Every Serial-Related Google Image Search You’ve Been Afraid to Do

(Spoiler alert: Many spoilers for the Serial podcast ahead.)

One of the most fascinating things about radio is how it forces your imagination to engage. You have to picture the stories in your mind, along with the places reporters are talking about and the people they are interviewing. You have to imagine the leaves you can hear rustling in the wind, and the desk you can hear someone sorting papers on.

But sometimes your imagination is tired. It’s been a long year, and now the most engrossing podcast of the year has just come to an end and you’re kind of over dreaming up the scenes. You just want to know exactly what everything in the story looks like.

Of course, we’re talking about Serial, the biggest audio-reporting phenomenon of our time, which wrapped yesterday. (If you haven’t listened to Serial yet, you should. If for no other reason than the rest of this piece won’t make much sense until you do.) Not only was it fascinating, it painted a picture unlike any other.

More than nearly all podcasts before it, the tension in Serial was high. The question at its heart asked: Was an innocent man (Adnan Syed) sent to prison for murdering his ex-girlfriend (Hae Min Lee)? Is an innocent man’s life being stolen from him every minute you’re listening to this story? And picturing him stuck in a cell might have been the most nerve-wracking thing a podcast ever made its audience do. Yet, as the weeks went on, listeners knew there would be no real satisfactory resolution.

And there wasn’t. But now that you’re not waiting for the conclusion, you can Google image search all the things about the show you were curious about but didn’t dare look up for fear of being spoiled on Serials‘s outcome. And actually, you don’t even have to, we did it for you.

What Does Adnan Syed Look Like?

Andan Syed. courtesy Serial

What Did Hae Min Lee Look Like?

A collage of photographs of Hae Min Lee and her friends. Elizabeth Malby/Baltimore Sun/TNS/LANDOV

What Does Sarah Koenig Look Like?

Sarah Koenig. Meredith Heuer, courtesy Serial

What Does Leakin Park Look Like?

This is a wooded area along Franklintown Road in Leakin Park, at the approximate location where Hae Min Lee’s body was discovered in 1999. Barbara Haddock Taylor/Baltimore Sun/TNS/LANDOV

What Does Adnan’s School Look Like?

Apple Isn’t the Only One to Blame for Smartphone Labor Abuses

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Apple is an easy target and, in a way, the most deserving. As the most valuable company in the world, it deserves exceptional scrutiny.

In that respect, a new investigation from the BBC provides a valuable service. In an exposé released Thursday, the BBC One show Panorama says it recently uncovered some appalling working conditions on an iPhone 6 production line. “Exhausted workers were filmed falling asleep on their 12-hour shifts at the Pegatron factories on the outskirts of Shanghai,” the BBC reported. “One undercover reporter, working in a factory making parts for Apple computers, had to work 18 days in a row despite repeated requests for a day off.”

A BBC team also went to the Indonesian island of Bangka, where it found that Apple’s supply chain picked up tin from small, dangerous mines where child labor is common. (Apple told the BBC it doesn’t refuse Indonesian tin because it would then lose its leverage to work toward improving conditions there: “We have chosen to stay engaged and attempt to drive changes on the ground.”)

But while abuses among Apple suppliers understandably command the most attention, to focus on Apple alone frames the problem too narrowly. Apple is not the only company that benefits from a system where cost-saving efficiencies come with a human toll. And we consumers are more than happy when those savings get passed down to us.

Supply And Demand

Where hardware itself is concerned, the gadget supply chain is hardly linear. The worldwide supply of smartphones and laptops originates from a dense web of fabricators and manufacturers, component makers, and raw material suppliers. This “ecosystem” feeds the output of just about every product maker, not just Apple. The likelihood that abuses like those witnessed by the BBC occur only when products are being assembled or materials mined for Apple and no other company is extremely slim.

And responsibility doesn’t end with hardware makers alone. Google benefits from every installation of Android on every smartphone in the world. It doesn’t make Android installs conditional on audits of factory working conditions. Amazon makes money every time it sells any smartphone, not just its own. During the last quarter, Facebook generated nearly $2 billion in mobile ad revenue thanks to advertisers eager to reach consumers gobbling up cheap smartphones. It doesn’t block its app from phones that don’t meet certain labor standards.

Apple is not the only company that benefits from a system where cost-saving efficiencies come with a human toll.

Apple issued a statement saying it was “deeply offended” by the BBC report, arguing it continues to work aggressively to improve labor conditions. Personally, I’m still more offended by the 12-year-old in the tin mine.

But as I say that, I’m typing away on a sleek Apple laptop that for all I know could contain the very tin that he mined. I certainly didn’t check where the parts in my MacBook came from before I clicked “buy.” Accountability for these problems extend up and down the line, from the companies that make the phones to the companies that profit off their use, from governments that look the other way to consumers more than willing to pay the lowest price possible without demanding better practices from the companies to whom they’re turning over so much money.

Apple may have the single biggest lever to pull to force change. But abuses at one end of a supply chain don’t exist without demand at the other.

Apple Isn’t the Only One to Blame for Smartphone Labor Abuses

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Apple is an easy target and, in a way, the most deserving. As the most valuable company in the world, it deserves exceptional scrutiny.

In that respect, a new investigation from the BBC provides a valuable service. In an exposé released Thursday, the BBC One show Panorama says it recently uncovered some appalling working conditions on an iPhone 6 production line. “Exhausted workers were filmed falling asleep on their 12-hour shifts at the Pegatron factories on the outskirts of Shanghai,” the BBC reported. “One undercover reporter, working in a factory making parts for Apple computers, had to work 18 days in a row despite repeated requests for a day off.”

A BBC team also went to the Indonesian island of Bangka, where it found that Apple’s supply chain picked up tin from small, dangerous mines where child labor is common. (Apple told the BBC it doesn’t refuse Indonesian tin because it would then lose its leverage to work toward improving conditions there: “We have chosen to stay engaged and attempt to drive changes on the ground.”)

But while abuses among Apple suppliers understandably command the most attention, to focus on Apple alone frames the problem too narrowly. Apple is not the only company that benefits from a system where cost-saving efficiencies come with a human toll. And we consumers are more than happy when those savings get passed down to us.

Supply And Demand

Where hardware itself is concerned, the gadget supply chain is hardly linear. The worldwide supply of smartphones and laptops originates from a dense web of fabricators and manufacturers, component makers, and raw material suppliers. This “ecosystem” feeds the output of just about every product maker, not just Apple. The likelihood that abuses like those witnessed by the BBC occur only when products are being assembled or materials mined for Apple and no other company is extremely slim.

And responsibility doesn’t end with hardware makers alone. Google benefits from every installation of Android on every smartphone in the world. It doesn’t make Android installs conditional on audits of factory working conditions. Amazon makes money every time it sells any smartphone, not just its own. During the last quarter, Facebook generated nearly $2 billion in mobile ad revenue thanks to advertisers eager to reach consumers gobbling up cheap smartphones. It doesn’t block its app from phones that don’t meet certain labor standards.

Apple is not the only company that benefits from a system where cost-saving efficiencies come with a human toll.

Apple issued a statement saying it was “deeply offended” by the BBC report, arguing it continues to work aggressively to improve labor conditions. Personally, I’m still more offended by the 12-year-old in the tin mine.

But as I say that, I’m typing away on a sleek Apple laptop that for all I know could contain the very tin that he mined. I certainly didn’t check where the parts in my MacBook came from before I clicked “buy.” Accountability for these problems extend up and down the line, from the companies that make the phones to the companies that profit off their use, from governments that look the other way to consumers more than willing to pay the lowest price possible without demanding better practices from the companies to whom they’re turning over so much money.

Apple may have the single biggest lever to pull to force change. But abuses at one end of a supply chain don’t exist without demand at the other.

If You Think Deep Links Are a Big Deal Now, Just Wait

Ariel Zambelich/Wired

They were a discussion topic on Google’s Earnings Call and were a focus at I/O. Facebook created a standalone initiative called App Links to take a leadership position. Long time internet watcher John Battelle claims the quickening is nigh. What is it about deep links that has everyone so worked up?

Today, they help us quickly navigate to specific places in our favorite apps. For example, deep links enable you to click on a push notification that takes you directly to a calendar invite for your upcoming meeting. Deep links also provides the connective tissue between apps and allow you to click on an Uber button inside the United app to book a car.

For Google, Twitter and Facebook, deep links provide the infrastructure to unlock the next stage of mobile ad dollars. Mobile app install ads have become a huge business, and the next step is driving users back into apps they already have, either through an ad in your feed or from a search result. User retargeting is already a huge business online and is starting to gather momentum in mobile.

While these improvements to mobile experience are great, they pale in comparison to the impact of deep links on mobile search and discovery.

Its hard to believe that 6 years later we are still browsing through lists in the App Stores to find apps. And when we search, we get a list of apps that might help us with a picture and brief description, not a link to solve our specific problem. Web search is light years ahead of app search, and until we solve it long tail discovery is virtually impossible.

Deep links help us understand the content inside apps so we can categorize them in a smart way. Google and other mobile search startups are now indexing apps, like the Googlebot that crawls the web. They’re building search engines that understand what apps can do and are combining them with important mobile signals (e.g. do I have the app installed already?) to provide relevant and personalized results that link directly to the correct place to take action.

Deep links will transform how we search apps on our devices. But what about discovery?

On the web we share links with friends on social media, hyperlink relevant articles in blogs (I’ve already done it twice here), or personalize our homepage with feeds from our favorite sites. We don’t think about it, we just copy and paste the URL or hit the share button. Coming soon to the app ecosystem courtesy of deep links.

And, like it or not, advertising also plays a huge role in discovery. Yet all we are discovering today inside mobile apps are new social games, or seeing ads for companies our friends liked in the past. There is no concept of contextual relevance – the ad networks don’t know anything about the app you are currently using. You could be reading about a music concert, a football game, or politics and you’ll still be served the same ad. Online, we can automatically scrape the html of a page to know what its about and then can target an ad appropriately. So as we understand the content inside apps, ads will be become more effective for advertisers, higher paying for developers, and far less annoying for users.

Ultimately, deep links provide the underlying infrastructure that will bring many of the awesome benefits we take for granted on the web to the app ecosystem.

Mike Fyall is head of marketing at the deep link search engine URX.

Obama’s Bold Sony Statement: Canceling The Interview Was a ‘Mistake’

President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference at the White House in Washington, DC on Friday, Dec. 19, 2014. Carolyn Kaster/AP

In his end-of-year press conference today, President Barack Obama called the decision by Sony Pictures Entertainment to cancel the release of its film The Interview a “mistake.”

“I am sympathetic to the threats they face,” Obama said. “Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake….

“We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States,” Obama said. “Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they will start doing when they see a documentary they don’t like or news reports they don’t like? Or, even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended.”

It’s important to point out that Hollywood is already engaging in self-censorship in the wake of the Sony hack; on Wednesday, another entertainment company, New Regency, pulled the plug on a Steve Carell film set in Pyonyang before the film had even hit production.

Actor George Clooney, in an interview yesterday with Deadline, noted that Sony didn’t want to cancel its film, but had no choice once movie theaters started canceling screenings.

“Sony didn’t pull the movie because they were scared; they pulled the movie because all the theaters said they were not going to run it,” he said. “And they said they were not going to run it because they talked to their lawyers and those lawyers said if somebody dies in one of these, then you’re going to be responsible.”

Sony CEO Michael Lynton denied that his company had “caved” under the threat. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter this morning, he said, “The movie theaters came to us one by one over the course of a very short time. We were very surprised by it…. At that point in time we had no alternative to not proceed with a theatrical release on the 25th of December….We have not caved. We have not given in. We have persevered.”

Regardless of who initiated the cancellations, in his interview with Deadline, Clooney expressed the same sentiments Obama did in saying that industries should not bow to threats—especially ones that trample on the First Amendment. “The truth is, you’re going to have a much harder time finding distribution now. And that’s a chilling effect.”

President Obama added today that he wished Sony “had spoken to me first” before making its decision. “I would have told them, do not get into a pattern in which you are intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”

He likened it to the idea of Boston canceling the Boston Marathon out of fear that another attack might strike that event.

“I think all of us have to anticipate that occasionally there are going to be breaches like this, they are going to be costly,… but we can’t start changing our patterns of behavior any more than we stop going to a football game because there might be the possibility of a terrorist attack..lets not get into that way of doing business.”

Obama’s statement followed an announcement this morning from the FBI that it had evidence attributing the Sony hack to North Korea. The evidence provided by the FBI in its announcement, however, has still not convinced many skeptical security professionals that North Korea is behind the attack.

Updated 1pm PST: To add statement from Sony CEO Michael Lynton.

If You Think Deep Links Are a Big Deal Now, Just Wait

Ariel Zambelich/Wired

They were a discussion topic on Google’s Earnings Call and were a focus at I/O. Facebook created a standalone initiative called App Links to take a leadership position. Long time internet watcher John Battelle claims the quickening is nigh. What is it about deep links that has everyone so worked up?

Today, they help us quickly navigate to specific places in our favorite apps. For example, deep links enable you to click on a push notification that takes you directly to a calendar invite for your upcoming meeting. Deep links also provides the connective tissue between apps and allow you to click on an Uber button inside the United app to book a car.

For Google, Twitter and Facebook, deep links provide the infrastructure to unlock the next stage of mobile ad dollars. Mobile app install ads have become a huge business, and the next step is driving users back into apps they already have, either through an ad in your feed or from a search result. User retargeting is already a huge business online and is starting to gather momentum in mobile.

While these improvements to mobile experience are great, they pale in comparison to the impact of deep links on mobile search and discovery.

Its hard to believe that 6 years later we are still browsing through lists in the App Stores to find apps. And when we search, we get a list of apps that might help us with a picture and brief description, not a link to solve our specific problem. Web search is light years ahead of app search, and until we solve it long tail discovery is virtually impossible.

Deep links help us understand the content inside apps so we can categorize them in a smart way. Google and other mobile search startups are now indexing apps, like the Googlebot that crawls the web. They’re building search engines that understand what apps can do and are combining them with important mobile signals (e.g. do I have the app installed already?) to provide relevant and personalized results that link directly to the correct place to take action.

Deep links will transform how we search apps on our devices. But what about discovery?

On the web we share links with friends on social media, hyperlink relevant articles in blogs (I’ve already done it twice here), or personalize our homepage with feeds from our favorite sites. We don’t think about it, we just copy and paste the URL or hit the share button. Coming soon to the app ecosystem courtesy of deep links.

And, like it or not, advertising also plays a huge role in discovery. Yet all we are discovering today inside mobile apps are new social games, or seeing ads for companies our friends liked in the past. There is no concept of contextual relevance – the ad networks don’t know anything about the app you are currently using. You could be reading about a music concert, a football game, or politics and you’ll still be served the same ad. Online, we can automatically scrape the html of a page to know what its about and then can target an ad appropriately. So as we understand the content inside apps, ads will be become more effective for advertisers, higher paying for developers, and far less annoying for users.

Ultimately, deep links provide the underlying infrastructure that will bring many of the awesome benefits we take for granted on the web to the app ecosystem.

Mike Fyall is head of marketing at the deep link search engine URX.

Obama’s Surprisingly Strong Statement on Sony: Canceling The Interview Was a ‘Mistake’

President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference at the White House in Washington, DC on Friday, Dec. 19, 2014. Carolyn Kaster/AP

In his end-of-year press conference today, President Barack Obama called the decision by Sony Pictures Entertainment to cancel the release of its film The Interview a “mistake.”

“I am sympathetic to the threats they face,” Obama said. “Having said all that, yes, I think they made a mistake….

“We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States,” Obama said. “Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they will start doing when they see a documentary they don’t like or news reports they don’t like? Or, even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended.”

It’s important to point out that Hollywood is already engaging in self-censorship in the wake of the Sony hack; on Wednesday, another entertainment company, New Regency, pulled the plug on a Steve Carell film set in Pyonyang before the film had even hit production.

Actor George Clooney, in an interview yesterday with Deadline, noted that Sony didn’t want to cancel its film, but had no choice once movie theaters started canceling screenings.

“Sony didn’t pull the movie because they were scared; they pulled the movie because all the theaters said they were not going to run it,” he said. “And they said they were not going to run it because they talked to their lawyers and those lawyers said if somebody dies in one of these, then you’re going to be responsible.”

But he expressed the same sentiments Obama did in saying that industries should not bow to threats—especially ones that trample on the First Amendment. “The truth is, you’re going to have a much harder time finding distribution now. And that’s a chilling effect.”

President Obama added today that he wished Sony “had spoken to me first” before making its decision. “I would have told them, do not get into a pattern in which you are intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.”

He likened it to the idea of Boston canceling the Boston Marathon out of fear that another attack might strike that event.

“I think all of us have to anticipate that occasionally there are going to be breaches like this, they are going to be costly,… but we can’t start changing our patterns of behavior any more than we stop going to a football game because there might be the possibility of a terrorist attack..lets not get into that way of doing business.”

Obama’s statement followed an announcement this morning from the FBI that it had evidence attributing the Sony hack to North Korea. The evidence provided by the FBI in its announcement, however, has still not convinced many skeptical security professionals that North Korea is behind the attack.

Tech Time Warp of the Week: The ’90s TV Special That Profiled Hackers and Their Glorious Hair

Dan Farmer looks more like the keyboard player for some New Wave band than a corporate cybersecurity guru. But thanks to a little tool he created called SATAN—short for Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks—he was one of the leading security experts of the 1990s.

That’s why he was tapped for the first episode of Internet Cafe—a PBS TV show that chronicles the early rise of the internet from 1996 until 2002. The episode (see above) aims to provide the inside scoop of the internet’s emerging hacker subculture, airing not long after a high-profile defacement of the CIA and Justice Department websites. In addition to Farmer, it draws on interviews with hackers like Aleph One (aka Elias Levy), the founder of the defunct Bugtraq mailing list, and two members of the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow: White Knight and Reid Fleming.

Yes, some of it is rather quaint. For modern viewers, the most baffling moment is surely the “CyberBlast,” where viewers could actually download software using a “TV modem.” And then there’s the hair. But what’s most striking about the episode is that not much else has changed since then. The guests talk about how large corporations fail to protect the online data of their customer. They explain the importance of applying security updates. And they debate the pros and cons of disclosing software vulnerabilities. In other words, they argue about same things security researchers are still arguing about today.

Did Sony do enough to prevent the recent mega-theft of its data? Should the makers of Metasploit really be sharing the scariest security vulnerabilities—and the tools to exploit them—with the entire world? Is Anonymous a legitimate political group or, well, just a big joke?

Questions like that weren’t even new even back in 1996, when the first wave of hackers were already starting to retire. Towards the end of the show, White Knight and Fleming talk about what a thrill it was to be a hacker in the early 1980s, back when you couldn’t just download everything you needed to hack a corporate server. You had to come up with ways of breaking into systems on your own. They even argue that although hacking is still fun for the new generation coming up, it’s becoming less alluring as the number of new things you can discover on your own diminishes.

But new hackers will always replace the old. If systems are vulnerable, people will break into them, whether it’s for fun, profit, politics, or revenge. Just look at Sony. And now apply your security updates.

Tech Time Warp of the Week: The ’90s TV Special That Profiled Hackers and Their Glorious Hair

Dan Farmer looks more like the keyboard player for some New Wave band than a corporate cybersecurity guru. But thanks to a little tool he created called SATAN—short for Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks—he was one of the leading security experts of the 1990s.

That’s why he was tapped for the first episode of Internet Cafe—a PBS TV show that chronicles the early rise of the internet from 1996 until 2002. The episode (see above) aims to provide the inside scoop of the internet’s emerging hacker subculture, airing not long after a high-profile defacement of the CIA and Justice Department websites. In addition to Farmer, it draws on interviews with hackers like Aleph One (aka Elias Levy), the founder of the defunct Bugtraq mailing list, and two members of the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow: White Knight and Reid Fleming.

Yes, some of it is rather quaint. For modern viewers, the most baffling moment is surely the “CyberBlast,” where viewers could actually download software using a “TV modem.” And then there’s the hair. But what’s most striking about the episode is that not much else has changed since then. The guests talk about how large corporations fail to protect the online data of their customer. They explain the importance of applying security updates. And they debate the pros and cons of disclosing software vulnerabilities. In other words, they argue about same things security researchers are still arguing about today.

Did Sony do enough to prevent the recent mega-theft of its data? Should the makers of Metasploit really be sharing the scariest security vulnerabilities—and the tools to exploit them—with the entire world? Is Anonymous a legitimate political group or, well, just a big joke?

Questions like that weren’t even new even back in 1996, when the first wave of hackers were already starting to retire. Towards the end of the show, White Knight and Fleming talk about what a thrill it was to be a hacker in the early 1980s, back when you couldn’t just download everything you needed to hack a corporate server. You had to come up with ways of breaking into systems on your own. They even argue that although hacking is still fun for the new generation coming up, it’s becoming less alluring as the number of new things you can discover on your own diminishes.

But new hackers will always replace the old. If systems are vulnerable, people will break into them, whether it’s for fun, profit, politics, or revenge. Just look at Sony. And now apply your security updates.

The Savvy Plan to Combat Malaria With Mobile Phones

Esther Havens/Malaria No More

Martin Edlund likes to say that malaria may one day be the first disease beaten by mobile phones. Yes, he happens to be the CEO of the non-profit Malaria No More, so he has to say stuff like that. But no, it’s not a total pipedream.

Africa, where malaria kills around 400,000 children every year, is set to top 1 billion mobile phone subscriptions by next year. That means that public health researchers will have one billion ways to communicate with—and collect data from—the people who are most at risk of catching malaria, a disease that has traditionally been extremely difficult to track.

“Lack of information and data is why this is among one of the deadliest diseases on the planet,” Edlund says. And he believes mobile phones could change all that.

He’s not the only one. On Friday, Google.org, the search giant’s philanthropic arm, announced that it’s giving Malaria No More a $600,000 grant to embark on a potentially transformative data mining project in Nigeria. The grant is part of a pot of $15 million that Google.org is doling out to organizations that use technology to solve the world’s biggest problems.

For the Nigeria project, Malaria No More is partnering with a Nigerian startup called Sproxil, a company that spent the last five years combatting the massive counterfeit drug market in Nigeria by placing unique codes on authentic medications. Anyone who buys those medications can text the codes for free to Sproxil to verify the drugs. To date, Sproxil has verified some 13.4 million drugs and counting.

But this kind of verification has implications far beyond the massive problem of counterfeit drugs. By urging people living in often remote places to submit information about what medications they’re taking, this system can also give other organizations, like Malaria No More, a huge amount of data on where illnesses are occurring and how they’re being treated. In other words, if the project is successful, the codes could become a proxy for actual incidences of malaria.

“If we can show there’s a strong correlation, we can look at the drug reporting around the country where we don’t know what’s happening with malaria, and suddenly, we can tell what’s happening with malaria,” Edlund says.

Review: Leveraxe Vipukirves 2

The Leveraxe Vipukirves 2. Yep, that’s an axe alright. You know, for chopping wood. Ariel Zambelich

If your trusty old wood-splitter just hasn’t been cutting it lately, give Heikki Kärnä’s invention a try. The now-retired Finnish air controller’s cleverly simple wood-chopping device is called the Vipukirves 2. Technically, it’s just an axe, though it probably doesn’t look like any axe you’ve seen before. That wonky, cherry-red axe head is not only bizarrely shaped, but the unconventional design gives it the power to tear a log a new one. Many new ones, in fact.

Here’s how it works. After the downswing and just after the blade pierces through the wood fibers, the counterweight on the right side of the head forces the axe to fall sideways. This creates a prying force that splits the fibers of the wood apart. Unlike a regular axe, you don’t need to jam the wedge of the axe head into the cut you’ve just made, and keep swinging in the same spot to wedge the pieces of wood apart. You just turn the handle a little and the head applies enough lever force to break the log apart easily. Compared to a traditional axe, it requires far less raw force to split wood. And of course, fewer bone-shaking, sweat-soaked hours spent prepping your fire fuel.

Kärnä developed the first Vipukirves axe years ago, and he sells both it and the updated Vipukirves 2 design through his company, Leveraxe. The popularity of his axes exploded once English-speaking bloggers began posting YouTube videos of a Vipukirves-wielding Kärnä blowing through hardwood rounds, splitting them into three-inch pieces in mere seconds.

The two Leveraxes: The original Vipukirves on the bottom, and the Vipukirves 2 on the top. Ariel Zambelich

The Leveraxe folks sent me both one of its original Vipukirves axes and the new Vipukirves 2 design to test. If you consider yourself an axe man, I can tell you that these tools should be fixtures in your arsenal for reasons beyond their efficiency. The Vipukirves 2 in particular is light considering the job it does. Traditional mauls weigh anywhere from four pounds up to a colossal 12 pounds. Typically, the heavier the maul, the better they are at splitting. The problem is that the heavier they are, the harder they are to swing. The svelte Vipukirves 2, which I preferred, weighs less than the original Leveraxe design. It’s just a little over four and a half pounds, so it swings easily.

And because the device never wedges itself all the way through the log, there’s little risk of hitting your shins or toes. Made of a beautiful birch, the handle absorbs shock and doesn’t get slippery when wet like some plastic handles.

One snag (besides its high price tag) is the learning curve. People who have previously used a regular axe will have a hard time altering their big-swinging ways. In order for the axe head to work properly, it needs to be able to twist. At the end of the downswing, you have to loosen your grip on the handle. If you can manage to loosen your grip on a sharp metal object while it’s hurtling through the air, it’ll be smooth sailing.

For extra efficiency, the company recommends creating the ideal setup for chopping. This includes a chopping block (a larger log), a tire, and a couple of screws. (Just like you’ll see in Kärnä’s videos.) This setup isn’t necessary for splitting logs, but the purpose of the tire is to keep the small pieces of wood gathered inside, thus reducing the time and effort spent picking up pieces that flew away, and repositioning the log you’re splitting once you’re ready to make another cut.

The Vipukirves works as promised, and did a great job of busting through the different California hardwoods I tried with it. It most definitely saves one the backaches and muscle soreness experienced when equal time is spent chopping wood the old fashioned way. So if you’ve got the money (around $300) and a lot of wood to break apart to get you through the winter, I recommend you give this funny-looking Finnish woodchuck a swing.

Another view of the Vipukirves 2. Ariel Zambelich

A Trippy Orchestra Made Entirely From Lamps and Electricity

Next time you flip on a lamp, lean in and listen closely for the soft buzz of electricity. You might not be able to hear it on your dinky IKEA task lamp, but it’s there coursing through the cables. This silence is a good thing—most lamps are designed to be that way—unless you’re Fabio Di Salvo and Bernardo Vercelli.

The duo of italian artists makes up Quiet Collective, a studio that focuses on sound performance. For their most recent piece, The Enlightenment, they’ve taken the soft hum of electricity and turned it into a booming orchestra of sound and light. “Usually this is the sound that disturbs concerts and performances,” he says. “But we’re taking it up as loud as possible to make it our own instrument.”

The orchestra is made from 96 lamps—neon tubes, spotlights, theatre rigs and strobes—all of which produce their own sound. The neon tubes, for example, are meant to mimic the whining sound of a violin, the strobes are percussion. Salvo and Vercelli rigged each of the lamps with a copper coil that could deliver programmed electrical currents. You can see the choreographed voltage through flashing lights and hear it thanks to sensors which communicate the currents to a computer (through Ableton Live) and amplifies them into an ominous buzz.

The setup is effectively giving lamps a voice, which is an interesting idea to ponder. At its most practical, similar technology has sonified imperceptible noises like the clicking communication among plants.

At its most poetic, you could consider that each object we encounter has a secret, hidden life. Even the things we think to be inanimate have a vitality and energy to them. As Vercelli puts it: “If you look deeper and open your eyes and ears you can see and hear things. Most things have their own special life, you just have to pay attention.”

The Savvy Plan to Combat Malaria With Mobile Phones

Esther Havens/Malaria No More

Martin Edlund likes to say that malaria may one day be the first disease beaten by mobile phones. Yes, he happens to be the CEO of the non-profit Malaria No More, so he has to say stuff like that. But no, it’s not a total pipedream.

Africa, where malaria kills around 400,000 children every year, is set to top 1 billion mobile phone subscriptions by next year. That means that public health researchers will have one billion ways to communicate with—and collect data from—the people who are most at risk of catching malaria, a disease that has traditionally been extremely difficult to track.

“Lack of information and data is why this is among one of the deadliest diseases on the planet,” Edlund says. And he believes mobile phones could change all that.

He’s not the only one. On Friday, Google.org, the search giant’s philanthropic arm, announced that it’s giving Malaria No More a $600,000 grant to embark on a potentially transformative data mining project in Nigeria. The grant is part of a pot of $15 million that Google.org is doling out to organizations that use technology to solve the world’s biggest problems.

For the Nigeria project, Malaria No More is partnering with a Nigerian startup called Sproxil, a company that spent the last five years combatting the massive counterfeit drug market in Nigeria by placing unique codes on authentic medications. Anyone who buys those medications can text the codes for free to Sproxil to verify the drugs. To date, Sproxil has verified some 13.4 million drugs and counting.

But this kind of verification has implications far beyond the massive problem of counterfeit drugs. By urging people living in often remote places to submit information about what medications they’re taking, this system can also give other organizations, like Malaria No More, a huge amount of data on where illnesses are occurring and how they’re being treated. In other words, if the project is successful, the codes could become a proxy for actual incidences of malaria.

“If we can show there’s a strong correlation, we can look at the drug reporting around the country where we don’t know what’s happening with malaria, and suddenly, we can tell what’s happening with malaria,” Edlund says.

Review: Leveraxe Vipukirves 2

The Leveraxe Vipukirves 2. Yep, that’s an axe alright. You know, for chopping wood. Ariel Zambelich

If your trusty old wood-splitter just hasn’t been cutting it lately, give Heikki Kärnä’s invention a try. The now-retired Finnish air controller’s cleverly simple wood-chopping device is called the Vipukirves 2. Technically, it’s just an axe, though it probably doesn’t look like any axe you’ve seen before. That wonky, cherry-red axe head is not only bizarrely shaped, but the unconventional design gives it the power to tear a log a new one. Many new ones, in fact.

Here’s how it works. After the downswing and just after the blade pierces through the wood fibers, the counterweight on the right side of the head forces the axe to fall sideways. This creates a prying force that splits the fibers of the wood apart. Unlike a regular axe, you don’t need to jam the wedge of the axe head into the cut you’ve just made, and keep swinging in the same spot to wedge the pieces of wood apart. You just turn the handle a little and the head applies enough lever force to break the log apart easily. Compared to a traditional axe, it requires far less raw force to split wood. And of course, fewer bone-shaking, sweat-soaked hours spent prepping your fire fuel.

Kärnä developed the first Vipukirves axe years ago, and he sells both it and the updated Vipukirves 2 design through his company, Leveraxe. The popularity of his axes exploded once English-speaking bloggers began posting YouTube videos of a Vipukirves-wielding Kärnä blowing through hardwood rounds, splitting them into three-inch pieces in mere seconds.

The two Leveraxes: The original Vipukirves on the bottom, and the Vipukirves 2 on the top. Ariel Zambelich

The Leveraxe folks sent me both one of its original Vipukirves axes and the new Vipukirves 2 design to test. If you consider yourself an axe man, I can tell you that these tools should be fixtures in your arsenal for reasons beyond their efficiency. The Vipukirves 2 in particular is light considering the job it does. Traditional mauls weigh anywhere from four pounds up to a colossal 12 pounds. Typically, the heavier the maul, the better they are at splitting. The problem is that the heavier they are, the harder they are to swing. The svelte Vipukirves 2, which I preferred, weighs less than the original Leveraxe design. It’s just a little over four and a half pounds, so it swings easily.

And because the device never wedges itself all the way through the log, there’s little risk of hitting your shins or toes. Made of a beautiful birch, the handle absorbs shock and doesn’t get slippery when wet like some plastic handles.

One snag (besides its high price tag) is the learning curve. People who have previously used a regular axe will have a hard time altering their big-swinging ways. In order for the axe head to work properly, it needs to be able to twist. At the end of the downswing, you have to loosen your grip on the handle. If you can manage to loosen your grip on a sharp metal object while it’s hurtling through the air, it’ll be smooth sailing.

For extra efficiency, the company recommends creating the ideal setup for chopping. This includes a chopping block (a larger log), a tire, and a couple of screws. (Just like you’ll see in Kärnä’s videos.) This setup isn’t necessary for splitting logs, but the purpose of the tire is to keep the small pieces of wood gathered inside, thus reducing the time and effort spent picking up pieces that flew away, and repositioning the log you’re splitting once you’re ready to make another cut.

The Vipukirves works as promised, and did a great job of busting through the different California hardwoods I tried with it. It most definitely saves one the backaches and muscle soreness experienced when equal time is spent chopping wood the old fashioned way. So if you’ve got the money (around $300) and a lot of wood to break apart to get you through the winter, I recommend you give this funny-looking Finnish woodchuck a swing.

Another view of the Vipukirves 2. Ariel Zambelich