Technology will forever present us with a stubborn conundrum: It evolves faster than our ability to figure out if it's any good for us. This is perhaps most true when it comes to children. It didn't take long after the launch of the iPad to see toddlers everywhere glued to tablet-sized screens. The debate over the proper dose of "screen time" for young children has since raged on, with little in the way of actual scientific evidence.
Now the empirical research is starting to roll in and it's looking good for education app developers.
The latest conclusion? Those reading-focused iPad apps you've been handing to your 3-year-old actually do work. In a recent study from New York University, the popular reading and phonics app Learn With Homer had a measurable impact on the literacy scores of the children who participated.
The randomized, six-week study took a sample of 95 disadvantaged students across seven different Head Start classrooms in Brooklyn and divided the children into small groups. Each of the 4- and 5-year-old students was given an iPad running either Learn With Homer or another unnamed math and music-oriented learning app. In 12-15 minute intervals, students were fully immersed, headphones and all, in these iPad-based learning environments. Adults only stepped in as needed to ensure the kids were staying on track, but did not aid directly in the learning process so as not to taint the results of the trial.
After six weeks, the students who followed Learn With Homer's lessons showed marked differences in six of the seven phonological skills being measured. They were especially better in three key areas: print knowledge, phonological awareness, and letter sounds. These students scored higher on their post-trial TOPEL (Test of Preschool Early Literacy) test than either group did before the trial began.
The study was led by Susan Neuman, an NYU professor of early childhood education and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. Neuman, who has long been interested in the impact of tablets and smartphones on early education, approached the New York-based startup about using the Learn With Homer app to conduct a formal study.
"As a company, we were delighted by the prospect of having someone of Susan's reputation and background conduct randomized research on the efficacy of our product," says Keith Meacham, director of partnerships at Homer. "It was admittedly a risky move for obvious reasons: Once you enter a blind study, you have to live with the results whether you like them or not."
Indeed, the team at Homer had been waiting with bated breath for the results of the study, since its results could singlehandedly validate or invalidate the entire premise of the company's flagship product. While there's plenty of further research to be done, the results of this study are clearly good news for Homer, not to mention anybody else working on tablet-based apps for reading and phonics education.
The lack of a scientific consensus on how mobile devices affect young minds hasn't stopped developers from churning out iPad apps aimed at entertaining and educating kids. Meanwhile parents and their tap-happy offspring continue to download kid-focused apps without much concern for the science behind it all. But Meacham thinks that may soon change.
"Despite the burgeoning of the education apps market, very few developers of apps for young children are putting their products up for rigorous evaluation," she says. "Our hunch is that there is going to be an increasing demand among parent consumers for children's technology products that are vetted by real research, in the same way that parents want to know more about the nutritional content of their children's favorite cereals or the safety of the car seats they are buying."
What if someone told you the way to fight online advertising--and the companies who make money by tracking all your surfing habits--was to click on all the ads? That's the idea behind AdNauseam, and it's just so crazy that it might actually work--in theory at least.
As you visit different sites AdNauseam silently clicks every ad on every page. The idea is that if you're always clicking every ad, the targeting and tracking that these advertising companies are doing won't work or be as effective because you are overwhelming them with false data.
Is this browser extension the superhero that citizens of the Internet have been waiting for, or a vigilante doing more harm than good? AdNauseam is hoping to obfuscate the data users are generating as they browse online. Its stated goal is also to amplify "users discontent" with advertising networks that blatantly ignore their privacy.
The reasoning for AdNauseam stems from the shortcomings of the Do Not Track standard and similar efforts. Which, if comics have taught us anything, puts the new browser extension much closer to the vigilante than a true superhero.
The move of trying to force change with questionable methods serves to excite people, but it also creates a dividing line. Searching Twitter and reading thread comments quickly shows a split between those in support and those who think it's an unwise move. Whichever side of the fence you come down on, it's likely one you feel passionate about the subject.
Another recent project attempting to stop the tracking of people from online advertising is Floodwatch. Instead of clicking all the ads, Floodwatch simply collects all the ads and makes the information more visible and sortable to the person being tracked. It's hoping, however, that people are willing to share that data with the group so that something can be done about the intrusive behaviors advertising networks are using.
Floodwatch allows collected ads to be viewed and sorted by network, color, brand, or through a number of other criteria. It also allows the amount of ads to be shown over time so that people can see the how their browsing directly affects which ads they're seeing.
Because Floodwatch serves more as research than something with immediate action, it's a little harder to have the same level of passion for it that users do for AdNauseam. Either way, both are among a new crop of different options for people that are sick of having their browsing serve as a intermediary between themselves and whoever wants deeper information.
For those interested, AdNauseam is currently an alpha build and only available for Firefox browsers, but will be released as a public beta on November 15th.
Healthgoth just hit the mainstream [via #ebolawave], and we've known about Spacegoth and Southgoth for a long time. But now there is Beachgoth, or apparently there has been Beachgoth for three years and Pauly Shore is involved somehow? There is also Snowgoth, so now I'm hoping for goth to expand its evolution into historically non-goth areas of life. Farmgoth? Toongoth? The sky's the limit here people! The dark, dark sky.
Who wore it better? [Minnie Riperton via yozadave]
Have you ever heard of a CBC radio host named Jian Gomeshi? Of course not, come on, who listens to Canadian radio? But you're about to hear of him, because he just got fired abruptly for what look to be a slew of incoming sexual harassment and abuse allegations. Ghomeshi attempted to get in front of the story in a Facebook post which makes him seem intensely creepy, so I guess that's the best he could make himself look? Ghomeshi apparently has a long history of skeeze. Privately Tabs is being told that "everyone in public radio has known that he's a shitbag forever." Kevin Donovan from The Toronto Star ("First to Know, Last to Report!"), and freelance journalist Jesse Brownpublished a detailed report of the allegations, including: "A fourth woman, who worked at CBC, said Ghomeshi told her at work: "I want to hate f- you." Jesse Brown also posted some audio comments here, about why he partnered with the Star. It appears that Ghomeshi has been not just fired but forcibly expunged from the CBC - for example, here's a picture of what used to be a giant Ghomeshi mural. Amanda Palmer is already exercising her unerring instinct for jumping in on the wrong side of any debate though. For more on this story: throw yourself in the garbage and roll around.
hey did you hear about agooddog
who's agooddog
you are, yes you are
Nitahsa Tiku is taking sole editorship of Valleywag, reports BI's Alyson Shontell in a somewhat roundabout way. Last week's Gawker blowup ended with this tab by Sarah Grieco in CJR which managed to be not just wrong but almost perfectly anti-correct and led me to agree with Freddie deBoer for a second time in one week, which is just intolerable. Fun fact: for a long time I thought "I'm No Fan Of" was actually some kind of affectionate nickname people had given Emily Gould? Anyway "I.N.F.O." Gould has a good Salon tab about authors losing it in public as a symptom of the publishing-promotional complex. Neetzan is apparently on leave from Whisper after his vociferous but less than fully accurate Twitter response to The Guardian. Artificial Intelligence == Demonsaccording to Elon Musk. This diminuitive prepper wants to be your Ebola boyfriend. Respond "with your picture and height." Facebook is like a dog, says David Carr, and "everyone knows that if the dog is big enough, he can lick you to death." Everyone knows that. Yes.
The intern is really bringing it this week, with some original reporting. Hit it Bij.
Today, the staff of Tabs is excited to premiere our first Author Interview, like, ever! Our guest is Jazmine Hughes, currently contributing editor of The Hairpin and formerly of New York Magazine. We got her on the horn (lol gchat obvi) to discuss her latest piece: "The Secret Fantasies Of Adults", which you can also find in this week's issue of The New Yorker dot print. [Ed: it's really funny! Go read it!]
intern: SO TELL ME: as a fellow 23 year old, what do you know about adults
Jazmine Hughes: The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence. end of lyrics
int: where did you learn it?
JH: Narrow streets of cobblestone,
'Neath the halo of a street lamp
int: how'd you come up with the topic?
JH: Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.
Good job, but let's talk after I post re: legal implications of calling yourself "the staff of Tabs."
Privacy is a dying myth, systematically crumbling with every new Snowden leak. We know that technology companies and government agencies are gathering our personal data and tracking our activities, turning all of us into potential customers and perhaps criminal suspects.
But what happens when a regular citizen--let's say, an artist--adopts their tactics and deploys biometric facial recognition software on thousands of unknowing participants, or continuously tracks their own location and posts it online, as a performative act of self-surveillance?
Tennis is an emotional sport. Coaches and players argue the merits of a technique or strategy, using past experience as a guide. But until recently there was little in the way of rigorous evidence to back that up. What would happen if tennis players and their coaches had data to bolster their instincts?
We're about to find out: The Women's Tennis Association (WTA) announced that it will for the first time allow on-court coaching breaks aided by customized real-time analytics via a tablet app.
The app, created by the European enterprise software giant SAP, incorporates data from 40 years of matches, as well as point-by-point details going back to 2008. It tracks matches on a season by season, surface to surface basis, giving players and coaches statistics that can be used to make real-time decisions during a match.
Performance statistics in tennis have historically provided only basic percentages based on dividing the court into sectors. Instead of limiting itself to shot placement results from a single graphical point of view, the app will cluster information and provide heat maps to better understand patterns of play.
The data will also be available to fans when the rule change goes into effect during the 2015 season.
"It's great to know that Anna [Ivanovic] served seven aces. But when did she serve them? Did she serve them at the beginning of the match when she was up 40 love? Did she serve when she was under pressure?" says Jenni Lewis, a solutions architect at SAP. "What we're able to do is actually have the player understand a little bit more about when they should be going for the ball, when they should be taking risks."
The WTA believes the app will improve the quality of its matches substantially, while also enhancing fan experiences as they come to understand more about the game and their favorite players.
"We need to make our athletes more accessible than they already are," says Stacey Allaster, CEO of the Women's Tennis Association. This new information feed presents an opportunity for the WTA--a traditional league with long matches--to produce content on multiple screens, with video that is wrapped in data. "But we have to do more in-venue, on-air, and online, particularly with rising stars, to help make them household names like Serena, Maria, and Li Na."
When Lewis and her team began work with the WTA, she asked coaches what statistics they wanted, what contextual analytics they felt would serve them. "We didn't want to build a solution that only the top 10 or 15 players in the world would benefit from," says Lewis.
Coaches wanted to better understand break point opportunities versus conversion, for example. Given 10 break opportunities in a match, perhaps five are converted. Fifty percent is a terrible percentage. But what if all five came in a single game? Numbers never lie, but they can be misleading.
"When a coach is looking at this type of information, they can actually see, Is there something that I need to work on?" says Lewis. A coach can tell an athlete that, based on the data, hitting the ball down the center of the court is the way to beat a particular opponent, for example.
Although the app hasn't been officially deployed yet, the coaches are already thirsting for more data. Lewis recently received an email from a prominent coach at the 2014 French Open. In it, he requested the conversion rate for all his player's 30-love points this season. The coach believed the player was not taking advantage of her opportunities, and he wanted data to back his argument when he spoke with the player.
"The eye will often lie because [tennis] is about emotion," explains Lewis. "But as soon as we start to introduce technology into the conversation, the player, the coach, everybody trusts that when we sit down and have a conversation, it's not based on emotion anymore."
The current stats-driven tennis conversation started back in 2008. That's when Hawk-Eye Innovations technology was introduced to tennis for the sake of electronic scoring. Six or seven cameras trace the path of a ball with Hawk-Eye's technology, and it's used in tennis to adjudicate line calls. It also produced a wealth of statistics that had never been available before. SAP partnered with Hawk-Eye to take advantage of that information.
"Instead of just having a static image at the end of the match that shows you where all the first serves went," says Lewis, "we give the coaches the opportunity of interacting with that software to say, 'Well, I actually only am interested in particular points throughout the match.'"
Those few key points make all the difference in a professional tennis match. "Every player thinks differently and every player approaches different situations differently," says the WTA's Allaster.
"What we want a coach to be able to walk out on court and do is look at the trends," says Lewis. "Look for the red spots. That is where you are being the most successful."
Nara Logics was founded in 2010 to mine the deep web and uncover relevant information for businesses to offer their customers. The company, founded by MIT neuroscientists, recently landed $7 million in funding, and makes money through revenue sharing with partners such as Uber, OpenTable, and TripAdvisor, and licensing its AI backend to vendors like Singapore mobile provider SingTel.
In the process of indexing venues for American cities, the team made an unexpected discovery: There are a few "supernode" restaurants that connect every eating establishment in large cities. Specifically, the top 1% of restaurants in large cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are connected to between 60-70% of all the restaurants in their city. Although they aren't necessarily the top-rated restaurants in a market, they do tend to share the most connections to other restaurants both among employees and customers, as well as other external sources.
Nara's software builds a connection graph for individual venues that links them together based on their properties. The company's web crawler vacuums up structured data, like restaurant listings, and unstructured data (reviews, blog posts, newspaper articles) to build profiles of the business establishments. These points are then linked together based on their characteristics. Scores for individual restaurants are generated for each individual user, based on the ratings Nara's users gave for other restaurants.
It's a massive index that can be queried along almost any dimension. "For restaurants, you could ask for the current best sushi restaurant in the world or for the best restaurant with a waterfront view close to the Financial District," says cofounder and CTO Dr. Nathan Wilson. "It's a brain-like system that sits on top of any large data set, and automatically organizes this information for personalization and recommendations."
By running their own analysis, Nara learned that these supernode restaurants aren't only linked by customers mentioning them in the same places, they share a much-higher-than average number of social connections to other restaurants as well. Interestingly, these restaurants were connected to both expensive and inexpensive restaurants through social connections. At least 15% of the restaurants they're connected to are "low-priced options," Wilson says.
These machine learning and neural network techniques aren't specific to just lodging or restaurants. Nara's approach bears a strong resemblance to the system Pandora uses to find connections and similarities between different songs, for instance. In one example Wilson gave, the company's web recommends restaurants to users based on similar decor or physical setting (such as a waterfront view) rather than strictly using cuisine, price point, or neighborhood as a primary metrics. Nara's hope is that machine learning and data science can find connections between restaurants that human reviewers can't--and that it can build a better recommendation in the process.
If you want to improve productivity on any piece of frequently used software there's a simple solution: ditch the mouse and use keyboard shortcuts instead.
Plenty of you already know to hit control-c and control-v to copy and paste, or control-t to open a new browser tab. But a relatively small but dedicated group of people have embraced an alternate set of even more efficient keyboard shortcuts dating back to a decades-old, open source text editing program called Vim.
Vim's fans say its keyboard commands, which let you edit and scroll through documents while barely moving your hands from the keyboard's central home row, save time and help stave off carpal tunnel syndrome.
"Reaching for the mouse is slow and when done repetitively can lead to physical pain for a lot of people," developer Eric Van Dewoestine wrote in an email. "Although most programs have many key bindings that eliminate the need for the mouse, they rely heavily on meta keys (ctrl, alt, etc.) which requires a lot of awkward hand movements using your weakest fingers."
The Vim editor is especially popular among developers, and as such many people have built and released add-ons to let them control other software, from web browsers to programming tools. Van Dewoestine built one called Eclim that allows Vim to access features from iTunes and Twitter as well as the Eclipse development environment, all using Vim's arcane but beloved interface.
"Vim's editing commands are not easy to master," wrote Daniel Choi, creator of tools to control iTunes, Gmail, Twitter and other common programs from Vim, in an email. "You have [to] learn the command grammar and train your muscle memory over time. But by the same token, Vim raises manual text editing from a mundane chore into an art that rewards study and practice, like playing guitar, swimming, or jujitsu."
Vim got its start in 1988, when Dutch programmer Bram Moolenaar began work on a version of the popular Unix editor vi for the Amiga platform. Vi itself dates back to the 1970s, and Vim was initially billed as a "vi imitation." But after Moolenaar made some enhancements and ported the software back to Unix in the early 1990s, the name began to officially stand for "vi improved," according to his website.
Unlike most recent software, where keyboard commands are distinguished one by one from regular input by using keys like control, alternate, or command, Vim ships with several "modes." In Vim's insert mode, the keyboard works in a similar way to most software: hit a letter or number key, and that character is added to the current document. But toggle to command mode, usually by hitting the escape key, and the keys take on new meanings: h, j, k and l substitute for the arrow keys and navigate up and down; d cuts and deletes text; y "yanks," or copies, and p pastes.
Combinations of keys have meanings frequent users come to know as well as Windows users know control-alternate-delete or old school gamers know the Konami code: dd deletes a line of text, for instance, and dw deletes a word. Numbers generally repeat the following command a certain number of times, so 5dd cuts five lines, and 3p pastes three copies of whatever's in Vim's clipboard-style memory.
And that's just the beginning. There are Wikis, tutorials, and tip sheets to help beginners master all the possible commands, and power users say being able to switch modes and reuse the most easily reachable keys to enter commands saves an incredible amount of time and wrist strain. For them, using control-key-based shortcuts on other software is like trying to type an all-uppercase document on a computer with no caps lock key.
"Vim's editing mode feels so natural and elegant to me at this point that I feel like I've lost a limb when I'm using a non-Vim interface to write and edit text, like Apple's TextEdit or Gmail, or even just scan and navigate textual information, like iTunes," Choi wrote.
His software actually harnesses APIs in other programs and Vim's built-in scripting language to navigate Gmail mailboxes and iTunes playlists and send tweets directly from the editor.
Other developers have built tools to add Vim's interface to other pieces of software, as well. Developer Anton Khodakivskiy created the plugin VimFx to add Vim-style shortcuts to Mozilla Firefox. Hit "shift-alt-v" with VimFx installed, and the browser slides into command mode, where h, j, k, and l scroll, f follows a link, and o opens a new address.
"It's just real simple," he says. "It takes me a fraction of a section to follow a link using one of these plugins, versus just moving my hands and mouse."
And VimFx is just one of several alternatives for those looking to surf the web, Vim-style: it's based on a Chrome plugin called Vimium, Khodakivskiy says, and alternatives for Firefox, like the Pentadactyl project, offer different takes on the interface.
Another project, called Vimprobable, offers a complete browser designed to be controlled from the keyboard, with a Vim-style command mode for most interaction and an insert mode for inputting text. Based on the WebKit engine, it shares a common lineage with Chrome and Safari, though creator Hannes Schueller says it's designed to be lightweight, making it easy to disable features like JavaScript, browser plugins, and even automatic image loading with a few keystrokes.
"I see the main advantage in providing direct access to functions and features," Schueller wrote in an email. "If I want to switch proxies in Vimprobable, I can do so in a matter of seconds by simply triggering the appropriate command whereas most other browsers force me to move my hand to a mouse and then send me through five unintuitive sub-menus. Modal operation of Vim enables me to avoid using wrist-straining key combinations."
Developers acknowledge the learning curve can be steep for casual users. The creators of Vim interface tools acknowledge that their base is mostly programmers who are using the editors to write code. Even other developers don't always build programming tools with textual controls in mind.
"In the case of Eclipse, the major hurdle is that some features are closely tied to the graphical interface, wrote Van Dewoestine, the Eclim creator. "The [Java development toolkit] in eclipse did a great job of keeping the core functionality decoupled from the GUI, but other plugins for other languages have core features which rely on passing around GUI objects, or objects which have dependencies on parts of the GUI. To get around this I've had to create dummy mock objects to trick some of the code to think it is working in a graphical interface."
History was made a long time ago, by the people who lived then, but occasionally some of it returns to us in the form of old things. The diary of George Murray Levick, for example, lost on Robert Falcon Scott's fatal 1910-1913 Terra Nova expedition, was revealed by last summer's Antarctic snowmelt and restored by New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust. Levick apparently spent the winter of 1911-1912 "in an ice cave on Inexpressible Island" which is my new goal in life. Another old thing is the crew manifest for the whaler Acushnet, which counts among its soon-to-be-regretful number a 21 year old Herman Melville, who would jump ship 18 months later at the Marquesas and have many other adventures before returning to MA to write the greatest book ever. My generation's version of going to sea and being horsewhipped by the bosun's mate was starting an online community, and Kyle Chayka has a great Gizmodo tab on what he calls the Web 1.0 revival, sites like Ello, tilde.club, and Facebook's new Rooms app. Of course the opposite of history is the future, and what says "the future" more strongly than tractor beams? If you need to move tiny specks of dust a fraction of a meter, you're finally in luck.
Why I Unsubscribed From Today in Tabs is the new Why I'm Leaving New York
According to Wikipedia, crowdfunding began as a widespread practice in the early 2000s. It feels like a uniquely internet-based phenomenon, re: ~harnessing the power of the global crowd~, although apparently praenumeration-selling stuff in advance at a discount-has been around since the 18th century. It was usually used for books, but in 1884 the practice raised over $100,000 for the Statue of Liberty in donations of generally less than $1.
Now that we've got Kickstarter et al., the process has become much more streamlined and now moves billions of dollars per year. But what happens when projects never come to fruition? Casey Johnston has a fascinating look at the backers left in the cold, over at Ars Technica. "Why burn out when you can fade away?"
Bijan's second sentence today started out with a parenthetical, two em dashes, and a semicolon. It was somehow only made of dependent clauses? I just want you to know the kind of thing I'm protecting you from here.
~so thick that every tab in the room is so uncomfortable~
Do you have an email address, or perhaps know a friend who does? If so, please subscribe to Today in Tabsright here to receive it by email as many as four days out of every seven! If not, or in addition to that, please read it on FastCoLabs, which is the "Labs" branch of Fast Company's various online media properties. If you consume tweets, I proffer mine @rustyk5 and @TodayinTabs. So how 'bout now?
October was my favorite time of year as a kid, because come the middle of the month I'd start working with my mom to decorate our front yard for Halloween. We'd put the pumpkins and corn stalks out and then get to cutting cardboard tombstones from boxes we saved, covering them in foil to create what I thought was a terrifying cemetery. We'd top everything off by making some dummy monsters by stuffing old clothes full of newspapers and topping them off with last year's Halloween mask.
Of course in the two decades since I helped my mom decorate our front yard, having a killer haunted house setup has become something that requires much more than just tin foil tombstones. Thankfully, cheap hobby materials and some simple hacking skills makes it easier than ever to make the best Halloween display in your neighborhood. We spoke with a maker, and Arduino hacker, and the operator of the country's most popular haunted attraction to bring you some simple and easy tips to hack together your own haunted house.
"Not everyone needs to have crazy engineering skills in order to make a cool haunted house attraction in their front yard," says Larry Kirchner, operator of the well-known haunted house attraction The Darkness. "It's best to start simply and go from there."
Starting simply, according to Kirchner, involves creating the staple prop of every good haunted house: a cemetery. You don't need to be a master craftsman or buy expensive pre-made plastic tombstones to get one.
"The best way is to get sheets of foam that you can pick up from a Home Depot or a Loews," says Kirchner. "You can take a simple hot knife and can cut the foam sheets into pieces, then glue the various pieces together until you have the basic tombstone design you want." Use the hot knife again to cut chips and chunks into the tombstone to make it look ancient and terrifying.
Once you have the foam formed into the tombstone shape, make it look authentic. Most people spray paint it grey. But Kirchner says the secret to a realistic looking tombstone is to cover it in concrete.
"Just a thin layer of spray concrete that you can get at a home improvement store works great," he says. "Since it's just a thin layer on top of foam, it hardly adds any weight. And since foam is so cheap--and light--you could actually build a big creepy, realistic-looking mausoleum in your front yard."
If you want to take your authentic-looking tombstones to hellraiser level, embed a wireless security camera into the foam--the kind that come in smart baby monitoring kits will do the trick. Use the camera's accompanying monitor, or better yet a smartphone app, to cue a scary voice from a speaker that seems like it's coming right from the tombstone when anyone walks near.
Once you've mastered the graveyard, the next expansion of your haunted house is the maze. "An average garage could be turned into two or three small scenes," says Kirchner.
Lay out your maze by drawing your garage on graph paper, every foot of space equals five blocks on the paper. Use this diagram to design your walls, which can be built from large sheets of foam or plywood. The maze doesn't have to be complicated enough for people to actually get lost. A few turns is all you need, especially after you add some cheap wireless Bluetooth speakers and AirPlay streaming to pump sound effects into every corner of the maze.
"Don't underestimate sound effects," says Kirchner. "Sounds in a dark unfamiliar place is often more frightening that visual effects."
Once you're wired for some Sinister Sonics, you can add creepy visuals without too much more effort. Jarod Reyes, a web designer and Technical Content Producer at Twilio, has spent the last few years hacking together his own haunted house to scare kids and adults in his neighborhood. In that time he's made some cool haunted hacks (see below), but says not everyone needs engineering skills to create creepy effects.
Old monitors can be turned into scary windows and mirrors thanks to CGI DVDs.
"With a projector you could project ghostly shadows on to your windows or textures onto the front of your house," he says, pointing out that many people have old projectors, TVs, and computer monitors laying around in the basement. Halloween is the perfect time to put these derelict pieces of tech to good use. A projector or even a discarded flat screen TV can be mounted inside your garage and used to play store bought CGI animations.
"The key is making sure you disguise the monitor so people don't recognize it," says Kirchner. "Put a false frame around it so it looks like a window. Put tattered curtains or fake cobwebs on it. When they suddenly seeing motion from it it'll scare the heck out of them."
Lighting is often overlooked when building a haunted house. Which is a shame, because a haunted cemetery is decidedly less scary with a white porch light glaring across the yard. The reverse isn't helpful either: If there's no light, who's going to see all the detail you carved into those fake tombstones?
Creating a spooky range of colored lighting has become easier than carving a pumpkin thanks to the numerous smart lights available from companies like Philips and LIFX. Stick a few smart bulbs in your garage or on your porch and you can control the brightness and hue with a few taps of your smartphone. The best Halloween lighting is deep purples and reds, although dark greens can also work well.
For slightly more advanced lighting effects, however, check out this awesome haunted hack by Reyes. Using Twilio, Arduino and a few electronic components he created a way for people to change the colors of lit pumpkins just by texting a color choice to a mobile app.
Text pumpkins to change colors using Twilio & Arduino by Jarod Reyes.
Arduino is a powerful computing platform that allows makers to create all kinds of ad hoc electronics. Mastering Arduino is by no means as easy as creating the Halloween hacks mentioned above, but if you start now you could have one of the creepiest interactive haunted houses on your block by next Halloween.
Just check out this haunting display by Chris Krueger, editor of The New Hobbyist. Using Arduino, some clever coding, a projector, some electrical components and some Styrofoam heads Krueger replicated part of his favorite Disney Haunted Mansion ride right on his front porch.
Arduino-powered Haunted Mansion display by Chris Krueger.
"I picked the Haunted Mansion busts in particular because I was in the process of experimenting with Arduinos and an older projector I had picked up used from a friend," says Krueger. "I've been a huge Walt Disney World fan since I was a kid, this interest only intensified when I started learning about electronics and design."
Incredibly Krueger's singing haunted heads busts only took about two weeks of on and off work. "The initial programming of the Arduino and laptop controller took some time because I was still learning the Arduino platform," he says. "I was fortunate to find the source video on Youtube and didn't have to recreate it. One of the more time consuming parts was aligning the heads and projector to have a clean and focused image. This was all mapped out a few days before Halloween and marked on the porch with gaffers tape."
Krueger's Arduino Halloween hacks don't just stop with severed heads. The platform allows for creating almost anything you put your mind to--and on the cheap.
"I helped a friend turn his air compressor into a 'Ankle Tickler' air blaster at his haunted house last year," Krueger says. "We used his existing air compressor, a photo-resistor, a PowerSwitch Tail, an electronically controlled air valve, and an Arduino to add a scare to his display. When someone walked by the photoresistor it triggered the air valve and shot a quick blast at visitors ankles. Got quite a few good jumps from that."
Looking at Kirchner's The Darkness haunted house or Reyes's color changing pumpkins or Krueger's singing heads, it's easy to feel overwhelmed at the amount of work that could go into creating your own haunted house. But the great thing about Halloween is that it comes every year and the grandest haunted house on the block didn't start out that way.
Besides you probably already have more for your haunted house than you think you do.
"Projectors, speakers, receivers, can all add to the aura of a good halloween house. Why not wire up some speakers into the bushes that just sound like chains clinking, or wolf's howling?" Reyes says. "Old RC cars are full of useful bits including Servo motors attached to a spine, which you could use to make an animated skull, a talking pumpkin or a floating ghost. Also keep your cardboard boxes around this time.They are useful for so many Halloween projects."
But his best advice?
"Start small. Build out one feature at a time and over the years you too will have the best house on the block," says Reyes. "You're more likely to keep it up that way."
Forty five years ago today, on October 29th, 1969, the first ARPANET connection was established, the first tenuous link in what would become the inescapable garbage trap we now call the internet. The first message was supposed to be the word "login" but the remote host at Stanford crashed after just two letters, so the first internet message ever sent was: "lo." Lol. Around the same time, the Soviet Union was, according toElon Musk, building the rocket engine that Orbital Sciences would use last night in the Antares rocket that blew up six seconds into its ISS resupply flight. Fortunately no one was injured, and no urgently needed supplies were lost. But I want you to keep the following image in mind, as it's kind of our spirit guide for today.
Today in better media news: Emily Yoshida is on her way from Grantland to The Verge, which is good news if you're Emily Yoshida or The Verge. Elisabeth Donellyinterviewed Mallory for Flavorwire and it's, I want to say "predictably great" but actually its somehow even better than I expected.
"We in the bed like-" T-Painsings to the staff of NPR. He's visibly nervous at first, but jesus can this motherfucker croon. And as soon as he realizes it-and those crunchy NPR people realize it too-he relaxes into the chords issuing from his stoic keyboardist, Toro. "Weird as hell!" he shouts after Buy U A Drank is over, probably because, again, he's singing to a roomful of people who work at NPR.
Berlin has been Europe's startup darling for years. But in 2012, Stockholm, which is home to successful tech companies such as Spotify, Mojang, and Klarna, decided it wanted the title back. So they called one of the few people in the world who has successfully built startup communities, Tyler Crowley.
"I went around and told folks, 'Hey listen--we could change this place really quickly. It's gonna look a lot different in a year and a half,'" says Crowley. "And they gave me funny looks."
Photo: Sebastian Stiernborg
A startup entrepreneur, Crowley has devised a not-so-secret recipe for creating startup neighborhoods from scratch. They are no match for the Silicon Valley mothership, or even New York City's Silicon Alley (wherever that is on the map these days). But after building Silicon Beach in Los Angeles, and helping to establish the Silicon Roundabout in London in time for the 2012 Olympics, and now with STHLMTech growing fast, Crowley is someone a government can reliably call on to bring an entrepreneurial tech community to life.
There are four things that need to be in place in order to build a startup scene. The first is a venue that is cheap and central, where meetups can take place. The second is a monthly event where all of the startups gather. The third is an established hashtag everyone in the community can use to share photos and event info. And finally, a coworking space that is open 24/7 so that when an outsider lands in the city, they have a place to go and meet tons of people in the scene.
This recipe establishes a tech community and helps them market their accomplishments to the outside world, creating a narrative of a cohesive and collaborative local scene that journalists, politicians, and investors can follow.
Crowley arrived at the recipe after building Silicon Beach back in 2007. But that scene was built out of necessity.
Sequoia Capital and many other venture capitalists at the time wanted the companies they invested in to be based in Silicon Valley. Crowley was down in Los Angeles at Mahalo.com, a startup created by serial entrepreneur and dotcom veteran Jason Calacanis. When the company got the financial nod from Sequoia and others, Calacanis refused to move north.
Instead, they decided to build their own version of the Valley. After raising $20 million, Mahalo moved to Santa Monica and started hosting meetups in their office. The company needed developers, and hosting meetups was the best way to find them.
"So our strategy was to go on places like Meetup.com, get all the Python, Django, and Ruby developers and say 'Hey, we've got an amazing venue in Santa Monica, we've got free parking, and I'll throw in beers and pizza and a projector,'" Crowley says. "Within six to eight months, all the tech meetups were happening out of our offices every day around 6 p.m."
Once Mahalo filled their team quota of around 125 developers, the tech meetups started to get in the way of doing business. Luckily, a young couple had just opened a coworking space across the street and the Mahalo team convinced them to host the meetups as an open house of sorts to attract coworking space rentals. That coworking space, CoLoft, is still one of the biggest hubs of Silicon Beach startup interaction.
"It was a really organic process. We didn't know we were building Silicon Beach at the time," Crowley says.
Another piece of the startup scene fell into place soon after: Twitter. The social media titan had just launched in 2007 and the Silicon Beach community jumped on it. When more and more friends left L.A. for the Bay Area after securing funding, Crowley and his friends got fed up and used Twitter to fight back.
They started using a hashtag and posting photos of the nightly events taking place in L.A. Then someone started holding a monthly event, a get-together that aimed to bring everyone from the smaller niche events into one space. They started bringing guest speakers from up north too.
"It really got to the point where journalists at the L.A. Times needed to report on us," Crowley says. "TechCrunch put a dedicated person here, and once they got involved, then the politicians got excited and wanted to take credit for it."
Within a year there was a coworking space, a meetup venue, a monthly meetup, and a hashtag. Silicon Beach was off to the races.
A few years later, Crowley got a call from the U.K. Prime Minister's office. It was early 2010, and London had found out they'd be hosting the 2012 Olympics. They decided to hold it in the O2 Arena in Shoreditch, an area that happened to have a tech coworking space and the beginnings of a community. They'd just started hosting nightly events but hadn't jumped on the hashtag train, though they knew that branding was needed. The Prime Minister created a task force, and they looked around the world to see which startup scenes were catching fire. That's when they noticed Silicon Beach.
A group of representatives came to L.A. for meetings with leaders of the scene to find the secret sauce. Crowley's name kept cropping up, so they asked him to dinner. By dessert, he'd given them the recipe. And London was willing to make a huge financial investment to speed up the organic process.
"This is 100% Tyler," says Calacanis. "He came up with this system and made it work in both cities."
After the Olympics, and with Silicon Roundabout firmly rooted in place, Crowley hopped over to Stockholm to meet with some entrepreneurs. He found late-2012 Stockholm very reminiscent of late-2007 Los Angeles. Lots of people were working with their heads down in their own corners. Crowley got in touch with the Stockholm Business Development, the equivalent of the department he'd worked with in the U.K.
Crowley offered the recipe he'd used in the past, starting with a monthly meetup, STHLM Tech, and a hashtag. He spent 2013 building the scene, and by the end of the year, investors started waking up to Stockholm's entrepreneurs. Companies like Lifesum, Tripbirds, and Wrapp have since attracted funding from investors in other parts of Europe as well as America.
"Klarna was the first top-level sponsor for STHLM Tech, and King as well. They deserve a lot of credit," Crowley says. "It's really cool to see King and Klarna take a senior big brother level of responsibility."
Before You Start Your Own Scene…
The recipe's success doesn't depend on a single checklist of conditions. Every city is different, with some features built in and others that need to be made.
Stockholm had a pipeline of talent--a key ingredient that many other cities are missing, Crowley says. Los Angeles didn't have the engineering talent, but they excelled in marketing. Scandinavian culture is much more communally focused, espousing humble productivity instead of raucous American-style self-promotion, a cultural attitude casually known as Jantelagen.
"Stockholm doesn't know how to hype, and in a way it's their downfall, but you have to give Stockholm time to shine," Crowley says. "It's why Silicon Beach is about two years ahead, while Stockholm might surpass it purely from engineering talent. The Swedish let the product speak for itself."
Scandinavian engineers are widely lauded for perfectionism in functionality and design, which results in a standard of excellence and reliability. But that leads to long development cycles waiting to release a perfect product instead of the startup world's iterative schedule.
There's always the fear that a startup scene could crumble. King, which went public this past March, is now trading well below it's original price and has not found a follow-up hit to Candy Crush Saga. But big IPOs from Swedish titans Spotify and e-commerce giant Klarna could float the whole scene and incentivize investment in other companies.
That's really what it comes down to from a banker's standpoint, Crowley says: what's on the tree. And that Swedish cultural humbleness and engineer exactitude helps keep costs down. "Valuation is less in Sweden--they really only take what they need. Valuation is conservative. It's really a benefit to the startup ecosystem," Crowley says.
While every startup scene looks to Silicon Valley for inspiration and competition, they need to develop their own DNA advantages to get out from under Palo Alto's shadow.
Los Angeles banks on being the entertainment capital of the world. It's no coincidence that Hulu sprouted in L.A. While Silicon Valley had the intention of taking over Hollywood with technology, Crowley says, Hollywood is starting to have the upper hand. Studios are putting out content, and YouTube stars are working out of L.A., not San Francisco.
Crowley, who still shuttles between Stockholm and L.A., has also recently flown to Oslo and Copenhagen for casual discussions about growing startup scenes there.
Oslo's challenge is that they have too much money, says Crowley. Thanks to extensive petroleum deposits in the soil, Norway doesn't need technology, they don't need to innovate--people come out of school and go right into oil. Tech is a risky bet, and the twilight of their oil economy is still distant. Oslo's caution is historically justified: The dotcom bubble devastated Scandinavia, especially Sweden and Finland, whose telecom titans Ericsson and Nokia had invested heavily. For countries of 9 million and 5 million people respectively, this investment led to slow recovery. Only now are the Scandinavian governments beginning to warm to tech startups again.
Crowley has his eye on a few other places that have either developed a small scene or have governments interested in dumping money into the startup void. He's been courted by Dubai, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. But they have the same problems as Norway: a very dominant resource industry that detours new talent away from startup tech. And without a real tech precedent or ecosystem, the Middle East is really starting from scratch.
After Alibaba's colossal IPO, four of the 10 most valuable Internet companies are now based in Asia, so China is next on Crowley's list. "They have 150 cities in China with over a million people," he says. "Stockholm has about 1.5 million. China has 150 of those! The numbers are insane."
Last week Realmac Software released RapidWeaver 6, the long-awaited upgrade to its flagship web design software. RapidWeaver has long been a staple app for those Mac users who want the simplicity of a drag and drop WYSIWYG website builder combined with more advanced tools for those that don't mind digging into code.
RapidWeaver's popularity has only increased in the years since Apple discontinued its popular iWeb web design software, and Apple has spotlighted the software in its Mac App Store from time to time. That's why it was something of a shock when, after the announcement of the immediate availability of RapidWeaver 6 last week, Realmac also announced the new software would not be available via the Mac App Store.
Just what is going on? Many major Mac developers say the Mac App Store is in need of changes to make it truly worthwhile for developers to sell their apps there. Here's what three of them told me what Apple needs to do to fix things.
All apps have bugs. That's just the nature of software. When you are talking about bugs in an iOS app, it's rare that any bug requires an immediate fix. After all, most mobile apps today are still not true productivity tools that we solely rely on. The same can't be said for desktop apps, which oftentimes are the tools we cannot do our jobs without. Even a moderate bug often needs to be fixed right away or it can seriously hinder a user's ability to get work done.
Through traditional distribution channels it's always been quick and easy to issue bug fixes. Once a bug is discovered and fixed, the developer could quickly upload the new build of the app to their website (or push it out through in-app software update mechanisms). This way a user could oftentimes get the fix for their problem within hours of a major bug being discovered. This isn't the case for apps distributed through the Mac App Store, however. Any app changes--including small bug fixes--must be approved by Apple, which can take a week or more. According to Dan Counsell, founder of Realmac Software, this was the primary reason the company decided not to release RapidWeaver 6 on the Mac App Store.
"RapidWeaver 6 is a huge update with a large number of third parties updating their add-ons to work with this new version," Counsell says. "We obviously wanted the update to go as smoothly as possible for our customers and should a critical bug appear during the launch we wanted to be able to fix it with hours, not days or weeks. If RapidWeaver was on the Mac App Store and we had to submit an update it could take at five days or more to go through the review process--I felt that wasn't fair for all our loyal customers."
Needless to say, Counsell's primary suggestion for how Apple can improve the Mac App Store is to speed up review times--something virtually every developer I spoke to agreed with. As one developer who wished to remain anonymous said, "Mission critical apps require mission critical bug fix times. You can't get that with apps through the Mac App Store."
But there was an additional reason Realmac chose to hold off RapidWeaver 6's launch on the Mac App Store: a lack of upgrade pricing for owners of older versions of the app. This too has long been a chief complaint among Mac developers. Apple understandably wants to make the software purchasing experience as simple as possible for users, but developers are tied down by the economic realities of what it costs to develop new versions of their apps and also the need to make past users feel like they are getting a good deal.
"I'd love to see upgrade pricing, however Apple seem very reluctant and at this point I'm not sure it'll ever happen," says Counsell. "It's something customers and developers repeatedly ask for, but Apple seem fixed on driving down the price of apps."
A lack of upgrade pricing can arguably have a big benefit for users--all major upgrades on the Mac App Store are free--but in the long run it can hurt users, as there's no reason for a developer to spend time and money improving an app if they can't financially benefit from future versions of it.
"No, it's not shocking news," says Ausra Meskauskaite, when I ask her about Realmac's decision to not sell RapidWeaver 6 on the Mac App Store. Meskauskaite is head of marketing at Pixelmator, the much-loved image editor for the Mac that is sold exclusively through the Mac App Store and has been featured by Apple numerous times as a standout Mac app. "Many developers feel that they need more flexibility on the Mac App Store. [Paid upgrades are] the upgrade scheme we've all gotten used to throughout many years. It's difficult for us developers to think of--and for the users to adopt--some other customer loyalty support scheme."
But while Meskauskaite would like to see paid upgrades become a reality on the Mac App Store, Pixelmator has no plans to go back to selling the app via any other channels. A few years ago Pixelmator decided to go Mac App Store-only, releasing every major update for free.
"The effect was huge," says Meskauskaite. "Pixelmator grossed $1 million in just 20 days after the Mac App Store launch. In fact, every Pixelmator release is each time better than the one before."
The fact that developers can have continuous blowout sales even if they can't make money from paid upgrades is no doubt one reason Apple doesn't feel the need to alter the Mac App Store's pricing structure.
"At this point, the most important item from that list for me is trial runs of App Store software," says Omni Group CEO Ken Case, when I tell him the other "wants" most developers have for the Mac App Store. Omni Group has been selling Mac software for over two decades and knows better than any that when you're asking people to pay $50+ for a piece of software, many people want to try it before they buy it.
Currently Apple's terms strictly prohibit trial or "lite" versions of apps in the Mac App Store, so many developers are forced to offer these demo versions through their own distribution channels on their websites.
"We do make two-week trials of our Mac apps available on our website, but the whole experience would be much better for App Store customers if it were integrated into the App Store itself," says Case.
Numerous other developers have voiced their desire for trial apps on the Mac App Store since its inception in 2011, but Apple--a company with a penchant for simplicity in its offerings--has yet to relent.
Case says he can accept Apple's view on demo software, but he's hoping Apple will change its ways on something even more critical in a developer/user relationship...
"I'd love to be able to reply to App Store reviews," says Case. "I often see reviews from customers who have missed some feature of the app--for example, a customer wishing OmniGraffle had free network stencils available, which in fact it does. Right now, there's no way to reach out to those customers to let them know how to find what they were looking for--and meanwhile, their disappointed review drives away other potential customers. That sort of thing can happen anywhere, of course, not just the App Store--but in most other contexts, I can reply to those customers and help them out. I'd love to be able to do that in the App Store as well."
Case's point is echoed by Realmac's Dan Counsell.
"We see customers writing reviews saying 'Clear doesn't have feature X' and we can't reply to them to let them know that it does have feature X or that it's coming in an update," says Counsell. "It's frustrating knowing you can help people with these issues, but we have no way of contacting them. If someone buys an app directly from us we can follow up with via email to see if they need any help to get up and running, we can let them know we're here to offer support if they need us--you just can't do that on the Mac App Store."
Counsell also points out that this lack of ability to reply to customers can cause problems between paying users and developers, noting that when a user buys a developer's app through the Mac App Store "They are Apple customers, not ours." He says this can lead to problems if a Mac App Store user requests a refund. "If someone ask us for a refund we have to redirect them to Apple and sometimes Apple refuses to issue a refund. The customer then comes back to us frustrated and angry."
Despite the gripes and suggestions developers have about the Mac App Store Counsell notes that he hasn't ruled out releasing RapidWeaver 6 in Apple's store in the future. Indeed, two of Realmac's other apps--Clear and Ember (not to mention RapidWeaver 5)--are still available on the Mac App Store. But for now a smooth release of RapidWeaver 6 with the ability to quickly fix bugs took priority. And though Apple clearly has its own views about how software distribution should work, that hasn't put Counsell off app development or the Mac.
"For me, the Mac has always been the best desktop platform to develop on and I don't see that changing anytime soon," says Counsell. "For all the issues I have with the App Store, I still think Apple does an amazing job and honestly I'm not interesting in building our apps for any other platform."
It doesn't feel right to say that Tim Cook came out today because that implies that he was "in," somehow, before? Cook's sexuality has long been generally known but never publicly acknowledged, so now it is. I think we all know who Cook's announcement is really about though: Glenn Fleishman. Glenn was crying a straight ally river for all the LGBTQ folks to sail to tolerance upon when he was rudely interrupted by another of those Gawker bullies, Ryan Tate, who pointed out that Glenn had previously said it didn't matter if Cook was gay. Instead of just saying it was entirely Cook's own decision whether to talk about his sexuality in public or not (which is a perfectly reasonable position and the one Glenn clearly holds!) he flippedout, and ultimately blogged his histrionic letter to Tate's boss, Intercept editor John "No Relation" Cook, who is also a known mustache-twirling ex-Gawker. No word yet on whether John N.R. Cook has taken time out from throwing Pierre Omidyar's lousy management under the bus to respond.
Even more people are out! Rachel Sklar "came out" as a 41 year old, single, pregnant woman. Apparently one time, at band camp… and the next thing you know she's gravid with #content! Congratulations to her, though, sincerely. The Maine ebola nurse, Kaci Hicox, is out riding her bike around Fort Kent. This sounds alarming until you realize that Hicox has no symptoms, Fort Kent is the ass end of nowhere even by Maine standards, and moose cannot catch ebola. Josh Constine is out in the baseball riots, making it about.me with the best of them. And Rutland, Vermont's Peter Italia is probably out of his gourd, having traveled to Guinea intending to fight ebola with "time travel and other methods."
Most guys, at one point or another, have ended up in the friend zone.
"Throw on a little Blue De Chanel cologne and wait for the inevitable compliments."
This:
Don't: Wear a Boring Sweater
Do: Take Her to Brunch While Wearing Amazing Shades
Aside from being bad-there's no such thing as the friend zone, shithearts-the article is wrong. Sweaters are dope. Not only are they a large part of Tabs' editorial mission, they're a large part of us. Sweaters are love, sweaters are life.
You mess with sweaters, and you're messing with Today in Tabs. You don't want that. You do not. Want. That.
~He said let's get out of this tab, drive out of the city, away from the crowds~
Today in Tabs is off tomorrow! Have a spoopy and creppy Hallowe'en! We are brought to you by FastCoLabs and your email, and I tweet @rustyk5. Want to sponsor us? Email me!
Neclumi is a "wearable projection" from Poland-based new media art and design collective PanGenerator. Using a smartphone app and a discretely tucked pocket projector, Neclumi displays responsive patterns of light over the wearer's neck.
There are four modes. "Airo" is an outward cascade of light lines, reacting to walking speed as detected by a pedometer.
"Roto" is appears as a ribbon-like shape looping through a pendant, corresponding to the rotation of the wearer's body, linked to a compass.
"Movi" is a bouncing fluid line which reacts to body movement using an accelerometer.
The most cinematic setting is "Soni," a tiny, microphone-activated sun that radiates lines of pixels. It reacts to ambient sound but is most dramatic when it bursts in rays as the wearer raises their voice.
No word on whether this will become more than an art project, but it's pretty impressive for ornamental technology.
Thomas Dixon has no idea what he did yesterday. Sitting across from me at an outdoor cafe, he tries to jog his memory by doing what a lot of us do habitually: checking his iPhone.
Specifically, he pulls up Twitter and starts scrolling through his own feed. "Ah right," he says. "I was talking to my friend Stephanie about our New Year's Eve plans." On this drizzly Friday afternoon in downtown Philadelphia, nothing seems even remotely unusual about a guy checking his phone to look something up.
But unlike you or I, Dixon isn't exercising a compulsive, unnecessary habit. Without his phone, he literally wouldn't be able to remember what he did yesterday. Twitter is his memory.
You wouldn't guess from having a face-to-face conversation with Dixon that his brain is damaged. That's because nothing about his speech or general intelligence was affected by the accident. Indeed, Dixon's high IQ has won him membership in Mensa and ensured him a 3.7 GPA when he finished his graduate degree in educational psychology at Temple University in May. He also recently recommenced a long-standing tradition of traveling to a different country every New Years Eve.
Four years ago, Dixon was out for a run near his parents' house when he was struck by a car and injured so badly that doctors weren't sure if he would survive. He doesn't remember the accident, but it left a permanent and pervasive mark on his life: Since that day, his memory hasn't been the same. In particular, his episodic memory--specific, autobiographical details like where he was, who he met, what he ate and the like--has been compromised by the traumatic brain injury he sustained that late November afternoon.
"I'm always aware of what I'm talking about and who I'm with in the moment," Dixon says. "I just don't know what happened yesterday or the day before. My declarative episodic memory is shot."
Since the accident, Dixon has relied heavily on his smartphone to augment the part of his brain that is no longer functioning properly. He uses Twitter throughout the day to make note of the details he isn't likely to remember tomorrow: What he was reading about, what kind of coffee he ordered, who he spoke to. Even the details of his sex life, which he tweets about in Korean to avoid embarrassing over-the-shoulder moments. All of this goes into his private Twitter account, which he can later refer to, search, and analyze.
Dixon's strategies for boosting his brainpower with technology are clearly very effective for him. It's also striking just how normal it seems--It probably says something about the rest of us that a man with literal brain damage doesn't look at all unusual consulting a tiny computer all day long. But while he inadvertently shames us for being glued to our smartphones, Dixon is also offering up free productivity tips: Here's how lifelogging and setting digital reminders can help any of us automate our lives. But Dixon's system could be especially valuable to other people with memory disorders.
"If this were decades ago, I would be walking around with binders," Dixon says, envisioning how he would cope with his injury without a powerful, Internet-connected computer in his pocket.
The process of writing down everything he does--Dixon sometimes refers to this as "extreme journaling"--is reminiscent of those stories you hear about people who overshare their every move just for personal experimentation or simply the hell of it. But for Dixon, the practice has become a necessary part of life. It's the reason he's able to function independently and travel the world on his own.
Over the last few years, Dixon's Twitter account has amassed more than 22,000 tweets, each one chronicling the details of his day-to-day experience. The account--which he casually refers to has his "memory"--serves as an on-demand personal archive that he can summon at any time.
As the data has piled up, it's also enabled Dixon to perform deeper types of analysis on his life. In this sense, his approach winds up supercharging his memory in a way that most people without traumatic brain injuries wouldn't be inclined to do themselves. "I have a simultaneously better and worse memory than everyone I've ever met," he notes.
To analyze his digital memory, Dixon downloads his personal Twitter archive and opens it in Excel, where he runs searches and performs basic computations. Looking over this data, Dixon is able to see that he mentioned going to the gym 234 times. Coffee comes up 240 times. At first glance, it seems like pretty mundane stuff, but by quantifying the humdrum details of his life, Dixon can spot patterns.
"Sometimes if I have like an hour, I'll be like 'How's the last week been?'" Dixon says. "I'll look at the past week and I'll go, 'Oh, okay. I really do want to get a run in.' So I will use it to influence certain decisions."
Dixon's digital memory isn't limited to Twitter. Like many of us, he uses his Gmail inbox as a list of reminders. "I treat my Gmail as another sort of external memory for general notes or meeting notes, summary of research, whatever," Dixon says. "Email is anything I need to look at, like attachments for work. If it's going to be more substantial I'll do it an email, but I'll mention to Twitter that I was working on the email."
Scrolling through Dixon's iPhone calendar, he appears much busier than he really is. That's because it's loaded with daily reminders, each one prompting him to take some kind of action. Some of them, like doctor's appointments, are the type of thing you can find on just about anybody's calendar. Others, like the reminders to take a certain medication at a certain time or follow up with the friend he spoke to two days ago, are necessary prompts that help fill in the blanks left in his brain by the accident.
All told, Dixon's approach is decidedly low tech. There's no programming involved and he doesn't even use any IFTTT recipes. It's just email, a calendar, and Twitter, although he does occasionally experiment with potential add-ons to his system.
The experience has inspired Dixon to look at things with an entrepreneurial eye. If this system is able to nearly eliminate the effects of his injury, what could it do for other traumatic brain injury patients? What about chemotherapy patients who experience memory loss? The elderly?
Dixon thinks his system could be merged into a single app that's marketed to people with memory issues. He's in the very early planning stages of creating a smartphone app called MEmory (prounced mee-mory). He's gotten as far as prototyping a logo and sketching out the basic functionality, as well as chatting informally with developers about the technical details.
Brain injury patients are encouraged to engage in the kind of self-documenting strategies Dixon uses, but far too often the rehab facilities are stuck on the pen and paper method. It seems especially old school in light of how ubiquitous smartphones are these days.
As his injury and coping strategies gets more attention--he's done a few local "Nerd Nite" talks and gotten some local press coverage in Philadelphia--Dixon's begun to think more seriously about dedicating his life to helping others with memory problems. In addition to building an app, he's considered marketing himself as a sort of consultant to others who could benefit from his strategies, or perhaps to the facilities that care for them.
It would be a logical career move for Dixon, who has been on Social Security disability since the accident. His recovery has put him in a somewhat awkward position: Although he has clearly coped quite well, his employability is still up in the air.
"They're putting me in this gray spot," Dixon says. "I'm not getting hired because I can't remember what happened yesterday." Even though he has, in a way, super-charged his memory with technology, his natural inability to recall the episodic details of his experience could lead to trouble in any number of traditional work scenarios.
In the meantime, he continues to refine his own processes in the hopes of figuring out what's next for him.
"I really want to know what's happened in my life," Dixon says. "Because that's what the injury stole from me: context. The ability to keep track of life's events. Why I went somewhere. All of that. This approach basically creates a sense that my life is not lost."
If you binge-watched the second season of House of Cards, along with a reported 15% of Netflix's 44 million subscribers, you may be newly interested in the Deep Web. Slate has done a good job of describing what the Deep Web is and isn't, but they don't tell you how to get there.
First: the hot sheets. Subreddit forums for DeepWeb, onions, and Tor are the way to go in terms of gathering a backgrounder for entry points into DarkNet. Unsurprisingly though, much of the information currently on the surface Internet about the actual underbelly of the web is outdated. Ever since Silk Road's takedown last year, the Under-web has been changing.
To get into the Deep Web these days, you first have to download the Tor add-on for Firefox. By downloading the Tor Browser Bundle from the Tor Project you are securing your anonymity to browse, which is the main draw for using Tor. Once you have downloaded the browser bundle, Tor builds a circuit of encrypted connections through a randomized relay. In layman's terms that means that your online activity is covered as Tor randomly pings your IP address from one place to the other, making whatever you do less traceable.
Multiple Redditors urge reading the Tor Project's warning page, where they discourage torrent file sharing and downloading while using Tor. The idea is to follow protocol maintaining your anonymity while browsing, chatting, or navigating. This obviously includes giving away your personal information like email addresses, phone numbers, names, time zones, or home addresses in any context.
The newest iteration of the Tor browser, Tor 4.0, was released in October 2014. It contains a variety of product tweaks designed primarily to enable use behind China's massive Internet firewall.
Other precautions include placing duct tape on your webcam, enabling your computer's firewall, and turning off cookies and JavaScript. Again, here is where you want to be completely free of an identity, so treading cautiously is key. The NSA and other government outlets peruse the Dark Web and onion sites frequently using cross-reference tools, malware, and remote administration tools to de-anonymize users engaging in illegal activity.
While the Deep Web houses the retail of weapons, drugs, and illicit erotica, there are also useful tools for journalists, researchers, or thrill seekers. It's also worth noting that mere access through Tor is not illegal but can arouse suspicion with the law. Illegal transactions usually begin on the Deep Web but those transactions quite often head elsewhere for retail, private dialoguing, or in-person meetups; that's how most people get caught by law enforcement officials.
For mobile users, several browsers exist which purport to--more or less--allow Tor to be used on an Android or iOS device. These browsers include OrWeb, Anonymous Browser Connect Tor, the mobile Firefox add-on, Onion Browser, and Red Onion. However, it is important to note that security concerns have been raised for all of these browsers and that anonymous browsing cannot be 100% guaranteed for any of these.
After reading up on the material, downloading Tor, and logging out of every other application, you can finally open Tor's Browser Bundle to begin secure navigation. Network navigation is slow once you are inside because of the running relay, so expect pages to load at a snail's pace.
The most common suggestion on Reddit is to start at the "Hidden Wiki." The Hidden Wiki has a similar interface as Wikipedia and lists by category different sites to access depending on your interest. Categories include: Introduction Points, News/History, Commercial Services, Forums/Boards/Chans, and H/P/A/W/V/C (Hack, Phreak, Anarchy, Warez, Virus, Crack) just to name a few. Under each of these headings are multiple sites with an onion address and a brief description of what you will find there.
Many of the listed sites on the Hidden Wiki though have been taken down. Deep Web Tor, Tor Jump, Tor Answers, and Tor.info were all busts. When the feds took down Silk Road, many other sites also fell victim and/or are currently down for maintenance. Still, gun, drug, and child porn marketplaces operate even though they are on much smaller scales and with a fraction of the reach than that of Silk Road or Atlantis, another drug-peddling site.
Some pages are less nefarious, but arouse your curiosity nonetheless. StaTors.Net is the Twitter for Tor users and Hell Online is the antisocial network with 369 members and 15 different groups. Torchan resembles Reddit, though you need to enter the username and password torchan2 for access, and is still up and running. But recent activity except in Request and Random rooms has all but stopped.
In the Random room a user asked for a new link to Silk Road and the responses were limited. Another user posting an image of a child fully clothed featuring bare feet pleading for a site featuring underage bare feet. An Anonymous user responded: "Someone please give this guy a link, this poor guy has been looking/asking for over a month now."
One popular chat service is OnionChat, an anonymous Tor-based real-time chat room quasi-affiliated with the Onions subreddit. The project's code is available on GitHub as well.
The DeepWeb Link Directory in the site OnionDir had some promising hyperlinks and some not-so-promising ones like the now defunct Deep Web Radio and a blog claiming to be a Deep Web blog but was actually just stories dedicated to spanking.
The New Yorker Strongbox is a secure transmission for writers and editors where I was given the code name: riddle yeah abreacts murgeoning. Through a given codename you can submit a message and/or file to the New Yorker's editorial staff. Mike Tigas, a news application developer for ProPublica, has a functioning blog in the Deep Web but has not posted anything new for some time, which was true for many other blogs as well.
Reddit user NekroTor is on a quest to reboot many of the Freedom Hosting sites that were taken down. On February 16th of this year, on his onion-routed blog, Nekrotown, he wrote, "2 days ago the BlackMarket Reloaded forum got seized. On the same day, the long-awaited Utopia Market was seized, which just goes to show that all the markets fucking suck these days except for Agora and TMP, and that you should just wait until BlackMarket Reloaded opens up again... eventually ...5 years later, no BMR."
NekroTor is correct in writing that most of the content right now on the Dark Web is not that great. On top of the fact that there used to be a wealth of sites for illegal black market interactions, there also used to be radio, books, blogs, political conversations, and even an Encyclopedia Dramatica that was a satirical culture-based wiki and is now laden with porn and pop-ups.
NekroTor created a new version of Hidden Wiki that has some functional links to audio and video streaming as well as some up-to-date forums for socializing and buying and selling. There are still a few image boards left, but the popular Onii-chan has the words "Well be back later" typed over spinning dildos.
After watching House of Cards, user TrelianScar turned to Reddit for guidance on how to navigate the Dark Web. TrelianScar is not alone. The Deep Web is making appearances in the media, in dinner conversations, and of course on Internet forums. One user jokingly writes to TrelianScar saying, "Wait till we send you an iPad. Then talk to the Dutch oil painting. Then await instructions," referencing HOC's unrealistic depiction of Deep Web interactions.
On a more serious note though, user Serbia_Strong writes, "What are you looking for first of all? Drugs? Guns? Assassins? Credit cards or counterfeit cash? I'd start your journey at the Hidden Wiki and then narrow in on your interests. I pretty much save every site I come across (you can't exactly just google them). Start at The Hidden Wiki and if you need any links just ask. Enjoy your descent into madness :)"
Another user, Dexter-Del-Rey explained a similar conundrum last week--he too is new to the Deep Web and wants some functional starter links. Redditor Ampernand writes back saying, "On the topic of torchan... here's a good piece on how it fell authored by the previous host. Currently torchan is hosted by someone that allows cp, gore etc, censors critics and doesn't give a flying fuck about the community. Effectively torchan has become exactly what it was trying to not be. Also, nntpchan is better." Ampernand links to NNTP-chan, which is a new forum replacing the image board Onii-chan.
New channels are popping up daily in the Deep Web. Currently, marketplace alternatives to Silk Road, Agora, and Pandora are the most frequented. Nonetheless, both TrelianScar and Dexter-Del-Rey were each respectively warned in their threads that the Dark Web is chock-full of scammers and is quite unlike its Hollywood depiction.
Interestingly, the Deep Web has lost much of its stigma over the past year and mainstream web services are experimenting with the platform even if they're not embracing it. In late October 2014, Facebook enabled Tor browser users to visit them anonymously, saying in a press release that "It's important to us at Facebook to provide methods for people to use our site securely."
In a dilapidated apartment complex, a handyman tinkers with a grotesque project. It's a sort of a pet--globs of thick-skinned meat, spurting wires connected to electronic equipment, plopped across a few shelves in the back of a facilities office--but it's got personality! Look how its mouth-like orifice quivers when it breathes. Aw. This is Flesh Computer, a short film from writer/director Ethan Shaftel.
It's a simple setup. Drunk dirt bags are terrorizing the building's most vulnerable residents, like the handyman's cat and a little girl with an inexplicably cybernetic eye. Then, they encounter something--or someone--that's not as helpless as they think.
There's also a housefly buzzing around as the actual philosopher David Chalmers on a fuzzy TV screen. "We have a hundred billion neurons in our head interacting like a giant computer--processing inputs, producing outputs," he says. "But we know we are not giant robots. We have subjective, conscious experiences on the inside."
Shaftel says he included the philosopher as a "counterpoint" for the gritty, fantastical action on screen and flourishes of Cronenberg-esque body horror. Chalmers is known for formulating "hard problems of consciousness" and charismatically massaging the gap which neuroscience can't easily fill, pondering the mysterious existence of subjective feelings and sensations which are produced along with our minds' more mechanic processing of sensory information. In his short dialogue in the film, he relates these human processes to artificial intelligence and vice versa.
The short is an entertaining, timely look at the timeless questions poised by philosophers and science fiction, particularly in the proliferation of DIY technology projects enabled by the open-source culture. Meanwhile, our definitions of consciousness become more nuanced as we begin to relate with artificial intelligence. It's a cold relationship--one between consumers and products. We get freaked out about user-responsive social media algorithms, wowed by biometric sensing wearables, and dependent on Internet-enabled compact technology as an extension of our personhood that physical brains and bodies can't store or display. But can we have feelings for machines and interfaces? Can we care or fear for one? What if it's surrounded by globs of shivering flesh, making little breathing sounds and needs its waste pan changed, like your cat?
Smart as they are, computers are still as blind as a bat. It's why search engines index the web using text and why you still have to fill out those annoying captchas. But with advances in machine learning and image recognition, computer vision is slowly getting to the point where it will be useful to us.
Flickr flexed its computer vision muscles recently with the launch of Park or Bird? The one-page web app was built in response to an XKDC comic poking fun at the limitations of computers when it comes to understanding the content of images. It allows people to upload a photo and automatically determine if the image was taken in a national park (using location meta data) or of a bird (using Flickr's computer vision).
The hack itself wasn't anything more than a fun response to an Internet comic, but it offered a taste of some impressive technology that Flickr is working on internally. And it's not just R&D: Computer vision has found its way into Flickr's product roadmap and will be something all of us will soon be exposed to more, whether we use Flickr or not.
Flickr's image recognition technology uses a type of neural network called deep convolutional neural networks. Google is also investing in this type of deep learning technique, and has acquired at least two companies companies that specialize in this technique (Jetpac and DNNResearch) in order to improve the image recognition capabilities of its photo app.
"These methods have evolved rapidly over the past few years, thanks to some key algorithmic improvements and the availability of more powerful computing infrastructures," says Simon Osindero, an AI architect in the Flickr Vision and Machine Learning group at the Yahoo-owned company. "They currently work well particularly for object, scene, and attribute recognition in photos."
Having parsed millions of images, Flickr's deep learning algorithm has learned to recognize 1,000 different objects in images. It does this by passing them through a series of layers, each of which transforms the original image and performs progressively more and more complex computations on it.
As the image passes through these layers, they are 'activated' in different ways depending on the features they've seen in the input image, and at the top of this network--after the image is transformed by the bottom layer, and that transformation of the image is transformed by the next layer, and that transformation of the transformation of the image is transformed by the next layer, and so on--a short floating-point vector summarizing all of the various activations at each layer is output. We pass this floating-point vector into more than 1,000 binary classifiers, each of which is trained to give us a yes/no answer to identify a specific object/scene class.
This wizardry relies largely on proprietary technology developed internally at Flickr, but it also uses some open source tools, such as a deep learning framework from UC Berkeley called Caffe. It's a project that Osindero says has come very much in handy, and his team is returning the favor by contributing to the Caffee code base.
"CUDA and GPU computing in general are also invaluable, allowing us to reduce model-training times by one or two orders of magnitude," he says.
So why does this matter? For Flickr, the ability to recognize objects in images is hugely valuable. They already incorporate this technology in their own photo search and the system can only get smarter from here. For a company that offers 1 terabyte of free storage and aims to be users' "camera roll in the cloud," giving people the option to easily search through their rapidly proliferating images is a pretty big perk.
Beyond photos, there are scores of use cases for things like facial recognition and machine vision, some of them more benign than others. But the photo-sorting problem alone is significant enough on its own to warrant the attention of Flickr's engineers. As our personal collections of photos explode (a trend that isn't likely to decelerate anytime soon), keeping them organized and accessible will only get harder. Indeed, this is the entire premise behind Apple alum Tim Bucher's new startup Lyve.
"Flickr is pioneering this effort with a team focused on vision and machine learning," says Osindero. We are still learning how to balance computer knowledge with human annotations in the best way. It's a challenging problem, but we are sure the ability to manage photos will greatly improve over time."
Starting this week anyone can download 3-D models of sculptures and artifacts from the collection of the British Museum. The models are available online in file formats that are ready to be used by any 3-D printer.
Through a partnership with the British Museum in London, Sketchfab is making these files available for download for free, under Creative Commons Attribution licenses. So far, the pieces that have been scanned and posted online are mostly from the museum's Ancient Egypt collection.
"This is a huge move for accessing cultural heritage," says Alban Denoyel, cofounder and CEO of Sketchfab. "3-D capture of cultural heritage is close to our heart. It's the only way to make sure that history stays accessible forever. Plus it's a great use case for 3-D scanning technologies."
Sketchfab has become known as one of the easiest ways to display 3-D models on the web. Using the WebGL JavaScript API, it allows any browser to display and interact with 3-D models. Now Sketchfab is branching out to not just display 3-D models, but also allow users to download and print models themselves.
Some potential uses of this growing treasure trove of digital assets include:
Artists can study and touch full-size replicas of famous works of art, even incorporate them into their own remixes
3-D scans of objects from antiquity could be incorporated into video games (including virtual reality like the Oculus Rift)
By 3-D printing works of art, museum collections could become accessible to a far wider audience. "It brings art and history to your home," Denoyel says. "You can now print a statue from Easter Island, in the material of your choice!" Playfully, he also notes that the variety of materials with which anyone can 3-D print means you could turn one of these statues into "the top of your wedding cake."
Still, Denoyel acknowledges that the market for this kind of technology is a bit unclear. "The market is pretty new," he says. "For now it's mostly makers, schools, and educators."
You can view the full gallery of Sketchfab's downloadable 3-D models here.
They look like rubber tentacles. They unfurl like tongues. But these organic appendages with "air muscles" that inflate and bubble might just be the future of your office building.
Furl: Soft Pneumatic Pavilion, a graduate project by Bijing Zhang and Francois Mangion at the Interactive Architecture Lab at the Bartlett School of Architecture of University College London, is an exploration of adaptive, soft robotic, "breathing" buildings. It's part of the responsive architectural trend that includes the use of "biometal" to regulate building temperatures, digital feathers that filter the air, and silkworms that weave pavilions.
These soft robotic components allow for unprecedented ability to bend, fold, change shape, and otherwise adapt to the needs of building occupants. The wagging arms are programmed to read human brain waves.
The "gestures" are programmed when the silicone casts are made, predicting how the arm would move if certain air pockets were inflated. But the actual air flow can be controlled via EEG readings.
A compatible EEG headset picks up the alpha (α), beta (β), delta (δ), and theta (Θ) brain wave levels of the user, and the raw data is then translated to air flow. For example, if a user concentrates, it changes the frequency of their theta brain waves--the "air muscles" fill up with air and the "arms" move.
Now imagine a functional Furl pavilion, the robotic walls morphing according to variety of custom algorithms and the will of its occupants.
"The problem is that robotics and mechanisms are typically rigid, sometimes dangerous, and generally incompatible with close proximate behavior to people. Soft robotics creates a new platform for architecture, to interact much more sensitively and directly to the human body," Mangion tells We Make Money Not Art. "It might be sometime before such techniques are commonplace but we think it opens up new horizons in biologically inspired architecture, an interdisciplinary approach that could potentially lead to a revolution towards a 'soft responsive architecture'."
