Budcaddell

Why ride one hot startup trend when you can ride two? Mytaxi, the European taxi startup that launched a US presence late last year, is now expanding into the field of one-hour deliveries.

Yes, backed by a new round of funding that we’re told runs into “tens of millions,” the Germany-based startup is getting into the same game as companies like Shutl and indeed eBay, by allowing businesses to offer one-hour deliveries using its roster of 35,000 drivers.

Mytaxi says that it will charge prices in line other express shipping providers, and the service has already been tested with German electronics chain Media Markt’s Hamburg stores. A limited trial will continue for the rest of this year before it is rolled out internationally.

The clever move makes sense – you’ve got a fleet of cars on the road so why not give them more opportunity to work. Whether Mytaxi can balance the supply and demand sides of the equation remains to be seen, though; will it have enough drivers in the places where retailers need them the most?

Beyond Germany, Mytaxi currently operates in selected major cities in Austria, Poland and Spain, as well as Washington DC in the US. The next three US cities the company will target are Miami, Denver and Seattle.

Mytaxi isn’t revealing the value of its new funding round, but backers include Deutsche Telekom’s VC arm T-Venture, and there’s a second investment from Daimler’s Daimler Mobility Services offshoot in the mix.

In a blog post today, Elon Musk revealed plans for an alpha version of his much-anticipated Hyperloop, an innovative transportation system that would move passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than 30 minutes. According to the plans, the Hyperloop would transport passengers in aluminum pods traveling up to 800mph, mostly following the route of California's I-5. The estimated cost would be $6 billion for passenger-only model, or $10 billion for a larger model capable of transporting cars. On a following conference call, Musk said he expected a prototype unit might take only three or four years to complete given the right project leader, including a couple years to acclimate themselves to the project. "If it was my top...

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Until just a few weeks ago, Freedom Hosting was the biggest hosting service for sites that hid behind the anonymizing software of Tor—what’s known as the Dark Web. After Freedom Hosting shut down last week, following the arrest and extradition trial of its alleged owner in Ireland, the Dark Web got even darker. A lot of websites disappeared.

What’s the full extent of the damage? It’s time to survey the landscape and see what still exists.

Previously, Tor users Nekro, chisquare, and TriPh0rce wrote and maintained a great guide to hidden services. However, their guide was last updated on June 1, so it doesn’t reflect the extraordinary changes that have occurred recently.

The Daily Dot does not advocate the use of Tor or any of the illegal services that may be available through it, but it’s important to recognize and acknowledge those activities—especially in light of the apparent federal action.

These sites (called onions on the Dark Web) do not turn up if you search for them in Google, and users require a special, encrypted browser to access them. 

Here’s a tourist’s guide to Tor’s hidden services, a broad geography of the Dark Web. 

Popular destinations

The Evil Wiki is, for many, the point of entry to Tor and the Dark Web. It is dutifully maintained, well-designed, relatively informative, and also a good place to look for international content.

Silk Road is the famous illegal drug market doing tens of millions of dollars in business per year. The Silk Road Forums are probably the most active on the Dark Web.

WikiLeaks is Julian Assange’s international nonprofit organization turned political party, responsible for the publication of some of the most high-profile leaks in recent history.

Reading material

The information buried in the Dark Web is serious, exhaustive, and troublesome. There are multiple libraries devoted to pirated books, music, hacks, and exploits, like one that apparently removes Apple DRM from media. You can find everything from anarchist texts to doxxes—the public disclosure of personal information—of famous people. 

Parazite is a strange, scatterbrained anti-censorship library of files and links that revels in its own weirdness. Nekro’s old guide to Tor called Parazite (by Marko Sihvo) “incredibly strange but incredibly well made.” The curious reader will be left bewildered, concerned, disgusted, impressed and then everything all over again—in any order.

I2Person is a sometimes-updated blog by chisquare, owner of Oniichan and Nameless IRC.

Dark Like My Soul is a blog about the Dark Web and poetic little nightmares.

Beneath VT documents the extensive tunnel system under Virginia Tech.

Encyclopedia Dramatica is the onion version of the famous archive of Internet drama.

Scientology Archive is a library of Scientology materials.  

Kavkaz provides Middle Eastern news in multiple languages.

OnionNews is a new but rather popular Dark Web news service. The service itself just copies journalist’s stories (for instance, here’s a copied Daily Dot story), but the comment section is lively in the wake of the Freedom Hosting bust. It will be interesting to see if it survives past this news cycle.

Communications

The Dark Web has its communication lines that enable secure and confident exchanges of information. 

SMS4TOR is comparable to Snapchat. It’s a quick messenger service that deletes notes once they’re read.

Tor Yellow Pages collects contact information for Torizens to allow for easier communication.

TorChat is a rather simple anonymous messenger designed to fit nicely into the Tor environment.

Salty Pad allows collaborative document writing on Tor. However, most users have recently disabled the scripts required to use it.

Forums

The Dark Web's reputation as a notorious den for child porn smugglers comes mostly from its imageboard-based forums. But it's not all smut.

Intel Exchange is a fun, paranoid group of conspiracy hounds. (Think: Illuminati.)

Hell Online is a half-Twitter, half-forum community discussing technology.

Black markets

Imagine the seediest flea market in the world, a place where drugs and guns are openly sold but with a difficult-to-trace crypto-currency. Silk Road has received must of the public spotlight but there are other competing markets. 

Black Market Reloaded is the quieter but still ultimately successful little brother to Silk Road. It completed several million dollars worth of transactions last year. The BMR forums are considerably less active than Silk Road’s.

Atlantis is the newest drug market on the block. It’s currently shooting for its first million. The Atlantis forums move slowly, but it’s not quite a ghost town.

Services

The Dark Web isn't just a space. It's a lifestyle, and there are a number of services necessary to maintain it. 

Bitcoin Fog (discussed here) launders the digital currency and attempts to erase any trace that might be made back to a real identity. 

Indymedia Keyserver is a Tor-based PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) keyserver that allows you to widely distribute your PGP key and make secure communication between strangers easier.

Electrum is an anonymous Tor server to access an Electrum Bitcoin wallet.

Is it up? checks the status of Tor’s notoriously inconsistent hidden services. You can see if a website is down for everyone or just you.

TorStatus shows detailed statistics about Tor routers, network bandwidth, uptime, and more. It’s a good place to find information about the router you’re currently using.

TorServers fundraises to run Tor hosting, servers, and exit nodes.

Deep Web Radio provides “music to go deep and to make love” to—whatever the hell that means.

IRC servers

The default port is 6667. You can type “/list” in the dialog box to see all the channels.

Anonymous Chat, Silk Road, Oniichan, FTW, Renko, Nissehult, KillYourIRC, Freenode, Nameless, and OFTC all support Tor IRC with servers of varying activity levels and uptime.

Editor's Note: A previous version of this article included many links and other specific contact information for these services. As the goal of this article is to illuminate rather than facilitate, that information has been removed

Illustration by Jason Reed

Pet Society was a Facebook game played by hundreds of thousands of people. Users raised pets and interacted with other virtual pet owners. Launched in 2008, Electronic Arts shut it down in June, explaining that it was being retired, so EA could "reallocate development resources to other titles."

This happens all the time in the world of online gaming. But this was different. This was taking away people's (virtual) dogs and cats. Former players have actually protested online.

"My wife has played Pet Society for almost five years," writes one supporter who signed Save Pet Society's petition on Change.org. "Shutting down Pet Society is like someone coming into our house and shooting one of our real cats. But wasn't that the point of Pet Society, to get you emotionally invested?"

According to AppData, when the game shut down, one million users played the game at least once a month and 500,000 played the game at least once a day. Among them was Selena Inouye, a retired "40-something" who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, three cats and two dogs. She's been playing Pet Society since 2009.

When she heard the news, Inouye sought out the Please Save Pet Society Facebook group, now almost 32,000 members strong, and quickly became an active member. She tweets, blogs and helps organize a boycott of EA products in an attempt to save her virtual pet. "Those of us who were still playing the game were like wait a minute, we don't think it's old, and we don't think it's ready for retirement, and what in the world is going on here?"

"I don't know if this is going to sound hokey," she said about her attachment to the game, "but your pet was always laughing, smiling, having a good time. The atmosphere was always very positive and uplifting, focused on being happy, and you know, In life...life is definitely not like that all the time."

Save Pet Society's Twitter profile picture is a caricature of sadness. A green, cartoon cat with big, round eyes sheds bulbous tears. Its eyebrows are raised in a pleading facial expression and its cute little paws hold up a sign inscribed with what is either a request or a call to action: "#savepetsociety."

Inouye's Pet Society pet was a pink cat. She named her Miss Hiss, after a real stray kitten she found in her backyard and later adopted. Inouye thinks the comparison between the loss of a virtual pet to the loss of a real pet is "really fair."

"I know that some people must think, wow, you people need to get a life, you're crazy, but one of EA's business partners is Disney, and people are crazy about Disney animated characters," Inouye said. "People were crazy about Pet Society too. EA has completely underestimated that, and yeah, a lot of people felt like EA was killing their pets. They gave us two months, to cope with the loss, I guess."

When I asked Inouye if she spent any money on Pet Society she laughed, a little embarrassed. "I spent...way too much money. I probably spent... probably $200."

In the social games industry Inouye is what's called a "whale," a term borrowed from the casino industry to describe big spenders.

There are a lot of other similarities to be drawn between social games and the gambling industry. Both business models often extract money from players in tiny increments and rely on audio-visual feedback to send people into the Machine Zone. In fact, a great number of social games are modeled directly after card games and slot machines.

"I'm not so offended," Inouye said after I told her about the whale designation, "but then again it makes me wonder too, if people are spending that much money on a 'free-to-play' game, how come EA couldn't keep it running?"

* * *

Pet Society was originally developed and operated by small startup Playfish. In November 2009, EA acquired Playfish for $300 million as part of its aggressive push into the then burgeoning social gaming space.

John Earner was Product Manager at Playfish at the time. He said that the game's success caught the team by surprise. "It just kept growing and growing. I remember in the early days when it made a $1000 a day we got excited. And then it made $5000, and $10,000. It went from 200,000 players to a million, which was amazing, and then it hit six million and it was the biggest game on Facebook. It was the most exciting career ride I've ever been on."

At its peak Pet Society had 50 million monthly players, 5 million daily players and made as much as $100,000 a day by selling in-game items--clothing for the pets or decorations for their houses. These were very good numbers at the time, especially for a small team of 18 people. But in the following three years Playfish exploded. Its U.K. studio alone, its central hub and the location that operated Pet Society, grew to 160 people, with almost as many marketing people as developers, and other, smaller satellite studios elsewhere in the world.

Meanwhile, competitors like Zynga started making 10 times as much with FarmVille and growth migrated from Facebook games to mobile games. From EA's perspective things stopped making as much sense.

Feeling the pressure, Playfish made a last ditch effort to save Pet Society and itself. The game was still making money and essentially funding the U.K. studio, but Playfish took as many people as it could and put them on the most promising title, The Sims Social, a Facebook version of one of EA's biggest brands.

This strategy proved tremendously successful when the The Sims Social launched. At its peak it made $500,000 a day, five times what Pet Society made on its best day, and many more times than the $30,000 a day Pet Society dropped to by then.

At that point EA stepped in and instructed Playfish's U.K. studio to hand over Pet Society to a new, small team in Hyderabad, India.

"I met those guys," Earner said, "They were very sharp, hard working, very intelligent. They very quickly understood the important aspects of Pet Society. They had a core team of five people. They spent the summer in the U.K. They got to know the Pet Society team, they took the code, they learned how to use it and at the end of the month they flew home."

The intent was to free up the more experienced developers at Playfish U.K. to make new games, and to outsource lower earning games like Pet Society to "lower cost locations".

* * *

The biggest expense in operating a Facebook game is the headcount, the people actively working on it; then there's the server costs, where the game is hosted. EA never stated plainly that Pet Society was losing money, even after the move to India, but it had long ceased being the earner it used to be. It was unlikely it would ever return to its former glory.

John Reseburg, Senior Director of EA Corporate Communications, reiterated to me in an email the general sentiment of EA's April 15 announcement, but with an additional technical detail. "A few months ago, we made the difficult decision to close down some Facebook titles where player levels had fallen off significantly," he wrote, "and the aging technology underneath the games was regularly breaking and leading to poor game experiences."

Earner concurred with the statement. Pet Society was modern at the time of its conception, but it wasn't built to scale up like later Facebook games, and, in a cruel twist, the players' enthusiasm made it a more costly operation. "At the time we didn't realize that people would own several thousand objects," Earner said, "the servers weren't architected for it, so Pet Society started having high server costs per active user."

EA is by no means the first or only company to shut down a Facebook game of this size, nor are they the first to suffer player backlash. In 2013 Zynga shut down more than a dozen of its social games, and eliminated hundreds of jobs when it closed development studios in New York City, Austin, Boston and other locations. EA "sunsetted" two other social games on the same day as Pet Society, including The Sims Social.

Yet none of these sparked an emotional reaction equal to that of Save Pet Society. One example that comes close is, fittingly, from SuperPoke! Pets. SuperPoke! players, however, could download their pets before the game ended. Offline, players could continue to interact with their pets and the items they purchased, but not with each other.

EA did not offer Pet Society players this option. Instead, EA offered them incentives to try other EA games, namely Plants vs. Zombies Adventures, which was preparing to launch at the same time that Pet Society was winding down.

"They [EA] were saying this would be the game for us to transition to," Inouye said, "and of course none of us want play it because it's the polar opposite of Pet Society...It's not all blood and guts and everything, it's not horribly violent, but it's just not the same."

"What should have been surrounding Pet Society during its last days is not neon marketing signs," Earner said. "It should have been thank you notes to an audience of millions of people that played that game for years. Instead, it was just bullshit marketing stuff. That's where they really screwed up."

* * *

Now that that battle is lost and the game is offline, Save Pet Society is focused on convincing EA to issue a Limited Use License. Such a license will allow another company to operate Pet Society at its own expense and let players back in the game, while still allowing EA to collect a percentage of the profits.

Inouye says that an executive level contact told her that EA has kept all of Pet Society's data. Should EA issue Limited Use License, players could presumably reunite with their pets, picking up exactly where they left off.

Inouye is a leukemia cancer survivor who blogs about the chronic pains caused by her condition atohmyachesandpains.info. As she rightly points out, video games have been shown to help with pain management by distracting players.

"Playing the game became an escape for me and a lot of people from the more unpleasant aspects of life," Inouye said. "It was just a really special place to go. I can think of at least three other people off the top of my head, who are living with chronic illness like me who I met through the game."

"I suspect that what's really going on is that this became a powerful way for people to communicate with one another," Earner said, "perhaps people who aren't comfortable doing it live, or just found the elements of that cute little pet instead of a blank chat more compelling... I think that what they miss is not their pets. I think they miss that community, that channel of getting to people that they love, and they're not going to get that back."

It's easy to dismiss Save Pet Society as yet another fringe group on the great and silly internet. But consider how much of who we think we are is performed in digital arenas controlled exclusively by companies who answer only to a fluctuating sea of faceless shareholders. How many hours have you spent with your World of Warcraft character? How long did your kid spend building castles in Minecraft, and what do they mean to him? How many people know you only by your avatar and screen name? Who owns the means that bind you to them and what do they owe you?

"Increasingly our world doesn't draw a line between the virtual and the real," Earner said. "That was a bright line 10 years ago, but increasingly virtual things have as much value to us as real things because at the end of the day it's about our experiences and memories. Those are the things that we hold dearly. . .

"This game is an example of what's going to be an increasing problem. If you're going to make an always-on, persistent service that people spend thousands of hours and also thousands of dollars in, what do you do with these games when they run their course? I think that what this story teaches us is that we don't have a good answer."

If you find Foursquare and Yelp restaurant reviews too subjective, here's a somewhat more robust method for harnessing social data to inform your dining choices. By collating tweets about unhappy meals and their locations, a group of University of Rochester researchers have been able to generate a map of potentially risky places to eat. More specifically, the nEmesis system looks for tweets that suggest their author is "likely suffering from a foodborne illness" and then tie the tweet's location to the address of the restaurant visited.

The ingenuity of the present system is in the algorithms and human-guided machine learning that are employed to filter out the noise and pinpoint relevant tweets.

After working through some 3.8 million...

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Picture your idea of a "family farm." American Gothic? Little House on the Prairie ? Maybe an idyllic 19th century life of cute cows and mowing hay? Yeah, everybody knows those don't exist anymore, swept away by the forces of globalization and massive industrialized agribusiness.

In one way that's completely true--and in two other ways, it's completely false, according to a new report out from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service.

Let's take the true part. Farms have gotten bigger, on average, when measured by the average number of acres under cultivation.

The increase has been driven by several factors, including the development of high-tech equipment, seeds, and pesticides that made farming less labor intensive, increasing the returns to scale. Also, the rise of contracts means that farmers could lock in prices for their crops ahead of the harvest, allowing them to invest in that new technology (which may also have been accelerated by farm subsidies and the early-1990s disappearance of quotas that limited production). Farming got much more specialized, focusing on tremendous production of one commodity, rather than growing all kinds of veggies and livestock:

But here's the first untrue thing: Even while the average size of farms is going up, there are more small farms than ever, especially in small states with farmland preservation programs like Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Community-supported agriculture, plus the local and organic food movement, are starting to show up in the numbers. It's the mid-sized farm, between 100 and 500 acres, that's disappearing.

And here's the second thing that's wrong about our understanding of the disappearance of family farms: 96.4 percent of the crop-producing farms in the U.S. are owned by families, and they represent 87 percent of all the agricultural value generated (non-family owned farms are defined as "those operated by cooperatives, by hired managers on behalf of non-operator owners, by large corporations with diverse ownership, and by small groups of unrelated people"). That hasn't changed since about 1996.

Part of the reason is that some mega-corporations have moved from direct ownership of cropland into a coordinating role, sourcing product from family-owned pieces of land that they've sold off. Also, families are just as capable of operating modern agricultural technology as agribusinesses are, as Chrystia Freeland described last year in the Atlantic. And finally, deep understanding of an area's soil conditions and weather patterns--not to mention the local political landscape--are still valuable to productivity, which advantages families that pass such knowledge on through generations.

That may not be the case forever. Ever-increasing size and specialization means that farms become riskier enterprises, able to be wiped out by a commodity price dip or unpredictable pathogen, which large corporations are better quipped to handle. And overseas, in places like Russia and Brazil, giant farms are developing monitoring techniques that could eventually make that local knowledge totally obsolete.

In the mean time, though, just remember that when you say "family farm," you might actually mean "small and relatively diversified farm," though advocates for such operations might try to get you to think otherwise.

Submitted by Franflow

Submitted by padf00t

Submitted by babismp

Submitted by Cookkar

An ex-NASA engineer has launched Elysium Space, a new startup with the goal of sending spacecraft into orbit with the ashes of the deceased. Loved ones back on Planet Earth will then be able to monitor the location of the ashes from an app.

A spot on the first “memorial spaceflight”, which is expected to take off next summer, costs $1,990. Customers receive a kit with a metal capsule for storing the ashes and can attend the launch if so desired. The Elysium Space app is currently available on Google Play and an iPhone version is coming soon.

This isn’t the first such service – Celestis has been offering the service for over a decade. However, Elysium Space founder Thomas Civeit is putting his NASA experience to work at making it more affordable. By comparison, Celestis’s Earth orbit service costs at least $4,995, though the company does offer a $995 flight that goes up into zero-gravity and comes back down.

The timing of Elysium Space’s public launch is curious, as it coincides with the theatrical release of the unrelated film Elysium. Civeit asserts that’s a coincidence, as he chose the name two years ago as a reference to the Greek afterlife.

So far, the space burial industry has appealed mostly to public figures, such as astronaut Gordon Cooper, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and actor James Doohan (“Scotty” from the original Star Trek). For his part, Civeit says the market research he’s done suggests strong consumer demand for the service.

Time will tell whether said demand translates into actual capsule sales, but if it does, the sky’s the limit for this startup.

➤ Elysium Space

Image credit: iStockphoto

A little bit of prepping in advance could save a lot of headache next time you lock yourself out, lose your keys, or need to let a friend into your place when you’re not there.

KeyMe, a New York startup, is today releasing an iOS app that promises to help users replicate keys after they take a picture of them lying on a white sheet of paper.

KeyMe users will be able to bring a description of their key to a local locksmith who can cut it on the spot, or order custom keys online. On-the-spot data access costs $9.99 and mail-order keys cost $3.99 and up.

“There’s actually very little information required [to copy a key], but there’s never been a way for people to pull that information off their key and store it and retrieve it,” said KeyMe CEO Greg Marsh. “Now you can get a key when you don’t have the original present.”

A locksmith needs two pieces of information to replicate a key, Marsh said. 1) The key type — that is, which blank key to pull off the wall. And 2) the “bitting code” that specifies the depth of the notches along the key shaft. (So, really, once you grab those, I imagine you could write them down somewhere outside the app rather than paying KeyMe each time to access them. Just saying.)

But isn’t storing digital copies of keys a security problem? Marsh contended that KeyMe is secure because it never asks for any information about users’ addresses, and because it treats user data with care. He said the system should work as long as people print keys only for people they trust.

Still, I’m skeptical that people really need to print keys all that often, and that they will download an app in advance to help them do so. Marsh said KeyMe’s market analysis has found there are something like 90 million lockouts in the U.S. each year. Plus, the added ability to remotely print keys for friends may open up the market further.

Marsh also described KeyMe as a more lightweight and compatible approach than new smart locks like August and Lockitron, which replace a door lock and can be opened via mobile app or other means.

“A lot of people are starting to focus on your door hardware and replacing it with pricey electronics,” Marsh said. “That tech is cool, but we think keys work pretty well. They’re portable, and there’s no learning curve, no batteries, and they don’t crash.”

KeyMe has 14 employees and has raised $2.3 million led by Battery Ventures. In addition to the mobile app, it is distributing key-making kiosks at 7-Eleven stores in New York.

Submitted by Galadriel

Submitted by Galadriel

In a remarkable paper Allison et al. (2011) gather data on the weight at mid-life from 12 animal populations covering 8 different species all living in human environments. Dividing the sample into male and female they find that in all 24 cases animal weight has increased over the past several decades.

Cats and dogs, for example, both increased in weight.  Female cats increased in body weight at a rate of 13.6% per decade and males at 5.7% per decade. Female dogs increased in body weight at a rate of 3% per decade and males at a rate of 2.2% per decade.

One ready, although not necessarily correct explanation, is that fat people feed their cats and dogs more and exercise them less. Thus, the authors also looked at animals not directly under human control such as rats.

…For the 1948–2006 time period, male rats trapped in urban
Baltimore experienced a 5.7 per cent increase in body
weight per decade from 1948 to 2006 and a nearly
20 per cent increase in the odds of obesity. Similarly,
female rats trapped in urban Baltimore experienced a
7.22 per cent per decade increase in body weight, along
with a 26 per cent increase in the odds of obesity.

that too has a ready, although not necessarily correct, explanation:

… just as human real wealth and food
consumption have increased in the United States, rats
which presumably largely feed on our refuse, may also
be essentially richer.

To counter both of these objections the authors do something very clever, they gather data on the weight of control mice used in many different experiments over decades.

Among mice in control groups in the National Toxicology
Programme (NTP), there was a 11.8 per cent
increase in body weight per decade from 1982 to 2003
in females coupled with a nearly twofold increase in the
odds of obesity. In males there was a 10.5 per cent
increase per decade.

Control mice are typically allowed to feed at will from a controlled diet that has not varied much over the decades, making obvious explanations less plausible. Could mice have gained weight due to better care? Possibly although that is speculative.

More generally, there are specific explanations for the weight gain in each of the animal populations, just as there are for humans. Each explanation looks plausible taken on its own but is it plausible that each population is gaining weight for independent reasons? Could there instead be a unifying explanation for the weight gain in all populations? No one knows what that explanation is: toxins? viruses? epigenetic factors? I am not ready to jump on any of these bandwagons and in some cases the author’s samples are small so I am not yet fully convinced of the underlying facts, nevertheless this is intriguing and important research.

Hat tip: David Berreby writing in Aeon about The Obesity Era.

Game of Thrones was potentially the most pirated show of 2012, but Time Warner's Jeff Bewkes thinks that downloading could be as good as one of the most coveted awards in television. On an earnings call this week, Bewkes was asked whether he condoned copyright infringement of Game of Thrones, which is produced by Time Warner subsidiary HBO. Bewkes first talked up the show's ratings, which he credited with strengthening HBO's brand. But he said that piracy was "a tremendous word-of-mouth thing" as well. "If you go around the world, I think you're right, that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world," he said. "Now that's better than an Emmy."

The show's director, David Petrarca, has expressed similar feelings: before the...

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A few days before important economic data comes out -- housing starts, unemployment, durable goods orders, etc. -- analysts guess where they're going to end up. Usually, they're not right on the money. And now, it turns out, their errors are almost predictable.

The research team at Goldman Sachs put out a paper Thursday morning analyzing the magnitude and direction of "surprise" in every release of data -- that is, the difference between the consensus expectation of economists polled by Bloomberg and where the indicator actually fell. They found that the forecasts tend to underestimate the outcome for several months in a row, and then overestimate it for several months in a row. In other words, if the forecasts were overly optimistic in one month, they're more likely to be overly optimistic the next month, as well.

That's surprising, because you might expect economists to adjust their forecasts based on being wrong the last time. Instead, they seem to think they were still close to right, until they finally change their minds and overcompensate in the other direction.

And guess what? The phenomenon seems to have gotten more pronounced in recent years. Here's the measure of the "autocorrelation," or the degree to which one consensus forecast will match up with the previous one:

That probably happened because the economic shocks of the last four years have just been so much greater than those of the relatively smooth years before them, and analysts have a harder time adjusting to structural changes.

Why does this matter? In part, because markets react to the difference between whether an indicator exceeds or disappoints analysts' expectations. So if you know that the forecast is more likely to be wrong in the same way that it was last month, you can make bets on the market reaction that are more likely to be right.

Mostly, though, it's just an interesting window into how people who are supposed to be able to tell where the economy is going have their own blind spots. And it will be fascinating to note, after realizing that bias, whether they adjust to get rid of it.

The other day, I posted this chart, which shows that private sector investment in R&D has been growing more slowly in recent years than it did in the 1980s and 1990s:

That seems to provide evidence for the "Great Stagnation" thesis, which posits that technological improvement has been slowing down in recent decades, and perhaps permanently.

But this is the only way to look at the numbers. For example, if you only look at private sector investment in R&D as a share of GDP, that's been growing steadily:

The rate of growth was pretty strong for the 1950s through the 1970s, and during the 1980s, but stagnated in the 1990s and has been pretty inconsistent since. But still, the amount being pumped into R&D every year, as a share of the economy, is way higher than it was in 1980. This suggests that the slowdown in growth in R&D reflects more that GDP growth in general has been lackluster since 2000 or so, rather than anything about innovation per se. We're still throwing a lot of money at that.

And this is a phenomenon unique to R&D. Total investment has been pretty constant for the past 60 years or so:

Correspondingly, the share of investment that's taken the form of private sector R&D has grown:

So are the declinists wrong? Do these charts — not to mention the advent of the Cronut and the doughnut ice cream sandwich — mean that there is no Great Stagnation? Not necessarily. It just means that businesses are investing more than ever in trying to innovate. But that doesn't necessarily translate to actual innovation. Maybe the returns, in terms of new technology, to spending on R&D are falling, and we're spending more and more just to keep pace. That aligns well with the theory that a lot of the 20th century's gains were from low-hanging fruit and that future innovations of similar importance will be harder, or at least costlier, to achieve.

But then again, if the returns are falling, then private business should be responding by spending less, not more, on R&D, and diverting the money to other, better investments. Under that view, the increase in investment on R&D is prima facie evidence that the returns on that are increasing, that we're actually in a golden age of private sector innovation.

I don't know who's right. But the fact that private businesses are directing more and more of their investments to R&D is certainly interesting.

Ever since the recession hit in 2007, Americans have been driving less and less. And, as we've discussed before, a big chunk of that decline has been due to the fact that kids these days don't seem to drive as much as their parents did.

Case in point: Back in 1983, about 87 percent of 19-year-olds had drivers' licenses. But in 2010, only 69.5 percent did.

So why the decline? Well, we could always just ask the young folks. And that's exactly what Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute have done in an interesting new survey.

The researchers found that about 15.3 percent of the U.S. population aged 18 to 39 now gets by without a license, a big increase from past years. And, within that group, they asked 619 people their primary reason for not owning one. Here were the answers:

--37 percent said they were either too busy or didn't have the time to get a license.

--32 percent said that owning and maintaining a vehicle was just too expensive.

--31 percent said they could hitch a ride with someone else if needed.

--22 percent said they'd rather walk or bike.

--17 percent said they'd rather use public transportation.

--9 percent said they were worried about driving's effects on the environment.

--8 percent said they could work or communicate online.

--7 percent cited disability or medical problems as their main reason.

That jibes with other evidence. One recent survey from AAA found that just over half of teenagers get a license by the age of 18, a big drop from the past: "Some teens don't bother because they have no access to a car; being licensed no longer holds the social status it once did for many young people; there are other ways to get where they want to go; and the cost of gas and auto insurance are too high."

Now, to be sure, this is still a distinct minority of Americans. As noted above, about 84.7 percent of young Americans aged 19 to 39 do own a drivers' license. And, what's more, about two-thirds of the non-licensed respondents told Schoettle and Sivak that they expected to get a license "within the next five years." (Probably.)

Still, the number of young non-drivers in the United States has been rising steadily, a trend that has implications for everything from transportation policy to future auto sales. And this survey offers some clues as to why — owning a car seems to be more of a hassle, while alternatives (from biking to public transit to telecommuting) are becoming more popular.

Further reading:

-- Why aren't younger Americans driving anymore?

-- Note that state regulations on teen driving have been getting stricter in recent years, and the latest transportation bill from Congress will make those rules even more stringent. So there's more context on the "hassle" angle.

-- On the "cost" front, here's some evidence that growing student-loan burdens are making it harder for young Americans to afford automobiles.

A couple people ate some hamburger in London yesterday. Not generally noteworthy, except that the burger cost $330,000 to produce and the meat was grown in a lab, not a cow. It was flavored with salt, breadcrumbs, and egg powder; red beet juice and saffron gave the cells a meatier hue. It's the first in-vitro burger ever created (though some artistic antecedents exist).

Cattle stem cells were cultured on scaffolding, which is required to give the meat something like the texture we're used to in our animal proteins. This is an immensely difficult and expensive task, as biologist Christina Agapakis pointed out last year. Nonetheless, the burger marks a major milestone for Mark Post, a biologist at the University of Maastricht, who has been working in this area of tissue engineering for many years.

Ever since I started following in-vitro meat at Wired six years ago, I've noticed a trend. Each time there's a media moment about test tube burgers, dozens of writers discover the existence of this corner of science and get an expert make a prediction about "when we'll see this kind of meat on supermarket shelves," or whatever.

This time around, Reuters got Post to predict commercialization in 20 years, but there have been many other types of forecasts. My intuition was that the predictions were always just far enough into the future to make them checking them unlikely. So I made this chart with some help from my memory, Google News, and Lexis Nexis, so that we can all keep track going forward; the data's embedded below and linked here.

What's it show? Well, most of the short-term predictions have underestimated how long any individual milestone might take to reach. As the burger demonstrates, the technology is advancing, but very slowly, and the commercialization horizon hasn't really gotten any closer over the last eight years. In fact, it may have receded.

The predictions varied widely in specificity, too. In the chart above, I always translated "a few years" as three years, exactly. It may not surprise you that none of the predictions using fuzzy language have been close to on-target.  

There is a broader trend in the prediction data, too. While most prognostications in the early days were about the kinds of meat that might become available (burgers vs steaks), more recent ones have focused on when these types of products could become available to consumers.

An intriguing look by Wired at how a fashion startup, Polyvore, made one of their most obsessive users, Jess Lee, its CEO.

It wasn’t an immediate move into the position but a gradual climb from customer, to product manager to vice president of product, to honorary co-founder and finally CEO.

Polyvore turned profitable in June 2011 with revenue primarily from affilate fees.

Lee is now trying to clone the process:

“Lee has done everything from writing code to selling ads to staffing entire divisions. After becoming CEO, Lee assigned herself a new mission, one she is attacking ferociously this year: to help Polyvore’s super-users rise from the ranks like she did and open boutiques, collaborate with designers, take prominent seats along fashion runways, and even launch their own clothing and accessory lines.”

➤ How One Startup Found Success by Making an Obsessive User Its CEO (Wired)

via http://runwiththegoldenwolf.tumblr.com/post/57426009210

Submitted by sorin75

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is buying the Washington Post for $250 million in cash, just days after another storied east coast daily, the Boston Globe, was sold to Red Sox owner John Henry.

Bezos' letter to the paper he now owns is here.

And here are seven important things we know now about the sale (more to come, I hope).

(1) It's Jeff Bezos making the purchase. Not Amazon. Get your "did he buy it in one click?" jokes out of your system now.

(2) For now, the paper is changing hands, but not personnel. Post publisher Katharine Weymouth (the fourth generation of the Graham family to be involved in the paper) will stay on as publisher. Editor Martin Baron will stay, too. "No layoffs are contemplated as a result of the transaction among the paper's 2,000 employees," the Post reported.

(3) The Washington Post Company had been quietly shopping the paper to "a half-dozen potential suitors" before settling on Bezos.

(4) Hardly a surprise, but: The Post acknowledged it wanted to sell the paper because revenue was falling off a cliff. Although publisher Katharine Weymouth told the New York Times that the paper was still turning a profit, all the internals have looked awfully bleak. Operating income within the company's newspaper division (which includes, but is not limited to WaPo) has fallen 44 percent in six years.

Since 2008, daily circulation fell from 673,180 to 474,767 in March this year. In May, Jordan Weissmann looked at the company's financials and determined that "the Washington Post Co. is now a healthy television company attached at the hip to a money-hemorrhaging mishmash of education and publishing businesses."

(5) The deal does not include Slate or Foreign Policy (or the WaPo Labs digital development operation or land owned by the Washington Post.)

(6) Bezos has no plan, yet. "I don't want to imply that I have a worked-out plan," he told the Post. "This will be uncharted terrain and it will require experimentation."

(7) Newspapers might provide a great service. But they're not a great business. The Post now joins other newspapers -- the LA Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe -- in the long tradition of family-owned city flagships sold off to rich guys.

Poor beer.

Just 20 years ago, it was America's most popular alcoholic beverage by far. Since then, per capita consumption of beer down 20 percent and despite population growth, annual domestic production has fallen down, too.

Gallup's new alcoholic preferences survey, summed up in the image above, finds that beer's lead over wine has slipped by 20 percentage points since the early 1990s. But the demographic breakdown is even more brutal. Young drinkers and nonwhite drinkers saw the steepest falls in beer preference. In other words, the fastest-growing segments of the country are also running the fastest away from brews.

Here are drink preferences among the youngest generation:

... and among nonwhites:

So what's going on here? From interviews with beverage analysts, I've collected string for a few theories:

(1) Americans care more about our health, now (because we know more about it)

Here's a look at change in drinking volume by beverage in the decade after 2001. Bottled water exploded. Tea is up. Soft drinks, beer and juice, not so much.

One explanation has been that American drinkers are more health-conscious today because there are so many studies and media reports of studies that make it impossible to be less health-conscious. This has hurt high-sugar and empty-calorie drinks that face relentless press criticism. "You're seeing that the consumer is taking a healthier look and having more alternatives [than soda], such as tea, and coconut water," Thomas Mullarkey, an analyst from Morningstar, has told me. "But also, Americans have aged, and soft drinks are most popular among teenagers and twentysomethings."

Still, that does not adequately explain why Americans would turn against light beer, which dominates the market. For that, we need another explanation ...

(2) Lower-class white guys are getting crushed.

Think of of cheap beer sales as a health indicator for blue-collar America, especially for men (they call him Joe Sixpack for a reason). Look at the chart at the top of the story again. Beer dips after the 2000/'1 recession and then begins to recover. Then beer preference falls again after the Great Recession, where the hardest hit industries (construction and manufacturing) were blue-collar-male industries. As the Wall Street Journal reported, light beer sales fell for three years after the recession and only bounced back in 2012 due to the resurgence of craft beer.

(3) Liquor ads work.

TV used to be a little less boozy and a lot more innocent. Liquor ads didn't air on U.S. television until 1996, according to WSJ, "when a local NBC station in Texas agreed to run a commercial for Crown Royal whiskey." It's only very recently that they've started running ads on broadcast networks. Since liquor marketing came out of the cabinet, liquor sales are up.

(4) Wine is delicious and affordable, and many Americans only recently realized that.

California's wine grape crush has grown by 160 percent since the famous Judgment of Paris in 1976. It's not just Americans who are ordering bottles in record numbers. Wine exports are growing every year, too. In this light, it's not that Americans are turning against beer so much as our preferences are turning somewhat more European as our capacity to produce good affordable wine has caught up to the old continent.

(5) Tastes just change.

I really do wish I could tell you that I know exactly what hundreds of millions of people drink every day and also why. I really don't. Maybe young people prefer higher-alcohol drinks nowadays, because they're more efficient? Maybe people decided Bud Light is awful? Tastes aren't always explicable.

For some Vonnegut fans, this might sound like an ironic, satirical commentary on modern life written by Vonnegut himself: Vonnegut's famous character Kilgore Trout, populist hero, science fiction writer, and fan of Communism, has joined forces with a capitalist machine.

But this isn't fiction. The Kurt Vonnegut Trust has partnered with the much-criticized commercialization of free online fanfiction that is Amazon's Kindle Worlds, its new program to pay fans for writing what is essentially franchise-approved tie-in fiction. The estate of the legendary author of Slaughterhouse-Five and Welcome to the Monkey House has joined a handful of other media franchises like The Vampire Diaries in order to license his works for fanfiction authors to play in—for a portion of the profits, of course.

Philip Patrick, publisher of Kindle Worlds, stated in a press release that "To include the work of an American literary icon in Kindle Worlds is a thrill for us and a golden opportunity for Vonnegut fans everywhere."

But Vonnegut fans might beg to differ, especially since many of the science-fiction fans steeped in Vonnegut are also steeped in the culture of online fanfiction, where tighter corporate control over the creativity of fannish minds is never a good thing. 

In its press release, Amazon stated proudly that "over 120" stories had been published so far through Kindle Worlds—hardly the triumphant industry revolution you might have been expecting. But if you're familiar with the long history of failed attempts to turn fanfiction into a capitalist enterprise, you won't be surprised that most fans have simply ignored Amazon and continued doing their own thing.

The move may be seen as part of a recent trend of science fiction lending its approval to new trends in publishing. Last year Margaret Atwood joined the online publishing phenomenon Wattpad, making some stories available to readers for free. And the Vonnegut estate has long had a working relationship with Amazon, recently releasing a set of posthumous stories exclusively to Kindle.

“We have been very pleased with the success of the Kurt Vonnegut backlist on Kindle,” said Donald C. Farber, trustee of the Kurt Vonnegut Trust. “With Kindle Worlds we have an opportunity to further his reach with today’s readers.”

Given the considerable reluctance fans have shown for adopting Amazon's capitalist model of fanfic, however, it seems possible that the franchise's new home might just alienate the very fans they're trying to reach.

Illustration by huxtiblejones/deviantART

Another month, another dive in the Stanford/University of Chicago Economic Policy Uncertainty Index. It's now down to its lowest level since 2008.

The index seeks to measure the effect of policy uncertainty, including pending regulations and expiring tax provisions, on the economy. As you may have heard once or twice over the last few years, many conservatives blame uncertainty for holding back hiring and growth in this recovery. Those lawmakers love to cite this index as proof of elevated uncertainty.

According to the index, the decline of uncertainty this year is clear*.

And the hiring boom that was supposed to follow? Well

* Caveat: The last big spike in the index was due to a debt-ceiling fight--which Congress could very well repeat this fall.

Facebook has appointed its first-ever Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) after luring Motorola’s recent head of marketing Gary Briggs to its Menlo Park headquarters.

Ad Age reports that Briggs, who switched to CMO at Motorola from his role as VP of consumer marketing at Google after the $12.5 billion acquisition was completed last year, will replace Facebook’s VP of product marketing Eric Antonow, who is leaving the company after a three-year stint.

Briggs was CMO at Motorola until January 2013, after which he transitioned to a role advising CEO Dennis Woodside on marketing and branding. The company recently redesigned its logo, and last week launched its first post-Google handset — the eagerly anticipated Moto X — which included some controversial ‘sexy’ ads as part of its initial promotion.

AdAge says Briggs will have wider responsibilities than Antonow. He will lead branding and marketing for all Facebook product and user initiatives, as well as product marketing, platform marketing and events, communication design, brand marketing and content strategy.

Fittingly, an update on Brigg’s Facebook profile communicated his new role. Motorola confirmed his exit to TNW.

Related: Facebook reportedly planning 15-second video ads priced at $1M-$2.5M per day

Headline image via LIONEL BONAVENTURE/Getty Images

Weight Watchers, the world's oldest and most recognized diet program, has had a bad run lately. After rebounding from the recession, its stock and earnings have been declining since 2011. This past week, it announced particularly bad results, and its CEO of four years departed to "pursue other opportunities."

When a company gets nervous enough to ditch the guy on top, it's time to take a look at what's really going on. And Weight Watchers looks to be a similar story to any number of industries floundering in the internet age: There are a bunch of new ways to get free the stuff for which they used to charge.

Weight Watchers is actually an amazing survival story. In an industry that's inherently faddish, it's been around since 1963, expanding to dozens of countries around the world. It's moved through several different weight loss methodologies as the science around obesity evolves; just this year it adopted a more environmentally-focused "360 Degrees" program for dealing with food choices at any given point in time. There's some clinical evidence that joining up delivers results, at least if you stick with it. Just by virtue of being around for 50 years, Weight Watchers has extremely high brand recognition, and an IbisWorld study from last month pegged it at 43.2 percent share of a $2.4 billion U.S. market.

The company has also weathered challengers before. The late 1990s saw news stories about an American public that had just gotten tired of diets, and resigned itself to its flab. "What we're finding is that Americans aren't dieting and saying 'it's OK to be fat,'" one Weight Watchers franchisee told Crain's Detroit Business in 1997. The low-carb craze took a chunk out of profits in the early 2000s, with millions flocking to meat rather than Weight Watchers' balanced program. Finally, the company started recovering as awareness of the obesity epidemic ramped up, and diet pills lost their luster--Weight Watchers seemed like the most tried-and-true option.

Earnings took a tumble in 2008, since weight loss programs are the first thing to go when economic hardship sets in. But they bounced right back, because Weight Watchers offers something most other diet programs don't: Weekly meetings with a community of people who provide encouragement and support, like Alcoholics Anonymous for overeaters. You pay to attend and get weighed on a weekly basis, and once you attain your weight goal, you don't have to pay again unless you gain it back.

And that's where Weight Watchers is taking a hit. The next generation of diet programs, like the FitBit and MyFitnessPal.com, have a social aspect built into them--you can build a community around your weight loss project without ever having to go to a meeting.

"What we've seen is a deteriorating trend in recruitments, particularly on our online business and we feel that some of that is driven by the continued sudden explosion of interest in free apps and activity monitors," said chief financial officer Nicholas Hotchkin, on the company's earnings call last week.

Sure, Weight Watchers has an app, but meeting fees are still the bulk of its business. Even with a new science-based regimen that incorporates attention from one of Weight Watchers' trained staff, it's hard to compete with free (or even almost free).

"In retrospect, the program resonated more with current members versus potential new consumers unfamiliar with our offering," said the company's old CEO, David Kirchhoff, on its first-quarter earnings call. "Our Weight Watchers Online advertising campaign focused more on the features versus the value proposition, which will be important for us to continue increasingly incorporating going forward." (He also mentioned that spokeswoman Jessica Simpson's pregnancy had put a hitch in their marketing plans, but hey, they still had Jennifer Hudson.)

But can doing the weight loss thing with an online community work? Dietician Katherine Tallmadge isn't a huge fan, and thinks Weight Watchers' troubles may be stemming in part simply from faster propagation of weight loss fads online. "Apps really are not going to work for most people," she says. "They've become the equivalent of yesterday's fad diet books." But Tallmadge says she has seen research that shows online communities can help--as long as they're supported (naturally) by individualized visits to a dietician.

Food policy expert Tracy Fox points out that whether or not they're the best route, online and smartphone-based diet aids are probably where people are shifting--especially since the U.S. is becoming an easier place to make healthy choices. She's also a big fan of her FitBit, which incentivizes compulsive compliance, especially since you know your friends can track your numbers online.

"It's more the philosophy of embedding this into your every day," says Fox. "Young people are not going to go to a class, it's just not their persona."

Of course, it would be silly to leave Weight Watchers for dead at this point. It's still growing into the workplace wellness arena, and may benefit from the Affordable Care Act's obesity prevention provisions. It's also got a wide-open market with men, who've been relatively ignored by the weight loss industry, and are now heavier than women.

But one part of its competitive edge is gone, and won't be coming back.

We’re pleased to announce that The Old Reader will officially remain open to the public! The application now has a bigger team, significantly more resources, and a new corporate entity in the United States. We’re incredibly excited to be a part of this great web application and would like to share some details about its future as well as thank you for remaining loyal users. We’re big fans and users of The Old Reader and look forward to helping it grow and improve for years to come.

First off we want to say that it’s rare to have an application that inspires as much passion as The Old Reader has as of late. We think that’s a sign of greatness and all credit for that goes to the wonderful team that has been running the show including Dmitry and Elena. We’ve gotten to know them pretty well this past week and they are smart, honest, and passionate people. We’re happy to announce that they are still a part of the team and we hope they will be for a long time to come.  The new team will be managing the project and adding to the engineering, communications, and system administration functions.

So now for the future. The Old Reader is going to retain all of its functionality and remain open to the public. Not only that, we’re going to do everything in our power to grow the user base which will only accentuate the things that make this application special. To facilitate these improvements, we’re going to be transitioning The Old Reader to a top tier hosting facility in the United States this coming week. It’s going to require some downtime and for that we sincerely apologize, but it’s also going to mean A LOT more servers, 10x faster networks, and long-term stability. We realize that doesn’t make the downtime easy but rest assured that things are looking up.

Over the coming weeks we’ll talk more about the new team of The Old Reader. We’re looking forward to introducing ourselves and making significant improvements to this incredible application. Thanks for reading and thanks for using The Old Reader!