Sunday, June 8, 2014
From Teledildonics to Interactive Porn: the Future of Sex in a Digital Age
Can the awkwardness of modern dating be escaped by moving one step further into the virtual? Not sex with someone you know, or sex with someone you don't know – but sex with someone you will never know? A site called Red Light Center has anything up to two million users. It's a massive multiplayer online reality (an MMO), like Second Life or World Of Warcraft, only with blaring hair-rock and a 1990s Vegas vibe. It is pretty crude on first examination, but is clearly working for the many people who have signed up for an online presence here.
Red Light Center works on a freemium model: you can wander around for free, chatting to other users, or dancing in the nightclub (not advised). But if you want to be able to get your kit off and your freak on you need to pay for VIP membership. It also has an internal economy with its own currency, "Rays", which have a (pretty stable) real-world exchange value. Real and virtual goods and services are for sale. There's a Camgirl Alley, where you can steer your avatar for interactive pornography. You can buy clothes, shoes and imaginary property. And if you can't persuade another player to sleep with you, there are others who will have avatar sex with you for Rays.
"There are professional working girls and some of them make quite a good living," says Brian Shuster, CEO of the Red Light Center's parent company Utherverse. "Even if you're only charging two or three dollars a time for virtual sex, that can quite quickly add up." These working girls pay rent to Utherverse for a place in the virtual bordello.
The site also hosts around 100 virtual weddings a month. "There's a justice of the peace, wedding planners, DJs, afterparties and so on," says Shuster. "These are third-party entrepreneurs. We have people that make $60,000-70,000 a year doing wedding dress design, DJ services or wedding planning services online."
Just like in the real world, you generally need to chat people up first. "A new user shows up and says: 'I want sex.' And the community will explain to this user that this is not appropriate behaviour here: we have our own set of standards and social mores, and if you don't adhere to those you're going to get ignored by everybody."
Are all these technological advances creating something authentically new, or simply let existing impulses flourish? The distinction may not be as clear as all that. Consider infidelity. For most people, having a partner use pornography in private probably wouldn't constitute infidelity. But where would you draw the line on interactive pornography? Is phone sex with a prerecorded chatline pornography, but phone sex with another person infidelity? If a virtual sex game – such as Thrixxx's 3D Sex Villa, where your avatar is going to have sex with a bot – isn't a problem, is the same true of something like Red Light Center, in which your avatar is having sex with an avatar controlled by another human being?
Then there's cybersex with someone who can bring you to orgasm by remote control: does that count as cheating? The remote-sex technologies sometimes called "teledildonics" are, in early crude forms, already with us. With names like Mojowijo, Lovepalz and RealTouch, these range from force-feedback vibrators plugged into your Nintendo, to self-lubricating artificial vaginas that – in sync with counterpart units on the other side of the world – will rub and squeeze to climax any penis you might be brave enough to put into them. Durex even briefly promoted his 'n' hers vibrating pants, or "funderwear", that could be controlled with a smartphone.
"We really are on the cusp of being able to have virtual sex that is damn close to the real thing," says Indiana University's Bryant Paul. And if anyone's in a position to know, it's him. Professor Paul teaches in the telecommunications department but his specialism is sex, media and new technology. "I go to parties and people are like, 'You're the porn professor!'" he laughs. "Everyone wants to talk to you. But in the final analysis you're studying something that goes right back to the beginning of the species, prior to the species. If you look at it in terms of understanding how we use media and technology to do something that we've always tried to do – get relationships, find mates – that's really very interesting. We are stone-age brains in the information age. Media sex is fast food for the stone-age brain."
Professor Paul has been married since 2001 and has daughters of eight and two. "People ask my wife: he's studying pornography – how do you deal with that? The way we always put it is: we like to eat. It's a job. I don't think people would look at my sex life or my media habits and think, wow, he consumes a lot of pornography. We would all be foolish to think that, while watching it clinically, you won't see things that are arousing – but it's possible to dissociate those things."
On the case in hand, he says: "If you look at interactive sex technology, there's a triple-A engine: affordability, accessibility and anonymity. Add to that that it augments what's possible: you can get more pleasure, more vibration, more thrust. A person who has a five inch penis can operate a 10 inch teledildonic device and see what that does to a person as they operate it. So that augmentation issue is very important: it offers the opportunity to improve, to augment the type of sex that people are having." He adds: "I've yet to meet a person that can vibrate at 120hz. And there's something to be said for that, you know? That the technology is potentially able to offer a level of pleasure that is higher than the real thing. That's going to have real ramifications for what people expect."
Serious work is being done on these augmentations. "The big condom companies are all getting into the vibration market," Paul says. "They're trying to find out the frequencies for optimal sexual response. I'm not at liberty to discuss the actual frequencies. [He is a consultant with Trojan on these experiments.] But, yes: there are frequencies that are more pleasurable than others. And it's not just about frequencies – it's about force amplitude. It matters about the size of the weight in the vibrator.
"What's cool is that we're figuring this stuff out. And these companies are now working, too, on the perfect substitute for skin. They're hiring researchers to say: how can we now make more perfect fake genitals? We're getting to a state where the science of sexual pleasure – synthetic sexual pleasure – is really taking off."
This sort of development, Paul points out, could have significant implications down the line for the way in which sex work is considered. "If you've got a woman or a man and you can go online and pay them to have sex with you over the internet, the spread of disease, and other harms, are gone. So how do you regulate that? Do you regulate that? Is there a need to?"
Red Light Center works on a freemium model: you can wander around for free, chatting to other users, or dancing in the nightclub (not advised). But if you want to be able to get your kit off and your freak on you need to pay for VIP membership. It also has an internal economy with its own currency, "Rays", which have a (pretty stable) real-world exchange value. Real and virtual goods and services are for sale. There's a Camgirl Alley, where you can steer your avatar for interactive pornography. You can buy clothes, shoes and imaginary property. And if you can't persuade another player to sleep with you, there are others who will have avatar sex with you for Rays."There are professional working girls and some of them make quite a good living," says Brian Shuster, CEO of the Red Light Center's parent company Utherverse. "Even if you're only charging two or three dollars a time for virtual sex, that can quite quickly add up." These working girls pay rent to Utherverse for a place in the virtual bordello.
The site also hosts around 100 virtual weddings a month. "There's a justice of the peace, wedding planners, DJs, afterparties and so on," says Shuster. "These are third-party entrepreneurs. We have people that make $60,000-70,000 a year doing wedding dress design, DJ services or wedding planning services online."
Just like in the real world, you generally need to chat people up first. "A new user shows up and says: 'I want sex.' And the community will explain to this user that this is not appropriate behaviour here: we have our own set of standards and social mores, and if you don't adhere to those you're going to get ignored by everybody."
Are all these technological advances creating something authentically new, or simply let existing impulses flourish? The distinction may not be as clear as all that. Consider infidelity. For most people, having a partner use pornography in private probably wouldn't constitute infidelity. But where would you draw the line on interactive pornography? Is phone sex with a prerecorded chatline pornography, but phone sex with another person infidelity? If a virtual sex game – such as Thrixxx's 3D Sex Villa, where your avatar is going to have sex with a bot – isn't a problem, is the same true of something like Red Light Center, in which your avatar is having sex with an avatar controlled by another human being?
Then there's cybersex with someone who can bring you to orgasm by remote control: does that count as cheating? The remote-sex technologies sometimes called "teledildonics" are, in early crude forms, already with us. With names like Mojowijo, Lovepalz and RealTouch, these range from force-feedback vibrators plugged into your Nintendo, to self-lubricating artificial vaginas that – in sync with counterpart units on the other side of the world – will rub and squeeze to climax any penis you might be brave enough to put into them. Durex even briefly promoted his 'n' hers vibrating pants, or "funderwear", that could be controlled with a smartphone.
"We really are on the cusp of being able to have virtual sex that is damn close to the real thing," says Indiana University's Bryant Paul. And if anyone's in a position to know, it's him. Professor Paul teaches in the telecommunications department but his specialism is sex, media and new technology. "I go to parties and people are like, 'You're the porn professor!'" he laughs. "Everyone wants to talk to you. But in the final analysis you're studying something that goes right back to the beginning of the species, prior to the species. If you look at it in terms of understanding how we use media and technology to do something that we've always tried to do – get relationships, find mates – that's really very interesting. We are stone-age brains in the information age. Media sex is fast food for the stone-age brain."
Professor Paul has been married since 2001 and has daughters of eight and two. "People ask my wife: he's studying pornography – how do you deal with that? The way we always put it is: we like to eat. It's a job. I don't think people would look at my sex life or my media habits and think, wow, he consumes a lot of pornography. We would all be foolish to think that, while watching it clinically, you won't see things that are arousing – but it's possible to dissociate those things."
On the case in hand, he says: "If you look at interactive sex technology, there's a triple-A engine: affordability, accessibility and anonymity. Add to that that it augments what's possible: you can get more pleasure, more vibration, more thrust. A person who has a five inch penis can operate a 10 inch teledildonic device and see what that does to a person as they operate it. So that augmentation issue is very important: it offers the opportunity to improve, to augment the type of sex that people are having." He adds: "I've yet to meet a person that can vibrate at 120hz. And there's something to be said for that, you know? That the technology is potentially able to offer a level of pleasure that is higher than the real thing. That's going to have real ramifications for what people expect."
Serious work is being done on these augmentations. "The big condom companies are all getting into the vibration market," Paul says. "They're trying to find out the frequencies for optimal sexual response. I'm not at liberty to discuss the actual frequencies. [He is a consultant with Trojan on these experiments.] But, yes: there are frequencies that are more pleasurable than others. And it's not just about frequencies – it's about force amplitude. It matters about the size of the weight in the vibrator.
"What's cool is that we're figuring this stuff out. And these companies are now working, too, on the perfect substitute for skin. They're hiring researchers to say: how can we now make more perfect fake genitals? We're getting to a state where the science of sexual pleasure – synthetic sexual pleasure – is really taking off."
This sort of development, Paul points out, could have significant implications down the line for the way in which sex work is considered. "If you've got a woman or a man and you can go online and pay them to have sex with you over the internet, the spread of disease, and other harms, are gone. So how do you regulate that? Do you regulate that? Is there a need to?"
by Sam Leith, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Sara Morris for the Guardian
Delphi: A History of the Centre of the Ancient World
In 356BC, the site of the Delphic oracle, hidden in the folds of Mount Parnassus, between the Corycian cave and the Castalian spring, was invaded by the army of neighbouring Phocis and placed under military occupation. The Phocians had been provoked to this intervention by ruinous fines imposed by the administrators of the shrine for alleged crimes against religion. So began the Third Sacred War, waged principally by Thebes, which at the time enjoyed the status of top nation in Greece. The Thebans had achieved this hegemony by ending centuries of Spartan supremacy in one decisive battle at Leuctra. But the Phocians, a community of goatherds and sheep farmers, proved more resilient. Somehow or other they hung on at Delphi for 10 years while the Thebans wore themselves out trying to knock them off their sacred perch.
One of the reasons the Phocians were able to resist for so long is that they were sitting on an enormous pile of treasure. It had been acquired by the sanctuary over many centuries as gifts from visitors grateful for (or hopeful of) divine favour and/or anxious to impress other visitors to the shrine with monuments to their piety and wealth. Around 550BC, Croesus, the king of Lydia, in western Turkey, had, it was said, ordered a gigantic bonfire of vanities – couches inlaid with silver and gold, goblets, fancy cloaks and so on – and turned the precious alloy into ingots that he shipped to Delphi to provide a shiny pedestal for a statue of a solid gold lion weighing 240kg. To this he added two gigantic urns of precious metal – one gold, one silver (with a capacity, we are reliably informed, of 5,000 gallons) – that were placed on either side of the entrance to the temple, and various other items of gold and silver plate, a golden statue of a woman over five foot high, said to be an image of a cook who had saved him from poisoning, and his wife's elaborate necklaces and girdles. The administrators were careful to maintain catalogues of the properties with which they had been entrusted, with details of weights and measurements inscribed on stone for all to see.
Almost exactly 200 years later, the Phocians melted and minted Croesus's golden offerings to fund war-machines – battlefield catapults – and an army of mercenaries to man them. A contemporary pamphlet, "On the Treasures Plundered from Delphi", gives a sense of the outrage felt by the rest of the Greeks at the Phocian occupation. The pamphlet's author accuses Phocian generals of using these precious objects given to Apollo by cities whose years of grandeur were now a distant memory, some of them actually extinct, to buy sexual favours: "to the flute-girl Bromias, Phavullos gave a silver tankard, a votive offering of the people of Phocaea; to Pharsalia the dancing-girl, Philomelus gave a crown of golden laurel, a gift of the people of Lampsacus".
Some cities had paid for elaborate temple-like treasuries to try to guard their precious gifts from thieves like this. The earliest was built in about 650BC by the Corinthians; one of the most ornate and spectacular was erected by the people of Siphnos, an Aegean community of a couple of thousand people. They had discovered a rich seam of silver on their tiny island and decided it might be worth investing in a little Apollonian insurance. By the time of Herodotus, even Croesus's spectacular golden gifts were locked away in the treasuries of the Corinthians and the Clazomenaeans.
And so the material fabric of the sanctuary burgeoned, until it came to look like a fantastic mountain village where the houses were of marble and the inhabitants an assortment of images and objects in bronze and silver, ivory and gold.
As well as temple-like treasuries there were also temples proper, of which the most important was the temple of Apollo himself. This was the symbolic hub of the entire complex and contained within it the omphalos, or umbilicus, the mysterious belly-button stone, said to be the stone swallowed by Cronus in the belief that it was his son Zeus, and placed by Zeus, it having been in the meantime regurgitated, in a position of honour at the point at which two eagles sent in opposite directions had met: the perfect centre of the world. It was also the place from which the Pythia, the oracle priestess, spoke, perched on a tall bronze cooking pot, her legs dangling over the edge.
In fact nobody is sure exactly how Delphi produced its oracles. Pious discretion may have inhibited close description, or the process may have been too banal to bother with. Most of our evidence comes from the Roman period, centuries after the oracle's heyday, or from hostile Christian sources anxious to differentiate pagan prophecy from their own divine revelations. But a number of things are clear: Apollo was the "seer" (mantis), the Pythia was a vessel through whom Apollo spoke, the "seer's representative or stand-in" (promantis).
She made her divine connection only once a month, only nine months a year and only if the omens were good. Since consultation took place on only nine days a year at most, there must have been long queues and disappointments before the priestess had spoken a word. This would explain the fierce rivalries and jealousy surrounding the honour of queue-jumping.
One of the reasons the Phocians were able to resist for so long is that they were sitting on an enormous pile of treasure. It had been acquired by the sanctuary over many centuries as gifts from visitors grateful for (or hopeful of) divine favour and/or anxious to impress other visitors to the shrine with monuments to their piety and wealth. Around 550BC, Croesus, the king of Lydia, in western Turkey, had, it was said, ordered a gigantic bonfire of vanities – couches inlaid with silver and gold, goblets, fancy cloaks and so on – and turned the precious alloy into ingots that he shipped to Delphi to provide a shiny pedestal for a statue of a solid gold lion weighing 240kg. To this he added two gigantic urns of precious metal – one gold, one silver (with a capacity, we are reliably informed, of 5,000 gallons) – that were placed on either side of the entrance to the temple, and various other items of gold and silver plate, a golden statue of a woman over five foot high, said to be an image of a cook who had saved him from poisoning, and his wife's elaborate necklaces and girdles. The administrators were careful to maintain catalogues of the properties with which they had been entrusted, with details of weights and measurements inscribed on stone for all to see.Almost exactly 200 years later, the Phocians melted and minted Croesus's golden offerings to fund war-machines – battlefield catapults – and an army of mercenaries to man them. A contemporary pamphlet, "On the Treasures Plundered from Delphi", gives a sense of the outrage felt by the rest of the Greeks at the Phocian occupation. The pamphlet's author accuses Phocian generals of using these precious objects given to Apollo by cities whose years of grandeur were now a distant memory, some of them actually extinct, to buy sexual favours: "to the flute-girl Bromias, Phavullos gave a silver tankard, a votive offering of the people of Phocaea; to Pharsalia the dancing-girl, Philomelus gave a crown of golden laurel, a gift of the people of Lampsacus".
Some cities had paid for elaborate temple-like treasuries to try to guard their precious gifts from thieves like this. The earliest was built in about 650BC by the Corinthians; one of the most ornate and spectacular was erected by the people of Siphnos, an Aegean community of a couple of thousand people. They had discovered a rich seam of silver on their tiny island and decided it might be worth investing in a little Apollonian insurance. By the time of Herodotus, even Croesus's spectacular golden gifts were locked away in the treasuries of the Corinthians and the Clazomenaeans.
And so the material fabric of the sanctuary burgeoned, until it came to look like a fantastic mountain village where the houses were of marble and the inhabitants an assortment of images and objects in bronze and silver, ivory and gold.
As well as temple-like treasuries there were also temples proper, of which the most important was the temple of Apollo himself. This was the symbolic hub of the entire complex and contained within it the omphalos, or umbilicus, the mysterious belly-button stone, said to be the stone swallowed by Cronus in the belief that it was his son Zeus, and placed by Zeus, it having been in the meantime regurgitated, in a position of honour at the point at which two eagles sent in opposite directions had met: the perfect centre of the world. It was also the place from which the Pythia, the oracle priestess, spoke, perched on a tall bronze cooking pot, her legs dangling over the edge.
In fact nobody is sure exactly how Delphi produced its oracles. Pious discretion may have inhibited close description, or the process may have been too banal to bother with. Most of our evidence comes from the Roman period, centuries after the oracle's heyday, or from hostile Christian sources anxious to differentiate pagan prophecy from their own divine revelations. But a number of things are clear: Apollo was the "seer" (mantis), the Pythia was a vessel through whom Apollo spoke, the "seer's representative or stand-in" (promantis).
She made her divine connection only once a month, only nine months a year and only if the omens were good. Since consultation took place on only nine days a year at most, there must have been long queues and disappointments before the priestess had spoken a word. This would explain the fierce rivalries and jealousy surrounding the honour of queue-jumping.
by James Davidson, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Getty
Love
Love is on my mind because on Tuesday my lecture in class was about the evolved function of emotions, and I focused on a few in particular, including love.
To motivate the discussion, I began by trying to persuade my students that, many-splendored thing it might be, love presents something a puzzle. Consider some apparently epically poor decisions from literature. Paris might be forgiven for falling for Helen, but was his next best option so much worse that it was worth starting a war? Could Lancelot and Guinevere not put their love aside, set against their loyalties to Arthur, King and husband? And when Romeo and Juliet believed the other to be dead, was suicide preferable to searching for another, though doubtless less compelling, mate?
While the fitness consequences of such decisions seem to speak for themselves, those who have fallen in love might be inclined toward not just answering each of these with a yes, but shouting its obvious truth with ebullient, confident enthusiasm. Who among us with the least poetry in our souls has not felt the unanswerably sublime pull of another, whose virtues so ensorcel that we feel as though we might fight, kill and, yes, die that we might be together?
And so, an evolutionary puzzle. If emotions function to guide us toward adaptive behavior, not the least of which entails making good tradeoffs in decision-making, what is this thing called love, and why does it torment us so? No one seems immune, as even the rich and powerful seem ready to make sacrifices at the altar of love, as cases from Edward VIII to John Edwards illustrate. We all dance to love’s tune and obey the pull of her strings.
To motivate the discussion, I began by trying to persuade my students that, many-splendored thing it might be, love presents something a puzzle. Consider some apparently epically poor decisions from literature. Paris might be forgiven for falling for Helen, but was his next best option so much worse that it was worth starting a war? Could Lancelot and Guinevere not put their love aside, set against their loyalties to Arthur, King and husband? And when Romeo and Juliet believed the other to be dead, was suicide preferable to searching for another, though doubtless less compelling, mate?While the fitness consequences of such decisions seem to speak for themselves, those who have fallen in love might be inclined toward not just answering each of these with a yes, but shouting its obvious truth with ebullient, confident enthusiasm. Who among us with the least poetry in our souls has not felt the unanswerably sublime pull of another, whose virtues so ensorcel that we feel as though we might fight, kill and, yes, die that we might be together?
And so, an evolutionary puzzle. If emotions function to guide us toward adaptive behavior, not the least of which entails making good tradeoffs in decision-making, what is this thing called love, and why does it torment us so? No one seems immune, as even the rich and powerful seem ready to make sacrifices at the altar of love, as cases from Edward VIII to John Edwards illustrate. We all dance to love’s tune and obey the pull of her strings.
by Robert Kurzban, Evolutionary Psychology | Read more:
Image via:
Making the Cut
3D printing is making huge strides in the design office and on the factory floor. What it is not doing, despite the many claims to the contrary, is making comparable progress in people’s homes and garages. Enthusiasts had expected it to follow a similar trajectory to the personal computer some 30 years before, emerging from the closeted world of professional Big Iron, to find a place on the desktops of ordinary users. As the humble PC steadily improved, mainframe-makers rued the day they dismissed it as hobbyist's toy. Within a decade, firms known collectively as the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell) had shuffled off the scene. Of America's original mainframe-makers, only IBM remained a force to be reckoned with, thanks in no small part to its ubiquitous IBM PC.
When Babbage soldered together his first computer, a Sinclair ZX80, the kit to make it cost a whisker under £80 (ie, £290 or $490 in today’s money). Strictly for hobbyists, this tiny machine had just four kilobytes of read-only memory in which to hold its operating system, an interpreter for the BASIC programming language and an editor, plus a mere kilobyte of random-access memory for data. Despite these limits, the ZX80 taught a generation of enthusiasts how to program efficiently. At the time, the $1,300 Apple II was beyond the reach of most enthusiasts. The ZX80’s modest price helped thousands of youngsters get a headstart in computing.
With the industrial success of 3D printing, pundits have long predicted that once the technology escaped the confines of the manufacturing shop and found its way into hobbyists’ homes, it would cause a similar upheaval in the way people did things. The personal 3D printer—like the personal computer before it—would create a torrent of opportunities as it ushered in an era of distributed manufacturing. People would print their own products from off-the-shelf designs, without the transaction costs of goods made in factories the traditional way.
Reality has proved a little different. Though industrially important, 3D printing has turned out to be nowhere near as disruptive as once imagined, and certainly nothing like the PC. Professional-grade 3D printers, costing anything from $100,000 to $1m, remain the Big Iron of the business, earning their keep making prototypes, mock-ups, one-offs, moulds and dies for the aerospace, motor, electronics and health-care industries. But the technologies pioneered on the shop floor to do this are trickling down but slowly to personal 3D printing.
The one 3D-printing method to make it successfully into the home so far is “fused deposition modelling” (FDM). In this, the object of desire is constructed, layer by layer, by melting a plastic filament and coiling it into the shape required. As ingenious as FDM is, the “maker movement” is still waiting for its equivalent of the Commodore 64, a capable and affordable machine that helped pitchfork the hobbyist computer movement into widespread consumer acceptance.
Another type of 3D printing, stereolithography, may yet challenge FDM for personal use. Stereolithography deposits thin layers of polymer which are then cured by laser or ultraviolet light. The technique was patented by Charles Hull in 1986, several years before Scott Crump patented FDM. These two inventors went on to found the two leading firms in the business today, 3D Systems and Stratasys. 3D Systems is bent on reducing the cost of stereolithography, so it, too, can appeal to the masses.
The problem with desktop 3D printing, however, is not so much price as usefulness. Rudimentary kits can be had for as little as $300 and the best of the bunch cost not much more than $2,000—far less, in real terms, than an Apple II did in 1978. But, whereas early personal computers allowed users to run spreadsheets, do word-processing, build databases and learn to program, today’s personal 3D printers are good for little more than making plastic trinkets and gewgaws.
At least three things prevent personal 3D printing from going mainstream.
When Babbage soldered together his first computer, a Sinclair ZX80, the kit to make it cost a whisker under £80 (ie, £290 or $490 in today’s money). Strictly for hobbyists, this tiny machine had just four kilobytes of read-only memory in which to hold its operating system, an interpreter for the BASIC programming language and an editor, plus a mere kilobyte of random-access memory for data. Despite these limits, the ZX80 taught a generation of enthusiasts how to program efficiently. At the time, the $1,300 Apple II was beyond the reach of most enthusiasts. The ZX80’s modest price helped thousands of youngsters get a headstart in computing. With the industrial success of 3D printing, pundits have long predicted that once the technology escaped the confines of the manufacturing shop and found its way into hobbyists’ homes, it would cause a similar upheaval in the way people did things. The personal 3D printer—like the personal computer before it—would create a torrent of opportunities as it ushered in an era of distributed manufacturing. People would print their own products from off-the-shelf designs, without the transaction costs of goods made in factories the traditional way.
Reality has proved a little different. Though industrially important, 3D printing has turned out to be nowhere near as disruptive as once imagined, and certainly nothing like the PC. Professional-grade 3D printers, costing anything from $100,000 to $1m, remain the Big Iron of the business, earning their keep making prototypes, mock-ups, one-offs, moulds and dies for the aerospace, motor, electronics and health-care industries. But the technologies pioneered on the shop floor to do this are trickling down but slowly to personal 3D printing.
The one 3D-printing method to make it successfully into the home so far is “fused deposition modelling” (FDM). In this, the object of desire is constructed, layer by layer, by melting a plastic filament and coiling it into the shape required. As ingenious as FDM is, the “maker movement” is still waiting for its equivalent of the Commodore 64, a capable and affordable machine that helped pitchfork the hobbyist computer movement into widespread consumer acceptance.
Another type of 3D printing, stereolithography, may yet challenge FDM for personal use. Stereolithography deposits thin layers of polymer which are then cured by laser or ultraviolet light. The technique was patented by Charles Hull in 1986, several years before Scott Crump patented FDM. These two inventors went on to found the two leading firms in the business today, 3D Systems and Stratasys. 3D Systems is bent on reducing the cost of stereolithography, so it, too, can appeal to the masses.
The problem with desktop 3D printing, however, is not so much price as usefulness. Rudimentary kits can be had for as little as $300 and the best of the bunch cost not much more than $2,000—far less, in real terms, than an Apple II did in 1978. But, whereas early personal computers allowed users to run spreadsheets, do word-processing, build databases and learn to program, today’s personal 3D printers are good for little more than making plastic trinkets and gewgaws.
At least three things prevent personal 3D printing from going mainstream.
by The Economist | Read more:
Image: Alamy
Saturday, June 7, 2014
Wikipedia Mining Algorithm Reveals The Most Influential People In 35 Centuries Of Human History
Whatever your interest in history, most of what you have learned will be strongly influenced by your language and your cultural background. The historical figures who feature strongly in Chinese schools will differ dramatically from those that feature in US schools, or Indian schools or Russian ones.
This kind of bias is also reflected in the various language editions of Wikipedia. For example, it’s not surprising to find that the Chinese language version contains more links to Chiang Kai-shek, who once led the Republic of China, than the German language edition.
That raises an interesting prospect. Perhaps the network of links between the Wikipedia articles about historical figures provides an objective way to assess their importance. So a person such as Napoleon who is highly ranked in many different language editions would be more influential than, say Park Chung-hee, the South Korean president and general who was assassinated in 1979, who is top-ranked in only the Korean language edition.
Today, Young-Ho Eom at the University of Toulouse in France and a few pals publish just such a list. These guys have used network theory to rank historical figures by importance in each one of 24 different language editions of Wikipedia. They then compare the lists to see which figures span different cultures, allowing them to calculate the most influential.
What’s more, by looking at the birth dates of these figures, the team are able to tease apart the way different cultures have interacted in the past and how the influence of different cultures has waxed and waned throughout history.
This list throws up some surprises. Depending on the ranking algorithm these guys use, the most influential figure in human history is either Carl Linnaeus, the 18th century Swedish botanist who developed the modern naming scheme for plants and animals, followed by Jesus; or Adolf Hitler followed by Michael Jackson.
by Physics arXiv Blog, Medium | Read more:
This kind of bias is also reflected in the various language editions of Wikipedia. For example, it’s not surprising to find that the Chinese language version contains more links to Chiang Kai-shek, who once led the Republic of China, than the German language edition.That raises an interesting prospect. Perhaps the network of links between the Wikipedia articles about historical figures provides an objective way to assess their importance. So a person such as Napoleon who is highly ranked in many different language editions would be more influential than, say Park Chung-hee, the South Korean president and general who was assassinated in 1979, who is top-ranked in only the Korean language edition.
Today, Young-Ho Eom at the University of Toulouse in France and a few pals publish just such a list. These guys have used network theory to rank historical figures by importance in each one of 24 different language editions of Wikipedia. They then compare the lists to see which figures span different cultures, allowing them to calculate the most influential.
What’s more, by looking at the birth dates of these figures, the team are able to tease apart the way different cultures have interacted in the past and how the influence of different cultures has waxed and waned throughout history.
This list throws up some surprises. Depending on the ranking algorithm these guys use, the most influential figure in human history is either Carl Linnaeus, the 18th century Swedish botanist who developed the modern naming scheme for plants and animals, followed by Jesus; or Adolf Hitler followed by Michael Jackson.
by Physics arXiv Blog, Medium | Read more:
Image: Linnaeus uncredited
Friday, June 6, 2014
Internet Giants Erect Barriers to Spy Agencies
[ed. Forgive me for being skeptical, but this sounds exactly like what everyone would like you to think.]
Just down the road from Google’s main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest arms race in modern technology: They are making it far more difficult — and far more expensive — for the National Security Agency and the intelligence arms of other governments around the world to pierce their systems.
As fast as it can, Google is sealing up cracks in its systems that Edward J. Snowden revealed the N.S.A. had brilliantly exploited. It is encrypting more data as it moves among its servers and helping customers encode their own emails. Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo are taking similar steps.
After years of cooperating with the government, the immediate goal now is to thwart Washington — as well as Beijing and Moscow. The strategy is also intended to preserve business overseas in places like Brazil and Germany that have threatened to entrust data only to local providers.
Google, for example, is laying its own fiber optic cable under the world’s oceans, a project that began as an effort to cut costs and extend its influence, but now has an added purpose: to assure that the company will have more control over the movement of its customer data.
A year after Mr. Snowden’s revelations, the era of quiet cooperation is over. Telecommunications companies say they are denying requests to volunteer data not covered by existing law. A.T.&T., Verizon and others say that compared with a year ago, they are far more reluctant to cooperate with the United States government in “gray areas” where there is no explicit requirement for a legal warrant.
But governments are fighting back, harder than ever. The cellphone giant Vodafone reported on Friday that a “small number” of governments around the world have demanded the ability to tap directly into its communication networks, a level of surveillance that elicited outrage from privacy advocates.
Vodafone refused to name the nations on Friday for fear of putting its business and employees at risk there. But in an accounting of the number of legal demands for information that it receives from 14 companies, it noted that some countries did not issue warrants to obtain phone, email or web-searching traffic, because “the relevant agencies and authorities already have permanent access to customer communications via their own direct link.”
The company also said it had to acquiesce to some governments’ requests for data to comply with national laws. Otherwise, it said, it faced losing its license to operate in certain countries.
Eric Grosse, Google’s security chief, suggested in an interview that the N.S.A.’s own behavior invited the new arms race.
“I am willing to help on the purely defensive side of things,” he said, referring to Washington’s efforts to enlist Silicon Valley in cybersecurity efforts. “But signals intercept is totally off the table,” he said, referring to national intelligence gathering.
“No hard feelings, but my job is to make their job hard,” he added.
In Washington, officials acknowledge that covert programs are now far harder to execute because American technology companies, fearful of losing international business, are hardening their networks and saying no to requests for the kind of help they once quietly provided.
Robert S. Litt, the general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all 17 American spy agencies, said on Wednesday that it was “an unquestionable loss for our nation that companies are losing the willingness to cooperate legally and voluntarily” with American spy agencies.
“Just as there are technological gaps, there are legal gaps,” he said, speaking at the Wilson Center in Washington, “that leave a lot of gray area” governing what companies could turn over.
In the past, he said, “we have been very successful” in getting that data. But he acknowledged that for now, those days are over, and he predicted that “sooner or later there will be some intelligence failure and people will wonder why the intelligence agencies were not able to protect the nation.”
Companies respond that if that happens, it is the government’s own fault and that intelligence agencies, in their quest for broad data collection, have undermined web security for all.
Just down the road from Google’s main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest arms race in modern technology: They are making it far more difficult — and far more expensive — for the National Security Agency and the intelligence arms of other governments around the world to pierce their systems.
As fast as it can, Google is sealing up cracks in its systems that Edward J. Snowden revealed the N.S.A. had brilliantly exploited. It is encrypting more data as it moves among its servers and helping customers encode their own emails. Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo are taking similar steps.After years of cooperating with the government, the immediate goal now is to thwart Washington — as well as Beijing and Moscow. The strategy is also intended to preserve business overseas in places like Brazil and Germany that have threatened to entrust data only to local providers.
Google, for example, is laying its own fiber optic cable under the world’s oceans, a project that began as an effort to cut costs and extend its influence, but now has an added purpose: to assure that the company will have more control over the movement of its customer data.
A year after Mr. Snowden’s revelations, the era of quiet cooperation is over. Telecommunications companies say they are denying requests to volunteer data not covered by existing law. A.T.&T., Verizon and others say that compared with a year ago, they are far more reluctant to cooperate with the United States government in “gray areas” where there is no explicit requirement for a legal warrant.
But governments are fighting back, harder than ever. The cellphone giant Vodafone reported on Friday that a “small number” of governments around the world have demanded the ability to tap directly into its communication networks, a level of surveillance that elicited outrage from privacy advocates.
Vodafone refused to name the nations on Friday for fear of putting its business and employees at risk there. But in an accounting of the number of legal demands for information that it receives from 14 companies, it noted that some countries did not issue warrants to obtain phone, email or web-searching traffic, because “the relevant agencies and authorities already have permanent access to customer communications via their own direct link.”
The company also said it had to acquiesce to some governments’ requests for data to comply with national laws. Otherwise, it said, it faced losing its license to operate in certain countries.
Eric Grosse, Google’s security chief, suggested in an interview that the N.S.A.’s own behavior invited the new arms race.
“I am willing to help on the purely defensive side of things,” he said, referring to Washington’s efforts to enlist Silicon Valley in cybersecurity efforts. “But signals intercept is totally off the table,” he said, referring to national intelligence gathering.
“No hard feelings, but my job is to make their job hard,” he added.
In Washington, officials acknowledge that covert programs are now far harder to execute because American technology companies, fearful of losing international business, are hardening their networks and saying no to requests for the kind of help they once quietly provided.
Robert S. Litt, the general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all 17 American spy agencies, said on Wednesday that it was “an unquestionable loss for our nation that companies are losing the willingness to cooperate legally and voluntarily” with American spy agencies.
“Just as there are technological gaps, there are legal gaps,” he said, speaking at the Wilson Center in Washington, “that leave a lot of gray area” governing what companies could turn over.
In the past, he said, “we have been very successful” in getting that data. But he acknowledged that for now, those days are over, and he predicted that “sooner or later there will be some intelligence failure and people will wonder why the intelligence agencies were not able to protect the nation.”
Companies respond that if that happens, it is the government’s own fault and that intelligence agencies, in their quest for broad data collection, have undermined web security for all.
by David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Connie Zhou/Google
Good News on Jobs. Why Aren’t We Happier?
We did it, America! Six and a half years after the Great Recession began, and five years after it ended, we have now regained all the jobs lost during the downturn. Huzzah!
O.K., maybe not.
At the previous high, in January 2008, American employers had 138.365 million jobs. With a solid 217,000 positions added in May 2014, that number has now reached a new high of 138.463 million. Yet we can all agree that, if throwing a ticker-tape parade for the economy was a thing that happened, we wouldn’t be doing it. The reasons tell something important about the economic calamity the nation has been through and why public opinion polls show such continued discontent among ordinary Americans.
The May jobs numbers released Friday morning were quite solid, and fit with both analysts’ forecasts and the general tenor of recent data — not just the 217,000 payroll jobs added, but an unemployment rate unchanged at 6.3 percent and hourly wage gains of 0.2 percent for private-sector employees
But a bit of simple math shows why, even after a progression of solid months of jobs data like May, things don’t feel so great.
Yes, the number of jobs on United States employers’ payrolls has risen back to its pre-recession levels. But in the six and a half years that have passed, the nation’s population has risen a good deal; the civilian noninstitutional population has risen since January 2008, to 247.4 million from 232.6 million. So we now have about the same number of jobs as we did then, but about 15 million more people who might wish to hold them.
And consider wages. The average private-sector worker took home $838.70 a week in April. In January 2008, if you use April 2014 dollars, that was $818.31. In other words, in the last six and a half years, the average private-sector American worker has seen a total inflation-adjusted pay increase of only 2.5 percent, a lousy $20 a week.
O.K., maybe not.
At the previous high, in January 2008, American employers had 138.365 million jobs. With a solid 217,000 positions added in May 2014, that number has now reached a new high of 138.463 million. Yet we can all agree that, if throwing a ticker-tape parade for the economy was a thing that happened, we wouldn’t be doing it. The reasons tell something important about the economic calamity the nation has been through and why public opinion polls show such continued discontent among ordinary Americans.
The May jobs numbers released Friday morning were quite solid, and fit with both analysts’ forecasts and the general tenor of recent data — not just the 217,000 payroll jobs added, but an unemployment rate unchanged at 6.3 percent and hourly wage gains of 0.2 percent for private-sector employees
But a bit of simple math shows why, even after a progression of solid months of jobs data like May, things don’t feel so great.
Yes, the number of jobs on United States employers’ payrolls has risen back to its pre-recession levels. But in the six and a half years that have passed, the nation’s population has risen a good deal; the civilian noninstitutional population has risen since January 2008, to 247.4 million from 232.6 million. So we now have about the same number of jobs as we did then, but about 15 million more people who might wish to hold them.
And consider wages. The average private-sector worker took home $838.70 a week in April. In January 2008, if you use April 2014 dollars, that was $818.31. In other words, in the last six and a half years, the average private-sector American worker has seen a total inflation-adjusted pay increase of only 2.5 percent, a lousy $20 a week.
And some sectors have come back more strongly than others. Spend some time with this immersive graphic from Jeremy Ashkenas and Alicia Parlapiano to understand how the recession and recovery have played out across hundreds of industries. (Hint: Oil and gas-related professions and nail parlors have done quite well; home construction-related areas haven’t).
The question is not whether the economy is in as good a shape today as it was back in January 2008, when total American payrolls were last at this level; it quite clearly isn’t. Rather, this milestone of surpassing the previous employment high is a good occasion to ask how much further we have to go to get to that position of true health.
The question is not whether the economy is in as good a shape today as it was back in January 2008, when total American payrolls were last at this level; it quite clearly isn’t. Rather, this milestone of surpassing the previous employment high is a good occasion to ask how much further we have to go to get to that position of true health.
by Neil Irwin, NY Times | Read more:
A Peek Inside a Professional Carding Shop
Over the past year, I’ve spent a great deal of time trolling a variety of underground stores that sell “dumps” — street slang for stolen credit card data that buyers can use to counterfeit new cards and go shopping in big-box stores for high-dollar merchandise that can be resold quickly for cash. By way of explaining this bizarro world, this post takes the reader on a tour of a rather exclusive and professional dumps shop that caters to professional thieves, high-volume buyers and organized crime gangs.
The subject of this post is “McDumpals,” a leading dumps shop that first went online in late April 2013. Featuring the familiar golden arches and the bastardized logo, “i’m swipin’ it,” the site’s mascot is a gangstered-up Ronald McDonald pointing a handgun at the viewer.
Nevermind that this shop is violating a ridiculous number of McDonald’s trademarks in one fell swoop: It’s currently selling cards stolen from data breaches at main street stores in nearly every U.S. state.
Like many other dumps shops, McDumpals recently began requiring potential new customers to pay a deposit (~$100) via Bitcoin before being allowed to view the goods for sale. Also typical of most card shops, this store’s home page features the latest news about new batches of stolen cards that have just been added, as well as price reductions on older batches of cards that are less reliable as instruments of fraud.
I’ve put together a slideshow (below) that steps through many of the updates that have been added to this shop since its inception. One big takeaway from this slideshow is that many shops are now categorizing their goods for sale by the state or region of the victim company.
This was a major innovation that we saw prominently on display in the card shop that was principally responsible for selling cards stolen in the Target and Sally Beauty retail breaches: In those cases, buyers were offered the ability to search for cards by the city, state and ZIP of the Target and Sally Beauty stores from which those cards were stolen. Experienced carders (as buyers are called) know that banks will often flag transactions as suspicious if they take place outside of the legitimate cardholder’s regular geographic purchasing patterns, and so carders tend to favor cards stolen from consumers who live nearby.
The subject of this post is “McDumpals,” a leading dumps shop that first went online in late April 2013. Featuring the familiar golden arches and the bastardized logo, “i’m swipin’ it,” the site’s mascot is a gangstered-up Ronald McDonald pointing a handgun at the viewer.Nevermind that this shop is violating a ridiculous number of McDonald’s trademarks in one fell swoop: It’s currently selling cards stolen from data breaches at main street stores in nearly every U.S. state.
Like many other dumps shops, McDumpals recently began requiring potential new customers to pay a deposit (~$100) via Bitcoin before being allowed to view the goods for sale. Also typical of most card shops, this store’s home page features the latest news about new batches of stolen cards that have just been added, as well as price reductions on older batches of cards that are less reliable as instruments of fraud.
I’ve put together a slideshow (below) that steps through many of the updates that have been added to this shop since its inception. One big takeaway from this slideshow is that many shops are now categorizing their goods for sale by the state or region of the victim company.
This was a major innovation that we saw prominently on display in the card shop that was principally responsible for selling cards stolen in the Target and Sally Beauty retail breaches: In those cases, buyers were offered the ability to search for cards by the city, state and ZIP of the Target and Sally Beauty stores from which those cards were stolen. Experienced carders (as buyers are called) know that banks will often flag transactions as suspicious if they take place outside of the legitimate cardholder’s regular geographic purchasing patterns, and so carders tend to favor cards stolen from consumers who live nearby.
by Bruce Krebs, Krebs on Security | Read more:
Image: Krebs on Seurity
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