Recently my brother sent my dad a video of the history of the Vocoder. (the Vocoder is a synthesizer that produces sounds from an analysis of speech input) Since my dad is a 30+ year veteran of AT&T and an electrical/mechanical engineer, he dropped some knowledge on my brother:

Much of this technology was also used to improve the efficiencies of the initial fiber optic trans-oceanic cables. I had been directly involved in implementing the first fiber cable (TAT-8) between the US (east coast, NY) and Europe (UK, France) as well as the Pacific ocean cables (HAW4/TPC3) to the far east (via California, Hawaii, Guam to Japan). There was limited capacity and the US telecom quality voice standard at the time was known as 64kbps per voice channel. Not too many simultaneous calls could be carried over the cable at that rate, so low bit rate technology (LBRV) was needed to be used instead to improve transmission efficiencies, which was a direct off-shoot of the Vocoder technology. The algorithm for voice frequencies vs. required bit allocation was critical for passing signals that would “sound” like a person’s normal voice but sent at a lower bit rate that would permit additional calls. Fortunately, the human ear can be “tricked” into thinking it’s hearing the original signal even though you are slipping/subtracting data bits at critically particular times and audio frequencies. I actually sampled some of the Bell Labs “blind tests” testing different bit rates and it was a fascinating experience to be at both ends of the project — lab development and my operations/engineering implementation. At the time Bell Labs was an incredibly deep and competent organization. I had several BTL engineers assigned to my team which made my life a lot easier! But back then then the technology was pure, as we called it then, “Buck Rogers”! Today, we are so many generations beyond this.

You rock, Dad.

via my brother’s site, chasing Tremendous

Being the crusty old-media scold felt good at the time, but recent events suggest that Vice is deadly serious about doing real news that people, yes, even young people, will actually watch. And given that Vice has been in talks with Time Warner for a partnership that may include its bringing its guerrilla aesthetic to an entire news channel, it’s worth looking at its growth and development as a source of hard news.

Last year, Vice gained a share of infamy by getting access to the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and the notoriously secretive country he leads through a caper involving Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters, a stunt that drew attention, invective and clicks. In March, Vice christened Vice News as a separate entity and joined with YouTube on a news channel. Almost immediately, the Vice reporter Simon Ostrovsky began filing remarkable dispatches from Ukraine and was, for his trouble, kidnapped in April. (He was freed after a few days.)
—David Carr, Its Edge Intact, Vice Is Chasing Hard News

In a world with microchip implants, car-to-car communication, and talk of drone delivery services, it can seem as if innovation is becoming increasingly high-tech. But what about the world’s poorest, for whom such gadgets are out of reach? What types of innovation would be most beneficial for them?

These questions are the driving force behind efforts in “frugal innovation” — designing products specifically to meet the needs of the world’s poorest people. The concept challenges innovators to do more with less. In general, the creators of frugal innovations strive for them to be affordable, sustainable, lightweight and rugged. Wherever possible, they should be made locally with renewable materials. Perhaps most important, they should be developed with the end user in mind, taking into consideration things like power outages in her village, the distance she must walk to seek medical assistance and religious customs she considers sacred.
—Sarika Bansal, Innovation Within Reach

What could be the most important scientific experiment of our lifetime is about to begin. The so-called Holometer Experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory aims to determine whether our perception of a three-dimensional universe is just an illusion. Do we actually live on a 2D plane, as a holographic projection? There is a well-established theory that states we are indeed living in a hologram, with a pixel size of about 10 trillion trillion times smaller than an atom. This has certain implications, some of which are quite sinister, even unspeakably horrific.

The argument about the nature of the universe hinges on something that 99.99% of people are not able to comprehend even on the most superficial level — namely, a comparison between the energy contained in a theoretical flat universe with no gravity and the internal energy of a black hole, and whether these two energy levels match or not.
—Tero Kuittinen, BGR.com
Huh?

Awesome Kickstarter project, Beastie Bak:

I am looking to finally print some rare and unpublished photos that I took of the Beastie Boys in the 80’s. I have been looking through the pictures that I took from 1983-87 around the time I did a shoot for their album, “Licensed to Ill” and all the tour photos that I shot at that time and before. I would now like to share these images with all the Beastie Boys and 70’s fans out there but need to scan and print them.

When a new technology emerges, it behaves like the technology that came before it. Moving pictures acted like photography. Television acted like radio. Cars were designed like the carriages before them (yes, that’s where the word “car” comes from).
And so it is for the first generation of smartwatches (aka “wearables”) with their skeuomorphic analogue watch hands.
I thought we had evolved from skeuomorphism?
We can do better than this shit.

image taken from BGR.com

Apparel is the word describing every garment, shoe and accessory product sold and amounts to about $1.2 trillion/yr. This amount of money is not spent only to protect the wearer from the elements-any more than the money spent on telecommunications is spent to convey vital information. Most of the value in apparel, perhaps 80%, is spent on solving psychological needs.

And therein lies the opportunity. As the value is beyond functional, substitution of psychological jobs by new products is a matter of engineering better solutions. Consider the behavior of US teens: anecdotally, theirspending on apparel is fading as the solution to feeling good about themselves increasingly relies on a device and service. Already, in this context, apparel retail is in crisis while buying shifts to devices.
—Horace Dediu, Apparel is next

BGR: Samsung continues to explain how hard it is to make an iPhone 6 ‘killer’:

After explaining a few days ago how hard it is to make an iPhone 6 “killer” – the partially metallic Galaxy Alpha is considered Samsung’s response to the incoming 4.7-inch iPhone 6 – Samsung is back with more marketing nonsense in a second post on the company’s blog that further explains the way Samsung designed this new phone.
Just stop, Samsung. You’re just making yourself look more pathetic.
Also, the bezeled edge on the new Galaxy Alpha couldn’t look like more of an iPhone 5 ripoff.

via BGR

Remember when you would talk to your friend—face-to-face or maybe over the landline telephone—and make plans for the weekend? Then a few days would pass and that weekend you would actually meet your friend where you had agreed to meet? This experience is foreign to a lot of people, particularly Millenials, the first generation to have grown up with cellphones and the Internet since birth.

Generally speaking, Millenials started popping out of their mothers’ uteruses around the time Nirvana’s Nevermind came out in 1991.

To be clear, though, Gen Xers, Gen Yers and Baby Boomers are all just as susceptible to being flaky shits.

Cellphones Make People Flaky as [Shit] via Alex Cornell

via Colossal

At Wired, Nick Stockton on why it’s so hard to catch our own typos:

You have finally finished writing your article. You’ve sweat over your choice of words and agonized about the best way to arrange them to effectively get your point across. You comb for errors, and by the time you publish you are absolutely certain that not a single typo survived. But, the first thing your readers notice isn’t your carefully crafted message, it’s the misspelled word in the fourth sentence.
Why?
The reason typos get through isn’t because we’re stupid or careless, it’s because what we’re doing is actually very smart, explains psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos of the University of Sheffield in the UK. “When you’re writing, you’re trying to convey meaning. It’s a very high level task,” he said.
If you’ve been following Daily Exhaust for a while, you’ve likely seen many of my typos. I always miss them. Luckily my friend and DE contributor Bryan always spots them like a sharp shooter.
Ironically, I notice I’m usually able to spot my typos after I hit the Publish button and I’m reading my post live on the site. I attribute this to my brain leaving the “conveying meaning” mode (see above quote) and switching into “reading” mode. I’m no longer close to my words.

via Twitter

This week Michael and Bryan discuss apathy, smoke alarms, f!cking bagel Fridays at the office, Robin Williams, Über, Lyft and Airbnb. The episode opens with a binaural 3D sound recording from the Eau Rouge/Radillon complex at Spa-Francorchamps.
Weekly Exhaust Episode 13