Inside Google+ How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social

Google, the world’s largest search company, is formally making its pitch to become a major force in social networking. The product it announced Tuesday is called Google+, and observers might wonder whether it’s simply one more social effort by a company that’s had a lousy track record in that field to date.

‘On Facebook I overshare. On Twitter, I undershare. If Google hits that spot in the middle, we can revolutionize social interaction.’ — Shimrit Ben-Yair, product manager in charge of the social graph.

Parts of it certainly seem to appear similar to what we’ve seen before. One significant component is a continuous scroll called “the stream” that’s an alternative to Facebook’s news feed — a hub of personalized content. It has a companion called “Sparks,” related to one’s specified interests. Together they are designed to be a primary attention-suck of Google users. Google hopes that eventually people will gravitate to the stream in the same way that members of Facebook or Twitter constantly check those continuous scrolls of personalized information.

The second important app is Circles, an improved way to share information with one’s friends, family, contacts and the public at large. It’s an management tool that’s a necessary component of any social network — a way to organize (and recruit) fellow members of the service.

But as I learned in almost year of following the project’s development, with multiple interviews with the team and its executives, Google+ is not a typical release. Developed under the code name Emerald Sea, it is the result of a lengthy and urgent effort involving almost all of the company’s products. Hundreds of engineers were involved in the effort. It has been a key focus for new CEO Larry Page.

The parts announced Tuesday represent only a portion of Google’s plans. In an approach the company refers to as “rolling thunder,” Google has been quietly been pushing out pieces of its ambitious social strategy — there are well over 100 launches on its calendar. When some launches were greeted by yawns, the Emerald Sea team leaders weren’t ruffled at all — lack of drama is part of the plan. Google has consciously refrained from contextualizing those products into its overall strategy.

That will begin now, with the announcement of the two centerpieces of Google+. But even this moment — revealed in a blog post that marks the first limited “field tests” outside the company — will be muted, because it marks just one more milestone in a long, tough slog to remake Google into something more “people-centric.”

“We’re transforming Google itself into a social destination at a level and scale that we’ve never attempted — orders of magnitude more investment, in terms of people, than any previous project,” says Vic Gundotra, who leads Google’s social efforts.

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Embrace Lovers-II by egon-Schiele, 1917

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How China Sees The World

by Thanassis Cambanis

The specter of a China with rising influence in the world has long provoked anxiety here in America. Like a speeding car that suddenly fills the rearview mirror, China has grown stronger and bolder and has done it quickly: Not only does it hold colossal amounts of American currency and boast a favorable trade deficit, it has increasingly been able to play the heavy with other nations. China is forging commercial relationships with African and Middle Eastern countries that can provide it natural resources, and has the clout to press its prerogatives in more local disputes with its Asian neighbors—including last week’s face-off with Vietnam in the South China Sea.

With China emerging more forcefully onto the world stage, understanding its foreign policy is becoming increasingly important. But what exactly is that policy, and how is it made?

As scholars look deeper into China’s approach to the world around it, what they are finding there is sometimes surprising. Rather than the veiled product of a centralized, disciplined Communist Party machine, Chinese policy is ever more complex and fluid—and shaped by a lively and very polarized internal debate with several competing power centers.

There’s a clear tug of war between hard-liners who favor a nationalist, even chauvinist stance and more globally minded thinkers who want China to tread lightly and integrate more smoothly into international regimes. And the Chinese public might be pushing a China-first mentality more than its leadership. Scholars believe that the boisterous nativism on display in China’s online forums appears to be a major factor pushing Chinese foreign policy in a more hard-line direction.

Today, for all its economic might, China still isn’t considered a global superpower. Its military doesn’t have worldwide reach, and its economy, while prolific, still hasn’t made the transition to producing technology rather than just goods for the world marketplace. Because of its sheer size and the dispatch with which it has moved from Third World economy to industrial powerhouse, however, China’s arrival as a power is considered inevitable.

As it does, understanding its foreign policy becomes only more important. Overall, the contours of its internal policy debates suggest a China that’s more isolated, unsure, and in transition than its often aggressive rhetoric would suggest. The candid discussion underway in China’s own public sphere underscores that China’s positions are still under negotiation. And one thing that emerges is a picture of a powerful state that is refreshingly direct in engaging questions about how to behave in the world as it embarks on what it fully expects will be China’s century.

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Million-Dollar Murray

by Malcolm Gladwell

Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage.

Murray Barr was a bear of a man, an ex-marine, six feet tall and heavyset, and when he fell down—which he did nearly every day—it could take two or three grown men to pick him up. He had straight black hair and olive skin. On the street, they called him Smokey. He was missing most of his teeth. He had a wonderful smile. People loved Murray.

His chosen drink was vodka. Beer he called "horse piss." On the streets of downtown Reno, where he lived, he could buy a two-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre bottle of cheap vodka for a dollar-fifty. If he was flush, he could go for the seven-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre bottle, and if he was broke he could always do what many of the other homeless people of Reno did, which is to walk through the casinos and finish off the half-empty glasses of liquor left at the gaming tables.

"If he was on a runner, we could pick him up several times a day," Patrick O'Bryan, who is a bicycle cop in downtown Reno, said. "And he's gone on some amazing runners. He would get picked up, get detoxed, then get back out a couple of hours later and start up again. A lot of the guys on the streets who've been drinking, they get so angry. They are so incredibly abrasive, so violent, so abusive. Murray was such a character and had such a great sense of humor that we somehow got past that. Even when he was abusive, we'd say, 'Murray, you know you love us,' and he'd say, 'I know—and go back to swearing at us."

"I've been a police officer for fifteen years," O'Bryan's partner, Steve Johns, said. "I picked up Murray my whole career. Literally."

Johns and O'Bryan pleaded with Murray to quit drinking. A few years ago, he was assigned to a treatment program in which he was under the equivalent of house arrest, and he thrived. He got a job and worked hard. But then the program ended. "Once he graduated out, he had no one to report to, and he needed that," O'Bryan said. "I don't know whether it was his military background. I suspect that it was. He was a good cook. One time, he accumulated savings of over six thousand dollars. Showed up for work religiously. Did everything he was supposed to do. They said, 'Congratulations,' and put him back on the street. He spent that six thousand in a week or so."

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image credit: Eric Pouhier

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The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret

by Ted Genoways

On the cut-and-kill floor of Quality Pork Processors Inc. in Austin, Minnesota, the wind always blows. From the open doors at the docks where drivers unload massive trailers of screeching pigs, through to the "warm room" where the hogs are butchered, to the plastic-draped breezeway where the parts are handed over to Hormel for packaging, the air gusts and swirls, whistling through the plant like the current in a canyon. In the first week of December 2006, Matthew Garcia felt feverish and chilled on the blustery production floor. He fought stabbing back pains and nausea, but he figured it was just the flu—and he was determined to tough it out.

Garcia had gotten on at QPP only 12 weeks before and had been stuck with one of the worst spots on the line: running a device known simply as the "brain machine"—the last stop on a conveyor line snaking down the middle of a J-shaped bench called the "head table." Every hour, more than 1,300 severed pork heads go sliding along the belt. Workers slice off the ears, clip the snouts, chisel the cheek meat. They scoop out the eyes, carve out the tongue, and scrape the palate meat from the roofs of mouths. Because, famously, all parts of a pig are edible ("everything but the squeal," wisdom goes), nothing is wasted. A woman next to Garcia would carve meat off the back of each head before letting the denuded skull slide down the conveyor and through an opening in a plexiglass shield.

On the other side, Garcia inserted the metal nozzle of a 90-pounds-per-square-inch compressed-air hose and blasted the pigs' brains into a pink slurry. One head every three seconds. A high-pressure burst, a fine rosy mist, and the slosh of brains slipping through a drain hole into a catch bucket. (Some workers say the goo looked like Pepto-Bismol; others describe it as more like a lumpy strawberry milkshake.) When the 10-pound barrel was filled, another worker would come to take the brains for shipping to Asia, where they are used as a thickener in stir-fry. Most days that fall, production was so fast that the air never cleared between blasts, and the mist would slick workers at the head table in a grisly mix of brains and blood and grease.

Tasks at the head table are literally numbing. The steady hum of the automatic Whizard knives gives many workers carpal tunnel syndrome. And all you have to do is wait in the parking lot at shift change to see the shambling gait that comes from standing in one spot all day on the line. For eight hours, Garcia stood, slipping heads onto the brain machine's nozzle, pouring the glop into the drain, then dropping the empty skulls down a chute. And then, as the global economy hit the skids and demand for cheap meat skyrocketed, QPP pushed for more and more overtime. By early December, Garcia would return home spent, his back and head throbbing. But this was more than ordinary exhaustion or some winter virus. On December 11, Garcia awoke to find he couldn't walk. His legs felt dead, paralyzed.

His family rushed him to the Austin Medical Center, not far from the subdivided Victorian they rented on Third Street. Doctors there sent Garcia to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, about an hour away. By the time he arrived, he was running a high fever and complaining of piercing headaches. He underwent a battery of exams, including MRIs of his head and back. Every test revealed neurological abnormalities, most importantly a severe spinal-cord inflammation, apparently caused by an autoimmune response. It was as if his body was attacking his nerves.

By Christmas, Garcia had been bedridden for two weeks, and baffled doctors feared he might be suicidal. They sent a psychiatrist to prepare him for life in a wheelchair.

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War on Rats

In his dystopian science fiction novel "1984," George Orwell described the rat as "the worst thing in the world." His protagonist, Winston Smith, is not alone in his fear and loathing; musophobia, or the fear of mice and rats, is one of the most common phobias known to man. Anyone who's spent a decent amount of time in a major city has at least a couple of horror stories involving rodents (or in the case of New Yorkers, six to 12). As upsetting as it may be to spy them scuttling along your local subway platform, the havoc wrought by infestations on the island of Manhattan pales in comparison to that of the ecologically fragile archipelagos in the Aleutians and New Zealand.

In his new book, "Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World's Greatest Wildlife Rescue," wildlife writer William Stolzenburg reveals that these feral little beasts, most of which have been introduced to the islands by man, are destroying native bird populations one pilfered egg at a time. The stakes are higher than they may appear. Many of these rodent transplants threaten to drive several species to extinction and quicken our planet's already rapid rate of biotic impoverishment. Stolzenburg offers a fascinating, if occasionally grisly, peek into the emerging science of preservation through eradication, as conservationists scattered across the five oceans have begun independent campaigns to save their islands' endangered species from one of our greatest biological weapons: the rat.

Over the phone, we discussed the ethics of extermination, the ways in which rodents (even rats) are often misunderstood -- and the perilous state of our planet's biodiversity.

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Fore!

by Larry David

On the par-3, 175-yard fourteenth hole at Riviera, I hit my tee shot a mere ninety yards and a physics-defying thirty degrees to the right—almost sideways. It’s a miracle I got my right leg out of the way, or I could have shattered it with the club. As I walked to the ball, I remarked to my friend that after seventeen years of playing this course I’d never seen someone hit a ball anywhere near where mine ended up. He had never seen it, either. “What’s more,” I said, “I couldn’t care less.” My friend was taken aback. But I meant it. I didn’t care, and I didn’t particularly care about the next shot, either. I felt liberated, not unlike the way I felt when my wife left me, except this time I didn’t take up skipping.

Finally, after years of pain and struggle, I had accepted the fact that I would never be a good golfer. No matter how many hours I practiced, no matter how many instructors I saw, how many books and magazines I read, or how many teaching aids I tried. Then it hit me. According to Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s book “On Death and Dying,” Acceptance was the final stage of grief that terminal patients experience before dying, the others being Anger, Denial, Bargaining, and Depression. I was in the final stage! When I started thinking about it, I realized that I’d gone through every one of those stages, but not as a terminal patient . . . as a golfer.

My first stage: Anger. There was a time when I was always angry on the course. Driving fast in the cart. Throwing clubs. Constantly berating myself. “You stink, four-eyes! You stink at everything. You can’t even open a bottle of wine! You can’t swipe a credit card at the drugstore! You can’t swipe. And you’ve never even been to the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim! And call your parents, you selfish bastard!” Then I’d walk off the course and vow never to play again, only to return the following week for more of the same. I hardly ever finished a round. Once, I bought a brand-new set of clubs, and then, after a particularly terrible day, I gave them to the caddy at the sixteenth hole and left.

The Anger phase lasted for years, and then I entered the next phase, Denial. “All I need are some lessons,” I told myself. “Why should everyone else be able to do it and not me? Why are they good? I’m coördinated. I have a jump shot! I can go to my left. Obviously I have it in me. I have it in me! Next year, I’ll go to Orlando and spend a week taking lessons with Leadbetter. I don’t care what it costs. How can you spend a week with Leadbetter and not get better? It’s impossible.” But I did, and I didn’t.

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image credit:  Vector_Golf by DaPino Webdesign

Looking for Someone

by Nick Paumgarten

“Internet dating” is a bit of a misnomer. You don’t date online, you meet people online. It’s a search mechanism. The question is, is it a better one than, say, taking up hot yoga, attending a lot of book parties, or hitting happy hour at Tony Roma’s?

In the fall of 1964, on a visit to the World’s Fair, in Queens, Lewis Altfest, a twenty-five-year-old accountant, came upon an open-air display called the Parker Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer clicked and whirred at the job of selecting foreign pen pals for curious pavilion visitors. You filled out a questionnaire, fed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match. Altfest thought this was pretty nifty. He called up his friend Robert Ross, a programmer at I.B.M., and they began considering ways to adapt this approach to find matches closer to home. They’d heard about some students at Harvard who’d come up with a program called Operation Match, which used a computer to find dates for people. A year later, Altfest and Ross had a prototype, which they called Project TACT, an acronym for Technical Automated Compatibility Testing—New York City’s first computer-dating service.

Each client paid five dollars and answered more than a hundred multiple-choice questions. One section asked subjects to choose from a list of “dislikes”: “1. Affected people. 2. Birth control. 3. Foreigners. 4. Free love. 5. Homosexuals. 6. Interracial marriage,” and so on. Another question, in a section called “Philosophy of Life Values,” read, “Had I the ability I would most like to do the work of (choose two): (1) Schweitzer. (2) Einstein. (3) Picasso.” Some of the questions were gender-specific. Men were asked to rank drawings of women’s hair styles: a back-combed updo, a Patty Duke bob. Women were asked to look at a trio of sketches of men in various settings, and to say where they’d prefer to find their ideal man: in camp chopping wood, in a studio painting a canvas, or in a garage working a pillar drill. TACT transferred the answers onto a computer punch card and fed the card into an I.B.M. 1400 Series computer, which then spit out your matches: five blue cards, if you were a woman, or five pink ones, if you were a man.

In the beginning, TACT was restricted to the Upper East Side, an early sexual-revolution testing ground. The demolition of the Third Avenue Elevated subway line set off a building boom and a white-collar influx, most notably of young educated women who suddenly found themselves free of family, opprobrium, and, thanks to birth control, the problem of sexual consequence. Within a year, more than five thousand subscribers had signed on.

Over time, TACT expanded to the rest of New York. It would invite dozens of matched couples to singles parties, knowing that people might be more comfortable in a group setting. Ross and Altfest enjoyed a brief media blitz. They wound up in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune and in Cosmopolitan. The Cosmo correspondent’s first match was with a gym teacher who told her over the phone that his favorite sport was “indoor wrestling—with girls.” (He stood her up, complaining of a backache.) One of TACT’s print advertisements featured a photograph of a beautiful blond woman. “Some people think Computer dating services attract only losers,” the copy read, quoting a TACT subscriber. “This loser happens to be a talented fashion illustrator for one of New York’s largest advertising agencies. She makes Quiche Lorraine, plays chess, and like me she loves to ski. Some loser!”

One day, a woman named Patricia Lahrmer, from 1010 WINS, a local radio station, came to TACT to do an interview. She was the station’s first female reporter, and she had chosen, as her début feature, a three-part story on how New York couples meet. (A previous installment had been about a singles bar—Maxwell’s Plum, on the Upper East Side, one of the first that so-called “respectable” single women could patronize on their own.) She had planned to interview Altfest, but he was out of the office, and she ended up talking to Ross. The batteries died on her tape recorder, so they made a date to finish the interview later that week, which turned into dinner for two. They started seeing each other, and two years afterward they were married. Ross had hoped that TACT would help him meet someone, and, in a way, it had.

After a couple of years, Ross grew bored with TACT and went into finance instead. He and Lahrmer moved to London. Looking back now, he says that he considered computer dating to be little more than a gimmick and a fad.

The process of selecting and securing a partner, whether for conceiving and rearing children, or for enhancing one’s socioeconomic standing, or for attempting motel-room acrobatics, or merely for finding companionship in a cold and lonely universe, is as consequential as it can be inefficient or irresolute. Lives hang in the balance, and yet we have typically relied for our choices on happenstance—offhand referrals, late nights at the office, or the dream of meeting cute.

Online dating sites, whatever their more mercenary motives, draw on the premise that there has got to be a better way. They approach the primeval mystery of human attraction with a systematic and almost Promethean hand. They rely on algorithms, those often proprietary mathematical equations and processes which make it possible to perform computational feats beyond the reach of the naked brain. Some add an extra layer of projection and interpretation; they adhere to a certain theory of compatibility, rooted in psychology or brain chemistry or genetic coding, or they define themselves by other, more readily obvious indicators of similitude, such as race, religion, sexual predilection, sense of humor, or musical taste. There are those which basically allow you to browse through profiles as you would boxes of cereal on a shelf in the store. Others choose for you; they bring five boxes of cereal to your door, ask you to select one, and then return to the warehouse with the four others. Or else they leave you with all five.

It is tempting to think of online dating as a sophisticated way to address the ancient and fundamental problem of sorting humans into pairs, except that the problem isn’t very old. Civilization, in its various guises, had it pretty much worked out. Society—family, tribe, caste, church, village, probate court—established and enforced its connubial protocols for the presumed good of everyone, except maybe for the couples themselves. The criteria for compatibility had little to do with mutual affection or a shared enthusiasm for spicy food and Fleetwood Mac. Happiness, self-fulfillment, “me time,” a woman’s needs: these didn’t rate. As for romantic love, it was an almost mutually exclusive category of human experience. As much as it may have evolved, in the human animal, as a motivation system for mate-finding, it was rarely given great consideration in the final reckoning of conjugal choice.

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Under the Radar

[ed.  Yani  won yet another major today and is the most dominant player on either tour.  What's the matter with the media?  I guess if you're a woman you have to be photogenic (e.g., Michele Wie, Paula Creamer) to garner much attention these days, despite your achievements.]

Maybe Yani Tseng should try ordering pints of Guinness.

Nothing else seems to have attracted a sliver of the attention golf's best female player deserves. And if you happen to be asking, "Who is Yani Tseng?'' thanks for making our point.

Northern Ireland's chubby-cheeked Rory McIlroy is 22 years old, and he won the U.S. Open on Sunday for his first major championship. McIlroy has golf falling all over itself to raise a mug of his country's favorite ale in celebration.

Tseng, meanwhile, is 22 years old, a native of Taiwan, and tees off in Thursday's opening round of the LPGA Championship with the world's No. 1 ranking and three majors already under her belt.

"It is pretty spectacular," LPGA commissioner Mike Whan said.

Unfortunately for Tseng, comparing the PGA Tour and the LPGA isn't apples to oranges -- it's oceans to lakes, Costco to Joe's Corner Market.

Still, at some point and by any yardstick, doesn't Tseng's level of excellence deserve acknowledgment?

"I am still trying to work on that," Tseng said after an early-week practice round, with barely a shrug to the suggestion of unfairness. "I tell myself if I play better and play good, more people will put attention on me."

Is that possible? Look at what Tseng is doing right now.

In the four-plus seasons since Tseng turned professional in 2007, she has recorded 15 worldwide victories, including seven on the LPGA tour.

Oh yeah, and after Thursday's opening round at Locust Hill Country Club, she's on top of the leaderboard at 6-under par, one shot in front of American Paula Creamer.

"I hit lots of fairways," Tseng said. "This course is tight. So narrow. I just hit it on the fairways. More chances to put it on the green. More chances for birdie."

Tseng's first LPGA win came in the 2008 LPGA Championship, making her, at the time, the youngest major winner in the tour's history. Last year she added the Kraft Nabisco and the Women's British to become the youngest LPGA player to win three majors.


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Directed by Tony Kelly for American Apparel from Tony Kelly Photography on Vimeo.
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Taster's Choice

by Frederick Kaufman

It’s springtime in Colombia, and coffee experts from every part of the globe have convened in Santa Marta, a small city on the Caribbean coast. It is time to award the coffee industry’s most prestigious prize. The taste mavens make ready: Alberto Trujillo is deep into his pre-sip calisthenics, which consist of knee bends and alternating leg shakes. The Tijuanan has to prime his body, nose, and mouth for the so-called cupping that’s about to commence. As any java snob can tell you, to cup is to scrutinize the tastes and aromas of freshly brewed coffee. But Trujillo is no ordinary java snob, and what he’s girding for is no ordinary cupping. He has been certified by the Coffee Quality Institute as a licensed Q Grader, a person who can boast experience in everything from roast identification to sensory triangulation. And he’s about to serve as a judge in the annual Cup of Excellence competition.

Alongside Trujillo stands Geoff Watts, vice president of coffee and an unroasted-bean buyer for the Chicago gourmet retailer Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea (winner of Roast magazine’s 2007 Macro-Roaster of the Year award). It’s early morning, the day’s competition will begin in short order, and Watts is sucking deep breaths, recalibrating his olfactory system, waiting for his mouth to reset. “Toothpaste is insidious,” he murmurs.

Trujillo, Watts, and 18 other coffee connoisseurs will soon sample the 29 brews that have made it to the semifinals. Ten of these sit in front of each judge, in identical white cups with only a number to identify them, meticulously arranged in 20 straight lines on six broad tables. Each cup holds 11.5 grams of ground beans, measured out to the hundredth of a gram.

The competition began four weeks before, when 513 fincas (farms) from across this coffee-obsessed nation submitted samples of their finest unroasted beans. Now, after marathon tasting sessions with Colombian judges, the contestants have been whittled down to the chosen few displayed on the white tablecloths of this convention center. In the three hour-long cupping trials that will soon commence, a panel of internationally renowned tasters will reject half of the remaining lots. Tomorrow Trujillo, Watts, and their cohorts will rank Colombia’s top coffees and name the champion.

The vibe among the judges is more geeky than gastronomical. The majority of them are roasting techs and quality-control wonks decked out in socks and sandals. Now they advance toward the cupping tables, clutching clipboards and calculators. Meanwhile, the heavyset chief judge, Paul Songer, tells me about the future of his noble calling. He earned his tasting bona fides after a two-year program in Applied Sensory and Consumer Science at UC Davis, and he believes that coffee gourmandism has the potential to rival oenophilia’s cultish obsessiveness. Watts notes that while the fruit of the vine incorporates about 200 different taste-bestowing elements, more than 800 distinct flavor- and aroma-imparting compounds have been detected in java. “In 30 years or so,” he says, “our taste in coffee will match our taste in wine.”

Of course, this bold future of coffee is already here — it’s just insufficiently blended. The elaborate rituals of, say, a Blue Bottle coffee shop already make a $4 Starbucks latte look like Folgers. But the fetishization of coffee has yet to extend beyond an elite circle of urban stimulant junkies. It will take all the business acumen and marketing wherewithal of coffee nerds like Songer and Watts to see the rest of us through to the day when the humble bean will become one of the most carefully cultivated crops in the world, when a cup of joe will explode into a stratosphere of price and a near-infinite selection of exotic varietals, each as renowned in its own right as Pinot Noir or Cabernet Sauvignon.

Everyone in this room is banking on the prospect.

The first Cup of Excellence competition was held 12 years ago in Brazil. Any farmer in the nation could submit beans for consideration. A panel of importers, roasters, and expert sippers selected a winner, which was then sold for exorbitant sums in an Internet auction. Susie Spindler, executive director of the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, masterminded the format, which was exported to countries across Latin America and to Rwanda. She now has her eyes set on Burundi, Kenya, and Tanzania. “Cup of Excellence has completely changed the infrastructure of how coffees are sold,” she says.

Once upon a time, coffee-growing countries were focused solely on maximizing the volume of beans produced. But the more that bean quality has affected price, the more impassioned coffee-producing nations have become about divergent strains and varietals. At last year’s Colombian Cup of Excellence, the winning beans, called Finca La Loma, caused a scandal. They garnered a score of 94.92, the highest in the history of the Colombian coffee industry, and judges declared that the velvety brew was exceptionally sweet and smacked of clover and watermelon. A 2,000-pound microlot sold at auction to a consortium of international buyers for $40.09 a pound, which translated to a staggering street value of $260 a kilo in Japan.

All this was good news for the peasant who produced Finca La Loma on his 20-acre coffee patch. But it was also good news for the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia, a nonprofit that represents the country’s half million growers. The organization, known by the nickname Fedecafé, trumpeted the fact that Finca La Loma was Castillo, a newfangled bean varietal bred by its scientific arm. This hybrid had been designed to withstand the dreaded Colombian coffee rust, a fungus that can devastate entire fincas. At Fedecafé’s behest, growers across the country had ripped out heirloom strains like Bourbon, Caturra, and Típica and replaced them with Castillo. But some farmers resisted, largely because they were not convinced that Castillo tasted quite as delicioso as Colombia’s traditional varietals.

Soon after Finca La Loma’s victory, dark rumors began to circulate suggesting that the winning bean was in fact a Caturra strain, delicate and vulnerable to coffee rust but renowned for taste. This was no picayune point of contention, for Colombia had recently registered its lowest level of coffee production in more than three decades. Castillo was supposed to save the industry from what The New York Times dubbed “peak coffee.” Now the Fedecafè9’s creation had been besmirched.

Cafecert, an independent coffee auditor, examined the disputed results, and while it could have deployed near-infrared spectrometry to differentiate between the chemical makeup of Caturra and Castillo, the auditors opted instead to visit the finca and count coffee trees. At which point the truth emerged: The Finca La Loma blend was about 30 percent Castillo—not the PR coup Fedecafé was hoping for, but not totally embarrassing either. The international scandal fizzled into a low-grade brew-haha, but it illustrated just how much the Cup of Excellence has come to matter to the growers, buyers, and comandantes who inhabit this new universe of coffee.

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Driverless Cars Legal in Nevada

[ed.  Crashing your computer now takes on a whole new meaning.]

We recently told you that Google was lobbying Nevada legislators to make driverless cars legal on state roads, and now it’s official – Assembly Bill No 511 just passed! The legislature makes it legal for Google’s automated Prius and Audi TT fleet to cruise Nevada roads. But this isn’t just about the next industry Google is aiming to take over – read on for a closer look.

Several companies have been working hard to create technologies that bridge the gap between today’s driver assistance tech and what they see as tomorrow’s driverless cars. The idea behind this is that driverless cars could avoid more crashes caused by distracted driving.

But just how far can this go – would you trust your car to drive you to work? And who will write the software to make this possible? We know one thing for sure: we’d rather have a Google, Apple or Linux car than risk the Microsoft blue screen of death while traveling 80 miles an hour to work. Check out the video below to see what Mashable thought of the driverless fleet.

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Wild Alaska Salmon Burgers

by Kirsten Dixon

We’ve been saving scraps and trim from filleting whole sockeye salmon to make burgers for our staff dinners. When we make burgers, we can scrape enough flesh from the backbone carcass of the fish with a spoon to add an extra burger or two. We don’t waste a thing. Take a look at the photo included in this article to see how much meat can be salvaged from a discarded salmon carcass. It really is remarkable.

When we make salmon burgers, we puree part of the salmon meat and cube another part of it. This textural variation makes a nice firm burger without having to add any egg or bread filler into the patty. We just add in herbs, seasonings and spices to give our burgers a little zing, shape them, and grill or sauté them. I like red onions, either pickled or grilled, with salmon. We’ve been using smoked paprika from Spain as a nice complement to salmon burgers lately. The lime and cilantro add a refreshing summer touch. We’ve had a little habit lately of making our own root chips and other vegetable crisps to serve with burgers. We’ve been sprinkling dried sea lettuce over our chips as a kind of salty accent.

Wild Alaska Salmon Burgers

1 pound boneless, skinless Alaska sockeye salmon

2 tablespoons minced cilantro

2 tablespoons green onion, thinly sliced

1 clove garlic, peeled and finely minced

Juice of half a lime

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

1 pinch smoked paprika

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Dice half of the salmon into 1/8-inch cubes. Puree the other half in a food processor. Combine both the salmons together in a medium bowl. Combine together the cilantro, green onion, garlic, lime juice, soy sauce, sesame oil, and smoked paprika. Add this mixture into the salmon, stirring to gently combine. Season the salmon with salt and pepper.

Shape the salmon into 4 patties and chill until ready to grill or sauté.

Makes 4 burgers.

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photos: Tyrone Potgieter