Information & Applied Knowledge : 2013

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Avoiding the Power Grid

A cheaper fuel cell could provide affordable power for microgrids.

By David Talbot on October 22, 2013

Eric Wadsman

A one-meter-square gray box studded  with green lights sits in a hallway near the laboratory of materials scientist Eric Wachsman, director of the Energy Research Center at the University of Maryland. It is a mockup of a fuel-cell device that runs on natural gas, producing electricity at the same cost as a large gas plant.

The box is designed to house stacks of solid-oxide fuel cells that differ from their conventional counterparts in a dramatic way: they’re projected to produce electricity for $1 per watt, down from $8 in today’s commercial versions, thanks to improvements that Wachsman has made in the ceramic materials at their heart.

The technology could eventually become a practical and affordable way to ease strain on the increasingly stressed electricity grid; anywhere there’s cheap natural gas, we could also have constant and cheap electricity.

That would make it possible to do away with the diesel generators that are now widely used for backup power and as a key component of microgrids in places like Malaysia and cellular base stations in rural areas around the world. Solid-oxide fuel cells—which can run on diesel fuel or gasoline, not just natural gas—use much less fuel per watt than diesel generators of similar size.

Conventional solid-oxide fuel cells run at high temperatures, making them more expensive and prone to performance losses. A key advance in the Maryland fuel cell is that it is based on cerium oxide and bismuth oxide, which are far more electrically conductive than materials used in commercial versions and produce much more electricity per square centimeter. The cell can operate at 650 °C, down from 900 °C in existing products, reducing thermal stresses and insulation needs. And the final product is made of 32 stacks, each of which can be replaced if it fails.

The gray box mocks up a 25-kilowatt version of the technology, which is now under development by a startup called Redox Power Systems. Redox is building a factory in Melbourne, Florida, and hopes to launch the product in 2014. A 25-kilowatt fuel cell is enough to power a small strip mall; units that are smaller still could serve a single house. In the long term, the technology could even be put into hybrid vehicles to charge their batteries, since it is both lighter than an internal-combustion engine and more efficient at producing electricity.

But the stand-alone generators, if successful, would be impressive enough. They’d mean “we’re on par with conventional power generation,” Wachsman says. “It’s not just backup power—it’s energy security.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/demo/520451/avoiding-the-power-grid/

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

The Decline of Wikipedia

By Tom Simonite on October 22, 2013

The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.

Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-ranking quality scores.

As Web companies and government agencies analyze ever more information about our lives, it’s tempting to respond by passing new privacy laws or creating mechanisms that pay us for our data. Instead, we need a civic solution, because democracy is at risk.

In 1967, The Public Interest, then a leading venue for highbrow policy debate, published a provocative essay by Paul Baran, one of the fathers of the data transmission method known as packet switching. Titled “The Future Computer Utility,” the essay speculated that someday a few big, centralized computers would provide “information processing … the same way one now buys electricity.”

Our home computer console will be used to send and receive messages—like telegrams. We could check to see whether the local department store has the advertised sports shirt in stock in the desired color and size. We could ask when delivery would be guaranteed, if we ordered. The information would be up-to-the-minute and accurate. We could pay our bills and compute our taxes via the console. We would ask questions and receive answers from “information banks”—automated versions of today’s libraries. We would obtain up-to-the-minute listing of all television and radio programs … The computer could, itself, send a message to remind us of an impending anniversary and save us from the disastrous consequences of forgetfulness.

It took decades for cloud computing to fulfill Baran’s vision. But he was prescient enough to worry that utility computing would need its own regulatory model. Here was an employee of the RAND Corporation—hardly a redoubt of Marxist thought—fretting about the concentration of market power in the hands of large computer utilities and demanding state intervention. Baran also wanted policies that could “offer maximum protection to the preservation of the rights of privacy of information”:

Highly sensitive personal and important business information will be stored in many of the contemplated systems … At present, nothing more than trust—or, at best, a lack of technical sophistication—stands in the way of a would-be eavesdropper … Today we lack the mechanisms to insure adequate safeguards. Because of the difficulty in rebuilding complex systems to incorporate safeguards at a later date, it appears desirable to anticipate these problems.

Sharp, bullshit-free analysis: techno-futurism has been in decline ever since.

Just how frightened should we be of chemical weapons, really? A 1929 essay tried to answer that question.

October 22, 2013

From “Facts and Fancies about Gas Warfare,” originally published in the February 1929 issue of Technology Review.

“Deadly gases purported to have sufficient toxicity to wipe out whole cities are periodically discovered, according to the public press, and it has grown to be the great indoor sport of a school of front-page chemists to draw horrific pictures of the use of gas in the next war. A ready-made example of this is a public statement from Hilton Ira Jones of Chicago, listed in the Directory of the American Chemical Society as Director of Scientific Research, The Redpath Bureau. He is quoted as asserting that the Government possesses knowledge of a new gas, believed by him to be cacodyl isocyanide, which is so overwhelmingly deadly that the Chemical Warfare Service of the Army has attempted to suppress discussion about it.

At best Dr. Jones’s statement is an ill-informed outburst, adding to public fear and misunderstanding of lethal gases and their military uses. It is a generally accepted maxim among informed chemists and physiologists that no gas exists at the present time (nor will one be discovered) against which some means of protection and defense may not be devised. Professor James F. Norris, former President of the American Chemical Society, in talking recently of the development and use of war gases, stated that the gas referred to by Dr. Jones was tested exhaustively by the Germans during the World War but was not used by them. Dr. Norris, who was in charge of offense chemical research and war gas investigating for the United States Government during the war and is now a consultant for the Edgwood Arsenal, holds that the Allies were also familiar with the cacodyl group and found it unsatisfactory.

Moreover, as Dr. Norris points out, it is improbable that more deadly and toxic gases will be discovered; enough sufficiently lethal gases are already known. Asphyxiant gases such as phosgene and blistering gases such as mustard gas will certainly kill if they make contact in sufficient quantities. Instead, the probable trend of gas warfare studies will be toward finding more effective means of using these known gases against the increasing effectiveness of methods to combat them, and in the development of so-called neutralizing gases which incapacitate rather than kill. Anyhow, it is patently absurd to say that any gas could be used in quantities sufficient to annihilate whole populations and altruism of the sort imputed by Dr. Jones would be obviously incompatible with faithful adherence to the responsibilities the Republic has entrusted to its Chemical Warfare Service.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/fromthearchives/519971/chemical-reaction/

A Tale of Two Drugs

By Barry Werth on October 22, 2013

In January 2012, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Kalydeco, the first drug to treat the underlying cause of cystic fibrosis, after just three months of review. It was one of the fastest approvals of a new medicine in the agency’s history. Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which discovered and developed the drug, priced Kalydeco at $294,000 a year, which made it one of the world’s most expensive medicines. The company also pledged to provide it free to any patient in the United States who is uninsured or whose insurance won’t cover it. Doctors and patients enthusiastically welcomed the drug because it offers life-saving health benefits and there is no other treatment. Insurers and governments readily paid the cost.

Several months later, Zaltrap was approved to treat colorectal cancer. The drug was discovered by Regeneron, an emerging biopharmaceutical company like Vertex, but sold by the French drug maker Sanofi. Though it worked no better in clinical trials than Roche’s cancer drug Avastin, which itself adds only 1.4 months to life expectancy for patients with advanced colorectal cancer, Sanofi priced Zaltrap at $11,000 a month, or twice Avastin’s price. Unexpectedly, there was resistance. Doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, one of the world’s leading cancer centers, decided Zaltrap wasn’t worth prescribing. They announced their decision—the first time prominent physicians anywhere had said “Enough” to the introduction of a high-priced cancer drug—on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Three weeks later Sanofi effectively dropped its price by half through rebates to doctors and hospitals. Even so, British health authorities said they would not pay for the treatment.

By Will Knight on October 22, 2013

A silver BMW 5 Series is weaving through traffic at roughly 120 kilometers per hour (75 mph) on a freeway that cuts northeast through Bavaria between Munich and Ingolstadt. I’m in the driver’s seat, watching cars and trucks pass by, but I haven’t touched the steering wheel, the brake, or the gas pedal for at least 10 minutes. The BMW approaches a truck that is moving slowly. To maintain our speed, the car activates its turn signal and begins steering to the left, toward the passing lane. Just as it does, another car swerves into the passing lane from several cars behind. The BMW quickly switches off its signal and pulls back to the center of the lane, waiting for the speeding car to pass before trying again.

Putting your life in the hands of a robot chauffeur offers an unnerving glimpse into how driving is about to be upended. The automobile, which has followed a path of steady but slow technological evolution for the past 130 years, is on course to change dramatically in the next few years, in ways that could have radical economic, environmental, and social impacts.

Adventures on the Intellectual Playground

MIT professor Angela Belcher applies her biological toolkit to society’s biggest problems in energy, the environment, and health care.

By Martin LaMonica on October 22, 2013

One of the most thrilling moments in Angela Belcher’s professional life came during a routine visit to the lab in the winter of 2009. Two of her graduate students in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering were trying to harness biological tools to make materials for a battery electrode. They showed her a petri dish holding a virus they had engineered to bind to materials that it normally wouldn’t have any affinity for—iron phosphate and carbon nanotubes. The virus had neatly assembled the two materials into tiny wires, which would turn out to perform as well as the electrodes in commercial lithium-ion batteries.

To the students, it was a promising result. To her, though, it was something much bigger—the realization of an audacious idea that she had once been discouraged from even pursuing. “When I started out, my dream really was to use genetics, or control of DNA, to make nonbiological devices better than can be made in other ways. It was a longer-term, pie-in-the sky idea,” says Belcher, who says she still gets chills recounting the story. Now her students had actually accomplished that goal: by tinkering with the genes of a virus, they were able to produce a high-performance electrode material. “We had got there faster than I was expecting,” she says.

Thanks to Google, Minecraft players can now toy with quantum teleportation and Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.”

Tom Simonite

October 21, 2013

One reason for the popularity of the video game Minecraft is the way its blocky universe faithfully adheres to the physics of the real one. Google has now released a software package that introduces quantum physics to the game, an area of nature’s laws previously missed out by Minecraft creator Markus Persson (see “TR35: Markus Persson”).

Players of qCraft, as the new “mod” is called, can toy with quantum teleportation, entanglement, and objects that exist in a “superposition” of multiple states at once.

Google asked Caltech quantum mechanic Spyridon Michalakis to help design qCraft. In a blog post on the project, he expresses hope that the mod will help people from school age and up to understand the quantum world better. Google also partnered with MinecraftEdu, a project run by educators from the U.S. and Finland interested in using the game as a teaching aid.

Although qCraft was released just last week, some Minecraft enthusiasts are already showing off what they can do with quantum physics in the game. In this video, a Minecraft player recreates the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. Google’s own interests in quantum physics extend beyond the theoretical. Earlier this year the company began a new research effort into quantum computing (see “Google and NASA Launch Quantum Computing AI Lab”).

For those looking for hints on how to get started, the qCraft project has produced a series of how-to videos about the mod. For an introduction to Minecraft read our recent article explaining its allure (see “Minecraft and the Secret to a Video-Game Phenomenon”).

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520596/google-entangles-minecraft-with-quantum-physics/

Why This Might Be the Model T of Workplace Robots

A mobile, one-armed robot that costs $35,000 is headed for research labs and maybe even some workplaces.

By Tom Simonite on October 21, 2013

According to Melonee Wise, the manual laborer of the future has only one arm and stands just three feet, two inches tall. Such are the vital statistics of UBR1, a $35,000 mobile robot unveiled today by Wise’s startup company Unbounded Robotics.

Wise, the company’s CEO and cofounder, says her business will at first sell the robot to researchers in academia and industry, who currently must either pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get hold of a similar robot or build one themselves. But the UBR1 has also been designed to be capable and safe enough to help out in real workplaces such as warehouses and factories.

Magnetic hard discs can store data for little more than a decade. But nanotechnologists have now designed and built a disk that can store data for a million years or more

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 21, 2013

Back in 1956, IBM introduced the world’s first commercial computer capable of storing data on a magnetic disk drive. The IBM 305 RAMAC used fifty 24-inch discs to store up to 5 MB, an impressive feat in those days. Today, however, it’s not difficult to find hard drives that can store 1 TB of data on a single 3.5-inch disk.

But despite this huge increase in storage density and a similarly impressive improvement in power efficiency, one thing hasn’t changed. The lifetime over which data can be stored on magnetic discs is still about a decade.

Qualcomm shows how a smart watch can make sense: by offering only limited functions.

By Tom Simonite on October 21, 2013

For all the technology companies large and small talking of smart watches as a mass-market inevitability, those that have launched are muddled and disappointing (see “So Far, Smart Watches Are Pretty Dumb”). But a hands-on demonstration with a new smart watch called the Toq has convinced me that this genre of gadget may yet succeed.

The Toq, made by Qualcomm, doesn’t try to do too much with the limited yet prominent real estate it inhabits on a person’s wrist. And the device can last days between charges thanks to the novel Mirasol display technology owned by Qualcomm.

AltaRock has figured out how to use fracking to get more heat out of a geothermal well, but work remains before the energy source can dent carbon emissions.

By Kevin Bullis on October 21, 2013

The use of hydraulic fracturing has unlocked vast new reserves of natural gas. Now Alta Rock, a startup based in Seattle, is developing technology that might do the same for geothermal resources, turning a marginal power source into a major source of carbon-free electricity and heat in the United States.

Earlier this year near the Newberry Volcano in Oregon, Alta Rock demonstrated a key part of that technology, a process akin to fracking. Just as fracking involves pumping high-pressure liquid into underground shale formations to unlock natural gas and oil that’s been trapped there, the new technology could unlock heat trapped deep underground. Unlike solar and wind power, that heat would be available around the clock and in all sorts of weather.

Experts Doubt Snowden Could Keep His Leaked Documents Safe From Spies

There is reason to doubt Edward Snowden’s claim that Russian or Chinese spies have not seen the NSA files he leaked.

Tom Simonite

October 18, 2013

In an interview with the New York Times published yesterday, document-leaking NSA contractor Edward Snowden made a bold claim in response to allegations that other nations may have got hold of his classified haul:

“There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents.”

Many security and surveillance experts publicly questioned that claim. Google security engineer Justin Schuh tweeted that the remark showed “Snowden is divorced from reality”, saying in a discussion thread with a fellow security industry insider:

@headhntr If you don’t assume any reasonably capable foreign intel has had all of it for months, then you’re indulging a fantasy.
— Justin Schuh (@justinschuh) October 18, 2013

That sentiment was shared by many others, including Jeffrey Carr, CEO of security company Taia Global and adjunct professor at George Washington University. He was dismissive of Snowden’s belief that he knows the capabilities of China’s security services thanks to his work at the NSA:

Snowden’s a classic case of Western arrogance towards the East combined with the illusion that SIGINT is all-powerful and all-knowing.
— Jeffrey Carr (@jeffreycarr) October 18, 2013

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jillian York also questioned Snowden’s trust in his knowledge of what China’s spies can and can’t do.

Snowden told the Times that although he took the documents to Hong Kong in June, when he fled to Russia in July he didn’t take copies with him. That leaves the journalists he has worked with to disseminate the documents as the only people in possession of them.

What has been released from those files so far suggests that properly implemented cryptography remains unbreakable even for national intelligence agencies (see “NSA Leak Leaves Crypto-Math Intact But Highlights Know Workarounds”). Yet we have also been reminded that agencies such as the NSA can be powerful because implementing security controls in a way that can foil a well-resourced nation-state is extremely difficult.

Even if Snowden did know everything about the capabilities of the NSA or its equivalents in other countries, his curent location in Russia would hardly put him in a position to know for sure that everyone who has access to his files has adequately protected them. That list now includes people at the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, and Pro Publica amongst various others.

Perhaps the best reason of all to be skeptical about Snowden’s claim that what he leaked is unknown to other nations is the ease with which he harvested the documents. Snowden was able to poke around inisde the NSA’s systems to collect the files, despite being a relatively low-ranking employee with an external contractor. It’s plausible other countries could have taken the same route.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520516/experts-doubt-snowden-could-keep-his-leaked-documents-safe-from-spies/

The Secrets of Online Money Laundering

Criminals are increasingly using the internet to turn dirty money into a spotless shade of green. Now a report written for the United Nations lifts the lid on many of these increasingly popular techniques

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 18, 2013

Money laundering is increasingly becoming a cybercrime. Gone are the days when the bad guys would pop down to the casino and hope to convert their loot into a clean win on the roulette table. And less popular is the old scam of taking out an insurance policy and then redeeming it at a discount.

Instead, modern criminals are focusing on the internet. And the opportunities for turning dirty money into a spotless shade of green are plentiful.

Ship Tracking Hack Makes Tankers Vanish from View

A system used by ships worldwide to broadcast their location for safety purposes lacks security controls and is vulnerable to spectacular spoofing attacks, researchers show.

By Tom Simonite on October 18, 2013

Off course: Spoof radio signals convinced an online ship tracking service that this fake craft had traveled on a path near Italy that spelled out the hacker term “pwned,” which describes a system that has been compromised by an attacker.

A system used to track shipping vessels worldwide has been shown to be easily hijacked. Researchers found that it is possible to cause fake vessels to appear, real ones to disappear, and to issue false emergency alerts using cheap radio equipment.

Researchers with the computer security company Trend Micro discovered the problem, which stems from a lack of security controls in a technology known as Automatic Identification System, or AIS, used by an estimated 400,000 ships worldwide. Ships using the system transmit a radio signal with their location and some other details, so that other vessels and port authorities can view a map with all nearby craft shown in real time. International Maritime Organization rules make AIS mandatory on passenger vessels and on cargo ships over a certain size. Lighthouses, buoys, and other marine fixtures also transmit their location using the system.

A new database tool dramatically improves processing speeds using technology that’s already in your computer.

By David Talbot on October 18, 2013

New software can use the graphics processors found on everyday computers to process torrents of data more quickly than is normally possible, opening up new ways to visually explore everything from Twitter posts to political donations.

Known as MapD, or massively parallel database, the new technology achieves big speed gains by storing the data in the onboard memory of graphics processing units (GPUs) instead of in central processing units (CPUs), as is conventional. Using a single high-performance GPU card can make data processing up to 70 times faster.

GE hopes to increase power output at existing wind turbines by offering free upgrades–you just pay if the upgrades work.

Kevin Bullis

October 17, 2013

GE had a problem. Its researchers were inventing a lot of interesting ways to eke out more power from already installed wind turbines—a software adjustment, adding a vortex-inducing strip of metal, and so on—but customers weren’t buying. Nevermind that GE carefully analyzed how much more their customers could make, and how fast they could pay off the investment.

Getting people to buy into little improvements is not GE’s problem alone. Startups that offer modest improvements to the incumbent technology struggle to get attention. There’s a similar problem when it comes to efficiency gains. A little upfront investment by homeowners and businesses in insulation, light sensors, and other equipment can quickly pay for itself. But those investments often don’t get made.

Biotech startup Greenlight Biosciences has a cell-free approach to microbial chemical production.

By Susan Young on October 17, 2013

Biotechnologists have genetically engineered bacteria and other microbes to produce biofuels and chemicals from renewable resources. But complex metabolic pathways in these living organisms can be difficult to control, and the desired products can be poisonous to the microbes. What if you could eliminate the living cell altogether?

Greenlight Biosciences, a Boston-area startup, engineers microbes to make various enzymes that can produce chemicals and then breaks open the bugs to harvest those enzymes. The scientists don’t have to go to the trouble of isolating the enzymes from the other cellular material; instead, they add chemicals to inhibit unwanted biochemical reactions. By mixing slurries based on different microbes with sugars and other carbon-based feedstocks, the company can generate complex reactions to produce a variety of chemicals.

A wearable depth-sensing camera may soon give sightless people a better way to master their environment.

By Richard Moss on October 17, 2013

Eelke Folmer and Vinitha Khambadkar think blind people could do without their white canes and instead navigate with a camera around their necks that gives spoken guidance in response to hand gestures.

Folmer and Khambadkar, researchers at the University of Nevada, presented the technology last week at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Known as the Gestural Interface for Remote Spatial Perception, which they abbreviate as GIST, the system utilizes a Microsoft Kinect sensor to analyze and identify objects in its field of view. “GIST lets you extract information from your environment,” Folmer says.

If smart watches are going to really take off, they’ll have to get a lot better-looking first.

Rachel Metz

October 17, 2013

The market for smart watches is hopping, with companies large (Samsung, Sony) and small (Pebble) betting consumers want to strap these gadgets to their wrists. Even Apple and Google are expected to be readying their takes, and market researcher Juniper Research expects wearable-tech revenue to grow to $19 billion by 2018 from this year’s comparatively paltry $1.4 billion.

Here’s the thing: existing smart watches are pretty ugly. I’ve spent a lot of time researching and trying out some existing options (see “So Far, Smart Watches Are Pretty Dumb”), and beyond all the technology changes needed for smart watches to become truly useful and complementary to smartphones (rather than just duplicative), they’re also in need of a major fashion makeover.

How Hollywood Can  Capitalize on Piracy

By Jake Rossen on October 17, 2013

Jack Valenti, the late president of the Motion Picture Association of America, once warned that a new form of distribution might kill his industry. It would empty theaters and drain studio coffers. Why would anyone venture out to multiplexes when films could be disseminated virtually free and viewed in the convenience of your own home?

Valenti was referring to videocassette recorders, the big boxes rolling out of Japanese factories circa 1980 that could make or play copies of movies at minimal cost. He called them a “parasitical instrument” and told Congress in 1982: “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.” Filmmakers heeded him: Steven Spielberg refused to release E.T. to the home video market for six years. The debate was so fierce that it took a 1984 Supreme Court ruling to guarantee a consumer’s right to record someone else’s intellectual property.

Twitter data reveals the cities that set trends and those that follow. And the difference may be in the way air passengers carry information across the country, by-passing the internet, say network scientists

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 16, 2013

One of the defining properties of social networks is the ease with which information can spread across them. This flow leads to information avalanches in which videos or photographs or other content becomes viral across entire countries, continents and even the globe.

It’s easy to imagine that these trends are simply the result of the properties of the network. Indeed, there are plenty of studies that seem to show this.

But in recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in the relationship between a network and the geography it is superimposed on. What role does geography play in the emergence and spread of trends? And which areas are trend setters and which are trend followers?

Review: New Writing Software Tries to Get Beyond the Word Processor

As We May Type

By Paul Ford on October 16, 2013

In 1984, the personal-computer industry was still small enough to be captured, with reasonable fidelity, in a one-volume publication, the Whole Earth Software Catalog. It told the curious what was up: “On an unlovely flat artifact called a disk may be hidden the concentrated intelligence of thousands of hours of design.” And filed under “Organizing” was one review of particular note, describing a program called ThinkTank, created by a man named Dave Winer.

ThinkTank was outlining software that ran on a personal computer. There had been outline programs before (most famously, Doug Engelbart’s NLS or oNLine System, demonstrated in 1968 in “The Mother of All Demos,” which also included the first practical implementation of hypertext). But Winer’s software was outlining for the masses, on personal computers. The Whole Earth reviewers were enthusiastic: “I have subordinate ideas neatly indented under other ideas,” wrote one. Another enumerated the possibilities: “Starting to write. Writer’s block. Refining expositions or presentations. Keeping notes that you can use later. Brainstorming.” ThinkTank wasn’t just a tool for making outlines. It promised to change the way you thought.

A startup pays people around the world to log prices in their local stores each day, offering a real-time way to track how economies are doing.

By Tom Simonite on October 16, 2013

In early September, news outlets reported that the price of onions in India had suddenly spiked nearly 300 percent over prices a year before. Analysts warned that the jump in price for this food staple could signal an impending economic crisis, and the Research Bank of India quickly raised interest rates.

A startup company called Premise might’ve helped make the response to India’s onion crisis timelier. As part of a novel approach to tracking the global economy from the bottom up, the company has a daily feed of onion prices from stores around India. More than 700 people in cities around the globe use a mobile app to log the prices of key products in local stores each day.

Study suggests how brain technology could one day tap into thoughts.

Susan Young

October 15, 2013

The electrical activity of a few thousand neurons in the human brain correlates with thinking about math or quantity-related ideas, say researchers. The findings suggest how research that connects types of thoughts to brain activity could some day enable patients who are unable to speak to communicate with others.

Josef Parvizi, a neurologist at Stanford School of Medicine, and his team used brain implants in three patients to record the activity of a collection of neurons suspected to be involved in mathematical thinking. The patients were undergoing brain monitoring to help treat their epileptic seizures and had electrodes implanted on the surface of their brain so neuron activity could be monitored over several days.

The Stanford team compared video recordings of the patients’ behaviors to the patterns of activity of a brain region suspected to be important for mathematical calculations. By recording from an implant, the researchers could observe more natural behaviors in patients than had been possible in previous studies.

Whenever the patients would consider math problems or even just quantitative thoughts—ideas such as “more than” or “smaller than”—the neurons were active, the researchers reported on Tuesday in Nature Communications

Parvizi says his group has also recorded from other regions of the brain while monitoring patient behavior, but those results await publication. While researchers are far from able to read minds, the implant technique could be a good way to try to grasp what is going on inside a person’s head, says Parvizi. “This is just the beginning of a new era in brain research.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520351/brain-implants-can-detect-mathematical-thinking/

The Greenhouse-Gas Case Before the Supreme Court Won’t Matter for Tech

In focusing on EPA regs aimed at stationary sources of carbon dioxide, the Supreme Court will leave fuel economy standards intact.

Kevin Bullis

October 15, 2013

Today the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could cut back on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse emissions from power plants. EPA regulation of greenhouse gases is a centerpiece of President Obama’s climate plan, since he can’t expect Congress to do anything on the subject. Regulations often have big implications for innovation, since they can force the adoption of new technologies.

But in this case, no matter what the Supreme Court decides, the impact on technology—such as methods for capturing carbon dioxide from power plants—is likely to be small (see “Capturing and Storing Carbon Dioxide in One Simple Step”).

Opinions differ as to just how big a deal the case could be. Some experts, such as Jonas Monast, the director of the Climate and Energy Program at Duke University, argue that the Supreme Court is only focusing on a narrow point that won’t affect Obama’s push for new regulations on power plants.

Others say that the court could have a big impact. It might rule that the EPA doesn’t have authority to regulate greenhouse- gas emissions from power plants. If these experts are right, then the EPA may not be able to issue regulations limiting carbon dioxide emissions at new and existing power plants.

But no matter how the case plays out, it probably won’t make a big difference for the development of technology. That’s because EPA regulations limiting greenhouse-gas emissions would only promote a shift from coal to natural-gas power plants. And that’s happening even without the regulations. The regulations will do little or nothing to promote carbon capture or require the use of renewables (see “EPA Carbon Regs Won’t Help Advance Technology”).

The Supreme Court could have had a big impact if it had decided to consider a broader question that petitioners had brought to it—whether the EPA was right to conclude that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten human health. If the court had decided the EPA was wrong, that could have invalidated ambitious fuel economy regulations. That would take away a major incentive for innovation in the automotive industry.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520331/the-greenhouse-gas-case-before-the-supreme-court-wont-matter-for-tech/

Three Questions for Microsoft’s New Head of Research, Peter Lee

As Microsoft prepares to absorb Nokia’s handset business, a new research strategy emerges.

By David Talbot on October 15, 2013

Microsoft new head of research, Peter Lee, is tasked with helping the company invent the future. His bosses hope that it will be one in which the computing giant has more than just 4 percent of the market for mobile operating systems.

Lee’s strategy is to funnel resources toward technologies he believes could revolutionize our relationships with computers, mobile and otherwise. He also faces the challenge of managing an increasingly rare breed in the computer industry: a large and sprawling corporate research division. Microsoft Research currently has 1,100 researchers and engineers in 13 labs around the world, from Cairo, Egypt, to New York City. A 14th is planned for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Microsoft may be about to absorb Nokia’s research wing when it completes its takeover of the handset maker.

The length of the messages we send on Twitter is getting shorter, raising important questions about how the social messaging service is changing the way we communicate, say researchers

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 15, 2013

Back in the old days, say in 2009, Twitter was a relatively unknown social network that was beginnign to spread like wildfire. In 2007, Twitter users posted some 400,000 tweets per quarter, by June 2010, they were posting 65 million each day. Today, there are 200 million registered users who send around 400 million tweets every day.

During this short time, Twitter has become so popular that its technical argot has entered the common language. Words like hashtag and @name would have seemed little more than gibberish just a few years ago. But even the word tweet is now a verb officially recognised in the Oxford English Dictionary.

So Far, Smart Watches Are Pretty Dumb

By Rachel Metz on October 15, 2013

A century ago, banker Henry Graves Jr. and industrialist James Ward Packard embarked on a decades-long competition to acquire the watch with the most “complications”—a term used to denote any feature beyond simple time-telling. Their rivalry culminated in the creation of a gold pocket watch known as the Graves Supercomplication, designed and built by the Swiss watchmaker Patek Philippe. Its 24 complications included sunrise and sunset times in New York City and a chart of the city’s night sky. Graves paid about $15,000 for the watch in 1933 (roughly $270,000 in today’s money); at auction in 1999, it sold for $11 million.

Many years and countless watch styles later, a different kind of wrist-borne complication battle is heating up. Inspired by the success of smartphones and tablets, and by the ever-more-compact computer chips, sensors, and screens found in these devices, electronics companies hope the smart watch could be the next big thing. Companies including Samsung and Sony, and perhaps also Apple and Google, are rushing to produce these devices, which typically connect wirelessly to a smartphone so that you can see call alerts and message notifications on your wrist.

Will GOTCHAs Replace CAPTCHAs?

Distorted pieces of text are often used to prevent computers getting unauthorised access to websites. Now a team of computer scientists think they can do better with inkblot tests instead

Emerging Technology From the arXiv

October 14, 2013

Most people who use the Internet will be familiar with the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, otherwise known as CAPTCHA. These are the distorted pieces of texts that you are regularly asked to identify to prove that you are human. Their goal is to prevent bots from accessing websites, to prevent them leaving spam, for example.

CAPTCHAs have been hugely successful since they were introduced in 2000 by Luis von Ahn and pals at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But in the cat and mouse game of computer security, it was always inevitable that the bad guys would spend significant resources attempting to break the system.

Leading Economist Predicts a Bitcoin Backlash

Economist Simon Johnson says governments will feel the urge to suppress the crypto-currency Bitcoin.

By Will Knight on October 14, 2013

Governments and established financial institutions are likely to launch a campaign to quash the decentralized digital currency Bitcoin, according to a leading economist and academic. Simon Johnson, a professor of entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, expects Bitcoin to face political pressure and aggressive lobbying from big banks because of its disruptive nature.

“There is going to be a big political backlash,” Johnson said on stage at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last Thursday. “And the question is whether the people behind those currencies are ready for that and have their own political strategy.”

Scientists use immune cells to smuggle molecules across the blood-brain barrier in the hopes of treating neurodegenerative diseases.

By Abdul-Kareem Ahmed on October 14, 2013

Deep in the base of the brain, a cascade of events including oxidative damage and inflammation can kill neurons, resulting in the debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

An international team of researchers has now developed a technique that might be used to prevent this cell death. They engineer a patient’s own immune cells to carry protective stowaway molecules, and these Trojan cells can help prevent neuron death by delivering treatments across the blood-brain barrier—a layer of cellular structures that blocks most molecules from passing into the brain. The researchers have so far tested the approach successfully in mice.

Three Questions for Tech Education Pioneer Scot Osterweil

An MIT education expert says we should enjoy our free time and let technology do the work for us.

By Aviva Hope Rutkin on October 12, 2013

Scot Osterweil is the creative director of the Education Arcade and a professor at the MIT Media Lab. He spoke at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference about why educators need to encourage more creativity—and how that could help us build a better, more leisurely future.

What’s wrong with American education?

Virtually all conversations about American education start on the premise that we have a crisis. The crisis is usually reduced to the simple fact that American students don’t seem to score as well on the international tests as students in other countries.

We’re looking at the wrong data. The reality is that there are problems in American education, but we have diagnosed the wrong problem. Because in fact, if you look at the data, Americans have always scored worse on those international exams, including the generation of students who invented the personal computer, the Internet, and basically fueled America’s high-tech dominance. Those students in school were scoring worse collectively on the exams. So those exams are not predictive of anything. There’s pretty clear evidence that people’s results on those exams correlate very well with poverty. If you actually normalize the scores for similar distributions of income, it turns out we’re scoring just as well as all those other counties.

If you visit most of the countries that do really well on those international exams, they all ask, How can we capture the entrepreneurship and the creativity and the innovativeness that we see in American students? So we are, in a sense, trying to drive our education system in the direction to be more like the places that would like to be more like us.

So how can we take advantage of what we’re good at?

What we need to do, to some degree, is sort of return to an era of free-range children, where there’s more play, more discovery. The problem in America right now is that kids are having less time to explore and invent and discover. The one space where I think kids are still being as adventuresome as they ever were is in the space of games.

I don’t mean to say that all education could be done through games, but I think we can look at what happens in game play and we should try to model that and make more of our education system like that, where we present kids with authentic challenges, give them freedom to really explore those challenges and invent solutions. The powerful thing with technology is that we can also, in the same process, be assessing how kids are doing, unlike the current assessments right now.

How do we encourage people to make more of their creativity?

It’s strange. We’ve always seen technology as a way of increasing productivity and saving labor. And now that we’re actually reaping those benefits, we don’t know what to do about it.

What we really need to do is to give people back free time. The real challenge to education is to educate people on how to use that free time. So we have a choice. We can either have people sitting around idly, slack-jawed, watching TV and wandering the malls, or we can really teach them how to be lifelong learners and lifelong makers. We can unleash their creativity and encourage them to recognize that their playfulness is actually a productive activity, even if it isn’t used for work.

And if people are beginning to use those skills, whether it’s writing software or designing things for 3-D printers or doing carpentry or other kind of crafts; if people get back in touch with the pleasures of those activities and sharing those with their communities, their neighbors, including their neighbors on the Internet; if we have a population that’s productively engaged—we’re actually achieving what we always wanted to achieve with technology.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520216/three-questions-for-tech-education-pioneer-scot-osterweil/

AOL Cofounder Frets That the U.S. Could Lose Its Entrepreneurial Edge

AOL cofounder Steve Case makes the case for American entrepreneurs outside of Silicon Valley.

By Antonio Regalado on October 11, 2013

Entrepreneurs made America the leader of the free world, and only entrepreneurs can keep it there.

That’s according to Steve Case, the billionaire founder of America Online, who is reëmerging as an influential figure in Washington, D.C., and one of the country’s most important technology investors.

Case cofounded AOL, a company that, with its CD-ROMs and memorable TV ads, helped connect America to the Internet back in the 1990s. Worth as much as $172 billion near its peak, the company lost its prominence on the Web after an ill-fated 2000 merger with old-media conglomerate Time Warner.
But Case has come back into public view with a strongly pro-American take on the role of entrepreneurs in the economy.

Porcshe’s new part-time electric car could challenge Tesla, which has been outselling the more established automaker.

Kevin Bullis

October 11, 2013

Plugged-in Porsche: The new Panamera S E-Hybrid charges outside MIT’s Media Lab during EmTech.

Next month Porsche will start selling its new Panamera S E-Hybrid, a plug-in hybrid that can travel 22 miles on battery power alone before its gas engine kicks in. Here are some first impressions after I took it for a quick test drive this week at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference. (Disclosure: Porsche was one of the event’s sponsors).

Mary Lou Jepsen, who leads the Google X display group, says wearable innovation moving fast.

Rachel Metz

October 11, 2013

Mary Lou Jepsen, head of the display division for Google’s notoriously secret hardware innovation lab, Google X–which is building the Google Glass head-worn computer–took the stage at EmTech Thursday to talk about innovation, creativity, and, naturally, wearable computing.

While Jepsen apologized a few times for being unable to divulge what, specifically, she’s working on over at Google (“Sergey insists,” she said apologetically at one point, referring to company cofounder Sergey brin), she did share a number of thoughts related to her division and the changing face of consumer electronics, among other topics. Below are some of her distilled thoughts.

She believes wearable computers are “a way of amplifying you,” saying that for years she felt that a laptop is an extension of her mind. “It’s coming. I don’t think it’s stoppable,” she said of wearable devices like Glass, adding that it makes it much faster to do things like take photos, and “you become addicted to the speed of it, and it lets you do more fast and easily.”

Ten years from now, assuming we can’t cure neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, she expects human-computer interfaces (such as the red Google Glass she wore around her neck, presumably) to be able to do things like identify the people around you.

She pointed out the importance of varied design in making commercially successful smart watches, similar to the different kinds of clothes we all wear.

Despite keeping her mouth shut about what she and her team are building, she indicates they’re working hard, saying they’re “maybe sleeping three hours a night to bring the technology forward,” and that we may see what they’re working on next year.

She stressed that industrial design and user experience design are “not the whole product,” when it comes to consumer electronics, and that, if you really think about it, the existence of the laptop was made possible by the creation of the liquid-crystal display, and tablets by further innovations in hardware. “There’s only so much you can do by styling the housing and icons,” she said. “I think there’s a lot of room for diversity and innovation of approach here.”

She also stressed the importance of understanding from early on in the product-development cycle about how what you’re making will scale.

She says Google’s driverless car, which the company has long been testing on California’s roads, is “safer than a regular driver now,” and that Google has driven more miles with its driverless car than the ground covered by all other driverless cars combined.

She noted the importance of innovation at any age. “I don’t think any one of us has an excuse on why we can’t get up and do something relaly big, really bold,” she said.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520231/google-x-display-guru-says-wearable-computing-is-unstoppable/

Pages

Thursday, October 24, 2013

A cheaper fuel cell could provide affordable power for microgrids.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

As Web companies and government agencies analyze ever more information about our lives, it’s tempting to respond by passing new privacy laws or creating mechanisms that pay us for our data. Instead, we need a civic solution, because democracy is at risk.

Just how frightened should we be of chemical weapons, really? A 1929 essay tried to answer that question.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

MIT professor Angela Belcher applies her biological toolkit to society’s biggest problems in energy, the environment, and health care.

Thanks to Google, Minecraft players can now toy with quantum teleportation and Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.”

A mobile, one-armed robot that costs $35,000 is headed for research labs and maybe even some workplaces.

Magnetic hard discs can store data for little more than a decade. But nanotechnologists have now designed and built a disk that can store data for a million years or more

Qualcomm shows how a smart watch can make sense: by offering only limited functions.

AltaRock has figured out how to use fracking to get more heat out of a geothermal well, but work remains before the energy source can dent carbon emissions.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

There is reason to doubt Edward Snowden’s claim that Russian or Chinese spies have not seen the NSA files he leaked.

Criminals are increasingly using the internet to turn dirty money into a spotless shade of green. Now a report written for the United Nations lifts the lid on many of these increasingly popular techniques

Friday, October 18, 2013

A system used by ships worldwide to broadcast their location for safety purposes lacks security controls and is vulnerable to spectacular spoofing attacks, researchers show.

A new database tool dramatically improves processing speeds using technology that’s already in your computer.

GE hopes to increase power output at existing wind turbines by offering free upgrades–you just pay if the upgrades work.

Biotech startup Greenlight Biosciences has a cell-free approach to microbial chemical production.

A wearable depth-sensing camera may soon give sightless people a better way to master their environment.

If smart watches are going to really take off, they’ll have to get a lot better-looking first.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Twitter data reveals the cities that set trends and those that follow. And the difference may be in the way air passengers carry information across the country, by-passing the internet, say network scientists

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

As We May Type

A startup pays people around the world to log prices in their local stores each day, offering a real-time way to track how economies are doing.

Study suggests how brain technology could one day tap into thoughts.

In focusing on EPA regs aimed at stationary sources of carbon dioxide, the Supreme Court will leave fuel economy standards intact.

As Microsoft prepares to absorb Nokia’s handset business, a new research strategy emerges.

The length of the messages we send on Twitter is getting shorter, raising important questions about how the social messaging service is changing the way we communicate, say researchers

So Far, Smart Watches Are Pretty Dumb

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Distorted pieces of text are often used to prevent computers getting unauthorised access to websites. Now a team of computer scientists think they can do better with inkblot tests instead

Monday, October 14, 2013

Economist Simon Johnson says governments will feel the urge to suppress the crypto-currency Bitcoin.

Scientists use immune cells to smuggle molecules across the blood-brain barrier in the hopes of treating neurodegenerative diseases.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

An MIT education expert says we should enjoy our free time and let technology do the work for us.

AOL cofounder Steve Case makes the case for American entrepreneurs outside of Silicon Valley.

Porcshe’s new part-time electric car could challenge Tesla, which has been outselling the more established automaker.

Mary Lou Jepsen, who leads the Google X display group, says wearable innovation moving fast.