The future of the black box flight recorder explored. This article was taken from the August 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. They were guarded by silent corpses, the passengers and crew of an Airbus A330 that plummeted to the bottom of the Atlantic in June 2009. For nearly two years, the boxes -- not black, actually, but bright orange -- had lain amid some of the most rugged undersea terrain in the world, 3,500-metre-high mountains rising from the ocean floor, covered with landslides and steep scarps. Until May when an advanced robotic submersible, the Remora 6000, brought the two black boxes from Air France flight 447 to the surface, they were among the world's most sought-after artefacts, the keys to understanding why a state-of-the-art wide-body jet fell out of the sky on a routine flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 228 aboard.
Leave the Driving to It. How would lives and landscapes change if every car had a computer in the driver’s seat? Brian Hayes Jane has a meeting this morning, so the car comes to pick her up at 8:15. En route, she finishes her breakfast, reviews her PowerPoint slides, updates her Facebook status, and does her daily KenKen. After the car delivers her to the office, it drives to a parking garage on the outskirts of the city, where it slips into a low, narrow slot. Later it will take young Judy and Elroy to their music lessons, then stop for a load of groceries before bringing Jane home. The car also has an errand of its own on today’s agenda: the quarterly inspection and recertification required of all licensed autonomous vehicles. Cars that drive themselves were already a cliché of futurist fantasies 50 years ago, and their long association with cartoonish fiction and dioramas at the World’s Fair makes it hard to take the idea seriously. Already, some cars come equipped with “driver assistive technologies.”
Ten years of Windows XP: how longevity became a curse. Windows XP's retail release was October 25, 2001, ten years ago today. Though no longer readily available to buy, it continues to cast a long shadow over the PC industry: even now, a slim majority of desktop users are still using the operating system. Windows XP didn't boast exciting new features or radical changes, but it was nonetheless a pivotal moment in Microsoft's history. It was Microsoft's first mass-market operating system in the Windows NT family.
It was also Microsoft's first consumer operating system that offered true protected memory, preemptive multitasking, multiprocessor support, and multiuser security. The transition to pure 32-bit, modern operating systems was a slow and painful one. Though Windows NT 3.1 hit the market in 1993, its hardware demands and software incompatibility made it a niche operating system. In the history of PC operating systems, Windows XP stands alone. The success was remarkable for an operating system whose reception was initially quite muted. 23 incredible new technologies you’ll see by 2021. How to See the Invisible. Everybody’s amazed by touch-screen phones. They’re so thin, so powerful, so beautiful!
But this revolution is just getting under way. Can you imagine what these phones will be like in 20 years? Today’s iPhones and Android phones will seem like the Commodore 64. “Why, when I was your age,” we’ll tell our grandchildren, “phones were a third of an inch thick!” Then there are the apps. Right now we’re all delighted to do simple things on our phones, like watch videos and play games. That term usually refers to a live-camera view with superimposed informational graphics. If you’re color-blind like me, then apps like Say Color or Color ID represent a classic example of what augmented reality can do.
Other apps change what you see. But it’s not. Some of the most promising AR apps are meant to help you when you’re out and about. When you’re in a big city, apps like Layar and Wikitude let you peer through the phone at the world around you. Palantir, the War on Terror's Secret Weapon. In October, a foreign national named Mike Fikri purchased a one-way plane ticket from Cairo to Miami, where he rented a condo. Over the previous few weeks, he’d made a number of large withdrawals from a Russian bank account and placed repeated calls to a few people in Syria. More recently, he rented a truck, drove to Orlando, and visited Walt Disney World by himself. As numerous security videos indicate, he did not frolic at the happiest place on earth.
He spent his day taking pictures of crowded plazas and gate areas. None of Fikri’s individual actions would raise suspicions. The day Fikri drives to Orlando, he gets a speeding ticket, which triggers an alert in the CIA’s Palantir system. As the CIA analyst starts poking around on Fikri’s file inside of Palantir, a story emerges. Fikri isn’t real—he’s the John Doe example Palantir uses in product demonstrations that lay out such hypothetical examples.
The antifraud tools of the time could not keep up with the crooks. Michael E. Everyone Speaks Text Message. What Is Sony Now? Sir Howard Stringer remembers when 2011 was going to be wonderful. “This was the first year of the payoff,” he says, “and next year was going to be the second.” As chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Sony (SNE), Stringer had spent six years trying to return the Japanese icon to its former glory and open a new era of growth. Sony expected an annual operating profit of at least $2 billion, its best in three years. A batch of new products was headed for store shelves, including its first tablets, a compact 24-megapixel camera, and a portable PlayStation player. Sony was also preparing to launch a global network that would connect the company’s movies, music, and video games to all its televisions, tablets, PCs, and phones—an iTunes-like digital platform.
“I honestly and truly thought I was going to have a year to remember,” he says over breakfast in his 14th-floor apartment on New York’s Upper East Side. The feeling of imminent triumph ended abruptly on Mar. 11. Transcript. Mike Daisey My only hobby is technology. I love technology. I love everything about it. I love looking at technology. I love comparing one piece of technology with another. And of all the kinds of technology that I love in the world, I love the technology that comes from Apple the most, because I am an Apple aficionado. And like so many of you who may be members of this religion with me, you may know that it can be difficult at times to keep the faith. But I do think it's important to understand where I sit in that hierarchy of Apple geeks for the purposes of our story. So the truth is, I never would have questioned this religion. So I'm reading one of those news sites when this article gets posted. They're not very good pictures. And I looked at these pictures.
Because you have to understand, I have dedicated an embarrassing amount of my life to the study of these machines. It's actually hard now to reconstruct what I did think, I think. Shenzhen is a city without history. The Social Graph is Neither. The Social Graph Is Neither I first came across the phrase social graph in 2007, in an essay by Brad Fitzpatrick, though I'd be curious to know if it goes back further. The idea of representing relationships between people as networks is old, but this was the first time I had thought about treating the connections between all living people as one big object that you could manipulate with a computer.
At the time he wrote, Fitzpatrick had two points to make. The first was that it made no sense for every social website to try and recreate the same web of relationships, over and over, by making people send each other follow requests. Fitzpatrick subsequently went to work for Google, and his Utopian vision of open standards and open data became subsumed in a rivalry between Google and Facebook. This rivalry has brought the phrase 'social graph' into wider use. I think this is a fascinating metaphor. I. One way to solve this comparison problem is with standards. (subject,verb,object) II. Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism - Conor Friedersdorf - Entertainment. These must-reads are my personal picks for the best nonfiction of 2010 Awards season in journalism is almost over: David Brooks has long since handed out the Sidneys, the Pulitzer Prizes have been issued, and the National Magazine Award finalists find out who won next week.
Throughout 2010, I kept my own running list of exceptional nonfiction for the Best of Journalism newsletter I publish. The result is my third annual Best Of Journalism Awards - America's only nonfiction writing prize judged entirely by me. I couldn't read every worthy piece published last year. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention. Thanks to Byliner, a promising new site dedicated to publishing and sharing feature-length nonfiction, my annual awards dating back to 2008 are soon going to have a permanent home. I am indebted to its founder, John Tayman, for including me in an enterprise well worth checking out - and for his encouragement as I assembled this list. The Art Of Storytelling GQHope. Empirical Software Engineering.
As researchers investigate how software gets made, a new empire for empirical research opens up Greg Wilson, Jorge Aranda Software engineering has long considered itself one of the hard sciences. After all, what could be “harder” than ones and zeroes? In reality, though, the rigorous examination of cause and effect that characterizes science has been much less common in this field than in supposedly soft disciplines like marketing, which long ago traded in the gut-based gambles of “Mad Men” for quantitative, analytic approaches.
A growing number of researchers believe software engineering is now at a turning point comparable to the dawn of evidence-based medicine, when the health-care community began examining its practices and sorting out which interventions actually worked and which were just-so stories. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The software industry employs tens of millions of people worldwide; even small increases in their productivity could be worth billions of dollars a year. The Resignation of Wadah Khanfar and the Future of Al Jazeera. The resignation last week of Wadah Khanfar as managing director of Al Jazeera has provoked speculation that scandal lurks beneath his departure. Many have pointed to a WikiLeaks cable stating that Khanfar had succumbed to pressure from the U.S. in 2005 and played down civilian casualties in some of the network's coverage of the Iraq War.
Others have argued that larger political matters related to its coverage of the Arab Spring -- especially its unrestrained, albeit selective, endorsement of democratic reforms -- forced Khanfar's ouster. Both suggestions contain more fancy than substance: it is hard to believe that Doha did not already know about Khanfar's talking to the U.S. ambassador or that pro-democracy strands in Al Jazeera's programming would end his career. (Khanfar regularly ruffled feathers during his tenure.) The more intriguing question is what comes next for Al Jazeera. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register Register for free to continue reading. The Professors, The Press, The Think Tanks—And Their Problems.
Some personal history: I graduated from college in 1982 and began a series of internships at two think tanks in Washington, DC. Believing I might make my career in this realm, I returned to school two years later to get my master’s degree in international relations, whereupon I landed a summer internship at a liberal New York think tank. Upon finishing my master’s, and after a failed Hemingway imitation in Paris, I returned to Washington, where I had managed to convert that internship into a gig worth $1,000 a month—this was 1986—to fill opinion magazines and op-ed pages with hard-earned wisdom garnered as a newspaper stringer and an arts columnist for the local alternative paper.
My only tangible duty was to serve a bagel breakfast—we were a New York think tank, after all—to Capitol Hill staffers and the occasional member of Congress once a month, where I would introduce some left-wing luminary to give a seminar about why everything Ronald Reagan said and did was in error. Comments: Top 10 Pictures That Shocked The World.
It has often been said throughout time that a picture is worth a thousand words. Any picture may be worth a thousand words, but only a few rare photos tell more than a thousand words. They tell a powerful story, a story poignant enough to change the world and galvanize each of us. Over and over again… From the iconic images of Omayra Sanchez’s tragic death to the horrifying images of the Bhopal Gas disaster in 1984, the power of photography is still alive and invincible.
Here is my top 10 list of photos that shocked the world: Warning: Be prepared for images of violence and death (in one case, the photograph of a dead child) if you scroll down. 10. Carol Guzy, the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography, received her most recent Pulitzer in 2000 for her touching photographs of Kosovo refugees. The above picture portrays Agim Shala, a two-year-old boy, who is passed through a fence made with barbed wire to his family. 9. 8.
F. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. Death in a Box. The truth and consequences of reporting from a war zone. Photograph courtesy of Christoph Bangert “My country is dying,” my friend, an Iraqi, says and looks at me. We’re standing in his garden and he is cradling some oily nuts and bolts in his hand. The sprinkler system he set up in our yard is filling the air with a thin mist.
He has called his device the mister-mister. “Mine too,” I say, “I think mine too.” Luc, the photographer I’m working with, is upstairs sleeping. Luc prefers to keep death to himself. Luc once photographed an Afghan as the rounds whistled through the grass around him and hit the sand—thppt, thppt. After Nasiriyah, I began to have death fugues. When I come to, I am on my side. The fugue of the musician: “A contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.” My fugue: I am stopped at a traffic light in Kuwait City. I am not sure. Easy, I agree. No. Tencent: March of the Penguins. It’s hot and crowded in the Shatang Internet Café in the southern coastal city of Shenzhen, where some 300 young factory workers sit amid flickering lights and discarded cigarette packs. At one computer, Zhou Qingqing chats with her boyfriend about 600 miles away in Zhejiang province using QQ, the popular instant messaging software.
She interrupts the conversation to play an online game called QQ Dancer, maneuvering a fashionably dressed avatar to the beat of a catchy Chinese pop song. “This is the only game I know how to play,” she says. “It’s easy.” Across the smoky room, not far from one of the No Smoking signs, Yan Huan also has QQ open on two screens, mainly to accrue the loyalty points that come from spending time on the service. Zhou and Yan are both in their own digital worlds, yet like almost everyone else in the cafe, they’re mostly engaged with the products of a single company: Tencent. Tencent is the Internet Goliath you’ve either never heard of or know little about. March of the Penguin: Ars looks back at 20 years of Linux.
Nadia Shira Cohen | Online Only. Escalation in Digital Sleuthing Raises Quandary in Classrooms - Technology. The Curious Science of Counting a Crowd.