Seven states have put forward proposals to roll out the ambitious national broadband network based on the special purpose vehicle (SPV) model, says Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. The Indian government which is keen to connect 2.5 lakh villages across the country to the national fiber optic network (NOFN) by March 2016 at least, has provided three options for its launch.
Currently, the national broadband network is being handled by SPV Bharat Broadband Network Limited and three Central Public Sector Undertakings (CPSUs) consisting of Powergrid, BSNL and RailTel. But not everyone’s happy with the way the project is being executed. West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha are considering the state-run or SPV-driven model.
If this happens, the current NOFN architecture will be reshaped to fit the much costlier BharatNet program. The government will have to increase the budget from Rs 20000 crores to Rs 72778 crores in order to get BharatNet up and running. Apart from the two aforementioned options to have the broadband network operated by CPSUs or SPV, states were also given the choice to allow private sectors to run it.
Reports say that BharatNet will be more expensive because it will extend broadband connectivity to district-level government institutions too and not just to villages. Broadband availability is expected to be 99.9 percent, against NOFN’s capacity of 96 percent. Also, the former’s services can go out for only 9 hours in a year, while NOFN aims for not more than 350 hours of down time annually.
Even Haryana is supposedly intent on opting for the state-led broadband roll-out model. Andhra Pradesh thinks it will be able to offer Internet download speeds of 10Mbps at Rs 150 a month via BharatNet.
According to the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index forecast, the annual Internet Protocol (IP) traffic in India will show massive growth between 2014 and 2019. The same can be said for IP traffic on a global scale too, with it expected to touch 2 zettabytes within the next 4 years. The change will be the result of more web users, increased machine-to-machine (M2M) connections, better broadband speeds and so on.
Cisco has added up all these variables and more, to come to the conclusion that the worldwide IP traffic’s compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) will be 23 percent during 2014 to 2019. Last year drew 59.9 exabytes of IP traffic each month and 2019 is supposedly going to achieve 168 exabytes of the same monthly. If you add up all traffic during the ‘Internet years’ from 1984 to 2013, the figure you get is likely to match what will be witnessed in 2019.
Another gargantuan force behind the momentum will be new and advanced video services like ultra HD, 360 and spherical. 80 percent of all IP traffic in 2019 (as compared to 67 percent in 2014) may driven by IP video. The Internet of Things which has devices and machines ‘talking’ to each other, is already shaping into the next big wave to hit technology after smartphones. Smart TVs, connected home appliances and wearable gadgets will greatly add to IP traffic by 2019.
Last year saw 39 percent of the world, or 2.8 billion people, accessing the web. 2019 may welcome 3.9 billion Internet users, which might account for 51 percent of the projected population. Considering India’s dense population what is only set to swell further, a huge portion of the IP traffic will originate from here. Cisco points out that it will take 32 years (1984 to 2016) for us to collectively generate the first zettabyte of IP traffic on a yearly basis.
But if the company’s latest forecast turns out to be right, 3 more years will be enough to get to the next zettabyte mark, which means we’ll see 2 zettabytes of IP traffic per year starting from 2019. By then, India will be able to boast of the fourth highest IP traffic growth rate on the globe at 33 percent CAGR during the predicted period.
Leading into Google I/O, one session caught everyone’s attention. Google ATAP — the company’s skunkworks division tasked with creating cool new things we’ll all actually use — teased their session with talk of a new wearable that would “literally” blow our socks off.
Project Soli is that wearable, but it’s not the wearable you might think it is. It’s not a watch; it’s you.
Google ATAP knows your hand is the best method you have for interaction with devices, but not everything is a device. Project Soli wants to make your hands and fingers the only user interface you’ll ever need.
To make that happen, Project Soli is really a radar that is small enough to fit into a wearable like a smartwatch. The small radar picks up on your movements in real-time, and uses movements you make to alter its signal.
At rest, the hand is actually moving slightly, which end up as a baseline response on the radar. Moving the hand away from or side-to-side in relation to the radar changes the signal and amplitude. Making a fist or crossing fingers also changes the signal.
To make the signal make sense to an app or service, ATAP will have APIs that tap into the deep machine learning of Project Soli.
It’s still early days for Project Soli, but it’s got the crowd here at Google I/O excited. Rather than go hands-free, Project Soli makes your hands the UI — which may already be cooler than voice control ever was.
GOOGLE DOESN’T HOSTmany events—there’s no quarterly launch cycle, like there is with Apple, or the scattershot “Hey we have a new phone!” approach from LG or Samsung. It doesn’t really show up at CES or MWC.
Instead, there’s Google I/O.
I/O, like Google, is heavy on explanation and theatrics. The keynotes are always long, and there’s a significant amount to cover in just two days—which makes sense, because Google is working on everything. We’ll likely hear updates on everything from search stats to self-driving cars. We’ll hear from ATAP, Google’s crazy research division, and Google X, Google’s other crazy research division. When Google SVP Sundar Pichai takes the stage, he and a team of executives will talk about browsers, TVs, cars, smartwatches, smartphones, tablets, PCs, instant messaging, email,photos, social networks, calendars, maps, smoke detectors, wearables, video, and likely, a few surprises.
We’ll be there live, covering everything we can get our hands. Ahead of the event, though, here’s everything to keep an eye out for at Google I/O 2015.
Android M:
Marshmallow? Marzipan? Mint Milano? Milky Way? Whatever the name of Google’s next mobile operating system… we probably won’t hear it at I/O. Google didn’t announce Android 5.0 was called Lollipop until October, and to signal that it’s still a work in progress, Google will probably stick with codenames again this year.
We will get to learn more about the OS itself, though. One system-wide feature of Android M will be that both the operating system and the apps are a little smarter, a little more able to figure out what you want and simply get it done. Google Now is becoming a hub for predictive actions, able to tell you when to leave for your appointment and how much that house for sale across the street costs. Search is more powerful than ever, too, offering more actions instead of just research. Voice commands are a theme for Google, and you’ll see more of them across the OS. Google also recently bought Timeful, a calendar app that would create a schedule for you based on what you actually need to get done—it’s probably too early for those smarts to really make their way across Google, but we might see some early fruits of the acquisition.
Generally speaking, Android M sounds like it’s going to be work-focused, as evidenced by an accidentally posted event listing that says “Android M is bringing the power of Android to all kinds of workplaces.” It’s an obvious move for Android, which needs to invade businesses the way the iPhone has. Work-friendly Android probably means more and more granular privacy and security in the OS, and it might also include support for fingerprint recognition, which has been rolled out in a few phones—most notably the Galaxy S6—but hasn’t officially been supported before. Oh, and that fingerprint reader is going to be a crucial part of Android Pay, the upgrade to Google Wallet that Pichai promised at MWC in March.
There will be lots of new features, from improved notifications to a possible new way to try apps without ever having to download them. The new Material Design will be refined and expanded, too, but don’t expect gigantic overhauls. Google feels like it’s hit on something powerful and lasting with the current path of Android, and you shouldn’t see it deviate too much.
The Androidification of Everything
There are two sides of the Android vision. One is simple: Make Android great. The other is bigger, and actually much harder: Make everything Android. Last year Google talked about Android for your TV, your car, your watch, your face—Android everywhere, all the time.
Expect lots more of that this year. A number of manufacturers showed off Android TV sets at CES in January; those will take the stage, finished and ready for purchase. Android Auto is finally starting to bear fruit, and there will certainly be more partner announcements and more feature upgrades. And a recent report says that there’s yet another version of Android, called Brillo, designed to power the Internet of Things.
Remember last year, when Google gave everyone those odd-looking cardboard packages that turned out to be an amazingly powerful, low-rent VR system? Google does. After I/O last year, it gave every employee in the company a Cardboard set, and virtual reality is only going to become more important to Google. It’s reportedly working on a version of Android for virtual reality headsets, and it re-assigned its brilliant search designer Jon Wiley to the VR team. YouTube is supporting 360-degree video, and there are literally billions of Android devices that may soon have VR support built in. In one fell swoop, Google could become the biggest player in VR—and that may happen this week.
Everyone’s also watching for Android Wear. There have been rumblings that Google’s smartwatch platform could soon support connection to iPhones, and Android M will surely bring more features to smartwatches new and old. We’ve been hearing that Google’s working on more native communication tools, to rival the Digital Touch and heartbeat-sharing on the Apple Watch.
Devices, Devices, Devices:
While Google might not immediately strike you as a consumer electronics company, its excess of devices argues otherwise. Plenty of Google Gadgets will get a mention on stage this week, and many could be due for an upgrade.
It’s possible there could be a new Nexus phone or Nexus tablet, though those both seem unlikely—Google just launched a line of cases (with Skrillex!) for the Nexus 6, and both devices are still fairly new. There will probably be some sort of virtual reality gear, which could be as simple as Cardboard or perhaps a Nexus-branded version of the amazing HTC Vive. We’re due for a new Chromecast, and for a new round of Chromebooks. Maybe even a new Nexus Player?
Of course, everyone will be waiting to see if there’s any news regarding Google Glass, which is being rebooted under the leadership of Tony Fadell and Nest. (Who, by the way, might just show up at I/O to talk about the Internet of Things.) Odds are it’s too soon to see the new gadget, but an update could be in store.
Amid all the surprises and “maybes,” there is one thing you can expect: smartwatches. A new version of Android Wear is coming, along with a spate of new watches—new devices from existing manufacturers like Motorola and Samsung, and possibly some new interest from outlets like Intel and Tag Heuer. Oh, and hey Google: It’s time for a Nexus Watch.
But Wait, There Will Be More:
Google’s keynotes are two-and-a-half hours long, and they’re fantastically unpredictable. One year, a bunch of Googlers skydived live into the building; another, Larry Page invited us all onto his island where we could experiment with technology. Just last year, there was an insane Rube Goldberg machine seemingly hellbent on destruction.
It’s going to be a big show for Google, as it shows the world what the industry’s strangest and most versatile company is up to. We’ll be there, covering everything live beginning Thursday morning in San Francisco. Don’t miss it.
YOUR HEADPHONES HAVEbeen lying to you. Maybe you’ve suspected that the tinny sound piping through your earbuds isn’t an exact replica of the rich, nuanced audio that our ears naturally capture. Don’t blame the headphones. Blame the recording device.
Most of the audio we listen to is recorded with a single microphone, which totally ignores the way we actually hear—from two ears. Binuaric wants to correct that oversight. The German company believes it has developed a way to record and listen to true 3-D audio, the kind that mimics the natural surround system of the world, in a pair of earphones.
Its OpenEars earphones (now on Kickstarter) record and play back what is referred to as binaural sound, or sound that’s captured from two microphones. The trick is to record sound waves as close to the human ear as possible, as a way to mimic accurately the way it hears. Binaural sound has been recorded for decades, but the technology used do it has always been clunky, requiring hefty microphones that sit atop “dummy heads” that mimic the natural shape of the human noggin. Binauric’s headphones have two little condenser microphone slots alongside the outer ear that capture sound waves at the rate they hit your ear, which allows you to record conversations and sounds like you might hear them in real life. “We just copied our ears and put it in a technology,” says Tanja Schauer, a co-founder of Binauric. With OpenEars, the company promises, you will be able to revisit a child’s first words as if the toddler were still in the room.
The thing about having two ears is that, depending on where the sound is coming from, you’re going hear it in the left and right ear at different times. Say you hear laughter on your left side. That sound is eventually going to make it to your right ear, but by the time it does, it will have traveled around your head and bounced off all sorts of environmental obstacles, which means it’s probably going to sound softer and slightly more muffled than what you heard in your left ear. We don’t notice these subtle differences day to day—after a while, our aural environment becomes stitched together—but they play a huge role in how we perceive the world. Binaural recordings are able to account for these environmental impacts.
Binauric has miniaturized binaural recording technology to a degree where it’s possible to stick them into headphones. To begin recording you tap the headphones; that audio can be turned into typical formats like WAV and MP3 or streamed directly through an app. The headphones have something the Binauric team calls “hear through,” which allows you to set, via an app, how much of the outside world you want to hear through your headphones. Also of note: They designed a GoPro add-on that hooks to helmets and syncs with the camera to capture 3-D sound.
Pretty neat stuff. But should we even care? Does it matter that the sound on your Instagram video isn’t top quality? Maybe not. It’s clear that Binauric’s vision isn’t about capturing the best musical audio. The company is more interested in the mundane—taxi horns, children laughing, old men telling bad jokes on the subway.
Smartphone camera technology has made huge strides, so much so that buying an auxiliary camera seems silly unless you’re using it to take professional photos and video. Our smartphone’s mics aren’t nearly as advanced. We’re just now getting to the point where we’ll be able to capture the aural world in the same quality as the visual world, and with as much ease. That’s pretty exciting. Because while looking at a photo of your family reunion is a fine way to recall an experience, there’s something about hearing the intonation of voices, the laughter (or the bickering) that’s so much more evocative.
EIGHT HUNDRED YEARSago, cathedrals were the height of human achievement. It was here that humans tested the limits of ingenuity. Here that design and precision reached new heights. Here that people gathered to pray, and asked the cosmos to reveal itself.
This same quest is now carried out in monuments to modern-day physics: in accelerator tunnels holding detectors the size of churches, on the tops of mountains, and at the bottom of abandoned mines. But if you are a would-be worshipper, you needn’t work at CERN, TRIUMF or KEK to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Just construct your own private physics shrine from the comfort of your kitchen table.
While you might not be discovering new physics, you can be part of the particle club. “Doing stuff that’s very high precision, quantitative—to get all the systematic uncertainties down, to get something that you would write up and publish in a journal—costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars,” says Michael Kelsey, DIY enthusiast and research physicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif. But you don’t necessarily need optical cables, high-precision mirror mounts, and mode-locked dye lasers. “You can see the quantum effects very, very cheaply,” he says. Just how cheaply? Read on to find out.
Cloud Chambers and Fusors:
The simplest path to spying on the universe might be to build a cloud chamber. It only takes a fish tank, some felt, dry ice, and isopropyl alcohol—stuff you should be able to pick up for about $40. The felt goes into the bottom of the tank, glued in place and soaked with alcohol. When you put the metal lid on and turn the tank over on top of the dry ice, the alcohol evaporates and condenses into a thick fog. You’re done! Turn off the lights and go grab a flashlight.
In that custom-created fog, you’ll see mysterious trails appear. Those are cosmic rays, invisible bits of matter—often atomic nuclei—that collide with the atmosphere when they come crashing in from space. The smash lets loose a scatter of less massive particles: muons (an unstable subatomic particle that is a sort of sumo-version of an electron), electrons, and positrons (electron’s anti-matter partner). You may even see particle decays, in the form of tracks that suddenly fork in two.
Another class of trails will show up, too—these ones look more like short, pudgy lines. You’re seeing radon, a naturally radioactive element, heave out an alpha particle—two neutrons plus two protons. That’s pretty cool, but radon is a natural part of the atmosphere, not a cosmic ray. Sorry.
Want to embark on something even simpler? Kelsey encourages physics fans to give photon detection a try—just like Thomas Young, you can observe the wave particle dualityThose interested in stepping it up a notch (in expense and danger) can build their own fusion generator, using electric fields to contain a plasma under pressure and prompt atoms to fuse nuclei. The same thing happens in the sun, or in a fusion bomb. Two atomic nuclei join to form a heavier element, releasing a blast of energy in the process. For decades, scientists have sought to harness fusion to create clean, near-endless energy: In the south of France, an international group is building the 23,000-ton International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which they hope will create hundreds of megawatts of power.
In your home, though, you can build what’s known as a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusion reactor, or fusor. Don’t expect it to help with your electricity bill, though. “You don’t get break-even [energy], you can’t use it as a power source,” Kelsey says. “But you can build this in your garage for $500 to $600.”
A homemade fusor—sometimes called a “star in a jar”—uses plywood, PVC pipe fittings, a transformer, mineral oil, and a host of other parts to generate an ionized plasma in which nuclei will fuse at low levels. But that fusion also releases gamma rays and X-rays, high energy particles that can rip your DNA to shreds. So please don’t sue us: If you build a fusor, be sure to put up steel plates or concrete blocks for shielding.
Cyclotrons:
If you’d rather accelerate particles, lend an ear to the siren song of small-scale cyclotrons. One of the first types of accelerators, these machines accelerate charged particles across a gap between two D-shaped electrodes by rapidly reversing the polarity of the electric field. The largest cyclotron (60 feet in diameter) resides in Canada, at TRIUMF (TRI University Meson Facility), where it is being modified to produce slow moving neutrons. If you want a cyclotron of your own though, it’s possible—all it takes is some determination and (cough) about $130,000. A pittance compared to TRIUMF!
For the past decade Mark Yuly, a physics professor at Houghton, has been working on a miniature cyclotron—with a lot of help from his students. In 2010, Houghton College in New York hosted the world’s first known small cyclotron conference. Only a few dozen DIY nerds attended, but what the small cyclotron community lacks in size it makes up for in commitment and verve. of light. Gather some foil, silly putty, a business card, utility knife, a laser pointer, some optical filters and a digital camera. Cut the foil into slits and shine the laser, set to a low power (or with the intensity reduced by filters), across them.
To detect the pattern formed by photons as they pass through the slits, place a camera with an “indefinite shutter” (or a piece of film) behind the foil. Set it out for a short time and you’ll see just a few pinpricks of light—indicating that light does behave like a particle. Set it out for longer and you’ll observe a distribution spread across the film. The distribution matches the patterns that occur as two waveforms create interference.
Yuly recalls reading a popular science article as a young man about a group of people who made a Van de Graaff generator. “I was surprised that you could make such a thing,” he says, “and basically use old parts to smash atoms.” He set his sights on a cyclotron and checked out the PhD thesis of M. Stanley Livingston—the graduate student who worked with Ernest Lawrence (winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize for physics) to build the first one.
That machine, which started accelerating in 1931, “was put together with old metal scraps and sealed with pieces of candle wax,” Yuly says. “I thought we could do at least as good as that.” And after about five years of construction, they did. “We were all pretty excited when we first got a beam,” says Yuly. “It was unexpected: We were just scanning the magnet and we saw the current jump up.”
About two hours later, though, a giant spark appeared in the vacuum chamber. It vaporized the glass insulators and the chamber lid, ruining the ion source, the D-shaped magnets, and the lid. “We basically had to rebuild the whole thing over the course of two years,” says Yuly. “But that’s OK, it was still pretty cool.”
Together with his students, Yuly has accelerated protons up to 100 kiloelectron volts. With their new design modifications—altering the magnetic field to better focus the beam—they should soon be able to reach 900 keV. Yes, Yuly says, the Large Hadron Collider (which is a different type of particle accelerator) has about a billion times more power, “but their accelerator is bigger than 10 inches across too.” (It’s more than 5 miles across, for a circumference of 17 miles.)
And Yuly’s mini cyclotron can do a lot of things that the LHC can’t. It teaches hands-on creativity and problem solving—skills needed in real life that are hard to pick up doing homework problems at a desk. “It’s more like what a scientist really does,” Yuly says. Sometimes his students continue to work with the machines, working for companies that make small cyclotrons for hospitals, which use the particles generated in imaging studies or cancer radiation treatments.
By and large, physics enthusiasts begin DIY projects to give their curiosity, and their desire to tinker, room to roam. Some work in public science outreach or are creating art pieces. And occasionally, they’re making something they really need.
Michael Kelsey’s favorite DIY example is creative but not exactly splashy. “For a combo of coolness and benefit to humanity,” he says, “I’d pick portable personal radiation detectors.” Following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami DIY sites proliferated with instructions of how to make these devices. Some included wireless data loggers allowing for crowd-sourced radiation data collection from the region. “To me that was really cool because it’s not just a project to show off,” Kelsey says. “There’s this whole group of people that really need this thing.”
WHEN GODADDY NAMEDBlake Irving as its new CEO, Elissa Murphy was one of the first people he called. Irving had worked with Murphy at Microsoft and Yahoo, where she was a vice president of engineering, and he asked if she would join him at GoDaddy. “Absolutely not,” she said.
As an exec at Microsoft, Irving helped push the software giant onto the internet. He spent two years as the chief of product at Yahoo. And after working alongside him for so many years, Murphy trusted his judgment. “I have faith in Blake,” she says. Nonetheless, GoDaddy was a company that used half-naked women to advertise a service for registering website addresses. It not only carried a reputation for shameless sexism. It was a technological backwater.
But Irving was pitching GoDaddy as a place for change. He said he would drop the sexist advertising. He described the company’s service—despite the low-grade software and PennySaver look—as a platform that could offer serious technology to any small business that signed up for an internet domain. He wanted to remake the company’s online infrastructure in the image of what Murphy helped create at Yahoo, so it could reach these small businesses not only in the US but across the globe. And though Murphy resisted the pitch at first, she spoke to others about it, thought it over, and eventually came around.
She warmed to the idea of building a new global operation, using the latest in open source data center software to expand the company’s foundational infrastructure from around 30,000 machines to 100,000. “I’m kind of a geek,” she says. She felt that with data on the habits of over 10 million existing customers, the company was in a unique position to understand and nurture the small business market. And considering that so many small businesses are run by women, she saw this as a way of turning the company’s M.O. upside-down. Just a few months earlier, Murphy says, she had used GoDaddy to help her hairdresser—a woman—set up a new website.
That spring, Murphy joined GoDaddy as its chief technology officer. And much like Irving, she received countless messages from friends and colleagues questioning her judgment. “Trust me: If you think he got emails saying ‘What the___are you doing?,’ I got more,” she says. But two years on, she represents a significant shift inside the company, in terms of both culture and technology.
Today, after Irving made good on his promise to drop the sexist ads, women fill 18 percent of GoDaddy’s technical and engineering jobs—slightly more than at places like Google and Facebook. This year, women account for 39 percent of its new technical hires from universities (up from 14 percent the previous year) and 40 percent of its technical interns (up from 14 percent). In April, the Anita Borg Institute For Women and Technology rated the company as one of the top workplaces for women technologists, alongside Apple and Google. And as the gender balance starts to shift, new tech laid down by Irving, Murphy, and so many others is reshaping the company into something that belies its reputation.
Brian Essex, a financial analyst with Morgan Stanley who closely tracks GoDaddy, says that despite its lingering reputation as a “gorilla marketer,” the newly-public company is evolving into the kind of international platform Irving envisioned. “They’ve focused on high quality,” he says of the company’s leadership team, most of whom joined the company after Irving took the reins, “and that shows through.”
As so many big-name companies say they’re seeking to advance the role of women in the tech industry, GoDaddy is an example of real progress. Known more for its sexism than its technology, it was in an even deeper hole than most. But now, says Telle Whitney, the CEO of the Anita Borg Institute, “GoDaddy outperforms the norm”—at least in terms of female hiring, starting with its CTO. (You’ll find women CTOs at less than 7 percent of Fortune 500 companies.)
And yet the evolution of GoDaddy also shows just how much still needs fixing. As Irving points out, 18 percent isn’t all that high. And as he and the company push for change, they’re often met with more antagonism than applause. Those TV ads linger in the minds of many—not to mention on YouTube—and some question the sincerity of the company’s newfound feminism. We’re a long way from a world where women in technology isn’t a debate.
‘This Is Why I Don’t Trust Women-In-Tech Orgs’:
Last year, the GoDaddy partnered with the Anita Borg Institute in a broad effort to promote woman in tech. Irving served as an executive producer on a new documentary, Code: Debugging the Gender Gap. He spoke at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. And in each case, he and the company were pilloried across social media and beyond, their efforts characterized as mere PR. Whitney says other Anita Borg partners complained about Institute’s association with the company.
“‘GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving also recognizes the value of women in technology.’ Right. Our value in GoDaddy’s sexist ad strategy,” one woman wrote on Twitter in the wake of the Anita Borg partnership.
“@anitaborg_org Don’t bother with them, #FutureOfGoDaddy. Work with someone who’s deserving of your skills!” said another.
Certainly, if GoDaddy is to win the small business market, it must scrub its reputation. Though a study commissioned by GoDaddy shows that women account for 60 percent of small businesses owners, they represent only 40 percent of the company’s current customers, a discrepancy easily blamed on its past advertising.
In 2013, Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson says, his company pulled out of a partnership with GoDaddy because so many women selling stuff through its online marketplace were complaining about the latest Super Bowl ad. Irving, three weeks into his tenure, assured Dickerson he was changing the ad strategy, and the Etsy CEO says he “sounded very sincere.” But Dickerson told Irving that a partnership wouldn’t work unless he dropped the ads right away, something that Irving felt he didn’t yet have the political capital to do. Now that the company has indeed stopped the ads—and changed in so many other ways—Irving wants the world to know about it.
But change is change. When Elissa Murphy arrived at GoDaddy, she helped found a “women in technology network,” after running a similar group at Yahoo. And through this group, she cultivated the relationship with the Anita Borg Institute, sending the first email to Telle Whitney. “I reached out to her, and I knew she would think: ‘Are you completely mad?'” she says. “But they have been nothing but fantastic partners.”
Twenty-three-year old Julie Logue joined GoDaddy as a user experience designer last summer after Blake Irving bought fro-yo for her and ten other female seniors at Cal Poly, explaining his personal reasons changing the culture at GoDaddy. He said it was part of a promise he made to himself several years earlier, after the death of his sister, a college professor who specialized in the psychology of women. “He said his vision was to carry on her work, but in his field,” Logue remembers. “I honestly have never been so inspired. I thought: ‘I have to get a job with this company. I don’t care if I’m washing the floors.'”
Alaina Percival, the CEO of Women Who Code, another non-profit pushing to change the gender balance, sees such change a different light than others do. “As companies realize they can be doing things better, we need to allow them to make those changes,” she says. “It’s fair to be skeptical, but if companies are genuinely making cultural changes—and more public changes—we need to be willing to forgive mistakes.”
‘What Better Place to Do It?’
Murphy says that GoDaddy’s transformation is as much about technology as culture. Like its reputation, the company’s tech is a long way from where she and Irving want it to be. “We’re still in the second inning,” Irving says. But it’s not what it once was.
On Murphy’s watch, in less than a year and a half, GoDaddy has overhauled its online infrastructure, building atop sweeping software tools like OpenStack,Hadoop, and Spark—the sorts of modern tools that companies like Yahoo use to run software and crunch data across tens of thousands of machines.
These tools have fed the company’s move overseas—over the past eighteen months, it has launched in 37 countries—and they serve as a common platform where the company can roll out any new service, expanding to more machines as need be. The company is now using machine learning to personalize offers to small businesses on its site, much as Amazon does for shoppers. And it provides a way for businesses—after signing up for an internet domain—to plug straight into email, word processing, and spreadsheet services from Microsoft.
The hope, Murphy says, is that the company can also build a new breed of applications using the enormous amounts of data it collects on its customers, which now number more than 13 million. “We can now know what our customers want when they come to a site, when they come to product,” she says. “In the future, we can help them customize their own marketing, so that they can better target their own customers.”
She could have built similar systems elsewhere. After all, “big data” is the panacea du jour. And when Irving approached her, she was weighing two other job offers. But after moving past her initial distaste for the company, she decided it would mean more if she made such changes at GoDaddy. There was more to change. “What better place to do it?” she says.
True, after the rise of Netflix, iTunes, and so many other services that push movies and TV shows over the Internet, the format isn’t exactly the future of high-def entertainment. But Facebook recently tossed Blu-ray a lifeline, fashioning a system that could transform these optical discs into a means of preserving the hundreds of millions of photos uploaded to the social network every day. Now Sony—the company behind the Blu-ray disc—has acquired the startup that grew from this Facebook project in hopes of bringing similar tech to businesses across the ‘net.
The startup, Optical Archive Inc., was founded by Frank Frankovsky, who oversaw Facebook’s efforts to streamline the data center hardware underpinning the enormously popular social network. Frankovsky says Sony and Optical Archive are working to create Blu-Ray systems akin to the one demonstrated by Facebook—systems that use robotic devices to store and retrieve digital information across thousands of optical discs.
Today, inside the data centers that run services like the Facebook social network, companies typically store digital information hard drives or flash drives. But Frankovsky and others argue Blu-ray provides a cheaper, more reliable means of storing older data. Though the medium doesn’t make sense for frequently accessed data (say, the Facebook photos you uploaded today), it suits archived data (the photos you uploaded five years ago). Frankovsky says it’s ideal for use inside financial services companies, which must retain data for regulatory reasons, even when few people are looking at it.
In Cold Storage:
According Facebook director of engineering Jason Taylor, it’s best to think of such “cold storage” as a cheaper way for a company like Facebook to back upall its data. Rather than using ordinary hard drives and flash memory for, say, a second backup, you can use Blu-Ray. “If you take one out of your three copies and make it ‘cold,’ it’s an absolute savings in money,” he says.
In the past, companies have used magnetic tape drives for this kind of thing. But data stored on tape—like data stored on hard disk—is more vulnerable than data stored on optical disc. It’s susceptible to both humidity (a growing problem as companies cut costs by cooling data centers with the outside air) and electromagnetic pulses. “Optical drives will be as a pervasive as hard drives and tape drives in the coming years,” Frankovsky says.
Facebook has not yet deployed its Blu-ray system. But according to Taylor, the company plans to. “We’re testing now, and I’m confident we’re going to roll many racks into production throughout this year and on into next,” he says. Frankovsky hopes that others will follow suit as more and more digital data streams into the world’s companies.
A Bigger Blu-ray:
Though the typical Blu-ray disc stores about 25 to 50GB of data—plenty for a feature film—Frankovsky and Sony are developing discs that house as much as a terabyte (1000GB). The idea is to build systems that use robotic arms to store and retrieve data across rack after rack of optical discs. The arms move discs into a central drive where data can be written and read before returning them to their racks.
Companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon can serve as a bellwether for the wider world of data center hardware. As these companies build new hardware to streamline their ever-growing online operations, others often mimic their work, sometimes driving entirely new hardware markets. Facebook actively drives this through its Open Compute Project, open-sourcing many of its hardware designs and encouraging others to do the same. Frankovsky helped found this effort and continues to serve as chairman and president of the independent foundation that oversees the project.
Typically, the Facebooks and the Google reshape the internet’s infrastructure by creating entirely new technology. But in the case of Blu-ray, the old tech will do just fine.
SCIENTISTS SHOULDN’T BE allowed to name their own creations. Today, researchers at Stanford announced a new way of creating gobbets of human brain cells that look and act like real, living grey matter. The researchers took this striking result and named their product “human cortical spheroids,” or hCSs. Which is terrible. C’mon guys, tell it like it is: You’re makingbrain balls.
In recent years, physiologists have learned to make and grow neural cells that look more and more like the real thing—most recently, by moving cell cultures beyond flat layers on the bottom of a Petri dish and into the third dimension. (Is this sounding like an ad for a 3-D movie?) A group out of Japan’s RIKEN Institute, led by the late Yoshiki Sasai, recently developed a cerebellum-like 3D culture. Jorgen Knoblich’s group at the Austrian Academy of Sciences created what they’re calling “cerebral organoids.” (Again, really: brain balls.)
The spheroids made by Sergiu Paşca’s group at Stanford aren’t the first 3-D neural cultures, then. But they are the first that neuroscientists have been able to study functionally, looking at the electrical workings of their structure as a whole. Nobody understands the workings of the entire brain as it fires, but at least they can begin to figure out how these simplified 5-millimeter globes of cells work.
To grow their spheroids, the group started with stem cells, cells (derived in this case from skin) that—with a little tweaking–grow into any kind of cell a researcher wants. It’s a property called “pluripotency.” But those cells won’t grow on their own; the team used a mixture of neuron-fertilizing molecules in a fluid bath.
It worked. And the neurons didn’t just divide and grow: They actually echoed some of what would happen to cortical neurons in a real, live brain. The tiny, growing brain balls curled inward, developing multiple layers of neurons both deep and superficial, just like the human cortex does.
Critically, after a certain amount of time the brain balls also started growing a type of cell called an astrocyte. These star-shaped cells provide physical and perhaps chemical support to neighboring neurons, so some of these brain balls stayed alive (and kept growing) much longer than they typically would—as old as 300 days. The cells also are critical for the formation of synapses, the junctions where neurons trade electrical messages. Because Paşca’s team was able to grow astrocytes alongside these cortical neurons, almost 90 percent of all the neurons inside the spheroids had active synapses, spontaneously sending electric missives to the network around them. They weren’t “thinking,” but they were doingsomething.
Click to Open Overlay GalleryCross-section of a human cortical spheroid showing a ventricular zone (high nuclear density) and surrounding neurons as shown by the expression of the neuronal marker MAP2 (red). ). Nuclei labeled with HOECHST (cyan).
That meant the team was able to do something other culturing methods don’t allow: slicing and studying brain balls like actual brains. When neuroscientists study neural networks in mice, “you take the mouse brain and slice it into thin slices,” says Paşca. “What we have done is take these spheroids and slice them like you would with a rodent brain and do slice recordings.”
Electrophysiological recording is a big deal. “The studies presented here, particularly the electrophysiology, raise the hope that organoid systems can be used for modeling neuronal network activity,” Knoblich, creator of those other organoids, wrote in an email. “They demonstrate a response of the neurons to external stimuli—an observation that has not been described before.”
Paşca talks about these brain balls, now growing by the thousands in his lab, like a mother hen protecting its eggs. Each dish, filled with its nourishing growth factors, supports 50 to 100 spheroids. And each is a different age, cultured from a different person’s induced stem cells. So each dish has its own identity, in a way—one that needs to be protected by changing that nutrient bath every four days and applying antibiotics to resist infection.
Maybe Paşca knows how this sounds, because he finds it necessary to interject, without my asking: “This is not a small human brain in a dish,” he says. “I don’t have any interest in building that.”
That would be creepy. A lot of people do, though. The ultimate goal for these 3-D cultures is to mimic the brain’s actual cytoarchitecture as closely as possible. “The thing that everybody has been waiting for is ‘can we build a circuit in a dish?’” says Paşca. “We’re not there yet, but for now we have built a very complex neural network.”
To make that a reality, a lot of work still needs to happen. “The method suffers from the same weaknesses that we are all trying hard to overcome,” writes Knoblich. It’s tough for a neural network to grow very large or sustain itself without a blood supply, which is why the spheroids are unlikely to grow much larger than 5 millimeters across (and why the researchers have to constantly switch out the nutrient broth, like cleaning a fish tank). More importantly, perhaps, while a certain amount of structure developed spontaneously in the capsules (as other culturing techniques have achieved as well), the brain balls still don’t develop the complex convolutions on the surface of the brain called gyri.
Another difference between brains and brain balls: For now, the method only produces excitatory neurons, the kind that tell other neurons to do more, more often. But there are plenty of other kinds of neurons: oligodendrocytes and microglia and inhibitory neurons and interneurons. That’s how a brain programs itself. In a way, that limitation on brain balls is good—biologists know little enough about how human neurons interact with each other that it makes sense to study one class on its own before expanding into others. But if you really wanted to recapitulate neural development in a dish, you’d need the other types. “It will be very complicated,” says Paşca. “There are so many developmental cues that we don’t even know of yet that lead to all of those different cell types.”
For now, Paşca will keeping growing his spheroids—and use them to study excitatory neurons cultured from patients with different disorders of the brain. “We already have a very broad collection of induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with autism or schizophrenia,” says Paşca, “and we’re developing spheroids from those cells.” Maybe they’ll come up with a better name next time.
BART SHEPHERD AND Luiz Rocha were going the wrong way if they wanted to find a reef. Off the coast of Anilao in the Philippines, the biologists were diving—and diving, and diving—deep into the murky waters. Propelled by scooters, torpedo-like machines like the ones Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage used to infiltrate Alcatraz in The Rock, they dove 100 feet down. Then 200, then 300. It got darker and darker until they at last reached a reef clad in blackness, 400 feet below the surface, swarming with invertebrates and fishes illuminated by the divers’ beams.
There was even coral, which shouldn’t make a lick of sense. A coral reef is supposed to be a bright blue, glimmering world, with flashy fish and maybe a sea turtle or two. It’s an ecosystem absolutely dependent on the sun: Corals have a symbiotic relationship with photosynthetic algae, which need sunlight to thrive and pump out nutrients for their hosts. But not deep reefs like this in the so-called “twilight zone,” the waters between 150 and 500 feet deep. They operate with little light or, if waters grow murky, no light at all. Yet a reef still flourishes.
These deep reefs are some of the least explored ecosystems on Earth—as in, almost entirely unstudied. Shepherd and Rocha, who returned to their home base at the California Academy of Sciences late last month, are among a handful of scientists who have visited a reef like this, much less studied one. You see, these depths historically have been too shallow to justify the expense of sending a sub, yet too deep to pull off safely with scuba gear. That’s finally changing: New technology makes it safer for divers to stay submerged as long as seven hours, so now scientists with the requisite funding (and nerves) can explore the deep reefs and see what no human has ever set eyes on. Their findings are revealing a strange ecosystem, where fish prefer to dress in red and coral grows with little sunlight—a reef that, like its shallow-water counterparts, could be in serious trouble.
Your typical bright, shallow reef begins with the sun, which feeds algae, which feed the proliferating corals that in turn provide shelter for fish, which attract predators like sharks. The whole chain is dependent on the sun. But deep reefs clearly thrive in low light or even darkness, so how do their ecosystems still churn? Well, in a way, the sun still powers them.
“Those reefs that we went to in the Philippines, the surface water was so murky that at 400 feet, even diving at 11 in the morning it was like a night dive,” says Rocha. “There was no light whatsoever, and every coral we saw were ones that feed only on plankton.” Shallow-water corals will also feed on plankton, but are very much dependent on algae as a source of energy—in the absence of light and algae, the coral here have come to rely entirely on plankton.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t depend on the sun. It just takes a couple more steps for corals to gain access to its photonic energy. Plankton is made of tiny animals called zooplankton, which feed on their counterparts, plant-like organisms called phytoplankton. These phytoplankton typically float at the top of the water column to absorb sunlight.
This is a dangerous place for zooplankton during the day, what with their own predators about. So zooplankton hang out in the dark depths when the sun is up, then ascend at night to feed on the phytoplankton under cover of darkness. Sunlight makes its way into the phytoplankton, which make their way into the zooplankton, which in turn end up as coral food when they descend into the deep. The ecosystem gets its energy from the sun, however indirectly.
And it’s thriving, packed with creatures specially adapted to life in the dark. Fish here, for instance, tend to have bigger eyes to gather the scant light, and “a lot of them have a sort of red, orange color,” says Shepherd, “because that spectrum of light doesn’t exist where they are. And so they disappear, they turn grey, blue, black when they’re that color.”
One of the Cal Academy’s stunning sessile comb jellies from the twilight zone.
Shepherd and Rocha also stumbled across two gorgeous and peculiar invertebrates (one shown at left) known as ctenophores, or comb jellies, which aren’t really true jellyfish. Comb jellies typically wander casually through the water column, but these two had attached themselves to fishing line tangled in the reef (you may not have known this place exists, but fishermen certainly do). “They actually take their mouthparts and they have these folds around the oral end of their body and they wrap it around something and hold on to it,” says Shepherd. “And then they put these two sort of finger-like lobes into the water and there’s tentacles that come out of them that they use to feed” on plankton. Shepherd and Rocha were even able to bring them back to the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco alive, along with 15 fish—the latter of which required the help of a very special device.
Under Pressure:
It’s not that it’s particularly bad for the human body to briefly be 400 feet below the ocean surface. Where it really gets dangerous is in the ascent. Do it too quickly and you’ll get the bends—the excruciating formation of nitrogen bubbles in tissues and blood—so Shepherd and Rocha had to stop at predetermined depths as they ascended, beginning with short breaks that got progressively longer. “You’ve got one minute at 180 feet,” says Shepherd, “one minute at 140 feet, two minutes at 100 feet, four minutes at 80 feet, and then it just keeps building until you have this two hours at 35 feet.”
Two hours in one spot. To fend off insanity on these kinds of dives, Shepherd and Rocha practice catching fish or swimming backward or testing a waterproof iPad case by playing Angry Birds. It takes so long that they’re afforded no longer than 20 minutes—and sometimes as few as 10—exploring the deep reef before they must ascend and decompress. (Spending this much time underwater is only possible because of technology known as a re-breather, which takes exhaled air, scrubs the carbon dioxide, and cycles the air back through.)
Things get even more complicated when divers try to bring live fish back up with them, because fish don’t respond to the same decompression schedule that a human does. They have an air-filled organ called a swim bladder, which helps them control their buoyancy so they don’t have to waste energy correcting their position up and down in the water column. “The swim bladder is an analog to our lungs, but it doesn’t have a connection to the environment, so it’s just a bubble inside the fish,” says Rocha. “And as they come up it increases in size unless the gases get diffused back through the bloodstream, or unless you use a needle” to pierce the swim bladder. If you don’t, the fish’s eyes bulge out as the swim bladder shoves its stomach out of its mouth. As you can imagine, this is somewhat traumatic for the fish.
Click to Open Overlay GalleryThe DIY decompression chamber that’s saved many a fish an uncomfortable trip to the surface.
Academy scientists came up with a clever solution: a portable decompression chamber that biologist Matt Wandell cobbled together with off-the-shelf parts. It’s pretty simple, really. Rocha and Shepherd carried a tube with them—actually your run-of-the-mill water filter canister you’d have at home. When they found a fish they wanted alive, they’d net it, jam it in the tube, and seal the thing up. As they ascended, the pressure in the water-tight chamber remained as it was at-depth, sparing the fish inside all that nasty eye-bulging and stomach-regurgitating.
Back on land, one of their no-doubt-sleep-deprived colleagues would check on the fish every two hours for around 24 hours, slowly releasing the pressure until it matched that at sea level. This allows the gas in the fish’s swim bladder to diffuse gradually, with far less trauma. Thus acclimated to the pressure, 15 deep-reef fish now swim in an open tank backstage at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, where they’ll be featured in a twilight-zone exhibit opening summer 2016.
Back in December, I did a series of stories exploring the cavernous collections at the California Academy of Sciences: millions of specimens gathered in the field, now kept in jars and pinned to boards. This did not make some readers happy. They couldn’t understand how killing creatures could possibly further the cause of science. But the fact of the matter is collecting and cataloging animals—or, better yet, keeping them alive to observe them—is indispensable to science, especially in this age of human-induced mass extinction.
Coral reefs in particular are in serious trouble, and when it comes to understanding an ecosystem like this, there’s simply no substitute for collecting fish. On this trip, Academy scientists collected nearly 100 specimens in addition to the 15 live ones. This way, they can at any time in the future pull the specimens from the collections to compare them to other species. That information is invaluable. These reefs are so rarely studied that science could well be in danger of losing the deep reefs before it can fully understand them.
Click to Open Overlay GalleryAn undescribed fish of the genus Symphysanodon. Collected by Richard Pyle and Brian Greene, Bishop Museum.
While a lot of these deep reefs are washed over with cool upwelling waters, perhaps staving off the harm that warming waters will do to the shallower reefs (bleaching, for instance, and more outbreaks of disease), the big problem will be acidification, which spares no coral. The staggering amount of carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the atmosphere is absorbed in part by the oceans, acidifying them. Indeed, since the Industrial Revolution, Earth’s seas have grown 30 percent more acidic. This monkeys with a developing coral’s ability to build its skeleton, which is made of calcium carbonate, and can even erode existing corals. And the prognosis doesn’t look good: Within the next three or four decades, coral reefs could begin eroding faster than they’re able to grow.
Then again, any number of other extinction events in Earth’s 3.5-billion-year history of life show that where some species perish, others flourish. Ideally, humanity could check its carbon output—but if that’s impossible, perhaps all is not lost. “I like to think corals have been around for a really, really long time,” says Shepherd. “They’re amazingly resilient, plastic animals. And things will probably change, communities will change, species will go extinct, other species will thrive. It’s hard to say in the long term what that will look like.”
Things will undoubtedly be different on the deep reefs a century from now, which is all the more reason for scientists to study them now in their more-or-less pristine state. So here’s to revealing the secrets of the deep reefs—20 minutes at a time.
