Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Face to Face With More Electronic Privacy Concerns

June 17, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
surveillance-face

Whether or not your electronic life is your own to share or not fuels debate over the propriety of U.S. government trolling of phone and Internet sources. But the face you present to the world—literally, your face—generates new questions about privacy as various local government-created databases are surveyed with facial-recognition software. That’s the takeaway message of a piece in today’s Washington Post, which reviews the legal and legislative terrain of law enforcement using all those driver’s license photos to track down (for now, at any rate) bad guys. With a whiff of ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs, Politics
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Your Stem Cells Are Here to Stay

June 17, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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With each new report of a technological breakthrough, stem cells both inspire hope in patients and incite ethical controversy. Some see stem cells as a potentially game-changing cure for currently terminal diseases; others see them as an unnecessary obsession of scientists who lack reverence for human life at its earliest stages. So, is this debate worth the time and energy? Yes, it is. Stem cells occupy a fundamental place in human biology and disease, which means, as an issue, they aren’t going away. The reason scientists have focused so intensely on stem cells is because these cells ... Read More

More like this: Science
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Before It Was Your Phone

June 13, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
1896-telephone

Last week The Guardian reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon, and has been since April. Critics hastened to point out that this behavior was totally legal under the Patriot Act. Furthermore, President Obama explained, the NSA was collecting only information about American’s phone records, who they called and how long the conversations lasted. "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," he said. As Mark Rogowsky wrote at Forbes, however, the government could probably do that if it were so inclined. ... Read More

More like this: Politics
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Are Video Games the Next Great Art Form?

June 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
bioshock-infinite

In 2005, late film critic Roger Ebert created a storm of controversy when he wrote that video games could never be art. While Ebert wasn't the first person to address the subject, he was one of the first mainstream critics to do so, and his statement set off a rash of essays, blog posts, and talks arguing for (few) and against (many) his position. The subject has drifted in and out of popular culture ever since, with different scholars weighing in here and there. Ebert himself would refine his position half-a-decade later, explaining, "Video games by their nature require player choices, ... Read More

More like this: Culture
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How Gallium Nitride Could Help Power the World

May 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Umesh Mishra thinks day in and day out about power conversion—the trillions of adjustments in voltage, frequency, and current made daily to deliver electricity from wall outlets to computers, TVs, virtually any electronic device. And he thinks about the gadgets that do the converting, mostly built using silicon. Collectively, those converters waste nearly as much power in the form of heat as all the energy produced by all the renewable sources in the United States. On average, silicon-based converters are only 90 percent energy-efficient. The 10 percent that is lost dissipates as heat ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, May-June 2013
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A Survivor of the Deadliest Tornado in U.S. History Tells Her Tale

May 20, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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The ghoulish, ongoing tornado storm in the midwest comes a few days before the anniversary of the Joplin, Missouri, tornado disaster, which leveled 25 percent of the city and killed nearly 200 people on May 22, 2011. However, memories can prove short—even for events like Joplin and this week's mile-wide twisters. In 1925, the worst tornado disaster in history hit the upper Midwest. The Tri-State Tornado still holds records for spending the longest time on the ground, where it left a swath 219 miles long. It killed nearly 700 people. "You know, I can’t remember that it lightninged and ... Read More

More like this: Science
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The Evolution of Gay Sex in Comic Books

April 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Apple made more than a few new enemies yesterday—and this time the tech giant wasn't the one that did something wrong. On Tuesday, April 9, Brian K. Vaughan, creator of the popular comic book Saga, released a statement on Tumblr claiming that the newest issue of his series was blocked from the App Store because of some potentially offensive imagery. "Fiona and I could always edit the images in question," Vaughan wrote, referring to Fiona Staples, his co-creator, herself a popular comic book artist since the mid-2000s, "but everything we put into the book is there to advance our story, not ... Read More

More like this: Culture
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The Dream Recorder (of 1926)

April 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Last week, new research was published that showed the first objective recording of the contents from a dream. Using an MRI machine and images from the Internet, researchers in Kyoto, Japan, devised a way to decode with some accuracy what people were visualizing while they slept. But scientists and science fiction folk alike have been targeting the elusive dream for capture since at least the 1920s. The cover of the September 1926 issue of Science and Invention magazine included concept art of the "dream recorder" machine. The device wasn't invented by sci-fi publishing pioneer Hugo ... Read More

More like this: Science, Time Machine
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Is Your Cell Phone Not Ruining Your Life?

April 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Cell phones can be wonderful things. You might even be reading this on a cell phone. And today is the 40th birthday of the first mobile phone. That phone—look at how cute the antenna is!—could call other people at a somewhat successful clip and not fit in your pocket, but that’s about it. Over the last 40 years cell phones have developed the ability to do so many different non-phone-call things, making calling more of “feature” or, oh no, an “app,” rather than a vital method of communication upon which this device’s existence is based. So, 40 years on, it’s time to take ... Read More

More like this: Science, The 101
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Nikola Tesla and the Myth of the Lone Inventor

April 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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This post is based on a talk I gave at South by Southwest and a version of it first appeared at BBC Future. Who invented the Internet? To answer that seemingly simple question you basically have two options: you can go on for hours explaining the hundreds of people and institutions that contributed crucial advancements to the way that the Internet operates, or you can just say Vint Cerf. Or Leonard Kleinrock. Or Tim Berners-Lee. People have been fighting for decades over who invented the Net. Some will tell you that Vint Cerf’s work on its underlying protocols—TCP/IP—was its ... Read More

More like this: Science, Time Machine
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