Search Results for: tech

State of the #Longreads, 2014

Lately there has been some angst about the state of longform journalism on the Internet. So I thought I’d share some quick data on what we’ve seen within the Longreads community: Read more…

Trust Us: The Ethics of Our Automated Future

"You should presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a conversation with Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla. To someone as smart as Brin, that comment is as normal as sipping on his super-green juice, but to someone who is not from this landmass we call Silicon Valley or part of the tech-set, that comment is about the futility of their future.

Automation of our society is going to cause displacement, no different than mechanization of our society in the past. There were no protections then, but hopefully a century later we should be smarter about dealing with pending change. People look at Uber and the issues around it as specific to a single company. It is not true — drones, driverless cars, dynamic pricing of vital services, privatization of vital civic services are all part of the change driven by automation, and computer driven efficiencies. Just as computers made corporations efficient — euphemism for employed fewer people and made more money — our society is getting more “efficient,” thanks to the machines.

-Om Malik, on the conversations we are still not having about personal data collection and our automated future.

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More tech in the Longreads Archive

Photo: sylvain_latouche, Flickr

Dealers Inject Business School Basics In Selling Heroin

Longreads Pick

Heroin dealers catering to affluent suburban addicts have shifted their operations from back-alley deals in shady parts of town to delivery on demand at downtown offices, high-end malls and suburban homes. But as the heroin business branches out from sketchy back-alleys, tactics have also changed. Now, drugs are marketed, dealers are trained, and the whole operation has been injected with MBA-style techniques.

Source: USA Today
Published: Jul 2, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,377 words)

A History of Scorpion Venom in Medicine

The new issue of Wired has a story about Jim Olson, a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher whose lab is looking into whether a scorpion-venom concoction can help detect cancer cells in our bodies. Injecting our bodies with scorpion venom may sound somewhat outlandish, but it’s been used in medicine for quite a long time:

Ancient practitioners of medicine were well aware that scorpion venom could heal as well as harm. In imperial China, for example, the cloudy fluid was used to treat ailments ranging from mumps to tetanus. And in certain rural corners of India, whole scorpions were dipped in mustard oil and then rubbed on arthritic joints. Scorpion venom has more recently become an object of fascination for developers of pesticides, who dream of protecting crops using the neuro­toxins that scorpions employ against locusts and beetles.

Today pharmaceutical companies regularly obtain venom for commercial use by milking deathstalkers—that is, jolting the yellow arachnids with electricity, then collecting the droplets that dribble forth from their tails. Courage is an essential trait for the technicians who handle this sort of work, for the deathstalker is among the most dangerous scorpions in the world: In certain instances, L. quinquestriatus venom can cause cardiac arrest.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

David Rakoff on the Downsides of Childhood

I had a beautiful childhood and a lovely childhood. I just didn’t like being a child. I didn’t like the rank injustice of not being listened to. I didn’t like the lack of autonomy. I didn’t like my chubby little hands that couldn’t manipulate the world of objects in the way that I wanted them to. Being a child for me was an exercise in impotent powerlessness. I just wasn’t—and I was never terribly good at that kind of no-holds-barred fun. I mean, you know, I’ve essentially made a career on not being good at no-holds-barred fun.

But, you know, I was just never sort of like, hey, yes, let’s go play. I was always more sort of like, does everybody know where the fire exit is and let’s make sure there’s enough oxygen in this elevator.

-The late David Rakoff, in a 2010 Fresh Air interview.

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Photo: poptech2006, flickr

A Doctor’s Quest to Save People by Injecting Them With Scorpion Venom

Longreads Pick

A profile of Jim Olson, a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher whose lab is looking into whether a scorpion-venom concoction can make cancer cells glow for easy removal:

A scorpion-venom concoction that makes tumors glow sounds almost too outlandish to be true. In fact, Olson explains, that’s what troubled the big grant-­making organizations when he came to them for funding. But when those organizations dismissed his ideas as too bizarre, Olson started accepting donations from individuals—particularly the families of current and former patients—quickly raising $5 million for his research. It was a bold and unprecedented tactic: Though patients and their families are often asked to donate to foundations with broad goals, Olson raised money for one specific, untested technology—a much riskier gamble. But thanks to his efforts, Olson’s fluorescent scorpion toxin is now in Phase I clinical trials, an impressive accomplishment for a compound with such a peculiar lineage. The University of Washington students are clearly awed by the work.

Source: Wired
Published: Jun 24, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,466 words)

Longreads' Best of WordPress, Vol. 1

Here’s the first official edition of Longreads’ Best of WordPress! We’ve scoured 22% of the internet to create a reading list of great storytelling — from publishers you already know and love, to some that you may be discovering for the first time.

We’ll be doing more of these reading lists in the weeks and months to come. If you read or publish a story on WordPress that’s over 1,500 words, share it with us: just tag it #longreads on Twitter, or use the longreads tag on WordPress.com.

Get the reading list

Photo: wallyg, Flickr

The Quest for Native American Voting Rights

What would Martin Luther King do? “About Native voting? He sure as hell wouldn’t dither about technicalities,” says Four Directions consultant Healy, a former head of the South Dakota Democratic Party. “Read Dr. King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ on the subject of waiting for rights.” In the 1963 letter, King decries the man “who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

But hey, Democrats! How about winning elections? Controlling the Senate? Doesn’t the party want all those Native Democrats at the polls? Wiley says the DNC doesn’t see it that way. “We don’t look at [expanding the vote] as making sure that more Democratic voters vote. We don’t look at it as a program to make sure more African-American or Latino or Native voters can vote. It’s [about] making sure everyone can vote.”

Perhaps the DNC believes it can count on Native voters without taking sides in Wandering Medicine. This may be hubris, warns former Montana Democratic state legislator Margarett Campbell. Originally from Fort Peck Indian Reservation and now a Fort Belknap school superintendent, Campbell has fought for Indian rights for decades. She suspects that confidence in the Democratic Party may wane among tribal members, who may then stay home in 2014. “You can’t take a huge segment of your voting population and treat them like that without them feeling disenfranchised,” she says.

In These Times‘ Stephanie Woodard, on the voting rights discrimination that Native Americans still face.

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Photo: solarnu, Flickr

After the Television Cameras Go Away

In MIT’s Technology Review, Antonio Regalado reports that paralyzed patients are participating in long-term studies of how putting implants in the brain to create brain-controlled prosthetics and computers may help paralyzed people in the future. Jan Scheuermann, 54, is one of these patients. After she awoke from her brain surgery, she was able to control a robotic arm within days. The findings from these studies were published in journals and made it onto the newsmagazine program 60 Minutes. But Scheuermann wasn’t expecting what would happen to her after she was out of the spotlight:

Since the TV cameras went away, however, some of the shortcomings of the technology have become apparent. At first Scheuermann kept demonstrating new abilities. “It was success, success, success,” she says. But controlling Hector has become harder. The reason is that the implants, over time, stop recording. The brain is a hostile environment for electronics, and tiny movements of the array may build up scar tissue as well. The effect is well known to researchers and has been observed hundreds of times in animals. One by one, fewer neurons can be detected.

Scheuermann says no one told her. “The team said that they were expecting loss of neuron signals at some point. I was not, so I was surprised,” she says. She now routinely controls the robot in only three to five dimensions, and she has gradually lost the ability to open and close its thumb and fingers. Was this at all like her experience of becoming paralyzed? I asked her the question a few days later by e-mail. She replied in a message typed by an aide who stays with her most days: “I was disappointed that I would probably never do better than I had already done, but accepted it without anger or bitterness.”

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Photo: Joshua Zader

What Happens When the Internet Takes Over Your Home: Virus Edition

I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows. The lights are flashing. My alarm clock is blasting Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something, I don’t know. I never listened to dubstep, and in fact the entire genre is on my banned list. You see, my house has a virus again.

Technically it’s malware. But there’s no patch yet, and pretty much everyone’s got it. Homes up and down the block are lit up, even at this early hour. Thankfully this one is fairly benign. It sets off the alarm with music I blacklisted decades ago on Pandora. It takes a picture of me as I get out of the shower every morning and uploads it to Facebook. No big deal.

I don’t sleep well anyway, and already had my Dropcam Total Home Immersion account hacked, so I’m basically embarrassment-proof. And anyway, who doesn’t have nudes online? Now, Wat3ryWorm, that was nasty. That was the one with the 0-day that set off everyone’s sprinkler systems on Christmas morning back in ’22. It did billions of dollars in damage.

Mat Honan, in Wired, with a fictional account of living in the internet-connected home of the future.

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More Wired in the Longreads Archive

Photo: jonathan_moreau, Flickr