Todd Moss, vice president and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, recently bought a new refrigerator. It's one of the nice new refrigerators. The super-energy efficient refrigerators. The ones that come with a little yellow tag bragging about how little energy they use each year. But Moss, who's got a more global view than most, knows "energy efficient" means very different things on different continents.
"I know I live an energy-intensive lifestyle," he writes. "Americans on average use 13,395 kWh/year (IEA data for 2010), which is nearly three times what the typical South African uses and 100 times the average Nigerian. But I was still pretty shocked to see how my new single-family fridge compares with an average citizen in the six Power Africa countries."
Google wants to hack the human lifespan. Today it launched Calico, a new startup with a hazy focus on "health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases."
Calico will be led by former Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson, who was once a research scientist at the biotech pioneer, and who will remain chairman of both Apple and Genentech (which is now a unit of the drug company Roche). Google didn't say what, exactly, Calico will do, although Google CEO Larry Page told Time magazine that it will focus on longer-term initiatives:
“In some industries, it takes ten or 20 years to go from an idea to something being real. Healthcare is certainly one of those areas,” said Page. “Maybe we should shoot for the things that are really, really important so ten or 20 years from now we have those things done.”
It’s called twXplorer, and it was released by Northwestern University’s hacker journalism workshop Knight Lab on Monday. twXplorer lets you search for a term on Twitter — perhaps a hashtag, perhaps a TV show title, perhaps just a word you’re fond of — and see, at a glance, the features of Twitter’s landscape around that term. twXplorer tells you:
Recent tweets which use that term,
The most popular links which appear in those tweets,
The hashtags which appear in those tweets, and
The most popular other terms which appear in those tweets.
It tells you the quantity of all those results, as well, and graphs them. It also lets you save “snapshots” of its dashboard for a search term. In sum, twXplorer lets you save cross-sections of Twitter, frozen in time.
And, notably, twXplorer also lets you view your Twitter lists in the same way — to see the most popular terms, tweets, hashtags, and links that appear in them. Twitter lists make up a great deal of my news reading regime, and this kind of auto-summary only makes them more powerful. It could be powerful, too, to make large, comprehensive Twitter lists, and let twXplorer capture and distill that large swath. Combine twXplorer with cleverly-constructed Twitter lists, and you could control your own little battalion of news-finding bots.
Disclosure: When I attended Northwestern, I almost did work for Knight Lab. But I didn’t.
Details are still coming out about the horrific shootings Monday morning at the Navy Yard in Southeast Washington, and we likely won't know the whole story for weeks. Still, one thing is clear: It was all too easy for the suspected gunman, Aaron Alexis, who had a security clearance and someone else's I.D. card, to, reportedly, walk into the gated, secured complex with an assault rifle and a handgun and kill 12 people.
Part of the reason for the weaker security may be budget-related. A forthcoming Defense Department inspector general's report found that the Navy Yard and other Navy facilities had relaxed some of their access control systems to try to cut costs, allowing 52 felons access to the grounds.
But over the past decade, the Navy has been anything but lax about security issues. After Sept. 11, 2001, new anti-terrorism standards required an 82-foot distance between barracks and an open road, which meant that the Navy would have to find a new location for its bachelor enlisted quarters somewhere within walking distance of the Navy Yard itself. In 2010, it finally embarked on the search, telling community members there was no other way to protect our service members from truck bombs speeding along the highway.
It's not that easy to find big chunks of space in crowded Capitol Hill, and the search has limped along; the last anyone heard, they were still trying to figure out what land to acquire. The fact that they're willing to undertake it at all, at tremendous expense of both money and attention, speaks to their seriousness about security, even if the effort might seem misplaced.
They wouldn't be the only ones. Security design in Washington. has largely been oriented toward blast protection, through such measures as putting bollards around security perimeters, restricting vehicle access, and "building hardening," or making exterior walls essentially bomb-proof. Few buildings exemplify the post-9/11 approach more than the one that houses the Department of Transportation, a few blocks from the Navy Yard on M Street SE, with its large setbacks from the street, disguised vehicle barriers and nearly void of street level retail (the District's local city planners pushed hard to have even a Starbucks on the corner, and it's still just attached to the outside of the building's impregnable shell). These days, though, almost all new federal facilities have defensive design baked into them, and a visitor wouldn't necessarily notice it.
But those defenses haven't been tested: There haven't been any 9/11-style attacks since, or the the kind of deadly attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City. And it's possible all the fortification has had a deterrent effect.
These days, with less than infinite funds available for security, the federal government takes a more critical approach to what actually needs protecting.
"The pendulum swings," says Richard Paradis, a security expert at the National Institute of Building Sciences. "Once you get away from an event, people begin to question how much money is being spent."
Protections are higher for military installations than for civilian office buildings, but those go through risk assessments, too. The Department of Defense's 2008 Unified Facilities Criteria and 2007 Minimum Anti-terrorism Standards for Buildings contain extensive metrics for evaluating how much protection a given facility needs.
"Given what we know about terrorism, all DoD decision makers must commit to making smarter investments with our scarce resources and stop investing money in inadequate buildings that DoD personnel will have to occupy for decades, regardless of the threat environment," reads the introduction to the latter.
The problem is, the type of lone shooter who attacked the Navy Yard and Fort Hood, especially an insider who doesn't need to break in, is still among the hardest kind of threat to protect against. The federal anti-terrorism standards still focus strongly on maximizing standoff distance and preventing building collapse as the most economical way to protect people against attacks, but that doesn't do much good when a gunman's already inside the building.
"As with equipment, there are no practical applications of manpower and procedures in mitigating these attacks other than ensuring that people know to take cover immediately after detecting an incoming round and in some environments, firing back at the aggressors," says the Unified Facilities Criteria manual.
Experts also don't know quite what to do with someone like Alexis -- an ex-employee or contractor with some sort of grievance (no conclusions have been reached about a motive for the Navy Yard rampage). While the Unified Facilities Criteria discuss all kinds of criminals, protestors and terrorists, this category is something of a mystery.
"This manual does not address the commonly referenced aggressor category of disaffected persons, which includes disoriented persons and disgruntled employees," it says. "Those aggressors are not covered separately in this manual because they may exhibit similar characteristics to any of the four categories included or they generally do not present a predictable threat."
The more effective way to save lives from "active shooters" is to prevent them from getting access in the first place. And there has been a more intense focus on insider threats since the 2009 shooting at Fort Hood. Testifying at a 2011 House committee hearing on homegrown terrorist threats to military communities, a Pentagon official explained a program called eGuardian, used to identify and share information about potentially threatening personnel. They've also worked with the FBI to beef up security at military bases.
Sometimes, though, there just aren't any warning signs. For that, it's almost impossible to prepare.
Puzzle games, for me, always seem to be on the forefront of game design. Like Bobby wrote a couple of weeks ago, sometimes game design can feel turgid, rote, and, frankly, uninspired. So many stories lack, emotional depth or attempt to put a real feeling inside you. I mean how many different times do I need to run around with a gun or hack and slash through a dungeon to get loot or save a princess?
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons feels different right off the bat. This new release on Xbox and PS3 is about two brothers looking for a lifesaving ingredient in a beautiful fairy tale world. Josef Fares, a Swedish film director, linked with Starbreeze Studios to give the game a cinematic sweep.
Here’s the big twist: you are asked to control both brothers at once, one brother per analog joystick. Each brother has their strengths, one larger and stronger than the other. While a section may appear easy, actual progress takes some cunning. To make it more of a challenge, no puzzle is reused. You must come up with new solutions each time. Provided, of course, that you aren’t laughing at an ogre, dodging through a battle field, or simply staring at the beautiful environments that make up this great game.
After its global hit ” The best digital campaigns of 2012“, whose slideshare reached 328K views, our Adverblog friend Gregory is back with a presentation of its own.
Most of you are digital professionals, and as Gregory is mentionning it in his introduction, this presentation is not dedicated directly to you. But, in our digital world we can all witness the gap which can sometimes exists between marketers. This presentation is a good exercise of how to explain digital in a constructive way to our colleagues. With no self-sufficiency and with taste : it is beautifully illustrated by Gaelle Lasne.
Four million YouTube views later and not a dollar paid for TV airtime, this ad could not be more loved. Chipotle comes out well, and looking good.
I'm a little curious about it still. Chipotle has more than 1500 storefronts and made $800 million in revenue last year. For one, the scarecrow, when confronted with the financial obstacles to farm-to-table business models, will find it hard to compete with companies like Chipotle. I mean only to raise this question, but what is Chipotle claiming about itself here? The company has traditionally, and continues to, espouse Food With Integrity. It advertises "naturally-raised" meat, though the definition of that is nebulous. Chipotle does still try to avoid antibiotic-raised food animals, but not always; and they do employ at least some industrialized farming. The ad also implies that their food is local, but Chipotle's actual position is, "It's not possible or practical for us to source all of our ingredients locally [defined as within 350 miles]. Still, we believe it's important to do as much as we can."
Finally, the drone-crow saw the scarecrow selling his fresh tacos, and that can't be good. That crow seems like he's going to report back to his giant crow bosses. And then, oh boy.
The best news from all of this is that Fiona Apple is alive and well. When you use her to manipulate our emotions, though, Chipotle—singing from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, no less—I hope you're doing everything possible to meet the standards implied here.
According to the sources contacted by Foreign Policy for a recent profile, NSA head Keith Alexander is a "cowboy," a well-intentioned extremist, a blithely naive fan of big data. He is also, it appears, a huge fan of Star Trek.Foreign Policy describes Alexander's data-processing "Information Dominance Center" in Fort Belvoir, Virginia as the site of a high tech homage to the Starship Enterprise. Alexander reportedly had his operations center redesigned to mimic the Enterprise bridge, "complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a 'whoosh' sound when they slid open and closed."
While only a brief look at the Information Dominance Center was offered in Foreign Policy's...
Frog design founder Hartmut Esslinger says the Apple of today isn't the Apple he experienced during his close collaboration with Steve Jobs. (AP)
Hartmut Esslinger knows a thing or two about industrial design and what it’s done for Apple. He worked directly with Steve Jobs to establish a “design language” that was used on the Macintosh line of computers for over a decade. Esslinger’s iconoclastic firm had already designed over 100 products for Sony when he signed an exclusive, $1-million-a-year contract with Apple in 1982.
But that Apple is mostly gone, says Esslinger in an interview with Quartz. The Apple of today resembles Sony of the 1980′s, says Esslinger, who witnessed the succession process at Sony first-hand: The visionary founder has been replaced by leaders who aren’t thinking beyond refinement and increasing profit.
“Steve Jobs was a man who didn’t care for any rational argument why something should not be tried,” says Esslinger. “He said a lot of ‘no,’ but he also said a lot of ‘yes’ to things and he stubbornly insisted on trying new things.”
One reason Esslinger is willing to recount his time with Jobs is that on October 9, at the Frankfurt book fair, he will release a design and management memoir recounting his time with Jobs, called Keep it Simple.
The origins of a design-led culture at Apple By Esslinger’s own account, when he started working with Jobs in 1982, Apple was a fractious company in which designers reported to engineers and many in Apple’s corporate structure were openly hostile to the founder’s influence. (By 1985, Jobs had been forced out; he returned in 1996.) At the start of his work with Esslinger, Jobs knew that design could help define Apple’s brand in a way that no amount of marketing could accomplish, and from the introduction of the Macintosh SE, Esslinger’s “Snow White” design language defined the appearance of the Macintosh, visually integrating its outer plastic shell with the software it contained.
Apple’s “book-like” computer couldn’t be realized with the technology of 1982, but it would later succeed as Apple’s touch-based devices.Hartmut Esslinger
As early as 1982, Jobs had already conceived of a “book-like computer,” though the project was not discussed outside the company. That vision eventually led to the Apple Newton, a tablet that failed, and the iPhone and iPad, which made history. That kind of vision is now lacking at Apple, Esslinger says.
“As soon as you can copy something [like the iPhone,] it’s not smart enough anymore,” he says. “I think Apple has reached in a certain way a saturation—the curve [of innovation] was really steep seven to eight years ago […] but now my iPhone is so full I am deleting apps because I want to keep it simple.”
What the next Apple might come up with So if a disruptive new company—the Apple of today—were to emerge, what kinds of products might it make? Esslinger, who retired from Frog design, the company he founded, in 2006, now teaches all over the world and especially in China, and he says that his students are primarily focused on three-dimensional interfaces as the “next big thing.” Their inspiration? Video games.
“Our students in China and in Germany, they come from the video game culture, and the video games are 3D,” says Esslinger. “I did a workshop a couple of years ago in Switzerland, and even MBAs said enterprise software should be like a video game.”
Just as important to the future of human-computer interaction, says Esslinger, will be a re-thinking of the integration of hardware and software. One example he gave was concept designs Frog did in collaboration with MIT, for flexible computers that responded to squeezing and other types of unconventional touch input.
“I think flat screens have reached a level of saturation,” says Esslinger. “Screens don’t have to be all right angles—the cheapest way is not always the best way. […] Not every country on earth likes square shapes, The cache and the memory makes it easier to have a rectangular screen, but it doesn’t have to be like that. There is much more freedom than we think we have.” (1)
Asia, young upstarts in the wings Some of that radical thinking could come out of China, where Esslinger currently teaches. “What’s happening in China right now is a paradigm shift where they realize they have to innovate, and can’t just make cheap products,” says Esslinger. “The first generation of entrepreneurs just wanted to make money, but now you have a guy like Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei, announcing in public, ‘I want to beat Apple and Samsung.’”
Wherever the next big thing comes from, it’s likely to be from entrepreneurs and designers who are not steeped in existing ways of thinking in Silicon Valley, in part because they’re young—Steve Jobs was 28 when he began working with Esslinger. ”At Frog, our best ideas came from our youngest designers, fresh out of school,” says Esslinger. In part, he says, this is because of a willingness to fail—something that is, at least, still part of American culture. “In Europe you learn not to fail, and in America you fail to learn. You need failure.”
Footnote (1) Esslinger speaks from experience: When developing the design language for early Macintoshes, he had to convince Jobs to adopt a more expensive manufacturing process in order to get the sides of the cases for Apple computers to be perfectly straight. (Injection molding processes demanded a 1 degree angle to otherwise boxy cases, so that molds could pull away from the cases easily.)
Subtle touches like that are now an Apple trademark, but refinement can only take a company so far, and the conservatism inherent in how design groups within companies must answer to their bosses means that companies tend not to innovate, says Esslinger.
The popularity of Netflix and other video-on-demand (VOD) services lets AMC stick with shows like Breaking Bad despite modest ratings, says AMC CEO Josh Sapan. Variety reports that Sapan addressed the difference VOD makes to how it assesses a show's success at an event this week. "We don’t judge a show in five episodes because that’s not how consumers are consuming them," says Sapan. The CEO points to shows that are now widely perceived as successes, such as Breaking Bad and Mad Men, as having "modest" ratings in their first seasons, before growing in popularity through "a pattern of consumption and referral that happens over time."
Don't tweet a picture of your product framing the ghostly lights of Ground Zero.
Don't offer free coffee and mini muffins for 30 minutes.
Advertising is hard. This is easy. Don't use a national tragedy as a news peg for your product or service. "Sorry for the deaths of 3,000 people, please give us money for something unrelated" is the polar opposite of clever adjacency. It is always offensive, and it never works. This is not a winnable challenge for copy writers.
On a day when most Americans are enveloped by visuals and memories of a horrible, horrible day, companies would be well-advised to adhere to the converse of "never forget." Please, marketing departments of America: Stop trying so hard to make us remember.
Counterterrorism may be the most significant area of government policy where we still have no idea what the hell we’re doing.
Everywhere else, policymakers are at least trying to know what they’re doing. Developmentresearchers and education wonks have become obsessive about running randomized controlled trials to evaluate interventions. Indeed, the popularity of charter schools is due in part to the fact that their frequent use of lottery-based admission makes them good ways to randomly test different school designs. Criminologists have run experiments on a variety of police tactics, probation designs, anti-gang initiatives, approaches to domestic violence, and more. And While there’s still plenty we don’t know about what health measures work, the Affordable Care Act is devoting millions to building up more evidence, and big-deal health policy experiments like the Oregon Medical Study receive the attention they deserve.
But terrorism? We have no idea. The Afghanistan war has cost $657.5 billion so far, we spend $17.2 billion in classified funds a year fighting terrorism through the intelligence community, and the Department of Homeland Security spent another $47.4 billion last year. And we have very little idea whether any of it is preventing terrorist attacks.
Some of this is just that it’s harder to collect good evidence than it is in other policy areas. You can’t randomly select some airports to have security screenings and some to not and measure how many hijacking occur at the ones with or without them — or, at least, you can’t do that and conform to anything remotely resembling research ethics. But merely because true experiments are often impossible doesn’t mean that you can’t evaluate policy interventions using other means.
Surveying the evidence
And people have tried those experiments. It’s just that nothing seems to have any significant effect one way or another. The Campbell Collaboration, an organization that publishes peer-reviewed systematic reviews of the evidence on various policy topics, first released its review of the literature on counterterrorism, written by criminologists Cynthia Lum (George Mason), Leslie Kennedy and Alison Sherley (both at Rutgers), in 2006 (it’s been updated since).
The first problem the review identifies is that barely any of the terrorism literature even tries to answer questions about effective counterterrorism. “Of the over 20,000 reports regarding terrorism that we located,” the authors write, “only about 1.5 percent of this massive literature even remotely discussed the idea that an evaluation had been conducted of counter-terrorism strategies.”
They found 354 studies that did, however. Further culling left them 80 studies that could be reasonably said to evaluate the effectiveness of counterterrorism measures. Of these, only 21 of those 80 studies “appeared to at least attempt to connect an outcome or effect with a program through a minimally rigorous scientific test.” Of those 21, only 10 met the Campbell review’s methodological standards. Three of those were medical studies dealing with the effects of bioterrorism, leaving seven for the review to consider.
It’s worth dwelling on that number. In 2009, eight years after 9/11, and after decades of work on terrorist groups ranging from the IRA to ETA in Spain to Palestinian groups to the Tamil Tigers, only seven studies, or 0.035 percent of all terrorism studies, evaluated the effectiveness of counterterrorism measures. By comparison, a Campbell Systematic Review of anti-bullying programs in schools found 622 reports “concerned with interventions to prevent school bullying,” of which 89 were rigorous enough to include. Stopping bullying is vitally important and I don’t mean to trivialize that cause, but it’s more than a little concerning that we have almost 13 times as many studies on how to stop bullying as we do on how to stop terrorism.
Anyway, back to the seven measly studies. For one thing, they are mostly done by the same handful of people. Three were coauthored by Walter Enders (at the University of Alabama) and Todd Sandler (at University of Texas Dallas), two by Enders and Sandler alone and the other one with Jon Cauley (at the University of Hawaii Hilo). Cauley did another study with Eric Iksoon Im (also at Hilo). So over half of the studies included were coauthored by one of Enders, Sandler, or Cauley. They’re all excellent researchers, and one should not discount their work because of their higher output, but generally we want a range of studies from a range of sources when building a literature like this.
The seven studies include among them 86 findings about the effectiveness of counterterrorism programs, and those findings are startling. Lum, Kennedy and Sherley report that the average effect of the programs examined was negative. That is, the intervention was found to increase terrorist incidents rather than reduce them. The results varied by the type of intervention, but not in a way that should give us any comfort about our strategy:
Metal detectors reduce hijackings, but terrorist just do other stuff instead.
The studies find that, on average, adding metal detectors and security screenings at airports leads to about 6.3 fewer airplane hijackings in the years examined. But they also find that those policies lead to significant increases in “miscellaneous bombings, armed attacks, hostage taking, and events which included death or wounded individuals (as opposed to non-casualty incidents) in both the short and long run.” In fact, metal detectors and security screenings at airports lead to about 6.9 more of these substitute events. “When calculating the overall weighted mean effect size for all of the findings examining the effectiveness of metal detectors, the positive and harmful effects cancel each other out,” the review’s authors conclude.
Fortifying embassies and protecting diplomats doesn’t appear to reduce attacks.
Most of the results here are not statistically significant. “In total, the findings do not indicate that the fortification of embassies and efforts to protect diplomats have been effective in reducing terrorist attacks on these targets,” the review authors conclude. More on this issue here.
There’s no evidence harsher penalties reduce hijackings.
Only one study looked at what increasing penalties for plane hijackers did to hijacking rates, and that one found no effect. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work, just that we shouldn’t reject our original assumption that it’s not effective.
Strongly written letters from the U.N. don’t help much.
One U.N. resolution, which included a recommendation that airports use metal detectors, was associated with a significant reduction in hijackings. But that could just mean that the metal detectors, rather than the U.N. resolution, caused the reduction, and the same substitution issues explained above hold.
A military reaction can backfire.
The 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya, intended to punish the regime for the bombing of the LaBelle Discotheque in West Berlin, lead to a statistically significant increase in attacks in the short term of around 15.33 incidents. The incidents tended to be less lethal and the effect doesn’t appear to be long-lasting, but still, that’s not the direction you want the dial moving in.
Changing political regimes can hurt too.
A study of ETA attacks in Spain found that having the Socialist Party — which took a harder line on the Basque separatist group — in power lead to a statistically significant increase in attacks. Meanwhile, the end of the Cold War and fall of Communist bloc governments appears to have led to a significant increase as well. The policy takeaways here aren’t particularly clear (I will go out on a limb and say it’s still a good thing the Cold War ended) but it does rebut the idea that electing hardliners can help fight terrorism.
More recent work
The Campbell review was last updated in 2009, so it’s worth looking around to see if the literature has produced any good evaluations since it came out. But what new studies we have don’t make our current counterterrorism posture look too promising. The most promising project is the Government Actions in Terror Environments (GATE) database being compiled by the University of Denver’s Erica Chenoweth and the University of Maryland’s Laura Dugan.
The first study out of the project examines Israeli reactions to Palestinian attacks from 1987-2004, and finds that repressive actions are either ineffective or lead to a backlash, and the reconciliatory moves can be effective at preventing future attacks. That’s promising, but it’s just the start of what should be a much larger literature on the question of when reconciliation works. Chenoweth also conducted an evaluation of Spain’s tactics against ETA with Evan Perkoski. They concluded that discriminate, targeted arrests were highly effective, and especially so when combined with expanded security laws, like increased police powers and border agreements.
Case studies can provide some help, but are limited in what they can demonstrate. Evaluations of the U.S. government’s responses to the Earth Liberation Front and the Puerto Rican separatist group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberaci n Nacional Puertorrique a produced some lessons, but fall short of the rigor of the studies in the Campbell review, and the lessons tend to be general, e.g. “think like a terrorist” or “be creative.”
Perhaps the most studied area since the Campbell review came out has been targeted killings of top terrorists. There, the evidence is somewhat mixed, but leans heavily toward finding that decapitation is ineffective or counterproductive. Matthews Dickenson looked at a dataset of attacks from 1970 to 2008 and found that leadership transition “generally causes a noticeable and statistically significant increase in attacks and casualties for the months immediately afterward.” Similarly, Jenna Jordan at Georgia Tech found that “Organizations that have not had their leaders removed are more likely to fall apart than those that have undergone a loss of leadership.”
Aaron Mannes at the University of Maryland also found decapitation strikes against groups to be ineffective, writing, “The most notable trend from the statistical analysis was that decapitation strikes on religious terrorist groups tended to be followed by sharp increases in fatalities.” Michigan’s Lisa Langdon, Alexander J. Sarapu and Matthew Wells failed to find significant effects of leadership changes, finding that “the arrest of the leader will not significantly alter the ideology or operations of the group in the long term.”
A few other studies found the opposite. Army Major Bryan Price found that decapitations increase the probability that a terrorist group will cease to be active, especially if it’s young and unprepared for leadership transitions. “In the first year of its existence, a terrorist group is 8.757 times more likely to end if its leader is killed or captured,” he writes. RAND’s Patrick Johnston found that decapitation strikes work in a counterinsurgency context, though his finding’s relevance in non-counterinsurgency efforts against militant groups may be limited.
So what do we know?
So the evidence base is getting better. The decapitation research and Dugan and Chenoweth’s work are real additions to the knowledge base on counterterrorism tactics. But there are a whole range of things we don’t know. Does limiting the size of liquid containers you can take on a plane reduce attacks? Does making people take their shoes off during their security screenings? Do drone strikes reduce the number of plots targeting U.S. citizens?
These are real, practical questions that deserve answers that only rigorous research can provide. It’s scandalous that we spend billions every year on counterterrorism but barely spend any effort on evaluating whether what we’re doing works. The federal government is showing slightly more interest than it once did. “We’re lucky because there’s a criminologist in DHS who helps the partnership along a bit,” Lum tells me. But the scale of the efforts pales in comparison the efforts to build evidence on health, education, social welfare, or crime policy. That has to change.
This table comes courtesy of UC Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez and the Paris School of Economics’ Thomas Piketty, everyone’s favorite inequality-tracking researchers (thanks to Annie Lowrey for pointing out the paper). They’ve added preliminary 2012 numbers to their dataset on growth in Americans’ — and in particular rich Americans’ — incomes, which gives us three years of data (2010, 2011, 2012) during the recovery, in addition to the full 2007-2009 span of the Great Recession. That lets us compare what happened to incomes in the recovery to what happened in past recoveries, and what happened during the recession to what happened in past recessions.
Shockingly — shockingly — what they found is that while only 49 percent of the decline in incomes during the recession was born by the top 1 percent (whose income share fell to 18.1 percent due to the recession), 95 percent of income gains since the recovery started have gone to them. This is a big change from past recessions and recoveries. Only 65 percent of the expansion under George W. Bush, and 45 percent of that under Bill Clinton, went to the top 1 percent. The rich bore a greater share of the 2001 recession’s damage than of the Great Recession’s, and the differential between the amount lost in the recession and gained in the recovery was much smaller last decade.
“Overall, these results suggest that the Great Recession has only depressed top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s,” Piketty and Saez conclude. “Indeed, the top decile income share in 2012 is equal to 50.4%, the highest ever since 1917 when the series start.”
It’s important to note that the Piketty and Saez data focuses on money income before-tax/transfer income, and so doesn’t take into account non-income compensation (like pensions, health benefits, etc.) or the effects of tax and transfer programs. But it’s still a pretty bleak picture. You can’t eat your vision plan, after all.
There has been a lot of outcry and disappointment regarding Apple’s unveiling of the lower-cost iPhone 5c – largely because it’s cheaper, but not cheap.
In China, the iPhone 5c will retail for CNY4488 ($733) — more than twice the amount of local player Xiaomi’s recently-announced Mi-3 flagship phone which will go on sale for CNY1,999 ($327). The iPhone 5c is also only a tad cheaper than the iPhone 5s, which will sell for CNY5288 ($864) in China.
Furthermore, the iPhone 5c in China is significantly more than the $549 off-contract price in the US — though the Chinese price already includes tax, but that still represents a mark-up of 33 percent.
On Chinese Twitter-like microblogging platform Sina Weibo, a search for “Apple” shows that netizens are extremely displeased. Some criticize the iPhone 5c for being the most-expensive “cheap” smartphone ever, while others lash out at Apple’s lack of creativity. One particular netizen even compared the colors that Apple has released to Crocs. Yes, those ugly shoes.
iPhone 5c stands for Color, or Choice
Despite criticism from armchair pundits, Apple — as a company that has been in this industry for years — has clearly done its research (and then some) before setting the price of the iPhone 5c in China.
Yet, as a report by Counterpoint Research notes, Apple is opting out of entering the long-tailed but potentially lucrative mid- and low-end markets:
Our Market Outlook service estimates that sub-US$300 smartphone price bands will contribute to more than two-thirds of the smartphone volumes globally in 2013. This is the segment which Apple is bravely ignoring and will be almost absent for some time now.
It is therefore obvious that Apple is more concerned about margins and profitability than market share, and side-stepping mass appeal, which is another reason the iPhone 5c is still high-end.
Up till now, Apple has not revealed what the ‘c’ in iPhone 5c stands for — it seems pretty clear that it means ‘color’, but it also rather appropriately denotes greater ‘choice’.
Color is more than just a hue. It expresses a feeling. Makes a statement. Declares an allegiance. Color reveals your personality. iPhone 5c, in five anything-but-shy colors, does just that. It’s not just for lovers of color. It’s for the colorful.
This is because the iPhone 5c essentially gives consumers that: just another choice on top of Apple’s usual flagship devices that it releases every year, and in an array of colors — as it seeks to solve the problem of a lack of options among its handsets. Yes, that is the problem it is trying to address, instead of attempting to ramp up its sales figures in China by moving into the low-cost market.
Apple typically only launches a new flagship device every year, which means consumers get only one choice per year.
By releasing the iPhone 5c, Apple is simply doling out more options in the higher-end smartphone market and giving a reason to those who can afford an iPhone — but may be bored with the typical color choices — a reason to purchase its devices.
The iPhone 5c will come with a polycarbonate shell and the option of a green, white, blue, pink, or yellow “soft-feel” silicon rubber surround, but in terms of specs it matches up to the iPhone 5. This means there is essentially no reason for Apple to substantially lower the cost of its handsets — if it still insists on maintaining around the same level of quality.
Apple is content to stay in the high-end market
China’s mobile market — the world’s largest smartphone market — is one that is currently dominated by lower-priced Android smartphones. And Apple knows that.
It is almost certainly because of this that Apple is content to only occupy a spot in the premium market — instead of jostling with the huge bunch of international and local vendors vying for customers by cutting prices.
Furthermore, market share does not necessarily mean success — as in the case of Samsung, which has warned that growth in its mobile business will slow due to the onset of more competition, even despite many analyst firms pegging the Korean firm as consistently having the greatest market share in smartphones.
By insisting on keeping its smartphones priced above a certain level, Apple knows it appeals to those who care less about price and more about quality and exclusivity — just like how branded goods are highly sought after by the Chinese who can afford them.
Even though China Unicom and China Telecom have offered full subsidies for the iPhone in the past, they have done so for monthly plans that are financially beyond what most Chinese consumers can afford – and this is further proof of how the iPhone only caters to a certain target audience.
Market share matters less than profit
In its most recent fiscal quarter, Apple revealed that revenue in the Greater China region was down a surprising 43 percent sequentially and 14 percent year-on-year. CEO Tim Cook noted on an earnings call that Hong Kong had contributed to the drag, as sell-through in mainland China was up 5 percent year-on-year after accounting for inventory changes.
However, the profit figure for the region was not revealed — and this could be where Apple is scoring versus its competitors (instead of market share): by earning much more from each handset although it does not sell as many units.
For example, even though local vendor Xiaomi moved ahead of Apple based on smartphone shipments in Q2 2013, according to figures from Canalys, the Chinese company only recently turned profitable for the first time after releasing its first device in 2011.
As a mark of Apple’s confidence in the Chinese market, Cook has predicted that China will eventually become Apple’s largest market and have more than 25 retail stores. It currently operates eight stores in four cities on the mainland.
Furthermore, even the anger being expressed by Chinese netizens is probably a good sign for Apple — it shows that people in China still care, and want its products badly enough to be affected by the fact that their budgets will not allow for the iPhone 5c.
It’s important that Apple takes criticism of design more seriously than the anger expressed over its prices for the latest release of its iPhone 5c. As the company seeks to offer more choices for its flagship devices, it should insist on upkeeping a certain high-end image (if it wants to go that route), instead of cheapening the look of its handsets.
If you've been mourning the coming end of AMC's Breaking Bad, today's a good day: the network is moving forward with a spin-off series based around the adventures of Walter White's attorney, Saul Goodman. Deadline reports that the show is tentatively titled Better Call Saul, and will actually take place before the events of Breaking Bad.
Played by Bob Odenkirk, the character of Saul Goodman is a favorite of both fans and Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, and the idea for a spin-off has been floated for some time. AMC has now closed the licensing deal it needed with Breaking Bad producer Sony Pictures TV, and the show is expected to get a series order once deals are closed with Odenkirk, Gilligan, and Peter Gould, the writer-producer...
At today’s Apple press event where the company unveiled not one, but two iPhone variations, one of the newest pieces of technology that comes with it is Touch ID. The use of a fingerprint reader isn’t revolutionary, but as the rate in which smartphones are being stolen and to better protect user data, having this feature is a big deal. In a way, it’s also ushering in biometric technology adoption into the mainstream.
Authenticating through the use of fingerprints has been integrated in various government agencies and security organizations for quite some time. It’s even a part of some laptops where users need only tap their thumb or finger on the device and instantly be logged in. However, it hasn’t quite become widely adopted by the average consumer and you don’t see it when you’re going to the grocery store, at the ballpark, in a restaurant, or in most popular places (there are exceptions, like financial institutions).
Apple’s Touch ID uses a laser-cut sapphire crystal and, combined with a touch sensor, will take high-resolution images of your fingerprints to determine if you can have access or not. The company claims that the information is encrypted and won’t be sent to anyone, including the NSA or even developers, as the latter will not have access to the technology initially. Nothing will also be stored on Apple’s servers nor on iCloud.
But as the company nears its 700 millionth device with iOS installed, the company may recognize that these are personal computers that people are enjoying and will want to keep it around for a while, in addition to storing massive amounts of potentially personal data. As people are doing more business through mobile apps, such as banking, managing company documents, photos, access to email, Twitter, Facebook, and what may be confidential or sensitive information, having biometric technology on the iPhone 5s offers something a bit more secure.
Personally, having Touch ID would be great because I’ll feel safer in case my phone gets stolen while riding public transportation in San Francisco — who knows if someone was watching me enter my PIN code. Having to repeat that exercise frequently may potentially expose a vulnerability, but requiring a fingerprint scan ensures that when locked, no one except for the owner can gain entry.
There’s no doubt that Apple has decided to split its product line so that the iPhone appeals to most consumers — the iPhone 5c is for those who are price-adverse while the iPhone 5s is more for those who want to dabble in luxury. The enhanced security fits the needs of these individuals and will offer that extra piece of mind when they’re snapping photographs, sending tweets, composing emails, or anything else in the public eye.
Apple’s integration of biometric technology will certainly expose more people to the concept and better prepare them for the future of authentication and security. It’s been said that biometrics and fingerprint scanning are more secure than simply entering in your password — and there are those that have really bad passwords, whether it’s your birthday, social security number, first name, last name, etc.
But if what Apple is doing frightens you, then you might feel more assured by the fact that fingerprint authentication will only be used to access the device and approve purchases from iTunes, the App Store, or iBooks Store.
The Israeli Embassy's first post on BuzzFeed (screenshot)
Two weeks ago, Israel expanded its robust "public diplomacy" efforts, which include an active Twitter presence and a popular military Instagram, with a post written by its American embassy (@IsraelinUSA) on the redoubtable viral news and entertainment juggernaut BuzzFeed.
"Looking at the virality and success of the current post, we’ll be back," the Israeli embassy wrote. "Who knows, maybe with lists, cats or something related to Miley."
The image attempts to offer a point-by-point explanation of why the actions of neighboring Middle East countries and terrorist groups pose an imminent threat to Israel's territory. If you were to take the infographic at face value, you'd think Iran and Israel's Arab neighbors were on the brink of pummeling the U.S.-allied nation with a torrent of rockets and nukes.
Even the PR operatives who created the piece foresaw the criticism—that the map blurs the line between real dangers and a far-fetched, apocalyptic scenario—and hedged with the phrase "sort of terrifying." It seems to anticipate negative reactions, saying: "Some may say the map is alarmist, but it is our geopolitical reality."
The threat map that the Israeli embassy posted on BuzzFeed (Embassy of Israel)
The Israeli embassy told The Atlantic that its decision to join the BuzzFeed community was motivated by the site's extreme popularity and, much like the other users on the site, a desire to receive maximum exposure. "We want to be where the people are," Noam Katz, the Embassy of Israel's minister of public diplomacy, wrote in an emailed statement. "Buzzfeed, as a website, offers a platform friendly to virality, and we wanted to see where it could take us. So, we opened a community page and created a post. If the public goes to a new platform, or a new website, we will explore opportunities to engage with them there."
With the crisis in Syria unfolding, the embassy saw a perfect opportunity to insert "Israel's perspective" into the news conversation with the late-August post. "It may not be light, but it’s important," Katz wrote. "We hope people see our goal for the post: It’s because of these threats Israel is ever more committed to maintaining our existing peace agreements with Jordan and Egypt, and reaching an historic peace agreement with the Palestinians."
The government-issued, and BuzzFeed hosted, propaganda has received more than 3,000 likes on Facebook, more than 400 shares on Twitter, and has been viewed more than 23,000 times. If the content had just been posted to the embassy's own website instead, the results would have been nowhere near as dramatic. Israel said it will continue to create content on the network, and suggested that it may even offer something a bit more frivolous. "Looking at the virality and success of the current post, we’ll be back," Katz wrote. "Who knows, maybe with lists, cats or something related to Miley."
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Israel is not the only foreign government posting to the site; the embassy of the United Kingdom began writing there in mid-August. Its pop-culture dispatches, including "11 Stats That Prove British Music Rules," seem less at-odds with the objective reporting of BuzzFeed's formidable foreign-news team, which is led by Miriam Elder, a former correspondent for The Guardian in Moscow.
As users continue to join the "community" section of the site at a rapid pace, the site has faced questions over its hosting of advocacy content under the same banner as posts generated by everyday users. A week before Israel's post ran on the site, the news site was criticized after a leading anti-abortion group, Personhood USA, penned alisticle that claimed to itemize all the "offensive, appalling, and illegal things" Planned Parenthood has done.
When user-generated items appear on the front page of the site, they aren't clearly labeled like paid, sponsored content is. If a reader clicks on a link created by a third-party user, the link opens the story within the community section, and a small disclaimer at the bottom reads, "This post was written by a member of the BuzzFeed Community, where anyone can post awesome lists and creations." But that distinction could arguably go unnoticed by a reader not familiar with the site. The casual navigator might conclude these posts are written by staff rather than government publicists—especially if the reader followed a link through social media.
In comments on both the Personhood USA and Israel stories, it appears that some readers were confused:
"Since when does Buzzfeed act as a propaganda outlet for Israel?" one reader commented.
BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith didn't respond directly to questions about whether government-created content would be deemed appropriate for promotion to the front page of the site, or whether posts created by governments would be labelled differently than ones created by users going forward. But he seemed confident in his readers' ability to distinguish between the staff-created and government-created content. "Our community has been growing at a crazy rate for the last couple of months, and we are always working to make it both technically better and easier to use, to consume and to share," he wrote in an email. "And we are really excited about the new, growing platform. But we also trust our readers and increasingly sophisticated consumers generally to understand the different kinds of content on the web."
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According to four Middle Eastern policy experts consulted about Israel's post, the map doesn't reflect the most accurate regional analysis.
Former Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian affairs Richard W. Murphy, a one-time ambassador to Syria and Saudi Arabia, said that the depicted threats from neighboring Arab countries and Iran are not as pronounced as they are made out to be. "Government publicists often make comments about the threats in their neighborhood though I don't recall so sweeping and cartoonish a presentation in official versions of the dangers as depicted in the map," Murphy, who worked on the peace negotiations between Israel and the Arab world throughout the 1980s, wrote in an email to The Atlantic.
Murphy also believed readers would accept the post at face-value without glancing at the byline. "I may be wrong but I think most readers will view the map/article as reflecting reality and not worry whether the author is a journalist or a government publicist," he added.
Despite the ongoing crisis in Syria, Israel's post also draws somewhat undue attention to the Iranian nuclear threat (the bold text is the embassy's):
And, as attention in the Middle East jumps from one hotspot to another, the public is losing sight of the greatest threat to international peace and security: Iran’s military nuclear program. Iran is developing its breakout capacity by stockpiling large quantities of low enriched uranium, expanding its ability to swiftly enrich uranium, and advancing a parallel plutonium track.
According to regional expert and 36-year veteran of the Department of State Allen Keiswetter, this focus on the nuclear weapons program is misplaced, given Iran's support for the increasingly belligerent Asssad regime. "In my view the Iranian nuclear program for the moment has signs of some encouragement with the election of [President Hassan] Rouhani," he said in an email.
The other missing element in the embassy's analysis is the sophistication and prowess of its own military. David Mack, a former Middle East diplomat whose assignments included time in Jerusalem, Lebanon, Iraq and an ambassadorship in the United Arab Emirates, wrote:
Regarding the map, Israel has very strong military forces and is, in the view of most military authorities, capable of protecting itself against the very wide range of real and perceived military threats dramatically shown. In addition, it has a strong alliance with the United States that will provide essential support with regard to some of the other real or potential threats.
Roby Barrett, the president of defense and security consulting firm CCOMM Corporation, and a former Foreign Service Officer with expertise in the Middle East, agreed, writing that the country had the "ultimate military capability" to grapple with "any and all of the threats represented."
It's certainly within any PR team's rights to use media platforms that are available to it, but will other governments take notice of the ease with which the embassy posted an advocacy item on the site—the kind that journalism is designed to monitor, question, and undermine—and try producing partisan listicles of their own?
There's really nothing preventing the U.K. Embassy from publishing "12 Good Reasons We Forced The Guardian To Destroy Government Files," for example.
Even Palestine could opt to make a BuzzFeed account and begin publishing articles with an anti-Israel bent. But the Israeli embassy, for its part, hopes that type of content would be curtailed.
"As we look around the web, we see opponents of Israel posting hate speech," Katz wrote. "We hope the Buzzfeed community editors will maintain their terms of use and that a culture of conflict, vitriol, and incitement is avoided."
Google said today that it will develop software for edX, a nonprofit created by Harvard and MIT that solicits and distributes online courses for free. Open edX, as the effort is called, is a platform for creating courses that can be taken by anyone with internet access. The move builds on Google's release last year of Course Builder, its own open-source education tool. "This platform is helping to deliver on our goal of making education more accessible through technology, and enabling educators to easily teach at scale on top of cloud platform services," said Dan Clancy, Google's director of research in the announcement.
Google said it will take what it has learned from Course Builder and integrate it with Open edX, although the...
Caitlin Heller’s YouTube video documenting a living room twerk session-turned-inferno has racked up almost 10 million views over the past week, but it turns out to have all been a clever ruse. Tonight on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the host revealed that the entire thing, from the yoga pants to the crash of the glass coffee table, was orchestrated in advance. Oh, and Caitlin’s name is actually Daphne. It just goes to show, you can’t trust videos of people failing on the internet. Take a look at the original video and the Jimmy Kimmel segment below.
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Apple’s Touch ID uses a laser-cut sapphire crystal and, combined with a touch sensor, will take high-resolution images of your fingerprints to determine if you can have access or not. The company claims that the information is encrypted and won’t be sent to anyone, including the NSA or even developers, as the latter will not have access to the technology initially. Nothing will also be stored on Apple’s servers nor on iCloud.
