Candian researchers have created a “hate map” that splashes a U.S. map with color-coding showing the proportion of all Tweets that contain common hateful words about race, sexual orientation, or disabilities.

The group responsible, based at California’s Humboldt State University, previously faced some criticism for their methodology in mapping racist Tweets concerning President Obama; in that project the researchers identified racist terms algorithmically, meaning the context might sometimes be misconstrued. They say they answered past criticism in part by analyzing tweets by hand to make sure certain words were really used in a derogatory way. In the new study, human readers reviewed 150,000 Tweets in the study sample to confirm the context was derogatory. The results are here.

While the new effort may accurately find hate in Tweets, there are reasons to doubt that the results accurately map hate in the United States.  For starters, the concentration of Twitter users is not even across the country, and not all Tweets are geotagged (they only looked at the geotagged ones).  Moreover, a lot of Twitter accounts are marketing-based and wouldn’t contain hate words, so those would drown out the signal.  Some Twitter accounts are phony.  Perhaps most of all, the number of times an individual person Tweets can vary greatly.  One guy spewing 1,000 hateful Tweets will make his county look pretty bad.

Overall, the map puts the midwest and southeast in a generally harsh light. By contrast, it says there seems to be very little hate in California, Colorado or Alabama — but lots of it in angry red splashes such as one between Davenport and Iowa City, Iowa. My skepticism is tempered by the unbroken corridor in light blue (denoting “some hate”) generally along the New Jersey Turnpike.  When I’m stuck there I don’t like my fellow man either. 

To make up your own mind, read more about the methodology here.

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A grand day out: One use of cell-phone based mobility models is to understanding inter-city or regional movements, such as commuting or the patterns of movements to and from landmarks. Call density on a summer Saturday in New York’s Central Park is shown here, with heaviest usage in red.

Researchers at ATT, Rutgers University, Princeton, and Loyola University have devised a way to mine cell-phone data without revealing your identity, potentially showing a route to avoiding privacy pitfalls that have so far confined global cell-phone data-mining work to research labs.

Working with billions of location data points from ATT mobile phone calls and text-messages around Los Angeles and New York City, they’ve built a “mobility model” of the two regions that aggregates the data, produces representative “synthetic call records”—then mathematically obscures any data that could tend to identify people.

The model can do things like rapidly predict how a new development or telecommuting policy would affect overall transportation, or it could be a new tool for planning at a town level where little mobility data is available, says Margaret Martonosi, a computer scientist at Princeton who is working on the model. Right now, planners generally rely on road sensors and the limited number of people who permit their GPS position to be captured.

Vincent Blondel, a computer scientist at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, and a leader in research efforts on call data records and privacy issues, says the work was impressive. “This is an excellent work that will help explore ways of making the best use of important data in a privacy protective way,” he says.

Even the simplest phone leaves behind extensive digital traces—called call detail records, or CDRs—that are preserved by mobile carriers. These records—on the time a voice call or text message was placed, and the identity and location of the cell tower involved—give the approximate locations of the phone’s owner. Over time, they can be used to develop an accurate trace of the user’s movements. 

In aggregate—but mostly in theory so far—this data can be used to guide epidemiology research, or to unsnarl traffic by giving an unprecedented view on all human movement patterns (see “How Wireless Carriers Are Monetizing Your Movements”). It can also guide development efforts in poorer parts of the world (see “Big Data from Cheap Phones”).

But building in guaranteed privacy protections represents the toughest hurdle to the growing number of research efforts that tap CDRs. Even if such records are stripped of names and numbers, the identity of the person can often be revealed through other means. For example, a single cell-tower ping at 4:12 a.m. could be connected to a public tweet made at 4:12 a.m. that includes the location and identity of the tweeter. Similar risks crop up for data belonging to people who live in a remote area or have unusual home-work commuting patterns.

The new approach starts by aggregating traces of real human movements, then identifying common locations that might indicate home, work, or school. Next, it creates a set of transportation models. These models generate route tracks of people that the researchers call “synthetic,” because they are merely representative of the aggregate data, and not of actual people.

But the third part is the key. Even these supposedly synthetic records can closely match real ones (especially when the underlying aggregate sample is small). So an algorithm, using an emerging technique known as differential privacy, calculates exactly how high this risk is, and how to reduce it by altering the data. “Noise is injected into the model at points in order to reduce the likelihood of individuals being identifiable,” says Martonosi.

Injecting noise includes deliberately altering the aggregated home and work locations to reduce the reliance on any one individual’s data. Likewise, the aggregated call times are changed to mask any individual’s contribution. Taken together, such tweaks to the data would throw off any efforts to align databases.

Part of this new mobility modeling work was first presented at a conference last year, but refinements and the differential privacy variant were presented last week at a conference at MIT. At the same conference, IBM researchers showed how call records could help optimize public transportation routes (see “African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell Phone Data”).

Martonosi says that publicly releasing the mobility models she and her colleagues have built of New York and Los Angeles metro areas won’t happen before additional publications finalize the work and prove the privacy approach, since the models indirectly draw from real user data.

In the meantime, the methods she and her colleagues used to build the model are publicly published. So other groups could build similar models for other metro areas if they have their own call data records to work with, she says. ATT collaborated on the research, which was done at an ATT facility on three months’ worth of customer data from 300,000 of the carrier’s customers each in the New York and Los Angeles areas. ATT declined to comment for this story.

Amid surging research interest in mobile data, the groups’ approach is garnering considerable interest. William Hoffman, who heads the World Economic Forum’s data-based development efforts, says the approach showed promise. “I thought the concept was quite interesting as a means of ‘de-risking’ the ability of researchers to explore the data,” he says. “It’s one of multiple steps data holders can pursue to strike the balance of using data while protecting the individual.”

One key question is whether a system of synthetic data records could get the carriers around the delicate matter of obtaining user consent. “That’s one of the big issues I took away from the [recent MIT] conference,” says Hoffman. The answer might depend how the data was used or sold, he says.

Nicolas Decordes, a vice president at Orange, the European carrier, says that the company’s RD team said the techniques “would be feasible and could be helpful” for transportation modeling. Because the method does not use real-time data, however, it is better for planning and cannot guide response to events.

The process of obtaining and using cell-phone data is already very touchy. When Orange released data from Ivory Coast to researchers last year, a process Decordes oversaw, that nation was chosen because its Information and Communications Technology (ICT) ministry hadn’t signed on to a regulatory framework restricting such use, in contrast to nearby African nations. And even so, Orange required researchers to sign agreements barring them from trying to identify individuals.

Linus Bengtsson, an epidemiologist at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and a founder of Flowminder, which provides mobility data to NGOs and relief agencies, says that however advanced the privacy protections get, the research community will always need codes of conduct to protect privacy. “Researchers in many areas analyze datasets where someone—with enough determination—could be able to identify people,” he says. “I think [developing] rules for this is actually a more important point than the difficult task of creating special anonymized data sets.”

Other recent research results included ones that show how call records can be used to follow soccer fans as they leave a match or even map poverty levels inside a country, if airtime purchasing habits are analyzed (see “Glimpses of a World Revealed by Cell-Phone Data”).

More Mobile Insights:
Hear from the industry experts driving the future of mobile, in person at the MIT Technology Review Mobile Summit.

June 10-11, 2013 in San Francisco

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Big fan: CFM tests the composite fan blades for the new LEAP engine. They’re mounted to one of the company’s older engines.

A new generation of engines being developed by the world’s largest jet engine maker, CFM (a partnership between GE and Snecma of France), will allow aircraft to use about 15 percent less fuel—enough to save about $1 million per year per airplane and significantly reduce carbon emissions.

The first of these new engine, called LEAP, will feature a technology that has never been used in a large-scale production jet engines before: ceramic composite materials that weigh far less than the metal alloys they’ll replace and can endure far higher temperatures. The engine will also make use of parts produced through 3-D printing, a new kind of manufacturing that can produce complex shapes that would be difficult or impossible to make with conventional manufacturing techniques (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Additive Manufacturing”). These technologies could eventually be used to make more parts of the engine, leading to further advances in efficiency, says Gareth Richards, LEAP program manager for GE Aviation.

Even though construction of the first engine began less than two weeks ago, the company already has orders for 4,500. They will be used in the Airbus A320neo, the Boeing 737 Max, and a new plane from China, the Comac C919. In addition to saving money, the engine will help manufacturers comply with current and anticipated regulations designed to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and pollutants such as smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx).

One of the key innovations is the use of ceramic matrix composites developed by GE. Ceramics can withstand high temperatures, but they’re normally too brittle for use in engines. Researchers at GE developed a way to reinforce them with silicon carbide fibers, which makes them as resilient as metal.

The ceramics will decrease the amount of energy used to cool off engine parts. Current engines operate at temperatures that are actually higher than the melting point of the nickel metal alloys used inside them; to keep them from melting, the engine diverts air from a compressor inside the engine through tiny holes in the parts, creating a protective cooling layer. The ceramic composite doesn’t require this cooling, so the air can instead be used to generate thrust.

In the LEAP engine, the ceramic matrix composites will replace only some of the nickel alloy parts. But in the future, they could be used for more engine parts, further reducing losses from cooling. This change could also allow engines to run at higher temperatures, making it possible to get more thrust from a given amount of fuel. Furthermore, composites could make engines lighter—parts made from these materials weigh one-third as much as the equivalent nickel alloy parts.

The engine will also feature 3-D-printed parts that can improve the engine’s efficiency and lower emissions. The system is more sophisticated and powerful than the desktop 3-D printers that have gained attention recently. Instead of depositing materials, it uses a laser to turn metal powder into solid shapes, layer by layer. The method simplifies the manufacturing of precisely shaped fuel nozzles that help the engine run at high temperatures without producing nitrogen oxides (see “Additive Manufacturing” and “GE and EADS to Print Parts for Airplanes”).

Another engine maker, Pratt Whitney, is developing its own advanced engine that can reduce fuel consumption by about 15 percent; buyers of the Airbus A320neo can choose either the Pratt Whitney engine or the CFM one. But Pratt Whitney takes a far different approach to improving efficiency. Rather than using composites, it’s introducing gears that help different parts of the engine move at optimal speeds (see “More Efficient Jet Engine Gets in Gear” and “Hybrid Wing Uses Half the Fuel of a Standard Airplane”).

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Brain calisthenics: A Lumosity user plays an online game.

Cancer survivors sometimes suffer from a condition known as “chemo fog”—a cognitive impairment caused by repeated chemotherapy. A study hints at a controversial idea: that brain-training software might help lift this cognitive cloud.

Various studies have concluded that cognitive training can improve brain function in both healthy people and those with medical conditions, but the broader applicability of these results remains controversial in the field.

In a study published in the journal Clinical Breast Cancer, investigators report that those who used a brain-training program for 12 weeks were more cognitively flexible, more verbally fluent, and faster-thinking than survivors who did not train.

Patients treated with chemotherapy show changes in brain structure and function in line with diffuse brain injury, and they often report long-term cognitive effects, says Shelli Kesler, a Stanford University clinical neuropsychologist who led the research. The new study “suggests that cognitive training could be one possible avenue for helping to improve cognitive function in breast cancer survivors treated with chemotherapy,” she says.

The results may not convince everyone. “One of the biggest challenges in the cognitive training world is to show an effect that generalizes to real-world functioning,” says Susan Landau, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Several companies offer commercial cognitive training programs that promise improvements in memory, attention, mental agility, and problem-solving skills. The appeal is clear, says Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, but whether they have lasting general effects is not.

The fact that companies are marketing these training programs to customers before their value has been rigorously proved has caused some skepticism in the field, say experts. “The field is still growing,” says Suzanne Jaeggi, a neuropsychologist at the University of Maryland. While studies have shown that there are cognitive benefits to the training, it’s very hard to detect an impact on daily life, she says. However, some work, including research by her own group, has shown that working memory exercises can improve reading abilities in schoolchildren.

In the study conducted by Kesler and colleagues, the participants trained at home on Lumosity, a collection of gamelike cognitive exercises developed by Lumos Labs in San Francisco. (Lumos Labs did not fund the study.)

Kesler’s project is one of around two dozen efforts using Lumosity software to study human cognition. With 35 million customers worldwide, Lumosity is collecting what it says is the world’s largest database of human cognition, which could be queried for connections between lifestyle and cognitive ability. “Our technology collects a lot of data and makes it easy to run experiments to learn more generally about human cognitive performance,” says Mike Scanlon, cofounder of Lumos Labs. “We track all of the results from the cognitive testing and training, and we can combine that with demographic information to learn about how people’s cognitive performance changes and develops over the years.”

One such finding, he says, is a correlation between outside weather temperature and cognitive performance: “It turned out that the colder it is, the higher people’s performance is, even though generally they are inside doing this on a computer.”

Most of the scientific projects involving Lumosity’s software are exploring the effectiveness of brain training in different populations, from schoolchildren to stroke patients. For the study on breast cancer survivors, 41 women aged 40 and older, who were at least a year and half past their last chemotherapy treatment, were tested on several cognitive tasks at the beginning of the study. Then half the women used Lumosity training modules for 20 to 30 minutes four times a week for 12 weeks, and all were tested again.

When the investigators tested the participants in verbal memory, processing speed, and cognitive function, they found that the women who had used the brain training program improved in three of five objective measures.

“This is a well-done study—they had not just one transfer test but several,” says Hambrick, who notes that many studies of cognitive training depend on a single test to measure results. “But an issue is the lack of activity within the control group.” Better would be to have the control group do another demanding cognitive task in lieu of Lumosity training—something analogous to a placebo, he says: “The issue is that maybe the improvement in the group that did the cognitive training doesn’t reflect enhancement of basic cognitive processes per se, but could be a motivational phenomenon.”

Even if the effects are due to motivation or some other benefit not related to mental agility, that’s still useful, says Landau. “If [cognitive training] is something that makes people feel good and improves their confidence in their own skills, that’s not trivial at all,” she says. “That could be a big part of the effect that’s observed.”

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These blindingly obvious suggestions run contrary to what’s actually happening. For example, a solar panel in Spain generates about twice as much electricity as the same-size solar panel in Germany because the sun shines on it more (here’s an graphic). But last year nearly half of all solar panels installed in Europe were installed in Germany, and only a small fraction were installed in Spain (see “The Great German Energy Experiment”).

Siemens calculates that if you were to install solar panels and wind turbines where the natural resources are best, and then string power lines to convey to the power to where it’s needed, you could save about $60 billion dollars by 2030 because you could install fewer of them. That savings figure accounts for the cost of the power lines (see “Supergrids”).

Europe isn’t the only place where solar is taking off in strange places. One of the major markets for solar power in the U.S. is New Jersey, which gets far less sun than the southwest U.S., but has policies that favor solar power.

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Otherfab’s Othermill is a small, lightweight, mill that can be used to make custom circuit boards and more.

A cool-looking Kickstarter project from San Francisco-based machine company Otherfab offers an affordable, portable way for anyone to make custom circuit boards that can be used for building your own electronics or adding connectivity to existing devices.

Called Othermill, it’s a 10-inch-square three-axis, computer-controlled mill that etches or cuts away at a solid material. And while Otherfab says it’s intended for printing your own PCBs, it’s not just for electronics hobbyists. The group (which, by the way, is a team within research lab Otherlab) also points out some of the other activities you could do with it, including making custom jewelry from wood or non-ferrous metals and molds. With one of these, a 3-D printer, and a few other tools, I could probably start my own custom techie doodad business.

The Othermill is already gaining lots of interest. Otherfab started a Kickstarter campaign earlier this month in hopes of bringing in $50,000 for the project; in less than a day it surpassed that goal, and as of late Wednesday it had raised nearly $180,000. The campaign’s rewards included a limited number of Othermills for pledges of $999 and up, a number of which are already spoken for (if you’d still like to get one, they’re now available with pledges of $1,399 and up).

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How Does the Great Firewall of China Affect Online User Behavior? Isolated ‘Internets’ as Culturally Defined Markets on the WWW

Sensitive Room-Temperature Terahertz Detection via Photothermoelectric Effect in Graphene

Phase Space Crystals: A New Way To Create A Quasienergy Bandstructure

Entanglement Thermodynamics

The New Science Of Metagenomics And The Challenges Of Its Use In Both Developed And Developing Countries

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Glass office hours at Google I/O this week. Will these desks one day be as common as the Apple genius bar?

Would you want your daily horoscope beamed to your right eye? That’s the vision of the future I saw when I tried out the fashion magazine Elle’s app for Google Glass yesterday, one of several apps announced at the extravagant software developer love-fest the internet company puts on every year.

The Elle app will feed information to Glass wearers’ timelines, including horoscopes, select headlines and fashion photos. Elle’s owner Hearst Corp. sees it as a test trial for many other media brands it owns. 

I admittedly already had a headache when I tried on Glass to demo the app, what with all the jostling to make the packed sessions on Glass and trying to snag a bit of the 1,800 pounds of free snacks that came straight from the Googleplex (and yes, Valleywag, also a $1,300 Chromebook Pixel—with full intent to return once my colleague tries it out). But after five minutes trying to navigate the Glass app, I immediately left to down two Advils. I’m not even sure what the horoscope said. Glass tried to read it to me outloud, but the noise level in the conference hall was too loud to hear much at all.

The headache, the noise. It’s the same problem I see with some of these early apps, really with the entire idea that anyone will want to consume information on Glass that is any small degree away from useful in the moment. Navigation directions when you’re lost are useful, and actually provide value in front of my face. Maybe, maybe, a shopping list when I’m at the grocery store, as one might pull up with Evernote’s new Glassware, as the apps are called.

But do I want to see New York Times news alerts near my field of vision? Or random Tweets, even from my very closest, most curated connections? What about Facebook timeline updates? Um, probably not, and certainly not all together. If I do, I promise, my phone or maybe even a future smartwatch are short glance away. 

Both Google and the media and Web companies producing these apps are clearly emphasizing that content in the Glass timeline must be more finely curated and immediately useful than on a phone. Using the CNN Glass app, for example, one can set the time of day headlines are sent and preferences for the kinds of updates received. But people aren’t good at being their own filters, and anyone who uses Glass will have to be given that app options will only grow from here. My own filter is filled with gaping holes carved out by best intentions. On my phone and in my desktop news feed, there are endless streams of content I hope to read and 99 percent ignore. On Glass, ignoring will be an even bigger and more overwhelming management task.

At a session on Glass for developers, Google’s Timothy Jordan talked in depth about the special considerations for Glass apps. He noted the timeline of “cards” that apps feed to a Glass wearer are inherently ephemeral. A Glass user won’t likely scroll back more than a few cards, and so the timeline inherently “decays,” he said. That’s why he advises app creators not to include a “Delete” option on their card notifications. Because it is unnecessary.

Glass has potentially amazing and potentially foreboding features (see “Treading Carefully, Google Encourages Developers to Hack Glass”). And perhaps mags like Elle could one day help people identify the dresses in a store and store it on a shopping list, for example.

But the real value of Glass will not be in how people interact with what’s already on the web. That will just give everyone a big headache.

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