It’s the Democrats’ Turn to Freak Out

Throughout most of the past year, Democrats were so serenely confident of President Obama’s reelection that many couldn’t trouble themselves to get involved or donate money. David Axelrod, the president’s chief strategist, was so alarmed about this—or pretended to be, anyway—that he routinely implored anyone who would listen not to be complacent, warning darkly that Obama was sure to be outspent by Mitt Romney and his allied super PACs.

Flash forward to today. Axelrod’s noisy worrying about money has turned out to be utterly unfounded. Obama and the Democratic National Committee just announced that they raised a record $181 million in September; meanwhile, Romney and the Republican super PACs are the ones looking somewhat hard-pressed for cash.

And that liberal overconfidence? It’s also a thing of the past, thanks to the shellacking Obama took in last week’s debate. Romney has pulled ahead in the latest Gallup poll of likely voters, 49 percent to 47 percent, and surged ahead of Obama by the same margin in the latest numbers from Public Policy Polling (not to mention the Pew poll released yesterday, which had Romney up by 4 percentage points)—causing paroxysms in Obama partisans. The motto for the Obama brain trust: Be careful what you wish for.

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Mitt Romney's Peevish, Prickly Debate Flop

I thought Mitt Romney’s second debate was nearly as bad as Barack Obama’s first debate. Two weeks ago, Obama seemed to have no awareness of what he was doing wrong, and he spent the evening staring at the lectern and searching for something to say. Romney seemed to suffer from a similar malady Tuesday night, imagining himself as winningly assertive while coming across as peevish, over-aggressive, and fussily obsessing over the rules like Tracy Flick in Election. In the town hall setting, Romney’s constant interruptions of the moderator, Candy Crowley, and the president, seemed rude in a way they did not when the two candidates stood together onstage.

Obama, after a nervous start, generally appeared calm and poised; temperamentally, he’s much better suited to this format. But his greatest strength was that he showed up prepared. Romney relied heavily on brute assertion. Obama’s answers took the form of his citing an earlier promise he made, followed by facts about what he’d done to meet it. Asked by an audience member how he would improve middle-class fortunes, Obama replied that he had promised to cut taxes for the middle class and had done so by $3,600 per family, and he had promised to help small businesses and then cut taxes for them on 18 occasions.

Often these answers segued into broader philosophical differences with Romney. Obama’s answer on the middle class, for instance, culminated with an explanation as to why it is important to include new revenue sources along with tax cuts—a point Romney disagrees with, but that registers highly with independent voters. Obama repeated this on issues ranging from women’s rights, equal pay, and immigration to the foundations of the social contract. It helped, too, that Obama injected some necessary (though still cutting) humor when comparing his own meager pension to Romney’s fortune.

Romney, too, came equipped with plenty of facts. But in his answers, he seemed to be mentally shuffling through his talking points, often without managing to pull the right one. The question about women’s rights in the workplace drew a wandering response about the unemployment rate and job prospects for college graduates. What he did say on the topic was a bit misleading. Whatever efforts Romney made to hire women as Massachusetts governor, the Boston Globe’s live fact-check noted during the debate that none were partners during Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital.

When Romney did draw questions that offered opportunities to score big points, he often whiffed—none bigger than the question about the president’s handling of Libya. Romney erroneously claimed that Obama had refused to call the assault on the U.S. embassy a terror attack until 14 days after it occurred, when in fact Obama did so the very next day. Crowley’s correction and admonishment of Romney—and the crowd’s applause—were devastating. Romney slunk back to his stool, looking utterly defeated.

Beyond the candidates’ stark differences in temperament, I thought that many of the positions Romney was forced (or chose) to take in the GOP primaries hurt him badly in Tuesday’s debate. On immigration reform and abortion, Obama managed to wrap Romney’s more strident positions of last spring (“self-deport,” for instance) around his neck in a way that made Romney, already visibly uncomfortable, look craven. That impression was deepened by Romney’s lawyerly explanations of what he had and had not stood for, and what he stands for now. He didn’t offer much that would persuade someone not yet comfortable with his candidacy, and he probably fostered doubts in a number of people who had warmed to him after the last debate.

Snap assessments of debate performances are notoriously tricky things. Maybe one of the candidates made a huge factual error that won’t be understood until later. Maybe both did. Maybe I’m incapable of viewing these events from a perspective other than that of a political reporter who’s been steeped in this stuff for 18 months. So caveat emptor.

That said, I’d be shocked if most independent and loosely affiliated voters in battleground states didn’t come away from this debate impressed and reassured by the president—and newly skeptical (re-skeptical?) of Mitt Romney.

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Consumer Confidence: It’s the Stock Market, Stupid

To read the economic news, there’s plenty to feel glum about: China’s slowing down, Europe’s still a mess, U.S. job growth has flatlined, manufacturing in particular is starting to weaken. And yet, Americans are beginning to feel better about things, especially their own finances.

The weekly Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index increased by the most since December, with 47 percent of respondents rating their own finances in positive terms, the most since early August. The index’s –42 rating is still well below the recent April high of –31. And it’s nowhere near the 2.0 rating clocked in 2007.

Still, in the face of a stalling global economy, rising gasoline prices, and jobless claims, the fact that Americans are feeling more confident is noteworthy, if not a bit odd. And it’s not just the Bloomberg survey that’s registering an uptick. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index also rose unexpectedly in September to the highest level since May. As Neil Dutta, an economist at Renaissance Macro Research, pointed out in a note on Friday morning, the University of Michigan measure “tends to be more sensitive to equity price action.”

And there you have it. The economy may be in the dumps, and you may be paying ¢50 more for a gallon of gasoline than you did two months ago, but the stock market is on fire. If you have one, your 401(k) balance probably looks a lot better than it did a few months ago. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has gained more than 4 percent in September alone. On the year, it’s up nearly 15 percent.

Add that to a slow rise in housing prices, and it’s easy to see why Americans are starting to feel a bit better about their finances. Although there’s a debate about whether confidence is a leading or lagging indicator for the economy, despite all the other measurables out there, most economists agree that confidence is absolutely essential.

Earlier this week I spoke with James Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis, about his views for 2013. Unlike most of the economists I talked to, he was rather bullish on the prospects for growth in 2013. “The biggest stimulant in the next four years is not monetary policy, and it’s not fiscal policy. It’s confidence,” said Paulsen. “If confidence goes up, everything else gets better.”

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Facebook's Is Bigger Than Yours

Earlier this week, Jay Parikh, the vice president for infrastructure engineering at Facebook, walked a dozen or so reporters through some of the social media site’s inner workings. Give any Facebook engineer enough time, and he’ll start boasting about the site’s level of geek endowment. “Is your Hadoop cluster bigger than Yahoo’s?” a reporter asks. “Yes. It is,” Parikh replies with a wink and a laugh.

As of its latest count, Facebook claimed 955 million users. What makes Facebook so unique in the annals of Web history is the amount of time all those people spend on the site (at least a few hours per month) and the frequency with which they return to it (just about every day). To cope with the update-hungry masses, Facebook has pushed the limits of computer science in a few areas. In particular, the company is good at sucking in, analyzing, and sharing huge volumes of data at record speed so that users get new, up-to-date pages every time they visit Facebook.

Here’s a recap of some of the latest and greatest figures that capture the staggering volume of data Facebook handles:

• Every day, people share 2.5 billion different items (which includes such things as status updates, wall posts, photos videos, and comments).
• People “Like” 2.7 billion things every day. This is what’s technically referred to as an Advertiser’s Wet Dream.
• Remember all those photo-sharing sites around before Facebook? No? Well, that’s because people upload 300 million photos to their Facebook pages each day.
• As for that big, old, Hadoop cluster that Parikh celebrated? Well, Facebook’s largest cluster—or collection of data-center computers—can handle more than 100 petabytes of information. One petabyte is the equivalent of about 250 billion pages of text.
• Facebook has a homegrown system called Hive that it uses to collect and keep track of all its data. Every 30 minutes, the Hive system combs through 105 terabytes of data. More than 500 terabytes are sucked into the database each day.

Is Facebook a good steward of all this information? It certainly claims to be.

Most companies that deal with a lot of data use a divide-and-conquer approach. They create a bunch of different databases and give different internal business groups access to the pools of information. By contrast, Facebook gives the entire company access to a shared infrastructure. Basically, it wants all employees—be they in advertising, engineering, or marketing—to have access to a complete version of the site and its information. “Companies usually take the easy way out and say, ‘We will separate this team from that team,’” Parikh says. “That has been unacceptable to us.”

Many of the tests these groups conduct are run on “anonymized” data (in which peoples’ identities have been stripped out), Parikh says, adding that the company has a “zero-tolerance policy” for abuse of user information.

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Zuckerberg on Facebook’s Stock, Mobile, and Morale

For the first time since his company’s disastrous initial public offering on May 18, Facebook (FB) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg spoke publicly about the social network’s rocky path to the market, saying that the stock’s performance has been “obviously disappointing.” He also argued that investors may be underestimating the traction Facebook is getting on mobile phones, comments that helped the stock gain more than 3 percent on Tuesday.

Zuckerberg spoke with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington in front of a packed audience at the annual Disrupt conference, held in San Francisco by the technology blog, a division of AOL (AOL). At times speaking as fast as a high school debater in his team’s regional finals, Zuckerberg said investors may not fully grasp how much opportunity Facebook has on smartphones.

He said users are more likely to use the site every day on their phones than on their PCs, and that ads can be directly integrated into the service, rather than lurking on the side of the page, as they do on desktop computers. “We think we are going to make a lot more money than we do on the desktop,” Zuckerberg said.

He also said the stock price—a gut-wrenching 50 percent drop since the IPO—“doesn’t help” with employee morale. He noted, though, that “Facebook has not been uncontroversial in the past. It’s not like this is the first up and down we’ve had.” And he implied that the company would likely be furnishing employees with additional equity to compensate for the decreased value of their shares. “I think it’s a great time for people to join and a great time for people to stay and double down,” he said.

Speaking with an easy smile and none of the flop sweat that has characterized earlier appearances on stage, Zuckerberg blew through a number of topics. He said the company made the worst mistake in its history by betting on the open HTML5 framework for mobile phones—resulting in subpar apps for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone—and he waxed enthusiastic over Instagram, a startup Facebook bought in the spring for $1 billion.

Zuckerberg also said definitively that Facebook has no plans to build its own mobile phone: “It’s so clearly the wrong strategy for us. We are building a network of 950 million users,” he said. “Let’s say we build a phone. Theoretically we could get 10 million or 20 million people to use it. It doesn’t move the needle for us.”

On the other hand, he signaled there’s a big opportunity for the company in search, and he implicitly lobbed a grenade in the direction of archenemy Google (GOOG). “Search engines are really evolving toward giving you a set of answers,” he said. “When you think about it from that perspective, Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer a lot of the questions people have”—such as which sushi restaurants friends have eaten at and liked. He added: “At some point we will do it.”

Zuckerberg said he’s still excited about the mission of the social network—to connect the entire world and allow them to share—and he claimed he doesn’t mind taking a beating in the media. “I would rather be in the cycle where people underestimate us,” he said. “It gives us good latitude to go out and take big bets and do things that are exciting.”

Toward the end of the 25-minute conversation, Arrington asked Zuckerberg if he still writes computer code. He said he does, for fun, but that he doesn’t formally submit code because he doesn’t want to give his engineers the burden of fixing it. “Everything I do breaks,” he said. And then, quickly realizing the import of those words, he added: “But we fix it quickly

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24 Miles, 833 Mph: Baumgartner’s Record Space Leap

Felix Baumgartner completed a world record jump from a balloon 128,000 feet above New Mexico on October 14. He reached a top speed of 833.9 miles per hour and deployed his parachute four minutes into a 10-minute free fall. His speed of Mach 1.2 broke the sound barrier. Video courtesy Red Bull.

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The Cracks in China's Shiny Buildings

On a Saturday morning in September, prospective homebuyers thronged the sales office for Fun City, a community of high-rises under construction on Beijing’s outskirts. Whether the buildings will still be standing a half-century from now is anybody’s guess. In July, massive flooding raised questions about the fitness of this low-lying stretch of land for dense development. Local media reported that properties adjacent to Fun City experienced water-logged basements, while parts of the nearby G-4 superhighway were submerged. At least 77 people died—many of them drowned in their cars—in part because of inadequate or clogged drainage systems.

Nearly every month brings news of an infrastructure failure, dramatic or mundane. In August a new $300 million eight-lane suspension bridge in Harbin collapsed, sending four trucks tumbling and leaving three dead. In 2009 a nearly completed building in Shanghai toppled like a domino because its foundation was inadequate. The U.K.’s Telegraph reported that within months of opening last year, the $210 million Guangzhou Opera House began to shed its glass window panels and developed large cracks in its ceiling. Last year writer Evan Osnos chronicled on his New Yorker blog the premature decline of his courtyard house: “When the rainy season hit Beijing, our house began to show its age. About four years old, to be precise.”

All of this is at odds with the image overseas of China winning the “infrastructure race,” as the headline of an Aug. 24 online story from Foreign Policy put it. China’s structural woes stem in part from the government’s focus on quantity of growth over quality. The idea is to employ as many workers as possible. Wang Mengshu, deputy chief engineer at China Railway Tunnel Group, says that rather than use advanced technology to carve out railroad tunnels, the group often prefers to hire millions of pairs of hands “to solve the national employment problem.”

Officials admit there are challenges. At a forum on green building in 2010, Deputy Minister of Construction Qiu Baoxing said, “Every year, new buildings in China total up to 2 billion square meters and use up to 40 percent of the world’s cement and steel, but our buildings can only stand 25 to 30 years on average.” U.S. commercial buildings are expected to stand for 70 to 75 years, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

For residential and commercial developments, architectural design and construction phases are typically allotted half the time as in the U.S., says Beijing-based landscape architect Paul Maksy. “With such a rapid pace of construction, there’s often relatively little monitoring of standards,” says Stephen Hammer, a lecturer in energy planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has worked in China.

Poor materials can cause problems: The collapse of school buildings in the wake of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake was due in part to the use of low-quality cement, resulting in so-called tofu buildings. “When cement is mixed inadequately or when other materials are mixed in, it’s not very strong, so any major storm or stress on a building could make it fall down,” says Francis Cheung, author of brokerage firm CLSA’s 2012 report, China’s Infrastructure Bubble. In 2011 the government issued guidelines on materials. “There is a movement toward compliance with international building codes and standards,” says MIT’s Hammer. “But implementation and oversight remain extremely variable.”

Cutting corners won’t be a sound long-term economic strategy for China if its buildings, bridges, and roads degrade rapidly and require fairly frequent replacement. Says Patrick Chovanec, an associate professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management: “If you have an asset that lasts for 20 or 30 years instead of twice as long, it has a much shorter earning life before you have to refurbish or tear it down.” Robert Blohm, an economist and consultant for Keen Resources Asia in Beijing, says China could get “stuck”: “Will China still be able to pay for another round of infrastructure development—or will its cities become landscapes of dilapidated buildings?” he asks.

For now, the cash spigot is open. In early September, China announced plans to build more than 1,200 miles of roads, nine sewage-treatment plants, five ports, and 25 subway and intercity rail projects. “In an economic slowdown, the government has to take some countercyclical measures,” Xu Lin, head of the planning department at the National Development and Reform Commissions, told reporters.

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Lesson of the iPad: In Tough Times, Treat Yourself

The iPad’s design and engineering notwithstanding, the real magic was its price. A $500 product is not cheap, but the average computer cost $710 in April 2010, according to market researcher NPD Group, and other tablets routinely topped $1,000. As such, the device was an ideal purchase for those who’d been paring back for more than a year and a half and were looking for a modest indulgence. They probably weren’t getting a new home in April 2010 (housing values were still 30 percent below their April 2006 peak) or a new car (sales were down 21 percent from April 2008), but, darn it, they were going to treat themselves to something. This is why other products, such as nail polish (up 65 percent since 2008) and chocolate (up 14 percent), saw a bump: They’re smaller purchases one can rationalize. Condoms (up 23 percent from 2008 to 2011) are yet another sort of rational, recessionary indulgence, acting as they do to prevent kids people can’t afford.

Also critical to the iPad’s success has been its use as a communication tool. Even in the face of scarcity, connection is a powerful attractor. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, households spent less on food, entertainment, apparel, and other categories from 2007 to 2011, but spending on communications rose more than 10 percent during the same period.

Novelty, an attainable price, and the power to connect people: It’s not the first time a new product with those selling points has defied a lousy economy. Most people equate the 1930s with bread lines, but the decade also saw sales double for a new gadget called the radio.

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Samsung Galaxy S III mini

When word first started trickling out that Samsung planned to make a mini version of the Galaxy S III, it had the air of plausibility -- we've heard from many a person about the too-large size of that phone for their hands. Then, a press invitation confirmed that "something small" was in the works, and finally mobile chief JK Shin confirmed that a smartphone of that name would be announced today in Frankfurt, Germany.

Now Samsung's spilled all the beans, and revealed the new Galaxy S III mini, a slightly paler version of its bigger brother in specs as well as screen size. Our own short time with the phone certainly revealed that its pushing all the same "inspired by nature" buttons of the original Galaxy S III (and the Galaxy Note II), with the same exact rounded pebble shape and layout. The German marketing rep we spoke to said his company's research found that users wanted the same phone design as the 4.8-inch Galaxy S III, but in a smaller form factor -- to more easily fit smaller hands and pockets. Samsung said those folks don't necessarily need or want the most powerful phone they can get their hands on and are content to have mid-level specs -- so the mini carries a 1GHz dual-core processor, 1GB RAM, a 4-inch, WVGA AMOLED screen and 32GB max of memory.

It remains to be seen if those specs will dilute the Galaxy S brand, but in any event, we found the phone certainly doesn't cramp our regular-sized hands like its older brother can (let alone the Note II), and the comfortable shape of the original works even better in a mini size. The button placement is identical to the larger handset, and the phone will come out of the box with nearly identical Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean functionality -- with the added Samsung TouchWiz twist, of course. That includes new niceties like the multi-screen option, and a brief play with the phone shows the same butter factor, even with the lesser dual-core processor. So might this mini-me Galaxy S III model sway you over to the Samsung Galaxy family if you disdain the giant screen of its predecessor? Check out the gallery below to see how the size compares with the rest of the family, and a hands-on video and interview with Samsung Germany rep Mario Winter, both after the break.

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The Real Story About Romney’s Tax-Cut Plan

At times the Oct. 3 presidential debate resembled a restaging of Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic” sketch—the one in which the two combatants spend the whole time saying “Yes, it is” and “No, it isn’t.”

For viewers at home, the most frustrating interchange was over Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s tax-cut plan. President Barack Obama repeatedly said Romney was proposing a $5 trillion tax cut, and Romney repeatedly said he wasn’t. Obama said Romney couldn’t cut taxes as much as he wants to without increasing the budget deficit. Romney said he could. It was a lot of “automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says,” as the Monty Python skit had it.

What’s the real story here? I asked the experts at the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. The Tax Policy Center has been accused by some Republicans of being unfair to Romney, but its goal is to be nonpartisan and its methodology is straightforward: It just adds up the numbers.

Romney started out modestly enough. The tax-cut plan he unveiled last winter probably would not have increased the deficit. But after several of his rivals for the GOP nomination came out with big tax cuts, Romney issued a more aggressive tax-cutting plan in March that would cut individual income tax rates an additional 20 percent. It involved, as Obama correctly said, approximately $5 trillion in reduced tax receipts over 10 years.

Romney said at the time that he could make up for the lost revenue from his tax cuts by “broadening the base”—i.e., eliminating various deductions and exemptions for upper-income Americans and preserving only those related to savings and investment. It’s a point he made again in the Oct. 3 debate.

But the numbers don’t add up. An August analysis by the Tax Policy Center found it was mathematically impossible (PDF) for Romney to simultaneously cut taxes on upper-income households, keep middle-income tax burdens from rising, and prevent an increase in the budget deficit.

Some Republicans have criticized the Tax Policy Center for failing to give Romney’s plan credit for engendering higher economic growth, which would increase tax revenue. But Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center told me that even building in the growth assumptions supplied by Romney’s economic advisers didn’t close the gap.

During the debate, Romney hinted at some ways he might broaden the tax base and thus reduce the deficit. According to Williams, they weren’t nearly enough: “It’s a suggestion of a piece of a plan to start addressing the revenue problem,” he said. Williams’s colleague, Howard Gleckman, said Romney was even vaguer in the debate than he was a few days earlier about one idea he’s floated: capping tax deductions at $17,000. “In the debate, he mused about capping deductions, not at $17,000, but at $25,000 or $50,000,” Gleckman wrote in a blog post. “This is no trivial difference.”

The bottom line: Romney proposed an extreme tax cut last spring to help him win the Republican nomination. Now that he’s the candidate, he’s having trouble making the numbers work.

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Why Small Businesses Won’t Stop Underpaying Taxes

There’s a way for Congress to lower the federal budget deficit to less than $1 trillion, maintain the Bush tax cuts for everyone, and abstain from making a single dollar of spending cuts. While this sounds like the kind of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too solution our elected officials fantasize about, no one in Congress is suggesting it, nor are they likely to anytime soon. That’s because the solution requires getting small business owners to stop underpaying their taxes.

Before you ask why I’m discussing such a political nonstarter, know that small business underpayments add up. The IRS estimates (PDF) that $179 billion annually in unpaid federal taxes comes from individuals underreporting business income on their personal returns from what are known as pass-through entities and underpayment of self-employment tax. We could eliminate 16 percent of the budget deficit if this subset of American taxpayers paid all the taxes they owe.

Congress couldn’t raise this kind of money by going after big corporations. The IRS estimates that underreporting by large corporations (those with more than $10 million in assets) amounted to $48 billion in 2006, the latest year for which data are available. Add the $19 billion that small corporations underreport to the $179 billion mentioned earlier, and you can see that small business accounts for about four times as much of the tax gap as large corporations.

(I’m not talking about minimizing taxes legally here the way some large companies do. I’m talking about failing to pay the taxes that people legally owe. Whether we should close the loopholes that allow big business to keep their tax rates low is a different question.)

It would obviously be political suicide to go after entrepreneurs. Americans love small business and dislike Congress. A 2010 Pew Research Center survey found that 71 percent of Americans think small business has a positive “effect on the way things are going in this country,” while only 24 percent think Congress does. Knowing they will have to face voters again, Congress isn’t going to risk upsetting the American public by attacking beloved small business owners.

Among the several tax compliance bills that the 112th Congress introduced, only one became law—and that’s the one that repealed the 1099 reporting requirement, which would have given the IRS more information to catch tax cheats. In a nutshell, the provision obligated businesses to once a year report to the IRS payments of more than $600 a year to any vendor, prompting vociferous outcries from lobbyists.

Stopping small business from underreporting would be difficult because many owners underreport a little. And the bulk of underreporting may have more to do with the complexity of the rules than dishonesty. The U.S. Government Accountability Office notes (PDF) that the typical sole proprietor underreports income by less than $1,000. IRS tax advocate Nina Olson told Congress in 2006 that most underpayment in general comes from taxpayer error. That means underpayment of taxes can’t be cut substantially without fixing our complicated tax system.

Many small business owners are worried that Congress’s response to the federal deficit will throw the country into recession in 2013. Ironically, they have the ability to keep the economy from hurtling over the fiscal cliff come January. While Congress won’t force them to help, small business owners can reduce the federal deficit by paying all the taxes they actually owe.

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Behold the Cheetah Robot. The Singularity Is Nigh!

Big defense budgets during the aughts financed the deployment of thousands of robots, including unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles, to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s fascination with robots hasn’t slackened even in these more austere times. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is funding Boston Dynamics’ development of a prototype robot called the Cheetah. On March 5, the company announced that the cat-like bot managed to gallop 18 mph on a treadmill, setting a new land speed record for legged robots. (The previous record: 13.1 mph, set at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989.) Here’s the video in all its Rise of the Machines creepiness. Or coolness. Your call.

Boston Dynamics, a 1992 spinoff from MIT that’s headed by Marc Raibert, has also developed a quadrupedal pack robot called the Legged Squad Support System (LS3). And in a move sure to wig out elements of the singularity movement, the company has a prototype human-like robot in the works called the Atlas that can walk upright and use its hands for balance while squeezing through narrow passages on surveillance or emergency rescue missions.

As for the Cheetah, Raibert thinks the cat-bot could clock speeds of nearly 40 mph once key design and technical features are further refined. “We’ve solved a lot of the engineering problems,” he says. Raibert declined to say when such a technology would be ready for the battlefield, but he says this sort of machine could someday serve as a “scout robot” and “maybe deliver some payload.” This kind of machine could also be useful in emergency rescue and civilian disasters, the company says.

In the latest speed test, the Cheetah was tethered to a hydraulic pump for power and relied on a boom-like device to help maintain balance. “It’s a lot like training wheels,” says Raibert. Those come off later this year when Boston Dynamics will start testing a free-running robot that will have an internal gas-powered engine and software capable of handling 3D movements. The Boston Dynamics research team is working with Dr. Alan Wilson, an expert on the dynamics of fast-running animals at London’s Royal Veterinary College.

While the Cheetah won’t be combat-ready for some time, its technology may be more immediately useful in improving other Boston Dynamics bots. Last month Darpa announced it had started field testing Boston Dynamics LS3 pack-bot, including the ability to carry 400 lbs on a 20-mile trek in 24 hours without being refueled.

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Dinner and a Robot: My Night Out With a PR2

On Wednesday night I had the pleasure of dining at the exclusive Willow Garage in Menlo Park, Calif. Appetizers included lobster and corn croquettes, local cheeses paired with figs, and a sort of melon gazpacho that, well, put the “-oup” back into cold soup. As the evening progressed, I devoured some heirloom tomatoes drizzled with olive oil pressed only a few miles away and a grand rack of elk sitting on top of summer vegetables. Chef Jef Piazzon stopped by with wines paired with each course.

Willow Garage is particularly exclusive because it’s not a restaurant at all but a 60-person robotics company. Still, Chef Piazzon—who earned his chops cooking at Google (GOOG) and the much ballyhooed Manresa (an actual fine-dining restaurant open to the public)—does whip up breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the troops. The typical meal may not include leprechaun—massaged elk—but it’s still quite something, from what I’m told. The food and the setting, an office building with a lazy backyard and plush outdoor seating, are rather spectacular for a company that, let’s face it, does not sell an awful lot of anything.

Scott Hassan, one of the main brains behind Google, founded Willow Garage in 2006 as a well-funded robotics research shop. Over the past six years, the company has earned some measure of fame in the robotics community for creating what amounts to an open-source operating system for robots and for building a video-conferencing robot that can cruise through offices, hospitals, and the like. Willow Garage also makes something called the PR2, which is a $400,000 robot that looks a heck of a lot like Rosie from The Jetsons, only without the apron or paper hat.

Here’s the deal with the products. Willow Garage spun out the video-conferencing technology into a separate company called Suitable Technologies, which Hassan now runs alongside a handful of employees taken from Willow Garage. Its products will appear in the “early fall 2012,” according to the company’s website, which also notes that “our private chef provides lunch daily from local, fresh ingredients.”

As for the software, well, it’s called ROS, or robot operating system, and it’s given away in the hope that other robotics folks will use it and make their own additions and return those additions to Willow Garage. I’m told that “dozens of robots” now run on ROS and that this is impressive, although I have to confess to having no idea whether that’s a lot of robots or not. The grand vision behind ROS is that it turns into the equivalent of Windows for robotics: a standard platform on which millions of robots run. That places Willow Garage at the center of the robotics universe.

For the moment, the PR2 is one of the main vehicles for getting ROS into roboticists’ hands. It’s sold to researchers as a general purpose robot tuned for experimentation. The machine has a head, two arms, and a base with wheels. It can see things and pick them up and move them and do all of this without harming anyone due to some of the engineering restraints around its moving parts.

Before the dinner, some of the engineers at Willow Garage demonstrated what a PR2 can accomplish in the home—tasks such as placing dirty dishes in the sink and then setting the table with clean dishes. Research is also under way to see if the robot can help people who are paralyzed or suffering from other debilitating conditions. One gentleman, for example, relies on a PR2 to pick up his son’s dirty clothes and to help the gentleman shave.

Each PR2 is handmade at the Willow Garage offices. The company can produce about four robots per month and relies on technicians, often former mechanics, to assemble them. A new robot will appear at an unspecified time at a much lower cost, according to Steve Cousins, the chief executive of Willow Garage. About 35 of the PR2s are out in the wild, including ones at Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania. One at UC Berkeley folds laundry and can pair socks.

Cousins envisions a coming era in which robots are not just letting humans “be there,” in the sense of a video conferencing robot, but also “act there,” in the sense of humans accomplishing actual tasks remotely. He provides a hypothetical example of his mother suffering an illness. “If my mom had a robot in her home that I could inhabit, maybe I would visit her once a day,” Cousins says. “I can make her a cup of tea and play a game and have a chat.” People might be willing to rent such a robot for thousands of dollars over the course of the few months needed to get over the illness.

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Obama Fights His Own Bull Market

Barack Obama, it might seem, should be privy to unlimited free pints in the pubs of Wall Street. Since he took the oath of office in January of 2009, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, including dividends, has very nearly doubled. The country has added $7.3 trillion in market capitalization—an indisputably huge boon to both garden-variety retirement account holders and one-percenters. The six biggest banks just enjoyed their best 12 months since before the financial crisis. In some respects, it’s as if 2008 never happened.

Indeed, Obama is just one of five presidents since 1900 to have overseen at least a 50 percent jump in the stock market during their first three years in office, joining the non-sequiturian class of Coolidge, FDR, Eisenhower, and Clinton. A positive $7.3 trillion sound byte should seem irresistible, especially for a campaign hard-pressed to brandish financial accomplishment.

Don’t expect to see Obama actually run on his bull market. For one thing, he has made a rhetorical whipping boy of investment bankers. “Gov. Romney plans to let Wall Street run wild again,” he tweeted last week. “But he’s bringing the hammer down on Sesame Street.” Obama has proposed to hike tax rates on dividends and capital gains, in sharp relief to the rate cuts proposed by Mitt Romney—he of private-equity pedigree. Even if Obama wanted to sprint a bull-run victory lap, a sense of confusion and contraction has diminished the target audience of the U.S. “investor class.” Oh, and the broader economy generally feels pallid. Why invite more criticism on that front?

“There is limited utility for Obama on this point,” says Andy Laperriere, head of the policy research practice of ISI Group. “While stocks are up, real wages are down, GDP growth has been anemic, and the unemployment rate remains high.”

Contrary to popular belief, U.S. markets have fared substantially better under Democratic presidents. According to Barclay’s Research and the Economist, since 1929 donkey White Houses have bested elephant ones to the tune of a 10.8 percent average annual return compared with 2.7 percent. Of course, a president exerts only so much control over the economy and markets, which have to process everything from interest rates and war to oil shocks, financial scandals, and bubble-blown euphoria and panic.

In Obama’s case, stocks started their free-fall mere weeks before his election, and bottomed only in March 2009, when they were at lows not seen since the mid-1990s. Yes, the Obama fiscal stimulus and bailouts of certain banks and automakers helped arrest the broad free fall. But so, too, did record accommodation by the Bernanke Federal Reserve and Apple’s (AAPL) unfolding world domination.

Greg Valliere of Potomac Research says he’s skeptical of finding a correlation between presidencies and markets. “You can prove or disprove almost anything with statistics,” he says, “but I would argue that the market clearly wants Romney to win, because he would bring a sense of predictability to issues such as tax policy.”

In the proposed Obama budget, the top dividend tax rate would more than double from its current 15 percent to 43.4 percent. The top capital gains rate would jump from 15 percent to 30 percent. Moreover, Obama’s Affordable Care Act calls for a 3.8 percent investment tax on certain brackets and investments. By comparison, Romney’s economic plan touts a continuation of today’s discount taxation of dividends and lower rates on income taxes in every bracket.

Valliere says the stock market was up early in Obama’s term “largely because it couldn’t go down much more, and the shock of the 2008 meltdown gradually ebbed.” He credits continued Federal Reserve stimulus for its ongoing ascent.

The S&P 500 set its record absolute high five years ago, in the waning days of the credit bubble that reached its peak under the Bush administration. On a total return basis (including dividends), the index made new highs this year. The thing is, though, a record number of individual investors whom Obama could appeal to—whoever, wherever they now are—don’t seem to give a quack. John Q. Investors are ditching the market en masse. According to the Investment Company Institute, 46 percent of American families say they own stocks or stock funds, a decline from 53 percent in 2001. Since the market set its low three and a half years ago, investors have pulled a net $138 billion from mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that invest in U.S. stocks, according to the ICI.

Amid this broader apathy, there’s some chatter that the market actually does not want to see Obama go. After all, the ultralow-rate status quo rests upon White House-Capitol Hill gridlock and record accommodation from the Federal Reserve. Wouldn’t a Romney-Ryan win hurt the chances of Bernanke staying in office?

At Wednesday’s Big Picture conference in Manhattan, investor Jim Bianco said the market has pulled back since Obama’s bum debate showing, reflecting the greater odds of fiscal and monetary hawks assuming power.

“The market,” insists Valliere, “wants Romney, period. Market pros concede that the stock market has done well, but the vast majority of these people are convinced that the market has risen in spite of Obama, rather than because of him.”

So you can see why Obama might steer clear of touting the bull market. He doesn’t much need a sequel to “you didn’t build that.”

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The World’s First 3D-Printed Acoustic Guitar

Scott Summit does unusual things on his vacations. For instance, he just spent a week up in the mountains, taking in the majestic scenery and all that, but also sitting at his laptop creating a 3D model of his ideal guitar. Then he sent the computer design to 3D Systems (DDD), which used its massive 3D printers to transform the graphic model into an actual acoustic instrument that Summit can play.

As far as anyone seems to know, this is the first 3D-printed acoustic guitar on the planet, and it raises all kinds musical possibilities. (As several readers noted, people have already made 3D printed electric guitars.)

As a kid, Summit pined after fancy guitars. “I wanted a $3,000 one like Jerry Garcia would play,” he says. At the time, Summit didn’t have the money, so he spent around $100 on wood and other parts and fashioned his own guitar. “It sounded like crap,” he says.


These days, Summit spends most of his time designing custom body parts and stylish prosthetics that get built from 3D printers. He is, in fact, one of the world’s leading 3D printing and design experts, and he decided to put those skills to use over a holiday, refining his childhood vision.

Since the acoustic guitar would be made from fused plastic, Summit figured it would have some serious shortcomings. If it actually worked, it would probably sound worse than his old $100 model. But chances were the guitar would break under the 200 pounds of string pressure that comes with tightening the strings via a tuning machine. Summit set up a video camera to record what would happen when the stringing process started. “I thought it would at least be cool if the guitar exploded,” he says.

But, no. It worked, and it sounds pretty good. “It’s rich and full and has a great tonal range,” says Summit, who’s been known to play at friends’ weddings and at dive bars.

Summit describes this version as a rough draft. He wants to start experimenting with more radical designs to see how they change the sound. Somewhere down the road he figures people will be able to use software to pick out what sort of treble, bass, or sustain they desire and then print a guitar to match those qualities. “It will arrive in the mail and sound just the way you wanted,” he says.

Earlier this year, 3D Systems acquired Summit’s body part printing startup. He’s shown the guitar to the 3D Systems crew, and they’re thinking about how to advance the idea. The one-off model used about $3,000 worth of plastic and had a headstock 3D printed with sterling silver; the plate on the neck was 3D printed out of stainless steel. “It’s sort of this salad bar of 3D printing,” Summit says.

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New computer virus targets Venezuelans after vote

The malicious software was launched after Venezuela's Oct. 7 presidential election and was spread by email, said Dmitry Bestuzhev, head of the Moscow-based company's research and analysis team in Latin America.

At least 75 Kaspersky customers came under attack by the malware, and non-customers surely did, too, he said.

Bestuzhev said in a blog post on Friday that the malicious file is named "listas-fraude-electoral.pdf.exe," which translates as "electoral fraud lists" — a title likely to make some Venezuelans curious after President Hugo Chavez's re-election victory.

He explained by email that computer users received an email message with a link. Once a victim clicked on the link, he said, the person was redirected to a fake website purporting to belong to the Venezuelan television channel Globovision.

"After the click the malicious file was automatically downloaded," Bestuzhev said. However, Kaspersky Lab said its antivirus system successfully blocked each attempt by the malware to infect its customers' computers.

Bestuzhev said the malware allows criminals to steal victims' banking information and also online credentials for those holding accounts with Venezuela's currency agency, known by its Spanish initials CADIVI.

Venezuela's government maintains strict foreign currency exchange controls, and the currency agency provides people who apply with limited amounts of dollars or other currencies for purposes including travel, certain imported goods and overseas tuition payments.

The malware was designed to gain access to Venezuelans' CADIVI accounts to use their allotted dollars, Bestuzhev said.

"Being that this malware is quite simple and also targeting only Venezuelan banks and CADIVI, we can strongly assume that the cybercriminals who produced it are from Venezuela too," he wrote on the blog.

Officials at the government's currency agency and Science and Technology Ministry could not be immediately reached for comment

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iPhone 5: It's Morning in Technology

The signal is strong and lighting up all five bars: We live in the post-Steve-Jobs-era. The flubbed launch of the iPhone 5, and its ensuing problems, is going to create new opportunities for technologists and entrepreneurs across the world in lucrative areas that Apple had bottled up for the five years.

Even though I'm an ex-Apple employee and Objective-C programmer, typing this blog post on a MacBook Air, with my iPhone and iPad both within easy reach, I am happy.

There's a tremendous amount of speculation about where Apple is headed but it's clear to me that the age of Apple's dominance on our collective imaginations is on the wane. Every era has an expiration date and Apple's is about to come due. (If that upsets you, don't panic, eternalism might help.)

Looking back on the last 25 years in technology it's pretty clear to me that there is a pattern of alternating chaotic periods with fierce competition and stable periods of domination by one major player. During the chaotic periods competing ways of thinking about a problem and the entrepreneurs that champion these business models fight it out for mainstream success. The contest is winner-take-all and the player that succeeds creates an ecosystem upon which its rivals must live in order to survive to fight another day. The dominant player gets to play the piper and the losers must dance to its tune, or iTunes.

During my life I can remember four periods where a single player dominated the tech world so completely that I had to change my job description, programming language, and thought patterns to prosper:

IBM and the PC Compatible in '80s
Microsoft and Windows in '90s
Google and search in early '00s
Apple and the iPhone in the late '00s and early '10s
IBM, which doesn't even make personal computers anymore, once so completely dominated the technology world that every business plan was a plan to fit into IBMs scheme of things or to break it. Apple grew to maturity out of a rebellion to IBM's way of thinking and has been a rebel for 30 of its 36 years.
I had great fun being an Apple fanboy before Apple become dominant. When I walked into a meeting or coffee shop and yanked out my black MacBook laptop (a collector's item now) its radical style started conversations and garnered looks of envy or distain. Now in every meeting I attend and every coffee shop I frequent I have this uncomfortable feeling that I'm in a Apple commercial. Everyone has the same shiny MacBook Air with glowing Apple logo on the lid.

While the iPhone 5 release is a devastating flub for Apple it's a fantastic opportunity for the rest of us. The interesting thing to note is that nothing has really changed. Apple just seems less infallible. Until now, Apple's thought leadership so controlled the conversation that instead of innovating companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have been trying to be better Apples. (I've never seen that strategy work.)

As of today I'm hopeful that in a garage or a cubicle somewhere a couple of smart technologists are ready to take advantage of the coming era of instability and knock my socks off, not with a better iPhone, but with a radically new idea.

I imagine Sally and Bob sitting in the Paradise Café on 8th Avenue in the shadow of the Google building in NYC's Chelsea neighborhood. Sally is a software developer who got bored at Google and recently left to start a startup with Bob, a hipster designer with too much ADD to hold down a steady job. They order Acai Smoothies and reverently unwrap brand new iPhone 5s from the nearby 9th Avenue Apple Store.

For Bob and Sally the iPhone 5 isn't just a smart phone or pocket computer. It's a way of thinking about users, problems, and solutions. Bob and Sally know exactly where they fit in as Apple 3rd party developers: Sally will write an app which will only work on iOS devices from Apple, using a computer programming language, Objective-C, that only runs on Apple devices, and is sold in a software store that only runs on Apple devices. Bob will design the app to mimic real world objects (skeuomorph) and conforms to Apple's user interface guidelines and app store policies. Bob and Sally really don't have to think different or much at all: Apple has done all their thinking for them.

Here is why the iPhone 5 is the most important device Apple has ever released: Its bugs and lousy map applications just might wake Sally and Bob up from their Apple dominance induced coma: "My goodness! This thing has flaws." Sally exclaims to Bob. And Bob, after realizing that the giant Google building next door disappears from Apple's Maps app as he swipes and back forth between 9th and 8th avenue, mutters "Bloody Hell?" and tosses the iPhone 5 back in its little coffin-like box.

"Sally," Bob says as he blinks away imaginary blinders, "I have this crazy idea, what if instead of creating an iPhone app we use that Raspberry Pi you've been playing with and ..."

It's morning in technology land

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Upcoming Samsung Galaxy S4

The recent legal spat between Apple and Samsung has shown us that Android devices need to develop their own trade dress. With smartphones starting to merge into one image with no distinct look at all, lawsuits will continue to fly with pioneers keeping the better cards in hand.

Samsung Galaxy S4 should introduce a unique trade dress

When 2013 comes along and it becomes time for Samsung to unveil the Samsung Galaxy S4, or the Note 3, or the Nexus 5, these phones will need to have their own corporate identity.

Judge Koh ruled that Samsung stepped on Apple’s copyright toes and so now Samsung will have to invent its own wardrobe or get ready to face legal repercussions in the future again. It’s thought that Samsung copied Apple’s look because iPhones sell well, but it’s now time for Samsung to go “clothes shopping” so this misunderstanding doesn’t come about again.

Samsung could introduce unique colours or casings, or have decorations on the fronts – anything that makes future ranges of Samsung phones scream “Samsung!” not “Apple!” It’s believed that Samsung copied 13 or so of Apple’s patents and it’s these that have caused the problems. Even the Samsung Galaxy S3 has now been implicated in the lawsuit.

For instance, the D305 patent is about the famous grid of squares set against a black backdrop that Apple uses on its homescreen. The iPhone 5 still uses it several years on. This is Apple’s trade dress, so anyone else wanting to use something similar would have to alter this design – maybe by changing the squares to circles. If Samsung are, with Google, able to invent their own trade dress, then Android smartphones would be able to take their deserved place in the smartphone galaxy and put this embarrassment behind them.

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alien worlds

What?!! Abandoned observatory?!! Yes, this is it! It turns out that observatories can be abandoned too. Where? In Nizhny Novgorod!

Remains of a formerly huge ionospheric antenna

The foundation of a radio telescope

The main site

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Top 10 Biggest Naval Ships

he ocean is home to some amazing moving bodies of which some stretch almost half-a-kilometer and sketch a daunting figure in the horizon. Today, we present to you the list of the biggest naval ships ever built. Rather unsurprisingly, most of the ships in the list belong to the US Navy.

No 10. Shinano – 266 meters

Country	Imperial Japan
Commissioning	1944
Type	Aircraft carrier

This ship was named after the ancient Japanese province Shinano. It was used during World War 2. When built, it was the largest aircraft carrier of its time. The Shinano met its demise when it was sunk by the submarine USS Archer-Fish on 29 November 1944.

No 9. Iowa class – 270 meters

Country	USA
Commissioning	1943
Type	Battleship

These battleships served the US Navy in every major war from World War 2 to the Gulf War. 6 Iowa class ships were ordered and only 4 were completed with other 2 being cancelled before being completed. The remaining 4 ships are now retired.

Read more: http://realitypod.com/2010/10/top-10-biggest-naval-ships/#ixzz27rX6Z21Y

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