Excerpts

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“The Two Men And Abramson Clearly Did Not Get Along”

May 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You have to wonder what the brand new New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein, who was poached from Texas Monthly, must think of Jill Abramson’s abrupt ouster. He was personally courted for the job by the erstwhile Executive Editor, and the two meshed on a vision for the future of the glossy publication at a time when some believe the periodical-within-a-periodical redundant with what the legendary paper has become in the paper-less age. He moved his family thousands of miles to work for the institution and not just Abramson, but it helps to have an ally at the top of the masthead as Hugo Lindgren, his predecessor, learned when he was removed by Abramson after being tapped by Bill Keller. Because of his high level of talent and because the company’s new lead editor, Dean Baquet, was involved in his hiring, Silverstein will likely be fine, but it goes to show you how crazy the business has become, even at the top, in this worried age of technological disruption. If we were living in an era when newspapers were flush and the Times was profitable, it’s hard to imagine this change would have been made. But all bets are off now. The pressure is immense and the patience short. Even formerly plum jobs are pretty much the pits today, just like the rest of them. 

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From Ken Auletta at the New Yorker blog:

“As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. ‘She confronted the top brass,’ one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was ‘pushy,’ a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. [Arthur] Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson had also been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, having spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, accounting for some of the pension disparity. (I was also told by another friend of hers that the pay gap with Keller has since been closed.) But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy. A third associate told me, ‘She found out that a former deputy managing editor’—a man—’made more money than she did’ while she was managing editor. ‘She had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.’

Sulzberger’s frustration with Abramson was growing. She had already clashed with the company’s C.E.O., Mark Thompson, over native advertising and the perceived intrusion of the business side into the newsroom. Publicly, Thompson and Abramson denied that there was any tension between them, as Sulzberger today declared that there was no church-state—that is, business-editorial—conflict at the Times. A politician who made such implausible claims might merit a front-page story in the Times. The two men and Abramson clearly did not get along.”

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From David Carr and Ravi Somaiya at the Times:

“The New York Times dismissed Jill Abramson as executive editor on Wednesday, replacing her with Dean Baquet, the managing editor, in an abrupt change of leadership.

Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of the paper and the chairman of The New York Times Company, told a stunned newsroom that had been quickly assembled that he had made the decision because of ‘an issue with management in the newsroom.’

Ms. Abramson, 60, had been in the job only since September 2011. But people in the company briefed on the situation described serious tension in her relationship with Mr. Sulzberger, who had been hearing concerns from employees that she was polarizing and mercurial. They had disagreements even before she was appointed executive editor, and she had also had clashes with Mr. Baquet.

In recent weeks, people briefed on the situation said, Mr. Baquet had become angered over a decision by Ms. Abramson to try to hire an editor from The Guardian, Janine Gibson, and install her alongside him a co-managing editor position without consulting him. It escalated the conflict between them and rose to the attention of Mr. Sulzberger.”

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“Robots Cannot Be Charged With A Crime”

May 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s not likely that legal issues regarding autonomous cars will be as much a hurdle as some think, but they will be somewhat of a story. In the New York Times article, “When Driverless Cars Break the Law,” Claire Cain Miller breaks down the potential future of civil and criminal culpability:

“In cases of parking or traffic tickets, the owner of the car would most likely be held responsible for paying the ticket, even if the car and not the owner broke the law.

In the case of a crash that injures or kills someone, many parties would be likely to sue one another, but ultimately the car’s manufacturer, like Google or BMW, would probably be held responsible, at least for civil penalties.

Product liability law, which holds manufacturers responsible for faulty products, tends to adapt well to new technologies, John Villasenor, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at U.C.L.A., wrote in a paper last month proposing guiding principles for driverless car legislation.

A manufacturer’s responsibility for problems discovered after a product is sold — like a faulty software update for a self-driving car — is less clear, Mr. Villasenor wrote. But there is legal precedent, particularly with cars, as anyone following the recent spate of recalls knows.

The cars could make reconstructing accidents and assigning blame in lawsuits more clear-cut because the car records video and other data about the drive, said Sebastian Thrun, an inventor of driverless cars.

‘I often joke that the big losers are going to be the trial lawyers,’ he said.

Insurance companies would also benefit from this data, and might even reward customers for using driverless cars, Mr. Villasenor wrote. Ryan Calo, who studies robotics law at the University of Washington School of Law, predicted a renaissance in no-fault car insurance, under which an insurer covers damages to its customer regardless of who is at fault.

Criminal penalties are a different story, for the simple reason that robots cannot be charged with a crime.”

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“These Are Brands That Detroiters, Even The Hip Newcomers, Likely Can’t Afford”

May 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

You sell what you have, and Detroit has urban decay, lots of it. It’s problematic that advertisers want to market it as something edgy and desirable and more troubling that brands that co-opt the Detroit brand will probably benefit more than the city itself, but I guess something is better than nothing. From Rose Hackman at the Guardian:

“Yet, to an advertiser’s eye, Detroit is cool. Gritty. Tough. Resilient. Authentic in its struggle. True in its American spirit of hard, honest work, ruins and all.

That’s where it gets uncomfortable for Detroit, The Brand. Detroit, the American phoenix rising from the economic ashes, is sitting on a valuable natural resource: street cred. This has not escaped the notice of profit-driven companies see the city’s rebirth as a chance to brand themselves and sell authenticity. 

The airwaves and billboards are plastered with ads from Chrysler (a Detroit native), Redbull (from Austria), new vodka brand from the giant French Pernod Ricard group, Our/Vodka, and luxury watch and bicycle company Shinola. They present a romantic, nostalgic take on grit – a highly effective spin, which presents poverty and urban decay as cool. The nostalgia element is all the more evident in that ads by Shinola, Redbull and Our/Vodka are often filmed in black and white.

Shinola’s spot features bike riders and a beautiful, blonde, white female model hugging a (presumably local) young, black girl. Redbull’s spot aired during this year’s Grammy Awards features local artist Tylonn Sawyer telling a compelling story of beauty and resilience. Our/Vodka’s launching ad includes Detroit’s beautiful, eerie, abandoned Michigan Central Station, stating the brand is rooted in ‘people’ and ‘community.’

These are brands that Detroiters, even the hip newcomers, likely can’t afford. It’s hard to imagine that many in Detroit could afford a $1,950 bicycle or a $900 watch, irrespective of whether or not the latter now comes with a lifetime warranty.”

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“Small Crowds May Actually Be The Smartest”

May 13, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Extrapolating on the Wisdom of Crowds theory, new research suggests that small crowds might be wiser than large ones. Perhaps. But what if it’s a tight-knit community of morons? Would the thinking be good then? What if it’s a politicized group that makes decisions that have immediate benefits for its own members without regard to others or to long-term ramifications? What if we’re talking about a doomsday cult? From Drake Bennett at Businessweek:

“The wisdom of crowds is one of those perfectly of-our-moment ideas. The phrase comes from New Yorker writer James Surowiecki, whose book of that title was published almost a decade ago. Its thesis is nicely summed up in its opening, which describes the 19th-century English scientist Francis Galton’s realization, while attending a county fair, that in a competition to guess the weight of an ox the average of all of the guesses people had submitted (787 in all) was almost exactly right: 1,197 pounds vs. the actual weight of 1,198 pounds, a degree of accuracy that no individual could attain on his own. As individuals we may be ignorant and short-sighted, but together we’re wise.

The implication is that the bigger the crowd, the greater the accuracy. It’s like running an experiment: All else being equal, the larger the sample size, the more trustworthy the result. The idea has a particular resonance at a time when online businesses from Amazon.com to Yelp rely on aggregated user reviews, and social networks such as Facebook sell ads that rely in part on showing you how many of your friends ‘like’ something.

A new paper by the Princeton evolutionary biologist Iain Couzin and his student Albert Kao, however, suggests that bigger isn’t necessarily better. In fact, small crowds may actually be the smartest. ‘We do not find the classic view of the wisdom of crowds in most environments,’ says Couzin of their results. ‘Instead, what we find is that there’s a small optimal group size of eight to 12 individuals that tends to optimize decisions.’

The research started from the fact that, in nature—where, unlike at county fairs, accuracy has life-or-death consequences—many animals live in relatively small groups. Why, Couzin wondered, would so many species fail to take advantage of the informational benefits of the crowd?”

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“We Knew There Was This Mysterious Kind Of Dark Force At Work In Human Behavior”

May 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the latest Edge article, “The Thing Which Has No Name,” by Ogilvy & Mather UK creative director Rory Sutherland, who argues, perhaps unsurprisingly, that marketers and advertisers understand certain things better than classical economists:

“It is true of quite a lot of progress in human life that businesses, in their blundering way, sometimes discover things before academics do. This is true of the steam engine. People developed steam engines before anybody knew how they worked. It’s true of the jet engine, true of aspirin, and so forth. People discover through trial and error—what Nassim Taleb calls ‘stochastic tinkering.’ People make progress on their own without really understanding how it works. At that point, academics come along, explain how what works works and to some extent take the credit for it. ‘Teaching birds to fly’ is the phrase that Taleb uses. As I say, I was seduced by economic thinking and the elegance of it, but at the same time having worked in advertising for 15 years, I was also fairly conscious of the fact that this isn’t really how people behave. We’d always known, in those fields of marketing, like direct marketing, where you actually got results—you sent out letters to 50,000 people and saw how many people replied—there was something going on that we didn’t understand. In other words, occasionally you might do incredibly elaborate, complex, and expensive work and have more or less no effect on the uptake of some product. Then someone would redesign the application form and slightly change the order of the questions on the application form, and the number of people replying would double. We knew there was this mysterious kind of dark force at work in human behavior.

The extraordinary thing about the marketing industry is that, by accident, it was pretty good at stumbling on some of these biases which behavioral economics later codified. There’s a wonderful/evil advertisement I mentioned in a recent piece, ‘How else could a month’s salary last a lifetime?’, which is a De Beers advertisement in about 1953 for engagement rings. Now, that’s a brilliant case of framing or price anchoring. How much should you spend on an engagement ring? We’ll suggest that whatever your month’s salary is, that’s what you should spend.

‘No one ever got fired for buying IBM’ is a wonderful example of understanding loss aversion or ‘defensive decision making,’ The advertising and marketing industry kind of acted as if it knew this stuff—but where we were disgracefully bad is that no one really attempted to sit down and codify it. When I discovered Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and the whole other corpus on Behavioral Economics…. when I started discovering there was a whole field of literature about ‘this thing for which we have no name’ …. these powerful forces which no one properly understood—that was incredibly exciting. And the effect of these changes can be an order of magnitude. This is the important thing. Really small interventions can have huge effects.”

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“A Shift Had Occurred”

May 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Douglas Coupland’s new Financial Times article concerns his relationship to television, a glowing box which has changed markedly during his life–and not just architecturally. Of particular interest is how the obsolescence of TV in the Internet Age has led to the medium’s creative apex. The opening:

“On April 19 1995, I bought my first genuine adult TV set – a 27in Sony Trinitron. I know it was this date because two delivery men brought it to the house at about 11 in the morning. We installed the TV into a nook in the bookshelves, turned it on, and on screen came images of the Oklahoma City bombing. For the three of us it was an ‘I remember where I was’ moment. We stopped for an hour and watched the news. I made coffee, we talked a bit and then the day progressed.

I used to watch TV back then. By that I mean I’d go into the living room and turn on the TV set, saying, ‘Gosh. I wonder what’s on TV right now? I think I’ll run through the channels.’ It’s hard to imagine anyone in 2014 doing this, even my parents. Over two decades, our collective TV viewing habits have changed so much that it’s actually quite hard to remember old-style TV viewing.

I remember 1997 and Princess Diana’s death and being glued to CNN for hours. The same for 9/11. But when Michael Jackson died in 2009, I was in my dining room writing when a friend texted to tell me. Instead of turning on CNN, I went right to the internet and it was only hours later that I thought, ‘Hmmm . . . I wonder how TV is covering this.’ A shift had occurred.”

 

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“This Takes The Robot-Car Industry Down Legally And Morally Dangerous Paths”

May 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Research has shown that a gentrifying neighborhood rocked by a shocking headline murder doesn’t stop gentrifying. The glaring, but rare, tragedy isn’t enough to reverse progress. The rewards of having a piece of an interesting, but still affordable, community outweighs the risks. I think the same will be true of autonomous vehicles, which will make the streets and highways far safer even if occasionally there’s a loud crash.

One of the biggest moral quandaries about driverless cars is one on the margins: When a collision is imminent, software, not humans, would make the decision of who is likely to live and who is to die. I would think the fairest scenario would be to aim for the best outcome for the greatest number of those involved. But perhaps car owners will be able to opt into a “moral system” the way they can choose organ donation. Maybe they’ll be an insurance break for those who do. Who knows? It’s likely, though, that this decision, like the steering wheel itself, won’t be in our hands.

In Patrick Lin’s new Wired article, “The Robot Car of Tomorrow May Just Be Programmed to Hit You,” he analyzes all aspects of this ethical problem. An excerpt:

“Suppose that an autonomous car is faced with a terrible decision to crash into one of two objects. It could swerve to the left and hit a Volvo sport utility vehicle (SUV), or it could swerve to the right and hit a Mini Cooper. If you were programming the car to minimize harm to others–a sensible goal–which way would you instruct it go in this scenario?

As a matter of physics, you should choose a collision with a heavier vehicle that can better absorb the impact of a crash, which means programming the car to crash into the Volvo. Further, it makes sense to choose a collision with a vehicle that’s known for passenger safety, which again means crashing into the Volvo.

But physics isn’t the only thing that matters here. Programming a car to collide with any particular kind of object over another seems an awful lot like a targeting algorithm, similar to those for military weapons systems. And this takes the robot-car industry down legally and morally dangerous paths.

Even if the harm is unintended, some crash-optimization algorithms for robot cars would seem to require the deliberate and systematic discrimination of, say, large vehicles to collide into. The owners or operators of these targeted vehicles would bear this burden through no fault of their own, other than that they care about safety or need an SUV to transport a large family. Does that sound fair?”

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“He Is Raising Consciousness, Not Merely Dust”

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

From a 1979 People article about the auto-racing exploits of Est scream machine Werner Erhard, who has always been a piece of work:

“For hours mechanics have been fine-tuning the squat red-and-silver race car, while assistants check their clipboards and keep the Watkins Glen (N.Y.) bivouac free of litter and strangers. One fan wanders through in a T-shirt with the baffling slogan: ‘Before I was different, now I’m the same.’ Presently the driver emerges from an enormous van, astronaut-like in his creamy flame-proof suit, and heads for the Formula Super Vee racer (named for its Volkswagen engine). At the wave of a flag he will roar around a 3.3-mile Grand Prix course at speeds up to 130 mph. 

There are 29 other qualifiers in this Gold Cup event, but only driver Werner Erhard claims he is here for the sake of mankind. Erhard, the founder of est (Erhard seminars training), says that when he slides into his 164-horsepower Argo JM4, he is raising consciousness, not merely dust. 

‘Real people—you and me—feel like they don’t make any difference in this lousy world,’ says the 43-year-old Erhard. He is tall and loose-limbed with icy blue eyes; he insists on eye contact during a conversation. If his listener looks away, even momentarily, Erhard stops talking. He wants everyone to understand why he is driving fast cars these days in addition to heading the $20 million business that est has become, plus a 1977 spin-off, his program ‘to end world hunger by 1997.’ ‘I wanted to organize a high-performance team,’ Erhard continues, ‘that could master a complex skill in a very short time with winning results and show that everyone involved makes a big difference, from grease monkeys to spectators.’ In order to prove this estian point, Erhard says he considered such adventures as skydiving and karate, but rejected them as not collective enough. ‘Auto racing was perfect!’ he exclaims. ‘I hadn’t driven a car in six years and didn’t know the first thing about racing. Whatever we’d achieve, we’d achieve together.’”

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“I found it a remarkable technology”:

“Cognitive Enhancement Devices Are Just The Tip Of The Iceberg”

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

Cognitive enhancement, through electric stimulation or drugs or genetic manipulation, is certainly our future. While it’s a serious business, some of the early efforts have come dressed in leisure clothes: Gamers are using brain-stimulation devices to give them an edge. Ethicist Hannah Maslen of the Conversation thinks regulation should start with these early adopters, even if their high scores are essentially meaningless. An excerpt:

“Our recommendations are not at all motivated by a belief that access to cognitive enhancement devices should be restricted in general. Instead, we think that consumer freedom is optimised when the products that people buy in fact do what the manufacturers claim they do, and when people have the information they need to properly assess which risks they are willing to take.

For my colleague Julian Savulescu, cognitive enhancement devices are just the tip of the iceberg. We will start to see more and more technologies that are aimed at enhancing human performance so we need to strike the right balance now. If we fall prey to scaremongering, we run the risk of over regulating but public safety is vital. The key is to inform the public properly about these devices so they can live their lives as they choose, taking reasonable risks if they want to.

The best option would be to filter the most dangerous enhancement devices out of the market. No one wants to use a device that will definitely cause them great harm and this is especially true if there are ways to make the same or similar device safer. This would also leave individuals free to choose which small-to-moderate risks they want to take in pursuit of enhanced cognitive capacities, whether that be for learning languages, mastering maths or eliminating the enemy in Call of Duty.”

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“We’ve All Got Our Own Set Of Biases, Priors, And Preconceptions”

May 12, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I really liked the first Freakonomics–I think I actually reviewed it–but I’m a lot more circumspect now about that class of behavioral-economics books. Science tomes that are that narrative-driven give me pause. Isn’t there a temptation to subvert a false narrative with another one? And all the while the readers are flattered because they, unlike the masses, are too smart too accept that status quo. Except that maybe what they’re accepting, supported by one study or another, isn’t true, either. Not saying that Stephen Dubner or Steven Levitt would ever knowingly do that, but even deeply thoughtful people can fall into these traps. Dubner, one half of the very bright duo, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

I’m curious if even you guys find it difficult to follow your own advice? Despite all you know about saving & psychology, what financial concepts do you struggle most with? 

Stephen Dubner:

Great question — and the answer is yes! One point we try to make repeatedly in the new book is that we’ve all got our own set of biases, priors, and preconceptions, and a big challenge in modern life is working through/around them. As Danny Kahneman wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow: “[W]e can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.” I personally don’t have much trouble in the financial realm — I am weirdly disciplined and conservative there — but certainly in other realms I do not always think like a Freak.

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Question:

I’ve often made the argument that if I could require every living person to complete just one college-level course, that course would be Behavioral Economics. If you could make the same requirement, what course would you select and why?

Stephen Dubner:

Well, I hate to be unoriginal but I might give your answer too. (Of course I would say that!) But behavioral economics is what got me doing the work I’m doing today. It was the writing of Kahneman and Tversky, and then Thaler, that got me excited for the first time about economics. Why? Because it blended the empiricism of economics with the feel and insights of psychology. I think that kind of interdisciplinary marriage is hugely valuable. And even though Levitt never thought of himself as a “behavioral economist,” one reason I was so attracted to his work is that it married economics with, among other areas, crime, politics, and so on.

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Question:

What are you working on now? Any new mind blowing statistics that you would like to share with us.

Stephen Dubner:

Believe it or not, our next major book will/may be the Freakonomics of Golf. Levitt is a longtime golf addict — when he was a kid, he really thought he’d be a touring pro — and in the last few years he’s gotten me addicted too. Our philosophy is to try to turn what you love into what you do for a living, so naturally it would follow that we’d try to pull off a golf book. We are working on it with Luke Donald, he of the beautiful swing and former world No. 1 ranking, and Luke’s longtime coach Pat Goss.

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Question:

Have you ever heard someone quote your book out of context? What was your impression? How did you react?

Stephen Dubner:

Ever? Are you kidding? I’d say it’s more common for quotes to be out of context than in — or, if not “out of context,” it’d be with all nuance/weighting removed. E.g.: the abortion-crime link we wrote about. In the chapter in Freakonomics, we make it clear that legalized abortion is one of several factors that contributed to a crime drop (along with prisons, more cops, and the collapse of the crack-cocaine market). But very often, those other factors get left out of other people’s retelling. At first it bothered me. But then I realized I was learning a valuable lesson: people hear what they want to hear, don’t hear what they don’t want to hear, and seek out evidence that confirms their existing beliefs. Which means you have to communicate even better to try to make your point.

 

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“Wars Fought By Killer Robots Are No Longer Hypothetical”

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

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” is the question that completes The Sun Also Rises, and it’s the one that comes to my mind when someone suggests that America or any other country or entity will be able to control machines that kill autonomously. It’s possible to largely keep a hood over nukes because of the rareness of the materials and expertise needed to create them, but that won’t be the way of drones, robots and other automatons of destruction. They’ll be easy, scarily easy, to make. And so inexpensive. That practically won’t cost a thing.

In her very well-written piece “The Case Against Killer Robots,” Denise Garcia of Foreign Affairs argues that it’s possible to halt “progress.” The opening:

“Wars fought by killer robots are no longer hypothetical. The technology is nearly here for all kinds of machines, from unmanned aerial vehicles to nanobots to humanoid Terminator-style robots. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, in 2012, 76 countries had some form of drones, and 16 countries possessed armed ones. In other words, existing drone technology is already proliferating, driven mostly by the commercial interests of defense contractors and governments, rather than by strategic calculations of potential risks. And innovation is picking up. Indeed, China, Israel, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and 50 other states have plans to further develop their robotic arsenals, including killer robots. In the race to build such fully autonomous unmanned systems, China is moving faster than anyone; it exhibited 27 different armed drone models in 2012. One of these was an autonomous air-to-air supersonic combat aircraft.

Several countries have already deployed forerunners of killer robots. The Samsung Techwin security surveillance guard robots, which South Korea uses in the demilitarized zone it shares with North Korea, can detect targets through infrared sensors. Although they are currently operated by humans, the robots have an automatic feature that can detect body heat in the demilitarized zone and fire with an onboard machine gun without the need for human operators. The U.S. firm Northrop Grumman has developed an autonomous drone, the X-47B, which can travel on a preprogrammed flight path while being monitored by a pilot on a ship. It is expected to enter active naval service by 2019. Israel, meanwhile, is developing an armed drone known as the Harop that could select targets on its own with a special sensor, after loitering in the skies for hours.

Militaries insist that such hardware protects human life by taking soldiers and pilots out of harm’s way. But the risk of malfunctions from failed software or cyber attacks could result in new dangers altogether. Countries will have dissimilar computer programs that, when interacting with each other, may be erratic. Further, signal jamming and hacking become all the more attractive — and more dangerous — as armies increasingly rely on drones and other robotic weaponry. According to killer robot advocates, removing the human operator could actually solve some of those problems, since killer robots could ideally operate without touching communication networks and cyberspace. But that wouldn’t help if a killer robot were successfully hacked and turned against its home country.

The use of robots also raises an important moral question. As Noel Sharkey, a British robotics expert, has asked: ‘Are we losing our humanity by automating death?’ Killer robots would make war easier to pursue and declare, given the distance between combatants and, in some cases, their removal from the battlefield altogether. Automated warfare would reduce long-established thresholds for resorting to violence and the use of force, which the UN has carefully built over decades. Those norms have been paramount in ensuring global security, but they would be easier to break with killer robots, which would allow countries to declare war without having to worry about causing casualties on their own side.”

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“I Think That We Live Such Digitally Switched-On, Always-Plugged-In Lives, And Yet We Still Also Somehow Feel Disconnected From People”

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

Not having a TV, I can’t say I’ve noticed the trend of advertisements that peddle products by pulling heartstrings, by creating 30-second weepies, but I’m certainly familiar the “inspirational” viral video and/or story made everpresent by odious sites like Upworthy and its clusterfuck cousin the Huffington Post. Even Gawker, famous for sarcasm and irony, has traveled down this well-paid road.

Apparently, this illusion of connectedness we’ve accepted, the Truman Show we’ve entered into, isn’t as fulfilling as we’d hoped, it hasn’t delivered to us quickly and easily the fulfillment that only comes with great effort, which means that there are profits to be made in selling “feelings” that can fill the void. Give the emoticon some more emotions. Except, of course, that it’s just another false promise. From “The Rise of Sadvertising,” by Rae Ann Fera at Fast Company:

“If human emotions are complex, so are advertising zeitgeists; there’s not one single reason that this tendency has found fashion at this particular moment. In a broad context, much of the trend can be attributed to technology, says [180 chief creative officer William] Gelner.

‘I think that we live such digitally switched-on, always-plugged-in lives, and yet we still also somehow feel disconnected from people. As human beings, we’re looking for true human connection, and I think that emotional storytelling can help bridge that gap. Brands and agencies have come to realize that this is a way to fill that void,’ says Gelner. Upworthy, he says, is a good analogy to the phenomenon in that its success comes from its ability to fill a cultural need. When asked whether this search for meaning has also granted people permission to be more open about their outward reactions to emotional ads, he says, ‘I think that emotional stories have been around for a long time. I’m sure people have always shed a tear or two, but the difference is they didn’t have their TVs in their pockets. I think it’s connected to that. You’re now able to consume those stories no matter where you are.’

Peter Moore Smith, ECD at Saatchi & Saatchi, also pegs the desire to share the content that we connect with as a major reason more brands are interested in playing to the heart. He’s had viral hits with Duracell ‘Trust Your Power’ and Cheerios ‘Nana’ and says this ability to see how well work spreads is appealing to clients.

‘I believe the rise in emotional work is because advertising that evokes a strong emotional response is very shareable. The spot that makes you smile or even laugh can be a welcome interruption if it’s done well, but the spot that makes you feel something deeper, as long as it isn’t cloying or manipulative, is something you want to share,’ he says. ‘As agencies and clients watch those likes and shares rise, naturally they’re going to want more.'”

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“Like A Turtle He Shrank Into Himself And Gathered His World About Him”

May 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Bobby Fischer seemed just another American eccentric, trying to write his own ticket because the rules of the game weren’t expansive enough to contain his genius. But he was imploding from the start–deeply ill, not just a diva. Two excerpts from Bard Darrach’s troubling 1971 Life magazine portrait of Fischer in Buenos Aires, as he was on the precipice of becoming the first World Chess Federation number-one ranked player.

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In the lobby people rushed up to Fischer from all directions. He looked startled and irritated. Argentina is chess-crazy (there are 60 chess clubs in Buenos Aires alone) and for more than a month he had been stalked day and night by Latin adoration. A white-haired man collared him now and spoke earnestly. A young girl grabbed his arm and said something intense that made him pull back and then stride away. A U.S. TV sports team puffed along at his elbow, but he wasn’t having any. “Later!” he flung at them and, tilting forward, lurched off with a powerful wambling stride that made him look like Captain Ahab making headway in a high wind. Never a man to enjoy the scenery when he can look at a chessboard, Fischer works out a problem on his chess wallet as he takes a trip in a small plane.

At the London Grill, a transplanted English pub of pleasantly peeling charm, Fischer made for a back table and ordered two 12-ounce glasses of fresh orange juice, the largest steak in the house, a mixed green salad and a pint bottle of carbonated mineral water. Five minutes later he ordered another glass of orange juice, and by the time he was ready for a huge dish of bananas and superrich Chantilly cream he had finished his fourth pint of mineral water. He ate with the oral drive of a barracuda and talked incessantly about how wonderful the food was. “Look at that juice! Fresh, not frozen! And where else can you get a glass that big for less than ten cents? Look at that steak! It’s almost two inches thick. And YOU can really taste it! Not like that lousy American meat, all full of chemicals. This is natural meat! I tell you, Argentine food is the finest in the world! They really go in for quality here. Like clothes. You can get a tailor-made suit here for less than $100, and they last! Shoes too. They got the best shoes in the world here. Look at this pair I got on. Here, look at them!” Quickly untying an enormous brown shoe, he took it off and handed it across the table. “Look at that sole! It’s composition and I’m telling you it’s strong! I go through an ordinary pair of shoes in days. Days! But I’ve had this pair for a year and it’s still great. I mean I love America and I’d never be anything else but an American, but things are failing apart up there. Everybody doing his own thing just won’t work. We need organization! We need to get back to basic values!” Shaking his head sadly, he ordered another dish of bananas and Chantilly.

At sundown, as he does at sundown every Friday of his life, Fischer disappeared into his room for 24 hours of solitary meditation. He is a member of the Church of God, a fundamentalist California-based religious sect, and he takes his religion seriously. He won’t talk about it, though. He won’t talk to the press about any aspect of his private life. But a good deal is known.

Child of a broken marriage, Bobby grew up in Brooklyn with a dominant mother and an absent father. He seemed lonely and a little withdrawn, in no way a remarkable child, until one day when he was 6 his older sister happened to bring home a chess set. From that day, bobby’s destiny possessed him. Father, mother, friends: all the people he needed he found, in a set of chess figures, all the world he wanted was there in a square foot of space. Later he tries another sport with somewhat less skill but the same furious will to win.

At 13, Bobby won the U.S junior championship. At 14, Bobby ripped through eleven matches, three with grandmasters, to become U.S. champion; the youngest ever. But his mother felt strongly that he was too little appreciated. She went to Washington and picketed in Bobby’s behalf. One day she actually chained herself to the White House gate. Acutely embarrassed, Bobby gradually pushed her out of his life. At 17, he quit school (“Teachers,” he said, “are jerks”) and lived alone in a warren of chess literature.

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At sundown on Saturday Fischer burst out of an elevator into the lobby of his hotel. An even bigger crowd was there. Dead-white with hunger after a day without food, he put his head down and headed for the street. He had promised an American TV network an interview that evening, but he pushed the cameraman aside impatiently. “Later, later!” Shutters clicked on all sides as he hit the sunlight. A husky Argentinian paparazzo gave pursuit, snapping shots every few feet. Suddenly Fischer swerved at him, grabbed for his camera but missed, then gave him two quick kicks in the right leg. Before the photographer could regain balance, Fischer turned the corner and was gone. Looking shaken, the photographer sat for some time on the fender of a nearby cab. “Bobby es loco,” he muttered, shaking his head. Fischer is a city boy born and bred, but he showed country instincts in the Argentine countryside. He tumbled about with a friendly collie named Ruby and at one point actually rescued an armadillo from her jaws.

An uncanny thing happened that night in Fischer’s room. Like a turtle he shrank into himself and gathered his world about him. First he switched on a Sony shortwave radio and fiddled till he picked up some soft rock from London. Then out came the Russian chess magazines. (Fischer seldom ventures beyond “chess Russian” but he reads and speaks Spanish fluently.) Eyes smoked with introspection, he played through 10, 15, 25 games at frenzied speed, slamming the pieces at the board like darts and muttering savage or mocking or fascinated comments under his breath. It was genius in full rage and it went on for almost an hour before he glanced up and remembered I was there.

“I shouldn’t have kicked him,” he said. “You can’t go around kicking people.”

Then his eyes smoked again and he raced through a dozen more games. This is it, I thought. This is Bobby’s life. Sleep all day. Grab some food. Hole up with a shortwave radio or a tape recorder or a TV set and play chess with himself all night. No people in his life if he can help it. Just a small circle of undemanding electronic acquaintances. A man alone in a monomania.•

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“Some Futurists See The Germ Of The 21st Century In Today’s Nascent ‘On-Line’ Services”

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

From “In Search of the Cybermarket,” Douglas Gomery’s 1994 Wilson Quarterly article about Americans beginning to get connected online, which shows how far we’ve come, at least technologically, in just 20 years:

“Some futurists see the germ of the 21st century in today’s nascent ‘on-line’ services, such as America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe. Pay a membership fee and dial up one of these services using a modem attached to your personal computer, and you can catch up on the news, check your mutual fund investments, and chat with like-minded folks on bulletin boards devoted to such specialized topics as your hometown hockey team, office etiquette, opera, or nuclear proliferation. But so far the services have attracted only a specialized clientele of affluent, highly educated, gadget-oriented users. The total subscriber base of these three top on-line services stands at less than three million, smaller than the subscriber base of Newsweek. At America Online, the hottest of the services, the largest number of pioneers actually traveling in cyberspace at any one time is only about 8,000.”

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“The Explanation Of The Puzzle Was Not That Lady Luck Actually Does Smile On Winners And Frown On Losers”

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

In gambling, it’s not so much that a hand can be hot but that initial wins can influence future wins. An explanation from the Economist:

“Using the power of the internet to round up a huge sample, the two researchers examined 565,915 bets made by 776 people on sports such as horse-racing and football. Because these were online bets their timing could be established precisely. Ms Xu and Dr Harvey looked at winning and losing streaks up to six bets long.

The probability of a first bet winning was 48% and that of a follow-up winning again was 49%. After that, the streak took off. The third bet won 57% of the time. The fourth, if the third had won, won 67% of the time, the fifth, 72% of it and the sixth 75%. As for the losers, after ploughing their first bets, their success with their second slipped to 47% and thence held at 45%.

The explanation of the puzzle, Ms [Juemin] Xu and Dr [Nigel] Harvey found, was not that Lady Luck actually does smile on winners and frown on losers. Rather, as winners’ winning streaks increased in length they started choosing safer and safer odds, which led them to win more often, though less profitably. In contrast, those who had experienced a losing streak went for ever riskier bets, making it more likely the streak would continue.”

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“If You Have Enough Metadata, You Don’t Really Need Content”

May 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of “We Kill People Based on Metadata,” David Cole’s New York Review of Books piece which explains why the NSA collecting our contacts instead of our content shouldn’t assuage anxieties about spying:

“Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called ‘metadata’—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading.

Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, ‘metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.’ When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment ‘absolutely correct,’ and raised him one, asserting, ‘We kill people based on metadata.'”

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“It Began To Allow Anyone With A Car And A Good Driving Record To Be A Makeshift Taxi Driver”

May 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There’s risk in progress, more than in the status quo. But people usually accept the risk for greater rewards. From Tim Bradshaw’s Financial Times profile of Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick, who sees all Camaros, Camrys and Corvettes as potentially being cabs:

“Silicon Valley’s more wide-eyed start-up founders often pitch their ideas as ‘saving the world’ – and genuinely believe that is what they’re doing, however mundane or minute the technical advances. Uber is more nakedly competitive and ambitious. ‘We feel we are very honest and authentic, to the point of being brutally honest,’ Kalanick says with some understatement. ‘Not everyone likes that style, and I get that, but at least we’re trustworthy.’

Nonetheless, many city halls still aren’t sure how to handle Uber, a ‘marketplace’ that owns no cars and employs no drivers – especially when, in 2012, it began to allow anyone with a car and a good driving record to be a makeshift taxi driver. Local authorities challenging this ride-sharing model are often encouraged by actual taxi drivers and their unions, who argue that Uber lacks the proper insurance and has been insufficiently thorough in its background checks.

Uber insists that its insurance is ‘best in class’ and its driver checks ‘among the most stringent in the industry.’ But its record on safety and liability will soon be tested in court. The parents of a six-year-old girl killed in an incident involving an Uber driver on New Year’s eve in San Francisco are suing the company. Uber has denied responsibility because the driver was not carrying a passenger at the time, which means its insurance was not applicable.

This is an extreme case, but Kalanick’s response to legal challenges has typically been hard-nosed; despite the rulings in Brussels and Berlin, the service continues to operate there, he proudly points out. He has earned his reputation as one of Silicon Valley’s most combative operators. ‘I’m a natural born trust-buster,’ he says of his mission to smash the taxi cartels. ‘That’s probably the best way to put it.’

That’s not what many would call Kalanick. He’s more often styled as an ultra-capitalist, not least because of ‘surge pricing,’ where Uber doubles or triples fares during busy periods such as rush hour or in bad weather.”

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“All Our Senses Are Being Controlled”

May 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

In a New York Times Magazine interview with Jessica Gross, high-wire artist Philippe Petit, the Marcel Marceau of mid-air, explains his dual feelings toward technology:

“Question:

You seem to have an ambivalent relationship with your computer. In the book, you call it your ‘necessary evil tool.’

Philippe Petit:

I hate all electronic things that are supposed to help the human being. You don’t smell, you don’t hear, you don’t touch anymore. All our senses are being controlled. At the same time, I am a total imbecile because to have a little iPhone that can take pictures, that can find the nearest hospital, that can tell you the weather in Jakarta — it’s probably fabulous. I’m supposed to be a man of balance, but my state of mind in those things is very unbalanced. I love or I hate.”

____________________________

“We observed a type of dancer because you couldn’t call him a walker”:

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“The Prevalence Of Texting And Tweeting Does Not Mean That People Magically Lose The Ability To Communicate In Every Other Conceivable Way”

May 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a Harvard Gazette interview conducted by Colleen Walsh, Steven Pinker mounts a defense of Twitter and other modern forms of expression that allow for limited characters. He sees it as a generational battle, though I don’t get the sense that most of those tweeting are particularly young. An excerpt:

“Question:

As an expert in language, what do you think of Twitter?

Steven Pinker: 

I was pressured into becoming a Twitterer when I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times saying that Google is not making us stupid, that electronic media are not ruining the language. And my literary agent said, “OK, you’ve gone on record saying that these are not bad things. You better start tweeting yourself.” And so I set up a Twitter feed, which turns out to suit me because it doesn’t require taking out hours of the day to write a blog. The majority of my tweets are links to interesting articles, which takes advantage of the breadth of articles that come my way — everything from controversies over correct grammar to trends in genocide. Having once been a young person myself, I remember the vilification that was hurled at us baby boomers by the older generation. This reminds me that it is a failing of human nature to detest anything that young people do just because older people are not used to it or have trouble learning it. So I am wary of the ‘young people suck’ school of social criticism. I have no patience for the idea that because texting and tweeting force one to be brief, we’re going to lose the ability to express ourselves in full sentences and paragraphs. This simply misunderstands the way that human language works. All of us command a variety of registers and speech styles, which we narrowcast to different forums. We speak differently to our loved ones than we do when we are lecturing, and still differently when we are approaching a stranger. And so, too, we have a style that is appropriate for texting and instant messaging that does not necessarily infect the way we communicate in other forums. In the heyday of telegraphy, when people paid by the word, they left out the prepositions and articles. It didn’t mean that the English language lost its prepositions and articles; it just meant that people used them in some media and not in others. And likewise, the prevalence of texting and tweeting does not mean that people magically lose the ability to communicate in every other conceivable way.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Could We Find A Way To Improve Our Collective Intelligence?”

May 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Alex Pentland got his start in Big Data, wearables and the quantified life while working with Canadian beavers four decades ago. From Maria Konnikova at the Verge:

“It all started with beavers. When Alex Pentland was three years into his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, in 1973, he worked part-time as a computer programmer for NASA’s Environmental Research Institute. One of his first tasks — part of a larger environmental-monitoring project — was to develop a method for counting Canadian beavers from outer space. There was just one problem: existing satellites were crude, and beavers are small. ‘What beavers do is they create ponds,’ he recalls of his eventual solution, ‘and you can count the number of beavers by the number of ponds. You’re watching the lifestyle, and you get an indirect measure.’

The beavers were soon accounted for, but Pentland’s fascination with the underlying methodology had taken root. Would it be possible, the 21-year-old wondered, to use the same approach to understand people and societies, or use sensors to unravel complex social behavior? And in so doing, could we find a way to improve our collective intelligence — to create, in a sense, a world that was more suited to human needs, where cities and businesses alike were developed using objective data to maximize our happiness and productivity?

Pentland would spend the next four decades exploring those very questions, finding ways to observe people and their patterns from a computer rather than outer space.”

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“None Of The Untreated Colonies Saw Their Bees Disappear”

May 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

There are likely numerous reasons for Colony Collapse Disorder, but new research seems to confirm that the most popular pesticides on the planet are likely a dramatic cause of bees being under siege. From Damian Carrington at the Guardian:

“The mysterious vanishing of honeybees from hives can be directly linked to insectcide use, according to new research from Harvard University. The scientists showed that exposure to two neonicotinoids, the world’s most widely used class of insecticide, lead to half the colonies studied dying, while none of the untreated colonies saw their bees disappear.

‘We demonstrated that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering ‘colony collapse disorder’ in honeybee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter,’ said Chensheng Lu, an expert on environmental exposure biology at Harvard School of Public Health and who led the work.

The loss of honeybees in many countries in the last decade has caused widespread concern because about three-quarters of the world’s food crops require pollination.”

_________________________

“If you’re after getting the honey  / Then you don’t go killing all the bees”:

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“You Need Education But You Also Need Progressive Taxation”

May 8, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Josh Eidelson’s new Salon interview with economist Thomas Piketty, an exchange about leveling wealth inequality with taxes and/or education:

“Question:

David Leonhardt, in his New York Times Magazine essay on your book, writes that rather than a wealth tax, there’s ‘another, more politically plausible force that can disrupt [Piketty’s] first law of inequality: education. When a society becomes more educated, many of its less-wealthy citizens quickly acquire an ephemeral but nonetheless crucial form of capital — knowledge — that can bring enormous returns.’ Do you share that view?

Thomas Piketty:

I do share partly that view. As I say in the book, education and the diffusion of knowledge are the primary forces towards reduction in inequality…

The question is, is that going to be sufficient?

…You need education but you also need progressive taxation.

It’s not an all-or-nothing solution. I think a lot can be done at the national level. We do already have progressive taxation of income, progressive taxation of inherited wealth, at the national level. We also have annual taxation of wealth at the national level. For instance, in the U.S. you have a pretty big property tax… Technically, it is perfectly possible to transform it into a progressive tax on net wealth…

The main difficulty is not so much to make it a global tax. The main difficulty is not international tax competition. The main difficulty is more internal political [obstacles]… Right now the property tax is a local tax, and so the federal government cannot do anything. You know, it was the same with the income tax one century ago.

So I don’t share the pessimistic view that a progressive wealth tax will never happen.”

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“The Plight Of Future Citizens Who Might Suffer Or Gain From Our Present Political Decisions Cannot Be Properly Weighed”

May 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In an Aeon essay, Thomas Wells wonders how we can consider yet-born generations in political decisions that will impact them, suggesting “futuristic voting blocs” may be the answer. An excerpt:

While we might feel a sense of solidarity with past and future generations alike, time’s arrow means that we must relate to each other as members of a relay race team. This means that citizens downstream from us in time are doubly disadvantaged compared with the upstream generations. Our predecessors have imposed – unilaterally – the consequences of their political negotiations upon us: their economic regime, immigration policies, the national borders that they drew up. But they were also able to explain themselves to us, giving us not only the bare outcome of the US Constitution, for example, but also the records of the debates about the principles behind it, such as the Federalist Papers (1787-88). Such commentaries are a substantial source of our respect for our ancestors’ achievements, beyond their status as a fait accompli.

By contrast, future generations must accept whatever we choose to bequeath them, and they have no way of informing us of their values. In this, they are even more helpless than foreigners, on whom our political decisions about pollution, trade, war and so on are similarly imposed without consent. Disenfranchised as they are, such foreigners can at least petition their own governments to tell ours off, or engage with us directly by writing articles in our newspapers about the justice of their cause. The citizens of the future lack even this recourse.

The asymmetry between past and future is more than unfair. Our ancestors are beyond harm; they cannot know if we disappoint them. Yet the political decisions we make today will do more than just determine the burdens of citizenship for our grandchildren. They also concern existential dangers such as the likelihood of pandemics and environmental collapse. Without a presence in our political system, the plight of future citizens who might suffer or gain from our present political decisions cannot be properly weighed. We need to give them a voice.

How could we do that?•

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“Households Viewed On Average Somewhere Between 17 And 18 Channels”

May 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

So many Americans consume content seemingly non-stop, and that can’t be healthy. But even though there are seemingly endless channels in this decentralized, long-tail world, most of them–at least the TV ones–go largely unwatched. From Brian R. Fitzgerald at WSJ:

“The data, provided by Nielsen and charted by Statista, show that people have more channels at their disposal today than ever. In 2013, there were an average 189 channels available to U.S. households, up from 179 the year before.

Still, the households viewed on average somewhere between 17 and 18 channels — and that was down slightly from the year before. In fact, the number of channels viewed plateaued at about 17 in 2008.

The Nielsen data is grist for opponents of cable-channel ‘bundling,’ who argue people end up paying for channels they don’t want. And it spotlights the challenges that advertisers face in an increasingly fragmented media world.”

“A Fair Was Held In Moscow”

May 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

D.A. Pennebaker, Shirley Clarke and Albert Maysles captured the Khrushchev-era exhibition of American consumer goods that was held in Moscow in 1959, the Iron Curtain briefly lifted. On display was the handiwork of Charles Eames, Buckminster Fuller and many others. The Kitchen Debates between Nixon and his Soviet counterpart took place during this event.

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