New York Times publishes allegations that PM's media adviser 'actively encouraged' unlawful practice while editor

The prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson, freely discussed the use of unlawful news-gathering techniques while editor of the News of the World and "actively encouraged" a named reporter to engage in the illegal interception of voicemail messages, according to allegations published by the New York Times.

Coulson, who resigned as editor of the News of the World in January 2007 after its royal correspondent was jailed for intercepting voicemail messages, has always insisted that he had no knowledge of illegal activity when he edited the paper or at any time as a journalist. He told a Commons select committee last year: "I have never had any involvement in it at all."

The New York Times website published a trail to a story due to appear in its Sunday magazine. It made detailed allegations likely to bring intense new pressure on Coulson and the Metropolitan police force, which stands accused of favouring Rupert Murdoch's newspaper group by cutting short its investigation, withholding crucial evidence from prosecutors and failing to inform victims of the newspaper's crimes against them. Coulson declined to comment on the allegations. The News of the World and Scotland Yard have denied all the charges.

Coulson resigned after the imprisonment of his royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, for "hacking" into the voicemail messages of eight public figures. When the Guardian revealed last year that the scandal involved other journalists at the paper and numerous other victims, Coulson said he had nothing to add to earlier denials of involvement, and the Conservative leader stood by him. David Cameron said: "I believe in giving people a second chance."

The New York Times, which has had an investigative team at work on the story since March, is citing two former News of the World journalists who specifically claim that Coulson was directly aware of his reporters' use of illegal techniques.

An unnamed former editor is quoted as claiming that Coulson talked freely about illegal news-gathering techniques, including phone-hacking, and that he personally had been at "dozens, if not hundreds" of meetings with Coulson where the subject came up. "The editor added that when Coulson would ask where a story came from, editors would reply 'We've pulled the phone records' or 'I've listened to the phone messages'."

In addition, Sean Hoare, a former reporter who used to be a close friend of Coulson, is quoted as saying that when he worked with Coulson at the Sun, he personally played recordings of hacked voicemail messages for him and that later, when he worked for Coulson at the News of the World, he "continued to inform Coulson of his pursuits. Coulson 'actively encouraged me to do it', Hoare said".

Hoare, who was sacked from the paper at a time when he had drink and drug problems, says he personally listened to the voicemail messages of celebrities such as David and Victoria Beckham and that he has spoken out now because he believes it was unfair for Goodman to get all the blame.

Coulson told the Commons media committee last year that he had never even heard Mulcaire's name and that Goodman had been the only reporter involved: "I am absolutely sure that Clive's case was a very unfortunate rogue case."

The New York Times claims to have spoken to a dozen former News of the World reporters and editors who say that phone-hacking was "pervasive" in Coulson's newsroom. "Everyone knew," according to an unnamed senior reporter. "The office cat knew." Most former reporters are unnamed, but Sharon Marshall is named as having witnessed hacking when working under Coulson from 2002-04. "It was an industry-wide thing," she said.

The paper says that Coulson ran a highly competitive newsroom "with single-minded imperiousness". Former News of the World journalists claim that there was a "do whatever it takes" mentality and that reporters were told to "get the story, no matter what". "They described a frantic, sometimes degrading atmosphere in which some reporters openly pursued hacking or other improper tactics to satisfy demanding editors," according to the New York Times.

The paper gives a specific example of the involvement of an editorial executive: "Matt Driscoll, a former sports reporter, recalled chasing a story about the soccer star Rio Ferdinand. Ferdinand claimed he had inadvertently turned off his phone and missed a message alerting him to a drug test. Driscoll had hit a dead end, he said, when an editor showed up at his desk with the player's private phone records." Driscoll was later dismissed and awarded £800,000 by a tribunal, which found that he had been bullied by Coulson.

Bill Akass, managing editor of the News of the World, dismissed the New York Times claims as "unsubstantiated". He said: "We reject absolutely any suggestion or assertion that the activities of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, at the time of their arrest, were part of a culture of wrongdoing at the News of the World and were specifically sanctioned or accepted at a senior level in the newspaper."

The New York Times goes on to quote unnamed sources from the Met suggesting that its inquiry into the phone hacking was hampered by a desire to avoid upsetting Britain's biggest selling newspaper: "Several investigators said in interviews that Scotland Yard was reluctant to conduct a wider inquiry in part because of its close relationship with the News of the World."

After a raid on Goodman's desk in August 2006, according to the New York Times, "several detectives said they began feeling internal pressure. One senior investigator said he was approached by someone from the department's press office, who was waving his arms in the air, saying 'wait a minute, let's talk about this'."

The investigator, who has since left Scotland Yard, added that the press officer stressed the department's "long-term relationship with News International". The investigator recalled furiously responding: "There's illegality here, and we'll pursue it like we do any other case." Scotland Yard says that operational decisions are made by police, not by press officers.

Former journalists told the New York Times that when Scotland Yard raided Goodman's desk, two senior journalists "stuffed reams of documents into trash bags and hauled them away". Police did not interview any other reporter or editor apart from Goodman. The material seized from Goodman and Mulcaire included paperwork which potentially implicated three named journalists. None was interviewed and, as the Guardian disclosed last year, the police failed to pass key paperwork to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The New York Times quotes an unnamed former senior prosecutor who was "stunned to discover later that the police had not shared everything. 'I would have said we need to see how far this goes' and 'whether we have a serious problem of criminality on this news desk', said the former prosecutor."

When the case came to court, police identified eight victims of the hacking. However, the New York Times claims that the officer responsible for the inquiry, the then assistant commissioner Andy Hayman, had been shown a "target list" of names and numbers taken from Mulcaire's home which ran to eight or 10 pages and which "read like a British society directory".

The Met told prosecutors that it would approach all known victims, but failed to do so. One who was approached, the then Respect MP George Galloway, told the New York Times that police warned him that his voicemail had been intercepted but refused to tell him who was responsible.

Scotland Yard denies cutting short its inquiry or being influenced by its relationship with the News of the World. The Press Complaints Commission was criticised after two inquiries into the affair failed to find evidence of wrongdoing other than that originally presented by police.

After revelations in the Guardian, the Commons media select committee held a second inquiry into the affair last year. Its report expressed concern "at the readiness of all of those involved – News International, the police and the PCC – to leave Mr Goodman as the sole scapegoat without carrying out a full investigation".

Coulson said tonight: "I absolutely deny these allegations."

Virgin Mobile’s MiFi is nearly like the ones offered by Sprint and Verizon but with three exceptions: an unlimited data plan, no contract and a $40-a-month service fee.

People are increasingly sharing different types of information on Twitter. For example, Tweets point to web pages, photos, videos, hashtags, people, check-ins, and more. Exploring Tweets is a great way to discover new and interesting information. And with devices of all shapes and sizes connecting to the Internet, we’re constantly looking for new ways to make this easier. To date, we’ve created applications for a variety of mobile phones, giving you instant access to Tweets and great content when you’re on the go.

Today we are bringing Tweets to a device that really lets content shine - the iPad. Twitter for iPad takes advantage of the iPad’s fluid touch interface, letting you move lots of information around smoothly and quickly – without needing to open and close windows or click buttons. There are a few things we want to point out that make this app a really fast and fun way to read real-time content.

Panes: Tapping on a Tweet opens a pane to the right. Depending on the content in that Tweet, you’ll see a video or photo, or maybe a news story, or perhaps another Tweet. You can continue tapping on Tweets, opening new panes, and getting new content as long as you’d like to. And, it’s really easy to move between panes by swiping to the right or left.


Media: When you tap a video link or open a web page with an embedded video, you can play that video inline. And, let’s be honest, video is great but sometimes it can take some time to load. The panes in Twitter for iPad let you look through your timeline while a video is loading, and then you can just swipe back to the video when it’s ready to play. You can also pinch on a video to watch it fullscreen.

Gestures: You can pinch on a Tweet to quickly view details about the author and to take actions on a Tweet, such as reply or retweet. Put two fingers together and pull down on a Tweet to peek at the replies, showing the entire conversation leading to that Tweet.

Apple announced on Wednesday a cornucopia of new hardware and software: sleek iPods, a brand new Internet-enabled video streaming device and new versions of its iOS software and iTunes 10. However, the most impressive to me by far was Ping, the music-only social network that Apple is opening up its 160 million existing iTunes users.

No, I’m not blown away by the 160 million number. What I’m impressed by is the thinking behind Ping.

Ping may function like a cross between Facebook and Twitter for iTunes by allowing you to follow celebrities, create social cliques and get artist updates via an activity stream. I think it could have tremendous impact on social sharing and commerce.

From a content perspective, there are three different types of media we love to talk about: movies we see, music we listen to and books we are reading. These are accepted social norms. In fact, many relationships are made on the basis of collective love of a movie and many friendships have started with mixed tapes.

It makes perfect sense for a music service to be social. I’m not alone: The popularity YouTube, the fast-growing MOG and the sadly defunct iLike and Imeem show that people gravitate towards music as a common, collective experience. A recommendation from friends on Last.fm often resulted in me buying many-a-few music tracks. My friends who listened to Thievery Corporation turned me on to The Broadway Project and Chris Joss, which I ended up buying on the iTunes store or via Amazon’s MP3 store.

This click-and-go-somewhere-to-download model of affiliate links can never match a unified experience. Amazon, for example, encourages bloggers and others to link to things they like and then get a piece of the action. This separates social from commerce and treats them as two discrete activities. On the post-Facebook Internet, I don’t think anyone can afford to keep these two actions distinct.

Ping, from what little I saw during Steve Jobs’ demo, allows a similar level of social interaction. It can tell me who my friends think are cool and the top 10 favorites of people in my social graph. Some of my friends are famous deejays. Others just have eclectic musical tastes. They can collectively sift through over 10 million songs and help with the discovery of music. This social-powered discovery is part of the biggest theme of our times: serendipity. About two years ago, when I wrote about serendipity, I said:

The problem is that there’s too much data coming online too quickly, and the traditional method of search that involves first finding and then consuming the information is not going to work for much longer. There just won’t be enough time for us to do that and still have a life. It’s a problem, and therefore solving it is an opportunity — a very big opportunity.

My belief has only been affirmed by growth in the amount of data available. With 12 million songs and 250,000 apps, the best way for Apple to enhance the iTunes store – aka its shopping experience — is through the use of social. Back in 2007, I argued that social networking was merely a feature that had to be embedded into applications to enhance their value. Apple has done a great job of that, but it’s also gone one step further, not only by adding a social networking layer to iTunes, but by meshing it with its commerce engine, the iTunes Store. And it’s made this experience available on both the desktop and its devices.

Apple received much of this social capability with the acquisition of Lala, an online music service, which as a standalone company used sharing of social objects to drive folks towards paid music downloads. Now Apple is only closing the loop by further sharing what users bought. I wouldn’t be least bit surprised if sales of music on the iTunes store rocket upwards, thanks to social discovery.

Amazon, which recently started experimenting with Facebook Connect, has similar ideas, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. On Amazon, I’m reduced to reading reviews from absolute strangers for music. I have a handful of friends who have impeccable taste in non-fiction business books, are all members of Amazon, and they already use email to share new book suggestions with me.

What if they too could share their likes and dislikes via a social layer inside Amazon.com? Or what if I could follow my favorite authors and get updates on their books? Much like Apple, Amazon owns book-based social service, Shelfari, and should find ways to embed the social layer inside of all Amazon products and connect its tens of millions of users.

Like Apple, Amazon too has a lot more data about its customers and their behaviors and could create a compelling discovery experience. I believe with tens of thousands of products in its store, the retail giant needs to figure out ways to surface content and other offerings smartly.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

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There’s a endearingly geeky moment in neurologist Oliver Sacks‘ new book, The Mind’s Eye, which is coming out in October. Like most of Sacks’ books — including bestsellers like Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and An Anthropologist on Mars — his latest is a collection of minutely observed and empathically drawn case histories that illuminate his patients’ ability to adapt and thrive despite neural injuries and challenges. The theme of this book is vision, and the patients in The Mind’s Eye are coping with blindness, alexia (the inability to read), prosopagnosia (the failure to recognize faces), and other disruptions of their ability to make sense of the world. One patient is a celebrated pianist who has become unable to read musical scores, but is still determined to give concerts; another is a neurobiologist, born with crossed eyes, who suddenly gains the ability to see in 3-D.

Unlike most of Sacks’ books, however, The Mind’s Eye also addresses the neurologist’s own illness and transition to a profoundly altered life. In 2005, he was diagnosed with an ocular melanoma in his right eye. Though the tumor was eliminated by radiation, Sacks is still struggling with profound changes to his visual field caused by the cancer and its treatment. The bearish 77-year old neurologist — who lives a block from his office in Greenwich Village — hasn’t talked much to the press about his illness, but that’s about to change with the publication of his highly frank account of the ordeal in the new book. This is his first in-depth interview on the subject.

The geeky moment occurs when Sacks is in the hospital, forbidden to leave his room because his opthamologist has embedded a chip of radioactive iodine in his eye in hopes of banishing the tumor. The tiny plaque of I-125 triggers a storm of hallucinations — including starfish, daisies, and purple protoplasm — as well as ravaging pain. In the middle of all this, Sacks muses about asking his long-time editor and friend, Kate Edgar, to fetch his beloved collection of fluorescent minerals so he can conduct an experiment. “Perhaps I could light them up by fixing my radioactive eye, my rays on them,” he writes. “It would be quite a party trick!” That’s Sacks: thinking like a subversive 18th century chemist in the most dire situations, eager to cast the light of science into unmapped recesses of the natural world.

For my first post at NeuroTribes, it seems fitting to begin by talking with the neurologist/author, whose humane portraits of people who “think different” — such as autistic author Temple Grandin, the subject of a recent Emmy winning HBO biopic — helped inspire some of the science and culture I’ll be exploring on this blog. After 14 years of writing full-time for Wired, I’m also currently working on a book. (Don’t worry, most of my posts won’t be nearly as long as this one.) I first met Sacks in 2001 after he responded enthusiastically to my article about autism among the families of engineers and programmers in Silicon Valley, “The Geek Syndrome.”  Shortly after that I wrote my own amateur case history of the doctor himself, “The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks.”

We spoke last week about his new book, the state of his health, his hallucinations (and the startling effects of cannabis on them), his apprenticeships with poets W.H. Auden and Thom Gunn, and the role of science writing in an age when the authority of science is being broadly undermined by religious zealots and he said/she said media.

Thanks to PLoS blogging guru Brian Mossop, my fellow “Ploggers,” and the whole PLoS crew for offering me this platform to explore science, mind, and culture. I’m honored to be included in such a distinguished group of writers and scientists. PLoS is the future of science journals. Welcome to the future of science journalism.

Silberman: Oliver, what happened to you just before Christmas in 2005?

Sacks: It was a Saturday, eight days before Christmas, the 17^th. It seemed just an ordinary day. I got up, went for my usual swim, and decided to go to the cinema, but as soon as the previews started, I became aware of something bizarre happening — a sort of incandescent fluttering to my left, which I took to be a visual migraine. But then I became certain that it was in my eye and not in the brain, as a migraine would be. That really alarmed me. I thought, “What’s happening? Am I detaching a retina? Am I going blind?”

I didn’t know what I should do about it — whether I should go to an emergency room or phone up an ophthalmologist, or stay put and see if it all settled. I did the last of these, although I couldn’t concentrate on the film. I kept testing my visual field. Then I noticed that some of the little lights showing the way out of the cinema had disappeared in front of me.

Finally, after about 20 minutes, I burst out of the theater, hoping that in the world outside, everything would look real. But it was evident to me that there was still a triangular chunk of my visual field missing, going from about nine o’clock to eleven o’clock. I phoned up a friend who asked a few questions, suggested a few tests, and then said, “Get yourself to an ophthalmologist ASAP.”

I did so and told my story to the ophthalmologist. He took an ophthalmoscope, looked in my eye — and then I saw him stiffen. He put down the ophthalmoscope and looked at me in a different way, a serious and concerned way. He said, “I see pigmentation. There’s something behind the retina. It could be a hematoma or a tumor. If it’s a tumor, it could be benign or malignant.” Then he said, “Let’s consider the worst case scenario.” I don’t know what he said after that, because a voice in my head started shouting, “Cancer! Cancer! Cancer!”

Silberman: Yes.

Sacks: He said he would contact someone who was a great expert on ocular tumors. I spent a very nervous weekend and went to see the specialist a couple of days later. He looked in the eye, dilated the pupil, took photographs, did ultrasound, and sat down with me and Kate. He had a large model of the eye, and he put inside this model a horrid, black, convoluted object — like a black cauliflower or cabbage. I immediately interpreted his meaning: I had a black tumor, a melanoma, in my eye. In my medical student days, one was told melanomas were the most malignant of tumors and everyone died within six months. My thought then was of how, in England, a judge puts the black cap on before uttering a death sentence. So I thought this was my death sentence.

The opthamologist, Dr. Abramson, confirmed that I had a melanoma. He read my thoughts and said, “But these things are highly treatable. The tumors in the eye have a different natural history. They very rarely metastasize, and there’s a good chance of extirpating it entirely with radiation and lasering.” He said, “In the old days, ten to twenty years ago, one would just take the eye out.” He said he had done a thousand such enucleations. But he said I should be tried on radiation first.

I immediately got very impatient. I wanted the radiation the next day, but I had to wait three weeks, because Christmas was coming up and then the New Year. And in those three weeks, though he said these tumors grow very slowly, there were a lot of visual changes. What had been a small segment of missing vision became a whole hemisphere. Various strange distortions appeared, with horizontal lines getting squashed down and vertical lines diverging, due to edema under the retina.  So then, three weeks later… Well, people can read the book if they like.

Silberman: Yes they can, in about a month. But it’s important for readers to know that while the tumor has been successfully treated, you’re still coping with profound alterations in your ability to see and navigate. How is your vision now, and what accommodations have you had to make?

Sacks: After June of ’07, the tumor encroached on the fovea and had to be lasered there. So I lost central vision in that eye. I then seemed to pass into a relatively stable period in which I had a little crescent of peripheral vision from about three to seven o’clock. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but that little crescent was invaluable, because it gave me a full visual field, and a little stereoscopy in the lower part of the field. Since it was peripheral, however, as soon as I looked at anything directly, it became flat. But at least I had a sort of sense of depth and space.

But then in September of last year — as it happens, four days before I had to have knee surgery — I had a hemorrhage in the eye, and my vision went out entirely on that side. I found that condition much more disabling, because I had no sense of anything on the right. I couldn’t see anything to the right of my nose.

I was told that things would clear in six to eight months, but at eight months there was no clearing, and it was evident that there was a clot stuck in the eye. Also, the pressure in the eye was rising.  Then ten weeks ago, on June the 8th, I had a thing called a vitrectomy done, removing the bloody vitreous, and at the same time, bringing some sort of clear fluid into the eye. I had hoped that would restore my vision, and almost instantly, the vision started to clear a little bit. But then three days after that, it darkened again.

I then had a second procedure, and the eye bled yet again. I had a third procedure in which a drug called Avastin was put into the eye, which inhibits the growth of blood vessels. Since then, my eye has been steadily clearing, and there has been no regression.  But it’s very slow, and it’s still hazy looking out. For example, when I’m at the piano, I can see the black and white keys and count my fingers. But that’s the limit. I’m vaguely conscious of things happening on the right, but my vision there is not really functional yet, though I dare to hope it will become so.

Silberman: In the book, you go on to describe some fascinating experiments you performed on your own vision, where you observed your brain “filling in” the blank spots in your visual field with patterns and hallucinations. The naive view of our visual system is that it works like a camera, passively receiving sense impressions and compiling them in the brain into a more or less accurate picture of the world.  But the work of researchers like V.S. Ramachandran and many others has led us to understand that vision is a highly active and even speculative process, with the brain making guesses and predictions about what the eyes can’t see.

In the course of your illness, you discovered that your brain would generate elaborate patterns, even clouds or leaves, to hide the blank space in your vision caused by the tumor. You’ve always been interested in the brain’s generative visual activity — whether caused by illness or psychedelics — and wrote about it at length in your first book, Migraine. But what did you learn from these experiences about how the brain creates a seemingly seamless world out of fragmentary sense impressions?

Sacks: In general terms, I learned that the brain is always busy. In particular, if a sensory input — whether it be vision or hearing or kinesthesia — is taken away, there will be some sort of compensation, and the cortical systems involved in those representations will become hyperactive. This first became clear to me when I spoke to various blind people. One man, for example, who had lost his sight when he was about 20, said that when he read Braille, he didn’t feel it in his fingers, he saw it. And there’s nice evidence that the occipital areas of the brain, and the inferotemporal areas — visual areas — are excited in that sort of situation.

For myself, I was very struck by this “filling in” business. The first thing that struck me was when I was in hospital and I could pay more attention to these things — perhaps too much attention. But the scotoma in my vision, the blind area, was almost like a window looking into a landscape. I could see movement, and people, and buildings in it — things like those my brain concocts while I’m falling asleep or before a migraine. But this seemed to be going on continuously.

And then there was an episode that very much startled me. Kate was in the room at the time too. I was washing my hands, and then for some reason I closed my left eye, and I continued to see the wash basin, the commode next to it, and the mirror very, very clearly — so clearly, in fact, that my first thought was that the dressing over the right eye must be transparent. But it was a huge, thick, opaque dressing. This was something quite different from an after-image. It was more like a strange persistence or perseveration of vision. The image wasn’t being erased in the usual way.

But this sort of thing really only hit me after I had been lasered in June of ’07 and lost my central vision. Then the night I took off the bandage, I saw this great black amoeba — this thing shaped like Australia — but when I looked up at the ceiling, it immediately disappeared. It turned white and became camouflaged by taking on the color of its surroundings. I then found that I could fill it in with simple patterns, like the repeating geometric pattern on my carpet.

Then I discovered another phenomenon which astounded me. Later that month, I went to Iceland for a friend’s wedding. Coming back on the plane, it was very hot, so I took off my shoes and socks. I liked playing with the scotoma, moving it around and putting things “into” it, so I used it to amputate my leg mid-shin. But then I started wiggling my toes, and gradually there was a strange, pinkish, protoplasmic extension around the stump of my leg. This formed itself into the shape of a foot with wiggling toes, and followed all my movements exactly. It didn’t look quite real — it had no skin texture or whatever — but it really was an astounding phenomenon, and made me feel that the visual area had become hypersensitive to other inputs, such as proprioceptive input or some sort of motor afferent.

I also had — and still have — almost continuous hallucinations of a low order: geometric things, especially broken letters, some of them like English letters, some like Hebrew letters, some like Greek, some runes, and some a bit like numbers. They tend to have straight lines rather than curves, but they rarely form actual words. This is not something I said in the book, but if I smoke a little pot, they sometimes become words. And they tend to be in black and white — but when I smoke a little pot, they’re in color.

Silberman: That’s wonderful. What do the words say?

Sacks: Short English words of no particular significance like “may,” or pseudo-words, like “ont.” Also, since my back surgery last year, I’ve been on nortriptyline, which is supposed to block the gating mechanism for pain in the spinal cord. I only take a small dose, because it gives me an intensely dry mouth. But even the small dose has a striking effect of enhancing dreams and involuntary imagery, and upgrading my hallucinations from black-and-white to color, and from geometric patterns to faces and landscapes.

Silberman: Interesting.

Sacks: Neurologists talk about “elementary hallucinations,” and my own hallucinations used to be elementary. But when I read those passages of The Mind’s Eye for the audio version, I whispered to Kate, “They’re not elementary anymore!” I partly refrain from talking about this in the book because I say nothing about the leg and spine injuries and operations going on at the same time. I wanted to keep things simple. And in fact, I haven’t smoked any pot in a long time, because I’ve been on so many other drugs for a year, I’d be afraid to have the pot on top of them.

Silberman: In the book, you talk about several blind people who each deal with their disability in highly distinctive and individual ways. There’s religion professor John Hull, who describes his state of “deep blindness” — a total absence of any visual imagery, external or internal — in spiritual terms, as “an authentic, autonomous world, one of the concentrated human conditions.” Then there’s Zoltan Torey, an Australian psychologist who was blinded in an industrial accident when he was 21, but developed his ability to visualize details to the point where he shocked his neighbors by single-handedly replacing the gutters on the roof of his house at night. What did these very different experiences of blindness teach you about how different individuals handle disability?

Sacks: They showed me that there is no set way of handling blindness. There can be diametrically opposite ways. There’s the Hull way in which visual memory, visual imagery, visual nostalgia, and visual thought are all lost or renounced. And there’s the Zoltan way, in which visual imagery is emphasized, trained, and heightened.

When I saw Zoltan last year in Australia, I asked him why he didn’t hallucinate. And he said, in a rather Teutonic way, “I wouldn’t allow my cortex to hallucinate. It is strictly obedient to my wishes. I have it visualize in the way that I describe. I will not indulge hallucinations.” Zoltan also regards Hull as someone who has, as it were, caved in to his blindness a sort of passive spiritual way. I’m not sure what Hull thinks of Zoltan.

Jacques Lusseyran talks about the “visual blind” as a sort of sub-species, and I like that paradoxical category. I wonder which way I would go if… if… if.

I suspect I would go in the Hullian direction. But I’m not sure.

Silberman: Going back in time, few people know that in addition to studying medicine, you were mentored as a young writer by two of the most brilliant poets of the 20^th Century, W.H. Auden and Thom Gunn. What did you learn from these poets that med school couldn’t teach you?

Sacks: Basically, they taught me to look at disease, disorder, and suffering in broader human terms, and not just in narrow clinical or physiological terms. To look at predicaments, plights, and situations — not just diseases.

I had a very long, nice meeting with Ved Mehta, who has written very openly about his blindness and his ways of accommodating, which include fabulous so-called facial vision. When he was younger, he would walk rapidly without a cane, “seeing” by the echo of the sound the shape and distance of all objects near him.

Silberman: I’ve seen a video about that amazing kid you mention in a footnote, Ben Underwood, who taught himself to do human echolocation before he died. That was quite something.

Sacks: Oh yes. I just got an email that had been mislaid from July of ’09 about someone similar to Ben who would map his surroundings by making a clicking sound with his teeth, and was even able to go canoeing and avoid obstacles in the water. The man who sent this to me works on sonar installations. If I’d known about this, I would have included it in the footnote.

Silberman: A vision researcher I know online, Mark Changizi, told me he had lunch with you at Caltech in 2005, when you were writing the chapter of your book on “Stereo Sue.” He said that you asked him if he considers himself a naturalist. “Although that’s not a term I readily use,” he said to me in email, “I realize that I am indeed a naturalist, as the fundamental premise of my research concerns understanding our biology in the context of the natural evolutionary environment.” But Mark is still not sure what you meant by asking him that question.

Sacks: I don’t think I meant anything quite as lofty as this. What I meant was that although I love general principles, I am no great shakes at extracting them myself. I feel that I’m sort of collecting specimens and observing phenomena. In this way, I’m like Wallace or Bates, but not like Darwin. Darwin of course was a fabulous collector, but his son says that he seemed to be charged with theorizing power, so that everything immediately generated a hypothesis. Crick was also like that.

Silberman: Didn’t Darwin himself say something about how his mind had become a “machine” for generating hypotheses?

Sacks: Yes, yes, exactly. There’s a peculiar passage in Darwin’s autobiography where he says how, when he was young, he took great delight in poetry, and painting, and music. But now, he said, his mind had become a sort of machine for extracting general laws from large collections of facts.

When I met Crick at a neuroscience meeting in 1987, he seized me by the shoulders at dinner, sat me down next to him, and said, “Tell me stories.” In particular, he wanted to hear stories of visual disorders. You probably saw the piece I wrote about Crick in the New York Review of Books. Crick was a theoretician who felt starved of the data that he needed. Some of this data would come from experimental work, but some of it would come from observations like mine, which look at experiments of nature, in a sense. It’s similar with Ramachandran, though he is more active and ingenious at devising experiments.

Silberman: Your case histories are accounts of these “experiments of nature.” What is the role of the case history in the age of computerized, data-driven medicine?

Sacks: Well, all science should be data-driven or evidence-based — whether it comes from a careful longitudinal study of a single individual or a study of thousands of individuals. The minute study of a single individual could provide data or evidence that may be inaccessible any other way. Doing that depends on patience, trust, and the relationship between the observer and the patient. I think of Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist as an ideal case history, though when I first read it, I thought it was a novel.

Silberman: Do you fear that physicians are losing the ability to write precisely observed case histories?

Sacks: Luria lamented in his letters to me that the great observers of the 19th Century are gone now, and that the art of observation has diminished. You can put that down partly to specialization and technology. Certainly, reading some of the classical papers on agnosia and alexia, one feels that no one is writing like that now, or very few people. But there’s a new journal called Neurocase that’s worth reading, and I’ve seen some return to the notion — at least in the more complex areas of neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry — that one needs case histories as well as detailed longitudinal studies and everything else.  Case histories can never be replaced. They will always be needed to compliment other sorts of study.

Silberman: Science is under attack these days by religious zealots who want creationism taught in schools alongside evolution, opportunists with political agendas, media outlets that play into bogus controversies about climate change, and so on. What should the role of the science writer be in an age when the role of science in society is being increasingly undermined?

Sacks: In my preface to An Anthropologist on Mars, I quoted G.K. Chesterton’s attack on science as a cold, impersonal, Sherlock Holmesian business, whereas his fictional detective, Father Brown, proceeds by a sort of uncanny empathy. I think as a writer, one needs to bring out the passion and the purity of science, the excitement, the beauty, and the fact that science may provide the only way of observing and understanding immense phenomena that lie beyond the unaided senses — the causes of things, things which are below the surface, like atoms.

I hesitate to use the word purity when there have been so many uncomfortable frauds in science. One can feel ideally that science shouldn’t need policing, because there’s much more pleasure in a genuine result than in making anything up. Nothing that one could make up will be as deep and interesting as the reality. Freeman Dyson says something like, “Nature’s imagination is much richer than ours.”

But I’m genuinely bewildered by people who tout creationism and so forth. It was understandable that Gosse should do so in his book, Omphalos, which was published in 1857, a couple of years before Darwin’s book. Gosse was a very good and passionate naturalist, but also a devout literalist, and this tortured book was his attempt to, as he put it, “untie the geological knot” and reconcile the Bible and the fossil record. But I can’t see how after Darwin, any beliefs like this can be maintained. The sheer, endless beauty and depth of evolutionary theory is far beyond the dullness of a divine Creation.

Withings, the Paris-based company behind the famous tweeting wifi body scale, has just scored 3 million euros from French VC firm, Ventech. It’s the company’s first round of funding and will be used primarily for the development of 2 new products, which should come out within the next 6 months.

For anyone who isn’t already familiar with the company’s first product, the tweeting wifi body scale, it’s a terrific wifi-connected device that tracks your weight. May sound simple but it can recognize up to 8 users and allows you to transfer your weight information to a computer, iPhone or iPad – which is where the Tweeting comes from, obviously. The product launched officially last year on June 25 goes for €129 in France and is a great little way to track a fitness program or diet.

For now, the 20-person company is entirely based in Paris but the product is distributed across several continents. The US accounts for roughly 40 percent of sales – as does Europe – and the rest of the world makes up the remaining 20 percent. With a partner in Japan, the startup it is planning to actively develop distribution in Asia – in Korea and Taiwan in particular.

The team still isn’t releasing info on the number of scales sold-to-date nor details concerning the 2 new products that are currently being developed. But we do know that one of the 2 will most likely be a similar, health-related product and other will be for more casual, everyday use.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution | Time.com
"We don't see this as the magazine being dead," says Paste editor Josh Jackson. "We just see it as taking a break right now. We've been trying to raise capital for a long time, and we had a deal that was about to close. And it just fell apart." || Charlie Duerr: "Sorry to see you go, Paste."
> It's possible a buyer will want Paste's digital assets

We heard earlier today that Paste Magazine was in imminent danger of folding. Looks like it's already happened. More »

…as I said, “more to come”.

You may have heard of the Double Rainbow Video. The guy who filmed this, Paul “Bear” Vasquez, lives in Yosemite and in the past month has gotten huge traffic for his ‘vivid’ reaction to that double rainbow. We hooked up with Bear to learn more about him & show him how to capture a full on double rainbow with Windows Live Photo Gallery using our panorama stitch feature. It’s so intense!

Some more background…

When I first showed the Windows Live team the famous “Double Rainbow” video back in July they thought it was hilarious. But when I said I wanted him to come and do a video with us, they looked at me as if I had been seeing rainbows all day…they thought I was kidding. I e-mailed Bear that night and sure enough, he responded, and with great enthusiasm.

I called him and gave him the lowdown on the project and asked if he would do a “Double Rainbow” redux. He was ecstatic! So we jumped right on it. He flew to Seattle and we had an absolute blast. After a 10 hour shoot we shared stories, ate delicious Vietnamese food (his favorite), and hung out with the crew.

 

Photo Caption: Bear and our crew. From left to right: Connor Lanman, Max Lanman, Adam Collins, Matt Garrett, Bear, Austin Chick, Michael Fishman, Andrew Sobey, & Shawn Anderson not pictured: Tommy Yacoe & Brendan Schlagel

We did a second video called “Meet Bear” where talks about his experience posting “Double Rainbow” and his love for sharing photos and videos with the world using Windows Live Essentials – video coming soon (will update post when its up). UPDATE: You can check out the second video called “Meet Bear” by clicking here!

Bear is something special. He’s entered the world of social media in hopes to share laughs, smiles, and insights. It’s not about the product, it’s about the people. It’s about the viewers, the users, it’s about you. And more importantly this project also shows how powerful sharing photos and videos can be. If tools like Photo Gallery and Movie Maker didn’t exist, Bear and I wouldn’t have met.

People can now share their lives with everyone and anyone, and can influence each other’s lives in a positive way. That’s what is so cool about Bear’s story.

Till next time,

-Connor

On the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the approaching storm caused many to flee, and others to head for the waves.

Facebook is in what’s called a recruiting sweet spot right now. Out of control growth in users and revenue and a nearly certain IPO run in the near future. That’s when employee growth expands at the greatest rate for a company as it grows from hundreds to thousands and then tens of thousands of employees. And with low priced private stock as currency, companies in that position can generally get anyone they want.

Yahoo of course does more than its fair share of feeding the beast, but they’re everyone’s favorite recruiting pool right now. But plenty of Googler’s are heading to Facebook, too – LinkedIn is tracking 118 of them to date. For some Googlers, it’s paying off just to go get an offer from Facebook and then tell their employer – a counter offer is almost sure to come, and it may be stratospheric.

One recent Googler, we’ve confirmed, was recently offered a counter offer he couldn’t refuse (except he did). He was offered a 15% raise on his $150,000 mid level developer salary, quadruple the stock benefits and…wait for it…a $500,000 cash bonus to stay for a year. He took the Facebook offer anyway.

Sources close to Google tell us that about 80% of people stay when they’re offered a counter to a Facebook offer. But some still leave. Part of that may be that Facebook is quietly telling people, never in writing, that there’s no reason their stock won’t hit $100 billion in total valuation over the next couple of years. No guarantees, yadda yadda, but hey if you get 1/10 of 1%, that’s $100 million in stock. Now it’s a party.

Google isn’t making these kind of counter offers to everyone, but it’s not a one off, either. It seems to me that every Google engineer at least should be taking a personal day to go collect a Facebook offer. Even if it’s just to get a counter offer from their current employer.

Art: Audrey Fukuman

Within the next several weeks, the New Yorker magazine will be publishing big pieces about a pair of digital icons located on the East and West coasts–an assessment of the turnaround at AOL by staff columnist Ken Auletta and a profile of Facebook Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Huffington Post senior contributing editor Jose Antonio Vargas.

For the Zuckerberg piece, Vargas was given a lot of access by the social networking kingpin, including allowing rare interviews with Zuckerberg’s inner circle and also longtime girlfriend and fulltime med student Priscilla Chan.

And Auletta–whose big New Yorker takeout on Google (GOOG) turned into a book that is now being turned into a movie–will be assessing the turnaround efforts at AOL (AOL), which is now being led by former Google exec Tim Armstrong.

The Internet icon has seen troubled times in recent years, including a spin-off from Time Warner (TWX), which should make for interesting fodder for Auletta.

Also in the tech-topic kitty at the New Yorker, sources said: A profile of trouble-making Gawker Media impresario Nick Denton by Ben McGrath, which I am hoping will include his terrific tour of Chinese markets near where he lives in Manhattan’s SoHo.

Curated.by is a new Twitter curation tool that makes it easy to gather and share collections of messages on any topic. The service is slowly letting more and more people create accounts, and I really hope it will launch soon so I can make public use of it.

It's quite simple: create a collection and drag Tweets into it, or use the service's new Chrome Extension to curate Tweets right from Twitter webpages. Then share your collections, embed them on a web page and subscribe to the collections of other users. Founder Bastian Lehmann, for example, curated a really good collection of Tweets about today's Apple event that I would have embedded below if the service had launched yet.

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Other interesting examples of collections saved for posterity include All YC DemoDay Startups as seen by @davemcclure and Tweets about the Chevy Volt.

Curation is a beautiful thing and something that's still too hard to do online. Curated.by is likely to make a nice addition to any content curator's toolset. (See also Curated.info, a very cool blog subscription bundle sharing service.) The service still has some rough edges, and these sorts of tools tend to require more investment than most users are willing to make, but I'm personally very excited for it to finally launch. "Soon," Lehmann says.

Click to enlarge.

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By Ryan Chittum The New York Times Magazine is out with a riveting story on the corruption at News Corporation's News International division. It's a fascinating look at the depravity and cynicism of the British tabloid press and of the British government. Scotland Yard failed abjectly to fully investigate what News of the World and others did by illegally breaking into people's...