Pacific Standard just published my piece on mapping rivers above and below the surface in its January/February 2016 issue. This was a fun one that grew out of reading a 2012 NYT blog post about a nascent river-mapping project by a guy named Kristian Gustavson. For years, I just couldn’t get the idea of river mapping out of my mind. So I contacted Gustavson and he was kind enough to host me on one of his river runs down the Sacramento back in 2014. I got an up-close view of the kind of cowboy science he and his team were doing.

It was great, but I needed to find others who were collecting compelling visual data for monitoring waterways. Turns out, there’s a growing need to track river ecosystems because dams are being removed and more rivers are flowing freer than they have for decades. I was excited, then, to come across FishViews, a company out of the Pacific Northwest that’s tackling the challenge of river mapping with serious verve and engineering muscle. Inspiring stuff. Add in the non-profit American Rivers’ mapping collaboration with Google, there seemed to be enough activity around river mapping to warrant a full fledged story.

Here’s an excerpt:

The thing about a wild river is that it’s not all rapids. A wild river—a protected resource in the United States and other countries—can be a trickle or a torrential flow; its water can be silty or clear; it can carve through canyons or spread out over grasslands; and a single wild river can be all these depending on the season and terrain.

The thing that makes a river wild is that its course hasn’t been significantly diverted by dams or other engineering projects: It experiences all its seasons and naturally supports its plants and animals. Simply put, a wild river flows free.

I didn’t know it until recently, but I’d never seen a wild river. Almost every waterway that looms large in the American psyche is significantly engineered, or, more often, over-engineered. The Colorado, Columbia, and Mississippi, just to name a few, are all significantly dammed to make reservoirs of ready water for communities far and wide.

This summer, though, I did experience a wild river, one of the few remaining in the West—virtually. I was able to pull up water-level shots and take a float trip down the Yampa in northwest Colorado.

You can read the piece here.

I’m pleased to announced that the book I’ve co-authored with Nathan Eagle, Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World, has won a 2015 PROSE Award. This award goes to a best-in-category academic book; we won in the Computing and Information Science category. The grand prize winner this year was Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. Not bad company.

To see a list of all PROSE winners, go here.

I wrote an essay for the most recent issue of Pacific Standard in which I investigate the extent to which modern technology deceives us. In some of these deceptions we play an active role. I’m thinking, in particular, of placebo buttons (elevator close buttons or crosswalk buttons that don’t actually perform their stated function). We press them to as if we’ve done our duty, but in reality many elevator doors and crosswalks work on their own timers.

But there are other examples of deceptive technologies that aren’t so harmless. These include online ads or shopping carts that trick us into clicks we don’t intend, or confusing settings on social networks that end up allowing our profiles to reveal more information than we intend.

My piece for Pacific Standard looks at a variety of modes of deception in technology and poses the question: how we might think about designing deception into future computer systems? And ultimately, how exactly should our artificial intelligence lie to us?

Click here to read the full essay.

Click here to listen to me discuss deceptive technology on New Hampshire Public Radio’s “Word of Mouth.”