Image via Complex Original
It was another volatile week, with digital recordings of Donald Sterling’s racist jibberish leading to a lifetime ban from the NBA, while the one-time king of portable technology Sony announced dramatically lowering its operating income because of the rapid decline of the Blu-ray market. Old bosses fall away quickly and easily in the tech world, but there is never any shortage of interesting new things to think about. To wit, here are some stories from the tech world you might have missed but definitely shouldn’t have, including everything from earbuds that can measure your heartbeat to a government-funded brain implant to retrieve lost memories.
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.
Steve Jobs Preferred Vinyl to MP3s
The man responsible for the world digitizing their music collections and squeezing them into iPods turns out to have preferred vinyl. This week Wired reports on Steve Jobs' long-held "serious Hi-Fi fetish" and traces the particulars of his home set-up in the famed 1982 photo of him in his near empty home, which would cost roughly $8,200 to reassemble on the vintage market. "The shiny boxes loom large in the background like sacred totems, which is precisely what they were to Jobs," Wired's Rene Chun writes. "They embodied everything he held dear in high-end industrial design: clean lines, quality materials and workmanship, outstanding performance–price be damned."
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CreepShield Promises to Protect Online Daters from Sex Offenders
This week, the New York Times reports on a new website that promises to help online daters prescreen their potential mates to protect against scumbags and criminals. Called CreepShield, the site uses facial recognition software to compare photos from dating sites like OKCupid, Match, and PlentyOfFish against a database of almost half a million sex offenders. The site's underlying technology may not quite be ready for widespread use, however, as the Times' Natasha Singer reports an experiment uploading a picture of another company's CEO into the system, a white man, who it matched with a criminal history attached to a Hispanic woman because both had rimless eyeglasses.
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Princeton Professor Manages to Hide Her Pregnancy from Facebook
Uncomfortable with the idea of yoking her unborn child into a data footprint before even being born, Princeton professor Janet Vertesi waged an extended campaign to keep all evidence of her being pregnant off of Facebook and other social networks. The idea was planted two years earlier when Google learned she was engaged before she'd told any of her friends or family, because of its data-mining her emails and chat logs. For the pregnancy, Vertesi and her husband created a dummy Amazon account through an alternate email address, which they stocked with cash-bought gift cards, having all baby items shipped to a local Amazon locker. "My job is to say: you have the power and the authority to think about which of these services you'd like to use," she told ThinkProgress's Jessica Goldstein. "And the ones you think you can't resist [or] you need to use for your job, you have the power and authority to think about how it is you want to use them and what information you want to give them."
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Cory Arcangel Announces Line of Leisure Wear for Web-Browsing
The Internet is easy to obsess about, and it's even easier to forget about the conditions you're in while obsessing over it. This week digital artist Corey Arcangel, one of the youngest living artists to be given an entire floor for an exhibition at the Whitney, announced a new line of clothing for the recumbent Internet browser, "everything one needs to 'chill' in bed all day and surf the Internet in comfort." Modeled after the surfer fashions from the 80s like T&C and Ocean Pacific, Arcangel Surfware will be sold at a one-day pop-up store at a New York Holiday Inn and through an online shop.
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American Tanks and Dynamite Have Trashed Minecraft Denmark
Last week, news spread of the Danish government having used Minecraft to recreate a 1:1 version of the country using Minecraft. The mod's creators at the Danish Geodata Agency had hoped the recreation would help students learn about urban planning and civil engineering. They'll also be able to use the simulation to teach students about warfare after some combat-minded players stormed the country with American tanks, planting American flags throughout the countryside, and destroying as much as possible with dynamite and water flooding. Rather than let the festering ruin persist as a bizarre social experiment, the Danish Geodata Agency has said they'll simply revert the map file on the server to its original state and hope for better luck next time.
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DARPA Working on Brain Implant to Bring Back Memories
At a conference in Texas this week, a DARPA researcher discussed an on-going project built around a brain implant meant to help combat veterans with impaired memories, either from trauma or physical damage. The memories targeted by the program are "declarative," mostly concerning facts, people, and events. The technology works by trying to replicate the neural patterns that store memories, the only trick is finding out which pattern has been lost. "If you have been injured in the line of duty and you can't remember your family, we want to be able to restore those kinds of function," DARPA's Justin Sanchez said. "We think that we can develop neuroprosthetic devices that can directly interface with the hippocampus, and can restore the first type of memories we are looking at, the declarative memories."
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Apple Researching Ear Buds With Biometric Sensors
With Apple's World Wide Developer Conference fast approaching the tech world is buzzing with speculation about what announcements the company will make. One possibility discovered by MacRumors is iPhone and iPod earbuds with biometric sensors to detect heart rate and blood pressure, which could make sense given the other big rumor about the next version of iOS featuring built-in health focused software. According to MacRumors' Eric Slivka, the company filed patent applications for earbuds capable of measuring pulse and oxygen levels as early as 2006. Could it be time for an unveiling?
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Google Glass Components May Only Cost $80
Google has not been shy about targeting its Glass project at rich people. The $1500 device is twice as much as an unsubsidized iPhone and nowhere near as useful. But it is novel, and novelty sells. Apparently it sells at an absurdly high premium too, as one firm's teardown of the components inside Glass estimate that the cost of goods come to roughly $80, with the most expensive part being a $13 microprocessor from Texas Instruments. Google told the Wall Street Journal the estimate was inaccurate but wouldn't say why, or by how much. Even so, the difference between $80 and $1500 leaves a lot of room for explaining, while reminding that most of what we pay for when we buy new technology is an optimistic promise for the future mostly made from scraps of the past.
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Maryland Police Announce Plans to LIve-Tweet Prostitution Sting
This week Maryland's Prince George Police Department announced it would soon conduct a prostitution sting, during which suspect photos and information will be publicly tweeted. The sting is part of an effort to publicly humiliate both sex workers and their clients, and though it's very probably unconstitutional, police believe it's all done for a righteous cause. "We're using this progressive, and what we believe unprecedented, social media tactic to warn any potential participants that this type of criminal behavior is not welcome in Prince George's County," PGPD wrote in a blog post announcing the operation.
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