Designers and engineers labour to create artificial noises that make life easier whether by generating atmosphere or making you feel more secure. (…)

To produce the ideal clunk, car doors are designed to minimise the amount of high frequencies produced (we associate them with fragility and weakness) and emphasise low, bass-heavy frequencies that suggest solidity. The effect is achieved in a range of different ways – car companies have piled up hundreds of patents on the subject – but usually involves some form of dampener fitted in the door cavity. Locking mechanisms are also tailored to produce the right sort of click and the way seals make contact is precisely controlled. (…)

The EU is still in the process of drafting a law which will require electric vehicle makers to have a signature sound with a minimum volume to make sure other road users can hear the otherwise silent machines whizzing towards them. (…)

While some US sports teams use artificial crowd noise to unsettle the opposition, lots of venues use it as a handy way to help amp up the atmosphere and encourage the real spectators to join in. (…)

Lots of modern telephone systems as well as software like Skype employ noise reduction techniques. Unfortunately, that can result in total silence at quiet points in a conversation and leave you wondering if the call has stopped entirely. To fill those lulls, the software adds artificial noise at a barely audible volume.

{ Humans Invent | Continue reading }

As Zadie Smith argued in a recent New York Review of Books article, Facebook’s private-in-public mode of operation traps us:

It feels important to remind ourselves, at this point, that Facebook, our new beloved interface with reality, was designed by a Harvard sophomore with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations. What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a “life”? (Prove it. Post pictures.)

The juvenile mentality built in the medium pushes us to broadcast our private lives and expect that the details we share will be obsessively dissected. We sense, more or less consciously, that with the capability to broadcast our lives comes an obligation to be entertaining. (…)

Thanks to social media, we are no longer obliged to disguise our voyeuristic impulses. Voyeurism has been culturally legitimized. We can turn to the real events of our lives as we have retold them and to the reactions they have prompted. On the internet, our personal lives have become our television shows.

{ The New Inquiry | Continue reading }

related { Facebook Lost Nearly 6 Million Users in U.S. in May }

The exceptional thing about Apple is not that it’s the most valuable consumer-facing brand in the world, that it has a market cap larger than Microsoft, or that its stock performance over the past decade bested Google. No, what’s different about Apple is that for a really long time—more than 20 of the 33 years it has been on this earth—it was a niche player. (…)

For the first two-thirds of their existence on this planet, no mammal ever got much bigger or more ambitious than a modern-day rodent. They were niche players. For about 135 of the 200 million years they have existed, mammals lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs that had a death grip on all the available ecological niches in the tech ecosystem—mostly Microsoft—kept out other players through competitive exclusion. Competitive exclusion means, basically, that if someone’s already really good at being, for example, the top predator, there’s no room for anyone else to come in and assume that mantle.

Then something crazy happened—an asteroid strike, some climate change—and the dinosaurs, the largest creatures ever to walk the earth, were wiped out. In this analogy, it was the Internet, or the early days of the post-PC transition (e.g., the iPod) that eroded the lead of Microsoft. Of course, Microsoft is still with us, and this transition is far from complete—even the dinosaurs weren’t wiped out overnight, and plenty of their relatives are still with us today.

After that extinction event, all the advantages that Apple—and mammals—already possessed were suddenly useful. A high metabolism, good design, live birth, devices that “just work.” These things were present all along, but they were meaningless as long as something bigger and stronger was present to prevent a growth in the market share of Apple, or an expansion of the niches occupied by mammals.

Taken together, these forces explain how it’s possible that a company, or an entire class of animals, could spend so much time humming along in a tiny niche, and then achieve “overnight” success by deploying traits they had been developing all along.

{ Christopher Mims/Technology Review | Continue reading | Read more: How the Rise of Google’s Chromebook Is Like the Rise of Multicellular Life | And: The first commercial deployment of SPDY (vs HTTP), a protocol designed by Google to make websites faster, launched last week. }

photo { Jesse Chehak }

Cramer’s company, HyperStealth Biotechnology Corporation… (…)

Over the past 10 years, Cramer, 43, has created more than 8,000 unique camouflage patterns. Ultimately none may have more influence than his most recent design. In April, the United States Army issued a request for proposals for a new family of camouflage patterns to replace the Universal Camouflage Pattern design that’s been the Army’s general-issue print since 2004. Cramer is expected to be among the top contenders for the contract to create a family of patterns and palettes that can function nearly anywhere in the world. (…)

The next half-step breakthrough in concealment might well be something called “adaptive camouflage.” “We’re working on materials that can change their color, shape, and brightness, depending on the surrounding environment.”

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

photo { Todd Fisher }

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

image { via Create Build Destroy | Thanks Cole! }

In 1846, an Irish immigrant named Alexander Turney Stewart opened a store in New York City unlike any that Americans had seen before. Located downtown, on the east side of Broadway, what became known as the Marble Dry Goods Palace was a huge emporium that offered luxury and everyday items alike. Stewart’s innovations as a retailer were numerous: He introduced what are believed to have been the first in-store fashion shows in America. He lavishly appointed his interiors, in striking contrast to the merely functional look of shops up to that point. And he was the first in the nation to use the street-level plate-glass windows as a display for merchandise.

Then there was A. T. Stewart’s most important innovation: His products came with price tags. At that time, in most stores, prices were set by haggling. The result was a frustrating dance between customer and salesperson, who parried back and forth until they managed to arrive at (in the words of one retail historian) “a price which neither party to the transaction considered robbery.” Stewart saw that this experience left buyers feeling taken advantage of, and it encouraged salespeople to squeeze the most from every transaction rather than build long-term relationships with customers. So he marked each product with a fixed price.

Customers embraced the new “no haggling” policy, and the Marble Palace became an enormous success. Sixteen years after the store’s debut, Stewart opened an even bigger one, the Cast Iron Palace at Broadway and 10th Street, which occupied a full city block and at the time was reputedly the largest retail establishment in the world. Stewart’s success—and his idea—did not go unnoticed by other merchants, and soon a plethora of other large stores, from Gimbels to Macy’s to Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, abandoned haggling and adopted fixed prices. Within a generation, the price tag became ubiquitous; by the late 19th century, fixed prices seemed inseparable from the retail experience.

Almost a century and a half after Stewart’s innovation, a man named Pierre Omidyar opened another store unlike any that Americans had seen before: eBay.

{ Who Killed the Internet Auction? | Wired | Continue reading }

{ Thanks Glenn! }

The Diaspora guys, four college kids turned chief engineers of the most-talked-about social networking start-up this year… (…)

Journalists and bloggers have called Diaspora “the Facebook killer,” “the Facebook rival,” “the anti-Facebook” (…)

The guys insist, they’re not aiming to replace Facebook with “yet another social network.” Rather, they’re taking a stab at reengineering the way online socializing works by building an entire network of networks from the ground up. They hope that in the process they will help promote standards that other social sites—such as Digg, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, and perhaps one day even Facebook—will use to bridge their services. They imagine that during the next decade, the Web will evolve from a sea of social networking islands into what many developers are calling the federated social Web—one that lets you choose your networking provider, just as you now choose your e-mail provider, and yet still connect with friends who use other services.

{ IEEE | Continue reading }

image { Mernet Larsen }

Can iMessages free the iPhone from the carriers once and for all?

iMessages is the one that may have the largest effect on the future of the iPhone and iPod touch. Although it is largely being referred to as a ‘BBM competitor’, iMessages is better compared to a full IM client that happens to live inside your standard Messages app.

iMessages also sets the stage for Apple to apply a, carrier-agnostic, iPad data pricing model to the iPod touch and eventually, the iPhone.

The choice to blend the iMessages functionality into Messages, rather than keep it as a standalone app seems at first to be Apple adhering to its ‘simpler is better’ tenets. Why include another whole app when you can simply toggle on an option and have it available to users right in the app they already use?

But if you step back from the issue and look at the inclusion of iMessages into the standard app people use to SMS, a picture starts to emerge that Apple is making a statement to the carriers with this feature.

{ The Next Web | Continue reading }

related { iMessage, Skype, Google Voice, and the death of the phone number | Four core takeaways from Apple’s WWDC keynote }

What goes on in stock markets appears quite different when viewed on different timescales. Look at a whole day’s trading, and market participants can usually tell you a plausible story about how the arrival of news has changed traders’ perceptions of the prospects for a company or the entire economy and pushed share prices up or down. Look at trading activity on a scale of milliseconds, however, and things seem quite different.

When two American financial economists, Joel Hasbrouck and Gideon Saar, did this a couple of years ago, they found strange periodicities and spasms. The most striking periodicity involves large peaks of activity separated by almost exactly 1000 milliseconds: they occur 10-30 milliseconds after the ‘tick’ of each second. The spasms, in contrast, seem to be governed not directly by clock time but by an event: the execution of a buy or sell order, the cancellation of an order, or the arrival of a new order. Average activity levels in the first millisecond after such an event are around 300 times higher than normal. There are lengthy periods – lengthy, that’s to say, on a scale measured in milliseconds – in which little or nothing happens, punctuated by spasms of thousands of orders for a corporation’s shares and cancellations of orders. These spasms seem to begin abruptly, last a minute or two, then end just as abruptly.

Little of this has to do directly with human action. None of us can react to an event in a millisecond: the fastest we can achieve is around 140 milliseconds, and that’s only for the simplest stimulus, a sudden sound. The periodicities and spasms found by Hasbrouck and Saar are the traces of an epochal shift.

As recently as 20 years ago, the heart of most financial markets was a trading floor on which human beings did deals with each other face to face. (…) The deals that used to be struck on trading floors now take place via ‘matching engines’, computer systems that process buy and sell orders and execute a trade if they find a buy order and a sell order that match. The matching engines of the New York Stock Exchange, for example, aren’t in the exchange’s century-old Broad Street headquarters with its Corinthian columns and sculptures, but in a giant new 400,000-square-foot plain-brick data centre in Mahwah, New Jersey, 30 miles from downtown Manhattan. Nobody minds you taking photos of the Broad Street building’s striking neoclassical façade, but try photographing the Mahwah data centre and you’ll find the police quickly taking an interest: it’s classed as part of the critical infrastructure of the United States.

{ London Review of Books | Continue reading }

In May 1846, a year and a half before gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, several extended families and quite a few unattached males headed with their caravans from Illinois to California. Due to poor organization, some bad advice, and a huge dose of bad luck, by November the group had foundered in the deep snows of the Sierra Nevada. They came to a halt at what is now known as Donner Pass, and, in an iconic if unpleasant moment in California’s history, they sat out winter in makeshift tents buried in snow, the group dwindling as survivors resorted to cannibalism to avert starvation.

From an evolutionary point of view, what makes the story interesting is not the cannibalism — which, in the annals of anthropology, is relatively banal — but who survived and who did not. Of the 87 pioneers, only 46 came over the pass alive in February and March of the next year. Their story, then, represents a case study of what might be termed catastrophic natural selection. It turns out that, contrary to lay Darwinist expectations, it was not the virile young but those who were embedded in families who had the best odds of survival. The unattached young men, presumably fuller of vigor and capable of withstanding more physical hardship than the others, fared worst, worse even than the older folk and the children. (…)

We are the descendants of those who had a competitive edge. The intricacies of intra-species cooperation (which can itself be exquisitely competitive) — of managing family and other ties — are a large part of the game. Indeed, they may be the largest part of the game in fostering survival, in nurturing the young, and in allowing us to out-compete other primates. This is where not only kin networks but social networks enter the picture.

Our big brains — in particular our species’ inordinately large neocortex — evolved, Dunbar argues, in lockstep with our ability to manage increasingly large social groups: to read motives, to keep track of who is doing what with whom, of who is a reliable sharer, who a likely freeloader, and so on. Many evolutionary biologists have made this point over the years, of course. Where Dunbar is unique is in having assigned a definite number to what constitutes a stable human group or community. The “Dunbar’s number” of his title is (drum roll…) 150. Extrapolating from the estimated size of Neolithic villages, of Amish and other communities, of companies in most armies, and other such data, Dunbar argues that this number is, more or less, the limit of stable social networks because it represents the limit, more or less, of our cognitive capacities.

The number is highly debatable, but it turns out that, Facebook aside, the average person has about 150 friends — people he or she might actually recognize and be recognized by at a random airport, 150 people he or she might feel comfortable borrowing five dollars from. As for how many friends we have evolved to “need” in a more intimate sense, that is a different matter. According to Dunbar, most of us have, on average, about 3-5 intimate friends whom we speak to at least weekly, and about 10-15 more friends whose deaths would greatly distress us.

{ LA Review of Books | Continue reading | previously }

The Internet has long promised a more efficient and greener world. We save on paper and mailing by sending an email. We can telecommute instead of driving to work. We can have a meeting by teleconference instead of flying to another city.

Ironically, despite the web’s green promise, this explosion of data has turned the Internet into one of the planet’s fastest-growing sources of carbon emissions. The Internet now consumes two to three per cent of the world’s electricity.

{ The Vancouver Sun | Continue reading }

Why Groupon is Worth $25 Billion

Admittedly, Groupon is a work in progress. They continue to spend insane amounts of money to acquire customers and merchants to try to extend their dual-sided network effect with consumers and merchants. Many people see this as unsustainable, some adamant it’s all just a Ponzi scheme. 

But these naysayers who are fixated on the current “daily deal” economics as long-term unsustainable are completely missing the point. The real innovation Groupon brought to the table wasn’t in advertising deals per se, it was their ability to profit off of closing the attribution loop in online-to-offline commerce. And this is a huge land grab that others had completely missed. 

Google never had success (monetarily) with online to offline search, because you can’t go to a search box and carry that discovery process to your offline environment. Yes, you can absolutely use a search query to find a place to go, but when you get there no one knows that you found it on Google.

{ Steve Cheney | Continue reading }

{ In June 1998, the market capitalization of Microsoft + Intel was worth $339 billion, vs. $3.5 billion for Apple. | WolframAlpha via Barry Ritholtz }

follow-up:

We speculate that mobile phones negatively affect sperm quality in men and may impair male fertility. Men with poor sperm quality planning for pregnancy should be advised not to use cell phone extensively.

{ Neurotic Physiology | Continue reading }

Do mobile phones cause cancer?

The International Agency for Research into Cancer (IARC), which is part of the World Health Organisation, convened a panel of 31 experts to look at the available evidence. Their verdict: “radiofrequency electromagnetic fields” – the sort given off by mobile phones – belong to “Group 2B”, which means that they “possibly” cause cancer in humans.

{ Cancer Research UK | Continue reading }

{ 1. Image of a tree with a steganographically hidden image. The hidden image is revealed by removing all but the two least significant bits of each color component and a subsequent normalization. | 2. Image of a cat extracted from the tree image. | Wikipedia | full article }

The number of people we can truly be friends with is constant, regardless of social networking services like Twitter, according to a new study of the network.

Back in early 90s, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar began studying the social groups of various kinds of primates. Before long, he noticed something odd.

Primates tend to maintain social contact with a limited number of individuals within their group. But here’s the thing: primates with bigger brains tended to have a bigger circle of friends. Dunbar reasoned that this was because the number of individuals a primate could track was limited by brain volume.

Then he did something interesting. He plotted brain size against number of contacts and extrapolated to see how many friends a human ought to be able to handle. The number turned out to be about 150.

Since then, various studies have actually measured the number of people an individual can maintain regular contact with. These all show that Dunbar was just about spot on (although there is a fair spread in the results).

What’s more, this number appears to have been constant throughout human history–from the size of neolithic villages to military units to 20th century contact books.

But in the last decade or so, social networking technology has had a profound influence on the way people connect. Twitter, for example, vastly increases the ease with which we can communicate with and follow others. It’s not uncommon for tweeters to follow and be followed by thousands of others.

So it’s easy to imagine that social networking technology finally allows humans to surpass the Dunbar number. Not so say Bruno Goncalves and buddies at Indiana University.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

related { What Do People Actually Tweet About? }

photo { Isaac McKay-Randozz }

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ Craigslist’s traffic seems to be plateau-ing. Why? This graphic by VC Andrew Parker shows why. Could the same thing happen to Facebook? | Business Insider | full story }