The Secret Ingredients of Everything

by Tim Folger

From smart phones to hybrid vehicles to cordless power drills, devices we all desire are made with a pinch of rare earths—exotic elements that right now come mostly from China. 

Most of us would be hard-pressed to locate Inner Mongolia, Jiangxi, or Guangdong on a map. Yet many of the high-tech devices we depend on—cell phones, laptops, and hundreds of others—would not exist without an obscure group of elements mined, sometimes illegally, in those three and other regions of China.

Rare earths, as the elements are called, were discovered beginning in the late 18th century as oxidized minerals—hence "earths." They're actually metals, and they aren't really rare; they're just scattered. A handful of dirt from your backyard would probably contain a smidgen, maybe a few parts per million. The rarest rare earth is nearly 200 times more abundant than gold. But deposits large and concentrated enough to be worth mining are indeed rare.

The list of things that contain rare earths is almost endless. Magnets made with them are much more powerful than conventional magnets and weigh less; that's one reason so many electronic devices have gotten so small. Rare earths are also essential to a host of green machines, including hybrid cars and wind turbines. The battery in a single Toyota Prius contains more than 20 pounds of the rare earth element lanthanum; the magnet in a large wind turbine may contain 500 pounds or more of neodymium. The U.S. military needs rare earths for night-vision goggles, cruise missiles, and other weapons.

"They're all around you," says Karl Gschneidner, a senior metallurgist with the Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, who has studied rare earth elements for more than 50 years. "The phosphors in your TV—the red color comes from an element called europium. The catalytic converter on your exhaust system contains cerium and lanthanum. They're hidden unless you know about them, so most people never worried about them as long as they could keep buying them."

Now a lot of people are worried.

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The Duke In His Domain

By Truman Capote

November 9, 1957

Most Japanese girls giggle. The little maid on the fourth floor of the Miyako Hotel, in Kyoto, was no exception. Hilarity, and attempts to suppress it, pinked her cheeks (unlike the Chinese, the Japanese complexion more often than not has considerable color), shook her plump peony-and-pansy-kimonoed figure. There seemed to be no particular reason for this merriment; the Japanese giggle operates without apparent motivation. I'd merely asked to be directed toward a certain room. "You come see Marron?" she gasped, showing, like so many of her fellow-countrymen, an array of gold teeth. Then, with the tiny, pigeon-toed skating steps that the wearing of a kimono necessitates, she led me through a labyrinth of corridors, promising, "I knock you Marron." The "l" sound does not exist in Japanese, and by "Marron" the maid meant Marlon—Marlon Brando, the American actor, who was at that time in Kyoto doing location work for the Warner Brothers-William Goetz motion-picture version of James Michener's novel "Sayonara.”

My guide tapped at Brando's door, shrieked "Marron!," and fled away along the corridor, her kimono sleeves fluttering like the wings of a parakeet. The door was opened by another doll-delicate Miyako maid, who at once succumbed to her own fit of quaint hysteria. From an inner room, Brando called, "What is it, honey?" But the girl, her eyes squeezed shut with mirth and her fat little hands jammed into her mouth, like a bawling baby's, was incapable of reply. "Hey, honey, what is it?" Brando again inquired, and appeared in the doorway. "Oh, hi," he said when he saw me. "It's seven, huh?" We'd made a seven-o'clock date for dinner; I was nearly twenty minutes late. "Well, take off your shoes and come on in. I'm just finishing up here. And, hey, honey," he told the maid, "bring us some ice." Then, looking after the girl as she scurried off, he cocked his hands on his hips and, grinning, declared, "They kill me. They really kill me. The kids, too. Don't you think they're wonderful, don't you love them—Japanese kids?"

The Miyako, where about half of the "Sayonara" company was staying, is the most prominent of the so-called Western-style hotels in Kyoto; the majority of its rooms are furnished with sturdy, if commonplace and cumbersome, European chairs and tables, beds and couches. But, for the convenience of Japanese guests who prefer their own mode of décor while desiring the prestige of staying at the Miyako, or of those foreign travellers who yearn after authentic atmosphere yet are disinclined to endure the unheated rigors of a real Japanese inn, the Miyako maintains some suites decorated in the traditional manner, and it was in one of these that Brando had chosen to settle himself. His quarters consisted of two rooms, a bath, and a glassed-in sun porch. Without the overlying and underlying clutter of Brando's personal belongings, the rooms would have been textbook illustrations of the Japanese penchant for an ostentatious barrenness. The floors were covered with tawny tatami matting, with a discreet scattering of raw-silk pillows; a scroll depicting swimming golden carp hung in an alcove, and beneath it, on a stand, sat a vase filled with tall lilies and red leaves, arranged just so. The larger of the two rooms—the inner one—which the occupant was using as a sort of business office where he also dined and slept, contained a long, low lacquer table and a sleeping pallet. In these rooms, the divergent concepts of Japanese and Western decoration—the one seeking to impress by a lack of display, an absence of possession-exhibiting, the other intent on precisely the reverse—could both be observed, for Brando seemed unwilling to make use of the apartment's storage space, concealed behind sliding paper doors. All that he owned seemed to be out in the open. Shirts, ready for the laundry; socks, too; shoes and sweaters and jackets and hats and ties, flung around like the costume of a dismantled scarecrow. And cameras, a typewriter, a tape recorder, an electric heater that performed with stifling competence. Here, there, pieces of partly nibbled fruit; a box of the famous Japanese strawberries, each berry the size of an egg. And books, a deep-thought cascade, among which one saw Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" and various works on Buddhist prayer, Zen meditation, Yogi breathing, and Hindu mysticism, but no fiction, for Brando reads none. He has never, he professes, opened a novel since April 3, 1924, the day he was born, in Omaha, Nebraska. But while he may not care to read fiction, he does desire to write it, and the long lacquer table was loaded with overfilled ashtrays and piled pages of his most recent creative effort, which happens to be a film script entitled "A Burst of Vermilion.”

In fact, Brando had evidently been working on his story at the moment of my arrival. As I entered the room, a subdued-looking, youngish man, whom I shall call Murray, and who had previously been pointed out to me as "the fellow that's helping Marlon with his writing," was squatted on the matting fumbling through the manuscript of "A Burst of Vermilion." Weighing some pages on his hand, he said, "Tell ya, Mar, s'pose I go over this down in my room, and maybe we'll get together again—say, around ten-thirty?"

Brando scowled, as though unsympathetic to the idea of resuming their endeavors later in the evening. Having been slightly ill, as I learned later, he had spent the day in his room, and now seemed restive. "What's this?" he asked, pointing to a couple of oblong packages among the literary remains on the lacquer table.

Murray shrugged. The maid had delivered them; that was all he knew. "People are always sending Mar presents," he told me. "Lots of times we don't know who sent them. True, Mar?"

"Yeah," said Brando, beginning to rip open the gifts, which, like most Japanese packages—even mundane purchases from very ordinary shops—were beautifully wrapped. One contained candy, the other white rice cakes, which proved cement-hard, though they looked like puffs of cloud. There was no card in either package to identify the donor. "Every time you turn around, some Japanese is giving you a present. They're crazy about giving presents," Brando observed. Athletically crunching a rice cake, he passed the boxes to Murray and me.

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Code School

by James Somers

When Colin Hughes was about eleven years old his parents brought home a rather strange toy. It wasn't colorful or cartoonish; it didn't seem to have any lasers or wheels or flashing lights; the box it came in was decorated, not with the bust of a supervillain or gleaming protagonist, but bulleted text and a picture of a QWERTY keyboard. It called itself the "ORIC-1 Micro Computer." The package included two cassette tapes, a few cords and a 130-page programming manual.

On the whole it looked like a pretty crappy gift for a young boy. But his parents insisted he take it for a spin, not least because they had just bought the thing for more than £129. And so he did. And so, he says, "I was sucked into a hole from which I would never escape."

It's not hard to see why. Although this was 1983, and the ORIC-1 had about the same raw computing power as a modern alarm clock, there was something oddly compelling about it. When you turned it on all you saw was the word "Ready," and beneath that, a blinking cursor. It was an open invitation: type something, see what happens.

In less than an hour, the ORIC-1 manual took you from printing the word "hello" to writing short programs in BASIC -- the Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code -- that played digital music and drew wildly interesting pictures on the screen. Just when you got the urge to try something more complicated, the manual showed you how.

In a way, the ORIC-1 was so mesmerizing because it stripped computing down to its most basic form: you typed some instructions; it did something cool. This was the computer's essential magic laid bare. Somehow ten or twenty lines of code became shapes and sounds; somehow the machine breathed life into a block of text.

No wonder Colin got hooked. The ORIC-1 wasn't really a toy, but a toy maker. All it asked for was a special kind of blueprint.

Once he learned the language, it wasn't long before he was writing his own simple computer games, and, soon after, teaching himself trigonometry, calculus and Newtonian mechanics to make them better. He learned how to model gravity, friction and viscosity. He learned how to make intelligent enemies.

More than all that, though, he learned how to teach. Without quite knowing it, Colin had absorbed from his early days with the ORIC-1 and other such microcomputers a sense for how the right mix of accessibility and complexity, of constraints and open-endedness, could take a student from total ignorance to near mastery quicker than anyone -- including his own teachers -- thought possible.

It was a sense that would come in handy, years later, when he gave birth to Project Euler, a peculiar website that has trained tens of thousands of new programmers, and that is in its own modest way the emblem of a nascent revolution in education.

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Flacking for Big Pharma

by Harriet Washington

Drug Makers Cut Out Goodies for Doctors” and “Drugmakers Pulling Plug on Free Pens, Mugs & Pads” read headlines in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Health Blog at the end of 2008 after, in a very public act of contrition, 38 members of the pharmaceutical industry vowed to cease bestowing on prescribing physicians goodies such as pens, mugs, and other tchotchkes branded with their names. Some physicians and ethicists had long expressed concern about the “relationship of reciprocity” that even a pizza or cheap mug can establish between doctors and drugmakers, and branded trinkets also send a message to the patient, who might reason that Gardasil must be a good drug if her doctor wields a reflex hammer inscribed with its name. But while the popular press celebrated this sudden attack of nanoconscience and while we still gravely debate whether physicians’ loyalties can really be bought for a disposable pen or a free lunch, the $310 billion pharmaceutical industry quietly buys something far more influential: the contents of medical journals and, all too often, the trajectory of medical research itself.

How can this be? Flimsy plastic pens that scream the virtues of Vioxx and articles published in the pages of The New England Journal of Medicine would seem to mark the two poles of medical influence. Scarcely any doctor admits to being influenced by the former; every doctor boasts of being guided by the latter. In fact, medical-journal articles are widely embraced as irreproachable bastions of disinterested scientific evaluation and as antidotes to the long fiscal arm of pharmaceutical-industry influence.

And yet, “All journals are bought—or at least cleverly used—by the pharmaceutical industry,” says Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, who now sits on the board of Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit open-access group publishing scientific journals that eschew corporate financing and are freely available online to the public.

Big Pharma, as the top tier of the industry is known, starts modestly, inserting the thin edge of its wedge by advertising copiously—and often inaccurately—in medical journals. In 1981, concerned officials at the Food and Drug Administration recognized the educational nature of pharmaceutical advertising by establishing explicit standards for medical-journal ads that mandate “true statements relating to side effects, contraindications, and effectiveness,” and a “fair balance” of statements about medication risks and benefits.

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Where Prisoners Can Do Anything, Except Leave

by Simon Romero

PORLAMAR, Venezuela — On the outside, the San Antonio prison on Margarita Island looks like any other Venezuelan penitentiary. Soldiers in green fatigues stand at its gates. Sharpshooters squint from watchtowers. Guards cast menacing glances at visitors before searching them at the entrance.

The children of some inmates swim in one of the prison's four pools. Prisoners say they financed the amenities on their own.

A bodyguard for the prisoners' leader, in a photo provided by an inmate. “I've seen some guns in here that I've never seen before,” said one of the inmates.

But once inside, the prison for more than 2,000 Venezuelans and foreigners held largely for drug trafficking looks more like a Hugh Hefner-inspired fleshpot than a stockade for toughened smugglers.

Bikini-clad female visitors frolic under the Caribbean sun in an outdoor pool. Marijuana smoke flavors the air. Reggaetón booms from a club filled with grinding couples. Paintings of the Playboy logo adorn the pool hall. Inmates and their guests jostle to place bets at the prison’s raucous cockfighting arena.

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Chet Baker - Almost Blue

 

Thanks, GS.

The Glasswinged Butterfly

The Glasswinged butterfly (Greta oto) is a brush-footed butterfly, and is a member of the subfamily Danainae, tribe Ithomiini, subtribe Godyridina.  Its wings are translucent, with a wingspan of 2.2 to 2.4 in (5.6 to 6.1 cm).  Its most common English name is glasswinged butterfly, and its Spanish name is "espejitos", which means "little mirrors." Indeed, the tissue between the veins of its wings looks like glass, as it lacks the colored scales found in other butterflies.  The opaque borders of its wings are dark brown sometimes tinted with red or orange, and its body is dark in color.

Adults range from Mexico through Panama. G. morgane oto visits common flowers like lantana, but prefers to lay its eggs on plants of the tropical Solanaceae genus Cestrum.   The green caterpillars feed on these toxic plants and are perhaps toxic to predators through secondary chemicals stored in their tissues; caterpillar chemical extracts are unpalatable to Paraponera clavata ants. Adults are also assumed to be toxic, but their toxicity mainly results from males feeding on flowers (e.g., Asteraceae) whose nectar contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids. These same alkaloids also are converted into pheromones by the males and used to attract females.

The Greta oto may also be found in Venezuela, as there are photographs taken in the mountain area around the City of Caracas.

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The Need To Be Valued

by Tony Schwartz

Think for a moment of the last time you felt triggered — pushed into negative emotions by someone or something. Here, for example, are several of my triggers: feeling taken advantage of, not getting a response to an email I've sent to someone, and not being acknowledged for good work I've done.

We move into negative emotions — what we call the "Survival Zone" in our work at The Energy Project — when we feel a sense of threat or danger.

But what is the threat exactly? Over the past decade, my colleagues and I have asked thousands of our clients to describe something that consistently triggers them and then explain why.

Remarkably, we've found that a trigger can almost always be traced to the same root cause: the feeling of being devalued or diminished by someone else's words or behavior. Consider my triggers above.

The struggle to feel valued is one of the most insidious and least acknowledged issues in organizations. Most employees are expected to check their feelings at the door when they get to work. But try as we might, we can't.

How we're feeling — and most especially whether or not we feel acknowledged and appreciated — influences our behavior, consumes our energy and affects our decisions all day long, whether we're aware of it or not.

Our core emotional need is to feel valued. Without a stable sense of value, we don't know who we are and we don't feel safe in the world.

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Friday Book Club - Nobody's Fool

by Francine Prose

Years ago, when I felt that the world weighed too heavily on my shoulders and believed (as only the young do) that the world would not willingly let me go, I used to dream of disappearing to some remote upstate New York town and checking in, a permanent guest, at its crumbling bleak hotel. Such towns, which I imagined to be off the edge of the map, are very much at the center of Richard Russo's fictional geography. His ambitious new novel, "Nobody's Fool," is set in North Bath, N.Y., a fractionally less blighted version of the blue-collar dead end where his earlier novels, "Mohawk" and "The Risk Pool," take place.

North Bath is the sort of community we might drive through without pausing, except to fantasize roomier lives for ourselves in its "aging clapboard Victorians and sprawling Greek Revivals that would have been worth some money if they were across the border in Vermont." But Mr. Russo encourages us to stop and look around; he shows us that what seems static is churning, underneath. And one soon realizes that no sensible person would go to North Bath to disappear, since life there, as Balzac wrote of the provinces, is lived entirely in public.

Perhaps that's the reason that small towns, like seagoing vessels, have always suited fiction: manageable little pressure cookers with a fixed cast of characters, whose lack of privacy and enforced proximity may cause the plot to boil over. What's turned up the heat in North Bath is the possibility that a theme park, to be called the Ultimate Escape, may be built there, and may breathe some economic life into the moribund former spa. Once a thriving resort, the town has declined steadily since 1868, "when the unthinkable began to happen and the various mineral springs, one by one, without warning or apparent reason, began, like luck, to dry up, and with them the town's wealth and future."

It's autumn 1984 and North Bath is "still waiting for its luck to change," but one senses its luck would need a fairly dramatic reversal to much affect the fortunes of Sully, Donald Sullivan, the novel's incorrigible and engaging hero: "Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully -- people still remarked -- was nobody's fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application -- that at 60, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable -- all of which he stubbornly confused with independence."

Sixty years have knocked Sully from one part of North Bath to another, from his violent father's house to the rooms he rents now from the elderly Miss Beryl Peoples, his former teacher. A painful knee injury has him working odd jobs, off the books.

Sully is a partly domesticated, slightly maddened bear, feinting and jabbing at the center of the book's many subplots and hard-luck characters. His estranged lover, Ruth, has a husband she despises and a daughter whose own husband is trying to kill her. Sully's son, Peter, has serious marital troubles, two difficult children, a crazily possessive mother, a sick stepfather -- and he's been denied tenure at the small college where he teaches. Miss Beryl has been getting lost on her excursions around town, and she is compelled to fend off the grabby, selfish meddling of her banker son, Clive Jr. -- one of the main boosters of the Ultimate Escape. Even Sully's best friend, Rub (he's too dim to find trouble to get into), is undone by his wife's late-blooming kleptomania.

The Death of the American Dream

By Walter Russell Mead

The news from the housing market this week is bad.  Really bad.  House prices today are lower in most of the country than they were in the dismal month of April 2009; we are now in the second dip of the double dip housing downturn.

This doesn’t just mean that President Obama’s re-election is in trouble.  It doesn’t just mean that stocks and the dollar may fall.  It doesn’t just mean that unemployment will stay high for a while and that whole economy may follow the housing market back into the tank for a second recession.

It means something bigger.  For eighty years we have defined the American dream as an owner occupied family home, preferably with a nice swathe of crabgrass-free lawn around it.  The home mortgage was the centerpiece of a society of consumers based on debt-financed living.  It was life on the installment plan.  The latest downturn in the housing market is one more grim signal that in its current form, the American Dream is going the way of the dodo.

A home of your own increasingly means a home of the bank’s.  Today some 86 million Americans live in homes that are ‘under water’ where the amount owed on the mortgage is greater than the value of the house.  Since the financial crisis began in 2008, over one million consumer mortgages have gone into foreclosure. Sales of bank-owned properties are now 34.5 percent of the housing market;  homes in foreclosure waiting for resale now account for a three years-supply on the sluggish housing market.

The damage is heavy.  For most Americans, their single biggest asset is the equity in their home.  At the peak of the boom, total net home equity in the US (the value of owner occupied homes minus the remaining mortgage debt) stood at 13 trillion.  Today it is down to $6.5 trillion. America’s home equity losses are greater than the GDP of Japan.

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The Most Divisive Moral Issue in America

Jack Kevorkian, the audacious doctor who spurred on the national right-to-die debate with a homemade suicide machine that helped end the lives of dozens of ailing people, died today at a Detroit-area hospital after a brief illness. He was 83.

Twelve years after Dr. Jack Kevorkian went to prison for murder when he helped a man with Lou Gehrig's disease die, American's are still sharply divided about the morality of doctor-assisted suicide. With 45 percent of people believing euthanasia is OK, and 48 percent against the practice, that issue stands atop a new Gallup poll of the nation's most divisive moral conundrums. Second and third were abortion and having a child out of wedlock, which is surprising when one ponders the adoration of "Brangelina."

What the vast majority of Americans can agree upon is that a married man and woman having an affair is morally wrong. And most also believe that it's bad to have more than one spouse and to clone humans.

Of course while the extremes on either end are always fun to see, what's most interesting about this survey isn't the poles. Most interesting is that for every practice Gallup asked about, at least a quarter of respondents found it morally objectionable. In a time in which America seems like it's filled with bigots who will never be willing to accept gays, it's important to remember that the number of people against gays and lesbians and the number of people against gambling aren't separated by too wide a gulf. As you can see below, nearly 25 percent of Americans even think something as benign as divorce is morally wrong.

The next time you're shocked, as I sometimes am, at how many people have moral problems with LGBT people, just remember that almost as many are opposed to a man and woman having intercourse out of wedlock, something millions of Americans do every day.

The point is that the moral police are going to be the moral police regardless of your race, gender, or sexual orientation. It's annoying, but it's now so archaic as to be laughable.

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A Short History of the Campsite

by Martin Hogue

Open camp in Adirondacks, ca. 1890. [Courtesy of the Adirondack Museum]

One does not impose, but rather expose the site.
— Robert Smithson [1]

There is a satisfying immediacy about the prospect of establishing an encampment for the night — clearing the site, erecting the tent, chopping wood, building a fire and cooking over the live flame — that in turn suggests a meaningful connection to landscape, place and the rugged life of backwoods adventurers. In essence camping is an act of faith and survival, a way to buttress a modest, isolated human settlement against the forces of nature. Situated "somewhere between challenging new circumstances and the safe reassurances of familiarity," the camp is a temporary substitute for the home — a place to dwell, to sleep, to interact socially, to prepare and eat food. [2] Stripped of any but the most vital conveniences, the camp is literally and figuratively open to the stimuli of its natural surroundings.

This summer millions of Americans will take to the road in search of this powerful experience of nature. And that parcel of land upon which most will elect to drive their car, set up their tent, park their trailer or RV is the campsite — which is thus not only an imagined ideal but also the fundamental unit of management of the modern campground. There are 113,000 federally managed campsites in the United States, 166,000 campsites dispersed across state parks, and untold numbers in private facilities. [3] Last year Kampgrounds of America — KOA, familiarly — alone reported a total usage of over five million campsite nights, as well as 1.5 million hits monthly on its website. [4]

Modern campsites embody a peculiar contradiction: They are defined and serviced by an increasingly sophisticated range of utilities and conveniences, and yet marketed to perpetuate the cherished American ideal of the backwoods camp. For artist Robert Smithson, whose sensitivities to site and site-making were informed by childhood family camping trips he helped organize, the campsite was where one could reenact the making of a place. [5] Campgrounds indeed commodify into multiple sites — literally tens of thousands of them — with each functioning as the locus of a singular experience, which is itself further commodified and mediated by popular imagery. The record sales reported by sporting utility stores like REI and EMS owe largely to the retailers' successful efforts to associate their equipment with the out-of-doors and the prospect of healthy living. For many urbanites, high-performance gear — hiking boots, mountaineering vests, etc. — have become staples of everyday casual chic.

Postcard, Silver Streak, "The Finest Travel Trailer Built." [Via Flickr]

Modern campgrounds are replete with delightful irony: each "lone" campsite functions as a stage upon which cultural fantasies can be performed in full view of an audience of fellow campers interested in much the same "wilderness" experience. Who in the camping community has not experienced a degree of gear envy at the sight, on a neighboring camp, of a brand new Primus Gravity II EasyFuel stove (with piezo ignition), a Sierra Designs tent, or a Marmot sleeping bag? KOA even leases some permanently parked Airstream trailers, which allow campers to spend the night in a cultural icon; this experiment also allows would-be campers to show up without any personal equipment, just as they would at a roadside motel. No wonder that the daily repetition of chores once associated with survival has now been so fully recast as a series of almost spiritual rituals intended to reconnect the camper with what has been largely lost; for by now most of the old necessities — hiking to and clearing the site, hunting for game, collecting water and firewood — have given way to such less arduous activities as parking the car, pitching cable-free pop tents, buying cold cuts at the campground store, hooking up electrical and sewerage conduits, setting up patio chairs, etc. Serviced by networks of infrastructure and populated with trailers and $100,000 RVs, campgrounds celebrate a unique form of American ingenuity in which intersecting narratives and desires (wilderness, individuality, access, speed, comfort, nostalgia, profit) have become strangely and powerfully hybridized.

To tell the story of the campsite is not to tell the story of any one site or even any one campground, but rather to examine how this cultural ideal of rugged American character came to be appropriated and transformed into a generic and widely replicated template of spatial protocols. It is to talk not only about campers but also about the crucial role of motor vehicles in shaping this narrative, which begins rather innocuously with early 20th-century roadside bivouacs and culminates in today's tightly organized loops of dedicated plots. The following four concepts seem to me key to understanding the radical physical and cultural transformations of the campground in the past century.

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The Making of Diaspora

by Ariel Bleicher


Armed with Google technologies, four young coders are planting the seeds for the post-Facebook future.

This is part of IEEE Spectrum's special report on the battle for the future of the social Web.

The Diaspora guys, four college kids turned chief engineers of the most-talked-about social networking start-up this year, get a lot of friend requests. Sometimes fans just show up at their office, uninvited, and ask to work with them. Every now and then, someone recognizes them in public, which freaks them out. On the day they moved into their current office in San Francisco, a commuter stopped them on the subway and commanded, "Go get 'em, guys! Kill Facebook!"

Journalists and bloggers have called Diaspora "the Facebook killer," "the Facebook rival," "the anti-Facebook," "Facebook's challenger," and "another Facebook wannabe." They have speculated about whether Diaspora is better than Facebook, whether Facebook will try to buy Diaspora, and whether Diaspora could "knock Facebook off its perch."

The guys, however, don't see themselves as competition. After all, Diaspora is a rookie company; its software is buggy and crash prone, and although the company tries to solve the biggest problem with Facebook by giving users better control over their private data, its site looks and acts like a vacant, amateur imitation.

Besides, the guys insist, they're not aiming to replace Facebook with "yet another social network." Rather, they're taking a stab at reengineering the way online socializing works by building an entire network of networks from the ground up. They hope that in the process they will help promote standards that other social sites—such as Digg, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, and perhaps one day even Facebook—will use to bridge their services. They imagine that during the next decade, the Web will evolve from a sea of social networking islands into what many developers are calling the federated social Web—one that lets you choose your networking provider, just as you now choose your e-mail provider, and yet still connect with friends who use other services.

Such a Web may be a distant, idealistic vision, but it's not Diaspora's alone. Many programmers and social media thinkers, including some at other start-ups, at universities, and at big companies such as Google, Mozilla, and Germany's Vodafone, have been working to develop open standards for a federated social Web since around the time "The Facebook" was a profile directory for Harvard students. They believe that such a Web is not only possible but also preferable. "If I couldn't e-mail people who don't share the same domain as me, that would be pretty stupid," remarks Joseph Smarr, a social Web engineer at Google. "But that's exactly the way social networks work today, and that's broken and should be fixed."

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