Forget AI, Technology Is Powering Our Own Intelligence

courosa/Flickr

If you’ve been out of school for a long time you may only remember the good parts — growing up with your friends, school events, and those few inspirational teachers who pushed you to excel. The bad parts of school are just as memorable; fights, changing relationships, and failures. But the day-to-day lecture, note-taking and test-taking is still commonplace in many classrooms and easily forgotten since it doesn’t engage the learning imagination.

A teaching model that centres on student consumption, review, and then being tested on information is simple, but it’s also less effective than more challenging methods of teaching and learning. In their 2014 book Make It Stick, Brown, Roediger III, and McDaniel describe how effective, long-term learning that is ready when needed requires that we practice active retrieval. Learners must make significant, personally active efforts to recall information and apply it to challenges.

Unfortunately, the lecture model is often perceived as easier than more active teaching approaches; if only because more teachers and students are used to it. But technology can help. For example, the flipped classroom model takes the passive information transfer accomplished through lectures and moves it online through digital recordings that students can watch on their own time, and at their own pace.

Video-based instruction may be created by the teachers themselves using simple webcams and mics, by a group of teachers working together to lighten the load, or may even come from the open web, through free and open videos from Kahn Academy, massive open online courses (MOOCs) and so on. By making one of their most rote activities, the lecture, reusable on the web, teachers can focus classroom time on hands-on, person-to-person learning activities.

In-class activities, too, can be aided by technology. For example, shared digital spaces can serve as a hub for student collaboration, whether that’s simply for note-taking or for cooperative authoring and editing. Teachers can poll students on challenging conceptual questions through their mobile phones, the results of which can be used to change the direction of class activities, or trigger student-to-student, reflection, discussion, and teaching.

Outside of the classroom, technology helps learning by doing what computers do best; automating processes and feedback that would typically require manual work. This is valuable when students need opportunities to repeatedly practice, and receive immediate feedback on that practice. Learning management systems, such as Canvas, provided by most colleges and universities are more than a hub for sharing files and student discussions; they can provide on-demand practice activities such as low- or no-stakes self-tests that trigger retrieval and reinforce or correct students’ understanding. Use of these learning platforms is gaining popularity in primary and secondary schools too, in part because they help connect parents with their children’s education, but also because they present a means of individualising instruction to foster better outcomes.

Part of what makes us human is our proclivity to learn. Up to a quarter of our lives are spent in formal education; schools, colleges, universities, trainings and so on. But this doesn’t mean we’re done with learning when school is over. Jay Cross, author of Informal Learning, suggests only a small percentage of our learning happens through formal schooling – around 20%. The rest of learning happens informally, here and there, on-the-job, and through our connections with an increasingly interconnected world.

We may be a little shy about sharing what and how we learn on the open web, but if you think about the practical, how-to information that you’ve likely frequently discovered on the web you’ll recognise that this is exactly what the educators are doing. The resulting online discussion, debate, and discovery of new information sources can extend our own personal learning networks, and establish our digital identity; a living, changing portfolio that may help us stand out for the real work we’ve done in a highly competitive world.

Carl Sagan wrote, “Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening.” Technology’s change on our lives and our culture both challenges traditional approaches to learning and creates new opportunities for active, lifelong learning. If we’re going to keep pace it’s increasingly important that we choose to leverage technology to establish learning practices and habits that are effective and efficient, both in school and in our own lives.

Jared Stein is VP Research and Education at Instructure, creators of the Canvas learning platform.

Forget AI, Technology Is Powering Our Own Intelligence

courosa/Flickr

If you’ve been out of school for a long time you may only remember the good parts — growing up with your friends, school events, and those few inspirational teachers who pushed you to excel. The bad parts of school are just as memorable; fights, changing relationships, and failures. But the day-to-day lecture, note-taking and test-taking is still commonplace in many classrooms and easily forgotten since it doesn’t engage the learning imagination.

A teaching model that centres on student consumption, review, and then being tested on information is simple, but it’s also less effective than more challenging methods of teaching and learning. In their 2014 book Make It Stick, Brown, Roediger III, and McDaniel describe how effective, long-term learning that is ready when needed requires that we practice active retrieval. Learners must make significant, personally active efforts to recall information and apply it to challenges.

Unfortunately, the lecture model is often perceived as easier than more active teaching approaches; if only because more teachers and students are used to it. But technology can help. For example, the flipped classroom model takes the passive information transfer accomplished through lectures and moves it online through digital recordings that students can watch on their own time, and at their own pace.

Video-based instruction may be created by the teachers themselves using simple webcams and mics, by a group of teachers working together to lighten the load, or may even come from the open web, through free and open videos from Kahn Academy, massive open online courses (MOOCs) and so on. By making one of their most rote activities, the lecture, reusable on the web, teachers can focus classroom time on hands-on, person-to-person learning activities.

In-class activities, too, can be aided by technology. For example, shared digital spaces can serve as a hub for student collaboration, whether that’s simply for note-taking or for cooperative authoring and editing. Teachers can poll students on challenging conceptual questions through their mobile phones, the results of which can be used to change the direction of class activities, or trigger student-to-student, reflection, discussion, and teaching.

Outside of the classroom, technology helps learning by doing what computers do best; automating processes and feedback that would typically require manual work. This is valuable when students need opportunities to repeatedly practice, and receive immediate feedback on that practice. Learning management systems, such as Canvas, provided by most colleges and universities are more than a hub for sharing files and student discussions; they can provide on-demand practice activities such as low- or no-stakes self-tests that trigger retrieval and reinforce or correct students’ understanding. Use of these learning platforms is gaining popularity in primary and secondary schools too, in part because they help connect parents with their children’s education, but also because they present a means of individualising instruction to foster better outcomes.

Part of what makes us human is our proclivity to learn. Up to a quarter of our lives are spent in formal education; schools, colleges, universities, trainings and so on. But this doesn’t mean we’re done with learning when school is over. Jay Cross, author of Informal Learning, suggests only a small percentage of our learning happens through formal schooling – around 20%. The rest of learning happens informally, here and there, on-the-job, and through our connections with an increasingly interconnected world.

We may be a little shy about sharing what and how we learn on the open web, but if you think about the practical, how-to information that you’ve likely frequently discovered on the web you’ll recognise that this is exactly what the educators are doing. The resulting online discussion, debate, and discovery of new information sources can extend our own personal learning networks, and establish our digital identity; a living, changing portfolio that may help us stand out for the real work we’ve done in a highly competitive world.

Carl Sagan wrote, “Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening.” Technology’s change on our lives and our culture both challenges traditional approaches to learning and creates new opportunities for active, lifelong learning. If we’re going to keep pace it’s increasingly important that we choose to leverage technology to establish learning practices and habits that are effective and efficient, both in school and in our own lives.

Jared Stein is VP Research and Education at Instructure, creators of the Canvas learning platform.

Analogues of a natural product are drug candidates against malaria

Malaria is one of the most serious health problems worldwide, registering 200 million clinical cases and more than 600,000 attributable deaths per year, according to information from the World Health Organization in 2013. Given the emerging resistance to the standard treatment most widely used throughout the world, which is based on artemisinin and its analogs, there is a need for new antimalarial compounds.

In this regard, scientists headed by Lluís Ribas de Pouplana, ICREA researcher at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), report on a new family of molecules and a new system of action to combat the parasite Plasmodium, causal agent of malaria. Specifically, they describe two derivatives of borrelidin that completely remove the parasite load from mice and confer immunological memory to fight future infections. The latter property is an added value that is not shared by current antimalarial drugs. The results are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"We have found that the chemical space of borrelidin offers the opportunity to find very strong and efficient antimalarial drugs. We must now study the action and pharmacological properties of these compounds in order to pave the way for their development as drugs. That is to say, we have to explain why they show low toxicity in human cells and understand how they induce immunological memory," states Lluís Ribas.

Borrelidin: a "new" agent against malaria

Borrelia is the bacteria that produces borrelidin, a toxic molecule for human cells. However, for several years, hundreds of analogues of this compound -- small variations made in the lab -- have been studied for use in cancer and heart disease treatment. The IRB Barcelona scientists performed an exhaustive analysis of the analogues and identified two -- BC196 and BC220 -- that are useful for combating Plasmodium. The compounds show low toxicity in human cells in vitro and a high efficiency at clearing the parasites both from cells in vitro as well as from animals. "The efficiency of these two compounds and the doses to give to mice are comprable and even better than those of chloroquine, a compound that has been used to treat malaria for 100 years and that is no longer used because of emerging resistance worldwide," explains Ribas.

Objective: to attack the parasite in all phases of the infection

The new molecules act on the protein production machinery of the parasite and they are therefore efficient in all phases of parasite infection in humans. With respect to the specific mechanism of action, the compounds based on borrelidin inhibit one of the 20 tRNA synthetases of the parasite, key molecules for the correct production of the proteins required for growth, replication and infection.

"The synthetases are crucial for the parasite both when multiplying rapidly in the liver and when infecting red blood cells," explains Ribas, head of the Gene Translation Lab at IRB and expert in this fundamental process of life. "Because the compounds attack a general component of the protein production machinery, they are of considerable interest because drugs that act in all the stages of infection are also better for the prevention of the disease."

The findings are part of the final results of the European project Mephitis, coordinated by Ribas, which aims to increase the currently limited number of compounds available to tackle malaria.

"It is most gratifying to end Mephitis with a significant contribution to the pipeline of antimalarial compounds. We will see how far they get, but right now we have a new target and new molecules that work very well in the models tested," concludes the scientist.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Apple and IBM Launch First Wave of iOS Apps for Businesses

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Apple and IBM, once an unlikely duo, teamed up back in July to create business apps for iPhones and iPads. Now, this union has produced its first wave of apps, aimed at retailers, financial institutions, telecommunications services, insurance companies, airlines, and governments.

On Wednesday, the two companies detailed these apps and revealed the first IBM clients that will use them, including Citi, Air Canada, Sprint, and Banort. Organizations can customize IBM MobileFirst for iOS, as the suite is called, and they can link it to their own internal business services. According to IBM, security is a top priority, since the apps will store sensitive company data, and they’ll provide valuable analytics too.

“This is a big step for iPhone and iPad in the enterprise, and we can’t wait to see the exciting new ways organizations will put iOS devices to work,” Philip Schiller, Apple’s vice president of marketing, said in a press release.

Of course, iPhones and iPads are already used in the workplace, thanks to the “bring your own device” movement and other, less overt Apple programs. But Apple and IBM want to take this further—and improve their own prospects in the process. IBM has realized it can now longer make money selling hardware, so it’s towardssoftware and data analytics, and though Apple is now a king of the hardware world, it must find new ways to boost growth, especially given its less than stellar iPad sales in Q4.

Scientific Peer Review Is Broken. We’re Fighting to Fix It With Anonymity

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We are the founders of PubPeer.com, an online forum for scientific discussion of research scholarship. We and many of the users of our website are anonymous. That anonymity is important for free speech, for academic freedom, and for scientific inquiry. But it’s being threatened, which is why we’re going to court to defend the First Amendment right to anonymity.

Have you ever questioned the claims that scientists make? For example, last year’s discovery of the so-called “God particle,” or the back-and-forth over whether caffeine is good or bad for you? Even if you haven’t, other scientists have. Analysis and criticism of the work of others is an integral part of research. The “papers” that scientists publish all undergo formal “peer review” before they are published, with the aim of ensuring high standards.

The Anonymous Founders of PubPeer

PubPeer is maintained by research scientists with the help of a computer scientist who all share a strong belief that raising scientific standards requires robust post-publication review protected by the right to anonymity.

The problem is that today’s peer review is a broken process. Too often, errors slip through, and they can go uncorrected for years. Even if they are eventually exposed, that’s often long after other researchers or clinical trials have relied upon them.

This not only wastes taxpayers’ money (consider the fact that the National Institute of Health gave out $30 billion in research funding last year), but it rots the very foundation of scientific research, which builds on existing work. If today’s basic cancer research turns out to be mistaken, what does that mean for those enrolled in tomorrow’s clinical trial? This is not a hypothetical problem.

A Job for PubPeer’s Anonymous Users

This is where PubPeer fits in. We created PubPeer in our spare time two years ago to improve peer review by using the power of the internet to accelerate the exchange of ideas and scientific progress. Now, thanks to PubPeer, scientists can instantly comment directly on the work of their peers. The results have been dramatic. Already, PubPeer commenters have been in the thick of some of the biggest scientific stories, notably in analyzing a controversial paper about stem cells, which was eventually withdrawn by its authors.

PubPeer works because we allow anonymous comments. Without that anonymity, most scientists would fear professional retribution if they criticized their peers’—or perhaps their future employers’—work. But with that anonymity, our users have generated a steady stream of comments highlighting problems in basic scientific research on any number of topics: cancer, stem cells, diabetes, and more.

Registered users must be authors on a scientific publication. We screen unregistered comments to keep things factual, scientific, and civil. Comments must be based on publicly verifiable information, which ensures that what matters is the substance of our users’ comments, and not their identities. We don’t force our users to identify themselves, and that turns out to be the secret ingredient that allows our site to make a unique contribution to peer review.

The Threat to PubPeer (and Science)

Unfortunately, the anonymity that makes PubPeer work is under threat. A prominent cancer scientist, unhappy with the attention his research papers have received on PubPeer, is suing some of our anonymous commenters for defamation. And he is trying to use a subpoena to force PubPeer to turn over whatever identifying information we have for them.

With the American Civil Liberties Union and our longtime attorney Nick Jollymore, we are fighting this attempt to chill scientific discussion, because we believe those comments are scientifically valid opinions that raise questions of real public interest. If you want to make up your own mind, you can read the legal brief we filed challenging the subpoena, along with an expert opinion from Dr. John Krueger, a scientist who spent twenty years in the federal government investigating claims of research improprieties.

We believe that scientific questions should be resolved through scientific discussion, not through court proceedings. Imagine if a lawsuit were filed every time one economist criticized the work of another economist! The threat of liability would stifle legitimate academic discourse. For that very reason, we have always encouraged researchers to respond to our commenters with logic and data, not defamation suits.

Fighting for the Right to Remain Anonymous

Fortunately, the First Amendment is on our side. It protects the right to anonymous speech. The right isn’t absolute, but it protects those who choose to remain anonymous when engaging in lawful speech. Some of our nation’s founders—James Madison and Alexander Hamilton—wrote their most influential papers behind the shield of anonymity. Why? So they wouldn’t face political persecution at the hands of the British, and so their ideas could be evaluated on their merit rather than on the identity of the speaker. The same principle is at work in our case. It’s about academic freedom.

Scientific Peer Review Is Broken. We’re Fighting to Fix It With Anonymity

Getty Images

We are the founders of PubPeer.com, an online forum for scientific discussion of research scholarship. We and many of the users of our website are anonymous. That anonymity is important for free speech, for academic freedom, and for scientific inquiry. But it’s being threatened, which is why we’re going to court to defend the First Amendment right to anonymity.

Have you ever questioned the claims that scientists make? For example, last year’s discovery of the so-called “God particle,” or the back-and-forth over whether caffeine is good or bad for you? Even if you haven’t, other scientists have. Analysis and criticism of the work of others is an integral part of research. The “papers” that scientists publish all undergo formal “peer review” before they are published, with the aim of ensuring high standards.

The Anonymous Founders of PubPeer

PubPeer is maintained by research scientists with the help of a computer scientist who all share a strong belief that raising scientific standards requires robust post-publication review protected by the right to anonymity.

The problem is that today’s peer review is a broken process. Too often, errors slip through, and they can go uncorrected for years. Even if they are eventually exposed, that’s often long after other researchers or clinical trials have relied upon them.

This not only wastes taxpayers’ money (consider the fact that the National Institute of Health gave out $30 billion in research funding last year), but it rots the very foundation of scientific research, which builds on existing work. If today’s basic cancer research turns out to be mistaken, what does that mean for those enrolled in tomorrow’s clinical trial? This is not a hypothetical problem.

A Job for PubPeer’s Anonymous Users

This is where PubPeer fits in. We created PubPeer in our spare time two years ago to improve peer review by using the power of the internet to accelerate the exchange of ideas and scientific progress. Now, thanks to PubPeer, scientists can instantly comment directly on the work of their peers. The results have been dramatic. Already, PubPeer commenters have been in the thick of some of the biggest scientific stories, notably in analyzing a controversial paper about stem cells, which was eventually withdrawn by its authors.

PubPeer works because we allow anonymous comments. Without that anonymity, most scientists would fear professional retribution if they criticized their peers’—or perhaps their future employers’—work. But with that anonymity, our users have generated a steady stream of comments highlighting problems in basic scientific research on any number of topics: cancer, stem cells, diabetes, and more.

Registered users must be authors on a scientific publication. We screen unregistered comments to keep things factual, scientific, and civil. Comments must be based on publicly verifiable information, which ensures that what matters is the substance of our users’ comments, and not their identities. We don’t force our users to identify themselves, and that turns out to be the secret ingredient that allows our site to make a unique contribution to peer review.

The Threat to PubPeer (and Science)

Unfortunately, the anonymity that makes PubPeer work is under threat. A prominent cancer scientist, unhappy with the attention his research papers have received on PubPeer, is suing some of our anonymous commenters for defamation. And he is trying to use a subpoena to force PubPeer to turn over whatever identifying information we have for them.

With the American Civil Liberties Union and our longtime attorney Nick Jollymore, we are fighting this attempt to chill scientific discussion, because we believe those comments are scientifically valid opinions that raise questions of real public interest. If you want to make up your own mind, you can read the legal brief we filed challenging the subpoena, along with an expert opinion from Dr. John Krueger, a scientist who spent twenty years in the federal government investigating claims of research improprieties.

We believe that scientific questions should be resolved through scientific discussion, not through court proceedings. Imagine if a lawsuit were filed every time one economist criticized the work of another economist! The threat of liability would stifle legitimate academic discourse. For that very reason, we have always encouraged researchers to respond to our commenters with logic and data, not defamation suits.

Fighting for the Right to Remain Anonymous

Fortunately, the First Amendment is on our side. It protects the right to anonymous speech. The right isn’t absolute, but it protects those who choose to remain anonymous when engaging in lawful speech. Some of our nation’s founders—James Madison and Alexander Hamilton—wrote their most influential papers behind the shield of anonymity. Why? So they wouldn’t face political persecution at the hands of the British, and so their ideas could be evaluated on their merit rather than on the identity of the speaker. The same principle is at work in our case. It’s about academic freedom.

Facebook Challenges Twitter With Savvy Update to Trending Topics

Facebook

Twitter has become one of the easiest, fastest ways to get and disseminate the news. Facebook wants to change that.

Earlier this year, Facebook launched Trending Topics to help its more than 1 billion users find the news stories that everyone was talking about. Now Facebook is taking that one step further with an update that could make it an easier place to navigate news than Twitter.

On Wednesday, Facebook announced that it would be releasing Trending Topics on mobile and adding new ways to sort through them. Now, when you click on a topic, you’ll see not only articles, but Facebook posts from users who are “near the scene,” posts from people who are involved in the story in some way, posts from friends and members of groups you belong to, and a live feed of user reactions around the world. You can select which feed you want to view. It seems like a small change, but it addresses a very big problem that Twitter has yet to solve, which is, how do you organize such a constant flow of information?

Twitter has tried to address this issue with hashtags, which you can sort based on things like location, who you follow, and what’s included in the post, and yet, the results lack a certain order. Select results from “people you follow” and you might find a friend’s Tweet below a Tweet from a news outlet below a Tweet from a celebrity. Facebook’s new Trending Topics let people filter by context.

Facebook

While Facebook hasn’t admitted outright that this is a swipe at Twitter’s market, it’s clear that Facebook has the microblogging service in its crosshairs in more ways than one. On Wednesday, Facebook-owned Instagram also tried to drum up some excitement, announcing the app has surpassed 300 million monthly active users. It would be an arbitrary number—big, but arbitrary—except for the fact that it makes Instagram larger than Twitter. And in another unspoken nod to Twitter, Instagram is also launching verified badges for celebrities and public figures.

Facebook is already winning the numbers battle against Twitter. That said, while Twitter’s reputation as a news outlet is already well defined, Facebook’s has been slow to take shape because of how its News Feed is organized. Unlike Twitter, Facebook’s feed is determined by algorithms, which tend to surface content similar to what a given user has clicked on in the past, which can lead to less than comprehensive news. But this new, easy-to-understand approach to Trending Topics could hasten Facebook’s development as a robust news source, and for Twitter, that could be dangerous.

The Anonymous App That Lets You Send…Sweet Nothings

We aren’t always that good at telling people how much they mean to us. Sometimes, we forget. Other times, we’re too embarrassed to say what we really feel.

But Calvin Liu wants to help change that. He’s the co-creator of a new iOS app called Outpour, an app that lets you post anonymous messages of gratitude to your friends and acquaintances. The idea is to embolden people to share good thoughts they might otherwise keep to themselves.

Launched on Wednesday, Outpour is riding a wave of interest in online anonymity. In the internet’s earliest days, social applications like IRC and Usenet were, for all intents and purposes, anonymous. But as trolling and bullying became more and more of a problem in the age of the social network, companies like Facebook and Google have insisted on real-names policies. But that brought its own set of disadvantages. Some people don’t feel free to express themselves when their friends, families and employers are listening. For others—such as domestic violence victims—using their real names is dangerous. So now we’re moving back towards anonymity.

This year has seen a wave of new apps—such as Secret, Yik Yak, and Facebook’s Rooms—that buck the real-name trend, promising online anonymity or pseudoanonimity. But these services often bring with them the same old problems of bullying, stalking, defamation, and downright lewdness. Liu is hoping that with Outpour, he and his team can design an experience that brings out the best in people.

He got the idea last Christmas when he sent old-fashioned printed notes to all his friends telling them what he appreciated about them. Seeing the popularity of Secret, he realized there was an opportunity to build an app that would help people do the same thing, but with much less effort. But in order for it to work, the Outpour team is going to have to keep the app from becoming yet another troll pit.

He says the app’s first defense against trolling is its design. With something like YikYak or Secret, you can just vent your frustrations out into the ether. That can make it easier to say something negative about a person without even really thinking about it. But with Outpour, you have to go to someone’s profile, where there may already be a number already positive comments. In order to leave a negative comment, you have to consciously decide to seek out their profile and write something that and violates the social norms of the site.

But the Outpour team isn’t relying simply on social norms to enforce good behavior. Users will also be able to delete hurtful messages, and block the users who send them. Liu promises the team will pay close attention to people who have been blocked, and that users who are blocked by more than one person may be banned. To reduce the risks of people signing-up multiple accounts just to mess with people, Outpour requires your to provide and verify a unique phone number during registration.

Liu says he’s not sure how the company will make money yet. One possibility is that the team will add the option of sending people gifts as a token of your appreciation, and then maybe take a cut of that. He also wants to eventually expand the scope of the app to include many things besides just people. If you want to express gratitude towards your your favorite book, your neighborhood park, or a really great sushi restaurant, you could do that. Brands could have their own profiles, which could also provide a stream of revenue. “Any database of things people like is pretty valuable for marketers,” he says.

Today, the app is only available for Apple iOS devices, but Liu says a web version and an Android app will follow next year. Of course, you don’t need a fancy new smart phone app to tell the people you love how much you care about them. But for those who need a little nudging, help is here.

Shazam Overhauls Its App to Take on iTunes and Pandora

Shazam

Before Apple’s App Store even existed, Shazam was helping people instantly identify the music they were listening to via text message. But despite the company’s early lead in the digital music market and its enormous base of users—the Shazam smartphone app has been downloaded 500 million times—it still owns a comparatively small piece of the overall digital music pie. But now, it’s angling for a bigger one.

On Wednesday, Shazam launched an update to both its app and its website. Until now, people have primarily used the app to identify songs and keep lists of songs they’ve previously identified. But the new app emphasizes finding new music—not just identifying what you’ve already found—with charts that show which tracks are trending in the app, when, and where. It also includes an Amazon-style recommendation engine to help users discover new music. Through an integration with Spotify, it will now let you actually play those tracks within Shazam itself (if you’re a Spotify member). And the company is launching its own music Hall of Fame for songs that have been Shazamed at least 5 million times.

Shazam has a unique perspective on the music industry, because it gets to see what is going to be popular before it’s popular.

To the untrained eye, these may appear to be cosmetic changes. And yet, they stand to make Shazam a much larger threat to some of the biggest brands in music, from Pandora to Billboard. Shazam has a unique perspective on the music industry, because it gets to see what is going to be popular before it’s popular. It’s a phenomenon that chief product officer Daniel Danker calls “the Shazam effect.” “Shazam’s an app you use when you’re hearing something you like and want to find out what it is,” he says. “We build an amazing set of data around future hits and can essentially predict the consumption behavior in the music world.”

That type of data, he argues, makes Shazam a better place for music lovers to discover truly new songs and artists, and it’s equally critical to all the radio programmers and music labels who are always hungry for their next big hit. The new souped up app and website are meant to appease both audiences.

Shazam’s task is to educate users on all the different ways they can use the app. Some of that can be handled with design. For instance, before, when users opened Shazam, all they’d see was a big blue button. Push the button, and Shazam would identify whatever song (or television show or advertisement, in recent years) was playing. Now, however, the button shares the home screen with a chart of trending Shazams as well as a news feed, personalized based on each user’s tastes.

Design, however, can only go so far. Shifting consumer attention away from massive platforms like Pandora and Spotify and onto Shazam is sure to be a major challenge for the company in the coming years. And yet, according to Danker, that’s the goal. “I think we all arrived at this conclusion over the last year that where we wanted to take this was to make Shazam the center of your music world,” he says. “It already is in individual ways, but we have the ability to take it to such greater heights.”

Russia’s Creeping Descent Into Internet Censorship

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When staffers at GitHub first saw the email from a Russian agency claiming dominion over the internetlast month, they didn’t take it seriously. GitHub operates an enormously popular site where computer programmers share and collaborate on code, and to the Silicon Valley startup, an email requesting the removal of a list of suicide techniques from the site just didn’t seem believable.

But GitHub is a place where you can post almost anything—not just code. On a handful of GitHub pages, someone had indeed cataloged the pros and cons of different suicide techniques (with the “pistol,” the drawback was “Time: From the fractions of a second to several minutes if bad aim). And the Russian agency was dead serious about wanting to take these pages down. Last week, after GitHub failed to remove the links, its service was blocked in Russia.

The outage lasted only a day, but it holds broader implications for US companies hoping to do business in Russia. Call it a minor skirmish in Russia’s larger battle to build a Kremlin firewall around the internet. Today, the Russian government is trying censor individual pages served from overseas, but a recently passed law could eventually prevent foreign internet companies from reaching Russia unless they set up computer servers inside the country, a setup that would leave them very at the mercy of the local government—and not only in terms of censorship.

It’s a battle that threatens to put Russia on par with China—a world power whose people experience a downgraded and closed online experience. Unlike China, however, censorship on the Russian internet is a relatively recent phenomenon, says Eva Galpern, a global policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “For a couple of decades, they’ve actually had a relatively free internet,” she says.

Beware the ROSPOTREBNADZOR

That all changed in the summer of 2012—a year after Moscow’s streets were rocked by protests. That’s when Russia created the ROSPOTREBNADZOR. Over the past two years, the agency has built out the muscle and infrastructure to take down anything it doesn’t like. It administers a central blacklist of blocked sites, used by Russian internet service providers to manage the Kremlin firewall.

“We should inform you that the URL…contains information which has been recognized by Federal service on customers’ rights protection and human well-being surveillance (ROSPOTREBNADZOR) as prohibited on the territory of the Russdan Federation,” read the email the agency sent GitHub on October 21.

In March, the ROSPOTREBNADZOR cut off access to websites run by Putin critics Alexei Navalny and Garry Kasparov. But it’s been harder for the agency to vaporize the instantly forkable GitHub suicide pages. Since news of GitHub’s one-day outage went public last week, hundreds of new pages, including virtually identical content have sprung up on the website. The agency did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Ostensibly, the ROSPOTREBNADZOR’s blacklist is there to keep what Russia considers to be dangerous content from the internet—things like suicide instructions, drug cookbooks, and information about terrorist organizations. But critics see it as a first step toward shuttering dissent. “What we have discovered, of course, is because there is no accountability for who gets added to this blacklist,” says the EFF’s Galperin, “they blocked pretty much all of the major independent news sites.”

The Near-Impossible Task

At the same time, says Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist who runs the website Agentura.Ru, the government’s long-term goal is to force companies U.S. companies to move their online operations into Russia. This year, the State Duma passed a law that would force foreign companies such as GitHub, Google, and Twitter to use servers located within the country when storing data from local users. It’s set to take effect next year.

If their servers are in Russia, that would mean even stricter censorship for U.S. companies. But, as Soldatov explains, it would also open these companies to surveillance by Russia’s Federal Security Service, known as the FSB. The more likely outcome is that, if Russia clamps down on U.S. companies, some just won’t play in the country. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal described the situaton as a “near-impossible challenge for US-based firms that have millions of Russian users but generally store data on servers outside the country.”

According to Galperin, this could drive US companies out of Russia by 2016. “We’ve essentially gone from let’s protect the children,” she says, “to let’s block news sites; let’s block independent journalism; let’s block political opponents, and—in the future—let’s block all services that might host content that might be potentially problematic.”

Finally, Sex Toy Reviews Done as Hilarious Comics

Oh Joy, Sex Toy creator Erika Moen.

Leah Nash

In the vast, digital sea of gadget review blogs, Erika Moen’s website has two things that set it apart. First, since she’s an artist and cartoonist, her reviews aren’t just text—they’re comics. Second, she reviews sex toys.

When Moen launched Oh Joy, Sex Toy [NSFW] in April, 2013, she wanted to do something creative on the subject of sex, with a little help from her personal gadget stockpile. The site has since developed a dedicated readership that visits more than a million times a month, and Moen’s new book of Oh Joy, Sex Toy comics is getting more orders than she can keep up with.

Moen co-writes the comics with her husband, Matt Nolan, with each reviewing toys for the relevant genitals. And since there is, in theory, anyway, a limit to how many sex toys anyone needs, her weekly updates alternate between reviews, how-tos, sex education, and even illustrated interviews with sex workers.

“There’s a lot more to it than just looking for a sex toy. We try to create stories with the comics, to make them self-contained nuggets of entertainment,” Moen says when I visit her Periscope Studio in Portland, Oregon. “I hear from asexuals who say, ‘I have no interest in [sex] personally, but I enjoy the comics so I’m reading it anyway.'”

But what really makes Oh Joy, Sex Toy special—not just in the world of gadgets but the world of sex—is how, well, joyful it is. Rather than the mechanical monotony of most pornography or the clinical detachment of so much sex education, Moen’s comics are funny, charming, even sweet. Everyone she depicts in sexual situations seem to be having a fantastic time—smiling, joking, and sometimes literally high-fiving.

“When I made a comic about butt sex, I put in so many amazing, quality butt puns—as many I could possibly think of,” says Moen. “I think people should laugh about sex. When you make people laugh, you make them feel included and their guard goes down. You can make it friendly and approachable. I want people to feel like they’re part of the conversation.”

Erika Moen

At first, Moen says she was thinking small: She simply wanted to to review her own stockpile of toys. But soon, review models started arriving from sex toy manufacturers, including the expensive erotic gadgets she’d always coveted but never been able to afford.

“When we started getting free ones, I was like, ‘This is going to be the best!’ I thought it would be like Christmas every day,” says Moen. “But really, the toys that worked best for me were the ones I already had.” The key to finding a good sex toy is less about shelling out hundreds for every shiny new gadget, and more about figuring out what you like, says Moen. “You don’t need every brand-new vibrating, gyrating dohickey that syncs up with your iPod.”

Like many people who do what they love for a living, however, she’s discovered the downside to turning your passion into your profession. “It’s gotten to a point where it feels like work when I have to try out a new toy,” says Moen. “[My husband] and I will be in bed and he’ll say, ‘Should I go get the thing?’ And I’ll be like, ‘No, I just want to have sex, I don’t want to review a toy!'”

Although Moen had shared details about her sex life through her autobiographical comic DAR , she says running a sex toy review blog feels far less personal since she’s just the narrator, not the star, of Oh Joy, Sex Toy. Rather than using cartoon images of herself, she draws “masturbateers” to demonstrate the toys. “It creates a bit of distance,” says Moen.

Every comic has new masturbateers, and Moen takes great pains to make sure they’re diverse, representing a wide array of races, shapes, sizes, sexual orientations, and gender identities. In Oh Joy, Sex Toy, much as in real life, all different kinds of people are having sex—not merely those who fit a very specific and conventional idea of beauty.

Erika Moen

“It’s super important to see yourself in the media you consume, especially in the sex world,” says Moen. “I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people who saw a figure similar to them in the comic being sexual, and it meant a lot for them to see their body being sexual and it being positive.”

One reader wrote to Moen after Oh Joy, Sex Toy featured a female character who’d had a mastectomy. “The masturbateer had scarring around the chest and no boobs, but it was no big deal. She was just having sex and having a great time,” says Moen. “His wife had just had a mastectomy, and he said that she cried, because she had literally never seen another female figure with a mastectomy enjoying sex.”

Unsurprisingly, she’s gotten her share of negative of feedback, particularly about her sex education comics—and not just from cultural conservatives, but liberals as well. One comic about emergency contraception features a masturbateer who doesn’t think she can take the morning-after pill because she’s pro-life. Moen’s narrator jumps in to explain exactly how emergency contraception works and why it’s fundamentally different from abortion.

“I got pushback that the comic was too pro-life, that it had given a voice to pro-lifers,” says Moen. “I was very surprised by that. To me, the people who most need to know that they can take this are pro-lifers. If they find themselves in a position where they might have an unplanned pregnancy, they should know this is an option for them. It was almost like I humanized them too much. But they’re human too. They deserve to know what their reproductive options are.”

Erika Moen

Moen is particularly concerned with debunking misinformation and dispelling shame around sex, largely because of the terrible sex education she received growing up. Sex was described to her as either rape, or a pleasureless activity women must endure to keep their husbands from leaving. Only later did she discover that sex could—and should—be enjoyable for everyone involved.

That ecstatic relief shines through in every Oh Joy, Sex Toy comic, as though Moen can’t quite hold back her excitement over the revelation that sex can be really, really fun. It’s a comic that feels like it wants to run down the street, tapping everyone on the shoulder and asking if they’ve heard the good news about sex. And in a way, that’s exactly what it does.

“I’m trying to make the comics that I needed when I was learning about sex,” says Moen. “If I can help people think about sex in a healthy, helpful, educational way, that’s awesome. People need to know how their bodies work, that sex should not be painful, and especially if they are women, that they are entitled to pleasure. No one should grow up thinking sex is what I thought it was while I was growing up.”

Although she has a special place in her heart for teen sex education—noting carefully that her comic is for readers 18 and over—she hopes that Oh Joy, Sex Toy’s approachable tone can help dispel some of the guilt, shame, and misinformation that clouds the subject for people young and old. Too often, she notes, even sexually active adults don’t feel comfortable talking about sex, figuring out what they enjoy, or fully understanding how their own bodies work.

Moen admits she didn’t totally grasp the more intricate details of reproduction until she researched it for the comic. “I thought that you ovulated and your egg went through the fallopian tube and met with the sperm in the uterus,” she says. Wait, I interrupt her, it doesn’t? She opens up her copy of Oh Joy, Sex Toy to her comic on pregnancy, and gives me an impromptu sex ed lesson—complete with sound effects—about how conception occurs inside the fallopian tube, not the uterus.

“How did I not know how babies were made?” I muttered when she was done.

“I know,” says Moen, her eyes widening. “Right?”

What Were the Best Videogames of 2014? WIRED and Smosh Games Debate

Picking out the best games of the year is always a knock-down, drag-out fight. So we recruited some experienced sparring partners.

WIRED invited the cast of Smosh Games to discuss, debate and just generally yell about the best videogames of 2014, plus some honorable mentions. WIRED editors will still be bringing you our official Games of the Year list later this month, but this should serve as an entertaining recap of the year’s most memorable moments. Thanks very much to Mari, Sohinki, Jovenshire and Lasercorn from Smosh, who proved to be more than capable debate opponents.

And of course, if there’s anything you think we left off the list (or games you’d remove entirely), now’s the time to say so.

Review: Samsung Chromebook 2

Samsung

I was a little surprised by the arrival of a brand new Chromebook with a Samsung badge on the lid. The Korean giant was a great friend to Google in the earliest days of its web-based operating system, releasing a stream of consumer-ready Chromebooks, including the first sub-$250 Chromebook worth buying.

But Samsung recently announced it would dramatically cut back its Windows laptop production, and the company even gutted its European Chromebook output. Here in the States, however, we’re still getting Chromebooks from Samsung—and pretty nice ones at that.

The latest in the Samsung Chromebook line is the Samsung Chromebook 2. I tested the XE500C12-K01US model, which features a 2.16 GHz Intel Bay Trail chip, a regrettably paltry 2GB of RAM, a 16GB flash drive, and a 1366 x 768 pixel 11.6-inch display.

The hardware does not put this in the top caliber of Chromebooks, but on the plus side that power-sipping Bay Trail chip does give this Chromebook close to the nine hours of battery life Samsung claims.

The other main selling point here is the low price. Samsung is offering the Chromebook 2 for just $250, which is a good deal given the new chip and impressive battery life.

The ports on the Samsung are close to what you’ll find on other Chromebooks—a USB 2.0 and headphone jack to the right, and then a USB 3.0 port, a full HDMI port, and a microSD card slot to left. The latter is somewhat unusual as most Chromebooks offer full SD card support. The micro means you’ll likely need a USB-based SD card adapter to dump photos from your camera card.

On the plus side, the microSD slot has a nice cover and the card disappears into it, making it easy to slap a 128 GB microSD card in there to act as a semi-permanent second storage drive.

Samsung has done a nice job of making this thing feel solid. There’s a somewhat cheesy faux-leather textured surface on the top (complete with fake stitching) but underneath that is a well reinforced frame that gives this model a sturdy feel often missing in Chromebooks.

That solid feel helps make the keyboard a bit nicer as well, and there’s none of the mushiness at the center that often plagues keyboards in all plastic cases. The chiclet style keys here have a nice feel that’s on par with the industry-leading keyboard on the Lenovo I reviewed earlier this year.

The big downside to this Samsung is the 2GB of RAM. That’s sufficient for light use like checking your email, browsing the web, and editing documents. But it will feel limited if you’re going to be watching a lot of videos, using the web-based version of Photoshop, or installing Android applications (of which there are, currently, few, but which looks to be a way of extending Chrome OS in the future). Samsung makes a $300 Chromebook 2 with a slightly better processor and double the RAM, and the $50 price bump is almost certainly worth it here.

Another potential downside to this cheaper Chromebook is the display. Yes, 1366 x 768 packed into 11.6 inches is technically HD, but it still looks pixelated next to your phone. It’s also not an IPS display so you get all the washed out color and limited viewing angles that come with older, TN panel displays. The display makes sense at this price point, but it would be nice if Samsung had a more expensive model with a higher resolution IPS display—the displays in the $300 machines are the same as this one.

In general Chrome OS is what it is. You’re either comfortable with that, or you stopped reading at the headline. That said, there is one new bit in here (or at least new to me): the Chrome Help app.

The Chrome Help app is still technically a beta, but Samsung has included it anyway. It connects you to a live help and troubleshooting chat system. There’s even video chat available, which lets you activate remote access and share your screen for troubleshooting purposes. That might be a selling point for those who want some tech support for their new Chromebook, but screen sharing with unknown parties ranks high on my list of supposedly fun things I’ll never do.

If your top priorities in a Chromebook are price, speed, and battery life, this is a model to consider. The 2GB of RAM could be better, but for general around-the-house use—basic web browsing, editing documents, battling the email inbox, and so on—it will suffice. Considering there are Samsung models with the Exynos 5 Octa processor and a full 4GB of RAM inside that are only $50 more, one of those machines would be better for anything more than the basics.

Cheap American Chicken Gave Us This Weird Subaru Pickup

Getty Images

One of the funkiest, coolest little trucks ever made was the result of us having cheap chicken.

Way back in 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson initiated a series of tariff increases on brandy, dextrin, potato starch and, weirdly, light trucks valued at more than $1,000. He did this in response to a trade war with the Europeans, who were in a snit because inexpensive American chicken that was flooding the market over there, hurting continental chicken farmers.

Most of the tariffs, which came to be known as the “Chicken Tax,” eventually were repealed. Yet the one on light trucks remains. The 25 percent tax on the importation of light trucks (LBJ was specifically targeting German-built Volkswagen vans), utterly failed at protecting the US chicken market, yet remains in place more than 50 years later. The CATO Institute calls it “a textbook example of a ‘temporary’ government policy that has taken on a life of its own.”

Regardless, the Chicken Tax has required automakers wishing to avoid that tariff to do one of three things: build their trucks here in the US as Toyota, Nissan and Honda did; ignore the domestic truck market entirely; or sidestep the definition of a light truck in often peculiar ways.

Which brings us to the Subaru BRAT.

In the late 1970’s, Subaru—which was just gaining a foothold in the US—was looking to enter the light truck market with the Brat. That’s an acronym, for Bi-drive-Recreational All-terrain Transporter. Subaru was marketing it as a so-called coupe utility truck similar to the venerable El Camino. And to get around the Chicken Tax, Subaru welded a pair of seats to the cargo bed, then added carpeting, seat belts and grab handles of questionable utility.

Voila! The Brat was no longer a truck. It was, under the law, a passenger vehicle and therefore exempt from the 25 percent Chicken Tax. (Light cars were, at the time, subjected to a 2.5 percent tariff.)

The wonderfully weird little truck typically used front wheel drive, but a manual transfer case allowed all-wheel drive. Base models came with a four-speed, but if you spent a little more you could get a three-speed auto and push-button AWD system. The 1.6-liter boxer four produced 64 horsepower, but later models offered a turbocharger version good for a whopping 94. Puny engine aside, the Brat was a capable rig, with or without the extra seats. It offered decent ground clearance and competence off road, so long as things didn’t get too hairy.

But don’t take our word for it. No less an automotive authority than Ronald Reagan owned a Brat, a 1978 model he used for tooling around his 688-acre ranch in Santa Barbara, California. It wouldn’t do for the quintessential ‘Murican to be seen with a Japanese truck, so the Gipper studiously avoided being photographed with his Brat, but the bright red beauty has been lovingly restored and remains at the Reagan Ranch.

Subaru is hardly alone in pulling a few moves to sell trucks made over there over here. Ford, for example, equips its small Transit Connect vans—built in Turkey—with rear seats and windows before shipping them to the states. Once they’re here, Ford yanks all that stuff out and sells the van as a conventional cargo carrier. The feds have called said the practice serves “no manufacturing or commercial purpose” and is only performed to “manipulate the tariff schedule.”

Be that as it may, as questionable as the Chicken Tax may be, we can at least thank LBJ for giving us the automotive awesomeness that is the Brat.

A Freaky Idea for Remote-Controlled Sightseeing With Human Avatars

An early version of the Omnipresenz interface. Omnipresenz

Think of all the ways you can now experience Barcelona from your couch. You can read about it at length on Wikipedia and peruse snapshots of the Sagrada Familia on Flickr. You can order delivery from the tapas place down the street and enjoy your meal while watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona on demand.

About the only thing you can’t do is have the embodied experience of actually walking through the city, deciding which streets to explore, which performer to listen to, which bar to duck into. If a handful of Spaniards has their way, though, you’ll soon be doing all that from your couch, too.

Omnipresenz is your chance to “explore the world with a human avatar.” The project, under development by researchers in Spain, works much as you’d expect. Someone in a distant city wears a helmet with a GoPro and an internet connection. You, at your computer, use a proprietary interface to dictate where they go and what they do in real time. Their eyes, their ears and, most importantly, their agency become yours.