Evan Ratliff

How’ve you been, lad? In trouble with the wife again, sounds like! Don’t worry, it’ll blow over. Not much happening in New York, except this bloody cold weather. Luckily my grandma knitted me that afghan this Christmas. I’d never heard of an afghan before, it’s like some kind of super warm blanket. Thank frickin God too, since our radiator is shot. Man, every year I dream about buying a big plot of land down south, with a few blueberry bushes and a dog roving around the yard. Just quit urban life forever. Sounds like Heaven right now.

Anyway, hope it’s beautiful in Virginia.

stay warm,
e

From: eratliff@*********.com
To: samschaffer@*****.com

Big news, Schaffe: Landed a new job! Still pushing papers, but an easy subway ride and finally making decent moolah. Oh, Marjorie says to say hi. She’s been on my case about the Xbox marathons again. I told her not to play martyr after we had the in-laws here for a week, but I’m not winning that never-ending battle.

Don’t think you’re catching up to me, though, Schaffe: I racked up huge kills playing Halo the other day. Face it, I would destroy you if we played right now. My skillz is real, bitch!

Still trying to keep that New Year’s resolution to get my ass in shape, so Christian and I ran twenty suicides at the gym yesterday (just like Coach “Gasbag” Kreil used to make us do after practice). I felt like my lungs were gonna explode. Christian ran them all ahead of me and then bombarded me with dirty taunts. Did I tell you he just moved into a phat walk-up over on Morton street?

fo shizzle,
e

From: eratliff@*********.com
To: samschaffer@*****.com

Yo Schafffe-Dog, just a heads up that Marjorie is sending you a care package of her brownies this week. Nuke them in the microwave for 20 seconds. The peanut butter ones are the bomb.

Did you decide about that knee operation? Schaffe, a man your age shouldn’t be still trying to slam dunk a basketball.

sweet,
e

From: eratliff@*********.com
To: samschaffer@*****.com

How bout the Giants draft picks? Maybe they can avoid a repeat of last year’s vicious playoff ass whipping from the Panthers. What a weak, bush-league effort. Dude, you’re lucky you escaped watching that game, it was torture. Year after year, no love for the faithful. They just never seem ready to play mentally. Benji had some theory about opening up the offense, but you know my cousin: always preaching run-and-gun football. I think they need a defense that is going to HIT HARDER! They’d better at least recruit some decent free agents into training camp this year.

Well, there’s always hockey. Your boys the Red Wings are still alive, but watch out for the Predators! They could be a sleeper. What godless moron gave Nashville a hockey team, anyway?

How’s the nightlife down there? Went to a Killers live show the other night, I can’t believe you’ve never heard them. Are you living in a cave down there? That band is blowing up!

OK Dog, gotta jet. You’d better be on a crusade to find the best bbq in the state of Virginia. When I get up enough funds I’m going to catch a flight down there and pay you a visit.

keep it real,
e

It’s worth noting that the survey was carried out by AOL, and the sample size was only 1,000 people, so skepticism of the methodology is warranted. Not to mention that there’s no penalty for lying about your income in such cases, as I always do (I mean, why not aspire to a better life?). But the results don’t seem far off what many other surveys have long established, e.g., that most of us will and do routinely trade away personal data for convenience or meager rewards.

Congress, meanwhile, is taking a renewed look at creating some kind of Privacy Bill of Rights, after the House Energy and Commerce Committee confirmed another piece of conventional wisdom, that companies like Google and Yahoo are tracking some of their users’ behaviors without their consent (although they do often allow in-the-know users to opt out):

Google, in its letter to committee Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.), Markey, Stearns and Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Tex.), stressed that it did not engage in potentially the most invasive of technologies — deep-packet inspection, which companies such as NebuAd have tested with some broadband providers. But Google did note that it had begun to use across its network the “DoubleClick ad-serving cookie,” a computer code that allows the tracking of Web surfing. Alan Davidson, Google’s director of public policy and government affairs, stated in the letter that users could opt out of a single cookie for both DoubleClick and the Google content network. He also said that Google was not yet focusing on “behavioral” advertising, which depends on Web site tracking. But on its official blog last week, Google touted how its recent $3.1 billion merger with DoubleClick provides advertisers “insight into the number of people who have seen an ad campaign,” as well as “how many users visited their sites after seeing an ad.” “Google is slowly embracing a full-blown behavioral targeting over its vast network of services and sites,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. He said that Google, through its vast data collection and sophisticated data analysis tools, “knows more about consumers than practically anyone.” [All the companies' letters can be found here].

So, should Congress do as we say or do as we do? The bill, to be introduced by Edward Markey, D-Mass., would mandate that companies only use some types of tracking — it’s not clear yet which — on people who have opted in. Much of the technical set seems to tend to favor the personal responsibility route: People should take charge of their own privacy, by turning off cookies and ceasing to give away information unnecessarily. Having once spent a month trying to collect my own personal data from companies that have gathered it on me — and finding that most of them wouldn’t even tell me what they know about me — I tend to side with Bruce Schneier in favoring a comprehensive data- privacy law. Sometimes market externalities need a little reining in. Michael Zimmer, a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, arguing (in a well-worth-reading paper) that such legislation may prove unwieldy, offers a third option: technology that makes it simpler to take command of your own data. I’m curious which approach Machinist readers favor.

You can watch little Gordon wander around, rodentlike, here and here.

The dramatic discovery leads some to ask, is this the answer to Alzheimer’s and other memory disorders? (You may be surprised to find that the University of Reading press release has already settled the question: “The key aim is that eventually this will lead to a better understanding of development and of diseases and disorders which affect the brain such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, stroke and brain injury.”)

I’m all for the next-big-thing-to-change-the-world stories — and anytime somebody hooks anything to neurons they’ve gotta learn something — but I might gently point out that Dr. Warwick has in the past proven adept at obtaining copious press coverage for revolutionary exploits that some later found to be less than revolutionary, and sometimes even worthy of ridicule. Facts which I’d be more inclined to overlook and get on board with the celebration, if Steve Potter at Georgia Tech hadn’t already gone public with very similar research back in … 2002. Any of the following sound familiar?

Steve Potter’s brand new robot would probably never make it to the second round of Battlebots. The size of a coffee mug, the cylindrical robot slides across a round meter-sized playpen on an apparently chaotic path. But this robot is a thinker, not a fighter, and it does its thinking with a network of neurons-culled from rat embryos-that resides a few feet away on an electrode-activated silicon chip.

The device, which Potter calls a hybrot, is in essence a rat- controlled robot, and marks the first instance in which cultured neurons have been used to control a robotic mechanism. And while the hybrot’s movements may appear less than graceful, the knowledge gained could lead to computer chips modeled on biological systems-and perhaps even to computers that incorporate biological components. Such computers might one day learn, repair themselves, and perform certain tasks-such as dictation-at which binary-based systems are miserable.

Not to say that the latest entry in the rat brain category isn’t cool. It really is quite fascinating. (And I don’t want throw a wet blanket on your favorite “Three Laws of Robotics” and “I, for one, welcome…” jokes!) But this seems like a small step in an evolution of technology that’s been happening for a while, rather than a giant leap into our new, rodent overlord future. In fairness, the New Scientist article that launched this frenzy largely portrayed it as such, but as always the second line coverage operates under its own rules.