Payments companies have been hawking the dream of a digital wallet for years, hoping to replace plastic cards with sleek and ideally more secure smartphone interfaces. Now another wallet standby is set to go digital: the state-issued driver's license, which Iowa will be implementing as a smartphone app starting next year.
"We are really moving forward on this," Paul Trombino, director of the Department of Transportation, told Gov. Terry Branstad during a budget hearing. "The way things are going, we may be the first in the nation."
Traditional licenses will still be available, Trombino said. But he argued that a license app, with PIN verification, would be more secure. "Having this really allows people to protect their identify," he said, according to the Des Moines Register.
Paul Steier, director of the Iowa Department of Transportation's bureau of investigation and identity protection, tells Fast Company that a smartphone driver's license brings the benefits of real-time data updates to both drivers and law enforcement officers. Changing a home address or suspending a license, for example, will be far easier to manage. "It takes away a lot of problems we have today with people physically needing to come into the DMV," Steier says. In addition, he says the app would eliminate the cumbersome process of verifying identity with multiple agencies when moving to a new state or applying for new state services.
DOT leaders expect initial development of the app to cost $20,000. Then, if next year's pilot tests are a success, Steier says he hopes to apply for grant funding to support the rollout and coordinate with other state leaders. "We don't want to develop something in a tunnel. We want to work with the DMVs and law enforcement to develop something that could be used across the country," he says.
Along with 30 other states, Iowa already allows drivers to display electronic proof of insurance during traffic stops. The driver's license app would serve as valid proof of identity in those situations, as well as at security checkpoints in Iowa airports.
The app HotelTonight is built around last-minute hotel booking. Users depend on the app to quickly deliver room rates and vacancies, especially when they have a spotty cell connection and it's a busy holiday weekend.
"We can have customers that are standing outside a hotel and booking a room and walking in and expecting to be able to check in," says HotelTonight cofounder and chief architect Chris Bailey.
The app's backend needs to be able to quickly sync reservations and vacancy information with a range of hotel reservation systems and users' phones and tablets, so it doesn't fail to display a convenient deal or, worse, book someone a room that's already taken, says Bailey. The app's Black Friday traffic peaked at eight times normal load levels, with a $7 room special selling out in under seven minutes.
"Historically in the industry, people aren't booking so much last minute, but that's really shifted," he says, thanks to mobile devices. "They can be in the back of a cab; they can be at a bar; maybe they're at a party and decide, 'Hey, I don't want to drive home tonight.'"
To keep data updated in real time even under heavy load, the company uses the speedy Redis, an open source data structure server that is currently sponsored by Pivotal. Bailey says it also helps engineers quickly add and tweak new features and record new stats without painstakingly building traditional database tables.
"We didn't initially start with Redis, but we pretty quickly figured out a need for it there," he says, explaining the company still uses MySQL for some of its infrastructure. "All these things that you thought well, shoot, I don't really want to write that to MySQL—it just seems like a lot of overhead, I have to create a table and manage a schema and there's a lot of overhead—now I just write it to Redis."
The database system also helps with a common issue for HotelTonight: handling network timeouts and other errors in communicating with customers' devices and third-party services like booking APIs, says Bailey.
Redis includes atomic counters—that is, variables that can be incremented in a single operation so they report and store consistent values even when accessed by multiple processes—which help keep track of how often an API call or other operation has failed.
Partially to avoid focusing too much on the uptime and scaling of Redis and other core services itself, HotelTonight relies on cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and hosting from Redis Labs, he says.
"It allows us to not have to have as much expertise in house and rely on true experts in those technologies for things like Redis or some of the other services that we use," he says.
That, and the flexibility of the kind of data that can be stored in Redis, make it easy build custom logic to track and handle failures of different types of operations, from rapidly scheduling retries to failing over to alternative providers, says Bailey.
"What's really nice about that is from the customer perspective we avoid giving them an error message," he says. "There's no error for the customer; they get what they're after."
Using Redis also makes database changes more painless, as engineers can effectively tweak what's stored in the database without rebuilding formally specified SQL tables, which used to require downtime, he says.
"Don't get me wrong—you will have a schema, so to speak, at some point," he says. "It's more about how officially defined is it."
Yes, Facebook is still considering adding the "dislike" button that users have long asked for—but it doesn't sound like it's coming anytime soon. "We're thinking about it, on the dislike button," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday afternoon. "We need to figure out a way to make it a force for good, not a force for bad and demeaning the posts that people are putting out there."
Zuckerberg was speaking at his second-ever public Q&A, broadcasting live from the social network's Menlo Park, California, headquarters. In front of him was a crowd of Facebook employees, fans, and random locals; people also watched it streaming online. He fielded a wide variety of questions that were delivered in person, through Facebook thread, and video.
One of the more biting questions came from a Facebook user in Islamabad: "Facebook has become synonymous with wasting time, lack of productivity, etc. How do you think Facebook can transform into a more productive, empowering medium?"
Zuckerberg seemed a bit taken aback by this characterization of the company he founded as a student at Harvard. He stressed that Facebook's main mission is to build relationships, whether it be romantic, familial, or professional. "That's not wasting people's time at all," he said. "That's extremely valuable in the world."
Another audience member asked about how Facebook might be used to better serve the public sector, particularly when it comes to communication between elected officials and constituents. Zuckerberg pointed to recent elections in India and Indonesia, and conversations he'd had with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indonesian President Joko Widodo during a recent visit to Asia. "They want a channel to directly speak to the people they serve," he said.
But the best question of the event came at the very end, when a female audience member asked, "If you and I were married, how would we handle Facebook with our daughter?"
"I think children are much more capable than we think," Zuckerberg replied. "I would want my children to use technology because it's one of the ways you become literate and acquire the tools of the modern world."
Congratulations on making it through another garbage week of another garbage year. Here's to you!
Ah, sweet consistency.
And finally, Buzzfeed just provided the only year-end list anyone needs: The 50 Worst Things on the Internet, 2014 (Content warning: Not safe for the young, the old, the middle-aged, men, women, neither, both, do not click)
Today's Song: The new, weirdly torture-themed video for Nicki Minaj's "Only"
~Nothing but real tabs only… bad tabs only… rich tabs only~
Another week is over, you made it! Today in Tabs hopes you return next week and bring a friend. Find us on FastCoLabs, follow @rustyk5, @bijanstephen, @TodayinTabs and honestly anyone else you want to follow. What even are wooden nickles?
The UN's International Telecommunication Union estimates that while mobile subscriptions have grown to 7 billion globally, developed countries take a far larger share, with only 69 out of every 100 Africans subscribing to mobile services, leaving roughly 340 million Africans without mobile access. Though Asia and Pacifica has a higher 89-per-100 subscription rate, that still means that 440 million people from that region are without cell access—leading to nearly a billion people without cell access worldwide. And a lot of these people—isolated on islands, in deep jungles, or cut off by mountains—aren't going to get coverage anytime soon. It's too expensive for telecommunications companies to build the grid out to them.
But maybe the grid is the real problem.
That's where Endaga saw an opportunity. The Berkeley-based startup created a cellular relay station they sell for $6,000, a satellite telco-in-a-box, called the CCN1. Bolt that gray box to a tall pole or tree and it'll relay cell signals from any GSM phone in a 10 kilometer (6.2 mile) radius, enough to serve a small town.
Endaga isn't some tech missionary airdropping a solution into place. Instead, the company is offering the locals who install their box a business opportunity.
"Our thesis is that local people know how to solve local problems more than anyone else—and they're motivated to do it," says Shaddi Hasan, CTO of Endaga. "If you spend time in rural areas there's always a hustler, someone who can get a solar panel or a woman who knows where to get Internet if they need to. These are the folks we want to empower, the person who knows how to get stuff done in these neighborhoods."
After years of testing and tweaking, Endaga is ready to sell those hustlers their own CCN1 box and they can build a business around it. The package includes billing and analytics software, including a sales dashboard. "It's all you need to start running a network," Hasan says. "The only decision you have to make is how much you charge end users for the service."
There's only one problem: Endaga's box is technically illegal.
The reason you can call someone on your mobile phone while surfing the web on Wi-Fi with the radio blaring is that each of those devices bounces content through the air on different frequencies. Cell phone voice and data frequencies are tightly regulated to ensure calls maintain a standard of quality. Governments license the use of those frequencies almost exclusively to telecom corporations.
Some nonprofits, like the Village Telco project, have circumvented the spectrum license issue by ditching cell frequencies for unregulated Wi-Fi frequencies. But while Wi-Fi is great for data exchange, it's poor for voice and SMS messaging and far less power-efficient than cell networks. Besides, the villagers Endaga serves don't have smartphones. Cell networks are popular for a reason.
That's why Endaga runs on dedicated 2G frequencies. But the company hasn't secured spectrum licenses for any of its CCN1 village networks.
"As a research group and an individual, I'm not a cross-the-T's and dot-the-I's kind of person," says Endaga CEO Kurtis Heimerl. "In these areas we ducked under the bureaucracy. We just didn't do the friction. if you really want to be innovative, you're going to have to push on these regulations. Our network is demonstration of that."
Endaga isn't high on anybody's crackdown list yet. In Indonesia where Endaga has deployed its CCN1, like most other parts of the world, the telcos are busy adding 3G and 4G coverage in urban areas.
When those companies do decide to venture into rural and remote areas, Endaga is hoping to partner—and they've had some introductory talks toward that end. The company has even developed a proprietary tech to detect frequency conflict from a newly arrived telco and switch to an unoccupied one in 90 seconds—without dropping a call.
For now, though, the CCN1 cheaply solves a problem the telcos are ignoring. And Endaga stays out of trouble since it's only selling a box while locals run the service.
"We are protected in a structural sense because we don't run the thing, the villagers do—but we aren't worried of people coming in and taking down the network," Heimerl says. "Nobody wants to shut us down. We're bringing coverage into areas where they don't have an answer."
Endaga leaves pricing in the hands of the town hustlers, who charge enough to ensure that the network is self-sufficient. Which sounds like an environment ripe for abuse—but these hustlers are members of small towns or villages. Everybody knows them.
"When you bring a new technology, who gets the benefit? By the very nature of any intervention, the powerful are the first to benefit," says Heimerl. "As abusive as it can be, at least the bar is lower than in [a city] where that person would be removed from that experience. Our experience is that this is better. It's a thing I worry about, but you make the progress that you can."
Their current setup is about equivalent to 2.5G, permitting voice, SMS, and GPRS data. They'll get to 4G eventually, Hasan says, but just providing voice and SMS is a great step forward.
"The key thing that we believe strongly is that the first few bits of connectivity are far more important than the next hundred megabits," Hasan says. "Looking back to first deployment in Indonesia, the villagers traveled a two-day trip to nearest town with cell coverage. If there was an emergency, you wouldn't hear about it for a month."
Which can quite literally mean life and death. There's one doctor who serves the Papua village Endaga deployed their CCN1 network into, a village in the highlands they refer to as "Desa" (Bahasia Indonesia for "village") to protect its identity while their network remains unlicensed. Desa is a four-hour drive from the nearest large town, Wamena, but the doctor lives on the other side of the island in the Papua capital of Jayapura—a 30-minute flight from Wamena that Google Maps can't even plot by car. Before the cell network, the resident nurse would've been on her own when the doctor left. But with Endaga's cell network, the doctor is just a phone call away.
"One time, a person came in with respiratory disease, and they texted the doctor and he told them what to do. He told them to give the patient the right drugs and he was fine," Hasan says. "It's literal life and death."
Kurtis Heimerl
Heimerl conceived Endaga as part of his dissertation research in 2011 as a Computer Science doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley, and fellow doctoral candidate Hasan joined him in 2012. They started with "silly stuff" says Hasan, going to the Burning Man festival and setting up a proto-CCN1 box there.
In true Burning Man counterculture spirit, instead of relaying calls, their box intercepted data and displayed what any interloper could learn from the data you send to cell towers. It's common knowledge today, but it wasn't back in pre-Snowden 2012.
A blog post written on their snooper box caught the attention of someone in Indonesia who wanted Heimerl and Hasan to use their box in a different way—to set up a mobile cell station in a remote village. Hasan, Heimerl, and the rest of the team set up a box and got full signal bars on day one.
The next step: make it sustainable. Endaga's phone relay tech is built off OpenBTS, an open source telco API that's been around for years. But the real challenge was in making the CCN1 system financially sound. How do you get locals invested in a service enough to maintain it, yet ease the barriers of entry?
The solution was to bundle network usage into credits for purchase which can be re-sold out across the village. But they also discovered that it's inefficient for the hustler running the network to personally sell prepaid credit bundles to hundreds of villagers.
Instead, Endaga designated a few dedicated agents who bought prepaid credit bundles from the network source at wholesale prices, which the agents turned around to re-sell with their own markup.
After the Endaga team left the Indonesian village, they noticed something strange. Tiny credit transactions of, say, 500 rupiah that were far below the 10,000 rupiah minimum credit bundle price began to appear. The villagers were trading credits for services—they'd created their own transaction infrastructure. The agents realized they could make their own credit distribution network—which inspired other shopkeepers to open a credit distribution service and try to undercut the agents.
Shaddi Hasan
Hasan insists that Endaga isn't planning to venture into mobile money. But in a way, currency is exactly what the credits became.
"To be clear, we're not doing anything with mobile money. You buy credits on your account and that gets used for paying for minutes or calls or whatever. It's hard to really know what a credit transfer system gets used for without talking to people," Hasan says.
Whether or not the system will work as well in other countries remains to be seen. There are partnership discussions in progress with villages in Afghanistan and the Philippines, but "those relationships move slowly and take time," Hasan says.
"The big exciting thing is decentralizing control of communications infrastructure," Hasan says. That includes empowering locals to harness and analyze data themselves.
And then there are the apps—yes, apps—that people can build to work on the CCN1 network.
"We built a really fun application called Village Idol, which had a call-in number to sing a song and record it. People could call in and listen and vote, then we'd distribute credits to winner," Hasan says. "So in academia we build products which are really suited to local networks, like job boards. We build networks that are community owned, more accessible, and more hackable than existing telco networks."
The insurance drone skims above the roadway, humming softly as it tracks your car. Multiple failed login attempts caused by an out-of-date token have prevented the vehicle from downloading a firmware update to its stabilization system. The vehicle broadcast this to all connected stakeholders, so now the drone is watching for unexpected guidance problems. It mainly serves to add a bit more to the evidence stack in case there's an accident. The car is sending detailed analytics that show problems immediately, and if it posed a risk, the highway's control system would know and quickly pull the car from the road.
And now the other cars know too. They're all connected by a wireless mesh net, exchanging data and using an array of sensors to continuously map their surroundings. They move a bit further away in their lanes, their guidance systems heightened to run the probabilities of your vehicle maintaining trajectory, slowing down, or veering off suddenly. In machine time, even an 80 mph event looks slow and manageable.
A fleet of 18-wheelers pushes through the line, snakelike and determined, 10 rigs long and linked together in an efficient swarm formation. The cars change lanes to let the fleet have priority without slowing down the stream. The rigs roar ahead. Suddenly, they break formation, skidding to a stop across the seven-lane freeway, blocking it entirely. The road comes to a halt with all vehicles on alert trying to understand the situation, their radios crackling with static.
"This is a system intervention. We are the People's Freedom Consortium of New Delhi. We have taken control of this roadway."
An EMP radiates out from the truck wall, knocking all the vehicles offline, into silence. A loud bang shocks you as the dead drone bounces off the hood of your car and clatters onto the pavement.
* * *
This near-future is already unfolding—and it's enabled by the convergence of a suite of technologies that have become cheap enough and powerful enough to work their way into the hardware of our lives. High-speed LTE wireless networks are nearly ubiquitous in most developed regions, connecting smart objects to each other and to remote services. These networks, combined with GPS and beacons, enable precise telemetry—the sharing of location, trajectories, and waypoints across transportation networks. Sensors have become much more sophisticated, miniaturized, and affordable, enabling devices at the edges of networks to scan and capture reality with tremendous fidelity. They pair with powerful computation riding the seemingly endless arc of Moore's Law to crunch volumes of real-time data and turn it into analytics, predictive models, and algorithmic corrections.
This is how the brains of the Industrial Internet are forming, leveraging data from networks and sensors to model the world, evaluate contexts, predict outcomes, and respond and adapt to feedback. Now, these young capabilities are beginning to animate vehicles and ships, aircraft and robots. And, as we'll see, they're starting to socialize and collaborate.
Factory assembly lines have been managed by industrial robotics for years but increasingly these systems are becoming mobile. Robots from Kiva Systems are automating order fulfillment in Amazon's warehouses. They use sensors to follow barcode markers on the floor that lead them to the exact shelving location to fulfill an order. Some robots, like the FastRunner, mimic the ways that an ostrich can run at high speeds. Others, like those being tested at Carnegie Mellon University, move like snakes, sidewinding up and over dunes. With camera eyes and computational algorithms, they're able to move into piles of rubble and detect fingerprints, faces, handwriting, and bodies.
More sophisticated humanoid robots are learning how to overcome obstacles and move across more varied terrain. The Big Dog, from Google's Boston Dynamics, has shown how it walk and run like a pack animal, using a spider-like array of sensors to map the landscape. The Atlas is their latest effort, standing erect on two legs and designed to negotiate outdoor terrain, carry objects, and even climb when needed. It has a mechanoid body, a digital nervous system, and the algorithmic strength to reason with the world. The team hopes their efforts will win the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge.
Another Google company, the Japanese group SCHAFT, has a similar humanoid born from years of developing musculoskeletal systems, powerful actuators, and high-torque motors. It's noisy and slow and a bit scary, but it's got the eye of DARPA. Recently, the U.S. military introduced a mandate to lower its troop count and bring in more unmanned robotic power. Some will look like Big Dog, some will look like regular vehicles without drivers, and others may cross the battlefield on legs like Atlas.
Computation has become so cheap and powerful that it's relatively simple to bring cognitive capacities to bear on advances in sensing, mapping, mechanical articulation, and behaviors. These capabilities are steadily transforming dumb, human-powered mechanics into smart self-directed systems.
Google's driverless car has been the prototype for the development of automated, sensing, and responsive vehicles. Their groundwork has drawn car manufacturers into the race. Tesla's Elon Musk has claimed that their cars will be 90% autonomous by the end of 2015. Honda has added a suite of Honda Sensing assistive technologies to its flagship CR-V. Audi recently became the first automaker to receive a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test its self-driving car on California roads.
The California DMV is the first state to offer such permits but it shows the critical role that regulators will play in the evolution of autonomous vehicles. The U.S. Department of Transportation has published its policy on automated Vehicle Development, listing five classes from "no automation" to "full self-driving automation." They hope automation will dramatically reduce the 30,000 annual auto fatalities on US roads, but they worry about the pace of technology and how these systems will scale in numbers and vehicle size. For example, Mercedes has demonstrated a self-driving semi-truck they hope to see in use use by 2025, but so much tonnage in the hands of an algorithm is a hard pill for regulators to swallow. It may be that roadways will develop special lanes for autonomous shipping vehicles. Ultimately, regulation and human behavior will have the largest roles in the future of our roadways.
Autonomous systems are also heading below the surface. NATO has sent self-directed underwater vehicles to make detailed maps of the seafloor in an effort to better control for mines. The National Oceanography Center has deployed eight autonomous craft to explore the entire water column, from seafloor to surface, of the rich ocean front between the Atlantic and the English Channel.
Naturally, weapons systems are also becoming increasingly self-directed. Arms manufacturer Raytheon has developed the Phalanx Close-In anti-ship defense system. Their website claims that "Phalanx automatically carries out functions including search, detection, threat evaluation, tracking, engagement, and kill assessment. " Algorithmic kill assessment is worth a pause to consider the implications. Plextek Consulting sells a suite of tools to defense organizations, including support for a "swarm of unmanned platforms" to share information and better coordinate. This swarm capability is going to increasingly shape the behavior of autonomous systems and potentially take them even further beyond our control.
Ants and bees are often studied to understand swarming. Individually, they're rather simple, following a small set of rules that determine their behavior. From this simple set, the colony and the hive coordinate to produce very sophisticated, large-scale behaviors that are far greater than the ability of any individual.
Alex Kushleyev and Daniel Mellinger of KMel Robotics demonstrated quadcopter UAV swarming in a popular YouTube video they posted in 2012. In a stunning follow-up they've recently partnered with Lexus to produce the carmaker's latest video, Amazing In Motion. It shows how much these little swarming quads have evolved to have precisely coordinated behaviors.
Radhika Nagpal is a faculty member of Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. His lab recently created 1,024 Kilobots—small, motorized robots—that can self-organize as a swarm to assemble into visible patterns like a star or the letter K. They observe each other with infra-red cameras and then use very simple rules to manage their relationships.
In August of 2014, the Office of Naval Research demonstrated how quickly this technology is advancing, and how well it can now scale. They deployed 13 autonomous lightweight littoral combat boats to escort a Navy vessel. The boats held formation around the vessel and then broke free to swarm around a simulated attacker. The Navy talks about deploying these units around vessels, tankers, and oil rigs beginning in 2015. They reduce costs, can operate longer than humans, process information much more quickly, and will ultimately remove more people from the line of fire.
Machine-to-machine communications allow autonomous systems to share their maps and sense data, modify their trajectories in response to dynamic conditions, and communicate goals and problems across the swarm. This will increasingly impact the built environment as infrastructure takes a larger role in coordination and governance. It will also impact how networks attach to high-data robotics and how we secure those networks against malicious intrusions. How we interact with and command autonomous swarms will be an exercise in understanding complexity, while simultaneously releasing a control to self-directed systems that we may not really understand.
Ultimately, these efforts arise from our deepening understanding of nature and our ability to manipulate matter with greater precision. We're training networks to pay attention and make decisions. We're giving senses to our machines, and the ability to reason and act quickly to adapt to changing conditions. By helping them communicate and coordinate we're starting to toy with complexity, and enabling the potential for unexpected emergent behaviors.
Autonomous systems are, after all, autonomous. This path will help us understand larger emergent phenomena like cities and economics and climate, but it may also unleash outcomes that we're currently unable to adequately plan for or contain.
* * *
"Stay in your vehicles. We have identified all users on this network. You are now part of the People's Freedom Consortium of New Delhi."
Your car blinks back to life showing the People's seal on the console. Hacked and rooted, the doors are locked and all communications dead. Your car and the others begin to roll towards the convoy wall, stalling against it one by one, adding to its mass across the freeway.
Just then the air is sheared by the whirring props of hundreds of quadcopters flying down the roadway. They break into multiple flanks and formations, swarming around the People's barricade, releasing a crackling of small pops behind a hail of projectiles. The People's trucks become pocked with mesh nodes, wrapping the vehicles in a wireless attack.
Several small wheeled vehicles streak under the cars into the roadblock, jumping off the roadway and attaching to the trucks. They join the mesh, offering massive GPU cores to decrypt the People's network. Once in, they crawl the People's wearables, painting each freedom fighter with a bright network ID. Larger drones spray them with non-lethals and foaming agents.
Your car shudders and reboots, reversing from the barricade, the console glowing with the face of the regional chief of the Department of Homeland Security.
"This political intervention has been contained. Your car will be directed to the DHS holding grounds for debriefing. Please cooperate with the receiving mechanoids. Thank you for your patience."
Earlier this week, The Pirate Bay, at the time the world's biggest torrent site, was taken down and seized by Swedish police. After the data center raid, one of the Pirate Bay's original cofounders, Peter Sunde, lamented what the site had become—stagnant and full of racy advertisements. If what Sunde missed was the simple search engine and file index that facilitated file-sharing, the people behind isoHunt have resurrected it, minus the NSFW ads.
Located at oldpiratebay.org, the new site is a functioning copy of Pirate Bay. A welcome message on the homepage reads:
"We, the isohunt.to team, copied the database of Pirate Bay in order to save it for generations of users. Nothing will be forgotten. Keep on believing, keep on sharing."
A host of copycat sites have emerged since The Pirate Bay went down, many purporting to be the legitimate Pirate Bay. It's unclear if any of them are connected to the original site, and some might even contain malicious software.
The isoHunt team told Torrent Freak that it didn't want to cause any such confusion or worry with Old Pirate Bay: "We saw a lot of topics where people are looking for something like this. For sure it has some bugs and glitches but we are going to improve it. The tool is for the users' convenience till TPB comes alive again."
Even in the age of blockbuster digital hits like World of Warcraft and Civilization: Beyond Earth, there are still plenty of gamers who like playing role-playing and strategy games the old-fashioned way: gathered around the table with friends, food, and drink.
Still, friends move away, and gamers can find themselves living far from anyone who shares their hobby for Dungeons & Dragons or Settlers of Catan, says Nolan T. Jones, one of the creators of Roll20, an app that lets gamers play their favorite tabletop games remotely by video chatting, moving game tokens, and rolling virtual dice through their web browsers. Since it launched in 2012, it's signed up more than 700,000 players.
"I think a large part of our success was this was a program made for necessity—it wasn't a business," Jones says.
Jones and his two cofounders started building the in-browser app in 2012 to play with each other and with friends who were living in different cities, then decided to raise funds on Kickstarter and develop it into a commercial product. Visitors can play dozens of different games, with various editions of Dungeons and Dragons and the related game Pathfinder among the most popular. Most play for free, it relies on donations and some paid subscriptions, allow users extra features and additional storage space. There's a bustling community forum and even scripting functions, which, coupled with an API, allows players to track games and program their next moves.
Next, the Kansas-based company plans to reemphasize the analog gaming experience, with a tablet app for iOS and Android that will bring some of the advantages of its online platform back to gamers who are playing in person. The app, expected in early 2015, will help players by handling the mechanics of tracking character stats and running numbers while they enjoy the social experience of sitting around a table with friends face-to-face.
Some players are already loading the web-based app on tablets to do just that, Jones says.
"Currently it's the web application being used on the tablet," he says. "It works, and I've definitely used it myself in that way, but why not make it better with as many people as are starting to use us in this way?"
The existing app initially focused just on replacing the table in a traditional gaming session, letting game masters design tiled maps for their friends to explore and providing video and chat interfaces to replace yelling across the room or whispering in an allied player's ear. When it launched, the site was a clean, streamlined, accessible update on the virtual tabletop software that a number of websites have offered over the years, some of which started in the early days of the web.
Roll20's creators planned to keep things simple, leaving most of the game mechanics to traditional pen-and-paper calculations. They wanted to create an easy, simple way to play tabletop games remotely, not a video game engine, says Jones.
"Character sheets were actually something for a long time that we said we weren't going to do," Jones says, referring to the sometimes pages-long tables of statistics that define role-playing characters' strengths, weaknesses, and magical abilities. "A character sheet isn't part of the actual table experience."
But as the program evolved, its creators realized it would be useful to offload some of that complex accounting to the computer. In role-playing games where figuring out the results of combat or other activities often comes down to keeping track of scores or a long series of dice rolls, automating those tasks can improve the gameplay experience.
"It runs a little smoother when you have the speedy tabulation of a computer behind it," Jones says.
Some common visual effects can work better with a computer's help, too, they've found: With traditional tabletop gaming, players walking their characters through a dimly lit dungeon might hear the game master announce what fearsome thing they stumble upon in the dark. With Roll20, game masters can effectively preprogram those kinds of lighting effects, having tokens for monsters automatically pop up on the shared map as players draw near.
"It's a really simple interface to do that sort of shadows or lighting," Jones says. "With all the things that we lose from not having the tactile in-person experience, here's something we can gain."
And, he says, players gaming online don't have to worry about swapping out paper maps, keeping spoilers hidden as players navigate from area to area, or storing maps and tokens between gaming sessions.
"If I'm playing a game at a table, I've got to pick up the table and walk away, or throw a tablecloth over it so nobody wrecks where we were," Jones says.
"We have 85 different creators that are providing elements for sale that we're distributing," he says.
Players can choose from a number of paid subscription plans that unlock access to additional features, or stick with free ad-supported access to the app. Jones says the company aims to keep the free plans powerful enough to be useful and make sure that paid subscribers and free users can participate in the same games, similar to how tabletop role-playing groups historically would have only needed to buy one copy of a rule book or set of miniatures.
And for those not sure they want to hand over their dice, Roll20 offers a compromise: Its uses a server-side quantum mechanical random number generator, and players can track a bar graph of dice rolls that it's generated over time to verify that the system is fair. Or, if they prefer, they can close the stats page and watch a set of virtual dice roll to a stop onscreen.
"Of course, you can also roll your own physical dice in person," according to the Roll20 blog. "It's whatever works best for your group."
Cathal Garvey used to work in cancer research. Now he is the scientific director of IndieBio, a biotech accelerator based in Cork, Ireland which is about to open a branch in San Francisco. Garvey originally studied genetics. "I got into genetics after seeing a documentary about it when it was quite young." he says."I had already decided that I was going to be a biologist at an even younger age. And then I thought 'Oh my God, living things operate on a code.'"
After graduating, Garvey became interested in the DIYBio movement of amateur biotechnologists. "I started seeing all these people doing really exciting stuff," he says. "They were just doing what they wanted to do. It was what I imagined I would do when I was going into college and what I imagined nobody ever got a chance to do when leaving college." So Garvey quit cancer research, built a lab in his mother's spare bedroom, and started to conduct biocoding experiments using his own open source tools.
DIYBio is the wetware equivalent of the maker movement: amateur biotechnologists tinkering with DNA using low-cost tools and an open source ethos. Synthetic biology, or biocoding as Garvey prefers to call it, is a subset of DIYBio, which views biological systems and organisms as technologies which can be engineered at the cellular and DNA levels. Biocoders don't just want to use sequencing to determine the order of nucleotides within a DNA molecule but to synthesize entirely new molecules. Biocoding can be used to engineer organisms like bacteria and yeast to make everything from vegan cheese to new cancer therapies.
"This is a technology that changes the way we eat, the clothes that we wear, the environment that we breathe," says Garvey. "It can undermine the inability of the existing pharma industry to provide the drugs that we need. They are not meeting some of our demands because they can't with their technologies or their capital requirements. Synthetic biology could."
IndieBio started life in summer 2014 at University College Cork, Ireland. Ireland is already a biotech hub and one of the world's biggest exporters of pharmaceuticals. Six teams from all over the world spent three months in Cork manufacturing artificial milk for vegans, engineering yeast to produce THC for medicinal purposes, and even making flowers that change color throughout the day. Most of IndieBio's first cohort of teams had strong backgrounds in the biological sciences (the technology for Revolution Bio's chameleon flowers, for example, was first developed as part of a DARPA project to make plants that would change color when they encountered explosive residues). IndieBio San Francisco is likely to add many more software developers to the mix.
Ryan Bethencourt is a cofounder of Berkeley BioLabs and now program director at IndieBio San Francisco. "Almost 50% of the people that we have in the lab are developers, software engineers, electrical engineers," he says. "Many developers get involved in this because they stumble across an interesting open source hardware project which is for biotech. Some of them learn bioinformatics and some of them actually want to get their hands dirty. They will build their own DNA sequence and then they can insert it into a new bacteria. "
The "Hello World" experiment of biocoding is glowing bacteria. First you need a chassis, a living cell that will host your new DNA. The E. coli bacterium and yeast are popular chassis since they are well understood and readily accept new genes. Select a fluorescent protein, generally from a firefly or jellyfish, in the color of your choice and order the DNA sequence for it. This sequence must be pasted into a plasmid, a circular DNA molecule which can replicate independently of chromosomal DNA. Essentially, you cut out part of the plasmid, paste in your fluorescent DNA sequence, and inject the plasmid into the E. coli. The bacteria manufactures the protein and starts to glow. With the right equipment and supplies, of the kind available at your friendly local biohacking space, you can do this experiment in under an hour.
Protocols, or step-by-step guides, are available online for many biocoding procedures like PCR (polymerase chain reaction). PCR replicates a DNA segment billions of times. It's the same process used in every crime show to take a cheek swab from a suspect's DNA and match it. "A protocol is a recipe for doing science," says Bethencourt. "You position the gel as such, you warm the gel for x number of minutes. There's nuance in it in the same way that you can be a good baker or a bad baker even when you follow the same recipe."
Once they have learned the basics, and made some mistakes along the way, developers start to engineer their own biotechnology products. "I've seen everything from developing new types of fermented mushrooms to algae bio batteries that were printed by a biochemist," says Bethencourt. "A computer scientist created cellulose. He took a bacteria and got it to grow a baking pan full of cellulose. When he dried it out it looks like parchment, so he basically made paper out of bacteria. So you just put in sugar and out comes paper."
So far there aren't many software tools available for making new DNA, as opposed to understanding existing DNA, but that is starting to change. Synbiota is a web-based groupware DNA design platform. "Think GitHub for biotechnology," says Garvey.
Antha is a new open source high level language (based on the Go language) for biological experiments, which builds work flows from individually testable and reusable Antha Elements. An element can be anything from genetic elements such as a gene, transcription factor, or the particular strain of yeast or bacteria used as a chassis to an experimental procedure such as DNA assembly. Antha can be used to control existing lab equipment and capture experimental data automatically. "It's hard to find a mental framework where using a computer to design the whole process makes sense, "says Garvey. "That's why I am excited about Antha because I think they are very close to getting that right. "
Biocoding is still considerably more messy than its software equivalent. "It can be quite frustrating," says Garvey. "There's no compiler. There's no debug. Nothing drops to the command line when your program crashes. It's hard, it takes time, it's a challenge but it's going to be a very rewarding challenge. Whoever gets into biocoding at this stage will be the people who shape it."
There is one characteristic, however, which biocoding does have in common with software. It scales. "Every diabetic in the world today uses insulin produced by genetically modified yeast or bacteria," says Garvey. "The cost of ordering the DNA for insulin is in the range of 200 EUR ($250). This is a technology that scales because every factory producing insulin, every cell of E. coli, can duplicate itself. In fact, it can't stop duplicating itself without human intervention. If you want to make a mobile app that does something or an organism that does something, there are many occasions where you will find that it's actually more straightforward and cheaper to do it with an organism."
"If you look at manufacturing in biology the costs are often sugar water and that's it," says Bethencourt. "So if you are talking about a bacteria or yeast, clear sterile sugar water that goes in and hopefully out comes your product. It's not expensive to get the basic equipment, maybe $1,000-2,000. If you have to buy newer equipment sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. Half a million dollars is enough to build a real biotech company."
Garvey now wants to educate the next generation of biocoders. CoderDojo is a global network of over 500 volunteer-led, free programming clubs for kids aged 7-17, which also started in Cork. Garvey is currently recruiting kids from CoderDojo to participate in the first BioCoderDojo. CoderDojo places a lot of emphasis on peer-led learning. Once the kids reach a certain level of proficiency, they mainly teach each other. Since most kids have tablets and laptops, but won't be familiar with lab equipment, the initial learning curve will be steeper for BioCoderDojo but its DIY ethos is the same.
"What we want is for these kids to come in and say 'What you did was cool but I have a better idea' and we actually support them in their own projects in the same way that CoderDojo does," says Garvey. "I want them to feel like this is something that is going to be very normal to your generation. Because that's how it's going to be."
For some, quantity trumps quality in scientific research. Countries that submitted the least papers to the online repository arXiv since 2011 tended to plagiarize the most. That's what Science's news and policy tracker, ScienceInsider, found when it asked arXiv to share data about the papers researchers submitted to it.
Anyone can submit a manuscript to arXiv—pronounced "archive"—as long as it documents a study in the math or physics domains. And the documents don't have to go through the orthodox peer-review process, which makes it relatively easy to get accepted.
The global view of science plagiarismMap: courtesy of Science Insider
When it comes down to it, a bot vets each new study for quality, especially regarding reusing text from older studies. The automated program compares a new article's text to the text of every other document in arXiv's database. After ruling out exceptions, like when an author cites her own work or uses quotes, the bot flags the ones that heavily lift text word for word from older studies.
Copying, the bot finds, is quite common: among the 767,000 papers submitted from arXiv's inception in 1991 until 2012, one in 16 authors were found to have copied long phrases and sentences from their own previously published work, and about one out of every 1,000 authors copied about a paragraph's worth of text from other people's papers without citing them.
So what happens to these copycat studies? ArXiv's founder, Paul Ginsberg, and Cornell PhD student Daniel Citron have conducted what they say is the first comprehensive study of patterns of text reuse within the full texts of an important large scientific corpus. Eventually, they found the ones with the most reused text tended not to get cited so much by later researchers.
"One motivation for undertaking this analysis of arXiv data was the known incidence of text copying and plagiarism, usually noticed by readers, and sometimes reported in the news media," the researchers write of their study, which attempts to focus on "textual overlap" within ArXiv, not "plagiarism" per se. There are no universal guidelines for what constitutes plagiarism in science anyway, they note, but rather "a standard somewhat more lenient than currently applied to journalists, popular authors, and public figures."
Even if the algorithm can't detect clear-cut plagiarism, it can help. An author's tendency to reuse text in an article is a good indicator of her likelihood to plagiarize. Citron and Ginsberg shared their results in PNAS earlier this month, and posited that the plagiarism was influenced by cultural differences "in academic infrastructure and mentoring, or incentives that emphasize quantity of publication over quality."
Those not highly proficient in English might also be likely to lift text from English sources. The paper observes this at the student level, "where in order to explain concepts, students less confident in their English proficiency tended to employ longer phrases from other sources, rather than just words." But even at a later career stage, there may be a continued impetus for plagiarism. "A researcher concerned that his or her articles are rejected due to the quality of writing may feel compelled to imitate sentence structures from other articles."
Overlap graphs for two unnamed authors. The number of articles and timeline of publication for each is a) 65 from 2003 to 2012, b) 126 from 1999 to 2012. The blue lines indicate significant self-copying, the green lines reuse from other authors
with citation, and the red lines reuse without citation.
But ScienceInsider wanted to get to the bottom of these cultural differences. Knowing that authors had to report their home countries with each submission, it asked Ginsberg to release this data. ScienceInsider then mapped out all the countries from which authors submitted at least 100 papers since August 2011 and found a small number of countries, like the U.S., Canada, and Japan had the least number of flagged authors.
Incidentally, authors from these industrialized countries turned out to submit the most papers to arXiv. Authors from less industrialized countries, ScienceInsider noted, had the most flagged studies but also tended to submit fewer papers:
For example, of all the authors from Bulgaria who submitted papers since August 2011, 20% submitted flagged articles. But arXiv's bot flagged only 6% of the authors from Japan. In the same time frame, around 4,700 papers came out of Japan, but Bulgaria only submitted around 200.
In the U.S., 1,236 out of 26,052 authors were flagged, while in Germany, 297 out of 9,201 authors were flagged. In Iran, 164 out of 1054 authors were cited for "text overlap," while in China, 688 out of 6,372 authors were flagged.
"While conceivably exacerbated by the ease of cutting and pasting text in electronic format," the researchers note, "the problem does predate both the new technology and the use of preprints. Ironically the combination of those make make that reuse that much easier to detect."
Leave it to a bot, a bit of data mining, and a map to keep researchers in check—or at least raise more questions about how the same science is conducted differently across the globe.
The worst tab of the weekend is media-establishment spokesturtle Michael Wolff's USA Today column, "A casualty in the race for digital traffic," a column so incoherently written that it is at first difficult to discern how stupid the underlying ideas it struggles to express are. Here:
Gawker, with its digital-generation rancor, superseded, much to many people's horror, Slate, Harvard on the Internet, as the state of the digital media art (i.e., digital media has about a five-year life expectancy, give or take).
This is not one cherry-picked bad sentence. This is representative of the entire thing. Here's the kicker:
But today's "vertically integrated digital media company," in Vidra's self-hoisting words, is another duck all together.
That is the first time a duck of any kind was mentioned in the column. Also: "Self-hoisting?" To the extent that it can be discerned, Wolff's thesis seems to be that digital media is… not good? Please do read this, it actually gives Thomas Friedman some solid competition in this year's Golden Globe award for bad ideas expressed ineptly.
Speaking of Gawker, founding blogger Elizabeth Spiers is pregnant, adding her good news to that of impending NY media moms Emily Gould and Rachel Sklar. Tabs was unable to determine if Julia Allison is pregnant because she is still, somehow, at Burning Man? The Take Tree suggested that Nick Denton should open a day care for the babies of former employees, who are likely to be born both less expensive and more talented than the current Gawker staff.1
some ppl play classical music to their fetuses but i am more focused on teaching mine not to read the comments
Great news everyone! Bijan quit his job, so now he's the full-time Tabs intern! Also he has moved into a spacious cardboard pied-à-terre in the Port Authority bus terminal!
I don't have to explain the significance of the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery. You get it. 54 miles, five days in the Alabama spring, for some small measure of freedom.
Today, the New Yorkerhas published some of Steve Schapiro's previously unseen photographs from the trail. Schapiro was down south covering the protest for Life magazine; a full half-century later, the pictures retain the urgency and intensity that marked—and continues to mark—the Civil Rights movement. The faces are hard and tight and resigned, sullen but not totally resentful. They're not so much answering a call to action as they are enacting the basic bodily imperative to preserve oneself from harm.
It is a biological reaction to injustice. Not one that's unthinking, though. These marchers understand the long road ahead. Look at the faces in these most recent marches: See how set they are, chin and jaw stony, as though poured from concrete.
It's the sound of a hit U.K. television show, landing on U.S. shores with a splash. Odds are, you've either seen Black Mirror and you're hounding everyone you've ever known to watch it now, or you know someone who won't shut up about it.
Since debuting in 2011, the show, created by producer and journalist Charlie Brooker, has chronicled a dystopian near future over six hour-long episodes. And tomorrow brings its highest-profile episode yet: "White Christmas," a special holiday episode featuring Jon Hamm, Game of Thrones' Oona Chaplin, and Rafe Spall of Prometheus.
Each self-contained episode of Black Mirror opens with new characters in new grim circumstances, navigating the dark side of technology. Although future tech is integral to Black Mirror's DNA, the show is grounded in human flaws: We can have the most sophisticated devices surrounding us or even implanted in our heads, but it's how we use them that matters. And so far, in the Black Mirror universe, everyone pretty much sucks at using tech. But it's not for lack of trying!
So before you catch the Christmas special, which airs December 16 on the U.K.'s Channel 4 (and on December 25 on DirectTV), we've recapped all six episodes of seasons one and two to get you up to speed. Here's hoping you can avoid some of the nastier stuff depicted on the show—sex with a pig on live TV, anyone?!—and happy binge watching.
This is, of course, drenched in spoilers, so proceed with caution:
The prime minister of Britain wakes up to the distressing news that the Duchess of Beaumont—aka Princess Susannah, aka Fake Middleton—has been kidnapped. The alleged "terrorist" doesn't want money or hostages released—he wants the PM to have full-on, legit sex with a pig on live TV or the princess will be executed. Yes, you read that correctly.
Despite the best efforts of the PM's team to scrub the kidnapper's video from YouTube, it's like a digital hydra: Delete one video and 2,000 more take its place. Naturally, it takes no time at all for the social media floodgates to burst wide open, in turn making it impossible for journalists to bury the news, even those under express order from the government not to air the story. Social media plus transparency equals yay!
Social media plus transparency equals . . . oh, man. In what has to be the most embarrassing situation possible, sex with a pig on live TV becomes a spectator sport. As the PM's wife says after reading comments and tweets, "I know people. We love humiliation—we can't not laugh. It's already happening in their heads." And when it actually does go down, people around the country are crammed around TV sets like it's the World Cup final.
Bing and many others live in bleak apartments with giant screens for walls, peddling bikes for a living to power the city and earning merit points along the way that can be cashed out for everything: snacks, toothpaste, even a ticket to audition for an X Factor-style show where the winner is catapulted to fame and out of the peddle room. When paying newcomer Abi's way onto the show blows up in his face, Bing exacts his revenge against the judges with an epically powerful speech on materialism and the frivolity it breeds, winning him his own show on a stream where he can rant about whatever he likes—essentially commercializing his abhorrence for commercialization.
We're beyond needing a phone or tablet in our hand: This is a hands-free, swipe-all, next-gen Apple Pay kind of world. It's technology that's fully and seamlessly integrated into your everyday life!
There's no off switch—you can't shut anything out. And what is being constantly sold? Anything that gets you off or doesn't make you think too hard—if at all. Think Alex's rehabilitation scene in A Clockwork Orange. Now add PornHub and BuzzFeed.
Liam just can't shake the hunch that his wife is cheating on him. And his Willow Grain, a tiny device implanted behind your ear that records everything you see and allows you to play back, sort, edit, and delete parts of your memory, isn't easing his concerns. Through some Sherlock-ing and brute force, all of Liam's questions are answered and are too much for him to bear, causing him to painfully extract his own grain.
You can call up any and every memory you've ever had—even from when you were a baby. Your entire life is at your fingertips to play back at your leisure and relive your greatest memories and delete your worst.
Pulling up a "re-do" every so often is fine—but do it too much and you're just living in the past. You're remembering people and places how you want to remember them and not as they are in the moment. And the temptation to nitpick every frame of every memory can lead to a downward spiral of obsession. Essentially, if you keep pausing and rewinding life, you're not really living.
When Ash dies, his girlfriend Martha goes to extreme lengths to get him back, ordering a clone embedded with software that processes all of his social media posts and saved audio samples so he can converse and interact IRL with Martha.
Having the opportunity to communicate with a loved one who's passed, even if it's just data in a cloud, can be comforting on some level, especially if that person died suddenly. With this technology, you can get a chance to say "I love you" one last time—and hear a response. Touching, right?
The levels of "nope" here are just staggering. Think about it: A synthetic version of a loved one built from what he or she posted online. People only post a fraction of who they are online. No matter how many tweets, selfies, or posts you produce, you're still filtering out what you don't want people to see or read about you, thereby filtering out who you truly are. Toss that all in a shell of a human and you've got yourself the shallowest clone money can buy.
As punishment for kidnapping a little girl and filming her murder at the hands of her fiancé, Victoria is sentenced to a sadistic sort of Six Flags where actors pretend to hunt her down for sport and paying customers get a front-row seat to film everything on their phones. Victoria, meanwhile, doesn't know what's going on, because her memory is erased every time the grisly truth is revealed.
You probably know the answer to this one. There are many excellent uses for the tech, of course. But to put it in Black Mirror terms, consider that horrific video of Eric Garner being choked and killed. If the police aren't going to police themselves, having a digital, visual record is a very good thing, indeed.
On the other hand, too often now, when tragedy strikes, the first thing we do is pull out our phones—not to call 911, but to take pictures or video. It's like a car crash we can't look away from, and while we are safely behind our screens, we have no real intention of helping those in distress.
An uncouth cartoon bear named Waldo is breaking up politics as usual when his creators decide to make him run for office. Jamie, the man behind Waldo's voice and controls, eventually cracks under the pressure to live up to something that's become bigger than him and, worse, something he's not sure he believes in.
A super-shady government agent in the episode actually gives a decent explanation: "You look at human politicians, you're instinctively like, brrr—uncanny, right? Like the girls in porn you just know something's wrong 'cause why else are they doing it? Just like politics. Waldo bypasses that. You already know he's not real. So no personal flaws."
Anyone who follows U.S. politics should recognize the perils here. Giving people something to believe in seems like a great idea, but it can make the average citizen more susceptible to following the leader no matter what treacherous path he takes them on. And because Waldo is a cartoon, he's one more step removed from direct accountability. Who, after all, is regulating those pulling the strings?
Fast-forward to 2018. That year, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, the country will have 1.2 million unfilled jobs in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math, known by that increasingly inescapable acronym STEM.
Look at those positions now and the lack of women—a group who make up more than half of the workforce—isn't a problem just for women. The whole economy feels it. And without question, changing gender stereotypes and breaking down what scientists and engineers should look like is a long overdue transformation. The good news is, it's all happening.
Female leaders in STEM are shedding light on a means to a solution by being the solution themselves. While the numbers are in need of multiplying, there are monumental strides being made among women and girls in STEM, and they call for celebration—so I've collected nine of the biggest ones from the past year.
On September 4, the White House appointed Google veteran Megan Smith, 50, as the country's third-ever CTO, giving women everywhere a new tech titan role model to follow. Directly assisting President Obama, the MIT graduate will be in charge of guiding the federal government's use of technology and its IT policies. Over the summer, she led Google's Made with Code initiative, a campaign aiming to get young girls excited about computer science. No stranger to tech innovation, Smith worked for Apple and a number of startups before joining Google in 2003.
Italian Air Force pilot Samantha Cristoforetti, 37, landed at the International Space Station on November 24, marking the first time Italy has ever sent a woman astronaut into space. Joining fellow female astronaut Elena Serova of Russia, Cristoforetti is conducting experiments on how microgravity affects sleep. When she arrived at the station, where she'll remain until May 2015, reporters asked if she'll be wearing makeup while she's in space. Suffice to say, she'll have other things to keep her busy, such as live tweeting spectacular images of the cosmos.
On July 16, Cynthia Breazeal, the 47-year-old CEO of the social robotics maker Jibo Inc., launched a crowdfunding campaign to finish the development of "the world's first family robot."
Cynthia Breazeal with Jibo. Photo: via Jibo
Originally set with a goal of $100,000, the campaign raised nearly $2.3 million in two months, making it the most successful technology campaign ever on Indiegogo. Built to engage with people, and take on tasks normally handled by apps or personal assistants, Breazeal's family robot is designed to treat its users like humans, unlike other devices. An MIT professor and long-time robotic pioneer, Breazeal is best known for creating the wide-eyed, social robot Kismet in the late '90s.
On November 20, President Obama honored 85-year-old chemist Edith Flanigen with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation's highest award for inventors. Most recognized for her work in molecular sieves—or crystal compounds that can be used to break down crude oil and reduce energy costs and industrial waste—Flanigen's 42-year career at Union Carbide allowed her to develop a new way to manufacture gasoline more efficiently and safely.
As part of GE's "Fallonventions" segment on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon in February, the series featured 17-year-old teen inventor Ann Makosinski, who built the Hollow Flashlight, which can light up through the warmth of the human hand. She began to develop the project when she learned that a friend couldn't do homework at night in the Philippines because electricity was scarce. Her illuminating invention won her the top prize at the Google Science Fair in 2013.
In November, the home solar electricity provider Sunrun unveiled an interactive kiosk that allows consumers to see if their houses are suitable for solar energy systems. Under the leadership of the company's 35-year-old co-CEO, Lynn Jurich, Sunrun was recently awarded $1.6 million by the U.S. Department of Energy's SunShot Initiative fund. According to the company's website, Sunrun and its partners build a solar system every 10 minutes. Jurich and her cofounder, Edward Fenster, dreamed up Sunrun while attending Stanford University, and launched the company in 2007.
On October 28, 14-year-old Holly Jackson won the Broadcom Master's Competition top prize of $25,000 for her project Sewing Science, an engineering device that measures the strength and capacity of fabric and threads. From fashion designers to protective-gear manufacturers to everyday people learning to sew, Sewing Science findings are of wide-ranging interest, and it all came together because of a hobby.
After a controversial launch in 2012 due to a lawsuit over parodying the Beastie Boys' hit "Girls" in a viral video ad, GoldieBlox showcased its engineering-inspired float, The Girl-Powered Spinning Machine, in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. This is the second surprise marketing hit for the toy company, which was created to encourage girls to take an interest in STEM. In January, GoldieBlox was featured in a $4 million Super Bowl ad seen by 111.5 million viewers. Founded by 31-year-old founder Debbie Sterling, GoldieBlox's first two products were top-selling items on Amazon last December.
Adrianna Mitchell, from Newark, N.J. with President Obama
On December 4, the 2014 National Christmas Tree Lighting took place on the Ellipse at President's Park with the help of thousands of girls across the country, who participated in Google's Made With Code campaign and programmed the flickering of the tree lights down to the second. The campaign is running through the holiday season, as the White House trees continue to add more programs from girls (and boys!) who contribute to the site. During the "Hour of Code" event at the White House four days later, one middle-school student—Adrianna Mitchell, from Newark, N.J.—showed the Coder-in-Chief himself how to write his first line of JavaScript ("moveForward(100);").
From Megan Smith's appointment as CTO of the U.S. to her initiative Made With Code, we have come full circle in spotlighting some of the biggest moments for women and girls in STEM this year. But as more attention is brought to this league of women and girls and to moments like these, stereotypes will change, culture will change, and the playing field at incubators, in labs, and in government will look more like the rest of the world does.
If you're kvetching online about being sick or subtweeting your sneezing co-worker, public health researchers would love for you to keep at it. You're feeding a faster, better system for predicting flu outbreaks.
It used to be that Google's search trends were the best public tool for flu monitoring, but epidemiologists are increasingly looking to Twitter and other social media for better results. A team at San Diego State University collected 160,000 tweets from 11 cities that contained the word "flu" and published a study in November showing that Twitter is becoming a more accurate surveillance tool for tracking the flu.
Mark Dredze
Other researchers are using Twitter in an attempt to reinvent flu forecasting. Mark Dredze, an assistant research professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, and his colleagues have used an algorithm to process 10 million tweets a day and examine the content of flu-related tweets. Dredze says this approach is more accurate than simply using search queries—a la Google Flu Trends has—to predict the spread of the flu.
The CDC still does routine surveillance of flu activity the old-fashioned way, with local health departments, public laboratories, health care providers and emergency rooms tracking the flu virus. But Matthew Biggerstaff, an epidemiologist at the CDC, says there's often a nearly two-week time lag with reporting flu data from all these partners. Twitter and other platforms help accelerate this process.
"People who are tweeting about flu may have not yet sought care, so this allows us to get a snapshot of what's happening among the entire population," Biggerstaff says.
Dredze says though the U.S. has a very robust system in place for flu surveillance, there's a lot more that can be done with forecasting to reduce the virus's spread.
"Knowing how bad of a flu season it's going to be—and most critically, knowing when things will get serious during flu season—those are two forecasting problems that make a big difference," he says. If health officials can more accurately predict the severity and peak of flu outbreaks, they can make better decisions about when to push vaccination and awareness campaigns.
Graham Dodge, CEO of Sickweather
While Dredze and his colleagues are using Twitter for flu forecasting, other applications, like the Sickweather app, have been using social media to track illness trends. Sickweather filters two million pieces of data a month from its users and updates on Twitter and Facebook. Graham Dodge, Sickweather's CEO, says the company weighs its data against the CDC's clinical data to ensure accuracy. He says Sickweather's hybrid approach makes social media a very effective tool for giving users real-time intelligence to combat sickness, compared to methods like Google Flu Trends.
"It's the difference between implicit data and explicit data," Dodge says.
Google Flu Trends, which uses search terms to indicate flu activity, falls into the former category. Google's model was criticized after it overpredicted flu levels during the 2012-2013 flu season. This year, Google spokesperson Jason Freidenfelds says Google Flu Trends is using CDC flu data to improve its model for the 2014-2015 flu season. When asked whether Google would consider incorporating social media postings into its model, Freidenfelds said the company was open to other ideas, but "we don't have anything more to announce at this point."
The tactic of combining the speed of web data with verified clinical data is only accelerating, thanks in part to the Affordable Care Act. Jennifer Horney, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Texas A&M University points to the Obamacare requirements to digitize records and make more data readily available.
"With Affordable Care, we're going to have a plethora of data that we didn't have before," Horney says.
Biggerstaff stressed that it's going to take some legwork to make the data more actionable. He wants "algorithms that can pick up people who are actually tweeting about being sick, rather than just reading a news story about the flu."
That's why Dredze thinks his team's approach can work long-term. There's often a huge spike in the number of people searching about the flu after extensive media coverage, which may have caused the hiccups with Google Flu Trends last year. (Other researchers have used Wikipedia for flu forecasting, correlating searches for flu-related content with the spread of the flu. This method may encounter the same challenges as Google Flu Trends.)
"We isolate those tweets that say things like 'I have the flu" or 'my daughter has the flu,' which are about infection," Dredze says. "The infections are a much more accurate form of surveillance."
This year, Dredze and his colleagues have launched a password-protected site for health officials called healthtweets.org to help them make better decisions when dealing with health epidemics. Considering the warnings about the current flu season, Dredze's solution may be coming at just the perfect time.
There's something bizarre about responding to a 600-page document detailing systematic U.S. government torture by declaring that the real America—the one with good values—does not torture. It's exoneration masquerading as outrage. Imagine someone beating you up and then, when confronted with the evidence, declaring that "I'm not really like that" or "that wasn't the real me."
And last, the Slate Take that had to happen, "Stop Publishing the Sony Hacks." I don't know what the argument is, I only read this part at the end: "Correction, Dec. 15, 2014: This article originally misspelled Adolf Hitler's first name."
The difference between intimate and non-intimate spaces is intuitive and often flickering, but generally clear. Your workplace isn't generally intimate and your bedroom generally is; there are circumstances, though, that can flip those generalities. And online, the distinction is fuzzier. Group chats are more bedroom than workplace, more quiet kiss than firm handshake—but again, there can be extenuating circumstances. Today, Kyle Chaykahas published a brief meditation on group chat's intimacy in Gizmodo.
It's not just the NSA that makes a private internet desirable. We also want to be shielded from each other. Group chats take the benefits of the open internet and social media—effortless communication, instant sharing, a sense of belonging—and shrink them down into something that fits the scale of our personal lives instead of the entire planet.
The technology is new, as Chayka points out, but intimacy is not. Human connection will never become obsolete.
Before I remembered that Bijan had claimed that tab today, I had it included above as: "Kyle Chaykadoxxed everyone's dark social Slacks." I think this pretty well captures the contrast between my style and Bijan's.
Today's Blog Entry: Casey Kolderup, "2014: What I Didn't." I'm feeling this.
Today in Tabs is handcrafted every day from local, organic takes, and served on a bed of fresh FastCoLabs with a side of roasted TinyLetter. Pairs well with a chilled @rustyk5. No substitutions, please. A gratuity of 15% will be automatically added for parties of 6 or more.
Short of checking every child's wish list, it's impossible to know what the most popular gifts are this holiday season. It is safe to say that a plurality of these gifts are being sold by a handful of prominent retailers including Amazon, Target, Best Buy, and Walmart. Before that, many of those toys must wind their way from Asia to U.S. shores, on giant container ships. And, in what should come as little surprise, at least to the parents of young children, it turns out that the biggest new entrant into Santa's global shipping lanes has everything to do with a single movie.
At least, according to the data.
Indeed, Frozen—which has already shattered records as the highest grossing animated film of all time, and stands as the fifth highest grossing film ever with ticket sales of more than $1.2 billion globally—is this holiday season's blockbuster. According to data collected during the period from August to October when retailers stock their shelves for the holiday season, Frozen filled a total of 1,267 shipments entering U.S. ports ahead of the holiday shopping season—a growth of more than 470% compared with the same time period in 2013.
Disney's Frozen Castle and Ice Palace Playset is widely sold out. Photo: via Mattel
According to shipping analytics company Panjiva, shipments of Frozen stuff were more than double the combined number of shipments seen from last year's favorites, Sofia the First (663) and Doc McStuffins (901). (Shipments are measured in 20-foot-equivalents, which relates to the size of a shipping container.)
And in case you were wondering: Elsa's more popular than her sister Anna, while Olaf (the snowman) is now certainly more popular than Frosty the Snowman.
But Frozen-related toys could not unseat the long-time, undisputed king of holiday toys, according to Panjiva's data: Shipments of Barbie and her related toys surpassed 3,000 shipments this year—a 32% increase over last year.
Other fun things that leaped over the 300-shipment mark—historically a good indicator of "strong performance and wide availability," says Panjiva—included Monster High, DohVinci, Elmo, and Nerf toys.
Electronic toys are increasingly common on wish lists too. The most popular items, at least according to the number of shipping containers they filled, included Zoomer, an interactive dog, which reached 417 shipments, marking a nearly 300% increase over 2013. Air Hogs, the flying toys most likely to fly into a relative's head at a Christmas party, increased nearly 70% over last year, with more than 485 total shipments. Educational toys also saw a boost: Shipments of LeapFrog and VTech are up 58% and 26%, respectively.
These numbers shouldn't be taken as the final word on most popular holiday gifts, of course. Panjiva, which relies on a variety of sources for its data, only tracks shipments by boat, which make up about half of U.S. imports; the rest comes by truck, rail, and air. But shipping is the cheapest method, and most toys sold in America are shipped by boat from Asia. Last year, toys arrived on U.S. shores—mostly at Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Newark—in more than 785,000 shipping containers. About 86 percent of them came from China and Hong Kong, Journal of Commerce estimates.
Another handy if imprecise metric for gleaning insights into holiday gift-giving: the best-selling charts at ecommerce sites. One item being shipped a lot this Christmas season is Cards Against Humanity. As of press time, three of Amazon's top five best-selling toys and games are related to the popular party game: the core Cards Against Humanity set ($25), and two expansion packs ($10 each). The other two best-selling toys at Amazon are the Disney Frozen Sparkle Princess Elsa Doll (available from Amazon vendors starting at $19.99), and the Snap Circuits Jr. SC-100 Kit ($20.99). (NB: Amazon just extended its free shipping deadline to Dec. 19, which is also Walmart's last shipping day.)
The list is completely different at Target.com. Target's list of best-selling toys and games are explicitly aimed at children, which is perhaps one reason Cards Against Humanity is, alas, not on it. Here, the best-selling toys and games are the Lego Friends Jungle Tree Sanctuary ($29.99), the FurReal Friends Get Up And GoGo My Walking Pup Pet (price unavailable), the Kinetic Sand - Beach Fun Playset ($22.99), the Littlest Pet Shop Style Set ($29.99), and the Disney Frozen Pull Apart And Talkin' Plush Olaf ($15.00).
Frozen toys. Photo: via Mattel
Frozen appears in yet another completely different list of top-selling holiday toys from an e-commerce site: Kmart.comlists their top five best-selling toys this Christmas season as Kinetic Sand Wackitivities ($16.99), the Hasbro Simon Swipe Game ($14.85), the FurReal Friends Pom Pom My Baby Panda ($39.00), the Nerf Zombie Strike SlingFire Blaster ($19.96), and the Disney Frozen Magical Lights Palace Play Set ($29.99). Note that Disney's Frozen Castle and Ice Palace Playset, $119, is now completely sold out—though you can find it going for between $225 and $700 at resellers and on eBay.)
Toys now make up the third-largest fraction of gift purchases during the holiday shipping-and-shopping extravaganza. In November, Gallup found that 60% of Americans were planning to purchase toys for gifts, just below prepaid gift cards (65%) and clothing (79%), and more than electronics (49%). The same poll found a rising interest in online shopping, with significantly more Americans planning to spend less than they did last year. Despite this—and notwithstanding a labor-management strife that's slowed West Coast ports—overall holiday shipments are expected to be up about 5%, and toy shipments up about 3% this season.
Even kids who have misbehaved this year might take interest in the shipping metrics. "Despite the anticipated high availability of many toys, Panjiva does issue a word of caution to children who may not be on the 'nice list,'" the company noted in a blog post. "Shipments of coal into the U.S. from August through October are up 2% over 2013, suggesting Santa might be extra liberal in handing it out to naughty boys and girls on Christmas day."
There are, truly, only two types of people in the world: those who write Yelp reviews and those who don't.
With a twinge of guilt, I must confess that I fall into the latter category: I regularly consult Yelp for advice about places to check out in my neighborhood, but I've never written a review myself. And yet, as I've scanned other people's posts over the years, I've often wondered what compels them to spend hours carefully crafting reviews. Are they more altruistic than I am? Are they more concerned with good service and high-quality food? Do they have more time on their hands?
It was with those questions in mind that I set out to examine the inner workings of the Yelp community. I quickly discovered that many people find reviewing an incredibly satisfying creative endeavor. The most prolific Yelp reviewers, in fact, treat their write-ups as a kind of art form, and approach them with care and pride. So, the 26,380 reviews that are posted on Yelp every minute can be arguably seen as a large-scale art project, not just a practical tool in modern life.
"For people whose jobs don't give them a platform for self-expression, Yelp is often treated as a creative outlet," Camilla Vasquez, a linguistics professor who studies consumer reviews, tells me. "Yelp reviewers often feel a sense of ownership over their work. They enjoy the feeling that they are an author, that their voice matters and that they are being clever in their style." Her hypothesis is that since I am a writer by trade, I already have a creative outlet, so I don't need Yelp to fill that void.
For her recent scholarly book, The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews, Vasquez analyzed thousands of reviews on TripAdvisor, Amazon, Netflix, Yelp, and Epicurious. She notes that each site has site has it's own particular flavor, cultural norms and rules of engagement. For instance, since film appreciation is so subjective, Netflix reviews often reflect individual tastes of the writer, while Amazon reviewers tends to focus on providing an objective evaluation of products. Of all of the sites, however, she found that Yelp is most likely to draw out reviewers' creativity. "Yelp has a very specific kind of ethos," she says. "It is the only site that asks readers to rate reviews on the basis of being not only useful but also funny and cool. That presupposes that reviewers are taking a specific kind of position as a writer: they are trying not only to be useful but also to be engaging and entertaining."
When I spoke to active Yelp reviewers, I found that creativity figures into the reviewing process in many ways. For some, developing a unique perspective and translating an experience into words is a rare opportunity for self-expression. This is the case for Albert Wong, a 36-year-old software engineer who lives in Los Angeles. He has spent most of his life studiously avoiding anything resembling writing, focusing instead on math and science classes that would pave the path to a career in technology. "You should have seen my cursive in school—it was totally illegible," he says. But around 2008, Wong felt like his life was missing something. "I wanted to be a bit more creative in life," he says. "It occurred to me that even my emails—which were probably the most original things I was producing—were dry and boring."
Wong tells me that the reason he took the plunge and started writing Yelp reviews six years ago was to improve his command of written English. He points out that he is a native English speaker, who was born and raised in the United States, but he found Yelp to be the perfect platform to play with language in new ways. Wong is now a prolific writer of reviews. At the time of publication, he had posted 1,345 reviews on Yelp and the last four had popped up in the three days it took me to write this story. (A far cry from the 8,000 reviews produced by Yelp's most productive reviewer, but an impressive tally nonetheless.) He makes it clear that his reviews are not motivated by altruism or a desire to help his community, but simply because he finds the process so enjoyable. "Yelp has always been more of a diary for me, rather than a way to contribute to society," he says.
Wong's job requires him to travel frequently, so he has made a bit of a game of checking out eclectic hidden gems in each city and writing about them on Yelp. Doing this requires him to process his experiences differently because he has to find an angle about each restaurant he visits and translate his experiences into succinct prose. Hearing him describe it, this approach sounds like an abbreviated version of what I do as a journalist. Vasquez tells me that while reviews appear simple and straightforward, reviewers must still articulate their experiences in narrative form, much like journaling and storytelling.
Yelp, for it's part, consciously thinks about ways to nurture their members' creative spark. "There are a few ways we try to encourage creativity when it comes to review writing," Yelp communications specialist, Hannah Cheesman, tells me. "We rely on the Yelp community to show us which reviews they like most by voting them useful, funny or cool." Yelp also highlights stellar reviews on it's Review of the Day section and in a Weekly Yelp newsletter to encourage reviewers to produce their best work.
Wong has developed a distinct style. His language isn't flowery or funny: he gets to the point quickly, telling his reader whether it is worth the visit and what they should eat. Like all the other reviewers I spoke with, Wong tends to give mostly high marks to establishments - the majority of his reviews are between three and five stars, and a restaurant needs to seriously screw up to a lower rating. (66% of ratings on Yelp are four or five stars.) Instead, his reviews tend to provide tips or insights that would not otherwise be obvious. Take his review of Pasadena's Lucky Boy Drive-In, which he gave four stars. "I came, I saw and I got the breakfast burrito," he writes. "Yeah, it's good, but is it the best? Nope. Still, it's an institution."
Yelp users—78% of whom have a college or graduate school degree—tend to have strong opinions about what kind of reviews tickle their fancy. Shortly after he began flooding Yelp with his reviews, Wong discovered he had quite a fan base on Yelp who kept tabs on his recommendations and complimented him on his writing style. ("You're my hero!" says Michelle K.; "Good writer," says Norman H.) Wong has a captive audience interested in the content he is producing, which is every author's dream. "I wouldn't call them groupies," he says, with a laugh, "but there are people who care about what I think about things. There are restaurants I go to where people recognize my face based on the reviews I have written. I'm still shocked that people would find value in what I write."
David Garcia, a 32-year-old content specialist in San Francisco, is another Yelp reviewer with a loyal following. Unlike Wong, however, Garcia appeals to his readers by elevating the simple review into elaborate works of creative writing, usually with a magic-realism flair. He's been on Yelp since 2006, but about three years into writing reviews, he started getting messages from complete strangers saying how much they appreciated his style. "I've always been into comedy writing," he tells me. "But when I started receiving validation for my writing from people I did not know, I started thinking of using this more as a mini publishing platform."
While Wong consistently devotes half an hour a week to writing several short reviews, Garcia focuses on quality rather than quantity, spending a lot of time on each review, developing characters and plots. In his recent review of Cheese Plus, a San Francisco shop he gave a five-star review, Garcia writes a story about two people who stare into the moon and speak out an ancient incantation to summon a powerful but nefarious cheese-loving villain. By tempting the villain with scrumptious cheese from Cheese Plus, the two heroes are able to kill the evil cheese-lover and end the day with a well-deserved cheese sandwich.
Garcia points out that Yelp has organically developed cultural norms about what goes into a review. Typical reviews are shorter, contain a series of common evaluative words ("good," "cool," "not great") and generally abide by good grammar. "As a user of the site, you're now experiencing diminishing returns because reviews have become so formulaic," he says. His goal is stand out from the crowd, but not deviate too far from the norms that his work is no longer considered a review. "I am always treading the line between what people would find acceptable," he says. "It's fun to take two distinct things—comedy and reviewing—and force them together. The limitations on what you're able to do presents bigger challenges, which pushes you to be creative in new ways." Garcia's reviews are always based on real locations, even though the storytelling sometimes takes bizarre turns like visits to other dimensions or time travel. In some ways, his reviews are tributes to shops or restaurants that he likes. The owner of Cole Hardware thought Garcia's review of his shop was so funny that he is including it in his company's newsletter.
These weird and whacky reviews don't particularly bother the Yelp as a company, as long as they are not disruptive. "We encourage our community members to contribute useful reviews that are truthful and based on firsthand experiences," Yelp's Cheesman tells me. "As long as a review fits that criteria, Yelpers can get as creative as they want. In fact, a lot of users view Yelp as a lifestyle blog: everybody's writing style is a bit different."
Garcia was recently contacted by a movie producer, Dana Merwin, who is interested in using his reviews in a series of plays she is writing. But he's by no means the only reviewer who is pushing the boundaries of the traditional review. Hundreds of other Yelp members are taking a stab at trying new approaches. (One guy, in fact, supposedly scored a book deal after a particularly riveting Yelp restaurant review, though further news of the book has proven elusive.) Chase C. is chronicling his love life through Yelp reviews. Farzan K. used punctuation marks to create a cartoon strip about an unfortunate experience at McDonald's. There is also an entire genre of Yelp reviews entirely in Haiku form. A user who goes by the name of Haiku F. writes all his reviews in verse, such as this one for the Brooklyn restaurant Olea:
I'm torn; so good but
Portions were crazy small so
We had 2 brunches
Click to expand
Camilla Vasquez, the linguistics professor, says creative expression is only one, albeit powerful, driving force for Yelp reviewers. "Some people are motivated by a sense of altruism and a desire to help others," she says. "They don't want others to make their same mistakes and they want to offer useful insider tips. And, of course there are also people who want a forum to vent about an unsatisfying experience they have had: Yelp can be a catharsis for them."
Katie Woodhull, a 27-year-old math teacher in New Jersey, for instance, is not primarily driven by the art of it all, but by altruism. Last year, she made a commitment to start writing Yelp reviews because she didn't want to benefit from the service without also contributing.
"It was my attempt to pay it forward," she tells me. "I'd used Yelp so frequently to help me find places to go to dinner or a happy hour when I arrived in my current town and I wanted to give back to the Yelp community." But she says that once she got started, she couldn't stop and became an avid user of the site, searching for new restaurants to add to her bucket list.
It didn't hurt that she eventually became part of the Yelp Elite, a privileged group of Yelp users who get to attend parties and dinners at new local establishments. To be considered for Elite membership, you need to be referred by another Elite and according to those I spoke to, you are judged on the quality of your reviews rather than the sheer number of you have written. An almighty-sounding body called the Yelp Elite Council is responsible for deciding whether Elites deserve to have their membership renewed every year, which ensures that members work hard to maintain their status. Vasquez says that being conferred Elite status comes with many benefits, besides the free meals. "Elites get to enjoy feeling like they are experts at something," she says. "It is a badge that allows them to be seen as credible."
Over the last two years, Yelp has been faced with several lawsuits from prolific reviewers who feel that they should be paid for the content they are producing for the site which Yelp is profiting from. (Yelp has dismissed these suits as frivolous.) But among the reviewers that I spoke to, there did not seem to be any negative feelings about the site. They tell me it provides them with a platform to share their knowledge and expertise, write in creative new ways, and feel like they are contributing to their community. It's enough to convince even someone like me to try my hand at writing a review.
So after finally getting a reservation at a popular Turkish restaurant in my neighborhood, I am happy to say that I produced my first piece of Yelp art—a Haiku poem about my experience:
Hair in the veggies
Really got me bummed out dude
Other food super.
During a computer science lesson, a fourth-grader might walk up to her teacher and ask, "Hey, how do I write this query using a Python interface?" The fourth-grade teacher might not have the slightest idea what to say and might kick himself for having agreed to teach programming in the first place. Even after having gone through all the training, the subject is still too obscure for him to teach confidently. And there's always a nice gig in Silicon Valley.
The typical teacher has no formal training in computer programming, leaving him overwhelmed if he tries to teach it. And when it comes to bringing programming into the classroom—now a sort of national mandate—principals hesitate, because computer scientists and programmers are hard to woo away from Silicon Valley, and retraining existing teaching staff can be very challenging.
To Code.org and Thinkersmith, two computer science education nonprofits, the earlier you start, the fewer hurdles there are.
Kids taking part in a computer science lesson.
"We try to incorporate into our training 'teaching like a grandma,'" says Kiki Prottsman, founder of Thinkersmith, who specializes in K-5 curricula. Under her program, teachers are encouraged to praise students for coming up with difficult questions, and give them the tools (and the leading questions) to help them find the answers by themselves. In the end, the teacher wouldn't have to pull a random answer out of thin air.
"So the students are just thinking that you came up with the idea on your own, but in reality you don't know what you did," Prottsman says.
This is the thinking behind Thinkersmith's teacher training philosophy. The main goal of its retraining program is making sure a teacher doesn't completely shut down when he's uncertain about a programming concept. Even if he doesn't know the answer to a question, he should encourage the student to find out the answer on her own and then come back and teach it to the rest of the class.
With Code.org, Thinkersmith has been disseminating its computer science curricula to elementary schools across the country. Together, they're aiming to give every school district a chance to implement computer science instruction, from kindergarten through high school.
So far, 60 school districts nationwide have partnered with Code.org, whose curricula include Thinkersmith's K-5 teaching plans. And Code.org counts the seven largest school districts in the country among those partners.
Last week's Hour of Code attracted 75 million students globally, more than doubling last year's total. Thinkersmith, which is running a concurrent Indiegogo campaign to expand its training force and facilities, contributed its kid-appropriate tutorials to the site. Most of the exercises on the Hour of Code's site were completely web-based.
Online videos and tutorials alleviate some of the pressure that teachers and schools put on themselves to produce students who can code. Khan Academy participated in its own Hour of Code this year, and while W3Schools and Codecademy didn't, they also provide free resources for kids looking for extra help online. And around 70,000 classrooms are signed up with Code.org's lesson site, Code Studio.
Although most of the Hour of Code's tutorials were fully computer-based, some of Thinkersmith's content required nothing more than pen, paper, and common household goods. In practice, these "unplugged" exercises demand no computer skills of the instructor at all.
"Most of the time [parents] are very forgiving of computer science at that level. They don't care that their kids aren't programming rockets for NASA," Prottsman says.
A student writing in a programming language made up of arrows.
And teachers don't have to be experts in coding at the elementary school level, she says. They just have to know how to talk to children and be persistent. Of course, that's no small feat. But with enthusiasm for the basics of computer science, teachers can rely on online resources and lesson plans to pick up the slack. Lessons are quick and individualized, so each student can use the website to search for answers to their specific questions.
"We need one or two subjects in school where students can teach themselves," says Prottsman.
Eventually, Prottsman wants to create a corps of Thinkersmith-trained teachers, nationwide. They would work on a freelance basis, so that schools could hire them on an as-needed basis.
The teacher-training program she and Code.org have designed is intended to make any willing teacher succeed. Programming is new to almost everyone in the education world, she says, so having to learn how to teach it—whether you're a math and science teacher or a music and art teacher—shouldn't be a cause for embarrassment. And Prottsman contends that one set of teachers doesn't have an advantage over the other.
"The brave teachers, the open-minded teachers," she says. "They're the ones that are going to make the best programming teachers at this stage right now."
In the youngest grades, kids aren't looking to learn the theoretical concepts behind machine learning and numerical analysis. But they are curious about the technology they are already using all the time.
"For me, it's about making more confident children," Prottsman says. "And adults."
Hidden in the endless trove of leaked Sony documents was a small but notable Snapchat acquisition. According to emails sent by Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, who is a member of Snapchat's board, the disappearing-photo app quietly acquired a startup earlier this year called Vergence Labs.
Vergence Labs has a subsidiary called Epiphany Eyewear that makes smart eyeglasses. They start at $300 a pair. The frames don't pack as many features as Google Glass, but they have the advantage of looking more like average spectacles. They have the ability to record and share HD video directly to the cloud, and their creators originally envisioned them being used on things like ski slopes. Or—perhaps pertinent to Snapchat's interests—at the club.
Other than that? Not many details are known. The acquisition doesn't necessarily mean Snapchat is getting into the wearables business. Maybe it was a talent acquisition. Or maybe Vergence Labs owns a patent that Snapchat wanted. Earlier this year, for example, Vergence debuted an app for the glasses at CES that uses motion-sensing technology to control a Parrot AR drone over Wi-Fi. All you have to do is wave your hands around.
In any case, Snapchat now owns a smaller, cheaper Google Glass competitor, which might not have been a bad move, considering Google Glass's recent troubles keeping developers happy.
That, and Google Glass still doesn't look very cool. "That's the reason we wanted to make these glasses as cool as possible," Epiphany Eyewear CEO Erick Miller told LA Weekly in February, "because we wanted cool people to wear them."
2014 was a garbage year, as both Bloomberg graphics and The Nib show in pictures, Vox shows in video, and Google trends shows in, um, trends. But that was then! Now it is just today, and today is not too bad. The crap-hurricane might be raging around us, but join me here in the eye for a moment, where it's quiet and peaceful.
Darius Kazemi made a new toy called "Content Forever" that takes a random stroll around Wikipedia starting with a subject you select, and gives you a completely unique and pointless piece of content to read. Caitlin Deweyfrom Dragon-lair Daily and David Holmes in Pando were both quite taken with it.
Am I a bad feminist if I point out how Leon Wieseltier looks like Graydon Carter had a baby with Martin Van Buren? pic.twitter.com/g0IkH2LK6I
The new meaning of the word "viral" suits it well: On our high-speed trainwreck of a 'net, infections spread fast and multiply furiously, relentlessly. The sun never sets online.
Brian Feldman understands this intimately (as judged, perhaps unfairly, by his Twitter presence). Today he's written an investigation titled "The Triumphant Rise of the Shitpic" for the Awl, which takes on—and coins the term—"shitpics." You know, those terrible screencapped and reposted image macro memes that show up regularly on Instagram and Twitter.
But if you look at a Shitpic, you can instantly tell the level of virality by how worn it looks, how legible its text is, how many watermarks adorn it. You can count them much like you would rings on a tree. A pristine-looking meme engenders skepticism—"This can't be that funny, it hasn't been imperfectly replicated enough." But when you see that blurry text, partially cut off by the top of the frame, and a heavily compressed picture of Kermit below… that's when you know:
This is gonna be a good-ass meme.
Good tab. It's a pleasure having you intern, Bijan. I don't say that enough.
~But for now we are young, Let us lay in the sun, And count every beautiful tab we can see~
I don't know, I just feel really chill today and there was a lot of great C O N T E N T out there? Today in Tabs will surely have an extra helping of hot garb tomorrow. Until then, read us on FastCoLabs and subscribe by email. I tweet @rustyk5 and sometimes @TodayinTabs.
