Charles Arthur

. Taking a class in stained-glass making, he discovered that the teacher’s handout with “useful web links” didn’t tally with Google’s results at all. “I realised that there were millions of people who knew the right list of search terms and would make a better engine than Google.”

Then he noticed growing amounts of junk sites in Google results – pushed there by experts who had gamed the giant’s algorithms. He decided that by hooking into web services such as Wikipedia, Yelp and Qype, he could get focused answers cheaply. By using a combination of those services and crowdsourced links, he built the site’s first search index.

Of the privacy angle, he says: “I kind of backed into that.” It wasn’t a political decision, but a personal one. “It’s hard to define my politics. I take every issue seriously and come to my own conclusion. I don’t really feel like I belong to any political party in the US … I guess I’m more on the liberal side.”

The reason he decided not to store search data was because it reveals so much about us. In 2005, AOL accidentally released details of searches made by 650,000 of its users via Google; reporters from the New York Times were able to use the information to identify one of the users: a 62-year-old woman in Georgia. Nowadays Google would also have your IP address (indicating your ISP and perhaps precise location) and, if you were logged in, all your previous search history. If you logged in to use Google on your mobile, it would have your location history too.

Having decided that searching is intimately personal, he deduced that governments would want to get hold of search data. “I looked at the search fiascos such as the AOL data release, and decided that government requests were real and would be inevitable, and that search engines and content companies would be handing over that data [to government] in increasing amounts.”

Greg Kable:

The new i3 is also the first road-going BMW model to be based around an all-carbon-fiber body. For development, BMW forged a working relationship with SGL Carbon and established a state-of-the-art carbon-fiber weaving and curing facility at its Landshut factory in Germany, where the new car’s structure is made.

BMW says using carbon fiber has helped achieve a low (for an electric car) 2,635-pound curb weight. This helps the car’s performance potential because BMW could use a smaller-capacity battery than would have been possible with a more conventional steel monocoque construction.

Stylistically, the production i3 differs little from the most-recent concept. It is a modern-looking car boasting proportions like those of the Mercedes-Benz B-class but with a more contemporary look. With no B-pillars, the car uses front-hinged suicide doors, allowing excellent access to the rear seat.

Power comes from an electric motor mounted low in the rear axle — a position allowing BMW to devote the space under the hood to improved crashworthiness. The synchronous motor is produced in-house at BMW’s Munich engine plant; the company says it weighs just 287 pounds and produces 168 hp. As with all electric cars, the torque is what counts, and the motor’s 184 lb-ft is 5 lb-ft more than what the Mini Cooper S’ 1.6-liter four-cylinder turbo produces. The i3 is rear-wheel drive with a single-ratio gearbox offering three driving modes: comfort, ECO-PRO and ECO-PRO+.

Elisabeth Rosenthal:

But America’s love affair with its vehicles seems to be cooling. When adjusted for population growth, the number of miles driven in the United States peaked in 2005 and dropped steadily thereafter, according to an analysis by Doug Short of Advisor Perspectives, an investment research company. As of April 2013, the number of miles driven per person was nearly 9 percent below the peak and equal to where the country was in January 1995. Part of the explanation certainly lies in the recession, because cash-strapped Americans could not afford new cars, and the unemployed weren’t going to work anyway. But by many measures the decrease in driving preceded the downturn and appears to be persisting now that recovery is under way. The next few years will be telling.

“What most intrigues me is that rates of car ownership per household and per person started to come down two to three years before the downturn,” said Michael Sivak, who studies the trend and who is a research professor at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. “I think that means something more fundamental is going on.”

If the pattern persists — and many sociologists believe it will — it will have beneficial implications for carbon emissions and the environment, since transportation is the second largest source of America’s emissions, just behind power plants. But it could have negative implications for the car industry. Indeed, companies like Ford and Mercedes are already rebranding themselves “mobility” companies with a broader product range beyond the personal vehicle.

“Different things are converging which suggest that we are witnessing a long-term cultural shift,” said Mimi Sheller, a sociology professor at Drexel University and director of its Mobilities Research and Policy Center. She cites various factors: the Internet makes telecommuting possible and allows people to feel more connected without driving to meet friends. The renewal of center cities has made the suburbs less appealing and has drawn empty nesters back in. Likewise the rise in cellphones and car-pooling apps has facilitated more flexible commuting arrangements, including the evolution of shared van services for getting to work.

With all these changes, people who stopped car commuting as a result of the recession may find less reason to resume the habit.

Related: Federation of State PIRGS:

From World War II until just a few years ago, the number of miles driven annually on America’s roads steadily increased. Then, at the turn of the century, something changed: Americans began driving less. By 2011, the average American was driving 6 percent fewer miles per year than in 2004.

The trend away from driving has been led by young people. From 2001 and 2009, the average annual number of vehicle-miles traveled by young people (16 to 34-year-olds) decreased from 10,300 miles to 7,900 miles per capita – a drop of 23 percent. The trend away from steady growth in driving is likely to be long-lasting – even once the economy recovers. Young people are driving less for a host of reasons – higher gas prices, new licensing laws, improvements in technology that support alternative transportation, and changes in Generation Y’s values and preferences – all factors that are likely to have an impact for years to come.

Peter Eisler and Barbara Hansen:

“If we ever learn about it at all, it’s only after the fact, if something goes wrong and the patient sees another doctor, or if Medicare or someone else comes in retroactively and does an audit,” says Rosemary Gibson, an authority on patient safety and author of The Treatment Trap, a book on unnecessary care. “The system, in my opinion, doesn’t want to know about this problem.”

Academic studies have discovered high rates of unnecessary surgery, particularly in spinal and cardiac operations.

A 2011 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reviewed records for 112,000 patients who had an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD), a pacemaker-like device that corrects heartbeat irregularities. In 22.5% of the cases, researchers found no medical evidence to support installing the devices.

Another 2011 study, in the journal Surgical Neurology International, evaluated 274 patients with neck and back complaints over a one-year period: More than 17% had been told they needed surgery but had no neurological or radiographic findings that indicated an operation was necessary.

“I am seeing more and more patients who are told to have operations they don’t need,” says the spinal study’s author, Nancy Epstein, a neurosurgeon and chief of Neurosurgical Spine and Education at Winthrop University Hospital in Mineola, N.Y.

Steve Coll:

The most likely explanation is that President Obama never carefully discussed or specifically approved the E.U. bugging, and that no cabinet-level body ever reviewed, on the President’s behalf, the operation’s potential costs in the event of exposure. America’s post-September 11th national-security state has become so well financed, so divided into secret compartments, so technically capable, so self-perpetuating, and so captured by profit-seeking contractors bidding on the next big idea about big-data mining that intelligence leaders seem to have lost their facility to think independently. Who is deciding what spying projects matter most and why?

Bill Vlasic:

The engineers working on Honda’s new Acura MDX luxury sport utility vehicle were obsessed with giving customers more — more space in the rear seat, more fuel economy from a high-tech engine, and above, all, more apps, maps and connectivity.

But there was one feature they wanted less of: buttons.

In an effort to simplify the newest Honda vehicle, which went on sale in June, the product team was determined to streamline the instrument panel. For the new MDX model, more than 30 buttons have been eliminated. The change was emblematic of the challenge confronting automakers in the age of the connected car. How does a car company give customers the technology they crave without overwhelming them with complicated controls that can impair their ability to drive safely?

“We are trying to give our customers what they want in a way that’s going to be safe and make sense,” said Steven Feit, a senior Honda engineer on the project. “That’s the balance we are trying to get to.”

Ethan Zuckerman:

The NSA documents Edward Snowden leaked have sparked a debate within the US about surveillance. While Americans understood that the US government was likely intercepting telephone and social media data from terrorism suspects, it’s been an uncomfortable discovery that the US collected massive sets of email and telephone data from Americans and non-Americans who aren’t suspected of any crimes. These revelations add context to other discoveries of surveillance in post 9-11 America, including the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, which scans the outside of all paper mail sent in the US and stores it for later analysis. (The Smoking Gun reported on the program early last month – I hadn’t heard of it until the Times report today.)

The Obama administration and supporters have responded to criticism of these programs by assuring Americans that the information collected is “metadata”, information on who is talking to whom, not the substance of conversations. As Senator Dianne Feinstein put it, “This is just metadata. There is no content involved.” By analyzing the metadata, officials claim, they can identify potential suspects then seek judicial permission to access the content directly. Nothing to worry about. You’re not being spied on by your government – they’re just monitoring the metadata.

Tom Foremski:

In 2005, Mr Engelbart confided to me: “I sometimes feel that my work over the past 20 or so years has been a failure. I have not been able to get funding and I have not been able to engage anybody in a dialogue.”

Power to be people…

His funding was based on the use of large computers connected to personal workstations that looked very much like PCs, a computer architecture called time-sharing. But the microcomputer and its promise of being self-sufficient, unconnected to anything, was thought to be the future at the time. And the counter-culture with its hatred of “the Man” and centralized systems of power and oppression, rejected the time-sharing mainframe based computer architecture that underpinned the work of Mr. Engelbart and his colleagues. Big centralized systems were out.

The promise of the individual, power to the people, the ideals of self-sufficiency that ruled the counter-culture movement became enshrined in the promise of the stand-alone Personal Computer. It’s an example of how popular culture can affect something as seemingly distant and unconnected as computer architecture.

Associated Press:

Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday that “whoever fears their communication is being intercepted in any way should use services that don’t go through American servers.”
Friedrich says German officials are in touch with their U.S. counterparts “on all levels” and a delegation is scheduled to fly to Washington next week to discuss the claims that ordinary citizens and even European diplomats were being spied upon.

Bad for US Tech firms and political leaders to sell out on privacy. Big Government + Big Tech firms = Big Contract$. Not necessarily good for global business.

Slavoj Žižek:

In his early writings, Marx described the German situation as one in which the only answer to particular problems was the universal solution: global revolution. This is a succinct expression of the difference between a reformist and a revolutionary period: in a reformist period, global revolution remains a dream which, if it does anything, merely lends weight to attempts to change things locally; in a revolutionary period, it becomes clear that nothing will improve without radical global change. In this purely formal sense, 1990 was a revolutionary year: it was plain that partial reforms of the Communist states would not do the job and that a total break was needed to resolve even such everyday problems as making sure there was enough for people to eat.

Where do we stand today with respect to this difference? Are the problems and protests of the last few years signs of an approaching global crisis, or are they just minor obstacles that can be dealt with by means of local interventions? The most remarkable thing about the eruptions is that they are taking place not only, or even primarily, at the weak points in the system, but in places which were until now perceived as success stories. We know why people are protesting in Greece or Spain; but why is there trouble in such prosperous or fast-developing countries as Turkey, Sweden or Brazil? With hindsight, we might see the Khomeini revolution of 1979 as the original ‘trouble in paradise’, given that it happened in a country that was on the fast-track of pro-Western modernisation, and the West’s staunchest ally in the region. Maybe there is something wrong with our notion of paradise.