We Need More Science: 01/15/15

Fact-Checking Those Outraged Oscar Nominations Tweets

Every January, as soon as the Oscar nominations are announced, folks immediately take to Twitter to express opinions about who got a nod and who didn’t. It’s tradition. (Or it has been since Twitter, like, existed.) This year there was a lot of “The Lego Movie didn’t get nominated?!” (see director Phil Lord’s tweet about the shutout above) and “None of the actors from Selma got picked?!” And so on.

Those are all (very) valid critiques, but—as in years past—amongst those tweets there are also a few interesting “facts.” You know what we’re talking about. It’s the nugget from that one smarty-pants friend or industry insider who knows some arcane piece of history about the history of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences that no one else seems to know (or maybe they just crunched some box office data to find a tidbit no one else would even think to look for).

But are they all true? RTs do not equal confirmations, after all. We decided to grab some of the most interesting tweet factoids—it’s the whitest Oscars since 1998!—and see if we could confirm them. Here’s what we found out.

True! Mostly. From American Sniper to Whiplash, all of the Best Picture nominees (here) had limited opening weekends before hitting theaters nationwide. It’s actually kind of surprising that’s true since a lot of studios have limited early runs of movies to qualify them for Oscar contention. Dentler is right, however, to put that question mark after “Interesting first”—while it seems possible this is the first time all the Best Picture nominees didn’t open wide in their initial release, it also could be that a previous group of nominees all started in limited release. Because, well, studios have limited early runs to qualify for Oscar consideration.

First of all, it sucks that Ava DuVernay didn’t get nominated. But is she also one in a list of women to be nominated for Best Picture but not Best Director? Yes, but she’s actually the 10th woman whose film has been nominated for Best Picture while she herself didn’t get a Best Director nod. (The list in the tweet above leaves out Penny Marshall, who directed Awakenings.) But also, many films have been nominated for Best Picture and not gotten a directing nod. (Like, a lot.) And, as the New York Times’ Josh Barro noted on Twitter, directors not getting nominated became much more common when the Oscars opened up the Best Picture field in 2009 to allow more nominees in that category than the five who are typically nominated for Best Director. It was also this way in the 1930s and early ’40s and it happened every year during that time. Ironically, One Hundred Men and a Girl fell prey to this discrepancy in the number of nominees.

This is mostly true. It comes from an analysis of Academy voters done by the Los Angeles Times in December 2013. That report found that the Academy is 93 percent white, 76 percent male, and, yes, has an average age of 63.

As the story in this tweet points out, according to a Huffington Post analysis, this is the first year since 1998 that all of the nominees in each of the four main acting categories is white.

Sigh. This is also true.

Fun fact! Cumberbatch played Hawking in, well, Hawking .

This is half true. Edward Norton, who is nominated for Birdman this year, played Bruce Banner in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. However, Lou Ferrigno, who pretty much originated the role on TV in the 1970s (and voices him in the Avengers movies), has never been nominated for an Oscar. But Regan, a Daily Show writer probably looking for LoLs, jokingly swapped in “Ferrigno” for “Ruffalo” here (Mark Ruffalo was nominated alongside Norton this year for Foxcatcher).

Homepage image: Matt Sayles/Invision/AP

Even the Guy Who Designed the iPod May Not Be Able to Save Google Glass

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Google Glass hasn’t changed the world. Not even close. Briefly hailed as the wearable heir to the smartphone, Glass has mainly become an object of derision, confusion, and indifference. Google never really succeeded in making a convincing case for why we’d all want to wear our phones on our faces.

The iPod, on the other hand, was a device that radically changed the trajectory of personal tech. The conceptual parent of the iPhone, the iPod upended the recording industry, revitalized Apple, and ushered in the online, on-demand era of music, movies, books, and TV. And the guy who designed the iPod? He now works for Google.

Tony Fadell joined the company when Google paid more than $3 billion for Nest, the smart-home startup he co-founded. At the time of the acquisition almost exactly one year ago, we made much of how Nest’s connected thermostats and smoke alarms would give Google entree to the oceans of data these smart devices will generate as they become commonplace in people’s homes. But buying Nest also brought Google something else: a guy with a proven record of designing hardware that is radically new but also widely embraced by consumers.

Nest CEO Tony Fadell. Nest

In that light, Google’s decision today to give Fadell oversight of Google Glass makes a lot of sense. If any gadget needs a guiding hand to transform it from geek fetish to viable product, it’s Glass. But the challenge is steep, even for Fadell. The problem is that Glass’ failure doesn’t ultimately stem from people perceiving it as uncool; it’s that Glass isn’t perceived as all that useful. Google had hoped Glass’ early users would help find the functions for its form; now Fadell will have to push reset on that unsuccessful effort. Instead of asking users what Glass is for, Fadell must find a way to tell them.

No Clear Advantage

From the time of its first limited release in 2013, critics have railed against Glass as a privacy invader and a anti-social intrusion on everyday face-to-face contact. But the outrage drew attention away from the more mundane question of what the real point was of having access to the basic functions of your smartphone through a tiny display permanently hovering just above your eye. To make sense as a general purpose consumer device, a gadget needs to have a clear advantage over those that preceded it. Glass’ advantage compared to pulling out your phone was never clear, and Google never effectively articulated it. Instead, Google seemed to hope that by offering Glass to a select number of early adopters and techies through its Glass Explorer program, which is now ending, the device’s first users would do the work of figuring out what it was for.

That didn’t happen, at least not in a way that made those advantages obvious to the general public. Over the past two years, we’ve learned that consumers are not clamoring for heads-up displays; what they really want are the same old smartphones, except with ginormous screens. As innovative as Glass may seem in its newness, newness alone does not entail innovation if the equation does not also include usefulness.

Glass came into the world as a gadget looking for a reason to be, and that reason hasn’t been found.

A caveat: connected headsets like Glass are here to stay in specific, mostly work-related contexts. Certain specialized occupations such as surgeon, construction worker, or jet-engine mechanic will benefit greatly from access to a constant stream of information that the person on the receiving end can consume while keeping both hands free. The future of wearable devices isn’t about a single device that does everything. It’s about lots of different devices that each do one thing really well.

And in a future like that, what place does Glass really have? That’s what Tony Fadell will have to figure out. Perhaps resetting Glass means re-presenting it to consumers as a device for work. And since consumers rather than IT departments are now driving the tech that gets used in the workplace, a reimagining of Glass for enterprise could still offer a path to mass adoption.

To be sure, Google is still signaling mainstream ambitions for its beleaguered eyewear. Along with putting the device in Fadell’s hands, Google is also pushing Glass out of the experimental nest of its Google X division (Glass is “graduating,” Google says). But if Glass is really out of its infancy, as Google asserts, it’s hardly all grown up. Giving the device to Fadell is a gamble that, with his user-experience chops, he will be able to define, implement, and convey a sense of purpose through which potential consumers will finally “get” Glass. But that still leaves the question: Who is that potential consumer?

Clarity of Vision

In a recent podcast post-mortem on the Consumer Electronics Show, Andreessen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans described the Internet of Things as a kind of inversion of the typical path for new tech. Instead of a great need that innovators strive to develop new tech in order to meet, the Internet of Things consists of a wealth of devices waiting for consumers to figure out what they’re good for. Evans said that, in that context, the real value of Nest to both consumers and Google isn’t so much in its thermostat or its smoke detector as gadgets unto themselves. Instead, the value of Nest is in the company’s jumpstart on creating a user-friendly system that conveys not just the usefulness of each device individually, but that through its design communicates how that usefulness evolves as more devices connect to the system.

“The point of of Nest isn’t the thermostat,” Evans said. “It’s the route to market and the communication.”

To succeed, Fadell needs to imbue Glass with a similar clarity of vision. And if anyone seems capable of making the case for Glass, it’s the guy who managed to persuade consumers that devices as boring as the thermostat and the smoke detector could be transformed into much more useful appliances. Unlike Glass, however, the thermostat and smoke detector both have obvious, well-defined purposes that tech augments by connecting them to each other and the internet.

Glass came into the world as a gadget looking for a reason to be, and that reason hasn’t been found. Someone with Fadell’s gift might be able to find it. But he’ll have to look pretty hard. Relaunching Glass as primarily a tool for work seems like the most fruitful path to take, to find highly specific niches where Glass makes sense. But the likelihood that even Fadell can convince the world of the need for a face-mounted smartphone is slim. It’s not like Google to think small. But Fadell will have to narrow Glass’ view if he wants it to survive.

Fact-Checking Those Outraged Oscar Nominations Tweets

As the story in this tweet points out, according to a Huffington Post analysis, this is the first year since 1998 that all of the nominees in each of the four main acting categories is white.

Sigh. This is also true.

Fun fact! Cumberbatch played Hawking in, well, Hawking .

This is half true. Edward Norton, who is nominated for Birdman this year, played Bruce Banner in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. However, Lou Ferrigno, who pretty much originated the role on TV in the 1970s (and voices him in the Avengers movies), has never been nominated for an Oscar. But we think Regan meant to say “Ruffalo” instead of “Ferrigno” here. Mark Ruffalo was nominated alongside Norton this year for Foxcatcher.

DHS Believed Mt. Gox CEO Might Have Been Silk Road’s Secret Mastermind

Long before the Department of Homeland Security set its sights on a 29-year-old named Ross Ulbricht, the agency had another surprising suspect in mind as the possible creator and administrator of the Silk Road’s massive online drug market: Mark Karpeles, the chief executive of the then-world’s-biggest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox.

In response to cross examination by the defense in Ulbricht’s trial today, DHS special agent Jared Deryeghiayan revealed that in 2012 and 2013 he had pursued Karpeles as the suspected owner and operator of the Silk Road, as well as Karpeles’ Mt. Gox associate Ashley Barr as the voice of the Dread Pirate Roberts, the Silk Road’s pseudonymous figurehead. Deryeghiayan confirmed he had even gone so far as to seek a warrant to search Karpeles’ Gmail account based on “probable cause” that the Mt. Gox owner had secretly administered the Silk Road in a bid to boost the price of bitcoin, and with it his own substantial cryptocurrency fortune.

In an August 2013 affidavit written by Deryeghiayan and read aloud by Ulbricht’s defense attorney Joshua Dratel, the agent cited evidence that included Karpeles’ purported control of the website silkroadmarket.org, information received from a federal informant working with Karpeles, and Karpeles’ profile as a programmer and bitcoin mogul. “I believe this evidence shows Karpeles controlled silkroadmarket.org and the tuxtele.com website and hosted them both at IP addresses he controlled,” Deryeghiayan wrote. He went on to cite Karpeles’ Linkedin page, and to argue that Tokyo-based Karpeles was “well suited to [create] an e-commerce website such as the Silk Road underground website.”

In his affidavit, Deryeghiayan also cited an interview I conducted with the Dread Pirate Roberts in July of 2013. “That sounds very much like Karpeles,” Deryeghiayan wrote.

Karpeles didn’t immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

According to Deryeghiayan, his suspicion of Karpeles began when he started to analyze bitcoin accounts in April 2012. By July of that year, he “believed he had a good target” in Karpeles.

While Karpeles’ English skills didn’t match the public writings of the Dread Pirate Roberts, Deryeghiayan confirmed in response to Dratel’s questions that he suspected Karpeles’ Mt. Gox staffer Ashley Barr had served as something like Karpeles’ ghostwriter, “a person who shared some of the same viewpoints…who was working for him.”

In an internal email to other DHS staffers at the time, Deryeghiayan says he wrote that “We’ve built up quite a large list of information to lead us to this.” By August 2012, Deryeghiayan believed strongly enough that Karpeles was involved in the Silk Road that he advised DHS officials not to visit any of the websites controlled by Karpeles for fear of tipping him off to his investigation. At some point he also began receiving information from a confidential informant close to Karpeles, though Deryeghiayan didn’t offer more details about that source in court.

By raising Karpeles as an alternative suspect, it’s not yet clear if Ulbricht’s defense is seeking to convince the jury that Karpeles was in fact Silk Road’s owner, or simply seeking to raise doubts about the DHS’s investigative abilities in the jury’s mind. Dratel spent the first half of the day forcing Deryeghiayan to admit uncertainties in the prosecution’s evidence linking Ross Ulbricht to the Dread Pirate Roberts persona, such as the possibility that the PGP private key Silk Road’s owner used to “sign” private messages had been shared among multiple people. Dratel also cited an internal email Deryeghiayan sent in which he posited that the author of the Dread Pirate Roberts’ writing had changed in April 2012.

Shortly after the defense raised the issue of Deryeghiayan’s affidavit, prosecutor Serrin Turner objected to the line of questioning as “hearsay,” leading to the jury eventually being removed from the courtroom so that judge Katherine Forrest and both teams of lawyers could debate the issue. “The defense is trying to argue this other target is the real Dread Pirate Roberts,” Turner protested.

But judge Forrest responded that the defense was merely trying to present “certain facts” to allow the jury to “draw inferences.”

“The defense has been [trying to show] that Karpeles was at least arguably ‘a’ Dread Pirate Roberts,” she said. “They’re trying to raise reasonable doubts.”

Developing story, check back for updates.

Even the Guy Who Designed the iPod Might Not Be Able to Save Google Glass

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Nest CEO Tony Fadell. Nest

No Clear Advantage

Glass came into the world as a gadget looking for a reason to be, and that reason hasn’t been found.

Clarity of Vision

“The point of of Nest isn’t the thermostat,” Evans said. “It’s the route to market and the communication.”

A Startup That Wants to Make Getting a Mortgage Less Tortuous

Screenshot: Lenda

Jason van den Brand had been working in the home mortgage industry for a decade when he realized he had the power to change it.

It was the middle of 2013, and he was working at a co-working space, alongside Elijah Murray, a user experience designer. At the time, van den Brand was complaining to Murray about how time consuming, expensive, and inconvenient the process of securing a home loan was for his clients. “So, I was griping about this to Elijah,” van den Brand remembers, “and he’s like: ‘You know we can build stuff that automates all of that, right?'”

Jason van den Brand. Lenda

And so they did. In October of that year, van den Brand and Murray launched Lenda, an online platform that lets people refinance a home loan completely online. By automating this process, van den Brand says, Lenda can cut out traditional brokers who charge hefty commissions and steep margins, and instead offer people cheaper, quicker loans. On Thursday, the company announced it has closed $25 million in loans to date and will be expanding beyond its initial test market in California to Washington state.

Lenda’s success in the home mortgage lending industry follows a swell of activity in the alternative finance space. In recent years, companies like Lending Club, Prosper, and OnDeck Capital have become viable alternatives to bank loans both for individuals and small businesses. Meanwhile, businesses like Wealthfront and Betterment have succeeded in bringing the costly process of investment management online, offering clients drastically lower fees than traditional money managers charge. With Lenda, van den Brand is extending this idea to the world of home financing.

“We knew it was coming. Millennials are growing up. They’re buying homes,” he says. “We thought: ‘We can either wait for it to happen, or we can do it ourselves.'”

The 25-Day Loan

On Lenda, homeowners start by entering basic information about themselves, including their credit scores, current mortgage, and estimated value of their homes. Lenda’s algorithms then automatically determine which loans that homeowner would likely be approved for.

Users can upload their bank documents right on the site and e-sign their applications, so they can avoid the mountains of paperwork that traditionally dominate the industry. And while it still takes about 25 days to close a loan with Lenda (there’s no getting around the basic regulations), van den Brand says that’s much shorter than the industry standard.

He also says that, unlike most of Lenda’s competitors, Lenda isn’t a lead generator, so it doesn’t just hand potential clients off to other mortgage brokers. “Traditionally, you get a rate comparison online. You put in your name, phone, and email. Then, you get hammered with telemarketing and spam, and no one likes that,” van den Brand explains. “If you had to boil down mortgages and why it’s so broken and why people are so pissed off, it’s because there are so many hands in the pot.”

The Competition

Despite the advantages to this model, Lenda still has some steep competition, both from banks, and from its older, more recognizable predecessors like Quicken Loans. But van den Brand says that similar to Wealthfront and LendingClub, there are advantages to being the newcomer in an industry that has so many deeply entrenched inefficiencies.

“When these companies were starting, the technology just wasn’t there. They didn’t have electronic signatures, or mass adoption of shopping online, so they built these processes around it,” he says. “So you’re talking about hundreds of bubbles on this workflow that are slowly but surely going to be popped through automation. Ultimately our vision is to get you a home loan online with the click of a button.”

Microsoft Is Teaching Cybersecurity to Cities Around the World—For Free

An aerial view of the downtown Chicago, 2014. Alex Menendez/AP

Cybersecurity isn’t just an issue for the feds and big companies like Google and Facebook. Cities of all sizes around the world are increasingly reliant on information systems that could be vulnerable to attack.

That’s why Microsoft is volunteering its cybersecurity expertise, free of charge, to select city governments through 100 Resilient Cities, a non-profit organization funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. “We’ll lead workshops for multiple cities over a period of time to share what we’ve learned from operating some the world’s largest data centers,” says Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s chief environmental and cities strategist.

The effort is just one of the ways that 100 Resilient Cities helps modern cities face the future. Founded in 2013, the organization defines resilience as “the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.” This could range from climate change and natural disasters to crime to public transportation—anything that affects their ability to provide services.

“By 2050, three fourths of all people people are going to live in cities,” says the organization’s communications director, Max Young. “Then there’s climate change accelerating the number of shocks that cities face. We saw a problem that was going to be concentrated in one place—cities—so we created 100 Resilient Cities as a method for implementing solutions.”

Selected cities are then given funds to hire a “chief resilience officer” to help the city identify projects that can improve the city’s resilience. “A chief resilience officer would be required to make sure all projects serve multiple purposes,” says Young. “So a new road wouldn’t be just a road, it would be an elevated road that serves as a flood barrier, is well lit for public safety, connects a neighborhood with poor access to health care with one with good access, etc. So the one project does a lot.”

Although the foundation provides funding to pay the chief resilience officer’s salary, neither the 100 Resilient Cities nor the Rockefeller Foundation has any say in who the cities hire, which companies, if any, they work with, or what projects they take on. It also connects cities with consulting companies like McKinsey that will help cities create strategies, or technology companies like Microsoft and Palantir, who will help implement those strategies. All of these companies work for the cities pro bono.

“What we provide is the suite of platform partners who are providing services to the city for free, and we provide deep expertise,” says Young.

But perhaps its most important function is as a matchmaker to help cities connect so that they can learn from each other. Medellín, Columbia is learning about earthquake preparation from San Francisco, while New York City is learning about flooding from the Dutch city Rotterdam, and Byblos, Lebanon is learning about cultural heritage preservation from Rome, Italy.

A Startup That Wants to Make Getting a Mortgage Less Tortuous

Screenshot: Lenda

Jason van den Brand had been working in the home mortgage industry for a decade when he realized he had the power to change it.

Jason van den Brand. Lenda

“We knew it was coming. Millennials are growing up. They’re buying homes,” he says. “We thought: ‘We can either wait for it to happen, or we can do it ourselves.'”

The 25-Day Loan

The Competition

Microsoft Is Teaching Cybersecurity to Cities Around the World—For Free

An aerial view of the downtown Chicago, 2014. Alex Menendez/AP

“What we provide is the suite of platform partners who are providing services to the city for free, and we provide deep expertise,” says Young.

President Obama Is Waging a War on Hackers

In next week’s State of the Union address, President Obama will propose new laws against hacking that could make either retweeting or clicking on the above (fictional) link illegal. The new laws make it a felony to intentionally access unauthorized information even if it’s been posted to a public website. The new laws make it a felony to traffic in information like passwords, where “trafficking” includes posting a link.

You might assume that things would never become that bad, but it’s already happening even with the current laws. Prosecutors went after Andrew “weev” Auernheimer for downloading a customer list AT&T negligently made public. They prosecuted Barrett Brown for copying a URL to the Stratfor hack from one chatroom to another. A single click is all it takes. Prosecutors went after the PayPal-14 for clicking on a single link they knew would flood PayPal’s site with traffic. The proposed changes make such prosecutions much easier.

Robert Graham

Robert Graham is an inventor of cybersecurity technologies. He is CEO of Errata Security. This article first appeared on Errata’s blog.

Even if you don’t do any of this, you can still be guilty if you hang around with people who do. Obama proposes upgrading hacking to a “racketeering” offense, means you can be guilty of being a hacker by simply acting like a hacker (without otherwise committing a specific crime). Hanging out in an IRC chat room giving advice to people now makes you a member of a “criminal enterprise”, allowing the FBI to sweep in and confiscate all your assets without charging you with a crime. If you innocently clicked on the link above, and think you can defend yourself in court, prosecutors can still use the 20-year sentence of a racketeering charge in order to force you to plea bargain down to a 1-year sentence for hacking. (Civil libertarians hate the police-state nature of racketeering laws).

Obama’s proposals come from a feeling in Washington D.C. that more needs to be done about hacking in response to massive data breaches of the last couple years. But they are blunt political solutions which reflect no technical understanding of the problem.

Most hacking is international and anonymous. They can’t catch the perpetrators no matter how much they criminalize the activities. This War on Hackers is likely to be no more effective than the War on Drugs, where after three decades the prison population has sky rocketed from 0.1% of the population to a staggering 1%. With 5% the world’s population, we have 25 percent of the world’s prisoners—and this has done nothing to stop drugs. Likewise, while Obama’s new laws will dramatically increase hacking prosecutions, they’ll be of largely innocent people rather than the real hackers that matter.

Internet innovation happens by trying things first then asking for permission later. Obama’s law will change that. For example, a search engine like Google downloads a copy of every website in order to create a search “index”. This sort of thing is grandfathered in, but if “copying the entire website” were a new idea, it would be something made illegal by the new laws. Such copies knowingly get information that website owners don’t intend to make public. Similarly, had hacking laws been around in the 1980s, the founders of Apple might’ve still been in jail today, serving out long sentences for trafficking in illegal access devices.

The most important innovators this law would affect are the cybersecurity professionals that protect the Internet. If you cared about things such as “national security” and “cyberterrorism”, then this should be your biggest fear. Because of our knowledge, we do innocent things that look to outsiders like “hacking”. Protecting computers often means attacking them. The more you crack down on hackers, the more of a chilling effect you create in our profession. This creates an open-door for nation-state hackers and the real cybercriminals.

Along with its Hacking Prohibition law, Obama is also proposing a massive Internet Surveillance law. Companies currently monitor their networks, using cybersecurity products like firewalls, IPSs, and anti-virus. Obama wants to strong-arm companies into sharing that information with the government, creating a virtualized or “cloud” surveillance system.

In short, President Obama’s War on Hackers is a bad thing, creating a Cyber Police State. The current laws already overcriminalize innocent actions and allow surveillance of innocent people. We need to roll those laws back, not extend them.

President Obama Is Waging a War on Hackers

Robert Graham

Robert Graham is an inventor of cybersecurity technologies. He is CEO of Errata Security. This article first appeared on Errata’s blog.

Apple’s New Programming Language Is Growing Like Mad

RedMonk

Developers are still going nuts for Apple’s new Swift programming language.

Since it was introduced last summer, Swift just jumped from number 68 to number 22 in the language rankings from research and analyst firm RedMonk. The rankings seeks to gauge how interested programmers are in different languages.

That growth is unprecedented in the firm’s rankings, analyst Stephen O’Grady wrote in a blog post about the findings. By comparison, Google’s programming language Go, introduced in 2009, only just broke into the top 20 this quarter. That’s not bad considering the top languages in the rankings are still venerable languages like Java, JavaScript, PHP and C++, but it’s nowhere near as meteoric as Swift’s rise.

It’s important, however, to keep RedMonk’s rankings in perspective. They don’t reflect what languages are most commonly used at companies today, or where the most jobs are. It uses only two dimensions to rank developer interest: the number of lines of code in the popular code hosting and collaboration site GitHub, and the number of questions being asked about a particular language on the question and answers site StackOverflow.

But they might just give us some insight into what languages programmers are actually interested in, and given the intense competition between companies for engineering talent, it could help companies make strategic decisions about what languages to use for new projects. And it gives us some insight into the changes occurring beneath the surface of our favorite apps.

As mentioned, Go still continues to grow quickly—-possibly due, in part, to its popularity in China. And Rust—a language created by Mozilla, the makers of the popular Firefox web browser—saw some upward momentum as well. But nothing is really coming close to topping Java and the other top tier languages.

That fits well with a ranking of database technologies that found that Oracle’s flagship product is still the top dog, despite rapid adoption of newer technologies. Such findings suggest that developers aren’t ditching old technologies, but adding new ones to their skill sets as they seek out the best tools for particular jobs.

Java and Oracle aren’t going anywhere, but the growth of languages like Swift and Go and the rising popularity of alternative databases shows us that the days when one or two development platforms could completely dominate the industry are over.

Of Course We Should Give Volunteer Firefighters a Tax Break

Jordan Golson/WIRED

Here’s a surprising fact: More than half of the firefighters in America are volunteers.

Of the 1.1 million firefighters in the United States, more than 780,000 were volunteers, spread across more than 25,000 individual departments. Roughly a third of the US population is protected by mostly or all-volunteer fire departments.

Also surprising, perhaps? Sometimes they have to pay for their own gear.

I know this because, in addition to writing about cars for WIRED, I volunteer as a firefighter in Durango, Colorado. I responded to more than 50 calls in 2013, everything from wildfires and heart attacks to structure fires and car accidents. In that time, I’ve spent close to $1,000 on optional gear not supplied by my department–things like higher quality flashlights, knives, and better gloves. Things that make my job easier. And I’m lucky. I volunteer for a well-funded department that covers the vast majority of my costs. But I know of departments that must take hand-me-down bunker gear and even used fire trucks and ambulances, because they simply don’t have any money. Some firefighters must even pay for their own training.

Yesterday, a bill (HR 343) was introduced in Congress by Representative David B. McKinley (R-WV) that would give a significant tax deduction to those who volunteer their time as first responders. I hope it passes, not because it will put some money in my pocket (though, hey, that’ll be nice) but because in easing the financial burden on volunteers and acknowledging their time commitment, I believe this bill will encourage more people to help.

And we need that.

If you live in a rural part of the United States, it’s likely that some or all of the firefighters responding to an emergency will be unpaid volunteers. And chances are, in your lifetime, you will need the support of the local fire department. While we’re all worried about identity theft, or credit card fraud or big, epic hacks, we’re much more likely to be the victim of a fire or a heart attack or a car accident. Nearly everyone needs the fire department at some point in their lives.

In rural areas where population density is low and calls for fire and EMS services are relatively scarce, it just doesn’t make financial sense to have career firefighters on staff 24/7. Instead, volunteers are used to fill in the gaps. We are ready to put our regular lives aside at a moment’s notice when that pager goes off to help someone on what is, literally, the worst day of their life. We have likely never met before, and might never again, but none of that matters in a crisis. Without volunteers, the whole system would collapse. This bill would give a modest but meaningful incentive to encourage more people to volunteer for their communities.

Volunteer firefighters save local governments close to $140 billion a year over the cost of having career staff on duty, according to the National Fire Protection Association, a truly astounding number. If the bill passes and all those firefighters took full advantage of the deduction (which is different from a credit, it just reduces total taxable income), it would only amount to between $1 and $2 billion—a far cry from the what volunteers save their communities compared to the cost of full-time firefighters.

But despite that, the number of volunteers has fallen by some 11 percent since the mid ’80s. The New York Times attributes this partially to the rise in two-income households where there may not be a spare parent to watch the kids while the other runs off to an emergency, as well as to more general trends in urbanization and an aging rural population.

More volunteers means faster response times and better service to rural areas, which will result in lives and property saved.

This bill will encourage more people to volunteer, and discourage others from leaving service. Every little bit helps, because fire departments are consistently cash strapped, even with all the cost savings. Fire engines and other modern firefighting equipment like self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) packs are extraordinarily expensive. Departments rely on government grants and fundraising in an attempt to cover basic equipment costs, leaving little money left to compensate volunteers.

Jordan Golson/WIRED

At Durango Fire, volunteers who respond to a six calls per quarter receive a $90 fuel stipend, as well as a modest pension after 10 years of service. Some departments, such as the Cascade Township Fire Department in Michigan, have “paid on-call” personnel, rather than volunteers. Their firefighters are paid $11.55 per hour for training, and $14 per hour when on duty. Cedar Springs Fire Department pays its firefighters just $10 per call, regardless of how long they spend on scene.

The Volunteer Emergency Responders Tax Deduction Act would allow volunteer firefighters and emergency medical personnel to treat up to 300 hours of services as charitable donations worth $20 per hour, a total of up to $6,000 in federal deductions per year. For me, that won’t amount to a huge chunk of change, but it would help. And more importantly for me and others, it will help us feel appreciated.

Though we spend money to buy gear and gas and sometimes even pay for our own training, by far the biggest sacrifice we make is time away from our families. And for us, the sheer time commitment of training (totaling dozens and dozens of hours a year, depending on certifications) and responding can be burdensome. In the three years I’ve been a firefighter, I have received training in Hazardous Materials Operations, Firefighter I/II, EMT First Responder, and training in how to fight wildland fires. Luckily for me, my department was able to cover the costs (with help from Federal grants), totaling several thousand dollars. I could easily spend years doing nothing but training, gaining EMT or paramedic certifications, more advanced HazMat, certification as a fire officer, fire investigator, or training on how to operate a fire truck pump panel or even the giant ladder trucks. And that’s in addition to my day job.

Fires are just the beginning. Firefighters must be prepared to deal with hazardous materials spills, electrical issues, car crashes, medical emergencies, injured animals, stranded hikers and much, much more. The Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department was first on scene to the crash of United Flight 93. Forty-seven volunteer firefighters were killed while on duty in 2013, including 9 at the explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas. As a volunteer firefighter, you just never know what the day has in store, so we train for as many scenarios as possible and are ready to go at any moment.

There’s a T-shirt that’s popular among we volunteers that reads “For Pride, Not Pay.” We volunteer because we know our communities need us. We don’t need a small tax break. Without one, we’ll still put on our gear when the alarm goes off right as we’re sitting down to dinner without any hesitation. But we’d appreciate one, and if it encourages more people to join us, it’s worth it.

8 Gorgeous Old-School Motorcycles Rebuilt Into Modern Classics

Despite the name and the look of its work, Hawgholic Motorcycles is based in Tokyo, where it specializes in making vintage Harley Davidsons into special creations. This is a 1945 Knuckle chopper, rejuvenated with a yellow paint job, four exhaust pipes, and a modified sissybar. It was rebuilt in 2011.

In 2011, Justin and Jarrod Del Prado at DP Customs took a 1980 Harley-Davidson Ironhead Sportster and made it into a cafe racer of sorts. The result is the Nake Café, with a stripped down frame and one-off parts including the rear cowl, oil tank, exhaust, and seat. The color scheme and angular look are inspired by the 24 Hours of Le Mans-winning Audi R18 TDI.

Triumph motorcycles may have been produced in England, but it’s in the US that they became something special. Exhibit A: Arie VanSchyndel’s 1972 Triumph 500, which he stripped down to the motor, frame, and wheels, then built up again with custom welded parts and no paint job.

Most of the bikes in The Ride are fancied up. The Bonneville Flyer is stripped down. Creator Patrick Dolan wanted it to feel like a turn of the century ride.

One look at the Kestrel, a 1970 Triumph Bonneville rebuilt by Ian Barry, and you see why the new name makes sense: It looks made to cut through the air. Modifications like added aluminum, brass, bronze, copper, gold leaf, iron, and leather, plus the exposed guts, make it a bike you’ll want to ogle for a while.

This bike, the Zero Crafter, is the work of Winston Yeh of Rough Crafts, who used a kit from Zero Engineering to add a special touch. The result is a “wonderfully gothic, Victorian vibe.” It’s like a steampunk bike, if steampunk came in drool-inducing awesomeness.

When he’s not working as a Harley-Davidson dealer in Germany, Andreas Bergerforth is making customized bikes. He’s produced some 160 so far, and the “PainTTless” is the star of the bunch. With no paint or powder coat to hide metalworking mistakes, it had to come out perfect. No wonder it was judged Best Freestlye Machine at the AMD World Championships of Custom Bike Building in 2012.

The Low Down & Shifty is not a pretty bike, but it is a fascinating one. Made from a Yamaha XS650 by Kurt Walker at ICON Motorsports, the chopper took years to build and hardly seems rideable by anyone who doesn’t play professional basketball. Retail price is listed as “too much.”

Most of the bikes in The Ride are fancied up. The Bonneville Flyer is stripped down. Creator Patrick Dolan wanted it to feel like a turn of the century ride.

“The sterotypical motorcyclist,” Chris Hunter writes in the introduction to The Ride: New Custom Motorcycles and Their Builders, “used to be a rakish young guy or girl, a thrill-seeker with a mechanical bent. By the end of the twentieth century, it was the retired dentist trailering his 800-pound chrome-laden cruiser to a motorcycle meet. But today, the motorcycle is back.”

Indeed it is, in no small part due to a slew of beautiful machines and what Hunter calls “a new wave of custom motorcycle builders.” These creators—who include Justin and Jarrod Del Prado, Arie VanSchyndel, and Ian Barry—are mining the machines and aesthetics of the past and marrying them to modern materials and approaches.

The Ride (2013), edited by Hunter and Robert Klanten, and published by Gestalten, catalogs those builders and their fantastic machines. It’s a 300-page tour of the amazing world of custom motorcycles, from the guys in Japan turning Harley-Davidsons into amazing choppers to the German perfectionist working without any paint to hide his mistakes.

Here’s a selection of the best bikes in the book.