Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Take a Tablet and Wake Up Smarter?

December 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
laptops

Over the years we’ve taken occasional peeks at the fate of the One Laptop Per Child initiative, an intuitively positive-sounding program that reasons giving every young students in the world a key to the digital future has just gotta be a great idea. Perhaps not all that surprisingly, it hasn’t turned out that way, at least not on the scale that visionaries like Nicholas Negroponte have suggested. The seven-year effort retooled itself (again) a year ago, as Jeff Shear reported on this site, with a third version of a cheap (i.e. inexpensive) laptop that would be handed out to children in ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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Identity Protection That Really Clicks

May 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

If you wish to truly know a man, follow the movements of his mouse. It sounds like an ancient proverb from some rodent-infested culture. But it’s the unspoken mantra of a group of computer security researchers who have refined an innovative method of combatting identity theft. In a newly published paper, a research team led by Clint Feher of Israel’s Ben-Gurion University introduces a novel way of verifying a computer is being operated by its rightful user. Its method, described in the journal Information Sciences, “continuously verifies users according to characteristics of their ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, Today in Mice
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Feds Appear Clueless About Their Own E-Waste

March 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

You upgrade your computer every four or five years. No big deal. Discarding the old one leaves a relatively tiny e-footprint. The U.S. government, on the other hand, is the world’s largest purchaser of information technology and discards 10,000 computers each week, says a new report from the Government Accountability Office. The government has a few options when its tech bits get worn out: donate them to schools; give them to a recycler; exchange them with other government agencies; or sell them to the highest bidder at auctions. But because of the difficulty of tracking and reporting ... Read More

More like this: By The Way ..., Environment
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The Background on Your Bytes

March 9, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

A large blue diagram fills the computer monitor in James Frew's office at the University of California, Santa Barbara; it’s a graphical representation of the life history of data used to create a map of ocean color around the world. Several tightly spaced vertical lines run down the left side of the screen, illustrating the flow of information toward the end product. As he scrolls down, small boxes containing data source labels come into view on the right side. Horizontal lines lead from the boxes to the vertical lines on the left, mapping how each boxed element, or data source, feeds into ... Read More

More like this: Science
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One Laptop Per Child Redux

December 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The New York Times called it,  “The Laptop That Will Save the World,” while the renowned Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University  referred to it as “a monumental feat of engineering and design.” Dressed up like a toy in a Kermit-the-Frog green and white plastic shell, this durable little computer was the progeny of the nonprofit organization, One Laptop Per Child. When the laptops went into mass production in November 2007, OLPC’s ambitious plan aimed to place a free computer into the hands of the world's 1 billion impoverished children. Education is the exit ramp ... Read More

More like this: Education
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The Fitness of Physical Models

December 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Fitness of Physical Models

Ranger Thomas Downs leads a group of visitors to a point above San Pablo Bay in Sausalito, California. Gesturing toward the Pacific Ocean, he clearly enjoys himself as he exclaims, “There's the Golden Gate Bridge!” The kids in the group grin at a California gray whale breaching in the distance. The four main bays that make up the San Francisco Bay estuary can all be seen from here: San Pablo, Suisun, Central and South Bay. The entire San Francisco Bay, including its famous bridges, is visible, and the whale is spectacular. This view is possible from only one vantage point on Earth: ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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U.S. Pledges to Reform Electronics Recycling

July 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Melinda Burns wrote in January about the difficulty in keeping hazardous materials — among them batteries, fluorescent lights, hypodermic needles and electronics — out of landfills. She described how state and local governments were taking the lead in the U.S. in calling for companies to take responsibility for their products at the end of their lifecycles, something known as "product stewardship." But even if a company does recycle its wares, that alone is not always a satisfactory solution. As Emily Badger reported recently, there is a shameful practice in which electronic ... Read More

More like this: By The Way ..., Environment
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Why E-Waste Should Be Kept, Recycled in U.S.

July 1, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

As laptops, flat screens and smart phones grow ever more ubiquitous, so does the problematic trash they ultimately become. It’s a quandary for the Information Age that seldom gets the attention of the cool tech tools themselves. Individual communities in the U.S. have been struggling with how to dispose of electronic waste, who should pay for its recycling and whether companies that manufacture electronics should be responsible for their full life cycle. But much of this e-waste is never disposed of anywhere in the U.S. — whether at local municipal dumps or corporate facilities. It ... Read More

More like this: Environment, The Idea Lobby
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Artificial Intelligence: It’s For Real

February 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

We all know artificial intelligence is dangerous. The machines got too smart and took over in the Terminator movies. In War Games the computer almost initiated thermonuclear war (until it realized that mutually assured destruction was pointless via cinema’s most suspenseful tic-tac-toe session). And, of course, in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, Eddie the shipboard computer was dangerously chipper and Marvin was depressingly depressed. What does the future of artificial intelligence hold? I hope to be able to use a computer to store and retrieve my memories. I want be able to ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, Think Again
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Smokey Bear Now Studies Computer Science

February 1, 2010 • By • 2 Comments

The war being waged against wildfires from Southern California to Greece and Australia is almost as complex as the infernos themselves. Innovative computer mapping tools advance, as do airborne imaging techniques that can look straight through black smoke for views of emerging dangers no firefighter ever sees. However, some crews battle blazes on bulldozers older than they are, and funding is tight all around. Still, the breakthroughs keep coming. Part I: THE POWER OF ‘LOOK-DOWN' TECHNOLOGY Part II: UNDERSTANDING WILDFIRE BEHAVIOR AND PREDICTING ITS SPREAD Part III: WHAT'S REALLY ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Science, Science & Environment
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