on the nature of the Internet.

"The movie is a big fantasy, an implausible story, but it's dealing with the fact that, if we don't have a face, we become a different person," he says. "If we cover our faces, we become someone else. And we see that all the time on the Internet and social media. Even people who keep their real names on the Internet, but they don't show their faces, they become less of a real person, and more of a jerk. For example, when you meet these people face to face, you realize that they're nicer. What is happening in (our) brains?"

Using The Format

Had a large cache of photos of the world's most famous actresses not leaked onto the Internet a few weeks before Open Windows reached theaters and VOD platforms, the biggest story about the film would probably be its innovative format. The entire film takes place on Nick's laptop screen, and while it pans from one area of the screen to another, and the computer moves around throughout the course of the film, we never see anything that someone looking at the screen wouldn't also see.

"I think it's impossible to tell this story outside of the computer," Vigalondo says. "If you tell it without the computer, it's going to be a different thing."

In order to tell the story the way he wanted, Vigalondo actually avoided too much reality--he didn't try to replicate certain parts of the Internet. Nick, for example, doesn't log on to social media. That puts Open Windows in sharp contrast with another film covered on this site that takes place solely on someone's computer screen, the 17-minute short Noah.

"That film is a realistic story about social media," Vigalondo says. "The reason there's no social media in Open Windows is because I was aware that every attempt to be realistic would be dated by the time the film was released. Technology is faster than feature filmmaking. Instead of trying to be realistic and feeling dated, we just had to make something that evokes reality, but that is not reality at all."

Say Something With Your Casting

Few actors do "nerdy everyman" with more authenticity than Elijah Wood. But when it came time to cast the part of Jill Goddard, Vigalondo recognized an even more unique opportunity when he found out that Sasha Grey was available.

"She not only works on screen, but her presence adds new layers to the story," Vigalondo says. "I don't want to tell a cautionary tale against pornography, but the fact that some people on the Internet are instantly angry that she's not making pornography anymore, who are condemning her because she should be doing pornography until the end of time...it's a male thing--that way of thinking is not far from the evil character in the movie."

This is all pretty heady stuff for a thriller that includes scenes of mistaken identity and subplots involving comic-relief French computer hackers, and it's what makes Open Windows such a compelling watch at exactly this point in time. The themes of the film are the themes of contemporary media life, and they're explored by someone with some innovative ideas about how to present them.

Learning to code is difficult. Duh. But it's hard to distill why that is. After spending a week devoted to Ruby on Rails, I can best describe the climb to code literacy as "grueling"--but the promise of actualizing our Rails proficiency is exciting. After four short weeks of 9-5 classwork, we're finally bringing our website projects to life.

While we haven't yet mastered HTML and CSS, the focus now is on back-end connections linking pages and server requests. "Seventy percent of getting apps to work is understanding the app communication cycle," says HFC Academy instructor Ricky Reusser.

Think of it like a massive box kite: It looks cool laid out on the ground, but if you want it to fly, you need to erect the frame. If one strut is in the wrong place, the whole kite goes down. Those struts are the framework between what you click on (firing off a request to the server) and whether the framework is set up so that the response from the server makes sense. Even if your kite just turns left instead of right, it's still broken. And your website products only get one chance to make a first impression.

Session Players

Despite the heartbreak that comes with breaking your site (again!) and rooting around StackOverflow for a similar problem, it's incredibly empowering to see a site come alive. Any amateur can crudely knit their website together with HREFs, but Rails lets you walk into the wide world of sessions.

There are two simple ways for websites to carry data from one page to the next. The first is form data, which you have to specifically command the website to carry over to the next page. The second is data tacked on to the URL, which you've seen when you click on an article from social media--that junk cluttering the address bar tells the website how you got there. Both of these methods work, for better or worse.

Using sessions allows you to store some temporary data on the server. This is necessary when you want to do something like, oh, sign in to a site. Security adds a whole new layer to the website onion, one that requires just the right nimble code stitching throughout your pages to make sure it authenticates and that the user has signed in correctly before displaying personal data. If you used data tacked on the end of a URL, someone could crack the pattern and brute force their way into your data.

That's because the HTTP that the Internet runs on is stateless, in which you send static requests and the page only loads information that is returned as a response from the server. The page won't change until you interact with it.

So a resource-cheap way to hold on to background data while you surf around and go back and forth is critical--one end of the information handshake will always be stateful. Shopping carts are an excellent example, along with surveys and installation wizards. If a user was halfway through a survey and wanted to run back and check a previous answer, finding the later content gone would kill any enthusiasm to finish.

Sessions aren't designed for heavy lifting, of course. Long-term data should be stored on the database. Don't rely on sessions too much, says Reusser, "because it's a good reason for things to explode."

Gem Shopping

Gems are the modular plug-ins that Ruby users upload on repositories like GitHub. They solve common problems--logins, data uploading, and so on--that save you time by letting you drop in tried and tested solutions.

"One thing I regret when I was learning was doing everything myself, trying to reinvent the wheel and not paying attention to what other people were doing," Reusser says about the utility of Ruby gems.

But dropping them in without fully understanding how they work is dangerous, especially as they grow to thousand-line monsters. Reusser once dropped a gem into a project to quick-fix a problem--in that case, uploading photos. But after his clients had manually updated hundreds of photos, Reusser discovered that the gem wouldn't process photo names with spaces--yet if he changed that code, then it would ruin all the existing photo data. The quick-fix turned into a time-consuming quagmire.

"I feel very strongly that gems are a great thing--the only exception being things that are tacky or unmaintained. You don't want to take on to your responsibility what they have messed up," Reusser says. "I've been burned by gems before. Sometimes people write things that they shouldn't be trying to do."

Which is why Reusser doesn't touch a gem that is more than eight months old. Recent updates mean somebody's paying attention and refining it--which is especially critical for user authentication and security.

Remember when you were forced to learn the long route of functions before you were allowed to use calculators? The same lesson applies here. After spending a week stitching our website together with handmade user authentication, we used the popular Ruby gem Devise to automate the process. Devise routed everything together in five minutes, automatically including password encryption, password reset mechanisms, and data storage of logs in history.

Seems like everybody's putting in work, getting matt.cash, chasing that paper. Atlantic deputy editor Alexis Madrigal is following Felix Salmon down the post-text rabbit hole to Fusion. "There was nowhere else I could expand my vision of the future," explained Madrigal, which sounded weirdly familiar... Media Twitter was quick to react:

Meanwhile hundreds of tech writers stampeded toward @ThisIsFusion, desperate not to be left behind. I guess if The Atlantic's Ello page suddenly goes dark, we'll know who was running it.

Also Today in Work:Taylor Lorenz is leaving the Daily Mail for Business Insider. Tabs beloved former home on the web Newsweekannounced that it's profitable, which makes me think that maybe I was the reason it wasn't profitable before. Steven Levy told us he was moving to Medium many months ago, when we were young and innocent, but he has finally done it. Hey guys. Hey. The search for THE P L A N E is back on. If you had been #amwriting a little harder maybe you'd be signing your $10m three book deal at age 25. Maybe you need a woman to do your work? But why won't more women work in tech? wonders GoDaddy's awful CEO. Julie Ann Horvath can answer that dumb question for free. You can't hire Adaptive Path anymore, anyway. Their black turtleneck budget is being paid in full by Capital One from now on.

Is this the most stylish man in tech? It's not for him to say whether he's an Indian Space Christ; that's for others to decide. If the Silicon Alley 100 is representative, he's certainly the most stylish man in New York tech, at least. Meanwhile, if you think the place you work has America's Top Office Dog, enter here and prove it. (Business Insider employees please note: Henry Blodget is not eligible.) Are you looking for a creative internship in Galway? Have you considered the art of the sandwich?

Sex work is work, and Matter has an incredibly good #longread about what sex work is like now, for some people. Last week I said something kind of offhand about Matter showing what you can do with an unlimited budget and no need for revenue, but let me clarify that those same conditions can also produce, for example, The New Republic, so I do mean it when I say I admire what they're doing over there.

Let's Play Point / Counterpoint:Buzzfeed has advice from Lena Dunham. But why does it "look as if she had been eating from a tub of potting soil?" Lit-minstrels Thug Kitchengo ahead with their book launch despite criticism. Promoter Daniel Power's defense of the white Hollywood "thugs" may not be the corrective he had in mind. "15 Guys Explain Why They Date Women Over 30" / "13 women explain why they date men with the Bubonic Plague." The best thing about NYC in the fall / is the declining piss smell.

Today's Truly Terrible Tab: "California's Sexual Consent Law Will Ruin Good Sex for Women" argues this horrific libertarian tab in Reason Magazine, which is very bad normally but rarely sinks to such depths of execration. "The reality is that much of sex is not consensual - but it is also not non-consensual. It resides in a gray area in between, where sexual experimentation and discovery happen," writes Shikha Dalmia, to which I can only respond: Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Bijan please save us from that horror!

Dang! You did it. Thanks, dude.

Today's Hot Startup: Need "fresh, quality nutrients delivered wirelessly to your body?" Try Carrot.

Today's Person Who Is Definitely Not High:Louis C.K.

Today's Music Mashup Machine:~tildemash by Andy Baio

~Milked the whole 'net twice gotta get it how I live~

Today in Tabs is on Fastcompany Labs and in your email somewhere. Follow @TodayinTabs and @rustyk5. Get plenty of sleep. Eat seasonally.

Gamers are really excited about a feature in NBA 2K14 that scans their faces and transposes the image onto the basketball-playing characters. It can actually work pretty well.

It can also fail beautifully.

A thread on the stalwart gaming and video site NeoGaf has collected various "failed" face scans. Spotted by Nerdcore, it's a gross parade of misplaced features, discolored globs, and monstrous, cartoonish mugs. Some look like rendering mistakes from bad angles or movement during capture; others look like they were manipulated by the gamer who put a different image over their face (like that of a skull) or bopped around intentionally.

Though there are plenty of places online devoted to uncomplicated enjoyment of video game glitches, we have to consider--is it art? It looks like the particularly ornate mash-ups exhibit some creative technique, which makes them approach unquestionably artistic territory. But basically, they look cool. And it's cool that glitching--deliberately corrupting digital information to manipulate its visual outcome--is so embedded in our daily life, it's popping up in a basketball video game.

Long live the new flesh. Good-bye, selfie.

Once upon a time, artificial intelligence was strictly the domain of giants. To make an app that thinks more like a person, you needed the computing resources of Google or IBM. That's starting to change as big companies open up their machine intelligence APIs for developers to use.

Today, IBM made good on its promise from nearly a year ago to open up its famous Watson AI platform in the form of a set of APIs. Eight of them, to be exact.

With this new set of tools, developers can build machine intelligence, natural language processing, data visualization, and host of other capabilities into whatever app they've dreamed up. "We've always enabled Watson to be fairly accessible by developers," says Ed Harbour, vice president of IBM's Watson Group. "But we only exposed two services. Now we're exposing eight. So we're adding colors to the palette for developers to use."

In particular, the new set of APIs will enable third-party apps to automatically identify and translate languages, better understand grammar (including euphemisms), more deeply understand users (and tailor the experience accordingly), visualize data, and conduct smart Q&A's backed by a trove of reference data.

For developers, this opens up new possibilities in terms of personalization, among other things. WayBlazer, one of the IBM's launch partners, is a travel search app. It uses Watson to take public web data--Facebook likes and public tweets, for example--and then return travel options tailored to people's interests.

Similarly, a few retail startups are using the platform to understand more about their customers, provide personalized, smartly timed promotions, and even fine-tune the language used to communicate with the user, making it more relevant to them. Are you snarky on Twitter? Overly optimistic on Facebook? On the backend, Watson can perform sentiment analysis on your public web presence so that apps and services can speak to you in language that sounds more like your friends and less like boilerplate marketing speak.

Currently in beta, the Watson APIs are available to try for free through IBM's Bluemix, a Heroku-style platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for cloud-based application development. Right now, developers are free to experiment with the new APIs all they want. IBM hasn't been explicit about the pricing for commercial use, but Harbour tells Co.Labs that they plan on working with developers on a case-by-case basis to figure out a revenue-sharing agreement. So, if you want to use Watson's smarts in a commercially available app, you'll have to demonstrate to IBM that it has the potential to make money.

To get started, developers will have to sign up for Bluemix, through which the APIs will be available. From there, the process should be pretty straightforward for most devs. After getting familiar with the way these APIs work and making a standard REST API call, developers can query Watson using natural language, so extensive programming isn't required. At launch, the platform will respond to typed verbiage, but Harbour says a voice-controlled interface is in the works too.

Every year, more than 100,000 Mexican migrant workers are recruited to travel to the United States on temporary employment visas (and many more arrive unofficially). They find themselves with little ability to research whether promised wages and working conditions will actually be delivered. In some cases, fake job recruiters even collect application fees from prospective workers, only to disappear without a trace.

"These prospective migrant workers have a great necessity to get work in the U.S.," says Sarah Farr, a project coordinator with Centro de los Derechos del Migrante or CDM. "There's really no information available to them that allows them to verify if this is a real job offer or not."

To help level the playing field, CDM created Contratados, a platform launched last week to let migrant workers share Yelp-style ratings and reviews of their experiences with different recruiters and employers.

The idea evolved out of a Facebook page run by a fraudulent recruitment agency. The agency had been routed out, but scam victims reappropriated the comments section to share information about their experiences with other employers and recruiting agencies.

"This Facebook page had since been abandoned by whoever had been administrating it and had since been used as a community bulletin board where workers were sharing information," says Farr.

CDM, a non-profit advocacy group based in Mexico City, found that while prospective migrant workers often don't have computer-based Internet access at home, many do have at least rudimentary web connections through cellphones or at Internet cafes.

"What we found was that most people, especially the younger generation, had access to basic Internet via either a pretty basic feature phone--often times it wasn't a smartphone--or via Internet cafes," says Farr.

Along with adding reviews through the web, workers can share their experience by leaving a voice message, sending a text, or passing along a photo. To enable this, CDM used Vojo, a voice and SMS storytelling tool built by developers from MIT's Center for Civic Media.

"It allows you to submit stories via text messages, and you can tag them and geocode them," says Farr. "Also users can submit information, say [if they're facing] recruitment fraud, or want to take a picture of a recruitment agency and say something about what they know."

CDM hopes to add the ability to access reviews and ratings via voice or text, as well.

There are only a few submissions on the site right now, and the group is using more traditional methods of outreach to promote the service. They've been contacting lawyers who assist migrant workers in the U.S. and broadcasting on cross-border radio stations popular with the target audience, as well as producing comic books and other educational material to teach workers about their rights.

The U.S. Department of Labor has expressed interest in using the reviews to target inspections and enforcement efforts, Farr says, and CDM is hopeful that the reviews will also be useful in motivating employers using recruiters that charge workers exorbitant fees to put pressure on them to change, she says.

"You can't use that argument of, 'I didn't know,'" she says.

It's not weird for an audio advertisement to talk to you, except when it's asking for a response in return. That's probably why the first time I heard one of XAPPmedia's new interactive audio ads, I actually missed the opportunity to respond--I didn't realize it was talking to me personally.

The NPR One app--National Public Radio's latest entry into the world of on-demand digital content--is one of the first to leverage XAPPmedia's new form of audio advertising. Occasionally between segments, a short, but distinct, melody will indicate an advertisement followed by a standard pitch for a product. However, instead of just throwing information at the listener, the ad asks if they'd like to act on that ad by opting in to, say, download an app.

There are a number of different interactions available, which the publisher can configure. Options include downloading an app, a podcast, or making a phone call. All the interactions are prompted by the user's voice, no need to look at or touch the mobile device.

XAPPmedia has already been inserting ads into the NPR One app, but it wasn't until last week that the company announced it was providing the proprietary technology for these new types of audio ads.

As creepy as the mechanics of these ads may sound, the process is unobtrusive. Right now they are built into the format of existing ads spots, and if no response is given then nothing happens.

Once a prompt has been given to the listener, the speech interpreter is looking for those exact words. If the company's Speech Cloud can't identify the words because of a noisy environment, or the words don't match, then it moves on with regularly scheduled programming.

"The solution has much higher voice recognition fidelity and a better user experience in part because it is only listening for a match to a specific phrase," explains XAPPmedia cofounder and CEO Pat Higbie. "Think of it as a voice click that is configurable per ad."

Voice click is an inevitable next step in the evolution of downloadable and streaming audio programming, since banner ads don't work any better there than the rest of the Internet. XAPP can back that up with data, since they also serve on-screen ads that accompany the audio. "What we've found is that 78% of our ads and promos are served while the app is in the background--not visible on the screen," says Higbie. "This is extremely interesting, considering how others have tried to monetize internet radio [audio] with companion banners which are largely ineffective."

Spotify already announced that it will begin serving video ads to its audio listeners. And the terrestrial radio tactic of repeating a phone number multiple times feels archaic compared to a voice click--you're probably listening to that ad on a device that makes phone calls, after all.

And the "podcast we think you'll like" recommendations that you hear on This American Life or Planet Money, while more personal, still don't take full advantage of the technology being used to listen to the program. As podcasts continue to rise in popularity, these audio ads could also find their way into that media format. It's not happening at the moment, but as long as there's an Internet connection at the time of the ad--which is likely to be a big stumbling block--the technology could support other methods of delivery beyond streaming.

Although NPR One is focused on handpicking and using human editors to curate a listening experience, XAPP ads are still fairly generic across listeners. The company is focused on connecting with listeners and providing a higher return for advertisers so it currently lets the publishers worry about the method for targeting gender, age, or interests.

The results for NPR One show some promise for monetizing audio more effectively. A Carbonite spot, for example, was able to generate 200 phone calls of interest, with a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of $25; compared to just 23 phone calls of interest from Yellowpages.com with a CPM of $42. It's still early, and how much this is a novelty effect versus a long-term trend remains to be seen.

The responsive and interactive audio ads fit in well with the talk radio style content, but it also has the opportunity to transform the music industry. Plenty of companies are playing it cool, but it's really an all hands on deck situation trying to figure out the monetization of recorded music. It's fair to say that the typical ugly banner ads make it hard to sustain that kind of advertising model and pay artists a respectable amount of money.

"Advertisers will pay all day long for return on investment," says Higbie. "By increasing response rates, the limited inventory [three minutes of ads per hour] becomes more valuable."

The amount of music streaming continues to rise, but paid downloads are rapidly dipping. Consumers still want to listen to music, either on-demand or in radio form--but they're less interested in paying for recorded music--a distinction between paying to go to live shows and even for band merchandise. The ability to increase revenue might help services gain traction, if not make a lasting impact.

Ebola is clearly not "the Fox News of explosive incontinence," because Fox News is already that. How did we get here? Newsweek has a timeline of the current outbreak, which looks increasingly permanent. With the death of our one confirmed victim so far, America is bravely facing ebola with our customary range of responses, from capitalist panic all the way through to unvarnished racism. We've instituted air travel security measures, because our air travel system is America's Freudian anus, the national sphincter where we locate and clamp down on all of our most visceral anxieties. "But," you're asking yourself by now, "is there a way we could make this both racist and political?" You bet there is, friend-o! Meet the #Obola hashtag, where our Truly Stupid make our implicit xenophobia explicit. With ebola cases in Spain and western fear increasingly hampering aid efforts in West Africa where the situation "continues to deteriorate, with widespread and persistent transmission of EVD," the only certainty is that this will keep getting worse.

Yes, ebola is bad, but at least it's not sentient. The same can unfortunately not be said for Andrew Auernheimer, also known online as weev, who is the internet's worst person by choice. Programmer and game developer Kathy Sierrawas effectively harassed off the internet in 2007 in a campaign of terror enabled by Auernheimer releasing her personal information. Auernheimer is unfortunately out of jail again, and is no longer bothering to cloak his antisemitism and white supremacist beliefs in their former winky veil of "maybe I'm just trolling." Which is why it's so very strange that journalist and longtime net freedom activist Quinn Norton can simultaneously publish a long Medium post on white racism which concludes "It is obvious that if white racism is going to be fought, white people have to fight it," but at the same time say this about Auernheimer (who tweets as @rabite):

I guess if white racism is going to be fought, it will have to be fought by other white people, who aren't busy temporizing over whether sociopathic racists are "villains or heroes." Auernheimer is not an isolated case, by any means. Inspired by Kathy Sierra, Adria Richards told her own story of the campaign of abuse waged against her. And of course #gamergate is still going on, unfolding and ramifying and spreading and growing more vicious and unhinged. I've known Quinn Norton for a long time, and I know she won't care what anyone thinks of her, but her position is essentially that of nerd culture-the putative outsider, the free-speech absolutist-and I haven't seen any better response to it than Pete Warden's "Why Nerd Culture Must Die."

Mustachioed taxi humper Thomas Friedmanis still allowed to write, if that's what you call it. Hamilton Nolan does a delightful Friedman impression in Gawker. And in case you were wondering if Friedman was somehow ever not garbage at thinking and writing, here's what Edward Said wrote in the Village Voice about his first book, in 1989. At least George Willfaced some consequences for calling rape victim a "coveted status." Ban opinion columnists.

The Times takes on #hashtags and it's everything you hope/fear it would be:

"If this was the year 1300," [Will.I.Am] said, "we would be communicating sending falcons. If this was 1988, we would use FedEx. Now it's 2014, we use hashtags."

Ok, first: it's "if this were the year 1300." Second: literally none of that makes any sense.

Oilfield services company Baker Hughes is distributing pink drill bits in a corporate breast cancer awareness pinkwashing effort that is repellent and incoherent in roughly equal measures. In Adobe, books read you. The Atlantic's rogue social media manager is unmasked, and it's... some 22 year old who wants a social media job. This is like if Scooby-Doo pulled the mask off the mummy and underneath it was also a mummy. Paul Fordexplains tilde.club. Further adventures in making the implicit explicit. Radio manclarifies views. Who's afraid of Olivia N'Gowfri? Flavorwire's 9 Real-Life Women Who Would End Christian Grey is surprisingly good. Today in Dads.

Bijan I see you looking thirsty in Hazlitt. What are the #brands up to?

What if, somehow, we invented an ebola that only #brands could catch? Makes u think.

#FF:Kanye Dreams

Learn 2 Code:Erlang!

~REPENT / THE TABS / ARE EXTREMELY / FUCKING / NIGH~

Today in Tabs exists in the increasingly forlorn hope that you find us in your email somehow, or remember to look for us on FastCoLabs, at least. It seems doubtful though.

Remember discovery? I don't mean finding the latest indie rock bands or articles you might like on the Internet. I'm talking about the word in its original, pre-buzzword sense: Exploring unknown parts of the physical world.

The age-old practice is being revitalized by a budding online community--and their pet robots.

Open Explorer is a website where hobbyists and scientists can chronicle expeditions conducted using small robotic ROVs (remotely operated vehicles). The project is an offshoot of OpenROV, the Kickstarted submersible vehicle from 2012 that made undersea exploration accessible to enthusiasts by lowering the cost of the components to under $1,000.

"This whole thing has just gotten out of control," says David Lang, cofounder of OpenROV and Open Explorer. The popularity of the device led to a flood of new DIY expeditions, as the ROVs are being sent into under-explored parts of the ocean to conduct scientific inquiries.

This offshoot of the maker movement has turned undersea exploration from a specialized scientific endeavor into a DIY weekend project for anybody who wants to virtually explore the ocean, 95 percent of which is still unexplored. "All of the sudden, you don't need a big NSF grant or to be a NatGeo explorer to go out and discover something," says Lang. "You just need to be curious."

Each entry on Open Explorer is a geotagged timeline that documents a given expedition in Storify-like fashion. As you scroll down through the timestamped blocks of text and imagery, the adjacent map adjusts to show the expedition's geographic movements. The idea is to not only give explorers a platform for sharing and collaboration, but a place to connect with donors who will fund their adventures.

"There's this sense that everything has been discovered," says Lang. And that there's only a few people who get to be explorers. And they are National Geographic people. And everyone else just gets to read about their stories later on. I think that's an unfortunate myth. There's so much left to discover, especially in the ocean."

At launch, all of the explorations on Open Explorer are ocean-based, but Lang wants to expand it to include other kinds of adventures as well. There are already projects underway that use drones for exploration and Lang says he hopes to see the site used to document urban expeditions as well.

Lang, along with his cofounder Eric Stackpole, were inspired to launch OpenROV by their desire to explore an underwater cave in the Trinity Alps in California. Since reaching their funding goal, the duo not only delved into the cave, but effectively crowdsourced their own education along the way. The endeavor proved to be much more complex than they anticipated and they soon realized that shipping hundreds of remote-controlled robots was only the beginning. The small but flourishing community would need a place to trade notes and collaborate.

Darcy Paulin is one hobbyist who has benefited from Lang and Stackpole's efforts. By day, Paulin runs a board game store in Vancouver, but on the side he's much more adventurous. Recently, he sent an OpenROV robot into the waters off of Passage Island in British Columbia. As the ROV floated along, Paulin spotted what he thought was a coral reef, but it turned out to be a rare species of glass sponge.

"It's amazing. People thought these were extinct," says Lang. "He kind of just stumbled across them and then got in touch with different scientists to figure out what it was. It's a pretty cool thing for someone to start with a curiosity and then stumble across this species that is very rare and a very important part of their whole ecosystem."

One student is using OpenROV kits to look for radiation in Fukushima, Japan. Meanwhile, NOAA contacted OpenROV about a project.

So go ahead, insist Lang and Stackpole, tap the "Explore" button on this app called life. You might need a robot to help guide the way, but there's evidently still plenty to be discovered out there.

There are lots of home monitoring devices on the market with built-in cameras, motion sensors, smoke detectors, and microphones to pick up unusual sounds, along with Wi-Fi or cell connectivity to transmit video footage or alerts in real time.

To Kallidil Kalidasan, the CEO and cofounder of MindHelix, that set of features sounded awfully familiar.

"From an engineer's point of view, these devices are built from the same stuff smartphones are built from," he says. "That's when it struck me that you could actually repurpose used smartphones into home security devices."

MindHelix is in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to fund its Rico line of home monitoring systems, which are designed to be connected to a used Apple or Android phone, which many people already have at home.

The smartphone provides audio and video capabilities, along with network connectivity, and the Rico units provide additional sensors for smoke, heat, humidity, and carbon monoxide. "Everything that's not there in the smartphone, we put into Rico," says Kalidasan.

In addition to monitoring for these dangers, the devices will provide live or cloud-recorded video streams and integrate with Rico-branded "smart sockets" that sit between ordinary outlets and appliances to add remote power control.

Because most of the functionality for the system is provided by the equipment customers already have sitting idle, Rico systems will sell for $99. That's $50 less than Dropcam or Simplicam, neither of which offer temperature, carbon monoxide, and smoke detection.

The company says the Rico units should be able to work even with cellphones that have broken screens, a problem faced by as much as a quarter of all iPhone owners according to one insurance company. And given Apple's annual release cycle, it's not uncommon for people to have an older model to sell or recycle--Horace Dediu analyzed the market in 2011 and estimated that half of people buying a new iPhone were also discarding an old one.

MindHelix will provide Android and iOS apps to integrate the phones with the Rico units, says Kalidasan, a serial entrepreneur who initially founded the company as part of the Startup Village incubator based in Kerala, India.

The company has since relocated to the Bay Area and participated in the Alchemist Accelerator program, which is backed by Cisco, Salesforce, and other companies focused on enterprise and Internet of Things startups.

MindHelix plans to begin shipping Rico units to backers in Fall 2015.

Obama in Medium: "History has dubbed you the 'Millennials.'" ◉ "...just another doggone tab." -Tom Scocca◉ "As public unease mounts, the Republicans are positioning themselves as Ebola hawks, and the Democrats risk being caricatured as doves." I can't even ◉ Supreme Court still making heavy use of the adverb "conservatively," I'm sorry to say ◉ Police report on Palin family brawl inexplicably omits the phrase "trash-stank"

Having finally murdered local retail, Amazon opens a store◉ Hoodie vs hoodie◉ In the battle between Uber's office vs. Lyft's office, I'm in a corner vomiting forever ◉ BLARPing: Business role play, or as I call it, "work" ◉ Yeah let's stop ebola with apps and a hackathon, good plan cool idea ◉ Third-party snapchat image saving service hacked, lots more terrible stolen nudes coming soon ◉ Emily Books:This is not a startup story◉ Lol d bags

Pinkwashing, NFL style ◉ Katy Perry and the Superbowldeserve each other◉ "...the purpose of this website is not to enforce the NCAA's insane bylaws. On the contrary, we're all for players making money, and are thus editorially supportive of those bylaws' erosion." Bless you, Sportsblog Nation◉ Put away your 3-goggles in Rio, gents

Instant karma's gonna get you◉ "Audience murmurs suggested confusion and displeasure..." ◉ "Was inarticulate re how women should ask for raise," Nadella inarticulately clarifies◉ "I answered that question completely wrong," clarifies the clarification◉ So much for the alliance◉ "The system has always been rigged," -Nitasha Tiku◉ Social media vs. Women, Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly lay it all out in the Atlantic

PEAK CAUCASITY ACHIEVED, via Desus◉ The best bots on Twitter◉ tilde.arcade: games on tilde.club◉ This is wronghugs are awesome ◉ Brunch on the other hand, is definitely for jerks◉ Mind you Adrian Chensaid that four years ago◉ Ugh maybe we should be giving Wikipedia money◉ It's always sweater weather in Twin Peaks◉ The best part is when Tiny Timthrows down his crutch in triumph◉ Shop the S H A D E

Regular-sized Kevin