Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design

While the projects had wildly different end products, they both had a similar starting point: focusing on how to ease people’s lives. And that is a central lesson at the school, which is pushing students to rethink the boundaries for many industries.

At the heart of the school’s courses is developing what David Kelley, one of the school’s founders, calls an empathy muscle. Inside the school’s cavernous space — which seems like a nod to the Silicon Valley garages of lore — the students are taught to forgo computer screens and spreadsheets and focus on people.

So far, that process has worked. In the eight years since the design school opened, students have churned out dozens of innovative products and start-ups. They have developed original ways to tackle infant mortality, unreliable electricity and malnutrition in the third world, as well as clubfoot, a common congenital deformity that twists a baby’s feet inward and down.

Those successes have made the D.school the envy of universities around the world. Sarah Stein Greenberg, a D.school alum and managing director, says she receives inquiries every week from universities looking to mimic the D.school curriculum.

The school has also become one of the most highly sought destinations at Stanford. Some of the most popular classes get four times as many applicants as there are seats available. To meet the demand, the D.school is adding full courses and so-called pop-up classes, which focus on a more narrow problem. “Where Did You Go Olympia Snowe?,” a recent pop-up class, challenged students to solve the seemingly most intractable problem of all: rekindling bipartisanship. Olympia J. Snowe, a former Republican senator of Maine, even made a brief guest appearance.

Mr. Kelley, who also started the design firm IDEO, says the goal is to give students — many of them analytically minded — the tools to change lives.

One emphasis is to get students to leave campus and observe people as they deal with life’s messy problems.

That is how Mr. Kothari, a mechanical engineering graduate student, started his ramen project. He spent hours at local ramen shops watching and talking to patrons as they inevitably spilled broth and noodles. Together with a group of other D.school students, he built a prototype for a fat straw that would let patrons have their ramen and drink it, too.

The school challenges students to create, tinker and relentlessly test possible solutions on their users — and to repeat that cycle as many times as it takes — until they come up with solutions that people will actually use.

An important element of the school, Mr. Kelley says, is having students start small, and as they gain what he calls “creative confidence” with each success, they can move toward bigger, seemingly intractable problems. It is not all that different, he said, from teaching someone to play the piano.

A recent boot camp class dispatched students to local hair salons to tackle that age-old problem: the bad haircut.

One group was surprised to learn that sweeping hair off the floor is the bane of many hairdressers. That group designed a prototype for a device that sucks up clippings before they hit the floor. A few courses later, the same students were asked to apply that same analytical process to the shortage of organ donors.

“It’s a guided approach to building that empathy muscle until, pretty soon, they are out there doing it on their own,” Mr. Kelley said.

One of the D.school’s most highly sought courses is “Design for Extreme Affordability.” Over two quarters, students team up with partners from around the world to tackle their real-world problems. So far, “Extreme” students, as they are called, have completed 90 projects with 27 partners in 19 countries. This year, students will work with partners in Cambodia, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Senegal and South Africa.

One of Extreme’s more successful projects is Embrace, a low-cost miniature pouch, not unlike a sleeping bag, that helps prevent newborns from developing hypothermia. Embrace’s inventors say the pouch has helped prevent 22,000 infant deaths.

This year, Ian Connolly and Jeffrey Yang, D.school students, formed a partnership with Miraclefeet, a nonprofit based in North Carolina, to design a brace for children with clubfoot for less than $20.

Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man Behind Android

If Amazon can imagine delivering books by drones, is it too much to think that Google might be planning to one day have one of the robots hop off an automated Google Car and race to your doorstep to deliver a package?

Google executives acknowledge that robotic vision is a “moonshot.” But it appears to be more realistic than Amazon’s proposed drone delivery service, which Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, revealed in a television interview the evening before one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.

Over the last half-year, Google has quietly acquired seven technology companies in an effort to create a new generation of robots. And the engineer heading the effort is Andy Rubin, the man who built Google’s Android software into the world’s dominant force in smartphones.

The company is tight-lipped about its specific plans, but the scale of the investment, which has not been previously disclosed, indicates that this is no cute science project.

At least for now, Google’s robotics effort is not something aimed at consumers. Instead, the company’s expected targets are in manufacturing — like electronics assembly, which is now largely manual — and competing with companies like Amazon in retailing, according to several people with specific knowledge of the project.

A realistic case, according to several specialists, would be automating portions of an existing supply chain that stretches from a factory floor to the companies that ship and deliver goods to a consumer’s doorstep.

“The opportunity is massive,” said Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business. “There are still people who walk around in factories and pick things up in distribution centers and work in the back rooms of grocery stores.”

Google has recently started experimenting with package delivery in urban areas with its Google Shopping service, and it could try to automate portions of that system. The shopping service, available in a few locations like San Francisco, is already making home deliveries for companies like Target, Walgreens and American Eagle Outfitters.

Perhaps someday, there will be automated delivery to the doorstep, which for now is dependent on humans.

“Like any moonshot, you have to think of time as a factor,” Mr. Rubin said. “We need enough runway and a 10-year vision.”

Mr. Rubin, the 50-year-old Google executive in charge of the new effort, began his engineering career in robotics and has long had a well-known passion for building intelligent machines. Before joining Apple Computer, where he initially worked as a manufacturing engineer in the 1990s, he worked for the German manufacturing company Carl Zeiss as a robotics engineer.

“I have a history of making my hobbies into a career,” Mr. Rubin said in a telephone interview. “This is the world’s greatest job. Being an engineer and a tinkerer, you start thinking about what you would want to build for yourself.”

He used the example of a windshield wiper that has enough “intelligence” to operate when it rains, without human intervention, as a model for the kind of systems he is trying to create. That is consistent with a vision put forward by the Google co-founder Larry Page, who has argued that technology should be deployed wherever possible to free humans from drudgery and repetitive tasks.

The veteran of a number of previous Silicon Valley start-up efforts and twice a chief executive, Mr. Rubin said he had pondered the possibility of a commercial effort in robotics for more than a decade. He has only recently come to think that a range of technologies have matured to the point where new kinds of automated systems can be commercialized.

Earlier this year, Mr. Rubin stepped down as head of the company’s Android smartphone division. Since then he has convinced Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Mr. Page, that the time is now right for such a venture, and they have opened Google’s checkbook to back him. He declined to say how much the company would spend.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 5, 2013

An article on Wednesday about Google’s increasing investment in robotics, including the acquisition of technology companies related to the field, misspelled the name of one such acquisition, a small design firm that makes high-tech wheels. It is Holomni, not Holonomi.

Q&A: Using ‘Do Not Track’ Options

Q. I have a new Windows 8 computer. How can I tell if my Internet Explorer is set to block Web sites that want to track me?

A. If you chose the express settings option when you set up your Windows 8 machine, Do Not Track is most likely enabled already; a visit to Microsoft’s Do Not Track test page is one quick way to check. You can also look at the browser’s settings.

In Internet Explorer, click (or tap, if your computer has a touch screen) the gear-shaped Tools menu icon and choose Internet Options. In the Internet Options box, select the Advanced tab, scroll down the Settings list to the Security section and the “Always send Do Not Track header” option. If the checkbox is turned on, your browser is set to send Do Not Track requests to the sites you surf.

Not every site or content provider that collects browser information for analytics and advertising will honor requests to stop tracking your Web surfing. You can find out more about Do Not Track at http://donottrack.us.

Internet Explorer 10, and some earlier versions, can also use Tracking Protection Lists to block third-party content from sites on that list. Microsoft has more information about Tracking Protection on its Web site.

Reinstalling Mac OS X

Q. How do you reinstall the operating system on a Mac with no DVD drive or system installer discs?

A. One method is to use the Recovery partition Apple includes with its recent Mac computers and OS X system software (Lion and Mountain Lion editions). The partition includes utilities and tools for reinstalling the operating system, repairing drives and restoring the Mac’s contents from a Time Machine backup file. You can find the Recovery partition by restarting the Mac and holding down the Command and R keys as the computer boots up.

When the computer finishes its start-up routine, you should see an OS X Utilities window in the middle of the screen with four options listed, including one for restoring the operating system. You need a broadband Internet connection to download the 4-gigabyte OS X software to reinstall. Apple has more information on OS X Recovery (and how to create a bootable external drive for recovery) at support.apple.com/kb/HT4718.

TIP OF THE WEEK Is the TV remote control always getting lost in the couch cushions? If you have a Samsung Galaxy S4, you can change channels with the smartphone’s built-in infrared hardware and WatchON app (samsung.com/watchon). The app works with many brands of TV sets and service providers, and includes a programming guide. It can also offer viewing recommendations in exchange for personal information and preferences.

To use the Galaxy S4 as a remote, find and tap the WatchON icon and work through the setup screens that ask for your location, television service provider and TV brand; the app can also pair with set-top boxes and other home theater components. Once you have successfully paired the phone with your equipment, WatchON supplies a channel guide and a button to tap when you want to change the channel or adjust the volume. (Swipe up on the basic remote screen to see controls for components like digital video recorders.) In the WatchON app settings, you can have the remote control appear on the Notification and Lock screens.

With infrared hardware or Wi-Fi, other smartphones can work as remote controls with the right apps and TV hardware, like the LG TV Remote app for the company’s newer Smart TV sets. Apple’s own Remote app (free in the App Store) can also turn an iOS device into a controller for iTunes and the Apple TV box.

App Smart: Using the Masses to Improve Apps

Weather apps, for example, sometimes have data only for cities or towns far from a specific location. The Weathermob app, free on iOS, tackles that by sourcing weather reports from people who are exactly at the spot you are interested in visiting or knowing more about. Users submit weather information from their location, as well as other data, like their mood or what they’re doing.

As I write this, for example, some users in the app’s “nearby” page have shared photos from a beach not far away where it is 70 degrees and sunny, and they’ve added a smiley tag to the photos. There is also an option for adding comments, which means those beach partyers could add information, like “Come and visit here — a band is playing in an hour.”

This aspect of the app is entertaining but not particularly useful — I can take a step outside and get most of that information. But the app is searchable for information on other locations. When I looked up a town that I would be visiting, for example, Weathermob users reported that it was 66 degrees, and the app’s detailed forecast page reported an 11 percent chance of rain the next day.

Entering your own weather report is easy. You dial through a rotating list of weather icons to one that matches what you see. Then you select a mood and an icon from the “it’s weather for...” list, which includes oddities like a sea gull or a cricket bat. You can also add a comment, photo or video. It’s fun to use, but the app depends on users’ actively taking part to deliver meaningful information — and that’s not necessarily going to cover every location.

Weathersignal, a free Android app, takes crowdsourced weather reporting one step further by using sensors in your phone or tablet to assess the local weather conditions. Your device effectively becomes a miniature weather station. The makers stress that the app is experimental and that not every Android device has the right sensors. With the right device the app can collect data like air pressure, ambient temperature and even brightness. But even then, Weathersignal is quite basic and has a few quirks — like telling me my Nexus 7 is sitting in 37-degree Fahrenheit weather, when it’s plainly a warm day.

But as more people use the app, the team should be able to refine the algorithms to make better calculations and predictions about current and future weather. For now, this app as something amusing to contribute to, not a reliable weather app based on crowdsourced data.

If you are trying to learn a new language, it is worth trying Duolingo, a great example of a crowdsource app. The app is like many that teach languages, with guided lessons on vocabulary, verb use and pronunciation. It’s graphically very attractive, with straightforward menus. There is also a rewards scheme that makes learning a new language a gamelike experience.

But where other apps simply test your new language skills on preset examples, Duolingo takes another approach. As you move through the lessons, either in the app or on the complementary Web site, you may find yourself being asked to translate other Web sites or documents. This means that you’re part of a crowdsourced translation engine — a point of pride when you get something right, and probably no harm done if you get it wrong, since the app will rely on the wisdom of the crowd. The apps, on iOS and Android, are free, but at the moment available only for students of French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and English.

Find it difficult to make a decision? Then you might want to download Seesaw, a crowdsource app that is all about decision making. If you’re undecided on something, Seesaw can poll your social network friends with a simple click-to-vote mechanism.

If you’re considering a new haircut, for example, you could put photos of four different haircuts into a status update on Seesaw and submit a question like “Which one is best?” Your Seesaw friends, added from your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account, can click on the picture they like best. They can also add a comment, if so inclined. It’s simple and easy to use, and you may be surprised by the answers. The app is photo-centric, though, so it may not suit all types of questions. It’s free on iOS.

Finally, check out the crowdsource video app Pixorial Krowds on iOS and Android, an app for sharing video of an event or location. The idea is that if you’re attending something like a music festival you can see what’s going on from other attendees’ perspectives. The interface is a little confusing, but the app is free.

Crowdsourcing apps are most useful when you actively take part and share data. But do check the apps’ privacy policies to be certain that you’re comfortable sharing the information that you are submitting.

Quick Call

Yahoo’s Fantasy Football apps have just been updated with a valuable new feature: They can now connect users to a live draft and even set up mock drafts. If you’ve never played fantasy sports, now is a great time to try out Yahoo’s free app on iOS and Android.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Using Skype or FaceTime

Does Skype work on an iPad for video calls, and, if so, does it have any advantages over Apple’s FaceTime system?

Skype, now owned by Microsoft, does have an app for the iPad. You can find instructions for getting started with it on the Skype site.

One of the biggest advantages Skype has over Apple’s FaceTime app is that you can make audio and video calls to other Skype users around the world on more types of hardware. This includes calling Windows and Mac computers, Android devices, Windows Phone handsets and even certain Skype-enabled televisions and Blu-ray players. Skype-to-Skype calls are free, and for a bit of money, you can call regular telephone numbers.

In comparison, Apple’s FaceTime app is also free for one-to-one video calls, but it only works on certain Apple-made products. These include camera-equipped iOS devices made within the past few years and Macs running OS X 10.6 and later. Still, because it is integrated into the operating system, FaceTime can be a little easier to set up and use if you plan to chat only with people carrying Apple gear.

Video and audio quality in both apps may vary based on network and data traffic issues, especially if you are calling over a 3G or 4G cellular connection instead of Wi-Fi. Since both apps are free for video calls, there is nothing stopping you from using both as you need them — or even adding Google Plus Hangouts into the mix if you are a member there, too.

Apple’s Rivals See an Edge in Using Wireless Accessories

Hotels outfitted guest rooms with alarm clocks containing a telltale wedge of 30 tiny pins that could play music from Apple’s devices and charge their batteries. Retail stores were thick with sound docks and other speaker systems meant to work with Apple gadgets.

But Apple’s iron grip on the digital accessories in hotel rooms, store shelves and living rooms is starting to slip — potentially risking the royalties it earns from accessory makers and, more significant, giving Apple customers more freedom to switch to rival products. That could be an issue for a company whose stock has been shaken in recent months as investors worry that the iPhone business is slowing.

Jeremy Horwitz, editor in chief of iLounge, a Web site devoted to Apple accessories, said Apple’s aggressive control over accessories for its products drove many makers to more open means of connecting devices, which helped feed the success of mobile devices made by other companies.

“At some point Apple’s obsession with having control over everything that is associated with its products may wind up biting it,” Mr. Horwitz said.

The Bluetooth standard for wireless connections has allowed accessory makers to build products that can work with many kinds of devices because they no longer have to worry about a physical hook. Other phone makers like Samsung and tablet-computing device makers like Amazon have become strong alternatives in the eyes of gadget shoppers.

And Apple itself provided an opening for competitors when it changed the way its phones connect to other devices, aggravating both its business partners and consumers.

Now accessory makers are eager, even obliged, to think beyond Apple.

“We’ve had to adapt to new technology, support more devices and meet the growing demands of consumers looking for accessories that can accommodate multiple devices,” said Ezra S. Ashkenazi, chief executive of iHome, one of the biggest makers of iPhone clock radios and other Apple audio accessories. This year, iHome is releasing more products with Bluetooth than ever before, he said.

Apple says it is fine with the wireless direction in which accessories are headed. “Apple provides users with the best wired and wireless connectivity options to work with the broadest range of accessories,” said Tom Neumayr, a spokesman for Apple. “As a result, iOS users have access to the world’s largest ecosystem of options and the most seamless integration with our products.”

Apple expected some grumbling from customers and partners last fall when it introduced in the iPhone 5 a new way for the mobile phone to connect to other devices. But its executives defended the connector, Lightning, because the new, smaller design allowed for slimmer phones and tablets.

While the 30-pin connector can be plugged into an old iPhone in only one way, a Lightning cable works even if it is flipped over.

Apple did not tell accessory makers about the change ahead of time, which is normal for a company known for its secrecy, but it was painful for many of its partners.

“You really don’t know where Apple is going to go next, if they’re going to change to something else down the road,” said Kyle Thompson, director of marketing for Cambridge SoundWorks. “They’ve made a lot of companies like us really nervous.”

That change frustrated partners whose customers had invested in products that used Apple’s old 30-pin connector. Those older devices are incompatible with the latest Apple products without an adapter that Apple sells for $29 to connect to the latest Apple products. Also, the new Lightning connectors are more expensive to license and manufacture than the old ones, electronics makers say.

“A lot of us were bitten pretty badly by the connector transition,” said Ian Geise, senior vice president for marketing and product development at Voxx Accessories Corporation, which makes audio products under RCA, Acoustic Research and other brand names.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q.& A.: Finding and Using Windows Contacts

I tried to follow your instructions for printing out my Windows 7 contacts, but I didn’t find a Contacts app when I searched for it or looked in my Programs menu.

Windows Contacts, which works as a stand-alone address book or companion to the Windows Mail program, arrived with Windows Vista and replaced the older Windows Address Book feature of previous versions of the operating system. Some e-mail programs, like Windows Live Mail and others, may not automatically share their own address books with the Windows Contacts, which may account for missing contacts files in the Contacts folder. (These other e-mail programs, like Microsoft Outlook for example, have their own methods for printing as well.)

If you search for Contacts and find none from the Start menu’s search box, try searching for wab.exe instead. An alternative method for getting to the Contacts folder is to go to the Start menu, search for (or open) the Run box, and type in C:\Users\YourUserName\Contacts (put your own user name in that string, of course). Press the Enter key. Even if your e-mail program’s contacts are not in the Contacts folder, you should see one for yourself that was created when you set up your user account on the computer.

Once the Contacts folder is open on screen, you should see a menu bar along the top edge of the folder window with commands for creating new contacts, editing contacts, printing them and importing contacts from other programs. (Maximize the window or click on a contact if commands seem to be missing.) The contacts themselves appear as individual files within the folder.

If your e-mail program has not stored its addresses in the Contacts folder and you did not manually add them yourself, you might be able to import the information into Contacts so you can manage and print them. Microsoft’s steps for importing and exporting address files between Windows Contacts and other programs outline the process. CSV (Comma Separated Values), vCard and Outlook Express contacts are among the compatible formats; the HowTech.PC site has a YouTube video that demonstrates how to export Windows Live Mail contacts as a CSV file if you want to see the procedure in action. The page also has links to articles for managing contacts and using them with other mail programs in Windows Vista and later.

Exporting and importing contacts between programs may seem like a hassle just to print them out, but it does give you a backup of your address book in case something happens to the computer or your e-mail program. Having a stand-alone manager like Windows Contacts can also save time if you want to look up someone’s mailing address or phone number quickly with a Start menu search for the name without having to switch to your e-mail program.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q.& A.: Using Facebook Chat Heads

I use Facebook on my iPhone quite a bit, but lately these little circles with my friend’s profile pictures have been popping up around the screen. What are these?

The circular images on the screen are Facebook’s new Chat Heads feature, which was included in a recent update to the iOS version of the Facebook app. When you see a Chat Head appear, it means that friend has sent you a message within Facebook.

Tap the picture to read and reply to the message. To dismiss a Chat Head icon, touch the image with your finger and drag it down to the bottom of the screen to a gray X.

The Chat Heads feature first appeared last month as part of the Facebook Home software for certain Android phones. In Facebook Home, Chat Heads can pop up when you are using other apps on the phone to keep you connected with your friends. On the iOS version, however, the Chat Heads are contained within the Facebook app itself.

Judge Allows Pilot Program Using Smartphone Apps to Hail Yellow Taxis

Last month, the justice, Carol E. Huff, issued a temporary restraining order on the plan, granting a short-term victory to the livery and black-car operators who sued the city. The plaintiffs argued, among other points, that the city’s plan would allow drivers to more easily refuse fares and that it discriminated unfairly against older riders who did not use smartphones.

They also said that allowing the use of the apps would violate the city’s longstanding ban on prearranged rides in yellow taxis, giving rise to the same problems wrought by radio communication in yellow taxis more than 25 years ago. In 1985, the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission ruled that medallion taxis would be barred from using two-way radio communication to arrange passenger pickups.

In her decision, Justice Huff wrote that the circumstances were not necessarily analogous.

“Petitioners have not demonstrated that the 1985 radio-dispatch situation with taxis is sufficiently comparable to the proposed e-hail program,” she wrote, “so that the same problems of taxi unavailability and passenger discrimination are destined to occur.”

At a moment when several pillars of the Bloomberg administration’s taxi policy have been threatened by unresolved lawsuits — including its Taxi of Tomorrow plan and efforts to expand street-hailing service outside Manhattan — Tuesday’s decision delivered a much-desired victory for the city.

“The market will ultimately decide which apps rise or fall, and we have an obligation to give the riding public that choice,” David S. Yassky, the city’s taxi commissioner, said in a statement. “Thanks to today’s ruling, they have that choice.”

Randy M. Mastro, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, which include the Livery Roundtable and the Black Car Assistance Corporation, called the ruling “so fundamentally wrong in so many respects that we are contemplating an appeal.”

Smartphone apps are in wide use already for livery and black-car operators. In December, the commission voted to approve a pilot program for the apps in yellow cabs, after several board members appeared poised to oppose a proposed permanent rule change.

Before the vote, as app companies like Uber and Hailo sought to enter the yellow taxi market, the city was criticized for its reluctance to embrace the new technology immediately. Officials said at the time that they could not allow the apps until contracts with payment processors had expired.

On Tuesday, Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive — who once noted that New York City contrasted with “more innovation-friendly cities” like Boston and Toronto — praised the Bloomberg administration as “forward-looking, tech-friendly and visionary.”

Bits Blog: Researchers Find 25 Countries Using Surveillance Software

Thor Swift for The New York Times Bill Marczak, left, and Morgan Marquis-Boire have been studying government use of surveillance software.

Last May, two security researchers volunteered to look at a few suspicious e-mails sent to some Bahraini activists. Almost one year later, the two have uncovered evidence that some 25 governments, many with questionable records on human rights, may be using off-the-shelf surveillance software to spy on their own citizens.

Morgan Marquis-Boire, a security researcher at Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, and Bill Marczak, a computer science doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the e-mails contained surveillance software that could grab images off computer screens, record Skype chats, turn on cameras and microphones and log keystrokes. The word “FinSpy” appeared in the spyware code. FinSpy is spyware sold by the Gamma Group, a British company that says it sells monitoring software to governments solely for criminal investigations.

Now, one year later, Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak have found evidence that FinSpy is being run off servers in 25 countries, including Ethiopia and Serbia, without oversight.

Until Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak stumbled upon FinSpy last May, security researchers had tried, unsuccessfully, for a year to track it down. FinSpy gained notoriety in March 2011 after protesters raided Egypt’s state security headquarters and discovered a document that appeared to be a proposal by the Gamma Group to sell FinSpy to the government of President Hosni Mubarak .

Martin J. Muench, a Gamma Group managing director, has said his company does not disclose its customers but that Gamma Group sold its technology to governments only to monitor criminals. He said that it was most frequently used “against pedophiles, terrorists, organized crime, kidnapping and human trafficking.”

But evidence suggests the software is being sold to governments where the potential for abuse is high. “If you look at the list of countries that Gamma is selling to, many do not have a robust rule of law,” Mr. Marquis-Boire said. “Rather than catching kidnappers and drug dealers, it looks more likely that it is being used for politically motivated surveillance.”

As of last year, Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak, with other researchers at Rapid7, CrowdStrike and others, had found command-and-control servers running the spyware in just over a dozen countries. They have since scanned the entire Internet for FinSpy.

The Munk School is publishing their updated findings on Wednesday. The list of countries with servers running FinSpy is now Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Britain, Brunei, Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Netherlands, Qatar, Serbia, Singapore, Turkmenistan, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Vietnam.

In Ethiopia, FinSpy was disguised in e-mails that were specifically aimed at political dissidents. The e-mails lured targets to click on pictures of members of Ginbot 7, an Ethiopian opposition group. When they clicked on the pictures, FinSpy downloaded to their machines and their computers began communicating with a local server in Ethiopia.

“This continues the theme of FinSpy deployments with strong indications of politically motivated targeting,” the researchers wrote in their report.

A Turkmenistan server running the software belonged to a range of I.P. addresses specifically assigned to the ministry of communications. Turkmenistan is the first clear-cut case of a government running the spyware off its own computer system. Human Rights Watch has called Turkmenistan one of the world’s “most repressive countries” and warned that dissidents faced “constant threat of government reprisal.”

In Vietnam, the researchers found evidence that FinSpy was running on Android-powered phones. They found one Android phone infected with FinSpy that was sending text messages back to a Vietnamese telephone number. That finding was particularly troubling, researchers say, given recent clampdowns by the nation’s government. Last year, Vietnam introduced censorship laws that prohibit bloggers from speaking out against the country’s ruling Communist party. According to Human Rights Watch, at least 40 people had since been convicted and sentenced to prison terms. Many are now serving terms ranging from three to 13 years.

The sale of surveillance technology is still largely unregulated, but Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak’s findings have prompted greater scrutiny. Responding to their findings last fall, Germany’s foreign minister Guido Westerwelle called for an Europe-­wide ban on the export of surveillance technology to repressive regimes. And last month, Privacy International and other groups filed complaints with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development against Gamma Group and Trovicor GmbH, a German company that also sells surveillance software.

“I don’t think you can put technology back in the bottle,” said Mr. Marquis-Boire. “I understand why police would want to use this type of technology, but I’m just not for commercial companies selling them to nondemocratic regimes with questionable human rights records.”

The Media Equation: For ‘House of Cards,’ Using Big Data to Guarantee Its Popularity

Or is it?

In any business, the ability to see into the future is the killer app, and Netflix may be getting close with “House of Cards.” The series, directed by David Fincher, starring Kevin Spacey and based on a popular British series, is already the most streamed piece of content in the United States and 40 other countries, according to Netflix. The spooky part about that? Executives at the company knew it would be a hit before anyone shouted “action.”

Netflix, which has 27 million subscribers in the nation and 33 million worldwide, ran the numbers. It already knew that a healthy share had streamed the work of Mr. Fincher, the director of “The Social Network,” from beginning to end. And films featuring Mr. Spacey had always done well, as had the British version of “House of Cards.” With those three circles of interest, Netflix was able to find a Venn diagram intersection that suggested that buying the series would be a very good bet on original programming.

Big bets are now being informed by Big Data, and no one knows more about audiences than Netflix. A third of the downloads on the Internet during peak periods on any given day are devoted to streamed movies from the service, according to Sandvine, a networking provider. And last year, by some estimates, more people watched movies streamed online than on physical DVDs.

Film and television producers have always used data, holding previews for focus groups and logging the results, but as a technology company that distributes and now produces content, Netflix has mind-boggling access to consumer sentiment in real time.

How much data does it have at its fingertips? According to GigaOm, Netflix looks at 30 million “plays” a day, including when you pause, rewind and fast forward, four million ratings by Netflix subscribers, three million searches as well as the time of day when shows are watched and on what devices.

Jonathan Friedland, the company’s chief communications officer, said, “Because we have a direct relationship with consumers, we know what people like to watch and that helps us understand how big the interest is going to be for a given show. It gave us some confidence that we could find an audience for a show like ‘House of Cards.’ ”

In addition, movies and TV shows on the service are annotated with hundreds of tags — metadata descriptors — inserted by viewers commissioned to describe the talent, the action, the tone and the genre, among many, many other things. In the past, those tags were used to recommend other shows from the long tail of content on the service, essentially building profiles based on the preferences of individual subscribers. But now Netflix is commissioning original content because it knows what people want before they do. “There are 33 million different versions of Netflix,” said Joris Evers, the company’s director of global corporate communications.

Based on that information, Netflix bought “House of Cards.” It is also producing new episodes of “Arrested Development,” and in April, it will begin streaming episodes of “Hemlock Grove,” a horror-thriller based on a novel of the same name.

Netflix has always used data to decide which shows to license, and now that expertise is extended to the first-run. And there was not one trailer for “House of Cards,” there were many. Fans of Mr. Spacey saw trailers featuring him, women watching “Thelma and Louise” saw trailers featuring the show’s female characters and serious film buffs saw trailers that reflected Mr. Fincher’s touch.

It is impossible to say that “House of Cards” is a hit because Netflix, to the consternation of some of its more traditional competitors, is not participating in ratings. But social media is thick with mentions of both the new programming and the new paradigm. The show made the front page of The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, and was on the cover of Emmy magazine, a good omen for its awards future. And when your price is as low as Netflix’s — $7.99 a month for streaming — a flurry of buzz can pull plenty of people off the fence.

While careers and entire networks have been made and lost based on the mysterious alchemy of finding a hit, Netflix seems to be making it look easy, or at least making it a product of logic and algorithms as opposed to tradition and instinct.

A cable executive who has talked to Amazon says that its Prime service, a nascent effort to get into original content, will also lean hard on data-driven approaches to determine its programming. The executive, who asked not to be identified because the discussions were private, said it would change the way that business operates sooner than people thought.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com; twitter.com/carr2n

H.P. Slate 7 Tablet Using Android Is Introduced

Hewlett-Packard has introduced the Slate 7, a $169 tablet powered by the Android operating system, a centerpiece of the company’s effort to expand in mobile devices and reduce its dependence on the shrinking personal computer market.

The Slate 7 is H.P.’s latest foray into the consumer tablet market. It follows the failure in 2011 of its WebOS-based TouchPad, which the company stopped selling after just seven weeks, citing poor demand.

Powered by Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the Slate 7 offers Google services including search functions, YouTube and Gmail, as well as Beats Audio for improved sound, H.P. said. The 13-ounce device includes access to apps and digital content through Google Play, and cameras on both sides of the seven-inch screen.

H.P. said it expected American sales of the Slate 7 to begin in April, and said the product offers a “compelling entry point” for people looking to buy tablets.

Google’s Nexus 7 tablet costs $199, as does Amazon.com’s Kindle Fire HD.

H.P. also makes a business tablet, the ElitePad, which is powered by Microsoft’s Windows 8. WebOS had been developed by Palm, which H.P. bought in 2010.

The Slate 7 is part of a multiyear turnaround plan by Meg Whitman, the H.P. chief.

Using Facebook to Announce Bad News

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The iEconomy: In Technology Wars, Using the Patent as a Sword

For three decades, Mr. Phillips had focused on writing software to allow computers to understand human speech. In 2006, he had co-founded a voice recognition company, and eventually executives at Apple, Google and elsewhere proposed partnerships. Mr. Phillips’s technology was even integrated into Siri itself before the digital assistant was absorbed into the iPhone.

But in 2008, Mr. Phillips’s company, Vlingo, had been contacted by a much larger voice recognition firm called Nuance. “I have patents that can prevent you from practicing in this market,” Nuance’s chief executive, Paul Ricci, told Mr. Phillips, according to executives involved in that conversation.

Mr. Ricci issued an ultimatum: Mr. Phillips could sell his firm to Mr. Ricci or be sued for patent infringements. When Mr. Phillips refused to sell, Mr. Ricci’s company filed the first of six lawsuits.

Soon after, Apple and Google stopped returning phone calls. The company behind Siri switched its partnership from Mr. Phillips to Mr. Ricci’s firm. And the millions of dollars Mr. Phillips had set aside for research and development were redirected to lawyers and court fees.

When the first lawsuit went to trial last year, Mr. Phillips won. In the companies’ only courtroom face-off, a jury ruled that Mr. Phillips had not infringed on a broad voice recognition patent owned by Mr. Ricci’s company.

But it was too late. The suit had cost $3 million, and the financial damage was done. In December, Mr. Phillips agreed to sell his company to Mr. Ricci. “We were on the brink of changing the world before we got stuck in this legal muck,” Mr. Phillips said.

Mr. Phillips and Vlingo are among the thousands of executives and companies caught in a software patent system that federal judges, economists, policy makers and technology executives say is so flawed that it often stymies innovation.

Alongside the impressive technological advances of the last two decades, they argue, a pall has descended: the marketplace for new ideas has been corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons.

Vlingo was a tiny upstart on this battlefield, but as recent litigation involving Apple and Samsung shows, technology giants have also waged wars among themselves.

In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.

Patents are vitally important to protecting intellectual property. Plenty of creativity occurs within the technology industry, and without patents, executives say they could never justify spending fortunes on new products. And academics say that some aspects of the patent system, like protections for pharmaceuticals, often function smoothly.

However, many people argue that the nation’s patent rules, intended for a mechanical world, are inadequate in today’s digital marketplace. Unlike patents for new drug formulas, patents on software often effectively grant ownership of concepts, rather than tangible creations. Today, the patent office routinely approves patents that describe vague algorithms or business methods, like a software system for calculating online prices, without patent examiners demanding specifics about how those calculations occur or how the software operates.

As a result, some patents are so broad that they allow patent holders to claim sweeping ownership of seemingly unrelated products built by others. Often, companies are sued for violating patents they never knew existed or never dreamed might apply to their creations, at a cost shouldered by consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer choices.

“There’s a real chaos,” said Richard A. Posner, a federal appellate judge who has helped shape patent law, in an interview. “The standards for granting patents are too loose.”

Almost every major technology company is involved in ongoing patent battles, but the most significant player is Apple, industry executives say, because of its influence and the size of its claims: in August in California, the company won a $1 billion patent infringement judgment against Samsung. Former Apple employees say senior executives made a deliberate decision over the last decade, after Apple was a victim of patent attacks, to use patents as leverage against competitors to the iPhone, the company’s biggest source of profits.

Contest Winner Loses Prize for Using Web Forum

Mr. Scott, 60, made it to the second round for which he created a video that was voted on by Gold Peak Tea fans on Facebook. To his surprise, he won the grand prize. He and his family were elated.

“Everybody is shouting and laughing and crying and so happy,” Mr. Scott said. “It’s just like we won the Super Bowl or won the lottery.”

But the feeling was short-lived. Days later, Mr. Scott was informed that he had violated the terms and conditions of the contest and was disqualified. The reason given was that he had used an online contest forum, a Web site where people who enter crowdsourced digital sweepstakes post links to those contests and ask members to vote for them.

But Mr. Scott did not go away quietly, and Gold Peak Tea finds that it is just the latest company to try to create excitement for its brand on social media only to find that sentiment can quickly turn.

The contest, called “Take the Year Off,” was one of several this year sponsored by marketers like McDonald’s and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority aimed at downtrodden workers looking for respite in a tough economy.

An image on Gold Peak Tea’s Facebook page promoting the contest that showed a woman kneeling against a file cabinet appearing to scream caught Mr. Scott’s attention. “I get it. I see where she is. I understand her,” he said in an interview last week. In his contest entry, Mr. Scott described how his job had taken him away from his family. “I had a family. I had a home,” Mr. Scott’s letter began. “But I let my career defer them. I let my debts outweigh them. I let deadlines sideline them. I let an office, computer, phone, and e-mails crush them.”

Mr. Scott pledged to spend the year off enjoying time with his family — he has four sons, four grandsons, and has been married for more than 35 years. “I’ll enjoy simplicity. Listen to music. Read. Write. Relax. And sip a glass of iced tea — at home,” he wrote in the essay.

In his follow-up video, Mr. Scott is seen at his desk, answering calls, books stacked on his desk, shuffling from office to office.

To increase his chances, Mr. Scott became a member of an online contest forum on About.com and made his pitch to the voters there. Susan Stribling, a representative for Coca-Cola, said the company declined to comment but pointed a reporter to a statement that had been posted on the company’s Facebook page. According to the statement, Mr. Scott had been disqualified for trying “to inappropriately induce members of the public to vote for his submission, a violation of Official Contest Rules.”

In an e-mail to Mr. Scott, Sarah Tabb, an associate brand manager for Gold Peak Tea, cited Section 6B of the contest rules which states that finalists were prohibited from obtaining votes by “offering prizes or other inducements to members of the public, vote farming, or any other activity that artificially inflates such finalists votes as determined by sponsor in its sole discretion.”

Sandra Grauschopf a sweepstakes consultant for brands and the writer of the contests and sweepstakes guide on About.com, said the issues with voter forums were complicated for companies. Brands are caught between wanting to drive traffic to their Facebook pages by encouraging consumer voting and managing how those votes are obtained, Ms. Grauschopf said.

“It’s a tough situation for them to be in,” she said of the companies hosting the sweepstakes. “On the other hand, they don’t want to have their image tarnished by other people saying that there is cheating going on.”

In a statement, ePrize, the company the administered the contest on behalf of Coca-Cola, said brands were seeing “success with promotional campaigns online, particularly in social and mobile channels.”

“But along with that, there will be more technologies developed and attempts to abuse the system,” the statement continued. “Of course, there are other instances in which people don’t intend to break the rules but simply do not follow them correctly.”

Mr. Scott defended his use of the forum saying he saw nothing in the rules that prohibited someone from asking for votes. “These were real people,” he said. “Not robotics or the creation of fake Facebook accounts.”

Ms. Grauschopf agreed. “In my opinion, that’s not cheating if those are real people who aren’t being induced.”

Coca-Cola declined to say who tipped the company off to Mr. Scott’s methods.

Ms. Grauschopf said, “It sounds to me like they are saying, we don’t want the public relations problems.”

One such public relations disaster happened with another online voting contest involving American Apparel, the clothing company known for its risqué ads. In 2011, the company held a contest that asked readers to vote on who should be its plus-size model.

Nancy Upton, an entrant, submitted photos of herself in daring poses, including one where she was almost naked from the waist down and another where she was bathing in a tub of salad dressing.

In the end, Ms. Upton was voted the winner, much to the chagrin of American Apparel. After some back and forth, the company decided to select another candidate as the winning model.

In Mr. Scott’s case, Gold Peak Tea chose another entrant’s submission as the winner, despite a number of posts on the company’s Facebook page calling for Mr. Scott to be reinstated as the winner. (Gold Peak Tea has removed some of the posts related to Mr. Scott’s case citing its decency rules for the Facebook page.)

Mr. Scott has since posted a rebuttal on the Gold Peak Tea Facebook page, and has created a Twitter account to support his cause, @GoTeamTheodore. He said he is deeply embarrassed.

Linda A. Goldstein, a partner and chair of the advertising, marketing and media division at the law firm  Manatt, Phelps & Phillips said there was “a very strong” legal precedent in the courts for upholding contest rules.

“There’s a broad discretion for the sponsor to disqualify an entrant,” said Ms. Goldstein, who has worked with Coca-Cola in the past. “The precedent in the courts for upholding the rules in the sponsor’s favor is quite strong.”

Prototype: Using Aluminum to Lighten Manufacturers’ Load

But innovations in their design and manufacture may play an important role in creating a fleet of more environmentally sustainable cars and trucks.

Taylor Hopkins, 24, was part of a five-student research team at Ohio State University that recently created three novel designs for shipping pallets. Ordinary pallets are made of wood; the students’ prototypes are made of aluminum, which lasts longer.

The aluminum pallets are also much lighter than wood pallets, which saves fuel during shipping.

“We were presented with the problem of, try and come up with a new pallet that we thought could make an impact environmentally,” Mr. Hopkins said. “We ended up going with aluminum just because it’s very widely used and it’s lightweight.”

Aluminum is also significantly more expensive than wood, which means that the students’ designs are unlikely to become the industry norm soon. But the technology behind them could be useful to carmakers, which have started to embrace aluminum as a means of building lighter, more fuel-efficient vehicles.

“This project is such an interesting microcosm of the challenges that the transportation industry in total is facing, in moving from heavy steel to lightweight aluminum,” said Randall Scheps, automotive marketing director of Alcoa, and chairman of the aluminum transportation group at the Aluminum Association. Mr. Scheps said the student team looked at various methods of joining, or bonding, metals. It also looked at forming, or bending, metals, and at recycling. “These are all issues that the auto industry is facing,” he said.

Companies and foundations have been looking to young innovators for environmentally sustainable and cost-effective solutions to real-world problems. In the case of the shipping pallets, the project was funded with a grant from the Alcoa Foundation, which wants future engineers to think about use of lightweight materials. (Although the use of aluminum clearly benefits Alcoa, an aluminum company, it did not have to be used in the project.)

It’s an issue that has taken on urgency in Detroit in anticipation of Obama administration fuel-economy regulations that will require American vehicles to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Ford, for instance, that producer of macho, all-terrain trucks, is working on an aluminum version of its popular F-150 pickup.

Dr. Glenn Daehn, a professor of materials science and engineering at Ohio State and the students’ research adviser, says the aluminum shipping pallets are an example of “using simple projects to inject ideas into how we might make lighter-weight door systems or seats” — research that Ohio State is working on with companies like Honda and General Motors.

Mr. Hopkins said welding is an issue in dealing with aluminum. “There’s just a certain property of aluminum that if you heat it up too much, or for too long, it loses a lot of its strength,” he said.

To get around that, the students relied on “conformal interference joining technology,” a method of joining metals through a process involving electromagnetism, as opposed to heat.

Then there was the question of how to make the pallets cost-effective. Aluminum pallets on the market can cost more than $200 each, in part because they are welded by hand. Aluminum pallets are used to ship materials that must be kept sterile, or that will be stored for long periods.

But the students’ models are all estimated to cost less than $75 each. That was achieved by making the designs simple enough so they could be mass-produced.

“They weren’t some crazy designs that would take 20 hours to produce, where you’d have to do it one at a time,” Mr. Hopkins said. “Our designs can be automated. They only have two, separate pieces in a couple of them.” That makes it possible to “knock them out in a short amount of time,” he said.

WHILE the project could eventually affect how cars are manufactured, it may not change the world’s shipping pallets. According to Edgar Deomano, technical director of the National Wooden Pallet and Container Association, wood pallets, which account for 90 percent of the domestic market, are not going away, mainly because of cost.

“A recycled, or repaired, wood pallet could go for as low as $3 each,” Mr. Deomano said.

As for the argument that wooden shipping pallets are responsible for deforestation, he said: “That’s a false impression. Our industry is able to recycle pallets again and again. You don’t have to cut down more trees, you just have to repair existing pallets.”

Dr. Daehn says he remains hopeful, however, that a company will “step forward and commercialize” the new aluminum shipping pallets.

“We need more than a student project to do that, but I think we’ve shown them the promise is there.”

In the meantime, the project has already served Mr. Hopkins well. After graduating from Ohio State in June, he was hired as a metallurgist at Valbruna Slater Stainless in Fort Wayne, Ind.

“It was definitely one of my résumé highlights,” he said.

Using Video to Teach Washington Teachers

In deference to a world enthralled by shows like “Extreme Makeover” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” the public school district in Washington has hired a reality television company to produce videos intended to improve the skills of its teachers.

The 80 videos, 5 to 15 minutes in length, are peppered with quick jump cuts, slick screen labels and a jaunty soundtrack. In short interviews and classroom snippets, the district’s highest-performing teachers demonstrate how they teach a range of lessons, from adding decimal numbers to guiding students of differing ability levels through a close reading of the Marshall Plan.

The videos, financed by a $900,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, were developed as a complement to Washington’s evaluation system, known as Impact, in which teachers are judged on student test scores and classroom observations.

Through these evaluations, versions of which are being put in place across the country, teachers receive feedback on the areas where they need to improve, as well as a numerical rating. But many of Washington’s teachers complained that they needed examples of the highest performing level.

“Teachers were saying to us, ‘Just be very clear about what good teaching looks like,’ ” said Kaya Henderson, Washington’s schools chancellor.

Because teachers spend most of their days isolated in their own classrooms, they rarely get a chance to observe their peers. The videos give them a way to peek behind the closed doors of their colleagues.

“Some things are much more easily conveyed through video than just words and text,” said Dan Cogan-Drew, director of digital learning at Achievement First, which runs nonprofit charter schools in Connecticut and New York and is among several charter groups — including KIPP and Uncommon Schools — that use videos for professional development.

Now, with new national curriculum standards driving teachers to modify their longstanding teaching practices, a broad range of school districts, universities, companies and nonprofits are rushing to develop online video libraries showing model teaching.

A nonprofit group allied with the New York State Department of Education is developing a series of about 200 videos demonstrating lessons aligned with the Common Core standards for reading and math that 45 states and the District of Columbia have adopted. Teaching Channel, a nonprofit, has a collection of more than 500 professionally produced videos of teachers recommended by school districts and other teacher organizations. The University of Michigan is indexing about 16,000 videos of fourth- through ninth-grade English and math teachers in six urban districts shot by researchers financed by the Gates Foundation.

Betterlesson.com, a popular sharing site for lesson plans, is working to develop a video component. And hundreds of amateur clips have been uploaded to YouTube by individual teachers.

Given this growing mountain of videos, “as much effort needs to be put into how to use this stuff as collecting tons of it,” said Deborah Loewenberg Ball, dean of the University of Michigan School of Education.

Education experts warn that video needs to be part of a broader program of professional development, comparing the use of video in teaching to how it is used by athletes.

A diver, for example, might want to watch clips of a top-performing competitor, said Thomas McDougal, executive director of the Lesson Study Alliance, a nonprofit education consultancy in Chicago. “But can the diver now go into competition, ready to do that dive? No.” Mr. McDougal said.

In Washington, evaluators and principals will recommend specific videos to teachers. Jill Nyhus, senior director of technology for the Washington schools, said principals or instructional coaches would also convene gatherings where teachers could discuss the videos.

Ms. Henderson, the chancellor, said she was initially skeptical.

“When you come home from a long day of teaching, do you want to whip out a professional development video and watch somebody else teach for 45 minutes? Heck, no,” she said. And, she wondered, “how do you make watching teaching sexy?”

The district hired Judith Stoia, a former producer with a PBS affiliate in Boston, and joined with Big Fish, a local independent production company, to create Reality PD (for professional development).

Jonah E. Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University who has studied teacher evaluation systems, said he was not convinced that the lowest performing teachers would “watch a video and a light bulb goes off.” But with extra coaching, he said, teachers in the middle range might well improve.

Dwight Davis, a fifth-grade teacher in Northeast Washington who has been rated “effective” three years running, said that after watching a video of Melanie Agnew, a 12th-grade English teacher at Calvin Coolidge High School, leading a class in analyzing “The Man With the Hoe,” a poem by Edwin Markham, he wanted to apply some of her techniques. “I said, ‘You know what? Why can’t I just use this and add this and take this away?’ ” he said.

But the video was just a beginning. “I was like, ‘What was your first step, and then what was your second step?’ ” said Mr. Davis, who has taught for nine years. “I really wanted to ask the teacher questions.”

State of the Art: On Touch Screens, Rest Your Finger by Using a Stylus - State of the Art

Well, in that case, thousands of people are happily blowing it every day. The stylus is one of the most popular accessories in the touch-screen age.

Mr. Jobs’s point, of course, was that you don’t need a stylus. Everything on the iPhone and iPad — every button, slider, list item — is designed to be big enough for a fat fingertip. But a stylus can be handy when you’re wearing gloves, you have long nails, or you’re a germophobe.

Then there’s the precision thing. Now, technically, a stylus is no more precise than a finger. Most touch screens these days, including Apple’s, are capacitive screens: they ignore touches by pens, toothpicks and almost anything else not made of flesh. But they require a fairly big contact area (a diameter of four millimeters) to register a touch, so a stylus needs a similarly broad tip.

Even so, a stylus feels more precise. Part of that is visibility: it blocks less of your view. And holding a penlike stick may be more comfortable than maintaining pointing position for hours, especially when drawing and writing. Don’t even think about playing Draw Something without a stylus.

I rounded up 40 styluses from Just Mobile, BoxWave, Griffin, Hand, SuckUK, Hard Candy, Hub, Kensington, Kuel, Logiix, MediaDevil, oStylus, Studio Neat, Targus and Wacom; even then, I’m sure I missed a few. I tested them in art apps like Paper and Sketchbook Pro, in note-taking apps like Penultimate and in everyday navigation on tablets and phones. Next time, I’ll tackle something less labor-intensive, like solving the energy crisis.

Here’s a guide to a panoply of styluses, organized by the problems that their designs address. (Most come in various colors.)

PROBLEM: TOO MUCH BAGGAGE A number of companies offer combo stylus/ink pens. On some, the rubber tip is on the end of the cap. That includes premium, handsome twist-open models: the hexagonal-barreled aluminum AluPen Pro ($33) and the Mont Blanc look-alike Kensington Virtuoso Signature ($23). They’re beautiful, but when you’re using the rubber end, the ink end is pointing at your face — a weird, upside-down feeling.

The perfectly weighted Wacom Bamboo Duo ($36) and shiny, polished Targus Executive Stylus and Pen ($29) don’t have that problem. Their caps click onto the end you’re not using.

The Hard Candy Capacitive iPad Stylus and Pen ($35) and nearly identical Gumdrop ($35) are striking, mirror-finish, double-ended bullets. Pull off one cap for stylus, the other cap for ink. Unfortunately, you don’t know which end is which — and there’s nowhere to stow the cap while you’re working.

PROBLEM: MUSHY RUBBER TIPS Most stylus tips are black, bulbous, mushy rubber bulbs, meant to mimic your fingertip. The choices range from the beautifully weighted Wacom Bamboo ($25), to the blasted-aluminum hexagonal heft of the AluPen ($15), to the bare-bones Amazon.com models labeled “Generic” — three for $1.18.

For a little more money, you can get a nicer stylus with a retractable tip, like the penlike Kuel H12 ($20). Its barrel is made of “Harmless Material Plated Brass.” (Whew!)

The black rubber tips glide nicely across the glass, but they wear or tear over time. And they’re so fat, you feel as if you’re drawing with a sausage.

There are alternatives. On BoxWave’s hollow-feeling EverTouch Capacitive Stylus ($14), the tip is covered with a fine fabric mesh that’s firmer and more secure than rubber. The company says it doesn’t require replacement like rubber, and, as a bonus, actually cleans the screen while you use it.

Nomad’s Compose stylus ($26), meanwhile, is — get this — a paintbrush. Now, the iPad still detects only a single point of contact among the bristles; don’t think you’re going to get brushlike paint strokes (unless you have an app that simulates that effect). Still, artists love the familiar feeling of gently bending bristles.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 3, 2012

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about styluses for use on touch-screen devices, described incorrectly the size of the contact point necessary to register a touch on most touch screens. They require a contact area with a diameter of four millimeters, not four square millimeters.

State of the Art: On Touch Screens, Rest Your Finger by Using a Stylus - State of the Art

Well, in that case, thousands of people are happily blowing it every day. The stylus is one of the most popular accessories in the touch-screen age.

Mr. Jobs’s point, of course, was that you don’t need a stylus. Everything on the iPhone and iPad — every button, slider, list item — is designed to be big enough for a fat fingertip. But a stylus can be handy when you’re wearing gloves, you have long nails, or you’re a germophobe.

Then there’s the precision thing. Now, technically, a stylus is no more precise than a finger. Most touch screens these days, including Apple’s, are capacitive screens: they ignore touches by pens, toothpicks and almost anything else not made of flesh. But they require a fairly big contact area (a diameter of four millimeters) to register a touch, so a stylus needs a similarly broad tip.

Even so, a stylus feels more precise. Part of that is visibility: it blocks less of your view. And holding a penlike stick may be more comfortable than maintaining pointing position for hours, especially when drawing and writing. Don’t even think about playing Draw Something without a stylus.

I rounded up 40 styluses from Just Mobile, BoxWave, Griffin, Hand, SuckUK, Hard Candy, Hub, Kensington, Kuel, Logiix, MediaDevil, oStylus, Studio Neat, Targus and Wacom; even then, I’m sure I missed a few. I tested them in art apps like Paper and Sketchbook Pro, in note-taking apps like Penultimate and in everyday navigation on tablets and phones. Next time, I’ll tackle something less labor-intensive, like solving the energy crisis.

Here’s a guide to a panoply of styluses, organized by the problems that their designs address. (Most come in various colors.)

PROBLEM: TOO MUCH BAGGAGE A number of companies offer combo stylus/ink pens. On some, the rubber tip is on the end of the cap. That includes premium, handsome twist-open models: the hexagonal-barreled aluminum AluPen Pro ($33) and the Mont Blanc look-alike Kensington Virtuoso Signature ($23). They’re beautiful, but when you’re using the rubber end, the ink end is pointing at your face — a weird, upside-down feeling.

The perfectly weighted Wacom Bamboo Duo ($36) and shiny, polished Targus Executive Stylus and Pen ($29) don’t have that problem. Their caps click onto the end you’re not using.

The Hard Candy Capacitive iPad Stylus and Pen ($35) and nearly identical Gumdrop ($35) are striking, mirror-finish, double-ended bullets. Pull off one cap for stylus, the other cap for ink. Unfortunately, you don’t know which end is which — and there’s nowhere to stow the cap while you’re working.

PROBLEM: MUSHY RUBBER TIPS Most stylus tips are black, bulbous, mushy rubber bulbs, meant to mimic your fingertip. The choices range from the beautifully weighted Wacom Bamboo ($25), to the blasted-aluminum hexagonal heft of the AluPen ($15), to the bare-bones Amazon.com models labeled “Generic” — three for $1.18.

For a little more money, you can get a nicer stylus with a retractable tip, like the penlike Kuel H12 ($20). Its barrel is made of “Harmless Material Plated Brass.” (Whew!)

The black rubber tips glide nicely across the glass, but they wear or tear over time. And they’re so fat, you feel as if you’re drawing with a sausage.

There are alternatives. On BoxWave’s hollow-feeling EverTouch Capacitive Stylus ($14), the tip is covered with a fine fabric mesh that’s firmer and more secure than rubber. The company says it doesn’t require replacement like rubber, and, as a bonus, actually cleans the screen while you use it.

Nomad’s Compose stylus ($26), meanwhile, is — get this — a paintbrush. Now, the iPad still detects only a single point of contact among the bristles; don’t think you’re going to get brushlike paint strokes (unless you have an app that simulates that effect). Still, artists love the familiar feeling of gently bending bristles.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 3, 2012

The State of the Art column on Thursday, about styluses for use on touch-screen devices, described incorrectly the size of the contact point necessary to register a touch on most touch screens. They require a contact area with a diameter of four millimeters, not four square millimeters.

Bicyclists Using Cameras to Capture Accidents

But the video camera Mr. Wilder had strapped to his head caught the whole episode. After watching a recording of the incident later, Mr. Wilder gave the license plate number to the police and a suspect was eventually charged with leaving the scene of an accident.

“Without the video, we wouldn’t know who did it,” said Mr. Wilder, 33, who was bruised and scraped in the crash.

Cyclists have long had a rocky coexistence with motorists and pedestrians, who often criticize bike riders for a confrontational attitude, and for blowing through stop signs or otherwise exempting themselves from the rules of the road. Now small cameras — the cycling equivalent of the black box on an airplane — are becoming an intermediary in the relationship, providing high-tech evidence in what is sometimes an ugly contest between people who ride the roads on two wheels and those who use four.

Video from these cameras has begun to play an invaluable role in police investigations of a small number of hit-and-runs and other incidents around the country, local authorities say. Lawyers who specialize in representing bicyclists say they expect the use of cameras for this purpose to increase as awareness of the devices goes up and their prices, now starting at around $200, come down.

Some riders even argue that the technology will encourage cyclists to keep themselves in check during dust-ups with drivers.

“I know my actions before and after some event are going to be recorded if I’m the one being a jerk,” Mr. Wilder said. “It makes me want to be careful.”

Bicyclists say cameras can also deter motorist harassment, a problem that many complain about and that cities like Los Angeles and Berkeley, Calif., have sought to combat with new laws.

“It’s a fact of life that on American roads that you get punked, cut off purposely, harassed, not once but on a regular basis,” said Bob Mionske, a former Olympic cyclist who is now a lawyer representing bicyclists in Portland, Ore. “If motorists start to hear about bikes having cameras, they’re going to think twice about running you off the road.”

Gary Souza, a cyclist in Sacramento, said something like that happened to him. He wears a camera on his helmet during his 50-minute commute each way between his home and office. He began riding with the device this year after buying a $7,000 velomobile, a three-wheeled recumbent cycle with a shell around it.

“Even though it’s insured, if anything happens I figured I wanted to get it on camera,” said Mr. Souza, who works in information technology for the state of California.

A couple of months ago, Mr. Souza said, a motorist became upset after the cyclist crossed in front of his vehicle to make a turn. The driver got out of his car to confront Mr. Souza, who pointed to the camera on his head.

“I said, ‘Don’t be stupid,’ ” Mr. Souza said. “He quickly ran back to his car. I’m certain I avoided a couple blows.”

The new cameras, which have started to catch on in the last few years, are meant for shooting video and photos while skiing, surfing and doing other sports. Likewise, many cyclists use them to memorialize their rides.

GoPro and Contour make popular models; GoPro says sales through bike retailers have nearly doubled so far this year from the same period last year.

One of the most prominent bicycle crash videos so far was recorded in April by two Brazilian riders who were climbing the hills of Berkeley when a black car knocked them down and sped off. Neither bicyclist was seriously injured, according to the Berkeley police. The video of the crash has been viewed more than 362,000 times on YouTube.

The Berkeley police identified the car’s license plate and later found the man the vehicle was registered to. They believe he falsely reported his car stolen to cover up for the driver of the car and are still investigating the incident, said Capt. Andrew Greenwood, a spokesman for the police.

On a recent Friday evening, as the streets of downtown Washington were jammed with cars heading home, Mr. Wilder pedaled away wearing a camera on his forehead, looking like a spelunker wearing a headlamp. He scooted between parked cars and traffic on the road, sometimes with less than a foot of space between him and moving vehicles.

The video Mr. Wilder shot of his crash in Washington, which occurred last August, at first did not seem as if it would help much in tracking down the motorist who had struck him. But Mr. Wilder, who works in the photography department of National Geographic, examined the video frame by frame until he discovered a clear picture of the vehicle’s license plate, captured while he was lying on the ground.

The District of Columbia’s office of the attorney general charged the motorist, John W. Diehl, with leaving the scene of an accident. Federal prosecutors, who handle felony cases in the district, are also looking into the case.

Mr. Diehl’s lawyer, Adam R. Hunter, declined to comment. Mr. Diehl has pleaded not guilty, said a spokesman for the attorney general.

Mr. Wilder said, “Most cyclists don’t use cameras so Mr. Diehl may have assumed he could assault and drive away anonymously.”