Thursday, March 21, 2013
See No Evil: The Case of Alfred Anaya
Anaya’s customers typically took advantage of this deal when their fiendishly loud subwoofers blew out or their fiberglass speaker boxes developed hairline cracks. But in late January 2009, a man whom Anaya knew only as Esteban called for help with a more exotic product: a hidden compartment that Anaya had installed in his Ford F-150 pickup truck. Over the years, these secret stash spots—or traps, as they’re known in automotive slang—have become a popular luxury item among the wealthy and shady alike. This particular compartment was located behind the truck’s backseat, which Anaya had rigged with a set of hydraulic cylinders linked to the vehicle’s electrical system. The only way to make the seat slide forward and reveal its secret was by pressing and holding four switches simultaneously: two for the power door locks and two for the windows. (...)
The forefather of modern trap making was a French mechanic who went by the name of Claude Marceau (possibly a pseudonym). According to a 1973 Justice Department report, Marceau personally welded 160 pounds of heroin into the frame of a Lancia limousine that was shipped to the US in 1970—a key triumph for the fabled French Connection, the international smuggling ring immortalized in film.
Traps like Marceau’s may be difficult to detect, but they require significant time and expertise to operate. The only way to load and unload one of these “dumb” compartments is by taking a car apart, piece by piece. That makes economic sense for multinational organizations like the French Connection, which infrequently transport massive amounts of narcotics between continents. But domestic traffickers, who must ferry small shipments between cities on a regular basis, can’t sacrifice an entire car every time they make a delivery. They need to be able to store and retrieve their contraband with ease and then reuse the vehicles again and again.
Early drug traffickers stashed their loads in obvious places: wheel wells, spare tires, the nooks of engine blocks. Starting in the early 1980s, however, they switched to what the Drug Enforcement Administration refers to as “urban traps”: medium-size compartments concealed behind electronically controlled facades. The first such stash spots were usually located in the doors of luxury sedans; trap makers, who are often moonlighting auto body specialists, would slice out the door panels and then attach them to the motors that raised and lowered the windows. They soon moved on to building traps in dashboards, seats, and roofs, with button-operated doors secured by magnetic locks. Over time, the magnets gave way to hydraulic cylinders, which made the doors harder to dislodge during police inspections.
By the early 1990s, however, drug traffickers had discovered that these compartments had two major design flaws. The first was that the buttons and switches that controlled the traps’ doors were aftermarket additions to the cars. This made them too easy to locate—police were being trained to look for any widgets that hadn’t been installed on the assembly line.
Second, opening the traps was no great challenge once a cop identified the appropriate button: The compartment’s door would respond to a single press. Sometimes the police would even open traps by accident; a knee or elbow would brush against a button during a vigorous search, and a brick of cocaine would appear as if by magic.
Trap makers responded to the traffickers’ complaints by tapping into the internal electrical systems of cars. They began to connect their compartments to those systems with relays, electromagnetic switches that enable low-power circuits to control higher-power circuits. (Relays are the reason, for example, that the small act of turning an ignition key can start a whole engine.) Some relays won’t let current flow through until several input circuits have been completed—in other words, until several separate actions have been performed. By wiring these switches into cars, trap makers could build compartments that were operated not by aftermarket buttons but by a car’s own factory-installed controls.
by Brendan I. Koerner, Wired | Read more:
Illustration: Paul Pope
When TED Lost Control of Its Crowd
“Wow. Such f---ing bullsh-t.”
No, this is not a snippet from the latest Quentin Tarantino film. It’s Stanford professor Jay Wacker responding, on the Q&A site Quora, to the now-infamous TEDx talk “Vortex-Based Mathematics.”A member had posed the question “Is Randy Powell saying anything in his 2010 TEDxCharlotte talk, or is it just total nonsense?” Wacker, a particle physicist, was unambiguous: “I am a theoretical physicist who uses (and teaches) the technical meaning of many of the jargon terms that he’s throwing out. And he is simply doing a random word association with the terms. Basically, he’s either (1) insane, (2) a huckster going for fame or money, or (3) doing a Sokal’s hoax on TED. I’d bet equal parts 1 & 2.”
Powell’s talk had been given in September 2010, at what was one of numerous local TEDx gatherings spun off by TED, a nonprofit that puts on highly respected global conferences about ideas. But the talk went relatively unnoticed until the spring of 2012, when a few influential science bloggers discovered it—and excoriated it. One dared his readers to see how much of the talk they could get through before they had to be “loaded into an ambulance with an aneurysm.” Another simply described it as “sweet merciful crap.” By August the uproar had gone mainstream, as other questionable TEDx content was uncovered. The New Republic wrote, “TED is no longer a responsible curator of ideas ‘worth spreading.’ Instead it has become something ludicrous.” As others piled on, TED staffers called Powell and asked him to send the research backing up his claims. He never did.
The TEDxCharlotte talk, which had received tremendous applause when delivered, was one of thousands produced annually by an extended community of people who neither get paid by nor officially work for TED but who are nonetheless capable of damaging its brand.
When it was founded, in 1984, TED (which stands for “Technology, Entertainment, and Design”) brought together a few hundred people in a single annual conference in California. Today, TED is not just an organizer of private conferences; it’s a global phenomenon with $45 million in revenues. In 2006 the nonprofit decided to make all its talks available free on the internet. (They are now also translated—by volunteers—into more than 90 languages.) Three years later it decided to further democratize the idea-spreading process by letting licensees use its technology and brand platform. This would allow anyone, anywhere, to manage and stage local, independent TEDx events. Licenses are free, but event organizers must apply for them and submit to light vetting. Since 2009 some 5,000 events have been held around the world. (Disclosure: I spoke at the main TED event in February this year.) (...)
Crowds will organize themselves far faster than you could manage, which is great when they’re holding events for you around the world—like TEDxKibera and TEDxAntarcticPeninsula—but not so great when they’re setting up ones that feature “experts” in pseudoscience topics like “plasmatics,” crystal healing, and Egyptian psychoaromatherapy, all of which were presented at TEDxValenciaWomen in December 2012. That conference was described by one disappointed viewer as “a mockery...that hurt, in this order, TED, Valencia, women, science, and common sense.” Within 24 hours commentators on Reddit had picked up the charge; by the next day more than 5,000 people had weighed in on Reddit, Twitter, or other social channels.
Two months earlier, in October 2012, TED had removed Randy Powell’s “Vortex-Based Mathematics” video and had begun to respond to public concerns about that particular talk on a few influential websites like Quora. But those small steps did not address the fundamental problem: The TED name had become associated with bad content, as the chortle-inducing lineup of TEDxValenciaWomen made clear. People who didn’t even know the specifics of those situations but had grown to dislike what TED represented used the occasion to trash the brand—both for its perceived elitism and, somewhat paradoxically, for dumbing down ideas. An angry mob was forming. The dialogue was mean. And, organizationally, it was life threatening because the very premise of TED was being questioned.
by Nilofer Merchant, HBR | Read more:
Artwork: Jacob Hashimoto, Forests Collapsed Upon Forests, 2009, acrylic, paper, thread, bamboo, wood, Martha Otero Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Curtis Steinback
We Really Don't Own Our Stuff Anymore
We live in a digital age, and even the physical goods we buy are complex. Copyright is impacting more people than ever before because the line between hardware and software, physical and digital has blurred.
The issue goes beyond cellphone unlocking, because once we buy an object — any object — we should own it. We should be able to lift the hood, unlock it, modify it, repair it … without asking for permission from the manufacturer.
But we really don’t own our stuff anymore (at least not fully); the manufacturers do. Because modifying modern objects requires access to information: code, service manuals, error codes, and diagnostic tools. Modern cars are part horsepower, part high-powered computer. Microwave ovens are a combination of plastic and microcode. Silicon permeates and powers almost everything we own.
This is a property rights issue, and current copyright law gets it backwards, turning regular people — like students, researchers, and small business owners — into criminals. Fortune 500 telecom manufacturer Avaya, for example, is known for suing service companies, accusing them of violating copyright for simply using a password to log in to their phone systems. That’s right: typing in a password is considered “reproducing copyrighted material.”
Manufacturers have systematically used copyright in this manner over the past 20 years to limit our access to information. Technology has moved too fast for copyright laws to keep pace, so corporations have been exploiting the lag to create information monopolies at our expense and for their profit. After years of extensions and so-called improvements, copyright has turned Mickey Mouse into a monster who can never die.
It hasn’t always been that way. Copyright laws were originally designed to protect creativity and promote innovation. But now, they are doing exactly the opposite: They’re being used to keep independent shops from fixing new cars. They’re making it almost impossible for farmers to maintain their equipment. And, as we’ve seen in the past few weeks, they’re preventing regular people from unlocking their own cellphones.
This isn’t an issue that only affects the digerati; farmers are bearing the brunt as well. Kerry Adams, a family farmer in Santa Maria, California, recently bought two transplanter machines for north of $100,000 apiece. They broke down soon afterward, and he had to fly a factory technician out to fix them.
Because manufacturers have copyrighted the service manuals, local mechanics can’t fix modern equipment. And today’s equipment — packed with sensors and electronics — is too complex to repair without them. That’s a problem for farmers, who can’t afford to pay the dealer’s high maintenance fees for fickle equipment.
Adams gave up on getting his transplanters fixed; it was just too expensive to keep flying technicians out to his farm. Now, the two transplanters sit idle, and he can’t use them to support his farm and his family.
This isn’t an issue that only affects the digerati.
God may have made a farmer, but copyright law doesn’t let him make a living.
by Kyle Wiens, Wired | Read more:
Image: Hugh MacLeod / gapingvoid ltd
Becoming the All-Terrain Human
Come winter, when most elite ultrarunners keep running, Jornet puts away his trail-running shoes for six months and takes up ski-mountaineering racing, which basically amounts to running up and around large mountains on alpine skis. In this sport too, Jornet reigns supreme: he has been the overall World Cup champion three of the last four winters. (...)
Jornet has won dozens of mountain footraces up to 100 miles in length and six world titles in Skyrunning, a series of races of varying distances held on billy-goat terrain. “Other Top 5 or 10 ultramarathoners can show up for a race, and he’ll just be jogging along, biding his time, enjoying their company until it’s time to go,” Bryon Powell, the editor in chief of the Web site iRunFar.com, told me. In the longest races, which can last 24 hours, he’s been known to best the competition by an hour or more. Lauri van Houten, executive director of the International Skyrunning Federation, calls Jornet “God on earth.” (...)
Even among top athletes, Jornet is an outlier. Take his VO2 max, a measure of a person’s ability to consume oxygen and a factor in determining aerobic endurance. An average male’s VO2 max is 45 to 55 ml/kg/min. A college-level 10,000-meter runner’s max is typically 60 to 70. Jornet’s VO2 max is 89.5 — one of the highest recorded, according to Daniel Brotons Cuixart, a sports specialist at the University of Barcelona who tested Jornet last fall. Jornet simply has more men in the engine room, shoveling coal. “I’ve not seen any athletes higher than the low 80s, and we’ve tested some elite athletes,” says Edward Coyle, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, who has studied the limits of human exercise performance for three decades.
by Christopher Soloman, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Levon Biss for The New York Times
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Desalinization with Less Energy
The process, officials and engineers at Lockheed Martin Corp say, would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.
Because the sheets of pure carbon known as graphene are so thin - just one atom in thickness - it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water, they said.
The development could spare underdeveloped countries from having to build exotic, expensive pumping stations needed in plants that use a desalination process called reverse osmosis.
"It's 500 times thinner than the best filter on the market today and a thousand times stronger," said John Stetson, the engineer who has been working on the idea. "The energy that's required and the pressure that's required to filter salt is approximately 100 times less." (...)
Stetson, who began working on the issue in 2007, said if the new filter material, known as Perforene, was compared to the thickness of a piece of paper, the nearest comparable filter for extracting salt from seawater would be the thickness of three reams of paper - more than half a foot thick.
"It looks like chicken wire under a microscope, if you could get an electron microscope picture of it," he said. "It's all little carbon atoms tied together in a diaphanous, smooth film that's beautiful and continuous. But it's one atom thick and it's a thousand time stronger than steel."
by David Alexander, Reuters | Read more:
h/t and image via: 3 Quarks Daily
A Box of Puppies
In reality, I was deeply dog-less. Until I was six, I had no pets at all, despite trying to catch rabbits in a net at the park and lure turtles with Sun Chips at other people’s country houses. My first (and worst) pet was a newt that choked to death on a bad worm. Next came a hairless cat my mother bought on Greene Street. Both were poor substitutes for the dog I wanted but couldn’t have. We didn’t have a proper home. We lived in what was essentially one big room, on Broadway. And all my promises to care for the dog were futile: I wasn’t even allowed to go outside alone.
My parents’ childhood dogs loomed large in our family mythology. My mother had been the proud owner of Cindy, a shepherd-collie mix with serious aggression issues and a pathological obsession with Ritz crackers. She was tied to a tree all day on the lawn outside my mother’s neo-Tudor house. At the age of six, my mother was both her captor and her protector. One of the first sentences I learned was “Cindy was a bad dog.”
A few states away, my father had General George Armstrong Custer (General for short), a runt dachshund whose claim to fame was that he’d once eaten an entire eighteen-pound ham. For days thereafter, General’s gut dragged along the ground. When it was really hot, he liked to run to the riverbank and roll in dead eels. He survived a German-shepherd attack in which he lost part of an ear. He died at eighteen, curled beneath my grandfather’s desk.
Both these dogs seemed to me like outcasts, kooks, pains in the ass who the adults secretly wished would just succumb to their own vices already. And so I concluded that dogs were not man’s best friend but, rather, the mischievous sidekicks of misunderstood children.
When I was fifteen, I took the box-of-puppies fantasy into my own hands. Walking down the main drag of Brooklyn Heights, where we now lived, I stopped to pet a tan mutt, the mascot of an animal-rescue group that had set up a booth at the corner of Montague and Hicks. As I scratched the scarred head of a sleepy “chow mix,” the group explained its mission: to end animal homelessness in our borough.
“My parents won’t let me have a dog,” I said.
“Well, maybe you can foster.”
I don’t remember exactly who the person in charge of the booth was. There were several girls and a man. The situation was so oddly traumatic that in my mind the man is played by the character actor Elias Koteas, of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” fame. I do remember, though, that what came next was a very bad afternoon. It involved my dreams coming true and the empty dread that often follows that experience. I climbed into a van with Elias Koteas, who told me that there was a pit-bull mother dead (in a box!) in a parking lot near the Gowanus Canal and three puppies that desperately needed a foster home. As he drove me out of my neighborhood, away from the bagel shops and the squash players, and into industrial Brooklyn, I suddenly recalled my mother’s countless warnings about “climbing into vans with strangers.” Somehow, this situation seemed outside the bounds of her edict. Just think of the puppies—three of them, he had said, their bodies cold, starving. In the van, one of his colleagues, a silent frizzy-haired woman, filled dog bowls with dirty water. I could hear it sloshing as we rumbled down Atlantic Avenue.
It was dusk by the time we reached the parking lot. It had started to drizzle. Elias Koteas told me to follow him, and I did, to a shipping crate in the corner of the lot. I peered in. The mother wasn’t dead. She lifted her head with tremendous effort, sad-eyed and gaunt, like Fantine, in “Les Misérables.” A mother in a desperate situation. Maybe that’s why she didn’t even growl when I reached in and took her babies, one by one.
They were barely puppies. More like kidney beans, slick and cool, eyes still sealed shut. They whimpered, but quietly, no louder than baby birds. Elias Koteas urged me back to the van. He told me to buy bottles and a heating pad and “make sure they’re warm all night.” I was dropped off near a subway stop.
by Lena Dunham, New Yorker | Read more:
Michael Hedges
[ed. One of the most innovative acoustic guitar players, ever. First video shows MH early in his career busking outside of somewhere (love how people just ignore him), the second is the full video documentary from the Artist Profile's series.]
The Carp Must Die
The Asian carp is a skittish fish, averaging about two feet long and 10 pounds apiece. When startled by something, say a boat’s motor, it’s prone to jump up to 10 feet in the air. So when Blake Ruebush, Levi Solomon, and Chase Holtman, an ecology team with the Illinois Natural History Survey, head out on an early October carp-hunting mission, they do so with caution, and armor.
Ruebush’s steering console has been modified with a carp-proof Plexiglas windshield and a side wall of mesh netting to guard the throttle and steering wheel from aerial impact. The team considered wearing helmets but dismissed the idea as too dorky. Instead, despite the humidity, Ruebush and Solomon wear waders to repel the slime. Holtman, a burly-looking guy, has gone the other way, opting for a T-shirt, shorts, and Crocs. “I’ll shower afterwards,” he says. “People look at you funny when you reek of blood and fish.”
As they head out from Havana, Ill., and up a side channel of the lower Illinois River, the water starts to churn with agitated fish, and the boat’s hull thumps from underwater collisions. Then the fish start flying—dozens of them, rising like a storm cloud. One ricochets off the boat’s guardrail; another leaps in from behind the boat, getting tangled in the motor’s steering cords. The air is so thick with fish that some bash together mid-flight, showering everyone with a snot-like splatter.
The fish come in at close to 30 miles per hour. That’s enough to cause bruises and broken noses—even concussions have been recorded—but Ruebush and his crew seem unworried. “This is Ground Zero for Asian carp,” Ruebush says, steering forward as his buddies stand at the front of the boat. They won’t have to endure the barrage much longer, though. They’re about to electrocute all the fish.
Solomon and Holtman lower two 10-foot booms attached to a generator capable of producing 5,000 watts. Ruebush starts the generator’s engine. It’s like a giant underwater Taser. As Ruebush motors ahead, fish that swim into the field will be stunned, then scooped off the surface by Solomon and Holtman with dip nets and dumped in a tub in the center of the boat, where they are identified, measured, weighed, and counted.
As the generator goes hot, they jump even higher. A fish hurdles the guardrail, skittering to a stop at Ruebush’s feet. “Hey! There’s a volunteer. We count those, too,” he adds, chuckling. Within a minute the water quiets and unconscious fish begin rising to the surface.
The electrocution, one of four that will occur in the area today, will last 15 minutes and cover about 200 yards of shoreline. INHS runs thousands of these “fish community assessment” collections a year—a mix of shock fishing and other techniques such as netting—to track changes occurring in the river. The group is looking for two different species of Asian carp. The jumpers surrounding the boat are Asian silver carp. The Asian bighead swims closer to the bottom of the river and is harder to zap. Both are filter feeders and thrive on plankton, a flotsam of algae and other microorganisms.
In the 1970s, fish farmers in mostly Southern states began importing Asian carp from China to help clean their commercial ponds. Some escaped in floods, making their way into the Missouri River, the Mississippi River, and the Illinois and Ohio River basins. They breed fast, grow fast, and eat piggishly. Females can spawn up to three times a year, releasing millions of eggs per drop. Young fish easily eat their weight in food daily, while adults can consume up to 20 percent of their body weight. That yields silver carp as big as 50 pounds and bigheads up to 100 pounds. After their first few months, the fish outgrow their natural predators in the river system. And they pick it clean.
Thanks to the interconnectedness of America’s waterways, Asian carp now infest more than 23 states, mostly in the Midwest. But they are not yet in the Great Lakes, home to a $7 billion fishing and $9 billion boating industry, according to the Great Lakes Boating Federation. Havana and the 210 river miles north to Chicago represent the last stand in the battle against the carp.
by Ben Paynter, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Image: Minnesota Public Radio
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
2 Cuisines, Both Full of Themselves: Chez Sardine
One major theme of modern restaurants is what we might call Asian stoner food. This is the cuisines of Japan, Korea and other places as seen through bloodshot eyes, the cravings of a hipster whose late-night munchies send him out in search of tacos stuffed with bulgogi, pigs’ tails cooked in root beer and the like.
Another competing theme is fat-on-fat cuisine. It challenges our notions of appropriate caloric intake, treats foie gras as a sacrament and has rarely seen an ingredient that couldn’t be improved by cooking it with some part of the pig.
If these styles were two friends of yours, you would think they were both narcissistic, a little dangerous and more fun to be around than almost anybody else you knew. And you would pray that they never, ever hooked up.
But hook up they have, at a friendly and demented Greenwich Village tavern called Chez Sardine that Gabriel Stulman opened just after Thanksgiving. Mr. Stulman, an increasingly busy restaurateur, described Chez Sardine as “a very inauthentic take on a Japanese izakaya.” This is the kind of izakaya where a bite-size piece of hamachi sushi is crunchy with fried pork rinds, and where sashimi is slipped into a stack of flapjacks.
For connoisseurs of Asian stoner cuisine, this will sound like high-grade chronic. But the chef, and one of Mr. Stulman’s partners in Chez Sardine, is Mehdi Brunet-Benkritly, who spent four years at Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal, the Stanford of fat-on-fat cooking. So this is also the kind of izakaya where you can order a grilled cheese sandwich stuffed with foie gras, garnished with cucumbers pickled in rice-wine vinegar.
The first face you see when you walk into Chez Sardine is Pat Morita’s in a framed close-up from “The Karate Kid.” Mr. Morita, who spent part of his childhood during World War II in an internment camp in Arizona, holds his chopsticks midair, midlesson, although the lesson here is a nuanced one about the strange things that happen when Japanese culture comes to America.
by Pete Wells, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Rebecca Greenfield for The New York Times
User-Renters in SimCity
[ed. Addresses the concept of ownership and what it means when computers and software are more dependent on cloud-based computing: music, books, games, etc. Be sure to click on this link.]
It was a disaster for EA, its distributor. Within hours the game blogs were humming, and the comments sections were humming even more. People had paid for the game; many people had pre-ordered it. Everything should have worked. People were angry. The problem quickly became obvious: SimCity’s Always-On DRM was gumming up the works. To clarify: the game requires a constant internet connection to play, with the game syncing to the servers every twenty minutes or so. The servers were overloaded. When people were able to connect, the game was frequently unplayable. Some games simply didn’t unlock on time.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t anywhere near the first time this very thing has happened. Games with primarily online components have often run into server problems at launch, with the issues resolving within a few days, after everyone has calmed down a bit. No big deal, people have said. This is just the new face of gaming. It’s growing pains. Things will sort themselves out.
Then other things started to come out. EA released statements to the effect that the game would be nigh-impossible to reengineer to run offline, because “with the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud.” Gamers responded that this was probably ridiculous bullshit, but we didn’t have proof of this until the last twenty-four hours, wherein a modder was able to run the non-regional version of the game offline without any significant issues. A Maxis insider has confirmed this. Clearly a “significant amount of engineering” isn’t actually required in order to make the game playable without an internet connection. The DRM that was presented by the game’s distributor as a fundamental part of the game’s function is not fundamental, practically speaking.
So either EA was misinformed by Maxis, or they’re lying.
Why should we care about this? Most simply, because it’s a continuation of an ongoing trend: The recategorization of technology owners as technology users, of the possession of private property transformed into the leasing of property owned by others, with all the restrictions on use that come along with it. And what’s most worrying about this are all the ways in which we as owner-users are being encouraged to view this as a normal part of our relationship with our stuff. When the very concept of “our stuff” is up for grabs.
by Sarah Wanenchak, Cyborgology | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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