Sunny Seattle

Spent a wonderful sunny day at the Seattle Center last Saturday (accompanied by the world's most babe magnetic dog, Lucile.]

Photos: markk
More pictures after the break:

Internet Video's Robotic, Idiotic Copyright Cops

On Wired, Geeta Dayal looks at the state of automated copyright enforcement video-bots, the mindless systems that shut down the Hugo awards livestream, took down NASA's own footage of the Curiosity landing, and interrupted the video from the DNC. Dayal examines the legal status and necessity for these bots (dubious); their ability to model copyright's full suite, including fair use (nonexistent); and the business reasons for deploying them (cowardly). She also looks at what's at stake when our ability to communicate with one another is suborned to the profit-maximization strategies of giant copyright holders.

“The companies that are selling these automated takedown systems are really going above and beyond the requirements set for them in the DMCA, and as a result are favoring the interests of a handful of legacy media operators over the free-speech interest of the public,” says Parker Higgins, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

The notice-and-takedown regime created by the DMCA allows copyright holders to send a written notice to an online hosting service when they find their copyright being violated. The online service can then escape legal liability by taking down the content fairly promptly, and the original poster has the opportunity to dispute the notice and have the content reinstated after two weeks. 

But that regime breaks down for livestreaming. For one, if a valid copyright dispute notice is filed by a human, it’s unlikely that a livestream site would take it down before the event ends, nor, under the law, is it actually required to. On the flipside, if a stream is taken down, the user who posted it has no immediate recourse, and the viewership disappears.

The Algorithmic Copyright Cops: Streaming Video’s Robotic Overlords

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:

How My Mother Disappeared

The meatloaf fooled me.

I should have known it would. That’s what a meatloaf is meant to do: make you believe the world is so forgiving a place that even an array of bits and pieces, all smashed up, can still find meaning as an eloquent whole. The duplicity is integral to the dish, if you make it well. And when I made my mother’s meatloaf, it was perfect.

In 2005, as my mother began the torturous process of disappearing in plain sight, I retreated to my kitchen, trying to reclaim her at the stove. Picking up a pot was not the instant panacea for illness and isolation and despair that I wanted it to be. But it helped. When I turned to my mother’s recipes, I felt grounded in her rules, and they worked every time. I could overcook or undercook the meatloaf, and it still tasted the same. I could eat it hot and eat it cold, and I ended up doing both, because my stepsons, Nat and Simon, and my husband, Frank, like meatloaf fine, but they don’t love it. The writer Peg Bracken summed it up perfectly in “The I Hate to Cook Book”: men prefer steaks and chops to casseroles and meatloaf, she wrote, because they “like a tune they can whistle.” But it was those inexact elements, murky and mystical, that drew me to my mother’s meatloaf again and again. It was my remnant of home and I conjured it, reaching back, always back. Each time I made it, it was absolutely perfect. And each time I made it, I felt more and more afraid. (...)

As Thanksgiving neared, Mom grew calmer. I did not. I spoke with Roberta Epstein, the social worker, filling her in on Mom, how she was there, but not there.

“It’s called ambiguous loss,” she said. “Gone, but not gone. She is your mother, but not the mother you knew. If she had died, it would be easier to grieve the loss. It’s hard to do that when she’s sitting in front of you.”
Would I prefer to have lost my mother completely, without warning? I used to think the answer was no. Still, as hard as that would have been on me, maybe it would have been better for her. To die as herself. Because the worst part was watching her know that she wasn’t in there anymore — watching her face as she heard herself speak and saw how other people reacted. No awards for bravery for keeping going while realizing how diminished you are, watching flashes of yourself crackle then disappear, like lightning.

So at that point, who was my mother? A 77-year-old woman who could no longer remember how many years she had been married or any of her children’s birthdays. She did not recognize her grandchildren. She stood in my apartment, where she had visited me for 19 years, and asked me who lived there. But the fierce, loving, prickly person she had always been was still in there, fleetingly for sure, and I didn’t want to let her go. I wanted to track her down and keep her there.

But she didn’t want to be tracked down. She didn’t want to be kept, anywhere. “Is someone here for me?” she had gone down to the lobby in her nightgown to ask the doorman one morning. “Am I moving?” she asked my aunt. She was sensing it was time to go. Even halfway out of her mind, she seemed to recognize the truth of that. When I still couldn’t.

I never wanted her to think I’d abandoned her. I wanted her to know I was fighting for her. I kept asking what I could do to help her, what I could do to make her happier. She looked at me pityingly every time. “There’s nothing you can do, because it’s not up to you,” she would say. “You’re here with me now. That’s enough.”

by Alex Witchel, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Alex Witchel

How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything

Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B -- and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. It's the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or "Ground Truth," actually works.

The company opened up at a key moment in its evolution. The company began as an online search company that made money almost exclusively from selling ads based on what you were querying for. But then the mobile world exploded. Where you're searching has become almost important aswhat you're searching. Google responded by creating an operating system, brand, and ecosystem in Android that has become the only significant rival to Apple's iOS.

And for good reason. If Google's mission is to organize all the world's information, the most important challenge -- far larger than indexing the web -- is to take the world's physical information and make it accessible and useful.

"If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online," Manik Gupta, the senior product manager for Google Maps, told me. "Increasingly as we go about our lives, we are trying to bridge that gap between what we see in the real world and [the online world], and Maps really plays that part."

This is not just a theoretical concern. Mapping systems matter on phones precisely because they are the interface between the offline and online worlds. If you're at all like me, you use mapping more than any other application except for the communications suite (phone, email, social networks, and text messaging).

Google is locked in a battle with the world's largest company, Apple, about who will control the future of mobile phones. Whereas Apple's strengths are in product design, supply chain management, and retail marketing, Google's most obvious realm of competitive advantage is in information. Geo data -- and the apps built to use it -- are where Google can win just by being Google. That didn't matter on previous generations of iPhones because they used Google Maps, but now Apple's created its own service. How the two operating systems incorporate geo data and present it to users could become a key battleground in the phone wars.

But that would entail actually building a better map.

by Alex Madrigal, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Japanese Woodblock Botanicals Shodo Kawarazaki 1939-1970’s
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Janet Lowry
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Find the Song Name Without Knowing the Lyrics

It happens all the time. You are sitting in a restaurant with friends or driving to work and there’s some beautiful music playing on the FM radio station. You would love to buy a copy of that music album for yourself but the problem is that you didn’t get the lyrics so how do you find out the name of that song.

Search engines like Google or Bing won’t be of much help unless you know a couple of words from the song lyrics or have some clue about the name of the artist or the band. How do you then identify the name of that lovely song?

Well, here are some of the best music recognition services that can help you discover song names without having to know the lyrics. You may use them to identify music playing from the radio, TV, Internet or that CD playing in the bar.

1. Find Music with your Mobile Phone

1a. Shazam – Shazam is a mobile application that you may use to find song names from your iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android or your Nokia S60 phone. You may also use Shazam on an iPod Touch provided you have an external microphone.

Simply install the Shazam application, hold your phone towards the audio source and hit the Tag button to let Shazam identify the playing music. Shazam works only with pre-recorded music and not with live performances.

The free version of Shazam will help you identify up to 5 different track per month while Shazam Encore, the paid version, offers unlimited tracking for $4.99. If the tune cannot be recognized, there’s no charge. If you are in the UK, you can use just about any mobile phone to recognize music with Shazam – just dial 2580 and hold your phone to the music.

1b. MusicID – Hold your iPhone up to some music and MusicID will tell you what song is playing. It’s a $3 iPhone App available worldwide but if you are on AT&T, you may also use your Blackberry, Windows Mobile or any Java phone to identify music with MusicID.

Like Shazam, MusicID works only with pre-recorded music and they also have an SMS based service for people in the US that doesn’t require any downloads – just dial a short code, hold your phone up to some music and you’ll get a text message with the result.

2. Find song names using your own voice

2a. Midomi – If you have a tune that’s stuck in your head, just grab a microphone, hum that tune yourself and Midomi will be able tell you what that song is. Alternatively, you may play a short recording of that “unknown” track for Midomi to identify its name.

Unlike Shazam which is a mobile app, Midomi offers a web interface where you can can hum or sing for about 10 seconds and the service will then show you a list of matching songs. For best results, keep the volume bar in the green and avoid background noise.

Midomi is free to use online, but it also offers mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Nokia Ovi and Windows Mobile phones. You can identify songs by holding your phone up to a speaker or by singing / humming the melody into the phone itself.

by Amit Agarwal, Digital Inspiration |  Read more:

How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

In September 1976, a mail runner from Katmandu arrived at Base Camp on Mount Everest with a package for Dr. Arlene Blum, a member of the American Bicentennial Everest Expedition. The package had nothing to do with the climb, or Blum’s status as the first American woman to attempt the world’s highest peak. It concerned pajamas. Inside were the proofs of an article she co-wrote for the journal Science about a chemical then widely used in children’s sleepwear. The subtitle was unusually blunt for a scientific paper: “The main flame retardant in children’s pajamas is a mutagen and should not be used.”

The article ran the following January. By April, the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the flame retardant from children’s sleepwear. Manufacturers quickly switched to a related compound, chlorinated Tris. Blum and her co-author, a biochemist named Bruce Ames, tested it and found that it, too, was a mutagen and thus likely to be carcinogenic. Chlorinated Tris was then removed from pajamas as well.

Blum went on to a storied career as a mountaineer, leaving biochemistry behind. But while she was adventuring all over the world, Tris was staging a quiet comeback in other products.

Blum discovered this fact six years ago, when, at age 61, she decided to return to science. Looking for a way to put her academic training to use, she attended a symposium on chemical policy in California. There she struck up a conversation with Bob Luedeka, who happens to be the executive director of the Polyurethane Foam Association. He was there, he said, because of worries about chemical flame retardants, which are found in almost all upholstered furniture. One of the most commonly used flame retardants is chlorinated Tris. Blum says she felt like Rip Van Winkle waking up after a 30-year nap.

Since 1975, an obscure California agency called the Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation has mandated that the foam inside upholstered furniture be able to withstand exposure to a small flame, like a candle or cigarette lighter, for 12 seconds without igniting. Because foam is highly flammable, the bureau’s regulation, Technical Bulletin 117, can be met only by adding large quantities of chemical flame retardants — usually about 5 to 10 percent of the weight of the foam — at the point of manufacture. The state’s size makes it impractical for furniture makers to keep separate inventories for different markets, so about 80 percent of the home furniture and most of the upholstered office furniture sold in the United States complies with California’s regulation. “We live in a foam-filled world, and a lot of the foam is filled with these chemicals,” Blum says.

The problem is that flame retardants don’t seem to stay in foam. High concentrations have been found in the bodies of creatures as geographically diverse as salmon, peregrine falcons, cats, whales, polar bears and Tasmanian devils. Most disturbingly, a recent study of toddlers in the United States conducted by researchers at Duke University found flame retardants in the blood of every child they tested. The chemicals are associated with an assortment of health concerns, including antisocial behavior, impaired fertility, decreased birth weight, diabetes, memory loss, undescended testicles, lowered levels of male hormones and hyperthyroidism.

Blum decided she would get the Bureau of Home Furnishings to change its rules so that flame retardants would no longer be used. She had the science. She had the support of the foam industry. And she had already done this once, with children’s pajamas. How hard could it be?

“I thought we’d have one meeting,” she says. “You know, Himalayan mountain climbers are acute optimists because there’s such a high fatality rate. If you do things like that, you have to be optimistic to the point of slight insanity.” (...)

Heather Stapleton, a Duke University chemist who conducted many of the best-known studies of flame retardants, notes that foam is full of air. “So every time somebody sits on it,” she says, “all the air that’s in the foam gets expelled into the environment.” Studies have found that young children, who often play on the floor and put toys in their mouths, can have three times the levels of flame retardants in their blood as their parents. Flame retardants can also pass from mother to child through the placenta and through breast milk.

The effects of that exposure may be hard to detect in individual children, but scientists can see them when they look across the population. Researchers from the Center for Children’s Environmental Health, at Columbia University, measured a class of flame retardants known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, in the umbilical-cord blood of 210 New York women and then followed their children’s neurological development over time. They found that those with the highest levels of prenatal exposure to flame retardants scored an average of five points lower on I.Q. tests than the children with lower exposures, an impact similar to the effect of lead exposure in early life. “If you’re a kid who is at the low end of the I.Q. spectrum, five points can make the difference between being in a special-ed class or being able to graduate from high school,” says Julie Herbstman, the study’s author.

There are many flame retardants in use, the components of which are often closely held trade secrets. Some of the older ones, like the PBDEs, have been the subject of thousands of studies and have since been taken off the market (although many of us still have them in our furniture). Newer ones like Chemtura’s Firemaster 550 are just starting to be analyzed, even though it is now one of the most commonly used flame retardants in furniture.

Logic would suggest that any new chemical used in consumer products be demonstrably safer than a compound it replaces, particularly one taken off the market for reasons related to human health. But of the 84,000 industrial chemicals registered for use in the United States, only about 200 have been evaluated for human safety by the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s because industrial chemicals are presumed safe unless proved otherwise, under the 1976 federal Toxic Substances Control Act.

by Dashika Slater, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Jens Mortensen

Miu Miu

Miu Miu f/w 2012

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Curtis Mayfield

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Stuffed

My grandparents’ move to the nursing home had offered a hard lesson in the value of things. It occurred in the spring of my freshman year of college, after my grandfather had suffered a severe stroke. I was only a few months removed from my time at a Jesuit high school, where we often spent theology class critiquing American consumerism, exposing the malign influence of advertising and understanding the vanity of worshipping things. St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuits’ founder, had instructed his followers not to prefer wealth to poverty, an attitude I found superhumanly ennobling and heroic. Consequently—and because I suddenly felt very guilty about my affection for clothing—I became an enthusiastic haranguer of modern capitalism. I spoke of solidarity with the poor; of radical, systematic change; of Reagan’s disastrous presidency (this, I should say, was in 2007), all while continuing to patronize Urban Outfitters, expensively cultivating a personal style best described as “unemployed 1970s music critic.” Like many of my high-school cause célèbres (the Great Society, pacifism, Jack Kerouac), my enthusiasm for anticonsumerism cooled during the first months of college from a gatecrasher’s zeal into a liberal’s conscience-assuaging principle. I was no longer refusing to buy any clothing made in Bangladesh, but I still harbored a smug disdain for the things of this world—except, of course, for books.

During the move, I had a long phone conversation with my grandmother. A frail woman for as long as I’d known her, she’d grown even weaker since I’d left for Chicago. Her voice now dragged and slurred, as if she’d always just awoken. I stood in Hutchinson Courtyard, the sort of sheltered campus grove that keeps you from considering the scene of crisis towards which the distant siren wail is heading, listening to my grandmother recount the dispersal of her things. My grandparents had a single room in the nursing home, forcing my dad and uncle to pass what remained of their life’s possessions through an unforgivingly narrow sieve. As she had throughout her life—through the Dust Bowl and World War II and the stillbirth of her first child—she set her jaw against hardship. But my grandmother was a tough lady, not an unfeeling one, and her sadness emanated from my phone’s earpiece, each strained pause suggesting truths about time, aspiration, and mortality that I could only begin to understand. But what I did recall at that moment was how much meaning, for better or for worse, we deposit in our things. “I can’t live without it” is an expression of attachment to an object, but it had become painfully literal for my grandmother. The gradual dissipation of her possessions must have looked like the very walls of her allotted time meeting in their vanishing point, which suddenly drew very near. (...)

True enough. A little more than a year after moving to the nursing home, my grandmother died. I was sitting in Hutchinson Courtyard—the same place where I’d listened to her pained account of the move a year earlier—reading Moby-Dick. My dad called to tell me the news, and the first thing I did after hanging up was circle the number of the page I’d been reading. My dad had been playing golf after visiting her at the nursing home when he learned of her death, and he kept his scorecard from that afternoon. After the funeral, he gave me one of Grandma’s Hummels, a doe-faced boy reading a newspaper, a nod to my interest in journalism. I placed it on my desk, where my hand seems to knock against it every time I reach for a pen or rearrange papers. But it was Grandma’s, so I keep it. My children will be bound to the Hummel by no such contract of memory. It is like an isotope with a short half-life, sitting on my desk while it leaks meaning.

We so often claim to be owners when we are in fact stewards. Indeed, with a sufficiently macroscopic lens, one that encompasses mortality, ownership gives way to stewardship entirely. And stewardship, with its connotations of preserving for later generations, may not be the right word, for there is no guarantee that the objects that mean a lot to us will be anything other than clutter to our descendants. The exigencies of time and the vagaries of individual experience ensure that most of what we own will speak only to us. A copy of Moby-Dick with a circle around the page number 38, a scorecard from an afternoon of golf, a postcard bearing a photo of a smiling father and his son: all of these things will someday become clutter, their stories silenced.

by James Santel, Paris Review |  Read more:

ENCODE: The Rough Guide to the Human Genome

[ed. Pretty extensive overview, be sure to continue scrolling for the entire article.]

Back in 2001, the Human Genome Project gave us a nigh-complete readout of our DNA. Somehow, those As, Gs, Cs, and Ts contained the full instructions for making one of us, but they were hardly a simple blueprint or recipe book. The genome was there, but we had little idea about how it was used, controlled or organised, much less how it led to a living, breathing human.

That gap has just got a little smaller. A massive international project called ENCODE – the Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements – has moved us from “Here’s the genome” towards “Here’s what the genome does”. Over the last 10 years, an international team of 442 scientists have assailed 147 different types of cells with 24 types of experiments. Their goal: catalogue every letter (nucleotide) within the genome that does something. The results are published today in 30 papers across three different journals, and more.

For years, we’ve known that only 1.5 percent of the genome actually contains instructions for making proteins, the molecular workhorses of our cells. But ENCODE has shown that the rest of the genome – the non-coding majority – is still rife with “functional elements”. That is, it’s doing something.

It contains docking sites where proteins can stick and switch genes on or off. Or it is read and ‘transcribed’ into molecules of RNA. Or it controls whether nearby genes are transcribed (promoters; more than 70,000 of these). Or it influences the activity of other genes, sometimes across great distances (enhancers; more than 400,000 of these). Or it affects how DNA is folded and packaged. Something. (...)

Think of the human genome as a city. The basic layout, tallest buildings and most famous sights are visible from a distance. That’s where we got to in 2001. Now, we’ve zoomed in. We can see the players that make the city tick: the cleaners and security guards who maintain the buildings, the sewers and power lines connecting distant parts, the police and politicians who oversee the rest. That’s where we are now: a comprehensive 3-D portrait of a dynamic, changing entity, rather than a static, 2-D map.

And just as London is not New York, different types of cells rely on different DNA elements. For example, of the roughly 3 million locations where proteins stick to DNA, just 3,700 are commonly used in every cell examined. Liver cells, skin cells, neurons, embryonic stem cells… all of them use different suites of switches to control their lives. Again, we knew this would be so. Again, it’s the scale and the comprehensiveness that matter.

by Ed Yong, Discover |  Read more:

Will I Live Longer Than My Cat?

Our cat is old. Old, deaf and a bit daft. But, as I steadily head that way myself, I've started to consider him as a role model.

He's over 20, and in the recent unseasonable sunshine has taken to lying corpse-like on the pavement. In a feeble impersonation of Schrodinger's cat, he could be either alive or dead, and the only way to find out is to prod him, as he doesn't respond to shouting.

Last week, he took to doing his death act on top of a bin, and so it looked like he had just been thrown out with the rubbish. He got kidnapped by a concerned cat lover and carted off to the local Blue Cross, and we had to go and bail him out.

Taking each cat year as seven human years makes him over 140 - twice the human three-score-years-and-10 Biblical use-by date. I recently "celebrated" my 59th birthday, which is only around eight cat years and so a relative youth.

Being a statistician, I naturally wonder what proportion of my life has already flitted by, and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) life-tables tell me that, assuming things stay the same as now, an average man my age can expect to live another 23 years - that is, until 82. Still way short of the cat, and suggesting I may have already had 72% of my life. Not encouraging.

But naturally I believe I am healthier than average, just as most people think they are better than average drivers. Of course, I could be unlucky and get knocked down by a bus tomorrow, or be lucky and slog on to 100.

The stats tell me that I have a 1.4% chance of scoring a century and getting a letter from the Queen. In fact, there is at least a 6% chance of the Queen getting a letter from the Queen (or whoever has the job in 2026), but she is not in the least bit average, and has good family precedents, with her mum hitting 101.

Our survival is governed by the "force of mortality" - the wonderfully archaic expression for the chance of dying each year. Each year, an average adult ages, this unavoidable force increases by around 9%, so that every eight years your chance of not making your next birthday roughly doubles.

But as the UK has got safer and healthier, the force-of-mortality has been decreasing for decades, so that life expectancy has been rising at about three months a year - it's odd to think we have been essentially ageing only nine months for each year that passes.

by David Spiegelhalter, BBC | Read more:

Vesper Lynd (Eva Green). Beautiful.
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The Siege of Academe

It’s three o’clock in the afternoon on Easter, and I’m standing on a wooden deck in the Corona Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, looking out toward Nob Hill. A man is cooking large slabs of meat on a gas grill as two dozen people mingle with glasses of bourbon and bottles of beer in the cool, damp breeze blowing in off the ocean. All of these people are would-be movers and shakers in American higher education—the historic, world-leading system that constitutes one of this country’s greatest economic assets—but not one of them is an academic. They’re all tech entrepreneurs. Or, as the local vernacular has it, hackers.

Some of them are the kinds of hackers a college dean could love: folks who have come up with ingenious but polite ways to make campus life work better. Standing over there by the case of Jim Beam, for instance, are the founders of OneSchool, a mobile app that helps students navigate college by offering campus maps, course schedules, phone directories, and the like in one interface. The founders are all computer science majors who dropped out of Penn State last semester. I ask the skinniest and geekiest among them how he joined the company. He was first recruited last spring, he says, when his National Merit Scholarship profile mentioned that he likes to design iPhone apps in his spare time. He’s nineteen years old.

But many of the people here are engaged in business pursuits far more revolutionary in their intentions. That preppy-looking guy near the barbecue? He’s launching a company called Degreed, which aims to upend the traditional monopoly that colleges and universities hold over the minting of professional credentials; he wants to use publicly available data like academic rank and grade inflation to standardize the comparative value of different college degrees, then allow people to add information about what they’ve learned outside of college to their baseline degree “score.” It’s the kind of idea that could end up fizzling out before anyone’s really heard of it, or could, just maybe, have huge consequences for the market in credentials. And that woman standing by the tree? She’s the recent graduate of Columbia University who works for a company called Kno, which is aiming to upset the $8 billion textbook industry with cheaper, better, electronic textbooks delivered through tablet computers. And then there’s the guy standing to her right wearing a black fleece zip-up jacket: five days ago, he announced the creation of the Minerva Project, the “first new elite American university in over a century.”

Last August, Marc Andreessen, the man whose Netscape Web browser ignited the original dot-com boom and who is now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capitalists, wrote a much-discussed op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. His argument was that “software is eating the world.” At a time of low start-up costs and broadly distributed Internet access that allows for massive economies of scale, software has reached a tipping point that will allow it to disrupt industry after industry, in a dynamic epitomized by the recent collapse of Borders under the giant foot of Amazon. And the next industries up for wholesale transformation by software, Andreessen wrote, are health care and education. That, at least, is where he’s aiming his venture money. And where Andreessen goes, others follow. According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companies increased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the huge generator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a particularly fat target right now.

This hype has happened before, of course. Back in the 1990s, when Andreessen made his first millions, many people confidently predicted that the Internet would render brick-and-mortar universities obsolete. It hasn’t happened yet, in part because colleges are a lot more complicated than retail bookstores. Higher education is a publicly subsidized, heavily regulated, culturally entrenched sector that has stubbornly resisted digital rationalization. But the defenders of the ivy-covered walls have never been more nervous about the Internet threat. In June, a panicked board of directors at the University of Virginia fired (and, after widespread outcry, rehired) their president, in part because they worried she was too slow to move Thomas Jefferson’s university into the digital world.

The ongoing carnage in the newspaper industry provides an object lesson of what can happen when a long-established, information-focused industry’s business model is challenged by low-price competitors online. The disruptive power of information technology may be our best hope for curing the chronic college cost disease that is driving a growing number of students into ruinous debt or out of higher education altogether. It may also be an existential threat to institutions that have long played a crucial role in American life.

I’m here at this party and in the Bay Area for the next few days to observe the habits, folkways, and codes of the barbarians at the gate—to see how close they’ve come toward finding business models and technologies that could wreak such havoc on higher education. My guide, and my host at this party—he organized the event for my benefit—is a man named Michael Staton. With sandy-blond hair, blue eyes, and a sunburned complexion, Michael is thirty-one—old by start-up standards—and recently married. He’s the president and “chief evangelist” of Inigral, a company he created five years ago to build college-branded social networks for incoming undergraduates. But just as importantly for my purposes, he’s also one of those people who has a knack for connecting with others, a high-link node in a growing network of education technology entrepreneurs who have set their sights on the mammoth higher education industry.

One of the bedrooms in the house where we’re mingling and drinking was Inigral’s headquarters for the first eight months of its existence, back when the founders were “bootstrapping” the company, which is valleyspeak for growing the business on their own using credit cards, waitering tips, plasma donation proceeds, and other sources that don’t involve the investment dollars that can shoot a start-up toward fame and fortune at the price of diluting the founder’s ownership and control. The longer someone can manage to feed themselves with ramen noodles and keep things going via bootstrapping, the more of their company they’ll ultimately get to keep—unless someone else comes up with the same idea, takes the venture capital (VC) money earlier, and uses it to blow them to smithereens. The start-up culture is full of such tough decisions about money, timing, and power, which are, in their own way, just as complicated and risky as the task of building new businesses that will delight the world and disrupt a trillion-dollar market.

by Kevin Carey, Washington Monthly | Read more:

Jim Buckels
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Blocking the Sun: Study Looks at Costs of 6 Geoengineering Schemes

[ed. It makes my head spin just to think about all the treaty and regulatory approvals needed to secure something like this, not to mention the politics involved in achieving a global buy-in. The sad fact is nothing will be done to ameliorate climate change until we reach some hysterical crisis/tipping point, and by then even geoengineering may be too little, too late.]

As the planet warms and the world continues to emit greenhouse gases at a searing pace, some argue that geoengineering ideas are rapidly becoming attractive, if not downright necessary. For the uninitiated, the Royal Society defines geoengineering as (pdf) "The deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system, in order to moderate global warming." In other words, hack the planet.

One of the two main categories of geoengineering is solar radiation management, or SRM. (The other is the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.) The idea is to mimic what volcanos do naturally, by putting aerosol particles into the stratosphere on a massive scale. For example, when Mount Pinatubo erupted (image, above) in 1991, the cloud that encircled the planet caused an overall cooling of about half a degree. An argument has been raging for years now about the wisdom of creating our own version of a volcanic eruption: Can it be done? Should it be done? What are the risks? What are the benefits? A few countries and research groups have tried to start demonstration projects; even these proof-of-concept exercises have garnered significant backlash from the scientific community as well as the public at large.

Most scientists would agree, though, that geoengineering ideas are at least worth looking into. And one of the primary questions is whether we can afford to do it. A new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters has done athorough cost analysis of the main techniques for SRM—importantly, this is not a cost-benefit analysis, where risks and benefits are included, but simply a look at the costs of putting enough aerosols into the atmosphere. What they found is either encouraging or terrifying, depending on one's feelings about geoengineering: it is, in the grand scheme of things, very, very cheap.

The authors, Justin McClellan, David Keith, and Jay Apt, found six main schemes for SRM:

by Dale Levitan, IEEE Spectrum |  Read more:

Image via D Harlow/USGS

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Understanding Digital Civics

How do people who’ve grown up using the internet engage in civic life? I see great potential and great possible harm from some of these experiments. I worry we’re heading uncritically towards a different way of conceiving of the civic relationships between individuals and governments. But I also think that if we can figure out how to harness these internet-based forms of civic engagement, we might revitalize political participation.

There’s a worthwhile critique of discussions about the internet and civic engagement that asks why we’d impute any special powers to a communication medium. I agree that we are oversimplifying situations when we declare that Facebook overthrew Mubarak or that Chinese authoritarianism cannot survive the rise of Weibo microblogging services. But it would also be a mistake not to take seriously the role of new communications media in understanding civic life. In democratic states, citizens need information about what challenges a government faces and what it’s proposing to do about it to be effective citizens. And citizens need to be able to connect with one another to discuss, debate and propose solutions. What a communications medium makes possible has a shaping influence on civic life.

In the United States, the government made an investment early on in a technology designed to connect citizens so they could govern themselves. This wasn’t the internet, but the postal system, established in the US Constitution, and implemented in a way that encouraged citizens to use the mail, the connective technology of the time, as a civic space. The postal system subsidized the distribution of newspapers, allowing newspaper publishers to trade “exchange copies” with other publishers at no cost, a phenomenon which meant content was often reprinted, with a paper in one state offering perspectives from a distant city. It cost so much less to send a newspaper than a private letter that frugal correspondents sometimes composed letters by placing pinpricks under words in newspaper articles. With costs of newspapers so low, many Americans subscribed to several papers, reading news and opinion from multiple political and geographic perspectives. (I’m leaning heavily on Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media here, both for the historical events and the core insight on media structure and democratic process).

As the structure of the media industry changed, we see some parallel changes in politics. The rise of advertising as a major source of newspaper revenue, replacing subscription, encouraged newspapers to move from partisan, opinionated organs to “objective” papers that sought to report events in a way to attract readers of all political persuasions. Papers increased in size and began covering more national and international events, relying on reports via telegraph to provide information, and published less opinion content. This shift from a multifaceted party press, with a great deal of local color and opinion, to a more nationally focused press coincides with the rise of a strong two party system and the lessening of local influence over political platforms. As broadcast media, and especially television, become dominant media forms, politics becomes synchronized nationally. It’s no longer possible to speak one way in one region, and differently in another – pander to segregationists in the South and you’ll be seen by an audience in the North as well. My friend danah boyd refers to “unseen audiences” in her work on social media – young people writing to their friends on Facebook aren’t always cognizant of future employers, who might read their posts. Politicians quickly became aware of these unseen audiences and changed their rhetoric to appeal to these wider audiences. (...)

The old civics taught us how to identify authority figures to influence and understand processes to lobby for change. A new digital civics teaches us how to raise attention for causes, how to use distributed populations to propose solutions to problems, and how to synchronize supporters around a strategy.

by Ethan Zuckerman, DMLCentral |  Read more:

Image: codyvaldes http://www.flickr.com/photos/codyvaldes/4863401480/