Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Will DNA Be the Hard Drive of the Future?

January 25, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
dna2

When the FedEx package arrived from California, its contents were so small as to be invisible. One of the British scientists, a mathematician, worried they’d been sent empty test tubes. His colleague, a molecular biologist, corrected him, turning a vial upside down, tilting it in the light. There, in the bottom, like a thimbleful of dust, were the data: tiny strands of DNA. Stored in their paired nucleotides were five files, 739 kilobytes of information: a color photograph of the European Bioinformatics Institute, where the researchers worked; an MP3 excerpt of Dr. King’s “I Have a ... Read More

The Touchy-Feely Future

November 15, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
senseg3

When I heard that we might soon be able to feel textures through screens, I wanted to play. So I badgered my way into a demonstration with Dave Rice, spokesperson for Senseg, a leading company in the emerging field of haptic (from the Greek meaning “to touch”) technology. We met at a San Francisco coffee shop, where he pulled out a Toshiba tablet that Senseg’s people had hacked with haptics. Engineers had opened up the tablet and embedded their custom electronics. Then they covered the screen’s glass with a special coating that has particular electrical properties. They also ... Read More

For Teens Online, Hundreds of ‘Friends’ and No One to Turn To

October 19, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Amanda Todd

Amanda Todd is an Internet sensation. Last week, her name was a trending Twitter #hashtag. A Facebook page honoring her has 590,000 “Likes.” A YouTube message she recorded to the world— “I’m not doing this for attention,” she wrote in an accompanying note, “I’m doing this to be an inspiration and to show that I can be strong”—has been watched more than four million times. http://youtu.be/vOHXGNx-E7E If only Amanda Todd had lived long enough to witness it. Todd was just 12 when, fooling around with friends and a Web cam one day, she flashed her breasts for a ... Read More

Book Reviews: How the Wealth Gap Damages Democracy

September 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Multi Books new shadow

Inequality and Instability. By James K. Galbraith, Oxford University Press. Affluence & Influence. By Martin Gilens, Princeton University Press. Reviewed by James Ledbetter, the op-ed editor of Reuters and the author, most recently, of Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the D Military-Industrial Complex   What do we mean by “inequality,” and why exactly is it bad for American democracy? Are we discussing inequality of wages within a given firm or industry? Or inequality in household income—i.e., the difference between the poor and the middle class, or ... Read More

Facebook: Saving Lives, One Kidney at a Time

May 16, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Kidneys in transparent body

Web-based social networks have little in common with hospital operating rooms. One exists on an ephemeral realm of bits and bytes, while the other lives in the very real world of blood and tissue. That incongruity helps explain why Facebook’s recent announcement that it will encourage its members to become organ donors captured people’s imagination. And according to psychologists who study how we manage reminders of our mortality, it suggests Mark Zuckerberg’s online creation may be a particularly promising platform to tackle a major medical problem. “I think it’ll work ... Read More

Television Violence Enticing, But Not Satisfying

March 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Why is there so much graphic violence in contemporary entertainment? Producers will tell you the answer is simple: because people enjoy it. According to newly published research, the real reason may be: Because it’s easy to market. When it comes to graphic gore, there’s a gap between what whets our appetite and what we actually find satisfying. That’s the conclusion of a study by Indiana University scholars Andrew Weaver and Matthew Kobach, which found students were enticed by descriptions of violent scenes, but actually enjoyed the programs more when those elements were edited ... Read More

Announcing Our New Name

February 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Miller-McCune was launched in 2008 to showcase some of the most intriguing academic research being produced in the world today. Our belief then, and now, is that it’s important to publish stories that are research-driven and fact-based, written by journalists, innovative thinkers, and leading academics. In the run-up to our fifth year, we’ve considered carefully where we’ve been and where we’d like to go. And we’ve thought long and hard about the benefits, and pitfalls, of publishing this magazine in California when most American magazines (a few gems notwithstanding) are produced on ... Read More

Bitter About Your Life? Blame Facebook

January 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Has life treated you unfairly? Do you have a nagging suspicion that other people, are, on balance, happier than you are? You might want to get off of Facebook. A newly published study suggests the phenomenally popular social networking site may be skewing the way users perceive their lives. It finds those carefully selected photos of cheerful, contented people cumulatively convey a self-esteem-shattering message: Our lives are fantastic! What’s wrong with you? At least, that’s the conclusion of Utah Valley University sociologist Hui-Tzu Grace Chou, who conducted a study of 425 ... Read More

Miller-McCune’s Top Stories of 2011

December 31, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The word “top” always proves fungible in that modern media creation, “the list,” but this year Miller-McCune is adding a pinch of rigor to our own efforts to craft a Top 10 list. We’re drawing on the stories we published in 2011 that attracted the most web visitors. That’s not as elegant as some of the methodologies we’ve tried in the past, and traffic counts are fraught since gaining web visitors can verge into the black arts. Nonetheless, by accident or design, this year’s traffic winners tend to a present a balanced picture of the types of stories we favor at ... Read More

Pop Charts Still Dominated by Men

December 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

In 1997, Rolling Stone magazine famously celebrated the rise of the female pop star, boldly declaring that “Women are ruling the roost.” It took less than a decade for that dominance to decisively shift back to men. That’s the key finding of a newly published study, which concludes that “gender inequality continues to characterize the world of popular music.” A Canadian research team led by Concordia University sociologist Marc Lafrance reports male artists continue to dominate the Top 40 sales charts, and the gender gap is even wider in terms of airplay. Lafrance and his ... Read More