Curt Long

Curt Long

Forethought looks to reshape enterprise search with AI

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Forethought, a 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield participant, has a modern vision for enterprise search that uses AI to surface the content that matters most in the context of work. Its first use case involves customer service, but it has a broader ambition to work across the enterprise. The startup takes a bit of an unusual […]

PoLTE lets you track devices using LTE signal

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Meet PoLTE, a Dallas-based startup that wants to make location-tracking more efficient. Thanks to PoLTE’s software solution, logistics and shipment companies can much more easily track packages and goods. The startup is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF. If you want to use a connected device to track a package, you currently need […]

Elastic’s IPO filing is here

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Elastic, the provider of subscription-based data search software used by Dell, Netflix, The New York Times and others, has unveiled its IPO filing after confidentially submitting paperwork to the SEC in June. The company will be the latest in a line of enterprise SaaS businesses to hit the public markets in 2018. Headquartered in Mountain View, […]

11 Ways to Improve Your Website’s User Experience Design

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From

This article was contributed by Les Kollegian.

In today’s digital market, customers have more options than ever when it comes to buying online. Nearly every product or service imaginable is available at their fingertips, which means that every online business must find a way to convince consumers to choose them over the other guys.

One of the best ways to do this is by offering an intuitive and positive user experience (UX). In fact, 71% of successful businesses believe that their superior UX is their top competitive differentiator that attracts customers.

What is even more incredible to note is the fact that customers are incredibly influenced by even the smallest of details, just one of the many UX challenges that web designers face.

With these facts in mind, you’ve probably understood why you need a kickass UX design for your website. Here are a few tips to keep in mind.

1) Perform A/B Testing Frequently

AB Testing

The key to creating a better UX is constant improvement, and that kind of innovation can only be supported by thorough testing and experimentation. A/B testing tacticsare the best way to determine which adjustments are best for your website specifically. Even the smallest of changes can have a heavy impact on conversion rates, so be sure that your design team is constantly experimenting and comparing new concepts and ideas.

2) Reduce the Number of Website Pages

No. of Website Pages

Efficiency and convenience are the two factors that customers value the most in a website’s UX – beating out service, technology, and even personalization. A website with dozens of pages for each and every bit of content is certainly not efficient, especially when someone is in the initial stages of the customer journey and is simply researching your organization. Simplify things by eliminating unnecessary tabs and always be sure that they never lead your customers to a dead end with no CTA.

3) Include Attractive CTAs

CTA buttons are fussy creatures. A few little tweaks here and there can boost or impact the click-through rate significantly. One case study found that when a website made their CTA button a contrasting color from the rest of the webpage, it had 122% higher click rates.

The placement is also very important to keep in mind. In general, the closer to the top of the page, the better the button will perform. Of course, your team should do some experimentation here to see what design changes perform best with your visitors, but keep in mind that even a little change (i.e. font, color, moving graphics, etc.) can have a big impact.

4) Pay Attention to Website Security

Website Security

One of the main reasons that a customer will abandon their cart or leave a webpage is because something scared them off. And for good reason; the number of data breaches continues to rise every year, so consumers are especially skeptical and concerned with the safety of their personal information.

Obviously, the safety and security of your website should be a top concern to your business as well. If you don’t have a security system in place yet, get one. Then be sure to clearly display your security features with trust badges throughout your website – especially on the checkout page. When customers see a security badge on an ecommerce site, they are more likely to buy.

5) Beware of 404 Errors

404 Errors

Want to know the best way to get rid of your customers? Lead them to an error page. 74% of customers who run into a 404 error will immediately leave your website without a second thought. There are plenty of monitoring tools out there, but just a simple check with Google Analytics data can show which internal and external links are broken.

6) Use Adequate Images and Videos, but Provide Ample Whitespace

There is no debate when it comes to visuals on your webpage. Including a video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80%. Product images have been statistically proven to increase engagement and conversion rates, but balance is definitely key when it comes to a smooth UX.

Heatmap

A little bit of whitespace goes a long way, and remember it doesn’t necessarily have to be white. Business and text-heavy landing pages can be overwhelming to a visitor’s eye and they don’t know where to focus their attention. Instead, cleverly-used whitespace can be very powerful in guiding eyes along the page right to the CTA button for better conversions, as you can see from this heatmap study. The page on the left has far more whitespace usage, and as a result, customers are naturally drawn to the contrasting black CTA button.

7) Focus on the Flow

Your website is there to take your customers through the buyer’s journey, hopefully ending in a conversion. Therefore, every piece of it must have a flow that makes sense. Interestingly, one study found that 46% of customers found it incredibly annoying when a website “lacked a message” – and this was the most common reason that they exited the platform altogether.

Again, proper usage and placement of CTA buttons is incredibly important here. Take the homepage for this San Diego website design company as a perfect example. It literally spells out how to interact with the website, and each tab offers responsive animation when the mouse hovers over the CTA.

JacobTyler Site

Your customers shouldn’t land on a page and wonder what to do next; create clear steps towards their next move and include content that supports each stage of the customer journey for a smoother UX.

8) Colors Matter

Colour Guide

Colors carry a whole lot of meaning when it comes to branding. A recognizable color scheme can increase brand recognition by up to 80%. According to psychological studies, customers associate various meanings to colors when they are used by a brand. For example, lots of blue evokes confidence and honesty while orange is viewed as innovative and creative. Be sure to use the colors that support the type of branding message you want to communicate to your audience.

9) Make It Responsive and Easy to Navigate

Responsive form

Over half of your website traffic is most likely from a mobile device these days, so smartphone compatibility is critical. An unresponsive website design will turn away as much as 80% of organic searches if it doesn’t adjust to their screen size or support mobile-friendly navigation. The key here is to simplify and enlarge.

While your website may have a lot of navigational options clearly displayed at the top of the page, this design is not so great on a small phone screen. Instead, opt for larger CTAs, fold down navigation, and be aware of the natural use patterns for phone screens for optimized placement.

10) Faster Loading Times Are a Must

According to findings by the Nielsen Norman Group, website visitors typically leave it within 10 to 20 seconds.

What’s more?

Bounce rate

If Statisticbrain.com is to be believed, the average person’s attention span is just 8 seconds and only 28 percent of words are read on an average web page. Therefore, quick loading speeds are a necessity. Every single second that it takes to load your site matters, and anything over 3 seconds could be enough to send them searching elsewhere. Stay on top of your website’s loading speeds and optimize the graphics and pages that could be slowing it down.

11) Conduct Site and Usability Audits

Site-auditor

Your business’s website will never truly be “finished.” There will always be room for improvement, especially as new trends emerge. There are several ways that your team can conduct UX audits regularly to ensure that your customers are constantly satisfied with their experience. Be sure to stay on top of your customer reviews and look for patterns regarding the UX of your website, or send out surveys to customers asking them to rate the usability. For a more technical approach, you can try a UX auditing tool that will gather analytical data to identify the areas that need improvement.

Conclusion

According to PwC’s research, nearly one-third of customers will abandon a brand after a single bad experience. Furthermore, 54% of consumers are unsatisfied with the UX from the majority of online brands.

Your customer’s happiness should be a top priority, especially once you realize how much rides on their online experience. Keep these tips in mind and see what areas of your website could use a little improvement.

The Genetics (and Ethics) of Making Humans Fit for Mars

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As George Church, a Harvard geneticist and leading synthetic biologist, argues: “One likely path for risk reduction in space does seem to involve biological engineering of adult would-be astronauts.” He has identified 40-some genes that might be advantageous for long-term spaceflight (and would benefit those who stayed behind, too). His list includes CTNNBI, which confers radiation resistance, LRPD5, which builds adamantine bones, ESPA1 (common in Tibetans), which allows people to live with less oxygen, as well as a host of genes that might make us smarter, more memorious, or less anxious. The menu even includes a gene, ABC11, which endows its possessors with “low-odor production,” a friendly trait in a confined space. (A spaceship with standard humans smells like the Harris County Jail, according to one recent inhabitant of the space station.)Church cofounded Harvard Medical School’s Consortium for Space Genetics, along with other prominent biologists like the anti-aging researcher David Sinclair, in order to study human health in space and promote exploration. He imagines “virus-delivered gene therapies, or microbiome or epigenome therapies” that astronauts would take to transform their biologies. “Quite a bit is already known about resistance to radiation, osteoporosis, cancer, and senescence in mice,” he says. Church stresses that many of these genes are already targeted by pharmaceutical companies, with drugs in clinical trials. Using gene therapies as a kind of preventative medicine for astronauts isn’t so far-fetched.

Gene therapies may make us fitter for space, but if we want to colonize new worlds, humans would want to breed a new race. The geneticist Chris Mason, whose lab at Weil Cornell is participating in a NASA study of how twin astronauts changed when one spent a year in space while another remained on Earth, has proposed a “500-year plan” for space colonization. Its three main components are expanding our knowledge of genomics, including determining which genes should wear a “do-not-disturb sign,” because their alteration would kill or disable us; engineering microbes; and adding, deleting, and modifying genes to create permanent, heritable changes in a population.

In the first stage of his plan, Mason is combining human cells with a gene called Dsup, unique to the indestructible tardigrade, that suppresses DNA breaks from radiation. Tardigrades can survive the vacuum of space; perhaps their genes might make us more fit for space, too. His lab has also created an artificial construct of the gene p53, involved in preventing cancer, which it hopes later to insert into a human cell. Elephants have many copies of p53 and seldom die from cancer; adding copies of p53 to human genomes might protect us from space radiation. Mason’s less speculative research includes editing Deionococcus radiodurans, sometimes called “Conan the bacterium,” a polyextremophile that can survive cold, dehydration, acid, and very high levels of radiation, the last by rewriting its damaged chromosomes. Mason wants the microbe to live as flora on our skin or in our guts, or on the surfaces of spaceships, protecting us from the deadly rays of space. “The microbiome is an extraordinarily plastic thing,” he says.

Some researchers have proposed more science-fictional projects. Harris Wang of Columbia wants to coax human kidney cells to synthesize the nine amino acids our bodies cannot make. A human cell able to synthesize all the organic compounds needed for health would require around 250 new genes, but if our tissues were made of such cells, astronauts could thrive by drinking just sugar water, a liberating adaptation: Missions wouldn’t have to lug bulky food or send it on ahead. Other scientists have suggested photosynthetic spacefarers, or editing the personalities of the space corps, so that they fearlessly longed for the high frontier because it was their true terminus.

If humans hope to leave Earth, we’ll need to be different. But if it’s possible to transform ourselves so radically, should we? Politically, eugenics has been an ugly word: the promise of genocidal tyrants. More generally, would it be ethical to call into existence a new people who had no say in their own design? The case for a race of astronauts is that they would not really be the products of eugenics as the word is ordinarily used: No one with undesired habits or traits would be coerced to have fewer children; no captive populations would be sterilized or worse. As for the new people themselves, none of us chooses our inheritance; we are all the products of our parents. Mason believes there is a categorical imperative to try. The primary goal of his 500-year plan reads: “Establish habitable environments in multiple star systems, to avoid extinction due to a cataclysmic event in one solar system.” He explains, “Whatever your moral priorities, you have to exist first.”

In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, published shortly after the flights of Apollo 10 and 11, Saul Bellow asked, “How long … will this earth remain the only home of Man? How long? Oh, Lord, you bet! Wasn’t it the time—the very hour to go? To blow this great blue, white, green planet, or to be blown from it.” Perhaps it’s time to think of children who can leave home. Scientists are telling us we should consciously direct our evolution, rather than surrender our fate to time, chance, and death—evolution’s historical servants. Of course, the inheritors who left Earth would be as different from sapiens as we are from Neanderthals. “There will be a speciation,” says Mason. “It’s not if, it’s when.”

More Great WIRED Stories

Scale API Wants Self-Driving Cars to Share Data

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On July 4, swarms of sugar-happy children, sparkler laden teens, and buzzed, burger-full adults crowd the streets in cities across the US. They stagger in packs, waving flags and wearing flags, acting, and let’s not mince words here, like very patriotic fools. Why not? Many have the day off, and maybe the day after off, too. Add fireworks, and you have the makings of a very good time.

Unless you’re a self-driving car developer, in which case you have the makings of a nightmare. See, on most days of the year, walkers act fairly predictably. They wait at crosswalks for their light. Or they don’t, and make little dashes across the street. Normal, everyday stuff—that’s what the systems that run autonomous vehicles are trained to handle. But if people act erratically, wandering about the lanes in ways they usually don’t, the cars can get confused.

So if you are that self-driving car developer, encountering Fourth of July for the very first time, you might pay for the services of a new breed of data labeling company, like Scale API. Scale’s automated systems, helped along by somewhere north of 10,000 contract workers, examine and label the data collected by autonomous vehicles as they run tests on American roads. Those labels, in turn, help the car’s software train to recognize particular situations next time they occurs.

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to Self-Driving Cars

Here, the fine distinctions matter. If a data labeler were to consistently label cars as people, an autonomous vehicle’s software might get very, very confused, swerving or braking when it shouldn’t. Or: If data is labeled perfectly and accurately, every single time, then those systems just might learn how to safely maneuver through the wide, weird world. Put another way, the tedious task of data labeling is essential to building safe self-driving cars.

Here’s the silly thing, though. When a Scale customer—like self-driving car developers Cruise, Zoox, Lyft, Nutonomy, Nuro, Pony.ai or Voyage, or self-driving truck builders Embark and Starsky Robotics—sends data to be labeled, that data doesn’t get shared with other Scale clients. This is too bad, because autonomous driving systems could always use more data to train on, more images of the real world that help them refine their robobrains. It’s doubly too bad when it comes to edge cases, the unusual but dangerous happenings that all cars should be prepared to handle.

Animation by Scale API

Sure, it makes a lot of sense for companies to want to keep these bits of data to themselves. The developers spend a lot of time and money collecting that information, after all. “I don’t know how you get competitors to share their most valuable information,” says Oscar Beijboum, who heads up the machine learning team at Nutonomy. “In a way, these corner cases are very precious.”

But it’s also kind of dumb for the companies to be so possessive. “Right now each company is so in its own lane and secretive,” says Alexandr Wang, Scale’s 21-year-old founder and CEO. “In reality, these edge cases, these are things that should be probably be shared or standardized across the industry at some point.” Wouldn’t it be great—and much much safer—if everyone had a hand in creating the training data that helps autonomous cars understand when to swerve, or when to hit the brakes?

Reading the Labels

Scale API is one of several companies that offer so-called data-labeling services. Mighty AI, Appen, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Samasource, and Cloud Factory all offer clients ways to connect with contract labelers who can do this work. Scale, which has 35 employees, is zooming in on the autonomous vehicle market, and the particular blend of sensor data those cars churn out. (It specializes in labeling quickly; companies that use the startup’s products often have their own contractors or in-house teams who do the most quality-sensitive labeling work.)

The car systems in question generate lots and lots of data, from cameras, radar, and lidar. The data covers lots of frequent driving situations, like what it looks like when a car is tailgating, or takes a left turn across traffic, or when a cyclist is sharing the road. And less frequent situations, like if the truck driving ahead suddenly unleashes its cargo of logs onto the road. (True story: This has happened to one of Scale’s clients.) Engineers train their self-driving vehicle perception systems on ten of millions of examples of this kind of info, until the systems themselves can quickly recognize them, interpret them, and learn how to take evasive action.

A company like Scale, then, provides the foundational infrastructure for self-driving car tech. “Scale is basically providing the ground truth for our perception systems,” says Anantha Kancherla, who oversees the development of self-driving software at Lyft. “It’s a very, very critical piece for us to develop.”

The startup, which today announces an $18 billion Series B funding round led by Index Ventures, officially began in 2016. Wang, now 21, dropped out of MIT’s computer science program to launch the company at Y Combinator. Two years in, Scale recently moved into an open-floor office in San Francisco’s techified SoMa neighborhood, the kind of place whose mismatched mugs, cheery, young, casually dressed employees, and fully stocked bar scream summer camp for sort-of grown ups.

These folks aren’t actually doing the labeling, though. That happens at home computers and in call center–like offices, mostly in Asia and Europe. Those workers mouse around camera images and 3-D lidar-generated maps collected by the car sensors. They draw boxes around cars, walkers, and cyclists. They ID certain pixels as road, not tire, or flesh, not steel. Or they double-check that Scale’s automated system has done all these properly by itself.

Here’s the silly part again: Sometimes, those contractors label the same sorts of data, over and over, for different Scale clients. When those workers see a particularly interesting corner case—a July 4th celebrant whose had too much to drink, or an e-scooter, or the logs tumbling off the back of the truck—they don’t alert other clients about what their technology saw. That means self-driving car companies are spending hours and hours of work, and lots and lots of money, collecting and annotating what might be mostly identical road data.

Yeah, this lack of sharing amounts to a bad system, and the companies working on building AVs acknowledge as much. “It’s a little bit ridiculous that the same companies do almost the exact same annotation work,” says Beijboum, from Nutonomy. “It does feel very wasteful and suboptimal.”

It could also prove dangerous. If only one company’s cars are prepared for the falling logs, what happens when another company’s cars encounter them? “If you’re worried about your system missing edge cases, the ‘unknown unknowns’, then the more examples you have, and the more conditions the car encounters, the more opportunities you have to train the system to do a better job,” says Michael Wagner, co-founder and CEO of Edge Case Research, which helps robotics companies build more robust software.

Animation by Scale API

Scale might be a great platform to share these edge cases. Or another company might be. But only if autonomous vehicle companies can get over their paranoia about sharing data with competitors. Yes, experts say, it’s possible that a competitor could divine something about your particular, proprietary technology based on the data you collect about weird situations on the road. Still, Wang thinks that if autonomous vehicle companies get better about sharing the load on the relatively easy task of collecting and labeling, then they can can start to compete on very tough stuff: building a car that can use that data to safely drive itself anywhere.

It’s an ongoing project. “Even when these things are on the streets and they don’t have a driver inside, there’s going to be this constant effort to make them better and better and better,” Wang says. Which means, of course, that Scale is never out of a job.

More Great WIRED Stories

The Real ‘Fallout’: Viral Videos Were the Scourge—and Savior—of Tom Cruise’s Career

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Ten years ago, Tom Cruise’s public image was dangerously close to self-destructing. In January of 2008, a nearly 10-minute-long video of Cruise solemnly discussing Scientology wound up on the now-deceased Gawker. “We are the authorities on the mind,” Cruise says in the clip, as a riff on the Mission: Impossible theme plays in the background. “We are the authorities on improving conditions.” In the video, Cruise alternates between uproarious laughter and stern lecturing, extolling the power of his religion—whose members, he says, have the power to stop crime and rescue auto-accident victims. Cruise’s affiliation with the group was never a secret, but the video made his devotion all the more clear. “You’re either on board,” he says, “or you’re not on board.”

At the time, plenty of people were decidedly not on board with Cruise, then stuck in what can now charitably be called his “Weird Tom” era—which had been brought about, in no small part, by the internet. It had begun in May 2005, when Cruise showed up on for an appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, where audience members screamed maniacally for the actor, leading a keyed-up to Cruise to scamper about the set and, briefly, wind up atop Winfrey’s couch. If the incident had occurred a few years earlier, it likely would have been forgotten—but Cruise’s couch-trip took place just a few months after the introduction of YouTube, and at a peak era for ’00s meme culture. It didn’t take long for someone to add some Return of the Jedi-style Emperor-shocks to Cruise’s appearance, just one of many online responses hinging on the idea that the always-steady Cruise was somehow out of control.

That perception only grew, thanks to a Today Show appearance soon after. During the multi-segment talk, Cruise lectured Matt Lauer on the evils of psychiatry—a practice Scientology abhors—and criticized Brooke Shields, who’d recently disclosed a battle with postpartum depression. Videos of the exchange seemingly commandeered the entire internet, where Cruise was vilified as a bully. The off-putting back-to-back appearances didn’t hurt Cruise’s War of the Worlds (which remains Cruise’s highest-grossing film). But a year later, Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone severed the actor’s long-running production deal with Paramount, the studio behind the Mission: Impossible films, citing the actor’s behavior as “not acceptable.”

By the time Gawker released the widely-seen Scientology video in 2008, Cruise was already in a delicate position. It only grew more precarious when millions of people saw the actor straight-facedly claiming to possess heightened powers, and laughing like he’d just landed a Reebok sponsorship for Rod Tidwell. And the video wouldn’t go away, even after the church tried to pull it from the web, ultimately leading to a war of the words between the organization and Anonymous. Oprah, The Today Show, the Scientology tell-all: The three videos only added to the belief that Cruise was either completely out of touch, or completely out of his mind—possibly both.

So Tom Cruise did what he always does when he’s in trouble: He ran.

The Ultra-Pure, Super-Secret Sand That Makes Your Phone Possible

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It was the feldspar, which is used in glassmaking, that first attracted engineers from the Corning Glass Company to the area. At the time, the leftover quartz grains were still seen as just unwanted by‑products. But the Corning engineers, always on the lookout for quality material to put to work in the glass factories, noticed the purity of the quartz and started buying it as well, hauling it north by rail to Corning’s facility in Ithaca, New York, where it was turned into everything from windows to bottles.

One of Spruce Pine quartz’s greatest achievements in the glass world came in the 1930s, when Corning won a contract to manufacture the mirror for what was to be the world’s biggest telescope, ordered by the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. Making the 200‑inch, 20‑ton mirror involved melting mountains of quartz in a giant furnace heated to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, writes David O. Woodbury in The Glass Giant of Palomar.

Once the furnace was hot enough, “three crews of men, working day and night around the clock, began ramming in the sand and chemicals through a door at one end. So slowly did the ingredients melt that only four tons a day could be added. Little by little the fiery pool spread over the bottom of the furnace and rose gradually to an incandescent lake 50 feet long and 15 wide.” The telescope was installed in the observatory in 1947. Its unprecedented power led to important discoveries about the composition of stars and the size of the universe itself. It is still in use today.

In the 1930s, Corning won a contract to manufacture the mirror for what was to be the world’s biggest telescope, ordered by the Palomar Observatory in Southern California. Making the 200‑inch, 20‑ton mirror involved melting mountains of quartz in a giant furnace heated to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Montifraulo Collection/Getty Images

Significant as that telescope was, Spruce Pine quartz was soon to take on a far more important role as the digital age began to dawn.

In the mid‑1950s, thousands of miles from North Carolina, a group of engineers in California began working on an invention that would become the foundation of the computer industry. William Shockley, a pathbreaking engineer at Bell Labs who had helped invent the transistor, had left to set up his own company in Mountain View, California, a sleepy town about an hour south of San Francisco, near where he had grown up. Stanford University was nearby, and General Electric and IBM had facilities in the area, as well as a new company called Hewlett‑Packard. But the area known at the time as the Santa Clara Valley was still mostly filled with apricot, pear, and plum orchards. It would soon become much better known by a new nickname: Silicon Valley.

At the time, the transistor market was heating up fast. Texas Instruments, Motorola, and other companies were all competing to come up with smaller, more efficient transistors to use in, among other products, computers. The first American computer, dubbed ENIAC, was developed by the army during World War II; it was 100 feet long and 10 feet high, and it ran on 18,000 vacuum tubes.

Transistors, which are tiny electronic switches that control the flow of electricity, offered a way to replace those tubes and make these new machines even more powerful while shrinking their tumid footprint. Semiconductors—a small class of elements, including germanium and silicon, which conduct electricity at certain temperatures while blocking it at others—looked like promising materials for making those transistors.

At Shockley’s startup, a flock of young PhDs began each morning by firing up kilns to thousands of degrees and melting down germanium and silicon. Tom Wolfe once described the scene in Esquire magazine: “They wore white lab coats, goggles, and work gloves. When they opened the kiln doors weird streaks of orange and white light went across their faces . . . they lowered a small mechanical column into the goo so that crystals formed on the bottom of the column, and they pulled the crystal out and tried to get a grip on it with tweezers, and put it under microscopes and cut it with diamond cutters, among other things, into minute slices, wafers, chips; there were no names in electronics for these tiny forms.”

Shockley became convinced that silicon was the more promising material and shifted his focus accordingly. “Since he already had the first and most famous semiconductor research and manufacturing company, everyone who had been working with germanium stopped and switched to silicon,” writes Joel Shurkin in his biography of Shockley, Broken Genius. “Indeed, without his decision, we would speak of Germanium Valley.”

Shockley was a genius, but by all accounts he was also a lousy boss. Within a couple of years, several of his most talented engineers had jumped ship to start their own company, which they dubbed Fairchild Semiconductor. One of them was Robert Noyce, a laid‑back but brilliant engineer, only in his mid‑20s but already famous for his expertise with transistors.

William Shockley worked with the element germanium, as well, before becoming convinced that silicon was the more promising material.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Pix Inc./The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
In 1959, when Robert Noyce and his colleagues at Fairchild Semiconductor figured out a way to cram several transistors onto a single fingernail‑sized sliver of high‑purity silicon. He went on to found Intel.
Ted Streshinsky/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

The breakthrough came in 1959, when Noyce and his colleagues figured out a way to cram several transistors onto a single fingernail‑sized sliver of high‑purity silicon. At almost the same time, Texas Instruments developed a similar gadget made from germanium. Noyce’s, though, was more efficient, and it soon dominated the market. NASA selected Fairchild’s microchip for use in the space program, and sales soon shot from almost nothing to $130 million a year. In 1968, Noyce left to found his own company. He called it Intel, and it soon dominated the nascent industry of programmable computer chips.

Intel’s first commercial chip, released in 1971, contained 2,250 transistors. Today’s computer chips are often packed with transistors numbering in the billions. Those tiny electronic squares and rectangles are the brains that run our computers, the Internet, and the entire digital world. Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, the computer systems that underpin the work of everything from the Pentagon to your local bank—all of this and much more is based on sand, remade as silicon chips.

Making those chips is a fiendishly complicated process. They require essentially pure silicon. The slightest impurity can throw their tiny systems out of whack.

Finding silicon is easy. It’s one of the most abundant elements on Earth. It shows up practically everywhere bound together with oxygen to form SiO2, aka quartz. The problem is that it never occurs naturally in pure, elemental form. Separating out the silicon takes considerable doing.

Step one is to take high‑purity silica sand, the kind used for glass. (Lump quartz is also sometimes used.) That quartz is then blasted in a powerful electric furnace, creating a chemical reaction that separates out much of the oxygen. That leaves you with what is called silicon metal, which is about 99 percent pure silicon. But that’s not nearly good enough for high‑tech uses. Silicon for solar panels has to be 99.999999 percent pure—six 9s after the decimal. Computer chips are even more demanding. Their silicon needs to be 99.99999999999 percent pure—eleven 9s. “We are talking of one lonely atom of something that is not silicon among billions of silicon companions,” writes geologist Michael Welland in Sand: The Never-Ending Story.

Getting there requires treating the silicon metal with a series of complex chemical processes. The first round of these converts the silicon metal into two compounds. One is silicon tetrachloride, which is the primary ingredient used to make the glass cores of optical fibers. The other is trichlorosilane, which is treated further to become polysilicon, an extremely pure form of silicon that will go on to become the key ingredient in solar cells and computer chips.

Each of these steps might be carried out by more than one company, and the price of the material rises sharply at each step. That first‑step, 99 percent pure silicon metal goes for about $1 a pound; polysilicon can cost 10 times as much.

Semiconductors are a small class of elements, including silicon, which conduct electricity at certain temperatures while blocking it at others.
Getty Images

The next step is to melt down the polysilicon. But you can’t just throw this exquisitely refined material in a cook pot. If the molten silicon comes into contact with even the tiniest amount of the wrong substance, it causes a ruinous chemical reaction. You need crucibles made from the one substance that has both the strength to withstand the heat required to melt polysilicon, and a molecular composition that won’t infect it. That substance is pure quartz.

The One Telecom Group That Actually Supports Net Neutrality

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The battle lines over net neutrality are firmly drawn. On one side are internet advocacy groups, large tech companies, and most Democrats. On the other are free-market adherents, telecom companies, and most Republicans.

Then there’s Charles “Chip” Pickering, a conservative Republican former member of Congress and CEO of a telecommunications-industry group called Incompas. He supports net neutrality.

“I don’t think there’s anyone who understands tech and telecommunications as well as he does,” says US representative Anna Eshoo (D-California). “He can give a presentation to a complete neophyte and get them to join the parade because he makes it so compelling.”

Pickering isn’t new to the fight over net neutrality. He introduced one of the first net neutrality bills in Congress during his stint as a representative from Mississippi from 1997 until 2009. At that point, net neutrality wasn’t on the agenda of many politicians on either side of the aisle.

Under Pickering’s leadership, Incompas has been a steadfast defender of rules adopted by the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission that ban broadband providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking or discriminating against lawful content. That’s placed it at odds with other industry groups working to undermine efforts to mandate net neutrality.

Incompas itself is something of a paradox. Historically, it’s been a voice in Washington for smaller telecommunications companies. But in recent years it also welcomed tech companies as members. And not just companies that have dabbled in offering broadband services themselves, such as Facebook and Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Its ranks also include Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter.

What these companies have in common, Pickering explains, is opposition to the policy preferences of incumbent broadband companies like AT&T. “The idea is to ‘unite the tribes,’ if I were to use a Braveheart analogy,” Pickering says. “I wanted to bring all of us who wanted competition and innovation into one alliance.”

Lessons From the Soviet Bloc

While other Republicans, such as FCC chair Ajit Pai, see net neutrality regulations as government interference in the free market, Pickering sees such rules as necessary to preserve competition on the internet. He notes that most people have access to only one or two broadband providers, according to FCC reports.

Pickering traces his reverence for markets and competition to his time working with a church group in communist Hungary in the 1980s after graduating from the University of Mississippi. “Having grown up in a small town in Mississippi, going to Europe and living in the so-called Soviet Bloc was very much an awakening in trying to understand how the world works,” he says.

‘I don’t think there’s anyone who understands tech and telecommunications as well as he does.’

US representative Anna Eshoo, on Charles Pickering

After returning to the US, Pickering received an MBA from Baylor University, where he served as a graduate assistant to a comparative economics professor who studied Western and Soviet-bloc economies. Pickering concluded that the differences in standards of living and individual freedom he saw between the US and Hungary stemmed largely from the different economic systems.

“I hate to see the consequences of monopolies, and I love what happens when you unleash free-market competition,” he says. “It really gives individuals maximum freedom and opportunity.”

After business school, Pickering worked in President George H. W. Bush’s administration, then landed a job as a staffer for US senator Trent Lott of Mississippi in 1992. Pickering was soon immersed in telecommunications issues such as cable-television competition and wireless spectrum auctions.

It was topical work for a senator from Mississippi, which was something of a hotbed of telco activity. American Cable Systems, the company that became Comcast, started in Tupelo, Mississippi. WorldCom, which changed its name to MCI after acquiring MCI in 1997, was founded in Jackson, Mississippi. And SkyTel, which pioneered two-way texting, was founded in Clinton, Mississippi.

“We’re not only the birthplace of blues, but the birthplace of texting,” Pickering says.

His stint for Lott culminated in his work on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first and last major update to telecommunications law since 1934. The act deregulated large swaths of the industry and relaxed media ownership rules. It’s been criticized for paving the way for more consolidation in media and telecommunications. At the time, Pickering saw it as a chance to promote competition by removing legal barriers that kept companies out of the pay-TV, local telephone, and long-distance markets.

Pickering was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1996 and eventually landed on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which handles telecommunications issues. In 2006, he cosponsored a bill that would have made it easier for telephone companies to offer paid TV services and authorized the FCC to enforce a few basic net neutrality protections. The bill wasn’t welcomed by net neutrality advocates, who wanted stricter net neutrality provisions and more rule-making authority for the FCC. But it passed the House, 321 to 101, with bipartisan support before dying in the Senate. Pickering tried to pass net neutrality legislation again in 2008 when he teamed up with representative Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), who had co-sponsored a separate failed net neutrality bill with Eshoo and others; but that bill never made it out of committee.

Pickering retired from Congress that year. The Democrats had just gained a majority in the House, and Pickering thought he’d be less effective. He also wanted to spend more time with his five sons. “After 20 years of public service, I wanted to make a little bit better of a living and provide more presence and be a part of their lives,” he says.

Baby Bells Grow Up

After a few years practicing law in Mississippi, Pickering landed a job at Incompas, then known as Comptel, in 2014, at a critical juncture for the group.

The organization started out as the Association of Long Distance Telephone Companies, or Altel, in 1981, then changed its name to Comptel in 1985 after merging with the American Council of Competitive Telecommunications. The group played an important role in the telecommunications industry after the government broke AT&T into seven regional carriers, known as the Baby Bells.

“There was a series of litigations about what the restrictions mean, what the Bell companies could do, what the Bell companies could not do,” says Jeff Blumenfeld, co-chair of the law firm Lowenstein Sandler’s antitrust and trade regulation practice, who worked at the Department of Justice during the breakup.

Comptel helped make the case for a competitive market. It played a similar role in the wake of the 1996 act, as regulators implemented its policies.

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to Net Neutrality

By the time Pickering took over the organization, Ma Bell’s progeny weren’t babies anymore. They’d merged their way into three telecommunications giants: AT&T, CenturyLink, and Verizon. Meanwhile, Comcast had evolved from small-town cable provider to the largest cable television and home broadband provider in the country. Verizon had swallowed up MCI. Pickering saw the influence that companies like AT&T and Comcast wielded in Washington and realized that their smaller rivals needed partners that opposed the incumbents’ agenda. The tech industry, ever worried about the control that carriers have over how customers access their content, fit the bill perfectly. Bringing in the internet giants infused the group with both the cash and cachet that it would need to fight the next series of battles. The organization changed its name in 2015 to reflect the fact that it now encompassed more industries.

The Trump Era

Even with the new members, life has been rough for the organization in the Trump era. One of Pai’s first actions as FCC chair was to ditch an Obama-era proposal to lower price caps on “business data services”—which provide connectivity to ATMs, for example—and instead eliminate caps for much of the market. And, of course, the agency voted in December to jettison the hard-won net neutrality regulations.

Pickering and company did land a big win last week, when the FCC approved rules that will make it easier for smaller companies to string their wires along existing utility poles. It sounds boring but could spur more competition and lower broadband prices.

But even as the group celebrates that victory, a bigger problem looms, as the FCC considers a petition filed by rival telecom group USTelecom that could cut off access to much of the infrastructure that Incompas’ member companies rely on today. Dane Jasper, CEO of broadband provider and Incompas member Sonic, calls the petition “a knife at the throat of the entire competitive industry.”

And consolidation could thin the organization’s ranks. In 2016, Verizon snapped up XO Communications and CenturyLink bought Level 3. Such deals can make for strange bedfellows within the group. Verizon has long been a “carrier member,” which enables it to participate in Incompas’s trade shows, but bylaws forbid the former Baby Bells from having policy voting rights within the organization.

Earlier this year, T-Mobile agreed to buy Sprint, one of Incompas’ earliest members. The deal is pending. Pickering says Incompas does not have a position the acquisition. (edited)

When it comes to net neutrality, public opinion appears to be on Incompas’ side. Earlier this year, a Morning Consult poll found that 60 percent of registered voters, including 63 percent of Republicans, support the idea. Republican voters were more likely to support net neutrality than Democrats or independents in the poll.

That may be pushing more of Pickering’s fellow Republicans to his side of the issue. In May, three Senate Republicans broke ranks to support legislation that would restore the FCC’s rules, and last month Representative Mike Coffman (R-Colorado) became the first GOP House member to do so, at an event cohosted by Incompas.

Pickering still has a long way to go to win over enough Republicans to restore net neutrality protections. “If anyone can get everyone to the table, it’s Chip,” Eshoo says.

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Ethical OS Helps Tech Startups Avert Moral Disasters

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Silicon Valley is having its Frankenstein moment. The monsters of today are the billion-dollar companies we’ve come to depend on for everything from search results to car rides; their creators, blindsided by what these platforms have become. Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t realized, back when he launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room, that it would grow to become a home for algorithmic propaganda and filter bubbles. YouTube didn’t expect to become a conspiracy theorists’ highlight reel, and Twitter hadn’t anticipated the state-sponsored trolling or hate speech that would define its platform.

But should they have? A new guidebook shows tech companies companies that it’s possible to predict future changes to humans’ relationship with technology, and that they can tweak their products so they’ll do less damage when those eventual days arrive.

The guide, called the Ethical OS, comes out of a partnership between the Institute of the Future, a Palo Alto-based think tank, and the Tech and Society Solutions Lab, a year-old initiative from the impact investment firm Omidyar Network. Both groups focus on the intersection of tech and society. Collectively, they imagine the EthicalOS as a bridge between the researchers who study tech’s growing impact on society and the companies that wield control.

“Here we are in this new era where there’s a whole set of unintended societal consequences that are emerging as tech becomes more ubiquitous, and yet, tech companies haven’t caught up with the direct link between the products they have and being able to get ahead of that,” says Paula Goldman, the head of the Tech and Society Solutions Lab. “The impetus for the Ethical OS toolkit was exactly that: Here’s a tool that helps you think through these consequences and makes sure what you’re designing is good for the world and good for your longer-term bottom line.”

Future Shock

The three-part guide—available to download here—addresses social impact harms, ranging from disinformation to the dopamine economy. It functions as a sort of workbook with checklists, thought experiments, and basic solutions for product development teams, designers, founders, or investors to grapple with the future impact of their products.

The first section outlines 14 near-future scenarios, based on contemporary anxieties in the tech world that could threaten companies in the future. What happens, for example, if a company like Facebook purchases a major bank and becomes a social credit provider? What happens if facial-recognition technology becomes a mainstream tool, spawning a new category of apps that integrates the tech into activities like dating and shopping? Teams are encouraged to talk through each scenario, connect them back to the platforms or products they’re developing, and discuss strategies to prepare for these possible futures.

Each of these scenarios came from contemporary “signals” identified by the Institute of the Future—the rise of “deep fakes,” tools for “predictive justice,” and growing concerns about technology addiction.

“We collect things like this that spark our imagination and then we look for patterns, relationships. Then we interview people who are making these technologies, and we start to develop our own theories about where the risks will emerge,” says Jane McGonigal, the director of game research at the Institute of the Future and the research lead for the EthicalOS. “The ethical dilemmas are around issues further out than just the next release or next growth cycle, so we felt helping companies develop the imagination and foresight to think a decade out would allow more ethical action today.”

Question Time

There’s also a checklist for mitigating disasters in eight “risk zones” including machine ethics and algorithmic biases, data control and monetization, and the surveillance state. The guide prompts teams to find relevant risk zones, run through the checklist, and then begin to think about how to correct or mitigate those risks. For example: How could bad actors use your tech to subvert or attack the truth? Is the technology reinforcing or amplifying biases? How might tools be designed to advocate for time well spent? Do you have a policy in place for what happens to customer data if your company is bought, sold, or shut down?

“The checklist is probably the easiest one to envision in a daily stand-up. We even created a version for boards to have as a five-minute board discussion,” says Raina Kumra, the entrepreneur-in-residence at the Tech and Society Solutions Lab, who also contributed to the toolkit. “As a founder, when you’re doing your initial product meetings, you can add this checklist into that process at the end or in the middle.

Finally, the guide includes a set of seven future-proofing strategies to help teams get started in taking more ethical actions. These borrow from ethical safeguards in other industries—a Hippocratic oath for data workers, for example, or a bug bounty program that would reward people for flagging ethical issues or potential societal harm from a tech company.

Human Playbook

The guide has, so far, been piloted by nearly 20 companies, start-ups, and schools, which have used it either to stoke conversation about ethics more broadly or to guide specific product decisions. TechStars, which runs over 40 start-up accelerator programs across the country, has begun using the EthicalOS framework to decide which start-ups to invest in based on their ability to think about future issues. Those kinds of conversations, Kumra says, haven’t been the norm in tech. “When I was fundraising for my start-up, I talked to over a hundred VCs and many, many founders,” she says. “The conversation around ethics never came up once.”

‘Everyone wants to do better, but we heard feedback when we were speaking to VCs and tech co-founders that they didn’t know how. They didn’t know what to do.’

Raina Kumra, Tech and Society Solutions Lab

For that reason, a guide like this is “welcome but overdue” says Luke Stark, a researcher at Dartmouth who studies the intersection of behavior and technology. “[Academics] been thinking about these problems for a while, so it’s exciting to see some of the ideas and general concerns potentially get in front of folks who are involved in design, development, and funding.”

Stark says the areas of concerns identified in the EthicalOS are “absolutely spot on.” But because the EthicalOS is a guide meant for tech founders and investors, some of the solutions privilege business needs over societal ones. The future-looking scenarios assume that deep fakes and facial-recognition technologies will continue to grow unchecked, and that the tech industry will remain largely unregulated for the next decade. It suggests ethical solutions for companies that are “nice to have”—including ones that will help a business’s bottom line—rather than “need to have.”

“In a way, ethics itself is a very narrow framing,” says Stark. “It lends itself to these narrow interpretations of individual conduct and individual decisionmaking, as opposed to thinking about the structural questions.” He sees a guide like the EthicalOS as an excellent first step in a series of “increasingly consequential steps” among tech companies.

Goldman also sees the EthicalOS as a first step to get start-ups thinking about future implications. She calls the guide “scaffolding”—a framework on which to build deeper, longer, and more serious conversations. Other industries, like medicine, have similar procedures in place to address ethics; in tech, many companies use similar guidebooks to address security, internationalization, accessibility, or user experience (like, how does someone navigate the first two screens of an app before they sign up for an account). “If you’re in product development, you’re used to having to run those playbooks to launch something,” says Cody Simms, a partner at TechStars. “I think Ethical OS can serve as a similar type of guide.”

Whether this kind of future-proofing can become standard in product development teams remains to be seen. But Goldman and Kumra say the interest from tech companies has never been higher. Silicon Valley is just starting its reckoning, and is looking for tools to do better.

“Everyone wants to do better, but we heard feedback when we were speaking to VCs and tech co-founders that they didn’t know how. They didn’t know what to do,” says Kumra. “Nothing can can change if you don’t have a simple set of tools to enable that change.”

A simple set of tools, then, could at least start the conversation—and make it harder for founders to use the standard dorm-room defense in the future.

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Unlikely Friends Found Huddling Together In The Wake Of Deadly Wildfire

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While battling the wildfire near the city of Redding, a crew from the Grass Valley Fire Department was surprised to find an odd pair of victims who’d somehow managed to persevere through the blaze together, forging a unique bond in the process.

Officials were in awe.

“In the doorway of a home, they found a cat and a chicken huddled together for safety and support,” the fire department wrote online. “The animals had survived one of the most destructive fires in memory, finding comfort in each other in the doorway of a home.”

Cat’s Inexplicable Love Of Peaches Is The Best Thing You’ll See All Day

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With summer well underway, farmers’ markets are full of amazing produce — and one cat couldn’t be more excited that it’s finally peach season.

It’s not that Ozzy wants to eat the juicy fruit. For the 5-year-old tabby, no bed can compare to a pile of fuzzy, ripe peaches. In fact, he even manages to find multiple uses for the downy fruit every time his family brings them home.

“He nuzzles them, uses them as a pillow to rest, or just stands over them guarding them,” Lydia Coutré, whose parents own Ozzy, told The Dodo. For years, the cat’s odd habits have delighted his human sisters, Lydia and Lorraine, to no end.

Why Facebook’s Thinning Profit Margins Are a Secret Asset

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Mark Zuckerberg & company surprised investors on two fronts last month, pushing Facebook shares down 20 percent and wiping out about $130 billion in market value. One was predictable, the other less so.

First, Facebook user growth is slowing, and the problem is unfixable: The company is quite literally running out of humans on the internet. At around 2.2 billion users at last count, there are nearly twice as many Facebook users as Catholics. Given that there are only about 3.5 billion humans on the internet, and many of those are behind the Chinese protectionist wall, Facebook has to either generate more humans (Facebook Dating!) or increase internet access (something it’s attempting via various means). This should come as no surprise to anyone who closely follows the company—I predicted as much in my memoir of working there, Chaos Monkeys—so only the un-smart money could have been spooked. But the reality does alter the company’s financial footing.

Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED. Previously he worked on Facebook’s early monetization team, where he headed its targeting efforts. His 2016 memoir, Chaos Monkeys, was a New York Times best seller and NPR Best Book of the Year.

Historically, Facebook has gained users at something like mid-teens percent per year. The math on revenue growth isn’t quite so simple, but directionally, revenue grows with eyeballs. So in some sense, Facebook was getting a bump to revenue “for free” just by increasing the number of Facebook eyeballs. That bump is fading and will soon be gone. Moreover, growth has plateaued in the areas where Facebook makes the most money per user, namely the US and Europe; future growth will be in lower-revenue developing countries that will take time to mature into profit centers.

As user growth slows, Facebook’s revenue will increase only if it can extract more money from existing users and their data, or create new revenue streams on relatively un-monetized services like WhatsApp (as it announced it will do next year). The company has shown itself able to squeeze more juice from the same user-base lemon in the past, but it’s a risk, and the market prices risk into your share price, often brutally.

The second item is more wonky, but arguably more important: Facebook warned that its operating profit margins will shrink. Operating margin is the difference between money coming in the door and what it costs to keep the trains running (known as operating expense, or “opex”). In an internet company, that’s mostly wages (high) and machines (low, but scaling with usage). In their quarterly call with analysts, Facebook executives said future operating margins would be in the mid-30 percent range, rather than the mid-40 percent range where they’ve been for years. By way of comparison, that’s still 10 percentage points better than Google, and still a gargantuan sum of money on $50 billion in annual revenue.

Margins will shrink as Facebook fields more people to police users and content, as the company has promised in response to the escalating scandals around the 2016 election, Russian meddling, Cambridge Analytica, and what to do about Alex Jones on its platform. Wall Street is reacting to the financial hit, not the public-relations concern, which has been in play for years now. Zuckerberg, whatever you might think of him, proved true to his earlier word that he’d put users and their privacy over profits. At huge corporate cost, he’s hiring an army of people to wrangle the various issues dogging the company. And Wall Street punished the company for it.

Should we be alarmed at Facebook’s future prospects?

The occasional blip around the censored photo of a nursing mother notwithstanding, Facebook is pretty good at content moderation, particularly given the scale at which it operates. I have some history here. In my previous life as a Facebook product manager, I once ran the Ad Review team that policed ads. Moderating content is harder; there are many more user posts than ads on Facebook. But both require scaling the limited and expensive efforts of human reviewers when confronted with malicious adversaries gaming your system.

As part of my unenviable duty in ad review, I presented the team’s results to Sheryl Sandberg each quarter. The key slide was the one that showed an increasing number of successfully reviewed ads with a flat employee headcount. That was an important metric at a company that is an engineering organization at heart, focused on driving ever-greater productivity. Now, that priority is gone, and Facebook is willing and able to buy as many humans as necessary, helpful when the corpus of content being reviewed is the immense firehose of News Feed.

Paradoxically, though, this tumult may have strengthened Facebook’s position and made it less likely to become the next MySpace.

Consider what it would take to challenge Facebook at its own game. It is said that an army marches on its stomach (though not by Napoleon, to whom it is often attributed). Well, a startup marches on its operating expense. Feeding that hungry opex depends on hitting usage milestones demanded by the VCs who are funding the enterprise. It also means driving growth by hyper-focusing on the user experience, at the expense of niceties like content moderation and user security. This is the strategy that Facebook and Twitter, and every other consumer internet app, followed until they were forced to do otherwise.

Now, the rules have changed. Either de jure via explicit regulation (in the case of Europe) or de facto in the case of user expectation inflamed by scandals, companies now must spend more to police content on their platforms, with the associated increase in opex and decline in operating margin. Beyond the cost, startups are not built to effectively moderate content, and they’ll naturally be unskilled at it. The task requires lots of expensive lawyers, well-run operational teams managed by veteran practitioners, skilled security professionals, and the like. This is not the natural makeup of an early-stage startup.

The result is that any proto-Zuck must now compete with the real Zuck not just on the usage battlefield but also on the content moderation and public relations battlefields as well. If even one “Napalm Girl” brouhaha is unacceptable, and any Alex Jones must be booted immediately, that makes the life of an aspiring Zuck much harder.

Much like Europe’s new privacy regime, which quickly caused some small publishers and startups to decamp from the EU and favored incumbents like Google and Facebook, regulation (almost) always benefits larger players, as they can best bear the costs. In the future, you will be less likely to see hate-filled rants in your News Feed, thanks to the recent outcries around content, and Facebook will be slightly less profitable. But you’re also more likely to be on Facebook and less likely to be anywhere else.

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Grieving Mother Orca Could Lose Another Family Member

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“J35’s incredible persistence in diving deep to retrieve the small body, even in the face of her weakening condition, speaks to her great emotional distress,” Barbara J. King, professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary and author of “How Animals Grieve,” told The Dodo last week.

“Tahlequah kept the body at the surface, supporting it on her head or holding it in her mouth. Orcas and other cetacean species have been observed carrying their dead, but rarely longer than a day,” Susan Casey wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “Tahlequah has been swimming with her daughter’s body through choppy seas for, as of Friday, 10 days and counting, on what social media observers and orca researchers call a ‘tour of grief.’ They’re right.”

Her plight has also highlighted the grave dangers facing the southern resident killer whales, who have struggling to survive for years due to environmental changes, like the damming of rivers that cut off their food source of Chinook salmon. The population previously suffered losses in the 1970s, when SeaWorld and other marine parks took a generation of baby orcas for display in captivity.

Facebook and YouTube Ban InfoWars but Invite New Headaches

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Early Monday morning, Apple pulled several podcasts associated with notorious conspiracy theorist and protein powder peddler Alex Jones from the iTunes store. The decision opened the floodgates to a wave of suspensions that continued throughout the day. First came Facebook, which said it unpublished four pages affiliated with Jones after receiving new reports over the weekend that videos on those pages violated Facebook’s policies on hate speech. Hours later, YouTube followed suit, suspending The Alex Jones Channel, which had more than 2.4 million subscribers as of Monday morning. According to YouTube, Jones had tried to circumvent the company’s prohibition on his livestreams, which was enacted after he received a punitive strike from the platform in July.

The sudden crackdown followed weeks of mounting questions being lobbed at both Facebook and YouTube about why, if they were really committed to eradicating hate speech and disinformation, they would allow someone like Jones to continue cultivating an audience on their platforms. But even critics of Jones and InfoWars, his right-wing media outlet, viewed Facebook and YouTube’s actions on Monday as reactive and self-interested, coming just hours after Apple’s announcement. At the same time, the companies played right into Jones’ hand, adding fuel to his paranoid claims that Silicon Valley and the mainstream media have launched a coordinated campaign to silence him.

The battle over InfoWars illustrates how what was once these tech giants’ greatest strength has become their greatest weakness. For years, Facebook and YouTube spent so much time defending anyone’s right to say almost anything on their platforms, they forgot to remind users that it wasn’t really a question of rights at all. Only the government can violate a person’s First Amendment rights, however wrong or hateful that person may be. As private companies, Facebook and YouTube were always free to restrict speech on their properties. And they have; nudity, for instance, is prohibited in most circumstances on both platforms. The problem is Facebook and YouTube framed themselves long ago as open, unbiased, and largely unregulated venues for all. That lack of oversight was Silicon Valley’s early advantage. These platforms gave anyone the ability to build a following by circumventing the traditional gatekeepers of the media industry.

For a while, that’s what made Facebook and YouTube great, until suddenly it wasn’t. These two giants became so unprecedentedly huge, so instrumental to people’s understanding of the news, so politicized, so siloed, it soon became clear that the logical conclusion of all that openness might not be so great after all. Over the past year, executives from both companies have been repeatedly dragged before Congress to answer for the hate and misinformation that festers on their platforms. In the process, tech companies have answered the call to more aggressively moderate the content their users post, reluctantly at first and with only the vaguest guidelines in place. But those guidelines have grown more granular over time. This year, Facebook made them public. And when it did, it became more than obvious that Jones had violated them many times over, often using dehumanizing language about Muslims, transgender people, and immigrants in his online rants. The question was never really whether Jones had violated Facebook’s policies—or YouTube’s, for that matter—but whether the companies would ever fully enforce those policies at the risk of breaking their promise of radical openness.

‘The question was never really whether Jones had violated Facebook’s policies—or YouTube’s, for that matter—but whether the companies would ever fully enforce those policies at the risk of breaking their promise of radical openness.’

Now that they have, both companies stand accused of censorship by Jones and his followers. And yet, if Disney, Fox, or Comcast opted not to air InfoWars, it’d be considered a programming decision. If News Corp didn’t give him a column in The Wall Street Journal, or if The New York Times didn’t publish his op-ed, it’d be considered editorial discretion. Facebook and YouTube are media giants, too, worth more than all of those other companies combined. But they’ve never wanted to admit it. They continue to refuse the characterization to their own detriment. It was their own mythology about being neutral, coupled with the opacity of their algorithms and moderation practices, that enabled people like Jones—and more than a few Republican members of Congress—to baselessly accuse the companies of secret censorship in the first place. Now that they actually have restricted Jones’ access, Facebook and YouTube have only given him more fodder to back up that particular conspiracy theory.

In a typically unhinged livestream on Periscope Monday afternoon, ironically titled “Alex Jones Responds To Being Banned From The Internet,” Jones cast the tech giants as being part of a vast conspiracy to suppress speech in the United States and Europe. He conflated Facebook and YouTube’s actions with news that Google, YouTube’s sister company, may soon develop a censored search engine for China. He falsely claimed that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was caught on a “hot mic” telling German chancellor Angela Merkel, “We’ll soon censor all the conservatives off the web.”

“I told you this was coming,” Jones said. “They finally dropped the hammer.”

When Facebook and YouTube decided to take more responsibility for what does and doesn’t belong on their platforms, they were never going to satisfy all sides. But their tortured deliberations over what to do with Jones left them with only two unenviable options: Leave him alone and tacitly defend his indefensible actions, or ban him from the world’s most powerful platforms and turn him into the odious martyr he now is.

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Google Android 9 Pie: The 5 Best New Features

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Google has just released the final version of its Android P software, which was first previewed at the company’s annual developer conference back in May. This also means that we’re finally learning what P stands for, after months of online debate. Popsicle? Pudding? Pumpkin pie? In keeping with Google‘s dessert-themed naming convention for its mobile OS, the new software is simply named Pie—although, as many will be quick to point out, not all pies are dessert pies.

Android Pie rolls out today to Google’s own Pixel phones. As for when the update will hit other Android phones, that’s a giant question mark as always.

Hold the half-baked jokes, because all in all, Android 9 Pie (its full name) appears to be pretty … sweet. It’s a significant update from the previous OS, Android Oreo. In many ways, the rollout of Android Pie is just a formality; the most recent beta release, Android P Beta 4, was really close to the final build. But if you haven’t been using the beta software (which you likely have not, as it’s intended for developers) and this is your first run-in with Android P-is-for-Pie, then you’re going to welcome the OS’s new navigation system, screen-time controls, battery optimization, and privacy tweaks.

Android Pie rolls out today to Google’s own Pixel phones. As for when the update will hit other Android phones, that’s a giant question mark as always. Google says devices that were a part of the developer preview program—those from Sony, Xiaomi, Oppo, OnePlus, Essential, and more—along with some Android One phones, will get the new software in the fall. Others will get the new OS sometime “this year.” Whenever Android Pie shows up on your phone, here are five new things to look for.

What a Lovely Gesture

In the new Android Pie, the familiar lineup of three navigation icons at the bottom of the phone has been replaced by a single pill-shaped icon in the bottom center of the screen. Long-press this digital button and Google Assistant pops up. Swipe up from it and it will bring you to the latest app you were using. From here you can scroll horizontally through all of your open apps. You can also swipe horizontally on the new icon itself to swipe through open apps. Swipe up from the icon again and it will bring you to your app drawer. Tap on it and it will bring you home.

One element of this users might find jarring: The permanent back button is gone, although it appears to the left of the pill-shaped icon once you jump into apps.

It’s all very reminiscent of the gesture-based navigation on the iPhone X, which doesn’t have a home button and forced Apple—and its users—to rethink phone navigation. While it takes some getting used to, this new feature-based navigation system does make the Android interface feel more fluid. If you hate it, though, you’re not stuck with it: You can go into settings and revert to the old button layout.

AI, But for Battery Life

Battery life optimization has been a big focus of Google’s past few OS updates, starting with Android 6.0 Marshmallow (with the introduction of Doze) all the way up to Android 8.0 Oreo (“Wise Limits”). Unfortunately, there were a fair number of complaints about severe battery drain with Oreo, particularly with Samsung phones. But Google has made continual improvements, and Android Pie has a new feature called “Adaptive Battery.” It applies machine learning to the problem of our ever-draining power cells.

Google says it collaborated with Alphabet’s DeepMind team in London to build this feature. It’s supposed to prioritize your favorite apps and put more limitations on the phone’s resources for the apps you use less frequently. Eventually, the tech is supposed to predict the apps you’re going to use over the next few hours, as well as the ones you’re not going to use, and then limit the battery for those unlikely-to-be-used apps. As with anything AI-related, results sometimes won’t show until the system has had the chance to “learn” your habits; since I’ve only been using the final version of Android 9 Pie for a couple of days, I don’t think I’ve experienced the benefits of this yet. But it’s something to keep an eye on.

If you’re concerned about privacy, and the idea of DeepMind having access to your smartphone activity creeps you out just a little bit, Google says that all of the machine learning is happening on the device itself and not in the cloud. Notably, it’s the first DeepMind technology to be applied on-device, and not in the cloud. (Similarly, Google’s tiny facial-recognition camera, Clips, uses on-device AI.)

I’ll Have a Small Slice

Usually when you search for an app on Android, the app icon itself comes up, as well as any other relevant results on the device or on the web. With Android Pie, Google is going to show you information that’s embedded within apps, offering you interactive app functionality from directly within search results. At a high level, Google says, it’s the company’s new approach to “remote content.”

One oft-used example is how photos show up in system searches. If you use your phone to search for a destination, like “Hawaii,” you won’t just get results for Hawaii’s time zone or Hawaii-bound flights. You will also see results from Google Photos from your Hawaiian vacation. It’s also good for navigation shortcuts; if you search for “data,” you’ll get all the web results you’d expect for “data,” but you’ll also have quick access to the mobile data tab within your phone’s settings. Google is fond of using Lyft as an example: Search results for “Lyft” will include estimates for times and fares for rides to work and home. This is similar in some ways to Siri Shortcuts on iOS, but instead of assigning a custom phrase to an app action, it’s just searching for that app and having the potential action pop up.

On Background

The idea that Facebook could be listening to our conversations through smartphone microphones is one of the most persistent, and still unproven, conspiracy theories on the web. Android Pie will make that theory even more dubious. The software update “restricts access to mic, camera, and all SensorManager sensors from apps that are idle,” the company said around the time that the new OS was first announced. This means that once the app switches to “background” status—you’re no longer using it—that app will lose access to your phone’s mic, and if an app tries to access your camera, an error message is generated. Given how invasive app permissions can feel, this is a welcome update.

Android Pie includes other new privacy features. Google has created a separate permissions category, called Call_Log, that requires developers to ask explicit permission to access users’ call logs, rather than lumping it all into a single “Phone” permissions group. And devs also now have to ask for permission before running a Wi-Fi scan (which allows an app to gather your location data). Android Pie also blocks HTTP connections by default and requests that apps use HTTPS connections instead. This is consistent with the recent switch to HTTPS made by Chrome on the desktop.

Give Me a Break

New tools are coming to Android to help you curb your phone use—or at least get a clearer picture of it.

Google

Google’s new “digital well-being” software is the only part of the Android Pie OS that will still be in beta for a while longer. This latest software release includes a sign-up flow where people can now enroll in the well-being beta, but again, these features will officially launch in the fall. Also: It will only work on Pixel phones to start.

So what’s digital well-being? If you missed the announcement on this back at I/O, it’s Google’s initiative around limiting the amount of time you spend mindlessly scrolling on your phone. It may seem counterintuitive for a company that makes a smartphone operating system (and smartphone hardware) to encourage people to put their handsets down, but it’s all part of a larger (yet unproven) trend; Apple and Facebook have also launched efforts that mirror some of the tenets of the Time Well Spent movement.

On Android Pie, this means you can go into settings and see a dashboard that tells you how much time you’ve been on your phone today, and what apps and services are the biggest time-suckers. You’ll know how many times you’ve unlocked your phone each day and how many notifications you’ve received. (For example, as of Sunday afternoon I had only unlocked my tester Pixel 2 XL phone 12 times, which I was feeling … oddly proud of?) You can set timers on apps and establish parameters for when you’d like the phone to switch to a gray-scale screen, or drop into Do Not Disturb mode.

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My Two-Week Edible-Insect Feast

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The insects appeared at my Chicago doorstep in swarms. Crickets, grasshoppers, locusts, mealworms, ants—all of them dead on arrival, entombed in resealable bags and glass jars. Before long, my apartment was overrun with bugs, and soon all of my meals would be too. I had summoned this infestation, ranging from whole dried insects to bug-based chips, granola, and protein bars, for the greater good. These are the spoils of an oft-touted emerging sector of the US food industry, projected by some market researchers to be worth $126 million by 2023 and repeatedly proposed as a solution to our impending global food crisis: edible insects.

Though 2 billion people around the globe dine on more than 1,900 edible bug species, the fare only trickled into the Western world in the late aughts through a subset of early adopters: doomsday preppers, hardcore Paleo dieters, protein-loading endurance athletes. Now, renowned restaurants such as Noma in Copenhagen, D.O.M. in São Paulo, and Mi Tocaya Antojería in Chicago have introduced bugs on their menus. When toasted grasshoppers were offered by the cupful at Seattle Mariners games last season, fans swallowed approximately 18,000 critters in three games, leading the ballpark to set a per-game order limit. Kroger, the nation’s largest supermarket chain, recently inked a distribution deal with Chirps, maker of cricket-flour chips.

Entomophagy—the consumption of insects—has progressed from a Fear Factor novelty to a business opportunity. The largest American purveyor, Aspire Food Group, has raised $18 million to date; this March it acquired Exo, a maker of cricket protein bars, becoming an edible-insect megabrand. ­Arielle Zuckerberg (sister of Facebook’s Zuck) has invested in at least two grub startups: Tiny Farms cricket farm in San Leandro, California, and Bitty Foods, a San Francisco–­based maker of cricket products. On Shark Tank, Mark Cuban offered $50,000 to Chapul’s cricket protein bars and $100,000 to Chirps’ chips.

So for two weeks, I resolved to forgo meat in favor of a diet rich in insect protein. My sustenance arrived from nearly a dozen edible-­bug artisans in Austin, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, New York, Denver, and beyond.

I piled all my insectibles in a green tote my wife dubbed the Bug Bag. As I surveyed the cornucopia, I felt my stomach churn. While the edible-insect market is growing, there remains a critical hurdle to mainstream bug bingeing: the ick factor. My only previous insect-eating experience—choking down a live Madagascar hissing cockroach for a moronic amusement park promotion as a twentysomething—had been traumatizing. For guidance, I called up the “Bug Chef,” David George Gordon, whose Eat-A-Bug Cookbook, published in 1998, presaged the trend. He suggested starting with something that appears familiar—say, tempura-battered mealworms, which have the look and mouthfeel of Cheetos—before scaling up to whole grasshoppers and locusts.

Following Gordon’s advice to start slow, I tore open a bag of cricket protein powder. The crickets are frozen into a lethal hibernation, washed, roasted, and turned into a fine flour that can be incorporated into everything from granola to pasta. I blended a scoop into a kale-banana smoothie, shut my eyes, and took a sip. To my surprise, the only difference from my usual morning shake was a pleasant, earthy base note. Encouraged, I turned to Chapul cricket protein bars in flavors such as coconut-ginger and peanut butter and chocolate; both were more palatable than a Clif Bar. Confidence mounting, I dumped a handful of Aketta’s Texas BBQ-flavored roasted crickets into my palm. I took a long look at their flavor-blasted bodies and beady black eyes, pinched one by the head, and dropped it into my mouth. It tasted like a corn nut.

By the end of the first week, I had fallen into a comfortable routine. I sprinkled cricket-­flour granola on top of Greek yogurt and snacked on “nutty chocolate chip” cricket bites. At night, I sautéed Oaxacan adobo-­flavored grasshoppers and mealworms into a leggy stir fry. The grasshoppers added a smoky heat and nice crunch. I heaped lemony Chinese black ants on salads and sprinkled them onto pizza as I would red pepper flakes.

My gag reflex was dwindling, for sure, but I was also grateful that I work from home, away from the queasy stomachs of other humans. A rice cake topped with hummus and dehydrated locusts may make a filling lunch, but it looks like a nightmare on toast. One night, as I splurped cricket tagliatelle with mealworm bolognese, my wife finally lost her cool. Watching me sauté insects in our kitchen while she made her own dinner, she declared, made her want to retch.

I sought support online. On the entomophagy subreddit, users posted recipes and questions about DIY-bug-farming dilemmas. On the podcast Ento Nation, an insect farmer known only as the Cricket Man interviewed bug chefs and edible-­insect “entopreneurs.” Scrolling the hashtag #entomophagy on Twitter and Instagram, I found a proud subculture of insect evangelists.

At the end of my two weeks, I whipped up a batch of cricket-powder pancakes. As I ate, I considered the silliness of my initial unease. If we’re willing to sink our teeth into lab-grown meat and plant-based burgers that magically bleed, maybe old-­fashioned, all-natural bugs aren’t such a stretch. Then I came across this stat: Pigs produce as much as 100 times more greenhouse gases per kilogram than mealworms. That—and some crafty recipes—made them a whole lot easier to swallow.

Food Styling by Lucy-Ruth Hathaway; Set Design by Georgia Cavanagh

This article appears in the August issue. Subscribe now.

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