Saturday, February 21, 2015
The Future of Virtual Sex
Today’s sex robots are so rudimentary that they are essentially unusable. But as sex-robot enthusiasts are quick to point out, the shoebox-sized cellphones of the 1970s were nearly useless—but they were the first prototypes for today’s ubiquitous smartphones. Eventually, sex robots will have reasonably humanlike facial expressions, limb movements, voices and even odors. The futurist Stowe Boyd has predicted that by 2025, “robotic sex partners will be…commonplace, although the source of scorn and division.”
I’m skeptical. Even by 2025 it seems unlikely that sex robots will have much appeal for male or female users. The reason is that simulating human interaction for such a multisensory experience as sex is a very complex engineering problem. Our brains have evolved to be very good at picking up on tiny social cues, like the direction of another’s gaze, the social intent of a brief touch or the shadings of vocal tone. In this interpersonal domain, we’re not so easily tricked.
Though the engineering challenges of simulating human sexual interaction are difficult, there’s no reason to believe that they are impossible to solve. Sex that entirely lacks human feeling and attachment may sound unappealing or even repugnant to many people, but at some point in the future, sex robots will become viable. A central question is whether that arc of progress will take so long that they will be leapfrogged by a different technology: neural virtual reality.
Rather than activating the body’s senses naturally, like a sex robot would, neural virtual reality simulates experience by artificially activating nerve cells. Until recently, the most common way to do this involved sticking an electrode (a thin metal needle) into tissue and passing electrical current to activate neurons at the tip. For example, if I were to stick an electrode into a sensory nerve in your arm, I could activate a single nerve fiber that might give you the sensation of vibration in a patch of skin on your palm.
More recently, scientists have developed a new and improved way to activate neurons. First, using genetic engineering, they create a virus that can only infect certain cell types (like the nerve cells with endings in the skin that respond to caresses). When the virus infects the target cell, it commands that neuron to produce a protein that sends out an electrical signal only when activated by blue light. Then, if someone shines a blue light on your skin, you will feel a caress. That perceived caress could be modified by flashing the blue light in different patterns all over the body. The sex robot of the future may well be a catsuit with inward-facing flashing blue LEDs embedded in it, linked via Bluetooth to an app on your phone. The sexual application of this technique, called optogenetics, could be just decades away.
by David Linden, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
Facebook Will Soon Be Able to ID You in Any Photo
Appear in a photo taken at a protest march, a gay bar, or an abortion clinic, and your friends might recognize you. But a machine probably won't—at least for now. Unless a computer has been tasked to look for you, has trained on dozens of photos of your face, and has high-quality images to examine, your anonymity is safe. Nor is it yet possible for a computer to scour the Internet and find you in random, uncaptioned photos. But within the walled garden of Facebook, which contains by far the largest collection of personal photographs in the world, the technology for doing all that is beginning to blossom.
Catapulting the California-based company beyond other corporate players in the field, Facebook's DeepFace system is now as accurate as a human being at a few constrained facial recognition tasks. The intention is not to invade the privacy of Facebook's more than 1.3 billion active users, insists Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University in New York City who directs Facebook's artificial intelligence research, but rather to protect it. Once DeepFace identifies your face in one of the 400 million new photos that users upload every day, “you will get an alert from Facebook telling you that you appear in the picture,” he explains. “You can then choose to blur out your face from the picture to protect your privacy.” Many people, however, are troubled by the prospect of being identified at all—especially in strangers' photographs. Facebook is already using the system, although its face-tagging system only reveals to you the identities of your “friends.”
DeepFace isn't the only horse in the race. The U.S. government has poured funding into university-based facial recognition research. And in the private sector, Google and other companies are pursuing their own projects to automatically identify people who appear in photos and videos.
Exactly how automated facial recognition will be used—and how the law may limit it—is unclear. But once the technology matures, it is bound to create as many privacy problems as it solves. “The genie is, or soon will be, out of the bottle,” says Brian Mennecke, an information systems researcher at Iowa State University in Ames who studies privacy. “There will be no going back.” (...)
But DeepFace's greatest advantage—and the aspect of the project that has sparked the most rancor—is its training data. The DeepFace paper breezily mentions the existence of a data set called SFC, for Social Face Classification, a library of 4.4 million labeled faces harvested from the Facebook pages of 4030 users. Although users give Facebook permission to use their personal data when they sign up for the website, the DeepFace research paper makes no mention of the consent of the photos' owners.
“Just as creepy as it sounds,” blared the headline of an article in The Huffington Post describing DeepFace a week after it came out. Commenting on The Huffington Post's piece, one reader wrote: “It is obvious that police and other law enforcement authorities will use this technology and search through our photos without us even knowing.” Facebook has confirmed that it provides law enforcement with access to user data when it is compelled by a judge's order.
by John Bohannon, Science | Read more:
Image: William Duke
Catapulting the California-based company beyond other corporate players in the field, Facebook's DeepFace system is now as accurate as a human being at a few constrained facial recognition tasks. The intention is not to invade the privacy of Facebook's more than 1.3 billion active users, insists Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University in New York City who directs Facebook's artificial intelligence research, but rather to protect it. Once DeepFace identifies your face in one of the 400 million new photos that users upload every day, “you will get an alert from Facebook telling you that you appear in the picture,” he explains. “You can then choose to blur out your face from the picture to protect your privacy.” Many people, however, are troubled by the prospect of being identified at all—especially in strangers' photographs. Facebook is already using the system, although its face-tagging system only reveals to you the identities of your “friends.”DeepFace isn't the only horse in the race. The U.S. government has poured funding into university-based facial recognition research. And in the private sector, Google and other companies are pursuing their own projects to automatically identify people who appear in photos and videos.
Exactly how automated facial recognition will be used—and how the law may limit it—is unclear. But once the technology matures, it is bound to create as many privacy problems as it solves. “The genie is, or soon will be, out of the bottle,” says Brian Mennecke, an information systems researcher at Iowa State University in Ames who studies privacy. “There will be no going back.” (...)
But DeepFace's greatest advantage—and the aspect of the project that has sparked the most rancor—is its training data. The DeepFace paper breezily mentions the existence of a data set called SFC, for Social Face Classification, a library of 4.4 million labeled faces harvested from the Facebook pages of 4030 users. Although users give Facebook permission to use their personal data when they sign up for the website, the DeepFace research paper makes no mention of the consent of the photos' owners.
“Just as creepy as it sounds,” blared the headline of an article in The Huffington Post describing DeepFace a week after it came out. Commenting on The Huffington Post's piece, one reader wrote: “It is obvious that police and other law enforcement authorities will use this technology and search through our photos without us even knowing.” Facebook has confirmed that it provides law enforcement with access to user data when it is compelled by a judge's order.
by John Bohannon, Science | Read more:
Image: William Duke
Friday, February 20, 2015
The Secret of the Bro
According to recent descriptions, the bro is a straight white man who is between fifteen and thirty-five years old, “an adult male whose social life revolves around collegiate homosocial bonding,” or simply a guy who says “bro.” He is “boisterous and uncouth” and “the worst guy ever.” He wears a backwards baseball cap, a light blue oxford or femsports team shirt, cargo shorts, mandals or boat shoes, and region-specific accessories like knit caps in LA or puffer vests in the Colorado. He drinks beer. Most of these articles focus on signifiers of the bro because their authors haven’t seized on the essential truth of brodom: A bro is just a man who primarily hangs out with other men and lacks consistent taste. The absence of taste is crucial: It’s not just that he wears cargo pants, it’s that he has the audacity to mix oxfords with athletic gear.
Ironically, the bro’s inconsistency—which is not limited to his wardrobe—is also the source of his lasting appeal. The bromance casts the bro’s contradictions in the clearest light: Although “bromance” co-evolved with the bro and is its autochoric carrier mechanism, in many ways, the bromance is the bro’s total contradiction. Bromance is loving, giving, nonviolent, and un-self-serious. But there are many bro subtypes whose basis is violence, real and metaphorical. This is precisely what makes the bro so compelling: Just as the bro mixes his cargo pants with his oxford shirt, he mixes violence with affability, self-absorption with giving, and hypermasculinity with masculinity. Now that the bro is the subject of a full backlash, these inconsistencies translate as hypocrisy.
“Bro” has appeared in texts as an abbreviation of “brother” for hundreds of years, but until the twentieth century, it referred to the biological family or clergy. And, before it referred generically to “man” or “fellow,” from the turn of the twentieth century until the nineteen seventies, “brother” meant “black man.” Sometimes in this context, it was truncated to “bro.” For example, in the year of the American bicentennial, rock critic Lester Bangs wrote, “If we the (presumably) white jass-buffs couldn’t get with it maybe it was only meant for the bros.” White men co-opted and whitewashed the definition of “bro” as “male friend” around the same time, borrowing from black power and mid-century Hawaiian surfer lingo, where “brah” was a common form of address. Well into the nineties, “bro” was a frattily lambent denotation for “male bud” and hadn’t suppurated into the para-meathead we associate it with today. To document this, the O.E.D. blog cites the teleplay for 1992’s Encino Man, whose stage directions toss off (now, it seems, gormlessly) that “Stoney and Hank have been bros since grammar school.” (...)
Although “bromance” is an invention of the last decade, male/male couples are common to Hollywood cinema. Scholars have traced the bromance back to comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy, cowboy movies, and the buddy films of the seventies through nineties. Many are violent. In a critical essay on the pre-millennial buddy film, Cynthia Fuchs argues that in cinema, male/male friendships absolve male friends of all transgressions, including murder, sexual assault, and rape. These transgressions can extend from the moral (e.g. sexual assault) to the aesthetic (e.g. poor hygiene or thin politesse in general). But when it comes to the bro, we might read Fuch’s equation in the other direction: Moral and aesthetic transgressions (perhaps best summarized as distastefulness) excuse the male/male friendship. Thus, poor taste excuses male/male friendships from being too gay. Again, this applies to both moral and aesthetic dimensions of taste. Two bros who gaslight women to sleep with them are totally not gay, even though they love each other. And aesthetically, it is bros’ bad taste—a preference for spending Sundays on a lawn couch with sweatpants and “the champagne of beers” that proves bros are straight.
The bro was not at his worst in 2014. Perhaps critics have seized on the bro as douchebag du jour because—correctly sensing the bro’s many contradictions—the bro is a hypocrite. Take this bro philippic in Vice, for example:
In the bro, masculinity powers up, achieves hypermasculinity, and in so doing circles back around to its own idea of femininity: The bro is a hypocrite because he claims to be a real man, but really, he’s a woman. Like a woman, the bro is characterized by excess and peacocking. He consumes and consumes: beer, Muscle Milk, and so many burgers he’s using more meat as hamburger buns. It’s so much he’s bursting at the seams, “pulsing like the mercury on a cartoon thermometer…ready to explode through the glass.” And he’s a little dumb. Like the effeminate metrosexual, he gets ripped without survivalist purpose, delighting in his body even if it’s not a machine for war or chopping wood. Like a woman (and totally unlike the bromance, which is a revelation of true love, often against the odds) the bro is inauthentic. “It seems impossible for a human being to care this much about recreation, to care this much about celebrating something so tiny, so contrived,” writes Vice. Hypocrisy, flanked by infantilism and unacknowledged privilege, is the number one critique of the bro.
by Johannah King-Slutzky, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Manuel Paul
Ironically, the bro’s inconsistency—which is not limited to his wardrobe—is also the source of his lasting appeal. The bromance casts the bro’s contradictions in the clearest light: Although “bromance” co-evolved with the bro and is its autochoric carrier mechanism, in many ways, the bromance is the bro’s total contradiction. Bromance is loving, giving, nonviolent, and un-self-serious. But there are many bro subtypes whose basis is violence, real and metaphorical. This is precisely what makes the bro so compelling: Just as the bro mixes his cargo pants with his oxford shirt, he mixes violence with affability, self-absorption with giving, and hypermasculinity with masculinity. Now that the bro is the subject of a full backlash, these inconsistencies translate as hypocrisy.“Bro” has appeared in texts as an abbreviation of “brother” for hundreds of years, but until the twentieth century, it referred to the biological family or clergy. And, before it referred generically to “man” or “fellow,” from the turn of the twentieth century until the nineteen seventies, “brother” meant “black man.” Sometimes in this context, it was truncated to “bro.” For example, in the year of the American bicentennial, rock critic Lester Bangs wrote, “If we the (presumably) white jass-buffs couldn’t get with it maybe it was only meant for the bros.” White men co-opted and whitewashed the definition of “bro” as “male friend” around the same time, borrowing from black power and mid-century Hawaiian surfer lingo, where “brah” was a common form of address. Well into the nineties, “bro” was a frattily lambent denotation for “male bud” and hadn’t suppurated into the para-meathead we associate it with today. To document this, the O.E.D. blog cites the teleplay for 1992’s Encino Man, whose stage directions toss off (now, it seems, gormlessly) that “Stoney and Hank have been bros since grammar school.” (...)
Although “bromance” is an invention of the last decade, male/male couples are common to Hollywood cinema. Scholars have traced the bromance back to comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy, cowboy movies, and the buddy films of the seventies through nineties. Many are violent. In a critical essay on the pre-millennial buddy film, Cynthia Fuchs argues that in cinema, male/male friendships absolve male friends of all transgressions, including murder, sexual assault, and rape. These transgressions can extend from the moral (e.g. sexual assault) to the aesthetic (e.g. poor hygiene or thin politesse in general). But when it comes to the bro, we might read Fuch’s equation in the other direction: Moral and aesthetic transgressions (perhaps best summarized as distastefulness) excuse the male/male friendship. Thus, poor taste excuses male/male friendships from being too gay. Again, this applies to both moral and aesthetic dimensions of taste. Two bros who gaslight women to sleep with them are totally not gay, even though they love each other. And aesthetically, it is bros’ bad taste—a preference for spending Sundays on a lawn couch with sweatpants and “the champagne of beers” that proves bros are straight.
The bro was not at his worst in 2014. Perhaps critics have seized on the bro as douchebag du jour because—correctly sensing the bro’s many contradictions—the bro is a hypocrite. Take this bro philippic in Vice, for example:
The only way to be a real man is to be a real man as ferociously as humanly possible. He goes all-in; he gets shredded and ripped and defines his life by aggression and competitions. He buys the hamburgers that comes with two other hamburgers and a chicken cutlet on top of it. Why? Because it’s three hamburgers with a chicken cutlet on top of it.But the bro didn’t “become” toxic. Ironically, our awareness of his toxicity seems to be inversely proportional to his actual behavior. In the early aughts, he seemed fun when he was at his most violent, in Jackass style pranks and frat-bro foreign policy. Now, our bros are more like Andy Samberg than Ashton Kutcher—they’re not violent, they just think with the right wrapping paper, their dicks make a good birthday present. (Then again, maybe this signals only a shift in violence from the physical to sexual.) The hipster has replaced the bro as the dominant lampoonable masculinity; Bush is out, Obama is in. (...)
In the bro, masculinity powers up, achieves hypermasculinity, and in so doing circles back around to its own idea of femininity: The bro is a hypocrite because he claims to be a real man, but really, he’s a woman. Like a woman, the bro is characterized by excess and peacocking. He consumes and consumes: beer, Muscle Milk, and so many burgers he’s using more meat as hamburger buns. It’s so much he’s bursting at the seams, “pulsing like the mercury on a cartoon thermometer…ready to explode through the glass.” And he’s a little dumb. Like the effeminate metrosexual, he gets ripped without survivalist purpose, delighting in his body even if it’s not a machine for war or chopping wood. Like a woman (and totally unlike the bromance, which is a revelation of true love, often against the odds) the bro is inauthentic. “It seems impossible for a human being to care this much about recreation, to care this much about celebrating something so tiny, so contrived,” writes Vice. Hypocrisy, flanked by infantilism and unacknowledged privilege, is the number one critique of the bro.
by Johannah King-Slutzky, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Manuel Paul
The Great SIM Heist
How spies stole the keys to the encryption castle
[ed. The NSA is completely out of control and no one seems capable of doing anything about it, including our President and Congress. It's like the Matrix.]
American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.
The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania.
In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”
With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt. (...)
Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment. “Once you have the keys, decrypting traffic is trivial,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.” (...)
Additionally, the spy agency targeted unnamed cellular companies’ core networks, giving it access to “sales staff machines for customer information and network engineers machines for network maps.” GCHQ also claimed the ability to manipulate the billing servers of cell companies to “suppress” charges in an effort to conceal the spy agency’s secret actions against an individual’s phone. Most significantly, GCHQ also penetrated “authentication servers,” allowing it to decrypt data and voice communications between a targeted individual’s phone and his or her telecom provider’s network. A note accompanying the slide asserted that the spy agency was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.” (...)
The U.S. and British intelligence agencies pulled off the encryption key heist in great stealth, giving them the ability to intercept and decrypt communications without alerting the wireless network provider, the foreign government or the individual user that they have been targeted. “Gaining access to a database of keys is pretty much game over for cellular encryption,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography specialist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. The massive key theft is “bad news for phone security. Really bad news.”
[ed. The NSA is completely out of control and no one seems capable of doing anything about it, including our President and Congress. It's like the Matrix.]
American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.
The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania.
In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”
With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt. (...)
Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment. “Once you have the keys, decrypting traffic is trivial,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.” (...)
Additionally, the spy agency targeted unnamed cellular companies’ core networks, giving it access to “sales staff machines for customer information and network engineers machines for network maps.” GCHQ also claimed the ability to manipulate the billing servers of cell companies to “suppress” charges in an effort to conceal the spy agency’s secret actions against an individual’s phone. Most significantly, GCHQ also penetrated “authentication servers,” allowing it to decrypt data and voice communications between a targeted individual’s phone and his or her telecom provider’s network. A note accompanying the slide asserted that the spy agency was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.” (...)
The U.S. and British intelligence agencies pulled off the encryption key heist in great stealth, giving them the ability to intercept and decrypt communications without alerting the wireless network provider, the foreign government or the individual user that they have been targeted. “Gaining access to a database of keys is pretty much game over for cellular encryption,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography specialist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. The massive key theft is “bad news for phone security. Really bad news.”
by Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
Thursday, February 19, 2015
The Gig Economy Won't Last Because It's Being Sued to Death
When Vilma and Greta Zenelaj came across a Craigslist job ad that promised they could make as much as $22 an hour and get paid fast, it seemed like a good deal. The Albanian sisters had moved to Santa Monica to get a foothold in the film industry, and though they had produced a few independent features, they had run out of savings before they could also make a living. Now they were desperate to pay their bills.
Handy (then Handybook), the company that posted the Craigslist ad, is best known as a cleaning service. But unlike Merry Maids or your local cleaning franchise, it doesn’t actually employ any cleaners. Instead, it relies on an army of independent contractors to complete jobs, taking a 15% to 20% commission of every hour worked. It’s part of the "gig economy," a much-hyped new class of the service industry where workers are expected to operate like mini-businesses. The influence of these companies is growing: according to an analysis by Greylock Partners, the value of transactions over platforms such as car services Lyft and Uber, grocery delivery service Instacart, courier service Postmates, and others could grow as large as $10 billion this year.
But the Zenelajs had never heard of the gig economy, and it wasn’t until orientation that they realized they would not be employees of Handy.
Soon they were booking up to four cleanings a day through the platform. Handy promised to turn them into entrepreneurs, and it was true that when things went wrong, they were responsible: They didn’t get paid to wait for a client who was running up to 30 minutes late, though they drove to his house (Handy does reimburse cleaners for one hour if the client doesn't show up); they didn’t get paid if they stayed home sick; they didn’t get paid when they got stuck in traffic between jobs. There was no overtime pay or benefits, and they had to buy their own supplies and gas.
But the sisters allege that other kinds of work independence were a farce. When they couldn’t finish a job in the allotted time slot, they had to call customer service if they wanted to stay longer for more pay. First-time clients could not book cleanings with them specifically, which made leveraging relationships for recommendations difficult. They say there were suggestions, which they interpreted as rules, about how to listen to music (only with headphones, with permission from the customer) and go to the bathroom (discreetly). After about two months, both of them were banned from the platform: Handy says one sister performed poorly and the other sister funneled jobs to her after she was banned. (Vilma and Greta say they had just teamed up to complete jobs, which is also against Handy's terms of service, and that's why both of them were fired.)
"It is not fair, because there are laws here," says Vilma. "They are claiming to be just giving us contracts, and they’re not. They’re acting like an employer. But they’re not paying for it."
She and Greta filed a class action lawsuit against Handy in October, alleging that the company misclassified them as independent contractors. They are seeking compensation for missed lunch breaks, minimum wage compensation, reimbursement for business expenses, and overtime, in addition to other penalties. According to Handy’s math, this compensation would cost $291,000, not including attorney’s fees. Not only that, if Vilma and Greta prevailed, the lawsuit would also apply to all its current and former workers in California over the last four years. As of this past fall, that was about 2,000 people. That’s a potential penalty of almost $600 million—a lot of money for a company that has only raised about $42 million in venture capital.
Lawsuits like the one being brought against Handy are just the most threatening cloud in a brewing storm. Uber drivers have protested in San Francisco and Los Angeles and gone on strike in New York. Anecdotes in high-profile stories about Homejoy, a cleaning service similar to Handy, detail grueling hours and so little pay that in one instance, the worker was homeless. Workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online platform that pays independent contractors cents per task, recently orchestrated a letter-writing campaign to Jeff Bezos asking for him "to see that Turkers are not only actual human beings, but people who deserve respect, fair treatment, and open communication." Legally, Uber and Lyft are also facing charges of misclassifying workers, and a case against an online work platform called Crowdflower that uses independent contractors to complete tasks is in the process of being settled.
This rising legal retribution is a huge threat to the gig economy. Not being responsible for employees’ taxes and benefits allows companies like Handy to operate with 20% to 30% less in labor costs than the incumbent competition, leading to eye-popping numbers like Uber’s $40 billion valuation or Instacart’s latest $220 million round of funding. Lose this workforce structure—either by a wave of class-action lawsuits, intervention by regulators, or through the collective action of disgruntled workers—and you lose the gig economy. (...)
What’s at stake with these lawsuits and protests? The very definition of "employee" in a tech-enabled, service-driven 21st century American economy. Gig economy companies do not own cars, hotels, or even their workers’ cleaning supplies. What they own is a marketplace with two sides. On one side are people who need a job done—a ride to the airport, a clean house, a lunchtime delivery. On the other are people who are willing to do that job. If Uber and other companies are going to be as big as some claim, a new deal has to be brokered, one that squares the legal rules governing work with new products and services. What benefits can you expect from a quasi-employer? What does it mean to be both independent and tethered to an app-based company? The social contract between gig economy workers and employers is broken. Who will fix it, and how, will determine the fate of thousands of workers and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Handy (then Handybook), the company that posted the Craigslist ad, is best known as a cleaning service. But unlike Merry Maids or your local cleaning franchise, it doesn’t actually employ any cleaners. Instead, it relies on an army of independent contractors to complete jobs, taking a 15% to 20% commission of every hour worked. It’s part of the "gig economy," a much-hyped new class of the service industry where workers are expected to operate like mini-businesses. The influence of these companies is growing: according to an analysis by Greylock Partners, the value of transactions over platforms such as car services Lyft and Uber, grocery delivery service Instacart, courier service Postmates, and others could grow as large as $10 billion this year.But the Zenelajs had never heard of the gig economy, and it wasn’t until orientation that they realized they would not be employees of Handy.
Soon they were booking up to four cleanings a day through the platform. Handy promised to turn them into entrepreneurs, and it was true that when things went wrong, they were responsible: They didn’t get paid to wait for a client who was running up to 30 minutes late, though they drove to his house (Handy does reimburse cleaners for one hour if the client doesn't show up); they didn’t get paid if they stayed home sick; they didn’t get paid when they got stuck in traffic between jobs. There was no overtime pay or benefits, and they had to buy their own supplies and gas.
But the sisters allege that other kinds of work independence were a farce. When they couldn’t finish a job in the allotted time slot, they had to call customer service if they wanted to stay longer for more pay. First-time clients could not book cleanings with them specifically, which made leveraging relationships for recommendations difficult. They say there were suggestions, which they interpreted as rules, about how to listen to music (only with headphones, with permission from the customer) and go to the bathroom (discreetly). After about two months, both of them were banned from the platform: Handy says one sister performed poorly and the other sister funneled jobs to her after she was banned. (Vilma and Greta say they had just teamed up to complete jobs, which is also against Handy's terms of service, and that's why both of them were fired.)
"It is not fair, because there are laws here," says Vilma. "They are claiming to be just giving us contracts, and they’re not. They’re acting like an employer. But they’re not paying for it."
She and Greta filed a class action lawsuit against Handy in October, alleging that the company misclassified them as independent contractors. They are seeking compensation for missed lunch breaks, minimum wage compensation, reimbursement for business expenses, and overtime, in addition to other penalties. According to Handy’s math, this compensation would cost $291,000, not including attorney’s fees. Not only that, if Vilma and Greta prevailed, the lawsuit would also apply to all its current and former workers in California over the last four years. As of this past fall, that was about 2,000 people. That’s a potential penalty of almost $600 million—a lot of money for a company that has only raised about $42 million in venture capital.
Lawsuits like the one being brought against Handy are just the most threatening cloud in a brewing storm. Uber drivers have protested in San Francisco and Los Angeles and gone on strike in New York. Anecdotes in high-profile stories about Homejoy, a cleaning service similar to Handy, detail grueling hours and so little pay that in one instance, the worker was homeless. Workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online platform that pays independent contractors cents per task, recently orchestrated a letter-writing campaign to Jeff Bezos asking for him "to see that Turkers are not only actual human beings, but people who deserve respect, fair treatment, and open communication." Legally, Uber and Lyft are also facing charges of misclassifying workers, and a case against an online work platform called Crowdflower that uses independent contractors to complete tasks is in the process of being settled.
This rising legal retribution is a huge threat to the gig economy. Not being responsible for employees’ taxes and benefits allows companies like Handy to operate with 20% to 30% less in labor costs than the incumbent competition, leading to eye-popping numbers like Uber’s $40 billion valuation or Instacart’s latest $220 million round of funding. Lose this workforce structure—either by a wave of class-action lawsuits, intervention by regulators, or through the collective action of disgruntled workers—and you lose the gig economy. (...)
What’s at stake with these lawsuits and protests? The very definition of "employee" in a tech-enabled, service-driven 21st century American economy. Gig economy companies do not own cars, hotels, or even their workers’ cleaning supplies. What they own is a marketplace with two sides. On one side are people who need a job done—a ride to the airport, a clean house, a lunchtime delivery. On the other are people who are willing to do that job. If Uber and other companies are going to be as big as some claim, a new deal has to be brokered, one that squares the legal rules governing work with new products and services. What benefits can you expect from a quasi-employer? What does it mean to be both independent and tethered to an app-based company? The social contract between gig economy workers and employers is broken. Who will fix it, and how, will determine the fate of thousands of workers and hundreds of millions of dollars.
by Sarah Kessler, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: Henrik Sorensen, Getty Images
PostSecret: The Art of Authenticity
For the past ten years Frank Warren has been collecting and publishing other people’s anonymous secrets, sent via postcard, on his blog, PostSecret. The stories behind the postcards span the entire spectrum of human drama, from tales of petty revenge to accounts of abuse and severe depression. This richness of experience — along with the secrets’ visual design, by now a recognizable mishmash of Americana, well-executed kitsch, and ironic arts & crafts creations — has kept the site popular through multiple waves of internet fads. Originally a local mail art project in suburban Maryland, the site has spawned several books, including The World of PostSecret (released in November 2014), as well as a play, a TED talk, and numerous live events.
I have a longstanding fascination with the history of the Post, a system of communication based on the competing interests of technology, surveillance, and intimacy. Ever since first visiting PostSecret, it has struck me as a project that builds on and plays with that original postal tension: does sending a postcard bring reader and sender closer together, or stress the distance between them? PostSecret harkens back to the days of handwritten correspondences and epistolary novels, but requires a very modern, digital infrastructure to spread its message of healing-via-sharing. Intrigued by the multiple layers at play in his project, I recently chatted with Frank Warren over the phone about the meaning of secrecy in the age of Snapchat and Whisper, the relation between authenticity and anonymity, and the way he chooses which postcards to publish, having received more than 1,000,000 over the past decade.
We all have a fairly decent idea of what the Post is. What is a secret?
I’ve been collecting secrets for ten years and my definition continually evolves and expands. One way to think of a secret is as dark matter — this stuff that makes up 90%-95% of what’s in the universe but that we can’t see, we can’t sense. The only way we know it’s there is how it affects the behavior of other objects. That’s the definition of a secret I’m living with now.
What happens to that dark matter once it becomes visible through a platform like PostSecret?
Maybe it goes from anti-matter to matter? I think the results of sharing a secret can be transformative. They can change who we are, they can create relationships. They can hurt, they can harm, they can heal. My hope is that when people share a secret with me and the world on a postcard, it’s a first step in a longer journey reconciling with that secret.
Do you ever receive follow-ups or updates from people who had sent you their postcards?
Yes! One follow-up I received was from someone who said that he had made up a story that he thought would make a good PostSecret secret and mailed it in. But then, after I scanned it and posted it on the web, he saw that through the mail process, some of the text that he had put on the postcard had been ripped away. And the secret had a new meaning. He went on to say — that secret that went on to appear on the postcard, on the website, was a true one in his life.
I’ve received another email from a woman who said, “I wrote down six secrets on postcards that I was going to send to you, Frank, but instead I left them on the pillow of my boyfriend as he was sleeping, and I went to work. Later that day, he arrives at my work and asks me to marry him, and I said Yes.”
How do you explain — to yourself — the power generated in the process of creating these postcards?
I think that when you’re speaking about secrets you’re talking about self-revelation. You’re talking about, in some cases, coming out to yourself. I was looking at a postcard today to make a selection for the Sunday Secrets on the website. And I saw one about an hour ago that said “Writing out this secret for the first time and reading it made me realize it wasn’t true.” So our secrets can have very complex relationships with who we are. Sometimes by sharing a secret you confirm it, and sometimes the sharing act in and of itself changes the nature of the secret.
I think that when you’re speaking about secrets you’re talking about self-revelation. You’re talking about, in some cases, coming out to yourself. I was looking at a postcard today to make a selection for the Sunday Secrets on the website. And I saw one about an hour ago that said “Writing out this secret for the first time and reading it made me realize it wasn’t true.” So our secrets can have very complex relationships with who we are. Sometimes by sharing a secret you confirm it, and sometimes the sharing act in and of itself changes the nature of the secret.
We live in a strange moment right now — everybody is extremely concerned about surveillance and privacy, yet at the same time we seem to be compelled to share our innermost, most intimate emotions. How does your project relate to this tension?
You talk about the line between what we decide to reveal versus what we decide to conceal. We’ve always had to make that decision — it’s part of the human condition. I would say, though, that it’s much more of a tension now — now it’s an earthquake, with security, social media, and people presenting an image of themselves for public consumption.
I feel like PostSecret is almost like an anti-Facebook. It’s the true story that you would normally never share in a public arena. But in some ways, the more of ourselves we share online through social media, the less value it has. Sometimes the more we try and project an image of ourselves to others — and perhaps to ourselves — the deeper our secrets can hide from us. And so if we can find the courage to look deep and discover, uncover, and share a vulnerable secret, I think those kinds of stories have the most value of all. Not just to the person who’s confessing, but to the community that can hear it.
You talk about the line between what we decide to reveal versus what we decide to conceal. We’ve always had to make that decision — it’s part of the human condition. I would say, though, that it’s much more of a tension now — now it’s an earthquake, with security, social media, and people presenting an image of themselves for public consumption.
I feel like PostSecret is almost like an anti-Facebook. It’s the true story that you would normally never share in a public arena. But in some ways, the more of ourselves we share online through social media, the less value it has. Sometimes the more we try and project an image of ourselves to others — and perhaps to ourselves — the deeper our secrets can hide from us. And so if we can find the courage to look deep and discover, uncover, and share a vulnerable secret, I think those kinds of stories have the most value of all. Not just to the person who’s confessing, but to the community that can hear it.
by Ben Huberman, Longreads | Read more:
Image: PostSecret
If You’re Over 30 And Single, You Should Be Using Tinder
[ed. Um, No: "Because much of the criticism of Tinder seems to actually be, implicitly, a criticism of the machinations of dating, and the ways in which dating causes people to, sometimes, show their worst, judgmental, passive aggressive selves instead of their best selves." No, because you have to be on Facebook to start with, which is the real deal killer.]
Most of the discussion around Tinder has focused on its core demographic: twentysomethings, gay and straight, in urban areas (New York and Los Angeles, where I live, are its two biggest markets), who seem to use Tinder to hook up, boost or masochistically deflate their ego, and/or issue sweeping, usually disparaging pronouncements about everyone they’ve ever encountered on it.But I’ve now come to realize that even though all of the press around Tinder focuses on its popularity with twentysomethings, it’s actually the perfect app for someone in their thirties, or older, to find love. As people age, they naturally grow less inclined to seek out relationships that are more casual. (For one thing, it’s exhausting. After you turn 33 or so, staying out past 10 on a school night becomes much more rare.) Also, as we age, the pool of eligible people shrinks, and with it so do the number of opportunities to meet people in the ways people met people in their twenties (well, before Tinder existed): through friends, at parties, at bars, at work, in grad school, wherever. There’s something really comforting to know that, in fact, there are actually tons of people out there who are age-appropriate and are looking for the same thing you are.
Because much of the criticism of Tinder seems to actually be, implicitly, a criticism of the machinations of dating, and the ways in which dating causes people to, sometimes, show their worst, judgmental, passive aggressive selves instead of their best selves. My co-worker Tamerra recently asked me, “Do people think that the app will relieve people of the responsibility of being sincere, projecting themselves honestly, and communicating what they’re looking for in a relationship the same way they would IRL?” Certainly, Tinder seems to make it easier to not be vulnerable, to put out a bulletproof version of yourself. But Tinder doesn’t make it easier to fall in love just because it makes it easier to be exposed to hundreds, or thousands, of potential dates. To fall in love means you need to really know yourself, and be secure and happy enough that you want to share yourself with someone else, and to be vulnerable. Tinder doesn’t get rid of those steps, and it’s unrealistic to think that it would.
I agree with the psychology professor Eli J. Finkel, who recently defended Tinder as “the best option available now” for “open-minded singles … who would like to marry someday and want to enjoy dating in the meantime.” And I think that’s especially true if you are in your thirties and you are looking for a relationship, and you see dating as a means to that end. There are, of course, exceptions to every single rule, but I found that the people on Tinder in their thirties were, generally, more receptive to the idea of being in a relationship than you would expect. Including me.
by Doree Shafrir, Buzz Feed | Read more:
Image: Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
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Heart Attack Grill
[ed. I'll admit, I'd never heard of the Heart Attack Grill until yesterday when a friend who visits Las Vegas regularly mentioned it. Truth in Advertising!]
On a recent trip to Las Vegas, I stopped by the Heart Attack Grill.The restaurant has been in the news recently after its owner "Doctor Jon" Basso gave a bizarre interview on Bloomberg TV where he said his restaurant kills its customers. He even carried the (alleged) cremated remains of a customer with him.
And while it's a macabre gimmick, it's not entirely inaccurate. Heart Attack Grill is crazy unhealthy: The restaurant's signature dish is its 9,982-calorie Quadruple Bypass Burger, which weighs a staggering 3 pounds. Customers can order burgers with up to eight patties, all topped with chili, tomato, cheese, onion, and bacon (for an extra fee).
Inside, the restaurant has an ironic medical theme with nurse waitresses and hospital-themed decor. Even the customers have to wear hospital gowns, and anyone more than 350 pounds eats for free.
by Megan Willett, Business Insider | Read more:
Image: Megan Willett
Bikes vs. Cars: The Deadly War Nobody's Winning
Concussion or no concussion, Steve Hill wants a new bike. Pronto.
“To be honest with you, I feel like I should have it already,” he says to the woman he’s facing, Megan Hottman, a 35-year-old personal-injury lawyer who’s taking notes on a laptop inside her Golden, Colorado, office. From where I sit, just to the right of Hill*—who is 38 and trim—he looks pretty good, considering that he suffered a concussion and whiplash in a car collision just one week ago. But as I watch him, I have to wonder if he should have even driven himself to this meeting. As a longtime rider, I’ve endured similar injuries: I once went to the ER with a concussion after a crash, and I felt the effects for weeks. Hill has already told Hottman that he’s been experiencing dizzy spells.
*Because of ongoing litigation, the name of Hottman’s client has been changed.
Talking a beat too slowly, Hill describes a big ride he’s supposed to do eight days from now. It’s a Colorado event that took place last summer and covered more than 100 miles and over 13,000 feet of vertical gain—a major undertaking.
Hottman nods. She’s a dedicated rider herself, so she knows all about the hunger to get back on the road. But Hill is in no shape for a day like that, and he’s naive to think that a lawyer can serve up a new high-end bike anytime soon.
“Almost every client sitting in that chair has some event coming up,” Hottman says diplomatically. “These accidents only seem to happen when you have something on the burner.”
Hill’s crash occurred in Boulder, 20 miles north of Golden. Pedaling his $10,000 dream machine on a pleasant summer afternoon, Hill was traveling north on two-lane Cherryvale Road as he approached South Boulder Road. He had the green light as he entered the intersection, at about 25 miles per hour.
Just then, a car turned left in front of him. Hill was far enough away to avoid a crash, but a second car abruptly turned left, too, and he couldn’t dodge it. The vehicle’s right front corner hit his left foot, shearing the pedal cleat off his cycling shoe. The car bulled into the seat tube of Hill’s frame, which snapped. He went flying, helmet first.
“I had very little road rash,” he says. “But I hit my head.”
“Yowzers,” says Hottman, a long, lean, and outgoing ex–professional road racer who now runs her own 50-member cycling team—called TheCyclist-Lawyer.com—and still manages to ride 6,000 miles a year. “Super, super violent!”
Hill again brings up the long ride he wants to do. “Do you think we’d be able to settle in a timely manner?” he asks.
With that, Hottman lifts her hands off the keyboard and peers up from the screen. Cyclists who consider hiring Hottman don’t always know about her out-of-office activities, which include a lot of educational work. She teaches bike-handling skills to beginners. She gives lectures to cops about relevant laws. She’s the coauthor of a forthcoming reference book that’s aimed at every attorney and judge in her field. Hottman has dissected cycling athletically, legally, and ethically, and she’s concluded that, while she dearly loves her two-wheeled brothers and sisters, riders don’t always display sound judgment.
“I’m not pro-cyclist all the time,” Hottman told me when we first spoke months earlier. “I get frustrated when I see riders behaving badly.” (...)
In her office, in the courtroom, in the news, on the Web, and on city streets and country roads, Megan Hottman encounters various species of the same genus: riders who are sure they’ve been wronged and simultaneously believe that cyclists are always right.
Often as not, they have been wronged, but Hottman consistently quotes a statistic that many riders don’t know or choose to ignore: roughly 47 percent of all bike-car mishaps happen because riders are at fault. That figure is debatable—there’s no national database, and Hottman’s use of it derives from small-sample studies, media accounts, and her own experience working on cases over the years. Still, there’s no doubt that riders often behave recklessly on roads and highways. Ask any driver who’s seen them blow through red lights or come screaming the wrong direction down one-way streets.
A particularly sour moment for cycling’s image occurred last September in New York City’s Central Park, when Jill Tarlov, a 58-year-old mother of two, stepped off a curb and into the path of 31-year-old Harlem cyclist Jason Marshall, who was swerving around other pedestrians and reportedly in an aerodynamic tuck when he hit her. Three days later, Tarlov, the wife of a CBS senior vice president, died from severe head trauma. Marshall, who told reporters that the collision was “unavoidable,” hasn’t been charged with a crime.
In San Francisco in March of 2012, cyclist Chris Bucchere killed an elderly pedestrian in the city’s Castro district, hitting him after running multiple stop signs. According to a report on the mishap in the San Francisco Chronicle, three other pedestrians had been mowed down in the Bay Area in the past year. Bucchere ultimately pleaded guilty to felony vehicular manslaughter.
We all know that motorists can be reckless and myopic as well, and statistically they may be at fault in car-bike accidents nearly half the time. When drivers screw up or drive too aggressively—or with outright malice—the consequences are usually dire for bicyclists because of the harsh realities of physics. Cars are massive metal beasts; bikes are not. When collisions happen, bikes and their riders get the worst of it, regardless of who’s at fault.
by Andrew Tilin, Outside | Read more:
Image: John Haynes
“To be honest with you, I feel like I should have it already,” he says to the woman he’s facing, Megan Hottman, a 35-year-old personal-injury lawyer who’s taking notes on a laptop inside her Golden, Colorado, office. From where I sit, just to the right of Hill*—who is 38 and trim—he looks pretty good, considering that he suffered a concussion and whiplash in a car collision just one week ago. But as I watch him, I have to wonder if he should have even driven himself to this meeting. As a longtime rider, I’ve endured similar injuries: I once went to the ER with a concussion after a crash, and I felt the effects for weeks. Hill has already told Hottman that he’s been experiencing dizzy spells.
*Because of ongoing litigation, the name of Hottman’s client has been changed.Talking a beat too slowly, Hill describes a big ride he’s supposed to do eight days from now. It’s a Colorado event that took place last summer and covered more than 100 miles and over 13,000 feet of vertical gain—a major undertaking.
Hottman nods. She’s a dedicated rider herself, so she knows all about the hunger to get back on the road. But Hill is in no shape for a day like that, and he’s naive to think that a lawyer can serve up a new high-end bike anytime soon.
“Almost every client sitting in that chair has some event coming up,” Hottman says diplomatically. “These accidents only seem to happen when you have something on the burner.”
Hill’s crash occurred in Boulder, 20 miles north of Golden. Pedaling his $10,000 dream machine on a pleasant summer afternoon, Hill was traveling north on two-lane Cherryvale Road as he approached South Boulder Road. He had the green light as he entered the intersection, at about 25 miles per hour.
Just then, a car turned left in front of him. Hill was far enough away to avoid a crash, but a second car abruptly turned left, too, and he couldn’t dodge it. The vehicle’s right front corner hit his left foot, shearing the pedal cleat off his cycling shoe. The car bulled into the seat tube of Hill’s frame, which snapped. He went flying, helmet first.
“I had very little road rash,” he says. “But I hit my head.”
“Yowzers,” says Hottman, a long, lean, and outgoing ex–professional road racer who now runs her own 50-member cycling team—called TheCyclist-Lawyer.com—and still manages to ride 6,000 miles a year. “Super, super violent!”
Hill again brings up the long ride he wants to do. “Do you think we’d be able to settle in a timely manner?” he asks.
With that, Hottman lifts her hands off the keyboard and peers up from the screen. Cyclists who consider hiring Hottman don’t always know about her out-of-office activities, which include a lot of educational work. She teaches bike-handling skills to beginners. She gives lectures to cops about relevant laws. She’s the coauthor of a forthcoming reference book that’s aimed at every attorney and judge in her field. Hottman has dissected cycling athletically, legally, and ethically, and she’s concluded that, while she dearly loves her two-wheeled brothers and sisters, riders don’t always display sound judgment.
“I’m not pro-cyclist all the time,” Hottman told me when we first spoke months earlier. “I get frustrated when I see riders behaving badly.” (...)
In her office, in the courtroom, in the news, on the Web, and on city streets and country roads, Megan Hottman encounters various species of the same genus: riders who are sure they’ve been wronged and simultaneously believe that cyclists are always right.
Often as not, they have been wronged, but Hottman consistently quotes a statistic that many riders don’t know or choose to ignore: roughly 47 percent of all bike-car mishaps happen because riders are at fault. That figure is debatable—there’s no national database, and Hottman’s use of it derives from small-sample studies, media accounts, and her own experience working on cases over the years. Still, there’s no doubt that riders often behave recklessly on roads and highways. Ask any driver who’s seen them blow through red lights or come screaming the wrong direction down one-way streets.
A particularly sour moment for cycling’s image occurred last September in New York City’s Central Park, when Jill Tarlov, a 58-year-old mother of two, stepped off a curb and into the path of 31-year-old Harlem cyclist Jason Marshall, who was swerving around other pedestrians and reportedly in an aerodynamic tuck when he hit her. Three days later, Tarlov, the wife of a CBS senior vice president, died from severe head trauma. Marshall, who told reporters that the collision was “unavoidable,” hasn’t been charged with a crime.
In San Francisco in March of 2012, cyclist Chris Bucchere killed an elderly pedestrian in the city’s Castro district, hitting him after running multiple stop signs. According to a report on the mishap in the San Francisco Chronicle, three other pedestrians had been mowed down in the Bay Area in the past year. Bucchere ultimately pleaded guilty to felony vehicular manslaughter.
We all know that motorists can be reckless and myopic as well, and statistically they may be at fault in car-bike accidents nearly half the time. When drivers screw up or drive too aggressively—or with outright malice—the consequences are usually dire for bicyclists because of the harsh realities of physics. Cars are massive metal beasts; bikes are not. When collisions happen, bikes and their riders get the worst of it, regardless of who’s at fault.
by Andrew Tilin, Outside | Read more:
Image: John Haynes
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Nap Like a Pro
Growing up, sleep was considered paramount in my family home. My siblings and I didn’t have many house rules – bedtimes were flexible, we had free reign over microwaved TV dinners (this was the 1980s), and video games. But one thing was always crystal clear: we couldn’t disturb an adult, or another kid, who was taking a nap.
As I got older, I was in for a rude awakening. Apparently, society looks down upon napping in the adult working world. But evidence is growing that napping can produce cognitive benefits from increased alertness to improved motor skills, perception and memory consolidation. So how do you get the best from a brief bit of shuteye? (...)
In a study published in 2008, the University of California’s Sara Mednick – author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life – and her colleagues compared the benefits of 200mg of caffeine (about the amount in a cup of coffee) with a 60 to 90 minute daytime nap on various memory tasks. They found that a nap generally improved memory performance, while caffeine either didn’t affect – or worsened – performance. The researchers suggest that caffeine blocks consolidation of new material into long-term memory by increasing levels of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine in the hippocampus (the same neurotransmitter that naturally decreases during slow wave sleep).
The promised benefits of sleep have even persuaded a few firms to allow their employees to nap at work. Earlier this year, software companyHubSpot designed a napping room in its Massachusetts office that features a hammock and dim lighting. Employees are free to book the space without limitations.
According to HubSpot’s Alison Elworthy, the policy is a huge success, especially helpful for new parents who are making up for disrupted sleep at night, or employees recovering from jetlag. “People are really excited to use it and haven’t abused the policy at all,” she says.
Other firms have had less success. Earlier this year, BBC Capital reported that napping policies led to slacking off and procrastination at some companies, and a 30% drop in productivity at one Toronto-based tech start-up.
Even so, Mednick claims that about 40% of the population are habitual nappers – meaning they feel the need for, and benefit from, a regular afternoon snooze. So if you’re a natural napper (and I am), what is the most effective way to nap?
The best way to nap
According to researchers, the most natural time to take a nap, based on our circadian rhythms, is in the afternoon sometime between 2 and 4pm. Mednick even designed a napping wheel that pinpoints the ideal time to snooze, when a nap would contain a good balanced of slow wave and REM sleep. This balance typically occurs six to eight hours after waking. (...)
But the best way to nap also depends on what kind of effects you’re looking for. In a 2009 study, Mednick and her colleagues compared the effects of REM sleep, non-REM sleep, and quiet rest (while awake) on creative problem-solving. On the morning of the test, students were given a task in which they had to come up with a word that is associated with three apparently unrelated words – for instance ‘falling’, ‘actor’ and ‘dust’ can all be associated with the word ‘star’. Early in the afternoon, the students either took an REM nap, a non-REM nap or spent time resting while awake. When they returned in the evening to repeat versions of the morning’s test, the students who had taken the REM naps performed the best. In other words, it seems that REM can enhance creative problem solving.
“So if you’re looking for a restorative nap, you should sleep later in the day when you have an increased amount of slow wave sleep,” says Mednick, “And if you’re looking for a nap that might aid your creativity, you should sleep earlier in the day when you experience more REM.” (...)
But getting REM sleep also means having to sleep for longer – about 60-90 minutes – because it is the last stage of the sleep cycle. Short naps can have benefits too, though.
by Tiffanie Wen, BBC | Read more:
Image: Thinkstock
As I got older, I was in for a rude awakening. Apparently, society looks down upon napping in the adult working world. But evidence is growing that napping can produce cognitive benefits from increased alertness to improved motor skills, perception and memory consolidation. So how do you get the best from a brief bit of shuteye? (...)
In a study published in 2008, the University of California’s Sara Mednick – author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life – and her colleagues compared the benefits of 200mg of caffeine (about the amount in a cup of coffee) with a 60 to 90 minute daytime nap on various memory tasks. They found that a nap generally improved memory performance, while caffeine either didn’t affect – or worsened – performance. The researchers suggest that caffeine blocks consolidation of new material into long-term memory by increasing levels of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine in the hippocampus (the same neurotransmitter that naturally decreases during slow wave sleep).The promised benefits of sleep have even persuaded a few firms to allow their employees to nap at work. Earlier this year, software companyHubSpot designed a napping room in its Massachusetts office that features a hammock and dim lighting. Employees are free to book the space without limitations.
According to HubSpot’s Alison Elworthy, the policy is a huge success, especially helpful for new parents who are making up for disrupted sleep at night, or employees recovering from jetlag. “People are really excited to use it and haven’t abused the policy at all,” she says.
Other firms have had less success. Earlier this year, BBC Capital reported that napping policies led to slacking off and procrastination at some companies, and a 30% drop in productivity at one Toronto-based tech start-up.
Even so, Mednick claims that about 40% of the population are habitual nappers – meaning they feel the need for, and benefit from, a regular afternoon snooze. So if you’re a natural napper (and I am), what is the most effective way to nap?
The best way to nap
According to researchers, the most natural time to take a nap, based on our circadian rhythms, is in the afternoon sometime between 2 and 4pm. Mednick even designed a napping wheel that pinpoints the ideal time to snooze, when a nap would contain a good balanced of slow wave and REM sleep. This balance typically occurs six to eight hours after waking. (...)
But the best way to nap also depends on what kind of effects you’re looking for. In a 2009 study, Mednick and her colleagues compared the effects of REM sleep, non-REM sleep, and quiet rest (while awake) on creative problem-solving. On the morning of the test, students were given a task in which they had to come up with a word that is associated with three apparently unrelated words – for instance ‘falling’, ‘actor’ and ‘dust’ can all be associated with the word ‘star’. Early in the afternoon, the students either took an REM nap, a non-REM nap or spent time resting while awake. When they returned in the evening to repeat versions of the morning’s test, the students who had taken the REM naps performed the best. In other words, it seems that REM can enhance creative problem solving.
“So if you’re looking for a restorative nap, you should sleep later in the day when you have an increased amount of slow wave sleep,” says Mednick, “And if you’re looking for a nap that might aid your creativity, you should sleep earlier in the day when you experience more REM.” (...)
But getting REM sleep also means having to sleep for longer – about 60-90 minutes – because it is the last stage of the sleep cycle. Short naps can have benefits too, though.
by Tiffanie Wen, BBC | Read more:
Image: Thinkstock
The Internet’s Hidden Science Factory
In a small apartment in a small town in northeastern Mississippi, Sarah Marshall sits at her computer, clicking bubbles for an online survey, as her 1-year-old son plays nearby. She hasn’t done this exact survey before, but the questions are familiar, and she works fast. That’s because Marshall is what you might call a professional survey-taker. In the past five years, she has completed roughly 20,000 academic surveys. This is her 21st so far this week. And it’s only Tuesday.
Marshall is a worker for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online job forum where “requesters” post jobs, and an army of crowdsourced workers complete them, earning fantastically small fees for each task. The work has been called microlabor, and the jobs, known as Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, range wildly. Some are tedious: transcribing interviews or cropping photos. Some are funny: prank calling someone’s buddy (that’s worth $1) or writing the title to a pornographic movie based on a collection of dirty screen grabs (6 cents). And others are downright bizarre. One task, for example, asked workers to strap live fish to their chests and upload the photos. That paid $5 — a lot by Mechanical Turk standards.
Mostly, Marshall is a sort of cyber guinea pig, providing a steady stream of data to academic research. This places her squarely inside a growing culture of super-savvy, highly experienced study participants.
As she works, she hears a rustling noise. “Grayson, are you in my garbage can?”
In the kitchen, the trash can’s on its side. Her son has liberated an empty box of cinnamon rolls and dumped the remaining contents on the floor. She goes to him, scoops him up and carries him back to the living room, where he circles the carpet, chattering happily as she resumes typing.
“I’m never going to be absolutely undistracted, ever,” Marshall says, and smiles.
Her employers don’t know that Marshall works while negotiating her toddler’s milk bottles and giving him hugs. They don’t know that she has seen studies similar to theirs maybe hundreds, possibly thousands, of times.
Since its founding in 2005, Mechanical Turk has become an increasingly popular way for university researchers to recruit subjects for online experiments. It’s cheap, easy to use, and the responses, powered by the forum’s 500,000 or so workers, flood in fast.
These factors are such a draw for researchers that, in certain academic fields, crowdsourced workers are outpacing psychology students — the traditional go-to study subjects. And the studies are a huge draw for many workers, who tend to participate again and again and again.
These aren’t obscure studies that Turkers are feeding. They span dozens of fields of research, including social, cognitive and clinical psychology, economics, political science and medicine. They teach us about human behavior. They deal in subjects like energy conservation, adolescent alcohol use, managing money and developing effective teaching methods.
“Most of what’s happening in these studies involves trying to understand human behavior,” said Yale University’s David Rand. “Understanding bias and prejudice, and how you make financial decisions, and how you make decisions generally that involve taking risks, that kind of thing. And there are often very clear policy implications.”
As the use of online crowdsourcing in research continues to grow, some are asking the question: How reliable are the data that these modern-day research subjects generate?
Marshall is a worker for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online job forum where “requesters” post jobs, and an army of crowdsourced workers complete them, earning fantastically small fees for each task. The work has been called microlabor, and the jobs, known as Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, range wildly. Some are tedious: transcribing interviews or cropping photos. Some are funny: prank calling someone’s buddy (that’s worth $1) or writing the title to a pornographic movie based on a collection of dirty screen grabs (6 cents). And others are downright bizarre. One task, for example, asked workers to strap live fish to their chests and upload the photos. That paid $5 — a lot by Mechanical Turk standards.Mostly, Marshall is a sort of cyber guinea pig, providing a steady stream of data to academic research. This places her squarely inside a growing culture of super-savvy, highly experienced study participants.
As she works, she hears a rustling noise. “Grayson, are you in my garbage can?”
In the kitchen, the trash can’s on its side. Her son has liberated an empty box of cinnamon rolls and dumped the remaining contents on the floor. She goes to him, scoops him up and carries him back to the living room, where he circles the carpet, chattering happily as she resumes typing.
“I’m never going to be absolutely undistracted, ever,” Marshall says, and smiles.
Her employers don’t know that Marshall works while negotiating her toddler’s milk bottles and giving him hugs. They don’t know that she has seen studies similar to theirs maybe hundreds, possibly thousands, of times.
Since its founding in 2005, Mechanical Turk has become an increasingly popular way for university researchers to recruit subjects for online experiments. It’s cheap, easy to use, and the responses, powered by the forum’s 500,000 or so workers, flood in fast.
These factors are such a draw for researchers that, in certain academic fields, crowdsourced workers are outpacing psychology students — the traditional go-to study subjects. And the studies are a huge draw for many workers, who tend to participate again and again and again.
These aren’t obscure studies that Turkers are feeding. They span dozens of fields of research, including social, cognitive and clinical psychology, economics, political science and medicine. They teach us about human behavior. They deal in subjects like energy conservation, adolescent alcohol use, managing money and developing effective teaching methods.
“Most of what’s happening in these studies involves trying to understand human behavior,” said Yale University’s David Rand. “Understanding bias and prejudice, and how you make financial decisions, and how you make decisions generally that involve taking risks, that kind of thing. And there are often very clear policy implications.”
As the use of online crowdsourcing in research continues to grow, some are asking the question: How reliable are the data that these modern-day research subjects generate?
by Jenny Marder, PBS Newshour | Read more:
Image: Edel Rodriguez
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