Claus.dahl

I love that POTUS has invited these scholars here and treating them like NCAA Champs!!!—
LeVar Burton (@levarburton) April 22, 2013

Some of the nation’s young brainiacs were honored today at the annual White House Science Fair. Every spring, the White House invites children to show off life-changing innovations that have mostly been constructed in MacGyver-like fashion from commercially available materials. Even though I cover this story every year, it’s hard not to be inspired by brilliant young kids motivated to tackle the world’s problems. “Let me just say in my official capacity as president, this stuff is really cool,” said President Obama.

We’ve rounded up three awesome and inspiring projects below:

1. A 3D-Printed, Mind-Controlled Prosthetic – 17-year-old Easton LaChappelle has created a mind-controlled prosthetic arm for the low price of $250, thanks to parts cheaply replicated from a 3D printer. In the Vine below, you can see the young lad using a commercial-grade, brain-wave-reading device, the Neurosky, to shake the robotic arm. LaChappelle explained to me that the prosthesis is controlled through a sophisticated system of blinks and thoughts. The Neurosky can measure different levels of concentration, as well as eye blinks. Two eye blinks, for instance, prime the arm for contraction, and the level of concentration controls the degree of contraction. The software is smart enough to learn a user’s daily patterns and make certain movements easier at specific times, such as eating lunch around noon.

2. Cancer Detection - Google Global Science Fair Winner, 17-year-old Brittany Wenger, found a low-cost way to radically increase early cancer detection. Wenger’s project utilizes a computer process modeled after the human brain, a neural network, to boost the accuracy of detecting cancer in skin samples to 99 percent, which could help doctors save lives through early treatment. The software lives in the cloud, so the more doctors feed data into it, the more accurate it gets.

“I came across artificial intelligence and was just enthralled. I went home the next day and bought a programming book and decided that was what I was going to teach myself to do,” she said. Since seventh-grade, this ambitious young scientist taught herself high-level artificial intelligence, mainly through the web and the help of available teachers.

3. Tactile sound – Eighth-grade Californian Jonah Kohn developed a tactile-sound device to help the hearing impaired enjoy music. Sound can actually travel through vibrations in the skin, which Kohn discovered when he decided to bite down on his electric guitar (remember what is was like to be young and experimental?). The discovery inspired Kohn to see if the same experience could aid the hearing impaired. “They were able to hum the melody of a song, even if they can’t hear it,” he told Bill Nye at the White House. Kohn said his project is related to a study that found a 93 percent increase in self-rated music quality of his hearing-impaired participants.

Many of the participants showed extraordinary fortitude and commitment to science. Sixteen-year-old Jack Andraka, who also developed a more accurate cancer-detection system, requested access to academic labs 99 times before he was granted permission. “I don’t know what you guys were doing in high school; that’s what Jack’s doing. Certainly better than I was doing in high school,” joked the president.

Obama also announced a new technology industry mentoring initiative with AmeriCorps, the U.S. 2020, where companies, such as Cisco, pledge that 20 percent of the workforce will spend at least 20 hours mentoring or teaching by the year 2020.

It’s been a crazy and disheartening week in the news. It’s good to be reminded that for as many setbacks as we face, the next generation is striving to make the world an even better place.

[Image: White House]

1. Information Security Breaches 2013 Report (UK Gov) — over 80% of small UK firms reported a breach, and over 90% of large. (via The Register)
2. Google Glass Forbids Resales (Wired) — leaving aside the braying naysayers with their “GLASS WILL DESTROY THE SOCIAL FABRIC AND OUR ESSENTIAL HUMANITY”, there’s a valid point about software being used to control what users do with their devices. Given that this run of Glass is limited edition and they’ve hand-picked to whom they go and for what reason, Ed from Philadelphia is both greedy and naive if he believes Google’s letting him buy a pair to resell on eBay.
3. Locked Stacks — As the British Library makes a glacially paced transition from being an analog behemoth to being a digitized one, an opportunity arises to lower the institution’s ivory tower-like walls and to create extensive access to its impressive catalog. The only problems, of course, are a lack of money and the currently insurmountable problem of UK copyright law.
4. Young Community Entrepreneurs Rebuilding Detroit (Fast Company) — from information-sharing real estate ventures to transportation startups and doomsday clocks to see how close the city is to bankruptcy, it’s a crazy world out there. Should be easy for them: Detroit comes pre-disrupted.

real-time collaborative game-making, looks outstanding [via] 

Posted 24 hours after Cooper Union’s announcement that they are ending a 150+ year tradition of free tuition, Felix Salmon, Reuters: It’s time to air Cooper Union’s dirty laundry

Felix points to “the official statement from Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees, saying that the college is going to stop being free very soon: beginning, in fact with the students entering in September 2014. The statement is curiously upbeat, for a decision which essentially marks the death of Cooper Union as we know it.”

[…]

“Over the past 40 years or so […] Cooper Union has been living beyond its means, financing structural deficits by periodically selling off various bits of land that it owned inside and outside New York City. That’s clearly an unsustainable strategy, and it finally came to an end when Cooper Union sold off the last sellable plot it had — the old engineering building at 51 Astor Place, which is now becoming a big ugly office block. The proceeds from that sale failed to remotely cover the costs of building the fancy New Academic Building at 41 Cooper Square — a building which the NYT’s architecture critic, Nicolai Ourourssoff, declared upon its opening to be an icon of the “self-indulgent” “Age of Excess”.

But here’s the most astonishing thing, at least to me: no one seems to care how this happened, no one has been held responsible, no one has been blamed. The current trustees talk vaguely about how they “share your sense of the loss” of free tuition, but they don’t apologize for their decision, and not one of them, as far as I can tell, has resigned in protest or shame.

Make no mistake: Cooper Union suffered a massive failure of governorship, and its trustees have abandoned the principle which underpinned the entire institution. A trustee is someone who governs for the benefit of others — and Cooper Unions trustees have failed, spectacularly, in their first and highest role, which was to preserve Peter Cooper’s tuition-free institution.

And after failing so miserably at their own jobs, the trustees then had the nerve to announce, right in the middle of dropping their bombshell, that they expected the current students of Cooper Union to give more to the institution! Never mind that Cooper Union will never be the same again, and that the whole reason why it is so beloved has now been jettisoned. Start donating today, and maybe future students might be able to save a few hundred bucks on their future tuition bills. Or maybe the president will just get a raise to $1 million a year. Who knows: the trustees seem to be capable of anything.”

—

Oh, and apropos, as of two days ago — when they made the announcement in a sealed room — I announced that I’m running for the position of the Alumni Trustee. I hate that idea, but I hate doing nothing slightly more.

It’s time to air Cooper Union’s dirty laundry, as Felix put it, and it’s also maybe time to update the wardrobe. 

It’s in deeper context here.

Last summer, New York-based hybrid investor / incubator / holding company thing Betaworks acquired social news site Digg and relaunched it soon after, hoping to bring back some of its mojo in the process. Nine months later, Betaworks has acquired another news-oriented application, this time bringing Marco Arment’s popular story-saving app Instapaper into the fold.

In an email, Betaworks founder and CEO John Borthwick remarked that the acquisition clarifies Betaworks’ role as a company that builds and operates multiple products, rather than just as an incubation space for new ideas which eventually got spun out. And, more importantly, with Instapaper’s purchase model, it makes Betaworks into a company that actually makes money.

“Starting 14 months ago I began to move Betaworks into being an operating company,” Borthwick wrote. “In our first three years we were a factory for building companies, we built them and spun them out, hired CEO’s and got other people to fund them. 14 months ago I paid our investors all their money back and started making the shift to operating company.”

As part of the transition, Betaworks has been building around the social reading an discovery space. With the acquisition of Instapaper, Betaworks is adding even more tools for saving — and sharing — news that is important to readers. Borthwick wrote that Instapaper will be a “perfect fit” with Digg and its forthcoming Digg Reader, which is being positioned as a sort of Google Reader replacement.

In a blog post, meanwhile, Instapaper founder Marco Arment said that he was passing on responsibility to Betaworks so that he could “try other apps and creative projects.” In looking for a new home, he wanted Instapaper to find a place where it could be fully staffed and grown.

With that in mind, the deal was structured to ensure the health and longevity of Instapaper, “with incentives to keep it going well into the future.” Arment said he will “continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operation, expand its staff, and develops it further.”

Digg, for its part, seems to have benefitted from the change in ownership: It’s reportedly grown 93 percent over the last 12 months, since being relaunched under Betaworks management. Adding Instapaper to its existing roster of social reading and discovery products could help to advance its aim of capturing that market.

Borthwick will be with us at Disrupt NY 2013 next week, and will no doubt have a lot to say about the acquisition and the future direction of Betaworks. Buy tickets here!

New media incubator and venture firm Betaworks has acquired a majority stake in Marco Arment’s read-it-later platform Instapaper, the companies announced Thursday evening. Other Betaworks companies and projects include bit.ly, Chartbeat and Done Not Done. The firm acquired Digg for a reported $500,000 last year.

Unlike Digg at the time it was acquired, however, Instapaper has a business model: It’s a paid product. The iPhone and iPad apps are $3.99, and the Android app is $2.99. Users can also install a bookmarklet to save articles.

On his blog, Arment wrote of the acquisition, “We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.” He said he has been looking for an opportunity to “try other apps and creative projects.”

Betaworks’ acquisition of Instapaper fits with the firm’s strategy of investing in both short and long-form content. Betaworks CEO John Borthwick said at the paidContent conference last week that companies shouldn’t favor one over the other: They need to invest in both. Digg is planning to launch a Google Reader replacement, and Instapaper’s technology could possibly be put to work on that project.

Here’s a video of Borthwick talking to Om Malik at paidContent Live:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in mobile
• The 2013 task management tools market

“I saw Bill Gurley say that you can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong. His logic was that you can’t make money by being wrong. And you can’t make money by being right about something everyone else knows. So you have to be right about something that most people think is wrong.”

- A VC: Return and Ridicule

3D printing service Shapeways has raised a $30 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Current investors including Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, and Lux Capital also chipped in. Chris Dixon, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is joining the Shapeways Board.

The company plans to grow their team and add more factories to allow for more local production of products. “We’ve come a long way with Shapeways,” said co-founder and CEO Peter Weijmarshausen. “We’ve made 3D printing and production really accessible. We’re making 3D printing more relevant to people.”

The company currently hosts 10,000 “shops” where 3D designers can sell physical objects that are printed on demand by Shapeways machines. The service stores 1 million products and 60,000 new designs are added monthly.

Dixon sees Shapeways as the vanguard of a new industry.

“In particular 3D printing is at a point where it’s been used for a long time and at the hobbyist level,” he said. “We’re making kind of a bet now that it’s ready to go more mainstream.”

When asked whether they would even invest in a home 3D printer company, Dixon demurred but was still optimistic. “Maybe some day they’ll come down in price. There is value in both the printer model and the service model,” he said.

“The Internet has made it easy for a software engineer to become a software entrepreneur,” said Weijmarshausen. “Now we do the same thing for designers. 3D printing is on its way to change the way we think about products.”

Dixon himself is a big fan of the service.

“I printed out the Inception totem. It’s in my office,” he said. He did not report if it toppled upon spinning.

• Internet of Dreams – Internet of Dreams
  "That is how the internet first appeared to me: as shared experience of make believe and dreams. And while much has changed in the decade since: that slipperiness, those mutable boundaries, the capacity for experimentation and imagination still is here. The internet is made of dreams."
  (tags: joannemcneil internet culture society )

Beyonce, Bieber and… The Young Turks? Cenk Uygur’s liberal online video network is set to become the first news outlet to score a billion views on YouTube this week. For Uygur, that’s proof that online video isn’t just a novelty anymore, but a primary source of information for a whole generation. “They grew up on YouTube. That is their TV,” he told me during an interview last week.

Uygur has been doing political commentary online since 2005, but also brought his brand to traditional media, appearing first on MSNBC and then Current. Asked about the secret for hitting a billion views, he told me it’s partially because other media organizations have long underestimated YouTube and online video in general. “We have been really lucky that this field has been left alone to us for so long,” he said.

The Young Turks were one of the news organizations tapped by Google for YouTube’s original content push, which included sizeable advances to bring more professionally produced content to the site. Traditional news organizations like Reuters struggled to find an audience for content funded by these kinds of advances on the site, but Uygur told me that the collaboration with YouTube was a full success for his company. “We were the first channel to get refunded,” he said.

In the coming months, he plans to continue that growth story by adding additional shows, but he also hinted at further TV collaborations, including production work for TV networks and additional platforms for his existing shows.

So what’s Uygur’s advice for news organizations that have a hard time with online video? “There is one trick: It’s to be authentic,” he told me. Having an authentic voice is the only way to speak to a generation that has grown up with YouTube, he argued, adding: “To them, TV now equals fake. And online equals real.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
• The state of cross-platform media measurement

Demand for international bandwidth grew 39 percent last year, and at a compounded annual rate of 53 percent between 2007 and 2012, according to Telegeography. The interesting bit here is that the growth is coming not just from developed regions, but all regions of the world.

Cheaper mobile phones with access to the web are certainly a part of that demand growth in developing nations, while in more traditional technology markets, hotspots, larger applications and cloud computing are to blame. Whatever the reason for demand, carriers are responding accordingly, with new submarine cables connecting more countries than ever before.

Telegeography tracks bandwidth supply, pricing and data on submarine cables, and the latest data shows how carriers that range from traditional players like Level 3 and Tata to newer investors such as Google are connecting all areas of the world. The firm estimates all regions are getting about 10 to 12 new terabits per second of capacity each year. All in all in the last five years the world has gained 54 Tbps of new capacity.

This is great, because additional cables means more redundancy, so when accidents happen or cables get cut — as happened late last month off the coast of Egypt – traffic can route around the nicks in the system. That redundancy also allows new players into the market and can result in lower bandwidth costs, which is good for businesses buying bandwidth and indirectly for consumers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• From car to cloud: the future of the in-vehicle app landscape
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud

Last month, we posted a bit of a rumor: that Finland’s Supercell — likely the most lucrative iOS gaming company in the world — had raised about $100 million in funding in a round led by Index Ventures, Atomico Partners and Institutional Venture Partners.

Now we have confirmation today that the deal did happen, according to a flashy Forbes feature.

The tiny Helsinki-based company, which is about 100-people strong, did in fact raise $130 million on a $770 million valuation from Index, Atomico and IVP. Like we said, the round was secondary: all shareholders, including early investor Accel Partners, sold 16.7 percent of their holdings in the company to the newer investors. Index took $52.5 million of the round.

Not only that, Supercell shared some revenue figures, (and holy crap, are they bigger than I thought they would be). Last quarter, Supercell made $179 million and netted $104 million of that after expenses and Apple’s 30 percent cut. Last year, they grossed $100 million.

Today, they’re making $2.4 million a day — which is about double the rumor figures I had heard from numerous sources in the industry. They also have about 8.5 million daily active users, which is actually lower than comparable companies like King or Zynga.
So they monetize their existing players well.

Why share these numbers now? It’s likely because Finland has some unusual rules around financial disclosures for privately held companies. Even privately-backed companies have to share the the split of their equity holdings. Angry Birds-maker Rovio reported earnings a few weeks ago, saying they doubled revenue and made about $195 million last year.

Supercell’s CEO Ilkka Paananen said in the Forbes story that they took the funding to give early shareholders a payout, give a “thank you” to employees and avoid pressure to go public.

Finnish business magazine Talouselämä has more details on how the round was structured. Apparently, all shareholders, including employees, were given the choice to sell 16.7 percent of the holdings, and all did. It’s equitable of them, in the sense that it wasn’t just executives that got to take cash off the table.

Clearly, Supercell didn’t need the capital. But $770 million is a steep bar to clear and they’ll now have pressure to prove that they’re worth several times that.

As for Index, which is effectively betting that Supercell will become a multi-billion dollar gaming company, one of their partners, Neil Rimer, posted an explanation of the deal earlier today. They were enamored of Supercell’s culture:

The founders had witnessed the downfall of too many companies that had turned into bloated, bureaucratic behemoths with many design studios in multiple time zones requiring massive management overhead and crushing hierarchies and to coordinate.

As its name implies, Supercell is organized as a collection of small, independent teams called cells tasked with developing new games or building new deep features for existing games. Cells are given complete autonomy in terms of how they organize themselves, prioritize ideas, distribute work and determine what they ultimately produce. Describing himself as the “world’s least powerful CEO”, Ilkka encourages cells to exercise extreme independence and prides himself on having no creative control over them once they are constituted. The company as a whole is merely an aggregation of these cells; a Supercell.

With only 100 employees compared to 3000 at Zynga and almost 10,000 at EA, Supercell offers a radically new model for agile content development that has made it the highest grossing iOS game developer with only 2 game titles (versus EA’s 970).

these are the amazing times we live in, wherein Anonymous pursues Rehtaeh Parsons’ rapists, and 4chan goes after suspects in the Boston Marathon bombs.

laughingsquid:

4chan’s analysis of photos from the Boston Marathon bombings

Here's a list of business ideas that seemed outlandish, ridiculous, and even downright stupid. See if you can match some of them to the billion dollar businesses they became before you click through.

Airlines are cool. Let's start one. How hard could it be? We'll differentiate with a funny safety video and by not being a**holes.

It will be ugly. It will be free. Except for the hookers.

We are building the world's 20th search engine at a time when most of the others have been abandoned as being commoditized money losers.

Give us all of your bank, brokerage, and credit card information. We'll give it back to you with nice fonts. To make you feel richer, we'll make them green.

It is like email, SMS, or RSS. Except it does a lot less.

The world needs yet another Myspace or Friendster except several years late. We'll only open it up to a few thousand overworked, anti-social, Ivy Leaguers. Everyone else will then join since Harvard students are so cool.

Tags: business   lists

“Want to make people run? Don’t give them a badge for running. Give them a ball and shove four sticks in the ground. They’ll run around the field chasing the ball (and each other) for ages. The experience is intrinsically challenging and amusing, and the running is a by-product. Games rely on dynamics like these and rules to generate the conditions for positive engagement.”

- Kill it With Fire: why Gamification sucks and Game Dynamics rule | Philip Trippenbach (via timoni)THIS (via ronenreblogs)

The death of journalism and fact-checking has long been the mantra of the major media in response to so-called internet journalism (which should just be called journalism, by the way). This, despite the fails of major media and the wins by journalistic websites, reveals a sort of paternal arrogance on the part of the still-major players in traditional reporting. It's always interesting when the roles are massively reversed, which was on full display in the Boston Marathon bombing aftermath.

Deadspin notes, with a hysterically cut up video montage, the full failure of major media reporting on possible suspects in the aftermath.

We thought we'd condense today's mess of media reporting into something easily consumable for the crowd that may have been working and thus wasn't privy to the disaster taking place on television airwaves. Here, then, are your trusted news sources reporting, misreporting, backtracking, and scapegoating their way through the day.

You have to see the video for yourself, which I frustratingly can't seem to find an embed for, to have the magnitude of mistakes and misreporting fully hit home. In a matter of hours, major news sources reported that a suspect was about to be arrested, had been arrested, was of brown-skin, white-skin, was taken by U.S. Marshals, then wasn't arrested, then was re-arrested and was on his way to the courthouse, was then again un-arrested, culminating with the reporting that no suspect was even known by name, let alone arrested. In fact, there are times when the supposed fact-checking media can go even further and splash the pictures of people they claim are suspects on their front page, who definitely are not, for no apparent reason beyond that which seems to be they are brown-skinned. It's enough to take one's breath away.

Now, it should be noted that this isn't to suggest that news sources on the internet aren't capable of misreporting as well. Media, in general, is subject to a drive to draw attention by having the latest information, which often results in a rush to report what hasn't been verified. But that is a characteristic of media, not traditional media or internet media. Just media. On the other hand, if you want the most extensive available investigation into the matter, your best choice isn't the television or the papers, but Reddit, which has organized their own crowd-sourced investigation. That's the power of the internet.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

(Phys.org) —Geneticists Richard Gordon of the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida and Alexei Sharov of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore ...
phys.org/news/2013-04-law-life-began-earth.html

Oh, just looking at photos taken a few miles away by police drones.

(via Twitter / MassStatePolice: Photos from State Police Air)

Public Safety and the Law:

[Editor’s Note: This turned a bit rambly and I’m definitely out of my zone talking about the law, so feel free to skip if you’re not up for a non-lawyers opinion on the law after reading two articles about it.]

Sorry, but I’ve got some time this morning and, like many of you I’m sure, I’m spending it reading as much as I can about yesterday’s situation in Boston. If you were watching TV while the second suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was found or listening later during the press conference, the question of whether he would be/was read his Miranda rights came up. In the moments after the capture there was some confusion, which was eventually cleared up during the press conference when the US Attorney Carmen Ortiz confirmed that he had not been read his Miranda rights under the “public safety” exception. I, like most I’d imagine, had never heard of the public safety exception before yesterday (or spent much time thinking about Miranda rights, to be honest).

Slate had an excellent explanation of what happened and why it’s a dangerous precedent:

And so the FBI will surely ask 19-year-old Tsarnaev anything it sees fit. Not just what law enforcement needs to know to prevent a terrorist threat and keep the public safe but anything else it deemed related to “valuable and timely intelligence.” Couldn’t that be just about anything about Tsarnaev’s life, or his family, given that his alleged accomplice was his older brother (killed in a shootout with police)? There won’t be a public uproar. Whatever the FBI learns will be secret: We won’t know how far the interrogation went. And besides, no one is crying over the rights of the young man who is accused of killing innocent people, helping his brother set off bombs that were loaded to maim, and terrorizing Boston Thursday night and Friday. But the next time you read about an abusive interrogation, or a wrongful conviction that resulted from a false confession, think about why we have Miranda in the first place. It’s to stop law enforcement authorities from committing abuses. Because when they can make their own rules, sometime, somewhere, they inevitably will.

This is one of those things where I don’t know quite how to feel. The FBI has a pretty extensive article on the subject that shed some additional light (I know the FBI is probably not the most balanced outlet for this sort of stuff, but the article is a pretty good and comprehensible look at the history of the law and, also, the FBI is very incentivized to get this stuff right since if they don’t any questions could be thrown out). The public safety exception was apparently introduced in a case where the police were chasing a rapist who, the victim informed them, had a gun. When they cornered him in a grocery he had an empty holster and the police asked where the gun was. The man, Benjamin Quarles, told the police where he hid the gun and they retrieved it. The court excluded the gun because the police had not read Quarles his rights. The ruling was appealed and eventually reached the supreme court, who decided that in situations where public safety was endangered suspects could be questioned without being read their Miranda rights. (I’m not entirely sure why I’m summarizing all this and I’d suggest reading the whole article.)

Anyway, the more interesting case, also mentioned in the FBI piece, seems like a case where the police raided an apartment in Brooklyn where two suspected bombers lived. “During the raid, both men were shot and wounded as one of them grabbed the gun of a police officer and the other crawled toward a black bag believed to contain a bomb. When the officers looked inside the black bag, they saw pipe bombs and observed that a switch on one bomb was flipped.” From there, the police used the public safety exception to question one of the bombers who had not yet been read his rights:

Officers went to the hospital to question Abu Mezer about the bombs. They asked Abu Mezer “how many bombs there were, how many switches were on each bomb, which wires should be cut to disarm the bombs, and whether there were any timers.” Abu Mezer answered each question and also was asked whether he planned to kill himself in the explosion. He responded by saying, “Poof.”

This case seems, at least to me, to be much closer to the root of the question. I don’t really understand how a gun hidden in a supermarket presents a public safety concern since presumably the police could search the market for the gun after arresting the suspect. However, this latter situation, where there was a big bag of bombs, some of them ready to explode, seems like a pretty reasonable time to question someone prior to their rights being read.

What’s interesting about this, though, is the question isn’t really whether you can question someone before their rights are read, since it’s obviously possible (and likely a frequent occurrence). But rather, in what situations can those questions be used in court against the suspect. Here, again, I agree with Slate: If the questions they asked Tsarnaev were about whether he had planted more bombs around Boston, then that’s fair game, but as soon as they move outside that things start to feel a lot less right.

Interesting, the FBI article goes on to explain that Abu Mezer, from the bag of bombs, felt the same way and eventually tried to get his last statement, about whether he intended to kill himself, thrown out:

Abu Mezer sought to suppress each of his statements, but the trial court permitted them, ruling that they fell within the public safety exception. On appeal, Abu Mezer only challenged the admissibility of the last question, whether he intended to kill himself when detonating the bombs. He claimed the question was unrelated to public safety. The circuit court disagreed and noted “Abu Mezer’s vision as to whether or not he would survive his attempt to detonate the bomb had the potential for shedding light on the bomb’s stability.”

Here, without reading the full decision or being a lawyer or knowing anything else about the case, I think I disagree with the court. Seems pretty thin to suggest that the police were given valuable information about the “stability” of the bomb by asking whether he intended to kill himself.

.. via NoahBrier.com: http://bit.ly/14F3zka ..

This morning, I woke to the news that Archive Team is working to save Upcoming. This is the Internet equivalent of hearing that Marsellus Wallace is sending The Wolf.

For those unfamiliar, Archive Team is a band of rogue archivists and programmers working to rescue dead and dying websites from destruction. To put it mildly, they are very good at what they do.

Led by computer historian/documentary filmmaker Jason Scott, they've saved massive sites like GeoCities, Friendster, MobileMe, Fortune City and many others from deletion, and collaborate with the Internet Archive to inject their backups into the Wayback Machine for permanent preservation.

The importance of their work can't be overstated. While companies like Yahoo work to destroy as much Internet history as possible, Archive Team is the only group actively trying to save it.

To assist their efforts, they've developed ArchiveTeam Warrior, a virtual appliance that makes it easy for anyone to help archive dying websites and upload the backups to their server.

Want to help? Install Warrior right now.

It's dead simple to get up and running, and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. And because it all runs in a virtual machine, it can't possibly hurt your system. It will only use your bandwidth and disk space.

After it's installed, you can choose the "Upcoming" project to start backing up Upcoming.org specifically, or pick "ArchiveTeam's Choice" to let the team decide. Posterous and Formspring are also dying soon, and that will allow the team to prioritize your work.

I made a little video showing how easy it is to start saving Internet history.

You can track the status of the Upcoming archiving effort in real-time, currently at around 6% of the complete site.

And again, thanks to all the dedicated volunteers of Archive Team for their effort.

Update (April 23): Three days later, the Upcoming archive is complete. Every event, venue, group, and user page is currently being compressed and uploaded in batches to the Internet Archive. Truly amazing.

My next step: to parse the HTML and extract structured data, distributed that database, and build something off it to make the community-contributed material accessible after Yahoo shuts it down.

 

neurosciencestuff:

The motivation to move: Study finds rats calculate ‘average’ of reward across several tests

Suppose you had $1,000 to invest in the stock market. How would you decide to pick one stock over another? Scientists have made great progress in understanding the neuroscience behind how people choose between similar options.

But what happens when neither choice is right?

During an economic downturn, for instance, your best option might be not to invest at all, but to wait for market conditions to improve.

Using an unusual decision-making study, Harvard researchers exploring the question of motivation found that rats will perform a task faster or slower depending on the size of the benefit they receive, suggesting that they maintain a long-term estimate of whether it’s worth it to them to invest energy in a task.

As described in an April 14 paper in Nature Neuroscience, a research team led by Naoshige Uchida, associate professor of molecular and cellular biology, found that rats averaged how much benefit they received over as many as five trials. When their brains were impaired in one region, however, the rats based their actions solely on the prior trial.

“This is a new framework to think about decision-making,” Uchida said. “There have been many studies that focused on action selection or choices, but the question of the overall pace or rate of performance has been largely ignored.”

To get at those decision-making questions, Uchida and his team designed the experiment.

In each trial, rats were presented with an apparatus that had three holes. Based on whether a sweet or sour odor was delivered through the middle hole, rats went either left or right to receive a water reward. On one side they received a large reward; the other side delivered a smaller reward.

“What we measured was, after getting the reward, how quickly they went back to initiate the next trial,” Uchida said.

What researchers found, Uchida said, was surprising. When rats received, on average, a larger reward, they were more likely to quickly initiate the next trial, which suggested that they weren’t reacting merely to the prior result, but were “averaging the size of the reward from several previous trials.”

“They essentially calculate the average over the previous five or six trials, and adjust their performance accordingly,” Uchida said. “They’re making a calculation to determine whether they’re getting something out of the task or not. If it’s worth it for them, they go faster. If not, they go slower.”

When researchers impaired part of the striatum, a brain structure that is part of the basal ganglia and is thought to be involved with associative thinking, in the rats’ brains, however, that calculation changed. Rather than considering the average of multiple trials, the rats chose whether to go slower or faster based solely on the prior result.

“They still go faster or slower depending on the size of the reward, but they base that decision only on the size of the reward they just got,” Uchida said. “So the rat becomes very myopic. They only care about what just happened, and they don’t take other trials into account.”

In addition to shedding new light on how decision-making happens, the study may also offer some hope for people suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

“This part of the striatum receives a great deal of inputs from dopamine neurons, so it may be related to Parkinson’s disease,” Uchida said. “Some people now think Parkinson’s may actually be related to the motivation, or ‘vigor’ to perform some movement. So if we can identify brain regions that are involved in the regulation of general motivation, it’s possible that it could be contributing to the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.”

Going forward, Uchida said, he hopes to study the role dopamine plays in regulating motivation and decision making, as well as working to understand what role other areas of the striatum might play in the process.

“There are some interesting similarities between this part of the striatum in rats and in humans,” he said. “One is that this area receives very heavy inputs from the prefrontal cortex. That’s an area that may be important in integrating information over a longer period of time. Deconstructing this process is a critical step to understanding our behavior, and this could go a long way toward that.”

A few days ago, in an interview to promote his (genuinely excellent) co-written study/manifesto on “Post-Industrial Journalism“, Clay Shirky had this to say about me, and NSFWCORP…

“You get a lot of people saying that their model is the best and that everyone else has got it wrong. Or they are unwilling to admit what exactly their business model is. Take Paul Carr – I disagree with much of the content of his work, but he’s just a brilliant writer: He never says that nsfwcorp is bankrolled by Tony Hsieh. He doesn’t go out and say, ‘my organization works because a millionaire thinks I’m great and other newspapers cannot necessarily replicate that.’”

I can’t tell you how grateful I am to Clay Shirky for saying those words. Not just the kind ones about my writing (although, in point of fact, Clay, I’m not just a brilliant writer. I also cook a mean beef stroganoff) — but also for setting my mind at ease, apropos the Future of Journalism (With Jokes).

To think, for the past few months, I’ve lived the constant near-panic of a start-up founder: obsessing over cash flow spreadsheets (which I update sometimes a dozen times a day), tweaking and re-tweaking freelance budgets, agonizing over healthcare options and waking in the middle of the night from nightmares of having to close down the entire company because of some miscalculation I’ve made during commissioning or hiring.

And all for nothing! Because everything is totally fine. Thanks to our millionaire benefactor, Scrooge McHsieh (John D Hsiehafeller? Bill McHsiehates?), I can rip up those cashflow forecasts, tear down our paywall and pour the team another pint of Krug 1928. Happy days are here the fuck again.

Careful readers will have detected my sarcasm in the lines above. I wonder, though, if my anger and frustration are coming through clearly enough?

In just a few smug words, Clay Shirky, one of our most respected media commentators, dismisses the entire business model of NSFWCORP — our paywall, our print edition, our ebooks, Conflict Tower — as a gimmick, a fig leaf to distract from the comfortable reality: that NSFWCORP is nothing more than a rich man’s plaything. We’re not the future of anything, we’ve solved nothing. At best, we’re lucky; at worst, frauds.

That’s just the kind of cuttin’-through-the-bullshit tellin’-it-like-it-is statement for which Shirky is famous, and for which institutions like Columbia and NYU keep cutting him checks. And, by happy coincidence, it allows Shirky to neatly slot NSFWCORP into the broader premise of his report: that no-one has yet figured out a viable business model for journalism in the Internet era. But maybe — just maybe — if we follow Clay Shirky’s advice then one day we might. (There’s actually a name for institutions — media pundits, say — trying to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. It’s called the Shirky Principle.)

Few people are better informed on the collision of media and technology as Clay Shirky, even if he is a little obsessed with the idea that EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED. Likewise, he’s absolutely entitled to have his doubts about the viability of NSFWCORP. God knows, I share many of them (more on that in a moment). But there’s just one problem with his demand that I acknowledge his description of our financial position.

It isn’t true.

In fact, it’s embarrassingly, infuriatingly, dangerously wrong.

Shirky says I should be honest about how NSFWCORP works, that I should “go out” and explain how the company is financed and what exactly our business model is. Well alrighty then….

NSFWCORP has raised a total of $640k from three investors, including Tony Hsieh’s Vegas Tech Fund (VTF), all of whom invested on exactly the same terms, as covertible debt. VTF is by far the largest investor, responsible for $600k of that total (the other $40k came from CrunchFund and Judith Clegg. It’s all disclosed here.) VTF’s $600k takes us right up to the maximum amount the fund invests in startups, and the fund’s partners have made absolutely clear: that’s it. Indeed, when I last saw Tony and asked for advice on future funding, his advice was that we shouldn’t raise any money if we can avoid it but if we did need to, he could introduce us to another possible investor. That’s it. There is no more money coming from Tony or Vegas Tech Fund. We are not “bankrolled” by anyone, except in the same way as any other company that has ever raised a seed round.

(Another important point, and I mean this as a positive thing: since we started publishing I have not once had a conversation with Tony about the content of NSFWCORP. In that regard, he is absolutely the perfect media investor.)

How am I doing so far, Clay? Honesty-wise?

Great! Let’s go on…

NSFWCORP was founded with two goals: 1) to create a brilliant news magazine (with jokes) and 2) to prove that it is still possible to build an innovative, independently profitable journalistic organisation: one that treats its journalists well, allowing them to produce great work which readers are willing (eager even) to pay for.

Journalistically, I think we’re doing pretty great. Earlier this week, the chancellor of Appalachian State resigned, just days after we published David Forbes’ exposé on how the university covers up rape and sexual assault by athletes. On Wednesday, NSFWCORP’s Yasha Levine broke the story of how California parents are being “empowered” by billionaires to destroy public education. Our first print edition featured Mark Ames’ first-hand account of being spied on by the ADL — the same issue in which we published the definitive list of the 100 people most culpable for misinforming the public in the run up the Iraq war.

How about innovation? Our entire publishing platform was built in-house, including our paywall that allows subscribers to “unlock” paid content for outside sharing. We’ve launched “Desknotes”, allowing subscribers to eavesdrop on our internal editorial discussions, and Conflict Tower to ensure transparency for everything we do. We’ve launched a nightly radio show and a monthly print edition. And that’s just the start: our product road map reaches from here to the moon.

Financially — well, I wish we had a millionaire benefactor. To put our funding in perspective, the total amount raised (converted to/from 2013 dollars) would barely cover the New York Times’ weekly payroll in 1916, or the cost of producing a single issue of Scanlan’s in 1970.

And yet… our entire business is perilously close to breaking even, thanks to the thousands of people who have signed up for monthly subscriptions ($3 for web / $7 for web and print) or our Conflict Towers membership program. (Conflict Towers “residents” can buy a virtual room for anywhere between $3 and $1500 to support our work. Residents get a lifetime subscription to web and print and a public profile on the site. Starting this summer, we’re hosting a series of Future Of… dinner parties for Conflict Tower residents and their guests, in cities across the US and internationally. Buy a damn room already.)

This month, even after paying good salaries to our reporters, paying the hilariously high travel costs required for serious reporting, finally setting up a healthcare plan for full-time staffers and expanding into print, our burn rate will drop to under $25k. Three months ago it was three times that high. We only need to sell 4000 more print subscriptions, or a dozen or so more floors in Conflict Tower, and we’ll break even.

That — that, Clay — is the honest truth about NSFWCORP’s business. We, like every other publication since the beginning of time, have raised a relatively modest amount of start-up capital, mostly from a fund in which Tony Hsieh is a partner. But what we’ve built with that start-up cash is a real, fiercely independent journalistic enterprise, delivering scoop after scoop (with jokes) for a growing audience across multiple platforms (while, by the way, solving the problem of porous paywalls, and proving that print isn’t dead).

So all of the above is why Clay Shirky’s comments make me feel like being sarcastic. Now here’s why they make me feel frustrated, and angry…

As founder and editor in chief, I am terrified, TERRIFIED of fucking this up. The closer we get to profitability, the more terrified I get. We are so close to pulling this off. So close to proving that it is possible to pay brilliant journalists a good salary (with full benefits) to do great work, in a profitable, sustainable way. And yet, with no immediate prospect of raising more money (I mean, what? Is now a good time to ask Mike Arrington for more cash?), I’m acutely aware that we’re going to take this right down to the wire.

All it takes is one unexpected expense — a rise in print costs, a story that goes over budget, or any one of a thousand other calamities that I failed to account for — and I’ll have to close the doors and lay off the best team of people I’ve ever worked with, all of whom risked their careers to help prove that great journalism has a profitable future.

It’ll only take a few thousand more subscribers for us to reach profitability, but it only needs a similar number to think “oh, NSFWCORP doesn’t need my support right now… they have their own pet millionaire” in order to doom us. With the stakes that high, Clay Shirky’s blithe, inaccurate claims could become the precise opposite of a self-fulfilling prophesy.

So, Clay, maybe next time you smack me and my business in the face with a velvet-wrapped two-by-four, you could at least pick up the phone first to check that we’re really as rich as you think we are.

Or better yet, buy a Conflict Tower room and you can ask me in person at one of our residents’ Dinner Parties. Appropriately enough, the first one is themed around The Future Of Journalism. I suspect we’ll have a lot to talk about.

[Illustration by Brad Jonas, NSFWCORP]

Paul Carr

Paul Carr is author of "The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations" and "Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore". He has written for a variety of publications, including The Guardian, and TechCrunch. He is the founder of NSFW Corporation.

På det seneste er begrebet “shitstorm” kommet i omløb blandt mennesker der beskæftiger sig professionelt med kommunikation og sociale medier. Er du en af dem, ved du hvad jeg taler om. En shitstorm er når mange brugere pludselig giver sig til at omtale en virksomhed eller en politiker negativt på netplatforme, hvor det de skriver er synligt for andre som også kan lade sig rive med. Nogle shitstorme virker velfortjente, hvis man kan holde hovedet koldt og analysere substansen, mens andre helt åbenlyst er en overdrevet og urimelig reaktion på en virksomhed eller politiker, som har gjort sit bedste og ganske enkelt bare fejlet.

Online shitstorme fungerer ikke alene. De er den del af et økosystem, hvor alene det forhold at mange mennesker foretager sig det samme på nettet, får journalister til at lugte blod og begynde at fortælle “historien”. Det kan være den om at Uffe Elbæk nu bliver trukket igennem sølet på Facebook eller at over 20.000 mennesker har “liket” en sur (og velskrevet) statusopdatering, der sviner Telenors produkter og kundeservice til. Når et hvilket som helst fænomen får likes nok, bliver det en nyhedshistorie. Hvis der findes et yderligere kriterium, har jeg endnu ikke opdaget det. Jovist – det er naturligvis en journalistisk gevinst, hvis der også er en vinkel af reel samfundsmæssig betydning. Men nødvendigt er det egentlig ikke.

Og når først journalisterne har fået færten, går det lynstærkt. Inden for en time har 20-30 af landets største websites omtalt og linket til det omtalte stykke indhold (som vi, for at blive i metaforen, passende kan kalde “lorten”). Og så begynder historien for alvor at tiltrække sig opmærksomhed. Og pressens arbejdsmænd og kvinder – som ved hjælp af en eller anden meget effektiv fortrængingsmekanisme, synes at kunne forblive blinde over for deres egen rolle i den slags fænomener – kan nu følge historien op med flere historier om dagens virale fænomen, som bare ingen ende vil tage.

Den perfekte shitstorm er nu en realitet.

Den koster de involverede virksomheder formuer og ministre deres embede. Men bare få dage efter er stormen blæst over og alle taler nu om noget andet. For eksempel om en fed koreaner som danser pudsigt. Og medierne genlyder nu af frydefuld undren over at den video virkelig kan få så mange views, når nu der kun er flere millioner journalister, der linker det dette spændende virale fænomen fra deres avisers websites. Ja, det er da også ganske mageløst. Hvem kan forklare dette uforklarlige virale fænomen. Nogen MÅ da fortælle historien. 

Imens samler ministeren sit liv og sin karriere op fra rendestenen og virksomheders ry er blevet sværtet, så de må bruge millioner på at relancere sig. Som f.eks. Telenor, der nu kalder det samme produkt de hele tiden har solgt for “nu”, på alle reklameflader du kan tænke dig. 

Måske der så dukker en avisartikel eller et indslag i Deadline op, som handler om disse vanvittige menneskemænger adfærd – eller man ringer til en internetpsykolog og spørger, hvad der dog får folk til den slags sindssyge ting. Og når det sker, er det fristende at se dette som en fejl ved systemet og begynde at tale om “den indre svinehund” og deltage i en ekspedition ud på brugerfladerne og ned i fokedybet, for at finde ud af hvad der dog kan få folk til at faile sådan.

Og det har jeg naturligvis også gjort. Jeg har talt om massepsykologi og om hvordan 3 ting typisk skal være til stede for at vække en shitstorm:

1. En magtfuld virksomhed, instans eller person
2. En helt konkret sag med et uskyldigt offer
3. En sjov, skarp og velskrevet tekst, der langer ud efter magten og forsvarer offeret

Prøv selv at skrive en statusopdatering på Facebook efter denne formel (hvis du altså kan skrive sjovt og skarpt) og du vil blive overrasket over resultatet. Ja hvis du efter tredje afsnit af denne blogpost fik en trang til at dele den, så er det samme mekanisme der gør sig gældende. “Så kan de medløbende journalister da bare lære det!!”

Men hvad nu hvis svinehunden er vores bedste vagthund?

Intet er nemmere end at stå på sideinjen og pege fingre af masserne, når de i misforstået retfærdighedssans går amok på en næsten sagesløs virksomhed eller offentlig, magtfuld person. Selve ordet “shitstorm” er jo et ret godt eksempel på den slags latterliggørelse. Men da jeg tidligere på året blev interviewet til en artikel i “Journalisten”, hørte jeg pludselig mig selvfremlægge et synspunkt, jeg ikke har kunnet slippe siden. Jeg begyndte nemlig at se disse “shitstorms”, som en negativ sideefekt af et langt større og helt uundværligt fænomen.

Vi har alle lagt store dele af vores liv og data i hænderne på store magtfulde virksomheder, som teknologisk og forretningsmæssigt er så langt forud for enhver lovgivning at vi er prisgivet deres hæderlighed og vilje til at varetage vores interesser. Og det eneste disse virksomheder er bange for, er at masserne skal gå amok på dem og skade deres aktiviteter eller ligefrem umuliggøre dem. Man kan altså se den lurende online pøbel, ikke som en svinehund, men som en vagthund, som holder de magtfulde i skak, når ingen andre gør det. Det er en vagthund der  levendegøres af dig, mig og pressen. Desværre er denne vagthund ikke særligt begavet. Den lever af uretfærdighed, likes og simple budskaber og kan finde på at kaste sig galpende ud af hundehuset, med savlen svingende fra gabet, og sætter tænderne i forbipasserende, bare den lugter noget der ligner en uretfærdighed.

Det er denne nærsynede og hyper-sensitive vagthund, der fik Palads Teatret til at gå ud og undskylde at de havde formastet sig til at skrive et opslag der omtalte det faktum at afslutningen af ramadanen ofte fejres med en bigraftur af unge muslimer, hvilket godt kan gå lidt heftigt for sig. Noget der i hvert fald i mine øjne var totalt urimeligt og overdrevet. Men det er også den vagthund der holder Facebook og Google i ave og er vores eneste værn imod markedets overmagt.

Som jeg blev citeret for at sige, i Journalistens artikel:

»Det kan godt være, at netbrugerne er som en doberman på 45 kopper kaffe, men det er den samme maskine, der gør, at store virksomheder tænker sig om mange gange, før de gør noget, de ikke skal. Så isoleret kan man sige, at overreaktionen virker dum og uproduktiv, men ser man hypersensitiviteten i en større sammenhæng, så vil jeg nødigt undvære den, for alternativet er værre.«

Reinvention and resilience are key to the success of any business. Look no further than the implosions of Borders Books, BlockBuster, Kodak, or any of dozens of other once seemingly impregnable or too-big-to-fail companies that have tanked in the past decade, to remind us that companies that fail to notice and adjust to change – and to see opportunities to innovate – are effectively digging their own graves.

So, amid today’s accelerating technological change and the resulting hyper-connectedness, how do we recognize when our own company is vulnerable – when we’re facing our own Kodak moment? I’ve pulled together  the seven major disruptive forces that have overturned and redefined the way business is done today.

The Google Effect: The separation of humans and information

The last time you Googled something, did you stop and think, “Hmmm, I wonder if these results came from a database in Oregon, Georgia or Virginia, or maybe from The Netherlands or Australia?” Of course not. Through the Google Effect, information and physical location in our personal lives have been fully virtualized and dematerialized.

So why in many organizations are the two (often very expensively) still forced to be co-located?

The Skype Effect: Free communications, death of distance

Remember yesteryear, when the physical distance of a long-distance phone call really mattered? When a call of 10 miles was significantly cheaper than a call of 1,000 miles, and an overseas call was a true luxury? Today, internet -based communication platforms have cost and usage bases that are completely disconnected to distance; speaking to someone around the world via the internet is the same as calling across the street.

So why mandate that employees travel to their knowledge work, when instead the work can go to employees?

The Facebook Effect: The virtualization of human relationships

Fundamental to Facebook’s immense popularity is that it allows you to maintain and enhance personal relationships even without regular physical presence.

The same intimacy is available to corporations, where working relationships based on capability and mutual trust no longer need to be physically proximate. So why stick to the high-maintenance, time-consuming and costly methods of the past?

The LinkedIn Effect: The virtualization of specialized knowledge

LinkedIn allows us to map our professional networks, and then to quickly locate trusted expertise. Why can’t organizations work in the same manner? The LinkedIn Effect provides a map of our personal networks; when brought to business, this capability enables the virtualization of expertise, allowing the right person to be brought to the right task at the right time.

The Amazon Effect: The virtualization of customer experience

Amazon knows you better than the manager at your corner store. Yet, when was the last time you met anybody from Amazon? This virtualization of customer intimacy is led by (but not the sole domain of)  new market leaders like Amazon, Netflix and Apple. Yet it is a viable option available to all organizations.

The Pandora Effect: Algorithms building customized products

“How did they know that?” If you’re a Pandora customer, you’ve probably asked that question. You provide Pandora with your favorite artist, or a few songs you like, and suddenly hours of music you truly enjoy is produced. It’s not magic; it’s Pandora’s algorithm at work.

This algorithm, finely honed by reviewing massive amounts of data, creates remarkably accurate musical taste profiles. In knowing just a few things about you – the first few dots if you will – the algorithm connects the rest of the dots to create customized play lists.

From such experiences, consumers are beginning to consider all their other business relationships: “If Pandora figured this out about me so quickly, why is my bank still so clueless? After going to the same ATM for 10 years, it still asks me what language I speak!”

iPhone Effect: The experience is more valuable than the physical product

Customer value is no longer confined to the physical manifestation of a product. Instead, it’s often found in the software. This was central to the recent transition in the mobile phone industry. Ten years ago mobile phone providers competed on hardware attributes – remember the famous Nokia ringtones, or the form factor of the Motorola flip-phone? That was the basis of competition.

Today, winning iPhone and Android models differentiate on the experience delivered chiefly by software. Most of the physical attributes of a mobile phone are now commodity. The experience has usurped the widget.

These seven effects are working together to alter the competitive fundamentals of many industries. With game changers like these, the cost of adhering to an industrial business model is significantly greater than moving to something new.

Malcolm Frank is Executive Vice President of Strategy and Marketing at Cognizant Technology Solutions, a global provider of IT, consulting and business process services based in Teaneck, N.J. 

Have an idea for a post you’d like to contribute to GigaOm? Click here for our guidelines and contact info.

Photo courtesy justin maresch/Shutterstock.com.

 

 

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

Blogging this midway through, to tell you this a great use of an hour of your time.

Even if you’ve never watched The Wire, even if you don’t care about newspapers, it’s an extraordinary talk.

In a moment that’s 100% what the what — here’s an hour about the why of the why.

David Simon: “The Audacity of Despair” (by UCBerkeleyEvents)

• Real As Hell: A Conversation With George Saunders | The Awl "In class I do this drawing of this big mountain, that I call Hemingway Mountain. And talk about how, early in my writing life, I just wanted to be up there near the top. And then I realized: Shit, even if I made it to the top, I'd still be a Hemingway Imitator. So then you trudge back down—and look, there's Kerouac Mountain! Hooray. And then it's rinse, lather, and repeat—until the day comes when you've completely burned yourself out on that, and you see this little dung heap with your name on it, and go: Oh, all right, I'll take that—better to be minor and myself. So that is painful. Especially at first. But it's also spiritual, in a sense—it's honest, you know. It’s a good thing to say: Let's look at the world as it is, as opposed to the way I'd like it to be. Let's see how the world seems to me—as opposed to the way it seems to me, filtered through the voice of Hemingway (or Faulkner, or Toni Morrison, or Bukowski—whoever)." This whole interview is great, but as a creator, I liked thinking about this. (tags: fiction georgesaunders writing authorship voice )

*These guys consistently surprise me with how on top of their game they are. You would think a thing like this would be silly pop-culture rubbish, yet it’s actually quite illuminating and even sorta pedagogical.

http://scifiinterfaces.com

“Q: Dario Fuentes asks: You seem to be completely ignoring video games and anime. Some of the best examples of interface both beautiful and innovative come from these spaces. Any reason why you left them out? [later] …not the game interface itself, the interfaces featured in cut scenes…as well as the game UI… (and what about anime…?)

“A: Well, writing a book about the life cycle of tigers doesn’t mean you’re ignoring bears, does it? Video game interfaces serve different masters for many reasons, not the least of which is that non-diegetic interfaces must be used by players where sci-fi interfaces are used by actors faking it. Cut scene, or diegetic video game interfaces might be includable, but they’re tied up in looking or feeling like the non-diegetic ones, and so can’t be considered in isolation. Sure, video games probably have a lot of influence for gamers’ expectations. I’m a gamer myself, and am inspired by some of the awesome interfaces I find there. I’d be happy to investigate and write that other book, that’s not what Make It So is about.”