Photo: Bartholomew Cooke

Almost a decade ago the space shuttle Columbia burned up on reentry into the atmosphere. The accident was as tragic as it was shocking. But should it have come as such a surprise?

The root cause of the problem — foam insulation had flecked off the craft’s external fuel tank during blastoff — had been reported on 79 previous shuttle launches. So why was NASA unprepared when a briefcase-sized chunk smashed a thermal shield on a wing, setting up that fatal return trip? Engineers had even warned about this vulnerability when the ship was designed. Over time, though, as the odds played out favorably, the potential for disaster just became easier to ignore.

It is the paradox of the close call. Probability wise, near misses aren’t successes. They are indicators of near failure. And if the flaw is systemic, it requires only a small twist of fate for the next incident to result in disaster. Rather than celebrating then ignoring close calls, we should be learning from them and doing our very best to prevent their recurrence. But we often don’t.

Post-Columbia, Robin Dillon-Merrill and Catherine Tinsley, two researchers at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, have been attempting to figure out how our near-miss blind spot really works. In one study, they asked NASA employees and MBA students to rank different versions of a mission scenario. One described a highly successful project; the other project nearly self-destructed but was ultimately saved by a lucky break. Regardless, subjects ranked both missions as equally well done. Why? Most of us grade outcomes in binary terms. Success is good. Failure is bad.

“People don’t learn from a near miss, they just say, ‘It worked, so let’s do it again,’” Dillon-Merrill says. Other studies have shown that the more often someone gets away with risky behavior, the more likely they are to repeat it; there is a sort of invincibility complex. “For ego protection reasons, we like to assume that past events are a product of what we controlled rather than chance,” Tinsley adds.

Thanks to the Columbia, NASA is trying to address this problem. To fight the instinct to treat each near miss as a success, Ed Rogers, chief knowledge officer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, gives NASA managers a training exercise based on the Georgetown tests to show how they fall into the binary trap. The FAA, meanwhile, has gone further.

The agency realized that many reports of in-flight errors were probably being treated as one-off mistakes. Since there are so many variables that go into an in-flight close call, it was hard for safety officers to spot patterns. To fix this, they asked their partner, systems engineering firm Mitre, to look at each element of flight—including mechanical, procedural, and geographic. Mitre took the FAA’s database of crew and air traffic errors and combined it with in-flight mechanical information and terrain maps of areas planes generally fly over (and around).

The resulting visualization let them easily spot common, potentially dangerous errors. Airlines then make a variety of corrections, such as charting a longer descent into a turbulent airport. (Indeed, the FAA has seen an 83 percent drop in fatalities over the past decade, in part from preemptive fixes.)

The more reports, the better. According to the Process Improvement Institute, a risk analysis firm, across many industries there are between 50 and 100 near misses recorded per serious accident, and about 10,000 smaller errors occur during that time. To keep the intel coming, though, institutions need to embrace people’s baser instincts. People may be keen to report near misses right after an accident but are prone to falling out of the habit.

In a recent analysis of NASA flight data from real missions, researchers found reporting of safety issues spiked after Columbia but then dropped off—except for extremely high-profile missions where everyone knew the world would be watching. One way to combat this is to change how missions are talked about internally. In a follow-up test at Georgetown using fictional incidents, researchers found that NASA personnel and MBA student test subjects were both more likely to grade close calls realistically if they were told beforehand that NASA is “highly visible” and “safety first.”

Most accident investigations work backward to determine the causes. A more effective way to curtail disasters is to get better at spotting the near miss. One great success in near-miss awareness is Dow Chemical. The company has seen an 80 percent drop in serious accidents since it started a new program to push close-call reporting. The company is proof that modern disaster prevention can and should be about stopping trouble before it strikes, not cleaning up afterward.

Ben Paynter (paynter.ben@gmail.com) also writes about inflatable mascots.

Also in this issue

• The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?
• Will Wright Wants to Make a Game Out of Life Itself
• Undead: The Rabies Virus Remains a Medical Mystery

Though it might seem impossible, and certainly inadvisable, to judge a person by her name, a new study suggests our brains try anyway.

The more pronounceable a person’s name is, the more likely people are to favor her.

“When we can process a piece of information more easily, when it’s easier to comprehend, we come to like it more,” said psychologist Adam Alter of New York University and co-author of a Journal of Experimental Social Psychology study published in December.

The so-called “grandfather theory,” the idea that the brain favors information that’s easy to use, dates back to the 1960s, when researchers found that people most liked images of Chinese characters if they’d seen them many times before.

Researchers since then have explored the roles played by names, and how they affect our judgments.

Studies have shown, for example, that people can partly predict a person’s income and education using only their name. Childhood is perhaps the richest area for name research: Boys with girls’ names are more likely to be suspended from school. And the less popular a name is, the more likely a child is to be delinquent.

In 2005, Alter and his colleagues explored how pronounceability of company names affects their performance in the stock market. Stripped of all obvious influences, they found companies with simpler names and ticker symbols traded better than the stocks of more difficult-to-pronounce companies.

“The effect is often very, very hard to quantify because so much depends on context, but it’s there and measurable,” Alter said. “You can’t avoid it.”

But how much does pronunciation guide our perceptions of people? To find out, Alter and colleagues Simon Laham and Peter Koval of the University of Melbourne carried out five studies.

In the first, they asked 19 female and 16 male college students to rank 50 surnames according to their ease or difficulty of pronunciation, and according to how much they liked or disliked them. In the second, they had 17 females and 7 male students vote for hypothetical political candidates solely on the basis of their names. In the third, they asked 55 female and 19 male students to vote on candidates about whom they knew both names and some political positions.

Altogether the researchers found that a name’s pronounceability, regardless of length or seeming foreignness, mattered most in determining likability. Ease of pronunciation accounted for about 40 percent of off-the-cuff likability.

“These settings were pretty impoverished, of course. In the real world, so many other things are going on that play a role,” Alter said.

In the latter studies, Alter’s team wanted to get a better sense of name-pronunciation effects outside the lab. They collected the names of 500 randomly selected lawyers, which undergraduates then rated for pronounceability and likability. When the researchers compared their tastes against the lawyers’ academic pedigrees, average salaries and corporate positions, they found a small but noticeable correlation.

With other variables eliminated, about 1.5 percent of a lawyer’s success — at least in this study — seemed to rest on the pronounceability of his or her name.

“Obviously that’s a lot smaller than 40 percent, and we don’t know which lawyer is most competent, which is clearly going to matter the most,” Alter said. “But the name still matters.”

Alter has already been influenced by his own work. If and when he has children, he said, he plans to keep their names simple.

Image: Dave Mosher/Wired

Citation: “The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun.” By Simon M. Lahama, Peter Kovala and Adam L. Alter. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, published online Dec. 9, 2011. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.12.002

Anonymous, a group not known for discipline, is giving itself a weekly deadline, a new attack every Friday.

Following the Tuesday compromise of the website of tear gas maker Combined Systems, Inc., the Antisec wing of Anonymous struck a Federal Trade Commission webserver which hosts three FTC websites; business.ftc.gov, consumer.gov, and ncpw.gov, the National Consumer Protection Week partnership website.

Claiming this hack in opposition of the controversial international copyright treaty known as ACTA, which had been widely protested around the world for its potential to curtail freedom of expression on the internet, Anonymous continued the political messaging that has marked much of its recent high profile actions.

Anons claiming responsibility for the attack spoke to Wired in an online chat just as it happened, freely admitted this there was nothing technically remarkable in this hack. As one remarked, “own & rm and move on.” (rm being a unix command to delete data.)

But this week’s attacks came with a promise, first articulated in the defacement of CSI, and restated on the FTC websites: every Friday will bring a new attack against government and corporate sites under the theme of #FFF, or Fuck the FBI Friday.

“We are already sitting on dozens of unreleased targets,” said an Antisec anon, who went on to describe an inventory of already compromised servers that could fill five months or more of #FFF releases.

“Yes, each and every Friday we will be launching attacks… with the specific purpose of wiping as many corrupt corporate and government systems off our internet,” the anon continued.

The choice of the FTC is an odd one, given the independent agency has no role in ACTA negotiations. Instead, it’s tasked with fighting unfair business practices, sanctioning companies like Google and Facebook for privacy violations, and running the Do-Not-Call list – hardly the stuff of Big Brother stomping on online rights forever.

While many attacks are likely to be simple defacements like the FTC website, Antisec claims to also be going through mail spools, SQL databases and password files on dozens of corporate and government servers which are unaware of their presence.

The anon speaking to Wired described the string of hacking as having “no foreseeable end in sight,” going on to say “the more we own, the more we steal credentials to even more targets.”

Consumer.Gov at 1:15am this morning, EST

They’ve decided try to balance between protest defacements like the two this week, and sifting through the data for material that can damage firms and agencies. “It’s more than just delivering a message or speaking truth to power… we are trying to disrupt their ability to operate and do business or exist at all on the internet,” the same anon said.

Jerry Irvine, a member of the National Cyber Security Task Force told the New York Times last week that attacks would become more frequent, describing the amorphous collective as “unstoppable,” because of the poor state of security online.

In an environment of heightened political tensions around protest movements like the Arab Spring and moves to restrict the internet like ACTA, those vulnerabilities are likely to play more of a role in Anonymous’ political dialogue.

“We’ve been saying it for the longest (time),” the Antisec anon explained, “this is war.”

Illustration: Simon Lutrin/Wired

Image courtesy Amazon

Amazon won’t be offering a standalone or premium subscription video service that isn’t bundled with Amazon Prime’s two-day shipping of retail goods from Amazon.com. Not now, not in the near future — maybe not ever. The integration Prime offers across Amazon’s product lines is simply too important to the company’s whole business.

That’s what Brad Beale, Head of Digital Video Content Acquisition at Amazon, tells GigaOM’s Ryan Lawler. “The bundle of benefits that come with Amazon Prime make perfect sense to offer to customers,” Beale said. “The way that Prime Instant Video is offered today — we’re going to continue that approach at least into the near future.”

Rumors of an imminent launch of a standalone streaming video service from Amazon, to compete directly with Netflix and Hulu Plus, have been swirling for weeks. But Wednesday’s licensing agreement with Viacom came and went without a change to Amazon’s model. This prompted Beale’s conversation with GigaOM.

In January, I reported on rumors from industry sources and remarks from Netflix’s Reed Hastings that Amazon was trying to secure exclusive content to launch a premium or standalone service. I argued then (and still believe) that this would make sense if Amazon were trying to lock-in premium video from a pay channel like Starz, Showtime or HBO that insisted on having their content paid for separately from Amazon Prime — per-subscriber, not as a lump sum — like it is through cable providers and like Starz insisted in September when renegotiating its deal with Netflix.

So we can probably also assume from Beale’s statement that no such blockbuster deals are on Amazon’s horizon. That is, unless the retailer is willing to eat Starz’s (or whomever’s) per-customer fee, and the premium channel is willing to accept Amazon giving it away with prime. It’s unlikely, but not unthinkable — after all, Amazon has been willing to treat loaned books as sales in situations where it didn’t have rights for its Amazon Prime lending library for Kindle.

Ultimately, Amazon has an interest in bundling these services, whether streaming video, lending libraries or two-day shipping, trumps its need to make a profit on every deal. It’s about promoting the full range of its wildly diverse ecosystem as a single product.

Amazon has exactly as much interest in securing regular shoppers as Target, monthly active users as Facebook, devoted superfans as Apple, and complimentary services as Google.

Remember Amazon’s long play with the Kindle Fire:

The Kindle isn’t a book. It’s a bookstore. The Kindle tablet extends that principle further, by making it a retail portal and showcase for everything Amazon sells, whether physical or virtual.

Amazon could try to blow away Netflix on content, by making a deal with Starz or HBO. Instead, they’ll try to blow them away on price, offering mostly identical streaming content plus additional value-added services for a lower annual cost.

The more you stream television shows from Amazon Prime, the more tempted you are to buy and download movies from Amazon Instant Video that aren’t on Prime. The more lending library books you read on a Kindle, the more books you buy on the Kindle. The more you use one Kindle, the more tempted you are to buy another Kindle device — if not for yourself, then for the rest of your family. And if Amazon finally really does sell a 9-inch Kindle Fire, then you’ll do even more reading and watching and shopping on that.

Finally, you’re an Amazon customer in an Amazon household — especially if all of those services help encourage you to buy more goods shipped in two days or less.

“Convenience is king,” writes The Motley Fool’s Amanda Buchanan, “and if history is any indicator of consumer shopping habits, Prime is the future.” Amazon is our Sears Roebuck, our Walmart.

And as Buchanan points out, one major reason Amazon wants to double down on Prime is that it has plenty of hungry competitors, from technology companies like Google to brick-and-mortar retailers, who’d like to break Amazon’s stranglehold on two-day nationwide shipping.

But still, Buchanan writes, Amazon has the advantage:

[W]ith the 17 new fulfillment centers Amazon opened last quarter, bringing its current total to 69, I don’t see that happening. These fulfillment centers not only mean faster shipping for Amazon, but also lower shipping costs, making this an even more sustainable business model for Amazon in the long run, and an easy thumbs-up CAPScall for me.

The fulfillment centers are just one piece to Prime’s puzzle. And all the pieces matter.

From Wired How-To Wiki

Photo by blakdeth/flickr/CC

It’s not hard to get tangled in technical jargon when buying a new PC, especially if it’s your first. You ask the vacant-eyed tech salesperson to help you, only to be assaulted by convoluted descriptions of RAM, quad-core processors, solid-state drives and OLED screens at best, and underwhelmed with misinformation at worst. Why get involved with trying to understand all that geek talk when all you want is a computer that does what you need it to do? This guide was made to help you identify what you want while PC shopping — without having to drag your token nerd friend along.

RAM, or Random-Access Memory, is basically the storage space that your computer can use at any time to keep data at the ready while your applications are running. When you’re waiting for a program to open or a game level to load, your RAM is hard at work, and the more you have, the faster the loading process is.

If you’re looking to use your computer casually for web browsing, word processing, media editing or movie watching, you probably won’t need more than 1 GB (gigabyte). However, if you’re a gamer, the more RAM you have, the merrier. Most current-gen games can be run comfortably on 4 GB, but certain games such as Crysis or Just Cause 2 can make use of 8 GB if you allow them.

When it comes to processors, multitasking is the name of the game. The more cores your processor has, the more things you can run at a time, and the faster each action you perform gets processed and executed. It’s relatively common to see quad-core processors that run at around 2.8 Ghz (gigahertz) per second, which is more than enough for the casual user, but some gaming rigs are seeing six-core behemoths that push 4 GHz.

Pro tip: Don’t worry about involving yourself in the difference between hertz and bits; even complex technical terms adhere to the logical tendency that more is better. If anything, imagine bits and bytes as storage space, whereas hertz is speed. Anything more than that you don’t need to know until you start building your own computers.

Keep in mind that processors come in two different architectures, 32-bit and 64-bit. 32-bit processors can, on average, only make use of about 4 GB of RAM, whereas 64-bit machines have no practical memory ceiling. However, 64-bit machines can be more difficult to develop applications for, so you may have trouble running some more obscure programs.

The two main things you want to be concerned about with a video card is output types and VRAM. VRAM is just like RAM but solely for the purpose of graphical memory, and the output type just means what kind of connection it has to an external monitor. Casual users don’t need to concern themselves with VRAM, but gamers should look for about 1 GB of VRAM. As far as output goes, you should aim for DVI or HDMI connections. VGA is still present in some video card models, but as analog video signal, it’s beginning to go the way of the dodo with the newer digital models coming out.

Windows is the go-to operating system for gamers and business people. It’s incredibly easy to add to a domain or workgroup in your office, and it runs a large majority of triple-A video games released today. Windows has oft been viewed as the “less pretty” operating system, but the latest release of Windows 7 features a slick operating system with intuitiveness to boot.

Mac OS is seen as an extremely easy operating system to learn, yet it can function as an incredibly powerful personal machine. However, it doesn’t play to office workers or gamers as much, because it’s harder to manage on a workgroup than a Windows PC and it can’t run DirectX games because DirectX is a proprietary Windows system. All Adobe products were also programmed natively for Mac, so designers can count on great performance with applications like Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Also, with the recent release of Steam on Mac, Apple users can also enjoy a limited selection of newer games.

Linux, while it carries a stigma of being difficult to use, has now entered the mainstream with easier-to-use distributions, such as Ubuntu. Backed by an open-source philosophy, many applications for Linux are well-supported and completely free. Just beware that some maintenance for Linux requires basic knowledge of terminal code, and a large portion of popular applications such as Steam and Netflix are not supported.

When considering form factor, portability is always an essential feature, but sometimes performance is sacrificed when size comes into play. For instance, some laptops and netbooks only feature onboard graphics, whereas desktop PCs typically have video cards. Onboard graphics work fine for casual use, but they will bring any gaming experience to a screeching halt. On the other hand, you may be able to run games that haven’t even been created yet on your beastly l33t PC. But the second you get asked to bring it to a LAN party, you’ve got a day’s workout ahead of you.

All-in-all, consider the specifications you can compromise on and the ones you can’t live without, and make sure to maintain a good balance of power and mobility based around your needs.

This page was last modified 23:52, 6 February 2012 by howto_admin.

Illustration: David Galletly

Weird stuff happens after about eight hours of watching the same TV show. Your eyes feel crunchy. You get a headache that sits in your teeth, the kind that comes from hitching your free time to a runaway train of self-indulgence—too much booze, food, or sleep. Of course, there’s also a sense of accomplishment, of smugness, that comes from blowing through years of television in mere days. Only four more nights (less if you call in sick) and you’ve logged the whole run of Breaking Bad. And by whole run, I mean the three seasons that come before the Prize—the gleaming fourth. Everyone else had to wait years for it; you get to careen toward it at dozens of episodes per week. Binge-watching: It’s the crack of the couch potato.

For quality binge-watching, you have to go solo and go hard. Getting strung out on the tension of a long-arc narrative is private. And if we’re talking about the postholiday dead of winter, go drama and (for the most part) go cable. You can sit through days, weeks even, of CSIs and Grey’s Anatomys, but it’s the more cryptic, complicated, grisly stuff that makes for the most immersive experience.

Seen on a laptop screen at 4 am, microprocessor superheating the bedsheets, shows like Deadwood and Dexter become portals right into the heads of their creators and the characters they’ve so painstakingly crafted. “You’re mimicking the main character’s experience, because they’re not getting breaks from their lives and you’re not either,” says Daniel Zelman, creator of Damages. “Their problems become your problems.” Speed is just distance divided by time, and binge consumption of a TV show collapses both—the time it takes to watch a whole run, the distance between you and the people who made it.

I’m not sure this applies to British shows, by the way. Their “we’ll run a season whenever we want and for however long” attitude makes them seem frugal. Just one season of Downton Abbey on Netflix? Only three episodes of Sherlock? Even if they are 89 minutes long, that’s not enough to tune into the wavelength. I want more, faster.

Also: I don’t even want to think about the business side, the vagaries of scheduling and time slots. I blew through Sons of Anarchy in a week, never having to worry about whether DirecTV would cut a deal with FX to keep it on the air; I nursed a four-a-night Friday Night Lights habit all the way through the final season without ever having to fret, like all the appointment-viewers, about when those last episodes would air. Watch a show all at once and you get the world of pure imagination—if you can handle mainlining it.

Me, I can’t stop. I stress about cash-poor, business-challenged Netflix, because I need my streaming fix. I’m wringing my hands about Hulu’s new owners (whoever they may be), because I can’t quit this pace. Peter Tolan, creator of Rescue Me, totally gets it: “I don’t think any TV is so precious that you need to reflect,” he says. “I doubt that you’re sitting there going, ‘Wow, that episode. I need a whole week to regroup emotionally before I can move on with this story.’”

Yes, binge-watching after airdates means you have to become the no-spoiler Nazi around your friends and coworkers. I won’t lie: It’s tough. It requires a certain purity of purpose. But that peace and quiet does have its own appeal. No more Twitter chatter or watercooler babble about last night’s episode. Serenity now.

Hey, come to think of it, isn’t Firefly on Netflix?

Email: mhkchoi@gmail.com