May
20
Monkey business
Filed Under Environment/Energy, Wired, Recent stories | Leave a Comment
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.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
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20
Wired makes it five straight
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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.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008
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27
The NPR double
Filed Under Media appearances, Science, Environment/Energy, Wired, Recent stories | Leave a Comment
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.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007
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25
Pipe dream to tailpipe?
Filed Under Science, Technology, Environment/Energy, Wired, Recent stories | 2 Comments
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? Read more
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
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27
Armchair cartography
Filed Under Technology, Wired, Recent stories | 1 Comment
“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.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
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18
More on the mystery of emerging viruses
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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.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007
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24
Bushmeat and the next pandemic
Filed Under Science, Environment/Energy, Wired, Recent stories, Photography | 3 Comments
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.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007
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26
Software on the brain
Filed Under Technology, Wired, Recent stories | 5 Comments
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.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007
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1
What’s the meaning of this?
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My most recent feature for Wired, which has been out on the newsstands for a couple weeks, went up online today, here. It’s about a New York company, Meaningful Machines, that has come up with a novel technology for doing machine translation — software-based translation of text from one language to another. I wrote about the company briefly in Safe, when they were at a much earlier stage. The original ideas behind the software, which are simple but fairly ingenious, sprung from the mind of Eli Abir, a former used car salesman in New Jersey with no college education and no formal training in computers, artificial intelligence, or linguistics.
Machine Translation, or MT, is a thorny problem, and the field has gone through years of eye-rolling hype and resultant vaporware. For a great comprehensive look at the area, check out Steve Silberman’s Wired story from a few years ago. But expectations are so low now (given the limitations of older systems like those currently used by Babelfish and most of Google Translate), that perhaps some new advances are being overlooked. The hottest area developing over the past few years has been statistical MT, the use of parallel translated text to train MT systems using statistical algorithms. As the story mentions, the outfits getting the best results with that method are Google (who hasn’t yet put many of their research systems up on Google Translate), Language Weaver, and IBM. Both Language Weaver’s and IBM’s are being used extensively by the military and a growing number of businesses.
Unfortunately the latest results from the NIST evaluation, which looks at MT systems head-to-head, weren’t out when the story closed. You can now find those here. Google, for the second year running, came out on top, and Language Weaver fared quite well. (Despite NIST’s new, bright-red disclaimer that its evaluation is not a competition, everyone in the MT research world still considers it the big show).
Meaningful Machines has yet to enter the NIST (non)competition, which is the most common criticism I heard about them. So there’s really no way yet to know whether their early promise will translate into a system that trumps the state-of-the-art, or they’ll end up on the scrap heap of MT failures. They, at least, believe they are on their way to human-quality translation.
This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006
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26
The photo police
Filed Under Wired, Recent stories | 2 Comments
I’m a little behind posting this, but for last month’s issue of Wired Test (an occasional glossy supplement that comes with the magazine), I wrote about a San Francisco photographer who shoots under the name Thomas Hawk. I followed Hawk around for a day, curious about the run-ins (some of which have been documented on BoingBoing) he often has with various police and security guards when he photographs the architecture and street life of the city. Many photographers get hassled in public places, but few know the law and are willing to challenge public and private police like Hawk. The day we went out, he had a fairly typical confrontation with a transit cop, who told him he “needed a permit” to shoot in a public space (which is not, in fact, the case).
Unfortunately Test doesn’t seem to be online, but I’ve uploaded PDF and HTML versions of the story.
Hawk is a remarkably prolific photographer, and it’s definitely worth checking out his Flickr site, where most days he’ll post 10 or more photos (as part of his goal to document San Francisco with 100,000 or more images over the next decades). The shots that he took on the days I followed him around are here and here. He also has a blog, where he talks about his photo adventures, the tech industry, and a lot of other goings on.
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 26th, 2006
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