Excerpts

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“Why Have Prices For Very Rare Stamps Risen So High?”

June 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Scarcity is a reason but not the only reason why an 1856 1¢ stamp is about to sell for who knows how many millions of dollars. The opening of an explanation from the Economist:

“ON JUNE 17th the British Guiana One-Cent Magenta stamp, the only surviving example of a penny issue printed in the South American British colony in 1856, will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s, a large auction house, in New York. Each of the three times it has previously been sold at auction it has set a new record for a single stamp, and the expectation this time is that it will do so again by a very wide margin. Pre-auction estimates are that it will fetch in the region of $20m, almost ten times as much as the price achieved by the current record-holder, the Treskilling Yellow, in 1996. That would make it the most valuable human artefact (by weight) ever sold, says the auction house. Why have prices for very rare stamps risen so high?

The broad reason is that number of extremely wealthy people in the world has soared in recent years.”

“I Have No Problem With Inequality Per Se”

June 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The (relative) mania surrounding Thomas Piketty and his unlikely bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has stretched from spring to summer. From a report of his sold-out lecture on Monday in London by the Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries:

“Piketty wants us to realise that the 20th century was unusual: rapid, unrepeatable population increases that helped accelerate growth, combined with shocks (two world wars, the Great Depression) that reduced the value of capital and so kept inequalities low. These are exceptions in human history rather than the rules. The 21st century won’t be like the 20th, the professor predicts. If we don’t act, the accumulation of capital in the hands of the very few will resemble the norms in the early 19th or 18th centuries.

Someone asks Piketty if what Margaret Thatcher proposed in the 1980s was right, namely that if you reduce inequality you reduce growth. ‘I have no problem with inequality per se,’ he replies. ‘Up to a point it can be a motivation for growth. When inequalities grow more extreme, it can be no good for growth. It leads to the perpetuation of inequality. Over time that stops mobility from happening.'”

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“There Is A Fear That The Idea Machine Is Slowing Down”

June 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

For all the flak the government takes–even by plenty of those in the government–its record of research investment is pretty spectacular. We’re not talking about only the Internet but the transistor itself, among many other innovations. As the anti-government forces have chipped away at such state-sponsored R&D, larger tech companies are trying to birth their own Bell Labs. From Claire Cain Miller at the New York Times:

“Silicon Valley, where toddler-aged companies regularly sell for billions, may be the most vibrant sector of the U.S. economy, fueling a boom in markets from housing to high-end toast (how many $4-a-slice artisanal bread bars does a place really need?). But as recent innovations — apps that summon cabs, say, or algorithms that make people click on ads — have been less than world-changing, there is a fear that the idea machine is slowing down. And while Silicon Valley mythology may suggest that modern-day innovation happens in garages and college dorm rooms, its own foundations were laid, in large part, through government research. But during the recession, government funding began to dwindle. The federal government now spends $126 billion a year on R. and D., according to the National Science Foundation. (It’s pocket change compared with the $267 billion that the private sector spends.) Asian economies now account for 34 percent of global spending; America’s share is 30 percent.

Perhaps more crucial, the invention of much of the stuff that really created jobs and energized the economy — the Internet, the mouse, smartphones, among countless other ideas — was institutionalized. Old-fashioned innovation factories, like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, were financed by large companies and operated under the premise that scientists should be given large budgets, a supercomputer or two and plenty of time to make discoveries and work out the kinks of their quixotic creations. Back then, after all, Xerox and AT&T, their parent companies, made so much money that few shareholders cared about the cost. ‘It’s the unique ingredient of the U.S. business model — not just smart scientists in universities, but a critical mass of very smart scientists working in the neighborhood of commercial businesses,’ says Adrian Slywotzky, a partner at Oliver Wyman, the global management consulting firm. ‘Then that investment was cut way back.’ By the ’80s, AT&T was being taken apart by the government; Xerox PARC, like other labs, was diminished by impatient shareholders and, in some cases, the very technology it helped create.

Most of the insurgent tech companies, with their razor focus on advancing the Internet, were too preoccupied to set up their own innovation labs. They didn’t have much of an incentive either. Start-ups became so cheap to create — founders can just rent space in the cloud from Amazon instead of buying servers and buildings to house them — that it became easier and more efficient for big companies to simply buy new ideas rather than coming up with the framework for inventing them. Some of Google’s largest businesses, like Android and Maps, were acquired. ‘M. and A. is the new R. and D.’ became a popular catchphrase.

But in the past few years, the thinking has changed, and tech companies have begun looking to the past for answers. In 2010, Google opened Google X, where it is building driverless cars, Internet-connected glasses, balloons that deliver the Internet and other things straight out of science fiction.”

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“Traditional Surgery In Space Would Be A Perilous Exercise”

June 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

When earthlings start traveling to Mars, stratospheric surgery will become a necessity. From “Robotic Surgery in Space” at the Medical Bag:

“Traditional surgery in space would be a perilous exercise. Besides the difficulty of performing delicate procedures using multiple tools floating around in zero gravity, the possibility that bodily fluids could escape, float away, and contaminate equipment would be disastrous. The use of a small robot that could perform procedures in vivo would lessen these dangers. This robotic device is designed to enter the body all at once through a specialized port that would avoid loss of insufflation and reduce complexity. It would be programmed to facilitate multiple minimally invasive surgical procedures, including appendectomies, cholecystectomies, and the repair of gastric ulcer perforations and intra-abdominal bleeding due to trauma. Upon completion of the procedure, the robot can be removed easily, along with any retrieved specimens.

Currently, the device is designed to be controlled remotely by a surgeon on Earth, who would manipulate the robot inside a patient in low-Earth orbit, such as on the International Space Station. “

“Do We Live In Order To Be Happy?”

June 16, 2014 in Excerpts | Permalink

One of the Frenchest paragraphs ever, from an Economist article about the nation’s current train-union strike:

“Yet the timing of this strike, reaching into the baccalauréat week, is also a public-relations risk. Every June, as part of a national ritual, over half a million school-leavers sit down to take the first bac exams. For half of them, this involves a four-hour philosophy exam based around a single essay question; this morning’s choices included ‘Do we live in order to be happy?’ The prospect of pupils arriving late due to the train strike has prompted much indignation and an emergency scheme by the SNCF to encourage car-pooling and other alternatives.”

“The Place Radiates A Non-Human Intelligence”

June 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A place where Wish Lists comes true, the Amazon fulfillment center is chiefly guided by intelligence that’s artificial. And that will only become truer with each passing year. From Marcus Wohlsen’s Wired article which peeks inside Bezos’ humming Phoenix warehouse:

“Through the engineering of its fulfillment centers, Amazon has built the world’s most nimble infrastructure for the transfer of things, a logistics platform that dramatically amplifies any one person’s ability to move matter to anyone else. As Amazon expands that capacity to include its own trucks and someday flying drones, the physical reach it can offer other businesses extends even further. Much in the way cloud services and the data centers that house them have become the foundation of doing business online, Amazon’s fulfillment centers have the potential to become the networked hubs of the consumer economy, the biggest of big boxes that free up businesses to focus on making things rather than moving them.

An Overarching Brain

Entering the fulfillment center in Phoenix feels like venturing into a realm where the machines, not the humans, are in charge. Also known by the codename PHX6, the place radiates a non-human intelligence, an overarching brain dictating the most minute movements of everyone within its reach.

At 1.2 million square feet, PHX6 consists of two fulfillment operations working as mirror images of one another, a redundancy that lets the FC scale up or down in response to rising and falling demand. A central mezzanine provides panoramic views of both sides of the warehouse, the back walls obscured in the distance. An impossible-to-trace web of conveyor belts and rollers shuttle the ubiquitous yellow totes–the basic logistical units of an Amazon FC–from one point to another, filled with goods destined for warehouse shelves or for customers.

Also known by the codename PHX6, the place radiates a non-human intelligence, an overarching brain dictating the most minute movements of everyone within its reach.”

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“Pollution Is Nothing But Resources We’re Not Harvesting”

June 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “The view From the Year 2000,” a 1971 Life article, Buckminster Fuller, ever the technological positivist, saw skies that were blue and cloudless. Our gadgets have grown much more powerful, but we’re still waiting for his future to arrive. An excerpt:

“A lot of what you’re hearing today is absolute nonsense,” he said. “The population bomb. There is no population bomb! Industrialization is the answer to the population problem. In colonial times, the average American family had 13 children, but now that we can count on the little ones growing up healthy, the average is about two. That’s evolution working–where industrialization occurs, the birth rate simply goes down. Now, of course, you have the environmentalists telling you that you can’t industrialize any further because of pollution, which is more nonsense. Pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value. But if we got onto a planning basis, the government could trap pollutants in the stacks and spillages and get back more money than this would cost out of the stockpiled chemistries they’d be collecting.

“Margaret Mead gets quite cross with me when I talk like this because she says people are doing very important things because they’re so worried and excited and I’m going to make them relax and stop doing those things. But we’re dealing with something much bigger than we’re accustomed to understanding, we’re on a very large course, indeed. You speak of racism, for example, and I tell you that there’s no such thing as race. The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.

“These social adjustments we’re witnessing are very big. They are marvelous, the most marvelous part of the whole show. They don’t get done overnight, but they’re actually happening so fast I can’t believe it. In my lifetime, I’ve seen a fantastic amount of change, and I know we’re going through something very extraordinary in the history of the world. We’re going through some great flume, and if we will only hold on and have patience and respect the integrity of the universe itself, we’ll make it beautifully together.”•

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“The Question Is Whether Tough Times Are Here For Good”

June 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As our society becomes more automated, we can be very productive and wealthy in the aggregate with many people being left behind. Having tens of millions of new Americans with healthcare may help drive jobs in the short run, but diagnostics, like many other areas of current employment, will soon be left to the machines. 

In the Wall Street Journal, Timothy Aeppel profiles economist frenemies Robert Gordon and Joel Mokyr, who see our financial future in starkly different ways. The opening:

“EVANSTON, Ill.— Robert Gordon, a curmudgeonly 73-year-old economist, believes our best days are over. After a century of life-changing innovations that spurred growth, he says, human progress is slowing to a crawl.

Joel Mokyr, a cheerful 67-year-old economist, imagines a coming age of new inventions, including gene therapies to prolong our life span and miracle seeds that can feed the world without fertilizers.

These big-name colleagues at Northwestern University represent opposite poles in the debate over the future of the 21st century economy: rapid innovation driven by robotic manufacturing, 3-D printing and cloud computing, versus years of job losses, stagnant wages and rising income inequality.

The divergent views are more than academic. For many Americans, the recession left behind the scars of lost jobs, lower wages and depressed home prices. The question is whether tough times are here for good. The answer depends on who you ask.

‘I think the rate of innovation is just getting faster and faster,’ Mr. Mokyr said over noodles and spicy chicken at a Thai restaurant near the campus where he and Mr. Gordon have taught for four decades.

‘What’s the evidence of that?’ snapped Mr. Gordon. ‘There isn’t any.’

The men get along fine when talk is limited to, say, faculty gossip. About the future, though, they bicker constantly. When Mr. Mokyr described life-prolonging medical advances, Mr. Gordon cut in: ‘Extending life without curing Alzheimer’s means people who can walk but can’t think.'”

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“The Psychic, Meanwhile, Stole Wasser’s Polaroids”

June 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

In this post, I used some 1971 photos of Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson playing LPs at his Mulholland Drive house, which were taken by the legendary Los Angeles photojournalist Julian Wasser, who is the Weegee of the West, sure, but also a thing all his own, ably adapting to shifting scenes, from street to crime to Hollywood. Wasser just published a book of his work, The Way We Were. Three more of his images follow.

Roman Polanski.

Roman Polanski, 1969

From “Photo Ops,” Dana Goodyear’s excellent W piece:

Wasser’s first real camera was a Contax, which his father gave him when he was a junior in high school in the 1950s. He got himself a scanning radio and tuned in to the frequency used by the police. The first pictures he sold, while still a student at Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker school in Washington, D.C., were of crime scenes. “Crime’s exciting, and it sells,” he says. He got a gig at the Associated Press and met Arthur Fellig, the legendary photographer known as Weegee. “He came in plugging some film,” Wasser continues. “He was my hero.” From Weegee, he learned to use a Speed Graphic. “He was this real gruff, tough, down-to-earth guy, the epitome of a hard-nosed photographer, a street guy on the level of the cops he worked with. He used to beat them to the crime scene.”

That sensibility—an instinct for drama and the decisive moment, the dab of beauty with a smear of grit—put Wasser in the way of news. He was at the Ambassador Hotel the night Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and was with the crowd watching as Richard Ramirez, the infamous Night Stalker, was taken into custody by police. In 1969, three days after the actress Sharon Tate was murdered, Wasser, on assignment from Life, went to the crime scene on Cielo Drive with Tate’s husband, Roman Polanski, a pair of detectives, and a celebrity psychic searching for vibrational clues. (The Manson family hadn’t yet been named as suspects.) Wasser took a picture of Polanski, crouched and grim-faced beside a door smudged with fingerprint dust, where the word pig had been written in Tate’s blood. “I felt so bad for Polanski and for being there photographing it,” Wasser remembers. “He was just shattered.” The psychic, meanwhile, stole Wasser’s Polaroids and sold them to the tabs. Later, during the case brought against Polanski for having sex with a minor at Nicholson’s house on Mulholland, Wasser photographed the judge.•

Bernard Cornfeld, mutual-fund manager, and friends, 1974.

From Cornfield’s 1995 New York Times obituary by Diana B. Henriques:

Born in Istanbul in August 1927, Bernard Cornfeld was the son of a Romanian actor who moved his family to the United States in the early 1930’s. He graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn and Brooklyn College. By 1954, he had become a mutual fund salesman, entering the industry just as mutual funds were experiencing their first strong surge of growth since the stock market crash of 1929.

In 1956, he moved to Paris, planning to sell shares of popular American mutual funds, chiefly the Dreyfus Fund, to Americans living abroad. Using his trademark recruiting challenge — “Do you sincerely want to be rich?” — he built Investors Overseas Services. At its peak, it was a far-flung organization that included a vast and intensely loyal sales force, a secretive Swiss bank, an insurance unit, real estate interests and a stable of offshore investment funds operating beyond the reach of any single country’s securities laws.

By 1970, his company had pumped millions of overseas dollars into the American mutual fund industry, initially through its aggressive sales force and then through Mr. Cornfeld’s trailblazing Fund of Funds, an offshore fund that invested in other mutual funds’ shares.

Mr. Cornfeld gave now-famous money managers like Fred Alger their start by selecting them to run funds owned by the Fund of Funds, which at its peak had more than $450 million invested in American mutual funds.

He also acquired enough financial power over American mutual funds and skirted close enough to the edges of Federal securities laws to attract the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which in 1965 accused him and his company of violating American securities laws.

In 1967, the company settled the commission’s complaint by agreeing to wind up or sell all its American operations. The Fund of Funds also agreed to buy no more than 3 percent of any American mutual fund, the limit imposed by Federal mutual fund law.

After leaving the American market, Mr. Cornfeld continued to live lavishly, and his financial empire appeared strong until early 1970, when it suddenly disclosed that it was short of cash and had substantially overestimated its 1969 profits.•

Farrah Fawcett, 1976.

Farrah Fawcett, 1976.

The opening of “Super-Powered Love,” Lois Armstrong’s 1976 People article:

It would take a network in a ratings crisis to create a six million dollar man, with one telescopic-zoom eye and three nuclear-powered prosthetic limbs—the role Lee Majors plays so stoically on ABC every Sunday night. But, still mercifully, only God can make a Farrah Fawcett-Majors, as Lee’s offscreen wife calls herself. “She’s so gorgeous,” Majors glows, “she’s like a little girl. So cute, so beautiful inside, you wanna…” His natural reticence stifles further elaboration. The whole preposterousness of his series and its success (it shot from the Nielsen cellar last season to No. 5) may also have gotten to his brain and consciousness—which never were exactly “bionic.”

Farrah’s looks are indeed breath-stopping, and her own career is rocketing in commercials (Noxzema, Wella Balsam, Ultra-Brite); TV (as David Janssen’s girl next door on Harry O plus a starring part in a pilot); and film (playing with Michael York in the upcoming Logan’s Run). So, when queried about having children, Farrah replies, yes, but not for a couple of years, and Lee quips, “We already have bids from people who would like to have pick of the litter.”

In the meantime, Majors has begat, if nothing else, a spin-off series premiering Jan. 14 that he calls The Bionic Rip-Off—the official ABC title is The Bionic Woman. Lee’s dubiousness owes to the fear that the new show could dilute the Six Million Dollar Man ratings already perhaps in jeopardy. Part of Majors’ rise can be attributed to this fall’s plop from favor of his CBS competition, Cher, but she is almost certain to make at least a one-week Nielsen rebound next month among viewers curious to see the return of ex-husband Sonny, not to mention the TV premiere of her now gravid midriff. Lee may also begrudge the sweeter contract the bionic female, actress Lindsay Wagner, has chivied out of Universal. She, unlike Majors, negotiated a sizable share of any merchandising royalties—Six Million Dollar Man dolls were supposedly the hottest item in toy biz at Christmas, and he barely collected a pittance. Lindsay was also guaranteed five feature films—which could rankle Lee, because he blames his TV stereotyping for thwarting his own movie career.

Majors, 36, professes to be less threatened by his wife’s sudden stardom at 28—as long as it doesn’t interfere with her cooking his nightly supper.•

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“He Spoke Up On Behalf Of The Dictatorship”

June 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two World Cup-related excerpts from Franklin Foer, New Republic editor and football fanatic. The first is from an Ask Me Anything at Reddit and the second from his excellent TNR article about the mixed legacy of Brazilian soccer, including a largely forgotten chapter in Pele’s life.

____________________________

“Question:

What do you think of the protests in Brazil? Is hosting the World Cup good for the people of Brazil in the long run?

Franklin Foer:

Over the past decade, the Brazilian middle class has exploded. A broad swath of the population has been lifted from poverty. This is a great thing and an amazing accomplishment of Lula’s party, the PT. But the new middle class has very sensible concerns about the expenditure of public money. They are asking very wise questions about a ridiculous 11 billion price tag; they aren’t falling for the old bread-and-circus routine. I don’t foresee the protests in Brazil spinning violently out of control. In the long run, this tournament isn’t great for Brazil. It highlights the country’s shortcomings, rather than affirming its greatness. I wish the Brazilians had focused their infrastructure planning and expenditure on a more limited number of cities and venues. This would have contained costs and created a greater likelihood of success.”

____________________________

From The New Republic:

“Over time, Brazil grew dangerously dependent on soccer. It came to define the nation in the eyes of the world, and it played an outsized role in its own sense of self-worth. Victories came so easily during the ’60s and ’70s that the country didn’t just demand trophies; they wanted those triumphs procured with what Freyre called Futebol Arte and what the world knows as Jogo Bonito, the beautiful game. As one coach of the national team complained, ‘It got to the point where we beat Bolivia 6-0 and one newspaper in São Paulo accused us of playing defensively.’

The almost unbearable pressure on managers inevitably led the team away from improvisational genius. The tactics used to win the 1994 World Cup—perhaps the worst World Cup of them all—squelched inventiveness and favored the deployment of pragmatic hard men, who had a greater skill at knocking opponents off the ball than running at them with step-over dribbling.

And there was a far graver cost to success than that. Dictators and aspiring dictators skillfully harnessed mass enthusiasm for the game. Getúlio Vargas, the authoritarian leader who presided from 1930 to 1945, explicitly used soccer to create a new sense of national identity, a campaign of brasilidade, or Brazilization—and to ballast his own power. He built stadiums, then held rallies in them. His successors mimicked this approach. During the reign of the military dictatorship in the ’70s, the government plastered Pelé’s face on posters alongside its slogan: ‘NOBODY CAN STOP THIS COUNTRY NOW.’

Pelé, it should be remembered as you watch him in commercials for Subway’s $5 foot-long, didn’t just lend his visage to the cause; he spoke up on behalf of the dictatorship. ‘We are a free people. Our leaders know what is best for [us],’ he said in 1972. At that very moment, the writer David Zirin has noted, Brazil’s current president, Dilma Rousseff, was being tortured in prison.”

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“Why Did We Have To Sue Somebody To Prevent Prayer In Outer Space?”

June 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Atheist crusader Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who lived furiously and died strangely, was right that children should not be forced to pray in public school, but that doesn’t mean she was an ideal parent. O’Hair had dissent in her family that she would not brook: Her eldest son, William, became a religious and social conservative in 1980. His mother, showing characteristic outrage, labeled him a “postnatal abortion” and cut off all communication. From a 1980 People article about the familial rift:

“He traces her atheism to that self-absorption and hubris and to an aggressive antiestablishment streak that led her (with her two sons) into a variety of left-wing causes—even, he claims, to the Soviet embassy in Paris in search of exile. Rejected by Moscow, she retreated angrily back home to Baltimore where, as he puts it, ‘The rebel found a cause in prayer at school.’

As the pawn of her crusade, Bill was excoriated by fellow students, given extra homework by his teachers and baited into schoolyard fights; once, he remembers, some classmates tried to push him in front of a bus. ‘While Madalyn was busy with her rhetoric, newsletters, fund raising and publicity,’ he says, ‘I was fighting for my life.’ At 17, Murray ran afoul of the law. He eloped with a girl despite an injunction won by her parents that prohibited him from seeing her. Police intervened, and both Bill and his mother were charged with assaulting them. (The young woman left Bill and their infant daughter two years later.) 

Throughout Bill’s life his mother’s reputation has been a millstone. Drafted a year after his marriage broke up, he was subjected to grueling Army interrogation about Madalyn’s activist causes—and asked to sign a statement repudiating her left-wing politics (he did). After discharge he took a series of jobs in airline management and remembers living in fear that his employers would find out who his mother was and fire him. He complains she even threatened to expose him herself when he balked at giving her discounted airplane tickets that were due him as an employee. 

In 1969 he asked Madalyn for his daughter, whom she had kept while he was in the Army. She refused, they fought a custody suit and Madalyn won. Still, in 1974, when her second husband was ailing and the AAC foundering, Bill agreed to come to Austin and help out. He did so with great success—and increasing doubts. He multiplied the AAC’s annual income, which underwrote a flurry of new lawsuits—over church tax exemptions, the words ‘under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and ‘In God We Trust’ on coins. But Bill says he began to wonder: ‘Why couldn’t we buy a new X-ray machine for a hospital? Why did we have to buy a new Cadillac and mobile home for Madalyn, or sue somebody to prevent prayer in outer space? I started to think it was because my mother was basically negative and destructive.’ He began to drink too much—’diving into the bottle to forget,’ as he describes it. Six months after he came to Austin, Madalyn turned her animus on him once too often. ‘I told her to get f——-,’ he recalls, ‘and got the hell out.’

By that time Bill was an alcoholic. He had a new marriage and a new job as an airline management consultant, but felt his life was falling apart. “

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“Now Even Doctors Face The Looming Threat Of Possible Obsolescence”

June 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of Tom Meltzer’s new Guardian article about the advent of upwardly mobile robots leaving the assembly line for information-rich jobs:

“Last year, reporters for the Associated Press attempted to figure out which jobs were being lost to new technology. They analysed employment data from 20 countries and interviewed experts, software developers and CEOs. They found that almost all the jobs that had disappeared in the past four years were not low-skilled, low-paid roles, but fairly well-paid positions in traditionally middle-class careers. Software was replacing administrators and travel agents, bookkeepers and secretaries, and at alarming rates.

Economists and futurists know it’s not all doom and gloom, but it is all change. Oxford academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A Osborne have predicted computerisation could make nearly half of jobs redundant within 10 to 20 years. Office work and service roles, they wrote, were particularly at risk. But almost nothing is impervious to automation. It has swept through shop floors and factories, transformed businesses big and small, and is beginning to revolutionise the professions.

Knowledge-based jobs were supposed to be safe career choices, the years of study it takes to become a lawyer, say, or an architect or accountant, in theory guaranteeing a lifetime of lucrative employment. That is no longer the case. Now even doctors face the looming threat of possible obsolescence.”

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“Cockfighting Remains Legal There”

June 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Here’s an uncommon sports-page paragraph, from Nick Cafardo in the Boston Globe:

“I was interested to learn that Juan Nieves’s father’s occupation was training and fighting roosters in the cockfighting arenas of Puerto Rico. Nieves grew up in that environment, and cockfighting remains legal there. Years ago, I ventured out with the late Ivan Calderon to some cockfighting events in Puerto Rico. Calderon had a stable of roosters, approximately 200, that he trained. The matches were gruesome. Calderon was murdered in 2003 when he wouldn’t give up his son’s whereabouts in a drug deal gone bad.”

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“The Art Market’s Greatest Strength Is Its Ability To Co-Opt Any Radical Demands That A Work Of Art Makes”

June 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Project Syndicate, ethical philosopher Peter Singer, that necessary nudge, assails those who spend tens of millions of dollars on status-boosting art works. While I don’t agree with all of Singer”s ideas about art, I’m with his larger point about philanthropy. An excerpt:

“Perhaps, though, the importance of postwar art lies in its ability to challenge our ideas. That view was firmly expressed by Jeff Koons, one of the artists whose work was on sale at Christie’s. In a 1987 interview with a group of art critics, Koons referred to the work that was sold last month, calling it ‘the ‘Jim Beam’ work.’ Koons had exhibited this piece – an oversize, stainless steel toy train filled with bourbon – in an exhibition called ‘Luxury and Degradation,’ that, according to the New York Times, examined ‘shallowness, excess and the dangers of luxury in the high-flying 1980s.’

In the interview, Koons said that the Jim Beam work ‘used the metaphors of luxury to define class structure.’ The critic Helena Kontova then asked him how his ‘socio-political intention’ related to the politics of then-President Ronald Reagan. Koons answered: ‘With Reaganism, social mobility is collapsing, and instead of a structure composed of low, middle, and high income levels, we’re down to low and high only… My work stands in opposition to this trend.’

Art as a critique of luxury and excess! Art as opposition to the widening gap between the rich and the poor! How noble and courageous that sounds. But the art market’s greatest strength is its ability to co-opt any radical demands that a work of art makes, and turn it into another consumer good for the super-rich. When Christie’s put Koons’s work up for auction, the toy train filled with bourbon sold for $33 million.

If artists, art critics, and art buyers really had any interest in reducing the widening gap between the rich and the poor, they would be focusing their efforts on developing countries, where spending a few thousand dollars on the purchase of works by indigenous artists could make a real difference to the wellbeing of entire villages.”

 

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“To Test This Theory In The Real World, We Can Study Penalty Kicks”

June 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

The effect of the World Cup on the Brazilian economy will be studied from every and any angle, but even within the game itself, some economic principles can be tested. From Ignacio Palacios-Huerta’s New York Times article, “The Beautiful Data Set“:

“The economist John Forbes Nash Jr. analyzed how people should behave in strategic situations in which it is not optimal to repeatedly make the same move — like the children’s game rock, paper, scissors, in which selecting one move again and again (rock, rock, rock …) makes you easy to beat. According to Mr. Nash’s theory, in a zero-sum game (i.e., where a win for one player entails a corresponding loss for the other) the best approach is to vary your moves unpredictably and in such proportions that your probability of winning is the same for each move. In rock, paper, scissors, for example, the optimal strategy is to mix your choices randomly among the three options.

To test this theory in the real world, we can study penalty kicks, which are zero-sum games in which it is not optimal to repeatedly choose the same move. (The goalie has an easier time stopping your shot if you always kick to the same side of the net.) Unlike complex real-world strategic situations involving firms, banks or countries, penalty kicks are relatively simple, and data about them are readily available.

I analyzed 9,017 penalty kicks taken in professional soccer games in a variety of countries from September 1995 to June 2012. I found, as Mr. Nash’s theory would predict, that players typically distributed their shots unpredictably and in just the right proportions. Specifically, roughly 60 percent of kicks were made to the right of the net, and 40 percent to the left. The proportions were not 50-50 because players have unequal strengths in their legs and tend to shoot better to one side. Shooting 50-50, in other words, would not take full advantage of their better leg, while shooting any more often to the stronger side would have been too predictable.

In accordance with Mr. Nash’s theory, penalty kicks shot to the left were successful with the same frequency as kicks shot to the right — roughly 80 percent of the time.”

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“The Appeal Of Vinyl Is A Mysterious Thing”

June 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I don’t collect books or records or anything. I love well-designed, beautiful things that make me happy, but I don’t have a deep need to own them. (Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, photographed in 1971 by Julian Wasser, disagreed with me on this matter.) From a Guardian piece about the value of vinyl by Marc Maron, who seems wonderful from a distance:

“The appeal of vinyl is a mysterious thing. Even when you talk to people who make records, who know how the sound gets from the groove to the stylus into the amp and out through the speakers, it’s still kind of magical, in some weird way. The idea of analog, even with its crackle and pops, the idea of this sound being pulled off this rotating disc through these other elements, I think there’s integrity to that, as opposed to this mystifying sequence of zeroes and ones that make that digital sound. I have no idea how the hell that works. It seems detached, inhuman.

At some point in the last two years, I got a renewed interest in playing records. I’d had turntables before, and I had a box of records that I’d been carting around since high school. I always knew in the back of my head that records had more integrity than digital music. I went to interview Jack White at his place in Nashville, and he’s a real analog guy. He had these Mackintosh tube amps, and I got hung up on the idea of getting a tube amp, but the ones Jack had were $15,000. There was no way I could spend that kind of money on stereo equipment and enjoy it; I’d always be thinking, does this sound like $15,000? I don’t think so.

I’ve got around 2,000 records now, and I play music constantly.”

_____________________________

“Are you fed up with constantly searching for the records you want?”

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“Apparently We Can Bounce Back From Some Awful Experiences”

June 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Some people with tremendous struggles are happy and some with uncommon good luck are bitter. A lot in the latter group have egos blocking out the sun.

And expectations also matter. They can often be adjusted as we respond to the stimuli we encounter, as we grow to accept a new normal. But there are some things that make us miserable no matter how we look at them. From Tim Harford’s Financial Times piece about so-called “happynomics”:

“It turns out that we grow accustomed to some conditions, happy or unhappy, but not to all.

The study which sparked the idea that we can get used to almost anything was published by Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman in 1978. It compared the happiness of paraplegic and quadriplegic accident victims to that of lottery winners – and discovered that the disabled people were scarcely less happy than the millionaires. Apparently we can bounce back from some awful experiences. (It is sad and troubling that a few years after making this discovery, Brickman killed himself.)

But how exactly is this apparent process of habituation supposed to work? Here’s where happiness economics has the long-run data to help. Consider bereavement: we cope by paying less attention as time goes by. A friend said to me, months after my mother and his father had both died, ‘You don’t get any less sad when you think about them but you think about them less often.’

The same is true, alas, for the nice things in life: we begin to take them for granted too. But there are experiences – unemployment is one of them; an unhappy marriage another – that depress us for as long as they last. What those experiences seem to have in common is the ability to hold our attention. Commuting, although shorter and less serious, is a classic case – annoying but also stimulating enough that we keep noticing the annoyance.

This suggests that we should look for the opposite of commuting: positive new experiences that are engaging enough to keep being noticed.”

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“It Has The Potential To Decrease Private Car Ownership”

June 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo wonders whether Uber, for all the very reasonable doubts about the service, could cause a serious decrease in private car ownership, which would have huge ramifications for not just transportation but also housing and environment. An excerpt:

“It is impossible to say whether Uber is worth the $17 billion its investors believe it to be; like any start-up, it could fail. But for all its flaws, Uber is anything but trivial. It could well transform transportation the way Amazon has altered shopping — by using slick, user-friendly software and mountains of data to completely reshape an existing market, ultimately making many modes of urban transportation cheaper, more flexible and more widely accessible to people across the income spectrum.

Uber could pull this off by accomplishing something that has long been seen as a pipe dream among transportation scholars: It has the potential to decrease private car ownership.

In its long-established markets, like San Francisco, using Uber every day is already arguably cheaper than owning a private car.”

“I’m Actually Not A Big Fan Of The Term ‘Sixth Extinction'”

June 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

At Vox, Brad Plumer interviews Duke biologist Stuart Pimm about his new paper on the acceleration of extinctions in the time of human beings. But he didn’t publish only about what will perish–he believes there’s also the option for us to avoid destroying diversity and perhaps our own species. An excerpt:

“Vox:

So extinction rates are higher now that humans are around. Why? What are we doing?

Stuart Pimm:

There are four big factors here. The first one, which is overwhelmingly important, is habitat destruction. We’re destroying the habitats where species are. About two-thirds of all species on land are in tropical rainforests — and we’re shrinking those rain forests.

In the Americas, the greatest numbers of species on the brink of extinction are in the coastal forests of Brazil and the northern Andes and Ecuador. If you look at the coastal forests of Brazil, east of Rio de Janeiro, something like 95 percent of all forest has been destroyed. So it’s not surprising that that part of the world has an unusual number of endangered species.

Second, we’re also warming the climate, and as it gets warmer species either have to move toward the poles or up mountains. This could be a big one in the future.

Third, we’ve been incredibly careless about moving species around the world. I’m in the Florida Everglades, where there are an obscene number of Burmese pythons slithering around, which can not do any good. So invasive species is a third.

Finally, particularly in the oceans, there’s just overharvesting. We’ve depleted the oceans by fishing and more fishing and yet more fishing, and driving species to the very brink of extinction.

Vox:

So the historical record shows that there have five mass extinction events in the Earth’s history. And lots of people keep suggesting we’re on the verge of a sixth. But what’s the criteria for this? How would we know?

Stuart Pimm:

I’m actually not a big fan of the term ‘sixth extinction.’ But we are certainly seeing a highly accelerated rate of extinction.

If that continues — and continues for many decades — then by the end of the century we are going to lose one-third or one-half of all species. And that kind of loss in biological diversity hasn’t been seen in 60 million years. The last time we lost that many species was when an asteroid plowed into the Yucatán in Mexico. So if trends continue, then yes, we are going to lose a large fraction of species.

But what the paper is about mostly, is ways in which we can avoid that. So yes it’s bad, but the paper is full of important news about how we can make a difference.”

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“Technology Leadership Is Not Defined By Patents”

June 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There’ve been rumors for awhile that Elon Musk was going to withdraw the patents for all his Tesla EV technology and open-source the previously proprietary information. That has come to pass, and it makes great business sense as well as being altruistic and progressive. If you were trying to popularize electric cars, wouldn’t you want a robust industry to be a part of? That way other companies will be producing innovations and nurturing talent and providing competition. It might be different if large manufacturers were deep into the game, but, sadly, they’re not. Also: Fewer patents mean fewer lawsuits. The Tesla press release:

“Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.

At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.

At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all.

Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.

We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. 

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.”

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“We Will Need Robots To Help Us Deal With This Reality”

June 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Technological progress has historically meant more jobs, but is the new normal of potential mass automation the first exception to that rule? Maybe, maybe not. Rodney Brooks, the MIT roboticist who was one of the focuses of Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, believes we won’t see a net loss. From Brooks at the Harvard Business Review:

“Over the next 40 years, we are going to see a dramatic drop in the percentage of working-age adults across the world. And as baby boomers reach retirement age, the percentage of folks in retirement is going to change dramatically in the opposite direction. That means there will be more people with fewer social security dollars competing for services, and fewer working people available to deliver those services to them.

We will need robots to help us deal with this reality, doing the things we normally do for ourselves but that get harder to do as we get older. Things like getting groceries, driving cars to visit people, and helping us move around more safely and efficiently as physical ailments settle in.

Before you dismiss this vision for a highly automated society, think about it the next time you put a load of laundry into your washing machine or hit the start button on the dishwasher as you head off to bed. These are tools that have automated unpleasant and time-consuming aspects of our lives, and given us more free time to pursue more productive or pleasurable activities.

A generation ago, these machines were looked at with skepticism and sometimes ridicule. Today, they are staples of modern life that most of us would be hard-pressed to live without. I hope and fully believe we will be saying the same thing about robots a generation from now.”

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“He Wanted The Woman – And Two Cats – To Be The First To Walk On The Moon”

June 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Speaking of the Guardian, that publication’s Karin Andreasson’s has a new article about Edward Makuka Nkoloso, a Don Quixote of the Age of Aquarius, who was the self-appointed leader of Zambia’s unlikely entry into the 1960s Space Race. He desired not only to go to the moon but to establish a Christian ministry on Mars. An excerpt:

In 1964, when Zambia gained its independence from the UK, Nkoloso, a science teacher, decided to prove that his country was just as important as the world’s leading nations. It was the height of the space race and he decided Zambia should take part. He designed a rocket and a catapult system to launch it, which he tested on Zambian Independence Day. He recruited 10 men and one woman as astronauts. He wanted the woman – and two cats – to be the first to walk on the moon.

Training took place on a farm near the capital, Lusaka. Nkoloso asked for £7m of funding from Unesco, but didn’t get it. That was one reason why the programme didn’t have a chance. Then the woman became pregnant by one of the other astronauts and her parents came to take her back to their village. And that marked the end of the space programme. People I have spoken to who met Nkoloso say he was very charismatic: a dreamer who took his project very seriously, maybe even with the same serious approach Nasa and the Soviet Union had.•

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“His Is An Absolute, Pre-Modern Sort Of Power, Faith-Based And Exclusionary”

June 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In his latest compulsively readable GQ article, “What Does the Future Hold for the Guardian?” Michael Wolff analyzes the British publication’s attempt to globalize itself and win the United States, to less-than-mixed financial results. The Snowden story, as important as it may have been, could not be monetized, and the company continues to hemorrhage cash. Wolff finds the the Guardian’s singular editor, Alan Rusbridger, “unpleasant” in his lack of transparency, whereas Wolff is unpleasant for the opposite reason. An excerpt about Rusbridger, who, by virtue of the publication’s unusual financial arrangement, is a throwback to an earlier era:

“While the Guardian has a business staff with a CEO, and is overseen by trustees with ultimate responsibility, it has one real power centre, strategic thinker and moral compass: its editor, Alan Rusbridger. (A kind of preternatural consensus surrounds Rusbridger, but underneath him the Guardian is a fraught political cauldron, with underlings struggling to align with him, stay in his favour and undercut everyone else who is trying: ‘a nest of vipers,’ in the description of an outside consultant brought in to work on one of the paper’s big redesign projects.)

The 60-year-old Rusbridger is, surely, among the most talented newspaper editors of his generation (the other, at the opposite end of the news and philosophical spectrum, is Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail) and, as well, the most opaque, sending cryptic messages in a cipher which no one person can completely decode.

An hour with him is both unpleasant in the exertions required to penetrate his lack of transparency and fill the conversational void and, yet, at the same time, uplifting and restorative. The vacuum that surrounds him somehow seems to represent moral superiority and it draws you in. Six different people of high rank at the paper have said to me, on different occasions, the following words: ‘I would do anything for Alan.’ These are not words you usually hear in a modern company; they are not even credible. But they suggest the Guardian’s sense of purpose and the potency of its Kool-Aid. (I once sat next to Rusbridger’s wife at a Guardian dinner; she kept referencing what seemed like a wholly different person, a normal, fallible, workaday chap named ‘Al.’ Weird.)

His is an absolute, pre-modern sort of power, faith-based and exclusionary. You believe or you don’t. You are in or you are out. You are family or you are not. Emily Bell, once a potential Rusbridger successor, who was at the Guardian for the better part of two decades (coming in through the Guardian’s acquisition of the Observer- ever an unresolved relationship), told me, after she left several years ago to take a teaching position in the US, “I never really was an insider.”

Rusbridger has run the place since 1995 and, in some less-than-rational way, its future exists wholly in his head or at his whim. Not only is there enormous deference to him and dependence on him, but a sense of the abyss at any suggestion that he might leave (he is often suggested for eminent positions at places like the Royal Opera House).

Rusbridger has maintained two dominant ideas about the Guardian’s future: going digital and going to the US.”

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“Sport Originally Evolved As A Way Of Showing Off Our Genetic Fitness”

June 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

There are hundreds of baseball players who’ve gotten special dispensation to use amphetamines in one form or another for “medical reasons,” which makes little sense. Yet a player trying to rehab from a legitimate injury with use of HGH under a doctor’s guidance isn’t allowed to do so. There are enough loopholes and inconsistencies in every sport’s drug policy to boggle the mind. 

From “A Doping Manifesto,” Julian Savulescu’s Aeon argument in favor of the allowance of some sorts of PEDS:

“Sport originally evolved as a way of showing off our genetic fitness. Displaying great speed, strength, intelligence, ingenuity and co-ordination in public demonstrated to potential mates your capability to survive and reproduce. It appears that we haven’t come far. One French study by Charlotte Faurie, Dominique Pontier and Michel Raymond published in Evolution and Human Behavior in 2004 reported that: ‘Both male and female students who compete in sports reported significantly higher numbers of partners than other students, and within the athletes, higher levels of performance predicted more partners.’ Perhaps because of the status bestowed by athletic prowess, sportsmanship – the spirit of sport – has come to embody the values we promote in society as a whole. As Dick Pound of WADA said: ‘You respect the rules, you respect your opponents, you respect yourself. You play fair. I think that bleeds over into life as well.’

The values behind the spirit of sport are defined by WADA as: ethics, fair play and honesty; health; excellence in performance; character and education; fun and joy; teamwork; dedication and commitment; respect for rules and laws; respect for self and other participants; courage; and community and solidarity.

Sport is meant to show humans ‘at their best’. It allows us to demonstrate determination, striving, struggling and conquering. Sport is also meant to capture the human spirit. That’s why, the argument goes, if doping were legal it would still be cheating, because sport would no longer be testing those fundamental human virtues and capacities, but would merely showcase the wonders of the modern pharmaceutical industry (or your other favourite supplier of dope).

Yet doping is not always contrary to these values.”

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“How Much Safer Would Driving Be If Robots Replaced Humans On The Roads?”

June 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When paying a bill online recently, I mistakenly entered one wrong letter in my password, and the system locked me out, thinking I was someone else trying to break into my account. I had to phone the company and speak to two tech people before I was re-allowed entry. Sometimes technology can read something innocent as something sinister and overreact in the name of safety.

They’ll be glitches, some unforeseen, when the road begins to crowd with autonomous cars, as there always are with any technological innovation, but on balance driving will be safer. The question is by how much. From Clare Cain Miller of the New York Times:

“How much safer would driving be if robots replaced humans on the roads?

It has been hard to estimate because fully autonomous cars are not yet available to test. Google says that its driverless cars have logged more than 700,000 miles without an accident caused by the car, and that its cars do not do unsafe things that people do, like sharply accelerating or braking.

But two studies by researchers at Virginia Tech — H. Clay Gabler, a professor of biomedical engineering, and Kristofer D. Kusano, a research associate — suggest how much safer robot cars might be. They found that even cars that are not fully autonomous but that automate some of the most dangerous aspects of driving could have as big an effect as seatbelts have had.

The studies, which were sponsored in part by Toyota Motor, analyzed the crashes, injuries and fatalities that could have been prevented by cars that alert drivers when they drift out of their lane or correct the car’s course, and those that sense an impending collision and automatically brake. They used a representative sample of real-world crashes nationwide and simulated what would have happened had the automation been in place.

They found that lane-departure warning systems would have prevented 30.3 percent of the crashes caused by lane drifting, and 25.8 percent of the injuries.”

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