Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Megan Garber

When Algorithms Take the Stand

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 12:00:00 -0400

In February of 2013, Eric Loomis was found driving a car that had been used in a shooting. He was arrested; he pleaded guilty to eluding an officer and no contest to operating a vehicle without its owner’s consent. The judge in Loomis’s case gave him a 6-year prison sentence for those offenses—a length determined in part not just by Loomis’s criminal record, but also by his score on the COMPAS scale, an algorithmically determined assessment that aims, and claims, to predict an individual’s risk of recidivism.

Law enforcement in Wisconsin, where Loomis lived at the time of his arrest, rely on COMPAS and algorithms like it to augment human intuition and analysis with, they claim, a more objective approach to justice. Loomis’s score suggested that he had a high risk of committing another crime; thus, his 6-year sentence.

Loomis appealed the ruling, on the grounds that the judge’s use of the predictive algorithm in his sentencing decision violated due process. (COMPAS is a proprietary algorithm, and the inputs that inform its ultimate risk assessments are, to the public, largely opaque.) The case made its way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and a ruling is expected to come later this week.

For Julia Angwin, a technology reporter at ProPublica who has spent the past year focusing her reporting efforts on COMPAS and other so-called “risk assessment algorithms,” the Loomis case is about more than the U.S. criminal justice system, and about more even than the constitutional rights that inform that system.

The case and the ideas at stake in it also serve as yet another reminder that algorithms are increasingly inflecting all areas of civic, and commercial, life. Credit scores. News. Policing.

As Angwin argued today at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic: In ways big and small, algorithms make judgments that, under the guise of cold, hard “data,” directly affect people’s lives—for better, often, but sometimes for worse.

The irony, Angwin argues, is that we—as a criminal justice system, as a political body, and as a culture—are taking an all-too-human approach to our algorithmic infrastructure: We trust it too much. We have not yet thought as rigorously or as strategically as we need to about its effects. We have not fully considered whether, and indeed how, to regulate the algorithms that are helping to regulate our lives.

“This is a wild and wooly area,” Angwin said. “It really feels like the Wild West at the moment.”

It makes some sense that we are inclined to trust algorithms as objective and, as such, unobjectionable. The appeal of a system like COMPAS is that it proposes to inject objectivity into a criminal justice system that has been compromised, too many times, by human failings.

What that appeal tends to elide, though, is the fact that algorithms, their science-y names notwithstanding, are as fallible as the people and the institutions that write them. Angwin researched the results of COMPAS, in particular—and found, after comparing the algorithm’s predictions with real-world outcomes, that it had only about 60 percent accuracy (“just slightly more than a coin toss”).

Worse still, the algorithm, as ProPublica’s article bluntly summed it up, “is biased against blacks.”

This wasn’t the first time that algorithms had exhibited that bias. And, for Angwin, what all that amounts to is the need for a more skeptical approach to algorithms in general: what she calls “algorithmic accountability.”

We’re still living in a time of general tech-optimism, Angwin argued—a time in which new technologies (smartphones! Facebook! robots that help you unload the dishwasher!) promise to make our lives both more efficient and enjoyable. Those technologies may help to make our justice system more equitable; they might not. The point is, we owe it to ourselves—and to Eric Loomis, and to every other person whose life might be altered by an algorithm—to find out.

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‘The Meatball’ vs. ‘The Worm’: How NASA Brands Space

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 12:22:53 -0400

“It’s a design nightmare,” Greg Patt, a publishing contractor for NASA, sighed. He was talking about the logo that’s been the space agency’s official one since 1992: the blue sphere meant to suggest both Earth and other planets, its interior sprinkled with stars of white and and belted with the letters N-A-S-A, all of it connected by a swoopingly aeronautical chevron of red.

That logo, making news because of a Kickstarter campaign to create a hardcover version of the old, bebindered NASA Graphics Standards Manual, has come to be known as “the meatball.” That’s in part because of its connection to aeronautics—the optical approach nicknamed the “meatball landing system” has long helped Navy pilots to land on aircraft carriers—but it’s also because of its visual clunkiness. The meatball, originally created to suggest NASA’s ability to move the nation forward into new frontiers, now reeks of retrofuturism.

As such: The meatball has been, long before 1992, a subject of disagreement at the space agency. Its biggest competition? NASA’s other long-time logo, its now-unofficial one: the logotype, sleek and rounded of edge, that came to be known as “the worm.”

The worm came about in 1974. The Apollo program had just ended, and NASA, which had become almost as skilled at public relations as it had become at space exploration, was in need of an image revamp. The agency hired professional designers through the National Endowment for the Arts’s Federal Graphics Improvement Program, which sought to revamp government agencies’ visual branding. The designers’ charge? To come up with a logo that would speak to NASA’s future rather than its past. To get people excited, once again, about what a national space agency could achieve.

The design the studio Danne & Blackburn came up with—N-A-S-A spelled out in thick, red lettering, the edges of its As curved to call to mind the noses of rockets—was aggressively simple. And that was the point. The logo’s stark clarity suggested that, whatever NASA would do going forward, its history would speak for itself. In 1975, the agency officially adopted the logo whose peak-and-valley letters, reminiscent of limbless locomotion, came to be known as “the worm.”

The logo, Wired notes, “was a hard sell to an organization full of engineers who couldn’t care less about kerning and color swatches”—many of whom were, despite their agency’s PR needs, nostalgic for the NASA of the moon-walking years of the 1960s and early 1970s. Among designers, however, the worm quickly became beloved.

“If the meatball shows us what made NASA so thrilling—rockets, planets, and sexy-sounding hypersonic stuff,” the design critic Alice Rawsthorn notes in her essay “The Art Of The Seal,” “the worm simply suggests it, and does so with such skill that it’s become the design purists’ favorite.”

The next decades, however, found NASA, at least in the public imagination, limiting its ambitions. From the heady days of the “giant leap for mankind” came Skylab, and with it the shuttle program, and with it the Challenger disaster. By the early 1990s, NASA was in need of yet another public image overhaul. It started, yet again, with its logo.

This time, the rebranding came almost by accident. In 1992, the new NASA administrator Daniel Goldin paid a visit to Virginia’s Langley Research Center.Langley’s hangars had retained the pre-1975 NASA logo, its red, white, and blue insignia still painted onto their doors. Langley’s director, Paul Holloway, saw an opportunity.

As Goldin recalls to The New York Times, “He said, ‘If you want to really excite NASA employees about changes coming, why don’t you tell them we’re going to de-worm NASA and bring back the meatball?’”

Goldin asked a White House official traveling with him whether he could, indeed, just re-meatball the space agency. Yes, the reply came, he could. And so, in an address to Langley employees, Goldin announced the change: NASA was bringing back the meatball. (He added, confidently if optimistically: “The magic is back at NASA.”)

And: “They went wild,” Goldin says. “It was an incredible reaction.”

Which is why the NASA of today—the agency that sent a spaceship to the edges of the solar system, the agency that is making plans to put colonists on Mars—has a logo that celebrates the past. Nostalgia is a powerful thing.

(Image via Edwin Verin/ Shutterstock.com)

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The Industrialization of Space

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 13:24:44 -0500

We may talk about "space tourism" as a specialized form of space travel; even the most cutting-edge space exploration, though, is disconcertingly similar to the basic experience of Earth-bound voyaging. You pack your bags, trying your best to plan for every circumstance that might arise while you're away, and then you're stuck with what you've brought. In space's case, the suitcases in question may be spacecraft and the tools required may be slightly more complex than voltage converters and travel-size shampoos ... but the idea's the same: If you'll need something on your trip to space, you have to bring it with you.

That basic paradigm, though, is changing. This week, NASA announced a breakthrough: For the first time, humans have 3-D-printed an object to be used in space exploration from space itself . The item in question was appropriately meta: a faceplate for the 3-D printer that was recently delivered to the International Space Station , the laboratory that orbits some 240 miles from Earth.

"It's not only the first part printed in space, it's really the first object truly manufactured off planet Earth," Aaron Kemmer, the CEO of Made in Space, which built the printer for NASA, told NBC News . "Where there was not an object before, we essentially 'teleported' an object by sending the bits and having it made on the printer. It's a big milestone, not only for NASA and Made In Space, but for humanity as a whole."

Made in Space

That may be hyperbole, but it's also true. Space's suitcase paradigm has meant that using objects outside of Earth has required huge amounts of energy—and, with them, expense. That's the reason why, for example, space food so often comes in dehydrated forms (water adds weight to a spacecraft's payload) and why astronauts living in space drink their own recycled urine (same reason).Using 3-D printers, however, engineers on Earth can simply email or upload designs to spacecraft that can, in turn, print out the objects. Spacecraft can become industrialized.

As Forbes 's Leo King put it , "The list of conceivable applications is as vast as science-backed imagination will allow."

That list includes construction. "For exploration missions," Niki Werkheiser, project manager for the ISS's 3-D Printer, told King , "we will be able to use larger 3-D printers to construct the structures we will need to live and operate." Those include not just landing pads and radiation protection, but also habitats. It's conceivable, for example, that Martian regolith, or soil, could be used as a building material in printers.

In the nearer future, though, a working 3-D printer in space means leaner, more efficient space missions. Instead of designing objects built to withstand the forces that come with a launch into space, away from Earth’s gravity, engineers can simply design objects as they're needed on the Station. This, Werkheiser told King, "opens up a design space we’ve never had before."

Spare parts? Nano-satellites? All the items we need to explore and understand the world beyond Earth? These can all be affected by the mini-factory now working on the ISS. If humanity's next step in space is making the transition from visitors to settlers , we'll need to manufacture the tools we need not on Earth, but from space itself. Additive manufacturing will help us to do that.

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We're Not Ready for a Federal Robotics Department

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 12:37:01 -0400

Should the U.S. establish a new federal agency to regulate robots?

Here's one potential problem with that proposal—one that has very little to do with the law, and very much to do with technology: "The government has virtually no experts on the inside that understand autonomous robotic systems."

That's according to Missy Cummings, a professor of engineering at Duke, an expert on drones and other robots, and a former fighter pilot. Cummings came to that conclusion—one that means, she says, that "the United States government is in serious trouble"—while advising the government in, among other things, its development of a $100 million robotic helicopter program.

"The one thing that I realized while I was on the inside," she said, during a talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival, is essentially that "the defense industry really cannot get the people that it needs for the robotics programs it would like to have." The U.S. not only doesn't know about robotics ... it doesn't know, in the words of another former member of the military, what it doesn't know. It doesn't fully understand how to test robots, Cummings says. It doesn't fully know how to regulate them.

Take drones. There are currently six sites, scattered around the country, that the FAA has established as testing areas for unmanned autonomous vehicles. But the agency, Cummings argues, likely won't be able to hire the people they're going to need to run these programs. It's a systemic problem, and one that begins with the education system. "Our country," Cummings says, "simply is not putting out enough" people—engineers, roboticists, software engineers—who have expertise in robotics. The government, in the military and beyond, isn't doing enough to incentivize or compensate technologists. "And the ones that we do train," Cummings adds, "are going to private companies like Google or Apple."

That means, among other things, a government that is ill-equipped when it comes to the work of regulation and oversight. Whether private industry's current hegemony over robotics is a generally good or bad thing is debatable, Cummings allows, "but I think it's certainly a problem when our government cannot assess whether or not technology is decent—or even ready to be deployed."

Which leads to another reason to think that "the United States government is in serious trouble." While the U.S. is lagging in when it comes to robotics' human resources, Cummings says, other countries are quickly catching up. They're developing their own expertise with automated technologies—including, alarmingly, automated weaponry. Drones, for better or for worse, are "are a true democratization of technology," Cummings says; they put significant amounts of power in the hands not just of states, but of individuals and other extra-state actors. And if the U.S. is ill-equipped, systemically, to deal with warfare that is newly democratized and newly weaponized ... "it's my prediction," Cummings says, "that we're about to have our you-know-whats handed to us on a platter."

(Image via josefkubes/Shutterstock.com)

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At This School, You Can Check Out Drones Like Library Books

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 14:13:28 -0400

The University of South Florida recently received a grant to expand its "Digital Media Commons"—part of a broader effort to remodel the school's facilities with new technologies. After a year applying that grant money, however, something crazy happened: The Tampa-based university found itself with leftover funds. So it decided to use that money to try a little experiment—one involving, as so many experiments do these days, drones. Starting this fall, USF will be loaning out drones to its students for various multimedia projects. The remote-controlled vehicles, which are designed to capture aerial video and photos, cost $1,500 each—but they'll be free for students to check out, library book-style.

The rent-a-drone system, as you'd expect, isn't quite as simple as book check-outs are. Students will be required to enroll in a brief training program before they're able to borrow the drones. They'll also be required to explain how they'll use the drones in their work—no joy-droning allowed. And while they fly the drones over campus, the students will be supervised by a faculty member. (At the moment, the program is mostly limited to on-campus droning—though, CNN notes, off-campus use is possible with a professor's endorsement. And with students held liable for any damages the UAVs sustain in the process.)

Bill Garrison, the dean of USF Libraries, sees the drones as potential participants not just in conversations about the future of surveillance, but also about the future of libraries. "One of the things many libraries have struggled with," he explains, "is how do you become a real part of the campus and not be viewed as a book warehouse. I find it very exciting that we are able to do this, and I think the students will appreciate it."

The dean also sees the potential for the drones to serve other aspects of campus life. "We have a global sustainability program," he notes, "and they are mapping out the campus to see energy usage, so they can use the drones to help map out the campus."

Garrison, in all this, is hinting at a broader shift: USF's new program is yet another step in a process that has been, in retrospect, both long and quick: the cultural normalization of drones. The university is treating drones not as exotic machines—flying robots! gee whiz!—but rather as one more tool in the digital arsenal available to a university community. It is treating them as ... banal. "There are a lot of opportunities for research and learning by using drones," Garrison says. "And the faculty can use it, too."

(Image via risteski goce/Shutterstock.com)

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'Why-Fi' or 'Wiffy'? How Americans Pronounce Common Tech Terms

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 17:19:44 -0400

Okay, once and for all: Is it "gif" or "jif"?

EBay Deals, which runs a blog, decided to find out. Its team surveyed 1,100 people—U.S. residents, ranging in age from 18 to 45—asking them about the terms they use to describe some of the most common objects and actions of digital life. And about the way they pronounce those terms when they're discussing them IRL, which is pronounced I-R-L. The team, a representative told me, started by issuing a round of questions to 200 people, asking for open-ended answers; once they got a selection of three or four common terms—"remote," for example, as well as "remote control," "clicker," and "controller"—they polled the entire group to get a sense of the popularity of each term.

Their findings? "Remote," it turns out, is much more commonly used than "clicker." But there were more surprising findings, as well. For example: More than 30 percent of eBay's respondents pronounce the word "meme" as "me-me," which is as fun to say as it is incorrect . And nearly 43 percent of those respondents pronounce "data" as "dah-tuh," eBay said—a nod to the original Latin, maybe, but also a snub to certain androids .

And the whole "gif" vs. "jif" thing? Nearly 54 percent of respondents use the hard-g version, compared to nearly 41 percent who use the soft. And more than 5 percent use another pronunciation entirely—which makes you wonder whether there's a group of Americans going to Buzzfeed, scrolling down, and remarking to themselves about all the animated jeefs .

Here are more of their findings :

Gif vs. Jif

eBay Deals

Meme

eBay Deals

Mobile Phone

eBay Deals

Flash Drive

eBay Deals

Trolling

eBay Deals

Remote Control

eBay Deals

Hashtag

eBay Deals

Booting Up

eBay Deals

Avatar

eBay Deals

Online Search

eBay Deals

'Data'

eBay Deals

'Wifi'

eBay Deals

( Image via Shutter_M / Shutterstock.com )

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One Closed API at a Time, the Era of the Open Web May Be Waning

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Tue, 17 Jun 2014 17:42:34 -0400

On Friday, Netflix's VP of edge engineering, Daniel Jacobson, sent the following letter to the service's third-party developers:

Netflix API Developers,
As Netflix continues to grow internationally, the emphasis of our engineering efforts is to satisfy a growing member base and a growing number of devices. To better focus our efforts and to align them with the needs of our global member base, we will be retiring the public API program. Effective on November 14, 2014, public API developers will no longer be able to access Netflix content. All requests to the public API will return 404 errors.
Thank you to for participating in the ecosystem throughout the years.
Daniel Jacobson
VP of Edge Engineering

Jacobson then followed up with a post on the Netflix developer blog, repeating the same sentiments and bringing finality to an API program that had existed for six years.

As news, this was both big and small. Small, because the closure of Netflix's API program was long hinted at, and therefore unsurprising. Big, though, because the closure makes Netflix the latest of the big tech companies and services to have closed their public APIs, effectively ending their relationships with third-party developers. Twitter did it. So did Flickr. So did Google.

APIs—application programming interfaces—are, essentially, a way for companies and developers to talk to each other and build off of each other. They're a means of converting the information a service contains into the stuff of the wider Internet. As Alexis explained it a few years ago, "APIs allow data to be pulled from an online source in a structured way. So, Twitter has an API that lets app developers create software that can display your Twitter feed in ways that the company itself did not develop. Developers make a call to that API to 'GET statuses/home timeline' and Twitter sends back 'the 20 most recent statuses" for a user.'"

APIs are enablers of remix culture, essentially. And what they mix is structured data.

Because of all that, APIs have been seen, traditionally, as symbolic andpractical. Sure, they're about creating products that people will like, and use, and find valuable—products, in other words, that will be monetizable. (Use Tweetdeck or Tweetbot? Those were built, originally, on the Twitter API.) But the interfaces, the mere fact of their existence, have also been about respecting, almost literally, the webbiness of the web—as a network. As an ecosystem. As a grand, crazy, nerdy collaboration.

So it's hard not to see the closure of the Netflix API, on top of the closure of all the other APIs, as symbolic in its own way—of a new era of the web that is less concerned with outreach, and more concerned with consolidation. A web controlled by companies that prefer their own way of doing things, without external input. A web that takes the productive enthusiasms of independent developers and says, essentially, "Thanks, but no thanks."

Many developers—most developers—have long adopted this more cynical view of the API. As the blog and podcasting pioneer Dave Winer put it in a 2012 blog post about changes to Twitter's API guidelines:

Smart developers will not just conclude that Twitter is unsafe to build on, but also any company that is operating in the Twitter model. If they are running a website, and trying to attract a lot of users, and are going in the direction of advertising, you’d be a fool to think they won’t do the same as Twitter has.

Netflix, according to its blog post on the API closure, is incorporating the products it likes into its service. It's abandoning the others. And you can't necessarily fault it for doing that. As Kin Lane points out on his blog API Evangelist, the applications that came out of Netflix's particular API program weren't, overall, that good. And there weren't that many of them trying to be good in the first place. That may be because Netflix deals with licensed content, as opposed to user-generated information.

But it may also be because the constant threat of a closed API—the constant threat of Netflix doing precisely what it has now done—has created just what you'd expect it to: a chilling effect. Products built on APIs are houses built on sand—specks controlled, in the end, by the whims of the larger company. A company that is free to tell you, with much finality but little apology, "Thank you to for participating in the ecosystem throughout the years."

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Tetris Turns 30

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 16:55:25 -0400

On June 6, 1984, the computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov launched the side project he'd been working on at Moscow's Academy of Science of the USSR: a simple video game—an almost ridiculously simple video game—he called Tetris. In short order, his creation would be called "by far, the most addictive game ever." It would also be dubbed the "greatest game of all time."

In the 30 years since it's been a part of our lives, Tetris—its angled blocks, its earwormy theme song—has infiltrated our lives and our culture. It has starred in TV shows and symphonies and research papers. It has helped us to waste time. And to pass it. In honor of Tetris's 30th birthday, here at 3o things to know about the game.

1. Beyonce grew up playing it.

2. It was part of the closing ceremonies for the Special Olympics in Sochi, with the game's tetrominoes spelling out the word "IMPOSSIBLE."

3. There is such thing as Jenga Tetris.

4. There is also such thing as the "Tetris effect": the phenomenon whereby you play a game for so long that you start seeing its frameworks outside the game.

5. Tetris's tagline when it launched with Nintendo was "FROM RUSSIA WITH FUN!"

6. Due to tetrominoes' function "as a proxy for molecules with a complex shape," Tetris models have been used to study the thermodynamics of nanoparticles.

7. In 1988, the IBM version of Tetris sold for $34.95. The Commodore 64 version cost $24.95.

8. Tetris has been featured on The Simpsons.

9. It has also been featured on Family Guy.

10. It has also been featured on Futurama.

11. It has also been featured in Office Space.

12. Pajitnov initially created Tetris to test the potential of Soviet computers.

13. He wrote it on an Elektronika-60 computer.

14. Days after Pajitnov invented it, his boss at the Soviet Academy of Science in Moscow banned the game at all the academy's computer workstations.

15. Tetris is named for a combination of the Greek numerical prefix tetra- (since all of the game's pieces contain four segments) and tennis, which was Pajitnov's favorite sport.

16. Tetris was the first entertainment software to be exported from the USSR to the U.S.

17. Some argue that, much like porn played a role in ensuring the success of VCRs, Tetris played a crucial role in ensuring the success of the Game Boy when it launched in 1989. And the Game Boy, in turn, helped to popularizeTetris—which was one of the five game cartridges Nintendo included in the box with its first run of the devices.

18. The Twitter account @TetrisQuotes includes the tweet, "I would like to thank Tetris for providing me with the skills to jam as many dishes as possibly into my dishwasher."

19. You can hack an o scilloscope and to play Tetris.

20. There is an orchestral version of the Tetris theme song. It is awesome.

21. There are Tetris-themed serving dishes. They are also awesome.

22. There are Tetris-themed shiny leggings available on Etsy. They are not at all awesome.

23. Tetris pieces have starred in droll cartoons.

24. Cognitive scientists have found a correlation between length of Tetrissession and efficiency of brain activity: The longer you play, the better primed your brain is to do the playing.

25. Researchers have also found that Tetris can provide a “quick and manageable" solution for people struggling to stick to diets.

26. Tetris is the subject of a documentary, Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters.

27. There are currently more than 60 known variations of Tetris, both official and unofficial.

28. One of them is named Not Tetris.

29. There is a Tetris-themed Bop-It.

30. In a thesis written in 1992, John Brzustowski asked whether it would be theoretically possible to play a never-ending game of Tetris. The conclusion he reached was that, given the frequency of the S and Z-shaped blocks, "the game is inevitably doomed to end."

(Image via Flickr user micahtaylor)

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We're Now Putting Ads on the Moon

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 16 May 2014 12:38:13 -0400

Here is a partial list of the trash that humans have left on the moon: more than 70 spacecraft, including rovers, modules, and crashed orbiters; 12 pairs of boots; 2 golf balls; an assortment of empty packages of space food; TV cameras; various hammers, tongs, rakes, and shovels; backpacks; insulating blankets; utility towels; used wet wipes; discarded personal hygiene kits; and 96 bags containing the urine, feces, and vomit of departed astronauts. Humans have left, all told,nearly 400,000 pounds of stuff on the surface of the moon; Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong alone left more than 100 items on the Sea of Tranquility—including a plaque noting that "we came in peace for all mankind."

Peace, but no Hefty bags. Which I mention because, very soon, the pock-marked lunar surface will host even more of the detritus of human dreams: in this case, a small, metal canister of energy drink. The can will be composed of titanium. Its contents will be powdered. It will also be, as The Verge puts it, "the first commercial product delivered to another world for marketing purposes."

In other words, the march of human progress has come to an inevitable point in its evolution: we're about to use our celestial neighbor as an enormous billboard. With the product in question being a powdered sports drink. Because what good is the final frontier if not for helping to sell some stuff here on Earth?

The firm behind the stunt is the Japanese beverage maker Otsuka, which manufactures a sports drink with the English-unfortunate name of Pocari Sweat. (Think Gatorade, with an "ion supply" function.) The company is taking advantage of the fact that, if all goes according to plan, the first private moon-landing mission will launch in October 2015. Otsuka is planning to put some Pocari Sweat in the Falcon 9 rocket meant to make the trip—and then to have the firm Astrobotic Technology (a company that, ironically, specializes in the clearing of space trash) deposit the canister on the moon.

According to Otsuka, the Pocari Sweat's presence on the lunar surface won't be so much about lunar ion supply as it will be about dreams. Because exploration is thirsty work! As with so much about our tentative steps into space, the drink-on-the-brink, Otsuka says, is meant to inspire young astronauts. Who one day, apparently, will travel to the moon, open up a can of Pocari Sweat, and finally feel that it has all been worth it.

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A Magic 8 Ball, Armed With Data

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Thu, 01 May 2014 11:24:33 -0400

There is an allure to a Magic 8 Ball. You roll the thing in your hands, you ask it a question, and—presto!—you have an answer. The whole thing is wonderfully simple. The only problem—and it's a big problem—is that it's random. Can you really rely on the Magic 8 Ball's advice? My sources say no.

I've long wished, however, that there could be something similar—a Rational 8 Ball or some such—for big life decisions.

Now there is. Or, at least: There's something that claims to be.

Something Pop is a web tool that promises to help us make better, or at least better-informed, life decisions. The creation of Ben Gimpert, a financial-tech startup co-founder (he built it as a hobby), the tool aims to help us do something that our brains aren't always good at: making decisions based on a clear-eyed, logical assessments of the data at hand. So, say you're considering moving to a new apartment. What's the best location? What's the best price point? How much do you really care about having a gas stove?

Something Pop lets you take each consideration that would factor into your decision and then assign it a weighted percentage that amounts to its relative importance for you. You hit a button—the web-tool equivalent of shaking the Magic 8 Ball—and your answer pops up. (Something Pop's name, Gimpert says, comes from that: Its point is to help the right decision "pop" up from the rest of the options.)

“There is something very seductive about quantifying a decision,” Gimpert told Slate, “knowing that your own personal priorities and goals went into generating that number." And it's an appeal that recognizes our own weaknesses when it comes to decision-making. We know that we are easily seduced by the things (the jacuzzi tub, the wood-burning fireplace) that may seem significant in the short term, but won't bring us much happiness in the long. We try to compensate for this deficiency. We don't always succeed. Something Pop takes a "quantified self" approach to decision-making—in the hope that, when it comes to the choices we make on behalf of our future selves, the outlook will be good.

(Image via Irina Mozharova/Shutterstock.com)

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When Your Hearing Aid Is an iPhone

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 17:28:20 -0400

The world is loud. As a partial result of this, the typical human aging process involves hearing loss that ranges from mild to severe. And though that loss can be a big problem—"blindness separates people from things," Helen Keller said, while "deafness separates people from people"—it's one that has a solution: Get a hearing aid.

It's a solution that should be both easy and obvious. At this point, hearing aids are relatively advanced; digital technology means that the devices have gotten very good at filtering out background noise, minimizing feedback, and emphasizing human voices in noisy environments. The little machines have become adept, as one audiologist puts it, at making "soft sounds audible, average sounds average, and loud sounds okay to hear."

The main problem with hearing aids, though, has less to do with technology and more to do with culture: Many people who need the aids don't want to get them. They associate them with age. They associate them with ailment. They associate them with the ailment that comes with age. As a result, in a society that values youth above almost all else, the people who can benefit most from hearing aids are often the ones least likely to take advantage of them.

While hearing aid manufacturers have responded to this by designing devices that are as small as possible and custom-fitted to the ear canal, one company has come up with another solution: a hearing aid that is integrated into smartphones. Starkey Hearing Technologies recently launched Halo, a hearing device that syncs with iPhones and iPads. The technology, the company says, doesn't just amplify hearing; it also allows users to listen to music, sync movies, receive phone calls, and chat over Facetime. It allows for geotagging according to specific places—so, for example, it calibrates itself to the volume of a user's favorite restaurant or coffee shop. It joins devices across wireless networks. It's a medical-tech answer, basically, to the broad aspiration of the connected home.

But what might be most significant about the connected hearing aid is not the simple fact that it's connected, but the fact, instead, of what it's connected to. iPhones, still, are considered to be cool. So are iPads. They signify wealth and youth and of-the-moment-ness—and when they're synced with hearing aids, they change what hearing aids themselves signify. This is not a small thing: Nobody, older people included, wants to feel old. There's a market in medical tech not just for tech itself, but for tech that also makes a cultural statement. Halo acknowledges this, implicitly. It tries to take something normally associated with frailty and reclaim it—with the help of devices that, on top of everything else, transcend age and generation.

(Image via andras_csontos/Shutterstock.com)

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These Emojis Would Like to Help You Structure Your Data

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 11:10:08 -0400

Last week, as a result of its most recent hackathon, Yelp rolled out a new system for its mobile apps: the ability to search business listings with small, cartoon-like figures called emojis. So: looking for a nearby pizza spot? Type a pizza emoji into your search field. Want to wash it down with an IPA? Type in a beer emoji. The system started as many a hackathon project does—a cheeky in-joke. But Yelp then thought its coders might be onto something. As Rachel Walker, a company spokesperson, put it: "We enjoyed it so much we wanted to share the fun with Yelpers."

Emoji search is, for the user, efficient. Why type out "ramen," five whole letters, when you can type a single bowl of ramen as a single character? As emojis become more and more common not just as punctuation, but as replacements for words themselves, it makes sense that Yelp is meeting users where they are. And where, more specifically, their International Emoji Keyboards lead them.

But there's a more significant efficiency here—one that has less to do with the user's interests, and much more to do with the interests of Yelp itself. Words are, as far as computers are concerned, messy and inconvenient. They're hard to parse. They can be strung together in weird ways—ways that totally transform their meanings. They can possess an artificial intelligence designer's worst nightmare: a tone.

Emojis, on the other hand—as far as machines and their minds are concerned—are much more straightforward. The images' tones are implied; semantically, they map to one meaning. And because of that, as Slate's Alison Griswold points out, emojis "can be extremely useful for tech companies when it comes to labeling and collecting data." They're effectively emotional tags applied to content, visual equivalents of labels and hashtags.

And, like hashtags, they can be extremely valuable in terms of sorting and organizing that content. They're much more precise than adjectives, and much more efficient than sentences. And because of that they can lead, Griswold notes, to things like more effective advertising and better data mining. Emojis can offer, in all their cheekiness and quirk, a shorthanded way to do what every consumer-facing tech company and its algorithms want to accomplish, in the end: to understand, in the most efficient way possible, what their customers want.

(Image via El Nariz/Shutterstock.com)

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That Old Space Race Feeling: NASA Memo Suspends Contact With Russians

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 16:07:55 -0400

Space has often been celebrated as a place that allows humans, literally and otherwise, to transcend the petty divisions of life on Earth. Astronauts, upon seeing the planet from outside its borders, often comment on how small the planet's vastness makes our differences seem. The grounding philosophy of the International Space Station, first articulated at the height of the Cold War, is that there should be a place outside of Earth dedicated to international cooperation. It's logic so common, and so comforting, that Bette Midler wrote a song about it.

I mention all that because of this: a memo that was sent to NASA employees this morning. One announcing that, because of "Russia's ongoing violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity," the U.S. space agency will be suspending its contact with representatives of the Russian government. The suspension, The Verge notes, includes "travel to Russia, teleconferences, and visits by Russian government officials to NASA facilities."

It is a big deal.

Here's the purported memo, as published by the site Space Ref:

From: O'Brien, Michael F (HQ-TA000) Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2014 9:33 AM
To: [Deleted]
Cc: [Deleted]
Subject: Suspension of NASA contact with Russian entities

Dear Colleagues,

Given Russia's ongoing violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, until further notice, the U.S. Government has determined that all NASA contacts with Russian Government representatives are suspended, unless the activity has been specifically excepted. This suspension includes NASA travel to Russia and visits by Russian Government representatives to NASA facilities, bilateral meetings, email, and teleconferences or videoconferences. At the present time, only operational International Space Station activities have been excepted. In addition, multilateral meetings held outside of Russia that may include Russian participation are not precluded under the present guidance. If desired, our office will assist in communication with Russian entities regarding this suspension of activities. Specific questions regarding the implementation of this guidance can be directed to Ms. Meredith McKay, 202.358.1240 or meredith.mckay@nasa.gov, in our office.

We remain in close contact with the Department of State and other U.S. Government departments and agencies. If the situation changes, further guidance will be disseminated.

Obie

Michael F. O'Brien

Associate Administrator for International and Interagency Relations

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

While it's significant that "operational International Space Station activities have been excepted" from the suspension—three of the six current denizens of the ISS are Russian—it's even more significant that a memo like this went out in the first place, not only given the "neutral zone" logic of our space exploration efforts, but also given how much of NASA's current operational infrastructure relies on cooperation with Russia. (The two Americans currently serving a mission on the ISS? They got there on a Russian Soyuz.)

We did have hints of the move, though: Last week, NASA administrator Charlie Bolden published an unusually passionate blog post denouncing his agency's continued reliance on Russia for that most basic of NASA needs: space launches. "Even as the 'space race' has evolved over the past 50 years from competition to collaboration with Russia," Bolden wrote, "NASA is rightfully focused now more than ever on returning our astronauts to space aboard American rockets–launched from U.S. soil–as soon as possible."

Via The Verge/Space Ref

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The Windmill of the Future Could Be Floating in the Sky

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 13:01:37 -0400

Don Quixote famously—infamously—tilted at windmills.

Were his story set today, though, Cervantes might have to change things up a bit: the monsters the self-styled knight battles might be set in the sky. Soon, in the airs above Fairbanks, Alaska, a wind turbine will be launched. It will use helium to hover above the ground, obviating the need for poles—and, for that matter, for land. The massive balloon will be, Gizmodo reports, the world's first floating commercial wind turbine.

The device is unfortunately not named the "Sky Donut." It is instead called the Buoyant Wind Turbine, or BAT. And its creator, the Boston-based startup Altaeros Energies, has developed it as an alternative to diesel generators—in, for example, remote communities or disaster areas where those generators might not be easily available. The idea is to harness the energy generated by the air that churns high above the surface of the Earth.

BAT isn't alone in its effort to serve as a high-flying harnesser of energy. Several other researchers have been racing to develop floating wind turbines,IEEE Spectrum reports. But the project in Alaska, Altaeros claims, represents the technology's first longer-term, commercial project.

The broader test? Whether Altaeros's windmills will prove popular in the marketplace. There's currently a $17-billion remote power and microgrid market that could benefit from BAT technology, the company says. There are military bases, mining sites, and even small islands that need power, after all—locations that are literally off the grid, but that still have energy needs. And Altaeros isn't alone in trying to serve those needs. Last year, IEEE Spectrum notes, Google X purchased a company, Makani Power, that manufactures airborne wind turbines. And there's also WindLift, SkySails, Sky Windpower, and NTS.

These firms aren't tilting at windmills; they're trying to reinvent them.

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Harvard's Looking for a 'Wikipedian in Residence'

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:57:00 -0400

The Houghton Library on the Harvard campus holds the university's collection of rare books. Inside its walls—in addition to objects culled from the old "Treasure Room" of Widener, the school's principal library—you'll find Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts; information about the creation of books; and collections of papers from, among many others, Louisa May Alcott, e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry James, William James, Samuel Johnson, James Joyce, John Keats, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Theodore Roosevelt, John Updike, and Gore Vidal.

The Houghton Library on the Harvard campus is awesome, is what I'm saying. And now it's looking for a little love. From, and for ... Wikipedia.

Yesterday, John Overholt, Houghton's Curator of Early Modern Books & Manuscripts, posted a job listing. He's hiring a Wikipedian in Residence—someone who can serve as a kind of liaison between Wikipedia and the academic, cultural, and intellectual institutions whose source material its entries rely on. In this case, Harvard.

The Wikipedian in Residence will, according to the job announcement, help to "expand coverage on Wikipedia of topics relevant to Houghton collections." He or she will add sources for existing Wikipedia pages and create new pages "on notable topics." The person will also "provide appropriate formatting and metadata (and OCR cleanup in the case of texts) to upload public domain content to Wikimedia and Wikisource, and facilitate the use of such materials by other Wikipedia users."

This won't be the first Wikipedia in Residence attempting to narrow the divide between the intellectual resources of the campus of those of the web. The British Museum has had such a person; so has the British Library. So has the Palace of Versailles in France and the Museu Picasso in Spain and the Federal Archives of Switzerland. Here in the States, Wikipedians in Residence have helped seed the crowdsourced encyclopedia with material from the Smithsonian Institution, the Gerald Ford Presidential Library, and the National Archives and Records Administration.

Overholt explained the reasons for the creation of the Harvard version of the job over email:

We're hiring a Wikipedian in Residence for the same reason that lots of museums and libraries have over the last few years. Wikipedia is such a valuable and widely used information resource--hardly a day goes by when I don't make use of it myself--and we'd like to find ways that we can use Houghton's online resources to enrich that experience for its users. We're digitizing more and more material all the time, and I'd like to make those things more accessible to interested researchers.

I think it's a clear and important extension of Houghton's mission to promote research and teaching with our collections to make them openly accessible and usable, and I'm excited that one of the aspects of the project will be to contribute images of public domain materials to Wikimedia Commons. It's my hope that those images will get widely used and shared. I hope as well that even though this pilot project is only going to scratch the surface of our collections, it might help spark a broader interest in the Wikipedian community in using Houghton materials to enhance Wikipedia entries.

Houghton is operating, in other words, from the same impulse as its fellow archives: to share its treasures with as wide an audience as possible. Which also often means taking the knowledge that is stored on shelves that are scattered across the world and making it, as Overholt puts it, "openly accessible and usable."

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This 13-Year-Old Just Became the Youngest Person Ever to Build a Nuclear-Fusion Reactor

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 12:09:11 -0500

It started with the Internet.

"One day," Jamie Edwards recalls, "I was looking on the Internet for radiation or other aspects of nuclear energy." (As one does.) Through that search, he came across the story of Taylor Wilson, an American who, in 2008, had become the youngest person ever to build a nuclear-fusion reactor. Wilson was 14 at the time.

"I looked at it," Edwards says, and "thought 'that looks cool' and decided to have a go."

Edwards is 13. He is a student at the Priory Academy in Lancashire, in the U.K. He loves science—so much so that, as he told the Lancashire Evening Post, he used to try and steal his older brother Danny’s science homework. So that he could do that work himself.

Edwards—a "young boffin," as the Post delightfully calls him—began construction of his makeshift nuclear reactor back in October in a science lab at Priory. He also kept a blog tracking his progress in the work of reactor-building, cataloguing his collection of a diffusion pump and a control panel and other components of the device that would eventually smash some atoms.

This morning, all that work paid off. Edwards smashed two atoms of hydrogen together, creating helium. Yep: From a little science lab in a school in Lancashire, a 13-year-old created nuclear fusion.

"I can’t quite believe it," Edwards told the Post, of this accomplishment, adding that "all my friends think I am mad." But he's also a record-holder—and one who got his record in just under the wire. Edwards turns 14 on Sunday.

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A World of Water, Seen From Space

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 17:06:47 -0500

Late last week, from a launch pad at the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan, a rocket shot toward space. Nestled inside it was an amalgam of solar arrays and communications equipment and propulsion instruments, all of them cobbled together in the utilitarian-chic manner favored by aerospace engineers—one more satellite for the growing constellation of man-made objects sent to orbit, and observe, the Earth.

NASA calls this latest satellite the Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory. I propose we call it, to make things simpler for ourselves, “Core.” Core is, technically, a weather satellite, built to observe the workings of the Earth from beyond its bounds. But it’s more complex than a traditional satellite: Core gets its name from the fact that it is the central unit in a network of nine satellites studded across the exterior perimeter of the Earth, contributed to the cause by various countries and space agencies.

Their job? To analyze the planet’s water, from beyond the planet. The Global Precipitation Measurement project , with Core as its central piece of orbiting infrastructure, will provide observations of the world’s snowfall and rainfall and cloud patterns, across a network, at three-hour intervals.

As Chris Kidd, an associate research scientist at NASA who oversaw some of the data infrastructure for GPM, explains it: “If there's any clouds or precipitation, that alters the signatures—so being able to use that information, we know where the clouds are. We know where the rain is."

And we can see the rain, and everything else, in 3-D—"so if we have a big thunderstorm," Kidd says, "we can see it in three dimensions.” And, Dorothy-from- Twister -style, “we can actually probe inside it to see the actual different particles within the thunderstorm.” This, in turn, can provide data—more data than we already have—about how these systems develop.

A visualization of the GPM Core Observatory, with partner satellites visible in the background (NASA)

Christa Peters-Lidard, a scientist at NASA Goddard’s Hydrological Sciences Laboratory, explains it like so: “It’s almost like taking a CAT scan of clouds."

***

To understand why space agencies have invested in this high-tech form of cloud-watching, you can look to, among many other places, the American west. Late last week, southern California was hit with a powerful rainstorm—the biggest one to hit the area in nearly three years. This might have been good news for a drought-ravaged section of the country. But the rain that pounded Los Angeles and its environs didn’t merely bring much-needed moisture along with it. It also brought landslides. And power outages. And, as one news outlet put it : “flooding, evacuations, [and] scenes of disaster.”

The storm also brought a reminder of a troubling fact: We don’t fully understand how water works. We understand the stuff, of course, on a molecular level (H2O!). We understand it, generally, on a biophysical one (8 glasses a day! Maybe !). We understand that it is, in a profound and also totally basic way, essential to our existence. Which is why, as we search for life on other planets, we look not for that life itself, but for evidence of water.

But water, as swimming pools and motion-activated faucets and the existence of Sno-cones can make it easy to forget, is not just stuff that keeps us clean and amused and awed and alive. It’s also a system, a complex of chemical interactions closed and contained within the delicate little globe that also happens to contain the rest of us. And in that sense, the systemic sense, water remains something of a mystery. How do clouds form, actually? How much water is contained within Earth’s soils, ultimately? How does water affect climate—and how will climate change affect the world’s water?

***

To answer those questions, you need the right equipment. Core is the latest in a long line of weather satellites; part of what distinguishes it from the others is the range, and complexity, of its imaging instruments. Chris Kidd is from the United Kingdom, where moisture tends to be both diffuse and relatively constant, covering Earth's surface in the form of fogs and light rains. He contrasts his country's climate with that of tropical rainforests, where rain is periodic and, as physical droplets, relatively large. It takes different instruments to capture, from space, these variations. Add to that the demands of imaging the clouds that cover Kansas, and the snows that cover Antarctica ... and you need a series of different instruments that operate, much like the space agencies that are cooperating for GPM, in unison.

The GPM constellation, as a rendering (NASA)

Core carries both a dual-frequency precipitation radar (acronym: DPR) and a microwave radiometer. The constellation of satellites it communicates with carry similar microwave radiometers—which allows them to talk to each other, essentially, across space. “The radar on the GPM Core Observatory is unique,” Peters-Lidard says, “and that's what gives us that detailed picture. But the microwave imager allows us to connect with all those other satellites so we can produce global maps of precipitation every three hours, everywhere where our orbit sees."

So the GPM project represents a surprising innovation, given that it's 2014 and that, with the help of satellites, we can see space-taken snapshots of our own houses with the click of a button. "It's the first time,” Peters-Lidard notes, that “we can see water drops all around the world.”

***

The idea of using satellites to understand the Earth’s weather patterns is older than NASA itself. The basic notion—sending cameras into orbit to observe those systems from above—dates back to the V-2 rocket launch of 1946 ; by 1958, the Army Signal Corps had developed early prototypes for objects that would take imagers into space for long duration. The first weather satellite, Vanguard 2 (designed to measure cloud cover and resistance), was launched in1959. It was unsuccessful, however. A poor axis of rotation, as well as an elliptical orbit, kept it from collecting much useful data. But the first successful weather satellite came soon after: Tiros-1, launched by NASA in April of 1960, operated for 78 days. It was followed by NASA’s Nimbus program , which paved the way, in turn, for most of the Earth-observing satellites NASA and NOAA have launched since then.

NASA sees its challenge now as putting those observations into a slightly more cosmic context—for itself, and for the public. As James Garvin, chief scientist at the NASA Goddard Sciences and Exploration Directorate, puts it: “How do we understand how we change over time, over scales that we care about?”

Given the weather results of climate change, the need to (as NASA puts it) “improve the techniques of predicting and preparing for abnormal weather” is urgent. And GPM will, the agency says, “set a new standard for precipitation measurements from space.”

GPM is an outgrowth, most recently, of TRMM, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission , which launched in 1997 with a three-year mandate. As sometimes happens, the vehicle outlived its expected shelf life; fourteen years after its planned expiration date, TRMM is still operating. Which is a good thing. But TRMM, as its name suggests, focuses on the rainfall around the equator. It covered an area that stretched from the 35th parallel north to the 35the parallel south—so, with it, as Peters-Lidard puts it, “we really were focusing on measuring the tropics.” GPM, however, covers an area stretching from 65 degrees north to 65 degrees south—all the way up and down, in other words, to the poles.

By expanding its observation areas to those latitudes, GPM will be able to make more accurate and frequent observations of tropical rainfall—but it will also be able to extend its vision to include the snowfall and light rain that are common in non-tropical areas of the Earth.

Getting such a comprehensive view of the planet's water required an international collaboration—one that was more than a decade in the making. JAXA, the Japanese space agency, oversaw the launch of Core as well as the development of the satellite’s DPR instrument. It developed that instrument in consultation with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology ( NICT ). NASA developed Core’s bus (its basic infrastructure) and its microwave radiometer. But other agencies contributed, as well, both to Core and its network of fellow satellites: the French space agency ( CNES ), the Indian Space Agency ( ISRO ), the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Studies ( EUMETSAT ), the U.S. Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program ( DMSP ), and, of course, NOAA .

The engineer Paul Richards, who traveled to space in 2001 for the STS-102 Discovery mission, points out how much work is involved not just in launching a spacecraft, but in coordinating that work among agencies that are scattered across the globe. “Twelve years ago, I worked a little bit on GPM,” he says. To make something of that scope come together, “it takes 12 years and thousands of people.”

***

The hope is that many more thousands of people make use of the data GPM provides. "One of our jobs as NASA scientists is to make our satellite data useful,” Peters-Lidard says. That includes converting those data into “products”—images, videos, databases, and the like. The information from the satellites, Kidd explains, “is transmitted in real time across a communications network and gets translated to Goddard, where they do the processing. They take that information and combine it with other information you get from other satellites.”

And they take that, in turn, and post it to the web.

"It's quite a big journey for the data,” Kidd points out. By the time the information has reached the public, it has traveled "through thousands of miles of communication networks."

So what will all that long-journeying information be used for, ultimately? To better predict hurricanes, for one thing. And to understand flooding patterns along rivers. And landslides. This knowledge can, in turn, be applied to our understanding of agriculture—not to mention famine. And drought. Peters-Lidard, as part of her work with NASA, collaborates with USAID . And “we use NASA's precipitation data,” she says, “to predict where drought and famine might occur and make more informed decisions about aid.” It's an actuarial approach to the Earth's resources, facilitated by images taken from space.

GPM's Applications Specialist, Dalia Kirschbaum, anticipates a similar use case. “I am also particularly excited about GPM," she wrote in an email, "because my research focuses on rainfall-triggered landslide modeling, which requires key precipitation inputs such as TRMM provides and GPM will provide." And that, she notes, will help scientists like her "to accurately estimate where and when landslides may be occurring all over the world." In places including, but certainly not limited to, southern California.

***

The implications, as NASA sees them, also translate to places that are slightly farther afield. "It's our job to put our Earth in the context of the wider universe," James Garvin says. “If we don't understand how we work, how are we going to understand how Mars works? Or how Venus works? Or planets orbiting around other suns?”

The tension embedded in terms like “weather patterns” and “climate change” bring an inevitable political dimension to the GPS products and the work that goes into creating them. “It's not just about the science,” says Jack Kaye, associate director for the Research of the Earth Science Division within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “We have the availability and the opportunity to make that information available” to the public, he says of the GPM products. And the public in turn, he hopes, can use that information to “make good decisions.”

The global scale of the project means that the “public” in question here is not merely the American version. With GPM, the world is flattening—at least when it comes to its understanding of its own crucial hydration systems. What we will be getting as a result of that little system of satellites hanging out above us is a constantly-updating snapshot of all the water, in all its forms, across the world. Those snapshots will be shared. “The data are just as good anywhere in the world as they are here,” Kaye says, from a building in Maryland. “If you think about it, that's unique in human experience.”

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Soon, the Coldest Place in the Known Universe Will Be on ... the International Space Station

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 14:38:31 -0500

Space, on top of everything else, is cold. Really cold. The cosmic background temperature—the temperature of the cosmic background radiation thought to be left over from the Big Bang—is 3 Kelvin, or -455 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet there's variation within that. Solar winds can reach millions of degrees Fahrenheit. And then there's the Boomerang Nebula, the cloud of gas puffed out by a dying star in the constellation Centaurus. The Boomerang Nebulaclocks in at a slightly-more-frigid-than-average -458 degrees Fahrenheit, making it, officially, the coldest spot in the known universe.

But that's about to change. Soon, it seems, the coldest spot in the known universe will be ... the International Space Station.

Yep. Meet the Cold Atom Lab, the "atomic refrigerator" NASA has planned for launch in 2016—a device that will, it's hoped, allow the agency to study quantum mechanics in a controlled environment. "We're going to explore temperatures far below anything found naturally," JPL's Rob Thompson told ScienceatNASA.

So how cold is unnaturally cold? NASA's orbiting refrigerator—the device that will, better than any other, put the "fridge" in "frigid"—will reach, if all goes according to plan, temperatures as low as 100 pico-Kelvin above absolute zero (with “pico” denoting one-trillionth).

And the fridge will use the ISS's own infrastructure to generate all the coldness. The station's existing cooling system relies on the fact that gas, as it expands, cools. The Cold Atom Lab will use magnetic traps to expand gas until it gets down to the temperature the researchers seek. The traps aren't expected to require much energy for their working, since, in space, the gas won't need to be supported against gravity.

But why go to all this trouble? Why bother to create a cold so cool it does not, to our knowledge, exist in nature? Because of these things known as Bose-Einstein Condensates, dilute gases that demonstrate unusual macro-quantum effects at temperatures near absolute zero. When two Bose-Einstein Condensates are placed together under particularly frigid conditions, they don’t mix; instead, they interfere with each other like waves. It's behavior that's mysterious to scientists—which means it's behavior that's also exciting to scientists. The ISS's "atomic refrigerator" will allow researchers to study those crazy gases ... at the coldest temperatures possible.

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Have Presidential Speeches Gotten More 'Tweetable'?

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:19:49 -0500

The White House regularly tweets sentences from key (and also from not-so-key) speeches on its various feeds. Which made Yahoo's News Chris Wilson and Olivier Knox wonder "whether the president's speechwriters were actually crafting his speeches to fit in Twitter-friendly increments." Perhaps it would stand to reason that presidential speeches, like so much else, have been influenced by the platform.

Turns out? Not so much. Wilson and Knox created a tool that measures the "tweetability" of text —which is, as they define it, "a measure of how many sentences fall below the 120-character mark" (since "most social media consultants say tweets should leave at least 20 characters free for retweeting"). The resulting rating is a percentage of the sentences that fall below 120. And while those ratios are, of course, extremely rough estimates—"tweetability" is about much more than mere sentence length alone—the tool offers a general idea of the length of presidential speeches as they play out over time, at the atomic unit of Twitter: the sentence itself.

But when I ran the transcripts of the past 15 years' worth of speeches through the tool, I could find no trends toward tweetability. The opposite, in fact: The past two years' speeches ranked much lower on the tweetability scale than did the speeches delivered between 2010 and 2012. And George W. Bush, who took office long before Twitter came on the scene, had much more Twitter-friendly speeches, according to Yahoo's metric, than Barack Obama.

This isn't to say that White House communications teams don't think about tweetability when they're crafting their speeches; of course they do. It's just that tweetability comes down to much more than character count—and, for that matter, to much more than text. Sure, the perfect, resonant sound bite—"it's morning in America," "read my lips," "where's the beef" (sound bites, alas, need not be poetry)—is a time-honored goal of political writing. And, sure, social media have generally altered the calculus of political engagement. They've mostly done so, though, not by changing the text of speeches, but by changing the context.

That's because speeches, when TV collides with livestreaming (collides with Twitter, collides with YouTube, collides with Vine), are no longer simply speeches. The State of the Union has become (sorry! but) a state of mind . All the traditional pageantry of the president's Constitutionally mandated update has extended into a weeks-long extravaganza of ambient spectacle. The White House previewed last night's speech on Instagram (via shots from speechwriter Cody Keegan, press secretary Jay Carney, and others); it offered "Behind the Scenes" videos on YouTube, published to WhiteHouse.gov's dedicated "SOTU 2014" page ; it sent mass emails with subjects like "Before I go on:" and "Tonight." And the Republican response to the speech included not just highly orchestrated speeches from the mainstream and the Tea Party, but also impromptu YouTube hits and Vines from other members of Congress, shot in the iPad-filled studio the GOP had commandeered for the occasion .

Last night's speech, in other words, was the culmination of a broad political posture, a tacit recognition that the work of persuasion cannot be confined to a chunk of primetime air. It wasn't just a speech. It wasn't primarily a speech. The reactions to it—which defined 'tweetability' in the broadest terms possible—reflected this. Often, they bypassed the speech's words altogether in favor of its images. The historian Daniel Boorstin described (and condemned) pseudo-events, contrived spectacles that are custom-made for the machinery of mass media. The title of his book is The Image . It was published in 1962. Last night, it was looking pretty prescient.

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Oh, Deer: NASA Rocket Gets Photobombed by Hungry Animals

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 11:50:05 -0500

Yesterday afternoon, at 1:07 pm Eastern Standard Time, the Antares Rocket launched from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, bound for the International Space Station. The rocket, developed by Orbital Sciences, will deliver science experiments, supplies, and even some children's books to the orbiting lab via the commercial firm's Cygnus spacecraft.

Before it blasted off, though, the rocket was simply an extra-tall feature of the weird-and-wacky ecosystem that is Wallops Island. On Wednesday, as people made the final preparations for Antares to streak into the sky, NASA photographer Bill Ingalls got a shot of some curious onlookers: three white-tailed deer.

The trio, as pictured, seem wonderfully unimpressed by their space-bound surroundings; they're simply grazing on the grass that surrounds the launch pad. And don't worry about their safety: As another picture proves, the deer, just after Ingalls got his shot, scurried away.

Nor is this the first time that animals have photobombed a rocket. This September, the launch of NASA's Minotaur V (the rocket that would help deliver the agency's LADEE craft to the moon) saw the launch of "rocket frog," the amphibious almost-astronaut that was shot off the ground by the force of the Minotaur's ignition. The Antares deer, fortunately for all but the frog, had better luck.

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What 3D-Printed Cake Tastes Like

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 10:43:50 -0500

LAS VEGAS—Call them Cakerbots. Adding to the growing list of things you can 3D print (toys, human organs, pizza that will be eaten on Mars , etc.) is a machine promising that, with it, you can print yourself some dessert.

In the "3D Printing" section of the Consumer Electronics Show, one of the consistently busy booths has belonged to 3D Systems's Sugar Lab . And to, in particular, the booth's display of elaborate cakes and candies whose confectionary components have been constructed inside a 3D printer.

The ChefJet and ChefJet Pro print, basically, sugar: They work by applying a m ixture of alcohol and water to wet and then harden the sweet stuff. The devices' focus on crystalline sugar, combined with the capabilities of the printers themselves, results in forms that would be next to impossible to construct with human hands—little sculptures that double as dessert. The printers start at more than $4,000 for models that print with black-and-white food coloring; color models will likely retail for closer to $10,000 . As Sugar Lab's co-founder, Kyle von Hasseln, told me, the target markets for the machines are bakeries, restaurants, and event planners.

So, basically: The plastic couple that sometimes tops wedding cakes? That can now be edible. The princess atop little Jennifer's birthday cake? Same. Architectural confectionery is enjoying a renaissance of late; you could see 3D printing fitting right into that trend. Indeed, the towering cake you can see in the picture at the top of this post was made in collaboration with Charm City Cakes 's Duff Goodman, of Ace of Cakes fame.

The construction components are fitting: Von Hasseln and his wife, Liz, are trained architects. They actually stumbled onto the Sugar Lab idea when they were experimenting with 3D-printer-friendly materials (sawdust, that kind of thing) for fabricating architectural models. "We tried sugar," Kyle von Hasseln told me, "just because it was cheap—and then we realized that if we modified it, we could eat it."

And what about making the eating ... actually pleasant? How do you make construction materials taste good? "We got into the material science of it," Von Hasseln says. "A chef probably could have gotten it really quickly," he laughs, but it took him and Liz several tries, he says, before they got a formula that would combine structural integrity with good flavor.

So then … what do 3D-printed confections taste like? I sampled Sugar Lab's chocolate offering. And the stuff tasted pretty much like traditionally manufactured chocolate does—except a little less sweet, a little bit drier, a little more crumbly. You know how chocolate, after it melts and rehardens, has a slightly different flavor and texture than it did before? The 3D-printed chocolate is like that.

But what it lacks in tastiness, it makes up for in prettiness. Imagine being served this towering thing for dessert.

( Image via vsl / Shutterstock.com )

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Facial Recognition for the People in Your Pupils

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 10:51:18 -0500

If you get up really close to someone—or zoom in really close in a photo of that person—you can see what he sees, reflected into your own eyes. It's creepy and cool and occasionally profound: Staring back at you in shiny, convex curves is yourself.

Which is another way of saying what Rob Jenkins says : that "the pupil of the eye is like a black mirror." And it turns out that even tiny, curve-warped faces of people—the people in your pupils—can be identifiable. In a paper newly published in the open-source journal PLoS ONE , Jenkins, a psychologist, and his co-author, Christie Kerr, share a way to turn the eyes, the old windows into the soul, into information. Photographic portraits can lend themselves to facial recognition ... not just of their subjects, but of their photographers.

A lineup-style array of reflected images from the photos used in the researchers' facial recognition task (in which participants were familiar with the face of the psychologist and unfamiliar with the faces of t he bystanders). The correct naming of the familiar face was frequent (90 percent). (Rob Jenkins via Ray Kurzweil AI)

So how do you make that transition? First, you have to zoom in (really, really zoom in) on images of eyes—since, as Jenkins notes , "a face image that is recovered from a reflection in the subject’s eye is about 30,000 times smaller than the subject’s face." Then you have to enhance those zoom-ins to isolate the faces—the " bystander images "—that the human subjects' pupils contain. But even if you do that, the question remains: Are the pupil-mirrored images, given their small size and curvature, even discernible as faces? If the reflection in the eyes is someone other than yourself, can you make out who it is?

To test that, the researchers presented a series of pixellated faces—an average of only 322 pixels each—as part of a face-matching task they administered to subjects. The subjects who were unfamiliar with the bystanders' faces were able to match the pixellated faces to the standard images of them with 71 percent accuracy; when they were familiar with the faces (if the pixellated face belonged to, say, Barack Obama), they performed with 84 percent accuracy.

Those scant pixels, in other words, were enough to identify not just a face, but a particular person.

The researchers' findings, most obviously, have forensic implications: They could be useful for identifying the perpetrators of crimes like kidnapping and sexual abuse, which all too often involve the photographing of victims. The findings could also, however, have implications for the many social networks that have a vested interest in identifying who your friends are. The eyes may be windows to your soul; they can also, when analyzed appropriately, be windows to your social life.

( Image via Phatic-Photography / Shutterstock.com )

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This 6-Year-Old Wants to Be an Astronaut, So He's Petitioning the White House to Save NASA

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 14:01:50 -0500

For half of his life, Connor Johnson has dreamed of being an astronaut .

And not just for the adventure of it. Not just for the romance, or the celebrity, or the outfits ... but for the giddy newness of it. Johnson wants to be a sailor of stars, he says, "so I can discover, like, new worlds."

Johnson, sure, may be only six years old . But he has wanted to be an astronaut since he was three. That's half a lifetime of desire. His toys are NASA-themed. His bedtime stories tell tales of Jupiter. He has been known to dress up as space shuttles . So he was crushed to learn, recently, about proposed funding cuts to the agency's science and space exploration programs .

Johnson, like any would-be astronaut, felt compelled to act. So he did what he could, given his dreams and his age: He gave his allowance to NASA, making NASA's budget deficit $10.41 smaller than it used to be. Then, he donated his life's savings to the cause. (Or, as the Denver news station WHNT puts it , "he decided to give his whole piggy bank to NASA.")

But Johnson realized that one person—even if that one person dreams big—could only do so much. So he took to the Internet. He started a petition on WhiteHouse.gov , asking the government to increase its funding for NASA. The petition has gotten more than 9,000 signatures so far. It needs 100,000 signatures to receive a White House reply. So the challenge is great: This would-be astronaut still has a long, long way to go before he reaches his destination.

His cause, however, is noble. He comes in peace for all mankind.

The reason his petition gives for its request? "So we can discover new worlds, protect us from danger and to make dreams come true."

And the author it lists? "CJ, Age: 6.5."

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Another Problem for Amazon's Delivery Drones? Angry Birds

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 10:09:58 -0500

We can talk about regulatory hurdles. We can talk about delivery zone issues. We can talk about cost and weight and range and reliability, about lawsuits and criminality. We should, when we're talking about Amazon's Prime Air , talk about all of those things . You know what we should also be talking about, though? Birds.

Yep, birds.

Because while Amazon-branded delivery drones may look to us humans like, well, Amazon-branded delivery drones, they look to birds like ... other birds. Encroaching birds. And that's because, as Slate's Nicholas Lund points out , birds—especially predatory raptors, your hawks and your eagles and your harriers—are territorial. Our airspace is also, in a very literal way, birdspace, with birds carving up that soaring territory among themselves, defending their celestial turf against would-be interlopers. Not just with an "excuse me, sir, I think you may be in my seat" ... but with violence. Those dudes will put a bird on it in the most Darwinian way imaginable.

You should probably not mess with this guy. (Shutterstock/ Michael Monzer )

Which means? The birds, Lund notes, "frequently chase, dive-bomb, and take talons to intruders."

Kingbirds are most famous for this behavior and can sometimes be seen riding the backs of much larger birds, escorting them out of the area. It’s impressive behavior when seen from below—an aerial David and Goliath—and it’s common among open-country species, either solo or in pairs, like the kingbirds, or in huge flocks .

And the bird-on-bird violence can be even more pronounced during nesting season, Lund points out, when nest-bound chicks can be seen as prey.

So what does all this mean for Amazon's drones? Nothing good. Birds, of course, have long been a nuisance—and, sometimes, a danger—when it comes to more traditional forms of air travel. The "Miracle on the Hudson" plane required its miracle because of a bird strike . The FAA, Lund points out, has tracked more than 121,000 instances of bird-aircraft collisions since 1990. Per one estimate , our feathered friends can cause more than a billion —billion, with a b —dollars' worth of damage to aircraft in a single year.

And Amazon—if its notional delivery system, er, takes off—may be giving birds a new way to do some damage. See the videos below for a little sampling of what might befall the drones in their attempt to bring new meaning to "air delivery." As Lund puts it : "Add 'environmental mayhem' to the list of things the FAA needs to consider before developing rules for Amazon’s drone delivery, or else be prepared to receive books scarred by talon swipes and beak pecks."

( Image via gregg williams / Shutterstock.com )

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In the World Series of 1918, the Military Flyover Was Done by Pigeons

Megan Garber, The Atlantic — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 20:00:00 -0400

A newspaper summary of the baseball pigeons, 1918 ( Boston Globe via Yoni Appelbaum)

The 1918 World Series , the Boston Red Sox versus the Chicago Cubs, was notable for several reasons. It was played, for one thing, as World War I raged, and was, as a result of a battle-shortened ball season, the only Series to be played entirely in September. It featured an up-and-coming young slugger named George Herman Ruth. It remains, despite this, the last Series ever to be played without the scoring of a single home run.

Red Sox fans—particularly those who were also soldiers, stationed 40 miles away from Boston at Camp Devens —were eager for news of the Series' games. And when you're eager for news, you generally want that news to be as up-to-the-minute as possible. But television, at that point, had yet to be commercialized. Same with radio. Newspapers were plentiful, but slow.

You know what communications method was fast and reliable, though? Pigeons. Homing pigeons that doubled as carrier pigeons.

A German camera pigeon from World War I (Wikimedia Commons)

In an article about the Sox-involving Series of 2013, the Wall Street Journal 's Brian Costa offers a reminder of the birds that acted , in their appropriately avian way, as precursors to Twitter's instant updates. "The last time the Boston Red Sox clinched a championship at Fenway Park," Costa notes, "they used carrier pigeons to deliver inning-by-inning updates to soldiers at a fort 40 miles away." Handlers attached updates to the legs of their little fliers, and the birds, in turn, flew "home" to Devens, delivering the updates. (The flight took about 40 minutes, generally, unless—as described in the Boston Daily Globe clip above—the animal took an accidental detour on the way back to the base.)

And yet. The pigeons' flight, it turns out, was more of a performance than a pressing necessity. It was, says Yoni Appelbaum , a historian and an Atlantic contributor, essentially a display of military capability: PR via pigeon. Homing pigeons may have been indispensable in the theater—acting as, like a 1918 Boston Daily Globe article put it, "the last resort when all other means of sending messages have failed." But Camp Devens was not a war zone. Far from it. As Appelbaum told me in an email:

Devens was, for all intents and purposes, a city. The population of the Camp peaked at more than 50,000, and more than 200,000 doughboys passed through its gates. It had its own post office, its own telegraph office, even its own telephone exchange. If officers wanted a score from Fenway, all they had to do was pick up the phone and ask.

So the Army wasn't sending dispatches to Devens by carrier pigeon because it needed winged couriers to reach some remote outpost in a timely fashion. This was a flyover, just like its modern-day equivalents, staged for the purposes of publicity.

Indeed. The World Series of 1918 coincided with the waning days of World War I. (The war would end, officially, on November 11, just over a month after the Series was played.) And stories of pigeonic valor—eager soldiers, trusty birds—seemed tailor-made for a war-weary public. "Few people appreciate the importance of this branch of the signal service," the Globe article would declare, going on to describe the birds' "intelligence, their courage, their wonderful strength and endurance." The story would note that war pigeons—"winged comrades" both "valued and faithful"—are "a vital factor in the war."

Which, if you substitute birds for military fliers of a more mechanical variety, isn't that different from stunts you might witness during our own war-weary age. "The first game of the 2013 World Series began with a military flyover," Appelbaum notes.

A formation of F/A-18 Hornets rumbled low over the Fenway Park, displaying for the assembled crowd the technological sophistication of the American military. The 1918 World Series was also played in Boston, after a war-shortened season. It, too, featured a military unit flying low over the stadium, to impress the crowd with the strength and sophistication of the military. Only in 1918, it wasn't fighter jets. It was pigeons.

Via Yoni Applebaum and the Wall Street Journal

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