Here’s some fun, dystopic-sounding news from the realm of the Internet of Things. HP, a printer manufacturer that DFC frequently encounters in the offices we service, has been sliding alarmingly towards 1984-type control over inkjet printers and components used by its consumers. (For example, in March of 2016, HP pushed a seemingly harmless security update to users of their OfficeJet and OfficeJet Pro printers. Hidden within that update was a timed code that went off six months later, that caused printers with the security update to stop recognizing non-HP ink cartridges. And then, after being found out, they did it again!)
 
This time, HP has hidden sneaky-sneaky DRM in its Instant Ink subscription packages. Instant Ink involves “renting” ink cartridges to a user for less than what it would cost to buy — unless (here’s the catch) the user goes over a monthly page limit, which is when they get hit with substantial fees.
 
Josh Hendrikson wrote about his experience with his Instant Ink subscription over at How To Geek, and underscored how weird and predatory the whole thing feels.
 
“According to the math, I’m the type of person who can benefit the most from HP’s Instant Ink program. I’m getting more ink for less money than if I had gone a traditional route […] But there’s a secondary cost. I’m left afraid to use my printer for the one reason I have it — printing. It’s a strange proposition that every time I go to print, I now feel the need first to check if I have enough pages left in my plan. It’s like asking HP for permission to use my printer. And if I don’t ask nicely enough, I’ll pay extra or, worse, they’ll take my ink away. And it’s not actually my ink: HP’s instant ink recycling page spell this out clearly […]

I can’t think of anything else in my house that works this way. My couches don’t have an allotment for sitting time, and I don’t need to continually pay the furniture store a fee for the right to use their cushions. I don’t fear that if I fail to pay my cushion subscription the store will take them away, leaving me with a cushionless couch.”
 
While I recognize the need for a company to preserve the way that it actually makes its money, I don’t like these underhanded tactics. As Hendrikson writes, there’s a very specific consumer this program should work for: a person who, a) when they print hard copies period, b) does so to an inkjet printer. (I myself print rarely, and it’s been years since we had an inkjet on the premises.) To me, this smacks of a company realizing their product is rapidly becoming obsolete, and grasping at anything that will keep the relationship monetized — no matter if it hurts the consumer in the long run. We at DFC strive to avoid that kind of relationship with our partners, the clients. It makes far more sense to look to the future with our clients’ needs!

Theoretically, spring is supposed to arrive this month, but in DFC’s snowy neck of the woods, winter continues to close its icy grip. I’ve been fighting back with the most powerful weapon we cold-climate-dwellers have: comfort food!
 
Chilis and soups are high on my list, but in this nastiest of months,  nothing beats the world’s most perfect starch: pasta.
 
As an enthusiast of both pasta and technology, I was fascinated by a recent collaborator article on Smithsonian.com (via the always amazing BoingBoing). The profile, by Elizabeth Chu and D. Lawrence Tarazano of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, outlines the impressive history of machine-made pasta shapes.
 
Traditional Italian culture has developed more than 1,300 (!) different shapes of pasta. A similarly staggering number of patents have been required to replicate — and surpass — some of the most popular shapes. And it’s been a complicated process.
 
“Pastas formed by hand have been the most difficult to replicate by machine because of the complexity of the actions done by hand. Cavatelli, gnocchi and orecchiette, for example, are made by rolling pasta dough by hand into a long snake shape, cutting it into equal sized dough pieces, and dragging the dough to form a cup-like shape. […]

Italian inventors Franco Annicchiarico and Adima Pilari, who received U.S. patent no. 4,822,271 on April 18,1989 for ‘an improved machine for manufacturing short cut varieties of Italian pasta (orecchiette, etc.),’ developed a machine for making these cupped pastas. Comprised of three units, this patented invention allows users to feed the machine with pasta mix that later extrudes into sticks of pasta. Those sticks are then ‘cut into cylindrical pellets,’ and finally, three rollers flatten, curl, rotate and form the pasta into a cup shape.”
 
Other noodles (like those for lasagna or ravioli), are subjects of patents for rolling and folding machines, and still others (like spaghetti or macaroni), for extruding machines.
 
It’s staggering to think of such a simple, handmade food being taken into the future on the wings of the most technical of documents. (Indeed, the far future: pasta company Barilla has a roster of 3D printed pastas of which they’ve staked intellectual ownership!) But however many heights they scale, all fanciful kinds of pasta will end up the same: inside the human stomach, converted to human energy. My favourite comfort food remains humble, even on the cutting edge of tech!

DFC is located in a pretty rural part of Ontario, so, with all the snow this winter, we’ve been seeing many vehicles that are rare birds for city dwellers. ATVs, snowmobiles, and any number of hulking trucks with huge plow blades have all muscled through the drifts and past our offices. With our humble SUVs, we’ve been glad to see them blazing a trail!
 
What we haven’t encountered in our neck of the woods, and won’t for a while, are some of the most contentious vehicles in development: autonomous cars. Besides the nasty winter conditions, I just don’t think these cars are equipped for the kinds of decisions that are made out here — can you imagine an itty bitty driverless Google Smart car taking on a moose??

But while the powers that be work the kinks out tooling around Northern California, thinkers are casting forward to when driverless cars will be publicly available in urban centres. One big question is, will urban centres be ready for them — particularly in the area of parking?
 
Parking spots are premium real estate in a lot of cities. If you’re a driver, you need to leave your car someplace once you’ve arrived at your destination, because, naturally, you’re no longer driving it. Driverless cars break this whole logic chain down. Professor Adam Millard-Ball of the Environmental Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz has written a paper on exactly this problem.
 
“‘Parking prices are what get people out of their cars and on to public transit, but autonomous vehicles have no need to park at all. They can get around paying for parking by cruising,’ [Millard-Ball] said. ‘They will have every incentive to create havoc.’ […]

Under the best-case scenario, the presence of as few as 2,000 self-driving cars in downtown San Francisco will slow traffic to less than 2 miles per hour, according to Millard-Ball, who uses game theory and a traffic micro-simulation model to generate his predictions. […]
 
‘Even when you factor in electricity, depreciation, wear and tear, and maintenance, cruising costs about 50 cents an hour – that’s cheaper than parking even in a small town,’ says Millard-Ball. ‘Unless it’s free or cheaper than cruising, why would anyone use a remote lot?’”
 
The post-apocalyptic-movie vibe of driverless cars circling a downtown with no one to pick up is a frightening one to contemplate. Besides the inevitable I-for-one-welcome-our-new-robot-overlords aspect — how are we regular folks (defiantly not wealthy enough to jump on the driverless car bandwagon) going to get downtown? I refuse to be made a second-class citizen to a metal box with wheels! Like any good post-apocalyptic movie, I sense a revolt of the underclass brewing. When driverless cars come to my neighbourhood, the moose and I will hold the line!

DFC the company supports small businesses all over with our array of business solutions. And DFC the humans try to do the same in our own community, through frequenting the many fairs, inns, and shops of our fellow Frontenac-dwellers. Sometimes we even go as far as Kingston! And it is in that bustling burg that I’ve found a heartwarming story about how important local support is to the small businesses in the area — and how important those small businesses are to the people around them.
 
Back in August, Brian’s Record Option, a legendary used record and music paraphernalia shop in downtown Kingston, suffered a catastrophic basement flood when a city water main broke. Brian Lipsin, owner of the shop for 38 years, believed the destruction of so many classic posters, records, and CD’s — never mind the damage to the building itself — spelled the end of the Princess St. landmark. That is until a GoFundMe set up for his store’s recovery netted four-fifths of its $10,000 goal in a single day. And the donations kept pouring in! Brian’s patrons responded to his plight by affirming (financially) how important his shop’s music, and identity as a hub for artists, is. And their generous donations have meant that Brian’s Record Option will open its doors again.
 
“Renovations in the store are in their final phases now. The floor has been replaced, new lighting has been installed, and storage bins and shelves are in the process of being built.

Donated money has been used to replace posters he lost in the flood along with adding new lighting and exit signs.”
 
According to the Record Option’s Facebook page, Brian is aiming for an early March grand re-opening. Until then, the whole community (at least those of us who like music!) is waiting excitedly to beat a path to his (new!) door.
 
This story makes me proud to be not only a Kingston-area community member but a human being. The dreams inspired by music are universal, and stores like Brian’s Record Option have become part of those dreams for everyone who’s ever enjoyed a genius, classic recording. Plus, it’s an object lesson in how small, personal, businesses are part of the fabric of community life — and the relationship goes both ways.

My entire life, I have been squirreling away facts in my brain that will come in handy when I inevitably get on Jeopardy. One of my favourites is a classic tidbit about one of Australia’s less-violent marsupials, the wombat. Specifically, that fact that its scat is cube-shaped!
 
While theories have abounded as to why wombats poop cubes (They stack them to mark their territory! There’s so little water to drink that they compress it all out in their guts!), no one has tried to find out the how. At least until Patricia Yang, a post-doctoral fellow in Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, got interested in the subject after hearing about it at a conference. Yang, who specializes in the movement of fluids in the bodies of animals, dissected the intestines of two roadkilled wombats that took months to acquire. (As a control, she and her team used a pig intestine.)

“As food is digested it moves through the gut, and pressure from the intestine helps sculpt the feces – meaning that the shape of the intestine will affect the shape of a dropping. So Yang and the team expanded both wombat and pig intestines with a balloon to measure and compare their elasticities (or stretchiness).

The pig intestine had a relatively uniform elasticity, which would explain the animal’s rounder poo. The wombat intestines, however, had a much more irregular shape. Yang observed two distinct ravine-like grooves, where the intestine is stretchier, which she believes helps shape wombat feces into cubic scat.”
 
Yang’s experiment goes a long way toward explaining why wombats’ waste materials conform to a shape that, barring crystals,  is actually pretty rare in nature. That’s a lofty result for a problem most often found in the gutter!
 
(Speaking of exotic animals and their bathroom habits: did you know that the three-toed sloth only poops once a week? They do so in response to their incredibly slow-moving metabolisms, as well as to minimize time on the ground that could attract predators. Now that’s efficiency…)

Welcome to February! Right about now is the point in the winter when I start dreaming of warmer climes — if only for a vacation. One of my personal life goals is to visit some of my favourite hot-weather plants, cacti, in their natural habitats. Saguaro cacti  in particular look so friendly  that I’d be tempted to give them a high five. (Though with their significant spines), only tempted…!)
 
Another plant I’d like to get to know from a distance is Euphorbia resinifera, which is native to Morocco. Also known as the resin spurge, this cactus-like plant has an incredibly powerful defense mechanism: it’s hot. Like, 16 billion Scovilles hot. To get an idea, imagine pepper spray, then multiply its effect three (!) thousand (!) times.
 
The heat has long prevented predators from chowing down on the spiny leaves; now it’s also being studied as a possible painkiller. Dubbed resiniferatoxin, or RTX, the spicy chemical derived from the resin spurge can be injected into a pain site, like a bad knee or injured back, while the patient is anesthetized. There it basically burns away the nerve endings that transmit the feeling of pain to the brain. Though it seems counterintuitive for something that causes violent pain to block out violent pain, the science is there. From Wired:
 
“[RTX] binds to a major molecule in specifically pain-sensing nerve endings, called TRPV1 (pronounced TRIP-vee one). […]

RTX is a capsaicin analog, only it’s between 500 and 1,000 times more potent. When RTX binds to TRPV1, it props open the nerve cell’s ion channel, letting a whole lot of calcium in. That’s toxic, leading to the inactivation of the pain-sensing nerve endings.

This leaves other varieties of sensory neurons unaffected because RTX is highly specific to TRPV1. ‘So you gain selectivity because it only acts on TRPV1, which is only on a certain class offibers, which only transmit pain,’ says [UC San Diego anesthesiology professor Tony] Yaksh. ‘Therefore you can selectively knock out pain without knocking out, say, light touch or your ability to walk.’”
 
Researchers all over are looking at this naturally inspired pain solution, partly in response to the opioid epidemic that is gripping the US in particular. It’s also being tried as an alternative to morphine for end-of-life pain management. Localized injection treatments have already been attempted — and proven very effective — in dogs, with researchers reporting cessation of joint pain lasting up to five months (which feels like years to a pup)!
 
I’m very interested in further research into RTX, both for the immensely practical applications and for the coolness factor. Joint pain or no, at this point in the year we all need some heat!

One of my favourite things to do on a cold winter day off is wandering around an art gallery or museum! I love how the snow outside bounces a different kind of light onto paintings and photographs, and how — with the weather being so grim — there’s no pressure to be anywhere else, or do anything except sit and appreciate.
 
Good art raises big questions, including “What is meant by this piece?” “How does it affect me?” Sometimes, with pieces of murky provenance, the biggest question is “Who the heck made this??” That can be really difficult to answer. But, in a recent case, science has happily stepped in to add real-world context to some incredibly rare art.
 
The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, had a pair of 16th-century bronze statues, whose creator was unknown. So, they took the outside-the-box step of asking clinical anatomist Professor Peter Abrahams of Warwick Medical School to have a look. Abrahams focused not on technique or material, but on the model. And it is through the physical quirks of the man who sat for the artist that Abrahams has determined the sculptures to be the only known bronze works by Michelangelo! As the professor said to The Guardian:
“Being an observant person, both as a doctor and a scientist, I noticed that the toes on the bronzes were a bit odd. […]
I then went and had a look at all the toes that I could find anywhere in Michelangelo’s oeuvre. Out of 40 toes, all except for two fitted this brief: they had a short big toe and a long second toe, and the big toe goes outwards — it looks like someone is wearing a flip-flop in between the toes.
In the Sistine Chapel, David, Moses, they all have the same toes. There are certain traits that shine through in an artist’s work.”

The toes were the clincher, but there were other tells: the model also had an “eight-pack” series of abdominal muscles on display. This rare configuration has a genetic basis, and further narrows down the modeling pool to Michelangelo’s usual collaborator. Most fascinatingly, the statues’ legs showed evidence of the sartorius muscle in action. The sartorius is not usually externally visible, and both sculptures predated the publication of the first human anatomy textbook in 1543, so Prof. Abrahams concluded the person who sculpted the bronzes had dissected human bodies. Bingo: Michelangelo!
 
While we often think of science as the opposite of art, in the case of the mysterious Michelangelo, it complemented it. Prof. Abrahams’ analysis answered a question about who made the bronzes, and leaves us to contemplate so many more: Who was the quarry labourer who had such a great working relationship with the artist? What was it like collaborating with such genius? And, how beautiful are the pieces left for us to enjoy, 450 years in the future, on our day off in the museum!

I’m lucky enough to have lived through a good amount of the 20th century, and into the 21st, two amazing centuries for medical science. In my own time, doctors (and vaccines!) have eliminated or nearly eliminated such terrifying diseases as smallpox, polio, and measles. But these diseases all come from outside agents: viruses. (Never mind all the nasty infections you can get from bacteria.) What about that lofty goal of curing cancer — taming our own rogue cells when they go haywire? How can we possibly get in there and convince parts of ourselves not to kill us?
With a trusty outside agent, says Professor Mel Greaves of London’s Institute of Cancer Research . The recently knighted scientist has trialled microbes — yes, microbes  — as assassins of a terrifying childhood cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
 
This leukemia results from a collision of two unhappy states: a genetic mutation and an “unprimed” immune system. The latter is often due to today’s hyper-clean parenting, which uses wipes and all kinds of concoctions to minimize germ exposure in babies. But “Sir Mel”’s research has shown him that children whose immune systems aren’t challenged in their first year, and who carry the leukemia mutation, can later have those trigger-happy immune systems wig out — thus sparking full-on leukemia.
 
“‘When such a baby is eventually exposed to common infections, his or her unprimed immune system reacts in a grossly abnormal way,’ says Greaves. ‘It over-reacts and triggers chronic inflammation.’

As this inflammation progresses, chemicals called cytokines are released into the blood and these can trigger a second mutation that results in [leukemia] in children carrying the first mutation.

‘The disease needs two hits to get going,’ Greaves explains. ‘The second comes from the chronic inflammation set off by an unprimed immune system.’”
 
Happily, this research means that, even if a child has the unfortunate genetic mutation, leukemia can be averted by “seeding’ their immune system with appropriate bugs. To prevent having your baby lick an escalator railing, Greaves is experimenting on mice to determine which bugs are most helpful. Then he plans to develop a yogurt-like drink, that could be taken with a minimum of fuss. This should provide enough of an immune challenge to avert the second mutation in a susceptible child, without any attendant illness.  I love how we keep going back to the human microbiome for our overall health. And it just keeps getting better: today anti-jet-lag, tomorrow, anti-cancer!

Deep winter is when birdwatching really heats up in our (literal) neck of the woods. I love looking out into forested backyard over my first cup of coffee and seeing who’s joining me for breakfast. Species who end up at our sunflower-and-suet-filled feeder include juncos, chickadees, and blue jays — the bullies of the bunch!
 
Another bird I love to see is the Northern Cardinal, whose brilliant red (male) or warm dun (female) plumage really pops against our deep eastern Ontario snow! But I recently discovered an assumption I had been making about that species is false: the idea that they are in fact one species at all. 
 
Turns out, researchers out of the American Museum of Natural History have discovered that what was previously known as the heterogeneous Northern cardinal species is in fact made up of at least two genetically distinct populations. Since the types of birds look almost exactly the same, the researchers detected their differences through a fascinating tell — how the birds communicate.
 
The scientists began by looking at the behaviours of two different cardinal populations separated by a distance, with one centred in the eastern US, and another in Arizona and Mexico. In both cases, male cardinals use their songs to not only attract mates but to posture against males of the same species. Male cardinals do not react against males of different species as strongly as they do their own, so the researchers realized they had a clear marker of genetic difference on their hands. From Gizmodo:
 
“The researchers played cardinal songs for four trials at 128 different sites, 67 in the Sonoran desert and 61 in the Chihuahuan desert. The cardinals at the sites generally came much closer to the speakers when songs from the local population played than they did when songs from the other population did, according to the paper published recently in the journal Ecology and Evolution. […]

Furthering the evidence, the researchers performed a genetic analysis of cardinals in either group. It demonstrated that the two cardinal populations likely diverged approximately a million years ago.”
 
The two populations are separated by the Cochise filter barrier, a geographical and ecological phenomenon, including a mountain range, that prevents the mingling of species between the areas of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts. Given this fact, and the confirmation of behaviour when confronted with rivals’ songs, the researchers are pretty certain they have different species on their hands. Much like books and covers, it seems you can’t judge a bird by its feathers!

If Santa brought you an Alexa device this year, once you hear this news you might turn right around and punt it out the window!  A German Amazon user requested that company’s data in him back in August, under the EU’s new, stringent, General Data Protection Regulation. Amazon sent his data — along with a 100MB ZIP file full of recordings of someone else’s Alexa voice commands for the entire month of May 2018. 

After receiving no reply to his concerned enquiry to Amazon, the user contacted German tech magazine c’t , and they began to investigate. To parse the severity of the privacy breach, the c’t team attempted to identify the mystery second user through the leaked recordings.

“It was obvious that ‘Customer X’ uses Alexa in multiple locations. He has at least one Echo at home and has a voice-controlled Fire box connected to his TV. A female voice also spoke to Alexa, so there was clearly a woman around at least some of the time. […]

The alarms, Spotify commands, and public transport inquiries included in the data revealed a lot about the victims’ personal habits, their jobs, and their taste in music. Using these files, it was fairly easy to identify the person involved and his female companion. Weather queries, first names, and even someone’s last name enabled us to quickly zero in on his circle of friends. Public data from Facebook and Twitter rounded out the picture.”

The investigative team, after having identified Customer X (and his girlfriend) from the recording, contacted him to warn him. He was shocked at the breach, but even more shocked, they report, at the fact that Amazon hadn’t reached out themselves. (The offending company must at least contact the regulators within 72 hours if a breach occurs.) Amazon ended up calling Customer X, with an apology for the “human error” that released his Alexa commands, three days after c’t approached them.

Amazon has been having giant problems with Alexa, but this is the first time the company has sent a pile of someone’s data to someone else and had it been their unequivocal fault. We know why they’re collecting massive amounts of data on us: in short, monetization. The significant question — which we must ask of Google, Facebook, et al — is if the companies themselves can keep up with what they’re doing. If they’re going to keep innovating devices that make our lives the easiest they’ve ever been in dark exchange for that data, that’s the least they can do.