We Need More Science

Good News! Kids Aren’t Dying as Much as They Used To

Children play soccer in Unification Town, Liberia, on Friday Oct. 3, 2014. Jerome Delay/AP

On a blog post at PLOS, the tropical disease expert Peter Hotez and postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Herricks take a run through the data on the biggest killers of children around the world in 2013, part of a new dataset from Global Burden of Disease study published in the January Lancet . The main one is malaria, which killed more than half a million kids in 2013, dwarfing the other causes of death—pneumonia killed about half as many, and whooping cough a tenth.

Hotez and Herricks rightly point out that what’s interesting here is how many of these diseases are preventable with vaccinations. The fact that a technology exists, though, doesn’t always translate into it being deployed. They write:

Just having a vaccine developed and manufactured is not always the complete answer. Of the dozen or so killer diseases of children, five of them are infections for which vaccines are available – pneumococcal pneumonia, rotavirus enteritis, Haemophilus influenza type b pneumonia, measles, and whooping cough.

In other words, getting medicine and vaccine to remote areas is hard.

Here’s a chart of the numbers they post from the study, which looked at yearly deaths for kids under 59 months for almost 200 countries between 1990 and 2013.

You look at that and you think, “Mmm, not so great.”

But that’s not the only takeaway from the Lancet data. One of the figures in the Lancet study, a fascinating slopegraph, shows the change in position of several dozen causes of death over time. And it makes the news seem not so grim for kids. For example, preterm birth was the third most common cause of death in 1990, but it dropped to 7th most common cause of death in 2013. Yay? Kinda? We wanted to get a sense of how diseases that specifically affect children have changed over time, so we looked at the percent shift in the main mortality factors for the under-fives (and in a few cases the under-one-months) between 1990 and 2013.

Ah! Suddenly that’s not looking quite so depressing. Deaths from a host of diseases, from tetanus (preventable with a vaccine) to malnutrition (preventable with food) are down. Death from HIV/AIDS are up from 1990. Malaria is holding steady.

Well, actually, it’s kind of even better than that. AIDS, for example, says Hotez, who is the Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, went up from 1990 until 2003, then started going down. He points to another Lancet study from last year.

Check out figure 7. AIDS deaths are higher in 2013 than they were in 1990, which is bad, but they’re heading in the right direction, which is downward. Same with malaria. It went up before it started going down, and this particular chart masks that hump shape. Hotez and I puzzled a bit over the drops in drowning (maybe a public education campaign?) and road deaths. Would those drops be due to better hospital care I wondered, for people who had been in accidents? Or said Hotez, maybe something simpler, even, than that: seatbelts.

As Search Revenue Growth Slows, Google Opens Play Store to Ads

In an apparent attempt to better compete with Facebook and others in the mobile advertising market, Google is now running ads in its mobile app store, Google Play.

The change, which Google revealed in a blog post, isn’t all that surprising. With its search-driven ads, Google effectively proved that digital advertising could be an enormous business. And yet, as the world has made the shift to mobile, Google’s search revenue growth has slowed, forcing the tech giant to seek out new avenues of expansion, including everything from self-driving car technology to wearables. Compared to these moonshot projects, moving into the world of app advertising should be a much simpler transition.

The Google Play store already reaches more than one billion people on Android devices, according to Google’s blog post. The company also says it has paid out $7 billion over the last year to developers who distribute their apps in the store. In other words, the Play Store is already a darn good place for developers, and now, Google wants to make it more appealing—and more lucrative for Google.

By enabling developers to promote their apps in the Play store, Google is competing head-on with Facebook, a company whose success in the mobile advertising space has a lot to do with its app install ads. According to The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources, that’s one reason why this week, Google acquired Toro a startup that makes Facebook ads for developers.

An app store is, perhaps, one of the few places where ads are welcomed by consumers. With an ever growing sea of options, ads can help narrow a smartphone user’s search, just as they have with traditional search. Other platforms, like Pinterest, are also trying to solve this problem, recently announcing a partnership with Apple, which allows iPhone users to save apps to their Pinterest boards and install them directly from Pinterest. Though Pinterest said it wasn’t planning to monetize that feature just yet, there’s little doubt that apps will soon be part of Pinterest’s own advertising efforts in the near future.

Google, for its part, plans to roll out Google Play ads slowly, according to the company blog post. For now, they’re only available to a select group of advertisers, with plans to expand the platform in the coming months.

Digital Wallets: End of the Beginning or Beginning of the End?

Alex Washburn / WIRED

Apple Pay is up and running and digital wallets are back in the limelight. Are merchants, consumers, and the market ready for mass adoption of digital wallets? Google Wallet’s poor early uptake comes to mind four years after its launch in 2011. We believe a combination of factors – part structural, part user experience – will drive the next and larger cycle in digital wallet adoption. Apple Pay will be a key enabler, it will neither be alone nor, the necessary winner.

The mobile wallet space has been fragmented without a clear leader. By this time next year we will have our leaders in place. Payment systems and currencies are either universal or limited, this has been true as long as records have been written down, carved into rock or told of around the campfire. The more limited the usability, the less likely a digital wallet is to keep users engaged as infrastructure catches up with entrenched payment methods. Past brushes with digital wallet greatness have withered on the cloud as insecure, less than seamless alternatives to boring analogue cash and plastic cards. Lack of a universal technology standard, disparate interests of stakeholders, and poor user experience, have severely limited adoption and growth. Apple Pay has begun to change this, quickly, given the short and still limited rollout of the service. Google’s recent moves with SoftCard from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon and Samsung’s purchase of Loop Pay suggest the future is arriving fast.

Fortunately for the industry, a perfect confluence of contextual realities has formed to allow rapid evolution of wide spread digital wallets adoption. The secular facts on the ground are: near-ubiquitous presence of NFC (Near Field Communications) POS terminals; October 2015 deadline for retailers to upgrade to Europay Mastercard and Visa (EMV) enabled POS terminals; and several massive hacks costing merchants and banks millions while driving up interest in newer, safer, payment. New fears, financial institution desire to take information out of the seemingly vulnerable clutches of merchants and new EMV POS terminals are all constructive/compatible with NFC technology. Lastly, the introduction of Apple Pay- offering secure, seamless experience with Apple’s allure- has focused the markets and teased out rapid responses from cellular providers, Google, Samsung and other market players.

The biggest hurdle for digital wallets has been the lack of NFC-enabled terminals. We are 4 long years into Google Wallet, and nearly half a year into Apple Pay and there are only about 220,000 live contactless merchant locations out of about 8 million U.S. card-accepting locations. Further, many NFC locations are vending machines. It is expensive for retailers to upgrade their hardware and the consumer has not been demanding change. There is always a self re-enforcing cycle. Either, consumers demand and drive change through adoption or merchants build it and everyone hopes that they come. The retailers blinked, not necessarily by choice. In the U.S., retailers want data on browsers and shoppers, feel the hot breath of ecommerce on their necks and need to transition to EMV. Millions of merchants must move to EMV – a chip and PIN technology vs. magnetic stripe on a card – by October 2015 card networks will pass risk of fraudulent charges to retailers who haven’t adopted the new standard. The vast majority of chip-card-reading terminals being deployed are equipped with NFC chips, which work with EMV terminals and support contactless payment. NFC digital wallets will work with the majority of new terminals being rolled out this year.

Security and user experience are the key deliverables from digital wallets. While Google Wallet and others had security built in, Apple Pay has taken it to the next level with tokenization of card numbers, Touch ID fingerprint biometrics, and on-device storage. None of this involves new or difficult to replicate software, hardware, or integration. Apple has appealed, very successfully, to banks and credit unions by not claiming user data – like Google – and by assuming the liability and removing the merchant as a fraud breach point in the payment chain. Apple Pay has appealed to banks, credit unions, and consumers by offering a simple, fast and private way to pay. This is important because one of the factors holding back Google Wallet and Softcard has been scant issuer support. Apple is working with 11 credit card issuers that it says represent 83% of U.S. charge volume, including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., and American Express.

The oft projected and repeatedly announced digital wallet future is emerging. Apple Pay has jumped out to an early lead and breathed new life and urgency into this space. Google has already struck a new partnership with SoftCard and Samsung has purchased LoopPay. We expect the dominant hardware firms in the globe straddling smart phone business, the duopoly leaders in mobile operating systems and the largest financial institutions and cellular carriers will articulate and dominate next generation payments in short order. We are confident this is the beginning of the end of the battle for digital wallet dominance and not another end of the beginning.

Max Wolff, an economist and strategist, is managing partner of Manhattan Venture Partners.

The FCC’s Vote to Protect Net Neutrality Is a Huge Win for the Internet

Federal Communication Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler, center, with FCC Commissioners Mignon Clyburn, left, and Jessica Rosenworcel, before the start of their open hearing in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

The internet is getting a regulatory re-wiring.

In an historic 3-2 vote, the Federal Communications Commission said it would change the way the nation’s internet service providers are regulated. For net neutrality advocates the vote is a major victory; for the nation’s internet service providers, a rebuke.

“The internet is the most powerful and pervasive platform on the planet,” said FCC Tom Wheeler during a public meeting ahead of the vote. “It’s simply too important to be left without rules and without a referee on the field.”

The 317 page order, entitled Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet, will take effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register, a process that’s expected to take several weeks.

With the vote, the FCC is changing the way it views both wireless and fixed-line broadband service providers, reclassifying them as “Title II” common carriers under the nation’s telecommunications laws. The Title II designation, which already covers voice services, gives the FCC the ability to set rates, open up access to competitors, and generally more closely regulate the broadband industry. It’s a reversal of course for the FCC, which until now did not even enforce net neutrality rules on wireless broadband services, and very lightly regulated fixed providers. But it’s also a return to the regulatory regime that governed consumer internet services 20 years ago, when hundreds of dial-up internet service providers competed on Title II-regulated phone networks.

Internet service providers and Republican commissioners on the FCC see the new rules as unnecessary and dangerous government interference. “The internet is not broken,” said FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. “There is no problem for the government to solve.”

Ironically, today’s vote was first set in motion by a series of lawsuits dating back several years, which challenged the FCC’s ability to enforce it’s own net neutrality regulations. Last year the latest legal challenge ended when a D.C. court ruled in Verizon’s favor, saying that the way that the FCC had classified internet services didn’t give it the right to enforce net neutrality.

A year ago, Chairman Wheeler said that the FCC could find a new way to enforce net neutrality without the Title II designation. But in November, the man who appointed wheeler, President Barack Obama, called for Title II. In retrospect, that made today’s vote inevitable, although Wheeler said today that he was looking at the Title II option months before Obama’s statement.

Service providers are worried because, in theory at least, Title II now gives the FCC the authority to set rates in the cable industry, and to regulate the back-end of the internet—where service providers have recently begun charging content providers, such as Netflix, fees to host their content in their own data centers, a practice that is essential to smooth movie-streaming . The Commission has taken pains to say that it won’t regulate rates, but that it will ensure that nobody’s internet traffic is blocked or unfairly prioritized by service providers

“It is a historic day in the history of the Internet,” said the man who coined the term “net neutrality,” Columbia University professor Tim Wu in an emailed statement. “Net neutrality, long in existence as a principle, has been codified in a way that will likely survive court scrutiny. More generally, this marks the beginning of an entirely new era of how communications are regulated in the United States.”

Update: 14:00 02/26/2015 This story has been updated to add comment from the FCC’s press conference and from Tim Wu.

Ex-Amazon Cloud Computing Pioneer Joins Software Company Pivotal

Benjamin Black. courtesy Benjamin Black

Benjamin Black—who claims a role in the creation of modern cloud computing at Amazon—is now joining one of the key companies providing the rather complex tools that allow the world’s businesses to fashion their own cloud computing services.

This week, Black moved to Pivotal, the rather ambitious outfit spun out of big-name tech companies EMC and VMware. From his home base in Seattle, the former Amazon and Microsoft engineer will run what he calls an “internet-of-things” lab, helping Pivotal develop tools that allow businesses to juggle data from a wide range of disparate computing devices, including environmental sensors.

“These are sensors that indicate a car went over a certain point on the road, temperature and humidity sensors in a soy bean field,” he says. “What you need is the ability to do sometimes-simple, sometimes-sophisticated analytics with these, so that, ultimately, you can see a picture emerge from a vast collection of tiny dots.”

Pivotal offers a wide range of tools for building online services that can drive sweeping software applications and juggle data across thousands of machines—in other words, online services for the modern world. The company’s work is centered around a piece of software called Cloud Foundry, and Black’s work will dovetail with this foundational tool.

While at Amazon a decade ago, Black helped gestate the idea of the company’s Elastic Compute Cloud, the service that kickstarted modern cloud computing, letting businesses and developers run websites and other software without setting up their own hardware. Such services changed the way the world built software. As a result, Microsoft and Google started offering similar cloud services, and old school hardware makers like HP, Dell, and EMC were forced to revamped their businesses.

Black’s move to Pivotal a convenient symbol for this changing world.

Audio Visuals: Sleater-Kinney Gets Cartooned for Their Bob’s Burgers-Themed Video

The glow of high-end music videos shines brightly in this week’s round-up. Beautiful cinematography, rich lighting, celebrity cameos—this collection of clips just oozes class. But true to the egalitarian spirit of the Internet, we’ve also made space for the budget ballers out there in music land. Here are WIRED’s favorite audio visuals of the week.

“A New Wave”—Sleater-Kinney

Digital Wallets: End of the Beginning or Beginning of the End?

Alex Washburn / WIRED

Max Wolff, an economist and strategist, is managing partner of Manhattan Venture Partners.