This Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading
The author of nearly three dozen books on the decline of manufacturing in America, and a future in which innovation can’t save us but reducing our consumption might:
Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing—from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What’s very important is in-house research. Innovation usually arises from somebody taking a product already in production and making it better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always starts with a product.
Look at LCD screens. Most of the advances are coming from big industrial conglomerates in Korea like Samsung or LG. The only good thing in the US is Gorilla Glass, because it’s Corning, and Corning spends $700 million a year on research.
The Surge
Health care workers are attempting to eradicate polio by penetrating remote areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan controlled by the Taliban:
Because all the Afghan polio cases in 2013 have been reported here in the eastern half of the country, these National Immunization Days have special importance in this region. As with the global campaign writ large, polio here has receded greatly over the past two decades but with serious setbacks along the way: Although cases dropped after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, an outbreak in 2011 brought 80 new cases and a general sense of emergency. And so the eradication program—which is government-run but supported financially by who and unicef —ordered a “surge” in Afghanistan. They doubled the international staff and cracked down on underperforming and corrupt officials. This year, the surge has paid a huge dividend, in that the war-torn south of the country, for a long time the greatest problem area, now appears to be free of the virus. It’s the inaccessible areas in the east, where Jalalabad is, that are now the main concern.
How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses
A class of students attending José Urbina López Primary School in Matamoros, Mexico had little access to the internet, broken classroom equipment, and difficult living situations. Their teacher, Sergio Juárez Correa, helped them succeed in extraordinary ways using a radical teaching method:
“In Finland, teachers underwent years of training to learn how to orchestrate this new style of learning; he was winging it. He began experimenting with different ways of posing open-ended questions on subjects ranging from the volume of cubes to multiplying fractions. ‘The volume of a square-based prism is the area of the base times the height. The volume of a square-based pyramid is that formula divided by three,’ he said one morning. ‘Why do you think that is?’
“He walked around the room, saying little. It was fascinating to watch the kids approach the answer. They were working in teams and had models of various shapes to look at and play with. The team led by Usiel Lemus Aquino, a short boy with an ever-present hopeful expression, hit on the idea of drawing the different shapes—prisms and pyramids. By layering the drawings on top of each other, they began to divine the answer. Juárez Correa let the kids talk freely. It was a noisy, slightly chaotic environment—exactly the opposite of the sort of factory-friendly discipline that teachers were expected to impose. But within 20 minutes, they had come up with the answer.
“‘Three pyramids fit in one prism,’ Usiel observed, speaking for the group. ‘So the volume of a pyramid must be the volume of a prism divided by three.'”
Public Enemies: Social Media Is Fueling Gang Wars in Chicago
Gangs in Chicago have used social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to spread inflammatory messages about rivals and incite violence:
“We naturally associate criminal activity with secrecy, with conspiracies hatched in alleyways or back rooms. Today, though, foolish as it may be in practice, street gangs have adopted a level of transparency that might impress even the most fervent Silicon Valley futurist. Every day on Facebook and Twitter, on Instagram and YouTube, you can find unabashed teens flashing hand signs, brandishing guns, splaying out drugs and wads of cash. If we live in an era of openness, no segment of the population is more surprisingly open than 21st-century gang members, as they simultaneously document and roil the streets of America’s toughest neighborhoods.”
The Secret Service Agent Who Collared Cybercrooks by Selling Them Fake IDs
Secret Service agent Mike Adams used the identity of a grifter named Justin Todd Moss to sell criminals fake IDs and build a case against them. The story behind the Secret Service’s long con:
“From the Secret Service’s standpoint, selling fake IDs – ‘novelties,’ in the parlance of the underground – would have held a number of advantages. Unlike intangible commodities like credit card numbers or passwords, fake IDs must be shipped physically, which gives the agency an address to check out for every customer. And, being photo IDs, the customer had to provide their photos. It’s a rare law enforcement operation that lets the cops collect mug shots before they’ve made a single arrest.
“‘It’s a great idea,’ says E. J. Hilbert, a former FBI cybercrime agent who worked undercover in the Carder Planet days. Feds routinely get close to carders by selling ‘stolen’ credit card numbers that are actually provided by card issuers, then tracked. Shipping counterfeit driver’s licenses, he says, has the same advantages.
“‘In fact, it’s even better,’ says Hilbert, now a managing director at Kroll Cyber. ‘You have one name and one ID that you can put in the system and flag. … I tried to get approval for this myself, and they wouldn’t do it.'”
Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share
A man decides to divide himself into 100,000 shares and sell himself on the open market, allowing investors to decide what he should do with his life:
“Then, on August 10, 2008, Merrill asked the shareholders to decide whether he should get a vasectomy. He didn’t tell McCormick that he was going to bring them in on it. As the CEO of himself, he simply wrote a note to his shareholders explaining his position on the subject. ‘Children are a financial drain,’ Merrill wrote. ‘The time investment of raising a child is immense. The responsibility is epic. The impact on future projects would be drastic. In light of these factors, it makes sense to reduce the chances to nearly zero and have a vasectomy performed.'”
“McCormick was furious and embarrassed. ‘He made our personal life public without consulting me,’ she says. It got worse when the ballots came in. Schroeder voted yes. Josh Berezin, a grade-school friend and political consultant, voted yes. To McCormick, it wasn’t just a referendum on the vasectomy. It was also a referendum on whether Merrill’s friends thought he should have kids with her. It was, she says, ‘a judgment on me.'”
See No Evil: The Case of Alfred Anaya
A man who installs secret compartments in cars—which are used to conceal things like jewelry, handguns, and drugs—finds himself in legal trouble:
“On November 18, as Anaya drove his Ford F-350 through a Home Depot parking lot, he noticed a dark sedan that seemed to be shadowing him in an adjacent aisle. He thought the car might belong to friends. But when the sedan stopped in front of him, the men who got out were strangers to Anaya. They identified themselves as DEA agents and ordered him out of his truck. ‘You know why we’re here,’ one agent said to Anaya, who was bewildered to be in handcuffs for the first time in his life. ‘Your compartments.'”
Mutants
Scientists track down a killer superbug by sequencing its genome:
“In late August, as word of the outbreak circulated among the NIH staff, Snitkin and his boss, Julie Segre, approached the Clinical Center with an unusual offer. In their jobs at the NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute, the two scientists had previously sequenced genomes from a bacterial outbreak long after it had died out. But today, sequencing technology had become so fast and so cheap. Why not analyze the bacteria in the middle of an outbreak? By tracking the bug’s transmission route through the hospital, they might be able to isolate it and stop its lethal spread. They put this question to the center’s top brass, who immediately accepted their offer. ‘It was a no-brainer,’ says Tara Palmore, the center’s deputy epidemiologist, who headed up its fight against KPC.”
A Eulogy for #Occupy
Wired’s Occupy Wall Street correspondent reflects on her year of covering the movement:
“Standing next to an older officer after one eviction, telling him what I’d seen and listening to him worry about how he was going to send his kids to college, I overheard the police talk to each other. Of the protestors they kept saying the same thing, the same three words to each other and walked away: ‘They’ll be back.’ Some said it with scorn, lips curled. Some said it with fear, some excited for the action. Some said it with the watery voices of drowning hope: ‘They’ll be back.’
“Please, let something matter again, let something change.
“The policing of protest in America makes it clear that protest has become mere ritual, a farce, and that, by definition, it becomes illegal if it threatens to change anything or inconvenience anyone. In time, all the police announcements came to say the same thing to me. ‘You may go through your constitutional ritual,’ they intoned, ‘but it must stop before anything of consequence happens.’ We must, above all, preserve everything as it is.”
Inside the Mansion—and Mind—of Kim Dotcom, the Most Wanted Man on the Net
A writer goes to New Zealand to visit Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, who is fighting criminal charges from the U.S. Department of Justice for committing copyright infringement, among other allegations:
“Police led Kim to the lawn, where most of the household was gathered. ‘I was so worried about Mona—she was pregnant with the twins. I kept asking where she was, where the kids were.’ Kim couldn’t see the kids, but he saw Ortmann. He and Batato had flown in for the birthday Kim shared with his son, Kimmo. It promised to be an epic event, complete with A-list entertainers from the US. The bouncy castle hadn’t even been blown up yet.
“The police found Batato by the back of the house with his laptop; he was still in his robe. Ortmann was in bed when the tactical team burst in. He looked freaked out and shattered. He wasn’t the sort who pretended at the gangsta stuff. He didn’t even play shooter videogames.
“Kim asked a police officer, ‘What are the charges?’ He imagined that, with more than 50 staff members from around the world, maybe one of them was mixed up in something.
“The answer surprised him: ‘Copyright infringement.’
“As the cops led him to a police van, Kim passed Mona. She seemed frightened. ‘All this for copyright?’ he said to her. ‘Bullshit.'”