"It's 6:00AM and I'm wide awake. Good friday morning peeps."
This is how the computer-generated "novel" programmed by developer Jonathan Puckey begins. The book, part of NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month), documents every minute throughout a 24-hour day by breaking down the giant global stream of peoples' tweets—there are some 6,000 per second—into an automatically-generated collective diary.
The book wasn't the main project, however: It came about as part of a Twitter bot, All The Minutes, built by Puckey and his small team at the Dutch design studio Moniker, to coincide with a museum exhibition. The account takes collected tweets and retweets them every minute—set to the Central European Time zone (Moniker is based in Amsterdam).
"We are obsessed with how people use new technologies to communicate with each other," explains Puckey. "We can easily spend hours trying out different search queries, looking for patterns on the strategies people use to talk to their followers. It's interesting to us that these days people choose to speak about exact minutes in relation to their lives—almost as if they could be doing something different every minute."
A self-portrait of Jonathan Puckey, the designer behind All the Minutes.
To get the tweets needed, the team wrote a script that searches Topsy for tweets in a standard format—"It's 11:45 a.m. and...". To make the novel a little bit longer, multiple tweets of the same time were strung together. The result: The mundane updates people post to Twitter become a kind of stream-of consciousness novella—the kind of thing that Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner, with their fixations on time and the microscopic moment, might have smiled upon.
As you might expect, people who have got wind of the Twitter clock have begun tweeting their own time-related messages, hoping to one day appear in the stream.
The project echoes a number of recent art projects, including Christian Marclay's 2010 installation The Clock, a 24-hour, minute-by-minute "supercut" built of shots of clocks in movies. And while Twitter bots are busy writing novels, writers like Jennifer Egan and David Mitchell have taken to Twitter to construct stories. Last month, the artist Cory Archangel published a book mined from a more particular kind of Twitter update: people who tweeted that they were working on their novel.
For Puckey, the idea of building a "novel" out of the Twitter bot's stream was the result of a happy coincidence. When the team caught wind of NaNoGenMo, they decided to jump in. All The Minutes doesn't actually hit NaNoGenMo's 50,000 word goal: It currently clocks in somewhere around a more novella-like 20,000 words.
Another algorithm-based Twitter clock called Chirpclock, developed by Mike Bodge in 2012, is a standalone website that samples Twitter in near real-time and updates in two-second intervals. But it doesn't string them together into a weird, postmodern novel.
It's 2:40pm and I'm drunk. I should be ashamed, but alas I am not. Its 2.41pm and my sister is still sleeping :/ how disgusting. It's 2:42pm and I finally just got dressed ^_^. It's 2:43pm and I haven't even WRITTEN my to do list yet. I need a reset button for today! It's 2:44pm and I haven't killed anyone today — yet. New personal best. Its 2:45pm and I'm sober? Quick, someone call 911 or Ghostbusters! It's 2:46pm and I have not gotten out of bed. Love days when I only have show call nearly as much as days off. It's 2:47pm and I have just woken up. Time for applejacks :). It's 2:48pm and I am so tired!! It’s 2.49pm and I’ve had 8 cups of tea so far. Next time I’ll think twice before cycling in the rain, getting soaked and freezing my ass off.
Reading through the automatically generated book or following the clock bot, there's something oddly satisfying, hypnotic even, about the project. It doesn't flow from beginning to end, but the text still intrigues, pulling you forward with the steady beat of the clock and the strange rhythm and repetition of thousands of peoples' thoughts. Think of it as an unknowing, crowdsourced version of The Hours—maybe, The Minutes—a portrait of humanity in the midst of its everyday, sometimes mindless moments, and a remarkable testament to the ceaseless stream of data that keeps those of us on the Internet scrolling down.
And if that weren't enough, the computer-generated book ends in a way that puts most human authors to shame.
"Its 5:58am and we just rollin in the house!!! We had a freakin blast!!! Night till mornin we aint leavin cuz we head bad!!!! TRINI 2 DI BONE. It's 5:59am and im awake..."
Podcasting may have become the year's biggest medium, but it still feels like a radio backchannel: A secret, member's-only club where radio hosts, bloggers, and enthusiasts bleed in the name of the content, instead of monetary compensation—though that doesn't look to be far behind.
One problem that podcasting still faces, however, is that it can seem difficult to get started. It's accessible enough that anyone with a mobile phone can create one, but at this point it's still hard enough that you have to want to create one. It doesn't come without a bit of brain juice and elbow grease.
"I think Serial is a very big moment and has got people podcasting who never would have before—that's great for all podcast makers," says the host of WYNC's New Tech City, Manoush Zomorodi. "But until the same audience that watches the Today show also knows how to podcast, we aren't there yet."
Due to podcasting's bootstrap nature, shop talk has always been somewhat part of the culture. People like to talk about what gear they're using to get shows recorded, how it came together, and how the other interested folks can join in. It may be a member's only club, but membership is definitely open to all.
"My podcast is all about the human dilemmas that come with technology—for busy people with kids or elderly parents and maybe not much indie tech savvy. I hope (and pray) easier podcasting will turn New Tech City into a mainstream hit," adds Zomorodi.
It's all about the sound, which means it's all about the microphone and a decent pair of headphones and where you choose to record.
Benjamin's recommendation for entry mic: the Samson C01U Pro USB Studio Condenser
Even though you can literally get started podcasting by using your phone's microphone to record yourself talking, getting a dedicated microphone is the best place to start. There are a lot of choices too. Dan Benjamin, who's been running a network of podcast shows and recording audio for years, has recently updated his list of podcasting recommendations; the mic he suggests for entry-level users is the sturdy Samson C01U Pro USB Studio Condenser, which costs about $79, stand included.
Among the different helpful parts, he breaks down the selection of gear by price and seriousness, beginner or advanced. Benjamin has also recorded a video on microphone technique—a critical part of making your quality mic sound as good as it can.
A decent pair of headphones can also be key. Again, any old earbuds will let you hear the conversation, but having a dedicated pair of headphones, even if inexpensive, will let you hear every last little detail—and every annoying pop. This is important, among other reasons, as Jason Snell from Six Colors points out, to help with mic technique. The Sennheiser HD 202 IIs run for about $25.
Benjamin's recommendation for entry headphones: the Sennheiser HD 202 IIs
For those a little more serious, extra items like a pop filter, mic wind screen, or boom stand can enhance some of the finer details and make the recording sound that much nicer. Having the mic on a stand instead of the table, for example, alleviates noises causes by touching items on the desk, frees up space in front of you, and lets you use your hands freely to take notes and have a real conversation.
Doing a podcast by yourself is as simple as just recording audio (don't get too close to the mic). The part that gets tricky is when there's more than one person, especially if they're not in the same room. Casey Liss, part of the Accident Tech Podcast (or ATP) recently wrote about about how to record a show with two other hosts who aren't physically with you.
Piezo to record my end of the call directly off the mic
Call Recorder to record both ends of the call, usually for redundancy
When you record audio, you'll either be recording everyone talking on the same track—the way it'd sound to listen to a bunch of people talk on a conference call—or record everyone to their own track.
A popular option with remote recording situations for podcasters is to have Skype facilitate the call, while each person records themselves on their own computer. After the fact, someone will need to take each of the recorded tracks and mix them together into an audio program. "First and foremost," writes Marco Arment, "as a listener, I should never know that you use Skype."
Giving everyone their own track means that any sort of editing can be done much easier—volumes can adjusted or cross talk cut out. This, or some variation, is what you'll want to do to get a better sounding podcast.
Reaper audio editing software
WNYC's Alex Goldmark, producer of the New Tech City podcast, recommends Reaper as a powerful piece of software for editing audio. For $60, it offers similar features to a more expensive program like Pro Tools.
There's also GarageBand on the Mac or Audacity, which are both popular, and free, options for their respective platforms.
If do want to record more spontaneous and on-the-go types of podcasts, apps like Opinion or Spreaker Studio make using your phone as viable an option as anything else.
The trickiest part of podcasting is getting it out to people. The basic idea is that you record audio, put it on the Internet, and then have that audio linked to a podcast directory. The iTunes store is, of course, the largest and most popular place to find and manage podcast subscriptions. But iTunes doesn't actually store audio—it's just the largest single distributor for links to audio.
You'll need to find a place to keep the audio online. Be prepared to spend some money on hosting the audio files, but depending on how many shows you record and their length, hosting doesn't have to be expensive.
Libsyn is one of the more popular options with plans starting at $5 per month and going up from there. Simplecast is another service that costs $12 per month, but advertises the quickest and simplest option to get started. You can also upload your podcast to SoundCloud as an audio file, but that won't allow you to distribute it through RSS, iTunes, or other services, unless you're a member of the SoundCloud's podcast beta program; the company is currently accepting applications here.
Simplecast stats page
You can also host the podcast files yourself, of course, but it can get quite expensive if the show becomes popular. A separate hosting service is the best bet for those just getting started.
Once you have your podcast uploaded to the Internet, you'll need to create a feed that you can submit to the iTunes store or to other distribution channels. Again, this may be a reason to consider a podcast-focused host as they'll provide an iTunes compatible feed. The reason you might want to use a third-party service like FeedBurner to manage a master feed is so that if you do switch hosting providers, there's less likely to be an interruption getting the show out to listeners.
Apple lays out a few guidelines, including the size of album artwork, that you'll need to have in place. One advantage to hosting your podcast on a dedicated podcast service is that it standardizes the input of information needed for iTunes compatibility.
At that point you can also submit your podcast's RSS feed to other stores and directories like Stitcher Radio. Good shows will often get featured in the different directories (stores), but you can't count on that as a way to get people listening.
In promoting your show, figure out where your podcast topic fits and join forums to spread the word about your podcast. Places like Reddit have an area dedicated to almost every subject imaginable with people truly interested in finding new things. If you're show is worthwhile, this can be a good way for it to spread.
There are also apps and sites highlighting great podcasts like Podcast Gift, which focuses on business, design, and tech. Podcats is another one which surfaces new podcasts by letting users vote on their favorites.
Here are some miscellaneous tips and tricks that might be helpful whether you're new to podcasting or already know the ropes.
Jason Snell on being aware of your surroundings: "Curtains and bookshelves and other features that absorb or scatter sound can help. Record yourself in different rooms and find a place that reduces echo and ambient noise."
Marco Arment on improving the sound quality: "In your audio editor of choice, apply an EQ adjustment that rolls off the bass (and maybe some of the upper treble) and has a slight narrow reduction in or near the 1–2 kHz range, so it's almost shaped like a very short, wide 'm.'"
And Manoush Zomorodi's three main recording tips:
Be sure to leave plenty of space before you start/finish talking. It makes editing later easier.
Do write out your introductions and goodbyes. It's harder to riff on the fly than you think.
Listen to your favorite podcasts and think about what kind of pacing you like. Do you want listeners to move quickly or mellow out when they hear you?
The constant piece of advice a lot of these recently published posts from podcasters mention, is the importance of caring, really caring about what you're sharing with the world. Forget all the above for a moment: If you care about what you're recording and talking about and spend enough time on the details, you could have a veritable piece of Fresh Air on your hands—regardless of the gear.
Every young person you know is on Snapchat. Industry experts say the ephemeral social platform has around 100 million active users, most of which "are between the ages of 13 and 25," according to an August Business Insider Intelligence report. With more sex appeal than Facebook and Twitter, and a more intimate user experience than Instagram, Snapchat's little yellow tile has become the de rigueur communication choice of mobile-obsessed teens looking to instantly share life's minutiae with one another (which, according reports, users do as many as 400 million times a day).
Bob Kelly is an outspoken member of this cutting edge community, and he's one of its most innovative power users. He's also 77, which makes him old enough to be a grandfather to Evan Spiegel, the 24-year-old fratreprenuer who founded Snapchat in 2011 and serves as its requisite investor-friendly wunderkind CEO.
Bob KellyPhoto: Ryan Kelly
I first got wind of Snapchat Grandpa (as one of his grandchildren calls him) in mid-November, in an email from an old UVa friend named Courtney. Her neighbor Ryan Kelly used the messaging app—once stigmatized as little more than a digital switchboard for nude photos—to communicate with his paternal grandfather, who had suffered a stroke and didn't like to talk on the phone. They snapped back and forth so often, in fact, that Ryan was making a physical scrapbook documenting this whole 21st-century epistolary relationship, which he'd be presenting to his grandfather for Christmas. Did I want to meet him?
I did, for two reasons. First, because—at the risk of sounding like a colossal dweeb—I'm a Snapchat addict. Second, because it sounded like Bob was unwittingly charting his way through a billion-dollar design problem. (More on that later.)
A few days later, I shook hands with Ryan, 27, in a cozy back bar in Manhattan's Financial District. We had barely dispensed with "who-knows-who" pleasantries (disclosure: Ryan and I are both alumni of Virginia, though we'd never encountered each other before I began reporting this story) and finished our first round before his iPhone buzzed with a Snapchat push notification.
"See?" Ryan grinned widely, clearly pleased with the fortuitous timing. "Here's one right now." We leaned in, and sure enough, there was Bob peering back at us—spiky white hair, ruddy face, twinkling blue eyes, every inch a grandfather.
"He's my 'best friend' on Snapchat," Ryan said sheepishly, referring to the app's term for a user's most responsive contacts. We got another round and I had Ryan begin at the beginning.
Having suffered a stroke 13 years ago, Bob often found texting a challenge, and even before the stroke, "we'd always have to call my grandma, and my grandpa would never want to get on the phone," Ryan said. As his grandchildren grew up and moved beyond Westchester County, it became difficult to keep in touch. Anyone with relatives has experienced the particular frustration of trying to get ahold of loved ones with busy schedules, and the Kellys were no different. But Bob remained distant, carrying a flip phone only for emergencies and generally communicating with his grandchildren either through Jean, his wife of 53 years, or face-to-face when they gathered for brunch each Sunday at his modest Mount Vernon home.
The dynamic changed when smartphones arrived, though. "One of my aunts thought it would be funny to get [Bob & Jean] Samsung Galaxies" around March 2014, Ryan recalls. A short time later, one of the cousins got around to downloading Snapchat on Bob's new smartphone. It's not clear who made this initial move, or who taught Grandpa what—"We know he doesn't know how to use video, even though he might claim he does"—but "all of a sudden, we all just started getting these snaps from him."
With its super-simple interface, open-whenever messaging, and emphasis on visuals over text, Snapchat turned out to be the ideal solution to Bob's stringent communication needs. Now, "it's a requirement that [all the Kelly grandchildren] send him Snapchats" every day, Ryan explained with mock gravity. "He'll get on us if we don't, because he'll worry about us."
The grandkids snap Bob all sorts of things, ranging from affectionate "hellos" to photos and videos of them relaxing with friends or having a few drinks. The latter is the sort of content that's made Snapchat so popular. (Party pictures are basically the only thing my friends use Snapchat for.) Bob doesn't drink anymore, and his son Robert doesn't drink at all. Out of playful discretion for this fact, a joke has developed: When Ryan sends shots of himself putting one back, he calls the alcoholic beverages "milk."
"But what does he snap?" I asked, trying and failing to imagine the sort of quick-disappearing content a retired grandfather of nine might deem worthy of sharing. Ryan began scrolling through screencaps on his phone. (The app notifies users when recipients capture photos before they disappear, as a guard against a bad actor amassing compromising content without its originator's awareness. Obviously, this is not that.)
There was a photo of Bob and Jean holding dairy milk up in a mock-cheers response to Ryan's beer shot; here was a photo of an old printed family photo pulled from an album; there was a straight-on shot of Bob's face, cracked wide open with a smile. A selfie from a septuagenarian.
The interaction felt as natural as it would between a pair of teenagers. Which is impressive, when you think about how many people have devoted millions of dollars trying to build tech that addresses the problems of isolated seniors. Today, health care investors are increasingly focusing on mobile care for senior citizens, i.e., people who spend $300 billion a year on health care. Startups have already replaced the "I've fallen and I can't get up" pendant with an Apple Watch clone and are trying to use talking pet avatars to help isolated senior citizens avoid depression. It all falls under the umbrella of senior-oriented "telehealth," which will be an estimated $20 billion market by 2020.
But while telehealth businesses can outsource medical and social aid, they can't guarantee the captive attention of the grandchildren that put smiles on grandparents' faces. Snapchat is where the kids are by choice, and, at least in this case, it's easy enough to use that the elderly can be there, too.
There are no phones allowed at Bob Kelly's table. I'd been warned, but of course I'd forgotten as soon as I sat down. Scrolling absentmindedly through my emails, I felt his clear blue eyes fixed to the phone in my hand. Most of the Kellys were in the adjacent kitchen, preparing lunch. He grinned at me conspiratorially. "That's okay," he said with a judicious nod. "You didn't know yet."
Realizing that Bob wouldn't be much of an interview over the phone (he still hates talking on them), I'd tagged along with Ryan and his sister to Sunday brunch at their grandparents' house in Mount Vernon. Their home is nestled within a pleasant working-class burgh directly north of the Bronx's upper limit—just the type of place young people sometimes fly away from once they've spread their wings.
"We lost everybody," Bob said wistfully. "They used to be with us every Sunday. Now", he says, gesturing to the phone in his pocket, "we're with them all the time."
It's not much of an exaggeration: between "good mornings," midday check-ins, and "good nights" to his grandkids, Bob estimated he sends at least 40 snaps each day. "That's what's great about Snapchat, see? It's ding-ding-ding." Across the table, Jean elaborates. "You can't call the kids in the morning, you know? They're getting ready [for school, work, etc.], they're busy. With this, they don't have to pick up right at that time."
That's generally true. Snapchat is asynchronous—a snap can be opened minutes, hours, or even days after it is sent. But Bob's snaps have a shelf life. "He gets after us if we don't open them fast enough," Ryan told me. Bob will even go so far as to punitively cut off those who neglect his snaps. Jessica, another of Bob's grandchildren who was at brunch the day I visited, had suffered just such a fate for failing to view and respond swiftly enough. "It's my birthday this week, Grandpa!" she said, lobbying for reinstatement. He smiled like a Cheshire cat and glanced around the table, gently gloating at his upper hand.
"I think more old people should use it," Bob kept saying throughout the meal. "People who are stuck at home… they should tell you about [Snapchat] when you're down at the Verizon." Bob is still able to drive, but many of his peers are housebound, and he's familiar with the challenges of isolation.
I suggested he should teach a class for 65+ folks on how to use 2014's hottest app for teenagers. He shrugged noncommittally. "Those guys down at the [Elk's] Lodge," where Bob congregates with other same-aged members, "they're men. They're not interested. But when I talk to women about it, [framing it] as a way to keep in touch with your grandchildren, they love it."
After the food has been cleared away, Bob and I talked one-on-one, him showing me how he used Snapchat, me snapping photographs. The app isn't exactly intuitive, even for me at 26, but he knows its ins and outs pretty well. He knows how to set the timer to keep his photos on-screen longer, and copies himself on all his snaps to review after the fact. "See, that one I didn't do so good," he admitted, critiquing a selfie he'd just sent. When he receives snaps from the kids with text written in such a way that it falls over their faces, he gets mad. ("You gotta move the black bar!") Like any grandparent, Bob wants to see good pictures of his grandchildren.
Once Bob got the hang of Snapchat, and figured out how to use the Samsung's stylus for more touchscreen control, his attitude toward technology softened slightly. Used to be, all Kellys had to deposit their phones in a lockbox—literally, a box that snaps shut—at the door upon arrival so he could be sure no one was using them beneath the table. Nowadays, Bob will occasionally take his phone out during Sunday brunch to send a snap to the cousins that couldn't attend. When his grandkids call him on his hypocrisy, he'll grin, blue eyes flashing mischieviously. "I can break my own rules," he'll say.
And what of Ryan's "Snapchat Grandpa" photo album, a permanent old-media commemoration of their ephemeral virtual correspondence? The grandson says he is planning to unveil it on Christmas Eve, when the whole Kelly clan is gathered in Westchester for the holiday. "He will love it," Ryan texts me a few weeks after our visit to Mount Vernon, "and will probably be a bit bashful of some he sent that he didn't know I saved." In other words, Bob will learn (in the most heartwarming way possible) a lesson that so many young Snapchatters have figured out the hard way: Nothing you send is ever gone for good.
High school physics will tell you that if you pass a signal down a wire, by the time it gets to the end the signal will have degraded. The same is true with computers, which typically use copper wires as a way of connecting together internal components, or even entire computers in data centers. According to researchers at Stanford, roughly 80% of the power used by a computer is lost thanks to the use of these copper wires.
But there's a solution in sight.
New research by Stanford's Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab demonstrates how we may soon be able to use optics, rather than electricity, to send data, making computers more efficient, faster, and more reliable by orders of magnitude.
The lab designs, builds, and tests extremely small optical devices—usually just a few microns across, or even smaller—for applications including high-speed telecommunications and quantum computing.
The project described in a new paper details a groundbreaking prism-like device, able to split different wavelengths of light and control them to a degree that has never previously been possible. In doing so, the researchers hope to allow computers to run exponentially faster and more efficiently than they do today, for use in intensive applications like high-bandwidth image processing and video streaming.
"If you were able to change electrical connections to optical ones you would be able to reduce energy consumption dramatically, which would also allow you to increase the operating speed," says Jelena Vuckovic, professor of electrical engineering, who led the research.
The reason for this is that light can carry more data than wires can, and it takes less energy to transmit photons than it does to transmit electrons. Computer networks running on fiber-optic lines rely on this principle. Some have also proposed using light superfast optical Wi-Fi, called "LiFi."
"Energy consumption is really the biggest bottleneck in computing," Vuckovic continues. "As you increase the speed of processors, they heat up more. As a result there is a limit to just how fast they can operate. You see a related problem in data centers, which are consuming pretty much all the power they are producing from sources like hydroelectric power—and yet they continue to expand. We need to dramatically change the way we approach this problem."
As wires get smaller and signals are sent at higher frequencies, this problem only gets worse. At some point, there is a barrier which stops data being sent any faster because too much heat is created, ultimately risking damage to the processor.
Optical computing suggests this might not be a problem. While a copper wire can achieve data transfer at speeds of up to 20 gigabits per second, optically there is no limit to how fast this could take place.
This tiny prism made of silicon, etched in Jelena Vuckovic's lab at Stanford with a pattern that resembles a bar code, is designed by an algorithm to transmit information in light.
The prism-like device created by the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab is referred to as an "optical link." It is an incredibly thin silicon chip just eight microns long (eight millionths of a meter) and intricately patterned with nanoscale etchings that resemble a bar code.
Unlike the simple geometric patterns created by previous nanophotonics researchers, the complex pattern on the optical link isn't the result of human intuition. Instead, it is created by an algorithm, which reduces a time-consuming design process down to 15 minutes.
The algorithm was originally developed by Jesse Lu, a former student in the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab. It is based around the concept of convex optimization, a generic term covering a wide range of local optimization techniques. These include optimizing stock market portfolios in finance, optimizing wing profiles in aerospace design, routing optimization for Internet traffic, and designing large electrical circuits.
"The basic idea is to have an 'objective function,' which describes the 'fitness' of a particular system you are trying to optimize with a single number," explains Alex Piggott. "We want to minimize the value of this objective function, and once we have done so, we have found an optimal solution."
The optimization algorithm allowed the researchers to design and build the optical link to take advantage of the fact that as light travels through different materials, it is transmitted and reflected in different ways depending on the medium—e.g., air or silicon. At the start of the process, the algorithm uses a simple design that consists of only silicon. By having the researchers enter their desired output, the algorithm can then make hundreds of tiny adjustments to the prism's surface, with the aim of producing exactly the right output light.
For the current paper, the chips were then fabricated and tested to demonstrate that they would work.
Both 1300-nanometer light and 1550-nanometer light—corresponding to C-band and O-band wavelengths widely used in fiber optic networks—were beamed at the chip from above. The bar code-like surface redirected the C-band light one way and O-band light the other, directly from the chip.
The result is a step forward for optical computing, a field that is also being explored by giants like Intel and IBM. (A separate proposal for superfast optical Wi-Fi—LiFi—relies on the same property.)
Some are exploring more sophisticated, multiple wavelength connections. The Phoxtrot project in Europe is fostering work on guiding light waves and embedded micro-mirrors to solve corner-turning issues. Others have imagined combining photonic chips with a material like graphene—a form of carbon that comes in sheets just one atom thick—to make chips even faster and more efficient.
And others, including Google and Microsoft, are experimenting with using light inside processors—what's called quantum computing—a budding and contested field that promises even more dramatic improvements.
The applications for much faster data links within computers—for instance, in the large energy-intensive data centers of companies like Amazon and Facebook—are tantalizing.
"Looking to the future, there are sets of problems where computing can benefit from using fully optical components," Jelena Vuckovic says. "Image processing is one such area. Another is pattern recognition. Both of these can be carried out more efficiently by building optical computing systems, rather than using standard binary architecture. I believe that one day we will be able to do this fully optically."
Three building blocks are needed for this to happen.
The first is a method of converting electrical into optical signals, such as a laser, that can convert a stream of bits into a stream of optical pulses. The second component is a way of routing optical signals between different end points. The third component is a way of converting the optical signals back into electrical ones once they arrive at their destination. This can be achieved by way of a high speed photodetector.
Parts one and three of this work have previously been carried out by collaborators of the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab. Stanford's new algorithm is the last piece of the puzzle. With it, the team can make any type of optical connectors, routers, and hubs necessary to route a complex network of optical signals around the chip.
"Of course, we have to put all of these building blocks together and integrate with the processor platform, which we haven't done yet," says Vuckovic. "But I am optimistic that we should be able to do it within five years or so."
It won't speed up computers immediately, but true optical computing isn't light years away, either.
In the New Yorker, Margaret Talbot drew a line connecting this story and the Satanic Cult panic of the 1980s, which was also characterized by reporting victims stories without any kind of fact-checking. This case is different, in that I don't see how anyone could read this letter from the pseudonymous Jackie's freshman suite mate and conclude that nothing actually happened. Clearly something did. In Feministing, Maya Dusenbery explains how the story could be both true and also incorrect and why fact-checking is critical—not to knock down Jackie but to protect her from exactly what has happened here. Amanda Taubmakes much the same point in Vox. I don't really have a bland, vapid, unobjectionable kicker so let's just see what New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan found when she examined the mote in Rolling Stone's eye: "News is a tricky business, full of minefields." Yup, there you go.
While I was traversing New York covering the Eric Garner protests, I ran into Adrian Chen near the West Side Highway. He mentioned that he'd recently been in Ferguson and was a little nervous about how the thing he was writing would turn out.
Livestreaming isn't just popular: It also lies smack in the middle of the contradictions that accompany a highly politicized spectacle like Ferguson in the age of social media. It's protest as reality show, or maybe reality show as protest. It offers hours of unvarnished footage that seems more authentic than cable news, but livestreamers tend to be so closely linked to the movements they cover that they become protagonists in the story they tell. And to some of the livestreamers' dismay, their success at raising the profile of their issue attracts the very forces of Establishment media (with its attendant narrative-shaping and soundbite-seeking) whom they believe it's their mission to counteract.
The way we tell stories—to ourselves, to the world—is never objective. Everything is a matter of perspective. As we marched down the streets of the city, that was hard to forget.
~I said boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. It's a tab based love~
Today in Tabs is just like oh boy oh boy oh boy today. We're on FastCoLabs and in your email if you subscribe. Or in your friend's email to whom you are tired of trying to explain what the hell you're talking about all the time, if they subscribe! It's an idea. Follow @rustyk5 now that I have passed my arbitrary round number of followers and will no longer need to sacrifice any of you to The Old Ones.
Monrovia—Sometime soon a slender robot that looks like Casper the ghost and works like Skype on wheels may visit the bedside of an Ebola patient in West Africa, as a doctor nearby instantly transmits data to other researchers over a portable Wi-Fi network.
For now, the bot is traveling in a suitcase with Debbie Theobald, the CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Vecna Technology, who came to Liberia (where Ebola is still raging) in late November to help bring an Ebola treatment unit into the 21st—or 22nd—century.
VGo
Even Theobald doesn't seem quite sure of the bot's destiny in the clinics: "I must admit I am curious to see what other benefits the caregivers can see from a robot that can go and talk to patients without having to suit up in PPEs," or personal protection equipment, which can take about 20 minutes to put on.
The robot, along with new medical software hacked together from a system already in use in veterans hospitals in the U.S., is a vanguard of the technologies that are quietly being deployed in the next round of the Ebola fight.
The clinic is the first to be designed and built by the International Rescue Committee, and it doesn't look like many others here. Among the familiar tents, beds, orange fences, and people in plastic suits, providers will carry tablet computers that run on the new EMR system.
It took one month for Dr. Wilson Wang, IRC's Senior Clinical Advisor, and his team to modify an electronic medical record system (EMR) that was originally developed for use at U.S. Veterans Administration hospitals, and to integrate it with a self-contained wireless network called the CliniPAK, which is designed to run off of any power source.
The computers—waterproof Sony Xperia Z2 tablets—are meant to be destroyed at the end of the unit's life to protect patient data; the data itself would be anonymized before being distributed to other doctors on the network.
The original VA-based records software comes from Vecna's corporate arm, while the hardware is built by Vecna Cares, its charity arm. "You can literally plug [CliniPAK] in to solar or battery and launch an [EMR] system with the touch of one button. You don't need IT personnel, and it could run for days without maintenance," says Theobald.
These features would be crucial in situations where infrastructure is lacking, and where imported technologies carry with them the shortcoming that, without the expertise to operate them, gadgets often go unused. Other CliniPAKs are deployed in Kenya, but this is will be software's first run. (The IRC hopes to start treating patients with the new system in the middle of December.)
In the VA, the patient information exchange manages queues, orders, and data for thousands of users, and, not surprisingly, plays an important role in billing. But patients in Ebola clinics in west Africa are not billed, and (so far), they do not they file lawsuits for bad care.
Wang's team has retooled it to suit their, and the patient's, needs, streamlining the Ebola clinic in three ways. It manages staff shifts and patient information, it records clinical data and sends it to a cloud-based server for near real-time analysis anywhere, and it suggests treatments to health care workers.
"There was an opportunity to design electronic medical record [software] only for quality, to support the providers, and to make sure that the patients got the treatments that were needed," Wang says. "We call our system JEDI [Joint Electronic health and Decision support Interface]. It was a joke, but we're serious."
For a doctor or nurse who spends up to 90 minutes in a hot plastic suit and is treating a patient who is seizing, for example, the system is meant to serve as a helpful assistant. It would reference the patient's weight, advise phenobarbital at 20mg per kg, "and then give you the actual dose," Wang says, "So there's no guessing." And every step is recorded.
All of this may seem amazing given that it is being deployed for Ebola, a disease that, until this year, was treated far from cities, in unpredictable intervals and using relatively basic materials. Pre-outbreak, it was not a pressing global concern. Ask any infectious disease expert why Ebola didn't have a high-tech tool-kit like experimental treatments, vaccines, or even a data management system at the ready, and they will cite those obstacles.
But it is also late. At this point, the outbreak has been raging in three countries and threatening others for almost a year. It has surpassed the worst previous outbreak 40-fold; months have passed since the World Health Organization declared Ebola an international priority. The World Bank, the IMF, the U.S., and many countries have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into fighting it. And this is 2014, not 1976. Why is technology only catching up now?
Funding has helped. There are now enough funds to try throwing more than just tents and personal protective equipment at the virus. And many organizations are involved, some of whom are primed for innovation. For Debbie Theobald, using electronic medical records is an obvious step. "This is just best practice for how to set up a system," she says.
Another big factor in the clinic's upgrade: Responders are realizing the need for better treatment and data collection. Collecting data about how Ebola attacks a human body is notoriously difficult, for the simple reason that no material that enters a clinic can leave it, including paper.
"I've seen or heard stories of very creative ideas," says Theobald. "They yell across the barriers to people, they fill out all the forms and post them in a window for people to copy. These are not optimal solutions."
A study about this very problem was published in the journal Viruses in December 2013, just before the current outbreak exploded. The authors spoke with clinicians familiar with hemorrhagic fever clinics and asked about recording shortfalls. Despite more than 35 years of the disease, there were many. Low- and high-tech solutions were proposed, but it has taken months to implement the simplest of these in field clinics. Infrastructure, relationships with health ministries, and logistics remain real obstacles for Ebola responders. But, the study noted, new approaches could potentially do a lot of good.
The paper received mixed attention, in part because it was published when Ebola scientists and responders "go back to their day jobs," said one health information manager. But Wang, of the IRC, was inspired by the study. It helped that his team already knew about Vecna's software.
"Being able to enter [data] in the red zone and have it be available everywhere immediately, without the errors, is a huge operational and clinical benefit," says Theobald.
The data, says Wang, will be given to the Liberian Ministry of Health to aid in tracing the spread of the outbreak, while some of the other data will be anonymized and shared with the rest of the world. Knowing what specific Ebola treatments are being provided when and where, how many patients are in the unit, what their survival rates are, and where survivors go after they leave the clinic can help doctors and researchers better understand the current outbreak and future ones too.
Leaving data in the clinics and treating patients in a rush costs lives, in West Africa as in America. Saving people means treating them early, measuring their treatments, and offering them novel approaches, like the kind every American and European who has contracted Ebola has received.
EMRs declutter the process for a health worker in a clinic, but they also provide a platform to study new therapies like antibodies, blood serums, and regular daily care. Every patient treated can improve the outcomes for the next, provided their data is recorded. In the end, collecting and using medical data responsibly is a patient's right. That is why without the high-tech gear, clinicians sometimes shouted vital signs from inside the red zone.
Another promising sign for the future of the fight against disease: The gear is readily available. Over the last five years, billions of dollars have poured into high-tech firms locked in the accelerating race for e-health. Systems that streamline patient services became profitable thanks to subsidies in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, specifically HITECH, the health information technology part. The VA's interest in digital records has helped companies like Vecna; and that software can now be adapted to other, much smaller uses.
"If you come in with a full-blown EMR, it's terrible for training, setup, and maintenance," says Theobald. "We focused on having it be a lightweight, patient-centered medical record."
Other technologies that have not yet been immediately accepted in the U.S. have encountered a valuable testing opportunity in the fight against Ebola. VGo, which makes the telepresence robot, is one of them.
VGo's robot was created in Nashua, New Hampshire, and not for health care, but for industrial applications and busy people who needed to be in two places at once; it's been used by Audi and by Boeing, and was developed in part by Grinnell More, who used to run iRobot's Military Systems Division.
VGo is essentially video chat on wheels. Some elite hospitals use it and similar telepresence robots for in-hospital and long-term home care, sending it home with kids so they can connect with the doctor without traveling back to the clinic (this is also meant to save the doctor's time). Executives use it for remote appearances and consultants at Audi use it to deliver remote technical assistance.
Bern Terry, VGo's vice president of sales, said his team started thinking about the robot's potentials in an Ebola context when the virus reached Dallas, because—and this is crucial—VGo does not have to be touched to operate.
"Ebola has opened new opportunities, because people say, 'wow, we could use this'," he says. Selling for slightly less than $10,000, it's an expensive device. But Terry justifies this against the cost of every suit that needn't be thrown away just to enter a clinic. (Bloomberg puts a suit at $77, and there is also the danger avoided every time a suit is handled, which is harder to put a price tag on.)
Other robots have been proposed for fighting Ebola in West Africa, including one originally designed for space exploration, and Baxter, a workplace robot that could, some say, be used to help workers remove contaminated clothing.
After Monrovia, Debbie Theobald will take her VGo bot into the red zone of an Ebola treatment unit in Sierra Leone, where it will help her train health workers to use the EMR she is installing there next. (The local Wi-Fi network extends just a few hundred feet. The connection to the rest of the world is not available yet, but when it is, a doctor in New York or Atlanta could connect directly to a patient in Africa, VGo says.)
This process isn't easy. In the developing world and this part of Africa, new technology is treated with caution by the aid organizations that deploy it. Most foreign humanitarians try to anticipate how new technologies will be received and how robust they will continue to be once the team leaves. Unsurprisingly, Terry Bern is optimistic. "If it works, we're likely to send a lot of those over there."
Clearly, there is demand. The first VGo was sent only to help Theobald train staff to work the EMR software, not to see patients; it will travel with Theobald to assist with her next installation in Sierra Leone. The bot has piqued interest however: another VGo is being sent to the IRC clinic in Monrovia, with the aim to try it in a live patient context.
Theobald says using the robot would be a learning experience for Vecna when approaching various future robot-appropriate scenarios. "Originally it was for training purposes, to be with the doctors and nurses," she said, "but I hope that people will feel more comfortable with this technology and think of other uses for it to proliferate."
And if and when a robot does roll up to a sick patient, in a place with limited internet penetration, few smart devices, intermittent power connection, and no other robots to speak of, a place that has suffered terribly while the international community has mobilized, a place where clinics are alternately feared and respected, a place where health care workers have poured sweat and lost lives to serve; when the robot, gleaming of American ability and techno-optimism, broadcasts a human face to a sick person in a bed, that will be a very interesting first.
Colin Baker is a writer, radio and video producer based in west Africa. You may find more of his work at colincbaker.com.
A few years ago, Stuart Mitchell's job would have been impossible.
The product director at edu-tech startup Verso needed to build a sophisticated "flipped classroom" app that would work in the browser and across gadgets like iPads, iPhones, and Android devices. It would need to be laser-fast, cross-generationally intuitive, and capable of scaling to many users without a hiccup. Crucially, it needed to update in real time, like the apps we're familiar with—and whose creation is made to look so easy by the likes of Facebook and Google.
But Verso is not Google. This three-person startup needed to slap together a highly functional, cross-platform app in just a few months, a task that would normally require several more people and a collective proficiency in about a dozen technologies. Then Meteor came along.
For the uninitiated, Meteor is a free, open source framework that lets developers quickly build complex apps for a variety of platforms—the web, iOS, Android—right in the browser, using only JavaScript. Their mantra is something others have long tried to achieve: one codebase, many platforms. And as a bragworthy corollary to that, with way less technical overhead.
It's relatively young, but Meteor is already making quite a splash among developers. A hit on Hacker News when it was launched in beta in 2012, and since backed by an $11.5 million series A investment led by Andreesen Horowitz, the San Francisco-based company that oversees Meteor's development just pushed out version 1.0 at the beginning of October. Meteor's ambitions could hardly be, well, more meteoric, even if it's only just reaching 1.0.
"Given that we started development of Verso back in May 2013, choosing Meteor was a bit of a gamble," says Mitchell. "Back then it was at about version 0.5!"
So why roll the dice on a new, unproven technology? For Mitchell, Meteor had a few key benefits: Meteor is open source, which he preferred. When building an app for use in an educational setting (and thus by a wide range of people), cross-device support is a must. Check. And since the user base for such an app can balloon pretty quickly, it needed to be built with something that scales easily. Check.
But to Mitchell, like so many others eyeing up Meteor for their projects, one of the biggest perks was the simplicity of its code.
"Having managed large web app teams over the past 15 years I've been frustrated where the database, functional code, and front end are in different development languages," says Mitchell. "In my experience it leads to differences in thinking and communication issues between the different team members."
With little in the way of direct competition—DerbyJS is another full-stack app development framework built on Node.js, but with smaller adoption—Meteor was a no-brainer choice for the project.
The end result is a fast, cleanly designed education app that lets students learn and interact with teachers in a new way regardless of which device each of them is using. Teachers push prompts and related multimedia to students, who then send their responses back through the app. Students can also communicate among themselves. All of this happens in real time and the students' progress can be evaluated from a high level using a separate app called Verso Campus, complete with data visualizations. It all works on Android phones and tablets, iPads, iPhones, iPads and any modern web browser.
"That's just not possible otherwise," says Meteor founder Matt DeBargalis, referring to the Verso project. "If you proposed building something like that in the traditional way, the fact of the matter is that it wouldn't get built."
Indeed, coding this type of functionality in a way that works across devices would normally require a huge budget and a team of developers with a range of skill sets. "That's nuts," says DeBargalis.
He would know. In 2011, DeBargalis and his then-cohorts were toiling away at an app of their own as members of that summer's batch of startups at Y Combinator. But their idea—a real-time travel companion that was sure to disrupt the way people explore new places—turned out to be an epic pain in the ass to build, technically speaking. By 2011, the web had evolved from a series of static, linked documents into sleek-feeling, live-updating, collaborative slivers of software. But while coding this type of thing was a breeze for the tech giants, smaller upstarts struggled.
Meteor founder Matt DeBargalis. Via Meteor
"We looked around the room at Y Combinator and realized every single other team was having the same problem," says DeBargalis. "You've got all these teams of good developers, but they're still stuck."
The technical knowledge required to build a truly modern app isn't, in and of itself, a barrier for somebody with enough time, money, or both. But when you factor in the need to deliver a product to whatever device a person happens to be using, things get drastically more complicated. And the problem goes well beyond startups.
"Every CIO has a wish list of 100 apps they want and they have a budget for 10," says DeBargalis. "Every company needs a lot more software. And the biggest limit in doing this is the talent. Because today to write that software you need A+ talent."
To meet the bare minimum requirements for cross-platform support—let's say iOS, Android, and the good old fashioned web—one needs to find a front-end expert well versed in CSS and all the latest scripting frameworks, a backend expert, and one developer for each of the two dominant mobile platforms.
All told, you need a team of people well versed in 10 or 12 different cutting-edge technologies just to get something off the ground. "That puts a real drain on productivity," says DeBargalis. "It limits how much good software people can write."
At the intersection of these all-too-common developer frustrations, Meteor was born. The framework has the very high-minded goal of streamlining front-end, back-end, and mobile development onto an open source platform that requires knowledge of only a single language: JavaScript.
"JavaScript, oddly enough, as exciting and as popular as it is, doesn't have a standard platform," says DeBargalis. "It's very fragmented."
He points to different camps of developers focused on JavaScript in the cloud (Node.js, for example), on iPhones (PhoneGap) and the browser (Angular, Backbone, and Ember, to name a few). The list of various JavaScript frameworks and libraries could seemingly go on forever. "They're all totally separate," says DeBargalis. "They don't actually have a lot to do with each other."
For developers, this means coding lots of individual components to a given piece of software and then finding ways to glue it all together and keep it maintained.
"As it turns out, the glue is substantial," says DeBargalis. "You end up writing a lot of glue and now it's something that you're forced as a company or a developer to maintain yourself."
Meteor is easily the best-known project to employ what's known as "isomorphic JavaScript"—that is, apps that blur the line between the front and back ends and thus introduce all kinds of advantages in terms of optimization, simplicity, and keeping things maintained.
"The idea is basically that the APIs that you use should be exactly the same whether you're talking about code running inside the phone, or inside the browser, or in the cloud," says DeBargalis. "If you can unify all those APIs, it becomes much faster to write code because you're not constantly switching gears in your mind."
Meteor's primary way of doing this is through the use of packages. These thousands of community-developed, functionality-specific bits of code are what make up the modular guts of Meteor. They're built to translate their intended functionality across whatever platform the end user is on. The camera package, for example, knows how to behave when running in a native iPhone app (take a photo with the hardware's camera and whatever camera software tools are available through that SDK), as opposed to working in the browser (use the HTML5 APIs that let you access the camera on the desktop).
This being an open source project, the vast majority of these packages are coded by developers out in the wild. At Meteor headquarters, they see their job as spot-checking things, managing official releases, and maintaining the larger community.
"It's really about creating an ecosystem where people can write code that works everywhere," says DeBargalis. "And a small team here at Meteor can ensure that the key pieces of that story are all tested together so that developers have a very smooth experience with it."
Hyped as it may be, Meteor isn't for everybody. For one thing, it's a full-stack framework and third-party compatibility is an ongoing effort, so for developers already immersed in the multi-flavored stack of their choice, Meteor is not the kind of thing that can be easily jammed into an existing environment.
Some developers have criticized Meteor as something that's best equipped to handle smaller projects and "prototypes." While the latter jab is a bit of an exaggeration, it's true that any project this young is going to inevitably come with a list of limitations. (Venture-funded, the company has yet to demonstrate a steady revenue stream, though it plans, among other things, to offer a cloud hosting service specifically tailored for Meteor apps.)
For now, the Meteor team is plowing forward with its technical road map (which is public, naturally) and prioritizing the various requests that pour in from the community. Meteor for Windows is a big one. And until the framework moves beyond MongDB for its database layer, some devs are going to be turned off.
But most of all, in DeBargalis's eyes, the organization's biggest role to play is as the leader of what he idealistically calls "a movement." Part of that is nurturing the community and ensuring that curious developers feel comfortable joining it.
"If I pick Meteor, I'm making a big professional commitment," DeBargalis says. "I want to know that I'm going to like the people. That they're going to like me. I want to know that there are jobs, there are professional opportunities."
Some Meteor developers, he points out, have built businesses not just on top of the framework itself, but on their own reputation within the Meteor community.
"The guys who wrote that router? They give conference talks on it," he says. The same developers have amassed enough credibility to get work consulting and training others on Meteor, he says. "I think a lot of developers see that and they're attracted to being able to do that."
The developers behind Meteor, which is only a month and a half past its 1.0 release, and the company overseeing it have their work cut out if they're to come anywhere close to reaching the ambitious goals they've set for themselves. Rightly so or not, DeBargalis seems confident.
"What we're left with is the fundamental question of whether or not people are going to want to keep building software out of parts," he says. "The promise here is that if we can all settle on a consistent, open source standard, then everybody is better off."
After achieving App Store success with the best-selling Camera+ app a couple of years ago, Lisa Bettany woke up to an app market that was saturated with photo apps. She and her team's next photo app failed to reach Camera+'s popularity, and she started to grow weary of the big tech scene. So she moved back to her hometown in Canada to regroup. The result? She now heads up her own company, focusing on creative apps for girls.
"It's been a crazy three years in the App Store. It's really changed," she says. "There was an opening in the market for something like this. Whereas in the photo category, everyone has an app with filters that interfaces to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram."
App designers are starting to realize kids and girls, in particular, want to play with apps on their own mobile devices. But most of the available apps for girls focus on shopping or style.
Bettany knows this. After three years in the making, her new company, CakeBytes Creative Inc., has launched its very first app, an arcade adventure game for girls.
Called Poppets, the app game stars lovable animal characters that have to navigate through increasingly difficult scenarios while collecting as many tokens as possible. Realizing that girls-only apps were missing a gaming element, Bettany and her team created a fantastical world that would draw young female gamers in.
"You can challenge the stereotypical role of these apps in young girls' lives," Bettany says. App developers don't need to follow a specific formula to develop interesting content for girls, and these girls don't need to see themselves in apps as pretty princesses and play dress-up. Bettany mentions GoldieBlox, the engineering-minded toy and book series geared toward girls, and says she wanted the experience of playing the app and learning about the characters to teach girls they could do anything, reach any level.
But the 99-cent game isn't designed to contain all that the Poppets' world has to offer. Bettany hopes to carry the app's story into offline territory, eventually telling her characters' stories through children's books and toys.
"[The Poppets] are all really misfits. They don't really belong anywhere except for this small, little world that they live in," Bettany says. "Apart, they're all very different, but they're stronger together."
The merchandise doesn't seem too far behind. Bettany got the idea for Poppets when she found the doll version of the characters on Etsy. Out of sheer coincidence, the shop's owner turned out to be her childhood ice skating buddy, Sarah MacNeill. They reconnected, and MacNeill is now in charge of design at CakeBytes.
Falling back into a familiar setting didn't make the entrepreneurial path clean-cut. Even with Camera+ under her belt, she found herself with another blank slate when she set out to create a game.
"I had to go and figure out what you need in a game to get people interested," says Bettany. She studied the philosophy of games, figuring out what elements specifically drive players to continue playing. Eventually, Poppets evolved into a 42-level game that challenges the players' motor skills with gyroscopic tilt controls.
A flying Poppet
Bettany cites GoldieBlox as a source of inspiration in her new market, noting there's a lot of room to be creative in the tech world when designing for girls. If GoldieBlox could do it in the toy world, then CakeBytes could do it in the app space. Earlier this year, GoldieBlox came out with a companion app and website to its already existing physical toy and storybook. And Bettany sees a similar expansion with Poppets.
"I mean, [GoldieBlox] had their own Thanksgiving float, didn't they? And they did that in two years," she says.
Seeing so many techie women in founder and CEO roles in the last couple of years has given Bettany the confidence to call the shots in her new venture, even given the expectations that come with having already created a hit app. Reinventing herself after Camera+ has been daunting, but her can-do ethos has carried her this far. And with her new app, she's also inspiring girls to step outside the box.
"It's an exciting departure from Camera+ for me," Bettany says.
Nobody needs another "Best Apps of 2014" list. Instead of telling readers what our favorite apps and games are, we took that list and then asked the developers of those apps to tell us their thoughts. We wanted to know: Of the new apps you saw this year, which did you wish that you'd developed?
Greg Pierce of Agile Tortoise
Greg's app we love:Drafts 4 The app Greg wishes he'd thought of:Transmit
Transmit
Why?
"Transmit was the first app to showcase the possibilities of iOS 8's new document picker extensions to provide an incredible amount of utility from an app you might never directly launch. Not everyone needs to upload and download files from FTP, S3, and WebDAV servers—but for those that do, iOS was not a happy place to be prior to Transmit. Transmit nailed the experience, integrating into iOS 8's share sheets and new document pickers.
I've worked hard to improve interoperability of iOS apps in my own apps, and it was great to install Transmit and find that just installing another app made my app better and more useful without me having to write a line of code."
"It's a great app (and free!) that allows you to track your calories and other fitness milestones. The app is well designed and provides a great native iOS experience. Plus, they have been wonderful with providing timely updates and supporting the latest iOS technologies. The app also integrates with wearables and fitness trackers, so it's a great fitness ecosystem partner."
"I'm a big fan of the 'Sentence' feature in Beats Music. I was making French toast one Sunday morning and it kicked off with Waylon Jennings' 'I'm A Ramblin' Man.' I would have never thought of that myself but it was somehow perfect for that moment."
Chris Laurel, cofounder of Fifth Star Labs
Nick's app we love:Sky Guide The app Chris wishes he'd thought of:Threes
Threes
Why?
"We're not a game developer, but if we were, I wish we would have invented Threes. It has the most original puzzle game mechanic I've seen in years and an ideal difficulty ramp that keeps me coming back to top my old best score."
"I am usually not much of a gamer, but Monument Valley caught my eye, first and foremost for the level of details that went into it. Games out there are often heavy on graphics whereas the designers from Monument Valley kept it very clean and simple. They take you through a delightful journey for a mind-bending experience.
I really admire the hard work that clearly went into that game. The balanced combination of sound and visuals were a revelation to me. It really emphasizes the power of great sound design and inspired me to explore sound in relationship to my work."
"It proves games can be elegant, quiet, evocative, and mysterious—both tasteful and smart. The virtual architecture and the storytelling flow seamlessly. Everything from the opening screen to the final animation is pitch perfect. Playing the game makes you feel clever as you progress level by level. And yet, the game isn't too hard; it's like a perfect dream.
The Escher-inspired virtual architecture in this app is breathtaking. We were struck with equal parts admiration and jealousy."
"Desert Golfing at first appears to be a very rudimentary golf simulator—just drag your finger across the screen to hit the golf ball at the desired angle. When you get the ball into the hole, the screen pans right to reveal the next hole. The holes do not stop at 18, or 100, or 1,000, but keep increasing, each one a unique course.
The feature that makes this game genius is actually the absence of a feature—the ability to go back. You cannot return to previous holes to try for a better score, and there is no way to restart the game. You can only progress to the next hole. You are forced to accept the events of the past, and try to learn from your mistakes as you move forward."
Two San Francisco residents are now suing Comcast for suffering from, among other things, "decreased, inadequate speeds on their home Wi-Fi network." Though plausible, the suit wasn't over any of the problems that people tend to bring up around Comcast, but because the cable company has been, with little notice, been using its customers' home Wi-Fi routers to extend its pay-as-you-go "public" Internet service.
Toyer Grear and Joycelyn Harris claim in a class-action lawsuit filed last week in California, that Comcast is violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by exploiting customers for profit, using their electricity to help power the company's giant network—it can often be seen listed as "xfinitywifi" or "CableWiFi"—and never asking for permission in the process.
The little-publicized program rests on the modem/router boxes that Comcast rents to its customers. These gateways house two separate antennas, one of which the customer can use while the other is reserved for the "Xfinity Wi-Fi" signal, an option that pops up increasingly often on lists of nearby Wi-Fi networks.
"Without authorization to do so, Comcast uses the wireless routers it supplies to its customers to generate additional, public Wi-Fi networks for its own benefit," the complaint says.
In 2013, Comcast announced its vision for stretching its network by turning customers' routers into public hotspots with the SSID "Xfinitywifi," allowing Comcast customers the ability to access hotspots by entering their account credentials into a website, or the public to access them for a fee. The company quietly started rolling the program out in Texas and Washington earlier this year before spreading it to more cities, with the goal of 8 million hotspots by the end of the year. Comcast has 21 million customers in the U.S., and says that over 200 million have connected to the Internet through the Xfinity network so far this year.
A map of Xfinity "public" hotspots as seen in the Xfinity Wi-Fi app. Image via Comcast
Issuing a statement at the time, Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas said that there shouldn't be any conflict between the two networks, and "The last thing we want to allow is to create a bad user experience."
While security may not be the main concern—unless an exploit is discovered—there are still some potential concerns for customers, including the increased electricity from more constant Internet usage, what the suit alleges is as much as a 30-40% higher electricity cost for the modem.
"If a consumer uses a Comcast-supplied wireless router that enables an Xfinity Wi-Fi Hotspot, he or she can expect an additional $20-30 in electricity costs annually if no one uses the hotspot," the suit alleges. It asks for unspecified damages and an injunction that would stop Comcast from using home wireless routers for its hotspot network.
Around the time of Comcast's initial announcement, Speedify, a company that analyzes Internet connections, tested Comcast's equipment to determine its electricity consumption compared to standard equipment. "Based on our tests," the company stated on its website, "we expect that by the time they roll it out to all of their subscribers, Comcast will be pushing tens of millions of dollars per month of the electricity bills needed to run their nationwide public Wi-Fi network onto consumers." Comcast asked the company to re-do the tests on a newer version of the router and the results, Speedify said, were even worse.
Comcast, which has brought in $8.4 billion in revenue from high-speed internet so far this year, has recently sought to burnish its reputation with a raft of customer service improvements. Of the 200 or so companies rated in this year's American Customer Satisfaction Index, only United Airlines and Time Warner Cable drew lower ratings for their services than Comcast did. In the last three years, there were 31,980 complaints lodged against Comcast with the Better Business Bureau, compared to just 22,332 against AT&T—a company with three times as many customers.
As Daniel Kline wrote for the Motley Fool: "Very few companies are brazen enough to sell customers a service then piggyback its own product on top of it. But Comcast has not become one of the more disliked companies in the country by always playing nice."
Comcast has defended the hotspots, explaining that they consume minimal extra power and do not pose security risks because they are walled off as a separate IP address. The company acknowledges that, as the suit contends, neighborhoods with many routers broadcasting many signals can result in interference and impact the speed of connections. But Comcast calls this "minimal" and that it designed the system "to support robust usage."
Comcast also offered a general response to the lawsuit today, saying, "we disagree with the allegations in this lawsuit and believe our Xfinity Wi-Fi home hotspot program provides real benefits to our customers. We provide information to our customers about the service and how they can easily turn off the public Wi-Fi hotspot if they wish."
From a Reddit thread.
If you are affected, you can switch off the public Wi-Fi service by accessing the gateway's settings or calling Comcast directly. A Reddit forum on the issue includes one common complaint: Many are having trouble successfully turning the "feature" off.
We encourage all subscribers to keep this feature enabled as it allows more people to enjoy the benefits of XFINITY WiFi, but you will always have the ability to disable the XFINITY WiFi feature on your Wireless Gateway. Visit My Account at https://customer.comcast.com/, click on "Users & Preferences" and then select "Manage XFINITY WiFi" or call 1-800-XFINITY.
To disable the XFINITY modem/router's DHCP/Router/WiFI settings, plug a computer into port 1 via ethernet cable. Open a web browser and navigate to 10.0.0.1, log in with the username 'admin' and password 'password'. From here you can navigate to the advanced settings. Locate the function BRIDGE MODE and enable it. Save the settings.
Back in June, after rolling out to 3 million homes, CNN reported that fewer than 1% of customers had turned off the feature.
A growing wave of apps is hoping to really get you.
While the tech industry is often seen as more interested in engineering than emotions, some designers are aspiring to engender a more affecting user experience, and build tools for us to develop our own emotional intelligence.
One example of tech's shift toward battling angst instead of obsessing over analytics is Emojiary, a new app that encourages you to journal daily using only emojis—by a company that embraces a feeling-based approach to design.
"There's an interesting emerging trend around how to track your behavior, usually around physical activity," explains Albert Lee, the founder and managing partner of the New York-based product studio All Tomorrows. Emojiary, Lee suggests, is more like a smartwatch but for your feelings.
In an era of social media and the quantified self, mood tracking is on the rise. There are a handful of smartphone apps designed to track your feelings, whether by asking you to input data (like MoodScope) or gathering data passively, about where you may be or the content of your Facebook posts (like Moodit). (According to one project at Rice University and Microsoft Research, app use and phone calls correlate with better moods). Affectiva, an emotion-analysis app developed at MIT that uses facial recognition to detect mood, has already been used by advertisers and marketers and may soon land on your phone. Some "mindfulness" apps, like Melon or Muse, rely on EEG-sensing headbands to monitor and track your brainwave patterns.
And already, the largest web companies are gathering data around user emotions and designing for it. Spotify can correlate a user's mood with the kind of music they listen to, while Facebook is able to read the emotional content of users' news feeds and tweak them accordingly, as its controversial study this year demonstrated.
Not all emotionally designed apps are about emotions per se, the way they are in Emojiary. There's also a larger trend of designers taking into account emotional context as a baked-in feature of a product's design.
Aarron Walter, the director of user experience at MailChimp, told me that his own approach to designing at MailChimp sought to address one of the most enormous stresses of the web: the feeling you get at that particular moment when you're about to press send on a giant email campaign. In the past, he explains, "designers have just been shooting for making a usable product and not creating an emotional experience."
That's not enough, Walter says: "Designers shooting for useful is like a chef shooting for edible."
And considering the competitive landscape out there, apps must go beyond usability and functionality and strive to create a compelling emotional experience.
Aarron Walter
In his 2011 book Designing for Emotion, Walter explains what he means by emotional design: design with personality that encourages empathy and a sense of connection with a human. To achieve this warmer sensibility, he suggests using cute mascots, personal idiosyncrasies, and favors layouts that use the golden ratio rather than grid-like structures.
All Tomorrows is also designing with emotions in mind, and pays a similar, holistic attention to user experience. Lee, who has a background in design and architecture—he's worked at 2X4 and Ideo—says that at every step his studio aims to avoid stress and uncertainty and encourage engagement in their apps, and these principles inform their UX design process as well.
That design begins in the first moments of the app, in an onboarding process that aims to give the user a sense of a journey. "All spaces are experiences that have a set of flows embedded with them," Lee says. That flow, he says, is something to be considered in app design as much as it is in IRL space.
In designing their app to take into account the user's emotional context, All Tomorrows is focused explicitly on a more internal and ethereal journey, in which the user gets in touch with their emotions. Lee noted that an impetus for the app was that a growing numbers of people report feeling unhappy. In both form and content, the app's emotional design is about supporting the user.
Image via All Tomorrows
For Emojiary, this means encouraging users to reflect on how they're feeling. In their qualitative research, which involved a lot of listening, talking to people in their living rooms and at their kitchen tables and hearing their stories, Lee and his team found that even this simple exercise made people feel guilty. "We heard that emotions were perceived as self-indulgent," said Lee. "People would say, 'Me spending time thinking about what I'm feeling, that just seems so luxurious.'"
In a culture that too often privileges analyzing Pew studies over blue feelings, and numbers to the point of numbness, emojis have emerged as a kind of pictorial protest. From Emoji-only chat apps and social networks to the bootleg Emoji Beyonce "Drunk In Love" music videos, it's clear these 2.0-era hieroglyphics strike a chord with people, and according to a New York magazine's reporter's anecdotal research, they're popular not just among teens and tweens, but moms and dads too. They give us the nuances we have in IRL communication with body language that are often lost in text-only talk.
Lee noted that during beta testing and surveys, users found traditional journaling much more daunting than expressing themselves with emojis. (Britain's National Health Service recently began promoting similar, emotion-recording apps .) It makes sense that for the emotionally- stunted or shamed—and for most modern humans, really—smiley faces and cartoons of shrimp tempura can sometimes seem like an easier way to engage with complex feelings than translating them into words.
Albert Lee of All Tomorrows
Historically, a culture of self-reflection has been restricted to a certain class. "Therapy's extremely expensive," notes Lee. And although Emojiary is not a clinical tool, it can be a helpful habit. And thanks to a small group of angel investors, Emojiary doesn't cost a cent. "Technology gives us the ability to provide tools that are supportive to as broad a population as possible," says Lee.
Free downloads aside, the end goal of a lot of emotional design is still profit. For all the warm fuzzy feels, it can still make you cold hard cash. Walter points to Apple as the best illustration of a company that's been wildly successful with its designs that are very human and encourage users to see themselves in their products. The pulsing light on their laptops and desktops, for example, is designed to mimic the breathing rate of an average human at rest.
"I feel like there's a great opportunity for designers right now to think about the emotional context and design something that makes the user feel like they are interacting with a human on the other end," says Walter, "and not just a computer."
The more worldly benefits of using emotional design can feel really good. "There are a number of companies that are doing that really well and they reap the benefits," he adds, not needing to name names. "They make a shit-ton of money."
When someone hears the term "health wearables" they most often think of devices like the Jawbone Up or the Misfit Flash that help users track their steps taken and calories burned. But an increasing number of startups are turning away from the consumer fitness sector to focus on wearable technology that could literally save lives.
One such startup is BioSerenity, which last week won the first annual iiAwards, an extension of the prestigious Grands Prix de l'innovation awarded by the City of Paris. The focus of the iiAwards is to recognize an outstanding startup that is developing technology that could have a truly meaningful impact on people's lives.
BioSerenity's winning product is the WEMU, a biosensor-laden wearable that uses the power of big data to diagnose and treat one of the least understood diseases—epilepsy. I spoke with BioSerenity's CEO, Pierre-Yves Frouin—an engineer with a background in the pharmaceutical and health diagnostics field—to find out about the device and see just how big of a change wearables could make to patients' lives in the future.
Epilepsy is neurological disorder that causes the sufferer to experience frequent seizures. While there is still much that is unknown about the disease it is known that the phenomena causing frequent seizures is due to "excessive electrical discharges" in varying groups of brain cells, according to the World Health Organization. Epilepsy is a widespread disease affecting 1 in every 26 people in the world, according to The Epilepsy Foundation. Thankfully, over 70% of people with the disease will respond to treatment.
But getting to the point where a patient gets treatment is a major barrier. That's because though epilepsy affects so many it's a notoriously difficult disease to diagnose.
"Epilepsy is a disease that affects 50 million people around the world," says Frouin. "In order to fully diagnose patients doctors need to record a seizure. With current systems this is very difficult since they are expensive, availability is limited, and you need to bring the patient to the hospital."
The WEMU system.
But even if you do bring a patient to the hospital, seizures never happen on schedule. They could occur hours or even days apart. This makes it incredibly hard for traditional diagnostic equipment to record the specific activity that is going on in a patient's brain during a seizure. It's random chance if a seizure occurs while the patient is hooked up to diagnostic equipment. And without the reading of the patient's electrical activity in the brain during a seizure the doctors won't have the information they need to diagnose the specific type of epileptic disorder the patient has.
That's where BioSerenity's Wearable Epilepsy Monitoring Unit (WEMU) comes in.
"With the WEMU patients can be recorded at home and the chance of recording increases significantly," says Frouin. "This should allow patients to be diagnosed much more quickly and then receive the right treatment, which is critical to help patients live a healthy life."
The WEMU is a system made up of three parts that work together to untether the patient from a hospital's diagnostic equipment. The first part is a shirt and optional cap that is laden with biosensors that record the patient's physiological characteristics. These characteristics are transferred from the wearable to the patient's smartphone app via Bluetooth.
The app then does the heavy lifting, processing the patient's physiological characteristics. Its algorithms are designed not only to identify a seizure, but to warn of a possible upcoming seizure and alert the patient and their caretakers. The data the app processes also negates the need to go into a hospital to be hooked up to traditional diagnostic machines. The information the WEMU collects can then be shown to a doctor, who can make a diagnosis.
WEMU in use at home.
But the WEMU doesn't just stop at acting as a warning and diagnostic tool for individual patients. The third leg of its stool is big data. After the WEMU app records seizure activity, it anonymizes it and uploads it to the cloud, where that data can be used by researchers in the field who can study it to learn more about the disease. This allows the WEMU to not just help individual patients, but potentially all of them.
"Epilepsy is not one, but several disorders combined, and there is still a lot to learn," says Frouin, who worked for Johnson & Johnson's medical diagnostics division before launching BioSerenity. "The problem was that too few patients were recorded having seizures. By increasing the number of patients recorded before, during, and after seizures, a lot will be learned and the mechanisms of evolution of the disease should be better understood. Big-data tools are also giving researchers a complete new way of structuring the search for patterns."
While the WEMU is meant to be used at home and in conjunction with a person's smartphone, it is not a consumer health device in the way that most fitness wearables are. It is a certified medical device that will be made available to doctors who then prescribe it to their patients. And yet, while the WEMU is very advanced by traditional health wearable standards, it probably wouldn't be financially viable if those simpler heath tech devices didn't come before it.
"We use smartphone applications, a medical cloud system, and electronic sensors," says Frouin. "A lot of that technology did not exist a few years ago or was too expensive."
But thanks to advances on the consumer front, startups like Frouin's can take medical wearables further. As for what Frouin thinks the future holds for smart technology helping to improve our lives?
"I believe there is a lot of innovation to come by cross-matching different sectors and bringing together people from different industries or from different areas of expertise," he says.
"In the wearables area, there is still a lot to do. We have decided to focus on medical innovation, but some other people might want to focus on fashion or video games. As long as innovation is done for the good and happiness of people I try to keep a positive attitude toward all sectors."
Still, Frouin warns users to always verify the health claims of smart wearables and other health tech devices.
"In the wellness area, sometimes the science behind the claims is lacking, but in the medical domain claims have to be substantiated and regulatory guidelines are strict, so in order to be successful you have to be impactful. That said, I believe doctors, patients, and customers should try to do their own fact checking as often as possible."
As for what applications Frouin would like BioSerenity to focus on next, he won't say. But he's glad he started with epilepsy, because the experience has been very rewarding.
"Working on understanding the brain is fascinating and there was a lot of support from doctors pushing us to work on epilepsy," he says. "Once we started we realized that there was a lot to do in that field to improve patients' lives. We receive support messages from patients or parents almost every week so it keeps our motivation very high."
Roland Osbone is a cofounder of Olark, which helps e-commerce businesses chat with their customers. But before he became a software entrepreneur, Osborne had a very different kind of passion. Osborne grew up in New Hampshire, in an old house that had "an accumulation of hardware and wood and raw materials from the 10 previous owners." When Osborne was about eight, he recalls, he gathered together a bunch of such raw materials and cobbled together a model of the shrink ray from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
Roland Osbone
"I even took a Cheerios box and burnt a hole and blackened some cheerios to convince people it was working in some capacity," he says. "I just had this desire to create things. It was very primal."
Making remained a hobby through high school—building remote control cars, jury-rigging submarines out of two-liter soda bottles and propellers—but by the time college ended, "I was honestly doing less," recalls Osborne. His world, like so many others' today, had become increasingly virtual. Years passed. He fell into the world of software startups, and making faded from his life. In 2007, he and some friends began Olark as a side project; in 2009 they incorporated, and the company soon began to grow and occupy more and more of his time.
This was a happy outcome, of course—any founder wants his or her company to grow. But as Olark became more and more successful, that success drove Osborne back to his maker roots. "When I started working with more and more people, the part of me that's an artist—that desires to control the process—came back a bit," he recalls. "I couldn't suppress that part of me that needed to take something straight out of my brain and put it into the world." It started small: in 2009, he got a carving tool and began making wooden bowls. The next year, he designed a "chicken tractor," a kind of mobile chicken coop. He was deeply proud of his open and airy design, which he thought was perfect—alas, the chickens themselves were less than enthused, feeling vulnerable to predators.
Meanwhile, as Osborne rediscovered carpentry, one of his cofounders, Zach Steindler, was discovering it for the first time. Strictly a software guy for most of his youth, Steindler had only dabbled in physical making, when he custom designed a computer case to show off at LAN parties. But as Olark began to take off, Steindler, too, felt a need to build physical stuff. He began visiting a place in Ann Arbor called Maker Works, and soon was designing and building a chair "to fit my body geometry," he says. Soon he made a kitchen table, then four more chairs, then a sofa and a coffee table.
Zach Steindler
If for Osborne, carpentry was about not having to compromise, for Steindler it was more about physicality. "I needed something tactile," he says. "I spend a lot of time in front of a laptop, thinking about algorithms." He says that people who spend their day in front of a laptop screen, then go home to watch something on Netflix (he was one of them, once), are "missing out on a world that exists out beyond the computer." And though he has created software that has affected countless thousands of users, there's a different kind of satisfaction that comes from that handmade chair in his house or office. "It's easy to point to that and say, 'I created this,'" he says.
Funnily enough, though these cofounders shared a passion, they didn't find out about the coincidence immediately. (Olark's founders live in different cities around the country, convening for retreats and meetings sporadically.) At first, each only caught glimpses of the others' projects. "I remember being inspired by a cherry bowl and spoon you were working on during a car ride," Steinberg tells Osborne during our interview. "I was like, 'Whoa, I want to learn more about that.'"
Ultimately, both feel that if you're someone who works in software—or in any virtual realm that necessitates collaboration and compromise—then a trip to your local woodworking studio could be in order. "There's something to be said for feeling like you've solved a problem to some sort of completion," says Osborne—rather than merely optimized something to offend as few users as possible.
"The only way you can do that is to build something for yourself."
Rumors of Apple's hiring a social media manager begat theories of a sea change for Cupertino's notoriously tight-lipped media strategy. Their execs are even tweeting—a move that the late Steve Jobs would've likely lambasted, as Fast Company's John Paul Titlow points out, much as he would have mocked that stylus the company patented this week.
It's hard to imagine such a mixture of voices speaking for Apple after Jobs's monolithic presence; even Apple CEO Tim Cook's tweets cautiously traipse along corporate lines as if awaiting a central tone to augment. So the question remains: In this new era of outspoken Apple, What Would Steve Tweet?
For such a faceted monolith, Jobs's current Twitter presence is sadly relegated to beige inspirational accounts with nary a parody account in sight. @LegendSteveJobs is just one of many accounts spouting Jobs-ey koans, channeling the Turtlenecked One's favorite (re)quote of "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish" with accurate quotes and/or things the Apple savior probably maybe would've said to his flock at some point.
Perhaps Jobs would go for the gusto, embracing his mantle of keynote kingpin by shifting from yearly sermons on the mount to proclaiming the glories of the Apple microcosmic.
What was his most anticipated keynote joke could have become a hashtag signature as Jobs tweets his latest #onemorething about, y'know, how Apple engineers tweaked the latest Maps build to suck ever slightly less than Google Maps. Might he, in a pang of nostalgia, succumb to RTing grainy fan-boi compilation videos?
Of course, the iconoclasts in the audience, the #ThinkDifferenters so to speak, would surely like to see the raw Jobs, the vicious taskmaster who pushed his team to glory with caustic critique. Would the petty, tantrum-prone boss have lobbed personal thunderbolts from on high to humiliate employees?
If they can hologram, they can holotweet, but we'll never truly know what Jobs would have tweeted. We can only take pleasure that Jobs's ghost still haunts Twitter as strangers use him to soapbox pithy inspirational quotes, and the media continues to report on his evidential testimony on everything from compensation to antitrust issues from beyond the grave. Whatever Steve Jobs might have thought about social media, and whatever identity-tweaking Apple does next, Steve will still be there.
For an amputee left unable to walk, prosthetic limbs can be a life-changer. Still, there's no getting around the fact that conventional prosthetic legs are less than ideal. Even recent powered, robotic legs can be clunky, requiring careful fine-tuning by clinicians. People using these kind of prostheses tend to fall more often, due to a lack of sensory feedback. They also walk more slowly and exert more energy too.
Fortunately, robots can help.
"Ever since my graduate days I've been fascinated by the fact that we can create robots to imitate the way we walk—and maybe even help people who are unable to walk to do so," says Dr. Robert Gregg, an assistant professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Dr. Robert Gregg at the University of Texas with a robotic leg similar to the one he used in recent tests. Image via UT
Over the past half decade there has been a revolution in powered prostheses—or robotic legs—aided by the arrival of new lightweight motors, sensors, and microprocessors. This has led to improved prostheses too, but the technology is still bulky, and requires significant adjusting for the user and tweaks by rehabilitation specialists.
In the design of bipedal robot legs, Dr. Gregg saw an opportunity to improve the prosthetic version, by replicating a human's natural gait by looking at a single variable: the center of pressure on the foot, which moves from heel to toe as a person walks.
When applied to a sensor-equipped robotic prosthesis, this "control strategy" allows Gregg, on his own, to modulate settings for the leg much faster than it normally takes a team of rehabilitation specialists. This also allows for the user to more easily adapt to variations in walking speed and environmental conditions than with existing prostheses.
In a study that involved walking on a treadmill at varying speeds, people trying out the robotic prosthesis were able to walk almost as fast as a person using biological legs. The result could improve the quality of life of millions of lower-limb amputees.
One of Dr. Gregg's key contributions to the field of powered prostheses is his application of what is called robot control theory. As he explains it, although the human body is able to execute a wide range of movements, it is a minor miracle that it is able to stand up at all. Even a task as seemingly straightforward as walking without falling down is immensely complex—and a challenge to anyone working in robotics.
"There are hundreds of variables involved in walking," says Gregg. "There are multiple joints, all of which can bend in different directions. In addition to the skeletal system, you also have a large number of muscles. In order for our body to be able to walk, and not simply to collapse, all of these need to coordinate perfectly with each other."
This is where previous research into powered prostheses has often faltered. The robotic legs themselves may be able to generate force using built-in motors, but they lack the necessary control to remain stable while dealing with changing terrain and other disturbances. Walking on a flat surface at a fixed speed is all well and good, but trying to extend this to more challenging tasks (like climbing stairs or navigating a ramp) regularly results in challenges.
This is partly because many previous researchers have chosen to study the so-called "gait cycle" based on events occurring over time. The gait cycle refers to the way in which humans walk and run. It comprises two distinct stages: the "stance" phase, in which part of the foot comes into contact with the ground, and the "swing" phase, during which that same foot doesn't touch the ground at all. A time-based gait cycle can mimic the appearance of walking, but offers very little flexibility to changes in walking speed or environmental conditions.
Following in the footsteps of humanoid robot designers, Gregg proposes a new way to replicate the process of a person walking for a prosthesis: by measuring one single variable representing the human body in motion. The crucial variable here is the center of pressure on the foot, which travels from heel to toe as the gait cycle takes place. The result is a more stable, flexible approach to tasks like walking.
After initially testing his theory using computer models, Gregg recently had the opportunity to literally run his technology through its paces with the help of three above-knee amputee participants. These participants were recruited with the support of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and the University of New Brunswick, both of which were involved with the work leading up to and including these experiments.
"It was amazing to work with the study's participants, and to see the years of work we'd put in really start to pay off," Gregg says.
Gregg configured his algorithms with the users' height, weight, and thigh dimension. They were then asked to walk on a treadmill for 15 minutes at various speeds. At their fastest, the participants were walking at more than one meter per second—which is slightly less than the average 1.3 meters per second walking speed of able-bodied people.
"One thing we noticed is that it, unsurprisingly, takes people a while to develop trust that the leg is going to behave the way they wish it to," says Levi Hargrove, director of neural engineering for the Prosthetics and Orthotics Laboratory Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago—who was involved in the study.
"At first, people are concerned about whether the leg will hold them up. Once they see that it does, they begin using it at slow speeds, before gradually growing more confident. It's no different than any other technology in that way," he says.
This element of trust is crucial—and a reason why Gregg's research is about more than just a nifty new algorithm interesting purely to researchers. The ideal powered prosthesis needs to have a synergistic relationship with its user: cooperating with them rather than feeling like a separate entity.
"My hope is that the control strategy that we're developing will allow patients to use prosthetic legs more naturally, like they would with biological limbs," says Gregg. "The goal is for the human user of the leg not to have to put any extra thought into walking. This would mean seamlessly adjusting to walking speeds as the subject decides to walk slower or faster."
Gregg says that he was extremely happy with the experiment, but there's still plenty of work to do before his technology can be made available to the general public.
For example, while the study successfully demonstrated that the powered prosthesis can intelligently adapt to different walking speeds, it still needs to be shown that it can shift between other actions without problems. This is particularly crucial when dealing with real-world scenarios that haven't previously been anticipated.
"That's a challenge that our lab is looking at right now," Gregg says. "Even if we're 99% accurate at identifying what task the leg should be dealing with at any given time, that still means that one out of every 100 steps you could have the wrong task—which is unacceptably frequent."
For this advance to take place, researchers must continue to develop different ways for the user to interface with their prosthesis. This could be a mechanical movement of residual muscles (think the leg equivalent of a touch-screen gesture) or more subtle muscle activation, as measured using electrodes. The goal of both would be to allow the user to subconsciously switch between gait patterns when anticipating a task change.
"When you use voice recognition on your phone, if you were to look at that voice waveform on your computer it would be incredibly noisy," says Levi Hargrove. "Yet the algorithm and signal processing on your phone does a good job of picking up what you're trying to say, by converting that noisy signal into useful information. When your muscles contract, they make signals that are very much like a voice signal. The information is there if you decode it properly."
Ultimately, the work is an exciting breakthrough that suggests that prosthetic legs could one day soon could come close to matching the functionality of biological limbs.
"It's my dream that motorized robotic limbs will be able to do all the everyday things that most of us take for granted, like running to catch a bus," says Dr. Gregg.
It may happen sooner than you think, too.
"I think this could be available within three to five years, which is pretty near-term for the prosthetics and robotics industry," says Hargrove. "I'm very optimistic."
Chances are you know someone who likes to code, build things, hack things, or make, break, and fix things. Chances are also good that you have no idea what to get them for a gift. But don't worry: Co.Labs has you covered. Whether they're into hardware or software, stuff you wear or stuff you fly, still in elementary school or retired from IBM, we have just the thing for the hacker in your life.
Makey Makey is pretty much the Coolest Thing Ever. It lets you turn anything that conducts just the tiniest bit of electricity into a touchable, programmable input device for your computer. Basically, if there's something you can do on your computer, Makey Makey lets you do it by touching whatever physical object you choose. Their video explains best—with a banana:
If you can connect an alligator clip to it, it can probably be an input. (Yes, you can even draw a control pad with a pencil and use that as a touch input.) You can play your favorite song by walking across the room or engage enemies in Counter-Strike with a stapler, Makey Makey has you covered. $49.95
FLORA is an Adruino-compatible platform for make-your-own wearable electronics projects. Adafruit's line of FLORA devices includes the main board and a number of attachments such as GPS, an accelerometer and compass, a light sensor, and color-changing LEDS. It's a complete toolkit for bringing that weather-forecasting cape to life.
Legos are the greatest low-tech hacker toolkit ever made. Imagination was your only limitation with Legos growing up. Well, that and the fact that they didn't know how to move around on their own. When I was a kid, if you wanted your Lego creations to move or, you know, do anything, you had to pick them up and move them yourself. With your hands.
But kids these days have all the things, so now they get Lego Mindstorms: programmable Legos with moving parts controlled by your computer or smartphone. Lego ships Mindstorms with instructions on how to build a handful of robots, but intrepid hackers of any age can ditch the manual and make their own designs. There's a huge community of people building out their own concepts using Mindstorms.
In case you didn't know, we're now living in the age of biohacking. A crucial part of biohacking is being able to analyze DNA, which means you'll need a thermal cycler. Thermal cyclers, aka PCR machines, use polymerase chain reactions to make copies of DNA molecules for analysis. Unfortunately, those machines run for several thousand dollars and are only found in university and corporate labs.
To make that technology more widely available, Chai Biotechnologies created the OpenPCR so that anyone can analyze DNA. Whether you want to test your Burger King Whopper for horse meat or genetically engineer yogurt that changes colors around toxic chemicals, OpenPCR is your first step to doing so. Chai Biotech also just completed a successful Kickstarter campaign for the next version of its product: Open qPCR, which offers "real-time PCR," using reactants to analyze your DNA and convert it into useful data, viewable on a screen. Open qPCR is not yet ready to ship, but can be pre-ordered on Chai's website. $599/1,499
From the makers of the Sphero, the Ollie is a cylindrical ruggedized rolling robot you control with your smartphone and can do tricks and smash into things. No really, that's what it's billed to do:
A toy that combines the fun of an RC car with the even more fun of smashing things into things is already a sure win. But the Ollie's wheels and lights will eventually be programmable and allow the device to follow pre-programmed sequences that you create. As far as we can tell, that functionality hasn't been exposed yet. But maker Orbotix made good on that promise with the Sphero, so there's no reason to expect they won't do the same with the Ollie.
You know what was always better than RC cars? RC helicopters. 3DR's quadcopter kit gives you just about everything you need to build a fully functional drone, from the control board to the GPS unit to the propellers and nuts and bolts. The hacker in your life can adapt your gift to their particular needs, whether that's toward the noble purpose of humanitarian relief or the slightly tastier purpose of dropping burritos from the sky.
Hacking is about more than just code and electronics. Think outside the box and get them something to complement their tinkering. Whether its wearable tech or wearable clothing, any hacker will eventually need to work with fabric. DIY.org offers an inexpensive basic sewing kit and also has free stitching tutorials online.
If, in the event your favorite hacker is already sew-enabled, consider a soldering iron ($22) or a multimeter ($99).
For the budding young hacker in your life, Kano is a kit that teaches you how to make your own computer and program on it. Kano comes with a Raspberry Pi board and the peripherals you need to turn it into a full-fledged computer.
The included SD card ships with Kano OS, an open source operating system that teaches kids how to program by modifying games they can play on the computer like Minecraft and Pong. For the coders out there worried about kids learning a useless self-contained and made-up programming language, don't worry—Kano's visual programming environment outputs Python and JavaScript. $149
This one's a little obvious, but it's a great gift idea nonetheless. 3-D printers are the quintessential realization of the maker impulse: If you can imagine something and draw it in modeling software, you can build it. MakerBot is the gold standard in 3-D printers and offers a number of models. From the top of the line Replicator to the slightly more affordable Replicator Mini. MakerBot also offers a 3-D digitizer, which allows anyone to scan any object and then 3-D print copies of it or modify and remix the original object. TechCrunch rightly called it "nearly magic."
If you want to up your hacker gift cred, forget MakerBot and go fully open source with a RepRap printer. RepRap models are fully open hardware under copyleft licenses and you can actually make a RepRap yourself. It's kind of like giving someone a homemade birthday card instead of a store-bought Hallmark card. Kits start at $699.
For the anti-consumerist hacker in your life, consider getting the only universal remote they really want: a universal off button. The TV-B-Gone kit provides all the parts (soldering required) to create an off button that should turn off nearly any kind of modern television. You can also buy a pre-made version. Warning: Using this in Best Buy's TV section may get you in trouble and/or be a lot of fun. ($19)
You may have noticed a number of gift ideas on this list are built on top of the Raspberry Pi or Arduino platforms. Raspberry Pi is a tiny, fully functional computer, while Arduino is a microcontroller with a straightforward IDE. While all these gifts above are great, if you truly don't know what the hacker in your life wants, chances are they will find some project that can press a Pi ($39.95 and up) or Arduino ($24.95 and up) into service.
And if you're not sure which to get, a decent rule of thumb is that the Pi is more useful for software projects, while the Arduino is better suited to hardware projects—the kind that require splaying out in front of the fireplace over a steaming cup of Club-Mate for hours on end.
If we're being accurate about it, "wearable technology" isn't new. Pocket watches, wristwatches, winter coats, and pieces of ready-to-wear fashion are also examples of wearable technology. Acknowledging this takes a bit of the luster off of wearables like the Apple Watch, which are, let's face it, essentially tiny smartphones strapped to a wrist.
But it also raises a crucial question: How will people decide that there's room on their bodies for a new breed of wearable technologies?
Like the Nike+ FuelBand, many of the products—typically wristbands, but more recently shirts and fashion accessories—organize various types of health data like heart rate, daily footsteps, calories burned, and so on. Predictably, this type of wearable most often finds its way onto the bodies of athletes and fitness fanatics.
But the market for wearables is growing, fast. According to projections by Gartner, some 91 million units of wearables will be shipped in 2016, including an expected 26 million "smart garments" and 19 million "smart wristbands." By then, a technology that's now mostly for fitness buffs and quantified-self geeks could be all over you.
To make wearables really take off, wearable tech will need to invade the worlds of ready-to-wear, haute couture, and street fashion. And we're getting closer.
Ballboy wears biometric Ralph Lauren shirt with OMSignal sensor.Photo: lev radin via Shutterstock
A survey of the wearables world reveals high-tech fashion and accessories that do everything from bringing smartphone app notifications and personal security-enabled rings to immersive 3-D eyewear that produce projection-mapped visuals and LED clothes that display useful urban information for those in proximity to wearers. Other wearable fashion seeks to promote intimacy with products like mood sweaters, or create craft cocktails based on human temperament.
Big questions remain: Will consumers care about these wearable technologies, what kind of functionalities will they want, and what new, yet-unimagined services will be developed from their data? And then, of course, there is the matter of user privacy—a concern that designers of wristwatches certainly never had to worry about.
Perhaps the best indication of the push toward attractive wearables was Diane Von Furstenberg's attempt to integrate Glass into her company's Made for Glass eyewear, which allows users to do things like get weather updates and answer calls. The effort, made with Google lead designer Isabelle Olsson, was an admirable one, but given Glass's bulky Borg-like design, it wasn't seamless.
The Toronto-based company OMsignal, which designs and markets wearable tech, is hoping to make wearables far less obvious to the eye. The company is currently in the midst of moving from their bread and butter, athletic wearable tech, to the worlds of couture and ready-to-wear fashion.
The company's chief medical officer, Jesse Slade Shantz, told Co.Labs that the trick in pulling it off all comes down to a contextual design approach.
"Our [athletic] shirts have to be really tight to get a good signal, so it's like a very technical, high-quality compression shirt that not everyone wants to wear," Shantz said. "It's good for an undershirt but will you wear it on the outside? Maybe. Which is why we're working with fashion brands to try to bring our technology to fashion that is branded and not just a technical garment."
For this year's U.S. Open OMSignal partnered with Ralph Lauren for a smart T-shirt. Ball boys wore OMSignal-Ralph Lauren smart T-shirts, while the two companies sponsored a training session that featured young tennis professional Marcos Giron in OMSignal-Ralph Lauren gear. All of this, Shantz said, was to demonstrate that wearable technology can be created and worn in a frictionless way. And Ralph Lauren has plans to introduce its Polo Tech into its more casual line of shirts.
Since OMsignal specializes in health and fitness data, collaborations with fashion designers would likely feature apps that use this data. While Shantz couldn't give specifics, he said that several fashion companies have approached OMsignal about incorporating wearable tech into their lines. They're interested in the technology, but not necessarily sure of how to deploy it.
"People are really free with talking about their ideas, figuring them out, and getting help developing them, then getting down to the business of doing it," Shantz said. "It's such a new market that it's hard to know where the interest is going to come from, but it can come from anywhere. I get asked by so many industries about it; even the mining industry and insurance companies have expressed interest in it."
The startup MeU, founded by Robert Tu, is also making a play for high-tech fashion. Using flexible LED panels, smartphone Bluetooth control, and open-source Arduino technology, MeU aims to give people the power to communicate not only their sense of fashion, but useful, everyday information.
As the company's website notes, the LED panels are able to display "striking visual message[s]" on a person's body, but also inform those around them about weather, breaking news, and the user's mood. Their goal is to allow users to change their fashion as quickly as they can send tweets.
This is part of MeU's goal of popularizing urban informatics, public information about local urban environments that can be shared with people who may not have immediate access to such information.
"Transit apps are very popular with smartphone users, which inform them of when the next public transit vehicle will arrive," reads the MeU website. "People without smartphones do not have immediate access to this information. By displaying this information on the body, it enables surrounding passengers to make better decisions regarding transit; should they wait for the next vehicle, walk, or take another form of transportation to their destination?"
MeU believes the idea of sharing this and other types of urban information on bodies will enable the "everyday citizen to participate in improving the public transit experience without having to wait for government investment or intervention."
But would fashion designers be willing to incorporate flexible LED panels with informatics into couture and ready-to-wear clothing? It's hard to say, since there's a fine line between sharing useful information and transforming one's self into a walking electronic billboard. However, designers might be interested in the cyberpunkish idea of conveying more personalized visual messages in their products.
First, the tech will have to be a bit smaller and less frictionless so that it can be integrated into shirts or coats without being cumbersome or annoying. Software is moving in that direction: Shantz said that context-aware computing will eventually be able to know what our bodies are doing, then tell us how we're responding to a given situation.
"A person driving a car, for instance, could be frustrated because they're lost," Shantz said. "If they have on wearable tech synced with the car's computer, the car could respond by dimming interior lights, dropping stereo volume, or suggesting the driver pull over."
Kate Drane, in her position as head of Design, Tech, & Hardware at Indiegogo, naturally sees a lot of wearable technology projects. Some inspire, others don't. Fitness trackers like Misfit Wearables' Misfit Shine and the Atlas activity tracker have impressed, as has the futuristic Skully motorcycle helmet, a smart helmet that gives users critical information in their line of sight.
Drane said crazier wearable tech projects pop up like the Atheer One, immersive 3-D glasses that would essentially projection map virtual visuals onto everyday reality. A quick look at Atheer One's Indiegogo video reveals a type of wearable that could open up new possibilities in exercise, education, entertainment, and, of course, consumerism. If Atheer Labs could blend this technology with, say, Diane von Furstenberg-type fashionable eyewear, or something like a Ray-Ban design, it would probably sell. As Google's missteps with Glass's form factor prove, users don't just want information displayed in a new way, they want to look good while doing it.
But, it's not all about looking cool.
"While there's definitely a cool factor to wearing a computer—the dreams of '50s sci-fi come to life—I think the most interesting thing about wearable tech will be seeing the new services that develop from this, and the kind of access and data we'll have available to provide those services," Drane said. "We're at the point where wearable tech first meets the market, so we see many sides of it—both the needs of the creators and the wants of consumers. It's a fascinating perspective."
"While sports and activity monitoring are clear needs with active and engaged markets, I think the real question is 'What types of services will wearable computing empower?'" Drane said. "More than where a device is worn, I'm interested in seeing what they'll be able to do."
Despite a mounting push for everyday wearable fashion tech from consumers and businesses, which makes such products inevitable, Drane cautions that mass adoption won't happen immediately.
Misfit Wearables' Misfit Shine activity tracker.
"We'll likely need a drop in size and an increase in battery capabilities before technology can shrink to fit in with most users' fashion preferences," she said. "[And] any new data [collected] relies on new sensors... I'm excited to see what new companies come up with."
Misfit Wearables' data scientist, Rachal Kalmar, sees wearable tech through a slightly different lens. She is interested in how wearable tech will make possible "the ability to do longitudinal data collection from individuals and populations." This, she believes, will enable "predictive models of behavior, health, and disease, and [enable] our ability to interact with our environment, blurring the lines between our physical and digital worlds."
As Kalmar said, Misfit Wearables operates in what is the current "big" smart jewelry trend. This market includes companies like Ringly, which sells precious and semi-precious stones that send cutomized smartphone notifications via light and vibration, and Sense6 Design's Artemis, which gives wearers instant access to a private security operator that can record audio and send help.
Misfit Wearables recently collaborated with Chromat, a fashion line exploring "structural experiments for the human body," for New York Fashion Week 2014. Chromat incorporated Misfit Wearables' Shine—the watch-like fitness and sleep monitor—into their collection of structural pieces, along with head cages, arm guards, and handbags, among other creations.
"We've seen both the tech word starting to focus on the fashion element, as well as the fashion world focusing on the tech element," Kalmar said. "We see examples of what the convergence of these two worlds might look like through artistic representations, such as the work of Kristin Neidlinger on Sensoree, Anouk Wipprecht, and the examples posted by Syuzi Pakhchyan on Fashioning Tech."
Sensoree's Mood Sweater
Sensoree's Mood Sweater looks like something straight out of science fiction. It uses "futuristic fabrics" that glow, promoting "externalized intimacy," and is made from, according to its website, "sustainable materials impregnated with sensitive technologies." Neidlinger hopes the Mood Sweater, and other fashion like it, will allow users to explore the "Sensory Computer Interface (SCI)—tools to enhance proximity, intimacy, telepathy, intuition, and humor between human and machine."
The Dutch "fashiontech" designer Wipprecht wants to bring artificial intelligence to fashion, but also make them artworks in and of themselves. Wipprecht has crafted dozens of these futuristic creations, which include everything from dresses that emit smoke to those that use hardware, medical technology, and "human temperament" to craft freshly made cocktails. The latter calls to mind the hybrid musical instrument-cocktail maker in Boris Vian's classic surrealist novel Foam of the Daze (L'ecume des Jours); but, you know, wearable instead. Cool as this fashion might be, it's not exactly envisioned as everyday clothing.
Chromat incorporated Misfit Wearables Shine activity tracker into its New York Fashion Week line.
"[A] lot of this technology will become invisible, closer to things like MC10's smart tattoo," said Kalmar. "But, until the technology is there we're seeing more people focusing on the fashion element."
Whatever forms wearable technology takes in this jig between haute technology and haute couture, it's bound to be of a great variety. Apps will proliferate. And where there is an explosion in wearable apps, there will be an explosion in data—and in the user privacy concerns that come with it.
While wearable tech awaits its killer app and its break into the mainstream, its still-low profile has allowed businesses, consumers, and even government the opportunity to proceed in an open and experimental way.
"Everyday wearable tech fashion would collect everything we're collecting now—activity, temperature, location, human-human interaction, human-device interaction, et cetera—but in a more wearable form factor," Kalmar said. "The purpose? That's like asking the purpose of your smartphone. Eventually this data will be used for everything, from health care to marketing, from interactive storytelling to mainstream entertainment, and beyond."
First, though, the shrewder designers of wearable devices will need to embrace a more basic feature: comfort and good looks.
The high-tech gadgets you're buying this season have a secret transportation problem. The freight service companies that get cargo containers full of video game consoles, LCD TVs, and smartphones onto massive ships to move them across oceans still rely on handshake agreements, faxes, and emails.
It's a field ripe for disruption, and an Israeli startup called Freightos thinks they see an opportunity to create a Priceline-style bidding platform for international freight. In fact, the company bought former Priceline CFO Robert Mylod onto their board this past October to do just that.
Much like other transportation service providers such as airports and seaports, shippers frequently use older computer systems and rely on paper and photocopies to an extent that would surprise many techies. And Freightos faces an additional challenge—while consumer shipping is split among a small number of competitors like UPS, FedEx, and DHL, the commercial freight world is split among tens of thousands of smaller companies.
It requires communication between parties located on opposite ends of the globe. In a telephone conversation, CEO Zvi Schreiber noted the challenges of working in an industry where "face-to-face meetings really matter, and things like playing golf is used a lot (to make deals)." Freightos' business model is largely based on both shippers and companies called "freight forwarders," which serve as middlepeople that send freight on behalf of companies to their geographic destinations.
The hope is that by offering an automated solution to these forwarders—many of whom are located in emerging markets worldwide—they'll be able to cut costs for them by replacing haggling and internal back-and-forth with quick quotes.
Freightos uses a subscription and commission model. The company, which has overseas offices in the United States, Germany, and Hong Kong, offers automated quoting and contract management to vendors, shippers, and third parties involved in the logistics process. This approach of offering a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to make shipping easier is already commonplace in the logistics industry, but it's still somewhat unusual for the transportation world.
The company's public client list appears to be more or less split between companies in China, Europe, and the United States, but they offer discounted subscriptions to Chinese and Indian customers. Freightos's head of marketing, Eytan Buchman (who was previously interviewed by Fast Company in his role of spokesman for the Israeli military), added that one of the startup's advantages is the speed they offer product producers and freight companies. Instead of waiting a week for a quote, he said, quotes can be generated almost instantly.
Schreiber says that one of the biggest challenges is generating algorithms for price quotes in the shipping world. For Freightos's engineers that means deep-diving into the highly complicated world of the freight companies themselves. "Apart from the engineering problems of going through millions of routes in seconds, there were the challenges of big companies like Maersk Lines, for instance." He says, "For instance, there are seasonal challenges shipping on the Suez Canal and density is very important. What do you do about weight, volume, and size restrictions? There are also restrictions on freight aircraft and many other details. This creates a lot of data problems because every carrier also presents data in different ways in Excel."
The startup's approach also signals something we'll see a lot more of in the coming years: Companies targeting highly decentralized, change-averse industries such as international commercial freight. In order to offer a viable product, Freightos has to offer a UI that works smoothly in a host of foreign languages to a user base dispersed around the world that demands their product work. It's a challenge, and a risky business to be in… but as more of the world (and more industries) get plugged in, the rewards for logistics startups will become bigger and bigger.
How much energy does your refrigerator use? Or your hair dryer, or toaster? Until recently, the only way to find out was to plug each appliance into a usage meter, something that only the most energy-obsessed actually take the time to do. But now a single device can tell you exactly how much power items in your house are draining at any given time.
"If you give real-time feedback. People start to understand that something's consuming so much power, people start reducing energy use," says Stefan Grosjean, founder and CEO of Smappee, the Belgium-based startup that launched the device in the U.S. today.
The small box works by recognizing the unique "electronic signature" of everything in your home. When your laptop sucks power from the wall, it creates a different signal than your fridge or your lights or your electric car. As the sensor measures what's running, it shows you on an app.
It can send alerts, so if you accidentally leave an iron running, you can come home and turn it off (it can also be paired with smart plugs that can be controlled remotely, so you could actually also turn the iron off from your office or the airport). "In my case, if the garage door opens, Smappee tells me so I know that the kids got home safely every afternoon," Grosjean says. "It gives additional capabilities; it's not just measuring energy consumption."
It also works with IFTTT, a web service that allows anyone to design their own simple commands. For example, you could tell it to wake you up when your coffeemaker is done making you coffee each morning. Grosjean has his system hooked up to an LED light that turns red when he's using too much power, and green when his solar panels are producing excess energy.
The device measures solar panel output through a second sensor. Since smart meters often only show net production (if your solar panels produced 1,000 watts and you used 1,000 watts, it will say you've used "zero" energy), Smappee provides a way to track energy more accurately—something they say will be especially useful when people start storing solar energy in their homes. People can track exactly how much energy they're making, and using, and better calibrate use.
By providing detailed data, the device also changes how utility companies can work with consumers to reduce energy. "Unlike everyone else, who can usually only provide pretty generic tips that don't really engage people, we can provide very specific tips," says Richard Morgan, head of business development at Smappee. "Because we have the visibility, we can say things like, 'Did you know your fridge is using three times more than the national average?'"
Before starting Smappee, the company's founders spent two decades helping corporations measure energy use, and realized that the only way anyone can make significant changes is to understand the details of how energy is used. A single number on a monthly bill doesn't help much, but when companies start sub-metering, they can reduce energy use by as much as 40%. The founders wanted to bring the same capability to homes.
"Our challenge was that we wanted to have a cheap, single metering device, like your utility meter," Grosjean says. "This was the holy grail. We worked a long time on that, and we're the first product on the market offering it."
Let's go ahead and talk about the longest work email any of us have ever read in our lives, Nick Denton'smemo on the re-organization of Gawker. Notably, Denton acknowledges his role in what a lot of people have characterized as a difficult year for Gawker, describes hiring Joel Johnson as a mistake, and announces a re-structuring of top leadership. Also Nick is going to start taking it to Kinja on a regular basis. The memo only indirectly addresses the Gamergate apology-fest, but that was a pretty popular topic at the all-hands held after the memo was sent out, and it seems like it at least played something of a role in the management changes. Our favorite mistake, meanwhile, was spotted at the Vice offices, as gleefully reported by Dylan Byers, who reminds us all that Vice can safely assume that Joel is probably willing to take a pay cut.
The other big media story today is an accusation that Malcolm Gladwell, who we all just thought was irritating and dumb, is actually also a thieving plagiarist (maybe). Honestly the best part of this story will always be watching old media struggle to write stuffily about "Mr. Blappo and Mr. Bort." Around the Tabs newsroom—it's a hole in a tree we whisper takes into—the main reaction is "IDK I guess it's kind of plagiarism," but this is likely not the last we'll hear of it, either.
More Trash News from Garb Planet: The world is full of truly terrible crowdfunding projects, but this might be the worst one: a piece of plastic the size and weight of an iPhone that you carry around as a phone surrogate to ensure you enjoy trashworld IRL instead of through your ~black mirror~. If this sounds like a good idea to you, I advise you take your $12 and put it towards time travel so you can go back to the middle ages or whenever and impress everyone with tales of the technological hellscape you survived, you fucking precious flower of humanity. Speaking of time travel, the future may be renewable but the past certainly isn't, so slow claps for Greenpeace all around. America is furious that a man was not eaten by a snake, as television had promised. I say we let the snake choose who it wants to eat, but I humbly suggest Bono. We are at marketing hoax level critical with the Sony hack, although emails like this deserve to be real. Every negative assumption you have about how viral content sausage is made is 100% accurate, you blood-spattered e-Cassandra. And yes, we can make an argument in favor of using Comic Sans to make serious statements about police brutality towards minorities, but do we really want to?
Duck the Cat is busy napping and being beautiful and I ask of her only what she deigns to give me, so I told Rusty's intern to submit his tab.
The cover of Run-D.M.C.'s third album, Raising Hell, features two black men in puffy black jackets who've just stepped through a doorway. It's purple, and the title is printed in green on the far left near the spine. The shot is blurred. The two figures look like they're in motion.
"When you have come to regard your very skin color as an insufferable disease, when you have to punch other people in the mouth just so you can be ok with who you are, not giving a fuck is the single most divine experience you can ever have," Carvell Wallacewrites at Pitchfork, in a quietly seething essay titled "How to Raise Hell in Three Steps: on Run-D.M.C., Parliament, Blackness and Revolution". Wallace continues:
But then like an act of nature, like the rain that suddenly sprang up these past few weeks to end the California drought, an "officer involved shooting occurred."
And another one occurred.
And another one occurred.
And another one occurred.
And with each one, we lose a fuck.
Stepping through a doorway implies movement, which in turn implies direction. What were they moving toward, and what were they leaving behind?
"…[I]t's a lyric from ["Proud To Be Black"] that seems most prescient nearly 30 years later," Wallace says.
If you try to take what's mine, I'll take it back y'all.
It's like that.
Of course today is the day Bijan submits a burn-resistant intern tab.
Finally, in an act of disgusting cluelessness so horrible that it becomes hysterically funny, the NYPD is holding a "Thank You NYPD" pro-cop rally in NYC next week, and really, what can you say other than "no thank you," maybe in Comic Sans.
* Jessie accidentally made up the word "upsettling" but I'm gonna allow it, please use widely for things that are both upsetting and unsettling. —Rusty
