Month: March 2019

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That Hackers Hacking Scene May Not Be So Dumb After All

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Is there a screen trope simultaneously more loved and reviled than real-time hacking? Not a chance. From the early 1980s, movies and TV shows have developed a seemingly endless appetite for scrolling gibberish, 3D interfaces, pop-up windows, and other kinds of eye candy that scream L33T H4X0R ATTEMPT UNDERWAY. But now, on the latest episode of Technique Critique, security researcher Samy Kamkar blazes a trail of destruction through the chicanery, diagnosing what each famous sequence gets right—or, as is much more likely, wrong.

All the classics are here: Swordfish. The Net. Hackers. Skyfall. Tron: Legacy. They range from utter crap (Swordfish and its reliance on fancy visual interfaces) to maybe not as utterly crap as we assumed (Hackers may feature a gratuitous flame war between Crash Override and Acid Burn, but as Kamkar points out, patching a target to foil other hackers while leaving a back door for yourself is actually a valid technique) to being decent enough for a participation trophy (Skyfall gets credit for including the idea of polymorphic code, but demerits for including invalid hexadecimal code.) But for each one of those, there's a surprising example of truth and accuracy—like Wargames ’80s-faithful move of dialing directly into a school's admin systems like a BBS, or Mr. Robot's portrayal of a hospital that runs its security on a hopelessly outmatched Windows 95 machine.

Of course, those aren't even half of the shows and movies that Kamkar dissects and explains. And none of those are the clunker that makes him laugh, look hopelessly offscreen, and say "I don't know what we want to say about this. No more pop-up windows!" Enjoy his bemused befuddlement—and relive some of hilarious hacking sequences ever—in the video above.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Watch a Robot 'Hen' Adopt a Flock of Chicks

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

I don’t want to tell these baby chickens how to live, but they’re going about their business all wrong. The cylindrical robot in their pen looks nothing like a hen, and it makes decidedly un-hen-like beeps, yet the chicks trail it obsessively, as if it’s their mother. Where the PoulBot goes, so too go the yellow little fluffs. Beep beep beep, says the robot. Chirp chirp chirp, say the chicks.

The idea behind this pairing, developed by researchers from several European universities, isn’t to give the chicks a complex—I promise—but to parse the extreme complexities of animal behaviors, especially as those behaviors manifest in groups. The ultimate goal is to develop robots that behave with the complexity of living beings so they can interact more realistically with actual animals.

The secret is imprinting. Around 5 hours after they hatch, chicks begin to grow deeply attached to their mother. It’s such a strong instinct that if something, anything, moves, chances are a chick will form a bond with it. That’s why farmers—at least the small-scale ones—go out of their way to bond themselves to their birds. It makes the critters more managable.

And researchers can use imprinting to trick chicks into falling in love with robots. First they put the chicks in little plexiglass boxes from which they watch PoulBot scoot back and forth. All the while the robot calls out, though not with pre-recorded hen sounds. “If you start to emit real sound, you have to understand what those real sounds mean, and you have to translate chicken language,” says Université Paris Diderot physicist José Halloy, co-author of a new paper detailing the process. So the robot makes sounds that are chicken-ish, which helps the creatures bond to it.

Now the chicks are ready to meet their adopted mother face-to-face in a little pen. PoulBot isn’t programmed to act like a classical chicken mom, though. Instead, it leads the chicks to a particular spot in the pen, constantly monitoring who’s following. “If someone is missing you have to go back and fetch them, stimulate the chicks to follow, and then go back to the target,” says Halloy.

An overhead camera tracks each chick, and PoulBot has a special covering around its base so the animals don’t get their toes squished in the tracks. (Tracks instead of wheels, by the way, so the works don’t get gunked up with chick crap. It’s a tank on a battlefield of excrement.) The researchers also programmed PoulBot with a behavior called avoid-running-over-chick. "If a chick has fallen asleep during the experiment and hence lies below the level of the sensors,” they write in their paper, they don't want it to be in danger. PoulBot must not kill its fuzzy babies! So it uses accelerometer readings to tell if it’s no longer on flat ground, and will back up accordingly. “The results are not very interesting if you destroy half of your animals during your experiments,” says computer engineer and study co-author Alexey Gribovskiy of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

Now, while the majority of chicks imprint on the robot, they imprint on it to different degrees, which is important because that influences the dynamics of the group. “Obviously if you have only strongly imprinted chicks, you get the military march,” says Halloy. “Everybody follows the leader. If you have a bunch of mixed weakly imprinted and strongly imprinted and in-between chicks, you have some kind of organized chaos there.”

Some chicks follow the robot and some chicks follow other chicks, creating a dynamic mob that’s tracked by the overhead camera. Algorithms even calculate their speed and acceleration, classifying every chick by how it’s behaving. This tells the researchers not only how well the robot is indoctrinating the subjects, but how chicks can vary in their acceptance of a fake mother.

Now, developing animal behavior models to power robots is hard. I can’t do it, and you probably can’t do it. “It takes a PhD to build a model, which means four years of work,” says Halloy. The PoulBot speeds that process up. “The idea was to use robots and artificial intelligence to automate as much as possible to produce a model faster,” Halloy adds. That’s right—postdocs aren't safe from automation either.

Unravel the intricacies of flocking behavior and figure out what cues a robot needs to send to get an animal to accept it as a mother, and you can build robots that get animals to do certain tasks. “I could imagine scenarios where robots act to lead animals to a food source or a medical treatment area without stressing them,” says ecologist and biomimetic roboticist David Bierbach, who wasn’t involved in the research.

The shepherds on the farms of the future, then, may well be robots. Robots on tracks, not wheels, of course.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

The Everlasting (and Still Growing) Appeal of Dragon Ball

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Talk about Dragon Ball long enough, and you're bound to hear a joke about shirtless men screaming at each other while their hair gets inexplicably sharper. In much of the popular imagination, the franchise evokes thoughts of a kids' anime show in which animated characters yell and power up and flex for several episodes in a row, an endless prelude to actual fighting. Nevertheless, in 2019—35 years after the original manga, written and drawn by Akira Toriyama, premiered in Japan—Dragon Ball is a sensation.

The story of Goku, a boy with a tail looking to grow stronger, and Bulma, a genius girl seeking wish-granting orbs, has long grown into an international pop cultural juggernaut, but almost two decades after its original animated run came to its completion in the United States and Japan, Dragon Ball is having a moment. Last year, the finale of the newest Dragon Ball anime, Dragon Ball Super, drew record audiences, filling stadiums in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America drawing tens of thousands of people. Dragon Ball FighterZ, one of the best games of last year, became the hottest new title on the competitive fighting-game circuit. And this week a new feature film, Dragon Ball Super: Broly, earned over $7 million dollars on its first day in theaters—an astronomical number for a limited-run anime film.

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"It is very surprising to me," says Chris Sabat, a Texas-based voice actor and producer who has voiced Vegeta, Goku's rival, in just about every piece of Dragon Ball media created since the mid-’90s. "I honestly thought this was going to be a job that lasted me a year or something like that. I had no clue." Instead, it's lasted him about 20, with no signs of slowing down now. But while Sabat's work for a long period was either redubbing remastered versions of the anime or rehashing the same old stories in a dozen or so mid-budget videogames, now he's working on entirely new material, with a higher budget and more attention than ever before.

Why now? How did a niche childhood sensation—Sabat says he used to describe it to confused parents as "Pokemon but with fighting"—become a resurgent cultural juggernaut?

Partially, it's just the right demographic at the right time. "Dragon Ball was first sold as a kid's show, because back in 1998 the networks still believed that cartoons were for children," Sabat says. But, he continues, those kids are now the same age as the franchise's very first fans: "The people who loved Dragon Ball in Japan in 1998 and 2000 were people of all ages, particularly people in their twenties who were reading these manga on the subway on their way to work."

In other words, Dragon Ball has managed to keep pace with its audience. Quickly after Akira Toriyama began the manga, which was at first a madcap adaptation of Journey to the West, the narrative started to shift, emphasizing fighting and superhuman strength over hijinks. After a significant time jump near the middle of the manga's run, hero Son Goku was revealed to be not a monkey boy but in fact a member of a race of superpowered alien warriors—because sure, why not?

From there, the series leaned heavily into melodrama and impossible action, a direction that it's only doubled down on during its current revival, a renaissance that began with the 2013 movie Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods. From a specific, goofy adventure story, Dragon Ball has grown into something more totemic and straightforward, something almost like professional wrestling: A collection of stories about larger-than-life heroes and villains brawling, with stakes that are both impossibly high and completely absent. The good guys will win and the bad guys will bleed; justice meted by cartoon fists and psychic energy beams.

But there's another reason for the Dragon Ball resurgence, too, and that's just that it's been so damn good lately. When the original Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z anime series were created, they were modest operations, with limited budgets, questionable dubbing, and no direct involvement from Akira Toriyama himself, who was busy writing the manga. Now, the new movies and the Dragon Ball Super anime (which, while discontinued, is rumored to return) are all being created with Toriyama's direct involvement and an increased focus on the value of good animation. While Super, as any fan will tell you, has its rough moments in terms of visual quality, moments late in the series are incredibly visually compelling, and Dragon Ball Super: Broly is the best the franchise has ever looked.

The truth is, the detractors joking about men screaming and flexing weren't necessarily wrong. The original anime is packed full of filler and repeated animations to save money and buy time for Toriyama to write more of the manga, leading to fight scenes that are questionably paced and not nearly as visually compelling as they should be. Recent Dragon Ball media, particularly the Broly movie, works hard to correct this, and in the process captures the power that fans' imaginations have always imbued Dragon Ball with. This is vibrant, fast, world-destroying heroic conflict, with each moment rendered in vivid color and with striking visual flair. Dragon Ball as it's always deserved to be.

Dragon Ball Super: Broly, then, is a culmination of years of slow building and at least a year of popular resurgence. And it might be, pound for pound, the best piece of Dragon Ball animation ever produced. The plot could be stronger, and the series has more iconic moments in its history, but it's never looked or sounded so good. It's never had the style it has here, with a new type of animation helmed by animator Naohiro Shintani, designed to give the series a more hand-drawn look drawn directly from the manga. Every frame is graceful and striking. It's one of the most lushly animated films I've ever seen.

If this resurgence continues, maybe the cliché conversations about Dragon Ball will change. Instead of evoking what the series used to be at its worst, maybe they'll more quickly reference the best. Something big and goofy and violent, and also kind of beautiful. Just the way some of us have always wanted it to be.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Real Heroes Have the Guts to Admit They're Wrong

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

What do you do when you discover you’re wrong? That’s a conundrum Daniel Bolnick recently faced. He’s an evolutionary biologist, and in 2009 he published a paper with a cool finding: Fish with different diets have quite different body types. Biologists had suspected this for years, but Bolnick offered strong confirmation by collecting tons of data and plotting it on a chart for all to see. Science for the win!

The problem was, he’d made a huge blunder. When a colleague tried to replicate Bolnick’s analysis in 2016, he couldn’t. Bolnick investigated his original work and, in a horrified instant, recognized his mistake: a single miswritten line of computer code. “I’d totally messed up,” he realized.

But here’s the thing: Bolnick immediately owned up to it. He contacted the publisher, which on November 16, 2016, retracted the paper. Bolnick was mortified. But, he tells me, it was the right thing to do.

Why do I recount this story? Because I think society ought to give Bolnick some sort of a prize. We need moral examples of people who can admit when they’re wrong. We need more Heroes of Retraction.

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Right now society has an epidemic of the opposite: too many people with a bulldog unwillingness to admit when they’re factually wrong. Politicians are shown evidence that climate change is caused by human activity but still deny our role. Trump fans are confronted with near-daily examples of his lies but continue to believe him. Minnesotans have plenty of proof that vaccines don’t cause autism but forgo shots and end up sparking a measles outbreak.

“Never underestimate the power of confirmation bias,” says Carol Tavris, a social psychologist and coauthor of Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me). As Tavris notes, one reason we can’t admit we have the facts wrong is that it’s too painful to our self-conception as smart, right-thinking people—or to our political tribal identity. So when we get information that belies this image, we simply ignore it. It’s incredibly hard, she writes, to “break out of the cocoon of self-justification.”

That’s why we need moral exemplars. If we want to fight the power of self-delusion, we need tales of honesty. We should find and loudly laud the awesome folks who have done the painful work of admitting error. In other words, we need more Bolnicks.

Science, it turns out, is an excellent place to find such people. After all, the scientific method requires you to recognize when you’re wrong—to do so happily, in fact.

Granted, I don’t want to be too starry-eyed about science. The “replication crisis” still rages. There are plenty of academics who, when their experimental results are cast into doubt, dig in their heels and insist all is well. (And cases of outright fakery and fraud can make scholars less likely to admit their sin, as Ivan Oransky, the cofounder of the Retraction Watch blog, notes.) Professional vanity is powerful, and a hot paper gets a TED talk.

Still, the scientific lodestar still shines. Bolnick isn’t alone in his Boy Scout–like rectitude. In the past year alone, mathematicians have pulled papers when they’ve learned their proofs don’t hold and economists have retracted work after finding they’d misclassified their data. The Harvard stem-cell biologist Douglas Melton had a hit 2013 paper that got cited hundreds of times—but when colleagues couldn’t replicate the finding, he yanked it.

Fear of humiliation is a strong deterrent to facing error. But admitting you’re mistaken can actually bolster your cred. “I got such a positive response,” Bolnick told me. “On Twitter and on blog posts, people were saying, ‘Yeah, you outed yourself, and that’s fine!’” There’s a lesson there for all of us.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

That Viral Video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Dancing Is a Meta-Meme

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Thursday marked one of the most important days in congressional history for diversity. A record 102 women took office, 35 whom were newly-elected. They include Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the first Muslim women to serve in the House of Representatives, and Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids, the first Native American women. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now the youngest congresswoman in history, also took the oath of office. The night before her swearing-in, a nearly decade-old clip of the 29-year-old began to resurface online, where she and other students dance to Phoenix’s then-hit song “Lisztomania.” It was uploaded to YouTube the year before she graduated from Boston University in 2011.

There’s nothing remotely scandalous about the video, but that hasn’t stopped right-wing Twitter users from attempting to weaponize it against Ocasio-Cortez, who is a Democratic Socialist. The New York representative is likely used to these types of attacks. Since winning her election in November, Ocasio-Cortez has been criticized for the clothes she wears, her bank balance, her modest childhood home, and now, apparently, for dancing in college.

But the reason Ocasio-Cortez’ detractors were able to find the video on the internet in the first place is far more interesting than their criticism. The story demonstrates how copyright law is often used to squash free expression on the internet—and sometimes even potentially erase a video featuring a future member of Congress.

The Ocasio-Cortez “Lisztomania” video was inspired by a separate YouTube clip uploaded in March 2009 by a woman named Sarah Newhouse (it has since been deleted; more on that later). Newhouse mixed the song with parts of iconic dancing scenes from 1980s “Brat Pack” movies like The Breakfast Club, which originally featured Karla DeVito’s “We Are Not Alone,” and Pretty in Pink starring Molly Ringwald and Jon Cryer.

“The video itself came as a product of being a creative type with too much time on my hands, having then-recently lost my job, spending time just editing goofy nonsensical videos to keep myself sane,” Newhouse said in a Twitter direct message. “I was also a fan of using YouTube Doubler to play with video and audio, and that combined with Phoenix's then-new album making me dance Molly Ringwald-style in my kitchen.”

Newhouse’s video quickly snowballed into a meme. Dozens of copycat clips were uploaded to YouTube, all featuring people doing The Breakfast Club dance to “Lisztomania,” including Ocasio-Cortez at Boston University. One of the earliest videos is from a group of dancers who filmed themselves on a roof in Brooklyn; their take was uploaded only several months after the original. According to Newhouse, Phoenix thought the video and subsequent mashups were great. “Oh, they loved it, they offered to have me come to a show and meetup, but they weren't playing anywhere nearby at the time, so that never happened,” she said.

This is where the copyright law portion of the story begins, which was first brought to WIRED’s attention by Parker Higgins. Back in 2013, Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and longtime copyright reform activist, uploaded a video to YouTube of a talk he had given at a Creative Commons event two years prior. It featured several of the Breakfast Club/Phoenix mashups, to help illustrate the point that “remixing” is an important part of culture.

Liberation Music, Phoenix’s record label, soon served Lessig with a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, demanding the video be taken down for violating its copyright for “Lisztomania.” Lessig quickly filed a DMCA counter-notice, arguing the his video constitutes “fair use,” since the song was excerpted for educational purposes—ironically to teach people about why copyright laws can stand in the way of cultural production. (This wasn’t even the first time a company had gone after the “Lisztomania” mashups. In 2010, Julian Sanchez uploaded a video to YouTube about the cultural importance of “remix culture,” which also featured the Brat Pack/Phoenix mashups. It also received a takedown request.)

Liberation Music threatened to sue Lessig, were he not to retract his counter-notice within 72 hours. Lessig then teamed up with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation to file another lawsuit, which Liberation Music settled for an undisclosed sum the next year. The record label also promised to adopt new policies that respect fair use. In this case, proponents of the freedom to remix, like Lessig and the EFF, won. But were Liberation Music to have gone after less copyright-savvy YouTube users, it may have been more successful in getting clips that featured “Lisztomania” removed. For instance, the video featuring Ocasio-Cortez may have been lost, erasing a small part of the story of an historic congressperson.

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The WIRED Guide to Memes

Similar DMCA takedown requests are regularly issued to YouTube users and those of other social media sites. Videogame companies have also issued DMCA takedowns against streamers, for instance. “The real danger of overzealous copyright enforcement isn't usually from targeted attempts to silence speech (although those happen to), it's from the Kafkaesque scattershot approach of just taking things down without caring about the consequences. The Lessig stuff definitely fell into that latter camp,” says Higgins, who worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation during the time of Lessig’s case and is now at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The problem also extends far beyond just YouTube mashups.

Copyright policy often polices the expression of underrepresented groups, says Higgins, making it more difficult for them to freely create art. For example, judges have previously hindered hip-hop musicians from sampling other music in their work, an integral feature of the genre. “For a decade or so, courts basically put forth an interpretation of copyright law that said this whole art form that was being created and shaped and enjoyed by black communities was basically illegal, and that there was no way to make it legal without getting permission from (largely white) artists and record label executives,” he explains. Three songs on the 1994 Notorious B.I.G. album Ready to Die no longer feature samples after two record labels won a lawsuit in 2006, for example.

Meanwhile, Newhouse, who created the original Breakfast Club/Phoenix mashup, says her entire YouTube account has since been deleted—for copyright infringement. “It was a three strikes rule, I got three copyright claims and poof!”

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

The Shrinking Building in Ant-Man and the Wasp Would Cause Massive Problems

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

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Maybe you are one of those humans that avoids all trailers because they spoil the movie too much. I am not one of those humans. Which is why I immediately watched a trailer that came out this week for the upcoming Marvel movie Ant-Man and the Wasp. Although I was a huge comic book fan growing up, I never really got into Ant-Man. But the first Ant-Man movie was better than expected—and now I'm looking forward to this sequel.

If you don't know about Ant-Man, I'll give you a quick overview. This superhero uses special technology that allows him to shrink to ant-size (or sometimes he can also get really big—as seen in Captain America: Civil War). He also has the ability to communicate with ants. Oh, and the technology used to change the size of Ant-Man can also be used to shrinkify or embigenate other objects.

In the trailer, we see Hank Pym (the creator of the size-changing technology) shrink a whole building and then roll it away on wheels. But what happens when you shrink a building? To answer that, we have to thinking about what shrinking actually does in the Marvle Universe. When an object shrinks, does its size get smaller but its mass stays constant? Perhaps the density of the object stays constant during the process—or maybe it does something weird like moving into other dimensions.

Really, the mechanics of shrinking is pretty tough to figure out. There's conflicting evidence from the first film: First, there is the case where Scott Lang (aka Paul Rudd aka Ant-Man) puts on the suit and shrinks. At one point, he falls onto the floor and cracks the tile, suggesting that he keeps the mass of a full-size human. Later, though, we see that Hank Pym has a tiny tank on his key chain—a real tank that was just reduced in size. But clearly, this tank couldn't have the same mass as a full size tank. Otherwise, how would he carry it around?

Whatever. I'm just going to go with the idea that the mass stays constant—and if I'm wrong, oh well. It's just a movie anyway.

Let's start with the full-sized building in this trailer. How big is it? What is the volume? What is the mass? Of course I am going to have to make some rough estimates, so I'll start with the size. Looking at the video, I can count 10 levels with windows. That makes it 10 stories with each story 4 meters tall, (roughly). That would put the building at a height of 40 meters. When the build shrinks down, it looks fairly cubical in shape. This would put both the length and width at 40 meters. The volume would be (40 m)3 = 64,000 m3.

Why do I even need the volume? Because I'm going to use it to estimate the mass.

I'm sure some civil engineer somewhere has a formula to calculate building mass, but I don't want to search for that. Instead, I can find the mass by first estimating the density (where density is defined as the mass divided by the volume). For me, it is easier to imagine the density of a building by pretending like it was floating in water. Suppose you took a building and put in the ocean (and the building doesn't leak). Would it float? Probably. How much of it would stick out above the water? I'm going to guess that 75 percent is above water—sort of like a big boat. From that, I get a density of 0.25 times the density of water or 250 kg/m3 (more details in this density example).

With the estimated volume and density, I get a building mass of 16 million kilograms. Again, this is just my guess.

Now let's shrink this building down to the size in the trailer. I'm going to assume it gets to a size that's just 0.5 meters on each side, putting the volume at 0.125 m3. If the mass is still 16 million kilograms, the tiny building would have a density of 512,000 kg/m3. Yes, that is huge. Just compare this to a high-density metal like tungsten (used in fishing weights). This has a listed density of 19,300 kg/m3. This building would have a density that is 26 times higher than tungsten.

But wait! There's more! What if you put this tiny and super massive building down on the ground with just two small rolling wheels, like Hank Pym does in the trailer? Let me calculate the pressure these wheels would exert on the road, where pressure is the force divided by the contact area. The size of the wheels is pretty tough to estimate—and it's even harder to get the contact area between the wheels and the ground. I'll just roughly estimate it (and guess on the large size). Let's say each wheel has a 1 cm22 contact area for a total of 2 cm2 or 0.0002 m2.

I know the force on the ground will be the weight of the building. This can be calculated by taking the mass and multiplying by the local gravitational constant of 9.8 Newtons per kilogram. Once I get this force, I just divide by the area to get a contact pressure of 3.14 x 109 Newtons per square meters, or 3.14 Gigapascals. Yes. That is huge. Let's compare this to the compressive strength of concrete at about 40 Megapascals. The compressive strength is the pressure a material can withstand before breaking. Clearly 3 Gigapascals is greater than 40 MPa. Heck, even granite has a compressive strength of 130 MPa.

If Hank wants to roll this building away so that no one will notice, he is going to have a problem. The wheels will leave behind a trail of destruction by breaking all the surfaces it rolls on. Or there is another option. Maybe the mass of the building gets smaller when it shrinks—but in that case, I don't have something fun to write about.

More Marvel Physics

  • Superheroes are really big on this shape-shifting stuff—but is the Incredible Hulk really as hulky as he looks in Thor: Ragnarok?

  • You can also have shape-shifting planets, like the weird non-spherical planet Sovereign in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Could that really work?

  • And for some super-nerdy density physics: Can you calculate the center of mass in Thor's hammer?

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Is It Possible to Find Love Without Dating Apps?

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

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Dating in 2018 can be a challenge. I'm sorry, let me rephrase: It suuuuuuuuccckkkkksssss.

Apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Grindr, and others are the dater's tools of choice , and yet hating them is the one thing we can all agree on these days. They're often more hazard than help, and the forced psychoanalysis of every picture and witty answer can shake even the most durable of confidences loose. Why am I not getting more matches? Why didn't they respond? But is it your fault, or the app's? Is it really possible to find true love with just your thumbs? I set out on a journey to find out, and it starts with defining love itself.

The heart of the matter is the heart itself. Like any muscle, it must be worked on to grow. And love for most people seems to emulate that—a laborious growing process. A symbiotic relationship where two people don't just grow together, but toward each other. But how do you decide on the person, the deciding factor of your success? I asked some of my friends that question and got varying answers: Someone that makes me laugh. Someone that's empathetic. Someone that gets me snacks. But how do you filter for that? Will Tinder ever have a checkbox for "level of snack-readiness?"

So if we agree that common interests and values are the types of things we're all looking for in relationships, how can we be expected to find them in an app that sorts for first-glance aesthetics and the ability to write one clever sentence about yourself? It's Romance Roulette. Your filters aren't set for love; they're set for lust, and their equation for it is faulty at best. Your best chance at not getting eliminated before you even start is to conform, in which case you arrive safely in the dating pool without any of the things that make you, you. Dating apps reward homogeneity, sifting everyone into two-dimensional profiles that look the same, sound the same, and in some cases, even algorithmically identify which picture is best to represent you for the largest possible audience.

Of course, people don't love each other for what makes them the same; they love them for what makes them unique. I wanted someone insatiable, someone whose eyes set ablaze when they talked about something important to them. I wanted someone who was a good friend, a motivator, someone who enjoyed being a blessing to those around them. I wanted someone to invest their love in me for exactly the things that make me different. For those looking for a simple standard, a dating app can provide you with a sea of able-bodied mates. I wanted more than a flat photo and a single sentence could provide. So I chose to swipe dating apps right off my homescreen.

Bye Bye, Bumble

Moving away from dating apps sounds liberating—and it is. You'll realize characteristics that only matter inside your phone screen—What picture is best of me? What's one sentence that describes me? Why am I not getting the matches I want?—have been worrying you way too much outside of it. If you try to game love, you can expect love to game you. Hookups and temporary flings can be easy to find on apps, but when deep connections keep evading you, it's not the app you question. It's yourself. It can chew on your confidence to the point where it's no longer raising your chances by widening the pool, it's hurting them by leaving you at half strength during the times that really matter.

But how does one even meet people without an app anymore? Approaching strangers in bars is harder than it's ever been; we leave our dating to our phones, and real life is spent inside the confines of our tightly knit friend circles. Anyone trying to date outside of their phone has the potential to come off, well, creepy.

The New Old Fashion

So to find old-school love I went old-school. I went speed dating for some face-to-face conversations, and it changed everything. I could gauge my interest within 30 seconds of talking to each person, and didn't have to make plans and text awkwardly all week just to get to there. They didn't have to tell me through a text they were passionate, I could see it. I didn't have to endure the difficult work of predicting if they would make me double over laughing; it either happened or it didn't. But—maybe even more importantly—it was a better shot for me.

There were no filters—and therefore no excuses—they were actually getting me. My personality, my humor, my empathy, even my snack-readiness, with no thumb-crafting involved. We know humans crave connection—real, deep, meaningful connection. Yet it's difficult to find that depth over text; it happens with body language. It happens with the dance and tempo of real conversation. The chemistry isn't very complicated if the ingredients never touch.

I went on to take a boxing class, and joined a new gym. I joined a social kickball team. I went to concerts of my favorite artists. I swapped my swipe for a tap into all the social events the internet could offer. Now instead of conforming, I formed it to me. I filtered for the things I liked doing, and indirectly filtered for the types of people I would meet. Add to that the kicker: When I showed up to the online dates I wasn't interested in, I had wasted a night. But if I didn't meet someone while my favorite musician bathed me in a searing guitar solo? It's a win-win. It's not that it's impossible to find love on dating apps—it certainly isn't. But it is a brute force trial and error approach. Instead of taking a route chosen for me, I considered my strengths and chose something fitted to them. For some, dating apps will widen the pool and lead to success. For others, like me, you might be better off on the road not taken. I may not have found true love just yet, but I'm enjoying the journey a helluva lot more.

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Oh Hey, Don't Steal Reviews, and the Rest of This Week in Games

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Let's get this out of the way: A lot of norms were disrupted in the videogame industry this week. There was news of a writer at a top gaming site allegedly plagiarizing reviews, and also reports that the Chinese gaming market is having troubles. Oh, and Diablo III is making the leap to the Nintendo Switch. Up is down, down is up, and a lot of things are out of whack. So let's expect the unexpected and get right to it.

PSA: Do Not Plagiarize Your Game Reviews. Seriously. Don't.

The journalistic side of the gaming industry was positively rocked this week with the news that Filip Miucin, a now very former editor at IGN, one of the biggest gaming sites in the world, allegedly plagiarized a significant amount of his work for the site. The similarities between Miucin's writing and that of others was discovered after a YouTuber posted a video entitled, "IGN Copied my Dead Cells Review: What do I do?" Once the information hit the internet, IGN investigated the matter, removed Miucin's review, and promptly parted ways with him.

It didn't end with the Dead Cells review, though. Further investigations found other similarities between Miucin's work and that on other sites. There are some examples on Kotaku, along with more context on the case. It's possible a plagiarism scandal like this has never hit games, and it served as a reminder the industry needs more mechanisms in the hiring and editing processes to root them out.

The Chinese Game Market Is Having Some Problems Right Now

News broke this week that the Chinese game market is essentially at a stand-still thanks to regulatory shakeups with the agencies responsible for granting licenses to new games. How'd this happen? Basically, every game released in China has to pass through regulatory bodies before it can be released. (This makes it a tough place for foreign developers who want to tap the country's huge market but always run the risk of getting rejected, especially since foreign games receive heavy scrutiny.) And in the last four months, as reported by the South China Morning Post, the approval of licenses in China has completely stopped, affecting all games on all platforms. The situation is too dense to properly explain in detail here, but it seems that instability in the regulatory agencies, along with concerns about gambling-esque mechanics like loot boxes and other potentially objectionable content, is motivating the freeze. Stay tuned.

Diablo III Is the Latest Game to Make the Leap to the Nintendo Switch

You won't need to hack your Switch to hack and slash (hehehehehe), because Diablo III, the latest in Blizzard's series of fantasy-based action/adventure games. First released in 2012, the game has seen a number of re-releases, expansions, and updates, giving it a pretty long lifespan. And in the grand tradition of Hey, why don't we put that on the Nintendo Switch? they're putting it on the Nintendo Switch.

Naturally, there will be exclusive Nintendo-ified goodies within. Ever wanted to fight the god of all demons as Ganondorf? Now's your chance.

Recommendation of the Week: Doom (2016)

Recently, Bethesda announced Doom: Eternal, the sequel to id's inventive reboot of the epochal shooter franchise, and it's convinced me to spend some time revisiting it. And, frankly, it's still stunning. What gets me the most, on this particular playthrough, is how much personality there is in every little moment. The game has a distinct set of attitudes and aesthetics, epitomized in the quietly mocking, rebellious and wrathful silent hero. Even some of the best games skate by with barely half as much attention to tone and mood as this title. It's a little unfair, really.

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Nintendo Labo Gets a Cheap VR Kit

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

Good morning, friends, and welcome to another edition of Replay. This week's videogame news includes a, um, battle royale between Fortnite and Apex Legends, another weird gaffe by Steam, and Nintendo sneaking a big surprise into an unassuming package. Press Start now.

Nintendo's Using Its DIY Cardboard Platform to Get Into VR

Remember Nintendo Labo? The cardboard thing, where you could build little models and robots and stuff and animate them with the Switch? It was part Lego robotics kit, part mini-game generator, and it was a fascinating experiment on the part of Nintendo. It was pretty kid-friendly, to boot! Well, now it's gonna do VR. The main VR kit will cost $80 and will feature VR goggles as well as several cardboard kits to build, while a $40 set will feature the goggles with only one kit, a blaster.

It's an interesting mixed-media approach to VR, the basic tech of a Google Cardboard merged with fully meatspace models that attach to the goggles and make them a bit more spatially vibrant for the kids to latch onto. As Nintendo's first foray into VR since the Virtual Boy, this is definitely a surprise. Testing the waters, maybe? We'll see if Nintendo's interest in VR continues into the future. But if not, at least we've got a neat cardboard laser out of the deal.

Fortnite Has Finally Been Pushed From Its Twitch Throne

For the past 11 months, Fortnite was the most-watched game on Twitch, which is one of the best barometers of a game's success the internet has to offer. If it's being watched, it's being talked about, written about, and just about everything else. A watched game is a big game. And for almost a year, Fortnite was easily the biggest.

Is Fortnite still the biggest game in general? It's hard to say for sure, but one thing is certain: It's no longer the most watched game on Twitch. Last month, that honor went to Apex Legends, the hottest new battle royale on the block. Will Apex Legends be able to keep up that momentum? Only time, and Twitch views, will tell.

Steam Blocks a Pretty Upsetting Game for a Pretty Flimsy Reason

Big ol' content warning for this one, folks. OK? OK.

So Steam, as we know, has questionable moderation policies, as exemplified by the game Rape Day, a real title that its developers attempted to release on the platform. The game, if it can be called that, is a visual novel in which you commit terrible acts of violence against women. Steam, a few days after Rape Day went viral for its untold horrors, announced the service would not be allowing it on the store. That seems good, right? Well, read on. "Much of our policy around what we distribute is, and must be, reactionary—we simply have to wait and see what comes to us via Steam Direct," Valve said in a statement. "We then have to make a judgment call about any risk it puts to Valve, our developer partners, or our customers. After significant fact-finding and discussion, we think Rape Day poses unknown costs and risks and therefore won't be on Steam."

Which, OK, cool. But a couple of things. First, that's the reasoning? It might put your bottom line at risk? That's a weak reason to remove a game from the store, when "because it's about really upsetting things for no good reason" is right there. That's not to say I want Steam to be moralizing on its storefront, but—and this is my second thing—it seems as though the company has no standards outside of keeping an eye on what people are most upset about, which is no way to run a market that sells pieces of interactive expression. I'm not sure how to curate a marketplace like Steam, but I'm fairly certain this is not it.

Recommendation of the Week: Black Mesa on PC

Half-Life is one of the greatest games of all time, a classic first-person shooter that set the mold for what those games could be. It's also, well, pretty old, and maybe you want to satisfy that Half-Life craving but with a more modern twist. For that, you gotta try Black Mesa, a full remake of the game created by fans turned creators in the newest version of the Source engine. It's impressive, works to fix some of the biggest problems the original had, and is almost—very nearly—entirely finished. Check it out.

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Does Your Doctor Need a Voice Assistant?

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

“Siri, where is the nearest Starbucks?”

“Alexa, order me an Uber.”

“Suki, let’s get Mr. Jones a two-week run of clarithromycin and schedule him back here for a follow-up in two weeks.”

Doesn’t sound that crazy, does it? For years, voice assistants have been changing the way people shop, get around, and manage their home entertainment systems. Now they’re starting to show up someplace even a little more personal: the doctor’s office. The goal isn’t to replace physicians with sentient speakers. Quite the opposite. Drowning in a sea of e-paperwork, docs are quitting, retiring, and scaling back hours in droves. By helping them spend more time listening to patients and less time typing into electronic health records, voice assistants aim to keep physicians from getting burned out.

It’s a problem that started when doctors switched from handwritten records to electronic ones. Health care organizations have tried more manual fixes—human scribes either in the exam room or outsourced to Asia and dictation tools that can only convert text verbatim. But these new assistants—you’ll meet Suki in a sec—go one step further. Equipped with advanced artificial intelligence and natural language processing algorithms, all a doc has to do is ask them to listen. From there they’ll parse the conversation, structure it into medical and billing lingo, and insert it cleanly into an EHR.

“We must reduce the burden on clinicians,” says John Halamka, chief information officer at Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.1 He’s been conducting extensive early research around how Alexa might be used in a hospital, to help patients locate their care team or request additional services, for example. “Ambient listening—the notion that technologies like Alexa and Siri turn clinician speech and clinician-patient conversations into medical records—is a key strategy.”

Alexa and Siri might be the best known voice assistants, but they’re not the first ones doctors are trusting with their patients. While Amazon and Apple are rumored to be working on voice applications for health care, so far they’re still piloting potential use cases with hospitals and long-term care facilities. They don’t yet have any HIPAA-compliant products on the market.

Not so for Sopris Health, a Denver-based health intelligence company that launched today after starting to roll out its app at the beginning of the year. You don’t summon a name to turn it on, just tap it when you want it to start listening. It automatically converts the audio to free text, then turns that speech into a doctor’s note, thanks to hours of training data from actual doctors’ visits. So “I think I’d like to see you again if things aren’t feeling better within a few days,” becomes “Schedule three-day follow-up.” Or, “We’re going to need to get an MRI of that left knee to figure out what’s going on in there” becomes “Order left knee MRI.”

Much in the same way that Google’s neural networks learned that cats and dogs are different animals that people like to keep as pets, Sopris’ algorithms learned to use context clues to pull out the medically actionable parts of a conversation. A cardinal number becomes an interesting feature—maybe it’s a calendar date or the dose of a medication. The words around it help the app decide to schedule a follow-up or order a prescription. And because it integrates directly with the EHR vendor, no separate orders or emails or phone calls are necessary: You just hit a button.

By doing so, physicians assume responsibility (and liability) that everything in it is correct. Which might sound like a leap of faith, but Sopris CEO and co-founder Patrick Leonard says is actually a positive feature. “What’s really cool is it’s changing physician behavior in a good way,” he says. “The app forces them to practice active listening, double-checking with patients that they got everything right. Which they actually have time for, now that they’re not sitting at a computer for six hours a day.” And if the assistant gets anything off, doctors can manually overwrite it.

Sopris plans to eventually move beyond orthopedics into other specialties; it’s currently in talks with a large children’s hospital about creating a pediatrics module. Another clinical voice company also launching today has even bigger plans. With $20 million in funding and stacked with engineers from Google and Apple, Redwood City-based Suki unveiled its AI-powered digital voice assistant this morning. Former Googler Punit Soni founded the company a year ago (it was originally called Robin), and has since launched a dozen pilots in internal medicine, ophthalmology, orthopedics, and plastic surgery practices in California and Georgia. Preliminary results from the company show Suki cuts physician paperwork by 60 percent.

For now, the app still needs some hand-holding. You have to say “Suki, this patient is 67 years old,” and “Suki, we need to order a blood test.” That’s because Soni’s team gave it just enough seed data to survive. But eventually, with enough data flowing through its neural nets, doctors will be able to say simply, “Suki, pay attention.” And then it’s on to tackling bigger problems.

“We’re starting with documentation, but then we can apply the same methods to billing and coding, and other higher order architectures,” says Soni. Things like prescription management, and maybe even decision support—an algorithm whispering hints in your doctor’s ear about a care plan. “I think it’s unreasonable to imagine that 10 years from now doctors will still be using clunky 1990s-style UI to take care of patients,” says Soni.

The health care system has long been impervious to this kind of disruption. But as deep learning gets even better, these kinds of assistants begin to look more plausible. The space is filling up rapidly; last year a third startup, SayKara, helmed by former Amazon engineers, announced it was developing its own Alexa for health care. Others are sure to follow. And that’s when lawyers focused on privacy and cybersecurity start to get concerned. “When you’re talking about AI in the health care space, the appetite to capture more and more data becomes insatiable,” says Aaron Tantleff, a partner at Foley and Lardner law firm in Chicago. He points out that one of HIPAA’S key privacy protections is a rule that says businesses should only collect the minimal amount of information that is necessary. It’s a provision that is fundamentally at odds with data-hungry neural networks.

Voice assistants also raise questions about unauthorized disclosures in the exam room. “We already know these listening devices can get hacked and allow third parties to record conversations,” says Tantleff. “In a medical setting, there’s a very different level of risk. What are companies doing to prevent that from happening?”

Both Suki and Sopris recognize the significant privacy and security considerations involved with their products. The companies encrypt audio on the device, and in between transit to HIPAA-compliant clouds where their algorithms run. And both apps require a prompt from someone in the room to enable listening. Plus patients have to opt-in; docs can’t just record people who don’t consent. The potential benefit to physicians seems clear. The tradeoff for patients less so. Then again, if you want to keep your doctor around for the long haul, maybe it’s worth asking, “Suki, can you keep my data safe?”

1 Disclosure: Halamka was also formerly a member of Suki's advisory board

The Algorithm Will See You Now

  • When time is brain, AI can help stroke patients get better care, faster.

  • Google has developed software that can detect early signs of diabetes-related eye problems, and is testing it in eye hospitals in India.

  • To keep pace with all the new ideas for using computers and machine learning in health care, the Food and Drug Administration had to create a new team of digital health experts.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES