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It was another contentious week in the tech world, with President Obama’s FCC head proposing a rule ending Net Neutrality by allowing ISPs to charge different rates to different sites in order to reach customers. Elsewhere, Google+ architect Vic Gundotra announced he was leaving the company alongside company plans to stop forcing users to connect their various YouTube and Google services through its languishing social network. But underneath the weighty political headlines, the tech world churned onward in its weird and colorful fashion. Here’s a collection of some of this week’s most interesting stories that you might have missed, from Saudia Arabian drifting videos to lab-grown human skin.
Michael Thomsen is Complex's tech columnist. He has written for Slate, The Atlantic, Billboard, and is author of Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men. He tweets often at @mike_thomsen.
Danish Government Recreates Entire Country in Minecraft
This week the Danish government revealed a 1:1 recreation of the entire country in Minecraft. Built with satellite data from the Danish Geodata Agency, the recreation faithfully renders every building, road, and hill in the country, which its creators hope can be used in school to teach a range of different subjects, from urban planning to environmental policy. Built by just two workers in the agency, the project is an interesting companion piece to the raw satellite data presented in Google Maps and Google Earth, showing how dramatically different your understanding of a place can be when you move through it in first-person instead of staring down at it from above.
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New Company Turns Computer Recycling into Addiction Rehab
The tech world obsesses over the possibility of new products and toys, but we're rarely reminded of all the old tech products that have to go somewhere. This week Fast Company profiles an entrepreneur who's built a company that recycles old computers and general electronic waste while employing recovering addicts who may have difficulty getting other kinds of jobs. As a former heroin addict himself, MHD Enterprises CEO Michael Dadashi knows first-hand what it's like recovering from an addiction and trying to get a job and make rent. "We're giving computers and electronics a second chance, but what talks to my heart is giving people a second chance," he told Fast Company's Tony Castle.
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MIT Student Designs a Web Service to Help Keep Women Safe
One day Stephan Boyer's girlfriend asked him to call and check up on her as she was planning to walk home through a dangerous neighborhood. After searching for an app that might help coordinate the timing of the call, he discovered there were none and so he decided to build one himself. Kitestring is Boyer's creation, a web-based service that allows its users to create reminders to check in on certain people at specific times to make sure they're okay. While the service doesn't currently have any features that can help intervene during an attack, it's a new way to keep friends and significant others mindful of one another in potentially dangerous settings. It's also handy for helping to remind people of upcoming flights, as one regular Kitestring user attests.
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Andy Warhol's Amiga Art Unearthed
When he wasn't busy filming people sleep, it turns out Andy Warhol was often drawn to computers. This week the Andy Warhol Museum shared a new volume of the painter's work made on his Amiga computer in the early 1980s. The files were laboriously transferred from the original floppy discs using a complex process to make them compatible with more recent computers. The paintings include a pixelated version of Warhol's famous Campbell's Soup can, and an impressive rendition of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus with a third eye comically inserted into her brow. The collection of digital art will be included in an upcoming documentary, Trapped: Andy Warhol's Amiga Experiments, that will be released May 12.
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Lab-Grown Human Skin Could Replace Some Forms of Animal Testing
Researchers at King's College London announced this week that they had successfully grown a layer of human skin derived from stem cells, offering the procedure as an ethical alternative to using animals for testing drugs and cosmetics. "It is cheap, it is easy to scale up, and it is reproducible," researcher Dusko Ilic told the BBC. Using lab grown skin could also improve the accuracy of test results and, most importantly, the team's method can reproduce an unlimited supply of skin cells to ensure the process remains easy and cost effective in the future. No word yet on whether the technology will be made available for commercial use, but it's not hard to imagine what office pranks could be pulled with a human skin printer. Lamp shades all around.
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Saudi Government Cracking Down on Drifting Videos on YouTube
According to a Wall Street Journal report this week, Saudi Arabia has a real passion for YouTube. Citizens there watch three times as many videos per-capita as the U.S. But with great passion comes more attention from government regulators. Such is the case with a recent government program to moderate the content of YouTube videos produced by Saudis. In addition to the expected regulations on nudity and alcohol use, the government is trying to curb the popular phenomenon of drifting videos, in which drivers push their cars and trucks through extreme maneuvers such as cruising on two wheels while passengers stand upright on the door panel.
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What Does Your Face Look Like When Facebook Scans It?
Earlier this year, Facebook announced a new facial recognition software called DeepFace, which is able to identify people in photos with 97.3-percent accuracy. This week a duo from the Rhode Island School of Design presented artwork they'd made from the data models DeepFace had drawn up based on their own faces, and presented them in frames as art work. Each face in the presentation is basically indistinguishable when broken down into long sequences of numbers and letters of computer code, but seeing the stark difference between a face, and the representation of a face that computers "see," is a stark reminder of how little most people understand about what Facebook can do.
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Illinois Mayor Orders Police to Raid Home for Mock-Twitter Account
Late last week the mayor of Peoria, Illinois, ordered local police to raid a home of someone suspected of operating a Twitter parody account of the mayor. The account had been clearly labeled as a parody account according to the Washington Times, but the police still went ahead with the raid under the misdemeanor charge of unlawfully impersonating a public official. Both computers and smartphones were seized at the home and three people there at the time were taken in for questioning. "This absolutely troubles me," Loyola Law Professor Aaron Caplan told the Times. "Under the Constitution, you can criticize people in power. It's how you can tell the difference between a democracy and a police state."
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Yamaha's Electric Motorcycles Gearing Up for Commercial Release
Not to be outdone by the public fascination with Tesla and battery-powered sports cars, Yamaha is preparing to stake its own claim on the e-vehicle market with a new line of electric sport bikes. A profile in Wired this week describes the company's electric motorcycles, noting a weight range between 188 and 220 pounds, significantly lighter than most gas-powered bikes. Yamaha is remaining tight-lipped about the exact mechanical specifications, but Wired's Jordan Golson attests that even with lower top speeds the "always-on torque" electric motors provides strong acceleration that makes for fun rides on twisty roads. No official release date has been set for the bikes, but the company's 2013 annual report promises it will happen sometime in the "near future."
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