It’s not a coincidence that billionaires keep buying newspapers. Warren Buffett has been buying them up for the last year, and last week, Red Sox owner John Henry bought the Boston Globe.
Jeff Bezos didn’t buy the Washington Post yesterday to “re-invest in the infrastructure of our public intelligence,” as James Fallows wrote in the Atlantic, and he didn’t buy it for a propaganda machine.
He did it because he understands something about media the rest of us don’t: distribution. Having conquered long-form, evergreen content (also known as books), he’s now interested in distribution mechanisms for short-form, timely, and topical content. The fact that many before him have failed to find a workable business model for newspapers, the traditional delivery mechanism for this kind of content, only makes the challenge more interesting.
To understand his motivations, you should take another look at two 2011 Google+ posts by Steve Yegge, a former Amazon and current Google engineer. With no disregard meant toward our staff writer J.J. McCorvey, who wrote an excellent profile of Bezos in the latest issue of Fast Company, Yegge’s hilarious rants are probably the most insightful things ever written about the enigmatic Amazon CEO.
In his second post, a war story about presenting to Bezos, Yegge describes him as hyper-intelligent, constantly thinking years ahead of his executives:
I mean, imagine what it would be like to start off as an incredibly smart person, arguably a first-class genius, and then somehow wind up in a situation where you have a general’s view of the industry battlefield for ten years. Not only do you have more time than anyone else, and access to more information than anyone else, you also have this long-term eagle-eye perspective that only a handful of people in the world enjoy.
In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs . . .
Trust me folks, I saw this happen time and again, for years. Jeff Bezos has all these incredibly intelligent, experienced domain experts surrounding him at huge meetings, and on a daily basis he thinks of shit that they never saw coming. It’s a guaranteed facepalm fest.
In the original post, which was intended to be posted internally at Google but accidentally made public by Yegge and later pulled, we learn how Bezos applied this ability to think ahead to Amazon. One day, an edict came down that all engineering teams had to redesign their systems to be service-oriented. If you wanted to use another team’s data, you had to use their service interface. No internal-only APIs or database access. The result was Amazon Web Services, now one of its most profitable divisions. We understand why he did it now, of course, but this was 2002, back when Amazon was still just an e-commerce site. Amazon saw that e-commerce companies were quickly becoming infrastructure for smaller online vendors. Yegge says:
You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?
Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable at aws.amazon.com. These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal favorite of the bunch.
The other big realization he had was that he can't always build the right thing . . .
I'm not really sure how Bezos came to this realization -- the insight that he can't build one product and have it be right for everyone. But it doesn't matter, because he gets it. There's actually a formal name for this phenomenon. It's called Accessibility, and it's the most important thing in the computing world.
Understanding Bezos in this way begs a tantalizing question: What does he see in the publishing industry? For that matter, what did Warren Buffett see in the several mid-sized daily newspapers he bought into? Bezos also invested in Business Insider earlier this year, so this isn’t a bet on just one title or brand--it’s a bet on the category.
When you look at these as capital investments in the context Yegge offers, you can start to think of the newspaper as a computing infrastructure for distributing information. The Washington Post has one of the best APIs of any newspaper; it’s a distribution mechanism for short-form content. (Although reportedly the team that developed the API was not sold to Bezos as part of the deal.) Purpose-built distribution networks for different kinds of content are beginning to solidify into infrastructure, just as e-commerce did 10 years ago. And if we’ve learned anything about Bezos, it’s that he loves to own his own infrastructure and leverage it into new kinds of business we can’t even imagine right now.
As our writer McCorvey says in this month’s issue, “Bezos may have proved himself the best CEO in the world at taking the long view.” Now that Steve Jobs has departed us, he’s vying for the position of most prescient living CEO. Only time will tell what he sees in newspapers, but it would be unwise to think that it’s just some good press or social goodwill.
Such a shame that we typically just let our phones laze around in our pockets a lot of the time, not doing much useful to anyone other than slowly burning up their battery power.
It's easy to forget about the incredible power of our smartphones nowadays--they're everywhere, and thus we take them for granted. But there really is an almost sci-fi-like marriage of advanced semiconductor design, wireless tech, battery chemistry, and engineering in each and every smartphone. This power is what lets your phone make a video call to the other side of the world, play "casual" games that 10 years ago would've needed a whole computer, or even just to keep you up on your friend's gossip via WhatsApp. If you think about the technology like that, then all this tech is going wasted when we're not using it. And that's more or less what the folks at BOINC have begun to tackle.
BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure For Network Computing, is behind many of the recent innovations in what's either known as "volunteer computing" or distributed/grid computing, depending on how you look at it. The idea is simple: A researcher somewhere comes up with a numerically intensive problem that would normally be suited to a supercomputer. But due to funding, the sheer brain-smashing enormity of the task, or other restrictions a supercomputer isn't an option. Instead the problem is diced up into millions of very small chunks, of a size and shape that even a typical consumer's home computer can manage. Then each chunk is sent off to someone's PC around the world to process. Since the task is distributed among a vast grid of volunteer machines, they can achieve phenomenal number-crunching power. Until now this sort of approach has mainly been performed on home PCs or laptops because they have swift enough processors to manage the task in meaningful intervals, like hours instead of years.
But there are now some 900 million Android phones out there. Wired together in the right way they could probably put any supercomputer yet built to shame, and they easily outnumber the 600,000 or so home PCs that already volunteer to solve BOINC's tasks. They're also in many cases always on, often experience long periods when they're not used, and are more or less continuously connected to a network.
Which is why there's a BOINC Android client. It's not quite a full-featured client yet, so for example there's no support for the well-known Folding@home project (for computing protein shapes for medicinal purposes) or SETI@home, the distributed search for a signal from an alien planet (both projects this writer has contributed compute cycles to for years). But there are clients for Einstein@home, so you can help search for the telltale signals of unknown radio stars; Asteroids@home, so your phone can calculate the shape and spin of asteroids; and FightAIDS@home, so your Android can calculate the shape and chemistry of drugs that could block the mechanisms of the AIDS virus.
Cleverly the app won't damage your phone's battery life, eat up precious mobile data minutes, or cause your recharge times to get much longer because its default option is to only compute when your Android device is on charge, its battery is over 90% full, and it's connected to Wi-Fi. But you are, of course, free to change these settings as you wish.
More projects will hit the Android BOINC client in the future, but for now why don't you consider turning over some of your Galaxy's processor power (and a teeny tiny amount of your electricity bill, of course) to the greater good?
This week former product manager for YouTube-turned-VC Hunter Walk got himself on the Hollywood shit-list by suggesting that theaters allow for second screens during the movie-watching experience. Today he posted a follow-up defending his position. An excerpt from his original post went like this:
Increasingly I wanted my media experiences plugged in and with the ability to multitask. Look up the cast list online, tweet out a comment, talk to others while watching or just work on something else while Superman played in the background... I’d love to watch Pacific Rim in a theater with a bit more light, wifi, electricity outlets and a second screen experience. Don’t tell me I’d miss major plot points while scrolling on my ipad – it’s a movie about robots vs monsters. I can follow along just fine.
We have all come to use phones and tablets while watching things at home, but I didn’t think Walk had a realistic use-case in mind here at first. Most of us are not tweeting about what we’re watching, I’d venture to bet--we’re killing time during a lull in the film or a commercial break on TV.
But actually, it’s perfect that he mentions “second-screening” two movies that are perfect for computerized distractions: The pablum that was the most recent Superman movie and Pacific Rim, two thoughtless kaleidoscopes of explosions and CGI.
But maybe I’m being too hard on Hollywood. In fact, maybe I’ve got it totally backwards--perhaps this is a characteristic of a new genre of film, a genre which is visually and aurally impressive but not mentally demanding. Perhaps this genre of film evolved with (and exists for) distracted audiences who still want something exciting on the big screen but are mostly engaged in what’s happening on the glass slabs in their laps.
If that’s the case then maybe movie studios don’t need to experiment with alternate endings after all. If I’m right about this new genre of brainless background-movie, Walk’s suggestion could save the movie industry. Both the films above bombed in the box office--but people might have been content to see them with a coffee, some snacks, and iPad and a reading light close at hand. Chris Dannen
Isn’t this the whole “making phone calls on airplanes” debate all over again? People are worried about being disturbed in places and ways they thought were immune to electronic distraction. The visceral reaction is to push back against drastically changing the movie-going experience because, at first glance, the trade-off is the tranquility of public places.
But endorsing mobile device activity in movies could mean publicity disasters, especially for films like the ones he mentions which were badly reviewed. After all, if Chris is right and Hollywood is going brainless, having people live-tweet about how awful the movie is would be no good for business. Tyler Hayes
Personally I enjoy my occasional visit to the cinema exactly because it's such an immersive and at the same time communal experience. I love the way you can walk into a theatre on a baking summer day and become part of a world set in a snowy landscape. To quote Bobby Draper from Mad Men, "Everybody likes to go to the movies when they’re sad.” Movies are about escaping the people in your networks, not interacting with them.
But Walk isn’t suggesting that we abolish that immersive experience, or even interfere with it, but rather allow some moviegoers to experiment with a different one. I don’t see what’s wrong with that, especially if your parallel activities can actually enhance your experience. Nobody objects to you eating popcorn, or in Europe enjoying a glass of wine, while you view. One cinema in Amsterdam, where I live, and several theaters in New York even serve full course meals whose menus are inspired by the movie you’re watching. Maybe movie makers can invent new ways of experiencing the cinema this way in the same way that they did with 3-D. Ciara Byrne
I’ve worked in both the technology and film industries and also consider myself a big fan of the movie theater experience (aka, a “cinema goer”), so perhaps that explains why when I read Walk’s piece it appealed to me--and scared the crap out of me at the same time.
Thinking with my cinemagoer hat on my immediate response was: “If anyone actually does this my sacred movie theater experience will be changed forever and it will be the downfall of cinemas!”
However, thinking with my tech and film industry hat on, I actually appreciate Walk’s idea, because like Walk, I’ve suggested other ways cinemas can use tech to their advantage to increase ticket sales. And make no mistake about it, cinemas are increasingly having difficulty getting people in the door. Home theater technology is getting better and better--if your home has a 60-inch flat screen, free food, a comfy couch, and a private bathroom, why leave? Walk’s idea is merely one way cinemas can use technology to get more attendees through the door.
But perhaps the most shocking thing about Walk’s idea is that he is a VC who’s looking for companies to invest in and he doesn’t realize he himself has a million-dollar idea. The cinema experience has been social for over 100 years, and though it still remains social on a limited basis when you watch a movie with your family at home, home viewing does lose a lot of that critical mass social experience. That could change if Walk puts his idea into a platform that allows viewers to watch movies at home and converse in real time with others who are watching the same timecode-synced film. You know how fun it is to watch a bad movie at your house with friends on a Friday night and make fun of it? Imagine doing that with a group of thousands all watching the same film and linked through a second screen app that allows you to create large social conversations about its merits from your couch. Now, that’s a movie theater experience I’d pay for. Michael Grothaus
It’s important to note that Walk is espousing new options, not a paradigm shift toward free-for-all theaters with ball pits and Starbucks furniture. Walk wants a cry room, essentially, where he can sequester himself with his devices (and a community of device-laden peers) without bothering or being bothered by the rigid expectations of traditional theatergoers. It’s silly for theater purists to think that Cineplexes would warp their policies so quickly (or at all) at Walk’s suggestion. The biggest innovations in movie theater UX in the last 100 years have been to add sound, ban smoking, and adopt stadium seating. These guys are slow to change.
The overwhelmingly negative response Walk received is proof positive that movie theater chains would court disaster by lifting device bans and light levels during movies without extensive pilot programs in specific cities. It also exhibits a weird false victimization of theater purists. What Walk’s critics really fear, as their ad hominem criticism suggests, is Walk’s ability to throw around financial weight as a venture capitalist. When will these tech people stop changing everything around me? But even a venture capitalist doesn’t have the funds to shift the policy of theater chains already frozen with panic at their sinking ticket sales. David Lumb
There's nothing social about surfing the Internet while you watch movies.
I'm with Ciara that the charm of movies is escape into an alternate reality. I'm not against tech that enhances that experience: If mice can have memories zapped into their heads, humans may one day beam movies directly into our brains, and I'll be the first to try.
But I don't see how web surfing and chatter at the theater is analogous to serving wine, popcorn, or even meals, as they do at my hometown Cinebistro. Can’t we find more creative ways of extending the viewing experience?
In his book Flicker: Your Brain On Movies, Washington University memory psychologist Jeffrey Zacks argues that transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) may soon be used to make our brains rumble, flash, tingle, and boom in synch with action onscreen. The book is upcoming from Oxford University Press in Spring 2014. An excerpt:
I love the idea of things we could do to our brains purely for entertainment... But all movies are things we do to our brains for entertainment--we are just stimulating our brains in the old-fashioned way, by putting signals in through the eyes and ears.
Now, that’s value added! I don't think Walk's proposal is in the same league--it’s just an endorsement of multi-tasking, like the theater-as-coworking space. I get that Walk has no ill will toward filmmakers or viewers. I just think money for movies should go to films worth watching with your whole head.Taylor Beck
Since I’ve started tracking the story of sexual computing I’ve received many emails and countless tweets stating that while developers and engineers may be working on sexbots and other sexual technologies, no “normal” person would ever use such tech in their sex life.
Nearly 20 percent of young adult smartphone owners in the U.S. between the ages of 18 and 34 use their smartphones during sex, and nearly 1 in ten U.S. adults who own smartphones use them during sex.
While this survey was conducted with a fairly large sampling size of 1,100 people, it did not specifically ask respondents what they were using their smartphones for while having sex. Theoretically the smartphone use could have been for anything from checking texts, to taking pictures and recording videos, to referencing Kama Sutra guides. Regardless, it does demonstrate a willingness among people--especially youth--to allow technology into their most intimate moments.
And it’s these people who are the reason why “smart” vibrators like the Vibease, which sets its speed according to cues from spoken erotic ebooks, are finding an increasing marketplace among a population that is growing ever more comfortable--even intimate--with technology.
And while checking your phone--or even using it to enhance your technique--in the sack is one thing, surely no one but a pervert would ever sleep with a real sexbot, right?
Wrong. A YouGov/Huffington Post survey of 1,000 US adults found that a whopping 9% of them admitted they would have sex with a robot if they could. That’s almost one out of every ten people--and those are just the ones who would admit to it. And there’s good news out there for the 9% who would like to: it will happen. When I asked the adult app store MiKandi’s CEO Jesse Adams to postulate the not too distant future of sex and tech, he had this to say:
There will be sex toy like robots that can react, listen and give you the exact pleasure you want to enhance these virtual experiences. These devices will understand and measure your arousal levels, body fluids, your breathing patterns, your body movements. They will also learn and adapt and react to your feedback.
And it will be those sexbots that can quantify and understand our needs and desires that will raise the most interesting human quandary of sex with tech: not mechanics, but ethics. Specifically, does sex with a robot that can understand our physical needs constitute cheating?
This is where it gets interesting, because while most people would say the use of a smart vibrator (which is essentially a “dumb” robot) would not constitute cheating, the YouGov/Huffington Post survey revealed 42% of respondents said sex with a robot would be cheating (while 31% said it wouldn’t, and 26% were not sure).
To put that another way:
Sex with a vibrator = not cheating.
Sex with a vibrator that has legs and eyes and a face = cheating.
Ironically, it’s the possibility of sex with inhuman robots that reveals something very human about our concept of what sex is. To humans sex is more than mechanics and pleasure; it’s emotion and connection, which are primarily conveyed through human-only traits, like eye contact, empathy, and a partner’s careful observation. But one day machines will be able to convey those traits, and when that happens is when the real debate over sex and technology begins.
A group of researchers in Spain have successfully coded software that mimics the language and attitude of a 14-year-old girl. The software, officially called Negobot--but now colloquially referred to as a “Virtual Lolita”--appears to be the first AI that accurately mimics an adolescent. As Jillian Scharr writes for TechNewsDaily:
The bot -- which can speak multiple languages thanks to translation technology -- is also programmed to act in a manner that could be considered vulnerable, trusting and naïve. But what makes Negobot unique -- aside from its crime-fighting mission -- is its use of game theory to trap potential pedophiles. That means, essentially, that Negobot treats conversations as a game, with the objective of gathering as much potential evidence of pedophilic tendencies as possible.
And it’s the use of “game theory” that makes Negobot so impressive--and so much more than just an app. Negobot starts off in a “neutral” mood. It will chat to strangers in a chat room about ordinary subjects, but once a stranger starts speaking in innuendo or overt sexual overtones, Negobot goes into game mode, tagging the chatter as “possibly pedophile.” Here it will start “revealing” personal details any 14-year-old girl might bring up: problems with siblings or school, life at home, boys. If the chatter continues along sexual lines of conversation, Negobot tags that chatter as “allegedly pedophile” and goes into full-on gaming mode. Now Negobot will try to titillate that chatter to keep them talking as long as possible--and hopefully get them to reveal personal details about themselves and agree to a meetup.
Negobot is a clever, indeed ingenious, use of software. The skill at which the programmers have enabled it to accurately mimic a 14-year-old girl approaches a work of art. Negobot can be shy, coy, and insecure. It knows the latest adolescent slang and pop references. It even misspells words on purpose and uses text speak (“u” instead of “you”) while chatting. It drifts from enthusiasm to boredom and back.
The only problem is: It’s a terrible thing to have built. Before anyone accuses me of being soft on pedophiles, let me state that I’ve interviewed many sex trafficking victims and learned more of the horrors perpetrated on them than I care to remember. My research led me to write a book about it and only strengthened my view that sexual violence is perhaps more pernicious than any other type of abuse.
However, using brilliant AI software--especially one that uses game theory--to lure potential predators is wrong. It’s entrapment. Don’t agree? If Negobot tags a chatter as “possibly pedophile” and then that chatter tries to leave the conversation, Negobot then bumps its game mode to the next level and tries to “win” at any cost. Negobot’s 14-year-old personality becomes more suggestive, more like the fantasy that every pedophile has in their head--hence the Lolita reference in my headline.
At that point, Negobot becomes the predator.
And I’m not the only one who thinks Negobot shouldn’t be used for its designed purpose. As the BBC reports:
John Carr, a UK government adviser on child protection, welcomed any move to relieve the burden on real-world policing. But he warned the software risked enticing people to do things they otherwise would not.
"Undercover operations are extremely resource-intensive and delicate things to do. It's absolutely vital that you don't cross a line into entrapment which will foil any potential prosecution", he said.
That’s not to say I don’t think Negobot shouldn’t be used at all. There’s a perfect use for it in sexual technology because it demonstrates that a lifelike erotic AI is feasible.
If there are realistic sexbots in the future, they’re going to need not only a good AI that mimics human behavior, but also an AI that can recognize sexual innuendo. Negobot does that perfectly. If it can detect when a chatter says something that has a sexual connotation, then it will have no problem mimicking the first stage of human foreplay: verbal innuendo.
And lets not forget that a walking, talking sexbot of the future wouldn’t just be good for those with more eclectic sexual tastes, but such robots could also be non-sexual companions to the old, lonely, or physically handicapped--especially ones that have an AI that is so sensitive it can detect and reply in innuendo.
Negobot is a brilliant example of the merging of sex and tech. It was just designed with the wrong goal in mind.
Sex is kind of a big deal for us humans. It drives a lot of what we do, and influences a large part of our world outside of the bedroom. It’s why some men seek high-paying, high-status jobs. It’s why some religions feel they need to issue moral laws. And whether we admit it or not, it can be a big part of our recipe for self-worth.
Sex has been synced with technology for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. If you’ve ever been in the Sex Machines Museum in Prague, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The museum holds some interesting mechanical (some even steam-powered) pieces of kit that were designed to enhance a user’s sexual experiences. When the technology of moving pictures was invented, pornos were some of the first things shot. Matter of fact, the porn industry arose hand-in-hand with the tech industry. Porn companies were some of the first to adopt the new technologies of VHS, DVD, and streaming video. And how long did it take porn companies to jump on Google Glass? About two minutes.
But sex and tech increasingly aren’t only linked by new mediums to show skin flicks. Outside of the medical industry, the most common places you’ll find research into synthetic skins are at sex toy companies. And while many extrapolate their fear of today’s drones and see them morphing into Terminator-like killing robots in the not-too-distant future, if history has shown us anything, we’re much more likely to see fully functioning sexbots first. Sound crazy? It’s not. After all, a robot getting pounded in the bedroom needs to absorb a lot less stress than one getting pounded in the battlefield.
And mark my words: One day we will be fucking robots.
I'm not trying to get a cheap laugh. It will happen. I know this because some very bright engineers across the globe are already working on technologies that will enable future sexbots to exist: synthetic skins with breathable pores that are capable of sweating; artificial intelligence that understands emotional context; human-accurate voice synthesis and facial recognition. And those are the hard parts. Believe it or not, building a robot that can mimic human movements isn’t that far off.
Before anyone jumps the gun and says that sexbots will lead to the moral decay of humanity and kill all human interaction, let’s not forget that sex with robots isn't necessarily just for kinky cyber fun. It could have mental and social health benefits--like by allowing disabled people to have physical relationships or by eliminating the risk of sexually transmitted diseases from popular sex tourism areas across the globe, such as Las Vegas or Thailand.
If you’re interested in the ever-closer world of sexual computing, be sure to follow this tracker. Here we’ll explore the latest hardware and software advances that will one day change sex forever. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing, we’ll discover as we go. And if you’re in the business of merging sex and tech, get in touch with the author @michaelgrothaus to let him know what you’re up to.
Clip-on fitness trackers and bracelets are already becoming the norm among the tech savvy, and soon eyewear like Google Glass will come to consumers, followed by (and perhaps swallowed by) the first true smartwatches--led by Apple, or course--and then consumable nano-devices to inspect your insides. Always-on “quantified self” devices can teach us a lot the world around us, and the world inside us. And when it comes to sex, the world inside someone else.
Gregory Ferenstein over at TechCrunch has written an interesting piece about how current technology--his BodyMedia armband--can actually alert his significant others to whether he is cheating on them or not. He discovered that his various sporting activities, including cycling, weight lifting, yoga, and more, actually produce different line graphs depending on the exercise. That is, each type of physical exertion has a unique signature (a series of spikes on the graph)--including sex.
See, Ferenstein wears his BodyMedia armband 24 hours a day, and when he gave his BodyMedia armband data to a friend, his friend--to Ferenstein’s surprise--was able to tell when he had sex. As Ferenstein writes:
Indeed, I inadvertently discovered that people knew whether I was engaging in sexual congress after I gave my health tracker data to a friend and he wryly quibbed about my night time activities [...] Were I married, my wife might like to know why I burned 100 calories between 1:07 to 2:00 am, without taking a single step, and fell asleep right afterwards. Many married couples hold joint online accounts for Facebook and email, and even more share their passwords. Anyone looking at my exercise readout that night would instantly know that I was getting a sweaty workout.
Skeptical readers may claim that not all infidelity happens at night, and that clever philanderers could simply claim that they were hitting the gym, when they were actually knee-deep in sin hotel. But, as we’ve seen above, sex looks quite different than weight-lifting. In fact, the profile of sex looks distinct from any exercise I’ve recorded myself doing, including weight lifting, sprinting, yoga, martial arts (capoeira), TRX, spin class (stationary cycling), grocery shopping, and cleaning the house.
Now, as Ferenstein notes, not all people wear their health trackers 24 hours a day--and it’s easy to remove them whenever you want. But it is an interesting (and slightly frightening) discovery that given access to your fitness data, a third party can glean information about your sex life from a health tracker meant to track your fitness.
That got me thinking: Sharing is a major component of these devices. Many fitness trackers suggest their users do so as to keep themselves motivated. Published on the web or even left lying on the screen of an iPad, records of all your body movements and outputs could expose a cheating spouse, or even let parents know when their teenagers begin having sex. One might argue that tech used in this way is a cheater’s comeuppance or a useful tool for parenting, but I would argue that in either case it is a gross invasion of privacy.
But more than just telling if someone is having sex, Ferenstein also noted that he could tell from his data from another piece of fitness tech he owns (a Basis watch) if the person he was having sex with was faking orgasm. This is due to the monitoring of perspiration output and heart rate--things that spike during a real orgasm, but not during a fake one (in this case, Ferenstein’s partner would need to be wearing the watch).
From a data science perspective, this is fascinating (How many women are faking it?), but from a perspective that I hold--that everyone is entitled to their most intimate privacies--this is frightening. If a man found out his wife is faking it, it could lead to hurt feelings, guilt, confusion, and more. I doubt a woman would appreciate it from her side either.
And keep in mind: This sexual information can currently be gleaned from what will look like archaic tech in a few year’s time. Once wearable tech moves on to true smartwatches with more advanced biosensors, and then to stick-on patches that we apply to our skin and fabrics that we can wear as shirts (or even underwear), it is very possible that our most intimate sexual moments will become social. Is this a good thing?
No. This is the only time I can honestly say I don’t think tech will help enhance our sex lives. There’s too much room for invasion of privacy; it’s too likely that people will get hurt. Imagine a young gay teenager using a fitness tracker. His parent’s who don’t know he’s gay knows he’s hanging out with a male friend. They see his fitness data spike, yet it registers he isn’t taking any physical steps, which suggests he’s lying in bed. His tech could inadvertently out him before he is comfortable with it.
But just because our sex lives might become more accessible to third parties in the future isn’t a case against wearable computing. There will be a lot of good that comes from it (healthier lives; better monitoring of medical conditions; easier ways to find lost children). But when the Age of Wearable Computing does hit us, it will become more important than ever for users to be vigilant over their privacy settings or else we risk our sex becoming social.
To get to the stage where people can interact with human-like robotic companions, whatever their function, will require overcoming three main challenges: building an AI that is intelligent enough to not only speak like a human, but to process a human’s complex speech patterns to understand emotional context; building synthetic organs that look and feel indistinguishable from a human’s; and building an underlying mechanical skeleton structure that allows the robot to move like a human.
That last challenge is already well on its way to being overcome thanks to a group of researchers at the University of Tokyo who have built a robot called Kenshiro. The amazing thing about Kenshiro is that its movements don’t rely on cogs or pistons, but on a pulley-like system that mimics how actual muscles in the human body works (human muscles only pull, they don’t push). Kenshiro has over 160 “muscles.” That’s a far cry from the 640+ in a human body, but just take a look at what researchers in 2013 can do with just 160:
But what happens once you get the mechanics down? A robot, even one that moves and looks like us, won’t feel real until it can give the illusion of understand our own -- and expressing its own -- emotional complexities. The most advanced “AI” most of us have access to nowadays comes in the form of iOS’s Siri -- and we all know how well that works. But even if true AI takes decades longer to achieve than human-like movement, that doesn’t mean we won’t have lifelike robots before then, as Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro successfully showed off this week.
In a show in New York, Ishiguro took the stage next to a lifelike robot version of himself -- called a “Geminoid.” The robot moved and spoke like the real Ishiguro, but that’s because it was "tele-operated" by a colleague offstage. The robot had to be remote controlled, of course, because of one big drawback -- there’s currently no AI that could make it act and work like a human. However, this “drawback” also lends itself to demonstrating another benefit of pre-AI robots: if a human can control lifelike robots then we can push these surrogates out into the world to handle jobs that are too dangerous for flesh and blood.
However, given all the robotics advances in just the last year alone, we still are a ways off from having robotic companions. As David J. Hill writes for SingularityHub:
In the years to come, news of robotics development will only increase as we watch researchers put humans together much like Doctor Manhattan. Whether individual bones and muscles will work best or some other design will prove superior will only be resolved once each design can be tested. In the end, the greatest challenge may not be creating individual robotics systems or artificial intelligence, but packing all of these components into a single robot.
It is possible one day, however, to think that a much older version of yourself will be explaining to your live-in robot that their lineage started way back in the day with the creation of Kenshiro and the Ishiguro Geminoid.
This video shows rare footage of Steve Jobs from 1980 giving a talk about starting Apple. What’s particularly striking is Jobs’s explanation of man’s skill as a toolmaker to amplify his inherent ability, which he says is why Apple was formed: not as many other companies were--to create a product--but instead to create tools that enhance man’s innate talents.
In this video from 1982 (actually, an audio-recording-as-video) Steve Jobs talks to the Academy of Achievement about what makes a person intelligent. He contends that a lot of it has to do with memory and the ability to make connections. However, he says in order to make connections that are innovative, a person must not have the same experiences as everyone else or else everyone will just be making the same connections. The key, he says, is to get an many different and wide-ranging experiences as possible.
As an entrepreneur, I know the dread you feel why you are going over the numbers deciding if you have enough to start a company. Indeed, “What if I spend all this money and I end up with nothing?” is a common refrain I hear whenever I talk to others deciding to go all-in on an original idea that more often than not has an equal chance of failing or succeeding. In this video of a talk Steve Wozniak gave to the Colorado School of Mines in 1984, Wozniak reflects on how Jobs turned the table on his thinking when he expressed the same fears. “Yeah, we [might] lose all our money,” Jobs told Woz, “but at least we’ll have a company.”
This is a great video from 1985 that shows Steve Jobs talking to academics from Lunds University in Sweden and it should be required viewing for anyone who says, “Yeah, but Apple hasn’t innovated in years!” Here Jobs talks about how the mid-1980s were seeing a lack of major advancements in the computer industry. However, he was quick to point out that all industries go through slow periods, though even when they do there is momentum behind that that eventually leads to new spurts of innovation. Extra points to the video for shows Jobs arriving by helicopter.
This is perhaps my favorite Steve Jobs video. In it you see a bearded Jobs from 1994--one of the most powerful and creative people the technology industry has ever seen--speaking about not being afraid to ask for help. In Western society--especially in America--asking for help often has false connotations associated with it that you aren’t smart, clever, or rich enough to do it on your own. But Jobs knew there was no shame in asking for help and here explains that the ability to ask for help is often the difference between the people who accomplish something and the people who accomplish nothing.
This is a video of a keynote speech by Steve Jobs at Siggraph '95. In it, Jobs talks about an upcoming movie his new company, Pixar, is making called Toy Story. The speech is rare in that it shows Jobs's masterful understanding of industries other than technology. In this case, it’s the film industry. Here he opines that the future of films will increasingly rely on animation instead of its traditional role as just a tool for children’s films. This was a groundbreaking assertion in 1995, but today it seems obvious as virtually every film made today features some type of computer animation--with some relying completely on it.
In this amazing speech from 1997 in a Town Hall meeting room on the company’s Cupertino campus, Steve Jobs launches the most iconic marketing campaign in the company’s history: “Think Different.” Jobs reflects on the difference between using marketing to sell a commodity and using marketing to impart the ethos of a company to its users. You can see the correlation between the Think Different campaign and the speech Jobs gave 17 years earlier about man’s role as a toolmaker. This is the birth of Apple conveying its ethos that the company is a simple toolmaker for people with the passion and ability to change the world. (Extra points to Steve for the dig against the milk industry).
Thanks to David Blake of Degreed, who suggested some of these videos. Degreed is a new service that helps users tell the story of their life's worth of learning and helps them track, measure, and share everything they learn. They have launched a series of case studies on the lives of interesting people, including Steve Jobs. The case study features 50+ articles, videos, and book excerpts that highlight the influences in his life, the pivotal moments in his education and career, and highlights his legacy today.
I vividly remember scoffing at Instagram to my friends. People were happy with Facebook for posting photos, weren’t they? I now Instagram nearly once a day, just like everyone else. But it makes me wonder how many more of these services I will feel compelled to join. Two years ago, we were all satisfied to live in our Facebook bubbles and things were simple; now we’ve layered on more and more niche social networks, each one claiming a different chunk of our personal digital artifacts. The more networks I gain, the less I actually know about my relationships in them, and the more time I spend managing each little silo and the group of friends that’s active there.
Are we losing something by having all these networks? Would consolidating them make us less aware of the niches and nuances of the various relationships we maintain on each network?
We think of social networking infrastructure as being progressive: First there were message boards, then email blew up, and now we have commercial “social networks” where we dump all our data. But rather than being additive, the latter networks have eclipsed earlier ones, taking much of my data with them.
They call it the “network effect” for a reason. By 2017, more than one-third of all people on this planet are expected to be active on one or more social networks. Yes, you read that right--one-third of all people. In the past year alone, 300 million more users joined a social network, and the list of networks is ever-expanding.
But why do we get cascades of new networks every few years, and what’s the cost of switching around? One answer is that people’s tastes change; another is that these private networks aren’t standardized or open source, making them harder to trust. I realized this recently while playing with a tool called Immersion, a network visualizer that its creators call a “people-centric view of your email life.” Designed by three guys out of MIT’s Media Lab, the program connects to your Gmail and displays--in beautiful little interconnected bubbles--your various networks and the prevalence of individuals in your email life. It’s astonishing how much your email knows about you, but the traditional interface isn’t meant to surface that information.
Immersion only pulls the To, From, and CC fields from your messages, plus timestamps--no actual content. Still, the nature of your closest relationships becomes immediately clear when you look at simple volume of communication: No photo tags, no check-ins, no Likes, no commenting, yet you can clearly visualize every pocket of your world. You can see information like this with LinkedIn’s visualizer, but I was surprised how--with nothing more than activity to display--the Immersion tool told me more about my communication patterns and much more about my virtual relationships. It reaches further, and connects networks and frequency of contact in an all-encompassing visualization that now seems impossible to get from any other singular social network.
I’m a child of the 1990s--I had never thought of email as a social network, having grown up almost entirely under the roof of Myspace and Facebook. But the Immersion visualizer raised a big question for me: Could email become my primary social network?
There are a number of widgets that have been developed for Gmail that allow it to become more social. This is right in line with Google’s own relentless campaign at sociability, with Google+, Google Hangouts, GChat; I’m sure Google has made you all too aware of their push for socializing their apps.
But Gmail’s standard interface still needs a lot of work in order to behave more like the social networks we’ve come to expect. Add-ons help, including Bananatag and ToutApp, which allow you to track what happens to your emails after they’re sent, including notifying you when they are opened and how many times they are opened (yes, it creeps me out a little too).
Nutshell Mail lets you to manage all your social media activity from Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in one interactive daily email, letting you use email as a kind of remote control. This effectively transfers all your activity to one place--your email inbox--and solves some of your too-many-networks anxiety.
CRM tools--the equivalent of “friends” lists--also abound. Extensions like Xobni, Smartr Inbox, and Smartr Contacts manage every person you’ve contacted through email, calls, or SMS, and provide a full profile of this person, complete with photo, job title, and updates from Facebook and Twitter. It’s this type of aggregation that makes these apps appealing and what would allow them to turn your inbox into your primary social network.
My point here is not that you would delete Facebook, but that you would go to Gmail for the Facebook information you wanted, allowing Gmail to be your fail-safe, bottom-layer communication tool anyway.
Much to Google’s chagrin, or anyone running an email service today, it may be too late to get people thinking about social email. One important mitigating factor I’ve noticed seems to be demographics: There is a lost generation of email users. At 19, email is nowhere near my go-to means of social interaction. My Immersion data clearly displays my work network and other random email circles--me, my roommates, and our landlord, or a group project at school--but lacks the network most central to my social life: my friends.
My father, a 52-year-old with 98 Facebook friends, uses email robustly. I have never found this old-fashioned, but merely recognize that he operates in a different world of communication from my largely photo-obsessed, real-time generation. We are most comfortable with what we know: He was introduced to online communication through email, I was brought in through AIM, Myspace, and Facebook. But now I’m questioning my alleged tech savvy. His Immersion screenshot was an incredibly accurate representation of all segments of his home, social, and professional lives--he could learn much more from his Immersion visualization about his closest relationships that I ever could with my list of Facebook friends. He’s an ideal candidate for this idea of email-as-social network.
For me it may be too late. But I’ll make peace with that--after all, there are entertainment aspects to social network sites that Gmail widgets will never be able to emulate. Facebook and Instagram may not be paradigms of functionality and efficiency, but email will just never feel as fun.
This text is not blinking. Neither is this, or this. Those words are rendered on your screen in straightforward text with standard HTML embellishments like underline, bold, and italic. Once it was possible to make text on a website flash like the merriest of fairy lights (okay, like a simple binary on-off digital text string) but it looks like that effect is going away because the latest version of Firefox has done away with the simple "blink" tag. This is more interesting than you think.
The accompanying release notes for Firefox 23.0 from Mozilla include the following line:
Dropped blink effect from text-decoration: blink; and completely removed element.
"Blink" is credited to web browser programmer Lou Montulli, who's partly responsible for 1991's text-centric browser Lynx, which was one of the earliest browsers ever. Mountulli explains on his own blog that the idea came from an unlikely evening in a Mountain View bar that had, among other things, a 30-foot Wonder Woman statue inside. Chatting with fellow engineers about the future of the web and the HTML format, Montulli said he was sad Lynx wouldn't be able to display many of the more advanced ideas they'd had; it could barely manage a simple effect like, say, blinking text. This led to a lot of laughs, and the evening unfolded normally. Then:
Saturday morning rolled around and I headed into the office only to find what else but, blinking text. It was on the screen blinking in all its glory, and in the browser. How could this be, you might ask? It turns out that one of the engineers liked my idea so much that he left the bar sometime past midnight, returned to the office and implemented the blink tag overnight. He was still there in the morning and quite proud of it.
Blinking text was something that was common on the early web, along with the all-too-popular "This site is under construction" sign, written in large text or embedded as a graphic in a form of excuse for the incomplete and perhaps even broken functionality on the rest of the page. Blinking text was neat, it was visually arresting--a way of drawing a reader's eye to something important: "Read this bit!" it seemed to say. It was fun.
But "blink" never became a standardized HTML tag, and instead it remained a proprietary tag in Netscape that was copied in some other browsers. It was actually reviled by many, particularly those concerned with the accessibility features of the web due to the fact it made it hard to read text. There were even concerns that the tag could be a trigger for website visitors who had photosensitive epilepsy. Montulli himself eventually came to say the blink tag was "the worst thing I've ever done for the Internet."
Internet Explorer doesn't support the tag, nor does Apple's Safari owing to the design of its WebKit core. The removal of support for it inside Firefox--a browser born from the ashes of Netscape Navigator itself--seems to indicate the final demise of HTML blinking. You can, of course, achieve the same effect with a handful of lines of JavaScript. But you probably won't.
Sad though you may be to see it go, the demise of "blink" is actually a good sign. In much the same way that the early text web gave way to the graphically intensive web and now the interactive web, and the way that you no longer see "This site is under construction" signs too often, the end of blink could be seen as a sign that the web really has grown up from its juvenile youth. Blink is an enemy of good, friendly website design. It behaved unpredictably and it's non-standard HTML. Considering the importance of being able to view online data in a variety of browsers on the desktop or on your smartphone, and the critical value of the Net to people's lives and commerce around the world, the end of non-standard elements like this may be a good thing. Now we only hope we can get rid of that damn Microsoft "marquee" tag.
Everyone who builds apps knows the axiom: If you can’t imagine yourself needing your imaginary software tool, chances are you won’t be able to create something that will attract other people, either. John Siracusa explains this principle well on the most recent episode (#24) of the ATP podcast, talking about his desire to build imaginary iOS or Mac apps. Siracusa says he rarely finds ideas that he believes in enough to sacrifice the time to build it.
Earlier this year I found an idea I thought was worth the sacrifice. So myself and friend Jared Moody decided to build a Hacker News-like site specifically for music content such as news, reviews, articles, and songs. We called it Next Big Thing and launched it at nbt.fm. What we learned after months of work was that we--the original target audience--just didn’t want this. But how could we have failed to see it in the beginning? How did we get so far before realizing our mistake?
After six months and a fair amount of traffic, the site is now a ghost town--an utter failure. The upshot: It’s harder than it appears to align your own interests with those of a sustainable audience. But a more subtle observation is that it’s hard to know what you, yourself, really want.
The idea for our site arose auspiciously. Certain music articles I was writing weren't fitting Hacker News' intended audience, and I began to wish there was a similar site, but for music-flavored interests. I imagined upvoting, submitting, and commenting on stories about new music. We could have done a subreddit, but at the time that seemed uninteresting: How could we build a brand off a subreddit? In hindsight we should have tested our concept there, trying out the use case and seeing where the Reddit experience fell short for music lovers before building something new.
Of the ideation process, Stanislas Coppin, cofounder of Ever, a yet to be released social iOS app, said to me, “I think the very first idea on the drawing board is something really personal that fits with a special need for yourself, and then it keeps evolving to become a tool or a platform that fits with the need of a broader audience.”
That process of beginning with a personal need and extrapolating it outward requires a lot of empathetic thinking. “Working on creating a new platform is a balance between making something you're passionate about, and being aware of the market you're working in by fulfilling needs or creating new ones based on what's happening right now,” says Coppin. But self-interest is the starting point. “I would not be able to build something I don't want to use every day.”
Knowing yourself--really knowing yourself--means mastering the one-user scenario. If an app can’t provide some value to a single, lonesome user, it’s exceedingly difficult to build a network effect. (The Reddit founders famously populated their social news site with dummy accounts, registering tons of activity for each of them to simulate a fledgling community.)
But Next Big Thing ultimately failed so quickly because, without a substantial amount of invested users, a social site ranking links becomes totally uninteresting. With the initial launch we got a few news stories mentioning the site, enough to draw some early adopters trying the new thing. After launch I felt obligated to be continually visiting and voting on links I thought were worthwhile, which meant I wasn’t using the site organically in the manner I had envisioned. Obligation isn’t a real use case.
There was also the issue of monitoring spam links and those trying to game the ranking, which also took up a fair amount of time.
After a month or so of protective and obsessive use I realized that I couldn’t sustain and decided to step back and try to be a “normal user.” But the dwindling audience slipped further away, too under-active to beat out other news sites.
The lesson here isn’t to wait for the absolute perfect idea before you build anything, but to build small, quick experiments indiscriminately, in order to test out the concept with other people in a real use-case scenario. Marco Arment recently built an app called Bugshot and said he built it just to get in the iOS app development rhythm again. Too often, we put the concept of building something before the practice, and that can lead us toward creating seemingly elegant (but technically un-tested) apps.
Everyone embraces the “lean” product development, but I’m not sure there’s enough emphasis on pragmatism. If you can’t use a prototype to solve (at least in some small way) a problem amongst yourself and a small group of like-minded people as soon as the prototype is built, then don’t expect any amount of roadmapping or new features to make it a problem solver in the future. When you create something that isn’t must-have for yourself, you’re only creating an obligation.
“The underlying grip of movies is that they program us to have experiences. They create events in our heads…”
- Jeffrey Zacks, Flicker: Your Brain On Film. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press
If you’re interested in science, you probably heard last week’s news that memories were successfully implanted in the brains of mice. In a study led by Steve Ramirez of MIT, published in Science, and covered by nearly every major news outlet including us, a mouse’s behavior could be manipulated by implanting a past experience directly into its brain.
This is the stuff of The Matrix or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: decoding experiences from neural patterns and creating false ones that feel real. But the story behind the science has been largely skipped. Where did the idea come from? Hollywood, as it turns out.
Steve Ramirez is a PhD student in the lab of Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa. He’s also the college roommate of Co.Labs’ News Hacker Gabe Stein; and, like me before I became a journalist, he studies the brain basis of memory. I spent three years in labs at Princeton, Kyoto, and St. Louis studying how memory happens in humans. Like Steve’s lab, the ones where I worked were searching for memories in the brain—the “temporary constellations,” as Harvard psychologist Dan Schacter calls them, that light up when a person lives an event and then echo back when the event is recalled. So I was eager to pick the brain of the world’s first-ever “memory inceptor” about where he gets his ideas.
“I thought memory sounded interesting,” Ramirez tells me, when asked how he first got involved in neuroscience research as an undergrad at Boston University. “I knew that if you got brain damage in certain parts of the brain, you’d lose certain parts of your memory. And there are movies likeEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Memento, and 50 First Dates that I thought were interesting. But I didn’t know what was their real neuroscience basis. So I said, ‘Hollywood has asked these questions before; here’s a lab that studies memory. Maybe I can get better insight into these movies, and at the same time get some fundamental insight into how memory works.’"
Here’s how it worked. The experimenters used flashes of light directed into the brain of the mouse to convey the neural patterns representing a dwelling place--let’s call it Box A-- where the mouse had been before. They did this while administering a shock to the mouse in a new place. That shock created a negative experience, while the light imprinted the old place on the mouse's brain-- associating a new, bad memory with the sensation of being in Box A.
Afterward, the mouse was found to freeze in fear when he walked into Box A, where he was never shocked, but had had the place’s neural signature shot into his brain.
Implanting the memories required surgically implanting an apparatus in the mouse’s brain. “You can eavesdrop on the brain when memories are being formed,” says Ramirez. “I fell in love with it.”
Here he explains how he went from this original inspiration to what he has nicknamed his “Inception experiment.”
Where’d you get the idea to create false memories?
We began touching on these ideas mainly because all of us are huge fans of movies like Inception, the ideas behind movies like Total Recall and Eternal Sunshine or Memento. For me personally, looking to Hollywood is a great source of questions.
I feel that Hollywood is a repository of all these fantastic ideas, because nobody in Hollywood is limited. Chris Nolan [director of Memento and Inception], for example, is not limited by a budget anymore. He can ask whatever question he wants, and turn it into art, through film. So I look at [filmmaking] as unfiltered creativity, and wonder: Can this have a basis in reality? Or how could this have a basis in reality? When [scientists] look at Hollywood, the goal is: filter these questions through the lens of science, and re-pose that question in a way that could be experimentally tractable, that can be framed as a scientifically tractable problem. I love it.
So you were interested in memory. You’d been recording from mouse brains, at BU. Did that drive you to the lab you’re working in at MIT?
The Tonegawa lab is the one I thought would let me ask the overarching questions I’d like to devote my career to. Big questions like: Is it possible to find memories in the brain, at the level of individual brain cells? Could you tinker with those brain-cells and therefore tinker with the memory? There are few labs in the world where I thought I’d be able to ask those questions.
How did you decide to try to implant memories in mice?
Three years ago, Xu [Liu, Steve's research partner, a postdoc in the Tonegawa lab] and I were asking questions about identifying memories in the brain, and playing with them. So last year we focused work on this big question: Is it possible 1) to find the underlying neurons representing a memory, and 2) can we trick those neurons to respond to light?
Last year, we were able to do just that [in this paper published in Nature]: We were able to find the memory, and trick the memory to respond to just pulses of light--by shooting light into the brain and activating the corresponding brain cells.
What do you imagine for Eternal Sunshine? You’d try to isolate a memory in the brain, like you guys have done, and then delete it?
Yep. One thing Eternal Sunshine got wrong was localizing memories. There’s a scene with Elijah Wood, where they’re going into the brain, and [saying] ‘There’s a memory right here, it’s at point A in the brain’, and boom, they delete it. But in reality, memories are distributed throughout the brain. There’s no one XYZ coordinate and bam, that’s the memory. Different aspects of memories are processed in different parts of the brain—high and low, front and back.
So, there’s the memory of Kate Winslet, and then there’s the awful underlying, visceral feelings that Jim Carey has when he recalls Kate Winslet [because of their break-up]: the emotional undertones that color in that memory. Now, the emotional undertones and the memory of Kate Winslet itself are largely mediated by separate brain systems. So you can imagine going into the brain, finding the brain cells that represent that dark feeling of a break-up, and inactivating only those. So the memory of Kate Winslet is still intact, but the emotional feeling is gone. You could imagine this might one day be useful for treating people with PTSD.
If mice had a Hollywood, things like Eternal Sunshine would totally be possible right now. I think that’s a possibility in mice, for sure.
You’ve talked about your collaboration with Xu Liu. How did the genesis of the false memory experiment come about? Did one person come up one day and say ‘Hey, why don’t we try this specific thing?’ or was it more collaborative and gradual?
When I joined the lab, the ideas of isolating and trying to reactivate memories were there already. Xu was the postdoc who was ballsy enough to take that on and say ‘Can we make this work?’ When I joined the lab, everything kind of reached escape velocity. I teamed up with Xu and we started asking ‘How can we do this?’
With the Inception Project, our team had grown in size. There were a couple of other postdocs, a couple grad students who were just as committed as we were to asking these questions, and they also shared the air of scientific camaraderie and this hugely ambitious goal of trying to play with single memories in the brain.
We sat down, about a dozen of us, in a conference room for hours saying ‘Well what about this experiment?’ ‘What if we labeled this memory?’ and it was just this unbelievably fruitful dialogue. Sort of like: You have an idea, and give it your all. The Hollywood influence was undoubtedly there. And then it was just sitting down and getting our hands dirty. These ideas were really born through those meetings.
So, in the movie version of this discovery, you and Xu will be main characters. You’ve mentioned ten others. How big is the Tonegawa lab?
Unbelievably humongous. Right now it’s around fifty-something people. That’s one of the reasons I joined. This is fifty different perspectives, fifty different criticisms, fifty different contributors, intellectually or hands-on, to a given project. That’s in the service of trying to make your science as watertight as possible.
So imagine when you’re presenting your ideas at lab meeting: fifty [MIT scientists] are sitting there saying ‘Hey, this is good. Maybe you could improve on A, B, and C.’ Or: ‘Hey, you need to do this control if you’re going to claim A, B, and C.’ It's great to shave off the fat of a project and get to the substance very fast.
You know, everybody says that a lab is like a family; and I’ve realized how true that actually is. For me, coming in day in and day out, science feels more like a hobby and less like a 9-to-5 job. The team that we have of about a dozen people, they’re the kind of people who are crazy-serious about science, and they love these lofty ideas, but on Friday once it’s 5:00 it’s obviously time to go have a beer and decompress.
Tonegawa is very famous, seventy-three years old, and Japanese. There are cultural differences between the way Japanese science is often done and the way American labs tend to work. Is Tonegawa’s default mentality more like the Japanese top-down style?
No. He has 100% embraced the sort of ‘Western’ mentality. He dislikes the Japanese or traditional [hierarchical] ‘Eastern’ style of running labs, because he likes [a lab] to be this egalitarian environment where you’re basically judged by the quality of your ideas, regardless of whether you’re a postdoc or a grad student or a professor: he cares about your ideas, the substance behind them.
You can still tell there is this child-like wonder when he’s talking about an unanswered question. For a guy in his mid-seventies, it’s pretty amazing. He doesn’t care who posed the question or who claims to have answered it: he just wants to know the truth behind the question. All that matters is the answer to that question, because that’s how science progresses. His mentality is: It’s an even playing field and you are judged by the quality of your ideas, and your execution of those ideas.
Let’s talk about reconsolidation: the idea of a memory being rendered flexible when it's recalled, and modified. Did this concept play into planning the experiment?
Absolutely. We update our memories all the time. Every time you recall a memory, it is reconstructed, reconsolidated; it's constantly updated. It's interesting because this, ironically, means that your most accurate memories are those you never recall.
Our idea with the false memory project was to find a memory in the brain that represents an entirely neutral environment, and then update that with aversive emotional information: to change that memory from a neutral environment to an aversive one by artificially associating the two. This really speaks to just how flexible this memory process is when it's being recalled.
When I read the press about your study, and even the title of your paper, I questioned the language: You say you've induced a "false memory," but this seems more like an implanted experience. I don't doubt that a perceptual, spatial experience flashed into the mouse's mind's eye. But do you believe this feels like recalling a moment from the past, or more like a hallucination or a dream?
What we're doing is very artificial, so I wouldn't be surprised if it had elements of both [a memory and a hallucination]. You’re right, we just don’t know.
You mention the headlines and tabloids. One common misconception that a lot of media read into the paper is that they approached [the experiment] as if we made a memory from scratch, de novo--like we wrote a memory into the brain. But it wasn't like that. We found a memory, then associated it with an emotional stimulus. To update a neutral environment and incorporate aversive information into it, that's what we're calling a 'false memory.' Whereas writing a memory from scratch? There are some experiments that could possibly get at that, but it's definitely the next step, not what we've done yet.
fwiw i think the hardest part of this gig is having to change / grow / mature / improve so quickly insider (sic) your work world while trying to stay exactly the same outside your work world.
Crowley was responding to an earlier post by venture capitalist Bijan Sabet, who asked the question: would Steve Jobs have been Steve Jobs if he was happy and balanced? Few of us have insight into the daily life of a high-profile tech CEO, but it seems like we’ve seen this struggle to balance the needs of the company with the personality of the individual from just about every modern tech leader.
Aside from Jobs, there’s the story of Larry Page, who, after re-taking the helm of the company he founded, shocked many longtime Googlers by effectively ending the company’s popular 20% time and ruthlessly shutting down beta projects in a way Google never did before. After joining Yahoo, CEO Marissa Mayer infamously banned telecommuting, even though she had just had a baby and was reportedly working from home herself. David Karp, Tumblr’s CEO, also got into trouble after his company was acquired by Yahoo by promising not to change Tumblr’s content censorship policies and then turning around and removing the ability to search for certain adult content in the company’s apps.
The bottom line is that staying true to principles over the long term seems nearly impossible for high-profile CEOs when they face pressure to perform. Viewed in this light, Jobs may have actually been the most successful at staying true to himself, because by most accounts he started out as an almost insufferable savant. That doesn’t mean he led a happy or balanced life by any means, but Crowley’s quote, viewed in the context of Jobs, does help you understand why he was so successful for so long and never seemed to run into the problems other CEOs have faced despite being a walking bundle of contradictions. Gabe Stein
In today’s age I would say that it is emphatically impossible for a high-profile tech CEO to balance his or her needs and ideals with that of the needs of the company. The reason Jobs could do it is because he got into the tech industry in its nascent days when the endgame of starting a tech company wasn’t to be acquired or go IPO--it was to change the world. Jobs did get rich off his company, but that wealth was secondary to his primary goal. And once Jobs got rich and changed the world, that gave him the power and respect to tell the owners of Apple--that is, the investors--to fuck off and trust him or take their money elsewhere.
That wouldn’t happen anymore. First and foremost because many tech CEOs see the endgame of their brilliant idea as a means to become rich. If you want that, you need investors and you need to keep them happy--so you do whatever they want. And even if modern tech CEOs’ goals are not riches, but creating a product that changes the world, the economies of scale to compete in a now mature tech industry are so large, it’s hard to do so without outside cash supporting your development or manufacturing efforts. That means you’re beholden to your moneymen, who, quite frankly, don’t give a crap about your ideals--because they’re always looking for an exit strategy. Michael Grothaus
Mark Zuckerberg might be the closest present-day CEO to an unwavering Steve Jobs type leader. One that is uninterested in money for money's sake and more interested in the product. Like Jobs, Zuckerberg has continued to press forward with his vision, in Facebook's case, for how online social should be done.
From the outside, Zuckerberg has remained focused. It's obvious though that internally Zuckerberg must have matured incredibly quickly in order to deal with a blockbuster movie showing the world his previous antics and controversial beginnings. Capturing nearly a sixth of the world's population as your company's user base also can't come without a higher level of maturity.
There are CEOs that can retain the appearance of being the same, or similar to their original selves--there just aren't that many. Tyler Hayes
Are CEOs the only ones who suffer from a lack of work-life balance? We have a plethora of productivity seminars and lifehacking blogs all created to help ordinary people deal with this contradiction. The audience for those can’t only be tech CEOs who are losing touch with their social lives or the person they used to be. With the financial crisis, and especially student loan debt soaring, more and more people have to work multiple jobs just to stay afloat. Surely that places on strain on relationships with friends and family.
That’s not to belittle the immense amount of time and energy that CEOs invest in their companies to provide much-needed direction and big-picture thinking. I just anecdotally can also think of people working in a variety of fields whose titles don’t include those three magic letters who are also struggling to find the right balance.
This discussion of “balance” also reminds me of cliched discussions people love to have about artists and mental illness. I’m thinking of people like Plath, Coleridge, and Van Gogh, who all struggled with mental illness. We have a voyeuristic tendency to wonder if they would have been such great artists if they didn’t have a mental imbalance they were struggling with. It’s this same kind of wonder we have about the obsessiveness that characterized Jobs. But isn’t the truth that it’s just sexier to think of creative geniuses this way? Jay Cassano
Charismatic CEOs, or at least those with a tailored public persona, are present and important in all areas of business, but the pressure to be a mainstream media celebrity seems specific to tech. I was reading today that 68% of Fortune 500 CEOs don't have any social media presence. At all. And there are about 45 tech companies on the Fortune 500 so (presumably) all of those CEOs are on social media plus about 100 others give or take. And that includes Warren Buffet, who has 542,000 Twitter followers even though he's only tweeted twice.
Basically, what I take from this is that the CEOs of tech companies are under impossible pressure to appear as a complete person and not just the boss at a big company. It's not enough for the CEO to live and breathe the work, she has to also voice public opinions about other issues, endure scrutiny into her private life, and ride a unicycle around her corporate campus. I agree with Jay that work-life balance applies to all people, but it's a weird competitive pressure that has emerged for tech CEOs. They have to prove their efficacy while handling the pitfalls of mainstream celebrity.
Crowley's assessment of life as a CEO seems accurate, but when he says that you have to, "stay exactly the same outside your work world" this seems like an oversimplification. CEOs have to remain constant in their overall philosophy and views while still appearing to grow and evolve personally. Someone who never dates, gets married, has kids, buys a new house, whatever, can be an unsettling force as the recognizable face of a company. I agree with Michael that there's no way to win. Lily Hay Newman
Compulsiveness: Is it a gift for commercial productivity, or a curse of unhappiness and social alienation?
I agree with Jay that talk of Steve Jobs's "savantism," as Gabe calls it, brings to mind mental illness and creativity--the hypothetical link between the two. But I disagree that this view is more hype than substance.
Talking about "work-life balance," most writers assume that CEOs are in control of their actions--that they could choose to be a more attentive spouse or parent, to restrain themselves from obsessing tenaciously about work. I doubt this is the case for many, like Jobs. Fred Wilson says this:
Jobs is the quintessential entrepreneur and there is so much to be learned from him. The power of focusing should be at the top of that list. When you focus, you can rid yourself of extraneous expenses (Jobs laid off over 3,000 people in his turnaround of Apple)
Jobs's ruthless brilliance reminds me of Jon Ronson's book The Psychopath Test, in which he tracks the history of clinical sociopathy, and its prevalance among CEOs. At least for Jobs--and probably for many CEOs--compulsion seems like drug addiction: mania, hyperactivity in ADHD, or intrusive thoughts in depression are not voluntary; Nor, I’d argue, is the kind of superhuman-ego that animates a person like Jobs. What Wilson calls "the power of focusing" could just as easily be called "the disorder of compulsion."
"Savantism" is typically a word associated with Asperger's syndrome, which I realize Jobs's probably didn't qualify for clinically. But his often antisocial behavior was surely on the spectrum. As John Elder Robison, brother of Running With Scissors' author Augusten Borroughs, shows in his memoir Look Me In The Eye, high-functioning "Aspies" often behave a lot like Jobs: single-minded, focused on goals over people.
Put a different way, CEOs by definition have abnormal brains and minds, like criminals do: Since their behavior is extraordinary, so are their psychologies. Neuroscientist-writer David Eagleman has argued crime should be treated as illness, subjected to rehab rather than prison. Seems to me, so should the freakish productivity and work-life imbalance of many CEOs. Taylor Beck
People ask Google some deep questions, like “why am I here?” “should I have a third child?” and “why is my scab turning that color?” Apparently 10% of our time on Google is spent digging into broad topics like these. So Google is curating and featuring authoritative treatises on popular subjects to provide a starting point for intellectual expansion. If you Google “abortion” or “nature,” essays and long-form journalism by respected authors will pop up as the first results under a new In-Depth Articles header.
Generally the assumption in online publishing is that readers want everything in bite-sized chunks. The thinking is that consumers have the attention span of a goldfish and will get distracted by a notification or a sudden urge to Tweet if a blog post or article is too long. There are data to support this, but there is also evidence that readers appreciate long pieces and will stick with them to the end. And Google pushing hefty word counts might be just what long-form needs.
In a blog post announcing In-Depth results, technical staffer Pandu Nayak wrote:
I'm happy to see people continue to invest in thoughtful in-depth content that will remain relevant for months or even years after publication. This is exactly what you'll find in the new feature. In addition to well-known publishers, you'll also find some great articles from lesser-known publications and blogs.
It all sounds blissful on our end. A win for long-form, useful information for people Googling tough questions, and beastly exposure for anyone whose piece makes it into an In-Depth section. But if “algorithmic signals” will be choosing what to feature (Google says humans won’t be involved in curation at all), will the section be able to succeed in presenting quality work that is varied? Does it need to? Of course Google is a for-profit service that individuals choose to use, but it is so crushingly ubiquitous that we can’t deny the influence and reach these articles will have.
Google is nudging publishers to streamline their content presentation so it can be considered for inclusion in In-Depth. Google lists a number of factors that should be standardized like using Schema.org-style markup, implementing consistent authorship and pagination/canonicalization markup (rel=next, rel=prev, rel=canonical, etc.), and including logos. The company also mentions that sites which protect content behind a paywall or other restriction should implement First Click Free.
None of these measures are particularly unusual or onerous. Most professional sites will conform by default. But Google claims that one of the strengths of In-Depth is that, “In addition to well-known publishers, you'll also find some great articles from lesser-known publications and blogs.” So small sites will especially want to conform for the chance of making it into In-Depth.
What does Google get out of this feature? The company says their goal is to surface quality work that might otherwise get pushed down by the news cycle and daily information deluge. And as this Nieman Lab post by Caroline O’Donovan points out, the In-Depth section could also affect the quality of information readers demand by reducing their reliance on general and uncrafted entries in information aggregators like Wikipedia. The more people read masterful long-form, the more they will rely on it for intelligent context. So perhaps this is a way for Google to divert readers from other tools and networks that aggregate quality content and build up its own index of encyclopedia-quality work.
There may also be a social networking angle. If people are able to easily access exactly what they need, they may not have go-to publications in the same way they do now--they can identify the author and explore all their best works. “We really want to help users find it all from across the web,” Google product manager Jake Hubert told Nieman. “This makes it easier for users to discover this kind of content, that used to be not as easy to discover.” Where the author of a Wikipedia article is usually irrelevant, the connections between individuals authoring pieces featured in In-Depth will become much more important; presumably many of these authors have already linked their bylines with Google+ (as it’s standard practice to do now in companies like ours.)
We’re trying to address the issue of context here at Co.Labs with extra-long “slow live blog” stories that help readers get a handle on broad topics. Let’s hope it pays off.
Yes, yes, Kinect hacks are SO 2011--but the little camera that could continues to give us strange goodies like an ever-flowing digital pinata. And with rumors abound of the New Kinect’s capabilities, we’re sure these little concepts are gonna rev up big time when the Xbox One drops.
With a Kinect, a projector, and some bath salts, researchers at Tokyo’s University of Electro-Communications Koike Laboratory turn your placid bath into a touchscreen party. Pinch and expand, drag windows into applications to open them, or pull into the water to delete--what was a simple five minutes’ peace turns into a pruning-inducing Mad Men marathon without the danger of dropping your iPad into the water. Very cool--but, awkward as it would be to drop enough bath salts in the water to cloud a pool, this could be a unique form of hydrotherapy, keeping under-strengthened limbs afloat while working on fine motor skills to physically manipulate digital space.
If all you need for a good time is darkness, lasers, and some WUB WUB WUBWUBWUB, Kinect has answers to elevate your experience. As part of an art installation in Jackson, WY, a storm of light pulses to the beat--visuals are controlled by audio and MIDI, and the Kinect recognizes and re-projects users onto the wall to form an interactive stage. There’s no reason this can’t be extrapolated to a big venue or programmed to have dancers manipulate or control the music themselves with Kinect-recognized motions.
While the Kinect has been getting widespread love from the medical community, which is using the device to pioneer new, robust, and cheap distance surgery, it can also tell if you’re depressed. Researchers at the University of Southern California have created a program called SimSensei that, yes, asks leading questions, but also focuses on body language like smile level, gaze attention, how open your eyes are, if you’re leaning into the camera, and other physical parameters. In tests, it accurately diagnosed depression 90% of the time.
Company researchers debuted a sign-language-to-text transcriber at Microsoft’s DemoFest a couple of weeks ago, but the New Kinect bundled with Xbox One has even more potential for communication innovation buried within. Underneath all the flashy specs and features, we learned that the New Kinect can read (not guess, read) your pulse--along with discerning whether your muscles are stressed or not, the momentum of your motions quick or slow. Combine this with more sophisticated voice recognition abilities and the Kinect can essentially pick voices out of a room. Think about it: The Kinect can follow you around the room by your pulse and either listen to voice commands over background noise (isolated from voices attached to other pulses) or (combined with the sign language commands above) recognize your hand-signed commands (discernible from flippant motions by quicker, more forceful motions). You may now return from the edges of your seats.
These hackers got pretty creative with a ceiling-mounted Kinect peering down at a backlit tabletop, using blocks to lay out a shadow profile of the neighborhood. The same technique of projecting up onto a tabletop allowed this researcher to create a multi-touch surface and interact with a flow diagram. The increased precision of the new Kinect will only make these kinds of modelling applications more useful for artists, designers, and architects.
In the wake of the PRISM Internet surveillance scandal, a site called PRISM break appeared containing a list of tools which could be used as alternatives to the proprietary services under surveillance. Inspired, software engineer Laurent Eschenauer decided to stage his own escape from PRISM to see how difficult it would be to set up a personal cloud, entirely unplugged from Google, Dropbox, Facebook and the rest. He reclaimed his identity, created a cloud and installed alternative apps. FastCo.Labs sat down with Eschenauer to find out what happened next.
Why did you decide to PRISM break?
I’m a long-time open source enthusiast and have been working for many years now on the topics of decentralized social networks. I am one of these people who believes that social communication is too important to be in the hands of a single corporation in a country far away from here (Eschenauer is based in Belgium). Recently I am involved with the Indieweb, which is going back to the roots of blogging, people having their own sites and communicating with each other in a decentralized way, that you should own your identity and not delegate it to an external company. You should own your content and your data.
I was recently disappointed by Google closing Google Reader so I thought I could host my own rss reader. Then Google dropped federation in Google Talk. Google Talk used to be able to connect to other services from other providers but they stopped that when they moved to Google hangouts. So I decided to host my own XMPP servers and chat server. This is all pre-Snowdon. Then this PRISM story came up and I found PRSM.org and thought I already installed two of these, let's see if I can decouple myself from all these third party services in the cloud. What would it cost me? What are the challenges? Is it going to be inconvenient? And also can we automate that? (Eschenauer is the founder of ComodIT, which automates the provisioning and management of IT infrastructure.) It was a big experiment.
Was it easier or more difficult than you expected?
It went much smoother than I expected. I was really impressed by the software I installed which I knew about, but never took the time to try. OwnCloud is a Dropbox open source equivalent and it works flawlessly. It has a desktop service that is synchronized. It's a great product. I replaced Google analytics with Piwik, which provides me with more data than I had in Google and it has a beautiful interface. On the software side the key weakness is email. I am a big fan of gmail. There is nothing equivalent in the open source world. So I had to go back to a good old desktop client. But from a software point of view I am really happy with what I installed.
I decided not to go into the cloud, which is in fact really expensive compared to dedicated servers. I am paying 50 EUR ($67) a month for a pretty big machine. The equivalent at Amazon would be the smallest instance with one tenth of the memory. You could even host it in your basement. The reason I didn't do it is an issue of bandwidth. The upload bandwidth in Belgium is terrible.
It took about a week to set up. To do the setup you have to understand the software you are installing. What are the requirements? How does it work? It's all new pieces of enterprise software which are all different. Every individual in the world who is going to try to do the same thing will himself have to become an expert in these things and that's where the waste of time is. That's where the time is -- in the understanding. Once you know, it's a question of writing a few scripts.
The challenge is on the operational side. How do I update these machines? How do I keep on applying security patches at the right time? Becoming your own system administrator on your own infrastructure can become a big burden. I did a good job I think from an architecture and security point of view but it's not trivial. If my rss feed has a security flaw I don't want people to be able to access the content of my Uncloud. Making the segmentations of these different services was really critical.
I pushed the logic all the way to using DuckDuckGo for a search engine and things like that. There is some inconvenience and then you start living with them and doing things differently.
What were the obstacles apart from the need for technical skills?
[interview]Developers don't talk enough to operational people. There are so many open source projects I have seen which have three pages of installation instructions. It's like developers make it really hard for us people to use their software. For developers writing software, think about the end user. Think about making it easy for people to install and upgrade. Upgrading should be one click not another three pages. [/interview]
What's your advice for other developers who want to do this?
[interview]For the everyday dev who wants to install his own infrastructure, take the time to think through security. Take the time to learn about operations. There is no point leaving Google to end up in a situation where it is much easier for everyone to access your data because your system is so insecure. I am not even sure that I am there yet.
There was some negative feedback to the blog post. The tone was “You are putting yourself much more at risk by doing this than if you stay with the big guys.” One group of developers believe that because it is Google it has more security. Google has awesome engineers who are pretty good at doing security but they are also a much bigger target. I don't see myself with my little server as a huge target. I own and control my data. It's a balance. Everyone has to figure out where he puts his line. [/interview]
Apart from developers, who might want to PRISM break?
[interview]For my Mum and the man on the street, I do not think they will be deploying their own server. That's a step too far. But if we can provide a well-standardized stack, it's a new business for mid-sized managed service providers if they can automate it enough. They have the infrastructure. They have the skills. It's amazing the number of SMEs here in Belgium who are sharing all their data on Google apps and Dropbox. They have their trade secrets in there. What happened is making them conscious of the risks and some of them will want to get back control of their own infrastructure. That's where the local managed service providers have a role to play where it's in their country, under the law of the country. I believe that some companies will leave the U.S. GigaOm recently tried to estimate the cost to the U.S. cloud industry of the NSA leaks.
Europeans have to realize how much they depend on the United States for Facebook, Google apps and all these services. We don't have a major European cloud provider. I do not think we will compete at a commercial level any time soon but people should understand that there are alternatives in the open source world. If you don't want to depend on U.S. corporate silos there are ways to do it. There is a cost of convenience but it's possible.
There are enough good open source tools that you can have smaller players. A University can offer this to students. That's one of the key ideas behind federated social networks. Let's have communities and small groups doing things and being able to talk to each other. [/interview]
We ran a story last week on why you should be your own platform. Is your PRISM break relevant to that?
I have seen so many services over the years where people people put in energy and effort and build their brand, their page and their content, and then it’s all gone. This Tumblr acquisition by Yahoo or Posterous by Twitter and now Posterous is closing. Five years ago I launched a project called Storytlr, which is an open source platform which aggregates all your content hosted on external sites so Twitter, Flickr photos, etc. Now I’m working on making Storytlr Indieweb compatible so your Storytlr instance can communicate with other people.
Microsoft has decided to try web-based app development for non-developers. It’s called Windows Phone App Studio and the beta launched this week. The news may have passed you by, either because you don’t care about Windows Phone, or more because dumbed-down app development (while nice for n00bs) doesn’t sound particularly powerful.
Windows Phone, for all of its nice design elements, has been a tough platform to get excited about. While the number of apps it has is rising and the Windows Phone app store now has suitable alternatives to most popular iOS apps, it still feels secluded from any mainstream buzz.
The issue is not whether Microsoft, known for creating rock solid development environments, can be the first major platform to make a good WYSIWYG app maker. The bigger question here is whether non-developers can (or will) be attracted to the black art of creating mobile applications.
It’s almost contradictory to have a developer portal aimed at non-developers: An obvious waste of time and resources. Anyone with the desire to create an app should also have the drive to learn enough programing skills to get them close--shouldn’t they? That’s a plausible argument, but there are certainly a lot of early-adopter types who might try building apps if it didn’t require the overhead of learning programming first. And maybe that will be the gateway to learning to code. Of course, learning to code isn’t quick and painless, but people have to get sucked into it somehow.
Yet there’s one problem: Most of the tasks people want to automate with software are surely too complex to be handled by an app built in a no-code IDE. How powerful could this thing really be? I decided to test out App Studio to see what the use cases might be.
I’ve seen tools like this before; Google tried the visual editor for Android with App Inventor and found so little interest that it was eventually abandoned and donated to MIT to be open-sourced. Giving someone with mediocre interest the tools to create mediocre (at best) apps just didn’t seem appealing to anyone.
For curiosity’s sake I went through the steps and signed up. Initially optimistic that somehow building a simple app would reveal more insight into Microsoft’s vision for Windows Phone, I was let down almost immediately. The templates that were available consisted of building things like a menu for a restaurant, a company profile sharing basic info, or apps for sharing my favorite band, story, or place. Predictably limited, the overall process was more delightful than getting punched in the face, but at the end I was left wondering why I had spent the time; I still didn’t have any desire to purchase a Windows Phone, and the freshly created app I built wasn’t reason enough.
The idea of a simple, web-based app creator isn’t the foolish part of this scheme. Like I said, people have to get sucked into programming somehow, and if this helps even one person get motivated to learn to code, then it’s a win.
The foolish part is thinking the people who need this will actually use it. More ambitious than the App Studio technology itself is the idea that you can convert average users into app creators.
Those looking for the next revolution in app development are probably expecting it to come in the form of touch. It might be smarter for Microsoft to focus its efforts on building a developer environment that is exclusively touch-based, made for tablets; the new interaction might remove some of the metaphors from programming, which could make it easier to grasp for people who already have the initiative but no one to teach them the basics.
Microsoft is already betting big on touch; if it was important enough to center Windows 8 around, and important enough to justify the Surface project, it should be robust enough to use for development. Already, the more interesting seeds of touch-based development are taking place on iPad and iOS. Moving to a new input method will be a long transition, and Windows Phone App Studio in its current form isn’t the right start. Microsoft should do away with the gimmicks and go for the long play.
If you buy or sell software or computer services that are used by anyone in Massachusetts, your life just got a lot harder. The State of Massachusetts has recently increased taxes on gas, cigarettes... and software. This tax applies to all “computer software, including pre-written upgrades, which is not designed and developed by the author.” Vague and scary, right? Well, if you don’t want to be nabbed for tax evasion, here’s what you have to know.
Anyone working in the IT industry who sells software or related services to any business that has any office in Massachusetts.
Any company that has software “used” in Massachusetts (internal software or external software presumably) and who doesn’t do ALL of their own IT work.
It’s crazy, isn’t it? There’s already a petition on Change.org for repeal, and rumor has it the law will likely be amended, but in the meantime you should pay taxes for worse-case scenario.
Immediately. This law went into effect a couple of weeks ago, and so starting July 31st, 2013, any contractors, freelancers or IT shops need to start charging their clients tax if their software is “used” in Massachusetts. If you’re not set up to collect Massachusetts sales tax, you might want to talk to your accountant now.
“I spoke to my representative a little while ago and they confirmed that likely some percentage of work we do would be taxable and some wouldn’t be. I explained that there is no way for our techs to separate out one from the other in our current ticketing system and even if there was, I couldn’t even train them how to do it fast enough.” --Delcie Bean CEO Paragus Strategic IT
This affects a lot of software vendors whose customers use Google Apps; if they have a customer rolling out Google Apps across an industry, and they need help “customizing” or “updating” anything, the freelancers and web design shops that get this cottage industry business will now be taxed.
This added levy is not only cumbersome, it’s super confusing. For example:
if you install software (Microsoft Office, Constant Contact, Drupal, etc.), it's taxable
if your client clicks the mouse to install it, it's not taxable
training your client to use this software is not taxable
but if you "customize" or configure the software in any way, it's taxable
if you don’t actually make any changes, but just discuss them and plan them, it’s consulting and not taxable
if you create graphic design mockups, it’s not taxable
but as soon as you implement that design (i.e. program it), it becomes taxable if you’re using “prewritten” software “not developed” by you (such as WordPress)
At least, that’s how we think it works. What it definitely means is that IT businesses in Massachusetts are going to take a hit. We’ve got a lot more paperwork and a lot of nuances to work out now; for instance, we lease a server and resell portions of it to our clients. The hosting costs include security patches, so some percentage of our hosting costs is taxable, even “hosting” isn’t taxable and our server isn’t in Massachusetts.
And what do you do if someone prepays for 100 hours of work that has not yet been defined? How much is going to be taxable? It seems you can't accept their money without also collecting sales tax preemptively, regardless of whether sales tax will actually apply. And, according to the Mass Department of Revenue (DOR), you should just overtax instead of undertax if you want to avoid fees. Great.
This hurts small development shops more than anyone. I’m sure the HPs of the world will be fine; big cap companies may have to invest quite a bit in training and accounting because of this, but they also have high-priced lawyers at their disposal who can work out the loopholes. It’s the freelancers and smaller shops who are already paying income tax on their work that will have the biggest increase in their administrative burdens, accounting costs, and liability as a percent of revenue.
And it’s not just Massachusetts developers that have to deal with this. It’s anyone who has clients who have “software” that is being “used” in Massachusetts.
“... computer software, including prewritten upgrades, which is not designed and developed by the author or other creator to the specifications of a specific purchaser. The combining of two or more prewritten computer software programs or prewritten portions thereof does not cause the combination to be other than prewritten computer software. Prewritten computer software includes software designed and developed by the author or other creator to the specifications of a specific purchaser when it is sold to a person other than the specific purchaser. Where a person modifies or enhances computer software of which the person is not the author or creator, the person shall be deemed to be the author or creator only of such person's modifications or enhancements. …”
“My accountant is tying himself in knots trying to differentiate between ‘prewritten software’ and ‘custom software.’ Is an Access database taxable? Is a MySQL database?” --Don Lesser, Pioneer Training, Inc.
As my colleague Don told me in the quote above, it will fall on our operations people to figure out how to interpret this law. We’re getting very little guidance from the people who made it.
Massachusetts lawmakers have created an FAQ which answers some of the larger questions. But unfortunately, the examples about how “Floppy Disc Co.” can navigate the laws (that’s the name of the hypothetical company, I kid you not) barely scratch the surface. We’ve created a flow chart for our clients to help them understand how this law will affect them, and we’ll keep it as up to date as we can. Here’s what (we think) we know:
No tax for hosting.
It doesn’t matter where you host the information. If the business you’re working for has offices in Massachusetts, you have to collect tax.
Any work before 7/31/2013 is exempt.
Any work contracted AND paid before 7/31/2013 is exempt regardless of whether the work has been completed.
“Generally” troubleshooting or reinstalling existing software isn’t taxable, but if you add any new hardware or software your time is taxable.
For clients with multiple locations, your clients can get an MPU certificate. Once they have that, you don’t have to charge them sales tax–instead, they are responsible for their own “Massachusetts portion of the use” and for filing a Massachusetts tax return.
All sub-contractors must charge you tax and you must pass that tax on to your customers. No more burying the cost of subs in your overall project cost.
Accountants and attorneys who use open-source or off-the-shelf software to generate tax returns or prepare documents are exempt, as is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the U.S. government.
Patches and installing anti-virus software are taxable.
If you’re based in Massachusetts and you’re working with out-of-state clients they’re exempt UNLESS they come to your office for services in which case some (all?) of your services are taxable.
501(c)(3) nonprofits are exempt from the tax as long as they are registered with Massachusetts and have been provided an ST-5 form from the DOR.
If you offer a combined (taxable and non-taxable) set of services to a client, and 10% or less of the work is taxable, you are not required to collect sales tax for that total amount of work. Though this is dependant on the state’s definition of “inconsequential” serving “only as a guideline, and varies depending on the facts and circumstances of the transaction.” (See this page for more details.)
I heard back from Representative (Denise) Garlick. She’s concerned and seems her understanding of the law as written may differ from DOR interpretation. Here’s an excerpt from her email:
My understanding as I voted (Massachusetts House of Representatives) is that this proposal does not tax: Custom built computer software, data recovery services, website design, “the cloud,” or access to software hosted on a third party server.
Further, the computer services tax included in this plan does not tax: Downloaded music, books or games.
Additionally, this tax does not extend to many consumer computer services including technical support, removing software from a computer (for example, removing malware or a virus), or running diagnostics.
I think “custom built computer software” and “website design” appear (in my interpretation) to be covered as taxable in the DOR FAQ, but this contrary to Representative Garlick’s expectations when she voted for it.”
According to State Senator Stan Rosenberg (current Senate Majority Leader, and the next Senate President) the proposal came from Deval Patrick’s office and was driven by the Department of Revenue and rubber-stamped by the majority of the state legislature (35-5 and 123-33).
The implementation of tax laws rest with the Department of Revenue. They did not raise the questions being raised by the industry and their opinions drove the process. The Legislature followed the lead of the administration as it was their proposal and the Legislature believed they could implement the new tax based on the information provided by Patrick’s administration.
It is the job of the Administration to set up the rules and regulations to implement the new tax law. If they are having problems implementing it they will have to come back with recommended clarifications.
This law was finalized about a week before its implementation and it shows.
Be sure to provide feedback to the people who are defining these policies and who are interpreting the law. It’s definitely worth sending them ANY fringe case you can think of to help them further define the law. The more fringe cases they have the better chance they’ll “do the right thing.”
Call the DOR at (617-887-MDOR) and let them know what you think.
Representative Jim Lyons (of Andover Ma) seems to be the sole voice of reason in the Mass Senate. He’s fighting this tooth and nail. Give him some love and offer your help.
Email: James.Lyons@mahouse.gov Facebook Twitter
If you live or have offices in the state of Massachusetts definitely let your legislators know that you don’t approve that they rubber-stamped this.
If you just feel like bitching, here are a few people you might want to talk to, not surprisingly we couldn’t find any of them on Twitter, and most don’t even appear to get “The Facebook”:
Robert DeLeo
Speaker of the House
Phone: 617-722-2500
Fax: 617-722-2008
Email: Robert.DeLeo@mahouse.gov
Therese Murray
President of the Senate
Phone: 617-722-1500
Fax: 617-248-3840
Email: Therese.Murray@masenate.gov
The trailer opens with a morose, milquetoast, mustachioed Joaquin Phoenix completing a questionnaire to determine the ideal characteristics for his new digital assistant. Out of the ether comes Samantha, who schedules Phoenix’s days with charm, critical wit, and the sultry voice of Scarlett Johansson, who makes Siri sound about as warm as dial-up modem. In terms of raw technical aspiration, this is the ideal of the personal digital assistant envisioned by science fiction since the dawn of electricity: An omnipresent, omnipotent personality that never misunderstands you and gently guides you towards productivity.
But unlike the best science fiction of yesteryear, “Her” does not initially appear as though it will truly explore the boundaries of human-computer interaction. From what we can see in the trailer, it’s not even about the evolving relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, which, in typical science fiction, is about exploring the human condition through the differences between what people and machines are capable of. Instead, Samantha appears to be essentially a human being trapped in a computer. “Her” thus appears to be about programming the perfect woman who fits in your pocket, manages your life, doesn’t have a body (and thus free will), and has an off switch.
Moreover, the “Her” trailer is overtly optimistic about the budding relationship between man and phone. It’s so sticky and saccharine that Phoenix’s BFF Amy Adams tells him “You deserve to have fun. Go live your dream!” From the charming indie love ballads playing over Joaquin Phoenix Looking Sad to the exhausted phrase “I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you,” this appears to be little more than an indie rom-com.
And it’s working. Given the amount of online enthusiasm generated by the oh-so-sweet trailer, Jonze appears to have duped the tech-infatuated men of the Internet into believing that this film will be about the puerile fantasy that they can all one day program the perfect woman.
Here’s where Jonze might be trolling us all: He’s a master of presentation, especially in the short form, who sharpened his skills directing award-winning commercials for global brands (remember IKEA Lamp? That was him) and music videos. His collaborations with writer Charlie Kaufman have produced Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, both idiosyncratic wonders with nested narratives chock-full of elegant social commentary that plays with the audience's expectations. We’d be remiss if we didn’t expect some tomfoolery from the man who followed up his adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are with a happy-go-lucky-turned-dystopic music video for Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” that premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival.
So what is he up to? Several fans have noted the plot’s similarity to other sci-fi works like the 1984 film Electric Dreams, in which a sentient personal computer grows jealous of the affection his owner is giving his attractive neighbor (the computer promptly cancels the owner’s credit cards, brands him “armed and dangerous,” and terrorizes him with appliances). Fans also pointed out the film’s similarity to an episode of Black Mirror, the British equivalent of The Twilight Zone, titled “Be Right Back.” In this story, an experimental computer program vacuums all the data about a woman’s dead lover and begins to mimic him. When she falls right back in love, hijinks and horror ensue.
These fictions are about the wonder and terror of how technology changes the human experience. That’s where we hope Jonze is going by initially positioning the film as a rom-com. If enough people fall for the trailer’s basic premise and expect a simple romantic movie, the film won’t just work on its own merits: It will become a scathing critique of the way we’ve all become fixated on using technology to shape even even the most human of experiences. Scoff at RealDolls? Watch Lars And The Real Girl with a smile that says “man, I’d never do that”? I’ll let Siri define “irony” for you.
What gives a startup dev cred? Developer evangelist Phil Leggetter told me that you need a product which solves a hard problem for coders and shows that you understand how they want to use software, must be represented by credible developers who build relationships with the community, and provide interesting content and solid documentation.
When you ask coders which startups they rate, certain names recur. Twilio received the most dev love in my informal Twitter poll, while some companies like GitHub are now so entrenched in the development world that coders barely remember to mention them. Payment startups were particularly popular, with Braintree and Stripe making the list while the U.K’s GoCardless gets an honorable mention. To steal Braintree’s tagline, devs seem to think that “It’s time to get paid.” The companies are listed in alphabetical order.
Chicago-based Braintree lets developers accept payments in their app or website and its customers include other coder favorites like GitHub and Twilio. The company already processes more than $10 billion in payments in 130 currencies, with 20% of that flowing through mobile, and covers Canada, Europe, and Australia as well as the U.S. On the server side, Braintree supports Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, Microsoft .Net, Perl, and Node.js. and there are mobile SDKs for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Twitter comments said that Braintree is “easy to build with in multiple languages” and mentioned its “great documentation."
Several Amsterdam-based developers mentioned local heroes ElasticSearch, the company behind an open source distributed real-time search and analytics engine for the cloud. ElasticSearch enables data exploration by allowing developers to pose free-text or more structured queries to large volumes of data via a RESTful API. It’s built on top of the Lucerne Apache project, a Java-based text search engine. A free text search on Twitter data might be something like“Find all the tweets about the president” while “Find all the tweets about the president when tweeted from Idaho in the past month” adds more structure in the form of place and time. ElasticSearch also allows some data, like today’s log filess, to be designated as more important than others and this is reflected in results. Hackers and Founders Amsterdam organizer James Bryan Graves said that “ElasticSearch solves a significant pain point for most companies with a familiar and simple developer interface.”
Firebase is BaaS (backend as a service), a cloud database which enables real-time applications like collaboration tools, multiplayer games, and chat clients to implement all application code on the client-side. Firebase replaces all the usual server-side infrastructure with highly scalable and secure data storage. When one client updates the data repository, where data is stored via an API as JSON, the changes are synchronized by notifying all other clients. Developers pointed out that Firebase creates high value for little effort and is used in some great open source projects.
GitHub may have only only existed for five years but it is now part of most developers’ lives and resumes. GitHub is a hosted Git repository, Git being a version control system which originally formed part of the Linux kernel. By putting public Git repositories in one place, GitHub allows coders to easily collaborate on millions of open source projects, although it’s not the first site to do so, Sourceforge being an older open source hub. One developer has pointed out that most of the projects hosted on GitHub are for use by developers themselves whereas SourceForge has more projects for other users. See our guide to 11 trending projects on GitHub.
Heroku, now owned by Salesforce, was one of the first Platform as a Service (PaaS) companies and it supports Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, and Scala. PaaS services let developers concentrate on writing code rather than operating infrastructure by managing servers, deployment, and scaling for them. Over 4 million apps are deployed on Heroku. Rails developer Jamie Lawrence said Heroku “made (Rails) devs lives easier. Employees I met were happy and dedicated. The service itself has fallen out of favor a little recently as other deployment options have caught up but the company is still good.” Heroku has a lot more competition than it used to and recently appointed a new CEO as part of its attempt at a comeback.
Czech company JetBrains has been making developer tools like IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), including the widely used Java IDE IntelliJ, as well as continuous integration and project management tools for over 10 years. Developer Josh Butts says “JetBrains makes the best development IDEs out there, specifically for PHP and Ruby, but others as well.” JetBrains is now creating a new statically typed language for the JVM called Kotlin.
London-based Pusher is a hosted service for adding real-time features like notifications, chats, and data feeds to web and mobile applications. Essentially, it lets developers offload a lot of the work of real-time synchronization to Pusher’s RESTful API. New information is sent to the API and Pusher uses a websocket connection to push new updates to the browser instead of pulling them from the server. Phil Leggetter, who used to work for Pusher, says the company “caught the wave of a popular and cutting-edge HTML5 trend, WebSockets.”
SendGrid hails from Boulder, Colorado, and has helped developers to deliver millions of transactional and marketing emails like purchase confirmations, without having to run their own email servers. To send email through SendGrid a developer just needs to change his email configuration to point to SendGrid’s servers. CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Django, Node.js, Ruby on Rails, and Symfony are supported. Pinterest, Foursquare, and Airbnb are among the company’s customers and it recently launched its own email marketing service competing with MailChimp and Constant Contact.
Stripe was cited by many developers as one of their favorite companies. Competing with Braintree, the company makes it really easy to accept credit card payments on a website or mobile app by eliminating the need for merchant accounts and gateways. JavaScript libraries and Android and iOS toolkits take care of capturing customer card data. The API is yet another REST and JSON combo for sending invoices, accepting payments, and managing subscription billing and account information. API libraries are available in Ruby, PHP, Python, and Java. However, Stripe is still only available in the U.S. and Canada with private betas underway in the U.K., Ireland and most recently The Netherlands.
Last but definitely not least popular with coders is Twilio, the original developer marketing pioneers. Twilio made it into Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list last year by letting developers add voice, SMS, and VoIP functionality into web, desktop, or mobile software. You can even build an entire call center system with Twilio's cloud API including call queuing, routing, and call recording. Another RESTful API, making a call or sending an SMS only takes a line of code. Bryce Keane, cofounder of 3beards, said “Twilio has an amazing team of developer evangelists who you'll often find at hackathons and other tech events, not just mentoring but hacking as well. They really get their developer audience because their team comes from that world.”
John Gruber’s Markdown, a lightweight, plain-text formatting language, was released in 2004 as a simpler way to write for the web. Although its popularity has increased slowly compared to the explosion of online writing in the intervening decade, it seems to be catching on recently, especially among the developer-blogger community. Though its success is far from guaranteed, I asked Gruber why he thought it was becoming more popular:
That's a good question. It does seem to continue gaining in popularity slowly but steadily. My guess is that it's a slow process because users don't adopt it until software they use supports it. I also think a lot of people resist trying it in the first place because it sounds like something that just adds a layer of hassle between your writing and the HTML markup. You have to actually try it to see that it removes hassle.
There have been some recent developments to make it easier for software to adopt Markdown. Last October, Coding Horror's Jeff Atwood wrote an enthusiastic post pushing for standardization and standards compliant tests. I emailed Atwood to see how he thought things were coming. His response:
We have decisions from the "committee" but there is a bit of a bottleneck with the folks able to contribute the reference C implementation of what we're proposing. Working on it!
Here’s what Attwood proposed:
A standardization of the existing core Markdown conventions, as documented by John Gruber, in a formal language specification.
Saner defaults for the three most common real world usage "gotchas" in Markdown: intra-word emphasis (off), auto-hyperlinking (on), automatic return-based linebreaks (on).
A formal set of tests anyone can use to validate a Markdown implementation.
Some cleanup and tweaks for ambiguous edge cases that exist in Markdown due to the lack of a formal specification.
A registry of known flavor variants, with some possible future lobbying to potentially add only the most widely and strongly supported variants (I am thinking of the GitHub style code blocks which are quite nice) to future versions of Markdown.
A big part of what makes Markdown usable is its plain-text formatting syntax, which means you can use it just about anywhere, online and off. The catch is that there are different variants and flavors of Markdown that make some implementations more desirable than others. As Atwood remarked, the devil is in the details, thus the need for standardization.
In that spirit, we want your feedback. Do you use Markdown? Do you like the idea of it, but find something is keeping you from marking things, er, down? Cast your vote either in the comments or, better yet, on Twitter.
Tag your tweet with #usemarkdown or #dontusemarkdown and share why.
(This post was, of course, originally written in Markdown)
This is a great crash-course in design thinking for journalists, but it’s missing some context. What’s the goal of design thinking? I’ve been led to believe (by books like this one) that the outcome should be two-fold; when you’re finished asking the questions that Li lists in this article, you should know
The overall message behind your product or service (or in this case, an article)
The format of your product or service (or article)
The “message” can be thought of as a hypothesis, and should have all the same characteristics. It should be non-obvious, somewhat controversial, and ultimately provable. The best headlines you read online have
these traits. Also, it should be forward-looking, not based on past events (since no one learns a backwards-looking hypothesis, Captain Hindsight).
The format is the proper vehicle for your message. If you’re trying to get the word out about a real-life event, a paper flyer makes more sense than an e-book. Design thinking will help you identify your audience and why you’re talking to them; it will also help you figure out what you should be saying to them. But you’ll need to extend this process to questions about format and content type to figure out how to reach them best.
Luckily, on the web, your format doesn’t have to have the highest production value--people will still attend to a crappily made YouTube video if your message is right-on. As the senior editor of PostTV, the Washington Post’s new video organ, said in an interview published today:
It’s important to figure out what you’re good at and what your audience can connect to…One of the things that’s attractive about the web is that it doesn’t have to be fully produced. The unfiltered, the raw, the grainy, sometimes that appeals to viewers because they feel a connection to that. Find the right voice for your operation, and be authentic. That’s what it all adds up to.
I first read about using design thinking for journalism in a 2010 blog post from the Stanford Institute of Design. In the post, Andrew Haeg, a 2008 Knight Journalism Fellow, talked about changing the mentality behind reporting to bridge what he saw as a widening gap between what journalists think is going on and what's actually going on.
I hope [design thinking] will become a widespread, concerted response to the disconnections that have imperiled journalism and distanced journalists from the public they serve. The reality of the modern journalist is, in practice, not that far off from any other cube-farm denizen: Work the phones, stare at your computer, crank out the copy. It’s not a stretch to blame the feed-the-beast, factory model of production for the commodifying of news, rising distrust among the public, a distancing of journalist from community, not to mention thin business models based on cheap traffic instead of rich engagement.
It seems like it could work, in a sort of elevated, idealistic way. As Li mentions, design thinking's emphasis on empathy translates in journalism to undirected observation, reassessment of assumptions, and intelligent scrutiny. These are definitely things that make journalism sharper, more accountable, and more relevant. She writes, "Once you think you understand, dig deeper. Go back and interview your sources or audience again and test the conclusions you’re making."
But in this financial climate especially, design thinking in the context of journalism raises some concerns. The approach is meant to aid journalists in pitching and reporting stories that will resonate with readers, but it's easy to see how being "focused on users," as design thinking is, could degenerate into catering to readers and trying to write what they want to read. More unique views, more money. And something journalism needs badly is more money. A stable bottom line can embolden a publication to publish tough stories alongside the daily traffic drivers, but this compromise can erode the integrity of news, and is not the journalistic utopia that it seems like proponents of design thinking are looking to achieve.
Journalists are supposed to report on everything, from topics that everyone wants to read about, to topics everyone is trying to avoid. There are noble goals behind implementing design thinking in journalism, but specifically basing a reporter's workflow on a process that is inherently and expressly consumer-driven seems unnecessary. Why inject ethical ambiguity when so many other organizational methods and guiding principles exist? Journalists can take the good lessons from design thinking and apply them without adopting an entirely reader-driven philosophy. Lily Hay Newman
Where design thinking could really help journalists is in rethinking the format in which we produce journalism, the second outcome mentioned above. Journos already have to be good at defining the message of their story and how it is relevant to the audience. But as David Cohn from Circa told us in an interview, news is still dominated by the article format, which was defined by the constraints of print and paper but is still dominant in the online world. Why?
Circa is making object-oriented news. The interactive news team at the New York Timescreates “news products” rather than articles, some of them short-lived and designed for a particular story like Hurricane Sandy. Editor’s Lab throws together journalists and developers to use software to create new ways to communicate news.
Forcing journalists to cast aside their assumptions about format, and make their own news product prototypes, could be the biggest contribution which design thinking can make to journalism. Ciara Byrne
Design mentality towards writing brings to mind how creative scientists often dream up new questions. As Andrew Donohue, senior editor of the Center For Investigative Reporting, puts it in the Poynter article:
“There’s something... empowering about using the design thinking method, where you’re not actually going out to interview [sources] about a specific story you have in your head.”
When you go into reporting with background, hypotheses, and questions, but not preconceptions about the shape of the story you're going to tell, there's room for discovery. I found this when MIT neuroscience PhD student Steve Ramirez told me lately how Hollywood inspired his real-life sci-fi experiment:
"We sat down, about a dozen of us, in a conference room for hours saying ‘Well what about this experiment?’ ‘What if we labeled this memory?’ and it was this unbelievably fruitful dialogue. Sort of like: You have an idea, and give it your all... We began touching on these ideas because all of us are huge fans of movies like Inception, the ideas behind movies like Total Recall and Eternal Sunshine or Memento. For me personally, looking to Hollywood is a great source of questions."
Ramirez, like the proponents of design thinking, is all for brainstorms and rapid try-and-fail. The enormous Tonegawa lab, where he works, has 50 people in it, around half Japanese and half Western researchers.
"This is fifty different perspectives, fifty different criticisms, fifty different contributors to a given project. That’s in the service of trying to make your science as watertight as possible. Imagine when you’re presenting your ideas at lab meeting: fifty [MIT scientists] are sitting there saying ‘Hey, this is good. Maybe you could improve on A, B, and C.’ It's great to shave off the fat of a project and get to the substance very fast."
The story "Definition" proposed by Li ("____________ (name) needs a way to _____________. Unexpectedly, in his/her world ____________") brings to mind Storycraft, a terrific primer on long-form writing by Oregonian editor Jack Hart. Desire, Hart says, is the driver of narrative: A story is a person wanting something. Not that this is news to journos, but good to keep the formula in mind. Taylor Beck
This week, a Texas judge may have initiated the beginning of the end of Bitcoin--by ruling it a legitimate currency under the protection of the U.S. government.
The ruling came out of a case in which the Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Trendon Shavers with running a Bitcoin Ponzi scheme--but since Bitcoins aren’t real-life securities (i.e., backed by the U.S. government), the SEC can’t sue him.
Bullshit, says the judge:
"It is clear that Bitcoin can be used as money. It can be used to purchase goods or services, and as Shavers stated, used to pay for individual living expenses. ... Therefore, Bitcoin is a currency or form of money, and investors wishing to invest in [Shavers’ company] provided an investment of money."
What made Bitcoin attractive was its independent value decoupled from governmental regulation. But as Bloomberg’s Timothy Lavin points out, this case (which the SEC is now citing in its press release warning investors of possible future Ponzi schemes in “virtual currencies”) is just the latest in a string of U.S. government agencies that are taking notice of Bitcoin’s use. Especially, say, its use in capital gains that may or may not be honestly reported to the IRS. The more agencies take notice, the less easily you’ll actually be able to get away with using it. Though with almost no way to track the flow of Bitcoins or who is purchasing the currency, regulators would need to nail people only when they convert back to fiat currency. It’s possible that would keep an all-Bitcoin economy somewhat isolated from the larger markets.
See, the thing about transferring money -- the thing that makes it expensive and cumbersome and oh-so-20th-century -- is that it comes with these annoying rules. Companies that move money have to register themselves and apply for licenses. They have to comply with money-transmitter laws. And the Patriot Act. And the Bank Secrecy Act. And international anti-money-laundering norms. And, if they're overseas, the profoundly complicated and meddlesome Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. And then there's the taxes.
Of course, the government also wants in on all those fun little activities that Bitcoin’s purchase anonymity is useful for, like drugs and the widespread gambling sites that operate outside the U.S. to avoid the SEC hammer. Of course, as Lavin points out, there are people working to decry the assumption that Bitcoin is even anonymous at all, as purchase patterns and behaviors in activity bottlenecks like exchangers and wallet systems provide enough data to narrow down buyer identity.
Doesn’t this sound familiar? Legalize, regulate, and neuter black market prices? Unlike drugs, however, Bitcoin isn’t a physical product. It can neither be physically seized (sources theorize that the DEA’s Bitcoin seizure back in June was acquired in a sting/honeypot operation) nor destroyed.
But if it is“legalized” and regulated, it could finally be used for real-world point of sale transactions beyond open source projects. POS purchases means folks wouldn’t have to exchange for fiat currency, reducing hassle and transaction fees and delay. But it would also defeat the purpose of a virtual currency. Whatever the outcome of this trial, Bitcoin’s position in the gray market will be as precarious as ever.
