Erin Biba

Turn On, Code In, Drop Out: Tech Programmers Don’t Need College Diplomas

(Feature from GOOD Magazine, Issue 025/WINTER 2011 The Next Big Thing)

David King got his start as a professional programmer working odd jobs. He took on small software projects, set up networks, that sort of thing. For fun in his spare time he’d contribute to the open-source operating system FreeBSD—a pastime many developers consider the most thankless job ever. People started to notice. Eventually, King landed a gig with Reddit, the biggest social news site on the web. Now he’s one of six engineers at Hipmunk, a travel site with good buzz and $5 million in funding. He works with his friends, makes a good living, has equity. By all accounts, Dave King is the midst of an impressive career. He’s a successful developer. And, like many of his peers nowadays, he did it all without a college degree.

While there are a few high-level computer-science concepts that require a college education to master, King says, 90 percent of developers won’t use that knowledge in their day jobs. And yet a diploma is still the first thing recruiters at most large companies look for when hiring a programmer. “It can be very difficult to prove yourself to the people you want to work for without a degree,” King says. “You aren’t even given a chance.”

That process is fine for most industries—a Harvard-educated accountant is a lot more likely to be a good hire then a self-taught one. But programming isn’t accounting. It requires creative thinkers and problem solvers, people unlikely to thrive in the confines of a college classroom. So why do hiring managers apply traditional methods to a nontraditional job?

As programmers become the backbone of the business world and the tech industry embarks on a bubble-driven hiring blitz, that thinking is going to have to change. In many places, it already has.

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The Sweet Science of Sugar

(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 19.10)

Oh, sugar, we know how toxic you are, but you give us so much joy. The pleasure is simply a matter of sucrose hitting your tongue, right? Nope. A series of discoveries by researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center has shown that many of the taste receptors on your tongue are also present in your guts. You continue to taste sugar as it works its way through your body.

• Tongue
  Taste cells specialized to detect sweetness live on the tip, back, and sides of the tongue. When something sweet like sugar brushes past these cells’ receptors, they snap shut, ensnaring the goodies like a Venus flytrap. The sugar activates the taste cell, which sends a signal to a nearby nerve that transmits a message to your brain: “Yum!”
• Intestines
  As you digest sugar, enzymes break it down into glucose and fructose. In the small intestine, transporter proteins carry those molecules into the bloodstream. Researchers have discovered these same proteins in your tongue’s taste cells. And some of the taste cells on the tongue are present in the intestine. When they detect sugar, they send a message to your brain: “Yum!”
• Pancreas
  When the glucose and fructose in your blood hit your pancreas, they prompt proteins called K channels to close, releasing insulin into your bloodstream. Monell researchers have discovered these same proteins on your tongue. And another surprise find—even your pancreas has taste cells that send a final message to your brain: “Yum!”

New Takes on Slow-Cooking Tech

(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 19.09)

There isn’t much you can do with a slow cooker that you can’t accomplish with a Dutch oven on a stove top. You still have to brown your meats and sauté your onions ahead of time. You still have to chop, dredge, and deglaze. But there is one important thing a slow cooker will let you do: walk away.

However, there’s more than just convenience going on here. Stewing meat for long periods over low heat breaks down collagen and other connective tissues. And those low temperatures make it pretty difficult to overcook your ingredients. Come home a bit late and you’ll still be greeted with delicious, fork-tender cuts.

So a slow cooker is the perfect piece of throwback gadgetry for the busy modern chef—which might explain why companies from All-Clad to the original Crock-Pot are constantly coming out with new takes on this 40-year-old tech. New models vary widely in price, functions, and features. Some heat the cooking vessel on all sides, while others heat only from the bottom. Basic cookers go for less than $30, while multiuse models, which double as griddles and steamers, can cost more than $200.

After testing several, here’s what we found: The most important feature of a slow cooker is what you put in it. When it comes to this category of kitchen gadgetry, low-cost and simple wins.

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Your Gait Can Predict Your Longevity

(From Oprah Magazine, September 2011)

Forget the “life line” on your palm and complicated medical algorithms. It turns out that forecasting how long you’ll live might be as simple as timing how fast you walk. 

University of Pittsburgh researchers recently crunched data from nearly 35,000 subjects 65 years or older and discovered that each increase in gait speed of 0.1 meters/second correlated with a 12 percent decrease in the risk of death. Among women 75 to 84, for example, 92 percent of the fastest walkers (traveling at 1.4 meters/second or faster) lived another ten years, while only 35 percent of the slowest walkers (shuffling at 0.4 meters/second or slower) survived until then. 

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BioTech@Home

(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 19.09)

A tiny spare bedroom is not an ideal space for a high tech biofabrication facility. To get to the one Josh Perfetto is putting together, visitors must walk all the way to the back of his mostly unfurnished house in Saratoga, California—through the kitchen, past some empty rooms, across a den with a lone couch—then climb a poorly lit staircase and round a corner. The room itself is about 120 square feet and has one big window with a view of an adjacent roof. There’s an 8-foot-wide gap in the middle; the rest of the room is for science. “I thought about moving the lab to the empty living room downstairs,” Perfetto says. “I really need more space. But that’s right by the front door. I don’t want to freak people out.”

He laughs a little awkwardly, and it’s easy to see why he’s worried. With its Pyrex containers on metal racks and other clinical-looking equipment, the bedroom looks perfect for cooking crystal meth. A mass of wires spills out of a wooden box; on top sits a metal plate punched full of holes. A table holds several laptops, test tubes, a box of purple surgical gloves, a rack with pipettes in various sizes, rubber tubes connected to vials, an orange plastic box with a blue light in the bottom, and a centrifuge that looks like an oversize rice cooker. The wooden box is actually a homemade device for doing polymerase chain reactions (PCR), a process that turns small samples of DNA into quantities large enough to analyze. And the orange plastic thing runs gel electrophoresis, a way to sort DNA strands by size. Perfetto, an engineer, built a few of the gadgets himself.

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Friendship Has Its Limits (Social Media Isn’t Social. It’s Just Media.)

Think about the last time you updated your Facebook status. You probably edited that snippet of text a dozen times to get every word just right. And then, right before you posted it—cursor hovering over the Share button—you likely considered how your friends were going to react.

“People are going to Like this,” you thought. “Maybe I’ll even get a few comments.”

Now, how many times have you run that same internal monologue before blurting out your opinion during a face-to-face chat with your best friend? I’m taking bets on the answer. And my money is on never.

Every time you post something on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Instagram, you’re influencing—or trying to influence—how the world views you. Each carefully crafted 140-character message that goes out into the metaverse fills a publicly accessible database that defines you to people you’ve never met. In the end, it isn’t who you really are. It’s the hilarious, adorable, fascinating, intelligent, so-worth-Friending version of you. Social media isn’t about having a conversation with people you know. It’s about advertising yourself. It’s not social; it’s media.

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Seven Creepy Experiments That Could Teach Us So Much (If They Weren’t So Wrong)

Separating Twins

The Experiment: Split up twins after birth—and then control every aspect of their environments.

The premise: 
In the quest to tease out the interplay of nature and nurture, researchers have one obvious resource: identical twins, two people whose genes are nearly 100 percent the same. But twins almost always grow up together, in essentially the same environment. A few studies have been able to track twins separated at a young age, usually by adoption. But it’s impossible to control retroactively for all the ways that the lives of even separated twins are still related. If scientists could control the siblings from the start, they could construct a rigorously designed study. It would be one of the least ethical studies imaginable, but it might be the only way (short of cloning humans for research, which is arguably even less ethical) that we’d ever solve some big questions about genetics and upbringing. Continue Reading

Toxic Heroes

The Experiment: Test each new chemical on a wide range of human volunteers before it comes on the market.

The premise: 
Under current US regulations, we’re all de facto test subjects for a whole range of potential toxins. So why not recruit volunteers to try out chemicals for us? Even with informed consent, medical ethicists would recoil at that idea. But it would almost certainly save lives over time.

To comply with the US Toxic Substances Control Act, manufacturers turn to testing labs, which expose animals—usually rodents—to high levels of the chemical in question. But just because a mouse survives a test doesn’t mean that humans will. The only studies we can perform on people are observational: tracking the incidence of adverse effects in those we know to have been exposed. But these studies are fraught with problems. When researchers can find high levels of exposure—for example, workers in factories that make or use the chemical—the number of subjects is often too small to yield reliable results. And with broader-based studies, it becomes extremely difficult to tease out one chemical’s effect, since we’re all exposed to so many toxins every day. Continue Reading

Yuck! That’s Delicious!

(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 19.06)

Just because a menu item sounds a little odd doesn’t mean it isn’t delicious. Ask chef Chris Cosentino, co-owner of San Francisco’s Incanto restaurant. He’s famous for serving up every part of an animal—even the bits that might make you say ick. “It’s about not being afraid of your food,” Cosentino says. With his favorite dish, Chris’ Last Supper, he takes some unconventional ingredients—blood sausage, trotter stock, duck eggs—and makes you want to inhale them. Here’s how it works.

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Light Up Your Wardrobe

(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 19.04)

Thanks to the open source Arduino microprocessor, hobbyists don’t need to mess with soldering irons or circuit boards to computerize their gadgets—to hack their alarm clocks, say, or put their thermostats online. But few have pushed the Arduino as far as Marc DeVidts, who used one to orchestrate a particularly dramatic wardrobe change. For last fall’s Dragon*Con, the annual sci-fi megashow in Atlanta, he wanted a costume unlike any other. Applying his scientific mind to the task, the software engineer hit on a rule of thumb for convention wear: Blinky lights good. “If you have a bunch of LEDs or anything that blinks, people love it,” he says. “So I decided that I would just make a whole suit!” What he envisioned was a white getup with embedded flashing lights, like a futurist Saturday Night Feverwhere John Travolta wears the dance floor. This was easier said than done—it took two months of engineering, programming, and sewing—but by opening night, DeVidts had created what has to be the coolest, flashiest suit in the history of Dragon*Con.

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Burning Question: Why Are ATM Cards Still So Vulnerable to Fraud?

(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 19.03)

It’s a local news chestnut: Crooks are stealing debit card PINs from ATMs and gas pumps! Your card could be next! But in these days of complex fraud-alert algorithms, RFID scanners, and embedded chips, shouldn’t we be hearing this story less often? Why aren’t ATM-debit cards more secure?

Well, they are secure. Just not in the US. When our current card-reader infrastructure was installed in the 1980s, we already had a robust telecom system that allowed for fast communications between machines and banks. As a result, our cards could be low tech. In Europe, however, lack of connectivity created time lags that made it easy for crooks to commit fraudulent transactions without anyone noticing. So in the 1990s, European countries began upgrading their hardware to support cards with chips that told the machines, “I’m legit!” They leapfrogged us. So did criminal technology. Now we’re the world’s debit-card backwater.

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Underground Caverns Keep Things Cold, Safe… and Secret

(Photo Essay, Wired Magazine, Issue 19.02)

When WikiLeaks wants to safeguard its trove of diplomatic cables or Kraft needs to keep tons of cheese cold, they head beneath the surface.

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Arctic by Air

(From Long Shot Magazine, Issue One, 2010)

People have been attempting to cross the arctic north in hot air balloons for more then 100 years. The key word here is “attempt.” Ill-fated expeditions over the polar ice cap reach back as far as in 1897, when famed Swedish balloonist S.A. Andrée and his team ran out of hydrogen after only two days of flying. Forced to land the balloon, the three explorers trekked across the ice for more then a month – carrying a 200-pound camera and 440-pounds of provisions in their sleds. They died.

When the balloons didn’t work, adventurers turned their attention to easier methods of transport (sort of). In 1907, American journalist Walter Wellman flew 15 miles out of Svalbard, Russia in a dirigible before deeming it too windy to go on. Ten years later Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen made it to the pole in a blimp – then attempted soon after to recreate his historic journey at which point he crashed and, of course, died.

In 2000, David Helpman-Adams paid homage to Andrée by reviving the balloon mission. He became the first to fly over the pole using hot air – though he traveled only about 15 miles. It wasn’t until 2008 that the first signs of hope began to shine on the icy pole. Jean- Louis Etienne, a French explorer who already held the title for the first North Pole solo-crossing (he pulled his own sled for 63 days), was planning to go the blimp route. He built the Total Pole Airship. A $7.7 million helium-filled dirigible that he believed would transport him a record-breaking 6,200 miles across the pole. But months before the expedition could begin, 70 mph winds broke the ship loose from its moorings and it crashed into a nearby house (no one died).

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Science For All

(From Wired Magazine, Issue 18.12)

The institutions that foot the bill for scientific research tend to be best at writing big checks for big projects. Now a bunch of nonprofits are trying to fund the little guys, asking for small donations to small projects. A focus on transparency—researchers must update donors with progress reports—could help get the public invested in science with their hearts as well as their wallets. Here’s a look at the new funds.

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Great News for Your Body: The Top 10 Health Tips of 2010

(From O: The Oprah Magazine, December 2010)

Every so often, medical researchers hit upon a scientific truth that makes us smile. Here, our 10 favorite studies from 2010.

Good Luck Charms Actually Work

Lucky pennies, four-leaf clovers, horseshoes—it turns out believing in them isn’t totally kooky. In a study at Germany’s University of Cologne, researchers asked superstitious participants to play a computer game; half got to keep their charms, half had to play without them. The participants who played with their jujus performed better than the others. The simple, non-hocus-pocus explanation: confidence. Your charm makes you believe you’ll do well, and believing improves your game.

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Nature’s Prophet: Scientist runs the numbers to predict the future of life on Earth.

(From WIRED Magazine, Issue 18.07)

There are lots of scientists trying to determine the fate of plant and animal species in the context of global warming. Few command as much processing power as Healy Hamilton, director of the Center for Applied Biodiversity Informatics at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. She got her start number-crunching nature with her PhD thesis, a DNA analysis of river dolphins. It required spending more than a month on the Amazon in 2001, subsisting on fried piranha and collecting tissue samples by nicking the aquatic mammals with a crossbow. (No Flippers were killed.) Tricky enough, but the real challenge began when she tried sequencing the samples on turn-of-the-millennium hardware. “I had a tiny data set running on small computers,” she says. “It would take weeks to analyze the DNA!” Today, Hamilton has 10 terabytes of storage, two 12-CPU servers, and a 136-node computer cluster, which she uses to process data like temperature and precipitation extrapolated from 17 different climate models. So far her team has mapped out how climate change might alter the habitats of a dozen species, from the Canadian lynx to the California redwood. The academy has more than 25 million plant and animal specimens in its collection. Better upgrade that CPU.

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