StumbleUpon Fights to Stay Relevant

StumbleUpon, founded in 2001, was one of the first sites to become wildly popular by helping people find amusing, weird, and useful things on the internet. Bored at work? Idle at home? By repeatedly clicking StumbleUpon’s simple "stumble" button, it’s possible to scan through hundreds of websites in one sitting, as its algorithm takes stabs at what you might like. Here’s a recipe for pasta pie. Here’s a video of a robot walking up some stairs. Here’s Anderson Cooper’s blog. It’s mindless, and it's brilliant.

According to StatCounter, StumbleUpon drove more traffic in 2009 than any other social media site in the US, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, and Pinterest. But like other content discovery sites, StumbleUpon is having trouble turning diversion into a business — especially now that traffic has plummeted following a big redesign.

Restarting

StumbleUpon has an interesting history. EBay swallowed up the company in 2007 when it was just a Firefox extension, albeit with 7.4 million users and some advertising revenue. But the auctionhouse couldn’t figure out what to do with its acquisition, so in 2009 cofounders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith bought the site back with the help of investors for a reported $75 million. StumbleUpon ballooned from about 30 to 130 employees, about two-thirds of whom are developers. After spinning out, the company launched plug-ins for all the major browsers and started amassing traffic straight to StumbleUpon.com. It launched apps for iPhone and iPad, Android phones, and the Nook and Kindle e-readers.

In April, after three years as a "restartup," Camp proudly announced two milestones. StumbleUpon hit 25 million users, more than triple the number it had when it was owned by eBay. What’s more, those users were clicking the "stumble" button 1.2 billion times a month.

All seemed rosy. But behind the scenes, StumbleUpon's traffic was way down in the wake of its biggest redesign ever. StumbleUpon was always a big dumb firehose of traffic, which is why publishers loved it. But starting at the end of last year, StumbleUpon has been driving noticeably fewer hits — reminiscent of the fallout at rival aggregator Digg, where a big redesign drove users away.

In May, Camp stepped down as CEO. "After 10 years leading StumbleUpon, it’s time for a change," he wrote on the company blog. Camp, who also cofounded the car service Uber, now chairs StumbleUpon’s board. The company is still looking for a CEO. In the interim, three executives are making decisions as a committee.

Traffic Turbulence

As part of a major overhaul in December, StumbleUpon tweaked its homepage to look more modern and "fresh," and tried to make the navigation more visual. At the same time, big changes were made to the algorithm that had the effect of distributing stumbles — pageviews originating from StumbleUpon — more widely across the web, so that users weren’t being sent to the same few sites over and over again. Around the same time, StumbleUpon started pushing its mobile apps, which now account for 25 percent of stumbles. Unfortunately, mobile users tend to spend less time on the site.

by Adrianne Jeffries, The Verge |  Read more: 

Image via: My Social Agency

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Kill or Capture

On September 30, 2011, in a northern province of Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen and a senior figure in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, finished his breakfast and walked with several companions to vehicles parked nearby. Before he could drive away, a missile fired from a drone operated by the Central Intelligence Agency struck the group and killed Awlaki, as well as a second American citizen, of Pakistani origin, whom the drone operators did not realize was present.

President Barack Obama had personally authorized the killing. “I want Awlaki,” he is said to have told his advisers at one point. “Don’t let up on him.” The President’s bracing words about a fellow American are reported in “Kill or Capture,” a recent and important book on the Obama Administration’s detention and targeted-killing programs, by Daniel Klaidman, a former deputy editor of Newsweek.

With those words attributed to Obama, Klaidman has reported what would appear to be the first instance in American history of a sitting President speaking of his intent to kill a particular U.S. citizen without that citizen having been charged formally with a crime or convicted at trial.

The due-process clause of the Fifth Amendment prohibits “any person” from being deprived of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Obama authorized the termination of Awlaki’s life after he concluded that the boastful, mass-murder-plotting cleric had, in effect, forfeited constitutional protection by waging war against the United States and actively planning to kill Americans. Obama also believed that the Administration’s secret process establishing Awlaki’s guilt provided adequate safeguards against mistake or abuse—all in all, enough “due process of law” to take his life.

Awlaki was certainly a murderous character; his YouTube videos alone would likely convict him at a jury trial. Yet the case of Awlaki’s killing by drone strike is to the due-process clause what the proposed march of neo-Nazis through a community that included many Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, was to the First Amendment when that case arose, in 1977. It is an instance where the most onerous facts imaginable should lead to the durable affirmation of constitutional principle, as Skokie did. Instead, President Obama and his advisers have opened the door to violent action against American citizens by future Presidents when the facts may be much less compelling.

by Steve Coll, The New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Tracy Woodward/The Washington Post/Getty Images

Djoma
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Fargo – A Documentary

Fargo is the Coen Brothers movie that had everyone going around saying “dontcha know” and “you betcha!” for a while way back in the mid-90s, and it’s so highly regarded that it was inducted into the U.S. National Film Registry for being “culturally significant.”

It’s one of those rare multi-genre movies that actually works, and watching this making-of documentary made me love Fargo even more than before.

via: Neatorama

Kingdom Come

“…Of comfort no man speak:
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let’s choose executors, and talk of wills…
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”
—William Shakespeare

Although I’ve yet to see sandwich-board men on the steps of the nation’s capitol declaring that the end of the world is nigh, I expect that it won’t be long before the Department of Homeland Security advises the country’s Chinese restaurants to embed the alert in the fortune cookies. President Obama appears before the congregations of the Democratic faithful as a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, cherishing the wounds of the American body politic as if they were the stigmata of the murdered Christ. The daily newscasts update the approaches of weird storms, bring reports of missing forests and lost polar bears, number the dead and dying in Africa and the Middle East, gauge the level of America’s fast-disappearing wealth. Hollywood stages nostalgic remakes of the Book of Revelation; video games mount the battle of Armageddon on the bosom of the iPad. Nor does any week pass by without a word of warning from the oracles at the Council on Foreign Relations, Fox News, and the New York Times. Their peerings into the abyss of what to the Washington politicians are known as “the out years” never fail to discover a soon forthcoming catastrophe (default on the national debt, double-dip recession, global warming, nuclear proliferation, war in Iran) deserving the close attention of their fellow travelers aboard the bus to Kingdom Come.

If the fear of the future is the story line that for the last ten years has made it easy to confuse the instruments of the American media with the trumpets of doom, the cloud of evil omens is not without a silver lining. The tears on King Richard’s dusty paper, like the handwriting on King Belshazzar’s fiery wall, protect the profit margins of the banks and the insurance companies, serve the interests of the drug and weapons industries, allow the season’s political candidates to clothe themselves in the raiment of a messiah come to cleanse the electorate of its impurities, take America back to where it belongs, risk-free and tax-exempt, in the little house on the prairie. Adapted to the service of the Church or the ambition of the state, the fear of the future is the blessing that extorts the payment of the protection money. For the Taliban and the Tea Party it’s a useful means of crowd control, but for a democratic republic, crouching in the shadow of what might happen tomorrow tends to restrict the freedom of thought as well as the freedoms of movement, and leads eventually to a death by drowning in the bathtub of self-pity. (...)

Over the last fifty years, the picture of the future has changed often enough to become recognizable as a fashion statement. I’m old enough to remember a future that was merry and bright, everything coming up roses, men on the way to the moon, and the rain in Camelot falling only after sundown. President Kennedy in 1961 extended Tom Paine’s birthday message to every other country in the world, so sure of America’s holdings in and on the future that it could afford “to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, or oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” I’m also old enough to remember, a year later, New York City schoolchildren being advised to hide in broom closets and under desks in the event of the arrival, said to be imminent, of Soviet nuclear missiles on their way north from Cuba.

Under the administrations of nine American presidents in the years since, I’ve heard the future described in the language of both the sales pitch and the sermon, seen it advertised as sunny beach resort and lifeless desert, as equal-opportunity employer and private club. President Reagan’s new morning in America in the 1980s followed Alvin Toffler’s bestseller Future Shock, as well as the Hollywood production of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. Toffler populated an American garden of technological Eden with kindly computers in California, as well-meaning as J. R. R. Tolkien’s industrious dwarves, spinning the golden threads of fiber optics and mining the jewels of microchips. The Right Stuff forged the American hero as titanium tubing impervious to reentry speeds and the heat of the sun, American power likened to a Promethean pillar of fire lifting its disciples out of the well of death. By way of balancing the market, the next decade produced multiple narratives of American decline, furnished abundant premonitions of doom in the form of popular books (The End of Science, The Death of Meaning, The End of Nature, The Death of Economics, and The End of History) drifting across the American sky well before the arrivals in New York of American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston.

The collapse of the World Trade Center in the fall of September 2001 destroyed the last trace elements of the American future conceived as a nostalgic rerun of the way things were in the good old days when John Wayne was securing the nation’s frontiers and Franklin D. Roosevelt was watching over its soul. The loss of the utopian romance that had once supported both the ambition of the state and the strength of the economy was terrible to behold. So terrible that it has been replaced by an apparition—Gorgon-headed and dragon-winged—that reduces its beholders to paralyzed stone. Much of the effect I attribute to the Bush administration’s war on terror, which was lost on the day it was declared. Lost because, to wage the war, the Bush administration was obliged to manufacture, distribute, and magnify the reflection of its own ignorance and fear. Nobody’s cell phone to be left untapped, a jihadist in every rose garden.

In the years since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the palsied dysfunction has become more pronounced. The foreign wars haven’t been going according to plan; the domestic financial markets have suffered calamitous reversals of fortune; the sum of the national debt goes nowhere but up. The public parks bloom with the installations of surveillance cameras; the inspections at the airports maintain the national quota of patriotic dread, introduce the frequent flyer to the game of playing dead.

Among the country’s stupefied elites, the bad news induces the wish to make time stand still, to punish the presumption of a future that presents itself as a bill collector. As self-pitying as Shakespeare’s melancholy king, they sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of money. Without it the future doesn’t bear contemplating, doesn’t include their presence in it and therefore doesn’t exist. How then can the banks be expected to lend money, the government to build hospitals and schools, the rich to pay taxes for comforts not their own? The suggestion is outrageous, an intolerable effrontery, out of line with the all-American revelation that the name of the game is selfishness. The surplus of resentment affords the excuses to do nothing and bids up the market in transcendence. Politicians in Congress stand around like trees in a petrified forest, or, if allied with the zeal of the Tea Party, console themselves with notions of biblical vengeance, the wrecking of any such thing as a common good a consummation devoutly to be wished. Secure in the knowledge that only the wicked shall perish, they press forward to the Day of Judgment when the host of the damned—variously identified over the course of the centuries as false priests, proud barons, profiteering capitalists, vile communists, and godless democrats—shall fall into the hands of an angry god and gnaw their tongues in anguish.

by Lewis Lapham, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Our Perfect Summer

My mother and I were at the dry cleaner’s, standing behind a woman we had never seen. “A nice-looking woman,” my mother would later say. “Well put together. Classy.” The woman was dressed for the season in a light cotton shift patterned with oversize daisies. Her shoes matched the petals and her purse, which was black-and-yellow striped, hung over her shoulder, buzzing the flowers like a lazy bumblebee. She handed in her claim check, accepted her garments, and then expressed gratitude for what she considered to be fast and efficient service. “You know,” she said, “people talk about Raleigh but it isn’t really true, is it?”

The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you’re a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence. He wasn’t the owner, just a helper who’d stepped in from the back, and it was clear he had no idea what she was saying.

“My sister and I are visiting from out of town,” the woman said, a little louder now, and again the man nodded. “I’d love to stay awhile longer and explore, but my home, well, one of my homes is on the garden tour, so I’ve got to get back to Williamsburg.”

I was eleven years old, yet still the statement seemed strange to me. If she’d hoped to impress the Korean, the woman had obviously wasted her breath, so who was this information for?

“My home, well, one of my homes”; by the end of the day my mother and I had repeated this line no less than fifty times. The garden tour was unimportant, but the first part of her sentence brought us great pleasure. There was, as indicated by the comma, a pause between the words “home” and “well,” a brief moment in which she’d decided, Oh, why not? The following word— “one”—had blown from her mouth as if propelled by a gentle breeze, and this was the difficult part. You had to get it just right or else the sentence lost its power. Falling somewhere between a self-conscious laugh and a sigh of happy confusion, the “one” afforded her statement a double meaning. To her peers it meant, “Look at me, I catch myself coming and going!” and to the less fortunate it was a way of saying, “Don’t kid yourself, it’s a lot of work having more than one house.”

The first dozen times we tried it our voices sounded pinched and snobbish, but by midafternoon they had softened. We wanted what this woman had. Mocking her made it seem hopelessly unobtainable, and so we reverted to our natural selves.

“My home, well, one of my homes . . .” My mother said it in a rush, as if she were under pressure to be more specific. It was the same way she said, “My daughter, well, one of my daughters,” but a second home was more prestigious than a second daughter, and so it didn’t really work. I went in the opposite direction, exaggerating the word “one” in a way that was guaranteed to alienate my listener.

“Say it like that and people are going to be jealous,” my mother said.

“Well, isn’t that what we want?”

“Sort of,” she said. “But mainly we want them to be happy for us.”

“But why should you be happy for someone who has more than you do?”

“I guess it all depends on the person,” she said. “Anyway, I suppose it doesn’t matter. We’ll get it right eventually. When the day arrives I’m sure it’ll just come to us.”

And so we waited.

At some point in the mid- to late nineteen-sixties, North Carolina began referring to itself as “Variety Vacationland.” The words were stamped onto license plates, and a series of television commercials reminded us that, unlike certain of our neighbors, we had both the beach and the mountains. There were those who bounced back and forth between one and the other, but most people tended to choose a landscape and stick to it. We ourselves were Beach People, Emerald Isle People, but that was mainly my mother’s doing. I don’t think our father would have cared whether he took a vacation or not. Being away from home left him anxious and crabby, but our mother loved the ocean. She couldn’t swim, but enjoyed standing at the water’s edge with a pole in her hand. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call fishing, as she caught nothing and expressed neither hope nor disappointment in regard to her efforts. What she thought about while looking at the waves was a complete mystery, yet you could tell that these thoughts pleased her, and that she liked herself better while thinking them.

One year our father waited too late to make our reservations, and we were forced to take something on the sound. It wasn’t a cottage but a run-down house, the sort of place where poor people lived. The yard was enclosed by a chain-link fence and the air was thick with the flies and mosquitoes normally blown away by the ocean breezes. Midway through the vacation a hideous woolly caterpillar fell from a tree and bit my sister Amy on the cheek. Her face swelled and discolored, and within an hour, were it not for her arms and legs, it would have been difficult to recognize her as a human. My mother drove her to the hospital, and when they returned she employed my sister as Exhibit A, pointing as if this were not her daughter but some ugly stranger forced to share our quarters. “This is what you get for waiting until the last minute,” she said to our father. “No dunes, no waves, just this.”

From that year on, our mother handled the reservations. We went to Emerald Isle for a week every September and were always oceanfront, a word that suggested a certain degree of entitlement. The oceanfront cottages were on stilts, which made them appear if not large, then at least imposing. Some were painted, some were sided, “Cape Cod style,” with wooden shingles, and all of them had names, the cleverest being “Loafer’s Paradise.” The owners had cut their sign in the shape of two moccasins resting side by side. The shoes were realistically painted and the letters were bloated and listless, loitering like drunks against the soft faux leather.

“Now that’s a sign,” our father would say, and we would agree. There was The Skinny Dipper, Pelican’s Perch, Lazy Daze, The Scotch Bonnet, Loony Dunes, the name of each house followed by the name and home town of the owner. “The Duncan Clan—Charlotte,” “The Graftons—Rocky Mount,” “Hal and Jean Starling of Pinehurst”: signs that essentially said, “My home, well, one of my homes.”

by David Sedaris, The New Yorker |  Read more:

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The Narco Tunnels of Nogales

If everyone had kept quiet, it could have been the most valuable parking spot on earth. Convenient only to the careworn clothing stores clustered in the southern end of downtown Nogales, Ariz., it offered little to shoppers, and mile-long Union Pacific (UNP) trains sometimes cut it off from much of the city for 20 minutes at a time. But the location was perfect: In the middle of the short stretch of East International Street, overshadowed by the blank walls of quiet commercial property, the space was less than 50 feet from the international border with Mexico.

On Aug. 16, 2011, just before 3:30 p.m., three men sat in a white Chevrolet box truck parked near the Food City supermarket on Grand Court Plaza. In the driver’s seat was Anthony Maytorena; at 19, Maytorena already had an impressive criminal record, and a metal brace on one arm as a result of being shot while fleeing from local police three years earlier. Locked in the cargo compartment behind him were two boys from Nogales, Sonora, the Arizona town’s twin city on the other side of the border—Jorge Vargas-Ruiz, 18, and another so young that his name has never been released. Together they drove over to International Street, where two cars were holding the parking spot for them.

Maytorena parked the truck, climbed out, and—watched by a spotter gazing down from high up in the hills on the Sonoran side of the border—sauntered around the corner. Inside, the two teenagers lifted a hatch in the floor of the cargo compartment; beneath, in the steel box that had once contained the truck’s refrigeration unit, was a trapdoor that opened less than a foot above the street.

On a word from the spotter, men underground lowered a camouflaged circular plug of concrete held in place by a hydraulic jack, revealing a hole just 10 inches in diameter. The hole opened into a tunnel 3 feet square and 90 feet long, leading to a room in an abandoned hotel on the Mexican side of the border. It took less than 40 minutes to transfer 207 tightly wrapped bundles of marijuana from the San Enrique hotel to the back of the truck: more than 2,600 pounds in all, conservatively valued at just over a million dollars.

U.S. Border Patrol agents and officers of the Nogales Police Department rode slowly past the truck while the transfer took place. None of them noticed anything unusual. Customs officers manning the pedestrian border crossing at the end of the street continued their work as normal. With the cylindrical plug jacked back into place, the boys in the back of the truck used a caulking gun to close the seam around it with concrete sealant. Once again, the tunnel entrance in the parking space was invisible. As the truck pulled away at a little before 4:30 p.m., it had begun to rain. Behind the wheel, Maytorena almost certainly believed the tunnel operation had been yet another audacious success.

Crime has been coming up out of the ground in Nogales for a while now. Since 1995 more than 90 illicit underground passageways have been discovered in various states of completion in the two-mile stretch of urban frontier that separates Arizona’s Nogales from its far larger twin in Sonora. Twenty-two complete tunnels have been found in the past three years alone. Streets have opened up beneath unwary pedestrians and subsided under heavy vehicles; the city has become infamous as the Tunnel Capital of the Southwest.

Although quantification is impossible, the underground shipment routes represent a significant economic investment, one that far exceeds the time and money spent on the homemade submarines, ultralight aircraft, and catapults used to move narcotics elsewhere. Some tunnels cost at least a million dollars to build and require architects, engineers, and teams of miners to work for months at a stretch. A few include spectacular feats of engineering, running as much as 100 feet deep, with electric rail systems, elevators, and hydraulic doors. But the economies of scale are extraordinary. Tunnels like these can be used to move several tons of narcotics in a single night.

by Adam Higgenbotham, Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:

AP Photo

The Wiggle of Least Resistance

I got a bike — a fixed-gear with bright blue wheels, custom-made to my specifications. I am a San Francisco techno-hipster, so this selection was a bit of a self-caricature. But sometimes the predictable thing turns out to be the best thing, too, and you can’t let that stop you. When I went to receive my bike from its maker in a cramped workshop down on Cesar Chavez Street, I didn’t know what I know now: a single San Franciscan in possession of a good bike must be in want of a Wiggle.

I got the bike and I started to ride it. Gently at first. Tentatively. When you’ve biked only on quiet cul-de-sacs and college campuses, the idea of riding in the city, right up there alongside the cars, seems frankly pretty absurd. So in those early days, I picked my path carefully through quiet avenues. I pedaled exclusively on side streets with no stop lights.

But slowly I gathered my courage. It began with a Saturday foray down Market Street, San Francisco’s ugly, angry main artery. I didn’t get flattened or flung over the handlebars and I liked the look of the tall buildings blurring by on both sides. Next, I wanted to ride my bike to work — but I couldn’t quite figure out how.

San Francisco is spotted with steep hills, and in the middle they mass shoulder-to-shoulder like a defensive line, splitting the city in two. To the west, there’s Golden Gate Park and the long avenues of the Outerlands, the grid that stretches all the way to the Pacific; to the east, there’s the Mission and Market Street and the glistening bay. To the west, my apartment; to the east, my office. The train that takes you from one side to the other tunnels through the heart of a hill. If you drive it, your car labors up one side, teeters at the top, then pitches down the other.

But there is no tunnel for bikers, and bikers can’t climb those streets. (Well, maybe some bikers can. This one couldn’t.) The shallow grade outside my door left me breathless, and the hills that separated me from downtown were much, much steeper. I cursed the blue-wheeled bike for its lack of mechanical advantage.

And then I heard about the Wiggle.

The Wiggle is not a secret, not exactly; there is a detailed Wikipedia entry. But you would never know to Google “the wiggle” unless someone told you about it, right? You would never know the Wiggle was even a thing unless one of your techno-hipster co-workers, also in possession of a fancy flat-colored fixed-gear, upon hearing of your plight, said: “Dude … you know about the Wiggle, right?”

by Robin Sloan, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Wendy MacNaughton

The Economics of the Google Gigabit

In the excitement around Google's unveiling of the $70 gigabit broadband connection in Kansas City, some may be wondering how it is that Google can offer a gigabit for moderately more than what most of us pay for far slower cable broadband connections.

On one side of the equation is the fact that big cable companies (Time Warner Cable, Comcast, etc.) have long been ripping off consumers by pricing their services far above cost -- something they can easily do because they face so little competition. But the more interesting side of the equation is how Google can make its gigabit price so low.

Recall that Chattanooga made major waves with its gigabit service, priced then at the rock-bottom rate of $350/month. A gigabit is not available in many communities and where it is available, the price is often over $10,000 per month. We published an in-depth case study of their approach a few months ago.

But, as Milo Medin -- the head of the Google Fiber project -- is fond of saying, "No one moves bits cheaper than Google." Google has built an incredible worldwide fiber optic network. Let's call this lessons 1 and 2.

Lesson 1: Google built its own network. It isn't leasing connections or services from big telecommunications companies. Building your own network gives you more control -- both of technology and pricing. 

Lesson 2: Google uses fiber-optics. These connections are reliable and have the highest capacity of any communications medium. The homes in Kansas City are connected via fiber whereas Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, and others continue to rely on last-generation technologies because they are delaying investment in modern technology to boost their profits.

Others have already followed these lessons but are not able to offer their gig for such a low prices. To understand why, let's start with some basics. I'm hypothetically starting Anytown Fiber Net in my neighborhood and I want to offer a gig. Whenever any of my Anytown subscribers want to transfer files amongst themselves, the operating cost to me approaches zero because (aside from the capital costs of building the network), the cost of transfering those files is basically the electricity it takes to pulse lasers over the fiber and keep the fans on the routers humming.

Lesson 3: Local traffic on the network is essentially free. A local gigabit is no big deal on a fiber network. (Hat tip to Lafayette Utilities System for being the first to offer local 100Mbps traffic for free.)

We start talking about real operating costs when Anytown users want to connect to networks that are not on the Anytown network. When a user wants to watch a video on YouTube ordownload a patch from Microsoft, I need to interconnect with other networks that can get me there. For a small player like me, that means paying for transit. I pay Level 3 or some other major national network operator so my user can send a request to YouTube over the Level 3 network.

The arrangement between me and Level 3 is interesting. I don't pay per bit that my customers use. Instead, I "commit" to a specific capacity. The higher the capacity, the lower my per bit charge. So if I commit to 500Mbps, I may be paying $7 for each Mbps but if I commit to 2000Mbps, I may pay $5 for each Mbps (these numbers are totally invented, not unlike how actual contracts seem to be made). But the interesting part is how it is measured and its implications.

My committed rate determines my cost but not necessarily what I have access to. Let's say I commit to a 500Mbps connection to Level 3 for $7/Mbps. I have to pay for the amount of Mbps that corresponds to 95% of my peak demand. The cost comes down to how high the peaks are, not how many bits are transferred over the course of the month. So if my peak was 550 Mbps, then I have to pay for (550 * .95) * $7, or $3,657.50

On the other hand, if I allowed the combined usage of my users to hit a far higher peak, say 1,000 Mbps, my cost would be $6,650 and I would be kicking myself for not upping my committed rate. Fortunately, I can control the peak with my routers, allowing me some control (at the cost of alienating my users who will see worse performance individually).

Another thing I can do is "peer" with others. For instance, if Anytown Net can get Google to connect directly to us, traffic to Google sites (ahem, YouTube) becomes free (as Google likely wouldn't charge because it wants to encourage everyone to use its services). This is why the Open Connect Netflix announcement is so important.

Allowing users to hit popular sites without increasing the peak bandwidth saves real money. In fact, a sizable community fiber network reported to me that peering with a major source of video traffic dropped their monthly costs by tens of thousands of dollars. This brings us to Lesson 4.

Lesson 4: Scale matters. Big time. Everyone wants to interconnect with large networks and large sources of content. The larger Anytown Net is, the more others will be interested in connecting with me.

by Christopher, Community Broadband Networks |  Read more:

99 Ways to Be Naughty in Kazakhstan

A few months ago, at the Tablao Villa Rosa, a tourist-friendly restaurant in Madrid, dozens of beautifully dressed women from all over the world were gathered around a stage taking cellphone pictures of a male flamenco dancer in tight pants. The women, whooping and clapping against the sides of their wine glasses, were editors, publishers and executives from the far-flung corners of the Cosmopolitan magazine universe — missionaries from the more established international Cosmos (Australia, France, Britain) and the newer, upstart Cosmos (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Vietnam and dozens of other countries). They gathered there at the biennial Cosmic Conference to soak up the Cosmo ethos (“Fun, fearless, female!”) and then went home to radiate it outward. One Cosmo staff member would tell me — in complete seriousness, having chosen her words carefully — that Cosmic was going to change my life.

“Did you see those pants?” asked Kate White as she sat down with a glass of red wine at the wine-barrel table where I was writing down my impressions of, among other things, the flamenco pants. White, 61, is the laser-blue-eyed editor of Cosmo U.S., the mother ship, or Big Cosmo, as it’s called by other editors. During White’s 14-year tenure, the magazine has increased its U.S. circulation to 3 million readers, from 2.3 million, and introduced 22 international editions for a total of 64, including spinoffs. (By comparison, Marie Claire has 35 international editions, and Glamour has 16). She’s dazzling but relaxed, with a full, frequent laugh. She is the Bill Clinton of Cosmic, the charming and influential American, the unofficial boss of bosses, toward whom her international counterparts gravitate. Her book, “I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know,” is due out in September.

White also wastes no time. Within minutes she was asking me whether and when I want to marry, whether and when I want to have kids, whether I’d want to marry but not have kids and whether I’d consider freezing my eggs. I was surprised by my answers, not knowing I had them until I heard myself telling her, with no hesitation, that I did want to marry and have kids but that I thought I’d be O.K. if neither happened and that work was more important to me at the moment (perhaps to the detriment of those things) and a number of other personal details. Another Cosmo editor swooped in before I could ask her for specific advice, but I would have.

White’s likable directness is one of her magazine’s defining characteristics. Cosmo has a cheerful, girlfriendy tone (“When Your Period Makes You Cra-a-zy”) and a much racier reputation than its newsstand competitors (“Eeek! You’ll Die When You Read What These ‘Normal’ Guys Wanted Once Their Pants Hit the Floor”). Its covers rarely fail to feature at least one bold, all-caps rendering of the word “sex.” The August issue, for instance, offered “52 Sex Tips” and “When Your Vagina Acts Weird After Sex.” A sampling of 2012 headlines includes “50 Sex Tips,” “50 Kinky Sex Moves,” “99 Sex Questions” and “His Best Sex Ever.”

The repetition can be a little numbing, but it may help explain how Cosmo, which is the best-selling monthly magazine in the United States, has morphed into such a global juggernaut. (“If all the Cosmo readers from around the world came together,” read a recent piece in Cosmo South Africa, “this group would form the 16th-largest country in the world.”) Through those 64 editions, the magazine now spreads wild sex stories to 100 million teens and young women (making it closer to the 12th-largest country, actually) in more than 100 nations — including quite a few where any discussion of sex is taboo. And plenty of others where reading a glossy magazine still carries cachet. (“Many girls consider a hard copy of Cosmo to be an important accessory,” says Maya Akisheva, the editor of Cosmo Kazakhstan.) As the brand proudly points out, in 2011 alone, these readers spent $1.4 billion on shoes, $400 million on cars, $2.5 billion on beauty products and $1.5 billion on fragrance and bought 24 million pairs of jeans.

by Edith Zimmerman, NY Times |  Read more:

Marie van Regteren Altena
Still Life with Geranium and Japanese Print
20th century
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The Best Time I Quit Drinking

I was sitting in a cafe the other day drinking tea and watching a woman sip a glass of wine. I wasn’t fully boring-holes-into-her-head watching her, of course, but working on my computer and dividing my attention among a project, two e-mail inboxes, iTunes, cute dogs trotting past, and this woman holding a glass of white wine and talking to her friend. I must have glanced over a dozen times to see the glass still held aloft and half-full, as if she had forgotten it was in her hand. My god, had she forgotten? What was wrong with this woman? Could the conversation be that interesting?

It’s at moments like these that it becomes impossible to forget what I would sometimes like to, that as perfectly okay as it might sometimes seem to have just one beer or join in a champagne toast, I can’t. If I start I won’t be able to stop; I’m not and never will be a normal drinker.

I never in my life forgot about a drink in my hand or a bottle in my cabinet. In those last desperate months when I still hoped that if only I exerted enough self-control I too could drink normally it was as if an open bottle of wine languishing in the pantry glowed phosphorescently. But it didn’t glow for everyone, and for a very long time I imagined that I could make myself not see it. I would leave notes taped to my bedroom door pleading with myself to not venture into the kitchen, I’d exult in having a single glass of wine with dinner, think “see! Ican have just one!” then spend the next three nights bombed. I remember one particular bottle of vodka belonging to a roommate that I must have drunk and replaced a dozen times. I would drink just a little bit at a time until I knew it would be noticed and felt I might as well finish it off before I bought a new bottle. I would worry all the next day that I would be caught before I could smuggle in the replacement but once I did I would tell myself it was no big deal: everyone drinks their roommates’ booze sometimes, right? But this wasn’t sometimes anymore.

Was I always this way? Yes and no. I loved alcohol from the second I first felt the fire of purloined whiskey in my throat at some high school party, but I was cautious, too. Three of my grandparents were addicted to booze or pills, two of them burning out before I was born (one doing so quite literally in a house fire caused by passing out in bed with a lit cigarette). Even before I was treated for an eating disorder at 15 I suspected that my mother’s food and exercise obsessions were manifestations of that same addictive hunger. And so part of my behavior toward alcohol involved careful self-monitoring — afraid that I would have to give up booze if it became an obvious problem I learned to be cautious and secretive about my relationship with it.

I hid the extent of my drinking, trying to camouflage myself as a moderate drinker. I drank before I went out and after, added shots to my drinks at parties when no one was paying attention, carried flasks. I can’t think of a single time when any one person knew how much alcohol I consumed over the course of an evening. This furtiveness is common to many alcoholics but seems more common among women, for one way we show our power and status in this society is by visible self-control, never letting anyone see how hungry we are (why else is Victoria Beckham so fascinating?).

I’ve heard the condition of alcoholism defined as fear of life, a condition alcoholics treat with booze and drugs as well as a variety of addictive behaviors. Although I rarely made the mental equation I feel bad = I need a drink, my cravings for alcohol manifested when I felt most keenly the gap between how other people saw me: a smart, cool, cosmopolitan person with a fascinating career — and how I felt inside: hollowed out, desperate, and worthless. I drank to blunt my fear and discomfort, to blur the edges, to forget I felt like a fraud. As Caroline Knapp put it in her beautiful memoir Drinking: A Love Story, “I loved [alcohol]’s special power of deflection, its ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings.”

by An Alcoholic, The Hairpin |  Read more:

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Saving "Craft" from Cuteness

In the first minute of the TLC summer show “Craft Wars,” the host Tori Spelling says the word “craft” and its variants over a dozen times. It’s the “ultimate crafting competition.” Competitors have “every crafting tool they could dream of.” “As an avid crafter myself, with my own crafting line….” The repetition seems unnecessary, given the show’s title and the beauty wall behind Spelling featuring the full spectrum of fabric, thread, tools, and notions. But after listening to Spelling say “craft” a few dozen more times, without substitution, I realized her writers weren’t brand-crazy. They were just stumped. There are no synonyms for a word that has lost its meaning.

What “craft” mostly means on “Craft Wars” is the act of making things cuter. Take this shopping cart full of sports equipment and make a cute bag. Take this shopping cart full of school supplies and make a cute playhouse. That these bags will never be used, that some of them are not even completed, that, really, a duffel bag has already achieved ideal sports-bag form, are not considerations, not when a sawed-off tennis racket can be inserted “for ventilation” and tennis balls strung to make a “more comfortable” carrying strap. And what could be more delightful than a playhouse roofed in composition-book covers, never mind its ability to withstand rain?

Craft used to mean something, and it would never have been made with Mod Podge. You can buy a tea towel with the William Morris quotation, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” (It is a hundred per cent linen, so it is both.) What Morris, a designer, entrepreneur, futurist, and leader of the late nineteenth century Arts and Crafts Movement, proposed was a return to the medieval craft tradition, in which objects were made by hand by skilled workmen, and priced accordingly. Rather than three sets of elaborately decorated transferware china, you would have one set of handmade and glazed plates. Rather than rooms full of elaborate Victorian furniture, you would own a few chairs, hand hewn and joined with wood, not industrial glue.

Reformers like Morris proposed that we live with less, but better, much as the unconsumption movement does today. Recent books like “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Clothing” show the physical and environmental toll of a closet stuffed with ten-dollar why-not dresses, while blogs like “Make It Do,” “Unconsumption,” and “Stuff Does Matter” suggest new criteria for getting, spending, and discarding the contents of those closets and cupboards. And many of those criteria derive from the old-school definition of craft: make it yourself, buy better quality items, think about each purchase, keep it for a long time.

“Craft Wars,” in contrast, seesaws uneasily between the desire to make it beautiful and the desire to make it useful and usually ends up at neither. Two competitors, asked to craft a birdhouse out of the contents of a kitchen junk drawer, build chunky boxes out of wood, and start sticking the junk to them. (The Victorians would have used seashells, to better effect.) Asked to make patio furniture out of beach toys, the competitors give us wetsuit throw pillows and a plastic pail turned ice bucket versus a lounge chair made of boogie boards threaded together on a steel-pipe frame. The boogie-board lounge maker, the only male contestant in the first two episodes, is also the only crafter whose skill Morris would have recognized. Kevin Chartier, who was laid off an an art director, makes metal sculpture while working as a stay-at-home father and handyman. When confronted with a large scale, three-dimensional project, he didn’t separate the beautiful from the useful, but got out the blowtorch. It’s regrettable, given the overall demographics of the show’s audience, that it had to be a man with power tools that broke the show’s decorated box. The longstanding gender division between the craftsman working for money, and the craftswoman working to feed, clothe, and comfort her family seemed re-inscribed.

by Alexandra Lange, New Yorker | Read more:

Illustration by Kim Demarco.

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance

I've had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies — once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once by my mother and twice by myself. Not sure how or if I've helped many folks say yes to life but I've definitely aided in few folks dying slowly in America, all without the aid of a gun.

***

I'm 17, five years younger than Rekia Boydwill be when she is shot in the head by an off duty police officer in Chicago. It's the summer after I graduated high school and my teammate, Troy, is back in Jackson, Mississippi. Troy, who plays college ball in Florida, asks me if I want to go to McDonald's on I-55.

As Troy, Cleta, Leighton and I walk out of McDonald's, that Filet-o-Fish grease straight cradling my lips, I hold the door for open for a tiny, scruffy-faced white man with a green John Deere hat on.

"Thanks, partner," he says.

A few minutes later, we're driving down I-55 when John Deere drives up and rolls his window down. I figure that he wants to say something funny since we'd had a cordial moment at McDonald's. As soon as I roll my window down, the man screams, "Nigger lovers!" and speeds off.

On I-55, we pull up beside John Deere and I'm throwing finger-signs, calling John Deere all kinds of clever "motherfuckers." The dude slows down and gets behind us. I turn around, hoping he pulls over.

Nope.

John Deere pulls out a police siren and places it on top of his car. Troy is cussing my ass out and frantically trying to drive his Mama's Lincoln away from John Deere. My heart is pounding out of my chest, not out of fear, but because I want a chance to choke the shit out of John Deere. I can't think of any other way of making him feel what we felt.

Troy drives into his apartment complex and parks his Mama's long Lincoln under some kind of shed. Everyone in the car is slumped down at this point. Around 20 seconds after we park, here comes the red, white and blue of the siren.

We hear a car door slam, then a loud knock on the back window. John Deere has a gun in one hand and a badge in the other. He's telling me to get out of the car. My lips still smell like Filet-o-Fish.

"Only you," he says to me. "You going to jail tonight." He's got the gun to my chest.

"Fuck you," I tell him and suck my teeth. "I ain't going nowhere." I don't know what's wrong with me.

Cleta is up front trying to reason with the man through her window when all of a sudden, in a scene straight out of Boyz n the Hood, a black cop approaches the car and accuses us of doing something wrong. Minutes later, a white cop tells us that John Deere has been drinking too much and he lets us go.

by Kiese Laymon, Gawker |  Read more:

Illustration by Jim Cooke

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emerald city
by wildpianist (chris tarnawski)
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The Purest of Them All

When most Americans talk about good-tasting water, they’re talking about water that tastes like their own spit.

“When you taste something, you’re comparing the taste of that water to the saliva in your mouth,” says Gary Burlingame, who supervises water quality for the Philadelphia Water Department. “The saliva in your mouth is salty.”

Salty saliva bathes your tongue, drenching every one of your thousands of taste buds. It protects you from nasty bacteria, moistens your food, helps you pronounce the word “stalactite” and even lets you know when you might be drinking something bad for you. Like water.

Pure water, that is.

Stripping water down to an ultrapure state makes it unfit for human consumption.

In the world of electronics, manufacturers remove all of the minerals, dissolved gas and dirt particles from water. The result is called ultrapure water, and they use it to clean tiny, sensitive equipment like semiconductors, which are found in computer microchips.

Water molecules have a slight negative charge, which means they’re good at dissolving or pulling other molecules apart. When water is in an ultrapure state, it’s a “super cleaner,” sucking out the tiniest specks of dirt and leaving your computer’s brain squeaky clean.

But if you were to drink ultra-pure water, it would literally drink you back. The moment it came through your lips, it would start leaching valuable minerals from your saliva.

by Kelly Izlar, Scientific American |  Read more:
Photo: Powering A Nation (100gallons.org)