Slashdot Mirror

Airbnb says it's cracking down on hosts who record guests. But is it doing enough? From a report: Airbnb's rules allow cameras outdoors and in living rooms and common areas, but never in bathrooms or anywhere guests plan to sleep, including rooms with foldout beds. Starting in early 2018, Airbnb added another layer of disclosure: If hosts indicate they have cameras anywhere on their property, guests receive a pop-up informing them where the cameras are located and where they are aimed. To book the property, the guests must click "agree," indicating that they're aware of the cameras and consent to being filmed.

Of course, hosts have plenty of reason to train cameras on the homes they rent out to strangers. They can catch guests who attempt to steal, or who trash the place, or who initially say they're traveling alone, then show up to a property with five people. A representative for Airbnb's Trust & Safety communications department told me the company tries to filter out hosts who may attempt to surveil guests by matching them against sex-offender and felony databases. The company also uses risk scores to flag suspicious behavior, in addition to reviewing and booting hosts with consistently poor scores.

If a guest contacts Airbnb's Trust & Safety team with a complaint about a camera, employees offer new accommodations if necessary and open an investigation into the host. [...] But four guests who found cameras in their rentals told The Atlantic the company has inconsistently applied its own rules when investigating their claims, providing them with incorrect information and making recommendations that they say risked putting them in harm's way. "There have been super terrible examples of privacy violations by AirBnB hosts, e.g., people have found cameras hidden in alarm clocks in their bedrooms," wrote Jeff Bigham, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon whose claim was initially denied after he reported cameras in his rental. "I feel like our experience is in some ways more insidious. If you find a truly hidden camera in your bedroom or bathroom, Airbnb will support you. If you find an undisclosed camera in the private living room, Airbnb will not support you."

Some of the same podcasters who first extolled AirPods are now complaining about them, reports the Atlantic: The battery can no longer hold a charge, they say, rendering them functionally useless. Apple bloggers agree: "AirPods are starting to show their age for early adopters," Zac Hall, an editor at 9to5Mac, wrote in a post in January, detailing how he frequently hears a low-battery warning in his AirPods now. Earlier this month, Apple Insider tested a pair of AirPods purchased in 2016 against a pair from 2018, and found that the older pair died after two hours and 16 minutes. "That's less than half the stated battery life for a new pair," the writer William Gallagher concluded. Desmond Hughes, who is 35 and lives in Newport News, Virginia, has noticed a similar thing about his own set: At first, their charge lasted five hours, but now they sometimes last only half an hour. He frequently listens to one while charging the other -- not optimal conditions for expensive headphones. He's now gearing up to plunk down more money on another pair....

The lithium-ion batteries that power AirPods are everywhere. One industry report forecast that sales would grow to $109.72 billion by 2026, from $36.2 billion in 2018. They charge faster, last longer, and pack more power into a small space than other types of batteries do. But they die faster, too, often after just a few years, because every time you charge them, they degrade a little. They can also catch fire or explode if they become damaged, so technology companies make them difficult, if not impossible, for consumers to replace themselves. The result: A lot of barely chargeable AirPods and wireless mice and Bluetooth speakers are ending up in the trash as consumers go through products -- even expensive ones -- faster than ever....

Of the 3.4 million tons of electronic waste generated in America in 2012 -- an 80 percent increase from 2000 -- just 29 percent was recycled.
The article notes that Wednesday Apple announced a new generation of AirPods -- but "did not say whether the devices would have longer lives."

They also report that Apple "does allow consumers to pay for what it calls a 'battery replacement' for AirPods, but each 'replaced' AirPod is $49."

"Scientists are hoping to unlock some of the universe's mysteries through 50-year-old moon rocks," reports the New York Daily News -- specifically, three samples that spent that half century sealed in airtight canisters. One Apollo 18 sample from 1972 contains 1.8 pounds of a vacuum-sealed lunar core that is a stratified layer of rock that will be studied by six research teams. About 842 pounds of lunar rocks and soil have been brought back to Earth over six missions. Although a great deal of it has found its way to science labs, technological breakthroughs should allow for a more thorough comprehension of the satellite's chemical and geological composition...

"When the previous generations did Apollo, they knew the technology they had in that day was not the technology we would have in this day," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "So they made a determination that they would preserve samples. ⦠I'd like to thank, if it's OK, the Apollo generation, for preserving these samples, so that our generation could have this opportunity."
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes, "That's remarkable considering how often moon rocks were misplaced over the years."

An anonymous reader shares a report: As more and more laptops find their way into middle and high schools, educators are using Google Docs to do collaborative exercises and help students follow along with the lesson plan. The students, however, are using it to organize running conversations behind teachers' backs. Teens told me they use Google Docs to chat just about any time they need to put their phone away but know their friends will be on computers. Sometimes they'll use the service's live chat function, which doesn't open by default, and which many teachers don't even know exists. Or, they'll take advantage of the fact that Google allows users to highlight certain phrases or words, then comment on them via a pop-up box on the right side: They'll clone a teacher's shared Google document, then chat in the comments, so it appears to the causal viewer that they're just making notes on the lesson plan. If a teacher approaches to take a closer look, they can click the "Resolve" button and the entire thread will disappear.

If the project isn't a collaborative one, kids will just create a shared document where they'll chat line by line in what looks like a paragraph of text. "People will just make a new page and talk in different fonts so you know who is who," Skyler said. "I had one really good friend and we were in different homerooms. So, we'd email each other a doc and would just chat about whatever was going on." At the end of class, they just delete a doc or resolve all the comments. Rarely does anyone save them the way previous generations may have stored away paper notes from friends.

rfengineer tipped us off to this story. The Atlantic reports: Your office is a den of thieves. Don't take my word for it: When a forensic-accounting firm surveyed workers in 2013, 52 percent admitted to stealing company property. And the thievery is getting worse. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners reports that theft of "non-cash" property -- ranging from a single pencil in the supply closet to a pallet of them on the company loading dock -- jumped from 10.6 percent of corporate-theft losses in 2002 to 21 percent in 2018. Managers routinely order up to 20 percent more product than is necessary, just to account for sticky-fingered employees.

Some items -- scissors, notebooks, staplers -- are pilfered perennially; others vanish on a seasonal basis: The burn rate on tape spikes when holiday gifts need wrapping, and parents ransack the supply closet in August, to avoid the back-to-school rush at Target. After a new Apple gadget is released, some workers report that their company-issued iPhone is broken -- knowing that IT will furnish a replacement, no questions asked. What's behind this 9-to-5 crime wave? Mark R. Doyle, the president of the loss-prevention consultancy Jack L. Hayes International, points to a decrease in supervision, the ease of reselling purloined products online, and what he alleges is "a general decline in employee honesty."
The report advises companies that the best way to reduce fraud was with surprise audits and data monitoring.

Another interesting statistic? "Fraudsters" who'd been with their company for more than five years "stole twice as much."

From Nature magazine: Female Aedes aegypti, like other mosquito species, feed on blood to get the protein they need to produce their eggs, and spread diseases such as dengue in the process. But once the mosquitoes have had their blood fix, they stop biting until they've laid their eggs several days later. Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist at the Rockefeller University in New York City, wondered whether she could hijack this biological process to switch off a mosquito's appetite.

Previous research had suggested that a mosquito's desire to feed is controlled by neuropeptides, molecules used by the nervous system to communicate. Vosshall and her team suspected that neuropeptide Y (NPY) receptors might be particularly important, because they form part of the molecular pathway involved in food-seeking behaviour for many animals -- including humans. Some human appetite-suppressant drugs already target the NPY receptors, so Vosshall decided to take a "completely zany" approach: feed these drugs to mosquitoes and see what happens. The method worked: mosquitoes that fed on a solution containing NPY-activating drugs were much less likely to approach a human-scented 'lure' than were the control group, and their appetites remained suppressed for two days. Further reading: A New Way to Keep Mosquitoes From Biting.

It might look dangerous, but flames have kept switches moving and rails intact for a century. From a report: As if the horrors of the polar vortex were not already enough -- temperatures that look like typos, Canada Goose robbers, and something called frost quakes -- the nation's railroad system took a turn for the apocalyptic this week, too. Rails broke in three different places between Baltimore and Washington on Thursday, causing severe delays. Amtrak canceled dozens of trains passing through Chicago, and viral videos appeared to show commuter tracks in the city on fire. Of course, the tracks themselves were not burning -- they are made out of steel, prized for its tendency to rarely go up in flames. But the sight is still dramatic. The videos of the fires in Chicago last week show flames smoldering in patches of melted snow around the tracks.

Fires have been employed on railroads -- and remained the preferred fix for many a winter hazard -- for most of their roughly two-century history. While railroads have developed impressive tools for dealing with snow on the tracks, extreme temperatures remain a challenge. Though steel is flame-resistant, it's subject to cold, which can jam up railroads' many moving parts. When cold weather does wreak havoc on railroads, lighting fires on train tracks can serve a couple of uses. One is to thaw the switches that determine which track a train goes down, which is what Metra, the Chicagoland commuter-rail authority, said was going on this week. Switches are moving parts, and if ice gets into them, they can freeze in place. There are various types of switch heaters, which might use electric current or gas to melt ice -- or even an open gas flame, which is what's appearing in the Metra videos. Where there aren't switch heaters, crews might use temporary torchlike devices with a flame, the railroad equivalent of the smudge pots farmers use to keep citrus groves and apple orchards from freezing on cold nights.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: Meteorologists have never gotten a shiny magazine cover or a brooding Aaron Sorkin film, and the weather-research hub of Norman, Oklahoma, is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Palo Alto. But over the past few decades, scientists have gotten significantly -- even staggeringly -- better at predicting the weather. How much better? "A modern five-day forecast is as accurate as a one-day forecast was in 1980," says a new paper, published last week in the journal Science. "Useful forecasts now reach nine to 10 days into the future." "Modern 72-hour predictions of hurricane tracks are more accurate than 24-hour forecasts were 40 years ago," the authors write. The federal government now predicts storm surge, stream level, and the likelihood of drought. It has also gotten better at talking about its forecasts: As I wrote in 2017, the National Weather Service has dropped professional jargon in favor of clear, direct, and everyday language. "Everybody's improving, and they're improving a lot," says Richard Alley, an author of the paper and a geoscientist at Penn State.

Understanding months-long events like El Niño, for instance, has allowed meteorologists to go beyond the seven-day forecast. Alley, the Penn State professor, says that he is awed by the new models. Well-studied features of Earth's climate -- like the temperate Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean -- emerge in computer models, even though developers have written code that only mimics basic physics. We are now surrounded by the products of these miraculous models. In 2009, a back-of-the-envelope study estimated that U.S. adults check the weather forecast about 300 billion times per year. Perhaps in all that checking we have forgotten how strange the forecast is, how almost supernatural it is that people can describe the weather before it happens. More than 1,000 years ago, the Spanish archbishop Agobard of Lyon argued that no witch could control the weather because only God could understand it. "Man does not know the paths of the clouds, nor their perfect knowledges," he wrote. He cited the Book of Job for authority, which asks: "Dost thou know when God caused the light of his cloud to shine? Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds ?"

Being one of the oldest forms of electronic messaging, users have come up with all sorts of different approaches to managing emails. Some people follow the "Inbox Zero" method of filing and deleting emails religiously, while others embrace the "Inbox Infinity" method of letting email messages pile up, replying to what they can and ignoring the rest. Taylor Lorenz, a staff writer at The Atlantic, suggests users embrace the latter for 2019. Lulu Garcia-Nevarro writes via NPR: In a recent piece in The Atlantic, tech writer Taylor Lorenz argues, in 2019, you should lose the zero and embrace the Zen. Let all those emails flooding your inbox wash over you. Respond to what you can, and ignore the rest. Key to inbox infinity -- telling close contacts and family that your email replies might be slow in coming -- if at all -- as well as alternative ways to reach you. It's that easy. Or maybe not, depending on how email-dependent your boss, your colleagues and your best friend, your mom and your husband are. As for me, I've apparently been embracing inbox infinity for years without knowing it. And let me tell you, it feels great. Don't expect a reply anytime soon. How do you manage your inbox? Would you say you follow one of these two principles, or do you have an in-between method that works for you?

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via The Atlantic: The latest experiments in this niche but increasingly vocal field come from Lilach Hadany and Yossi Yovel at Tel Aviv University. In one set, they showed that some plants can hear the sounds of animal pollinators and react by rapidly sweetening their nectar. In a second set, they found that other plants make high-pitched noises that lie beyond the scope of human hearing but can nonetheless be detected some distance away. After the team released early copies of two papers describing their work, not yet published in a scientific journal, I ran them past several independent researchers. Some of these researchers have argued that plants are surprisingly communicative; others have doubted the idea. Their views on the new studies, however, didn't fall along obvious partisan lines. Almost unanimously, they loved the paper asserting that plants can hear and were skeptical about the one reporting that plants make noise. Those opposite responses to work done by the same team underscore how controversial this line of research still is, and how hard it is to study the sensory worlds of organisms that are so different from us.

First, two team members, Marine Veits and Itzhak Khait, checked whether beach evening primroses could hear. In both lab experiments and outdoor trials, they found that the plants would react to recordings of a bee's wingbeats by increasing the concentration of sugar in their nectar by about 20 percent. They did so in response only to the wingbeats and low frequency, pollinator-like sounds, not to those of higher pitch. And they reacted very quickly, sweetening their nectar in less than three minutes. That's probably fast enough to affect a visiting bee, but even if that insect flies away too quickly, the plant is ready to better entice the next visitor. After all, the presence of one pollinator almost always means that there are more around. But if plants can hear, what are their ears? The team's answer is surprising, yet tidy: It's the flowers themselves. They used lasers to show that the primrose's petals vibrate when hit by the sounds of a bee's wingbeats. If they covered the blooms with glass jars, those vibrations never happened, and the nectar never sweetened. The flower, then, could act like the fleshy folds of our outer ears, channeling sound further into the plant. (Where? No one knows yet!)

Three-quarters of Canadians own smartphones-- and 94% of 15- to 34-year-olds. But this week the Globe and Mail profiled "digital refuseniks" who are "deliberately logging off -- and they say it's done wonders for their imaginations and peace of mind." They are hidden among us, neither jobless nor friendless, and living quite happily. Cut off from Uber, yet somehow thriving. For example, Tony North does not live for his smartphone, because he's never had one. "I just didn't want to get into the habit of distraction," he says simply, in an interview conducted over landline from his home in Paris, Ontario. The high-school teacher spends about 20 minutes a day [on his laptop] on his one social-media platform, Facebook, which he uses to keep in touch with family back home in Australia. In fact, you could blame Australia for Mr. North's desire to be digitally unleashed: He remembers leaving home to travel overseas, and the wonderful feeling of being uncontactable that came with it. "It was such a feeling of freedom, and I guess I wanted to keep a bit of that."

As a teacher of English and drama, Mr. North, 53, is worried about the consequences of teenagers' near-constant devotion to their online lives (his own two children, 12 and 13 years old, do not have phones). In drama class, he makes his students put away their phones and engage in face-to-face exercises: "I'm basically forcing them to interact," he says. "When I ask for evaluations at the end of the semester, it's one of the things they most seem to appreciate...." Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34 spend nearly five hours a day online, according to a 2017 survey from Media Technology Monitor... "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" the Atlantic magazine asked last year in a cover story designed to keep parents up at night, frozen in the blue light of further bad news.
North says in the extra time "he reads many novels and enjoys quiet moments of reflection and watching the world go by." And 18-year-old Bethany March is also severely limiting her phone use. ''I saw the way that people got so invested, not just in their phones, but in social media, and I didn't want to be that person," she says. "So many times people would be zeroed in on their phones. It was just rude, to be honest. I'd think, 'I'm here with you, talk to me.'"

71-year-old John Moir insists that living without a smartphone makes him really experience new locations, "rather than trying to be in two places at once," adding that "Whenever I tell people I don't have a phone, they say, 'Oh, that's so great. I wish I didn't have to have one.'" That's "one thing digital refuseniks never have to worry about," the article concludes: "Who is the servant in their digital relationship, and who is the master."

In San Francisco and Bangalore, street-vendor unions and nonprofits are helping informal food workers eke out a living -- but their future is still uncertain. From a report: Bangalore and the Bay Area have a lot in common. They are the tech centers of the world's second- and third-most-populous countries, respectively, and they both sometimes feel like they're bursting at the seams. Some economists argue that when tech companies move to cities with rigid housing markets, the value of real wages goes down as the cost of living jumps. [...] In both places, many street vendors are migrants -- Bangalore's come from other parts of India, while in the Bay Area many hail from Latin America. They and their livelihoods offer a warning about the fate of immigrant service labor in the tech economy: When space is at a premium, the high-profile, high-margin industries tend to take it up, while the low-paid, already precarious jobs that keep them humming are threatened.

Bangalore is full of food vendors like Sukumar N. T. According to Aditi Surie, a sociologist at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements who specializes in the gig economy, Bangalore has limited licensed areas for people to ply food, so "across income groups" in the city, "informal food vending is valuable to all." But near the International Tech Park Bangalore in Whitefield, you won't see street vendors. Plenty are stationed immediately outside the ITPB's gates, however, which has led to some tension. Earlier this year, The Times of India called the street vendors near the office park "a huge menace" because they impede ITPB employees' passage in and out of the complex. Whitefield "is really illogically planned," Vinay Sreenivasa told me from his dusty office. Sreenivasa is a member of both the Alternative Law Forum, a legal-advocacy organization, and Bengaluru Jilla Beedhi Vyaapari Sanghatanegala Okkuta, a street-vendor union. "They planned only for tech parks and hotels," he explained. "In a way, those [informal] livelihoods are created by the poor planning." That generally doesn't bother rank-and-file IT workers -- they need to eat, too -- but according to Sreenivasa, some managers and officials think that the informal businesses undermine the area's air of modern enterprise.

Back in California, some of the Bay Area's massive tech campuses have become mini cities, complete with their own closed food systems. This is an understandable move for companies in remote suburban enclaves, perhaps, but less so for urban headquarters, where abundant free or subsidized food can allow tech employees to avoid engaging with local restaurants or vendors. Some tech offices do hire small catering businesses. And companies such as Zendesk choose not to offer free food, to encourage their employees to frequent local businesses. But many technology headquarters isolate themselves from the local food culture, and the people whose livelihoods depend on it.

In San Francisco and Bangalore, street-vendor unions and nonprofits are helping informal food workers eke out a living -- but their future is still uncertain. From a report: Bangalore and the Bay Area have a lot in common. They are the tech centers of the world's second- and third-most-populous countries, respectively, and they both sometimes feel like they're bursting at the seams. Some economists argue that when tech companies move to cities with rigid housing markets, the value of real wages goes down as the cost of living jumps. [...] In both places, many street vendors are migrants -- Bangalore's come from other parts of India, while in the Bay Area many hail from Latin America. They and their livelihoods offer a warning about the fate of immigrant service labor in the tech economy: When space is at a premium, the high-profile, high-margin industries tend to take it up, while the low-paid, already precarious jobs that keep them humming are threatened.

Bangalore is full of food vendors like Sukumar N. T. According to Aditi Surie, a sociologist at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements who specializes in the gig economy, Bangalore has limited licensed areas for people to ply food, so "across income groups" in the city, "informal food vending is valuable to all." But near the International Tech Park Bangalore in Whitefield, you won't see street vendors. Plenty are stationed immediately outside the ITPB's gates, however, which has led to some tension. Earlier this year, The Times of India called the street vendors near the office park "a huge menace" because they impede ITPB employees' passage in and out of the complex. Whitefield "is really illogically planned," Vinay Sreenivasa told me from his dusty office. Sreenivasa is a member of both the Alternative Law Forum, a legal-advocacy organization, and Bengaluru Jilla Beedhi Vyaapari Sanghatanegala Okkuta, a street-vendor union. "They planned only for tech parks and hotels," he explained. "In a way, those [informal] livelihoods are created by the poor planning." That generally doesn't bother rank-and-file IT workers -- they need to eat, too -- but according to Sreenivasa, some managers and officials think that the informal businesses undermine the area's air of modern enterprise.

Back in California, some of the Bay Area's massive tech campuses have become mini cities, complete with their own closed food systems. This is an understandable move for companies in remote suburban enclaves, perhaps, but less so for urban headquarters, where abundant free or subsidized food can allow tech employees to avoid engaging with local restaurants or vendors. Some tech offices do hire small catering businesses. And companies such as Zendesk choose not to offer free food, to encourage their employees to frequent local businesses. But many technology headquarters isolate themselves from the local food culture, and the people whose livelihoods depend on it.

In San Francisco and Bangalore, street-vendor unions and nonprofits are helping informal food workers eke out a living -- but their future is still uncertain. From a report: Bangalore and the Bay Area have a lot in common. They are the tech centers of the world's second- and third-most-populous countries, respectively, and they both sometimes feel like they're bursting at the seams. Some economists argue that when tech companies move to cities with rigid housing markets, the value of real wages goes down as the cost of living jumps. [...] In both places, many street vendors are migrants -- Bangalore's come from other parts of India, while in the Bay Area many hail from Latin America. They and their livelihoods offer a warning about the fate of immigrant service labor in the tech economy: When space is at a premium, the high-profile, high-margin industries tend to take it up, while the low-paid, already precarious jobs that keep them humming are threatened.

Bangalore is full of food vendors like Sukumar N. T. According to Aditi Surie, a sociologist at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements who specializes in the gig economy, Bangalore has limited licensed areas for people to ply food, so "across income groups" in the city, "informal food vending is valuable to all." But near the International Tech Park Bangalore in Whitefield, you won't see street vendors. Plenty are stationed immediately outside the ITPB's gates, however, which has led to some tension. Earlier this year, The Times of India called the street vendors near the office park "a huge menace" because they impede ITPB employees' passage in and out of the complex. Whitefield "is really illogically planned," Vinay Sreenivasa told me from his dusty office. Sreenivasa is a member of both the Alternative Law Forum, a legal-advocacy organization, and Bengaluru Jilla Beedhi Vyaapari Sanghatanegala Okkuta, a street-vendor union. "They planned only for tech parks and hotels," he explained. "In a way, those [informal] livelihoods are created by the poor planning." That generally doesn't bother rank-and-file IT workers -- they need to eat, too -- but according to Sreenivasa, some managers and officials think that the informal businesses undermine the area's air of modern enterprise.

Back in California, some of the Bay Area's massive tech campuses have become mini cities, complete with their own closed food systems. This is an understandable move for companies in remote suburban enclaves, perhaps, but less so for urban headquarters, where abundant free or subsidized food can allow tech employees to avoid engaging with local restaurants or vendors. Some tech offices do hire small catering businesses. And companies such as Zendesk choose not to offer free food, to encourage their employees to frequent local businesses. But many technology headquarters isolate themselves from the local food culture, and the people whose livelihoods depend on it.

The European Union has a target of making all new buildings zero-energy by 2020, but in Norway, carbon neutrality isn't enough. From a report: A consortium in Oslo made up of architects, engineers, environmentalists, and designers is creating energy-positive buildings in a country with some of the coldest and darkest winters on Earth. "If you can make it in Norway, you can make it anywhere," says Peter Bernhard, a consultant with Asplan Viak, one of the Powerhouse alliance members.

Bernhard says Powerhouse began in 2010 with a question: Is it possible to not only eliminate the carbon footprint of buildings, but to also use them as a climate-crisis solution? It was a lofty goal. According to the European Commission, buildings account for 40 percent of energy usage and 36 percent of carbon-dioxide emissions in the EU. But after undertaking several energy-positive projects -- building a new Montessori school, retrofitting four small office buildings, building a few homes, and breaking ground on two new office buildings -- Powerhouse has found the answer to the 2010 question to be an emphatic "Yes." In 2019, the collective's biggest project to date will open to the public: Powerhouse Brattorkaia, in the central Norwegian city of Trondheim.

A lack of personal savings, competition from abroad, and the threat of another economic downturn make it harder for Millennials to thrive as entrepreneurs. From a story: Research suggests entrepreneurial activity has declined among Millennials. The share of people under 30 who own a business has fallen to almost a quarter-century low, according to a 2015 Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data. A survey of 1,200 Millennials conducted in 2016 by the Economic Innovation Group found that more Millennials believed they could have a successful career by staying at one company and attempting to climb the ladder than by founding a new one. Two years ago, EIG's president and co-founder, John Lettieri, testified before the U.S. Senate, "Millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation in recent history."

Some of the reasons have been well-documented. The romantic view of entrepreneurship involves angel investors and venture capital funds, but in fact, the ordinary entrepreneur is more likely to fund a start-up using personal savings -- something underemployed Millennials simply could not build as they entered the workforce during or in the immediate wake of the Great Recession. Funding from friends and family is the next most common source, but this personal network could not help much during the most recent economic downturn, when so much home equity was underwater. Student debt worsened the underlying economic problems. According to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, between 2004 and 2014, the number of student borrowers rose by 89 percent.

Lately, though, it seems that even those who might typically have access to other forms of funding, like venture capital, are having a hard time getting investors' attention. As Matt Krisiloff, a former director at the Y Combinator start-up accelerator in Silicon Valley, tweeted, "Start-ups are a lot less cool than they used to be." Michael Sadler, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, is concerned about the rising concentration of start-up investment in just a few super-performing regions such as Austin, New York, and Silicon Valley. As with American politics, it appears the geography of U.S. venture capital and economic growth has become increasingly polarized.

A lack of personal savings, competition from abroad, and the threat of another economic downturn make it harder for Millennials to thrive as entrepreneurs. From a story: Research suggests entrepreneurial activity has declined among Millennials. The share of people under 30 who own a business has fallen to almost a quarter-century low, according to a 2015 Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data. A survey of 1,200 Millennials conducted in 2016 by the Economic Innovation Group found that more Millennials believed they could have a successful career by staying at one company and attempting to climb the ladder than by founding a new one. Two years ago, EIG's president and co-founder, John Lettieri, testified before the U.S. Senate, "Millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation in recent history."

Some of the reasons have been well-documented. The romantic view of entrepreneurship involves angel investors and venture capital funds, but in fact, the ordinary entrepreneur is more likely to fund a start-up using personal savings -- something underemployed Millennials simply could not build as they entered the workforce during or in the immediate wake of the Great Recession. Funding from friends and family is the next most common source, but this personal network could not help much during the most recent economic downturn, when so much home equity was underwater. Student debt worsened the underlying economic problems. According to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, between 2004 and 2014, the number of student borrowers rose by 89 percent.

Lately, though, it seems that even those who might typically have access to other forms of funding, like venture capital, are having a hard time getting investors' attention. As Matt Krisiloff, a former director at the Y Combinator start-up accelerator in Silicon Valley, tweeted, "Start-ups are a lot less cool than they used to be." Michael Sadler, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, is concerned about the rising concentration of start-up investment in just a few super-performing regions such as Austin, New York, and Silicon Valley. As with American politics, it appears the geography of U.S. venture capital and economic growth has become increasingly polarized.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Other sounds that reach 70 decibels include freeway noise, an alarm clock, and a sewing machine. But it's still quiet for a restaurant. Others I visited in Baltimore and New York City while researching this story were even louder: 80 decibels in a dimly lit wine bar at dinnertime; 86 decibels at a high-end food court during brunch; 90 decibels at a brewpub in a rehabbed fire station during Friday happy hour. Restaurants are so loud because architects don't design them to be quiet. Much of this shift in design boils down to changing conceptions of what makes a space seem upscale or luxurious, as well as evolving trends in food service. Right now, high-end surfaces connote luxury, such as the slate and wood of restaurants including The Osprey in Brooklyn or Atomix in Manhattan.

This trend is not limited to New York. According to Architectural Digest, mid-century modern and minimalism are both here to stay. That means sparse, modern decor; high, exposed ceilings; and almost no soft goods, such as curtains, upholstery, or carpets. These design features are a feast for the eyes, but a nightmare for the ears. No soft goods and tall ceilings mean nothing is absorbing sound energy, and a room full of hard surfaces serves as a big sonic mirror, reflecting sound around the room. The result is a loud space that renders speech unintelligible. Now that it's so commonplace, the din of a loud restaurant is unavoidable. That's bad for your health -- and worse for the staff who works there. But it also degrades the thing that eating out is meant to culture: a shared social experience that rejuvenates, rather than harms, its participants.

Fax, once at the forefront of communications technologies but now in deep decline, has persisted in many industries. From a report: Law-enforcement agencies remain heavily reliant on fax for routine operations, such as bail postings and return of public-records requests. Health care, too, runs largely on fax. Despite attempts to replace it, a mix of regulatory confusion, digital-security concerns, and stubbornness has kept fax machines droning around the world.

An early facsimile message was sent over telegraph lines in London in 1847, based on a design by the Scottish inventor Alexander Bain. There is some dispute over whether it was the first fax: Competing inventors, including Bain in the United Kingdom and Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell across the Atlantic, sought to father facsimile technology, which was a kind of white whale for inventors. Telegraphs already allowed messages to be passed across distances, one letter at a time using Morse code. But the dream of transmitting copies of messages and images instantly over wires was very much alive.

Writing in 1863, Jules Verne imagined that the Paris of the 1960s would be replete with fax machines, or as he called them, "picture-telegraphs." The technology did eventually lead to a revolution in communication, though it didn't happen until years later. It first became known to many Americans after the 1939 New York World's Fair, where a fax machine transmitted newspaper images from around the world at a rate of 18 minutes per page -- lightning speed for the time. Further reading: 'You Had to Be There': As Technologies Change Ever Faster, the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter.

The dome where crew members practiced red-planet missions will now be converted to a simulated moon base. Excerpt from a report: For the last five years, a small Mars colony thrived in Hawaii, many miles away from civilization. The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, was carried out in a small white dome nestled along the slope of a massive volcano called Mauna Loa. The habitat usually housed six people at a time, for as long as eight months. They prepared freeze-dried meals, took 30-second showers to conserve water, and wore space suits every time they left the dome. To replicate the communication gap between Earth and Mars, they waited 20 minutes for their emails to reach their family members, and another 20 to hear back. Sometimes, as they drifted off to sleep, with nothing but silence in their ears, they really believed they were on Mars.

In February of this year, something went wrong. The latest and sixth mission was just four days in when one of the crew members was carried out on a stretcher and taken to a hospital, an Atlantic investigation revealed in June. There had been a power outage in the habitat, and some troubleshooting ended with one of the residents sustaining an electric shock. The rest of the crew was evacuated, too. There was some discussion of returning -- the injured person was treated and released in the same day -- but another crew member felt the conditions weren't safe enough and decided to withdraw. The Mars simulation couldn't continue with a crew as small as three, and the entire program was put on hold. [...]

Despite vast increases in the time and money spent on research, progress is barely keeping pace with the past. What went wrong? An anonymous reader shares a report: Today, there are more scientists, more funding for science, and more scientific papers published than ever before. On the surface, this is encouraging. But for all this increase in effort, are we getting a proportional increase in our scientific understanding? Or are we investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress? It's surprisingly difficult to measure scientific progress in meaningful ways. Part of the trouble is that it's hard to accurately evaluate how important any given scientific discovery is.

[...] With that in mind, we ran a survey asking scientists to compare Nobel prizewinning discoveries in their fields. We then used those rankings to determine how scientists think the quality of Nobel prizewinning discoveries has changed over the decades. As a sample survey question, we might ask a physicist which was a more important contribution to scientific understanding: the discovery of the neutron (the particle that makes up roughly half the ordinary matter in the universe) or the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (the afterglow of the Big Bang). Think of the survey as a round-robin tournament, competitively matching discoveries against one another, with expert scientists judging which is better.

For the physics prize, we surveyed 93 physicists from the world's top academic physics departments (according to the Shanghai Rankings of World Universities), and they judged 1,370 pairs of discoveries. [...] The first decade has a poor showing. In that decade, the Nobel Committee was still figuring out exactly what the prize was for. There was, for instance, a prize for a better way of illuminating lighthouses and buoys at sea. That's good news if you're on a ship, but scored poorly with modern physicists. But by the 1910s the prizes were mostly awarded for things that accord with the modern conception of physics. A golden age of physics followed, from the 1910s through the 1930s. [...]

Our graph stops at the end of the 1980s. The reason is that, in recent years, the Nobel Committee has preferred to award prizes for work done in the 1980s and 1970s. In fact, just three discoveries made since 1990 have yet been awarded Nobel Prizes. This is too few to get a good quality estimate for the 1990s, and so we didn't survey those prizes. However, the paucity of prizes since 1990 is itself suggestive. The 1990s and 2000s have the dubious distinction of being the decades over which the Nobel Committee has most strongly preferred to skip back and award prizes for earlier work. Given that the 1980s and 1970s themselves don't look so good, that's bad news for physics.

Despite vast increases in the time and money spent on research, progress is barely keeping pace with the past. What went wrong? An anonymous reader shares a report: Today, there are more scientists, more funding for science, and more scientific papers published than ever before. On the surface, this is encouraging. But for all this increase in effort, are we getting a proportional increase in our scientific understanding? Or are we investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress? It's surprisingly difficult to measure scientific progress in meaningful ways. Part of the trouble is that it's hard to accurately evaluate how important any given scientific discovery is.

[...] With that in mind, we ran a survey asking scientists to compare Nobel prizewinning discoveries in their fields. We then used those rankings to determine how scientists think the quality of Nobel prizewinning discoveries has changed over the decades. As a sample survey question, we might ask a physicist which was a more important contribution to scientific understanding: the discovery of the neutron (the particle that makes up roughly half the ordinary matter in the universe) or the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (the afterglow of the Big Bang). Think of the survey as a round-robin tournament, competitively matching discoveries against one another, with expert scientists judging which is better.

For the physics prize, we surveyed 93 physicists from the world's top academic physics departments (according to the Shanghai Rankings of World Universities), and they judged 1,370 pairs of discoveries. [...] The first decade has a poor showing. In that decade, the Nobel Committee was still figuring out exactly what the prize was for. There was, for instance, a prize for a better way of illuminating lighthouses and buoys at sea. That's good news if you're on a ship, but scored poorly with modern physicists. But by the 1910s the prizes were mostly awarded for things that accord with the modern conception of physics. A golden age of physics followed, from the 1910s through the 1930s. [...]

Our graph stops at the end of the 1980s. The reason is that, in recent years, the Nobel Committee has preferred to award prizes for work done in the 1980s and 1970s. In fact, just three discoveries made since 1990 have yet been awarded Nobel Prizes. This is too few to get a good quality estimate for the 1990s, and so we didn't survey those prizes. However, the paucity of prizes since 1990 is itself suggestive. The 1990s and 2000s have the dubious distinction of being the decades over which the Nobel Committee has most strongly preferred to skip back and award prizes for earlier work. Given that the 1980s and 1970s themselves don't look so good, that's bad news for physics.

Ed Yong, writing for The Atlantic: For many people, a two-and-a-half-minute video of a baby brown bear trying to scale a snow-covered mountain was a life-affirming testament to the power of persistence. As it begins, the cub is standing with its mother on the side of a perilously steep ridge. The mother begins walking across, and despite slipping a few times on the loose snow, she soon reaches the top. Her cub, following tentatively after her, isn't so fortunate. It loses its footing and slides several feet. It pulls itself together and reattempts the ascent, before slipping again.

Finally, the cub nears the top. But as the footage zooms in to focus on the moment of reunion, the mother inexplicably swipes at the youngster with her paw, sending it hurtling downward again. It slides a long way, scrabbling for purchase and finding some just before it hits a patch of bare rock. Once again, it starts to climb, and after what seems like a nail-biting eternity for anyone watching, it reaches its mother. The two walk away.

The video was uploaded to the ViralHog YouTube channel on Friday, and after being shared on Twitter, it rapidly went viral. At the time of this writing, it has been watched 17 million times. The cub's exploits were equal parts gif, nature documentary, and motivational poster. It had all the elements of an incredible story: the most adorable of protagonists, rising and falling action (literally), and a happy ending. It was a tale of tenacity in the face of adversity, triumph against the odds. But when biologists started watching the video, they saw a very different story.

The video, they say, was clearly captured by a drone. And in it, they saw the work of an irresponsible drone operator who, in trying to film the bears, drove them into a dangerous situation that almost cost the cub its life. "I found it really hard to watch," says Sophie Gilbert, an ecologist at the University of Idaho who studies, among other things, how drones affect wildlife. "It showed a pretty stark lack of understanding from the drone operator of the effects that his actions were having on the bears." (It wasn't just scientists, either; several drone pilots were also dismayed by the footage.)

Ed Yong, writing for The Atlantic: For many people, a two-and-a-half-minute video of a baby brown bear trying to scale a snow-covered mountain was a life-affirming testament to the power of persistence. As it begins, the cub is standing with its mother on the side of a perilously steep ridge. The mother begins walking across, and despite slipping a few times on the loose snow, she soon reaches the top. Her cub, following tentatively after her, isn't so fortunate. It loses its footing and slides several feet. It pulls itself together and reattempts the ascent, before slipping again.

Finally, the cub nears the top. But as the footage zooms in to focus on the moment of reunion, the mother inexplicably swipes at the youngster with her paw, sending it hurtling downward again. It slides a long way, scrabbling for purchase and finding some just before it hits a patch of bare rock. Once again, it starts to climb, and after what seems like a nail-biting eternity for anyone watching, it reaches its mother. The two walk away.

The video was uploaded to the ViralHog YouTube channel on Friday, and after being shared on Twitter, it rapidly went viral. At the time of this writing, it has been watched 17 million times. The cub's exploits were equal parts gif, nature documentary, and motivational poster. It had all the elements of an incredible story: the most adorable of protagonists, rising and falling action (literally), and a happy ending. It was a tale of tenacity in the face of adversity, triumph against the odds. But when biologists started watching the video, they saw a very different story.

The video, they say, was clearly captured by a drone. And in it, they saw the work of an irresponsible drone operator who, in trying to film the bears, drove them into a dangerous situation that almost cost the cub its life. "I found it really hard to watch," says Sophie Gilbert, an ecologist at the University of Idaho who studies, among other things, how drones affect wildlife. "It showed a pretty stark lack of understanding from the drone operator of the effects that his actions were having on the bears." (It wasn't just scientists, either; several drone pilots were also dismayed by the footage.)

YouTube wants to recommend things people will like, and the clearest signal of that is whether other people liked them. From a report: Pew found that 64 percent of recommendations went to videos with more than a million views. The 50 videos that YouTube recommended most often had been viewed an average of 456 million times each. Popularity begets popularity, at least in the case of users (or bots, as here) that YouTube doesn't know much about. On the other hand, YouTube has said in previous work describing its algorithm that users like fresher content, all else being equal. But it takes time for a post to build huge numbers of views and signal to the algorithm that it's worth promoting. So, the challenge becomes how to recommend "new videos that users want to watch" when those videos are new to the system and low in views. (Finding fresh, potentially hot videos is important, YouTube researchers have written, for "propagating viral content.")

Pew's research reflects this: About 5 percent of the recommendations went to videos with fewer than 50,000 views. The system learns from a video's early performance, and if it does well, views can grow rapidly. In one case, a highly recommended kids' video went from 34,000 views when Pew first encountered it in July to 30 million in August. The behavior of the system was explicable in a few other ways, too, especially as it adapted to making more clicks inside YouTube's system. First, as Pew's software made choices, the system selected longer videos. It's as if the software recognizes that the user is going to be around for a while, and starts to serve up longer fare. Second, it also began to recommend more popular videos regardless of how popular the starting video was.

Remember that study which reported humanity had wiped out 60 percent of animal populations since 1970? The researchers' findings "have been widely mischaracterized," reports the Atlantic's science writer -- while adding that "the actual news is still grim."

The researchers had studied sample population estimates representing 4,000 of 63,000 known vertebrate species -- or 6.4 percent -- then performed a scientific extrapolation: Ultimately, they found that from 1970 to 2014, the size of vertebrate populations has declined by 60 percent on average. That is absolutely not the same as saying that humans have culled 60 percent of animals -- a distinction that the report's technical supplement explicitly states. "It is not a census of all wildlife but reports how wildlife populations have changed in size," the authors write. To understand the distinction, imagine you have three populations: 5,000 lions, 500 tigers, and 50 bears. Four decades later, you have just 4,500 lions, 100 tigers, and five bears (oh my). Those three populations have declined by 10 percent, 80 percent, and 90 percent, respectively -- which means an average decline of 60 percent. But the total number of actual animals has gone down from 5,550 to 4,605, which is a decline of just 17 percent.

For similar reasons, it's also not right that we have "killed more than half the world's wildlife populations" or that we can be blamed for "wiping out 60 percent of animal species" or that "global wildlife population shrank by 60 percent between 1970 and 2014." All of these things might well be true, but they're all making claims about metrics that were not assessed in the Living Planet Index... The average 60 percent decline across populations also obscures the fates of individual species. In the hypothetical scenario above, lions are still mostly fine, the tigers are in trouble, and the bears are on the brink of extinction. And of the species covered in the actual Living Planet Index, half are increasing in number, while only half are decreasing. This means that for those that are actually in decline, the outlook is even worse than it first appears.
The science writer also points out that vertebrates studied are vastly outnumbered by the millions of species of invertebrate, "which make up the majority of animal life..."

"None of this is to let humanity off the hook... At least a third of amphibians face extinction, thanks to climate change, habitat loss, and an apocalyptic killer fungus. "

Astronomers on Wednesday reported new telescope observations of the environment around the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, named Sagittarius A*, pronounced "a-star," and they transformed the data into a lively animation. From a report: The video is positively ghostly. Clumps of gas swirl around the black hole, traveling at about 30 percent of the speed of light. Astronomers collected the data for the visualization using an instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, located in the deserts of northern Chile. The instrument, appropriately named GRAVITY, detected flares of infrared radiation coming from the disk surrounding Sagittarius A*. The researchers believe the bursts originated very close to the black hole, in an incredibly tumultuous region known as the innermost stable orbit. Here, cosmic material is slung around violently, but it remains far away enough that it can circle the black hole safely without getting sucked into the darkness.

If the thought of orbiting a monstrous, star-gobbling black hole spooks you, don't worry. Earth, located about two-thirds out from the center of the Milky Way, is at a very safe distance. The planet is in no danger of being consumed and wiped off the face of the universe. But, like everything else in the galaxy, it has long been subject to the black hole's whims. When black holes belch radiation out into space, the outflow can heat surrounding gas so much that it prevents it from cooling. If cosmic dust can't cool, it can't condense to form individual, brand-new stars, including ones like our sun. Scientists suspect that the fates of galaxies -- whether they produce new stars or stop altogether -- rests with the supermassive black holes at their centers.

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that the Russians and the Chinese were eavesdropping on President Donald Trump's personal cellphone and using the information gleaned to better influence his behavior. This should surprise no one, writes Bruce Schneier. From a story: Security experts have been talking about the potential security vulnerabilities in Trump's cellphone use since he became president. And President Barack Obama bristled at -- but acquiesced to -- the security rules prohibiting him from using a "regular" cellphone throughout his presidency. Three broader questions obviously emerge from the story. Who else is listening in on Trump's cellphone calls? What about the cellphones of other world leaders and senior government officials? And -- most personal of all -- what about my cellphone calls?

There are two basic places to eavesdrop on pretty much any communications system: at the end points and during transmission. This means that a cellphone attacker can either compromise one of the two phones or eavesdrop on the cellular network. Both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. The NSA seems to prefer bulk eavesdropping on the planet's major communications links and then picking out individuals of interest. In 2016, WikiLeaks published a series of classified documents listing "target selectors": phone numbers the NSA searches for and records. These included senior government officials of Germany -- among them Chancellor Angela Merkel -- France, Japan, and other countries.

Other countries don't have the same worldwide reach that the NSA has, and must use other methods to intercept cellphone calls. We don't know details of which countries do what, but we know a lot about the vulnerabilities. Insecurities in the phone network itself are so easily exploited that 60 Minutes eavesdropped on a U.S. congressman's phone live on camera in 2016. Back in 2005, unknown attackers targeted the cellphones of many Greek politicians by hacking the country's phone network and turning on an already-installed eavesdropping capability. The NSA even implanted eavesdropping capabilities in networking equipment destined for the Syrian Telephone Company. Alternatively, an attacker could intercept the radio signals between a cellphone and a tower. Encryption ranges from very weak to possibly strong, depending on which flavor the system uses. Don't think the attacker has to put his eavesdropping antenna on the White House lawn; the Russian Embassy is close enough.

An anonymous reader quotes New York magazine: Salmon are just the latest entry in a growing cornucopia of animal faces loaded into databases. For some animals, the biometric data gathered from them is being used to aid in conservation efforts. For others, the resulting AI could help ward off poachers. While partly creepy and partly very cute, monitoring of these animals can both help protect their populations and ensure safe, traceable livestock for developing communities...

U.K. researchers are using online resources like Flickr and Instagram to help build and strengthen a database that will eventually help track global tiger populations in real time. Once collected, the photos are analyzed by everyday people in a free app called Wildsense... The mighty lion is being surveilled too. Conservationists and wildlife teachers are using facial recognition to keep tabs on a database of over 1,000 lions... Wildlife experts are tracking elephants to protect them from encroaching poachers. Using Google's Cloud AutoML Vision machine learning software, the technology will uniquely identify elephants in the wild. According to the Evening Standard, the tech will even send out an alert if it detects poachers in the same frame.

The story of whale facial tracking is one of crowdsourcing success. After struggling to distinguish specific whales from one another on his own, marine biologist Christian Khan uploaded the photos to data-competition site Kaggle and, within four months, data-science company Deepsense was able to accurately detect individual whale faces with 87% accuracy. Since then, detection rates have steadily improved and are helping conservationists track and monitor the struggling aquatic giant.
U.S. researchers are trying to protect "the world's most endangered animal" with LemurFaceID, which is able to accurately differentiate between two lemur faces with 97% accuracy. But "In the livestock surveillance arms race China is definitely leading the charge," the article notes, citing e-commerce giant JD.com and its use of facial recognition to monitor herds of pigs to detect their age, weight, and diet.

And one Chinese company even offers a blockchain-based chicken tracking system (codenamed "GoGo Chicken") with an app that can link a grocery store chicken to "its birthplace, what food it ate and how many steps it walked during its life."

Economist Paul Romer, a co-winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics, uses the programming language Python for his research, according to Quartz. Romer reportedly tried using Wolfram Mathematica to make his work transparent, but it didn't work so he converted to a Jupyter notebook instead. From the report: Romer believes in making research transparent. He argues that openness and clarity about methodology is important for scientific research to gain trust. As Romer explained in an April 2018 blog post, in an effort to make his own work transparent, he tried to use Mathematica to share one of his studies in a way that anyone could explore every detail of his data and methods. It didn't work. He says that Mathematica's owner, Wolfram Research, made it too difficult to share his work in a way that didn't require other people to use the proprietary software, too. Readers also could not see all of the code he used for his equations.

Instead of using Mathematica, Romer discovered that he could use a Jupyter notebook for sharing his research. Jupyter notebooks are web applications that allow programmers and researchers to share documents that include code, charts, equations, and data. Jupyter notebooks allow for code written in dozens of programming languages. For his research, Romer used Python -- the most popular language for data science and statistics. Importantly, unlike notebooks made from Mathematica, Jupyter notebooks are open source, which means that anyone can look at all of the code that created them. This allows for truly transparent research. In a compelling story for The Atlantic, James Somers argued that Jupyter notebooks may replace the traditional research paper typically shared as a PDF.

Brian Merchant, writing for The Atlantic (condensed for space): In 2016, an anonymous confession appeared on Reddit: "From around six years ago up until now, I have done nothing at work." As far as office confessions go, that might seem pretty tepid. But this coder, posting as FiletOFish1066, said he worked for a well-known tech company, and he really meant nothing. He wrote that within eight months of arriving on the quality assurance job, he had fully automated his entire workload. When his bosses realized that he'd worked less in half a decade than most Silicon Valley programmers do in a week, they fired him. [...]

About a year later, someone calling himself or herself Etherable posted a query to Workplace on Stack Exchange, one of the web's most important forums for programmers: "Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?" The conflicted coder described accepting a programming gig that had turned out to be "glorified data entry" -- and, six months ago, writing scripts that put the entire job on autopilot. After that, "what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes." The job was full-time, with benefits, and allowed Etherable to work from home. The program produced near-perfect results; for all management knew, their employee simply did flawless work.

The post proved unusually divisive, and comments flooded in. Reactions split between those who felt Etherable was cheating, or at least deceiving, the employer, and those who thought the coder had simply found a clever way to perform the job at hand. [...] Call it self-automation, or auto-automation. At a moment when the specter of mass automation haunts workers, rogue programmers demonstrate how the threat can become a godsend when taken into coders' hands, with or without their employers' knowledge. Since both FiletOFish1066 and Etherable posted anonymously and promptly disappeared, neither were able to be reached for comment. But their stories show that workplace automation can come in many forms and be led by people other than executives.

Ross Goodwin, a former ghostwriter for the Obama administration, uses neural networks to generate poetry, screenplays, and, now, literary travel fiction. The Atlantic tells the story of how Goodwin used a custom machine to write a "novel" narrating its own cross-country road trip. Slashdot reader merbs shares an excerpt from the report: On March 25, 2017, a black Cadillac with a white-domed surveillance camera attached to its trunk departed Brooklyn for New Orleans. An old GPS unit was fastened atop the roof. Inside, a microphone dangled from the ceiling. Wires from all three devices fed into Ross Goodwin's Razer Blade laptop, itself hooked up to a humble receipt printer. This, Goodwin hoped, was the apparatus that was going to produce the next American road-trip novel. The aim was to use the road as a conduit for narrative experimentation, in the tradition of Kerouac, Wolfe, and Kesey, but with the vehicle itself as the artist. He chose the New York-to-NOLA route as a nod to the famous leg of Jack Kerouac's expedition in On the Road. Underneath the base of the Axis M3007 camera, Goodwin scrawled "Further."

Along the way, the four sensors would feed data into a system of neural networks Goodwin had trained on hundreds of books and Foursquare location data, and the printer would spit out the results one letter at a time. By the end of the four-day trip, receipts emblazoned with artificially intelligent prose would cover the floor of the car. They're collected in 1 the Road, a book Goodwin's publisher, Jean Boite Editions, is marketing as "the first novel written by a machine." (Though, for the record, Goodwin says he disagrees it should bear that distinction -- "That might be The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed by a program from the '80s," he tells me.) Regardless, it is a hallucinatory, oddly illuminating account of a bot's life on the interstate; the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test meets Google Street View, narrated by Siri.

Gul Dolen, a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who studies how the cells and chemicals in animal brains influence animals' social lives, gave ecstasy to octopuses and recorded her observations. The study, published in the journal Current Biology, suggests that the psychoactive drug that can make people feel extra loving toward others also has the same effect on octopuses. An anonymous reader shares the report from The Atlantic: [Dolen] and her colleague Eric Edsinger put five Californian two-spot octopuses individually into the middle of three connected chambers and gave them free rein to explore. One of the adjacent chambers housed a second octopus, confined inside an overturned plastic basket. The other contained an unfamiliar object, such as a plastic flower or a Chewbacca figurine. Dolen and Edsinger measured how long the main animal spent in the company of its peer, and how long with the random toy. The free-moving individuals thoroughly explored the chambers, and from their movements, Dolen realized that individuals of any sex gravitate toward females, but avoid males. Next, she dosed the animals with ecstasy. Again, there's no precedent for this, but researchers often anesthetize octopuses by dunking them in ethanol -- a humane procedure with no lasting side effects. So Dolen and Edsinger submerged their octopuses in an MDMA solution, allowing them to absorb the drug through their gills. At first they used too high a dose, and the animals "freaked out and did all these color changes," Dolen says. But once the team found a more suitable dose, the animals behaved more calmly -- and more sociably. "With ecstasy in their system, the five octopuses spent far more time in the company of the same trapped male they once shunned," the report continues. "Even without a stopwatch, the change was obvious. Before the drug, they explored the chamber with the other octopus very tentatively."

"They mashed themselves against one wall, very slowly extended one arm, touched the [other animal], and went back to the other side," Dolen says. "But when they had MDMA, they had this very relaxed posture. They floated around, they wrapped their arms around the chamber, and they interacted with the other octopus in a much more fluid and generous way. They even exposed their [underside], where their mouth is, which is not something octopuses usually do."

Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, New York Times best-selling author, and The Wharton School's top professor, says Americans should work two hours less. Instead of the typical 9-to-5, people "should finish at 3pm," says Grant in a recent LinkedIn post. "We can be as productive and creative in 6 focused hours as in 8 unfocused hours." CNBC reports: In the LinkedIn post, Grant was weighing in on an Atlantic article about the time gap between when school and work days end, a bane for many parents. But it's not the first time Grant has given his stamp of approval to less work with more productivity. "Productivity is less about time management and more about attention management," Grant tweeted in July, highlighting an article about a successful four-day work week study. For the study, a New Zealand company adopted a four-day work week (at five-day pay) with positive results; the company saw benefits ranging from lower stress levels in employees to increased performance. In a recent blog post, billionaire Richard Branson also touted the success of a three-day or four-day work week. "It's easier to attract top talent when you are open and flexible," Branson said in the post. "It's not effective or productive to force them to behave in a conventional way."

"Many people out there would love three-day or even four-day weekends," said Branson. "Everyone would welcome more time to spend with their loved ones, more time to get fit and healthy, more time to explore the world."

An anonymous reader shares a report: For many middle and high school students, giving an in-class presentation was a rite of passage. Teachers would call up students, one by one, to present their work in front of the class and, though it was often nerve wracking, many people claim it helped turn them into more confident public speakers. "Coming from somebody with severe anxiety, having somebody force me to do a public presentation was the best idea to happen in my life," one woman recently tweeted. According to a recent survey by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, oral communication is one of the most sought-after skills in the workplace, with over 90 percent of hiring managers saying it's important. Some educators also credit in-class presentations with building essential leadership skills, and increasing students' confidence and understanding of material.

But in the past few years, students have started calling out in-class presentations as discriminatory to those with anxiety, demanding that teachers offer alternative options. This week, a tweet posted by 15-year-old high school student declaring "Stop forcing students to present in front of the class and give them a choice not to" garnered over 130,000 retweets and nearly half a million likes. A similar sentiment tweeted in January also racked up thousands of likes and retweets. And teachers are listening.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Ten years have passed since the 2008 financial crisis, and the effects linger. For one thing, the crisis produced a significant shift in American higher education. Scared by a seemingly treacherous labor market, since the downturn college students have turned away from the humanities and towards job-oriented degrees. It's not clear they are making the right decision. The humanities were humming along prior to 2008, according to an analysis by the Northeastern University historian Benjamin Schmidt. Over the previous decade, disciplines like history, philosophy, English literature, and religion were either growing or holding steady as a share of all college majors. But in the decade after the financial crisis, all of these majors took a nosedive. The popularity of the history major is an illustrative example. From 1998 to 2007, the share of college students graduating with a degree in history averaged around 2%. By 2017, it had fallen closer to 1%. (All data in this article are based on reports that colleges submit to the US Department of Education.) Other humanities majors saw a similar fall. "Declines have hit almost every field in the humanities... and related social sciences," wrote Schmidt in the The Atlantic. "[T]hey have not stabilized with the economic recovery, and they appear to reflect a new set of student priorities, which are being formed even before they see the inside of a college classroom."

Following a string of murders by drivers of China's top ridesharing app, Didi Chuxing, users are deleting the app in large numbers and calling for others to boycott the service. According to The Atlantic, "the hashtag #BoycottDidi on Weibo has garnered more than 1 million views." From the report: Over the weekend, the driver confessed to local police to raping and stabbing his 20-year-old passenger on her way to a friend's birthday party. The murder is the second in three months -- this May, a young flight attendant was killed by her Didi driver. It is the third in a year -- last May, according to Caixin Global, another woman was strangled and killed by her driver. And it is the fourth in two years -- the year before that, a female teacher was robbed and killed after threats from her driver.

"As a platform, we have disappointed the public's trust in us and cannot shirk this responsibility," Didi said in a statement, admitting to failing to react quickly to another passenger's complaint filed against the driver the day before the murder. The rideshare company has suspended its Hitch services (as it did after the last murder) and fired two senior executives, one in charge of Hitch, its intercity carpooling service, and the other in charge of customer service. The Didi president, Jean Liu, oft-regarded as a hero for Chinese women in business, issued an apology on Tuesday. China's government is now cracking down on reform across the transportation sector.

It's a well-documented, often criticized phenomenon that women's pockets are too small to fit a smartphone, but "there's been very little data to back up a wealth of anecdotal evidence," writes Megan Farokhmanesh via The Verge. Now, The Pudding has used scientific findings to fill this absence. From the report: According to The Pudding's findings, pockets in women's jeans are, on average, 48 percent shorter and 6.5 percent narrower than those of men's. To put this into a perspective we all care about, the site says that only 40 percent of women's front pockets can completely fit a iPhone X. The number only goes down for the Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel (20 percent and 5 percent, respectively, though the report doesn't specify which model) of the flagships). As for men's pockets? The Pudding marks a 100 percent success rate for the iPhone X, 95 percent for the Samsung Galaxy, and 85 percent for the Google Pixel. "If you're thinking 'But men are bigger than women,' then sure, on average that's true," the site adds. "But here we measured 80 pairs of jeans that all boasted a 32 inch waistband, meaning that these jeans were all made to fit the same size person."

Millions of publications -- not to mention spy documents -- can be read on microfilm machines. But people still see these devices as outmoded and unappealing. From a report: I recently acquired a decommissioned microfilm reader. My university bought the reader for $16,000 in 1998, but its value has depreciated to $0 in their official bookkeeping records. Machines like it played a central role in both research and secret-agent tasks of the last century. But this one had become an embarrassment. The bureaucrats wouldn't let me store the reader in a laboratory that also houses a multimillion-dollar information-display system. They made me promise to "make sure no VIPs ever see it there." After lots of paperwork and negotiation, I finally had to transport the machine myself. Unlike a computer -- even an old one -- it was heavy and ungainly. It would not fit into a car, and it could not be carried by two people for more than a few feet. Even moving the thing was an embarrassment. No one wanted it, but no one wanted me to have it around either.

And yet the microfilm machine is still widely used. It has centuries of lasting power ahead of it, and new models are still being manufactured. It's a shame that no intrigue will greet their arrival, because these machines continue to prove essential for preserving and accessing archival materials. [...] Microfilm's decline intensified with the development of optical-character-recognition (OCR) technology. Initially used to search microfilm in the 1930s, Emanuel Goldberg designed a system that could read characters on film and translate them into telegraph code. Further reading: 'You Had to Be There': As Technologies Change Ever Faster, the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter.

Last year, Lavell Burton, 36, wanted to learn to code, but was surprised to find that many of coding bootcamps cost several thousand dollars upfront. Then he found a 30-week remote program, Lambda School, that was free to attend. The program would provide comprehensive web-engineering training, and would help with job placement. Once employed, graduates would be required to pay back a set portion of their salary under an arrangement called an income-share agreement, or ISA. The Atlantic dives into such income share agreements. From a report: The concept of ISAs has been around since at least the 1950s, when the economist Milton Friedman outlined them as a hypothetical model of repayment. Yet ISAs were rarely implemented until the past few years, as student-loan default spiked and schools sought to offer other ways to pay. In 2016, Purdue University launched an ISA tuition option aimed at families who might otherwise take out high-interest private loans or Direct PLUS loans for parents to fill the gap between federal student loans and the cost of tuition. Purdue hired Vemo Education, a for-profit startup, to help design and administer the program, which is largely backed by the university's funds. The private schools Clarkson University and Messiah College have since announced plans to follow suit, as has the United States Collegiate Athletic Association, which has partnered with Vemo to create ISA options for its roughly 80 member schools.

Among for-profit programs, in 2012, App Academy, a coding bootcamp with locations in San Francisco and New York, began offering a twelve-week program built around an ISA. Others, like the New York Code + Design Academy, which provides a range of web engineering and design courses, and Holberton School, a two-year program in San Francisco, have similar payment options. [...] The ISA-based programs have generated hype, as well as some early success stories. Yet questions remain about whether they are a good deal for students and if they make for profitable businesses in the long run. For one thing, there's little consensus around how much is fair to reap from program graduates, and for how long. Lambda School, for example, requires graduates earning at least $50,000 to pay back 17 percent of their salary for two years, with total payments capped at $30,000. The terms can vary widely among programs. Also, while it's clear how programs like Lambda School might help some people improve their prospects, many of them are so new -- Lambda School is one year old this month -- that there isn't much data about how people do once they get through the programs. That makes it difficult for prospective students to evaluate them.

An anonymous reader shares a report: All that's required to create an account and post on any of Reddit's 1.2 million forums is an email address, a username, and a password. You don't need to tell the company your birthday, your gender, or even your real name. As Huffman put it on Thursday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, "Reddit doesn't want the burden of personal information ... and is not selling personal information."

Huffman argued that anonymity on Reddit actually makes using the site "more like a conversation one has in real life" than other exchanges on the internet. "When people detach from their real-world identities, they can be more authentic, more true to themselves," he claimed.

How many exclamation points does it take to exclaim something? One, a human of sound mind and a decent grasp of punctuation might say. But, on the internet, it often doesn't. The Atlantic: Not anymore. Digital communication is undergoing exclamation-point inflation. When single exclamation points adorn every sentence in a business email, it takes two to convey true enthusiasm. Or three. Or four. Or more. I noticed this in my own social circles recently. Multiple exclamation points were popping up in mundane places, not attached to hyperbole or any kind of frenzied emotion. A simple work email might yield a "Sounds good!!!" I find myself doing it, too. "All of these quirks of social media -- that would include exclamation points, and all caps, and repetition of letters, those are the three main ones that show enthusiasm -- people use more of them," says Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. This sort of inflation is a natural linguistic phenomenon that regularly happens to words, like how awesome was once reserved for that which truly struck awe into a quavering heart and is now scarcely more than a verbal thumbs up. But this time it's happening to punctuation.

Sample this: Me: So that's the marshmallow but you're going to eat it with this graham cracker and chocolate.
[My son looks at me like I am the dumbest person alive.]
Sebastian: No, I'm going to eat it with my MOUTH.
[End of play.] That's from "S'MORES. A Real-Life One-Act Play", a conversation between Hamilton impresario Lin-Manuel Miranda which his young son Sebastian. In that brief interaction, young Sebastian Miranda inadvertently hit upon a kind of ambiguity that reveals a great deal about how people learn and process language -- and how we might teach computers to do the same.

The misinterpretation on which the s'mores story hinges is hiding in the humble preposition with. Imagine the many ways one could finish this sentence: I'm going to eat this marshmallow with ... If you're in the mood for s'mores, then "graham cracker and chocolate" is an appropriate object of the preposition with. But if you want to split the marshmallow with a friend, you could say you're going to eat it "with my buddy Charlie." The Atlantic elaborates: Somehow speakers of English master these many possible uses of the word with without anyone specifically spelling it out for them. At least that's the case for native speakers -- in a class for English as a foreign language, the teacher likely would tease apart these nuances. But what if you wanted to provide the same linguistic education to a machine?

As it happens, just days after Miranda sent his tweet, computational linguists presented a conference paper exploring exactly why such ambiguous language is challenging for a computer-based system to figure out. The researchers did so using an online game that serves as a handy introduction to some intriguing work currently being done in the field of natural language processing (NLP). The game, called Madly Ambiguous , was developed by the linguist Michael White and his colleagues at Ohio State University. In it, you are given a challenge: to stump a bot named Mr. Computer Head by filling the blank in the sentence Jane ate spaghetti with ____________. Then the computer tries to determine which kind of with you intended. Playful images drive the point home. [Editor's note: check the article for corresponding images.]

In the sentence Jane ate spaghetti with a fork, Mr. Computer Head should be able to figure out that the fork is a utensil, and not something that is eaten in addition to the spaghetti. Likewise, if the sentence is Jane ate spaghetti with meatballs, it should be obvious that meatballs are part of the dish, not an instrument for eating spaghetti.

Sample this: Me: So that's the marshmallow but you're going to eat it with this graham cracker and chocolate.
[My son looks at me like I am the dumbest person alive.]
Sebastian: No, I'm going to eat it with my MOUTH.
[End of play.] That's from "S'MORES. A Real-Life One-Act Play", a conversation between Hamilton impresario Lin-Manuel Miranda which his young son Sebastian. In that brief interaction, young Sebastian Miranda inadvertently hit upon a kind of ambiguity that reveals a great deal about how people learn and process language -- and how we might teach computers to do the same.

The misinterpretation on which the s'mores story hinges is hiding in the humble preposition with. Imagine the many ways one could finish this sentence: I'm going to eat this marshmallow with ... If you're in the mood for s'mores, then "graham cracker and chocolate" is an appropriate object of the preposition with. But if you want to split the marshmallow with a friend, you could say you're going to eat it "with my buddy Charlie." The Atlantic elaborates: Somehow speakers of English master these many possible uses of the word with without anyone specifically spelling it out for them. At least that's the case for native speakers -- in a class for English as a foreign language, the teacher likely would tease apart these nuances. But what if you wanted to provide the same linguistic education to a machine?

As it happens, just days after Miranda sent his tweet, computational linguists presented a conference paper exploring exactly why such ambiguous language is challenging for a computer-based system to figure out. The researchers did so using an online game that serves as a handy introduction to some intriguing work currently being done in the field of natural language processing (NLP). The game, called Madly Ambiguous , was developed by the linguist Michael White and his colleagues at Ohio State University. In it, you are given a challenge: to stump a bot named Mr. Computer Head by filling the blank in the sentence Jane ate spaghetti with ____________. Then the computer tries to determine which kind of with you intended. Playful images drive the point home. [Editor's note: check the article for corresponding images.]

In the sentence Jane ate spaghetti with a fork, Mr. Computer Head should be able to figure out that the fork is a utensil, and not something that is eaten in addition to the spaghetti. Likewise, if the sentence is Jane ate spaghetti with meatballs, it should be obvious that meatballs are part of the dish, not an instrument for eating spaghetti.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via The Atlantic, written by Alexis C. Madrigal: No one picks up the phone anymore. Even many businesses do everything they can to avoid picking up the phone. Of the 50 or so calls I received in the last month, I might have picked up four or five times. The reflex of answering -- built so deeply into people who grew up in 20th-century telephonic culture -- is gone. There are many reasons for the slow erosion of this commons. The most important aspect is structural: There are simply more communication options. Text messaging and its associated multimedia variations are rich and wonderful: words mixed with emoji, Bitmoji, reaction gifs, regular old photos, video, links. Texting is fun, lightly asynchronous, and possible to do with many people simultaneously. It's almost as immediate as a phone call, but not quite. You've got your Twitter, your Facebook, your work Slack, your email, FaceTimes incoming from family members. So many little dings have begun to make the rings obsolete.

But in the last couple years, there is a more specific reason for eyeing my phone's ring warily. Perhaps 80 or even 90 percent of the calls coming into my phone are spam of one kind or another. [...] There are unsolicited telemarketing calls. There are straight-up robocalls that merely deliver recorded messages. There are the cyborg telemarketers, who sit in call centers playing prerecorded bits of audio to simulate a conversation. There are the spam phone calls, whose sole purpose seems to be verifying that your phone number is real and working.

An anonymous reader writes: With Netflix and Amazon Prime, Facebook Video and YouTube, it's tempting to imagine that the tech industry destroyed TV. The world is more than 25 years into the web era, after all, more than half of American households have had home Internet for 15 years, and the current smartphone paradigm began more than a decade ago. But no. Americans still watch an absolutely astounding amount of traditional television.

In fact, television viewing didn't peak until 2009-2010, when the average American household watched 8 hours and 55 minutes of TV per day. And the '00s saw the greatest growth in TV viewing time of any decade since Nielsen began keeping track in 1949-1950: Americans watched 1 hour and 23 minutes more television at the end of the decade than at the beginning. Run the numbers and you'll find that 32 percent of the increase in viewing time from the birth of television to its peak occurred in the first years of the 21st century.

Over the last 8 years, all the new, non-TV things -- Facebook, phones, YouTube, Netflix -- have only cut about an hour per day from the dizzying amount of TV that the average household watches. Americans are still watching more than 7 hours and 50 minutes per household per day.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The search for extraterrestrial life, in general, has continued over the past decades, of course, carried out by academic institutions around the world, by people like Tarter, one of the field's best-known seti researchers (and the inspiration for Ellie Arroway, the protagonist in Contact, Carl Sagan's 1985 classic science-fiction novel). But they wouldn't get any help from the feds. "[Senator Bryan] made it clear to the administration that if they came back with seti in their budget again, it wouldn't be good for the NASA budget," Tarter says now. "So we instantly became the four-letter S-word that you couldn't say at headquarters anymore, and that has stuck for quite a while."

That could soon change. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives recently proposed legislation for NASA's future that includes some intriguing language. The space agency, the bill recommends, should spend $10 million on the "search for technosignatures, such as radio transmissions" per year, for the next two fiscal years. The House bill -- should it survive a vote in the House and passage in the Senate -- can only make recommendations for how agencies should use federal funding. But for seti researchers like Tarter, the fact that it even exists is thrilling. It's the first time congressional lawmakers have proposed using federal cash to fund seti in 25 years.

An anonymous reader shares a report: This summer, a NASA spacecraft will launch into space from the coast of Florida, headed for the sun. After making several flybys of Venus to slow itself down, the Parker Solar Probe will come within 4 million miles of the sun's scorching surface, closer than any spacecraft in history.

NASA is never one to miss an opportunity to drum up publicity for upcoming space missions, especially the less flashy ones. Sending something to study the star we see every day may sound less thrilling, for example, than launching a mission to find exoplanets around 200,000 stars. So in March, the space agency announced a little campaign to promote the Parker Solar Probe: Send us your names and we'll put them on a microchip inside a spacecraft bound for the sun. (They even got Star Trek actor William Shatner to help promote it.)

The call for names, which closed at the end of last week, received more than 1.1 million submissions, according to a spokesperson at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which designed and built the Parker Solar Probe. On the surface, the campaign was little more than a quirky act to get the public interested in space exploration. But considered more deeply, it represents the human desire to find ways to outlive ourselves and our bodies, to be remembered once our time here on Earth is up.

A new project untangles the handwritten texts in one of the world's largest historical collections. From a report: The Vatican Secret Archives is one of the grandest historical collections in the world. It's also one of the most useless. The grandeur is obvious. Located within the Vatican's walls, next door to the Apostolic Library and just north of the Sistine Chapel, the VSA houses 53 linear miles of shelving dating back more than 12 centuries. That said, the VSA isn't much use to modern scholars, because it's so inaccessible. Of those 53 miles, just a few millimeters' worth of pages have been scanned and made available online. Even fewer pages have been transcribed into computer text and made searchable. If you want to peruse anything else, you have to apply for special access, schlep all the way to Rome, and go through every page by hand.

But a new project could change all that. Known as In Codice Ratio, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour these neglected texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time. If successful, the technology could also open up untold numbers of other documents at historical archives around the world.

For the first time in two decades, a huge number of books, films, and other works will escape U.S. copyright law. From a report: The Great American Novel enters the public domain on January 1, 2019 -- quite literally. Not the concept, but the book by William Carlos Williams. It will be joined by hundreds of thousands of other books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923. It's the first time since 1998 for a mass shift to the public domain of material protected under copyright. It's also the beginning of a new annual tradition: For several decades from 2019 onward, each New Year's Day will unleash a full year's worth of works published 95 years earlier.

This coming January, Charlie Chaplin's film The Pilgrim and Cecil B. DeMille's The 10 Commandments will slip the shackles of ownership, allowing any individual or company to release them freely, mash them up with other work, or sell them with no restriction. This will be true also for some compositions by Bela Bartok, Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, Winston Churchill's The World Crisis, Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Pigeons, E.E. Cummings's Tulips and Chimneys, Noel Coward's London Calling! musical, Edith Wharton's A Son at the Front, many stories by P.G. Wodehouse, and hosts upon hosts of forgotten works, according to research by the Duke University School of Law's Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Throughout the 20th century, changes in copyright law led to longer periods of protection for works that had been created decades earlier, which altered a pattern of relatively brief copyright protection that dates back to the founding of the nation. This came from two separate impetuses. First, the United States had long stood alone in defining copyright as a fixed period of time instead of using an author's life plus a certain number of years following it, which most of the world had agreed to in 1886. Second, the ever-increasing value of intellectual property could be exploited with a longer term. But extending American copyright law and bringing it into international harmony meant applying "patches" retroactively to work already created and published. And that led, in turn, to lengthy delays in copyright expiring on works that now date back almost a century.