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Botany is addictive. As a kid growing up near the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, I took numerous summer camping trips to the forests where I loved trying to identify every kind of tree and wildflower I saw. I would religiously consult the plant pictures and descriptions in my copy of T. Storer's Sierra Nevada Natural History, the classic guide for anyone exploring California's most glamorous mountain range.
Now as a graduate student in the research department at RSABG I am still fascinated with native plants. I am currently working on a floristic inventory of the Rock Creek drainage in Inyo National Forest on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, about 50 air miles southeast of Yosemite National Park. On a topographic map the upper Rock Creek watershed appears as an eggplant-shaped hollow about 30 sq. miles in area, surrounded by steep granite ridges and peaks, many reaching 12000 feet and higher. In the course of my research I have found there is little documentation about the biodiversity of the high mountain summits around Rock Creek, which are physically challenging to reach.
Rock Creek, Inyo NF |
I'm inspired by the work of botanists whose insatiable curiosity has led them on searches for plants in wild remote places. Long before before I was born, an accomplished botanist named John Thomas Howell made a challenging climb up a high mountain in the Rock Creek drainage that had no record of previous botanical exploration. Howell—who earlier in his career had been the first botanist hired on staff at RSABG—described the flat-topped mountain as a "sky island" looming high above Rock Creek Lake. It had no geographic name, so he called it Mono Mesa. He originally saw it while on a botanical collecting trip through Mono Pass. Howell climbed to the top of Mono Mesa in July 1946, collected representative samples of as many different plants as he could find, and shortly thereafter published a list of species. He found 73 taxa, which he considered an impressive number for a high summit with ¼ sq. mile of land area. Howell recounted his fascination with the barren yet beautiful landscape he described as a "velvet-textured monotony." He wrote that Mono Mesa was unusual, that unlike the surrounding jagged ridge tops it had never been glaciated, never changed by eroding effects of melting and moving ice.
Sky island: Mono Mesa's flat surface visible from the Mono Pass area |
Sixty seven years later in summer 2013 I stood at our base camp at Summit Lake near the top of Mono Pass, impressed by the monumental view of Mono Mesa rising into the sky two miles to the north. I contemplated my quest to resurvey the mesa, which had been many months in planning, preparation and no small measure of uncertainty. Local folks in the Rock Creek valley had assured me that a day hike to the summit (12260 ft.) was very doable but there seemed no clear consensus on which route was best and no established trail to follow.
We set out from camp the morning of July 12, a two-person team consisting of myself and RSABG colleague Travis Columbus. It took us several hours to make our way cautiously along a narrow knife ridge of piled boulders leading up to the mesa edge and after many heart-pounding moments negotiating our way around gigantic boulders and sheer drop-offs we arrived at the summit in early afternoon. I spent the remainder of the day collecting plant samples, recording GPS data and taking field notes as we surveyed the wide plateau.
Sky pilot (Polemonium eximium) is endemic to the Sierra Nevada |
I was struck by the barren expanse of sandy rocky plain, practically devoid of trees and shrubs except for a few small, scraggly whitebark pines (Pinus albicaulis) clinging to the south rim. A closer inspection revealed an assortment of small colorful plants with cushion- or mat-like growth forms, hugging the ground or sheltering under lichen-covered rocks as if to take refuge from the unforgiving alpine environment. Plants have to be tough survivors up here. Many species I happily observed still thriving on Mono Mesa decades after Howell documented them, including Davidson's penstemon (Penstemon davidsonii), alpine gold (Hulsea algida), dwarf alpine Indian paintbrush (Castilleja nana) and sky pilot (Polemonium eximium): arguably the flashiest most charismatic alpine plant that only grows in the Sierra Nevada.
Alpine gold (Hulsea algida) |
My curiosity to resurvey the mesa was especially keen because of the potential impacts of climate change. Warming temperatures are a significant threat to alpine plant communities especially on the highest summits where plants cannot disperse any higher to find cooler microclimates. Perhaps there are species still unknown to science persisting on Mono Mesa and atop other Sierra sky islands where the chance of discovering them is getting slimmer as the climate warms. It was an unforgettable experience seeing the wonderful flora of Mono Mesa; hopefully my ongoing work to identify the plants I collected there will contribute to understanding life on these magnificent islands in the sky.


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Be ahead of the curve with these top diet trends
From maple syrup-based lemon detox fasts to the protein-heavy Dukan diet, the slimming world has seen some pretty outrageous food fads of late.
Thankfully, this year getting healthy is all about taking a sensible approach to food – and there are some pretty amazing trends lurking on the horizon. 'The new year represents a time of change and life improvements. Many people sign up to the gym, buy a new health appliance such as
a juicer, or just vow to eat more fruit and vegetables. Any positive lifestyle change during January is going to be beneficial,' says nutritionist Ella Allred. To make
sure you're one step ahead of the crowd, we've rounded up the top health-food trends to watch out for in 2016.
1 Pulses are set to pimp up meals
Legumes are a good substitute for tofu, which is often heavily processed and best consumed in small quantities. So put pulses firmly on your foodie radar for 2016. Our favourite vegan protein source is getting a makeover, with the UN declaring 2016 as the International Year of Pulses in an effort to help slash levels of obesity and chronic disease. From lentils to split peas, amping up meals with these protein-filled gems also provides a fibre boost, so you feel fuller for longer and naturally snack less. 'We are expecting a boom in the
sale of pulses in 2016. Experiment with dhal, an Indian dish made from lentils, and use chickpea flour in baking and sauces. Also, 100g of chickpeas contains more than your recommended daily amount of folate, which is impressive,' adds Ella.
2 Exotic grains are here to stay
Do you know your freekeh from your farro? Exotic grains are hot, hot, HOT for 2016 with global offerings like Middle Eastern freekeh (a variety of young durum wheat that contains more fibre than brown rice and a good amount of protein) and farro – an Italian wheat-based grain often used in salads and stews – making waves in culinary circles. While we're fans of pasta, it often leaves us feeling a bit bloated and lethargic. These exotic grains however, will fill you up without filling you out. 'Plus they are very easy to cook with,' says Ella.
3 Flexitarians will be 'a thing'
One of the easiest ways to get healthier is to eat less meat. A study by scientists at Oxford University found that eating meat no more than three times
a week could prevent 31,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease, 9,000 deaths from cancer and 5,000 deaths from stroke, as well as save the NHS £1.2 billion in costs each year. Wow! Flexitarianism – eating
a mainly plant-based diet with occasional meat consumption – is set to rise in 2016, so get started by substituting meat for healthy protein sources like quinoa, nuts and lentils. 'You'll see a massive change in your health, the planet and your bank balance! Start by halving your meat consumption and doubling your vegetarian protein consumption,' advises Ella.
4 Eating in is the new dining out
Dining out is sooo last year! But
don't worry: 2016 is the year of home-delivery meals. We're not talking about
ordering a greasy Chinese from your smartphone, but more about high-class restaurants that cater to the needs of foodies by providing home-delivery. Check out deliveroo.co.uk for more information.
5 Fat is back
We're finally cottoning on to the fact that fat is as tasty as it is good for us, so you can tuck into that juicy steak guilt-free. A wealth of emerging research is starting to show that this nutrient is an important part of a balanced diet. Consumed in moderation, saturated fat in meat, monounsaturated fats in avocado, medium triglycerides in coconut oil and omega-3 fat in oily fish can help to improve skin and brain health. 'Fats have had such bad press and stigma over the last few decades. The advice on fat consumption is starting to finally change. It is not fat that makes us fat, but sugar – which also contributes to many diseases including cardiovascular disease. Including
fat with a meal helps you to feel satisfied,' reveals Ella. It's that simple!
6 Food porn is the norm
From meticulously cropping photos of your breakfast to creating filtered photos of your dinner, food-boasting has become a massive part of our lives. We're obsessed with seeing what our friends are chowing down on as much as we love sharing perfectly composed shots of our own meals. But posting the foodie equivalent of a selfie on social media isn't merely a narcissistic pursuit – it can actually help you stick to a healthy diet. 'Posting pictures of healthy meals on social media may be a great way to encourage yourself on your health journey. It is a good way to share knowledge, recipes and hold yourself accountable,' says Ella.
7 Breakfast is a global affair
Toast and jam doesn't quite cut it in the breakfast stakes anymore. The most important meal of the day is getting a makeover for 2016, with Mexican and Middle Eastern specialities reigning supreme. Most Mexican breakfasts, such as huevos rancheros (a burrito with chilli, eggs, tomatoes and peppers), are high in protein, while Middle Eastern morning favourites of olives, cheese, salad and flatbread offer a nutrient-dense start to the day. 'In Mexican breakfasts, eggs are incredibly nutritious and may help sustain energy levels and keep hunger pangs at bay. Middle Eastern-style breakfasts are also good news for your waistline. They often include salads and cheese which provide essential nutrients and protein to help your body repair and balance your blood sugar levels,' says Ella


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The Heart of the Plate by Mollie Katzen
For people of a certain age, Mollie Katzen's 1970s hand-drawn and lettered cookbooks were the first place they discovered vegetarian cooking, whether as cooks and parents in the kitchen or as children who were raised on food cooked from Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. A few years have passed, those kids have grown up and so has vegetarian cooking. Today's vegetarian food is more sophisticated, less dependent on dairy, and reflects the influence of many countries and the wider selection of fruits, vegetables, grains now available. A new generation of vegetarian cooks is emerging, too, and once again, Mollie Katzen is a wonderful guide and inspiration.
Quick Facts
• Who wrote it: Mollie Katzen
• Who published it: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Number of recipes: 250
• Recipes for right now: Grilled Bread and Kale Salad with Red Onions, Walnuts, and Figs; Lablabi (Tunisian Chickpea Soup); Pear Tart with Olive Oil-Cornmeal-Pinenut Crust; Curried Mashed Carrots and Cashews; Golden Lentils with Soft Sweet Onions; Hazelnut-Wilted Frisee Salad with Sliced Pear; Thai Tea Cheesecake with Chocolate Crumb Crust
• Other highlights: The Heart of the Plate: Vegetarian Recipes for a New Generation is a substantial book, with almost 500 pages and dozens of photographs and drawings from the author. The book opens with an introduction, pantry notes and 35 menus taken from the recipes for both vegan and vegetarian eaters (almost half of the recipes in the book are vegan). From there the chapters are divided into Soups; Salads; Stews and Their Accessories; Cozy Mashes; Rice and Other Grains; Pasta and Asian Noodles; Suppers from the Oven; Burgers and Savory Pancakes; Vegetables; Sauces, Vinaigrettes, Toppings; and Desserts.
The outside cover is an excellent indicator of what you will find within: colorful, vibrant, forward-thinking food from a talented and venerated cook. Outside, it is sturdy and practical in construction, and within it is imaginative and far-reaching in scope. Those of you who miss the hand-drawn books of yore will enjoy the front and back full-color flyleaves which are hand drawn by Mollie.
As the subtitle suggests, these are indeed recipes for a new generation: healthy and delicious dishes based on fruits, vegetables and grains. While Mollie does not eschew eggs, milk and cheese entirely, you will find a much lighter touch here with many recipes vegan, or easily adopted to vegan. This is not new territory for the author as she has been steadily producing cookbooks with an emphasis on health for several years now and is a charter member of the Harvard School of Public Health Nutrition Roundtable and an inaugural honoree of the Natural Health Hall of Fame.
• Who would enjoy this book? Anyone who enjoys fresh, vibrant vegetable-forward recipes. You do not have to be a vegetarian or vegan to cook from (and eat from) this book!
Find the book at your local library, independent bookstore, or Amazon: The Heart of the Plate by Mollie Katzen
- Visit the author's website: Mollie Katzen
- Check out our interview with Mollie: 5 Essentials for Home Cooks
Apartment Therapy Media makes every effort to test and review products fairly and transparently. The views expressed in this review are the personal views of the reviewer and this particular product review was not sponsored or paid for in any way by the manufacturer or an agent working on their behalf. However, the manufacturer did give us the product for testing and review purposes.
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Involved in educational publishing since 1980, Bruce Brown initially developed supplemental instructional materials, a series of high interest, easy-reading textbooks for struggling learners—and has more recently developed manipulative materials and learning games. In January 2010, Bruce was speaking with a district administrator who shared with him how mobile technology was being used in the schools. "The light bulb went
on," says Bruce. "I began my research about the use of mobile technology in the classroom, how teachers were using it and what teachers needed to become more effective." He learned that there were a tremendous amount of apps on the market, but teachers were looking for content-specific apps that were aligned with the core standards. "They wanted strong curriculum apps, not edutainment," says Bruce. "That was the beginning for me. I set off to develop a line of content specific apps, much as I had done with learning games over the years." And so it goes; here, Bruce shares his views on education, technology, learning "e-skills" and of course—what eSkillsLearning can do for educators.
Victor: What does the name of your company mean?
Bruce: The e in e Skills Learning is a name intended to communicate "Essential Skills" and "Electronic Learning"
Victor: What is it? Who created it?
Bruce: The name was just a brainstorming session among a group of us who are now all involved in the development and marketing of this product line.
Victor: How is it unique from other similar products/services? What companies do you see as in the same market?
Bruce: We, of course, compete with all of the traditional publishers who have entered or are now entering the mobile learning market. Much in the way that I developed content specific learning games, I am approaching the development of our iPod apps. We have a broad product range on the drawing board with the introduction of several new apps each month.
Victor: When was it developed? What is something interesting or relevant about its development history?
Bruce: We started developing the first app in January 2010 by programming various "engines" that we could use to facilitate our production. Apple approved our first app – Fractions – in September 2010, and we made it available Free of Charge to acquaint teachers with our product. We now have two Reading Comprehension apps (Reading for Details and Reading for Inferences) and two Math apps (Fractions and Decimals) available at the iTunes store. Analogies should be released shortly, followed by Homophones, Synonyms, and Antonyms.
Victor: Where did it originate? Where can you get it now?
Bruce: With our new Reading Comprehension apps, we have tried to make the passages engaging to encourage student reading. We had a writer create the Reading for Detail apps around Inventors and their Inventions. The same writer developed Reading for Inferences around the civilizations of the Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs. Each app can be played in three different ways—Practice Mode, Single Player Mode, or Multi Payer Mode. This gives the teacher a wide range of possibilities on how to incorporate the use of mobile technology into their lesson plans. A unique feature of our reading apps is that we have carefully controlled and measure the reading levels using recognized readability formulas. This allows a teacher to use the same app with a wide range of student abilities.
Victor: How much does it cost? What are the options?
Bruce: The prices range from $1.99 to $8.99 depending on the app. The Lite versions are less expensive, have a limited data base and operate only in Practice and Single Player Mode.
Victor: Who is it particularly tailored for? Who is it not for?
Bruce: The apps are primarily intended for Grades 3 and up. Since the apps are not age specific, they can readily be used with older students who need more practice, learners of English as a second language, GED students, and adult learners.
Victor: Your thoughts on education these days?
Bruce: Technology is exciting and engaging. It gives teachers yet another tool to help with differentiated instruction, extra practice for other students, and fun quick test practice activities. Also, new technology has opened up tremendous new possibilities for special needs students.
Victor: Any formative experiences in your own education that helped to inform your approach to creating eSkillsLearning?
Bruce: Personally, I had a tremendous public school education. My parents instilled in me the value of learning and encouraged me to succeed in school. I attended an academic regional high school which at the time was an all boys school (Central High School, Philadelphia, Penn.). That high school education prepared me well for college. At Drexel University I opted for the 5-Year Work Study Program—six months of classes followed by six months of real world work experience in my chosen major. Nothing can help the learning process better than to apply what you have learned to a real world setting. Accordingly, in addition to our mobile apps, we have created a series of offline real world application materials that help students transition from digital learning to real world applications.
Victor: How does eSkillsLearning address some of your concerns about education?
Bruce: Our work at e Skills Learning has a significant focus on language and reading. From my own personal experience, supervising employees over the years, and my observation of young students in school today— reading and language are the foundation blocks for learning. Strong writing and language skills are the foundation for good communication in adult life and the world of work. Students need to read and develop strong reading comprehension skills to be effective in adult life—to understand fact from opinion and to have the knowledge and skills to research information that they need.
Victor: What is your outlook on the future of education?
Bruce: Very positive. Our education system is fortunate to have many dedicated teachers who work hard and have the dedication and vision to help students learn. These teachers deserve our financial and emotional support. They are helping shape the minds of those people who will be running our country in the future. Like others, I use a variety of social media to communicate with teachers. Teachers spend their evenings preparing for class the next day, twittering with others to exchange ideas, reading Blogs about new materials that are available, and attending Webinars—not to mention the amount of money that they spend personally to purchase materials for their classes.
Victor: What else can you tell educators and other leaders in and around education about the value of eSkillsLearning?
Bruce: Not quite a specific answer to this question but more about technology. Students today are called digital natives—not my term but one coined by others. They have an intuitive understanding of technology and begin using it at a very young age. They have no clue how to use a rotary dial telephone phone or adjust a set of rabbit ears on a television antenna. But they can keyboard with their thumbs at record speed. We have to "meet these students where they are". Learning has changed and we need to adapt and engage these new learners in a way that helps them succeed.
In addition, in these times of budget constraints, technology offers tremendous value for the money. Online textbooks are more current. Changes can be made more quickly. Information does not become dated. New products do not need to wait for the long arduous process of waiting for the next catalog to be mailed. Technology allows us to be more responsive.
Further, mobile technology helps teachers offer special help for individual students. A student needing extra practice in decimals can practice the decimal app at home while another student practices fractions. Assignments can be much more individualized. The iPod and iPad, like other mobile devices, are instant on. No need to wait for an operating system to load. Students can do work on the school bus, waiting at the dentist office, or any other free time.
A caution: technology is a tool—another resource for teachers to use in the education process. It is not the "be all and end all". Just, as we found that manipulatives and learning games helped engage students, so too, technology is a tool and should be used as such.
On the e Skills Learning web site (www.eskillslearning.net), there are many resources that can be downloaded for Free to help teachers with ideas on how to incorporate technology into their lesson plan plus the use of pre tests and post tests to measure student progress.
A final comment—for those districts facing tough budget constraints, visit my Blog at www.helpingourschools.com. There are tremendous non government grants, funding and other money sources available to help schools. Don't be intimidated by the grant writing process. If you can write a lesson plan, you can write a grant.
Victor Rivero tells the story of 21st-century education transformation. He is the editor-in-chief of Edtech Digest, a magazine about education transformed through technology. He has written white papers, articles and features for schools, nonprofits and companies in the education marketplace. Write to: firstname.lastname@example.com


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Cam Newton and the Diversity of Carolina's Zone-Read Package
In Week 1, the Carolina Panthers' listless offense turned over the ball twice, gave up three sacks, and registered a grand total of 10 — yes, 10 — rushing yards. Last week against the Saints, Carolina exploded for 35 points and 219 yards on the ground while Cam Newton averaged an amazing 12.7 yards per pass attempt. The Panthers looked like the offense it was for much of last season, and they did it by getting back to what is, for them, basics — the read-option running game.
Newton is a one-of-kind offensive weapon, and his abilities to both be a threat to run the ball and make accurate run-game reads make everyone on the Panthers offense better, including his wide receivers. Steve Smith had Carolina's biggest play of the day — a 66-yard catch in which no one on New Orleans's defense was within 20 yards of him. As Newton explained after the game, Smith was the direct beneficiary of Carolina's dynamic rushing attack: "Of all of the people on this field to be wide open, you would think Smitty would be the last person," Newton said. "But that is what type of pressure the zone read gives us."
That's the beauty of the Panthers' offense when it's rolling. Newton led the Panthers in rushing, but Jonathan Stewart and DeAngelo Williams each added more than 50 on the ground, and Smith, Brandon LaFell, and even Mike Tolbert were dangerous receiving options. "You do read option, read option, read option and then get them to play seven or eight in the box and you've got so many variations of plays and passes you can run off that," Newton said.
The most exciting part about the diversity of the Panthers' attack, though, isn't the mix of traditional and spread offenses, or the number of players who touch the ball. It's the diversity within their read-option package.
The most well-known read-option run play is the "zone read" — a traditional zone-blocked running play coupled with the quarterback making a read of a back-side defender. The purpose of the zone read is really nothing more than to keep this defender from attacking the running back; otherwise it's just an old-fashioned run play.
Ron Rivera's Panthers had good success with these basic zone-read plays against the Saints, but they've also started to incorporate more advanced read-option schemes, ones that can better keep defenses off-balance and incorporate a wider diversity of blocking schemes and best utilize Carolina's weapons. These are the plays New Orleans had no answer for on Sunday.
One of them is a play Newton made famous at Auburn — the "inverted veer" or "dash read" play. Unlike a typical zone read where the quarterback reads a back-side defender, the inverted veer reads a player on the front side — the quarterback and running back head in the same direction. Coupled with "power" run blocking with a pulling guard, the defense is outnumbered to the play side, and blocking lines up nicely.
Against the Saints, Panthers offensive coordinator Rod Chudzinski took Cam's old inverted veer one step further by running an outside run coupled with a read of an interior defender — a "sweep read." Carolina ran this play several times against the Saints, but the best example came in the third quarter and resulted in DeAngelo Williams bursting around the left end for a 27-yard gain.
On the play, Williams runs laterally to the left while Newton puts the ball in his stomach and makes a read. The key to this play is whom Newton is reading. Unlike the typical zone read or the inverted veer, here Newton is reading an interior defensive tackle instead of an edge defender like a defensive end.
This may seem like a little change, but it's enough to open an entirely different world of offensive options. Most NFL teams are spread-option dilettantes that never get beyond reading the defensive end (if that), and defensive coordinators scheme accordingly. With Newton, the Panthers are quickly becoming experts though, and the ability to read multiple defenders can make even a carefully calibrated defensive game plan totally, woefully wrong. Once the offense develops a system for reading different defenders, they can choose whom they want to pick on.
Notice what reading the Saints' defensive tackle — here, the shade nose guard or "one-technique" — does for the Panthers. By leaving him unblocked, the play-side guard, Amini Silatolu, is able to pull and lead-block for Williams while everyone else on the line blocks back to seal off defenders.
Just after the snap, you can see the play design working perfectly. Silatolu begins his pull as the Saints linebackers hesitate, not knowing if Newton will hand off or keep it. The unblocked defensive tackle does exactly what he's been taught — aggressively attack. Unfortunately for him, what he's been taught takes him completely out of position, and Newton simply hands off to Williams as the running back sprints to the left. Had the Saints defender tried to take away the sweep, Newton would've had an easy gain straight upfield. The beauty of the play is that, although it's a read-option, based on the defensive tackle's predicted assignment, Newton is not likely to get the ball. Changing the read defender allows the Panthers to use read-option principles without Newton taking unnecessary hits.
The final advantage gained by leaving a defender unblocked is that it allows others to be double-teamed, and here, center Ryan Kalil solidifies the blocking upfront by attacking the other defensive tackle. Note, too, the extra defenders to the right who are waiting on Newton and unable to help as Williams runs the other way.
As the unblocked defender stands useless next to Newton, and Williams and his escort run unimpeded around the left end, it quickly becomes apparent that this play is going to work.
Williams was eventually tackled, but not until downfield blocking from his receivers helped him scamper for 27 yards. It's difficult to run for big gains in the fast, athletic NFL, but Carolina's scheme — and Newton, even when he doesn't have the ball
— makes it a lot easier. Carolina's opponent this week, the New York Giants, is filled with players like Jason Pierre-Paul, who are almost impossible to block one-on-one. It's players like him that have the Panthers following an old coaching adage — if you can't block a guy, read him instead.
Filed Under: Cam Newton, Carolina Panthers, Chris Brown, New Orleans Saints, Total Breakdown
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Political Donations by Text Message Closer on the Horizon
Americans moved a step closer to being able to make campaign contributions by text message on Wednesday when the Federal Election Commission approved protections sought by wireless carriers over fraud and profitability.
The FEC ruled that wireless carriers would have no responsibility for possible fraudulent campaign donations and could decide whether to refuse text-donation services to campaigns if they are not deemed commercially viable.
"Barring some unforeseen issue I think this increases the likelihood that text donations in some form will be used this year," said Jan Baran, a prominent campaign finance lawyer representing carriers. "The carriers are evaluating to see if there are any other concerns that may not have been addressed."
The FEC's historic approval of text-to-donate for political campaigns on June 11 allowed anonymous donations by text capped at $10 per text, $50 per month and $200 per cycle to comply with disclosure requirements.
The campaigns of Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney both supported approval of such donations, which were touted as a step toward empowering smaller donors in the 2012 campaign marked by a flood of multimillion-dollar donations.
But the mobile companies that would implement the program, including the four U.S. giants Sprint Nextel Corp, Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile USA, asked the FEC for another vote for more specific guidance.
The carriers' two main concerns were about liability over fraudulent or excessive donations and discretion over which campaigns they do business with, industry officials have said.
The FEC on Wednesday put the onus on the political campaigns, saying they were "solely responsible" for ensuring donations comply with federal laws that prohibit donations from corporations, foreign nationals and people under 18 years old.
The FEC also ruled that carriers, like other vendors in the past, should be allowed to develop commercial eligibility criteria that would allow them to refuse text message donation services to some campaigns.
For instance, the service could be limited to presidential campaigns or reserved for candidates who are on the ballot or have a history of successful fundraising, according to examples the carriers' trade group CTIA has presented to the FEC.
"Wireless service providers propose 'to establish objective business criteria that are specific to political contribution text messaging campaigns.' They may decide, for commercial reasons, to accept only proposals from some political committees and not others," the FEC said in the new ruling.
"Alternatively, the wireless service providers may decide that it would not be in their 'commercial' interest to participate in the political fundraising process and 'refuse participation by all political committees.'"
The CTIA's comments to the FEC submitted ahead of the vote also indicate that carriers seek the ability to "refuse to sell services to candidates who, based on the wireless service providers' business judgments, espouse views that may harm the wireless service providers' brands."
That position has raised red flags among some observers who worry it gives phone companies dangerous power to pick and chose participants. Wireless carriers have argued they need that power to protect themselves from damages to their business.
"The brand is so important for these companies, and it doesn't take much to have that sullied," said Jeffrey Silva, a telecommunications policy analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
About 88 percent of U.S. adults have at least one cell phone line and about three-quarters of those use text messaging, according to the Pew Research Center.
The top four carriers account for about 90 percent of the more than 330 million wireless subscriptions in the nation.
Sprint spokeswoman Crystal Davis said the firm was reviewing the FEC's rule and "intends to implement this new service in a way that adheres to FEC regulations for political contributions (and) protects the privacy of our customers."
A T-Mobile representative declined comment, while Verizon and AT&T representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The 2012 campaign has been marked by an unprecedented flow of multimillion-dollar donations to outside spending groups that have no fundraising limits.
The text donation proposal approved in June had been brought to the FEC by political consulting firms Red Blue T LLC and ArmourMedia Inc and corporate aggregator m-Qube Inc, which serves as a middleman between campaigns and mobile companies.


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But many of us, in these worst of circumstances, would also leave behind things that exist outside of those familiar categories. Suppose you blogged or tweeted about this article, or dashed off a Facebook status update, or uploaded a few snapshots from your iPhone to Flickr, and then logged off this mortal coil. It's now taken for granted that the things we do online are reflections of who we are or announcements of who we wish to be. So what happens to this version of you that you've built with bits? Who will have access to which parts of it, and for how long?
Not many people have given serious thought to these questions. Maybe that's partly because what we do online still feels somehow novel and ephemeral, although it really shouldn't anymore. Or maybe it's because pondering mortality is simply a downer. (Only about a third of Americans even have a will.) By and large, the major companies that enable our Web-articulated selves have vague policies about the fate of our digital afterlives, or no policies at all. Estate law has only begun to consider the topic. Leading thinkers on technology and culture are understandably far more focused on exciting potential futures, not on the most grim of inevitabilities.
Nevertheless: people die. For most of us, the fate of tweets and status updates and the like may seem trivial (who cares — I'll be dead!). But increasingly we're not leaving a record of life by culling and stowing away physical journals or shoeboxes of letters and photographs for heirs or the future. Instead, we are, collectively, busy producing fresh masses of life-affirming digital stuff: five billion images and counting on Flickr, hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos uploaded every day, oceans of content from 20 million bloggers and 500 million Facebook members, two billion tweets a month. Sites and services warehouse our musical and visual creations, personal data, shared opinions and taste declarations in the form of reviews and lists and ratings, even virtual scrapbook pages. Avatars left behind in World of Warcraft or Second Life can have financial or intellectual-property holdings in those alternate realities. We pile up digital possessions and expressions, and we tend to leave them piled up, like virtual hoarders.
At some point, these hoards will intersect with the banal inevitability of human mortality. One estimate pegs the number of U.S. Facebook users who die annually at something like 375,000. Academics have begun to explore the subject (how does this change the way we remember and grieve?), social-media consultants have begun to talk about it (what are the legal implications?) and entrepreneurs are trying to build whole new businesses around digital-afterlife management (is there a profit opportunity here?). Evan Carroll and John Romano, interaction-design experts in Raleigh, N.C., who run a site called TheDigitalBeyond.com, have just published a tips-and-planning book, "Your Digital Afterlife," with advice about such matters as appointing a "digital executor."
Adele McAlear, a social-media and marketing consultant, became interested in this subject a few years ago, when one of her regular Twitter contacts died. A Web enthusiast who has created "Lord knows how many profiles" for herself in the course of road-testing various new services, she is an "advocate of creating content and putting it online." And yet, she continues, it "hadn't dawned on me, what happens to all of this stuff that you put out there, this digital litter that sort of accumulates." That may be particularly true for people like McAlear, who have thoroughly integrated their Web expressions into their identity. (Indeed, she explores her new interest on a blog, DeathandDigitalLegacy.com.) But you don't have to be a social-media consultant to live that way. More and more people do, as a matter of course. Millions of us are "sharing" our thoughts and tastes; our opinions and observations about WikiLeaks and "Glee" and the Tea Party and some weird dude on the subway this morning; and photographs of newborns and weddings and parties and — why not? — that weird dude on the subway. Maybe the momentous and the momentarily amusing add up to a pleasing means of real-time connection, but what do they add up to when we're gone? The legacy of a life you hope your survivors will remember? Or a jumble of "digital litter" for them to sort through?
On Oct. 18, 2009, Mac Tonnies updated his blog, sent out some public tweets and private messages via Twitter, went to bed and died of cardiac arrhythmia. While he had experienced some symptoms that indicated potential heart problems, his sudden death came as a shock even to those who knew him well. He was 34.
Tonnies lived in Kansas City, Mo. He was single and childless, owned two cats and paid his bills through workaday jobs, behind the counter at Starbucks or doing phone work for a small marketing agency. He was also a writer (he had just finished a draft of his third book) with an adventurous intellect. His audience was small, but devoted. Tonnies, who started his blog, Posthuman Blues, in 2003, was an extremely active user of online media and forged many friendships with people he never met in the physical world. Many of his interests were distinctly future-oriented, including speculative or fringe topics that sound to most people like science fiction. Often this was the common ground of those online relationships: a freewheeling consideration of the very nature of humanity.
Rita J. King, an expert on online identity and persona who is an "innovator in residence" for I.B.M., was introduced to Tonnies via e-mail in 2004, and they kept in frequent touch. "He is the one I had all my conversations with, early on, about technology and consciousness," she says. Possibly a typical venti latte buyer in Kansas City would have found that puzzling and dismissed some of Tonnies's other interests (U.F.O.'s, life on Mars, the paranormal) as flat-out weird. But online, he wasn't some guy with a lot of strange ideas. He was himself. And he attracted an eclectic group of similarly minded friends.
The last entry on Posthuman Blues was titled "Tritptych #15," a set of three images with no text. The first comment to this post came from an anonymous reader, wondering why Tonnies had not updated the blog or tweeted for two days. Some similar comments followed, and then this: "Mac Tonnies passed away earlier in the week. Our condolences are with his family and friends in this time of grief." The author of that comment was also anonymous. After a rapid back-and-forth about whether this startling news was true and some details of the circumstances, that post's comment section transformed into a remarkable mix of tributes, grieving and commiseration. You can still read all this today, in a thread that runs to more than 250 comments."It was a very strange feeling," Dana Tonnies, Mac's mother, told me, describing how she and her husband became aware of the swirl of activity attaching to her son's online self. "I had no control over what was being said about him, almost immediately." Dana and Bob Tonnies were close to their only son — in fact they had coffee with him, in a regular Sunday ritual, the morning before he died — but they had little contact with his digital self. Sometimes he would show them his online writing, but he had to do so by literally putting his laptop in front of them. The Tonnies did not read blogs. In fact they did not own a computer.
In the months after their son's death, Dana and Bob went about the difficult business of organizing his papers (letters, e-mail printouts, story drafts) and deciding which of his belongings to keep (like his thousand or so books) or to give to his friends (his leather jacket, his three watches). This painful process took awhile, and they were not really focused on his blog or Flickr account and the like. They also inherited their son's computer and have since learned how to navigate it and the Internet. But by then, their son's online circle had already taken action.
I spoke to a half dozen people Mac Tonnies met online and in some cases never encountered in the physical world. Each expressed a genuine sense of loss; a few sounded grief-stricken even more than a year later. Mark Plattner, who lives in St. Louis and met Tonnies a dozen years ago through the comments section of another blog, decided that Posthuman Blues needed to survive. He used software called Sitesucker to put a backup of the entire thing — pictures, videos, links included — on a hard drive. In all, Plattner has about 10 gigabytes of material, offering a sense of Tonnies's "personality and who he was," Plattner says. "That's what we want to remember." He intends to store this material through his own hosting account, just as soon as he finds time to organize it all.
Plattner was one of several online friends who got involved in memorializing Tonnies and his work. Dia Sobin, an artist who lives in Connecticut, met Tonnies online around 2006; they communicated often by e-mail and phone, but never met in person. She created art for Tonnies's site and for the cover of what turned out to be his final book. Less than two weeks after he died, she started a blog called Post-Mac Blues. For more than a year, she filled it with posts highlighting passages of his writing, reminiscences, links to interviews he gave to podcasters and bloggers, even his Blip.fm profile (which dutifully records that he listened to a song from "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today," by David Byrne and Brian Eno, at 4:16 p.m. on the last day he lived). Her site is "a map to Mac Tonnies," Sobin says. "And a memorial."
"I only ever knew him over Twitter," Sarah Cashmore , a graduate student in Toronto, told me. She shared his enthusiasm for design and technology and learned of his death from Twitter contacts. "I was actually devastated," she says. A few months later, she teamed up with several other members of Tonnies's Twitter circle to start a second Tonnies-focused blog, Mac-Bots.
This outpouring of digital grief, memorial-making, documentation and self-expression is unusual, maybe unique, for now, because of the kind of person Tonnies was and the kinds of friends he made online. But maybe, his friend Rita King suggests, his story is also a kind of early signal of one way that digital afterlives might play out. And she doesn't just mean this in an abstract, scholarly way. "I find solace," she told me, "in going to Mac's Twitter feed."
Finding solace in a Twitter feed may sound odd, but the idea that Tonnies's friends would revisit and preserve such digital artifacts isn't so different from keeping postcards or other physical ephemera of a deceased friend or loved one. In both instances, the value doesn't come from the material itself but rather from those who extract meaning from, and give meaning to, all we leave behind: our survivors.
The most remarkable set of connections to emerge from Tonnies's digital afterlife isn't among his online friends — it is between those friends and his parents, the previously computer-shunning Dana and Bob Tonnies. Dana, who told me that her husband now teases her about how much time she spends sending and answering e-mail (a good bit of it coming from her son's online social circle), is presently going through Posthuman Blues, in order, from the beginning. "I still have a year to go," she says. Reading it has been "amazing," she continues — funny posts, personal posts, poetic posts, angry posts about the state of the world. I ask her if what she is reading seems like a different, or specifically narrow, version of her son. "Oh, no, it's him," she says. "I can hear him when I read it."
Mac Tonnies's digital afterlife stands as a kind of best-case scenario for preserving something of an online life, but even his case hasn't worked out perfectly. His "Pro" account on the photo-sharing service Flickr allowed him to upload many — possibly thousands — of images. But since that account has lapsed, the vast majority can no longer be viewed. Some were likely gathered in Plattner's backup of Tonnies's blog; others may exist somewhere on his laptop, though Dana Tonnies still isn't sure where to look for them. All could be restored if Tonnies's "Pro" account were renewed. But there's no way to do that — or to delete the account, for that matter: no one has the password Tonnies used with Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo. He used Blogspot for Posthuman Blues; that's a free Google product, and there are no fees to keep it updated or any immediate danger of it disappearing. On the other hand, there's no guarantee of how long it will remain. Updating, altering or maintaining it would require Tonnies's password, which he didn't leave behind. Obtaining that password from Google would require providing the company with proof of death. As lovely and moving as the tributes and communal mourning that appeared in the comments to his final post are, it's jarring to see the thread gradually infiltrated by spam-bots — pidgin-English comments followed by long lists for links for "cheap Ugg boots" and such. It's like finding a flier for a dry cleaner stuck among flowers on a grave, except that it's much harder to remove.
It's unlikely the material Tonnies left online would have fared as well had it not been for his savvy and generous circle of Web friends. For most survivors, coping with the physical possessions and conventional assets of the departed can be overwhelming enough, but at least there are parameters and precedents. Even if a houseful of objects is liquidated through an estate sale or simply junked, mechanisms exist to ensure some sort of definitive outcome, even in the absence of a will. And there's no way of ignoring or forgetting it: eventually the stuff will have to be dealt with.
Bit-based personal effects are different. Survivors may not be aware of the deceased's full digital hoard, or they may not have the passwords to access the caches they do know about. They may be uncertain to the point of inaction about how to approach the problem at all. Any given e-mail account, for instance, can include communication as trivial as an "I'm running late" phone call or as thoughtful as a written letter — all jumbled together, by the hundreds or thousands. Similarly, let's just say not all of us are discriminating curators in uploading pictures to Facebook, for instance, flinging more images from one weekend onto the Web than an earlier generation would have saved from a weeks-long vacation. When you inherit a physical scrapbook or even a diary, some choices have already been made — either by culling or by constraints of space — but accessing and then assessing the digital effects of a dead loved one entail a thicket of choices and challenges that many would simply rather avoid.
This has inspired a variety of entrepreneurs to place bets that, eventually, people will want control over the afterlife of their digital selves. Several promise to manage the details of your digital death — storing your passwords and your wishes for who gets access to what and integrating your content-related instructions into a kind of adjunct to a traditional will. Legacy Locker claims "around 10,000" people have signed up for its digital-estate-management service. Its rivals include DataInherit, a service of DSwiss, "the Swiss bank for information assets" (you can even update your digital-legacy data via its iPhone app), and Entrustet, of Madison, Wis. Last May these three firms sponsored Digital Death Day, an event tacked on to an annual online-identity conference near San Francisco.
The founders of Entrustet are surprisingly young. Jesse Davis , who is 23, was still a student at the University of Wisconsin when he wrote the original business plan in 2008. He came up with the idea after reading what has become one of the best-known stories on the complexities of digital assets and one of the few that has found its way into the courts. Justin Ellsworth, a Marine killed in Iraq in 2004, did not leave behind the password to his Yahoo e-mail account, and when the company refused to give his parents access to it, they sued. Eventually, under orders from a probate judge, Yahoo gave them a CD it said contained Ellsworth's e-mail. Ellsworth's story convinced Davis and his business partner, Nathan Lustig, 25, that there was a market for "digital estate planning" services. In the case of Entrustet, this means an automated system for storing passwords and instructions for all your digital assets.
Such businesses rest on a simple idea: Web, mobile and social-media use keeps exploding; everyone still dies. Meanwhile, much of the archiving of basic family life is becoming digital. It has become routine to have an online "presence" even as an infant, by way of a picture posted on a parent's social-networking profile. Lustig pointed me to a recent corporate study that identified "chief memory officer" as a kind of unofficial role taken on by someone (often mom) in many families — the person who is paying attention to the idea that there may be no physical scrapbook or set of journals to hand down to future generations and that bits-and-bytes memory objects need to be preserved somehow. Trendwatching.com has predicted a "burgeoning market" for products and services that protect the digital content that is "the nucleus of one's personal brand."
I spoke to a couple of Entrustet users, who said they particularly wanted to protect photos stored online, along with hosting and domain-registration information for personal and business sites. Entrustet also offers an "account incinerator," to obliterate content its users would prefer not to have linger on after them, and one person I spoke to mentioned having tagged a personal Twitter account for deletion — "it's just inside jokes, personal ranting and raving" — along with a Gmail account. "I don't need people judging the personal e-mails that I sent to my friends," he explained.
Given the degree to which the most popular online platforms involve promoting a quasi-public persona — the "you" who declares fandom of Bob Dylan and Flannery O'Connor, but not the "you" who binges on "Jersey Shore" reruns and TMZ.com — this instinct seems logical. If we try to control the way we are perceived in life, why not in death, too? It's not wholly unusual to do this with physical artifacts: letters to be opened only after death, or even to be destroyed. If you don't want your heirs figuring out that you had a secret Tumblog clogged with pictures of Natalie Portman, maybe you should just arrange for it to be "incinerated." If nothing else, those Entrustet users figure they are leaving behind some guidelines about which bits of their online lives matter, and which don't.
Most people do not leave such directives, making the fate of their digital lives uncertain. One of the better-known instances of a disappeared digital legacy involves Leslie Harpold, a Web pioneer who died unexpectedly in 2006, at age 40. Her writing and other online projects connected her with friends and admirers who were helping create the Internet's self-expression tool kit back in the mid-1990s. In early 2010, after her sites Harpold.com and Smug.com quietly disappeared, some of those friends lobbied Harpold's family to let them preserve her work. "Her work is her legacy," one admirer, Rogers Cadenhead, wrote to Harpold's niece, Melissa Krauskopf, an attorney who served as the personal representative of Harpold's estate. "I have corresponded with several of Leslie's friends about her sites all disappearing from the Web. For what it is worth, all of us believe that she would not have wanted that to happen."This offer was declined. Harpold's niece replied that Harpold's legacy isn't in her online work but rather "is with every person who knew her and loved her." I spoke to Krauskopf briefly, and while she was cordial, she had little to add. Had her aunt left directives about her online work, they would of course have been honored, she said. But in their absence, the domains were part of the estate that went to Harpold's mother, and while Krauskopf appreciates the perspective of her aunt's Web friends, it was a family decision that doesn't require public explanation. "People need to appreciate that she was a real person," Krauskopf says, and the family prefers to "remember her as she was."
You might think that stories like that would inspire at least the most cutting-edge true believers in the importance of online expression to stampede digital-afterlife-management companies. But Entrustet and its rivals acknowledge facing a variety of challenges, from an estate-planning community that isn't particularly tech-forward to convincing potential customers that the start-up meant to deal with their digital afterlife will still be a going enterprise by the time they die. I tried out Entrustet myself. It seems to ease the unwieldy process of sorting out what to do with lots of online accounts with different passwords and so on, but I would add another challenge to the list: it's depressing. I made my wife my "digital executor," which meant that she received an e-mail about her responsibilities that she found jarring and a little chilling, even though I'd warned her. The idea of updating this thing every time I change a password or try out a new social Web tool that I may or may not keep using seemed even less enticing than cleaning out the attic.
Perhaps as a way around this problem, Entrustet is testing the waters on making deals with social-networking services. Its first partner in that approach is Broadjam, a service where musicians store and share their work. The idea is that Entrustet will function as a quietly integrated feature built into something you are happily using rather than being the go-to brand for everything you would rather not think about.
For now, the digital identities of people whose Web contacts aren't sophisticated techie types are simply languishing, or quietly fading away, with no hubbub, controlled not by friends or family but by the defaults of the services that enable their creation. And maybe that's as it should be: what difference does it make what happens to the mundane accumulated detritus that makes up so much of what we do online? Once the people who cared about our status updates are gone, who cares if the updates persist?
One answer to that question is future historians. They surely won't be poring over as many physical documents as today's historians do, and surely the granular documentation of life in the 21st century, in digital form, is unprecedented. Fragile digital selves, then, represent a potential loss to the future.
This point of view has been most convincingly articulated by Dave Winer, the software developer whose Scripting News site is regarded as one of the first examples of what would come to be called blogs. He has been writing about the issue of online content preservation — he calls it "future-safing" — for several years. His views are a surprise to anybody who assumes that expression preserved in bits is somehow more durable than expression preserved in atoms; in fact he has drawn the opposite conclusion, repeatedly pointing out that digital technologies can be surprisingly unstable or can change rapidly in ways that leave a trail of obsolete material in their wake or both. He has written about his own efforts to preserve the original specs and code for some of his most significant technological creations on a suitably reliable server that future historians and others will be able to access. In thinking about how to do the same for his (and others') online writing, he sounds pessimistic.At one point he suggested a big company like Amazon or Google might be a suitable repository — maybe charging a flat fee to host content in perpetuity. But lately he has leaned more toward solutions involving institutions like universities or maybe the government. "What's needed," he wrote in early 2010, "is an endowment, a foundation with a long-term charter, that can take over the administration of a Web presence as a trust — before the author dies."
In general, the companies that have created the most popular places and tools for online expression don't exactly encourage users to stop and think about these subjects. Specific policies vary — details, buried in terms of service agreements, often involve a fair bit of effort, like providing a death certificate — and newer social-media services often have no particular policy at all. (Twitter established its guidelines only in August 2010.) The most prominent place this issue has come up, not surprisingly, is Facebook. For some time now, it has offered an option to request that a profile be switched to "memorial" mode when an individual dies. A post on the company blog explained that the issue first arose internally back in 2005, when one of its employees — there were only 40 at the time — died in a bike accident. ("When someone leaves us, they don't leave our memories or our social network," the post said.) Someone must put in a request for a profile to be memorialized, which deactivates certain features and resets various privacy controls, converting its function to a place where friends can leave remembrances. The process doesn't give much direct control to any heir or executor or similar figure, and as some have complained, it can mean wiping out meaningful material and replacing it with "a thousand 'sorry this happened' " messages, as one user put it.
To Winer, however, the issue goes beyond how a person is remembered by those he or she knew. And he's right that Web sites come and go — often vanishing in months, depending on the whims and intentions and attention span of their creators. One estimate from the late 1990s suggested that almost half the sites created disappear within one year. The Library of Congress has a program that saves slices of the Web and announced last year that it would archive all tweets. But in general its mission is less a comprehensive record than a representative one, built around themes and events, like Sept. 11. Efforts like Internet Archive's WaybackMachine are, while impressive, not intended to be complete. Richard Oram, associate director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, recently discussed on NPR the problems of tending archival material stored on old floppy discs. Similarly, saving census data that was once stored on Univac computers was a costly effort, and images recorded by early space missions and stored in now-obsolete formats have simply been lost.
"This is a huge gap in the Web we're building today," Winer has written. "Eventually it's going to catch up with us when we lose a huge amount of stuff we thought we couldn't lose."
Cameron Hunt is one of the few people I encountered who is actively trying to preserve his digital identity. A 38-year-old Tampa resident who works in the military-contracting industry, Hunt attended Digital Death Day last year. Many of those who attended had some professional interest in the subject — academics, consultants, entrepreneurs. Hunt's interest is more personal. He wants to leave a definitive, and stable, digital legacy behind — "a master repository of me," as he puts it.
His motivations aren't obvious: he is in good health; he's divorced and has no children; and unlike Tonnies he is not engaged in traditional acts of creative expression, like writing books. Raised a Mormon, he never really connected to that church's penchant for genealogy, which always struck him as a bunch of dry lists of names and dates. Then, a couple of years ago, his grandmother died, and he was given a copy of various family stories she had written. "Reading them as an adult, I was able to read between the lines," he says, "to understand things in a rich way, and see how the stories and the experiences had influenced down through multiple generations." Something else happened at the same time: the family realized that a big batch of slides in his grandmother's possession had faded beyond recognition. Hunt was stunned. "Memories that were precious to me — not just living them, but after that going back and revisiting them — and now it's gone," he recalls. "I thought: I really need to do something."Hunt uses Twitter and Facebook; in fact, he has no privacy restrictions on his Facebook account, which lists his address and cellphone number. "I do that as part of my persona," he told me when I suggested that it was a bad idea. "My friends know — if there's an image that maybe I've cultivated, it's 'Cam's crazy, he won't be afraid to do it.' Therefore opportunities come to me or people confide in me."
In any case, while he's also a user of Flickr, LinkedIn, Foursquare and various other online services, the core of his digital legacy is a collection of e-mail dating back to 1994. He has come to realize that achieving his goal is going to take serious effort. "I want to fund a bank account," he says, "so that when I die, a curator can be paid to digitize anything that may not have been digitized, manage the collection, maybe do some research, help people find stuff if they're looking for it.
"You know," he adds with a chuckle, "all these ego-driven things of not being a famous man yet treating my digital afterlife as if I were famous."
Admittedly, Hunt's thinking sounds over the top. But part of the reason it seems so audacious is that there is so much to preserve, compared with, say, the physical material his grandmother left behind. A side effect of digital life is that the border between the real-time self-expressive object and the durable memory object has become porous.
Consider Gordon Bell, a famous computer engineer whose innovations date back to the 1960s. More recently he undertook a project under the auspices of Microsoft Research called MyLifeBits, which included not only the totality of his e-mail correspondence but also digital records of Web pages visited, scanned versions of paper notes, recordings of routine conversations and tens of thousands of snapshots taken every 30 seconds by a digital camera that dangles from his neck. Bell suggests that this in fact is ultimately what digital technology is for: "to capture one's entire life." As he once told ComputerWorld magazine, the point is not to share it all in real time but to give the individual a tool to "leave a personal legacy — a record of your life."
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, notes Bell as an extreme example of a general cultural drift. It is only relatively recently, he argues, that our tools for recording what we see, experience and think have become so easy to use, inexpensive and effective that it is easier to let information accumulate in our "digital external memories" than it is to bother deleting it. "Forgetting has become costly and difficult, while remembering is inexpensive and easy," he writes. This is so even though a great deal of our digital expression is simple communication about the present, "intentionally ephemeral." But because it's more trouble to delete old blog posts, digital pictures and tweets than it is to make new ones, "society's ability to forget has become suspended, replaced by perfect memory."
Mayer-Schönberger is only glancingly concerned with the notion of legacy; he is mostly making a point about privacy and personal information, not about what happens after life ends. So in the long run, his contention that the digital memory is "perfect" is doubtful. And as he notes, even in real time, digital memory can be flawed and misleading: it often merely seems perfect but can be incomplete or even altered.
Stacey Pitsillides, now finishing a graduate degree in design at Goldsmiths, University of London, has been researching digital afterlife issues for a few years now, drawn specifically to the question of what the piles of identity that we're building up online will ultimately amount to. "We just see it as this infinity," she says, but it isn't. "There are certain costs, financial costs, physical and social costs, to keeping this amount of data. One of the social costs is that we kind of lose the ability to begin to choose and arrange what we want to say about ourselves, and instead get lost in this wash of information."If every object you've ever owned was a memory object," she continues, "and we gave that to a family member and said, 'You have to remember this person by all of these objects,' then what position would we be in, and how would we ever remember everyone?"
It is possible that technology will answer this question with new ways for organizing, sifting and coping with masses of preserved personal data. Richard Banks, an interaction designer for Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, has made some "technology heirloom" prototypes that collect, say, tweets or Flickr pictures in new physical devices that would automatically organize them (chronologically or thematically) for heirs or others. And a few nascent businesses have lately floated services that aspire to something closer to Cameron Hunt's "master repository of me" or Gordon Bell's vision of total memory forever. Something called Lifenaut.com has a product called a MindFile, "a database of personal reflections captured in video, image, audio and documents about yourself that can be saved, searched, downloaded and shared with friends." This information is meant to be filtered through an "interactive avatar," modeled on you, "that becomes more intelligent as you add more information." The site welcomes you with a sweeping, ominous tone; the company's tag line is "Eternalize." VirtualEternity.com, from a company called Intellitar, also claims to convert the personal data you provide into an avatar — sort of like one of those chatbots that some online companies use for automated but more humanish customer service. "We want to give users the gift of immortality," an Intellitar founder has said.
That, to put it mildly, is a hard claim to take seriously. For now, the less pie-in-the-sky issue is whether most people scattering digital objects across the Web have strong feelings about their persistence, or whether, as Mayer-Schönberger suggests, it simply isn't worth the time to dispose of them. To Hunt, his own project is perfectly consistent with any effort to preserve analog mementos of life, just as his family (and many others) have for many years. "I'm just part of another generation," he says. "I really don't think it's different in instinct or desire from what other people have done — except that so much of that information is quasi-public already." He has a point there: even if we aren't obsessing about the persistence of online expression and memory materials, we sure are cranking it out. What's really surprising is how few Cameron Hunts there are, actively working out which of the digital self-traces they want to preserve, and how to go about it. All he is really trying to do is have some say in how he's remembered.
My favorite digital-mortality business, DeathSwitch.com, gives the idea of speaking from beyond the grave a Web-era update. DeathSwitch was founded in 2006 by the neuroscientist and writer David Eagleman to coincide with a short story he wrote for Nature, titled "A Brief History of Death Switches." The story imagines an automated service that allowed its users to send messages after they die. People use it to reveal secret bank accounts to heirs, confess to sins or settle scores from beyond the grave. Over time, uses for this fictional death switch become so elaborate that it is hard to tell that the sender of the message is deceased. That last part hasn't happened yet, but otherwise the service offered by DeathSwitch.com, in real life, is basically the same as the fictional one: some final words from you, to whomever, after you've gone.
DeathSwitch.com has enough subscribers to cover costs, according to Eagleman. It keeps tabs on users by sending a periodic e-mail to make sure they are still alive. I suggested to Eagleman that I would find this regular reminder of my own mortality pretty unnerving, and he seemed perplexed. "If you allow the fact that you are going to pass away," he replied, "and there are smart things you can do before you pass away to keep everybody in your family happy and well, then it's as useful as a will, or a do-not-resuscitate."
Eagleman is an interesting character. He is an assistant professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, and "Death Switch" is among the short stories collected in a slim, pleasing book he wrote in his spare time, "Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives." As the title suggests, each story imagines some fictional variation on what might come after this life. It's often quite funny and, as Eagleman points out, can be read as fundamentally hopeful in its willingness to wonder openly and imaginatively about life's end.
His speculative afterlives end up offering provocative takes on what mortality and legacy really mean. One story posits that there are three deaths, the last coming when your name is spoken for the final time. In another, there is a hell in which you see yourself as others saw you; and in yet another, we sit in the afterlife looking back at life for evidence of our influence, as long as it lingers. "Death Switch," the story, suggests that there is no afterlife as we think of it but that "a version of us" lives on in the endlessly sophisticated last notes we each send out, creating a strange network of "transactions with no one to read them." The afterlife isn't some other place or state of being. "Instead an afterlife occurs for that which exists between us."Mac Tonnies's many eclectic intellectual pursuits included at least a passing interest in the notion of cyberimmortality. The idea of the self escaping bodily death by transforming into an age-proof, sickness-proof essence that can be uploaded into a computer or network dates back at least to Vernor Vinge's 1981 novella "True Names." A year after that, William Gibson gave us the word "cyberspace" to describe a new place where humans might exist, potentially forever, outside the physical world. By the 1990s, as the Internet became a familiar presence in many people's lives, some began to suggest that this was no mere science-fiction scenario; it was the future. Vinge was among those (along with, notably, Ray Kurzweil) to discuss the transformation of humans by technology, coming in a matter of decades, referred to as "the singularity." The Carnegie Mellon robotics expert Hans Moravec, the artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, the computer scientist Rudy Rucker and others articulated visions of a future in which technology might truly free us from "the bloody mess of organic matter," to use a phrase of Minsky's. In her 1999 book, "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace," Margaret Wertheim contextualized such speculations as attempts to, in effect, "construct a technological substitute for the Christian space of heaven."
Wertheim pointed out that cyberspace had become a new kind of place, where alternate (or at least carefully curated or burnished) identities could be forged, new forms of collectivity and connection explored, all outside the familiar boundaries of the physical world, like the body and geography. It's not such a long journey to follow those assertions to the "view that man is defined not by the atoms of his body but by an information code," as Wertheim wrote. "This is the belief that our essence lies not in our matter but in a pattern of data." She called this idea the "cybersoul," a "posited immortal self, this thing that can supposedly live on in the digital domain after our bodies die."
And that, essentially, is what is implied by Gordon Bell's assertion that his MyLifeBits project is a way to "leave a personal legacy — a record of your life." Or to put it more prosaically, it's the same thing Trendwatching.com meant by calling your digital traces on social networks the "nucleus of one's personal brand." It's what the uncanny avatars of Lifenaut and Virtual Eternity hope one day to encapsulate. It's at the heart of "singularity" theory.
Wertheim, it should be noted, saw the cybersoul notion as both flawed and troubling, and I would agree. Life's essence reduced to captured data is an uninspiring, and unconvincing, resolution to the centuries-old question of where, in mind and in body, the self resides. At least other imagined versions of immortality (from the Christian heaven to the Hindu wheel of life) suggested a reconciliation, or at least a connection, with the manner in which a physical life is lived; the cybersoul's theoretically eternal and perfect persistence ignores this concept. Most of all, though, fantasizing about living forever — in heaven or in a preserved pattern of data — strikes me as just another way of avoiding any honest confrontation with the fact of death.
Avoiding that confrontation isn't merely a stumbling block for those digital-afterlife start-ups. I was struck by how many of the people I spoke to who professed a keen interest in the issue of preserving a digital legacy had in fact done absolutely nothing about it for themselves. "Hmm, that's a good question," one of the organizers of that Digital Death Day event, a Web-identity expert, replied when I asked her why she had not taken steps to plan for the future of her digital creations. "I'm probably afraid of resolving the issue," another online-expression enthusiast offered (before joking that all he really wanted to do is "save my work better than my enemies save theirs"). Actually, I completely empathize. I'm not anxious to resolve the issue either, at least not by making any prolonged and thoughtful effort centered on the extended contemplation of my demise.
For me, at least, pondering the digital afterlife made me rethink digital life. We're encouraged to record and express everything, all the time. In real time, we can record and distribute the most important moments of our existence, and some of the least. For the generations growing up in the Web era, this mode of being is more or less taken for granted. But the tools we use privilege the moment, not the long term; they also tend to make everything feel roughly equal in importance and offer us little incentive to comb back through our digital scribblings and sort out what might have lasting meaning from what probably doesn't. The results are pretty much the opposite of a scrapbook carefully edited to serve as a memory object but could end up serving that function by default.If "digital litter" is all around us, then thinking about how to clean it up in real time — or producing less of it in the first place — might be more productive. Rita King, the online-identity expert who was a friend of Mac Tonnies's, is clearly pleased to have access to his online effects and generally optimistic about new forms of remembering that digital technologies might enable. At the same time, though, she expressed some caution about the mindless expression of everything, the default veneration of "sharing" over "curating." While she's clearly an online-life enthusiast, she's also careful about what she discloses in that new form of space. "If people thought about dying more often," she observed, "they'd think about living differently."
I found myself wondering, oddly enough, about what Mac Tonnies's take might be. The last of his friends to whom I spoke was Paul Kimball, a filmmaker who lives in Nova Scotia. He met Tonnies online about a decade ago; they corresponded for six years before meeting in person, when Kimball came to Kansas City to interview Tonnies for a documentary. They ended up becoming close, even collaborating on a play (swapping drafts via e-mail) that was staged at the Boulder International Fringe Festival.
Among their shared interests, it turns out, was the relationship among technology, consciousness and mortality. Their play, based on a science-fiction story Tonnies had written in college, involves two women who turn out not to be, strictly speaking, creatures of organic matter: one is an artificial-intelligence program, the other a human consciousness uploaded into a form that could survive a centuries-long space journey. The very title of Tonnies's Posthuman Blues blog, Kimball points out, hints at ambivalence about these subjects. But that was the place, he says, where his generally private friend "revealed himself," post by post. The fact that the blog persists, in public, is what makes it distinct from, say, a journal Kimball owns that belonged to his grandfather and that has been read by perhaps 20 people.
The day before we spoke, Kimball continued, he had linked to an old Posthuman Blues post on his Facebook page, seeking reactions from his own online circle. "So I'm still having this conversation" with his friend Tonnies, he told me, "even though he's been dead for more than a year." Eventually, Kimball added, such situations may be routine. "We're entering a world where we can all leave as much of a legacy as George Bush or Bill Clinton. Maybe that's the ultimate democratization," he said. "It gives all of us a chance at immortality."
After talking to Kimball, I ended up watching a couple of interview clips of Tonnies on YouTube. In one, he discussed "transhumanism," the techno-scientific quest to transcend the traditional limits of the human animal, death included, whether through merging with machines or fiddling with our genes. Skeptics or opponents of transhumanism are missing the point that it's well underway, he argued: medicine is transhuman, in that it thwarts mortality. While I didn't find this wholly convincing, I will concede that it was interesting to find myself in a position to listen to his arguments at all. It made me wish I could offer Tonnies my counterpoints — but of course I can't. So I'll give him the last word. "I like to think of death as a glorified terminal illness," Mac Tonnies said, and will continue to say, for as long as this particular collection of bits remains available for someone to watch and listen to. "If we can escape the boundaries of death, maybe we'll be O.K."This essay was originally published in The New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2011.


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Submitted to: Industrial Crops and Products
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal Publication Acceptance Date: 5/22/2012 Publication Date: 1/17/2013 Citation: Gesch, R.W., Archer, D.W. 2013. Double-cropping with winter camelina in the northern Corn Belt to produce fuel and food. Industrial Crops and Products. 44:718-725. Interpretive Summary: Camelina, which is a relative of canola, is being developed as a dedicated biofuel crop for the U.S. Previous work by our Lab has shown that camelina not only grows well in Minnesota, but it can also be grown as a winter annual crop. This means it can be planted in the fall just like a cover crop and then harvested the following summer. Moreover, our previous research showed that fall-planted camelina could be harvested early enough the next summer to allow growing and harvesting a second crop after it. No one has experimented yet with this idea. But, if it is successful, it would provide a way to produce a dedicated biofuel crop and a food crop on the same piece of land in a single growing season. More importantly, this means that a dedicated biofuel crop such as camelina could be produced without sacrificing food security. We conducted a two-year study to look at whether it is agronomically- and economically-feasible to produce soybean, sunflower, and forage millet after harvesting winter camelina, which is referred to as "double-cropping." The crops planted after camelina were seeded later than they normally would be. However, double-cropped soybean and sunflower yields on average were only 18 to 28% lower than if they were grown as a single crop seeded at a normal time. For the camelina-soybean and camelina-sunflower double-crop, the average combined seed oil yield was 75 gallons/acre and 161 gallons/acre, which is considerably more than if you grew a single crop of soybean or sunflower. Double-cropping is more expensive than producing a single crop. However, our results showed that the camelina-soybean double-crop sequence was both feasible and the most economically attractive. In fact, during the 2009 season, the double-crop camelina-soybean sequence resulted in net earnings of $70 to $142/acre more than if just a single crop of soybean was grown. Furthermore, there was essentially no sacrifice in seed quality of double-cropped soybean and only a small affect on sunflower seed quality over both years of the study. Our research shows that a biofuel and food double-crop system is feasible for the upper Midwest. This research will likely benefit the biofuels industry and useful for growers potentially interested in producing camelina as a dedicated biofuel crop. Technical Abstract: Camelina (Camelina sativa L.) is a viable oilseed feedstock for biofuels. Recently, it was shown that fall-seeded winter camelina can be successfully grown in the upper Midwest and may be harvested early enough the following summer to allow producing a second crop. Double-cropping may offer a profitable means of producing a dedicated biofuel crop without jeopardizing food security. To our knowledge no published information exists on exploring double-cropping with winter camelina. Therefore, a 2-yr field study was conducted between 2007 and 2009 in west central Minnesota to evaluate the agronomic and economic viability of producing short-season cultivars of soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.], oilseed sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.), and forage millet (Setaria italic L.) after winter camelina in conventionally-tilled and no-tilled soil. In most instances, yields of camelina and the second crop in the double-crop sequence differed between years but not by tillage practice. Averaged over both years, total oil yields for the camelina-soybean and camelina-sunflower sequences were 704 and 1508 L ha-1. Compared to conventionally produced mono-crops, on average, double-crop soybean and sunflower yielded 82% and 72% of their mono-cropped counterparts, respectively. As expected, double-crop production costs were greater than for conventional mono-crops. However, in 2009 if camelina prices were similar to canola, net returns for double-crop camelina and soybean were $172-352 ha-1 higher than for soybean alone with highest double-crop net returns for conventional tillage. Furthermore, double-crop soybean seed protein content was little affected by late seeding, while double-crop sunflower oil content averaged over both years was about 13% lower than conventional sunflower sown at an optimum time. A winter camelina-food or –forage crop double-cropping system may be viable for the upper Midwest USA. |


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On this date in our extended family history . . . the 15th day of December . . . in the year 1863 . . . Josephine Martha Hall is born in Houston County, Texas. Little Josephine is the 3rd child, and 2nd daughter, born to James Madison Hall (1819-1866) and his wife, Margaret Annot Sharp (1840-ca.1878). Margaret is the sister of Samuel Houston Sharp (ca.1839-1885), who is a 2nd great-grandpa of the Keeper of this blog about our family history.
Tuesday December 15th 1863. Today Sam and the boys finished the floor in the mill forebay and let down the gates to catch a head of water. The little woman was taken sick and at 11½ o'clock a.m. was delivered of a female child. She may truthfully be said to be a woman of ready conception and easy delivery. there were present Mrs. Bird, Mother [i.e., Mahala Lee Sharp Hall nee Roberts], Nellie [i.e., Mary Alexandrien Sharp nee Lemaire] and myself, assisted by Rachael a negro woman. I sent for Dr. Murchison, who came but as usual too late to be of any service in his profession, he remained for dinner and then left for home. Weather cloudy with occasional showers of rain and a hard rain at night. . . . Thursday December 17th 1863. . . . The little woman is doing very well after her confinement. Mother is still here attending to the new responsibility, whom we have this day named Josephine Martha Hall. . . .The above information about little Josephine's birth is from entries in an 1860-1866 daily Journal kept by her father, J.M. Hall. Regarding the Christmas immediately following the birth of his 2nd daughter, Hall penned the following words :-
Friday December 25th 1863. Today being Christmas all order of business was suspended and we all went in for a regular jollification. I had with me to partake of our Christmas dinner Father [i.e., Col. Joshua James Hall], Mother, Capt. Peacock, Mrs. Bird, Mr. Leaverton, and sundry others besides the home folks. the egg nogg flowed freely and all went off as merry as a marriage bell. To close the scene at night the negroes had a ball in the yard by moon light. they touched the light fantastic ? and were as happy as happy could be. . . .
and will forever hang, over so many households;
even while war still rages;
even while there are serious questions yet to be settled -
ought it not to be, and is it not,
a merry Christmas?
Harper's Weekly, December 26, 1863
I'm dreaming of a White Christmas . . .
This divided back card was made in Germany, and bears a one-cent postage stamp. The card is in the private collection of the Keeper of this family history blog, and sends wishes to the recipient for a Happy New Year in 1915. This collage incorporates further expressions of celebration -- Merry Christmas -- Happy Anniversary -- Birthday Wishes -- which also ties it into the theme for today's entry for the Advent Calendar and the COG (see below). And in keeping with the white theme for the Festival of Postcards, even the recipient's surname -- Frost -- calls to mind the (non)color of white!
Youngstown, Ohio December 31 1030 pm 1914 | Mrs. Wm. Frost, 168 Wooster Ave. Akron, Ohio. | 12-31-1914. Dear Sister: A Happy New Year to you all. And many choice blessings is the sincere wish of your Sister Yours at hand this a.m. "Emma" |
This post incorporates two Season of Christmas collages with supporting information, and was prepared for the following 2009 community events in the geneablogging world :-
- The current topic for Thomas' Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories as well as the 86th edition of a Carnival of Genealogy (hosted by Jasia at Creative Gene) is Other Holiday Happenings, e.g., birthdays that occur during the season of Christmas (see below). Other events in my family tree during the month of December, including birthdates and death dates of deceased family members, and anniversaries of an assortment of our kith 'n kin, are posted > HERE < on a daily basis.
- The topic for the 6th edition of Evelyn Yvonne Theriault's Festival of Postcards is White, which I have illustrated by using a mostly white postcard from the year 1914 (see above).