Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Rebecca J. Rosen

Is the Problem With Tech Companies That They're Companies?

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 07:00:00 -0400

What news do people see? What do they believe to be true about the world around them? What do they do with that information as citizens—as voters?

Facebook, Google, and other giant technology companies have significant control over the answers to those questions. It’s no exaggeration to say that their decisions shape how billions see the world and, in the long run, will contribute to, or detract from, the health of governing institutions around the world.

That’s a hefty responsibility, but one that many tech companies say they want to uphold. For example, in an open letter in February, Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the company’s next focus would be “developing the social infrastructure for community—for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”

The trouble is not a lack of good intentions on Zuckerberg’s part, but the system he is working within, the Stanford professor Rob Reich argued on Monday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic.

Reich said that Zuckerberg’s effort to position Facebook as committed to a civic purpose is “in deep and obvious tension with the for-profit business model of a technology company.” The company’s shareholders are bound to be focused on increasing revenue, which in Facebook’s case comes from user engagement. And, as Reich put it, “it’s not the case that responsible civic engagement will always coincide with maximizing engagement on the platform.”

For example, Facebook’s news feed may elicit more user engagement when the content provokes some sort of emotional response, as is the case with cute babies and conspiracy theories. Cute babies are well and good for democracy, but those conspiracy theories aren’t. Tamping down on them may lead to less user engagement, and Facebook will find that its commitment to civic engagement is at odds with its need to increase profits.

The idea that a company’s sole obligation is to its shareholders comes from a 1970 article in The New York Times Magazine by the economist Milton Friedman called “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” In it, Friedman argued that if corporate executives try to pursue any sort of “social responsibility” (and Friedman always put that in quotes), the executive was in a sense betraying the shareholders who had hired him. Instead, he must solely pursue profits, and leave social commitments out of it. Reich says that these ideas have contributed to a libertarian “background ethos” in Silicon Valley, where people believe that “you can have your social responsibility as a philanthropist, and in the meantime make sure you are responding to your shareholders by maximizing profit.”

Reich believes that some sort of oversight is necessary to ensure that big tech companies make decisions that are in the public’s interest, even when it’s at odds with increasing revenue. Relying on CEOs and boards of directors to choose to do good doesn’t cut it, he said: “I think we need to think structurally about how to create a system of checks and balances or an incentive arrangement so that whether you get a good person or a bad person or a good board or a bad board, it’s just much more difficult for any particular company or any particular sector to do a whole bunch of things that threaten nothing less than the integrity of our democratic institutions.”

Reich said that one model for corporations might be creating something like ethics committees that hospitals have. When hospitals run into complicated medical questions, they can refer the question to the ethics committee whose members—doctors, patients, community members, executives, and so on—represent a variety of interests. That group dives deeply into the question and comes up with a course of action that takes into account various values they prize. It’s a complicated, thoughtful process—“not an algorithm where you spit out the correct moral answer at the end of the day,” Reich said.

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The Only Woman in the Computer Science Department

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 10:20:26 -0500

Irene Greif always thought she'd be a teacher. "For one thing," she told me, "I'd been told by my mother that it was good to be a teacher because you just worked the hours your kids were in school and you could come home." It had just always been the profession in the back of her mind, the default.

So then it must have been a bit of a shock when, after in 1975 becoming the first woman ever to receive a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, Greif discovered that she didn't really enjoy teaching—she much preferred research. And so eventually she left teaching as a professor and did what she did best: studying, thinking, and figuring systems out. She founded a research field, computer-supported cooperative work, and has spent her life figuring out how to build better systems for humans to work together.

Greif recently retired from IBM, where she'd been since the mid-'90s, and is hoping to devote some time to encouraging young women to go into STEM fields and coaching them to stick with them—a twist on teaching that she does genuinely like.

I spoke with Greif recently about her experience as a young woman in a field with so few other women, about how things changed during the course of her career, and for what advice she wishes she'd had when she was first starting out. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Why were you first drawn to computer science?

Well I got exposed to computers as early as high school. I was at Hunter College High School [in New York City] and we took a course in the college nextdoor, using an IBM 1401. So I started with punchcards and zeroes and ones and machine language and so on.

And what year would that have been?

That was probably my senior year in high school, so that would have been '64-'65.

I had always liked math. My mother had always liked math. She was an accountant, so that meant adding numbers. Over my career I learned about other notions of what math is and what a mathematician does. I liked logic problems, which I think probably drove me to computer science.

When I went to MIT it was early—they were just starting to define a computer science undergraduate degree. It was in engineering—which it still is now—and it actually had more of an engineering feel than I was comfortable with, and I kept slipping back and forth between math and the new computer science, and ended up getting a math degree instead.

There are some interesting things about that. There are a lot of kinds of math that are very close to computer science and I was able to choose some of those things and kind of piece together my computer-science major by making it have the feel I liked. But I think I also learned a lot about how different people think, by switching from the engineering mentality to math and back and forth, and it probably helped me in my career, in that it made me good at interdisciplinary kinds of work.

Can you talk a bit about what it was like being a woman at MIT during that time?

I think I was in the first big co-ed class. There had been women at MIT for ... forever, I'd have to check. But the big breakthrough for undergraduate women at MIT came in the 1960s, the mid-'60s, when Katharine McCormick donated a dormitory for women to MIT. [Editor's note: The money was actually donated at the tail end of the 1950s, but the dormitory took a few years to construct.] And that made a huge difference in whether parents would let their daughters go to the school.

In my class, that entered in '65, we had 50 women, in a class of 1,000. And that was big.

By now it's close to 50-50, so there's really been a huge change compared to what it had been.

I know you say that was "big," but that still seems quite small, at least compared to my own college experience. What was it like being on campus with so few other women around? What was it like socially?

Well, different people were different but, yes, there was a lot of working together and studying with the other women. There were certainly women who have stayed friends forever since then, and I have some friends from that time.

I always talk a lot about a woman, Candy Sidner, who was the third computer-science Ph.D. who, with a group of women, wrote a report, one of the first reports, on what it felt like to be a woman in the department and described the behaviors of men who were hard to deal with and so on. And I just always felt like, even being in the tiny cohort that she was in, having a couple of other women to talk to, made a huge difference in sorting out what's me and what's going on around me. And I never had that.

I remember, though, feeling that it was hard to find appropriate study groups. Because if you didn't find the right women doing the right courses in your dorm, finding a group of guys to work with was just, you know, for young women, laden with this is-this-dating-or-is-this-working-together kind of stuff. So it was hard.

I imagine it's easier now that there's a more even mix and you don't have to be—or try to be—the one girl in a little study group doing whatever the subject is you happen to be studying.

So, yes, I think we got very close to each other in the dorm, but I think it really was limiting and an issue.

Did you feel like the male undergraduates and male faculty respected your intelligence in a way that was equal to how they respected your male peers?

It's so hard to say. I mean, you know, we all had experiences of feeling like the professor kept looking directly at me to see if I nodded and got it. You did feel unusual and singled out in class.

I've certainly talked to people [women] in other fields who were told explicitly, you're going to waste your degree, or you shouldn't be doing this, or you should study X instead of Y. I never had that kind of experience at MIT.

So what was the next step for you, after finishing up your undergraduate work at MIT?

I stayed in graduate school at MIT, and so, in graduate school, my Master's and Ph.D., are in computer science. And I was, literally, the first woman to get a first computer science Ph.D. at MIT. There were other women who got computer-science degrees at other schools before me. So, you know, it's a mix of—it was early, and I'm old now—but also of which schools gave which degrees when. But I was among the earliest at all, and literally the first at MIT.

That's awesome.

It is awesome, but I always talk a lot about a woman, Candy Sidner, who was the third computer-science Ph.D. who, with a group of women, wrote a report, one of the first reports, on what it felt like to be a woman in the department and described the behaviors of men who were hard to deal with and so on. And I just always felt like, even being in the tiny cohort that she was in, having a couple of other women to talk to, made a huge difference in sorting out what's me and what's going on around me. And I never had that.

I know you said that your mother was an accountant. Was your family very excited about your achievements in computer science? Were they supportive?

Oh yeah! They were thrilled! They were bragging! And they bragged that I was a girl among boys. They thought that was cool. [Laughs]

What came after you completed your Ph.D.?

Well, the interesting thing is that I sort of did it assuming that I would teach. For one thing, I'd been told by my mother that it was good to be a teacher because you just worked the hours your kids were in school and you could come home and all that stuff. So I had this teacher notion in the back of my mind, even though I went to get the Ph.D. and I wasn't going to be a K-12 teacher that worked that sort of hours.

My first job was at the University of Washington, Seattle. What I learned fairly soon was that I actually didn't really enjoy the mix of teaching and research, trying to balance the two. It just didn't work for me.

I think it also doesn't work for me to be a teacher. I give good single lectures but piecing together the story over a whole term ... I mean, maybe now I could do it, but I wasn't good that when I was young.

So it took a while. I went from Seattle back to MIT, but within a couple of years at MIT I switched to research staff and started focusing on just being a researcher. At the time I felt it was a little awkward. They have a kind of research track now, but then it still felt like the faculty were really the first class people there. But, you know, I have a whole history of always choosing marginal roles and in marginal subjects of research and so on for myself.

I did become a researcher, and slowly moved from these very mathematically oriented computer-science areas to much more people-oriented work—office automation and human-computer interface and so on. And that was progression over the years from '75 to the mid-'80s. And it was in the '80s that I started this research field, computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), which is the major thing I've done in my life: getting a set of people together across disciplines who would look at social systems and computer systems at the same time.

Can you tell Atlantic readers a bit more about that work and why you were drawn to it?

When I came back to MIT, the hot topic in systems was distributed databases and ways of preserving consistency across copies of databases, and, at the same time, there was increasing interest in office automation and putting work online and helping people formalize business processes.

There was a point when I realized that a lot of the work we were doing on the database side actually resurfaced among people in offices. Even in the way people set up appointments or set up meetings in real life is like the way people were doing the database work. So if you are trying to set up a meeting with a lot of people, you ask all of them to pencil in some times until you find out what times everybody is available and then you go back in the second phase and lock in the time. So things like that, that were being done at a systems level were also being done at a people level, and it seemed more interesting to me to do it with the people.

I shifted to working in office automation, but actually learned pretty quickly that there was also a set of people starting to look at what happens in offices and realize that you could go too far with automation—that if you start to make processes a little too invisible, you break a lot of the important social things that actually make work happen. The simplest example of this is if somebody is walking a paper form around an organization trying to get signatures, one person might notice that somebody two signatures down is about to be on vacation, and you better rush ahead and find that person and come back to me later. If you've got that form moving around in a system and each person just sees what they have to do and then it goes to the next one, you lose the chance for that conversation, you lose the chance to adjust the process.

And that was really the beginning of the notion of who needed to be talking to each other among researchers, in order to really get things right around using computers to help people work together. It had to be a mix of the systems people who knew how to build cool distributed systems who knew how to build cool, distributed systems, and these ethnographers and anthropologists and sociologists and different kinds of designers—people who would be able to take into account these social issues—as they design system.

I feel like a lot of people would say that women tend to be more interested in collaboration, or the human side of systems. Do you think that your gender played a role in you finding this niche?

Probably! You know, it's hard to say—it's not as if the field is totally dominated by women, although we do see more women in some of these more socially facing settings, and it's interesting.

I was in a meeting with one of the most prominent women in the field recently, honoring somebody who was very big in all that distributed database stuff in the '80s, somebody who had been at Xerox PARC, MIT, and Microsoft and so on. It was his 70th birthday honoring him. And at this event, we don't think there were 10 percent women.

The more you get into the straight computer science, the more you do see that it's still male dominated. And certainly if you have the old-timers coming to an event, you'll see it skewed that way. It was quite a dramatic reminder of what things had been like in those early days.

On the other hand, I was having dinner with somebody the other night who was saying that he's so thrilled that the applicants to MIT computer science for jobs this year were 50 percent women, and so he feels like, oh my God, we finally solved the pipeline problem. And I don't think we've solved the problems, but it's a dramatic difference from years ago when people couldn't find any woman—would claim at least—they couldn't find the women to even interview.

How would you say, more specifically, things have changed during your career? What are your observations about the field today?

So computer science overall is pretty broad, and it goes from things that are very mathematical, and you'll probably see fewer women there, to the very social and user facing, where it's more balanced. Overall there are more women around in numbers, and numbers matter. As I was saying before, just having women to talk to, to get some perspective on what's going on around you, really matters. I think it becomes ... easier, for somebody moving through the system now.

In some ways, it's a set up—you know, depending on what you choose—a woman who is moving through the system with enough women to not notice, and then makes a choice that leaves her in her first job, or whatever, and is suddenly in a predominantly male setting, might have more trouble with that than some of us who knew we were getting into that. And any place you go where there's a long history behind you, even if they're making concerted efforts to change the numbers, you're just going to see imbalance, and it's slowly getting fixed.

When did you join IBM? What was the environment there like?

When I left academia I went to Lotus Development Corporation, so I joined IBM when we were acquired by them. I had actually worked at IBM once before as a summer intern, but this was really joining IBM, because of acquisition. It was kind of interesting—it was the first of many software acquisitions that IBM did—and it actually took, like, five years before we really had to act like IBMers. I was still part of Lotus and I ran a little research group in Lotus, but I did start—because I knew colleagues in research at IBM, I mean, it was a preeminent research institution in the world, and I had certainly known a lot of those people from conferences and so on—I started interacting with the research division, going to their strategy meetings and so on, from '95, when we were acquired, on.

I would say that IBM has overall a great track record on trying to do well by women, and it keeps getting voted best place to work for mothers and so on, but it was a shock to go to the research strategy meetings and look around and count the women to see how many were there, because it was much more of a hard-science atmosphere. At the time, hard sciences attracted more men than my CSCW community, but there were areas where women were making headway. My colleague Pat Selinger in 1999 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for her work in databases. That was also the period of time when IBM was ramping up work-life balance programs to help working mothers.

By 2000 I became part of the research division, when Lotus had to be a regular division, my research group started reporting into the research division, and I reported at a senior enough level that I was able to be involved in supporting women and making sure women's voices were heard at review meetings. So I think I've helped some.

I have this other thing. As I've chosen these user-facing approaches, design-by-story and so on—I mean, I have been a bit of an outlier. While I think I've been respected, I also ... well, I gave a talk once about our approach to design at one of our staff meetings, and when I sat down, one of our male colleagues said to me, "That was very brave of you, Irene." So I kind of have been an outlier, not just by being a woman, but by choosing to do more user-facing work in pretty straight computer science. (And don't forget that IBM scientist Fran Allen became the first woman ever to win a Turing award, which was in 2007.)

If you could talk to your younger self, do you have any advice you wish you had had? Things that would have helped you when you were younger?

I had been a terribly shy little girl, and I always assumed that any issues I had, socially, were because it was me. And it would have been great to have been told, you know, it isn't you. But, you know, my mother and father would have been telling me that anyway, so I'm not sure where I could have had credible advice. Parents love you, so where do you get the advice you can believe? (I can’t help but add that I realize that I’m very lucky to be able to say this. My parents really thought I could do anything. I’m not sure all girls that get support at home.)

Just watching anyone else ahead of me might have made a difference. And it's because it is so important to have role models that I am still fanatical about making sure women are visible at by-invitation conferences and panel sessions—it's surprising how often people slip up on this even in fields where there are plenty of women. If you don't watch for it, you might inadvertently just have men on the program.

When you look back on your career and your younger self, what are you most proud of? What are the things you feel like you did really right?

I think it's a kind of mix of going with my gut, but mindfully.

I often will tell young women this when I'm doing career talks: I didn't have a planned career. And there's nothing wrong with that. Sure, I know people who know, every couple of years, what their next move should be. And I haven't done that, but I think I've taken the time at various points in my career to think about: Is this working for me? Is this right? Is it time for a change?

It's a being-true-to-yourself thing, and having some integrity about what you're doing, that I feel good about. I don't exactly how it came about that I would operate that way.

I think it served me well also, ending up in corporate labs where you're always trying to transfer ideas. So you have a brilliant idea, you write a great research paper about it, but how do you decide: Is this the moment to fight for transfer? So, product group's not ready, do I stick with it, or do I give up and go on to the next thing? You just always have to be reevaluating, rethinking. People are always asking me, how do you do tech transfer? And there isn't one way; it's what's right at that moment.

I think that's what I might say: This ability to be flexible and reflect and shift directions ... I think I've done right, perhaps inadvertently many times, but I've done it right over my life.

(Image via Flickr user parksdh)

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Just a Bunch of Autonomous Convoys Driving Around an Army Base

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 08:00:00 -0500

Last month, General Robert Cone, the head of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, gave a speech that the service's future configuration. In short: fewer soldiers, more "lethality."

How's that? Cone said that in the years and decades ahead, the Army could scale back its brigade combat team—dramatically—from 4,000 to 3,000 soldiers or thereabouts. To make up for the loss in manpower, the service would turn increasingly to robots. Robots could perform many of the support tasks soldiers currently are saddled with, sparing American lives while, as Alexis put it, "giving the Army more killing power per brigade."

Now, a new video from Defense Update provides a glimpse of how that future might look. Recently, the a collaboration between the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) and Lockheed Martin demonstrated their autonomous systems technology, and how it might be applied in urban environments on a variety of types of vehicles.

The demonstration, Defense Update reports, was a success: “The AMAS CAD hardware and software performed exactly as designed, and dealt successfully with all of the real-world obstacles that a real-world convoy would encounter,” David Simon, program manager at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control for the Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System (AMAS).

The project, Defense Update explains, is "aimed at completely removing the soldier from the cab," leaving only robots on the line. That's the goal: a more lethal force, deadly to somebody else.

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Why NASA Made a Movie You Can't Watch at Home

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 11:00:24 -0500

We live in an age where just about any piece of multimedia is available from the comfort of one's living room. Want to watch a recent episode of Girls ? Done . Want to see the Hunger Games ? Easy enough . Yes, sometimes you may need to wait a few months while something is still in the theaters, and sometimes you might have to pay, but in the end, you can watch what you want at home.

But not NASA's newest film, Water Falls , which debuts this weekend in Tupper Lake, New York.

Water Falls , unlike most movies, doesn't project onto a flat, rectangular screen. Rather, it plays on a sphere , specifically, a "Science on a Sphere" globe, developed by NOAA in 2005, which is a 50-pound carbon-fiber ball, about six-feet in diameter. ( Here's a little demo video that shows what this looks like in action.)

Spherical film projection introduces all sorts of problems, which director Michael Starobin sorted into a taxonomy: There's the "problem of non-existence" (how do you make sure the film isn't focused on an object that half the room cannot see?); there's the "problem of the egg" (how can you show not just the surface of the sphere, but what's inside it—say, the core of the Earth?); and there's the "problem of the chair" (the challenge of projecting objects without a funhouse effect).

The problem of the chair (images courtesy of Michael Starobin)

For any landscape, you have to somehow join the left and right edges of a scene together, even if in reality they'd be at opposite ends of your view. For any animation, you have to account for the distortionary effects of being projected onto a screen.

"The biggest question is: What do you do if you have an image that you want to go all the way around the screen, but its of ... a dog? It's not a sphere. What happens?"

Commissioned as part of the education resources around the upcoming joint NASA/ JAXA Global Precipitation Measurement mission, the nine-minute-long Water Falls is an effort to answer those problems. "We don't like to say that these are 'solved.' We like to say that these are refined," Starobin says.

A trailer (meant for viewing on plain old flat screen) gives a flavor of the final product, but can't convey the way the film works in three dimensions. But it does contain some clues: Pay close attention to how the landscape scenes often have very similar left and right edges. That's no accident. Starobin and his team sought out places where, say, a hill on one side rose a similar height to a hill on the left. On the sphere, with some editing sleight of hand, those edges have been seamlessly stitched together so that it can be projected onto a sphere. "The thrill is the chess of how to figure it out," Starobin says.

There are clearly some built-in advantages to spherical films. If you're NOAA, say, and you're trying to understand how weather patterns interact around the globe, projecting weather data onto a sphere makes a ton of sense. After all, a sphere more accurately represents the physical reality of the thing (the Earth) that you are trying to represent. For the scenes of Water Falls that show how satellites cross-cross around the planet's atmosphere, the sphere works more naturally than a traditional flat screen.

But Starobin says there's another advantage to spherical films, one that goes beyond the value of its corpor properties. And that is that you can't have it at home. You have to actually go to a "Science on a Sphere" site— of which there are about 100 worldwide —and then that is your only chance to take it in.

"In this incredibly wired culture, [audiences] can't download it on their phone. They can't see it anywhere else. And so there is a nice sense of destination that always accrues," Starobin says.

On a trip to a sphere in Colorado about a year and a half ago, a couple of local teachers told Starobin that the fact that the experience was rare made their students appreciate it more. "The students knew you can't see this anywhere else," Starobin told me, "and that focused their attention."

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3D Printing and Legos: Perfect Together

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 10:43:18 -0500

There is a little thrill in watching something you designed get built, layer by layer, by a 3D printer.

But it's a slow thrill.

3D printing, even for a small object, can take a loooooong time. If you're just trying to make a little widget on a one-off basis, (say a piece for a board game or something), a little wait while one strip of plastic is extruded upon another is no big deal. But for professional designers, speed is, doctoral student Stefanie Mueller says , "mission critical."

According to Mueller, designers often allow their plans to print overnight, so as to waste less time. But that limits them to "a single iteration per day." Over a whole design process, that really gums up the works. "A typical iteration process when refining a prototype easily adds up to a week—even though the actual design work may not have taken longer than a day," she wrote to me. The whole process gets bottlenecked at the 3D printer.

This is why Mueller built faBrickator , a program that marries 3D printing with a building material beloved around the world: Legos. Using faBrickator, designers can sub Legos into their designs, and only print small pieces.

For example, Mueller says, consider this design for a head-mounted visual display glasses:

Head-mounted visual display glasses, front (Stefanie Mueller)

Head-mounted visual display glasses, back (Stefanie Mueller)

For such a project, the details of the casing will require less attention than the part around the lenses, which will need to be tinkered with until the right optical path is achieved. To print the entire thing takes about 14 hours, Mueller says. But the whole thing doesn't need to be printed each time to perfect just one part. With faBrickator, Mueller explained to me, designers can "mark the lens mounts as 'high-resolution'," which will leave those parts for the 3D printer. "faBrickator then exports these parts for 3D printing and generates instructions that show users how to create everything else from Lego bricks. If users iterate on the design later, faBrickator offers even greater benefit as it allows re-printing only the elements that changed."

She demonstrates how that works in the video below:

Mueller says that many experienced designers do this kind of blending of 3D printed bespoke parts and existing materials already, but doing so "requires a good amount of ingenuity and experience." With faBrickator, built at the Human Computer Interaction Lab at Hasso Plattner Institute , designers easily play with which parts need to be custom built and which Legos can easily substitute. After all the parts are perfected, designers can revert the whole project to 3D printing, and drop all the Legos out.

Mueller says that though many materials may make good 3D printing supplements, Legos are particularly ripe for this sort of integration. "We used Legos as an example to demonstrate the concept since Legos exist in many different sizes and shapes, are inexpensive, and can quickly be assembled and taken apart," she explains.

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Hunting Licenses to Shoot at Drones: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 16:05:56 -0500

Last spring, a Seattle woman reported that some guy was flying a drone over her yard.

It was, she wrote , a "warm spring day," and she at first believed that the buzzing sound she was hearing was someone doing yardwork. But soon she looked out her third-story window, and saw "a drone hovering a few feet away."

The drone's operator was outside on the sidewalk. The woman's husband went outside to ask him to quit and he refused, arguing that "it is legal for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our windows."

Whether he was right about that is unclear. What kind of drone was it? Who was the operator? Was he taking pictures of the inside of her home or of the public street?

These are questions for law enforcement and courts to sort out, I said in a piece about the incident . In the meantime, though, many people wrote to me to say: To heck with that. I wouldn't wait for any cops. I'd shoot that thing right out of the sky myself.

Well, Phil Steel of Deer Trail, Colo., thinks that is a great idea.

Steel has proposed that his town adopt an ordinance that would allow residents to take up to three shots at drones flying over the town at fewer than 1,000 feet (more if your life is in danger). The measure, which has divided the town of 550, will be voted on at the ballot box in April. Until then, Steel is selling his own licenses, for $25 each, to anyone who wants, though they "have no legal value," Matt Pearce reports in the Los Angeles Times .

Drone-hunting license. Comes printed on vellum . (Phil Steel)

I checked in with John Villasenor , an expert on the laws governing domestic drone use, to see what he thinks of the idea. In a word: "terrible."

"The most obvious concern is that the person doing the shooting could end up accidentally hurting or killing someone on the ground," he wrote to me. And that's not the only type of tragic mistake people could make: "What happens if there's a very small manned aircraft at 950 feet and someone mistakes it for a drone?"

Villasenor says that drones are going to bring us into uncharted legal territory concerning the lower airspace. "A property owner clearly ought to have control over the air at shoelace level. On the other hand, a property owner doesn't have a reasonable claim of control over the airspace 1000 feet above the ground. So where does the control start?" Just because a drone passes over someone's private property (without taking any pictures), "that doesn't give the property owner a right to impede its flight."

That said, we're not starting from a blank slate. We have laws to protect privacy, and just because drones are a new technology doesn't mean that the laws are going to be ineffective. "If a drone is hovering right outside someone's second floor window without permission and taking pictures into the interior, that would almost certainly be a Fourth Amendment violation (in the case of a government drone) or provide grounds for an invasion of privacy claim (in the case of a private drone)," Villasenor writes.

It's unlikely that will be of much comfort to Steel and his supporters. "I have declared the sovereignty and the supremacy of the airspace of my town," he told the LA Times . "This is an act of sedition, and I proudly state that."

( Image via Steve Oehlenschlager / Shutterstock.com )

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When Does Technology Change Enough That the Law Should Too?

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 10:31:23 -0500

In the past 10 days, two separate courts have handed down "diametrically opposed" rulings on the legality of the NSA's bulk telephony metadata collection programs. One, decided by a federal trial judge in Washington, found that the program was "likely unconstitutional"; the other, decided today by a federal trial judge in New York, found that the exact same program to be A-okay under our nation's statutory and constitutional law.

Though the two judges were at odds on many, many aspects of the law (run down expertly by my colleague Andrew Cohen here), one disagreement stands out, a central axis around which all other details aligned: Should the Supreme Court's 1979 ruling Smith v. Maryland guide the way for interpretation of the Fourth Amendment today? In that case, the Court found that people could have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" for information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. If Smith's logic extends to today, than the Fourth Amendment would not protect the metadata that cell-phone carriers are providing to the NSA.

As Andrew writes, "One judge went around the precedent of Smith. The other judge embraced that precedent and said he had no right to ignore Smith."

Judge Richard Leon is the former. He wrote, "When do present-day circumstances—the evolutions in the Government's surveillance capabilities, citizens' phone habits, and the relationship between the NSA and telecom companies—become so thoroughly unlike those considered by the Supreme Court thirty-four years ago that a precedent like Smith does not apply? The answer, unfortunately for the Government, is now."

Judge William Pauley, on the other hand, deferred to the precedent. The Supreme Court has not overruled Smith, he argued, and "the Supreme Court has instructed lower courts not to predict whether it would overrule a precedent even if its reasoning has been supplanted by later cases." That is a job for the Court alone.

But that didn't prevent Pauley from taking a look at that precedent anyway, and arguing that, you know, even if it were up to him, it still looks like a pretty good decision. He writes (citations removed):

Some ponder the ubiquity of cellular telephones and how subscribers' relationships with their telephones have evolved since Smith. While people may "have an entirely different relationship with telephones than they did thirty-four years ago," this Court observes that their relationship with their telecommunications providers has not changed and is just as frustrating. Telephones have far more versatility now than when Smith was decided, but this case only concerns their use as telephones. The fact that there are more calls placed does not undermine the Supreme Court's finding that a person has no subjective expectation of privacy in telephone metadata.

Is Pauley right? Is our relationship with our phones enough the same as it was in 1979 that Smith should still apply?

At least one voice on the Court has already suggested that she is not convinced. Back in January of 2012, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a concurring opinion that Smith may be outdated (the majority in that case did not reconsider Smith). She argued (and I'm quoting at length because it's worth it):

More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers. ... I would not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason alone, disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection.

There is a lot of merit to this argument. Pauley is right that, in a narrow sense, the basics of our relationship to our telecommunication carriers may be much the same (and in the case before him, he's only looking at telephone calls, which are quite the same as they were in the '70s),but Sotomayor's argument takes a wider view. She is arguing that third parties more generally play a very different role in our lives than they once did, and that our "reasonable expectations" have shifted over time. As I wrote back in June, "We daily convey our information to third parties -- Google, our cell-service provider, Facebook. For most people in America today, eschewing disclosures of this kind would leave them unable to go about their daily business. Can it really be that participating in life, the economy, and society require a forking over of one's claim to a 'reasonable' expectation of privacy?"

Moreover, to Sotomayor's point, the techniques of data analysis are light years more sophisticated than they were in '79. Even if the act of making calls looks the same, as Pauley says, the sorts of surveillance enabled by Smith are much more invasive. Sotomayor hints at one way the Court could go: Technology has changed in the past four decades, and the law Smith left us with no longer protects us. Time for a new paradigm.

Of course, there is another possibility: Perhaps Smith was a bad decision from the get-go; perhaps the Fourth Amendment should never have been interpreted so meekly with regard to the information we disclose to third parties. But maybe, we couldn't see that until the full implications came to pass, as they now have. If that's the case, let us hope that the justices see fit to change course, and lead us off a path we set down so many decades ago.

(Image via sergign/Shutterstock.com)

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Study: Consumers Will Pay $5 for an App That Respects Their Privacy

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Thu, 26 Dec 2013 16:05:32 -0500

Ever since the iPhone came out in 2007, the going rate for many of the most popular apps has been exactly $0.00. Consumers pay nothing.

But of course, nothing is free. Instead, consumers pay with their data, that's sold to marketers, or with screenspace, which is forked over to make room for ads. It's a trade consumers are happy to make.

But are they?

A new study from economists at the University of Colorado finds otherwise. It shows that the average consumer would prefer to pay small fees for their apps, in exchange for keeping their information private and their screens uncluttered.

In their study, Scott J. Savage and Donald M. Waldman surveyed 1,700 smartphone users, presenting them with a set of apps they could purchase. One of the apps was a real, free app, currently available in the iTunes and Google Play stores. Five other apps were also suggested, and were said to have exactly the same functionality as the free app. But these five came with varying levels of privacy and advertising protections (some protected location data, others address book contents, and so on), and all had a price tag.

What Savage and Waldman found is that consumers were willing to spend a bit more to keep their data to themselves, and just how much depended on which data were at stake. For example, on average, consumers were willing to spend $2.28 for an app that would not read their browser history; $4.05 for an app that would not have access to their contacts; $1.19 for an app that did not track their location; $1.75 for an app that did not obtain their phone's ID number; $3.58 to prevent an app from having access to the contents of their text messages; and $2.12 for an app that had no advertising.

Because the "average" app (as determined from a sample of more than 15,000 Android apps) has both advertising and access to a person's location and their phone's ID, Savage and Waldman say that paid versions of such apps could rake in somewhere around $5 per download. That's way, way more than the pocket change that most free apps bring in per download.

What's more, Savage and Waldman use that $5 figure and to do some back-of-the-envelope figuring: Given that the average consumer in their study has 23 apps, and given how many smartphone users there are in the U.S., they calculated the total amount that consumers would spend, if only the apps were there for them to buy: $16 billion. And that's the conservative, lower-bound estimate.

Will that make it worth it for app developers to offer a paid alternative? There are many reasons why the math might not work out so neatly in reality. Will customers search both the free and paid app categories? Will they be aware of the paid option? Will download rates suffer, if companies more overtly signal how they are using consumer data in an effort to push paid versions?

But if those hurdles can be overcome, both developers and consumers stand to benefit.

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Researchers: It Is Trivially Easy to Match Metadata to Real People

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Thu, 26 Dec 2013 10:11:06 -0500

In defending the NSA's telephony metadata collection efforts, government officials have repeatedly resorted to one seemingly significant detail: This is just metadata—numbers dialed, lengths of calls. "There are no names, there’s no content in that database," President Barack Obama told Charlie Rose in June.

No names; just metadata.

New research from Stanford demonstrates the silliness of that distinction. Armed with very sparse metadata, Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler found it easy—trivially so—to figure out the identity of a caller.

Mayer and Mutchler are running an experiment which works with volunteers who agree to use an Android app, MetaPhone, that allows the researchers access to their metadata. Now, using that data, Mayer and Mutchler say that it was hardly any trouble at all to figure out who the phone numbers belonged to, and they did it in just a few hours.

They write:

We randomly sampled 5,000 numbers from our crowdsourced MetaPhone data set and queried the Yelp, Google Places, and Facebook directories. With little marginal effort and just those three sources—all free and public—we matched 1,356 (27.1%) of the numbers. Specifically, there were 378 hits (7.6%) on Yelp, 684 (13.7%) on Google Places, and 618 (12.3%) on Facebook.

What about if an organization were willing to put in some manpower? To conservatively approximate human analysis, we randomly sampled 100 numbers from our dataset, then ran Google searches on each. In under an hour, we were able to associate an individual or a business with 60 of the 100 numbers. When we added in our three initial sources, we were up to 73.

How about if money were no object? We don’t have the budget or credentials to access a premium data aggregator, so we ran our 100 numbers with Intelius, a cheap consumer-oriented service. 74 matched.¹ Between Intelius, Google search, and our three initial sources, we associated a name with 91 of the 100 numbers.

Their results weren't perfect (and they note that the Intelius data was particularly spotty), but they didn't even try all that hard. "If a few academic researchers can get this far this quickly, it’s difficult to believe the NSA would have any trouble identifying the overwhelming majority of American phone numbers," they conclude.

It's also difficult to believe they wouldn't try. As federal district judge Richard Leon wrote in his decision last week, "There is also nothing stopping the Government from skipping the [National Security Letter] step altogether and using public databases or any of its other vast resources to match phone numbers with subscribers."

(Image via Genialbaron/Shutterstock.com)

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How Astronauts Nearly Missed Taking the Iconic Earthrise Photo on Christmas Eve, 1968

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 10:05:19 -0500

Forty-five years ago today, Christmas Eve 1968, astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders saw something no human had ever seen before—our planet as it appeared to rise over the moon's horizon.

Their picture of that sight is one of the most iconic images of the 20th century. But they almost missed taking it: The Earth disappears from their view just seconds after they successfully located the color film. Without that picture, the power of that moment, the perspective it conveys, would never have been seen by the billions of humans whom it has touched in the years since.

A new video from NASA weaves together the audio recordings from inside the orbiter with illustrations and modern lunar imagery to tell the story of how that photo came to be, and how it almost didn't.

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NASA's Original Lunar Images Are Housed in a Former McDonald's

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 14:27:53 -0500

At an old McDonald's at NASA Ames Research Park in Moffett Field, California, there are no Big Macs or chicken nuggets.

Instead, there are reels and reels of original footage from the five lunar orbiters NASA launched in 1960. It's all part of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, an effort by Dennis Wingo and colleagues to digitize the old tapes.

What it means is that the first image of Earth as seen from behind the moon is located in this former fast food joint, known colloquially as "McMoon's."

"We even had someone come in one time, and we said, this is not a McDonald's anymore. And they said, well, can we at least get a coke?" Wingo, co-founder of the project, says in the video below made by YouTube host Veritaserum. "And I said, well, I can get one out of the fridge." And a coke was served.

A McDonald's may be a banal setting for such profound work, but how charming too. Who needs grandeur, when you have something so grand?

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VA Helps Develop an Artificial Hand That Can Feel

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 06:27:11 -0500

Over the past few years, artificial hands have come a long way in terms of dexterity. They can grasp, shake hands, point, and, usefully, make the "come hither" gesture .

Now, researchers at the Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University have made significant progress in building a prosthetic hand that provides something like a sense of touch.

The hand, which you can see put to use in a demonstration in the video below, has 20 sensitive spots that can perceive other objects' physicality. Implants that connect those spots to nerves in the patients arm have continued to work 18 months after installation, which MIT Technology Review reports , notes is a important milestone since "electrical interfaces to nerve tissue can gradually degrade in performance."

Hands are more than tools for manipulating the physical world. They are also tools of perception, reporting sensations such as heat, texture, contact. These two systems, output and input, work together, helping us to know when our grasp is tight or whether we've reached the object on a shelf that's just out of view. The difficulty of building a machine that can perceive tactile information and report it back to the brain has become the roadblock for a truly hand-like prosthetic.

The new prosthetic is a step towards creating this feedback loop. And it can do more than sense simple contact. Dustin Tyler, of Case Western, can adjust the device to signal different textures. Igor Spetic, who is using the hand in the above video, "says sometimes it feels like he’s touching a ball bearing, other times like he’s brushing against cotton balls, sandpaper, or hair," according to the Technology Review report.

The seven-millimeter-long cuff
electrode (Russell Lee/Case
Western Reserve University)

At the heart of the technology is a custom version of an interface known as a cuff electrode. Three nerve bundles in the arm—radial, median, and ulnar—are held in the seven-millimeter cuffs, which gently flatten them, putting the normally round bundles in a more rectangular configuration to maximize surface area.

Then a total of 20 electrodes on the three cuffs deliver electrical signals to nerve fibers called axons from outside a protective sheath of living cells that surround those nerve fibers. This approach differs from other experimental technologies, which penetrate the sheath in order to directly touch the axons. These sheath-penetrating interfaces are thought to offer higher resolution, at least initially, but with a potentially higher risk of signal degradation or nerve damage over the long term. And so they have not been tested for longer than a few weeks.

Thus far, the device has only been tested in the lab, but researchers are hoping that further development and study could bring it to the market within the next decade.

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How to Get NSA's Attention (It's Art)

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 16:30:00 -0400

Many people, upon learning of the government's expansive programs to monitor electronic communications, probably thought to themselves, "Huh, I wonder if there is any steps I can take to make sure my emails do not end up in the pile that the NSA ' touches .'"

But not Ben Grosser. Grosser, an artist whose work explores the effects of software in society, had a different idea: How can I put my emails—the ones about my new cat, the invitations to meet up for coffee—under surveillance?

The result of this counterintuitive line of thinking is ScareMail , a new extension for Gmail that tacks text onto the bottoms of emails, algorithmically generated to capture the attention of the NSA's filtering mechanisms.

A bit of extra text tacked onto an email, full of NSA-alluring keywords. (Ben Grosser)

Grosser explains :

One of the strategies used by the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) email surveillance programs is the detection of predetermined keywords. These “selectors,” as they refer to them internally, are used to identify communications by presumed terrorists. Large collections of words have thus become codified as something to fear, as an indicator of intent. The result is a governmental surveillance machine run amok, algorithmically collecting and searching our digital communications in a futile effort to predict behaviors based on words in emails.

ScareMail proposes to disrupt the NSA’s surveillance efforts by making NSA search results useless. Searching is about finding the needles in haystacks. By filling all email with “scary” words, ScareMail thwarts NSA search algorithms by overwhelming them with too many results. If every email contains the word “plot,” or “facility,” for example, then searching for those words becomes a fruitless exercise. A search that returns everything is a search that returns nothing of use.

And he demonstrates in a quick video:

ScareMail from benjamin grosser on Vimeo .

As you can see from the examples, the results aren't exactly intelligible, and that's intended, says Grosser. Part of what he hopes to demonstrate with his project is that the mere inclusion of certain terms does not itself imply "intent"—that keywords will always generate some content that is innocuous.

Will ScareMail work as intended? The picture of how the NSA filters and handles email contents is still incredibly vague, and you'd have to know how that system works in order to game it, as ScareMail seeks to do. A recent report in The Wall Street Journal explained that of the 75 percent of all U.S. Internet traffic the system could conceivably reach, an unknown amount actually winds up stored within NSA databases, though "some" of what does is said to be communication between Americans (as opposed to between Americans and foreigners, or exclusively between foreigners).

Just what terms and other clues go into filtering that firehose—a collaborative process on the part of several telecoms and the government—remain mysterious. Grosser says that "the 'scary' nouns and verbs" his program generates "are a best guess at probable NSA search keywords." He relies on a "Department of Homeland Security list of keywords used by their National Operations Center (NOC) for searching social media sites ." As expected, Grosser says, that list contains terms such as "Al Qaeda," but, he adds, "it also contains a large number of multipurpose words, such as 'plot,' 'facility,' 'wave,' 'dock,' etc."

On their face, those words aren't scary in the least—which is precisely what's scary about their inclusion on that list.

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Dear NASA, Happy Birthday! To Celebrate, We're Shutting You Down. Love, Congress

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 09:47:58 -0400

October 1 is our nation's space agency's 55th birthday. To celebrate, NASA employees can, well, do whatever they want, just as long as they don't do their jobs.

NASA, as President Obama put it in his afternoon remarks, is shutting "down almost entirely" after a faction of congressional Republicans succeeded in preventing a clean continuing resolution to keep the government open from coming to the House floor for a vote.

According to The Washington Post, just 549 of NASA's 18,250 employees were expected to work in a government shutdown. The remainder -- 17,701 people -- will be furloughed.

Even Curiosity, our rover on Mars, will face its own little robot furlough: The explorer will "be put in a protective mode" for the duration of the shutdown, and will not collect any new data during that time.

A memo from Elizabeth Robinson, NASA's CFO, outlines which operations will continue:

There are two major operations or classes of operations that would require ongoing support in accordance with the definitions of excepted activities identified above. First NASA currently is operating the ISS with a crew of 6 astronauts/cosmonauts, which has been in continuous operation since 1998. To protect the life of the crew as well as the assets themselves, we would continue to support planned operations of the ISS during any funding hiatus. Moreover, NASA will be closely monitoring the impact of an extended shutdown to determine if crew transportation or cargo resupply services are required to mitigate imminent threats to life and property on the ISS or other areas.

Second, if a satellite mission is in the operations phase, we will maintain operations that are essential to ensure the safety of that satellite and the data received from it. However if a satellite mission has not yet been launched, work will generally cease on that project.

To those 549 people, the 549 people who must keep our satellites up and running and keep our astronauts safe from harm, we salute you. Good luck in your lonely offices.

This story first appeared at TheAtlantic.com.

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Scientist Recalls Winning 1971 Voyager 1-Related Contract by Telegram

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 16:53:49 -0400

Last Thursday, NASA made a historic announcement: Voyager 1, "the little spacecraft that could," became the first ambassador of human civilization to exit the bubble around our sun and enter interstellar space.

Even though the spacecraft is 11.6 billion miles away, and could have no possible impact on my day-to-day life whatsoever, I love thinking about it, way out there, and I love thinking about what its location says about humans that we've managed to send it there.

But there is one small detail, minuscule when compared with the majesty of this accomplishment, that I love as well, and it's something that Norman Ness, one of the members of the Voyager science team, told me when I spoke to him on the phone last fall.

Ness recalled the time, in the early '70s, when the mission was just getting started and NASA put out a solicitation for proposals for what instruments would go onboard. Ness responded with his plan for a triaxial fluxgate magnetometer that would measure the magnetic field around the spacecraft.

And then the best part: Ness found out in December of 1971 that his proposal had been accepted, and he found this out by telegram. It was, he told me, the "best Christmas present I ever got."

In the time since, we've erected skyscrapers that seem to actually scrape the sky, cleared patches of forest the size of countries, and connected far-flung corners of the globe by undersea fiber-optic cables. We've built a new world, one in which telegrams, already on their way to obsolescence when Ness received his, are signposts of another era.

And we did all of this so quickly: Four decades is no time at all, in the scheme of things.

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Video: What Is Reddit?

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 17:15:00 -0400

How many times have I found myself at a family dinner or out with friends trying to explain Reddit? More than I care to count, and though I've over time honed my description, I can tell I'm not doing a great job. "Well, anyone can submit a link, or just a question, or whatever, and other people can ..." I hear myself saying, as my audience's eyes glaze over.

A new video does a pretty good job of giving that big-picture overview of the site -- what it is, how people use it, and what they like about it. The video's perspective is that of a devoted user, someone who understands the mechanics of the site from hours spent there, not by reading about it in the news. As such, people who followed Adrian Chen's reporting on Reddit troll Violentacrez last year may wonder where that side of Reddit fits into this portrayal, but that's not the Reddit this narrator sees.

As he says in the video, "The great thing about Reddit is that it changes to suit you." And maybe that's exactly why it is always so hard to explain.

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Your Heartbeat: The Ultimate in Password Protection?

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 14:04:10 -0400

Nearly all of computer security boils down to one question: How can a device know that you are you?

Passwords are the most basic tactic for confirming your identity. If you can come up with your secret string of numbers and letters, you must be you.

But everyone knows that passwords are pretty weak barriers, in part because people are bad at choosing them (tending to use innovative combinations such as "password" and "123456") and because computers are good at breaking them.

Other than passwords, there are a host of other tricks, all with that same goal in mind: verifying that you are you. Two of the most common are security questions (silliness) and two-step verification such as Gmail's, which involves a secondary code that only you have access to.

These, however, are all variations on a theme -- logging in, account by account, to the data or service you are trying to access. A new device called the Nymi has a different idea in mind for how to verify your identity, and with it, its creator Bionym prefigures a time where you don't so much as log in as present yourself.

What is this device? It's a little bracelet you wear that makes sure you are you by verifying your unique heartbeat. It then can unlock your accounts and devices, just by its presence. If someone else wears the device, no dice. (Rumors of a similar Apple device have circulated for years.)

Read more at The Atlantic.

(Image via Eliks/Shutterstock.com)

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A Database of 3D Fossils, Ready for You to Explore and Print

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 12:29:34 -0400

Fossils are a marvel to behold. Coils of shell, lines of bone, spreading branches of a plant -- these are the records of the lives that once graced our planet, a reminder that our moment is not only the present alone, but an accretion of the years before it.

Beyond their beauty, fossils are also physical objects, with heft and depth, contours and textures. These qualities are not easily conveyed across the Internet, which tends to resolve on screens, brightly colored and flat.

This shortcoming is being addressed by a new database launched by the British Geological Service, which contains not just thousands of images of fossils held in a host of British collections, but also 3D models of many of those fossils, which can be viewed, rotated, and enlarged in an interactive display case (if your browser supports HTML5) and can additionally be downloaded as .ply and .obj files, for those who would like to try printing out their own version. Here, for example, is a 3D, interactive trilobite for you to play with.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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3D Printing Goes Mainstream Retail

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 12:25:03 -0400

About a month ago, a UPS store in eastern San Diego started offering a new service: 3D printing. Six weeks ago, store owner Burke Jones says, "I didn't know anything about 3D printing."

"I'd love to take credit for the idea because it's been really successful, but the truth is UPS came up with it," he adds. "They wanted to test the market." Last week, UPS rolled out another 3D printer, at a shop in Northwest DC, and it plans to open up four more over the next few months, at locations that have yet to be finalized.

Since the printer arrived at his store (a uPrint SE Plus), Jones has faced a pretty steep learning curve, he says, experimenting with the technology right alongside his clientele, who range from basement tinkerers looking to test some far-fetched idea to big businesses whose engineers just need to prototype something quickly and the company's equipment is otherwise occupied. Those are the easy jobs, Jones says, "They call us up and say I have an [STL] file and I need to print three of them." No problem.

Jones doesn't want to give anyone's ideas away, but he's seen people come in and print things ranging from "pet-feeding apparatuses to high-tech gadgets you attach to your smartphone." Several people have come in needing a car part, such as the little plastic gizmos you used to pull to unlock a manual door. "There was a guy who had some old cars and those had broken off and he wanted those," Jones says. It's not exactly cheap -- something as simple as a ball bearing can cost $15 and prices go up from there -- but for companies trying to get a quick prototype, that can be well within the budget for a project.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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Making Prison Phone Calls Cheaper: Why It Matters

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 10:52:14 -0400

Earlier this month, the three current members of the Federal Communications Commission voted on a question that had gone unanswered for a decade: How much should prisoners and their families have to pay to talk on the phone with each other? By a 2-to-1 vote, the commission decided to move forward withrules that will dramatically lower the rates of such calls.

On Friday I spoke with the FCC's acting chairwoman Mignon Clyburn about the commission's decision and what it will mean for those who are incarcerated and their families. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Can you begin by explaining what was the issue with prison phone rates? What was the issue the commission was trying to solve?

Last year, I had a chance to meet with a number of family members, friends, and legal representatives of inmates, and they affirmed to me that for more than 10 years, they have been urging the courts and the FCC to ease the burden of the exorbitant prison-phone calling rates. They told me the stories of thousands of families who were making unbelievable sacrifices, trade-offs that were jeopardizing their everyday existence, to keep in touch with their inmate family and friends: They were not buying medicine; they were not buying clothing. And they asked the FCC to, at long last, bring about a just and reasonable rate regime.

And so why were these rates so expensive? What were people paying for?

The structure [of the prison-phone market] is a bit different. It's not like the commercial market in which we engage. What happens is, the facilities put out a request for bids, and various companies -- currently the market is made up of a few providers and two providers have more than 80 percent of the market -- would answer the bid. The facilities would evaluate the bids, and what they were looking at was what was the most attractive bid for them. What that often included was a package, so to speak, that included commissions -- commissions that we have found in the record to be as high as 60 percent, and one or two examples even eclipsed that. And so what you would find was a rate regime that included that, on top of the other security protocols and the costs of doing business. This made for a very expensive regime that we addressed.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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What Does It Really Matter If Companies Are Tracking Us Online?

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Fri, 16 Aug 2013 12:55:06 -0400

Say you, like me, went to bed a little early last night. And when you woke up this morning, you decided to catch the episode of the Daily Show that you missed. So you pointed your browser over to thedailyshow.com, and there, as you expected, is John Oliver. But there's something else there too, at least if you're me: flashing deals for hotels in Annapolis, which just so happens to be where I've been planning a weekend away.

We all are familiar at this point with the targeted ads that follow us around the web, linked to our browsing history. In this case, Google (who served me this ad) only got it half right: I had already booked a place.

And yet, I am planning a trip to Annapolis, and Google "knows" this, and is using this information to try to sell me stuff, a practice commonly criticized as "creepy." But as philosopher Evan Selinger asserted in Slate last year, the word "creepy" isn't particularly illuminating. What, really, is wrong with ad tracking? Why does it bother us? What is the problem?

A new paper by professor Ryan Calo at the University of Washington goes the furthest I have seen in elucidating the potential harms of digital-ad targeting. And his argument basically boils down to this: This isn't about the sanctity of the individual or even, strictly speaking, about privacy. This is about protectingconsumers from profit-seeking corporations, who are gaining an insurmountable edge in their efforts to get people to part with their money.

But those are my words. Here are Calo's:

The digitization of commerce dramatically alters the capacity of firms to influence consumers at a personal level. A specific set of emerging technologies and techniques will empower corporations to discover and exploit the limits of each, individual consumer's ability to pursue his or her own self-interest. Firms will increasingly be able to trigger irrationality or vulnerability in consumers -- leading to actual and perceived harms that challenge the limits of consumer protection law, but which regulators can scarcely ignore.

Calo is taking the long view here. Digital marketing techniques haven't quite gotten sophisticated enough to take advantage of a consumer's idiosyncratic irrationalities. Right now, he writes, digital advertising's main strategy is relevance: putting the relevant ad in front of the right person. But Calo foresees a much more personalized approach down the road -- not just the right good, but a customized pitch, delivered late at night, when the company knows you, particularly, have a tendency to make impulse purchases.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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NASA's Newest Space Telescope Sends Back Its First Images of the Sun, and They're Gorgeous

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 12:34:19 -0400

Last month, NASA launched a new telescope, known as IRIS, into space to study the sun. Today we got our first glimpse of what IRIS is seeing, and ... wow.

Even NASA's press release bubbled with excitement:

The moment when a telescope first opens its doors represents the culmination of years of work and planning -- while simultaneously laying the groundwork for a wealth of research and answers yet to come. It is a moment of excitement and perhaps even a little uncertainty. On July 17, 2013, the international team of scientists and engineers who supported and built NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, all lived through that moment. As the spacecraft orbited around Earth, the door of the telescope opened to view the mysterious lowest layers of the sun's atmosphere and the results thus far are nothing short of amazing. The data is crisp and clear, showing unprecedented detail of this little-observed region.

The region of the sun IRIS is observing, the lower atmosphere, and how it powers the sun's scorching upper atmosphere, known as the coronoa, is not well understood. Jay M. Pasachoff, an astronomy professor at Williams College called it "one of the important unsolved problems of astrophysics."

Read more at The Atlantic.

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Interactive Gettysburg: Using Modern Mapping Tools for a New Look at the Historical Battle

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 12:56:12 -0400

When Robert E. Lee looked out over the land at Gettysburg, 150 years ago this week, what could he see?

Not much, says Middlebury professor of geography Anne Kelly Knowles. That is her conclusion based on a nearly decade-long project to visualize the Battle of Gettysburg using advanced digital mapping techniques, available for your exploration at Smithsonian.com.

"What our visual terrain analysis shows is that Lee, at no point in the battle, could see how many federal forces kept arriving at the field," she told me. "He really had no idea how big the force was that he was attacking on day two and day three."

The idea of using GIS to map the historical battle first came to Knowles one morning 12 years ago. "I was literally brushing my teeth one morning and I thought, gosh, what could Lee see at Gettysburg?" she said.

Because surveillance technology at the time of the Civil War lacked aerial capabilities, intelligence about troop movements was limited to what generals and their scouts could actually see. Based on that visual information, generals had to make quick decisions about whether to attack and where to deploy troops. "I knew that GIS could help a person answer that question, because you can use it to analyze terrain three dimensionally," she explained.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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NASA: Voyager 1 Is in a 'New Region' of Space

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 11:51:17 -0400

For months, space enthusiasts have been sitting on the edges of their seats, ready for the Voyager 1 spacecraft to become the first emissary of human civilization to cross from the bubble around our sun* into interstellar space. Last August, two of the three instruments on Voyager 1 started sending back signals that something was -- suddenly, dramatically -- different. Particles from our sun fell way off, and cosmic rays from outside our system shot up. Was this the moment we'd all been waiting for?

Well, not quite yet. That third indicator -- the magnetic field data -- has turned out to be a bit, well, stubborn, showing month after month that Voyager is still in our sun's magnetic field. Two out of three ain't bad, as they say, but scientists need all three boxes checked before they will officially say that Voyager has crossed over, NASA explained in a release today.

Now scientists are giving Voyager's current home a new name -- the heliosheath depletion region. As Kelly Oakes writes in a terrific explanation in Scientific American:

Yep, what Voyager's instruments are now showing us is so odd we need a new name for it. Voyager is, almost literally, pushing the boundaries of our knowledge about the solar system.

Which, if you think about it, is hardly surprising. As Stamatios Krimigis of John Hopkins University, Maryland, and his colleagues write in one of the three papers out today, our ideas about the size and shape of the bubble of plasma we call the heliosphere, created by the solar wind that continuously flows from the sun, are older than the space age.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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No Red Phone Ever Connected the White House to Moscow

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 09:26:01 -0400

If there's one symbol that conveys the power, secrecy, responsibilities, and brinkmanship of the modern presidency it's the red phone, the direct line of communication from the White House to Moscow. Funny thing though: It's a myth. There never was any red phone.

Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which messages traveling between the two superpowers could take half a day to reach their destinations, American and Soviet leaders agreed that they needed a faster and more secure way to communicate. In a memorandum from June 1963, the two powers agreed that "for use in time of emergency the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" ought to "establish as soon as technically feasible a direct communications link between the two Governments." But the result was not a red phone. As Tom Clavin writes at Smithsonian:

The use of the word "direct" in the memo's title was a bit misleading; there was no red phone involved. Messages sent to the Soviet Union on the wire telegraph circuit were routed on a 10,000-mile-long transatlantic cable from Washington to London to Copenhagen to Stockholm to Helsinki and finally to Moscow.

Still, it was a start. Soon after the agreement, four American-made teletype machines were flown to Moscow and installed in the Kremlin. An equal number of machines manufactured in East Germany were shipped to the Soviet Embassy in Washington. They were delivered not to the White House but to the Pentagon, which has remained home to the "hotline" ever since. The two sides also exchanged encoding devices so that the Americans could translate received messages into English and the Soviets could translate messages into Russian on their end.

The hotline was up and running by the end of August of 1963. John F. Kennedy, assassinated just three months later, never had cause to use it.

Read the full story at TheAtlantic.com.

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