Tech 9: Stories From the Week You Need To Read Right Now

Image via Complex Original

For years Facebook has tried to better understand the secret patterns of human behavior by collecting data on human behavior. In a story for Wired this week, Daniela Hernandez reports on one new experimental idea sprung from that effort devised by Lars Backstrom from Facebook's News Feed engineering team. In trying to better guess which posts should be given priority in assembling a person's News Feed, Backstrom and his team built an algorithm that can guess who a person is most likely to form a romantic relationship with, and also predict how long that relationship will last. Consider it an elaborate ruse to advertise relationship counseling to you.

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This week, Vice reports on a Total Recall-like memory wiping process, but instead of making a super hero agent forget about his former life, this new pharmaceutical will help disrupt the memory response addicts form when they get high. The research is led by Courtney Miller of the Scripps Research Institute and is intended to help people just released from rehab, who have to live on their own while surviving all of the powerful memories of wiping away their problems with another dosing. "The process of forming drug-associated memories seems to happen really fast, so we put a drug in that disrupts that," Miller explained. "But the drug doesn't work on a normal memory, because the cycle happens so slowly the memory can replenish itself before the drug can affect it."

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It's convenient to think Google tamed the Internet, making everything discoverable through its search algorithms. A new company called Vocativ is building its own search algorithm to mine data from the digital information abyss to find news stories that are almost always missed by Google and whatever's slotted on the front page of the New York Times. Using software derived from hedge funds, Vocativ's search machine scrubs through far-flung message boards, Facebook conversations, and other forms of social media to find stories that don't get reported anywhere else, such as Syrian sex tape blackmails and gun manufacturer give-aways on Facebook. The tools had originally been pitched to law enforcement agencies as a way of searching for illegal behavior, but the company realized its technology might be more valuable as a tool for journalism.

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Since the telephone was invented almost no one has questioned its use of a ringer to alert its owners of incoming calls. This week a Japanese company introduced an add-on for Android phones that will release a scented spray whenever a new notification pops up. Scentee will be refillable with a number of swappable scented cartridges to keep any one odor from becoming boring. The launch lineup will include bacon, coffee, curry, jasmine, Korean BBQ, baked potato, apple, mint, cinnamon roll, strawberry, and several others. The device will be out on November 15, prepare your nostrils.

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In an attempt to combat the massive energy cost of running air conditioners, a group of researchers at MIT have invented a wristband that tricks your body into thinking its hotter or colder than it actually is. The device is called Wristify and was just awarded a $10,000 grant from MIT to continue work on a prototype that might one day turn into a commercial product. The device doesn't actually change body temperature but manipulates the way our body perceives temperature by sending electrical impulses to the skin, which prompts a temperature correction response from the body.

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One of the stranger qualities of the 21st Century has been the degree of convergence between the tech industry and politics. There's no bigger example of this than the recent launch of HealthCare.gov, the government sponsored website that uninsured Americans are supposed to use as an online marketplace for getting health coverage. Writing for ArsTechnica, Sean Gallagher enumerates seven missteps the government made in launching the service, foremost of which was the outsourcing of huge parts of the site maintenance and architecture to external contractors. As Gallagher explains, "the whole thing was dependent on data provided by Experian-a data source that neither the government nor the other contractors could do any quality work on."

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This week Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and manager of a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm, won a legal battle allowing him to gate off a public beach access road that happened to lie on his $38 million property. Although gating public roads is not permissible by California Law, Khosla invoked the 1848 Treaty of Hidalgo Guadalupe, which ended the Mexican-American War and exempts land grants from the 19th Century Mexican government from having to comply with American law. Apparently Khosla's property fell into that category and he was allowed to circumvent the law and close off access to a big part of the Half Moon Bay beach.

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Does morality depend on the time of day? This week researchers from Harvard and the University of Utah published the results of a study meant to measure the moral consistency of people over the course of a day. Their findings showed that most people are more honest and generally moral in the mornings, while in the afternoons they tend toward dishonesty and immoral shortcuts. "Unfortunately, the most honest people, such as those less likely to morally disengage, may be the most susceptible to the negative consequences associated with the morning morality effect," their report argues. "Our findings suggest that mere time of day can lead to a systematic failure of good people to act morally." Maybe this explains why there are so few riots in the morning.

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This week a California woman was stopped for a speeding ticket while wearing Google Glass. When the police officer saw her wearing the device he added an additional fine to her ticket, claiming she had violated a California law that prevents drivers from having a computer monitor visible to the driver of a car while it's in motion. The law is vaguely written and many have contested its legitimacy in this case, but it poses an interesting question of whether or not the new headset device is really safe for drivers speeding down a freeway. If texting and driving is illegal in many states, should Google Glass be also?

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