Content Curated By Darin R. McClure & a few photos

TED: Jessica Green: Good germs make healthy buildings – Jessica Green (2013): Our bodies and homes are covered in microbes — some good for us, some bad for us, and some just along for the ride. As we learn more about the germs and microbes who share our living spaces, TED Fellow Jessica Green asks: Can we design buildings that encourage happy, healthy microbial environments?

NASA to Launch 13,000 Square Foot Kapton Solar Sail in 2014:

Navigating space isn’t easy—there’s no air, water, or earth to push your spacecraft in another direction. Rocket fuels and gravity assist have been our best tools for over fifty years. But in 2014, NASA hopes to launch a 13,000 square foot solar sail—the third to hit space and by far the biggest yet. It’s no warp drive, but solar sailing could send satellites into novel orbits or even to another star.
The sci-fi inspired mission, Sunjammer, is named after Arthur C. Clarke’s 1964 tale of sun-yacht races through the solar system and will carry the ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and his wife Majel Barrett Roddenberry to the mission’s destination, a gravitationally balanced orbit between the Earth and Sun (L1). See here for a video on the mission from NASA’s private partner, L‘Garde:

Sunjammer’s sail is a third of an acre, about 124 feet to a side, and seven times the size of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Planetary Society’s solar sail IKAROS, the biggest sail successfully launched to date.
After deployment, the solar sail’s reflective surface will harvest momentum from sunlight—not unlike an ocean-going ship, only using photons instead of air.
The sail’s pulling power is proportional to its collecting surface area and drops off by the inverse square of its distance from the sun. To maximize the thrust-to-weight ratio, NASA and L‘Garde fabricated a five micron thick (about the thickness of a red blood cell), 70 pound sail from DuPont’s thin film, Kapton. Stowed for launch, the sail fits in a space the size of a dishwasher.
However, even though the sail is ultra-thin and light, its pushing power won’t be much to sniff at. NASA expects Sunjammer to yield no more than 0.01 newtons of thrust—the equivalent of “a ‘pink packet’ of artificial sweetener.”

Sunjammer solar sail under construction.

It’s not thrust over the short term that matters for solar sails; it’s the aggregate acceleration over time—long after conventional rockets run out of fuel. The power of sunlight is such that NASA engineers have to compensate for solar pressure when calculating trajectories.
And as an old NASA report on solar sails notes, a hypothetical solar sail launched near the sun in 2010 would gather enough speed to overtake Voyager by 2018, “going as far in eight years as Voyager will have journeyed in 41 years.” Some theorists dream we could further accelerate such a craft with a powerful laser—perhaps achieving velocities 1/10 the speed of light.
But such technology is yet far in the future. In the near term, solar sails will be more useful closer to home.
“It will be us flying to a place that a customer actually wants to fly a solar sail to,” Nathan Barnes, Chief Operating Office at L‘Garde told Space.com. “There are neat, clever, exotic orbits you can do with the solar sail that would permit viewing different portions of the sun that we can’t normally.”
Specifically, Barnes is referring to NOAA’s solar weather warning satellite (ACE) currently placed at L1 (where the Earth and Sun’s gravity cancels). ACE gives scientists about an hour advance warning of incoming solar weather. A warning system equipped with a solar sail could offset gravity with solar pressure and create a “psuedo Lagrange point” closer to the sun than L1—thus improving on how quickly storms are detected.
Solar sails could also be used to clear defunct satellites from orbit by slowing them down to burn up in the atmosphere. Or they could propel missions to multiple near-Earth asteroids instead of just one.
First, Sunjammer needs to successfully prove the technology. A key moment will be when the spacecraft unfurls its sail. NASA’s previous solar sail demonstration, NanoSail-D, spent a “month and a half stuck inside its mothership. Inexplicably, the glitch eventually solved itself and the sail sprang free. But the incident highlights how touchy the procedure can be. For the sake of future solar sail missions—and Star Trek fans everywhere—we hope Sunjammer opens without a hitch.
Image Credit: NASA, L’Garde

Barack the Unmerciful:

Your Papers, Please: Man Deals with “Immigration Checkpoint” 350 Miles Away from Border:
Your federal dollars at work: A Homeland Security/ICE checkpoint apparently checking passers-by for proof of United States citizenship. As the fellow in this video points out, that is more than likely a pretense to snoop for drugs. Remember the magic phrase: “Am I being detained? Am I free to go?” Oh! Also remember to have a camera and witnesses. DISCLAIMER:  This is not to be construed as legal advice, and your own your own success implementing this strategy may – and probably will – depend on your gender, ethnicity and the color of your skin. Exercising your rights may result in side effects up to and including: Ass-beatings by thugs with badges, indefinite detentions, trumped-up charges, placement on watch lists and even death.

A Deeper Look at Autosuggest:
Autosuggest enables people to select a query from a pull-down menu of suggestions when they start typing a query. You often find the query you want in the menu and select it, saving you extra keystrokes while reducing a chance of misspelling. It is a feature that people may take for granted but upon examination it involves a tremendous amount of technical sophistication and computational horsepower. In this blog Antonio Gulli who is our development manager for Autosuggest discusses how we implement the feature focusing on a new Autosuggest advancement we recently shipped called “Ghosting” which further optimizes the user experience.
- Dr. Harry Shum, Corporate Vice President, Bing R&D
As we’ve all experienced, sometimes search can be a hit-or-miss experience. You enter a query, scan through the results and refine your search until you find what you’re looking for. Autosuggest attempts to accelerate the process by providing a list of suggestions as soon as you start typing. Let’s look at the following example:

In a previous post, we highlighted how Ghosting in Autosuggest lets you get more done in less time.  In this follow up, we would like to shed some light on the algorithms used to complete your query once Bing has confidence in the intent of your search.
Let’s consider the above example where someone begins typing the query prefix {american}. In this case, the intent is not yet clear. You could be searching for American Express because you need a new credit card, American Idol because you’re a fan of the show or American Girl because you’re looking to buy your daughter a birthday present. At this point, you can either pick one of the provided suggestions or continue to type a different word not yet captured by our suggestions. In order to provide these suggestions our search algorithms analyze billions of search queries and optimize the list based on multiple objective factors including how often people have searched with the prefix {e.g. american}. Now, observe the evolution of the suggestions when someone adds an additional letter. Immediately, our algorithms update the list of suggestions offering a refined selection.

If you type one more letter and the query is {american ai} the dominant intent becomes clear. Instead of picking one selection from the list by either clicking on the mouse or by using the keyboard cursor arrows, our algorithms immediately complete the query prefix with the most likely result to complete that task, in this case {american airlines}.

At first glance, the gains might seem negligible. But for Bing, where we consider speed and relevance to be paramount the gains are significant. Indeed, Ghosting increases the searching speed by 16% by reducing clicks and letters typed.
How do our algorithms identify the dominant intent? The key insight centers around previous queries that can be grouped into multiple topics with each topic representing a different search need.  This algorithmic grouping occurs in the space of milliseconds between keystrokes.
Let’s look at another example where our algorithmic grouping can identify {lindsay lohan} as a truly dominant search intent for all the query prefixes beginning with {linds}. In this case, Bing takes into account all the past searches related to the name {lindsay lohan} which are more frequent than searches related to {lindsey vonn}. In this way, we speed up the search experience by completing the query and eliminating the need for you to use the mouse or keyboard cursor arrows.

How quickly are we able to predict truly dominant intent? Our algorithms are fueled by the millions of people who use our service every day so if you just type {f}, we know the majority of people on Bing are trying to get to Facebook so we “Ghost” the rest of the word. No surprise there.

Now let’s take a look behind the scenes at how we make all of this happen.
At Bing, we maintain a data structure commonly named in computer science as trie, which stores the millions of searches entered every day. A trie (short for retrieval) is a specialized data structure where all descendants of a node have a common prefix of the query associated with that node, and the root of the tree is associated with an empty symbol. Make sense?
Let’s illustrate with an example to clarify the definition. Below, you have a tree where the root node (top circle) is empty and you see edges departing from the root node. Each edge is labelled with a letter of the alphabet (for the sake of simplicity only the initial tree letters are represented). The root node represents the first letter that you are typing in the search box. In the case of “amex” that of course would be “a.” So we start with the letter “a” and continue as the letter “m” and then to the letter “e” and the letter “x” are typed. While this is happening we are looking at all of the myriad combinations of “ame” and trying to discern the most likely combination of letters to follow. Using this method, we are able to access the word “amex” previously stored in the trie. This time, let’s walk down the path of “ame” again but this time let’s follow the letter “r” and then “i”, “c”, “a” to access the word “america”.
Why do we take this approach? Well, the word “amex” and the word “america” share the prefix “ame” which is stored only once in our data structure. With this approach, we have an efficient way to assess the intent of your search based on the similarities of words. Keep in mind, that we perform this every time you type a letter. Storing common prefixes only once allows us to be very fast in retrieving the suggestions. Why is efficiency so important? We need to be efficient so we can quickly process several billion searches in the time it takes you to type another letter. Every millisecond counts.

That’s not all. In addition to processing suggestions, we are also running parallel algorithms that filter spam, detect adult or offensive content, check for spelling errors and classify the type of search you are attempting across categories.
Currently, we have a platform with multiple data layers. If a query suddenly becomes popular it will be inserted in our trie data structure within 5-15 minutes. Similarly, a query may already be in our trie but its dominance may change. For example, Lindsey Vonn has been in the news recently, and once we identify her as freshly topical, {lindsay lohan} may no longer be the dominant intent for {linds} as we outlined above.
Finally, ranking is also a critical component of Autosuggest. As soon as you begin to type we need to provide relevant suggestions. In a few milliseconds we evaluate how fresh the suggestions are, how many users have submitted them, how many times the suggestions have been selected in the past alongside over several hundred additional ranking signals.
We’re constantly looking for ways to make search faster and more relevant at Bing. Hopefully you found this interesting.
- Dr. Antonio Gulli, Principal Development Manager, Bing R&D

How America Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gays:

Over at the wonderfully-named Iranian Redneck blog,
Darren Sherkat
highlights some fascinating data from the
General Social Survey. The chart covers public opinion from
1973 through 2012. The blue bar represents people who describe
“homosexual sex relations” as “always wrong”; the red bar shows the
people who say such relations are “not wrong at all.”

The image pretty much speaks for itself. Note that the turning
point comes in the early 1990s. The
comment thread is open for speculations about why the
floodgates would open at that particular time. Bear in mind that
politics and pop culture tend to follow trends rather than setting
them, though they can reinforce a trend once it’s already
underway.

An Open Letter To Photographers, From A Model: UK-based conceptual fine art and fashion model Jen Brook has written an open letter to new photographers about shooting models.

In her letter entitled ‘Dear Photographer… Kindest regards, Model xxx’, she takes the perspective of the subject and gives tips on how to conduct them, communicate with them (note: do not be a perv) and, in general, working with them.

Take a look at the letter below or head over to Brook’s Tumblr.

[via Jen Brook]

Chrome Experiment Turns Any Website Into A 3D Maze That You Can Play In: [Click here to view the video in this article]

Google Japan has created an amazing Chrome Experiment that turns your favorite website into a 3D maze that you can play in.

Called ‘Chrome World Wide Maze’, it lets you use your mobile device as a controller to navigate a ball in a virtual maze on your computer.

To start, simply connect Chrome on your mobile to Chrome on your computer and select your favorite website to play in.

It will automatically turn the website into a 3D maze, complete with obstacles for you to get past.

The aim is to navigate through the maze and head towards the goal, while collecting as many points as possible within the given time limit.

To start wasting some time, click here.

Click to watch the video below:

[via Chrome World Wide Maze]

Foursquare Checks Into New Headquarters In SoHo, NYC:

Foursquare checked into its new office in SoHo, New York not too long ago.

The headquarters of the social networking company occupies two floors of 28,000 feet each in Cooper Square, 568 Broadway.

The lush indoors was designed with the help of Audra Canfield of Designer Fluff, and features references to the company, with badges for each conference room, and a geolocation pin coffee table.

Each conference room is decorated based on different themes—the camera badge room has lots of cameras on the shelves.

Besides the workspace, cafeteria (#FatDenny) and lounges, the fun environment also offers sports and recreational rooms with foosball, ping pong tables, and shuffle boards.

Bike-parking is also made available, for its employees to ‘check-in’ their bicycles.

[via Design Milk]

All Too Present: An Interview with Doug Rushkoff:

If we insist on defining people by their occupation, then Doug Rushkoff is a very hard man to define. He is or has been a media theorist, lecturer, columnist, blogger, novelist, graphic novelist, documentarian, college professor, musician, activist and philosopher. His work has shaped the way we talk and think about technology and media (he coined the terms viral media, social currency and digital native, among others). But unlike your Zuckerbergs, Jobs, Pages or Gates, Rushkoff has done so from outside of corporate power, on the strength of his theories rather than the sale of his products.
Rushkoff’s latest book, Present Shock, takes on a major philosophical question: how has technology changed our perceptions of time, and how have such shifts changed our culutre? In particular, he traces how the titular concept, ‘Present Shock’—a sort of mass-psychological overload emerging from the huge amount of instanteous information and experience provided by digital technologies—plays out in our personal lives, political and institutional experiences and business practices. The book provides a powerful critique of the ways technology has enabled us to live too excessively and obsessively in the now, rather than actually experience the present. He also offers models throughout the book of positive changes and responses emerging from what he calls “presentism”, from Occupy to solidarity economy work to online communities.
I met up with Doug a couple weeks ago to talk to him about his book and the ways that our culture is being transformed by Present Shock.
Willie Osterweil: Throughout the book and your writings you talk about how ideas germinate over long periods of time. How did you first come up with the concept of Present Shock? Is this an idea that has been building slowly, or has it come to you more recently?
Doug Rushkoff: I actually got this idea originally in the 1970s: I was in high school and a little bit of a pothead. I read this article in Rolling Stone called “The Dog is Us” about how, as people get older, they would stop smoking pot because it would make them paranoid. And I was interested: why is that? I decided that it’s because pot stops time: I think that’s its main cognitive characteristic. You smoke and ‘voom’, you’re just, there. If you’re a young person that’s not a problem, you’ve got so much natural forward momentum that you can stop and it’s alright. But if you’re an adult and you’ve run out of that natural momentum, when you stop all of a sudden it’s like: “Who am I? What am I worth? What are my values, what am I doing, what is my carbon footprint?” Time changes it. That was when I got the first inklings of the idea.
Then, when I started writing this book Cyberia, the very beginning features a conversation between these two psychedelic hackers talking about chaos attractors and wondering if, as a civilization, we are over the event horizon. While you’re moving toward the lip of an attractor everything is accelerating: you’re moving toward the vortex. But then once you’re over the lip, then you’re in the strange attractor. There’s a sense I had with the birth of the internet, with Alfred Toffler and Moore’s law and everything accelerating that we were going towards this moment: It feels like we’re in it now. I don’t feel that acceleration of change anymore. We’re in the thing. We did connect. We are always on. We are real time. That’s it. We’ve achieved as a society the kind of asynchronous, timeless, sequential reality of our digital devices.
And then all these patterns started emerging that reflected that: present-based-value algorithmic trading—where people are looking to make money in the moment on the trade rather than long term investment—happened, Netflix happened, everybody is watching things on their own time rather than together and sequentially. And I thought “This has to be written about. This notion of presentism: It’s throwing so many people off the rails, they’re in Present Shock and I understand that. But they don’t have to be. They could also be presentist.”
But the final inspiration was occupy. These kids are doing presentism the right way. I wanted to talk about that.

WO: In the book, you bring back an Ancient Greek differentiation between two forms of time: Chronos, or purely chronological and calendrial time, and Kairos, which is more about being in the moment. You see Occupy and solidarity economy practices representing an attempt to capture Kairos constantly and eschew the purely calendrial/chronological way of thinking about time. Could you speak to these differences in forms of time and the way you see those connecting to presentism?
DR: The easiest way to say it would be we’ve become overcommitted to chronos. We’ve become over committed to clock time as a way of defining time. In other words “it’s 3:23, that’s what it is.” But that can’t help with the question: “What’s the best time to tell dad you crashed the car? 3:23 or 3:26?” It doesn’t really matter what number’s on the clock, it’s whether he’s had his drink, it’s whether the Knicks are winning tonight or not, etc. It’s the difference between time and timing. The more clock like we become, the less we live in the genuine present. We end up addicted to the indicators of the present rather than the actual present that we’re in as bodies in space.
That’s why the whole movement towards informationism, the singularity/Kevin Kelly/Ray Kurzwell thing bothers me so much. They’re looking at the information but missing the humanity. We are more than the tricorder can measure, as McCoy might tell us. The metrics are true, as far as that goes, but they’re only telling a part of the story. It doesn’t have to be some weird new-age crystal-waving reiki-therapy thing to say “no, I’m actually present’.
And there are all these things we haven’t figured out. We don’t know quite how mirror-neurons work: we’re developing rapport when you nod and I nod and we sync up. We’re not consciously calculating all that stuff, it’s just part of being alive. And we’re better and faster at doing it than Facebook is or big data is or these other companies are that are trying to concatenate our human databases.
WO: There’s a lot here about psychological effects—present shock is obviously a psychological condition. You organize the book around different forms of shock, concepts like ‘fractalnoia’ or ‘digiphrenia’: what is the importance of these psychological phenomena?
DR: If in the 20th century Sigmund Freud invented the individual that we understand, the analyzable individual, for the 21st century, what if we apply these sort of symptoms to us as a culture—if we see these not as symptoms for individuals but for all of us—that we are all in a stage of fractalnoia. I went back and forth about whether to use them or not because if you organize your book in terms of ailments it sounds like Present Shock is kind of a bad thing. And the fact is, Present Shock is kind of a bad thing. Present Shock is just like future shock, you don’t want to be in Present Shock, you want to live with presentism.
WO: That speaks to a broader theme that I noticed in the book, and in your work generally, which is the notion that technological change, particularly with communications technology, drives social change. How do you see communications technology affecting the way that we imagine ourselves?
DR: I always go back and forth wondering: did the invention of text allow for calendrical thinking and the development of accountability over time through the contract? Or were there these social needs that then get met by the invention of text? I feel like both happen at the same time, which is not to say it’s magical or mystical or anything like that, but the environment changes and different mindsets and behaviors are supported. And different mindsets and behaviors require new kinds of technologies because, consciously or not, we’re driving toward a new set of goals.
Sometimes, of course, they’re forced. Look at the beginning of the industrial age or the Renaissance, the invention of the chartered monopoly and the invention of central currency. It’s not like the people adopted these things because they didn’t wanna have their own little businesses, they wanted to have jobs at big ones and they didn’t wanna use local currencies, they wanted to borrow money from the king at interest. No, the kings and the monopolists hired soldiers with swords to kill people, it was war and blood. So in many cases the change happens because the people in power are able to muscle it.
In other cases, like now, the emergence of digital technology promotes peer to peer exchange, it promotes decentralized value creation and all these kinds of things that are really consonant with our Burning-Man-Etsy-Occupy-local-farming mindset. But I don’t think Microsoft or Apple were thinking about things that way. If you look at these companies they’re just thinking about getting to their IPO. Facebook and Google, they went down the traditional route. They’re industrial age companies using digital technologies. But there’s a hunger for those things. And that hunger leads to the uptake of all this stuff which is gonna allow it.
WO: A lot of the book is about how Present Shock is changing the way business gets done: Bankers who are no longer interested in the stocks but just in the trades, start-ups which just want to get enough momentum to get purchased. How do you see Present Shock playing out in the broader business landscape? And what are the presentist openings for coops and worker controlled businesses?
DR: Presentism applied to industrial age stock-market values is just panicked short-termism. “Oh my gosh I gotta get it done now oh my god!” This is opposed to moving towards a kind of steady state sustainable business equilibrium. A steady state business equilibrium is incompatible with debt, it’s incompatible with taking investment money, or big loans from banks. All those people want their money to grow at the rate of debt or better. And if you’re gonna grow, then you need a narrative, you need a future, a goal, a growth plan.
But if you just want to create something that works, if you’ve got 50 people living in an area that want to do something that’s going to be more permanent, then there are approaches that don’t necessarily involve that growth. The prerequisite is that you can’t take money from someone, at least someone who wants more money then they gave you.
In the old days, if you will, when you had a town and they needed, say, a blacksmith, some guy comes in and says “oh I’m a blacksmith”. The community says: “Cool. We’ll make you a sign, and this lady will feed you dinner for the first few weeks, and this guy’s gotta barn we can put together for you, etc.” The town will invest in that person or that business because they need it.
You see the same thing now with these local kickstarter-like things like Socstock or Small Knot here in New York, where the premise is: “Oh you want the pizzeria in your neighborhood to get a new bathroom? Everyone put in a hundred dollars, and you’ll get a hundred fifty dollars worth of pizza in 6 months.” It’s a discount, but you’re also investing in change you’re gonna get to see. If you’re getting 150 bucks of pizza for 100 dollars you’re making back 50% on your investment—which is way better than you’re gonna do on Wall Street anyway—and you’ve increased the value of your town.
But what we’re talking about is seeing the economy more transactionally than in terms of earnings. And if it’s transactional, then you start thinking about things like the commons rather than hoarding money into your own account.
WO: How do you do that as a company right now?
DR: That’s the question. And it’s by not doing it alone. By finding other companies. You might need to have two sets of books as it were, one for the companies that are in the network of sharing resources, and one for the business that you’re doing outside the network. You can imagine that a community will have to have a local currency through which people in the town interact with each other, and then a long-distance currency through which they buy their iPhones.
WO: You talk a lot about how presentism leads to a certain narrative collapse, and that that narrative collapse is reflected in Occupy’s lack of demands. The lack of demands really upset a lot of people. How does Occupy connect to present shock and how does it reveal a positive sense of presentism?
DR: In some sense what we’re looking at is the difference between 20th century things and 21st century things. Industrial age things and digital age things. Between mythic narratives and this more sort of real-time participatory narrative. Occupy represents the latter.
In a traditional social movement, you have a charismatic leader marching arm in arm with his followers down 5th avenue and telling everyone to keep their eyes on the prize, that the day will come, we’re gonna get over that mountain and to the other side, here we go. And people work in that ends-justify-the-means way toward the finish line. We’re not in a world like that anymore.
The problems we’re facing are not big wars against big things, they’re chronic ailments like global warming and mass shootings: weird steady-state ever-present problems that you can’t “win”, can’t stick a flag on the moon and say “we’ve done it”. If the political movements—Marxism or capitalism or communism or fascism—these broad movements towards great goals have all proven to be false and idealistic, what would constitute a political praxis?
Rather than campaigning for some other thing, what if we don’t even campaign at all but just be that other thing? That’s what Occupy turned out to be. It may have started as “fuck you, Wall Street” but the practice of occupying became a kind of normative behavior. “Let’s model society. Let’s actually do something”. The “goal” of the movement as such became much more about evolving democracy into a form of consensus building as opposed to agonistic debate. And that was so confusing, especially to people in media who need the nine second sound bite in order to make sense of something.
Rather than activism being focused on fighting a battle against one thing and winning, what if it becomes “we are gonna grow consensus slowly over time and change state”? You end up with this group of people that refuses to state what their goal is, because we don’t have a goal. And people say “Well this is gonna go on forever” “Yeah, exactly!” We’re not in a thing that ends. Its like a business without an exit strategy, there is no end to this, we’re going to occupy reality. Everyone is gonna be an artist, everyone is gonna be real, in the present.