That Was the Strangest MLB Game Ever

Baltimore Orioles starting pitcher Ubaldo Jimenez throws to Chicago White Sox's Adam Eaton in the first inning of a baseball game, Wednesday, April 29, 2015, in Baltimore. The game was played in an empty Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Patrick Semansky/AP

This afternoon, an innocuous matchup between the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox became the first Major League Baseball game in history to be closed to the public and played in an empty stadium. Monday and Tuesday’s games between the Orioles and White Sox had already been postponed amid the ongoing riots across Baltimore. MLB’s press release cited the same thought process leading to the closed-door game: “After conferring with local officials, it was determined that Wednesday afternoon’s game should be played without fan admittance in order to minimize safety concerns.”

Empty stadium games occur in European soccer often enough not to be seen as unicorns—but those games are most often mandated punishments in response to supporters’ racist acts or fights with other fans. In American professional sports, instances of deliberately empty stadiums are exceedingly rare. The 1989 North Atlantic Conference (now America East Conference) men’s basketball tournament shut out spectators under measles quarantine. In 2002, the Charleston Riverdogs, a Tampa Bay Class A affiliate, played in front of an empty stadium for five innings during “Nobody Night,” a publicity stunt promotion typical of minor league baseball. And in 2008, the Triple-A Iowa Cubs and Nashville Sounds played a game with only scouts and essential employees in attendance due to flooding concerns in Des Moines.

But for professional baseball, the previous record low for paid attendance appears to be six patrons, back in September 1882 for the Worcesters of Worcester, MA. Today’s game was the first time in the history of the four major American professional sports leagues that a game was played to an intentionally empty stadium. “As far as we can tell, that is unprecedented,” says Jacob Pomrenke, Web Editor for SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research. “It’s never happened before in Major League Baseball.”

One member of the Orioles front office has taken an admirable public stance on the civil unrest in Baltimore—before any escalating violence in the streets. COO John Angelos, son of Orioles owner Peter Angelos, responded to a radio broadcaster on Twitter with an eloquent defense of protestors.

But if that’s the case, why even play the game at all? Monday and Tuesday’s games had already been shifted to a late-May doubleheader, and this weekend’s series with the Tampa Bay Rays has been relocated to Tropicana Field in St. Petersberg, Florida. “Part of the appeal of baseball is, as [former] Orioles manager Earl Weaver once said, ‘We do this every day,’” says Pomrenke.

Granted, there is historical precedent for postponing games due to civil unrest. Major League Baseball postponed Opening Day of the 1968 season due to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral—but only after Roberto Clemente and the Pittsburgh Pirates refused to play, a sentiment echoed by the Cardinals’ Bob Gibson and others. And the Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdict in 1992 forced the Dodgers to postpone four games in a row, while the Lakers, Clippers, and even the San Francisco Giants all moved or postponed games as well.

That still leaves today’s empty stadium game as unique among the tens of thousands of baseball games in history. The decision to play behind closed doors was made ostensibly to ensure public safety while maintaining the integrity of the schedule. But eerily, the game was still televised and streamed on MLB.tv, which will meant that whatever audience surrounds a mid-afternoon businessman special were gawking and laughing at the peculiar silence of professional American sports with no spectators. It’s also not great optics for the league, according to Bill Savage, a SABR member and Associate Professor at Northwestern University. “If it’s not safe for fans to come to the game, but it’s safe for players,” says Savage, “that reinforces the fact that fans and players live in different universes.”

To Savage, the televised spectacle of an empty stadium sends a message about “the relative importance of urban unrest in relation to economic activity. Everyone else in town might have to shut down, but [they’re] going to bus in 50 ballplayers, 10 coaches, four umpires and some clubhouse guys and play a ballgame in an empty stadium to fulfill contractual obligations to television.”

And that, more than anything, is likely the reason for the ultimate call of “play ball!” Despite John Angelos’ eloquence, he’s also the President of the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), which is 90 percent owned by the Baltimore Orioles, and which broadcasted today’s game. In fact, in 2013 the Orioles were valued at $1.12 billion, due in large part to MASN.

As a lifelong Cubs fan, Savage doesn’t pass up a chance to joke that “the White Sox are used to playing in front of empty stadiums.” But when that emptiness becomes a symbol of broadcast contracts being prioritized over common sense, the league might wish it didn’t have the spectacle streaming across the Internet, quiet as the Field of Dreams cornfield.

WIRED Binge-Watching Guide: Futurama

One of the best things about animation is that it’s flexible. Whereas characters are typically bounded by actors’ bodies, an animated creation can bend, blur, and break, so long as they’re still recognizable to the viewer, something that allows for a remarkable degree of leeway in the name of expressiveness and control. More than that, animation allows the writers to create the rules of a world as they go along and have the viewer simply accept them in a way that rivals the ability of the written word.

That elasticity is what makes Futurama, which rarely makes an effort to even appear bounded by a semblance of reality, so special. Where that other show by co-creator Matt Groening radiates outward from its focal family, Futurama (also created by David X. Cohen) is, at least in the beginning, about a universe—the New New York of the future. The show’s world frequently gives off the appearance of being unfeeling and cold, forcing the characters and the viewers who follow them to fight tooth and nail for every scrap of warmth. But really, it’s a playground for the inquisitive, nerdy, and surprisingly empathetic writers, who infuse the show with all of their obsessions, from theology to Star Trek to Richard Nixon.

Futurama also gives off the mistaken impression of cynicism in part because its setting is meant to be de-familiarizing. Frozen for a thousand years in cryogenic sleep, pizza delivery boy Philip J. Fry (Billy West) awakens in the brave new world of the year 3000 (well, technically New Year’s Eve 2999) before falling in with his closest living relative—the borderline senile, borderline psychotic Professor Hubert Farnsworth (also Billy West). Farnsworth runs the dysfunctional interstellar delivery service Planet Express, the home of the rest of the main cast, especially Fry’s best friend, the childlike criminal robot Bender (John DiMaggio) and his love interest, the hyper-competent, hyper-violent cyclops Turanga Leela (Katey Sagal).

In one of the first high-profile instances of the now-common practice of televised voodoo, Futurama was canceled by Fox after a few seasons, then resurrected by Comedy Central—first as a series of films, then for another run of episodes. The first few seasons are excellent, but the hit-miss ratio became a little sketchier as the show aged. Still, Futurama, in contrast to many other sitcoms, never quite wore out its welcome, and even at its worst the show’s vision of the future is always a fun place to spend half an hour. Escape to the next millennium with WIRED’s binge-watching guide for Futurama.

Futurama

Number of Seasons: 10 (140 episodes, give or take. The cancellation, initial airing schedule that contradicts the production order, and the season that’s just composed of the movies, make it difficult to pin down exactly which episodes are included in which season, but Netflix is the prime purveyor of Futurama, so their system it is.)

Time Requirements: Watching at a perfectly reasonable three episodes a day should get you through the show in just under seven weeks, a perfect summer project. But let’s be honest—once you’re under Futurama’s Hypnotoad-infused spell, you won’t be able to go through it that slowly.

Where to Get Your Fix: Netflix, Amazon, iTunes

Best Character to Follow: It makes the most sense for first-time viewers to keep a close eye on Fry, one of the best-executed instances of the cliché of the seemingly normal, doofy character who turns out to be of cosmic importance. Much of the groundwork for Fry’s eventual destiny is laid early in the series (look for Easter eggs on your second, third, or seventh time through the series), but the true genius of Futurama’s treatment of Fry lies in the way that he becomes a figure of prophecy by being, at all times, a kind idiot. He makes bad decisions that allow him to save the world, but he also grows over the course of the series to the point of reasonable competence. One of the treats of the last few seasons is watching him struggle with learning how to be in a relationship with Leela, an adult emotional problem that isn’t handled half as well by most “serious” treatments.

Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip:

Look—there are a lot of great episodes in the Comedy Central seasons, but there are also far more unnecessary ones. As it aged, Futurama became more topical in ways that never really produced biting satire and felt dated quickly. It’s a bit of a cliché that all science fiction is really about the present, but Futurama made this increasingly literal as the seasons progressed. Many of the early episodes use the year 3000 to imaginatively play with present-day familiar faces and question the costs of our choices, but by the time the show got around to episodes about Barack Obama’s birth certificate and the ubiquity of iPhones, it had ceased to be particularly novel.

Most of these episodes are still pleasant to watch if you’ve made it that far in the show—you’ll already be at a point where, like most older sitcoms, you’re happy to just hang out with the characters for half an hour. But there are a few that are particularly rancid, and best avoided until you reach more advanced levels of Futurama obsession.

Season 7: Episode 3, “Attack of the Killer App” An uninteresting, crusty jab at Apple and the supposed inanity of those darned kids and their modern technology, this is the point at which Futurama most closely resembles a later season of South Park—with all the attendant flimsiness. Unnecessary viewing.

Season 9: Episode 11, “31st Century Fox” Though it touches on some of the writers’ long-running environmental themes in its treatment of animal rights, this episode, which features Bender trying to protect robot foxes from British hunters, never escapes the thought that it was written solely for the title.

Season 10: Episode 6, “Saturday Morning Fun Pit” The absolute worst episode of Futurama ever, this one is an attempt at a series of stories based on Saturday morning cartoons. Though the anthology format worked well in other episodes, this one is a bunch of thinly-drawn, lazy Family Guy-style reference gags that don’t have anything to them other than “Hey, remember when this was a thing?”

Seasons/Episodes You Can’t Skip:

Pretty much all of the first five seasons (the Fox years) are excellent—some are just decently funny, but all of them have at least one effective character moment or clever reversal that adds to the overall sense of Futurama’s brilliance. Over the course of these episodes, and the rest of the series, Futurama settled into a few different distinct episode types—including the madcap sci-fi adventure, the spot-on genre parody, and the sad episode where a character reckons with their past—each of which has several installments. Here are the best representatives of several of the types of Futurama episodes, with a few more classics thrown in for good measure.

Season 1: Episode 9, “Hell Is Other Robots” The first truly great episode of the show is also the first episode to fully capture the genius of Bender, a character often pegged as a violent, evil criminal but who is generally more reminiscent of a curious, alcoholic baby. That’s exemplified by how easily Bender is ruled by his appetites in this episode, getting addicted to electricity before falling into the religion of Robotology—putting him within the dastardly musical clutches of the Robot Devil (Dan Castellaneta) and laying the groundwork for several other classic installments.

Season 2: Episode 9, “Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?” Doctor John Zoidberg (also Billy West) gets his first great showcase in this episode, which has some of Futurama’s sitcom-lite gender politics (Fry plays Cyrano, tricking the object of Zoidberg’s affection into loving him with just a few non-idiotic words) but all of its weird heart. And it ends with one of the most potent questions ever posed by a sitcom—if your species died in the process of having sex, would you still do it?

Season 3: Episode 8, “The Luck of the Fryish” Fry’s attempt to find his lucky seven-leaf clover and reconcile his relationship with his long-dead brother provides the model for the kind of sentimental Futurama—complete with the standard-issue “twist” emotional ending—that was eventually used for the infamous and heartbreaking “Jurassic Bark” (with his dog) and “Game of Tones” (with his mother).

Season 3: Episode 12, “The Day the Earth Stood Stupid” Futurama’s “mythology” could become a little irritating as the show went on and began to wear its heart more directly on its sleeve, but the introduction of Fry’s greatest enemies—naturally, an army of giant brains—is classic, perfecting the series’ balancing act between empathizing with its gross protagonists and the razor-sharp, over-educated minds of its writers.

Season 3: Episode 15, “Time Keeps on Slipping” Maybe the best episode of the entire series, this one is neatly divided into a few parts. First, there’s a silly story about the alien Harlem Globetrotters challenging Earth to a basketball game. Then there’s Professor Farnsworth creating an army of Space Jam-like basketball monsters to accept that challenge. Then there’s the part where Farnsworth’s meddling causes time to begin to skip forward, with no memory of the interludes. And all of that is followed by an excellent, nuanced Fry-Leela love story. It’s basically one great bit after another, condensed into just a few minutes.

Season 4: Episode 5, “Godfellas” Theologically dense and hilarious in equal measure, it’s hard to beat “Godfellas” for sheer cerebral intensity. The script doesn’t just ask “What if you were God?” but instead asks “What if Bender were God?” It turns out that he’d make a few mistakes but eventually get on the right track, with an assist from the genuine article (maybe).

Season 5: Episode 9, “Sting” Leela’s biggest spotlight outside the episodes that focus on her mutant heritage, “Sting” is also one of the most surreal Futurama episodes, paying off a line from the pilot to delirious, moving effect.

Season 5: Episode 16, “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings” The last episode to air on Fox, “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings” is both a perfect episode of the show, and a perfect potential finale. Every ending the show tried is excellent, including the last shot of Into the Wild Green Yonder and the eventual last episode, “Meanwhile,” but “The Devil’s Hands” is still the pinnacle of goodbyes. It includes an extended musical sequence, cameos from many beloved recurring characters, and manages to substantively move the Fry-Leela relationship in a way that still somehow doesn’t feel cloying. (All while finessing a runner on the meaning of the word “irony.”)

Season 7: Episode 7, “The Late Philip J. Fry” The story of Fry trying to make it to Leela’s birthday dinner on time after being trapped in a forwards-only time machine justifies the existence of the rest of the Comedy Central seasons on its own. Taking the premise to its logical conclusion, “The Late Philip J. Fry” marks Futurama as maybe the only television show in history to gleefully depict the heat death of the universe.

Season 8: Episode 13, “Reincarnation” An effective, smart split anthology episode, “Reincarnation” accomplishes everything “Saturday Morning Fun Pit” doesn’t. Each of the vaguely related segments pays homage to a certain style of animation (black-and-white early Disney cartoons, 8-bit videogames, and low-budget anime) by using its formal restrictions to depict something that can’t be seen. Somehow, Futurama was the rare show that could often make telling funnier than showing.

Why You Should Binge:
Futurama is a lot of things to a lot of people—reference-laden comedy, slightly disappointing Simpsons relative, the only show to ever have a character sleep with his own grandmother—but what makes it so special is that can be all of these things at the same time, within one episode (and sometimes one scene). That the series had so many diverse threads and interests and managed to maintain its specificity and voice while pursuing all of them is nothing short of a miracle. And it somehow managed to do the impossible—make science boring, in the most interesting way possible.

Space travel, teleportation, and cryogenic freezing is just run-of-the-mill technology in Futurama’s world, which means everyone just has more time to focus on watching TV or the silly social minutiae that would have fit better in an episode of Seinfeld. Sharing that general penchant for the oddities of small, casual human interaction in conjunction with a desire to explore the cosmos is a powerful combination—for anyone who vibes at the same wavelength as Cohen and the rest of the Futurama team, there’s really nothing quite like it.

Best Scene—’The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings’ Musical Sequence

The extended musical sequence in “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings” features commentary on good (and bad) writing for TV, a discussion of the meaning of irony, catchy music, and solid characters beats, all within the span of a couple of minutes. Dizzying.

The Takeaway:
Smart, funny, emotional, and caustic in equal measure, but also weird and specific, too—what more could you want?

If You Liked Futurama You’ll Love:
Futurama is flexible enough that it has several possible spiritual descendants, but the closest thing on the air is likely The Venture Bros., which has a similarly chilly, nerdy exterior hiding a heart of gold. Adventure Time has a similarly deep bench of animated oddballs. And, uh, you could maybe check out this other little show called The Simpsons or something.

How to Be a Good Internet Citizen During Breaking News

Skip to story A woman checks her phone while police officers monitor the situation near a CVS pharmacy that was looted and burned by rioters, April 29, 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland. Andrew Burton/Getty Images

While “24/7 news” television networks covered the White House Correspondents dinner this past Saturday, many turned to Twitter to find out what was happening in Baltimore. I spent the better part of the last several nights watching the unrest there unfold through photos, live streams, video clips and Facebook posts and tweets. The pool of media available from eyewitnesses seems to grow with every major event. Who needs cable news when 64 percent of American adults and 85 percent of young adults now own a reporting device, better known as a smartphone.

But how informed are we really by these glimpses? Is there enough context? Who do we trust when the information is potentially coming from those who have a vested interest in a cause? We have to wrestle with some of these questions when dealing with members of the mainstream media already, but their reputation often precedes them, putting the information shared in perspective. How do you apply that to a random internet handle that just popped into your feed? Most importantly, now that we are all able to engage in citizen journalism, what responsibility do we have to get it right?

WIRED Opinion

About

Anthony De Rosa is the Editor-In-Chief of Circa. He was formerly the Social Media Editor at Reuters where he won an award for Best Innovation in Storytelling.

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As someone who spends a good deal of time trying to sort out the signal through the noise of social media, my main focus is on observing rather than sharing. It’s very alluring to want to take a piece of seemingly newsworthy information and instantly share it. If you’re not a journalist, you’ve got less at stake to toss it back out there without concern for your reputation to take a hit. But sending misinformation out into the world can be harmful no matter how many followers you have. The more people who retweet a false fact, the harder it is to debunk and get to the truth.

The suggestion to never tweet is too pat a solution, and one that eliminates the potential for you to be a productive part of a news event.

Some people suggest a very easy solution to this: never tweet. This is a refrain mostly offered up by journalists sick of seeing Twitter become an instant race to Snarktown the moment any news breaks. It’s not just misinformation that can be harmful, but also tweets and posts that jump straight to humor for want of being quick to the joke. But this is too pat a solution, and one that eliminates the potential for you to be a productive part of a news event. It’s also just unrealistic; it’s the equivalent of abstinence education. You are going to tweet. But you can take steps to do so responsibly.

Much of what journalists do to validate and find news on social media can be useful to even passive Twitter users, so I’m going share some best practices here. If you’re a news hound, these tips will help you maximize the potential of social media to get you the raw facts. But even if you’re a more casual observer you can be a better, more reliable part of a breaking news conversation by keeping in mind three things: time, curiosity and context.

Time

In breaking news situations, the thirst to be first is too strong a temptation for many to resist. Resist that urge! When a story is breaking, you don’t need to tweet about it right away. You don’t need to jump in. You can almost guarantee that a good deal of what you hear and see initially will turn out to be misrepresented or flat out wrong. If you’re willing to wait, you’re far more likely to get to the truth.

If you’re on Twitter to find out what is going on, you’ll need time to gather up enough evidence understand a story clearly. The quickest way to gather is by building, or simply following Twitter Lists. Often in a breaking news situation, there’s someone who has already build a fantastic list for you to follow. If you’re lucky, the list will be sanitized for your protection, with official sources and reliable reporters providing updates. You’ll want that list but you probably also want to go raw too. Grab TweetDeck and set up a breaking news filter column. Filter the search by applying geotags (near:Baltimore) and then turn on the option to only show tweets with photos or video. You’ll now have a raw feed of citizen sourced media. I go into further detail on setting up TweetDeck for gathering breaking news information in the Verification Handbook.

Now that we are all able to engage in citizen journalism we have a responsibility to get it right.

While Twitter tends to be my main window into what’s going on, you can sometimes find useful information elsewhere. Lesser known platforms like YikYak can sometimes surface conversations taking place in a specific locations. Networks like YikYak tend to give more of a temperature, or a sense of how people in the area are reacting to a situation. The anonymous nature can be a both a blessing and a curse. People may be more open about their feelings but the claims can also be totally erroneous. The same goes for Secret and Whisper, which some news organizations have mined for information with varying levels of success.

There’s a popular notion, shared by journalists like Mathew Ingram and Christopher Mims, that Twitter is a ‘self cleaning oven’ where ultimately the truth comes out, despite the potential for misinformation to form and spread. Mims believes that since there are so many witnesses all sharing and responding to what’s being said, the process of having a conversation about it online will ultimately lead to the real story.

One thing that has happened in past crises covered on social media is the rapid spread of misinformation and rumor. But now, owing to the sheer density of people who were actually there, distributing images, video and firsthand accounts through Twitter, Facebook, Vine and Instagram, I saw rumors pop up and just as quickly get smacked down in the comments.

Ingram shares a similar feeling, citing Hurricane Sandy as his example:

Can you believe everything you read during such an event? Clearly not, since there were innumerable false reports and fake photos circulating on Monday night. But what’s interesting isn’t that there was fake news — it’s how quickly those fakes were exposed and debunked, not just by Twitter users themselves but by an emerging ecosystem of blogs and social networks working together.

However a new study from the American Press Institute claims that false information on Twitter beats out the attempts to correct it by a factor of 3 to 1. And important caveat to this report, however, is that social media may have a hand in propagating false information but the supposed trustworthy traditional media is often the source for the wrong information in the first place. Such was the case when many outlets falsely reported that the brother of the killer behind the Newtown massacre was the shooter, or the the false report that an AR-15 was used in the Navy Yard shooting, and when John King falsely reporting that the Boston Marathon bomber had been arrested.

Curiosity

Obviously you have enough curiosity to be looking at the news in the first place. But you’ll need a well of it to stay on the right track. You’ll need to be willing to gather up what you’re seeing, and then keep going to run it through the paces. Photos, in particular, are problematic.

The first thing you’ll want to do with images you’ve gathered is run them through a reverse image search. Tin Eye is a popular method, I also use Veracity when I’m on my phone and can’t easily run images through a web page. The most common thing people tend to do is share old images and try to pass them off as occurring during a breaking news event. It happens almost every time something major occurs. Doing a reverse image search will show you the source of the image and if it’s been posted in the past. If you’re not getting any results for that image, that’s a positive sign that the image is likely new.

When it comes to video, Storyful’s Open Newsroom is where you’ll want to commiserate with other folks who spend a great deal of time looking for clues to detect a fake. Often they’ll be able to quickly spot inconsistencies with the landscape portrayed in the video, such as a building that shouldn’t be there.

If you’re trying to verify content that took place in a conflict area, like Ukraine or the Middle East, Eliot Higgins has you covered with Bellingcat. Drop in and share what you’re seeing, though it’s likely they’re already on the case and have applied some of their CSI-like forensic media investigation skills to sort out fact from fiction.

Be upfront about what you do and do not know and that you’re not a first-hand witness.

Channel your curiosity into wanting to discover as much as you can without feeling the need to toss it back out to the world. Ask questions of the people who are posting it. Try and see if you can elicit how legitimate they are. Be respectful and appreciative of the time they’re willing to give. Try and find out more about what they’re seeing and hearing. There can be a lot of satisfaction derived from the interactions you have with those on the ground. The satisfaction you get from that interaction can help you overcome the temptation to instantly toss that information back out to the world immediately. Keep gathering and gathering until you’ve got enough evidence and corroboration that you feel comfortable enough to show your work.

When you are ready to share, caveats are advisable. Be upfront about what you do and do not know and that you’re not a first-hand witness. Be generous with your links and be prepared to back up what you say with multiple sources of evidence. I prefer to use something like Storify to share what I’ve found. While some folks choose to post their findings directly to Twitter, in the form of retweets, that can sometimes lead to confusion without additional context. Context is essential for understanding the meaning behind these social media updates.

Context

Context is the toughest of the three keys to sorting out what you’re seeing. Context isn’t going to be easy to obtain. Journalists will question eyewitnesses directly, but as a consumer of news you may not want to contribute to the overflow of confusion by trying to tweet directly to people at the scene of an event. Instead, you can search for what they are already saying. Looking for reports to come around that add more information, both from official sources and citizens. The official sources aren’t always telling the whole truth, so their word will need to be tested with evidence.

It can be easy to trick yourself into thinking that you have a strong grasp on what’s happening.

One of the benefits of social media is having a bit more situational awareness than being on the ground. Through social media, you’re given multiple inputs from various witness at the same scene. When you’re on the ground, your point-of-view is limited to what’s right in front of your face.

Andy Carvin, who does a great deal of newsgathering with social media talks about this phenomenon:

I discovered very quickly that when I would be in a place like Tahrir Square in Egypt, I found it really hard to get a big picture of what was going on, simply because when you’re surrounded by tear gas and people throwing rocks, you have a fairly limited field of view. Once I could get away from that scene and get back online, over my phone, I’d immediately have contact with dozens of sources across the field of battle who could help paint this picture for me and give me the type of situational awareness that I actually didn’t have when I was there in person.

It can be easy to trick yourself into thinking that you have a strong grasp on what’s happening. This is not always the case.

A perfect example of lack of context leading to misunderstanding is this particular tweet that showed black effigies of bodies hung from trees. Absent context it can be viewed in an entirely different way than how it was intended, as an art installation.

But even though having various moments through media to determine what occurred can be helpful, the same way a juror has to piece together what happened through testimony, there’s still the potential to be misled by various flaws. The message can be distorted. You could be seeing only part of what occurred, and not what led up to it or what happened afterwards. Or the reverse could happen, like in the case of Mike Brown, where most of the footage was after the shooting, or from a vantage point so far away, it was hard to tell what actually occurred. People tend to want to try and make assumptions based on limited evidence, which turns out to be problematic.

For most folks, the advice I’m giving may seem like more work than it’s worth, and that’s fine. My hope is that platforms like Twitter and the like will move toward providing a more structured editorial layer on top of the the nervous system containing the raw material. In the meantime, it’s up to you and me to make sense of it all. It’s messy and chaotic, and we’ll get things wrong sometimes. More importantly, the hope is that observing these events doesn’t serve as just a cheap thrill, but that some will actually be motivated enough to perform meaningful, positive action in the wake of what they’ve learned.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. GIF and a Graf: Coulson Calls in the Avengers

You gotta hand it to Marvel, they know how to get your butt off the couch and into a theater seat. For most of this season on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) has been acting a little cagey and talking about some secret Theta Protocol. Well, on last night’s episode—just in time for the release of Avengers: Age of Ultron!—we found out that procedure involves calling in Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. In the perfect setup for the movie hitting theaters Friday, Coulson took a call from Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) during which they discussed whether or not Hyrda got their grubby hands on Loki’s scepter and what they should do about it. The final question from Hill: “Theta Protocol, is it ready?” Response: “Yes it is. Time to bring in the Avengers.” See you at the multiplex, everyone!

On the Apple Watch, the Best DJ Is an AI

Pacemaker

When the Apple Watch App Store opened, a prominent “Get Started” section featured a line-up of usual suspects. The first app was Twitter. The next was The New York Times. No surprises there. Then came… a DJ app? It was an odd inclusion. How do you DJ on a watch?

You don’t. You let AI do it for you.

Pacemaker, the unlikely recipient of Apple’s coveted recommendation, arrived last year as a groundbreaking DJ app for the iPad. Its thoughtful interface and exclusive pipeline into Spotify’s catalog made mixing music terrifically easy. But according to creator Jonas Norberg, not easy enough. “It’s still too hard for the majority of people to create something that sounds good,” he says.

The Apple Watch offered Norberg and his eight-person team a chance to do something even simpler. Indeed, the Stockholm outfit’s new app scales DJing back to something so basic it you can’t even really call it DJing.

The app relies almost entirely on a pair of algorithmic features. The first, MatchMachine, analyzes your playlists, evaluating factors like beats per minute and key to shuffle songs into the optimal sequence for mixing. Then, a patent-pending artificial intelligence engine orchestrates transitions between songs. Internally, the team refers to the AI DJ as Mållgan, after a character in a popular Swedish children’s book. Officially, it’s called “Autopilot.”

From the watch, you can trigger Autopilot transitions and sprinkle in a handful of effects, including reverb, a whooshing wave of white noise, and a glitchy 8-bit-style filter (The app is free; the effects cost a few bucks each). The AI assists here, too. When you tap an effect from your watch, it isn’t deployed instantly. Instead, the app scrutinizes the waveform of your track and mixes the effect in smoothly. “It’s not good enough just to start the effect when you touch it,” Norberg says. “You need curves—you need someone turning on the knob. Autopilot controls the knob.”
Pacemaker
As many have noted, Apple’s new device forces developers to rethink assumptions about what apps should do. “The watch is really interesting because of the constraints. To do something with those limitations is extremely hard,” Norberg says. Algoriddim, maker of another popular mixing app called Djay, took what might be considered a more obvious approach to crafting its Watch app, shrinking the standard two-deck layout and providing features like crossfading and looping. It does you might expect a miniature DJing app to do.

Pacemaker’s creators consciously opted to give users less control. As they see it, the ideal experience for the wrist isn’t being a mix master, but enjoying a straightforward, slightly more active form of music listening. “There’s many people out there that want to do more than passively consume music,” Norberg says. “Mixes are a great because you can mess around with them and make music more personal.” Autopilot’s meant to ensure it sounds good.

Norberg cites Paper, the popular iPad sketching app, as inspiration. One of its great innovations was the “Expressive Ink Engine,” which interprets scrawls and smooths them into beautiful lines on screen. “Autopilot is our Ink Engine,” Norberg says.

These examples point to an interesting trend. On mobile devices, where input is limited, algorithms and AI can serve as powerful mediators, smoothing rough edges both literally and figuratively. But as our devices shrink and input becomes ever tougher, this mediation becomes increasingly important. On the iPad’s large screen, you can let users do, say, 90 percent of the driving and let algorithms fill in the rest. As the new Pacemaker app suggests, the opposite ratio might be best.

It’s an approach we’ll almost certainly continue to see developers experiment with. The smaller our devices become, the more chances there are for apps that act all on their own.

Microsoft Unveils Tools For Moving Android and iOS Apps onto Windows

Microsoft is providing ways for software developers to move applications from both Android and Apple iOS devices onto Windows phones, tablets, and other machines.

Terry Myerson, Microsoft’s vice president of operating system development, announced the new tools during his keynote speech at the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. The company was expected to unveil tools for moving Android apps onto Windows, and it went a step further in unveiling a toolkit for moving iOS apps as well, sparking cheers from the hundreds of developers gathered in the keynote hall.

According to Myerson, Microsoft’s software development kit, or SDK, will allow developers to grab Java or C++ code that drives Android apps and then reshape into a Windows app that ties into services only available on the Microsoft OS. And he said that coders could use another SDK to do much the same with Objective-C code that drives apps on Apple iPhones and iPads.

The move is part of a larger effort to significantly expand the number of applications that run on Windows phones and tablets. In recent years, Windows mobile devices have been well reviewed, but compared to iPhones, iPads, and Android devices, they control a tiny slice of the market—2.8 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, according to IDC—and, as a result, offer relatively few applications.

It’s a Catch-22 for Microsoft: people aren’t buying Windows phones in part because they lack the robust app ecosystems of iOS and Android; but app makers don’t want to waste time making apps for phones relatively few people use. Now, Microsoft is hoping to kickstart the development of apps by pulling in not only Android and iOS, but code that drives applications on older Windows devices and on the web.

Microsoft unveiled an early version of Windows 10 this past September, releasing a “technical preview” to a select group of testers. Like previous versions of Windows, the OS is designed for both businesses and consumers. According to the company, the new OS will run across a wide range of machines, from desktops, laptops, phones, and tablets to servers running in the massive data centers that underpin the world’s internet services and even the company’s new Hololens augmented-reality headset. “With Windows 10, we’re targeting the largest device family ever,” Myerson said.

The company is also pushing the idea of “universal apps” that run across all Windows 10 devices. This, like Microsoft’s efforts to pull Android and iOS code onto Windows, could certainly boost the number of apps on its operating system. But it should be said that refashioning existing apps is often easier said than done, even if you’re moving code from one type of Windows device to another. Moving from a disparate OS is even more difficult.

Myers pointed to game maker King as a successful example of a company that has already moved code from iOS to Windows. But he acknowledged the developers will want proof that moving an app from iOS to Windows actually works.

Why We Need a Global Human/Technology Manifesto

It’s not true to say society’s heading for a technological disaster but we must keep our hands firmly on the wheel, says Ian Wood, senior partner at Lippincott.Read more here…