Note to Self

Amber Smith's voice is a symptom of illness and an alarm for looming danger, even if she doesn't always hear it herself.

Amber has bipolar disorder and her mood swings are a risk: high highs can lead to massive spending sprees and low lows have dipped into suicidal territory. She's managing it now with medication. She's also testing out a new technology to try to catch a mood swing before it starts by using her cell phone to analyze the acoustics of her voice. Tiny variations in how she speaks, or you speak, can be clues to shifting mental states. 

"Speech is incredibly rich it encodes so much of our behavior, it encodes information about gender, about our age, about our identity, and in this case about mood," explains computer engineering professor Emily Mower Provost of the University of Michigan. She and her colleague psychiatrist Melvin McInnis are testing out how to plumb the hidden signals and codes of a human voice to enable early action and better care for people with mental health issues. 

It gets touching, it gets ambitious, and it's all pretty hopeful. Have a listen. 

This is Part 1 of a two part series on voices and how computers and new technology can hear hidden meaning in how we speak. Next week: how this is being used to make products and profits. Subscribe to New Tech City here to make sure you don't miss it. 

This plan went way beyond email. The small startup Outbox had done its homework on the role mail plays in our lives, on the value people place on a letter and a catalog, and they imagined what mail could become. The plan to reinvent postal delivery for the digital age had real promise, the founders thought. So did investors and many customers. It was a new age of mail. And then... well, the Postal Service didn't want to play nice.

The 'get girls interested in coding' push is growing from techie pet project to mainstream movement. Now it has a celebrity spokesperson. A very girly spokeswoman to be precise. 

"For someone like me who does identify as traditionally girly, it’s a good way to trick girls into thinking its fun and colorful and then they stay because they can do other stuff with it."

Actress and TV producer Mindy Kaling of The Office and the Mindy Project is a spokesperson for Google's new Made With Code initiative. And she says, meeting girls where they are is definitely the way to go. 

And if you look at the Initiatives and after school projects popping up left and right with names like Girls Who Code, Girl Develop It, Girls Teaching Girls to Code, Black Girls Who Code... well, there's a lot of pink mixed in with the computer science. 

We want to know why? And if it is really necessary to embrace gender norms on the path to bridging the gender divide in tech. 

(Listen to our episode 'The Way We Teach Computer Science Hurts Women' for a sense of why this is so urgent).

In this episode: 

Our brains are wired to forget. The internet, not so much. That mismatch is a risk to our humanity. 

Now that the the European Court has ruled that there is a so-called 'right to be forgotten' online, Google must consider requests to remove some search results in the name of privacy. American commentators went nuts over this. Free speech would be lost, went the outcry. A right to know would be buried, echoed the refrain. But maybe Americans are seeing it wrong.

This week New Tech City hears from a man with a heart-wrenching plea for Google to forget one macabre photo, from a German lawyer inundated with new clients trying to jump on the forgetting bandwagon, and we talk to the philosopher Viktor Mayer-Schönberger who wrote the book that started the whole conversation about who should own your online identity and search results. 

Forgetting, he says, "enables us human beings to evolve, to learn, to move forward, and if we undo that capacity to forget because our digital tools remember, then we are undoing a very important element of what makes us human." 

We get thoughtful, personal, and a little European in this episode. Click play above to listen. 

For more stories like this one, subscribe to our podcast via iTunes or RSS. And follow us on Twitter, won't you? 

Matt George runs a new bus company that doesn't own buses. And he's making some big promises. 

He says his company Bridj is going to "rethink the way mass transportation works for the first time, really, since 1897 when the first subway tracks were laid" in Boston, where Bridj just launched its first data-driven routes. George thinks that by crunching enough mobility data he can figure out where people need to go in almost real-time, and create or alter bus routes so there's always one when you need it, and they all go pretty much express. As for the not owning buses thing. Bridj will make the schedules and routes then contract actual bus companies for the wheels, much like the way Uber and other taxi apps use private drivers but don't employ any of them directly. 

If George is right, his technology could fundamentally change the way people get around cities with something between a taxi shuttle and the subway. It could also become an elitist alternative public transit for the smartphone crowd.

To find out — and to test out a few other transpo tech promises — New Tech City producer Alex Goldmark takes a road trip from New York to Boston using every possible means of high-tech-enhanced transportation and trip planning tools he could possibly find. Listen to this episode to hear how the future of transportation rolls... and lurches, and crashes. 

Fear of math is real.

In fact, psychologists now use the term “math anxiety” to describe the panic many people — particularly girls and women — have about doing math. On this week’s New Tech City, host Manoush Zomorodi plays a new video game that is being developed to alleviate math anxiety by getting physical in front of a screen. Players move into so-called 'power poses.'

It's all based on the incredibly popular TED talk below. The game Scoops! from NYU-Poly's Game Innovation Lab turns fractions into fun and attempts to put research about the mind-body connection to use all by making kids stand strong. Can it heal Manoush’s own math PTSD?  

VIDEOS: 

Computer programmers are injecting machines with consciousness and the power of thought. It's time we stop and ask, 'which thoughts?'

In this episode we hear how robots can become self-aware and teach themselves new behaviors in the same way a baby might learn to wiggle his toes and learn to crawl. Though this is happening now, Hod Lipson, Cornell researcher, tells us that uttering the word consciousness to roboticists is like saying the "C" word. It could get you fired. We say, it's time to start talking about robot morals. 

However you look at it, Google's self-driving car is a robot and it will be entering our lives soon. So we talk with psychologist Adam Waytz of Northwestern University about his experiments measuring how people form bonds with robots, and how we naturally project human characteristics onto machines — for better or worse — including a friendly driver-less car named Iris.  

By the end of this episode, we raise a lot of questions and offer a few answers about the ethics of living in a robot world. Please consider this the start of a conversation and let us know what else you want us to ask, answer, cover or investigate, including who you want us to interview next. 

You can get in touch with us through Twitter, @NewTechCity or email us at newtechcity (at) wnyc.org. And if you like this episode, please subscribe on iTunes, or via RSS. It's easier than finding your toes. 

VIDEOS:

We mention a few videos in the podcast. Here they are in the order they appear in the show. 

Watch the full event with Hod Lipson showing off his thinking robots. He shows off his "Evil Starfish" starting around 14 minutes in. It "gimps along" best at 28 minutes in.  

And here is Google's promotional video for it's first fully driver-less car.

David Joerg has a problem and he knows it. Until a few months ago his nights would go something like this: He'd put his daughters to bed. He'd wait for his wife to fall asleep at a reasonable hour. And then he'd submit to his craving. "I'd fire up the computer, grab a sleeve of crackers and a fresh tub of Nutella, play video games," and anything else online. Over and over and over until dawn was creeping up on him. He was getting three hours of sleep or less some nights. "I would just be destroyed the next day and just limping through like a zombie."

This is David's tech addiction. But he's beaten it. Part of the solution involved creating a special program for his computer that would outsmart him in his moment of weakness. You can request a copy of the program for yourself from David here. 

Also in this episode, a reprise of a great Radio Rookies piece about how teens are "vamping" all night long, forgoing sleep to chat and click and post online from their beds. It's like an infinite sleepover that wreaks havoc on morning classes. 

Stories of tech addiction on this week's New Tech City. 

If you like this episode, why not subscribe to our podcast here, and follow us on Twitter here. 

There's a neighborhood in Austin, Texas where the refrigerators tell stories. The roofs are paved in solar panels. There are more electric cars per capita here in the Muëller community than in any residential neighborhood in America. It's a kind of paradise and it could drive you nuts.

It's also the future happening right now. 

Even when she's out, Kathy Sokolic can tell when her husband gets home or leaves because the light switches leave a trail. In their house, every carbon footprint gets tracked as part of the Pecan Street Research Project. It's preparation for America's energy future. Seven hundred otherwise-normal homes have been wired to track how people really use energy when they have things like solar panels, smart thermostats and electric cars, lots of electric cars.

The thing is, in the process of gathering all that information, the people who live here now are awash in data about themselves and that changes how they behave. Hear their story in this week's New Tech City. 

If you like this episode, why not subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, or listen to past episodes in the green player on the right. Or follow us on Twitter. 

EXTRAS:

Here's the chart mentioned in the podcast where Sokolic spotted her refrigerator behaving oddly and took action!

VIDEO: Peek inside the homes of Muëller.

This episode of the New Tech City podcast explores how technology has changed sleep through the ages, specifically through artificial light.

Hear historian Roger Ekirch and psychiatrist Thomas Wehr explain how they each discovered the natural segmented sleep pattern our bodies want. And why we don't sleep that way because of modern technology.

Plus, we learn what actually happens to our brains when someone actually does return to the ancient way of sleeping: "People would sometimes say they felt a kind of crystal clear consciousness when they were awake that was not familiar to them. And it made me wonder if any of us knows what it’s really like to be awake — fully awake,” Wehr says.  

Even though technology is the problem, it can also be the solution. "You have people that are using their phones as alarm clocks, people who are checking their phones all night long... And every time you get that hit of light, it’s like a hit of espresso, and we’d like to fix that for everybody,” says Lorna Herf, co-creator of the app f.lux. She and her husband have an app and a plan.

The revelations in this episode might be a wake-up call. You’ll sleep better after listening to this one.

If you liked this episode, why not subscribe to New Tech City on iTunes and follow us on Twitter.