My story in this month’s Wired, on how technologically savvy Obama’s presidency can be, headed to the printer just before Christmas and came out online today. There were several developments on the Obama Web/technology front in the interim (although, for better or worse, not as many as I’d expected). The most significant was probably a non-happening: Obama has yet to name someone to his promised “federal chief technology officer” position. Steve Hamm at Business Week had the scoop last week that the choices have narrowed to Padmasree Warrior, CTO at Cisco, and Vivek Kundra, CTO of the District of Columbia. Outside of hearing good things about Kundra while reporting around DC last fall, I don’t have a take on the choice. The more salient point to me is that the decision to not name someone before taking office reveals something (not unexpected) about the relative priority of “rebooting the government” on Obama’s priority list.
Over at Change.gov, the transition team went through another round with the “Open for Questions” feature, with responses from press secretary Robert Gibbs. Participation was high: “103,512 people submitted 76,031 questions and cast 4,713,083 votes,” according to the Obama folks. But after moderating out the Blagojevich questions in the first round, the transition team chose this time to simply ignore the most popular question (about naming an independent investigator to look into possible Bush administration crimes), as noted by The Nation’s Ari Melber.
Posted at 4:30 pm | Comments Off | Filed under Articles, Politics, Technology, Wired |
Just in time for the inauguration, my latest feature for Wired — on whether and how President Obama will carry out his promises to reboot the federal government — is available online. The glossy version should be out sometime later this week or early next.
I’ll have more to write shortly here about what has happened vis-à-vis Obama’s digital strategies since the piece closed in December. First, however, a note of disclosure. Originally the piece contained a description of my own minimal participation in the campaign, part of a longer section on how Obama utilized tech to win the presidency. Eventually we decided that the role of tech in the campaign had been covered well elsewhere (most expertly by Jose Antonio Vargas at The Washington Post). So we focused the piece more on how Obama might use the same digital techniques to govern. The longer first person bit shrunk to the somewhat cryptic:
Those efforts were combined with massive database-crunching to identify potential voters who could be approached door-to-door by last-minute canvassers, myself included.
Posted at 2:09 pm | Comments Off | Filed under Disclosures, Politics, Recent stories, Technology, Wired |
My latest feature for Wired, “Law of the Jungle,” is out in the June issue. Seven months in the making, it’s the story of how an internationally renowned primatologist named Marc van Roosmalen went from being hailed as an environmental hero to being labeled Brazil’s foremost environmental criminal — sentenced to more than a dozen years in a dank prison in Manaus. Roosmalen, a Dutch-born researcher and naturalized Brazilian citizen, worked for a Brazilian government institute studying both the plants and primates of Amazon, and made a name for himself over the past two decades by discovering a half-dozen or more new species of large primates and other mammals. In an effort to link his science to conservation, he ran primate rehabilitation operations (including out of his backyard, in downtown Manaus), and set up non-governmental organization to raise money to buy and protect the habitats of his discoveries.
Along the way, however, he engendered a variety of enemies, some of them with the power to collapse his life’s work. The environmental authorities spent half a dozen years pursuing him for a shifting collection of environmental crimes that coalesced under one label: biopiracy. Released temporarily from prison, Roosmalen lives on the run in fear for his life. His final appeal is still to be decided.
Posted at 11:37 am | Comments Off | Filed under Environment/Energy, Recent stories, Wired |
In what’s becoming a yearly tradition, and roughly as safe a bet as UNC making the NCAA Tournament, Wired picked up it’s fifth straight nod as a finalist for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence.” A win would make it three out of the last four. One of the three issues the magazine submitted is the October one with the cellulosic ethanol story on the cover, giving me a sliver of a role in the nomination. That issue and its stupendous cover art also make an appearance in the Design category, a well-deserved nod for creative director Scott Dadich and the rest of the art folk. The magazine picked up a third nomination in the Magazine Section category.
The real fun of the NMA announcement each year, however, is looking up the nominated stories — in the Feature Writing, Essay, and Reporting categories — that I somehow missed. Last year’s Essay winner, “Russell and Mary” by Michael Donohue in the Georgia Review, was stunning.
If any piece was a sure-bet finalist this year, I’d have put money on John Anderson’s New Yorker story about poppy eradication in Afghanistan.
UPDATE: The Huffington Post tracked down links to all the nominated stories.
Posted at 12:40 pm | Comments Off | Filed under Wired |
A little late posting this, but I made a pair of appearances on National Public Radio recently, both times discussing the ins and outs of cellulosic ethanol based on my Wired piece. Both shows are archived for your listening pleasure:
First off, “Talk of the Nation Science Friday,” on October 5.
Followed by “Fair Game,” November 15.
Posted at 6:25 pm | Comments Off | Filed under Environment/Energy, Media appearances, Recent stories, Science, Wired |
My latest feature for Wired, about the science of cellulosic ethanol, begins its run on newsstands this week. The full story is also online, here. That’s a stalk of switchgrass adorning the cover, but the cellulosic ethanol described in the story actually involves making fuel from a wide variety of different plants—e.g. poplar trees, wood chips, other grasses. (Call it editorial discretion, but illustrating the cover line “THESE PLANTS ARE THE FUTURE OF ENERGY” might have cluttered things.)
The current method of producing ethanol (in the U.S.), from corn kernels, has been much castigated in the news lately. Although it seems a lot of the ethanol backlash is only tenuously based on actual research (especially when it comes to the energy balance of what goes into corn ethanol versus what you get out), there’s little doubt that corn ethanol has serious problems, enough to at least call its massive subsidies into question.
There is, however, another way of making ethanol, using a biological or chemical process to extract the cellulose, or “structural” part, from plants (rather than the starch, as in the case of corn ethanol, or the sugar, as in the case of the sugarcane ethanol in Brazil). Cellulosic ethanol usually makes the last couple paragraphs of ethanol stories; it’s declared to be some indeterminate number of years off, a biofuel holy grail awaiting a scientific breakthrough. There is general agreement that if we could make it, cellulosic fuel avoids most if not all of the problems of corn ethanol. Meanwhile, our federal energy targets (which are closer to hopes than targets, really) essentially assume that hundreds of millions of gallons cellulosic ethanol will soon be arriving. So, what gives? Post continued…
Posted at 3:43 pm | 1 Comment | Filed under Environment/Energy, Recent stories, Science, Technology, Wired |
“Cartographers manufacture power,” the eminent geographer J.B. Harley once wrote. So what happens to that power when cartography goes digital? That’s the question I endeavor to tackle in my latest feature for Wired, “The Whole Earth Catalogued.” It’s just out, in the July issue that features the Transformers movie on the cover (or alternately, if you for some reason elected to have your cover “personalized,” it features my story and you on the cover. It’s just like that booth at Six Flags!) In any case, the story is also online here.
As the online version’s headline implies (or possibly, overstates to the point of self-parody), it’s about how Google Maps and Google Earth are altering the way people relate to geography. Perhaps more interestingly, it’s about how thousands of people have taken the tools made by Google and other companies to become their own mapmakers.
Posted at 3:12 pm | 1 Comment | Filed under Recent stories, Technology, Wired |
Nathan Wolfe, the subject of my recent Wired profile, has a new paper out in Nature this week — co-authored with Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel — outlining some of the ideas from the story in greater scientific depth. The abstract is here. Some further coverage at MSNBC here.
Wolfe and Diamond, along with Claire Dunavan at UCLA, lay out a five-step process by which viruses jump from animals to humans and then become established in human populations. They also comb the scientific literature for 25 significant viruses, from hepatitis B to influenza A, to AIDS, to smallpox, and parse out some interesting conclusions about how some deadly viruses become endemic in humans, and others don’t.
Their main conclusion, however, is that we know very little about the origins of diseases that have shaped human history. They propose an “origins initiative” to study the beginnings of a dozen of the deadliest agents. They also describe Wolfe’s effort, described in depth in the Wired piece, to expland his bushmeat hunter-monitoring project in Cameroon into a global early monitoring system for new viruses jumping from wild animals to humans:
Most major human infectious diseases have animal origins, and we continue to be bombarded by novel animal pathogens. Yet there is no ongoing systematic global effort to monitor for pathogens emerging from animals to humans. Such an effort could help us to describe the diversity of microbial agents to which our species is exposed; to characterize animal pathogens that might threaten us in the future; and perhaps to detect and control a local human emergence before it has a chance to spread globally.
Posted at 12:05 pm | Comments Off | Filed under Science, Wired |
My latest piece for Wired, about UCLA biologist Nathan Wolfe‘s efforts to detect and study viruses as they cross over from wild animals to humans in remote corners of the world, is out in the May issue. It’s on newsstands now, and also available online here.
Some additional photos from my reporting trip to Cameroon are currently online at Wired, and I’ll be posting more here later today.
Also coming: Some additional material that didn’t make the story cut. In the meantime, comments welcome or drop me an email at eratliff[at]atavistic.org.
UPDATE: I’ve put some more photos up. Captions up coming shortly.
Posted at 10:02 am | 3 Comments | Filed under Environment/Energy, Photography, Recent stories, Science, Wired |
My latest feature in Wired is just out (on the newsstands at the moment; not yet online but I’ll post it when it is online here). It’s a profile of Numenta, a new company founded by Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm Pilot and Treo. Hawkins has been studying neuroscience on his own for the last couple of decades, and co-wrote a book about the fundamentals of intelligence and the human cortex, called On Intelligence, back in 2005. Numenta is his attempt to put the ideas from the book into practice, and build a new kind of artificial intelligence technology. It looks something like this:
Make sense? Well, hopefully the story explains in a somewhat intelligible fashion. I’m hoping to elaborate on a few things in the article here over the next week — there are some tricky issues in discussing any technology at such an early stage — but in the meantime feel free to offer opinions in the comments, or send me an email at the address to the right.
Posted at 4:46 pm | 5 Comments | Filed under Recent stories, Technology, Wired |
