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Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Technology Channel. He s the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. More The New York Observer calls Madrigal for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter. He co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.He s spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press).Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley s Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland. A discussion with Hank Adams, the CEO of Sportvision, the company that created the glowing hockey puck and football's yellow line At 11:02pm, on Thursday, August 29, my son entered the world, taking his first breaths calmly in my wife's arms.Since then, I've avoided writing about him. For one, I have not wanted to process this experience in real-time. Everything's always changing, like the little micro expressions that canter across his face and then disappear the second I bring my camera to the ready, and I just don't know anything yet about being a dad. Friends of ours who had a baby two weeks before we did refer to their own "birth" as parents when their little boy came into being. That's how I feel, like a newborn, unsure when to eat, in-and-out of the dream world, and as likely to provide a coherent answer about fatherhood as my little boy is when we ask, "Why are you the most beautiful thing on Earth?"That's how I feel, like a newborn, unsure when to eat, in-and-out of the dream world ...But I have thought a lot about him in time and in space, the way he came to be precisely where he is. A couple days after we found out my wife was pregnant, I took a 20-mile hike up in the Oakland hills, thinking. Near the top of the ridge, I was struck by a rock outcropping that I've returned to again and again in my mind as I stare at his perfect little ears. Thin plates of sedimentary rock stack vertically, like books. What was once ground is now wall, and time reads from right to left. Atop the rocks, where new soil has become fresh ground, massive eucalyptus trees have gained purchase,[url=http://www.ugg-boots-sale.org]cheap ugg[/url], and their roots wind down through the rock, splitting it, and holding it together. Down at the base, I see myself from the perspective of the rocks: biology on this teensy-tiny human time scale, large in self-importance, small in duration. To the rocks, I'm a barely-there ghost in a long-exposure photograph. And yet, the asphalt I'm running on marks a more permanent humanity. I remember that at our wedding, a friend explained that Jews bless the wine and not the grapes because it represents not just that which was created, but also what we've done with it. On that walk, the sun had just come up, and that was another kind of time, eternal in its circles. And all I could think was that some time in August or September, we'd be holding our child, our contribution to the deeper levels of human time. It was not an easy moment to Tweet, and the light was not right to capture the rocks with my camera. And the blessing really was something that all my life had prepared me to make with my mind, anyway, the creation of these rocks and this light acting as the substrate for the flashes of neurons, as they drove down into what this simple geology could mean. All I could think was that some time in August or September, we'd be holding our child,[url=http://www.ugg-boots-sale.org]cheap ugg[/url], our contribution to the deeper levels of human time. So it is when I look at him. Of course I could go on forever about his toes and his emergent eyelashes. His triumphant feeding and the whimpers of his dreams. That's the right of every parent, obviously, and if I run into you in person, I will make no excuses for being madly in love. But I also think about his native American and Mexican ancestors, who came over aided by a cold climate and prodded by necessity. I think of his English great-great-great-great grandparents who rode the boats over from Europe and never went home. I think of his Jewish great grandparents, who left all they knew in Vienna and Russia for uncertain but hopeful lives in New York and Detroit. I think of his grandfather, a Mexican emigre, and his Jewish grandparents who settled in Colorado. He is a child of the globe, a member of La Raza Cósmica, a Westerner, a Jew, a Mexican, a Californian: an American. And he's perfect, perfect, perfect. Perfect. I love him so much.I won't be writing much in this space over the next two months. I'll be bonding with him, and playing devoted and plucky sidekick to my superhero wife. Eight days in, fatherhood is the most epic thing I've ever experienced. As my friend Tim said, "It may be common as air, birds, flowing water, and the shade of tall trees, but it is a majestic and glorious thing to be a father of sons." The Rad New Words Added to the Dictionary in the '90s: Where Are They Now?Poking fun at new words added to various dictionaries is a time-honored journalistic tradition, nearly as well-loved as writing about nomenclature after the Social Security Administration's annual release of the country's most popular names.And for good reason: Everyone uses words and everyone has a name. It doesn't get more universal than the language we share. So, today, when the Oxford Dictionaries Online (not the OED) added bitcoin and hackerspace and emoji and TL;DR, everyone had some fun arguing about whether all the additions were appropriate. On one side are the traditionalists, who would prefer English remain the same as it's always been, where "always" is defined as whenever that person was 23. On the other side are the people who are right. This is literally a never-ending debate, and yes I just used literally to mean figuratively and you still knew what I meant.But, question! Many of the words entering our dictionaries have a distinctively technological flavor. They are things we use to describe our interactions with machines, or are used almost exclusively in mediated realms like Gchat. So, if our language is being partially forced to find new ways to say things because we can do new things with technology, and we know technology obsolesces, then are we naming actions and ideas that will only exist until the next upgrade comes out? Matter of fact, back in the year 2000, journalists recognized this had already become a problem. In part because of technology, "the pace of change in the language has really increased," John M. Morse, publisher of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, told the St. Louis Dispatch (paywalled). His dictionary was adding a hundred words a year back then, up from a few dozen in previous decades. (Side quote: "Morse is wondering what term will catch on for the new decade [i.e. '00s]. He said it could be the 'two thousands,' but also said it might be something a little less formal, like the 'oh-ohs.' " The oh-ohs! Way better than the aughts.)In any case, we went back to the trove of equally excited articles about new words being added to dictionaries in the 1990s to see how the words had aged. Better than you'd think, I'd say.Applet: This one caught on, didn't it? But only in its abbreviated form, app.Boot Up: In the old days, a computer booting up could take a minute or two as technical arcana flashed up your monitor. That's not how most computers work anymore, and slowly, I think we're losing this word. And in its more figurative meaning — go through the turning-on process — we have "spin up" and "start up."Browser: This one has stuck. It certainly is more likely to mean the piece of software we use to move around the web than someone looking through a store.Cowabunga: This word has nothing to do with technology. Still. You kind of miss it, too, right? It wasn't the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that initially popularized it, but rather surfers via the Howdy Doody Show. (How childhood dies.)Cypherpunk: In the early days of both computing and the Internet, cryptography to keep people from spying on you was all the rage. For obvious reasons, both the term and idea of cypherpunk are coming back, I think. Digerati: This is another word used primarily by newspaper columnists to discuss large, vague groups of people, as far as I can tell. It is certainly still in use, though dubiously useful.Dot-com: It's still used to refer to the go-go era before the tech bubble burst, but now the preferred name for an Internet company is clearly "startup." (Especially now that many companies are going "mobile first." Someone who works for Facebook might technically work for a dot-com, but it'd be a real stretch to say an Instagram employee does.)Emoticon: Still doing the Lord's work of inflecting text with affect. :)E-Tailing: If anyone tries to sell you e-tailing consulting, run! Almost no one uses this term anymore, although you do sometimes see people sometimes call Amazon an "e-tailer" instead of the preferred nomenclature "steamroller."Flying Mouse: "A mouse that can be lifted from the desk and used in three dimensions." New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1998. Huh. I think this can be classed a failure.Geek: Yup, nailed it. This word is everywhere, including its horrifying verb outgrowths ("I'm geeked!").Icon: A New York Times writer provides a strange window into the world before icon meant a part of a graphical user interface. "Readers of this dictionary will find 'icon,' defined not as a religious picture but as a small symbol on a computer screen." Infobahn: This synonym for "information superhighway" never caught on. Too German sounding for American ears, I reckon.Infotainment: I'm pretty sure videogame developers came up with this word to sanitize their wares for parents. This word's still floating around, and I wonder if it could be profitably attached to the current generation of MOOCs.Glocal: Global + local. Eww. This was coined in the early '90s and is enjoying an improbable resurgence to describe some types of business models. Hunt and Peck: The slow way of typing is still recognizable as a phrase, but as more and more people type faster and use smartphones/tablets, we seem to have fewer opportunities to use it. Karaoke: A spectacularly successful entertainment technology experience, the original noun is now a verb, too. LOL: This rather contemporary sounding term made a dictionary way back in 1998, when I was LOLing and ROFLing in chat rooms across the Internet.Mouse Potato: This play on "couch potato" didn't make it many places outside the Oxford Dictionary of New Words. Nerkish: Another missed opportunity! Formed from nerd and jerkish, it describes a substantial portion of the Internet.Netiquette: This word appears to be used by newspaper columnists and grandparents. It's fallen out of common usage. Netizen: I guess people sometimes use the term, but the spirit that infused it, this idea that the net was a separate space, an independent country that you could have citizenship in... Well, yeah, the NSA thought that was cute, and made sure to tap the pipes on American soil. Palmtop: Appearing in Webster's New World Dictionary, this word never caught on, though, with the rise of the old smartphone, we're all living in the age of the palmtop. (What the editors didn't see coming in 1992 was that we'd hang on to the word "phone" for devices that are used far more often to do other things!)Pharm: This term was supposed to mean a place where genetically modified plants and animals were raised. But that would be most U.S. corn farms, for example, and you don't see the term applied. Phone Sex: Still around, though I think it's lost its 900-number paid-for connotation. Now, the meaning seems more like "voice sexting." Phreaking: Phreaking was hacking the telephone system, essentially, and it's a classic term that's becoming obsolete because a smaller and smaller slice of our communications run through the infrastructure phreakers investigated. Publify: I LOVE THIS ONE. Publify was meant to mean "publish online" or in a database. I can't wait to publify this post. Please help me bring this into common usage. Tell your blogger friends. Screensaver: Most people don't use screensavers anymore because our computers are sophisticated enough to shut off their own monitors when they're not in use. I will say that I think we collectively missed an opportunity to repurpose this word to mean terrible, ignorable television (or other content).Spam: This is probably the one technological thing you never, ever have to worry will go away.Voice Mail: Sadly, the word and phenomenon persist. (Though at some point, people deleted the space: voicemail.)Y2k: Not so prevalent anymore. But you know, if the world had come to an end when '99 rolled over into '00, we'd probably be talking about it more, so it's probably best this one is long gone.Zettabyte: Maybe some day this word will catch on. I think the editors were a bit ahead of their time in this case. The scale goes: kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta. So, we're a few years off from this becoming a household term. In a world of cell phones and iPads, there's one back-to-school product both grandparents and children share: lined paper. Whether it's three-hole punched for a binder, perfect-bound into a black-and-white composition journal, or waiting to be torn out of a spiral notebook, lined paper is the medium of schoolwork. While the products have remained the same, the industries that manufacture and sell paper have been buffeted by the forces of globalization, mechanization, and automation that have transformed nearly every industry. Domestically, paper and notebook producers like Mead, Norcom, and Top Flight employ about 500 people at factories in small-town Ohio, Georgia, and Tennessee. They used to employ many, many more. In the early 1980s, a single Mead plant in St. Joseph Missouri employed more than 900 people during the peak back-to-school production season. But very cheap imports combined with retail dynamics in the United States have produced an incredibly competitive marketplace. The school-supply paper market is as seasonal as Halloween costume rentals. And worse, the paper and notebooks are what retailers use as their loss-leader or door busters. The cheaper the notebooks that kids need, the more families come to the store and end up buying the expensive higher-margin stuff that kids want.That makes retailers intensely price sensitive. They're already going to lose money on the notebooks, so they want to lose as little as possible. With just a few national chains — Walmart, Target, CostCo,[url=http://www.ugg-boots-sale.org]ugg outlet[/url], the office supply stores, the pharmacies — controlling most of the market, they have an immense amount of bargaining power and can squeeze their suppliers, who are providing a lightly branded commodity product. Chinese imports of school-supply paper products grew steadily through the 1990s from a little over $9 million in 1990 to $170 million in 2000. Then they doubled between 2000 and 2005 to $344 million, according International Trade Commission Data.American paper companies were on the brink of disaster. They were getting beat on price, which left their factories running below capacity,[url=http://www.ugg-boots-sale.org]cheap uggs[/url], which made them less efficient,[url=http://www.ugg-boots-sale.org]ugg outlet[/url], which hurt their margins even more. And if they weren't spinning off cash, they couldn't invest in the sorts of machinery that could lower their per-unit costs and keep them more competitive. It's the sort of situation that has crushed American manufacturing. And while the executives at companies swamped by foreign competition might find new jobs in new industries, it's a lot harder for the workers, especially ones #file_links[D:\keywords3.txt,1,S] who've built their lives in the small towns where their jobs were located. Finding another job in Philadelphia is tough enough. But try the manufacturing job market in Griffin, Georgia, population 23, 628, where Norcom has a facility.Things got so bad, in fact, that the American school supply companies and the union representing their employees went to the U.S. International Trade Commission in 2006 to ask for "anti-dumping" action against China, India, and Indonesia. They claimed paper suppliers from those countries were subsidized by their national governments, and thereby were able to sell their products below "fair value." Furthermore, they were selling paper cheaper in the US than they were at home, crushing the American industry. And the ITC eventually did level steep levies, essentially, particularly against Chinese paper products, an action they renewed for another five years in 2012. US imports by customs value of school-supply paper products using the categories primarily discussed by the ITC (HTSUS headings: 4820.10.2050,[url=http://www.ugg-boots-sale.org]cheap uggs[/url], 4810.22.5044, 4811.90.9090, 4820.10.2010, and 4820.10.2020). But what's really fascinating is that the hearings the ITC conducted to determine what actions to take provided a peek into an industry pushed to the edge of extinction. Top Flight Paper CEO George Robinson proved an eloquent advocate for his company and industry. The outfit is located in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where its factory employs 150 people, some of them for decades. It's a family-run business, too: CEO George is the grandson of one of the men who founded the company in 1920, H.T. Robinson. "I've been working at the company since I was 15 years old. Today, I work with my father, my uncle and three of my first cousins, as well as over 150 Chattanooga area residents," he told the ITC last year. And yet, it didn't seem like they were going to have much of a choice back a few years ago."In 2005 I lost several of my largest orders to dumped and subsidized products from India and China. These losses forced Top Flight to lay off 15 percent of its workforce, many of whom I worked with as a teenager," Robinson said. "Given these circumstances, in July of 2005 Top Flight was considering shutting down domestically and relocating some or all of its manufacturing offshore. We were simply at a loss for how to solve the dilemma that we were facing -- sharply declining volumes, sharply declining employment, profits -- all resulting from unfairly priced imports. At the time we were losing bids by such margins that the winning price was below our manufacturing price. Because of the declines in our company's performance, our primary lender asked us to find a new bank."And yet, Robinson couldn't find it in himself to blame the retailers, who themselves have remarkably slim margins. "That's their job," he said. "Get the lowest price they can. It doesn't matter if it's George from Top Flight or if it is the Indonesians or the Indians or the Chinese."The dynamics of back-to-school retail are difficult to get around. The retailers desperately need to drive foot traffic because it's basically a second Christmas for them. They need good back-to-school sales or they'll never make their third-quarter numbers. "The market condition is that this product is central to the education of our kids, certain lined paper school supplies. This is what the kids use in the classroom. These items are the items that are used for note taking, for preparing handwritten notices and that sort of thing. It is vitally important to just about every family that has children," Robinson explained. "And so it has been determined as being one of the most -- if not the most -- promotional event of the year, second only to Christmas, for large U.S. retailers. It creates an incredibly intensive price negotiation in order to minimize the loss because that's what they're doing. They're looking at am I going to lose 30 cents? Am I going to lose 35 cents? And when they're selling millions -- in some cases hundreds of millions -- of units of certain lined goods in a matter of three weeks it is ruthless competition, and we all participate in that competition, in that competitive market."In the old days, there were price lists, but as communication technology got better and retailers got larger and smarter, they moved to an auction-based system that puts them into communication with all kinds of different producers. Seth Kaplan, a consultant for the American companies at the ITC hearing, expanded on the brutal reality of the market. "First, the evolution of distribution in the United States has moved from distributors to brokers to direct imports by purchasers. There are no intermediaries anymore. All the larger retailers know and deal directly with the foreign producers, and this allows for intense and immediate price competition. Second, the evolution of price determination over time. At one point this industry worked with price lists, both foreign and domestic. Then it moved to an RFP or bid process where the foreign producers were asked to bid at these large retailers," Kaplan explained. "Today, much of the prices are determined through multiple bids and auctions, so there is direct contact between major retailers with producers in all the major countries, the subject countries and the United States, and they go back multiple times to get the best price. So you have a situation now where the conditions of competition have intensified the effects of imports on the market and dumped imports."To make matters worse, retailers of all types have come to rely on white-label products from foreign manufacturers to create their own house brands for commodities. (Just look at how many products in your average Safeway or Whole Foods are retailer branded.) The same is true in school supplies. So your own branded Top Flight or Norcom products are competing against the ultra-cheap house brand. The partial answer for US manufacturers has been to reduce their labor costs, that is to say, to get rid of workers. Watching the paper production process at Top Flight, there is very little human intervention from massive roll of paper to notebook at the other end. Robinson himself admitted as much to the ITC. "[The notebooks] are all assembled by machine in Chattanooga. It's really the only efficient way in the United States to manufacture these products, and we have a machine that's made by Bielomatik that is very productive and does all that in-line," he said. "You hang a roll on one end and you get a finished notebook off the other end."That's one reason that after the ITC slapped the penalties on Chinese companies, employment in the school-supply paper industry didn't shoot up. In fact, it fell from almost a thousand workers to less than 500 even as foreign imports began to falter in 2009. That's left unions in a weaker bargaining position, struggling to support workers while helping the companies stay in business. They've given ground in hopes of keeping the manufacturing jobs in the US."There's been changes to work rules and other items so that the company can bring machines in, move machines around in order for the company to remain competitive," LeeAnn Foster, the union representative at the ITC hearing said. "I want to emphasize that both of these facilities and I believe the other producers that are in, their facilities are in rural areas. These are family supporting jobs in rural areas where the communities very much rely on these jobs. We've gone to the mat for the employers #file_links[D:\keywords2.txt,1,S] to be able to compete and to survive, but we're only able to do that and that's only possible if the unfairly traded goods do not come back from these three countries. We're only able to work with an employer that is there."Which brings us back to the question of what to do about school-supply paper imports from other countries. For the next five years, Chinese and Indian paper will continue to get slapped with penalties leveled by the ITC, which the American paper companies say are crucial for maintaining their health. But what about the other side of it? I talked with Mike Shor, who represented Indonesia at the 2012 ITC hearings. He got Indonesia taken out of the ITC order. To his eye, it looks like the Chinese "get screwed." In essence, American regulators class China as a non-market economy. So when they do the calculations to see if Chinese companies are dumping their products on the US market, they won't use data from China itself, but from a purportedly analogous country like the Philippines. Under this system, the numbers always seem to come out stacked against the Chinese. Most countries will get levies of five to twenty percent, Shor said, but "in these China cases, it's more like 50 to 200 percent." "The dumping and subsidy calculations are done by the International Trade Administration in the Office of Commerce, an Executive Branch agency," Shor said. "Who are they more interested in protecting, the domestic industry or the Chinese?"The answer, of course, is the domestic industry. Especially when there are Congress members like Ohio Republic Rob Portman calling on the ITC to protect Mead jobs in his district. What adds one final wrinkle to the equation is that American paper brands like Mead do, in fact, also import and sell notebooks from other countries, most notably Mexico and Vietnam (which does not show up in the chart above, but is the dominant foreign supplier of composition books). So what you're holding in your hands when you've got an unbranded composition book, made in China, or a Mead college notebook from an Ivy League bookstore, or a spiral-bound Top Flight from CostCo, is the simple end product of an incredibly complex system. The state of the world is in that notebook, even before you fill its pages: The two most powerful nations in the world supporting their domestic industries. Small-town America on the brink of collapse. Automation making some American workers obsolete, while foreign competition eliminates the positions of most of the rest.And at the center of it all, ruthless competition for the back-to-school shopper's presence and therefore dollars: the battleground is blue-lined paper, and the war is won with a few nickels of price differentiation.Wyoming women won the right to vote in 1869. Illinois was the tenth state to extend the vote to women... 44 years later. And it wasn't until August 26, 1920 that the 19th Amendment to the Constitution passed. It read, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."Between Wyoming and the 19th amendment, that's 51 years of campaigning by dedicated women of different classes, creeds, and colors. That's more than half a century, longer than the average life expectancy for a woman born in 1869.One of these campaigners was Alice Park, a Californian who fought for women's rights. Park kept suffragette posters, a collection that was purchased by fellow activist Mary Winsor of Philadelphia, who donated them to Harvard's Schlesinger Library in 1950. The library has since digitized the collection, and today, in honor of the 19th amendment's 93rd anniversary, they posted highlights from it. I've posted them below. I'd recommend entering Zeega's full-screen mode, so you can see the posters at a larger size. Hello, future. It is nice to meet you. You're not quite like I expected from reading about you, but you're interesting and I'd like to get to know you better. Just this weekend, you surprised me again. Apparently, some people decided to franchise the idea of Pamplona's running of the bulls to a handful of cities in the United States. To market these events, they posted photographs of Pamplona on their website, with the caveat caption, "The pictures featured in the slideshow are not from The Great Bull Run, but are representative of the type of experience to be offered at this event." PARTY LIKE PAMPLONA! Party in way that represents the type of experience offered in Pamplona!The very first of these Great Bull Runs occurred this past weekend in Dinwiddie, Virginia. This is what it actually looked like:A shoddy simulacrum of the running of the bulls in VirginiaTo up the production values, there were announcers and cameramen and a little dronecam -- maybe a foot across -- helicoptering its way around. Until, somehow, the drone operator lost control of the little chopper, and sent it careening into the crowd. The announcer cries out, "It just hit a dude in the face!" It did, indeed. Apparently four or five people had minor injuries that were treated by medics on site. If you need me for the rest of the day, I'll be over here trying to think of how to explain this event to someone from Finland or the year 1990.Via Poynter. VMA GifMTV's annual pageant of music and weirdness, The Video Music Awards, aka the event of the teenage late summer, happened again last night. There were shocking performances and the audience was appropriately shocked.And for a brief moment, as seems to be required by Internet law, everyone on Twitter was talking about and making jokes about the VMAs. Many of these jokes involved animated GIFs because tiny, low-resolution loops of video are the best way of emphasizing the absurdity or awesomeness of certain actions. (Plus, they play on phones and don't come with pre-roll advertising.)In any case, all these jokes, all this talk, created a lot of data about what GIFs were the best. (GIF quality, of course, being perfectly and precisely measured by popularity.) And now, thanks to the weekend project of a Redditor, you can see rankings of the most tweeted GIFs at any given time. This glorious service is called GIFHELL (can be NSFW, depending on the moods of Twitterers). So, right now, at the top of the charts, we find a selection of fine VMA GIFs to help you understand what happened last night, and so, so many boy band loops. But we can also pe #file_links[D:\keywords4.txt,1,S] ek in on things that are just catching fire and we find ... oh... more VMA moments, some anime, and people twerking. Everything, basically.Rihanna, et alVia Dave Weiner Just about a year ago, a new website from two of the founders of Twitter launched. It was called Medium. The new site was invite-only, but outsiders could read from various collections. Ev Williams announced the site in a post. Medium, he said, was "a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends." While Medium m #file_links[D:\keywords1.txt,1,S] ight look like a standard blogging platform, a content management system, it had been "designed for little stories that make your day better and manifestos that change the world." And yet "it helps you find the right audience for whatever you have to say."At the time, I didn't notice the contradiction between the normative idea that Medium was some particular kind of publication -- that "a Medium" was a genre -- and the platform idea that Medium was for anyone to do anything and "find the right audience."Over the last year, Medium's momentum has been building, and as it grows, the tensions between these sentiments is beginning to show. In the last couple weeks, five very different posts circulated widely in social media, all housed at Medium.com. They were:Journalist Quinn Norton's long-form essay on Bradley Manning.Magazine writer Joshua Davis' high-design reportage, "The Mercenary," from his project, Epic.Coder Peter Shih's anti-San Francisco screed.Entrepreneur Patrick McConlogue's idea about teaching a homeless man how to code.Journalist Michele Catalano's post about Googling for backpacks and pressure cookers, then having law enforcement visit her house. The first two pieces are awesome. The second two are the opposite of awesome. And Catalano's story was fascinating, even if ultimately proved that her husband's former employer was paranoid more than it proved anything about the nature of government surveillance. The posts on Medium are arrived at in different ways. The Norton and Davis articles were clearly driven by Medium's in-house editors like former Wired.com chief Evan Hansen (for whom I used to work). McConlogue and Shih were just blogging, as people have done since Blogger and Wordpress evolved. From the outside, Medium's strategy has seemed to be the following: 1) Create a beautiful, simple blogging platform, which Medium most certainly is. 2) Very slowly release control of who can use Medium to create cachet. 3) Pay some people to post to the site, but not most of them. (Sub-strategy: Don't disclose who's working for Medium and who's working on Medium.) 4) Promote the people they've paid along with a very small subset of everyone else.All this built the idea that Medium was something more than yet another blogging platform. It was a place to be seen. Pieces that might have run on The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or Wired would pop up on Medium, and I'd be like, "Dang. How'd that happen?"Medium seemed to be a machine for generating the kind of passaroundable content that does so well on Twitter. You want a smart "second-day" take on the news? Oh, here's this post on Medium. All that made sense, too, given that the company was hiring elite web editors. Medium wasn't building a magazine, I realized, but a magazine killer.Th #file_links[D:\keywords5.txt,1,S] ey would and could do what we could do, but merely as a component of their overall strategy. It would be as if LiveJournal simultaneously built The Verge. It was almost an evolved Huffington Post or Forbes, with similar editorial chops at the high end and a better blogging platform at the low end (minus the relentless social media stuff).Until recent weeks, this seemed like a tremendous strategy. They could skim the cream, and let the bad posts just sink, unloved and unshared. They got a bunch of great free stuff they could promote and any crap that got published on Medium didn't besmirch the great work they were doing with their paid-for stories. They could have their cake and a free one, too. (In this analogy, I suppose eating it would be making money, and so far, there's no sign Medium is doing anything but stockpiling cake.)While people wondered why anyone would publish on Medium, as Marco Arment did, the big questions about what Medium was and what Medium was doing were relegated to footnotes. Indeed, Arment's post included this one: "[Medium] will also face a problem I'm familiar with: If the plan is to grow frontpage traffic and be more like a magazine, what kind of magazine is Medium? What's it about? Who's it for? And if they narrow the focus enough to make that easier to answer, who gets left out?"In other words: what are the boundaries and limits of Medium? If anything defines a publication, it is what it *doesn't* do. More specifically: is Medium a place where Peter Shih should post about San Francisco women he thinks are ugly? Is Medium a better place on the Internet or is it any old place on the Internet?Why does this matter?For us media producers, we have to decide whether Medium is a friend or a foe. They don't appear to have the financial constraints we have (like making money through advertising or subscriptions), which gives them a design leg up, and they also don't have the ethical constraints we have in what runs on their site. If we publish something plagiarized, it reflects poorly on us. If Medium publishes something plagiarized, it reflects poorly on the writer. In fact, in five minutes exploring Medium's latest posts, I found a post that came right up to the plagiarism line. The content marketing company that created it quickly pulled it down after I tweeted about it. But who takes the brand hit for that kind of mistake? And if the answer is not Medium, have they managed to create a system in which only positive attributes can be attributed to the posts they pull from their platform bloggers? That doesn't seem like a tenable long-term situation. (This is the Internet, after all.) Individual writers, too, should probably know what it means that their writing is going up on Medium. If Medium is a publication, their work is situated within the journalistic tradition, with goals separate from corporate imperatives. If Medium is a platform and the goal is for it to acquire more users, then everything that gets posted on its site is marketing for that platform itself, even the very best stuff. The payments to writers get filed under user acquisition, and belong in the business category "growth hacking."Maybe, though, I'm applying old-line thinking to this new creation. Perhaps Medium can continue to do precisely what it has been doing, and their brand value will continue to grow while these major questions remain unresolved. The center will hold because there is no center. In a world when every post stands on its own, atomistically, perhaps it's silly to think a publication can't be incoherent. Maybe a platform can sometimes be a magazine, when it sends out a newsletter of its best content, or when a visitor comes to its home page, but not to an individual story.So what is Medium? Medium is a place to read articles on the Internet. Medium is a blogging platform, like Wordpress or Blogger. Medium is the new project from the guys who brought you Twitter. Medium is chaotically, arrhythmically produced by a combination of top-notch editors, paid writers, PR flacks, startup bros, and hacks. Is it the publication for our particular moment? When the bug strikes We don't know a lot about the technical problem that shut the NASDAQ stock exchange down for three hours today. As with the recent Amazon or Google outages, the most likely scenario is that some bug buried in zillions of lines of code caused some cascading failure. But hell, maybe it was something weird (like squirrels). Understanding the hows and whys of these systems isn't easy from the outside. During 2010, when the markets experienced a "flash crash," a whole SEC investigation dug in and found a firm's algorithm had made a simple mistake. And that, for whatever set of contingent reasons that day, set off a panic. Why that day? Why that magnitude of effect? It's very hard to know. What we can say is that when things work in new ways, they break in new ways. And that's a theme that's worth obsessing over. ReutersOne day, I was sitting on the street, not even asking to be given a fish, when a guy came up to me and said, "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." So, he taught me how to fish, and I learned. I got good! And for a while, I made a pretty nice living, got a condo out by the Home Depot, and started raising a family.But a price war broke out to supply the fish finger market, and highly mechanized fishing fleets, driven by the relentless pressures of profit maximization, depleted the fish stocks I'd been depending on. A single fisherman couldn't survive with his pole and his wits. So I learned the new way of fishing and got a job on one of the boats.But then with all the fish in the ocean all gone, it got cheaper to farm similar fish in poor countries with lax environmental regulations, which could be sold under the same name here and at half the price and to consumers who probably couldn't taste much of a difference.I retrained to become a fish logistics specialist, learned all the software, but so did everyone else, so wages are really low, and that's if you can get and hold a job.Now I'm underemployed and go fishing on my off days. We shouldn't eat most of the fish, but we do anyway.I'm learning to code at night. I'm hoping to make a fishing app for the Android operating system. @StealthMountain's avatarSince November of 2011, a spelling bot has been shaming us all on Twitter. The @StealthMountain account looks for the text "sneak peak" in tweets and sends the reply, "I think you mean 'sneak peek.' "We first wrote about @StealthMountain in January of 2012, when it had sent 8,000 replies, and since then I forgot all about it.But when I made the peak/peek homophone mixup myself this morning, I thought I'd check in on our old friend. Turns out: The script is still running, automatically correcting unsuspecting people hour after hour, tweet after tweet. In fact, over the last couple years, it has sent 346,541 grammar corrections to different Twitter users. And it shows no signs of stopping. While I was writing this post, it sent out another dozen tweets.We now have an on-going record of our collective error, preserved for anyone who wonders (from his or her vantage point in the year 2085) how peek and peak became the same word. More than 50 percent of teen app users have avoided downloading apps because of privacy concerns, according to a new Pew Internet Project and Berkman Center poll of teenagers.Another 26 percent have deleted an app "because they found out it was collecting personal information that they didn't wish to share." And 59 percent of teen girls have turned off location-tracking in apps.Teens are also the driving force behind ephemeral apps like Snapchat and Whisper, which don't force their users to maintain a singular, archived identity. Pew researcher Mary Madden told the Wall Street Journal that "teens tend to think about privacy in the sense of 'social privacy' or whether an app is 'creepy' ... not in terms of advertising or governmental surveillance like adults do." Which makes perfect sense. For teens, parents are, by far, the most intrusive and controlling force in their lives. If they're trying to preserve an independent sphere of thought and action, it's from their guardians, not the state.Nonetheless, whatever privacy-protecting habits the younger set forms now may serve them well in the future. Anthony Antonellis marked another milestone for the body-hacking movement, implanting an RFID chip encased in glass into his hand. The tiny chip can transmit an animated GIF that he's stored in it through a tiny antenna. He can swap out the image it carries and transmits, but here's what he's currently got in the one kilobyte of memory his implant stores:"Think of it as a changeable, digital net art tattoo," he told Animal New York.Antonellis joins a long line of people who've implanted electronics into their bodies. University of Reading professor Kevin Warwick might be the most famous person to implant an RFID chip into himself, which he did in 1998. Warwick was motivated not by art, but by his desire to explore what it meant to live as a cyborg.If you want to learn more, you can see what Grindhouse Wetware is up to. They've been working on projects like Bottlenose, which transmits information about a room to a special magnet implanted in the finger. Pittsburgh coder Tim Cannon put it like this. "You can just sweep it over a room and get an idea for the contours of the room with your eyes closed," Cannon told Slate. "It's kind of like a sonar sense." Alexis Madrigal explains how energy really works in AmericaRead more Before the fracked gas boom of the last 10 years, before the rise of mega oil companies, before the entire 20th century, actually, humans figured out how to increase the flow of fossil fuels from a well. It was simple: take an iron container about the size of a large thermos, stick some black powder or other explosives into it, stick a blasting cap on it, send it down the well, and then send a weight down to detonate it. BOOM. They called this, "Shooting the well!" And I believe the "!" is required, as in Yahoo!The process was first commercialized by Colonel E.A.L. Roberts in 1865, a veteran of the Civil War, and he soon formed the The Roberts Petroleum Torpedo Company. But his success spawned a host of imitators, and the whole thing devolved into a patent brawl out there in eastern Pennsylvania near Titusville in the region that was once known as Petrolia. (I told this story in my book on the history of green technology because... well, I think because who can resist petroleum torpedoes?)Reports in the paper of record, The Titusville Morning Herald, regularly discussed the wonders of the torpedoes as in this snippet from July 2, 1866:A gentleman who has just called on us from Tarr farm, tells us that an experiment was made on the 21st, with one of Roberts' Torpedoes in the 'Bakery Well' which has formerly pumped from 7 to 8 barrels per day. The production has continually increased. On the 27th it produced 60 barrels and yesterday the production was 100 barrels. We wonder how the owners feel at the great difference in their balance sheet! To increase a production 1200 per cent in a week is no small gain. The 'Hayes well', Petroleum Centre, was 'fired Off' last Saturday the 13th, and it has greatly improved. The exact figures we have not got. The Roberts' Torpedo must scatter the paraffines or break things generally.Break things generally, indeed. The science doesn't seem too complex. Break apart the rocks underground and it's easier for the petroleum to flow through the seams.What's amazing is that the process, which is a distant ancestor of today's hydraulic fracturing techniques, was created just a few years after the first American oil wells of the 1850s. That is to say: Almost immediately after we started drilling wells, we started fracturing the rocks underground to increase the flow of fossil fuels.Petrolia, for its part, was the first boom-and-bust oil region. It made fortunes, then dried up, and cost them. Now, it's sitting on the Marcellus Shale, one of the leading geological formations for fracked gas. Extending affordable Internet access to everyone in the world who wants it is probably a worthwhile endeavor. Information has economic value, after all.Today, Internet.org launched, a new industry coalition that includes Facebook, Samsung, Ericsson, Nokia, Opera, and Mediatek. It's fronted, at least for the launch, by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.The initial goal of the organization, as it laid out in a press release and associated New York Times article, are to "cut the cost of providing mobile Internet services to one percent of its current level within five to 10 years by improving the efficiency of Internet networks and mobile phone software."Right now, Internet.org features exactly one thing above the fold on the site: a video of scenes from around the world, cut in Facebook's characteristic style. A piano tinkles in the background as we see children playing in Africa, agricultural workers in south Asia, people playing games, chasing pigeons, swinging on an amusement park ride, hair blowing in the wind. Friends bicycling along a road in Latin America. Et cetera.And over the top of these scenes of the globe, we hear John F. Kennedy's New England oratory. He's talking about peace. Here's a complete transcript of what he says in Internet.org's video:I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace. This will require a new effort, a new context for world discussions. It will require increased understanding and increased understanding will require increased contact. So, let us not be blind to our differences -- but let us also direct attention to our common interests. Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal. Who doesn't want to cheer after that? Let's go to the moon!And who knew that John F. Kennedy delivered such a perfectly crafted speech to emphasize the importance of communications to the concept of practical peace: "a new context for world discussion." Why, that sounds like Facebook! Or at least one of those peculiarly apt quotes you see on Facebook after a major world event. So, I looked up the speech from which these lines are drawn. It was given at American University on June 10, 1963. The video is cobbled together from lines across the text.And what's left out is fascinating.The Internet.org audio highlighted in the context of a portion of Kennedy's speech. Click to enlarge. (Alexis Madrigal) For one, it's stripped of all context. Kennedy gave the speech in the middle of the Cold War. The world was seven months out from the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy frankly acknowledged that "the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace." These were nuclear weapons, of course. And that was back when saying billions meant something more like saying hundreds of billions now.Kennedy asked the graduates of the school to look inward, and contemplate their own attitudes toward peace. This was not a general peace, but a specific one designed to stave off nuclear apocalypse. And it's not that Kennedy's words cannot resound beyond their original intent, but rather that their global scope and heft comes from those stakes. As he makes clear earlier in the speech, peace had to be maintained because human technologies had, for the first time, made the actual destruction of the world possible. ("[War] makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.") The humans had to contain the possibilities of technology ("Our problems are manmade--therefore, they can be solved by man.").Now to the speech itself. The excerpted portion begins: "I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream." Then, the following line is cut, "I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal."The video returns to the speech for this line, "Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace." But then cuts the rest of that paragraph:based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions--on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace--no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process--a way of solving problems.This cut is important because it elides Kennedy's actual answer for how to attain peace -- "a series of concrete actions and effective agreements" -- and replaces it with the kind of "single, simple key" that he warns against: "a new context for world discussions."And here is the context for the context line itself:This will require a new effort to achieve world law--a new context for world discussions. It will require increased understanding between the Soviets and ourselves. And increased understanding will require increased contact and communication.This will require a new effort to achieve world law. How different that sounds from, "This will require a new effort, a new context for world discussions." One is a call for a program; the other is a call for a platform. And what's strange about this moment in the Internet's cultural evolution is that we were presented with a platform, but it turns out it was also a program, "a new effort to achieve world law."Within the United States, we might be able to cling to the rather flimsy safeguards we have for preventing the NSA from collecting data Americans submit to Internet services. But in a discussion of global Internet access, that is no comfort, however cold. The hard fact is that what is in web companies' self-interest -- getting more people using the Internet -- also expands the reach of American surveillance. That may not be Facebook or Google's fault, but it is the reality we're all living with now. And just like the average person has to adjust, so do these companies, in rhetoric at the very, very least.The Internet.org video cut another bit from Kennedy's speech to make the end punchier (the cuts are bolded).So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal. The hint of politics -- the "means" of resolving differences -- and the hint of doubt that underpins wisdom, are both gone. And so is the line about making "the world safe for diversity." These lines complicate the simple story Internet.org wants to tell about the universality of the human experience. So, they don't belong in this slide deck.In a post-Snowden world, the kinds of soaring declarations about connectedness that we see in this video just don't feel right. They sound a little absurd even. Simply look at the comments on the Internet.org YouTube video for evidence:"Nice try, Facebook, NSA.""Yup! FREE! FREE! FREE! but more advertising to Connect The World, that's how that make $ --don't see that coming hah?""It's all about money, once again. :)""Its all for money , for your money actually dont pretend to be saints, we are not stupid"And that's really the point here: Don't pretend to be saints. We are not stupid.Because the narrow scope of Internet.org's actual mission sounds both reasonable and, perhaps, attainable, given the 60-year decrease in costs associated with all semiconductor-based technologies.Not even a grump could take issue with an industry trying to make itself cheaper, so that more people could use its products.But that's only one level of what Internet.org is trying to do. The public facing-side of Internet.org is not satisfied with looking and sounding like an industry collaboration to increase technical efficiency. It's also working at an ideological level to reinforce the idea that connectedness means peace, that Internet access means progress (or even Progress), that working for a tech company is about making the world a better place. At some point, it may (may) have made sense to associate Facebook with peace. But that time is over. The thing is: People love the Internet, and they'll hop on it if it's available, even given all privacy concerns. The tech business is safe. But its leaders also want our adulation. And we shouldn't have to worship web products, or the people who make them, or the values they hold, to use the Internet. Seems like everything gets hacked these days. Baby monitors. White House employees' personal email. Toilets. If it's connected to the Internet, it seems at least a little vulnerable. But surely we can trust that workhorse selfie-generator, the iSight webcam built into the top bezel of Mac laptops. Or... Maybe not. Yesterday, security researchers Steve Glass and Christopher Soghoian were passing around a National Security Administration factsheet with a little bit of advice for Mac users on how to "harden" their computers to attacks.Among the tips, we find the following suggestion: "Disable Integrated iSight and Sound Input.""The best way to disable an integrated iSight camera is to have an Apple-certified technician remove it," the NSA writes (emphasis added). Then, you might try "placing opaque tape over the camera" or try the software-only method of removing one of the components of Quicktime's files. And if the NSA doesn't trust a particular piece of hardware can't be used for surveillance, it's probably safe to assume an average user shouldn't either.The built-in microphone comes under scrutiny, too. The NSA suggests setting the mic input level to zero and removing a file that cripples the sound system.The rest of the tips are available in this handy, seemingly laminateable PDF. They include firewalling instructions, file deletion suggestions, and several other procedures. In fact, the NSA maintains an archive of factsheets on protecting its employees, contractors, and associates, but you can use it to protect yourself from hackers -- inside or outside the government. I read a lot of Charles Bukowski once upon a time, back during my Beat-reading phase, when the tragic strictures of the 1950s seemed to reflect my own pre-adult circumstances, and their abandon felt like the freedom I wanted.Bukowski would have been 93 on Friday. This is his birthday weekend, which I'm sure he would have toasted. And so when I saw the tweets marking this minor occasion, I dug out the book of his that I remember best, a posthumous collection called, What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire. I can even remember pulling it from the shelf at Powell's in Portland and walking all the way across town to the South Park Blocks. I read it in the sunshine (it must have been July?) and I marked the poems I liked with tape tabs. Reading through those favorites now, 14 years later, I mostly see the things in Bukowski that I loved then, but came to dislike. Stanzas like this: how to break clear? a .44 magnum?a can of ale?the museum of paindoesn't charge admission,it's free as skunkshit.Being a writer (and person) of considerably sunnier disposition, I used to revel in darkness on the page. Depravity, desperation, depression: these things were heavy! And who doesn't want to be heavy at 17? My dad even wrote me an epic warning letter after I made him read some of my teenage poems warning me not to equate being messed up with being deep.In any case, I do not have unalloyed admiration for Bukowski anymore.But there was one poem I marked that still speaks to me. It's called "the railroad yard."the feelings I getdriving past the railroad yard(never on purpose but on my way to somewhere)are the feelings other men have for other things.I see the tracks and all the boxcarsthe tank cars the flat carsall of them motionless and so many of themperfectly lined up and not an engine anywhere(where are all the engines?).I drive past looking sideways at it alla wide, still railroad yardnot a human in sightthen I am past the yardand it wasn't just the romance of it allthat gives me what I getbut something back there namelessalways making me feel betteras some men feel better looking at the open seaor the mountains or at wild animalsor at a womanI like those things tooespecially the wild animals and the womanbut when I see those lovely old boxcarswith their faded painted letteringand those flat cars and those fat round tankersall lined up and waitingI get quiet insideI get what other men get from other thingsI just feel better and it's good to feel betterwhenever you cannot needing a reason.I don't see the writer I became in a lot of what I read as a teenager, but here, I do. We can marvel at the landscapes we've built, their depths and ways can be as sublime and full of possibility as any natural system. But only if we look at them the right ways. There's something about diamonds that brings out the worst in ad makers. Perhaps it's the subtle implication in almost all diamond ads that you must purchase jewels for women in order to secure their love. A bit chattely for my taste.But journalist Ruth Graham dug up an especially disturbing ad from a 1971 Life magazine (above). "Your Henry VIII, with the wandering eye," we read. The suggestion, it would appear, is: thank you, honey, for ignoring my infidelity, here's a diamond. Woof. As Graham told me, "42 years later and I'm feeling so sad for the imaginary woman in this marriage." I have a secret to tell you: There is a mobile app you've probably never heard of that gets 2.5 billion page views a month, substantially more than all of CNN. It's called Whisper, and the youths just love it.Here's how it works. Anyone can post an anonymous message to the service in the form of an image macro: text overlaid on a picture. When you open the app, you see six such images. Each one has a "secret" on it. You can respond to a message publicly or privately, choosing a public anonymous post or a private pseudonymous chat. Users don't have a public identity in the app. While they do have persistent handles, there's no way to contact them except *through* the messages they post. The app is PostSecret, optimized like FarmVille.Fascinatingly, when you open the app on the phone, you can post and see public messages, but any time you want to see an archive of your own activity, you have to enter a four-digit pin number. So even if your phone were to fall into the wrong hands (i.e. parents), the posts and messages would still be hidden from view.For the past couple weeks, I've been playing with Whisper. It is not for me. In fact, I hate it. It's like being granted telepathy, but there's a catch: your superpower only works in middle school bathrooms. UGH. Every mating strategy a 14-year old has ever thought of is now anonymously displayed for one to thumb through. If you've ever worried that our technologies are changing kids, Whisper answers unequivocally: "Nope, just as annoying as ever."My first post (left), and the two replies it netted (Alexis Madrigal).On the other hand, this app is fascinating. It's the social experience of the street ported to the web, without all the persistent, real-name trappings of other networks. The kinds of interactions it allows people to have are closer to what happens at a mall or county fair than anything else on the Internet: A person you know nothing about says something, you reply, and that can continue or end. That's it. Liz Gannes at AllThingsD highlights the way Whisper creates a different network structure than Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook: "There's no such thing as a celebrity user or a Whisper star." Each image rises or falls on its own, except for "Featured" posts, which are chosen by Whisper staff. These set the schmaltzy tone for the app. These are the top six at this moment:"I'm terrified to meet my dorm mate." [photo of a dorm room]"My best friend has no idea that when I tell her I love her, I mean it a little differently than she thinks." [photo of two young women swinging themselves around]"I've been faking a british accent ever since I got to college 3 years ago" [photo of a dorm room with a British flag hanging on the wall]"I've finally met the person who sees me for who I really am" [which is a skeleton, apparently, as the image is a double exposure of a girl and an x-ray showing the skeletal structure]"I get self conscious when my pet sees me naked" [picture of a creepy cat]"I can't tell if I miss you or if I miss what I wanted you to be" [fuzzy, desaturated picture of a woman near water]You get t
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