Excerpts

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“[They] All Elected Republican Senate Candidates Who Oppose The Affordable Care Act”

November 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Two things about the midterm elections: It’s bizarre that a state with the population of Rhode Island has as many national senators as California. More representative of state demarcations than the people. Also: Many Americans still vote against their best interests, guided by their ideology rather than their reality. From Margot Sanger-Katz in the New York Times:

“In places where the uninsured rate plummeted this year, Republicans still scored big electoral victories.

Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia — states that saw substantial drops in the proportion of their residents without insurance — all elected Republican Senate candidates who oppose the Affordable Care Act. Control of the West Virginia state House of Delegates flipped from Democrats to Republicans. And Arkansas elected Republican supermajorities to both houses of its legislature along with a Republican governor, a situation that could imperil the Medicaid expansion that helped more than 200,000 of its poorest residents get health insurance.”

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“We Actually Use Less Water Now For All Purposes Than We Did Back In 1970”

November 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It seems almost impossible that the United States uses less water than it did 45 years ago, but that’s the finding of the Pacific Institute. Growing population and villages of computer servers that need constant cooling would suggest we’re thirstier than ever, but in addition to improved conservation methods, globalization and outsourcing have played roles in the apparent reduction. From Brad Plumer at Vox:

“The US economy keeps expanding and the population keeps growing. But we actually use less water now for all purposes than we did back in 1970. That includes freshwater for our showers and toilets. It includes farm irrigation. It also includes withdrawals of both fresh and saline water to cool our fossil fuel and nuclear power plants.

The underlying data comes from a new report by the US Geological Survey, which notes that water for power plants (45 percent) and irrigation (33 percent) still made up most water withdrawals in the US as of 2010. But use in both of those areas has been declining over time.

Some of the credit goes to major efficiency gains: Power plants have implemented more efficient cooling systems that either recirculate water or use ‘dry’ cooling. More and more farmers are turning to drip irrigation and other efficient watering methods (though this is far from universal). Inside homes, toilets and showers have become much more efficient. And recycling of wastewater has become more common in some cities.

But that’s not the whole story: The USGS also notes that some manufacturing facilities that once used a fair bit of water for industrial purposes have moved overseas.”

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“It May Represent Another Step Towards Durable, Practical, Printed Guns—Even Semi-Automatic Ones”

November 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As we become faster, cheaper and even more out of control, as the anarchy of the Internet imposes itself on life in three dimensions, controlling objects, even deadly, semi-automatic ones, will be all but impossible. The future points to things that can be pointed at you–cameras, tricorders, guns, etc. From Andy Greenberg at Wired:

“As 3-D printed guns have evolved over the past 18 months from a science-fictional experiment into a subculture, they’ve faced a fundamental limitation: Cheap plastic isn’t the best material to contain an explosive blast. Now an amateur gunsmith has instead found a way to transfer that stress to a component that’s actually made of metal—the ammunition.

Michael Crumling, a 25-year-old machinist from York, Pennsylvania, has developed a round designed specifically to be fired from 3-D printed guns. His ammunition uses a thicker steel shell with a lead bullet inserted an inch inside, deep enough that the shell can contain the explosion of the round’s gunpowder instead of transferring that force to the plastic body or barrel of the gun. Crumling says that allows a home-printed firearm made from even the cheapest materials to be fired again and again without cracking or deformation. And while his design isn’t easily replicated because the rounds must be individually machined for now, it may represent another step towards durable, practical, printed guns—even semi-automatic ones.”

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“The Greatest Tragedy Of The Emergent AI Technopanic That Musk Fuels Is That It May Reduce Human Autonomy”

November 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Elon Musk, spurred on in part by his reading of Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, recently has been warning of the existential crisis Artificial Intelligence poses. In a Slate piece that’s, of course, contrarian, Adam Elkus takes the Tesla technologist to task for what he sees as technopanic. I don’t believe we’ll survive as a species without advanced AI, but it certainly possesses its own extinction threats, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with leaders in the field addressing them. From Elkus:

“When public figures like Musk characterize emerging technologies in mystical, alarmist, and metaphorical terms, they abandon the very science and technology that forged innovations like Tesla cars for the superstition and ignorance of what Carl Sagan famously dubbed the ‘demon-haunted world.’ Instead of helping users understand, adapt to, and even empathize with the white-collar robot that may be joining their workplace, Musk’s remarks encourage them to fear and despise what they don’t understand. It is fitting that Musk’s remarks come so close to Halloween, as his rhetoric resembles that of the village elder in an old horror movie who whips up the villagers to bear pitchforks and torches to kill the monster in the decrepit old castle up the hill.

The greatest tragedy of the emergent AI technopanic that Musk fuels is that it may reduce human autonomy in a world that may one day be driven by increasingly autonomous machine intelligence. Experts tell us that emerging AI technologies will fundamentally reshape everything from romantic relationships to national security. They could be wrong, as AI has an unfortunate history of failing to live up to expectations. Let’s assume, however, that they are right. Why would it be in the public interest to—through visions of demons, wizards, and warlocks—contribute to an already growing divide between the technologists who make the self-driving cars and the rest of us who will ride in them?”

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“The Device Of The Future For Books Is The Phone”

November 5, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m sorry, but I’m just not reading books on a phone. Of course, what’s true for me may not be so for the broader world.

From Ellis Hamburger’s Verge interview with Willem Van Lancker, co-founder of the Oyster book app:

Question:

Where are people reading more, tablets, phones, or on the web?

Willem Van Lancker:

We’ve always been really big believers that the device of the future for books is the phone. That’s the first thing we went to publishers with when we started talking about the differentiation of Oyster, that we can provide the best possible mobile experience.

It’s hard to get the data on this with Android, because, what is a tablet? But between iPhone and iPad, it’s a 50 / 50 split. It might even be higher on the phone in recent months over the iPad. This is an app that people use on their phone constantly, and we see the actual activity spiking during the week at lunchtime, and through the evening and peaks around midnight, and on the weekends it’s pretty sustained. Unlike a lot of products, our biggest days are Saturdays and Sundays, but when we added the web reader, you see it spiking on weekdays because people are reading during work.

We thought about making a button you could hit that would make Oyster look like Microsoft Word like they do for March Madness. It would be funny to bring that to books.

Question:

Why did your gut tell you that people are going to be reading on phones in the future?

Willem Van Lancker:

It was my own behavior. Even when I’m in bed at night, I have an iPad mini with Retina and I still use my phone. And I have an iPhone 6 now, which is even better.•

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“Drunks Invariably Run Up To Grab His Beard Without Asking”

November 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

There’s really no representative person who raises a 340-pound log above his head. Case in point: Andrew Palmer, the seventh strongest man in America (or at least on the nation’s strongman-competition circuit), a mountainous software engineer who moonlights by moving trees with his limbs, while performing in a surprisingly subdued modern Herculean sideshow. An excerpt follows from “Carry That Weight,” Alex Pappademas’ very fun Grantland portrait of Palmer.

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There are no typical strongmen. Michael Caruso is also a microbiologist. The Bulgarian Dimitar Savatinov came to the sport after a stint as an actual strongman with Ringling Brothers, where his act, according to the web site Rogue Fitness, involved “laying [sic] on broken glass while a board on his chest had twelve performers dancing on it, bending iron bars, [and] holding and spinning seven girls on a  human carousel[.]“ Five days a week, Andrew Palmer works as a software engineer at a startup in Seattle. Before that he worked for Microsoft. He played high school football and was briefly the only 300-pound forward on the school soccer team. After college, he slowed down, gained desk-job weight. He started training for his first strongman contest — the 2008 NorCal Winter Strongman Challenge, in Concord, California — the way you might set your sights on a half-marathon. It was a reason to go to the gym. He figured he’d do it and go to the contest and get his ass kicked. Instead he came in second, just behind a more experienced strongman named Chris Grantano. That was how it started.

Palmer had some issues with depression when he was younger, and the lifting helps with that. It helps him sleep. It’s almost like meditation. It does what meditation is supposed to do — it takes him off the wheel of thought and experience for a little while. “When you’re grinding out reps,” he told me in Vegas, “you fall into a tunnel vision where there’s literally nothing but the movement. You’re doing that movement over and over, and then it stops, and you come back, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m back. I remember who I am again.’”

The trick is having an existence to come back to. Palmer likes having a circle of friends who don’t do what he does. In recent months, his Instagram feed has included blurry concert photos of Echo & the Bunnymen at the Showbox and Erasure at the 9:30 Club and EMA at a music festival in Portland. Palmer goes to a lot of rock festivals, even though whenever he’s in a crowded place with alcohol flowing, drunks invariably run up to grab his beard without asking, the way strangers feel entitled to touch a pregnant woman’s belly. Palmer likes a few beers, Palmer likes a hang. “I know guys who would never drink a beer except for the night after a contest,” he says. “More power to you, but I’m gonna drink beer more often than that. And if that means I don’t ever take top three at World’s Strongest Man, I’ll deal with that, because otherwise I could go crazy.”•

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“C’mon, Andy!”:

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“Welcome To The Beginning Of What Is Being Touted As The Internet’s Next Wave”

November 4, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Internet of Things is wonderful–and terrible. How valuable will be the aggregated information when all objects report back to the cloud and the network effect takes hold, and how impossible it will be to opt out, how unfortunately that information will sometimes be used. If we go from the ten million sensors currently connected to the Internet to 100 trillion by 2030 as theorist Jeremy Rifkin predicts, the next digital revolution will have taken place, with all the good and bad that entails. The opening of Sue Halpern’s New York Review of Books analysis of a slew of new titles about how tomorrow may find us all tethered:

“Every day a piece of computer code is sent to me by e-mail from a website to which I subscribe called IFTTT. Those letters stand for the phrase ‘if this then that,’ and the code is in the form of a ‘recipe’ that has the power to animate it. Recently, for instance, I chose to enable an IFTTT recipe that read, ‘if the temperature in my house falls below 45 degrees Fahrenheit, then send me a text message.’ It’s a simple command that heralds a significant change in how we will be living our lives when much of the material world is connected—like my thermostat—to the Internet.

It is already possible to buy Internet-enabled light bulbs that turn on when your car signals your home that you are a certain distance away and coffeemakers that sync to the alarm on your phone, as well as WiFi washer-dryers that know you are away and periodically fluff your clothes until you return, and Internet-connected slow cookers, vacuums, and refrigerators. ‘Check the morning weather, browse the web for recipes, explore your social networks or leave notes for your family—all from the refrigerator door,’ reads the ad for one.

Welcome to the beginning of what is being touted as the Internet’s next wave by technologists, investment bankers, research organizations, and the companies that stand to rake in some of an estimated $14.4 trillion by 2022—what they call the Internet of Things (IoT). Cisco Systems, which is one of those companies, and whose CEO came up with that multitrillion-dollar figure, takes it a step further and calls this wave ‘the Internet of Everything,’ which is both aspirational and telling. The writer and social thinker Jeremy Rifkin, whose consulting firm is working with businesses and governments to hurry this new wave along, describes it like this:

The Internet of Things will connect every thing with everyone in an integrated global network. People, machines, natural resources, production lines, logistics networks, consumption habits, recycling flows, and virtually every other aspect of economic and social life will be linked via sensors and software to the IoT platform, continually feeding Big Data to every node—businesses, homes, vehicles—moment to moment, in real time. Big Data, in turn, will be processed with advanced analytics, transformed into predictive algorithms, and programmed into automated systems to improve thermodynamic efficiencies, dramatically increase productivity, and reduce the marginal cost of producing and delivering a full range of goods and services to near zero across the entire economy.

In Rifkin’s estimation, all this connectivity will bring on the ‘Third Industrial Revolution,’ poised as he believes it is to not merely redefine our relationship to machines and their relationship to one another, but to overtake and overthrow capitalism once the efficiencies of the Internet of Things undermine the market system, dropping the cost of producing goods to, basically, nothing. His recent book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, is a paean to this coming epoch.

It is also deeply wishful, as many prospective arguments are, even when they start from fact.”

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“If Banks Can Be Hacked, Why Not Aircraft?”

November 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A terrorist remotely taking control of a plane is very, very unlikely. Hacking into the system and causing a crash-inducing error (or threatening to activate one to demand ransom) is possible but also not the easiest thing to do at this point. An employee introducing a “ghost” into the machine from the inside is the simplest way to hijack a modern airplane through an act of digital terrorism. That hasn’t happened yet, has it? Has it??? From the Economist:

“How realistic is it for computer hackers to interfere with aircraft while they are in the air, a phenomenon known as cyberjacking? It partly depends on terminology. Hijacking and fully controlling an aircraft by remote means borders on the impossible, according to David Stupples of City University in London, a specialist in communications. But interfering with an aircraft’s systems, including inducing a catastrophic failure, in order to extort money is a distinct possibility, he warns.

There are two ways this could be done, one more likely than the other. The first is a cyber attack from the outside. Passengers increasingly demand internet connectivity for work, games, movies and the like. But drilling holes in fuselages for additional antennae is costly and inefficient. So internet signals are routed through existing communications architecture, such as the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which is used for short messages, or the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), an anti-collision system. As these both send and receive information they can, in theory, be targetted. When aircraft become more connected to the wider world they begin to look, electronically at least, like fixed structures. If banks can be hacked, why not aircraft?

Yet such an attack from outside is unlikely due to the technical challenges of overcoming software architectures that, unlike banks, are currently unfamiliar and largely bespoke. It would be far easier to pay a disgruntled employee to implant malware either directly into the aircraft during a maintenance routine or through the jetway when the aircraft docks to upload the In-Flight Entertainment (IFE) system. (The IFE on the Boeing 787 used to link to the flight control system, but the company have since rectified this, according to Mr Stupples.) Just the threat of activating such a program when a flight is in the air could be enough to trigger a ransom.

So why hasn’t it happened yet?”

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“If Modern Physics Is To Be Believed, We Shouldn’t Be Here”

November 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

On the face of it, the Multiverse seems so very sci-fi-ish, but common sense tells us how unlikely it is that life on Earth turned out how it has. If there were trillions upon trillions of chances humans with smartphones and lattes would result, that would be more plausible. Natalie Wolchover and Peter Byrne’s Quanta article looks at the growing acceptance of the many-universe theory and the difficulties in making measure of it. The opening:

“If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up either of these constants even a little would render the universe unlivable.

To account for our incredible luck, leading cosmologists like Alan Guth and Stephen Hawking envision our universe as one of countless bubbles in an eternally frothing sea. This infinite ‘multiverse’ would contain universes with constants tuned to any and all possible values, including some outliers, like ours, that have just the right properties to support life. In this scenario, our good luck is inevitable: A peculiar, life-friendly bubble is all we could expect to observe.

Many physicists loathe the multivere hypothesis, deeming it a cop-out of infinite proportions. But as attempts to paint our universe as an inevitable, self-contained structure falter, the multiverse camp is growing.

The problem remains how to test the hypothesis.”

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“In The Future, Berners-Lee Sees AI Dominating Communications”

November 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Despite, you know, the issues, I’m happy there’s a World Wide Web, understanding how much it’s enriched my life with its trove of information. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who gifted the globe with double-yous, spoke about his creation and other topics with Lucy Ingham of Factor-Tech. A passage about AI:

“Turning his attention to artificial intelligence, Berners-Lee argues that it was, more or less, already here.

‘Yes, you don’t have a completely human-like assistant helping you with everything,’ he says. ‘But originally, 20 years ago they taught in schools that there are things that people can do and things that computers can do.

‘Computers can do calculations; computers can do lots of data. People can do intuitive things like music and play chess. People can do things which need really sort of very powerful parallel processing, like driving a car, which is the sort of thing that computing can never do.

‘Ok, hello? A large number of those things which were up there as challenging for artificial intelligence actually have quietly gone by. AI has done that.’

In the future, Berners-Lee sees AI dominating communications.

‘As the machines get more powerful, and in something like financial trading in a lot of companies the work is all done by machines. The machines are making the trading decisions, the machines are basically running the company. So that means that communication out there is largely going to be machine communication – it’s going to be data.'”

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“Not Everything Is What It Appears To Be, Missy”

November 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Growing up is bruising in the best of circumstances but imagine the marks that need healing if your father happens to be a serial murderer. That was the reality for Melissa Moore, daughter of Keith Jesperson, the “Happy Face Killer.” In “My Evil Dad,” a new BBC article, she writes of their uncomfortable relationship and how she gradually escaped his dark shadow after the revelation of his awful actions. An excerpt:

One of the things about my dad – which made me very uncomfortable as a young woman – was that he was very explicit about his sexual relationships. For example, he sometimes went into graphic detail about what it had been like sleeping with my mother. He would leer at women in public, make lewd remarks about them, and harass them. That morning in Denny’s Diner was no different – I remember him flirting horribly with the waitress while we sat in a window booth.

It was during this meal that my dad said, “Not everything is what it appears to be, Missy.” And I said, “What do you mean Dad?”

I watched him wrestling with something internally. Then he said: “You know, I have something to tell you, and it’s really important.” There was a long silence before I asked him what it was. “I can’t tell you, sweetie. If I tell you, you will tell the police. I’m not what you think I am, Melissa.”

I felt my stomach drop, like I was on a rollercoaster and had just hit the lowest part of the loop. I had to run to the bathroom. When I returned to the booth I felt calm again and I found to my relief that my dad was willing to just drop the conversation.

But I go back to that incident so often and I think: “If he had told me, what would have happened next? If he had told me about his seven murders – it was very soon to be eight – would I have gone to the police? Having revealed his secrets, would he have given me the chance?”

Could my father have killed me? That has been a huge question mark in my life.•

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“I Believe This Merger Is Coming, And Coming Fast. But Who’s Going To Lead It?”

November 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One thing that drove me crazy during the 2012 Presidential debates was Mitt Romney myopically (and incorrectly) stating that the government’s loan to Tesla Motors was a boondoggle. Not only are such investments wise for business, they’re also matters of national security. Whatever country wins the race to alternative energy and robotics and AI will be the most secure. In a blog post at the Financial Times, Andrew McAfee handicaps the potential leaders of, as he calls it, the Second Machine Age. The opening:

“How much should it worry Germany that the world’s coolest car company no longer hails from that country?

This question occurred to me as I sat in a meeting a short time ago with a senior figure responsible for Germany’s economic growth and future trajectory. He was confident that his country’s many strengths would allow it to continue to prosper, and to lead in what it has labelled ‘Industry 4.0.’ This is the anticipated fourth industrial revolution (after the ones powered by steam; electricity and the internal combustion engine; and the computer) during which the real and virtual worlds will merge.

I believe this merger is coming, and coming fast. But who’s going to lead it? Which country’s companies will grow by creating new markets and disrupting existing ones? These questions matter not just because national pride is at stake, but also because national prosperity is.

Consumers around the world will benefit no matter where the next set of profound innovations originates. To some extent the same is true for investors, who can now invest in markets and companies far from home. Citizens and workers, however, do best when their countries are the ones doing the most to create the future. These countries tend to grow more quickly, expanding the tax base, job opportunities, and overall affluence.

Because it was the birthplace of the first industrial revolution, Britain pulled away from the rest of Europe during the 19th century. America then took over, becoming the world’s largest and most productive economy at the start of the 20th century as it developed many of the breakthroughs of the second and third. Will the lead change hands again as we head into Industry 4.0, the Second Machine Age, or whatever you want to call it?”

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“Globalization Trumps Puritanism Even Here”

November 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

You hear that Iran has sentenced a female activist to a year in prison for attending a men’s volleyball game, and it seems like the same old, a country trapped in oppressive patriarchy and backwardness. But there are some hopeful signs, both with negotiations over nukes at the top and in life below the surface. It’s hard to trust but equally difficult to completely turn away. From “The Revolution Is Over” in the Economist:

“For now, Iran is disliked and mistrusted across much of the democratic world. Terrible things have been done in the name of its revolution. Some of its leaders have denied the Holocaust. They have locked up and tortured citizens who dared to challenge them openly. The country really could be set on having a bomb. But while the world has been cut off from Iran, it has failed to notice how much Iranians have changed. No longer is the country seething with hatred and bent on destruction. Instead, the revolution has sunk into the disillusion and distractions of middle age. This is not always a nice place, perhaps, but not a Satanic one, either.

To be sure, Iran is hard to fathom. It often makes visitors feel unwelcome. Journalists who have been able to obtain a precious visa still leave with a sense of uncertainty as few Iranians feel free to speak their mind. For years the government even refused to share information with the World Bank. John Limbert, an American diplomat held hostage in Tehran in 1979 who served his country until 2010, points out that ‘almost nobody in Washington has been to Iran in decades.’

Yet the country has unmistakably changed. The regime may remain suspicious of the West, and drone on about seeding revolutions in oppressor countries, but the revolutionary fervour and drab conformism have gone. Iran is desperate to trade with whomever will buy its oil. Globalisation trumps puritanism even here.”

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Iran just 35 years ago:

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“He Knows That Going Into Space Will Put Different Strains On His Frame”

November 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Pioneering and vacationing in the same wilderness is always a dicey proposition, since trailblazers expect hardships and danger while pleasure seekers do not–and the stakes have never been higher than in outer space. It would seem to make sense to limit the peril to those actually endeavoring to colonize these new worlds, a very important mission, and to leave the sightseeing for a time in the future. But it can be argued that space tourism will normalize and improve what may be a species-saving process. From Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson’s Financial Times interview with Richard Branson, conducted just prior to the Virgin Galactic disaster:

“Our lunch falls in the middle of a typical Branson week. It began in Montreal with a meeting of his charitable foundation, Virgin Unite, then moved to Toronto for the launch of a Virgin Mobile training programme for homeless Canadians. He is in New York to hold a press conference for the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a group including nine former world leaders that favours decriminalising drug use.

Next he will be off to Washington for breakfast with Republican senator Rand Paul, before heading for a spin in a ‘centrifuge gondola’ near Philadelphia to prepare his body for the stresses of a long-awaited suborbital space flight with Virgin Galactic, which he dubs ‘the world’s first commercial spaceline.’ Somewhere between these public appearances, he will also find time to run the eclectic collection of airlines, train operators, gyms, mobile phone businesses, radio stations, music festivals and banks that have built a fortune Forbes estimates at $5bn.

In person, Branson is an almost shy showman. He has barely made eye contact from under his sweep of silver-gold hair. Wearing a dark blazer with two shirt buttons undone and cuffs open at the wrist, he plays with a pen while he talks about his next adventure.

He has performed his fair share of stomach-turning exploits in hot-air balloons, high-speed boats and the like. But, at 64, he knows that going into space will put different strains on his frame. ‘There’s eight seconds where you go from nought to 3,500mph,’ he says. At 4.5 G-force, ‘you’re going to feel it on your body.’

His dream of experiencing ‘the overview effect’ that astronauts talk of when they see the planet from afar has been delayed by about seven years, but his best guess now is that in March next year he and his son Sam, 29, will lift off from the ‘spaceport’ in New Mexico.”

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“Facebook Increased The Amount Of Hard News Stories At The Top Of The Feeds Of 1.9 Million Users”

November 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Another Facebook “social experiment,” one which took place in 2012, saw the social-media company quietly manipulate users’ feeds, inserting more hard news, which apparently spurred more of the “subjects” to vote. The results are interesting, the methods dubious. From Micah L. Sifry at Mother Jones:

“Facebook has studied how changes in the news feed seen by its users—the constant drip-drip-drip of information shared by friends that is heart of their Facebook experience—can affect their level of interest in politics and their likelihood of voting. For one such experiment, conducted in the three months prior to Election Day in 2012, Facebook increased the amount of hard news stories at the top of the feeds of 1.9 million users. According to one Facebook data scientist, that change—which users were not alerted to—measurably increased civic engagement and voter turnout. 

Facebook officials insist there’s nothing untoward going on. But for several years, the company has been reluctant to answer questions about its voter promotion efforts and these research experiments. It was only as I was putting the finishing touches on this article that Facebook started to provide some useful new details on its election work and research.

So what has Facebook been doing to boost voter participation, and why should anyone worry about it?”

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“Then Uber Descended From The Gods”

November 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Uber and Lyft and the like can go the way of Napster, but the Sharing Economy will still disrupt the taxi sector the way file-sharing did the music industry. It’s not about any one company but the larger wave. In music, it’s been a mixed blessing: The structure of distribution improved greatly, but the content makers themselves were devastated. It may be a similar situation with car service: Summoning a ride with a smartphone and paying without cash is wonderful, though medallion owners may be ruined and a lack of regulation may eventually be painfully costly.

While Uber is currently be playing rough in Los Angeles, that autopocalypse is the American city ridesharing can transform more than any other. From Melena Ryzik in the New York Times:

“Los Angeles — When Ryan O’Connell, 28, moved here from New York last year, he didn’t want a car. ‘I’ve always been so scared of driving,’ he said. ‘I feel like I would be a bad driver.’

Normally, that would be a problem in one of America’s most auto-centric places, where cruising along the Sunset Strip is a lifestyle and cars are not only a means of transportation but a status symbol. But Mr. O’Connell was only briefly perplexed.

‘I didn’t know what I was going to do,’ he said, ‘and then Uber descended from the gods.’

These days, he uses Uber, the smartphone-enabled car service app, as much as three times a day, Mr. O’Connell said the other day, sitting with friends by the rooftop bar at the Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles, a popular Uber destination. He takes it from his home in West Hollywood, Calif., to his job, as a writer for the MTV series Awkward in Hollywood, and out for drinks after work. His roommate and best friend has a car, and yet they rely on Uber to get around on weekends.”

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“The Amount Of Data This Thing Collects Is Staggering”

November 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You can (mostly) opt out of the new surveillance state for now, but for how long? Part of your payment these days for almost any service is your personal information, which can be repurposed. That scenario is going to stretch until it blankets the globe.

In the short run, a market might arise which would sell appliances with many of the same functions as smart ones without the digital trail. But you’ll have to sacrifice some utility if you aren’t willing to let the TV watch you while you watch the TV. And eventually you’ll have to opt in if you want to plug in. From Michael Price at Salon:

“I just bought a new TV. The old one had a good run, but after the volume got stuck on 63, I decided it was time to replace it. I am now the owner of a new ‘smart’ TV, which promises to deliver streaming multimedia content, games, apps, social media and Internet browsing. Oh, and TV too.

The only problem is that I’m now afraid to use it. You would be too — if you read through the 46-page privacy policy.

The amount of data this thing collects is staggering. It logs where, when, how and for how long you use the TV. It sets tracking cookies and beacons designed to detect ‘when you have viewed particular content or a particular email message.’ It records ‘the apps you use, the websites you visit, and how you interact with content.’ It ignores ‘do-not-track’ requests as a considered matter of policy.

It also has a built-in camera — with facial recognition.”

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“He Led Several Lives, Apparently”

November 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

It was the strangest thing. In 1984, stories began to escape the San Diego Padres clubhouse about a trio of pitchers, Eric Show, Dave Dravecky and Mark Thurmond, who’d become devout members of the John Birch Society. A racist incident that postseason in the team’s clubhouse against Claire Smith, an African-American female sportswriter, brought more attention to the extreme politics of the Birchers.

It all began with Show, a sort of baseball Bobby Fischer, a troubled nonconformist and deep thinker who couldn’t fit into wider society let alone the claustrophobic confines of a bullpen or dugout. He was a self-taught jazz musician ravenous for philosophy, physics, economics and history, a seeker of truth who wandered into an Arizona bookstore and picked up a volume about the John Birch Society and became obsessed (though he always denied any racist leanings). Two stories follow about his odd life and lonely death.

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From “Baseball’s Thinking Man,” by Bill Plaschke, in the 1988 Los Angeles Times:

YUMA, Ariz. — Let’s play a game. What if some real smart people with a sense of humor–people who know nothing about baseball–one day decided to invent a very good baseball pitcher.

But after giving him an elbow and shoulder and all the usual stuff, what if they decided to get tricky?

What if they gave him a love for physics? A love for studying philosophers, historians and theorists? A love for writing classical jazz?

What if on road trips, while his friends are shopping and watching movies, he is in the basement of musty libraries trying to figure out why the Earth is round?

What if at home, while many players are at the ballpark several hours ahead of the required reporting time, he is still in his home, in his second-floor office, under a bright light, studying the effect of a new foreign government or ancient civilization?

What if, before he wins 20 games, he records and produces his own record album, and co-stars in a movie? Finally, just to throw everybody off, what if they made him an open, verbal member of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society? What if . . .

Forget the what ifs. Such a pitcher exists. His name is Eric Show.

His six seasons have established him as one of the National League’s best pitchers and most unusual people.

Yet, after six seasons, another question is probably more applicable.

Why?

Why has he no close clubhouse friends? Why does everybody in there look at him so funny? Why do some think he’s selfish and arrogant? Why did some even take to calling him “Erica”? And why do things always seem to happen to him?

In 1984, his John Birch affiliation is uncovered when he is spotted passing out pamphlets at a fair, and black players think he doesn’t like them.

In 1985, he gives up Pete Rose’s record 4,192nd hit, but during the 10-minute celebration he sits on the mound, and now nobody likes him.

Last season, he hits the Chicago Cubs’ Andre Dawson in the head and must flee Wrigley Field fearing for his life. When he returns to that city this season, he has only half-jokingly claimed it will be in disguise.

Show, 31, enters the 1988 season in the final year of a $725,000 contract and at the crossroads of his baseball career.

Can he find enough peace to once again become the pitcher that won 15 games to help lead the Padres to the 1984 World Series?

Or will he continue twisting in the winds of discontent, like last season, when he went 8-16 despite a 3.84 earned-run average?

Either way, the Padres say he’s trying.

“There has been change in Eric just since the middle of last season,” Padre Manager Larry Bowa said. “In the clubhouse, away from the stadium. He’s really working at understanding and being understood.”

Show says he’s trying.

“As strange at it may seem, I have tried to be more a part of my baseball environment,” Show said carefully. “If I’m still off, it’s because I started way off.”

And whatever happens, only one thing is ever certain with Eric Show.

Something will get lost in the translation.

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From “Eric Show’s Solitary Life, and Death,” by Ira Berkow in the 1994 New York Times:

An autopsy released soon after by the coroner’s office said the cause of death was inconclusive, that is, there was no observable trauma or wounds to the body. A toxicology report would be coming in about two weeks. But in statements to the center’s staff, Show said that he was under the influence of cocaine, heroin and alcohol. He said he used four $10 bags of cocaine at about 7 that night, Tuesday night. “Didn’t like how I felt,” he said, adding that he then ingested eight $10 bags of heroin and a six-pack of beer.

The questions about Eric Show’s death are no less difficult to answer than the ones about his life. Why was he so hard on himself, such an apparently driven individual? Why was he so compulsive, or at least passionate, about almost everything he undertook?

Show (the name rhymes with cow) was known as a highly intelligent, articulate man with broad interests that ranged from physics — his major in college — to politics to economics to music. “Eric didn’t fit the mold of the typical ballplayer,” said Tim Flannery, a former Padre teammate of Show’s. “Most ballplayers were like me then; we had tunnel vision. We weren’t interested in those other things.”

Show was a born-again Christian who regularly attended Sunday chapel services as a player and sometimes signed his autograph with an added Acts 4:12, which discusses salvation as coming only from belief in Jesus Christ.

He was an accomplished jazz guitarist. Sometimes after games on the road, he would beat the team back to the hotel and play lead guitar with the band in the lounge.

He was a member of the right-wing John Birch Society, a fact the baseball world was surprised to learn in August 1984 as the Padres moved toward their first and only division title.

And he was a successful businessman with real estate holdings, a marketing company and a music store, all of which kept him in expensive clothes, with a navy-blue Mercedes and a house in an affluent San Diego neighborhood.

But other elements seemed to intrude. And ultimately, the contradictions of the best and worst in American life became a disastrous mixture that defeated him.

Beyond Statistics, Just Who Was He?

For most baseball fans, Eric Show was a decent pitcher who had once been lucky enough to make it to the World Series. But to the people who were close to him, he was, in the end, someone they did not fully know.

“He led several lives, apparently,” said Arn Tellem, his agent at the time of his death.

To Joe Elizondo, his financial consultant, and Mark Augustin, his partner in a music store, and Steve Tyler, a boyhood friend from Riverside, Calif., where both were born and raised, Show was a charming, devoted friend and a caring man. “He would give you the shirt off his back,” Elizondo said. “And he did. I once told him how much I liked a shirt he was wearing, and he said, “Here, it’s yours.” He’d stop a beggar on the street and learn he was hungry and run to a diner and bring back a hot meal for him.”

To others, though, Show could seem selfish or arrogant.

And there were the drugs. Some said Show’s drug problems began when he took injections to relieve pain in his back after surgery, and he sought more and more relief. Others wondered if he had been taking drugs before he reached the major leagues.

He may also have begun taking drugs simply because he liked the challenge of being able to handle the dreaded substance. …

His death evoked memories of two strange scenes in Show’s life, one in 1992 and the other last year.

In the spring of 1992, Show was in training camp in Arizona with the A’s. He had signed a two-year contract with them in late 1990, and managed only a 1-2 record with them in 1991. Following several mornings in which he had reported late for workouts, he showed up with both hands heavily bandaged.

He explained that he had been chased by a group of youths and had to climb a fence, and had cut himself. But what was not reported was that the police later told club officials that Show had been behaving erratically in front of an adult book store, and fled when officers approached. They finally caught him trying to climb a barbed-wire fence.

Last July, he was caught by the police when running across an intersection in San Diego and screaming that people were out to kill him, and then begged the police to kill him. He was handcuffed, and while in the back seat of the police car, he kicked out the rear window. He was taken to the county mental hospital for three days of testing. Show had admitted “doing quite a bit of crystal methamphetamine.”

It was one more startling development, one more contradiction for an athlete who, in reference to his John Birch membership, once said: “I have a fundamental philosophy of less government, more reason, and with God’s help, a better world. And that’s it.”

Always Looking For Answers

Actually, it wasn’t it. Show, as a John Birch member, also denied that he was a Nazi or a racist. In fact, he had a Hispanic financial adviser, a Jewish lawyer and agent, and black friends in baseball and his music world. People from his first agent, Steve Greenberg, to Tony Gwynn, a black teammate, agreed that he was no bigot. “He joined the Birch Society because he thought it would provide answers to how the world works,” Tellem said. “He was always looking for answers.”

Show once said, “I’ve devoted my life to learning.” Asked what he was learning, he replied, “Learning everything.”

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“What Do We Really Mean By Self-Driving Cars?”

November 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “When Can We Expect Truly Autonomous Vehicles?,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s WSJ piece, the author thinks the transition will be incremental (something already happening) and won’t be fully operational once inter-automobile communication becomes standard (something yet to happen). The opening:

“A few weeks ago I attended MIT’s Second Machine Age Conference, where I heard a number of very interesting presentations on the evolution of AI, robotics, and other advanced technologies. The prospects for truly autonomous vehicles was one of the main topics of discussion. With most other topics, there was considerable audience consensus, but not so with self-driving cars. While many thought that fully autonomous vehicles will be all around us within a decade, others, myself included, were not quite so sure due to the many technical and societal issues involved.

What do we really mean by self-driving cars? There seems to be no precise definition. Are we talking about a human driver assisted by all kinds of advanced technologies, or is there no driver whatsoever? Will such vehicles operate amidst regular human-driven ones, or will they be confined to special lanes equipped with sophisticated navigational technologies? And, is self-driving per se the actual objective, or is it a metaphor for the development of near-crashless cars, regardless of whether human drivers are still in the picture?

These questions are not surprising given the very early stages of such a complex area. When exciting new initiatives are first launched, we sometimes describe them using an attention-grabbing phrase that, while potentially unattainable in practice, should be taken more as a marketing pointer to a general direction rather than as a realistic near-term objective.

For example, in the early 1980s the paperless office became a metaphor for the PC-based office of the future. The past 30 years have seen major transformations in just about every aspect of the office, including the very nature of work. But, we have come nowhere near getting rid of paper. In fact, printers, copiers and scanners are all around us. The office of the future is alive and well, but no one seems to mind that the paperless office never really came about.”

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“I Still Think The Segway Is The Transportation Of The Future”

November 2, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In Douglas Coupland’s latest Financial Times column, he ruminates on the meaning of Silicon Valley, a part of California state as well as a state of mind, including his surprisingly positive feelings for the Segway, which has thus far been only nominally more popular than G.R. Gooch’s 1842 walking machine, the Aeripidis. The opening:

“I’ve found that if you ask most anyone to locate Silicon Valley on a globe, they pause for about 15 seconds, say umm, and then hesitantly put their finger down somewhere a little bit north of Los Angeles. They then apologise for being clueless and ask where it really is – and are often surprised it’s up near San Francisco. I think it’s because for most people Silicon Valley is largely a state of mind more than it is a real place… a strip-malled Klondike of billionaires with proprioception issues, clad in khakis, in groups of three, awkwardly lumbering across a six-lane traffic artery with a grass median berm, all to get in on the two-for-one Mexi-burrito special at Chili’s before the promotion ends next Tuesday.

I’ve many happy memories of the Valley. One afternoon, in a long-ago world called Before-Nine-Eleven, I’d park my car just in Menlo Park, on the other side of Interstate 280, just west of the Sand Hill Road exit, the Valley’s venture capital capital. Walking through what seemed to be a Christmas tree farm, I’d arrive at a chain-link fence with a Department of Energy warning sign, walk through its many breaches, and sit beside the Stanford Linear Accelerator, two miles long and operational since 1966. I don’t know what I was expecting to see but it was nice to lie in the grass like Tom Sawyer and imagine positrons committing suicide while a Cooper’s hawk soared high above, scoping out the freeway for roadkill.

I remember the month the Segway came out and an annoyingly rich Palo Alto friend (who lived in a massive apartment furnished only with a folding lawn chair, a card table and a $500,000 flight simulator) bought a fleet of 10. That night a group of us rode up Page Mill Road to the parking lot of the now-closed Wall Street Journal printing plant and then we started going overground, over the endless roadside berms that define the Valley’s aesthetic. Talk about a dorkfest, but it was fun and I still think the Segway is the transportation of the future. How did they blow it? These things are great.”

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“Spahn Also Came To Know The Young Man Who Seemed To Be In Charge Of The Group”

October 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Daily Beast has reprinted Gay Talese’s 1970 Esquire article, “Charlie Manson’s Home on the Range,” which looks at living arrangements of the madman and his minions when they set up house on the desolate land outside of Los Angeles of blind, lonesome rancher George Spahn. An excerpt about when the iceman first cometh:

Then one day a school bus carrying hippies arrived at the ranch and parked in the woods, and young girls approached Spahn’s doorway, tapping lightly on the screen, and asked if they could stay for a few days. He was reluctant, but when they assured him that it would be only for a few days, adding that they had had automobile trouble, he acquiesced. The next morning Spahn became aware of the sound of weeds being clipped not far from his house, and he was told by one of the wranglers that the work was being done by a few long-haired girls and boys. Later, one of the girls offered to make the old man’s lunch, to clean out the shack, to wash the windows. She had a sweet, gentle voice, and she was obviously an educated and very considerate young lady. Spahn was pleased.

In the days that followed, extending into weeks and months, Spahn became familiar with the sounds of the other girls’ voices, equally gentle and eager to do whatever had to be done; he did not have to ask them for anything, they saw what had to be done, and they did it. Spahn also came to know the young man who seemed to be in charge of the group, another gentle voice who explained that he was a musician, a singer and poet, and that his name was Charlie Manson. Spahn liked Manson, too. Manson would visit his shack on quiet afternoons and talk for hours about deep philosophical questions, subjects that bewildered the old man but interested him, relieving the loneliness. Sometimes after Spahn had heard Manson walk out the door, and after he had sat in silence for a while, the old man might mutter something to himself— and Manson would reply. Manson seemed to breathe soundlessly, to walk with unbelievable silence over creaky floors. Spahn had heard the wranglers tell of how they would see Charlie Manson sitting quietly by himself in one part of the ranch, and then suddenly they would discover him somewhere else. He seemed to be here, there, everywhere, sitting under a tree softly strumming his guitar. The wranglers had described Manson as a rather small, dark-haired man in his middle 30s, and they could not understand the strong attraction that the six or eight women had for him. Obviously, they adored him. They made his clothes, sat at his feet while he ate, made love to him whenever he wished, did whatever he asked. He had asked that the girls look after the old man’s needs, and a few of them would sometimes spend the night in his shack, rising early to make his breakfast. During the day they would paint portraits of Spahn, using oil paint on small canvases that they had brought. Manson brought Spahn many presents, one of them being a large tapestry of a horse.

He also gave presents to Ruby Pearl—a camera, a silver serving set, tapestries—and once, when he said he was short of money, he sold her a $200 television set for $50. It was rare, however, that Manson admitted to needing money, although nobody on the ranch knew where he got the money that he had, having to speculate that he had been given it by his girls out of their checks from home, or had earned it from his music. Manson claimed to have written music for rock-and-roll recording artists, and sometimes he was visited at the ranch by members of the Beach Boys and also by Doris Day’s son, Terry Melcher. All sorts of new people had been visiting the ranch since Manson’s arrival, and one wrangler even claimed to have seen the pregnant movie actress Sharon Tate riding through the ranch one evening on a horse. But Spahn could not be sure.

Spahn could not be certain of anything after Manson had been there for a few months. Many new people, new sounds and elements, had intruded so quickly upon what had been familiar to the old blind man on the ranch that he could not distinguish the voices, the footsteps, the mannerisms as he once had; and without Ruby Pearl on the ranch each night, Spahn’s view of reality was largely through the eyes of the hippies or the wranglers, and he did not know which of the two groups was the more bizarre, harebrained, hallucinatory.•

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“It’s Cool To Say You Don’t Have An Electric Bill”

October 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Right now in California, homeowners are repurposing Tesla car batteries to help convert their homes to solar, and as alternative energies and batteries keep improving and becoming more cost-efficient, more people will opt out of the power grid. The opening of a story on the topic from Mark Chediak at Bloomberg:

“David Greene woke up one day and fired his power company. It wasn’t that hard to do.

Greene, 48, is neither a hippie nor a survivalist and his environmental leanings are middle of the road. He runs an air-conditioning repair service out of his home and lives in the suburbs, not the woods.

It’s just that his three-bedroom house near Honolulu is in a place with America’s highest electricity rates — 38 cents a kilowatt-hour compared with the 13-cent national average. Fed up, Greene put solar panels on his roof and batteries in the garage to store the excess juice. He told his utility to come get his power meter.

‘I enjoy being off the grid,’ Greene said. ‘It’s an independence thing. It’s cool to say you don’t have an electric bill.’

Even better, Greene calculates he’s spent about $58,000 on a system that will pay for itself in six to eight years — factoring in that he now mostly avoids gas stations by charging his hybrid Toyota Prius from the rooftop solar system.

Greene remains something of an outlier. While there are no official U.S. government estimates of how many Americans live off the power grid, the Snowmass, Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute says anecdotal evidence suggests it’s much less than one percent of the nation’s utility customers. About 147 million people get their power from the grid, according to data from the American Public Power Association.”

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“The Idea That Everyone Should Slavishly Work So They Do Something Inefficiently So They Keep Their Job – That Doesn’t Make Any Sense To Me”

October 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Financial Times interview conducted by Richard Waters, Larry Page discusses the Bell Labs ambitions of Google, the search giant that aims to remake itself in radically different ways. He also concurs with the current conventional wisdom that says consumer prices are about to markedly shrink and that will make up for technological unemployment. An excerpt:

Some of Google’s own big bets are in areas that he describes as being at the “fringes” – things that seem open to a technological solution but which, for some reason, have not received concerted attention. As examples, he picks self-driving cars and the diseases that afflict older people – the latter a field that his wife worked in at a lab at Stanford University. “It wasn’t a high-status thing,” he says. Through a new biotech arm called Calico, Google is now planning to plough hundreds of millions of dollars of its own into the area.

“We do benefit from the fact that once we say we’re going to do it, people believe we can do it, because we have the resources,” he says. “Google helps in that way: there aren’t many funding mechanisms like that.”

But compared with its heady early days, when every brash initiative was welcomed by an adoring public with the indulgence of a parent celebrating a child’s finger paintings, the onrush of technological change has started to stir up fear.

“I think people see the disruption but they don’t really see the positive,” says Page. “They don’t see it as a life-changing kind of thing . . . I think the problem has been people don’t feel they are participating in it.”

A perennial optimist when it comes to technology, he argues that all that will change. Rapid improvements in artificial intelligence, for instance, will make computers and robots adept at most jobs. Given the chance to give up work, nine out of 10 people “wouldn’t want to be doing what they’re doing today.”

What of people who might regret losing their work? Once jobs have been rendered obsolete by technology, there is no point wasting time hankering after them, says Page. “The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job – that just doesn’t make any sense to me. That can’t be the right answer.”

He sees another boon in the effect that technology will have on the prices of many everyday goods and services. A massive deflation is coming: “Even if there’s going to be a disruption on people’s jobs, in the short term that’s likely to be made up by the decreasing cost of things we need, which I think is really important and not being talked about.”

New technologies will make businesses not 10 per cent, but 10 times more efficient, he says. Provided that flows through into lower prices: “I think the things you want to live a comfortable life could get much, much, much cheaper.”

Collapsing house prices could be another part of this equation. Even more than technology, he puts this down to policy changes needed to make land more readily available for construction. Rather than exceeding $1m, there’s no reason why the median home in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, shouldn’t cost $50,000, he says.•

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“It’s Still Hard To Get It In My Brain That This Is All Going To Happen With Robots”

October 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Mentioning The Second Machine Age reminded me that the book makes reference to the 2004 Popular Science piece, “Debacle in the Desert,” which reported on the inaugural DARPA Great Challenge, a 142-mile traverse across the Mojave for driverless vehicles. The “winner” completed fewer than 8 miles. It was pure folly. Just six years later, autonomous vehicles were not only easily crossing desolate spaces but being discussed seriously as probable in the near future for busy streets, and by 2014 they’ve racked up tens of thousands of miles of test runs on highways. The progress in just a decade has been astounding, even if they’re still some major obstacles. The opening of Joseph Hooper’s PopSci piece:

“When last we visited with the men and women, the boys and girls, the Red Teams and Blue Teams and Road Warriors of the DARPA Grand Challenge off-road robotics race, back in March, we signed off on a note of authentic ambivalence. The teams themselves were all over the map, from rehearsing victory speeches to praying they would pass the qualifying round and be allowed on to what was anticipated to be a 210-mile course from outside Los Angeles through the Mojave Desert to somewhere just west of Vegas. The race’s organizers, for their part, couldn’t quite muster a consensus on how to handicap the event. Race manager and resident sunny optimist Col. Jose Negron unblinkingly predicted that a team would cross the finish line in under 10 hours to claim DARPA’s million-dollar prize in the race’s inaugural run-yet course designer Sal Fish couldn’t bring himself to share this official vision. ‘It’s still hard to get it in my brain,’ Fish said, ‘that this is all going to happen with robots.’ Chalk one up for Mr. Fish.

Here, to spare you the suspense, is how things looked once the dust had cleared on race day, March 13: Carnegie Mellon University’s Red Team, the presumptive race favorite-in the minds of many race insiders, the only team with a realistic shot at the million-dollar prize-had ended the race at mile 7.4, its Humvee’s belly straddling the outer edge of a drop-off, front wheels spinning freely, on fire. SciAutonics II dropped out of the running at mile 6.7, its Israeli dune buggy stuck in an embankment. Digital Auto Drive quit at mile 6.0, its Toyota Tundra stymied by a football-size rock. The Golem Group stopped at mile 5.2, its pickup stuck on a hill with insufficient throttle to move forward. Team Caltech, another race favorite, dropped out at mile 1.3, its Chevy Tahoe SUV having careened off course and through a fence. Team TerraMax, a heavyweight collaboration between Ohio State University and the Oshkosh Trucking Corporation, was out at mile 1.2, stopped of its own accord, a 32,000-pound six-wheel military truck flummoxed by some bushes. These, it should be noted, were the Grand Challenge success stories. The rest of the field went haywire at or just beyond the starting chute in full view of the press who packed the grandstands erected for the event.”

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“We Should Be Vigilant About All Great Concentrations Of Power”

October 30, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, a first-rate look at the technological revolution’s complicated short- and mid-term implications for economics, is one of the best books I’ve read in 2014. The authors make a compelling case that the Industrial Revolution bent time more substantially than anything humans had previously done, and that we’re living through a similarly dramatic departure right now, one that may prove more profound than the first, for both good and bad reasons. In a post at his new Financial Times blog, McAfee takes on Peter Thiel’s contention that monopolies are an overall win for society. An excerpt:

“His provocation in Zero to One is that tech monopolies are generally good news since they spend heavily to keep innovating (and sometimes do cool things unrelated to their main businesses such as building driverless cars) and these innovations benefit all of us. If they stop investing and innovating, or if they miss something big, they quickly become irrelevant.

For example, Microsoft’s dominance of the PC industry was once so worrying the US government went after it in an antitrust battle that lasted two decades. Microsoft still controls more than 75 per cent of the market for desktop operating systems today, but nobody is now worried about the company’s ability to stifle tech innovation. Thiel paraphrases Leo Tolstoy’s most famous sentence: ‘All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.’

I like Thiel’s attempt to calm the worries about today’s tech giants. Big does not always mean bad and, in the high-tech industries, big today certainly does not guarantee big tomorrow. But I’m not as blithe about monopolies as Thiel. The US cable company Comcast qualifies as a tech monopoly (it’s my only choice for a fast internet service provider) and I struggle mightily to perceive any benefit to consumers and society from its power. And there are other legitimate concerns about monopsonists (monopoly buyers), media ownership concentration and so on.

I once heard the Yale law professor Stephen Carter lay down a general rule: we should be vigilant about all great concentrations of power. We won’t need to take action against all of them but nor should we assume that they’ll always operate to our benefit.”

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