Your Kid’s School Is Missing the Tech Revolution, and It’s All Your Fault

Barry Rosenthal/Getty Images

A few months ago, I got an email from a parent at my son’s San Francisco public school, asking if I was familiar with an app called Pencil. It seems that this was a messaging app designed for teachers to communicate with students and their families, and our principal had grown enamored of it. (I’ve since moved, and left the school.) But this parent wasn’t so sure. The company was a young one, venture-backed, and she didn’t know whether it made sense to entrust vital communications to such an untested firm. She had worked in startups before, and she knew how cavalier they could be with data. “You know how they work,” she said. “You’ve got contractors coming in and out, and they all have access to the database. It’s not very secure.”

I wasn’t familiar with Pencil, but it sounded innocuous enough. It’s not like messaging apps are some terrifying new technology—they’re basically ubiquitous. Seven hundred million people have signed up for WhatsApp! Workplace messaging app Slack became a billion-dollar business in just eight months, thanks to its 500,000-plus user base! Meanwhile, our school’s communication system seemed to consist of a cobbled-together collection of email lists and Google Groups. It was inefficient and annoying. A messaging app—better yet, one designed specifically for schools—seemed like an easy fix.

But it turned out to be anything but easy to get Pencil into our school, even with the principal’s support. When I called him, he told me that he’d been talking to the company since fall 2013, when he met its CEO, Yogesh Sharma, at a party at his neighbor’s house. (This kind of thing happens when you live in the Bay Area.) He invited Sharma to speak to the PTA, but it didn’t go well. His already over-clocked teachers balked at the idea of learning a new system—even one as simple as Pencil’s. Parents had privacy concerns. Nobody seemed particularly eager to adopt it.

It turns out that this was a pretty familiar situation for Pencil. A month or so ago, the company gave up on the education market altogether. A visit to its website turns up no mention of schools, merely of “one simple messaging app” that has “a million uses.” (Not, as of yet, a million users.) “We’d keep getting stuck,” Sharma told me when I called him to ask what had happened. “There’s all these stakeholders—the principals, the PTA, the teachers, and then there’s the district that has their own way of doing things. You’re in the middle of this crossfire and the ball doesn’t move because nobody has the ability to make a quick decision.”

A Bottom-Up Approach

In and of itself, this is not really that surprising. For the last couple of decades, entrepreneurs and academics have struggled to find ways bring some of the Internet’s disruptive force to the education system—only to be stymied by predictably sclerotic bureaucracies and overcautious government agencies. But in recent years, entrepreneurs have started making an end run around administrators and taking their products directly to teachers and parents. By targeting individual users, the thinking goes, they can get their products into the hands of the people who use it, instead of slogging through arcane procurement processes. It’s reminiscent of the way Apple invaded the workplace by selling so many iPhones to individual employees that IT departments had no choice but to incorporate them. Or to the way that Uber has quickly signed up so many customers that it has forced legislators to rewrite their laws to accommodate them or risk alienating their citizens.

Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr hailed this approach last year in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “The mobile technologies that have revolutionized the American workplace are now transforming our education system,” he wrote. “For years entrepreneurs and educators have been pushing to bring education technology into the classroom, but adoption has often been slow. Now the education tech landscape is shifting toward mobile devices and new, free and easy-to-use services.”

That at least partially explains why education startups have become extremely hot investments. A recent New York Times piece cited data from research firm CB Insights that showed investors pouring $1.87 billion into education startups in 2014, a 55 percent increase over the previous year and the largest amount since the company started tracking such investments in 1999. New products and services seem to crop up almost daily. Some are from established companies like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, whose educational division, Amplify, is run by former New York Public Schools chancellor Joel Klein; or publisher McGraw-Hill, which snapped up Engrade, a learning-management startup, last year. Others are from newer firms like ClassDojo, a behavior-tracking app that has signed up more than 35 million users since it was introduced in 2011.

But despite some successes, as Pencil’s experience shows, getting teachers and parents to use those services—no matter how innocuous they may seem—can still be difficult. Just like many physicians resisted the adoption of electronic medical records, teachers often feel annoyed or even threatened by new workflows, or by what they see as an incursion into the sanctity of their classroom. And parents, teachers, and administrators, barraged by new apps and services, are left scrambling to figure out which ones to use and what the implications are for their kids. Many are particularly concerned that so many of these services come from Silicon Valley, which has built an entire industry around the idea of collecting tons of data and figuring out how to monetize it later—usually by selling it to advertisers.

“It’s kind of the wild west,” says Michael Walden, a partner at Rethink Education, a venture fund focusing on education technology. “It’s thrown open a whole new set of issues. What’s being adopted in my school? What information is being collected? Who owns my data? What are they doing? It’s really super-scary to everyone, and you’ve seen some backlash.”

Data Concerns

Just ask InBloom. You might remember reading about the extremely ambitious non-profit ed-tech startup, backed with $100 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. It aimed to amass and organize huge amounts of student data for public school districts across the country, making it easier for teachers to access information and chart the progress of their students. Reformers saw it as the first step toward tech-enabled, personalized education, but some concerned parents saw it as an Orwellian monster that fed on their children’s most sensitive information—like social security numbers and parents’ marital status. Last April, after the New York state legislature passed a regulation forbidding the department of education from sharing student information with third-party aggregators, the company announced it was shutting down.

To this day, many ed-tech enthusiasts see InBloom as a cautionary tale of parental hysteria run amok—a sign of how unaddressed fears can sink even the most benevolent efforts. And they argue that privacy concerns are overblown. “Startup companies are really waking up to how carefully they need to walk around data in this world,” says Betsy Corcoran, who runs Edsurge, a news hub that connects teachers and entrepreneurs. “The vast majority don’t have plans to sell the data to someone else. That’s not been a dominant business model.” Which is a good thing, considering that lawmakers are moving to clamp down on any trade in information about students. In September, California passed the Student Online Personal Information Protection Act, which forbids companies from selling student data or using it for any non-educational purposes. In January, President Obama pushed for similar legislation at the federal level when he announced his Student Digital Privacy Act. And so far 112 companies have signed the student data privacy pledge, a voluntary promise to safeguard the information they collect.

Still, in a world rife with NSA chicanery and shifting business plans, it’s not hard to sympathize with wary parents. Indeed, when everyone from Target to JPMorgan Chase has fallen victim to data breaches, it’s difficult to trust that even the most sophisticated tech company will be able to truly protect students’ data. And these aren’t always the most sophisticated tech companies we’re talking about here. Jonathan Mayer, a computer scientist and lawyer at Stanford who has studied the security practices of education technology startups, says he’s been horrified by what he’s found—including programs that didn’t use the secure https protocol or that don’t hide passwords as users enter them. “Very straightforward technical problems, stuff that should be licked by businesses that have even a modest degree of sophistication, those are the mistakes that are being made right and left,” he says. “In 2015, this is almost tech malpractice.”

Kids Are Different

Let’s be honest. If we were always this cautious about data, the Internet economy as we know it would never exist. Many of the innovations of the last couple of decades have sprung directly from our willingness to blithely let Google track our web activity or post photos of our families on Facebook or share our innermost thoughts with the world on Twitter or allow apps to know where we are at any given moment. From time to time, we grow alarmed—when we learn that Facebook has changed its privacy settings or that the NSA has been storing our email or that Uber executives are sharing our real-time travel data to impress people at parties—but not enough to actually change our behavior. An entire ideology has sprung up among tech startups—move fast, break things; it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission—encouraging founders to trample convention, offend sensibilities, and risk screwing up. It’s the cost of progress.

For the most part, we’ve been able to accept that trade-off—for ourselves. But kids are different. They evoke almost unbearable wellsprings of emotion–love, sure, but also doubt, fear, and guilt. We lay awake at night worrying that we are failing them, that we aren’t giving them enough emotional support or the right skills, that we are too lenient or too strict, that we are too approachable or not approachable enough. We worry that we are bequeathing them a world that is worse than the one we inherited, that they will be forced to fend for themselves in a drought-besieged dystopia where only the mega-rich can afford such luxuries as, I don’t know, meat. We worry that the same technological advances that have both enchanted and enraged us will further dominate their lives—and we feel powerless to understand or predict precisely what that will mean.

Whoa, sorry, maybe I got a little carried away there. Am I projecting? Somehow I doubt it.

Anyway, I have to think that’s partly why educational technology remains so difficult to implement. We may know—deeply believe—that technology can have a miraculous impact on the education system, but we can’t help but become at least somewhat driven by our worst fears. We worry that the decisions we make today will have unintended consequences that follow our children for the rest of their lives. This is one realm where we don’t feel comfortable making mistakes and asking for forgiveness later, and that makes it difficult to take even the first, most innocuous steps.

“There’s an emotional piece to this that some people don’t understand,” says Walden, the education tech investor. “We’ve seen that with the Silicon Valley-type entrepreneurs who come out and say ‘We’ve done this with other industries, we’re just going to come out and do this with education.’ They think tech can be a cure-all, they think this industry can be like the others, and that’s where they get caught.”

Walden says that entrepreneurs are starting to learn this. Last weekend, he hosted a sold-out event in Washington DC to help small businesses understand the legal and practical standards and ramifications of working in the education industry. He also pointed out how ClassDojo responded to recent privacy concerns. One day after a New York Times story cast doubt on the company’s use of data, founder Sam Chaudhary responded that student records would be deleted after one year.

Internet companies are used to forcing through changes in attitudes and behavior—think of how Facebook overturned our sense of personal privacy through sheer force of will. But our emotions around school won’t be so easy to adjust. Go ahead and disrupt my taxi, my hotel—even my job. But you’d better think really hard before you disrupt my kid.

Your Kid’s School Is Missing the Tech Revolution, and It’s All Your Fault

Barry Rosenthal/Getty Images

A few months ago, I got an email from a parent at my son’s San Francisco public school, asking if I was familiar with an app called Pencil. It seems that this was a messaging app designed for teachers to communicate with students and their families, and our principal had grown enamored of it. (I’ve since moved, and left the school.) But this parent wasn’t so sure. The company was a young one, venture-backed, and she didn’t know whether it made sense to entrust vital communications to such an untested firm. She had worked in startups before, and she knew how cavalier they could be with data. “You know how they work,” she said. “You’ve got contractors coming in and out, and they all have access to the database. It’s not very secure.”

I wasn’t familiar with Pencil, but it sounded innocuous enough. It’s not like messaging apps are some terrifying new technology—they’re basically ubiquitous. Seven hundred million people have signed up for WhatsApp! Workplace messaging app Slack became a billion-dollar business in just eight months, thanks to its 500,000-plus user base! Meanwhile, our school’s communication system seemed to consist of a cobbled-together collection of email lists and Google Groups. It was inefficient and annoying. A messaging app—better yet, one designed specifically for schools—seemed like an easy fix.

But it turned out to be anything but easy to get Pencil into our school, even with the principal’s support. When I called him, he told me that he’d been talking to the company since fall 2013, when he met its CEO, Yogesh Sharma, at a party at his neighbor’s house. (This kind of thing happens when you live in the Bay Area.) He invited Sharma to speak to the PTA, but it didn’t go well. His already over-clocked teachers balked at the idea of learning a new system—even one as simple as Pencil’s. Parents had privacy concerns. Nobody seemed particularly eager to adopt it.

It turns out that this was a pretty familiar situation for Pencil. A month or so ago, the company gave up on the education market altogether. A visit to its website turns up no mention of schools, merely of “one simple messaging app” that has “a million uses.” (Not, as of yet, a million users.) “We’d keep getting stuck,” Sharma told me when I called him to ask what had happened. “There’s all these stakeholders—the principals, the PTA, the teachers, and then there’s the district that has their own way of doing things. You’re in the middle of this crossfire and the ball doesn’t move because nobody has the ability to make a quick decision.”

A Bottom-Up Approach

In and of itself, this is not really that surprising. For the last couple of decades, entrepreneurs and academics have struggled to find ways bring some of the Internet’s disruptive force to the education system—only to be stymied by predictably sclerotic bureaucracies and overcautious government agencies. But in recent years, entrepreneurs have started making an end run around administrators and taking their products directly to teachers and parents. By targeting individual users, the thinking goes, they can get their products into the hands of the people who use it, instead of slogging through arcane procurement processes. It’s reminiscent of the way Apple invaded the workplace by selling so many iPhones to individual employees that IT departments had no choice but to incorporate them. Or to the way that Uber has quickly signed up so many customers that it has forced legislators to rewrite their laws to accommodate them or risk alienating their citizens.

Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr hailed this approach last year in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “The mobile technologies that have revolutionized the American workplace are now transforming our education system,” he wrote. “For years entrepreneurs and educators have been pushing to bring education technology into the classroom, but adoption has often been slow. Now the education tech landscape is shifting toward mobile devices and new, free and easy-to-use services.”

That at least partially explains why education startups have become extremely hot investments. A recent New York Times piece cited data from research firm CB Insights that showed investors pouring $1.87 billion into education startups in 2014, a 55 percent increase over the previous year and the largest amount since the company started tracking such investments in 1999. New products and services seem to crop up almost daily. Some are from established companies like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, whose educational division, Amplify, is run by former New York Public Schools chancellor Joel Klein; or publisher McGraw-Hill, which snapped up Engrade, a learning-management startup, last year. Others are from newer firms like ClassDojo, a behavior-tracking app that has signed up more than 35 million users since it was introduced in 2011.

But despite some successes, as Pencil’s experience shows, getting teachers and parents to use those services—no matter how innocuous they may seem—can still be difficult. Just like many physicians resisted the adoption of electronic medical records, teachers often feel annoyed or even threatened by new workflows, or by what they see as an incursion into the sanctity of their classroom. And parents, teachers, and administrators, barraged by new apps and services, are left scrambling to figure out which ones to use and what the implications are for their kids. Many are particularly concerned that so many of these services come from Silicon Valley, which has built an entire industry around the idea of collecting tons of data and figuring out how to monetize it later—usually by selling it to advertisers.

“It’s kind of the wild west,” says Michael Walden, a partner at Rethink Education, a venture fund focusing on education technology. “It’s thrown open a whole new set of issues. What’s being adopted in my school? What information is being collected? Who owns my data? What are they doing? It’s really super-scary to everyone, and you’ve seen some backlash.”

Data Concerns

Just ask InBloom. You might remember reading about the extremely ambitious non-profit ed-tech startup, backed with $100 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. It aimed to amass and organize huge amounts of student data for public school districts across the country, making it easier for teachers to access information and chart the progress of their students. Reformers saw it as the first step toward tech-enabled, personalized education, but some concerned parents saw it as an Orwellian monster that fed on their children’s most sensitive information—like social security numbers and parents’ marital status. Last April, after the New York state legislature passed a regulation forbidding the department of education from sharing student information with third-party aggregators, the company announced it was shutting down.

To this day, many ed-tech enthusiasts see InBloom as a cautionary tale of parental hysteria run amok—a sign of how unaddressed fears can sink even the most benevolent efforts. And they argue that privacy concerns are overblown. “Startup companies are really waking up to how carefully they need to walk around data in this world,” says Betsy Corcoran, who runs Edsurge, a news hub that connects teachers and entrepreneurs. “The vast majority don’t have plans to sell the data to someone else. That’s not been a dominant business model.” Which is a good thing, considering that lawmakers are moving to clamp down on any trade in information about students. In September, California passed the Student Online Personal Information Protection Act, which forbids companies from selling student data or using it for any non-educational purposes. In January, President Obama pushed for similar legislation at the federal level when he announced his Student Digital Privacy Act. And so far 112 companies have signed the student data privacy pledge, a voluntary promise to safeguard the information they collect.

Still, in a world rife with NSA chicanery and shifting business plans, it’s not hard to sympathize with wary parents. Indeed, when everyone from Target to JPMorgan Chase has fallen victim to data breaches, it’s difficult to trust that even the most sophisticated tech company will be able to truly protect students’ data. And these aren’t always the most sophisticated tech companies we’re talking about here. Jonathan Mayer, a computer scientist and lawyer at Stanford who has studied the security practices of education technology startups, says he’s been horrified by what he’s found—including programs that didn’t use the secure https protocol or that don’t hide passwords as users enter them. “Very straightforward technical problems, stuff that should be licked by businesses that have even a modest degree of sophistication, those are the mistakes that are being made right and left,” he says. “In 2015, this is almost tech malpractice.”

Kids Are Different

Let’s be honest. If we were always this cautious about data, the Internet economy as we know it would never exist. Many of the innovations of the last couple of decades have sprung directly from our willingness to blithely let Google track our web activity or post photos of our families on Facebook or share our innermost thoughts with the world on Twitter or allow apps to know where we are at any given moment. From time to time, we grow alarmed—when we learn that Facebook has changed its privacy settings or that the NSA has been storing our email or that Uber executives are sharing our real-time travel data to impress people at parties—but not enough to actually change our behavior. An entire ideology has sprung up among tech startups—move fast, break things; it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission—encouraging founders to trample convention, offend sensibilities, and risk screwing up. It’s the cost of progress.

For the most part, we’ve been able to accept that trade-off—for ourselves. But kids are different. They evoke almost unbearable wellsprings of emotion–love, sure, but also doubt, fear, and guilt. We lay awake at night worrying that we are failing them, that we aren’t giving them enough emotional support or the right skills, that we are too lenient or too strict, that we are too approachable or not approachable enough. We worry that we are bequeathing them a world that is worse than the one we inherited, that they will be forced to fend for themselves in a drought-besieged dystopia where only the mega-rich can afford such luxuries as, I don’t know, meat. We worry that the same technological advances that have both enchanted and enraged us will further dominate their lives—and we feel powerless to understand or predict precisely what that will mean.

Whoa, sorry, maybe I got a little carried away there. Am I projecting? Somehow I doubt it.

Anyway, I have to think that’s partly why educational technology remains so difficult to implement. We may know—deeply believe—that technology can have a miraculous impact on the education system, but we can’t help but become at least somewhat driven by our worst fears. We worry that the decisions we make today will have unintended consequences that follow our children for the rest of their lives. This is one realm where we don’t feel comfortable making mistakes and asking for forgiveness later, and that makes it difficult to take even the first, most innocuous steps.

“There’s an emotional piece to this that some people don’t understand,” says Walden, the education tech investor. “We’ve seen that with the Silicon Valley-type entrepreneurs who come out and say ‘We’ve done this with other industries, we’re just going to come out and do this with education.’ They think tech can be a cure-all, they think this industry can be like the others, and that’s where they get caught.”

Walden says that entrepreneurs are starting to learn this. Last weekend, he hosted a sold-out event in Washington DC to help small businesses understand the legal and practical standards and ramifications of working in the education industry. He also pointed out how ClassDojo responded to recent privacy concerns. One day after a New York Times story cast doubt on the company’s use of data, founder Sam Chaudhary responded that student records would be deleted after one year.

Internet companies are used to forcing through changes in attitudes and behavior—think of how Facebook overturned our sense of personal privacy through sheer force of will. But our emotions around school won’t be so easy to adjust. Go ahead and disrupt my taxi, my hotel—even my job. But you’d better think really hard before you disrupt my kid.

We Put 5 Instant-Read Meat Thermometers to the Test

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

With the mainstream adoption of sous vide and other ultra-precise cooking methods, the kitchen thermometer has become a necessity of the modern chef. In fact, the need to know the temperature of what we’re cooking, cooling, or eating has been a constant since the days of Louis Pasteur, but the era of the leave-in meat thermometer and the pop-up turkey button are well behind us. Now is the era of the instant-read thermometer, an electronic device that can provide the temperature in mere seconds instead of the minutes a classic meat thermometer requires. That’s not a trivial improvement—delicate dishes can go from raw to well done in the time it takes an old-school probe to stabilize. Similarly, less time spent with the over door open as you wait for your readout means less escaping heat and a more stable cooking environment.

The market is flooded with instant-read thermometers, but all are not created equal. Every instant-read thermometer takes a few seconds to provide an accurate reading, but the actual speed varies considerably between models. How fast is instant? Or, to quote The Smiths, when you say it’s gonna happen “now,” well, when exactly do you mean?

To find out how soon now actually is, I tested five popular instant-read thermometers on a variety of solids and liquids, hot stuff and cold, in a household kitchen setting. Here are the probes which are worth your investment.

What to Look for in an Instant-Read Thermometer

Considering these devices are really just high-tech temperature gauges with only one function, there are a surprising number of features and capabilities to ponder. These are the big ones.

Design. Two types of designs dominate. One is a standard wand style probe-with-control-bulb on the end, usually featuring a protective, removable sleeve. The other design features a hinged, folding probe, with no sleeve. These tend to be the more sophisticated probes.

Function buttons. Some thermometers you just stick in and wait for a readout. Others require navigating a small array of buttons that let you change the temperature units, “hold” the readout, calibrate the temperature, and more. If you’re wearing oven mitts, these can be tricky to manage.

Backlighting. A few units have a backlight on the LCD readout, handy when cooking outside at night or in other light-challenged situations.

Range. Expect to see a temperature range supported of well below zero to 550 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. If the range is narrower, the limitations are noted below.

Speed. How fast does the temperature stabilize? This was the big question mark, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Testing Instant-Read Thermometers

The ThermoWorks Thermapen ($96) is the Cadillac of the instant-read thermometer world, about four times the price of the low end of the market. The maker specializes in industrial sensors and other equipment, but its handheld thermometers have found quite a home in gastronomy. The device is stripped-down simple, a fat fold-up model with no extra features (no buttons, no backlight), and by default it only shows full degrees, not tenths. (Pro tip: You can flip a DIP switch in the battery compartment to change this.) What it does have is one thing: raw speed. ThermoWorks claims it will reach a stable temperature in three seconds or less, and it does, whether a fat pork chop or an ice water bath. Three seconds was par for the Thermapen. Never did I see it take more than four to stabilize.

ThermoWorks also makes a budget thermometer, the ThermoWorks ThermoPop ($29). This balloon-like wand thermometer features just one button (power) but a backlight comes standard. The ThermoPop is only marginally slower than the Thermapen, generally taking four to seven seconds to stabilize. (It’s faster when measuring colder temperatures.) Unfortunately, the placement of the readout—in line with the probe, not perpendicular to it—makes it difficult to read no matter how you’re using it. If you’re trying to work with something in the oven, this can result in a lot of dangerous jostling about.

The EatSmart Precision Elite ($45) is a folding model that, unlike all the other units in this roundup, requires two AAA batteries to operate. (Everything else uses a coin style battery.) It sure looks fancy with its backlight and vinyl holster, but it was also on the slow side, taking six to eight seconds to stabilize at temperature. The EatSmart also tended to run on the hot side of readings for me. It does offer a calibration system, but this is so complicated to deal with that it’s probably easier just to remember to knock off a couple of degrees when you use it.

The Grill Beastometer ($25) is representative of most cheap instant-reads out there, offering a wand design, and a spray of buttons on the outward-facing display. Easily the slowest of the bunch, the typical stabilizing time was nine to 13 seconds. The upper temperature range of 450 degrees is also on the low side.

Finally, the Lavatools Thermowand ($28) looks like a smaller version of the Thermapen, and it’s priced accordingly. There are no controls or fancy features, you just unfold it and go. I was surprised to see the Thermowand turning in amazingly speedy numbers, taking just four to six seconds to stabilize. Range is slightly lower than the Thermapen (topping out at 482), and the probe length is a bit small. But in exchange you do get an integrated magnet that lets you affix it to your refrigerator, grill, or prosthesis.

Our Hottest Pick

When it comes to performance for the price, the Lavatools Thermowand is the solid winner here. It’s one of the cheapest thermometers on the market, and it’s fast enough to work perfectly well in the field. Or the kitchen. If raw speed is all you need, the ThermoWorks Thermapen is definitely the thermometer to get, but bear in mind you’re only saving a second or two while investing an extra 68 bucks. And that kind of cash will get you a nice Wagyu to experiment on with the Thermowand.

I’m Too Old for Snapchat, Which Is Exactly Why It Should Be Worth $19B

WIRED

As I get older, I’m starting to think the best way to predict a tech trend’s success is by how little I understand it. Right now, the app at the top of that list is Snapchat. I’ve tried to use its disappearing messages a few times, and I’ve watched a few “Snapchat Stories,” which—as best I can tell—are like Vines except they go away. And I honestly don’t get it.

But Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel isn’t losing sleep over my lack of comprehension. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Snapchat was seeking to raise as much as $500 million in a financing round that would value the company as high as $19 billion. The amount may seem vast to aging pundits like myself whose memory banks include dim recollections of the 1970s. But it’s exactly my fast-approaching irrelevance as a tech consumer that makes 11 figures a totally reasonable sum for a startup run by a 24-year-old that has only the dimmest plans for making money

Tech is about the future. And judging by the recent past, the future looks like Snapchat.

Before Snapchat’s valuation, $19 billion stood out in Silicon Valley lore as the price Facebook paid for messaging service WhatsApp. The figure was later revised upward to about $22 billion. Either total seems like a ridiculous amount for another company that hardly made any money. But a year later, the deal is starting to look like a steal.

At the time it was bought, WhatsApp reported 450 million users on the service. Just after New Year’s 2015, WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum said his company now had 700 million monthly active users—an increase of nearly 56 percent. Sure, WhatsApp lost $138 million last year. But that’s less than a dollar spent for every user gained. In all, Facebook spent about $49 per user at the time it bought WhatsApp. At WhatsApp’s current user base, that cost goes down to less than $32 per user.

If Snapchat really does reach critical mass with teen users just coming into their own as digital consumers, the network effect could be explosive.

That price puts WhatsApp in the vicinity of two of the greatest bargains in recent tech history. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, or a little less than $29 per user. At the time, the photo-sharing app had about 35 million active users. It now has 300 million.

The other most relevant point of comparison is YouTube, which Google bought in 2006 for $1.65 billion. Shortly before the purchase, YouTube was reportedly seeing 19 million visitors to the site monthly, or nearly $87 per visitor. Today, YouTube reports more than 1 billion visitors, and estimates peg its ad revenue at $1 billion annually.

As a private company, Snapchat doesn’t reveal how many users it has. The Wall Street Journal puts the number at more than 100 million. That would peg the price of each user at the valuation Snapchat is currently seeking at $190, or a lot more than WhatsApp, Instagram, or YouTube. But Snapchat shares with all three a product that appeals to a global audience of millennials and teenagers and that works best on the mobile devices that audience prefers.

To be sure, Snapchat could hit a saturation point like Twitter and level off below the 300 million user mark. But Twitter is where oldsters such as myself like to play. If Snapchat really does reach critical mass with teen users just coming into their own as digital consumers, the network effect could be explosive.

Sure, me and my fellow fuddy-duddies might not be there. But to Snapchat and its investors, our attention doesn’t matter that much. They’re looking to the eyeballs of the future, a market that over the past decade has made billions look like a bargain.

Valve Will Show Off Its ‘Steam Machines’ and VR Gear in March

Valve will show off its Steam Machines, the “final” version of its Steam Controller and virtual reality hardware at Game Developers Conference in March, it said today.

On its website, Valve said that this “powerful new family of entertainment devices” would be released this year.

The company behind the Steam gaming platform has been promising an entry into the game hardware business for some time now, showing off a variety of Steam Machines—custom-built PCs meant to run Steam in users’ living rooms, bringing the PC out of the bedroom and taking a potshot at consoles’ dominance.

Additionally, Valve has continued to tweak its Steam Controller, a gamepad meant to let you play mouse-controlled PC games while sitting on the couch. The first iteration had two sliding touch pads instead of joysticks. Later versions had joysticks added back in.

But the biggest news has got to be Steam showing off what would seem to be a consumer-focused virtual reality device. “With the introduction of SteamVR hardware, Valve is actively seeking VR content creators,” it wrote on its website about the announcement. It invites developers and publishers to sign up for a behind-closed-doors demonstration of the SteamVR hardware system.

No word yet on whether the press or public will be invited to see SteamVR.

Valve added that “new living room devices,” seemingly distinct from Steam Machines, would also be shown at GDC.

We Put 5 Instant-Read Meat Thermometers to the Test

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

With the mainstream adoption of sous vide and other ultra-precise cooking methods, the kitchen thermometer has become a necessity of the modern chef. In fact, the need to know the temperature of what we’re cooking, cooling, or eating has been a constant since the days of Louis Pasteur, but the era of the leave-in meat thermometer and the pop-up turkey button are well behind us. Now is the era of the instant-read thermometer, an electronic device that can provide the temperature in mere seconds instead of the minutes a classic meat thermometer requires. That’s not a trivial improvement—delicate dishes can go from raw to well done in the time it takes an old-school probe to stabilize. Similarly, less time spent with the over door open as you wait for your readout means less escaping heat and a more stable cooking environment.

The market is flooded with instant-read thermometers, but all are not created equal. Every instant-read thermometer takes a few seconds to provide an accurate reading, but the actual speed varies considerably between models. How fast is instant? Or, to quote The Smiths, when you say it’s gonna happen “now,” well, when exactly do you mean?

To find out how soon now actually is, I tested five popular instant-read thermometers on a variety of solids and liquids, hot stuff and cold, in a household kitchen setting. Here are the probes which are worth your investment.

What to Look for in an Instant-Read Thermometer

Considering these devices are really just high-tech temperature gauges with only one function, there are a surprising number of features and capabilities to ponder. These are the big ones.

Design. Two types of designs dominate. One is a standard wand style probe-with-control-bulb on the end, usually featuring a protective, removable sleeve. The other design features a hinged, folding probe, with no sleeve. These tend to be the more sophisticated probes.

Function buttons. Some thermometers you just stick in and wait for a readout. Others require navigating a small array of buttons that let you change the temperature units, “hold” the readout, calibrate the temperature, and more. If you’re wearing oven mitts, these can be tricky to manage.

Backlighting. A few units have a backlight on the LCD readout, handy when cooking outside at night or in other light-challenged situations.

Range. Expect to see a temperature range supported of well below zero to 550 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. If the range is narrower, the limitations are noted below.

Speed. How fast does the temperature stabilize? This was the big question mark, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Testing Instant-Read Thermometers

The ThermoWorks Thermapen ($96) is the Cadillac of the instant-read thermometer world, about four times the price of the low end of the market. The maker specializes in industrial sensors and other equipment, but its handheld thermometers have found quite a home in gastronomy. The device is stripped-down simple, a fat fold-up model with no extra features (no buttons, no backlight), and by default it only shows full degrees, not tenths. (Pro tip: You can flip a DIP switch in the battery compartment to change this.) What it does have is one thing: raw speed. ThermoWorks claims it will reach a stable temperature in three seconds or less, and it does, whether a fat pork chop or an ice water bath. Three seconds was par for the Thermapen. Never did I see it take more than four to stabilize.

ThermoWorks also makes a budget thermometer, the ThermoWorks ThermoPop ($29). This balloon-like wand thermometer features just one button (power) but a backlight comes standard. The ThermoPop is only marginally slower than the Thermapen, generally taking four to seven seconds to stabilize. (It’s faster when measuring colder temperatures.) Unfortunately, the placement of the readout—in line with the probe, not perpendicular to it—makes it difficult to read no matter how you’re using it. If you’re trying to work with something in the oven, this can result in a lot of dangerous jostling about.

The EatSmart Precision Elite ($45) is a folding model that, unlike all the other units in this roundup, requires two AAA batteries to operate. (Everything else uses a coin style battery.) It sure looks fancy with its backlight and vinyl holster, but it was also on the slow side, taking six to eight seconds to stabilize at temperature. The EatSmart also tended to run on the hot side of readings for me. It does offer a calibration system, but this is so complicated to deal with that it’s probably easier just to remember to knock off a couple of degrees when you use it.

The Grill Beastometer ($25) is representative of most cheap instant-reads out there, offering a wand design, and a spray of buttons on the outward-facing display. Easily the slowest of the bunch, the typical stabilizing time was nine to 13 seconds. The upper temperature range of 450 degrees is also on the low side.

Finally, the Lavatools Thermowand ($28) looks like a smaller version of the Thermapen, and it’s priced accordingly. There are no controls or fancy features, you just unfold it and go. I was surprised to see the Thermowand turning in amazingly speedy numbers, taking just four to six seconds to stabilize. Range is slightly lower than the Thermapen (topping out at 482), and the probe length is a bit small. But in exchange you do get an integrated magnet that lets you affix it to your refrigerator, grill, or prosthesis.

Our Hottest Pick

When it comes to performance for the price, the Lavatools Thermowand is the solid winner here. It’s one of the cheapest thermometers on the market, and it’s fast enough to work perfectly well in the field. Or the kitchen. If raw speed is all you need, the ThermoWorks Thermapen is definitely the thermometer to get, but bear in mind you’re only saving a second or two while investing an extra 68 bucks. And that kind of cash will get you a nice Wagyu to experiment on with the Thermowand.

I’m Too Old for Snapchat, Which Is Exactly Why It Should Be Worth $19B

WIRED

As I get older, I’m starting to think the best way to predict a tech trend’s success is by how little I understand it. Right now, the app at the top of that list is Snapchat. I’ve tried to use its disappearing messages a few times, and I’ve watched a few “Snapchat Stories,” which—as best I can tell—are like Vines except they go away. And I honestly don’t get it.

But Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel isn’t losing sleep over my lack of comprehension. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Snapchat was seeking to raise as much as $500 million in a financing round that would value the company as high as $19 billion. The amount may seem vast to aging pundits like myself whose memory banks include dim recollections of the 1970s. But it’s exactly my fast-approaching irrelevance as a tech consumer that makes 11 figures a totally reasonable sum for a startup run by a 24-year-old that has only the dimmest plans for making money

Tech is about the future. And judging by the recent past, the future looks like Snapchat.

Before Snapchat’s valuation, $19 billion stood out in Silicon Valley lore as the price Facebook paid for messaging service WhatsApp. The figure was later revised upward to about $22 billion. Either total seems like a ridiculous amount for another company that hardly made any money. But a year later, the deal is starting to look like a steal.

At the time it was bought, WhatsApp reported 450 million users on the service. Just after New Year’s 2015, WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum said his company now had 700 million monthly active users—an increase of nearly 56 percent. Sure, WhatsApp lost $138 million last year. But that’s less than a dollar spent for every user gained. In all, Facebook spent about $49 per user at the time it bought WhatsApp. At WhatsApp’s current user base, that cost goes down to less than $32 per user.

If Snapchat really does reach critical mass with teen users just coming into their own as digital consumers, the network effect could be explosive.

That price puts WhatsApp in the vicinity of two of the greatest bargains in recent tech history. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, or a little less than $29 per user. At the time, the photo-sharing app had about 35 million active users. It now has 300 million.

The other most relevant point of comparison is YouTube, which Google bought in 2006 for $1.65 billion. Shortly before the purchase, YouTube was reportedly seeing 19 million visitors to the site monthly, or nearly $87 per visitor. Today, YouTube reports more than 1 billion visitors, and estimates peg its ad revenue at $1 billion annually.

As a private company, Snapchat doesn’t reveal how many users it has. The Wall Street Journal puts the number at more than 100 million. That would peg the price of each user at the valuation Snapchat is currently seeking at $190, or a lot more than WhatsApp, Instagram, or YouTube. But Snapchat shares with all three a product that appeals to a global audience of millennials and teenagers and that works best on the mobile devices that audience prefers.

To be sure, Snapchat could hit a saturation point like Twitter and level off below the 300 million user mark. But Twitter is where oldsters such as myself like to play. If Snapchat really does reach critical mass with teen users just coming into their own as digital consumers, the network effect could be explosive.

Sure, me and my fellow fuddy-duddies might not be there. But to Snapchat and its investors, our attention doesn’t matter that much. They’re looking to the eyeballs of the future, a market that over the past decade has made billions look like a bargain.

Valve Will Show Off Its ‘Steam Machines’ and VR Gear in March

Valve will show off its Steam Machines, the “final” version of its Steam Controller and virtual reality hardware at Game Developers Conference in March, it said today.

On its website, Valve said that this “powerful new family of entertainment devices” would be released this year.

The company behind the Steam gaming platform has been promising an entry into the game hardware business for some time now, showing off a variety of Steam Machines—custom-built PCs meant to run Steam in users’ living rooms, bringing the PC out of the bedroom and taking a potshot at consoles’ dominance.

Additionally, Valve has continued to tweak its Steam Controller, a gamepad meant to let you play mouse-controlled PC games while sitting on the couch. The first iteration had two sliding touch pads instead of joysticks. Later versions had joysticks added back in.

But the biggest news has got to be Steam showing off what would seem to be a consumer-focused virtual reality device. “With the introduction of SteamVR hardware, Valve is actively seeking VR content creators,” it wrote on its website about the announcement. It invites developers and publishers to sign up for a behind-closed-doors demonstration of the SteamVR hardware system.

No word yet on whether the press or public will be invited to see SteamVR.

Valve added that “new living room devices,” seemingly distinct from Steam Machines, would also be shown at GDC.

Antibiotics give rise to new communities of harmful bacteria

Most people have taken an antibiotic to treat a bacterial infection. Now researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of San Diego, La Jolla, reveal that the way we often think about antibiotics -- as straightforward killing machines -- needs to be revised.

The work, led by Elizabeth Shank, an assistant professor of biology in the UNC-Chapel Hill College of Arts and Sciences as well as microbiology and immunology in the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine, and Rachel Bleich, a graduate student in the UNC-Chapel Hill Eshelman School of Pharmacy, not only adds a new dimension to how we treat infections, but also might change our understanding of why bacteria produce antibiotics in the first place.

"For a long time we've thought that bacteria make antibiotics for the same reasons that we love them -- because they kill other bacteria," said Shank, whose work appears in the February 23 Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "However, we've also known that antibiotics can sometimes have pesky side-effects, like stimulating biofilm formation."

Shank and her team now show that this side-effect -- the production of biofilms -- is not a side-effect after all, suggesting that bacteria may have evolved to produce antibiotics in order to produce biofilms and not only for their killing abilities.

Biofilms are communities of bacteria that form on surfaces, a phenomenon dentists usually refer to as plaque. Biofilms are everywhere. In many cases, biofilms can be beneficial, such as when they protect plant roots from pathogens. But they can also harm, for instance when they form on medical catheters or feeding tubes in patients, causing disease.

"It was never that surprising that many bacteria form biofilms in response to antibiotics: it helps them survive an attack. But it's always been thought that this was a general stress response, a kind of non-specific side-effect of antibiotics. Our findings indicate that this isn't true. We've discovered an antibiotic that very specifically activates biofilm formation, and does so in a way that has nothing to do with its ability to kill."

Shank and her team previously reported that the soil bacterium Bacillus cereus could stimulate the bacterium Bacillus subtilis to form a biofilm in response to an unknown secreted signal. B. subtilis is found in soil and the gastrointestinal tract of humans.

Using imaging mass spectrometry, they subsequently identified the signaling compound that induced biofilm production as thiocillin, a member of a class of antibiotics called thiazolyl peptide antibiotics, which are produced by a range of bacteria.

At that point, Shank and her colleagues knew thiocillin had two very specific and different functions, but they didn't know why -- and wanted to know how it worked. That's when they modified thiocillin's structure in a way that eliminated thiocillin's antibiotic activity, but did not halt biofilm production.

"That suggests that antibiotics can independently and simultaneously induce potentially dangerous biofilm formation in other bacteria and that these activities may be acting through specific signaling pathways," said Shank. "It has generated further discussion about the evolution of antibiotic activity, and the fact that some antibiotics being used therapeutically may induce biofilm formation in a strong and specific way, which has broad implications for human health."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Long-term nitrogen fertilizer use disrupts plant-microbe mutualisms

When exposed to nitrogen fertilizer over a period of years, nitrogen-fixing bacteria called rhizobia evolve to become less beneficial to legumes -- the plants they normally serve, researchers report in a new study.

These findings, reported in the journal Evolution, may be of little interest to farmers, who generally grow only one type of plant and can always add more fertilizer to boost plant growth. But in natural areas adjacent to farmland, where fertilizer runoff occurs, or in areas where nitrogen oxides from the burning of fossil fuels settle, a change in the quality of soil rhizobia could have "far-reaching ecological and environmental consequences," the researchers wrote.

"The nitrogen that we apply to agricultural fields doesn't stay on those fields, and atmospheric nitrogen deposition doesn't stay by the power plant that generates it," said University of Illinois plant biology professor Katy Heath , who led the study with Jennifer Lau , of Michigan State University. "So this work is not just about a fertilized soybean field. Worldwide, the nitrogen cycle is off. We've changed it fundamentally."

Not that long ago, before the advent of industrial fertilizers and the widespread use of fossil fuels, soil nitrogen was a scarce commodity. Some plants, the legumes, found a way to procure the precious nitrogen they needed -- from rhizobia.

"The rhizobia fix nitrogen -- from atmospheric nitrogen that we're breathing in and out all the time -- to plant-available forms," Heath said. "Plants can't just take it up from the atmosphere; they have to get it in the form of nitrate or ammonium."

In return, legumes shelter the rhizobia in their roots and supply them with carbon. This partnership benefits the bacteria and gives legumes an advantage in nitrogen-poor soils. Previous studies have shown that nitrogen fertilizers can affect the diversity of species that grow in natural areas, Heath said. In areas polluted with fertilizer runoff, for example, legumes decline while other plants become more common.

In the new analysis, Heath and her colleagues looked at six long-term ecological research fields at Michigan State University's Kellogg Biological Station. Two experimental plots were located in each of six different fields. One plot in each field had been fertilized with nitrogen for more than two decades; the other, a control plot, had never been fertilized.

The researchers isolated rhizobia from the nodules of legumes in fertilized and unfertilized plots. In a greenhouse experiment, they tested how these bacteria influenced legume growth and health. The researchers found that the plants grown with the nitrogen-exposed rhizobia produced 17 to 30 percent less biomass and significantly less chlorophyll than plants grown with rhizobia from the unfertilized plots.

A genetic analysis of the microbes revealed that the composition of the bacterial populations was similar between fertilized and unfertilized plots: The same families of rhizobia were present in each. But rhizobia from the fertilized plots had evolved in a way that made them less useful to the legumes, Heath said.

"This study tells us something about mutualisms and how they evolved," she said. "Mutualisms depend on this balance of trade between the partners, this special nitrogen-carbon economy in the soil, for example. And when the economy changes -- say when nitrogen is no longer scarce -- these mutualisms might go away."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Anti-GMO Activist Seeks To Expose Emails From Food Scientists

The legal attack hit Kevin Folta in early February.

After receiving a FOIA request from US Right to Know—a nonprofit dedicated to exposing “the failures of the corporate food system“—the University of Florida notified Folta, a food and agricultural science professor at the university, that he would have turn over all of his e-mails relating to correspondence with fourteen different firms involved in agribusiness. His options: Submit all of his emails and allow lawyers to sift through them independently, or spend hours doing it himself alongside legal counsel.

The request is a response to public arguments by Folta that genetically modified foods are safe. Folta compares the strength of the scientific consensus on GM safety to the consensus on climate change and vaccines, and US Right to Know—or USRTK—believes the food and agricultural industries may be pressuring Folta and other scientists into voicing such arguments.

On January 28, US Right to Know sent out a FOIA request targeting fourteen scientists at four universities, including Folta, requesting that they all turn over their email correspondence with industry representatives. Gary Ruskin, the executive director of USRTK, says the move is essential for uncovering the food industry’s efforts to manipulate scientists into advancing pro-genetically-modified propaganda.

“The agri-chemical industry has spent $100 million dollars in a massive public relations campaign,” he tells WIRED. “The public has the right to know the dynamics.” The implication is that the scientists are working too closely with businesses who support genetically modified, or GM, foods.

Legal teams at the universities—Nebraska, University of Florida, UC Davis, and the University of Illinois—are currently evaluating the situation, but some scientists have already spoken out against the FOIA request. Although all of the targeted academics feel the requests are an unwarranted invasion of their privacy, many tell WIRED they are happy to comply with the requests, adamant they and their colleagues have nothing to hide.

“I’m just a teacher, trying to distill a controversial literature for the general public,” Folta says of his stance on genetically modified foods. “I turned over everything [requested by the FOIAs] immediately.” He insists his job is to communicate that science to the public, no matter what kind of intimidation he might face. He has published extensive blog posts about the FOIA requests, some with examples of his e-mails to food industry businesses.

The situation is part of a long and heated battle over the future of GMOs. But there’s much more at stake than just food safety. For some, this FOIA request—which echoes a high-profile FOIA made amidst the even more heated debate over climate change—represents a serious threat to academic freedom as well as the right to privacy.

“Open records requests are increasingly being used to harass and intimidate scientists and other academic researchers, or to disrupt and delay their work,” reads a 2015 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Academic institutions and other involved parties need to be prepared to respond to these requests in a way that protects the privacy and academic freedom of researchers while complying with the law and respecting the public’s right to information.”

The Two Sides

Prominent scientific organizations agree with Folta on GMOs. “Every…respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion,” reads a 2012 statement by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.”

The World Health Organizations website includes a similar statement, last updated in 2014: “The GM products that are currently on the international market have all passed safety assessments conducted by national authorities.” And a Pew Research Center study showed that 89 percent of scientists believe that GMO foods are safe—compared to 88 percent consensus on human-caused global warming.

This is in stark contrast to the general public, only 37 percent of whom believe that GM foods are safe. And various activist groups, including USRTK, believe that organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science may have fallen victim to a massive and well-orchestrated industry PR campaign.

Ruskin, USRTK’s executive director, spearheaded California’s failed Proposition 37 for the mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods. And he’s the author of a recent report, Seedy Business: What Big Food Is Hiding With Its Slick PR Campaign on GMOs , which accuses some of the targeted scientists of being “untrustworthy” and “shills.”

GMO Answers

When journalist Keith Kloor wrote about the USRTK’s FOIA request at Science Insider, Ruskin asserted that the scientists had been selected for FOIA requests due to their involvement with GMO Answers, an industry sponsored website that posts answers to public questions about the safety of GMOs, or genetically modified organisms.

After it was pointed out that some of the scientists had no involvement with GMO Answers, Ruskin apologized for the error and stated that some scientists had also been targeted for making public statements against California Proposition 37.

He and other activists claim that industry-tainted scientists unfairly harass researchers who publish studies questioning the safety of GMOs. As a result, there is no room for unbiased dialogue about the safety of GMOs in the sphere of academia.

“It’s sad that it’s come to this,” says Michael Hansen of the Consumers Union. “But I find it interesting that when the side that’s attacked is trying to use the same tactics, they cry foul.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy group, decried the FOIA requests in one of the first comments made on the issue by an independent organization.

“These requests to the genetic engineering researchers, just like other overly broad open records requests that seek excessive access to scientists’ inboxes, are inappropriate,” reads a February 20 statement. “We know such politically or ideologically motivated attacks can have chilling effects on researchers and confuse the public about the state of the science.”

Scientists targeted by the FOIAs insist that no harassment is occurring, and offer a different explanation for hostility to research that has suggested GMOs are unsafe.

“It’s just bad science,” says Bruce Chassy, former head of the University of Illinois’s food science department, who is also the target of a FOIA, referring to work that purportedly shows the dangers of GMO foods. “I’m an outspoken critic of bad science, and in my point of view, the anti-GMO movement is a showcase of bad science.” (His university has rejected the request since Chassy is emeritus.)

Chassy points out that it was part of his job, and the job of all food scientists, to build bridges between universities and industry. To smear anyone who works with industry, he says, would be to relegate research to the ivory tower and cut higher education off from important funding sources.

“As a department head I have not always been sure about the proper relationship between a university and industry,” he says. “That’s an important discussion to have, rationally and publicly. But these requests are not about rational dialogue. They are destructive, unethical, and immoral. They are looking for words to twist and take out of context.”

‘Witch Hunt’

USRTK’s request is the latest in a long list of controversial FOIA requests. As Ruskin points out, a Greenpeace FOIA request just uncovered industry funding of a prominent climate-change denier at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This, Ruskin argues, is the same kind of collusion he wants to uncover with his own request.

Chassy tells WIRED the comparison is ridiculous. “When someone is saying things that are against the scientific consensus, then you ask yourself: ‘What’s going on here?’” he says. “But when people are producing work in line with the scientific consensus there’s no reason to go on a witch hunt.”

He and other academics, as well as the Union of Concerned Scientists, say that a more valid comparison is with the FOIA request made of former U-Va climate scientist Michael Mann in 2011. The request was initiated by a Republican congressional delegate and the American Tradition Partnership, a conservative advocacy group. Scientists and academics widely viewed the request as motivated by the desire to intimidate Mann and suppress good science, and they applauded the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision to reject the request.

Dialogue over GM foods is highly polarizing and emotional, making rational evaluation of the current situation extremely challenging. At this point, it is essential that scientists, academics, and policy-makers unconnected with the agri-chemical industry examine the relevant information—all of which is available online—and state their conclusions clearly and publicly. The status of the debate over GMOs, and nothing less than the future of academic freedom, depends on what they have to say.

This Guy Composed an Entire Album Using Playing Cards

Ben Chasny, guitarist and leader of the band Six Organs of Admittance. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Ben Chasny is sitting across the table from me, sorting a deck of playing cards by suit. He’s not prepping a magic trick, and he’s not trying to psych me out before a poker game. I’m certainly not dipping into my wallet for an ante.

What Chasny wants to show me is something he calls the Hexadic system, a compositional tool he’s developed for writing music using random selections of playing cards.

All of the songs on the new album by his band Six Organs of Admittance were written using this system, which is applied by laying out playing cards in geometric patterns on a table. The resulting record—Hexadic, which dropped last week—is a challenging, chaotic bit of music. Some songs revolve around just two chords or one repeated musical figure, with Chasny’s electric guitar blasting through complex scales on top. It’s all quite removed from the hushed, contemplative acoustic music Six Organs of Admittance is known for. It’s a pretty radical shift, but it’s also what happens when you start conceiving your songs mathematically.

“The system is a way of applying algorithmic thinking to creating art,” Chasny says. He got the idea after digesting historical and philosophical texts by the likes of Gaston Bachelard, Frances Yeats, and Morton Feldman. One of his primary sources of inspiration was Ramon Llull, a 14th-century monk who laid some of the earliest groundwork in computation theory and is considered one of the forefathers of computer science. Over the last two and a half years, Chasny has developed, refined, and documented his system. He’s written a book, to be published in April, that explains his methods in depth and also lays out some variations musicians can apply to make their own compositions.

How to Make Music with the Hexadic System

After giving me the backstory, it’s demo time.

The first thing Chasny does is “align the cards,” assigning six cards to the first six notes on the lowest string of the guitar, his primary instrument. He lays the cards next to each other, building a virtual guitar neck across the table. He names each note as he goes: “This is a G,” he says, pointing to the three of hearts. The four of hearts is a G-sharp. He continues until he’s mapped 36 cards across the first three octaves of the guitar neck. Then, he scoops up the 36 cards, shuffles them, and lays them out on the table again in a six-armed geometric pattern. He winds up with six clusters of cards, each of them a six-note musical scale.

Another card (the four of spades, chosen randomly) is laid in the center, and some math is applied to determine the timing and the order of the notes.

At this point, there are so many rules it’s becoming fairly hard to grok. But the end result is clear: Just by laying out cards on a table, we’ve assigned a tonal center, a musical scale, and some basic timing structures for a song. If one were to pick up a guitar and play through this fresh composition, it would sound totally alien—certainly unlike anything most songwriters would whip up while plucking chords on their porch swing.

“With an exercise like this, you end up moving your fingers in ways you’re not used to,” Chasny says.

Breaking Bad Habits With Math

Musicians will tell you that when they sit down to write songs, or even just to doodle around, they’ll quickly fall into old patterns, habitual ways of approaching their instrument. Breaking away from these familiar patterns can be near impossible. Using a construct, a machine, or an algorithmic device is an effective way to defeat those habits. This is not new thinking. Brian Eno has his generative music software, John Zorn has his game pieces, and as Chasny notes on his website, “even Mozart was throwing dice around in 1787.”

A few times during the demonstration, which Chasny delivers with a Rasputinic fervor, he has to move his iPhone to make room for the cards. This prompts me to ask: Why not just make an app?

“Right! People ask me that. But I think it’s important to make it tactile. It becomes a contemplative exercise,” he says. “You’re thinking about it, and you’re taking the time to write out musical charts with a pen. You’ll end up thinking about the composition in new ways as you go.”

Even after applying the system, building songs, and writing out the sheet music for the guys in the band, Chasny says much of the sound of Hexadic wasn’t finalized until they got into the recording studio. Specific production choices were made in the moment to get different emotional textures, evoke different moods.

“None of this really tells you exactly what this is going to sound like,” he says, waving his hand over the clusters of cards. “It just creates a projection.”

Lessons from CES: The Evolution of the Connected Experience as We Know it Today

The EggMinder — everything will be connected, and like with most connected devices, software is central. Quirky

A walked through the floors of CES 2015, they immediately suggested that the trends for the year ahead are steeply inclined towards the Internet of Things (IoT). With Gartner predicting that the IoT market is poised to reach nearly $24 billion by 2020, companies are looking at rapidly capitalizing on the market with a range of connected offerings. The most important of the lot, wearable devices, connected cars and connected home entertainment.

Despite the popularity of the overarching theme, visitors at CES were left with a very certain message: Software and Data is the pivot, driving the Internet of Things.

Every device is virtually turning into a smart device. The convergence of device, data and cloud will be driven by powerful software at the back-end, bridging the gap between the user and their gadgets. While the focus of Internet of Things was across sensors, and wireless technologies, but 2015 is expected to see software leading the charge.

It’s hard to imagine the rapid journey of the technology ecosystem from dial up days to hyper-connected everything. Looking back, the evolution was evident, but the seamlessness of the transformation is nothing short of astonishing.

Moving From Physical to Digital

Early 2000 saw a shift in the way businesses were transforming themselves. With customers gaining easy access to the Internet and phones getting smarter, customers were looking for their solutions online rather than literally walking into a store. Companies like Amazon capitalized on this shift by structuring their business based on consumer interactions online. The lack of a physical store provided Amazon the edge that allowed them to capture the market early and capitalize on the customers who were changing their online behavioral patterns.

Similarly, Uber was able to disrupt an entire industry by solving a very simple customer problem, by taking services to their doorsteps. The lack of a physical booking center or even a contact number put Uber on the digital map, allowing the ‘always online’ customer, to choose his mode of transport and engage in cashless transactions. Products like Oculus Rift and Microsoft’s Hololens began bridging the gap between the digital and the physical world. The increasing growth of digital businesses proved their success with a very specific group of customers, the connected ones.

From Digital of the Connected

Being digital simply wasn’t enough to thrive. Disruptive innovation unleashed itself across markets worldwide, allowing companies to find ways to move away from age old traditions of selling and be present at the point where the customer was most likely to make her decision. Gradually moving from digital, companies began focusing on being connected. Soon the word was abuzz, connected cars, connected homes, connected lifestyle, connected healthcare, connected devices, it was everywhere!

Google’s acquisition of Nest was a raging example of how a software led business expanded its offerings into the connected world. By allowing devices to communicate with each other, Internet of Things (IoT) steadily began its ascent to the $24 billion business which we will know by 2020. Software continued to be the backbone of the connected ecosystem, allowing the seamless communication between device and data. Devices like Jawbone UP24 are taking health and fitness to mobile devices. The band like device transmits user information like sleep patterns, steps taken and time the user has been slacking off to the smartphone application allowing user to assess their cycles better.

In Connected Cars lies the current gold rush, after Tesla broke the myth about electric vehicles and packed their cars with a series of features event the best of models were yet to witness. With over the air updates and remote diagnostics, software became the new driver of the car.

We are not far behind the point where manual intervention is necessary. The convergence of software and hardware is rapidly building intelligent systems that can make decisions on their own.

From Connected to Intelligent

Eight years ago, the pinnacle of a smart device was the cellular phone which could connect to the Internet. Today, houses can turn on the heater based on when the owner leaves work and depending on how bad the traffic is. Devices are no longer just connected, but making intelligent and informed decisions based on the data available to them from extrinsic sources. Watches are informing doctors about their patient’s current medical condition and allowing them to diagnose the patient even before they enter the hospital. Cars are able to relay information to the manufacturer about the need for a software update and scale up, without the owner’s explicit intervention.

With the quantum of data generated, devices and systems are able to adapt to their own requirements in a self-sustained manner and provide the end consumer with hassle free experiences. In several cases, smart devices are connecting with other smart devices to form a network of intelligent systems that can function on an end-to-end basis.

Through this journey, there has remained a constant that shaped the future of the connected experience ecosystem as we know it today: Software.

With software forming the glue that brings connected devices closer to their experiences, the market will soon see a steady increase in the demand for software led services. For our company, HARMAN’s announcement to acquire Symphony Teleca is a big step in this evolution – a partnership that promises to bring software and hardware closer to each other.

The next year is bound to see newer technologies flood the market, lowering the drawbridge that gaps the physical from the connected world.

Sanjay Dhawan is President and CEO of Symphony Teleca Corporation.

Why Parks and Recreation’s Final Season Was Its Best Ever

NBC

The end of a television show is the time its writers have the most creative freedom. Long-running series thrive on a status quo—that everyone on Mad Men will work at the same ad agency, that the friends of Friends will live across the hall from each other—that is only ever in doubt when the end is near. Series finales give shows the freedom to go nuts, whether that means killing off most of the main cast (like The Sopranos, which set up its intentional whimper of an ending with several episodes of thunder) or completely changing format (like Angel, which turned its characters from struggling private investigators into uncomfortable corporate bigwigs). Parks and Recreation, which ends tomorrow night after seven seasons and 125 episodes, has brilliantly used that leeway to examine what it means for a sitcom to end.

After a two-season-long coast marked by cast departures and network shenanigans, the show is going out roaring, with maybe the best run of episodes in the show’s history. These 13 episodes are better than they had any right to be—they’re why the term “victory lap” was invented—but how? Partly, Parks is just really good at endings. It’s hung on through several renewal cycles, forcing the writers to come up with just as many potential conclusions; that’s how we got Leslie winning her city council race, as well as her wedding to Ben. So it’s unsurprising that with a whole season to wind things down, Parks has been able to put enormously satisfying buttons on many of its long-running plots, from April’s listlessness to Tom’s relationship woes.

But that very skill created some difficulty—Parks is a deeply optimistic show (one of its chief selling points), meaning each happy ending had to escalate in happiness, from the Harvest Festival to Leslie’s election to her romantic conclusion with Ben. How could co-creators Greg Daniels and Mike Schur keep topping themselves for sheer bliss and contentment? And how could the show keep its characters together when their trajectories would inevitably take them away from the small town of Pawnee? At the height of everyone’s success—Leslie taking a job at the National Park Service, Tom opening his own restaurant, Andy finding his calling as children’s entertainer Johnny Karate—Season 7 solved that problem by jumping two years into the future.

Colleen Hayes/NBC

In 2017, the former Parks Department employees have grown out of being a sitcom cast into, as Ron Swanson puts it, “independent people who have moved on to better things.” Tom is busy running his businesses. Leslie and Ben are overworked by their jobs and terrifying triplets. Ron has left the public sector to run a contracting firm. These characters can’t ride off into the sunset—at least not in the way they’ve been together over the rest of the series, on the ghost of a miniature horse. April spends the season trying to figure out what she wants to do with herself next, because being in government was always Leslie’s dream, and she (and the rest of the cast) were mostly along for the ride.

There’s a level of tension built into any long-running sitcom. The structure of the show means that we want to see the characters get what they want (because, unless it’s something like Seinfeld or It’s Always Sunny, the show works by making us want to hang out with them every week), but it also means that writerly contrivances are necessary to keep them together. Parks and Rec’s final season has staked out that paradox as a playspace: The writers plotted their escape by (deep breath) skipping ahead to its cast coming together again after drifting apart, essentially restarting the show by getting the gang back together in opposition to a common enemy (the overreaching tech company Gryzzl). The best episode of the season (and possibly the series), “Leslie And Ron,” forces the titular characters to confront the passage of time head-on, something that’s simultaneously deeply sad and very exciting.

Tyler Golden/NBC

That’s in sharp contrast to the last sitcom that tried something this self-reflexive: the final season of How I Met Your Mother, which pulled a similar temporal trick in the opposite direction, setting its first 22 episodes in one weekend before skipping through decades in its series finale. “Last Forever” attempted to skip through Ted, Robin, Barney, Marshall, and Lily’s futures, revealing that the afterword is just…life. Pushing back against the idea that a TV romance ends in stasis is noble, but the cynicism of the finale, particularly in the way it cast aside Barney and Robin and Ted and Tracy’s weddings, just left audiences flat. Sure, sometimes the happy ending doesn’t stick, but showing that doesn’t have to entail giving audiences the finger.

HIMYM spent its final season (and, in a sense, the entire series) building toward two weddings. But both of those relationships were shams. Parks and Rec, a series that has perfected the art of the sitcom wedding, had its lowest-key nuptials as its last in “Donna and Joe.” Partially, that’s because Donna isn’t as crucial of a character as April and Andy or Ben and Leslie, but it’s also because the framing of the season acknowledges that the wedding is, in some sense, unimportant. It’s the culmination of Donna and Joe’s relationship, but that’s a given—-they’ve already made the commitment, so we can skip through the ceremony and head straight to Donna’s brother Levondrious (Questlove) making trouble, because it’s funnier.

Big events in characters’ lives and the sitcoms that portray them are attempts to capture everything in amber—a birth or a death or a wedding means that everything will be different forever, in a better way. But the emotional crux of “Donna and Joe” is Ben’s decision to run for Congress, a career move that sends his life in a new direction, off to bigger and better things, with the support of everyone who loves him. And the emotional climax of the series is Ron and Leslie renewing their friendship, consciously agreeing to work on a relationship rather than allowing time to drag them apart.

Ben Cohen/NBC

That’s what this last season of Parks and Rec has realized—it’s a celebration of beginnings in addition to endings, of the idea that there are always possibilities, even if those end up leading you back to the same people (kind of like a wedding!). The cast could wind up like Ethel Beavers, regretting never telling Bill Murray’s Mayor Gunderson how she felt, but the show’s optimism hinges on its faith that they won’t. All the show needed to end on a high note was to allow all of its characters the chance to renew their vows.

WIRED extends condolences to the colleagues, friends, and family of Harris Wittels, an executive producer, writer, and performer on Parks and Recreation who tragically passed away last week.